Anne Notations

Sacred dance

2011-07-27T00:32:00.003-04:00

This afternoon it was warm and windy. The bay was deep teal crowned with whitecaps as Daisy and I walked toward the public beach. There were few sunbathers or swimmers; scudding clouds and the choppy surf kept the usual crowds away.

As we neared the main part of the beach, I noticed a brace of seagulls riding the offshore winds some 25 feet aloft. They didn't need to flap their wings to stay up; they rode like kites, buoyed by the breeze, so that they appeared stationary. Just below them, a woman – not young – smiled broadly as she waved her outstretched arms toward the floating gulls. She hopped rhythmically from one foot to the other, her face tipped skyward in wonder, her dark limbs and pale-gray tunic rippling in a spontaneous dance of joy.

Oh! To be utterly in the moment like that woman; to dance in the cooling wind; to reach upward toward feathered riders in the sky. She was seeing with fresh eyes what I scarcely notice every single day here at the beach. She exulted!

So should we all. Look up, feel the wind, dance with happiness, say "hooray" for birds and for being alive, say "Amen."

Hooray! Amen.

Tanned and well-read

2011-07-19T10:46:00.008-04:00

Tans are a health risk, yet here I am, well tanned and loving it. Mine is a gardener's tan, golden-brown except for the white spaces representing tank tops, shorts, and Crocs.

My enforced vacation from work has had an upside: being home during a summer of unusually spectacular weather, being outside where I love to be. Also, for the first time in years the house is in pretty good order – no clutter accumulating in my little home office/sunroom, which stayed buried in Stuff for most of our first four years here until I cleaned it almost to the bare walls this spring. I tidy the living room and kitchen before heading to bed every night so that when I come down each morning, I like what I see and have that feeling of ahhh that a clean, neat living space evokes.

It's mostly about feeling in control of some portions of my life. Pulling out incipient weeds that poke through the mulch is like casting demons from a holy space. Pinching sucker shoots from the crotches of my tomato plants is performing life-enhancing surgery, and I have the sweet little fruits to prove it. One of our dogs now responds to my voice commands, after months of training him to "Come," to drop that forbidden dead crab "Out!" of his mouth, to "Leave it!" when we walk by something yucky or even see another dog on the walking path, to instantly drop "Down" and stay there as I prepare food in the kitchen. I did that; I taught that sweet dog to obey.

Since May I've taught Melinda and Kevin to drive, with all the nerve-racking excursions that implies. I've done freelance work, too.

Most recently, I've decided to address some of my physical complaints by trying a low-sugar, gluten-free diet with the accent on lots of dark green vegetables, plain Greek yogurt, fish, chicken, eggs, rice crackers, and nuts. Already I've lost six pounds and cleared up my chronic IBS. Even my complexion looks better. At Dr. Crisafulli's office yesterday, my blood pressure was a lovely 130 over 74. I'm not thinking of this as a "diet" at all, no sir, because I always fail at "diets". It's a way of eating that takes into account my body's sensitivities.

Michael and I have been relaxing and having some fun together on his visits home. After 36 years of marriage, I still get that flutter when his car pulls into the driveway. I still run to kiss him when he walks in the front door. I describe him as "hot" – in the good, modern sense. Not a bad thing for two old geezers, eh?

Speaking of "old," I recently finished a novel, Emily, Alone, by a favorite writer, Stewart O'Nan. It's a sequel to his earlier book, Wish You Were Here. We catch up with Emily Maxwell, a cultured, self-reflective widow in her 70s, living alone (save for an aging dog) in the family home in Pittsburgh. Emily and the late Henry's children and grandchildren live in other parts of the country, and she has come to rely on her sister-in-law, Arlene, not only for companionship but also to give her rides – Henry's huge old boat of a car being too intimidating for Emily to attempt driving. Emily and Arlene's friends, many of them in their 80s and 90s, are dropping like flies, and attending funerals has become a staple of their social life. Over and over, mortality stares Emily in the face.

I like this book and read it quickly, which puzzles me now because not much really happens in it. It is a book about characters with only the barest of plots to move the reader along to the end. O'Nan does a remarkable job of getting into an older woman's head and heart; Emily has her quirks and stubbornness, but you end up liking her and wanting good things to happen. During the course of the book, she reviews events in her life, plans for her eventual death and the disposal of her house and belongings, and works earnestly at maintaining relationships with her difficult, recovering-alcoholic daughter Margaret and her calm, Henry-like son Kenneth.

I'm not sure this is a book for everyone, but as I plod along toward my 60th birthday this fall, I found much in it that made me nod in recognition, wince in apprehension, and stop to review the course of my own life and what it may be like 10 and 15 years from now. Certainly women of middle age and older would find it a rewarding read. I never hesitate to recommend O'Nan's work, and I can say the same now for Emily, Alone.

O'Nan's ability to write sympathetically from the viewpoint of an older female protagonist reminds me of Jon Hassler's lovely fiction series about Agatha McGee, a crisp spinster living in the fictional small town of Staggerford, Minnesota. Agatha turns out to be far more complex and interesting than her starchy Catholic persona would suggest: she takes in outcasts, travels alone to Ireland, and carries on a long-distance love affair with a man who is not what he seems. If you'd like to meet Agatha, start with Staggerford (which sets the stage in brilliant, plot-rich fashion), then read A Green Journey and finally (and least, in my opinion), Dear James.

I have quite the stack of books I'm mowing through this summer – another blessing of this interval between jobs. Reading is perhaps my oldest, most constant friend on this life journey. Thank God for writers who transcend gender and genre to take us inside everyday people's lives to remind us both of our universal human condition and of each individual's complexity and worth.

I'm trying

2011-07-11T14:59:00.013-04:00

At the end of May, what was to have been a year-long freelance contract job ended abruptly after only three months. The news came to me not during a meeting or by telephone, but in a formal letter delivered by the USPS to our house. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. To say I was personally hurt would, alas, be true.

In addition to a monthly paycheck and the allure of the book project itself, a casualty of my second job loss in less than a year was a related ten-day trip to Russia planned for last month. I have the brand-new passport to prove it. That's me: all rubber-stamped (albeit looking like a grim Russian mobstress) and nowhere to go.

Setbacks hit me harder these days. I seem to lack the resilience I took for granted when I was younger. The job losses have been more than humbling; they have stolen my confidence and professional self-image. A nasty critic in my brain now sneers, "You're worthless! You're a fraud. A loser. No one will hire you. No one should hire you!" My heart, faltering, responds, "I know. I'm too tired for this crap."

Worse, to me, has been my increasing tendency to respond to people, to life, with undisguised cynicism. To be sarcastic and snarky.

I don't want to be that sour woman! I'm making an effort to ditch her. In the last two days I've apologized to both of our at-home kids for specific moments of verbal unkindness. I am determined to be mindful of the power of words and tone, to respect and cherish the people I love in my deeds as I do in my thoughts.

Mother Nature has done her best to help me out from under my gloomy cloud. Over the past several weeks we have had a string of near-perfect June and July summer days. My gardens have erupted with flowers, tomatoes, herbs, and shrubbery. For weeks in June the aroma of wild roses and honeysuckle drifted our way from the vacant fields across the road; I inhaled huge gulps, high on the sweetness. Small sailboats dance on Greenwich Bay, sometimes with bright spinnakers bellying before them. Yogi and I have been swimming in the bay just a short stroll down the dead-end road; he loves to fetch anything I throw for him, plowing through the small waves. After the sun sets, the evening breeze is like silk on my bare, tanned arms.

People have stepped forward, too. In the past month I've heard from some old friends, and I mean 40-years-ago old. Through our shared memories I've recalled my younger, eager self. At first the contrast with "now" was sobering, but I ended up finding hope in that earlier me.

Meanwhile, an upside of being home so much is that I've become friendlier with several of our neighbors, older women with spunk and wisdom who lift me out of my funks on a regular basis with their wit and generosity. Not least, about a month ago when I thought I was (literally) losing my mind, friends at a distance stepped up by phone and email to listen and to sympathize. Bless the goodness of people. I am lucky in my friends, including those whom I've never met but who have shared their lives with me via Internet for many, many years.

Caroline has been over several times, most recently to spend the night on July 1 when Warwick held its annual fireworks display on our beach. She is five now, a "graduate" of preschool and headed to kindergarten in the fall. Her passions are bugs, dinosaurs, and dresses – and our two dogs. When she said to me the next morning, "Nana, I love your house. I love the dogs. I love you", I felt my heart melt.

Caroline and Yogi at our beach in June.

To follow up on my last post: I'm still keeping up with the kitchen sink. Between cleaning it every night before I go to bed, and getting the kids in the habit of putting stuff in the dishwasher daily, the room looks better. Which helps me feel better.

Heavy "traffic" on our street, 4th of July weekend.

I've been networking and applying for jobs. No interviews (and one kiss-off) to date, but seeking employment is a process rather than an event. Right now I'm freelancing a bit – small projects. It's a way to use my skills and remind myself that they have value in the marketplace.

Onward!

Reboot

2011-05-30T20:21:00.004-04:00

Yours truly, age 18-24 months.

That first step. Why is it so hard for me? Why do I balk?

And what is the first step when parts of my life feel frazzled and out of control? What one little deed will set me on course to achieve positive thoughts, healthy habits, productive work days? Help, help!

I know all about Just do it. I know about Live in the moment. I know about Don't put off til tomorrow what you can do today. I know It's time for you to grow up. But where do I start?

This can't go on, this tendency to be my own worst enemy. How many reality shows will I imminently be a candidate for? Biggest Loser. Hoarders: Buried Alive. It's Me or the Dog. Or maybe a new one about women who lose their mojo.

Here are two things I will do tonight.

1. Put dirty dishes in the dishwasher and clean the kitchen sink. (This counts as one item.)

2. Floss my teeth at bedtime.

Basic stuff. Baby steps. It's worked before.

Oh, one more:

3. Record here each night or morning what new task, and old ones, I manage to complete.

And I'm off! Dirty dishes, you're history. Expired mojo, watch your back.

Comme çi, comma ça

2011-05-16T10:41:00.007-04:00

Forecast: Rosy with a 100% chance of thunderstorms.

A friend who left Facebook for a while reconnected yesterday and sent me a message: "How are you doing?" I have been pondering off and on for several hours how to answer her question. It's not so simple.

