Exit Only
“Because once you depart from this one-way road of life, there is just no getting back on.”
Little Miss Do-It-All
Tough getting up today, especially if you're like me and you overworked all weekend – if you can call it work bringing seven male teens to see some Shakespeare, then having supper with them before going to play laser tag until 10 at night. That was all fun, as was going to see the most amazing troupe of young actors perform an original version of The Pied Piper. It was also fun to write my 1000th post; fun to take notes in a deli for this week’s column, fun to do it all –
If only I had stopped before I began refinishing the furniture.
I notice people kind of hate you if you seem to be organized and 'productive' and have it all together. I know I've drawn some fire in the past from people for being neat and having spices that were alphabetized and all but if they get even a little closer they see: You don’t live this way because you choose to. You live this way because even after all these years you are still pursued by these nameless Hounds of Hell who make you think that it’s not enough to just BE your own little self, you also have to also DO, and serve all the time. So they will love you I suppose. So they maybe won’t leave.
I knew I had crossed the line when I saw myself pulling those two dusty and wrecked old bedsteads out of the attic and starting in on the job of refinishing them, just because one of my kids spotted them in there a few weeks ago and indicated they were maybe pretty nice beds under all those scratchmarks.
Now, on this Monday March 12th, besides working a full day and taking a 91-year-old man to the cardiologist and buying the food and cooking, I also have to finish staining two foot boards, and getting the whole mess out of the kitchen where I was working on the project - which feels like a pretty tall order to me right now.
I bet all our Monday chores feel like pretty tall orders to all of us playing the Daylight Savings game, which is everyone in the U.S. anyway especially when we woke at 6:00 or 7:00 and already felt like we were an hour behind and low on sleep besides.
Ah well. I guess today I’ll just start in again with those mantras I learned in those 12-step Al-Anon meetings, like One Day at a Time, and Easy Does It, and Don’t Just Do Something Stand There.
But gosh the old wood sure looks great. Here's the "Before" with the old finish off but no stain:
And here's the wood with just one coat:
You liberate the living tree when you strip and refinish a piece of wood. If only it were as easy to liberate yourself.
A Thousand Days
My grand-daughter is two weeks old today, and today I write my 1000th post on this silly blog, begun in the waning days of 2007 with George Bush still in the White House, the country still believing that bubble would never pop and gas still going for under $3 a gallon.
Just after midnight when I felt the clock nudge into Sunday, I knew this would be my thousandth post and I tried saying something, though my brain is mostly just jagged images and old advertising jingles at that hour. I have deleted that attempt and replace it with this.
I see more clearly at dawn which is why I rise early and do my writing then - before the phone has rung or anyone has spoken or I have had my feelings hurt in some ridiculous way. (That’s actually Francis Ford Coppola’s take; he too feels the need to write when the hour is early and the Etch-a-Sketch is freshly shaken.)
Although I'm most alert in the mornings I know others are different. This new baby, for example, keeps being found staring large-eyed into the dark, from where she rests beside her mother’s body.
“Hey, you! What are you lookin’ at?” my daughter whispers to this little Caroline, who looks back at her somberly.
They say babies don’t see well and don’t know what they're seeing anyway.
Still, she looks and looks until she is done looking, and her body goes limp around that mounding milk-filled belly and away she sinks again, back under the surface of sleep, leaving only that little mystery smile you see spread over a newborn’s face from time to time, as if the child is lost in pleasant reverie.
She is adjusting well to life on the outside though she does find the wind a little unsettling, as you can see by the veiling she seeks under her mum’s sweater.
I look at this young mother and remember every moment of our own honeymoon-time together in the early months of the waning 1970’s as Winter turned to Spring and she slowly mastered Cobra Pose, pushed at the rug with small starfish hands and raised herself up at last on her little forearms.
I study the picture above and can scarce realize that the capable handles cradling young Callie here are those same hands, seen below, that once grasped my single finger as if life itself depended on it.
On 999 other days I have come here and written something and now on this thousandth day I do that again. Like any infant I don’t much know what I have been looking at either. Ah but what joy to just look and look and then try telling about it anyway.
