Wait, I'm DRIVING?!

These things happen, what are you gonna do?  One minute you’re minding your own business puttering around the house and the next you’ve shot yourself square in the face with a household cleaning product and you’re staggering around bellowing like Oedipus when he finds out he married his mother.That was two weeks ago. A more recent goof-up took place last Friday. It was less serious but a lot more humid:  I went through the car wash with the driver's side window down, even after smirking at the kid when he said, "Put 'er in neutral and close those windows!"“I haven’t done this before?” the smirk said. “What do I look like, a chimp behind the wheel?”Then whoosh, everything inside the car was wet: My pants. My jacket. My lovely hair so carefully flattened not two hours before with chemicals and jolts of electricity. And that's not counting the car's interior, which looked like our Aunt Gertrude did that time the lion sauntered up to the edge of the cage and aimed a torrent of pee stronger than a firehose at her there in her new Sunday coat.But then yesterday! My God, yesterday was worse than any of these.It was actually last night. Darkness had fallen, I had my two young houseguests in the car, fresh from their wrestling match. We had just been through the drive-through and now, here in the parking lot outside the local supermarket, they were chomping on their two sackfuls of animal fat while I was busily devising a food list rife with fresh fruits and vegetables, black beans and yogurt which I hoped to introduce into their unsuspecting systems over the next several days .I was pulled up in one of the middle rows of the vast parking lot and we were talking. That’s what teen males like. I have found. They like to be in the car with some music tuned in low while they talk – just talk, joshing a little and speculating, narrating the world as it passes before them  I don’t know anything more fun than hearing them do it.We had a good 30 feet in front of us and really the parking lot was pretty empty, and  good thing too.Because they next thing I heard was when one of them said  “Wait you’re driving?”“OH GOD AM I DRIVING?!” I yelped and sure enough: I only thought I had put the car in ‘park’ whereas really it was still in ‘drive’ and I just had my foot on the brake……Until I suddenly didn’t have my foot on the brake and we were just sort of coasting across the parking lot like a little toy ship under sail.It’s my birthday today and it’s true I’m gittin’ up there but before you say you think I’m losing it let me just say in my own dubious defense: I’ve always been like this; just ask my family.

When Your Friend's Parent Dies

My heart leaped when I heard her voice on my answering machine. It was Judy, who we teased so in college for her youth: she was just 16 for most of our freshman year. Judy my roommate and bridesmaid from the days when young women had hair down to their elbows and dressed in gowns as flowing in gossamer as you'd see on a host of angels.

But glad as I was to hear her voice, I was that sad to learn why she called: Her mother was hospitalized near here and she had dropped everything back in Manhattan to come sit by her for her final weeks.

I don’t know how many times I saw Judy during this period.

Once was for perhaps the saddest New Year’s Eve dinner she will ever spend, with her mother going and her dad having gone just last June.  Once it was to meet at my dry cleaners, where she left off the clothes in which her mother would be buried.  Once I brought her straight from the hospital to the movies, where the two of us sat in the theater’s garage, downing the chicken cassoulet I had thrown together so she could eat before the show.

Naturally, I saw her at the funeral, where she rose and spoke so movingly  of her mom’s life, beginning in 1920s Brooklyn and going on through the marriage and parenthood, right up to her final years when, even with growing dementia, she could still beat the pants off her husband in Scrabble. This is the lady above.

And this is Judy on the piano bench at 12.

She spoke of her childhood and family life in Brooklyn, then Cincinnati, then Dayton. She told what her mother had loved: Her children. Music on the stereo.  Things of beauty, like the high-end jewelry she sold for years in her career.

I took in every word.

And afterward, as I stood studying the gorgeous photo of her mom as a young woman, Judy came and stood beside me.

“YOU love pictures!” she said. “I have literally hundreds of them back in my hotel room. Would you like to come see them the tomorrow night as I pack everything up, maybe even keep some for yourself?”

I said I would relish having one last visit with her and this time I brought chili and a Waldorf salad. “Why are you always feeding me?!” she laughed when she opened her door.

As we ate, she told me the story of her family, who had come here in the early 1900s from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. She spoke too of the ones who did not come, on her dad’s side; whose letters had abruptly and heartbreakingly stopped – just stopped - as Hitler’s dark shadow stretched over Europe.

I heard about Brooklyn grandmothers in funny old grandmother shoes.

I heard about her family’s migration to suburban Cincinnati where grandmothers drove actual cars and wore sleek Jackie-style pumps.

We spoke of all this and then turned to the hundreds of photos, from jocular candids to formal studio groupings and beyond.

“Take some!” she urged.

She also gave me a brooch, a single gold ‘S’ for her mother’s name.

“Your LAST name begins with ‘S’” she said. “At least it did when I met you. And I have no family member with this initial.”

“But you might someday,” I said. “I will keep it for you until then.” And so I will.

I took a lot of photos too and in the days following scanned them and saved them on my computer, where I go and look at them often.

I look at them very often, in fact, struck as I am by my good fortune in being near her during this passage; struck as I remain by the generosity of spirit that takes a mere friend from the old days and turns her into family.

