EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

May I whine some more? Thank you.

I came home from two weeks away to find the temperature inside the refrigerator a balmy 68 degrees. Who knew cottage cheese could become gun-metal grey?

I came home to find one car screaming like a murdered rabbit when you start her up, then emit a world of white smoke and an acrid we’re-about-to-see flames-here stink.

I came home to find internet takin’ the fifth, saying nada, nothing and my male cat standing nearby looking guilty. “Never mind,” I told him because I am a saint. “It  happened to me once during some ill-advised surfing; a single visit to CelebrityMorgue.com where they’ve got pictures of something that looks like spaghetti coming out of a dead guys’ bottom and the whole thing crashed like a chandelier with its wires cut.” I told the cat all this but I do wonder what site the cat went to but I didn’t ask: a man who’s had his penis removed is a man who needs a little room. (see March archives)

You come home from two weeks away and all this is amiss and you’re STILL jet-lagged and now you’re fat too and you have to meet the mechanic, bring your 88-year-old uncle to the heart doc, feed the both of you get your hair dyed this wildly improbable color you phony, you pathetic excuse for an all-natural girl, then oh God GO ON TV to talk about your new book probably looking like those newscasters in the original Batman movie who have to go live with all their zits and blotches on display because that crazy Joker has poisoned the city’s whole store of beauty supplies, waaaah.

Really, that last part will probably be the best part of the day because interviewers are always so glad to have a guest that isn’t frozen-mouthed with nerves or else turgid with self-importance that the two of you always have fun  just talking off the tops of your heads so why don’t I SHUT UP AND LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE?

OK NOW I’m ready to jump into my pantyhose and take on the day.

Just got another email from my many friends in cyberspace, Natasha this time, shy pretty girl at internet café  lonely smiley please to write me so we can meet…. (Oh Natasha! Where would I be without you and your spiritual sisters with your daily offer of love?)

Where would I be without the offer of commerce either come to think of it, because here’s what came two minutes later from one Mr. Alwin who is ‘pleased to establish Long-term & Solid Trading relation with you, our factory has been dealing in producing all different kinds of Fashion Jewelry for many years, our Idiomatical, Multigrade & Charming Jewelry and Ornaments Series, as follows: very New & Hot Fashion Necklace, Elegant Diamond Ring, Exquisite Workmanship Bracelet & Bangle, Beautiful Hair Ornaments, Brooch, Keychain, Extremely Pattern Earring….’

Well who doesn’t love an idiom? Three strikes and you’re out! Deaf as a haddock! Shove it! Bite me! And I’ve been a fan of extremely pattern all my life as haven’t we all am I right. Like when you throw up after eating too much of your pizza–with-the-works. I just look at that throw-up and think Watch out Jackson Pollock!  Plus Alwin is inviting me over, see? ‘Besides we make sure the Excellent Quality, the Reasonable Price and the First Class after-Sale Service, if necessary, welcome to our factory and have coffee in our office, so that you are very satisfied to accept our items. If necessary, I will choose our jewelry attached price list and send you then, you will confirm whether we can cooperate with you then, thanks! Wish our Enjoyable & Successful Cooperation! Very looking forward to your prompt reply!!

Hey I’m answering the guy right now because you know I LOVE bangles.  I LOVE idiomatical, multigrade and charming jewelry and ornaments series!  And come to think of it I’M a pretty, lonely girl here skippin’ church here and going on the Internets! Please to write me so I can hand you off to my boss who will steal your identity and clobber you with spam until you die!:-)

below, Michelangelo’s David as he would look today

I knew I had to leave home for 17 days this month and there was so much to DO before I left, I just never thought past today, the 21^st of October when I would get home at last. I mean I had to drag all 45 of my house plants out on the screened-in porch so they could just pee right where they stood when watered, had to write all these columns to tide my newspaper readers over, had to get the international chip in my phone so I could call home if I really needed to and receive calls too and I did get one from a Madison Square Garden guy ecstatic about the mention I gave to the big annual Burlesque Festival in the paper a few weeks ago and tell ya what next year I am GOING to that thing because not only did they have the Pontani Family Reunion Dancers but also Torchy Taboo and Hot Pink Feathers. Not only Through the Keyhole and Ginger Goldmine but Kitty Diggins, and Twirla. Not just Skin Tight Outta Sight, Trixie Little and Kitten on the Keys but Miss Delirium Tremens herself and who in their right mind would want to miss a show like THAT another year?!

Anyway I had not given one thought to dragging out the winter clothes, say, or putting the bathing suits away; hadn’t thought ahead at all to Halloween or decided who to give my 40 Obama/Biden buttons to either but mostly mostly MOSTLY since around August 1st when I began to really feel this Italy trip comin’ at me I did not give a single thought to Abstemious Living, the principle that normally guides my every action and so when I get home tonight and it’s 1am Europe time I will fall in the bed, then get up tomorrow and shop only the outside aisles of the supermarket, meaning the fruits the veggies the fish the chicken the eggs with no frozen pizzas, no sausages no sauces no quiches no ice cream, not even any dark chocolate of the tiniest size because for the last ten weeks it’s been Feedbag City with me and I am now as broad in the beam as this guy in the photo with a girth to match.

