A Less Than Joyful Noise? Complicated Feelings at Christmas

The boy is standing halfway up my front hall stairs. He is a little boy and his speech is still imperfect.  The “s’s” at the beginning of his words come out sounding like “t's” but I can understand him – most of the time. Right now he has paused on the way up my hall stairs to ask me something.“What are you going to get me for Christmas, TT?” (He calls me TT.)“Oh!  Well I’ve already gotten it!”“What is it?’ he asks, twisting his hands together in front of him.“Ah now I can’t tell you that, can I?”“You CAN tell me!” he cries with a sudden anguish. “TT, you can!”Stalling for time, I then do what grownups so often do: I fib.“Um, let’s see if I can remember. Oh I know! I got you every single thing on Santa’s sleigh!”“No, you didn’t!” he nearly sobs, even as I am asking myself what on earth I think I’m doing, teasing a four-year-old.“I’m only fooling,” I quickly say. “What kind of thing would THAT be, putting Santa out of a job?”“So, what DID you get me?”“A jar of pickles.” (Gad, I’ve done it again!)“Not really!” he cries, his expression turning desperate.“No, not really. I’m sorry honey. Do you really want to know what I got you?”He sits down on the fourth step like a man exhausted by life.“Shall I tell you in your ear so it’s a secret?”He nods.“It’s a bank that counts your money as you put it in,” I whisper.At this he turns from me, closes his eyes and leans his little forehead against the wall, a bit of body language that comes through loud and clear.“You don’t want a bank that counts your money as you put it in?”He shakes his head no as the tears begin to brim.“Then I’ll give it to your brother, why don’t I? He loves banks, come to think of it! And you love stuffed animals, isn’t that right? Should I be thinking about a stuffed animal for you?”He nods his head. Of course! How many times have I seen him arranging the occupants of that toy doll carriage!“And what would be the best stuffed animal, do you think?”He tries for a brave smile but he can’t seem to speak.“Do you have a favorite animal?”He nods.“What kind then?”“A raccoon,” he says in a very small voice.“A raccoon is it?” I repeat after him.“Yes!” he now full-out sobs.He falls into my outstretched arms and there we stand, two people balancing on sharp point between laughter and tears, two people caught on that sharp point (a) because these long weeks of ad-fed hankering stand in opposition to every stated spiritual impulse of the season, and (b) because, thank God, they areFinally...Almost ...BEHIND US!

On This, Another Short Day

"The bustle in a house the morning after death is solemnest of industries enacted upon earth..."That's Emily Dickinson, just after the death of her mother. You feel the truth of her words when a loved one dies. The hush does lift and the busy-ness begins.Of course at the time when Emily Dickinson was writing, in the mid 1800s, most everyone died at home.I was lucky because my one parent died at home too. In my home, right in this chair. That's her cane resting where she left it. Really I just bring it out on the anniversary. Other times it stays in the umbrella stand in the front hall - unless little children are playing with it.How comforting it has been over the years for me sit on the sofa opposite and look at this chair!  I feel as if she only just rose from it to get something and will soon be back. (And ah that's the perspective all right, I realize writing it: the belief that have only just stepped away and we’ll soon enough see them again!) It reminds me of something else Emily wrote: "Dying is a wild night and a new road," she said – “and we the Left Behind know not one thing about it” she might as well have added.And that calls to mind a frequent remark by the oldest family member I ever knew, Great Aunt Mame born in the 1860s: "Not even a postcard!" she would hiss disgustedly and for comic effect, she who lived into her tenth decade, stripped of every last contemporary, sibling, and mill-girl chum from the 1880s. Not even a postcard: I love that.And speaking of postcards, here's one I came upon while looking for information about the school I attended as a young child.

It's a picture of Notre Dame Academy in Roxbury, Massachusetts as it looked back in the 1880s. The message-side on the back was filled in by one "Mrs. B. Morris,"  who evidently thought she was better than the Catholics. Anyway it reflects the prejudices of that time and place: "A Catholic institution but a very pretty place," she said of it as you can see here....

...which in turn reminds me of what young Emily Webb muses,  from her place in the Grovers Corners graveyard in  Our Town: "The living don't understand, do they?" she says to another dead person in that  ground-breaking Thornton Wilder play. "No, dear, they don't," the dead lady beside her says back.

And that, folks, is the understatement to end all understatements - and reminds me of something my oldest child once said to me when she was all of 14, just after her father had said something to me that I found terribly vexing.

"Sometimes I just don't understand Dad!" I said in a rare burst of candor.  

"You don't have to understand him," she said back. "You just have to love him." 

And so it is with this life. We're not called upon to understand it, its many partings and heartaches notwithstanding.

Heeeeere's Brian!

Rather than inflict any more Irish moroseness on the world today, I'd like to turn things over to a friend who just proposed himself as my co-host.I met this friend last June and found him unforgettable.Well actually I've really only met him here. I have never met him met him.So click here to read what he has to say today. He's the only person I know who also thinks morris dancing is funny which it is.I read his every post and have infected him, he claims, with the notion that we should keep writing as often as we can even though it sometimes feels as though WE are the tree falling in the forest that nobody hears.His name is Brian Moloney, spelled just that weird way with an O and not like the way we REAL Maloneys spell it. (Maloney was my grandmother's name) but kin all the same.He seems always happy, like this crowd of Moloneys whose picture was taken in 1910.(Quite a contrast to my sad mom and her sad sibs if you remember the photo taken the same morning! It's here if you don't.)Plus he makes bad puns on the word Yule (See above).Anyway he always makes me laugh every time, so check him out. For sure his pictures are way more fun than my pictures.

