Have Some Vitamins

  And while we’re talkin' night creatures as I was yesterday,  how can I forget the time I came into the kitchen at 6am, sleepily reached for the uncapped plastic bottle where I keep my vitamin C, and, while the coffee was brewing, tipped it up toward my mouth....Only to find  alive and sleeping  bat folded up inside it like a gentleman’s umbrella.The spokes of its velvety wings,its bony shoulders,that small scowling face:all were mere inches – nay, centimeters from my open mouth.Add THAT to the things you never get over in your life. Talk about your gag reflex. I could scream even now thinking of it ...

Don't Look Now!

Of course sometimes when you look up you're sorry you did, like when your older sister has you pinned to the ground and is lowering a long drool of spit onto you. (I know, I know. You’ve heard this tale from me before, but some things are hard to put behind you, ask any younger sibling.)This post follows that ethereal set of jottings from yesterday. I mean the lovely thoughts of the person manning that isolated webcam had, about airplanes passing high above us.Some things you don’t WANT to see coming. Henry the 8^th had his wife Ann Boleyn beheaded with the sword and not the ax because it was a swifter and more merciful death. Additionally he had the headsman wear soft little slippers so the blindfolded queen of England would not hear his spinning approach.  (That’s how they did it according to Hilary Mantel, Booker-award winning author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies: The guy got a running start, swirled like a dancer executing a pivot and delivered the blow with all the energy that move delivered.)You also don't want to look up in the morning and see a spider right over your bed when he too is lowering something onto you, namely his furry many-legged self.In fact they say all kinds of critters trundle around on us as we sleep, even if the mattress is vermin-free. What about all those dear little ladybugs that appear everywhere the minute there’s a warm day? They don’t check into a motel when the lights go out. Just like your cat or dog, they too probably like to curl up pressed against warm sleeping You.The chimneys in this house are well-traveled highways for things from the sky: birds, squirrels, though God knows how they get their fat little fat hips down the flue, and also bats.The worst are the bats, because here they suddenly appear out of nowhere, in their jagged stitching flight.We once chased a bat all over this house, tennis racquets in hand, until it made its way clear to the third floor and hid behind the big oak mirror that hangs over a low chest of drawers. (Well, I wasn’t actually holding a racquet. I was mostly holding the totally enraptured children who were shrieking like banshees.)My old man, Old Dave was holding the racquet, making wild swings whenever the poor thing swooped by.“Let’s just shut the door to this room” I called to him in that third floor room, thinking, We never have to use this room  again.He said nothing. He knew that was no solution.He thought a minute. He looked at his racquet.He looked at the mirror.Then he went up to it and pressed it, slowly but firmly into the wall, and the dead bat dropped like a heavy little purse, down on to the floor.I felt a little badly of course but then thought what I still think today: If only more of what ‘befalls’ us could be dispatched with such ease!

Invisibly, Over Our Heads

This is a posting by an individual who spends his days and on the shores of New Hampshire’s largest lake, posting on a blog called Winnipesaukee WeatherCam.I don’t know this person’s name.I don’t know this person’s gender.I found this person only because of Facebook where the link to a recent post carried me to a short entry so poetical in nature it seemed worth quoting here.“Windy moonlit night and desolate-seeming at the lake this time of year,” it begins. “But the air corridors over our heads are busy! We found a real-time flight radar web site to identify those flashing strobe lights among the stars.“In the past hour we have seen several FedEx flights come from Europe to Memphis directly over Sandwich.“On the same route we saw an Atlas Air 747 heading to London/Stansted from Huntsville Alabama.“Pinnacle Airlines went to Portland from Detroit passing over Laconia.“We watched as UAL 242 descended towards the ocean and make a wide turn there for final approach to Boston from San Francisco, following the same path AAL 202 from LAX had taken just minutes earlier.“United went over Alton Bay en route to Istanbul.“But the real prize of the night was watching Singapore Airlines Airbus A-380, the largest passenger aircraft in the world, pass slowly over Rattlesnake Island, making a flashing strobe reflection on the water. The passengers with a portside window seat would have had a nice moonlit view of our lake, with southeastern New Hampshire in the foreground, perhaps just as they began receiving the in-flight dinner…”It could be the evocation of an all-seeing Eye looking down on all our movements.It could be the image of this one small human going ‘outside’ to look up, and coming back to tell us what is there.Anyway it comforted and charmed me, as I hope it might comfort and charm you too, as we all pause a while under our little dome of sky, with the growing season done and the winter coming on.

Scared Shirtless?

Thoughts on the new James Bond film Skyfall:Thought One: Daniel Craig takes off his shirt every ten minutes so we can all study his torso.  A half hour into the movie I felt like 1,000 mothers  examining their kids' chests for signs of measles.Thought Two:  Mighty small nipples!Thought Three: Bond gets shot with a high-powered gun, falls of a moving train and goes over a waterfall, seemingly downs and still doesn’t die? Reminiscent of Tom Hanks meeting Darryl Hannah-the-mermaid in Splash.Thought Four: Motorcycle chase along the tops of buildings in Istanbul: this isn’t E.T. and Elliot on the bike!Thought Five: Of course not! No full moon... !Thought Six, on Javier Bardem in the film: Here’s an argument for Polident, yikes. (No picture from the film here... Spoiler.)Thought Seven, on the movie in general. I didn’t fall asleep once during the whole 2 hour and 23 minute thing, for a workaholic like me , well that’s akin to a miracle.

