Will You? Will You Huh?

Good day, yesterday.Birthday wishes first thing from my own true love and from a nice young houseguest.Then an exercise class,Then lots of nice Facebook messages...A bit of cooking and a supper out.Didn’t jump into my good clothes til 6 o’clock but that’s OK.We are who we are.That old song came to mind and for good reason: Will you still need me will you still feed my when I’m Sixty-Four?Guess I’ll find out now!

Just Say.... No?

I've been taking so many drugs this last week it's a wonder I haven't begun having ALL the side effects, from compulsive lip chewing to random head movements to tongue swallowing - the whole terrifying litany.These are the meds that handsome young doc gave me in at Mass. General a week ago today:There's this Flucticasone Proprionate, the real name for the drug you see advertised as Flonaze, which sounds so much like the opposite of what the drug is meant to do - I mean do you seriously want more fluids FLOWING out of your NASAL passages? -It's a wonder the team that came up with that name wasn't immediately fired.Then there's Iophen, basically Robitussin with Codeine, which I had to practically produce a passport and birth certificate to take delivery of.And finally there's this stuff called Benzonatate, which I guess I was saying wrong. Someone my age, raised on declensions and conjugations you'd pronounced that word BEN-zo-nuh-TAH-tay. I had to look it up in Wikipedia to see how you really say it (be-nZO-nuh-tate.Either way you say it doesn't it sound like every Christmas carol about the birth of the Baby Jesus?Who says the Latin Mass is dead? Give a click here. Pretty beautiful actually![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyV01zXuW-A]

Dreams Don't Lie

My lord, the dreams you sometimes have! Last night I dreamed my daughter and I were shopping for a goat, why I don’t know  To nibble the grass? To eat the leftovers? I’m pretty sure goats don’t really eat tin cans the way they did in Saturday morning cartoons but who am I to say? A goat did try to eat my mother's pocketbook that time at the petting zoo.Anyway, in this dream the goat is pleasing to me and I am drunk with the recollection of that blank check God wrote Adam & Eve when he supposedly said, “Go ahead, kids! Have dominion over all creatures!” The goat is graceful, petite, lovely in every way – except for his eyes which frighten me badly, looking so much like the eyes of Satan in that super-short shot from Rosemary’s Baby where poor Mia Farrow finds herself pinned under the Dark One, getting impregnated.  (Remember her cry? “This is no dream, this is really happening!”?  And then boom! one the deed is done her actor-husband's nemesis falls ill, the husband gets the part and the deal is complete. He sold his wife’s body to Satan for a successful career in the theatre.To get back to the dream, in it the goat's eyes are so frightening to me that I try pulling them out, just as I did with the stuffed dog Fluffy I go when I was fives. That experiment proved grisly too since Fluffy’s glass eyes were on long sharp stalks. They looked the way we to the X-ray machine when looked from above .The only upside in Fluffy's case was that I could stab them into his straw stuffed head and out again at will.To get back to the fearsome present tense of the dream, with this real goat I cannot take an eye out and put it back in as I could with Fluffy. With this real goat I start pulling on his eye and out come three or four inches of the complicated circuitry lying behind it, the muscles the tendons, the optic nerve… The goat is mute with terror, mute as a rabbit is said to be mute in extreme distress and my daughter is screaming “Stop!” only I can't stop and I can't reverse the damage I have already done?I think about breaking his neck. as big, dim Lenny does with Curly’s wife in Of Mice and Men but lack the skill for that in this dream. So I just run away from the damage I had caused. I do think Who do I know who owns a gun, to put him out of his suffering? but I have no thought of calling a vet. No thought that a goat could live with just one eye. I just want it all to be over.Hours later the doorbell rings and a little neighbor boy tells me his family is even now boiling the goat whole, in a great vat, and did I want to stop by later and eat some. I turn from the door and vomit as the curtain falls.Dreams show us to ourselves all right and often the sight is far from pretty. Go here to see the impregnating scene from Rosemary's Baby, or, while waiting for your OWN dreams tonight, settle for frightening yourself a little now with one of Hieronymus  Bosch's paintings:

