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I want to write this quick before Dave gets home and by “home” I mean to the hotel room here in Savannah where he’s just finishing the first day of play in the Liberty Mutual “Legends of Golf” Pro-Am tournament which on the weekend will roll right on into this big Senior PGA event which you can see on national TV and everything. The company he works for does business with Liberty Mutual and that’s why some lucky ducks like us are here, parking our little fannies in the gorgeous Westin Savannah Hotel Resort and Spa.
It’s a real hardship for me I can tell you. I was supposed to spend this week on Staten Island, sleeping in a church basement with 30 young people and working with them in soup kitchens and food pantries. Then home comes Dave one day and says we’ve been invited to this wonderful event and would I come do the wife thing so I said well I guess maybe I can. I’m a saint is what it is.
So every day he’s out there playing serious teamed-up golf with serious teamed-up people. The first day he even won a crystal bowl for “Closest to the Pin.” And every day I’m here lying by the pool, watching in-room movies and sitting down every 50 feet in downtown Savannah saying to myself “Was this Forrest Gump’s bench?” Was it this one?” Plus today I went for a ride in a blimp.
The blimp ride I just got back from and maybe I can write about it here tomorrow if the horizon ever stops tilting on me. Right now though I’m a on a kind of tight schedule. A significant portion of the famous Boston Pops Orchestra is tuning up just below our room for our evening’s entertainment and whoops, it’s 4:30 already and I have an appointment at the Spa.
The young lady that booked it called it a “Lip Wax” and that’s what you see Mariah Carey getting above here, but if my Southern-fried pal of 30 years were here she’d call it what it really is. “Ah am goin’ to git mah mustache snatched” Liz would say and, I would only add, “all’s right with the world.”
Life is such a Dickens novel it slays me, the way it loops around and interweaves and characters not see since the early chapters show up again knitting at the Guillotine.
I wrote about an instance of this in my column this week, telling about what happened a few days before when, on a bus to Manhattan, I began thinking about a pal I first met over 40 years ago who now lives in New York and then didn’t she manifest right there in the tiny shop in Grand Central Station where I was going to meet my boy Michael for supper. If reading more of my stuff doesn’t make you feel like too much you’re doing shots of maple syrup you can see this column, and in all kinds of places, but most easily perhaps by Googling “Terry Marotta” and the phrase “kitten’s teeth.” Google my name and “kittens’ teeth” and if it’s the last weekend in April or later up will pop the piece as it looks in papers all over.
Three of our ‘honorary’ kids were at the dinner too which I don’t think I said in that column. An honorary kid in my book is anyone who has (a) lived in our house for a year or more, (b) launched college and/or grad school applications from here and (c) knows how to unload the dishwasher. Anyway three of the five of them came this night to see Michael because it was his birthday coming up and he is the family baby after all, born some 15 years after the oldest honorary kid and younger by a fair amount than his two ‘real’ sisters.
Sometimes he has no sense. I love that about him. You can read in a February post how he put his coffeemaker in the bathtub to clean it a while ago and when he lived under our roof he was no better. He spent his early years hiding behind doors to scare us and dressing up in odd costumes. He microwaved an egg still in its shell once just to see what would happen and oh wait that was my idea, but he sure loved the results more than anyone else. When he turned 14 he began at this wonderful place called Commonwealth School and never wore a coat from one end of the school year to the other that first year though he had to walk to the train station, switch to the subway, get out at a windswept plaza and walk yet more to get to the school. September to June the kid didn’t wear a coat I guess because the thought he looked cute in these certain vintage T-shirts bought for fifty cents and sized for a ten-year old… He could wear child-size clothes because right around then he turned skinny. He was round and darling as a child and then he just kind of skinnied on out and even now still weighs just 135 pounds.
He still wears those tissue-paper-thin T shirts from the 1970s too. He had one on the other night and over it this odd little military jacket that looked like something an organ grinder’s monkey might have on.
Anyway forgive me for talking about him so much. It’s just that today is his birthday which is also old Will Shakespeare’s birthday and I’m a big fan of both guys. May you live and live, Michael of ours and be like Willie Shakes if that’s what you want getting married after the baby’s on the way and then having twins and going to the big city and doing what you love. To us you’ll always be what your big sister Carrie called you when she was a college sophomore and came home midweek for supper and you were saying funny ridiculous things and when you left the room to go back to your homework she called you Our Best Final Project. So Happy Birthday BFP, and TRY to keep the electrical appliances out of the bathtub. Can’t wait to have ya back under the umbrellas some nice warm weekend soon.
