Family Life

There are no bad experiences when the company’s good. I realized this anew when I came upon journal entries made when my kids were young. We'd just returned from the big trip to Disney World, where it was mobbed, as usual. We stood in the’ line-line’ mostly, snaking back and forth for 50 or 60 minutes to go on the seven-minute rides. (This on the left: the It's a Small World After All Ride. Words can't describe it. Really.)

When the week was over, one child named our visit to the Magic Kingdom the best part of the vacation, another cited Epcot. Our then-kindergartner said his favorite part was fishing in the creek behind our lodgings - with a saucepan and a pair of my pantyhose.

I recorded our fun both during that week away and the week following when we were all back in our routines and I have to say: reading those journal entries today has granted me a new appreciation for family life.

With family members you don't have to pretend or explain. They 'get' you already.

The journal reports that occasionally, at the supper table, we'd play a certain game.

 “OK, let's switch roles. You be Mom and you be Dad,” someone would say and a fast improvisation would take place.

I drew the 13-year-old role once. I swung my hair over one eye and said, "Give me money, give me a ride, give me money, give me a ride.”

Once, the five-year-old drew his father: quick as a wink he got down on the floor and began snoring, with a newspaper over his face.

And once our ten-year-old drew me. "Come to dinner, people!” she shrieked. “Come before I throw it all in the yard for the raccoon!”

It's instructive to watch yourself thus parodied.

In a family, people come home with tales of pain and triumph - funny stories too.

The then-kindergartner had the most of those. One day that week he told about the little classmate who would clasp her hands as if in prayer and squeezes her eyes shut during the Pledge of Allegiance.

Another day he reported that a big boy had told him he had his pants on backwards.

“I can't understand it!” he said. “I put them on this morning and they were frontwards. And one day I put on my Spiderman underpants and looked later and they were GONE!"

“Then then in the hall the boy at the front ran and so then the whole line ran, and we got a big time-out. Then when we were doing words that begin with “f” Colin drew a person flushing a toilet and the teacher got mad. Then I got mad because she always lets the girls go first for recess and when I grow up I'm going to be a teacher and let the BOYS go first!”

“You talk kind of a lot,” someone observed, not unkindly, after five straight minutes of this monologue.

“I can't help it," he earnestly answered. “School is a strong thing.”

It sure is. Every day we go out and face strong things in life.  Morning comes and food gets gulped down, there’s a mad scramble for shoes and then everyone is out the door with no one left to enjoy the sight of sunlight pooling on the floor.

Ah, when my children were young!

At night, when they slept, I made the rounds to kiss their fresh young faces, smelling as children’s faces do, like apples and geraniums and fresh-baked bread. I knew they would grow up and leave us. I’m just glad I also knew how much I loved them; how often they made me smile.

Wait, I'm....OLD?

Something is happening to me now. Everything I do I'm slower doing (and they used to call me 'the Turtle' way back in junior high!)

It’s been happening for a while now but I think writing as I did yesterday that I don’t always know how old I am on waking up mornings made me realize it. I said I generally feel as if I’m about 32 but I am SO not 32. This next month I’ll be…. 63. 63!

So how can I keep forgetting that? Is it my colorist’s fault for keeping my hair brown?

Fashion’s fault for making it seems normal that women in their 60s are pawing through racks of the same gracefully drooping sweaters as the 20-somethings wear? And by the way a shout-out to the fashion industry for inventing those awesome sweaters which can hide even a figure like Homer Simpson’s, so nicely displayed above.

You forget you’re old maybe because when YOU were a kid old people wore black tie shoes with little heels – kind of like what Al Pacino wore in Scarface ha ha. Sneakers were unheard of past about the age of 12 for a girl unless she played sports in high school but oops there were no sports in high school when you were young, Title IX having not come along ‘til the 70s.

Anyway what’s been happening is, I feel my age now. I see it in the mirror, sure – the sun damage alone – but I feel it too.

I can hop up and down for an hour at these various cardio classes but not as high as the young mothers. Not as high at all. I used to do yoga but now changing rapidly from position to position? Forget it. I get up the way a card table gets up, painstakingly, limb by limb. It's ok; I kind of hated yoga anyway. The mindful part I liked; the breathing I liked but backbends? The pigeon? Please.

I feel my age because I am slow to wake mornings. I used to be always grabbin' the moral high ground by being out of the bed literally hours before Old Dave. Now I find nothing nicer than to wake up and see him over there on his side and go back to sleep thinking “He’s still here! After all these years!"

“Hey!” I say to him when I open my eyes. And he reaches over and pinches my nostrils shut. (Maybe you’d have to know him to see how that’s a gesture of affection.)

So I get up later. I also go to bed earlier. AND I can’t drink like I used to. Sometimes I pour that three ounce glass of wine I can afford on my Weight Watcher Points, take one sip and toss it in the sink . Why doesn’t it taste good anymore? I never drank to get fuzzy; drink doesn’t’ make me fuzzy, it only makes me anxious and depressed. I drank because it tasted good. But now, “I need this?” I’m beginning to say to myself, and yet having a glass of wine with friends is such a symbol of conviviality, how will I put it aside entirely? It’s like tobacco was to every smoker you ever knew: did you ever see anyone happier than smokers when they smoke. Nirvana!

