Clean Bones Please

Somebody put out a call for clean dry bones in an email blast and imagine my satisfaction in knowing I had those very things – and not even buried in my cellar either. I just so happen to have bought a bin o’ bones, an entire person’s worth, during the six years when I practiced massage therapy, and there was one of the stranger detours I have taken in my life;  I’m still not completely clear about what road it set me back down on.

I do know I’m a more enthusiastic writer now, grateful to be doing work that doesn’t drive pain up my arms and into my already-messed-up neck; but it also gave me the ability to SEE things in people, through this kind of  invisible eye that slowly opened up in my chest area as more and more I looked upon the bent human frames that appeared on my table. It may sound cheesy, like someone ripping off early Steven Spielberg – ET’s ‘I’ll be right here’ as he pointed a bulbous fingertip at his heart – but  is a real and true thing as anyone in the healing  professions will tell you.

The best thing I learned studying structure in those years is that we are all burdened; that we all hurt. Look at the person at the Post Office window next time you step up to it; really look at the way he is holding himself, the way one shoulder droops, the way the head is inclined a certain way like Meredith Veiera’s (see?)  Broken kites all of us.

But the bones, the shining bones in whose innermost parts the blood is made! God knew what he was doing when he gave us the bones!

Countertop

It was bad news for me when the Wall Street Journal called the Gores’ breakup after 40 years the ‘new normal.’ because I’ve been married 40 years this month. AND, and my veil looked just like Tipper’s!

And the similarities don’t end there. Dave was in Al Gore’s class at Harvard, though he’ll be quick to tell you he didn’t invent the Internet. He says all he did was play Freshman Football and, since he couldn’t afford to buy the books, read his course assignments in the library, starting around 48 hours before Finals. He also played cards by the hour and just generally did a whole lotta Not Much Else until I came along his Senior year and we began hanging out with my big funny family. And it’s been such a Big Top of fun-and-fightin’ ever since I can’t imagine walking away after the early innings like the Gores did,

In that Wall Street Journal piece Jeff Zaslow also cites a survey sponsored by the British dating site ForgetDinner which reports that people married one year spend 40 minutes of an hour-long dinner talking. By 20 years, they’re down to 21 minutes, by 30 years, 16, and by 50 years all of three. To which I say: fiddle-faddle. We sure never spent 40 minutes over those first-year dinners. We didn’t have enough food for that. We could’ve eaten the roaches to extend things maybe, crisped ‘em up in one of the zillion fondue pots we got as wedding presents.

By our 20^th anniversary it is true that our dinner-talk only lasted about 21 minutes but that’s just because we could hardly make ourselves heard over the offspring resulting from that yeasty early years. And by our 30th, we were too busy executing our kids’ desire to have people join us for dinner: pals of theirs, pals of their pals, even a doorbell-ringing solicitor if they took pity on him. And Dave and I, we just keep bringin’ on the chow. Who could talk?

Since the survey is silent about what happens at 40 years in I can tell you right now: At 40 years in you can break all the rules, because it’s just the two of you again.

David has recently taken a notion to eat standing up like a horse, maybe because he can’t wait to get back to the crossword he’s afraid to bring to the table since that time I took a match to his Sudoku. It used to drive me crazy to see him standing and eating at the island like a commuter at a pushcart – until I got the idea of sitting ON the island countertop, legs crossed under me, to eat my dinner like that.

And it works, We’re at eye level. We chew. We talk. And if  people look in the window and see two diners, one a standing man and one a woman in apparent I-Dream-of-Jeannie-style levitation, sure they might be flummoxed. Hey, we’re flummoxed ourselves most of the time, and if not laughing 24/7, havin’ some pretty good times.

For Bobbie

She was just Bobbie, one of the big kids with the long legs at camp; much sought after when we played those long games of Run Sheep Run and Capture the Flag..She paid no attention to me then in my dumb little baby shorts with elastic waistbands and curls foaming from the top of my head like water from the blow-hole of a whale  – but suddenly the summer I was 12 she was my counselor, still fleet of foot and glamorous but now she taught us swimming and slept in our cabin, a goddess among trolls, and tucked us in after Taps.

