Clarity?

Saturday was the night of the big close moon and yesterday was the day of the wide blue sky. So maybe today, with snow falling again, it makes sense to see the weekend for what it was: a window of.. can I call it clarity after that crazy week I put in last week?

My friend Bobbie tells me I should stay away from all ‘screens’ one day a week and I actually did sort of do that this past weekend. I took a lot of pictures and read sections of the five or six books I’ve got going and fretted about the fact that we’re bombing another country. What I didn’t do is remain chained to my laptop, beaming my faint message like E.T. out to the vast and empty skies.

We had driven to our summer place partly to get out of the way of our new housemates as they settled in at our house – it seemed the  kind thing to do –  and it was beneficial to us as well. Certainly seeing that moon rise over a lake would clear anyone’s vision.

I’m working hard at figuring out why I pack so much ‘doing’ into my days and will report on that once I’m done. But at 11 last night when I turned out my light and saw the glow from that nice fat moon, a poem came into my mind. Mary Oliver’s “The Moths” which I copy here as if it were prose. Read it aloud in as fast and breathless a way possible and see if you don’t identify with the speaker at all. I know I do:

There’s a kind of white moth, I don’t know what kind, that glimmers, it does, in the daylight, in mid-May in the forest, just as the pink moccasin flowers are rising. If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more. And anyway I was so full of energy. I was always running around, looking at this and that. If I stopped, the pain was unbearable, If I stopped and thought, maybe the world can’t  be saved, The pain was unbearable. Finally, I had noticed enough. All around me in the forest the white moths floated. How long do they live, fluttering in and out of the shadows? ‘You aren’t much’, I said one day to my reflection in a green pond, and grinned. The wings of the moths catch the sunlight and burn so brightly, At night, sometimes, they slip between the pink lobes of the moccasin flowers and lie there until dawn, motionless in those dark halls of honey.

Rushing around or sitting motionless, we can all be glad of this: spring began last night and even the coldest, thickest ice is cashing in its chips s and starting to liquidate.

Facing Facts

I felt such a soaring sense of gladness as I jotted all that down first thing yesterday, and then someone immediately wrote  “How on earth do you find time to WRITE?” and I realized how crazy I sounded. And – this is the embarrassing part – I didn’t even write down a lot of the stuff I did this past week. I didn’t say for example:

That I also brought someone to the mall because his new red sneakers were too big. “It’s Ok because I need new dinnerware!” I told myself and it’s true. Our plates and bowl are in terrible shape, so while he did his sneakers thing I literally sprinted to Housewares at the Sears store where I heard they had Corelle but alas, no such luck.

That I went BACK to this Mall two days later when a flier came in the mail saying that Macy’s had all their dinnerware deeply discounted. I wasted 40 minutes of THAT day compiling bowls and plates from a Martha Stewart collection before I thought to read the writing on the bottom of each piece. “Dishwasher and microwave safe,” it said. “Will get hot in microwave.”  (You tell ME who wants a mug that practically brands your whole hand when you go to reach out your tea?)

I didn’t say that I took the elderly relative to that little pond he loves, not once but twice between Monday and Thursday and on Thursday I bought him coffee at the coffee shop, and two subs at the sub shop and then, while I was running into the bank to deposit his checks, a burger at the McDonald’s next door which I quick ducked into on the spur of the moment, knowing how he loves a nice hot burger. (The subs he carefully cuts in sections and eat for his suppers. Born in 1920 to parents fleeing Armenia, he has trouble eating a thing all at once.)

All this I did while he sat sweetly, patiently in the car waiting for me. All this I did before we then went to that same little pond he loves so much in spite of its stubborn snowbanks all covered with litter and its sulky seagulls. (They sulk because they’re seagulls I always figure and keep looking around and thinking  “This isn’t the beach!” which it sure enough isn’t.)

There he ate his burger and I choked down the salmon salad I had hastily thrown in Tupperware so he would see that I was eating too.

