Son of This Town

I was writing along quietly when I heard the choppers overhead. Then here came an email from my neighbor Linda to ask if anyone wanted to join her in watching the funeral procession pass. It had slipped my mind entirely that this was the funeral day for Navy Seal Glen Doherty, whose life was lost in the attack in Benghazi, Libya just one week ago, when angry protesters stormed the U.S. consulate.Ambassador Chris Stevens and two others also perished.Glen was a child of this town, and the town turned out to honor his memory.I wish I had captured more pictures, but how could I snap the hearse going by, and the limousine holding the immediately bereaved?I looked, and then I had to look away.I thought of at least taking pictures of all the students at Winchester High lining the streets to honor the passing of this their predecessor by a quarter of a century but I didn’t have the heart for that either. In the end I only took this picture of them as they filed back into the school, the American flags they were holding now tucked away again.The,n ten minutes later, when the choppers had moved west into the hills to hover over St. Eulalia's where the Funeral Mass was being said, I crossed the street and took this photo, out behind the town's Senior Center. It could almost be May, couldn't it, for how verdant the landscape still looks.The green won’t last, as the little squirrel also captured here well knows. Alas, we are all on Time’s escalator going down.As the clock sounded the 11th hour, I thought of John Donne’s "Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XwmRNwSvS8&feature=g-upl]It tolled yesterday for 42-year-old Glen Doherty, who I remember as part of Coach Tremblay's Wrestling Squad when he was a boy and life, and fatherhood, and service to the nation were all still before him.

The Ones Who Hurt Kids More Than Help

Let’s talk about teaching then. Let’s talk about my kindergarten teacher Miss Keller as I’ll call her, who looked like Woodrow Wilson and was forever calling to us children   "Attention, children! Children!” in her fluty Brahman voice.She was nice enough I guess– except to our classmate Francis Christmas. whom she punished.Francis was one of only two Black children in the class.I fervently hope that was not why she singled him out but he was forever being punished. Once she forced him to stay behind the piano, trapped by it bulk in one sealed-off corner of the classroom, while the rest of sang our songs about bluebirds and apples. All the while, he had to stay back there in his isolation.I remember him yodeling away, singing his own songs, in what I see now might have been  a cheerful effort to keep his spirits up.He wasn’t afraid of her I don’t think, even though she also brought him to the cloak room sometimes and secluded him there. I remember seeing him when we gathered there to suit up for Recess, his shirt collar suspended from one of the old brass hooks. She didn’t actually affix him to the hook, did she? Let me be remembering wrong!And yet I have this visual still in my mind after all these years. Did he pretend to be hanging himself, again in some valiant pretend-jolly way that helped him save face?I can’t say for sure that she did these things,  busy as I was trying to eat all the nice salty white glue I could get my hands on, those little dabs of the stuff that she passed out on little tabs of yellow paper when it was time for Art.No, I can’t she ever made me feel afraid.My feeling-afraid came later, as I said yesterday when we kids had to watch as our chums the boys were being paddled by our middle school teachers. The sound of the paddles whizzing through the air was bad enough, and the resounding slap when it hit the open hand that the boy was ordered to open wide and hold out. Worse yet: each boy’s effort to smile even as tears of pain sprang to his eyes.The feeling-afraid came again to me again when we kids heard tales of our older cousin who began at this Catholic high school for boys where all the teachers were monks. The he lived in fear of was Brother James, let's call him, who when he caught one boy searching inside his desk when he shouldn’t have been, took its wooden lid , opened it as wide as he could and slammed it down hard on the child's head. My cousin told his parents about this and the news percolated down to us younger kids. He left the school shortly after.Dark thought indeed.A reader named Jacqueline said in a comment on my school-related post from yesterday that "if we are to learn then we need to be inspired, not shamed."  True words, Jacqueline-from-Scotland and very well stated!Tomorrow, some more positive tales I hope

Clean Your Mind

  If you could clean out your mind the way you clean out your house what amazing amounts of room you would have - to learn physics, say, or Italian. I would love to learn Italian! Even hearing the music of it you can’t believe the people speaking it are just answering basic questions like, “What time does the train come?” In with phrases like “Buongiorno!” and “Dopo di lei” I say! Out with that memorized list of English prepositions that got stapled into my brain by my Seventh Grade teacher with her thin cloud of dark hair hovering like a mist over her pale shiny scalp.She was our English teacher but she doubled as the headmaster’s secretary and I can’t help but think she must have found that second role difficult, since the man saw himself as the sole person competent enough to save the nation.I know he WANTED to educate us -- I  had him for Latin my last year at the school -- but I also know he wanted to punish us.He would single us out and make us stand trembling beside our desks one by one while he hammered us with unanswerable questions about politics.“What did the American voter THINK, electing that fool Roosevelt who saddled us with this crippling national debt?”We didn't know. We were 12 years old! And it was the 1960s, not the 1930s!He ranted anyway.Worse yet, he believed in corporal punishment and how sick we all felt seeing the male teachers swing back their special wooden paddles and bring them down hard across our classmates' tender fingertips.The teachers used only their paddles, but that headmaster favored the rod, which he kept stored in a special solution to keep it supple. He used it mostly on boys whose families were poor and unlikely to question him. I noted even then that he never dared cane Dr. Black’s son, or the son of Attorney Smith.But let me turn away now from that dark past and focus on the good and real teachers, now, at the school year’s start.The good and real teachers never abuse their power. They are firm but they are kind.They are strict about keeping order, but they do so in a gentle and measured fashion.Nobody gets targeted in a real teacher’s classroom. Nobody gets shamed. The good and real teacher will also tell you the truth about yourself when you need to hear it.I think of the time my high school French teacher told the whole class it looked like Mademoiselle Sheehy was “growing a little BIG for her breeches.”I was the show-off-y Mademoiselle Sheehy, and I knew she spoke the truth.The lady never raised her voice; never brought her personal demons into the classroom.I remember her dictating vocabulary quizzes to us that one autumn and noticing how her gaze would lift away from us and drift out the window as we scribbled our answers. She had just lost her life’s companion to an early death but that occasional faraway look was the only sign we ever had of her heartache.I can still see her now, small and compact. She stood for the whole class and spoke every word of t.e lesson in French until even the slowest of us got so we could think in that language.All this was years ago but it is as if that teacher is with me still, correcting and encouraging me. This is what good and real teachers do. Lucky children who sit now before the ones like those!  

