Exit Only
“Because once you depart from this one-way road of life, there is just no getting back on.”
Little Orphaned Undies & Other Tales
I bumped over into the pathological with my too-busy ways this past weekend when I signed up to be in two places at exactly the same time.
Even I knew that was crazy.
I had signed up to work booths at our annual Town Day both as a volunteer with our local ABC program and as a Board Member with the Multicultural Network, both from 11:00 to 1:00. How was I going to do that?
Also an out-of-town colleague had written me the night before asking me to stop by the bookstore booth with as many ABC guys as I could collar so we could all meet Brian Walker, author of Black Boy White School. Oh and then there was the two-hour graduation ceremony in the middle of everything.
This was all the day after I had three young male house guests, all members of the Class of 2011, all joyfully reunited now after a year at their different colleges and here to see their brothers from the Class of 2012 graduate. From my bed I had heard the popping of Nerf Guns ‘til 2:00 in the morning. It was like being in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. When I staggered downstairs four hours later to make the coffee, every rug in the place sat slightly askew from their circuits they had run to catch and shoot each other.
They were all still sleeping when I tossed my water bottle in my backpacks and hurried downtown to keep my promises. It was spitting rain and when I got there not only was I damp on the outside, I was damp on the inside: the water bottle, poorly closed, had spilled all over the inside of my backpack.
I looked for but never did find the Network booth. I did work the ABC booth, met the author Brian Walker and brought one of the ABC scholars to meet him too. I also bought his book, bought Sourpatch Kids for the boys, attended graduation, and drove out into the country with David to see family members.
This took place on Sunday and I haven't stopped yet. There was my column to file, food to buy and cook same as always and all the linens from my young male houseguests to wash , along with that pair of Pirates of the Caribbean underpants I found over by the bookcase. A truly dashing pair of boxers, are they not?
All these days later, I still feel jangled in part because when that water bottle spilled it wet one of my electronic devices whose little screen immediately clouded over like a cataract in the eye of an old hound dog.
“Bury it in a bowl of uncooked rice till the moisture gets absorbed,” one of the house guests advised me. "Don't try turning it on until three days have passed!"
So today is the day I get to take it out and make that try. If it’s dead it'll be a lesson for me all right and one I should embroider onto a pillow:
“You’re Only One Person” it should say on one side and on the other “Slow Down Babe. Nothing Beautiful Happens to Hurriers.”
Litt
Worth the Exhaustion? OH yeah.
These are the busiest weeks of the year for your active-duty parents, what with recitals, and proms, the big Spring Songfest and good old Yay for Art Night. Watching them juggle everything reminds me of what humor columnist Erma Bombeck said when someone asked how her generation of stay-at-home moms managed, back in the time when women were pretty much on their own in the parenting department.
“We drank!” she quipped.
She was kidding of course; no parent could maintain the habit of daily cocktails and orchestrate the movements of even one child, never mind more than one. Not in this day and age, when being a parent is like being an air traffic controller. Fail to keep your signals straight and you’ll have your Pop Warner running back racing for the goal posts in his baby sister’s tutu.
So parents are bound to look a little rough around the edges. But what I wonder is, what’s my excuse, with my own kids all grown and gone? I asked myself this just yesterday when I shot out of the bed at 5:30 in the morning and didn’t sink back into it until almost midnight.
I asked, but I knew the answer, really. The answer is that four years ago I decided I wasn’t going to keep withdrawing more and more from the life of my community, just because my children were gone. Instead, I was going to dig back in.
In my early 30s, I began volunteering with my town’s local chapter of the National Program for A Better Chance which identifies academically talented students of color who, with their family’s support and blessing, leave home to attend rigorous public and private high schools all around the country.
In my town’s program, I started out working on the Student Selection Committee. Then old Dave and I offered ourselves as host parents to one of the young men. (All the ABC scholars in our town are male.) I spent two years as the program’s Writing Tutor and finally became Head of Enrichment and General Fun, if you can call it that.
I vividly recall that autumn when, to raise a little money, the guys decided to harvest a thousand pink hydrangea blossoms from my yard which they spent weeks fashioning into wreaths and festooning with delicate white lace ribbons so as to offer them for sale at a local crafts fair. Then they divvied up the profits and each one bought a Walkman, (which will tell you how long ago THIS was!)
Those boys were all born in the Nixon years. Could I really go back now and work with kids born in the … Clinton years?
I could and I did, and today, as the Chair of Student Life, I am more involved in the program than ever I was before.
Together the 8 guys and I catch live theater and we do Go-Karts. We Laser Tag and we hit the museums. As often as their academic and sports commitments allow, we drive in to the city where they tutor young children in a nationally known after-school writing program.
It’s all fun of course , but I almost think the best fun comes when we’re just driving or walking or taking the bus to all these places.
