Sick of the Slugfests Yet?

Stayed up late to watch the slug fest last night.Anyway it felt late.I had foodshopped,exercised,written a column,worked on pictures and copy for the newsletter the guys and are roducing to tell the world about what’s new with the Winchester Chapter of A Better Chance (ABC.)All of that took the day.Then I made Old Dave supper,then attended a dinner meeting, bringing the dessert,Attended my book group meeting, bringing the wine....and STILL got over to David’s brother’s house to join all the Marotta brothers except for the one out in Tucson in order to watch last night’s slugfest.So this morning, to bring us together and TRY to knit up the body politic again,  two great videos, the first of Bill Cote doing Mitt Romney’s pretend twin brother Spitt. It’s silly and funny to imagine such a character bring related to the elegant Mitt –[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQwNio8xjYo&feature=related]And then this longer video about Luis Ortiz who “does” President Obama.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsCF9nYC51c]Watch them both, have a laugh and - remember the old song?  - C’mon people now, smile on your brother everybody get together gonna love one another right now.Woo! God bless America! Thank you! Vote on November 6^th!

Pity the Poor Readers

Within a month or so a great sigh of relief will go up from all the high school seniors who have applied early to college. For some kids that sigh went up yesterday.These kids will feel wonderfully ‘done,’ having filled out every line on every application, in many cases using the electronic Common App that has made life so much easier in that it allows students to enter only once the information that is then disseminated to all the schools to which they seek admission.Likely this had been the first time in their lives that they have struggled to give an account of themselves in the dread 500-word essay that most schools require.As both an old teacher and someone engaged in the writing game over many years, I have been asked to look at many such essays, so I know what effort is involved for the poor kids who have to rummage through a whole mental attic for the memory of that experience, or person, or core belief that has made the difference for them.I feel for them.I feel too for the parents who, if they have told their seniors once have told them a thousand times to just sit down and WRITE the darn thing.And mostly I feel for the people in the nation’s college Admissions Offices, who, after reading these essays all day long at work must then take their hunched shoulders and their strained eyes home and read many more of them at night.They will be doing this for the next six or eight weeks with the Early Action and Early Decision kids, and again in a few months when the blizzard of Regular Admission applications start arriving.What a job for all concerned are these college essays!And yet what a fine exercise it is for young people to be writing them. To have to tell what has moved you, steered you, made you weak in the knees with fear or hope or unbounded joy.High school seniors may think they will do this only once and can then walk away, in that slam-the-book-shut, cap-the-pen sort of way but it isn’t so. All our lives, in all the best and most memorable conversations we have, we are saying what we believe.We may not always wish to be saying these things but we are saying them just the same. ‘Who we are’ shouts loud over our heads all the time, as that sage of Concord Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked.And so we do well to bring this ‘Who am I?’ question into conscious awareness, at regular intervals even.I hold in my lap here three college essays I have found in my files and am moved all over again by their opening sentences:“As I look back over 17 years of family parties and crowded holiday tables…” begins one. Begins another, “Walk through any high school and you will hear some kid shouting this insult:...” Opens a third, “Through a sky blue screen door, we passed from the bright sun of a mid-summer day onto the back porch of my Great-Grandmother’s house….”The authors of these sentences were all high school seniors mightily sweating the college essay, and yet in the end all three managed to write something simple and heartfelt.I am so glad I still have copies of them, because they remind me that once you sit to the task, it isn’t that hard at all to speak your truth.Still, I want to say God bless the kids doing who are trying to do that now.And also the families who support them.And MOSTLY the poor professionals who will spend many hours, days and weeks reading what they have written.  

