'Down There'

I just wish that when I was little I had known what boys looked like ‘down there'. My only exposure was statues in the park with fig leaves over the pubic area, which I can tell you seemed far  more disturbing than any actual truth could be. Boys have - what? - parsley growing out of their bodies?I was ignorant, in short, and stayed ignorant even after that time I was three and our mom’s friend’s three-year-old peed on my leg in the bathroom. It was the arc of gold I noted though and not the delivery system.In the meantime I was growing up in a houseful of women, where none of the real words were ever used. My sister and I, for example, called breasts ‘lumps’ because we had no other word for them. We certainly had no words for the other parts of our bodies. Our grownups were so highly ‘evolved’ no such words ever passed their lips, which was too bad.I was in college before I could really ‘see’ the stunning beauty of the body. I think it was Art 100 when we studied Michelangelo’s David.I listened as the professor walked us through its details, from the earnestly furrowed young brow to the hand holding the slingshot, oddly bigger than the hand of such a youth should be; and the veins in that hand, more prominent than the veins in the hand up by his chin because of course they would be: with gravity; with being held in that downward position, until the moment when he would lift the arm and swing it and at last unleash the stone that would kill a giant.I read that sentence and see for the first time how in the moment just ‘before’ the stone flies, the sculpted hand with its veins engorged suggests potency in all its manifestations, that ineffable mighty force that keeps us reproducing.I’m not like the two women who raised me, too shy to use the words even for the parts of our bodies; but I am their child in this way: I can’t bear leering descriptions and/or nicknames for our body parts.It’s ordained minister Fred Rogers I have always identified with, sweet Mister Rogers with his kindliness and his respect for all the Created world. Here are the lyrics to ‘Everybody's Fancy’, about the difference between boys' bodies and girls' bodies, and here below is the man himself testifying before the U.S. Senate in 1969 about what his show can do for America's children. The Senator's reaction is as moving as this good man's testimony. Take five minutes and see if you don't feel like weeping for how far we have fallen.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXEuEUQIP3Q]What a good man he was and how we miss him!

Speedos!

And a Voice emerged from the crowd saying to the Prophet, “Speak to us of Speedos, Master!” And the Prophet answered saying,

“The person brought for the first time into the presence of the Speedo  at first startleth and turneth away, surprised at what a complicated structure hath been devised, not by the folks at Thpeedo, but by Nature herthelf. (Ack! Cough! There. That's better.)

“Nature, Who causeth the mountains to shout to another over the plain and sometimes even throw rocks.

"Nature, Who maketh the trees to toss their long branches like unto crazed young girls at rock concerts, thus frightening the birds for hectares in all directions.

"Lo, even Nature,  Who hath devised the means for  the fat little birds to cling to their tree  branches, even while sleeping; which hath devised the means for The Great Large Birds With Funny Eyes to snatch The Rabbit from her clover dinner quicker than thou canst say ‘Holy Crap what was that?’

"On the body of Woman, the organs of increase are largely out of sight and yes, thanks very much the Prophet knoweth very well that he borroweth from Shakespeare when he uses that phrase. He also enjoys referring to himself in the third person and tough luck if thou dost not approve. (How many books hast thou sold? Serf?!)

"I tell you, Nature hath hidden The Woman’s complicated workings behind a magic curtain such as can be seen in the puppet shows on old Mister Rogers Neighborhood episodes. “But on THE MAN'S body it is a whole other thing:

On the body of MAN, it is All Right Out There In The Shop Window so to speak, and that being the case, this piece of men’s gear is just TRUTH IN ADVERTISING.

All these things have I said to you this day. Now please someone fetch me a beach towel. I believe I’ll Speedo up too and strut along the strand a bit myself.

Lemmings, & Ban-Tights-as-Pants?

Somebody commented yesterday on the post I did about how people do love to express themselves in their dress.  “Judging by what I see in public, teenagers dress to say, ‘Here’s who they are – and I’m like them!’”

