When Will Dad Become a Woman?

Now that it’s December I could start right in making fun of the crass materialism of the holidays – OR I could offer for your reading delight a series of lovely books with nice large print and free shipping ha ha!This odd purply-looking book is the first one I ever wrote and is funny in the way all books are funny that have in them small children saying embarrassing things. I called it I Thought He Was a Speed Bump because all 50 of its chapters revolve around the fact that we rush so much in life we don’t notice what we’re running past. Or through.  Or  over.I also called it that because that's the exact answer  the two-and-a-half year-old next door made when questioned about WHY, two times in a row, he climbed on his tricycle and ran right over his little friend’s tummy.The best fun with this book was deciding on the copy for the back of it which appears below. Once an angry reader said of my column,  which has always appeared with my picture, that my teeth looked false, my hair was out of style and my eyes were beady. I just had to put that on the cover; it was such a good comeuppance for the mighty amounts of showing off I had done in the by-then dozen years I had been writing a weekly column.As you can see, John Updike once said something about my writing too so I put that there as well. There can be no doubt that short phrase is what got the book noticed and reviewed and bought by public libraries and schools all over the country. Maybe it's a painless way to reach the sort first-person essay.All I know is I loved looking back through all my old columns to choose the 50 best, based not only on my own assessment but also on the amount of mail each one had  generated.And I boy did I get a kick out of making up the titles for each short chapter, as well as names for each of the book's five sections. The section about learning stuff, for example,  is called "Thy Kingdom Come I Will Be Dumb," what one of my kids somberly intoned at age four while trying to recite the Lord's Prayer.In the section called "When Will Dad Become a Woman?" these are some of the chapter headings:

• Nine Months Later it Turns Into You
• Boy, Oh Boy
• Perfume-Giving Ken
• I’m Not Naked (I’m Wearing My Penis)
• Pod People from the Planet Destructo
• Smoke ’em If You Got ’em
• Bum Bum!
• Nothing But Gonads and a Grin

Gosh it was a fun book to write, and it’s still a fun book to read. The best letter I got was when a lady wrote in to say she laughed so hard reading one of its stories the coffee she was drinking shot out her nose and across the kitchen table.  High praise!So if you'd to have like a copy or two for holiday gift-giving just go here for the form. The very day your check comes to my PO Box, I'll hurry over to my 'warehouse,' crack open a fresh case of Speed Bumps and send however many you would like, for just $10 each, shipping included.And tomorrow? Tomorrow I'll tell about the next book I did, which is also fun but with a little crying in it too. For now though, here's a very small taste of one story (click on it to make it readable.)  Maybe it will make you smile - hope so!

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You Get Odd When You Stay in the House

No wonder we put on weight between now and the first of the year. Remembering winter’s isolation, we start right in planning the parties: we know we’ll need the company.In summer, company finds us, as we jostle for spots by the pool, or at the beach, or at those free outdoor concerts.Not now though; now we need interaction - and I feel lucky as far as that goes: In the last 24 hours I've had no fewer than four cheerful exchanges with people.The first came at the supermarket, when I found myself standing before a glistening display of cut-up butternut squash.“You have to be careful with squash when it’s cut like this,” I said to the woman already studying them. “It tends to get really…”“SLIMEY!” she shouted. Only she pronounced it “Slim-eh,” and we both laughed at what slow learners we have been, still buying the cut-up stuff instead of just going with the whole shapely vegetable, packaged the way Nature intended.The second came just three hours later, as I listened to a man telling me that mine was a great little car, really; that I could get another 200,000 miles out of her, easy. The only problem was he said this while dragging my supposedly great little car behind his big tow truck because it had, yet again, died on me.  What a good soul, trying to cheer me up like that!Then¸ when he dropped me at my service station, I had my third pleasant exchange, which took place when I related to my mechanic what my towing friend had told me.“He said I could keep her going ‘til the 300,000 mile mark,” I said.“God, you don’t want to do that!” he shot back - even though “doing that” would surely make him some pretty good money as the car continued its drama-tinged decline.Finally, carless, I walked to the drugstore, arriving just in time to see a young mother stepping away from the pharmacist’s window, prescription in hand.With one motion she clapped her phone to her ear and began talking fast.“Well, we saw the doctor. She says he has pinworm. Pinworm!”A silence, as she listened.“I know, right?! AND, she says the rest of us probably have it too!”I tried not to hear this, a diagnosis with the word ‘worm’ in it, but she was talking in such a plain bold voice.She looked at me and silently rolled her eyes while shaking her head, in that classic ‘Do you believe this?” way, with a chaser of “What are you gonna do?” thrown in for good measure.It was just the look you would have if you were faced with pinworm, whose two chief symptoms are (1) mad itching of a particular kind and (2) a marked restlessness as you attempt to escape your own skin.But what are you gonna do? You can’t escape your skin any more than you can escape winter. All you can do is stay cheerful and stay connected to every fellow sufferer out there. Now when's that next party again? 