Now We Turn Inward

Here we are at the midpoint of the heart-breaking month.Anyway it's heart-breaking for those of us in the northern hemisphere, with earth leaning farther and farther back from Sun's kiss.It's heart-breaking because it's so lovely even as all the growing things begin to die.We had a soft rain yesterday and Friday and Saturday nights a frost. Yesterday was a reprieve temperature-wise.Still, I don't think I got all my houseplants in from the side porch side in time to avoid that below-freezing air on the previous two nights : One of the peace lilies is looking a lot less like a plant that is merely thirsty and a lot more like a sculpture of wilted spinach, trussed so as to stand upright in a pot.We shall see how it reacts now that it’s inside with the rest of us, for we are inside looking out once again.I am inside anyway, but I can't stay away from the windows.The above picture is from our bathroom window.The one below it is from the bedroom.Both look out on a hawthorn tree that grew from a little stick of a thing that I planted in June of 1990 in memory of a young person I loved.Last September, when one of the young people with whom I now work came to this house for the first time he went right over to the window seat in our kitchen that also looks out on this hawthorn tree, but sees its lower uprising branches instead of its leafy arms."If I lived here I'd sit on this window seat all the time!" he said.Then a second youth who was also present walked over and said, "I would sit here during every snowstorm!"So perhaps I will do that now myself: I mean sit on that window seat almost a spiritual practice and look out at the what the day has brought me. And perhaps at the very first snowstorm I will go get these two boys so they can come with a lapful of homework and take turns on that window seat, sitting 'inside’ the branches of this little tree, looking out at winter's beauty.But winter’s beauty is for later.Now we are still very much in beautiful autumn, begging Nature to slow this gorgeous swooning death scene down, even as Robert Frost begged her to do in the poem I borrowed a line or two from last Saturday.Scroll down beneath the photo to see it and today, rain OR shine , train your gaze outward to catch the ongoing spectacle.

October

O hushed October morning mild,

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

The crows above the forests call;

Tomorrow they may form and go.

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief,

Hearts not averse to being beguiled,

Beguile us in the way you know.

Release one leaf at break of day;

At noon release another leaf;

One from our trees, one far away.

Retard the sun with gentle mist;

Enchant the land with amethyst.

Slow! Slow!

For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,

Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,

Whose clustered fruit must else be lost-

For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

                                                                                                                                             from the Complete Poems of Robert Frost 1916

The Fabulous Decomposing Ball

Sooner or later there are things we all notice in life.We note, for example, that our senses don’t quite work the way they once did.That, and the fact that time is speeding past.And that we rush way too much in our lives.But if we are paying attention there are other things we notice too, like the fact that diminishing physical powers are more than made up for by a less judging disposition. Lots of folks just get nicer as we age.I myself have noticed that life is full of invitations to have a good laugh.I think of the day my then-Sixth Grade boy was waiting for me to finish checking out at the supermarket.He dropped a quarter into those little vending machines there by the door and fished out a sort of tiny plastic jigsaw ball which, we gathered, you were meant to pull apart then try putting together again.On the basis of what they chose to name this strange little gizmo, we guessed that its makers were new to the English language.“The Fabulous Decomposing Ball” it was called and the instructions that came with it, encircled by a forest of exclamation points, read this way:

• (1)   Hold in Hand
• (2) Drop to Floor
• (3) Have Fun Decomposing.

This three-line ‘poem’ had all of us - four shoppers and the checkout person - laughing our heads off there by the cash register.And for sure that was something I didn’t expect to see happen when I set out that day to follow my same old path to my same old supermarket.But that’s my point:  ‘unexpectedly’ is exactly the way most laughter comes; unannounced and as a gift, often from a stranger.I believe life offers us regular helpings of such opportunities for laughter.The trick is staying awake enough to notice when you’re being offered such gifts.What helps me stay that awake is jotting down what I see and hear in a week or a day or even just an hour.You can call that keeping a journal but really it’s not as formal as that.In fact you don’t have to write things down at all to be such a chronicler.You just have to stay alert and notice what you’re noticing, like the kindness, and the courage and the simple joy fountaining out all around us every day.I can attest to the fact that witnessing such things will act as an antidote to the blues every time. Noticing what happens around you, remembering the exchanges you have with people and the exchanges you see them having with each other will help you fully inhabit every minute of your waking day.There’s a poem by Robert Frost that I have always loved in which he talks about savoring autumn’s beauty.In it he is addressing Nature, the architect of all this glory. “Release one leaf at break of day; at noon release another leaf,” he implores Her..“Retard the sun with gentle mist; enchant the land with amethyst” And how I love that last line with the evocation of amethyst’s royal tones!Maybe we actually CAN slow down the all-too-quick progression of our days, just by savoring them.And what wise soul said that the journey was the destination? That person was right. The journey IS the destination.So let’s raise a toast to the change of seasons, and laugh, and – why not? - have fun decomposing just like those quirky instructions advised.