Mostly I feel old because now when I take our 91-year-old uncle to his favorite city pond as I do two days a week I no longer feel antsy and bored when he says for the 900^th time "How many shades of blue do you think is in that water?” while gazing hungrily out over it. Now I’m right there gazing too.

We went there today and the wind was up and all of the last fortnight’s ice was gone; just melted away in this eerie warm winter. Look at the chunks of it riding on the waves.

"It looks like ice in your drink," said Uncle Ed.

"Exactly!" I said back and we both smiled.

See if you don’t think this is pretty nice too, however old you happen to be:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC1d7ZoZ-ps&feature=youtu.be]

You Know It Was a Good Weekend If...

You know it was a good weekend if you (a) got to sleep past 7:00 both days – even just a few minutes past - and (b) you couldn’t quite remember where you were in your life when you woke.

This happens to me all the time: Am I six months old and waiting for that large friendly face to lean over my crib like the sun peeking in at the window?

Am I 16 ? Oh God am I still 16 with a term paper due in two days? Am I 91 like Uncle Ed, who every single day canes his way to the bathroom for that shower-and-shave ceremony drilled into him as a daily ‘must’ by his three-year hitch in the Army?

I was 32 when I woke up yesterday. I’m often 32 after sleep. It’s the age I expect to be in Heaven. But back to our checklist:

You know it was a good weekend if you got to look out the window even for just five minutes to watch the birds taking rides on the wind.

You know it was a good weekend if you love to exercise and you did exercise. If exercise is just OK in your book and you drag yourself to the gym every working day of your life, you had a good weekend if you didn’t even think about exercising, except for the exercise involved in lifting food to your mouth.

You know it was a good weekend if you didn’t care what you were wearing. I had to dress way up last week to tape a public service announcement even though the camera turned out to show me just from the clavicles up so that awesome new Superbra went to waste and my eyes turn out to now be so wrinkle-crinkled they look sewn shut, like the sleepy rick-rack eyes on your first stuffed doggy.

Well I did my best - what can I say - but the minute Friday night came I pulled on my stretchy yoga pants and the hooded sweater I gave to my son in Seventh Grade that he never wore even once but that I love more than I all other clothes and basically wore them all weekend.

I knew it was a good weekend because I:

• Downloaded and watched the pilot episode of Justified for the first time.

• Watched episodes 4 and 5 of Downton Abbey's first season.

• Watched that early episode of Friday Night Lights where the best friend finally shows up in the injured kid’s hospital room and both boys cry on parting.

That was it for television.

The rest of the time I:

• Sewed something by hand for the baby coming to our family any day now.

• Made that awesome Weight Watcher Turkey Meatloaf recipe.

• Fried up some Dover sole in egg yolks and cornmeal for Old Dave.

• Broiled a filet of salmon for myself.

• And read: it had been all I wanted to do this past weekend: I read a novel, a memoir and two New Yorkers, an Atlantic Monthly and as many chapters as I could manage in A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman’s history of the troubled fourteenth century.

The sun was gorgeous and then it went down. Stars came out and a big wind tried to frighten the fruit trees which, with nothing left to lose, laughed in its face. The year ticked along and spring grew closer and somewhere around 11 last night as I felt slept closing my lids I felt some internal second-hand surge forward and knew that I was ready for the new week ahead.

Who's a Wreck?

This business of not ever really resting: it’s pretty common I guess and I'm thinking maybe it grows out of the anxiety we have about the slopes-of-Vesuvius state of our little earth. I know I was out every single night last week at meeting after meeting. All my life I have been one of these people, running all around and never stopping - though come to think of it, one of those  nights I was actually at a play and NOT a meeting.I went to see “As You Like It” at the American Repertory Theatre where I know I would have had $50 worth of fun - if I hadn’t slept through much of the first act, waking up only during the Ages of Man speech. (You know it: it’s the speech where all the stages of a life are ticked through, from the time the child is just a babe “mewling and puking in its mother's arms."  (Always hated that phrase. Whoever Shakespeare was he sure wasn't a woman, you think hearing it spoken.)) These are illustrations of the concept, above and below.I was seated in the back since I had arrived late. I had dropped off the kids I had with me so at least they wouldn’t be late – always such a rush on a school night. They were just out of wrestling practice and still hungry (I’d made some hot food and packed it in Tupperware to eat on the way over.)But then the theatre is in Harvard Square where I had my first-ever apartment that I shared with my classmate Vicki  - and the remnants of our suppers that kept disappearing down the drain of the kitchen sink only to reappear in the bottom of the bathtub, and well, you can’t walk fast when you’re walking through your own past.So my guys were inside enjoying the play for a good two-and-half scenes before I go there and of course Management wouldn’t let me join them in my ‘real seat’ until intermission. So there I was up in the back where the actors looked so tiny and dear and the next thing I knew: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.But when intermission came I saw a new friend and that was nice, and also one old friend, not encountered in almost ten years who called out “Terry Marotta!" and that was also nice and woke me up entirelyThe kids I’d brought to the play had texted me by then. “Intermission time Terry,” they wrote. I suppose they didn’t know what had happened to me. But there they were in the lobby and we did sit together then and for the rest of the play that I was so wide awake I found myself laughing out loud AND tearing up at the touching parts…Then all the way home, we talked about the sonnets which they are reading in school and the film Shakespeare in Love and I don’t know what all else.I didn’t get to bed til 11:30, but that was an hour earlier than I got to bed every other night what with all my other meetings that were real meetings and not fun nights at the theatre.Still. Going out in the week sure does make you tired and I sure enough was beat when the weekend got here.  And judging from the all-over-the-map nature of this post it looks like I’m not recovered yet.But today is Sunday with a fresh chance for us all to calm the heck down so I’m hoping tomorrow I can talk more sensibly about what keeps us Americans push-push-pushing all the time. We shall see! For now, it’s 6am. Time to slam this old laptop shut and go back to SLEEP a while before I myself look like the guy on the right!

