EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

Hey who wouldn’t want to write a disgruntled memoir about all the shady stuff they were forced to live with? Back when it was Howdy Doody Time for all us early Boomers how frequently did I myself want to set down in black and white the abuses I suffered as a toddler when mothers would routinely shut their wee ones up in the ingenious Gitmo-style restraint knows as the “Snuggle Ducky,” a sort of zippered cotton envelope which prevented a person from sucking on his fingers or toes, forced him to lie as if crucified, unable even to scratch his nose - I choke back old tears writing this - able only to do what my three-year-old self bravely, gamely, spoke of as ‘making cookies ‘ which meant using the only thing I had, my little rosebud of a baby mouth to suck little circles of moisture onto the cloth as the only source of sleepytime fun. ~ SOB! ~

Plus, I was also given enemas, right in front of three, sometimes four wildly smiling older women. (What was it with the enema and the woman of former times, can somebody tell me?) Also, my sister and I were taken out on leashes, in public! Also tied to the maple tree out front so we wouldn’t wander off.

In other words I can totally identify with this Scott McClellan dude and his exposé of life in the White House. And the only thing that stops me from taking pen in hand and writing up my own book of Humphs and Grievance is the sad fact that I myself live in fear now: of my very own cats of all things who I can just tell in the twilight of their careers have totally forgotten the meaning of loyalty and are poised to start talking to the media. And I know what they’ll cite: The tuna-flavored lip balm designed to bring up hairballs; the odd thermometer addressed to their nether parts when such a thing proved needful; the cry of genital mutilation from our boycat, just because he got his pee-pee cut off this spring BUT NONE OF THESE WERE MY IDEA, they were the vet’s, and the vet is my superior and nothing is my fault ever and all right so I won’t write my memoirs but continue instead to hold my tongue and lick my wounds poor me, poor sainted, sainted me.

Sun, rain, sun: yesterday was of those days I guess. One hour it was 80 and sunny here and I was thinking how I really should go outside and scrub the patio chairs and then – boom! – the heavens opened and the rain drummed so hard the lilacs on their bushes knelt right down flat like obsequious courtiers and yay I was off the hook for the scrubbing anyway.

Somebody said this about blogging: Nobody cares what you had for lunch; they just want to know what you’re thinking and feeling. (Could this possibly be true? Should we ask everyone who read about Gawker editor and blogger Emily Gould in the New York Times Magazine Sunday?)

But OK I’ll play along: At the moment I’m thinking about how happy I felt at the airport after my visit to my pal Bobbie last week – until an old lady with blue hair pulled out a cell phone and starting talking.

Loudly. And for quite a while. “MAUDE? WELL YES MAUDE I GOT THE DIARRHEA DON’T YA KNOW BUT I’M TRYIN’ TO HOLD IT TOGETHER HERE!”

At first I thought, “I won’t look over at her, I don’t want to embarrass her.” Then, five minutes later I stole some little glances at the other people there at the gate to see if anyone else thought this was as funny as I did. “Nothin’ doin’ there. Then five minutes after that I thought ‘What the HELL lady!’ and I did look at her, neutrally the way you have to so the person you’re looking at doesn’t jump up and beat you to death with his carry-on bag – and the woman paid absolutely no attention but rather made a second phone call to a second friend and began again with her fascinating account.

So there it is: sun and clouds on just about any day you care to name… and that’s what I’m thinking right now. And oh right, I almost forgot: Yesterday it was tuna salad, a handful of almonds and a chaser of Crystal Lite – and you?

I met somebody over the weekend because a mutual acquaintance said we should meet since he thinks we have a lot on common. This somebody lives in Center Harbor NH and I live six miles away, on the weekends anyway, and so we met at this eatery in downtown Meredith.

I got there late, and rushed in full of apology. Oh she was late herself she said. In fact she was glad I was late because it gave her the chance to read this poster here about free English lessons and she has someone new in her family eager to perfect her English. So do I!

