From the BIG Desk

What about the first week of school on the teacher's side of the desk? Someone wrote in the other day that he had had a first day of school 59 times, man and boy. Of that first day as a practice teacher he said, “you do wonder doing those initial moments just where the path will lead.”Yes you do. I was a teacher for only a scant seven years, yet the experience shifted the whole direction of my life. And yup that first day sure IS hard, for everyone.But picture it from up front: the kids walk in with this fixedly expressionless look on their faces. "Why should I trust you? this look says. "What if you plan on mocking me, or singling me out, or, God forbid, you force me to rise and stand suffering beside my desk, trying to stammer out some kind of answer for you?”"I won't do that," I wanted to say every year. "I promise I will never do that." But you can’t say such a thing without subtly undermining any teachers of the Don't Smile Before Thanksgiving persuasion. The only way for the students to ever trust you is to live out that promise day after day and NOT humiliate, or single out for scorn, or laughter. The only way is again and again NOT to do that even though you have the power to do it. It’s heavy stuff.Which isn’t to say there aren’t your lighter moments too.I think of the time my cousin Carolyn stood up from her desk on her first-ever day of teaching and stepped directly into the wastebasket even though the first thing she was told in her teacher training class was for heaven’s sake don’t get so nervous you step in the wastebasket!I think of the time at the start of my own second year on the job when, having mastered the teacher’s art of lip-reading, I totally saw it when one girl took a long appraising look at me, turned to her friend and mouthed the words ”She’s fat.”I wasn’t fat actually; I was just fluffy as the saying goes; just sort of zaftig, like most 19-to 22-year-old females seem to briefly be. It’s Nature’s trick, padding us up to take aboard a baby and keep it safely insulated for the next nine months.The lesson there? Whatever this whole teaching/learning thing is about it’s sure not about physical appearance. It’s what’s happening inside the Control Tower upstairs that you'd best be thinking of there in school.

Let Me In!

I look at this famous cartoon of the kid trying to get into school by pushing on a door that says “pull” and it takes me back to the day I ran to this school in the picture, to meet me big sister who I was pretty sure would be getting out of kindergarten any minute.I was only three but I knew the way all right: up Charlotte Street and right on Blue Hill Ave., cross McClellan and there was the Endicott School. I found it fine. I got to the big front door. Then suddenly this giant Fourth Grade boy who'd been sent out to clap the erasers  opened the door, looked down at all 35 pounds of me and snarled “Get outa here kid!”Terrified. I turned and ran, across McClellan, clear past Charlotte Street where we lived, across Esmund, Wales all the way to Talbot Ave. and halfway to Mattapan, even as my entire family began the manhunt, searching in drainage ditches, garages, even in he in-ground garbage cans we all had in those days (Step on a pedal and the lid yawned open to reveal a maggoty metal bucket that a city worker weekly lifted out and carried to his reeking truck.)I was my mother’s miracle-baby, come all unexpected at the last possible moment. I was the last link to the handsome husband she had lost 18 months into the marriage - AND I looked like just him.She was more than frantic. She called the cops, little knowing I had been saved by then and was walking along Blue Hill Ave. next to the baby carriage of a Polish woman who spoke only Yiddish – she couldn’t understand me, I couldn't understand her, but she had bought me an ice cream and I was fine.The family didn’t know that of course. My poor 45-year-old mom, her pretty younger sister Grace and all three of the octogenarians we lived with: all had fanned out in different directions. Then at some point the police brought home another lost kid, the cop carrying the wailing child up our front porch stairs – just picture the howling and drama then!- but finally angelic Aunt Grace, driving 5 mph down Blue Hill Ave. in her Nash Rambler, spotted my curls and I was found. I talked about this alarming episode for weeks on my way to bed. “I runned across the streets so I wouldn’t get runned over,” I kept explaining to Mom so she would see how sensible a person could be even at three years and three months.You’d think all that trauma would have put me off school. It didn’t. I loved school, the fresh smell of the pencil shavings, that good white paste so salty and satisfying on the tongue, the obeying.... All you had to do was obey in school and how happy the grownups were! Who knew how much more would be required of us as adults?

