Exit Only
“Because once you depart from this one-way road of life, there is just no getting back on.”
All That We Don't Understand
What’s nice about the writing life is you're never really alone in it. Yes, you may start out alone carrying your armful of fuel down the road in the form of the images you use and the stories you tell, but then suddenly here comes this nice other person who offers to help you carry the kindling all the way to the hearth, as fuel for your ‘fire.’
What I’m trying to say is that that person is your reader, and your reader meets you halfway on any road, coming with his own fresh take on things. He or she sees what you're trying to say, sometimes more clearly than you see it yourself. I think this is why telling what happened to me, telling what ideas burbled up in my mind can act as such an antidote to loneliness, leading me forth out of the stuffy closed room of my mind.I wrote the other day about how my young grandchild seemed to have somehow lodged himself inside the Play Place structure at McDonald's and was sobbing inside it.I had no clue what to do and that was the story I thought I was telling here Tuesday.It wasn’t until I got to the end of my telling that I suddenly saw the whole event as a metaphor for parenthood: Our kids go where we can’t follow and so on. And ll of that was me carrying my fuel alone on the road. But the everything changed when this one reader name ‘met’ me on the road and added his own interpretation. In the comments section here he wrote, "Perhaps [your little grandson] was not so alone in that tube but rather quietly listening to another guide, in addition to you of course, who pointed the way back to you.”'Another guide'! Another Capital ‘g’ Guide! See? A wholly fresh take on the same event. My little grandson's predicament had suggested just two ideas to me. (1) I fall short as a caregiver and 2) We can't go before the children we love, taking joy in their joy and quelling their fears. The time comes when they will go where we can never follow.But now here was a whole look at the event, that acknowledged what else might well be happening in this world every day, in fact, realms and realms beyond the understanding of us bossy grownups, who are so smug in our belief that we are the ones who move the world. Another Guide indeed! Thanks, fellow traveler. Thanks for helping me see that this child will never be alone, truly.
Gluttons & The People Who Envy Them
That scowling cat was just too cute to pass up yesterday but you have to realize what happens inside your head when everyone around you is heaping thirds onto their plates and you can’t have a second tiny glass of wine. You just feel like pinching them hard on the fat of their thighs, these people with their Sweet and Spicy Doritos and their special darn beers and those shiny marconi almonds that come all slippery with oil right? I mean, right?
Eh. Not really. All that passes pretty quickly, to be replaced by immense delight that just for today as people in recovery say, you are patrolling your borders and not tipping whole refrigerator shelves into your giant maw of a mouth.
I started Weight Watchers when I first started to date Old Dave “Dude, your hair’s out of style” I told him about a month in, when it seemed safe to offer a little constructive criticism.
“Yeah well you’re a little FAT!” he said back with a merry smile and maybe that’s why I liked him. While there has never been any cruelty, there has never been any of the old BS either. The man doesn’t lie.
SO ….. I began on Weight Watchers and went from 146 to 125 and that lasted until after my first baby, when I went down to 118. After my third baby I hit 112, if only briefly and these many decades later have evened out at around 132 - though of course now much of the muscle has gone to that something like you see in those bags of fluff you buy to stuff pillows with. And of course here in the waiting room that is Osteopenia, my bones are like Sponge Bob’s bones.
It’s OK with me. The men in my life eat their fried egg and bacon. I eat my banana on plain Shredded Wheat. They have a Coke with their meal. I have sparkling water, pepped up with my special mixture of mint tea and no-cal lemonade. And yes sometimes I get to put a splash of red wine into this mix and boom! Sangria! And sometimes I put in a splash of whiskey and boom again! A whiskey sour!
But mostly I am able to abstain from these little extras because of the great satisfaction I get out of the fact that JUST FOR TODAY I am not ending the day by strapping on a feed bag drooly with Ben & Jerry's best.
And that, ladies and gentleworms, is a victory all by itself.
Darn DIET!
This is how I feel lately.
I have a giant boy living here who can sit down in front of a bird like this and have most of it gone in 30minutes.
I also have a man excellent at batting cleanup.
I'm the cat in the picture, always on a diet, always scowling sourly away at what others are feasting on.
Maybe I'll just stab it with one bacteria -laden claw and hope they both fall sick.
