Breakin' the Rules

 

Friday night is a big night for dreams around here, at least for me, probably because like most of us, I don't have to get up in the morning. I opened my eyes at 6:30 and again at 7:00 and it's the-not-getting-out-of-bed-right-away that brings them on.In the work week my mind is whirring like a top by 6:30 even if I don't leap right from the bed. Today by contrast I knew I could lie there til 9am if I liked, so I turned over and in came the dreams.One was about the far-distant friend I ran into in Macy's. She had just blown into town for a week, she told me there in Domestics."But where are you staying?" I asked her, meaning Why aren't you staying with us?"RIght over there," she said, indicating the linens section of this Home Department and sure enough: Among the dozen perfectly curated display beds, each one tricked out with gorgeous color-coordinated puffs, quilts and duvets, not to mention a world of improbable throw pillows, was a bed that had clearly been slept in and only partially made, with an actual somewhat-worse-for-the wear stuffed animal atop it.More than her resourcefulness I admired her chutzpah.Chutzpah must have been the theme of the hour during that 6:30 to 7:00 window because the second dream showed more nerve than the first:My family and I were on some sort of Disney-style cruiseline of a ship that prided itself in providing a highly sanitized and carefully managed experience. Maybe it really was a Disney cruise come to think of it or maybe, as the dream wore on, we were by then in actual Disney World where , if you've ever been there, you know you can't so much as hoist yourself up to sit on a fake-stone wall without having three guys wearing blazers and walkie-talkies converge on you to suggest you hoist yourself the heck back down. Ma'am.Anyway, we were this restaurant whether on land or sea, when our young waitress, dressed as Snow White, suddenly set down her pot of Decaf, tugged at the front of her costume which must have been velcroed together  like stage clothes, and with one motion stood before us entirely bare, that super-white  Snow White skin looking all the whiter for the contrast with her jet black hair."My first naked lady!" a little boy exclaimed just before a flying wedge of blazer guys began hauling her off.As she passed me I couldn't  help it. I spoke to her. "Hey good for you!"  and she shot me her dazzling smile.So there it is: proof that even a good girl who leaps straight from the bed already planning a dozen ways to save the world, can have some pretty transgressive dreams if allowed to sleep even 30 minutes over... But hey, fun is fun, right? And we all need a little friskiness in our lives.

Carried Away

Below, for this bright day, is a poem called "Request" by Lawrence Raab. Maybe it's all those flowers and leaves, swooning so beautifully toward death, that puts me in mind of it. The poet writes of what music he would like to have played at his funeral services... 

For a long time I was sureit should be "Jumping Jack Flash," thenthe adagio from Schubert's C major Quintet,but right now I want Oscar Peterson's"You Look Good to Me." That's my request.Play it at the end of the service,after my friends have spoken.I don't believe I'll be listening in,but sitting here I'm imaginingyou could be feeling what I'd like to feel—defiance from the Stones, griefand resignation with Schubert, but nowPeterson and Ray Brown are makingthe moment sound like some kindof release. Sad enoughat first, but doesn't it slide intotapping your feet, then clappingyour hands, maybe standing upin that shadowy hall in Parisin the late sixties when this was recorded,getting up and dancingas I would not have done,and being dead, cannot, but mightwish for you, who would thenunderstand what a poem—or perhaps onlythe making of a poem, just that momentwhen it starts, when so muchis still possible—has allowed me to feel.Happy to be there. Carried away.

And now, here is that very song, as it was performed 37 years ago by Oscar Peterson and Ray Brown:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l85eHT1BDnE]

Back at the Workbench

Is Monday easy for anyone? This is my household this morning. We have such a hard time getting going they send in three adult matrons and an oversized teen girl to keep us on task and get us pumped for the day.They start by getting us up at 5 and making us do squats and jumping jacks in the driveway. Then we’re given a bowl of porridge apiece and read to for an hour: inspirational stories mostly, by famous old advice-givers like Ben Franklin and Horace Greeley.Today when we seemed a tad less than energetic, they then turned to long passages from the Book of Exodus and basically said You don’t like building pyramids all day? We’ll show you! Now you’re going to have to build the bricks for building the pyramids. In this picture you see us shackled to the workbench, building the palms trees before we get to work on the bricks and the pyramids. I’m the one farthest to the left, trying to curry favor with by smiling at the off-camera matron who is taking the picture.  (I’ve always been the Stockholm Syndrome type.) My man Dave is the one on the right way down toward the end of the table with his head in his hands.His clothes are mismatched I see, but it appears that most of our clothes are mismatched. Sigh. I guess you just do the best you can on a Monday morning. With whole new mountains to push uphill again this week we’re just kinda thinkin’ Whence comes our deliverance? Let’s hope the people in Washington can end this government shutdown today and get to work on the debt ceiling yikes. 

