All I Did Not Know

Until I was nine, I lived in my grandfather’s house in a Boston neighborhood that was about to become one of the most vital black communities in the country.The year I started kindergarten though, the place was still very white. There was just one black child in our class whom, as I recall, the teacher was constantly punishing.One day, saying he sang too loud, she barricaded him behind the piano, which she then pushed into the corner, so he couldn’t get out.Another time, she took him into the cloak room and hung him by his belt loops from one of the hooks.I brought these stories home to my mother, who found them as troubling as I did.All through our childhood, my sister and I were given to know that ours was an “enlightened” family. Hadn’t this grandfather we lived with given learned talks even at the Young Men's Jewish Association, Roman Catholic though he was? Hadn’t he labored to get the teachers their first-ever pay raise when he was Chairman of the Boston School Committee?These were the stories we heard of him, a classic bootstrap tale, beginning when he left behind thin-soiled farm and Irish immigrant parents alike to try his luck in the wider world. He finished college, and law school, and by the time he was giving those learned talks around Boston, his speech was as refined as that of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who were running the place.His success was a direct consequence of his hard work, I was taught, and only much later did it dawn on me that he might have been accepted as easily as he was by these WASPS because, with his Northern European ancestry, he looked just like them.But that wasn't mentioned in the family story.Neither was the breakup of our mother’s wartime marriage, that abandonment of a wife and two babies by our father. He was never mentioned him, not even once.“Where is OUR father?” it finally occurred to us to ask.“You don't have a father, we were told. End of discussion.Still, we had an advantage, a kind of “protection,” as white children, and children whose people had gone to college. I mean, no teacher ever tried to hang either of US in any cloak room.At age 17, I was admitted to one of the country’s top women's colleges – because I was such a clever little star, as I told myself. I chose not to dwell on the C-minus I got In Algebra III that semester might or to consider the fact that I just might have been admitted because I was a legacy, my mother having gone to the same school four decades earlier. Whether I truly earned my place there or not, my real education began at that school where for the first time in my life I met and worked beside Asian students, black students, Jewish students and Latino students. And my education continued when I went on to teach in a diverse urban high school.In time, married and with babies on the horizon, my young husband and I went on to become homeowners, something we might not have been able to do without help from our parents, who were homeowners themselves. Another advantage.Maybe I go on too long here, because this is meant just as autobiography. Certainly it is not meant as any kind of sermon. I mean to say only that I ‘see’ more and more, the longer I live. And I am resolved never to be that person who find herself on third base and tells herself she has hit a triple.

Things That I Miss, Things I Am Glad For

Things I miss: I miss the late 70s. The fashions were so great! Why are men's shorts now below their ankles and isn't that a kind of Victorianism all by itself?Things I am grateful for: Funny pictures and witty cartoonists.Here's a picture I once used to characterize the suppertime habits in this house. I called it "I cook. He cleans."That's a good funny one. And I like this one a lot too:And god bless the cartoonists, the theological ones being among my favorites. Here's one:We still do that, we children of Adam.And here's maybe my favorite one of all.On dreary winter days, if you want to cheer up, seek out the merry. It's like Yeats says in "The Fiddler of Dooney," a great old poem if ever there was one:

When we come at the end of time,To Peter sitting in state,He will smile on the three old spirits,But call me first through the gate.For the good are always the merry,Save by an evil chance,And the merry love the fiddleAnd the merry love to dance;And when the folk there spy me,They will all come up to me,With "Here is the fiddler of Dooney!"And dance like a wave of the sea.

Payback

The other day I drove 100 miles with  four feet of my scarf sticking out of the car and dragging along the ground. AND, it was 32 degrees and sleeting. Sigh. Such a pretty scarf too: I got so I was very vain, wearing it.I had closed it in the car door though I didn’t know it ‘til we got to our destination. It was frozen solid, like a brick, only sort of bent.Old Dave thought it was the funniest thing in the world. I think he saw it as payback, because when I say I was driving I was really only helping him drive, which I admit I do, since he’s so aggressive a driver, passing this driver, nosing right up under their petticoats of that one. I used to read, or nap, or treat him to my own brand of fascinating chatter as we drove. Now I seem to  be so vigilant I can’t do anything but 'help him' steer. It’s like this anniversary card I just bought to give him where they even got the name right. As you can see, the front says “Dave didn't have to watch where he was going...” Then when you open it up it reads “Because his wife was an excellent back seat driver." Just look at that woman sitting behind him. Of course I don’t look like a bit like her - not me! But the weird thing is, she does look a lot like my mom when she got her bossy hat on. Hmmm, what was it that Oscar Wilde said? "Every woman becomes like her mother. That is her tragedy. No man does. That's his"? (Good old Oscar Wilde: so epigrammatic always - and so RIGHT!)