Will We Make it?

Gad December 20th and I'm not even done with the Christmas card! It's such a production always. Who can I leave out? This year I'm up to 200 cards to honor my various friendships, none of them casual. (I mean, is it casual when that girl Wendi at the Post Office gives you hand cream just because the two of you bonded over dry skin talk one day? When she thinks to set aside some of her own and brings it in for you and hands it across the formidable barrier-window belonging to the United States Post Service?)  I sometimes see Wendi on the street, away from her ‘Post’ and she seems to me an apparition, as if Glinda the Good Witch materialized before me. How could I not send Wendi a card?Then there's the question of who to include ON the card, meaning whose face should be on it.  Everyone who lived here this year that's for sure and that's before you even get to my gene pool. But how many images have I got when I gather up all my favorites? 15? 20? Thank God for Google's Picasa that lets you make a collage of them all, bunching them pinched at the waist as you do when making a bouquet.... Yesterday I talked about what makes a good holiday picture. Here above is one from the archives, taken the summer of the great heat when, to escape it, I had the brilliant idea that we drive to a steaming valley in central Massachusetts (bad decision) to visit the working early 19th-century farm known as Old Sturbridge Village, where we leaned, faint with heat, and watched a sow do whatever it is sows do. (Oh I remember: it wallow in mud (and the mud sure looked GOOD to us that day!)This above is Take One of the pictures I took that day where the expression on Annie’s face spoke for us all. I think I actually put it on the holiday card that year.And this below is Take Two. The children were 11 and 9 and 4 and my mother had died six months before and without her it felt to me as though my world had just.lost its firmament. I remember well the sense of vertigo I had. Having lost my ceiling, I was just beginning to look down at my floor.These guys are my floor and also the man off camera who helped me make them; who every single day helps keep my walls strong.I have a to-do list a mile long for today, like everyone else. But I will put on my special bright blue top and do the best I can, thinking of my Builder, and my Floor, and my Ceiling.Perhaps especially I will think of my Ceiling because it was on this day that she died, in the midst of her own birthday party, wearing that same blue top that she said made her feel like an Empress.Here's to us all then, Empresses and Emperors, past and to become! Do your best today, smile on your brother and be on the lookout for those angel visits which come as routinely as the rain, whether we realize it or not.

Quick Where's the Dog?

If you haven’t yet done your holiday card, it's still not too late. In this age of the digital image you can get a picture for it in no time flat. Here’s all there is to it:Tip One, if babies and toddlers are involved, schedule the picture-taking before they get so tired they begin corkscrewing in your arms and turning their heads clear around on their necks like little owls. (Watch for that melting-like-wax trick where they slide clean off your lap too. Small children can go boneless at will, making it impossible to get them into a shoe or a snowsuit or get them up off the floor without the aid of a giant spatula.They also know how to make faces that can really sabotage your Holly-Jolly photo. Ask yourself: do you really want your little one giving the raspberry to 100 of your closest friends?Tip Two: If your kids are anywhere under the age of seven, put mittens on them to keep their fingers from their nostrils. Think how many plays and pageants you’ve witnessed where the little ones at the edge of the stage began these digital explorations the minute the curtain goes up!  Think how few you’ve been to where a tiny girl didn’t lift her skirt up over her head. See what I’m sayin’?Tip Three: Do include your family pet in the picture-taking session, even though this may seem like a recipe for mayhem. It is not. Because if the pet is canine, you’ll be patting it and holding it, causing it to offer a big old doggy grin that will lift the spirits of everyone who receives your card. And if it’s feline, it is bound to be making one of those dead-pan faces cats make where they're obviously saying,  'Uh, what happened to the good old days when we were looked on as gods?' Cats also wear an expression you often see in works by the Old Masters. Think of that one guy often seen in a painting who isn’t looking at the chief object of interest at all, but rather straight out at you, the viewer. 'This won’t end well,' his look says, which is exactly the look the cat has in the family picture. Hilarious!Tip Four: the cat is right: Things won’t end well with your photo shoot, but that’s OK, that’s fine, because this way you can pretend that your goal ALL ALONG was to send a madcap card. You might even consider putting jokey headgear on everyone, to perpetuate this fiction. Antlers are a popular choice.Tip Five: Examine the foreground of your picture. Soft drink can aren't great in the holiday picture, friend; this isn’t a young guy’s Facebook page.  In my family there was this rule that even ketchup and relish had to be decanted. “No labels on the table!” my mother would boom.  It’s a good rule for the holiday card too.Tip Six, even more crucial than Tip Five: Keep beer cans especially out of the picture and also NO DRINKING BEER BEFORE TAKING THE HOLIDAY PICTURE. My advice: go right to the hard stuff, have everyone yell “Whiskey!” so they at least look like they’re smiling, pick a pose, order up the cards, send them off to the 100 friends and you are done for another year!