Did You Say LICE?!

What’s fun about life is its many surprises.I was certainly surprised one winter’s day when my little girl came trailing down the stairs from her nap to find me cozily reading in the kitchen.My friend had called the week before to say she couldn't come over, because her own little girl had developed a case of head lice.“Head lice?!” I wanted to shriek, only didn't, since my friend was already weeping softly over the horror of it all, she who keeps a house so clean you could toss a salad in the toilet bowl. My little one crept up in my lap then, clutching her blanky and - scratching her head. “YOU DON’T SUPPOSE…?!” I thought suddenly. I lifted a length of hair - and saw a row of teensy eggs stitched like seed-pearls along each wispy strand. It was all I could do not to 911. I tried holding her at arm’s length while urging her bendy limbs into a snowsuit so we could go to the doctor’s, and there’s a task roughly equivalent to drinking a glass of water with both arms in wrist-to-shoulder casts.“Hmmm, fascinating!,” the doctor murmured, browsing through her scalp. “I've seen a thousand cases of nits - the lice's eggs, you know - but never an actual louse!” he added, beaming.Per his orders, I bought the nuclear shampoo and that medieval torture device the fine-tooth metal comb. Once home, I washed her hair with it, only to see the bathwater turn into a small Yangtze River, bustling with the commerce - dead now - of a hundred actual and ‘fascinating’ lice.It was some little surprise, all right. But such surprises happen to us all.My friend's cat Squeak got gum trouble and went in to have her teeth out.While under the knife, she was found to have a tumor too, which the vet removed. But at home, toothless and convalescing, she kept opening her wound. Finally, the vet put her on Valium. She jumped up on things and missed; forgot how to blink; smiled a lot; and developed a weird appetite - for elastics and earrings and cigarette butts. “Never mind Squeak, give ME the Valium!” my friend said to the vet next time she saw him.Many surprises seem to involve the animal kingdom. I think of the time my sister's cat Shadow bit her on the toe. “At 2:00 A.M. the lymph nodes in my groin had swollen,” Nan wrote me afterward. “At 6am when I got to the Emergency Room, the doctors took eleven syringes of pus out of my foot and sent me home to bed with an Rx for Darvocet. Looks like yet another allergy to painkillers for me: everything I saw was framed like a stained-glass window, and the Space Shuttle kept landing in my kitchen.”One animal surprise in her life didn’t even come from her own animal. She came out to the garage one morning to find that a wild beast had entered her car, spent several hours whooping it up to such an extent the sight of her car brought sobs of disgust even to the pros at the car-cleaning place.You TRY to be ready for anything but hey, you can't be. As a teen, I used to carry safety pins,TicTacs and pencils against life's many surprises. As the years passed and I  began catching on more, I added a pen-knife, Band-Aids, and disposable wipes. Now I'm considering a tourniquet, a pair of Depends and some feel-good pills myself.The pills I may not need right now, but who knows? Anyway, according to Squeak, they go for ten bucks a pop on the street.

If a Man Asks for Your Shirt...

It doesn't show poor boundaries that I offered a guy one of my contact lenses, does it?He came to look at our house to see if there were any way we could air condition such a leaky old ship as this place and arrived a little after our appointment time."I'm so sorry I‘m late!” he said. “My contact lens just popped out of my eye on the way over here! I had to pull over and I looked all over the truck but I didn’t find it.”His eye was watering.“If you’re like me you can't see at all,” I said.“Right!” he said.“Are yours the extended wear 30-day kind like I have?"“Yes they are.”“What magnification?”“3.75 in that eye,” he said.“Just a sec,” I said. I went to my medicine cabinet, pulled out one of my own 3.75s and gave it to him - and we had a little festival of joy for the poorly visioned then and there.It isn’t often you can help someone in such a specific way like this. I was glad I could. 

