Why We Stay Up Late

What do we stay up late for these days?We stay up to read about our friends on the Internet. Say what you will about Facebook, it brings you closer. There’s a woman in Colorado who once lived just five minutes from me here in New England. I knew her not at all then, except by repute as a writing tutor to the young. And I was jealous, knowing her this way. "What's wrong with ME that I'm not a writing tutor to the young?" is all I could think when I heard her name.Today she lives among those mountains. Somehow we found each other on Facebook and now almost I every day I feel her gentle spirit as she shares a thought or a photo. (And my, how she loves her dogs! If they added to the Seven Cardinal Virtues surely loving animals would be right up near the top.)So we stay up to check on one another.We stay up with sick children. Also with children having nightmares, hallucinations, irrational fears. We have them ourselves.We stay up late to watch YouTube videos like the one I recently posted of the grand swoop of that owl with his mighty thighs and his outward-reaching talons as he comes to snatch up his prey. A video like that thrills us, clear witness as it is that something is coming for us too, something fierce and strong.I stayed up so late a few nights ago I had a kind of waking dream. It was of my grandfather about whom I have never dreamed even once since his death 50 years ago.As a small child I felt so safe living in his house as we did. In my dream I didn't notice him until someone said "Hey did you see who’s here?" and there he was, working in the garden out behind the farmhouse where he passed his boyhood in the 1880s. I recognized the place because I have every picture he ever took.Also every journal he ever wrote in.I have his degrees, rescued from the attic and framed now, Also framed pictures of him both old and young. This picture below shows him inhis very first year as a lawyer, looking so proud to be sitting at a real desk with his own law library behind him and his assistant beside him, he who went barefoot most of the year and got to school only when they held school, the typical thing in those rural communities.It was so nice to see him again in this waking dream. He even called me "Blackberry Top", a name he gave me for the shiny black curls clustered tight together on my two-year-old head..At my mom’s 80th birthday party I read aloud a letter he had written her when she was a college sophomore, eating too much and flunking French and smoking her brains out with the dorm windows flung wide to the cold night air. He knew she was doing all that – other letters were filled with admonition - but this was a birthday letter and it was only loving.When I got done reading it aloud to all gathered there for her special day, she turned to her younger sister and said "Did you feel that Grace? He was HERE in the room!” Then, 20 minutes later, she closed her eyes and died.Some months later, after writing to a childhood friend about what had happened, he wrote me back: “In my faith tradition we’re taught that one who loved you in life comes for you at the end. Maybe that’s what happened with your mother: her dad came for her.”What a comforting thought! That someone comes for you, strong with beating wings, and lifts you up and carries you home.

And When I Die

Let’s talk more about death but let’s be cheerful about it: Do you know that poem by Mary Oliver When Death Comes? I loved it so much when I first saw it that I typed it up and  framed it: For the last 15 years it has hung in our downstairs bathroom, right at eye level  over the toilet so that most of  our male visitors know it by heart. One does anyway. You could go up to this young guy while he was skiing down a mountain in the middle of blizzard and say recite "When Death Comes" and bam! he'd do it for you. Perfectly. At lightning speed. (Ah Youth!)I used to know it by heart. Now I can get through only the first few lines alas, the rest having gotten tumbled around with all the other things I know by heart like "Stopping by Woods on A Snowy Evening" and "Jabberwocky" and the Preamble to the Constitution. Thanks to the minor deities Cut and Paste though, I can give it to you now:

When death comeslike the hungry bear in autumnwhen death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purseto buy me, and snaps his purse shut;when death comeslike the measle-pox;when death comeslike an iceberg between the shoulder blades,I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?And therefore I look upon everythingas a brotherhood and a sisterhood,and I look upon time as no more than an idea,and I consider eternity as another possibility,and I think of each life as a flower, as commonas a field daisy, and as singular,and each name a comfortable music in the mouthtending as all music does, toward silence,and each body a lion of courage, and somethingprecious to the earth.When it's over, I want to say: all my lifeI was a bride married to amazement.I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.When it's over, I don't want to wonderif I have made of my life something particular, and real.I don't want to find myself sighing and frightenedor full of argument.I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Pretty nice eh? And here's another nice one, a song Laura Nyro wrote that Peter Paul & Mary covered in the 60s before Blood Sweat & Tears got their hands on it. A great tune with a great message, whoever's doing the singing.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_R02Mm_J_s]