Sawdust and a Bucket: First Day Memories

This came 24 hours ago from a man living in the cap city region of New York state:  "I'm reading your blog today post while waiting for the incoming freshman class to wander, meander, stumble, and eventually find their way into my classroom for their orientation. OK Back to work! (signed) Chris.”God bless Chris, he’s a teacher. I know this,even though the two of us have never met.  And God bless his incoming freshmen class. Today it was their first day of school.From time immemorial the Wednesday after Labor Day was the first day of school for most everyone – until in recent years those cruel horsemen the retailers decided to push Christmas shopping every earlier, using powerful reins to cruelly yank the whole calendar back toward early fall,  the bit in our poor mouths tearing at our delicate cheeks aaaargh!But back to the first day of school:Can you remember it? And if so what do you remember?I remember standing between my mother’s legs as she tried to contain my curls in 1,000 tiny elastics, little fat milk bottles smelling faintly of cheese, the sawdust brought in by the custodian to mop up the breakfast some poor childI remember that the simple sight of the lunch my mother had packed me brought tears to my little eyes.I remember how I suffered after walking back into class from the bathroom with the hem of my dress tucked up into the waistband of my underpants.I remember our 8^th grade English teacher pronouncing poetry “poytry” that very first day and then trying to get us to do the same.Now what DO you remember? I wrote Chris back and told him to be sure he ate a good lunch, because - just in case you don’t know this - if you think sitting in one of those little desks is hard,  try being the person standing in front of that big desk, who, period after period , day after day,  has to make the magic happen. A prayer for all the teachers then, at the start of  another year!

Why Read? I'll Tell Ya Why

Plenty of years when that big-mama school bus heaves around the corner, you know there are kids who haven’t done it. Who have just skimmed the books and are looking to fake it. Or who bought one of those cheaters’ guides generally written by grumpy PhD candidates that end up being more weirdly dense than the books whose themes they’re meant to elucidate.All I know is, I pity all people who don’t do their summer reading. Why?  Because when you read any book, its story starts spilling out like silken thread. Then, a page or two in, another ‘story’ begins taking shape alongside it, spooling up from your own mind.It’s like the principle illustrated in the sewing machine: You press the pedal and an upper spool pays out a little ‘line’. At the same time, from underneath and inside the thing, a second, lower, spool does the same. In an instant these two lines meet, negotiate a secret handshake and there you have it: a stitch, followed by another and then another.Pockety-Pock, it goes, Pocket-pock, as that mid-air kiss is repeated between the top and bottom threads. And the next thing you know you have a prom gown. Or a pair of slacks. Or sails for your sailboat if that’s what you needed.Reading is like that too, only it’s your mind and the author’s mind that meet.“Does this match my experience?” you ask yourself as your eyes move across the page. “Have I looked at things this way?” And if the answer is ‘no’ and what is described seems foreign to you, then so much the better. That means you’re walking a mile in the other guy’s shoes.In fact, that’s actually why we read. is it not? In order to walk in the shoes of others?I’ll admit I also read to slow down Time. In this hurry-up culture, so much rushes toward us and then away. It’s like sitting on a high-speed train and looking out at the many scenes as they are presented, then snatched away; presented, then snatched away. Whole industries count on our being accustomed to this pace, designed to keep us restless and thinking we need new things all the time.We don’t though. We don’t need new things. Back-to-School bargains or not, it’s never things we need to make a new start in our lives. All the real new starts come from hatching a new understanding, encountering new ideas fresh from the minds of others.Thus, when my senior-in-high-school friend cracked open On the Road for his summer reading, so did I. When my freshman neighbor began on Lost Horizon, and The Last Days of Summer, I started in on them too, knowing that in both cases that we could talk about them afterward.It wouldn’t matter if I had read some of these books before. That was another time and I was another person. I’d be a brand-new self reading these books because you know the saying: you can’t put your hand in the same river twice. The river changes moment to moment, as you do also.These young people to me are companions on the journey; and I relish the chance to look at what they’re looking at and see life through their clear young eyes.

Seek and Ye Shall Find

A last glimpse at summer: I was a guest at a beach house, sitting like Ahab on the uppermost deck,when two young families arrived to take possession of the rental next door. A pair of little girls tumbled from the car and raced instantly to their house’s upper balcony, a boy about four began begging his dad for a game of catch and a toddler in a diaper was swooped up, unceremoniously sniffed and told he needed a new one.After ten or 15 minutes the adults gathered on the front porch. “There’s no front yard,” said one. “But there’s this nice skinny side yard,” said another. At the beach you don’t always see a lot of land around a rental.As I half-read my book and half-watched I sorted them out finally: two sets of young parents, four young children between them and a visiting couple who looked to be there just for the day.  I went back to my book in earnest, then after an additional 30 minutes scanning the horizon for the great white whale. climbed down a level to the large lower deck – where some 90 minutes later, the little girls appeared.“We need to borrow some butter, can we borrow butter?” said one. “Also syrup.” smiled the other. “We’re having waffles!” they cried as one, too exhilarated at this stunning fact to keep it  to themselves any longer.“Let's see what we can do!” said another houseguest and brought them right to our mutual host who reached into his fridge and pulled out the desired items like two rabbits out of a hat.“Where are you guys from?” I asked the little girls once we were back on the deck. They named two towns out of state. “How old are you?”They were seven, born just six weeks apart. “Our mothers are best friends” they said with great satisfaction, their arms now draped round each other’s shoulders.“And where are your husbands?” asked this other houseguest,who had already gotten them to say that they’d bring him waffles in the morning."Well our BROTHERS are two and four!” the said while their merry laughter added their all but audible thought that  grownups really were very  silly. “There’s a block party tonight at dark, right across the grass there,” said the same teasing man. You should come!”But they shook their heads. “We’ll be in bed by then,” one said, too kind to say aloud that anyone with any sense at all is in bed by dark.So they didn’t come to the block party though their friendly parents did, taking turns so as to guard the sleeping youngsters and a lovely two couples they were who had driven all the way to the shore on this day, in their excitement forgetting all about what they might feed their kids for supper or what that menu might need in the way of tasty extras.Alas for our teasing friend, no waffles appeared for him in the morning. What did come was this nice card, personally delivered by Miss Aubrey and Miss Lilly, representing their joint gratitude and even the gratitude of their non-husbandly little brothers Sawyer and Finn.

