Prove All the Pessimists Wrong

“Did you hear the news?" a stocky man with white hair said to me on my way into the bank the other day.“No,” I said, dreading some fresh collapse, attack, or act of God.“They’re doing a recount in Ohio! And if they do it there, they’ll do it everywhere. This Obama: he doesn’t have a mandate!”I saw him  again five minutes later at the dry cleaners and ten minutes after that in the liquor store. He was saying the same thing to everyone he encountered and spoke with such earnest hopefulness it was all I could do not to hug him.Lots of people have been inspiring this sentiment in me over the last few days.There's high feeling out there. It could just be the remnants of Election Day fever.It could be the fact that we can all feel the suffering of those folks in the New York still without power, even if the feeling is coming to us only subliminally. Here are the rest of us buying snow shovels and joshing about this early snow that blew in over the last 48 hours but we’re all cozy in our warm kitchens at the end of the day. Those people are not.They are cold and in the dark and why isn’t there more coverage about their plight in the national media? Is it really because the girl star of the Twilight movies has recently been seen keeping company with someone other than her co-star boyfriend? Did I really hear Matt Lauer talking about that on the Today show yesterday morning as if it mattered?Sometimes you want to throw up your hands.Rush Limbaugh wants to throw up his.The day after the election he said “I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking all this discussion we’d had about this election being the election that will tell us whether or not we’ve lost the country. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country.”And they say women are prone to over-reaction (though not the people who actually know any real women.)I like what Joe Klein said at the end of his piece in Time this week. He said "There are some things I can just about guarantee, no matter who wins this election. The fiscal cliff will prove a mirage. There will be a budget deal. Taxes won't be lowered on individuals, but revenues will be raised as deductions and entitlements are severely curtailed for the wealthy. There will be a deal on immigration reform, as the Republican Party will have to embrace our glorious demographics sooner rather than later. We will not become Greece, as Romney suggests. We will struggle along, secure in our freedom, and eventually prosper. That is the American way: we make fools of pessimists.”I love that . Let’s go forward now and live into this American way he speaks of. Let’s get busy and prove all the pessimists wrong.

Meet in the Middle

I had never fought fair until I fell in love I had never learned to ‘fight fair’ with anyone. To disagree and be civil? It was a skill I never possessed. I was raised by a mother and an aunt, two sisters who were used to saying the blunt frank thing, as siblings will do.Certainly I did that with my own big sister, as she did with me. We said harsh things and we did harsh things. When we were still young, maybe ten and 12 years old, she still got a kick out of knocking me down, sitting on me, then slowly releasing a long thread of saliva over my face, sucking it back up at the very last second. It was like something out of Edgar Allen Poe.I was 12 and she was 14 that time locked herself in the bathroom with my diary, and then threatened to share my adventures with our mom.But I gave as good as I got and took my revenge a week or so later when she was bleaching her hair on the sly. I watched for the moment when she stepped out of the bathroom for the 20 minutes it took for the bleach to work, then zipped in there myself, slammed shut the door and locked it too. I wouldn’t let her in, no matter how much she begged and pounded. It didn’t matter to me how crucial it was that she get back in to apply the neutralizer that would halt the work of all that peroxide. She went to school for a whole week with hair the color of straw – green straw, in actual fact.But that’s how it is with siblings. There often are no rules.  It isn’t until you take a vow to stick with someone through thick and thin that you start to be a little more careful.That’s what happened to me when I met this boy. Before two months had passed we knew we were in it for keeps.And so, slowly, we learned how to fight – ‘disagree’ is a better word - without scorching the earth all around us.I learned to say “That’s not how I see it,” instead of “You’re crazy!”He learned to say, “really?’ instead of “Don’t be ridiculous.”We both learned not to give a superior smirk when the other one took a position we didn’t agree with.We learned – slowly! - to change the subject and move to a more neutral topic. We tried not to nitpick, find fault, so that kind of case-building we all can do when we’re just so sure that the other guy is in the wrong.And mostly we have learned to stay connected. To brush a hand across the other one’s shoulder after a disagreement. To say a decent goodbye instead of slamming the car door after one of our tiffs if they took place in the car, which they often did.We don’t agree about everything. He thinks the sponges and the bottle brush belong in on the kitchen counter while I think they belong in the sink. He takes them out. I put them back. Neither of us ever speaks about this or criticizes the other.It’s just too important to us to remember that we are one. Maybe it’s important for us as citizens to remember that too.