Prey Unceasingly

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they're not out to get you, as they say...And just because you're not watching them doesn't mean they're not watching you.This is a beautiful and amazing video of an owl caught on camera just as he’s swooping down on his prey,It stirs up many responses in me all at once:Like how much fun it must be to fly, a thought I have at least once a day every day.And also...what amazing strong legs he has;and the glory of his plumage;and the intricate workings of those talons.I'm joking with the paranoid talk. The video doesn’t really make me feel hunted by anything: not illness, or bad luck, or even death.Anyway, death isn’t like this, as far as I can tell. Death is more of a subsiding. And whatever the agent of your death, in the movie of your life it’s the loss of oxygen that makes the projector stop. (I learned that by reading physician Sherwin Neuland’s oddly comforting book How We Die.)No, this creature’s slow-motion pounce doesn’t remind me of death at all, even though his landing spelled death for his meek victim. His flight, his pounce, his grace and energy remind me of life and all life’s beauty.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA6XSrM0V_0]

Your Day Starts Now

It was pouring out and I was partly blocking the onramp to a parking facility in a car that had suddenly died. Could there BE anything more annoying to other drivers? Dozens had already passed me, shaking their fists.One shouted “For God’s sake, open your hood so people will know!” so I quick jumped out in the rain and opened it. Another few dozen passed, also glowering, before somebody else yelled, “Close your hood, idiot! Rain hurts the engine!” So I climbed out again and closed it.Then a kind-faced employee of the parking facility approached. Though we had no common language, he clucked sympathetically, went away for five minutes, then returned through the downpour with an armful of traffic cones, which he set around my car like so many party hats.Finally, some 40 minutes after I had placed the call to AAA, the man in the tow truck arrived. But even for him the car wouldn’t start.“Fuel pump,” he mumbled, and began lashing it to his rig, into whose mile-high cab I hoisted myself as bidden, settling gratefully into the passenger seat.As we followed the gentle dips and hills that would bring us to my service station, we lapsed into conversational mode. I asked him what people were like when he came to save them. Were they grateful? Resigned? Grouchy as all get-out?“Most people are nice,” he smiled, “though you also get the other kind. There was a woman I was sent to help once. She had a $100,000 car, and probably $8,000 worth of furs on her back. And there she was on her phone when I pulled up, just screaming at somebody, probably her poor husband.”“Did she get nicer when she saw you?”“Nah. She was just mad. It was amazing though. Right on the same block was this poorly dressed man going into a store with cans and bottles he had just picked out of some trash cans. He went in to redeem them and came out again with a pack of smokes and a smile on his face like it was Christmas morning! And I thought to myself, ‘What a contrast!’ Because you know, you can live like the woman who has everything and is all the time griping, or you can live like this guy, happy with whatever comes his way. It just struck me, you know?”“I do know.”We rode in silence a while.“I feel much calmer than I did even ten minutes ago,” I said, surprising even myself. “I think you must have that effect on your 'clients.'"“I don’t know about THAT,” he said, “but I’ll tell you what I always say to people when they’re so upset about their cars. I say ‘Listen, your day starts now.’ Meaning ‘Begin again here’. Meaning, ‘Don’t look back at what went wrong.’”“That reminds me of something I read in a book about first responders,” I answered. “The author wrote about a paramedic friend who, when he approaches the victim at the scene of an accident, says this one thing always. Before doing anything else, he quietly tells the person, ‘It's OK! The worst is over.’ There’s just something so comforting in those words.”“I hear that,” said the tow truck driver.I think again of the two phrases, “The worst is over” and “Your day starts now,” and find them both to be good and hopeful sentiments at the start of this new year.

Dancing Queen Looks Back at Week

• No wonder I was tired Friday. Last week I :Had 11 people at my house for a working lunch. Much vacuuming hauling groceries, hulling strawberries -  whew! - but fine once we got down to our work. We are all board members of the only organization I’ve ever been part of where no one ever interrupts anyone else and people listen so kindly and carefully whenever anybody speaks. Nice time.Took Uncle Ed out twice. Very nice, though he can hardly walk now. He is mighty in the upper body though, even at 91, and heaves himself into my van which is good and tall and has a grab bar for him to do his trapeze tricks with. We bought two coffees with espresso shots and a sack of hot drooly burgers and spent an hour time-travelling back to 1925. (Amazing journey those!)Went back to the Y for the first time in more than a month on Monday,  Thursday and Friday and made my heart race for a solid hour each time. Nice in a stress-test kind of way. Had forgotten that I laugh all the way through Thursday’s Cardio Hip Hop, seeing Old Dog in  mirror doing that New Trick.After High Lo Aerobics, saw a small child sobbing in the glassed-in child care room, parked there while his grownup worked out somewhere else in building. When he caught my eye he cried out “He-e-e-e-e-l-p! Get me out of here!” at which point matching tears sprang to my own eyes and I had to rush out to the parking lot.Got bangs cut – finally - so as to look a LITTLE less like that girly dog Peg in Disney's Lady and the Tramp.Jumped on the scales for the first time in a month. Jumped off again fast.Made a vat of the Weight Watcher Fresh Vegetable Soup recipe. Polished the whole pot off singlehandedly within 24 hours,  and finally….Sat for two hours with a high school senior as he read aloud to me the 8 long essays he had composed for the Gates Foundation Award and that was the best thing of all.I mean what’s nicer than listening to the thoughts of a young person who, in the miraculous way of all the young people we know and love, is at the same time completely and utterly the same as he was when you knew him as child and yet utterly, utterly different, with a clear sure voice all his own. Ah!

