Diamonds and Rust

She loved him, for sure. She loved that Bob Zimmerman who renamed himself Dylan and the song 'Diamonds and Rust' that she wrote a dozen years after their affair proves it. I’ve always been haunted by the image in it of her watching him, his back toward her, as he looked out the window of a rundown hotel in the Village; the brave vulnerability in that line "speaking strictly for me we both could have died then and there.” In that moment anyway, she was ecstatically happy.She wrote 'Diamonds and Rust' the same year she let someone shoot this brief footage of her in a bar where she has gone to meet her former lover. In the two-minute segment she suggestively caresses her shot glass, arches her back, comes in too close, far too close to this man who no longer loves her. It squeezes the heart to see it. Slide the bar in to about one minutes 25 seconds marker to catch the brief, brief scene.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09wI0j9nkkE&feature=related]So apparently there was sex between them; however there is never only sex between two people. If they sleep together over a period of time it is never ‘only' sex I don’t think. I remember feeling cloven in two the first time I read the book by Evelyn and James Whitehead called The Sense of Sexuality. They assert that in sex very subtle but real promises are always made, promises not well kept in casual encounters. “They need a home, a place in which to grow." We also need to rescue Eros from its contemporary degraded connotation as the merely erotic, they say. In classical times, people understood Eros to represent our passionate drive for life and growth. "It moves in all our longings to make contact, to be quite literally in touch. That's Eros, whereas intimacy refers to the many ways we hold one another. As friends we hold one another in affection. As colleagues, we hold one another accountable in work. Intimacy is part of sex but it encompasses more than sex they say. “An intimate relationship draws us close enough to one another that we are changed in the process”.Maybe that’s what happened between these two. Anyway here footage from the 2005 Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. Watch it and think about who you have linked your life to, whether in passion, or work, or devotion to a cause; then think what the two of you together have put in the world as a result.We don’t know what there was between this Baez and Dylan when they were this young in a long-gone world. We do know what they did together; we know the songs he wrote and she sang in that long ago time. Dylan himself speaks about four minutes and again at eleven minutes in. The best part though is Joan, all grown up in her 60s, looking back with such kind wisdom at the boy who broke her heart. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkyGqrfPf4Q]

Joan and Mimi

Speaking of Joan Baez, here she is in that American Masters documentary from 2009, reflecting on her early family life and her relationship to her sister Mimi, seen on the left.Mimi too was a folk singer, who married fellow folkie Richard Fariňa at 19 and lived happily with him until his death at age 29 (He and Jim Croce, boy. Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Richie Valens, Patsy Cline, Aaliyah, John Denver, Ricky Nelson: all lost in crashes both on land and in the air.)Joan just loved little Mimi. The images of them as little girls are so tender as to break your heart. In the footage below she talks about her dad’s work for the military in the early years, work that eventually caused him to feel conflicted. He became a Quaker; they all became Quakers and he went to work for Unesco and lived in Iraq where they witnessed extreme poverty. And yet as Joan says, she has memories from her time in Baghdad that are inexpressible beautiful. Watch just a little if not all:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgPoFue5IIs]And here is another tender bit of video while we are at it, of Joan and Mimi signing "I Shall Be Released" in a prison. At one point during this concert she says to the audience how happy they are to be there. "Some prisons don't let us in even.''''The don't let us OUT!'' calls an inmate from the audience and everyone cracks up. That’s kind of a high point here. Another one occurs at around three minutes in, when she brings on the darling blue-eyed Mimi to join her on a song in Spanish and the prisoners explode in unfeigned delighted applause.You look at their faces, mostly brown and black, and you have to ask yourselves some questions about our justice system. Where’s the white kid busted for distribution of cocaine, or the one that killed his parents? Where is that Fortunate Son? Well I’m taking a turn down a long road here so let me back up and just show you this:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKQ-WzzQvyY&feature=related]

