Sickbay

You tend to find it sort of funny when OTHER people get sick, perversely enough. When my man got sick the other day I felt so entertained by the sight of his coat just thrown on the newel post when I got back from the store, his dress shirt thrown on the bureau, a puddle of socks beside the bed. "He never leaves his clothes like this! What a rascal!" I thought.But then there he was in the bed, still wearing his pants, and his belt, still clinking with pocket-change though under the covers. He had that Walking Dead look like the zombies in the gory AMC series. (Well, he lacked the missing lower jaw and the bloody drool - but he sure had that 1000-yard stare.)I took his temp: 102.3. "You have to take something!" I cried and ran to the bathroom and ransacked the cabinets. Nothing in there of a helpful nature, not a single thing but eye shadow and mustache bleach. Then I ran to the other bathroom where six months ago I found a bottle of Children's Tylenol. that had expired in 1989. 1989! I did finally manage to locate a lone packet of Theraflu."But this is no good," I said, reading the fine print. "It expired in 2003!”"Close enough!" he said and I thought that was wonderfully funny. He drank the mixture down - and slept all that night and the whole next morning – right up until the time we had planned to drive north to find out if our place by the lake had turned into a solid cube of ice with this last cold snap.We shouldn’t go,” I said.“It’ll be fine,” he said."Ok but I’m driving," I said and I did drive the hour and 45 minutes while he lay in the front seat like the dead guy in Weekend At Bernie's.Once there he got right in the bed again, this time still wearing his coat. (Couldn't blame him; the house was freezing.) I took his temp. 102.1. I thought we had other meds here that maybe didn’t go back to 1989 and so we did. I got some of them into him. As I approached the bed he held one hand out."Death of a Pope," was all I could think. He looked like Pope John XXII always looked, one hand out, blessing everything in sight the way he did - only of course David looks nothing like that short fat saint of a man. (Except he's half Italian so actually there IS a slight resemblance. See? )It was so sad being up there at that joyful family place there with him sick. He spoke not a word for 48 hours. This is widowhood I thought, and felt so bleak watching stupid Friday night TV and trying to keep my spirits up . It was a frank relief when ten o'clock came and I could sneak into bed beside him.I killed the last light and darkness leaped into the room and encircled us. Strangely, I felt better then, there in the woods, in winter, the cloaking night all around us, the two of us and the deer and the trundling possum."Let go,” i told myself and for once in my life I did, and was instantly asleep and dreaming.

SO Cold!

How cold was it this week in my part of the world? So cold the flashers were describing themselves.So cold the posts of your earrings were turning your ears into something resembling two frozen apricots stuck to the side of your head. It was so cold it the fillings in your teeth stabbed you with an iron pain the second you opened your mouth. So cold the tiny hairs in your nose grew tiny icicles.I didn’t leave the house for a full 36 hours during the worst of it.I needed to buy milk. “Forget the milk,” David said. I needed to go to the Apple store and have one of those nice One-to-One sessions with my new Mac. “Forget the Apple store!” I told myself and rescheduled for next week.I needed to work out at the Y, which sits on a windy hilltop 100 yards from where I would have to park my car. “The heck with the Y for now," I also thought and went to the third floor and made myself get on that treadmill that Dave's pal Frank talked him into buying 15 years ago.Being inside did have a few good effects: I cleaned. I sorted stuff. I made and hung new curtains for the living room windows which up until now looked like a face with no eyebrows.See? This is Before: Pretty blah, right?And this is After: pop!Anyway ....We could only bear to stay downstairs until around 4pm when everything on that floor grows arctic. (It’s an old house, what can I say, with a three-story hall that carries the heat RIGHT out through the roof.)We ate supper every night on the bed and were under the covers by 7:00.It actually wasn’t a bad week, take it all around, and today they say the temperatures will moderate.Sigh. I hope so. Tell you the truth my ears are still kind of a funny color.But at least the spider webs over the windows are gone.And running on the treadmill was sort of OK but the truth is I can't wait to get back up on that window hilltop for Zumba's particular brand of torture

Six Things

Try this: Try making a list of six things you feel good about – even on days you walk through frigid puddles of slush. I try to make a list like this every couple of weeks, whenever a whinier self threatens to get the upper hand.Right now I’m drawing up mine as fast as I can write. I find it feels more ‘true’ or accurate if I ambush myself this way and compose it on the spur of the moment.Below then, without further talk, what I have as today's list of Six Things I Love.