And this is the Judy I met at 16, here seen at 20 the day before our Smith graduation:

No friends like the old friends

Deliver Us

I’m jumpy, I wake in the night with stomach cramps, my thoughts are not my own…. If there’s anything harder than knowing you’re about to have a baby yourself it’s being the mother of someone who is about to have a baby.

I’m talking here about my oldest child, born the very last day of the big Bicentennial year. From August of 1976 on, at least a couple of times a week I donned a long-sleeved t-shirt with a cartoon of a fat-bottomed infant wearing an American flag for a diaper. Can it really have been 35 years ago?

I seem to be the only nervous one though. She isn't a bit nervous, perhaps because the hormones of pregnancy act as a kind of sedative. I remember my mother telling me very late in her life that she never worried for an instant the whole time she was carrying me, even though my father had just pulled off a disappearing act worthy of Houdini. That changed about six weeks after I came but then, well, here I was and my sister too, a ringleted two-year and she didn’t have the luxury to indulge sorrowful thoughts.

But back to my girl's story:As I say, she is poised now at the top of the roller coaster ride that is labor and she’s full of optimism and good cheer. She wanted to have her last baby at home. She had the midwives lined up and the portable tub all rented and ready and no, you don't have the baby IN the tub; that's a whole different deal. You just use it during labor because the hot water eases the pain. But then a late-in-the-game complication brought her instead to the hospital for the great effort - and an effort it was all right, what with the long labor that all “primips” seem to have, and acccursed Pitocin the doctors love to squirt around these days.

This time she's scheduled to deliver at a different hospital where they have big deep tubs, the midwives, and no apparent inclination to declare a sudden impasse and pull out the scalpel as seems to happen in an astonishingly high number of cases across the country these days.

We went out to lunch the other day and I took a picture of her, from the back, for some reason, and also a video so short that neither one of us realized I was taking it.

This is the photo. She could use that hair as a baby sling it's gotten so long!

She's due to deliver on my birthday which is just 48 hours away. Maybe that's why I can’t sleep and my stomach hurts and I'm jumpy. Because here comes Life, and Risk, and the great yawning truth that we are once again about to meet a small but imperious Someone who will make us go weak in the knees with love for the rest of our natural lives.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fgs7XiF4TA&feature=youtu.be]

Weekend Arrives Just in Time

This is me today, wallowing in the Saturday vibe. Hang that Gone Fishin' sign!

Slept like a baby last night, without help too. Was it the hour-long Aerobics class?

Amblin' with Ambien

My primary care doctor is awesome the way she writes down everything I say and offers such good solutions. Three years ago she wrote me a prescription for Ambien that I was too chicken to fill. I sent her an email the day before yesterday. Could she write me another one now, I wondered, adding a good 200 words of unnecessary blah-blah about how This didn’t work and That didn’t work and how I had Tried All Else and was ruining my marriage with all this sighing and turning over and sighing some more.Her response was brief:“I’d be happy to do this for you.”So now I'm here sitting on the edge of the tub with all 14 of my 10 mg Ambien babies, each one to be cut in half and the whole lot of them meant to last until June. (That’s fine, that’s cool. I won’t need this stuff more often than once every 14 days I figure.) And I'm reading the 10,000 words of warning that come with any drug these days.Hmmm.Is it just me or are these not the oddest few paragraphs ever composed by the medical community? They sound earnest and panicky both. They sound like they were written by a 15-year old is what they sound like. Read on, starting with the first part with its echoes of the Baltimore Catechism:"Q. What is the most important information I should know about Ambien?"A. AFTER TAKING AMBIEN, YOU MAY GET OUT OF BED WHILE NOT BEING FULLY AWAKE AND DO AN ACTIVITY THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW YOU ARE DOING. THE NEXT MORNING, YOU MAY NOT REMEMBER THAT YOU DID ANYTHING DURING THE NIGHT. YOU HAVE HIGHER CHANCE FOR DOING THESE ACTIVITIES IF YOU DRINK OR TAKE OTHER MEDICINES THAT MAKE YOU SLEEPY."It goes on:"With Ambien reported activities include:·         Driving a car ("Sleep Driving")·         Making and eating food·         Talking on the phone·         Having sex·         Sleepwalking"Call your doctor right away if you find out that you have done any of the above activities after taking Ambien!"Important:"1. Take Ambien exactly as prescribed. Do not take more Ambien then prescribed. TAKE AMBIEN RIGHT BEFORE YOU GET IN BED, NOT SOONER."2. Do not take Ambien if you: (a) drink alcohol; (b) take other medicines that can make you sleepy. Talk to your doctor about all of your medicines. A doctor will tell you if you can take Ambien with your other medicines: (c) cannot get a full night’s sleep.And then under the heading "What are the possible side effects of Ambien?" is this:"Serious side effects of Ambien include: GETTING OUT OF BED WHILE NOT BEING FULLY AWAKE AND DOING AN ACTIVITY THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW YOU ARE DOING. (See “What is the most important information I should know about Ambien?)"I don't know, maybe it isn't all that funny but I just liked it. Down there in the small print is the usual list of grave side effects, "aggressive behavior, confusion, agitation, hallucinations, memory loss, anxiety, dizziness, diarrhea, a 'drugged' feeling” and so on, but it's mighty clear that the main one they're worried about is the idea of you popping out of your little trundle bed to do something that you and the makers of Ambien will regret and that you might even try suing them for, even in spite of the fact that we TRIED to tell you, using all the capital letters in the alphabet!

