EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

Thoughts For the Day: Turns out I don’t like turkey all that much. (I know: how many of us feel that way today right?) ALSO I am so glad  I didn’t have to cook again this year. Ever since our younger daughter Annie went to culinary school we’ve had a pretty easy time of it on the holidays. AND NOW all that’s left is the ride home, since, like a zillion other Americans, I too face a commute to get back to my workday life. I’m riding with our older daughter Carrie and the two little boys five and two, along with our old gray cat Abe who will sing like Luciano Pavarotti himself for the whole hundred-mile drive if I make him sit in the dread carrier, which is actually an entire rabbit hutch with a doggy bed inside it that I patched together out of pure mother-love and because I am a saint. To Abe though it’s prison pure and simple and for there to peace in the car at all I’ll have to hold him in my lap while he drives his daggery nails into my thighs . I’ll also probably have to sit in back between the two kiddie car seats because how can I sit in front with my back to those two cuties? This means that like the last time we drove with me in the middle they’ll probably reach their little fingers inside the armholes of my shirt and shake hands with each other someplace in the vicinity of that cute little bow on my Bali bra.

The Old Ball ‘n Chain, meanwhile, will burn brush ’til it gets dark then drive home in a car free of molestation-by-mammals and we’ll converge there at around 6 when – what else? we’ll all go out for burgers before putting our youngest, Mike. on the train to NYC. Yay  family life!

a ‘bed’ aboard the Mayflower II

You and I spent the day in a warm place with full tummies. Be glad. When those poor voyagers landed in the New World they smelled to high heaven and no wonder. The inside of the Mayflower was so tiny you wouldn’t try putting 120 people in there for an hour never mind two months.  One person died on the way over possibly because  of the food,  “The bread musty and mouldy, the  beefe and porke of such a loathsome and filthy taste”  that people “were constrained to stop their noses” to get it down. Liquids would have helped there but “the beer was sharp and sour and the water corrupt and stinking” enough so that the only way they could get that down was to mix it with wine – which had to also taste terrible.

You and I ate pretty good today and now we get to crawl into our nice little beds.

Here’s the typical bed in the Plimoth of 1620. (Note firewood stacked under it.)

and here’s what they had for insulation:

It was December when they got here and within a year fully half their number would be dead. Not the cheeriest note to end on but it does make you ponder.

11:23 on a Thanksgiving night in the first decade of the new Millenium. Rain and a touch of snow comin’ in. Peace in this house and a sweet old cat beside me. I know I feel grateful.

Just sayin’: if I were an indigenous person I’d be rolling  my eyes heavenward and getting mad all over again about the wrong-headed versions of what went down in the fall of 1621. Also, check this out: Half the people who came over on the Mayflower died within the first year. ‘Course ALL the people who lived in the settlement called Patuxet died a few years before that – of the Plague brought over by You-Know-Who, the Big-eyed, Big-nosed White Man as the Chinese once called our enlightened emissaries to the Eastern kingdoms.

Squanto (real name Tisquantum ) was kidnapped by the English in 1614 and by the time he made his way back seven years later it was to find his whole village wiped out by this  plague and full of people from England and Holland.

I learned all this visiting this amazing place Plimoth Plantation which I wrote about in this week’s column – and by the way kudos to the historical impersonators like this lad, and this young woman.

The people to really see? the actual Wampanoags who are good enough to share their time explaining the ancient arts.

Uh oh, mouse tracks everywhere today! Time to get out the traps, using my new method that works every time (as you can see from this photo.) It involves affixing to the trap’s mechanism a bit of string nicely smeared with peanut butter: the old Bait and Switch at its finest. Will that be a bit brunch or a broken neck today? I hate thinking about it.

Time was, our two cats covered the whole Wild Kingdom beat around here and invading critters got away with nothing, not even the bats who drop down the chimney from time to time. Once, when our boy-cat Abe came down from his nap and saw a bat swooping and dipping around in the kitchen his face said “Damn!” and quick as a wink he was six rooms away. The girl-cat Charlotte had another reaction: she sauntered into the room, caught what was happening, shot one deadly mitt in the air and  – POW! – felled the thing mid-flight.

Charlotte is hunting on that Far Shore now and Abe is pleading old age so it’s back to man-made contraptions for us these days. Maybe one day we can all live peaceably together like the three pals in this You Tube video but it won’t be in MY house, at least not until we can teach mice about potty-training!

Reunions Magazine has just quoted part of a column I wrote about a mini-reunion with my college pals. Only thing is they have me down as a columnist for the Norwich (CT) Bulletin whereas in fact I am a Columnist for the World in the sense that my little words go far and wide, which is a great source of satisfaction for me even if there’s no money in it. (350 papers in Massachusetts alone have access to my column and many of them use it. My compensation? $15 a week.)

But never mind that. Here’s what the Reunions issue labeled November/ December/January 2010 quoted from that piece. It was kind of the big finish:

And in the end this reunion seemed to be just what any school reunion should be: a field trip of the imagination to the time when we would gather in small groups to joke and commiserate and tell fond semi-mocking stories about our families, who turned out not to seem so crazy after all when compared to other people’s families; to a time before we were tied in tight to this world by the cords of love and obligation; to a time when we believed – really believed – that Time would never touch us.

