Farewell August Rose

Today, one day following the anniversary of Diana's death, I wonder how we cannot feel compassion for her, as she tried to do what was called upon her to do as a member of the Royal Family, whose burdens are so formidable! In The Diana Chronicles, her meticulously researched 2007 biography, Tina Brown writes that for us to even imagine what it might be like to be in the Royal Family we should think of the worst aspects of our own jobs and then just do just the parts that bore us the most…Year after year…With no possibility of retirement.Girl of 20 that she was, she could not have known what she was in for until after she marched down that aisle, Brown writes; could never have imagined ahead of time what Brown calls “the oldness, the coldness, the deadness of Royal life, its muffled misogyny, its whispering silence, its stifling social round confronting sycophantic strangers.”  She must have felt plain marooned in those vast palaces, especially after her divorce, often dining alone in her room, her much-loved children off with their father.Anyway I think about her at this time every year, in the days surrounding the anniversary of her passing, and about Mother Theresa too, who left this life just five days later:Diana with her heart’s delicate roots ripped from its seated place in that Paris tunnel.Mother Theresa, with the new revelation that at some point decades earlier her sure shining faith became infused with an all-too-human doubt.I think also of Elvis alone in the bathroom at the time of his death.And of course I think of our candle-in-the-wind Norma Jean Baker, simply Marilyn to the world, who, like Diana, was also just 36 when she died.Her morgue photo shows her with her clean young hair still wet from the shower.Maybe it’s odd that we probably all know that picture but anyone who has Internet connection can see it. Maybe it’s odd that so very many of us know and remember the details of these deaths. They are two of our deepest urges I think: to hold in memory, and to speak of what we remember. As billowing August rounds each year into its quieter sister month I light a candle to both.And now, for yourself today these two lovely montages: First regarding Diana, with Elton John’s time-of-her-death adaptation of the song he initially wrote for Marilyn - that one is here - and the second of Marilyn herself, in all her sad beauty and vulnerability.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1qIQpwFNA8&feature=related[/embed]  

Two Months Back

Two months ago now, just at that moment of the deep dive into true summer, I went out and bought a fat book to celebrate the season. It was about Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great philosopher and Transcendentalist, and it had a wonderful title: "Emerson: The Mind on Fire: it was called^.. I remember that there was a wild cloudburst as I drove to the bookstore, found this volume and forked over the full $35 for this book. The price seemed worth it to me though; I think that for me it symbolized these ten delicious weeks of school’s-out freedom.

And it certainly started out in lively enough fashion, recounting how a year after his first wife died at age 20, the grief-stricken young Emerson has her body disinterred so he could gaze once more upon her face.

Talk about your sensational opening chapters!

But as I have continued reading, I have been sorry to find the rest of the book to be as dry as toast, dealing more with the influences playing upon the man, what he must have been reading when he wrote this or that - in short, the kind of stuff that scholars build careers arguing over.

 As a result I’m still on page 68. Just sixty-eight pages for my $35! What was I thinking?

Maybe I was drawn to it not just because of my fondness for this man but also because of how I passed so many summer days as an adolescent: When swimming and field sports were done for the day, I read.

 Of these young summers I remember chiefly this:  The shady porch of a simple house built my grandparents in 1920.  A living room furnished with wicker and ignored ever since.

 I close my eyes and see more still: The floorboards by the windows washed bare of varnish by winter sun and the spill of summer rains. Two rugs, faded to grey and as thin as Kleenex. The lumpy cushions on that wicker couch and me stretched out on them, reading and reading.

I carried a battered dictionary everywhere then, to look up unknown words. I still have a list of the ones I wrote down at 13. When I say them aloud now I see a girl in an oversized shirt and cut-offs, barefoot, and deeply absorbed.

I kept a notebook then too, of all the quotes that moved or inspired me, which I own still and have just pulled down from the shelf. And surprisingly enough, here are the words of Mr. Emerson himself, copied so long ago. I read them again now:

 He said, “You shall have joy, or you shall have power.... You shall not have both.”

 He said, “Give me health and a day and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.” I love that one.

 He said, “For everything you have missed, you have gained something else."

 And finally he said this, as if he were sitting right here beside me and clapping shut every book in sight:

 “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”

All right, Mr. Emerson, here is what I know:

 I know that my time is my own, to savor or to waste.

 I know that many fat books await me if I but make time to read them.

 And I know that sweet nostalgia notwithstanding, this summer, the summer of Right Now, beats any summer I could hope to disinter from memory’s dusty vaults.

Summer Morning : Earth

When we’ve all moved lock, stock and candy wrapper to some giant biosphere high up in Space, what will be said of our time on this planet? What will be remembered, say, of a summer day here on Earth?