It's true. Go to the mall and there they are that certain segment of teen girls, middle schoolers especially, dressed alike down to the least particular. In winter it’s all Uggs all the time, and those pajama-bottom-looking sweatpants with writing on the fanny.

Or else it’s Uggs with tights, which is a great mistake.

In fact there’s a whole website devoted to what a mistake it is to wear tights as if they were pants.  Here is it’s manifesto:

Let’s be clear: The wearing of tights as pants is an abomination.

TIGHTS ARE NOT PANTS.

Sure, in the context of sports, ballet, hair metal and Renaissance fairs, tights function as suitable leg coverings but still:

TIGHTS ARE NOT PANTS

No, these are not activities that transform tights into pants; these are historically acceptable acts of pantlessness.

Tights as pants leave nothing to the imagination.

Tights as pants are an affront to those of us who prefer not to know the most intimate details of our neighbors’ bodies.

Tights as pants are the fashion equivalent of

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

This gratuitous divulgence of assets repels where the tights-as-pants wearer presumably hopes to entice.

We have tired of attempts to force tights into general use as outerwear it concludes and have decided to do something about it.

I didn’t click on the link to SEE what they are doing about. You can do that if you like.

I’ll settle for closing with this harvested-from-Google-Images picture, worth a thousand words as the fella said. (Poor girl! You just never know who’s going to point a camera at you next. I hope she doesn’t recognize herself.)

Express Yaself

Once, young guys wore briefs and old guys wore boxers. Now it’s just the opposite. Once, it was sailors on boozy shore-leave who got tattoos. Now, even kids in braces and Marching Band uniforms get them. Customs change.Girls still saunter around with vast crescents of flesh showing between their tops and their pants even though the fashion mag I just read in line at the pharmacy says it's not ‘classy’ to do this.People have a wish to expresses themselves, that's all. This is who I am,” is all they're hoping to say.I have a 20-something friend who dresses in a kilt when he’s of a mind to, and he certainly doesn’t do THAT to shock anyone. Yes, he studied the bagpipes once, but he’s also an Eagle Scout, a wilderness survival guy and an EMT. Oh and the computer hasn’t been invented that he can’t get to sit up and beg. So try pigeonholing HIM, you know?It was back in the mid-90s when our oldest got a tattoo and I can tell you that very few young women were doing that at the time, especially among the other double-Econ-and-Religion majors there at Wellesley College. As I recall, her dad had something to say when he heard about plans for this species of personal ornamentation. “Well, you’ll never get a job in the corporate world!” he told her tartly.“Oh Dad, I’m not going into the corporate world!” I remember her saying with a big smile. “I’m going to head up a federal agency!”“But why is she DOING it?” this mate of mine asked the ceiling later.Neither of us knew - until she came back from that trip with her best college pal Sarah and saw it. The tattoo that encircled her arm just above the elbow was the same daisy-chain pattern of the wedding ring of her grandmother, recently deceased. She had carefully made a pen-and-ink sketch of the ring's design and brought it with her to Nevada.So she didn't get it because of any fashion; she got it it as a symbol of something important to her.Also I will say these many years later, she DID join the corporate world, MBA in hand. And her equally tattooed best pal Sarah is now in Infectious Disease doc at a prestigious Boston hospital.So maybe we have to look at all fashions as mere avenues for people to express themselves.Thoreau said it: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him put on the undies he likes, however tailored or hanging down. :-)Here is the girl today with that her grandmother's wedding ring pattern and her new baby girl.

From Dylan (Thomas That Is)

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barnsAbout the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,In the sun that is young once only,Time let me play and beGolden in the mercy of his means,And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calvesSang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear andcold,And the sabbath rang slowlyIn the pebbles of the holy streams.

What's nicer than a Sunday in high summer?

