Safe Through the Storm

You never know what lies ahead.

Ten days ago we were celebrating the birthday of this little guy at his house – the house his family was to move out of three days later.

He got a tattoo that day. It’s the wash-off-after-ten-baths kind, so he was still wearing it when the movers came, along with these basketball fans who are the other young people in my life.

We hauled stuff all morning and around 4:00 I took everyone under 20 back to my town – well everyone but Baby Sister Caroline who may or may not end up being called Callie. Nobody knows yet and she is keeping mum on the subject.

She’s got enough to think about what with having just mastered the girly pushup.

Back we went to TT and Papa’s house, ‘TT and Papa’ being what we are now called because this happens as you age: your kids rename you. (In another ten years they’ll probably rename us again, with say, stuffed animals names like Fluffy and Grumpus.) At our house, Tattoo Man and his big brother Edward had a long bath and a book apiece and were sleeping by 8pm so that bright and early the next morning we could all ride BACK over to their town to see Edward get his Bible there at First Parish Church of Lincoln and there was another passage for us all.

The whole Second Grade Sunday school class sang David Mallett’s famous ‘Garden Song’, also known as ‘Inch by Inch, Row by Row’, as you can tell if you view this 20-second clip below. That’s Edward you see right at the beginning . You also see his two moms there in the background, beaming away with little Baldie, who slept through the whole thing.

I say you never know what’s ahead because within 24 hours of this service Tattoo Man and Eddie and I were all sick, Eddie so sick he had to be hospitalized. I got better almost immediately with my tough old immune system but Tattoo Man is still talking in a voice like the Godafther’s.

As for Eddie, with the infection spreading to his kidneys the way it did, he was in hot water for a while, in the 48 t0 72 hours before that broad-spectrum antibiotic kicked in.

So there it was: we all thought we were going to be spending last week toting boxes and bringing snacks. Instead we were shuttling back and forth to a hospital and trying to find a way to comfort a slender child with two IV ports, one on the back of each hand, and bandages the size of small pot holders on each of his legs.

Now that it’s over and he is here in the next room I can finally say something about it. It was a scary time, sure enough. And how grateful and limp with relief we all feel today to have been brought, inch by inch, safe through another storm.

 

This Day of Remembrance

We always went to the cemetery with our mother and aunt, my sister Nan and I, though it didn’t mean much to us, young as we were. We mostly danced among the graves, and dashed happily off to fill the dented metal watering can at the leaky old spigot.

Anyway, our dead had been dead for so long, the mother of our mother just letters etched on granite and never mind that I bore her name. Never mind that my sister looked just like that poor doomed girl who died so young, along with her equally doomed and stillborn child.

Then the years passed as the years will do and I guess I was around 20 when I noticed that we weren’t going to the cemetery so much anymore, though by now our mother and aunt’s father also lay in that grave.

“Is it because we moved an hour north and the place is too hard to get to on the busy holiday?” I asked our Aunt Grace one day as we she and I stood in the dining room of my childhood home. “That’s not it,” she said right away. “It’s because they aren’t there,” she went on and then repeated the declaration with a strange passion I had never before seen in her. “They’re NOT THERE!” she said again, as if to suggest that any fool knows the dead travel to a place infinitely farther than we humans can conceive of in our poor imaginings.

Was that why we weren’t going to the graves so much anymore?  Because nothing was really down there but clay? Or dust? Or whatever remains behind aside from the metal hasps of the coffins? And if that were the case, then why, all these years later, do I still stand again at that grave and picture them all just a few feet below me? I see our mother in that pale lavender suit she so loved; our grandfather with his dark eyebrows; the young lady I should have known as my grandmother lying in the high-necked Gibson-Girl-style dress they would have chosen for her back in 1910.

What good can come of these vigils? Two years ago I saw a young woman sitting on the grass of a soldier’s fresh and flag-decked grave. She was there when I came by at noon and she was there when I came again at 6:00.

It seems we process death by degrees and each in our own way.

