The Fake-out

I changed all our clocks at 7:00 last night, just before David and I went out to dinner at this snug little place called Camp, a restaurant built to look like a cabin, with rough-hewn pine tables, and kids’ names carved into them.Trying to honor the spirit of the place I ordered the meatloaf, which arrived looking like a big, very old, softball, under a brown sauce. OK that was a step too far, I thought, and I concentrated instead on my salad and my zucchini and summer squash mix, knowing the eating machine that is my husband would have no trouble polishing off the meatloaf-ball if we brought it home with usWhich we did and immediately queued up the second episode of The Americans, which I had slept through the first time I’d tried to watch it earlier this week. This time I fell asleep again, even earlier in the episode than before, and woke to an empty living room. Where was David? For a minute I thought he’d been 'taken', along with our meatball horror of horrors!But no. There he was in the bedroom, snoozing away.On walking in there I saw that even though really in the world it was just 9:50, our clock read 10:50 because, of course I had jumped it ahead before we went out to eat. No surprises for me! I see what’s coming! I thought. I’ll wake at 6:00 tomorrow and there'll be no sign of daylight. I'll write a post on my blog and answer 20 emails and then watch the sun come up and it will be so early still and the further jobs of the day an eternity away!Only it doesn’t work like that and how can I forget that every year? Because I did get up before the sun but now here it is almost 9:30 and no emails answered at all, just a lot of noodling around online reading the Globe and the Times and catching Lena Dunham's clips from  last night's SNL. Because what happens on the second Saturday in March is we lose an hour, which I didn’t properly remember until 20 minutes ago when I read today's posting on the blog of my cherished old friend Milton Brasher-Cunningham, who just nails it every time out and for sure nailed it late last night with an original poem on the time change.I reprint it here but go to his blog anyway and try following it. He writes every day in Lent. It's a gift to us all.So enjoy the light, as I mean to do now too, freshly tutored by my friend.  What am I doing writing a lot of emails on a Sunday anyway?

Savings sonnet  

 by Milton Brasher-Cunningham 

the earth had a way of tilting its headto set up the space for each seasona delicate dance a wonderful threadfrom sunny to snowy to freezin’ the days first grew short and then they grew longas the winter conceded to springbut we have decided nature was wronga new seasonal schedule to bring spring forward we said — move time up an hourthe change will make march days seem longerthere isn’t more sun — we don’t have that pow’rwe’ve just shown that our hubris is stronger than our logical thought or common senseas kids wait in the dark for their buswhy can we not live in this present tenseand stop winding ourselves in a fuss this silly rhyme has one conclusionwe’re quite content with our illusion   

The Getaway

You know how it is when you try to cheat winter and grab a few days in warmer climes. You stay up late and get up early every day for weeks, to shoehorn in just a few days when your ears won’t feel like a couple of frozen shrimp pinned to the sides of your head.That’s what I did, fretting ceaselessly over the question of how life would go on without me. ‘Who will do all the driving?’ I obsessed. ‘Who will collect our papers and our mail? Never mind that, who will make sure the moon comes up with me gone?'David and I were to leave before dawn and a mere five hours before that, as Jimmy Kimmel Live rolled its final credits, I was still throwing things in a suitcase.  Then the big day arrived, and brought with it many vivid hours of the blur-and-turbulence that is winter air travel.Then – finally  - we were in the Caribbean.Waiting for the ferry to take us to our hotel across the bay, I watched a promotional video about the place. It was playing in an endless loop on an immense super-hi-def TV.You know how it is: you can’t look away from these big TV’s, even if you want to.Ten times I must have seen this video. First, it showed old footage from the 1950s, the people moving jerkily in that old home-movie way, waving sweetly and self-consciously at the camera.  (“Oh the past!" I always think, seeing such footage. “Are my parents there? Where are MY parents?”) But then this nostalgia bath gave way to the wordless ‘story’ of a modern couple – two actors really – riding bicycles and smooching and getting up out of the hotel bed that floated not near but actually IN those blue ocean waters. (They can do anything with film editing these days.)The fourth time it looped, I noted a chickenpox scar on the female actor’s face. The sixth, time I saw three small pimples on her neck. The tenth time, watching the actor boyfriend in his filmy harem-pants tumble from the bed and swim off like the Little Mermaid, I laughed out loud.That next morning, I saw that I'd forgotten to pack my comb, my sunglasses and my hat, my frantic planning notwithstanding, and sure, you could buy all these things at the gift shop for a small fortune, but I thought ‘Eh’ and just bought the comb, deciding to squint for four days and let the sun have its way with my dye job. And that was the start of my letting go. By degrees I went from noticing everything in that sharp 21^st century way to noticing very little, except the lapping of the waves.The ocean was almost body temperature. Sitting at its edge, I watched pelicans swoop down to feed and suddenly I WAS a pelican. I watched a cloud billow across the sky and suddenly I WAS a cloud.  I looked over at David sleeping in a lounge chair that stood perpendicular to my own chair, so that I looked upon him not from the side, as usual, but as if from above.I saw his still-muscular arm thrown up over his face. I saw his hair, no longer black as in days of old, but as white now as a seagull’s wing.And suddenly I too was in a video, along with every living thing on this island, all of us in our own home movie, captured for those few seconds, all moving and breathing and as delightedly alive as the folks in this old reel. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kanChmXAge4]