Where Do They GO?
I watch young children and am amazed at how skillfully their parents manage their small storms of frustration, their major meltdowns. How is it done again? First you show empathy, then brightly serve up some new distraction? And didn't I once do that too? I seem to remember that special cooing tone you take as you talk your four-year-old out of going to school with his superhero underpants worn OVER his regular pants. I remember how you learn to rig the game ahead of time by offering your child only the choices that YOU can live with. “Should we have the bath first and then read the story?” you say, cleverly leading them to believe that in all the universe there are really just these two alternativesSigh.Once I could calm any baby, talk down any young child. Couldn't I? Sudden mood swings, accidents of either the Band-Aid or bladder kind, I could handle them all.It’s a whole other way now, as I learned with my little grandson on the day I took him into the play space at the home of the Golden Arches. The Play Place at McDonald's is this whole extra room filled with interconnected plastic tubes and pipes, into which kids whose heights are appropriate can crawl and slide and tumble for wonderful long intervals while you their ragged grownup suck on coffees and watch.
Except you can’t watch really because they disappear INTO these pipes and tubes.That’s what my little guy did anyway: He disappeared up into that gizmo and stayed there. Then, after about four minutes, sounds of a struggle ensued, followed by a loud yelp.Then three other people’s children popped out the bottom of the final length of tubing, which is fashioned into a kind of covered slide.Where did they come from? Hadn’t HE entered the maze first? “We climbed over him,” they said before I could ask.“But is he all right?” I all but shouted as the sounds of his sobs echoed from inside this bright plastic caterpillar. “Oh sure,” said one.“He sort of kicked me,” said another cheerfully.“He wouldn’t talk to us.”I called to him in my most cooing voice but he wouldn’t talk to me either.'What will I DO?' I fretted. Try sending in a massed phalanx of kids to more or less push him through? Go in myself? But I’m a good foot-and-a-half taller than the posted height limit and I weigh 135 pounds. If I got stuck in there they’d have to do a C-section on the whole apparatus to get me out.In the end none of that was necessary. Within four minutes more his sobbing had stopped, and he was down and out and asking for a chocolate shake – leaving me to ponder this truth about parenthood:Where our children go we can never ever follow. All we can do is cheer from the sidelines and hope that they come out all right in the end.
What The Babies Are Doing Really
Babies make simpletons of us all, even of old Ralph Waldo Emerson, who I fell in love with all over again yesterday morning on reading what he had to say about his own little ones.
It's funny because you think of Emerson as this very grave man, with his great nose and his sad wise eyes and those sloping shoulders you see in every portrait and bust ever done of him; but when he brought that careful attention to his babies’ doings, something so delightful emerges, I just had to jot some of it down here.
For example, he recorded that at four months old his baby “studies Manipulation, and Palmistry and Optics.”
Wh-a-a-a- at? I thought at first – until I realized that of course! Those are exactly the topics all babies are puzzling about on first coming awake in the world.
Optics: 'Well it’s certainly much brighter here than it was in my old apartment and things appear to be more 'layered'. I mean here’s my terrycloth bunny that seems much larger than that that chest of drawers over there. Yet the chest holds all my clothes!'
Manipulation: 'And what are these two waving appendages that go wherever I go and can I get either one of them into my mouth?'"
Palmistry: 'Ah yes, here's one now, right near my mouth and almost in it, a knotty-appearing thing that opens and closes like a day lily with five smaller and more wiggly appendages attached. Hmmmm.'
A few years later when a little sister came to Emerson and his wife, he wrote that she “slept incessantly - hands up, as for defense.”
Later, as she was learning to walk he wrote of “little balancing Nelly, moving with forthspread arms and smelling as delicious as a cake pan."
Delicious as a cake pan: I love that. I love that he said his little son was " as handsome as Walden Pond at sunrise."
And I really love that I live just 20 minutes from Walden Pond and drove past it at 7 last night - past its deep waters, and the exiting pilgrims who had come to see where Emerson’s great friend Thoreau built his cabin and lived deliberately; past the train tracks whose shuttling commerce back and forth from Cambridge to Fitchburg at first so alarmed the denizens of sleepy Concord.