Myself I have found over the past weeks that when I think of  our final elder who left us just last month, I do not think of Heavenly realms and eternal reward, in spite of the fierce faith I saw lived out in my family of origin. I think of that man as I knew him over the last six years of his life when he became in many ways my closest friend.

In the long quiet days since his passing I have studied countless snapshots of him – in Latin School in the 30s, in the South Pacific in the 40s, in college on the GI Bill in the early 50s – and am newly in awe at all that a life can contain. I even imagine that I’m beginning to understand what Aunt Grace meant that day: The dead really aren’t ‘there’ under the ground. Rather they are all around us, not farther but infinitely nearer than we humans can conceive of in our poor imaginings.

a bouquet and my grandmother, dead at 31

 

Abe Called

To round out our talk of mirrors let me end with these two photos of Abe Lincoln which do show what a marked difference it makes to flip your image, right to left.

In this first photo with his dry and difficult hair and that sensual lower lip he looks as we ‘remember’  him: noble, generous, broken hearted.

In the second picture you get a whole different impression . Here he looks really rumpled,  almost deranged, and those spots on his cheek look almost cartoonish, as if they were drawn on by somebody.

I remember reading somewhere that more words have been written about this man than any other figure in the world with the exception of Jesus of Nazareth. The shock we feel on seeing him in an unfamiliar way proves that he is ‘in’ us all right, an iconic figure if ever there was one.  And now let’s end with this tuneful song by someone whose perceived image of himself seemed to torture him all his life. 

 

You Only THINK You Look Good

Writing about mirrors has me thinking of the True Mirror that shows you how you really look.

I just heard a podcast about it by the two fun guys from Radiolab.

The idea is you MAY look better than you think!  (but don’t get your hopes up.)

“At the physical-appearance level, there are some very useful applications of the True Mirror,” the website pitch says.

“There is a 3-D effect from the two mirrors used in a True Mirror, which gives a better idea of how clothes fit on your body”

Because it’s two mirrors placed at right angles, see, with the seam that joins them masked  in some ingenious fashion we don’t quite understand.

So you may think you look dashing in that new suit jacket but really you look like Fiorello LaGuardia as depicted in the poster for the Broadway show.

Also, the pitch goes on,  you have to realize that “hair styles have very distinct ‘looks’ depending on if an asymmetric hair part is chosen – something we believe contributes very strongly to the impression people have of us” – and they advise us to read their theory on where you part your hair for more on that.

“In addition, hats and glasses styles and any accessory can be accurately viewed for the effect. For example, if you wear a brimmed hat in an angle, your choice of which angle looks the best is probably exactly OPPOSITE from the angle that you should be wearing the hat!”

TRUE ENOUGH!  I wear this hat you see above sometimes and only sometimes is it actually workin’ for me. “Hey, nice LID!” guys call to me from across the street and maybe they’re not being sarcastic.

Other times I wear it tipped too far back and I just turn into Will Rogers minus the quips and the lasso.

“Is the True Mirror for everyone?” the site blurb goes on. ”Frankly, no. It isn’t much use for shaving your face or plucking your eyebrows. Not after a lifetime of learning to do these things backwards!” (And in high heels.)

“And the novelty value of the effects described above wears off rather quickly.”

BUT –  big but, which the mirror can also help you with identifying truly,  “learning about yourself is a different matter. Introspection and the journey of self-discovery is a multifaceted adventure involving many processes and tools. Adding this new way of communicating with yourself privately can help you validate feelings and thoughts that you may already know about yourself — aspects of yourself that are conspicuously absent in a traditional mirror. With the True Mirror, you can more quickly understand yourself and subsequently reach your own goals more completely.”

Communicating with yourself privately: just what this ego-mad culture needs more of, Gad!

So let’s hear it now for the nation’s favorite occupation: Dancin’ With Your S-eh-elf. And have a good, selfish Mem-Day weekend, y’all.

 

I See You (and You’re Naked?)

