Dumb & Dumber

Some people are bigger dopes than me even.Yesterday when my iPod fell out of my bra and into the bucket of polyurethane I went right to the internet and asked the universe about my dilemma, and - sure enough! Here was some poor schlub looking for help with the same predicament on Yahoo Answers.“Don” posted this first:I dropped my iPod in some paint yesterday, and I need to know what would take the paint off. I was quite pissed when it happened, seeing as how the iPod is less than a week old.Then under ‘Additional Details’ he said,Also, I forgot to add, it is the iPod classic, not an iPod touch. . .There were a few suggestions for him on good old YA: One had him carefully wiping the whole outside with mineral spirits which seemed sensible. But my hands-down fave was the one that said, “Pour paint thinner in a container, and soak the iPod in there until all the paint is dissolved.”Was the guy who wrote that kidding? He was, right? Wasn't he just messing with poor Don or have electronics really changed so much that you can do this?I don’t believe it.I also don’t believe that if I leave the iPod out in the sun the cloudy tornado that now lives on its screen will dry up and go away. My pal and fellow blogger at The Freelance Retort says it will but how can it? Because I didn’t 'just' drop it in water. I dropped it in a petroleum-based goo that never dries but just goes on resisting the circular stains from your drunken guests’ cocktail glasses.Here’s another picture of how it looks now, a lot like yesterday's with the black cloud in the middle only this one also act as a recommendation for the podcast Stuff You Should Know from How Stuff Works.com..While I was stripping sanding staining coating sanding coating etc. etc. I was listening to these podcasts, about beer and sweat and whales and the so-called the Lost Continent of Atlantis. I listen to podcasts day and night now and am getting very, very S-M-A-R-T -when it comes to things other than living in the real world, anyway.BUT! Of the two beds and two bureaus I’m rescuing from 60 years of dried cracked varnish and - yup! - water rings, one bureau is finally done!

Note can of powerful chemical finish-dissolver standing ready for the next piece. I no longer have fingerprints. :-)

Death by Drowning?

 Remember 'Don't say ain't, your mother will faint, your father will fall in a bucket of paint. your sister will cry, your brother will die, your dog will call the FBI?'Well I fell in a bucket of paint Wednesday night, or rather my IPod did. Can you imagine? My IPod Touch that cost so much? That I put a mirrorlike screen protector on so it would shine like crow’s bait in whatever dark place and never get lost? "NO NO NO NO NO!" was all I could think.And I hadn’t even said 'ain’t'. All I did I had done was to try for that last run down the mountain that smacked me into the tree. All I did was take my little craft out on the sea even though I should have known better with those storms clouds gathered on the horizon.In other words what I had done was keep working on that darned refinishing project even though my back hurt and my hands were cramping up and I had to kneel to get at the bureaus chest and lie down to get it its undercarriage.It wasn’t exactly paint, it was polyurethane.I had on my carpenter’s overalls and had tucked my iPod into the chest pocket, dummy that I was, then for extra safekeeping worked it into that inner corner of my bra where I keep my Bluetooth. Nothing ever falls out of there.And I was tired at the end of this nerve-wracking hour of applying the final finish. Nerve-wracking because you have so much in the piece by then: the hour of stripping, the sanding, the rubbing in of the stain, the rubbing off of all excess stain, the first coat of poly, the gentle roughing up with fine sandpaper, the second coat of poly, the even gentler application of sandpaper or even fine steel wool and finally finally, finally that last coat of Minwax Glo SatinThat’s what I was on that very last coat. And that’s when I leaned too quickly forward and plop! In it fell, into a gooey three-inch-deep polymer bath consisting of a chain of organic units joined by urethane links.”I gasped and grabbed it out.Maybe its holster will have protected it! I thought. I looked at that mirrored plastic screen protector, now gummy and opaque and quick peeled it off. And …. the IPod kept on playingAnd wonder of wonders the IPod is still playing these 36 hours later though it now has the image of a dark tornado imprinted on its face. Now every time I look down at it I say Oh yeah I remember: Don’t take your little boat out when storm clouds are gathering, DON’T make that last run of the day when you’re tired and the light on the mountain is failing, and especially DON’T regard as secure any pouch or pocket above the waist unless you are absolutely SURE you’re not going to be bending over.  

An Attractive Model

I love Dear Abby; her advice is always so good. Yesterday she counseled a woman on what to say when people tell her she looks just like her mother. The trouble, the woman said, is “my mother is ugly! I no longer respond to the comment, preferring to remain silent and just stare at the person instead.”