Not Too late For a Few Resolutions?

I hope it's not too late anyway - because I drew up a new list again this year. I couldn’t help it. Making such a list was one of the first habits I formed growing up in a family bent on eternal  improvement. In fact, we’re all still laughing about the time the family patriarch announced one day in early January that he was bringing all the kids to the doctor to have their nostrils blown out – and that was 90 years ago. 

Even though my own plans are far tamer, I offer them here:

Resolution One, to stop saying how exhausted I am all the time. What is it with us moderns that we dwell so ceaselessly on our level of fatigue? A hundred years ago people didn't carry on about how tired they were, maybe because they were too busy stoking the furnace and boiling the diapers.

Resolution Two, to refrain from getting into a lot of competitive technology talk, like about those apps that supposedly empty the dishwasher and open the canned peas while you’re still stuck in rush hour traffic ten miles from home. I mean, I appreciate a GPS as much as the next guy, but shoot me if you ever hear me going on and on about what route it had me take to get to your house just now.

Resolution Three, to stop telling people my dreams. What’s harder to sit through than a person saying  “So then a guy with a gorilla’s head began reciting the Preamble to the Constitution only – no,  wait - he only started out as a gorilla before turning into Don Johnson circa 1989”? Most people can’t tell their dreams right to save their lives.

Resolution Four: to tell fewer jokes, since I can never tell them the right way anymore. If I really want to tell jokes I’m going to have to start rehearsing them ahead of time so I don’t keep putting the punch line in the middle.  

Resolution Five: to keep getting my photographs printed. It's just not enough to have them stored in the cloud. I say, put them in an album. Put them in a  battered old shoebox even. Sure, there might be a fire, but there might also NOT be a fire, and think about it: your kids aren’t going to gather around a computer screen when you’re gone to cry over pictures of the old days. The place for pictures is in people’s hands.

Resolution Six, speaking of hands: to take better care of my hands, which are showing signs of real wear these days. In my girlhood they looked so smooth and flawless I was forever waving them around my head, hoping others would think so too. Now, they’re wizened little monkey-paws. I guess 30 years of furniture refinishing finally took its toll on them. 

It’s ok though. It’s fine. Because here’s my Seventh Resolution, which follows naturally from the Sixth: to keep trying to wear out rather than rust out.  ’Use it or lose it,” the fitness folks say of the body’s strength. But heck, we're going to lose it anyway eventually so let’s use it now, place our shoulders to the wheel, and help make this old world a better place in shiny new 2014. Excelsior! :-)

Evolving

We all evolve; nobody starts out perfect.Consider this little person, a casual caregiver at best, with her bottle of beer and her baby splayed, arms outstretched, in the grass.She LIKED the baby well enough. She just didn't really know how to care for her.Her grandfather David and I didn't know how to care for her mother at first either: we read her to sleep on a waterbed in the basement of our friend's house by the sea.In Coastal Maine.In late August.And the waterbed, it turned out, wasn't even heated - so when we came back downstairs many rollicking hours later, having played rounds of Botticelli til we were blue in the face, we found our child seemingly blue in the face herself - or so we at first thought when we touched her and felt her cool, cool skin.People almost shouldn't be allowed to have babies until they're like 40.And yetAnd yet.Only six months later, this little person is still only one year old and already she has grown in the nurturing arts, as you can plainly see. .Moral of the story? Love a little person hard and s/he will learn to do the same.

Call the Darkness Light

The  solstice is past, but the days are still so short  many of us are traveling to and from work in darkness even now. I think this was the first year I really “got” why so many people deck their houses with  lights – sometimes even before they’ve polished off the Thanksgiving turkey.They don’t do it because they feel 'hurried into' the season by retailers. They do it to lift their spirits.So this year I tried doing it too, and wonder of wonders, stringing little lights did indeed help me beat back that shudder of dread I feel when the darkness comes to cloak us.In the classic Isaac Asimov/Robert Silverberg story Nightfall, the action takes place on a planet whose sky holds as many as six suns at a time, where, at 2,000 year intervals, a mysterious event occurs that causes the land to be enveloped in darkness for the first time in anyone’s memory.And yes, one ‘fringe’ religious sect teaches that it’s God’s judgment that brings the dark, along with the subsequent appearance of these fearsome things called ‘stars’ that rain down fire to destroy all of civilization. Few believe this though, because each time, the conflagration destroys all records.  The reader learns only as the story unfolds that it’s the people who are responsible, because as creatures who have never in their lives experienced darkness, they panic and set the awful fires themselves, for the light.All during December I wondered why this tale kept coming into my mind. Only in the last few days did I see it is because that same kind of wild and unreasoning fear lives also in me.Over the past six months, we have had many ‘systems’ problems in our house, as first the washing machine died, then the dryer, then the fridge. The shower pan in the upstairs bathroom also failed so that for days on end water dripped down into the room below it.We fixed all these problems, but not before I had expended a world of energy whining about them.Sometime in there, social media allowed a faraway friend to take note of all this and sit down and send me this message:

Terry, I am sorry to hear about your refrigerator and the discomfort you have been having. I know just how bad it has been for you. We have seen similar things happen here. Our bathtub legs fell off while one of the girls was in the tub, the bathroom sink got clogged up and one of the refrigerator doors broke so for over a month our food was constantly spoiling.“Thank God things are back to normal now – somewhat, LOL! The roof is still leaking but God is on that too. Remember, you are in my prayers.”