Today I'm Keeping my Focus Close

I'm keeping my focus in close today I think – not much past my own front yard in fact.I need the rest.So this is what I see these days, on the frosty autumn mornings.I see the milky morning light as it plays on the landscape. We live on the corner so we get a good a good look around at things.I note that the ivy is growing on our house again. How hard it was to see it all stripped off last year so the painters could paint! It's coming back now, if slowly. It's about up to my head where it climbs the chimney with those tenacious tendrilled fingers.I see that the birds are vying for the last berries on the hawthorn tree.....I see all this.And I see these stalks of oat grass if that is even oat grass, bought at Whole Foods the people who would sell you back the dirt under your shoes if they could figure out how to get it away from you long enough for to mark it up in true Whole Paycheck style.Still, it's pretty, the oat grass.I see my pumpkin, nibbled even more that it was last week by this little guy and his pals, all seeking to plump up before the real cold comes.And speaking of the real cold, something special happened yesterday morning: The ginkgo tree lost all its leaves within an hour's time, as is its custom.Here is what it looks like. I just love seeing - and hearing - this happen every year. What is the ginkgo's lesson for us do you think.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QVv1vsHXHmQ#!]

Not Much Today Because I've....

....Gone Voting!But here's the trailer to that great Reese Witherspoon/ Matthew Broderick movie Election.Watch it ; it's just two minutes long. Give yourself a smile .[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaQvqhtCYW0]

Boo to the End of Daylight Savings

This end to Daylight Savings: I'm having second thoughts about it.I bumbled around the house for hours on its first morning, totally confused about what time it was.I got up at 4am, who knows why. I just woke up.So I took a bath.I ate breakfast.Then I sanded four little tables that I had stripped the day before and wiped them down with mineral spirits.I rearranged furniture, dragging chairs all around the living room.I looked at the clock, thinking it must be noon, but it was really only 9am.When noon did come it seemed like 5:00 in the afternoon.And when 5pm came, well, by then it was pitch dark and it felt like midnight.I'm writing this at 7:00 on Sunday evening and going to bed as soon as I dot the last 'i'.If it appears at 4am Monday morning you'll know it all happened again.This monkeying with the Big Clock that 49 of the 50 states do, I don't know about it.

Goodbye to All That

This is how things looked at the lake we visit. I took this picture last weekend. Just last weekend!The warm morning light on the railings, the topaz hue of the leaves...Then at afternoon's end, there was this view from the end of a dock:How does the heart not break when one looks at such beauty? Especially now that Sandy  has come like an avenging angel sweeping all before her.God's own leaf blower is a hurricane.We wake to a wider sky today.More light, with the foliage gone.More light, in the day's early portion at least, with the thudding new arrival of Daylight Savings in the wee hours of this morning.I woke at 3:45 and never slept again. Don't know why.I wandered the house watering a few thirsty plants, then brought coffee back into my bed and read my book.The plants can't say they're crazy about being brought inside now that I've closed up the screened-in porch.Being next to a radiator is especially hard for them.But it's adapt or falter in this world. Out in the porch this peace lily would be frozen brown stalk in less than a month .And so it is with us. Adapt or falter.Get out of bed now. Sweep the leaves from your stoop.  Do your errands early so you can feel cozy when the night once again lowers.And think of all who, a week after the storm, still have no light or heat.