I Gasped

I don’t often find yourself gasping, but I gasped three whole times this past weekend. I  gasped  at the big 'reveal' four-fifths of the way through Disney's  Frozen  when we find out that one of the most  benevolent-seeming characters is actually wicked  down to his toes. (And let me pause and say what a charming movie that is, even without Idina Menzel’s  gorgeous full-throated warble as Elsa. The little snowman with his moveable carrot nose alone!) But you’re just not ready for that drop of evil that spreads its stain all over. I gasped again when I went Sunday to witness the beauty of the Chinese performance known as Shen Yun which I saw with my friend Lois, as wise, perceptive, and able-bodied a woman in her mid-80s, as she was when I met her 25 years ago. (Hmmmm, in fact, I think she's even wiser, and more perceptive, come to think of it.)I gasped when the curtains part and 20 woman dancers are seen - or rather not seen, since they are at first hidden by a rolling mist - as they crouch on the stage floor, holding aloft ivory-colored pink-tipped lengths of silk that they cause to rapidly flutter like flower blossoms in a soft spring breeze. In a twinkling the mist dissipates and they start to dance in the portion of the program called Lotuses in Bloom. In fact everyone gasped. We gasped as one, and 2,000 of us and remembered why it is we go to seek out communal activities such as you have in a theatre. And finally I gasped at the restaurant when this little boy.......who has the same name as my husband his grandfather, opened his mouth wide and threatened to pull out his own loose tooth,.It sent a chill clear through me to see it, I  weep to see him those baby teeth go, and the soft-skinned curve of cheek as well. Too soon ! Too soon do they lost that look! But let us turn to the cheerful theme of NOT hiding your light under a bushel and watch now as Idina-as-Elsa sings this instant classic from Frozen:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEKLFS-aKcw

