What Weekends Are For

This chest of drawers is from the 1820s, meaning that it's even older than my own chest ha ha. Thus I knew I should exercise care in replacing its one missing knob.I had bought it just last Monday in a used furniture store and nicked and flawed as it is, I could still see its beauty. It reminded me of the sort of chest where our girl Emily Dickinson might have hidden away her sewn-together packets of poems.This past weekend I was up early both days in my quest to find the true artist who coud use his lathe to 'turn' a new knob for me, out of mahogany like the other nine knobs. Ad didn't I find him thanks to a series of recommendations  that brought me at 9am on those two days to two different parking lots in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. The first day the man studied one of the intact knobs that I had brought along and less than 24 hours later here he was again with what looked like its exact replica, which he had made with his own hands.Lately I've been trying really hard to focus on the fact that weekends are for stopping your antlike work a while and looking around some. I looked at the stats page for this blog and saw with some alarm that as of last Friday I had written some 1300 posts here. Ant indeed!So instead of writing, or answering emails, or responding to Facebook messages and besides making those two forays at knob replacement, I basically sat in one room reading and thinking and listening to music.I hung this print of a semi-famous Impressionist painting on the wall.I found I didn't like it much anymore and thought to give it a try in a new place. I decided that the problem was its gold frame which seemed a bit over the top to me so I borrowed the belt from David's bathrobe and hung it along the side to see if it would benefit from a darker frame.Then I read some more and thought some more and listened to music some more while 'auditioning' this look - well, that is until David wandered into the room to ask me if I had any idea where the belt to his bathrobe might be.I gave it back to him but that was fine: i knew by then what I would do.And so on my way back from meeting the wood-turning genius for the first time I stopped at the hardware store, bought some Espresso-colored paint and painted the frame. So much better, right?And while I was there I also got some nice dark woodstain to address the old chest with. I applied it as well to a chair that has grown pale and bald with 60 years' sitting in sunny rooms and is now darkly handsome again and awaiting only some fresh upholstery for its seat, the work of ten minutes since I have the goods already.So in short it was a pretty nice weekend. And if anyone wants the contact info for the gifted woodworker Steven Crane, well, just let me know and, with his permission, I'll get it to you right away. :-)

Happy Weekend!

We drove to our place up north for 48 hours. The week is over and I am SIGNING OFF for two days!My advice for everyone out there? Exercise caution at all times:  Don’t let the cat near your fine silk drawers, use nothing stronger than Woolite on your dainty washables and read all labels lest you rub Liquid Silk into your hair thinking it’s your Thermal-Protectant Conditioner. Beyond that you’re on your own.We just got to this summer place in the woods where it sure don't look like summer now.I just watched two deer nibbling desperately on whatever tiny patches of greenery they can find at snowbank's edge and the wind is making this kind of mischief with the trees.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4POf3mFPho]I also just opened what I thought was a cheap bottle of red from the famous Marotta cellar of cheap reds at the back of the bedroom closet. Turns out to be a very nice Shiraz from the year 2000. (What did I say about reading the labels?) Now we have to make the night worth the wine. :-)Happy weekend everyone. Tomorrow I’m buying lettuce for those deer. This one looked at me for so long as I stood not 12 feet from him at the edge of night here, I felt abashed. I was the one to withdraw first, leaving him to his  private yearning.

The Full Glass

It was john Updike’s birthday Tuesday, and how could I have missed that fact, he being a fellow Pisces and I owing such a debt to him for teaching me to 'tell'what I see.Look at the words of the narrator he gave life to in his story "The Full Glass,"  published in The New Yorker in 2008. I loved it so much on first reading it, I scanned the whole thing so I could keep it always.It begins “Approaching eighty, I sometimes see myself from a little distance, as a man I know but not intimately"  which seems so sad now because the man who created this piece never saw 80. He was dead less than a year after its publication.Then further down on that first page:

Now that I’m retired…I watch myself with a keener attention, as you’d keep an eye on a stranger who might start to go to pieces any minute. Some of my recently acquired habits strike me as curious. At night, having brushed my teeth and flossed and done the eyedrops and about to take my pills, I like to have the water glass already full. The rational explanation might be that, with a left hand clutching my pills, I don’t want to fumble at the faucet and simultaneously try to hold the glass with the right. Still, it’s more than a matter of convenience. There is a small but distinct pleasure, in a life with most pleasures levelled out of it, in having the full glass there on the white marble sink-top waiting for me, before I sluice down the anti-cholesterol pill, the anti-inflammatory, the sleeping, the calcium supplement (my wife’s idea, now that I get foot cramps in bed, somehow from the pressure of the top sheet), along with the Xalatan drops to stave off glaucoma and the Systane drops to ease dry eye. In the middle of the night, on the way to the bathroom, my eye feels like it has a beam in it, not a mote but literally a beam—I never took that image from the King James Version seriously before….

and then, of that one glass of water...

That healthy sweet swig near the end of the day has gotten to be something important, a tiny piece that fits in: the pills popped into my mouth, the full glass raised to my lips, the swallow that takes the pills down with it, all in less time than it takes to tell it, but tasting of bliss.

From there he goes on to describe the bliss he felt as a young person, who  woke up inside his life and like any person does and takes joy in all five of his senses.I read Rabbit Run when I was 12; it’s how I found out how sex works.But it wasn’t the sex that kept me reading. It was always the way he made you see what he was describing; the way he made you feel you were right there beside the characters he was moving through their own special world. A letter carrier who passed me crossing the street said it, when he saw me in 1990 toting my brand-new copy of his autobiography  Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike. “Hey I read that!” that man called out to me is we passed each other on the crosswalk. "That John Updike can make even psoriasis sound interesting!”He  sure made the world interesting for me. I told him so in a fan letter I sent along with the story I had written of my mother’s sudden death. I was responding to one of his short stories, again in The New Yorker, that was very obviously about the death of his own, real, mother. He wrote me back four days later , on a postcard, with a remark so kind that more than two years later when I was writing my first book I wrote a second time to ask if I could use his quote on the jacket ."Ok on the quote.  Good luck with the book," he wrote back, again by postcard, again not four days after I wrote him.He was like that is all I can say: generous, and decorous and kind. The world of letters is surely the poorer without him.Take six minutes and read "The Full Glass" now why not, which now, five years after publication, is available for anyone, just by clicking here.

New Day

I feel OK about the new foot of snow because look what I had this morning: A sunup like this, all that warm buttery light just beginning to play on the face of the house across the street.That and the crocuses, ready to push up through the snow once again and brandish their short pale-purple swords. ( I know they're under there; I saw their tips just the other day.)How can we NOT hope now, with the days at last longer than the nights?Here is my favorite poem about faith in things unseen. The last line is just the best in my book.  The poem is called Green Feathers and it's by Reg Saner:

Five minutes till dawn and a moist breath of pine resin comes to me as from across a lake.It smells of wet lumber, naked and fragrant.In the early air we keep trying to catch sight of something lost up ahead,A moment when the light seems to have seen us Exactly as we wish we were.Like a heap of green feathers poised on the rim of a cliff?Like a sure thing that hasn’t quite happened?Like a marvelous idea that won’t work? Routinely amazing -How moist tufts, half mud, keep supposing almost nothing is hopeless.How the bluest potato grew eyes on faith the light would be there.And it was.

All that faith! AND the lush image of moss!Now to pull my boots back on and dig out more of these sword-blades.