Beauty All Around Me

Even after being up all night on a red-eye a week ago, when every other single soul on the plane was asleep,  including probably the captain and co-captain, I have to admit: it was stunning to fly west with the night and see the Sierra Nevadas from 35,000 feet just at sunset.It was more than thrilling to have seen the Arizona desert a few days before.They call it the Sonoran desert. Its saguaro cactuses, some of whom seem to be doing the Walk-Like-an-Egyptian dance, live for 200 years.None of us will reach 200. We can't hope to.The most we can hope for is the occasional glimpse like this, of a landmass that looks made up of the mounded backs, the living vertebrae of large unknowable creatures.But WHAT creatures, you think, on whom so many life-forms ride?' And who is the even larger Creature upon Whose back WE ride?Paul said it: We see through a glass now, only darkly and know only in part, but one day face to face.May it be so! May it one day prove to be so.

Easy to Make Fun

Sure, it's easy to make fun of Carl Sagan, who I mentioned here yesterday. I bet even a six-year-old in Madagascar could do a take-off of the way he said "Billions!" in his effort to make us look up now and then from our antlike preoccupations.But look at this video below, which somebody made, setting and compressing his utterances into a kind of song. There's even brief footage of Stephen Hawking in it. How many have viewed it? You'll see when you pass the ad and click through: over 8 million of us, one of whom has written in the comments section that watching this video is what turned him/her away from a degree in Computer Science and toward a degree in Astrophysics .In case this doesn't appear for you, Click here to see the original video and then here to see the "Symphony" this person created. "Who knew Carl could beat-box?" might be your first thought; but your'e made of stone if you don't feel a catch in your throat when he speaks of not a sunrise but a galaxyrise.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc]

The Blue Dot

Forty-eight hours after that meteor hit in Russia and the asteroid that was the biggest object of its kind to be seen coming this close to Earth, I'm reading me some Carl Sagan. His show Cosmos still holds the record for the most watched science-related ever to be broadcast.

You look back at him with that 70s hair and sure it's easy to make fun. Mention his name at a party and at least three people will make a somber face and go "Billions!"Ah, but he died too young.Here's something he wrote about our little blue pearl of a planet, and under that a short clip of him speaking, in words as reverent as any prayer. The two bring tears to my eyes this day.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECuarAmpK00]

Contagion!

I was sick for two weeks before it occurred to me to seek

treatment.The coughing was unbelievable. It got so I didn't have a friend in the whole six-state area.Plus, it hurt.The day I coughed my lungs up I finally knew I needed to be seen.I went in to Urgent Care and the first thing they did was slap this mask on me.I look like some sad sort of 'Adopt Me!' Dog don't I though? And the mask doesn't go at all with my whimsical ivory boa.I thought this was bad.Until...Until...Until ...to take a chest X-ray they gave me a different mask and made me wear this:A johnny! (And it wasn't even this year's model)!

