Such Peace

You fly all day inside a fuselage that looks like the inside of a lobster carcass. Hour one: slow. Hour two: even slower. Hour three: are we there yet? Hour four: not yet. Hour five: and the clouds give way and the tarmac rises to meet you and at long last  you are sq-u-ee-e-e-ezed on out of the plane, slowly though, as the other passengers gather up their bags and belongings, like so much cake batter inside a pastry cone.Then you hobble to baggage claim, find what's yours, board a bus to the rental car center, get the vehicle and drive for another forever as the children get restless and the baby gets hives but at last  AT LAST!  the following morning you wake in this new place and its peace fills you so full you forget all but the beauty of this moment.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N8Qrswwra8

First Day of the Rest of Your Life

Here we are again with another First Day of the Rest of Your Life.Time for that lovely poem by Red Saner called Green Feathers. It's about moss, like the kind that grows on old headstones, but it's all about hope, this springy green stuff, not the end of hope. Listen:

Five minutes till dawn and a moist breath of pine resin comes to me as from across a lake. It smells of wet lumber, naked and fragrant. In the early air

We keep trying to catch sight of something lost up ahead, A moment when the light seems to have seen us Exactly as we wish we were.

Like a heap of green feathers poised on the rim of a cliff?

Like a sure thing that hasn’t quite happened? Like a marvelous idea that won’t work? Routinely amazing - How moist tufts, half mud, keep supposing

Almost nothing is hopeless. How the bluest potato Grew eyes on faith the light would be there. And it was.

And it was: the light was there.  Welcome new life! Alleluia!

 

Cause of Death

As my good friend and fellow blogger Ann Aikens posted just now on The Upper Valley Girl, "If holy weekend Passover on about death and mayhem and baffled onlookers I don't know what is."I do hear that. The topic of death has me thinking today, the quiet day when the Christians world waits to see if the miracle will occur tomorrow. And I guess death is also on my mind because of a fantastic article I recently read in The New Yorker about the history of death certificates, which seem to have first originated after the huge loss of life during the Black Death in the 14th century.Here are some of the things you could die of according to the old documents which in 17th and 18th century England were called Bills of Mortality. Back then you could be carried off by: 

• Bleach – I almost did that once. Stuff tastes na-a-a-a-asty.
• Cramps – had those - nasty again.
• Itch - what torture to die of an itch!
• Cut of the stone (hmmm)
• Or something called Rising of the Lights. (And who doesn't understand how daylight might affect you if you'd been to a real Rager the night before?)

According to Kathryn Schulz, the article’s author, you could also die of something called Kings Evil. (Is that Anything like droit de seigneur?)I'll let her tell the rest: In 17th and 18th century England

“You could succumb to Overjoy, which sounds like a decent way to go, or Be Devoured By Lice which does not. You could die of Stopping Of The Stomach, or Head Ach, or Chin Cough. You could die of Horseshoe Head but don't ask me how.  You could die of being a Lunatick. You could die of, basically death: "Suddenly”; "Killed by Several Accidents"; "Found Dead in the Streets."

You could also die of "Frighted" and of "Grief."The story in my family is that a long-ago relative died of fright in the 1870s some time after a bunch of boys dressed as ghosts dangled themselves outside her bedroom window. She was 13. Another ancestor died of 'Dropsy'. I know that because it says so right on her death certificate though I can't say I know what Dropsy is.What we really need to know is WHY someone died. As the author writes "we want to know if a loved one suffered or was at peace, or if her death was meaningful, or whether we could have prevented it, or how the universe could have permitted it at all. " On these questions, she goes on to say, "the death certificate is mute. "instead it provides the pathological basis of death, determined by some combination of fact, convention and guesswork, and described in terms that most non-doctors struggled to understand.”My Uncle Ed's death certificate lists a heart condition. Because the circumstances were so painful I know that they were only guessing about that, but there it is. They were wrong about the time of death too. They wrote down the date when I found him but I could tell because I knew him so well and knew his patterns that he had died someplace between 5 o'clock and 7 o'clock the evening before.The author concludes this article by underlining the fact that all a death certificate does is try to explain WHY we die. "But when we are in the pitch of grief – or for that matter in the full sunshine of joy – what form, what blank, what cause, final, immediate, or underlying could possibly answer that question to anyone's satisfaction. Why do we die? We die because we were born; because we are mortal....”But on a day as glorious as this just ending do we rely believe WE will ever die? Are we not the stable central cast of characters around whom other characters briefly flit and visit? No, alas, we are not. And one day our names too will be placed on a form and filed with the state. 

I'm Goin' With It

Yesterday saw such a tropical wind-driven rain around here that people’s hairdos were all over the place.My own hair, curly by nature anyway, was practically in the next county - EVEN THOUGH I had duly blown it dry and flat-ironed the daylights out of it, as is my custom.

The moisture in the air, driven by strong spring winds, was so extreme the TV reporters on scene all over the area were apologizing for their coifs. They looked like the utterly bedraggled news anchors in the first Batman movie, remember? After Jack Nicholson's Joker poisons the makeup supply to give people that same frozen smirk he has? I don't have a still image of the funny cameo when you see a pair in the days afterward, on camera without their usual buffing up, but let's say they - and all of us yesterday - looked like Sofia Vergera on one of those mean 'Celebrities WIth No Makeup' sites:

(Hard to believe that even IS the hot Latin wife from Modern Family, huh? "Mahnny! Dj'you loook so haaaandsome!" )When I got home last night my hair was so wildly tentacled I decided to do something new: I decided to stop fighting it. I put it in a few small rollers and 20 minutes later it looked like  this. I'm thinking of going with it. All these years I've had this curly hair, why NOT set it free at long last? I'm no Sofia Vergara to begin with and thank the good Lord for that.  

