Um, Those Are Your Underpants

On a lighter note today, my pal Mary just sent me this video, made eons before MTV, of Nancy Sinatra and her own 60s-era fly girls, dancing to These Boots Are Made For Walkin'.Did women really dress like this?They sure did. My mom was 63 years old the summer my sister Nan and I got married and wore two mother-of the-bride dresses so comically brief above the knee they looked like paper doll outfits.And as for the hemlines on the really young women?Well here was our rule: if your fingertips didn't brush skin when you let your hands drop down by your sides, your skirt was too long.Nan and I would come downstairs set to go out for the evening and our mother would rattle her teacup in its saucer and tremble so hard her cigarette ashed all down onto her clothes. We both remember the time she yelled "Oh the bust! Oh the hem!" (Luckily we married at 21 and 23, young enough so there were no consequences to be paid for going about all tarted up like that.) Yikes~!Anyway this is me before the Ivy Day Parade at Smith College.I dressed this way for a ceremony! On Commencement weekend!  We even dressed our babies with leg showing it seems.This is from the Christmas of '78. The shy one looking down is my firstborn Carrie. The leggy lass beside her is Nan's one-an-only Gracie, as we called her then whose marriage I told about here.But on to the video, seven women in their underpants doing the pony and the swim and sort of a timid shimmy. Mary's one wry sentence appended to the message she sent it with: "I still dance like this!" Haha, she does not (but boy did I laugh...)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbyAZQ45uww#t=70 

The Sunsets are Wondrous

These short wide days: their beauty just stuns me.We recently had cut down a number of trees at the edge of our yard and our landscape is so altered I gasp going past the windows.Remember Emily Dickinson on sunset?Here she is: 

Blazing in Gold and quenching in PurpleLeaping like Leopards to the SkyThen at the feet of the old HorizonLaying her spotted Face to dieStooping as low as the Otter's WindowTouching the Roof and tinting the BarnKissing her Bonnet to the MeadowAnd the Juggler of Day is gone 

Who is Watching? Everyone

I think of you high school seniors, all you once and future college applicants! You have long since endured the Make Way for Ducklings exercise that is the campus college tour, led by cheery chattering student guides. You have worked on, or are even now working on, those fearsome college essays. What can I DO? you must wonder. Write about overcoming adversity? Speak of an inspiring figure in my life? Or should I do an ‘I Used to Think But Now I See’ piece to show how I have changed? Could be a good way to spin that D I got in Tenth Grade History, come to think of it.I picture you with such thoughts as you sit there, agonizing! I feel for you, walking through these fires! But now I must remind you of another whole section of your college application, largely invisible to you:I speak of the college recommendation, written by two or three adults who have worked in a supervisory capacity over you.I began writing college recommendations as a young teacher, when Richard Nixon was still shaking his angry jowls at a recalcitrant nation and I'm writing them still, as I find myself once again working with high school students - which is why I can say this with some certainty: Writing the letter of recommendation can be an easy, even pleasurable task for your ‘recommenders’ to take on, if, and perhaps only if, you have let your true self be known by them. Why? Because a recommendation shouldn’t be a list of glowing adjectives but rather a series of telling glimpses into the applicant’s true self. Let me give an example.I recently spent an hour at a church rummage sale with a high school sophomore who is under my ‘care’. Though two long years will pass before I'll be writing a letter for him, I note everything he says, even as I do with the other six young people I currently help supervise.At this rummage sale, for a mere $5, you could take home whatever you could fit in the standard grocer’s brown paper bag.I watched as this boy happily chose items not ynlu for himself but also for his brothers back home. Gym shorts, cool T-shirts, hoodies: all these went into his bag.Then we climbed the stairs to the book-sale room where you could fill a bag for a mere $3.Almost immediately, he spotted a gorgeously illustrated book called Egyptology.“Oh no,!” he exclaimed. “There’s  a whole series that this book is part of and THIS is the only one I could never find!”He had looked and looked for it, he said, and, finally despairing, ended up giving the whole collection away.“And now you can have it,” I said.“And now I can have it,” he repeated, looking down almost reverently at the volume as he placed it in his bag.“Maybe there’s a message for me here,” he added.“What would the message be, I wonder?”“If you want something enough, you will find it? “ he tried. “If you love a thing, it will come to you? I don’t know, really...”He didn’t know. Sometimes a person can’t know a thing like that right away. But I knew something I did not know before. I knew that I had just had a glimpse into his young soul. And don’t think I won’t remember his letting me have that glimpse.So my real message to you, you high school seniors, both for now and for later?Let yourselves be known. Open yourselves and speak your truth. We are all watching one another, and we all gain strength from what we see.and here, right on Amazon is another book in the set, his for the asking and $15 plus shipping  