I'm doing fine, really, although I find myself once again in career limbo – wait, more like career confusion. I'd thought I was set for a year of monthly freelance paychecks, but now that arrangement is in question. I'm gearing up to renegotiate and, if necessary, resume the full-time job hunt. Oh, how I miss the relative stability of salaried employment, especially in this spooky economy.

Melinda and Kevin arrived home for the summer on May 6 and 7, respectively, and their presence lights up my home life. Yes, the house is often a mess. (How do two people generate such chaos?) Yes, my "other" job is now taking each of them for hours of on-road training as they prepare to take their driver's license tests. But they are such joys to have around, in general.

Mr. Innocent.

My little dog pack of two continues to have its ups and downs, with three terrifying fights between Daisy and Yogi since February, the most recent on Saturday as our five year old granddaughter watched. It was a far different situation, though, with Melinda and Kevin here to each grab a dog while I used the break stick to unlock their jaws, from the two previous fights when I was home alone and unable to get the dogs apart, with resulting bloodshed, surgeries, and monumental vet bills.

Daisy is the "unstable" one, and she is understandably mad at having to share her castle with the upstart Yogi and his bumptious personality and demands for our attention. She attacks; Yogi responds. I understand all the dynamics and have had to learn the hard way that I cannot let either get away with giving the other the canine "stink-eye", which can signal an imminent attack. Separate feedings, collars and leashes at all times in the house, use of the e-collar to interrupt fixations... I just need to stay vigilant. Yes, I feel sorry for Daisy, and I love the old girl dearly. But she needs to know she doesn't control who or what is in our household; her people are in charge of that. Anne: Alpha Dog. (heh)

We are having a cool, wet spring. Temperatures in the 50s this week with nary a ray of sun predicted. It helps keep me focused on my indoor work, both paid and household tasks.

Things I wonder about: My future employment. My marriage. (We're in an unprecedented phase as we live in different states and often fail to connect more than superficially on the weekends Michael makes it home. I was surprised at how unnerved I was when Michael changed his official residence to New Hampshire and came home with the corresponding license plate on his car. It's a huge tax relief, though.) Whether the dogs can ever coexist peacefully. Friends. Whether the Raconteurs will ever get back together and tour. My current religious and spiritual doldrums. Getting old. If I will ever be able to lose and keep off weight. If I will ever be able to exhale.

¡Orale!

What I look forward to: Seeing Los Lonely Boys in Boston next month. The continued rehabilitation of my heel tendon, which I strained or bruised several weeks ago and which continues to make me limp and wince. (Enough with the ice packs already. Brrr.) The summer fireworks season here in Oakland Beach. Picking Sun Sugar tomatoes in our front garden later this summer.

See what I mean? I have nothing substantial to say, but I'm OK-ish. The view from here is sweet, and life goes on.

Easter sans sacraments

2011-04-24T23:40:00.006-04:00

Easter Day: Nature waves her spring flag of white, blue, and chartreuse.

For the first time in at least 20 years, I had an entirely secular Easter weekend and Holy Week. In 1991, we brought our newly adopted children to Holy Name Church on the East Side of Providence for the early Easter Mass. We weren't officially Catholics yet. The following year we went to Beneficent Congregational in downtown Providence. That fall we made the big decision, had the children baptized Catholic in Brown's chapel by our friend Fr. Howard O'Shea, and became regular churchgoers at St. Sebastian's, the Providence parish we still consider home.

Holy Week was something I anticipated with longing and dread: longing for the ancient rituals and the Passion; dread of the wild sorrow I felt after we said the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!" – Jesus's agonized cry from the cross echoed down the centuries and hurt my heart.

This year I have forsaken it all. I don't know why. I missed the build-up from Palm Sunday to Holy Thursday, the inexorable march of the narrative to betrayal and torture, the stricken silence of Friday and Saturday followed by the Easter vigil and its jubilant conclusion. Our former pastor Father Randall had us all shout with joy: "We are Easter people, and Hallelujah is our song!" Amen!

We live a half-hour's drive from St. Sebastian's now, so I rarely make it there anymore. Yet I don't want to attend another church. Our local Catholic church here in Oakland Beach is rich with community spirit, but the choir, alas, makes my teeth hurt and my head ache. Music is a big deal for me and I am too dismayed by the earnest volunteer singers to tough it out. The spirit (mine) is willing, but the flesh is shamefully elitist.

Other changes have undercut my motto that one must practice a faith to "get" it. My husband, disgusted by pedophile clergy and the complicity of the Catholic hierarchy, has left the faith entirely – ironic, since his call back to the Church was what put us all in Catholic pews 20 years ago. The kids, like most college students and 20-somethings, are either agnostic or lazy when it comes to faith these days, a phase I understand well. The Church makes it hard, sometimes, for me to be loyal; Bishop, please, run the Diocese as you wish but keep your church laws out of the State House.

I'm apparently still angry about the changes I neither wished for nor could influence over the past year, and that is poisoning my spiritual inclination, feeding my inner cynic and skeptic.

So: No church this Holy Week, not even today, Easter itself. I miss it in the abstract way I miss young love: wistful for those feelings while accepting that I may never experience them again. In my mind I hear a Biblical exhortation: Pray without ceasing.

On the secular side, this weekend we had fun with eggs and chocolates. Caroline came over Saturday morning for the annual egg-dyeing fun. She loved doing two-tone eggs after Kevin showed her how. We read some children's Easter books about bunnies, ducks, and chicks. Michael presented Caroline with a sweet, tiny Easter cake in the shape of an egg.

Today, Easter Sunday, for the second week in a row Michael and I headed out just before noon with our cameras and took photographs along the shore here. This is when I experienced my own personal "Easter," sharing an activity we enjoy with my husband. Saturdays tend to be rushed as he tries to catch up on local errands and household finances. But these photographic rambles are relaxed, un-fraught with money tensions, a reminder that we can still have fun with one another. We bring Yogi with us; he is such a good dog on the walks, sticking close by us, helping explore the shallows as the waves lap the shores, getting down next to Michael's lens to see what's going on.

A promise of spring greenery erupts on a brisk day.

For now, good night from spiritual limbo.

Move on. Rebuild.

2011-04-18T09:54:00.008-04:00

This sign grabbed my attention on Warwick Avenue last month.
What does it mean? Nothing? Everything?

A little over a year ago I learned that my job of 29 years was being eliminated, an event I had anticipated with dread for the entire preceding year.

Nothing personal! Budget reasons!

When your life has been as interwoven with an institution – in my case, my much loved alma mater – for as long as mine was, being cut off like an unsightly carbuncle feels very personal indeed. I was angry and bereft. I tried to be classy – and succeeded some of the time. Privately I was pretty much a mess. In addition to significant financial losses, including a college tuition benefit for our youngest two children and an employer-subsidized pension fund, I lost my career. Melodramatic? Nope; in 2010-11, it's cold reality. Very few employers are interested in a 59-year-old director-level job candidate, especially in my fast-changing field of communications and journalism. I'm now on my second temporary contract job, sans benefits as most such jobs are these days, grateful for the work and dogged by the knowledge that next fall I'll be job-hunting again, this time at age 60.

Perhaps I'm over-sensitive (who, me?), but I have found my mind gnawing on the bitter bone of rejection way more often than I'd expected, and for far longer. My moods have swung wildly, particularly since Kevin left for college in late August. With Michael still working and living out of state, I became an empty-nester – all by myself. It is not how I would choose to live.

Let's be blunt: I have had a year of painful losses, not least the loss of my self-esteem. Regardless of one's career achievements and honors, being laid off sows seeds of deep doubt: I must be a real loser or they would have found a place for me. I was too this (outspoken, wry, ADD-addled?), not enough that (humble, serious, focused?).

I know I'm lucky compared with so many in this dire economy. Yet I need to be clear about my challenges and, yes, my constitutional limitations. Another person who doesn't also battle chronic depression (13 years now), anxiety/panic disorder (since my mid 20s), and hypothyroidism might have bounced back faster than I.

An old, washed-up float. Formerly afloat.

But listen: I am what I am, and what I am is often exhausted simply trying to stay positive and calm. You can call it weakness, or you can nonjudgmentally call it my lot in life and spare the moralizing. Some days the best I can do is to climb out of the emotional cellar and remind myself I have no choice but to persevere in the face of fatigue, self-doubt, and loneliness. On other blessedly rare occasions the best I can do is to sleep, read, and/or cry for a day. Pathetic? Your call. I need to forgive myself in order to move on.

Giant step forward: A clean, neat, and functional
home office for my freelance career.

Moving on. Spring is a good time for it. All this extra sunlight – when we're not being drenched by mini monsoons – helps my mood a lot. Fussing with the yard and gardens, fixing up my new bike with a dog-walking attachment for Yogi, cleaning the house siding and front porch, finally decluttering my home office and making it freelance-ready while hauling unneeded stuff regularly to the Salvation Army and the library book-sale bin – these are healing pursuits. The swelling buds on our three-year-old lilac bush? Thrilling. The tender beginning or strengthening of friendships away from the easy hothouse of the workplace? Precious. Unexpected succor? Grace.

My online rabbi friend who writes a thought-provoking, often moving blog, published a little book of his original haiku recently. He sent me one as a gift, with a kind inscription that mentions my own writing – praise that gladdens my heart.

Here are two of Neil's haiku that spoke to me this morning. Thank you, Neil.

G-d above made love
filled with little pieces of
big human frailty

We are born temples
We mourn our own destruction
We live to rebuild

Flotsam

2011-04-16T08:47:00.012-04:00

April weather report: Windy and unsettled.

This winter and early spring have brought high winds and high seas to our peninsula, driving the geese farther up Brushneck Cove at times and the bay's detritus up onto our narrow strands. The dogs and I walk the shore three times a day regardless of the weather, so we see these salty offerings in abundance.

A beached jellyfish the size of a luncheon plate lies next to a large, gutted Canada goose carcass. Crab legs jettisoned by seagulls as they gobble the creatures' living meat in midair festoon the high-water line of drying seaweed (and, at least once, appear eerily on our front walkway). I have successfully taught the dogs the commands "Leave it!" and "OUT [drop it]" with the help of their e-collars, and thankfully both have abandoned their offal-eating ways when we're out walking. Goose poop is the latest "treat" they've learned to eschew. Whew!