Where We Lay Our Heads

I woke up mighty early the other day because these two slept over:The big one got up at 4:45, as he tells me he does every day and that was fine. I was up myself.The reason I was up is on account of the game of musical beds we play when these two stay over stay over which goes roughly like this:One, Mr. Early Bird sleeps on a pull-out sofa in a little back bedroom, an arrangement he finds very cozy and satisfying.Two, his little brother sleeps with ‘Papa’ so there are two Davids in the old marital bed, one ‘my’ original David, and the other his little grandson and namesake. He won’t consider lying down anywhere else.And three, since I also time-travel when I sleep, I can’t be in the same bed with anyone but my own Original Dave, beloved companion of many decades on this long bus trip called life. I just can’t be in the same bed with a little egg-beater of a person like his namesake  who in sleep, sends his small sturdy legs shooting across the sheets until they hit the closest warm thing. When I peek in at the two of them the little one is often  nestled right up against his grandfather’s back. I can't bear having even a cat on the bed with me I travel so far when I sleep. All my life this has been true for me: I don’t just forget when it is, I forget who I am.Soooo I sleep in the third of the three bedrooms on this our second floor and feel completely happy in it. There is something so peaceful-seeming about finding yourself in an unaccustomed bed right in your own house. It makes me feel the way I used to feel when my sister and  I would get sick as little kids and our mother would carry us to her bed to be sure we didn’t perish entirely in the night..In fact I'm watching over this oldest child just 20 feet away, listening for those first stirrings when he wakes before dawn, but it feels as though someone is watching over me.That must be how we're meant to feel when we sleep, in a world without war or violence.It’s a great way to feel all right.I wonder if these youngsters feel that way when they hold their new little sister, who will one day have overnights here too in time. Maybe I can go sleep with her.

The Humor's in the Contrast

It felt sort of WRONG to have this jokey kitchen magnet on my blog here Tuesday. Even in this far ‘breezier’ culture it felt too.... daring, almost, to post - especially for an old classroom teacher like myself.

But it just struck me so funny, the contrast set up between the crudeness of the phrase and the prim look of this MadMen-era lady with her hands prettily folded under her chin and all. They call that cognitive dissonance; you get that when a thing you believe to be true conflicts with another, previously held thing that you've already told yourself you believe. Discomfort arises then, though you wouldn't know it to look at this lady's expression.

Here are some examples of cognitive dissonance, offered by somebody in a chat room on the subject:

Say you eat a few grapes in the Produce department of the supermarket. You know it’s wrong but you tell yourself you’re just checking to see if they’re any good.

Or, you speed on your way to work. You're breaking the law - you know it - but you tell yourself it’s more important to get to work on time.

Or – here’s a doozy- say somebody you dislike makes a really generous gesture towards you. Because you WANT to dislike this person – since you have actively disliked him all this time – you write it off his kind gesture as an attempt to make you feel guilty

A lengthy diversion I know but it comes to mind in relation to this funny picture.

Because, you know, the lady LOOKS like some kind of servin’-others-at-all-times Ozzie and Harriet-style saint but here she is saying something snarky – get it ?

I offer another for you below, which I also really like. Maybe all of us nurturers just really need a little snark to even out all that sweetness and light. :-)

What the Heat Can Do

I started the day yesterday sumo-style, which is to say I was lookin' like one of these three babes...I ended it  like this, from an actual self-portrait taken in my living room around 7:00 last night .That’s what extreme heat will do to you, especially in a basically un-air-conditionable house built in the 1890s.Like tallow, the fat just melts away. (It does leave you a mite thirsty however.)  ;-)

Pedicures Schmedicures

Back in late March, I tagged along with Old Dave to a Plastics Conference where he kept busy attending workshops with names like “Gasket Enhancements 2012!”Since none of these workshops really piqued my interest, I used my time in the blazing Florida sun to people-watch at the pool, peer futilely into the unreadable screen of my i-Phone  and get a pedicure.This last thing made me so happy I swore I would keep up appearances footwise for the next six months right up until boot season.Instead I haven’t been to the pedicurists once,  and here we are more than halfway through the season of the Strappy-Sandal.Maybe I should feel ashamed going around with the toenails I was born with but somehow I’m not. Ten perfect little ovals looked good enough to God on his drafting table; shouldn't they be good enough for us?Or maybe it’s my time of life and curmudgeonliness is at last descending on me. Here's an adorable piece of cognitive dissonance for you, this lady's face and what she is saying ha ha..