Pictures from a Wedding

I'm not done yet with the residual joy I had from this recent family wedding.There were pictures displayed outside the ballroom, of the bride and groom as little children. 

the bride

the groom

I wish I had known Troy then. I knew Gracie, as we called this godchild of ours from the day of her birth. She was the first baby I knew up close and wonderful to say, still has this same little dimple high on her cheek. Her mother is my sister Nan who I have written about here and here and here and in five books and countless newspaper columns.Grace's father Tom was my husband David’s best friend and a force of nature all on his own. He died one matchless August morning sipping coffee and having the day's first smoke, moments before his regular Sunday game of tennis. He had just turned 50. Grace was just done with  her 9^th grade year. It was a hard time in life to lose a dad and she shared the loss with her four siblings from Tom’s first marriage. How they got through those years I do not know. Nan dreamed once that first year that he appeared in their bedroom, looking sad, which he never was in life, and still in his tennis togs. " I want to come back," he said quietly.  Were there tears welling in his eyes? “You can’t," Nan said, tears in her eyes and voice both. "Your  friend Jan took your job and we gave away your clothes,” her dream self-told him and the pathos of this exchange was almost more than a body could bear.But time passed and brought new happiness. The man who had built the couple’s new house, himself newly widowed, fell in love with them both and became like another father to Grace. He and David, having showered love on her ever since, got to both walk her down the aisle.  Troy has his own story of course, which I so look forward to learning more of. His brother told us in his Best Man toast, that before he became a Marine he was voted the strongest 17-year-old in Pinellas County. He’s a strong man still; anyone can see that. How did they find each other again, knowing each other only slightly in high school? What miracle sets one person's life down next to another's with a landing as smooth and resolute as the jet makes when once again, lightly, it touches the earth?I'll stop now just show a few more of the imperfect pictures snapped by us amateur cameraman, lucky loving witnesses to this lucky event.

David on the left, Chuck on the right

the ceremony

two families, united

Troy & Grace Webb and G's fond godparents

a hug for all dads

Mazeltov!

The Ones Who Come Home - for Veterans Day

The Ones Who Come Home (For Veterans Day as the sun is setting) The ones who come home live a life like anyone - sometimes.In our family one uncle lived that normal life, and one didn't.The one who did wrote poems during his two years in the bloody Pacific and maybe that helped. The one who didn't prayed to a bottle when it hurt too bad and died standing by his fireplace in his mid-50s.I spent this quiet holiday walking and thinking about the healing qualities of the simple everyday; walking and thinking and  feeling so grateful to have been part of a family event that I will remember all my life, when this man, Troy married this woman, Grace, the child of my sister, the child of my heart.More about this joyful event soon but for now, thanks all you who served, in wartime and peacetime both. I think of you, the lost, as the sun goes down this November 11th ..

Pianos

It's not often that I repost something from another site, but I was so struck by the video below of pianos placed in certain places around Boston and the time-lapse photography that captured who sat down at them.This D.H. Lawrence poem below also carried me back to a time when pianos were the heart of every house and everyone knew how to play them.It and the video have stirred so many images in me.I was a child at the end of the great age of the piano.I feel I must stop everything I am doing and pull these images  back with me into the dark cave of memory to listen for all that perishable/imperishable music that once sprang from their cracked old throats.This is D.H Lawrence:

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;Taking me back down the vista of years, till I seeA child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling stringsAnd pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of songBetrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belongTo the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outsideAnd hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamourWith the great black piano appassionato. The glamourOf childish days is upon me, my manhood is castDown in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

And below is the video, as published today in the  Globe. The Boston Public School department's Office of Instructional & Information Technology created this video of the city's recent public piano installation and posted it to its YouTube page this week with the following description:The piano locations featured in this video are: Boston Common, the Old State House , the Museum of Fine Arts, Copley Square, Castle Island, the Esplanade, Faneuil Hall and City Hall Plaza. Praise the visionaries who knew what these sounds and images would bring to those who passed by, or stopped to play, or even only watched it here![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0wnDPr_Eao]