Aftermath to a Holiday

I failed to report on my actual Thanksgiving Day. Maybe it's not too late to do that now.I'll confess I didn't have a thing to do with the meal. Most of the credit for the day goes to my girl Annie, She can do anything, it seems.This is Annie just last week. (Sometime your kids don't let you take endless pictures. You have to kind of sneak up on 'em.)Anyway, she left her apartment with the 20-pound bird  in his 20-pound pail of brining fluid and came over here to the house of her aging parents who were just sliding their feet into their slippers.She cooked for the rest of the morning, gleefully accepted the dishes made by three other great  family members and had us all seated at 2:00 for the feast.  All I did was make the gravy and get the porch furniture out of the dining room in time. (See here for that story.)  Old Dave even got in a little yard work in the morning, pruning some branches off of the hawthorn so the coming snow won't do that for us.That’s when he noticed the ball stuck high in the branches of the crimson maple which he knew would drive him crazy all winter long.  But that got solved when the guest who is also a firefighter/medic arrived. He shinnied 60 feet into the air, loosened the ball from the tight grasp of the branches and shinnied down again.And when a tiny fire occurred in the oven threatening to wreck half a dozen "sides"  he fixed that too, without harming a hair on their heads so to speak. (He's a firefighter/medic.)It almost goes without saying that that guest is Annie’s intended who she fell in love with while still in high school.So here’s one more handful of gratitude tossed up in the air.  Getting older isn’t bad at all if the ones coming up behind you are this kind of competent and helpful.And know how to smile and have fun too.

Pull Up Your Pants and Answer

You whine about how busy and fine and underappreciated you are. Then you look in the Book of Job where he’s sadly scratching his scabs, everything gone but Missus Job who only drops by to offer some lemony advice, if you can even call “Curse God and Die”  a piece of advice.Anyway he’s whining  like we all do until THE LORD shows up and puts a few questions to him.“Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” he begins. Then you picture him thinking “this little pipsqueak?“Gird up now thy loins like a man,” God says - pull your pants up in other words – “for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me:“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched the line upon it?  Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened, or who laid the cornerstone thereof when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? (What an image! ah!) “When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling band for it, and brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors and said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?"Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days, and caused the dayspring to know his place that it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it? … Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the search of the depth?  Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?  Hast thou perceived the breadth of the earth? Declare if thou knowest it all."Where is the way where light dwelleth? And as for darkness, where is the place thereof, that thou shouldest take it to the bound thereof, and that thou shouldest know the paths to the house thereof?  Knowest thou it, because thou wast then born? Or because the number of thy days is great?Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? Or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail, which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war?"By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth?  Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder to cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man; to satisfy the desolate and waste ground; and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth?"Hath the rain a father? Or who hath begotten the drops of dew? Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?  The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen…. Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? or who hath given understanding to the heart? Who can number the clouds in wisdom? Or who can stay the bottles of heaven, when the dust groweth into hardness, and the clods cleave fast together?..."Well, there's more. We all know there's more. I just thought it might be nice to quote it maybe because I didn't get to church yesterday. :-)Anyway I love it. I also totally identify with what Job says in response, which is "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee, Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes."  Been THERE all right, haven't  you? I know I have!

Keep it Simple Stupid, it's the Weekend

Even good old Dear Abby knows what the weekend is for. On Saturday she posted three letters, answering each in her typical blunt way.The first was from a woman so full of smug advice that Abby just basically let her give the sermon. She did well in school, she said, then got a good job; and when she got laid off from that job she decided to ....go back to school again! Because she loves learning! (Now why can’t other people do this too, the whiners? is what's she's all but saying as far as I can tell. )I think Abby picked this big non-question because she didn’t even have to wake up from her nap to answer it. She just said basically, Good for you dear. And that door over there? Don’t let it hit you on the way out.The next letter she chose to answer came from a teenager who explained that he was growing out his hair. He said his bangs now come down to his eyes and it looks really cool and all, but his teachers keep commenting on it. What should he do?Abby's tart response: Cut it. “Teachers like to see your eyes.”But really what did the kid expect, asking an adult? Adults all like to see the eyes. It’s because we know, just like the animals know: you have to see the eyes to read intent. If the eyes narrow, start packing your stuff. If the teeth get bared, start running.The third and final question she shared came from a well-meaning person who, noticing how much her niece seems to like her own pet rabbits, thought Hey what if she gave the kid a nice little bunny of her own? Wouldn't that be cool? And should she also throw in a cage?Now on a weekday Abby might have wound up and given a full Power Point presentation on why this was s a bad idea. But because it was Saturday she just bit her tongue and said that no it’s actually never a good idea to give a live animal as a gift. I myself would probably add “especially a poop-each-time-it-hops animal who needs hay of all things and has long sharp teeth like the killer rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail."But I am not as wise as Abby and do not always remember that weekends are for taking it easy; for saying less rather than more; and for just pressing 'Play'  and enjoying a little humor:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmu5sRIizdw]

You Think YOU'RE a Glutton

You think we’re bad: I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s book At Home, a Short History of Private Life about how the upper classes once lived and all I can say is it looks like they were even worse than we Americans are, inhaling whatever high-calorie special KFC is now touting.When he wrote this book Bryson was living in the old house of an 18^th century rural clergyman, and so spent however long it takes Bill to write a book  - what, six weeks? Six days? - going room by room through the place, offering meditations and curious facts about the uses of each room through history.It’s a big old doorstop of a book; Bryson's editors never seem to cut his words down and as a result I have learned quite a lot.One thing I have learned is about the eating habits of another man of the cloth who left a very thorough journal called The Diary of a Country Parson.Here’s what that guy ate at one meal in 1784:

• Dover sole and lobster sauce
• Spring chicken
• Ox tongue
• Roast beef
• Filet of veal with morels and truffles
• Pigeon pie
• Sweetbreads
• Green goose and peas
• Apricot jam
• Cheesecakes (plural if you please!)
• Stewed mushrooms
• Trifle

Then another day for supper he had

• A platter of tench
• A ham
• Three fowls
• Two roasted ducks
• A neck of  pork
• Plum pudding and plum tart
• Apple Tart
• Miscellaneous foods and nuts and as also with the previous meal
• Wines both red and white, beer, and ciderIf he lived today he’d be a fan of Colonel Sanders for sure. That new menu item the Bacon Bowl? Check out the ad and see if you don’t think it’s right up the old parson's alley. “Today tastes SO good,” the ad ends. And tomorrow? Well we’ll worry about how to get your 600 pound self off the sofa then.

KFC's Bacon Bowl

Safe! The Turkey Rounds the Bases!

Remember how in elementary school we made paper buckles for our shoes for Thanksgiving,  and paper Pilgrim hats for our heads?  One year my 5th grade class made all of Plimoth Plantation on a felt-covered mound in the back of the room: a whole little village of cabins made of small painted milk cartons, with a forest behind, through which the gracious natives would come, bearing corn. (Years later I visited the real Plimoth Plantation and learned that those first settlers pretty much steered clear of fresh water, choosing instead to drink a healthful quart or two of beer a day. Looking at the real slaughtered hog hanging headless and upside-down by a doorway, I could understand how they might have needed it.)If they drank to get through the big day as well, they sure weren’t the last to do so: My mother and aunt used to tell the story of her dad once coming home a freshly killed turkey given him as payment for his services as a lawyer.“Here you go, girls!” he said to them, slinging it onto the table and moseying off in search of his slippers.They took one look at it, with its long feet and enough feathers to stuff a pillow with and headed straight for the Scotch.Turkey is never all that easy to make; don’t let anyone fool you. If four people in a family are snoozing away Thanksgiving morning and wake at 10:00 to the delicious scent of roasting poultry, it means a fifth person got up at 5:00 and stood alone in the kitchen. bathing an ice-cold carcass before heaving it into the heavy roasting pan.Things don’t easier once it’s in the oven either. Roast it breast up or breast down, wrap it in cloth or muffle it in paper, every tactic brings its consequence.One year I set our bird on fire. A few years before that, I basted it in such a way that when I opened the oven after the usual five or six hours, it shot straight across the open door and slid into Home Plate against the table.  And some few years before that, when I took my first look at a dressed bird with its neck and organs packed tidily inside it, I fainted, just as I had done faithfully in church throughout my whole long childhood.Still, on the great day itself, few of us prove vegetarian. We eat some of that big clumsy bird, then take a walk, or watch the game, then sit down to eat some more.I recall the moment on one Thanksgiving in my adult years when my mother and aunt arrived, the “here you go girls” of family lore.I heard their voices before I saw them, the one light and merry, the other deeper and more ironic.“Here they are!” I remember thinking, and felt once more like a little child of seven.Their voices are stilled, as this Thanksgiving approaches. The faces change. The years blink by.I stepped outside early this morning, into a day all still and misty.As I watched, six leaves seemed to spill down together from the little oak tree across the street. But just I saw them, sadly thinking, “Goodbye then!”  they changed direction, became six live birds, and took to the sky.It felt like a message to me, and the message brought me comfort. ‘Be content where you are,’ it said. ‘Do not fear where you will one day go.’ A falling or an ascension: it depends upon your angle of vision.

The Day Before the Thanking Day

Yesterday here in the precincts north of Boston we had classic Day Before Thanksgiving weather, with air like apple cider and a sun so strong the shadows lay black on the bright-green grass.If I were still little, I’d have looked out at that bright green grass and seen pheasants doing their strut-walk in our yard, funny as it seems to say that since we lived in a city.Lowell was the nation’s first planned city, a factory town filled with mills and rowhouses and churches for every wave of immigration… And yet here we had pheasants out back.Why? Because the city sits on the confluence of two rivers, muscular and sudsy, and they are the real main characters in Lowell’s story.Even now, you drive through Lowell and Lawrence and Haverhill and all you have to do is squint your eyes to see the old fields lying just beyond the downtown, just under the suburban-style homes with their driveways and their swing sets.Our old house in Lowell sits on what had been, since Revolutionary times, an apple orchard. The house to our right was the farmhouse and the one to our left was its barn. We were the dooryard between the two, with this row of little apple trees marching out back, crooked and stooped like the oldest soldiers in the parades of your childhood.The oldest soldiers at the school assemblies of my youth were from the Great War mostly. I even remember one from the Spanish American War, that fraudulent 1890’s conflict cooked up by a nation bent on empire. When my mom was little they saw veterans from the Civil War at their school assemblies, imagine it! There’s footage on YouTube of the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg that would break your heart.  It makes me think of how seldom we ever think on the blood that was shed over time. After Memorial Day, after Veterans Day, who thinks of all that sacrifice, besides the families whose sons and daughters who have most recently shed it?I feel ashamed for all we take for granted in this country; I mean for the peace, both and political that allows someone like me to dream back and paint pictures of times gone by.We wake today to rain in New England. Rain with all its own charms. Rain that send us hurrying back indoors, grateful for the hot tea and the dry towel…I opened my eyes at 6am to the rain. Then I closed them again and saw those pheasants, and our neighbor's great old dog Tramp coming over to greet us as we jumped in the swirling leaves, the brown oak leaves that are falling this week, the last to go always, like me the most reluctant to acknowledge an end to the gaudy party. 