The Innkeeper's Life

I woke up yesterday eyeing this window, whose inset of tiny panes we took down because it has blobs of interior white paint on the exterior side that should be all green: spillover from an old paint job that was, let us say, less than careful.To fix this problem a person would have to go assemble sandpaper and a putty knife to remove the blobs of spilled-over paint, and a delicate enough brush, and then start in on the careful ballet of removing and reapplying.B-u-u-u-u-u-t yesterday we had 13 people staying here so I knew it would be hard breaking away from the fun to get this done.And so instead I watched:Our 'chef-daughter' Annie as she wrestled with this too-tough pie crust. (I love her expression as she realized she practically needed a hacksaw to do the job...)Chris as she fried the homemade 'pommes frites' Annie had prepared.And just everybody generally doing what they felt like, which is what you're supposed to do on a summer weekend.So, where I could have stood in the hot garage for two hours sanding and painting while the smell of garbage in the garbage bags wafted gently over I figured Why bother, you know?I can remember how the window Is supposed to look with the grille in, so for now I'll be satisfied with that.

This is Your Brain on Boil

It was a tough week and then it ended thank God, thank God.Even my new pink bra couldn't cheer me when the temperatures climbed.I felt like a tea cake on a hot summer day in Alabama.That's from To Kill a Mockingbird, that image.Here's another: Sometimes when I'm looking out the windows of my office at the schoolchildren waiting for the bus, or the little boys wrestling one another to the ground, I feel like shy Boo Radley peeking from behind his curtains. "I'm the Boo Radley of the neighborhood," I sometimes say to the younger moms and dads, who smile nervously and edge away. No doubt in another ten years I too will be leaving notes in the hollow of the old oak tree.My point is, your thoughts DO melt and slide around in the heat. Slider thoughts they are and while I'm at it whose idea was it to name little burgers 'sliders'? Talk about cue the paramedics and brush up on your Heimlich Maneuver! Burgers don't slide down the throat, you have to chew them, kind of a lot in fact.And why was Chewbacca named Chewbacca? Was that some sort of product placement for the smoking lobby? Freud died of throat cancer I'll have you know... So sometimes a cigar really is a cigar and cigars give you cancer.Well that's it for me. Slammin' this little 'book' shut and heading for the country where it's all so QUIET.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw_-THlcyHc]Y'all have fun now too, heah?

Alive & Talking

In the park, a leashed and bounding pup gave his master a pretty bad case of bark-burn when it suddenly shot toward a tree and climbed six feet straight up it. Then a fat worm, just pulled from the soil, provided two small birds with a dandy workout as they dribbled, and intercepted, and hip-checked each other for ownership.It was morning, when all such strivings seem called for. By evening though, most striving has ceased.It had surely ceased at the little pond to which I came at that day’s end as so many others had done, to quiet myself, and take a final sip of daylight and look out across the water.

• Here, two primary-school girls in bicycle helmets were skipping stones across that liquid dance-floor. There, a boy and a girl were fly-fishing. Their lines spooled out from their extended arms with a long graceful flick to land – splish! - on the pond’s burnished surface.
• A fleet of ducks set sail from shore, the high-necked mama leading her twelve small charges in such a straight line it looked like sewing, she the needle and they the stitches, all small and evenly spaced and perfectly following.
• A human mother arrived, a brightly-colored palette of tattoo painting both bare arms from shoulder to elbow. With her was a tiny child, the skirts of a pink sundress belling around her legs. She squatted in the easy way little kids can, and plucked up first duck feathers and then a discarded bobber from someone’s tackle box, all the while naming the world in loud unintelligible syllables and making the same approval-inviting, one-hand-up gesture that a magician makes at the completion of yet another astounding feat: Ta-Da!
• A beefy dude in his 30s appeared then, attended by a beefy child who marched up within six inches of this small magician. “Say hello to the little girl,” the dad advised.