Last week after winds and waves churned the cove's waters and dumped an unusual bounty of shells, glass shards, and fish skeletons on the sand bar, I saw a glint of glass at my feet and pulled from the wet sand an old half-pint milk or cream bottle. It's from the Norman I. Turner dairy, formerly of Pawtucket, and on its reverse it bears the imprint 5¢. A friend who collects old bottles says it dates at least to the 1940s. The thick glass is unchipped or -cracked, marred only by minor scuffing from grazing the Bay's sandy bottom for decades. I scoured it and will keep it as a small flower vase – my unexpected gift from the sea and from the past.

Our most spectacular post-storm discovery was an enormous green channel marker that came to rest on Oakland Beach near Iggy's. The dogs approached, barking, then examined it up close. At home, I notified the Coast Guard via web form, and within hours I received a phone call from a nice young man who thanked me and promised to send a truck for the buoy so it could be reinstalled in the bay.

Two evenings ago, in light rain and fog, I spotted a figure standing near the old retaining wall at the tip of our southwestern point. We got closer and I could see it was a young woman, perhaps 17 or 18, wearing a down vest but no rain gear or head covering, staring at the sand. A backpack lay near her feet.

The dogs and I returned from our walk to find her still standing in the same manner. My motherly instinct told me this girl was troubled. I called out, "Are you OK?" She glanced over and said, "Yes, I'm fine." I didn't believe her, but I could see she wanted to be alone. What sorrow had washed her up on our beach and left her there, soaked and solitary?

It is hard to know when to be persistent in offering help. I decided if the girl were still there in an hour, I would walk back out and offer to listen or to bring her somewhere warm. But by then she was gone. Peace be with her.

Pity party

2011-04-03T20:04:00.006-04:00

I have no right to pity myself on these silent Sunday nights – these nights alone when Michael has returned to Nashua and the kids are away at college. Others – friends, relatives, bloggers, strangers – have lost so much more. I have a house! A (part-time) spouse! I have work! I have, so far, health! I have blue water views and grand cloud pageants in the sky above!

Yet I feel sorry for me.

I have no right to indulge in lassitude, to drift from computer to kitchen to couch like a zombie. Time is precious, yet it rushes through my heedless fingers like water before a drought. I should care. I should get off my ass and seize the day, make hay while the sun shines, turn lemons into lemonade, etcetera.

Yet I'm inert.

I should count my blessings. And, really, I do. Honestly, I am grateful.

Yet on these Sunday nights when I'm alone, facing another week (or two) of being alone, inexperienced in the condition of being alone, I can't pretend to be anything other than lonely.

Happy happy Saturday

2011-03-26T12:26:00.006-04:00

I live for these days – the Saturdays when sun spills through our south-facing windows and the bay sparkles bright blue, dotted with gulls and geese. The days when Michael is home and makes the best coffee – I don't bother drinking it except on weekends when he's here – and I sit with one of my blue and white mugs on the sofa, drawing in the rich coffee goodness and reading the Providence Journal. Michael sits at the kitchen island drinking his coffee, and thanks to our little house's open floor plan we trade remarks about what we're reading, which right now has a lot to do with college sports – mostly the NCAA hockey Sweet 16 but also basketball March Madness.

I walk the dogs at 8 a.m. along our shore, and because it's cold with a fierce north wind blowing, we have the place to ourselves. They run off-leash (me gripping the remote collar controller in my right hand just in case I need to remind them what "Come!" means, but they've learned well and thankfully I almost never use it anymore), tumbling alongside one another, play-jawing and leaping over each other's backs, briefly lost in pure canine ecstasy. Yogi collects mussel shells and rocks from the sand and carries them in his big funny mouth; he makes me laugh. We practice "Out!" so he'll release them for me. After a half-hour, breathless and windblown, the dogs thunder up the front porch steps like stampeding elephants. I make them sit and wait for the invitation,and then we come in to the warmth of the house.

Saturdays have always been oases, the one day I wasn't either working or getting ready for Monday's work. Now, more than ever, I treasure them for the full day of being with my husband before he returns to New Hampshire on Sunday. I've become accustomed to living alone most of the time; indeed, I've enjoyed my own company ever since I was a young girl playing in my big bedroom closet with dolls and Breyer horses and troll figurines, constructing elaborate rooms and towns for them out of shoeboxes and cardboard.

But I'm also a companionable person, and the freelance life can be a lonely one in between interviews and the occasional client meeting. My old work environment at Brown, I realize, was my social life as well. And while I've kept in touch with friends from the workplace, it's not the same; it never is without the daily casual contact the office affords. So on Saturdays I feel like a flower opening in the warm sunshine of my husband's presence. I'm nearly giddy. I talk too much! – something he remarks on wryly. That makes me laugh.

Such luxury, to have a loved one nearby to hear me laugh!

Later we'll watch college hockey on TV, and maybe an On Demand movie – we've wanted to see The Fighter. We'll get takeout from the Greek place on Oakland Beach Avenue; the moussaka pizza is to die for. I'll do some laundry and change the sheets.

My Saturdays are full of the simplest pleasures. Thank God.

Nothing but the (partial) truth

2011-03-16T22:21:00.005-04:00

When Sigmund Freud's nephew passed along an editor's proposal that he write his memoirs, Freud demurred with the scruples of a scientist. "A psychologically complete and honest confession of life," he responded, "would require so much indiscretion about family, friends, and enemies, most of them still alive, that it is simply out of the question. What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity."

In a way that's how I've been feeling about this blog – this poor, neglected, cobwebby blog. This beloved blog.

I've loved writing here and sharing my thoughts and modest adventures as I fumble my way through life these past six years. The problem is, I've begun to self-censor to the point of verbal constipation. I'll think of something or someone to write about and then shut down: "No, that wouldn't be prudent." Because it might cost me a future job or recommendation. Or jeopardize my severance package. Or simply make me look like a colossal whiner.

So here I am in mid March, up to my eyeballs in a Norovirus that has knocked the stuffing (quite literally) out of me since Sunday night and also, much more pleasantly, in freelance research and writing. For the first time in my life, I have no employer except ME. I think I'm happy about that. I know I'll be much happier when I finish clearing out my workspace at home and making it more like a real office. I'm completing a smaller writing project that has been rewarding – Oh, how I've missed interviewing people! – and am launching a year-long family history book project on behalf of a dear, admired friend.

While my health insurance situation is taking a nose dive and I no longer have either a pension or a free RIPTA bus pass, I'm lucky to have any sort of work, and I know it. Also on the plus side, our kids are doing well in their respective colleges and careers. I lucked into a fun if hectic six-month creative gig at Hasbro Inc. that ended last month. A scary biopsy in December came back clear. The death-row shelter pit bull I adopted impulsively in November has settled in, not without some major drama, such as a terrifying fight between Daisy and Yogi last month that I managed to break up with my bare, trembling hands.

Yogi's adoration (something I truly need right now, even from a dog) and his silly antics, our growing bond, and my walks with him and dear old Daisy on the beach every morning help salve my loneliness. Michael, newly a college president in New Hampshire after nearly two years of living and working in Connecticut, comes home on weekends when he can. These years apart undeniably are changing our relationship. Most of the time I live as a true empty-nester, a role that doesn't come naturally.

Where does all this leave my blog? When my most regular contact with friends happens via pithy status updates on Facebook, what shall I say here?

I have written something tonight, the hardest step of all. I hope I'll be back.

Why we grieve

2011-02-26T11:27:00.008-05:00

Over the past several months I have become blog friends with a young woman who mourns the tragic drowning death of her husband last summer. J is articulate and honest as she shows, not just tells, what grief feels like day in and day out. I am stunned by the clarity and beauty of her writing even as my heart breaks for her.

While I have felt the knife-sharp loss and lingering darkness that followed the deaths of my parents and several close friends, I can only imagine how much more debilitating the death of a spouse, lover, or child would be. J, left alone to raise her beautiful toddler daughter, is working through the maze of loss, not always as quickly or graciously as others might wish. She is doing it her way, at her pace. She has received counseling and the support of loved ones, but ultimately grief may be the loneliest voyage of all. There is no universal chart to steer the bereaved away from the jagged rocks of pain and speed them toward the shores of healing.

I sent J a passage that was recently the daily book excerpt I receive from Delancy Place. Here it is, followed by my thoughts. This is from The Brain in Love by Daniel G. Amen, MD:

What happens in the brain when you lose someone you love? Why do we hurt, long, even obsess about the other person?

When we love someone, they come to live in the emotional or limbic centers of our brains. He or she actually occupies nerve-cell pathways and physically lives in the neurons and synapses of the brain.

When we lose someone, either through death, divorce, moves, or breakups, our brain starts to get confused and disoriented. … When we cannot hold her or talk to her as we usually do, the brain centers where she lives becomes inflamed looking for her.

Overactivity in the limbic brain has been associated with depression and low serotonin levels, which is why we have trouble sleeping, feel obsessed, lose our appetites, want to isolate ourselves, and lose the joy we have about life. A deficit in endorphins, which modulate pain and pleasure pathways in the brain, also occurs, which may be responsible for the physical pain we feel."

Revolutionary, to think of a loved one living in some measurable, physical way in one's brain! My thoughts, which I shared with J:

I am attracted to Dr. Amen's explanation for the physical ache, even torture, of grief and loss because I crave biological and chemical explanations for human emotions and behaviors. I strive to be unromantic about our emotionality. On the other hand, I consider myself spiritual and sometimes religious. Amen's model works for that side of me, too: Our physical brains are made, hard-wired if you will, for attachment and love.

It's simplistic to call this neural phenomenon part of a grand design concocted by an overarching intelligence. Yet I yearn to believe that our capacity for love is a signpost in the cosmic wilderness of "why".

(How appropriate that the author's last name is Amen. Indeed.)

Portrait of the artist

2011-01-27T21:56:00.003-05:00

Imagine a story that fits what you see in the painting. You have 10 minutes.

The artist hadn't touched his food.

"Alors – you mustn't dwell on yesterday," Yvette scolded. "Everyone knows the Salon is political. These days, a rejection means nothing."

Gaston continued to ignore the savory dishes before him. What would a dance-hall girl know about art? he mused stonily. How could she comprehend the wound to his pride, his very soul? He drained his glass of champagne.

"Come now, cheri. Mangez."

"Tais-toi!" he snapped. "Enough." The young woman pulled away, lips pressed in a thin pout.

Earlier that day Gaston had fled his studio in despair. It was all he could do not to throw his canvasses out the tall windows, to snap his brushes over his knee.

