We Bostonians

This weekend the days spooled out like satin ribbon, and for once we all let it spool.We watched the Red Sox.We watched the Celtics.We watched the Bruins.There were some losses but that was all fine by us.Things seemed almost back to normal, that is for us lucky ones with our health.I lay on my back and read about books about the 19th century.I made a shopping list, then never went to the store.At last and hesitantly recorded the week's events in my diary..And, by this lake where we come some weekends, gratefully and prayerfully, I watched as the light billowed and faded and the holy night came on.

You Ain't Goin' Nowhere

All Day yesterday I was focused on just one thing: the plane that woud bring my husband and my daughter home to Boston from their lengthy business conference 1,000 miles away.Here's how I felt about David in particular, my feelings nicely expressed in this classic song about a soon-to-be-home lover. Substitute 'bridegroom' for bride and that's me.I give you three great singers from the dawn of their careers  Shawn Colvin, Roseanne Cash and Mary Chapin Carpenter singing Bob Dylan's  "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere."Gettin' out that rockin' char now![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yicpOvhhvg8]

The Anguish, Again

Monday was so lovely here in that way so much like the weather on September 11th. I suppose that thought came back to us all as we looked on images of blood fountaining all around the Finish Line.Within minutes we all discovered we couldn’t make phone calls, whether on cell phones or landlines. The Boston.com site crashed so there was no news there. Thank God for Facebook and Twitter.My firstborn child is in Florida this week along with her dad, my husband David, as well as another person from the company they both work for. She got through to me via text. “Is my family OK?” is all it said. (This is her family here.) She couldn’t get through to them.That's how it was for everyone with someone in Boston Monday as in anguish we looked on those images, wondering who were the poor unfortunates from whose bodies life and health both were so violently torn.It was the same question we had on September 11^th.The planes all came out of Boston’s Logan Airport that day, you'll remember. When I called David at work, he told me that three of their people flew out of Logan that very morning. The agonized question on everyone's mind: were any of their plans the ones that hit the towers?They learned the answer when the company’s travel agent called sobbing. He knew that the nicest man in the company was on Flight 175. His name was Bob Jalbert and anyone who knew him said the same. Here's his obituary.September 11th happened on a Tuesday. The next day Bob's son called David, and asked him to give the eulogy at the memorial Mass. American flags filled the funeral home. there and in the church the atmosphere was heavy with grief. We were still so in shock over the events of that awful day we reacted with surprise at the end of the service when the priest came down front and said, "Please. Take the flowers." For there was no body and there was no grave.What a thing it was for my David to be the one asked to stand and speak about his friend. He is a quiet man not given to public utterance. I imagine he might say that standing before that weeping assemblage to speak of his friend was the hardest thing he has ever had to do. What an impossible task to sum up the life of a person. What a burden. What a privilege.Looking out at the signs of our slow New England spring I keep asking myself: Who are the people who will speak for these newly dead and wounded. And what can they say? What ever can they say?This is Bob, glowing as he did all the days of his life.

Times Like These

On days like the one we saw yesterday it's hard to know what to write, if, like me, you blog every day. Do you go for something light, to comfort people, or look it in the face? I mean the fear, the panic, the sudden loss of control you feel when all the phone lines go down as ours did within minutes after the explosion at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.'Keep calm and do your work' they say. That's a challenge now for us all.My personal moment of panic came when it suddenly hit me that our daughter Annie works right there on Newbury Street.I tried to call her cell. No Answer.I tried to call her office. No answer.I could picture her wandering out onto the street to watch people come in; oh could picture her.....But no. Her company takes the day off with all the thousands of people milling in there. She got lucky maybe.But what would I do, what would I do if these pictures were the last I would ever take of her, as she smiled on Easter, as she sat on our bed with her sister's baby?Three families will wake to that anguishing thought again this morning : the realization that they have taken their last photo of that loved one.May God bless those families. May God bless us all as we try to heal from this last event.

