Wipe That Smile

What’s funny to one person isn’t funny another. You can tell this by studying the audience in a comedy club. There’s always that one guy out there who looks like his hemorrhoids are acting up. He won’t crack a smile, never mind utter an appreciative snort.Luckily, comedians are tough; they don’t seem to mind catching sight of that one sourpuss out there. They’re used to it maybe.I did a little standup in my primary school years when I would say or do just about anything to get the laugh at the supper table and I can tell you I would never get used to it if someone out front had the poker face. If I had stuck with it and done standup after I turned nine -  if I had done standup into my adult years - I bet I’d be wading right out into the audience to slap the guy who wouldn’t smile. Of course you can’t do stuff like that anymore in this New Jerusalem of an era when where we’re all so careful about letting people have their reactions.It’s a good thing, really. It's a big improvement over the old days when kids especially were told they couldn’t react in accordance with their feelings.How many times did grownups tell us we weren’t feeling what we said we were feeling? And remember “Wipe that smile off your face?”My eighth grade principal kept a whip in his office that he would hit us with if he didn’t like the looks on our faces. A whip! And he hit us as hard as he could on our little outstretched hands. Even the boys cried, trying to smile as the tears ran down their faces. Which reminds me of other things they used to say:Remember “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about”?Remember “You’re not scared! You go right back into that room and go to sleep!” My man was scarred for life the time a gorilla showed up in his closet and none of the grownups believed him. This happened almost 60 years ago and he still swears the beast was in there. Those WERE the bad old days.So as much as I wish people would get with the program and laugh when everyone else laughs I guess it’s their right.Like I said, some stuff is funny to you and other stuff is funny to me. What do you think of this little cat singing 'Lean on Me'? It made me smile but then my standards aren’t what you'd call high.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=B0jTKL3Dp00]

Fore!

The caption here as copied from Wikipedia: "Jerry is forced to act as tee, moments before Tom's ball ricochets into his own mouth." Keep it in mind.

What’s funnier than seeing people behaving in goofy and graceless ways when things go wrong? How about this story, told to me by a still-young guy about the time he went on a kind of bachelor party weekend involving golf?As the young guys prepared to tee off, a lineup of old duffers sat on the wall watching this party of whimsical lads. One of them had brought a bowling ball attached by means of various ingenious gizmos to a heavy metal chain, which he affixed to the ankle of the prospective groom. (The old ball and chain, see.) Somehow they were let onto the course anyway.The teller of this story was maybe 22, and though he was an athletic and well-muscled lad he had never before set foot on a green.He was there with borrowed clubs which he was just then studying fervently in the hope that he might choose one that would let him get the ball to go someplace, anyplace.He chose that jumbo apostrophe of a club called the Big Bertha, thinking its width would improve his chances.Instead, the club took a picturesque kind of revenge both on him and his friend's kindly father who had lent him his clubs for the day.When it was his turn to tee off he swung, missed the ball by a good five inches, and in his awkward follow-through, saw Bertha bend, come apart, wrap itself around his neck and sock him in the jaw. Maybe he looked a little like this:Do you doubt such things can happen? Ponder the action in Tom & Jerry's Tee for Two; then watch this clip, from America’s Funniest Home Videos and see for yourself why they call golf a' good walk spoiled.'[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MSs4GJn_TU]

Fill 'er Up

So let’s return to what’s funny, to keep our spirits up with all these early sundowns.One of the funniest things ever to happen in this house happened when Annie and her palsSusan  were talking in the bathroom. Maybe they were in 8^th grade.Kids are always doing things you can’t believe they’re doing; we know that.On this particular day as they were laughing the way only kids in 8^th grade can laugh, Annie gave herself a quick boost up so she could sit on the vanity into which the sink was set if you can picture it.No one commented on this – until, after a bit, Annie went to hop down off the sink only to find that the rear belthook of her pants was looped around under the spigot. She couldn’t turn around enough to see what was happening; she was hooked, with no more freedom of movement than a fish on a line has.All she could so was reach two hands around behind her and with one hand try grasping the faucet while with the other she tried pushing down and unhooking that belt hook .And no one thought to help because her whole hind end filled the sink; there wasn’t room for another set of hands.They were laughing too hard already. But when in her effort to get free she ended up leaning on the two taps, they really laughed – because of course what she had done was to open them both by leaning on them so that water from coming from the common tap released torrents of water down into her pants.I could hear the shrieks three floors away. And though I didn’t witness the scene, in my mind I can just picture it: water barreling out of the tap and a little wisp of a girl changing before their very eyes into Violet Beauregard from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. One minute she looked like this:And the next she looked like this:

It's a lesson to us all I guess, to look first before backing into a thing.