Justice... AND Mercy

Here below is something 'Dear Abby' has to say today to a person just coming out of the prison system.Do you know anyone in the prison system? I had student once, a blue-eyed fair-skinned boy who at age 22 or so began serving what I believe ended up being a 30 year sentence on a second-degree murder charge, for an act he has no memory of committing. (He had been taking a very dangerous drug that caused hallucinations.)During his time in prison he had a religious awakening and married a lovely woman with similar religious beliefs... He asked me to write a letter for him and come to his parole hearing which I did.H e was denied.I visited him in his minimum security facility at a time when the state gave work permits. He himself worked, selling high-end cars at a well-established dealership, and he went home to his wife once a month for the weekend. Then a prisoner who was also serving a murder charge here went off on this weekend furlough program, failed to return and ten months later committed a violent crime in Maryland. Much criticism was directed toward the then-governor of my state and in the end all weekend furloughs and work permits were cancelled.My former student was so hopeful in the first twelve years of his imprisonment. That didn’t last.I have lost touch with him and also his wife and mother by now, though I look for them in all the usual ways we can now look. I suppose he is out - I hope he is out – and pursuing the quiet life he always dreamed of having, even when he sat in my classroom so long agoAnyway here is someone’s letter to Abby, which she answers in her signature merciful fashion.There are two sides to every story I know, but must there not be something wrong in our country, which has only 5% of the world's population but nearly one-quarter of the entire world's inmates.

DEAR ABBY: My life has always been scary. My parents divorced when I was 3. Dad always seemed to cause trouble for Mom, who struggled to provide for me and my older sister. She always struggled with alcohol and drugs. I have spent a portion of my life incarcerated, starting when I was a teenager. I'm now 22 and doing time for selling drugs. I have never been able to find a decent job, although I have my GED and tried to attend a school for nursing, but I screwed it up. Selling drugs seemed to be the only way to make enough to support myself.I'd like to find a decent job with opportunity, and be able to pay my bills and save a little. I'm tired of my crazy lifestyle and want to    settle down. How can I go about finding a job? Keep in mind, I don’t have a resume and although I have had many jobs, I never stayed very long, and I have a criminal record. -- SERVING TIME IN PENNSYLVANIADEAR SERVING TIME: I admire that you have decided to change your life and walk the "straight and narrow" from now on. A place to start would be to talk to the prison chaplain. Some religious denominations have programs in place to help inmates and former inmates successfully transition back into society.The oldest prison/re-entry group in the country is the Pennsylvania Prison Society. Their website is at prisonsociety.org. If they don't serve the community into which you will be released, they will know an organization that does. Their re-entry program helps former prisoners attain self-sufficiency through a four-day job readiness workshop which teaches the skills necessary to find and keep a job. Pre-registration is recommended, and their phone number is 215-564-6005, ext. 117.

A Busy Mom's Best Friend

It’s amazing what you can do in a car. Parents in the 1920s almost lost their minds worrying what the young people were doing in their cars, these rolling parlors they could get in and go just anywhere, get themselves just anywhere, as far as they liked if they had gas enough .But I’m not talking about THOSE kinds of activities.I’m talking about the myriad other ways your car comes in handy, especially if it’s a minivan.In my book the minivan is the nest invention since the blow-dryer. The pencil sharpener. The clothes drier even.And I’m serious. I got my first Dodge caravan in 1986. It was red, like three-quarters of Nancy Reagan’s wardrobe. When it died in seven years’ time I got a white one. Then a green one. Then another red one and I’m here to tell you my lords it over the cars of every other car out there, be it Honda or Subaru, Toyota or big old Caddy.The Chrysler is the only minivan with the Stow-and-Go seats, these plush comfy thrones that at the push of  a button fold up and sink away under the floorboards, yielding me a ballroom of space. Then another touch and up they come again like a band of jolly ghosts appearing  once again at the dinner table.Look at all the room!In this space I can and have toted swoony big palm trees, dining room chairs past counting, whole dining room tables, or as I did yesterday, a seven foot long buffet. I have stretched out for a nap, soothed travelling cats, cages and all, and now apparently refinished furniture. (Just as a note the furniture refinishing I did in my car Sunday and Monday didn’t involve any 5F5 which you wouldn’t use in a small enclosed place of course, unless you wanted to keel over  dead within ten minutes. It was just a little subtle steel wool-and-rubbing agents that I know about as someone who has been rehabbing furniture since before Nancy Reagan was First Lady of California, speaking of that slim the giant-headed clothes horse who went to my college but didn’t finish, just like Fellow Republican Barbara Bush did with her pearly dog-collar and her salty talk. (Did you know she is famous for sketchy? I didn’t know that I until I read that thinly disguised 2008 fictionalization of Laura Bush. Which I read. In my car. In stolen moments in various grocery store parking lots.))Here they are the two of them, Miz Pearls first  and Nancy below her.Well here’s the beauty of a blog: you can just go on and on spooling out stories and nobody fires you or gets out the red pencil. even. Everyone in my family of origin could do this, speaking of ghosts at the table. There were four grownups at my dining room table growing up and any one of them could talk tile the cows came home. Once my 90-year-old great aunt fell asleep during one of these talkathons and fell clean out of her chair and onto the floor.Anyway the Chrysler Plymouth people have a wonderful car in the minivan. Mine is now eight years old and I can hardly wait to get the new model. In the 2013 Chrysler I’m hoping to set up a small bowling alley. :-)