• I love seeing packs of girls with ponytails jogging, as they do for Cross Country practice. I love the way their hair switches back and forth with each step. They remind me of so many young horses cantering slow and easy over the landscape.
• I love it when I overhear people talking to themselves. Last Monday I heard a man say “Fat Chance!” to his car door. The week before, a woman walking into a store passed me saying to herself, “Your gloves are in your pocket. DO NOT LOSE THEM!”  Of course I always need to be sure the people really ARE talking to themselves and not to unseen others on their cell phones; but when they are, they give me such a great peek into their minds. It makes me feel like the two heavenly spirits in the movie City of Angels, who perch atop tall buildings in LA and, with alert and compassionate expression, ’listen in’ on every thought that passes through the wee mortal heads of the motorists in the traffic below.
• I love that first bite of the forbidden cookie that I have decided to go ahead and eat anyway. The second bite is great too, and the third is pretty good as well, but by Bite Four I’m having second thoughts. Which brings us to Number Four:
• I love the way my mate lets me foist the rest of such cookies off on him. I’m like the little kid who takes a bite of that one chocolate from the chocolate box, grimaces and surreptitiously spits it into the waiting palm of his parent. I love the forbearance of the man who will finish eating what I only thought I wanted to eat, when the idea of eating it was really what compelled me.
•  I love the day’s first sip of coffee -  that's Five -  and finally...
• speaking of the day’s firsts, I love these dark winter mornings when I rise early and look out to find the rest of the world still sleeping, even the winter birds not yet tuning their instruments. The world just feels so cozy to me then, as if we’re all in a snug cabin in some ancient Hobbit-y forest.

So there it is; that’s my list. Now you draw up one, and just SEE if it doesn’t make you smile, frigid ankles and all.

Ah, the Play Place

Some people might find spending 90 minutes at a McDonald's Play Place akin to working for 20 years on the chain gang, like Jean Valjean does in Les Miserables.

I'm not one of those people. To me going to that room of brightly-colored interconnecting tubes is just the thing when I have charge of my two young grandsons. I find it does them good: the climbing in and out of them, the hollering gaily to other children, the swinging themselves round and round the sturdy steel poles that hold the structures up.

It's a metaphor for life the way they ascend up out of their grownups' sight. We old people all sit down below, holding their coats.. We can't get at them with our big old grownup bodies. All we can do is pray they're OK .

Used to be when we came here the littler one of these guys would climb up inside and then just sort of slow down in there and start pondering things. Oh God  he takes after me! was all I could think, since I was always sitting down in the outfield WHILE THE KICKBALL GAME WAS GOING ON; just kind of easing down onto the ground to run my fingers through the grass and dream. Was that what he was doing, when he‘d park himself inside that final slide-tube and just secretly remain there, like an intestinal blockage, preventing all the other little ones from getting by unless they clambered over him?

Add to that the fact that he'd sometimes be crying.But none of that happened yesterday. The bigger one continued his ministry of niceness, finding out other kids' names and offering to give them a boost up. He has been like this since he looked like this at age five and kindly asked me, when we were in the bathroom of his house once, if I needed for him to reach me a tampon . (That shows what life with a houseful of women will do for a child!)And the little one, seen below here?This time at the Play Place, he neither wept nor created any blockages. He just sat right with me and his Yoda toy as we ate and only much later disappeared up into that place where adults cannot follow.The two are in kindergarten and third grade now and I find myself wondering: How many more times will they want to come to the McDonald's Play Place with old TT which is what they call me?Who can say? There are things we cannot know as well as places we cannot go. I think on my tombstone it should say: "It was enough to have held their coats." :-)

Scattered

Sunday morning I sat with a group of people at a round table as we talked about the wise and foolish decisions we have made in our lives; how you don’t always know at the time which kind you are making. (This was at church and we were parsing the parable about the builder who builds upon rock as against the builder who builds upon sand.)Because we didn’t all know each other some small talk entered into our discussion and it was revealed that one of our number had moved here recently from the south. Somebody asked him if people in New England where we all live really are standoffish.I can’t tell because I was born here. Also I’m pretty sure I am not standoffish myself.But most of the people at the table were not New England born and they said right away that we were prickly – prickly! - but once you got to know us we would be your friend for life. Your real friend, they said, not a surface friend, which I took to mean a friend you can relax around; a friend to whom you can admit how sad and screwed up you sometimes feel.I know I love people who freely admit they don’t have it all together. The effort of presenting that perfect façade otherwise is so, so…. immense, you know? Think of how you agonized as a teen about whether you fell within the bounds of normal. Think how you worried about your clothes. I had only one pair of hosiery the fall of my 10th grade year and along about October they got a run in them. I stopped it run with clear nail polish but you could still see it when I sat down and my skirt rode up, so I spent the two months - from October until Christmas vacation - pointing to the run and saying "Darn! Look at this run! My desk must have done it when I went to get up!” Exhausting stuff all that subterfuge!Maybe all this is just my way of saying to you guys that I'm sorry for all the mistakes in my copy last Friday (since corrected.)  I must have been in one of those waking sleeps when I posted that flawed version for a better edited version. It’s like I was in one of those Ambien trances you hear about where people get up and mow the lawn at 3 in the morning and remember nothing about it the next day. Anyhow my blogger pal Brian let me know right away with his signature “Dude! Typos!” alert in the subject line of his email. What I would do without Brian I do not know.I accomplish a lot in the course of a day but I’m often sort of scattered. As I looked at picture of Inaugural gowns for yesterday’s post I had to smile at this one below, showing the wardrobe of Frances Cleveland, old Grover's wife: One full gown and then two gowns that are only half gowns. That'll be me any day now: stepping out into the thoroughfare minus my skirt.

