Erasers

In two hours the school bus will pull up 100 feet from my door and the youngest kids in the neighborhood will climb on board with their new shoes and their little backpacks. I remember so clearly the day our youngest here did that.Below is a poem evoking a school-related custom from when we ourselves were children. I too had nuns for teachers. I too found myself punished for what seemed to me unpreventable bursts of whispering, day after day. Once, when I was eight, the nun made me go stand in the back of the First Grade classroom since I was 'such a baby,' she said. And once, nay, twice, nay, more than twice, I was sent outside there on the grounds of that convent school in Roxbury MA, to clap the erasers. Mary Jo Salter takes us back here to those memories or freedom and freedom’s opposite in this lovely poem,  "Erasers."

As punishment, my father said, the nuns       would send him and the othersout to the schoolyard with the day's erasers.Punishment? The pounding symphony       of padded cymbals clappedtogether at arm's length overhead(a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers       powdering their nosesuntil they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)was more than remedy, it was reward       for all the hours they'd satwithout a word (except for passing notes)and straight (or near enough) in front of starched       black-and-white Sister Martha,like a conductor raising high her chalkbaton, the only one who got to talk.       Whatever did she teach them?And what became of all those other boys,poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?       My father likes to think,at seventy-five, not of the white-on-blackchalkboard from whose crumbled negative       those days were never printed,but of word-clouds where unrecorded voicesgladly forgot themselves. And that he still       can say so, though all the lessons,most of the names, and (he doesn't spellthis out) it must be half the boys themselves,       who grew up and dispersedas soldiers, husbands, fathers, now are dust.  

Summer's End

In June it rained too much, and July was too hot, Then finally August blew in with weather so cool and forgiving it woke us all out of our grousing and reminded us that this season we wait for all year was almost over.Crickets provided the soundtrack to our nights in August and the crows began gathering on our rooftops. The crickets will go silent, a few at first and finally all, but the crows will stay on, seeming always to scold and scold and scold us the way they do. This morning when I woke there they were again, out on maneuvers, swooping from branch to branch, causing two small yellow bird to dart and flutter like a pair of nervous hostesses.I have accomplished very little on this long weekend: Didn’t read my book, didn’t work on my column, didn’t script all the emails and memos for the non-profit I give the best part of my waking hours to these days.I didn’t even write in my diary.What I mostly did was sleep: nine hours one night, ten another, a whopping 11 hours on the third. One morning I got up long enough to eat and make the bed, then ended up falling onto a different bed in another room where I slept for two more hours.We drive north to a lake in New Hampshire most weekends and, for the last ten weekends, our kids have done that too. It was never the sun that woke me on those Saturday mornings; it was the sound of our bedroom doorknob turning and then the thudding of two little feet. I would open my eyes to see a small face not six inches from my own.Later, the screen door would bang as someone set off for a run. The coffee maker would churn into life. A baby would emerge toddling about and saying “Hiiii!’ to the animate and the inanimate alike. It is very nearly her only word so she gives it a good workout.

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By night, a lot of meat got grilled and a few bonfire go lit. We burned the marshmallows. We melted the Hershey squares. By day, canoes and kayaks set out on the water, and everyone played a little whiffle ball.It's hard to know what your harvest has been at summer's end. You wish you could ask someone how to find and hold it in your hands..We caught a fish once and let him go.Maybe he could have explained it to us before disappearing again with a flick of his tail.They all went home anyway and here we were this weekend, just David and I, with our friends the crows, and the goldenrod and a swim raft rocking in a quieter lake. 

The Brush

I had a bit of a scare yesterday. Spent a good chunk of the day at Massachusetts General Hospital, or MGH as we locals call it, wearing the lovely blue gown, open at the front, and the white plastic bracelet.

My friend Mary heard about my symptoms the night before. She's an RN who worked in the ICU in this very hospital before her kids came. She offered to come with me but by Mac was also having symptom so I had to stop first at the Apple Store and sort that out and I knew she wouldn't want to come along on that errand.The Apple store guy pressed various buttons in various combinations as we did a little looking around in the laptop's brain and all was well. I bought a second external disk drive because that's what careful worriers do and I am for sure one of those. I mean what if I lost every essay I have written every week since the fall of 1980 - and almost 1500 blog posts? That would be so sad for me. Not for the world of course, but for me.I got to hospital at last at 2:45, made my way up to the sixth floor offices of the Internal Medicine Associates, walked in -  and there was Mary.She came in to the exam room with me as I described and then revealed the source of concern. I had just had a mammogram in April so what was this?“We can do another mammogram,” said the nurse practitioner who was so cheerful and smart.“And an ultrasound?” said Mary.“Sure.  We can do an ultrasound. Let me see what's available.” She scrolled and scrolled through images on her computer screen. “How's 8:30 tomorrow in Danvers?” she said.“Anything today?” said Mary. “Anything right now?”It was by then almost 4pm.“Let me see.” she said and disappeared briefly from the room.Mary and I talked more with each other and then all three of us talked together when the nurse practitioner returned.Then her phone rang. “Got it.” she said into the mouthpiece, then turned toward us. “If you go downstairs to the Breast Center RIGHT NOW...We went and within 90 minutes both the mammogram and the ultrasound had been done and read and I had talked with not one but two radiologists who confirmed that there was no mass.Mary and I parted with a hug, I drove home, pulled up outside the church that has been my spiritual home since that same fall of 1980 and breathed.I called David who was eyebrows-deep in yard-work and so could not get away. "I'm going to get a bite at Lucia's and catch my breath,” I said. I had peppers and onions and fragrant grilled chicken and a glass of Chianti Classico and three glasses of water. There was a young singer with her guitar in the room where the bar was but the room I was in had only happy toasting diners. People love to be together over food though, don't they?I read my book a little and though I meant to write in my diary I was too distracted.I left the restaurant just as darkness became complete and took this picture of one of the ornamental streetlamps, hung as they are in summer with these wonderful baskets.I put the picture up on Facebook later last night. “A beautiful evening to be alive in “I wrote under the picture and thought of all the people I know and love, who struggle now with illness or loss, and do not have the easy happy ending that was mine today. 