Darkened by the passage of time, a photo of my same firstborn in 1977, smiling at her first friend (who always smiled back)
There is No Discarding
Maybe you should come to my house, not just to see our impressive array of expired drugs but to look at this little opening in the back of one of our medicine cabinets. The idea seems to be that you ‘mailed’ your used razor blades on into that slot and there they stayed. What a neat system, right? You could feed these used blades in there one by one, year after year, and just forget them. Oh somebody might have come in contact with them way down the line but it wouldn’t be you.
As far as I can see this was the attitude in the old days when bathrooms like these were being put together.
Remember the world then? People just blithely threw their candy wrappers out their car windows.
They tossed their cigarette butts with a flick of the wrist and let them land where they would.
They certainly let their dogs trot all around the neighborhood, leaving their calling cards wherever they pleased.
(And if a dog used your yard as his toilet you didn't go talk to your neighbor to ask him to clean it up. You just went and got a dog of your own and sent him to us your neighbor's yard as his toilet.)
For sure the grass didn't benefit, any more than the stretches of sidewalk littered with butts, or the roadways swirling with discarded bits of trash.
Still, that’s how we were then. Nobody thought of the earth as a living creature, an organism much like us, struggling every day to breathe, and seek nourishment, and tend its wounds.
In the old view the planet was insentient, just a picture on the wall in your Fifth Grade classroom. Back then, the concept of Ecology lay far in the future, the idea that Earth might just be the body of God unheard of.
I love that idea: Earth as God's body. This rich soil God's face. It just sounds right doesn’t it?
Still, I have to give some credit to those people who designed my medicine cabinet. At least they tried to guard the people in their own houses from used and rusty blades in the wastebaskets. They did seem to care at least a little about what they were leaving behind.
I hope we can come to care more. Have you ever seen the countryside around Tijuana, out a bit from the city? There you find whole orchards and harvests of discarded plastic bags clinging to all the branches and caught against every fence.
This picture was taken in Los Angeles, California, part of the shiny and progressive (?) First World and look how terrible it is – and that’s even before you get to the pictures of the animals caught in that indestructible stuff.
We can do better than this with all our ingeniousness, can't we? Can't we?
Come on In! (The Water's Fine)
Speaking of home dangers as I was, if you do come here for a visit I can also send you away with skin like a pepperoni pizza.
Our hot water heater has scrofula - I think. Anyway that's the only disease-name I can think of that conjures up the right degree of hideousness.
The thing produces such large amounts of rusty silt it’s infecting the houseguests.
Not two weeks back, a young male guest tried to have a bath here and erupted in an instant rash.
“Help!" he squealed in alarm, showing me his arm. “My skin is my main asset!” he mourned. “Girls don’t date me, they date my skin." Poor guy. And I understand it’s only in the last couple of days that the little bubbles have started to shrink.
I feel terrible, of course. I guess I must be so used to the tea-colored water I didn’t even think to warn him.
"For heaven’s sake!" friends tell us, “call the plumber and get a new hot water heater !" but “Not yet” says my man.
Nope, David always wants to try ONE MORE THING, and in this case that one more thing is draining the tank yet again to see if doing so doesn't fix it this time.
Sigh.
We had our little grandsons here for a couple of days at the end of last month - it was when their baby sister was being born - and I just knew the only way I could get them in the tub at day’s end would be to ‘treat' the rust-colored 'tea’ coming out of our faucets. So, on the sly I dosed the bath water with blue food coloring.
They came in while I was doing it and – luckily – were entranced.
They leaned their little tummies over the tub’s edge and took over for me, squeezing out more and more blue from the little vials, then some nice bright green, then even a dash of purple just to see what would happen.
It’s true I sent them home to their parents inked to the elbows but hey, they were clean. I even washed their hair.
I’m thinkin’ now that maybe the next time they come for a sleepover we’ll throw in whole vials of food coloring, add a gallon of vinegar, jump on in and become our own Easter eggs. Why not, right? What's skin for if not for decorating?
This isn't my own particular grandchild but you get the idea. I call this picture FUN WITH GRANDMA. :-)
The Chance at Failure: Updike on Baseball
Tomorrow night you can catch the Red Sox for just 10 bucks as they face off against the Pirates in Fort Myers.
Book the flight now and you can get there easy.
I think of this because last night with sleep eluding me I read John Updike's last book, a collection of poems many of which he wrote from Massachusetts General Hospital where he was when he learned what would kill him; what did kill him very soon after.