It's the Dress

I've been watching the Inaugural Day festivities every year since Camelot. Sometimes I was rooting for the man of the hour, sometimes just hoping things would go well under him. Reagan seemed so jaunty and familiar; it made me believe all would be well in his term of office. (Pity the air traffic controllers who he soon fired! Pity those early victims of AIDS! Little did they sense what was coming - or in the second case wasn't coming. (Attention. Help. Federal dollars.)I felt the same with George Bush the younger, though I did wonder why Dick Cheney wouldn't sing along to the national anthem. 'What's the deal with this guy?' I remember wondering, long before the man's ways and beliefs became familiar to us all.I do enjoy watching it all. And like millions of us, I just love seeing the gowns.The gown of Barbara Bush's alone, worn by Bush Senior's first lady, a lavish velvet edifice that is so '80s' you expect Molly Ringwald to open a little door  in the skirt area and step out of it!  That's it up top. And how about Mary Todd Lincoln's, immediately below? What I wouldn't give to have that in our attic closet with 30 years of clothing and dress-up accessories!These deep rich blues seem like a popular color for January when the world is gone to shades of white and pigeon-grey. Hillary never looked lovelier in hers, from '93.But how gorgeous are the pales ones too. Like Lady Bird Johnson'sAnd  Rosalynn Carter's, speaking of Camelot. I had a bathrobe in the '70s that looked just like this - or wait, maybe it was my wedding gown - but how cool is it that this was the SECOND time she wore this dress. Those Carters! Way ahead of the rest of us!Of course our current First Lady had one a real stunner four years ago, a dress that only a woman so obviously lean and toned could get away with wearing :I can't wait to see what she has on tonight!And now for some Inauguration Day trivia, who is this First Lady, who wore birthday-cake pink for her gown? Way to go with that hunky date too!

Hobbit-y Fun

I guess this Arts & Entertainment week here for me. I saw The Hobbit at the I-Max last night. All 186 minutes of it and I have to say: What a lot of slicing and dicing with hatchets and swords!The little Hobbit Bilbo Baggins misses his cozy cottage and I missed it too. The larder alone stuffed with cheeses and fruits, bread and barrels of mead, or whatever it was that people drink back in the days of Middle Earth.The whole thing reminded me of the many times I have read The Rainbow Goblins out loud to a child. (Those are the little imps from that book up top.)The trolls in the movie are funny. So dimwitted ha ha! (We all love to see dopey people in action. (Well, as long as they’re not like trying to operate on us or fix our cars, that is.))The elves are vegetarians and that's funny too; the scene when one of the dwarfs is offered a bit of lettuce by an elf made me laugh right out loud. "I don’t eat green food,” he says with a haughty look.Gandalf is like God, saving everyone at the last minute all the time.And Gollum?Gollum is just amazing. He looks like Steve Buscemi, with these liquid blue eyes that reveal his humanity. He's the one I really identity with, quarreling with himself and shuttling between kindly and cruel. He's how I'm going to look when I'm 100 I know it. Willard Scott I'm ready for my closeup!Here's the trailer. Well worth watching :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=9PSXjr1gbjc]