Long Thoughts in the Quiet

I was alone all day yesterday - brought my man to the airport at 8am and felt such a tug leaving him there; not approaching the ticketing kiosk right alongside him.Usually when I drive home from the airport I just know I’ll be finding my plants hanging over the edges of their pots, even though I gave them all a thorough soaking minutes before leaving. That’s how sunny this house is, with its big old windows admitting so much light (and wind and in summer the prying fingers of ivy that work their way right around the edges of the screens.)But there were no thirsty plants this time because of course this time I had only been gone from the house for 30 minutes. I felt a dip of desolation in the pit of my stomach knowing I was alone here, and would remain alone for some days; but then something nice happened when the implications of that state became manifest:Within two hours my head cleared and I realized I could think. I could both picture the week ahead more calmly than usual and I could reflect more clearly on the week just passed.The week just past held a death, the news of which turned my legs to water as I learned of it in a text message as I stood pulling on my street clothes in the Women’s Locker Room at the Y.The week just past also held a birth of a darling baby girl who I count as a new grandchild for David and me, though her parents are related to us not by blood but by the bonds of love.I didn't sleep at all Friday night while this little lady tried and tried to get herself born. At 3:30 Saturday morning, after the last text from the would-be dad spoke of fetal distress, all texting from him ceased - for hour after hour after hour. At 6am I was about ready to pull on my clothes and drive straight to the hospital.But - finally - at 7:30 in the morning in came word of a safe passage: the child was here and she was perfect. The mother was safe and undamaged.All this I was able to ponder yesterday: the arc of our lives, the great passages, the way joy and loss are so often tangled together in our experience.In my solitude I worked all day, emptying a 12-foot-wide bookcase of its hundreds of books, dusting them and sorting and packing them in boxes until we get done painting the room in which they are displayed.Behind the books I found a sheaf of sheet music that my former child Annie used for her recorder lessons. I found a copy of The Advocate, the literary magazine on whose staff my onetime boy-child Michael worked in college. I found a lock of hair belonging to my former fourth grader Carrie, my own firstborn, who has had from the beginning a mane of hair so thick and long the horses all envy her.We have lived in this house for 34 years this month, their father and I. We look back and know that those years passed in a twinkling. Will we get another 34 years of life? Why not? I say. No way, says he.Solitude just seems to invite ruminations: About birth, and death, and the way ivy will press its hands against your windows and stay all summer until the cold comes once again and turns them to scarlet and summons them earthward.å

The Backward-Facing Seat

There she was again, the elderly woman I so often saw outside my uncle’s apartment building when I went there to take him out. Like him, she too would be waiting to be picked up by some member of the ever-hurrying younger generation. She was glaring at me, same as always.I felt I knew why. It was because when Uncle Ed spotted me from the lobby and began trudging out along the 40 feet of canopied walkway, I would stay in the car. "What’s the matter with that girl?" I just knew the woman was thinking.I looked away from her to wave at this 91-year-old uncle who was by then pulling himself patiently along with his cane.“Why does she just SIT there?” I was sure she was thinking. “Why doesn’t she get out and help him?” So, this time, I got out of my car and approached her.“He won’t let me help him walk you know,” I said without introduction.  “He just won’t!”He didn’t mind the assist once he got close to the car though. Then I would jump out, hug him, take his cane and stand ready to help him 'come aboard'.Crippled up as he was by arthritis in his hips, he would take this process very slowly, using his still-mighty arms to pull himself up into the air, pivot and then land, one haunch at a time, on the front seat.Sometimes he could do this in one motion and sometimes he couldn’t.When he couldn’t hoist the right half of his bottom successfully into place he would laugh and say, “Turn the other cheek!” then try hoisting the other.Eventually, he’d be belted safely in place and we would drive off to eat our picnic and feast our eyes on all that passed before us as we sat by the Town Common or the little pond behind the library.I was still standing next to The Woman Who Glared as these thoughts rushed through my mind.“Really I’m just following orders,” I went on. “He also says ‘Don’t get out!’ when I bring him back here, and scolds me if I try. ‘I've taken enough of your time today!’ he always says.”“I know you must think that I’m awful,” I concluded.She looked at me and blinked.“Awful?” she finally said. “That’s not what I think! I see you and think ‘How does she do this so often, coming to take him out all the time?”I didn’t know how to answer her. Could I tell this stranger that I was trying always to atone for the fact that I had been so slow to understand about the loneliness of the shut-in? Could I tell her how remorseful I still feel not to have sensed the loneliness in my own mother, who only wanted to see me and be around me, but alas I was too  ‘busy’?In my speechlessness I could only take and squeeze her hand, and now here was Uncle Ed, smiling and calling “Ahoy!”I did not know on that early-April day in 2012 that this would be the last afternoon I would have with him; did not know that five days later I would find his poor body, fallen and cold in his neat-as-a-pin apartment.We so often act as if we’re omniscient; we even imagine we can read the thoughts of others. But in truth we are like children in the backward-facing seat of those station wagons of yore, seeing only where we have gone and never, ever, where we are going.

