Eerie, that Naked Lady

It unsettles me: every time I opened this site lately, the music from Cocoon started playing and that naked actress with the really small waist once again began lowering herself into the pool.  The video was harder to upload than others I’ve posted here so maybe it came trailing some mysterious coding that has crept in like ringworm through my laptop’s feet. Maybe my blog was under its spell in some way and yearned always to show that naked lady. I finally had to replace the video with a mere link to it so you’re now a step away if you’re in this for the skinny-dipping.

Only one time did my computer get really infected and that was the time I went to that silly website that shows the autopsy photos. I was looking to see if the pictures said to be of our assassinated 35^th President are really out there for anyone to see. They sure are and you’d know it was JFK all right, just by that wonderful hair the color of maple syrup and the freckles on his torso from many a boatride.

It’s a hard photo to look at of course, though for me not nearly as hard as the one of Marilyn Monroe who in death looked nothing at all like the still-young woman-child she was the night she took that overdose. Her hair is all slicked back and the skin on her face is so slack and she just looks so… alone. Alone and in despair. Even the lividity in her face doesn’t strike you as much as that look she has of one truly forsaken.

As a sophomoric gross-out final act on this site, one of its last links takes to you to the autopsy picture of a man who died of worms, which I guess brings us right back to where we started. They’re seen spilling from his body cavity, which tells me that this site is mostly trying to scare us with the threat  of our own death but heck, I go with what the philosopher Epicurus said which is basically that when we are here death is not and when death is here we are not, simple as that…….

Rain AND snow predicted in these parts so  another big day for Mother Nature. I say let’s go outside anyway and watch her water the flowers, something that she does even in places like this:

a graveyard, Anytown USA

Goodbye Frog, So Long Mouse

Here’s a scary sight from the trip my family and I took out west. While the rest of sat like fat lizards in sun so dry the skin on your face tightens like a mummy’s, Annie went hiking with her super-fit man, then sat for a bit in a gully while he ran up the side of a mountain. As she sat by that little creek-bed she saw this snake eating a frog who, she says, cried out in heart-rending fashion until only his little hands remained, which you can just see disappearing down the snake’s throat.

When I emailed this picture to a member of the family who couldn’t come on this trip she wrote back to say it was the saddest thing she had ever seen and there sure is enough plenty of sad stuff in the great outdoors I guess. Plenty of ‘sad’ indoors too if you count mouse death.

Our new housemates, freshly transplanted from Florida, stayed behind and shivered in the late March cold.  (Click here to see one of the nice big fires they made so as not to die of frostbite in the 20-degree nights.) I bring them up because yesterday when we were cooking together in the kitchen I saw evidence of mouse-life over by the earthenware jars where we keep the coffee. “Shall we set a trap and kill it right away or wait for warmer days when it will go outside on its own?” I asked Veronica who as a size Zero is not much bigger than a mouse herself. (See?)

“Oh I hate to kill it!” she said at first, then some ten or 15 minutes later reversed herself: “I’ve been thinking about that mouse…” she began.

So the a death sentence it was: I smeared peanut butter on a 59-cent mousetrap and here he was this morning, all nicely packaged for his trip to the dump.

It does feel sad – such perfection of form gone down to death! – but that’s how it is in this world. The poet Tennyson said it; nature IS red in tooth and claw.

David put him into the bag; Veronica and I were useless.

Look Up, Dummy

This is  me with my new phone.  And yes that’s my old phone in pieces on the floor beside me. (I bit it; I was mad.)

I like this picture because it reminds me  how all of us are in this head-bent position all the time. We have so many screens in our lives, so many little gadgets we’re poking and peering down at, while all this time the real excitement is happening above our heads.

I mean the birds. The birds are going by thick and fast now. I feel like I’m on the tarmac at the airport almost, the big commercial birds and the little private birds, all zooming past. At 6 o’clock this  morning the sky was thick with them the way it used to be thick with passenger pigeons in America’s early days when they literally darkened the skies so numerous were they – until those pasty-faced Europeans arrived in the 1600s that is. They shot and ate them by the hundreds of thousands; then shot them and fed them to the pigs; then just plain shot them idly and for sport the way they later shot the buffalo, and in such numbers that by the year 1900 they were all but gone and by 1914 the very last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Sad.