I was returning from a family event where our own new baby herself kept busy studying Manipulation and Palmistry and Optics. I felt so glad of my morning reading, which let me look at this first granddaughter with a whole new set of eyes, and isn’t that what a good writer does for us every time.
Maybe little Callie will write one day herself. What fun to see if what SHE has to say! What fun to learn of any new person's 'take' on the world !
The Sun is Up and the Air is Cool
The sun is up and the air is cool. My mate got up at 5:30, disappeared downstairs for 20 minutes and came back into the bedroom muttering."It’s freezing out!" he said and fell back into the bed in a sort of spiraling pirouette, like Holly Hunter does in The Piano after that meanie husband of hers cuts off her fingers with an axe.It’s not freezing but it is just 60. And we had every window in the place open last night against all that humidit,y which made the air feel like the breath of an overheated dog.Dave is asleep even as I write this now, at 9am. Needless to say, the teenage boy staying with us for these weeks is also asleep and will be until at least noon if the past weekend days are any predictor.All of which I find pretty great because here I am with the morning all mine; the sun streaming on the windows of the screened-in porch mine; the day mine too, well at least for the next hour or so when I have to go buy a pork loin and giftwrap big enough to cover the box that fills the whole back of the Red Dragon, as the teenager calls my sweet elderly van.To celebrate this sunny Sunday feeling I just drew from the shelves a book about Ralph Waldo Emerson. I remember the day I bought this book. My kids were 6, 11 and 13 and it was the first day of summer.In my ever-flowering optimism I actually thought I'd have time to read this 600-page tome about the life of one of my heroes.I also recall vividly how I was walking through the mall parking lot already greedily paging through it when - wham! - I walked right into a bundle of two-by-fours protruding from the back of somebody’s pickup truck. I saw stars just like they do in the cartoons.What does it mean? I thought at the time though I found out soon enough. It meant with kids 6 and 11 and 13 and no school for them to go to because school wouldn’t be in session again for months my future probably did NOT include a whole lot of lounging around reading the words of Emerson.All that seems like it was just a second ago but it happened in 1990. Now, 22 years later, I pulled out the book and here in its pages are the sweetest little accounts the man wrote about his children as babies. I had no idea he had such a tender side.I can quote some of them here tomorrow. For now, I can’t stop reading, because you know old Holly Hunter in his sweatshirt could get up any minute.
Someone Did What in the Pool?
Under the simmering sun yesterday, with a hundred hot people in their bathing suits, the big pool's bright blue cube of water was suddenly still, and as empty as a mirror in an abandoned house.“What’s this? Adult swim or something?” I asked, on coming out of the Ladies Locker Room where I had been holding a baby who, having only lived on the planet for 15 weeks, was definitely NOT happy about the heat.Then five people at once said "Someone pooped in the pool!"Not just the five-year-old walking beside me and the 12-year-old we were walking past but two 50-year-old moms and somebody’s grandfather.And the lifeguards were confirming it.In just that language.It’s a new world, all right. In the old days no one dared refer to such events. There were euphemisms for everything. Why, when I was a little kid at summer camp, the counselors would ask us every night if we had had a 'B.M.' It took me years to even figure out what that was, and once I DID find out, I lied about it. What ten-year-old wants to divulge that information? (Hmmm though as I think of it now no wonder the camp nurse was always coming at me with the enema kit!)But there were fake, cutesy names for everything then. Evasions. Circumlocutions.One lunchtime at this same summer camp, two horses began wildly mating in the horse-riding ring, which was no more than a football field distant from the wide-windowed, screened-in dining hall where 75 young girls sat happily belting out the words to "Bingo Was His Name Oh". On the camp director's immediate hissed orders, six counselors leaped to their feet to bang the shutters down -Which only made us kids think a kind of murder was being enacted.Hmmm.I guess it really is better to call things as they are, and someday I’m sure I’ll get used to the word ‘poop,’ much as it makes me blush now. Anyway it’s better than the cruder alternative.
You Know It's Hot When....