The Saint, the Grouch and the Greek Chorus Remarking

A trip to the mall cheers me up every time. I smile just looking at the life-size posters of those sulky-looking models, all starved into skeletons.“Better you than me, gals!” I always think, on walking past them.But if seeing the fashion posters at the mall is fun, seeing the people there is more fun, because let’s face it: people-watching is what you go to a mall to do.The mall is the village square of modern life, the place where you’re encouraged to loiter, on the chance that you’ll suddenly be overtaken by the urge to approach one of these little kiosks and actually buy those smokeless cigarettes, that mane of fake hair, those fuzzy-slippers fashioned to look like giant bear paws.And then there are the human interactions on display there.Below,  a scene I just witnessed at my local mall, the meaning of which I have been trying to plumb ever since.It took place at the Nightie-and-PJs counter of a department store and revolved around an endlessly patient clerk, an out-of-sorts elderly customer and the customer’s friend, who stood four feet behind her and functioned as kind of Greek chorus to all the action.The out-of-sorts customer was giving the clerk a hard time about the coupons she had dug from her bag,  which were turning out not to be valid.“Do you believe this?” she shouted looking up at the ceiling, as if to God in Heaven.“Here she goes again with the coupon tantrum,” her friend said out of the side of her mouth.I didn’t know if she was talking to me or not but I answered anyway.“The coupons are the wrong ones? Or they’ve expired?” I asked.But the words had hardly left my mouth before the customer at the counter started in again.“You people MAIL me these things, I make plans to come IN here with them and now you tell me they’re no good!”“I’m very sorry for the inconvenience,” said the clerk, kindly.“Sheer InCOMpetence I call this!” crowed the customer.Then she turned around to her friend beside me.“It happens to me every time!” she shouted and turned back again to the clerk.“She thinks everything just ‘happens’ to her,” her friend muttered to me. “She never sees what part she might have in how things turn out.”I was nervous now about seeming to talk behind the back of the out-of-sorts customer, so I stepped up to the counter myself.With her shoulders held high, still in a huff, she shot a quick look over at me.“I hate to sound so worked up,” she said.Afraid of saying the wrong thing and setting her off again, I replied, “I bet you don’t sound this way very often.”A sharp laugh emerged from the Greek chorus six feet behind me.The angry lady’s shoulders dropped then. “I think I’m just hungry,” she said miserably.“Let’s go EAT!” boomed her friend, in the voice of a nursery teacher selling the idea of naptime to her weary little charges, and they began moving off.“You ladies have a nice afternoon!” called the sales associate after them, before turning to me with a perfectly pleasant and neutral expression.She didn’t roll her eyes. She didn’t grimace. She didn’t shake her head even slightly to shake off negative feelings.She only greeted me pleasantly, as if the world was made new with every new person she met. Which come to think of it, may be. Which may very well may be.Now if somebody could just convince there poor sourpusses that this is so....

It Was Halloween. You Were SUPPOSED to Eat Everything In Sight

The big day came, here in my town anyway - two little Trick-or-Treaters showed up right at 6:00. I thought I was ready this year but - whoops! - I had forgotten to turn on the front porch light. I sprang for the switch and lurched to the door, giving two fairy princesses a bit of a scare. In my haste to get the lights on, I didn't even have the bowl of goodies in my hand."Uh, can we have some candy?" one of them said unsmilingly as if I needed help understanding how things were supposed to work on Halloween,As it happened, I did. I had candy enough to feed three Boy Scout troops and the right kind this time too, since I was advised twice over thusly:“Where are the Dum Dums?” a kindergartner had said to me Tuesday, inspecting my stash and trying to disguise his contempt.I went right down to CVS and loaded up on them.Then, “Don’t get Three Musketeers !” I heard a guy at the supermarket say to his wife just as she - and I - were hauling Three Musketeers bars by the armful into our two carts.“No kid wants a candy bar that’s just nougat!” he exclaimed.I quick put them back.“That’s right,” he said to me. “Stick with your Snickers, your Reese’s Pieces,” which I’ve noticed a lot of people pronounced “Reesee’s Pieces.”In the end we had maybe 30 kids, including a wild little band of ten-year-olds who had the brass to show up twice. “My, what a lovely house!” said the boldest of these, stepping right inside past me as his buddies helped themselves to fistfuls from the bowl: Snickers, Kit-Kats, Skittles and on and on. "Whoa, be moderate !" I said."Yeah, be moderate!" echoed a masked ninja impishly.And the funny thing is when they rang the bell again not ten minutes later,that stepping-right-inside kid did the same thing again: “My, what a lovely house!” he said with a twinkle in his eye, knowing right well that this gave them away as repeaters and scam artists.I love a kid like that I have to say. Plus you’re supposed to be a little naughty on Halloween, right?And tell ya what it’s a lot more fun to be the one answering the door than the one dragging around after his little kid yelling Tiffany! I said No running!” But seriously it isn't really Halloween unless there's running AND trying to scarf up all the goodies. The squirrel on our yard sure does that every time he visits my nice pumpkins.