Girls is for Everyone

I just want to say that I think Lena Dunham is amazing. Her show, HBO’s Girls, is SO funny and well-written and she is SO smart. I’ve heard a dozen podcast interviews with her if I’ve heard one and she sure enough is smart. Also humble. She freely admits how nice it has been to have parents in the arts, because they understand. Also to have parents who said she could still live at home with them as long as she paid her way.Hanna Horvath is the name of her character. Here are the four main  'ladies' in the show now in case you don't know them:I like that her best friend from college is in the show with her, sexy Jessa played by Jemima Kirke. I love the character of Soshonna Shapiro played by the versatile Zosia Mamet, daughter of David Mamet and  granddaughter of Russel Crouse, who wrote such blockbuster musicals as Anything Goes and The Sound of Music.I like that we get to see newsman Brian Williams’s daughter Alison every week, though she may be getting a tad too THIN lately. (eh?I love Elijah played by the wonderful Andrew Rannells is great too. His is a face any camera would love.And the honesty of  last season’s boyfriend is amazingly appealing to me. Adam Sackler, played by Adam Driver.In the first episode of the new season she is coming to his apartment every day because she more or less caused him to get in such a state at the end of Season One that he got hit by a truck. His leg is broken and he needs bedpan help. At one point she says to him, “You’re not being very nice to me right now” and he says back,  “When you’re in love you don’t have to be nice all the time.” Great writing! -  and in my book about as true a thing you can say about that raggedy ol’ thing called marriage oh yes.) Anyway I could look at that long crooked-nosed face of his all day and was surprised to see him in Spielberg’s Lincoln.Finally I think I love her because who in the history of capturing still or moving images has even been braver than she is about showing her soft untoned body in its true light in episode after episode? I read a John Updike passage lately where he spoke of a young woman’s thighs as looking ‘columnar'. Like the thighs of all young women, he said, and I thought for the millionth time how true and exact he was as an observer of us all.Lena is 26. I’m the flip of that age plus add a year but I feel the truth of everything she writes and says. I say here’s to her and her fine intelligence. She even reacted kindly when the puerile Howard Stern called her a 'little fat chick' on his radio show this week. Wit! Humor! Forbearance! She has it all. May she live to be a hundred!Here’s the trailer from season one, a perfect little ‘film’ all by itself, Her very last remark, made in an examination gown on her gynecologist’s table is one for the ages.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_L52eExAHU]

Forecasts You Can Count On

I've just spent hours poring over The Old Farmer’s Almanac, trying to figure out what side of my OWN personal trunk the moss will have grown on by winter’s end ha ha.Certainly January lends itself to such porings-over but anyone can pore over the Almanac’s wisdom at anytime, just by picking up the 2013 issue of this periodical, founded by one Robert Thomas in 1792, and published every year ever since.I love the thing. its signature advice, its woodland lore and its tart observations about human nature especially, a selection of which I found in a book published 60 years ago called The Old Farmer’s Almanac Sampler, a kind of candybox collection of some of the best quips and tips gathered up from all those previous issues.In the 1804 issue, for example, said

It is with narrow-souled people as it is with narrow-necked bottles – the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.

Who can’t sense the truth of that epigram even today? Then there was this even plainer truth, which appeared in the 1795 issue:

He that makes an ass of himself must not take it ill if men ride him.

But pity the poor jackass! How unfair it is that he, along with the sloth and the dodo, should be such a perennial target! But I guess foolish behavior is foolish behavior, whatever the era. It seems human nature does not change very much, even here in Reinvent-yourself America.The country itself has certainly changed though: As the Sampler reports, the year The Old Farmer’s Almanac first came out, there were just six cities or towns containing more than 8,000 inhabitants and the number of post offices was a meager 75. Fifty years later, in the 1840s, it goes on to say, many articles of domestic use were still unheard of: "There were friction matches, no electric no waterproof clothing, no gaslight or electric light, no coil, oil or kerosene."What an image that passage conjures, of a whole nation of people in damp pants and soggy footwear huddled in the dark! Yet still folks made merry, as we see in this January wish for all:

‘Tis an old custom at this season to wish our friends a Happy New year. I wish mine many, in comfortable fires without smoky chimneys, sleigh rides without overturning, heavy purses with a liberal hand, full tables with generous hearts, and social enjoyments without contention.

The without contention part is what makes me smile, calling up as it does the picture of family gatherings where a few of the men end up leaping to their feet and offering to punch each other’s lights out.I guess folks are bound to get testy when cooped up in interiors lit by smelly whale oil. Lucky for them, there was this compendium of sense and sauciness.For example I like this one so much I may even make in my mantra!

If wisdom’s ways you wisely seek,                                                                                             Five things observe with care:                                                                                                    Of whom you speak, to whom you speak,                                                                           And how and why and where.

Two Cool Videos

Boy have a misspent my time on this planet! I just looked and saw that almost 26,000 people have looked at this one silly video I made in 2010 about what a real Boston accent supposedly sounds like.The thing makes me blush every time I come upon it.It embarrasses me AND sometimes hurts my feelings, as when one guy wrote “Nice Boston accent, you old bag.”I guess if you’re in the business of sharing your thoughts with the world this is the kind of thing you have to expect.One person sent me a request in the ‘comment' section. She said she was acting in a play supposedly set in Boston and so needed help in coming up with a good Boston accent. It was a bad week and I didn’t ever get back to her, sorry as I am to admit it.I made a lot of videos when I had that little Flip camera, but then it malfunctioned and the manufacturers were no longer supporting the product so that was the end of that – until I was told you can make great videos just with your smart phone.That’s how I got this footage of a street singer in Italy that still brings tears to my eyes to watch. I’ll put that one immediately under here:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjaN9hI9ZRc]and then under that let's have the video of this young guy who, in an 8-minute tour de force, talks in no fewer than 24 regions accents as heard all over the English-speaking world . Don’t watch it if crass language bothers you. Otherwise watch and be amazed. 25 million viewings for him! That's what REAL talent will win you![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=dABo_DCIdpM&NR=1]

And the Nominees Are...