Just Yesterday

I thought it was happening back on Wednesday when our ginkgo tree suddenly started dropping its leaves. They make a sound like rain on the ground.But then just as abruptly, it changed its mind and stopped.“They're still green. Maybe that's why,” I thought but no.  At  8a,m yesterday, a strange flickering light fell  across the rug in this upstairs room, making me look out the window. They were coming down for real, still green or not.Ginkgo leaves hold on and hold on, then fall all at once within a matter of hours. Sometime they have turned to gold. Sometimes not.One time, just after we moved in this house, David and I were standing outside with our babies, when a strolling stranger passed our yard and stopped.“You know you have one of the only two ginkgoes in this town,” he said in grave tones.“OK,” we said, knowing little then of the power of trees.“Yes,” he said sternly. “The ginkgo is one of the Nature’s first trees, a real primitive. Look how its leave grows right from its large branches; there are no little branches!”We started noticing then. That was in April and six months late we saw what you will see in this short clip. We heard what you will hear.We're like the ginkgo too in our own way. Say we  live and live. Willard Scott salutes us. Al Roker too. And we get to thinking maybe we WON'T have go after all.But then the call comes and we do go, just as these leaves went, making their lovely carpet on the grass.  What a mystery it all is, even here in our big-shot 21st century.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVv1vsHXHmQ]

It's Now or Never, Kid

Here is a thought for this newly hatched day, when we woke amazed by the streaming golden light flooding in our windows at 6am (only 6:00!) Here is a thought for this first day of violet evening coming, as it does in my part of the world, with the children scarce home from school.

It's a poem called 'Time Change' by Gloria Lewyn that I copied out of a magazine in the days when my babies napped away the afternoons. It goes like this: 

Time is different with a digital watch.

The minutes that used to limp around

The small dial on my left wrist

Come in early these days

Like the train.

I wound it myself then

But now time has changed.

It jumps up at me

Pulsing

Hours minutes seconds even days

Into then.

My new watch says

It’s now or never, kid.

Whatever became of o’clock?

You could make it last as long as an ice bar

Or another kiss,

Walk in late

And still be on time.

I found it so long ago as it seems to me now, and yet its words shiver me still.  It's now or never, kid. 

Let's make it now.

Unfit for the Job?

I had a comment on my blog about humor yesterday. Brian from New York wrote, "I’m curious: were you funny that way with your own kids or did you have to play the straight serious parent all the time?  I always used the grownup talking silly thing with all my friends’ kids and my assorted nephews and nieces. I was wildly popular with the under 10 set.. But mostly because they didn’t expect it from a “grownup”. They’re so used to their parents setting a good example."I’ll answer this in the simplest way I know: I’m huge with the Fourth Grade.In other words yes, I think I was funny with my kids. The youngest one in particular liked a good laugh. He and I were always hiding behind the doors on each other. Only we didn’t ever  jump out and scream the way Peter Sellers’s manservant used to do in the old Pink Panther movies. We did something much worse:Say one of us  was coming out of the master bathroom whose door opens outward and pushes back flat against the door to the bedroom that bathroom is in. It would swing out, bam! and hit the wall of the bedroom next to the bureau - unless the other person was standing behind it. Just standing there looking straight ahead and sort of crazed in a Tony-Perkins-as-Norman-Bates kind of way.It wasn’t that you could see the person. The person was behind the door.  What you could so was feel the person.Instead of the door banging smartly against the wall and thus making a sound,  the person opening it would feel something…  something sort of soft... and squishy .... and resistant, that something being the body of the lurker.It made the door-opener shout way louder than s/he would have if the person had pounced, screaming like a banshee; yell so loud the one waiting behind the door would also yell .The door opener never learned.Sigh.  It was a great game and one we never tired of. All through his Sixth Grade year one or the other of us was screaming.I guess this doesn’t really make me seem so much like a funny mom as a slightly deranged one with a kid to match. Let’s get a visual about the contagion of fear. Let’s close with the famous scene from  E.T. which I like anyway since I look kind of like the little alien these days, especially when I dress up to go to meetin’ in my purse and bonnet.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbhWftjWrEE]