Why I Love Boardwalk

Speaking of TV shows as we were the other day, the show I find I like best is Boardwalk Empire.Not, I suspect, for the usual reasons. I don’t like it because I find Gillian a fascinating character.Though I do.She ran a house of prostitution but really did seem to insist in maintaining an atmosphere of courtliness there. Think how appalled she was when Lucky Luciano’s men were seen to be taking their pleasure right there in the drawing room.I also don’t like it because of Steve Buscemi  with his wildly protruding eyeteeth, though I’m a big fan of those teeth. Without them could he possibly have risen in the world of film? Back in 1990’s in The Usual Suspects they made him seem only laughable. Then in The Sopranos when his character Tony Blundetto was getting out of prison and trying to start his life over as a massage therapist they seemed strangely sweet. Now as the corrupt, icy-eyed puppetmaster Enoch Thompson the teeth make him seem above all petty concerns like vanity. Nucky has his eye on the prize; with his wife and child long dead, nothing else even appears on his radar.  The truth is, I like the show for its interiors.I practically faint with nostalgia at the sight of those living rooms. The wallpapers alone! The davenports and easy chairs! Even the draperies, as they are properly called. (My mom would narrow her eyes with contempt if anyone in our house dared call them ‘drapes’.) I love the rooms in Boardwalk because they look just like the rooms I grew up in.  My grandfather purchased our family home for his new wife Grace, three long years after the sudden death of his bride Carrie  who was Grace's loving sister. Carrie had wide cheekbones and electric blue eyes and she died at 31 carrying the couple’s fifth child. This new bride Grace was older when she came to marry my grandfather. She was 30 and a dedicated schoolteacher. She didn’t want to leave her students – she said so in many a letter to this man who was courting her but in 1913 no teacher could stay in the classroom once she had married.This is my grandfather Michael Sullivan:He bought this house for that former schoolteacher and his four little children, who were 4 and 5,and 6 and 8.Then two years later they had a child of their own....and with five little ones together and a house with such a nice front porch life was good. I know because I have read all the diaries.Then, tragically,  this happy wife Grace died just after turning 40,And the house? The house fell under a spell.Thirty-five year later, when I came to live there, with our grandfather an old man by then, and his two ancient sisters-in-law still there and now my big sister Nan and our mom, the place looked exactly the same as it did around 1920, because, as I believe, no one had the heart to redecorate it.And so in some crazy way, when I see the interiors on Boardwalk I think “I’m home!” I think that  my  gentle grandfather is reading one of his many histories of the Republic in his wing chair, and the two great-aunts are shuffling about, making jam and clucking over the news of the world. Our mom is working from home every day trying to prop up a failing business and Nan and I are happily lowering baskets of stuffed animals suspended by a string of tied-together scarves from the third floor banister clear down to the entry hall so many steps away.This was the 'best' living room as we called it in the late 1950s. Maybe you can see what I mean.Where is the past then? Where are those faces? Washed away now, like the footprints Atlantic City’s Nucky Thompson leaves in the sand just off his boardwalk.And yet I have that circular mirror you see on the wall, and  Nan has that desk. I have that little round tip table and my girl Annie has those chairs I even have all the books in the bookcases even, and the very same pink paper on my walls. Everything, in short but those people and how I do miss them. How I do miss them today.

Breaking Bad (Hashtag Hashtag) Kinda Glad It's Over

The Breaking Bad craze yikes. Last night I watched the final episode of the final season of that AMC show just like everyone else and saw the internet light up with the universal sign #, which means "this is what I'm referring to." People were practically out in the streets in their excitement.The Today Show did some a short tribute to the show at 8:15 this morning, being careful not to give away anything as I will also be careful to do here since no doubt many DVR'd the episode due to pressing football commitments or sock-sorting chores or baby-tending tasks or whatever it is that people do on Sunday nights.I watched the live post-mortem too and was charmed both by Vince Gilligan's humble ways and by his intelligence. Aaron Paul, who has played Jesse Pinkman for all these episodes, spoke too and he was okay though I was sorry to see that his personality seemed very much the same as it is in the show. I'm always so sad when this happens, and it happens a lot. I mean can Diane Keaton even MAKE a movie anymore where she's not either sobbing showily or laughing maniacally?I have no idea what Jimmy Kimmel was meant to add to the lineup there on that couch but I guess they know what they're doing, the people who stage these events.I will miss Gus Fring. Will he never be back in his impeccable suit?  No, alas, he will not.I will miss Hank Schrader whose real life self I came to know a bit about by listening to 'Fresh Air' with Terry Gross. A Harvard kid who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.I will miss Walter White's lovely son, and also  Hank's wife Marie with her purple purse and her purple rugs.I won't  miss all the point-blank shooting-of-people-in-the-face that became almost the show's trademark in this last season. At the very least can't a person be allowed to finish his sentence before this happens to him?Well it's over now and Bryan Cranston is now playing LBJ six miles from here at the American Repertory Theatre.Since I mentioned talk show host Jimmy Kimmel let me also mention the great Jimmy Fallon as an introduction to this clip: a very funny takeoff on the use of hashtags by the (mostly) young. Jimmy is the funniest man in America, in my estimation and as for Justin, is there ANYTHING he can't do?Sit back now and give yourself a smile with this clip about hashtagging from a recent Saturday Night Live.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57dzaMaouXA]

One, Two, Three, HIKE!