With what shame did my cheeks burn as I read this note from a woman who, virtually alone, raised up her own three children, sent them off to college, and then took in three teenaged girls to whom she has given love and care in full measure.  The one who was in the tub when its legs broke off was pregnant when she came into her family and is expecting her baby this month, a fact that only gladdens my friend’s heart, because - as she will tell you - God is on that too.And there it all is in a nutshell: One camp of people sees the approaching dark and panics, while the other just calls it sweet night and waits in trust for the light’s return. I think in this new year I'm going to try moving from that sad first camp into the second.  

A Final (Funny) Postscript

Here's a final postscript as the  jingling tinker's wagon we call 'the holidays' lurches off down the road. It served as my column last week.Remembering Christmas Past is like remembering childbirth: a certain amnesia sets in. If you asked me earlier in December what happens around here most Christmases, I’d have said not much. Then, last week, I looked up  Christmas in an old diary. How quickly we forget.That year, I came up with the idea that I should send a card to 192 people, and thus spent every spare moment over a five-day period entering their names and addresses on my laptop so as to generate labels.Finally one morning, I pressed “Print” and hurried away to take my shower - but when I came back, our nice fat-bottomed cat was delicately shredding the sheets of labels one by one as they emerged from the printer, while sitting directly ON the laptop, causing it to beep frantically, then lose its mind altogether, writing  “#!” when you tried to write "the" and "%#~" when you tried to type "when." And it kept ON doing this, hiccupping and speaking in gibberish for the next 13 hours.Then I spent five more days of non-existent spare moments working up a newsy collage of holiday greetings and when that turned out to be way too big for a conventional envelope, I went and bought bigger envelopes, on which my printed labels now looked puny and impersonal. So I took another five days and made everyone who came into the house help me decorate each one with a bright holiday drawing.And then there were the Disappointing Presents.Our then 15-year-old turned out to be hoping for a leather jacket and instead I bought her a big silky Cheese Puff of a thing. What was I thinking?So too, our then-10-year-old wanted little green army guys, but when the bucket of them was opened on Christmas morning, I turned out to have bought the wrong kind, a kind that couldn’t even lie down in the mud and inch along on their tummies. What kind of army guys can’t do THAT, right? Yet asking this bunch to do it would be like asking a Ken Doll to reach up and tousle his own hair. No elbows was the problem.Also, the much-wished-for video game was sold out until March, and it seemed you couldn’t BUILD Erector Set Number 6 unless you already OWNED Erector Sets Number 1 through 5 - which we didn’t.And as for the two presents I thought were sure-fire, the ones I had actually I had in fact bought super-early and even wrapped? These I couldn't even find until three days after the big day.On climbing into bed Christmas night, I recall my ten-year-old’s eyes shining with sorrow. “It’s my fault,” he said, so as not to sadden me his hapless mother. “I didn’t get in the Christmas spirit. I should’ve thought more about what I was giving, instead of what I was getting,” he went on.So this year we all tried to do that in this family: think more of what we were giving and not at all about what we might be getting.Still, you sure can get turned around. All this time later I now see that I was the one who wanted that big downy Cheese Puff of a jacket all along. I think it looks pretty good on me, don't you?  The hot pink really sets off my new hair color.:-)

Note at Vacation's End Part 1

Here's the motto I've been living out this last month:One more night of excess to go: Ready, set... start swallowing, whether it's food or drink! 

Happy Day After

A nice day here yesterday. The mess alone made a wonderful spectacle. Also, what's nicer than spending the morning in your pjs on Christmas.Just for old times sake I wore the bathrobe David gave me for Christmas in long ago '79 when we first moved to this house - even though it doesn’t wrap QUITE so entirely around me as it did when I weighed 120.Lots of years gone by, the old Christmas stockings falling apart now, including the little one we hung for the baby that didn’t get past week eight in utero. David insists that little one's stocking hang front and and center every year, though the two of us may be the only ones who know what it represents.I'll put more picture to put up if I get the chance – such happy mayhem – but for now I’ll close with the robe, a Pendleton woolen number. A few moth holes in the girl by now but none in the garment!Happy Day After to all, and to all a good night.  