The Set-Up, the Punch, The Set-Up, the Punch

The other day at the breakfast table I asked our second-grade grandson if he ever liked to have a coupla smokes before breakfast and he 'got' right away that I was joking. A four-year-old might not have gotten it but you wouldn’t try this with a four-year-old.What’s funny is practically a science when you get thinking about it.People laugh when they’re getting tickled, yes, but younger siblings the world over know that being tickled led does not, in anyone’s universe, mean that you’re having fun. Tickling can be aggressive, even mean. In my book any tickle that last longer than two or three seconds is just one person trying to show dominance.So what’s funny, would YOU say?Some people think puns are funny. I am not one of them but that’s fine, that’s cool.Some find animal photos funny when the animals are seen doing human things, like when a dog looks to be driving......It’s funny when the mighty are brought low; Aristotle saw this long ago, and I believe the Three Stooges would agree. (Just think of all those stuffy gents and dowagers they were always upending.) The big laughs in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night come when the pompous head steward shows up in Act Four festooned like the decorations at a pre-schooler’s birthday party, all because some happy lowlifes have forged a letter leading him to think Milady wished to see him thus dressed.Kurt Vonnegut writes that all comic writing consists of the set up and the punch, the set up and the punch. An example: on the lecture circuit once, he said, “Those who believe in Telekinetics, raise my hand.” Ha! A good one!What I find funny are unexpected images. If I tell a story that makes a reader smile. it’s because he or she can visualize the scene.the unexpected is often funny, as I was saying on that Halloween post. It’s funny when the twinkly grandmother casually asks a seven-year-old about his smoking preferences. Incongruity is funny. In fact I know what, let’s cut to the chase: here’s Will Ferrell in the much-emailed clip from Funny Or Die where he plays a tenant late on his rent when the nasty landlord shows up. The best moment of all comes the second he opens the door, check it out.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl37b45hnQw]

Go to Your Room

Well, our boarders moved out the second their power came back on. They went home, even though trees still litter the landscape over in their town. They were up before 7 and gone within the hour.Word is they spent their day mopping up the puddles from their long-thawed fridge-and-freezer; I spent mine washing all the linens from the beds they slept in, and the towels from their many baths and showers. It was fun actually. And with all the mindless work of the Tide and the Bounce, the smoothing of sheets and the stuffing of fat-lady pillows into their corsets I realized a few things:(a) It’s easy to have house guests who go to bed right after supper.(b) It's equally great and easy if there’s a 'no-TV-on-school-nights' rule. The talk was excellent.(c) I found it wonderful that I could exploit the two younger boarders, in a Child Labor kind of a way; turns out little kids like nothing better than to clean out a closet. They can't get enough of the task of pulling things out and examining them. Someplace over the last few days I saw the bottom of one closet for the first time in 25 years.(d) Old Dave and I turn out to bicker less with houseguests around even when one of them is our own child. Not that we ever argue that much; still, these last few days we were acting like a couple of people lobbying for sainthood. I know I don't want to be seen as some witch in front of that sweet little family. I don’t want to come across like the yammering wife in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.I want my kids to miss me when I’m gone, not be dancing down the aisle behind my casket. I want them to remember me as the placid ventriloquist’s puppet David wishes he had married. (Click there to see me perched on his knee that week we went to Paris.)So that’s all I wanted to say here. Good houseguests have many qualities, but that going-to-bed-right-after-supper is possibly the awesomest. If we all had a bath and a book and Lights Out just after supper, there'd be a lot less grouchiness in the world --- and that's the truth, pbbbbt!

In It for the Laughs

(Big family dinners: they're complicated!)