Nice Day

I made the most of the holiday I think. I did Nia, the dance class at the Y that I love most of all. Then I drove two towns over to drop the legs of an old 1920s table off at Michael's house. (And it's not just any table; it's the table once belonging to Michael's great grandmother when she a new bride in this new bustling country. I will maybe also say it's not just any Michael but my own Michael, my own final child, a child no longer alas alas.)Here he is with Old Dave a few years back:Anyway I had refinished the table legs for him and was carrying them up his driveway to leave on his back porch. It's a pretty tight fit with his car right there as you can see.........And somehow my back pocket got caught on the faucet and SHOT a world of water all down the inside of my pants.That was pretty funny, if damp. I don't have a picture of my pants but here at the top is a picture of the table legs where you may or may not be able to see the drops of water.They got wet too.Then ... it was back to my house to collect these two guys so we could have lunch together and they could carry a big seven-foot long buffet from the cellar and put it in the back of the Red Dragon here. Machias is one the left, striking a pose for fun. Gamaral is just looking grave and intelligent the way he always does.That done, they played touch football out front, with three other boys and I went upstairs to write.The clouds had come in by then but I was happy because I knew we were going to our girl Annie's house for dinner as soon as I finished dropping the buffet off at her sister' Carrie's place. It was for Carrie's sake that we hoisted that coffin of a buffet.Annie fed us well - she always does. David left at 7:00 to play tennis and watch Monday Night Football with his pals but I stayed until almost 10:00.So there it is, a day like many another day, with not much work and many small pleasures.Glad to have had it I was. Glad enough too, I guess, to be returning to work today, rainy day or not.

Wasted It

We recently had a day so lovely it took my breath away when I opened my eyes to it at dawn. The stand of trees across the street made me think God had taken up needlework, so bright were their colors. They looked like crewelwork where the thread is thick and the patches of color really sit down and stay a while.“Let me be a kid child again in endless days!” was all I could think throwing back the covers and hurrying to the bedroom window. "Oh, Time let me play and be golden in the mercy of your means! " was all I could think, recalling that wonderful line from "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas.But I didn’t do that. I didn’t play and be golden on that matchless day, because....I had errands.Errands: the curse of all adults at the stage of life some call Maintenance of the World.I sometimes ask myself what I used  to do with all the hours I now spend bringing stuff to the cleaners. I try to wash by hand to save the trip  but it doesn’t always work. I wore a brand-new shirt Thursday that said to Machine-Wash- Cold-Delicate-Cycle-Line-Dry and I heeded all those instructions except maybe the delicate cycle part and alas, when I drew it from the fragrant tangle of its freshly shampooed brethren it was half its former size, darn it all. My dog would look good in it if I had a dog.So there was the dry-cleaning - and I did bring things to the dry cleaners, including my winter coat which turned out to have a nice piece of dark chocolate still in the right-hand pocket.Then there' was refueling the car with ever-more-costly gas. I did that.Then I drove to my son’s new apartment and took the base of his great-grandmother's old dining room table off the back porch where he'd left it for me. In some lapse of sanity the day before I had decided I would refinish it for him over the weekend.It's a little jaunt over to his place and back  but it was early still when I got done and the light still billowed and bounced. The light felt to me like this big soap bubble that had alighted here on earth and somehow taken us inside it. A great iridescent bubble, like this.But I wasn’t really inside the bubble because really I was inside my car.Then inside the food store.Then the bank.Then another food store.I wanted to go to the cemetery where lie some people dear to me. That would be the one time of the day when I did get outside in the air for more than ten minutes.The sun was lowering in the sky by then. It was after 5:00.A funeral bouquet on a grave looked like more needlework , Natures' work aided by man's.I got down on the grass; lay right down next to the grave that is freshest for me and looked up.If the one who lay beneath me could still talk and if he could see me wasting a bright bubble of a day like this one, I know he would have some tart advice for me about slowing down and looking up more.I looked up just as the light was failing and saw this, a view that managed to make up for all that day's wasted opportunities.And now if you have the time, the Welsh poet's c as read by Anthony Hopkins:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpydvqTm0hI]

Bangs

Last week while I was on vacation, somebody told me my bangs were too long.“You need to sweep it back, get it off your face,” he said.The thing is, he was eight years old. Eight years old!So I knew it was true.Therefore as soon as soon as I got home I went to Ronaldo."Cut my bangs WAY shorter," I said.And after protesting for a while, he did, with the result that where I formerly looked like an English sheep dog...I now look like.....Ramona of children's-book fame.