No birds are dying up there now though. You look up into the clean late-March skies and find yourself rooting for them, just the way you secretly did the first time you saw Alfred Hitchcock’s famous movie.

They’re ba-a-a-a-ck!  Go to the window right now and look up. (And for heaven’s sake turn off the phone!)

God had It Easier

I stood in Aisle 10B of the crafts store with a high school student bent on building two human arms complete with hands and fingers. He would then accompany this vivid display of with dense and complicated passages of prose explaining the physiology of the nerves involved but I had no part in any of that; I was just the ride.

Though I’ll admit when the call came asking for help getting to the craft store I dropped everything. Because don’t school projects furnish the most cliff-hanging and hilarious drama imaginable?  Just being in the presence of the appropriate materials seemed to fill us both with a kind of giddy optimism.

“Look! 10 pound bags of plaster of Paris! Get three just in case! Look! Kits for making a model of the human hand! Get two and we’ll stick them on the end of each arm!” All these things did we buy and more besides, and went home happy.

I was happy anyway, since all I had ahead was supper and a little TV and a nice early bedtime. I thought all was well for him too – until a dire second call came in a day later : The compound wasn’t setting up right; the arms looked nothing like arms.

And that’s when I remembered the sphinx sculpture my best friend and I had tried to make for Ancient History way back when: its plaster of Paris on my sphinx hadn’t set up either! We bought bag after 10-pound bag of the stuff and still the beast had this little shrinking pinhead and hips that just kept on growing each night in my cellar: while we did our Algebra homework and ate our simple suppers; while we slept in our girlhood beds..  Wider and wider the sphinx-body grew, pooling and creeping like lava-flow.

It all came back to me as we stood once again in Aisle 10B, scanning the shelves and considering the problem. We stood and we stood until suddenly I remembered: I save skeletons! I love skeletons! And wouldn’t this store carry those big bags of fiberfill you use for stuffing pillows? And also yarn to act as nerves?

So bags of puffy stuff it was, and yarn, and poster board too; also, rolls of bandages from the drug store and we were SET.

Two hours later we had wrenched the arms from the torso of my favorite little skeleton and padded them with an exquisite layering of fiberfill “muscles” held in place by a great winding of bandages. I even went and got some of my knee-high pantyhose and encased the arms like two fat sausages  in case he’d like that effect. (He didn’t.)

Ecstatic myself, I saw a good day’s work.  The student saw an all-nighter and then some.

Why? Because for him the great challenge still lay ahead. It was the challenge of how to convey in mere words the intricate and divine engineering that lets our bones or the bones of Adam’s brethren, simply and miraculously…. get up and dance. 🙂

Armless now, this little man used to give me a hand with my columns.

Love in the Pool

I guess it seemed mean to just tell about that scene from Cocoon where the sexy-looking alien ‘initiates’ the young guy into the way people make love on her planet but I couldn’t find it on YouTube.

I was operating entirely on my 25-year-old memory of the scene in fact –

until I happened upon it, led by my own curiosity about Tahnee Welch, and what do you know here it was in a post called “Alien Sex.”

It’s as funny and innocent as I recalled. See if you don’t think it’s nice too:

 

go to http://www.hulu.com/watch/28463/cocoon-alien-sex

Foreplay Ourselves

Looks like this is Anatomy  week,  all right, Wednesday  the head, today the hand, though I guess every week is Anatomy week with these hands doing such delicate work all the time; with these sensitive feet forever analyzing the terrain and reporting back so we don’t keep falling over…

I spent two days this week on airplanes where my own hands were sure taxed, especially while yanking that 20-pound computer bag out from under the seat. They hurt a lot these days so I’m aware of them more. It’s why I had to stop practicing massage. During one of the Deep Tissue workshops I took while studying muscular therapy the teacher told me I had to build up more hand strength.  I wasn’t ever able to do that. I also realize now that I leaned in on them too much as I made my way down the back of whoever was on my table. The result after just four years: I could no longer bear the pain of working on people.