You know it’s hot when your candles faint dead away, pooling waxily on the tabletops.You know it’s hot when the freckles melt right off your faceYou know it’s hot when you can’t really walk right and ambulating at all feels like wading in the ocean when the waves are really surging.You know it’s hot when your body forgets it’s hungry so busy is it sending telegraphing “Get water! I need more water!”But you really know you’re hot when your very eyeballs start coming to a boil, start sort of shimmying like a couple of peeled eggs getting poached.Then you can’t even see.Yesterday with my silverback gorilla of a mate off on a business trip I thought I was going to die in this ancient house with its horsehair plaster. We do have three little AC units but not one of them was installed and that’s no job for me in my new starring role as Mrs. Osteopenia.Also, one of the units had on it a Post-it note in my handwriting. “This AC is a horrible disappointment. August 2011,” is what it said.Soooo I went to Sears and bought another, fourth AC for $109.And when this young houseguest came home from wrestling camp with his long strong arms we installed all four of those babies.Old Dave came home at midnight and cheered.Now he and I can sleep.And the young houseguest can sleep.And that houseguest soon to fly in from Atlanta can sleepAnd most important - for me anyway - I can once again work in my office, writing this deathless prose. :-) Thanks Rayvoughn!
Still Married After All These Years
I'm having an anniversary today, though not really, with the groom in Chicago for a few days.
It's OK I guess. We don’t mark days like this the way the greeting card people would have us do. Giving someone a card just because it’s, like, Grandmother’s Day seems to me like forcing a person to tell you he loves you: all the real feeling drains right out of the thing.
On our first anniversary in the great era of Bobby Orr Boston, we took ourselves out to celebrate at a joint set up in the old Allston Depot, designed by the great H.H. Richardson.
We couldn’t afford much but we ordered a drink apiece and some appetizers. The Clams Casino turned out to have a piece of glass in it so the manager gave us two more drinks, on the house.
That made us sure-enough giddy, kids that we were. I could almost forget I had to teach five classes the next day. David could almost stop remembering he had that crucial paper do for 'gradual' school, as one of Garp’s kids calls it in the John Irving novel.
Fun to think back and isn't that the beauty of a blog! The way I can just write what I feel day to day.
It’s so much fun I sometimes feel I’m running some sort of scam here –except of course I don’t charge for it. I don’t have ads or links to the Aren’t I Great page that embarrasses me every time I look at it.
I tried to make it a writer of books but I was just one person. Now I don’t care about all that.
I guess if we're lucky we kind of turn back into the simple people we were at the beginning.
On those early anniversaries we were kids still, still jumping out from behind doors to scare each other, still throwing cups of icy water onto the other guy in the shower.
I guess we still do some of that, come to think of it. My own favorite trick is still to sneak the shower door open when David is in there and just sort of stand there – not IN the shower stall but just outside it. Just stand there, expressionless.
He doesn’t know I’m there for the longest time because he has his eyes squeezed shut against the sting of the shampoo– until suddenly he opens them and there I am with the zombie face. He jumps a mile, every time.
So here’s a picture of us on Anniversary Number 25. That night we ate at Legal Sea Food with my sister Nan and my cousin Eleanor, both visiting from out of town.
Our children gave us two kittens who made things lively around here for the next dozen years.
That dress was from Costco and cost $19.95. I still have it around here somewhere.
ESP?
Sometimes I’m clairvoyant myself, speaking of people having visions of things not right in front of them as I was here yesterday: One time our baby’s stroller went missing and after two whole days of frantic searching I suddenly ‘saw’ where it was.
“It’s behind the Hootchiecootchies’ house!" I exclaimed, though of course that wasn’t their name.
I walked over there, slipped around back and there was the stroller, half-submerged in the shallow stream at the edge of the lawn.
It wasn’t like I knew it.
It wasn’t like I figured it out, using ratiocination, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fave word for that he used for his guy Sherlock.
I just saw it and there’s no taking credit for that.
The gift of discernment: don't we wish we had that every day?