the next door neighbors' glider, with the old apple trees that dotted both our yards

Drownin' Here

I spent two whole days cleaning out the hall closet, and what did it do for me really but make me see how ridiculously thin I was back when that green leather coat was new? (How did we survive the fashions of the 70s with the super-tight waists? How did we breathe even ?But what I really want to say here is you're right, you are so right, all you wise souls who posted comments yesterday noting that the less you have, the lighter your burden. Because I also worked all weekend in the dining room which you see as it looked on Friday. Just try having Thanksgiving around six lamps and a world of wicker! The outside of the house is being painted – the screened in porch too - and everything has been in chaos for the last five weeks. If my camera had a wide-angle lens you could also see the box of human bones, a story for another time.BUT! Less than 12 hours after the painters were done with the screened-in porch I had carried every last lamp, footstool and table back out there.Single-handedly 'cause Dave was away.Then I dug out my grandmother’s pale frail china from 1903 and her brittle little goblets. I found the pickle forks and the celery dish, unearthed and re-washed the tablecloth, and the tablecloth that goes over the tablecloth and ironed all 80 yards of both of them.Now I'm turning to my mom’s wedding silver, which of course has gone goldenrod yellow with the passage of time and needed to be polished the old fashioned way (with the stuff that turns your hands black that means), then thoroughly washed, then dried with a linen towel and polished some more etc etc.And the whole time all I could think was how appalled a guy like Henry Thoreau would be, who said Simplify! simplify!How appalled Khalil Gibran would be who said Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.This place isn’t even an anchor; it’s the Titanic and maybe it’s going down!“Jaaaaack! Jaaaack! That’s me as Kate Winslet.Or maybe we’re that old couple who stayed in their stateroom, hugging in their bed ‘til the last.Anyway I’m not really complaining; I love the old things, the Limoges given to poor Grandmother Carrie, who died in her 32nd year.I practically put her soup bowls to my ear and listen to them, just as if they were sea shells.And you know what? Sometimes, sometimes, I think I actually hear things. 

Why We Clean

Now is the time you find all the little hammocks the spiders laid out on your windowsills, when the days were long and the bees danced their tipsy jigs.But the spiders are gone now.Roll up their bedding and wish them the best, wherever they might be. Think of Charlotte and her pig-friend Wilbur and send up a prayer of thanks that you too have had such a nice long time in the sun.Now is the time to pull out those winter clothes, and how many coats or jackets are there that I haven’t worn for a good 15 years? Give them away I tell myself.In my hall closet I have just found a pair of pink rubber boots with flouncy fake-fur trim and I can tell you it has been many a moon since the people drawn to such footwear lived here. I found Old Dave's high school football jacket too, its white leather sleeves slightly darkened with age and “Dave, Co-Captain” stitched on the front.I put it in the attic. In one corner, I found two family tablecloths wrapped in protective brown paper, rolled on fat cardboard dowels and left to stand in the odd corner of four different houses over a 50-year period. Will anyone ever use them again, artfully patched as they are and speckled with faint brown speckles? And from what old gravy boat, I wonder? From what brimming glass of claret?I put them back in their corner.There are consolations in cleaning, letting go of what needs letting go of and holding tight to what we can’t yet part with.I found old gloves, my favorite kind, in black, my favorite color. Five identical gloves for the right hand and none at all for the left so what to do here? Save them in case their wandering partners ever return, or throw them away? Such quandaries lie at the heart of all cleaning projects.Finally, way in the back, I found the fur coat our male cat fiercely peed on when he was sick and on his way to the vet. He hissed and arched too, mistaking it for a living foe. I put in a whole new lining but still, I seldom wear the thing. Keep it or pass on?I fished in its pockets and pulled out a slip from the dry cleaners. I studied the items listed there and hey, hadn’t I just been looking for that mauve-colored gypsy-looking dress just the other day?I closed the closet door and drove right to the cleaners.I gave the slip to the man at the counter, who, five minutes later, smilingly brought forth a whole armful of clothes I had put in storage there…in May  of 2007, fully four and a half years ago.So now I have three good wool skirts, a tweed suit, three wool jackets, the missing gypsy number and four warm sweaters I did not have before. A whole winter wardrobe almost. I just have to throw on the coat and be willing to wear right-handed gloves on my left hand and I will be SET. (And tell you what, those cute pink boots with the fur trim are looking better to me all the time.)

The Teeter-Totter Would Cease to Choose Sides...

