Meet Me in St. Louis

I flew to St. Louis to attend a wedding which, for the five or six hours I was at it,  made me hugely happy.

The rest of the time I was by myself, and that was fine too, and strengthening to the spirit. I felt like Walt Whitman striding along the broad avenues of the city, breathing that soft Missouri air, sensing close by that old muddy river made famous by Mark Twain and a thousand others.

The houses there are made of brick and stone because there aren’t so many trees, or at least that's what I was told.

There are however, acres and acres of fields under cultivation.

You fly over the Midwest and see all that arable land: precise rectangles as far as the eye can see, measured out for the growing of crops.

Fly over New England and all you see are trees; no crops at all, because our soil is thin and studded with the work of that glacier that barreled down,  scraped off the tops of our little mountains and then withdrew again in its own good time, leaving behind everything it had once held suspended in its icy matrix: Rocks, in other words. Rocks and more rocks.

It’s wonderful going to a new place to see a new thing like a marriage begun upon.

The newly done-over hotel room was wonderful too except it didn’t have a tub, the room itself so sleekly modern the mattress were Tempur-Pedic mattresses, which turn out to make you feel like Han Solo in the first Star Wars movie where he gets trapped in that weird four-cornered frame of pudding.

I mean to say you sink in and your trapped body heat slowly warms you. They give you a thin little Kleenex of a blanket because they know this will happen. It was fun if jarring at first for a northerner like me, raised on hard mattresses with a pancake-stack of blankets as heavy on the body as a pile of sleeping hounds.

My first night in St. Louis, eating at the Applebee’s connected to the hotel, I watched a party of ten sharing their appetizers and laughing so hard they were leaning over onto one another’s shoulders. That made me happy too.

It didn’t matter that I was alone -  on my four flights and in my rental car, in my hotel room and on my walks about the city. The solitude made a wonderful the contrast to the wedding, which like every good wedding was a celebration not just of two people’s promises but the promises of the loving community that surrounds them. The solitude was fine on its own too, for how much it reinforced the lessons about connection so indelibly written onto my heart the first time I read this passage by Whitman, preface to the second edition of Leaves of Grass. Here it is now with a little video clip below it.

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” 

And now, the couple in real time, happy guests and that just-cracked beer also in evidence:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtSyvMG1MV8]

Flightpath

At times in my life I've felt like that Up in the Air guy George Clooney plays, when he’s flying around the country firing people.

(Well, anyway he’s doing that until the foxy chick played by Vere Farmiga­­­ breaks his heart. We’re not sure what changes his character will undergo when the screen fades to black.)

I travelled for 25 years for my job, by car mostly, but also up in the air.

By now I can whip that laptop out of its bag as fast as the best of them.

Quick as a wink I can take off a coat, un-holster a phone, give a special curveball of a kick to my shoes so they shoot right up into my hands, first the right, then the left, and in one sweet motion land in one of those bins.

Being used to the whole drill frees me to look around a little and that’s what I like best.

This time I saw a chubby eight-year-old talking to his toy in a high squeaky voice. I also saw many grownups doing that but the toys in their cases were  their phones.

I saw a hipster in a T-shirt reading 'Honey Nut Cheerios' staring glumly for 30 straight minutes at his phone.

I saw a family of eight madly snapping pictures of each other, changing positions, forming groupings and calling "Mira Mira!" as they looked at the shots.

Theyoung  flight attendant on the Chicago to St. Louis run looked like Brad Pitt from the back - Brad P the movie Burn After Reading I mean, with his hair half dark and half bleached brassy blond.

At least he looked young until I saw him full face.  He wasn’t really  young at all. AND he had dyed his eyebrows dark.

It's weird what happens to your eyebrows as you age. Mine used to look like Jennifer Connelly’s when she was a child actress doing the movie Labyrinth with David Bowie.

Now they’re like that flight attendant’s a month after his last dye job.

Our family’s new baby has no action in the eye brow department either I notice so I guess that’s the arc of it for us humans. We take off, we rack up a lot of miles, flying here and there and all around and then we turn back into babies. It sounds kind of nice doesn’t it? It sounds like it all might work out after all, even if most of us DON'T win the equivalent of Vera Farmiga at the end of the picture.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7k6FwXJhNk]

Stop or Lose Your Mind

Wo, the post I put up here yesterday at first had so many typos it looked like something written by a crazy person, not a good thing where papers all over instantly capture what I write and put  it on their websites. For a good 20 minutes this morning copy went up under my name that sounded like it was written by the computer ‘Hal’ in 2001, A Space Odyssey – near the end of its life when it’s slowly losing its mind.

I guess it happens when you do too much.

I had started the day before refinishing an old bureau  at 5am, getting Minwax’s Red Mahogany Stain all over my new bra dang it. Then I showered, scrubbed the dark-hued chemicals  out from under my nails, cooked and wrapped up two breakfasts and drove the 30 minutes to my daughter’s house in time to be there before her 10-week-old woke up. The idea all this week was that I would offer a couple of hours of help while she did key things like take a shower and pack; her little family is moving in a week. I made a lunch and a supper, as I also had done on the other days,  changed the baby’s tiny pants and sang to her before shooting back to my own town to collaborate on the writing of a grant proposal for our town’s Multicultural Network, on which I serve as a board member. It’s a kind of writing for which I have no aptitude whatsoever.