Yet far from finding solace at the brasserie, he had encountered instead the very face that stared back from his painting – his rejected, unloved portrait of a sensuous beauty.

Yvette – model, mistress, muse. And now, unbearably, the living emblem of his failure.

Painting: Les Soupeurs (The Diners), by Pablo Picasso, 1901. RISD Museum of Art.

Thanks to colleague Terry for the inspiration at our work group's daily morning "energizer."

When a tree is more than a tree

2011-01-25T19:31:00.008-05:00

Thoughts about a photo I took several evenings ago

1. The telephone pole is our public self, the respectable persona we show neighbors and colleagues: upright, reliable, calm. The tree is our spirit, dancing free of expectations, tossing its hair in the twilight.

2. Pole: "Can't you ever hold still?"

Tree: "No! Not when the music's on."

3. A brother and sister grow up very close but with markedly different personalities.

4. Even though she is decades past childhood, the girl still enjoys hiding, then jumping out – "Boo!" – to scare her friends.

5. The pole is a husband, strong and tall, perhaps a little rigid. He isn't (usually) silly, nor does he sway in the breeze. He is, and always has been, a grown-up.

The tree is me.

Views at sunrise

2010-10-07T21:14:00.009-04:00

From approximately 8:15 am until 6 pm or so every day, I work inside a cavernous converted factory with high ceilings and a hive of cubicles. I sit in a little office built inside the facility; while angled skylights admit diffuse light above, I have no direct view of the outdoors.

Being encapsulated in a windowless environment makes me appreciate my brief outdoor forays more than ever. This week, we had rain and gray skies from Sunday through last night. This morning's clearing air was all the more welcome when I set off with Daisy down the walking path for a daybreak stroll.

A long bank of cumulus clouds crouched on the horizon across the bay, their billowing crowns touched with the rising sun's rosy light.

I love clouds. I always have. When I was about five, I lay alone in our Elmhurst, Illinois, backyard on the warm summer grass and stared straight up at a towering cumulonimbus in the blue sky above. Snow-white and apparently dense as fresh whipped cream, it grew taller as I watched, churning with shadows and highlights – alive! Growing! I felt small... minuscule... alone, and afraid. I jumped up and ran in our back door to the safe kitchen, breathless and not entirely sure what I had run from except that it was far too big and spacious for a five-year-old to tolerate for more than a minute. I can still see that vertical cloud clearly in my memory.

Just as we humans sometimes perversely run toward what has frightened us, as a schoolgirl I was obsessed with meteorology. I read about fronts and updrafts. I memorized cloud names: cirrus, stratus, cumulus. More colorfully, I learned to distinguish a mackerel sky (altocumulus), the evocative mare's tails (wispy cirrus), and the descriptive if embarrassing mammatus that sometimes depend pouchlike from the undersides of cumulonimbus clouds before a storm. (I saw my first mammati only this past year. They are straight out of science fiction.)

Since we moved here three summers ago, I have taken more photographs some months than in the preceding decades of my life – and most of them have the sky and clouds in starring roles. Sunrise, sunset: It's a grand show that I can't get enough of. From the terrifying (but basically harmless) shelf cloud that seemed to reach down for us several summers ago ahead of a violent cloudburst, to the crystalline icy cirrus clouds of winter, to the architectural curl of a roll cloud this spring, each day here is a potential cloud lover's feast.

This evening as I drove home from the Pawtucket/Attleboro line on I-95 south, a sunset of sublime beauty formed, bloomed, and faded while I poked along in rush-hour traffic. Bands of horizontal clouds lay purple across an apricot sky that glowed like a candlelit pumpkin. Other deep-hued cumulus ridges with rosy highlights kept vigil on the eastern horizon. Oh, to have my camera with me!

Calm down, I told myself. Drink in the sunset. You are lucky to be out of the work-cave and on an interstate with clear western views. By the time I was winding south alongside Brushneck Cove on Seaview Ave., nearly home, the skies had darkened.

Sometimes you get to observe the break of day; sometimes nightfall. Each is fine with me, especially if there are a few clouds involved – and a camera close at hand.

Looking down at the sky – in a rainwater puddle on our street this morning.

Hey: Any of the above photographs are prettier if you click to see them larger.

September evening

2010-09-27T20:44:00.003-04:00

Ephemera

Pale ghost on silver water:

A swan glides past the rocks

And out to sea, its wake

A fading memory.

Dear Pastor Jones

2010-09-09T09:53:00.003-04:00

C'mon, dude. Be a true patriot and back off your indulgent plans for a Koran-burning "stunt," as President Obama so aptly called it this morning.

Slogan and graphic by Katherine Hinds and Anne Diffily.

Curry. As in … "curry"

2010-08-29T19:00:00.016-04:00

One of these people is trying not to cry. Can you guess which?

It takes but a tiny gesture to turn a mom's frown upside-down.

When I got back from Stop & Shop this evening, I checked my email and lo! son Kevin had sent me a summary of his weekend at college so far. He already has a posse of friends, mostly girls (no raised eyebrows; Kevin is one of those guys with tons of girl friends, as opposed to girlfriends), and has gotten to know guys on his dorm floor. Says he has been busy every minute. And, so sweet: He assured me he is choosing a healthy diet. "I'm actually eating an apple as we speak."

Looking back at the entrance road to Curry College from the main green.

A twisting, bumpy high school path brought Kevin to Curry, a small private college in Milton, Mass., seven miles from downtown Boston. He applied there almost as an afterthought, in February. We visited in April on Accepted Students Day and liked what we saw, including small classes, a very active and congenial Communications Department (his probable major), and lots of support for students with learning disabilities and ADD. Also, a beautiful campus.

Families pull their cars up to the freshman dorms.

We arrived Friday morning at said campus for freshman move-in. The weather gods blessed us with a crisp, sunny day and low humidity, and a team of burly student-athletes quickly transferred Kevin's bags and duffels to his new home. His window is on the first floor at far right.

Roommate Luke has been on campus for two weeks, attending preseason football practices, so the room was already well organized. We had Kevin's side unpacked and fixed up in a jiffy.

I was happy to learn that the bathroom is one door away and the unit's Resident Assistant (upperclass student), an affable guy named Chris, lives directly across the hall. The room itself is small but efficient. Guys have so much less STUFF than girls, anyway.

The academic quad includes the library (left) and classroom buildings.

We were on campus most of the afternoon, minus a hop over to Braintree for lunch and a few more dorm items from Bed Bath & Beyond. What a beautiful place Curry is.

The new student center is the gem of the campus. It houses the cafeteria, basketball gym, fitness center, mail room, campus store, and offices for various activities; and is located midway between north and south campuses.

An outdoor barbecue ended the day for most of the freshman families.

Yes, I miss my youngest child. I even miss the sight of him sprawled on the couch in front of the television. I miss his dry sense of humor and his compassion. But he's only 55 minutes away. It's Kevin's turn to start the next chapter of his life, this time on his own. The kid is all right. And his mom will be, too.

Back at home, alone with Daisy, I tried to focus on the beauty all around me, like this sailboat returning to its berth in Brushneck Cove, complete with seagull honor guard.

Table for one

2010-08-28T19:47:00.010-04:00

Just because you're eating alone, you don't have to settle for grazing right out of the fridge. Or so I told myself today – my first day living solo, and I mean ever in my life. (Egads.)

Michael has to work all weekend in Connecticut, and our chicks have flown the coop. To keep myself on track, I made three meals. Schedules, within reason, are good things when you're left to your own devices. It seems to me that living alone, I could easily let my weekend home life deteriorate into an anarchic blur of sleeping, reading, snacking, gardening, and Internet. I'm on guard!

Breakfast: Activia yogurt, fresh raspberries, small slice of wheat toast spread thinly with lowfat Philly cream cheese. Bigelow peach green tea with a spoonful of clover honey.

Lunch: Slice of rye toast spread with tuna salad, topped with big fresh tomato slices.

Onward to dinner.

The basil in my back garden has waxed tall and lush while I've been housebound with my (now receding) pneumonia and bronchitis these past three weeks. I picked a big bunch and washed it. Mmmm, that smell... like a summer day in Italy.

Oh good. I have two key ingredients on hand.

Meanwhile, defrost some chicken breasts. Love those $1.99 sales.

Add olive oil to basil, garlic, and parmesan, and whir. I worship my ancient Cuisinart. How ancient? More than 20 years … and countless batches of hummus.

Set the table. Make two-bean salad (canned goods to the rescue) with balsamic vinaigrette and thin-sliced onion. Pick red Sweet 100 and orange Sun Sugar cherry tomatoes in the garden.

Now, isn't this civilized? Observe how a wedge of lemon dresses up a plain old glass of ice water. Not feeling up to a glass of Chardonnay yet. Maybe next weekend.

After taking these photos, I sat down and actually said grace – and meant it.

It's a good thing I like the looks and taste of this meal. I'll be seeing it again tomorrow and Monday for dinner, with some of the chicken also in a salad for Monday's lunch.

Whew. Survived my first day in the very empty, overly spacious, but comfy nest. My first day of a truly new life. One day at a time.

A dog's tale

2010-08-28T14:43:00.013-04:00

By Daisy

Since the older boy named Andrés moved out five years ago, Kevin has been my special kid. Every day he has fed me my supper and taken me for a walk. Sometimes twice a day!

I like to think I taught him to love animals as much as he does. Sure, he used to love stuffed animal toys, but after he outgrew them I was Number One, let me tell you.

We are pretty much a mutual admiration society.

This week I knew something was up. The front room of the house was filled with boxes and duffel bags and plastic bags and shopping bags, all crammed with things I didn't recognize and clothing whose scent I did recognize. Definitely Kevin's.

It made me nervous. We've had a lot of changes around here in the last two years, and usually a commotion like this means another one of my people is going away. I really hate it when that happens.

Two years ago my girl Melinda left and stayed away for months at a time. People talked about "Syracuse" and Otto the Orange. Whatever Otto is, it can't be as cool as a dog. Every time she came back home for a while, I stuck close by as she watched TV on the couch. Melinda is the champion at scratching the itchy spot on my back, right near the top of my tail. Ahhhh.

Then my older boy, Andrés, who hadn't been living with us for a while but came over almost every week to visit, moved to someplace called Ohio. Now I only see him a few times a year. It's not fair. He used to be my best bud, before Kevin.

Last year my alpha man, "Pop" as the kids and I know him, stopped living here during the week. At least he comes home most Friday nights. Boy, do I get excited when I hear the sound of his car engine pulling into the driveway!