The neighbor kept peeking in the bedroom window of this young couple’s rented bungalow, which is pretty ‘Psycho’ right? Like Norman Bates in the family motel dressing up in his dead mom’s clothes and sniffing around poor Lila Crane as she got ready to take the most famous shower in history.

I read about it in Dear Abby. A lady named Lilo from Costa Mesa told it this way:

Many years ago, soon after my husband, Klaus, and I arrived as newlyweds from Germany, we rented a small bungalow in L.A. There were seven of them in two rows behind our landlord’s large home in the front. Between our little house and our next-door neighbor’s was a brick patio that extended from our bedroom window to her back door. Not long after we moved in, the woman began looking into our bedroom window on weekend mornings, pressing her nose against the glass. Because we were guests in this country, we didn’t want to say anything, but we knew we needed to stop her.

BUT, she went on to say, her husband came up with the perfect solution:

He placed a large mirror in the window frame. Sure enough, the weekend came and she peered into our window. Seeing her face reflected back, she dashed into her house and never looked again.

I love this story for the perfect symbol it offers of what we all do when we put the focus on others instead of ourselves. When I was 21 and a first-year teacher, a famously grouchy fellow teacher in the math department marched up to me and began yelling, yelling, yelling in my face because I had not hurried down to the cafeteria fast enough with those Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate cards that schools used in those days to ascertain enrollment in the classes. (Remember those cards? They were for those old-time computers that took up a whole wall.)

Anyway, she gestured and shouted and made herself fearsome and terrible. And I was so cowed about being castigated in front of all the other teachers I went mute. My position was too junior for me to try yelling and gesturing back; anyway that would be opening a second front in this ‘war’ she was waging so… I just looked at her.

Later, in the faculty parking lot, the nicest teacher in the school approached my car and leaned in the window. He could see I was still shaken.

“That was about her, you realize. It wasn’t about you at all.”

I had never heard that perspective before and I have never forgotten it. And so even today I think of  this man, who left teaching six years later and went to his own personal mecca of San Francisco, there to live happily and then die young, one of many who died young in the dying years of the 1980s when on ‘principal’ (?) the country’s President made sure not to let even the word “AIDS” cross his lips.

I could have been like Lilo’s husband; I could have just held up a mirror to that mean teacher so she could see how she looked yelling like that and getting all red in the face. As it turned out what I unwittingly did was almost as good. Turns out when someone is screaming at you and you keep silence, they eventually hear themselves. They hear what they are saying and they ‘see’ how they look and then … they stop. I find it works every time.

 

Give Them Their Space

It’s like I was saying yesterday: Folks are a little crazy nowadays, like the Mad Hatter. You have to give them their space.

Once I rode down in an elevator with a man who, the minute he boarded on Floor 6, exhaled angrily. I was the only other person on this up-flying lift and I could plainly see he was mad at something; steam was practically coming out of his ears.

“Bad day, huh?” I said with my eyebrows up in what I thought was a sympathetic way.

“EXCUSE ME?!” he replied with a withering look.

“I’m sorry!” I said. “I just thought… Well I thought you seemed …just sort of frustrated.”

He maintained his furious silence as on we swooped past Floors 7, 8 and 9.

That’s when he exploded, just as we approached Floor 10: “My God damn SISTER!” he said.

I felt a little vindicated, sure, since I had read his mood right after all, but still. The lesson I took from THAT day was that often when  a person is angry and it’s  best to just have to let them have their anger and stay out of their way.

 

Department of Oops

It’s hard to complain without sounding like a nasty person. Someone told me the other day that I could have handled that cold coffee incident better than I did and that’s true I think. It’s hard to get the tone right. 

One thing I’m gathering is that if you’re going to complain about something you shouldn’t start out with a lot of apologizing for doing so. Too often that just infuriates whoever it is that you’re interacting with. It’s enough you’re about to get satisfaction for the ‘wrong’ done you from the persons you are addressing; you don’t need to insult them by seeming to seek their friendship.