On Death and Acceptance

Last month I wrote a column about the way we all used to tan so madly, all heedless of the consequences.  It was a humorous piece, or so I thought – until, this email about skin cancer arrived from a reader:“Parents and middle-aged adults can quip about how fun it was to tan, or do all the stupid things we did as kids and then ask coyly how we made it this far. The answer is that those who didn't make it aren't here to write an article.”Her words led me through many long corridors of regret and ended by bringing me to this memory: of an essay someone wrote for a class I once taught in which he described the final days of his robust 40-something son, who died of this disease, leaving his own young family to live on without him. The slightly shortened piece appears here below:

Our son’s death was a sledge-blow, but from the gentle way he told us of his diagnosis until those final days he lived his time with grace.He had no illusions about his illness. He recognized that this sudden ambush attack by a cancer of unknown origin had made his body a battleground.Doctors hoped he would have a few weeks of relative ease, and though his body lost the battle in a matter of days, his spirit remained undaunted. “It’s a good day to die,” he told us on one of those days. “‘I have just seen my beautiful place and I want to go there.’We knew he would, because anything he ever wanted he worked for, and he was working for this.There were important papers to be gotten together which would require his signature. If we worked all night, we saw that we just might have them ready. We asked him if he could hold on and he said, “I will wait.”On the road home that night, we received a call from his sister, herself an RN who had been in constant attendance. She said we should come back. Then our son insisted she hand him the phone  and his voice came clear through the night:“Mom. Dad. Don’t rush back. Don’t do any more work. We’ve said our good-byes. Remember when the children came in? Have you ever seen such a day?  I love them! And I know you love me. Good-bye!”We cried.Then his sister had the phone again.  We talked it over there in the dark and decided maybe it wasn’t yet ‘a good day to die.’ So we kept on, collected what we needed, and gave it to the lawyer who worked all night. The next morning we presented the papers to Scott. Propped up with pillows, he signed them with a barely legible signature.He and his mother talked for the last time. Then he smiled at her and said, ‘Night ‘night, Mom,’ reminding her that, as in childhood, he felt loved and unafraid as he went to sleep.When it was my turn, I told him I only wished I could have been as good a father as he was. He asked me to kiss him. As I bent down to his bed, he squeezed my hand, smiled, and said, ‘On the mouth, Dad.’Then something wonderful happened: As we held each other, a great clear aura of love filled the room. There seemed to be no furniture, nothing physical at all, and I saw that all the love he would have shown had he lived was now here, to be felt and used by us all. That love has already bound our family closer together, given us more understanding and more consideration. As John Lennon wrote, ‘All you need is love.’  Love is here for us all. Believe it , feel it, use it and add to it from your own stores.”

My thanks go here both to the wise reader who led me back to this story and to the brave grieving father who first set it down.

Nice Guy Traffic Cop

This was me in traffic yesterday morning, feeling kind of grouchy, waiting my turn while the opposite lane of cars snaked around some construction in the road ahead. The cop who halted me held up his hands, held them up again, held them up again as if to say 'stop, stop, so STOP already!' - which seemed a little weird because I was stopping. Then he pointed to a particular patch of pavement is if to say 'come right here, come right here,' kind of like they do at the rental car return place.When he approached my car I thought “Here we go."But instead of chastising me in any way, he motioned for me to roll down my window. Seeng that Ihad my iPhone plugged in with that little tether that lets you listen to it through the radio, he said,"whatcha listenin' to?"That took me by surprise. "What's that now?" I said."Whatcha listenin to?" he said again, leaning in my window. "Meaning what kinda tunes?""Oh I'm not listening to tunes, I'm listening an audiobook.""Cool! What book?""Oh um something called If I Wake Up or When I Wake Up or Will Someone Please Wake Me Up. To be honest I just started it. It's for my book club. Some lady with amnesia or something,"I said.“Amnesia, huh?” he said, and we both took a minute to think about what it would be like to have that particular affliction. Would that also be ‘cool'? Or would it be painful and punishing to maybe not remember who we even were or what we were doing paused in the middle of Rte. 38 there.If he had amnesia he might forget that he was 26 years old and liked to chew gum. If I had amnesia I might forget that I was his age in reverse and now have pretty little spider-vein 'bracelet ringed around both ankles.But we didn’t have amnesia. We knew who we were and where we were, and he especially knew that the best days are of the ones where you have just enough high spirits left over to take on even the grumpiest-looking fellow citizens..

Updike: Still the Best

I saw the thinly disguised remembrance of Updike's mother in The Sandstone Farmhouse. It appeared in The New Yorker shortly before my own mother died so suddenly. I wrote to him to offer my condolences and he wrote me right back, the nicest letter.I always said I would go and find the story and offer a bit of it here, maybe on some quiet summer day.It looks to me as though this is finally the day.It’s just this passage partway through the tale.His writing inspires me as much now as it did when I first read Rabbit Run, during Rest Hour the summer I was 13 and lying on my cot at summer camp.