My Haunted Ride

Well I found the bag with my lost items and a good thing too, since the spare car key old Dave loaned to me was bewitched.It has that touch pad on it, you know the one, that you use to make the back hatch pop up or the sliding doors open.(This my car by the way, a 2005 Town and Country.)Well none of those functions work with Old Dave's key. His key to my car behaves so badly he has to bury it in the back yard so it will cease communicating with the vehicle. (OK, not really. Really it’s in his the bottom of his sock drawer, which is practically the same thing.)With his key, when you’re done driving it, you turn off the engine, press ‘Lock’ on the little keypad that’s right on the key and walk away, secure in the knowledge that your vehicle is protected. Not with Dave’s key. With Dave’s key you lock up and within 20 seconds people are yelling that one of your sliding doors is.“Hey, you left your DOOR open!” they call as if you’re the stupidest person in the world, but that’s only if you’re lucky.If you’re not lucky, as I learned yesterday, you come back from 45 minutes in the grocery store and only THEN find that the car door is open and a family of raccoons has moved in and begun preparing dinner.So the first thing I did yesterday was go the dealership to see about making a new key to replace my old key.“That’ll cost ya $225,” the woman in Service told me.“I can’t pay that! I said and went on to explain the problem with Dave’s key. “Can’t you just do something to make it stop talking to my doors this way?”“Gosh, I don’t know. Let’s move you over to Parts.”So over I went to Parts, where I explained my problem to the equally nice person manning that desk.He listened as I gestured to my car, visible through the plate-glass window, just 50 feet away.He tested its battery which was fine, and laid it on the counter to consider the problem.Then “Hey! I didn’t even touch the key and look!” he cried, gesturing outside. “Your left rear door slid open!”“What I’m sayin’!”So he has ordered a new key with no smart functions at all that will cost me less than 50 bucks.Of course Old Dave is trying to call this a waste of money. “The key is fine,” he said if you can call a key fine that has to be buried at all times to make it stop poltergeisting all over the place.Anyway I go back to the dealership today and pick up my new, UN-smart key – which I’m thinking I will keep ON MY PERSON at all times - maybe inside my bra even, which is where I keep my Bluetooth – so that I never again find myself locked out as I was on Wednesday.Still, all’s well that ends well and I am happier than I can say that my missing bag was found.I went back to the mall in person again yesterday and walked from office to office asking after that lost RadioShack bag. “Sorry” they said at Macy’s Lost and Found. “No, Sorry” at the Mall Office. “Sorry!” at the Customer Service counter at the mouth of the Lord and Taylor walkway.Then, I went back to EBar, the fancy-coffee place just outside Nordstrom’s. I had bought a coffee there Wednesday and that’s the first place I went in retracing my steps that day, but they hadn’t seen my bag either.This time though on my second day of scouring I approached the barista.“Nobody turned in a RadioShack bag to you, did they?”“The other day?”  she said.“Yes,” I said with a quickening heartbeat. ‘She walked ten feet down the counter and bent over to reach into a shelf.“Here ya go!” she said. “Somebody brought it in at the end of the day.”So it wasn’t stolen at all but only lost.I love it when things are only lost because I believe all lost things come back to us in the end.  When I was two I lost my favorite ball toy and mentioned it aloud it in my prayers every night along, with the little stray cat we called Stranger who was with us for only about a week. God please find… “ I prayed.Those two things aren’t back yet but hey: I’m still in the early innings here, right?