Will anyone recall the young women riding morning buses on their way to work?Earlier this week, I looked up from the task of wedging groceries into my dented little car, and saw, on a bus idling at a red light, one such young woman perched on the inward-facing seatsShe wore a dress scooped low in the back, and I watched as with sure and practiced hands she reached behind her to arrange her hair, lifting and looping sections, disciplining its long braids, until, at last satisfied, she let the heavy whole of it drop against bare skin.  Where is the video camera for moments like these?Later that day, 100 miles farther west, at a rest stop on Interstate 90, I wondered that same thing again, as I sat on one of the arc-shaped stone benches encircling the stone tables on the Visitors’ Center's leafy patio.  I watched as the scalloped edges of the umbrellas sheltering this Stonehenge-like seating danced in the wind and thought, “If I could only paint! I wouldn’t need a video camera if I had the artist’s eye to capture this breeze in a series of brush strokes.”I looked around more and saw a woman well into her 70s so delighted with the pre-school child holding her hand that she was literally skipping from her car to where I sat, the little boy skipping with her and the two talking delightedly away even as they flitted from the hot asphalt to that cool bower of shade where we outdoor diners sat, paused on our several journeys.That pause is a big element of life on this Earth in the warmer months I think.I move through my days, same as I do all year, but find myself lately taking more time to notice each moment.Yesterday I was trying to clear a sink drain and accidentally dropped the small red cap to the can of the harsh chemical down into the drain too, thus doubly stopping it up, and the irony of that fact made me ponder.I called the plumber and when he arrived we chatted away about all the small mild ‘reprimands’ Fate sends our way. “Look at this,” he said, indicating his reddened left arm. “I was weeding around the foundation of my house when a whole swarm of yellow-jackets buzzed up out of the ground and stung me!" "I have eight or ten bites here,” he added, pointing. “Yikes!” I said. “And nothing hurts worse than a yellow jacket’s sting!” “Oh, but that’s not all! The next day when it started itching like crazy, I realized: That weed patch was full of poison ivy!”    It seems likely to me that here was a conversation that would NOT have taken place in the hurry-up cold months.The young woman would have been in a coat for one thing, her lovely back all covered; and the canvas umbrellas would not have even been there to snap in the breeze; and for sure the older lady would not have been skipping over stone-cold asphalt.Time seems to slow in the warm months and open these small still pools into which we can for once really see ourselves living, the way God sees us and, let us hope, the way God smiles in the seeing. 

How I Spent My Week Off

How I spent my week off: Not the way this picture would suggest. This was our vacation week; the only week old David and I take all year, just for ourselves, up at our place by the lake.My friend Bobbie, in a laconic email containing only one link, pointed me to an article in The Times about how you really mustn't let your work life encroach on your vacation. It says you just can’t keep answering emails and making calls, much less initiating them, but... well, you know how it is: you’re never on vacation really after about age 30, and certainly not if you're someone who writes for a living.And then in my case there’s the non-profit I spend so much of my time with the local chapter of an organization called A Better Chance that places outstanding students of color from all around the country in secondary schools that are regarded as the among the most challenging, the high school in our town being one such. We call it ABC for short and somehow I can never NOT work on ABC stuff, especially now with two shiny new ABC scholars due to arrive in a little over a week.  Lots of us volunteers have been busy lately, fixing up the house where our eight guys live together with two amazing resident directors and a crack resident academic coordinator. I myself have been buying new file cabinets and furnishing the newly painted study room with cozy window treatments and fresh artwork.I'll admit I’m mad for window treatments lately and earlier this month even tried hanging swags from old Dave's broad shoulders, like Carol Brunette did in her spoof of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind when Scarlett uses those velvety drapes from the lost glory that was Tara to make herself a ball gown. It’s like a nesting mania with me lately. You’d think I 22  and eight months pregnant.Anyway the the upperclassmen will be coming back any day now, one for Cross Country, one to row Crew and one just to help get the younger guys assimilated to life in New England. And there’s yet more to do: We’re spiffing up the grounds and painting the fence, getting a plumber in to replace one of the shower doors., and day and night I’m writing to all the new volunteers in an attempt to infect them with the enthusiasm I feel for this organization that helps so many young men grow into their gifts.Here’s one of them now, Machias Turner, who left here in June at 6’5” but looks to be returning to us closer to 6'7”. The picture was taken on the ABC College Tour outside of one of the buildings on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill.BUT ANYWAY, having said all this about the work i couldn't help doing, I did relax some. In fact, along about Wednesday that rainy,rainy day I relaxed so much I wasn’t paying attention even to the simple things. I was treating my coffee with liquid sweetener and  added some drops then tasted: added more drops and tasted again. Why isn’t this getting any sweeter? I wondered before looking down at what I held in my hand to see what I was actually using: the bathing solution for my contact lenses. I knew I was in what passes for vacation mode in my world when I was able to just smile. So I put saline solution into my coffee, so what? What’s wrong with a little salt to go with your sweet? I mean, what else made the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup the hit that it is? :-)

Time with Its Power

We sense so poorly that we too will die, like the every-young-seeming Robin. Ill chance and age come upon us as such an utter surprise.