Edward Haydon, 1920 -2012, outside his home

Fun 'n Drinks

What's nicer than coming upon a gaggle of children playing on a swingset, when the sun is gold and the air is warm, and someplace deep inside folks' houses, unseen grownups are performing the magic that will bring forth supper?Three of the young ones in the  photo below are 'mine', meaning I am the mother to their mother, and three are new friends to me. In the shot above the two new-to-me lasses were demonstrating their mastery with swings.Just after I snapped that top one, three of the four little boys also worked their way into the picture frame, as you can see, while the fourth continue to describe dizzy circles on the bike that was right there in his driveway.The minute I came upon this happy scene, 'my' three saw I had my yellow thermos with me. "Oo can I have some tt juice?" said the oldest."What's TT juice?" the four new-to-me-friends asked, as one."It's a drink TT invented," said my oldest grandchild."I'm TT," I said. "I'm the grandma. Hi!""We have an aunt we call TT! Hi TT!" they said. Then every kid there took a pull on the TT juice thermos."How do you make it?" they wanted to know as one after another took more swigs.We talked of many things over the next 20 minutes and I took pictures, just with my phone cell which is why they're not crisper, but one thing I did promise to do was set down the recipe, SO.... To make two quarts of TT juice:

• Use any large packet of powdered lemonade mix, adding just one quart and a half of water instead of two quarts. Stir or shaker until mix is dissolved.
• Take one teabag of mint-flavored herbal tea and set it any microwave-safe cup large enough to hold the 12 ounces of water you will pour into it.
• Microwave the tea-in-a-cup on high for two minutes.
• Remove from microwave and let steep, discarding teabag once the tea has attained a nice mapley-syrup sort of color, then discard teabag.
• Pour the tea in the shaker, adding ice.
• Do all this again with a second 12 ounces of water and a second teabag and a second scoop of ice.
• Shake it up baby.
• Cool mix if there's time; otherwise start enjoying then and there.

More zing than lemonade! Not too sweet! No calories! that is if you use Crystal Light, which admittedly has in it what my two male grandchildren call 'cancer sugar,' because that's what their mum calls any artificial sugar, even Stevia . I think she's  stretching it a bit there but what can I say? She, incidentally, was one of the grownups inside making the supper during all this. When she came out and saw our little communion service with the yellow thermos she said "you didn't give any to the baby did you?""Nah," I told her. "By the time she got to it there was none left."It's just that good, and gives you just the refreshment you need to strike a pose look at life in all new ways.:-)

Posters We Wish We Had Seen in Time

Sure wish I saw the notice of this event earlier -  like the day before the lecture took place instead of the day after .It just kind of speaks to a person, y'know? Do I know any psychopaths? you think.  Oh God, am I one? Am I that wold in sheep's clothing? Not a  bad thing to examine your conscience like this now and then. Sure sorry I missed the lecture!