Dishing

I feel like I went to high school with Elton John; that's how connected to him I feel. When I first heard "Your Song" on the radio I felt this shudder of familiarity. Was I thinking I knew that voice? Or was it those lovely understated words, penned by the great Bernie Taupin? Maybe anyone who was around in the 70s gets that twinge of nostalgia at the thought of a pair of platform shoes. Elton took the fashions of that decade and just kind of magnified them.But really my topic today is how everyone thinks he's an expert on the celebrities. Back in the 60s people around here would say "Oh sure Joan Baez, she really slept around.” That that casual piece of slander made me furious and kept me that even after I saw the 2009 American Masters documentary about her where she says basically 'I was pretty promiscuous for a while there, whatever that was all about." (Ah what a great human being she really is. In my book she took that sliver-of-mercury voice God gave her and wrapped a whole lot of goodness around it.)Here's what I'm sayin':  Just because someone who supposedly knows someone swears that story about Richard Gere, say, is really true doesn't mean a thing . To that I say "Eh." My kid was in Mark Zuckerberg’s class at Harvard and though he ‘knew’ him and saw him around he doesn’t pretend to know a thing worth mentioning about him. I was in Julie Nixon’s class at Smith  but I too feel I can say nothing at all about what she was like except to mention that she had a rapid blink, probably arising from the fact that her dad was the president - and that in an age when most men looked like the Twelve Apostle she was shadowed wherever she went by a couple of  buzzcut Secret Service agents straight out of Central Casting.I did ride down in the elevator of the Hotel Northampton with her mother Pat Nixon when we were both overnight guests there. She had stayed there because she was visiting Julie and her new husband David Eisenhower. I was there because by the time I got drinking those 25-cent beers at the City Cafe it was too late to get back into the dorm. I called in the overnight as you had to do in those days and the local boy I was with gallantly got me a room that I hasten to add he never set foot in. He pressed the Up button on the elevator, gave me a peck on the cheek and went back to the bar to meet up with his buds.Ancient history you say? Nah, it was only yesterday. My hero Thoreau said it: ""Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is."  (My mom went to high school with him I think.) Now let’s bow our heads and listen to Elton when he was but lad in his early 20s.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13GD78Bmo8s]

Mark 'n Me

If you have a naked lady, lead with her; if I learned nothing else from 30 years in the news business I learned that ha ha.I was saying here yesterday that my house was like the Mark Twain House in Hartford Connecticut but then the only photo I showed by way of proof was of a couch that’s like another couch in my childhood home! Stupid girl straying from the point! So anyway here are the similarities:Both the Mark Twain House and this house have statues of a naked lady nude by the window. This is theirs below here, and this is ours on the left.My wonderful artist-cousin Tebby George sculpted our Blue Lady as we call her and I have to say we all love her. Whenever a baby is in the house getting carried around the place like a tiny God the way babies manage to do, it always reaches out a little starfish of a hand and pats one of her breasts. Very sweet.Both houses also have a big billiard room on the third floor. His is super-fancy with pictures of pool cues painted onto the wall. Ours is less fancy but that’s what they called it all the same, I guess since the place was built in the 1890s. They always  called the big room at the top of the third floor stairs the 'billiard room', anyway that’s the term I’ve heard all my life, though I myself didn’t come into contact with billiards ‘til that night at the Twist 'n Shout when I was 21 and everyone in the place was drunk including the bartender.So this is the Mark Twain's billiard room… ….and this is ours. The dress-up closet is also in this room, which though it gets heavy use when little ones are around we mostly use it for guests. And for the treadmill. And for hanging articles of clothing on the treadmill before lying disown on the bed for a nice nap ha ha.Oh and for keeping the ghost from the attic up in the attic (but that another story. This small person got used to the ghost in the attic crawl space when he was only three. (As you can see, it turned his hair white.)  Finally both houses have a boatload of potted palms and I am here to tell you that our palms get better care from me then David does. I should say that this is Abraham among the palm fronds just two years before he went to Heaven in search of his sister Charlotte. (How we miss them!)So there it is: how my place is like Mark Twain’s place. Now I'd LIKE to tell you that I’M actually like the great man himself but it wouldn’t be true  - except when it comes to our two mustaches of course, and I have to say mine is really starting to come in good now . :-)     

Hoarder Here?

The last time my mom came to my house, she placed her cane in the umbrella stand where she could reach for it when it was time to leave again. Only she  never did leave, as I know I have said here before. She died that afternoon in the wing chair by our fireplace. But this quarter-of-century after her death that cane still rests where she set it.I've often wondered if I was crazy, holding on to things this way. Then one day I walked into the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut (seen here on the left) and it was all I could do not to throw my arms in the air and yell, “I’m home!”The big old steamboat of a place that Sam Clemens built for his family just knocked me out so much did it remind me of the house where David and I have lived all these years, raising our children and mourning our old folks. We don't have Persian rugs draped over everything the way they did but still: Here were the same potted palms! The same ceiling-high bookcases! Even a similar sculpture of a standing nude! But really it was the feeling emanating  from every object that did it for me. You simply can’t find anything there that didn’t have great meaning for Mark Twain and his wife Livy, as the docents there will eagerly tell you.I loved their house because it said so much about their journey, just as I guess this house must say about ours.Even now I am thinking of  that closet in the back bedroom containing two baby dresses stitched in the 1860s. Of that wall in our dining room holding a framed sampler made by one of David’s Yankee ancestors in the 1840s. Of our living room, which has as its focus a sofa my grandfather bought second-hand in 1890. 1890 and we're still sitting on it! This old horsehair sofa  slept for decades in the basement of one family home after another, until, in the early 1980s, I taught myself how to upholster and did it over in a dark red satin. When I touch it now I can almost see the past.I have no idea what makes me look back and hold on in this way. But imagine my surprise when, 20 years after redecorating the living room in this house, I came upon a crinkled snapshot of that first childhood home, whose interior I can barely picture because we moved when I was eight: It's almost exactly like my present living room: Same pale-pink wallpaper, same white paint on the bookcases and the trim, and the exact same soft blue on both couches, the one from my childhood home and the old 1890s one now done over again, thank God by a professional upholsterer this time.  So did I remember that room  on some level? Did I see it in a dream?  I have no idea.Much of the time we humans are living forward and looking forward, I realize. But lots of times I think we are also looking back, as if perhaps to see if those absent others aren't following after us, hurrying even now to catch up and tell us all their news.

