Surprise!

I don't 'get' most teasing so I’m not much on April Fool’s Day jokes. Even surprises are hard for me.

We almost killed my mother with a surprise party on her 70^th birthday. This was back in the day when I had this crazy legendary energy, so I hatched the plot:

What we did, Old Dave and I, was to have my mother and Aunt Grace over for dinner at 6:00 at our little apartment, kiss them goodbye at 8:00, then sneak out the back door and race to our car on a nearby side street so that while they were still buckling themselves into their seatbelts, we were zipping up I-93.

Thus there we were among the crowd at their house 20 miles to the north when they walked in.

Mom saw David and me first. She knew she had just left us in Somerville and now here we were... in Lowell?

Then her gaze fell on the many nieces and nephews, my big sister Nan and her husband, all 30 of us gathered in the living room.

“Am I dead?” she yelled. She was always a great one for humor. Then, ten years later, she did die at her birthday party, a small plate of desserts on one knee.

But ah Cal, as everyone called you, how much like you I wanted to be, funny all the time and making light.

I got the chance to be funny yesterday at the awesome Book Festival at the Maynard Public Library about which I will say more tomorrow and Tuesday too. For now, four hours late with this post, I’m jumping into my pantyhose to hit church with two of my favorite 15-year-olds.

Happy April Fool’s Day y’all! Happy Palm Sunday! Happy Week With Passover at Its End! Stroll on into Jerusalem as if you will live forever, unafraid of anything the future might hold!

Where Did Spring Go?

The weather is having mood swings again:  The trees all flowered in last week’s heat and now aren't they sorry, some of them!  Like our magnolia that usually doesn’t flower 'til mid-April.

Its blossoms emerged around the twenty-second day of March and five days later temperatures plummeted to a frigid 20°. Now they look like so many antique ladies’ gloves, limp and sepia-colored.

The apple and cherry tress came out too and that doesn’t happen around here until May.

Oddly enough they went right on looking gorgeous, freeze or no freeze, with their little branches all sewn with living popcorn.

Some of the daffodils fell on their swords but not all.

Last night when my head hit the pillow I felt like flopping over dead myself. It’s how you feel on a Friday night.

Now it’s new day and almost a new month.

(Yay!)

Meantime, could you ever watch this flower-dying footage without a stab to the heart? It’s about one minute into the opening sequence of Alan Ball’s award-winning HBO series Six Feet Under.

Crazy idea that things die and stay dead, when even those poor limp magnolia blossoms know they’ll all be back next year!

(Right? Right?)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYAe0qwg9Yw]

The Fabulous Decomposing Ball

Turns out the less you talk the more the other guy will talk. What else are shrinks doing? How else did people find themselves telling Jesus about every last sad thing that was pressing upon them? They did it because someone was listening to them.Tomorrow I'll drive through what looks to be a chilly spring rain to “listen” to the 25 people who have signed for my journaling workshop.Not that I’m some big expert on journaling. Really all I know is that if you tell a story, the person listening will tell a story back. My one aim tomorrow is to help the people who come realize that the things they see and a hear in their daily lives make stories every bit as interesting as the ones some of us get paid for telling.Here's a little story now:I was with my youngest in the supermarket; he was maybe 11. He asked me for two quarters to drop into one of those little vending machines there by the door. He trotted over and the next minute was fishing out a small plastic sort of a ‘jigsaw’ ball which looked like you were supposed to take apart and put back together again.We knew right away that the people who made it were new to English not just because of what the toy was named - the fabulous decomposing ball - but because of the advice on how to use it printed on a wee piece of paper, which I quote verbatim. It said,

1. Hold in Hand
2. Drop to Floor
3. Have Fun Decomposing.

This  little haiku had four or five perfect strangers  laughing along with us there by the cash register, and for sure that was something I didn’t expect to see happen when I set out that day to follow my same old path to my same old supermarket.That’s the point though: that’s just the way most laughter comes, unannounced and as a gift, and as often one given to us by some stranger.If I told that story Saturday I bet a dozen people would come up with stories on the same theme that were funnier still. It’s just how things work with human beings.The workshop is a brown-bag lunch affair so if you do come, come with a sandwich and a drink.We’ll have fun, I promise.I’ll bring extra pens and notebooks for people who don't think to bring them. Oh and call the library first so they can set up more chairs. The number ,if you live in New England and can maybe get there, is 978-897-1010.Richard Russo is speaking! And Andre Dubus III! Roland Merullo, Jane Brox and Margaret Livesey. What a day it will be!   