Now here’s my Hip Hop dance class just to get you going on a Sunday. I’m the one on the left.  :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlgNAo3AnaA&feature=fvsr]

Balance and Rest

BACK IN THE OLD DAYS, when women feathered their hair back Farrah-style and wore pants so tight at the waist no one dared grow a muffin top, I had a shy student named Michael who sat smack in the first row but spoke almost not at all. I had his sister in a second class and his brother in a third. There were six kids in his family and didn’t their mom come to every Parents Night to see how they were doing.The years passed as years do and in time this shy lad moved out of state, becoming in time a husband and a father, a bookseller and librarian, even as he kept on writing the same wonderful stories and poems he was writing when he was 16 and had me as his English teacher.Happily, we have kept in enough touch over time so that he one day showed some of my writing to that mother of his. She and I wrote each quite frequently for a while and someplace in there she sent me a thick packet of verse by the person she called her favorite poet.The poet's name: Louise Guyol Owen, a woman born in 1901 who graduated from Smith College in 1923 and subsequently sold her witty and insightful verse to publications ranging from The Saturday Evening Post to The Mercury, from The Ladies Home Journal to The Christian Science Monitor.I mention all this because just last night, after a spare solo supper, I decided to do a bit of cleaning and came upon this very packet of poems at the bottom of a drawer I have not looked in for almost a decade.Alone in my bed at midnight, I read every one again, while the wind whistled and moaned outside.The poem below seems to be about a cat, but it speaks to us humans too.I can tell you it sure speaks to me.It's called "Still the Hunter Follows" and it goes like this:

Be lazy, mind; be lazy for an hour. Lie by the fire, and stretch, and close your eyes,

Untense the fine-drawn nerves; be tired, be wise;

Sheathe the small swords that give your paw its power.

Cease your nocturnal wailing a the moon –

Forget the picket fence’s dangerous height –

Idle a little, while you can, tonight;

This opiate moment will be gone too soon.

The red flames flicker. Restless and unrested,

Your head lifts up; your yellow eyes grow narrow…

Long enough respite for the nested sparrow,

For mouse and mole to scurry unmolested!

Steal out, resume your hunt, pursue forever

Your hurrying prey, but never hope to find

Satiety; and satisfaction never –

Never for the hungry predatory mind.

This weekend I would very much like to tell my own mind to be lazy and, for a little while anyway, reclaim some sense of balance.Maybe that former student will see his mother's favorite poet here and bring this to her, wherever she may be. I will hope for that, even as I hope that we might all use these two days to once again feel newly balanced, and nicely re-aligned.

Dig It

When you say you like one thing and then say you like another, you’re just doing what great minds have often felt free to do. Didn’t Emerson call a foolish consistency the hobgoblin of little minds?I love Emerson's writing and was thrilled to receive a pewter bust of him for Christmas. Still, at the same time I’m often sore at him, for all kinds of reasons, like changing his wife’s name to something he found more "classical-sounding" , and withdrawing into his books when their little boy Waldo died, leaving the poor wife doubly bereaved. I also feel like "Oh easy for him to look down his long nose at the littler minds, he who never made a bed or picked up after tea!"But that’s how it was to by a gentleman of the comfortable class in the 19th century. They never carried their full chamber pots down the stairs mornings. They never hauled a hundred pounds of boiling water up the stairs for anyone's bath. Invisible and nameless others did that for them.So see? You can admire someone on one level and be mad at him at the same time. (Think marriage, any marriage.)And remember that other famous quote from Emerson’s same century? Give ya five bucks if you recognize who said this one:“Do I contradict myself? Then I contradict myself. I am vast. I contain multitudes."Yup. That was Walt Whitman, whose genial free spirit made stuffier 19^th century types almost burst their corset buttons. Word of him even reached quiet Emily Dickinson in her seclusion who said never read his book, but was told it was "disgraceful."But that’s what you have to love about the guy. That maxim "Nothing human is alien to me"? That was Whitman all over. He could sing the praises of a pile of Plague corpses if you caught him in the grip of one of is ecstasies. (Could and did just about. Remember the "beautiful uncut hair of graves"? Remember him happily enriching fthe soil with his own lifeless body?)I admire Whitman very much. I guess I'm more like him than I am like Emerson. One day I would love to visit his house in Camden NJ, but until I get to do that it might be enough to just go outside and dig things the way he did.Hmmm looking outside here. Cloudy right now with a sky that looks like cake batter ladled into the pan. Like dirty snow. Like soiled bed linens. And yet an amazing radiance just at the horizon.Dig it. It's all God asks of us.