Cut the Guys Some Slack

Everywhere you went this last week you saw them: desperate guys hoping to stay out of trouble with their ladies. I think of the one I saw a year ago at the supermarket checkout at 9 at night, clutching a bouquet of flowers so wilted it seemed like week-old romaine.We both looked down at it when he placed it on the belt. “Hey it’s the thought that counts!” he said defensively.My own man Old Dave is never defensive when he presents such gifts.  He felt GOOD about the can of WD-40 he gave me one year. Ditto the jumper cables I got the next year. When our kids were little, what I did was to make a huge deal of Valentine’s Day, with food coloring even. (Pink milk! Mashed potatoes the color of Strawberry Shortcake’s petticoats!)What he did was bring us one small square box of fudge.One year anyway. Oh and one year he bought me a card, though he didn't bother signing it.It must have been the following year that I got some 'marriage revenge' by washing his underpants with my dark-red sweater. But I had less understanding then. And the world was very different.I think of the old jokes male stand-up comics used to make, like ”My wife: Can’t live with her, can’t live without her.“ And “My wife: She’s so big that when she sits around the house she sits AROUND the house.” You don’t hear those anymore. Things shifted somewhere along the line and now nobody DARES make fun of women. Rather, we show how evolved we are by making fun of men.Think about it: All over the media men are now portrayed as louts or goofballs, or well-meaning doofuses, like the Phil Dunphy character on ABC’s Modern Family.Only that’s not what men are like at all, at least not in my experience.I say this because in my line of work I get to talk to a lot of strangers. I also receive a lot of e-mails, a surprising amount of them from men.One man wrote to say that when he moved to his new town and began reading my column in his local paper he thought of me as his first friend in the area. I found that an extremely sensitive and generous thing to say.Another wrote to tell about a cat he drove past that morning as the poor thing lay by the side of the road, just as his neighbor sped going in the other direction. He stopped his car. He saw the blood.  “I think my neighbor hit her without realizing it,” he wrote in this email that I still have.  “My first thought was to knock frantically on doors, but instead I called Animal Control because the cat was still alive. “I hope I made the right decision,” he added, “but I can’t stop thinking about it.”And a third man wrote once to describe how kind and sensitive his young sons were when his best friend died. “Joseph is having fun in Heaven,’” one told him. “Someday you’ll make a new friend,” said the other gently.Men are louts and dopes and goofballs? I don’t think so. Men are our partners in adulthood, our allies, who find themselves living in a culture that paradoxically still feels free to mock signs of tenderness in them.So what do I care if my man doesn’t ‘deliver’ on this shamelessly commercial shakedown of a day? When for me, secretly, it’s been enough to have a good set of jumper cables, and that fresh can of WD-40 when I need it.So thanks Dave for all the fun. It was those veiny forearms that caught me but all the fun we've had since then that has kept me by you. (Arms so famous they're on display in the world's coolest art gallery!  :-) ) 

Kick in the Pants

I got sore at Old Dave on our recent flight west; he always tries to hold my boarding pass and he did that again the other day."I can hold my own boarding pass!" I hissed when he tried to take it from me at the ticket counter.Then he said to take my plastic bag of toiletries out of my carry-on as we went through Security, which made me equally wild. Did I need to be told that?He always fishes around in MY seat pocket before we deplane too, to see if I've forgotten and left anything in there he says. Grrrr!The other day, with my having twice acted so indignant, he decided to keep mum and try not to worry about what I might be leaving behind as we changed planes in Dallas.The result of all this? I (temporarily) lost my boarding pass, I forgot to take my cosmetics out of my carry-on for proper scrutiny and I left my i-Pad on the first plane from Boston during the layover and had to do some mighty fast acting to put THOSE three problems aright!Sometimes life just gives you a good kick in the pants I guess. And sometimes that's just what you deserve.

Serves Me Right

I wrote this at 5pm Sunday just before beginning my 18-hour journey homeward.  I guess I though if I wished for two good flights, I’d get them. Hah! Here's what I said, evidently thinking I could predict the future:

 "I feel lucky right now because I flew all night and nothing bad happened. I didn’t get stuck next to a huge guy or hemmed in by large unconscious persons such that I couldn't get up and go to the bathroom..."

Let me stop right there.. I mean, maybe there were things to feel grateful for, like the nice great salad at one airport and the glazed salmon and broccoli at the next one; like that friendly waiters and the couple kissing at the table next to mine, a good omen always....BUT!I did in fact  get stuck next to two unconscious snorers, and they were on the six-hour leg of the flight  and me pinned in a window seat. I did in fact get stuck to a giant of a guy who looked exactly like Kahl Drogo from Game of Thrones.Only he weighed 400 pounds such that I was sort of tucked in under his chest the whole time.And he smelled like cheese.A good lesson for me never to write about stuff that hasn't happened yet.