I see that I wrote “choked down.”  (Sigh.)  I believe I have some thinking to do on this sunny Sunday. More tomorrow I guess. Maybe some insight then,

Timecard

Timecard time. Here’s what MY week was like:

• Made dinner for 14 hungry mouths and toted it TO said mouths, along with pot, pan and cookie sheet. The cheesy potatoes: definite thumbs up. The homemade strawberry shortcake: apparently passé. My kitchen like a Jackson Pollock canvas. (Hey, I tried.)
• 
  
• Took dear elderly relative to look at his favorite pond, a theoretical exercise at best since (a) pond still frozen and (b)  same darn snowbanks (now dotted with litter) block the view anyway. Enjoyed swooping birds at least.

• Offered to bring appetizer to Smith Club Book group and, hurrying out of the house, pressed container of shrimp too close to body, thus arriving in silk blouse puddled over entirely with stinky shrimp drool.
  
• Received call from two anxious high school seniors without the means of transportation to go buy supplies for the fashioning of human parts for Anatomy & Physiology class. Off to the crafts store in search of  plaster of Paris. Success! ($123 later.)
  
• Sat down to plan student activities for eight: Should it be outdoor paintballing or a trip to the science museum? Trampoline jumping or Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra. Tony & Cleo a definite I declare as the driver.
  
• Brought a college student together with a high school student for purpose of one tutoring the other in Italian. Envious of student.
  
• Received second call about Body Part Project: Plaster of Paris failed to set up! Back to crafts store for modeling clay, paint, giant fat bag of fiberfill. Rush rush, due next day lengthy text describing Physiology of feedback loops.
  
• Home at last to find prodigal son and bride arrived all the way from Florida with two cars stuffed to the roof, arrival having been preceded by the arrival all week of heavy box after heavy box. Two postmen! three bad backs! They are here to stay, these two. (See yesterday’s post.)  Exclamations of joy! Hugs and kisses!
  
• Sleep came at last that night in a house once again full as in days of old.
• Saturday came. Tired. Dead tired at end of a long great week.

Homecoming

I’ve spent the last three weeks clearing out every drawer and closet on the third floor because he’s coming home today. I mean Dodson. Dodson is coming home. We call him our oldest child, not because  I bore him  – I  didn’t; his awesome parents are New Yorkers – but because he gave himself to us when, as a high school freshman just five feet tall he came into our lives as a member of the A Better Chance program in our town.

He and his friend Keith were so small the football players once put them on top of the lockers just because they could. Dodson didn’t seem to mind; he had a fine sense of himself  even then. Didn’t he wear his red and blue satin Mets jacket all that year? This in the fall of 1986 when everyone in every seat around him was rooting for the Red Sox?

Our biological kids were 10, 7 and 2 when he came into our lives and he simply became… their big brother.

For college he had a choice between Georgia Tech and RPI and we were so glad he chose RPI because Troy NY was just three and a half hours from here. He lived with us summers too, and on most school vacations. (I should say that this picture at the very top shows him with our girl Annie when Annie was a high school sophomore.)

He got his first real job right near here, at Raytheon; bought his first car here, which Annie then drove for five years once he was done with it and Michael drove for five years after that; go this first apartment here. He let me practice on him when I was going to school to become a massage therapist. He really bulked up then as you can see.

He called that process “the thickening” and it sent him straight to the gym where he magically transformed himself back into slenderness.

Then one fateful day in 2005 while visiting my sister Nan and niece Gracie in Florida he met the little firecracker God had been saving for him all along. Veronica was visiting from Argentina, he was living in Lowell MA in one of the gorgeous converted mills along the Merrimack River. Could they make a life together?

They could and they did, getting engaged in 2006 and marrying in 2007. They settled in Sarasota and now – now, saints be praised, they are moving back, to make their home and and start their family here by us. the ones who fell in love with him in that long-ago year when it was was the Mets and the Yankees in the World Series.