I guess won’t go see Django Unchained. That people are tomatoes I already know; I don’t need to see them split and splattered again and again, even in those revenge scenes that Tarantino says are meant to leave audiences cheering. I haven’t seen some of the other movies either, Argo and Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Master. I have a lot of work to do before Oscars night.I did see Lincoln and need to see it again for what feels like the total accuracy of the portrayal. Daniel Day Lewis and the cinematic magic tricks folks got that extra set of knees into him that you always sensed he had. That tall crooked shamble, ah! I watched all 234 minutes of Lincoln and was sure the man himself had been conjured up before me. And Mary Todd Lincoln as portrayed by Sally Field! For the first time you sense the pathos of her position, her beloved Will lost to the typhoid likely carried down the Potomac from the camps where the runoff from the dead and dismembered fouled the waters. More than once her grieving husband ordered the small coffin of his child exhumed and opened, so that he might gaze again upon his face. (That was a privilege few families had once the slaughter began and there was a government with no Board of Registration for the dead, not even the 19^th century equivalent of dog tags, much less an organized method of burial.)Finally, I did see Les Miserables and saw it with such high hopes for hadn’t I loved the play so much? Hadn’t I taken seven ABC students in November of ’87, the minute it opened, before the press night even? Hadn’t I gone back with my own three children young as they were and seen it twice more?I loved Ann Hathaway as Fantine. I loved Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean. I loved the way the downtrodden looked so ill and blistered as I’m sure they must have looked. It’s just that it's TOO MUCH like the play. I say if you're going to make a movie, make a movie. Let that hulking Russell Crowe just act; don’t put him up on all those rooftops and make him moo like a wounded steer.And as for Amanda Seyfried as Cosette, with her cinched waist, all I could think of was one of those rubber dolls you squeeze and its eyes pop out.Only it also sings.And sings.And sings.

No Swelled Head Yet

The people at Wordpress, who host this blog: they try to give us bloggers a boost. They wrote me a report on Exit Only for 2012 saying that - get this:

"9,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform and this blog was viewed about 110,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it!"

Well, they try to buck you up . But I know very well that

most of the visitors to my posts were probably only here looking for all my pictures of near-naked people.

Like this photo I once posted of Susan Sarandon, showing what 60 can look like if the ligaments hold up:

Or this nice one, of Marilyn, that I found for one of the times I wrote about her.Or this great shot where Sophia Loren is seen looking over at Jayne Mansfield.

Or even this one of.... well, I don't know just WHO these two are but you could have a lot of fun thinking up a caption for this pic:

But really what brings them here, according to their analysis ? Searches for the word "Speedo," the term "wardrobe malfunction" and fascinating phrase "the head of Jeremy Bentham," that particular item being on display in a museum in London

(The head on the dummy is fake; the one under 'his' chair is real.)

.

So there it is.Like I say, no swelled head yet!

The Old Girl & The New One

A hard thing it is to trade in your ride.  My old girl! She was the best of cars, she was the worst of cars.  In her youth how wondrous she was! The way she would slide her rear doors open at the touch of a button! The way she would slide them shut that way too!In her youth how wondrous was her hatchback that opened and shut the same way! Touch the icon and  - whirrr! - she was open and ready to load.  Touch it again, hear  another whirrr and the great door shut as tight as a mobster’s lips.She did everything for me:

• Told me what direction I was driving in.
• Told me what the outside temperature was.
• Told me how much farther I could go with the amount of gas in her tank.

And then there were those Stow ‘n Go seats, which no one but Chrysler has been able to come near to. You want to take six people to the movies? They’ll all fit, no problem.  You then want to carry a giant desk and a six- foot bookcase from your house to the apartment of one of your kids? Tug here, touch there and the seats kneel right down like trained circus animals and then – more magic! - disappear under the floorboards!Added to all this, she was lipstick-red with pale grey seats of leather. She was the best deal they had for me when I was looking so she was the car I bought back in spring of 2005.But…. Eventually…. Time began having its way with her. Four years in, her doors began flying back open after you had closed them. They would nearly shut and then – whoosh! pop back open again, sometimes well after you’d walked away from her. Many’s the time I came out of some store to find her whole interior laid open as if under the surgeon’s knife. I began to worry that squirrels would set up a condo association inside her.And so it happened that last month I went to look for her replacement, as different from the old red lady as she could be.This new girl is Midnight Blue. Her seats are made of a humble cloth fuzz instead of leather.