Holding Back

The high school reunion I talked about yesterday was so great I’ve decided to throw the whole topic in the pot for a few days and kind of let the flavors blend together. In a week or so I’ll know what I should tell here I bet.I find it’s best to do that with your experiences - let them settle a bit before talking about them I mean. Otherwise you get all wound up, telling things in the wrong order, and generally babbling on till people’s eyes glaze clear over.It’s a real tightrope if you’re a teacher, like I was back in the day. I knew better than to go on and on but I couldn't just let them sit there either during those unpredictable times when the P.A system would crackle into life to announce that for reasons none of us needed to know the period would be extended indefinitely. Then there you’d be with 30 antsy captives in front of you and the day's lesson almost done. You had to keep them engaged, keep them discussing, I always thought. You’d be crazy to let them just descend into jabbering chaos, right?What about the shy girl who had no one to jabber with?Or the new kid from Holland with his weird sweaters?

What about those twosomes of whispering girls who could make even God feel bad, so sure He'd be that they were talking about Him?Or the boys itching to clobber each other with their books?

No, you HAD to keep them talking - and listening - to each other. What a waste of those extra minutes together if you didn't.Enough. I seem to be the one babbling now! Suffice to say the ability to Keep it Going with questions back and forth is a handy skill to have wherever you land in adult life, even just to help you pass the time in line at the DMV.

High School Reunion

my sister Nan, lucky David and I in 1974 (in the great age of tanning)

I went to see Ronaldo Friday in hopes that my super-curly hair might look at least a little normal for my big class reunion, which took place last night. But then mere hours out of the salon I was out moving a dining room set in the pouring rain and my hair just went crazy.With 98% humidity again yesterday I knew it wasn’t likely to look much different by reunion time no matter how much I blow-dried it; no matter how hard I squeezed it between the searing ceramic plates of the flatiron. It was curly back then; why would my classmates expect any different now?This picture above shows David in his John Denver stage flanked by my blond sister Nan and me, both of us in the kind of dress our cohort of women would wear to say a 5th reunion. (Halter tops were huge in the 70s.)Dressing for last night’s affair all these years later, I knew I wouldn’t go the plunging neckline route.Or the spike heel route (and really when did that ever seem a good idea for a woman?)Would I even wear a skirt, or would I panic-buy some kind of glitzy slacks-and-a-tunic-with-shoulder-pads getup like the Golden Girls?At 3pm I still didn’t know.When I went to David’s class reunion last spring I wore a warm autumn-brown ensemble and could hardly breathe inside its tourniquet of a bustier, so the Ace bandage around the thoracic region was out.In the end I was leaning toward my one good pair of slacks and a top handed down to me (handed up to me?) by one of my daughters, the more clothes-conscious one.Anyway I wasn't that worried. I knew that unless we all showed up looking like Crusty the Clown nobody was going to be paying that much attention, because the action is all on the inside by the time people get to be our age. Exterior things just don’t matter that much, and isn’t THAT a blessing and a relief. You know it is!