“Hi, little girl.” the child said.“How old is he?” asked the young mother.“I’m fwee!” declared the stout child sternly, and then, turning to the baby, said, “What YOU got?”“It’s a bobber,” said the mother. “Like in fishing.”This registered not at all with the child, who decided to try again.“How old are you?” he shouted, as if to a deaf person.“She’ll be two in October.”This he also ignored.“Why don’t you talk?” he cried, now nose to nose with the toddler. “CAN'T YOU TALK?”I’m not sure  of course, but what I think the toddler was saying, with the deadpan look she gave to her mother, was something along the lines of, “Is this person insane?” Because of course she could talk, in a way that both she and her mother understood.Late that night I dreamed about my new grandbaby who, settled in my lap just post-nap, yawned sleepily, then alerted and brightly remarked, “Well, hello there!”“I didn’t think you babies could talk!” I exclaimed.“I didn’t think you big people could think,” she replied in perfect parody.I smile to recognize in that dream the day’s lesson repeated.Because don’t we all think at first that we’re the sole stars of the show, and that everyone else is just…. scene design? But then, after some time here, we see the truth: this bird, dog and duck; that worm and babe and trout are as alive and feeling as any one of us, whether at busy striving dawn or restful end of day.

Thoughts From the Closet

Thoughts from the closet: Maybe that should be the name of my next book.I’m thinking of life in the closet because of yesterday’s memory (seen here) of being held captive in my own bedroom closet.By a little Christopher Robin of a four-year-old.All by myself for 40 minutes, which is an unheard of amount of time for any of us Americans, addicted as we are to Sights! Sounds! Movement!! Shopping!I say alone – all alone – with nothing to keep me company but a dozen pairs of stiletto heels and a bald babydoll named Bruce.As it happens, Bruce and I go back.I gave Bruce to the child six years ago and isn’t he the jaunty fellow still, in his stylish pajamas sewn permanently to his body at neck and wrist and ankle, the only way to keep a man in his pajamas in my experience.He remains a great favorite with the boy, who, on the lip of Second Grade, still sleeps with him every night.Along with Pedro Hispanic Boy, named just that way by the well-meaning folks at The Kaplan Early Learning Company.This is Pedro and the name amazes me yet.Sure, people from the first half of the last century thought of people in terms of ethnicity but haven’t we gotten past that?Even my mother, who was an outsider all her life and seemed in most ways so accepting and cool, couldn’t seem to help herself when I came home from school with an unfamiliar name on my lips. Samenuk let’s say the kid’s last name was.“Samenuk,” she would repeat. “Now what kind of a name is THAT?” she would say before he said anything else and you could just see her riffling through a mental Rolodex of names in her head. “Dutch? Russian? Polish?”She liked pondering Poles: “The Poles are smart!” she would say out of the blue sometimes, tapping the side of her head. Or “The French are very tight!” she would remark apropos of nothing. “the Italians? When Italians marry the Irish, the children are said to be handsome!”It seems crazy to us now, but that’s how people thought.I guess the folks at Kaplan are still thinking that way – unless they’re just trying to open the white-bread minds of the Mercian people. "Multicultural babies are a world of fun and snuggles!” their blurb reads on the Amazon site where I first found Pedro.The child of course and wonders not at all what ‘kind’ of name that is, any more than he wonders what ‘kind’ of name he has. But adults are slower than children and some supermarket still have an aisle marked “ethnic foods.”SMH as the kids say: Shake My head.You can do a lot of that in the closet. Ponder I mean and reflect. More tomorrow, deo volente.