Hamster on a Wheel

I tell myself I haven’t been posting here as often lately because I now spend three or four hours a day working for this great volunteer organization of which I am  currently the president.....But is that it really? I have to wonder.Because like a great many women especially, I have always crowded my calendar: I worked with a church youth group, served as a writing tutor, and looked after all our old people and used the kids’ naptimes to refinish large pieces of wooden furniture – all in addition to meeting the deadline for this column that I have been writing since Ronald Reagan first smiled his way onto the Presidential stage.I had the energy, all right!For a while there, I also spent my nights marketing the three column collections I had put together, sending out review copies to the radio and TV stations I had called during the day -  and never mind that I often fell dead asleep at my desk at midnight. Five hours later, I was good to go again, vaulting in practically one leap from my bed to my keyboard, before the children woke and life intervened.The year I decided to post on my blog every day was just the most recent chapter of my life as an overfunctioner.Back in ’99, a mere month after David's lovely mother died her timid and undemanding death, I decided there must be more I could to comfort people and so added massage school to my list of activities - once again without letting anything else go.For two years, I studied that art, undergoing countless hours of interning and then renting a room from this great chiropractor, where, two days a week, I kneaded out the knots in people’s necks and backs and helped opened the tissues of their poor tired feet.I worked that job for four whole years, not stopping until the day I had my first sudden awareness that there might be an ending to this thing called ‘Life’."What am I DOING?” I asked myself one day. “I'm in my 50s! What about that family history I was always going to write? Didn’t God make me a writer first?“I gave my notice to the chiropractor that same week – and the very next month started the blog, which, as the word suggests, is supposed to be a log, like a ship’s log, something you contribute to every daily.Maybe I only ever wanted to see if I could do it.And I could.For a while.Now, though, I can’t keep posting every day. I just can’t.And so I don’t.I still write the column each week. Thirty-four years and counting!I still work with young people in that great non-profit I mentioned, which is no burden at all because I love them. I spend time lying around with my husband as he peers into his i-Pad doing the New York Times crossword. I spend time with our kids and take such joy in them still.There's no more choir though, and the church youth group seems to be doing just fine without me.There are no new books I’m trying to write. Alas, there are no more old people to look after. And frankly right now I think I’d rather set fire to one of my beloved old wooden chests than to refinish it.A certain quiet has grown in me and I don't know what to call it. A return to the serenity I last knew in childhood maybe? If so, I say “Welcome back!” and “Where ya been so long?”

Where is the Warmth?

You’re grateful for any sun-up. Look at the beauty of this little stand of buildings facing on an alley I looked down at from a hotel room once.Mornings are the best!Even when it’s so cold out the birds' whistles and peeps sound as wheezy as kazoo music. Even when it’s so cold the leaves of the long-suffering rhododendrons are needle-thin, shrunk down, as I imagine, to reduce the surface area exposed to these frigid winds.Because there are winds all right, and my God are they frigid.Most years by the end of February, even here in the provinces north of Boston, fat-hipped geese have begun waddling around like they own the place. Crocuses have begun poking their small praying hands up through the soil, even if the soil still rests under a mantle of snow -- though these last weeks you wouldn’t call it snow even; it’s rock-solid ice, with the last day’s snow-dusting it over it.Nature sprinkles a little snow every 48 hours the way county folks once scattered corn meal on dance floors: so you could glide more. Last night I ‘glided’ under a parked car while trying to billygoat may way onto the open road and nearly snapped tibia and fibula both, like a couple of chicken bones.Where is spring? Where oh where are even the signs of spring? We can’t  glimpse it even on the far horizon. It’s 8:15 already two hours after sun-up. I need to work on next week’s column, vacuum four rooms, quickly change the batteries in the two smoke detectors that I can’t actually reach, then go out and buy groceries, a decent bedspread and six pillowcases, all before I see the bodywork Pilates wizard who is helping me strengthen my messed-up back. And all before noon when a whole other list of tasks loom.I love to see that lady wizard. And what’s more fun than buying bed linens?  But with temps like these I'd like it better if I could do all the outdoors stuff WITHOUT ACTUALLY LEAVING THE HOUSE.  

Study these Pictures

Study these pictures, taken over the past ten days and see if you can see what they have in common. I know that one Mary Woolf is going to know right away. And possibly Downton Abby's Mr. Carson would be quick to see as well.I mean this kind of fun has to rise on SOMEBODY'S back, right?Ach I have to give it away: Thanks, dear husband, for always always always doing the clean-up.  You're a  man outstanding in your field all right! 