A Great Thing It Is

one of my writing heroes, Gloria

A great thing it is to be a writer. An even greater thing to be a writer who never made it to the big Leagues, and so has an undefinable 'audience' if she has an audience at all. (Is it the mom of this brace of babies in the twin stroller here? That late-night web surfer looking for news about Jeremy Bentham? The people who clicks through from my column in any given paper to see the blog post I wrote that day because that paper is nice enough to provide the link to it?)Last week on this blog I had a piece about April Fools Day bookending things on the Monday and a picture of my mother in her casket bookending things on the Friday. Yesterday I posted Ten Tips for Using a Public Restroom and later this week I will post a piece, tearfully composed on the anniversary of his death, about my husband's elderly uncle who became my own best friend. What I'm saying is I realize the tone changes a good bit from day to day and I hope that's OK with people.On the Writer's Almanac last week I heard Garrison Keillor quote something Gloria Steinem said that I identify with entirely. She said, "Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else."I feel just that way about writing and also, I'll admit, about any time at all that I have with young children and any time I spend reading things either by or about 19th century American writers. (Does anyone KNOW anymore how amazing Walt Whitman was? Walt Whitman who said "Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches; give alms to everyone that asks; stand up for the stupid and the crazy, argue not concerning God; have patience and indulgence toward the people; go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and the mothers of families....")I just tell what I saw, heard, felt. I may sometimes amuse people and sometime anger people. Sometimes I may make them feel more than they wanted to feel and maybe sometimes I just make them yawn.But every time I write I too feel, like Gloria, and probably like the great Walt Whitman, that there is nothing in this world else I would rather be doing.

Tips for the Public Toilet

A few tips for using the public bathroom:

• One, head right for the first cubicle you come to. In their natural animal desire for privacy most people bypass cubicle Number One. Hence, it's apt to be cleaner. 
• Two, DON'T be afraid to use the cubicle with the baby changer in it. This dandy drop-down shelf makes an excellent shelf for whatever you might be carrying. 
• Three, don't make a giant mess by spreading toilet paper all around on the seat for heaven's sake. Women used to be told they could get a particular kind of lice from the undraped toilet seat. Consider that is was usually men telling women that for motives one can only guess at. 
• Four, if you are a women do not try attempt to relieve yourself while crouched ten inches above the seat. Unequipped with a proper nozzle, a woman can't hope to get the 'aim' thing down and no one who follows you wants to find a seat covered with spray. Yuck. 
• Five, follow the posted suggestions and refrain from throwing in the toilet anything they tell you not to throw in there. I know the signs rattle us: one day, while using the rest room at her place of business, my sister got so addled by such a sign that she tucked her ten squares of toilet paper into her wallet and blew her nose on her paycheck. 
• Six, never flush your paycheck, as she then did. Under these circumstances it's hell to get a new one issued to you. 
• Seven, when it comes to sink-time, do wash with as much soap and hot water as you can for at least as long as it takes to sing the Happy Birthday song. 
• Eight, no need to sing that song out loud however. 
• Nine, check your heels to be sure you're not carrying a 'paper trail' out into the world. The only thing worse than that is walking out of the Ladies Room with the back of your skirt tucked into your underpants. And finally... 
• Ten, enjoy the hand driers.They're more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTI6n66u5AQ]

Now and at The Hour...

my mother, with her firstborn Nan inside her

Do most people believe in ghosts? I think they do, if by ‘ghost’ we mean that sudden sensed presence of one now departed. In fact, show me the person who claims never to have had this experience; never to have ‘heard from’ such a one.I know I did, once. Only once, but I ‘heard’ all right. It happened about three months after I lost my mother, who died very suddenly, right before my eyes.She was 80 and I was 38 and still a child myself in some ways. All I knew was that living my life without her seemed impossible; she was still that much of a parent to me.She had a pragmatic kind of sense that she expressed with a wonderful bluntness.Take the time I called to tell her we’d be welcoming a 19-year-old Austrian girl into our home to help care for our baby while the older children were in school, she laughed right out loud.“Great! Now you’ll have FOUR kids!” she said, and come to think of it she was right about that. I felt such tenderness for this sweet young woman, so far from her home in the Alps, that my ‘office hours’ as a listening mom never ended. A full 90 minutes after I was supposed to be at church for choir practice, say, I’d still be sitting on the front hall stairs with one of them, whether the seven-year-old, or the nine-year-old, or the 19-year-old, listening, listening, car keys dangling in one hand – ‘til it got so late I knew the only lights on at church would be the outdoor ones illuminating the steeple.She was pretty frail by then and she could hardly see, but she weighed in on things just the same.“An aging actor in the White House?” was one tart remark from the spring of 1980.Another: “Cookies IN the ice cream? Isn’t that going a bit far?”Every week I would drive the 20 miles to my childhood home to see her and if I was ever delayed because of a deadline she'd be equally frank.“Just write anything!” she would cheerily say on those occasions, even knowing that the wonky, stay-up-all-night-doing-homework daughter she had raised could never do a thing like that.She loved to laugh. here she is the day she came home from the hospital with a broken hip that would keep her out of work for a month. Still smiling, as you can see.