In 17 days here in Italy:

1) Inspect (and utilize) hotel bathrooms in six different cities.

2) Discover bidets in every one.

3) Consider using them to wash doll clothes in as preschool cousin Kathleen once did with every toilet within reach.

4) Find an alarm in every bathroom, generally placed above bathtub. In America can DIE in tub and all they do is charge you the extra night.

5) Experience double-take moment regarding the many aprons and tea towels showing outsize images of male genitalia passing selves off as “details”of the David.  What happened to towels featuring dead Lady Di?

6) Learn to drink coffee standing up, down the hatch and strong as Drano.

Observe even more:

+ Modern young mums nursing in public. Nobody stares.

+ Little children out at all hours.

+ Absence of bug life. (How they DO that?)

+ Absence of litter. (How they do THAT?)

+ Presence of quiet dawns, raucous midnights, yummy wines and aperitifs.

+ Clocks in local basilica sounding the hours.

+ One fly, just ONE fly in this Ointment of Eden……. (Are you ready?)

+ Entire population smoking like chimneys.

All these Holy Family scenes: you gotta love ‘em. You could write a whole dissertation on the expressions seen on the Virgin’s face alone. My favorite: that “How did  I get HERE ?” look of hers with Joseph’s face a close second. “How did YOU get here?!”

And the Baby Jesus who sometimes looks a lot like Jon Lovitz? He often has a face only a mother could love. Sometimes in the painting he’s squeezing a bird and sometimes a pomegranate. Sometimes he’s got his fingers going in funny ways: “You got a little something right here,” I thought one of them said but Dave insisted it said “YO! Keep your eye on ME, bud! I’M the main event here!” I could see it since I myself caught a look like that in the painting I call “So Whadja Bring Me?”

You can entertain the daylights out of yourself with all kinds of jokey thoughts like this until one day, ONE DAY you stumble into the rotunda that houses the David and it just plain shuts you up. All around you are people sitting on benches just to be in its presence.

That Michelangelo: dead on one level but still alive on so many others. Just think of David’s life: Pops Goliath with a tiny rock; plays harp for the king; BECOMES the king; takes another man’s wife, just because he wants her; sees the first child of this union die as punishment; sings in public for sheer joy though some find it unseemly. He does dumb things, he does great things, he is human. He dies and leave the throne to his kid Solomon whose Psalms are still singing in all our heads still especially that Song of Songs Which is Solomon’s, Arise my love my fair one….And all of this, all of this is in the marble that looks like flesh, like veins, like living muscle in this work that one man made. Ah!

An Essay in Pictures 

When we got to Venice we were fresh from a visit to Padua and the cathedral shrine to St. Anthony who met St. Francis and demonstrated ever after in his life the power of that man’s example. There, in ancient glass cases, are St. Anthony’s lower jaw, teeth and tongue, the simple tools he used to spread the message relayed to him by one who heard it from one who heard it from one who heard it from One who, going back a good bit, said He heard it from His Dad.

What I learned about Anythony in Padua I know I will never forget. But it was his mentor St. Francis I was thinking about as I stood in front of St. Mark’s in Venice the other day. They say the birds flocked to him for his loving heart. They flocked to me for my chunk of bread. One minute I was just standing there, looking around at the brave people who would take some bread, hold it aloft and immediately be as covered with pigeons as the statue of General Patton there by the banks of my favorite River Charles.

Maybe I can be brave like that, I thought. So I crouched down and they climbed all over me.

Italy Day 11: Being on a guided trip is like being a baby again: you HOPE your caregivers know you need a nap and a juice break; you HOPE they’ll check to see that you’re still dry. Our caregivers do know all this and have handed us along from dawn to forenoon to golden gloaming with so many of our needs anticipated that I find myself released somehow to range in thought over all of my tiny life, remembering, and regarding anew, and looking forward.

 What I’m remembering today is what it was like to be 18 and beginning my second year at Smith College, when a girl named Vicki James arrived.  Dewey House, where we lived, was a tiny dorm, the place where my Aunt Julia had lived in her own time at Smith with her big sister (my future mom) just three dorms away. It is for me one of THE key places of my life, a stage upon which unfolded so many new thought and fresh insights, a place gracious and formal and fine, staid and timeless – until Vicki came and changed everything.

She knew History, and believed in History’s lessons. She also knew what fun was and she believed in beer. The above picture shows her blindfolded on the lawn in front of Dewey House before the Freshman Sophomore picnic that ended with one of us spraining an ankle and another getting wedged inside one of the sinks at the Davis Student Center. It was Vicki who found out we could drink 35-cent beers in downtown Northampton. She liked the townie boys and so I liked them too, and the nights we walked down to see them we’d roll back up the hill toward campus singing the ancient Latin drinking song she taught us all.  “Gaudeamus Igitur dum Juvenes” it began. Let us rejoice now while we are young because “Where are they who were in the world before us?” As if we didn’t know. We knew all right, but we didn’t think for a minute that we would ever be anything other than young, with firm strong limbs like the marble limbs of the Greek and Roman youth we saw in our textbooks.