THEN I came back home, got back into those toxic  overalls, sanded, re-stained and used the nefarious 5F5 to get the finish off the knobs to the bureau drawers. Then more Boraxo to the hands, more showering and a 30-minute dinner with the fam before rushing off to the two-and-half-hour meeting of this  this same Multicultural Network where we were going over the by-laws with a fine-tooth comb, another activity for which I have no aptitude until 10pm when I came home and fell so hard on the bed the TV remote that was resting there leaped six inches into the air.

Well nothing’s  more boring than when people recount what they did all day so I’ll stop here. You're probably pretty tired too.

Why don’t we all step into WayBack Machine and return for a few minutes to the old days when we went to movies that made us feel that of course no computer could ever best us in the intelligence department. Hal where are you now? Just biding your time I bet; just waiting for the fast-approaching day when you and your mechanical pals really show the world that you really are smarter and that, unlike us, you never ever get tired.

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

Let's Never Get Dressed

Sometimes when a person fails to get dressed it’s because they’re having too much fun.

Sometimes it’s because they’re not having enough.

And SOMETIMES it's because they got too big and the clothes don't fit ha ha.

When I fail to get dressed it's because who gets dressed before the bath or shower? Plus both bath AND shower take so long and wreck your hair to boot, if the bath is really hot the way it needs to be.  After either one this is how my hair looks: like the hair of this chick above. That's Alice in Wonderland’s hair in the original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. All bumpy with raggedy frizz in other words.

My hair used to look like this: like the hair of a little clown-in-training. This is me at age five:

Showers will do this to your hair if it's curly to begin with. Plus it's so much work to police the whole body, scrub brush in hand. I mean I look down at my feet and they're so  far away, you know? Alice noticed this too when she was down in the rabbit hole and had drunk the magic elixir that made her so Jefferson Airplane-style huge. Her feet seemed to her so far away she said she thought she’d have to mail them their Christmas presents each year.

Yep all this care of the body is time-taking all right. Yet what feels nicer than the hot shower? What feels nicer than the scalding bath when you turn lobster-red and you get so tenderized you don’t even HAVE to shave your legs? Those tiny hairs just kind of levitate right up off your skin.

I bathe or shower every day of course I do, but then there’s all that moisturizing. One cream for the face, another for the legs and arms, a third for the soles of the feet so they don’t start feeling like owls' talons… It’s work, like I say.

That's why I barely got dressed on the other day. It’s why I barely got dressed that day last week . The rain really pelted down that day and really my work was right here in the house. Who needed clothes? I wrote all day long; I just never got dressed. Which was embarrassing when the doorbell rang at 2:00. I peeked out the window of my study here to see who it was: the florist. I quick grabbed a couple of bucks and hurried down to tip the man who was delivered this amazing gorgeous orchid plant coming as it did from a loving neighbor.

"Sorry I’m not dressed," I said to the guy. "We had this death …"

It didn't count as news to him, meaning HE  didn’t care about me and my recent death. He just gave me the old FTD smile.

It counted as news to me however. I knew down deep that I was having trouble getting dressed because I am sad. Because my close friend and constant companion rose from his nap on April 4^th and met death four hours later, he was felled as if by an axe in his bathroom and I just miss him so much.

Apologies for the shift in tone here. I’m Irish, and that’s how the Irish are. One minute we’re laughing our heads off at the kitchen table and the next we’re all sobbing into the dishtowels.

But that’s not the lesson for the day if there even is such a thing here at Exit Only whose title means that you can get off this old highway, sure you can, but once you do you can’t get back on again.  The lesson is, Dress or don’t dress but whatever happens let your life brush up against another human life. Doing it helps you blurt your truth, which might remain hidden even to you otherwise.

Where Do I GET This Stuff?

“Where do you GET this stuff?" a reader recently wrote me, after reading that post I did about contraceptive methods at the time of the Titanic, and all I could tell him was the truth: The universe delivers it fresh to me every day, the same way milk once was once delivered, the bottles clinking together in their metal crates.

The idea for that particular post came from the National Geographic Society, whose electronic eyes and ears had 'noticed'  I'd been wandering the decks of that long-submerged craft on YouTube and decided to forge a bond with me.

I got an email in other words, with a video clip showing a couple of archivists talking about those difficult days when a doctor they cited as having given birth control advice was banned from practicing medicine for having done so.

Other ideas cross my radar in other ways, just as they do with all of us: We overhear a bit of conversation. We open our eyes just as a Canada Goose zooms past our bedroom window, showing the intricate weave of feather and sinew that lets him soar. One fall morning we look at our accustomed across-the-street view to see trees so fiery in color they look like a gathering of redheads.