Twenty years after, with Nan beside her

Eventually, she moved to a wonderful assisted living facility in my town - and brought her renegade ways with her: Once during a fire drill there, with sirens blasting, she buttonholed her best pal Alice, who was obediently caning her way toward the elevator. “Never mind that nonsense!” Mom told her with a wink. “Come, we’ll hide in my room here, and have some sherry!”Ah, she was something. And what a hole her passing left in my life. In the weeks after it, I listened for her on every frequency I could think of. Where WAS she?I heard nothing for months. And then I had this dream:In it, she and I were descending a wide flight of stairs; kind of sprinting down them, in fact, with that galloping rhythm you develop when you do that.I suddenly realized what was happening. “Mom you’re RUNNING!” I said.“I know, isn’t it great? I’m not old anymore!” she said back.And that was the dream. It lasted maybe two seconds.Still, it comforted me.And in these weeks with so much stirring and returning to life, the thoughts of powers beyond our ken? Well, those thoughts comfort me still.

and twenty years after that, as Nan looks upon her face one final time

SOMETHING is Happening

Last night the blogger 'manning' the Lake Winnipesaukee Weather Cam said"There has been noticeable ice loss today. Satellite imagery shows the lake color is now the same as the land color on the visible image, and the lake appears only slightly cooler than the land on the thermal image. Based on the structural integrity of the ice observed here, we conclude that one decent-size nor'easter could take most of the lake's ice out. It wouldn't have to be a "Sandy" but along the lines of this past winter's bigger storms. If you're looking for a fast 'ice out', don't just look for warm weather -- search the horizon for storms or other major wind events."Good to know.I was on the lake last weekend and you can see the ice right there by our dock. It's all melted in by the shore here because of the hyrdrotherm unit that burbles away all winter, preventing great slabs of ice from wrecking the dock and carrying it away in splinters.I took some video of it for the sound, which I find strangely delicious.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2AIO_PjBXE] Isn't it altogether lovely to watch spring advance, whether on land or on water?

The Best Laugh I've Had in a Month

The best laugh I've had in a month came to me yesterday when I came across this video, brought to my attention by Dave Hunter who  has a blog called Reaching Utopia that you can see here.  I should say that what you’ll see below is from the "funny" category on his site.  There are many other, more serious sections too.)Now kick back and relax and think on the times when you too were this young, and limber, and crazy :-)  (God I love watching people fall to be funny! I used to do that. I did just about anything to get a laugh.)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KNXXC1tDJQE]

Turns Out You Really DON'T Need Big Muscles

It’s been a while since someone asked me to swordfight and play basketball but I got to do both Sunday afternoon. Lucky thing I didn’t have pointy high heels and an Easter bonnet on!This was with little David, my second grandson, who is five.The shooting hoops was his idea. He said I’d probably be ok at it even though I didn’t have big muscles. He pointed out that John, seen above here taking a splinter out of David’s finger last summer, doesn’t have big muscles and yet he’s good at everything. (Funny idea of not big muscles eh?)As it turned out, I proved not to be so great at the basketball part. Plus then the little boy's grandpa came out and sunk a few while holding a beer in one hand just to show he still could. (I knew the guy played varsity basketball in high school but the only evidence of all that I’ve ever seen is the tiny Medford High School satin shorts that still sleep in his bottom drawer. I didn’t know him then.)But never mind, because I was good at the sword-fighting which was my idea in the sense that I brought the swords. Light sabers they were really, newly purchased and brought to this Easter celebration just in case 'Somebody' needed a little more exercise.What I didn’t know; what I learned from little David with his cute lisp is that sword fighting is only really cool if you keep leaping up onto stone walls and back down again. That I could have done all day.Here’s how little David looks these days, ready for anything, as you can see.And here’s how I looked Sunday, just heading back outside for the re-match he challenged me too. Ah spring!