Dessert First

‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ (see yesterday’s post) makes me think about my mother-in-law Ruth Payne Marotta who worked at the forward-thinking Tufts University lab school I mentioned yesterday. During her time there she would try to get me to  bring my first baby in. I’d do it sometimes, bring her dressed in a little baby bonnet  – she was balder than the Buddha – and sometimes even leave her for a while at Ruth’s request. I was never sure just what happened while I was gone but I knew it had to be good.

She was the most open-minded adult I have ever known, this Ruth Paybe Marotta. “There’s no reason not to have dessert first,” I heard her say to my kids more than once as she spooned ice cream into small Bert-and-Ernie bowls. You also couldn’t shock her so you didn’t try. She regarded children, and all young people,  as spiritual equals to adults and she spoke to them in grave matter-of-fact tones.

That baby of mine graduated from the great high school she attended some 17 year after her visits to that Child Development Center, and her cousin Katy and her old pal Alden came all the way into the city to attend the ceremonies. At the special lunch we went to afterward Alden sat beside Grandma Ruth. He asked her what it was like to be old. He always had this childlike curiosity Alden did and he asked this in the most respectful way.

She didn’t flinch or rise up in all haughty in her chair or rap his knuckles; far from it. She welcomed the question and answered it carefully and thoroughly. I remembering wishing I could sit just a little closer to better hear what she was saying.

Ruth had a gay roommate back when they were both members of the Class of ’39 at Tufts and was  a loyal friend to her for their whole long lives. And she didn’t bat an eye when one of her own family members and then another revealed that they were gay themselves.

I feel so lucky to have met her at age 19; to have had her as an ‘extra mother’ – even before I married her son at 21. For years I watched her calm way of dealing with life and learned at her feet, because my family’s way was so different. (We yelled, we laughed, we sobbed – sometimes while laughing. (We were Irish what can I say?))  But now all these years later I am actually more like ‘Grandma Ruth’ than I am like my own mother.

Anyway I’m quieter than I was and calmer too, slow to take offense, and impossible to shock and all of this I lay at her doorstep. Or maybe on what promises to be this sunny warm Thursday I will go find her gravestone and lay it there, with some spring tulips for my thanks.

She was the beloved younger child of a couple of New Hampshire Unitarians. This is Ruthie now, peeking shly at the camera. I have to say her son is just like her.

Keep Calm

Keep calm and carry on: Good advice for us all right now in our state of near-panic over Japan’s unfolding tragedy. I saw Professor George Scarlett of Tufts University’s famous Eliot-Pearson School of Child Development on TV this morning and he says that’s the ticket for us all now, especially as we relate to the children in our lives.

He gave some basic Dos and Don’ts: Don’t say “Oh that’s way over there,” thus downplaying the magnitude of the loss, and don’t fan the fears that such a cataclysm is due here too any minute.  I especially see the wisdom of this last. Children are so tender; and if I’ve learned anything as a worker with youth all these years it’s that teens are too, with a world view still very much in the making.)

In sum he says to (a) model an appropriate behaviors of concern and compassion but also of optimism that all will be well; (b) use this as an opportunity to help them learn about the forces of nature world; and (c) model helping behaviors in any way that seems natural for your family, from donating money to simply praying of prayer can ever be called simple.

The worst thing I have seen people do and I’m sorry to say it’s older people who do it is to say “Oh the world is going to ruin. I’m glad I lived when I did!” If you feel that way I say go become a day trader or a mime or a toll taker at the edge of a bridge in the back end of nowhere, but please please please stay away from the young.

And now if you have the six minutes, click here for one of the world’s tenderest songs by a singer-songwriter I have loved through all her career, from the wild rebellious young redhead she was at the Michigan Women’s Festival in the early 80s to today when she is.. well, not so young, but still so strong in her heart. “Clean your house in troubled times” the words say and seek out those people who will wait for you when you are walking through your own private hell.

Seek good friends and clean your house. Stay calm and carry on.

The News from Toweltown

Whenever I get worked up about aging, I think of my sister Nan, who sees comic possibilities in every stage in life. One example: she finds it hilarious that in her 50s she was looked upon as a ‘trophy wife’ by the buddies of her older-by-a decade husband Chuck, who she married a decade ago, ending a period of widowhood for them both.