Sometimes, riding home after tutoring the little kids, every last one of these teens falls dead asleep, and my car goes utterly quiet but for the soulful croonings of everyone’s favorite, Bob Marley. It's then that I feel a real bond with today’s younger parents, who I'm pretty sure, also say to themselves what I say: 'Hey I can catch up on sleep later. This is too good to miss out on!'
Photo by Mark Flannery ©MarkFlannery.com
Who am I to Talk?
It sounds as though I was criticizing the nuclear (pun, pun) family in yesterday's fallout shelter post. which is pretty funny considering MY family was never exactly the Family of the Year as you can see from this photo.
By the looks of things the five-year-old was slated to become a natural born killer but no. He' grew up onto a productive citizen, like most people.
The girl held at gunpoint used to cut holes in the fronts of her pre-school trousers so her knees could see where they were going as she explained to us; she's fine today too and is the only person I know who held down a demanding fulltime job in the field of project management while doing fulltime work toward a Master's Degree at Harvard.
The oldest boy was our former ABC host son and though he was always teasing the 13-year old beside him, threatening to shave off her eyebrows as she slept, he went on to become a whiz in his field: he manages (and if you don’t think THAT job is where the runner meets the road well you’re just not paying very close attention to the way the world works these days.)
The 13-year-old used to sneak out onto the front porch roof and shinny down the posts to be with her friends. Then she got to high school and took a load of Latin, majored in Econ and Africana studies in college and now works for the father beside her in the wonderful world of foam.
That's me with the black hair God gave me and the fake-gold earring glittering brightly at the dead center of the shot. Not sure how I turned out though I do know that I’m still carrying my water bottle around in my bag with the cap screwed on wrong and then being surprised when it spills all over the interior.
God knows how I'll turn out.
The hamster took off two seconds after the picture was taken, never to be seen again, and the cat - well, the cat we had to give back to the non-destroy shelter, because she formed the habit of climbing the lace curtains in the living room and peeing down on us all from there,
Just a moment in time, as lived by the far-from-perfect Marottas. with whom I'd be happy to live in a fallout shelter with anytime.
The Way It Was
Check out this picture of a fallout shelter circa 1960 which to me defines just about everything I DON’T miss about family life in the early 1960:
The father: humorless. No doubt bossy.The mother: smiling in as pretty a way as she can muster as the wife of this glum autocrat.The kids: as blank-looking as three empty chalkboards. Maybe it was life under Dad’s roof that did this to them, or the Children Should Be Seen and Not Heard rule some of us remember so well. All I know is I look at this picture and I THANK GOD I married a man nothing like this man and that my kids were far from being dead-in-the-eyes but rather were frisky and outspoken.I look at it and think, No wonder the Youth Movement blossomed, seeded in this kind of soil and basically blew the roof off a scant six or seven years later.
Fun in the Fallout Shelter
I guess you can get used to anything and learn to call it normal. I sort of saw this last week when our grandson was so sick in the hospital: Instead of waking up and thinking "Aarrgh! How will I do all my work today?" or "Why do I get these crazy foot cramps after an hour of ironing?" it seemed almost normal to be wondering “Has his fever gone down at all? Did his mother and he get any sleep at all there in Room 608?” (Well not really normal. That famous stress hormone was coursing through my body like an electric current but you get what I'm saying.)
And speaking of stress of stress hormones, check out this rosily-imagined scenario cooked up for a Sunday supplement from more than 50 years ago. This article too attempts to normalize something pretty awful.
It has in it a shot of a father-son team cheerily pounding stakes into the ground to make the shelter. “A Lad and His Dad Enjoying the Weekend” the caption might as well read.
And here in the picture we see the iconic ‘teen-age girl’ blabbing cheerfully away on the phone. It’s after the blast of course – she’s inside the shelter - but she's happy, doin' what gals do, is the idea, chatting away on a phone that somehow, miraculously, still functions. Gossiping about the upcoming record hop is the idea. Never mind that she's in the bunker.
Under a naked light bulb.
With clouds of radiation swirling around just outside the walls - to say nothing of the splintered trees and the dead birds, who left only their shadows behind.
Pity the poor ad agency the government gave this 'campaign' to!
I suppose it's pretty brilliant for the way, in a horrifying time, it comforts with familiar images. Not that I remember much about that time. The year these fears were really flying I was busy attaching pom-poms to the handles of my goofy balloon-tired Schwinn to get ready for the big Bike Parade.
I do notice one thing in the picture below kind of raises my eyebrows though: Check out the shot below of one family's attractive new backyard shelter which doubles as a kind of rec area.
The father’s takin’ it easy on a lounge chair.
The two boys are lounging around playing shuffleboard.
And what about the mother?
The mother is working. The mother is toiling away like Noah in his post-flood garden, doubtless worrying over what to about dinner that night.