Fun for the Four-Eyed (and more)

Two days ago I picked up a pair of glare-canceling nonprescription glasses (for night driving) and also a pair of prescription glasses, for the dreaded unforeseen circumstances under which my contacts pop clear out of my head.When you're at the optician's, they clamp all these gadgets to your face and then take a picture.Soooo, documentarian that I am, I took a picture OF that picture.It's me all right - same dumb little nose - but my eyes look strangely un-brown. I knew I had better get some of those glare-killing glasses because I often have precious cargo aboard in my car: seven talented young scholars, entrusted  for four years  to my town's local chapter of the A Better Chance Program by their awesome families. Here they all are last fall, on a fun outing in Boston that Resident Academic Coordinator Penny took them on. It was also last fall, while bringing them to see an amazing performance of Romeo & Juliet at the Strand Theatre in  Dorchester,  that I glanced down at my navigator for half a second and rolled into the car in front of us.At 5 mph, but still. The woman driving that car yelled "That really hurt!" and grabbed her neck when I jumped out to apologize. She also called the Staties. Those guys arrived, lights flashing, together with three guys in a fire truck, all of whom quickly assessed the situation and declared it a non-event.The boys, meanwhile, had hopped out of my car right when I did, some of them to comfort me (she was really yelling) and some to take pictures of her completely unblemished rear bumper.But then, when we all climbed back in to resume out pilgrimage, they were, to a man, quietly texting their mums:"Terry just rear-ended someone."Humbling! AND scary!Now I take so many precautions behind the wheel it's a wonder I ever get out of my own driveway, where peace reigns and even the field mouse feel safe. 

Who Needs a Shrink?

If it weren’t for your subconscious, you wouldn't have a CLUE about what your real issues are.  I dreamed that I woke one morning to find our house filled with many different families. I began tearing around to make sure we had enough provisions for all these strangers and only noticed after what seemed like days that I hadn’t seen the cats. “WHERE ARE THE CATS?” I cried in this dream, dashing about yet more frantically - until I found them at last in our dank unfinished basement, as skinnied-out with neglect a pair of empty gloves. Then, two nights later, I had a dream that was no dream at all but an actual memory, of something my hail and vital mother said halfway through a party we threw for her 80th birthday. At the celebration's start, just before the guests began arriving, she heard some of us squabbling about who was supposed to have laid the fire. “That was always the trouble in our family,” she sighed sadly about a time 60 years in the past: “No one was ever in charge.” Then, an hour later, still sitting there by the fire, she closed her eyes and died, her small plate of dessert pastries falling from her lap.Unearthing that memory sure explains why I’ve held myself responsible for the very wheeling of the stars ever since that fateful day. SOMEONE’S got to be in charge!...And more messages from my subconscious came just last night, when I dreamed I was trying to run a meeting of volunteers in my community but somehow could not speak commandingly enough to hold their attention.I started out in the classroom and so I know: this is every teacher’s worst fear.  In this dream that was more of a nightmare, one of the whisperers actually turned her chair around so that her back was to me. In this dream that was more of a nightmare I say again, I went over to her and in a pathetic begging tone said, “Don’t you care about the mission of this organization?” "Not since YOU took over as president!” she sneered.  Then, “When is this going to be over? somebody groaned. “Yeah,” whined someone else. “I want to watch the game!”I threw out the most intransigent talkers, something that in real life you can't actually DO in an all-volunteer organization, and finally gave up and gavel things to a close.On her way out, the sneering one shot me a sidelong look. "Nothing personal," she smirked. "It hurt, what you said before," I began, again with that pathetic wheedling tone, but "Hey!" she barked back. “It is what it is! Plus, you know you've really let yourself go lately."So there it is: a trifecta of Bulletins From My Subconscious, which would appear to be suggesting the things I am evidently worried about, which are:

• A. That I'm a poor caregiver and have done little to keep the home fires burning; 
• B. That I really am letting myself go. (Didn’t I just the other day wear a pair of pants I’ve had since the 1970s?)
• C. that I’m less than stellar at running the actual meeting I do actually have to run in my waking life.

I worry about these things, evidently, but maybe I shouldn't, overmuch. God didn't make me a manager anyway. He made me a teacher I’m pretty sure, and maybe I'm a teacher still, on the inside, because really I just want to affirm everybody and make it a good class. And clothes from the 70s are cool!  And as for the cats, well the cats died some time ago. Maybe they're sitting in Heaven right now, together with my mom, all three this very minute enjoying a nice little plate of pastries.

What's the Deal with the Docs?