Thank God It's the Weekend

Whew! End of the week and boy am I bushed but why? Could've been those 5 houseguests we had last weekend, though they were easy, as houseguests go. I mean nobody woke up crying  or spilled his milk or fell down the stairs which happens routinely when the little people stay over. Still, I was dead by the time they left.Hmmm. Maybe it was washing all their linens afterward, or setting out six meals - though our girl Annie made the best meal FOR  us ahead of time to spare her poor parents the work: two giant glass casseroles of Baked Ziti as only Annie can make that dish with homemade everything; she practically made the Pyrex dishes the ziti sat in. (This is Annie peeking around in front of her man. She’s actually 5’ 9’’ but he’s Paul Bunyan sized enough so she looks small in comparison.)Or maybe it was getting the news Tuesday that Annie’s big sister Carrie is carrying an actual baby girl, as the 19-week ultrasound revealed. (And here we were thinking it would be all boys all the time in that house! I was so emotional learning that the child was perfect and calm and even seemed to be doing the Sunday crossword in there, I just leaked tears all day.)  Or was it when Carrie grew so sick Wednesday with a hellish unstoppable cough? I ended up dropping everything to bring her to the Urgent Care people where they loaded her up with no fewer than three pregnancy-approved meds, including a sort of hookah every bit as fancy as the one the caterpillar had in the Alice in Wonderland.I guess it could have been attending Parents Night at the high school Thursday night in place of Hazees’s mom who couldn't get to the big ABC Family Weekend 'til the following day. More on that another time but this is Hazees a year ago now when he was a brand-new scholar with this Program that means so much to me. The big guy holding him was just making a point about his size. (He's much bigger now!) It could also be the fact that when David and I and our 5 houseguests went hiking high in the mountains last Saturday, the One Who Knows All About Mushrooms departed the trail, billygoated down a super-steep incline at the bottom of which lay a dry riverbed spiky with rocks, all in order to get to a giant rare mushroom. He went to lean his weight against the 50 foot tree beside the mushroom only to see the thing just plain fall over - the tree fell over, pitching him forward into the ravine."J-o-o-o-o-h-n!" we all yelled.Everyone but his wife, that is. She’s well accustomed to his fungal mania. Her remark: “Let’s just pray he’s not the one holding the car keys.” In case he we couldn't get him back up, seeMajor Calm I call that. Maybe I’ll have it in my next life.

Make a List

“She got a lot done.” That's what it will say on my headstone when I die and the reason I got a lot done is that I made To Do lists all my life.This is today’s list on the left. I made it at 2am perched on the bathtub's edge when sleep once again eluded me.A person's list can be puzzling to others: My list sometimes says "Remove nails" which sounds like a terrible sort of torture, pulling someones toenails out of their nailbeds I know but actually refers to taking off the polish.The personal care items appear at the top of most day's lists but soon give way to the larger projects, like this lofty goal penciled in on list for the weekend. “Edit book,” it could have said because I've decided to take one of my audio books and release it as a black-and-white-hold-it-right-there-in-your-hands document that people can read and look back . I've already picked out my assistant editor who will watch the most glaring errors from the script that I used in recording the thing. Though just 17, this person is only one I know under 75 who uses the words “shall” and “will” correctly. Plus the young have good eyes, and their bottoms don’t get as tired from sitting as the bottoms of us old folks. Never mind that a young person practically has a laptop sewn to his thighs most of the time. Easy money!Here’s what Annie Dillard wrote on the subject of lists and they schedules they give rise to:

"A schedule is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order…. a haven set into the wreck of time. It is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living..."

I love that idea, that a schedule makes the scaffolding that holds us aloft even when we think we might tumble from the great heights at which we balance in this precarious life.Remember that so when trouble does come you will have your list: “Bathe, 7am” it will say. “Fold wash 8:00” and on as you make your way through even the hardest days, when you file for unemployment, say, or wake to remember your diagnosis. My young grandfather wrote this in his journal just hours after his wife and unborn daughter died of a raging infection:

This morning I will go to Undertaker Feeney's and choose my darling’s narrow room. Now I will lie down on the couch now and watch the blackest day of my life dawn, though the sun comes up brightly and the birds sing in the window. How will I keep sane?

He kept sane the way we all do: by drawing up a little plan and putting one foot in front of the other. And savoring the sweet moments, and laughing as much as you can.

Go to Bed!

I slept until 8:30 these last two days. 8:30! It scared me to death.I know John Updike preferred getting up later than everyone else – he liked to let others arrange the world before he stepped down into it he used to say - but you sure won’t catch us nervous types doing that. WE want to arrange the world, thanks very much. Aren’t we the ones responsible for making the sun rise every day? You know we are.I was only able to sleep so late because at 4am both days I got up and worked for an hour; just woke up at 4:00 on my own, wrote madly for a spell and fell back in the bed at 5:00, there to sleep like the dead.I’m doing too much, I know, but I’ve always done too much. Tonight I have to go to Parents Night at the high school, even though my own last kid graduated back in’ 02, but the second I get home I’m hitting the hay.Because tomorrow I'm taking 12 strangers to lunch.After bringing them on a walking tour of my town.In the pouring rain, poor lambs.Then I’m helping out at a dinner for 60 at 5:00, and after that, at around 9:00, I'm picking up a dining room table from a house in one town and delivering it to a house in another town.Being my kind of person really can wear you down, and I’ve noticed I look pretty wrecked along about now. Me and this poor guy, who looks so much older than he did in the year 2000, whew! Remind me never to become President.