Nice Weekend. Good Times

It was such a nice weekend:ONE PERSON threw up eight times.ONE PERSON watched 21 episodes of Modern FamilyTWO PEOPLE gave a dog a bath using Johnson’s No More Tears, offering him a pedicure after. Lucky dog!THREE PEOPLE played the board game Risk for hours.TEN PEOPLE devoured a yummy meal made by the dog-bather above: super-fresh thin-sliced swordfish drizzled with cherry tomatoes in oil, broccolini, braised kale with shredded parmigiano reggiano cheese, roasted cauliflower and a wheat-berry side dish.ONE OF THOSE DEVOURING PERSONs also blew out some candles....... on a chocolate  cake made by a family of five who ended up fleeing before the plague of throwing-up and so were not present for the fun - but! who, in their niceness, also left a giant shepherd's pie for us all, a homemade banner saying Happy Birthday and a wonderful card.ONE PERSON, having recovered entirely from the throwing up fits, enjoyed an iPad, with headphones so as no to drive the rest crazy with the sound.ONE PERSON enjoyed the cake so much he had several pieces.And ONE PERSON  watched it all with very wide eyes.It was a very nice weekend. A family is a family is a family all right.Wait, what's that you say? You've never seen that HBO documentary? Here's a 45-second clip from it. Dare ya to watch it unmoved. :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkFr-rjjzlw]

The Joke's on Me

Just after the last really big storm I drove over to the ABC House and was just hurrying up the hilly sidewalk to get inside when - whoops! - the icy walk got the better of me and I slammed down on the ice on both knees. I tried to get up and slipped again. And worse luck, everything in my hands flew out of my grip, and landed far out of my reach across the treacherous stretch of sidewalk. What to do, what to do?Luckily, since my phone was tucked into the pocket of my jeans, I still had it anyway. Crouching down so I wouldn't fall a third time, I called the house phone just inside and one of the students answered."Bryson, I fell down out here. I'm fine but I keep falling down somehow. I can't seem to even take a step. Plus I lost my keys, which are like six feet away from me.""What?! " said Bryson. "Oh God, I'll be right out!"And sophomore Bryson did come right out, along with senior Hazees, and together they led me up the hilly path into the house."You were so alarmed, it was sweet," I said to Bryson once we were safely inside. "Did I really sound that panicked?""No it wasn't that! It was when you said you lost your keys. I thought you said you lost your TEETH."Lost my teeth! And me a mere baby of 65 as of today.Still I take scant comfort; losing my teeth could be next all right, all right. For now, on this quiet birthday I'm just feeling grateful.For friends and family...For the full set of teeth I grew in my own once-little mouth... and for the help of the young and strong. Thanks, all of you! Thanks for all the fun and learning, you super ABC guys! 

Wrong Audience

Ever say something that gets met with a silence so profound by those listening to you that you can hear the sound of their blood swimming laps inside their bodies?It doesn’t happen because what you’ve said is wrong in itself, most times; it’s just that you’ve said it in front of the wrong audience. In life, it’s all about knowing your audience. I knew I had the right audience the time I was addressing a roomful of women and proposed pantyhose for the upper arms. General hilarity! I also had the right audience when I was asked to speak to a class of Fifth Graders about the joys of first-person writing. I warmed us up by having everyone think about how funny it can be when people get the words wrong, and, by way of illustration, pointed to the many little kids who think the Star Spangled Banner is all about bums bursting in air. More hilarity!But sometimes you just have the wrong audience for your remarks. I think of when I went to get my car serviced last month and in seeking to remove my car key from its jangle of fellow keys, came upon the one that opened my dear uncle’s apartment, in his grave these two years now.I began telling the young mechanic about how I found his body.And crying. Which utterly flummoxed him.I had the wrong audience.  Another day, in my book group of highly refined ladies, I was trying to help us remember the name of the next book in our lineup.“Wait I know what it is! It’s on the tip of my tongue! The title is one word. Two syllables.” “Bootstrap!” one person said  and everyone laughed. “Hiccup!” said another. Again with the laughter. “Butthead!” I sang joyfully. Nobody laughed. Wrong audience. Again. And then there was the time last week when my mate and I went for dinner to the house of friends we have seen maybe eight times in the last 20 years. As we were packing up to leave at evening’s end, this spouse of mine picked up my little tote, one of those soft, six-section bags that the liquor store gives you if you buy a few bottles of wine.  “You never know WHAT she’s going to have in here," he told our hosts in jocular fashion. “Rotting fruit, random beverages, which then spill…” I shot him a look. It’s true I often carry produce in there, as well my traveling mug with the coffee still inside it - even though the thing has long since lost its spill-proof sealing gasket. But then, peering down into the bag, he went on: “Whoa, wait! You have a bra in here too? Why on earth are you carrying around a BRA?”At first a look of horror started across my face. Then I gave up and chose Truth:“Why is my bra in my wine tote? Because, everyone, I took it off during dinner, that time I slipped away to the bathroom.” I held my breath. I looked at our hosts – who  after a short pause, broke into peals of laughter.It's true we've only seen them eight times in 20 years, but 20 years is 20 years and they know me sure enough. Luckily, that time I had the right audience.