Then she went on to ask Abby to “please remind people that unless the comparison is to an attractive model, opinions should be kept to oneself.” And she signed it "BEAUTIFUL IN MY OWN WAY.”

Abby was much kinder than I would have been. "The trouble is your mother is ugly?" I would have written “Are you serious?”

To me no human face is ugly. If the six years I spent studying Anatomy and Physiology to work that second job as a massage therapist taught me anything they taught me that there are no ugly bodies either, but only valiant, hard-working bodies that try so hard every day to do our bidding, whatever crazy head-forward and/or slouching positions we ask them to maintain. (You’d be surprised how many people feel shame about their feet. And yet little was more moving to me in the course of the hour-long session than to hold a person’s foot in my hand for there is visible all the gathered strength and balance we demand every day to go on clinging to the branch, to set out from it in search of food, to catch and settle upon it afterward and attempt to take our rest.)

What Abby did instead of scolding her was to say instead

DEAR BEAUTIFUL IN YOUR OWN WAY:

I'll remind them, but it's possible that you are overly sensitive. The person could be referring to a family resemblance, your coloring or a mannerism. A diplomatic response would be, ‘Thank you. Isn't she a dear?’

I might stop with the “Thank you,” just in case Mom isn’t all that much of a dear, in which case the daughter would seem to be engaging in sarcasm.

I do wonder though: if the daughter feels as though she can call own self beautiful in her own way, why can’t she see that that might be true of her mother as well?

You know I’ve been thinking of Mother Teresa all this week. Who could fail to see her beauty as she went about her work as a pencil in the hand of God? I’d be happy to look like her any day.

Don't Go Breakin' My Heart

On the night of April 18th, 1775  Paul Revere and William Dawes rode out to warn the colonials that the British were armed and marching. In my corner of Massachusetts there are signs all over the place saying the two passed this spot and this spot and this one. I hope they at least went through the traffic lights! I would always think when I saw those signs as a kid. 

People who live IN Concord and Lexington do this anniversary up big. The third Monday in April we celebrate by calling off school, shuttering scads of businesses and playing host to a little thing called the Boston Marathon.I live only a few hills and meadows away from Concord and Lexington so I went there one April 18th, and in the middle of the night just as Dawes and Revere had done, together with my sister Nan, my cousin Sheila and our three young husbands. It was 1975 and to kick off this big 200-year mark of America's birth President Ford was coming to the Old North Bridge. The six of us wanted to see him do it and so donned tri-cornered hats, grabbed two coolers of beer and drove to a place by the Concord Boat House. There we spent the night, playing cards in the car and laughing. At 5am we rented three canoes and paddled along the Concord River to that famous bridge - where we waited and waited and waited, until the President showed up, his head a distant balding egg.There too we saw Caroline Kennedy, sprung from Concord Academy for the day, and heard many speeches blowing across the water. ( Here's Caroline from back then, together with her mother Jackie, her fearsome grandmother Rose and her uncle Ted on the day she graduated from that fine private high school.)It felt like the beginning of something big all right, this two-year celebration, with the reenactment of the battle, the first visit of the Tall Ships to our harbor and, for many of us kids, an Elton John concert on the Fourth of July 1976, at the stadium where the Pats still play, with Kiki Dee doing the opening act.The longest game in professional baseball happened on this day too, played by two teams in the Triple A League in Pawtucket RI. It lasted for 33 innings and took almost eight and a half hours to finish.  And that’s a nice American fact too.But what I will always remember about this date is laughing my head off all night in a parking lot, then paddling through waters as silvery and smooth as mercury in the pre-dawn light. About that time I will always remember Kiki Dee doing “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart" with Elton. I knew that under the hippie-style maxi-dress I wore that day was the little bump that would become my first chid and  likely forever end my days of drinking and laughing until sun-up. But that was fine too. I was ready.I guess I knew too that life would go breakin' my own  heart, as life does, but I hope I knew too that there would also be joys both loud and quiet, and brights dawn, and music to give it all a soundtrack.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0qW9P-uYfM   

Beautiful

Today in history, in the year 1907, the so-called Ellis Island Immigration Center processed 11,747 people, more than on any other day. Yikes!  Welcome to America, exhausted travelers! Diseased people, step to the side!  Ah and no, no TB,sufferers thanks very much.