The Best Third Sunday in June
I woke yesterday to realize that all the sorrow and self-pity that used to enshroud me around the subject of fathers had just suddenly …lifted, I think because just a few days ago I remembered a conversation I had 20 years ago with the then-pastor of Pilgrim Church in the Upham’s Corner section of Boston. This man of the cloth was telling me that a curious ‘gift of vision’ had recently arisen in him, as perplexing to him as it was to those around him. I asked him how it manifested itself.“Well for example right now I see that there is a man standing behind you.”The little hairs on my arms stood up.“What does he look like?"“He’s older,” he said. “He has wavy white hair and really bright blue eyes.”“I know who that is.” I said. “I met him only once, when I was 19, and we spent an hour together in the bar of the DuPont Hotel in Wilmington Delaware.“He was your father?” said this man, who knew nothing whatever about me and my life story.“Yes,” I said.“He looks so sad,” he said glancing over my shoulder.“Well, he drank. He left us,” I said, feeling the old hard knot of anger for all my mother suffered as a woman alone in that era of the famously intact family“That being the case, maybe leaving was the kindest thing he could think to do for you all.”“Maybe,” I said but I didn’t believe it.But now with the return to my mind of this long-buried conversation I’m seeing things in a new, more forgiving light.Plus you know I look just like the man: Under the dye job, my colorist tells me my hair is now almost all white. God knows it’s really wavy. And just 16 weeks ago Nature served up to our entirely brown-eyed family a baby with eyes that same bright-blue as Hap Sheehy once had.‘Time to issue the man a welcome, Terry,' is what I thought waking up to Fathers Day yesterday.So welcome, my poor sad terrified dad. Pull up a chair and we’ll all scootch over. It isn't hard at all to make a circle bigger.
Word Associations Yikes
You never know where people’s minds are going to go. Example: I was riding in a car with two 17-year-olds when the subject of profiling came up, especially racial profiling. They happen to be young black males which means they have thought about this subject once or twice along the way. At one point one of them said, “Of course there is the argument that profiling wouldn’t exist without SOME basis in people’s experience.”“Hmmm,” I said back and thought right away how whenever I see a guy in a mullet I right away think three things.
- Drives a pickup.
- With a flag on it.
- Owns a gun.
I almost didn't say this since it made me sound like a total labeler myself. Having said it, however, I then tried to move on to something more innocuous.“So take mustaches. What do you guys think of when you see a guy with a mustache?” Now me I’m thinking:
- Guy from the Village People.
- Guy with trouble letting go of his youth.
- Lone holdout, like David Crosby.
But do you know what these two said? Literally in unison?“Pedophile.”“Where do you get pedophile?!” I asked, completely caught by surprise. Were they thinking of the creepy murderer played by Stanley Tucci in The Lovely Bones? (See the chilling trailer for that movie here. Of movies older than that? Of a thousand episodes of Law & Order? CSI? Special Victims Unit?But they couldn’t say. Born in the early half of the 90s, they swim in different waters than the ones we oldsters wiggle our fins in. Cultural associations like this fascinate me. The person who named her salon “Hair Today” could not possibly be old enough to know about the second half of that old adage, which is “Gone Tomorrow” or she would have chosen another moniker, wouldn't she? I mean, come here and lose your hair? Is that really the message she chooses to convey? It’s a wonder we can get together on anything. It’s a wonder there even IS a thing called consensual reality.Sigh. But maybe this is a thing we can all agree on when we look at images of Mark Wahlberg in the old Calvin Klein ads: Even before Boogie Nights and The Fighter, the guy had an amazing body. The ad agency that dreamed up this campaign sure knew a thing or two about word associations!
So maybe it was the title of that post.I wrote last week and not the 'threesome' mentioned in the comment someone made about it that got Facebook refusing to include a link to it. Some people said they thought it could have been naming the thing ‘Little Orphaned Undies' that sent up red flags in the 'mind' of Facebook, suggesting as it does, what? Black market children maybe, playing off that other shocking ad from the early 80s where a practically pre-teen Brooks Shields is telling the world that nothing comes between her and her Calvins? Remember that whole series?
Man! Did the 1980s mark the beginning of our long slide into the salacious? This clip below just makes you blush for us all, doesn't it? To hell in a handbasket, the whole lot of us, mustachioed or not.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK2VZgJ4AoM]
They Seriously Blocked Me?
Huh? Did Facebook really block a link to my innocent blog just because of a comment somebody made with the phrase “make it a threesome” in it? I was writing about all the scurrying around I had done the weekend before and my cyber-friend Joan posted a comment that said “You leave me breathless! Think about getting yourself cloned, and make it a threesome! In the meantime, why not delegate some of the responsibility? Yes, I know, no one can do it just as you would. But, girl, you've got to let go. No one can live at that pace for very long.”