Good follow-up to a night of 'toasting' with Big Dave's bridge pals: We hiked up Rattlesnake Hill.Encountered:two big dogs,several slews teens, all affectionately pawing one another,and dozens of young parents urging their kids along with everything but electric cattle prods.David, good host that he always is, carried a sack of drinks, so that when we got to the top we could have a Sprite Zero, a Bud Light, or a wee can of Strawberry Margarita, the latter two perhaps being somewhat in violation of trail rules......which may account for this image: The person behind the camera thought he was shooting a picture on my i-Phone but turned out to really be shooting a video.Oh well! Love his laugh, anyway.Good old Charlie! Then David took this picture of toothy me. REALLY NICE WEEKEND WITH REALLY GOOD FRIENDS.. :-) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlaMOdaeC9Q]

"Ma'am! Excuse Me Ma'am!

It was late and I was walking farther than I would have liked to get to my hotel, since, as the woman at the front desk had told me, the gate to their garage had malfunctioned.“Drive down a block to the city garage,” she had said airily, vaguely indicating a scarcely visible concrete structure a quarter-mile away.I had made the trek, and parked, and had just finished walking back, past several vacant office buildings and a woman talking loudly to herself with a pair of pants wrapped around her head, when I heard another voice, just as I approached the hotel entrance.A man was asking a young couple for money. “Hey howya doin’, folks,” he said, stepping in front of them. ”I wonder if you can you help me out here. My momma’s in the hospital up in the next county. Seems she was brought into Emergency. I’m dying to get up there but I can’t afford the fare.”The Styrofoam take-out containers the two 20-somethings were balancing tipped a little in their hands when they found themselves thus halted, but the ‘asker’ seemed pleasant enough, which is maybe why they paused before politely declining his request and walking on.Or maybe they paused because it’s human to pause and acknowledge people when they address you.I know I've stopped to listen to an ‘asker’ many times in my life. Once, back in the 80s, when New York City was a far wilder and woolier place, I had a whole line of askers following behind me in Penn Station because, at my own foolish suggestion, they were waiting for me to change a $20 at the nearest storefront.It’s true I had poorer boundaries back then, but it always seemed to me part of the social compact NOT to barrel along, acting as though you didn't notice when someone was speaking to you.I’m not saying I’m some saint when it comes to these things. I’m definitely no saint at the mall when the salespeople at the kiosks run toward me calling, “Ma’am Ma’am! YOU’D like to have softer skin wouldn’t you?" When did we become such a nation of hucksters? I grouse to myself in those circumstances. And why have I become that mall shopper who no longer dares even to smile out at the world but rather keeps her head down and just barrels on past these polished young hawkers?It troubles me. I miss the open person I once was - and yet I know it’s not smart to engage with just anyone.I learned this all over again upon leaving that same hotel two days later.I had my laptop bag and my purse over one shoulder and was dragging my suitcase behind me, when a young man with what looked like a big bag of groceries began approaching me from behind and a little to my right.Out of the corner of my eye I saw him pull an apple from the bag and kick it toward me.”Whoops! Could you get that for me?” he said, much closer to me now. “It fell out of my bag and my hands are full!”But my hands were also full.And in order to help him I would have to set my own bags down.Plus: I saw him kick it over to me. I saw him.He had such a nice smile but it cut no ice with me. I said “Sorry pal,” kicked it back and kept on walking. And what was lost and what was gained in that decision I guess I'll never know.

Had Some Setbacks, Had Some Fun

Setbacks first; the delivery guys came a third time to install our new fridge but now the plug doesn't fit. (Sigh.) After whining about it here and then again here, I choose to think of other things today.Like the fact that our son came home this past weekend  from faraway Arkansas and made us laugh til our sides hurt about the adventures he and his buddies had trying to drive an RV so wide that saplings were breaking off along the lonely desert road until they managed to get the hang of it. (It's like when you're pregnant: at first you just don't KNOW how wide you really are.)Also, the Whole ABC Family gathered to celebrate Fall Family Weekend, and had such had a nice time eating and talking and cooking (and square dancing!)Also fun looking at pictures of ourselves doing all this. :-)Then too, one of our 'extra' kids  came home  and did some champion sleeping in his room. (Computer Science major is not for the faint of heart; he was tired!)  We went through some of his stuff from high school and I came upon this picture from when he was just a freshman with Winchester ABC. He doesn't look a thing like this now but what fun to be reminded of when he did. Was it only four short years ago?Sunday morning I took my two grandsons to eat pancakes at a McDonald's Play Place where they came to the realization that at six and nine they now feel too big to crawl inside those large plastic intestines. Sad! The first of many closing doors for them but instead......Instead we came back to our house, just in time to meet the rest of the fam, pretend to watch football and bask in the joy of being all together.Which is what it's all about really in life. Which for sure is what it's about. 