the lost bag and keys, found at last

the lost bag and keys, found at last

When Things Go Wrong

When things go wrong, they really go wrong. Or maybe this is just a bad time for me.First, I lost my Nikon Cool Pix camera, a silvery little thing, skinny as an angel fish and slippery as a palmful of mercury.  It just slipped into another dimension is all I can say.This happened in August and I whined about it here a week or so ago. Then this past weekend when I posted some photos here, a few especially alert readers commented, "Ah you found your camera!"But I didn't find my camera. I used my phone to take those pictures.So finally, after I had wrestled with my conscience and argued with my pocketbook, I counted up all my coupons from Staples and went to that store and bought a new camera, a fancier one and, more importantly, one that bulges out on one side. Harder to lose, I figured.Then today since I was at the Mall anyway I ducked into RadioShack  to look for a case for it,  which I found. And the salesman was lovely so while I was there I also bought a bigger media card and a battery for the remote control of my Bose radio. I paid,  pulled out my car keys, tossed ‘em in the RadioShack bag and started for my car. But then at the last minute I thought I might just run into that rest room outside Nordstrom’s - oh and maybe grab a coffee at the coffee bar they have just to the right of the entrance.Then suddenly I was inside Nordstrom's.  It happens but my excuse was a good one: we have a family wedding on the beach at 11am this Sunday for which I foolishly thought I would wear this gorgeous spun-sugar dress, a gossamer dream of swoops and scallops, the kind of thing Tinkerbell would wear if they ever let her out of those green cutoffs. Only now it  looks now like it’s not going to BE warm and sunny on the beach at 11am. It's going to be 56° with temperatures climbing to the 60s if we’re lucky and a fair amount of overcast.I do have another get-up I can wear but no shoes to go with it, which is why I went into Nordstrom's, after hitting the bathroom and before hitting the EBar where they make such awesome coffee.Somehow, in one of those three places, I set down the RadioShack bag, which, remember, had my car keys in it.I got out to the car and immediately got that awful feeling you get when you realize you can't get into your vehicle.I had to call my friend Mary let herself into my house with the extra key she keeps for us, went up to old Dave's bureau, found his key to my car and drove all the way to the mall to rescue me.I kept thinking as I waited for her that surely I would find the keys inside the car. After all I had made two trips to the car earlier because I’d had my laptop with me and that was too heavy to lug around shopping . Then I bought two skirts and I didn't want to be carrying them. Thus I had made at least two offloading trips to the car.Or was it three? Surely the Radio Shack back and the keys were in there too?Only they weren't. The RadioShack bag is gone, along with that brand-new camera, a media card, a camera case, the battery for the remote for my Bose radio - AND ALSO my car keys, my house keys, the key to my Post Office box, and the special skinny key chain cards that in my case get me the good deals at CVS,  at Mahoney's Rocky Ledge Nursery and at Rite Aid. Oh and the one I need to gain entrance to the Y every day.All this bad luck broke on me at 4pm yesterday and I feel just sick about it.I called Nordstrom's and RadioShack and the Mall Office but no one had seen any such bag. I left my name and number.You don't think about people stealing stuff but maybe if you’re such a fool as to set down a bag from RadioShack so as to paw through the tumble of discounted shoes, this kind of thing will happen.I wonder if that happened. Nobody has stolen from me since 1980, when a couple of second-story men shimmied up the columns to our porch, pushed up the window to my study, and relieved us of all our wedding gifts. And my mother's ring from the Boston Latin school. And my own National Honor Society pin. And the charm bracelet my high school boyfriends kept adding to, wee silver trinket by wee silver trinket until it jingled on my wrist like the ankle bracelet on a gypsy queen.All gone now, along with this latest list of things, like that new camera that I didn’t get to use even once.It's a lesson for me all right and not an easy one.  I'm just hoping for a better day today.

Keys like the ones here - only my key ring holds a good 15 keys plus the 4 mini-cards

Undressing a Maiden

Back again to Emily Dickinson who was the opposite of tame, the opposite of conventional.Our Emily, who would never use proper punctuation.How that shocked the literary bigwigs! No commas or semicolons for her! She favored the dash.This killingly beautiful poem by Billy Collins gets at her nature and the world she lived in too. You might have to be somewhat knowledgeable about her poems to recognize the fly buzzing and the plank and the loaded gun - she really did say Life was a loaded gun - but you don't have to know a single thing about all that to see the beauty and eroticism of this piece. And for you strictly 21st century readers, a tippet is a brief ornamental garment that hovers about the shoulders. Tulle is like organdy if that helps at all: stiff and somewhat gossamer in nature.  And whalebone stays were the joists in a corset that kept the whole edifice erect.I'll assume you know what a bonnet is and can visualize the ever-startling iceberg of human nakedness. Here is the poem then. Hold on tight!

Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes

First, her tippet made of tulle,easily lifted off her shoulders and laidon the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a morecomplicated matter with mother-of-pearlbuttons down the back,so tiny and numerous that it takes foreverbefore my hands can part the fabric,like a swimmer's dividing water,and slip inside.

You will want to knowthat she was standingby an open window in an upstairs bedroom,motionless, a little wide-eyed,looking out at the orchard below,the white dress puddled at her feeton the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women's undergarmentsin nineteenth-century Americais not to be waved off,and I proceeded like a polar explorerthrough clips, clasps, and moorings,catches, straps, and whalebone stays,sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebookit was like riding a swan into the night,but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,how her hair tumbled free of its pins,how there were sudden dasheswhenever we spoke.

What I can tell you isit was terribly quiet in Amherstthat Sabbath afternoon,nothing but a carriage passing the house,a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhalewhen I undid the very tophook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,the way some readers sigh when they realizethat Hope has feathers,that reason is a plank,that life is a loaded gunthat looks right at you with a yellow eye.

What a relief to undress and be undressed as she undresses and is undressed in this the poet's fantasy! Every woman who ever wore a bra or girdle, or pantyhose,or Spanx understands the feeling. “Wild nights!” she said in one poem, a gossamer-spun fantasy of her own.And now the poet laureate himself, reading the piece aloud:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5oUS3_3Dsg]

Take a Sad Song

This past weekend I had business at the airport, but having arrived there, I found myself reluctant to enter the terminal.Instead, I lingered in the parking lot, watching the planes lift and soar, or else glide and settle like great graceful birds that seemed to tuck their wings on landing.I thought of the lives lost on planes over the last decades: in the accidental crash of ValuJet’s Flight 592 and TWA’s Flight 800 and through terrorist acts, including Pan Am’s Flight 103 over Lockerbie and the four flights lost on September 11th: American Airline’s Flight 11, United’s Flight 175, American’s Flight 77 and United’s Flight 93.It was as if I were afraid of all I might feel on entering the terminal.But once inside that cool bubble of space, a comforting calm prevailed.A kind of official host patrolled the long line of travelers, searching for the tardy few who would miss their flights if not found and brought forward.A man on his phone made calls, dialing and barking his name, proposing figures, proposing dates.Poker-faced, a toddler in a nearby stroller eyed him skeptically.I saw that I would have a wait, and I'd eaten no breakfast, so I stepped from the line to find a sandwich.In a jauntily-lit fake-saloon of a joint, I sat down and looked around at the stained-glass lamps and the polished bar. The place had an old-time feel to it, and so did the music being piped in. It was the song  “Hey Jude” by the Beatles.“And anytime you feel the pain, Hey Jude, refrain, don’t carry the world upon your shoulder,” is how the words go. "For well you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder...”Thirty minutes later, in line once again, I inched my way toward the counter.Just as I began my transaction, a baggage handler stepped between us.“I need a word with my friend here,” he said, indicating the ticket agent. They solemnly shook hands.“Hank, I want you to give me your phone number,” he said to the agent.Careful as a schoolboy, Hank wrote it on a slip of paper and handed it over.“I’ll be calling you,” said the baggage handler pleasantly, slipping the paper into his breast pocket.There was no way to know, but it felt as if Hank needed help, which his friend was offering.So friendship still works, I thought from my dark frame of mind.And then I saw that much still works in this world. Every day millions of us get up and go about the business of living, thinking from time to time of our dear ones at home perhaps, or that lovely last hour of summer light as seen from a west-facing window.Every day hundreds of thousands of us go aloft, trusting our lives to hold up beneath us.It sears us to think of those for whom things went another way. In our minds we still hold the sight of their datebooks and backpacks salvaged from some wreckage. The sight of their innocent shoes.We tell ourselves they don’t need shoes where they are now, or backpacks or datebooks either, and many of us believe that this is so. The assurance of things hoped for. The conviction of things unseen.Leaving the airport that day, I thought again of that old song by Lennon and McCartney, and of the kindness one man showed to another, and suddenly I could once again look at those airplanes as the great graceful birds I have always imagined them to be.