Tell the Truth

Look me in the eye and tell me you accomplished a lot yesterday.That's what this guy is saying.Try telling me you bought gifts, he says...Or finished the holiday card...Or finally got done trimming the tree.Guys like him are always talking like this, always acting so superior, just because THEY may have spent the whole day gathering nuts.Me?I didn't spend the day shopping OR trimming OR addressing the envelopes for that holiday card, though all of those tasks go unfinished.Instead I laundered 8 sets of curtains, washed the windows they belong to, sewed a slip cover for a chair everyone else in the family is happy to bring to the Free Stuff table at the dump and ate a pint of ice cream.It's a stressful time of year.And sometimes, sometimes the only way to throw up a barricade against that stress is to work on something - anything - in no way related to the tasks you're supposed to be working on.Human nature, what can we say?

These Children

These children I talked about Monday: somebody said they look like they all wanted i-Pods instead of the toys they are holding. Funny!I just wish I could find the actual photo of them because these two images here are from a charcoal based upon a tiny snapshot from 1910. Thus it is not a photograph of nameless children like you'd pluck from a bin and buy for a dollar at some antique store. These were unique and particular creatures, as we all are.Take this dubious-looking one with the old telephone. Some 40 years after this picture was taken she caught that old train bound for Conception mere moments before the last egg dropped down her tubes to make her my mom. “The oldest mother in America,” she called herself, though she didn’t seem old to us kids.Only kind of strong.Only kind of kick-ass, in the nicest possible way.Still, she couldn’t spank us to save her life. Only once did she start after us with a hairbrush to tan our hides. Then she saw herself, a woman 50 chasing a couple of primary school kids around a table. "You little hooligans!" she cried, then sat down and gave herself over to laughter.That's what she did all her life with her brothers and sisters: she laughed. They all laughed, all the time.The boy on the left was the funniest one, though he wasn't trying to be funny when he signed his letter to Santa that year “Your friend James, a fat six-year-old boy.” He was just offering Santa the description. I remember him making his siblings laugh until they cried when they were all in their 60s and he began recalling memories from the nineteen-teens. “It was one of those Saturdays when Pa took us all to that doctor in East Boston to have our nostrils cleaned out,” he was saying and how his siblings roared. We all did. (But did their father really do that? Possibly. Dramatic interventions of a health-restoring sort were huge at the start of the last century as far as I can tell from my reading. According to this dad’s diaries, every time anybody sneezed it was enemas all around.)And this seated child, the one with the broad cheeks holding the train?He was sweetness itself. When my mother started kindergarten in 1912, he could just imagine how scared she would be and so went clear to the edge of the Boy’s side of the schoolyard, himself a little first grader, and held her hand all through Recess.He came and lived with my mother and aunt for a while when Alzheimer’s was just beginning to trip him up. He kept going to the hall closet to fetch his hat and start out the door. "Rob, where are you going?" his alarmed sisters would ask. “Down to the courthouse to argue a case of course," he would reply mildly. He had been a lawyer earlier in life, when he was a dead ringer for To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch as played by Gregory Peck.In the actual snapshot, which I promise I will look for, there were five children smiling in front of the tree. The artist son chose not to portray them, even though he did not know as he chose that they were the cousins; that they were not the people from whom he is himself descended.I guess that’s enough to say for now. If I start on how their young mother had just died the previous summer I will surely go on too long. That's the difference between the writer and the artist maybe. The writer can really empty the dictionary on an idea, and still bring you no closer to understanding it. With the artist though, it's another way.

Misshapen

You can pick us right out if you go by our house these days: in a neighborhood where every other house is billowing with lights by December 5th, ours looks like Boo Radley’s .It’s not that we don’t want to dress the old girl up for Christmas. It’s just so much work.Putting candles in every window with their flimsy bases taped to the sills? We actually did that all through the 80s and 90s? Now I need a nap just thinking about it.The one thing we can seem to manage is a tree on the porch.A tree on the porch as well as in the living room has been our custom since a family member came home to see the live tree I bought one year, immediately undressed it and dragged it out the front door, then went out and bought a whole new tree and began again with the lights and ornaments. (The rest of that story is here.)Some years we've had TWO trees on the porch, the littler fake one and then also the real one, because Old Dave and I can’t seem to get around to dragging that live one in.Last year it waited 10 whole days out there before we finally got around to it.I think I have said that I'm generally the one buying the tree, as everyone seems to assume when you work from home you  'have the time'. I think it was Christmas of ’08 when I decided I just could NOT  haul one more tree off the top of my car and onto that porch.  Plus I had seen these nice fresh balsam trees advertised in a catalog. "Your tree will be SO fresh!” the copy read and I was SO gullible! I pressed "Add to Cart" and entered my credit card number.  Two weeks later here it came, delivered by the men in brown, landing thwump! on our porch in its plastic hairnet.A week passed. Eight Days. Nine. Ten. I couldn’t get Old Dave to tackle the two-man job of bringing it in. He was reading, I was reading. Then there were all those naps.Finally on Day 11, we peeled back its plastic netting and beheld what we had: a thin green Q-tip that stayed a Q-tip the whole time it was up, and upon which it was just about impossible to hang an ornament.The kids came home on the 24^th and shook their  heads.I can smile as I think about it now though. Because Q-Tips are cute, right? And a tree with its arms up as if in desperate supplication? That's funny too.Plus I just looked up the history of  Q-Tips, invented by one Leo Gerstenzang who first dubbed them 'Baby Gays’ and I have to say, that made me feel better all by itself. We're all good at some things, less good at others. When it came to product-naming, Leo could use some help, his friends doubtless said behind his back. When it comes to the Christmas tree project, the Marottas could use help too. No shame there. And admit it: isn't Charlie Brown secretly your favorite Peanuts character?