Now Boarding

Six hours in one airport, four hours in the next and the waiter at Chili's Too here in LA just tried to Talk me into a second glass of wine."I really shouldn't," I said. "I mean I have to fly in an hour."He smiled."Well, but I'm not the pilot of course."And then he said, "Ever see the movie Flight?""Denzell's new movie! Not yet!""You should see it," he said.Here's the trailer and me about to board the red-eye to Boston... I should see it, no doubt Just maybe not tonight. ;-)Take a look! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlFMZ5D8FNc]

Travel Day

8am: I'm leaving this sunny Tucson  hotel room in an hour for the six-hour Wait-and-Hope session at the airport. (Will I get on any plane? Can it be done?) Then, if no standby chance appears, I will fly to LA at sundown for a four-hour wait there, then fly all night alone, not to get in to Boston until tomorrow...

But really David and our kids have the harder part. They will fly out this morning via Dallas Fort Worth,  getting in at 9om tonight to scrape 30 inches of  snow off our car on the roof at Central Parking at Logan, then help each other dig out two more cars where we left them in Somerville and, perhaps, my own little buggy in my driveway, though I guess that job can wait til morning.

here it is, snapped by our good neighbor Linda. Yikes~

So it will be a long day and a long night ahead for me. It will be nice good to be home, though I will miss the beauty of the desert and the mountains, so moving to look out at even with traffic in the foreground. This was last night as we made our way into the Catalina foothills for dinner at the Grill at Hacienda Del Sol.

Missing It

I'm not yet back in Boston because 3,500 flights got cancelled in the blizzard, mine among them.I can only rely on photos like this gorgeous one of the mall on Commonwealth Avenue, as darkness fell last night. (Charles Krupa of the Associated Press took it.)The city looks beautiful, from this distance, but how it will look to me when I get back?  I'm way out west in Arizona, with four members of my family. Their flights, set for tomorrow, will likely go out as scheduled, but because I was supposed to come back early for a long-scheduled event planned for February 8th, my flight has been rebooked, not getting me back into Boston until Monday morning after a total of ten hours waiting in two airports, one of them even farther away from Boston than Tucson is.I'll be alone with my suitcase and my crooked back, my carry-on and the food I always seem to travel with. And darned if I didn't forget to bring my awesome 'Sky Rest' pillow that even the flight attendants laugh at, even though I ordered it from one of the Sky Mall magazines that they themselves provide, in the same seat pockets that hold the emesis bags. Huh!Sigh. I guess you can't blame them. They ARE pretty funny-looking.This was me last year ha ha. By now I've shaved off my beard at least. ;-)Anxious as I go in to this long day's journey...I should have all the fun I can today, before packing my things at 9am tomorrow and bidding this sweet sheltering hotel room goodbye.

Thoughts at One in the Morning

It's been a big travel week for my family, with my sister beckoning us first to Florida and then David's brother and his partner calling us out to Arizona. I was home just 24 hours between the two visits, and feel as though I've flown so much  I expect to feel a fastened seatbelt across my hips in every time I go to rise from a chair.Right now we're an hour north of the Mexican border, in Tucson. The light is so clear and the air so dry! Lizards stunned by the growing February warmth pose still as ladies' brooches, sun-stunned on the thick stucco walls.It’s heavenly here and will remain heavenly for the rest of my family all weekend, but I am scheduled to leave them all this morning to be back home for a long-planned event that I now find has now been snow-cancelled on account of what they’re currently calling a 'crippling historic blizzard.'If only we could see the future! Why did I book to come back early if really my fate was to be marooned at the midpoint of my journey in the vast indoor metropolis of the Dallas Fort worth airport? Or if I’m to circle for hours over the dark Atlantic, veils of windblown snow enshrouding the plane?. Or, best case scenario, if we finally land and I must fund and face our car, parked on the roof because every other floor n Central parking was full, ad there I am in my new suede boots, as thin as fawn-skin trudging through two feet of snow and a 50-mph winds to reach a vehicle entirely cocooned?It's so hard not to worry. I write this at 1am. I've been trying since 10pm but I cant seem to get to sleep.What will the future bring to me? What will it bring to any of us? And why do we not lie awake every night of lives living as we all do on the slopes of a great Vesuvius?