What's Fun

Over these last few weeks I’ve been trying to be less obsessive about writing every day.I thought it would feel like a vacation - and so it has - sort of. But the truth is I'm uneasy with vacations. They throw me.I don’t like surprises either.In fact I dislike any unplanned forays into the unexpected unless I’m the author of them. By which I mean I do like to follow fire trucks sometimes – at a discreet distance of course - but I don’t like it when somebody in whose car I am a passenger decides to do that. Then it feels like a hijacking.I remember once a friend was really pushing me hard, trying to talk me into some last minute escapade. “Come on for heaven’s sake!” she said. “It’ll be fun!”“I DON’T LIKE FUN!” I answered, which is of course is crazy-sounding but that’s what I’m sayin’ here.  I like the fun that I plan for myself. Also the fun that little kids plan for me just because their fun puts me in comical situations.I once spent a good 40 minutes in a darkened bedroom closet, forbidden to even open the door by my four-year-old jailer. I was supposed to be pretending something, I forget what now, but I felt so Patty Hearst imprisoned by the Symbionese Liberation Army, me a bald babydoll named Bruce, I just couldn’t stop smiling.For the last two years I promised myself I would write here every day and aside from some stutterings over the last two weeks I’ve done that. Then just in the last few months it’s gotten harder to do. I sometimes feet like a standup comic who booked to ‘work’ every day of the week.So to ease up or not? Think I’ll step into the closet with Bruce and think it over. Pass me my beret would you? I want to look good for my captor. I think he likes me .

Jump Away!

Here’s how we’re all feeling as we contemplate going back to work tomorrow after this awesome Rec Swim of a week with the nation’s most important  holiday smack in the middle,.

The bath is your regular life.

You are the cat.

Jump away! Jump away now!

Maybe you can hid under the bed until NEXT weekend. :-)

'And the Voice of the Turtle is Heard in the Land...'

Summer stuttered at first but finally flared into life. I think it happened that last week in June, when that real 'school’s-out' feeling filled the air. Even the rabbits were putting an extra shimmy into their gait as they hopped and paused across the twilit grass.“Have you NOTICED all the rabbits lately?” the man at the auto-body shop said as he banged my tail-light back into place. “They come for the clover,” he added, nodding toward a wild patch of the stuff growing next to the asphalt.I picked a few of the bunchy-headed blossoms and we took turns inhaling their scent. "Now for the first time in 25 years I GET what they were saying in Bambi!”Later that day, sitting at a stop light, I saw a carful of bare chests flash past trailing laughter: teen-aged boys, every one with his shirt off.Just then, a lone goose began crossing the road and it was at this point I began to feel that new thing in the air.I pulled into the lot adjacent to a grocery store  to sit a while and see what else might pass before me. parking beneath a tree whose leaves were rustling like taffeta petticoats . Dark green and heavy with chlorophyll, they look so different now from the way leaves look in autumn, thin and dry, and scratching at a cold grey sky.A bee flew in the car window and settled a moment on my knee. He regarded me calmly with his shiny compound eyes, and then, with a sorry-wrong-pew kind of nod he flew off, resuming his jagged journey.Two women came along, one of middle years and one much older and stood a long time studying a stand of willows, pointing at it and talking.. They wore hats against the sun, and held aloft two large black umbrellas."Well, these two represent ONE attitude toward sunlight!” I thought before heading homeward, passing as I did the diametrically opposed point of view: five high school girls in bikinis lying on the flat roof over a house’s wide front porch. I only saw them because their knees jutted up. Then they swung side to side. Then a head appeared here and over there a torso. Then they all stood as if by one accord and arranged themselves anew and lay back down.They looked to me like some complicated structure made of silk that a breeze was causing to billow and subside, billow and subside. They were loveliness itself.Then I was home and sat for a spell in my driveway, looking around a little more.On the radio the music stopped and a man began speaking with that soothing Public Radio voice. Just done with the news, he ended with the weather: “Rain arrives by evening, slowly from the west,” he said, and the phrase seemed like poetry with its near-majestic cadence. I looked at my windshield, stippled sure enough with a few fat raindrops.It rained all that night and the next day too. But then the sun returned, bringing our first hot days. I felt, then and now, a silky relaxing of my own limbs and I think of another fine and cadenced phrase, this from the song that is Solomon’s:“The flowers appear on the earth. The time of the singing of birds is come.”And not a moment too soon for most of us.