I Knew She Was No Mouse

Up until now we've had only one photo of that famous recluse Emily Dickinson, in which she does look somewhat unformed and even mouselike. (Think of Robert Burns’s ode to that small rodent: "Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie, O what a panic's in thy breastie!") She looks timorous and wee if not cowering. She also looks like you could blow her clean over by exhaling sharply in her presence.She was recovering from an illness at the time, family members said later. It’s why she was so thin in this 1847 daguerreotype of her, made when she was just 16.Now suddenly news has broken of a new picture of Emily which Amherst College believes is the poet for sure. (They keep all her archives – she lived in Amherst Massachusetts all her life and her dad was associated with the school.) Emily is the one on the left, sitting with her friend Kate Scott Turner.Amherst College worked with Dr. Susan Pepin, Director of Neuro-Ophthalmology at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. She compared the two images one to one using scientific measurements. She says this is Emily all right, sitting with her recently widowed friend. She is 29.And here is the image made by a Vermont Firm called North 100, proving the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. Watch the video to see the 16-year-old change into the 20-year-old and back again:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYfdk4bi5GY&feature=relmfu]They are the ones who produced this living emergence of the wan girl into robust adult womanhood. They tell the story here , and within this link you can find a second link to the report by Dr. Pepin, who sees more clearly than the rest of us ever could about skin folds and eye size and even the shape of a person’s cornea who has been dead since the 1880s. She notes the way light shines in a certain way off that right eye of hers; you can see it as clear as day. That is an astigmatism. Dr. Pepin says, and it is identical in both pictures.So yes we have a resurrected Emily, that poet who wrote such wonderful things I practically keep a list of them by my bedside. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to see her in full health with that almost-mischievous smile playing about her lips.She made so many sly cracks about organized religion, and love, and time, and yet she herself worshipped at the altar Nature, and knew what love felt like even if it was love at a distance, and sensed the ever-approaching End. Here is what she wrote once to the handsome John Long Graves who became a special friend in his years at Amherst and then, like all the others, moved away from the little village:“Much that is gay I have to show if you were with me John, upon this April grass! Then there are sadder features, here and there, wings gone to dust that fluttered so last year – a moudering plume, an empty house in which a bird resided.... Where last year’s flies, their errands ran, and last year’s crickets fell! We too are flying , fading, John, and the song “here lies” soon upon lips that love us now will have hummed, and ended.”This passage has always brought me near tears, and it does that again today as I type it, especially as I attend the late summer sound of the acorns outside my window, dropping like small bombs on roof and sidewalk.'We too are flying, fading, John.' But not altogether, if we capture our thoughts in ink, or pigment, or musical note. Not altogether if we leave behind some sign of how it was for us when we were here.Look at that little smile. She was no mouse! She was a lioness!

Let There Be Light... Again

I can never throw anything away, not even this front porch light of ours that got so repeatedly taken over by nesting birds that it finally shorted out the whole line, forcing us to spend $400 on a NEW light and an electrician to make repairs and install it.It was no small job: It took three hours of his time and several holes drilled in our front hall ceiling to run out a new line.In the meantime we had this square glass thing, stuffed entirely with grasses and bits of straw and other nesting materials thought useful by the various momma birds that made their home in it over time. (This imperfect blurred picture shows how it looked when David took it down the last time.)The birds did these every spring for three springs and it was awful for us. We couldn't use the front porch light without incinerating a whole family, or soon to be family if the babies were still in their egg stage, and we were we about to do that!So company was forever stumbling on our front steps.Finally this past month, we took it down for good. Old Dave was all for bringing its straight to the dump, but I asked him to wait.I studied its sides and thought candles would look nice shining through its pretty glass.I examined the screw posts sticking up out of its four corners and thought four 99¢ finials would cap those off and serve as ornamentation besides.I turned it over and glued that special felt onto its metal edges so it wouldn’t hurt the table I mean to set it on.Then I set it on that table, nestled this bunch of fall flowers in a short square vase in its center, dropped four tiny tea candles in and lit them with my lighting wand and voila! Once again there was light!  And no birds died to furnish it. :-)

The old light by day in its new life as a planter...

and the same light by night with the candles burning

Losin' It

So much that you lose somehow turns up again. That’s my one comfort.I’m like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass who, when Alice sees her in the woods, reports that she has lost her comb, while her hairbrush hangs unnoticed from a section of her unkempt locks.I can identify, is what I’m saying, because ONCE AGAIN I have lost my camera.It wasn’t misplaced. It wasn’t left behind somewhere. It was simply rendered invisible as if by some magic spell, and all I can do is hope it might as magically manifest again.I also lost my phone holster and did not find it until three days later when I was rummaging through the fridge. That's where my keys always are too when they get lost, typically on the third shelf from the top, right next to that jar of salsa.AND I was reading the nice book called The Notebook of Lost Thing, but then I lost it. (This is true!)Sigh. Maybe I should just make a list of the things I haven’t lost yet; that might be easier.Let's see:

• Well I haven’t lost my tendency to stammer when I have trouble getting a word in.
• I haven’t lost my wedding ring, probably because it’s practically soldered onto my hand after all these years.
• And, I haven’t lost the ability to recite that list of the thorniest Latin verbs in all their forms, though I don’t get much call to trot those out anymore.