It kind of sets my teeth on edge but I guess a blast was dealt to that scenario in the years soon to follow. And it wasn't the nuclear kind now, was it? :-)
Food Fights
A division has opened up between my man and me, even after all these years of marriage: It seems what he really craves is pasta, something I have never heard him say once in all the years since we first met in the days when Old Tricky-Dick Nixon was still flashing his hunch-shouldered victory sign to a puzzled nation.This son of an old Yankee mother apparently adores the stuff. News to me! I myself meanwhile would be fine if I never saw a squiggle of pasta again. What I like is a potato, which, it further seems, he doesn’t even regard as food and would no more pull from the fridge to cook and eat than he would reach for that little yellow box of baking soda that’s supposed to keep the butter from smelling like onions.All these years into the marriage and I’m just hearing all this. Plus there’s more: it doesn’t end with the starches: I no longer cook a whole lot of your red meats like beef and lamb, or even your pink ones like pork, but when I do prepare these meats I roast them. I figured what man doesn’t like a big thud of meat on the platter?But I figured wrong, because last week I bought this nice pork tenderloin. I rubbed it with a freshly quartered onion and sea salt, then roasted it at what I regarded as the perfect temperature so that when it was done the outside had that lovely caramel color and the inside was still juicy.And what did the man say on seeing the leftover portion in the fridge the next night? “Well that tasted kind of blah. You need to do something else with these meats that you roast.”Can you imagine? Then he added insult to injury by telling me it’s because my ancestry is Irish and all the Irish know how to do is boil a piece of meat until it turns as grey as the fog over London. Fooey. He’s just not over the fact that my mother and aunt cooked a roast every single time we went there for a meal but it wasn’t GREY for heaven’s sake. It was kind of PINKY-grey, but with the frozen squash and frozen peas they always served with it, I sure thought the plate was sufficiently colorful.Almost 25 years my mom has been gone and still he won’t eat either squash or peas. His idea of the five food groups? Pasta, tomato sauce, cheese any kind of cold cuts, even the kind that’s shot through with disks of solid fat and a giant bags of salty snacks. taken as a chaser. That’s what he would eat if left to his devices.By contrast, my diet consists of fruits and vegetables, peppered with an occasional two-ounce rib chop of lamb; enough salad greens to stuff a sofa with; and so much broiled salmon it’s a wonder my hair isn’t pink.Thus our common food ground is slipping out from under us.Oh and here’s the real kicker: I’m the one with the high cholesterol.“You’ll be burying me!” he always says. “Men die first.”"I sure hope not," I say back. "But if I’m the one to go first, just dig a hole and bury me in salad. (Dressing on the side, same as always.")
Still Our Baby
Today I'm taking some time away from the usual weighty drivel since it’s the birthday of our girl Annie, seen here (as a baby on the day of her christening) in the arms of my old pal Kathy, one of a small group of women with whom I wouldn’t have survived those early parenting years.
Annie was the second-born so we didn’t teach the daylights out of her like I had done with her poor big sister. We just enjoyed her.
Like any second-born, she had the sense not to take parental expectation too seriously: She told us about the big Fourth Grade project on Native American Myths just hours before it was due, choosing as ‘her’ myth “Why the Buffalo Fears the Chipmunk,” and drawing for her buffalo a wobbly picture of a seeming mammal that bore an eerie resemblance to Herbert Hoover and using for her chipmunk our hamster-of-the-moment, decked out with tiny Indian props.
The next morning at school the hamster ate the box, Herbert and all, and escaped its shoebox to make mayhem in the classroom. Everyone loved it.
Annie knew even then how to take things in stride.
She also had amazing powers of observation. Such amazing powers of observation I decided to try apprenticing myself to her so I could notice more in life. She could 'sketch' for you any person in her class, not by pouring the whole dictionary n them as I tend to do but by naming just one feature and then, eerily ‘showing’ the person to you by making her face look like that person’s face. You know how that Saturday Night Live’s Darrell Hammond ‘did’ Bill Clinton mostly by biting his lower lip? It was like that. I thought even then that Annie could get a job doing impressions.
Add to that the fact that she’s funny; was funny, right out of the gate. She was only 15 when one of her big brothers said of her that no party really started until Annie got there.
Here she is one last time on the day of her graduation from that awesome school in Northampton, together with her godmother Sheila and that her big brother Dodson. Happy Birthday Annie Marotta! May you get three times the number of years you have now!
Safe Through the Storm
You never know what lies ahead.
Ten days ago we were celebrating the birthday of this little guy at his house – the house his family was to move out of three days later.
He got a tattoo that day. It's the wash-off-after-ten-baths kind, so he was still wearing it when the movers came, along with these basketball fans who are the other young people in my life.
We hauled stuff all morning and around 4:00 I took everyone under 20 back to my town - well everyone but Baby Sister Caroline who may or may not end up being called Callie. Nobody knows yet and she is keeping mum on the subject.