I told her I often carry my meal to a restaurant and just round it out with stuff from their bill of fare, just to drive up the tip, really. She does that too. And she too sits near the back for sneakiness.

She has three kids. So did I! Her man’s name is David. So is mine! She knows everything about one half of her parental unit and nothing at all about the other. Me too! I had a relative who spent serious time in The Institute of Living in Hartford CT for ECT and many other therapies. She has relatives who have both worked there and consumed the services.

She told she always has to sit with her back to the wall in public places. So do I! She says she tells her family it’s because of her days in the Mob; I say that too!

“You’re my first friend in the area” I shyly told her as we parted and she said she was mine.

“But how can that be if you’ve lived here for ten years?” I said.

“I’m just really fussy when it comes to friends ” she smiled and maybe I’m pretty fussy too since come to think of it I’ve been in the area myself since the fall of ’99.

So maybe we will become friends because now I’m remembering this too: When I told her over coffee that I didn’t actually like fun she laughed out loud but in the nicest possible, exact right way. She ‘gets’ me all right and maybe I ‘get’ her too and what a thing that is for two strangers, what an amazing amazing thing.

The column I wrote for this weekend is a tribute to my middle school teacher who just last week departed this life at the ripe old age of 102. You can see it at right now by clicking here.

In it I told of the English class we had her for and her sweet vexed utterances at all our hi-jinks. (“What AILS you people?” she was always saying to us.) I did not tell how naughty we really were, especially my best friend Kathy and I. For example we had a music teacher named Miss Priest, a maiden lady, young and pale in a cashmere sweater and pearls who disapproved of the two of us, perhaps because we held our violins under our chins in Orchestra and those instruments just shook with our laughter the whole time we were rehearsing up under the sweltering roof of that Civil War-era schoolhouse. Kathy always got assigned the cool complicated part with many curlicues and arpeggios, while I was always given the dumb part that no matter what the tune was went basically “Uh uh, UH uh, uh uh, UH uh…” – just the two sounds, just what you could saw out for the low notes without doing too much violence to the melody. A monkey could have played my part and this was what we found so killingly funny. We laughed all through “Scenes from Carmen” and even, preparing for graduation, through the grave and weighty bars of “Pomp and Circumstance” itself

We thought we didn’t like Miss Priest; probably we had crushes on her. Anyway we found a greeting card designed for an ordination, tore out the real message inside, wrote a new message in a demented-looking scrawl and slipped it under her door. “Thou Art a Priest Forever” the real part of the card said, then in our writing on the inside, “That is, until I crush you in my arms my little PASSION FLOWER ha HAH!” We didn’t get suspended but we sure-enough got caught and so set out to compose a long and earnestly over-the-top letter of apology that made us feel wonderful connected to the side of the angels, just wonderfully forgiven if only by ourselves.

And that wasn’t half as bad as what we did when we found out the youngest male teacher in the school was getting married: We put a jar of Vaseline on his desk which carried the strong implication that of all things he would need in his new conjugal state Vaseline was uppermost – just as if we actually knew Thing One about the marital act, which, uh, we didn’t.

Back in the late-90’s, thirty years and three kids into my own marriage I remember a youth group leader telling the high school kids we both worked with that they really and truly would be a lot better off postponing sex until much later because it was, well… it was just too complicated.

“Complicated?” said one of these sweet kids, looking truly puzzled. “Why complicated?”

“Let’s just say it involves a lot of towels,” she said with a meaningful look.

Dave! I rushed right home and said to my husband, “I think we’re doing it wrong!”

Ah dear…Our old English teacher was great all right but how could she answer the pressing questions of her middle-schoolers? How could anyone have answered them when what we really wondered about was sex which of all things in this wide world is STILL the most mysterious?

