EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

I am sick to death of blondifying and straightening my hair. Who talked me  into a color like an infected cut anyway?  I have black hair; black and unruly with silver comin’ in and what’s wrong with that? My girl Carrie always says Let it go curly, let it go grey but do you know they say they can’t help you let your hair go grey and you just have to cut it all off and start again?

The last time I cut my hair short was on the day I turned 28. We threw a party that night and the first guest to arrive took one look at me and said “Nice hair! You look like a toilet bowl brush.” (Never forgot it, the bastard.) So why not a return to my roots?  Hair the color God made it and doing whatever it feels like day to day?  And how ‘bout I lean over like this wherever I go  like in the picture. It fits my motto, I’ll say that: talk about ‘look at it this way’!

Here at the annual conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists I’ve just heard a talk by Jeff Zaslow, author of The Last Lecture on Professor Randy Pausch’s amazing final talk before his death from pancreatic cancer and the sound of gulped-back tears filled the room.

Randy left behind three small children even younger than the three left by Michael Jackson, God rest his troubled soul.These children of Randy’s won’t remember their dad and he knew that. It is the cruelest and yet the kindest thing that happens to you as the sorrowing left–behind one, the way your spider of a heart wraps the time immediately following the death in such thick numb bunting you can’t recall them.

When, at 45, my sister Nan lost her young husband Tom to death on the tennis court, she blundered blindly through the whole following year. Then one night she ’saw’ him as she lay in their bed. He stood at their bedroom door in the tennis outfit he had died in. “I want to come back,” he said plaintively. “You can’t!” she exclaimed through fresh tears.  “Your friend took your job and I gave away your clothes!”

Was it a dream or did Tom really come to her that night? And if so, did he repent the pack-a day cigarette habit, the six-hard-boiled-eggs-and–six hot-dogs suppers chased down by whole pints of ice cream?  Does Michael repent the fact that he exhausted his frail and pain-wracked body in preparing for the superhuman task of a 50- show tour? We can’t know. But if we could speak with our dead just one time more I think they would have us take a long look in the mirror and resolve from here on out to spend our own remaining days loving all those of whatever age who shelter in our care and nurture.

Poor Farrah, the original California Girl… I thought I had her hair for a while there, only mine was curly so I actually looked more like an English barrister with bangs. That  TV special where she’s seen alternating between throwing up and dutifully scribbling away in her illness journal was so sad. That’ll be me, still trying to write in my diary in the funeral home. (Remember what the young lady says in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest?  How she never travelled without her diary because a person should always have something sensational to read on the train ha ha ? Those were the days when my diary was so racy with the adventures of a 13-year-old that my sister stole it and used it to blackmail me!

It’s Thursday morning and I’m in the LA airport with my own diary. Noticng that they really are all tanned  around here and some sensational-looking man-made breasts just went by. This just to say goodbye Farrah with your courage . I only wish you hadn’t been talked into that lip-altering facelift; you were gorgeous just the way God made you.

I just took a 4-hour journey wedged into a 12-inch-wide span of space between two little ones in car-seats, and SO GREAT was the love of these two for each other that all they wanted to do was clasp hands in a show of kinship – which they accomplished by having the one reach his hand under the left straps of my bra and sundress while the other reached his hand under the right two straps until – success! – they could touch at last, cutting off my airway only a little.

Then, because I’m routinely forced by the older tyke into making Stalinist-style confessions on the theme of Naughty Things I Did as a Child with an emphasis on Acts of Peeing in Strange Locations, I was thinking hard for the full 120 minutes – during which time the littler child gently patted me on shoulder, arm and torso with hands painted in the fresh juice of the berries I had been foolish enough to pack for the journey. Then, as I struggled to free-associate, pulling forth this and that bright scrap from the costume trunk of memory, my chief listener, now riveted by my talk, dreamily pulled the UPC labels from the small toys I had also brought along, affixing them to various places on my body.

‘Who’s the old lady in the stickers?”  I told him people would say when we got to our destination and they saw my many bar codes. I was  wrong though. When we got there and I toppled from the car so  red-skinned with touching and berry-mash that I looked like I had been molested by angry seagulls what they really said was ….

“Who’s the slasher victim and why is she on sale?”

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The painter:

The collage artist:

Pity us over 50s:  we have these little spider webs around our anklebones that make us look like bad gremlins have been gnawing on us.  I know this. I worked as a massage therapist for six years. I saw a lot of feet. I also know the cosmetics industry is poised to offer us makeup for all parts of our bodies which sounds GOOD TO ME. Look as good today as you’ll look in your casket! Makeup so richly hued you’ll be mistaken for a Hollywood star! So full-bodied even your 3-D moles won’t show! So cleverly made that yes, even the Milky Way of your exploded blood vessels will be safely hidden from view!

The heck with these youngsters who think they don’t need pantyhose. All winter they go about with bare legs and wonder why they’re cold. and they probably think they look prett-ee fine with the tanned legs in the summer but hey,:They don’t get the kind of tans WE used to get, no-siree Bob. Baby Oil I’m talkin’, with Tincture of Iodine to give us that real Oven Stuffer Roaster look! Baby Oil, and a sheet of tinfoil to reflect those rays upward to the face and chest – which may be why we have now have these curtains of pleats running along our chests and upper lips.So hmmm come to think of it when will they give us aging Boomer women what we really need?  Hosiery for ALL the body-parts, starting at the hairline and going right clear down to the toes!

(at least we’ll always have scarves!)