Another: She has a sign in her kitchen: “Next Mood Swing: Six Minutes.”

She’s pretty tart, Nan is. She’s also sharper than most people: A few years back she had that famous ‘look-around’ procedure we’re all supposed to have after 50 and when it ended up perforating her colon she quizzed the doctors gathered around her bed with the exact anatomical terms. My favorite part of that incident came a month later when, at the doctor’s for the follow-up visit, she seized the chance when he stepped out of the room, spun the chart around and read his notes on the whole procedure. “Stronger than appears,” he had written.

She sure is strong and I think part of that strength comes from not caring much what people think of her.

And aging? She laughs at it.

Once when I was visiting her there in Florida she was recalling the time, mere  weeks before their wedding when she addressed Chuck where he was sitting watching TV some 20 feet away.

“Are you done in the bathroom?” she called from the kitchen, her arms full of towels for the wash.

“There’s a 70% chance,” he called back.

“Uhhh, when do you think you’ll be done in the john?” she tried again.

“Tomorrow – late afternoon!” came the pleasant answer.

“This guy either needs a diaper or a hearing aid,” she thought to herself – and said under her breath, “It’s gonna be a lo-o-o-o-o-n-g 20 years!”

As luck would have it, Chuck heard that part.

I remember him agonizing when their little cat contracted an illness that caused it to walk crookedly and fall down often. It recovered though and soon all that remained of the malady was a slight cock of the head, giving it a sweet inquisitive look that makes Chuck melt with sympathy ever time it walks in the room.

Nan just calls it “Two O’clock.”  “Hey Two!” she’ll jauntily say. “Come sit on the couch with us!”

“Chuck says no more cats once this guy goes,” she told me that time. “He wants a puppy but I said forget it. Because then HE’LL  go and die and I can’t have some yippy little faux-dog coming between me and my next husband.”

She’s just kidding natch. In truth Nan is as tender-hearted as Chuck is.

I know because she has framed on the living room wall the card she gave him on their last anniversary.

It’s a photo of a crazy-looking couple pulled over beside the highway.

The woman is studying a giant road map – upside-down. The man, sporting the loud shirt-and-white-socks-with-dress-shoes look, stands alongside her, his hand over his face in despair.

“Still Lost in Love!” the card says, and under that in Nan’s writing, “I’ll love you WHEREVER we end up” – and what could be nicer to hear than that for a person to hear?

Nan now (and her daughter Grace who came upon Shadow falling apart)

The Times They are a-Changin’

Man, there’s nothing easy about this time change!  I got in the bed Saturday night at 9:00 and watched the news (terrifying as usual) while inserting photos into my 2010 album, a tedious and painstaking task long postponed. I turned out my light at 10:20.

Someplace in there Old Dave, surfeited at last after his standard weekend marathon of Man TV (hoops, golf, hockey etc. etc.) crawled into bed beside me, turned out his light and said “Give it a  rest T! It’s 11  at night!”  (He likes to round up like that, to make me seem crazier than I am.)

But here’s the question: WAS it 11:20 already in a way, or was it still 10:20? The Time Gods hadn’t yet turned the clocks back after all. And when I woke and got a drink of water at 1:30 they still hadn’t turned them back, so at what point did it start being an hour later? 2am on the dot you say? That just seems weird.

It confuses me every year. I said to David Friday morning during  his shower – I opened the shower door to ask him this, that’s how pressing a question it was –  I said, “Explain this to me again. I know at night we’ll all be thinking ‘Man it looks so early, this is great!’ when in fact it isn’t early at all. But what about in the morning? Will it be harder to get up then and easier to go ot sleep at night? Is THAT how it works?”

“Bad news,  T: it’ll be harder to get up in the morning and harder to get to sleep at night.”  What kind of a deal is that?

My last act of the day Saturday was to go to the kitchen and change the time on the microwave. The next morning I was up before David; I always am. He found me tapping away on my keyboard in the dining area.