Genie-in-a-Bottle Bra

Talk about under armor!

what the big girls wore when I was still in undershirts

So what's the DEAL  with these Ahh Bras and Genie Bras? Do you mean to tell me I've been spending over $100 for custom-fit bras when I could just stroll into a CVS or a Walgreens and throw a Genie Bra into my cart along with my batteries and my fish oil capsules?I'd like a comfortable bra, sure... I'd be cheering, like Brandi here.At least my bras don't dig into my shoulders anymore thanks to enough steel in the old underwire area to set off the metal detectors at the airport. (I am serious. This happens.)And I've been taught by the pros that you're just kiddin' yourself sizewise if the center element of the thing doesn't cleave to your breastbone. (If it gaps, it's too small. Deal with it. The first speciality bra those fancy-pants brafessionals sold to me was a 32F, 32F!, and sold me a bra accordingly. I'm still not over it.)But nowadays my torso is slightly rotated. so there's some weirdness with the bra there, enough tightness in the band more on the right side than on the left such that I am MORE THAN HAPPY  by about 6 at night to pull those straps out through the armholes of my shirt the way we did at summer camp and leave the thing in a tangle on the floor.So maybe I should actually look into the Genie Bra or Ahh Bra.Anyway I've been looking at some YouTube action about them both. All I can say is I hope they paid these women well to walk let themselves be filmed struggling into their undergarments. Me I think I'll just go on setting off metal detectors, at least for a little while longer.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJXVPmJOJuY

Spare Me

I have more to say about this guy Hemingway. On the advice of my internet friend Joan, who reads this blog faithfully, I searched all over for a copy of That Summer in Paris in which Morley Callaghan talks about knowing “Hem” as a young man, in Paris in 1926. A Canadian journalist at the time, Callahan very modestly described what he saw and understood about all those boozy 'expats', including the beautiful and damned Scott Fitzgerald and his spellbinding wife Zelda with the dark gold hair, Zelda on whom Fitzgerald based several of the characters in his fiction, from Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby to Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night.I've always felt a definite fondness for poor Fitzgerald, trying so hard to work in spite of worsening problems with alcohol, not to mention his efforts to help his wife manage her own faltering mental health.Hemingway, by contrast, I'm always mad at, maybe because of that macho swagger of his. And then of course he had to go and commit suicide, which brought my judgment down on him for years, at least until my friend Mary pointed out that his whole family of origin was plagued with depression and mental illness.The guy has always been hard for me to like or understand, even after reading the remarks of this Callaghan fellow, which seem very modest and therefore truthful..Apparently Hemingway was always insisting that Callaghan box with him, implying that he could teach him much in the ring. He knew Callaghan had boxed in college and that seemed to goad him on. He wanted to put the guy to the test and even tried to force him to box right in his own living room.One day at Hemingway’s gym, they went a few rounds. Callaghan says he was the better boxer only because he had gone up against so many fast boxers in his college years. He emerged the victor in any case and Hemingway came out of the fight bloody and bruised.Yet every chance he got he tried to box with somebody. “He had all the lingo, he hung around gyms, he had watched fighters at work. He wanted to be seen as the sage of the ring. Writes Callahan "something within him drove him to want to be expert in every occupation he touched."This is the point where I get off the Hemingway bus. I have known too many men like that in my life - and then too he was so uncharitable about poor Scott, who wanted his simple friendship.Callaghan writes about his own talks with Fitzgerald and how impressive he found the then-29-year-old:"I remember drawing back and looking in wonder at this slender, charming and secretly tormented man. This was the man who was supposed to be leaving a crazy disorderly life? Yes, he did get a little drunk, did crazy things, and people thought of him as the wild irresponsible playboy of the era. Yet what fantastic energies he had stored in him! What power of concentration while at the same time he watched over the wife who Hemingway called crazy! Here he was telling me of the production which could only come from an exacting rigid discipline, What haunted him I was sure was that he gave only his spare time to the work that was closest to his heart... He made him me feel lazy, as I was, and it seemed incredible that a man as knowing as Ernest would talk of him as if he were simply an alcoholic. He worked much harder than Ernest did. In fact he made me feel I didn't work at all…"Later, when he saw Hemingway, he told him that he and Scott had talked for hours."I had liked Scott's shrewd opinions, quick fine intelligence, extraordinary perception and tireless interest, and I remember that Ernest merely shrugged,, unimpressed. Ernest was simply unbudgeable. It was depressing. Was no one else to have an insight about Scott? Was Scott’s story written and no line ever to be changed? A drunk who knew he was wasting himself and his talent?.. He seemed to have some other feeling about him, some other hidden resentment."Hemingway was jealous of Fitzgerald, is how it sounds to me.Oh I guess I admire the guy a little. His style of writing certainly changed everything in 20th century American literature from the moment his work emerged. But he was vain and greedy for love it seems to me and well, I'll take a fallible man beset by self-doubt over a guy like that any day.I'll take Fitzgerald, who made pure magic with words and did his best with the tools he had to work with and died suddenly and young of heart attack and not a bullet in the brain.