She was my counselor again the next summer when Patty O’Donnell and I lit up cigarettes, big as day, right in the cabin, the summer Joey Cardamone lost her retainer a record ten times…

And then suddenly I was 15 and in the C.I.T. cabin and here she was once again our counselor, this time riding us hard, giving us the requisite Counselor in Training tests and lectures and every other day it seemed pulling me aside to point out my many shortcomings.

By the time I myself became a counselor she was off at a fancy camp in California and never did come back to Fernwood. I was in her wedding though as she would have been in mine if she weren’t half way across the world by then. But along about the time she was expecting her first child we connected again and talked through our way through every little kid question, raising-a-teen dilemma, kid-out-of-college conundrum, marriage mystification, spiritual query, hormone issue and medical mystery . She worked 20 years in corporate America, then started her own business and ran with that for a decade. Now she works out every day and reads to the dying and and impersonates sick people at a med school  – it’s not a scam it’s a job – and  helped elect Joe Sestak to Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional district in ’07.

She just got back from hiking in Iceland and today is her birthday. So this is the shout-out on my blog to my wise elder and spiritual counselor Bobbie who on my birthday sent a shout-out to me on hers.

Bobbie then-Bayley as a camper herself with Mary Creagh, counselor Percey Williams and Ellen Smith in a summer in the Camelot years

How You Know You’re Nuts

You still have your 10^th grade term papers. You still have all the notes you and Ilona Wisniewski passed in 12^th grade English when you sat bored out of our skulls in that windowless classroom. You still have that fat candle with the three wicks that you can’t light anymore without having it drool  all over the place but how can you throw out a thing that came to you as a gift from such a dear of a human being whoever that was?  So maybe you’re a hoarder and maybe that’s OK because they know what to do with hoarders these days. But you have compulsions too and they’re more of a nuisance.

One Example: You just came across a pile of letters you received from readers in long-ago 2004 and your first thought was that you should sit right down and write to them all again. Even though you answered them back then. Another example: ten days ago you lost your diary and without the ability to write things down just so in that particular volume you haven’t been able to feel your feelings at all. Do you find it gratifying that the oil spill is in its 69th day? Hmmmm, a mystery. Are you happy your faraway friend died last Saturday and you never understood that he was dying so you never went to see him? You heard the sudden-stroke-after-surgery part but not the cancer-came-back-which is why they even had the surgery part.This news has knocked you clean  off your feet and you just can’t process it. Your psyche is a locked room whose only key is that little leather-bound diary left someplace dumb like in the Ladies Room at Target.

Now here it is Sunday and you’re feeling a strong urge to visit the stationery store. Maybe you’re on the brink of buying a new diary and starting over, writing off as lost the last six months.  You HOPE you come home with some sort of journal, late as it in the year, because if you show up back here with notecards meant for once again writing all those readers from 2004, well we  might as well call in the Crazy Police right now.

Me and the Cows

It was a five-guy day field trip for me Thursday because I had charge of the little ones and looked to the big ones for help. We went to the Y first where the big ones joined revolving teams of players scooting up and down the court, their sneakers barking like seals and I thought I couldn’t feel any hotter –  until an hour later when we went to a pool in whose Ladies Room I bent to within an inch of the slimy floor to pull some very small shorts off a very small person and thought I was going to pass out and die.

I was as miserable as the kids were happy with the heat. Then, as we sat at the table ordering food I suddenly knew rain was coming. It was as if the news had telegraphed itself to my every pore. Or maybe my ears sensed a sudden dip in the barometric pressure.

“Did you feel THAT?” I said to my five companions. “It’s going to rain – hard! We’d better get home before it does.”

“Rain?!” said Mr. Italian Ice here, pointing to the enamel-blue sky. “The weather guys were wrong if they said rain for THIS day!”