Ah but Time touched us all right. Time turned us and turned us, forcing us to grow as the chambered nautilus grows. That little creature inhabits one ‘room’ of his delicate shell, grows, builds a new, larger room, moves into it, grows, builds a new, larger room, moves into that, etc. until he has that lovely circular condo whose image we see on all the exercise equipment. (I bet on some level you also know the poem about this creature by the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes if you’ll just reach back far enough in memory. “Build more stately mansions O my soul!” etc., remember? The whole thing is here, if you want to have a look.

You’ll also see the nautilus’s shape in this picture I took of the stairs inside the lighthouse at Pemaquid Point in Maine which we visited during our three days together. We hiked clear to the top, clambered up into the place where the beacon is and clambered down again. These were once my best friends in the world, Vicki and Cathy and Elizabeth, Virginia, Susan and Judy and in many ways they still are that. A seventh pal, called Lynne, couldn’t make it this time but I think of  her every day – not just because she was and still is  so  beautiful but because she taught me by example that even if you feel all sad and weird you can still by God get up off your fanny and do your work.

(Lynne at an earlier mini-reunion on Rattlesnake Hill, NH. For more on that experience go to Elizabeth’s website here)

She’s great for even more reasons, this primary care doc I talked about the other day. During my annual check-up last week I told her I thought I was losing it a couple of months ago. A guy I met at the plant store told me he had ADHD and by golly he suffered my same symptoms. He didn’t find out ’til he was almost 50 he said but now with the right meds he feels focused with a wonderful time-release calmness.

I sure wasn’t calm anymore, OR focused. I who since the age of 15 have eaten an early breakfast and taken my time making a beautiful daily list and writing cryptic amusing entries in my diary. Suddenly I couldn’t sit to those tasks, and often didn’t have a bite of breakfast until 11 in the morning, which may be normal for most people but sure isn’t normal for me. I read a checklist that helps you see if you have attention deficit/ hyperactivity: “Do you veer into people?” was one question. “Do you leave cabinet doors open?” I asked David if I did either of these things and he gave me deadpan look, gestured at our own yawning cabinets in mock horror and said,“ AND, you’ve been veering into me for 40 years.”

So I got the referral for the Psychiatric department at Mass. General and went to see someone who after 40 minutes ruled out ADHD and said, right to my face,   “I think you’re depressed.”

“WHY would I be depressed?”

“Because your kids are gone.”

“They’ve been gone since 2002! “

“Still.” she said and gave me a second appointment which I ended up having to cancel. And now in the closing minutes of my annual checkup with my awesome Primary Care Doc it occurred to me to mention all this. After listening carefully she put down her pen and said something I wasn’t expecting to hear: “I think you ARE depressed.”

Again!  “Why do YOU say that?”

“You just told me that you’ve lost twelve newspapers that used to subscribe to your column and that many of the rest can’t pay you.”

“Well that’s true.”

“And you’re not sad about that?”

There was a shocked pause on my part. Then, “I’m really sad about, that though I never talk about it with anyone! I feel terrible. All these years I’ve never made a profit and now I feel like I’m ….disappearing! I feel like all my life I was trying to give the world a gift that it just didn’t want!”

“Listen to me,” she said, sitting forward in her chair. “I know you. You’re really smart and you have tons of energy. You could have been a judge. You could have been a CEO. Instead, you became a writer – an artist – and artists…. struggle.

Another long pause from normally-glib me. Then, “I’m not sure but I think you’ve just saved me a year of therapy.”

“Write a book that isn’t a reworking of columns and sell it to a real publishing house!” she said, walking me to the door. “Forget doing another one yourself.”

“I’ve thought of that but how does anyone write 20,000 or 30,000 words? I’m just writing 600 a week and it’s practically killing me!” But going down in the elevator of the Wang Building I got to thinking. ‘Could’ve been a judge,’ she’s said.  ‘Could’ve been a CEO.’  I was never all that smart but I do have a lot of energy, even now. Maybe I should just begin, and see how many 600s it takes to reach 30,000.

So my next question is to you, you dark-of-the-night, early-morning friend, if you are out there at all: what do YOU think a book by me should be about?

I actually like going for my annual physical because my Primary Care doctor is so awesome – plus I’ve been going to her so long it feels like we’re pals. Yesterday, for example,  she so patiently went over all my boring issues writing it all down. Of course being such a GIRL, I went right into apology mode the second she stepped close for the looking down your throat and up your nostrils part “Look at these lines coming around my mouth!” I yipped in self-castigation. “Hey come on, you look great” she said (She’s my same age so we’re talkin’ relative here.) “I have those lines too, see? A few more years and our lipstick will start bleeding down into them!”

“So you don’t think we should go get face-lifts?” I said half in jest.

“Facelifts, God no! The women I know who with face-lifts look weird. Listen, it’s better to just age. We look a little crappy for a few years but then it all changes and we turn into these beautiful old women in our 70s and 80s.”