If I only I could have massaged them with my mind! I’m thinking of that scene in the 1985 movie Cocoon when the Steve Guttenberg character is talking to the beautiful alien in the indoor pool where the space-pods first opened and asks her what making love is like on her planet. In reply she has him stand at the opposite end from her, then sends this ray of light across the water which caroms around off the walls and ceilings until it lands Pow! right in his chest. His head is thrown back and he smiles ecstatically, the camera pans away to the outside of the building and you can just barely hear him saying  “If this is foreplay I’m a dead man!”

Maybe we humans are just the foreplay too. A humbling thought for all those Genesis readers out there raised on the belief that  we humans were the crown of creation.  Us the crown of creation? Us Nature’s best final project? We’re probably just one of Her rough sketches.

Now watch this  trailer and tell me it isn’t great – not just Tahnee Welch’s face in the love-making scene but what Wilfred Brimley says to his young grandson:

Go With It

Speaking of altering your look like the stars do, here’s a dog who actually had to have surgery because he couldn’t see. His mom might be appalled but I bet the pooch himself feels just fine about the change. I mean he might not look like all his pals anymore but hey: he can SEE!

To me it’s a reminder to us all to make our peace with our changing situation and move on. Some women, after mastectomies, tattoo the empty spot on chests, turning scar tissue into some gorgeous kind of wall covering.

I can see doing that – if I could get the tattoo done under deep anesthesia or something. (It’s like what Woody Allen said about dying. That he didn’t really mind the thought of  dying – as long as he didn’t have to be there when it happened.)

The final episode of HBO’s Big Love gave a pretty good picture of how it is to be the person in those final moments. There’s that momentary fear as the faces leaning over you grow indistinct and then… that light we’ve all heard about and there you are looking down at that little ragdoll of a body and maybe wondering why it seemed such a major big deal to you while you were riding around inside it.

It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Just let go and move into the light. Isn’t it so odd that not one of us REALLY knows what the transition is like? Science types say the light you see is a result of the brain’s being deprived of oxygen but you know how Science types are. Me. I’m not buyin’ that theory for a minute.

Thank You Liz

Elizabeth Taylor gave me my first lesson in how true it is that nobody likes a wise-guy. This was back in the mid-80s when face lifts were relatively rare  (meaning before current times, when even the family dog is getting work done.)

Liz got some done on her jawline and then kept gaining weight so she kind of grew around it. I was mean and chilldish enough to mention this in one of my columns. What I actually said was  “at least one of her chins is still pointy.”

And boy did I get a lecture!  “Who do you think you are?” this one woman wrote in an angrily scrawled hand. “Where do you get off making fun of others when your eyes are beady, your teeth look false and your hair is out of style?” She could tell all that from the headshot that accompanied the column. And she was right on two counts: my eyes are beady and my hair is generally out of style but did that stop me? Nah. I then took that quote and put it on the cover of my very first book I Thought He Was a Speed Bump.

Dear Elizabeth: she couldn’t learn to stop marrying (and what did Samuel Johnson call that, the triumph of hope over experience? ) Me I couldn’t learn for the longest time stop trying to get the laugh even if it meant sometimes getting it at somebody else’s expense. She did a lot of good that lady, AND singlehandedly saved over-the-topness after we lost Liberace. I hope the lids closed easily on those amazing blue eyes.

What Could Be Nicer Than This?

People have written me such great letters over the years. One I could never forget came from the person who wrote to say she laughed so hard reading one of my columns that the coffee she was drinking shot out her nose and across the room.

But even better are  the messages that have heart – like the one I received some five or six years ago: ““Why am I writing to Terry Marotta?” it began. “It must be because of this sentence: ‘Wasn’t I once a person who refinished AND reupholstered all her furniture? Now I look at that pound of raw chicken and think ‘Who could I PAY to turn this into dinner?’ Yes it’s just a sentence from a newspaper clip saved among many in my desk. But the column it was from struck a chord for 86-year-old Me in my Old Folks Home. I think we were in a writing group years ago. I used to come with Charity Wetzler who died early last year. We met in someone’s apartment on Whitney Avenue. Was that you?”