There’s a theme running through my life this week and that theme is WHY didn’t you call us? It’s a story in two parts so gather round, children. We’ll have Part One of the tale today and Part Two tomorrow.
I have a friend named Lois who will be 79 this year and one night about a month ago with a houseful of people due to arrive on my doorstep to read a Shakespearean play aloud, she arrived to help me set things out but became distracted by what she called the smell of gas outside your house. “There’s the smell of GAS outside your house, dear! You really must drop everything and call the emergency line!! Terry, dear, you really MUST,” she said again in her voice like Eleanor Roosevelt’s, the idea being What if it’s a leak?
But I was in no mood for that. Not only were 30 relative strangers about to descend on me but I’d just finished installing my post-surgical cat upstairs in sickbay with a clown-collar around his neck to prevent him from tweezing out the stitches with those pointy little teeth of his. Never mind that I couldn’t find the goddam COCKTAIL NAPKINS, and was fanning frantically through all the kitchen drawers thinking “OK shoe polish, plant food, tuna-flavored hairball cream, WHERE IN HELL ARE THE COCKTAIL NAPKINS? Am I going to have to set out folded squares of toilet paper for these fancy people? “
I found them finally and the crowd arrived and we read our Henry VIII and that day passed and the next and eventually a whole month went by and my poor cat healed up and his lovely pale green eyes the color of Coke bottle bottoms began to sparkle once more and Lois came again to my house, this time to pick me up for more Shakespeare at somebody else’s house this time and uh oh now I was in trouble because she said again that she smelled gas out on the sidewalk. “You really must call the gas company in the morning!” she said sternly and a third friend who was also going to the reading said she’d write me an email when she got home to remind me and she did and so I did. Call I mean.
And not 20 minutes afterward, the doorbell rang and there was the gas man. He identified himself but he didn’t make eye contact. He asked me to show him where we were getting the smell from so we stepped out on the sidewalk.
I said a number of friendly if not out-and-out wheedle-y beseechingly co-dependent things and finally he sort of thawed out enough to actually look at me. “Not to be fresh or anything,” he said “but my work order says you smelled gas outside here a MONTH ago. Why did you wait so long to call?”
“Well see I didn’t really smell it” I said and told about the 30 people and the sick cat and ended with “I mean what’re you are saying, that houses, like, blow up or something?”
He narrowed his eyes for just a second, then opened them really wide. “HELL YES THEY BLOW UP!” he bellowed. Then he just sort of came to life.
“There are these two gay guys a few towns over not that that enters into it, and they smell gas at 1:00 on a Sunday afternoon only they want to watch the football game, see, so they don’t call it in until 4:00. And when our guy comes he doesn’t even have to set foot inside to know what’s happening. He tells them, “Get out! Get out of the house now!’ and then BOOM! she blows. The House is GONE! Follow?”
He named three other houses in neighboring towns that also blew up, then told me he would have to use his various long-nosed sensors to probe around outside every OTHER house on the street too. He said he might have to knock on all their doors and get inside those houses too.
“But like that neighbor right there: she’s not home in the day.”
“Don’t matter!” he shouted. “We get a reading of gas leaking, we’re goin’ in! We break a window if we have to.”
“Hamm, well if the people ARE home, will they let you in always?”
“Hah! Sometimes they don’t want to let us in even if they called us. I get this one lady calls us up and I come and she won’t let me in. ‘I need to see some ID,’ she says . So OK ‘Here’s how I looked 20 years ago’ I say, showing her my badge. ‘And how do I know that’s really you?” she goes. “How do I know you’re really from the gas company?’ ‘Lady YOU called ME!’ I mean, what did she think? Was this Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory? She thought I, what? intercepted the call, caught up with the real gas man, knocked him out, took his clothes, rang her bell?! Gimme a break!”
After all this fun he came inside at last and spent a good 20 minutes in the basement positioning his delicate proboscis of a sensor here in there in the foundation and whew the inside of my house looked OK even if I did wait a month to call him and by then we were practically pals. “I’m going out now to check on all the neighbors’ houses” he then said, “and either you’ll never see us again, which means it’s basically nothing to worry about, or you’ll see us immediately, which means there’s a serious leak. OR,” he said, “You could see us within the week which means it’s a leak all right and we’re there to fix it.”