She’s got enough to think about what with having just mastered the girly pushup.
Back we went to TT and Papa’s house, 'TT and Papa' being what we are now called because this happens as you age: your kids rename you. (In another ten years they’ll probably rename us again, with say, stuffed animals names like Fluffy and Grumpus.) At our house, Tattoo Man and his big brother Edward had a long bath and a book apiece and were sleeping by 8pm so that bright and early the next morning we could all ride BACK over to their town to see Edward get his Bible there at First Parish Church of Lincoln and there was another passage for us all.
The whole Second Grade Sunday school class sang David Mallett's famous 'Garden Song', also known as 'Inch by Inch, Row by Row', as you can tell if you view this 20-second clip below. That's Edward you see right at the beginning . You also see his two moms there in the background, beaming away with little Baldie, who slept through the whole thing.
I say you never know what’s ahead because within 24 hours of this service Tattoo Man and Eddie and I were all sick, Eddie so sick he had to be hospitalized. I got better almost immediately with my tough old immune system but Tattoo Man is still talking in a voice like the Godafther’s.
As for Eddie, with the infection spreading to his kidneys the way it did, he was in hot water for a while, in the 48 t0 72 hours before that broad-spectrum antibiotic kicked in.
So there it was: we all thought we were going to be spending last week toting boxes and bringing snacks. Instead we were shuttling back and forth to a hospital and trying to find a way to comfort a slender child with two IV ports, one on the back of each hand, and bandages the size of small pot holders on each of his legs.
Now that it’s over and he is here in the next room I can finally say something about it. It was a scary time, sure enough. And how grateful and limp with relief we all feel today to have been brought, inch by inch, safe through another storm.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5yWA5FBWTA&feature=youtu.be]
This Day of Remembrance
We always went to the cemetery with our mother and aunt, my sister Nan and I, though it didn’t mean much to us, young as we were. We mostly danced among the graves, and dashed happily off to fill the dented metal watering can at the leaky old spigot.
Anyway, our dead had been dead for so long, the mother of our mother just letters etched on granite and never mind that I bore her name. Never mind that my sister looked just like that poor doomed girl who died so young, along with her equally doomed and stillborn child.
Then the years passed as the years will do and I guess I was around 20 when I noticed that we weren’t going to the cemetery so much anymore, though by now our mother and aunt’s father also lay in that grave.
“Is it because we moved an hour north and the place is too hard to get to on the busy holiday?” I asked our Aunt Grace one day as we she and I stood in the dining room of my childhood home. “That’s not it,” she said right away. “It’s because they aren’t there,” she went on and then repeated the declaration with a strange passion I had never before seen in her. “They're NOT THERE!” she said again, as if to suggest that any fool knows the dead travel to a place infinitely farther than we humans can conceive of in our poor imaginings.
Was that why we weren’t going to the graves so much anymore? Because nothing was really down there but clay? Or dust? Or whatever remains behind aside from the metal hasps of the coffins? And if that were the case, then why, all these years later, do I still stand again at that grave and picture them all just a few feet below me? I see our mother in that pale lavender suit she so loved; our grandfather with his dark eyebrows; the young lady I should have known as my grandmother lying in the high-necked Gibson-Girl-style dress they would have chosen for her back in 1910.
What good can come of these vigils? Two years ago I saw a young woman sitting on the grass of a soldier’s fresh and flag-decked grave. She was there when I came by at noon and she was there when I came again at 6:00.
It seems we process death by degrees and each in our own way.
Myself I have found over the past weeks that when I think of our final elder who left us just last month, I do not think of Heavenly realms and eternal reward, in spite of the fierce faith I saw lived out in my family of origin. I think of that man as I knew him over the last six years of his life when he became in many ways my closest friend.
In the long quiet days since his passing I have studied countless snapshots of him - in Latin School in the 30s, in the South Pacific in the 40s, in college on the GI Bill in the early 50s - and am newly in awe at all that a life can contain. I even imagine that I'm beginning to understand what Aunt Grace meant that day: The dead really aren’t ‘there’ under the ground. Rather they are all around us, not farther but infinitely nearer than we humans can conceive of in our poor imaginings.
a bouquet and my grandmother, dead at 31
Abe Called
To round out our talk of mirrors let me end with these two photos of Abe Lincoln which do show what a marked difference it makes to flip your image, right to left.In this first photo with his dry and difficult hair and that sensual lower lip he looks as we ‘remember’ him: noble, generous, broken hearted.
In the second picture you get a whole different impression . Here he looks really rumpled, almost deranged, and those spots on his cheek look almost cartoonish, as if they were drawn on by somebody.