In a Way We're All Naked in the Park

This is a piece about a long-ago summer day. It took me out of myself to remember it.The girl lay on her blanket looking as naked as a light bulb, her skin glowing waxy white against the criss-crossed bits of cord and fabric that made up her bikini. Oblivious to the swirl and bustle around her, she glanced neither to the right nor left, but rested on her stomach reading, with her chin propped on both fists.'But what protects her?' I wondered each time I passed her on my walking circuit. Where are the cads and dummies you might expect to see accosting her every couple of minutes? 'What maintains her splendid isolation?' was it the fact that she was reading, and people still respect reading, for all the culture's silly love romance with hotter media? Or was it her beauty, because who isn't stunned into silent awe in the presence of great beauty? Maybe some guardian powers flowed from the only other two things she was wearing: a pair of prim eyeglasses, like the ones worn by secretaries and schoolmarms in a thousand Hollywood movies; or the colorful tattoo splashed across the top of one arm with the word “Mother” spelled out inside an inky tangle of loops.I looked around then, wondering what it is that safeguards any of the living things in that public space. Because every creature I saw seemed calm, even those trusting ambassadors the dogs, who strained against their masters' leashes to sniff and touch noses.Across the path from the bench that I finally settled into, a couple seated in wheelchairs ate ice cream and discussed the accessibility of the city's public transport systems. A woman floated by under a parasol looking like she'd just sailed in from another century. Two kittens so new their eyes were the biggest things about them stood unsteadily on the laps of a pair of young women seated on the grass.I must have heard seven different languages being spoken by those who passed by.I saw a dozen different books tucked under people's arms, from novels to chemistry texts, from "The House of Mondavi," about the famous vintners, to "A Lotus Grows in the Mud," Goldie Hawn's autobiography."My Marvin and I were married for 58 years!" boomed an elderly woman on the bench to my left, only she pronounced it "Mawvin." Her makeup was a deep fawn color and her hair the exact bright hue of a Strawberry Shortcake doll.Then suddenly two girls around 12 appeared before me, each wearing a T-shirt adorned with the image of two much smaller girls smiling against a portrait studio backdrop."Want to buy some candy, support the festival?" one asked as the other displayed a boxful of chocolate bars."Um, what festival is this? When does it take place?""September, probably," said the more outgoing of the two."It's in the park. Well, the other park," she added, gesturing in a northerly direction."And who is in it again?""Really it's just us two," she said with a dazzling smile as she pointed to the T-shirts. "We sing, and then we dance."And so in that safe place where all my fellow citizens had met to share the sunshine I decided I might as well vote for trust and brotherly love myself. I gave the girls the money and they gave me a Hershey bar. Then I peeled it down and ate up every bite.

All Cats are Grey in the Dark (and Other Sayings)

All through childhood I heard these little aphorisms from the grownups. I don’t mean the kind still shiny with steel-bladed wit such as you see in Poor Richard’s Almanac, all penned by Ben Franklin in his idler days at the print shop before nation-building and the delicious women of Paris captured all his interest.“Fish and visitors smell in three days.” That’s one of his, about the burden of harboring house guests.  “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.” That’s another  with its suggestion to  steer clear of companions ‘with a past’ as they used to say. Poor Richard is also the one who said “All cats are gray in the dark,” his tart little observation about sexual act,  which, it seems to be suggesting, is never as much about your partner's relative beauty as it is about you and your own gratification.Anyway, these quips aren’t the kind I’m thinking of here. I’m thinking of the high-minded “thought gems” people once so cherished, the kind schoolgirls once embroidered onto samplers. Everyone born in the first two-thirds of the last century had these maxims spooned into them like cod liver oil."Hitch your wagon to a star. Hang on tight and there you are!” That was one, by sweet old Ralph Waldo Emerson. Then there's Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's oft-quoted “Lives of great men all remind us we should make our lives sublime,  and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time. But the one  I’m thinking of today, anonymous as far as I know?"As a rule man’s a fool, when it’s hot he wants it cool. When it’s cool he wants it hot, always wanting what is not."I think of it because just yesterday in this space I was saying, Hey where’s winter?” And  also, “What about snow and skiing and those bracing mornings when you see the arms of the rhododendron branches clasped tight to their sides so they look like so many Irish step dancers? Where is all THAT in this balmy post-autumn spring we’ve been having here in Grovers Corners? I wrote this just yesterday. Yesterday!  And today the temperature outside my window?8 degrees and look at the rhodies today!As a rule I’m a fool is my personal aphorism. I have occasion to cite it every single day.