Not What I Expected

I thought Sunday was all about St. Patrick's Day so when I got to church and saw a fiddle on the cushioned pew seat up front I thought,  "Wow, we're going to have reels! Maybe even some step-dancing!"But I was wrong in several ways that day.First, in my attempt to wear green and still be warm on a mighty frosty morning, I wore a green wool scarf along with my fake-emerald pendant. I felt so good about the green AND the fact that I would actually be getting to church on time that I asked David to take my picture, which he very nicely did. The only problem was, I had put on one green earring and one purple one, which I didn't realize 'til I looked closely at the photo.But that wasn't my only wrong assumption, as I say. I was wrong as well about the fiddle music. The violin that lay on that first pew seat at the front of the church was there because this was to be a Healing service, something that I had forgotten had been scheduled for this third Sunday in March.I hadn’t expected when I arrived that I would soon see people filing quietly toward three healing stations in the sanctuary while a woman played that violin, accompanied by the organist/fill-in choir director who sat at the piano beside her. I had been to a healing service 20 years before at the height of the AIDS crisis and remembered the way people had come from all over Metropolitan area to be at it, some of them very visibly sick with the scourge that AIDS was in the early 90s.I hadn’t expected to feel so moved as I watched the folks seeking healing sit in the designated chair as two people on either side and the person directly in front leaned in to hear what each had to say. Some spoke of what they needed healing for and some just bowed their heads to indicate they sought general prayers and the blessing that would follow.In both cases, for me in the fifth pew, the sound of their whispers was as the sound of water over stones in a springtime brook.So there were several surprises for me on that day. Sure I'm always sorry to miss a chance to hear an Irish reel but the sweet sobbing of the violin more than made up for any sense of loss on that score.Here now is Greg Scott playing Jay Ungar's Ashokan Farewell, a tune we associate with the dim past because Ken Burns used as it the theme song for his documentary The Civil War. In fact it was written just 30 years ago. Listen to it now and think how for all the old beauty Creation shows us there is also much new beauty. Then think how, as my church teaches, revelation abounds, and God surely IS still speaking in this world.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFXbK9aZzXk]

The Wearin' o' the Green

Who isn’t looking out the windows lately?  It’s not just the merchants who are scanning the skies for signs of spring, it’s all of us. I guess they do it so they can tie their promotions to the next card-buying opportunity that’s set to break over us. The rest of us do it so we can be ready to throw off the dowdy feathers of winter coats and walk around outdoors for a bit in our shirtsleeves.As far as the seasonal merchandise goes, I can bypass the rows of bright plastic eggs and Easter basket grass no problem.  I have a cellar full of such stuff. I can bypass the cardboard Pots o’ Gold and the leprechaun hats too. In fact, I’ve grown so resistant to the jingoism of St. Patrick’s Day that I sometimes 'forget' to wear green on the 17th, though all my family on both sides hail from that Emerald Isle. You know what I mean: this stuff:So those things are easy to do. What I can’t seem to do is stop running outdoors, because outdoors things sure are getting lively.

• A couple comes down a city street. She has blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and a baby inside so big it’s the main thing about her. As she passes, she looks down at her great belly and says to her man, ”Have you noticed? When I walk, it sways from side to side!”
• At a busy intersection in that same city I see a man with the deep inadvertent tan of the homeless.  He stirs from his seat on the sidewalk and approaches some preschoolers attempting to cross the street.
• The preschoolers file along, cuffed at the wrist to a thick soft rope, so many living pop-beads on a brightly colored necklace.
• Their teachers look alarmed at the approach of the man - until his courtliness and self-assurance win the day. He stops traffic with one long arm and with the other bows them all across.

Later, back in my own town, I stop at the post office to pick up my mail. There I find a package of home-made biscotti from a reader in Maine, a letter addressed to “Box Holder,” which acts as a bracing reminder that the world will keep turning long after I stop renting space in it; and, a handwritten note.“Your newsy bits about life help make my day, so here is your pat on the back,” says the note.“Excuse my spelling. I’m 89 years young and get up every morning.”There is no signature and no way to respond - unless I respond by doing so here.A toast then to the 89-year-old and the biscotti-maker both!

• A toast to the baby soon to be born and his swaying mama too!
• A toast to St. Patrick’s Day just past too because why be such a grouch, Terry?
• A toast to all adults shepherding every pop-bead necklace of children everywhere.
•  A toast to those little ones, fixing to one day take their place in the world.
• And finally a toast to the courtly gentleman with season’s first tan, who rose from his spot on the sidewalk to help them across the street.