Keep on Dancin'

Once, old Dave and I went for dinner at the house of some friends - well, really they were just the parents of our child's friend, so we knew them only that well. The young people had gone off to the hosting kid's room the way kids do, so we four were alone in the living room. I believe we were at that stage of such an evening where you're inquiring delicately about one another’s pasts, and I guess I must have been the one to ask the dad of the family if he still had his parents."Both gone," he said, looking down. He paused for a beat, reflectively, even sadly I thought, then looked up again. “AND IT'S LIKE BEING A SENIOR IN HIGH SCHOOL!” he crowed with a big happy smile. What he meant, as he explained to his somewhat shocked dinner guests, was that no one had the right to expect things of him anymore. He was free.That remark has stayed with me to this day as I have asked myself over and over if I could I identify with it on any level. I guess I did feel my daughterly obligations disappear with the ambulance that drove off with the body of my last remaining parent, but really I have never felt "free" in the way that man was using the words. And so I wonder: How can some people just sort of .. rest inside their lives while others keep taking on obligation? I mean, are we do-gooders the crazy ones? I have no doubt that I'm a crazy one. I feel so crazy after this long week I just want to spend the weekend reading. I feel as though I can't do one more thing for anyone. Look how cozy this woman below looks. Hmmmm... OK I'm going to do it! Now if I can just find someone to bring me food every three hours.... (Dave? Oh Da-a-a-ave?)

God Can't Be Shocked

Some people criticize John Updike, saying he objectified women, portraying them as mere sex objects and so on.I never saw it that way, even though I read Rabbit Run the summer of my 13^th year and felt my world split open upon reading the sex scenes. 'Grownups do this?' I asked myself stunned. This is what they're up to when they’re not buttering our toast or rotating the tires on the family car?'My big sister Nan had tried to clue me in on the particulars of sex; by the time she was ten she had sent away for a thousand pamphlets on the subject. And certainly her information was better than what the boy down the street said happens after you get married: He said they then take you into a secret room and tie you together by your underpants.What Updike described was much more specific. And once you got used to reading the actual truth, anything but shocking. No, he never objectified women, in my book; in my book he only loved and noticed them.He is the person who singlehandedly opened my eyes to writing. Three years he is gone now and it has taken me almost that long to read his final collection of short stories, slim as it is. I just didn’t want it to end, knowing there would be no others.Here's one thing he said that I love and agree with. He said his theory was that God already knows everything and can not be shocked.In the same essay he also said,

Only truth is useful. Only truth can be built upon. From a higher, inhuman point of view, only truth, however harsh, is holy. The fabricated truth of poetry and fiction makes a shelter in which I feel safe, sheltered within interlaced plausibility in the image of a real world for which I am not to blame. Out of soiled and restless life, I have refined my books.

I love that last sentence: Out of soiled and restless life I have refined my books. And I understand exactly the part about the shelter his creative writing made for him, remembering a description earlier in this book of the place he loved best as a child: it was the spot on the side porch of his first home where he would upend and then hide under the wicker furniture to become the observer unobserved.It’s what I wanted to be since my own baby days, only my spot was under the dining room table. Now I lurk in my car or on the park bench, listening to the old men and yelping teens and the women together talking. It’s what I have been since the dawn of the Reagan years when I began writing my column. For all these years I have written every week for the papers and now, here on this blog, I write every day.Seeing and then telling what you have seen is for me what I think it was for him too: merely a way of saying thanks for it.

Playdate

On bright days like we've been having I want to be like those lucky housepets who spend the day moving from room to room in pursuit of each warm pool of sunlight.

Here's a sunny room above.And here's a cat who knows just what to do with it: I want to go down on my stomach and rest my chin on my paws too - ah!This winter sun is still slanty enough so that it’s right in here with us, like that warm light on top of your fish tank.It’s more than 'in here' with us; it came expressly to spend the day with us, as with a playdate arranged by unseen parents. It makes me want to put on skates and hold a roller derby zooming around the rooms. It makes me want draw 50 pictures and tape them to the wall going up the stairs like my sister and I did that Saturday morning our mom dared sleep until 8.She was pretty mad when it turned out to be a permanent exhibit.(Who knew the tape would take the wallpaper with it when we pulled it off.) We kids didn’t mind it; so for us it just made a nicely unusual art gallery, like the kind Jack Nicholson-as-the-Joker makes when he and his goons come calling at the Gotham City museum. (That's below if you want to take a peek.) But listen the sun really is getting stronger every day, can't you feel it? And yet it's still so close to us. It likes Earth better than those other planets, that's all. Yeah I'll say it again. A day like this just wants to make you stretch right out. Now for some weird late-80s pop and Jack Nicholson with the ultimate Face Lift Gone Wrong. :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-c-pRsZR9g]