A rainy day like this reminds me of the spring I was ten, when, visiting our super-fun cousins in upstate New York, five of us came whining into the house to say we had nothing to do – at which point our extra-super-fun Uncle David smiled big and shouted “Why not go out in the yard and hang yourselves?”

Everyone loved Uncle David and especially his first cousin, my mom, who the world called Cal. While nervously working her way toward his casket in 1987, she suddenly exclaimed in real pain “He was my first friend!”

They were the same age, younger kids in their respective families of pushy older sibs. ‘Cal’ was shy, and naughty in secret ways (winging a rotten strawberry at the stately fanny of a passing matron) while her pal was publicly naughty (telling us all when they were both in their mid 70s how he used to get her to join him in peeing behind the ice house.)

Here’s a picture of their idea of rainy day fun anyway. Mom is the one on the right who looks like she’s just come from being punished, a pretty good bet. And Uncle Dave? The guy in the hood, of course, who went on to vaudeville and Hollywood, family life and years and years and years of community theatre.

Kid walkin’ down the street, mindin’ own business 15 maybe 16 years old. Lone cop in squad car activates flashers, screeches in front of oncoming early afternoon traffic, rockets up ONTO sidewalk to accost him. Kid looks stunned, offers his best here-comes-a-grownup-what-now smile. Cop utters unintelligible commands. Kid produces papers of identification. Cop reaches up, pats him down: on both breasts,  arms, waist,  thighs, flanks. 30 seconds later boy is walking again in my direction, tucking away his papers and trying to look nonchalant as cop zooms manfully back into own lane, dousing the big blue flashers.

Another victory for public safety… or  not?

Rain again jeesh. I’m sitting here watching a ladybug trundle around in the vase of peonies I brought in quick before they get all slashed and flattened by the downpour. Thinkin’ back to a week ago when Annie got that diploma under the very same trees I once stood under myself, clapping  for the boy who would one day be her father. Ah the years do compresses themselves at times, like those novelty sponges that are flat as pancakes ’til you plunge them in water…. All these guys look young and fresh and adorable but it’s the half-glimpsed one with the dimples who caught my heart and kept it.

Where Have All the Flower (Children) Gone?

I went to Harvard’s Commencement exercises last week to see my girl Annie get her Master’s and was amazed to find myself steeped in the same resentments I feel every time I step into that famous Yard.

First I think about how when I was applying to colleges they didn’t take my kind at the Ivies – meaning women. I remember looking at my future husband’s  Freshman Classbook from this place and thinking “I must be as smart as at least some of these jokers, yet I couldn’t even apply here!”

Then I think about the snooty guys who turned away Uncle Ed 60 years ago when he applied to the Medical School, he an Armenian-American, small  and ‘swarthy,’ a code word for  ‘not of our pure northern races.’  They rejected him and when he asked for an appointment to find out why, the man across the desk lifted an eyebrow and said “Tell me,  Mr. Haidostian, where did your father go to college?” His father, a man born in the 1880s when even here in the States the average young man never even finished high school!

“My father is a graduate of the University of Tarsus,” said Uncle Ed simply. “In Asia Minor,” he added when the guy seemed unable to answer, and maybe he really was speechless but it  didn’t get  Uncle Ed any closer to his dream of being a doctor.

So when I first walked into that Yard last Thursday all I could think of was grievance.

And then I looked around – and saw among the graduates and family members as many people of color as you would  see in any of our larger cities.

Of those accepted into this class of ’09, as I have since read. a record 10.5 percent were African American, 17.8 percent were Asian American, 8.2 percent were Latino, and slightly more than 1 percent was Native American. And fully two-thirds of them received some form of financial aid, with an average total student aid package approaching $30,000.

So I ponder all this. And then I remember something else too: My own husband, a Harvard grad himself, is the son of a man whose father was a tailor from a little village north of Naples. My youngest child, a very recent Harvard graduate, is, on his mother’s side, the great-grandchild and namesake of  a man who grew up dirt-poor on a farm with a mother able to read and write in Gaelic only, but who yet became a lawyer AND a judge AND such a tireless worker for the public good that fancy-pants Harvard itself once gave him an honorary degree.

So let me chose thanks over resentment here, because don’t we all believe that here in America the best can rise and rise?

Anyway Annie rose, she who once thought she was the dumb one and her sister Carrie the smart one. Phi Beta Kappa in college Annie, you whose infinitesimal penciled numbers used to float like wee party balloons to the tops of all your math papers, making your primary school teachers cry Eyestrain!  and also Intervention!  Master of Arts, Annie Marotta, and isn’t your sister Carrie as proud as she can be of you, even as you pull her hair here in this picture?

We are all proud of our graduates and humbly remember why our own parents sent us to school when it was our time as the young ones. They sent us to make things better. They sent us to learn to serve.

We had a party in our back yard on the weekend. I’m not over it yet.

There were three of us in this neighborhood with landmark birthdays, so we put our heads together, rented a tent, called the barbecue wizards at Redbones and laid in some hooch.

It poured the morning of the party and the temps couldn’t seem to climb out of the 50s so we quick called the tent guys and added heat.

180 people showed up dressed for the weather but it was still freezing those first few hours; all the heat seemed to do was roast the caterers’ ankles. Then the DJ cranked the sound and the part took off.  We asked 200 people and darned if most of them didn’t come.The grass out back is still flat as a pancake and burned in places , just like the caterers’ ankles. The guests though? Those guests were HAPPY!