Gettin' There

This picture doesn't look like much, I know, all somber tints except for the rosy snowsuits on the children. I took this picture through my car window today at a pond I love to visit.As I say, I know it doesn't look like much now but when i think how it used to look like... (Scroll down and then quickly down again.)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEIU3Ne552U]And SOON it will look like this! (Oh you wonderful Winds, who usher in so much!)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXXLYJdY33Q]

Goodbye Trauma Unit

Turns out it's harder to get out of the hospital than it is to get out of jail. Gary was told he was getting out at 9 in the morning, but it was 4:35 before we saw this welcome sight in our rear-view mirror.It's also just as hard to visit at this famous Regional Medical Center in Memphis as it is to visit someone in prison, except they don't take away your jewelry or send deny you access for wearing low-cut clothes. (I know this because I sometimes helped lead Troop Meetings in our local women's prison, so Girl Scouts could work toward their badges together with their incarcerated moms.)To get into this hospital where Gary was since Feb 28, a person needs to show a photo ID. Then they take this mug shot of a picture, a copy of which you have to stick on your clothes and show to show to  teensy camera when you get upstairs, either to the ICU or the Stepdown Trauma Unit, and probably to that little baby garden of a nursery too, lest you have plans to smuggle some newborn out under your coat.We waited and waited, for the final wound care, the final bath, the help getting dressed. Gary had to evaluate the nursing care for them and pick a dish for supper just in case we were still there when those clanking trays came around, then go to Discharge and undergo more questions.By the time I had fetched my little rental car and they had rolled him on out to it,  we had a mile-high pile of things on the accompanying cart, from the creative greeting cards and posters his friends had made to the many magazines, to the Steven Hawking book to the pint-size  DVD player his sister Susan sent after her own visit back in the critical first days, to her quart of Tomato Basil Soup. And of course that 30-pound fruitbasket sent by the company whose van had hit him. And the running shoes and wool cap  he had been wearing when he was hit, all the rest of hid clothes having been cut apart at the scene of the accident.It rained like Biblical Flood the whole day before, greet sheets of rain coursing down the glass walls of the cafeteria, but on this day, just as we were taking our leave, the clouds broke and a golden sun poured down on us as we drove south and west, south and west, across the state line and back to his home in Helena and it felt like a blessing and an omen both.

Notes from a Hospital Room

I came to this hospital to be with Gary on Friday.I came to relieve his Aunt Ginny and Uncle Mike, who got in their car almost the second they heard about the accident and began driving here to Tennessee from their farm in Michigan.Gary and his friend Scott were out on a morning run in Helena Arkansas when they were hit by a 15-person van. They were immediately airlifted across the state line to the highly respected Elvis Presley Trauma Center here at the big Regional Medical Center in Memphis.Friday and yesterday Ginny and Mike taught me everything I would need to know to help care for someone who, as Mike put it, looks as though he was picked up by someone with supernatural powers and jammed headfirst into the pavement. They began the long drive back to their farm yesterday morning.The medical people all say he is lucky to have survived at all and no one who saw him over those first days could doubt that.He wards off pity though; that's his way. Every nurse or doctor or physician's assistant who has come into the room since this happened 11 days ago has received the same answer when they ask how he is. "Doing well!" he always says.We feel for him anyway, however much he forbids it. And we feel too for the driver who struck Gary and his friend Scott, though Scott, thankfully, was able to walk out of the place that same day.Gary doesn't seem to know who that person is but we imagine he will have hard dreams for some time to come.This basket came early last week from the company that driver works for. He doesn't have the heart to open it somehow so it remains sealed this way, like Sleepy Beauty in her casket of glass.

Cannibalism?

While trying to fly to Memphis today I began paging through my photo stream and came upon this picture.