KIDS FIRST GLIMPSED 6:55AM

The noise grew slowly at five of seven this morning. First it was just a tiny squawk outside our bedroom window as if maybe a baby blackbird had fallen out of a tree. Then another squawk followed and some small shrieks too. I went to the window and saw Charlie Chaplin shoot by on a dirt bike followed by two girls in pigtails and baby clothes also on these short little bikes. The Charlie Chaplin guy was in a suit with black bushy hair and a drooping mustache and the girls looked ALMOST like they normal girls and at first all I could think was that they were some insane family like my sister born-again neighbors who she once looked out the window at 1 am to see silently running down the street down the street in utter silence and holding hands.

Then the noise grew louder and here came a guy in a clown suit and a girl in roller blades; here a helmet, here a Rambo-style headband. A safari hat here, and over there on one boy a pointy headpiece drooping at the tip that looked like a lot like a condom and before you knew it here were 60 people 30 feet from my house and even more clambering out of pickup trucks and SUVS whose backs were loaded with more bikes.

At lat I realized what this was: I knew what this was: It was: the special day when tradition has the town’s 12^th graders either ditching or rather lightly attending school and beginning it by roaring through the streets of our little downtown on bikes, then heading straight for the high school just when the underclassmen are arriving, to take a kind of taunting victory lap. It’s funny to them but it’s poignant to those of us who have already left high school and maybe we roared past the old place and maybe we didn’t but in neither case did we know how quickly and completely the gates of that Eden would close against us. This morning’s kids don’t sense that yet and why should they with the prom and graduation and one lovely long summer all still ahead for them. Let them enjoy it all and believe as we all once believed that the old friendships would never end and Love Always was a promise you could hang your hat on and not just a quickly scrawled inscription in a yearbook.

Outside my front door they fell into formation on their bikes and roller blades and a shriek went up like the sound of ten thousand magpies and off they moved, up the street and around the corner and out of sight.

AND SO GOODBYE

I was heading for Swarthmore PA to see my friend Bobbie who tried to tell me it was going to be 49 and raining in that leafy little town but I guess I didn’t believe her. I showed up in sandals and a couple of flouncy, Cher-style angel-sleeved tops – only to be greeted by a day that was 46 degrees and raining so hard the goldfish in her Koi pond out back were seeking cover – and fish are already wet, you know? Lucky for me she lent me sneakers, some fat wool socks and a heavy sweatshirt which I wore the whole two days I was there, over not one pair but both pairs of the pants I had packed.

to lift our spirits We thought we’d go to Yoga and when it was over this nervy young class member came up to me and said she could see I’d been having trouble with this one pose where, with your legs wide open and knees locked you bend from the waist and yes, rest your head on the floor. She said she thought we should take a minute while she helped me get it right. Now the teacher had just told us when we started that she never lets people face toward the mirror since in Yoga the journey is supposed to be inner. She didn’t want us looking at ourselves, never mind having other people look at us.

I didn’t know WHAT to say to this young woman.

“Come, shall we try it?’ she said like some camp counselor. “Oh but look I’m not barefoot now,” I said lamely pointing to the fat wooly socks Bobbie had given me and which I had just donned for everybody’s favorite part of Yoga when, right at the end of the class, you get to do Corpse Pose and pretend you’re dead for six or seven minutes.

“I’ll brace your left foot with my foot so it doesn’t slide,” she said brightly, and, dope that I am, I let her and I tried to DO the pose, and in that totally unbraced RIGHT foot starting slowly sliding so far from the midline I thought I’d break right in two like a wishbone. Instead – boom! – I fell clean over and saw my little skeleton clatter onto that hard wood floor like a stack of tipsy teacups, which caused the young woman to apologize quickly and and hightail it on out of there.

Bobbie was fuming. “Who did she think she was? We should report her!” she sputtered. Instead though, we went back out into the deluge, ran a couple of errands and went home to her house which was as dark and cold as crypt in that the 8^th hour of rain.