Relatives and neighbors spoke to him with a soft gravity, as if he were fragile in grief. He knew he and his mother were regarded as having been unusually, perhaps unnaturally, close, whereas between themselves the fear was that they were not close enough. Why grieve? She was old and in pain, worn out, She was too frail in her last half-year to walk to the mailbox or lift a case of cat food or pull a clump of burdock. It was time; dying is the last favor we do for the world, the last tax we pay.He cried only once, during the funeral, quite unexpectedly, having taken his seat at the head of his raggedly extended family, suddenly free for the moment, of arrangements and decisions. An arm’s reach away from him gleamed the cherry-wood casket he had picked put at the undertaker’s three days before. The lustrous well-joined wood, soon to be buried – the sumptuous waste of it. She was in there and in his mind there appeared a mother conceived out of his earliest memories, a young slim woman dressed in a navy-blue suit, with white at her throat, dressed to go off to her job at the downtown department store, hurrying to catch the trolley car. She had once reminisced, “Oh how you’d run, and if you missed it, there wouldn’t be another for twenty minutes and you wanted to cry.” She had laughed, remembering.His tears kept coming, in a kind of triumph, a breakthrough, a torrent of empathy and pity for that lost young woman running past the Pennsylvania row houses, under the buttonwood trees, running to catch the trolley, the world of the 30s shabby and solid around her, the porches, the blue midsummer hydrangeas, this tiny well-dressed figure in her diminishing pocket of time, her future unknown, her death, her farm, far from her mind. This was the mother, apparently, that he had loved, the young woman living with him and others in a brick semi-detached house, a woman of the world, youthfully finding her way. During the war she worked in a parachute factory, wearing a bandanna on her head like the other women, plump like them by this time, merging with them and their chatter one lunch break when, he, somehow, had bicycled to the side entrance to see her. She was not like them, the tough other women, he knew, but for the moment had blended with them, did a job alongside them, and this too renewed his tears, his native pride in her then, when he was 10 or 11. She had tried to be a person, she had lived. There was something amazing, something immortal to him in the image of her running.He remembered, from their first years on the farm, a crisis with the roof; it was being reshingled by a team of Amishmen and they had left it partially open to the weather on the night of the thunderstorm. Crashes, flashes. Joey's parents and grandparents were all awake, and he, boy though he still was, was expected to help too; they rushed up and down the attic stairs with buckets, to save the plaster of the walls and ceilings below. There was a tarpaulin in the barn that might help; he found himself outdoors, in the downpour, and he had retained an image of running across the lawn in a flash of lightning that caught the white of her bare legs. She would not have been much over 40, and was still athletic; perhaps his father was included in this unsteady glimpse; there was a hilarity to it all, a violent health.Working his way, after her death, through all the accumulated souvenirs of her life, Joey was fascinated by the college yearbooks that preserved girlish image. Group photographs showed his mother as part of the hockey team, hiking club. With a magnifying glass he studied her unsmiling competitive face, with her hair in two balls at her ears and a headband over her bangs. Her face seemed slightly larger than the other girls’, a childlike oval broadest at the brow, its defenses relatively unevolved. As he sat there beside the cherry casket crying, his former wives and adult children stealing nervous peeks at him, the young woman ran for the trolley car, her breath catching, her panting mixed with a sighing laughter at herself, and the image was potent, as fertile, as a classic advertisement, which endlessly taps something deep and needy within us. The image of her running down the street away from him trailed like a comet’s tail the maternal enactments of those misty years when he was a child crayoning with him on the living room floor, sewing him Halloween costumes in the shape of Disney creatures, having him lift what she called the ‘skirts’ of the bushes while she pushed the old reel mower under them – but from her point of view; he seemed to feel from within his mother’s head the situation, herself and this small son, this defenseless gurgling hatched creature, and the tentative motions of her mind and instincts as she, as new to the mothering as he was to being alive, explored the terrain between them. In the attic he had found a padded baby blue scrapbook, conscientiously maintained, containing his first words, the date of his first crawl, and his hospital birth certificate imprinted with his inky day-old feet. The baths. The cod liver oil. The calls to  the doctor, the subscriptions to children’s magazine, the sweaters she knit. Trying to do the right thing, the normal thing, running toward her farm, her death. In his vision of her running she was bright and quick and small, like an animal caught in a gunsight.This was the mother he had loved, the mother before they moved, before she betrayed him with the farm and its sandstone house….

There is more of course but I will stop there. The mother in the story, like his own real mother, dropped dead in the kitchen of that sandstone farmhouse, lying there for a day or two before neighbors discovered her.About ten years ago I flew to see my friend Bobbie in Swarthmore. One day during my visit, she and I drove to the tiny village of Plowville  to look for this sandstone house as well as the one ‘in town’ in the larger township of Shillington with its storefronts and trolley tracks. When we walked into the to Town Hall there to ask the address, a man who knew him happened to overhear us and told us so many details about him, mostly about his loyalty to the town and his perennial graciousness.Four and a half years gone now but doesn’t he still live and move in my mind~ !

Jeeesh, What Are You Gonna Do?