Well no, it wasn’t. But I found this letter so wonderfully personal I could never throw it out, even after answering it. And she saved the best part for last: “Speaking of change being the essence of our lives here, getting old has been and remains a great education – and NOT an entirely negative one!”

She closed by sending me best wishes and adding an original sketch of a person’s nose in profile with two legs and two sneakered feet emerging from the nostrils. The wry caption: “Running nose.”

I came upon this note just yesterday and it was all I could do not to drop everything and search for its author, who would be 91 or even 92 by now. Maybe I will do that: Just find her somehow. Just reach out.

I reached out immediately to a new friend who wrote me last January.

She was referring to a column I had done about the traces of former inhabitants we sometimes come upon in our houses: “Your subject on Friday about finding unexpected treasures in the houses you have lived in reminded me of the inscription my husband wrote when he built an addition onto our former house,” her letter began.

“Before he had installed the inside wall paneling, he wrote on the bare wood wall: ‘Built by (her husband’s name) on (the date) for the comfort of his wife.’

“I liked that inscription, and I anticipated some future owner replacing the paneling and seeing it, sort of like something an old pioneer might have written.”

I know I would have loved to come upon such an inscription, courtly as it is. When I got back to her to say how touching I found her note and to ask if I might share it, she wrote again, sending more words, also well worth saving and passing on.

She said, “I sent this story to the paper and included in it mention of the inscription I have passed on to you. You are welcome to use it for it must have been at least 40 years ago that it appeared in the newspaper and now my husband is deceased, and I am an old person of 84 blessed with wonderful memories of a long and happy life.”

I have read these words and the ones above them again and again, written as they were by two people who know – just know in their hearts – that at every stage of life we are meant to bless this life and call it good.

What’s in That Head

I’ve been looking at drawings like these lately; I find it calms me. When I was in massage school I bought this book of drawings by one Frank Netter, believed to have been the greatest anatomical illustrator since Leonardo. (That’s Da Vinci not DiCaprio – and by the way you’e never supposed to say ‘Da Vinci’ in spite of the blockbuster book and the Tom Hanks movie. That would be like calling Mark Wahlberg DeBoston.)

Anyway this is what we look like on the inside. You know when they say “What were you thinking?” Maybe this is what they do to find out.

As I’ve  examined the workings of my own head lately I have come to see that all I wanted was for people to feel better. It’s why I’ve been writing that mostly light-hearted newspaper column since the fall of 1980: I didn’t want anyone to be sad, at least not for long. I wanted them to laugh and blow their nose and have a nice dish of ice cream. It’s also why I started to study the body: I wanted to understand how to comfort people that way too. We had just had a death when I began at the Massage Institute of New England and I never again wanted to find myself standing by the hospital bed of someone I loved and be at a loss.

Here’s what you can do when you are in that situation: you can hold the person’s hands. You can stand at right angles to him and lay your hands on his tummy or his legs. You can cradle the eggshell of her head that holds all the amazing scaffolding you see here picxtured.

When Uncle Ed, who is pictured below, had his last bad bout of congestive heart failure in June of 2006, he lay in the ER for eight whole hours waiting for a room. He was 85 at the time and didn’t tell any of us he was feeling funny; just drove himself to the hospital, the dickens. It wasn’t until I went to his house and found it empty that I put two and two together and called the ER. Yup, he was there all right.

I hurried right over. They were taking fine care of him only he felt cold. I had my mom’s old fur coat on so I put it over him. Then I sat the edge of his bed and held his feet. It’s not rocket science; it’s just human touch.  When the day comes and I am at my own end with a mind quickly emptying I hope someone comes and sits by me, of course I do. But I hope even more that they get to think a minute about the miracle of life that carries us from youth to old age and lets this delicate vessel the mind carry its cargo of memories the whole voyage long.