Stairway to Heaven

Funny that I was just writing yesterday about my teaching days when all of a sudden someone put this up on my Facebook page. It’s from the year I ran the prom and these are the students on the Prom Committee.

I can almost name every one of them.

That’s Nancy Camelo standing over to the right, that much I’m sure of.

She was a good friend to a girl named Barbra who called her "Poco" because she often wore her hair in braids, which is how we all pictured Pocahontas back then.

Barbra herself would not have been in this picture. She didn’t actually GO to the high school that year but came around a lot with her guitar anyway and sat in the back of the class, adding greatly to the discussion. (I was an English teacher so there was always plenty of discussion.)

You’d never get away with that kind of thing today, having a student who didn’t actually go to the school coming to class anyway but that was the 70s for you. I was invited to teach four electives and write the curriculum myself.

 Though she didn’t go to the high school Barbra did go to the prom – in a tux - and back in the 70s doing a thing like that was pretty much unheard of.

I remember on the big night when the headmaster called me over, pointed to her and said, “What is THAT one?” I had no idea what he meant.

 "She’s a human female" I said, probably rather jarringly. He said he knew that.

Anyone could see that, though she was a bit of a tomboy. She always reminded me of how Scout Finch would look at 17.

 I wonder now if I should have said, “THAT one? That's a young human being."

But I was more timid then and very young myself and did not understand quite yet that men ran the world and intended to keep running it for some time to come. I guess that didn’t happen now did it?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Here are some generic prom kids from the era now. And underneath them that endless song that gave that prom its name.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9TGj2jrJk8]

Gonna Be Fun!

Yesterday, after I voted in the town election and had my annual doctor's visit, I went to hang copies of this poster in surrounding towns. It's for the workshop I’m giving on Saturday at the Maynard (MA) Public Library where, being an expertly unstoppable blabbermouth, I will teach a small group of interested people how to journal – or rather show them that they already know how.

For sure I believe in the practice.  Dark times in my life, journaling is all that got me through I sometimes think. I would drive in my car to someplace quiet, some anonymous outdoor space and just scribble my every thought down on paper. Scribble it down, tear it up. Scribble it down, tear it up.  It worked too. It helped me fish around in every last corner of that messy attic that is the human mind.

And that was just when times were tough and my mind was a toss of conflicting emotions. When times are good inside your head and the livin' is easy, well who wouldn't want to write stuff down then?

I have a whole 90-minutes for this workshop during which the audience and I will remember back over our lives, using little starter phrases to get us going. I got a million of those all right. And if you’re not shy about telling your own funny-slash-embarrassing stories you find that your audience isn't shy either and pretty soon everyone is laughing and slapping their knees, their own if not each other's and sometimes that too.

I used to be so shy I couldn’t call up the theater to find out what time the movie started but I am not shy now because at the tender age of 21 I got a job where I was thoroughly exposed, right down to my footgear and fingernails. ("Gardening over the weekend, eh Miz Marotta?" No, staining wooden furniture actually.) Or "Miz Marotta! Time for some new shoes!"

You only get remarks like this in the job if you stand between the front rows, among your ‘customers’, so to speak, which is what you have to do if you want them to pay attention and live in healthy fear of getting called on.

You know what that job is now, right? Here are two super-blurry picture of me doing that job many a long moon ago, and along with it some of my 'customers' from Sixth Period.