A bunch of people offered such good advice when I posted on Facebook two days ago about grouchy reader who wrote in to say he thought my latest column was the most boring thing he has ever read in a newspaper.I liked all the comments people left, from the one that said, "Tell him to go suck a lemon" to the one who said  "Jealous! Who says that? He hasn't gotten the memo that mean people suck? You go girlI nodded and also learned something when one person wrote, "People who take the trouble to write are people you've affected, whether it's positively or negatively. To a communicator, they're of equal value. Your enemy is indifference."I smiled in appreciation of the one that said "I have learned that we are not always *for* someone - kind of like when you hear speakers and some just "speak" to you and others turn you off. No biggie."True enough, true enough, Laura.I even liked the one that said, "You may be controversial at times, or even irritating, but never boring. I love reading your columns." That one made me laugh right out loud. I'm irritating? Really?But the one that made me feel best of all came from fellow columnist Mike Deupree now retired. I have been learning from HIM since 1988 when I attended my first ever National Society of Newspaper Editors Conference and here is what he wrote:I once got a phone message from a reader. He sounded very upbeat, gave his name and phone number, said, "I just wanted to let you know that your column this morning was the dumbest f***ing thing I ever read in my life." I always responded to people who identified themselves, so I called him and talked for a while. Nice guy. Became a regular correspondent and we met in person several times. (He was wrong about that column, though).That experience has been mine exactly. Sometimes people write me the most hateful things, me with my liberal theology and my support of equality in marriage. I too always answer - by email because people don't call me - and I think them for taking the time to write and sometimes say a word about God being a God of love and how I too admire and emulate Jesus and do you know what? Nine times out of ten they write back and say "well I was kind of in a bad mood when I wrote that" and though we haven't become friends exactly like Mike and his caller, we seem to have blessed each other, which is all I'm hoping for every day when I get out of bed in the morning.This is Mike, called 'Doop' by his friends around the time I met him. I miss him and wish he were still in the business.

Boring He Said

Got some good advice from my Facebook friends Monday night when I told about the reader wrote to say that my latest column was the most boring thing he had ever read in the paper.A couple of people asked to see the piece, so they could see for themselves. Here it is then: the word for word exchange I had with the cab driver who came to bring me to the bus station.Maybe a column shouldn’t have as much real life stuff in it but I thought the opposite was true. Anyway, here she is:

Because I had to be in the city to catch a bus at 10am, I ordered a taxi for 9:00 and was out in front of my house at 8:55.With an hour to traverse the eight miles to the bus station I felt happy and relaxed, the way you do in a cab when the cabbie is friendly and present, which is to say NOT talking on his phone the whole time.In fact, this cabbie did use his phone once when it rang but only because he saw that it was his wife, just waking for the day. He told her it was raining out so she should just turn over and go back to sleep and who wouldn’t be happy to overhear a cozy domestic exchange like that?Plus, friendly? He was sure friendly.As he wove deftly through the braiding lanes of traffic on this expressway, he chatted about this and that: About how he had just been on this road two hours ago, bringing a woman to the airport. About how his stop-for-a-drink-after-work pals were all cops and firefighters. About how he graduated high school back in the 70s. 1974 to be exact.“I know about the Class of ’74! “ I said. “Did you have shoulder-length hair and go to the prom in a tux with a ruffled shirt and a velvet bow tie?”“Who knows about the tux, it’s so long ago, but yup to the shoulder-length hair!”“And did they play Stairway to Heaven for all its endless length including that part in the middle when the tempo changes and you can’t slow-dance to it at all?”“No doubt!” he said and broke into song. “Dah dah DAH dah dah dah, dah dah DAHdah dah dah and they’re buy-ee-ing a stair-eh-way to Heah-ev-en.”We rode in a remembering silence a while before I recalled what had just happened on this road the week before.“What a shame it was about the intoxicated driver in the Caddy who hit that trucker so hard he went over one of these guard rails and fell 40 feet down onto the spur beneath!"“Another few inches and he would have fallen the full 400 feet to that street.”“But he’s OK, I read.”“If you call a broken back and neck OK. You sound like the driver. ‘Well he didn’t DIE,’ she said when she heard about his injuries.”“No, I know! A broken neck and back is awful-”But he was still talking:“I also hear that-“I wanted to interrupt him but by the time I saw what had happened it was already too late. In all the talk he had exited right when he should have stayed straight and now here we were in the long, no-turning-around tunnel that finally brings you up at…The airport.“You know I’m actually going to the train station, right?” I said in a small voice.“Dang! “ he exclaimed. “ I have NEVER done this before!”He went on. “Not to worry though. Watch this!" - and he orbited those airport roads faster than a hamster orbits his hamster wheel, dove into a second tunnel, surfaced four miles farther south, shot a mile and a half back north and landed me at the bus station at  last with 20 minutes to spare.“I’ll eat the $5 toll for the airport,” he said, but I gave that same amount right back to him as a tip.Because really how could I not? If there was ever a case of dual responsibility for that proverbial wrong turn, this was surely it."

And now, just for fun, that very song and a typical couple from the good old class of '74:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOemwDVBlqE]

Off to College

This boy came to our town as a five-foot tall freshman in high school. He was a scholar in our local chapter of the ABC Program. Such a journey!Back at the start of his time here I used to bring him over to Harvard for to bone up on his Italian with my nephew Matt. Matt was a freshman there at the time but time passed as time will do.Matt is now a senior at Harvard - and as of yesterday Rayvoughn was a freshman at the University of New Hampshire where he will study Computer Science.Even at 14, Ray was good with computers. Shortly after he arrived, he was already the go-to guy at the ABC House for PC issues.He networked all the computers and set up the wireless printer. And anytime anybody got a new Smart Phone - and we all know the Smart Phones are smarter than we are - Ray had it set and synched it up in a matter of minutes.I felt lucky. As a volunteer and then the head of the Student Life , I got to see him all the time, starting when he was just over 5 feet tall and stood up at the big Fundraising Dinner and all unbidden said what it meant to him to be part of this wonderful program.I remember when he began wrestling and found out he was good at it.That was the same time of year he wrote his History paper on the symbolic import of the Brooklyn Bridge in the years just after the ruinous War Between the States. I still have a video clip I made of him discovering all the material .But time keeps moving; we all know that. He began working for PC Quick Help and grew almost a foot and graduated from Winchester High School last June, making both his dad and his mom and the host family who sheltered him for four years very proud.

both as a 15-year old...