They say the things that enter your mind early are the things you remember best and I think it's true. Yesterday in the waiting room of the doctor’s office a handsome man walked in, took a chair and looked me full in the face.“You’re Terry Sheehy!” he said.Startled, I just looked at him.“Shane!” he said, pointing to his chest. “Shane McDonough!”Now I have not seen Shane McDonough except once, from the back, for almost 50 years. Not since I was deep in 7th Grade love with his older brother and he was the cutest little six-year-old on the block.“Shane! Of course! But how did you know me?”“How did I know you? You look like yourself!” he said, which to me seemed completely impossible since back then I was basically a jelly doughnut whereas now I have that same pointy-chinned. long-nosed look that Zelda Fitzgerald got near the end of the wild years in Paris when she and old F. Scott were slipping booze into their baby’s bottle, to make sure she got the really GOOD sleep.It’s a lovely thought though, that we might look the same to the people who knew us ‘back then' and maybe it's even true.  I'm just now realizing that when I look at Old Dave I still see the 21-year-old I fell for so long ago. So while I may lose all manner of things over the years, I maybe can take comfort in knowing that all the really important stuff is being safely held for me… somewhere...Now if I could just find that camera… 

First Day of School 3pm

It was the first day of school, and at 2:00 in the afternoon there was NO ONE in the supermarket. They were all out meeting the schoolbus.One half hour later, however, my local Staples was simply jammed with kids and grownups alike.On the way back from Staples, at the classic ‘school's-out’ hour of 3:00, I saw four kids shrieking with joy and running like mad along the sidewalk, raincoats tucked in around their bouncing backpacks because the day had cleared and it was now 84 degrees out. They were, as best as I could tell:

1. A Second Grader
2. A Third Grader
3. A Fourth Grader and, on the Fourth Grader's back, having the piggyback ride of her life....
4. An especially tiny First Grader.

I smiled so wide I thought I couldn't smile any wider.And then I saw a toddler and a kindergartener standing with the family dog and their mother, getting ready to greet another galloping schoolchild just heading in their direction from down St. Mary's way.To mark the triumphant return of this schoolchild, whom I judged to be around ten, the kindergartener had lifted the pup up on its hind legs and was waving its paw in greeting. Then the schoolchild waved, the mother waved, the kindergartner freed one hand from the puppy to wave too and the toddler popped his thumb from his mouth and gaped.Yup. The first day of school is a mighty day, no matter how you slice it.

Back in Harness

The first day of school hereabouts and rainy too. My ever-bubbly neighbor called merrily back to her household upon walking out her door at just now.Meaning JUST now, at 5:25 in the morning. “Good bye Good bye! Have a great day!”  etc.That’s what woke me.It also woke Old Dave, who since 2:00 am had been in the living room on his insomnia couch where he very nicely goes so as not to disturb me by switching on the light. He gets under his special insomnia blanket and starts in reading the Wall Street Journal’s tiniest-printing pages and before he knows it he’s dozed off again.It’s better than Sominex! he says, showing how sweetly out-of-date he is, talking Sominex when fully one-third of the American population is mainlining Ambien and having somnambulistic adventures that would make your hair curl if you thought about it at all . (ASLEEP WHILE DRIVING? This person in the oncoming car is actually sleeping?!)So this nice neighbor’s voice woke him as I was saying and woke me too.HE sank into the bed, sighing comfily and went back to sleep for another two-and-a-half hoursI couldn’t do that.Not on the first day of school.Never mind that my kids are out of school themselves.Never mind that I haven’t been a teacher for many years.Three years ago my brother-in-law, then a school principal, asked me if I wouldn’t like  to be a permanent substitute just from April vacation until the end of the school year on June 20^th."'JUST' that long? You mean of course every day I suppose?""Yes every day.""You mean ALL Day every day?""Well yes all day every day."I have gone in to many a classroom since I became a writer to give little talks and workshops but I have not since Jimmy Carter was in the White House spent more than a day max. I’m an ‘act’, a guest speaker, a one-hit wonder.Spend the whole day in front of the kids, hour after hour, class after class, selling joy, and the fun of learning, and the satisfaction of mastery over a subject?The thought that I could do that now from the midst of this dabbling and dilletantish current life made me blood pressure soar.It’s not a job for the faint of heart. It’s a job for the pros, the heroes, the athletes, in other words the teachers who,  in my town anyway, start all over again today. And I know one thing: THEY sure won't need Sominex tonight or anything like it either.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0_pOLHghkY]