What keep me going are laughs like the ones I get from my friend Ann Aikens, who described what she called ‘the  wine-fueled row over nuclear power" she got into with her family at Thanksgiving last year.  “My aunt nearly dumped a casserole of boiling German Beans on me, she writes.  "Coincidence?  Hard to say.’  Or the  rundown she gave of the Christmas when her pals brought a pig too big for the oven. “If you too do this, make sure you have a clean hacksaw blade handy because the alternatives are really hard to explain to the neighbors.”It was years before Ann and I met face to face though we both wrote for the The Vermont Standard in Woodstock VT,  one of  the last of the old-time papers, section after section, page after page  of opinion and local news, columns on country living and who’s up to what. Sometimes I think I'm in Heaven itself when I go see them there in Woodstock and the satellite towns.I also write for the nearby Herald of Randolph where a jewel box of a music hall acts as focal point  for musicians and singers as fine as any you’d find at Lincoln Center or the Met.She calls herself  Upper Valley Girl in her column and for a spell she actually moved to LA to LA and became a real valley girl. That year she sent a Christmas card showing herself  in Lolita-style glasses and leopard skin swimwear sitting out by a pool.Because she feels almost like a baby sister to me, I was happy when she came back east.The last time I saw her was in July of 2010 at the memorial service for Kevin Forrest, longtime editor of the Standard,  musician and father, beer lover and all-around great guy who liked nothing more than to stay up late with his million friend laughin' and pickin’ until dawn. BUT ! She did write a column for the Herald of Randolph just last Thursday. It starts like this:

One of the great things about going to Disney World is that you think for weeks, “I’m goin’ to Disney World!” You could be in gridlock traffic with a full bladder. Getting fired. Your leg could be falling off. But things really aren’t so bad; you’re goin’ to Disney World.

I don't know yet what the rest of it says since that's as much as the piece the paper will let you see at first, unless you're a subscriber. But the rest of it should be up tomorrow and I can get my fix of her frank funny talk then. Or who knows, maybe she’ll see this post and send me an even fresher laugh, hot off the griddle.

Today It's All a Lovely Blur

I’m sleeping like the dead now. Our little guys and their parents have been here since Sunday morning and it’s lively times all right. Their power went out at 11 the night of that freak October blizzard. There was a kind of pop! and then that eerie silence.No clunking of the ice-maker in the fridge.No purring furnace.Just the shrieking  wind and the ticking of the slowly-cooling house. They said it was freezing by morning, yet for hours they couldn’t get out: fallen trees across both ends of their road. Finally they did get out, and came here with bags and boxes of food rescued from their fridge. Also, play clothes, work clothes and - of course! - costumes. So Sunday we ate their food, did loads of wash fluffed a whole bunch of pillows, and were all IN OUR BEDS by 8. Then yesterday the day bloomed and faded and Halloween came and as the picture shows, it was all a lovely blur.Two gangs of kids came to our front door and then immediately afterward, to  our back door. (We live on a corner. They thought it was a different house.) Our little guys got asked to a pre-trick-or-treating pizza-fest by the nicest neighbors in the world and by 7:30 we were all sitting by the fire, divvying up the loot.Whew! I myself was up  until midnight last night, finishing all the work I hadn't done by day - that's me below - but it's been one swell time all the same!

Spirits Abroad

The funny thing is it felt like Halloween was coming, freak blizzard or not. I lay in our bed as the wind howled and slept not a wink all Saturday night. At one point, a picture in our bathroom suddenly jumped off the wall and crashed into the tub, its glass exploding all over. I turned on the lights and swept up every last shard, then went over the whole surface of the tub with a cotton ball moistened in Baby Oil just to be sure I got it allI went to the guest bedroom then, hoping for better sleep- luck there but the wind howled even louder in that room and sleep eluded me. I stayed anyway and dreamed a waking dream of my sister Nan though, I swear I wasn’t asleep. I saw her dressed all in white, and young again, with her long thin track-star legs.Were there spirits abroad as uneasy as the wind? Poltergeists even?  I lay there worrying, first about our one girl flying home from Italy in the midst of all this, then about our other girl and her family on their heavily wooded street they seemed sure to lose power in this freak October storm. I threw in worry over our boy in Brooklyn, up all night as I guessed, at that Halloween party he was having with his friends.I startled into sharp awareness at 3:00, just in time to see the branches of my favorite tree break under the force of the wet snow and swoon down toward the ground.When, two hours later, David and I woke for real, he said, “Did you set a mousetrap in the kitchen last night? Because I heard this loud SNAP! at one point.“Nope,” I said and turned my head to look out the window. “Whoa there’s your mousetrap!” The light was still dim but I could see what had happened: the pane in the upper sash of our wiggly old window had cracked all over. My heart sank.... But then this amazing sun rose and the night had passed and we still had power, lucky us. The trees shook off the snow and I told myself "there are no spirits,” then stepped into my morning bath  -  and yelped as a fine needle of last night's glass drove itself into the pincushion of my thigh.A message from Beyond it might have been, saying “Child, you have NO idea what really moves the world.” And that I can well believe.