I remember reading somewhere that more words have been written about this man than any other figure in the world with the exception of Jesus of Nazareth. The shock we feel on seeing him in an unfamiliar way proves that he is 'in' us all right, an iconic figure if ever there was one. And now let's end with this tuneful song by someone whose perceived image of himself seemed to torture him all his life. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgpEg3tu01I&feature=related]
You Only THINK You Look Good
Writing about mirrors has me thinking of the True Mirror that shows you how you really look.
I just heard a podcast about it by the two fun guys from Radiolab.
The idea is you MAY look better than you think! (but don’t get your hopes up.)
"At the physical-appearance level, there are some very useful applications of the True Mirror," the website pitch says.
"There is a 3-D effect from the two mirrors used in a True Mirror, which gives a better idea of how clothes fit on your body"
Because it’s two mirrors placed at right angles, see, with the seam that joins them masked in some ingenious fashion we don’t quite understand.
So you may think you look dashing in that new suit jacket but really you look like Fiorello LaGuardia as depicted in the poster for the Broadway show.
Also, the pitch goes on, you have to realize that “hair styles have very distinct ‘looks’ depending on if an asymmetric hair part is chosen - something we believe contributes very strongly to the impression people have of us” - and they advise us to read their theory on where you part your hair for more on that.
“In addition, hats and glasses styles and any accessory can be accurately viewed for the effect. For example, if you wear a brimmed hat in an angle, your choice of which angle looks the best is probably exactly OPPOSITE from the angle that you should be wearing the hat!”
TRUE ENOUGH! I wear this hat you see above sometimes and only sometimes is it actually workin’ for me. “Hey, nice LID!” guys call to me from across the street and maybe they’re not being sarcastic.
Other times I wear it tipped too far back and I just turn into Will Rogers minus the quips and the lasso.
“Is the True Mirror for everyone?" the site blurb goes on. "Frankly, no. It isn't much use for shaving your face or plucking your eyebrows. Not after a lifetime of learning to do these things backwards!" (And in high heels.)
“And the novelty value of the effects described above wears off rather quickly."
BUT - big but, which the mirror can also help you with identifying truly, “learning about yourself is a different matter. Introspection and the journey of self-discovery is a multifaceted adventure involving many processes and tools. Adding this new way of communicating with yourself privately can help you validate feelings and thoughts that you may already know about yourself -- aspects of yourself that are conspicuously absent in a traditional mirror. With the True Mirror, you can more quickly understand yourself and subsequently reach your own goals more completely.”
Communicating with yourself privately: just what this ego-mad culture needs more of, Gad!
So let's hear it now for the nation’s favorite occupation: Dancin’ With Your S-eh-elf. And have a good, selfish Mem-Day weekend, y'all.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=812HHetzbe4]
I See You (and You're Naked?)
The neighbor kept peeking in the bedroom window of this young couple’s rented bungalow, which is pretty ‘Psycho’ right? Like Norman Bates in the family motel dressing up in his dead mom’s clothes and sniffing around poor Lila Crane as she got ready to take the most famous shower in history.
I read about it in Dear Abby. A lady named Lilo from Costa Mesa told it this way:
Many years ago, soon after my husband, Klaus, and I arrived as newlyweds from Germany, we rented a small bungalow in L.A. There were seven of them in two rows behind our landlord's large home in the front. Between our little house and our next-door neighbor's was a brick patio that extended from our bedroom window to her back door. Not long after we moved in, the woman began looking into our bedroom window on weekend mornings, pressing her nose against the glass. Because we were guests in this country, we didn't want to say anything, but we knew we needed to stop her.
BUT, she went on to say, her husband came up with the perfect solution:
He placed a large mirror in the window frame. Sure enough, the weekend came and she peered into our window. Seeing her face reflected back, she dashed into her house and never looked again.
I love this story for the perfect symbol it offers of what we all do when we put the focus on others instead of ourselves. When I was 21 and a first-year teacher, a famously grouchy fellow teacher in the math department marched up to me and began yelling, yelling, yelling in my face because I had not hurried down to the cafeteria fast enough with those Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate cards that schools used in those days to ascertain enrollment in the classes. (Remember those cards? They were for those old-time computers that took up a whole wall.)
Anyway, she gestured and shouted and made herself fearsome and terrible. And I was so cowed about being castigated in front of all the other teachers I went mute. My position was too junior for me to try yelling and gesturing back; anyway that would be opening a second front in this 'war' she was waging so... I just looked at her.
Later, in the faculty parking lot, the nicest teacher in the school approached my car and leaned in the window. He could see I was still shaken.
“That was about her, you realize. It wasn’t about you at all.”
I had never heard that perspective before and I have never forgotten it. And so even today I think of this man, who left teaching six years later and went to his own personal mecca of San Francisco, there to live happily and then die young, one of many who died young in the dying years of the 1980s when on 'principal' (?) the country's President made sure not to let even the word “AIDS” cross his lips.