Oh and you people who do get in? We’ll spell your name wrong on the official documents just to keep you humble.

The picture above is of that center in its heyday.

But also on April 17, Olivia Hussey was born. She did the Franco Zeffirelli version of Romeo and Juliet in 1968, in which the lovers are portrayed as the children they were. This is Olivia here:

And here's a sweet clip from that film, one of the first in which audiences saw two naked people in an amorous situation.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aEFaMZAxc4&feature=fvwrel]

Interestingly enough I'm just now also seeing that Olivia Hussey also played Mother Teresa of Calcutta 35 years after she played Juliet, in a made-for-TV movie of the same name. I say 'interesting' because I was just taking of Mother Teresa here yesterday.

Watch this clip to see how lovely she still was in 2003 and reflect how the real Mother Teresa also shone with her own beauty. Stick with it long enough to hear her say that great thing at the end. I want to do that too.

Charlie C & Mother T

Today is the birthday of Charlie Chaplin and here’s to you too Charlie!  I myself am beginning to look like Charlie, around the hips especially.

Also of the Pope. Kudos to the former Cardinal Ratzinger!

It’s vacation week here in my state so I thought I might celebrate by marking 'This Day in History'. I guess I started doing this yesterday with that post about Julie Christie, last seen in the film Away From Her where she plays a woman being slowly enshrouded  by the fog of Alzheimer’s.  Near the start of the film she dries off a washed pot and carefully places it the freezer, as her husband looks on in silent horror. (That part sure hit me: once I tossed a brimming cup of cat kibble into the washing machine with a full load of dainty slips and panties.)

It’s the 100^th anniversary of the day Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly over the English Channel in 1912, and yes that was the very day after the Titanic went down with its loss of over 1500 souls.

As you can imagine the first-mentioned fact was overshadowed by this last.

It’s tough to be overshadowed. Mother Teresa died the day before the funeral of Princess Diana who had her heart jerked free of its moorings in the back seat of that speeding car under the Paris streets.

This seemed like a terrible shame to me Mother Theresa, getting such low billing.  I admired her a great deal.

I admired her no less when documents revealed that at least for one chapter of her long story she had more doubt than faith. We are all enshrouded by doubt. I attended a Bible Study for 15 years whose clergyman leader often quoted a phrase from Tennyson, There lives more faith in honest doubt than an in half the creeds.

That seemed so kind to me, and comforting too, his reminding us of this truth. We live out our days, at times summoning the joy to twirl our canes and doff our hats in comical fashion. We fly across a wide channel, from this near shore to that distant one, but then we arrive. What did the poet say?  We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time?  The character played by Olympia Dukakis says it in this clip: “It's just life.” Only life after all.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct7eXP-ivAk]

Yesterday's Takeaway

What I saw yesterday:

Inside the grocery store a tiny hand reaching out like a pickpocket’s from deep within a baby sling.

Outside that store a child of five taking a picture of a bright purple rhododendron with his papa’s smartphone

What I heard: A young female employee at the coffee shop extravagantly flirting with the young male employee..

What I prepared for supper: salmon in ginger sauce and asparagus and a salad of fennel, toasted walnuts, baby spinach and shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Oh and with a fresh made dressing of oil, balsamic and mustard

What I appreciated: How Noah Webster on this date in 1828 first published an American dictionary, in an effort to regulate spelling which had gotten WAY out of hand, even as it flowed from the pen of General George Washington who wrote ‘cloathes’ for ‘clothes' and other such approximations. Webster was the first to write down and legitimize American words like skunk, hickory, and chowder. He changed musick to music, centre to center, and plough to plow, though the Merriam Webster site reports that “other attempts at reform met with less acceptance… such as his support for modifying tongue to tung and women to wimmen—because this was ‘the old and true spelling’ he said and the one that most accurately indicated its pronunciation.)

What I did not appreciate: the fact that Kate Winslet has judgment about poor Celine Dion and was not very nice recently when she went on the record to say she holds her breath and inwardly rolls her eyes every time she hears her sing that blockbuster song 'My Heart Will Go On' from Titanic that she and Leonardo DiCaprio starred in. That was a disheartening thing to read 100 years after the sinking and it made me have judgment about Kate, which wasn’t very nice of me either.

What I reflected on: How Julie Christie turned 72 and is as beautiful today as ever she was back when she burst onto the scene in the 60's ( See pictures above and below.) And how Loretta Lynn turned 80 and is still going strong, she who grew up in a place called Butcher Hollow and got taken off the shelf and claimed for marriage at just 13.