It Begins

It’s the real eve Christmas Eve now. It’s time to light the candles.People were nice today out in the world, even with the traffic such a snarl. The man that cut my swordfish steaks, the one that handed me that pork roasts: both nice. (I sometimes think I foodshop every day just for the human contact. For that and for the way a crisp fresh pear talks back to you when you first bite into it.)David in his Wellesley College sweatshirt is changing a light bulb just now. Down in the kitchen, Dodson is feeding the baby while Veronica is out buying just a little more gift-wrap. Gary, safely back with us from the Delta, just blew in with the glad announcement that he has finished his shopping. Our son Michael, also here for just this week from his own job in Arkansas, is still out. I hear he took the train into Boston while I was out and if my memory of the timetable serves, he too will be walking in any minute. I have to dress up to go to Annie and John’s house - they're feeding us tonight - but before I do that I need to make a dish for tomorrow, and also water the Christmas tree, which has a kind of dry discouraged look today. It knows better than we do that really it died weeks ago and this whole display is just an extended wake.Ah but it’s a beautiful wake! Remember the days when trees weren’t perfectly shaped and had that wild and piney secant? Remember the years when we all hung plastic icicles on our trees and strings of colored bulbs as big as your nose? Remember the years before those even, when we hung a kind of tinsel that was metallic and crinkly and made your teeth hurt if you ever got it in your mouth?In my mind I see my single mother on Christmas Eve, reading us the old story at bedtime and then rushing downstairs, once we drifted off, to bring forth the whole Christmas miracle including even the tree itself, with only her aged dad and her ancient spinster aunties to help if our pretty Aunt Grace didn’t drive over to lend a hand. We lived together, all of us. It was a very happy home.May your home be happy too, both for the remains of this glowing day and in the days to come as well. Feliz Navidad!

Holiday Slip 'n Slides

You forget about the Holiday downsides: The way you always plan too much. The way your eyeballs start jiggling the minute you get to the mall and see those kiosks filled with jokey T-shirts and giant bunny slippers. You THINK you’ll be fine and finish all the holiday tasks.  You’ll just get up a little earlier in the morning. You’ll just go to bed a little later at night. It’s all about efficiency, you tell yourself.In the name of this efficiency I decided to brew my morning coffee one day last week right in the bathroom, to get that jolt of caffeine at the earliest possible moment.I had my little pot all set up on the edge of the sink. It would brew while I took my bath. Brilliant! I thought.I had tested the water temperature, dipped a toe in the tub and had just lowered myself into the hot suds when I realized I’d forgotten to press “Brew.”No problem I thought.I stood up looking like the Michelin Man in my coat of soap bubbles, stretched across the length of our wide old 1940s sink and then…lost my footing.  My whole upper body crashed down onto that rock-hard porcelain, causing the coffee pot to SHOOT off the sink and land in the toilet – but not before creating geysers of coffee grounds, which plastered themselves on the walls, the floor and even the ceiling.That should have acted as a sign for me if I had eyes to see it. It should have been just the lesson I needed.But no, I had no such eyes. And no, I heeded no lessons - with the result that a worse occurrence followed three days later when I leaped suddenly from our bed to assist my sick ‘roommate.’It must have been something he ate that day, or maybe it was just one of those pesky stomach viruses that settle in and shiver your timbers for 24 hours.Anyway, this roommate-slash-spouse felt suddenly sick around midnight and, on waking to realize that this was so, I vaulted from the bed and ran to the bathroom just as he had done.Thinking to show support, see.Only once in there, I found myself bouncing against the shower door.Are you all right? I called to him in a faint voice.Then I careened in the other direction and bounced off the sink.This bathroom is two rooms, really, the larger one with the shower and sink in it and the other, far smaller one, with just the ‘facilities.’That’s the room he’d been, until he heard my voice.“What’s going on out here?” he said, emerging. “I’m not sure,” I said. He walked toward me. “You seem to be falling down,” he said.“I think I’m falling down,” I said, amazed,  and I fainted and did fall, section by section, knees buckling, ankles turning to Silly Putty.He grasped me under both arms as I dipped and swayed. “What do you want to do?” he said. “Just let me lie on this nice bathmat a while. “I’m fine,” I said.  “I love this bathmat,” I added.I lay there for a good little spell while my roommate, feeling rather better for his ordeal, went back to bed.  And it was as I lay there that a double realization came to me:One, too much haste around the holidays really is ill-advised.And two, have a nice soak in the tub or start pumping in the caffeine, but never, ever, ever try doing both at once. 

Shop Fearlessly - Really?