Not Exactly Princesses

Remember how boys used to just Trick or Treat as hobos in outsized jackets with coal smeared on their faces and pillowcases to stash the goodies in?  My sister Nan and I went out as hobos ourselves, but we weren’t your typical little girls. For one interesting period, she used a dead cat in an alley as a departure point for a whole series of lectures on decomposition and the Mortuary Arts. We'd visit that poor Flat Stanley of a thing the way pilgrims visit a shrine. We would have Trick-or-Treated carrying it around with us if we’d been just a little more daring.But to get back to the customs regarding boys’ costumes:Have they ever changed! These days males of every age are willing to don costumes as elaborate as the girls’. They’ll be going out dressed to the nines, as Transformers or Power Rangers, as classically tragic bad guys like Darth Vader, eyeless and wheezing inside his giant black helmet. Some may even show up as poor old Nixon in that hideous mask Christina Ricci wore in The Ice Storm's middle school sex scene. And the point will be what it's always been: To startle. To counter expectation.We had a good friend back in the day. Didn't smoke. Didn't drink. Took old bikes from the dump, fixed them up good as new and gave them to kids who didn't have bikes. On the Halloween immediately following some madman's murder of several people by slipping poison into some Tylenol bottles, this friend took his kids around for Trick or Treat, himself dressed as.....a giant Tylenol capsule. He was actually surprised when another dad offered to punch his lights out.THAT escapade countered all our expectations.Partying indoors on Halloween will of course reduce your chance of getting punched - and you can still surprise your friends, as when the dedicated beer guzzler comes as a Mormon elder, or the biggest Don Juan in the group comes as the Pope.I never went in for a super-girlie look; never wore makeup. But for one Halloween party we threw, I came as Cher, in heavy mascara, a leopard skin body-stocking and a giant wig exploding in cascades of inky curls. I looked ridiculous. It was great. And Old Dave dressed like Sonny and looked even better in a peasant shirt, baggy harem pants and a Prince Valiant wig. He actually looked more like the early John Denver, or Moe of Three Stooges than either of those two, but still - he SEEMED to himself as Sonny Bono.And that's the fun of Halloween, getting to seem like someone else for a while.Maybe I’ll dress up myself tomorrow night. I like this costume quite a bit. And what's nicer than dining out on one of your major holidays?Now let's watch that cute pumpkin video from Google and all turn to each other and yell "Happy Spooky Day!" (And I'll just run and get that cat. :-) )[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FPAa7BqgSbw]   

Rights and Privileges

Here's what almost happened to us yesterday, a day so clear the local Chamber of Commerce could have taken a picture and used it for a postcard.David and I were in the car,  happy and talking, as he rounded the corner just a half a mile from our house.  That’s when the truck from a side street pulled out into the oncoming lane – only he swung too wide, jumped the yellow line and was heading straight  for us.  David swerved sharply, pulling us out if his path. We just had time to see the look of sheer terror on his face as he rocketed on past.He did not hit us, though it occurred to me that if he had, we would have fit  what the statistics show to be the classic profile for your typical motor vehicle accident: Broad daylight. Dry pavement. Less than five miles from home. He did not hit us.But if he had hit us and if David had been grievously injured and lay unconscious at the hospital, as his wife I would be instantly recognized as his next of kin and been granted all the right and privileges  pertaining thereunto.But this post isn’t about a near-miss car accident.This post is about marriage and how unfair it surely does seem to me that same-sex couples in the vast majority of these 50  states are denied the right to marry.I won’t go on here but will  just invite you instead to click on the 'Play' icon below and see how you feel when watch these couples in Asheville North Carolina being turned away, however kindly, when they come to the  Buncombe County Register of Deeds office to ask for a marriage license. It’s true this was an intentional gathering and that they knew there would be cameras. But just note the quickly suppressed expressions of sorrow on their faces when that “not you!” judgment is once again made about them. Just look and listen, especially to the voice of the woman in her mid-60s. I expected to feel only anger at the inequity of these laws watching this video.  Instead, I found myself sobbing:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP61wDGAmXA]