What I had done that day was to bring back a cup of coffee two minutes after it was served to me to say that wasn’t hot. Then when the person who had poured it answered my complaint by giving me that undeniable poker faced Gimme a Break look I got flustered and said “No it really isn’t hot! Stick your finger in it.”

“I’m NOT sticking my finger in it! “she harrumphed and turned away to pour me a fresh cup.

Her reaction taught me two things about interacting with strangers, whether they’re waiting on you or you’re waiting on them or you’re just jostling past one another on some sidewalk and those things are:

• (1) Don’t be referencing people’s body parts, pretty much no matter what.  And…
• (2) Stay away from any suggestions that have the verb “stick” in them.

Two good rules for a new day!

 

Commencement Was Yesterday

I left home for keeps at 17, when I packed up my poetry books and my dorky bike and headed for college. We drove west on old Route 2 in that car that smelled like dog no matter how often we  tried to clean it. ‘Who will ever accept me the way my family did?’ I worried on that trip, ‘me with my obsessive list-making and my line of meaningless chatter like a monkey’s?’

Then we arrived and here was my roommate from Aspen Colorado, blond and blunt and athletic. “Man, you’re Catholic?” was the first thing she said to me with high amusement. “I never met a real Catholic before!”

I felt awkward for…. oh, at least an hour on that long dark hallway our rooms lay along. But then other freshmen began opening the doors to their rooms, all our families having left gone by then and didn’t we all have our favorite pillows and our homely slippers, even the same nature posters with that legend “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World” printed along the bottom. By the end of that first day freshman year I had six new friends. And by the first day of sophomore year I couldn’t wait to get back to campus, a feeling that kept multiplying exponentially with each passing year.

Then, almost overnight it seemed, we graduated and joined the long line of alums.

I missed our 5^th reunion but went back for my 10th, and for every reunion thereafter and loved every one.  I kept meeting these wonderful open people I had not known as an undergraduate and it was all utterly great. What was even greater was coming  back on ordinary days, when I was passing through Northampton MA on a business trip, say, or coming to attend a lecture or two-day symposium, or, best times of all, coming to see Annie Marotta and Susan De Young, our two daughters, one ‘real’ and one honorary, who graduated the last year the amazing Ruth Simmons was President there at Smith. I remember how Ruth – we all called her just ‘Ruth’, the way Moses is just called Moses – left the podium and came to the front of the stage at Commencement exercises and held out her arms in this cherishing gesture while the whole class of 2001 clapped and hollered and stamped for her.

I adored my time at Smith and I adored every inch of its beautiful campus. The love of my life and I decided we would marry while standing on this red bridge by the athletic fields.

Then, two whole decades later, I brought four of our kids back to see the place, little thinking that Annie and Susan would one day go to school here; little thinking that Carrie, in the background, would do a Summer Science program here. Michael our youngest would have gone to school here himself if he weren’t a boy.

Anyway, this is all of us at that red bridge. Susie was the one taking the picture so she isn’t in it. And this below is a short video that to me shows why the school is still so great. Commencement was yesterday and all day my thoughts were travelling westward along old Route 2, just as I had done that first time long ago.

 

 

Conundrum at The Rest Stop

I had just bought the coffee and it was cold. I had pulled up at a rest stop on the interstate and gone right in to the national chain of eateries where they put the milk in for you – the sweetener too if you take sweetener. This means I wasn’t the one who made it cold by adding too much milk.

 “Not my fault!” I said to myself. “For sure it’s not MY fault the coffee is cold!’

I was doing some hard miles that day and badly needed the lift I would get from the coffee.  Should I just drink it and keep driving?

As luck would have it, I was already back in my car before I took a sap and was greeted by this sad fact of its tepidness.

I thought a minute. Because, well, you hate to be a crank. But then I remembered the many miles behind me and the many more still ahead. I remembered too that I had promised my body that nice hot kick of caffeine, which I hoped would distract it from its various aches.