Golly Houston

The sand is gone from my bathing suit, the sunburn from my nose. I guess it’s time to stop talking about that lovely cruise I went on. It’s just that I found Hemingway was right about one thing: you DO see a thing more clearly when you’re away from it. He could see his boyhood in northern Michigan in Paris much more clearly than he could ever see it when he was actually there. In fact it took going to Paris and drinking the many drinks with comrades good and true who had seen war and knew that a man must …. (Ha ha, sorry. It’s hard for me not to parody the guy, especially where I just finished reading The Paris Wife, a fictionalized account of what it was like for his first spouse living. It was like living with a cad of the first order.“Talk about a thing it and you’ll lose it,” he told somebody once. I was a new writer when I first came across this piece of advice I sensed the truth of it right away. I have always been sorry I didn’t come across it earlier in my life. I’m sorry I told even four people about the time I hunted down my father and sat with him for an hour in my 19^th year. Now I can only remember the words I used in the telling and not the reality of the meeting.If I had written about it maybe I would have described his hands and the way his hair went back in waves from his forehead which was high, like mine.Instead the thing I sealed inside the melodramatic words of that college sophomore and I can’t get to it. It’s like when you make a document into a PDF. Kind of a mistake, you think to yourself after in that you can’t mess with it anymore.I almost got to ride on the Shuttle years ago, meaning I was a National Semi-Finalist and one of the youngest and most idealistic of the thousands of journalists who entered that competition. It was cut short by the Challenger disaster though I’m aware that many young people out there don’t know what this disaster entailed.I entered the contest because I knew NASA needed to sell the idea of space travel to the American taxpayer if it wanted to put anything up there, and they themselves told the society of professional journalists that they needed a wordsmith; that the astronauts themselves, were hopeless at conveying what saw from low earth orbit. The best they could so was say “Golly Houston,” on seeing our little blue earth blinking in and out of sunlight...I can’t do much better when it comes to saying what this little boat ride was like.All is a few pictures.I look at them now: this one of Old Dave and me in the dining room.And the one at the top where the ship itself looks like a baby whale.And this super-short video of the surging deep. Ah, the briny deep, mother to us all.. Where are my fins? Why did we have to evolve?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1orVykWPi8&feature=g-upl]

It's the People Watching

  What I like best on any cruise is the people-watching.Seeing the way folks lick their ice cream down for example.I could watch that all day, and did in fact, since they serve ice cream all day long out by the pool on Deck 9.Some eat it the way a cat would.Others more puppy-style as in Down the hatch! in one quick gulp.To me the people-watching is the best fun thing about all travel.I remember being at Disney World one day when the weather was so hot Snow White was running sweat all down her back under that satiny costume.We were tolling along the main drag trying to fight our way toward Space Mountain, that famous indoor ride with the twists and turns where we figured we could cool off anyway if we could ever get there and here came this red-faced father walking fast behind his ten-year-old son.“Slow down!" he hollered at the boy. “I told you 50 times stop running ahead!”The boy stopped, turned.“Dad I’m not even walking fast,” he said."You shut your mouth or I’ll take off my belt!”“Dad, you’re not wearing a belt.”“THEN BY GOD I’LL BUY one!”That’s some pretty good people watching, when you get to see someone make a jackass of himself in front of a hundred witnesses.Of course it’s all much milder on a cruise ship. It’s more like being in a room with a lot of sleeping zoo animals. People sure look funny when they fall asleep with their mouths open!We had the chance to watch a lot of people because we hung out on deck three where sooner or later everyone passes by on their way to the Casino or the Chapel, the Library or the Fun Shops.The cabins are lovely, paneled in warm wood with balconies and ingeniously-designed little bathrooms where every surface sparkles and the towels are infinite in number and the water from your shower never ever slops onto the floor but still....You want to have maximum fun on a cruise curl up in one of those window seats and watch the whole parade of humanity pass by.It’s the Canterbury Tales all over again.Here’s Nan doing that on our last cruise, book in hand.  