O Crappy Tree O Crappy Tree

For the last nine years I've been the poor schmuck assigned the task of buying the tree.No one else had the time they always said.  My youngest, who has had a real eye for balance and proportion ever since he first picked up a crayon to draw a Ninja Turtle, was off at college since Christmas of '02 and of course Old Dave has never cared. He always just wants to do his Sudoku.My problem doing the job alone is this: I’m not good at it.One year I got some weird kind of tree with needles that LOOKED super soft but turned out to feel like asbestos fibers when you touched them. Plus they were so closely grouped on their branches that the ornaments you tried hanging on them ended up lying sideways.Another year I'm told I got a tree that was way too small - who can tell when you’re there in the lot with no indoor walls or ceilings to give you a sense of scale?Plus I  didn’t see the part on the tree's side that was sort of scooped-out looking, probably because I have a part on my own side that looks that way, a spine that, once it turned 50, started taking a right-hand turn out of the lumbar gate, then changed its mind and went left, then righted itself to head  north again. I'd show you the X-ray but it’s too disturbing. My tailor screamed when he saw it and he's a strong man. “God! Do you know what that LOOKS like?” he said but I wouldn’t let him go on. Bad enough knowing how I think it looks: like a fat worm, writhing. Like a slug, failing the sobriety test.Anyway, that  year when College Boy came home  December 23^rd he took one look at the tree and said “Oh.”Then  “Hmmmm.”     Then “Mum, don’t be mad.  I’m just going to go out and get another tree.”I wasn't mad. I'm never mad. My job in life is to make the first stab at a thing, so others can then come in and point out the problems.He went out then and there and got a new tree, then took every light and ornament off the slug-tree and dragged it out on the porch.....Where began our new custom of having a tree on the porch, which is now a fake tree that comes in several parts and that you jam together using its several daggerish stake-through-the-heart elements.The year I first came home with THAT one was a big hit. “Old TT!” shouted College Boy’s father. "Buying just the essentials again I see!”That’s a joke between us whose origins lie here, two posts back.Come back tomorrow for the rest of the saga.. But the holidays, man. Crazy-making or what?

Suckers for the Latest Gizmo

Want a vacuum cleaner that bumps around the room on its own, cleaning your house for you? You can have it! How about a car that parks itself? You can have that too, if your pockets are deep enough! The Future is here, and people are hoping to find its gadgets wrapped and waiting for them under the tree.This December it’s been my goal to resist the power of that giant invisible magnet that is ever attempting to draw us toward shopping. I wanted to really do it this time; to be like unto a child and keep life simple.I mention children because I just saw the Santa list my daughter transcribed as her pre-schooler recited it to her. He told her he wants a picture of Santa and some monkey dark chocolate.Now we’re not exactly sure what monkey dark chocolate IS, but we can look for it, we can look! Dark chocolate is everywhere these days. As for the Santa picture, you can just rip that out of a magazine. So, you know, shopping done! Here ya go, kid.Only of course the child will change. He’s bound to change. His older brother has suggested an i-Pod and a video camera for his own gifts and he’s just in Second Grade.“An i-Pod and a camera?” I thought on hearing this. “What’s wrong with a new rubber ball, or a nice little wagon or a pretty spinning top?”But no. People are enamored by the latest gizmo. ‘Twas ever thus.The Christmas I was six, I got a doll whose diaper would grow moist soon after you forced a little water between her hard plastic lips.“Betsy Wetsy” she was called and how I loved her for this feature.To think that she too had tiny pipes and canals all through her like the rest of us! I kept holding her under the water during my baths, to see what else we could get going. And until just now when I looked her up on the Internet I thought she was a product of the Space Race Era of the ‘50s and early ‘60s but no: she was invented way back in the 1930s.I guess people have been enamored by gizmos since the invention of moving parts.Why didn’t I know this, with that snapshot I found in the attic? It's a tiny two-by-two-inch picture, curling at the edges, of three very young children standing before the tree on Christmas morning, each clutching his most treasured toy from Santa.It was taken in 1910. The children were two, four and six years old. And the gifts were a toy train, a toy camera, and a toy telephone, the kind once dazzlingly new, that has two parts, one you talk into and one you listen at.Even 100 years ago, toy versions of the latest technologies were much in demand it seems. So maybe like it says in the Bible a little child really shall lead us.They’re leading us all right. Even children under four can take your cell phone, tap a few keys and be playing the latest version of Angry Birds before you know what hit you.And they’re not just playing it; they downloaded it.Next thing you know they’ll be doing all our holiday shopping for us, online – which will free us old folks to get back to the more menial chores we're used to anyway, like vacuuming the floors and parking the old-fashioned way.Here are those children from 1910 with their futuristic gadgets. It just gets you thinking, doesn't it?