See why I like her? Beautiful old women in our 70s and 80s! She meant all women in their 70 and 80s are beautiful, and not in spite of being old but because they are old. Like these two bold babes, cigars and flowery caps and all.

Another holiday, bah. Bookstores jammed, malls jammed, people lined up out the door to get their fix at Starbucks, which is to coffee what unfiltered Camels are to cigarettes… Whoever said Hell is other people was talkin’ my language yesterday. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood after seeing that mother-daughter combo brought on the Today Show because the daughter sneezes ten times a minute.

I felt bad for the mom because as nice as Ann Curry was, leaning forward to coax out the story, the house “expert,”  Dr. Nancy Snyderman, was pretty harsh saying (a) what kind of a sneeze is THAT, it doesn’t even involve the nose; (b) could be a tic of some sort like people get with Tourette’s and (c) could be Munchausen’s and your kid just craves attention. I thought the mum looked at old Doc Snyderman like she wanted to BITE this chief medical editor but I could be wrong. It’s just that she and her 12-year-old seemed so sensible and calm, you could tell it wasn’t THEIR idea to be on national television. Then here’s the Today Show trying to justify it all with an appeal to the public: “Do YOU know why Lauren is sneezing? Send your cards and letters etc. As if any of us dummies know anything. but it does bring up an old memory: Back in the 50s there was this rumor that the Pope couldn’t stop sneezing. I was just a little kid but it made a big impression on me. Also, how about the news that he finally read the letter the Virgin Mary dictated through the Fatima kids that no one was allowed to open until then and when he finally did he  fainted dead away? So what did it say, did anyone tell us kids? No one told my sister and me who finally just shrugged, forgot, and went back to sticking Mr. Potato Head body parts into all the apples.

Here’s the poor child now:

I wrote a Happy Birthday Terry Sheehy card to myself back last winter, Terry Sheehy being who I was before marriage hunted me down and took my name, my youth, my thick black hair boo hoo.

As I sat down to write that post I thought I’d Google my old name and see if there were any other Terry Sheehys out there who HADN’T experienced Death by Matrimony and sure enough: Terry Sheehy is also a boy from Ireland. I quoted all the lovely nonsense he posted on his My Space page and now suddenly just now the boy’s dad has written to me to say how very interesting it was for his son to find his face on my blog and also to assure me that the lad’s spelling had improved a bit since he wrote what he wrote. If you don’t care to click and read that old post from my birthday month I can quote what he wrote on his profile page.

Hay my name is terry sheehy and im 17 going out with susan browne i love u susan !… i like to play basketball football i also like to watch UFC and figthing sports.. Thanks to my fab sis whoohooo and just want to say befor i go to bed just leve a coment and ill comment u back. i like action films and films that kinda do with shit that im interested in and also comedy and going to the cinema

So hmmm… It looks like words really can last and last, and circle the planet too. And wasn’t Terry’s his dad gracious? ”PS: You should have kept your name,” he even added in wry good humor at the end of his email, but ah Mr. Sheehy it’s just as well. I’ve been Terry Marotta for nigh on to 40 years and have lived into that person. Let the lad have my old name, this handsome lad from Ireland posting a a quick note to the world before jumping into his PJ’s and sleeping the clean blank sleep of the young.

It was bright and sunny three hours ago when my husband David’s Uncle Ed said he wanted to go to the cemetery where his wife Fran lies. He just had to see the grave he said, tired as he was from our trip to the dentist, but for some reason we just couldn’t find it, in spite of my sprinting down the grassy lanes like some kind of loony Irish setter.

Uncle Ed is 89 and can’t walk on smooth surfaces never mind rough ones so I left him in the car as I did this; but it must have irked him that I kept coming up empty because at one point I looked back from some 100 yards away and there he was, handing himself tentatively along between the monuments.

The thing is, Auntie Fran is buried right next to the grave I still think of as David’s father’s grave though his mother Ruth is there now too. Ralph Marotta sickened in his early 40s and was gone by 45 when his second son was a carefree 12 and the next brothers down were only nine and six. Ruth never told any of her four boys that their father was dying – those were different days, is all – and only big brother Toby, 15, seemed to understand. He  remembers him leaving for his final trip to the hospital; he remembers going to sit in his lap and kiss him goodbye.

There’s more to this story, which I can tell on another such brilliant day that all too soon goes down to darkness but for now I will only say How we miss them: Pretty Aunt Fran seen here on her wedding night pointing mischievously to the bed. Meek-seeming Ruth Payne Marotta who was secretly made of steel and didn’t care what anyone thought. She modeled such great courage for me, a daughter-in-law scarce out of her teens.

With his extra weight and congestive heart failure Uncle Ed knows well that he will soon be here himself. Maybe he just wanted to be sure that on future days I would know just where to find him.

Go back now through these lines  and click on every word that’s a different color, ‘lit up’ in hypertext and see their pictures up close: Uncle Ed with little David long ago, and Fran, and Ruth when all were young and the world was new and the grass was ever greening.