I'm 65 now - 65! But can I be really, when I feel like the same 14-year old who dawdled home from school with her pyramid of books clutched against her chest, back in that long-ago time before anyone dreamed up such a thing as a backpack for the poor schoolkids? Instead we had bookbags - the boys used them more than the girls I seem to remember. I know I never could use a bookbag. What, let the History book and the French book, the Latin grammar and the tome that was Biology spill randomly into some sack?  No. I carried those books like an offering, as I walked dreamily home from the bus stop, enjoying this small slice of time when I was sure no teacher would call on me, where no conductor of a 9th orchestra would raise her eyebrows in my direction as Second Violin. Soon enough I would be home and laboring under the burden of all those assignments. This was my time, and it often seemed, my only time.

Yes, I am thinking on Time today as I think of Robin gone from the world now; as I picture Billy Crystal, once that fresh-faced kid from Long island...

...now looking more like Kim-Jong-Il in his later days:I wonder at the power Time has over us all. Here is a passage from In Football Season, from John Updike's collection The Early Stories that sums up for me exactly how wide that sky does seem when we are young. He speaks of the nights when he and his high school classmates would choose to walk the three miles home from the football game in a neighboring town, and felt that they had the night, and Time, all to themselves.

How slowly we went! With what a luxurious sense of waste did we abuse the stretch of time! For as children we had lived in a tight world of ticking clocks and punctual bells, where every minute was an admonition to thrift and where tardiness, to a child running late down a street with his panicked stomach burning, seemed the most mysterious and awful of sins. Now, turning the corner into adulthood, we found time to be instead a black immensity endlessly supplied, like the wind.

Would that it were. Would that time were endlessly supplied. 

Helper or Helped?

Maybe we all prefer to see ourselves as the ones who help, rather than the ones who need help. Here are two quick tales on this topic.I belong to a group of college alums, the second-oldest member of which is a career educator I'll call Rose, who still lives independently, together with her two cocker spaniels, in the house where she was born in the late 1920s.Two weeks ago, when the person in our group who is closet to Rose reached out to say that she had fallen in her kitchen the day before and been taken unconscious to the hospital, I drove directly there.She and Rose's nephew had been in the ER with her for hours as they waited for a bed, but by the time I arrived she was settled in a pleasant room, her long hair, customarily worn in a 50’s-style ponytail, falling loose about her shoulders.I don’t know exactly why I felt I had to drive there at 10 in the morning. I knew she would likely still be in the dazed state you get with a head injury. Maybe I thought it would help her to see the face of another friend, for we are fast friends, Rose and I are.“How are you?” I burst out, practically running toward the hospital bed. “I‘m well,” she said mildly, and reached up to touch the bandage covering a ragged arc of coarse black stitches. “The staff here is very fine,” she added.“Does it hurt?”“No,” she said with that same mildness. “And they don't think they‘ll do forgery.”She hesitated, sensing that wasn’t quite right.“Perjury,” she then tried.“You mean surgery?” I asked, and she nodded, laughing at her mistake.I guess I thought I was also helping the next time I went to the hospital and found her having a very quiet day indeed, with a magazine article open before her, single phrases of which she was reading aloud, in a slow and ruminative fashion.I took both of these so-called ‘helping’ actions almost automatically. I just woke every day that week wondering “How can I help?” a variation of which, I suddenly realized, was the same question I wake asking myself every day.So apparently I am one of the people who prefer to think of themselves always as the helpers and never as the ones in need of help.Then came another realization. It was on the second day I came home from the hospital and found myself so unaccountably frazzled I couldn't get my eyes to focus on the pileup of emails in my Inbox. This I was sadly regarding when a name popped up in the corner of my screen.It was a Facebook ‘Friend Request’ with a warm message from a person named Susan whom I could not place. I accepted the request and messaged back, “Do we know each other, Susan?”We certainly did, as she quickly pointed out; for not only had she had me for English back in in high school, but she had also gone on to become a nurse and ‘re-met’ me in a very different setting. As she wrote, I took care of you in Room 314, in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital when you gave birth to your daughter.”I remembered that all right. If there was ever a day I needed help it was the day my first child was born, and Susan provided it, along with steadfast care and attention. Thus do I sense some connection today, and feel lucky and grateful for any help sent my way in past or future, even as I feel lucky and grateful to have been one who sometimes offered help.  

Ghost Town

Where IS everybody?It feels like even the Wallgreen's parking lots are empty. It feels like if you called 911 you'd be able to just tell that the dispatcher was filing his nails and slurping a smoothie.It's the weather.When the weather gets like this and stays like this, don't you just want to dress any old way and mosey on over to the Arts & Crafts tent?I do . I surely do. Let's go ask these nice ladies for some gimp and get under that big tree outside and make us some lanyards, whaddya say?