In Pustules and in Health

Here’s more about the body, this time about the body when it’s ailing:  One of our honorary kids called me from school once to see if I could bring him to the pediatric practice that oversaw his care. He said he had a rash that was just tormenting him and the school nurse was stumped."She had no idea what it was," he told me when I picked him up at 2:30. “She said, ‘Well, this one on your neck could be a bug bite, and this place on your arm could be heat rash, and this on your foot could be irritation from your shoes. I thought how likely is it that it’s three separate things?’”When he first phoned me I had asked him to call the pediatrician’s office to see if they could fit us in.  But oops he didn’t do that, as he told me while we were pulling into the parking lot of the medical building. Thus did we present ourselves, all unexpected, at the receptionist’s desk.“Can I help you?” she greeted us pleasantly. "I have this rash,” said the teen, holding his arms out for inspection. She glanced over at me.“And … you have an appointment?”“No, actually," I stammered. "We just thought it might be as easy to make the appointment in person as over the phone.” She looked at the two of us,  one blooming in pustules and the other feebly smiling. She looked down at her book.‘I can fit you in at 6:45,” she said.It was 3:15.I didn’t know what to say to that. Could the boy miss practice? Miss dinner? I wasn’t sure I could really make that call. And the boy himself went totally mute.“So … you’ll come back?” she asked, but still we just looked at her, buffaloed.“Okay, well how about this? How about I write you in for 6:45 and you can also wait here now, in case something opens up in the next 40 minutes. Do you want to take that chance?”We nodded gratefully. And sure enough, in 10 minutes’ time, his name was called and seven minutes after that he had been diagnosed with a fine case of poison ivy and sent on his way with the name of the magical relief-bringing cream.I think of all this now because I’ve recently been speaking with an RN friend  who was advising me how to help someone in my family get an appointment with her own doctor sooner rather than later.“Tell him to be very pleasant when he calls but also to say he needs to be seen. Then, if he goes in there, he should be even more pleasant and wait patiently until someone can speak with him.”Amazing huh? So maybe you really can just show up and stand there with your foolish smile in hopes that they’ll work you in.  But if they do  - IF THEY DO - it won’t be because you were just that nervy but because they were just that nice. And I wouldn't try this very often either.

Whose Body Is This?

When Our Bodies Ourselves first appeared in Boston as a stapled-together pamphlet in 1969 it was hard to find reliable information about birth control. Why? Because thanks to the Crimes against chastity law, the distribution of contraceptives by anyone other than a doctor to anyone other than a married person was illegal, even in the now-progressive state of Massachusetts.I don’t mean abortion; I mean birth control.This man, Bill Baird, was arrested at Boston University when after addressing an overflow audience of 2500 he gave a condom and a package of  contraceptive foam to an unmarried undergraduate woman. Arrested. Hauled off to jail and held there for months.This was in 1967.The law was still unchanged  in the summer of ‘69 when the women of the Boston Women's Health Collective were writing this pamphlet that would become a book. 250,000 copies of it sold in the first year, mostly thanks to word of mouth.I was about to enter my senior year in college in the summer of '69. The summer before that, I had fallen in love with a boy named David. We had told our families that we'd be marrying as soon as I graduated. I was 19-and-a-half. I didn’t know much, but I knew I needed a prescription for the Pill.But how would I get such a thing? Especially on the serene and cerebral  campus of  my women’s college? Lucky for me that college was Smith College, that drew from every state in the union,  and the roommate I'd had freshman year was from the sunny sane west. A citizen of the world from Aspen Colorado, she knew a lot more than I did.  “Call the Infirmary and tell then you have to see a doctor." she said. "Say ‘I’m thinking of becoming sexually active and I need protection.’”But could it BE that easy? Could I just say that to some stranger, just as if I had a right to ask such a thing?  It could and I did. I said what she told me to say and just like that I was protected until the time of my marriage and for half a dozen years afterward, until this David and I welcomed our first baby and thus began upon the joyful chapter of life that brought us three kids of our own and the opportunity to welcome and shelter a five more kids beyond in their teen years.  Our Bodies Ourselves, now in its 11^th printing, is not just about sexual health but about health of every kind. Here are  some of the women who worked on it, as they looked in those heady and complicated early years, this from the forepages of a companion work Ourselves and Our Children. I salute them. 