Best job I ever had, I still say. Guess what that job was and I’ll give you a free book on Saturday when a bunch of us will look back together :-) (Oh! and the library says "If it's not convenient for you to register in person, send an email to fmplibrary@gmail.com, include "workshop" in the subject line. and specify which class you're interested in.")

 

Melt Down the Soap & Wash in Kerosene

I'm back to the real world now with a day of work-work-work ahead. Gonna have to improvise for supper. 'Course back in the old days people really knew how to improvise, as I'm  reminded every time I reach for this 19th-century home management manual that I keep in my kitchen.

Oh sure there were a few things you had to go out and buy before you could begin improvising - the kitchen of the 1890s, for example, was going to need, among other things, “one stove, one coal shovel, one meat cleaver, one clock, one kitchen table and two kitchen chairs' - but then you could just go town mixing and matching to make do with what you had.

I do that myself now, thanks to this book. Say I’m out of butter and it’s time to make the doughnuts?  I now know I can just scare up some chicken fat, melt it down and add salt. It says so right in this old book that someone gave my grandmother as a young bride at the turn of the last century.

Say I have no chicken fat? I can just use suet. And if you don’t know what suet is, it’s what your thighs appear to be made of when you’re trying on bathing suits in the department store dressing room.

Or say I cut myself with my meat cleaver. With this dandy book by my side I now know all I have to  do is take a handful of flour and some cobwebs, apply that mix to the wound and - presto! - the bleeding will stop.

(And no, I’m not making any of this up.) I am at the book constantly. It inspires me to make do with what I have.

Last month I wanted pink Peppermint Stick ice cream to serve to some dinner guests, but out of respect for people’s diets I wanted the kind made with Splenda. As luck would have it I couldn’t find this kind of Peppermint Stick ice cream anywhere. So I just squeezed a few drops of red food coloring and a few drops of peppermint extract into some sugar-free Vanilla and there I had it, a lo-calorie dessert as pretty and pink as a Barbie prom dress.

And sure, maybe I did use a tad too much of the peppermint extract, whose label says that it’s 89% alcohol, but those dinner guests practically tipped up their sherbet glasses and licked 'em clean. And really what does a cook from any era want but a tableful of eaters as eager as that?

You should totally come over. Dinner’s at 6:00.

At The Flea Market

At the flea market there's something for everyone:

Hearty snacks,

And specimens from nature (?)

Fine collectibles...

And beautiful people... 

Especially this beautiful person, our darling god-daughter Grace.

Seeing her in that setting put me in mind of that great Nanci Griffith's song where 'Rita was sixteen years, hazel eyes and chestnut hair,  she made the Woolworth counter shine' - because this Grace of ours doesn't make the fake bear-head and the computer mouse from 1995 and the Starsky and Hutch picture look bad; rather she endows them with some of her glow, just like the song says. :-)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GK462XnRjQ]

Turn it Down Yo

Alec Baldwin says they’re ruining music, they play it so loud and so ubiquitously. Anyway, that was his Tweet from yesterday, minus that last word. You have to be so succinct when you tweet he probably didn’t dare go for a word so thick with u’s and q’s, never mind that ‘ly’ suffix that makes it an adverb.He’s right of course about the music that’s playing everywhere. Bad enough you have to sit next to people on the bus the syncopation of whose music is so loud even coming through theirs skull that it comes through your skull too and makes it think it’s at some dance club, poor skull, alas poor Yorick I knew him well.Also: the last thing I want to hear when I sit down at the dining section of, say, my local Whole Foods is some warmed-over music from the 60's.Music from the 70's I could stand. Who can get sick of Bohemian Rhapsody with its low growls and high falsettos? But Downtown? They’re truly playing Downtown by Petula Clark on the loudspeaker?The day I heard that I felt like picking up my whole lentil-and-sprout salad and heaving it against the wall -  which in a Whole Foods would be like taking a Jesus statue and putting one of those hats with the straws and the beer cans attached on its head.Since that day I've never again tried to eat there. I’d rather start the day equipped with my own food, wolf it down in my car come lunchtime, then walk into any old joint, even a McDonald’s where you can get some Newman’s Own coffee and that apple-walnut-yogurt cup and listen to the old guys all joshing with each other, happy as clams to be out of the house and away from their wives for a while.Yeah give me that anytime: the patter of old guys, or teens skipping school, or young parents begging their kids to stop making a choo-choo train of their french-fries on the germy tabletop.What can I say? Call me a curmudgeon, a Scrooge, an Andy Rooney, but to me music is really personal. If I'm not at a concert where we’ve all paid actual money to hear this one particular show I say keep it away from me.Unless of course it's Queen making the music and the song is Bohemian Rhapsody. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9rUzIMcZQ&ob=av3e]