Watch what you say to your doctor, jeez. This new doc I talked about seeing last week took the records from my old doc and just copied  a bunch of stuff without going over it with me - and the stuff was wildly inaccurate. Unbeknownst to me the first doc had written this about me:None of which is true. None of it!Take syncope, which means fainting. Sure, I fainted some in my school days but the roots of that were theological. The minute I joined the Congregational Church the fainting stopped.And sure I may have mentioned the time I fainted one midnight in a lovely old Vermont farmhouse where I was a guest but that was only because I had spent 8 hours on my feet that day, then driven three hours to get there. At midnight, in my little bed, I suddenly got a cramp in the leg of that accelerator foot that was so painful it lifted me like Lazarus from out-flat to upright in less than half a second. You can't zoom the elevator to the top that fast without losing a little blood to the head, naturally and so I fainted. Got up too fast from that spectacular slump, and lurched toward the bathroom - where I fainted again, hitting my head on sharp corner of the bathroom vanity en route to the floor.That’s where the 'neck pain' came from: ten days after the episode when the finally did an X-ray to see about things my neck muscles were still in spasm. So yes I had neck pain, FOR A WHILE, yes. And I had fainted that night one night; I did.  But I haven’t fainted more than twice in 40 years. The only other time I remember fainting was at the Harvard Coop when I was shopping for a nice wide necktie for David's birthday. It was the 70s and ties were wonderfully wide, and colorful. I went down in the aisle and the floor manager dragged me behind the counter to get me out of the way. (Fainting is like, that, trust me: the people around the fainter just want to haul off the body.)As for Osteoporosis I don’t know here the first doc got that one, unless it was from the little joke I made about Osteopenia, which I called the other osteo's waiting room.I look now at this sheet with my ‘conditions’ on it as I exited he new doc’s office last week and it makes my blood boil. To make matters worse there's this disclaimer that says if anything is in error tell your PCP. Like, 'Don't tell us! We don’t care!'I found that strange too.When I first sat down with the new doc  I asked the guy Should I write down every procedure I ever had? Meaning should I write that I had my tubes tied back in ‘84?“Nah,” he said at his desk without even looking over his shoulder at me. “We just care about eye stuff. "So there you are: if the first doc wrote down too much and wrote it down inaccurately then this second doc was willing to write down too little.So maybe the sipping straws that are a person’s fallopian tubes really aren't that interesting to anyone 30 years down the line but something about the whole thing griped me. I should have told him I'd had my head replaced, like they did with old Jeremy Bentham when they staffed him and put him on display in that British museum. (You see his fake head on top, see, as his actual, somewhat worse-for-the-wear head rests under the chair on which he sits.) I wonder what either one of them would have written down then? Here's dead and stuffed Mr. Bentham now, providing some good perspective on many levels for us all .   

Ready for the Week?

I'm waking up earlier these mornings so I can lie in the bed longer.I know it sounds funny but is there anything nicer than just being where you are for once and looking around a little?This is what we did as babies as we lay in our cribs and what sound is sweeter than the sound of babies waking and quietly cooing to themselves? Video cameras installed in their rooms let parents watch all this nowadays but isn’t it better to let them have their privacy, at least for these little rituals?I wouldn't want anyone but God looking at me mornings when I then shift over on to my back, hang my head over the edge of the bed and look out the bedroom window at that sky every morning, doctor's orders. (It's good for any neck that has begun to arc forward, instead of arcing back as Nature intended.  I also assume Yoga's Reclining Bound Angle Pose to open my hips.My bedmate thinks I’m odd but I can tell you it feels amazing, not just the opening of the joints but the just plain lying there. Inside my head, aloft in this mental heaven, thoughts drift past, and, in their drifting, match the lazy flights of the birds riding the air currents high over all our roofs.My thoughts are long thoughts because my mind has risen above the daily landscape. There are no lists, no tasks, no plans for the future, but only this wonderful perspective. I can see my babyhood from here. Sometimes in my mind I can even walk through our old first house with its dark oak wainscoting and the smell of my grandfather’s cigars enshrouding his reading chair. He was still going off to his law office at 80, and at day's end would ride the El home and have Hershey Bars in the pockets of his overcoat for my sister Nan and me to ‘go fishing' for when he took it off to hang it in the closet.I see all this and I think about the arc of my life, bending toward whatever fate. Last night I dreamed of sweet forgiveness from one I had long ago wronged and remembered that dream only because I was lying on my back in this way.Oh for how many years did I leap from my bed already fizzing with the day's anxiety! For now, somehow, all that has lifted. Problems remain with more problems to come but maybe I will be able to greet them more peacefully now, with a quieter mind.Thus i am grateful for these gifts that today are mine:  the absence of pain, a safe home, and food in my belly. Gratitude for work to do and people to love. I’m midway through the day’s work now with much more work ahead. The difference is I feel equal to the task - and I hope you do too. :-);

Everyone But Me

People are crazy. I'm always asking myself: why can’t they be normal like I am? Why don’t they do things the way I do them, the right way, in other words?And I know what I’m talking about. I get around. I go to laundromats for example. I watch the way people stuff their clothes into those washing machines. Crazy! SOME people – people in my own family, in fact - crowd up a washing machine like you wouldn’t believe. In go queen-size sheets, a few bath towels, a mattress pad, all in one load, and how is it going to get pounded clean THAT way?  I’d rather make a dress out of newsprint and wear that around than put on some of the clothes I’ve seen washed like that. Also, you hate to say it but a lot of people are crazy and nervy both. Young people, I'm thinking in this case. Young female people.Who are my children. They won’t wear stockings, even in winters as frigid as this one just past. Their legs are purple. But will they listen if you mention this fact to them? They will NOT. And they then have the nerve to frame ME as some kind of throwback.  They even mock me, for the nice Queen Size Suntan pantyhose I happen to be sporting. Which, by the way, are wonderfully warm. AND make my legs look great. “Sausage casings!” they hoot. “You’re wearing sausage casings!” And speaking of nervy, Get this: I'm at the leotard-and-dance-shoe store stocking up on Zumba essentials this one day and I ask the clerk if she can point me in the direction of the tights.“I’ll fetch them for you,” she says. “How tall are you?” she then asks, and I give her the same answer I gave at age 16 to the Registry cop who was filling out the paperwork after my road test.“Five-seven,“ I said to him at the time, thinking, ‘Why not round it upwards, Terry? You'll grow more …’So, “Five-seven " I say to the clerk. “Five-SEVEN?!” pipes up this perfect stranger beside me at the counter. “I’M five-seven and you're totally shorter than me. Plus, look. I'm in ballet shoes and you're wearing a boot with a heel. You're no five foot seven!” I handed over my money and hurried away from that dame fast.Damn fast, I can tell you.So see what I mean about people? Nervy and crazy both.Because isn't a girl free to say what height she is?I’m five-foot-seven! A cop said I am. He wrote it down. And his word lives on, right here on my license.  :-)  