Drink and Get Diapered

There’s a jaunty amateurish quality to the daily announcements on board ship that made me smile every day on this last cruise. It's as if they were written by people new to the language.“Like money? Like to be Pampered?”  The author of these squibs wrote in one paragraph, capitalizing the verb form of the word ‘pamper' as if it were a  proper noun; as if to say Here's a nice kind of onboard fun: have someone diaper you!It goes on: “Then then you’ll loooooove what we have in store for you.” (Yep: six o’s in the words ‘love.’) “Play 7 Huge (more upper case mania) games on one card giving away over $1,000. You couldn’t beat this deal if you tried, not that you’d want to!”But .... you WOULD want to beat it if you could, wouldn’t you? Beat a good deal with a better deal. It doesn’t make sense but there is something sort of dear about it anyway.Here's another: “Step right up because we have all the lights, bells and buzzers to make you feel right at home! “ it says regarding a night at the casino I suppose.. But do we HAVE  lights bells and buzzers at home? Should we? What are we missing?Ah but isn't that the question at the root of all advertising. People can't bear to think that they lack a thing that everyone else has. How else to account for all those Pet Rocks we bought a few decades ago?I bought a few things: some cheap jewelry and a pretty satin evening bag... A Deep conditioning treatment at the salon in Deck Nine and about 35 glasses of wine... I'm not immune to suggestion, far from it.Below a picture of the last time I was on a  ship as merry as this last one.They had Toga Night and it was right there in the Daily announcement: No Sheet No Eat it said.. They even supplied us with the requisite linens.Here are Old Dave and I with my Cousin Sheila and my sister Nan. We were all on this cruise too...   Looking at the four of us you have to wonder: can getting diapered be very far off?

I Was a Wreck (So I Took a Cruise)

I was a wreck, so I took a cruise.This was me two weeks ago.I don't look all that much better now but I feel better.Cruising today isn't like cruising 100 years ago when wealthy wasp-waisted women dressed for dinner in their rustling silks, and their gents came in white-tie-and-tails. Today, for as little as $500,  anyone can revel in a week of total spoiling, and far from the chill Atlantic to boot, moseying instead among the sapphire-tinted harbors of the Caribbean.During this whole cruise I took I kept thinking, Well here we all are, waddling about in our scanty beachwear consuming literal tons of food at the almost-continuous all-you-can-eat buffets; shopping obsessively, both on ship and shore; and gambling day and night in the jingling casino spaces you can’t cross the 5th deck without having to walk through. No wonder much of the world finds us laughable. We’re a boatload of Baby Hueys, I kept thinking, getting fed and fussed over, having our pants changed, practically, by a vast staff of people 95% from developing countries.But hey: why be negative? Basically it's AWESOME to be on a cruise. Awesome to see how many ladies for example, succumb to getting their hair lashed down in the tiny island-style braids that unless you have the face of an angel and a noggin to match, make you look like ET.Awesome to notice how middle-schoolers find each other so unerringly on a cruise, making friends fast and moving in packs around the ship, the girls shrieking “Omigod!” every five minutes and the boys bellowing “Dude!”It’s even fun waiting in line for the iron in the laundry room, with the dozen others trying to gussy up for the big Captain’s Reception. It feels like a college dorm then, or a real friendly apartment building. The whole experience feels like a big sleepover we were all having.But the best fun on a cruise is what you notice the first night out and that is this: when you lie in your bed, the bed moves.All night long it moves, and you sleep rocked like an infant, dreaming lovely long dreams with complicated plots and sub-plots.  And even later, the boat docked and the cruise long over, when you sleep once again in your own bed, you can still feel it: that something much larger is holding you and you, great baby, are just along for the ride. AH!Also, show me a nicer sight than this eh?Now picture yourself with your eyes closed , on bed in your cabin, face down and clinging lightly to the bedding, as a baby chimp clings to its momma's fur as she swings slow and easy through the treetops.That to me is the best part of the whole deal.

This is Me Since Thursday

I've been kind of AWOL and I'll tell you why.This is me since Thursday.I know I should move about some.It’s cold.It’s late November.A mouse has eaten the edge off the hem of my skirts.Plus I have all this mending.But I ate so much Thursday, what with the Nantucket Bay scallopsand the buttery corn,the creamed onionsand that big old turkey roasted to perfection and dry-brined for three days beforehand.Never mind all the pies, the homemade Anadama rolls, the sugar-butter, the fresh cranberry sauce that sets up all by itself, so much pectin is in the skins of those wee rubilous orbs…Oh and the savory herbed cubes of bread the bird was stuffed with.I’m stuffed myself still.Stuffed even now.Maybe I’ll just sit out here in the sun a little longer, til that big old wind blows in later today.Maybe by then I can roll up in my feather bed live off my fat and sleep until spring.

Talk amongst yourselves

Talk amongst yourselves, as our teachers used to tell us when they wanted to nip into the hallway and gossip with a colleague. That's my way of saying I don’t have much entertainment for you today.What did I do yesterday that could entertain you or make you laugh?Not much.Um. I saw Lincoln after school but that was only awesome and not funny at all  -  unless it’s funny to see what a wonderful wreck is Tommy Lee Jones’s face nowadays, Tommy Lee who Old Dave played football with at Harvard when he looked so nice. (Well, MY Dave STILL looks nice.)What else?I got a kick out of studying the Subaru-and Prius-jam in the Whole Foods parking lot yesterday. I couldn’t park!So I went instead to the good of Stop & Shop at 6 o’clock this morning to beat the crowds, thinking I could fashion a centerpiece out of a few bronze-colored mums and some vegetables: I thought two pomegranates, a few artichokes and some of those nice bumpy squashes that look like the nose on that e Rembrandt self portrait.BUT wasn’t open yet, and here I thought I was so ahead of myself, having gotten up at 4am to bring a kid into the airport. (Safe travels Hazees!) And now it’s 8 am and here I am three hours late posting.I have to take a bath, make breakfast, bring two guys to work, and hit Hi-Lo Aerobics by 9:30, all before beginning my real work of the day involving writing for pay, polishing silver, opening the dining room table and standing amidst yards and yards of linen tablecloth which wrinkles as quick as you iron it .Ah well. Have fun talking  amongst yourselves, as I say. Your stories are doubtless more interesting than mine anyway