I could have been like Lilo's husband; I could have just held up a mirror to that mean teacher so she could see how she looked yelling like that and getting all red in the face. As it turned out what I unwittingly did was almost as good. Turns out when someone is screaming at you and you keep silence, they eventually hear themselves. They hear what they are saying and they 'see' how they look and then ... they stop. I find it works every time.
Give Them Their Space
It's like I was saying yesterday: Folks are a little crazy nowadays, like the Mad Hatter. You have to give them their space.Once I rode down in an elevator with a man who, the minute he boarded on Floor 6, exhaled angrily. I was the only other person on this up-flying lift and I could plainly see he was mad at something; steam was practically coming out of his ears.“Bad day, huh?” I said with my eyebrows up in what I thought was a sympathetic way.“EXCUSE ME?!” he replied with a withering look.“I’m sorry!” I said. "I just thought… Well I thought you seemed ...just sort of frustrated.”He maintained his furious silence as on we swooped past Floors 7, 8 and 9.That’s when he exploded, just as we approached Floor 10: “My God damn SISTER!” he said.I felt a little vindicated, sure, since I had read his mood right after all, but still. The lesson I took from THAT day was that often when a person is angry and it’s best to just have to let them have their anger and stay out of their way.
Department of Oops
It’s hard to complain without sounding like a nasty person. Someone told me the other day that I could have handled that cold coffee incident better than I did and that’s true I think. It’s hard to get the tone right. One thing I’m gathering is that if you’re going to complain about something you shouldn’t start out with a lot of apologizing for doing so. Too often that just infuriates whoever it is that you’re interacting with. It’s enough you’re about to get satisfaction for the ‘wrong’ done you from the persons you are addressing; you don’t need to insult them by seeming to seek their friendship.What I had done that day was to bring back a cup of coffee two minutes after it was served to me to say that wasn’t hot. Then when the person who had poured it answered my complaint by giving me that undeniable poker faced Gimme a Break look I got flustered and said “No it really isn’t hot! Stick your finger in it.”“I’m NOT sticking my finger in it! “she harrumphed and turned away to pour me a fresh cup.Her reaction taught me two things about interacting with strangers, whether they’re waiting on you or you’re waiting on them or you’re just jostling past one another on some sidewalk and those things are:
- (1) Don’t be referencing people’s body parts, pretty much no matter what. And...
- (2) Stay away from any suggestions that have the verb “stick” in them.
Two good rules for a new day!
Commencement Was Yesterday
I left home for keeps at 17, when I packed up my poetry books and my dorky bike and headed for college. We drove west on old Route 2 in that car that smelled like dog no matter how often we tried to clean it. ‘Who will ever accept me the way my family did?’ I worried on that trip, ‘me with my obsessive list-making and my line of meaningless chatter like a monkey’s?’
Then we arrived and here was my roommate from Aspen Colorado, blond and blunt and athletic. “Man, you’re Catholic?" was the first thing she said to me with high amusement. "I never met a real Catholic before!”
I felt awkward for.... oh, at least an hour on that long dark hallway our rooms lay along. But then other freshmen began opening the doors to their rooms, all our families having left gone by then and didn’t we all have our favorite pillows and our homely slippers, even the same nature posters with that legend “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World” printed along the bottom. By the end of that first day freshman year I had six new friends. And by the first day of sophomore year I couldn’t wait to get back to campus, a feeling that kept multiplying exponentially with each passing year.
Then, almost overnight it seemed, we graduated and joined the long line of alums.
I missed our 5th reunion but went back for my 10th, and for every reunion thereafter and loved every one. I kept meeting these wonderful open people I had not known as an undergraduate and it was all utterly great. What was even greater was coming back on ordinary days, when I was passing through Northampton MA on a business trip, say, or coming to attend a lecture or two-day symposium, or, best times of all, coming to see Annie Marotta and Susan De Young, our two daughters, one 'real' and one honorary, who graduated the last year the amazing Ruth Simmons was President there at Smith. I remember how Ruth - we all called her just ‘Ruth’, the way Moses is just called Moses - left the podium and came to the front of the stage at Commencement exercises and held out her arms in this cherishing gesture while the whole class of 2001 clapped and hollered and stamped for her.
I adored my time at Smith and I adored every inch of its beautiful campus. The love of my life and I decided we would marry while standing on this red bridge by the athletic fields.
Then, two whole decades later, I brought four of our kids back to see the place, little thinking that Annie and Susan would one day go to school here; little thinking that Carrie, in the background, would do a Summer Science program here. Michael our youngest would have gone to school here himself if he weren’t a boy.
Anyway, this is all of us at that red bridge. Susie was the one taking the picture so she isn't in it. And this below is a short video that to me shows why the school is still so great. Commencement was yesterday and all day my thoughts were travelling westward along old Route 2, just as I had done that first time long ago.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNh4FFpwFjI&feature=relmfu]
Conundrum at The Rest Stop
I had just bought the coffee and it was cold. I had pulled up at a rest stop on the interstate and gone right in to the national chain of eateries where they put the milk in for you - the sweetener too if you take sweetener. This means I wasn’t the one who made it cold by adding too much milk.