Then – sigh – I couldn’t get manage to get online and do the whole column writing thing that I’m paid to do and when I finally DID get on and wrote for a while and came here it was to discover that all my nice photos had one by one erased themselves. Then I called my spouse back home who said, “Nobody misses you, the cats haven’t even asked,” which I know I’m supposed to know by now is code for “ I miss you and the cats are suicidal” but still… Plus I spilled coffee all over my sweatshirt and had only my Gidget Goes Hawaiian get-ups and so was getting really really cold and also now my bones all hurt.

But Bobbie drew me a bath and she and her husband built us a fire. She made this amazing homemade food, lentil soup and rice pudding and a salad with many lettuces fresh from the garden, which we washed down with some fine wine except I decided to pretend I was in a Hemingway novel and so drank whiskey with lemon juice, and we were all in our beds by half past nine.

All this was on Tuesday. When we woke yesterday morning the sun was shining and some total SAINT out there in Internet World had read my plaintive query about why my pictures were disappearing and gave me some tips for fixing the problem, and I had a bunch of nice emails about this week’s column which I wrote in honor of a favorite teacher of mine, just deceased at 102 and Bobbie and I took a walk on campus and by 4 o’clock yesterday I was home again in Boston and sure the cats are a little sore but I think they’ll get past it and Bobbie has just now emailed me a photo she took that morning showing the Koi pool where the fish were so happy in yesterday’s bright sunshine I bet they were just about swimming tummy-up.

(This is the pool. Goldfish not available for comment.)

So it turns out cheering yourself up by listening to people call each other names on the Internet works, but only for a while. I got sad again last night but then did I get lucky! Around 10:00 I got a ladder out and began checking out the top shelf of my bedroom closet – I smelled dead mouse, I know I did – and instead found a copy of an “atlas” called Our Dumb World written by those merry online jokesters at The Onion. I’d bought it to give to one of our kids, then lost it, then forgot about it, hey HEY! here it was now, right next to this cute little sparkly nightlight still in the package.

The book has two pages for every one of the world’s countries, one with funny comments and one with a map – like their map for Greenland, which shows all kinds of key areas. (My favorites: “Mt. Enormous,” “God-It’s-Cold,” and a large area up by the northwest coast labeled “Shitload of Fiords”

Pretty funny stuff for a tame country like Greenland, right? But the stuff they have about France is even better. At the top of France’s page it says, in boldface, “One Nation Above God” and then launches in: “Located directly in the heart of the universe around which everything else revolves, the nation of France is the sole beacon of life in an otherwise black and empty void… The French have produced every great achievement in every field of endeavor in the history of mankind including the sculptures of Michelangelo, the symphonies of Beethoven and the writings of William Shakespeare …The people of France are extremely proud of their cultural achievements and offer no apologies for giving the world such things as self-indulgent cinema, the awkward ménage à trios or the Frenchman.” Then the map shows places like “Toplèsse,” “Whine Country” and “Sole Acre of Country That Has Never Been Surrendered to a Foreign Power.”

Egad! And I thought seeing people make fun of individuals on the internet was amusing! I know the world will never improve if we start mocking whole countries; but I used to be a high school teacher and it seems to me the writers at The Onion are like that witty kid in the back of the back of the room: you were grateful for his energy, even if you did sometimes have to send him to the principal’s office.

I felt slightly blue today maybe because the garage is brimming with things I’ve been told that I personally should take to the dump, just because I’m the one who put them out there. That I should be the one to get my hands dirty handling a bunch of broken coffee makers and blow-driers, never mind the bath mats that have had bleach spilled on them and so look like victims of vitiligo, the bleach coming into it because every few months I go through a stage where I feel like changing the colors of things and so dye the towels, my clothes, even the lampshades if I don’t like the way they look on a particular day, and then sometimes well most of the time I end up making the colors perhaps a little TOO vivid and have to try toning them down with a quart of Clorox. All right so now I feel bad about mentioning “vitiligo” because just think how hard it must be to have that pigment problem and be spotted all over like Michael Jackson. Wait a sec, now I’m Googling Michael who I have been worrying over ever since his nose fell off and would you look at that! There are scads of videos on You Tube where you can watch his face change over the years, in, like, time-lapse photography practically.