Your Kids: They Judge You

Tell you what: Admit nothing to your grown children, for they will surely judge you. Here’s a scene that took place at my house last weekend:It was midnight up in the country and my grown child and I were just straightening things up after watching a House of Cards episode when, standing under the light that hangs over the dining room table, he suddenly went “Whaaaat?”“What what?” I said.“What is THAT thing?" he said, indicating a tiny sphere bobbling about in the warm currents of air. Think of a snow globe that a home-décor-minded mouse might set out in his hole come the holidays. "Is it alive? Is it attached to something? The ceiling?" he said. He passed his hand above it. No thread, or web, or filament held it.He let it land on his hand and touched it. “It has… body. And - ew, it feels greasy. But it’s not a soap bubble….”Just then it burst, as I was trying to take it from his hand into mine and we knew that’s exactly what was.“But what’s a soap bubble doing way over here? And at this hour? I mean where is it FROM?'I swallowed. I knew what was coming and so armed myself in my breeziest manner:“Oh earlier tonight before you got here I just put a bottle of Dawn in the blender.”There was a silence followed by that mild look of incredulity your grown kids always give you when they question your choices.“Why?” he finally managed to say. “Why did you put a bottle of dishwashing liquid in the blender?”This time I went for a jaunty matter-of-factness. “I was dyeing it," I said.“Dyeing the dishwashing liquid? OK, Mum: This is a whole new level of crazy, even for you.”“Not at all,” I countered. “I dye all my liquid soaps if I don’t like their color, hand soaps, bath gels, all of them. Dad bought this transparent dishwashing liquid and it just looked so dull to me and I mean, who wants that? I want a dishwashing liquid with a nice deep-amber color. So I add food coloring, one drop of red, two drops of yellow and there we are!  Only tonight they didn’t mix right in the bottle so that’s why I poured the whole thing in the blender.”“But what happened when you did THAT? It didn’t spill over?”“Oh it got a little foamy. And when I poured it back into the bottle it had this 'head' at the top, like you get with beer: just this layer of tiny peach-colored bubbles. So I left the cap off and I guess that’s how one bubble got to where it was still floating around two hours later and 20 feet away.” I smiled at him, with my most confident smile.“I don’t know, Mum,” he said, shaking his head.I suppose the guy does realize that I’ve been dyeing my hair since he was in kindergarten but maybe not, and who knows? By the time I’m on my deathbed I may also be found to have a giant tattoo splayed all across my midriff. I may just. But hey, I say we should all ‘decorate’ any way we please, because it’s so cheering. Just ask that mouse with his little snow globe. 

Don't Let Go Girl We Got a Lot

This last was a week when I was really dragging myself to the finish line, but then as if waking from a long bad dream, I suddenly woke up to find myself at a concert by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.The ‘Seasons’ themselves, those handsome lads in their clingy black tees, weren’t even alive in ‘70s, whereas ol’ Frankie came into the world LONG before that – he turned 80 this past May – and as I peered down at him through the swivel and play of lights all I could think is I’m watching Al Pacino prowling the sage as Richard III. Seriously? I thought. That’s really his voice? Doing the stage patter between songs he was now and then gulping bites of air but then when it came time to hit the rafters in that high falsetto he seemed to be doing it.Or maybe he wasn’t doing it I don’t know. Milli Vanilli you could be mad at for lip-synching that album; it was right that they got laughed off the bus, but who could be mad if a guy 80 used technology to add the more curated version of his voice or the mix, tracks laid down in some studio when he was in vigorous mid-life.Anyway they were great. Any crowd anywhere loves What a Lady what a Night. A beefy 40-something guy in front of me kept leaping to his feet and dancing a happy arms waving jog that from the hips down was strangely dainty and ballerina-like. Mean people shouted at him - I guess they thought it wasn’t that kind of concert  - and certainly his little ten-year-old looked embarrassed but I liked the guy and admired his zeal, every time he stood to do his little jig, only to sit down again, looking pained and embarrassed by the cruel shouts directed at him.I finally patted his shoulder by way of reassurance. I couldn’t help it. Though I am no longer much of a stander OR a dancer at concerts these days. I was once, I remember that. I remember at my first Elton John concert with my hair down my back in a kind of Princess Leia-style full-length dress I had just bought to accommodate that first baby, quietly growing inside me. Big Girls Don’t Cry was great, and Sherry Bay-ay-bee Sherry was too of course. But for me the night hit its peak when Frankie took the mic and sang his first solo hit My Eyes Adored You, which made me think how we were all young once, and how someplace, on some other plane just out of the range of our dim, dim sight, we all still are.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqz9eyakGqY[/embed] 

Get Up. Get to Work

Here's another kind of call to arms, as rousing to me as that guy in the last post warbling out his a cappella version of the Marseillaise. I saw it yesterday on Brain Pickings Weekly, a wonderful site that serves up great plate of food for thought every Sunday. Go here to see.It featured Leonard Cohen and his work habits as a songwriter, which were are interesting in themselves - but what I really liked was the trouble the website's authors took to gather up what other writers and musicians have said about so-called inspiration:Composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: “A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood.”Novelist Isabel Allende: “Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”Painter Chuck Close: Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work."Author and essayist E.B. White: “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope: "My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best." (And may we correct the old notion by adding the woman who will work the hardest will also work the best.)The dailiness of writing – and I write every day, for publication may seem to some like a terrible burden. And sometimes when I am in one of my sad places, it seems that way to me - until I sit down and start tapping away when, like a sweater pulled over the head and quickly turned inside out , it becomes not even just a pleasant task but a pure and certain joy.     