They say credit cards can be dangerous, but I can’t help it: I love the way you can just input that old number and send away for a thing.  Of course catalogs are arriving at our doors by the dozen at this season, every day their glossy pages spilling slippery through our letter-slots.Lots of them I CAN resist. After all I can just choose not to open the skimpy lingerie catalogs with those poor cold girls, skinny as insects - but rhe mail-order items that do get my attention are the ones found advertised among the sober pages of the traditional old news magazines.One example: I’m reading along about some country where they’re trying to actually SELL clean air to people, when all of a sudden there’s this ad with a picture of an old-fashioned model train chugging out from under the branches of an old-fashioned Christmas tree. “Classic trains!” reads the text “Relive the magic of your childhood, when large metal trains were a part of every holiday season!”Large metal trains, I sigh, growing instantly misty - and then I remember: We HAD large metal trains when I was little. We kids I used those sharp-edged bullion-bars of steel to clobber each other with. Then there was the year I got the wheels of one stuck in the thousand tendrils of curl that sprang from my scalp, causing me to run around the house dangling a Large Metal Train from my hair and shrieking, ‘til the grownups could figure out what to do about me.Another example:  I’m reading an article about teaching kids Phonics and here’s another ad: For a gizmo said to rid your home of “pests and vermin, mice, rats, roaches bats. Even raccoons and squirrels” the ad says.“It delivers a tremendous blast of ultra-sound, inaudible to you and your pets“ that disrupts their nervous systems. “They’ll leave your home within a few weeks - never to return!”It has volume-control and six variable pitches, depending on the size of the vermin, and already my fingers are reaching for the credit card, because don’t WE have such pests? Mice, when the weather turns cold? Egyptian meal moths the year round, raising their children in our cereal boxes. Bats and raccoons and I-don’t-know-what-all?We had a serious infestation of squirrels in our last house. They threw parties inside the eaves, chattering just inches from our sleeping heads when their friends came over, and grimly chewing and chewing when they were alone.In our desperation, we actually bought this device back then, or something very much like it. We never had the slightest notion whether or not it worked, its sound being inaudible and all. WE wound up moving instead.So last week those two items tempted me.But just the other night, and this is no word of a lie, I thought, “Never mind these silly toys and gizmos, why not use my credit card to order some nice books from Amazon the way you can so easily do these days?”I decided on The Age of Innocence and Doctor Sleep. I entered my credit card number and pressed “Buy.” Then, well pleased with myself and humming a little tune, I decided to check my e-mail.A message from Amazon - already!'This is to confirm your recent order,” it said. 

• 'Copies of The Age of Innocence: 1. 
• 'Copies of Doctor Sleep: 591.
• '$17,745 billed to your MasterCard. Payment authorized.”

Maybe these credit cards are deadlier than I thought.

Rest Well

The burial that takes place today could be the most widely watched one in history when Nelson Mandela takes up his final resting place.I remember the day he was let out of jail. It was a Sunday in February and I wore a big hat to church in celebration. My daughter who was 14 at the time, stood up front and sang a brief a cappella duet with her best friend Samantha.So much has been said over the past week - so much WILL be said in years to come - but for me in these last days there days there is only again and again the sound of Ladyship Black Mambazo singing, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, whose lyrics use the five most widely spoken of South Africa's eleven official.  (More about its origins here.)I saw them sing this South African National Anthem as part of Paul Simon’s Graceland your in 1987. Here is footage of the them doing the song it almost as a prayer to Mother Africa itself, that time with the great Miriam Makeba who I saw sing even longer ago, in the summer of 1967 when I was a schoolgirl still. I understood in only a small way who she was and what truths she spoke for. I knew more by the time I attended the 1987 performance. I know - all of us know - even more about them today thanks to this great man. Rest well, Father of us all.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFW7845XO3g]

Called Here: For Emily

When Emily Dickinson died in her 50s her family used for her epitaph a phrase from one of her letters. "Called Back" it still reads today on her Amherst headstone, a phrase which suggests belief in a God who set her down here, monitored her as she went about the full human tour through pain and gladness and loss and merriment, and decided when He decided that He then needed her back again.In fact there isn't much proof that Emily believed in an afterlife and a good bit of sly evidence that she didn't. (I think of what she wrote to a friend about shunning men and women: "They talk of hallowed things, aloud, and embarrass my dog," adding, of this canine, "I think Carl would please you. He is dumb and brave." There, is, however, plenty of evidence that she believed in this life, for who has celebrated its minute music-box-gear turnings with such care and precision?I was ‘called back’ to remembering all this yesterday when my cousin Rebecca sent me a quick flash on Facebook from her home in California. It said only "Emily's birthday!"I knew right away who she meant and looked Emily up and sure enough it was her birthday, not the day she was called back but the day she was called here.It was snowing as I read these things, some 90 miles from her grave. Big fat flakes were falling at that hour, each one as round and soft as a coconut Christmas ball. Then I Googled Emily’s name and the word ‘snow’ and sure enough here is what she left for us, one of thousands of such pearls to help us remember what she said to her another friend in a letter once. "To have been made alive is so chief a thing." And so it is. And so it surely is.Now Emily, on the snow:

It sifts from leaden sieves,It powders all the wood,It fills with alabaster woolThe wrinkles of the road.It makes an even faceOf mountain and of plain, —Unbroken forehead from the eastUnto the east again.It reaches to the fence,It wraps it, rail by rail,Till it is lost in fleeces;It flings a crystal veilOn stump and stack and stem, —The summer's empty room,Acres of seams where harvests were,Recordless, but for them.It ruffles wrists of posts,As ankles of a queen, —Then stills its artisans like ghosts,Denying they have been.

Ready or Not It's Here

Well, SOME of you may have been ready for December. You know who you are. You've had your lights up for weeks. Goodie-goodies.Most years I don’t get our lights up ‘til our youngest child arrives home from whatever faraway place has beckoned him that year and I’ll admit it: that practice makes me nervous.One year I just couldn’t wait and got taken in by a catalogue ad for trees that are supposedly harvested only hours before shipping and what a mistake THAT was. When the thing arrived it looked like a giant Q-Tip -  and kept on looking that way even a whole week after I'd liberated it from its plastic mesh hairnet.“W-h-a-a-t?” our son exclaimed  when he got home on December 23rd and saw it all decorated in our living room. He's burdened by what I can only call your 'artist’s eye' : your crooked trees, your trees half bald on one side are a torture for him to look upon.Gently, swiftly he took off every ornament and string of lights, dragged the poor tree out back and drove straight to the nearest nursery for a realer version, shaggy and flouncy and still smelling of the piney woods.But preparing for the holidays is just part of what I have to face come December. For me there's also the glove problem.Every fall, I buy two pairs of black winter gloves that are sort of nylony and hug the hand so nicely. Then, not two weeks into the cold weather, I lose the one for the right hand.Always the one for the right hand. Never the one for the left.I don’t know how it happens but at last count I had on the shelf in the front hall closet exactly seven identical black gloves, all for the left hand. And because they have these nice little gripping ‘pads’ on the palm surface, you can’t just flip them. You’d walk around looking like somebody took each arm off, switched it and hung it from the opposite shoulder.It’s a problem for a person like me, who can’t leave the house from November to April without gloves on. Last winter I bought five pairs, just to keep that right hand warm.And finally in December I face the issue of storing the car, since, where we live, they fine you in winter for parking in the street.We do have a driveway, though it’s narrow. We also have a garage built circa 1915 when a car wasn’t much bigger than a sewing machine.But somehow this garage gets filled during the warmer months, this year with items from a deceased uncle’s house, boxes of our own mismatched china from Dallas and Dynasty days, and a broken old Nordic Track.You have to empty a garage enough to get one of your two cars inside but where do you begin?  Especially when you really loved the uncle and can’t part with his furniture? Especially when you’re the kind of person who remembers so very many of the thousands of meals eaten off that china?Every day I go out there looking to see what I can pry from the pile and discard.It’s painful. Worst case I’ll find that cast-out Q-tip of a Christmas tree. But best case, who knows? I just might come upon seven right gloves. 

Pictures from a Train

I took the train yesterday and for four hours sat by the window watching the soft New England landscape roll by, city street slowly giving way to salt marsh with ocean just beyond.Providence and Westerly, Mystic and New London and then city again: New Haven and Bridgeport, the glass towers of Stamford, once-tony New Rochelle and finally the edges of the nation’s biggest city, its old churches and school houses, and traces of the abandoned factories and little storefronts, the stoops and body shops that once pinned these old neighborhood together.I sat next to the window and watched it all roll by, our land, my land as I think of it, where my people lie buried back to the 1850s, some here in this factory town, some there by that mill, victims of the old killers TB and diphtheria, scarlet fever and childbirth.It was lovely . And then an hour from my destination, a man traveling clear through to Baltimore came aboard and sat beside me. "May I have this seat?" he asked."I don't bite," he added, before I had come out of my trance enough to say yes. I couldn’t think of a reply to that remark, the patronizing air of it, the faint insult of it so he stumbled on: "That's not to say I won’t snore or drool heh heh.”Again I was speechless. I tried to make myself smaller, gather in my possessions against these eventualities. I wished I were still alone and felt mightily irked  - until he did in fact fall asleep, so deeply that I had to wake him when the train came to my stop.He offered to help me get down my bag and sent me off with a “Safe travels now!” and I was sorry I had harbored unkind thoughts.An hour from now I get to make the whole trip in reverse, on a day that here at my starting point is rainy and not sunny as it was when I set out yesterday. It will be picture seen from a window all over again, this time in sepia instead of Kodachrome. I can’t wait to find my seat and settle in. 