The Vision Thing

My on-the-road husband did show up at last, ending my week alone and a good thing too. I'd begun hanging curtains on the screened-in porch – curtains on a porch! - but at 108 inches per panel , they're a little LONG for the purpose and so sort of melt and swirl about on the porch floor like the hemlines of a gathering of ghosts. Of course I realized their excessive length only after whanging a bunch of nails and screwing a bunch of screws along the whole 30-foot length of wall out there to get the curtain rods in place so now I will have to take down and cut the curtains, hem the curtains, RE-IRON the curtains and then hang them again using the cute new bought-for-the-purpose stepladder that looks like a jaunty four-foot-tall upper case A when in use, then magically sandwiches itself shut again to turn into a kind of a Flat Stanley of aluminum, skinny enough to store behind any door.Anyway the ladder is a great success...And I know some might say you don’t actually NEED curtains on a screened-in porch.It’s what Old Dave said the second he saw them. Actually he said one word, “No,” which after all these years of marriage I take as a sign from God herself that I should press on.I mean I know curtains on a porch may seem weird since the whole idea of a screened-in porch is to let the breezes in. But this porch has a high set of windows above the screen that I find sort of questionable looking and that also force our nice new neighbors to have to look at me out there in my trusty blue nightie 7am, sucking in coffee and tapping madly on my keyboard. Why wouldn’t I want to spare them that sight if I could?Also – and they don’t know this because they just hot here two months ago - this paradise of palm trees and fern fronds gives way to a very different sight come winter, when Old Dave takes every stick of outdoor furniture we own including the wicker chairs on the three real front porch and stuffs them in practically on top of and in some cases actually on top of all the furniture already living there. Then the place looks like a warehouse.For years I have felt terrible about this; about the way our former neighbor had to look over from her house and see this mess. I even, mentioned it to her once. “That’s the least of my problems,” she said which I took to mean it was, in fact, a problem, or anyway an eyesore.Ever since, porch curtains have been on my mind and now I’m just making them, whatever David thinks. I’m going to let them drape to the floor, then gather them up in my arms, flip them over the rod and tug at them until they scallop and fluff like Scarlett O’Hara’s petticoats.It will be nice! He’ll see! Maybe I can take a picture and post it here when I get them all up, though I expect my progress might slow down now that he’s back and I can be calm and normal again. Anyway they were so cheap. 75% off! I got ‘em at Macy’s during their Super Special Sale Days and then when I pulled out my pocketful of promotional coupons. I saw I couldn’t afford NOT to buy ‘em.

Antidote to Loneliness

During my week alone I cleaned and sorted and filed all kinds of things and came upon this poem that our Uncle Ed had saved among his papers.He lived alone for 20 years - more  even.Ever since 1991, when his beloved wife Fran had to go into a nursing home with her Alzheimer's, and then for the 12 years after she died and before he followed her into death this past April.I remember sending him it.My daughter had sent it to me.Between me and other family members, we saw him four days a week but I suspect the other days were long indeed.I hope that it comforted him and that he believed its message. Anyway here it is.It's called 'Everything is Waiting for You' and it's by David Whyte.

Your great mistake is to act the dramaas if you were alone. As if lifewere a progressive and cunning crimewith no witness to the tiny hiddentransgressions. To feel abandoned is to denythe intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,even you, at times, have felt the grand array;the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowdingout your solo voice. You must notethe way the soap dish enables you,or the window latch grants you freedom.Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.The stairs are your mentor of thingsto come, the doors have always been thereto frighten you and invite you,and the tiny speaker in the phoneis your dream-ladder to divinity.Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease intothe conversation. The kettle is singingeven as it pours you a drink, the cooking potshave left their arrogant aloofness andseen the good in you at last. All the birdsand creatures of the world are unutterablythemselves. Everything is waiting for you.

Clean and Empty

Well, the summer houseguests are gone,and now I’m cleaning and putting the rooms to rights, vacuuming up the hundreds of spider webs that I just KNOW weren’t here two weeks ago (A spider web from the mirror on my bureaus to the curtains on my window!  A spider web WITH A SPIDER, not five feet from the bed, where I have been sleeping all week...alone....with David a thousand miles away bringing the wonders of foam to a grateful nation.The vacuuming part is actually sort of fun. It reminds me of going to Confession in the hard old days when you had such terror about having to report every bad intention never mind every bad act; but afterwards - ah! - You felt so clean! Shriven was the word they used. This house is shriven!The sleeping-alone part seemed like it might be fun for a change but it hasn't been.Oh at first it was cool knowing I had the bed to myself and piling all kinds of things in there with me but after that...  I don't know.Last night I tossed and turned.I miss the old ball and chain and when he gets off that plane at 4pm today I can tell you I will be HAPPY to see him, that wiper-down of counters  and picker-up of sticks outside, that meticulous householder. I suppose he'll notice right away that I ran over a giant bottle of Nivea with my car. It exploded with a loud crack when it went under the wheels and sprayed its special Super Enriching formula in a 30-foot delta across the driveway.Yeah. He'll notice that. He is  one vigilant guy. Here is a picture of him now, keeping watch over our littlest one's supper that time we took all the kids to Disney World. (Or, come to study it more, he might just be eyeing everyone’s leftovers.)I hope he even gets here early. I think I'm growing a little odd without him. Can you say Grey Gardens? :-)There was something cool about old Edith Beale but ice cream in bed taken straight from the cartoon is generally a bad idea. :-)