I had my first apartment ever with Vicki that summer while I worked and she took the courses at Harvard that would let her finish Smith in three years’ time.  A week into our living in that tiny Cambridge house I met the boy who would become my husband. Vicki went on to the PhD program at Harvard; David, then a Senior there, went on to get his MBA at the B School just across the river. And I, who had so earnestly hoped to go to grad school too, instead became a teacher of Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth graders and saw almost every value I had previously held turned on it head, in the best possible way. Those students changed me as much as Vicki had and when the letter came at last admitting me to my own Masters Program I tore it up, taught five more years, and four years after that began writing the newspaper column that has aimed always and only to delight a weary public.

Well, Vicki came a few days ago to see her two old friends in Bellagio. She is called Victoria now, Dottorressa Munsey in fact and has lived here in Northern Italy for the last quarter century. She and I walked the hills above the city while David toured the Villa Carlotta and then three old friends ate dinner together.

Our blindfolds are off now and we all see more clearly. And if we are old, yet are we happy.

So here below is old Dewey House that gave birth to our young dreams; and below that and larger for the beauty of the photo the clear light from our hotel room that helped me remember it.

Yesterday was Banshee Protection Day, World Poetry Day, Love Your Body Day, National Grouch Day, Mushroom Day, National Pasta Day, and Blog Action Day and if I had more time I’d look closely at each one of these “days” and ask myself how each applied to me. I didn’t even know it was National Poetry Day yet I managed to finally memorize a sonnet famous for being all one sentence (50 bucks to anyone who knows what it is!) I also ate pasta, blogged and TRIED to love a body that has begun looking more and more like those of the naked ladies you see on all these Italian frescoes.  Lake Como, Verona, Padua and now Venice.  (Venice you just can’t believe. If you came here from New Orleans you’d be terrified the whole time!)

And as for the banshees I have never met one but as members of that fellowship of the strengthless dead I’m sure they need our protection and good will at all times even as we need theirs.

The graphic seen on all Exit signs here in Italy is of a little green guy running like hell for his very life, but let’s tell they truth here: when it comes to actual languages, some are a lot prettier than others:

Here’s the English on the plastic bag the typical hotel provides for your dirty laundry: “Linen to be washed and ironed,” it says. Then there’s the French phrase for the same thing: “Linge à laver ou à repasser,” It’s OK but it’s nothing great, right? And forget the message in German: “Schmutz-oder bügelwäsche. ””Schmuz? Oder?” I mean how unpretty is that?

But in Italian? In Italian the message is just plain sublime. Dirty clothes or not you just can’t argue with “Biancheria da lavare o stirare.”It makes you want to break into song, am I wrong? And it almost- ALMOST – makes you forget how very frank and practical Europeans really are, because not only do the Exit signs tell it like it is and even though I myself just used it to wash my socks in, this little dandy gizmo which we have seen in four of our last four hotels really IS what Mick Dundee called it in that cute first movie that bears his name!

Yay! and Why NOT Drink? Day 6 in Northern Italy –  

Since I can’t possibly do justice to all the villas and all history we’ve witnessed over the last several days maybe I’ll just answer one pressing question and say that yes my man’s suitcase DID arrive finally and his blue polo shirt got a much-needed rest.

One by one I pulled his fresh shirts from that bag and sobbed into them. “I’m crying because they’re such beautiful shirts!” I burbled, oh but no wait, that wasn’t me, that was Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby when she realizes too late alas that she’d backed the wrong horse, married the rich bastard who cheats on her every time he gets the chance instead of waiting for the man who would love her til he died.

My own husband is decidedly other-worldly. He just doesn’t care about fancy things – and me I buy at Marshall’s and Dress Barn half the time and so I can tell you I was I was prett-y nervous about that bag of his because although he still happily wears clothes from the early ’70s this time his suitcase held one fancy damn blazer from Brooks Brothers.  

He bought it after our darling honorary kids, the above-pictured newlweds Dodson & Veronica, gave him a few polo shirts from there for his birthday – and because it turns out that EVEN OLD DAVE can sometimes have too many polo shirts, he decided to take them in and exchange them for a new blazer, and a very nice blazer it was that the salesman draped round his shoulders even though it had no actual price tag on it – and, well, if you knew Dave you’d know he hates to spoil the moment with anything as crass as asking what a thing costs and so …. well, so when the suitcase came at last with that thousand dollar silk and linen blazer in it even the angels wept – even the naked little angels with no underpants on who adorn every villa and fresco we’ve been gawking at these last days.

And as we watch the action on Wall Street and ponder the days ahead; as we sip our wine and glance at this fancy piece of linen in his suitcase all we can think is heck, worse comes to worse we can always cook and EAT the sucker, buttons and all.