But it did rain, 90 minutes later and trees went down all over the county.

It’s not that I smelled it. It’s not that I saw it either unless it was that moment when the wind did a quick ten-second somersault and the leaves all went pale and threw their dresses over their heads. Mostly I just ….. sensed it. Games of basketball and Marco Polo may be behind me but I’m good at other things. Unlike these guys below, me and the cows, we feel that rain a-comin’ and we just want to go lie down.

The Innocents Laid to Rest

When the moon rose at dusk last night it looked burdened, like the head of poor mythical Atlas stooping under the weight of Earth. I had gone for a short walk, passing the church where our four murder victims will be remembered today. The street was already lined with signs to save space for the funeral cortege as I assume, or possibly the media. “EMERGENCY NO PARKING” the signs all said, though the emergency felt far behind us now. There was a quiet feeling at that hushed hour with the birds swooping low and a plane out of Logan ascending like a prayer.

I could look in the windows of the church hall and see the Gifts and Memorials Committee at their meeting. At other hours in the week this hall plays host to other groups as well, among them the local chapter of Rotary International and those following the Steps and Traditions set down nearly 80 years ago by Bill W. and Dr. Bob. Additionally, according to the sign out front, the Cloister Concert Series will take place, tonight featuring contralto Marion Dry in an evening called “Saints and other Mortals” from 7:30 to 9:00, ice cream afterward.

Just as I passed, the Reverend Thomas Brown himself emerged from his car carrying his robes for today, freshly ironed as they looked. He seemed as burdened as poor Atlas, perhaps from standing so long in these last days by the woman who was sister and daughter and aunt to the victims; yet he had such a beautiful light-filled countenance I wished I too could attend tomorrow and hear his words of comfort.

I can’t. This morning I rose at 4:30 and worked for two hours and sit now on my front porch awaiting the very early arrival of the little boys 3 and 6 who are my grandsons; and, several hours later – because teens need their sleep – the arrival of the big boys who will help me care for them while their mama keeps a vigil by a bedside.

They say we’ll see heavy rain before the sun goes down and a hard thing it is to leave any graveside in the rain. But who knows? Perhaps a cleansing rain will bring some relief for these mourners, or at least the end of the time of the first hot tears.

In this life we are again and again delivered from sorrow without ever knowing by Whose hand. But if we could see God’s face even just once I think it would look the way Reverend Brown’s face looked last night: filled with somber care, but shining; shining.

Texting While Stupid

A good thing: The Massachusetts legislature is about to approve a ban on texting while driving. Also a ban on talking on the phone while driving for the under-18 set. Said one State Senator to the Boston Globe, “I commute 72 miles each way to the State House, and people are reading textbooks, putting eyeliner on, slapping their kids in the backseat, eating Big Macs, and a myriad of other things, while driving cars, usually with their knees.”

With their knees? While doing their homework and putting on eyeliner?  And ouch, while turning to slap away at their poor kids in the back seat?

High time, is all I can say, And Massachusetts is hardly out in front on this: if the bill passes, my state will be the 29^th in the nation to ban texting for all drivers; the 29th to ban all phone use for under-18s.  Oh and it also covers doing these things while idling at traffic lights and Stop signs.  Plus the lawmakers are smart: their ban also explicitly includes e-mailing,  web searching and all other non-calling activities you can accomplish on any kind of  electronic device.

It’s a good law because the world  full of idiots. I’m an idiot myself. I think from now on I’ll keep my Blackberry in the ‘way back’ where I can’t possibly get to it and make or take a call or look at a text. After all, that’s where I keep all the snack food I’m transporting home from the store.  WeightWatchers girl that I am, I don’t trust myself to sit beside it –  and if Doritos are bad for your health how much worse is that semi bearing down on you as you wander across the median into oncoming traffic?