Girls Hug, Boys Run

You have to love elementary school field trips, which somehow never change over the years. I went along as adult ‘helper’ for two Third Grade classes when they traveled to Plimoth Plantation to learn about the lives in 1620 of both for the newly-arrived English and for the Wampanoag Indians who made room for them.I must have asked a thousand questions of the historical re-enactors at the English settlement, and of the modern day Wampanaog as well, who also demonstrate what the art of staying alive in the 1620s was like.The kids asked questions too, but mostly they acted like kids.Specifically, the boys acted like boys, in a way that took me clear back to the late 1980s when I went with children the same age to visit the gravestone of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, seen here on the left.That day, the teacher handed out copies of Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life” for us to real aloud.We recited it together: “Life is real, Life is earnest, And the grave is not its goal. ‘Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest’ was not spoken of the soul.”While two chaperones wiped at tears, and the girls looked gravely at the earth, the boys all but simmered with suppressed energy, like bacon in the pan. Then one boy leaned over to another and, with a mischievous grin, whispered, “You’re standin’ on a dead guy.”So much for ‘life is earnest’!The boys on this latest field trip showed the same high spirits:From the moment they got inside the gates, they ran in ever-widening circles, though the two teachers had carefully divided us into groups of six: four Third Graders and two adults per group.The Third Grade mom I was paired with spent about two minutes assessing the situation before making policy:“OK guys, listen up! We’re going to call ourselves ‘The Explorers’! Every time I yell ‘Explorers!’ you come running! Got it?”It was a brilliant scheme, even though it didn’t work even a little.The boys scattered like spilled mercury wherever we went – the meeting house, the cabin of Goody Winship, the Indian settlement...The girls. meanwhile, remained in their foursomes, bonding, and seeking common ground and devising quiet games. Later, when we saw the exact replica of the original Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor, they climbed three and four together into the wee wooden beds and hugged. It's what little girls do.The boys, by contrast, dashed back and forth along the length of the ship and pretend-shot one another from its cannons. I must have heard the historical re-enactor on deck say a dozen times, “Put the belaying pins BACK please.”Now don’t get me wrong here: I know girls grow up to be explorers, and scientists, and heads of governments that make war on other governments, all careers historically associated with men.I know boys grow up to be nurses, and primary school teachers, and experts in home decorating, careers historically associated with women.I know too that these third graders, and in fact all third graders, will be asked as adults to demonstrate both strength AND tenderness, to function effectively in the home AND in the marketplace.All I’m really saying is it’s fun to watch them in this early stage of life. All I’m saying is if an elementary school you know about ever puts out the call for field trip chaperones, clear the time if you possibly can, and answer that call.You’ll come back bushed, but smiling from ear to ear.

How Will I Get Ready??

How can a person whose dining room table looks like this, covered since the first week in April with every document our Uncle Ed ever saved....

.....ever possibly come to look like this in 48 short hours?

From here I just don't know.I wrote about Uncle Ed here just a day or two ago. Now it is time to do the hard work of putting these things aside - and the harder work of having our first holiday without him.It reminds me of that wonderful Emily Dickinson poem , written as I always have supposed, the morning after her mother's death:

The bustle in a houseThe morning after deathIs solemnest of industriesEnacted upon earth, -

The sweeping up the heart,And putting love awayWe shall not want to use againUntil eternity.

It is time though. Time to get out the good plates and press forward... Now where did I put my grandmother's good tablecloth again?

Remembering

It was our Uncle Ed’s birthday yesterday, though he wasn’t here to mark it.I marked it every year but I marked it wrong, stubbornly stupidly remembering it as the 18^th of the month and not the 17^th, showing up at his lonely apartment with a gift and flowers and the special Armenian food that he liked.A couple of years ago I arranged for my whole family to also come, for a grand celebration.On the wrong day, see.He was too nice ever to mention my error, which I didn’t find out about until I tried to call in his meds once and confidently reported the wrong birth date. "We have an Edward G., Haydon born November 17^th" the woman at the pharmacy finally told me when, exasperated, I went there in person.Poor Uncle Ed! I felt so sad all day yesterday knowing he is in that cold-and-getting-colder wedge of earth now.Everywhere I looked I seemed to see him.I looked at pictures of him:As a soldier in World War II, as you see here.As the groom of David’s Auntie Fran when the war ended and the good times seemed guaranteedThen on into the 50s and 60s, grilling chicken at backyard barbecues and making the small repairs he loved to make with the just-so tools he carried in his pocket right up to the end.Pictures of him at the pond we visited twice a week in his last years, where we feasted our eyes on the dancing waters, outlasting even the visiting geese as we did so.None of these made me feel better. Nothing could made me feel better I thought – until I came upon a letter he wrote me in response to one I had sent him, some dozen years ago, shortly after the death of his beloved wife Fran… Here it is now:

My Dear Terry,Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with me this week. I have to tell you, I filled up here and there as my own memories were recalled.Perhaps you saw the Bergman film, wherein the dying woman was wildly looking for some comfort, someone to hold her, someone to help her over the great divide. Several relatives were milling about the death bed but not offering any comfort. At last, a servant, grossly fat and somewhat plain, climbed into the bed and drew the dying woman into the softness and warmth of her body and gradually the whimpering stopped.You know that I went to see Fran twice a day every day, like clockwork for the ten years she was in the Alzheimer unit. On the day of her death, I arrived for the afternoon visit and the help I gave her with some supper. She was in the last throes of dying. The room was crowded with the aides and the nurse who was giving her some morphine to help quiet her struggle for breath. She died shortly after I came into the room. I did not have the chance to hold her hand or to talk to her or to hug her or to say goodbye. With the room full of people, I could not even weep. I could not be alone with her as they started preparing the body, as they do before the undertakers arrive. All I could do was to kiss the still-warm cheek, say goodbye, and caress her face. I wept alone at home for a bit. There was no way I could have called you to come in and be with us. I came in as described above so I was cheated even as you were cheated by my not telling you. There was just no time. But now with this letter I have shared some of what we were both denied. And I hope you can understand and forgive me for the apparent lapse noted above.Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts as always. Knowing you as I think I do, I have to say your message hit home. I have been alone for so long, what with Fran’s long illness and death, and my trying to fill the gap in my life… My daily message to myself and to anyone who might listen is: the Lord will provide.Thank you again for your loving heart and your many efforts on my behalf. Thank you for the goodness in your heart and mind and for letting me have some of it.Much, much love,Ed

Wonderful letter! And here he is now long ago with my dear second baby Annie. I pray he rests in peace now.

Acorns

Our family’s summer cottage is like a cabin, meaning it has no attic. Hence rain on its roofs sounds like the rat-a-tat-tat of artillery.I love that. I love everything about this place and I can’t stay away from it. I watch the lake that it’s on going as white with ice in December as the cataracts on an old dog’s eyes. I see it glassy-flat and drowsing in a summer heat wave; see it peaked up into cowlicks in autumn wind storms.Going there this past week I saw the results of just such a storm. The acorns were scattered so thick on the pathway we were practically roller-skating to get to the door.These acorns get my attention every year.If rain sounds like artillery when it hits the roof, the acorns sound like bombs.  “Pow!” they go when they hit. “Blam! Dobble dobble dobble dobble, as they hit and then roll on off.It never occurred to me they might be trying to tell me something until the day one hit me square on the noggin. It hurt like crazy, and “Wake up!” it seemed to be saying. “Yeah, you. Start looking around some!”So lately I have been doing that. And this is what I have seen:

•  A girl baby not yet two enjoying an especially warm autumn day. She wore tiny braids and, for the moment, no top at all, which suited her fine. As her momma chatted with her girlfriends, she jumped and hopped and talked to herself, escaping all their attention ‘til she had decided to remove her pants too and frisk about in her diapers.
• A baby even younger, enduring his parents’ endless efforts to take his picture as they squinted into the camera and cooed like excited pigeons to get him to get the smile. This he endured as long as he could, then pressed the apple he was eating to his own squinted-up eye and in perfect parody “shot” them right back.
• A squirrel rushing by with a chestnut in its mouth so big his cheeks almost split. I was guessing he wished he had been equipped as the boa constrictor is with a jaw that unhinges itself and opens even wider to accommodate those really big meals.
•  A gathering of hawks, each one by turns diving and wheeling as the others watched. “Beat this!” each seemed to be saying, as if in competition, though maybe not if the documentary “Winged Migration” has it right. Competitiveness is the last thing you think of as you watch these birds in flight, filmed from a noiseless glider rowing through the air right up there with them. Instead you’re busy thinking about the simple quilting vegetation on the land’s soft body, the lovely lack of borders or boundaries seen from up where birds fly.

One day soon I’ll wake to find that the water on our old birdbath has wrinkled and turned to ice.How to feel about that event is the question, and again I look to the birds, this time the dozens I saw swooping over a wide stretch of median on the interstate.Their wings darkened and then lightened again in the low-angled sun, like those magical billboards that broadcast one message, then shudder and shift and broadcast another.Two messages then. Two choices maybe: dance in your diapers while the day is still warm or rush out and gather more acorns.I know which one I’d pick.