Humor in Uniform?

Remember that old feature in The Reader’s Digest called 'Humor in Uniform'? Well, as a follow-up to my tribute yesterday to our family’s last remaining veteran, I offer the following. letter, printed in the Hairenik Weekly for which Uncle Ed wrote in his three years stationed off the coast of New Guinea during World War II.Says the faded clip by way of introduction," From Headquarters, Far East Air Forces, Office of the Commanding General, this letter was received by Mr. Krikor Haydostian of Roxbury, Massachusetts  advising him of the Department’s pride in his son, Staff Sgt. Edward, for his outstanding service in the Pacific and Far East operations for more than two years."Read the official letter, then scroll down for the punch line…..

FOR OUTSTANDING DEVOTION

                                                         Headquarters,  FAR EAST AIR FORCES,   Office of the Commanding General

September 26, 1945Dear Mr. Haydostian:For his outstanding devotion to duty and for his exceptional skill, your son, Staff Sergeant Edward K. Haydostian, has been personally commended to me by his commanding officer.I feel sure that you will share my pride in the excellent record he has established as a member of an Air Force team during more than two years of sustained operations in the Pacific and Far East.Your son typifies the many specialists who are a vital part of our organization. Without the crew chiefs, the bomb loaders, the engineers, the mess sergeants and the clerks, it would have been impossible for our combat crews to carry the war to the enemy.Sergeant Haydostian has been chief administrative clerk for one of our Medical Supply Platoons. The consistently high quality of his work has won the respect of his officers and fellow soldiers. His fine record is a credit to himself and to his organization.His has been a real contribution to victory. I am proud to have him under my command.

The joke is, Uncle Ed wasn’t IN the Air Force. While waiting to hear back from them,  he finally lost patience and joined the Army. He told me this story three days before he died. Otherwise we sure would have wondered! 

What Day This Is

I am mindful of what day this is, the only holiday we celebrate on its real date; the only one not nudged this way or that to give us the coveted three-day weekend: It’s the birthday of this nation, for which so many died.

My husband’s uncle was in the Big War and did not die, stationed as he was for three long years in the South Pacific.

Last July Fourth, while the rest of us were whining even with our air conditioners going full blast, he was making do with a single fan and the blue bandanna he wore around his neck to wick up sweat. He had AC; it came with his building. He just wouldn’t use it.

“Hot?" he’d say to me when I came to get him and take him out for our times together. “THIS isn’t hot! In the jungle temperatures routinely hit 120!”

I loved Uncle Ed ever since I met him on first coming into my husband’s family as a girl of 19; but it wasn’t until one day in the fall of 2006 that I came to really know him.

That was the day he stepped into the back room of his little place and came forth with at a worn three-ring binder filled with his original writings, clips of the dispatches that were sent back and published in a Boston based paper called The Hairenik Weekly aimed at the Armenian-American community of which he was a part.

“I’ve never shown this book to anyone until now,” he told me.

“Can we look at it together?”

“No!” he said. “Read it alone. Read it and keep it.”

So I kept it, for six years, but within a month I had transcribed every word of it and carefully unglue and reglued some of the photos mounted there too.

The one you see at the top is one such. “Edward Haidostian,” he had written in fine black ink. “The Island of Biak.”

The clips are of are poems, profiles and meditations.

“Enemy supplies line these dead places––burnt, battered, and useless,” one begins. “Piles of rice lay scattered all about rotting––spread over the land by the blasts of bombs and the power of attack. Motors lay smashed. Fragments of planes strew the ground. Exploded shells are everywhere. Paper, refuse, fill the beach and the stench of death is keen in the nostrils.”