Bikini Bottoms and More

 Thoughts you have when you’re NOT running at 100 miles an hour:

1. Young women still love those super-high heels with the straps.
2. Also camisoles.
3. Bikini bottoms are just these little triangles, like the little flags kids used to have on the tails of their kites.
4. A white guy in dreadlocks I don’t know. And here’s his kid in dreadlocks too. Will the kid get beat up? Mocked? Have his hair yanked by big mean boys? You worry.
5. Hotel pools that let you eat and drink right by the water are awesome.
6. The happiest-looking people around such pools are the ones who’ve sneaked away from the conference for an hour.
7. You can tell them by their suit jackets, thrown over the back of their chairs.
8. Salespeople are always pitching, they can’t help, it and male salespeople especially. By a hotel pool with surrounded by young women in small triangles of fabric what would you expect?
9. The strawberry piňa colada is a beautiful thing.
10. 
11. A shrimp salad would be beautiful too if only you could figure out how to eat it from a lying down position.
12. The state of Florida: what a great invention, now truly - and why not let your whole family have dreadlocks, right down to the family dog if that's what you want.

 

A Casket Convention?

I'm down in Orlando right now, investigating O-rings.

All my friends laughed when I said I was going to a gasket convention. "A casket convention?" they all said.

People really hear what they want to hear. And we all have had many a good laugh about it too.

Only guess what? I just learned last night that there ARE in fact gaskets IN caskets!

So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

And for those of you who don’t know what gaskets are, they're O-Rings.

And O-rings, folks, are just plain everywhere....

Even on palm trees.

See?

We're All Here at the Deli

It's lunch-time at the deli and the sidewalks have sent in just about every variety in the vast chocolate-box of humanity.

Here comes a young woman in a peach dress who swishes past, sighing impatiently and rummaging in a purse the size of a cigarette pack. At a neighboring table, another young woman yawns and stands. She wears the briefest of tops, a sort of cross between a slingshot and a training bra. As she stands, she stretches, revealing every fern-frond rib in her delicate midriff.

Here, a young man about 20 sits, in a sweat-soaked T-shirt, hands and arms sooty as a chimney-sweep’s. He has an alert and hungry look in his eyes, which keep losing focus as he wolfs his sandwich in six quick and enormous bites.

Two pyramids of apples balance on the counter, encircled by a kind of pop-bead necklace made of oranges. Brightly-colored as a box of brand-new crayons, they twinkle in the sunlight pouring through the cafe’s plate-glass window.

An old man in big roomy shorts toils toward the counter with a walking stick, his calves gone bald with decades of friction from his trousers.

 A young man behind him stands in hairy calves and the standard chin-fringe, one hip jutting like Michelangelo's David.

 Here now is an older lady with a facelift so tight it must have straightened her hair.  Here beside her, a friend with a gently-curving back. Three hundred years after Bach’s death, jazzed-up techno versions of his compositions plunk clinking electronic notes down around them like tiddlywinks.

Two male teens approach in tattered denim, with flannel lumberjack shirts tied around their loins. Engirdled thus, they look like Elizabeth the First and a royal companion, taking their voluminous skirts out for a morning stroll.

Now a woman maybe 50 with huge brown eyes sits down beside me. More than half of her long chestnut bob is now given over to graying roots. She wears backless orange pumps and talks rapidly to herself in a high tiny voice.