Oh well. She is kind of cute, right? Like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, and she was cool as well as cute.

AND I can see really well.

My Secret Vice

“I LIKED it all right, but what was that whole thing at the end?" This is me after most movies, because I just MAY have been talking.Just a little of course, but about almost anything: the popcorn I spilled when I fumbled the giant-sized tub that’s as big as your chest, or the raw carrots I slipped into my back pocket that were now digging painfully into my backside. Or maybe I was asking my friend beside me, “IS THAT THE GUY? Isn’t that the same guy from the beginning?”That person generally just stares straight ahead, like a man waiting for a bus. This talking when I shouldn't be talking: it's been a problem for me in life.I talked to my best friend all through worship services when I was 12. Who wouldn’t talk, with the whole parade of humanity passing by? How funny they all looked to me!But then everything is funny when you’re 12.  And I just wanted to share the joke.This ‘sharing’ started when I was in Second Grade at the nun’s school where I whispered so much in class that one day Sister Mary Suffering went red in the face, shouted that I was expelled and put me out, all alone to wait for my mother, at the remote edge of the convent property.There I stood by the box of textbooks she also put out with me, because in Catholic school you have to buy your books. When you go, the books go.“What will I do NOW?” I’m too little to get a job!” That was my first thought standing out there as the El screeched by overhead.My second thought: “Mom is going to lift Sister Mary Suffering clean off the ground for this.” And so she did, or almost did.My mother was 50. I was seven. And poor Sister Mary Suffering was barely 20, with scant experience in the classroom.“You EXPEL a child for talking?” Mo=m bit each word hard as it left her mouth. “Don’t you know that a child who is talking is a child who is bored?” And so on.Poor Sister Suffering; she wasn’t our teacher anymore after that. We were told she had gone away for a rest somewhere.So I was off the hook for that crime anyway.It was different later when I got all those detentions for whispering in 7th grade: detentions and punishments like having to write "I will not talk in class" ten thousand times. And one memorable demerit which made me feel so ashamed.Luckily, I grew up. I became a teacher myself and so got to talk for a living. Hurrah!Then I turned to writing and tending babies and things got quiet for a while - until I began getting asked to give funny speeches and even workshops.More talking! Double Hurrah! It was such fun making people laugh. Seeing them come alive like that.I did this for three decades, and then…Almost overnight…I went quiet.I’m quiet still.Used to be, in book groups or at community board meetings I talked my head off. Now I say hardly a word.It’s not that that I’m sleepy, or that that I have no ideas. It’s certainly not that I’m uninterested in what’s being said.It’s just that all these year in, I find I would rather hear what others have to say than talk myself.All these years of being in “Transmit,” I am finally, gratefully, on “Receive.”Respite for all!

Message from the Past

Something I was sharply aware of in my time in the low country around Charleston was the spirit of the enslaved peoples who for more than 150 years lived and toiled and died on that island of Kiawah.I thought of them all week and of how almost all traces of their lives have vanished, plowed under to erect these spacious homes available for sale or rent, to people whose family stories have never included having your work, your body and your offspring being owned by others.I thought of them all week and then came home to an email from one of my students from the years I taught high school. He somehow found me last winter, though I am the one still living within three miles of the place we both spent our days. He is the one who has traveled far, serving as a Marine, and then becoming a Trappist monk over the years.As a monk which he has spent days-weeks-months keeping silent but opening his mouth for prayer and song. He wrote me regularly for a three-month period starting last December and when he once again fell silent I knew it was because he had returned to the contemplative life.But here in my inbox Sunday was this description of a moment he had at Mepkin Abbey also just outside Charleston. He wrote it last December when he was living there and wandered one day into its woods.This is Bruce..I will go silent now and let him say what he saw that day…  The spirits of our ancestors do live. Can there be any doubt?