Saints? We're No Saints

Somebody said to me yesterday, “You and your husband must be saints, having teenagers in the house all summer"  -see yesterday's post "The Give and the Get" - but it makes me so uncomfortable when people start with that you-must-be-saints stuff.I grew up in a three-generation household so it feels totally normal to me to have a bunch of people under one roof and I’m guessing it feels normal to  Old Dave too. Wasn’t he one of four brothers in a three-bedroom house that also included a single aunt?Didn’t he share a room with that aunt as a baby?These are the four Marotta boys on the left here. That’s oldest brother Toby looking like a teen idol, then my future husband David with his striped shirt and his white teeth, then in the front row younger brothers Skip and Jeff.Even here in our current house we've had many years when there were six or even seven kids, only three of whom our biological ‘own’ kids – and this is back in the era when we had just one shower. .David does occasionally have insomnia these days, so the one request I made to the guys when they moved in last June was that they be out of the downstairs after midnight which is when the affliction really hits. I figure what sleepless adult born before the first moon landing wants to come downstairs with his George R.R. Martin book to find a 17-year-old draped on the couch in front of the Cartoon Network?They got that. Of course they got that. They also got it that I don’t want to be chatted with when I’m writing.And for our part we ‘got’ some things too. A long time ago we started ‘getting’ it that most houseguests don’t want to be fussed over. Accordingly, we showed the boys the spoons and dishes and bought them the right milk and the right cereals and the kinds of chees and rolls and coldcuts that they like. We showed them the pots and the cutting boards and kept the fruit bowl full and that was about all we had to do.They were easy - in part because they are ABC Scholars, young people who because of their academic ability and their ambition applied as eighth graders to the national A Better Chance program and ended up coming here to this town with its first-rate high school. They left home and family at 14 to do this – some came at 13 - and they know better than most of us how to navigate new waters.Plus having lived with one another in the ABC House, they’re wonderfully neat. The bathroom they used all summer never had so much as a wet towel in it never mind any toiletries. They carry those things in and when they’re done they carry them back out again.Then they’re so funny and smart and they wrestle each other to the floor just like I used to see Dave’s brothers do with him when we were young and I was first coming into the Marotta family.So saints? We're no saints. We're just doing what we've always done in this house. This below is Dodson, our own ABC host son, when he lived here too just before heading off to college in long-ago 1990. Then under that here is he is again teasing our oldest girl Carrie. They painted the study for me and earned money pulling  the old shingles off the front porch roof that summer. I look at these pictures and remember back over  these last two months and think, well, the fun is where you make it in life!

The Give and the Get

It’s not hard to love the people who live in your house. They're right there in your house, so you really SEE them,  almost from inside their very own eyes!I mean here's this one’s toothbrush, and comb, for example and the towel he uses each day for his shower, tokens of the daily care-of-the-body tasks we all must perform each day.Here’s the book that one reads when sleep eludes him. He has left it on the porch, thinking maybe to pack it on his bike and take it to work to read at the lunch hour.And here, under the bureau: here is a balled-up sock where it has landed after being taken off and tossed away some weary midnight.You can never be annoyed at a person once you have seen these things.I should say I don’t do actual maid service around here- not unless my houseguests are the ages of the two little ones I wrote about yesterday - so I see socks and such only sometimes, when these guys would be away for a week or two and I stripped their beds to washed their linens, just because everyone deserves clean linens….But why don’t I back up a little here and explain this better: We have had four different young people staying in our house this summer, all part of the National Program for a Better Chance, all young men of on the cusp of college life.  No shower has gone forth without the muted boom of hip-hop pulsing from the bathroom. No golden summer afternoon has billowed into evening without the sound of their happy voices in the kitchen.Two of them had jobs in this the first summer before heading off to Bard College RPI. That's Cam and Tristan at the top here. Then a third, now a high school Senior, worked as a tech for a computer repair company, leaving for a two-week stint at Brown where he took a course in the computer operating system known as Linux . And a fourth, a high school Junior did a college tour, took a Neurobiology course at Emory and spent just a week with us, doing an SAT-prep boot camp at a great place called Chyten.  Boy Three did the same course and both came home each day at 5:00, brimming with news about all the English words derived from Latin.The "give" By David and me was that they slept here and ate a little, though not very much I must say. They packed their own lunches so I just had to buy deli stuff , and it's amazing how far a teen male can go on Pop Tarts and Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Cocoa Puffs, foods I have never before stoked in this house. It's true they like meat at night but hey so do we and if you're grilling two nice fat burgers you might just as well grill six. I guess I also gave them rides to the Y so they could work out but again, I was going to the Y myself to catch those cardio classes I love so much.So that was pretty much the 'give.' Not such a long list.The 'get'  list for me is much longer. I personally got:

• Much more motivation to get to the Y than I would normally have.
• Help putting away the groceries
• Companionship in buying the groceries
• All the emergency help I could ever have wanted with my PC, my i-Pad and i-Phone and even  my i-Pod when I dropped it in the sink that time
• Help hanging drapes on extra-wide windows (Number Three has a six-foot wingspan) and..
• A million laughs.

Here are House guest Numbers Three and Four, Rayvoughn and Hazees, helping me tote stuff in June.Ray was with us almost the whole summer. He helped me, he teased David, he backed down from an arm-wrestle challenge from David (more than once) and he played with our little grandsons.It's  time now for him to start the long grind of applying to colleges.He's equal to the task I think. He's a smart as a whip and hurdles just don't scare him. even if he doesn't always ZIP the life jacket even tough he put its mostly on, and maybe THAT's the lesson he taught me this summer: Strike a humorous pose, look like you're equal to any challenge and you might just pull it off!

When They Can't Sleep, Neither Can You

What a time we have had in the summer of 2012. At the moment I can’t think back past last weekend when two very young guests had  a sleepover here, giving rise to my new understanding that when your house guests can’t sleep, you can’t sleep either. (And this is the younger one in a picture snapped by his brother who is three years older.)I didn’t sleep more than two hours together that night. And when one of these little boys began weeping brokenly over the mosquito who wouldn’t leave him alone I did the only thing I could think to do:“I'll lie on the floor here" I said, "and we’ll keep watch together,” meanwhile thinking “Oh there’s no mosquito really.”There WAS a mosquito all right, whose high tiny whine almost drove me mad as I too lay all quiet in the dark hoping to hear the child's breathing change as he slipped into sleep.It never did. And then of course I also 'saw' the world as he was seeing it; heard the sound of the trains swishing past the end of our street, and the deeper whine of motorbikes and the sound of traffic on the parkway.I also began to realize just exactly how an invalid gets a bedsore as I felt my pelvis digging into the floor: There’s the hard knuckle of bone and the hard grain of oak and between them only half an inch of flesh and maybe three-quarters of an inch of that old Persian carpet. I could almost literally feel the red crater developing, which made me feel fresh pity for all people too debilitated to turn over.I could turn over and I kept doing so. But then the little boy began again to weep so we collected up his special blanket and stuffed animals and climbed the stairs to try that third floor room with the crib in it.Thank God that room 'worked' and he fell asleep - only ten minutes  before the OTHER little boy stumbled into the room Old Dave and I share,  where I was trying mightily to doze off."I can't sleep TT," he said miserably so now all three of us were awake.For almost an hour it was like a Restless Leg convention in our bed until  I finally picked up my own favorite blankie  and stuffed animals and decamped to my office and the pull-out sofa this second  little guy had so recently vacated - which worked until 4am when he appeared by my head to say he was hungry.Sigh.His mosquito-plagued older brother always wakes before 6am , but he knows how to read so I didn’t hear from him for a while, bless his heart.But the hungry younger one was wide awake bright and early and scaling the bookcases before the  sun had crested the horizon. Here HE is pondering his great grandfather's library and looking happy as a clam.He looks fresh as a daisy doesn't he? I'll spare you the picture  he took of me two minutes later. The bags under my eyes are still so heavy I need one of those airport carts to lug them around.It was fine though. It was all part of a much larger weekend extravaganza also involving two teenaged boys, who were and have been our houseguests too.I'm still changing beds and washing linens. More on all that when I'm done.