• She won’t open or close her doors at the touch of a button. She likes to see you bring a little effort of your own to the task.
• She won't slide her seats forward and back at a button’s touch. You want the seat closer, you reach under for the metal bar and heave yourself forward, the way we all had to do in the old days.
• Unlike her sister, she won’t tell you what direction you’re driving in.
• She’s mute when it comes to the outside temperature.
• She won’t even tell you it’s time to look for a gas station. If you’re such a dope that you let your tank run clear down to droplets ‘til you stall, well, she figures, let that be a lesson to you.

And the funny thing is, I really like all this, in part because with fancy features come fancy glitches.Also, she fits what I see as the emerging spirit of the age. “Simplify!” said Henry Thoreau and I am  doing that now with my new car that cost  a full $5,000 less than her predecessor did almost eight years back.But! I should add that she is a Chrysler minivan as well and so has those fabulous seats, whose magic-circus trick can go on for years making my kids kneel down, in gratitude, for all that dandy, custom-delivered furniture. :-)

Cheer Up, Jeeze

Cheer UP, Jeeze! That's what I said to myself yesterday after realizing what I wrote on the two days before  this.I swear, you’d just be crazy all the time if you didn’t have other people to pull you back into Normal. I picture the lone ant blundering off without a mission, feeble feelers waving as his companions march along together cheerfully, bending now and then to lift the dead ones off for burial. Solidarity!The point is, I felt pretty bleak Monday morning and so wrote that dismal limerick.Even on Tuesday I had little to offer but mopey sheets of 'sensitive wallpaper' as Garrison Keillor calls most  introspective writing.Hmmm, well OK maybe it wasn’t ALL  mopey. There were those high school girls hoisting their skirts up and me telling myself that sure, I worked out every day when in truth what I mostly did was sitting OUTSIDE the health club in y car reading and looking at the sky.But mostly, it was like this: Two days, two downer posts.Then in came a comment to the blog written by a reader named Chris N. plucked out 15 words from that 50 word limerick to show me what I had done. Here’s what he said:

Motivation and discipline are interesting. I’m starting to realize that a big part of both of them is visualizing the positive future benefits of the discipline in the here and now, and putting aside the visualization of the negative experiences of the discipline itself. So put the “dark”, “chill”, “summon the will”, “quit”, “bleak”, “rock”, “push it on back up the hill” and all those other downers in a tidy pile on the side of the road, say goodbye to them, and write a limerick full of positive images of where you will be after you got up early, did what needed to get done, and then are enjoying where it got you!

He was so right . My spirits shot up  like mercury in a dog days' thermometer from that point on.I couldn't call up the wit to write the cheery limerick he suggested, but here’s one by my old student Bill, someone I haven’t seen since Jimmy Carter took office, but who feels to me now as if the two of us are still in each other’s daily lives, every Fourth Period in a that sunny top-floor  classroom with its big old windows that rattled in the wind.

Yes it’s true, it’s a morning to shiver,Time to rise and to stand and deliver,Pushing boulders up hillMay be wearisome, still,It beats eagles consuming your liver.

"It could always be worse, he added. "You could be Prometheus," he added.Prometheus! Who stole not cookies but fire from the gods and got punished every day by having his liver plucked out by crows - only then it regenerated itself every night! A good one! So now I feel much better.

Change Now?

That’s it, I’m making some changes. I don’t WANT to feel like Sisyphus pushing the same rock up the same hill every day. (See yesterday's.)  Back in ’08 when I began writing this blog in earnest, I said I would post every day and it was huge for me the first time I skipped a day. Who am I disappointing? was all I could think. I trained as teacher and began adult  life in the classroom. It would be like just not being there when the kids showed up. Eventually, though, I was given to understand that even famous bloggers take the weekend off, so I started doing that around last summer.But then this last Sunday night I went to bed with nothing at all dreamed up for Monday morning’s post and I knew I couldn’t write it at 7 and put it up at 8. The morning hours for me have always been for the newspaper column that I've been writing since 1980 and I know if I start writing crummy columns, people WOULD be disappointed and they would be the editors of those newspapers and that would be the end of THAT career.So now here I am wandering the house in my nightie between 6am and 7:00, watering the plants and looking at the sky and watching the small figures of commuters hurrying to catch the train into Boston.It feels odd. It’s scary when you feel yourself changing.For the the last ten years since our last child flew the nest I would write every day for two hours, THEN eat, THEN go to some damn gym at 9:00 in the morning.It took me years to realize I was mostly sitting outside the gym, reading old Time magazines and writing in my diary, and on lucky days scribbling down sweet things I saw out my car window, like when a squirrel would sneeze, or one of those parochial-school girls would pause in the alley before going into the building to hike her skirt up a foot above the knee.I got so I hated the gym, yet it took my years to cancer my membership. Even today if I never see another Nautilus machine it will be too soon.Now I go to the Y. At 10am instead of 9am and it makes all the difference.I still hurry right past even the treadmills and just do the dance classes. I look at the faces of the other ‘dancers, ’ all of them lit with the joy you get when you move to some music. Zumba alone!  Little did I think I could do those mambo moves, a stick-in-the-mud wonk like me who looked while dancing like one of the extras from The Walking Dead! Sped-up stumbling: that’s what my moves were.I know I’ll keep going to the Y. God knows I need to keep moving, but beyond, that my days are  changing. I can feel another rhythm trying to get established.Suddenly I just want to sit on that sunny window seat and read my book.I want to write more notes to people going through hard times. I want to sit beside my husband and try to figure out from him what sanity feels like.I don’t want to be writing bleak limericks in my head at 5am, wasting that first fresh hour of wakefulness just so some fool looking for dirty rhymes can happen upon my blogWell, we'll see if I can make the changes stick. I sure hope I can. It's exhausting to be my brand of crazy.