...and as an 18-year-old

And yesterday it was my privilege to bring him to college.And yesterday it was my privilege to bring him to college. Four trips up those stairs and my car, whcih at 10 am that packed to the gills, by 2:00 was once again empty.So shine on Rayvoughn Shion Millings! You have a world of support behind you!

Jumping the Fence

We were like a couple of second-story men backing down the driveway of this empty house.No one was home and we knew that. “This won’t take long,” we told each other, stepping out of the vehicle.But not 30 seconds after we opened the van’s rear gate, a muscular woman with short curly hair from the house behind this one shot out of her back door and began trotting toward the chest-high chain link fence that separated her yard from this one.  Then, without so much as a pause for breath, she placed two hands on its forbiddingly spiky top, gave herself a boost and vaulted over it. “Hey!” she called, striding toward us.  Talk about your neighborhood watch! was all I could think.As it turned out though, she wasn't there to challenge us; she was there to help us. And we weren’t there to take stuff away from this empty house but rather to bring stuff into it. The door off the back deck had even been left open for us. The muscular woman must have seen that at once, taken a long look at these two old Boomers and thought, “These two sure need help! “We’re the Marottas,” I said, pointing to the empty house. “We’re his godparents.” “Name’s Maura,” she said, quickly extending a hand. Then, just as quickly, she brushed me aside and took one end of the Queen Ann Sofa we had begun pulling from the van. I glanced back toward her house and saw a second woman who looked to be in her early 70s also approaching the fence. She wore a sleeveless blouse and Bermuda shorts and held in one hand the longest cigarette I think I have ever seen. We too exchanged names. “That’s my daughter,” she said, lifting her chin to indicate our muscular helper, who, together with my spouse, was now carrying the couch up onto the deck of the empty house. “She just jumped over this fence!” I told her. “She’s been doin’ that for the 40 years now.” And so, while the two lifters tipped and tilted the sofa, trying to get it into the house, the two of us chatted. “She’s an electrician,” she said. “No kidding?” “Uh huh. Like her dad is  - or was, I should say.  He passed three years ago.” “Oh, I’m sorry,” said. She nodded, looked away for a minute. “Yep, not one but TWO electricians right in one family.” “The  International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers!” I said, rather foolishly I fear. But “You know it!” she said. “And don’t I thank God every night for Local 103! They took care of me.” We both looked toward the house, at the precise moment the two lifters were concluding that this sofa was definitely NOT going to fit through the door.But just then, lucky for us all, our godson materialized on the back steps, home early from work. “Well, I’m the one who put this door on,” he smiled. “I guess I can take it off too.” And he went to get his tools. “You guys got this? If you’ve got this, I’ll take off,” said Maura. “I’m playin’ in a softball game a few towns over.” She gave a kind salute, waved to her mom at the fence and was gone, almost before we could thank her. And ten minutes later, a Queen Anne sofa, two tables and a dozen boxes were inside the house, everyone had said their goodbyes and this little stage was empty of players, leaving us with the fresh reminder of what good neighbors really are.

Dribbling on the Liquid Night

This is for anyone who was ever carried outside to the see the stars when the light dimmed and died at the end of an August day like this one .

It could have been during the Perseid Meteor shower, or anytime at all.

Kenneth Rexroth wrote it and called it "Halley's Comet," after that ball of light that visits us only once in every 75 years.

I saw it, or thought I saw it in '85.

I won't see it again.

Maybe some of you will.

Thanks to Mr. Rexroth for wrting this jewel of a poem and to Deborah Bird, founder of EarthSky.com, for publishing a few of the pictures people took over the last few days and nights, including this one above, taken by one Mike Lewinsky.

Halley's Comet

When in your middle years
The great comet comes again
Remember me, a child,
Awake in the summer night,
Standing in my crib and
Watching that long-haired star
So many years ago.
Go out in the dark and see
Its plume over water
Dribbling on the liquid night,
And think that life and glory
Flickered on the rushing
Bloodstream for me once, and for
All who have gone before me,
Vessels of the billion-year-long
River that flows now in your veins

We're a Bunch of Beauties - Sleeping Beauties

Here’s Henry Thoreau writing way back in the 1840s with some good thoughts for us all today:“If you have built castles in the air your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”So he clearly believes that we should dream; that we should build those castles in the air,Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t, I take his meaning to be.And he goes on:"Why level downward toward the dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.”He must have been a great teacher when he turned his hand to that fine art, together with his brother John founding a grammar school called Concord Academy, long before the famous prep school by that name was founded. He must have lit up the classroom with witty pithy bits of like that.I bet he was kind to his pupils always.But for sure he’s no fan of those who hardly know they're alive, which let's face it is most of us, most of the time.Plus were always complaining. As Henry puts it, "Some would find fault with the morning red, if they ever got up early enough.”Like his friend Emerson, Thoreau believed that the present is what matters. "All we have is this day, as my friend Gwen said yesterday in a comment on an earlier post of mineI like the way Henry puts it too:“The learned societies and great men of Assyria" he says. "Where are they now? What youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life!”True enough. Now we see through a glass, darkly, as that famous letter-writer put it to his little band of pals in Corinth, but then one day face to face. And  who knows what glories we will look upon then?