It was the front page of the in-flight snacks menu that American Airlines was giving out just a month ago, mere moments before they merged with US Air.I took a picture of it with my phone, it looked so strange to me.I suppose they've destroyed all copies of the thing by now, bearing as it did the 'old' AA logo and a good thing too. It looks like the man has two sandwich halves for legs. What's the guy silently saying anyway?

• "You've heard of mermaids"?
• "Eat My Legs?"
• "Try running on these babies, Mr. Pistorius!"?

Really all I could think was,  "Fire the jokers who designed this one!"

Feeling It

Hey the winter is over, storm or no storm. That old snowpack is beginning to look like the dough the pizza-man tosses over his head so as to fill it with air.Look at these winds, that are now so strong. Out my window I see the large trunk-like limbs of an oak swaying like the branches of a willow.Between the winds and this new strong sun,we're all getting kind of giddy.At the dry cleaners’ the other day, a woman I have never met turned to me as we waited in line. “I know you!” she cried. “You’re the one whose sister sings opera!”I am in fact not the one whose sister sings opera and said so as kindly as I could.“Well anyway, I know I’ve seen you at those summer concerts in the courtyard of the Episcopal Church!”Wrong again, but why say so when this late-winter thaw brings such high spirits?For sure it was high spirits that moved the tiny girl I passed at the town pond to bend over and toss her little skirt clear up over her head, revealing a paradise of ruffles on the seat of her little undies.“Hayley, put your skirt down right now!” cried her mother. “Why would you even DO that?”Silly question, when it seemed to me she did it because the geese were also doing it at the thawing margins of this chilled champagne-bucket of a pond. Down went their heads into the water. Up came their feathered bottoms, as gloriously arrayed as young Hayley’s ruffles.All I know is that something is coming and it isn’t more winter, in spite of today's snow... In spite of the fact that the Great Blizzard of 1888 that brought snow to the sills of the second-story windows began on March 11^th of that year.Even that old oak tree feels it. Day and night now, I watch its great limbs, stirring, stirring the sky like vast wooden spoons.

Silly Me

I sent flowers to poor Gary in the hospital Saturday and then saw a picture on his Facebook page of what I thought was our bouquet.It looks like this:Whaaaat? I thought. I'd asked the finest florist in Cambridge to collaborate with the finest florist in Memphis and this was the result? I mean, a turquoise bow and ... peacock feathers for trying to recover from the shock of being hit by a van while out on a morning run?I was as surprised to see the look of these posies as our little granddaughter was last month when her momma set her down next to her own birthday bouquet.She got used to them of course and two seconds later was likely trying to put them in her mouth..But the unexpected does rock you momentarily. I know I was rocked by the sight of that flower arrangement straight out of Dr. Seuss - until somebody clued me in to the fact that MY flowers were as straight-lacedly demure as something you'd expect to come from the town where Longfellow and Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes all lived, whereas this yard-tall arrangement was in truth from his work cohort who purposely ordered something over the top to bring to him one what must be one the only smiles he has had there at the Trauma Center.

Do What You Can Do

I got up at 5am took a long shower. While washing my hair I decided spur of the moment to use that special conditioner made from sheep placentas or something. God knows who sold it to me. The same people who pitched me those padded underpants probably.The rain drummed on the sidewalk outside and it seemed pretty clear that even a scant week away from Daylight Savings, actual daylight was by no means guaranteed.Plus there had been sadness of late, a child of my heart in the hospital 1,000 miles away, three friends battling cancer who were as healthy as ten-year-olds just six months ago.In times of trouble, focus outward they say – but what if ‘out there’ is where the trouble is? Then I guess you have to to look back inward, the way babies do with their special blankies, curling them around the same fingers which are also using to suck on and pat their cheeks with.It’s an art, this self-comforting thing.Comfort comes to me when I slow down – long enough to run a special conditioner through my hair, say, and leave it in for ten minutes.I blew my hair dry and sure enough the sheep placental worked. I looked just like the Ghost of Decades Past, with hair just like Jackie Kennedy, which is to say smooth with just the smallest sign of telltale frizz at the root.I always noticed this about her hair: the unconquerable hint of frizz close to the scalp.If you have curly hair like I do, wavy hair like she did, you know the hair the world sees isn’t 'your' hair ever - except in a heavy rain - but rather this carefully curated version of your hair, to use a word that's all the rage now..“Cultivate your garden,” advised the great Voltaire at the end of his famous novel Candide by which I think he meant keep it simple. Do what you can do and let the big scary world spin as it wants to spin for a while without trying to change it.Days like yesterday, with clouds like dirty drop cloths blocking the sun, it did me good to remember that quote.The memory of those padded underpants helped too. And also comparing myself to Jackie in any way at all, however much of a s-t-r-e-t-c-h the comparison may be.