I loved those pretend “comments” on God’s handiwork one post back. I liked the pretend guy who pretend wrote that the creeping things that creepeth over the earth were gross. Yup, probably. Now try realizing that there are millions of them swarming all over your body right now, 90% of which didn’t even start out on your body. (See the work of Wash U School of Medicine scientist Jeffrey Gordon who says there are 10 times more microbial cells on and in our bodies than there are human cells (but maybe don't look into all that on a night when you’re having trouble getting to sleep.) I really liked the pretend person who asked “Why are the creatures more or less symmetrical on a vertical axis but completely asymmetrical on a horizontal axis? “I liked thinking how funny it would be if we were symmetrical on a horizontal axis too yuk yuk. Because just think we’d look with feet coming out of the tops of our bodies!  Or, we might have two heads, one above and one below and no feet. Then how would we get places, hmmmm? Maybe the heads would be fashioned out of bouncy stuff so we could get along by hopping.Real commenter Frank wrote in my 'real' comments section to say he got thinking about our being vertically symmetrical and went to the mirror to part his hair down the middle and nearly scared himself to death he looked so much like Charlie Sheen.He's right: Being left to right symmetrical isn't all it's cracked up to be and most of us aren't even close anyway with one hand being larger than the other, one eye squintier etc.  I know one of my eyes looks like it belongs to one of the younger Mouseketeer – Karen or Cubby - remember them anyone out there in TV land?while the other eye looks like all three Kennedy brothers circa 1960.So God wasn't going for symmetry at all, it seems.But the idea of balance has me remembering a poem I have always loved. It's about a teeter-totter and I offer it here. Call it the sermon for this November Sunday and while you’re feeling grateful for Paul Simms's wit with the Creation blog  comments, send up a nice word of praise for  April Bernard who wrote this poem called   “ What Would Happen Then” :                       

A bird, bright and quick,

blue with livid streaks,

would arrive on the windowsill

as official harbinger

and then….

The low would be raised up

the sneers crushed under their own bricks,

the teeter-totter would cease to choose sides

and sit in peaceful sway on its fulcrum.

The kiss that had been held back

all those years at last would release

into the mouth in flood,

And ‘why not?’ would replace all other dicta,

but gently, as a sunlit nudge.

God's Blog

If God posted on the internet: Paul Simms spun up this creative little piece of writing for The New Yorker a few months ago. It has God announcing His Creation and then a bunch of us moronic humans “commenting” in His work. It’s funny for how sweetly positive God sounds - and how pettily full of ourselves we humans are!It starts with God talking:"UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out.(I love “God out! So jaunty. :-) ) And here are some of the so-called comments. The whole piece is available here if you like:   Enjoy this Saturday, Sabbath to many, and a kind of Sabbath to us all~!

•  Not sure who this is for. Seems like a fix for a problem that didn’t exist. Liked it better when the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.
• Going carbon-based for the life-forms seems a tad obvious, no?
• The creeping things that creepeth over the earth are gross.
• Not enough action. Needs more conflict. Maybe put in a whole bunch more people, limit the resources, and see if we can get some fights going. Give them different skin colors so they can tell each other apart. 
• Why are the creatures more or less symmetrical on a vertical axis but completely asymmetrical on a horizontal axis? It’s almost like You had a great idea but You didn’t have the balls to go all the way with it.
• Amoebas are too small to see. They should be at least the size of a plum.
• Beta version was better. I thought the Adam-Steve dynamic was much more compelling than the Adam-Eve work-around You finally settled on.
• SPOILER! One of them is going to eat something off that tree You told them not to touch.
• Adam was obviously created somewhere else and then just put here. So, until I see some paperwork proving otherwise, I question the legitimacy of his dominion over any of this.
• Unfocussed. Seems like a mishmash at best. You’ve got creatures that can speak but aren’t smart (parrots). Then, You’ve got creatures that are smart but can’t speak (dolphins, dogs, houseflies). Then, You’ve got man, who is smart and can speak but who can’t fly, breathe underwater, or unhinge his jaws to swallow large prey in one gulp. If it’s supposed to be chaos, then mission accomplished. But it seems more like laziness and bad planning.
• Putting boobs on the woman is sexist.
• Wow. Just wow. I don’t even know where to start. So the man and his buddy the rib-thing have dominion over everything. They’re going to get pretty unbearable really fast. What You need to do is make them think that there were other, bigger, scarier creatures around a long time before them. I suggest dinosaurs. No need to actually create dinosaurs—just create some weird-ass dinosaur bones and skeletons and bury them in random locations. Man will dig them up eventually and think, What the f?
• Epic fail.
•  Meh. 