10 Ways to Live Longer

Here’s a list of ten things you can do to live longer:

• One, learn to vacation in your driveway. Yup, just pull up outside your house after work and sit there for a minute. You’ll be surprised at what you’ll suddenly start noticing. I saw a squirrel chasing another squirrel around. I saw birds were pecking at the berries off that hawthorn tree so fast, whole piles of them were landing on the ground – where those same squirrels were collecting them up faster that movie theatre ushers between shows.
• Two, on the highway, choose the tollbooth staffed by a live person now and then. Toll takers get as lonely sitting there as you would get driving all day by yourself. Take a minute to be human with them? Who are you, some CEO rushing to his private jet? No, you're not.
• Three, talk to these people, or to anyone behind any counter as you pay. You’ll learn things for sure. Ask,  "How’s it goin’?” and wonder of wonder they’ll tell you. The other day at the discount drug, the lady behind the counter told me she couldn’t WAIT ‘til that full moon stopped monkeying around making everyone so crazy.
• Four, just take a chance generally with people. Smile at that stranger coming toward you, if only because in this one moment your paths are crossing. Sure, there’ll be a little hiccup in his gait and his face will say, “Wait, I don’t know you,” but eventually he will recall the dim long ago: "Oh yeah, civility! We used to practice that once!
• Five, think of the person whose habits annoy you the most and practice what in the recovery movement they call “the turnaround.” This means, imagine him as every bit the same precious, unique, valiantly striving individual your momma always saw you as.
• Six, try doing this on yourself, setting aside that invisible shield of self-contempt we carry around with us always.
• Seven, go back now and give Number Four another try. See if it isn’t easier to look that person in the eye and smile.
• Eight, put away your I-Pod and stash those ear buds with their long white tentacles. Listen to the music in your head. Spin up your own podcasts as you walk, or try for a quick Q & A with the person beside you.“Do you remember your babyhood?” I asked the woman bedside me at Airport Security last week. (We were both looking at a little child in a stroller.)  “I certainly do!” she said and off we went comparing notes. I myself remember having my diapers changed, even though in the era when I lay on a changing table, kids were all potty-trained at 18 months. I figure a little more practice and I can remember clear back to my arrival day.
• Nine, while you’re at it, press the ‘Off’ button on that smartphone of yours.
• Ten, Remember the advice “Only connect!” as E. M Fortser once famously wrote.

Do these things and you’ll learn to have a good time even the DMV; even waiting in line at the pharmacist’s window. All it takes is engaging with others.  Make that creative leap of imagination that puts you in the other guy’s shoes and soon enough you’ll be able to make a friend and ally out of every stranger; to take even loss and learn to turn it inside-out like an old sweater to reveal its silver lining.

Morning Has Broken

This morning the bare tree limbs outside these windows nod and shift and look to me like a gathering of stags as they lower and raise their antlered heads. The rain is gone and with it the warm windy air mass. It's below freezing. The flowers I’ve arranged for our Thanksgiving table rest in the tiny north-facing bathroom whose thermostat registers a nose-biting 52 degrees. No wilting there!I have made the coffee and eaten a little breakfast and David is reading the paper.  When our son Michael gets up, he and I can tackle the spinach-with-raisins-and-pine-nuts dish, the only ‘real’ thing I have to prepare this year.Last Sunday, our daughter Carrie and her Chris borrowed from us 20 sets of china and silverware, three gravy boats, two ladles and two white tablecloths, a store of things accumulated here over the last 35 years. Thanksgiving is at their house, so instead of waking at 5 to jam a giant bird into a too-small oven, David and I slept until 7, which was nice since we were up 'til almost 2:00 so as to greet our returning son, home for the weekend from faraway Arkansas.I’m to make the gravy when we get to their house, that being my only other job. I have packed the chicken stock and the non-clumping flour, my best sieve and a good pot, and that wondrous invention the gravy separator. I've packed the coffee, which I wanted to brew myself and also a can of salted peanuts just like we had when I was little, the nice greasy kind, in the very bowl in which our grownups served them too.Carrie and Chris live in a house built exactly 50 years ago, so they have decreed this a 1963 Thanksgiving and planned foods and drinks to match that theme.Easy enough! I thought, on hearing that, for inside my head it is at once 1963 and 1958 and 1979 when we first moved to this old house, a young couple with two babies, and began doing the holidays ourselves.I hope everyone's day is nice as ours promises to be. The dark comes early but oh this morning light! - and family to enjoy it with. Happy Thanksgiving to all!  

In Your Going Out and Your Coming In

I'm trying to picture you now. Are you in the traffic? Are you in line at the airport, waiting to wrestle with your shoes and belt and outerwear to get through Security?