Why I Could Never Live on Some Farm

Because our family business was in the Berkshire Hills in Western Massachusetts, I spent my first 17 summers in the country. I feel safer in the dark than I do in a street-lit road but still: I say give me human habitation, the opportunity to wake mornings and see the houses of others, like I did 24 hours ago.The moon was just setting when I woke at 6:30 and looked across the street .Two minutes later, the sky was just that much lighter:And by 6:45  - well, you can see the change. A few lights on here, a path yet unshoveled there.Where are these neighbors right this very minute and what are they doing?On Thursday at the height of that storm, my neighbors Carol and Jim ran and got their own gear and shoveled me out when I got stuck half in and half out of my driveway, with wheels that simply spun and an engine that raced and whined.Carol had been walking her dog and came upon me.Maybe a dog is the thing to get; then you're out there ALL the time, connected to your fellow man and trotting mornings past house after house, all filled with the sleeping and the wakeful and the little children just leaping from their beds ..  

Happy V Day! Here, Let Me Stab You to Death

Here's an ominous Valentines Day symbol for ya: Check out this video taken from our study window just now. I video'd it instead of just snapping a picture because... it's SWAYING in this stiff winter wind. LOOK OUT BELOW! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmn3SXck-B8&feature=youtube_gdata_player]

False Gods

You hear a lot these days about our young people: How they don't know much. How they can't name the last three Presidents, say, never mind the first three. I read a survey of youth designed to reveal what they wanted in life - lots of money, they said, fast cars, fame - and It has me remembering the time a 13-year-old I’ll call Jenny came to my house and said it outright: “I don’t want to be known for any one thing,” she said cheerfully. “I just want to be famous.”“You know Jenny,” I  remember saying back.  “You could say that I'm so-called ‘famous’ in every town that runs a picture of me alongside my column in the paper but.. it’s nothing. I mean it doesn’t help. Mostly it just means strangers stare at you and think you don’t have feelings.”“Listen to this," I went on: 'One day an older woman beckoned to me from a group of women she was standing with. ’My friends wanted to know who Terry Marotta was,’ she said. They looked at me. Nobody spoke. ’That's all,' she finally added. 'They just wanted to see what you looked like.’ “So see what I mean? It’s not helpful. And sometimes, it hurts. And seeking it can be a kind of addiction.Years ago, I went to a wedding where the father of the bride was so famous he had to sit in a chair the whole night wearing an expression that said,  “Please. It’s my daughter’s day.” People respected that – until the second or third drink. Then they surrounded him, and his smiled was forced and tired.“No, don’t wish for fame, Jenny, I ended by saying. "The Queen of England has fame and who are her close friends do you think? The serving woman who helps dress her? The serving man who brings her her breakfast tray?”The survey also cited the famous people the kids said they wanted to be like: Entertainment figures and athletes to a one. There were no political or spiritual leaders on the list. No humanitarians. No inventors.But the kids aren’t to blame here. If they worship money it’s because we worship it. If they crave gadgets and fast cars it’s because we do too. If they covet fame and the big life is may be because they think it can protect them from a rising sense that the small life is not enough.One day, I was driving  with a 15-year-old I I’ll call James, who needed a ride to a place where he could take some standardized tests, because he wondered if he should go to a new school.He had had a bad year, and was at a loss. Three months before, a fire destroyed his home. His mother was severely burned. His little stepsister perished, as did the younger brother, who he had always said was his best friend in this world.But on this day we didn't speak of that. We spoke instead of the survey, for he had seen it too, and it bothered him.“Entertainers,” he said.“Fame,” I said.“Money,” he said. “Cars.”“Is that what we’re here for?" I asked rhetorically.He paused. He looked out the car window.“I always thought we were here to serve God.”No, fame and money don’t help – and they appear to have done very little to ease the troubled young heart of a Lindsay Lohan, say, or a Justin Bieber, who is  running widely afoul of the law right now.Let’s hope more of us can learn to be like James, who gave me permission to tell his story here; and who, in trying hard to do well and find his path is surely  serving God.