Now I listen to Joan. Joan is funny and full of heart . She's also been around the block a few times. She once told me her birth year and if calculate right she is 85. So what, now Facebook is imputing salacious thoughts to senior citizens?
Not that I think of her as a senior citizen because I don’t. For me her comment did send up a red flag but not the kind Facebook had in mind. I felt alarm bells going off because I actually DO want to live a very long time, at least until my grandchildren have children, and how hard can that be? Sure, one of them can’t even sit up yet but the other two are five and eight years old already! They'll be dating any minute, right? They’ll have kids in middle school and I’ll still be only.... 90.
But the people at Facebook doesn’t care about my longevity, of course they don’t. They just want everyone to keep it clean. But speaking of middle school it does seem to me kind of middle-schoolish to me the way they suspect every ordinary word of being a double entendre. It’s like the music teacher we had in Eight Grade who withstood so bravely the unceasing mischief made by the naughty-boys in back who broke into peals of laughter every time they had to practice singing “This is My Country” slowly to get the enunciation right for the big assembly. It's like when the author of Up the Down Staircase said she could never teach Emily Dickinson’s “There is no frigate like a book” without seeing the doltish males in the back of the class dissolve into giggles at the syllable ‘frig.”
It just seems so silly to block people like us. I mean, two people whose ages practically add up to 150? WE’RE going to be talking about group sex?
There’s a French phrase that functions as the motto of the Order of the Garter in Britain. “Honi soit qui mal y pense” it goes. ‘Evil to Him Who Evil Thinks,’ is how I’ve always heard it translated meaning in other words ‘It’s all on you if you have a dirty mind, pal.”
Big Deal
Newspapers are sure aiming for the lowest common denominator these days. boy. In the condensed headlines-only online version of the Boston Globe that appeared in my inbox yesterday it read, “This Day in History: Ally Sheedy turns 50.”
Really? News about that little fox-faced waif from The Breakfast Club tops the list of all the things that happened on July 13 over the centuries?
I clicked on that link and saw that all kinds of other things happened too, far sweeter things and more evocative things:
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Like the fact that on that date in 1842, Queen Victoria became the first British monarch to ride on a train, traveling from Slough Railway Station to Paddington in 25 minutes. (Paddington! Like the bear! Queen Victoria, who missed her dead Prince Albert so much after his death at 42 that forever after she had the servants bring fresh water to his dressing room, the same as when he was alive!)
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Or the fact that on that date in 1886, King Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned in Lake Starnberg. (A king drowns? Was there even an investigation? Was it like Fredo’s death in Godfather Two - or wait, that wasn’t exactly a drowning was it?)
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Or what about on July 13, 1927 when Charles Lindbergh was honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York City? Lindbergh, that hero who turned into a pariah for saying nice things about the Nazis! I always felt like I knew the guy: my mom was in college with Anne Morrow, his future wife, who went on to live through so much, her husband’s ostracism, the kidnapping of their dear first baby, the many burdens of fame… Mom heard her once in the college book store, talking about how she had just met the famous young aviator...
So yes, my initial reaction was “Ally Sheedy? Pfffffft!” but in truth I have always identified with her, I think because she has that jaw-chin arrangement. We have that in in my family, too. I have it. See? That's me on the right.
My girl Carrie has it too. And my mom sure had it. When she was mad she could extend that jaw of hers so far forward she looked just like a witch.
I can that do that witch trick too but I never do on account of how I’m all the time trying to frame myself as the new Mother Teresa ha ha. As for Carrie, when she sticks her chin out at work grown men run for shelter under their desks.
I read where Ally was a ballet dancer before she turned to acting. And she wrote a children’s book that made her famous before she was even old enough to vote. Her folks were these hooked-up artsy New York types so that that sure didn’t hurt.
Me I had to make it on my own (sob!) but look at what I can do now: yoga poses that make Salvador Dali’s meting watches look stiff. Or wait, is this really me or is it secretly Ally? Place yoru bets - then watch this clip from that signature high school film. Ah, Anthony Michael Hall! Ah Molly Ringwald! Emilio Estevez! Judd Nelson! Ah the lost 80s!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkX8J-FKndE]
Bumper Car Breakdown
Speaking of aging, ever notice that just when you’re getting used to how your body works Nature starts switching things up on you? Think about how long it took you to fit in to your skin; how many decades passed before you got truly accustomed to your own personal Bumper Car of a body that moves so deftly through space, navigating its way past everything else out there. It takes years to be able to say to yourself, “OK, so THIS leg turns out a little, which is why I walk like Charlie Chaplin.” Or, “I get it! My ribcage has been plunked down on my pelvic girdle with a little rotation to it!”