This One's Killing ME Softly

All of these people had a hand in making Marlo Thomas's Free to Be You and Me that I referred to here yesterday. Among them were:(deep breath) Alan Alda, Harry Belafonte, Mel Brooks, Rita Coolidge, Billy DeWolf, Rosey Grier, Michael Jackson, Kris Kristofferson, Shel Silverstein, Tommy Smothers, Dionne Warwick, Cicely Tyson, Carol Channing, The New Seekers and - whew! - The Voices of East Harlem.BUT! the one whose participation - and image - move me the most is Michael Jackson seen below as a skinny boy singing one of the sweetest songs on the album with no less a crooner than Roberta Flack of Killing Me Softly fame.I have to admit it killed me softly.What happened? What dark forces played on this  child to rob him of peace of mine, and a sense of self-worth and, by the end even of sleep?I watch this short clip and find myself wishing someone could have stepped in and helped him somehow, just when he was at his height, right after the Thriller years. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwJaDK02CAk]

Soaps & Detergents & Powders & Pastes

All this talk of housework has me remembering that cut on the ground-breaking 1972 album “Free to Be You and Me,” produced by and starring Marlo Thomas. It later morphed into an After School Special, also produced by Thomas and featuring performers from to Harry Belafonte to Roberta Flack, to Mel Brooks to Alan Alda. Check out the lyrics to this segment spoken by Carol Channing. You can hear her reciting it in her slightly daffy way here or just scroll down:

• You know, there are times when we happen to be
• Just sitting there quietly watching TV
• When the program we're watching will stop for a while
• And suddenly someone appears with a smile
• And starts to show us how terribly urgent
• It is to buy some brand of detergent,
• Or soap or cleanser or cleaner or powder or paste or wax or bleach, 
• to help with the housework…..
• Now, most of the time it's a lady we see,
• Who's doing the housework on TV.
• She's cheerfully scouring a skillet or two, 
• Or she's polishing pots till they gleam like new,
• Or she's scrubbing the tub or she's mopping the floors,
• Or she's wiping the stains from the walls and the doors
• Or she's washing the windows, the dishes, the clothes
• Or waxing the furniture till it just glows
• Or cleaning the fridge or the stove or the sink,
• With a light-hearted smile, and a friendly wink,
• And she's doing her best to make us think that her soap,
• Or detergent or cleanser or powder or paste or wax or bleach
• Is the best kind of soap-or-detergent-or-cleanser-or-powder- or-paste-or-wax-or-bleach in the whole wide world.

• But I'll tell you one thing I know is true:
•  The lady we see when we're watching TV,
• The lady who smiles as she scours or scrubs or rubs or washes or wipes or mops or dusts or cleans,
• Or whatever she does on our TV screens,
• That lady is smiling because she's an actress,
• And she's earning money for learning those speeches
• That mention those wonderful soaps and detergents and cleansers and cleaners and powders and pastes and waxes and bleaches.

• So, the very next time you happen to be
• Just sitting there quietly watching TV
• And you see some nice lady who smiles
• As she scours or scrubs or rubs or washes or wipes or mops or dusts or cleans,
• Remember, nobody smiles doing housework but those ladies you see on TV.

• Your mommy hates housework, your daddy hates housework, I hate housework too. 
• And when you grow up, so will you.
•  Because even if the soap-or-cleanser-or-powder-or-paste-or-wax-or-bleach you use is the very best one,
• Housework is just no FUN.
• Children, when you have a house of your own,
• Make sure, when there's house work to do
•  That you don't have to do it alone.
• Little boys, little girls, when you're big husbands and wives,
• If you want all the days of your lives
• To seem sunny as summer weather
• Make sure, when there's housework to do, That you do it TOGETHER.