Memory Distorts: The Winter of '64

Memory sure distorts. I could have sworn the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show the same night I had that party where nearly 60 kids showed up and, as my diary, tells me, "ground chips into the rug, dumped sandwiches on chairs, tore books, spilled Cokes, flicked ashes, broke the television (Freddy fixed it), broke the glass punch ladle etc." Maybe you can make out the writing for yourself down below here.I also had the memory that, as the Beatles sang and the party roared on, some of the more poorly behaved boys, the ones who arrived smoking, were seen holding a bottle of Clorox. I know that the next morning I found out my little pet alligator dead, his ivory tummy thrown to the sky  in the shallow water of his enamel tub which smelled suspiciously like a swimming pool. (The party was held in our basement where the washer and dryer were, as well as the clothesline, which we took down for the night. (Clotheslines! Remember clotheslines?))It’s true all this happened but it wasn’t the Beatles-on-Ed Sullivan night at all. The party was on January 4, 1964 whereas the big night on NBC was February 9 of that year as we were all told again and again yesterday.How I blush to see what I revealed of myself in that diary: the way I was 'auditioning' one boyfriend and easing out another at age 14. The way I so callously described my mother’s poor bloody hand when she climbed up over the counter where we folded the clothes, hoisted the sash of the window she was bent on polishing for this silly party with one hand and then – too late – saw that same sash slam down onto her other hand. I only say that it ‘bled disgustingly’ but  even at the time I remember my heart swelling with love and gratitude to her for trying to make things nice for me and help me work my way in to the big new school.Here’s my favorite picture of the pre-Ringo Beatles, just as they were just starting out – and here at the top, obviously, is that diary entry too. Long time passing since those days all right!

Mock Away

People mock you when you have a minivan. They mock me,  but hey: when somebody  wants to transport a coffin I’m the one they call – and I notice they're not laughing then.I've had six minivans over the years, all made by the company that shares a name with that gorgeous Art Deco spire in New York City.I had a red one, then a maroon one, then a white one, then a green one and now a midnight blue one.  These last years, of course, they've all had the famous Stow ‘n Go Seats, where you just pull a couple of straps and the chairs all sink down into the floor, making room for your sideboards, sinks and sarcophagi.Also I love the design of the thing, with its cute high-hipped look, like certain breeds of puppies have, or colts. The running board is well off the ground, see, so you don't have to shrink and stoop to get into it. Plus then you ride high, like a long-distance trucker.You rule the road. And the speed at which you can accelerate is nothing short of amazing. Above is my baby today, just waiting to shake off this cocoon of snow and take me where I want to go tomorrow, when the sun is once again shining. 