Enough with the 'Old' Talk

I myself am not old; just my insides are ha ha. The day my mother died, I was walking her to the car to bring her to the big birthday party arranged in her honor, when she turned to me and said, "I feel like a bride!”Go figure huh? You just never know. I could die today or I could live another 40 years. People born in 2012 could reach the age of 150 I read last week - by which time they WILL have pantyhose for the upper arms! I've done a kind of Theme-of-theiWeek thing  from time to time here on this blog, like when I had that Name That Celebrity contest back in March, or with last week’s talk of Fashion, or now with the subject of Aging two days in a row.It happens this way: You get rolling and the ideas pop and the yarn spools out and you get thinking 'Snip it off now and you’ll have yarn for tomorrow!' Or, to use another domestic art, "Keep back a bit of yeast today and you’ll have bread for another day!' It's comforting  to have someplace to start the next day. It is for me especially, because I’m determined to make good on my promise to write here every day no matter what. It's my gift, this ability to write with  honesty. I just want to give it and not worry about who might be there to receive it.I can tell you there's peace in that outlook. It's very calming to just be able to love the world without worrying whether the world will love you back. I probably learned this when I realized what a big chunk of the audience at any author talk I gave was just there trying to get in out of the cold; just trying to get off their feet awhile. It was OK by me. They made great audience members.So really I don't worry much about what I will write here next. Annie Dillard said it about doing any first draft: the problem is how to set yourself spinning. But once you do, you can keep on spinning for a good long time I have come to see, since really, spinning is just talking, freely and unselfconsciously. Ask a question of the guy next to you in line at the Post Office and you’ll see: He’ll spin like a top. We all will, given the chance.

Old in a World Full of Youngsters

I am an old person, in Nature’s eyes anyway, and the old are ever mystified. My groom and I: constantly mystified.We're mystified by the packaging our razors come in. We need to enlist the help of our young people to crack them open.  We're mystified too by the activities of these young people, who can watch television without a television and play live card games with people in other countries.We are mystified and we're frequently in pain: After raking all day, David walks into the house looking like a human andiron. Just that bent and bow-legged. After doing God knows what, I wake one day with a sensation in my back of a knife soaked in acid and plunged in deep.This was just last weekend. It felt as if a rib had tilted like that one rogue slat in a set of Venetian blinds and was digging into my lungs. I couldn’t sit or recline or breathe without feeling stabbed. I prowled the house all weekend, vacuuming, washing windows, even refinishing the top of an old coffee table.By Sunday afternoon, though, I was a wreck, and so began licking up painkillers the way an anteater licks up ants. I swallowed aspirin at 2pm, Excedrin at 6:00, Advil at 10:00. No relief. At midnight I threw down a couple of fingers of whiskey, hoping that would knock me out but no dice there either. Finally, rummaging around in the guest bathroom I came upon some expired Percocet from who knows what painful procedure, fired one down, and found relief at last at 3 a.m….Relief that was gone with the morning dew.So, the second my chiropractor’s office opened at 8 a.m., I called. He saw me just hours later, asked many good questions and told me to get myself to Prompt Care right away, just in case one of my organs was about to explode. Then, he did an adjustment on me. He pinged at my sad little skeleton like a man tuning a piano. He pinged and he thought. He pinged and he listened.And finally he sent me home with instructions to ice the area, 20 minutes on, two hours off, for the next 24 hours - which I did. And it worked. And I was CURED.But the story would not be complete if I did not also relate what happened mid-way through the regimen, the morning after I saw the chiropractor and before my appointment with Prompt Care: I went to the freezer to get the last of the bright-blue icepacks, whose fellows, all thawed now, still lay about on the floor around my bed.But this icepack with its array of purplish-blue cells held in a thick Zip-Lock bag did not look like the other icepacks.“Some new kind I guess,” is all I thought and took it to the couch where I wedged it against my back and commenced writing busily away on my laptop – until about 30 minutes in, when I realized that this was no icepack at all. This was a bag filled with Jell-O shots, many tiny cuplets of blueberry-flavored vodka, long since stashed in our freezer by the aforementioned young people.What can I say? By the time I’d finished the day's second shower, this one to quell my distinctly boozy aura, I had passed through Mystification to arrive in the land of Acceptance.Which frankly isn't a bad dwelling-place at all for an old person in a world full of youngsters.