Sleep Aid!

When it comes to sleep aids  you just have to find the one that’s right for you  as they say in the laxative ads.

I was scared to death of Ambien.

Who hasn’t heard stories of the trans-Atlantic flier dutifully popping an Ambien at the gate? Who then immediately goes  so weak at the knees he has to be dragged aboard like a duffel bag?

I fear all situations where my mind gets hijacked.

What a pain I was in my teen years:

• Wouldn’t drink.

• Prom date filched a bottle of champagne for the night. I made him pour it in the dirt.

• Tried partying with the big kids in college but couldn’t keep up (“What’s happening to me? I can see right through my hand! Look out! The North Star is headed straight for us! Duck!” )

I well  remember this one weekend at Dartmouth. We had been drinking since literally 10am and now, at 8pm, I was in a frat house basement where some 'bro' was ladling chili into soup bowls as big around as a school clock. By then we had been through the deadly milk punch at 10, the whiskey sours at 1 and now here were these foamy quart cups of beer. The walls were pulsating as the Stones sang Satisfaction.

I had kicked off my shoes and leaned back on the banquet, balancing a cup of suds on my stomach. When I sat forward again to dangle one leg prettily over the edge as I imagined it, a sensation of warmth spread up my body.  “Ah!" I thought in a haze of well-being. "This sure beats writing a paper on the  Transcendentalists!"  Then I looked down to see that I had plunged  one whole foot into my chili. I lurched over to a mirror and tried to find the rotating pinwheels of my eyes.

Sigh. No wonder I mated for life at 19. I was no good at all at these singles scenes.

But back to the sleep aid that I knew I needed:  Trazodone was out; the few times I tried Trazodone I was dopey for a good  24 hours afterward. So I did what I often do when I have a pressing question: I went to my friend Lou of the Body Work Education Project who had been my Anatomy teacher back in massage therapy school. Her advice? Go with the Ambien. It burns clean, she says, meaning you feel like your same peppy self in the morning.

I wrote an email to my primary care doc and six hours later the pharmacy called to say I could pick up my scrip. Success!

There’s more to say, natch – isn’t there always with the Irish? -  but I only got three hours of sleep last night so I'm drooling onto the keyboard here. Tell ya the rest tomorra!

160 Miles Northwest of Lansing

160 miles northwest of Lansing: That's where Jeff Zaslow was when he died. He was travelling alone to do a reading about his latest book when he lost control of his car, slid into the path of a semi and was instantly killed.

His wife and three daughters buried him on Monday. Those of us who knew him from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists were hoping that the eulogy by Sully Sullenburger would be videotaped. It wasn't. We felt connected to him. He came to all the conferences. I remember him speaking at the 2006 NSNC Conference in Boston that Suzette Martinez Standring and I co-chaired, where Arianna Huffington also spoke, and we visited the home of John and Abigail Adams and their son John Quincy.

It seems only a minute ago now, 2006. Jeff's career was just taking off: under his belt already were his winning the nationwide competition to replace Ann Landers and also his regular gig with the Wall Street Journal. Still ahead: his writing of The Last Lecture, about the beloved Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch. Also The Girls of Ames, and the book about Sully Sullenberger; the book he did with Gabby Gifford and this latest one about fathers and how they do love their daughters. (They are all here. And here is his wonderful face as he stood with Randy in 2007.

The Magic Room: that's the book he was promoting when he skidded on that snowy rode in northern Michigan. The email entitled "Our friend Jeff Zaslow has died" appeared in my inbox Saturday morning and I felt the air rush from my lungs. It came from the folks in the NSNC member, the same people I was with when word came of Michael Jackson's death. The same people I was with in '94 as a fugitive OJ Simpson attempted to outrun law enforcement.

But this felt different. This felt personal, and not just because I knew him to be the kindest most gracious man, who wore his success so lightly. It felt personal to me because I identified with Jeff: the way both of us did book after book, then drove all over the map through snow and darkness to meet with 12 or 15 strangers and talk a while of what matters most in life. Sure there were differences. He had a real publisher doing his books and he made real money. I published my stuff through my own imprint and basically lost money. Still I read this story of his final minutes and I thought that could be me.

I think how close I came to dying that time on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when a legendary November blizzard blew in and I still tried crossing from Erie to State College to Allentown in it, the whole breadth of that big long cow of a state. The long-haul truckers were the only other vehicles on the road in that blinding snowstorm.

I think how close I came the time I almost smashed into the guardrail of the Sunshine Skyway just south of St. Petersburg going 60 miles an hour before I woke and saw where the car was veering.