Chattering away to herself, she fans the pages of a fat paperback. “Alice in Wonderland” the cover announces in bright Disney colors. But I am close enough to see that it’s really a tattered version of the Bible.

 A nurse jangles keys as numerous as those to Heaven’s many mansions. She wears the standard garb of her profession, and, in the delicate wing of one nostril, a small and flashing diamond. In leisurely fashion she makes her way out, her sandwich in its brown-paper bag tucked under one arm.

 Come winter, when we open doors to go out, we duck our heads in dread and make a quick dash into the cold; but on summer days like this one I am remembering we almost swim as we exit, and with the wiggle of a tail-fin, join the warm surging tide on the sidewalk.

Now, abruptly, the woman with the white roots stands, cries in her tiny doll’s voice, “Isn’t it rather foggy in here?!” and makes for the door.

God bless her, I think watching her go.  And God bless a world that gives us the seasons, and crayon-bright tumbles of fruit. God bless the young, and the no-longer-young, and those living in single rooms.

When the time comes for me to leave this place, foggy as it surely is, let me not duck my head and jump, fearing cold. Let this easy summer day be my guide. Let me open that door and sense warmth beyond it, and lightly join the others.

Kenny Powers Sheesh

Ever wonder how you’ll come back in your next life? I sometimes think that I, this over-wrought ever-apologizing caricature of delicate feelings and political correctness, might come back as Kenny Friggin’ Powers from Eastbound and Down.

"How do you find this so funny?" my husband asks as he sees me laughing at this HBO series, "you who have always hated the very idea of crude language?”

I have always hated the idea of crude language.... mostly. I really hate movies with bodily function jokes and I also hate the idea of me using crude language, so I don’t. Once, at age 19, back from college for the summer and hanging my things up in my bedroom closet, I let a double handful of wire coat hangers rattle to the floor in a wild tangle and said ‘sh__.” My mother zipped around the corner, materializing out of nowhere, to stand ashen-face before me. “Is this the kind of language my hard-earned dollars are going for?" she hissed. "To teach you language like THIS?”

That cured me for decades.

The real truth is I never could quite carry off the swearing thing. All I’ve really picked up over the years is the correct use of the word, “yo” (at the end of the sentence, for emphasis.) You also seem to use “dude” that way, as when you want to point out to someone that they’re being a baby, as in “Dude it’s a five paragraph compare-and-contrast piece. Just write it!” (I spend a lot of time helping high school kids with their homework in case that isn’t obvious.)

I hope you can view this YouTube video on your device, so you can see what I’m getting at here. This is a kind of dream sequence from Eastbound and Down with main character Kenny Powers who refers to himself in the third person with a form of the ‘f word’ for a middle name. Besides being the only clip I could find without swearing in it, it’s also a perfect illustration of one of the key elements of comedy, which is juxtaposition. Here’s this rough, egocentric former ball player now cut from the roster and trying to make a life back in his hometown as a sort of teacher’s aide at the middle school. What’s funny is the contrast between his adult cynicism and the sweetness of these pint-sized children.

This might even be the very first episode of the first season of the show which is now halfway through its third and very last season. Actor Danny McBride has done some very good straight roles too, as when he played the temporarily reluctant bridegroom with George Clooney in Up in the Air.

I guess all I’m saying is we won’t have Kenny Friggin Powers around much longer. Take off the white gloves, set down that teacup for a bit and see what you think. For the the R-rated more accurate version you can just go right to YouTube and click on almost any other scene.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN5EnOPhnWI]

It All Comes Too Fast

I know, I know: Too much hand-wringing and too much angst here lately. Should I have tipped him? This guy, that guy, the other guy?

Probably yes to all.

I tip all the time now, and have been tipping since my honorary kid from New York City came into my life. I wince at the memory of all those times 'before' when flowers were delivered me and I didn't know enough to reach into my pocket for the dollar.