The Old Doc to the New Doc Blues

These are your eyes, seen form above. Pretty choice pic huh?So I just changed eye doctors yesterday. I had a perfectly capable one but my husband is a trustee at this famous eye hospital and it finally dawned on me that I should be going there for my care.Plus my night vision really sucks lately.The eye doctor who used to treat me was honest with me always. She said there was a tiny ‘fog’ of cataract in one eye, which we would watch. Each time I came to see her she noted my mother’s glaucoma history and told me I had 'drusen' in my eye, which always made me feel like laughing. “Your drusen keeps on Snoozin'" I would think every time she said it.And you know I liked her well enough - even though in these last years she seemed to imply that I was some ancient thing. For example when I said I was on no medications save for a tiny dose of Levoxyl she looked at me the way they do when they think you're lying about how many drinks you have in a day.Then she said the time was coming when I probably couldn't wear contacts anymore. “God forbid!” I cried. “Why do you say that?”“Because older people have trouble seeing their eyes and getting that little tiny lens in there.  Plus, well you know, with the wrinkles and all….”Still, she was a warm person.  And as soon as I sat down in front of this new eye doc I to begin missing her sharply.He kept interrupting me as I told him what the other doctor said.“A cataract?!" he thundered. "People shouldn't throw around the word ‘cataract’! I would not call when you have a cataract and you certainly don’t need a surgical procedure!”I mentioned the contacts issue too and how sad it would be if I could no longer wear contacts.“Why on earth would you be unable to keep wearing contacts,” he barked.  “Unless your hands become crippled with arthritis?”He said in so many words that glaucoma isn’t inherited so I could just chill the hell out about that too.Then he told me everybody has bad night vision, and that I should just go get the specially-lensed glasses.I started to say “No but, see, I don't LIKE to wear glasses”, but I knew he didn't care to hear it.  I guess I’ll wear my contacts same as always and over them, at night, I’ll wear some plain-glass glasses, made in this special glare cancelling way. "I'll see you in a year,” he wound up. “Call with any problems” he added and I was out the door.So yeah, he might have been a mite grouchy but his news was good and the head technician in the place who did all the eye chart stuff couldn’t have been nicer. When she first came in the room and saw my reading through the records I had brought from my old eye doctor we had a good laugh. “It says here that I kept coming in with my contacts rolled back in my head somewhere.  It says sometimes I’d come because I had two lenses in the same eye, one on top of the other.“Hah!” she cried merrily. “Don’t feel bad. I couldn’t get a contact lens in if you stood over me with a gun.” And thus drops the curtain on another eye exam. I went out into the day blinded by the light with my scary dilated pupils ....but happy enough – as long as I was careful not to dwell on the fact that exactly nobody out there has any kind of decent night vision (!) 

Jiggety Jig

Going to a conference in a famously warm climate was fun and all but let's face it: You can't avoid your fate and our fate as Americans is obviously to shiver for five months, because that's sure enough what we've been doing. My man and I packed shorts and t-shirts, bathing suits and sunscreen and really, except for about 90 minutes at the end of one afternoon we never took of the twenty-five towels we tried wrapping ourselves in out by the pool.Plus then you have to come home again... Where It's raining and HAS been raining and PLANS on raining for the foreseeable future. Suffice to say we didn't need these!This was a conference about gaskets, which we all know and love. And in the end I was happy to be there in the company of people who know gaskets.“You should come with me to the gasket convention in Orlando,” David had said to me months earlier.“Gaskets! What are gaskets anyway?” I  had said.“O-rings,” he said. “Things used to make a joint water- or air- or particle-tight.”“Come on, there aren’t any O-rings anymore, only microchips!” I said back, just to get him going. He’s in manufacturing, an industry which for a while appeared to be diminishing here in the good old US of A like a tray full of Shrinky-Dinks in an oven.“How wrong you are,” he replied. “You couldn’t live without O-rings. Nobody could.”And if that wasn’t the language of romance then I don’t know what the language of romance is. And so, to paraphrase Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses, I said, yes I said yes, I said yes, I will go with you to Orlando.”And go I did, to sunny central Florida, where I saw exactly no preening by the Gorgeous Young, nor anyone enviously eyeing anyone else’s contours. Instead I saw only myself reading a story in which the main character finds herself touring Ireland as a passenger in a car her mother has to rent because she herself can’t drive a standard shift. Every day the narrator sits on what should be the driver’s side but without any steering wheel until she begins to feel like a child again and thinks, “I’m back.”That’s how I felt, despite the chill:  Back. A little kid again with all this solitude.Watching the people go by.Reading my book.Times like this you almost don’t MIND the chill, and hey your fate is your fate. Plus one way or the other you gotta figure there'll be tulips in a month. Right? Am I right there, please God?   