I read back to all my laments here about doing too much and then having sleep elude me and a cold chill runs through my body. I haven't died yet from some crazy self-inflicted moonshine of a mission but it’s not too late, it is surely not too late.

Jeff did die and how the world will miss him and those three daughters especially whose hearts will never again be young.

Remembering about him these last days I came upon a post I wrote when Michael Jackson died and we were together in Ventura. What's eerie is that Jeff is in it too, in the sense that I named him as the author of The Last Lecture and then posted the video of Randy Pausch, weakened by the cancer that claimed him so young, taking the podium at the last commencement he would attend at his beloved Carnegie Mellon, thinner and fainter of voice than he had been but still so full of life.

We live until we die, they say and the emphasis is on the word ‘live’. We're meant to live each day to the fullest. We owe at least that much to God, who I always imagine standing to one side watching us, and just sort of shyly hoping that we liked it well enough here, and noticed everything, and felt happy and joyful as often as we could.

Now here is the post from June of '08 with Michael, and Randy, and Jeff in it that, eerily, enough is about how it is for children to lose their father young, and here below is Randy Pausch on YouTube in a video that more than 14 million people have looked at.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo]

Check it Off Check it Off Check it Off

I made this list last night when yet again I could NOT find the way to Dreamland.

The Melatonin hadn’t worked, any more than that super-mild,over-the-counter sleep aid.

The first little glass of warm milk hadn't, any more than that second glass fortified with an ounce of whiskey.

Insomnia ruled.

SOOO I dragged out a legal pad and a pen and went into the bathroom, turning the lights way up;  I figured if I couldn't sleep then I'd just out and out embrace wakefulness, dammit.

A quick look in the mirror showed a female Scrooge from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, just after he sees the scariest ghost of all.

Then I tried my last resort of a remedy, which is getting into a bath so scalding my vision begins to ebb.

That part worked.

The overhead light was pulsing, brighter and then less bright, brighter and then less bright, every time the blood from my heart rounded the bend at my toes and fingers and started back. It was cool and scary, like what happens to the lady in Requiem for a Dream.

I finally pulled myself out of that hot scented hallucination factory and toweled off. I wrapped myself in my big old robe, cracked a window for that nice bite of cold night air and sat down on the toilet's closed lid to make this list.

When you have insomnia, your mind feels to you like that guy’s mind in the movie Limitless. I even looked in the mirror again to see if my eyes had maybe turned ultra-blue like Bradley Cooper’s kept doing all through the movie. (Nope. Now I looked like I'd just been visited by the Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come with Tiny Tim dead alas dead and the rest of the family perishing entirely and Scrooge just knows it's all his fault.)

It didn't matter how I looked. What mattered is what I would plan for the day ahead.

I had my legal pad my pen and my just-won't-quit mind. I made this list.

And when I got done I was suddenly limp with sleepiness.

I did sleep then, from 3:30 until 7:30 when the sound of schoolchildren at the bus stop dragged me back to the waking world.

Four hours; it isn't enough.

Looking at the tasks on the list now, even thinking how great it would be to polish them all off I know I don't have much chance of doing that - not unless I crawl back under the covers and sleep one more hour.

If I do, I bet I can check off every single task here named, and in jig time too, because because because, as I have been amazingly slow to learn, there is just no sub- sub- substitute for a good night’s rest.

Annoying Expressions Part Two

In a post last week I wrote about having used a certain word to a traffic cop that made him so mad the veins in his neck stood out. That word was “Look” as in, “Look, I’m happy to move!” I can’t remember if I actually said “There’s no need to be unpleasant about it” or if I merely thought it.While “Look” used to be a harmless enough word, today it's used like a weapon, as in argument or political debate.  Today it means, “Look, idiot,” something you probably don’t want to be caught saying to a cop. Other words and phrases have hidden meanings, too:  When, for example, a person says, “It’s all good,” what he really means is, “Can you please calm down the heck down and stop catastrophizing?”When I myself hear “It’s all good,” I think of the character called Algernon in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest:  After his friend Jack says that something is the truth, plain and simple, he replies merrily that the truth is rarely plain and never simple and that modern life would be very tedious if it were either.If “it” stands for our general situation I think we can all agree that “it” is never all one thing or all another. It may SEEM like a harmless bit of rah-rah to say that it’s all good, but I'm pretty sure even the people who use it don't mean it that way.Then there are phrases that you may not need a translator for:When, for example, someone says, “Don’t get me wrong, I love her to death,” you just know that the next sentence will be nasty. “I love her to death,” “I love him to death:” such phrases  never come without that cruelly qualifying word “but” hard on their heels. The same is true with “No offense,” which is invariably uttered either immediately before or immediately after some doozy of an insult.So too, when a person begins a sentence with “Not for nothing,” it means.... Well to be honest I’m STILL not sure what “not for nothing” means, with its strange double negative, but I have noticed that it’s generally followed by a long self-pitying lament.If you come into the kitchen before going out and your mother says “Is that what you’re wearing?” you know that it means you can either go change, or get in an argument; the choices are that limited.Finally, we would all do well to learn the latest fresh meaning for the word “Really,” once employed as a simple adverb but now used ironically. These days, “Really?” is delivered as a question, as in “You are seriously doing [or saying, or thinking] this highly uncool thing?” It’s said just that way, and conveys a whole universe of judgment.I'm not wild about it. To me it seems loathsomely high and mighty but hey maybe I'm wrong. I could probably write a grouchy little piece every week on this topic and never run out of examples but i guess the main lesson here is that can’t be too careful about what you say—especially to a cop when you’re the one who’s illegally parked.