Lucky

Lucky. He is lucky.We 're lucky, all of us in whose lives Gary has played a part. He was hit by a 15-person van just before dawn on Thursday while running with his friend Scott.Word is, when Scott sat up, Gary was 30 feet away  unconscious and bleeding from the head. Luckily Scott was able later that day to walk out of The Med in Memphis to which they were both airlifted.I first met Gar when he was in 7th grade. He and his sister Susan began coming to our house most days after school to join the rest of the kids swarming around the island in our kitchen.. Even now, when he comes to Boston we still enjoy the pleasure of having him here in this house: He sits, working at his laptop, in our living room. I sit, working at mine, one floor above him. He still paces when he talks on the phone, just like he did in middle school. I remember when he was 15 he blushed to see evidence of his own printing on an application he was making to prep school; he said it looked like something Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes would have crookedly penned.Last night my friend Marcia celebrated her 90th birthday. I couldn't be at her party but when she sent me this poem below by Mary Oliver, I felt as if she were right in the room with me. She read it at her own daughter's funeral, she told me, and at the funeral of her longtime companion Arthur. I felt as if Marcia  just knew, even without knowing about this accident,  just what all of us have been feeling in this broadly defined family that Gary has gathered around himself over the years.  It was written in autumn but its message couldn't be more timely for us all now, as Gary is ushered safely hour by hour toward healing. Pictures below!

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the treesare turningtheir own bodiesinto pillars

of light,are giving off the richfragrance of cinnamonand fulfillment,

the long tapersof cattailsare bursting and floating away overthe blue shoulders

of the ponds,and every pond,no matter what itsname is, is

nameless now.Every yeareverythingI have ever learned

in my lifetimeleads back to this: the firesand the black river of losswhose other side

is salvation,whose meaningnone of us will ever know.To live in this world

you must be ableto do three things:to love what is mortal;to hold it

against your bones knowingyour own life depends on it;and, when the time comes to let it go,to let it go.

Thank God that time has not come yet to any who read this today.

Here is Gary on the left with his one-of-a-kind brother John and between them their darling baby sister Susan from the days when I seemed to be cooking for young people all day long and their bookbags covered every surface.

A Nation of Whiners

Speaking of that last line of Mary Oliver's poem where she says "When it’s over, I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument," could we DO  any MORE whining in this season when the earth lies dormant?A shopkeeper I'm beginning to know tells me she is amazed at how much people complain about things. “It’s so cold!” they say the second they step into her shop. Or, “Where’s the SUN?!” Or, “Do you believe all this SNOW?!”I think we all do it: whine, I mean. I practically make a living doing it, right here on the blog.This past month I whined about it all:

• How my husband caught the flu because, unlike me, HE hadn’t had the sense to get a flu shot.
• How the awful cough he had caused him to lie beside me nights for two full weeks, spraying fountains of bacteria into the air with the regularity of Old Faithful.
• How I I then caught the cough and began sending similar germ-plumes into the air over our bed for the next two weeks.
• How I couldn’t get back from a recent trip away because of the blizzard Nemo, going on and on about how hard that was, even though I was in sunny Arizona.
• I whined about having to wait for 12 hours all alone in the airport before the two ‘red-eye’ flights I spent pinned against the wall of the cabin, first by a ponytailed giant whose wide-load of a belly pressed upon my arm for two hours; and then by a pair of men who slept like the dead for five-and-half of the six-hour flight while I could only fantasize about visits to the bathroom at the back of the plane.