Well I guess it turned out to be the last thing, because all of a sudden today what do we have outside but TWO gas company trucks, a big yellow backhoe AND an actual policeman workin’ the paid detail. They’re making a huge racket and that asphalt just doesn’t want to bust up as the backhoe tap-tap-taps on it with the back of its gorilla knuckles. It will bust up eventually though, I’m sure. Because even I understand this much by now: this the bloomin’ gas company we’re dealing with here, and when the gas company says jump you just say, “How high?”
I got panhandled, if that’s what it was, during my very last minutes in Manhattan yesterday.
I was waiting to take my four-and-half-hour bus ride home, standing outside the Hilton when a frail woman came up to me with a look of woe on her face. She was pushing a stroller with a baby in it and walking beside a girl of about 14, who she said was the baby’s mother.
“We need money. We have no thing to eat all this day,” she said in heavily accented English.
“Have you come far?” I asked, putting one hand on her shoulder and one on her arm. I couldn’t help it. She just looked so lost and woeful.
“Yes,” she said, nodding sadly. “Today we have come all the way from the Bronx looking for the food.”
That stopped me for a second. The Bronx? “But another country? You’re not from another country?” I asked, because she did have a serious accent.
“No, she said. “No other country.”
I gave her a ten because that’s the bill my hand folded around first when I felt in my pocket.
She thanked me, the three of them moved on down the sidewalk and I returned to my place in line just in time to hear the man standing next to me in a pair of soft wool slacks. “Con artists!” he muttered, with an angry look on his face.
“Hey what can I do? It’s my church’s teaching!” I said, trying to keep it light.
But I couldn’t just leave it at that. “Con artists?” I asked in a tentative voice. Because to me they just seemed like three uncomfortable-looking people fighting a wind so harsh the little green sword-blades of the Hilton’s daffodils were leaning dangerously over in their boxy concrete planters.
“Gypsies. Thieves.” he said. What had we, wandered into that old Cher song from the early 1970s? “Roma,” he added, as if that explained everything.
“Oh the ROMA! You mean the people who were shot on sight by Nazi soldiers and maybe those were the lucky ones because all the others were stripped of their citizenship, brought to concentration camps and gassed, even the old men and the pregnant women and the little children? I‘ve heard it said that Hitler caused between 200,000 and 800,000 Roma to be killed in the name of the ‘racial purity’ he saw as being so central to his plan for world domination.”
But I didn’t say any of that really.
I just said “What does that MEAN though? Where are the Roma FROM? I mean is it a country or just a region in Europe?’”
“Romania. Parts of Bulgaria. Other places,” he said. “They’re gypsies,” he said again. “Con artists,” he repeated. “And you are the worse sort of sap,” he all but added.
“You’re lucky you didn’t just get your pocket picked” he said. But how that frail woman was going to pick my pocket when I had one hand on her shoulder and the other on her arm I don’t know. Her 14-year-old stood dejectedly on the other side of the stroller with her hands down at her sides the whole time and the baby – well the baby was a baby.
Then the man looked at me full in the face for the first time. “What church do you belong to?” he asked, going back a couple of sentences.
“Oh I’m just a Congregationalist. Just the United Church of Christ,” I said.
“Ah the Congregational Church, that rock-ribbed New England institution!” he said.
“Yup,” I said, leaving out about six other things I could have told him about all the ways we’re about as far from ‘rock-ribbed’ as a denomination can be. I love my church. Love, love, love it for all the ways it has helped me to join any day’s ‘party’ with an open heart, leaving all judgment and suspiciousness at the door. But that’s not the church I meant, really.
I think the church I really meant is the one I ‘joined’ the very first time I read Walt Whitman’s first Preface to The Leaves of Grass, which he wrote in 1855 and which I read the winter I turned 19:
“This is what you shall do,” it goes. “Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and the mothers of families, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, AND YOUR VERY FLESH SHALL BE A GREAT POEM AND HAVE THE RICHEST FLUENCY, NOT ONLY IN WORDS BUT IN THE SILENT LINES OF ITS LIPS AND FACE AND BETWEEN THE LASHES OF YOUR EYES AND IN EVERY LAST JOINT AND MOTION OF YOUR BODY.”
The caps here are my doing but you tell me, all you have ever waited for a bus in a stinging wind in a city of many strangers: Are these ideas not every bit as moving and revolutionary as those expressed in the Sermon on the Mount? To me they are.
Anyway the bus came eventually and I found a great seat for myself in Row Four just in front of the man with the beautiful pants. I put all my stuff down, then on an impulse as sudden as it was sure, picked it all up again, went to the back of the bus and rode my four and a half hours home from there.