When I first heard this cut back in ’74 I was desperate to get help from my groom with the household chores - I was a feminist in full fledge by that time – but I also remember being faintly shocked by the assertion that we all hate housework. Do we? Even when the sky is falling and washing the floor is the only thing that is keeping us sane?Nice job helping kids get wised up about the lies of advertising though. These many years later we could still all use more lessons like that!   

The Man is a Prince: He Does the Dog

The phrase ‘the second shift’ refers to that whole second workday most women put in after they get home from their real jobs. I read a recently that nowadays  men are doing just as much around the house as their wives.  I certainly hope this is true.They sure weren’t when Arlie Hochschild spent eight straight years conducting the research for her book The Second Shift. Observing daily life in the homes of 50 working couples with children, she found that only 20% of American men shared the extra work of chores and childcare while women put in an average of 15 hours a week on those tasks,  which add up to an entire month of 24-hour days. You could resent the heck out of your spouse living this way, but what many women do is create a 'story'  that allows them to keep resentment at bay. One woman named Nancy explained that her husband Evan 'did' the downstairs while she did  the upstairs - only in their house doing the upstairs meant doing all the work relating to the kitchen, living room, dining room, bedrooms and bathrooms, while Evan, for his part, handled the garage.Oh, and the dog. He did the dog.But this  way of framing things allowed Nancy to think of Evan as pulling his weight. When asked by Hochschild to reflect on this, Evan said, “We don’t keep count of who does what,” quickly adding, “Whoever gets home first starts the dinner,” a statement which did not in any way line up with what Hochschild saw as a frequent visitor.This was just their ‘story’, the ‘family myth’ as she calls it that they had devised to cover up the imbalance. “The truth was, Nancy made the dinner.”Other husbands in her survey had stories of their own. One said, with a perfectly straight face, that he made all the pies."But I was brought up to do housework,” explained poor Nancy, in charge of every room in the house. “Evan wasn’t.”And there's the crux of it right there. As Hochschild puts it, “the female culture has shifted more rapidly than the male culture, and the image of the go-get-‘em woman has yet to be matched by the image of the let’s-take-care-of-the-kids-together man.”  Or as Gloria Steinem said a while ago to a standing-room-only crowd of fellow Smith College graduates, “The problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, "How can I combine career and family?"The day will come though, I feel sure - provided we work hard on raising up strong  and fair- minded little girls  - AND  get them the heck away from all that appalling sex-kitten apparel they’re showing these days in the stores.Tomorrow I won't be so crotchety, I promise. :-)

The Sick and the Well

The workman across the street from us is a fan of ‘70s music.  He's got Janis Joplin and Credence singing so loud I feel like I'm in the shower with them – which is fine with me. It’s nice to be someplace where a workman feels like he can whistle or sing along.My heart aches for those people in the dark still so many days after Irene. Without juice it’s dark even at high noon inside most houses. You can’t see a whole lot in a closet, for example, even with your flashlight, and how many people have generators?  Of course a stove won’t work because the spark to light it is electrical. TV and radio are out, natch, so the only sound is the creaky little string-section of the crickets coming from the yard. AND you can’t maintain very good hygiene with no water - though you do find yourself saying prayers of thanks for Sir John Harrington who, in the 1500s, invented the entirely mechanical device we now call the toilet. Pour in water, even by hand, and the thing flushes. The only challenge is you have to haul the water from someplace else to do this if you don’t want to be wasting the potable stuff on this task.In this family all we had to do when the storm hit was live for six short hours without power, then cut up the 30-foot tree that toppled at the height of the storm. But what pity I feel when I look at pictures of the destruction others have faced and are still facing!In the second-to-last chapter of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald observes that there is no difference between people so great as that between the sick and the well  and you could say that about a community too, the communities whose services still function normally being the obvious well ones.Look at this picture above from Winooski, Vermont. At first glance it looks like a snow field much trampled, right? Nope. Those are the still-raging waters of the river tearing through the town of Winooski Vermont three whole days after the passing of Tropical Storm Irene. It's chilling to see the kind of power evident in that photo and in the video below as well. It makes you realize why humans taught themselves to whistle and sing in the first place: they did it to tamp down terror.   [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lBw6Zzk4L8&feature=related]

"Give That Woman a Medal"