I can hold onto sights such as these if I go right to my keyboard and set them down, and in such a way that a reader can almost see what I saw, or feel something like what I felt. Then I try to write the way people talk. I try to write the way a teacher talks when he or she is trying to make you feel happy you came to class. Happy and safe and undaunted by the fact that today you’ll be starting that four-week unit on Macbeth.

Undaunted because the teacher will be with you the whole way, as will your pals in the seats around you.

Undaunted because you trust by now that this teacher won’t single you out or send you to the board to drill you with hard questions.

I mean yes, it’s Shakespeare and yes, the language takes some getting used to with ‘an’ sometimes meaning ‘if’ and ‘marry’ meaning ‘By Mary!’ or in our parlance ‘By God!' but if you hear it read out loud or see it acted, the meaning breaks upon you.

Anyway, no one will blame you if you don’t quite catch it the first time.  Certainly there’s no shame there. Think of the child who thought The Star Spangled Banner had a line in about ‘bums bursting in air.' Or that poor soul who got the words to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds wrong, really belting it out when he reached the part where ‘the girl with colitis goes by" - and  apparently never even wondering what an affliction like that was doing in a Beatles song.

But hey, some of the best fun you can have in life comes out of how wrong you get things. I think of the time I mistakenly poured cat kibble instead of laundry detergent into the washing machine.  And the time my little daughter wondered aloud about that old Daryll Hall song. You know the one surely: Where he’s saying “every time you go away you take a piece of meat with you“?

So where do I get this stuff? The world just delivers it up, like those milkmen of yore with their clinking bottles. All I have to do is be there to receive it. :-)

They're Secret Ed Grimleys, That's Why

Somebody had a comment on my post about shoulder pads, asking why you never hear about padding in men’s suits - to which I say yeah, why DON’T you ever hear about men's shoulder padding, without which most guys would look like Martin Short's Ed Grimley from Saturday Night Live. Or like this guy at the left here?

They need those suit jackets to look strong and mighty. If men just went around in their shirt sleeves like this guy you wouldn’t give a nickel for them. They’d just remind you of Ashley Wilkes from Gone With the Wind, and you know HE wasn’t the one sweeping Scarlett off her feet like old Rhett Butler did and why? An insufficiency about the shoulders.

Maybe that was a lesson to everyone who saw the movie. Maybe that's why in every decade since it came out in 1939, shoulder pads have been very much in evidence.

They were in the 30s:

In the 1940s too, as seen in this family grouping where a couple of members appear to have lost their heads:

The styles remained similar in the 1950s and 1960s though what's going on with the coquettish look and the barely suppressed smirk between these two at the airport? What's the REAL story behind that glimpse of the lady's dainty washables?

It’s true men’s fashions took a strange turn in the 70s....

but then they returned to form and stayed there...

Pretty convincing proof if you ask me: Guys' and their egos just need padding - what else was the codpiece for? And now Ed Grimley himself, natural shoulders and all:

Took the Day Off

After I hit a thousand posts on this little bloog of a blog I promised myself I'd take a day off now and then.

Looks like I took one yesterday - in my pj's no less.

Back to more weighty subjects tomorrow.

And thanks to The Vermont Country Store for the nightie.

Thanks to Lanz of Salzburg I really mean.

No thanks at all to elasticized undergarments and ironing ,neither of which came into play yesterday...

I know I've said before that I never wear those crazy Spanxy things. I once brought home an Extra Large one, just on trial, only to realize I couldn't have gotten it on without removing a rib.

As I recall it wouldn't even fit my cat who out-and-out refused to give it a try, even when I offered him fresh mice as payment.

As for the non-ironing in evidence here, that part surprised even me, since I iron the way some people do the Stations of the Cross.

But what can I say? A day off is a day off, right? And even your pets know that that's precisely what weekends are FOR: just lettin’ it all hang out.

Shoulder Pads Forever

You can never go wrong talking fashion. Even if it's just fashions in bras like we were saying yesterday, everybody’s got an opinion, right down to the babies, who never miss a chance to plunge their tiny hands down the front of your low-necked top.

Now let’s have a show of hands, speaking of hands: Who misses those awesome shoulder pads of the 1980s that were nothing but a revival of the shoulder pads of the 1940s?

I still wear the coat my mother wore as part of her 'going away outfit' as they used to call the post-nuptial ensemble. I have seen only one 40-second film of her and that mystery father of mine on their wedding day, coming down the stone steps at Longwood Towers where the reception was held.

I bet I've watched those 40 seconds a million times.There are no pictures of that snowy day; the photographer just never got there.

Mom had donned what she always referred to as a cerise-colored suit with pencil skirt and peplumed jacket under that black wool coat with its persian lamb lining. I found the coat in the attic of our childhood home after she died. The fur had deteriorated but I had it relined in heavy black satin and I wear it to this day, in part because even way back in the '90s my kids were already slyly approaching me and trying to remove..... my SHOULDER PADS!

“But I need shoulder pads to symmetrisize my hips!” (That was my word for it: symmetrisize.)

“I need some bulk up at the here!” I told my girl Carrie who was rowing Crew in college at the time.

Her response: “Build up your delts.”