Enough for Meryl? Never

Doesn’t Meryl Streep have enough Oscar nominations? I’ve loved her forever but should she win for playing Margaret Thatcher? Can’t any one of us ladies tease our hair into a Buzz Lightyear helmet and get a film crew to follow us around the house talking to the pictures?Ah but that's mean of me. I love Meryl. Who has better skin, and a greater laugh? Who else dares sing and hop around on the Greek isle for that film version of Mamma Mia?Also she and I are the same age.The same height too.We’ve both also had our pictures taken by the famous Bachrach studio, the outfit that did the official portrait of JFK just after his election to the presidency. The Bachrach photographer who took my picture there told me she was a real challenge what with that crooked nose, but “What a face!” he said. “What a face!” The picture of me that day makes me look a cross between a mother superior and a flight attendant circa 1960. It would work propped on top of my casket someday, if it had a sign next to it saying “Really she looked nothing like this.”So it’s not that I don’t love Meryl. It’s just that she I wanted to see Keira win a chance at the prize, as I was saying yesterday.But the more I write here the more I see how irresistible Meryl is.I was watching Woody Allen’s Manhattan the other night and there she was lighting up the screen as Woody's ex-wife. And whenever I get brave enough to watch The Deer Hunter again it stops me in my tracks every time to see her in that final scene with her friends following the funeral of the Christopher Walken character, when they sing this song:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LwGt9d1-lU]She’s modest, you hear, from people who've met her and I bet she sighed on hearing the news of yesterday's Best Actress nomination. "Another pair uncomfortable shoes!" she probably thought. "Another night where even my scalp will ache from all that compulsory smiling!"Now I've just watched a scene from Sophie’s Choice, the 1983 film about a woman’s secret history and the way what she did, and saw, and endured, has changed her forever.Just watch it yourself now. What an actress! And how lucky we are to be living at the same time![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk7GWw7MagU]

Give That Girl an Oscar

I’m really hoping Keira Knightly is named for her role in A Dangerous Method when Oscar nominations are announced today. In this latest David Cronenberg film she plays a raging and distracted mental patient, who, when introduced to a calm empathetic listener sitting in a chair behind her, recovers clarity of mind and goes on to graduate from medical school and become a psychotherapist herself. (OK it’s also true that this calm empathetic listener sleeps with her too, then puts her aside when it suits him, but she expresses her feelings on these events in one blindingly fast three-second gesture that made the audience I was part of gasp with surprise.)But this is Jung and his onetime mentor Freud we're dealing with here, in the first decade of the last century when people were just getting the idea that they weren’t in Kansas anymore. Freud had just dropped his bombshell of a theory about the dark impulses involving sex and aggression that lurk just under the surface of our conscious thoughts – and as you can imagine, sex and aggression would rattle the teacups in any polite society back then, in those quiet years before the slaughter of World War I commenced.I’m wondering now if Freud’s ideas didn’t take hold more easily on account of that war, which killed an entire generation of young men and exposed how thin a veneer ‘civilized’ behavior really is.The losses from the "war to end all wars" were felt even over here in the States, however slow we were getting into it. It wasn’t just the speakeasies and the bathtub gin that made the Twenties roar, I don’t think. It was also the horror people felt after witnessing the carnage caused by trench warfare: A million casualties in the Battle of the Somme alone! They just wanted to forget it all. They roared too because Freud and his sometime protégé Jung had let this particular genie out of the bottle: no one in polite society had ever before spoken of our so-called baser impulses.In one of his plays 200 years before, Molière satirized the class of "genteel" people who refused to use the word for 'legs' – too coarse! Too vivid! They wouldn’t use the word 'teeth' either, calling them instead 'the furniture of the mouth.'But Freud and Jung? They kicked all that over. They kicked it into next week as the saying goes.The woman Keira Knightly plays was a real person named Sabina Spielrein, who suffered humiliation at the hands of her spanking-obsessed father, but then recovered just as she does in the film and contributed greatly to the understanding of our deepest impulses. (My heart squeezed shut when they rolled the credits to reveal that she and her two daughters were shot to death in a barn by SS officers. (They were Jews, as was Freud.))What I will remember is the image of her so sharply suffering at the beginning as Keira Knightly plays her. She writhes in the arms of the hospital orderlies; extends her already long lower jaw in a simian rictus of agitation. She looks like an animal being tortured. Poor young woman! Poor all women in those days when they called our anger “hysteria” and took away our humanity. Tough century, the 20th; thank God for every Suffragette and Feminist who worked to put things right.Anyway here's the trailer under one last picture of our girl:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjyP9DjUdVk]