Leadership with a Capital "L"

This is why you never have to worry what you're going to write next: other people give you ideas. I know you could lose your mind scrolling back over my posts – they spool back so endlessly, to the time when Bush was President – but if you have it in you go back just two posts and read where the seeds of today’s are.The topic was Presidential politics, a subject one witty commenter weighed in on.He said,"Sure, I read the papers, watch the news, follow the issues… but when it comes to casting my ballot I usually end up voting for the guy who reminds me most of Martin Sheen on The West Wing. Man he was a great President…!"And that is so true I realized. He WAS a great president and then he also had that nice slightly blousy wife he couldn't really control...and that First Daughter with the stick-out ears who has since washed up on Mad Men... He had Bradley Whitford as the cute right-hand man Josh Lyman. (That's Josh on the right.)He had our friend John Spencer keeping everyone on track all since the long-ago days of LA Law. There was smart lugubrious Toby always quoting from the Constitution and Rob Lowe who hasn’t been out of work a single day since that time immediately post his star turn in Wayne’s World when he got caught in some sort of videotaped swinger situation. (It’s Teflon with men when it comes to swinger situations, ever notice? Try being a woman involved in such hijinks though. The double standard lives!)Anyway it was a great time in America when we could tune in to that show every week - even though the fast-talk as they speed-walked through the White House corridors did make you so dizzy you almost passed out. My brother-in-law used to say he fell asleep like clockwork every week between the West and the Wing.Yeah... Those were the days all right… and speaking of Rob Lowe and P.O.T.U.S as they all so cleverly referred to the President of the United States, how about we see what Mike Myers is doing for the next four years? Wouldn't Mike-as-Wayne make a dandy president? At least the music would be good![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzUU7SRRsGo]

Mysterious

 Some days all you can do is pray on it all. This picture if from 1986:

This one is from 1988:

I was 36 when I met these guys. I was the English  tutor in the ABC program.Now I’m 62, yet I can still feel my 13-year-old self inside me, so serious a girl then.I was merry as a small child, then I grew grave as my circumstances changed. Then I met David and married and have been merry ever since.He thinks I’m funny. Wrong a lot, but funny. I think he's funny too. Truth is, we've only recently stopped dumping cold water on the other guy while he or she is in the shower... Good times~Uncle Ed is 91 today. Our honorary daughter-in-law Veronica bought all his favorites foods to him at lunchtime. She and I met at his apartment and it was so cheery on a dark rainy day.Once he looked like this when he was four years in the South Pacific:Life is so mysterious. If I get 91 years it will be 2040… Can't wait to see where we all are by then!   

On Never Giving Up

When my sister and I were little, we tried to get our mom on that show Queen for a Day. If she won, those nice people would find our father, we reasoned. Little as we were, we couldn’t imagine what skills of euphemism and tact Mom had to call on to tell us the hard truth: that sometimes a person lets himself be lost to us because he wants to be lost to us.In the past 48 hours I have used every means available to find someone who is lost to me now, though back when this picture was taken he was a virtual member of our family. Finally, yesterday I got in my car and drove 200 miles to look for him in what I thought were the likeliest places.I had no luck.The sun was going down when I decided to go to the last place where, some three or four years ago, I heard he had worked: the dining facility on a college campus. It was full dusk by the time I reached that campus and asked the first person I saw where the dining hall was. She wrinkled her nose at the bad news she had for me:  “There are many dining halls,” she said. "As many dining halls as there are dorms.”“Well, is there a campus center where they sell food?” I asked. There was and she gave me its name.The place was all but empty when I walked in. I saw only one young man wiping down tables.“I know this is a long shot but I’m looking for someone who I heard might work in the dining services on this campus. You don't know anyone named Rob do you?”Gee no, and that IS a long shot,” he said, shaking his head. "Though I think I do SEE a guy named Rob sometimes. Stay here and I’ll ask.” I could hear him asking a woman in a hairnet who had just materialized at the register so I walked that way. That lady too shook her head. "But wait, does he cook?”"Yes, last I heard. He's a cook.”She then walked me back to two young guys in chef’s attire standing behind the counter. I gave them Rob’s whole name and explained that he had been like a son to me; I explained that he was to be honored next week at a special dinner establishing his high school’s Wrestling Hall of Fame.“He's not here today but serious? He was a wrestler?”  “State champ!” I said.Then I took his picture from my wallet.“God is that ROB?” one cried. “He was this good-lookin’ dude!" said the other. “It’s him all right,” said a third person, walking over. “Look at the eyes.”This first guy gave a low whistle as he took from me the envelope I had ready.  “I’ll give this to our boss and she’ll give it to him tomorrow,” he said. "Don't worry."I thanked them, got back into my car and began the long drive home in the dark. Still, I felt at peace, and grateful for what seemed like the near-miracle that had pointed me, at the last possible minute, to this one kitchen of the more than dozen kitchens on campus.I had not been able to see Rob, but I had been able to leave the announcement of the wrestling event, and my very short note, and also,  on a whim, the crinkled original version of the picture you see here, which has not left my wallet in almost 22 years. Maybe it was also miraculous that, just last year, I scanned it into my computer.Rob is not lost to his community out there:  He has his life, He has his sons. But he is lost to some people back here who miss him keenly, like this wonderful Coach Tremblay, below, who will honor him next week even if he never again sees him again in his life. Not many people will do that for you.I hope Rob lets us find him this time. 