I did that only once in my life and no phones where involved. I was just  gesturing toward the view  and the country  road was narrow and, well, I meandered all unwitting  across that center line – and came SO close to hitting the kid behind the wheel of the oncoming car that our mirrors whacked each other, hard. I have never forgotten that moment.

So yeah: Phone in the “way- back” for me from now on. And not because I fear the ticket.

Again with the Sex and Babies

Not only has that new-mother dove come back to my windowsill, she even put the sign out –  even though it was just last week she got her babies launched – and all this just as I was getting ready to lift the sash and scour the whole length of wood, the babies having used it as a combination rec room and potty chair for two weeks, not moving a muscle ’til Mom gave ’em the big nudge and they took flight at last.

It just seems weird to me. I was expecting her to be joining the Y or signing up for a course in Bug Finding but here she is again.

Not that she’s paying me any mind. All day yesterday she looked at me like I was wallpaper, fixed as she was on the Hoochie Dance she kept doing every time Mr. Pointytail came around. He’d stick out his chest and start bobbing his head like a hip dude at a jazz club, then – boom!  –  the deed was done. Several times in fact. Then he began showing up with all these twigs which she took from him twig by twig to form a nest much bigger  than the nest she had last time.

Just now when I leaned in close Poppa, above here, took off in alarm. Not Momma though. She is here for the duration. She fixed me with a look I recognized as a special girl-to-girl telegram. “Here we go again,” is what it said.

I could identify.

Eat a Fish, Rev Your Engines

Two things over the weekend, each with its charms: the peace of a lakeside stay and ….BIKER WEEK! The peaceful part involved 80-degree weather and a wind so strong you could hook an umbrella on it. A great blue heron swooped down right in front of us and grabbed a 12-inch fish right from the water, landed on the float 50 feet away, waggled his head this way and that until that fish went DOWN  – then sat there, the poor dying trout making a giant mound in his gullet.

I tried to tape him taking off after he swallowed but only managed this crooked video in which nothing happens at all except a possibly nauseous feeling on the part of the people watching it.

The other thing was the perenially crazy carryings-on of the  300,000 motorcycle enthusiasts who all but deafen the population each year when they visit for Biker Week. They zoom loudly up and down the roads surrounding the lake all night long, then start again bright and early in the morning.

I was at the food store in Center Harbor at 4:01 Saturday and snapped the picture above – serenity itself, right? – then got in my car, drove 80 yards and at 4:02 caught the shot below. From the sublime to the tinniticulous. I may never hear right again.

Hop on Pop

The man we’re celebrating this Fathers Day had just one suit the year this picture was taken. It was bought for his middle school graduation. That was fine with him. We’ve been married 40 years today and in all that time I have never heard him utter a single boast. I remember before his 25^th college reunion he didn’t want to fill out the survey. “Look I’ll read the questions and write down your responses,” I said, and took out my pen.

“It’s asking for your special achievements. “Leave it blank,” he said.  “Or else put ‘My family.’” “It asks if you’ve served on the Board of Directors of any companies. You have!” ” I said. “Leave it blank,”  he said.

He doesn’t care if the world thinks him successful. It just doesn’t matter to him. I remember asking him that day how many suits he had now. “One,” he said. “One that I can wear.”

The year our son was going into 8^th grade he spent all eight weeks at a summer camp in the Berkshires.  On that first Visiting Day, most of the other campers had parents with fancy cars. At one point we found ourselves next to the basketball court where a lone father in fancy shoes and a Versace shirt was shooting baskets. David had on shorts and his Dr. Seuss T-shirt with Hop on Pop stenciled on the front.  I knew he wanted to shoot with our son, but was holding back, not wishing to interrupt this well-dressed dad. “Go on out there!” I said under my breath. “This guy’s just some cardiologist! ”

He laughed. He knew what I meant. I meant, “Some rich guy in fancy clothes? Some rich guy is no match for a man with just one suit.”

Happy Fathers Day Old Dave! And Happy 40 Years With TT who loves you even more now than she did when she snapped this picture.