Monday's Lament, Pre-Dawn

It's Monday still dark and so chill

And yet I must summon the will

To quit my bleak talk

And shoulder the rock

and push it on back up the hill.

Road Trip

I had to drive 100 miles on that cold short day and already it was 3pm.I stopped first at my local gas station where the attendant always speaks to me in such a friendly manner.“How was that funeral you went to?” he asked.  “It was in your home town, you said.”“The funeral was really beautiful, but it was sad seeing the changes there. I went past a hospital that they’re tearing down now. I had to drive by twice to get it through my head that it would soon be gone.” As I spoke my thoughts strayed to the times we visited my mother there when she broke her hip, and our cheery aunts and uncles kept coming with sherry and little crystal glasses to drink it from, talk about your vanished world!“The whole building was laid open,” I told him, “like a dollhouse, only with the roof gone too. It’s hard to see change like that, you know?”“I know,” he said. “Oh, I know!”He did know. Of course he knew. We are all refugees from the past.I began my long drive then, and noticed after just the first few miles that the large box I had dropped on my foot just before leaving home was still ‘with’ me. Though it hadn’t hurt much at the time, a sharp pain was now radiating up my leg and into my hip..I saw I had no choice. I would have to use the last of the fading light to get off the highway and buy some sort of analgesic.This I did, literally limping into the first discount drug store I passed. I grabbed some Tylenol gel caps from the ‘pain’ aisle and limped out again, heading for the fast food joint next door in search of water to wash it down.“What can I get you?” said the young woman behind the counter. “Oh, what’s wrong?” she added, reading the look on my face.I told her. She gave me a big cup of water, no charge, and just as I was tipping back the two capsules she stopped me.  “That’s Tylenol PM!” she cried, half a second before it had gone down my throat, thus saving untold numbers of motorists from sharing the road with a seeming narcoleptic.I thanked her and got back on the highway.There was traffic by then and it had begun to rain.An hour passed. Two hours. Finally, just ten miles from my destination, I stopped to gather myself a bit and elevate my foot.I chose the 99, a chain restaurant. I love all chain restaurants, for so many reasons: The breezy manner of the wait staff, the speediness of the  service, the way they know right away that yes, you would like some popcorn while  you’re looking over the menu and so they just bring it to you.I ate and looked around and slowly my stress level ebbed.And when I saw the little girl gently leading her blind grandpa by the hand to the booth their family had chosen, the stress went away completely. It went away because there,  near the end of my long day, I realized what its lesson had been: That we are not alone in this life. That we too are led, escorted in a way, both by those we love and by kindly strangers.This all happened last week. It was a good lesson to end the year on.