What is Going ON?

OK is it spring yet?It’s not snowing and the buds on the magnolia tree are starting to get that hopeful look, so What’s going on?Where are the days of snow like steel needles being shot sideways into your face?The days when rhododendron all over the county are holding their leafy arms straight down and close to the body, like Irish Step Dancers, the way the only do when it’s really freezing out?What happened to winter?Old Dave and I were able to shingle and paint our whole house. starting two-thirds of the way through October and not finishing until December 12th. The painter said he had never before been able to pick up a brush for exterior work in November. never mind in December.Is this global warning finally showing its true face?The weather report says temps today will be only in the 20s but by week’s end they're supposed to be edging up again. And as far as I can tell there's no snow in sight until next Thursday at the earliest.So I just have one question:WHY, with the buds on the magnolia trying to get started all over again and the rhododendron holding their arms out like little kids spinning around to make themselves dizzy, why oh WHY can’t I wake up in the morning? I who always shot out of the bed at 6 if not 5:30 or even 5:00 to begin working, before coffee even? Am I actually growing calmer and less driven as I get older, or is it ...justthat it’s stillSo gosh darn DARK IN THE MORNING?

We Put It Away

We put it all away finally. It took three days and I broke yet another ornament doing it but we finally got it all put it away and I miss it already.Our tree was so nice this year, tall and fragrant, though we never did get many ornaments on the top branches. We weren’t tall enough, not the four-year-old nor the seven-year-old nor the two grown women helping them.It was beautiful to us and that's what counts. It kept reminding me of that scene in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage where the main character flees from the terrible slaughter and enters the hush of the forest, which seems to him a kind of cathedral with its high arching trees. They are fir trees as I have always pictured them, like the little fir tree we had this Christmas.The  first week it was up,  its fragrance wafted over to you the minute you walked in the room.  Even the second week it still brushed gentle against your hand, soft like the muzzle of a horse. By the third week I had to come very close to get that sweet wild scent, and... Well by the time we took it down yesterday, it was raining its needle down all over us and the two floors it crossed on its way out the door.That's when my gaze fell on an ornament I had somehow failed to notice when we put the tree up on December 10th.Can you read what it says on it, the heart-shaped one that looks like a cookie?It says “We miss you.” My then-eight-year-old made it for someone who couldn't be with us one year, and doesn’t it speak to the way I feel today, I who couldn’t wait for all the holiday hub-bub to pass! (Humans, huh?)And so the holidays ended. The year ended too and a half a second later another year began. Here’s how the sun looked yesterday as it rose over one of my favorite spots on earth courtesy of the Winnipesaukee Weather cam. Beauty before us and beauty behind us. Beauty all around us if we can just  remember to look for it.

The Last Fun Day

On the last fun day we had together, we built a race track that these two had given to our little guys. They waited this long to bring it forth, knowing it would be a big hit after things had settled down some. After the little boys had done simpler things, like climb into this unfinished cabinet and make twin bunk-bed forts there. After they had worked on their Lego sets for hours and done all the puzzles and cooked up the Shrinky-Dinks.All my life I wanted to replicate the family feeling I grew up with when my sister Nan and I had a mother and a grandfather, a pretty young aunt coming over every day to work at the family business and the real stars of the show, those ancient great aunties, one in the chair where she sat in her old-lady shoes with her stockings rolled down to her ankles and the other scooting around in her dark blue Keds, making the beds and the jelly and the chicken 'n dumplings 90% of her waking hours and only then sitting, when her 90-year-old legs begged her for a little time off.When we came into the kitchen there were always people there, our pretty Aunt Grace with her light high voice like a bell or our mom with her contralto growl. (Was it the cigarettes or was it the irony she cloaked herself in to keep pain at bay? ) Great Aunt Margaret when not saying her beads, would beopening her mail: ten thousand solicitations from the world’s unfortunates. (“I‘m dead with praying for the blind orphans!" she once cried.) And Great Aunt Mame, a spinster since she stopped looking in the 1880s, would be snorting at the engagement announcements in the paper. ("For every old sock there's an old shoe!" she would tartly pronounce.)The women cooked all week for the one man in the house, our grandfather, who came home from some bland emeritus tasks at his law office to sit in his wing chair and read his histories and biographies, carefully cutting the pages open as he went with a pen knife once belonging to his own dad (seen here as he looked newly arrived from Ireland in the early 1850s.)How keenly do I miss these many now! How more keenly still would I miss them had I not been able to make a family very similar to that one I grew up with. By which I only mean to say that for the last week there were nine of us together under one roof, ten if you count that unborn baby. And when our kids were kids it was the same: every room filled with kin, both 'real' and 'honorary' such that at night to the owls passing high overhead this house must have seemed to billow with our common breathing.Anyway, here's the race track in motion. That's our first ‘honorary’ son Dodson and his Veronica admiring it to the left, and our youngest ‘child’ Michael doing the same to the right. The little guy in the middle, named for 'my' David, has the last word, that as far as I'm concerned, can stand for this whole ride of mine through life:"That was awesome!" you’ll hear him cry at the end. And yes it was and I hope I have the sense to say so too.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkh-LZGAlbQ&feature=youtu.be]