Day of Rest

It's late morning here and I'm still exhausted, both from an event that I worked seven months on and also two deaths.The deaths have me hollowed right out, one the death of Jess Zaslow by car accident as he drove to promote the latest of his wonderful books and,  I'll readily admit, Whitney’s death too.I don’t pray in a way that might be recognizable to the fathers of the faith I was born in, but I do pray in my own haphazard way; never for myself but for others. I’ve been praying for years for Whitney. I prayed for her and for Michael Jackson because both seemed so lost: one mired in a self-hatred that made him turn to scalpels to alter the man in the mirror and the other because - well, because she has looked so sad and fragile for so long now. I just watched some YouTube video her trying to get through the shows on her latest tour and really you have to press 'Stop". You just can’t bear to watch.It was yesterday that I heard of these two deaths and also yesterday that the Multicultural Network of our town put on this amazing event to bring people together. I want to write about Jeff and about the event but I think I’d best wait. I got home at 5 last night; fixed two plates of  food for us and then slept clear through the latest spine-tingling episode of Justified and HBOs’ Saturday night premiere of Something Borrowed and the ten o’clock news, Then I turned out the light  and slept 8 more hours.Prayers work sometimes and sometimes not: that could be one conclusion here. Another could be that you’re in no position to be fussing over somebody else's well-being until you start taking care of yourself.I’ve been sitting in my nightie writing for the last four hours (though none of it was for Exit Only here – this post took five minutes.)I just looked at the clock. It’s after 11:00. High time for coffee and breakfast.But God bless the dead. God bless them; they rest from their labors.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xtZHMPcS9I]

People are Crazy

Who dresses a  child up as a lobster and stuffs him in a lobster pot? And with what implication? That you're going to boil him? That you're going to eat him?

That's what Jonathan Swift had the English suggesting those pesky Irish do in that famous satirical essay of his: they should sell their kids to the rich for food if they're so hard up har har.

Funny, like this picture.

Only not exactly.

Funny like this guy setting out a punishment for his daughter who published a whiny letter about her parents on Facebook. Lots of people are hailing him for taking a strong parental stand against Tyranny by Teens but watch the thing all the way through and see if you still think he's so great when you get to the big finish . Yikes!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl1ujzRidmU]

An Ass out of You and Me

I had an old friend named Bob who would react the same way whenever the word “assume” came up in conversation “You know what they say about assume!” he’d boom genially. “It makes an ass out of you and me!” (You have to picture the word to get the meaning here.  ‘a-s-s’ plus the letter ‘u’  plus ‘me’, get it?)

Ok so it was never a terribly funny remark but it wasn’t meant to be I don’t think. It was just meant to point out a truth and my gosh does it ever: Old Dave and I wandered in the wilderness for years in our marriage, ‘assuming’ we knew what the other one was thinking. Or worse, assuming judgment when there was no judgment intended, as when I’d darkly interpret a look at the supper table that probably just meant something he was chewing had gone down the wrong way.

Just the other day I ‘assumed’ something about a little girl I saw at my gym. She was just emerging with her mom from the big glassed-in room where the childcare takes place, making her way toward the bathroom.

She had on a sweatsuit with a princess dress over it.

I beamed at her the way all grownups beam at little kids, admiring her sturdy and forthright manner; and smiling too at the thought that I go around dressed this way too some days, having dressed in a fog, earrings like chandeliers topping off an outfit you’d wear to shampoo the dog in.

But this child was so CUTE!  I went on in my mind, the way she had so clearly had wanted to wear that princess dress. It was a cold winter morning and her mother had probably said, “First we dress for the weather; then maybe we can we accessorize’” and the 'accessory' happened to be this pink tornado of spangled chiffon.

I knew what was going on here! I knew what I was seeing! Didn’t my sister and I, playing in our red corduroy overalls, often affix  our mother’s best linen tea towels to our heads to act as hair? Long, glamorous shoulder-length hair we could swing around while posing with one hand on our locks and one on our hips in the manner of Mae West? We were only five and seven but we knew all  about that bombshell of an actress. And here was this tiny girl acting  just like we had! Wasn’t she? Wasn’t she?

No, in fact, as I learned when another smiling adult passed by.

"She wouldn’t leave the house without her princess costume, eh?” said this fellow parent.

“Nah, that isn’t it,” said the tot’s mom. “Her little pal in there?” she said, indicating the glassed-in childcare room where the pal in question stood, dressed in a tiger costume. “She’s the one. Every time Amber comes in she takes her and dresses her in this get-up.”