Today is the Day

Safe through the storm is how we  prayed we would come, though it was hard to believe we would when the wind was whipping round the house like filaments of cotton candy around the paper cone.Yikes! is all I can say.Last year it was snow.This is year it was rain AND snow.Both years it was wind like you wouldn't believe.48 hours ago got a call from my daughter Carrie who lives 20 miles from here asking if her little family of five could come shelter at the old place where she grew up - here with us, along with their Halloween costumes just in case.And now that great day is here.Officials are still calculating the damage, in numbers of dollars so high I personally can't conceive of them. Most of us can't, is my belief , but especially those of us who remember Green Stamps, and the way you could once buy a perfectly nice dress at a good department store for just $12.I feel a little like someone falling fast down a covered slide . Plummeting in the dark, if you can picture it. And with this painful election going on and on I feel even more dread at what bitterness may lie ahead for us.But then I think of Jack O'Lantern mushrooms, which gather with their brethren in the woods and all by themselves in the quiet dark spring forth one day and glow like a bank of votive candles in a church.I'm taking my comfort from them and keeping my own flame alive. I am believing, as Lincoln said in bidding farewell to the people of Springfield, that all may yet be well.

The Kids & The Animals

Here is something I wrote some good little while ago.  It's  from my second book , that book of days Vacationing in My Driveway. Hoping it might bring people a smile in the wake of all this mess.

Oh, to be young again in autumn, I think on these windy midnights, these short sun-slanting afternoons.The reports from First Grade come home these days all in headlines. Of course Halloween is a big part of the excitement."WE'RE LEARNING TO PAINT IN ART CLASS!” went the headline two weeks ago from our first-grade boy. “I PAINTED VAMPIRES THROWING UP ON EACH OTHER!”Later there was a witch-drawing contest. “My witch is great,” he hollered that day getting off the bus. “There's blood in her hair and her eyeball is falling out and a spider is lowering itself down from her eye socket...”The season just seems to call for such dismantlings and such grotesqueries, though some kids take it to extremes:“The lunch ladies were really mad today. One stood up at the front of the room and made an announcement,” he said clambering up onto a kitchen chair and imitating the sour outraged face of a disapproving grownup. “’Someone has been doing something really disgusting around here!’” he imitated, and went on to tell a dark tale involving accumulations of spit left close to the food.Imitation is the name of one game at this season. We do on Halloween what we would like to do all year round: hide who we are; become someone other; prowl past unnoticed; and defy a few rules.Years ago, when this child was small, I had some say in how he dressed on Halloween. One year he was a fat flannel pumpkin with an orange lid tied like a baby's bonnet to his unprotesting head. Then, two years running, he was Dracula, with hair moussed back and a tuxedo shirt and a medallion (he really looked like Lawrence Welk.) But this year he did it all on his own; discussed his costume not at all with mom or dad, but came down the stairs sober-faced at five o'clock Halloween night in full regalia: black clothes and an eye patch; a hook hand and Creepy Teeth; scary fingernails and a woman's wig of black shoulder-length curls. He looked like a cross between Cher and the prophet Isaiah.“Uh, who are you supposed to be, Michael?,” some bigger boys asked, seeing him later on the moonlit streets.“A monster!,” he called back over his shoulder, literally sprinting from house to house, his dark ringlets bouncing like Scarlett O'Hara's.“R-i-i-i-ght! Way to go, Mike!,” they called kindly after him.Something big happens when the seasons turn that has nothing to do with the rule book.Last weekend, as usual, the First Grade met on various teams to play one another in soccer. The wind was warm, yet bare tree limbs swayed like skeletal arms. In mid-game two small boys attempted some soccer moves, then fell to wrestling like puppies, then assumed classical ballroom dance positions and waltzed down the field. Two others wandered toward the sidelines where they found a book, sat down and began reading it.“Does this mean the game has ended?” asked the perplexed coaching dad forlornly.No, it just means that autumn is reigning. The air, having turned first to cider and then to applejack, intoxicates us with its tang, especially the more sensitive among us.I woke to a noise one night last week: willed, not accidental, by the sound of it; unmechanical; just furtive enough to be unsettling. A thwock followed by a swish, and then silence. The same thing again. A pause, then two such sounds together. I looked through the whole house for the source if it. A silence grew as I searched; and came at last upon the cause: our black cat hard at a game of street hockey with a Tootsie Pop, her chosen booty from this pagan feast called Halloween.It’s the season that does it. I lie on the carpet in my upstairs study and look out the just-washed windows, on the inside stripped of curtains, on the outside stripped of the framing fringe of ivy. I watch the sky go by, muscular arms of wind pulling clouds past by the handful. The world is trying to turn a new way, it feels like. Stop rotating to the right, and begin again to the left, maybe. Turn itself inside out, like a sweater pulled off over the head.Something happens at this season of the high winds and the swirling oak leaves that makes us restless. We wake at night and ask, “What is it?”Only the kids and the animals know. And the kids and the animals aren't talking.