Body Talk

How 'bout we make this Frank Talk About the Body Week here at Exit Only? I figure we might as well since we began the week evoking the image of a man sleeping with one leg thrown over his bedmate. In fact let's start there:I know lots of guys like to sleep that way and if their partners like it too, fine. Still, I have trouble imagining that many women like it. I mean here you are sound asleep and suddenly boom! a 40-pound leg arrives on the delicate breadbasket of your pelvis. AND you’re lying on your side where there isn’t that much cushioning!I know I couldn’t be with a guy who liked sleeping that way. I go a million miles away when I sleep. And when I wake I’m not sure even sure who I am never mind what century it is. I'd be a terrible candidate for this kind of straddle-spooning. Lucky for me I’m 40 years with the same guy who sleeps like the very dead, even when awake. Plus he was a preemie and did time in an incubator. That means he totally gets it about the need for ‘space’ when you’re sleeping.But back to our human bodies which are let’s face it the least unique and most interchangeable things about us. Yet there’s all this talk always about the body, who’s thin, who’s thinner, who’s had breast augmentation, who’s had his back-hair dipped in hot wax and snatched off so as to look better on the beach or in bed. What must God think of us?I bet He's proud of the ones who have honored the body and told the truth about it. This is the 40^th anniversary of Our Bodies Ourselves, a book about women's health and sexuality produced by the organization then called the Boston Women's Health Book Collective back in '71.Let’s talk a little about that tomorrow, why not. I won’t make anybody blush I promise, or encourage you to speculate about your friends sleep. In fact let’s call the picture below “What are YOU lookin’ at?” Because the sleeping room as they call it in German really is the one place we  can find sweet oblivion, and our minds can rest at last as slumber knits up what Shakespeare called the 'raveled sleeve of care'. 

Bringing the Distant Close

All day yesterday I thought about how I saw Orion the other night, as proud in that sword-wielding pose as a six-year-old. It so comforted me to see him Sunday night, not poised menacingly over us but lying on his side as he was on that first cold night of this fast-aging autumn. It reminded me of 'Choose Something Like a Star' by Robert Frost with words that cphill me every time, evoking as they do the star’s distant and taciturn quality, its serene sense of remove from the messy woes below.When I began looking for it here on the web I came instead upon 'The Star Splitter', also by Frost and what do you know? Frost also speaks of Orion's close-to-the-horizon position, only his image is even more animated. Rather than saying Orion is merely reclining, he has him heaving one leg up over the tops of trees. The words suggest great energy and at the same time call to mind the image of a man sleeping, as some men do, with one leg thrown over his partner's flank.As to this poem, it is set in a small country town and tells of the man who burned his house down and used the insurance money to buy a telescope.I was going to quote a little of it here until I found this link that has the poem and the voice of Frost himself when you touch the "play' symbol; of Frost dead these nearly 50 years, but still here reading! Reading to us in that memorable folksy voice the phrases that sound so much like those of a man come to town for a keg of nails you can hardly tell that they're part of a poem.Click the link even if you only for a moment and listen; just listen to that voice. I did and was able to catch hold of them and hitchhike my way clear back into my own family’s past on a lonely farm in the mid-1860s. I did and was transported back to the dimly remembered day when as a little girl I saw a young president take the oath of office while an old poet squinted to see the page he was to read from, then gave up and recited an even better poem he knew by heart.What you hear is Frost's own mortal voice, And this, this is his 'Choose Something' poem, here set to Randall Thompson’s music and paired with images captured by the Hubble telescope in those close and distant heavens.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNDrMifZqLU]

Peeping Tom Reclining

I know they say the stars are so far away that the light from them left before the birth of Jesus; before the dinosaurs were even in middle school but still. When you look up at them they seem so present and benevolent, bending over out little cradle here.Say you're having one of those nights when you're making twisted ropes of the bedsheets with all your tossing and turning, and adrenalin shot of anxiety keep jolting through your body.Desperate, you get up and begin touring the house in your insomnia, straightening the pictures and talking to the chairs. You drink some water, not too much. Maybe you take a hot bath, hoping to stun yourself sleepy that way. Then, at the end of all that, just as you're crawling back into the rope-nest of disordered sheets your eyes travel to the window and there on the other side of it is... Orion, big as life and back for the winter.Even schoolchildren know Orion on sight, even on his back like this with his belt in its perfect three-star line-up, his dagger attached, his upraised arm and those wide, wide shoulders.There were meteor showers over the weekend and you tried to see the 15 shooting stars an hour that were said to be visible. Alas clouds had rolled in by then and anyway you couldn't stay awake.There are no clouds this night and no meteor showers either but awake you are and glad to see this old gladiator lying on his side, leaning on one elbow and looking in at you as if to say "Hey." You smile and turn away from him and are sleeping within 30 seconds.