If he could walk to the west-facing windows in those last weeks of 2008, he would have been able to see the ball park he wrote so memorably about the day of Ted Williams' last game.
He would have been able to see funny-shaped Fenway Park, built a hundred years ago now, when Babe Ruth played for the Red Sox.
Anyway this is Updike's poem about baseball from his final collection Endpoint, from Alfred A. Knopf. It's going to be 70 degrees out there today and the birds are just exulting.
I say let's us exult a little too, in the spirit of spring peepers and line drives and those long, long summer games in the warm and velvety nights:
Baseball
It looks easy from a distance,easy and lazy, even, until you stand up to the plateand see the fastball sailing inside, an inch from your chin,or circle in the outfield straining to get a beadon a small black dota city block or more high,a dark star that could fallon your head like a leaden meteor.
The grass, the dirt, the deadly hopsbetween your feet and overeager glove:football can be learned,and basketball finessed, butthere is no hiding from baseballthe fact that some are chosenand some are not—those whose mittsfeel too left-handed,who are scared at third baseof the pulled line drive, and at first base are scaredof the shortstop's wild throwthat stretches you out like a gutted deer.
There is nowhere to hide when the ball's spotlight swivels your way,and the chatter around you falls still,and the mothers on the sidelines,your own among them, hold their breaths,and you whiff on a terrible pitchor in the infield achievesomething with the ball soridiculous you blush for years.It's easy to do. Baseball wasinvented in America, where beneath the good cheer and sly jazz the chance of failure is everybody's right, beginning with baseball.
The Doctor is IN
You say you have a spring cold? Then come to my house because I have all the latest remedies.
Take this bottle of Tylenol: You can't see the date in this position but it says 1996. And yet my hardy perennial of a husband insists it’s probably still good. I’ve seen the man eat eggs that even the con-men who run the giant chicken farms tell you not eat after a certain date. He eats them as an example to the rest of us who have run screaming from the room. (“Aaaaargh, don’t crack them open! For God’s sake don’t crack them open!”)
He does crack them open though, and calmly cooks and eats them. He is one Waste Not Want Not kind of a guy.
But back to my point about remedies: I’ve been working on next week’s column about the art of improvising and pulled down from the shelf three cookbooks from the 1890s to see what they say about substitutions and making do. I’ll admit I have these books out all the time, and not just to see the handwriting of my young grandmother who closed her pretty blue eyes for the last time before her 32nd birthday. I take them down because the advice about housekeeping so cheers me, involving baking soda and naphtha, camphor and kerosene. (Yup kerosene! Those ladies knew how to LIGHT IT UP all right.)
Anyway they have plenty to say about sickrooms too as well as the remedies we should all know about – like this one for a head cold which says you should "take a quantity of black pepper and put it in a handkerchief; the fold the handkerchief over so that the grains cannot fall out, and saturate the whole thing with camphor; bind this plaster on the head and lie down. In a very few minutes headache will be relieved and the patient will be asleep."
I think I like it because it isn’t clear if you’re putting the peppery mess on the head of the patient or yourself.
I also like the remedy for earache that says it’s probably a bad tooth which you should pull out at once.
But I like best the remedy for a poor complexion which reads as follows: "To improve complexion:Be cheerful; get as much fresh air indoors and outdoors as possible; keep in health; and promote a good digestion and regular evacuations."
It also says, "It is good to rise early in the morning, drink a cup of milk, walk into the fields, wash the face in sparkling dew, gaze on creation below above and all around you, till mental pleasure beams forth on your face in radiant smiles. check the effects of grief, disappointments, embarrassments."
Just check them, dammit! Then stride out into the fields again. Nothing is easy, people.
And if none of that works come back here, we'll put you by the fire and blow some black pepper up your nose - then serve you some of David's eggs followed by a nice tall glass of Nyquil on the rocks.
Nice Work If You Can Get It
So I’m away from home last Friday trying to receive a delivery at the place where I’m staying. Bad combination I know, but I do learn something from it, yes indeedy.