Honor the Battle

The other day, I came across a few sentences I had scrawled on an old yellow pad back in the early 1990s:“For the last 10 years, anyone lying on his back in this bedroom has looked up at a water stain shape like Australia. I study it now, knowing that with every fresh rainfall it may grow, extending an ever-larger coastline of destruction across the plaster.“It's strange to find a message like this from one’s past; even stranger to come upon an old issue of a magazine from that same year and see a similar theme echoed there.In one of this magazine’s features, then-supermodel Lawrence Hutton was asked if she would consider having a facelift.“We must start to honor the battle,” she told her interviewer. “That’s what life is, and it shows on our faces. Plastic surgery is a way of saying you don't believe in experience.”This house of ours sure honors the battle. A world of facelifts couldn't keep all the experience it has seen from seeping through.We had already been here a while when I scribbled those notes. Several years had already passed since we had first walked inside and fallen in love. It may have been the graceful curve of the banister in the second-floor hall.Back then, we took one of its old-lady-style bedrooms and made it over for a toddler in a jungle wallpaper with cross-eyed monkeys and zebras and toucans. During the eternities of naptime, that child had slept and talked to her stuffed animals and even, as we learned years later, wormed her way under the bed to leave crooked pencilings on the wooden slats supporting the box spring.The little room down the hall we did over in a teddy bear motif for a baby soon to arrive.Both wallpapers were gone by the time I wrote those notes, the teddies having given way to a paper with a repeating pattern in which Wile E. Coyote parachuted sadly to earth after his last failed attempt on the life of the Road Runner, seen zooming gaily around the baseboards in a snappy roadster.As for the jungle creatures, they had given way to a pale peach paint, jointly chosen by mother and child, that, as the years passed, was gradually covered over by a collage of photographs: of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley and Edgar Allen Poe.But all that was just cosmetics.Plenty else has happened here, including two falls down the stairs, the gradual loosening of that pretty banister due to too much use by small would-be ballerinas, and a sudden deluge of water through the kitchen lights when a person who shall remain nameless turned on the bath taps and wandered off to write. We have also seen many a mice infestation and many a bat visit.Someone’s life ended in this house and someone else took a spectacular inadvertent dive backwards off the front porch and into the bushes. We've been hit by one unforgettable bolt of lightning that in an instant took out every electronic appliance in the place.No, you don't have to sit still long in this life for things to begin happening to you. A great deal has happened both to us and to our house in our time here, it seems. The water stain shaped like Australia is gone now and I actually sort of miss it. Luckily though, the kitchen ceiling has started to come slowly down in fat curling flakes - more ‘experience’  as Lauren Hutton would say.I just sweep them up, and shake my head, and smile.

Silliest Come on Yet

The surgical department here named is one of the best. They dug a basal cell carcinoma out of my own little shin two autumns ago and within the year, the wound was almost invisible.  What looked like an elliptical scoop- mark, made as if by an oversized grapefruit spoon, is now a faint and slender line, scarce visible even to me, never mind casual observers.They're the ones who sent me this promotion  last week.The lady is pretty and I guess I get the sentiment but when you say that aging simply won't do you might as well say you're ready to reach for the hemlock.We age. Period. You can suck out and pin up all you want but look around the whole perimeter: Are your two feet the smooth little darlings they once were? Are the backs of your hands freckle-free? Don't look now, but something is sure happening to the skin at the base of your glutes and I'm not talking about cellulite.It's gravity, baby. Gravity and wear-and-tear. When Aging Simply Won't Do: Hah! What really won't do is acting like you can beat the House when everyone who’s honest knows it: the House always wins in the end.

You Know You're Old Part Two

And here's the second half of the story I started earlier, this one 'given' to me one day last week as I stood in a room chatting away with seven male teenagers and one grown woman.“Ready to go?” I said to the seven teens who were departing on an expedition with me, and took a few strides toward the front hallway of the house we were in.“Wait, what’s THAT?” one teen suddenly said, pointing down toward my boots,  where a cloud of purple silk was seen to be pooling around my ankles.“It’s my slip!” I yelped, no less surprised to see it than I would be to see a small fire licking its way up my calves. But come to think of it, the elastic at the waistband did seem a little shot when I had put the thing on an hour before.The one other woman present was, by this time, laughing so hard she couldn't talk, and that was funny all by itself. But it paled in comparison to what one of the male teens then said: “What's a slip?” I might as well have been wearing a whalebone corset for the way they looked at me as I tried to explain.Something has happened in the culture if full slips and half slips have disappeared so thoroughly from the radar of the under-30s ......Which leads me to ask this question of anyone who might know the answer. Why on EARTH does every young woman under 40 now go bare-legged, even in the depths of winter?! 