Let's Talk About This

Let's talk about all the stupid warning labels out there, like this one on the left.  Or, "Do not take internally,” it will say on your spray deodorant, just in case you thought you’d start using the stuff as mouthwash.You see these ‘Don’t Take Internally warnings everywhere: On your sunscreen. (Really? You don’t want to try swallowing it for a nicely bronzed set of lungs?) On your cleaning products... It seems so crazy – though come to think of it, my neighbor did just report to me in a text message that she recently sprayed some those famous foaming bubbles into her face, instead of the toilet.  “You know the kind that sprays blue and turns white when everything is cleaned?" she texted me. Well I’m here to tell you it really does spray blue.. even on your eyes, face and teeth!”You see it on hair coloring. - though come to think of it again, I did almost tint my insides a trendy Autumn Glory once in a dyeing mishap so comically awful even a shameless revealer such as I am cannot tell the story..... Well, maybe if you got me drunk.  And if I were on my deathbed.And you were dying too.I made cookies last week from the kind of frozen kit school kids are always hawking door-to-door.

1. “Preheat oven to 325,” the instructions read. OK, easy enough.
2. “Bake 10 – 12 minutes.” Got it.
3. “Do not burn cookies.”

‘Do not burn cookies?’ It might as well say “Listen, just stop now. Baking is beyond you.”That one seemed to me the most insulting set of instructions yet – that is until last Saturday when the mail brought from my sister Nan in Florida an envelope.It contained no letter but only the instructions that come with one of the many electric appliances  we ladies use on our hair.“Keep cord away from heated surfaces,” it said about this curling iron.OK, fair enough.“Do not touch hot surface of the appliance,” it said, which seems, you know, kind of obvious.“Never drop or insert any object into any opening” it went on, and I’ll admit that one struck me as a little strange. Don’t try using this curling iron as a what, a piggy bank?But the instruction Nan had highlighted with yellow marker was the best one of all.Regarding this red-hot electric-cattle-prod of an appliance it actually said, “Do not use while sleeping.” How would you manage that even if you wanted to? is what I wonder. So do manufacturers include all these warnings because care for us? Because they worry about us, more than a roomful of brand-new parents? No, ladies and gents. It is because they don’t want to end up in court  here in frontier-town America, where instead of the six-gun the latest weapon is - can anyone doubt it? - the lawsuit.

All's Right with the World

I THINK I'm finally starting to feel better after this long siege of sickness... I got on a plane over the weekend to visit my awesome sister Nan, WITH my two daughters and my grandbaby.It was just like the old days sitting around with Nan, funny as she is, smart as she is.She's a real catalog girl and it was in a catalog that she managed to find a perfume our mom used to love, not that she could afford to keep herself in perfume or had anywhere to go where she could wear it – I mean the bottle we both remember was 20 years old when we first came upon it and tried putting it on that mean old cat Impy with the hitch in his hip.. It was called Nuit de Noel and Nan found it somewhere on the old "Inert-Net" and now I have it, along with a wonderful note she wrote that just brought back those early years together when we were little.Mostly though her catalog finds are not sentimental. She has a T-shirt she found in one that riffs off the great old song from the musical Hair. To get the joke you have to remember "This is the Dawning 0f the Age of Aquarius." The T-shirt's wry commentary on what the advancing years does to a girl? It says "This is the Dawning of the Age of a Scary Ass." Hah! How could I not feel better having spent the weekend with Nan AND my two girls AND that little female coming along behind them? Here they are now, first Carrie holding our baby and then Annie in the shades.and finally Nan in a boat back when we were younger even than these two.Oh and here’s me. My nice salon do from last week fell apart since last Friday when I looked so awesome but I‘ve got my wig on now and all’s right with the world. ;-)

On the Mend?