I have a new friend who’s always writing letters to the editor about what kind of Hell the country is headed for now. I find I agree with a lot of what he says though I lack his edge, meaning the anger that allows him to fire off searing missives to every paper in the county.He sent me one, is how we met.He thought I was an on-staff journalist in whatever paper it is where he reads my column each week; he didn’t know I was one of those slacker freelancers who are half the time writing from a bed piled high with half-eaten bagels, orange peels and a doting housepet or two.Anyway he knows what I do now. And this is what  he had to say regarding Tuesday’s post about the woman who used extreme measures to get her sons and husband to pitch in with the tasks of daily life:

"Every household is as different as every country," he began. "My mother had 11 children.  She cleaned, cooked, did everything mother always did then, including going down cellar every morning to get the coal for the stove, for heating  the house, for cooking. My two oldest sisters would do the dishes.... SOMETIMES. My two oldest brothers did nothing as far as I can remember. Nobody had chores except…. my mother! No sense talking about my father the gambler. (He lost OUR shirts as well as his own!)"

He went on to say that when the 11 grew up and left home they did finally become conscious of what they should have been doing. His feeling: they just didn’t know before: “We didn’t know because nobody told us and since no one told us what to do, it was left  to our housekeeper/cleaning-woman/mother to do everything. We did all go to work at 16 to support the old man’s habits and addictions. Finishing high school was out of the question. ‘ Education’ was not a word we heard; college was a disease. "So give an A+ to that lady you wrote about in your column,” he ended by saying. “She deserves a medal!”Again you can read here  about the method of 'that lady' whose best move in my book getting rid of all the old dishes and bowls and cups and cutlery and giving each of family member his own small color-coded set.  That way if one ran out of his color he couldn’t poach the other guy’s without being exposed. Genius, no? She also stopped washing their clothes unless she jolly well felt like it.When our kids lived here I started every day at 5am with a load or two of wash. We’d been poor enough so that having a washer and drier in the home still seemed to me like the height of luxury so I didn't mind Dishes though? Dishes are a whole other thing.If I lived with a guy who left his dishes around or kicked off his socks and walked away from them I don’t know what I’d do. Luckily, Old Dave is great around the house, though we did have some bumpy times early in the marriage. (The man’s mother used to IRON HIS UNDERPANTS. AND THEY WERE BRIEFS!)Women have memories like elephants so I have a thousand stories about the Chore Wars but tell ya what: I'd much rather hear how others divvy up the jobs.  Send an email if you're shy about posting a comment publicly and let's see what we've come up with among us over the years.  

Heard at the Coffee Shop

I was in line at the coffee shop on August 1st when a young woman appeared beside me who was evidently known to the store manager. “How’s it goin’?” asked her pal behind the counter.“Great! Hey, did you know that I’m fasting?”“Fasting, no.  Why on earth are you fasting?”“Ramadan began yesterday. "And my boyfriend, he’s a Muslim. So I just thought, whydon't I fast too and see what happens. Inside my mind, you know. Inside ME.”Well now! I thought.  Maybe this is how minds are opened, one person at a time, who admittedly is just sticking a toe in the great river of Islamic thought – of a new spiritual belief – but isn’t that the way we all begin swimming? By sticking a toe in?  I overheard this conversation on August 1^st and the next day  saw this picture with the women looking so lovely in their pale sherbet-colored garments.

The caption says they are  "Indonesian women, performing  the evening prayer called tarawih, the night before the holy fasting month of Ramadan begins.’" It was taken at the Istiqlal mosque in Jakarta.

Now, today, with the celebration of Eid al-Fitr, Muslims mark the end of the month-long fast of Ramadan and I was thinking: Our cities and towns all suspend school for Christian holy days, and many do the same for the Jewish High Holidays. Maybe one day we’ll do the same for Eid.The U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp for both of the Eid holy days  ten whole years ago, under President George W. Bush, so can other kinds of official recognition be far behind?  That’s where the real strength of this country lies, remember. It lies in our ability to welcome new people, and embrace them and learn from their ways.It's a good reminder: whether August 31st is Eid or the anniversary of the day your father died, or the day you got sober or the day your firstborn landed in the world, every day is sacred to someone. 'Put thy sandals from off thy feet for the place where thou art  standing is holy ground.'   That's Yahweh to our pal Moses.Holy ground, this earth. Holy people, us, when we try to be. 