I got claimed for marriage when I was just six years older than that, so David and I capping 43 years together come June.

Somehow learning to sing like a lark and out-act everyone in the room didn't come to me with all those years, but I identify with these two wimmen all the same because Old Dave and I have made some beautiful musick together over the years. Oh and like them, I too know how to smile.

How's Never?

I'm thinking of going into hiding. I had a great time with some great people over dinner last night and I think I might just end on that high note, don a wig and a beard and disappear.

Remember that New Yorker cartoon where one guy has just been asked by another guy about getting together? They're on the phone. The guy we can see is saying "How's Never? Is Never Good for you?" How many times I have wanted to say that in my life!

Thinking this way has me remembering a poem by America’s most kick-ass poet (pardon the language) who I was lucky enough to hear speak twice at Smith College, a pretty kick-ass school. (I'm sorry. It seems to be coming with the mood.)

Here she is now. It's not cynical at all; the whole last part shows why:

The Art of Disappearing by Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you?say no.

When they invite you to the party

remember what parties are likebefore answering.Someone telling you in a loud voicethey once wrote a poem.Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.Then reply.If they say We should get togethersay why?It's not that you don't love them anymore.You're trying to remember somethingtoo important to forget.Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.Tell them you have a new project.It will never be finished.When someone recognizes you in a grocery storenod briefly and become a cabbage.When someone you haven't seen in ten yearsappears at the door,don't start singing him all your new songs.You will never catch up.Walk around feeling like a leaf.Know you could tumble any second.Then decide what to do with your time.

New Day (with Flowers)

How can I thank people for indulging me over this past week as I tried to make sense of our sudden death? Yesterday I went back to the cemetery and somehow could not find that grave though I have visited it so many times with the one who now lies in it. I had to phone David at work who was so kind even in the middle of his meeting. "Go left, then right, go all the way back to that fence behind the houses..." And there finally it was, filled in now, with that spray of white roses just freshened with drops from a sudden downpour. I drew a few out and brought them home here.

For the rest, life went on:I had a blood test. "Did you eat?" the tech asked. "Just coffee" I said. She shook her head and scowled. "Even coffee is bad. It’s a diuretic; it makes your veins a little less full and the job is harder for us. For you too!" she added and sank the needle in.

I moved through my day. I stopped at the shop of my friend who works in wood and picked up the three drawers he had stripped for me. They feel like satin now. I brought them home to stain and finish myself, the staining and finishing being the parts that make me happy.

Then I did another whole thing and a whole thing after that and on some crazy whim at 7:00 at night I began on these drawers while Dave worked on our taxes in the dining room. He had to do that job. I didn't 'have' to do mine. Certainly not right then amidst the funeral flowers with a sore back and a mind as tossed as a Caesar salad but that's just what happens to me sometimes: I get stuck on 'spin'.

Today I will drive three hours to get my co-grandmother and bring her to our new baby who is just beginning to offer that shy little smile with one half of her mouth. Then more furniture-work and the column of course and tomorrow's blog and then the living-out of some dinner plans I cooked up three months ago.

These are the drawers and some flowers and the taxes. A bottle of Scotch is still out I see, not that Scotch ever called to me thank God, thank God.

|

|

|

It's already past 7:00 so I'm behind myself already. The sun has just peeked up over the trees and is lighting up everything all around. New day, ah a new day, and flowers to go with it!

|

What Remains

It’s nearly 20 years since Auntie Fran first grew confused and lost the sense of a daily plan; started following Uncle Ed around the house, even standing outside the door while he used the bathroom. When she began pocketing her food and hiding it in odd places, we wondered if it was time to talk nursing homes.

“I don't think I can do it!” Uncle Ed told me, but in the end, he didn't have to. She fell and broke her hip, could not manage the rehab and so did go to a nursing home – where, when we visited her, she never seemed happy to see us.

Once when I came, she reached in her mouth and handed me her teeth. 

For more than a year, she hardly spoke. Not to us. Not even to Uncle Ed.

It grew harder to recall the cheerful breezy woman she had been.

Uncle Ed went twice a day to feed her and sit with her and tuck her in with the kiss she turned her face from. I certainly meant to go. Three days a week I wrote, “Visit Auntie Fran” on my list.

In fact, I rarely went. None of us did.  We were busy, to put it one way. We were scared, to put it another.