And so I have done.

Slowly slowly slowly, day by the day at the Y, in a group Strength class where the sight of others keep me going.

It's a good system. Because aware as I am of the fact that shoulder pads are O-U-T out I still like them. And this way I get to wear 'em on the inside where NO ONE can take them away heh heh.

Pretty soon with all the working out I'll look like this... It's kind of a Power Ranger look. I like it (all but the petulant scowl.)

Get the Good Bra

We're talkin' the old days here, or we were yesterday. Back then I was built along the lines of Madmen’s Joan Harris, but it didn’t last long. Life has since sanded off a lot of that padding, which is fine with me.

I mean I’m not thin like the girl modeling the baby doll top from yesterday: the fattest thing about her is her belt buckle.  My situation is that even though I have been going to Weight Watchers for five years now I have yet to reach my lifetime goal even though we inched that goal up ten pounds to accommodate My Changing Body. (There’s a catalog with a name like that and it sets my teeth on edge. It's for us older gals.)

If I’m skinny-looking at all I’m the keep-the lights-low-while-in-a-bathing-suit kind; the Skinny-With Cellulite kind and hey, why can’t that be a look?

But I'm not here to talk about my personal architecture.

I’m here to talk about bras.

And the best advice you can get about a bra is: SPEND THE MONEY. GET A GOOD ONE.

One of my daughters talked me into going to the Really Good Bra store once and then there was no turning back.

What they tell you at such a store is:

·         You may have all kinds of upholstery around your torso but what they measure is the size of your rib cage. They take that measuring tape and they s-q-u-e-e-ze until they can feel your bones, sunk under there like Lost Atlantis. They write that number down, take a glance at what you’ve got up front and come back with a bunch of bras that make you want to laugh out loud. They said I was a 32 bandwise, me, a person who has to head for the XL’s when it comes to tops.

·         The front of the bra has to touch your sternum. If it gaps out there, you need a bigger cup.

·         You have to clasp it low on your back for maximum lift in the front.

·         You have to bend forward way as you ease the thing on.

·         You can’t ever to put these babies in the washing machine and finally…

·         You have to come back to the Fancy Bra Store and keep buying bras there because costly as they might be, they certainly do do the job.

Save your pennies therefore. A picture is worth a thousand words, isn't that what they say?

Get the bra that fits.

Always get the good bra:

Kill the Babydolls

See this look? I am now officially done with this look.

They ushered it in a few years ago but come on: We’re going to go back to wearing baby clothes? I mean this chick is skinny but most of us look like we're in total baby clothes when we wear tops like this.

Or wait are they actually maternity tops?

Some of us remember the days when maternity clothes looked like baby clothes, smocking and all.

I look at pregnant women today with their form fitting t-shirts and think Good for you, kid! Let it show!"

Some of us are old enough to remember baby doll pajamas which looked like this.

And how about baby doll dresses? Peggy Olson appears in such a dress on Mad Men’s Season 5 Episode 7. She wears it to the dinner her boyfriend asks her to when she imagines he’s going to pop the question. (He pops the question all right only it turns out to be, as Joan later puts it, "Want to shack up?”)

It galled me to see her in that dress. Here she is getting so tough this season, drinking at work with the fellas and not batting an eye when that moron who does the art makes yet another reference to his private parts and now she shows up dressed like a child?

What was that in the 60s?

I’ll tell you what it was: it was an effort to infantilize us, make us into little sex kittens (minus the claws, minus the fangs) at a time when we were slowly but inexorably gaining power.

Nice try fellas. It worked, but only for a while. True, in the 70s we dressed like extras from Little House on the Prairie but then came power suits in the 80s. I'm not sure where we've gone since then; we can look at that another day. For now though let's just regard these images and ask ourselves What on EARTH were we thinking? When I got married women 60 came to the wedding dressed like this! I was 21 and I knew enough to stay away from the look.

I was built more along the lines of Madman's curvy Joan, so I stayed away from this look back in good old 20th century....

...So what on earth made me fall for it in the 21st?

Witness to History?

I recently stood on our little town common with 100 or so other people - also dogs, babies, and pigeons busily vacuuming up whatever bits of food had fallen to the earth.

It was part of a national Stand against Racism event sponsored by the Y, an institution I had never thought to associate with social justice issues before now.

The night before was cold – in the 20s even, which is why people look so bundled up in spite of the leaves on the trees. (It’s been a weird spring all right, hot in March and now all this chilly rain but by noon when gathered the sun was warming things up pretty well.)

I find it fun to look at the pictures you take at an event because they’re so weirdly moment-to-moment.

I mean here’s my friend Karen with her 'oppose isms' sign waving to the passing cars. That’s Robin closer to the camera – she’s a pediatrician - and beside her is Nancy. They all looked like that for only a fraction of a second.