Just getting to where I can climb our of the the bed and look around a little.Still feel pretty crummy though. (This winter cold is killing me!)BUT! they do say "Feed a cold, starve a fever" so….here's me without my wig searching in the fridge for a snack . :-)

My Man is Tough

My man is tough, no doubt about it. When the flu hit me a few days ago I told everyone I could think of and kept looking at my tongue in the mirror to see if it had fallen out yet.But the bug hit him first and he still has it... Yet he met his tennis pals Monday night just the same because... well, you can’t let three people down who are expecting to play double, can you? Then Tuesday night he let Annie and me take him out to dinner - again after a full day's work. (Yes he's going to work every day.) Then Wednesday night he had a business dinner at The Capital Grille when I know very well that the thought of downing red meat made his gorge rise. And finally last night he had the fellas over for bridge and those three guests were drinkin' and hollerin' about the state of the world ‘til way past midnight.I don't know how he did it. All I could manage was writing every day and getting my hair dyed - and that last thing nearly killed me."My god what an ordeal!" I cried, on coming back home after three hours in the salon. "No more roots though! Here, take a picture with my phone!"And he did and here it is:If only HE wrote a blog I often think, because for sure you're only gettin' half the story from me.

Here's Who We're Like

It finally came to me who Old Dave and I are like here in sickbay. Remember Charlie's four grandparents in Willy Wonka? We're like them. It even SEEMS like there are four of us in the bed, we've been in it so long.Yup. Were just here in the bed. I'm normally up at 5:00 but right now it's 7:30 and I'm just surfacing. Then I know I'll be back in the bed by 3:00 with aches all over.David actually did a business dinner last night, but then when he came home at 9pm he shed clothes like a snake sheds skin and was on his back and passed out cold five minutes after climbing in beside me. Also, the poor thing seems to have eaten something at lunch that has made his upper lip go straight out like Daffy Duck's.As for me, I'm still coughing like the Little Engine That Could in the part where everyone was pretty sure it Couldn't. Between 7pm and 8pm last night I wept copious tears while watching my recorded version of last Sunday night's Downton Abby and so my nasal passages were doubly stuffed.I thought about reader Paxi's advice about the Jamison with lemon and honey.I thought about hitting myself with the green velvet hammer that is NyQuil.In the end I decided to just 'go commando' as teen males seem to call it when they go without underwear. I decided to do without any meds in other words. 60 mile-an-hour winds tore and screeched around the house all night and here I am now in a new day, as here we all are.It's kind of pretty out right now with the branches all wet with raindrops, and  they say we might even have a bit 'o sun by noontime. I guess I'm just happy to be alive, to sum up - and to be honest, staying in bed is actually kind of fun when the company's good. :-) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29_uSlEEPSk]

Karma

I'm sick now too. First it was a tickle in my throat and then a rumble in my chest, like the sound from the engine room on the Queen Mary. This id what I get for making light of my man's illness.I went to bed the other night feeling as bleak as bleak can be, sleeping next to my dead Pope of a husband who had not uttered more than 12 words to me in 24 hours. (That extended whine is here.) But then, the next morning I woke to glory all around me: this sunlight in this room at January’s end. (David's reclining body in the foreground.)If only I had not, over the last few nights, curled up in the same small nest of bedding as a person who lay spouting like a whale – every cough and sneeze flying straight up into the air and settling in a fine mist all around me.By evening I had the headache too, and in spite of the 16 kinds of cold medications I took, it was excruciating. In the night I was sure that some evil force had got hold of the plastic-bag-like membrane in which the brain is suspended and was trying to pull the whole thing out through my ear.This is what I get for making Weekend at Bernie’s style jokes about poor David. It's my ‘goin’ around comin’ on around for sure.I had a flu shot back in October so whatever this is it’s presumably not the flu. David, however, did NOT have a flu shot and so presumably does have the flu.Anyway he’s still pretty miserable. I fetch him tea and toast, but he doesn't care about eating. Last night we tried to grab a meal out with our girl Annie but he couldn't even bring himself to have a drink. (what, no alcohol?!) He’s still got that thousand-yard stare, though and now it’s morning again too.And now we're home again our workday world with the Poop-Doggy-Dog-Walkers filing past outside our windows, sigh.I wish we had the view above that we had Sunday morning when we were up north. It sure did raise our spirits, sick or no. But the world these last few days is wrapped in fog and rain - and we're just here exchanging droplets. :-(