Let's Go INFANTS! (as an American Might Translate It)

♫ Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrive ♫My 84-year-old friend Lois threw a Bastille Day party last Monday, which was attended by seven brave people capable of generating enough gill action to swim through the air as thick as wet clay to find their way to her house. They were: the friend she met at Oxford in the summer of ’52 and her nice husband, on the board of a nearby Art Museum; the teacher whose classroom was right next to Lois’s in their years at the local high school; a professor from the local University; and Lois’s nephew who was visiting for a few days on his way to the can-only-get-there-by-boat island off the coast of Maine where his family has been going for decades.One guest brought a dozen note cards imprinted with a moving photo of a crowd surrounding General De Gaulle in Paris 1944 after that amazing city had at last been taken back from the Nazis. In this picture everyone in the picture looks deliriously happy, even the General himself with his long cowcatcher of a face. Lois had three kinds of wine, a chicken salad and a potato salad she had made herself. One guest brought a large bowl of cut-up fruit so colorful it looked like a mound of precious stones. Another brought a peach-ish velvety fruit punch that made your taste buds cry out with joy, which was a good thing since the improvised limeade I made and brought tasted like battery acid.And then there was this lovely cake.The wine didn’t see that much action where it was so hot out, and in spite of the window unit in the living room, most of us were sweating like teacakes, as Harper Lee said regarding those southern ladies come summer in To Kill a Mockingbird.We sat in chairs around the table instead of at the table, kind of up against the walls, which gave the thing the feeling of a visitation as much as of a meal. Actually it felt like a salon as we spoke of books and art and French history. My sole contribution was to recall the first chapter of A Tale of Two Cities where Dr. Manette gets released from his miserable cell in the Bastille -   only I couldn’t recall a single other thing about the man afterward except that he was the father of Lucie Manette whoever she was, my mind being such an echo chamber of forgetting lately. Then at Lois’s instruction, copies of the words to the Marseillaise were distributed. She started us off in her bold alto voice and away we went. We got clear to the second verse, and, finding us wholly unfamiliar with words and somehow the music as well, declared the effort a success and went at the cake.Good day. Good company. Now let's hear this lovely version and count our joint blessings as co-believers in 
Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité! (and possibly have some cake if we can find any equal to this gorgeous one pictured above.)[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqZq5v8UjNg[/embed]

Hit the Floor!

It’s fainting weather again.  If you’re an old fainter like I am, you’ll TRY blaming the weather when you faint anyway, even knowing perfectly well that there are other factors leading to your smackdowns.If you’re a fainter, you know that you can faint under all kinds of conditions: You faint if you get too hungry. You faint in religious settings, whether it's the airlessness in the place or the staying in one position that turns the world so suddenly black. If you’ve been fainting since childhood, you will remember how quickly you became a small rumpled pile of clothing under the pews, and how large male hands would haul you out by your armpits and make for the door as your little feet dragged on the floor behind you.It gets embarrassing if you’re still fainting well after childhood of course, and the memory of this embarrassment is so vivid that each time you start to feel even a wee bit odd in a public place, you’re sure you’re about to go down like the Titanic.You also faint when you get scared. That’s what made me faint at 14 when a mystified old-time doc, believing he knew how to remove my two very small warts, drew a small blowtorch from his bag and came at me with it. He burned twin holes on my forearm whose scars I have to this day. Plus, it hurt like crazy, so add that: You faint when you’re in pain. You faint at bad news.And you really do faint when the weather gets muggy, as I did in a department store at age 19, only to wake and see that all new male strangers had dragged me away by the armpits – because you can’t have insensate young women interfering with commerce.There’s a predictable physiology to the faint, naturally: You faint due to a reflex caused by one of the above-mentioned triggers. Then the blood vessels in your lower extremities dilate, and blood pools in your legs. Then your heart rate slows, your blood pressure drops and - boom! – you have left the premises, or your consciousness has anyway. it seems that this vasovagal syncope as such fainting is called, only happens when you're standing or sitting upright. It never happens when you're lying down.I read all this on the web just last month in a posting that said how useless it is for people to try holding you up, even IF they add in the additional treatment of yelling in your ears or slapping you. It also said that trying to fight off the faint “by forcing yourself to remain upright, willing yourself not to pass out almost never works out very well.” Get down before you fall down, in other words. And so I've been doing that, and also elevating my legs once I’m down there, which is also helpful evidently.I get leg cramps at night, see. So now instead of leaping up and making desperate pogo-stick-like hops around the room, I plop down on the floor and put my legs up on the bed.Last weekend, when I did this for the first time, my bedmate woke and saw the soles of my upturned feet by his ribcage. He peered over the bed’s edge at me.  “What on earth are you doing now?” he said in his mild way. A good long time we are married but still: he will never truly comprehend the swoon. So I just smile dup at him and said, ‘Oh nothing. It’s fainting weather is all.”  