On retreat last Christmas I began a long walk to the American Negro Slave Cemetery that is respectfully maintained on the 3200 acreage of the Abbeys property at Mepkin. On my way through the woods, the path meandered toward a perfectly quiet running stream, a contribution of the nearby Cooper River. Here, a variety of colorful birds, deer and fox made their journey to drink. Varied animal footprints were found in the soft brown mud. I decided to follow the stream off the constructed path with its arrowed signs directing my steps to the cemetery. "I'll see it another time," I said to myself. Perhaps taking an unconscious cue from Frost to take the road less traveled?That would be me.As I followed the stream, pausing now and then to snap a photo and listen to the quiet and birdsong, I noticed vaguely a clearing about a quarter mile to the south, just beyond the edge of the woods. I was curious to know just why a field was deliberately plowed among the southern pines. What was there?As I made trek to the opening, I became awestruck and it seemed as if I had landed back in time. The Deep South had taken on a greater reality when I stepped out into a vast cotton field. About the size of a football field or more. Here I discovered long furrowed, neat rows of strong thicket brush with beautiful white angel hair cotton growing in abundance. When you view the entire field, it's as if snowballs grew on bushes. It looks like a snowfall. Or a cotton candy patch. The fields were wet with morning dew and a recent Carolina thunderstorm. My boots sloshed and squished along the rows as I picked wads of the pure white cotton with great care. I thought of how the slaves worked the rice and cotton plantations of Mepkin.The result upon return to the Abbey was this verse.It's nothing special. What is special are the slaves who lived and died there. The cotton is symbolic of so much to me. Purity. Labor. Strength and love. To think, here I stood where those beautiful people sang Negro spirituals in that brutally hot humid Carolina sun, was a thing quite sobering and somewhat of a gift. This was the real "holy ground" I thought. I could see them. Hear them. The beautiful black women wearing old fashioned flowered dresses with bandannas on, singing and praising God. The men. Voices low and masculine, wearing straw hats. I started to hum a Negro slave song, "Did you see him hanging on the tree? Did you see him hanging on the tree? Were you there when they crucified my Lord? O' Sometimes...Sometimes.. it makes me tremble.."I put the cotton to my face, so soft. I put it to my lips and closed my eyes. I sniffed it. I touched my closed eyes with it. I wanted to know. It was so so soft. I took some home in a plastic sandwich bag and cherish it like a relic from the middle ages.

And now that song, which I too sang for 20 years with my church choir, every Maundy Thursday at the candlelight service. Jim Reynolds, son of  Augusta Georgia and graduate of Morehouse College would sing the solo then, Jim, gone to glory now. This is Marion Williams singing it here:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu_GW2osRVA]

Back to Reality

Sometimes you get home from a week away and find that the pipes have all burst.That happened to us one winter. We went to my sister's in Florida, leaving a 20-year-old house-sitter here with the cats.Her phone call to us three days later was so sweet:"Well," she said "things are fine, really. But it's 33 degrees in the living room and the cats and I are under the electric blanket in your bed."She was such a dear. She was from Austria where for all I know it's 33 degrees in everyone's living room.Or maybe being just three months in the States, she thought this was normal for us."Thirty-three degrees!" David yelped when I conveyed the news to him. "The pipes are going to burst !"This was at 3:00 in the afternoon and even down in Florida we knew that temps back on our northerly shores were headed down to zero.The pipes burst all right. It was New Year's Day and we couldn't get hold of the furnace man in time and when we came home the whole first floor was under water.It wasn't that bad this time.This time we came home from our week on Kiawah Island to rain and 56 degrees. Our floors were just fine however. And our nice neighbor Henry had brought in all our mail and kept an eagle eye on the needs of my zillion house plants, still enjoying summer camp on our screened-in porch.The problem we faced - or rather the problem I personally faced - is the problem I came home with, and isn't that always the way? My problem continues to be a computer riddled with viruses and an external disk drive so oddly configured by well-meaning amateurs that even the guy at the Apple store couldn't discern what was on it. I can't use the new Mac Book until I can bring 30 years of writing over. So it's back to a period of speechlessness for a while as the files are being ritually cleansed and then brought over, because really how much can a journalist produce just using her smart phone and I-Pad?I realize that in the last week I have written more about my family than is my custom and am grateful to all who bothered to read it all. We were all together except for Carrie's wife Christine, 'Mama' to those three young children while Carrie is 'Mum.' Chris just couldn't take the week off work and we sure did miss her. Hopefully she will be with us next time, in five more years, when Eddie will be 13 and David 10 and little Callie 5, and who knows? There may even be other little ones by then.Carrie took this picture of little David at Olde Charles Towne Landing where she brought both boys for an outing while we stay-behind adults worked together to mind one 13-pound baby.He asked his mother to take it, which almost never happens. He wears an expression on his face her I find very interesting. I can't say in what it means but it strikes me as oddly reassuring. He looks so content, and assured of something....Do the young see more than the rest of us? Does he see the day when his little lisp will vanish and he will tower over his parents rather than vice versa? Can he imagine the day when he will perhaps speak at the funeral of these grandparents he spent a week with in the summer when he was five?Who knows what lies ahead, whether leak or flood or cascades of virus? We are kids ourselves, in the backward -facing seat of that classic old station wagon. We see only where we have been, and thank God for that.

