Meeting Mozart

There’s an old John Denver song that says the farther we go the closer we are to one another. It’s a sentiment that felt pretty true to me the day I met that singer in Vienna: I was just exiting the grounds of the pale-yellow-and-cream wedding cake that is the Schönbrunn Palace, my eyes still joggled by the sight of its many frescoes and paintings, when I heard a loud and melodious voice.A man with gold-painted skin, a golden wig and gold brocade clothing stood on a small wooden box, gorgeously executing an aria. He was what they call a Living Statue such as appear at tourist sites like New York City’s Seaport District where you can routinely be startled by a quietly breathing Lady Liberty rendered exactly, from her grey-green skin and robes to her windowed crown to the torch she holds tirelessly aloft. “Who is THAT?” I said to one of my traveling companions.“That’s Mozart of course!” he said, as we began walking toward our tour bus.Stunned by the beauty of his voice, I began walking backwards, to keep him in my sight – until it occurred to me that the small cylindrical container in front of him had a purpose.I hurried back and dropped in a couple of Euros.And that's when this living statue came to life for me.“Ah, many thanks,” said the painted gentleman, taking my hand in his two golden ones. “And from where are you?” “The U.S.” I said. “Massachusetts, specifically.”  At that he began singing: “Feel Ah'm goin' bahck to Mah-sa-choo-setts…”“The Bee Gees song!” I love the Bee Gees!” I started to say. He stopped me abruptly then and regarded me with somber mien.“They are all dead but one,” he intoned. “I know, it’s so sad,” I said. “And that one… was it Maurice Gibb? How could he die so young?”He shook his head. “The road,” he said.“The road?”“Anyone it will kill.”“Really?”“I KNOW. For 20 years I am a singer and I have traveled. I have, so to say, toured. Is not good.”“Why not?”He shook his head. “The drinks in the bars after. The wines. The cocaine. It’s no good for people. No good for me for sure.”“And yet you were trying to do something with your music,” I said. Still holding my hand, he answered me with freshened feeling. “Listen. I tell you what I do for my music today: Every Thursday I study with… you call it a ‘voice coach’, and I am today a far better singer.”“You certainly are a fine singer,” I said - but just then one of my traveling companions called my name from 30 yards away. I turned to see that she was taking pictures of Mozart and me deep in our conversation.It was a conversation I won’t soon forget, and not because of the illusion that I had leaped across centuries to have it. It was a conversation I won’t forget because of how it reminded me that wherever you wander, through space OR time, you find that people are all the same. We all just want to guard our health, and use our gifts, and sometimes stand outside, singing our mortal hearts out in the sunshine. 

Back to The Kale and the Tofu!

It's back to the kale and the tofu for me, but boy did we eat great on that riverboat cruise!Here's the menu for the Captain's Dinner on the second-to-last night of our trip - and, as was true every night, the wine was not only free but it kept on coming:Since we got back  I've purged my kitchen of all cookies and crackers and the fridge of that lovely thick cream, a teaspoon of which I often blopped into my coffee mornings.Still though, STILL I have that Homer Simpson tummy. Paying the piper even these three weeks later.Here I am on the third floor of our house back home, looking out the window and envying the sparrows their svelte little bodes. (Gad, my bikini undies are even tight! May have to go to a thong til the weight comes off. ;-)  

Happy Birthday Dear David

Yesterday was my husband's birthday. I used to write a lot about him in the paper-  jokey pieces, mostly - in which I mostly revealed my own petty nature, enviously describing the way he was permitted to sleep late Saturdays by the same small children who wouldn’t leave me alone for three minutes together. Him they treated like a combination lounge chair and entertainment center, watching cartoons in our bed while balancing bits of toast on the shelf of his sleeping flank, leaning against his broad and gently-breathing back.It was after describing such a scene that a man came up to this husband of mine. “You’re David Marotta,” he said. “I don’t know how you stand it!” He meant being the subject of intimate revelation. He meant being described in the paper. Well, I had no wish to embarrass the man, so after that I pretty much stopped writing about him. But he has always been there in the background. He was there the time a strange woman approached and began attacking me for a light piece I once wrote about Christmas cards filled with endless bragging. That lady went after me like a pit-bull. I tried everything I could think of to win back her good opinion.David saw how rattled I was. “You should just say, ‘Look, it’s my job. It’s what I write; it’s not who I am.’” Ah, but what I write is who I am, which is why it means so much to me that the papers I write for print my address. I have learned so much over the years from my readers’ reactions.One thing I have learned is how much folks prize certain qualities in their fellow citizens.This husband of mine owned one suit when we got married, bought for his Junior High School graduation. He was a scholarship kid, and has always identified with those who by virtue of birth or circumstance found themselves excluded from the great American bazaar of getting and spending. He never boasts. You can hardly get him to tell where he went to school or what his work is. Before his last college reunion, I had a terrible time getting him to fill out the class questionnaire. I finally said “I’ll read the questions and write down your responses.”It asked for your special achievements.“Leave it blank,” he said.  “Or else put ‘My family’”It asked if you’d served on the Board of Directors of any companies. He does. “You do!” I said.“Leave it blank.”He doesn’t care if the world thinks him successful. It just doesn’t matter to him.What does matter to him, what he has saved the best of himself for, are those same untidy children who lean on him still. He plays golf, but mostly with clients. He never plays on the weekend. I asked him yesterday how many suits he has now. “One,” he said. “One that I can wear.” I like that. I can’t say how much I like that.This year, for the first time, one of our kids is spending all eight weeks at a summer camp. On Visiting Day, we noticed that most of the other campers are New Yorkers, with parents in fancy cars. At one point, we found ourselves at the basketball court where a lone father in Louis Vuitton loafers and a Versace shirt was shooting baskets.David had on shorts and his Dr. Seuss T-shirt with “Hop on Pop” stenciled on the front.  I knew he wanted to shoot with our son, but was holding back, not wishing to interrupt this well-dressed dad. “Go on out there!” I whispered. “He’s just some cardiologist!”He laughed. He knew what I meant.I meant, Some rich guy in fancy clothes? Some rich guy is no match for a man with just one suit.Now these little stories chapter will embarrass him, I know. But he said it himself: It’s my job. :-)  