Even with three of my five people gone, this past year was all right because I had my main caretaker, "Mom," at home after work. I pretty much follow her everywhere she goes around the house. I sleep beside her bed on a comfy cushion. Gotta make sure she is OK at all times.

Kevin was with me the most this past year. Every afternoon I could hear him walking up our front porch steps after he took the bus home from school. I literally howled for joy when he unlocked the door and came inside! Ah-woo-woo-wooo. He was never too busy to get down on the floor and play with me or ruffle my fur and hug me. That guy kept my tail wagging.

Yesterday morning, Pop stowed the stuff from the front room in his car. This didn't look good. Mom commented that boys sure were easier to move than girls – a lot less to pack, she said.

Then Kevin called me over to where he was sitting in a chair on the porch. I jumped into his lap and he hugged me and stroked me. Usually I would be ecstatic and lick his face. But instead, I felt even more worried. What was going on? Brrr – I shivered.

They all left in Pop's car. Many hours later when Mom and Pop came home, Kevin wasn't with them. Just what I'd been afraid of! Pop had a new purple decal for his car window, and those two kept talking about something called "Curry College."

All night I waited for Kevin to come home. A few times I checked his bedroom. Why was it neat and tidy? No clothes thrown on the floor? Uh-oh.

This morning I'm still waiting for my boy to come back. Mom has been extra nice, petting me a lot and taking me for a nice slow walk along the beach. The mailman came a little while ago and gave me a dog cookie; woof, I love those.

But I won't be able to relax until I hear those familiar footsteps on the front porch – the ones that mean my Kevin is home. When I do, I am going to let out the biggest and happiest howl of my life! Just you wait.

A fine whine

2010-08-22T21:21:00.002-04:00

I'm so sick of being sick.

Bronchitis. Pneumonia. In my third week now.

Two antibiotics have struck out, most recently the famed Z-pack, which was guaranteed to fix me up. My fever is back; the chest pain, coughing, and congestion haven't stopped. I can't lie down in bed, but must attempt to sleep upright in the recliner downstairs.

Tomorrow I'll call Dr. C and hope he can see me and try something else.

Note to self: Stop Googling and reading information on "antibiotic-resistant pneumonia." It won't help to scare myself to death!

Add to my physical discomfort the guilt I feel for being only briefly (three days last week) available for my new job, and I'm one big mess of stress.

"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." Dear Julian of Norwich, I will try to believe it.

Turn, turn, turn

2010-08-11T15:59:00.004-04:00

This ol' graying dog knows how to age well: Get plenty of rest.

A friend asked in his blog recently:

What is your true feeling about getting older, staying attracted (or attractive) to your mate, and what's your general sense of how women are treated when they venture into their 30s and 40s?

First of all, I think it's a shame we waste mental and emotional energy worrying about being physically attractive as defined by society's standard du jour. On the other hand, I realize competition for mates during our fecund years is hardwired in us and magnified by the popular media.

Perhaps I was deluded, but I continued to feel OK looking in midlife. Yes, I was overweight, except for several shining years in my mid 40s when I did the medically supervised Optifast diet and felt like Da Bomb. But even with those pounds back on, I didn't feel grotesque. I continued to wax flirtatious. (Hmm. Maybe that was grotesque.)

Now I'm over the hill or the hump; postmenopausal, whatever. The hormone train has left this station for good. The weird thing is, and please listen up, young'uns: IT'S FINE. When the crazy hormones ebb, so does the time-wasting obsession with looks, sex, the "chase." Construction guys no longer stare when I walk by? Thank God. I'll always be "Ma'am" and never "Miss" to store clerks? ¡No hay problema! I would have sworn in my libidinous 20s I would never feel such equanimity about the fading of my bloom, but it turns out that to everything there really is a season.

At 58, it's my season to try a new career challenge, enjoy the empty nest with the last kid off to college next week, experience being a grandma, relax in the companionship of my husband and friends and relatives. And I can do so without being preoccupied with how I look, what people think, when I last had sex, how high the heels on my shoes are (answer: low), how much cellulite is on my backside, and whether I "dare" get into a bathing suit.

We live a few hundred yards from a beach, and you better believe I'm putting my trunk-junk in my big ol' Speedo and going in the water. I had my day as a nubile young thing rockin' a bikini. Now I am the happy lady splashing like a manatee alongside our aging mutt and bumptious granddaughter. Whee!

Please read this Grace Paley poem. It shows – brilliantly, wryly, honestly – what I have tried to tell.

Summer of twenty-ten

2010-08-10T10:09:00.014-04:00

It has been the summer of insufferable humidity. At 7:30 this morning, the Providence Journal's news blog reported:

We're in for another swampy day today as the humidity is once again higher than the temperature. At this hour, it is 70 degrees and the humidity is 94 percent.

Now, the temperature is at 80. And climbing.

How did people survive without air-conditioning? Also: What happened to New England's famed clarifying sea breezes? Huh? I could live in Florida if I wanted to spend my summers indoors, ducking the humidity.

Speaking of weather, it has been a summer of several good, crackling thunderstorms, including one that was preceded by a dramatic roll or shelf cloud traveling quickly toward and over us from the west. Shivery stuff.

It has been a summer of transitions, with more on the way. I said farewell to my longtime workplace on June 30 and plunged into the job hunt, with support and advice and, perhaps most important, structured exercises from an experienced outplacement firm. Sarah, our counselor, combined witty charm with no-nonsense instructions to make sure we stayed busy and honed our resumes and interviewing skills. Note to anyone who hasn't been in the job market for a long time: Everything is different, from resumes to competition. If you're still putting "Objective:" at the top of your resume, you've got it wrong.

It has been a summer of reckoning for childish things stored in the U-Haul cubicle. Melinda's Bitty Baby, "Clara," went to a little girl in Woonsocket via Craigslist. My daughter is far less sentimental than I. Me: "Melinda, is it all right with you if I pass along Clara and her outfits to someone?" Melinda: "Who?" Me: "Clara. Your Bitty Baby from American Girl." [pause] Melinda: "Oh. Sure. I'd forgotten about her." Two huge garbage bags of stuffed animals and Beanie Babies, each toy once fiercely hoarded, named, and cherished by the very young Kevin, went to the Salvation Army. Kevin's complete collection of Hank the Cowdog books: off to the library book sale. Getting rid of the kids' once beloved toys and books isn't easy for me. I've had to override my tendency to anthropomorphize – "Oh, it's Mama and Baby Raccoon! I hope they will stay together" – as well as my sentimental attachment to these totems of sweet times.

It has been a summer with time for fun. Peter and I went to Boston's House of Blues to meet my lovely friend Vel (we first met at the Star Wars convention in 2005) and attend a concert by Jack White's current enterprise, The Dead Weather. Vel scored VIP access, meaning the three of us were admitted before the rest of the horde and snugged right up against center stage.

Holy excitement! Afterward, I was able to meet my Facebook friend Mary, a talented artist, and her husband John, who runs a cool sandwich place in Lowell, MA. A perfect night out.

It has been a summer that has already brought an exciting opportunity to try a new job (for at least six months) that uses my writing and editing skills, and also exploits the vast accumulation of otherwise useless trivia stored in my head. I was to have started at Hasbro Inc. today, but ....

It is a summer when I somehow got bronchitis and pneumonia. Specifically, I have been sick for the past four days. I am now the proud owner (and consumer) of enough pharmaceuticals to stock a small clinic. Hoorah for antibiotics. (Nurse: "You'll have to stand up. We inject this in your, um, gluteus maximus.") At any rate, my new boss is understanding, and I will be starting the Hasbro job as soon as I feel better.

Still to come: Departure of the beloved children for college in a few weeks. How will I manage without their lively conversations? -- oh, wait. I mean their constant texting with their friends. What will I do without the crumb-covered dishes and crumpled napkins left on the living room tables, flip-flops arranged in a festive obstacle course around the house, tedious requests for cash, open cosmetic containers overtaking the bathroom counters, moans of "There's nothing to eat!" (uttered while staring into a full refrigerator), and a kitchen sink piled with used glassware?

I think I will manage just fine.

Sand in my shoes

2010-07-10T22:49:00.003-04:00

Oh, I was a rammmmm-blin' girl. Which is to say that my parents and I had relocated seven times by the middle of my freshman year of high school. My brother, born more than five years after me, experienced fewer uprootings and remained in the same school system from third grade through 12th. Moreover, he and his family have lived in our Massachusetts hometown for nearly 20 years, and for the past eight have occupied our late parents' house – our childhood home. Whereas I have stayed in Rhode Island all my adult life but am now on my ninth home since I graduated from college in 1973.

Fascinating, then, to read in the New York Times about a study, “Residential Mobility, Well-Being and Mortality,” that appeared last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Among the findings: "The more times people moved as children, the more likely they were to report lower 'well-being' and 'life satisfaction' as adults." Introverts seemed to suffer the most long-term damage, and the study's author cautions, "Parents who are considering moving need to think about their children’s personalities and the potential risk.”

There are a number of reader comments on this article. I was most struck by those that confirmed what I've long suspected: My ultra-mobile childhood has made me restless and residentially fidgety. Not only did I apparently became inured to frequent moves, as an adult I have craved them. I can't seem to make it a full decade in any domicile; nine years has been my (and by extension, Michael's) limit.

Also, I have long wondered why I have only a small handful of true, lasting friendships. In the comments, I read of others who likewise feel deficient in sustaining deep friendships over long intervals. Well, duh! We never stayed anywhere long enough to cultivate them properly, and/or we have subconsciously shied away from the prospect because it wasn't part of our early development. Now, as I approach my 60s, I find myself wanting to hold friends closer, both emotionally and physically. I crave the comfort and connection of friends, particularly those with whom I've shared important life experiences and milestones, friends who "get me" as I believe I "get them."

Here's my response to the Times article. (below)

I was an extreme introvert (read: painfully shy) as a child and adolescent. My father's job for a large corporation kept us moving – 7 times – until midway through my 9th-grade year, when we made a last move and I finished high school in the same town where my parents retired finally.

But: I found that perhaps because of the frequent need to survive those fearful first days in new schools and neighborhoods, I began to morph into an extrovert. I became adept at adapting to my environments and eventually had close friends in several "hometowns." By the time I went away to college, I was good at the process and even relished it.