Landmine Holiday

I guess it’s never really the same old, same-old at the holiday.It just seems that way to me when I drag out the decorations each year.Here's that spiky fake tree that looks like something out of a Tim Burton movie no matter how hard I try to get a graceful swoop into its crooked wire branches.Here’s old Donut the Christmas doggy, still with a crater of black seared into his plushy thigh from that rogue Christmas tree bulb. I keep him as a reminder of what can happen.Here are the battery-operated window candles that seemed like such a great idea when I bought them."Look. no more cords!" I sang happily to Old Dave as I carried them into the house.But it turns out you still have to actually traipse around to every window to turn them on, dang it, and what if you’re away for the night? Any robbers, parked and lurking in their van, would know right away that you weren't home and then what?They'd come right in and steal all your presents and your Christmas doggy! Maybe even your window candles too (which might actually not be so bad since as it turns out they glow so dimly the only way anyone inside OR out can see them is if you turn off every other light in the house.)

~ Sigh. It's such a production every year. And I sill haven't bought the evergreens that I first tie to the banisters, then spend two hours festooning with strings of blinking white lights until you can’t pass up or down the stairs for fear of tripping on the wires. Maybe we should thing about installing a Mrs. Deagle-style 'lift' on the stairs to avoid tumbles entirely. (though remember the ride she got once the Gremlins entered her life? Its right here if you want to see it.

Every year Dave says the same thing to me when I come home with fresh decorations: “Just the essentials, eh T?"It's a reference to this scene from Dumb and Dumber, that great old Jeff Daniels/ Jim Carrey movie, where they’re broke, they have no jobs and the Jim Carrey character says he’s going shopping with the last of their money. The joke comes when the next shot shows him emerging from the store in a giant sombrero with two cases of beer, two pinwheels and a Bolo paddle. See?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppSUnOB4DZw]It’s a fun scene and I believe it has given me a fresh idea to pursue later today - for  a South of the Border Christmas, complete with tiny cactus plants nestled in all the corners, hot peppers hung on the tree and a pair of giant maracas for keeping the beat!That's 'maraca' not 'marcarena', people. The macarena is a whole different thing.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqzAVCn0ohI&feature=related]

A Post in Very Few Words

Here's how life is generally and around the holidays especially:  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old, same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old...

-  SUDDEN DEATH! -

~poor little kitchen mouse!~

same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old same-old,  same-old, same-old, same-old, same-old same-old, same-old.Then bury the dead and go on festooning with red.

This Blog is Interrupted

This blog is interrupted by the steady advent of DECEMBER 25 which has yanked me out of my cozy memories of the fun that is high school and yearbooks and reunions, including that reunion I went to with my dress on backwards by mistake. I didn’t realize I had done so until six months had passed.( "Oh wait!" I thought trying it on again the following summer. “The plunging V doesn’t go in the front?  It isn’t the shoulder blades that those two pointy pockets in the back were designed to make room for?") I am yanked away from these pleasant reveries by the need to start pushing uphill the rock that is Christmas, so that our family won’t be the only people on the street trying to string up holiday lights 24 hours before the big night, when Santa harnesses those tony rain-DEER and starts makin’ his rounds.  (And please note that that’s how you say it, people:  When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny rein-DEER. ) Anyway here’s the first casualty: the angel who normally occupies that  proctological seat atop the Christmas tree. She had too much grog at the holiday party and fell and broke her ankle. I ran an IV and put her in the little hospital bed I keep especially around for small accident victims.  There’s a little blood from the fall and as you can see she’s been crying, mostly because she knows very well  that that Angel We Have Heard on High is mocking her plight with the violin playing.Those angels: no sympathy.Catch you tomorrow if I can find my way back out of the Mall.

Sign My Yearbook

Where I've just been speaking of high school with its slam books and its study halls, how can I not mention some entries in my own old yearbook, so recently pulled down from the shelf? A boy named Ray wrote, ”Best of luck to a really sweet and serious kid. Don’t tell anyone but I love you.”(Bet he wrote that in all the girls’ yearbooks.)Then there was this one from a boy named John: “To a really nice kid. Don’t forget Chorus and A Cappella and our other fun experiences.”Like the way we secretly  held hands sometimes between our two sections, Tenor and Alto? He was a skinny kid with glasses but he did have a certain…. something. We made out once behind the two-ton velvet curtain on the stage in the auditorium. Girls wrote more heartfelt things:“I wish you all the happiness in the world,” said one:  “Never forget Gym Class ha ha!” said another, and who could forget Gym in that era when there literally were no sports for girls, when some of us spent the whole hour pretending we had our periods so we could sit in the stands and do homework.   But  was the inscription written by the teacher I had for senior English is what really made a difference in my life, though not at the time:“Please keep writing! “I expect to be reading your articles one of these days!”  wrote Miss Shea whose picture I here append. This stunned inscription when I came upon it 15 years after graduation, because I had totally forgotten I ever dreamed of writing. When I was in college I wanted to be a college professor; in my twenties I wanted nothing more than to teach forever; and as I was turning 30 I had my eye on Divinity School.By that time I had left the classroom and was tending two babies.This one day the two babies were napping and having scoured both the high chair, the booster seat, and every available surface in the kitchen, I had gone to sit by the sunny widow in the upstairs study.From that vantage point it was easy for my gaze to fall on the tall bookshelf across the room, on whose top shelf rested my old high school yearbook.I fetched it down and read all these scrawled benedictions, as they now seem to me.Ray liked me enough to lie and say he loved me, Linda and Elaine wished me the best and maybe John maybe knew as well I did that that was one delicious ten-second adventure we had behind those musty curtains.And Miss Shea? Miss Shea had done what all good teachers do: She had seen something in me and named it.So let’s send up a prayer for all the teachers who noticed us and our little talents, whether got the chance to write in our yearbooks or not.

the Dance Band

Ouch!