Better Than Watching the Ball Drop

The best thing I ever did on New Year’s Eve was have a baby - which incidentally is nothing LIKE what you see in picture. I remember my doctor calling his pals from the delivery room. “I’ll be there by 9:00!” he gaily told them and that sure put me in MY place. Working to get a human born, hearing all that praise and encouragement from the nursing staff gets you thinking you've got the Baby Jesus Himself ready to make an entrance. Then it turns out you're just some hurdle the doc is trying to clear before he can go back to doing what he's really interested in doing...David and I had gone to the hospital at dawn to have this first child of ours and I was ready for anything: I had the lemon drops to suck on and the cornstarch for massaging my mountain of a belly. I had my picture of a tree to pin to the wall and help me get to my happy place...As for Dave, he had the sports pages and the latest spy novel, the dog.Together we saw the sun rise and sink away again; saw the team of nurses change and give way to a new team.The doc thought Pitocin would get him to his party a lot sooner so Pitocin it was.I did my breathing.I used up a whole box of cornstarch for the massage, which, by the way,helps not at all.I looked at my picture of the tree pinned to the wall.Dave fell asleep.They they turned up the drip on the Pitocin and all hell broke loose.When I finally begged loud enough for the epidural, the anesthesiologist showed up and took so much time asking me how much I weighed that I grabbed hold of his shirtfront and growled at him in the voice of Satan himself.Then… peace.Relief from pain.And a special new epidural ward where none of us needed to suck lemon drops or massage our bellies or pretend that the sight of a tree in a forest could help with the pain.The child came at 7:30 with this pointy little jaw she began leading with right out of the gate. She was a lovely little soul in spite of the iron will that strong jaw foretold, quiet and considerate too.The jaw stayed strong and the will emerged but still she was sweet, and careful, and kind.She is all that even today.So Happy Birthday to you Carrie M. In six more weeks you'll have your own first daughter and we'll have another picture then.

Minding Our P's and Q's

Out with the old and in with the new, that's what they tell us each year. So what Old Thing will YOU choose to leave behind as the days carry us toward 2012?I know I can name a couple of customs I'd like to see go out with the trash:I would like very much to see people especially in commercial settings stop saying "No Problem" when thanked for their services. I mean, are we so fixed on problems in this society that the word is ever on our lips? Did the donors of this giant turkey say "No problem" when President Bush said "oh hey thanks for this!"?Certainly other cultures have more graceful ways of acknowledging thanksThe French say "pas du tout" or "not at all."

• Those speaking Spanish say "de nada" which means "It is nothing for me to help you in this way."
• And the Germans use the single word "bitte" that appears to mean, by turns, "please," "thank you," "your table is this way" and "I'm sorry to say we are out of bratwurst but let me bring you another half-gallon tankard of beer."
• All these phrases are nicer than "No Problem."