If you were made more like a Lego figure, you could just screw your rib cage down a notch until it sat straight again but no. This is how you are made. It’s how the Jell-O of your connective tissue ‘set up’ when you were livin’ on the inside, getting knit up in your mother’s womb, as the Bible puts it.
But it’s all OK - sort of - because you know by now how to ‘drive’ the little vehicle that’s been rented to you for this all-too-brief trip down Life’s highway.
OK until the shape-shifting starts, that is.
We women get a foretaste of shape-shifting if we go through pregnancy, when the body changes faster than Alice when she tosses back the 'Drink Me' potion that has her bumping her head on the ceiling of the White Rabbit’s foyer. Suddenly we’re as big as ocean liners. We look like a turtle with its shell on backwards. We bump into things. Our mouths are farther away from our spoons so we spill a lot and what we spill lands on our turtle shells.
It’s pretty perplexing but it finally ends and we go back to our normal size again.
This doesn’t happen with the changes that come with age. Your keep waking up mornings to find that you're just a tiny bit shorter. I sometimes feel like that paranoid guy who calls the private detective to figure out who keeps sneaking into his house and sawing half-an-inch sections off the legs of his furniture.
And then there’s your hair: It thins. It loses luster.
Guys are lucky right now what with the new fashions: guys going bald can just shave the whole dome, grow a goatee and - boom! - they become Trendiness itself.
I came upon a beribboned box containing coils of long midnight-dark curls, harvested from This Old Head in the early 1980s. They seem as remote from my current hair realities as the tresses on a doll’s head.
One of my favorite movie scenes of all times comes from the 2009n film It’s Complicated where the character played by Meryl Streep, giggly from having partaken of a mind-altering substance associated with a person’s youth, finds herself in the bathroom, laughing away with her former husband (played by Alec Baldwin) and her future son-in-law (played by John Krasinski.)
It’s all fun and giggles until, in this slightly altered state, she catches sight of herself in the mirror and stops mid-titter.
Is THAT what I LOOK like?” she gasps in horror.
It’s a sentiment we can all identify with because yup, it's what we look like all right. The mirror doesn’t lie.
I guess what we have to do then is just be thankful we’re still here to show up in mirrors, then get back behind the wheel of that little bumper car of a body and cruise on down the highway.
A Waiter and a Birthday Dinner
It was my man’s birthday Friday so we went out to dinner. (This is Old Dave as he looked in around the year 2000. He looks the same now only his hair is greyer.) Icould tell right away that our waiter at that restaurant was lonely for real conversation. He heard us talking about beers and spoke about a microbrewery he knew about.
He heard us talking about what it’s like to hike the Appalachian Trail and weighed in with a book recommendation about some guy who had done that with a house on his back or some extreme thing.
He heard our girl Annie and me trying to recall the last lines from Song of Myself and paused to listen. We finally looked it up on an i-phone and read it aloud.
“That’s beautiful,” he said of Whitman’s closing lines.
I asked for a glass of ice on the side and he told us he always forgets the ice so we should feel free to remind him. He did forget and we did have to remind him – twice – but it was fine.
I liked him and felt I understood the kind of loneliness in the rush-rush world of your average Friday night restaurant in a tourist area. It’s that certain alone-in-a-crowd loneliness of a person hungry for adult conversation. You see it in orthodontists too with their clientele of middle-schoolers.
Anyway it was a nice dinner and a nice 'real' birthday, last Friday, squeezed as it was between two losses by our poor Celtics. It certainly was a nice weekend.
I took Sunday off from blogging so I could look through pictures 100 years old of my people, thought of whom came sharply back when I went to see the house I grew up at the end of last week.
I’m on the verge of some more looking back, just to warn you. No more silly posts about underpants, for a few days anyway.
In the meantime here I am with a mate now eligible for Medicare. How the guy below turned into someone that old I don’t know. Course being the wife and not the mother I missed some of the early innings.