Charlotte the Spider to Wilbur the Pig

This is a passage from the great E.B. White. It is in my thoughts today at the final, sure-enough end of summer. It is of course that old soul Charlotte the spider speaking to little Wilbur in his pen:"These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come and you, Wilbur, will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world. Winter too will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return, the frogs will awake, the warm winds will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur, this lovely world these precious days.May acceptance and joy in the moment be ours this day..

Still No Luck

I so much want a refrigerator by now - any refrigerator! Well, any refrigerator but the one that's been stewing in its own juices since it died here on September 8th, just before our last heat wave. That refrigerator immediately began giving off an odor like a combination of rotten eggs, dirty socks and the way a thing smells when somebody sneezes on it.I bought the new fridge over the phone 8 days ago. last Friday, not three but SIX delivery guys found that it wouldn’t fit in the room. They suggested we hire contractors to make the adjustment necessary to getting it in here.( Those stories above.)They came back again once we'd made those adjustments and they STILL couldn’t install it, for the simple reason that the floor under the old fridge had rotted completely away . Evidently a leak some time in the Clinton Administration just chewed away the solid old support beams that shore up the kitchen ."It's a wonder this thing didn’t fall clear through the floor and land in your basement!" said one delivery guy."It did seem to be kind of rocking when you opened it  I noticed lately " said a family member."I'm afraid to step here!" trilled a second delivery guy.Then Brave Dave came home and 'stepped there' with our carpenter-pal Dick Iannetti. They worked together most of yesterday cutting out the old beams. Dick will come back today and finish putting in the new.Pretty funny to think what might have happened: 'Got Milk?'." Sure,  let me just reach in here. Whoa!!!"  Foomp! And only settling dust left to tell the tale. This is the wood under the old one: As they used to say in Ancient Rome,  "Res ipse 'loquitur! The thing speaks for itself. This was taken in the kitchen. Those are the  bricks of the chimney it backs up to. And that golden light center front? That's coming up from the cellar.   

It Came It Saw, It Went Away Again

This was Day Six with no refrigerator. The start of that tale is here.

The new one came, it saw, and it went away again. What did it see, you might ask? It saw it couldn't fit into the kitchen.

"Sorry," the three delivery guys said after ten minutes of chin scratching,  "It's just not gonna happen."

"But..." I sputtered. "The old fridge is the same make and model. I mean we didn't build the kitchen around it!"

"Ah but see you got handles projecting from this new one. You didn't have handles with the old one."

"So let's take the handles off."

"Can't do that. It voids the warranty."

I was alone with these guys so I said “Let me just called my husband at work.” I called Old Dave and told him the situation.

“Tell them to take off the door from the dining room,” he said in that annoyingly reasonable way a person has who, though not present, is giving advice to people who are.

"We tried that. It’s not gonna fit."

“The back door then."

“Tried it."

“The porch door."

“Tried it. (Do you think we’re idiots?’ I thought about saying, suddenly siding with my new pals the delivery guys.)

"Why don’t YOU talk to them," I said and handed the phone to one of the men.

"Hi! So what do you think? What can we do?“ he asked them.

“Well there is one door. The one leading from the living room.” Then the man holding my phone half-turned to me too, out of courtesy I think .“You folks will have to  call someone to take off the door and pull out the radiator."

"WE can do THAT," I snorted. "We've been taking off doors and pulling out radiators for years."

"But this swinging door with this big iron spring? I've never seen a door like THIS door and I'm 31!" I didn't say that the house was four times older than that. I knew it though, and knew that the spring was original to the house.

“Ok then so we'll get the door off and move the radiator and then call you guys back over.”

“You know you have to drain the whole system,” he said

“We do it all the time,” I said.

And so they left. and took our new fridge but tell ya what: Twenty-four hours later the door was OFF and the system was all drained, We moved the radiator too, three ton thing that it is, and yes entered another week without a fridge-  but somehow felt triumphant just the same.