So here’s something worse than finding your Slam Book page covered with casual cruelties: You do a little video of what the Boston accent is like and post it on YouTube. Six months go by and every few weeks someone sees it and writes a comment saying 'Yeah that totally IS the real Boston accent' or 'Actually you sound like you’re from the Bronx,' or 'Hey I know someone named Marotta, are you related to Frank  Marotta ?'  etc.  This is me I'm talking about, just to be clear, and I like all these comments that have been left on the site by people killing a little time and curious about the way people talk around here.And then the day before yesterday someone wrote "Wait, is this a drag queen?” About me.‘Drag queen’ is a word you don’t hear too often outside the theatrical world - I don't anyway. I mean people are trans-gendered or trans-sexual, people are transitioning from male to female or from female to male but "drag queen "feels to me like an old word, used more for guys who enjoy dressing as women for the simple fun of it. They can even be straight guys, but for someone to seriously think I'm doing that? That I'm a man trying to pass himself off as a woman? As if menopause  wasn't bad enough! Is it because my hair gets so puffed-out and helmety in summer humidity that it looks like a wig? Did the light on my face make me look like I was suppressing whiskers?  I probably am suppressing whiskers these days with the estrogen going out like the tide, but I actually think it’s my general... presentation. I am 'feminine,' whatever that means or so I've been told along the way, sometimes by people who seem sort of sore about it. I mean once in my 20s a guy actually said to me, “You know you’re not as pretty as you make yourself appear!” What did that mean? That he thought I was working some kind of con? Am I? And am I now some sort of ridiculous figure, who is 'older' and should look … less like a woman?  "So sue me" I tried to say back in'the hell-with-you-pal' fashion but the truth is, I was hurt.I was hurt this time too, so much so that I erased the comment the minute I saw it.I did leave the video up because people seem to enjoy thinking about our accent here in Boston, and I like to revisit the subject now and then. I’ve even been thinking of seeing if my nephew will do a 60-second podcast with me where we just talk a little, since when he talks the whole world gets to see what the total no-holds-barred Casey-Affleck-in-Good-Will-Hunting Boston accent really is.Anyway this comes at a good time in our little Back-to-School week here at Exit Only.Now here's Felcity Huffman in the very tender movie Transamerica, just to open our hearts a little. And here  - I'll just give you the link, I still haven't been able to go back there  - is me. It kinda brings the bad part of the teen years back in full force.  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a7HXgYou-8]Tomorrow: back to the sweet subject of the high school yearbook.

Reunion Thoughts

Let’s honor one more late-autumn passage before we head into the clash and tinkle of  Christmas: I mean the time-honored high school reunion, so often held in the days just after Thanksgiving.Who under 90 does not anticipate this event without at least a twinge of apprehension? We were so young, and undefended against the judgment of our peers! I opened my old yearbook and felt it all again.“To Terry: Never forget Chemistry!” someone wrote next to his smiling picture and the fact that I never took a single day of Chemistry in my life bothered me not at all. He had called me Terry, and added exclamation points.“Best of luck to a swell kid,” wrote somebody else, but was I ever that? I remember being a timid kid, despite all my gay chatter as I strode along the hallways, my textbooks clutched tight to my chest. I know I was an anxious and an earnest kid, thrilled to be singing in the Chorus, and the Special Chorus, thrilled to be acting in the odd old-fashioned plays our ancient Miss Casey chose to be put on by us Drama nerds.I was thrilled even to be part of the European Culture Club where we ignored grainy slides of Paris while whispering in the back of the room.These were “activities”: what they told us we would need for our "permanent record."I also remember this: that in the Slam Book where people were expected to write blunt and candid things about each other I had been called a “poser.” I didn’t know what the word even meant and had to ask that girl at my lunch table.” It’s true! I am a poser!” I thought when she exaplained it to me and for the rest of the year hung my head as often as I held it high.But all that was then, and this is now.Five years ago, my class put on a jam-packed reunion, complete with a tour of the old school, a pub night, and tickets to Saturday’s game, all before the big dinner in the hotel ballroom. But with my old reticence again in full flower, I managed only to attend that last event, where I didn’t even dance but instead lurked sadly over by the coffee, studying the fresh-faced pictures of the classmates now deceased.So this time, in 2011, I wanted to do things differently. According when our just-passed reunion was announced last spring, I volunteered to join the planning committee. I knew only a few people on it. But even if I had known them all and they me, who would we have known really? We were all of us so young, all posers in our way,  fakin' it to make it  in that looming grownup world.I marveled at the two committee members who searched and called and searched some more until they had found almost all of our 800+ classmates, and could practically recite each one’s street address and circumstance. I loved all our meetings, in rainy spring, and swoony June and ripening autumn.And when the big night came it was more than great.I talked with Rob W and Debby S, with Dick S and Frank M and Sam P, with Jane T and Cheryl M and Allison C.Mike M I get to see often but Ilona W I hadn’t laid eyes on since graduation.  Coming up to me that night she said, “I knew you right away, even from the back - Well, after adjusting for the maturation factor of course!"We both laughed right out loud at that. So I guess humor lives on, and candor lives; and kindness too.There was a lot of kindness on display that night, especially when that one guy's belt broke on the dance floor and his pants fell down. All night long I watched the dancers, smiling my face off. Here are a couple of pictures of two pals, Mary Ann and Ilona. 

the good old Electric Slide that brings so many together :-)

And my new resolve, for the next reunion?  To go to all future reunions and talk to everyone there. To leave the deceased ones in their corner by the coffee, and to dance myself. 