If I Could Give the Talk at Graduation

Let’s pretend it’s graduation day and I am the speaker and you are one of the many young people there in your rows of fanny-squeezing chairs. This is me talking to you now:

“What I would like to do in my time at the podium is tell you about a topic that arose the time I went on a seven-day retreat with some other young people. There, in our daily evening sessions, some music got played, and some special topics got looked at, principally about our lives and what God was maybe hoping we might do with them.“My ‘job’ that week? To offer thoughts lively enough to act as inspiration for the journaling the kids would do during their daily Quiet Time.  So for twenty minutes each night, their young faces were pointed in my direction, just like yours are now.“Of course it’s thrilling for all us old folks to be given the chance to talk to you guys, so I thought and thought about what I might say.“I decided finally on a walk through the great ‘Stages of Life,’ the all-important Who am I? stage at life’s beginning no less than the wonderful end stage when we’re meant to give back and pass down all we have gained in the way of riches and wisdom. The Using Your Gifts stage came up too of course, as well as what I’ll call the Changing-the-World’s Light Bulbs stage.“But the phase of life that really made their eyes light up was the one we all come to when we begin to look around for a partner.“I don’t know any more about this subject than the average guy, of course, but I did find my own life’s companion when I was just one year older than these kids, and I am with him still. Thus, I just offered a few tips on Love, and, in the hope that it might bring a light to your eyes too, and I’ll repeat them here:“One, don’t expect to like each other every second of the day. Even Gandhi found their close companions annoying at times. And yes, I know all about cranky old Sartre with his Hell is other people’ talk; that’s just nonsense. Other People are the ones who heal and redeem us.“Two, find a partner who makes you laugh.“Three, make sure that person gets a kick out of you too.“Four, don’t be afraid the relationship will break if you have a fight. It won’t break, as long as nothing really cruel or spirit-withering gets said.  “Five, in fact just never say those hurtful things. Learn to hold your tongue. In my marriage, the more one of us screws up the less the other one says about it and why? Because people see when they’ve done a dumb thing. If nobody starts berating them about it they can skip the defensiveness and give themselves  a pretty stern lecture. “So I said all that at the session devoted to partnering and the next day three different youth approached me.“‘It was great what you told us,” one said to me.“‘I could never picture myself married ‘til last night,” said another.   “’Can you give us another love talk?’ asked a third.“But it’s all a Love Talk really, your teachers’ lessons, your parents' advice, and every last speech you hear from old fogies like me. Because it doesn’t matter a bit that school is almost out. Straight though the calendar and our whole lives through, Love is and will be the great and only subject.

Bump in the Night

Darkened with bruising even these seven days later, my back looks like a map drawn by a caveman.  That's why I haven't written here for a while.It wasn't because because of the end-of-year party we put on in the organization so close to my heart, or because of the graduation ceremonies the following day. It wasn't because because I have had nightly visitors in the form of alums of that same organization who are so much fun to be around I could practically sell tickets to strangers to come hang out with them. And it wasn't because I gave an hour-long talk last Friday at the local high school, or because of the DMV trip I made with my favorite new driver, or because of the potluck supper I went to, bringing crab cakes on a bed of greens, as promised.It was only because last Tuesday night I once again got a 10-on-a-scale-of-10 leg cramp, causing me to shoot out of bed with pain that felt as if the character the Mountain from Game of Thrones was twisting my leg off.I ran into the bathroom for hot water - I find my leg cramps are eased by hot water.“Fill the tub!” I thought, but that would take too long and the pain was too excruciating.  “Hoist the foot into the sink like when you’re shaving your legs and run hot water on your calf that way!" – only how could I do that, stand storklike on one leg when my knees were knocking so?“Wait, why are my knees knocking?" asked myself.  And why am I light in the head?”“Ah, Terry," came the answer from some wiser, more inner voice.  "Do you never learn? You are light in the head because any minute now you are going...to...faint. I tried to sit down so I wouldn't hit my head, like I did that time ten years ago when they made me wear a Holter monitor around for a week because they didn’t believe it was just a faint brought on by a leg cramp.And did sit down – I think. All I really remember is that there was a sharp crack! - then a brief blank period - and then I woke, halfway into doing a sudden sit-up. Thirty seconds later I was back in the bed.“What was all THAT? said David who has grown used to loud noises when to comes to his wife."Oh nothing," I said. "I fainted.” And I really did think it was nothing.The next day though, when I went to the Y for Pilates and found I couldn't sit. I guess I’m a little slow. "Really?" was what I thought.  "You can have arthritis in your sitz bones?” Then, an hour later, the class over, I reached for the car door and felt pain in my arm. "Really?" I thought again. "That shot I got at my annual exam is STILL hurting after all this time?"It wasn't until two days after when toweling off after a shower in our bathroom with the mirrored wall just opposite the tri-fold mirrors over the sink that I saw: I was - and still am - black and blue everywhere, on the delt of one arm, on my whole back, and, as I just saw this morning while in fact shaving my legs with one foot in the sink, on my left sitz bone, where the black and blue I got there a full week ago is still a lurid purple. I can’t picture any of it but I’m guessing I lost consciousness halfway through the-getting-down-so-I-wouldn’t-fall-down motion, landed hard on my bottom, had my torso slam back onto the tiles, even as I unconsciously kept my head upright, thus effecting that sudden sit-up I woke to find myself doing.I'm darkened with bruising even these seven days later, it's like I say: my whole dorsal side looks like a map drawn by a caveman, and all I can do is to wonder: How DID I clatter down to the floor really?And what would it take to get a nanny-cam installed in the bathroom, for the next time, because I mean really,  who doesn't love forensics? :-)