So that's my first gripe. My second gripe concerns the bad grammar you hear on electronic media of every kind.I would like to see every reporter, news anchor, talk show host and meteorologist go back to school to learn a little more about proper English usage.Oh maybe they know that a noun is the name of a person place or thing. The family dog probably understands that much. But who understands pronouns, those handy ‘his-her-and-their-type words that save us from having to say "Johnny crashed Johnny's car when Johnny tried to text Johnny's buddy while making a too-wide turn at the stoplight"?Very few.Pronouns have to agree with the nouns they're standing in for: that's the rule. And here is a helpful little refresher:You know you're dealing with the NOMINATIVE CASE when you're looking at the subject of a sentence, like the word "Joe" in the sentence "Joe patted the dog."You know you're dealing with the POSSESSIVE CASE when a noun comes with an apostrophe-s tacked on to it, as in the sentence "That dog is not Joe's."And you're working with the OBJECTIVE CASE when a noun receives the action of the verb as in "the Dog bit Joe."Again, a pronoun has to match its noun in case. Thus, if you say "Mom told Beth and I we could go to the mall" you are making a huge error as you will see if you take out the word "Beth.""Mom told I?" You wouldn't say that!You wouldn't say, "the waiter set the plate down before my date and I" either because "before" is a preposition and prepositions take the objective case. You know the above is wrong the minute you take that date of yours away (though it is admittedly stressful to have your dates taken away in restaurants, especially if you're hoping they'll foot the bill.)And now here we are back where we started, in restaurants with patrons offering thanks to the wait-staff for serving them and the wait-staff in one way or another saying they were happy to do it.I guess that's the most important thing: that we acknowledge one another's efforts in keeping that social fabric nicely knit together.Sigh.As for thanking ME for this grouchy little harangue, I know you might not feel like doing that. But if you do I'll probably just say "You're welcome" because, in case it isn't hugely obvious, for some of us OLDER folks the breezy approximations of modern speech just plain make us crazy!

Dear Diary

My job for these last days of 2011: write 21 days’ worth of diary entries. I have to write all these now because I stopped writing altogether on December 12th when a sudden piece of illness popped up in the family and, looking back, I think I just didn’t want to make it any 'realer' by writing about it.The details were just that scary, even for an old Premature Burial fan like me. For those of you too young to remember, Premature Burial was a horror movie about these poor people who everyone THOUGHT were dead  - until exhumation revealed that (a) they were alive alive-o the whole time and (b) they had scratched the daylights out of the inside of their coffin lids.)Then I didn’t want to write the next day since the details were even scarier,  or the day after that either.Finally I figured I’d wait until all was resolved and I could set down this scary event alongside other, sunnier events, like the day’s harvest of eavesdropping or the funny insults Old Dave and I had traded during the last car ride.Anyway, the illness did resolve thank the lord but then it was Christmas and you know how that whole thing is.You’d think for a daily blogger a 21-day journaling marathon would be easy – and it should be. But then I remember what I have learned from reading my mother’s diaries, begun in 1916, and my grandfather’s, begun in 1888. (I know huh? Hard to believe a babe like me can have close kin born so very long ago. In my mind my mom was like 60 when I was born. (In reality she was 41.)She was irreverent, and funny, and yelled “Gad!” in exasperation six times a day. Pretty colorful in other words. Yet most of her 40 or more diaries aren’t good reading at all.  An entry reading “Went to Mass” just doesn’t cut it, any more than my grandfather’s characteristic entry, "Went to town. Retired at 9:00”  does.Their most interesting entries? The ones where they’re describing unattractive behaviors in family members. But really even these aren’t so good because in both cases they're mad as they're writing them. Or aggrieved. Or fizzing with self-pity. And in all those cases they’re the ones exhibiting unattractive behaviors and I sure don’t want to do that.I’ll have to get back to you once I get rolling on this. In the meantime maybe you have some ideas. 21 days' worth of overheard dialogue? The latest knock-knock jokes. Lists of current TV shows? I am OPEN to suggestion here!

My Diary This Year (not really, ha ha)

Look at it This Way

So here's how I really feel.......Most of the time.I got used to this position during my Catholic girlhood when, every Sunday like clockwork, I fainted in church."Put her head between her knees!" the grownups  were always shouting. (Adults were cruel in those days.)"Turn her upside down!"I knew better than anyone in the congregation how much gum there really IS stuck under those pews.Now of course we all feel this way.Especially in the month of December at whose rag-tag end we now find ourselves.This squirrel was in our hawthorn tree all day, even doing the Houdini move to get at the last of the berries.Can't blame him.After the first he too will probably be joining Weight Watchers.Don't scoff, yo. It works if you work it. :-)

The Squirrels Know

I feel for this guy, who I found trying to raid the hawthorn tree for berries before the poor birds could get to any.They’re running out of food out there!It’s been mighty mild for these parts but still: The critters know what's coming.I hung around in my bedroom for almost an hour to get this shot. (I have 20 lousy shots.)There were four squirrels in the tree at the time but this guy seemed the perkiest. And then he turned and gave me his handsome profile.And I was just close enough, my breath fogging the cold windowpane  - though if you click on the picture to enlarge it you'll see the mesh of screening.Just look at him, shoveling it in with those slim little fingers.  I suppose he’s offering a lesson to us all, but with the holiday aftershocks still bouncing against me, I’m still too fried to figure out what it is. 

The Last Christmas?