The clouds are low and hairy in the skies

All I can think of right now is Robert Frost's poem. I have a recording of him reading it that I think was made around 1960 just before he died. He read it fast with hardly a pause for breath, in his old man's voice. It was as if he was hurrying to get it recited before he too had to run and 'prepare himself for rage.'Here it is, two ways:The shattered water made a misty din.Great waves looked over others coming in,And thought of doing something to the shoreThat water never did to land before.The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.You could not tell, and yet it looked as ifThe shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,The cliff in being backed by continent;It looked as if a night of dark intentWas coming, and not only a night, an age.Someone had better be prepared for rage.There would be more than ocean-water brokenBefore God's last Put out the Light was spoken.And this is he reading it via iTunes.. You get 90% of it; enough to hear the wonderful quaver in his voice.. Click right here...But there's no quavering in our voices today, right? Although before all this is over we just might be glad the cliff is backed by continent... Good luck everyone!

Let Go

I guess everyone gets hungry, and squirrels do love a nice fresh pumpkin.We have to just accept it.‘Feed my sheep,’ said Jesus when somebody asked what work they should be about after he was gone.Look after everybody, he meant and maybe by sheep he meant not just the wayward flock of bipeds known as human but all creatures.So there’s a hint about how we should live: mindfully, gratefully.e.e. cummings wrote If swallows tryst in your barn, be glad, nobody ever earns anything , everything little looks big in a mist….  So when raccoons apply those fine little fingers to our trash bags, I guess we should be glad too.My sister Nan  in  Florida feeds her neighboring raccoons whole turkey carcasses which she heaves into her yard forest’s edge and they love her for it.You have to detach from the outcome, the sages all  tell us. Give your gift to the world. Set out those plump orbs of vegetable gold. Then what happens, happens.  Anyway we're all just passing through. 

Racing, but to Where?

Maybe people are just stressing out and that’s why they send along nasty demeaning emails, like the ones I was talking about here on Monday.Maybe stress is also responsible for the curmudgeonly ways of that crotchety shopkeeper I told about Tuesday.A documentary dealing with stress and what stress does to our kids was screened in my town the night before last. I couldn’t go see it because I was three towns away getting sweetly peed upon by a naked baby just now learning to sit upright, which is what she was doing, on my lap , while the two of us watched the soapy fun her brother was having in the tub.Still, I honored the event in my own way yesterday morning, when I looked up the documentary on Google and watched its every trailer and clip, the coverage the New York Times gave it the interview Katie Couric did with Vicki Abeles who made it – everything I could find about it on the Internet in short.In Race to Nowhere as  director Abeles has chosen to call her film, we get a look at all the must-do's in our public schools, from the hours of assigned homework to the introduction of  the high stakes testing that came on the scene with the No Child Left Behind program inaugurated by the previous President George W Bush.A chief point made in the documentary is that the so-called “high ability” kids are so pushed to achieve that many are nearing the breaking point, even as other students, who do not do well on standardized tests, are growing discouraged by their results on these standardized tests and dropping out of school at a much higher rate than in the years before this program was implemented.Additionally most educators agree that when you merely “teach to the test,” working to prepare students for a single  exam that will be used to label the teachers and the school system AND the students, you drain all spontaneity and creative ferment out of the classroom.Maybe you'll agree with the film’s thesis and maybe you won’t but one thing is sure: with adults in this society exhibiting the levels of stress that they do the last thins we need it to be inflicting more stress on our children. As the Mayo Clinic’s website puts it, "“When the stressors of your life are always present, leaving you constantly feeling stressed, tense, nervous or on edge, that fight-or-flight reaction stays turned on. The less control you have over potentially stress-inducing events and the more uncertainty they create, the more likely you are to feel stressed. The long-term activation of the stress-response system — and the subsequent overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones — can disrupt almost all your body's processes. This puts you at increased risk of numerous health problems, including heart disease, sleep problems, depression, obesity, memory impairment…" And that's just a partial list.Watch the clip now and see what you think.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uem73imvn9Y]

Stuff You Rarely See

Here are some things you almost never see:

• Teenagers skipping. I saw this after school the other day and was amazed by such blatant high spirits, blatantly displayed.
• Guys getting pedicures. You see guy getting manicures sometimes but only confident and cool guys. Guys getting the soles of their feet sanded and buffed? Not so much.
• Squirrels lying down. You see squirrels cavorting, leaping from branch to branch, bunching in furry balls and just generally vibrating with excitement over whatever it is they have clutched in those little paws but you never see them lying down.