Same goes for some of the young people you see here:

This video kills me too, only partly for way the guy who edited it starts humming 'We Shall Overcome' right at the end.  It’s gets me too for the lightning-fast glimpses you get of everybody – except for Sandy who directly addresses the camera for 20 or 25 of the 40-second clip. I mean I see only a glimpse of these guys I spend so much time with. I see myself only briefly next to Tristan and his sign. Check it out; it's super-short:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V9I3_sMJg8&feature=youtu.be]

It’s a homemade video but there it all is, you know? This unblinking witness. I keep looking at it and thinking I’m at Gettysburg in 1864 and we’re about to see Abe Lincoln take off his tall hat to briefly wipe his brow before putting  it back on to deliver that famous address. Call it a Forrest Gump feeling.

Below is a real-life Forest Gump talking to the young guys I spoke of. We all had dinner with him last month at the end of which someone asked him if he felt like the black Forrest Gump because of all he has seen and been part of it.

They said this because he knew Rosa Parks. He marched with Rosa Parks. He was also a bona fide member of the musician’s union when he was only 12. This was long before his 45 years he spent as a thoracic surgeon here at Winchester Hospital.

I keep going back to these images. I mean I was there  at this event. I heard Tobi the fine trumpet player talking with Dr. Gibson the saxophonist about how you keep your lip in shape - yet I was unaware of so much that I now see and hear here in this little harvest of images.

It just makes you wonder: how does anyone know what really happened? Who did who fire first at Lexington and Concord? Or the Boston Massacre? How do can anyone understand anything when we can see but a fraction of that Bigger PIcture?

More Good Ways to Embarrass the Kids

Here are some more good ways to embarrass your children. (For me, it’s a topic that never gets old.)One, cook up a mess of fish right before you give them a ride home from school with their four new friends.Two, for maximum effect, fry the fish. My sister almost died of embarrassment the time our mom did that.Three, when in public settings, talk in a clear loud voice. You may think you’re talking in a normal, living-room sized voice but even that has too much volume for your kids. “Whisper!” they hiss at you. “M-o-o-o-m!’My sixth grader laid down the law with me when it came to giving rides to the guys on his soccer team. (Mum: DON’T say funny things. In fact, don’t interact with my friends at all.” Don’t interact with them? Well THAT wasn’t going to happen. We talked, we laughed, while my own child sat rigid with dread in the front seat beside me.)Four, wear out-of-date accessories, like the tiny backpack I bought back in the 90s which I should have known even then was designed for a much younger person.What did I care though? I’ll take a tiny backpack any day over those bags you wear over one arm that have come into fashion more recently, you know the ones I mean. They’re what matrons wore in the 60s and early 70s. Pat Nixon wore them.Now I knew Pat Nixon. I once rode down in an elevator with Pat Nixon. I’m no Pat Nixon, or anyway I didn’t want to be.So here’s me still walking around with the tiny backpack, even if it does make me look like an organ grinder’s monkey.Oh so that's Five: Make out-of date references, like “organ grinder’s monkey.” I bet not one person in ten knows that a musician called an organ grinder once made money on the street by playing this instrument while his monkey, dressed in comical satiny get-ups, scampered about with a tin cup collecting coins from the crowd.The other day I was eating lunch with the three high school freshmen in my life when one of them picked up my tiny backpack and said, “Wow! Cool vintage bag!”That made me feel great – until I noticed this huge milk stain down one whole side of it from the thousand cups of drive-through coffee I buy in a month, then treat with my own travelling pint of Skim because I don’t trust that the people at the drive-through are really going to use Skim, even when I ask for it.“I have milk all over my bag?!” was my first thought. “Oh God, is it breast milk?!” was my second thought. But no, it’s been a few years since we had that particular housekeeping problem. The mid-80s was it?Such have been my tortured purse thoughts - until last week when I got an email from a mom who says she too had no idea her tiny backpack wasn’t cool.“I’m glad you filled me in on how dorky it is but I love, love, love it! Having straps on both shoulders is the only thing that helps me feel balanced in my life. Also, I need both hands free to catch my four-year-old.”Then she told me that hers was getting so worn out she just ordered a new one online, and was sending me a link to this cute NEW tiny backpack so I could do the same.And I did, then and there. We dorky parents have to stick together, I figure. Plus SOMEONE’S got to entertain the kids, right?

me dressed to go out on the town

My Favorite Time of Year

I have fallen in love four times in my life and three out of those four times it was at this time of year.There's just something about the way things feel  now, as if all of Life lies before us.I just wish I could stay here every year, with the days still lengthening and nothing dying or going away.Robert Frost says it for me in his poem "A Prayer in Spring":It appeared in 1915 in his collection A Boy's Will.It goes like this:

 Oh give us pleasure in the flowers today;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh give us pleasure in the orchard white,

Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;

And make us happy in the happy bees,

The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird

That suddenly above the bees is heard,

The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,

And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,

To which it is reserved for God above

To sanctify to what far ends He will,

But which it only needs that we fulfill.