April Fool's Day

Dear Abby celebrates April Fool’s Day today by publishing a few exchanges she thinks are pretty funny.One begins with a query from a woman who, while doing the wash, found lipstick on her husband’s undies. He says it's red paint from his workplace men’s room, currently being done over, but she's pretty sure it’s lipstick and wonders how to get the stain out. Abby's clever (?) retort: Worry less about getting the lipstick out of the shorts than about keeping the shorts away from the lipstick. Ha hah!Another ‘ask’ is by someone wondering if it would be OK to charge guests a little money for the use of a rented port-a-potty which he and his girl would have delivered to their fourth floor walk-up to help handle the 'overflow' from their one bathroom on the night of their big party. Abby's answer in this case: Do this and you’ll have so few guests in the future you'll never have to worry again about runs on the bathroom. Again, ha ha!A final back-and-forth starts with a letter from a married man who says he's dating a married woman. He goes on about the light in her eyes, the way he loves to watch her interact with all kinds of strangers when they’re out together and on and on, and closes with the surprise ending that - whoops, guess what? - THEY'RE MARRIED TO EACH OTHER, a revelation to which Abby responds by saying “Normally I'd advise you to try to turn your wife into the love of your life, but you're ahead of me!” Ha ha some more!I'm afraid old Abby is kind of phoning it in with this column. It looks to me like she just cobbled together a few semi-funny stories from the files and called the whole thing an April Fools column. 'Course I'd like to judge her for this but then aren't I doing the same thing by quoting her?You bet, I am, it's April Fools!  Old Dave is in Minnesota till late this evening but I’ll be ready when he gets home. I got the dribble glass right here, and I just finished short-sheeting the bed. This is how short-sheeting works if you never went to summer camp. I've shaved off my goatee since making this video. ;-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7ubbHxfHug]

Wash All Their Feet

I am very moved that the Pope washed the feet of women in a detention center, for who couldn’t use a blessing like that and a woman shut away from her children; who suffers more?I lived for the first ten years of my life up in an old Boston house on whose porch this picture was taken. My grandfather bought it in 1913 for his four little children and this new wife Grace, who you see to the left and below.Formerly a spinster teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, she was also the sister of his first wife Carrie, who died in 1910 from pre-eclampsia while carrying the couple's fifth child, a stillborn daughter now buried in her arms.This house, though built in the 1880s, was new to these newlyweds and for them it carried all the promise in the world. It was there that they welcomed their own new baby, seen here, and who knew that this tall former teacher would also follow her sister into early death, now leaving six people in that house with all their sorrow?It was also the house from which my mother was married at 38, by then a spinster herself in the eyes of the world. Two years later, when she came to understand that her husband was truly abandoning her, it was the house to which she returned, with a baby at her knees and another on the way.I was that second baby. My sister Nan was the first. We three lived in this house along with that same grandfather and his mild sister Margaret and his true-spinster sister-in-law Mame, still grieving the loss of her two dear sisters. We all lived there until that good man died and the aunties needed nursing care and then we moved.Thirty years later, dawn by dream and memory, I went back to this house, which by then was serving as a pre-release center for women getting out of prison. I visited there again and again and in so doing came to know the women a little.Most of them were mothers.  According to the Family and Corrections Network of the Federal Resource Center for Children of Prisoners between 1995 and 2005, the number of incarcerated women in the U.S. increased by 57%, compared to 34% for men. And 75% of all incarcerated women are mothers.The mothers in my old Boston house on the Roxbury-Dorchester line were permitted to have their  babies with them, just on weekends, but the house needed more cribs. As it happened, I was just finishing up with the crib I found on the Want Advertiser and bought for $20,  refinished and used for my own three babies.I refinished it again and brought it to this house, now latticed with fire escapes, but otherwise looking not very different from the way it looked in 1913 as the pictures below will attest. So would I who am not the Pope wash the feet of an incarcerated person, whether man OR woman? Would I perform that humble gesture that says 'I am at your service’?  You bet I would.