Also:

•  You rarely see swans one by one. Swans come in pairs. They’re twin ships, sometimes facing in the same direction like the Niňa and the Pinta making for Cathay, and sometimes facing prettily away from each other, like bookends. I saw a lone swan only once, standing incongruously at the bottom of the Post Office steps. So charmed was I by a moment seemingly straight out of Disney I extended my hand – and got a good hard bite for my trouble.
•  You rarely see cats in those satellite-dish collars designed to prevent an animal from getting at some below-the neck wound or affliction.  You see dogs in these collars all the time and your heart just goes out to them, the way dog so stoically accept their fate. It is another way with cats: I had never seen a cat in such a collar until our fifth kitty Abraham had to be buckled into one after some surgery. With his grave expression and that stiff white cone encircling his face he looked like some stern nun or else like a mightily annoyed husband whose wife made him dress like a nun for Halloween.

And speaking of Halloween and rare sights, here is another thing you rarely see:

•  Snow on trees that are still in full leaf, and yet that’s what we got around here a year ago: a true Nor’easter that howled around the corners of my ghostly galleon of a house like the banshees described by my Irish great-aunties. A record 32 inches of snow fell in one New England town. They even postponed Halloween in some communities, the least moveable of all feasts in the eyes of the nation’s children.More examples?
•  You don’t see many tutus worn over snowsuit bottoms - unless it’s Halloween night and freezing out, and the wearer is under six years old.
•  You don’t see bras worn on the outside rather than the inside, though you couldn’t prove this by Madonna or Lady Gaga.
•  You don’t see many people using a blender to mix fabric dye and now I personally know why. (You have to hold that top down HARD.)
•  You don’t see duct tape used much for the patching of window screens, but I know for a fact that it is used that way, and who can blame the user when you consider the versatility of this wondrous substance?
•  You don’t see many women affixing clip earrings to the collars of their blouses  just because they look so sweet there, but of all the memories I have of my Aunt Grace from the last year of her life, the memory of her delight in this new accessorizing style remains among the most endearing I have of her.

I could go on. Anyone could. The rare thing crossing our path unsettles us all at first – until we learn to relax and appreciate the unusual just as much as we appreciate the sameness of the comforting day-to-day.

The Customer's Always... Wrong?

First I fumbled the scissors as I pulled them from the kitchen drawer and saw them land, point side down, on my instep.  Then I lifted my glass of juice only to have the whole thing slipped from my grasp and land bang! on the kitchen table, its contents spilling everywhere.Then I got too wrapped up in writing something and missed my exercise class at the Y.“Shoot.” I thought. “I might as well get the dry cleaning, buy the groceries and bring my earring with the missing stone to that jewelry-and-accessory shop that does repairs.” I figured I could cannibalize the bracelet that matches the earrings since the bracelet is already missing a few stones. But when I walked into the place I discovered I had the still-good earring with me and not the messed-up one. Dang!I would have settled into a real pout at this point had the shop’s proprietor not done that thing I can almost count on seeing her do every time I am in there:She was interacting with an older man and woman who were also there to get a piece of jewelry fixed. The difference between them and me was they either wanted their job fixed for free or else they were sore because they had bought it there, then  it broke and now here was the proprietor giving them the bad news about how it’s costume jewelry and when it breaks it breaks. Not her problem, she tells people. She even has a sign to that effect that she points to when this happens. “Read the sign!” she says levelly, looking over the rims of her glasses at whatever poor petitioner stands before her.I missed the first part of what the older couple’s was saying but this is what I did hear:Customer: “We just …”Proprietor: “Hey! You want to do me a favor and not harass me about this?”Customer: “But …”Proprietor, again interrupting: “What’s your name sir?Customer:  “Joe” (I will call him.)Proprietor: "Well, JOE, you want to quit saying the same thing over and over? I said I couldn’t help you.”Customer: (inaudible reply, meeker in tone.)“And what’s your name, Ma’am? she then said to his wife/The man’s wife then answered meekly.Proprietor: Well, you two. You know what I want you to do? I want you to go have a nice lunch somewhere. Joe, take your wife out to nice lunch, what do you say?”Customer and wife, gathering their things: “All right then.”And they pass me on their way out, in a kind of slow toddle, whispering to each other.It was my turn at the counter then but before I could ask about my messed-up earring whose repair I had every intention of paying for IF I could ever manage to bring it into the store, I heard myself say, “I love how you’re always disciplining your customers,” which could have been a rash thing to say if it offended her, but it didn’t.“And they love it!” she said. “They come back for more!”I didn’t get my earring fixed obviously but I did give her a bum watch I spend 80 whole dollars for at T.J Maxx that broke within a month. I let six months pass before I tried to get my money back but by then I had lost the slip so no dice.Back then, I brought it to this same shop and had the proprietor sell me a battery that did no good at all. Now, today I was trying one more time.She unwrapped the new battery and inserted it into the watch, all the while chatting pleasantly. She set the time for me and set it in motion. “We’ll see what happens,” she said.And an hour later, when I looked down at my wrist and saw its hands had moved only five minutes, I knew for sure that the watch was bad.I could have gone back to my fierce friend and asked that she take the battery back, it being brand new and all but I didn’t dare.Instead I hurled the thing into the nearest trash can trash and went home to tend to my wounded instep and police the kitchen floor for teensy shards of glass.