Another Great Lady

Back in 1996, when Erma Bombeck died of kidney disease, every print and broadcast outlet in the country ran a piece about her: the lady from Dayton who one day sat down and began sending dispatches, from the front lines of parenthood, that grew into a column and 11 books and a weekly slot on the tube. Though uniformly fond, many of these tributes seem slightly dismissive, framing her as “housewife humorist” or clever dabbler.  In a tribute in The Boston Globe, Diane White noted this too, speculating it was perhaps Erma’s choice of subject matter that led people to see her as a “suburban mother who started writing columns as a lark.”But as White also reminded us, she was a 32-year veteran of deadline journalism. Just like me, only I’m now closing in on 35 years on the job.The morning of her death, my friend Cindy called from her desk at work. I see Cindy rarely since the long-ago days when she had me as her 12th grade teacher. The first thing she asked: Was I writing about Erma this week? “What gets me,” she said, “is how they make it sound like the column was just some easy thing she wedged into the odd-half hour.” But no one spending a half hour could hope to put it the way Erma could always put it. She said she once lived in a place so small she had to iron in the playpen. She said if her kids had looked as good as the kids of her perfect neighbor, she’d have sold them. She spoke about the child who could "eat yellow snow, kiss the dog on the lips, chew gum that he found in the ash tray," but wouldn’t drink from his brother's glass.I quoted some of this in a get-well column I wrote and sent her three years ago when 20/20 first revealed the extent of her illness. In one of the pieces, she was imagining how each of her three kids might someday recall her, one as "the thin...dark-haired [mom] who used to read me stories, bake cookies, paste my baby pictures in the album “; one as "the somber-looking bleached blonde who used to put me to bed at 6:30 and bought me a dog to save on napkins"; and the last as “the grayish lady who fell asleep during the 6 o'clock news and was going to show my baby pictures - when she took the rest of the roll at my wedding.”She had just that light way of remarking on things like Time and its effect on us all. She told the truth, beginning in an era when the “Women’s Pages” revolved chiefly around the woman’s role as consumer, cook, and student of etiquette.She also dealt with the feeling that comes to women raising kids in America’s insular families: "No one talked about it a lot, but everyone knew what it was. It was a condition, and it came with the territory." That condition was loneliness. I learned about this loneliness when I left my job teaching to care for some babies. When the babies napped, I read the paper and met the writer who would one day change my life. When the babies woke, I put them in boots and snowsuits and pushed or walked or carried them, somewhere, anywhere I could find another woman in another house trying to do the hardest job on earth all by herself.Today by conversation’s end, Cindy and I hadn’t figured out a time when we could catch up more by phone, much less get together. “How about I call you at home some night?” I asked, picturing her there relaxing with her husband and one-year-old. “Are you kidding?” she said. “ That’s the last place I have time to talk!”Erma would totally get that. I hope she and Maya Angelou are having a great old laugh in Heaven right now.

Job? What Job?