Stress Nation

It's an anxiety-filled age, all right, filled to the brim with stress and anxiousness.Just last week, a friend described to me the older woman he met in the supermarket who had lost sight of her little grandson. Paralyzed by her own panic, she could do nothing but stand rooted to the spot, alternately calling his name and the name of her creator.My nice friend went right over, got a description of the child, and began trotting along the aisles, looking for the pint-size blonde in a blue shirt.When he spotted such a tyke standing in front of a younger woman with a smaller child on her lap, he pointed."Here's a blond boy in a blue shirt!” He called to grandma.Whereupon the younger woman leapt to her feet, snatched both kids in a vice-like grip and shot her hand out, fingers spread wide."THESE ARE MY CHILDREN!" She shrieked. "STAY AWAAAAAY!"Looks like being a Good Samaritan just doesn't pay the way it once did.It's that people feel such stress. We're fizzing with it, like apple juice just turning into cider. We’re buzzing with it, like hornets trapped in a jelly jar.I was parked alongside the curb yesterday when a woman in the car in front of me showed signs of trying to pull out.I backed up to make room and waved her toward me.Her hands flew in the air in a gesture of frustration and the next thing I knew, she was standing by my car window."Uh Oh," I thought. "Angry lady!"But the lady wasn't angry. The lady was near tears. "I can't back up!" she cried. "I can't do anything!""See this cast?" she went on, holding up one arm, encased from the elbow down in rigid white. "Six weeks I'm wearing this cast! And now the doctor says two weeks more.""Awful,” I countered."I can't brush my hair!" she said."You can't do your bra!" I said.She lowered her voice, constricted now with emotion. "I can't pull on my pants," she all but whispered."Here's the trouble," she went on, pointing to a thumb similarly encased and held fast to the rest."Wow. Well, you know, cut that part off," I suggested. "Have you got a hacksaw at home?""Cut it off?! You can cut off your cast?"I shrugged. "My young cousin did.  As a matter of fact, she took off her own braces."She pondered a minute. "I'm calling the doctor back. I'm making him free my thumb.""Right," I said. "Just say, 'See here. This won't do.’”"Right!" She cried, and dashed back to her car with fresh resolve.Later I thought to myself "Hmmmm. Here was a person buzzing around in a perfect little go-cart of stress and what did I do but climb in beside her and help drive?"But tension is like that, as quick to jump hosts as the friskiest flea. Quicker to spread than the most contagious flu.Maybe what we all need is a mass inoculation.

The Leaves Rain Down

Around here in fall, the leaves go slowly. Here is how things looked yesterday at the pond I like to walk around.But in my own yard there is one tree that loses leaves all at once.You wake to the sound of a gentle patter.Then you look up and the light is all dappled as they rain down so quickly, and land with a dry little splash on the quickly accumulating leaves below.I wait every year to witness this amazing event, when, within the space of three hours, every single leaf on the tree in front of our house falls to the ground,And I am so glad I was home to watch it today.You watch it too and be amazed by this world we are blessed to inhabit. I am just made dizzy by it every fall. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEbjWzA_eP4

Old Time vs. New

The old timepieces were more forgiving than all the new kind, as this sweet poem testifies. I offer it on this day with its oncoming plunge into early darkness later on.  It's called "Time Change" but I have no record of its author. Lovely anyway: 

Time is different with a digital watch.The minutes that used to limp aroundThe small dial on my left wristCome in early these daysLike the train. I wound it myself thenBut now time has changed.It jumps up at mePulsing Hours minutes seconds even daysInto then.My new watch saysIt’s now or never, kid. Whatever became of o’clock?You could make it last as long as an ice barOr another kiss,Walk in lateAnd still be on time.

 

Shake Not Thy Gory Locks at Me!