Then my husband’s brother Toby came, from San Francisco and Toby was not afraid. He went every day for two hours to be with his aunt. He squired her around in her throne of a wheelchair and talked to her nonstop.

Outside once, wearing the sunglasses he had put on her, she gave him a dark look.   “Your teeth are green,” she said matter-of-factly. He laughed and lifted her sunglasses. "What color are they now?"

"She's in there!” he told the rest of us. "She understands!"

But why won’t she speak? I wondered, especially to Uncle Ed, who read her silence as mute reproach. What can I do?

 One day I knew what I could do: I talked Uncle Ed into letting me take Monday lunchtimes and sit with her as, with great dignity and great effort, she chewed for the better part of the hour it took for her to feel full.

Imitating Toby, I talked my head off, asking silly questions that she mostly didn't answer. 

After some weeks, though, I began to see what looked like thoughts passing like clouds behind her clear blue eyes. “You look EXHAUSTED!" she told me once after giving me a frank looking-over.

We kept news from her, in the way the well will do with the sick. 

Then one day when I came, I took a gamble: "Jackie Kennedy died," I said lightly. "I know." she answered. "I saw it on the television."

 I put the spoon down. "You understand everything we say, don't you?" 

"Just about," she answered lightly.

My eyes filled with tears.  "Fran, we thought you were gone! You wouldn't talk! You won’t talk to Uncle Ed! Are you mad at him?"  

She looked down fast.   

“And when Toby came east for that month he told us you were in there! He called you. Uncle Ed is calling you." I held out my arms. "We're calling you back, Fran!"

 Her eyes brimmed as well. And three days later she looked Uncle Ed square in the face and said, "Oh, Eddie, my Eddie. Can’t you take me home?” 

 Then it was his turn to cry.

How much is taken from two people in the end? Everything perhaps? Last week, alone in his apartment, Uncle Ed stepped from this life into the next, his arms up as if he were embracing a long-missed companion.  

 And how much remains, when there is love?

Why, everything again.

Long Awaited But Too Soon Here

Today we will bury David’s uncle Ed who became my true friend years after he was just my uncle.For a couple of reasons we have had to wait all these days for his final services but the day is here now.Today at 10am, we will do the whole thing just right there in the funeral parlor according to his wishes.It was 15 or 20 years ago when he took care of all the arrangements, the casket, the service, the cemetery plot where he will lie down again at last beside his pretty wife Fran.This picture shows him at her funeral, in April of '99.Just the sight of him bending over like that brings tears to my eyes. The woman holding the baby is our friend Karen who's the kind of person who just comes. Back when my mom died she left her job as an EMT in the middle of a shift so as to sing with six others, EMT uniform and all, at that funeral Mass.I look at all those folks and think of their kindness in showing up, coming even to the cemetery. The somber-faced little boy there is now a sophomore in college. My hair was dark. Uncle Ed was only 79.Well this funeral will bring comfort. I did find some great music for it, five short pieces burned on a CD and ready to go:In Paradisum from the Faure Requiem is about the most beautiful music I have ever heard. Terrence Malik used it in the most beautiful scene of all in his 1999 remake of The Thin Red Line.That story takes place in the South Pacific where Uncle Ed was stationed for three long years.This is how he looked then. I just found this picture yesterday.And do: here's a little of the music for today and above it this just-discovered likeness of the man when he was a young man on an island off New Guinea, able and strong with his young life all before him.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-i1ESIRKdA]

Be Who You Are While There's Still Time

I need a day off. Today I chose funeral music and pictures, ordered all the flowers,  filed a column, read three paragraphs of a book that made me cry and finally got my ears blown out at that big fancy hospital in Boston where nobody is better than anybody else. I like that.

Looking for old photos  of Uncle Ed I found this one of David’s mom and me on our girl Annie’s high school graduation  day.

That was the year we had a blizzard in April and people’s roofs fell in I remember.

It’s also the year I so damaged my hair with straightener that I wasn’t even allowed to blow dry  for six months. And my hair is naturally curly.

It was as if curly black kudzu had invaded New England...

I had supper last night with Old Dave’s cousin Barbara who has gorgeous white hair that she wears short. She says I should throw the Lady Clairol out and do what she has done.

She may be right. I remember what my friend Carol said when she saw my hair back in ’97. She said “Finally! The outside matches the inside.”

Food for thought, food for thought….   

And now back to funeral planning .. 

Mighty

Mondays will be different now...