The Best Pals are the Old Pals

The people who knew you when you were young are the best ones. You don’t have to work hard to impress them. They know you; they know you from the back.I spent last Sunday with 13 people I had gone to camp with, talk about an old notion. These days if kids go to camp at all they go for a week or two, and it’s a specialty camp, like for basketball or cheerleading or weight loss. Oh there are still the fine old camps that are fully subscribed every season but their number is dwindling.Back when I was a kid, parents thought nothing of packing their kids off to eight full weeks of camp. (Everything was cheaper then, and that sure helped.) We all went to camp for eight full weeks as girls. It was the only way we could go. And we didn’t just go in that classic latency age before the hormones hit. We went to camp for six, or nine or eleven summers and then came back as counselors.Four of the people I saw last Sunday were sisters. There are five of them all together and didn’t the camp photographer love to line them up for a picture! We had five Creaghs, four McSweeneys and on and on.  Here is one of the sisters pictures below.I was in pre-school when some of these former campers met me. My mom and aunt ran the camp is why I was there at such a young age. We lived there. So all these years later in spite of the changes in my face they say they would know me anywhere.No doubt many remember the time as flag bearer during “colors” my underpants started to sag below my little-girl camp shorts as I marched hup-two-three toward the flagpole. They were touching my knees before I got there.The people who have seen your underpants fall down and like you in spite of this social gaffe are the people who know you. One camper who wasn’t present at Sunday's gathering might remember the summer I was so full of myself there was no living with me. She was my counselor for three years so she really saw my faults - and she called me on them.You can really relax around people who know you that well. This is the camp play I was in during which  what relaxed were my bladder muscles. I wet my maroon  crepe paper beet costume just moments before the curtain went  up I remember. I wept with shame after my scene and ran to my mother sitting in the back of the theatre. She didn't care about my wet pants. She pulled me into her lap and comforted meYou guys, who read this blog, know me. If you've been reading it for a while you know about the time my big sister Nan and I peed in the upstairs hall during our naps and left the puddles there on the hall rug,  each with a small corsage of t.p. in its midst, something we did for the sheer naughty fun of it. I think we must have  sensed that there was some sort of frisky fun associated with what resides in a person’s pants and pee was the closest we could come to imagining what it was.Well enough on THIS theme! I'll sum up here by only saying that we might like people to look upon us as some new Mother Theresa, some new Dalai Lama, but the truth is we’re more comfortable with people who have really got our number.What fun I had with my old friends Sunday! And that’s without even singing the great old camp songs like John Jacob Jingle Heimerschmidt! :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjWbT28VO34]

The People You Walk With

It was a good first day of the year, yesterday was. I fetched a young ABC scholar just off the bus from the long vacation and brought him and his two ‘brothers’ to Anna’s Taqueria for burritos. Then they helped David carry a desk as the size of an elephant down three flights of stairs in our house. It was bound for our daughter Annie's place after 'living' here for 20-plus years.I remember carrying this desk UP all those stairs, in 1991, with only one skinny teenager to help me.“We had to saw off one of its legs,” I told David as we anticipated this job. His take on things? That the skinny teen and I must have approached the task wrong way back in the 90s. So imagine my satisfaction yesterday, when, after turning it every which way, all four of these guys concluded simultaneously that the thing couldn't POSSIBLY fit out the door of the room it was in... Unless we cut one of its leg off.Then things got easier, boy. We found the old cut, applied a hacksaw to it, got the leg off and got that desk DOWN the stairs. Well, they did that part while I hustled outside and commanded the five rear seats in my minivan to lie down flat. The next thing you knew that desk was in there.Getting that major task done AND being thus vindicated felt great – but not as good as what happened to me as with these three guys I sat over my burrito at Anna's:A woman stopped at our table on her way toward the door. Her shining face as she leaned down to me made me reach up and take her hand."Can I ask you something?” she said."Sure!" I replied."Were you once a teacher at Somerville High?”"Yes I was!" I happily admitted and then she told me her name and like magic there she suddenly was in my mind as her 16-year-old self.She gestured then toward the three young men and asked if they were my sons.A dozen answers came to my lips but the one I finally came out with felt the most honest:"They’re ... well they're the sons of my heart,"I said.And when I think of the things they do for me, like today's Herculean task, and of all the hours we have spent together talking after seeing a play or movie, or while riding in my car, and how many of their papers and essays I have looked at, eyes peeled for the run-on-sentence, the pronoun that doesn't agree with its antecedent, the pitfalls you risk falling into with too many adverbs, I realize that they really ARE the sons of my heart, and am so proud that this lovely former student took them for mine.Here they are now, Tobi Omola, Enderson Naar and Rayvoughn Millings. What great things they will do in the world one day! What great weight they mean to one day carry on all our behalf!

Three Strong Hints for New Years

“So Happy New Year! Don’t drink too much tonight, don’t talk to any boys and keep your legs crossed!”This is what the checkout person at the grocery store said to me as she handed me my change.Then she laughed. “That’s what my mother in Austria used to say to me every year at this time.”Her remark was the ‘something small’ that made my day yesterday, a day of many errands outside the house and much cleaning and packing-up once I got home.A poem I like very much begins “Make much of something small.  It cites “the cat coming in to the room, with one ear inside out.” Also

the elemental sedimentyour broom has missed,and lights each grain of sugar spilledupon the tabletop, besidepistachio shells, peel of a clementine...

"Slippers and morning papers on the floor" it goes on. It’s called "Bounty" and it comes from Robyn Sarah’s collection of poems, A Day's Grace, published in 2003 by Porcupine's Quill.My 'something small' yesterday was what that woman said from her place behind the counter. That and the memory of the fires we made in the fireplace in the days surrounding Christmas. Today’s ‘something small’ will be whatever arises in my mind as we continue to put away Christmas for another year, little knowing where another Christmas may find us.The poet’s advice is good and I would only add to it. “Talk to every stranger, and laugh every chance you get. And if you‘re intent on not partying too much ever, well, for heaven’s sake don’t work too much either!