We're All in This Together

Even on a bus 50 miles out, you can feel the great city pulling you toward it, and next thing you know you’re rolling down an off-ramp to a small sign. “Welcome to the Bronx,” it says.Here, a century-old schoolhouse stands, with cutouts of small paper tulips adorning its windows. There, items on a clothesline resemble notes on a musical staff. They hum a few bars as they snap in the stiff spring wind. And ever southward the big bus lumbers, as it carries us closer to the city’s soaring towers.One wide corner more and we are on the isle of Manhattan: high up in Harlem.“Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard” a street reads, and the earnest commerce spreads all around us from the Wizard of Eyes Optical Shop to a take-out shop called Young Fish.A man in a wheelchair sits by a crosswalk as if waiting for the light-change - until a closer look shows him to be sleeping, head bowed, his hand resting on his head as a mother’s hand might rest on the head of her little one.Before an old brownstone, a young dad stoops beneath his popped-up car hood, probing inside it, as beside him, a slender little girl in pink looks thoughtfully on.Here are You and Me Fashions and The Bethel Church of Our Lord God Jesus Christ.  Here now is the We the People Document Service Center. And here is a mosque. And there is a temple.Every time I come to this city, I am amazed by the easy exchanges among its citizens.At home, I live on a corner lot in a town with yards both front and back. My neighbors are great and friendly people but we keep a certain distance.Here, the opposite is true, and I can’t help but smile at people as I pass them. Most smile back, though often after that little hiccup of hesitation when you can see that they’re thinking, “Do I know her?”But they do know me, in a way.  In New York we all know one another. We are all eating at this pushcart, with its pretzels and hot dogs. We are all watching this street vendor as he puts on his lively show.More important, we are sleeping side by side, and I think it is this fact that moves me the most when I come here: the implied human trust that lets us lie down in such proximity. The bed in my hotel room is not 15 feet from the bed of the woman next door. I tune out the ventilator’s humming din and I can tell: she has a little cough. When it is time to leave this wonderful place my big mooing bus just reverses direction and wades on upstream: Past Fineman’s, the department store and Engine 35, the firehouse. Past P.S. 57, the elementary school and Casa di Dios, the house of worship.Past playgrounds and past basketball games. Past housing projects with their benched and sunning elders.  In my town, one family has its property rigged up so that a loud recorded voice warns you away the second your foot hits the driveway.That’s no way to live, if you ask me. What makes a city work is the same thing that makes a country work: the willingness to look out for one another and not just ourselves; the willingness to extend our good wishes and our greetings both, and the willingness to freely use and share our public spaces.  

I Was Away for a While

I was away for a while, so I set this lady up in my place  (haha! Throwback to Tuesday's post.)I wasn't really away from Dave, though we have been at this business conference. He's this one with the white hair:I'm this wanly waving one. (It's freezing here, palm trees or no. I had to go up to the room and get my tights.)At any conference they make you wear these big clunky nametags on chains - for the networking of it I suppose - but a man can carry off this look a lot better than a woman in a cocktail dress can. Riding down in the elevator to the first night's reception, I caught side of myself thus hung, in the mirrored walls."I feel like a cow at an auction," I said.  "Why do I have to  wear this things at your conference? No one wants to network with me!""Two words," said another conference attendee also in the elevator. "Free drinks."Moo.  

Inside the Bathing Suit

Here’s the latest Believe It or Not: I found a bunch of bathing suits that come with the ladies already in them! And OK yes they’re made of see-through plastic and are missing their insides and their arms and their whole back half but still they have the important stuff, meaning,  ahem, breasts, that fill out the suit very nicely.“Wo they’re selling ladies! “ I cried when I came upon them in the bathing suit bin at my local BJ’s. Four other shoppers whipped their heads around to stare at me, but I couldn’t help it: they reminded me so much of the Visible Woman I got for my ninth birthday and oh the fun I had painting her little pancreas and tiny colon!She had breasts too, which were highly interesting to us kids since our mother was so modest she practically hid in the cellar to change. As a result Nan and I grew up in ignorance. What were breasts anyway? WE sure didn’t know and we were girls! We called them ‘lumps.’ “When will WE get lumps?” we asked each other.And now here were all these bathing suits that came with them! I picked one up. A two-piece, nice. Little black shorts and a kind of overblouse, cute. Made by Jantzen, a reputable house.I grabbed one and brought it right home; put a fright wig on its stem of a neck and propped it up on the bed next to Dave who said “DO NOT take a picture! OK DO NOT put that picture on your blog!"So I took her into the study and propped her up against the window so you could se her.She’s amazing , right?  She even has a bellybutton!  I love her.She goes with my skeleton, the next best thing I bought in the last six months.Now all I need is a bag of insides and there’s my kit: Visible Woman '14, here I come! 

I'm Happy Today

I'm happy today hanging out with my old man David  - these are his arms -who slept so late I thought he'd been kidnapped from our very bed, sucked out through the bedroom window by aliens. Call Liam Neeson!I'm happy because we will see our daughter Annie and her man John,though not their baby-dog Archer, still just a pup, though tall enough at 8 months to sweep the counters clean if left unattended.We'll see our daughter Carrie too, which makes me happy......though sadly not her  Chris, or their oldest son, since the two of them will I suppose be watching basketball or some such silly March thing while the rest of us are at our favorite eatery.Along with Carr, we'll also get to see their two younger children who are always ready to join me in restaurant fun. (Today: tiny black-velvet fuzzy-posters with bright neon-colored markers!) Sadly, we won't get to see our son Michaelsince he's out in Utah this weekend pretending to ski, a thing not really in our blood. David grew up with sandlot baseball, and pounding and being pounded by the other kids at the park, while the main pastime for my one sister and me was sneaking into the alley just around the corner from Blue Hill Ave. to inspect this one dead cat as it went through the absorbing transformation from the three-dimensional to something flatter than an old kid glove squashed under somebody's tires. I'm happy because I'm about to sit down and write 14 days' worth of entries in my diary. (My entries are a lot more interesting, I find, if wait 'til I'm really in the mood for the endeavor and can do the mental levitation that let me look at my last few weeks from the air, so to speak, and thus spot the highlights.)I'm happy because I just said 'Screw returning those shoes to Macy's today. The store will still be there tomorrow when my workday ends.'I'm happy because I think I might be about to actually vacuum that room I've been meaning to vacuum for a month.I'm happy because we watched that old chestnut Ghostbusters yesterday and I read my three books and stripped the lid to the piano bench for a piano that lives at the ABC house. I'm happy because I got it all sanded and primed and even stained. Now David will help me screw on the lid, I can put on two finish coats and then trot it on over there.I am not so happy when I remember that I almost learned to play the piano as an adult, together with Michael who was then 11, but quit just as I was getting that itchy feeling in the top of my head when my fingers were starting to know what a note was. We both quit and I'm sad now that we quit, causing the people who gave us the loan of that nice old upright piano to take it back again to give to worthier persons ... But the days are getting longer now and who knows but what I'll go out and buy a little keyboard and have another go at learning a new thing? We learn till we die do we not? I'm happy remembering that truth.And now, me playing that classic beginner's piece The Happy Farmer at age six (but why doesn’t that guy in the suit leave my nice pink dress ALONE!  