But "shoulda coulda woulda" huh? These days everyone uses that phrase, right before they say, “Don’t worry about it, What’s done is done, You did what you did" etc. It’s as though we no longer wish ever to look back and question our deeds or our motives. Kind of American of us if you’ll pardon my saying so.

Maybe we’re this way because we’ve been conditioned by years of listening to the newscasters, with their “And now this!”  “And now this!” Neil Postman called it the 'the amputated presence tense of television'. There IS no past, and there’s very little future  - unless they're trying to scare us to death with stories like “Is YOUR refrigerator emitting deadly fumes? Details at 11" - in which case there is a future involving doom.

Mostly on TV it’s just that big wide sky of a Present Tense where this and this arrives like “incoming” in a war.

Sometimes you feel like Lucy on the assembly line, struggling every minute of the day to keep up with what’s coming at you.

And here's that comic genius now, and above Laverne & Shirley, Lucy and Ethel's heirs in a way, who were wised up enough to at least occasionally daydream at work. (And there's one big fat generational division right there!)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnbNcQlzV-4]

Missing the Social Cues

Last week, in the parking lot of a supermarket I sometimes patronize, I encountered the effusively friendly employee whose job it is to bring in the carriages once people have loaded their bags into their vehicles.  I wrote about it here.

My problem is that some 24 hours after I had reported on the exchange - after everyone who read the post had had a nice warm bath in the sweetness of it, more details about our meeting began coming back to me. It hit me then that I actually read him all wrong and denied him the kindness he was obviously hoping for, all because I appear to have blocked out two small parts of our meeting even as they were happening.

See, this store has a big No Tipping sign up by the cash registers so it didn’t occur to me that maybe the man was wildly effusive in his warmth toward me because he was hoping for a tip despite the rules. It didn’t occur to me because he had said so many over-the-top sweet things, calling out “Ah my friend!” in his melodious East Asian accent when he first saw me leaving the store, then going on to shake my hand, to make small talk about my purchases, and to repeatedly exclaim “You are my good friend!” in a sort of joyous yodel, He even sort of blessed me as we parted with a “See you next time!” (Or as he said it in his new-to-the-language way “Next time I see you!”)

But then the next day the two additional details of our interaction came back to me:

The first was the fact that when I entered the store and smiled at him in his place by the door, he did not smile back but only nodded in somber fashion. His smile did not appear until he saw me leaving the store 30 minutes later and hurried over to push my cart and unleash his stream of friendly chatter.

The second was the fact that he uttered this one odd sentence when he finished loading my bags into my car: After smiling some more and shaking my hand again, after once again saying, "You are my good friend!" and explaining that if I needed help in my house, or any place at all, for cleaning, for anything, I should call him - he then nodded toward my battered little minivan and said, “You have car. I have no car.”

Had he in fact been out-and-out asking for money and for work, and if so, how could I have failed to see this?

Did I wrong him or did he faintly wrong me? It’s hard to imagine that the latter could be true when I was the one with the car, and a command of the language, and money to spend at this upscale supermarket. Whatever insight anyone out there has I sure would love to hear it!

Pierced His Skull

Last night I was so tired I fell asleep sitting up, still clutching two feet of virgin dental floss. It’s not as bad as the time I fell asleep in that hotel dining room and split my jaw open on the edge of the table but it gives you the idea. I never did get to the flossing part of my oral hygiene regimen – AND I dreamed terrible dreams all night.

First, in the hours from midnight to 4am, the dream was about my being stalked by a murderous thug who wanted to kill me. I would wake and return to sleep and the dream would continue – until I finally killed him by heaving a chair above my head and, with my Supergirl powers, planting one leg of it, hard, into his left eye and on down through to the floor. You’d think it would at least be a garroting what with the two feet of dental floss and all.

Then the dream from 4am to 6am was about a real friend in my real life who died at 35, but in the dream he didn’t know he had died and was still among us these many years later, aged appropriately and sitting at the table. “You’re not as jocular as you once were,” I said to him, and he smiled sadly.