The UPS guy does come with this package that needs signing for, only he comes so early I’m not there to sign for it. His note says he can try again Monday but it’s kind of a do-or-die thing for me; I need what he has for me NOW. So, I call the distribution center from which those boxy brown trucks go caroming all over the county. "Can I come fetch it today?" I ask, knowing that they'll be closed all weekend.
“Well tell you what,” says the jaunty soul on the other end of the line. "I’ll give you the driver’s cell phone number and you can work something out. His name is Scott.”
"Okay" I say, thinking this seems a tad odd but it’s cool, it’s cool. I take down the number and call him right up.
“Hello?” Scott answers.
“Scott, hi sorry to call your cell but the UPS lady said to. You tried to deliver a package to me this morning but I wasn’t there. I just wondered what time you might be going back to the distribution center so I can maybe pick it up.”
“Not’ til 5:30,” he says and darn it all I have to be someplace 30 miles from there at that hour.
“You’re not coming by here again?”
“Nope.”
“Not even close”?
“Nope. You can come to me though.”
“Come to you?”
“Yeah I’m grabbing a bite at that new restaurant on 125,” he says and starts in giving me directions to a pizza-and-beer joint several towns over. “You’d better hurry though. I won’t be here forever.”
A little perplexed by all this, I grab my car keys, open Google Maps on my phone and head out. Up one hill and down another I go, past tackle stores and bodies of water, alongside pastures and meadows until finally, at a little strip mall with an Italian flag out front, I spot that boxy brown truck.
And there is our Scott standing outside the driver’s side door, set to climb aboard and drive away as it looks. Oh No! Have I come all this way only to miss him AND my crucial package?
But as I get closer I can see that standing though he is, he is not standing alone.
I swing into the parking lot and that's when I see that he's in fact standing with another person, a girl who. just at that moment, he lifts clear off the ground, while smooching her in extended fashion.
I get out of my car and walk toward him.
“Scott?” I say when he comes up for air.
“Yup” he grins.
“I almost missed you!”
"Yeah but you didn’t," he says, still madly grinning, and turns and pulls my package out of his truck.
I smile. He smiles. The girl smiles.
And everyone goes home happy.
Mom! M-o-o-o-m!
Heaven knows that in their early years, your children can embarrass you, as when your three-year-old drains the cup of cranberry juice set before him in the fine restaurant, smacks his lips and exclaims, “This wine is good!” They also parrot things that make your cheeks burn: “Is Daddy a pain in the ass?” my baby niece once asked her mom in front of the visiting clergyperson.
But really the much longer-lasting stage is the one when you as a parent are embarrassing to THEM.
As an intolerant 13-year-old, I was hugely embarrassed by my mom. That time she stumbled and fell to her knees on the steep stone stairway to the Public Library, I actually kept on climbing, pretending I didn’t know her. When I was in that excruciating what-will-they-think-of me stage of life, she embarrassed me even when she wasn’t falling down: the way she talked so loud all the time! The way, when she picked me up after school, she always glared at the smokers, gracefully draped over the hoods of cars!
“What are those children doing with cigarettes?!” she would bellow, scowling over at the very people I prayed would one day befriend me. “Why aren’t they home riding their bikes?!”
Back then I thought there just couldn’t be a parent more embarrassing to her kids.
Now I feel another way, because now I too am a sorry, out-of-it grownup with my own long list of Crimes against Coolness.
Many's the time I have embarrassed my own children - and many are the lessons I have learned along the way. Let me list a few of these lessons here, in fact. Over time I have learned that:
- Thin is overrated. Sure, it’s probably healthier to be too thin than too fat but exactly no one likes you better because of it.
- That old wool sweaters are cool, as your kids will tell you. Those elaborately figured and/or sequined Golden-Girls-style numbers you’re so drawn to at the holidays? Aren’t. (Sorry.)
- Your curly hair isn’t half as weird as you thought it was so really you can stop with the flatiron, because – and let us recite this together - NO ONE IS LOOKING AT YOU, MOM.
A number of other truths come to mind now too, including:
- The truth that nobody irons, besides us old people.
- The truth that nobody under 50 wears pantyhose (about which fact I will only observe that nobody OVER 50 thinks this is anything but dumb.)
- The truth that disposable cameras are very last century and really, Dad, don’t even come to the party if you’re planning to pull out one of those silly things.