A Miracle All Right

You go to school to learn, of course, but how much learning takes place outside school? A lot, that’s how much. Only think of all you have learned outside the classroom.Think how you struggled to turn the idioms of that new language you were taking in school. What on earth did the French phrase ‘to sleep on both ears’ mean? It took a while to understand that it meant to sleep soundly.Think of the time you first tied your own shoes. Maybe you were four or five and sitting on your back steps, working away at the wobbly loops of those laces until, almost on their own, they executed a sort of pirouette and resolved into: a bow!Remember the moment in William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker when young Helen Keller finally understands that there’s a relation between what is spilling over the palm of one of her hands from the pump and the movements being drummed into the palm of her other hand? When she ‘sees’ at last that one signifies the other? That this lovely cool stuff has a name, and the name is water?Helen Keller speculates in her autobiography that she made the connection in part because, as she learned much later, ‘water ‘ had been one of her first words at age one, just before a sudden illness robbed her of sight and hearing both. But in large part too it was the tireless repetition of the signs worked into her hand by her dedicated teacher Annie Sullivan.We learn language through repletion, by big people leaning down toward us like gods from their tall high world, cooing the words we will soon enough speak: ‘Baby.’  ‘Mamma.’  ‘Blankie.’We learn so much through repetition: The multiplication table. The names of the state capitals. The principles that together build the precisely balanced scales that is mathematics.But other things we learn in other ways. We learn both by sudden insight, and by a slow sort of dawning.Take insight. Take the first time you really understood that poem you had to analyze for English class. You went along reading the thing, often distracted rather than helped by its rhythms, your eyes scanning along until - bang! you slammed into a word you did not expect. You thought ‘huh’?  Then ‘ahhhh’! Because suddenly the poem’s tight little bud of inscrutability had opened like a flower, revealing fold after fold of meaning, layer after layer of beauty.Then take slow dawning, the things you learn by degrees:

• As in the way you come slowly to realize that when you dislike someone almost on sight it is because of something you see, or think you see, in that person that reminds you of a part of yourself you have split off from or tried to deny.
• As in the way you come slowly to see that not hate, but a willed indifference is the opposite of love.
• As in the way you slowly recognize that love is not a feeling at all, despite what all the songs say. It’s more a decision, love is. When I think of the people I love it’s as if I am saying to them with every thought and deed, “I’m for you, kid. I am in your corner.”

Why live at all if not to learn? What would separate us from a pot of plastic daisies were we to stop even trying?I get so excited when the school year starts. We still have so much more to understand!Now, under this picture of the real Helen Keller and her teacher, is the 'water scene' from that great 1962 film.[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=lUV65sV8nu0]

I'm Still Doing It

I'm still doing it: I'm still vacationing in my driveway. This picture was taken two whole cars ago. This green van yielded to a red van and now I have a blue one - and we keep all our cars for seven years so that's a while now.But I'm still doing it: pulling up outside my garage and just sitting there for a spell watching everything. The ivy growing. The icicles yearning down from the garage roof. The sparkles of snow accumulating on my windshield.On the last day of my grey cat's life, he and I sat in this driveway for quite a spell, he ill and sluggish but happy to be out all the same. His name was Abraham and the two of us looked out the car windows together for a good 20 minutes before making that last ride to the vet's . We saw the sky and the brave pink flowers - I say 'brave' because it was downright cold for April on that day. We saw the sky.I don't know what Abe thought about except his pain. I thought about how many more crisp New England springs my husband David and I would see from this yard of ours, knowing that Abe was seeing his last.We're worlds away from April now it feels like but I guess the beauty of these Fall days has me thinking the same kind of large slow thoughts.Yesterday as I sat outside, a dragonfly perched on my lap and stayed for two whole minutes as I watched him, fascinated.I'm so glad my driven nature occasionally lets me just sit and look around like this. You try it too now, with feet out your car window or not, as you wish.Just sit and look and think you thanks for every graceful and lively sight you see.

Slime City

I haven't written much this week because something horrible happened Monday.Our refrigerator died.We didn't know it had died for almost 24 hours.We went to bed, woke up in the morning, and the baloney was slimy.The eggs were sweating.And the black beans and broccoli crowns in their little bowls....Well, let's not get into the black beans and the broccoli.Weatherwise we started the week on the cool side. Then temps soared into the 90s.We considered our options. We've repaired this refrigerator four times just in the last ten years. Even the repair guy, who has gone to Florida several times thanks to this old fridge, couldn't recommend that we fix it again when he came again last May.We knew we had to buy a new one and we knew it had to fit in the cut-out made in the cabinets for the old one, back when we did this kitchen over in the late 1980s. Which meant it had to be by the same manufacturer. And the cost of the new model is like four times the money my family spent to send me to college back in my era which was the Woodstock era..Plus, it might not fit. We measured and talked to the salesmen, measured and talked and it looks like the old fridge, though the same brand as this new one, is half an inch taller. Which means when the guys come in a few minutes, it really might NOT fit. Plus it's so old, its hookups might not match: the places where the electrical cord goes and also the water source that makes those clunky half moons of ice for you.So, they may just have to leave it in the middle of the kitchen floor until we can also call a plumber, a carpenter, and electrician. Unless Dave can act in all those capacities, which he probably can.Sigh. Tell ya what, nothing is easy.I better stop now and go look our front for them. They'll need face masks I'm pretty sure, and maybe some of that highly mentholated stuff for putting under their noses.