In either case, you’re probably there with hundreds of others, since the record shows that the biggest travel day of the whole year is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. 

Are you on a train now, rocking slowly back to the land of your childhood? 

Are you on a bus, as I was this last week?

For me riding the bus is an experience as singular and familiar as the smell of wet mittens after a snowball fight. When we get on a bus we are all children again.  Anyway, we know we’re no longer driving.

Folks board a bus and automatically start heading for the back, I notice.

It’s very dear and human, the way we all think there are greener pastures ahead, but on the bus the plan often backfires: You’re just as likely to splash up against that rear wall and then be forced to backtrack, this time against the tide of your fellow boarders, having found no better seat there than the ones you passed along the way.

Me, I look for a seat as close to the driver as I can and, in my mind at least, keep him company.

On fine days a person can see forever out those big bus windows. On rainy ones like today, the windshield wipers tock to the left and right like a metronome.

The bus keeps its nose down, inhaling the road, as the anteater inhales its tiny victims.

Beside you, smaller vehicles pass or are passed. You can look down into them like a god from your greater height. 

Here now: here is a person fiddling with the controls on his radio. Here is one stretching one arm and then the other up toward the car ceiling.

Here are two talking a mile a minute to each other.

Here is one piloting the vehicle in seeming friendlessness, as his passengers all lean and snooze together beside and behind him.

You could say we are all on the road and we’re all heading home.

So I‘ll ask it again here: Are you in traffic right now, or waiting in line? Are you flying over the land or rocketing about inside it on some underground channel?

Are there people beside you? Take a look at them. Admire the complexity of the human ear, or the bare limb like a table-leg deftly and turned on a lathe by some skilled Artisan?

Are you venturing out as you read this? Bless you in your going out and your coming in then, from this time forth and forever as it says in the Bible, but especially in this small season designed for giving thanks.

Waiting CAN be Fun

Waiting can be fun if the company's good. We had set out before 5:00 to get to the campus of Milton Academy to hear a talk by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who in 1971 first came to this elite boarding school from the projects on Chicago’s South Side. He was a scholar with A Better Chance, the unique-in-the-country program that, since its founding, has helped more than 1400 students of color graduate from some 300 of the country’s most rigorous public and private schools and go on to careers in medicine, the law, government, you name it. (Read more about it here.)When I say ‘we’ I'm referring to the seven scholars in my own town’s ABC program, who live together in a cozy old house to which they came the summer before their 9th grade year.We had left for the event before 5:00 but now here it was almost 7:00 when ABC Executive Director Sandra Timmons stood to tell the crowd that foul weather had grounded the Governor’s plane in New York.Well, we could believe that;  even here in New England, dark clouds boiled and spit and winds were gusting up to 40 miles per hour.She said we shouldn’t worry though because, upon learning that his flight has been scrubbed, the Governor had started to drive, a four-hour journey under the best of circumstances.After some short remarks about the program, she said, “ Enjoy these wonderful appetizers!” “And… have fun networking!”“Have FUN?  Networking?” I’ll bet many were thinking. But in the end it was fun, in part because when you're waiting, you can relax. You’re where you’re supposed to be so for once you can let time spool, and enjoy the exchanges that come your way.One nice exchange I had occurred when I went to wash up from the buttery heaven of the appetizers and was greeted by a woman just drying her hands.“Welcome to the Ladies Room!” she cried and before we knew it we were talking passionately about the role of public education. Later, in that basement hallway, a gentleman and I laughed at the sight of a little brown lizard executing his calisthenics as he inched up the wall, blown up north, we joked, on this tide of southerly rain. And shortly after that, I stood at the beverage table where a third person and I noticed a bowl of greenery that appeared to be offering itself to one and all. We were examining it with interest when, in the nick of time, we saw a fork plunged in its pretty midst. “This is somebody’s salad!” we both yelled simultaneously, and just barely missed committing the faux pas of trying to make off with that guy's supper.A stir arose near the back of the hall and suddenly the Governor was bounding to the front of the hall.“Can you hear me without this? “ he asked, indicating the microphone.“Yes!” everyone  called back.Then he spoke simply, his hands clasped before him, about the lessons he has learned along the way.He said he now sees that his grandmother was right to say the prestige of having been admitted to Harvard meant less to her than opportunities her grandson would have there. He said you need to really peel back the surface layers of a thing to find its true meaning. Do that, he advised all of us. He said that when a young person asks something of you, you should try to say yes, and then stay faithful to that promise. He had stayed faithful, in fighting his way across the miles to see us. We had too, in waiting for him. And if we had some smiles along the way, why all the better.

(Sometimes it's good to have your schedule changed or to be blown a bit off course... )

      especially when your wait is really worth it  (Gamaral Sawyer with Governor Patrick in his office)