Cynical? Sarcastic?

I was getting some bodywork, on account of a spine that in the last few years has started to feel like one of those twisty drinking straws your kids will beg you to buy, then use once and forget all about. Only of course your back you can never forget about since you use it every day, along with the muscles in your core that hold it up.There I was anyway, prone on this massage therapist’s table, my face pressed into that padded doughnut-looking thing they have at one end.I was doing my best to get through the part where they use the tip of an elbow to press the living daylights out of your calf muscles – since, as they explain, everything is connected to everything else in the body and if you want to ‘open’ the tissues higher up, you have to start by undoing any kinks closer to the floor. “Breathe through the pain,” she had just said and God knows I was trying to. Then, as she was walking around me to get at my other leg, she asked what I did for work."I write,” I said in a voice muffled by the foam of the face cradle. “A column,” I managed to add.  “For various newspapers.”She started in on my other calf and as the lights inside my head began to dim and billow with that point-of-the-elbow move, she went on:“What do you write about?”“Oh I don’t know,” I squeaked. “ Our common life I guess.  It’s mostly observational. “Sometimes it’s funny,” I added.That’s when she asked the question that leads me to bring you into this sacred-seeming room in the first place:“So what is your writing like? Is it cynical and sarcastic?”Puzzled by the question, I stayed silent for a beat. “Oh no! Not at all!” I finally blurted.“Because I mean I can be pretty sarcastic myself,” she said.Cynical and sarcastic?The words kept echoing in my ears. In all the interacting and people-watching I have done in the course of my career, I have never seen anything that would prompt me to write in a cynical or sarcastic fashion.  In fact 99% of the time what I see is either funny or uplifting. Here’s one example: This week in Starbucks I got a free coffee, because, as the barista told me, that man in the blue shirt by the windows had told him he wanted to pay for the beverages of the next ten people to walk in the door. “A random act of kindness,” the man smiled when I went over to thank him. And here’s another: I sent a skirt back to the J. Peterman catalog people, asking for a refund, since, as I wrote in the “Reasons” section, it seemed very ill-made.Then, not four days later, a fresh J. Peterman box arrived holding two precious-to-me documents, which I had inadvertently enclosed in the box with the poorly made skirt. No note accompanied it these documents, no scrawled first name on the “Packed By” card you sometimes see. More importantly, no charge was posted to my credit card, then or ever. Someone in the shipping room had lifted out the skirt, seen the photo of the 14-year-old Brooklyn boy and the citation, done in gorgeous calligraphy, awarded to him four years later and understood what these might mean. This person then wrapped then in fresh tissue paper, adorned it with cream-colored ribbon and shipped it right back to me. So I ask you now and I really do wonder:  In a world with such generosity and kindness, how can anyone, ever, speak cynically and sarcastically? And now, just for proof, the two documents sent back to me by that good person in the shipping room at J. Peterman.    

First You Dream It ,Then You Do It

Here are some words written and delivered by the man I spoke of Monday, whom I knew well, and in whose house I lived until my tenth year.  (This picture on the left is how he looked around the time he wrote them.)I found this speech, for a speech it is, in my attic last week while searching for historical information for the Fourth Grader you see in the center of the picture below.Because the boy has been working on the big Family Research Project, he asked me to help him learn about Margaret Shea Herlihy, the first person in our family to come to America, from County Kerry, in the 1850s. She was the pipe smoker I spoke of here, who managed to get passage out of Ireland for all four of her girls, got them settled in West Newton MA, contrived to marry them off to four likely young men, then talked them all into buying four small farms, offered for sale because their owners had been killed in what some in the South still call “the War of Northern Aggression.”We made only a little headway the day last week that I went to this child's house to help with the project perhaps. This was on account of the general level of bounciness in the house occasioned by a visit by me, their local grandma, (but really who can focus on writing history with a little goat sitting on your worktable with you?)Finally though, we got to work - which means I watched while the boy laboriously printed, working his tongue around on the inside of his cheek the whole time.It wasn't until the weekend when I went back to my attic and found - and sat down to read -  all ten pages of this speech from 1919.And what a speech it was that this Michael Sullivan delivered at the graduation exercises of one of the city's high schools - for, I should explain, he was at the time the Chairman of the Boston School Committee.Give it a read and see if the issues he names aren't still with us. I mean, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan could have written this first part:

"Some will say we cannot spend all of our money on education: there are other needs. Yes. That is true there are other needs, but they are secondary. You can afford to economize in every other department except education. In that, never, so long as the need exists. Roads can wait to be built. Streets can be paved. But time makes boys and girls into men and women and the days lost to them are lost forever. The education of boys and girls must not wait until the tax rate is lower, or until this public work is done or that public work is done. They must go on regardless of what else goes on.