Strong Medicine

A woman wrote in to 'Dear Abby' about her retired husband Bud, calling him a lazy slob because "all he does is watch TV or play on his computer all day" while she works fulltime outside the home. ""Our house has become a pigsty, she went on. "If I try to do some cleaning, Bud gets mad and says he'll do it 'later' but 'later' comes and goes. Returning to a filthy house after work is driving me crazy. He doesn't even do the grocery shopping; I have to do it on my lunch hour."Abby suggested the lady try getting her husband to articulate his 'vision' of retirement. "You may find that it's very different from yours."Also, he may be depressed at the changes that have occurred in his life... If Bud was always a 'lazy slob,' then face it - that's the person you married. However, if this is a recent, radical change in his behavior, you should insist he be examined by his doctor. "Good luck getting any guy to see a shrink just because you don’t like his behavior, right?  Still,  Abby's tips are good tips all the same - just not as good as this regimen that  a reader of mine says she has used for her own husband and sons. She first wrote to me after reading a column I did about boundaries. We talked back and forth over the months and one day in came this email, from the lady I will here call Jan, whose last name I don't even know:

I began realizing my effort to be a good person, wife, mom, and daughter were becoming a huge drain on me, so for a while I stopped doing everything around here. I redefined what was mine to do and let the rest go. Basically, I cooked a simple healthy meal and that was it. I gave them all their own sets of towels and dishes, all color-coded. I had to give them each their own color because that stopped them from being lazy and using someone else's clean things ha ha! And wow what a breakthrough! I no longer wash dishes. My husband and sons rinse them off after they use them. I no longer wash their towels or laundry either. If they run out, that's their problem.As time passed though, I saw that my husband worked long hours and paid all the bills and mortgage - and he did try to do his own laundry - so out of love, I have helped out. My boys wash their clothes but sometimes, out of love, I will fold them. I try not to take over their personal responsibilities; I have my own. And so a switch started taking place inside of me:  I was no longer doing things out of a sense of duty, but out of love, and it felt much less draining on me.I still don't wash anyone's dishes. It only takes them a few seconds to run them under hot soapy water, dry them off, and put them back on the shelf and if they can't manage that then Jeez I have really crippled them!I just had to just stop everything and take a step back to redefine what was mine to do and what was theirs. It took about six weeks. And I had some guilt, but then I realized:  It's all about healthy boundaries. And so this works for us all and I feel more respected by them and more respectful of myself.

 And there, folks, is the magic combination: of self-respect, a recognition of the importance of community-mindedness and the willingness to walk a mile in the other guy's shoes. Brilliant!

Waiting It Out

Like everyone else. we waited around yesterday, but because the body will stay for only so long in a state of alert we also watched some TV.  I myself swam with this Scooby Doo fan, out to the swim raft, onto whose ladder a water-spider had tied a webby netful of babies.This same little guy’s mum, who is our first-born and is seen to the left in profile, told us not to climb onto the raft. If we did we might dislodge this one mother spider's silk-sack of webbing, inside which her two dozen tiny progeny trembled tinily.So we paddled around for an hour without once resting, he using his Spider Man boogy-board and I on my  own two legs, trained at age five to do the Elementary Back Stroke.Our other daughter meanwhile, whipped up an Indian food feast that took eight hours to prepare. (When you make the cheese, then press the cheese, then cube it, then deep-fry it, all so you can mix it into the Saag Paneer and the Shahi Paneer, it takes eight hours at least and these were but two of several  different dishes. She also did a homemade banana later cake.)Our other young grandson played a really hard game with Uncle Jeff to pass the hours. This was after Jeff and Old Dave and the little boys’ other mother Chris had taken and moved indoors every lawn chair, houseplant, loose branch and wind chime.... And then, again like everyone else, we waited.And the storm came and for five hours put us in the dark with no water. When the juice came back on it seemed like a miracle. After supper and before bed, the Defender of All Spiders was limping a little. She spoke of a hitch in her hip-flexer and so for the first time in five years I practiced some deep-tissue massage. On her. To release the TFL if I could and just bring some freshly oxygenated blood to the area.Later, as the wind still howled, lashing the trees outside our bedroom window I worried I had gone too deep on her. She is pregnant and what if I lifted one of the complicated membranous ‘pegs’ anchoring the delicate water balloon of packaging in which her child floats, disturbing him/her just as she had feared disturbing the water spider's babies? On a day filled with wind and flood you worry about such things, even as you count yourself safe in your shelter from the storm.

 many trees and branches down on the innocent-looking morning after

A Real Pinwheel of a Storm

• The shattered water made a misty din,
• Great waves looked over others coming in,
• And thought of doing something to the shore
• That water never did to land before.