God For President

Every November, I start thinking we should all have to stand for re-election, from doctors to cops to customer service people. It’s an idea that has occurred to cartoonist Ruben Bolling too, since one of his “Tom the Dancing Bug” comic strips shows no less a figure than God himself out on the hustings.“GOD’S ELECTION CAMPAIGN,” the caption reads, next to a campaign poster with a shot of the Creator himself, duly robed and bearded and standing against a background of stars and planets. “My 12 billion year term is almost up,” he is seen declaiming, one finger in the air, “and I need your support for 12 billion more!” Then caption underneath says, “God for Supreme Deity’’ with the persuasive slogan, “Hey, his name is GOD!!”Mr. Bolling knows one thing: name recognition counts for a lot in any contest. Think about it:Many‘s the obscure candidate voted into office around the east because his last name was Kennedy. John Kerry never pretended he was a Kennedy but how my mother fumed back in the 80s when he first broke on the scene with his middle name beginning with “F.” “He’s no JFK!” she sputtered, as if he thought all he needed to win office was those magic initials.People may not be that dumb but still: it's pretty amazing to hear how often they say they enter the voting booth with no idea about why they’ll pull the lever for a particular candidate. Many say they don’t decide until the last minute, waiting on some flash of intuition, some welling-up of that warm fuzzy feeling, that “Reach Out and Elect Someone“ mentality that media expert Neil Postman describes.It wasn’t always like this: In my desk I keep a letter written in 1899 to my grandfather, a first-generation American whose mother could read and write only in Gaelic. Sent from Danville, Kentucky, the letter is written by his Uncle Patrick, an immigrant with no formal schooling – and goes on for two full pages in precise and tiny script about the ways in which Presidential Candidate William Jennings Bryan’s ideas are consistent with those of the Founding Fathers.You don’t see many voters with that kind of grasp of the issues these days, boy. These days in presidential election years, we all want somebody who seems dignified and all that but not, you know, boring to look at, or tiring to listen to, or God forbid in this youth-centered culture, wrinkled. We want someone Presidential, but not, you know, too challenging. Someone Presidential, but not demanding anything of us. (What would John Kennedy say if he saw what become of his Inaugural Day “Ask Not” directive?)Well I guess we have a whole year to work ourselves into a tizzy over this issue so let’s return to the Tom the Dancing Bug strip we started with. Here are the words in its final panel:“The campaign was not going well. God’s previous inaccessibility made his attempts at positive publicity seem disingenuous.”Then there’s a drawing of God, microphone in hand, saying, “And I’m sure this new shopping mall will bring prosperity to the whole tri-county area!” while out in the audience, an unseen heckler yells “`Hey GOD! I prayed for a job eight months ago and I’m still out of work!”Good satirist, that Ruben Bolling. He almost makes you wish God would make a few selected appearances - though I have a feeling if he were to, he might just bring along something bigger than prosperity, and to more than just the tri-county area.

Window on the Morning

I sure do like it here. Who thinks up all this entertainment for us?Four hours ago the world was indigo-blue when I shot up in the bed and let out a yelp. I had dreamed a bird flew at my face, then got stuck in my hair, which Old Dave calls ‘the Net’ because all kinds of things get stuck there.He heard me yelp, dealing as he was with Chapter 20,569 in Dave’s Own Book of Insomnia. He says he just opened one eye, thought “Good ol’ TT” and went back to sleep.So four hours ago we had Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds" around here and now in a few minutes the sun is going to be up and spreading its unconditional love all over the place, even on the messy lawns and sidewalks ankle-deep in leaves with last night’s winds.People are glad to wake up, that’s what I think, however much they moan about having to crawl out from under those covers.We all have our rituals, the bathing, the drinking something hot, the stretching... Maybe we fire up the television and let the paid cheer of the morning news team wash over us. “They care!” we’re meant to think. "They want us to start the day informed of the latest roll-over, low pressure system, house fire!" It’s not exactly the way our mothers used to wake us but it will do.So here it is Monday of the week of heavy obligation I whined about yesterday, only rather than feeling burdened I feel content. Content and even happy to be stitched so tightly into the fabric of my community.Just now our neighbor inched up out of his driveway just like always. The newspaper whumped down onto our sidewalk at the usual time too. All over the land teachers are walking down the still-empty corridors toward their classrooms, and the lines at the drive-thrus are eight and ten deep with the eat-on-the-run types.When I get up, I make coffee and sit right down here for an hour – and now I'm remembering I told a favored friend I would find her some footage of a ginkgo tree and sure enough here is a YouTube clip of one in Anduze, France.I watched it three times before I noticed what people left as comments underneath it. Two years ago somebody wrote “That’s a beauty!!!!” Then eight months ago another person said “Ginkgo the best!” Lastly a year ago, somebody else again viewed the same footage and wrote “my cats staring at me and I’m worried cos i havent fed him, mmmmm nice tree.”I like that last one ungrammatical as it is, the way the person registers obligation and beauty. Her cat and this lovely old tree having its hair combed by the wind. The near and the far. It shows just exactly how we live.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyH6S1IcZJI&feature=related]