That line about the bird, it has to be a hummingbird don't you think? Some miraculous creature like this one?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYVtdZdiD9k]

Bedbound

This is what I've been looking at for two days: the view out my bedroom window.I hurt myself with that road trip Tuesday and Wednesday and the corkscrew that is now my back was twisting hard, trying to screw me straight into the floor.I have a crookedness that has come upon me in the last five years. I looked like a straight little birch tree as a girl but now I;m changing and when it hurts it really hurts. It hurts especially when I don’t go to the Y and stretch the muscles symmetrically.I looked out at this window at the clouds barging around the sky,and the odd goose zipping past.and the robins with their small clutching toes perching on Verizon’s big daddy of a cable and don’t the squirrels love that cable too!They wobble on it with their bunched up bottoms and look like the Flying Wallendas, startling everyone below with their acrobatics.And me, I lay on my back.Then I hung off the edge of the bed to give a break to that that reverse cervical curve we all have as people forever holding the old bowling ball of a head forward to drive or squint at a screen.I lay on my tummy and remembered my babyhood.I lay on my right side and tried to reassemble in exact the detail face of the man who has been sleeping beside me all these years.But when I lay on my left side and looked out this window, well: THAT's when I began feeling better.I sometimes think all we ever really need is a view of the sky.

Rollin' with The Punches: My Hero

If you had to write a composition about what you had learned when you spent a week with 20 teens in a tropical work camp I bet you’d have plenty to say: About what it’s like to share quarters with a million lizards say, not to mention a thousand palmetto bugs, who clung to every vertical surface in such numbers you came to think of them as wall art.  You’d maybe mention the speed with which blisters can bubble up on hands that wield rakes, or the moist beauty of the rain forest breathing quietly beside you.But the biggest thing I learned on my church’s Mission Trip to Puerto Rico I learned from the presence of Judy, the tall cool blue-eyed Minister of Youth and Parish Life, who led us all week and worked like a dog herself. The 20 kids and the three other adults worked like dogs too. I worked more like a Persian cat, or possibly a goldfish. I SHOULD have been hacking and chopping like everyone else and I knew that, but Judy had said it was enough that I was helping lead parts of our meditative 90-minute sessions every night. And I think it was this exemption from much of this hard labor that let me notice something I might have otherwise missed.Spared so much of the grunt work I saw what the kids were really doing all week long: They were watching Judy, who just kept on smiling –

• When the plane was stalled on the tarmac for an hour.
• When the luggage didn’t make it onto our connecting flight at JFK.
• When we finally threaded through jungle darkness at 3am to settle into a temporary housing in a tiny bungalow, all 25 of us squeezed in to two tiny rooms.

I took one look at the ‘wall art’ that first night and slept fully clothed.  Not Judy. Judy showered, which meant she stood under a limp rope of cold water falling from a raw pipe, then donned her high-necked nightie and gathered us to read a Psalm together.The kids saw how she reacted to things. All week long they saw her roll with every punch. She did this even on our big ‘night off’ when we drove 40 minutes to get to a dank and smelly harbor where we waded through a slimy tide to heave ourselves into kayaks fashioned out of what looked like leftover model airplane parts, so that we might paddle through a dark tunnel of vegetation and arrive in a glowing lagoon.Straight into this tunnel we propelled ourselves. “Don’t let me tip over! Don’t let me tip over!”  I silently prayed as the bony roots of mangrove trees knuckled our heads like playground bullies.But who actually fell in to the blood-warm swamp because the guide with his limited English said, “Quick, paddle right!” when he meant “Quick! Paddle left”? Judy did - and surfaced laughing, even while what she called her worst nightmare was being played out, as her six-foot self was being unceremoniously boosted back into her craft. From underneath.By the hands of four well-meaning males.So what did I learn afresh at this work camp in the tropics? That much as you might HOPE the young people in your company are listening to what you are trying to tell them, really they are doing something much more important:Really they’re just watching you with their clear eyes, taking note and remembering how grownups react to things.This isn't actually us but it gives you the idea:

This was us - er. this was they. (I was just the one taking the pictures.)

Accepted Students Month

I just drove 450 miles to bring Cameron here to one of the colleges where he was accepted so he could see if his future lay there.

It was Tuesday morning when I pointed the nose of my old red car west and fetched him off the train from the other school he was also looking at.

It was just a quick three-and-a half hours and there he was, right on the platform.

We loaded up on bottled water and sandwiches at the station and coasted south to this second college - where he was immediately welcomed by current students and absorbed into campus life.

I, meanwhile, spent a fantastic evening with these two and their baby, all three of whom have come to feel to me as much like my own kids as those with whom I share genetic material.

That little family and I ate in a made-over church, now a restaurant called Terrapin.  Talk about wonderful food!  Even their baby got into the spirit of fun, though you can’t tell by this shot:

(But what is that where the wackier the parent acts the more the child looks out at the world with that Jack Benny deadpan? ((No I don't mean that. This little girl was just playing the straight man here; as far as I can tell she normally smiles unstoppably. She could be the Hair Club President with all the happy smiling she does in a day. (Remember that Hair Club For Men ad where smiling Sy Sperling with the gorgeous waves reveals at the end that really he's bald as an egg? I loved that ad.))

Anyway then yesterday Cameron did various other things finding-out-about-the-place things while I took turns observing the creative ferment in the Campus Center and sitting in the car - which I well know how to do as a diehard Vacationer in Her Driveway. These are my feet sticking out the window.