We'll Always Have Paris: On Hanging In

What Mindy Kaling says about her parents' marriage is all well and good but are WE pals, the many rest-of-us coupled up and marching together in life? Based on my experience, here’s how you can tell:You’re pals if you started married life thinking it was funny to throw cups of cold water from the bathroom sink over the shower curtain and onto your spouse, all nice and toasty and soaped up in there.

You’re pals if, even decades later, you both still laugh when one of you reaches for the drinking cup while the other is just stepping into the shower

The two of you are pals if you say nothing about the fact that a CERTAIN PERSON in the marriage never, ever wipes off the sink after shaving, leaving puddles that drip down to leave white marks on that nice wooden vanity you had to really stretch to buy.  (You used to say plenty about this habit, but your remarks had no effect so you gave up. “Pick your battles,” wise older souls have told you all along and now you get what that means.You’re pals if that person says nothing about the fact that for some reason you can no longer cook a meal without opening all the doors to the kitchen cabinets and then leaving them open. (It’s a mystery why you do this. “Creative ferment?” you try telling your spouse, who just gives you that studiedly neutral look on seeing them and before quietly going around shutting them all.You’re pals - and you can stay pals - if you can master this neutral look, as it is far safer than a smile, which can be seen as a smirk, or a gloat, or what it usually is: the ill-fitting mask for a scowl.In fact in the name of marital accord you must ban many looks, from the I-Told-You-So look to the I’m-a-Saint-For Putting-Up-With-You look. Facial expressions like these send malevolent veils out into air that twist and curl and choke off all good will in a marriage.Kaling says no, she never did see her parents gazing into one another’s faces - unless perhaps her mom was administering drops to her dad’s eyes. She says gazing isn’t necessary when you are pals and I think she's right. If you hang in long enough to become pals you can tell how the other one’s day has been, just at a glance.When I first got married, my mom started referring to my husband as ‘Silent Sam,’ as a joke, just because, unlike the rest of us in the family, he didn’t feel the need to talk until his listeners all lapsed into comas. Maybe I too wished he talked more at first, but after a time I began to ‘get’ him.I remember thinking he didn’t care that much for our little cat - until after she went missing for several days. Then one morning she suddenly popped out of the bushes. “Here she is!” he cried from where he stood in our driveway and just for a second I saw his knees buckle with relief.I think Mindy's exactly right: Spend enough time living right close to people and you can’t help starting to love them . And gazing and pretty speeches hardly come in to it at all.Oh and that's us, above . November of 2004, Paris. Gooood time!

C'mon Married People

I just finished reading Mindy Kaling’s 2012 book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? And Other Concerns, a part-memoir, and part-general-musings-kind of a book that dances right on the edge of the funny and the moving.Mindy stars in The Mindy Project on FOX, but for many seasons prior she has also played the inimitable Kelly Kapoor on NBC’s blockbuster hit, The Office. She has, in also written, directed and co-produced many episodes of both shows. No flies on this girl!One short section of the book shows what I mean about her ability to both amuse us and touch us. It’s about marriage, and her parents’ marriage in particular. She says her parents get along because they are pals. They like to talk about the same things.

"In my parents’ case, they can spend and entire day together talking nonstop about rhododendrons and Men of A Certain Age, watch Piers Morgan, drink a vanilla milkshake and go to bed."

I should point out that the name of this section is “C’mon Married People” and in it she talking directly to us wedded folk.She begins by saying she doesn’t want to hear about the endless struggles to keep the ‘spark’ in marriage or about the work it takes to plan date night.Instead,

"I want to hear that you guys watch every episode of The Bachelorette together in secret shame, or that one got the other hooked on Breaking Bad and if either watches without the other, they’re dead meat....I want to see you guys high-five each other like teammates on a recreational softball team you both do for fun. I want to hear about it because I know it’s possible, and because I want it for myself.”