Fret Not

I guess everyone knows who Tom Waits is, the singer with a voice like rocks being dragged over sheet metal - go ahead: take a quick listen - but I’ll bet not everyone knows how grateful and quietly pleased he seems to be with life. It's something I learned by hearing him talk with Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” a few months ago when his latest album came out.The first cut on "Bad as Me" is one where you’re just sure you’re hearing the pops and clicks of vinyl; you think it’s a record. Nope: that’s the sound of chicken on the barbecue, a sound so like the sound of a record you’re positive he had a phonograph there in the studio.So too he said he could name no better way to get the sound of snare drum than to jump on a trampoline in November when it’s all weighed down with an autumn windfall of sticks and branches.The man takes that kind of delight in the world; a child’s delight.He said he’s been known to put a tape recorder inside a trash can and wheel it around the yard to see what kinds of sounds he gets, what kinds of rhythms suggest themselves.You don’t need to worry even if you haven’t written for a whole year, he said, because the music is always there and all music has rests in it; you know that. You, you’re just on a rest if you're not creating right now. No worries.He also said he often just sings spontaneously, making up any old tune as he goes along, as does his collaborator and wife Kathleen Brennan. "What's the choreography of a bee?" he said rhetorically near the end of this interview. Bees don't have instruments. Bees don't take lessons in how to weave the patterns of their flight. They just fly.It seems like a perfect lesson for a brand new week: Just fly. Just sing. You don't need a guitar, he said, 'cause one thing is sure: “There are no frets on your neck.”No there aren't. In other words, sing or write any old way. That's what I take this to mean. In other words, we make the path by walking, as the proverb goes.Now here's the nicest tune on Bad As Me, in my book anyway, something called "Back in the Crowd" which owes a lot to Elvis and a lot to Mexican music as you'll probably hear right away. Enjoy![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCbPkr9AEG4&feature=relmfu]

Love This Month

January is the month of the plain days, when we return to our right minds, the way that old Prodigal Son did, waking among the pigs. I’m guessing that happened in January too.It's the month when we breathe free again, for behind us is December's delirium; behind us the scorekeeping, the anguished thoughts about just exactly who we exchanged with last year and should we buy them all gifts again this year?Now it's Plain January and January's no month for keeping score.January's the month for letting go and letting it happen.Cold happens in January. Sometimes it happens in such a big way you can’t wear jewelry without causing the flesh it touches to freeze in sympathy.  Last weekend my ears looked like two little dried apricots just pulled from the freezer, even without the steel posts of earrings skewering their lobes.Snow also happens, as the folks in Cordova, Alaska can testify with their house-high amounts.But snow too we just have to have to let wash over us.In fact that’s all we need do in January: endure the weather and try to get to the Superbowl without giving ourselves coronaries.I love the month for its blankness. It’s like the yearly planner before we fill it with all our appointments. I love it for its rhythms, the 31 days all alike with one welcome holiday weekend smack in the middle. I like the way we can set our alarms for 6:00 or even 5:00 and then just lie there a while in the pre-dawn hush. Because even a full month after the shortest day, it’s still not light until 7:00 and there’s something cozy in that early morning darkness.Sometimes I rise from my bed at 5:00 and see old Orion, armed to teeth, and leaning in my window. “Go back to bed, fool,” he seems to be saying. “Can’t you see it’s night still?”I follow his orders and dream just one more dream.So though the days are short still, there is something nice in that fact. It lets us not be fibbing when we tell our pillows, “Be back real soon!” And in another four weeks, a muscular young sun will be pulling our covers right off us, impatient as a puppy eager for breakfast.That’s true, hard as it may be to believe on this 22nd day of January, when just halfway through the Patriots-Ravens face-off, our little patch of earth will be plunged once again in darkness. But think on this; just think on this: Right now, the Almanac says the sun came up at 7:15 A.M.  A month from now it will be up by just after 6:30. And by the 21^st of March? By then, we’ll be two whole weeks into Daylight Savings, with sunset not due until 7:30 P.M.In sum, I love this month for its message that all we need do is snooze and wait, just as the seeds are doing in their deep earthy beds. Then one day, when we’re busy with other things, we'll turn and spot that one frail crocus blossom and see that Life really is as ever-regenerating as the poets have always told us.

just look at that blue sky and tell me it's not thinking 'robin's eggs!'

Don't Worry. Be Happy

Here’s a tip on how to write happy: be like Francis Ford Coppola who says he does all his writing very early in the morning because nobody else is up, nobody calls, and no one has hurt his feelings yet.Pretty sweet little insight into this giant of American cinema, eh? But also a good insight into what we all need in order to create or even just do our work: we need to feel unencumbered in our spirit, free from self-obsession, ready to stop focusing just on ourselves and start focusing on what-all is around us.I love hearing writers of fiction say that they’re as curious as anybody to see what will happen next in the stories they’re writing. They almost all say it too: that they invent these characters and the characters just start talking... That must be so nice, to feel that you’re just the stenographer in a way. It must be very freeing.I write only non-fiction and find that I'm happiest when I wake up early enough to work for a good two hours before the 'real' work day starts. I go right to my laptop at 6:30 with that first cup of coffee and feel as if I’m just opening a wide window onto the world. Today I felt even happier than usual knowing that it would snow all day, and here it is a Saturday so we can just relax and watch it fall.We’re meant to love our time here. We’re meant to love our work too. Many people hate it when their work involves deadlines but what can you do? Deadlines come with the territory in life.I used to fret so over this column that I've been writing since 1980, because it goes all over the country and that’s a lot of people to let down if I write something glib or half-baked or inauthentic.I also used to get all whiney about how hard it was to write once a week. Then, three years ago, I decided to try writing every single day, and now I never feel whiney at all but only happy. A paradox!Francis Ford Coppola once said, “It’s ironic that at age 32, at probably the greatest moment of my career, with The Godfather having such an enormous success, I wasn't even aware of it, because I was somewhere else under the deadline again.”Maybe we all do that early on: fret over the deadlines in our lives. Then slowly, over time, we learn to enjoy life more and fret about it less - and hopefully check our fat little egos at the door.Here's a great short interview done when Coppola was only 36. I really love what he says a minute and 20 seconds in. The great ones are often humble like this, ever notice?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJhTWBl4EiU]