Ah the sweet forgetting that comes over you when you shake off the reins step out of the traces a while.All of us Americans were on 'away' holiday for three days now and I myself have been gone even longer. My man and I took a trip down the Danube on one of those Viking Cruise Lines you see advertised so heavily on public television. Who by now doesn't associate that start of Downtown Abbey and its the shot of the retreating fanny of His Lordship's hound with the image that just precedes it, showing a view like this one, of the ship we overate on for seven days and nights? The experience was delightful, to say the least: Free wine and beer served every day at lunch and dinner, which for me on my customary diet of seeds, kale and the  pale watery juice that surrounds your cube of cube, felt like the height of self-indulgence! But back on land now with a fresh ring of lard around my waist, it's time to address all the things in my life that were so pressing I almost missed the plane trying to get them all done.  It's twenty past seven on this post-holiday morning I'm ready to get back to work on all those projects - if only I could recall what they were.  There'll be more to tell about that trip once I catch up but for now let me pause a minute and repeat: what a sweet forgetting it is to just float a while - and you don't have to be an elder to know that it's true. :-)

Visiting the Graves

Wondering about what Memorial Day means to people nowadays, I conducted a small-scale poll find out. “Another Monday off,” three people told me. “The start of summer,” reported two others.  Time was, the day meant more. Time was, it marked a time to pay respects at the graves of the dead, lying quiet now under that 'rafter of satin and roof of stone' Emily Dickinson speaks of.I told a friend about my research and she said she figured almost nobody saw it in the former way now. “Just maybe the old-timers.”So  call me an old-timer then; because every day I think of the dead, and every day I feel death’s silent swoosh, as if a great black curtain were rushing shut above me.I saw a dead bird in the yard, its stiff body propped oddly erect somehow, its small head resting on the soil, as if listening still for breakfast. I saw a tree on a twisting road with a spray of flowers tied to it, signifying someone had died there, hitting it in his car. Outside a funeral home, I saw two people stood holding each other. Not moving. Not hurrying to break apart, or giving small pats. Not even speaking, but only holding each other as they stood and stood. And I saw all these things in one 90-minute period.The man I love lost his father young. when he was 13 and in his sorrow so long-unexpressed, he found he could not speak his father’s name or go to visit his grave. But his mother went sometimes, and when I came into the family she took me too.Then I began taking myself there. When our last baby came and he a boy-child, I took him there, not yet a month in this world. Eventually, our two other children learned where it was, the daughter 14 and the daughter eleven. The older one would bike there sometimes to sit and draw. One fine spring evening when the whole family mobilized for a dinner out, the hour came and we could not find this older daughter.  “Let’s try the cemetery,” her younger sister suggested, and so we drove there.Once inside its gates, we looked and looked, but plainly she was elsewhere.Then her younger sister the eleven-year-old did a fine brave thing. “Park the car," she told her dad.“Let’s get out a minute," she said. She circled the vehicle and took him then by the hand.“Come,” she said simply. “I will take you to your Papa.”And so she did. And I tell you as the woman who has loved this man long and long, then with his hair all dark and now with his hair all silver, that a change began in him that very day.Was it finally facing that first death, or just being so gently invited to? We didn’t know. All we knew who loved him best was that a sadness deep inside him started lifting.In denying death, we somehow deny ourselves life and live diminished. For do we not all sense that it is life’s completion? That death is but a door, through which we all will one day walk - and who knows what adventure awaits us there?

On Busing Other People's Trash

Here’s some more let-it-go advice I have been given on this riverboat cruise. It was 6 o’clock this morning and I’d gone up on deck to get coffee from the fancy machine that dispenses, day or night, whatever kind of hot drink you want, from regular to decaf, from espresso to cappuccino and back. And I noticed right away that some other voyager had enjoyed his or her coffee already, and left the soiled cup right in the way of others who might come after.“Now that’s rude!” I mused aloud, without half knowing that I spoke the words rather than merely thinking them.Then I heard a light voice.  “Behind you,” its owner said, and here suddenly there was another person present, not more than 18 inches from me. I prayed  she hadn’t been the one to leave her cup.“I’m sorry. This cup…. I just thought… I didn’t know what to do with it. I mean, it’s kind of in the way here…” I said, and ended by picking the thing up bringing it into the empty dining room to set on the bar.“Hold up,” she said“I’m sorry,” I said again.“No, no, hold up, seriously. Relax! You’re not on mom duty here.”“No?” I said.“No,” she said.Then I didn’t know WHAT to do: Bring the dirty cup and saucer back? Leave my own soiled cup and saucer there when I got done, by way of demonstrating a commensurate carelessness? She must have seen my confusion. Anyway, she put her hand on my arm. “Seriously,” she said. “You just need to R-E-L-A-X.” I saw she was right. Of course she was right~!So I want back to our stateroom and made our bed – with David still in it, same as always. :-)

Letting Go

First day away and all I could think is why didn’t I bring my hairdryer?And then I remembered: I didn’t bring my special hair-straightening drier-with-the-brush attached because I figured we'd be in Europe with the wrong kind of voltage and who knows but what the thing would explode, even using the right adapter/converter. Only wouldn’t you know in our tidy Hobbit-sized stateroom the cruise line has thoughtfully provided a couple of 110-volt outlets.THEN I REMEMBERED: I’ve stopped straightening my hair, which now curls all around and around exactly like the vines surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle. I also thought why oh why didn’t I bring my little fan that I always need to get to sleep, for its sweet little zephyr that it provides? And for the white noise to that helps me forget that there’s a person two feet away from me who sometimes snores to beat the band.THEN I REMEMBERED: We’re moving fast down the longest river in Europe and so there’s my breeze for my white noise and me too.Finally I thought why on earth didn’t bring my diary with all this free time so I could write down everything I was learning in this country and the sweet shops signs with their approximations of jazzy American English?THEN I REMEMBERED: the last time I brought my diary over the miles to Europe I left it on the airplane. My DIARY, that my kids will get such a bang out of reading aloud to one another while drinking one day long in the future. And it was November when I lost it! Ten-and-a-half months of funny tales lost and gone forever. So I mourned these things - for about fifteen minutes.And now I’m sitting looking our at this lovely braided muscle of water that looks like the anatomical drawing of the humans quadriceps and think to myself, this is how you let go.You just … Let …Go...And if I can learn to do that this week maybe I can learn to let go when life really demands that of me. And anyway: Budapest and all its history! Budapest and The Danube and Vienna by Wednesday morning!  