Vacation's Final Day

It was our vacation's last day so we really tried to live in the moment, though every second we could feel time slipping away.We booked this trip back in January is why and waited and waited for the week to arrive.It had been five years since we'd had a family trip together.It would be five years more before we could swing another such trip. We knew this in our bones.Thus, we sensed the momentousness of it.And so, to honor our last day we swam in the pool a final time, though from one day to the next the pool seemed colder.(End of September! October looming!)We also swam in the ocean a final time, or rather let the surf pick us up and throw us down, pick us up and throw us down. I told Old Dave who was too smart to do this that I felt like my own laundry by the end of these swims, so tossed around I was, not to mention black and blue. Talk about Don't fool with Mother Nature!Speaking of Old Dave, he doesn't appear in many of these pictures but he's been here all along, providing perspective, as always.

You could call this shot “Through a glass (Bud)Lightly” ha ha.

These pictures were taken at the Ocean Course where they had the PGA six weeks ago. We even saw some golfers finishing up.

This is Edward watching them with his grandfather, who will never admit that he's pretty good at the game himself, though he never swung a club until he was out of college and the clubs were borrowed. Even today he goes to these corporate tournaments and comes home with the trophy for the Longest Drive. Last fall he won an i-Pad but he claims that was just luck. Anyhow he gave it away immediately.

I believe that whenever I think back to this lovely place, I will imagine this last sunset as it looked on the last night when we came to have a drink and a light bite on the porch of the club house.

.My we were happy here, coloring the kids' menus and getting sunburned

looking mildly like freaks in our Men in Black shades...

Not worrying for once about our frizzy hair ..

It was all just beautiful, especially the weather which held for seven straight days.

What a place Kiawah is. This sight below I know I'll remember for at LEAST the next five years, and through many a long winter's night.

Life Is Life - Even on Vacation

   Life is life, even on vacation.Three of us got splinters from the deck here on Kiawah Island.One of us refused to let anyone take it out and ran screaming from the room at the mere sight of  the super-pointy surgical another one of us carries. The child hid for hours.One  submitted to the surgery which you see going forward on the left here.And one of us hoped her splinter would just plain go away, along with her computer problems, or, she hoped, maybe she could just arrange to die before she had to have hers dug out.Anyhow it was vacation still, so we admired the sights...Like the Kiawah River here in the Low Country ...We also went for a boat ride, sometimes going really F-A-S-T!During that voyage, the baby dropped my water bottle into the drink though the boat's captain did circle around and retrieve it, so as to keep things nice for all the creatures living in it.Babies!It was heaven.It's been heaven, though one of us got bitten by a crab.Five of us went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant last night....And four of us stayed home, three of us reading Curious Garage and the Hardy Boys and one dreaming her baby dreams.I was the stay-at-home girl that time.The tide got high.The tide got low.And finally finally finally I heeded all the advice I have had here,counted what’s left of our money,changed out of my bathing suit,was gone for three-and-a-half hours on a pilgrimage to Charleston,and came back at last from the closest Apple store,with a sleek new MacBook Pro, which allows me to tell all this here. Yay!

Radio Silence

It's our family vacation but there was a slight pause in the fun for me with this busted laptop.I'm together with everyone for the week so my kids are around. When I came down from our bedroom in this rental house and said I had this weird message every time the laptop crashed, they asked what the message was."Well it seems to say, 'That's all she wrote Jim!' and then everything goes away.""Mum! That's not a message Microsoft would send you! You have a virus!"Now when I personally have a virus I know it because I usually have a temperature.Not so with my laptop. And a person born like me from the Eisenhower years can go on for a quite a long time without realizing that something is very much amiss.People like me are old and when you are old you get used to certain facts: Things break, wear out, go rusty.The shower faucet in our bathroom in this vacation-house went awry sometime yesterday morning and poured only super-scalding water, with the result that I had to go to the food store with salt and probably clam bodies still nesting in my hair.My hair feels like straw and tastes like pretzels even now, with the thing still busted.It makes me jealous of certain other members of my family on this vacation, with their bald or near-bald heads....More soon I hope. Writing this much on my smartphone.