Give it Away

Are you sick of it yet? The bids to buy, buy, buy? The midnight sales? The Act Now and Get  20% Off deals? A  friend just wrote me an email saying that life as we are living it these days is 'nothing but a set-up to labor, pay bills, get screwed by big government, then die.' He says the system is structured for the wealthy, and this is on the increase. He says he feels like a serf, a puppet for the political powers that be.

Sigh. He’s right, Scroogelike as it may sound - and I know I’m part of the problem, pestering family members for gift ideas. I’m also part of it, going on and on over these last 5 days about my own book, like this guy lusting after a little coin.This is the last day and here is the last book. It’s a collection of the nicest pieces I ever recorded for Public Radio over the years when I went to their local affiliates all over, recording these seasonal pieces in their studios, most of them light, some touching, all designed to be appended at the end of the Drive Time news.I traveled all around doing this, from Provincetown to Tucson to Portland to WAMC, the Public Radio station that blankets all of New York state.For years I drove to WFCR in Amherst where the late Bob Paquette was senior news producer and the host of the station's "Morning Edition" show. I would sit in my special recording room and he would sit in his special engineering room and we’d go to work, he stopping me every few paragraphs to go back and down it again if I swallowed the end of the word or hiccupped or something.It was the same thing when I went to Maine Public Broadcasting in Portland. Keith Shortall would do the same careful correcting until we got a good product.No one ever paid me for any of this but that’s not why I stopped doing it. I think I only stopped because I was too busy writing a weekly column and writing a daily blog.I make very little money from the column. I make no money from my friend the books. And obviously I make no money for these daily mediations you see here at Exit Only.And that feels just right to me... I only thought I’d mention the books here to see how it made me feel. Maybe I’ll just keep giving them away to the book program for our servicemen and to the public schools where I go give talks. That’s one thing I’ll never say no to.I think you almost never mind it when you give yourself; it’s selling yourself that wears you down.Oh! And here's the photo I used for the cover. It helps me remember that each season has its own beauty. I decided to call it All Beautiful. Here's what the case looks like front and back:   

Listen to This

It's strange: I write something every day here and I find it easy. Yet when I decided last week I would give myself a break and take 5 days to just mention each of my 5 books it turned out to be... difficult. I feel uneasy going back to all that self-promotion. 'Hi, wanna buy a book?' 'Hiiii! Here's a funny book!' It was such hard work and people are busy. Why should they stop and listen to me with my ambush book signing?They even call those kinds of signings 'ambush signings’ and I hated them. It finally got so if a bookstore said Come do a signing I would say Let me come give a talk instead. ThatI could do. People would hear the laughing and come and sit down and there we'd all be, together, for the next 30 or 40 minutes: Instant community. Some of the people dearest to me now are people I met on the road this way. I’d get in my car and drive 8 hours and do the talk and think nothing of it. I was just happy for the chance to say how great it's been for me all these years to be able to say out loud how the world looks to me each week.So that’s what this fourth book is about: gaining the confidence to write your own stuff.And just for fun I decided to record this book so it’s actually a book and two CDs. In both I just I tell a few of my own stories before offering the prompts designed to get listeners scribbling away themselves.For example in the chapter titled “What Do You Like?” I describe six things I just plain love, then invite folks to do the same. In “Rules to Live By” I tell what my ‘ten commandments’ are, then ask them to set down theirs. ”The Wicked Elsewhere” gets people remembering back to the time they first heard where babies come from. Then, between every chapter, a fresh musical interlude helps people begin traveling down their own long-forgotten paths into the realm of memory, where everything we have ever experienced awaits us still. I picture the memories all resting at the bottom of a deep pool like so many bright leaves, waiting only for the waters to grow still enough to let us peer down and see them. This book simply provides tools both for seeingthose leaves and fetching them up into the light.That person on the front cover is my big sister Nan who made my childhood so much fun. And that’s the old oak table that was my family’s back in the 1920s. There’s my grandmother’s blue and white ‘caddy’ for her pens and nibs and quills when she was a schoolgirl in the 1890s. That’s the old magnolia tree outside the window of the room I’ve spent my days in since we first moved here back when old Jimmy Carter was filling the airways with that strange Deep South accent.He was a good man though and this is a good book and funny in parts because I used to teach and you know how teachers are, always trying to make you glad you came to class.Here are some of the chapters:

• Have Fun Decomposing
• What Do YOU Like?
• Rules to Live By
• Who Is Around You
• Fannytime
• Fun with the Language
• The Wicked Elsewhere (that’s the facts of life one)
• The Little Cat
• Kiss Me Goodbye
• The Summer I Was Ten
• If I Could’ve SEEN Myself!