Stirred AND Shaken

I have to pause here and just show you these images of the little jewel of a pond I go to every day.It's tucked in the corner of a nice old city once known for its tanneries and its fruit trees, its pastures and its dooryards. Even just 40 years ago you could still feel the presence of the farm families and the mill folk who lived here.The island you see across the soon to be icy waters once had a pavilion on it where an orchestra would set up of a summer night for dancing under the stars. The ladies and gents  would step in their evening slippers into launches that carried them across to it. Today there isn’t a structure upon this island , but only the walking trails and the tenacious oaks so slow to relinquish their fawn-colored leaves. If you dug a couple of feet under the topsoil, I imagine you would also find the implements of the people who first settled hereabouts some 60,000 years ago, having walked across the land bridge that is now the Bering Straits.You have to know that I'll never run out of things to say about our natural endowment as describers and storytellers - what I promised to do  but I will wait to say more about that topic from yesterday. How can I not use today to show you these images?Of open waters on the brink of freezing?Of gulls struggling to fly in a 30 mile an hour wind?Of the way the water looks right at shore’s edge where the ice is starting to form in earnest?I watched it chuckling and churning as those strong winds dragged the new ice this way and that. It made me feel wonderful, as though I were inside tall silver cocktail shaker, both shaken and stirred!See how it makes you feel when you press 'Play'.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEIU3Ne552U&feature=youtu.be]

How to Write a Paper

I think writer’s block is only a problem if you’re afraid to begin. "JUST BEGIN!" I tell students in any writing class I teach."Write any old thing at first," said my hero Brenda Ueland. “Be a lion! Be a pirate!" in your writing. Put anything on the paper to get the waters flowing and the mind inching along its little pathways.She said too that you should picture someone who loves you listening as you talk.I was the baby in my family, the amazing good news at the end of all that bad news, my mother abandoned, my father four states away and not coming back - and that was all before the real ugliness started. But then this baby got born at the end of that bad period and our whole houseful of five oldsters just melted. “Look, it’s a BABY!” they said to each other as if they were expecting maybe a mole. And then there was the added darlingness of my sister Nan who was also just a toddler and the next thing they knew they were all laughing at the dinner table again, same as always.I really do just picture those kind faces when I sit down to write.Or else I picture David who may love me too after all these years because why else would he keep shaking his head and saying “TT! Old TT!” as he did again the other day when he caught me picking cherry pits up off the floor with my toes.I had my reasons:“I’ve decided not to bend over more unless I’m paying someone to MAKE me bend over” I told him.I meant in Hip-Hop Cardio and all those other dance classes I take at the Y.“You want me to be in shape, right?” I added.“I’ll show you in shape!" he says every time. "How 'bout you quit the Y, give ME the 60 bucks a month and I’ll beat you into shape?”Who wouldn’t feel happy with someone like this in their life?With writing, the real main thing is to stay calm and remember that you know how to do this. Just talk in your own voice.I mean don’t you feel sorry for the young woman at the top? She’s bound to panic and freeze, panic and freeze; that's what I think looking at this picture, since it appears to be a sort of term paper she’s working on.If that’s the kind of writing you’re doing, here’s my advice:Take notes on all those books on good big index cards, then set the books aside, deal the cards out on the floor and walk all round them until you figure out what order you want to put them in as you spin out your argument.I have more tips but I’ll save them for the next time. Time to go do my pale imitation of Julia Stiles in Save the Last Dance at the good old YMCA.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSv8zSG2U4U&feature=related]

Undies in a Bunch and Other Matters

Just to be clear: the underpants flung across the hotel room weren't ours. (See Sunday's post Fun at the Fancy Pants Hotel.)We're not that kind of hotel guests,; we’re the other kind: when we first walk into a hotel room we pick up the bedspread with a set of tongs practically to drop it in the closet so there'll be no chance of accidentally touching it.It's David really. He's the kind of hotel guest who'll hardly even walk barefoot to the bathroom. 'Who knows how much beer, or Pepsi, or nacho sauce is worked into that rug?' is his reasoning.We're also the kind of guests who leave money for the person making up the room of course but I often leave a note as well.The other night when I pushed open the drapes and found some guy's bunched-up undies I knew I couldn’t call Housekeeping; that would bring trouble to whatever people had cleaned our room because they had missed seeing them. They clearly didn’t pull the drapes back enough to find then there lurking like a dark family secret.The only time I was ever in Palo Alto was to visit Stanford with our oldest girl when she was looking at colleges. She had packed in a kind of quilted laundry bag that she flung over her shoulder. I, on the other hand, was in a stage where I was madly overpacking all the time, and when the day time came to leave, I just couldn't jam everything back in that suitcase.I had this bright-pink wool jacket that just would NOT squeeze in there. As it happens, it was part of the 'going away' outfit my mother wore on the day of her wedding, and all those years later it was still great-looking, and had about it somewhat the same party-hat air as those gaily-flung boxer-briefs.Dope that I was, I left it behind with a note to the chambermaid, suggesting maybe she could find a use for it.I think of that bad decision every time I leave a hotel room.Sigh.In the end Carrie didn't go to Stanford; she went to Wellesley.And I have never been back to Palo Alto nor do I expect to go there again - unless Mark Zuckerberg decides to call me on the carpet for filling his site with a million links to a blog whose posts are just all over the place, funny and sad and crazy all at the same time and seldom casting their author in a flattering light.What can I say though? We write, as we talk, to ease our burdened hearts. How did  this guy know that, at only 19, when he founded what was then called "the Facebook"?