That’s Robert Frost, in" Once By the Pacific" when he saw Nature winding up to deliver a real punch.I read where the word ‘hurricane’ was all but unknown in our part of the world before the storm in ’38 roared up the eastern seaboard and, in the space of an afternoon, killed over 700 people and injured twice that number. The Before and After pictures from that storm are stunning: a whole village of homes and beach pavilions in this shot, a community as it looked for a hundred years; and in this next shot, nothing, not one stone upon another.Picture it yourself, your house collapsing under you, you and your family rushing to the roof and then the roof goes too and you’re launched open upon the waters like Huck Finn in his raft. Picture the 50-foot wall of water in 1938. People said they looked in the direction of the bay. What IS that huge thing? What’s that noise? they were all thinking.And then it was upon them.My mother and aunt were in the Berkshires with their sister-in-law and her three-month-old baby when it began roaring in their directions. Their immediate thought: get to Naughton’s Market fast for steaks and beers. Well they were young, barely out of their 20s. It’s what you think of at that time of life, how to make a party out of everything.But boy did that storm do damage. They say that more than any other factor, the Hurricane of ’38 is responsible for the absolute wiping-out of what once made New England look so New Englandy: town commons graced with many examples of the American Elm tree, all shaped like so many wineglasses, like living fountains spouting cascades of green..That hurricane started what Dutch Elm Disease finished. If you didn’t know about the two phenomena you could scratch your head a long time without figuring out just exactly why every street in America has an Elm Street when the elm tree itself is now so rare.Let’s hope things don’t get that dire this time. Just in case they do I’m going outside to take a picture of our maple.

Hurricanes Schmurricanes

This is what Nature is saying to us 24/7:

It's nothing personal; just business as usual.

Coupla Dopes Posing as Naughty Minxes

Now even that good grey lady the New York Times has lost its mind:I opened the online version of the paper just now and got immediately taken to this weird little semi-titillating, young-women-resting their heads-on-one another's-laps video.It's an ad for pajama bottoms I think.Plus never mind they out-and-out STOLE "Bossy Pants," the name from Tina Fey's memoir..Click here to see the two models in full drowsy, live-action pout- there's a little short ad first, the footage.It really irks me for some reason. I say make these two dopes pick up the place NOW, then split them up and send 'em to their rooms without any dinner.

Kathy I'm Lost

To me the high point in Simon & Garfunkel’s touring career was the Concert in Central Park back in ’81, when even Superman couldn’t have leaped the tall buildings of women’s hairstyles.I had a cassette tape of that performance that I played so much I could make Paul's same cracks about the joints circulating in the audience as he made, with his exact timing and intonation.I found it so touching, earlier this week, to see how many people have the lyrics to their songs memorized.  Somebody posted the following verse on Facebook the other  day when she read what I had written about the duo and to me it conveys perfcectly the poignant quality of their work. Bet you know it too:   

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat" "We smoked the last one an hour ago" So I looked at the scenery. She read her magazine And the moon rose over an open field “Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping "I'm empty and aching and I don't know why" Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike They've all come to look for America , America 

But what is this America that we should seek her so? A dream? If so, it is a dream owned by no one man, or woman or political party.  An idea, like the green light on the end dock that Jay Gatsby so yearns to reach out and touch, standing at the edge of his own raw and ostentatious gardens? Though really it was the golden girl just back from that green light whom Gatsby loved, not for herself but for the way he looked to himself when he saw his reflection in her eyes.It’s that way with our country: the dream of what America is has sometimes made us seem better to our paltry human selves than we actually are; has made us believe we can BE better, and at times we have been. It’s an aspiration that children understand instinctively, harboring in their own hearts an idealism we are meant to foster in them and not cynically stamp out.Anyway let’s listen together in a minute and reflect that being lost and knowing you're lost can be the best first step to finding a truer path...   [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCbOEZ8c8dM&feature=related]

Hooking Up

“Follow the Bouncing Body-Part” I should have called yesterday’s post. Don’t they have some amazing ways of dancing these days though. And how on earth do people hear each other at the noisy clubs? How can they even begin to size each other up when all they have to go on is what meets the eye?Or maybe the point really IS to just the quick ‘hook-up', a phrase that always sounds  very painful and fish-hook-like -  with a barb on the end to wound you in your tenderest parts -and also sadly mechanical, like those long, dull docking sequences from The Empire Strikes Back.Neil Paumgarten wrote a piece for The New Yorker earlier this summer about online dating sites, sites that one handsome, single friend just told me he wouldn't dream of using since in his mind they smack of “desperation”.Boy is he wrong. As Paumgarten put it,  "The process of selecting and securing a partner, whether for conceiving and rearing children, attempting motel-room acrobatics or merely  finding companionship in a cold and lonely universe" is really "consequential. "Lives hang in the balance. And yet we have typically relied for our choices on happenstance – off-hand referrals, late nights at the office, or the dream of meeting cute.”College campuses and cities  meanwhile he calls great “habitats of abundance and access” when it comes to meeting possible partners  “but as people pair off, and as they corral themselves, through profession, geography and taste, into cliques and castes, the range of available mates shrinks. "We run out of friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends. You can get to thinking that the single ones are single for a reason.”Which is nonsense of course. Few people are single because they deserve to be. My Great Aunt Mame used to say it about pairing off: "For every old sock there’s an old shoe." All people really need is the help of the complicated algorithms so painstakingly perfected by sites like e-Harmony and Match.com and OK Cupid. You need the pre-sorting that they do. How are you going to avoid getting in too deep with a Tea-Party-when you’re a Socialist, if the best you can do is read lips at some noisy club?As for Joe Nichols here, well we all know this: getting a girl out of her clothes thanks to alcohol is pretty much the last thing any woman wants to remember having done the morning after, however coyly cute Joe looks singing about it. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj2700em-JQ&ob=av2e]