And that showed ME! Assumption 100% wrong! Just like that baby isn't really a shark! Oy!

Now let's pause a moment and pay homage to that above-mentioned icon Mae West who made a whole career making thwarting people’s assumptions. Here she is playing the madame of a brothel, using her tough-girl purr to throw down the gauntlet before Cary Grant who, compared to her, sounds like a stiff and hopeless toff. Ah those fake-British accents the stars and starlets all used to affect! Everyone but Marilyn that is. Everyone but Mae.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L0eJp7V2Zs]

Celebrate!

Today I'm going to celebrate life, just as I did yesterday on the birthday of our first grandchild, who sure had a hard row at the first: He was so sleepy in his newborn weeks his two moms had to sometimes feed him with an eye dropper, urging the milk into his mouth in the tiniest increments.

It was the drug prescribed by the doctors that made him this way, though it wasn't very long before they  insisted the dosage be cut in half and then eliminated, at which point he woke and fattened up almost overnight, swelling like biscuits in the oven with yeasty life.

So yesterday this child turned eight and we went to his house last night for a feast of his favorite meal. His little brother was present and I guess you could say his baby sister was too though she is not yet born; she's in her cocoon still and not due to break out for another week or so. Yet she must have heard us. She must know everyone's voice by now, especially this birthday boy Eddie, and little David, and his parents. He has had a lovely childhood so far, what with playing in the snow, and digging up the yard up worse than a gopher, and setting up lemonade stands and drum sets in the driveway.

Eddie on the right with his little brother David

One time his parents came home to find that he'd talked the babysitter into letting him take the contents of an entire closet out into the driveway, improvising some sort of stage set. Even today his favorite thing seems to be organizing. Taking everything apart, then putting it together in a new way.

He has a questioning mind. Once when he was four, he spotted a crucifix on the wall of our bedroom, the bedroom of David and me, who are his maternal grandparents.

“What's THAT?” He exclaimed, examining the limp body affixed to it.

"Well," I said, "that was taken from my grandfather’s coffin just before they closed it"

 He just looked at me. That’s not what he meant. He meant, "What on earth kind of thing is THIS to make a sculpture out of?"

Eddie is a Unitarian child being brought up in that clear-eyed tradition, going Sundays to a plain white church with clear panes of glass looking out at the old New England sky.

I started trying to explain what a crucifix was, how you call a cross a crucifix if it holds the image of the dying Christ and so on but he interrupted me: “Why is he dying?" he wanted to know, and “Why were they trying to kill him?” What was I thinking, talking to a child so young of driving nails through the flesh of a person everyone said was the nicest person you could ever meet? He was four years old!

I was in over my head in less than 30 seconds but that's what happens with Eddie: he asks and you answer and the next thing you know the furniture in both of your minds has been moved around once again and you’re looking at things in a whole new light.

Anyway, now he’s eight, and the geese have come back to us a full three weeks earlier than they usually do and the Paper White Narcissus that six weeks ago was a fistful of hard round knuckles in a pot is today a glory of blossom, each stem, like this child, reaching its strong young neck up to the light.

 

Look, OFFICER!

There are certain phrases you hear a lot these days. It is what it is, there’s one, reflecting  an observation that on its face seems argument-proof. And yet it's surprising how many people find it irritating.  Why? Do they wish “the thing” were NOT what it is?  Does “It is what it is” sound too fatalistic to them? Too quick to close off the possibility that the thing might at any point become another thing, a thing perhaps far better than the thing that “is”?

So we have that loaded phrase. Then we have What are you gonna do?” probably thanks to the HBO series The Sopranos. Tony Soprano and his fellow thugs were always saying it,  especially when death came into the picture. “He pulled a gun so I stuffed him in my trunk, what are you gonna do?” What can anyone do?” it suggests, a position you’d be glad to take if you didn't want to be held accountable for anything.

Then there are the remarks that stand as greetings: “How's it goin’?” being one, and “What's goin’ on?” being another. Both questions are rhetorical, as we sense, because really the speaker’s just saying “Hi”. Or “Hey!” as they say in some quarters. Often the two come together, as in “Hey! How's it goin’?” with the “Hey” signifying an element of pleased surprise, as if the person is saying “Well now, who is THIS well-intentioned fellow-citizen walking toward me now?”

“Hey” is fond. You’d never say, “Hey! I’m getting a ticket here?” In fact, saying such a thing might well get you a second ticket.

I recently learned about the power of loaded words in a ticketing situation myself:

I was idling in my car outside a city bus station, evidently in an area you’re not supposed to idle in. I was waiting for a young person who, when he texted me to come, thought he was ten minutes away, whereas in fact he was still a good 30 miles distant.

There were lots of other cars, no signs I could see, and at the time I parked I was sure the young person would be along any minute.

Suddenly a police officer was screaming “Move!” at me and gesturing angrily. “Where else can I GO?” I said, unrolling my window, thinking there must be the equivalent of an airport cell phone lot nearby.

That was my first mistake.

“I said ‘MOVE!’” he boomed. So I said, “Look, I’m happy to move but there’s no need to be so unpleasant about it.”