A Late-in-the-Day Word about 9/11

Smoke rises from a building and we think of them. It can be any building, anywhere. A plane rises from the ground and we think of them, and pray they did not see death rushing toward them.It is so hard NOT to imagine their final moments, our minds somehow veer away from them, so heart-breaking are they to contemplate. Instead I find that my mind has hovered around another event these last few days, one that took place nearly 100 years ago, also in lower Manhattan:A fire broke out on one of the top floors of the Triangle Shirt Factory on March 25, 1911. The workers trapped there, with flames raging behind them and firefighters’ ladders far too short to reach them, leaped to the sidewalks below and met death there.There's a poem called “Shirt,” written by Robert Pinsky, that touches in part on this tragedy. He speaks of a witness in the building across the street, who watched a doomed young man help first one girl and then another step up to the windowsill, “as if he were helping them up to enter a streetcar, and not eternity.“ Before jumping himself, he held these two girls out, away from the wall, then let them drop. “A third, before he dropped her, put her arms around his neck and kissed him.”Then he held her into space, and dropped her too.Some say the only way out is through; that if we are to find ease on the other side of sorrow, it will only be by allowing ourselves to feel that sorrow wholly.In studying this other tragedy, I have been able to get at the pain I feel over its modern counterpart.Those families must have felt things very much like the families of the September victims. The next morning’s New York Times said “grief-stricken crowds gathered at the site of the factory, crying the names of their loved ones.”I looked up these names: Julia and Lizzy and Abraham, some of them were, Anna and Rosie and Jacob.Not a week after the attacks, I attended one of the strange memorial observances so common that autumn. Like most of the others, it was a wake without a casket, a funeral without an interment. At the Mass’s end, the priest bent into a microphone. “Take some flowers,” he told us all - because there was no grave on which to lay them.There will never be graves for many who met death that day. Met it at the Pentagon or in the Towers. Met it in the soft soil of Pennsylvania, where thousands of our Civil War dead met death too.I think of Walt Whitman, who during that war came to the Capitol in Washington expressly to nurse and comfort the sick and dying soldiers filling its halls. In “Leaves of Grass,” he spoke of the “beautiful uncut hair of graves.” Whitman could see beauty anywhere. And he knew how to befriend death, as we all must learn to do, early or late.I think of the weather we had that week, the way each day dawned so clear and brimmed with a crisp pale-amber light.There is that light to think of now.And there is that image, given us by our own modern poet.I refer to the kiss, and then the letting go.All the ones we have ever lost: they kiss us now. They ask us to let them go.

Here Comes the Bride

Bridal showers are always fun. Nobody knows anybody else so you have to mix it up. At the shower I just attended for my niece Grace, the bride-to-be was both radiant AND composed as she opened 1,000 boxes of filmy underwear.She'll use it all though; fads come and go but women still wear underpants.Also bras, I'm pretty sureBack in the Pleistocene era when the mother of the bride and I were given bridal showers we received these hideous two-part things for what was then referred to us our 'trousseau.'  What they were even called I can't remember. One part would be this enormously flounced-out, mostly see-through garment shaped like a dinner bell  that came with a second enormously flounced-out  mostly see-through over-garment that tied at the neck with a bow. I was just a kid when I got married: Nan was too. We spent our days in cut-offs. Why were they dressing us like lampshades in a little girl's bedroom?These gifts were better. Grace received and immediately donned a white baseball cap with the word 'Bride' on it......and praised and relished every single present while her mom took notes on who gave what.There was some poorly shot video by me which I will try to post here in a bit, but suffice to say that everyone had fun.We ate and drank in the delicate way women do. We talked about our fertility, our surgeries, our men. Sooner or later when women are together they're bound to share such truths. Once at church in a special session called Discerning Your Path, I got paired up with my friend J. We were instructed to talk about the times we felt the call of God upon our lives but as she said later to a third pal, we mostly just complained about our husbands. (Tell you what, put women in charge of the world and honesty will rule over all!)Anyway it was a great time - and now we have the wedding to look forward to. Our lovely bride and her beautiful groom: Long may they prosper!