But Don't Get a Swelled Head

They try to make me feel good, these guys who host my blog: They just issued a report saying that if I were an exhibit at the Louvre, it would take three days for all the people who came to my blog in 2011 to see it.And I find that very nice indeed - even though I know very well that at least half of these people came  hoping to see pictures of ladies in bras.Or not in bras.Or because they spotted the tag "men’s underpants."I posted for 364 of last year’s 365 days and am told that my busiest day was October 19, when I wrote something I titled "Call Me Miss Hannigan."Go figure.I don't think I wrote about a drunken orphanage boss but let's have a look. Ah yes, here it is now, one of those whiney posts.I forget what the most popular post was in 2010 but in 2009 it was the piece I wrote about Rosemary Kennedy, the “other sister” in the Kennedy clan, the one with the botched lobotomy.My mother knew her. She didn’t know the rest of the family, except for the iron matriarch Rose whose clipped and imperious letters I still have in my attic.She sure knew Rosemary though. They slept in the same cabin for three weeks. .And my most popular post in 2008, indeed my most popular post of all time?One called "Peachy Keen: Dirty Pictures" that  had an antique photo in it that just proves the old truth that if a girl covers up just a little she will end up looking far sexier than if she went totally nude. That one is here with its picture belowSo there it is: my report card so far. I’m rounding the home stretch to the 1,000-post goal just now. Come with me and let’s see how the world looks to us from there.A life well spent eh? Well, laugh and the world laughs with you!

"It's Full of LESBIANS"?

One time while I was standing in line at the supermarket, an acquaintance hailed me to ask where my child was in the college application process. Then, in a loud voice, she began naming the schools her daughter was considering.When she got to one of the finest women’s colleges in the country, she called over, “Oh, but we don’t want her going THERE! The place is full of lesbians!”The remark was unfair on so many levels I found myself  willing her to stop, even just for her own sake. I hurried over to her. It was all I could do not to cover her mouth with my hand. I was that sure she didn’t mean to speak so carelessly.This exchange took place in that late 90s but I had one like it just recently, when I brought a malfunctioning lamp to the one store in the county where a real lamp guru was said to work. Sure enough, while four stores had said they couldn’t help me, this man had a different response:“This is nothing!” he said pleasantly. “I’ll take it home tonight and have it fixed for you by Thursday.”We got talking then, and it came out that he hailed from Roxbury, the same section of Boston where I myself spent the first decade of life.“Isn’t it beautiful though? The broad streets, and the brownstones, and that wonderful park designed by Frederick Law Olmstead?”“It WAS beautiful, before it changed,” he replied gravely.He was such a nice man; the last thing I wanted to do was embarrass him. Or maybe I was embarrassed for myself, because of what I took to be his implication. In any case all I could do was repeat his word:“Changed?”“The people. Everything. I can’t drive in there anymore!”“Ah, that’s just because we’re old!” I said. “Sometimes when I go there, all I can think is, ‘Where are the trolley cars? The butcher shops? The little delis on every corner?’”But it was as if I hadn't spoken.“I can't stand their music!” he blurted. “Or their... food ! Or the way their voices sound! I really can’t stand the way their voices sound!”Did he mean black folks? Latinos? The growing Asian or South Asian population?I didn’t know, and I didn’t stop to ask because of a sudden thought that made start laughing.“But that’s what they said about US when we came!” (He had told me earlier that he was Irish by descent.) “Those old Yankees said the same things about us, and then WE said them about everyone who came after us!”“I suppose that’s true,” he said, smiling again.“For a long time I didn’t go back either, but now I’m in Roxbury every week and I wish you could see it: The new townhouses. The children tumbling out of school buses with family members waiting to greet them. The great little restaurants. Now, every time I go I see less of my own dead past and more of the vibrant life there before me.”He smiled and patted my arm. “OK then, come back Thursday.”I think of these stories now as we remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who yearned for the day when people would be judged by the content of their character.I believe I have made enough mistakes since I first heard those words that now my task is to cover my own mouth, lest I speak carelessly myself. And I also believe that under our fear we yearn for a day when we might stop judging altogether and instead get close enough to see that in truth we really are all one family.

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This is Roxbury is it looked to my camera one day last June. The field is the site of the former Notre Dame Academy, just down the street from the 826 Boston,  a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills .  NDA was the school in whose whispery corridors I moved, with my starched uniform, my Baltimore Catechism and my Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox. 

And these below are the streets and driveways surrounding that old convent school where the children and grandchildren of that whole untidy wave of immigrant Irish came to get an education.