And that was my second mistake.

“Stay right here,” he said in icy tones. “I'm writing you UP!” he added, storming away.

 Well, I didn’t stay and he didn’t write me up. He was busy yelling at two other drivers when  I inched away from the curb, drove north for 15 minutes, then circled back into the city when I judged my young person would actually be there.

And that night marks the moment I learned about yet another expression laden with meaning: the expression “Look,” used at the start of a sentence.

You hear it on talk radio, when the guest being interviewed gets sore at the way things are going. “Look,” the guest will say, and then go  aggressively on with his argument. Turns out the word is short for “Look, idiot.”

And I had used it on a cop.

The words and phrases we use are highly nuanced, it seems. I was born in this country and have been using its language all my life and STILL I get in trouble, as you see. Imagine the challenge for those who are new here?

It's Cryin' Time Again

Someone thanked me for helping her start the day yesterday with a jig, specifically the jig known as "All God’s Creatures Got a Place in the Choir". She didn’t say whether the Patriots’ fate in the Superbowl had anything to do with her needing a jog toward a jig. She didn’t even say she was sad. I know I was sad when I composed that post but not because of football. God doesn’t care about football I always say though I don’t say it too loudly, especially in crowds of diehard fans who’ve been pounding down the beers.

I felt sad because of a few things that began falling apart on some other fronts. I had turned the Superbowl off after seeing Madonna, that schoolgirl-thin athlete. I had watched something on Public Television during the first half of the game, and then didn’t watch the second half at all. I really can’t bear to witness situations where the winners and losers are so cruelly labelled. I have to look away from the set altogether when they announce the Oscar winner for any given category and just for that nano-second the camera still lingers on the face of the nominee whose name has just been read. I can’t stand it if the person doesn’t win I mean. I can’t bear the expression, however fleeting, where rising Disappointment gets stuffed underwater; pushed in the face back out of sight while the person struggles to muster that pleased good-sport look.( Poor humans I always think. Poor, poor humans with all their brave trying!)

That’ll be the next thing: the Oscars.

I just saw this video of a woman whining like a spoiled child because her Patriots lost. (Check it out here; you just want to send her to her room without any supper, don't you though? You hate to hear losers cry; it’s bad form as we’ve been told – well, unless you’re longtime public servant Edmund Muskie and you’re crying in the snow because the press said your wife drinks and uses crude language. (The 70s were a spiteful time in politics.)

What I love is to see winners cry. It’s funny, right? Who can forget Sally Field when she won an Oscar for Places in the Heart?!The audience claps and she just falls apart: "You like me! You really like me!” she blubbered. Poor lamb. They liked her til THEN maybe; but after that boy did they make fun of her! Here she is that night with her cute apple-red cheeks.

I'll say this: it's really tough to be in the spotlight, whatever is happening to you...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_8nAvU0T5Y]

Rounded with a Sleep

This winning and losing is such a silly measure in my mind. We all have our place. We all have our work to do and we do it as best we can.

Millions – can it have been millions? - rooting for their teams in yesterday’s big contest wore that certain sweater or sat in that certain chair, convincing themselves that they could influence their favorite team’s fortunes, even knowing how unlikely it was that their actions would have any effect. It made them happy and I hope they all had a great time watching.

I guess half of them are happy again today, with bragging rights guaranteed for the next 12 months. But I hope even the fans whose team didn’t win are happy enough as well. It’s only a sort of make-believe in the end, these contests. It's as that aging magician Prospero says near the end of Shakespeare’s last play: We really are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep

Well we'll all sleep again tonight at the end of another day’s efforts and feel ourselves part of that great big chorus Bill Staines was thinking of when he wrote his song, here sung by Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcG1JNpazN4]

Skip Church and Watch This

Here’s a nice gift for a sabbath day, whatever your religion. I went looking for it after writing yesterday’s piece about a morning by a city pond in winter. The song is called “For the Beauty of the Earth” and it was written by a man still in his 20s back in the 1860s. His name was Folliott Sandford Pierpoint but the arrangement is by our own contemporary,  the incomparable John Rutter. This first video is a church choir doing their best with it. Watch it not for the execution of the piece, earnest and workmanlike, but for the great human touches: The older lady  right near the camera fiddling with her collar. The antsy kid dragged up into the choir loft by a mom who doesn’t trust him alone in the pew. Note the man with the long straight hair parted down the middle, the woman one row down from him who feels the hymn clear down to her  feet. I love the stragglers moving in and out of the room. I love the old guy who walks so directly in front of the camera you feel you can practically tweeze his nostril hairs for him... See if it doesn’t make you smile.

Now watch the one under it, a version of the same anthem by a more professional-sounding soloist, though captured by a less-than-professional video artist who manages to show only half of her face, then not even half her face, then fails entirely to show the owner of the magnificent tenor voice coming in on Verse Two.... But what lyrics in either case! Glance at them quick, then watch both videos and see if they don’t almost make you  see us the way God sees us; the way we hope God sees us, earnest and messing up but doing our best with the tools we have to work with.