The Hunch

I'm at the office of the massage therapist who has started by placing me face down on the table and running the heel of her hand like a plow-blade around the edges of the two kite-shaped ‘angel wings’ we call the scapulae. And in fact I do feel like a patch of plowed-up earth, the way she digs into me, but finally she stops. “There!” she finally says with satisfaction. “NOW your shoulders are up on your back again where they belong!”I'm calling today's post ‘The Hunch’, for what we’ve been doing to our poor bodies ever since we first stood upright and began sashaying around on two legs. Once our ancestors spent their days running across open spaces and handing themselves along among the tree branches. Every day they reached high above their heads, shoulders back and chests open. Today by contrast, at work and in leisure-time both, we spend our days hunched over screens and devices. Our arms in front. Our shoulders rolled forward. Our backs, quite noticeably, hunched. Right?And our bodies pay the price,  as I am learning on this table.Twenty minutes in, with my dorsal side ironed flat, the therapist flips me like a pancake so I'm now face up. Then, coming in from the side, she begins working her way through the filo-dough of tissues under my left arm to address that strong rubber band of a muscle known as Teres Minor.She presses. I leap like a fish. It’s worse than electrolysis. Worse than getting your mustache snatched off. Worse even than that time in childhood when, on a dare, you popped a wad of  tinfoil in your mouth and bit down, just to see how it felt on your fillings.While a person generally signs up for that last experiment only once, with massage therapy you’re there as often as you can scrape together the dough, the  ‘vividness’ of the experience notwithstanding.Deep work on little Teres Minor can be tough to receive, sure, but really? It’s worth the pain. As with the other three muscles of the rotator cuff, it lets us circle and swing our arms, while still keeping them attached to our bodies  - and a good thing too, because how would it be if people were all accidentally flinging their arms off every time you turned around?“Ah now, this is good,” the therapist is now saying in her calm soothing voice. “This way when you reach for that vase high on the shelf, you can just shoot an arm up without the rest of your body having to come too.” Then she works on my neck a while, so that I won’t have to  turn my whole torso to look behind me before pulling out into traffic.And by gosh, it all works. When, with the session over, I pull out of my parking space, I can keep my body facing forward while I turn my head practically clear around.I feel like an owl. A happy owl at that. Then once home, I try that other thing:  I reach a vase down from its place on the shelf using one of my newly mobilized, strangely longer arms while the rest of my torso, earthbound, taking things easy down below.In fact I’m looking at that vase as I dot these last i’s here, because as soon as I’m done I believe I’ll fill it with flowers and run it over to her office.  Then, on the way back to my car, shoulders back, and head high, I may even reach up to those pretty trees lining the sidewalk and swing from some low-hanging branches myself. 

Holiday Weekend

This past weekend when I realized i was really NOT at the center of things, my time was marked by all I did not do.I didn't help put up the new basketball hoop.I didn't hold the toddler so she wouldn't get hurt as they hoisted it.I didn't even so much as hold a screwdriver I didn't go out and get the fireworks AND I didn't prepare any meals...Really I just worked at my work and folded laundry.Oh and I took these pictures. This is our oldest, Carrie, who had more sense than I did and more energy too. She was a key part of the basketball-net-hoisting duty AND  she, wise girl, got out on the deck. It's Ok I think. Summer is just starting, right? It is, right? Isn't it? Someone tell me it's not a sin to waste a Sunday such as we just had! 

Poem for a Quiet Weekend Day

Here is the amazing Mary Oliver with a poem I don't think I ever really felt the truth of until today. It’s called Wild Geese and it goes like this:

You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your bodylove what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers,Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clear blue air,are heading home again,Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -Over and over announcing your placein the family of things.

Summer Salad (with a Dash of Kids)

This year June seemed to last forever, yet here we are at the final day of this most beautiful month. Could it stay awhile , cool as it was and lovely every day? Alas no, it cannot.In its last week we looked in on our younger grandson’s First Grade Show and Tell Day, arriving nice and early in our cool summer clothes.We admired his artwork, and played on the classroom terminals,      ate strawberries and bagels outside and watched as he said goodbye for now to his best friend Diego.Then this past Friday we kicked off summer.  We went to Legoland...then dropped off little Miss Sundress at her house and continued on, taking her two big brothers away for the weekend, where Auntie Annie, pregnant on not still did all the cooking for us .On Saturday, the guys in the family chatted away, and hit golf balls. We had a fire, and when bedtime came we made a bed on the floor that everyone wanted to sleep in, even me. Even though it was on the floor of my own bedroom.                         Next morning, there was a game of Sorry with David Marotta the Younger and Auntie Annie,  as Annie and John’s  puppy Archer, who is the size of a large file cabinet, kept Annie’s growing baby warm.The boys fought some of the time and we found out that now, as grandparents we're not quite as good as we once were at taking that in stride. (At one point, when they were hitting each other with OUR i-Pads I snatched them both out of their hands and all but clashed them together like cymbals. At another, David-Marotta-the-Larger picked up Mini-David-Marotta the way a man might pick up a bag of laundry and carried him by the waist into our room where he made him lie for ten minutes on his improvised bed on the floor, while 'Papa' lay on our bed, calmly doing his crossword, same as always.) Nothing came of these small microbursts I'm happy to say. The boys know how we love them and are ever merry and loving back, and as we began the longish drive to return them home again, the car was full of laughter and the eating of McDonalds.And now it’s June 30^th, with a short week ahead and summer, summer, summer stretching like that big happy  dog of Annie and John's before he thuds to the floor all puppyish elbows and knees.   