On this new Monday I won’t write for three hours, put the finishing touches on that food I prepared the night before, make the coffee, pack both coffee and food and hightail it over to Uncle Ed’s house to take him out for our two hours together.

Today he won’t come slowly out with his cap and his cane to get into my car – never an easy task for him because my seats are tall and he was short.

He would more or less back into the seat on the passenger side and try lifting his left hip up on to it. And when he couldn’t hoist himself into the car that way he would sometimes say “Let’s try turning the other cheek!” and slowly pivot and hike his right hip until gradually, very gradually he got himself into the car.

"If only I weren’t so FAT!” he would say but in my book he wasn’t fat. In my book he was mighty.

In my book he was a short-in-stature 'strongman' who always wore a soft blue workshirt, in whose breast pocket he carried an elegant little pocketknife.

He could pull out any splinter on any child. He could pull out any baby tooth that needed that one last twist.

He was my uncle by marriage but mostly he was my friend. He loved our outings but he loved me more. Nine days out of ten, before we had driven even 100 feet he would say “Now I know you’re very busy. Why don’t you swing right back around the block, dump me and go about your day?”

Dump him?! I never wanted to dump him. In all my adult life I never had the sense to stop working and take a break to eat lunch like a normal person. When I was with Uncle Ed I learned how to do that. Every Monday and Thursday for the last six years we ate lunch together somewhere out in nature.

Today I must arrange the music and choose the pictures to display at the funeral home.

Here are two of them now.

The one at the top is from last June, showing him as he caned his way from his apartment door out toward my car.

This one underneath is from a summer day in the 80s and shows how it really was: couple of us goofing around with a watering can while he did what he always did and cooked up everyone's food.

Words & Music

Day dawned and that old sun rose and any minute true warmth will come to this cool, cool region.

Peace to all today. Peace and wind chimes and also a poem.

First the music....

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAA3-4JTS-g&feature=youtu.be]

And then the words....

What Would Happen Then by April Bernard

A bird, bright and quick,

blue with livid streaks,

would arrive on the windowsill

as official harbinger

and then….

The low would be raised up

the sneers crushed under their own bricks,

the teeter-totter would cease to choose sides

and sit in peaceful sway on its fulcrum.

The kiss that had been held back

all those years at last would release

into the mouth in flood,

And ‘why not?’ would replace all other dicta,

but gently, as a sunlit nudge.

The Waiting Days

Yesterday David and I went again to Uncle Ed’s house and saw again the empty chair that he sat in all day long and struggled so to rise from, crippled as he was with the bad hips even before you got to the arthritis and the gout.As David studied his box of crucial documents, I just stood, looking at everything:His many photos.His water glass there by the chair.His cane that he would so lightly toss to me before he slowly, painstaking lifted those burdened legs, one and then the other to fold himself into my car.We picked up his paper and fetched in his mail.We took his address book and pulled the door shut and left the dust motes swirling minutely in the air.The ancient Jews in the day after their deliverance: I keep thinking of them. “Now what?" I keep thinking, just as they must have thought, dazed by the empty space all around them."Now what?" I keep saying to myself, as the followers of Jesus must have also said the day after his execution, when it turned out he hadn't thrown over his captors and come off the cross swinging at all but had died like all the others - of strangulation, they say, when the method is crucifixion; when the victim grows so weak he can no longer push off with the feet and the pressure on the pectoral muscles cuts off the airway.Dark thoughts in these waiting days.I roused myself finally and called the newspaper to cancel his subscription. I called ElderCare and stopped the service that would pick up his laundry Tuesdays and return it Fridays, so clean it made your nostrils sting to sniff it.I called the two ladies who had sent him Easter cards, one signed in such a spidery hand she must have been in her 90s too.I spoke to his faraway blood nephews. I worked out a date and time for the service, so we could get the one great minister from the church his near nephews grew up in. (Ed was their uncle really, the uncle by marriage of David and his three brothers.) I wrote the obit in which I did not name myself.We drove straight north from his house to be at a place that calms me every time. We will go home in the morning for church and then it will be Easter and maybe I'll feel a little better.

For now I feel like the speaker in this poem, W.S. Merwin’s "How It Happens." Though he has written it with no punctuation, it's easy to tell it's a dialogue. Maybe he wrote it without punctuation to suggest that this conversation is an inner one. I know the inner conversation is mainly what I'm having right now. Read this piece of bleak beauty by our poet laureate now.