“So the time in the kitchen’s ALL screwed up,” he said mildly .

“All screwed up! But I changed it last night!” I said.

“Yup,” he said studying the little numbers. “You pushed it back an hour.”

All which leaves me wondering: how on earth did I get all those A’s back in high school?

The Jaw

A week ago I ran this silly Who ARE These People contest, mentioning that line of kings the Hapsburgs with their mighty chins. I always think of those guys because I have a bit of a chin myself: they called me Dish Face in high school.(Prominent forehead, prominent chin, no nose to speak of, you get the picture.

The chin I got from my mother who stuck hers way out to make the world’s most disapproving face. I in turn gave it to my daughter who  I understand uses it in workplace situations to signify an immovable stance. (“Oh our poor boss!” a colleague was heard to say on seeing him in her office. “She’s chinning him!”

I just spent a little time looking up mandibular prognathism which is what this is called and found some dandy images, like this one of Jay Leno who has it. And these are two pictures taken 90 years apart of my grandmother who died at 31 and that same daughter who, God willing, will get to live three times that long at least. Same profile, isn’t it amazing?

But  that’s not why I bring up the Hapsburgs today. I bring them up because in my book  we are now officially in SPRING what with last night’s time change . And anticipating that return to warm and remembering those old Spanish kings brought to mind this wonderful poem I have long adored. It’s by Maxine Kumin, and it’s about love and our brief,  brief lives. Give it a read. The image of the little frogs right down to the tender brave ending, ahhh!

Love, we are a small pond.

In us yellow frogs take the sun.

Their legs hang down. Their thighs open

like the legs of the littlest children.

On our skin waterbugs suggest incision

but leave no marks of their strokes.

Touching is like that. And what touch evokes.

Just here the blackest berries fatten

over the pond of our being.

It is a rich month for putting up weeds.

They jut like the jaws of Hapsburg kings.

Tomorrow they will drop their blood

as the milkweed bursts its cotton

leaving dry thorns and tight seeds.

Meanwhile even knowing

that time comes down to shut the door –

headstrong, righteous, time hard at the bone

with ice and one thing more –

we teem, we overgrow. The shelf

is tropic-still. Even knowing

that none of us can catch up with himself

we are making a run

for it.  Love, we are making a run.

Innocence

You speak of innocence. I did anyway, right here yesterday. It was in relation to the young girl who thought she had lost her innocence because she had ‘gone all the way’ with a boy, and now figured it didn’t matter how many partners she had.

It seemed so sad to me that she thought innocence could be lost that easily. Didn’t that itinerant teacher from Nazareth say that nothing we put into our body, no ritual we could perform or fail to perform has any real bearing on our true goodness? It’s what’s happening up in that busy little mind of ours that counts, whether it’s given over to kind thoughts or unkind thoughts, leading to unkind words and actions, words that harm others, actions that harm others.

Remember this about the purity of our souls: it remains. Even the death-row inmate, no matter how blindly he stumbled, no matter what chaos and pain he caused; even he gets up mornings and goes forward with the same chance we all have to start again every day.

I think of the film Dead Man Walking and the way the character played by Sean Penn boasts and swaggers and denies his part in the savage killing of two kids unlucky enough to have crossed his path. I think of the miracle the nun works who walks beside him in the week leading up to his execution. The love of this nun, played by Susan Sarandon, allows him to admit his guilt – and that admission uncovers the goodness in him long-buried.

I don’t need to write another thing and you don’t need to go find the movie. Instead take a minutes and watch this well-crafted trailer in whose 120 seconds the whole story is told. It is our story too. My friend Bill Tammeus, author of the blog Faith Matters and former award-winning faith columnist for the Kansas City Star reports that in his church this past Wednesday folks were asked to write on a small piece of paper a confession, a hope or a concern, which they wadded up and threw in a common container, the contents of which were then lit aflame to make the ashes. As he put it at the end of that day, “We are wearing our own thoughts.” Another reason to try to make all our thoughts kindly thoughts.