“Not my fault!” I said to myself. “For sure it’s not MY fault the coffee is cold!’
I was doing some hard miles that day and badly needed the lift I would get from the coffee. Should I just drink it and keep driving?
As luck would have it, I was already back in my car before I took a sap and was greeted by this sad fact of its tepidness.
I thought a minute. Because, well, you hate to be a crank. But then I remembered the many miles behind me and the many more still ahead. I remembered too that I had promised my body that nice hot kick of caffeine, which I hoped would distract it from its various aches.
I turned the car off again and popped open my seatbelt; picked up the cup and went back inside – where the young woman who had helped me was now helping a dozen young men from a travelling lacrosse team.
Should I wait in line and risk being late for my appointment? I didn’t dare.
I stepped tentatively up to the counter, certain that she’d remember me.
She remembered me.
“Yes?” she said.
“I’m sorry, but this coffee seems to be cold,” I told her.
She gave me that dead-eye look people use to show they can’t believe how many jackasses there are in the world.
“No, it really is,” I said.
Now her eyes came to life. I could tell because she rolled them.
“Seriously, it isn’t even close to hot. Stick your finger in it,” I said.
“I’m NOT sticking my finger in it!” she snapped and, turning her back to me, tossed out the old cup and began preparing me a new one.
This is when one of the lacrosse players beside me spoke up.
“Well THAT was poorly handled,” he said.
“I know,” I mourned. “I never should have told her to stick her finger in it!”
No, I don’t mean you. I mean her!”
“Oh, “ I said, and, relieved to have the focus off myself, quickly asked him where his team was heading.
He named the capital city of the state next door.
By then the young woman had handed him his food and thrust my fresh cup of coffee toward me on the counter, allowing us both to stroll toward the exit, chatting chummily.
“Good News! “ I told him about his destination, “You’re a little more than an hour way from your destination.”
“Great news!” he echoed.
It was all great news for the two of us, who had come to this place, said what we wanted and walked away with it. It was less great news for the young woman who would stand all day behind that counter waiting on a bunch of people who were either as finicky as I had been or so caught up in their own lives they scarcely even looked at her at any point in the transaction.
I was sorry now that I'd made that suggestion about dipping her finger. Someday I’ll be able to remember that it’s almost always better to say little than to say too much.
Swimwear for All!
You gotta love the Internet that delivers such treasures to us - like the email I woke up to with “Swimwear for the Whole Family” in its subject line. I opened it just for fun and sure enough: Bathing suits for all.Most of course are designed for woman with figures like celery stalks - like these bathing suit bottoms, from what we might call the My Pants Are Falling Down Collection for the Hipless.
But, lucky for us all, nowadays they do also show swimwear for the more upholstered ladies, cut more generously and often with a special clinch of Super Elastic around the waist. I myself have such a suit that makes me feel like Captain America, Iron Man, and the Incredible Hulk are squeezing me, hard, around your middle.
This isn't me obviously but you get the idea.
They had to make roomier swimwear, with 30% of the adult population obese and another 30% overweight. I mean they had to do something. Even the Disney parks had to rip out the seats for the It's-a-Small-World ride and make them bigger. Seems it's not such a small world after all!What’s odd is that the ideal of feminine beauty hasn’t changed. We're still mostly seeing fashion models who look like celery stalks. In fact I can’t even remember back to a time when the unwritten rule wasn’t that a woman should look as much as possible like a 12-year-old boy.I remember reading a film critic saying he sat through a movie in which the beautiful Isabella Rossellini appears largely unclothed. He said he could hear people around him literally gasp at the sight of her soft untoned body.I remember noting her body too when I saw that movie, though I can't tell you now what movie it was. I looked at the screen and thought, "Huh! So maybe every successful women really doesn't have look like Jane Fonda in one of her workout tapes!"(That dates it: this must have been in the 80s when Jane, even in early 40s, looked so sleek and fit slicing into the waters of Golden Pond.
I remember watching On Golden Pond when it first came out and thinking Why God? Why can't I look like that? But then her dad was pretty tough on her, both on screen and off so I couldn't feel too envious.But it all goes to show you what influence the fashion deciders have and here's another question. Who did this to men's shorts and bathing suits someplace in the last two decades?
What a pity, I think every time I look at a guy in these ridiculous togs. What happened to shorts that were really shorts? I did used to so love watching basketball back in the old days. :-)
Others Really DO
Others really do see you better than you see yourself:
“Are you finished talking about your brassieres yet?” someone asked me the other night, at the end this lovely evening I spent with my Shakespeare pals, reading Henry V and eating great food.