The sky said I am watchingto see what youcan make out of nothingI was looking up and I saidI thought youwere supposed to be doing thatthe sky said manyare clinging to thatI am giving you a chanceI was looking up and I saidI am the only chance I havethen the sky did not answerand here we arewith our names for the daysthe vast days that do not listen to us

That Cottage of Darkness

Here below  is my favorite Mary Oliver poem, When Death Comes. Death came 36 hours ago for my Uncle Ed, and it came in just that way, the dagger of ice plunged between the shoulder blades.

I found his body and I got to be near it for a long time: through the EMT's to the police, to the firefighters who had to take  the hinges off the bathroom door to get him out because he fell against it, wedging it shut. Ed was a big man.

When they did finally get him out, his arms were up - frozen up because he had died some 12 or 15 hours before - and it just struck me, that position. He looked like he was reaching out to embrace some dear long-awaited friend.

That's the image I will take with me over the next days. It reminded me of this poem. Mary Oliver says Let me live my life like the bride married to amazement, Like the bridegroom taking the world in his arms.

Read on...

When Death Comes

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn;

When death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

When death comes like the measle-pox;

When death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything

As a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

And I look upon time as no more than an idea,

And I consider eternity as another possibility,

And I think of each life as a flower, as common

As a field daisy, and as singular,

And each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

Tending, as all music does, toward silence,

And each body a lion of courage, and something

Precious to the earth.

When it’s over I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement,

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

If I have made of my life something particular and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing

And frightened,  or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

 

Hair Today

Three women got on the medical building’s elevator, each with a hairstyle from a different decade.

The first one you could tell went to high school in the 80s. Her hair was a tumble of curls, swooped up and reined in with combs like the young Madonna's here..

Then my gaze fell on her daughter, who had the hair all young women have had now for ten years or more, pulled straight back in a ponytail just the way Brandi Chastain wore hers in that famous Women's World Cup game in '99 where, at the moment of victory, she pulled her shirt off in joy and showed the world her sports bra.

Remember?

I like this hair for its apparent ease and lack of artifice, even if I do sometimes wonder if the young women will laugh later in life at how sort of bare they looked, like so many shaved cats or bunnies without their ears.

I looked down at my watch then and when I looked back up a third woman had dashed onto the elevator and turned her back to the rest of us, so all I could see was long brown hair; really long brown hair that swayed this way and that.

"Now there’s a beautiful sight!" I thought to myself.

Then the woman turned and looked at us all and I saw that she was not 20, or 30, or 40, or 50. She was 60 if she was a day and this hair she was wearing was the hair she had worn in the Age of Aquarius.

Way back when I was a kid, girls went to school with hair rolled on the ends like window shades.

We liked to think it was a 'look' but really it was the best we could do with hair curlers.We all looked like we had half-lowered window shades hung around our heads.

Then, almost overnight, the revolution hit, hemlines went up a foot and hair came down and stayed down.

I guess that's why I found the last lady’s hairstyle so gorgeous: because it was the style when I was a girl of 20.

Tonight I get to be in a fashion show with 20 other women from all over the community. I imagine many of them are having their hair done and maybe getting help with makeup and nail polish. I don’t wear makeup and nail polish. Once a Woodstock Girl always a Woodstock girl I guess.

But I did just get done washing my hair, which I’m wearing longer than I've worn it since Old Jimmy Carter sat in the White House.

Well that’s enough about me, what about you? What hairstyle, if any, do YOU get misty-eyed over?

Deaf as a Haddock

I went to the hospital yesterday to have my ears blown out. Lately I’ve been as deaf as a haddock.

Because I'm an idiot however, I neglected to insert the drops twice a day for four days ahead of time and so they sent me home again.

Still deaf. Possibly more deaf because in trying with her fearful irrigation equipment to shake things loose in there, the nice nurse created such a fearful din that my auditory nerves collapsed in fright.

I have to go back Monday.

She didn't scold me. She even walked me up front and cancelled the charges for the visit which was more than nice. Still, there's no doubt they all thought I was an idiot.

I know it was stupid of me. It's just that I was so busy in the days leading up to the appointment and when you squirt the drops on in there, you're supposed to then lie down for 15 minutes on one side and how was I going to do that twice daily when I don't even SIT course of the day never mind lie down?

I will though; I'll do it. I hate not being able to hear. I spend a lot of time with teenagers and teenagers say these really funny things all the time, but they only say them once. They're not about to repeat them for the hard of hearing.