When you start in whining it's hard to stop.Anyway when I got home after that week away and realized that I still felt crummy, I finally made an appointment at the Urgent Care clinic. The very first thing the professionals there did, after hearing my story? They slapped a facemask over my nose and mouth and told me to keep it on 'til I left the hospital.It was a facemask, yes, but I knew what else it was: It was a muzzle and by then it was just exactly what I needed.

Considering Suicide

Anne Sexton lists many wounds in her poem about life's pain that I quoted here yesterday: She speaks of 'When they called you crybaby, or poor, or fatty, or crazy, and made you into an alien..." She seemed to feel such unease about her life, an unease that did not stop until the day she ended it. Having gone over her manuscript for her next collection The Awful Rowing Toward God with her friend and fellow poet Maxine Kumin, she went out to her garaged car, started the engine and sat there until the carbon monoxide essentially overcame her by-then unconscious body.I only mean to say make it clear today that whatever pain living may have caused and however much I praised that poem, I would never do what she did - as long as I was well look out at the sky and know I was looking at it; to gaza at the faces of my caregivers and know them for the benevolent angels that such people are....As long as I could know myself to still be balancing the brimming chalice that is life I would not consider suicide.Here's the poem that for me outlines the best way to look at death. Mary Oliver wrote it, and for 20 years a framed copy of it has hung on a wall in my house. Give it a read and tell me you don't find it beautiful, and comforting, and inspirational:

When Death ComesWhen death comeslike the hungry bear in autumn;when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purseto buy me, and snaps the purse shut;when death comeslike the measle-pox;when death comeslike an iceberg between the shoulder blades,I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?And therefore I look upon everythingas a brotherhood and a sisterhood,and I look upon time as no more than an idea,and I consider eternity as another possibility,and I think of each life as a flower, as commonas a field daisy, and as singular,and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,tending, as all music does, toward silence,and each body a lion of courage, and somethingprecious to the earth.When it's over, I want to say: all my lifeI was a bride married to amazement.I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.When it's over, I don't want to wonderif I have made of my life something particular, and real.I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,or full of argument.I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Striding Out

Why write about the silly and the shallow just because our childish culture has a thirst for such?If I'm to write every day let me write about things that inspire the mind or gladden the heart.Let me copy out Anne Sexton's poem Courage, for both its bravura and its pain. She was born in the city my ancestors came to as mill workers in the 1850s. She lived, she struggled. She soldiered on as we all do.I remember the day the news broke that she had taken her own life; in my teaching years it was. The head of the English Department opened my classroom door and told me. I was young but I knew who she was, I knew. And her poems thrilled and frightened me.I am not young now but they thrill and frighten me still. The slippers in the closing lines alone!! Not the self-killing but oh for that bold stepping forth...Anyway It goes like this.

It is in the small things we see it.The child's first step,as awesome as an earthquake.The first time you rode a bike,wallowing up the sidewalk.The first spanking when your heartwent on a journey all alone.When they called you crybabyor poor or fatty or crazyand made you into an alien,you drank their acidand concealed it.Later,if you faced the death of bombs and bulletsyou did not do it with a banner,you did it with only a hat tocomver your heart.You did not fondle the weakness inside youthough it was there.Your courage was a small coalthat you kept swallowing.If your buddy saved youand died himself in so doing,then his courage was not courage,it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.Later,if you have endured a great despair,then you did it alone,getting a transfusion from the fire,picking the scabs off your heart,then wringing it out like a sock.Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,you gave it a back ruband then you covered it with a blanketand after it had slept a whileit woke to the wings of the rosesand was transformed.Later,when you face old age and its natural conclusionyour courage will still be shown in the little ways,each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,those you love will live in a fever of love,and you'll bargain with the calendarand at the last momentwhen death opens the back dooryou'll put on your carpet slippersand stride out.