I turned the car off again and popped open my seatbelt; picked up the cup and went back inside – where the young woman who had helped me was now helping a dozen young men from a travelling lacrosse team.

Should I wait in line and risk being late for my appointment? I didn’t dare.

I stepped tentatively up to the counter, certain that she’d remember me.

She remembered me.

“Yes?” she said.

“I’m sorry, but this coffee seems to be cold,” I told her.

She gave me that dead-eye look people use to show they can’t believe how many jackasses there are in the world.

“No, it really is,” I said.

Now her eyes came to life. I could tell because she rolled them.

“Seriously, it isn’t even close to hot. Stick your finger in it,” I said.

“I’m NOT sticking my finger in it!” she snapped and, turning her back to me, tossed out the old cup and began preparing me a new one.

This is when one of the lacrosse players beside me spoke up.

“Well THAT was poorly handled,” he said.

“I know,” I mourned. “I never should have told her to stick her finger in it!”

No, I don’t mean you. I mean her!”

“Oh, “ I said, and, relieved to have the focus off myself, quickly asked him where his team was heading.

He named the capital city of the state next door.

By then the young woman had handed him his food and thrust my fresh cup of coffee toward me on the counter, allowing us both to stroll toward the exit, chatting chummily.

“Good News! “ I told him about his destination, “You’re a little more than an hour way from your destination.”

“Great news!” he echoed.

It was all great news for the two of us, who had come to this place, said what we wanted and walked away with it. It was less great news for the young woman who would stand all day behind that  counter waiting on a bunch of people who were either as finicky as I had been or so caught up in their own lives they scarcely even looked at her at any point in the transaction.

I was sorry now that I’d made that suggestion about dipping her finger. Someday I’ll be able to remember that it’s almost always better to say little than to say too much.

 

Swimwear for All!

You gotta love the Internet that delivers such treasures to us – like the email I woke up to with “Swimwear for the Whole Family” in its subject line. I opened it just for fun and sure enough: Bathing suits for all.

Most of course are designed for woman with figures like celery stalks – like these bathing suit bottoms, from what we might call the My Pants Are Falling Down Collection for the Hipless.

But, lucky for us all, nowadays they do also show swimwear for the more upholstered ladies, cut more generously and often  with a special clinch of Super Elastic around the waist. I myself have such a suit that makes me feel like Captain America, Iron Man, and the Incredible Hulk  are squeezing me, hard, around your middle.

This isn’t me obviously but you get the idea.

They had to make roomier swimwear, with 30% of the adult population obese and another 30% overweight. I mean they had to do something. Even the Disney parks had to rip out the seats for the It’s-a-Small-World ride and make them bigger. Seems it’s not such a small world after all!

What’s odd is that the ideal of feminine beauty hasn’t changed. We’re still mostly seeing fashion models who look like celery stalks. In fact I can’t even remember back to a time when the unwritten rule wasn’t that a woman should look as much as possible like a 12-year-old boy.

I remember reading a film critic saying he sat through a movie in which the beautiful Isabella Rossellini appears largely unclothed. He said he could hear people around him literally gasp at the sight of her soft untoned body.

I remember noting her body too when I saw that movie, though I can’t tell you now what movie it was. I looked at the screen and thought, “Huh! So maybe every successful women really doesn’t have look like Jane Fonda in one of her workout tapes!”(That dates it: this must have been in the 80s when Jane, even in early 40s, looked so sleek and fit slicing into the waters of Golden Pond.

I remember watching On Golden Pond when it first came out and thinking Why God? Why can’t I look like that? But then her dad was pretty tough on her, both on screen and off so I couldn’t feel too envious.

But it all goes to show you what influence the fashion deciders have and here’s another question. Who did this to men’s shorts and bathing suits someplace in the last two decades?

What a pity, I think every time I look at a guy in these ridiculous togs.  What happened to shorts that were really shorts? I did used to so love watching basketball back in the old days.  :-)