On Shortening Your Sentence

Lately I'm haunted by my every unkindness. Just haunted...Somebody said that's what Hell was: realizing at the end of your life how many people you hurt while you sashayed through life think mainly of yourself.I received an email two weeks ago, one of those ‘forwards’ - about how the President was a secret Muslim terrorist. I got so worked up reading it I actually felt the blood billowing in my temples. AND I almost did what I had just seen done by somebody in an organization with which I am affiliated. That person, on receiving a negative mass email about how screwed our country is shot back with the following:  He wrote “Pleases stops needing these blaming and shaming emails. I do not read them and I do not wish to see them in my inbox - Which was OK I guess except that he when he wrote this he clicked ‘Reply to All’ instead of the simply “Reply’, so that the very thing he was objecting to he did himself; that is he shamed and blamed the person who sent him the email.So when I received my Obama-is- a-terrorist email the very next day I and discovered that I too was on the brink of making a harsh reply I instead took a long breath and wrote only that the email was upsetting to me and I hope he could take me off the list of people he sent such emails to.He wrote right back. “Terry,” he said. “I am sorry. It will not happen again.”I found this answer so sweet, but I guess four or five days went by before I could acknowledge it.When I did I said. ““That's Ok Don. Thanks for writing back :-)” adding the smiley face just because it is so hard in electronic communication to signify real intent. I wanted to be sure he understood I had no hard feelings.I wrote that email the night before last.First thing yesterday morning he wrote me a final again and do you know what it said?It said “You made my day. I did not want to upset you. Thanks for your reply. It means a lot...”So there it is:  If all we have to do to make a person’s day is be a little thick-skinned and NOT fire back harsh words, well heck: I ought to be able to do that. And I ‘m going to do that from now on, and shorten the list of things I have to regret when I’m working off my debts in the Afterlife. 

Devils Posing as Angels

  Devils Posing as Angels: that's us.Here's a dandy little poem in this season of the hypocritical utterance.“Bless her heart ,” you say - right  before you say something nasty.It’s in the same category as  “I love her to death but....."Here it is below:  "Bless Their Hearts" by Richard Newman.  

At Steak ‘n Shake I learned that if you add

“Bless their hearts” after their names, you can say

whatever you want about them and it’s OK.

My son, bless his heart, is an idiot,

she said. He rents storage space for his kids’

toys—they’re only one and three years old!

I said, my father, bless his heart, has turned

into a sentimental old fool. He gets

weepy when he hears my daughter’s greeting

on our voice mail. Before our Steakburgers came

someone else blessed her office mate’s heart,

then, as an afterthought, the jealous hearts

of the entire anthropology department.

We bestowed blessings on many a heart

that day. I even blessed my ex-wife’s heart.

Our waiter, bless his heart, would not be getting

much tip, for which, no doubt, he’d bless our hearts.

In a week it would be Thanksgiving,

and we would each sit with our respective

families, counting our blessings and blessing

the hearts of family members as only family

does best. Oh, bless us all, yes, bless us, please

bless us and bless our crummy little hearts.