The downside for me hasn't been a difficulty making friends (I'm extremely sociable,) but … in maintaining long-term friendships except through social media. What I have struggled with even more noticeably is staying in one place. My husband and I have lived in three apartments and five houses in the past 3 decades – all in the same state. I get bored or stifled or claustrophobic after about 7 years of living in the same abode, and begin combing the real estate ads and driving around different towns and neighborhoods and going to open houses. Consequently, as we near retirement age, I do not feel firmly rooted anywhere, although I love the actual relocations, fixing up houses, and discovering new communities, stores, roads each time.

Perhaps I'm simply more comfortable with the role I played in my first 15 years: The Eternal Newcomer.

What about you? Is "home" still the same town where you were born and raised? How has that stability or its opposite – a childhood of frequent moves and changes – affected your choices in life, your relationships, and your personality? I don't regret my own experience; I believe it made me flexible and friendly and socially brave. I hope our kids, who at least always stayed in the same schools, don't feel they have suffered from living in three different houses.

Blessings 7-9-10

2010-07-10T00:19:00.007-04:00

My first full week as an unemployed person has ended, and I'm still not sure how I feel, besides adrift. Being part of a working community for years and suddenly finding myself utterly on the outside is as poignant as I'd expected. I knew about the "out of sight, out of mind" phenomenon, but still I can't get over feeling that I've stepped from sunshine into a silent night.

I need to clean out my browser's bookmarks folder soon: The links are still there to log into my Brown email account, to password myself into edit mode on Today at Brown and the approvals screen of Morning Mail, but I'm nobody now; the university network has total amnesia where ADiffily is concerned.

It's OK; I'm keeping busy, albeit in a disorganized fashion. My office/workroom here is still a mess, so I must get serious about that. I did empty, declutter, and organize two large storage closets last week, which felt great; and I've delivered bags of clothes and miscellaneous household stuff to the Salvation Army. I've bought pretty much everything Kevin will need for his freshman dorm room next month, plus new bedding for Melinda. I'm working on a small copyediting job with a designer friend, which I'll finish tomorrow. The three-month temporary editing position I'd been called about turned out to have been filled before I ever heard about it. Good practice in rolling with the punches.

With the future a blank, this is a good time to resume counting my blessings.

1. Friday movie night at home with two kids and my husband. Tonight we re-watched Miracle yet again, and again we were impressed with Kurt Russell's portrayal of hockey coach Herb Brooks. At a key moment when Brooks was haranguing his young players to psyche them up, Daisy raised her head and gruffly commented: Wwrrooof.

2. July 3rd at home with dear friends from Connecticut: beer and cookout in the back yard, a stroll to the beach, the city fireworks viewed from our top deck, topped off with a late-night viewing of The Princess Bride. Lisp along with Wallace Shawn: "Inconthievable!"

3. Sunsets like this one on July 4:

Go ahead: Click this photo to make it bigger. You won't be sorry.

4. Putting away warm, freshly laundered clothes, sheets, and towels; later, after a shower, getting into a bed made up with clean sheets.

5. After days of temperatures in the high 90s and even over 100, today's gray blessing as I walked the dog along the beach.

Early Morning Fog

Cool, damp...

A cloud leans down

To kiss my sunburned shoulders.

6. The simple fun of Fridays with Caroline. She gets so much pleasure out of the small plastic wading pool that I set up and fill on our front walkway; the bright plastic fishing set; a pail of water sprinkled with cut grass. (Soup!) I sit in a plastic chair and do nothing but converse as she plays. Nothing but be here, for her and for me.

One enchanted evening

2010-07-05T16:46:00.010-04:00

A friend posted on her blog about a "single, perfect evening" she experienced a few years back. It got me thinking about perfect evenings.

My all-time favorite evening took place 25 years ago on June 28, 1985, in the seaside city of Agrigento, Sicily. Even the name enchants me to this day.

I was, unbelievably, in Sicily on a magazine assignment, covering an archaeological dig unfolding on La Muculufa, a barren, "razor-like crest" in a remote Sicilian plain. The dig, which was excavating the site of an early Bronze Age Castelluccian village dating to the end of the third millennium B.C., was directed by a popular Brown alumna/professor and staffed by her students, both undergraduate and graduate.

I had never been anywhere quite so different from my world of the American North. Much of the island of Sicily is desert-like, with scrubby vegetation and reddish soil, although crops such as olives thrive in thickly clustered rows. In the cities and villages, everyone pulled down heavy blue metal window blinds at the sun's first light to keep their houses cool until evening. Like typical dumb Yanks used to onshore breezes, we kept trying to leave the windows in our hotel room uncovered when we left for the day, but the determined chambermaid put a stop to that.

Michael was along for the ride, and he did his part by getting deep into the dig trench every day and carefully unearthing gorgeous shards of terracotta-colored pottery decorated with black designs. The site was loaded with these treasures, some featuring amazing artistry and suggesting that this was perhaps an important destination back in the third decade B.C. – maybe a shrine? As happened frequently during our month in Europe that summer, I got shivery – despite the choking heat – from brushing up so close to truly ancient history.

Here I am (left) digging alongside Martha Joukowsky, the dig director, and a handsome Sicilian worker (and rugby player!) named Giuseppe. Please note that I represented Louis' Restaurant on College Hill by wearing my "Lou and Dom" tee-shirt!

We were with the crew for five days, and on our last evening together La Profesora escorted us and a handful of the students to the Valle dei Templi in Agrigento. This splendid succession of seven ancient Greek temples reflects Grecian occupation of the region in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. At night, the temples are illuminated with floodlights, creating a stunning panorama from many vantage points in the city.

Here, then, is my perfect evening: With my adored Michael two weeks before our 10th anniversary, on a gorgeous, historic island in the Mediterranean among affable, smart art and archaeology scholars of varying ages. We went from the temples to an outdoor rooftop restaurant, which I think today may be known as the Hotel Villa Athena, and proceeded to have one of the most delicious meals of our lives. Better yet, the night was magic.

I kept a travel journal that month, and here is what it says about the evening of June 28, 1985:

"Mom" [Professor] Joukowsky has worn everyone out with her exuberance as hostess and tour guide. After a grueling 10-hour day at the site in hot sun and murderous wind, we had time for a shower at the hotel (ah! the exquisite pleasure of rinsing layers of grime). Then John, Martha, and Misha picked us up in Gertrude, the old Renault, for the hour's ride from Canicatti to Agrigento.

Compared to dusty little Canicatti, Agrigento seemed like a resort, like a Newport. It's a sizable city, and the temple area is a long compound on a high ridge. Most of the temples survive only partially; some are simply columns standing in centuries-old vigil.

Martha (right) and me near the Temple of Concordia, Agrigento.

We bought postcards at the kiosks in the parking lot, then walked up to the best-preserved building, the Temple of Concordia. It glowed a luminous reddish-ochre in the setting sun's rays. From our perch next to it, we looked off a bluff at the dusty-blue smudge of the Mediterranean in the distance, beyond which lies Africa. Africa! A larger-than-life half-moon hung above us as the park began to close for the night. Martha took us posthaste to see the Temple of Jupiter, locked behind an iron fence and in great disrepair – but even a glimpse of one great column and capital was amazing, the latter big as an elephant.

We met the rest of the dig group for a late dinner on an outdoor plaza overlooking the Valle dei Templi. Half-moon above the terrace … Elegant service by a tuxedoed maitre d' … Directly in front of us, now aglow with lights, the magnificent Temple of Concordia. Martha told us it is one of the best preserved of its era in the world. It is a view I will never, ever forget.

Drinks and aqua minerale all around … delicious appetizers or first courses of pasta or risotto – my pasta had meat, eggplant, tomato, and spices on it … Brilliant purple bouganvillea spilling in profusion over the stone railing and still glowing in the near-dark … Tall palm trees with bases that looked like monstrous pineapples … Gentle, often funny conversation. Michael, with his knack for drawing people out, had Martha telling the story of her courtship and marriage to Artie. She is one of the loveliest, most generous and intelligent women we've ever met.

For dinner: veal saltimbocca. Usually I boycott veal, but when in Sicily …

After this prolonged, civilized dinner, Brian drove us in Gertrude from Agrigento to Catania, where our flight to Rome would depart early the next morning. The moon rode above our little car in the black velvet sky as we passed exit signs for Canicatti, Enna, and other now-familiar towns. I dozed in the back seat, sated and feeling blessed.

That, my friends, was a night.

‘How was your last day at work?’

2010-06-30T20:39:00.006-04:00

What might have been a sad day was not. Overnight the heat and humidity fled before a cool front, and early this morning I walked Daisy with a sweet breeze ruffling my hair and a pale three-quarters moon hovering over the water in a blue true sky.

At the office, Mary had brought a huge sack of fresh bagels and three kinds of cream cheese, and Juli came in with amazing pastries and muffins from Seven Stars. Sandy and I spent much of the day finishing a thorough clean-out of our respective offices – and they are more than offices; they have been our professional homes for decades. The stack of materials I gathered for recycling included Brown student directories going back to 1971-72, my sophomore year! – this one inscribed on the front in turquoise Flair pen, "Anne Hinman, Emery Hall." Why did I still have it nearly 40 years later? Who knows. Now I've sent it on to become a new piece of paper and freed myself of a useless thing I've dragged with me all these years.

All day, colleagues stopped by or called. Friends sent sweet e-cards: "Thinking of you." It was a day for remembering and laughing. Kate gave me the biggest, squeeziest hug ever, and Martha brought a nosegay of fragrant lavender tied with a bow. Computer guru Peter wore his "Life is Good" T-shirt and scrambled to erase the hard drives of the five of us leaving by day's end, one of whom was himself, alas. (On the plus side, he begins a new job tomorrow.) My boss came up late in the day to say good-bye and that she was sorry; I believe her. Carrie adopted my ficus plant and carried the microwave oven to my car as I left for the last time.

When I picked up Melinda in front of the South Main Street law firm where she is working this summer, she didn't launch into the usual litany of funny stories about her job, but looked hard at me and asked, "So, Mother – How was your last day at work?" She gave my arm a sympathetic squeeze. "I had a really nice day, actually," I replied. Her warm hand lingered on my forearm.

Tonight: A taste of my life after August, when I'll be on my own 5.5 days a week. Right now Melinda is at Target with Brittney, Kevin at a movie with Mike E., Michael in Connecticut. At home it's just me, Daisy, and the parakeets. As the sun floated lower this evening, I picked a few tomatoes and watered the petunias. I sat for a moment in the porch rocker and watched the soft white sails of a racing fleet in the bay.