Afternoon Delight

I worked at my keyboard for three straight hours each day of this vacation,  but then I did nothing.By nothing I mean I sat on the deck and read my book called Titan, the new biography of John D. Rockefeller with his long skinny face. (I’m just on page 21 of its 800 pages but it's a start!)I read this for an hour sitting up. Then I turned over onto on my stomach and read some more, now on the fully collapsed lawn chair with the book on the floorboards beneath me. Then I fell asleep for 90 minutes.On waking, I made a tuna sandwich without the bread or mayo which is a little like eating salty sawdust but never mind.  I also made a protein shake using as its base 8 ounces of strong coffee, a cup of ice cubes, a scoop of  chocolate flavored protein and two  and a packets of Truvia, the natural non-caloric non-sugar that would put a smile on the face of dead man.THEN I went back out to my lawn chair on the deck and read  some more  on my Kindle this time, that old sob story of a novel The Prince of Tides by by Pat at Conroy, made into a movie starring Blythe Danner, Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand. I have read both this book before, which vacation is for. :-)It's true that since last Sunday I have I logged in about 25 hours of work for the organization that lately claims all my heart and many of my waking hours, but really I mostly just walked a little and looked out at the water.Around noon yesterday, a ruckus broke out on the deck next, like the sound of  a tiny helicopter crashing. I looked down and behold: it was two tiny helicopters crashing:  Two dragonflies, mating.The sight of them brought to mind the e.e. cummings poem I so I loved in high school about what a fine thing it is  when two creatures mate on your premises. These dragonflies whirred and fluttered and remained locked together for four or five minutes before the male flew off, leaving the female still and dazed.I have felt that way too this week: Still and dazed. It’s my one week off in the summer and I’m making the most of it. My man is outside for five of our 16 waking hours every day working,working, working on his ministry of weeding and when he comes inside in the world’s filthiest T-shirts and dirt in his teeth I can see he is one happy man. I’m happy too.  Once in a while I guess we all just need change of pace.And here's e.e. cummings from a different poem, speaking for me again:

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

a sweatshirt, a railing and a wee weeding man bending over his trash can. (I'll take the 800 page book ;-))

Blender Mishap

So yes I'm on vacation but I drove 100 miles home yesterday anyway, for two meetings, one to be held at my house at 6:30 and another to be held at somebody else's house at 8:00, both for the sake of this organization of which I am currently the president.I scored some pizza and salad to serve to the people coming at 6:30 and while they ate, drank and talked I slipped into the kitchen to prepare the food I had offered to make for the second meeting at 8:00: a plate of fresh sliced peaches and two small bowls of luscious jewel-toned raspberries, with, I had promised, fresh whipped cream on top.It was no problem arranging the peaches on a pretty plate.And let's face it there's not much you can do to a raspberry to make them any more perfect..Like these perfect rubilous orbs resting on somebody's windowsill.So all that was left was to whip the heavy cream... BUT ! I should maybe add that I had also driven into the city at 4:00 to see my doctor  and had also stopped at the wine store to buy a nice Chardonnay, so I was pretty wilted by the time I got home at 6:20, mere  minutes before my guests would arrive.I bolted up the stairs and changed quick into this  navy dress with white polka-dots that I've owned since the mid 1990s, fluffed up my already fluffy hair......and went down to whip the cream.But they were already here, all those guests! And I couldn't find one of the beaters for my hand-held mixer! And I HADN'T chilled the metal bowl the way you're supposed to do when you whip cream! So I dumped all 16 ounces of that pale velvety butter-fat into my blender and pressed 'Puree.'It looked pretty good, actually, but it needed just a little more whipping. Plus, I noticed, it had stopped churning and most of the already-thickened cream was stuck to the sides.So I did what you're never ever supposed to do: I opened the lid as it churned on and inserted the tip of a soup spoon to oh-so carefully liberate the cream from the glass sides - with the result that the blades hit the spoon, which SHOT out of my hand and up in the air while at the same time showering three cabinets and the whole of my dress with tiny white dots.I came out onto the porch with the drinks a few minutes later."There was a small explosion in the kitchen," I said.My guests looked over. "At least you've got the right dress on" they said and went back to their socializing.The lesson I took from all this? what happens in the kitchen stays in the kitchen. Just keep bringin' on the food. :-)