Morning Has Broken

And HOW can we not feel happy with sun like this pouring down all around?

Sunday the 21st of October, 2012 7:45am.... Puts me in mind of a great old song ...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6QLXWNqyIw&feature=fvwrel]

Start with Yourself, Kid

The longer I live the more troubled I am by how casually unkind we are to one another. How causally unkind I myself have been toward others.Just in conversation.Just behind their backs.To be funny,  you understand.As if that made it any better.When my sister Nan and I were kids, we heard many a joke at the expense of others around the family table. My sense of it was we thought we were great wits.I see now that my people felt unsure, not good enough, judged by the outside world and this wit was their armor.But still.  People not present were always getting characterized by some witty term. If an old fellow’s hair rose slanting from his head they called him "Stiff Wind" or "Mister Nor’easter." That kind of thing. People not present were always getting ‘acted out’ based on their body language or verbal tics.I impersonated someone at my tenth birthday party, a merry affair with all my young cousins and Franco American Spaghetti for the entree. At one point I made my face look like the face of an elderly family friend whose mouth and left eye drooped due to a birth accident, and felt an immediate shocked silence on the part of my young.  The one 13 even chastised me, gently.You’d think that would have taught me. And it did, mostly. Yet I look back at my first columns from the early 1980s and here are many references to 'a fat lady' , 'old people' and so on. I would never use such terms today and I don’t know why I used them then except that we all felt much freer to speak so.  And the Fat Lady was a figure of fun, was she not? Someone you paid money to go stare at at the circus? So what made us finally feel how sad her fate was? Maybe reading tabloid stories of people so large teams of police and EMTs have to take out the windows or even the whole sides of their houses to get them to the hospital for the medical attention they need?This past week, somebody sent me an email containing terrible allegations about our President  It was a “forward,” meaning that he had not composed it. Still, he had sent it to his whole address book. I thought about it for a few hours and finally wrote him: "Dan, can you take me off this list? I find emails like this so upsetting.” And he wrote back. “I’m sorry Terry. It won’t happen again."It was that easy.So yes I’m going to keep on hoping for civility 'out' there” BUT! I am also going to start policing my own self too and rooting out all signs of unkindness.  I think of Michael Jackson and the powerful message he sent out in this song. Ah Michael, with your demons. How we all still miss you![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Nh84lfvW0]

Keepin' It Light

You have to keep it civil; otherwise things get ugly fast.Like millions of Americans I watched the debate Monday night, but not before I attended a shortened meeting of the book group I’m in with fellow alums from the school I went to. They are all very cool women but the coolest of them might be the one who is soon to turn 90.“I think I won’t join you on the 16th," she said in her email to us a few days earlier. “I didn’t read the book anyway so I’ll stay home and become enraged again watching this new debate.”I could see her smiling as she wrote that. She always smiles when delivering these little quips. It’s the key to aging I think; not digging in and getting too serious.Like millions of Americans I also had my phone on while I myself watched, at the house of David’s brother and his wife, and how could I not look at the chatter on Facebook as I watched?You could tell the Democrats by what they said. “Bully! Let the President speak!” posted one.You can could tell  the Republicans too. “He sure blew the Libya question!" said another.I can’t stand to see people fighting, having grown up in a household run by a mother and aunt who could pull out the long knives and slice each other up before you could breathe in and breathe out again, so I tried to say only neutral things.At one point I remarked on Twitter about how sort of cute it was that Obama had on a red necktie and Romney had on a blue one, an exact flip of their red-state blue-state affiliations.Then on Facebook, at one point, I wrote “Grecian Formula”. It just popped into my head as I looked at Romney.I have no idea if he colors his hair or he doesn’t, of course, but it made me volunteer the information that my husband is the exact same age as Mitt Romney, and his hair is completely white.A Facebook friend who I knew for one year when he was a 15 posted that he would be glad to have any hair at all, but he doesn’t anymore. Easier when the wind is up he said.And then I posted this picture of David holding our newest little baldie…I was bald myself for years and then the curls came in and foamed up out of my head like Jiffy Pop. Maybe that will be her fate too.Anyway this kind of talk kept me from getting all nasty. Why spread that around in the atmosphere when it’s all we can do to deal with the real pollutants. (Tip: when the snow finally does come don’t – DO NOT – gather it in a glass and tip it back - not until it has a chance to melt and you can see what’s really in there!  And there's a topic for much more national discourse!