Hail and Farewell

All last week my car was dying. I knew it because we’re close, my car and I. It wasn’t just this rattle or that wheeze. It wasn’t just the ever-more-frequently failing battery because goodness knows a person can get a new battery.There is this new noise it has begun making as we struggle up a hill together. Even last week I knew we were coming to the end of something.So I went to the dealership where I bought this old friend in ‘05 and saw the car I wanted right away; saw it the second I walked up the hill way back up in the field up behind the showroom.It’s a midnight blue, a beautiful dark color, and has a ‘pearl coat’ as they call it.Nicer still is what the car doesn’t have:It doesn’t have leather seats, but rather those nice fuzzy seats like I had in my last car that remind me of the fur on a cuddly Care Bear.It doesn’t have automatic doors which may seem like a fine thing until they start malfunctioning and pop open again behind your back, so there you are walking out of the supermarket with your cart full of food only to find both sliding doors and the hatch yawning as far open as the mouth of that deadly Great White in the movie Jaws.The windows of this blue dream car are automatic though, and there’s air conditioning and I’m glad about both those things, but if you want the front seats to go forward you have to reach under them for that steel bar we remember from the old days and yank on it while scooting forward with your body. I think I love that most of all! “It’s the ‘70s again!”  was all I could think on trying it, and looked in the mirror to see if my Farrah hair was back.It has a rear-view mirror of course but no back-up camera so I’ll  still have to put a hand on the passenger seat and crane my neck to look behind me, which seems like a fine thing, both for keeping a limber neck and a watchful eye.It has no TV monitor for small children to ruin their neurons on. I don’t approve of small children watching TV at all, much less in a car.Finally it has the very best thing that ever came out of Detroit: I speak of the Stow-and-Go Seating System that lets me touch here and here and here and see two rows of seats disappear into the floor, affording me enough cargo room to transport beds and bureaus and large buffets from dining room sets built in 1910, then push another button, see them pop back up and take six big guys to see a performance of Macbeth or any number of kids and grandkids for a nice little ride to McDonalds.My little red car has this, old she is now, and my new blue car will have it too, so I really just want to say THANK YOU, Chrysler, for creating a great concept and staying faithful to it. All hail your awesome minivan! This will be my fifth.

The Newsletter That Almost Killed Me

If someone were to ask me what I did with the month of October and first half of November I would say I produced the ABC newsletter. It feels like all I did in these last seven weeks but now it is done thank God, thank God.It was hard for me mostly because I have scant aptitude for serious information-driven writing and our student editor was just up to his eyeballs with academics and music lessons and football, so I said I would do it alone.  So I basically just used a bunch of pictures of these eight guys, got them to say a word about themselves and then just did some reporting about what the fall of 2012 was like at the Winchester ABC House,  just the way I would tell you if you were sitting here by me drinking soup say. On the couch say, in front of a fire say, our legs tucked up under us. It’s the only way I know how to write.I should say that National Program for A Better Chance has been opening the door to educational opportunities for thousands of young people of color in this nation for almost 50 years. Look here to read more .I have been Chair of Student Life for our local chapter of ABC for the last three years.This means I get to see our eight scholars a lot and in the most delightful ways.Example:At 8:30 on Halloween night I realized we had bought WAY too much candy for the number of Trick or Treaters who showed up at our door.I texted the ABC House leader, 17 year old senior Rayvoughn and said as much. He texted me back immediately. “We’ll be there in 20 minutes,” he said and sure enough at 8:50 here were five of the eight of them at my door. (The other three had too much homework to come. Winchester High is a hard school and these are serious achievement driven learners.)They got right at that bowl of candy.Then the boy called Hazees, a junior said “We want to see Dave."They like Old Dave, my husband since the first Moon Landing very nearly."David is reading in our room,” I said.“He'll want to see us, I know” said Hazees.So I hopped up the stairs to see if this was true. It was true and so up came all five and stood around our bed. David said "Not you guys again!", while smiling from ear to ear and they went on as males tend to do, saying jokey mock-insulting things back and forth.I took a picture with my phone but it's sort of terrible. It does show three of them standing around in our room.Better pictures are in the newsletter itself.. Like this one of Tobi, a sophomore who plays five musical instruments AND varsity football.and this one, of freshman LaVon:Then Gamaral with his mom  and his nice host family:Freshman Bryson with his two host brothers:And then there is this picture that isn't in the newsletter but shows three of the guys studying some of the pics I took on my phone:

Machias, Enderson and Tobi

What great kids they are and how I do love them all!Here is a page from the newsletter explaining a little of the more serious side of the program if you care to see it.

Important Notice: ABC Matching Gift Challenge is Under Way - A Message from the Board

As part of the 2012/2013 Annual Appeal, ABC has announced the kick-off of an exciting challenge from the Cummings Foundation.In honor of ABC’s long-time supporter Mike Regentz who passed away this past April, all donations to ABC in excess of last year’s pledges will be matched dollar for dollar up to $100,000. Also if a person’s employer has in place a matching donation program, the Cummings Foundation will ‘double the double’. Thus, a new gift of $100 which is matched by the donor’s company, would become $400.Funds raised in this way will be designated for college preparedness, and will make a huge difference to the lives of our scholars who must compete for those coveted college slots. Accordingly, we have over the last few years, begun identifying summer programs for them, as well as SAT preparation courses and college seminars.These things cost money, but the scholars could tell you how much they have benefited. In the last few years the guys have taken courses in Computer Science at Brown, Bioengineering and Molecular Biology at Clemson University, Writing at the University of Virginia, Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Psychology at Cornell, and general Humanities Courses at both Davidson College and Carleton College.When they come back to visit us as graduates they all go directly to the House at 2 Dix Street. This means that the current scholars all know their older ‘brothers’, and not superficially, but well.  DaLonn Pearson put it into words when he spoke at the Gala put on by the North Suburban YMCA. “This is what we do,” he said. “We build community.”  He expresses it exactly. It is what we all do when we are at our best, as brothers and sisters to one another and citizens of the world.