Eggshells

This whole wearing-your-clothes-backwards thing: I was doing it 20 years ago and people would say “Oh you’re like Kriss Kross!” and I’d think Seriously? I’m like an early 90s rap group? Then one day about ten years ago I ran into a former student of mine named Michael Dwyer who immediately noticed the backwards-facing top I had on and said I was well within an old tradition among us Irish. He said "they do that  to ward off fairies."And now just this week comes this email from him about eggshells:“According to my grandmother the custom began in the 1840s during the Great Hunger, when millions of Irish were starving in ditches and millions more were fleeing to America in Coffin Ships. Whole families, entire villages, were abandoning land they had lived on for centuries - since the Middle Ages, if not longer, so long that they were intimate with their world in a way we can no longer imagine. Not just the land itself, the trees and hills and waterways, but the things that lived in it - the leprechauns and the kelpies and the Sidhe. Out of a combination of respect and caution, these enchanted peoples were called ‘the Gentlefolk’, ‘the Good People’, or ‘the Gentry’ - because it's best to be polite to forces you don't understand.“And in the same way that they had developed a relationship with the land, some  families developed such strong relationships with these “gentry” that when the Famine forced a family to emigrate, a few decided to go with them. And that was what saved the Irish in America. As bad as things were for the refugees here, they would have been much, much worse without their luck and magic."The trouble was, my grandmother said,  the Gentlefolk didn't like it here. They wanted to go home to Ireland. They couldn’t return as they came, of course; the ships were strictly one way. But they weren't dependent on ships and for centuries had been making serviceable boats from eggshells."Because they could do magic."They would lurk unseen in the corners of our kitchens, and whenever someone cracked an egg and discarded the shell they would claim it, and fashion a boat, and sail back to Ireland.  But if enough of them did this, the luck they brought with them would vanish."So, my grandmother said, it was up to us to stop them. Every time we cracked an egg, we had to crush it before we threw it away, because a crushed shell was unfit for a boat."I was young when she told me this, maybe six or seven years old. And from that time on it was my job to crush the eggshells. Any time we used an egg - at breakfast, after Easter, whenever we baked a cake - I would crush the shell and rinse my hands in the sink."But over the years questions arose.  First I wondered how we could make a difference, just the two of us, when there were so many people using eggs every day and not crushing shells? Because, explained my grandmother, most people didn't count. Magic has rules, and even the Good People can't ignore them:  If they want to make a boat that will take them to Ireland, the eggshell has to be broken by Irish hands."So each time I crushed a shell I did it not only for myself but for her and my Uncle John and for my parents and my brothers and sisters, and that's a lot of people."Fair enough, I thought. But soon I had another worry, because if the Good People hated it here and wanted to go home, wouldn't they be angry with me for preventing them?"Oh no, said my grandmother, not at all  Because if I worked to keep them here it showed that I believed in them, that I understood how important they were."The only reason they want to leave, she said, is because no one in this country believes. No one greets them or asks their pardon or leaves them gifts. When I crushed an eggshell I did all of those things, as if I were saying "Please don't go. We need you." Doing that, I made them happy. "So I crushed eggshells, and continued to even as a jaded teen, bored and angry and believing in faeries all the same. I crush them to this day, and always will."Interesting story about broken eggs eh?....and who it to say it doesn't carry truth? 

Free at Last

What’s wrong with wearing odd thing on your head like I was saying yesterday? My big sister and I wore sweaters on our heads as veils every time we put on the big Baby Jesus pageant in the upstairs hallway. She was always Mary and I was always Joseph. Well a short, pudgy version of Joseph, that good sport of a guy, forever befuddled-looking in the religious art, forever stuck wearing brown.It helped that our mom had lots of brown - she looked great in the color - and that the great aunts had lots of blue, blue being the total signature color of the BVM. (Even her eye shadow was blue they used to say around Nazareth.)It really is fun to customize your clothes like the Catholic-school girls have been doing since Day One. And when you get to a certain age you can go all out. At the end of her life my aunt was wearing her clip-on earrings at the top of her shirt collars just because she liked the way they looked.I myself have taken to wearing my tops backwards and it’s really workin’ for me I have to say. Spill something down the front of your top and all you have to do is swing it right around and poof the stain is gone from sight, as far as I'm concerned.Also as the pointiest-breasted pupil in my 7^th grade class....

....I'll admit that I’m also sick to death of my own cleavage, here in a world where you practically can't buy a top that doesn’t have a deeply scooped neck. So there again I spin ‘em around backwards, having first delicately picked the label off with an X-acto knife and EVERYONE IS FOOLED ! I wear high-necked bathing suits even, Spandex right to the clavicles, They're hard to find. yes, but you really really can't be wearing a bathing suit backwards. I’d rather go swimming looking like this:

than like this:Yes I have to to search hard for the high-neck suits but it's worth it. This was me at the beach this past summer (and look! I finally get to wear blue!)