Also while we're being honest, Mom, please lose the tiny backpack. It makes you look like Pinocchio. You might as well add a little stack of books, short pants and a big floppy bow.
I include this last because I sometimes sense my grown children eyeing my own tiny backpack, which I have been wearing steadily since 1998. They are too kind to say anything though, which I greatly appreciate, since the way I see it is, “Why waste money on a million different pocketbooks when you can get away with just one?”
And maybe that’s it in a nutshell right there: The young are intent on beauty, maybe because they have so much beauty themselves. We old people though: We old people are just lookin’ for what lasts.
Occupy Winter
It’s all white here this morning.
I’m a little north of where Sunday generally finds me and what a difference.
Back home I expect the landscape is once again brown and green after that mid-week snow but up here, even just 90 miles closer to Canada, I feel as if I'm hiding inside a basket of clean sheets at age four in some long-ago game of Hide and Seek.
I look out the window at the pines, bowed down with the white stuff. It’s all cloudy outside with a sort of cold fog, like what rises from dry ice when you plunk it in the punch and the air is filled with something resembling fiberglass filaments.
Old Lady Winter, boy, you have to give her credit. She’s a great little housekeeper, zapping busy life into stillness with that icy wand.
It’s like the old game of Freeze Tag when it first happens in December. Remember Freeze Tag? When you’d run and run and when the leader shouted “Freeze!” you had to stop on a dime and turn into sculpture?
Winter does that for as long as she has her powers; freezes everything stiller than Sleeping Beauty’s castle and then covers it all with snow. You didn’t get all the leaves up last November? Not to worry. Winter casts her blanket and covers them up. That ragged woodpile? Covered. That scar in the earth where the truck veered off the road? Covered too with the merciful snow.
When you don’t want to feel your feelings, the loss, the impending loss or what have you, winter is your season.
But now Winter is ending.
Back home, what passes for our lawn, trounced as it was last fall by a two-month re-shingling project, a crocus riot is taking place. They all have their little tuba tops open and yearning sunward, even in the midst of all that dirt. Plus they escaped their bank and have begun a little Occupy movement of their own.
Here’s TO ‘em is all I can say is L'Chaim, L'Chaim To life!
More Than a Houseguest
I’m reeling with this week. It feels like so much has happened and our baby's baby is STILL only six days old.
Not that I’m hurrying over there to the newborn’s house every day.
I haven’t been to that House of New Life except one night in the middle of the week when the two parents invited the whole bunch of us. They had some beers and some of us non-beer types had a glass of wine. I didn’t see my girl-the-new-mother drinking, though they do say a little dark beer is good for the milk, rich in B vitamins as it is.
Chris, who is amazing in every respect, made roast chicken with all the fixin’s. As as of that day, Day Four of little Callie’s life, she was still the only person to have changed any diapers. The new mom herself mostly saw to other tasks, like trying to sit up, and talk in a normal voice, drink plenty of water and get short bouts of sleep when she could between those every-three-hour feedings that a new human needs whose weight is nowhere near the weight of your Sunday roast.
She yearned to sit with her two older children whose lives will never be the same though I'm not sure they know it yet.
I say this because we kept them all last weekend, right up until Monday morning when David exhorted them into their clothes and out to his car to bring them back to their own house, from which they would depart for school. (My job: that simple six-course breakfast grandmas are famous for.)
Apparently at the end of the 22-minute drive back to their own house just as they were walking in the front door, David cautioned them to keep their voices low in case mother and baby were sleeping.
“Wait the baby is HERE?" said one of them, thoroughly startled by the notion. "The baby isn’t back at the hospital?”
Ah, the dear child! But that is the thing with babies: they come and they stay for the next 20 years.
They come and then they are forever and ever with us, ever in our thoughts, long after they have climbed down from our laps, long and long after they have fled our loving arms.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Now a short clip of a small infant and the doctor demonstrating our earliest human reflexes... This one and the one I posted a few days back: they just tug at my heart somehow.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgSspS6gZ6M&feature=related]
Poor Me (Sob)
You can really get the blues when the weather is cold and your lips are chapped and every time you see a fresh photo of yourself you look more and more like Mother Theresa, shown here getting fast-tracked to sainthood in this great cartoon by John Spooner.The Mother Theresa part is fine actually.The Mother Theresa part I’m getting used to.I just have that kind of face.It’s the kind Zelda Fitzgerald had where her face was so full and rosy in youth and then just skinnied on down when her 20s were behind her.See?