The whole thing is just me telling a few stories and then giving you the ‘mic’ and offering to listen as you tell yours. Really it's just the same thing all people do when they meet, at the supermarket say, or on Facebook. We can all tell our stories, and, I believe, we can all write.Anyway here’s what it looks like, the back cover first and then the front with the actual graphics in place. Click on them to enlarge them, same as always. .And if you’d like to learn more about it go here, then send a check for $19.95 to Ravenscroft Press at PO Box 270 Winchester MA 01890 and we'll cover shipping. ( Sorry it's more money than this one and this one and this one: it was the larger production costs, with the two media.)

The Best Book I Never Wrote

What’s nicer than helping other people feel that they can write? Encouraging them to, I mean? My chance to do this came the day an 85-year-old lady from my church called up to ask if I would teach a course to be called Writing from Personal Experience at the local Senior Center."We've all been talking,"  she said and we know you write for the paper each week."  They had all already decided it seemed that I would teach them once a month -  "on Mondays we thought, in the afternoon, since we  don’t like to go out at night.” I would prepare a lesson each time and assign a writing topic. Then,  at the next meeting, I would collect up all their pieces, take them home,  write comments on them and report on them at the next meeting at which time I would repeat the process..."And oh!” she added cheerfully, “course we wouldn't be paying you anything; that’s our policy here at the Center."What do you think?"What did I think?! My palms had begun sweating at her first sentence. Why had I even picked up the phone? How could I POSSIBLY do this?  I’m too busy! What about all these kids in my kitchen every night!Then I had one of those rare moments where I felt that someone way bigger than I am was nudging me forward.I gave in to it. “OK,” I said meekly.And so began a three-year odyssey that ended in a book whose title comes from a poem by Robert Frost  about the near-impossible task of raking leaves, something we all know a little bit about at this season for sure. We began each class saying something about the day itself and then we would start.Once Bill Jeffery  read aloud a remembrance from childhood, his voice broke and he had to stop. “Let it out!” cried the lady across the table who had been in his First Grade Class some 70 years before.“My wife says I’m emotionally unstable,” he joked before clearing his throat and going on.But permission had been given: from that day on we were unashamed to show our feelings.Looking back, I now realize there were tears at every session. We listened to one another’s memories and we cried. Because of this, class member Clarence, who wrote for most of his 96 years, called the classes my “séances.” (He once dropped me a note in his bold hand, “Lately I haven’t been well enough to get to too many of your séances...”)Maybe he thought we were conjuring the dead in that basement room with the orange tulips painting the outside of our little window come spring.Maybe he was right. Here is one of his poems now:

The Cat

 The Cat is a creature of infinite grace,

It spits on its forearms and sponges its face.

It licks and it sponges itself every place.

It licks and it sponges itself without haste,

It uses no soap no powders, no paste,

No cold-cream, no napkins, no towels to waste

Very efficient - but how does it taste?

 Witty eh? But his best work – indeed everyone’s best work appeared when they looked back to the early decades of the last century – the meadow and the field, the bucket and soapstone sink – and to those long-gone ones who populated that world.If you'd like to give this book to a friend download the same form I referred to in the last two posts. Again I’ll cover the shipping costs.I’m smiling now just thinking of those stories: of ladylike Eleanor Matson taking off her coat in church – only to look down and see she had forgotten her skirt. Ah bless them all for having the courage to believe that harvest was anything but meager! The evidence is all right there.This photo at the top is just me at a talk I gave on this and other books  for the Friends of the Abington Library, speaking of cool older people.And underneath here is more about the book. Just click on it to make it easily readable.

Vacationing in My Ride

So I guess what I was saying is that first book o' mine  was basically about those awkward moments like  like the parish priest shows up at your door and your dog comes downstairs with half a box of tampons in his mouth.Or when your children’s poor daddy, as sleep-deprived as you are with your two little girls under four, opens his briefcase at the big presentation to find the frilly underpants of Baby Crawl Away tucked carefully into one corner.

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That’s I Thought He Was a Speed Bump, the book I was waxing nostalgic about yesterday. I wrote it when I was young and almost everything in life struck me funny, aside from the sudden death of my only parent, which threw me for a loop that looped for four long years.

With the passage of time however, I began to see how death fits into the larger scheme. That’s when I wrote this book whose cover you see here.I had two themes in mind for it: that everything returns if you wait long enough - like spring for example - and that you can find a wonderful kind of calm in this crazy modern life if you can just manage sit there for a minute when you pull up outside your house – just sit there and let the inner waters clear for a bit instead of rushing inside and bossing everyone around, including yourself ('Start the dinner!' 'Fold those clothes!' Why do we shout these things to ourselves all the time?)I love a double theme, in this case the theme of the seasons AND the theme of learning to chill out more, and come to think of it so does my littlest grandson who can’t resist being two things on Halloween. (This year he was a Power Ranger AND a Vampire.) But they say what you need to sell a book or movie is "high concept," the ability to sum it up in a sentence and that’s where I might have gone a little wrong with my two themes. It did OK though; I got it into all these Barnes & Noble stores and then drove all over the map giving funny talks about it.Then of course it all slowed down and the books gradually came back to me.This happened right after I had gone to a second printing so I still have almost 3,000 mint copies which is why I’m offering them here.As I say, this book is funny like Speed Bump AND has some death in it but what doesn’t, right?YOU can have a copy for just $10 bucks too if you like.One of my favorite chapters is this one about letters to Santa, taken right from the pages of an actual newspaper. (You'll have to click on this first image to see it in a readable size..)and the last page of the chapter:

This story makes me laugh even today . Kids huh?