Fun at the Fancy Pants Hotel

Here’s where WE stayed last night, woo!- a onetime jail that is now a hotel.We won the right to sleep here almost a year ago and only now cashed in.The fun unfolded this way for me:

• 3:30: Arrive. Champagne in the room, wh-a-a-a-a-t? Drink every drop.
• 4:30: Nap seems in order. Take one.
• 5:30 Wake to play with various hotel room gizmos. High tech heaven. This is how the 1% lives!
• 5:45 Hunt in vain for in-room coffee maker. Hotel's wish: that you spend $15 on room service coffee instead. Nah, forget the coffee.
• 6:00 Have Nap Number Two
• 6:30 Wake once again. Read fascinating amazing book on Kindle. Alice Hoffman rules!
• 7:00 Have Nap Number Three. ("What happened to sight-seeing?" says Old Dave. "What happened to striding purposefully along the Charles River in 35 mph wind?" say I. Nice enough just watching it all out the window.
• 8:00 Jump up and dress for 9pm dinner reservation at Scampo Lydia Shire, chef.
• 8:30 Descend in elevators, passing at least 100 30-year-olds, the guys peering into the faces of their ladies in a way that connotes One Hope Only if you catch my drift.
• 9:00 Killer drinks. Flat-top haircut on genial young waiter! Killer apps, killer entrees, killer desserts!
• 10:30 Ride back up in the elevator, look out at cupola of the old jail again, this time softly illuminated. Gorgeous. Feel like Middle Passage Alaskan cruise ship passing iceberg. Spectacular! Only fly in all this nice ointment: the moment when, on pushing big cozy chair closer to picture window, we spy, just under the hem of the draperies, one (1) pair of Champion Men's boxer briefs, flung away in moment of gleeful abandon by previous hotel guest.

HUMANS, what can you say? Nothing human is alien to us! We kicked 'em back under the drapes and went cozily to sleep.

Secret Eating

This is me having my afternoon snack yesterday. It sure is hard to get back on the old weight-loss plan until you get to the place when there's NO bad food in the house at all!We’re just about getting there now, on the 14th of January.Our trouble is, we get these tins of nuts through the mail at the holidays. They’re gifts from people who want us to die young: greasy cashews, super-salty almonds, macadamia nuts even, which have more fat than you find on the thigh of a pig.Then there’s the whole array of specialty chocolates people bring.And the bottles of wine.It’s all part of the holiday haul which takes longer than you think to dissipate.Lucky for me. Old Dave plays cards once a week his grizzly scotch-drinking pals. That's when I trot out all this hi-cal stuff and put it right near to where they’re playing.It works pretty well unless this one guy brings his famous pan of chocolate chip brownies studded with walnuts that I want to get under the covers with and eat every crumb of.Instead, I make Dave take care of it. “Hide this from me and never tell me where it is no matter how much I beg!” I tell him."Jeez! Show a little discipline!” he says but he hides them yes he does because he’s no fool. He knows if he wants to feel that butter-and sugar-and-dark-chocolate combo on his own tongue he’ll have to hide them.He’s pretty mean to me come to think of it, teasing me, calling me "fatty" and all and making "boom! boom! boom!" sounds when I walk across the bedroom floor - when in fact I weigh 20 pounds less than I did when we met - And he weighs AT LEAST 20 pounds more than he used to. Ok I've gained 15 pounds since the millennium but that just brings me to 135, and he’s calling ME fat?That’s the thing with men though: they don’t look fat. Dave has a big deep chest and legs that weigh like 75 pounds each as I learned when I was moonlighting as a massage therapist and he never looks fat.So there it is: your man looks awesome and manly with this white hair that the ladies all swoon over while YOU, no matter how trim you get with Weight Watchers, are still just this aging chick with cellulite.Well whaddya gonna do? At least I got this cute new haircut. :-)

A Day Like Any Other (But with a Lot More Rain)

I knocked over my water glass at the fancy new restaurant and when the waiter said "Have you ever been to this restaurant?" in my mind he was asking if I'd ever been to any restaurant. I felt like that much of an oaf.Then back home here I dropped the sewing box I have had for 25 years, a roomy multi-tiered thing with a place for bobbins and thread and a shears-shaped cut-out where you're meant to nestle your shears. It’s made of hard plastic, dark amber in color, like the old tortoise shell combs, and when it landed on the bare floor it exploded like a grenade and a shard sharp enough to open an artery shot into my leg. (Not that much blood, as it turned out.)The day was like that all around. Rain poured and winds gusted to 40 miles an hour. My hat blew off and cartwheeled across the grocery store parking lot before landing in a puddle half under somebody’s car. Then too I worked on a major sewing project for so long my back wouldn’t straighten afterward. Oh and I sat outside in my car in the soggy weather waiting for someone who forgot I was even coming.BUT in the supermarket a woman stocking the shelves sang “Hard Day’s Night” in this total pop star voice and then winked at me when I looked over at her.And a man 80 who was tailing his wife in the Health and Beauty aisle called out "I don’t need any lipstick today!” to the back of her head. Then he winked at me too, adding, “They don’t have my color anyway.”And just as I approached the checkout, I saw someone I had not laid eyes on in 30 years. Mac, as everyone has always called him, was an usher in our wedding. David’s best pal from high school, he still looks exactly like he did then except his hair is grey. We talked for a bit and parted smiling/.I wish I had had my camera with me so I could illustrate this ordinary day that was nice enough in the end except for the foot cramps that lifted me howling out of my bed again when I finally crawled into it at midnight.It was a day like any other day, with good moments and bad, soggier than most for sure."I'll take it." I said to myself as I held my face up to the wet at one point.

And I'll take this new day too.