It happened to Rose Kennedy too.It’s an Irish thing maybe.I had this little button nose in my youth. They called me 'Dish Face' my nose was so small in relation to that giant lightbulb of a forehead and sizeable chin.Now scarily, my nose is growing, and one day I will look like this. This is a relative of ours whose picture I found after my mom died, her name somehow lost to history though she sure does resemble all the old people on my grandma Maloney’s side.
So there’s all that. And then there’s the fact that I feel like I’ve never BEEN anywhere much. People are always going to Aruba and the Bahamas and all but have I ever been to either of those places even once? Nope.My best friend just got back from Alaska and a month before that she was in Antarctica paddling a kayak. PADDLING A KAYAK!And what do Old Dave and I do by contrast? We read our books. We bicker about who left the bathroom light on this time. We fall asleep early.Maybe we don’t have enough Serotonin and should medicate ourselves like the other 80% of Americans.Maybe we just lack the travel gene.Well, enough whining. We are going to Florida for a gasket convention for three days later this month and I should be happy about that.I am pretty happy about that actually because I lied about that being the picture of some anonymous crone above. That’s really me and as you can see I’m kinda developing a little mustache. I figure three days in the Florida sun will lighten that up to where it’ll hardly show at all. :-)
Who Wouldn't?
This is what’s called the 'Moro' or ‘Startle’ Reflex. I took it off YouTube.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_bAQDOOgq0]
It’s something babies do where they suddenly shoot their arms out into the air. The new baby in our family kept having it last night when we were all together.
When I used to watch it happen with my babies, I assumed it was because they suddenly felt like they were falling.
That’s how it looks exactly: like they wake up from their dream and think "Oh GOD what's this new medium all around me? What happened to that that nice firm waterpack I’m used to?' but no. Evidently any new baby will have this Startle Reflex that seems to last for three or months.
All I can say is, in a world where there are blizzards in October and tornadoes in full winter; where the price of gas is higher than the Bride of Frankenstein’s forehead and the ice caps are melting and people in charge are getting so cavalier they’re letting their cruise ships keel clean over How are we not ALL startling ALL the time?
Yet we don’t. Yet our babies grow calm in the face of it all, like this baby, old enough now so that she has grown accustomed to the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgmjVeqHIU&feature=endscreen&NR=1]
But do you ever get used to them really? Maybe that’s what big brothers and big sisters are in a way: shock absorbers offering just that extra needed bit of insulation.
Just a Day
The sun came up and shone all day.
A robin sat on a bald bush and peered through the screen of our kitchen door.
Then a workman came and fiddled with that old curved window in the attic.
He really knows what he's doing and what a great pleasure that is to see in someone.
He‘ll be back in a month when the new panes of glass have been fashioned -' the storm windows too.
It's cold in this old lady of a house. I hope fixing these windows helps.
Today I also thought about that son of mine quoted here the other day as a little boy. He starts a new job next week. I thought how thin he is, like his great-grandfather Chauncey Payne and his uncle Toby. We named him not for that man but for a different great grandfather who was smallish but handsome too, ah handsome. Twice widowed, he never stopped serving as eye candy to the good women who watched him live his upright life.
I thought about Michael's sister Annie in her new place 40 minutes west of here.
I thought about Annie and Michael's sister Carrie and her Chris, the two new mothers of yesterday’s post.
When I think of their baby I feel that old tingling in my shirtfront, hard as that may be to believe. "Sarah laughed" remember? Then along came Isaac. Miracles abound.
When I think of this earnestly scowling new soul I think too of her two older brothers who stayed with us all weekend.
Before dawn on their last morning here, the little one came thundering across the bare floor of the upstairs hall and burrowed under the covers with us. Ten minutes later the other one appeared. It was still dark and nobody spoke. We lay quiet for 30 whole minutes.
Only David their grandfather kept his eyes closed. We three others looked out at the window and around the room. We stretched and shifted and pummeled our pillows and nestled back down in them. The younger one, still only four, raised his hands to the ceiling and waved them around in a pattern. The big one, eight, hung his feet over the edge of the bed and sighed. We maintained the silence as if by one accord.