“The water is smoothed into quiet ripples by the brisk breeze,” another ends. “The passing barges and harbor craft leave a wake that widens and lingers in a long sweep in the calm water. Sunlight and moonlight, in turn, glint on the small waves at the shore. The sea and the jungles glow in the brilliance of the setting sun and the stars sparkle high above it all in the stillness of the night.”

I re-read these words and meet again a man I will never see again.

“Keep the book” he had said and I kept it – until the day three months ago when, alone in his apartment, he died, between the hours of 6:00 and 11:00pm as I concluded afterward, I who found him lying dead like a soldier felled in battle after all, his head having smashed through the flimsy wooden door of the bathroom vanity,

I think of him every day and today especially.

Last night I watched again Terrence Malick’s film adaptation of The Thin Red Line and was struck anew by how much it reminded me of this man so lately lost: the way it covers another horrific battle also fought in the South Pacific; the way it has much of the same hauntingly beautiful classical music in it that he loved and played on his little hi-fi.

Here posted are two snapshots of the man as he looked stationed on the island of Biak in that war, with all of life ahead of him if he could but survive it.

How I wish I had known him then.

I think of him and all the others who left their youth behind in war for our sakes. It takes an artist to make beauty of the experience. Uncle Ed did it and so did Terrence Malick, as this clip will attest.

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

Many Dreams

I had so many dreams Sunday night I felt like I’d serially sneaked into all 8 movies at the old Cineplex.

The dreams were:

1) About riding my bike on an eight lane highway. Not a single accident !

2) About riding a souped-up ATV and going off a cliff. Major accident! Heartening fact: did not die during dream about dying.

3) About finding out that Old Dave was dating on the side. Dating! On the side!

4) About present when someone who looked a lot like Old Dave but was maybe his brother (?) or some kind of doppelganger was buying presents for the ten-year-old love child he had had with this person he was dating on the side.

5) About going to see a high school production of Hamlet where my party and I were seated outside the theatre. From what I could see from numerous sneak-ins , the production was so bad I came to see that ours were the best seats in the house.

Old Dave got up at 5:30 yesterday morning and I slept until 8. There’s basically no doubt in my mind that you have the best dreams after the other guys vacates the premises, why I don’t know

Our family's new baby has for the last four months slept all swaddled like a burrito in her bassinet but is just now graduating to larger accommodations. In this bigger venue called a CRIB she stretches out like a little Buddha, with her arms up over her head like this guy at the top - and I bet has dreams every bit as entertaining as mine – and with no vehicular mishaps either.

Marriage! Or...Taking Sides

There's always some new thing to argue over when you’re married.

A month ago Old Dave made me switch sides on the bed and he  took the good side.  ‘Course I admit I made him change the room all around that very morning, which is why he took my good side: to punish me.

It was nice to win the room-arranging fight. Very satisfying indeed.

Only now here he is on what was once MY perfectly taut side of the bed.

And here I am on his side, trying to get to sleep inside the virtual trough made by his body with its ropey muscles and heavy scaffolding. (My side, I should say, has this super-shallow almost undetectable dip that really I can’t take any credit for; it’s the porous bird-bones I was talking about the other day.)

Anyway it feels pretty strange, and not just because of the trough.

It feels strange because the room looks so different when I open my eyes: the window that used to be above the bed is now across from it and I now have to reach to the right instead of to the left for that glass of water I keep on the bedside table.  I feel like we turned the place over to new people who changed it all around, only we’re the new people.

He’s used to turning to the right - away from me - when he settles into the night’s deepest sleep only now he can’t because a turn to the right brings him in contact with the whole Argentina-long country of another body: mine.

When he did this last night it startled me awake because here he suddenly was, right on the set of the action adventure dream I was having.

It woke me right up.  “What‘s happening?” was all I could think.  Was he about to heave one of those 50-pound legs across my wicker breadbasket of a pelvis?

“Dave! I’m right here!” I said from my trough, meaning Don’t steamroll me.

He opened one eye and gave me that wry look he sometimes puts on. “Thanks T.” he said. “I feel so safe!”

You could die from such a man, you know?

see that trough? You could water your horse in it!