I thought all the way through the dream that I knew more than he did. He was dead after all, a figment of my imagination. Unless really it was his dream in which I was the figment.

I realized something just before bed last night that brought me down into this pit of gloom and permeated both my sleeping and waking lives both, but I’ll save THAT cheery account for tomorrow. I guess we should all be grateful I didn't come to bed clutching our letter opener.

The Field Behind the Plough

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all for whom that has meaning! Here is a Stan Rogers song I have long loved, here done by Irish songster Frances Black, formerly of the band Arcady. It's worth listening to just for its evocation of the hard life of farming, an occupation common to the whole human race.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU97D8A3-oA]

My Hair's a Mess

So about that grocery store parking lot where a man ushered me so kindly to my car the other day: the place used to have a policy where you got escorted out whether you liked it or not.

God it was awful.

You piled all your purchases up onto the belt, swiped your card or forked over your cash and boom! The person who bagged it all suddenly took hold of your carriage and wheeled it the 100 yards out to your car, during which time a painful silence ensued since nine times out of ten you didn't share a common language.

One day at this store it was the store manager who ushered me out, giving me the chance to ask him about the policy.

"So how’s this new escorting-folks-out thing going over with the customers"? I wondered. I knew it was a new policy because this was a brand-new store.

"Well,' he said “the women aren't too crazy about it."

"No kidding" I said. "Why is that now?"

"They feel bad because they think their cars are messy and they don't want anyone seeing them."

This made me so sad. It reminded me of the girl I used to know who said she couldn't be intimate with her husband if she thought her hair didn't look just right.

Our cars aren't right, our hair isn't right: when will we learn to accept ourselves enough to let the world see us as we are?

You Are My Friend

Every time I go to that one supermarket at the edge of town, the man in charge of the carriages shakes my hand.

I'm pretty sure his job is just to bring them back into the store but when he sees me he comes right over smiling. We have made friends, he and I, in spite of the language barrier. (He speaks two languages; I only speak one.)

"Ah you, my friend!" he called when he saw me yesterday morning as I left the store. "Ah, you are my very good friend!"

"I am your very good friend" I agreed as he commenced pushing my cart for me in the general direction of my car.

"You buy this greens?" he asked, pointing to a potted plant in the top shelf of the cart.

"Yes." I said.

"How much moneys?"

"Five dollars," I said.

"Very good so nice thanks to God," he said, gesturing toward the heavens.

We reached my car but as I bent to help him  unload my bags into the trunk he held up his hand in a warding-off gesture.

"I he'p you!" he said. "You are my friend."

"We are friends," I agreed and so only reached only for the small houseplant we both liked so much. "I'll just take this up front with me."

"As well the ice cream!" he said, handing me my quart of Mocha Almond.

When we got done unloading he took my both hands, "If you need he'p any places, in the house, with clean, with any things, you call me, yes?"

"I will call you" I said.  We shook hands once more.

Then, instead of climbing into my well-packed car, I began walking across the parking lot towards the liquor store.

“You go?" he said looking confused.

“I go to buy some wine."

“Ah!" he cried

“Ah!" I echoed.

“Next time I see you!” he called, waving gaily.

"See you next time!"  I called back, assuming in my vast American smugness that I could teach him by my own sterling example what the phrase really was.

But then I stopped short of that assumption because…. well, because maybe he meant it just the way he said it.

The next time he would see me, just like he does surely “see” me every single time I come to that parking lot. And how nice is that? Because how often do any of us get really seen in the course of our busy rush-rush lives?

Another Pickle

And now, back to the theme of not being too crazy in your life:

The reason you should try to be a quietly normal person is so you don’t find yourself hatching the kind of plan I hatched last week where I corralled a 91-year-old man, a young woman that had just given birth and her ten-day-old baby into a car whose battery then died -  all to go sit by a pond for an hour.

Especially you should not hatch such a plan when the 91-year-old man has pain issues, the baby really has to eat soon and you are in a very public place.