DaLonn at the podium Winchester High School class of 2009

Please help the scholars - and us - continue to build this extraordinary community of learners and future leaders.Winchester ABC has been opening the door to educational opportunity for talented, young men of color since 1971. It is funded entirely by private donations from Winchester individuals and organizations committed to making opportunity available to all. Donations may either be sent to Winchester ABC. P.O. Box 94, Winchester MA 01890 or made on line at www.winchesterabc.org 

Maybe the newsletter was hard to put together but it sure was fun gathering the news.

Now it's at the printer and very soon we will go get it bring it to the Post Office and out will go all 1700+ copies to all the good people who make the program possible.

Hazees and Ray below, with last spring's newsletter.. I feel so lucky, just to be watching them all on their journey.

Read It and Weep

Read it and weep. That’s what my shrink would do if I had a shrink.Here’s why I almost lost my mind last week. (Click on the picture to see the ridiculous list of the things I did just from Wednesday through Friday.)I carried the heavy leaf of an old dining room table to the professional furniture refinisher because oops! We had forgotten all about it when we brought him the whole big table itself. He practically wept to see it; matching the other finish will be that big a challenge for him.Then I decided on the spur of the moment to refinish five little occasional tables, right in my kitchen, and then on the spur of the spur I threw in a sixth, the top of the built-in desk right there by the fridge which somebody must have spilled battery acid on at some point because one whole corner of it was all blistery and scrofulous.I did this because I thought I could. (It’s one of the most annoying things about us Baby Boomers, the way we think we can do anything.)The tables look pretty good though I have to say and really any job is doable if you break it down: One day, strip the piece, using the thick chemical gel that will remove your very skin if it comes in contact with it   The next day, sand it, wipe it with mineral spirits, go away until the air quiets then come back and stain it. (I used Minwax’s Dark Walnut this time.) Day after that, stain again. Day after that, time for the coat of Minwax's satin polyurethane. Apply it holding your breath, praying you don’t screw it up. Then leave the room immediately so as not to roil the air and get dust motes stuck in the finish. Next day, sand lightly, wipe down, wait, coat again, run from room.  It’s fun, almost, and it only takes about a week to get to the end.During this week though I also redecorated our late Uncle Ed’s apartment to make it more appealing to potential buyers (see yesterday’s post),  put the finishing touches on a newsletter that took me a solid month to gather then news for, then write and then format (see tomorrow's post) and finally buy a car (see this coming  Thursday’s post.)Somewhere during this same week just past I had an email from a faithful reader named Mary who has come to be very dear to me.   It is OK to simplify your life,” it said. “From your daily journal” – by which she means this blog – “it is obvious that you do way too much for everyone.   I also think sadness about losing Uncle Ed may have raised its ugly head.  Just keep taking deep breaths.   You do not have to prove anything to anyone.”Is that what’s going on with me? AM I trying to prove something to someone? Food for thought, food for thought …. Looks like Mary has given me my homework for this new week.

The Bigger Picture

Here’s the guy who got me through last week. Just when I thought my head was going to explode with all I had to do, I'd look out my window and see him. Sometimes he was looking right in my bedroom window at me from his perch in the hawthorn tree where the berries are red and succulent still.I needed his friendship because it was one of those weeks. My car died, I was out every night doing community work, I was up every day at 5:00 trying to keep up with the writing, and we finally listed my late Uncle Ed’s place with an agent, which meant I was also running over there with plants and bud vases,  occasional tables, and a clutch of leather-bound Dickens novels held between two marble bookends. “Make the place look warmer, more lived in” the agent advised us. On my last trip over I threw in three pretty lamps tricked out with soft-pink bulbs.Up and down the stairs of that sad empty place I went.Back and and forth.In an out.After the last trip, as I pulled into my driveway at dusk here was my friend the squirrel again, in the fir tree next to my car. He knows me by now; I swear he does.Anyway he regarded me calmly and remained on the branch.“Hey,” I said to him in a soft voice. “How you doin', buddy? “When he stood his ground and did not whisk away I thought There’s a message for me here.So I took out my phone and captured the above picture. I did it so I could look at later and  try to figure out what that message might be. It's kind of grainy and imperfect but it got me thinking:  Maybe this  alert  little fellow was meant to slow me down, or at least help me take the long view, though with a week like the one I’d had made my thoughts as fuzzy as this picture.What was the message? It didn’t come to me until the next morning when I stepped outside to retrieve the paper and saw the once pretty pale-gold pumpkin on the porch now gnawed almost down to a nubbin.                The sight just made me smile. He was ‘using’ what was no longer useful to me. Indeed he was surviving on it. Harsh weather is coming for us all as if we could forget that fact with Sandy’s devastation still so much in evidence.The lesson for me? Slow down , savor what feeds me today and be thankful.And so I shall. And so I shall.