Tonight we're celebrating at the house of these two along with our other kids including the Whitman fan. The ‘these two’ have three young children, one at 14 weeks old just realizing what fun it is to laugh so it’s bound to be a good time, even for Old Dave. Hey for any of us to grow old and full of years: there are worse things, you know? (And few things better.)
Warm Weather Thoughts
A thought I never have in winter: Maybe I’ll paint my toenails.
Myself.
Just for fun.
Green like I wore them in my 20s.
And listen to some Santana.
Wearing shorts.
And sipping a Tanqueray gin and tonic.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpPb2cVswlI]
Account for Yourself
So what would I say I did this week if somebody asked?
Well it looks like I started the week with this picture of my family, which was NOT the picture that made it to the holiday card.
Now I seem to be finishing it with a second photo from that same day, the five-year-old still in violence-mode but everyone else looking pretty ‘prettied up' and ready for the shot.
In between week's beginning and week's end, I had my highs and my lows, as we all do:
I spilled a water bottle inside my bag, again, and was consequently taught how to do CPR on my device by plunging it in a big bowl of raw rice.
I skipped my Weight Watchers meeting, but caught that Zumba class.
I came out of the Post Office Friday to discover that someone had managed to take out my left tail light without dealing even so much as a scratch to the rest of the car.
“Maybe they stole it!” said David, as puzzled as I was when he saw it, but how would you do that, and WHY? Still, it does look pretty popped out, like poor King Lear’s eyes after the bad guy went at him with a grapefruit spoon.
I had some island food from Singh’s Roti and that was awesome.
And while I was there, in the sweet old burg that is Dorchester, I drove past my first childhood home that, in my baby days was my universe entire with its oak wainscoting going up the front hall stairs and that big stained-glass window at the landing.
Back in the 90s, it was a halfway house for women getting out of the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Framingham. I used to visit the women there and once I wrote about it for the Boston Globe.
Most of the houses on the street look great. Like Mrs. Kaposky's old place:
No so much mine.
It's no longer used by the state but the fire escapes remain. And the steps are sort of rotting. And somebody started to paint but only did as much as they could reach without a ladder and then gave up.
I got out of my car and looked at this house for a pretty good spell, remembering and remembering: my life there and my mom's life before me and the life of my grandfather before her who bought the place with such a sense of hope and joy in the spring before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand ushered in the bloodiest war the world had ever seen - until that next war broke out just two and a half decades later.
So I guess in short it was a week like any week, lived partly in anticipation and partly in memory. It’s our curse and our blessing, this ability to live however briefly in moments that are not the present moment.
Seasonal Sneezing
Seasonal allergies are worse than labor. At least labor eventually ends, you get a heated blanket and everyone tells you to Just Rest Dear.
It’s been a BAD year for them all right. We’ve had so much pollen that when you go outside mornings your car looks like my kitchen looked that time I accidentally left the top of the blender off while trying to whip up a batch of guacamole.
The thing is, when your nose gets stuffed up it’s a torture. The last time I was afflicted this way I took some drug that turns out to be the very last thing you should take because it has a rebound effect.
“Hell, never take that stuff!" someone posted in a chat room about it”
“Throw it away!” another wrote. “If you can’t go cold turkey, use it one nostril and the next night in the other,” somebody else said.
“Use Benadryl instead...” “Eat raw foods only.”
I remember thinking I might as WELL eat only raw foods since I couldn’t taste anything anyway
The night of this last spell I was up for hours and didn’t finally crawl into bed for keeps until 4am, at which point Old Dave (who I despise because he can sleep ha ha) opened one eye.
“I’m dying!” I croaked.
“Nobody ever died from lack of sleep,” said the brute.
“But I have chest pain too! And I think it’s radiating down my arm!” I improvised
“TT,” he said, patting my arm. “Old TT!” That’s been his name for me forever.
That’s the thing with physical suffering. You’re just so alone with it.
Anyway… Here’s how the parking lot outside my dermatologist's looked the other day: a ballet of pollen. I even gave it a little soundtrack. My hand is kinda shaking but that's what it does to you. The Zapruder Film all over again.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUWzT-jZ0xI&feature=youtu.be]