And to be honest, I'm not sad about having to go back to the hospital Monday. I saw a few interesting things in the elevator yesterday and I expect I'll see more interesting things next week.

I can tell you about yesterday's interesting things here tomorrow but right now old Dave is saying something in the other room and I have to go find out what it is. The man certainly does MUMBLE!

This is he on the right, a mumbler if ever I knew one. On the left? That's  just me without my wig. (I am pretty tiny since I began shrinking after menopause. I'm shopping in Toddlers nowadays. :-) )

'They Have You in That Box' - Unless....

One last story on this subject, this one from a rainy night in a Vermont library when a couple dozen people came to a session I gave about setting your truth down on paper.

It started with someone raising her hand to ask what the difference was between writing a journal and keeping a diary. A puzzler. We decided maybe a diary was something you expected others would someday read, while a journal was perhaps more persona – or was it the other way around?

What we were talking about was the practice where you took up your pen every day and just scribbled away, hoping to figure out what you were getting at.

“So is there one place where YOU personally write down everything?” somebody asked me at one point.

“Well, maybe not everything,” I answered truthfully.

“So you censor yourself?” someone else asked.

“We all censor ourselves,” said a third person over by the windows.

“My children don’t know the real me!” exclaimed a woman in the back.

“They see you as their mother,” replied someone up front, turning to face her. “They have you in that box.”

“Then will they never know us?” asked another. “Never know who we really were?”

It was a great session.

At the end of it somebody asked why we wish to journal at all.

I groped around for an answer. To relieve our burdened hearts, I said. To catch ourselves at our most honest. To say, in however shy or oblique a way, how much we appreciate the beauty of the little world we find ourselves set down in.”

But any truths I may have spoken were nothing compared to the truths I heard uttered in that workshop, at the end of which I was so dazzled I forgot to hand out the Contact Information cards I always carry as a way of holding on to people. As a result, though I can still call up most of their faces, I don’t have a single one of those good people’s names.

That didn’t matter so much, as I knew even then. What mattered was that they had each other’s: as I packed up to leave that warm room, they were all busily swapping phone numbers and addresses.

Ah, to have found my voice and used it all these years: what friendship and accompaniment it has brought me! And how happy I have been to think that I can now help others find and use their voices too!

Workshop? It was More Like a Playshop

Woody Allen was right: 90% of any job really is about just showing up.I feel as though I did little more than show up myself at that workshop I ran yesterday. I mean, I told a few funny stories, sure, but for every story of mine it seemed as if each of those 30 people had three stories. They scribbled in their notebooks like happy schoolchildren, just as I hoped they would and then the brave ones read what they had written and got us all laughing, or thinking, or feeling that certain catch in the throat.The stories came so thick and fast I can only remember a few of them: Like the one about the 92-year-old who, on the lip of that Next Great Adventure, told the undertaker she did NOT want a pillow under her head in her casket because why be seen for the last time with a cascade of double chins?Another told about the two-and-a-half-year-old who fell asleep on one very long road trip, waking only long after, in utter darkness in a region thinly settled and sparsely lit. Her parents in the front seat heard her stir; then, out of the darkness came her little voice.“Who turned out the goddam LIGHTS?”Word is, Dad put his hands up over his face. He knew well where she had heard such language.Kids say so many dear and funny things and we shared a good number of them between our jottings-down.Meanwhile, the library provided lemonade and bakery items, a big old box o’ joe and a platter of Irish soda bread with a list of its every ingredient hand-written in a neat blue hand.I had them write to a 'Six Things I Love' prompt and also one that starts “I knew I shouldn’t be laughing....”That last brought a very touching the tale by a man scattering his father's ashes.At one point a woman spoke of her very earliest memory when, on seeing her papa approaching her crib, out of pure joy and pride she took hold of its rails and executed a perfect acrobat’s tumble just for him.We went on for nearly 90 minutes which to me seemed like ten minutes.At the end, by way of closing, I asked them to write a sentence that started “I used to… but now I…”  in response to which folks wrote some lovely things.The thing that stays most in my mind now that it’s Monday-Monday-can’t-trust-that-day? A sentence one woman wrote that went, “I used to be cynical, but now I have a seven-year-old.” Let’s none of us be cynical, on this or any day since life asks of us Hope, and faith in things unseen..God bless poor Mama Cass, who died so suddenly. God bless lucky Us, who are all still here with our fruit platters and the many stories that connect us. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h81Ojd3d2rY]