"Shake Not Thy Gory Locks at Me!" That's Macbeth, talking to the bloody ghost of Banquo who shows up at the palace just after Macbeth has ordered the death of  his old best friend. Scary, that image of a split scalp and bloodied hair..And speaking of scary, here are some images to stop you in your tracks: Pictures of how kids used to look when they went out on Halloween. Worse than any creepshow mask you can buy today eh?Hope you all got through the big night safely and are happily enjoying your loot today. Don't forget to brush and floss after, is all! :-)

Not So Spooky

It’s not just that Halloween comes around now. You’re drawn to the spooky anyway at this season, with the bones of the world emerging through the trees; the branches scratching like dead man’s fingers at window panes icy to the touch.When I was little, we went once with our cousins to a tall old ruin of a house, abandoned and alone on a hill. We stole inside and crept around. We looked down the parched throat of a long-gone toilet. "See that rusty stuff in there?" the eldest among us said. "That’s blood!" We shrieked, and bolted, and ran all the way home.Funny: I live in a house like that now, though it teems with life still. I sit by the hour in the little window seat of its second-floor study.  Just outside the glass, when there’s a wind, the ivy outside waves like the Queen at the parade passing before it.  In summer, the ten-thousand hands of its leaves are shiny-green. Now they are red-tipped, or vermilion throughout. "Ivy rots the shingles!," the experts shout when the talk turns to house-painting.  "Ivy is ruinous!" "Tell it to the birds," I think, the birds who shelter and practice their scales there, all safe and hidden in its rustling depths. Once a decade, the painters come and strip the ivy to the ground. But almost before the year is out, it has grown back, clear to the roof, nearly - and we secretly cheer it on.When David and I were in our twenties and babies still in every way, we bought a little apple orchard way up in Maine that belonged to a dead man named Luce.  This land was inexpensive because it had no electricity and no water on it.  The old man, who had been born on the land, sold it for not much money to some city-slicker who immediately doubled the price and sold it to us. Shortly after this, Luce died. Some said it was the humiliation that killed him. A neighbor that first year asked us if he could graze his cows on our land; it would keep the grass down, he said. Sure, we told him, and went back to building a cabin that looked like the Three Little Pigs’ House of Sticks. We used to go there for weekends, and cows as big as oil burners watched us as we set fire to our steaks, to our marshmallows,  to our very selves, on some nights. After eating, they watched us walk the orchard’s 20 acres.We often stopped to wonder at the clump of vegetation growing together by the road -  birch and aspen, and a riot of blackberry - a strange sight on this land, cleared but for the tidy rows of apple.  Finally, one day we looked closer: The growth sprang from a cellar-hole, the foundation of the house where Old Man Luce was born.Structures crumble, the message seems to be, but loveliness grows up from the ruins. And though Winter seems like death to us now,  it is only Winter. Would the noble geese leave us had they not made reservations for next year’s visit?The part of our house covered in ivy is a small turret capped at the top by a pointy princess-hat of a roof. Under it, on the second floor, is my curve-ended study with its window seat. Under that is the equally arc-shaped end of the living room where we put the Christmas tree each year."When I die, lay me out here inside the curve of this turret," I used to tell our kids. Never mind rented men in a set of rented parlors, I say. "Invite the world, give 'em lots of food and drink, and laugh as much as you like. ""OK!" they answer in chipper fashion. They don’t find it strange or macabre, because they were kids, and kids understand this truth best of all: the Old Growth dies to make way for the New.  Scary? Nah, it's not scary.That little cat at the top is mostly just ...curious!

A Wider Sky

It’s silly the way we all dread what we think is coming when the really big tigers sneak up on us all unawares and bite our throats out before we know what hit us.Macabre-sounding I know but hey it’s Halloween week, and didn’t the opening episode of AMC’s Walking Dead just have post the highest viewer numbers in the history of something or other.When I wrote here last Monday I thought I would have to joke around continually this week so as not to feel the sadness I thought I would feel when give of our trees fell to the woodcutter’s blade. And in fact it was pretty sad.I went outside when I saw them out front. The main tree guy of the three-guy team saw my face as he perched high in the 60-foot maple that was once so young and wobbly it needed wire cables to hold it upright  “Now it’s just a little off the top for these trees out front, right?’ I said to him, wanting to be as certain as the surgeon is when he says "So today we’re operating on your LEFT arm, is that right?” They would be pruning the ginkgo too.“Just a little off the top!” he called down happily. "Yeah that's probably what they say when they sit you down in the electric chair too. “He laughed, but a tad uneasily as it seemed to me. “Nutcase,” he was probably thinking. On the other hand, he knew as well as I did that he and his men would soon be donning the executioner’s hood to cut into the healthy flesh of five tall white pines out back. I fled the scene. I knew I couldn’t watch. I stayed away all day: went to an exercise class, wrote in my car and walked round and round the little pond whose beauty I captured in this post.But when I got home at last I was surprised to find that the place looked pretty good with the five tall pines down. David wanted to cut them because they were impeding the growth of tress that we just plain cherished more: the two crimson maples that hold the birds every season as a beautiful woman loosely holds a strand of pearls; the evergreen an old friend gave us on the occasion of our son Michael's birth; the once-small-and-slender elm our daughter Annie asked for as a present for her 16th birthday. These were spared.We'll need to plant some things - shrubs to hide our homely cars from view and maybe those gorgeous sea grasses currently in fashion   - sure, but all in all it's an improvement. See if you don't think so too.This is the corner of the lot before:And this is the corner of the lot now:This is the view of our driveway before:And this is the view of our driveway now:Oh I don't know. Maybe I don't really like it better. But life demands we make choices. And I'll admit I wake wake almost elated these mornings, to look outside and find I live now under a wider sky.