I call this picture "Annie Carries Us All" because she does. Not only is she everyone's favorite auntie - you can see the shadowed profile of the little nephew she is holding here - but she also cooks. This daughter of ours appeared like the Announcing Angel at 6:00 Christmas Eve and together with this girl in the middle whipped up an amazing supper that proved to be so raucously fun the curtain didn’t close in it until almost midnight, when she’d finally finished working on the dough for the morning's croissants. She returned to her apartment then but was back here at 6am to roll it out or put it in pincurls or whatever it is that you do with croissant dough.I didn’t see any of it. I didn't get up until almost 9. (Our grandchildren wake up in their own house now. They used to wake up here, before it became time to make their own rituals.) All I can do is report that six hours later she had magically cooked a beef tenderloin, a couscous dish, some sort of witchy combination of bread and cheese and heavy cream, an asparagus dish, some zesty pinwheels of acorn squash and a foot-and-half long pelt of salmon served on a bed of lentils and fresh cranberries. A few other people made several other things and by 3 o’clock there were 20 people here feasting. I wish I had a picture of the whole crowd as I looked down the length of the living room at them. I managed to get only one or two, like this weird one in which the Tom Brady fan is about to be hung upside down by Annie's guy John.Back in November, he and Annie signed the Purchase and Sale agreement on a house they will take possession of next month. When the sellers accepted their offer, one of the things she said to her parents was, “You’ll never have to do another holiday!” We haven’t seen the place yet but we hear it has a great kitchen, with a work area all girded about with and countertops in the modern way.This morning when I asked Annie’s papa if he remembered what had Annie then, he smiled a familiar smile. Familiar because it’s the smile you see on the faces of all people whose memories go back to the time when Christmas tree balls were called 'baubles' and everyone still owned one or two Santas that looked like the guy in the old Thomas Nast cartoon.I think it's the semi-sad smile of remembering and then letting go.Maybe we never will do another holiday. But I look back now over the six years since Annie went to culinary school and realize we haven’t really done a holiday in all that time. Oh, we iron the tablecloth and set out the china. We do the dishes afterward, polishing those old glasses with three ancient linen towels until they shine like ornaments themselves. And afterward we police the house, picking up wrapping paper and torn bits of packaging.We were so young when we came here that two of our three children had not arrived. They all did arrive in their time and now two of the three have houses of their own and now it's time to get ready for a little change I guess - if it's ever NOT time to do that. I’ll take tomorrow off I think, maybe just put up a picture or two if I can find some. Enjoy this nice quiet day everyone, looking back. Looking ahead....

When the Big Day Comes

You wait and you wait for that elf to arrive.Looking out this window and that butfinallyfinallyfinally he does comeand brings those toys and clothessome of which are so scary that the children won't put them on.So the grownups have to wear them instead..which is initially terrifying,but then not so muchIn general people seemed to like their presents around here,  especially the one who got a giant abominable snowman jackets.In general it was like this today around the tree (though the video is from two years ago.)  I just like that little one’s quiet way as he looks around in his webbed Spider Man PJs, taking it all in.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7SVfdvNqN8]Hope you take it all in too, and are warm and happy and safe as the sun does its quick winter  fade and we rush around fast to light the candles.

The Holiday Card is DONE!

It's been a thin year for receiving cards I can't help but observe. Maybe people are too sad or broke to send them out.I get that. Two weeks ago I thought about not sending a card either. For one thing they’re a lot of work if you’re crazy enough to want to make your own like I’ve been doing since the early 90s.It’s assembling the exact right photos that I find hard. Then if you have kids over nine never mind over19 they want to exercise their right to censor what you say. There’s all this back and forth where I’m going to them with hat in hand saying "Is this ok? Can I say this?" Or in the case of the pictures themselves asking, “This one is good of you, right?” and the answer is usually No.It’s a marathon, doing the holiday card.I got lucky this year though, when a young person in my life showed me this feature on MS Publisher that lets you just choose your however-many favorite photos and make a collage of them.I did that and here it is. On the front of the Marotta Family card these pictures of the people who made my year:Then of course there's a message on the inside that mentions who people are, who lived us with us for a while and who is about to deliver our third grandchild.It mentions the fact that my children’s dad, Old Dave himself, maintains he can't tell the difference between his two daughters from the back and so on.It's kind of a silly card but that’s OK. There’s no bragging in it anyway and this year I gave up trying to say anything funny about myself.The card just gives a short cheery shout-out, which is all anybody expects from a holiday card.And now that it’s done I’m glad I made it and sent it to all those people who never send to me.It’s a lot like writing a blog come to think of it and there’s a good reminder for us all: to just send our little message of good will out there without worrying about who sends the same back to us..