I stopped. I breathed. I smelled the roses.

Arise

2010-06-23T00:04:00.005-04:00

This greeting card caught my eye as I browsed in the main turnkey post office this morning. How like my thoughts in the previous evening's blog! – especially its last full paragraph. I knew I had to buy the card and scan it so I could add Marcus Aurelius's cogent words here. (Also, the photograph is nice.)

This morning as I walked Daisy, I wished desperately I had brought my camera along. From the walking/bike path stretching over toward our house, the green field was dotted with beautiful wildflowers – and old cultivated rosebushes now run rampant. Orange lilies, red and dark pink roses, phallic yellow spikes (left), brilliant magenta and violet beach-pea blossoms, and white honeysuckle, all popping out in the bright gray morning light like grounded fireworks of the sweetest kind. I breathed their perfume deeply, over and over, until I felt dizzy.

Solstice eve

2010-06-20T20:40:00.011-04:00

June 20-21 is one of two solstices, days when the rays of the sun directly strike one of the two tropical latitude lines. … In 2010, the solstice occurs and summer begins in the Northern Hemisphere early on June 21, at 7:28 a.m. EDT.

On the beach, 8:20 pm

Here is what I can show you:

The long, long glowing sunset over the cove.

Endless ripples on the water.

A gull winging by in silhouetted glory.

The moon.

I wish you could smell what I smell tonight:

Heavy-sweet honeysuckle and roses.

The sulphur tang of low tide.

A whiff of clammy fry oil from Iggy's.

I wish you could hear what I hear tonight:

Gentle swush of waves on the shore.

The mournful bark of gulls.

A mother explaining hermit crabs to her son.

A murmur of voices from back yards and jetties.

The fizz and pop of small fireworks.

I wish you could believe what I know tonight:

We who breathe the breeze, who see the sea and clouds,

who feel the summer air – peau de soie,

We are the luckiest of the lucky.

We are alive. We alone on Earth love beauty.

We are children of a darkly glimpsed Father.

Praise God from whom these blessings flow.

In memory of my father, James Hinman, on this Father's Day.

He loved sunsets and the shore.

How to spend a summer Friday

2010-06-19T13:03:00.008-04:00

"Flowers," by Caroline, age 4

Nana, this mac and cheese is GOOD!

Sings to the tune of "Up on the Housetop":

First comes a butterfly and lays an egg,
Out comes a caterpillar with many legs,
Oh see the caterpillar spin and spin,
A little chrysalis to sleep in.

Oh, oh, oh, wait and see
oh oh oh, wait and see
Out of the chrysalis, my oh my
out comes a pretty butterfly.

We learned that at my school. I go to Buttons and Bows.
Nana, you sing it now.
Say chrysalis, Nana. It's where the caterpillar turns into a butterfly.

My favorite color of butterflies is rainbow.

I'm catching a fish for you and Daisy.

Daisy, this (plastic seahorse) is my baby. I hold her like this when she's afraid. (croons) Poor baby, poor baby. It's all right.

I'm her mother and I take care of her. Next Friday she'll be four years old.

Ta-dahhhhh

2010-06-15T19:12:00.000-04:00

La Salle Academy Graduation, June 10, 2010

No words necessary.

With a whimper

2010-06-09T14:56:00.005-04:00

It's funny, being a lame duck employee. When you first learn you're being laid off, most co-workers are solicitous and sympathetic, while others never say a word. "Huh? What elephant in which living room?"

The work itself keeps coming pell-mell at first, especially when a high-profile annual event is only weeks away. Gradually, though, your activities begin to taper off, partly thanks to exclusion (no need to attend directors' meetings anymore) and partly because those staying on are looking ahead and adapting to a workplace without you.

People at work cut you a lot of slack when you're a lame duck. You are frequently out of the office to meet with human-resources staff and job counselors, to go for interviews or training. Since you can't begin any long-range projects, you do just the basics and begin cleaning up your office, packing personal objects such as framed photographs, freelance samples, and what's left of your Star Wars collection. You delete old emails and put personal digital content on disks and thumb drives. All of this makes you sad, because your office is that special "room of one's own" where you have been YOU, a creative professional with an identity separate from that of mother, wife, and grandmother.

What you miss most in these waning days of a long career is being needed: for input, brainstorming, institutional perspective, urgent text or web posts, opinions. All of those occasions when one or another boss said, "Let's put Anne on the [choose one] web redesign committee/ research communications group / Clinton visit planning committee / Summer Studies marketing audit team" – they are in the past. You're off the list, dropped from the batting order, cut from the A Team or indeed any team whatsoever. No one cares what you think about this or that proposal, this or that strategy. You are suddenly so yesterday.

Here is the truth: The life of a lame duck is boring, frustrating, demeaning, and melancholy. Driving in each morning to this particular office in this building at this campus on this historic hill in this capital city is What You Do – or rather it has been for more than 30 years. You're three weeks away from losing the whole enchilada – the colleague-friends, the cherished edifice, the professional identity – and you are alternately agitated and verklempt.

Mostly, you are alone – drifting away on your little boat, like it or not. The voices on shore get fainter, the lights on the dock dim, and the mouth of the harbor approaches. Soon even that will recede as you reach the open sea.

Baby, the last time

2010-06-06T23:23:00.014-04:00

Is this the little [child] I carried,
Is this the little boy at play?
I don't remember growing older,
When did [he]?
Sunrise, sunset; Sunrise, sunset,
Swiftly fly the years …

Here's our boy – Baby Keckie, as his toddler sister called him some 16 years ago; Kevin from Heaven as dubbed by his Grandma Sally, "Diffles" per his 7th grade classmates; now "Diff" among his male peers, like his father and uncles and boy cousins before him. Kevin.

The Fiddler lyrics are slightly maudlin but somehow right for a bittersweet milestone like this. Sweet, because we're launching the last of our children out of the nest and into his new, adult life. Bitter, because I have enjoyed motherhood in all its forms – step-, adoptive, and biological – more than anything else this life has graced us with.

And so begins tomorrow the long-awaited graduation week with its hoopla and solemnity stretched out over four days. We've done all this before; now we'll do it one last time: the last senior liturgy, the last senior banquet at the legendary Venus de Milo, the last beautiful graduation ceremony in the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul in downtown Providence. For this is our baby, our last child to make his way through the halls of La Salle Academy and don the maroon gown and mortarboard and gold tassel with his classmates on an evening in June.

I didn't cry at Andrés's (2005) and Melinda's (2008) La Salle graduations. I was excited and happy for them; each achieved beyond anyone's expectations, and I was proud, giddy even, to watch the formal ceremonies and snap their photographs on those nights.

This may be the year I cry in the cathedral. Kevin's path to his graduation week has been more fraught, more hair-raising (hair-graying may be more apt) for me than I could have predicted. My bright, beautiful boy has been the classic underachiever. His standardized test scores are fairly dazzling, but his grades were all over the map, mostly (alas) south of the border. He was actually expelled after his sophomore year, but was readmitted after passing some summer school courses and pledging his best intentions to Principal Kavanagh. His diagnosis with severe ADHD that same summer helped us get him an education plan and some medication that did help with his focus, but not with motivation. That part was up to him, and it was a moving target. Junior year he made second honors on his report cards. Senior year he failed four subjects one quarter. He had to get very high grades on his final exams and in his last quarter just to graduate ... and he did it.

In late August he'll be off to Curry College in Milton, Mass., seven miles from downtown Boston. He was lucky to be accepted by three good schools; he was rejected by six other colleges. Curry is small (2,000 undergraduates, no graduate programs), on a lovely estate-like campus in a pretty suburb, and has a gorgeous new campus center/gymnasium and an excellent program in communications and journalism. He decided against two larger schools with higher visibility because, thank God, my son knows himself and understands what he needs to do well. "I thought I'd be able to focus better in a small school where the faculty get to know you really well." Exactly.

Kevin was a squally, unhappy baby; I think "fussy" and "agitated" were words Dr. Utter, our beloved pediatrician used. I had to give him simethicone drops for gas, Augmentin for recurrent ear infections beginning at three weeks old, Aveeno oatmeal soaks and silver nitrate ointment for raw-red diaper rash (probably yeast infections caused by the antibiotics for the ear infections). He did not sleep through the night until he was three years old. He wanted to be held and nursed, and I did my best but also returned to work part-time after a few months, due to my dear boss/mentor's unexpected stroke. Kevin loved and wanted me so much, he would lunge at my shoulder like a shark as I held him upright and sink his milk teeth into my flesh, leaving crescent-shaped bruise lines and sometimes even a mosaic of blood. He exhausted me and sank an anchor into my heart. He was devoted beyond all reason to his enormous collection of stuffed animals and Beanie Babies.

When Kevin finally began to say more than "no", "Mama", "Papa", and "hot!", around age two, he spoke immediately in full, grammatical sentences, as if he'd been watching us and waiting until he had it right before he went verbal. And verbal he was, often in odd and surprising ways. I kept a small lined notebook to record his quirky utterances:

AGE FOUR
• "How old is God? Is he older than that guy who planted the apple seeds?"

AGE FIVE
• "Guess what I'm going to be for Halloween next year. … Jesus!"
• "I hate soccer." (Note: He loved playing soccer but was angry at not scoring a goal.) "It's a plump rock."
• "When we say the Hail Mary in school, I sing this: Yankee Doodle went to town, riding on a pony."
• [Watching trucks tearing up our street for repaving] "I'm not sure I like those trucks. I'm very concerned with that."
• "I'm as tired as a snake!"
• "Peanuts [his Beanie Baby elephant] likes raw, dead corn."
• [Watching me cook supper] "Fortunately, my magic markers smell better than that chicken."
• "Holy chickens of the Lord's death!"
• "Next Halloween I don't want to be Jesus." [Me: "That's fine, honey."] "I want to be Mary."
• [At Fred's Barbershop with Michael for haircuts] "I get to go first because I don't have any patience."
• [Furious at me for something] "You're just a shack!"
• Me: "Did you talk to anyone at soccer camp today?" Kevin: "Yes. I called the other team names."
• [At Prospect Park in Providence, where RISD students were sitting on the grass playing medieval instruments] "Mommy! That sounds like ducks fainting on a hot day."
• [Drawing a dinosaur:] "I'm terrible at drawing T. Rexes. Look at this! It looks like a person in a bathrobe with a pig nose and no eyeballs."
• Michael: "Boys can be naked with other boys [in the pool club showers], and girls can be naked with girls. But boys and girls shouldn't be naked together. They only do that when they're married."
Kevin: "I'm not going to get married! I'm going to kill myself!"