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(I got the wind-machine think goin' to blow back my hair  :-) ) 

Buried Alive

Grey Gardens boy: I bet I've watched both the HBO dramatization and the original documentary about that sad old story a dozen times. There's something so haunting about the relationship between Edie the elder and her daughter. Poor Edie Jr., 40 years after this picture was taken, walking around with one skirt functioning as a head scarf to hide her baldness and a second upside-down skirt pinned around her torso. Poor both of them, hiding in that bewitched Sleeping Beauty castle of a house, holed up in a single room on bare filthy mattresses surrounded with cat waste. It's like some nightmare about the future that could fill you with stark terror as you slept.At one point in the documentary the two are talking of marriage and Edie Jr.’s unmarried state, she who said she could have married any number of men if she hadn’t been prevented by her various dark forces including her abandoning father; could even have married Joe Kennedy and been First Lady like her beautiful cousin Jacqueline. That abandoning father and husband, that Phelan Beale:  listen to what gets said about him by the two and about marriage in general. This is what I copied down from the 1974 documentary and not HBO’s re-creation. It's Edie Jr. speaking first, in that hoity-toity accent she assumes when she dwells on lost glories.“My father believed in ruining his children’s lives,” she says. Then, in an odd non-sequitur, “He wanted me to get a Masters Degree.”“You were scared of your father,” says Edie Senior who with her wispy hair and her ruined partly nude  body seems much more down-to earth. Back to Edie Jr now: “He said the only thing to BE was a professional woman. He did say that, didn’t he, mother? He didn’t want me to get married.”And the mother says, "I don’t think it’s important for people to get married. I don’t believe that at all. Don’t you want some of this butter pecan?[eating ice cream straight from the carton] "Mmmmm!”“If you can’t get a man to propose to you you might as well be dead,” says Edie Jr. “These women who don’t marry, what are they proving? I think it’s disgusting! They have to go around with dogs or other women… It’s disgusting!"But dogs are lovely!” says her mother. “I’ll take a dog any day!” She could have been saying all that in this shot here:Only the whole time neither is looking at the other, or at the camera. The surviving Maysles brothers says in the commentary on the Grey gardens DVD that they often didn’t seem to be even thinking about what they were saying much less listening to each other. It harrows me. When people get marooned and sealed away as the old and the forgotten often do: the thought just harrows me.

 the real Maysles with their real subjects

and below here, the real Edie I think, and not Drew Barrymore playing her

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG5baCxTtgw]

Nice Doggie

Too many rocks headed my way yesterday in reaction to the post about Obama and Jackie, whoo!Who said if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen? Harry Truman, wasn’t it? If politics is the art of the possible (which it is) and if much of it relies on tact and diplomacy (which it does) then a second remark comes to mind, this uttered by the great Will Rogers: "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie'  until you can find a rock.These are snakey times all right; people are mad. It brings to mind what Will Rogers also said: “Every guy just looks in his own pocket and then votes. And the funny part of it is that it's the last year of an administration that counts. A president can have three bad ones and then wind up with everybody having money in the fourth, and the incumbent will win so far he needn't even stay up to hear the returns. Conditions win elections, not speeches.” Pretty apt! He also said, ‘Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for." Apt again.So tomorrow I think I’ll get as far away from 'the kitchen' as I can and return to Jackie Kennedy Onassis Tempelseman (if we can pretend she married that last guy which she might as well have.) But how can we end without quoting Will one more time?“We don't know what we want but we’re ready to bite somebody to get it”.Hard to believe he spoke 80 years ago, eh?

Barack, Meet Jackie

I just need to say this to my man Obama:Dear Mr. President,Don't take this the wrong way. In my book you’re great. I voted for you in ’08 and I intend to vote for you next year but I think you have to get some serious coaching for your speeches because you sound like such an insufferable  smarty-pants. I’m not sure if it’s the way your voice goes up at the end of certain sentences and down at the end of others but the net effect isn’t good. You sound like a know-it-all, an intellectual, or “pointy-head” which in this country is not the way you want to be perceived. (Look at how they  sneered at Adlai Stevenson. At Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton.)I’ve been listening over and over to the voice of “our” Jackie, in this audio tape made when she he spoke to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. just four months after the death of the husband Jack whom she so obviously loved despite his rabbity ways. She says,

I was so happy that I could do something that made [Jack] proud of me because I’ll tell you one wonderful about him: I was really… I was never any different once I was in the White House than I was before but the press made you different. Suddenly everything that had been a liability before -  your hair, that you spoke French, that you didn’t just adore to campaign and you didn’t bake bread with flour up your arms…. You know everyone thought I was a snob and hated politics. Well Jack never made me feel that I was a liability to him but I was!