And then this man from 1919 hones in on the topic of education for women, this in a time when our gender had still not secured the franchise:

"I think of what happened in Boston nearly a century ago:  From the very settlement of Boston there was opportunity for boys to prepare for college so that we might have clergymen doctors and lawyers and it was nearly 200 years before the general high school for boys was established for those who did not want to go to college or could not, so that they not might have more education than the common schools as they were then called, furnished. So in 1821 the English High School was established. "In 1826 it was thought desirable to open high school for girls and the first establishment provided for seventy-five girls. Three hundred girls presented themselves and for two years the school was carried on and then closed because the then Mayor of Boston said that no municipality could stand the expense of educating girls through the high school and it took twenty-six years to reestablish that school in Boston and then it was established as a training school for teachers."It was a deception, but it was done to make those who were afraid of spending too much money for education, believe that in this instance it was alright because we have to have teachers and girls were cheapest to have and therefore we would prepare them. And in a few short years it became what it now is: Girls High School, pure and simple, the first of its kind in the country and it has stood as an example and inspiration for thousands in the country that have since been established.Yes, the taxpayers of that day were willing to educate girls because they would teach school cheaper and now it is about time that we paid those girls at least as much as we pay the cheaper cheapest labor municipalities employ. We got now to recognize the debt that this country owes to its teaching profession, especially the women we have to give them do credit for the 2 millions of men that they helped to make man who went across the ocean and help to win the war and we never again should be open to the charge of praying upon the services of exactly exemplary women who makes citizens of our children.The necessary character that a woman must have to teach school and the exemplary life she must live in the community, regardless of the consideration is worth at least $1000 of the money of any municipality and I hope the day is in sight when we will all recognize that and at act in accordance therewith.

He says he hopes the day might be in sight when these women teachers would get the raise they deserve, and in fact he was the man who got it for them, as I had always been told by his children, my mother “Cal” and my lovely Aunt Grace. I guess I knew he did this, but more digging in my attic revealed that he did it just six months later, as this letter written to him by Calvin Coolidge in thanks, reveals.So it's the old story: The diligent idealists with their vision 'see' what should happen. They dream the dream, and  then, with luck they make it come true, so that the rest of us can live fuller and more abundant lives and hold little tea parties for our friends.. 

Irish in This Way

I am Irish in this way and not in that way:I am Irish in the way that I know the story of the first of us to come here, a woman in her 50s in the 1850s, fed up with the injustice of it all, the hunger and the dying and finally, last straw, the death of her only son in the Crimean war, his blood spilled for England, in England's war.I know how she got here and I know where she lived.I know what she took for a drink, nights, along with her pipe, and what she said to the children when they came spilling in the door of that farmhouse so poor the tree that grew outside it couldn’t afford branches.I am Irish in that way. I am not Irish in the way of saying all the time what a great fine thing it is to be Irish.Of the four bloodlines that went toward making me, I know about only two. I never learned a single thing about the family on my father's mother side or the family on my father's side because then I would have had to know about my father and I don't.I am Irish on all sides, as I have been told again and again, listening to all the jolly talk about how there were two kinds of people in the world the Irish and the ones who wish they were. Also I have heard the less jolly talk about the One True Church and the pagan babies and the non-elect, marooned outside forever, like smokers, the non-Catholics into whose houses of worship we never could go under pain of… what? Excommunication was it?No wonder then that as a girl of 19 I fell for a boy of 21 (still wearing the suit from his ninth grade graduation because it was the only one he owned) and he wasn’t Catholic and he wasn't Irish and didn't I just sleep with him after all those years of saving myself and go right home and march into my mother’s bedroom to tell her I would marry him, and I did. (Poor lady! I can still see her trembling hands that night as she lit one cigarette and put it to her mouth, then immediately lit a second one and tried to get it in her mouth too.)I guess I was just sick of all that Only-Us-ness by then and so  set sail in a life that kept on opening before me as I, who had never tasted lasagna, or wontons or hummus, or naan, tasted all of those and found out about what I'd been missing.Still, all day yesterday I thought about our ways as Irish people: All the remembering, and weeping we did. All the songs.That long-ago woman, born in 1800 and dead of the dropsy in 1891: I know about her because I knew her youngest grandson, who was my grandfather. My sister Nan and I lived in his house, together with our abandoned mom, and two ancient great aunties born in the 1860s. He would pass me playing on the floor and lay his hand on my dark  curls and call me Blackberry Top. “Little Blackberry Top” he would say.So yesterday I went to the attic and read all of his papers. He really did get the Boston teachers their first-ever pay raise, exploited women that they were. I have the public talk from 1919 in which he vows to do that. He really did run for Mayor of Boston against the 'rascal king' James Michael Curley, in such a quixotic bid that a full 40 years later we were still making grocery lists on the unused letterhead from that campaign. He was an idealist and maybe I am too, on account of him.I know he fell hard for a blue-eyed girl in the early 1890s. She married him when he got done law school and bore four babies in five years, and, scarce out of her 20s, saw her fifth baby die inside her only hours before she died herself.His world went black then, as he wrote in his diary of that day.In time he fell in love again with the younger sister of that blue-eyed girl  and tried all over again like Job and here sure enough came a new fifth child… But then that wife died too, at only 40, and he found a snatch of verse in the newspapers and cut it out and hung it by the mantle where I saw it every day walking past that hearth. Here is what it says:

Good night! good night! as we so oft have said  Beneath this roof at midnight in the days  That are no more, and shall no more return.Thou hast but taken thy lamp and gone to bed;  I stay a little longer, as one staysTo cover up the embers that still burn.

When he died and we sold the house he had built with such joy, we took the yellowed piece of newsprint and tucked it away, where, these 50 years later, I have again come upon it. I am Irish in the way that my heart contracts to read it again as I have done just this morning But no more than the heart of anyone would contract at the thought of the lost, in whatever breast  that heart beats, and from whatever land. 