Of course everyone was calm but me: Uncle Ed was calm because, God bless him and give him strength, he has made his peace with his pain. The newborn was calm because the newborn out cold, at least for the moment. And the new mother was calm because though she is new to this newborn, she isn’t new to motherhood. And she has excellent mental health.  And she is well accustomed to these scrapes, having had me for a parent all her life.

After we realized the car battery was as dead as last week's corsage, Uncle Ed began whistling softly, Carrie went to sit on a nearby bench and consul the long list of Calls She Would Like to Try Making While the Baby Is Sleeping, and the baby herself snoozed on.

It was all I could to do gurgle out a single sentence, my throat constricting in panic:

“We have to call a tow truck!” I squeaked.

“Just call AAA,” Carrie called over her shoulder from her bench 20 feet away.

“AAA takes 45 minutes!”

"They only SAY they’ll take that long but they never do.”

“They do though! Sometimes they do!” I yelped, remembering the last time I was in a pinch like this (which you can read about here.

In the end I called Nick and Michael at the service station where I get all my car care, and within ten minutes they sent Jimmy, who gave us the jump, wouldn’t accept any money and insisted on taking a quick peek at the tiny sleeper in the back.

So maybe all really is well that ends well, but I think there might be a lesson for me in here somewhere. I mean a lesson besides the one about being thankful for the presence of angels in our lives with names like Nick, and Michael and Jimmy.

Brave Girl, Good People

I live in a town that was once mostly white and mostly Christian, with almost no Jewish families. Word is, when the great waves of immigration began 150 years ago the townsfolk just about died of apprehension. I do know that when David and I first got here in the late '70’s, an otherwise kindly elder told us that it was all a whole lot nicer before these nouveau Italians moved in. (I guess she hadn’t caught our last name.)Today, though, things are different. Today, African American, Asian and Latino families have added richness and depth to our community; there are some 50 households headed by same-sex couples; and folks attend worship services of every kind, including those held at a synagogue with a 300-member congregation.These changes are part of why the town’s Multicultural Network decided to host a special day-long event, to which people from every segment of town life came. They came to celebrate our new diversity, build bridges and plan together to make this an ever-more-welcoming place to live, work or play. As a Network Board Member, I facilitated four table discussions where I met among many others (a) a single parent who described how it feels to live in a place where most people are coupled up, (b) a Catholic priest so warm you would want to have him at all your holidays dinners, and (c) a woman who told what it’s like be part of the new group, whom people appear to fear and misunderstand. “We need to stand as allies to one another,” one person said. “We need to make the invisible visible,” said someone else. There IS hunger in this town; there’s even homelessness. We need to SEE more!”Here is something we all saw, right at the day’s start when people were invited to rise and share their own stories:The college freshman you see here is named Angie. She was the first to stand and speak. She told about moving here after her junior year in high school. As a gay person, she had been targeted daily by her classmates in her former community. Now here she was at a school with an actual Gay Straight Alliance. She said it seemed like Heaven to her.But, she also said, it was very hard to see the suffering of her new best friend, who all her life has wanted nothing more than to transition from male to female, as now, with the help of  the medical community and her family, she has begun to do.Near day’s end, after we all had talked and listened and made lists of action plans, one attendee turned to this college freshman who had spoken so openly. “How is your friend doing now?” she asked kindly.Angie smiled and leaned back. “Why don’t you ask her yourself? “ she said, indicating Gen sitting beside her.Gen did not know Angie would speak of her that day but she was delighted with what had happened. I know because she said so when I drove them home. They seemed to feel both happy and peaceful.I guess that’s how you do feel when you gather with others and speak truly about your own journey, and realize, perhaps for the first time, that you are not alone on it.

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As I say, that's Angie at the top, who rose and spoke of her friend. Underneath here are two of the children who danced for us and three members of the morning panel,those photos courtesy of Caroline Hirschfeld. And under THEM? A picture of Angle and the loving dad who gave her all that courage.