 For the beauty of the earth, For the glory of the skies, For the love which from our birth Over and around us lies, Over and around us lies. Lord of all, to Thee we raise this our joyful hymn of praise.

For the beauty of each hour Of the day and of the night, Hill and vale and tree and flow'r, Sun and Moon and stars of light, Sun and Moon and stars of light. Lord of all, to Thee we raise this our joyful hymn of praise.

For the joy of human love, Brother, sister, parent, child. Friends on earth and friends above For all gentle thoughts and mild. For all gentle thoughts and mild. Lord of all, to Thee we raise this our joyful hymn of praise...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5lh7G_eCmA&feature=related]

So human! And now this, human too, with a touch of the divine:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6CGg12QNzU&feature=related]

Happy Day of Worship to you, whatever path to the Absolute is yours...

An Hour by the Pond

Those little kids didn't even notice the cold, or the ominous way the clouds were piling at the horizon's edge in thin mounded folds like batter poured in the pan. You'd think it was balmy spring to hear the joy in their voices as they practiced on their scooters.

I was parked on this half-acre of asphalt because it abuts the pond I bring Uncle Ed to.

Some of the cars around us stood empty, as their owners took a quick walk, but many more were inhabited by people who like to look out at this small-scale landscape as serene and self-contained as a paint-by-number canvas.

"Kids and animals like any kind of weather," I was thinking, when along came a golden retriever. He trotted over to a spot directly in front of our car, throwing eager glances at his owner behind him

He seemed to have something in his mouth and sure enough, once his black-haired mistress caught up to him, he lifted his chin in a “Check this out!” way, then dramatically dropped a well-mouthed tennis ball onto the frozen ground. The obvious message: “Your move.”

She picked up the grey grey-green ball, and for the sheer teasing fun of it slowly raised it high in the air, then carried it low, moved it wide to the right, then wide to the left, like a clergyman making the Sign of the Cross.

The dog followed her motions with his head, but brought to the game a look of intelligence that took things to a level beyond the mere shadow of her Father-Son-and-Holy-Ghost routine. So subtle were his movements he looked like more the catcher in a game of baseball, silently communicating his series of Yes’s and No’s to his pitcher on the mound. “Go get it!" she shouted, finally making the toss. And the dog tore after the ball, fetching it up in his jaws just inches before taking a nail-scrabbling skitter out onto the ice.

I looked out then at the lake's still-unfrozen center portion, where a dozen brown ducks paddled, nicely color-coordinating themselves with the dark, choppy waters.

I looked at the lake's frozen margins, where a similar number of white birds played the same color-matching game as they stood on the ice, displaying their profiles and looking like dancers on the floor of a ballroom, waiting for the music to start again.

I listened to see what this music might be made of, and heard the calling of birds and the shouting of kids, the barking of the dog and one thing more: From the car parked beside me I heard the soft rhythmic sound of an oxygen tank attached by the usual tubes to the nostrils of a woman contentedly reading her book, pencil in hand.

I guess in a way these sounds were all notes, written on a musical staff made of a wind that sighed even as it sifted through the piney branches. I guess they made a kind of morning anthem that everyone present was happy to hear.

Right in the Face

Setting the microwave for the wrong time wasn’t the only dumb thing I did yesterday (and, truth in advertising, I did that particular thing to the oatmeal some months ago, and took a picture of it because I was feeling light-hearted that day.) Yesterday’s microwave mistake was burning the popcorn. That cute little bag looked more like a sackful of peppercorns by the time I got it out of its furnace. Even the neighborhood squirrels wouldn’t eat it and you know how greedy squirrels are.

I didn’t snap a picture of that disaster because I was feeling less than light-hearted yesterday, having recently sprayed myself with the equivalent of pepper spray. At close range. Smack in the eyes. (And no that isn't really a picture of me here but I just really liked it. The caption, in my book: "And I may have to give up smoking too!")

The stuff I shot myself with was a household product. I had dropped it, see, and knocked the little spray gizmo off. When I stuck it back on and it looked a little crooked, I brought it close to my face for a better look and then phssshhht! Right in the face.

I screamed. My eyes swelled instantly shut and stung like fire. I had to bathe and bathe and bathe them in water, while repeatedly reaching for fresh facecloths since the chemicals in the stuff immediately saturated the material; it was that strong. Also fiendishly oily, which I realized when I saw that I’d gotten it in my hair too. And it stank so and felt so entirely toxic I had to shampoo my whole head, right there at the sink. I couldn’t see well enough to find the shower and you know what a pain it is to get dressed just in the morning; I certainly didn’t want to do THAT twice in a day.

So I washed my hair and blew it dry, with both eyes swollen shut, still screaming and crying

It went on like that for hours and that’s why I couldn’t write yesterday: I couldn’t see. Plus the screaming really wore me out.

Early to bed anyway, once again done in by life. I slept a solid ten hours that night and last night too, so just you wait, world. Today I aim to be at the top of my game again. :-)

aaaargh my eyes!

It Was One of Those Days

Sigh ~ It was definitely one of those days...

Details at 11. :-(