A Late-August Memory (For Nan)

Every year at this time I think of the camp my sister Nan and I went to from the time we were five to the time we finished high school. This is Nan when she was five, here in the left.Our mom and aunt owned and ran that camp, and how they agonized over it during the off-season, mailing their hopeful brochures, driving to meet mother-daughter pairs in the tearooms of the old hotels, anxiously counting and re-counting the number of campers signed up already.And then how they worried as they ran it all summer! Would they have to deal again with that bear who appeared out of nowhere, nuzzling the little kids’ beach towels on the lines behind their cabins? Or with some misfit counselor who was mean to the kids, or the one who cried for hours, or the one with a bad yen to slip out nights and drink in some roadhouse? Would lightning, God forbid, strike one of the buildings, as it had that one summer?They fretted constantly over these things, but Nan and I scarce gave them a thought.We only loved the place.We loved the weeks camp was in session of course, but we also loved the weeks beforehand, when we were the first kids of the summer to whack the new tetherball, big as the moon and buttery yellow; the first to visit the camp store pre-season, helping ourselves to the bottles of Halo, to the tubes of Gleem and Ipana, those health-and-beauty products of yore.Then camp started, and we learned again all over again how to bunt and hit a backhand; how to make a fire and do the overarm sidestroke.There were plays and track meets.This is Nan as Anna in The King and I:a summer’s-end banquet when even the six-year-olds won awards; and that magical last-night ceremony involving candles, when the big girls wept prettily over the pain of parting and the little ones made mischief with the wax.Then suddenly by 5:00 the next afternoon they had all gone home, counselors and campers alike.  That’s when the fun resumed for Nan and me, as we took off into the empty camp, two kids alone with a world of sporting goods.  For hours we high-jumped. We played badminton. We shot arrows - thwock! - into a by-then mighty ‘thwock-marked’ target. We went again to that little closet that doubled as camp store again and helped ourselves to more Halo and more Ipana. We invaded the infirmary and took turns playing Broken Leg and Busted Appendix, then used the nurse’s chart to measure ourselves and see if we’d grown.And we knocked that old tetherball silly. We ran to the lake and swam ‘til our fingers went blue and jumped and dove and cannonballed off the diving board.We were giants for those weeks, champions, giants, amazons.And then Labor Day came and we were home again, two pale kids in school uniforms, exchanging wordless looks when, escorted by a flying wedge of nuns, we passed in the no-nonsense hallways of that no-nonsense convent school.Maybe it’s the feel of who you were in summer that’s slowest to fade as fall approaches.I close my eyes and see Nan now, graceful as a deer, arcing up and up in a swan dive, then, in an instant, jacking her hips to reverse direction and slice narrow as a knife-blade into the water. I am ten and she is twelve which is what she is in this picture below (Nan on the left) and for me we are ten and twelve still, somehow; just as somewhere, for us all, summer lasts and lasts, and never ends.  

Richard Nixon in a Wig

My cousin thought that was a picture of my wet bottom on the plane – see here – but that could never be me, and not only because it’s practically impossible to take a picture of your own backside.It couldn’t be my bottom because I would never wear shorts on a plane.Why not? Because I’m older than faxing, that’s why.I may even be older than office photocopying. Wait let me check.... YUP. WAY older than office photocopying!And when you’re old in this way you wouldn't dream of wearing shorts when you fly. Instead you sort of dress up, a little, even today.In the old days when a lady flew, she wore not just a skirt and heels but often a hat – a hat! And little white gloves, natch.I just came across a few photos of me in my senior year of high school on a trip my family and I took to Our Nation’s Capital, which is what we called it back then.I’m wearing the get-up I flew down in – well minus the hat because now we were touring around, in our high heels and our skirts and it was like 90 degrees although it was only April.My mom had on this shawl-collared coat in fake cashmere. My sister Nan looked like Grace Kelly. And I looked like Richard Nixon if he dressed up as a woman.Also a little like Imogene Coca. Remember her?The point is we made this big effort and we made it because that was the expectation placed upon women: that we’d smile, and be charming and stoke male egos in all places and at all times. I remember weakling down a street when I was just 17, homesick, far from my family, getting plumper by the minute on the Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding Dinners the college kept serving us, accompanied by buttery homemade rolls and followed by puddings and thick chocolate cakes. I was dawdling along the street minding my business when a guy around 35 passed and said to me in this really nasty voice, “SMILE for God’s sake!"It was the "click" moment for me all right, when the personal became the political, just like our Gloria described 40 years ago.God bless Gloria! God Bless the Women's Movement I say! And, sisters, if someone asks if you're a feminist you just tell them, "You can bet the farm on it BABE! "