WHAT NEXT?!

Anything can happen and maybe that’s kind of good, if only because it keeps us on our toes.By now  we’re so ‘on our toes’ around here, we could dance Swan Lake.It all started in August, when the shower pan in the upstairs bathroom ‘failed,' as they say in the drip-and-leak business. and water dripped so steadily down it made the map of Madagascar on the ceiling below.Also, back then, a bird flew out from under our TV. How she got inside is anybody’s guess. All we know is she was too big to crawl through whatever dime-sized opening it was that let that bat in four weeks earlier.Yup, a bat. We had a bat too, with its wee fangs and that sober little J. Edgar Hoover of a face.He may have gained entrance by worming his way in under one of the air conditioners, which we set in such old wide windows we have to use a world of cardboard and duct tape to seal things up each year.Which rarely works, despite our best efforts.We never did catch J. Edgar, in spite of the tennis racquets and fishing nets we had at the ready.They worked on the bird however, who was nicely escorted back outside, though not before writing  a ‘review’ of the TV show then airing, right smack on that pretty plasma screen.What else now? A kind of amnesia takes over when so much goes awry.Ah yes! Our old refrigerator almost fell through the kitchen floor when it was discovered that the thick beams beneath it, sturdily nailed together in the days when houses were made to last, looked like nothing so much as flakes of canned tuna.  Then, a week ago, the furnace announced itself broken.But all this was nothing compared to what happened last Monday night, when, at 11pm, burning-hot water began gushing out from under the sink as one of us was doing dishes and the rest were wiping down the counters and putting things away. The hot water just suddenly stopped coming from the faucet.“HEY! WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HOT?” this someone said.Then, not three seconds later, scalding water began coursing around his ankles.Ten seconds after that, the scalding tide had filled the cabinet under the sink and was fountaining all over the floor – and because our house tilts after 118 years of standing in one place, the flood was speeding fast toward the living room.It seems the feed pipe for the hot had simply exploded.There ensued some Three-Stooges-style yipping and running around in circles. With a near-boiling Niagara in the way, we couldn’t reach in under and turn off the water supply under the sink, so instead ran for towels and mops.We knew we had to get to the cellar and turn off the main water valve but then more yipping and running around in circles took place when we realized we didn’t know just WHERE that valve was.What a mess. What a cleaning-up task to begin upon at almost midnight. And we had to take every single thing out from the cabinets and place it all on the counter.But when so much goes wrong in a two-month span, you can’t focus on the bad. You have to focus instead on the good: all the fauna have moved out, the systems are hum along, and the pipe, thank God, didn't explode later when we were at work or, God forbid, away for the weekend..Had that happened I’d be writing all this from the Red Roof Inn and mourning the loss of three rooms of flooring , 30 years' worth of treasures in the basement and the last remnants  of my sanity.

A Little off the Top?