To Go and Stay Here Both

It can still bring me near to tears, what Lincoln said to the people of Springfield when he left that place to take the oath of office. I love every part of that speech, but today especially I'm thinking of the part where he refers to God as being that one who can go with him, and remain with them, and be everywhere for the good. I think about that a lot when I‘m leaving a place and wish I could leave and stay at the same time.  Even checking out of a hotel room I stop at the door, suitcase and car keys in hand and thank the room for sheltering me.  I picture how it will feel to itself empty, before the next guest arrives. I wonder if a part of me remains there always. I had a moment of such wondering this past fall in a hotel room as I looked out my small window at this view, which I captured on my phone. I was packed and ready to go that morning, but I had some time to think. Thanks to the lifting of that fog of Obligation I feel so often, I was able to just sit a while.I mention all this because today I'm picturing how my house will 'feel' with us gone from it these next eight days, but I do not worry for its safety, because a family member is staying here.He’s staying here not for the cats: the cats are safe in Heaven. He's staying here not for the plants either: just last Monday I brought all the plants to ‘summer camp’ on the screened-in porch where the light and the moist May air will make them practically jump for joy. He’s not staying to bring in the mail, which you can stop and start up again in 30 seconds via the USPS website.He is staying here because he's a member of our family by now and I can confidently picture him here, since he stayed her for much of the summer before this one that’s about to begin. He will lower the blinds in the kitchen, a thing we never think to do. He'll stock the shelves with his weir bright blue juices and his Ramen Noodles and his Pop Tarts. He'll wash the dishes and wipe down the counters every day because that’s how he is, and then jump on his bike and ride off, enjoying this free week before his summer job starts. So this person will take care of my house. And maybe, 30 years from now when he comes back to help bury me, he will remember himself here, a young man with his life all before him, even as I remember myself waking up here for the first time on a spring day in 1979, a young woman nine months pregnant, with curly black hair, and my own life before me too.      

The Lively Times Bus Station

I recently I took a bus to a part o​f Massachusetts where spring comes early, as I knew well, ​having lived there in ​my college years​. By late March, lunchtimes would often find me heading to a quiet campus spot by the pond, where I would stretch out on the flat belly of river-plain and let the sun's warmth seep into my bones.The day the following events took place however, the temperature in that valley stood at 42 degrees six weeks into spring or not, and ​a steady rain flung itself like handfuls of cold pennies at all our faces. I say “our.” I was in a bus station that late afternoon along with what seemed to me like an usually large number of people, perhaps because of this gruesome twinning of the cold and the wet. ​I thought maybe ​they had come to get in out of the weather. In the Ladies Room, an elderly ​lady with a cane waited outside the occupied wheelchair-accessible stall.“Are you coming out soon?” she asked after a while, rapping on the door. Then  “​You’re not handicapped!” she  snapped at the far younger woman who emerged at last. “I certainly am!” the woman shot back. “Want to ​see my license?”  “N​o​ THANK you​!” the older lady ​pronounced, ​hobbling past to enter the stall in question. ​Now at one of the sinks, a young blonde was telling all present about a man she had just encountered who couldn’t stop remarking on how beautiful she was ​and how many boyfriends she must have  - “right up until he started calling me a loser and saying I'd never amount to anything​.” “Goodness!​" said one of her listeners. “How did you react to that?” “I slapped him ​and said ‘Go back on ​your meds​, fool’ In the ​large waiting ​area, meanwhile, things felt much more placid. A thin man came in out of the rain wearing a ​huge heavy-duty trash bag, one corner of which made a whimsical peaked cap atop his head​,with a hole cut out for his face. Because the bag stretched clear down to ​the floor, he had to ask several people ​for help in ​taking it off. The security guard came through then and demand​ed to see people’s bus tickets.​Everyone ​lacking such ​a document was ordered to leave. Some drifted out. Others seemed to just lift and resettle, like birds on a wire after the quieting down of a mild disturbance ​below. Two men stood watching ​an update on the Don Sterling affair on the TV screen that hung from the celling. “It’s rare when a white man gets called out for racism” said one.“Ah, the guy was just jealous​, ​h​is girlfriend with a bunch of young guys” said the other. Both were African American.​ The clock on the wall marked the slow-passing time. A middle-aged woman punched her phone awake and got to work excoriating  the person who answered it, while over by the windows, a bus driver and two lounging civilians debated the merits of cremation vs. burial.​​​"Cremation's way cheaper too!" said one.​“Hey dust to dust either way,” said another, by way of ​finishing ​on an amiable note. The clock-hands kept inching onward. More of the ticketless drifted in. And thus by degrees id the afternoon drained away. ​Then, ​a fresh wind, ​as nimble as like a set of salad tongs ​in the hands of a professional chef, began tossing swirls of litter outside by the buses​, just as, in the sky, a ​slice of ​clear blue opened up right at horizon’s edge.