Tenants' Revenge

The old place really needed painting and last week we shaved off its mustache AND its beard -  picture doing that to the Amish man! – with the result that certain somebodies are now unhappy. (The story of the tea-cozy of ivy hugging our house until now is here on yesterday’s post with Before and After pictures available here and here for the too-busy-to-go-back.)Who are these angry somebodies?  Who but the local bird population. They have relied on us for years and, come to think of it, they've grown even feistier since that addictive little app started appearing on people’s phones. Did they hear about Angry Birds® somehow and decide to start throwing their weight around? Maybe so: The summer before last a pair of mourning doves took up residency on the windowsill of my second floor office, and, nicely hidden by the fringe of ivy, copulated, brought forth babies fed the babies taught them to fly, then did the whole thing again six weeks later. It was charming until the gathered mix of grasses and guano began piling six inches into the air.Then, this past summer, a mother sparrow decided to build make her nest in our front porch light. We almost burned the place down before we realized she had stuffed it with enough straw to stuff a loveseat: all we had to do was flip the switch on. Plus once the eggs appeared we could've had omelets.Once they'd used up their maternity leave and gone back to their jobs we removed all traces of their nests - which didn't mean other birds weren’t also nesting inside the ivy; they were. Every summer for years I would watch them swooping in and out of this rustling curtain of leaves just next to my office laptop. It’s a wonder they weren’t asking to pop inside and check their email.These last days though, with the ivy stripped off, all was silent - until just a  few hours ago anyway when I heard a hard and rhythmical tapping. It didn’t bother me. In fact it made me smile as it called to mind that time our 20-month-old dressed in nothing but a diaper, toddled to my brand new car and began laying a little line of dents along its perfect flank with a ball-peen hammer he had somehow come upon.Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap, Tap-tap-tap.‘ I wonder what THAT is.” I thought dreamily, tapping away myself on my keyboard, Then then suddenly dreaminess vanished and I KNEW: it was a woodpecker who, flying by, noted these bare and brand-new shingles and decided to do a little writing of his own.

Shave and a Haircut

When an old 70s guy like Tom Selleck shaves  his mustache he looks so different we hardly know him. When a long-haired girl goes short it’s dramatic too. Remember the cry that went up when  Keri Russel lopped off those curls she had as Felicity?Great changes in appearance are jarring even for the person walking around with the new look.I'm jarred myself today, not by anything to do with my hair which, over the years has gone from looking like Janis Joplin's....to looking like Demond Wilson’s as Redd Foxx’s boy in that great golden oldie Sanford & Son.  I am jarred by what’s happening to our house:It has gone bald. It took 15 years for the ivy to grow, as, inch by inch, it lifted itself to where its tiny green fingers now reach clear to the roof. How I have loved it in summer when it’s the bright green of a tree-toad! How I have loved it in autumn when it blushes with the cold and turns to shades of maroon and burgundy:How I have loved turn the corner  at any time in the growing season and see how it has made the  whole south side of the house shimmer and billow.But ivy is bad for old shingles - new ones too, they say – and we did need to paint. We knew the men would soon pull it all down to do their work as they would have done if had David not decided he wanted to do the job himself, in the same way you want to be the one holding your beloved pet when the doctor inserts the final needle. He came home from work that day, and without even coming inside, set his things down on the grass and began pulling at the vines. I could hear the ripping sound from inside a closed window, and in no time at all those shiny green leaves lay face down in the dirt.I have rooted for the ivy, even knowing it causes damage; I applauded it this past summer when for the first time it rounded the corner and began growing outside the bathroom window.

To me it was beautiful.

Anyway here’s how the place looks now: new and ordinary, not old and a-shimmer and it feels like such a loss. Still, there is beauty in the new dark-chocolate stain and the bright white trim.And the ivy, pruned to its roots, is still alive after all, and come spring, like the hair on the head of the vanquished Samson,  will once again be growing, growing, growing.... Her e