Made New

This is how lovely the world looked at 7 yesterday morning. It just about took my breath away to see it.That's the tangle of branches that by early April are kid-gloved up to their elbows in magnolia blossoms. This tree stands just outside the second-floor room where I write every day.They were all lovely, those trees, dipped in icy batter as they were. This is the ginkgo, that weeps away its leaves all at once, within a couple of hours come fall. A video of that stunning phenomenon is here.In sum, every view from every window was lovely. Still, the loveliest, somehow, was the sight of our neighbor's house on that same morning, from a different window in my study. Take away the cable and phone wires and it could be a Currier & Ives print, couldn't it though?

Oscars Post-Mortems

We didn't have a red carpet in this house last night but we did have fun, celebrating three family birthdays. My son, who I wrote about yesterday was here too, and this morning in the archives I found this picture of him, taken just six months after March of 1998 when we took that three-movies-in-24-hours Pre-Oscars-Night road trip.The fact that he's sleeping in the picture shows what time of life he was in. Adolescents need sleep, all right. They say school shouldn't even start until 9am for kids older than 12; they're just not awake until then. In fact come to think of it, one of the three people celebrating a birthday here last night just turned 9 and he showed up in his pjs. ("Pick your battles," his parents probably decided.)The fun went on well past when the Oscars actually began, but about 45 minutes in I got a Facebook message from Old Dave's dashing-looking older brother Toby. "Compared to Tommy Lee Jones, David looks like a viable Oscar Host," he wrote. Typical big brother remark huh? Even David, you might think he was implying. Even my dismissible kid brother, though David was never dismissible and of course Toby knows that.Tommy Lee's face is collapsing into some amazing swags and wrinkles now but what a face it is! It's a beautiful ruin and God bless him for never getting 'work' done on it. Look how cute he was when he was a high school senior in Texas. This is the picture that appears in the Freshman 'Face Book' the year he entered Harvard.I know because he and David were classmates there at Harvard and played freshman football together. I'm looking at that old book as I write this.'Course my man was pretty cute too, as you can see in this photo I took when he was an usher in a wedding but maybe it's the tuxedo that carries the day in these cases.....Hmmmm, food for thought. Anyway, ya gotta love Oscar Night, eh? The morning after and I can hardly wait for NEXT year.:-)

Oscars Tonight!

A freelance columnist like me is also a salesman, and one year, when my boy was in 8th grade, he came with me on a sales trip to Pennsylvania that was to be half business half pleasure. I was visiting newspapers, yes, but we would also stop at Hershey Park and check out the fun there. We took the train from Boston to Philly, rented a car and began making our way west across the state, the visit to the Patriot News in Harrisburg being sweetened by the Hershey stop.There were disappointments of course, there always are: The Patriot News people told me they had to discontinue the use of my column, Hershey Park was not yet open for the season, and my boy wouldn't eat any of those nice tuna sandwiches I made for the train. (There's one truth I learned on that trip: a middle schooler won't EVER be seen eating food prepared at home; in fact It's hard to get a middle schooler to eat anything at all in public.)There were nice parts too though, the best being the fact that I decided after Harrisburg to scrap all the remaining newspaper visits. Instead, as we drove back across the state staying a night or two in a motel, we saw three awesome movies, all up for Academy Awards that year. They were Good Will Hunting, Titanic, and As Good As it Gets.In the car at one point, tearing across the Pennsylvania Turnpike to get from one movie theatre to the next in time for each show, he said, very much under his breath, "You're really fun.""What's that?" I asked, because I wasn't sure I heard right.But he was reluctant to repeat it.Still, I'm pretty sure he said it - and I'm very sure that watching those three great movies, all within a 36-hour period with that lively child, all before we had to board the train for home was, in my mind, just about as good as it gets for this three-time mom.And now a scene from Matt Damon's and Ben Affleck's first film, still a winner in my book. Enjoy it. Believe its message. And HAVE FUN tonight![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gfipuaIA68]