Maybe we were thinking how our lives had changed as they surely have, and in a twinkling too: Old Dave and I now have a granddaughter who, I imagine, will understand us without our ever having to offer a word of explanation. These two little boys now have a sister who I bet will help them understand themselves, in both good times and bad.
What a miracle it is when new people come into your life. When the new people are babies because you just know you’re going to love them. But the real miracle comes when the news people are not babies at all or even relatives but just people you know you'll be walking with for at least this next stretch of the road. You don’t KNOW you’re going to love them but you end up loving them, for their sheer flawed familiarity as fellow human beings.
I think loving is the default human stance, I really do. Love your enemies said that guy Jesus, which I take to mean Pay attention to them long enough so that Compassion flows in where Judgment once was.
This was my day yesterday and these the thoughts that came to me in it.
Women of Steel
When I had my first baby, I acted like the walking wounded. Whined. Limped around the house in my bathrobe for weeks. Had the devil's own time getting into that heavy cotton nursing bra.
I remember drinking gallons of water to stock the dairy case, so to speak, and when I spiked a fever and got a lump in one breast I called the doctor in a cold panic thinking, Breast cancer! An episiotomy and now breast cancer!
He took my panicked call and agreed to see me.
“Uh, that’s milk,” he said on examining me.
“That’s just a blocked duct,” he went on and patted my hand. “Put the baby to the breast more often and you’ll be cured in a matter of hours.”
And so I did and so I was, but I was still a wreck for at least the next 12 weeks – right up until the time the baby pushed herself up on her elbows and started smiling like mad at her pint-sized Raggedy Ann doll.
Well this is that smiling baby above. She had a baby two days ago and talk about a contrast.
Let’s just say that I don't expect much limping and whining.
She did most of the labor at home. When I came by the house, she was calmly reading in the tub while timing her contractions.
She and Chris got to the hospital somewhere after 9pm and the baby came shortly after midnight. When we saw her there 9 hours later she looked as fresh as a bouquet of apple blossoms in her tank-top and skirt, with nice shiny hair and lovely pink cheeks.
In short there couldn’t have been a greater contrast to my experience, I don't know why. Maybe it’s because she played sports in high school whereas when I was in high school there were no sports - unless you called cheering for the boys a sport.
Girls today are tougher than we were, what can I say? They can look sweet and pliant but underneath? Pure steel. You think it's easy bringing one of these into the world? This is the new little Marotta-Campo baby, to be called Callie, short for Caroline.
I hope she goes easy on these two big brothers of hers (and they think playing games on their grandparents' i-Phones is a challenge!)
Kids, huh?
Let’s not sell the young short. There’s a lot you can learn from them, whether they’re little OR big.
It was from the young that I learned how easy it is to push a keychain with its small silver beads far back enough in your nose that you can then reach toward the back of your throat and - Presto! - pull it out of your mouth. Sure, it takes some convulsive gulping but it can be done.
You can also press “Play” on your iPod, insert the two ‘ear buds’ of your headset into your nostrils and say “Ah” and yup, there’s another pharynx trick: the music rolls right out over your tongue.
Some of these things I have learned from my own kids, some from the ever-renewing crop of teenagers I work with in my volunteer time.
My own kids are grown now and gone from the nest, I should explain, but I have a really good memory. And between what I remember learning from them and what I remember learning from these many other young people, I have a whole headful of lessons.
For example, from the VERY young I have learned that as a specimen anyway, I am vastly interesting.
Not as an individual, mind you, but as a specimen.
And as any little child can demonstrate, you are interesting too.
Just think what they do when you hold them: They look in your ears. They tug on your hair to see if it’s stuck down. They put their fingers in your mouth, perhaps asking themselves if a career in the oral health field holds any appeal for them.
Because he was our last and had two older sisters and four or five honorary siblings, our youngest child, pictured here, grew up with a blizzard of talk around him.
This meant that from toddlerhood on, he gave voice to his every thought.
“I love your nice fat arms!” he said to me once, squeezing the place where my biceps would have been if I’d had any biceps.
Another time he returned to our towel at the beach, looked down at what I had vainly imagined were my attractive Coppertone-slicked legs and said, “Your thighs look like hot dogs.”