Glad I Came

I flew to Florida Friday to go to the house of my sister Nan and be present at my niece Grace's bridal shower. Here they are some few years ago when Grace was a little on the bald side.When she first invited me she said she knew I couldn't come. Fly 1200 miles to see a roomful of ladies cheering in the dismantling of gift wrap? No one expected that of me.But the minute I heard about it I knew I wanted to be there. I didn't say so but I knew. 'Maybe, just maybe, I'll surprise this godchild of mine.Then, eight days ago Grace texted me to say a quick hi. "I so wish you were going to be there" is how she ended it.I couldn't help myself. "Oh Gracie I am going to be there! " I texted back. "I booked my flight the second I heard about it and even got a good price! At $237 round trip Boston to Tampa how could I NOT come?"So much for surprising her. "We'll surprise Nan," we decided, but really there was never any surprising Nan, somehow, who has been three steps ahead of me all my life.But the point wasn't for ME to be the event anyway. The shower was the event and I'm so glad I came for it. The guests on the bride's side and the groom's side seemed to instantly bond and share stories both funny and sad, the way women do when they're alone together. I am so glad I was there.And now it's Sunday morning and I'm packing up for the airport. I stayed at the Tarpon Springs Hampton Inn, not to be in the way, and I rented the car that in 30 minutes will take me to the airport and then back to my own near-and-dears who I texted someplace in there yesterday, suggesting we all go swimming at the local pool one last time when my flight gets in. They went for it but we might all be crazy given the cool front that's just blowing in up there.Anyhow all that lies in the future. As for right now which is the only moment we ever really have, I am feeling happy and grateful and stunned by the glory of a brand new day.

It All Starts Again Now

September is really here now and wherever you go you see things that mark this new beginning. Ducks in an empty swimming pool give you a pretty good idea.I have note several other things as well:Thing One: I note that folks have a bit more energy suddenly. At the Y I go every day to exercise, people were actually smiling all through Zumba class last week and I sure don’t remember a lot of smiling in Zumba during July and August. Over the last few months we’ve been fighting our way through air so thick we’re feeling our ribs to see if gills have sprouted yet. Now though, there’s a spring in all our steps, even when the teacher has us hop on one foot while turning in a circle.Thing Two: I notice people are lining up outside the cobbler’s shop, getting their shoes resoled. In summer we are all in sandals. Soon, we will all be in our ‘real’ shoes and every teenaged girl in the country will be back in her Uggs.Thing Three and Four: I note that flu shots are suddenly being offered at various pharmacies. I also see kids going to the doctors,’ many of them to get their forms filled out for school and sports.I was with one such youth who needed a physical so he could play football. I brought him in for that.This youth is nearly 17 so I didn’t go in to the exam room with him. However, his doctor kindly came out to the waiting room to speak to me afterward.“Well, it’s too bad he hasn’t had his growth spurt yet,” he began with somber demeanor.”I just looked at him, perplexed, until he went on:“The nurse practitioners just clocked him at six-foot-four but I’m pretty sure that’s just because she couldn’t reach any higher. Does six-foot-four sound right to you?” he asked the tall boy, who smiled widely.“At our first practice the coach said I was six-foot-five.”I guess everything grows in the summer: The grass, the trees, our children.And last but by no means least I come to Thing Five, a show of patience that I witnessed in the parking lot outside this same doctors’ office:As the boy and I pulled into a parking space close to the building that houses this pediatric practice, we noticed a car next to us, its rear door flung open and a man in a baseball cap leaning into its interior.We didn’t look closer; it seemed rude to. Instead, we went inside and the teen had his physical – but when we came back out again the car was still there.The door still stood open.The man still leaned into its interior.It was only when we came right up to my car beside this one, that we understood what we were seeing: a father, speaking in patient and earnest manner to a little boy in a car seat, wiping tears and clinging to his blanket.“Immunization Day!” the dad called to us cheerily. “We’re here for our shots! Aren’t we buddy?” he said to the little boy.And with that, murmuring all the while to him, he lifted the child ever so gently from his car seat and carried him into the building, and this last show of patience seemed just the best thing to witness as the work of a new year begins.Leading any young person from a customary place to a new place takes a patient forbearance exactly like what we had just seen enacted over 30 minutes’ time.And so do I here bless all teachers, parents and leaders who demonstrate this virtue’s power by modeling it in their own behavior.