That right there. That’s the what I mean about the disarming double tone:  “I want to hear about it because I know it’s possible, and because I want it for myself.”She says, she guesses that “happiness can come in a bunch of forms, and maybe a marriage with tons of work makes people feel happy. But part of me still thinks… is it really so hard to make it work? What happened to being pals?

 "I’m not complaining about Romance Being Dead – I’ve just described a happy marriage based on talking about plants and a canceled Ray Romano show and drinking milkshakes; not exactly rose petals and gazing into each other’s eyes at the top of the Empire State Building. I’m pretty sure my parents have gazed into each other’s eyes maybe once, and that was so my mom could put eye-drops in my dad’s eyes."

Funny, right?“I’m not saying that marriage should be easy, but we get so gloomily worked up about it these days.”And that part’s surely true, is it not?“Maybe marriage IS work,” she says, “but you may as well pick work that you like.So “Married people it’s up to you. It’s entirely on your shoulders to keep this sinking institution afloat. It’s a stately old ship, and a lot of people, like me, want to get on board. Please by psyched, and convey the psychedness to us.

And always remember, she ends by saying, “so many, many people are envious of what you have. You’re the star at the end of the Shakespearean play, wearing the wreath of flowers in your hair. The rest of us are just the little side characters.

And there it is: a sweet, funny and sage perspective on marriage from a single girl. Next in this space: Companion thoughts on marriage from someone more than 40 (?!) years in.

You're the Jackass

Thought for the day, paraphrasing Deputy Marshall Raylan Givens from the FX series Justified: “You run into a jackass today, OK you ran into a jackass. You run into jackasses all day long, you’re the jackass.” (Only Raylan uses a more vivid word for it.)How right he is though: Some days all you want to do all day long is pick a fight with people, only you don’t know that’s what you want. You think the people who irritate you are just idiots. even if they happen to be people you love, and you’re dying to tell them so.It’s happened to me more than once, but now I have Raylan’s maxim to help me get right in my head.I mean to use it too. Because what’s true is that on most of those days when you’re trying to pick a fight every minute the whole time what you really need  but can’t seem to ask for... is a hug.Humans! When will we learn ?

The Pit - and The Pendulum Too

This was me Sunday night, all but the rats: I was so sick I thought I was dying. That’s exactly how you do feel when those steel walls of pain close in on you, like they did for the poor sucker in "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allen Poe. Here come the room’s walls, shoving you like dirt before a backhoe, closer and closer toward this yawning oubliette-style hole that has suddenly opened in the center of your pain - and let’s not forget that special blade of a pendulum that starts lowering down from the ceiling on the poor guy.I could feel that too, in my delirium, tickling the fibers of my pj's, then starting to slice me neatly open.What did our friend Emily Dickinson say? Pain has an element of blank, It cannot recollect When it began, or if there were A day when it was not. She was right about that, boy. Past and future fall away when pain is extreme.I tried to think of all the tasks and projects I had planned for the day and could not even remember what they were.I felt like Job on the dung heap. Like Job scraping his boils, and listening to that trio of distinctly uncomforting comforters who showed up and started proposing reasons for his suffering. You deserve this, I kept thinking, and really it’s not hard to think you do deserve many of the blows Fate deals you. In my case I have to look no further than the self-satisfied tone of my last post:  Oh! I swapped out some colors and re-arranged the decor in my little burrow!  What a clever little foxy am I!

(That's me on the right, the girl-looking one, admiring my walls. )

It was a terrible night anyway, with some vividly extra terribleness toward dawn. But then ....As quickly as it came the pain left, and one again I felt skipped over by the Grim Reaper; passed over as the ancient Jews were passed over by the Angel of Death so 4,000 years ago today. and happy be set down on the safer shores of that wide Red Sea; once again on the shores of Health and the blessed dullness of everyday life.