Thoughts on the Vernal Equinox

Huge leaps of time ago, I watched small waves lap against a raft just to the left of this scene. Only it was June. A lone swimmer oared his way leisurely along, his arm upraised. A breeze arose and the water's surface, cracking into a million shards of blue, coral and lemon, became an Impressionist painting: Monet's water lilies, without the lilies.It was the longest day of the year and the wooden dock on which I lay felt smooth. Its planks, gone silver with age, drank in the sun’s warmth.An hour before sunrise, I had risen to look for a window I could lie down in front of to catch the Early Show put on by birds, who swoop so close to our house they seem like aircraft, cleared one by one for flight. So fast do they pass I can detect neither species nor color even, only glimpsing in a flash the fuselage of an underbelly, the landing gear of two tucked-up feet.By 8am I had I stepped out on my sidewalk, across which an ant lumbered as ants always lumber, bearing their burden of crumbs or fallen comrades.Just nine weeks before that day it had snowed, the day before Easter or not.Six weeks later, tornadoes skipped and whirled and set devastatingly down across the region.I remember all this.I remember too an evening in that hard winter just past, when four deer came over the deep snow to nibble any roots they could find. The papers all said they were starving and they certainly seemed to be in sore need, the way they came so close to people’s homes, their antlers held aloft like complicated branching torches.Was this truly just four months before the luxurious long cat-stretch of the summer solstice? It seemed from there an eternity. But Time plays tricks on us all.  As I lay on that longest-day dock, the breeze stretched a new canvas over the frame of lake and did another impression of 19^th century painting: a Van Gogh this time, I thought.On how many a summer solstices have we stretched out on docks, or sands, or sun-warmed stoops, thinking each time that June would last forever? Too many to count?In her wonderful novel The Maytrees, author Annie Dillard has this to say: “Old people were not incredulous at having once been young but at being young for so many decades running.”I smile every time I remember that passage. I smile for its truth.For we are all young who draw breath Really all the living are young, as any bird or ant can tell you. My thoughts ran this way on that year’s longest day with, as I told myself, many such days before me.But in truth there is but one longest day and after that, they get shorter and shorter still.Give me not the summer solstice therefore. Give me instead the spring solstice now approaching, when, for a lovely billowing incandescent bubble of a moment, Day and Night meet as equals and kiss, the day fully as long as the night, after many months being so much shorter. I study the tables. One day this week in my part of the world, the sun sets at 7:07 and rises at 7:04 the next morning. At that day’s end, it sets at 7:08, and rises the next day at 7:03.Then finally comes the day, when it both rises and sets at 7:05,  Day and Night again stand as equals and we feel ourselves lightly if briefly held, inside that lovely wobbling bubble of a moment. It's almost upon us now. Run outside and get ready for the Return!   

The Fun Never Ends

Really and truly, in this life the funny stuff never stops coming. That is, if you’re willing to LOOK at it as funny. And if you have people around you who support you in that view. Time was, my ten-year old boy and I used to think everything was funny. Microwaving an egg with the shell on as we once did? Hilarious! Duct-taping my old wig-head to a folded-up ironing board and dressing it in my bathrobe to scare his napping dad? Sidesplitting! Last week at the supermarket with the new ten-year old in my life along for the ride, I selected a bottle of sparkling water flavored to taste exactly like a fresh pink grapefruit. I needed some of this Ruby Red, and I needed it bad, because my trusty thermos-with-the-pop-up-nozzle had been sipped at over the last 30 minutes by this grandson of mine, whose mom and baby sister were bumping along in their own aisle, several food categories away. The boy just loves the special concoction I fill it with, a zesty combination of lemonade and mint tea that I mix up by the gallon. He named it ‘TT juice,’ when he first learned to talk, I guess because he calls me  ‘TT’ and he sees this as my signature drink. Anyway, he had drained it down to the final two inches in this jaunty blue thermos of mine when at last we stood on the far side of the checkout lanes. Thirsty as I had been, I’d wanted to set an example for the child and not be one of those shoppers who begins devouring the bag of chips or cookies before even paying for them, secure in their belief that no ‘mere’ stock boy or sales associate would dare call him on this behavior. I had waited until I’d handed over the money and was on the ‘paid’ side of the register.But at that point, as my daughter paused to re-fasten the baby’s shoes, I saw my chance: In one swift motion,  I twisted off the cap of that bottle of Ruby Red and began swiftly pouring it into mouth of my handy little thermos.In went the fizzy stuff. On went the screw-on top with the pop-up nozzle.I knew there was still SOME TT juice down at the bottom so naturally I shook the thing, to mix it up.I shook it hard. Then, I pulled on the pop-up nozzle…When I say the stuff geysered like Old Faithful I am not exaggerating. There was a loud pop and it flew high in the air, utterly soaking the whole front of my head before raining a fine mist down on the nine or ten people in the three checkout lines closest to us.Worse, it kept ON geysering, for almost half a minute. I couldn’t stop it, hard as I tried.And what did my young grandson say?“Don’t look up. Don't look around. Just let's walk out of her fast.”His mother, my own daughter, agreed, and so we did walk out.Which I found kind of a shame.  I mean, I SAW those people’s faces. I KNOW they were about to join me in the laugh.As it was, I had to wait ‘til we got home with the groceries, where my mate was making a sandwich, along with our own visiting former ten-year-old, now a thoroughgoing adult of 29.I told them both the story.My mate just rolled his eyes, for the ten-thousandth time in our marriage.My son, however,  laughed delightedly.Then he and I staged a reenactment - and the geysering was every bit as funny the second time as it had been the first.Who says you can’t repeat the past?