I'm a baby I guess but hearing that they were going to take down five trees in my yard about broke my heart when I heard about it out on Monday.I ran away that day; couldn't bear to be around my old friends knowing that these were there last days. After all, we have been together since 1985. Then yesterday I was on the run anyway and wouldn't let myself think of it. Today though, Boston Tree Preservation arrived at 8 AM and got right to work . I'll  have better pictures tomorrow when I have regained my composure, but here's some video of what is going on in my yard right now. The pruning: that's the stage they're at now. The executions themselves are complete. :-([youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzY1JdOzH4w]

Saved by the Joke

When you feel life’s stinging side is when you reach for relief through humor.  I cheered myself right up not long ago when I was transporting seven teenage boys who are part of my life into the city where they tutor young schoolchildren.They  love doing this. The children they help look up at them with the shiniest eyes, thinking, as I imagine, This is how I will look in just eight more years! – Like Hazees here! Or Machias! Or Tobi, or  LaVon or Gamaral or  Enderson or Bryson!'  One child always sets a small hand on his older helper’s hemp bracelet and slowly turns it as they work.I mean who wouldn’t be in high spirits after outings like this? I’m always in high spirits too as we make our way home through the by-then rush-hour traffic. We listen to Bob Marley and Frank Ocean, Justin Timberlake and Marvin Gaye. They joke and catnap, talk and sing along. One day though we were on the last leg of the journey, navigating the curves and dips on road that constitutes the final leg of the journey  to lands us at last in our town, which is when one of the boys said “your car smells today.”  “Yeah it does,” said another. “I ‘m getting it too’” said a third. “It’s like rotting vegetables.  “It does not!” I said.  “Kinda though , Terry. It kinda does,” they said  one said and they all laughed some more.So, what could I do but go funny: Oh yeah?” I said as we sailed down the last lap of that hilly road. “Well I’ve been drinking heavily, how do you like that?! Also....  I cut the brakes .” They laughed appreciatively at the absurdity of both ideas and we were off the topic of my sweet little girl of a minivan.I was hurt by the remark about her, sure. And to be honest I generally DO have some old forgotten piece of fruit huddled under the seats festering away. But hey: If you’re the grownup and you’re spending time with young people the last thing you should do is make them feel they have to take care of your emotions.Saved by humor again, as I hope to be so saved for many more years to come.

Took a Walk. Had Some Thoughts

I've spent the whole day so far walking and letting various thoughts rise to the surface.‘What weather!’  was my first thought. Also my fourth, 15th and 98th. Then  'How lovely these living creatures look, highlighted in their supple beauty against the drying landscape.'I listened to podcasts for much of the time I was walking  and from one such learned that comic Lenny Bruce had this to say about the craft of standup, which he was allowed to practice for only so long before they dragged him off the stage and arrested him. (This was of course was in those far meeker Days of Yore, before a six-year-old you could hear such language at any hour you care to name on television.)He said the role of the comic was to say something funny at least every 15 seconds."Tall order!" was all I could think hearing that, even as a person who used to write funny stuff all the time.If my heart hurt, I wrote funny. If I were bored, I wrote funny. But I found I could also 'go funny' when I felt so happy that my face was in danger of falling off what with all the smiling it was doing.When someone loves you and the audience is with you, it's easy to be funny. That's pretty key to it, I have found. You also need the chance to speak in order to be funny. It's hard to be funny when no one is listening to you. I remember sitting at the family supper table as a four-year-old with my grandfather, two great aunts, my mother, my aunt and my older sister. I couldn't get a word in edgewise at those meals, and began stammering badly in an effort to be heard. Until my mother made everyone keep silent a minute and listen to me, I used to have to do physical comedy to get any attention at all, mostly a takeoff of the lady in the Playtex girdle ad.What IS humor anyway and why do we need to produce or ‘consume’ it? Maybe I'll think a little about that this coming week. I've got a little loss heading in my direction so maybe it's time to turn jokey.In the meantime, here's poor Lenny Bruce, who never did get over being silenced and died two years later of heroin addiction.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXiPpud_oHI] 