It's Ba-a-a-a-ck! On Winter's Approach

Well, we got through last week and now a new week is about to start and in this new week we will still be called upon to go out in the pitch-dark for evening meetings. WHAT IS WRONG WITH OUR CULTURE THAT WE EVEN HAVE EVENING MEETINGS?  In other parts of the world people don’t do this, so what's wrong with us?This next week I’m slated to go out every single night, Monday for a meeting on the state of my soul, Tuesday for a meeting on the state of some young people in my life, Wednesday for a meeting on the state of my town, Thursday for our uncle's 91st birthday and Friday to drive 8 teenagers to a Poetry Jam and out roller skating afterward God help me, God help me. It all seems insane to me now.I felt crummy this past week and so stayed home nights. The one meeting I attended took place in my own living room which meant I could come to it in a semi-conscious state with a mind so muddled I couldn’t answer the simplest questions. But what if my lack of zip is the start of a trend, and here we are only one WEEK into the sad turning away from Daylight Savings Time? I looked around yesterday afternoon and noticed that an awful lot of leaves are still on the trees.  ‘Maybe winter won’t come after all’ I heard myself say. Then I actually told myself that at least the days would start getting longer now but  neither of those things is true!  (a) Winter is sure enough coming and I know this  well. I keep thinking of those poor souls stationed on the Wall  in  Game of Thrones. They're all trying to get themselves ready for that season of cold so brutal no one will talk about it, but I know just what it will be like!  It’s going to be so cold your earlobes will turn into wee frozen bagels. Your fingers will turn to icicles and fall shattering to the ground. And (b) the days aren’t getting longer! That’s six weeks from now that the days start getting longer! What’s happening now is they’re getting shorter and shorter and darker and darker.I spent all last week lying in the bed next to David who is like a big St. Bernard dog. HE doesn’t rush out to a lot of evening meetings unless it's part of his job. He meets our grown children for nice restaurant meals in the city and attends orchestral performances with them afterwards. I used to do this after falling dead asleep for the seventh time within the first 20 minutes of the concert's start I got uninvited.OK, I uninvited myself. There's something about the approach of darkness that just shivers my timbers.  When it's winter, either  in George R.R. Martin's world or in my own, here's where I really want to be:

Maybe I can figure out a way to sleep all day, THEN sneak out to those evening meetings(with a coat on over my PJ's and still be back in the bed by 9:00.)

We're Human

If Rick Perry had been in somebody’s living room when that Third Thing eluded him it wouldn’t have been a big deal. His mind went blank. My mind's been known to go blank quicker than an Etch-a-Sketch. I could be talking to Rotary or the Spouses at the Ancient & Honorable Society of Taxidermists or the Annual Tea of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Tablecloths and suddenly - nothing. I always feel honored to be asked to speak someplace and I work hard on my remarks, thinking up funny things and true things and writing them all down and promising myself not to depart from the text at all…But then the day comes and here are these wonderful open faces and how can I keep looking down at some dead piece of paper when I could be looking into their eyes?  I start in telling my stories and pretty soon somebody in the back is laughing so hard her friends are thumping her on the back.  And then this one thing I say reminds me of another crucially funny un-leave-out-able thing and I tell that and then we’re all really laughing and then – whoops!  – I’ve lost  the path back to my main thought.It sounds like a speaker’s worst nightmare but you know… it just isn’t. And the reason it isn’t is that people are just so glad it isn’t them up there that they help you right out.I ask “What was I saying before that last thing?” and some good soul down front says, “You were telling how the water leaking out of the kitchen light fixture reminded you of when just before you throw up you start drooling that  horrible way”.  (A speech by me isn’t exactly an audience with the Pope.)  And then I remember just exactly where I was going and I carry right on and NOBODY MINDS at all.It doesn’t get recorded in the organization’s monthly newsletter.It doesn’t appear on the Six o’Clock News.And the reason is that we all goof up sometimes, and if somebody holding the mike goofs up too, it just.....shows.....that...he...is....

HUMAN!

People Notice

Talking of that one guy not laughing when everyone else is in stitches reminds me of something a high-level crime fighter once told me . And I do mean high-level: as in worked for Scotland Yard.He told me that people are pretty amazing when it comes to noticing things that don’t fit the pattern. That's what helps the cops track down the criminals.It could be that guy who lives with his grouchy mother. He usually comes out of his house at 8am on the dot, buys a paper at the newsstand and walks north. Only this one day he didn’t come out until 9.AND he was dragging something heavy.AND chuckling to himself.OK too obvious an example maybe but here's a thing I noticed almost 12 years ago during the inauguration of George W. Bush. I noticed that Dick Cheney didn’t sing the National Anthem.George sang along. Laura sang. Everybody up there sang along but this Cheney guy who just looked somberly straight ahead.What did it mean I remember wondering?We didn’t know much about Bush back then. Would he be open and good-natured, or would he tend more toward caution and secrecy? Would he hold grudges and fence himself off like a man in a stockade, or would he be able to let go of grievance, seeing people as they really are, filled to the brim with every sort of impulse, from high to low?I remember wondering this about Former Present Bush that day as he and Laura and the girls got ready to take up residence in that satin-pillowed jail, as former Bush and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan once described the White House (and she ought to know since she worked there for three years.)I remember silently wishing him the best. But mostly I remember the cold withholding feeling I sensed coming from that man who served as his vice president.And for all we have learned or not learned about him in the years since - from his book, his utterances, his actions - I still wonder: why didn’t he behave like a team player that day and sing along when they played our national anthem ?I'm not saying it has great meaning. I’m just saying…… I noticed.