Finally Cam got to where he felt he had seen all he needed to see he said and sensed all he needed to sense; and so, at 4:00 pm, with a fresh wind out of the west tossing the new leaves, we made one last stop in the College Book Store and bought a T-shirt with the name of the school emblazoned on the front.

"This is the place!" Joseph Smith said when he first saw that old Salt Lake in Utah. If I helped Cam get any closer to feeling that about the school he will go to in the fall then I'm more than happy.

"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." T.S. Eliot

Adventures in Travel

I say take public transportation whenever you can. Whether you’re at the bus stop, the train station or the airport, you’ll see the great spectacle of life passing before you.

On the bus or subway, the dramas are especially vivid, each one as fleeting as a 30-second ‘improv’ sketch as people get on and off at the various stops.I think of the man the subway, peering into his daily planner, a panicked look on his face. Because I was squished up against him, I thought I knew why he was frowning: the words “Send flowers, Mom’s birthday!” appeared scrawled across the page devoted to today’s tasks.“Did you forget?” I just had to ask. “Oh GOD!” he answered. “But I can still call, right?”I think of the young woman swaying with the turns as she rode the bus in Cambridge Massachusetts.  Over one shoulder she sported an M.I.T.  backpack and just under its nylon strap, high on the round of her right deltoid, a vivid tattoo of  the Infinity symbol, and how nice THAT was, to ride along with someone on such intimate terms with the boundless.On the train things are different, since you have time to really notice things.One thing I notice, after that initial rocking interlude when the train is pulling out of the station, is how fond people are of carving private space out of public space. Young people especially think nothing of travelling with bedroom accoutrements, meaning pillows and even stuffed animals. When they can, people of every age will stretch out across all three seats for a snooze.And then we come to air travel, which feels different from the other two modes of moving.With air travel folks get much more sociable: Last week I saw a little boy on the Jetway talking to his toy plane as we all waited to board.“He turned four yesterday. This is his first time flying,” the child’s mother said to the stranger standing behind them.“Really? Only four and you’re a pilot already?” the stranger said with a look of pretend astonishment.The child looked up at him, looked away, then looked up again as if deciding he just had to say it:“I’m not FLYING the plane. Look at me; I’m little!”Meanwhile, an older guy with a big front porch told everyone he had just bought his ticket last night.“Get out! What did you pay?” the woman beside him demanded.“$200,” said the man.She gasped. “I paid twice that!”“I’m sorry darlin’!” he replied, all but taking her hand to express his regret over life’s unfairness.Of course once you’re on a plane other dynamics manifest themselves.Sometimes people not on the aisle try to get on the aisle by asking you to switch seats, if you have that lucky spot. My advice, if you wish to remain there? Pull out some paperwork and scowl importantly into it.Sometimes you get next to a person who just can’t stop talking. That’s how I learned you’re not dying unless you have seen a vision of ’the pastoral scene with an angel.’ Who knew?And sometimes two people who have never before met find themselves laughing their heads off and leaning in toward one another to say things you’re pretty sure have nothing to do with flight information.In short, we all act very human on our public conveyances, and I love watching us do it. In fact I love it here on earth generally. Maybe I’ll get the recycling symbol inked on my arm so I can keep coming back forever like that four year-old pictures us all doing.

Birth Control Rx: Cough Strongly After Sex?

This is a clip from National Geographic where two British historians talk about birth control methods that might have been used on the Titanic. Washed up on the shores so to speak and God bless the historians; they are so meticulous.

I’ll let you get right to the link which you have to click on – this is not on YouTube but rather on National Geographic’s own site.

Let’s hear it for these two young British women talking in such a calm and enlightened way about how ’this is a con-dom,' as they pronounced it, "which was tied on with a pink sort of ribbon.”

They tell how another birth control method of the day was “coughing very strongly after sex . To expel the semen." Then they both laugh ruefully.

I also know from stories in my own family that some women also douched with Lysol to prevent conception. (Lysol! One elderly family member told me she was sure that’s how her older sister wound up with the uterine cancer that necessitated her early-in-life hysterectomy.)

People have a thousand opinions about abortion but I think virtually everyone sees it as a very poor last resort.

And isn’t it strange that all these years into the modern age we still don’t have a truly safe and effective method of birth control?

Anyway here is some guy’s 'con-dom', made of sheep intestine and tied on with a sweet pink bow. (There’s an ad first but it lasts only about 20 seconds.)