As I Lay Dying

Every few hours at unpredictable intervals my computer crashes.It's nerve-wracking.All of a sudden, one by one, within less than three seconds, the applications shut down, email Facebook, Google Maps - whatever I have open on the Internet... And then all the others, Word, Excel and so on.Goodbye work! Goodbye favorite poems I have saved as Word documents and was just rereading! Goodbye all Word documents I have open!One by one they say goodbye to me, some never returning, even after the heroic retrieval attempt the system then makes.It's like seeing the process of your own dying, only sped up. You were talking - just a second ago you were saying something interesting, or putting a commitment on your Google calendar and then - poof - all goes quiet.When real death happens, where will I be? It makes you wonder.I was reflecting on the beauty of the ocean which was right in front of me as I wrote.Also labeling more of the pictures taken at our family wedding.And editing newer pictures with Google's Picasa.Working on the ABC Fall Newsletter which we hope to get out in three weeks.And throwing some brightly colored threads of words down for a college recommendation I'll soon be writing.Because I'm also childish and distractable I was also looking at the lineup of new shows as presented by yesterday's New York Times.At the last system crash I was watching this short clip about the new show Animal Practice, debuting tonight. Hard to think that the last thing I might ever have done on this little laptop was watch the following. (On the other hand though, you gotta love a monkey. :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEmQwjeDqCI]

Fun and More Fun

I don't know what could be nicer than going away with your family right after you've had a family wedding.That's what we did.The fun we had at the wedding alone could last all year: watching people dance, say like these guys are doing.              And holding close the people we love... Sitting by the bonfire til the stars themselves started yawning.Even finally taking off the finery and sleeping late the next day.Then, to unpack, do a week's worth of work in one day practically, and take off again for a new beach in a new place.The family hasn't had a vacation together in five years but we're having one now.Boy are we having one.And boy do we feel grateful.

Wedding by the Sea

What’s nicer than a family wedding on a Sunday in September?When the sky is so blueAnd the prelude is by Pachelbel [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sHpAP-qevc&feature=g-upl] And even the view from the hotel room just lifts the spirits.And then we have the bride and her father. Ah the bride and her father~! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sHpAP-qevc&feature=g-upl] Such a day is bound to be happy, as folks stroll and playAnd toast and yell and wave their spoons around ... And everyone claps the "May I present Mr. and Mrs." moment... And the dancing goes on for just hours.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF7LtE00tXI&feature=youtu.be]

Heaven Down There

Here's a poem for a Sabbath Day and what if it's true? What if Heaven really is down, in the salt sway where all life originated and not up past the sky at all?The poem is called 'New Religion' and it was written by Bill Holm:

This morning no sound but the loud

breathing of the sea. Suppose that underall that salt water lived the godthat humans have spent ten thousand yearstrawling the heavens for.

We caught the wrong metaphor.

Real space is wet and underneath,the church of shark and whale and cod.

The noise of those vast lungsexhaling: the plain chanting of monkfish choirs.

Heaven's not up but down, and hellis to evaporate in air. Salvation,to drown and breatheforever with the sea.

 It reminds me of that scene from Terrance Malick’s 2011 film The  Tree of Life.  I could watch this trailer again and again. It's all in here, from the Creation to miracle of conception, from Cain and Abel to prodigal sons, from stern and yearning fathers to mothers who ache for the sight of their lost children - and under and around it all the waters, the waters, the waters.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXRYA1dxP_0]

I'm So Busy (I'm Such a Martyr!)

Here's how I feel this week:We all get like this, and we act like it's a virtue.I was so busy yesterday I left a pan on over a full flame while I went upstairs to start the bath.David was there and got to the pan before it charred the onions entirely but he couldn’t be two places at once so when I tore back down to the kitchen to see about the pan I left the bathtub running and..Well not really but almost ....Then he caught me this morning peeling out of the driveway, over a little too far to the right so the pine boughs came right INTO the passenger-side window and tried to comb my hair again for me .I was 30 feet away by the time I saw that Old Dave had seen me. He just held out both arms, palms up, as if to say "Whaaat?"I answered with the same gesture only in my case it meant "Search me! I don't know what I'm doing!"I wrote a book once called Vacationing in My Driveway about how all the best fun in life comes when you slow down enough to notice what’s actually going on around you.I took the picture for the cover. This is it:This is our driveway. This is my car, or the green version of it which was mine until I worn it down to a rusted nub and got the red versions that I have now.I think it’s time to take some of my own advice here, or I won’t be pedaling happily away too much longer. Oy!