Shop Talk

For a person who hates to shop, I do love going to go to the store.Last week at Macy’s, the most cheerful clerk I have ever encountered stood waiting on customers and complimenting them on their choices, even as she swung the garments this way and that, patting them into neat rectangles the way a storybook mouse might fold and smooth his little hanky after the wash. When it came my turn at her register she was just upbeat with me as she had been with the others. After I swiped my credit card in the magic slot, she said, “Now just sign your name and we're done!” Then in recollection her face opened into a wider grin.“Yesterday I told this one lady to sign her John Hancock and she actually wrote the words ‘John Hancock’! Do you believe that? People kill me!”People kill me too, which is what sends me out into the world to find them.Find more of them I did, a few days later at the supermarket when I was treated to a second friendly exchange: A woman in her late 50s pulled up behind me at the check-out, the seat of her shopping cart filled with a small two-year-old boy with a girl of about six standing alongside.I smiled at the girl, who was looking directly at me.She held my gaze for several seconds, and then beamed. “That's my Grammy!”  she whispered conspiratorially, her eyes shining with affection as she slid them over to the woman pushing the cart."Is that your Grammy?” I said in the same conspiratorial way. It was not really a question but more of an exultation to match her own, and it caused the woman to look at me guardedly, until I spoke directly to her.“I wish MY grandchildren were with me right now.”“Oh aren’t they wonderful!” she cried. “And yet you love them so much it scares you. You have so much to lose!""I know!" I agreed. “We’re really out on a limb now!” And with that we parted ways, each, I think, reeling with this truth.Finally, just yesterday the following happened when, again at the supermarket, the cashier and I came to the swipe-the-card moment - only this time, instead pulling my card from the wallet I was not actually carrying, I pulled it from and returned it to, a far more accessible place. “Did you just put that in your bra?" The young woman asked."Yep," I said."I do that too!"“Really? I thought only eccentric older people who didn't care what others thought did things like this!”“Oh No." she said. "The way I figure it, you’ve got this... SHELF...."  “A pocket with no holes!”“That's right! Plus you there's two of them and, really, what else are they for?"“Exactly! Well besides a baby’s food needs.”I decided to leave aside for the moment what these wondrous things are NOT for, namely an industry based on the male gaze, and profit, and exploitation – which was a good thing since just then it occurred to me to look at the boy bagging my groceries.“Sorry about the girl-talk,” I told him.But he just smiled. “Oh no problem!" he said."Actually I like it. All the talk makes my day really fun!”      And I couldn’t have said THAT any better myself.

Such Days

Such days, such perfect days! The morning light alone as it pours thick as honey through the window pane! How can we not thank God every minute of our lives here? 

Here is a passage from one of John Updike's stories about a bot sick in bed as a child, seen through the eyes of the man he would become. All the longing for that simple time, all the gratitude in it I feel too right now. Bittersweet!"He had awoken with a sore throat and stayed home from school. Ferguson, turning the newspaper pages, heard the child’s mother mounting to him with breakfast on a tray and remembered those lost mornings when he, too, stayed home from school: the fresh orange juice seedy from its squeezing, the toast warm from its toasting and cut into strips, the Rice Krispies, the blue cream pitcher, the sugar, the japanned tray where his mother had arranged these good things like the blocks in an intelligence test, the fever-swollen mountains and valleys of the blankets where books and crayons and snub-nosed scissors kept losing themselves, the day outside the windows making its irresistible arc from morning to evening, the people of the town travelling to their duties and back, running to the trolley the people of the town travelling to their duties and back, running to the trolley and walking wearily back, his father out suffering among them, yet with no duty laid upon the child but to live, to stay safe and get well, to do that huge something called nothing. The house in all its reaches attended to him, settling, ticking, clucking in its stillness, an intricately worked setting for the jewel of his healing; all was nestled like a spoon beneath his life, his only life, his incredibly own, that he must not let drop."Ah! Indeed we must not let drop this life, this only life...  