You have to listen to this, Mr. President, even if you did see last night’s Diane Sawyer special.. My point is that here she was, the child of immense privilege and she seems so humble and down to earth. And here’s you, raised by a single mother, visited only once by your grandiose and overbearing father after his abandonment of you as an infant,  moved from one part of the world to another.... Why can’t YOU talk like a regular person if even Jackie could? I think you can. I seem to remember you doing it that long-ago Time Before.      It took like 500 years of history to get you and your wonderful family into the White House, Mr President. I can’t bear the thought that you might only have only one term there.

Learn Something

A weird thing, fear: it’s what we knew as children, alone in our beds, terrified that the monster beneath would jump out and eat us up. It’s what we courted as older kids, on roller coasters and in speeding cars, or at scary or violent movies.  Even as adults, fear made us feel more fully ‘alive’ in a way we didn't often feel in our safe American lives.We love this manufactured fear, the way it keeps real fear at bay, but tell ya what: It does nothing for sadness, in whose dark kingdom we seem to have been dwelling for this whole last decade.There’s a great passage in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, a coming-of-age story of the legendary King Arthur, once an ordinary boy called Wart. That Wart is the rightful heir to the throne of England nobody knows, except the wise old wizard Merlin, who appears one day, with his pointy hat and his moon-and-stars cloak, to walk him toward adulthood.Later in the story, he comes upon his young charge in a state of sadness and tells him this:

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then: to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting… 

Me I’d like to learn  Italian, like my friend Bobbie is doing. Or Physics, since I somehow missed Physics in high school.  Or maybe embroidery which I haven’t done since I tried stitching my 5^th grade teacher’s initials onto a pretty handkerchief for her and ended up sewing them tightly to the lap of my skirt. But I love the idea that learning focuses you outward – not inward toward your own small self, but outward, toward the intricate beauty of this world, and all those other worlds beyond it.How many were there did Carl Sagan used to say?  “Billions?” We made fun of him but he was a cool guy who died too young and Cosmos was a really wonderful show. Remember it?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLkC7ralR30]

School Uniforms

Humans love to customize a uniform; it makes them feel saucy. Catholic school girls have done this for decades when they thought they could get away with it but the truth is most Catholic-school kids went to school looking like the young people in this picture, which it to say dressed in ill-fitting blazers style after J. Edgar Hoover's suitcoats.I went to Catholic school from Grades One through Four in a uniform designed shortly after the Great War. It didn't matter that this was the Space Age. These garments were of heavy dark-blue serge. Since you couldn't wash them presentability was preserved by decking them with a set of collar-and cuffs that buttoned on and off so your poor mom could keep on washing ironing and starching them every time she turned around.And if the regular school clothes were bad the  gym suits were worse. We wore bloomers, not just at Notre Dame Academy but also when I got to a public school! Also in college! They were all a  kind of weird combination of shorts and bloomers below and a bowling shirt above. We were a sight to see.The only attractive  thing about uniforms in my book was how nice this species of humanity looked in their school ties. If you ever dated a Catholic school, or even a prep school, boy in your youth you'll remember what it did to you to observe all that rectitude of dress on the bodies of those wild creatures known as "boys." Even today the sight of a loosened collar on a dress shirt sets my heart a-flutter.There was Mystery in life then, and the school uniform kept the mystery of our growing bodies at least somewhat under wraps, which I now think was a good thing.I don't approve of the skimpy tops and short-shorts so many girls wear to school these days. They bring sex to much to the fore and then where’s your mystery? Plus I don’t care what they say: girls are judged in all kinds of ways when they dress in too revealing  a fashion. They just are.    

September Morn

(Almost an) Autumn Day

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by. Now overlap the sundials with your shadows, and on the meadows let the wind go free.Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine; grant them a few more warm transparent days, urge them on to fulfillment then, and press the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Irene seems to have hurried in autumn, or at least that's how it felt to me two weeks ago now. Are there more red leaves than we'd expect this early in the month of September or do I imagine it?

This is a branch from the tree felled at the height of the storm, cut up now and hauled to the wood pile.

It is lovely to look at but of course it is dead, unlike like the other trees whose seasonal gowns we will soon be admiring.

The wind freshens and things change. Anniversaries come and anniversaries pass. We want to look back always, like Lot's wife, even when we know the looking might hurt us.

Better to look forward, enjoy the music of Nature's freshening wind and watch to see what beauties She has in store for us now.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5ylGCBPXoQ]