Violets

Just about a year ago now, I received this note in response to a column I wrote for Mothers Day.  No words that I could add or bookending remarks that I could possibly add to it to make it any more meaningful than it is already.Here then the letter from Pattie Wesley of Woodbury Connecticut.“This is my first mother's day in almost 65 years without my mom.  She died in January, just shy of 88.“It is my first spring without her. She loved spring.“This is my fist violet and dandelion season without her.“As a young girl, I would run out on the morning of mother's day and pick violets and dandelions to fill the construction paper pocket I made for her.“She loved it.“When I first returned to this part of the world 26 years ago, I went out one day in my parents' yard, picked violets and brought them in to her. She burst into tears."’You always brought me the violets," she said.“This is the first spring since, that I have not been able to hand her the violets.“My mother was in the geriatric unit at Bridgeport Hospital for more than a month before she died. The nurses would tell me she kept asking, ‘Where is my mother?’ apparently not a good thing to hear from an old person.“Indeed, one day when I walked into her room, she was asking the nurse, ‘Where is my mother?’“The nurse said, ‘Jane, your mother is not with us.’“Looking straight at me, standing in the doorway, she said, 'She's right there.'“I do not think my mom thought I was her mother. “I think she lost the word daughter.“I think she knew, after years of holding me, that I was now holding her."And so she was. She held one parent and then she held the other as I learned just now when I wrote to Pattie to ask of I might share this tale:"I do want you to know that my dad, closer to 98 than 97, died in October of 2013, after my mom died in January. He was doing okay until we buried my mom in March on her birthday. Then he slipped down hill. His sweetheart was gone and he died, 24 hours after my brother and sister in law had said good bye and 30 minutes after I told him I loved him for the last time.“They were excellent human beings and the best parents. I miss them every day and I don't wish them back. Each, in his or her own way was ready to go. Their children are the luckiest people in the world.”As I said at the outset, no words that I could add…. No  bookending remarks except a word of thanks to you, Pattie, on behalf of us all.        

Words we didn't have in the old days:"Denial""Issues""Challenges"Heck we didn't even have "addiction". We didn't have the word and we didn't have the concept. We just had Well dear, Uncle Joe.... is nervous.Don't try telling ME the world isn't better now. 

Oops (Part 999)

Ah jeez. I washed my husband’s pants with the wallet still in the pocket.'What IS that pounding sound?' I remember asking the air halfway through the drier cycle but even then I didn’t get it. I thought there was a sneaker in there or something, but when I looked nope: no sneaker. I slammed the drier door shut and pressed the On button again. It wasn’t until hours later when I finally pulled the clothes out to fold and smooth them that I felt something heavy in those pants of his. What has he got, a tennis ball in here?No such luck. It was his wallet. That which was once a smart and tidy fold of leather now resembles a very small damp badger rolled up in his protective ball.Meaning it looks sort of ...rounded.And afraid somehow.Never mind that even today, a full 48 hours after I threw it in that load of wash and soaked the whole thing with the usual slimey shot-glass of Tide, the thing is STILL damp. Oy!Extracting the items from inside the wallet was a job too. It was like trying to deconstruct a sheet of baklava.All his business cards. All his careful notes. All reduced to pulp.I just feel awful.There’s only one silver lining: His credit cards appear to be as healthy as ever – unless there’s some horrifying truth about the magnetic strip and two hours of Pounding, Rinsing and Roasting on High that I don’t yet know about, please God no. Because after all, even a highly forbearing man has his limits.And this is that forbearing man. And these are the pants.

Trying to Remember Something

I once drove 200 miles over bumpy back roads to get to the place where poet Naomi Shihab Nye was speaking, and it was worth every pothole. This was at Smith College some five or six years ago.That day she told those of us in her audience that everyone should all make time for the writing of poetry because doing so keeps a person  ‘in a very distinct relationship with language.’Her relationship with language seems so natural I sometimes feel like she’s standing right beside me when I read her. Take the poem “The Art of Disappearing”:

When they say Don't I know you?say no.When they invite you to the partyremember what parties are like before answering.Someone telling you in a loud voicethey once wrote a poem.Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.Then reply.If they say We should get togethersay why?It's not that you don't love them anymore.You're trying to remember somethingtoo important to forget.Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.Tell them you have a new project.It will never be finished.When someone recognizes you in a grocery storenod briefly and become a cabbage.When someone you haven't seen in ten yearsappears at the door,don't start singing him all your new songs.You will never catch up.Walk around feeling like a leaf.Know you could tumble any second.Then decide what to do with your time.

I thought of this poem on waking today with the pressing jobs of the week all crowding in shouting “Pick ME first!”  “No, I’M the important one!” I really take to heart that line about thinking of yourself as a leaf and knowing you could tumble any second. I like that a lot.The poet told us that a young man once came up to her after a talk and said “Here’s my address, write me a poem.” And so she wrote him this one, called  "A Valentine for Ernest Mann":

You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.

Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”

and expect it to be handed back to you

on a shiny plate.

 

Still, I like your spirit.

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,

write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.

So I’ll tell a secret instead:

poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,

they are sleeping. They are the shadows

drifting across our ceilings the moment 

before we wake up. What we have to do

is live in a way that lets us find them.

 

Once I knew a man who gave his wife

two skunks for a valentine.

He couldn’t understand why she was crying.

“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”

And he was serious. He was a serious man

who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly

just because the world said so. He really

liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them

as valentines and they became beautiful.

At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding

in the eyes of skunks for centuries 

crawled out and curled up at his feet.

 

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us, we find poems. Check your garage, the off sock in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.

And let me know.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we'll find peace of mind too. Peace of mind and maybe even poems. I’m all for trying to do that.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZX7ZJ0wzCQ  

Spring Bounce

When the nice weather comes, people start expressing themselves; they just can’t help it. They shed clothes, for one thing. Last week I saw so many pale pairs of legs I thought I was at the Ballet.  Any minute now, sunburns will start to show, along with the permanent tans of the boat lovers, whose shins gleam winter and summer with the same shiny brown you see on a horse chestnut. And the shedding of clothes is hardly the end of it. Come the warm weather, folks also begin stepping outside their normal pathways. I know I did this one spring day when, still enough of a baby to be in training pants, I took a small Bible from the bookshelf and headed down the street to church.  Adventure! was all I thought. But oh what earnest teaching I was subjected to after by the many grownups in our house, who could only pray that I had learned my lesson. I hadn’t: Three months later, with my mom watching me through the kitchen window as she fixed me a snack, I sat in the sandbox of our fenced-in yard. I was right there - until suddenly I wasn’t. And then followed the running around and calling my name, the searching and the summoning of police.All I remember is how happy I felt, toddling in my little yellow sunsuit with the ruffly-bottom seat, on up Charlotte Street to Blue Hill Avenue, then across McClellan, to arrive at last at the Endicott School.  My sister wasn’t there in the schoolyard of course, nor was any child.  Recess was over, and when I turned for home I grew confused and toddled on past not only my own street but eight or ten streets more.  Back home, meanwhile, the drama kept unfurling, as a policeman ascended our steps lugging somebody else’s bellowing child (who of course was bellowing, since she knew very well that she didn’t live there.)When my family finally found me, I was eating ice cream and holding onto the baby-laden stroller of a young mother from Eastern Europe, who spoke no more a recognizable brand of English than I did.But really this is no big story. This is just what people do when the air is soft and the daylight feels unending: They go on walkabout. I see it in my own town. A few days back, at schoolday’s end, I watched as an eight-year-old dashed out of the brick fortress that had held him all day and danced on down the sidewalk, executing a perfect penguin impression as he tilted from side to side, his hands jammed down into the sides of his pants.And that was nothing compared with what I witnessed the following day, when three middle-school girls, who had been awaiting the “Walk” light to help them cross the street, started out into the busy intersection. Two of them, bearing backpacks, sailed across, as stately as a couple of swans. The third, free of backpack and stateliness both, got herself right into the middle of intersection - where, with traffic from five different streets stopped, she hopped twice and executed a perfect cartwheel, right there on the asphalt. If we hadn’t all been strapped in our cars, I think every last motorist would have given her a standing ovation. I know I yearned to.I yearn to salute all signs of high spirits. I yearn to applaud every length of limb on display.And sometimes – ah sometimes! – I do yearn to go back to the time of that little ruffly-bottomed sunsuit.    

Nice to be Back

Is there anything nicer than being back in your own bed and your own regular wardrobe, never mind all those travel clothes you take on vacation?After a full day's flying home from, we both slept like the dead Sunday night and opened our eyes yesterday to a cool,  cool sun and the popcorn of cherry blossoms strung along the branches of the little tree under our window. I felt good all day, in part because I had not only unpacked everything as soon as we got in Sunday but also washed and ironed it all, catching up on episodes of Veep, Silicon Valley and the frightening outrageously R-rated Game of Thrones, a show that makes me want to run into the bathroom and peek only a tiny bit through the crack in the door. (And yes we DO have a TV in our bedroom, so sue me . We brought it in when I was heavy with child in 1976 and only got through the early months of that first baby's life thanks to All in The Family, Cheers and that groundbreaking serialized drama Alex Haley's Roots.)I worked like crazy on my work-work and didn't get to the Y where I do need to go since soon I'll be doing even MORE ironing as I dig our my fashionable summer wardrobe.I'm going out to that YMCA even IF the sun is not supposed to come out at all tomorrow and the temperatures are going to feel more like March than the brink of May. I learned early in life, if you want fun in your life you'd best learn how to make it yourself.  Plus I always have fun at the Y. Hot Hula? You bet. I do it every week (love that sarong!) See it here.      