Professional Translater For Hire

On a recent trip in Europe, I was at first slightly cowed by all I did not know. Luckily THAT didn’t last. Sure, I was surprised to find out there are still seashells from a long-ago ocean to be found in the Bavarian Forest. And yes, I was interested to hear that the old city of Vienna is home to one of the world’s first Ferris wheels. But if you’re a true provincial like I am, your surprise would soon give way to the smugness we Americans tend to bring everywhere with us.I mean, it didn‘t take me more than an hour to be smiling indulgently at the inscriptions outside many of the shops and eateries, all gamely aiming at a jaunty, American-style English. "Nonstop buffet!" read the sign outside one such place. “American Rump!” it said outside another. “How quaintly earnest,” I smiled in my smugness. And only after some days did I realize that of all the signs in languages other than my own I could read….…Exactly none.  I have no German. I have no Hungarian. I have no Italian. And I'll admit this fact almost made me feel slightly inferior. I say ‘almost’ because any trace of inferiority disappeared for me when I traveled on a smaller craft up a narrower section of the Danube where the guide began speaking not only in Hungarian, Italian and German, but also in French.“French!”  I crowed inwardly, because didn’t I just study French in high school? I figured all I needed now was confidence. I envisioned myself with a Parisian waiter’s tiny mustache and in my mind touched its tapering tips. Then, with an elegant flourish, I began translating for my American friends every French sentence the guide was speaking. And here, without further ado, is what he said:"Ladies and gentlemen, commence to please yourselves! The suitcase sits upon the cat!”He pointed to a castle we were just sailing past. “Fix the eyes: on this place are fixed 65 anniversaries, which George dragged under his bottom.” It’s true I didn't know who George was, but I was getting the gist for sure. I was ON this.“Eh Bien!” he went on, a common French phrase meaning ‘oh beans.’   “Inform yourselves! In Roman Times George found himself hung from this bridge, a deviant.” Poor George, I might have mused. But I was too busy translating for actual thought.“Imaginez! To your right, it is seen, a great bubbling from the nose,” he said. Surreptitiously, I checked my own nose. Then he waggled his eyebrows in meaningful fashion. “To your left is found the green plaque in the mouth of the king.“I nodded knowingly. ‘Those lazy royals,’ I muttered. I’ll confess I wanted him to like me. I wanted him to see that I got it all. I gave him my biggest American smile.He didn’t smile back. Expert as I am in translating French words, I couldn’t read his mind of course. Yet in my own mind suddenly flashed the phrase “American Rump!” It was as if we had some kind of mental telepathy. And that was kind of funny, you know, because… well, because who would have thought that here on the river, the guy would be thinking of steak? ;-)           

Who Would Have Called You Gramps

Nice day, Sunday. We cleaned house. Remember Lady Macbeth saying "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him," just after slicing the king up as he slept? That's how we felt yesterday when we cleaned out the cabinets where we store liquor. Who knew the Marottas could open a saloon?  Most stunning was the realization that we had five entire bottles of Creme De Menthe.

My sister likes to have a stinger after dinner when she visits us from Florida every three or four years and stingers are made of brandy and this creme de cremey stuff and I guess she brings a bottle every time thinking 'Surely they’ve have finished that bottle from 2002.'  But it seems we never finished that bottle or any bottle. To me the stuff is kind of eh. I mean, I’ll just as soon have a shot of Scope.

It was Father’s Day of course so I asked David to wear his Hop on Pop T-shirt in part so people could see I didn’t make that story up about how he’s too highly evolved to brag in his class reunion book and how he's so simple in his needs and hangs on to his clothes forever. That story I told last week and it's right here.  And that piece, which was once a column that I only much later turned into a chapter in my second book? I wrote that piece in the summer of ’96, almost 20 while years ago and still the T-shirt gets worn. He also so worked in the yard for many hours so here’s a picture showing him taking a break, with our middle child Annie beside him and her giant dog’s tiny dog toy in hand. (They weren't acting as extras from the prison scenes in a local production of Les Miserables. It was the sun painting those stripes on them from the deck beneath which they sit.)Then later, the rest of our gene pool came over and there was Chinese takeout and a little FIFA watching and a long fun game of whiffleball out back. It was all very nice.Later, after they all had left, I opened Facebook, and saw that everyone was putting up pictures of their fathers but I never knew mine, so posted nothing. And I guess I write this now by way of focusing on what I have instead of what I ever lacked.Anyway here’s the man now, taken when my sister Nan was a baby and he was still around.One time, a minister I knew and respected told me he saw sorrowful-looking older man bending over me in his pastoral office where we sat talking. "Was there an older man in your life who might need your forgiveness?" my friend asked me. There was I supposed and it would have been our dad.But who doesn’t need forgiveness, even now, even decades after the harm they might have caused? I think most of us inwardly punish and hold ourselves responsible for the pain we have caused in this life. I think we all know the ways we have failed others, and I think we are all sorry.Anyway here's to you Francis John “Hap” Sheehy of Wilmington Delaware. I hope that you're resting in peace, wherever you may lie buried. And I'm sorry that you never had a Hop on Pop T-shirt yourself, or knew the four children who would have called you Gramps.