The Sky is Falling

It was a full year ago when this place on my kitchen ceiling began billowing downward, but in such a tiny way I thought I was dreaming it. Then one day a circle some 20 inches in diameter ceiling had visibly swelled down to occupy more and more of the air-space above the kitchen table.“Hmmm,” I thought. I looked over at the wall, mentally measuring the distance between it and this strange growth of plaster. I went upstairs and stood in the spot I judged to be directly above it. Sure enough. I was standing by the shower just off our bedroom. I walked over to the bed I share with my One and Only, still snoozing away at 8 in the morning. “The kitchen ceiling has a tumor,” I said to him.“What?” he said, coming slowly awake.“Well it LOOKS like a tumor, or maybe a breast. Kind of an androgynous breast, but still….”He got up with a sigh and let me lead him into the bathroom. “I think the shower might be leaking,” I said.“Nah” he said. “Somebody just left a cup of water on the lip of the bathtub once and it spilled and seeped through the floorboards.”“Somebody who?”“I don’t know, one of the cats.”“One of the cats? Our last cat died in 2010!”“Somebody,” he repeated. 'You,” I knew he was thinking, but it couldn’t have been MY fault. How could it be MY fault when the only things I ever leave on the lip of the tub are back issues of old New Yorker magazines that then fall into the water and become a kind of pulpy baklava.“Let’s wait and see,” he went on, because that’s his answer to most things. I’m having the phrase chiseled onto my tombstone once I’ve finally choked to death on that last bite of healthy kale.And so we waited.And so we saw.And the tumor grew as the ceiling lowered, then lowered more – until finally I was allowed to call the fix-it men who came and sawed a big square hole in the kitchen ceiling so that now you can look right up into the bathroom while you're eating your meals.With the ceiling laid open like that, the boss fix-it man made his diagnosis:“It’s the pan,”  he said somberly. “Your shower pan has failed.”So the following Monday in came the pick-axes. Out went half a ton of tile and concrete so thoroughly busted apart that every picture on the walls went crooked from the pounding.“Two more weeks and you’re set,” the boss fix-it man said. “In the meantime, take all the baths you want. Nothin’ wrong with your bathtub!”cAnd so we're doing our best to muddle through, me with my baths and my soggy magazines.It’s true that there are pieces of the shower stall all over our bedroom. True too that just this morning a fresh fall of water began dropping like the gentle rain from Heaven once again on the kitchen table, only this time from the tub and not the shower.But at least the tumor is gone – and as I eat my daily tangle of kale I look up and think to myself Hey but really: what’s nicer than a room with a view?

I Went to the Woods...

“I went to the woods to live deliberately...” That's Henry David Thoreau in the opening pages of Walden, the little book he wrote after two years of living in the cabin he built on the shores of Walden Pond, just two miles from the town of Concord where Nathaniel Hawthorne briefly lived. Where Bronson Alcott lived too, with his high-minded ways and raised up the dark-eyed talented Louisa. Where, most of all in my mind anyway, Ralph Waldo Emerson lived, with his big nose and his kind face; Emerson, who helped support his far younger friend Henry, lending him the use of that patch of land by the pond, and even taking him into his house to live with his family and tutor his children..Around these parts we all know Walden Pond over there in Concord.I know it's just ten miles from my house. I know it was formed by the retreating glacier a mere 10 or 12 thousand years ago. I know, or learned much later, it's the place where my teen children went night-swimming with their pals behind all our backs and all in defiance of many laws.I have read Thoreau’s Walden so many times that the things he says there and facts of his life come constantly into my mind, and I wonder always how he managed after losing his brother to John to lockjaw. It was about their trip down the Concord and Merrimack rivers that he was trying to write when he lived in that little cabin. I always assumed he was trying to bring his brother close again in the writing, as I have been trying to do with my sister Nan who, much to my dismay, moved to faraway Florida in the late '70s and has been there ever since.This week my man and I are away from our house that lies so close to Concord. Life chugs along without us there however, since four adults and an infant are living with us this summer - which means that I the worrier am free from worry over who will bring in the mail and papers. Free from worry over what lights we’ll leave on to fool those robbers in their cartoon robber-masks who we somehow picture making their nightly rounds, trying doors, as faithful as lamplighters of old ....This week I'm free from all such worry. Free to hike and swim and read Walden in these soft New Hampshire hills, where we mean to spend our time.Here’s something I read there just now, upon rising from my bed:

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Food for thought all right. I wonder: should it be crisp broccoli, rich butternut squash and good dark beans for our supper tonight?

Blinded by the Light

I had my annual visit with the eye doctor yesterdayWhich I dread always.Because of how they dilate your eyes.Because of how the first drops sting! and the second drops open those pupils so they grow into two great lacunas in your head.I looked just like these pictures above and below. ( Wo, I see my mustache is growing in again but you get the idea.)PLUS, not to make a big deal here. but you can't read.And everything is so BRIGHT! Even with the roll-open-and-plant-on-your-face shades they gave me I almost had to throw my skirts up over my head to keep from having my retinas scorched by old Mister Sun. (And it was a cloudy day!)I couldn't even peer into my trusty mobile device the way we all do, consulting the mite-sized characters on its tiny screen the way the Ancients once studied the entrails of sacrificial animals.Nope.All I could do was stagger about in a Walgreen's more or less window shopping the easier -to-identify items like Huggies boxes and emesis basins.Here's me a full three hours after the drops. I had just tried to do business in the  Post Office, but ended up pocketing the letters I meant to mail and neatly affixing stamps to the corners of my two prescriptions.Oy! At least I only to do this once a year