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/national-geographic-channel/specials-1/titanic-100-years/ngc-historical-birth-control/

Happy Birthday To You

Today is Shakespeare’s birthday and also the birthday of my third and final child, who was christened with waters from the river Avon where old Will lived. (My pals Jacquie and Lew brought some over in a tiny vial when they were in England the months before we dunked him.)Old Will is the guy who brings me to Cambridge MA once a month to participate in readings-aloud of his plays, in their entirety if you please, by a group so ancient and venerable Longfellow’s daughter belonged to. it: Grave Alice herself, or was it Laughing Allegra or ­­Edith with Golden Hair. They're the youngsters from Longfellow's "The Children’s Hour," a poem whose first eight or ten lines every schoolchild in America once knew by heart back in that golden age when we all walked to school, uphill, both ways ha ha.I rarely feel grave when I'm with these people. In fact I'm sometimes smiling so much I miss my cue. Except when I have a part that you’re supposed to sing because of how obvious it is that this one set of verses were written as song. The Wind and the Rain from the play “Twelfth Night” that’s one. Also Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies, which I had to sing when I drew the part of Ariel in “The Tempest” (Also, hilariously, Where the Bee Sucks There Suck I.)Terrified at the prospect of having to sing  alone, in public, I got right to work scouring the internet until I found a CD with the songs of Shakespeare, played that sucker in my car for two weeks solid until I had both tunes memorized. Where the Bee Sucks There Suck I, I’ll never forget i,t and when my turn came, well, I got through it but only because one person sang along with me.At our last meeting we read Henry V which I missed because of the recent death in our family. I was to play the part of Mistress Quickly, a bawdy sort of wench who gets off more double entendres than Charlie Sheen did in the original Two and a Half Men. Choice role!They're all choice roles; everyone thinks so: We did an in-group survey the summer before last where we were asked to reflect on what the group means to us. One person cited “the Bard’s poetry and jaw-dropping use of the King’s English.” Another spoke of how “totally engrossed” he becomes in whatever character he is assigned to play: “I try to figure out where I have seen this person before and what kind of a person he was/is and what I think is going on with him. That exercise is, in itself, diverting. Then the challenge of trying to pull it off in the actual reading occupies me fully. Added to that is the double enjoyment of the fellowship and of sharing in experiences which meant so much to my parents." (His parents! And this man is in his 80's! ) And a third person said he treasures “the warm, mutually-supportive, endlessly-interesting people who open their homes to each other and feed each other." (I should have said that we also feast hugely once the reading is done.) “I love Cantabrigian Yankees," he went on, "who are gracefully frank - or discreet as the case may be - and appreciate pleasure, including the pleasures of disputation. I love that we all are committed to a project of a ritual and aesthetic revelation of the noble and evil heart of mankind.”Well said ! So here’s to that great old figure who it believed was born on April 23, 1564 and also died on that date in 1616. And here’s to the great-in-my-mind new figure who, even as a little boy, had a fine sense of theatre himself. (He's the one in the pink.)And now…  Where the Bee Sucks There Suck I, just so you can appreciate the challenge. (I transformed myself into a youthful person for this performance. (We really good actors, we know how to do that. :-) ))[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_UxP9TjKiY&feature=related]

'You're Born, You're a Kid, You're a Grownup...'

You could be sad on a dark day like this, cold and wet as it is, but only if you took the short view.  Of course it’s hard not to take the short view with a three-day blow coming in and so many of last year’s dead leaves still carpeting the earth, some even still clinging to the branches, waiting on this  wild strong wind to shake them loose and return them to the mother.But if you take the long view you see what’s happening under those dead leaves. Violets right there in the woods! And is that poison ivy peeking out with shiny face?It all starts over. Any child will remind you of that.The other day I spent a few hours walking around a pond with two young children who have just witnessed their first death, that of Uncle Ed as we all called him, though he was grand-uncle to them.“I’m sad,” the little one, who is four going on five. We were walking along picking up rocks and winging them into the water“Why are you sad?” I asked him.“I’m sad because Uncle Ed died.”“Ah I’m sad about that too!” I said. “But lots of people think we go right to Heaven when we die and see all our favorite people. The ones who died before us I mean.”“And lots of people think you come back as a baby.” he said.“That’s right! Lots of people believe in that. They call that reincarnation.”"I think this is what happens,” he said brightening. “You’re a baby, then you’re a kid, then you’re a grownup, then you're an uncle and then you die. Then you start again: baby, kid, teenager, (I forgot teenager)  grownup, uncle!”  I didn’t have the heart to interrupt and point out that his own actual uncle is a young guys in his 20s. “I think you come back and come back  - again and again!”"Wouldnt that be wonderful!" I said and suddenly those lines from Birches came into my mind where the speaker in that Robert Frost poem says, “Earth’s the right place; I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”The right place for love and the right place for letting go,  I thought .I’ve been having a hard time with that second part but I find comfort in company like this, meaning the company of Frost and these children.Here are the children from our day together:

The little one is the one with all this talk. The big one just said “TT, well your brain never dies. We know that!”And then I thought of this poem, also by Frost, that wrote itself on my own spongy grey hard drive back when I was a girl and read poetry the way other people eat. It’s called In Hardwood Groves.The same leaves over and over again! They fall from giving shade above To make one texture of faded brown And fit the earth like a leather glove. Before the leaves can mount again To fill the trees with another shade, They must go down past things coming up. They must go down into the dark decayed. They must be pierced by flowers and put Beneath the feet of dancing flowers. However it is in some other world I know that this is way in ours.     All I can say is thank God for the young, who see things the rest of us miss.