Learning to befriend my extra flesh was his gift to me.
.Reminding you of your place in the universe is another such gift.
Fret aloud about your appearance and one of them is sure to look at you with pity.
“Mum, it’s fine” he or she will say. “Nobody’s going to be looking at you!” And yet they speak the words so kindly, even lovingly - often with little pats to your arm.
Really what they are saying is that you don’t have to be ‘cool’ or ‘hip’ and only think what effort this knowledge will spare you in the end!
I am happy to know that if I ever trot out my old platform shoes, or my college bell-bottoms, or God forbid, that halter top fashioned from two scarves, they will gently distract me and hide all three items.
One day last summer when we were all together as a family, I pointed to the skin on my arms, now crisscrossed with tiny fine wrinkles.
“Look!” I said turning to one of my girls. “My arms are starting to look like Grandma’s arms!”
“I know,” she said with the most loving smile. “Isn’t it great?”
I got her meaning right away because it is great. Of course it’s great.
Because only the lucky grow old. And the really lucky get to know a few young ones, whose high spirits can gladden any heart.
Break a Leg Billy!
Billy Crystal’s big night is tonight. I love him; I root for him, even though he now looks a little like North Korea’s newly deceased dictator. Even though to many viewers’ minds it will be as if someone dug up Teddy Roosevelt and asked him to host the Oscars.
It’s not that way for me. And old Teddy Roosevelt could never do what Billy can do, however jovial he might have been with those great big chompers.
Just look at this tape from the early 80's. It's so funny with his bit about his high school full of meek Jewish kids facing off against the giants from Erasmus High.. And the part where he talks about puberty hitting. Billy sure had it ~ and my money says he still does.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPn7-dK7cs0]
Zootime
Never mind the robins acting like nuns in my last post, the seagulls act like fussy little school principals - or maybe like my Latin teacher when I was in Eighth Grade.He was a plump little man with a named that rhymed with Chardonnay. He giggled at inappropriate moments and rolled his hands one over the other, like Mr. Burns on the Simpsons.He gave me three demerits for incessant talking and when my fearsome older-mother-of-a-mom hove into sight like the Queen Mary, he giggled some more, did a rapid nervous blink and in a doomed effort to ingratiate himself, blurted out the confession that as someone whose family came from Montreal, he got his Latin and his French mixed up all the time. (That did it for Mom. You might as well have told her you didn’t know the difference between Ireland and Northern Ireland.)She gave him a devil of a time about the Latin but the demerits were left to stand, right there on my Permanent Record, as they used to always tell us our crimes would do.I only bring all this up so I can speak about seagulls, who as you know often appear many miles in from the briny deep. The seagulls I watched a few hours ago reminded me so much of Mr. Chardonnay the way they skittered and plunked skittered and plunked. They really did look like fussy little pedagogues.I love the way can take off at a trot, the way those drinking straw legs propel their plump bodies, bip-bip-bip-bip across the ice. Bip-bip-bip-bip they go again; then stop on a dime, all turn and face left like Civil War Generals posing for a studio portrait. Then, ten minutes later they all turn right.There’s always that one you see on the shore standing on one leg like Ahab on the deck of The Pequo . Ahab only had one leg, remember, the other having been chomped by the white whale Moby Dick.
I saw that seagull yesterday too, standing on one with the other tucked up against his body. He was squinting into the wind trying to look like a Civil War general himself, just hoping someone would take his picture. I'm a nice person. I took it:
I bet he wanted to look fierce, like when Snoopy tries to look like a vulture to scare little Linus here.
"Be afraid! Be very afraid!" he is saying - Unless I'm completely wrong and really he's pretending he’s a flamingo and would like nothing more than to trade this tan-bland landscape in for something more gorgeously hued, preferably with palm trees and a turquoise pond, where he could stand around striking poses and looking like a lady's drink in a cocktail lounge in Key West. (They call that projection ha ha. That’s where I wish I was, my one long leg in fish-net hose.) Remember Simon and Garfunkel's The Zoo? We humans try to anthropomorphize the animals, as the images in this clip show. It’s so sweet and sad! It says everything about Poor Lonely Us and very little about Majestic Self Sufficient Them.Because the animals, God bless 'em, just go on being animals.