The Balloon Lady

The boys and I went into the city last week. They’re just done with Kindergarten and Third Grade, so the subway ride alone offered them food for thought. They feasted heir eyes on every passenger and sign in our car.Then, having climbed up out of that dank subterranean space, they looked around even more:At the sunning pigeons and the equestrian statues, and the Golden domed Massachusetts State House and the elderly woman who sat in her collapsible chair shaking a fistful of bells, a donation basket on the pavement next to her bare and swollen feet. We waded in the Frog Pond and rode on a carousel. We ate an Italian ice and watched horrified as a bicyclist tearing across the Boston Common braked so suddenly to avoid a darting child that the cyclist flew clean over his handlebars. All this we did see.And then we met Sheila.Sheila sells balloons twisted into shapes that are not the usual shapes, like Mickey Mouse head or Bugs Bunny heads, but shapes more whimsical and improvised. One balloon looked like somebody’s appendix, and one looked like a sweet potato. The balloon the Kindergartner was drawn to looked like DNA’s double-stranded helix, three feet long with a braiding of skinny balloons of red, white and blue.We asked to buy that one.“Howsabout a face at the top?” she offered, and, opening a bag of shrunken balloon ‘heads’, invited them to inspect it.The boys chose the superhero Wolverine and Sheila talked as she pumped air into him.“People ask ‘aren’t you afraid you’re gonna bust ‘em with all that pumping?’ and I want to say “If only you could SEE how many I bust!’ I learned to do this from the balloon men across the park. I got laid off last spring but I have a hawker’s license so balloons it is, for now anyway.”At last she handed us the DNA one with a bulbous yellow Wolverine balloon tied to its top.“We just saw the Governor go by!” said the big brother of my pair.“Did you darlin’?”“Yes and we were excited because we had just seen his picture in the paper holding his new grandbaby," I said."He has a grandbaby, does he?""His oldest daughter’s baby who weighed only two and a half pounds when she was born.”“Well, there’s nothing like family, whatever size or shape,” she said.“Right!” I said. “These boys are my family. My grandsons, Edward and David here have two moms at home.”“There you go!" she shot back. "And this is Malachi,” she said, indicating a boy about ten who we had not noticed before. “He and his brothers have two fathers! And I’m their grandma who takes care of them.”Family is what family does. You know that I bet,” she added, addressing my two. “We look after each other and it is ALL GOOD in the Lord’s eyes!”“I think so too,” I said.We had to move off then, as another party was just approaching her little balloon stand under the trees.“She was really nice!” Edward exclaimed as his little brother bumped his balloon along the old paving stones.“Watch out!” I said, but even as I spoke, Wolverine’s head exploded with a bang and the strands of DNA, rapidly unbraiding, turned back into three latex worms.So, we lost our balloon, but we weren’t sad really.  We had had our day with its delights and dramas. And we had met the wonderful Sheila who I am guessing we’ll remember for a long, long time.

A Fresh Wind

Yikes what a summer this has been, just weatherwise alone. One minute my grass looked like the grass you find in a salt marsh, bright blinding green and so perennially wet you couldn’t mow it. Then in blew the searing heat and within three days it looked like someone trained a blowtorch on it . It’s no longer even grass, by the look of it. It's Corn Flakes. Just Corn Flakes.So once a year we get to go to the summer home of our friends at the beach for an all-too-brief 48 hours. This past week, I didn’t see how I was going to live long enough to get there.. A family of three is moving in with us for a while as they continue to look for a house in this daunting overpriced market.We 're crazy about all three -  they’re family! - but all week long I could NOT stop stressing over how I would make space for them. I spent five solid days taking our stuff out of closets and bureaus, bureaus and closets and trying to figure out what to do with it all.  Of course I also had to work every day as everyone does, plus get to the doctor,  oversee some details around the estate of our much missed Uncle Ed and feed the hungry young mouths of a few other people, also staying with us this summer.I was a tight little bundle of stress by the time we pulled late into our friends' driveway in other words. It was pouring rain and the trip took hours. and while David gamely went out to a karaoke bar with the guy half of our hosts I fell exhausted into bed.Then, in the night the wind came up. It rattled the bedroom door and set the window screen to singing and I slept like a stone - and woke in the morning to the sea across the street and the sun overhead and one gorgeously crisp flags-snapping day. Deliverance! 

Ghosts of Summers Past

Things change, and so much we once associated with summer has vanished.Take tanning. Tanning is gone, or nearly gone. Only your young teens still lie out on the griddle of pool deck or beach, and the only deeply bronzed people you see in the media are figures of fun, like the neighbor lady in There’s Something About Mary. I remember the  audience screaming with laughter when she first appeared on the screen – and that was a good 15 years ago.Nowadays I'm almost frightened  by the sight of a deeply bronzed person. It takes me a good ten or 12 seconds to realize I’m looking at a suntan; a full ten seconds before I stop thinking ‘What on earth happened to this poor prune?’Your young parents however, totally get it that catching rays is a dangerous practice. Just last weekend I was a looking for some sunscreen to offer a houseguest getting set to take his baby for a stroll.“Here you go!” I cried triumphantly after rooting around under the bathroom sink for some.  “Suntan oil with an SPF factor of 8!"“SUNTAN OIL?” the young dad repeated with a look of horror. It was as if I had offered him a vial of skin-dissolving  acid.“And with a factor of 8, are you kidding?"The fact that I think of 8 as super-protective tells it all, especially since I just had a patch of Basal Cell removed my shin, which now looks like someone dug a trench in it with a grapefruit spoon. Live and learn!Also pretty much gone from the summer scene:Drive-in movies.  Handpush lawn mowers with their wonderful scissoring sound.  Dancing in the toxic fog the bug man left behind. Who knew it was DDT, or if they knew who had the sense to warn us away from it rather than toward it? Our parents didn’t seem to know; babes in the woods that we all were, we thought it was just another example of Better Living Through Chemistry  as the good people at DuPont used to say.What about those cute halter-tops girls wore together with hip huggers so as to really show off a tan? My friends and I wore both. We applied Baby Oil to the vast expanse of skin laid bare by such togs and held record albums wrapped in tinfoil under our chins to really train those UV rays at the face .We sunned on the flat tar roofs of our buildings, and took diet pills prescribed by real doctors, who gave them to any of us wishing to look better in a bathing suit.The diet pills were amphetamines of course, pure speed, though for sure nobody told ME that. I was 19 and living in Colorado that summer and would look at those Rocky mountains after taking my morning pill and literally think I could walk to the top of any one of them, easy as pie.I look back now and think the only thing there is to think from the perspective of the years: How did we live to be grownups at all?