We Learn as We Go

A week is made by many small exchanges but here is one that has colored all my thoughts.  It came when, arriving back home after an appointment, I opened an email from someone I had offended with my words.The offense occurred in a column I wrote the week before last about life’s many surprises. In it I had joked, at the end of a string of short humorous anecdotes, that the meds, which I called ‘feel-good pills', given to my friend’s cat after some oral surgery, sounded pretty good to me and, as I heard it, could be had for ten bucks a pop on the street. It was a quip. It was a throwaway line. And it wasn’t at all funny, as this reader made clear. “While I enjoyed the intent of the above column,” she wrote, “I was very disappointed in the ending line about the cost of a ‘feel-good pill’ on the street.  Seven weeks and three days ago, my 35-year-old daughter passed away after buying such a pill on the street.  I don't know if it cost 10 dollars or 10 cents, but what I do know is that it ended her life.  Your ending was a less than sensitive attempt at humor.”I felt sick reading this, and hit ‘reply.’"I am so sorry," I wrote to her. "You know, when I first typed that last sentence I felt a little tingling on my arms and thought THAT’S not what you want to say. But then a day passed and I had a houseful of people and when, just before my deadline on Friday afternoon, I went back to look for any typos, I somehow failed to read for meaning. Anyway, I never cut that part out.” I knew even as I wrote this, that it was no kind of excuse This person’s child had lost her life doing something I had made a foolish and irresponsible joke about.Somehow though, the lady appeared to be forgiving me, as an immediately following email showed. "Terry, thank you for your kind response,” she wrote. "I prayed you would take my remarks in the heartfelt way I intended.  My daughter helped so many people in her three-and-a-half years of sobriety. Her viewing was attended by nearly 1,000 people who waited almost two hours to pay their respects. We were blessed to have had her. She fought a really good fight but eventually made a bad decision that cost her her life. Our hearts are broken yet I believe she is whole, once again." “If you are interested and you have a free moment, take a look at the funeral home’s website – she included the link – “and see the endless comments made about her and the impact she had on so many lives. She truly mattered and for that we are grateful."Then she thanked me for allowing her to share. Thanked me, after my offense. Thanked and forgave me both. I can’t recall ever having been the beneficiary of such generosity of spirit.Nor can I recall having ever been offered such a clear lesson of how careful we must always be about how our words ‘land’ on the people within our hearing.And talking of things learned, here’s another truth that this exchange helped me remember: namely that those people who have lost most are often the most compassionate people. Suffering scrapes the heart raw, and at first seems to hollow it out entirely. But then, by some grace beyond our understanding, it can somehow, sometimes, fill again, fuller than it was before.

Here's the charming evidence

When did I ever say I was a vigilant housekeeper?

See two posts before this for the back story..Ewwww!

Gotta Love a Birthday!

 TWO close family members are having  birthdays today but one is so busy with fatherhood and husbandhood it will be all we can do to take the little family out for a quick bite.'The other, our daughter-in-law Christine, seen here with her youngest, the baldest prom queen on record... ....allowed as how she and Carrie and the three bambinos would just as soon stay in and eat takeout pizza and watch the Red Sox. (Chris and their oldest son  were actually AT Fenway Sunday night for that unforgettable game. Yowser!) We'll do a real celebration for these two on the weekend,Today I also got to help celebrate the 84th birthday of Lois Goddard, a friend who is just turning 84. Our darling mutual friend Gloria set out a table worthy of the Winter Palace in Czarist Russia and we drank sherry and feasted on homemade cream cake and ice cream rolled around in pecans and huge tasty strawberries.Gloria asked all us  guests to write and recite a poem for Lois and every one of them was clever and  touching. Whenever I try to write a poem of this sort I tend to hang it all onto the coat hanger of Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, whose rhyme-scheme seems to be stapled permanently into my head so I did just that and stood to read it when it was my turn.One would-be guest, who is 90, realized  at the last minute that she had a conflict so what did she do? She wrote a limerick on the spot and emailed it to me and here it is, right above this picture of Lois herself,  holding a bouquet of roses and all our teary  love. 

"Since I have no gifts as a bardI  found it incredibly hardmy brain simply dodderedWhen I tried to rhyme 'Goddard'All the best to Miss Lois GodDARD!"

Aliens in the Kitchen

This is who I'm not:Here's why I say that:A can of oranges  exploded in the back of the kitchen cabinet sometime in the last ...can we say year?Dole's Mandarins, the kind with the pop-top.I guess they must have expired or something but ....wasn't July of 2010 just a minute ago?It looked like a tiny guy's skull was oozing out - turned out to be some seriously hydra-headed fungus.I thought I was in the movie Alien but I don't know .  I sure didn't have  Sigourney Weaver's reaction.I'd have taken a picture but that's really hard when you've just run screaming from the room.Good old Dave saved the day as usual. (Men aren't afraid of anything are they? Or else they've been so conditioned  they just have to act that way. Anyway the place is all cleaned up now. Smells a little funny but it's clean.)Here I am with the fungus now. I ran so fast I fell, and well, you know how a head wound does bleed. I'm fine really. :-)