Greedy

I'll call this one We Got Too Greedy, or else maybe Tub o' Sludge. Here's why:We went on vacation, all ten family members, thinking, OK we'll stay for the FIRST part of the week in the cool old inn with the 1940s bathrooms. Sure, the other guests there are mostly ancient, but we figured that even if one or two did chance to visit the pool, they wouldn't mind us with our goggles and our floaties and our young ones with their fat baby limbs - and they didn't.And I loved that inn in Tucson and felt so sad when, on Thursday, we bid it goodbye to go to another, 21st century joint, named for the two brothers whose portrait hangs in every lobby, founders of this giant hotel chain.There, at the J.W. Starr Pass Marriott, were ten times the number of guests, including a Medical Records Convention, a Transit Conference, and a charming gaggle of pre-teen females here with their folks (or mostly mums, really) for some sort of Trapeze Convention.At this hotel, there are pools within pools, and a water slide, and a Lazy River, with the usual giant inflatable tubes in which you can float serenely around the perimeter of the aquatic  acreage, propelled by just enough water pressure to make a girl feel like Katherine Hepburn on the African Queen, before the part where she and 'captain' Humphrey Bogart get a little storm-tossed.That first night, when we came back from dinner, however, our tub looked like this. While we were gone it had vomited up this black sludge that would not wipe away with mere towels. I called Maintenance, who came instantly and poured what looked like Muriatic Acid down the drain and strongly suggested we wait until  Housekeeping could come in the morning to truly sanitize the thing. No baths for us!Then two of us humans began also vomiting up stuff, such that I got to spend five hours in a dark hotel room next door watching inane pre-teen programming on the Disney Channel while rubbing the back of my favorite six-year-old as he did residual gagging and spitting for 90 minutes into the room's wastebasket, carefully lined with the plastic bag from the ice bucket - all this  while everyone else had the world's most festive time with our brother-in-law/brother/uncle team, the ones we had come out west to see and here they are:Then, the same night it happened again with our tub. And the baby broke out in hives. And on our last full day yesterday the temperatures plunged from 90 degrees to 60 degrees and a day-long wind blew that practically sanded our faces off.Still it was wonderful to be there and now, in two hours, we will fly the five hours home.I will remember the clear dry air but not the sludge, and how we cherish these brothers who live here. Also I bet I will remember always how lovely it was to watch, at the pool, as 11-year-old trapeze girl, as slender as a young stalk of celery, executed an amazingly long hand stands while sipping at her lemonade upside down, through a straw - and don't I wish I had captured an image of THAT  wondrous feat!And also I love caring for any sick child which in any case helped me take my mind off my own sickness.Here he is playing on my phone once he felt up to such pleasures. And here I am bidding you all Good Day as we drive to Phoenix to begin the long journey home. 

Skinnyman

Thinkin' about bones today. It must be this desert around me that's doing it. I just love bones, the way one nudges so nicely into another; the way the fat round head of the femur nestles into the deep bowl-shaped part of the pelvis fashioned to hug it tight.I used to keep a little dancing man of a skeleton on display in my office in the years when I practiced massage. He stood a good three feet tall there where he perched atop my file cabinet. You couldn’t miss him when someone opened my office door and I guess that’s why that little brother-and-sister team knocked shortly after I had arrived that one time. When I had passed them in the hallway where they were playing, they must have looked in and seen my clattery man, grinning down in that dapper little ​Mr. Bones way.“We want to see your skeleton!” is how I remember the little boy saying breathlessly, while his sister hid herself behind him.“Hmmm Well, I’m actually wearing my skeleton at the moment,” I replied, pretending to misunderstand.​ “I mean it’s under my skin.”He brushed past me and my silly joke and together with his sister entered my office.“THAT skeleton,” he said, pointing upward.“He’s scary,” he added gravely.“Scary? No!“ I said back​. “These are just his bones, just like we all have.” Then I went on. I can never help going on when it comes to this topic.“Bones do so much for us, holding us up, helping us move, providing a platform for our muscles...”“Look at his FEET!” squealed his younger sister.“I know​, aren’t they great, with all those tiny parts? And look at his ribs, like a perfect little birdcage, just right for protecting his heart.”The boy swallowed hard. “Show me his skull,” he said dramatically.“Let me see if I can lift him down then,” I answered and did so, causing the figure’s limbs to caper and sway.The children squealed, and squeezed back toward the wall.“And you know what the skull protects, don’t you?” I said. “The most important thing you have, which is….”“Your BRAIN!” they both yelled together laughing, then piled back out to the hallway.The boy dashed off then, but the girl stopped before following him, shot out one arm and waved a merry goodbye.“My name is Terry,” I told her because we had not introduced ourselves exactly. “What’s yours?”“Vanessa!” she shouted gleefully.“Well then Vanessa, goodbye for now. We’ll see each other again soon, I’m sure.”“Goodbye!” she yelled and danced away down the hallway.And that was ​that. It was an exchange that lasted maybe five minutes, but even all this time later I still cannot think of a nicer way to have started my day. For the whole rest of the week in fact, I felt cheered and buoyed up by it, and newly conscious of all the small people present among us.For if humanity is a forest, then we adults are its stiffly standing old trees, while they are the new ones. Self-important lot that we are, we imagine that we rule the forest. We even imagine we hold up the sky, with our barky old arms, hurrying the very clouds along to their next assignment.But the future of any forest lies in its new growth. And the whole time we elders go on looking upward for meaning, the meaning lies below us in these tender saplings - like the ones I met that day, so bright, and limber, and trembling with that fresh young life.