‘Course now I feel even sadder thinking how people love to criticize poor skinny MJ who certainly did NOT molest any children and I should know. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who really knows him now that Diana’s gone, the only one who’s been there for it all, the Liz Taylor friendship, the Barbara Walters interview, the Oprah one, his own descriptions of how would take him to the mirror as a little fella and say “Look! Look how ugly you are” and all.

But hold the phone maybe I’m not the only one! Because here’s this chat room I’ve just entered where people have been really dicing him up fine and a young woman weighs in and says to this other moron “How OLD are you anyway? All you ‘teens’ need to grow up so you don’t become lame donkey-ass adults. Grow up, teenager!” Well now I believe that’s done it! I feel completely cheerful again. “Lame donkey-ass:” now there’s a phrase that’s worth remembering!

TIRED tonight, boy. I haven’t had any down-time since Monday morning when I was unexpectedly summoned to the airport to meet a bunch of Seventh Graders from rural Arkansas and bring ten pieces of their luggage, 200 pounds of their food, three of the young scholars themselves alive-alive-o, oh plus one of their teacher-chaperones to the hotel where all 30 of these young sojourners would be staying for this the Boston leg of their big History-related field trip to the North.

As soon as they’d all checked in I was asked to go right “onstage” and talk about the pleasures of first-person writing, which was fun since they were such a cute audience, laughing at all the best parts of my stories like when people fall down and little naked kids say funny things and when I got done one of them stood and led the others in a little chanting cheer of appreciation.

Then yesterday I went to an out-of-town funeral that took all morning, then bought a new pot to replace the one I burned the bejesus out of making the rice on Sunday night, bought a new iron to replace the one I have dropped on the floor so many times it doesn’t even get warm never mind hot anymore, brushed my hair, changed my clothes and zipped over to a lovely old Cambridge home to act out my part in a reading of Shakespeare’s As You Like It , a piece of cake I figured since it consisted of like three short speeches as the so-called Second Page – only whoops! -it turned out the First Page and I were supposed to SING that whole passage at the end of Act Five, did I not see that those 24 lines were actually a song? And surely I knew the melody did I not, that famous centuries-old tune with the Hey Nonny Nonny Nonny Nonny No? The room grew dim. My head swam. A faint threatened – until a kindly soprano lady took me aside and taught it to me then there and even sang along with us both when the time in her clear, practically see-through soprano voice so whew! I got through that.

Then today I got up at 5:00, wrote ’til my back hurt, went to a Weight Watcher meeting, brought David’s 87-year-old uncle out into the sun for two hours, did exercises for my messed-up neck, drove to a more commercial corner of Cambridge this time and watched the highly accomplished young author and illustrator Matt Tavares take his turn presenting to the Seventh Grade kids, then went accompanied them to the famous JFK Library and did the tour with them, trying my best to answer their questions. They asked about Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. Also about Kennedy and James Meredith whose enrollment at Ole Miss he made possible by kicking ass and taking names when the backward-thinking governor there tried preventing him. Considering the life of President Kennedy is for kids born in 1996 and ‘97 a lot like considering the life of oh, Alexander the Great, say, and when I told them I had met the guy once they looked at me as if I were Methuselah himself.

But really they had long since forgiven me my decrepitude. We had wonderful fun and I even got a few pictures before they climbed on the bus to go see Yale and finish up their field trip with two-and-a-half days in Manhattan. They were adorable and who cares if I’m too tired to iron or make rice the right way it was a great three days and yeah sure I’m pretty tired now but hey I’ll sleep when I’m dead, you know?