You Know You're Old When ...

You know you’re getting up there in when, you have an experience like this: On tearing through the mall one day, you impulsively duck into a discount department store, head for the loungewear and pull from the rack a delicious-looking sample of the cozy-clothes on display there.You don’t even try the thing on.Then, on seeking to return it a week later because in fact it is sized more for Dumbo the Elephant than for any human female, you learn to your amazement that the young person at Customer Service does not recognize it as any species of garment at all.“What IS this?” she asks, holding it up to start processing the refund.“Uh…” you say.She keeps on examining it, turning it over in her hands as you stand stunned into silence.“Wait, what do you mean ‘what is it?’ you finally say. “It’s a bathrobe of course!”“THIS is a bathrobe? “ she says with a look of complete befuddlement.“Yes, it’s a bathrobe!“ you say back with a similar look.  It’s as if you are from two countries sharing a common language in which the word ‘bathrobe’ means entirely different things. “It’s not, like, a costume of some kind?” she says. “A costume?’ you say. “Like for a king? One of the Three Kings maybe, like, you know, for a Christmas pageant?” “What? No! This a BATHROBE. This is what bathrobes look like!"Ah but that is where you are wrong. Because in fact bathrobes have not looked like this in some time.No, these kinds of bathrobes, done in polyester plush, zipping up the front and topped off with a yoke of smocking or ornamental braid, have not truly been seen since the Golden Girls drifted around their airy ranch house on rising from their beauty sleep.That is why the young woman thinks you a dinosaur, as you are. As you surely are.... 

At Least Someone is Enjoying the Winter

At least someone is enjoying the winter.Kids seem to like it fine, though I see by this picture that ONE of our own young'uns seems to not THAT bundled up against the cold? (Where is your hat, little David? Are you like your uncle Michael who took the commuter rail to school every single day of his ninth grade year in only a T-shirt?)But anyway...The squirrels also seem to be having a fine time, with their tails as curved and compact as croquet wickets.They say the cardinals are fine with winter too, though I have yet to see a cardinal this whole winter. Do they even stay here, or do they board that southbound bus like Ratso Rizzo with his  newfound pal, the country boy Joe Buck. Remember that movie Midnight Cowboy? Remember Everybody's Talkin' at Me, that wistful haunting song that seemed to function as almost another character in the film? Here's a lovely montage that shows why that film was s unforgettable...I dream of that big bus south. Once, we took the train all the way from Boston to Tampa in deep winter and I still remember how it felt to fall asleep glimpsing at the icicle-resembling obelisk of the Washington monument and wake rockingly in Georgia where everything was softer and green even at that season and dogs loping across their yards to sniff what was new in the soil that day.  Ah! How long until I can I go south myself, even for a few days? How long oh Lord?But you know what? It's not enough to just give you the link to that montage. Let me insert it right here.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMN8zyT7QDQ]

So Much for ONE Resolution

I promised here the other day that I wouldn't be telling people my dreams but after the doozy of a dream I had the other night I had the urge to tell it to everybody I saw the next day, practically. It had plots and subplots, early death, shower scenes. It was like a screenplay by Hitchcock , directed by Martin Scorsese. I do talk to people more than most folks do – even to strangers - but not about my own stuff and in the end only my poor husband heard that account in full.No, I don't bore my family members with my inner thoughts. I save that for my descendants, meaning:I write a diary.Here are a couple of pages I'm not necessarily proud of. (The penmanship alone!)I just riffled through the 2013 diary randomly to find them.I know it seems like pretty dull stuff.And yet what is life made up of but the blessed everyday? Who among us, in the moments after the car crash, the fire, the diagnosis, does not bargain hard with the Universe for the clock to be turned back just one hour, just a single hour, God, to return to us to the dear, dull quotidian?