My eyes widened. Finished talking about my bras? My BRAS? Had I fallen asleep during the reading and talked in my sleep? About my bras?! In front of these lovely people?
Then I realized that he was talking about this blog and what I wrote about for much of last week.
Which was bras, all right,even my bras, God help me.
I had forgotten that this man had told me he reads me every day here and so he really knows me, of course he does.
He sees the unvarnished day-by-day truth of who I am in the same way students know their teachers: in other words in ways that teachers might not imagine. The kids really do 'see' their teachers. They see them when they’re annoyed and when they’re tired, when they’re excited and when they’re eyes travel out the window during test times and anyone can see that their thoughts have moved far from the classroom.
They know when the teacher has had a haircut, even a tiny trim. “Miz Marotta! New shoes!!” my own students would call happily on days when I was a young teacher and showed up now and then with fresh footwear.
So what can I say here to the elegant bow-tie-wearing man who asked me that question? Yes, I am finished writing about bras, my bras, the bras of others, bras on dogs, what have you.
At least for now.
And I'm finished showing pictures of bras. Well, almost finished, as you can see.
Tomorrow It's on to bathing suit bottoms.
God Bless the New Friends
I've felt weirdly sad over the last few days and was about to offer some new droopy tale or other here today - until saw this post that my new friend and fellow blogger Brian Moloney wrote, saying how he's been writing for exactly a year now and mentioning me in the course of his remarks.
He also quoted an excerpt from Salinger's Franny and Zooey that brought back everything I so earnestly hoped and dreamed that I might do with my life, even back in junior high. It's what came to me when I finally stopped obsessing about how funny-looking I was with my chapped lips and my too-short bangs.
You can read his whole post here but I'll just say it begin by describing how a year ago now he was wondering if he really could go on puttin’ it out there every day when he came upon my name somewhere. He says he wrote me on a day when he was ‘on the verge of chucking the whole thing' - and it seems I wrote back, promising that I for one would read him every day and that the two of us would be go on to be friends forever.
“And surprisingly, nearly a year later, we are well on our way to being just that: forever friends,” he says.
"Even though I have never met her - you know, because of the restraining order,” he adds in his jokey way.
“I have never mentioned her or thanked her before on this thing but I thought this was a good time to do it," he goes on. "I won’t go into a lot of details but the truth is—if it weren’t for this lady with the odd Boston accent, I probably wouldn’t have made it to a month...let alone a year.” (Nice man! And he's right too: I do have an odd Boston accent, as people keep telling me when they come across that little video I once made.)
He says we're different because I'm more forthcoming about myself in what I write but still: we have in common the fact that “as difficult as it can be on any given day to put something worthwhile down on a page, we do it for the fat lady sitting on the porch swatting flies.”
That’s the Salinger reference, which I think means we do it out of some mystical blend of faith and general Agapic love, the kind we all hope to learn to give in our lives.
He recommends we all go to the last few pages of Franny and Zooey to see what he's talking about. And then we should go to the first page and read the whole thing, something he says we should have done long ago.
I did read the book long ago and was completely knocked out by its message - before I forgot about it for almost 50 years.
It just goes to show you that old theory about life is true: You really can't see yourself. Emily Dickinson knew this. “The Mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly,” is how she put it. You can’t know what effect you have in the world. It takes some kindly watching Other to do that for you.
Home is Where the Fun Is
Kurt Vonnegut used to say he could only think one thing when he went back to visit his home town as an adult. Every time he went back to Indianapolis the phrase “Where’s my bed? Where’s my bed?“ kept running through his mind was that thought.
I didn’t feel that way being off by myself for that wedding in St. Louis this past weekend. Not after I decided to befriend my surroundings instead of missing my man and wishing he were beside me.
Anyway the hotel was fun in that they provided popcorn all day long: I ate box after candy-striped box of the stuff, all shoveled by hand out of the hot little machine in the lobby.
And the room was fun in that it was right across the Forest Park Avenue from an apartment building. I began feeling like Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez in those two Stakeout movies from the 80s. I could see who was watching TV and who wasn’t at just about all times.
I also got to go to a beautiful wedding ceremony complete with communion in two species, the flat little disc of bread and then the wine that you could take by gulp or by tincture. I sat by myself in the church and so was free to leak like a faucet all through the especially touching parts. I took one intentional picture of the high vaulting ceiling of the place. Then I took an unintentional one of that same ceiling along with somebody’s nose in the upper right-hand corner.
I got to hug two newlyweds, hold a baby, drink a Pinot Grigio and a glass of sangria. I got to devour quantities of baby shrimp and a big slithery plate of fresh tomato and mozzarella slices.
I got to wear a pair of new shoes with heels so high the bride noticed them from her throne on the altar and mentioned them to my directly after the service They made me feel talker than Popeye’s girl Olive Oyl.