Follow the Bouncing Ball

Here by the beach, with a slender moon catching all the action, things are gettin’  lively at the karaoke bar. As I walk in, four young women have just told the Master of Ceremonies that one of them turned 21 that very day.From the stage he shouts to the rest of us, “Born as recently as the 90s, and they’re drinkin’ here tonight, people!" “I have socks older than they are,” a mustachioed man remarks, but the emcee does not hear him because, like a preacher with a killer sermon, he is busy building momentum.“Do you even know what a radio is, honey?” “Sure,” responds the birthday girl. “Didn’t I just ask to sing a Paul Anka song?”“Later, Darlin’,” says the emcee, for he knows he has to craft the evening carefully, let the amateurs take a few cracks at the mike, then bring up enough ringers to get things really jumping.The first young guy up sings something so wildly off key that only the two great-grandmothers at the corner table manage to smile their encouragement. Everyone else talks right over him, some wincing as they talk.Then two ladies join forces for “We Are Fam-i-lee” (as in “I’ve Got All My Sisters With Me”) and the crowd stamps and whistles.Next the emcee shouts “Now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the best attorney on earth AND the moon, FRANK!” And Frank takes the stage to deliver a tender ballad called “Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off.”“Yes!” cries a young woman with a drink in her hand. Then, as if to illustrate its theme, she rises and begins gyrating slowly while languidly waving one hand in the air like a sleepwalker hailing a taxi.In response, a young man moves toward this young lady whose clothes have in fact begun doing a bit of Venus-on-the-Half-Shell thing. He smiles to show harmless intent, then yells at the top of his lungs into her ear, which is what people have to do in order to be heard in settings like this.She leans very far forward, whether in real or feigned deafness, prompting the three other guys who had come in with this brave swain to snap their eyes over to the slow loping rhythms of the ballgame on the wide-screen. No guy wants to be seen eyeing the girl another guy has begun the Great Dance with.Now a young guy steps to the stage and does a hip-hop song about love and body parts.Now a stocky girl takes the mike for a growly version of Nancy Sinatra’s “Boots.”And now a smallish young man tackles Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” the one song I have just recently been told is guaranteed to bring any wedding dance-floor to soaring life.Finally, a man in his 70s comes forward and croons a pitch-perfect version of Louis Armstrong’s “Wonderful World” – at which point even that elegant Fred Astaire of a crescent moon seems to bow in homage, just ever so slightly, in this moist August sky.

(oh yeah and in this video? That's me on the left ;-) :

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmJjD33eKDU]

Good Old Simon & Garfunkel

Say the names Simon and Garfunkel and see what it evokes. Steve from South Caroline wrote the other day that he was listening to their early work and within seconds PilotPatty from the Metrowest area of Massachusetts laid down four lines of a classic S&G song bam!,  just like that right out of her head.Music goes deep all right.The mere mention of their names takes me back to senior year in high school when late at night I worked away up in the attic, making  two velvet dresses for my sister and me while “The Sounds of Silence” played  on the radio. The dresses were Burgundy and Forest Green I remember and they bunched in a sad homemade way around the armpits so later that winter I added long sleeves in the belling-out angel-costume fashion of the times.We thought we looked so great e decided to get our picture taken in them at good old Loring studios in donntown Lowell. As present for our mom we thought. Only when the proofs came back we looked in every shot like the female equivalent of that eager-to-fit-in-pair the Wild and Crazy Guys as played by Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd in the old Saturday Night Live skits. (Have mercy on all young people! They work so hard at inventing a self!)  I just came upon this rendition of  S & G’s ‘For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her’. How many young females swooned over this one with its words carried in on the waves of Art’s high-tenor voice. Sex was getting closer by the minute with the Pill newly available and all those rockin' sounds out of England, but how scary could it be when sung about by these gentle souls with their Kathys and their Emilys, in search of some town called Scarborough Fair? Searching always for that one girl, just that one girl? How the world has changed since those days my gosh! Here is Emily now:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7aUNZQVpQ&feature=related]