AGE SIX
• "Melinda and I made up a TV show. It's called He-Man and His Little Pet Bunny. He's supposed to be strong, but he's just dumb."

AGE SEVEN
• [Discussing Career Day at school, with Andrés] "After I'm done being a pro hockey player, I'm going to be a scientist."
• [At breakfast, watching our parakeets Patty and Laurie in their cage] "Laurie looks like a graduate student."

AGE EIGHT
• We had just left the NCAA women's national hockey championship game in Boston, which Brown lost narrowly to Minnesota. Michael grumbled that he'd seen two of the referees joking around, not taking the game seriously.
Kevin, indignant: "I know! I heard one say to the other, 'Why did the cow cross the road?'!!"
• "I could never play the violin. If I tried to play the violin, I would scribble."

AGE TEN
• Daisy had just galloped downstairs in the morning. "She sounds like an elephant on tiptoe."

The kid can still turn a phrase, although no longer in such delightfully unorthodox ways as when he was a boy without a self-censor. As someone who lives to make words flow and sing and communicate clearly, I could not be more thrilled that Kevin got the writing gene. Little did I know he would also grow into a passionate (and fairly well informed) debater, an unabashed leftist liberal who would have fit right in with Dorothy Day's Catholic Workers Movement, a poised orator at Mass and on the Mock Trial team, a nimble and persistent conversationalist, and (yay) an avid reader of the daily newspaper – not just the sports section, which he reads from cover to cover, but also of the news and editorial pages. He recently wrote a letter to the editor about the misplaced priorities of our nation: Why fight wars in areas of the world where no one wants us? Why not spend that money – OUR money – on better school for all children, not just those whose parents can afford (as we managed to do) private and parochial tuitions, or homes in pricey suburbs?

Kevin (second from left) and his "bros" before the junior prom, May 2009.

This is our son, Kevin from Heaven, or somewhere, from whence he arrived in my 41st year: not quite a good enough hockey player to make varsity, but potentially a great sports reporter; not the blue-eyed blond tot I'd imagined I'd produce, but his father's Armenian son – dark and handsome and well-built. Tolerated and beloved by his sister and brother. More and more, understood and guided by Michael, perhaps better than I can guide a teenaged boy at this stage in his development. And utterly cherished by his weary, protective, ever hopeful mother.

Let the festivities begin, one last time! Here comes my son, the almost grown-up, the former underachiever, the writer and thinker and mordantly funny commentator. Kevin, I love you so much. Your grandmother angels will be watching over you as you walk into your future.

Photo at right: Kevin and date Livia before the senior prom, June 4, 2010.

Comeback kid

2010-06-03T23:04:00.003-04:00

As my last month of employment at Brown winds down, I look forward to many things: a long summer vacation, possibly an evening course, regaining my confidence, losing some weight (please), and ... drum roll ... getting back to writing my blogs. I love writing for the sheer pleasure of it. It's like a sweet prize at the end of a day.

Tonight I got caught up on my sunset photo blog. Please visit and enjoy the colors. Check back here, too. I have lots to say!

A “Rather Gloomy Place”

2010-05-02T18:23:00.008-04:00

Why does everything seem so hard? Some days I'm breezy, but more and more I am stalled... listless... gutted. My prayer, my chant, is always, "Let me be strong. Give me strength," but so far there is no answer.

In the weeks since I learned about my layoff, I have been astonished by the rapid cycling of my moods and well-being. At a workshop on job-interviewing skills, the four of us attending were more engaged by the opportunity to commiserate and vent than by the subject matter. All but one of the job openings I've seen in my general skill area locally pay approximately in the range I was making in 1992. About a 40% cut. Jeez Louise!

This weekend I had another bout of what is now a too-familiar affliction: extreme fatigue, muscle and joint pain, and IBS. It was gorgeous out, yet I spent two days indoors, sleeping and/or lying on the couch in front of the TV watching real-estate shows on HGTV.

Can I really be coming down with a GI virus every other week? What's with the headaches? The brain fog? Am I sick, or am I heartsick? I can't tell. I've lost control of the household, too. Dirty dishes sit in the sink, the dishwasher goes unemptied, the disposal smells rotten, the stovetop is littered with grease and blobs of food. Every surface in the house -- tables, desks, kitchen counters, blanket chest upstairs -- is cluttered with stuff I need to deal with: put away, give away, sort, process. And I have no energy to do it.

I have no energy to package myself for an upcoming interview. I have no energy to "craft" (please!) customized resumes for different jobs. I have no energy to act competent and excited. Is there a term for this? General malaise? I'm already taking two antidepressants; is it possible that I'm depressed? Have CFS? Fibromyalgia? That I'm dying? (Lucy van Pelt voice: "That's it!")

Clearly I need to do something. A list is the only place to begin – a modest list, something I can manage. Here are two phone calls I can make tomorrow:

1. Get some psychotherapy appointments.

2. Make an appointment with my doctor for a complete physical.

That's it for now. Oh – and resume posting here about my blessings, even if I have to stretch. Stretching, after all, can feel good.

End of a long day

2010-03-26T23:54:00.005-04:00

Friday, I surrendered to mourning my losses. Sleeping a lot. And some crying. I'm alone this weekend, with Kevin at a school retreat and Michael working overtime in Connecticut. It was hard not having my husband here.

In the early evening I glanced out my study window and saw Mom waving at me in rainbow colors.

Visitation

After the sun set, beauty knocked on our windows and summoned me to the porch.

Benediction

Click on this one.

Peace be with us all.

I only cried once

2010-03-25T21:56:00.004-04:00

View from my office window at sunset, winter 2009-10.

Today I received my layoff notification, effective July 1. I've been dreading this for several months, which is why I've been the writing equivalent of tongue-tied here... strung out, anxious, distracted. Too much to say for a blog; too little energy left for benign topics.

When I left the meeting this morning, at first I was simply relieved to be out from under the dark cloud of unknowing. I went out to lunch with dear friends (one of whom was similarly laid off last year) and returned to my office to do some work.

After I posted a "pink slip" visual pun on my Facebook page, friends began posting and emailing me to express shock, support, and sadness. Even anger on my behalf, in a few cases, which I admit made me feel loved: fierce friends say what we can't, at times.

I've worked at Brown for 34 years, with a three-year break when I worked for two other colleges. My office is, literally, my personal "room of one's own," complete with plants, Star Wars memorabilia, framed family photos, lamps, and my collection of University directories and Commencement programs going back to 1974. My friends are my colleagues. The campus remains one of the prettiest places I've been; each day has offered foliage and brickwork and details that refresh my eyes.

Across the street from my building: the College Green.

This evening after I'd arrived home, I sat Kevin down in the living room for a tough talk about his slacking off (again) in school, and the possible consequences, such as no college next year. I am weary of it. But parenting must be done regardless of mood or circumstance, and I'm the only adult at home to do it.

I served him supper, and then stood by the kitchen sink as he ate, muddled and mute. After an action-packed day, I was at a standstill: What now? How am I feeling? (Answer: About 100 years old.) I saw myself suddenly as an old, tired woman. I'd been sloughed off, deemed useless, passé. My face sliding down into jowls and grooves. My hair a mess of colors: brown, dark blonde, gray, and blonde highlights – pathetic! Bags under my eyes. Shoulders slumped. Dumpy. Defeated: stopped in my tracks after a lifetime of charging forward, coping, learning, branching out, adapting, having fun, moving past tragedies, immersed in work and play and family.

As if my posture had telegraphed my thoughts, Kevin rose from his meal and took four steps to my side. He reached his arms around me and pulled me close and patted my back: pat... pat... pat... pat... "It will be okay," he said calmly. We stood that way for a minute, and it was not awkward in the least to be embraced by my 17-year-old son.

What bolt struck his heart and moved him to comfort me? Here was my contrary teen, smart and sarcastic and skeptical. Here he was, tall and wise now, holding his old, tired, fired mother and telling me everything will be all right.

That's when I cried.

Thirty-four years

2010-03-25T19:41:00.002-04:00

Blessings and prayers 3-13-10

2010-03-13T22:05:00.007-05:00

Andrés, Caroline, and Andrés's girlfriend Rebecca.

1) Our son Andrés, who turned 24 today: His smile, his easiness with people, his gentleness with children, his compassion, his sense of humor are blessings to all who know him.

That he finds his path to a real career with a living wage and the hope of a stable life – and health insurance, always health insurance – I pray to the Lord. Lord, hear my prayer.

2) Our daughter Melinda, home yesterday for her spring break week from Syracuse: Into this late-winter anxiety-beset household she brings her unsinkable zest for life, her sunshine, her hugs for this tired ol' madre.

That she realizes her dreams, I pray to the Lord. Lord, hear my prayer.

3) Sweet Caroline, bubbling with excitement at the ungodly hour of 6:45 a.m. on Fridays when Leslie drops her off at our house; exclaiming as she hugs the dog, "I love Daisy the best!"; asking for her crayons and paper, "reading" her favorite books from the milk crate in the living room, skipping down the walking path to the playground near Iggy's and announcing to another four-year-old girl: "I'm Caroline. Are you a good girl?" and then playing for the next half-hour as I watch from a bench.

That we remain close, this dear girl and I, when we no longer have these gentle Fridays together, I pray to the Lord. Lord, hear my prayer.

4) Friends who send books. Friends who understand. Friendships that endure, that sustain me. Friends whose words inspire. Friends who make me laugh even on the blackest days. You all know who you are, or maybe you don't realize how much it means to me that you email, call, read this blog, write wonderful blogs of your own, leave a post or message on my Facebook page. It means a lot.

That I am always present to my friends with love and selflessness, as they are to me, I pray to the Lord. Lord, hear my prayer.

5) Fortitude in the face of uncertainty, indignity, self-doubt, and betrayal. In the past 20 years I have encountered unforeseen personal challenges and shocks. Most of the time Michael was at my side navigating the same rough waters, although once I believed even he had forsaken me. So far I have been blessed with a strong constitution, a willingness to seek the best help possible, and the will and opportunity to grow new interests and friendships while keeping depression at bay.

At the moment I am relying on every one of these blessings as I put one foot in front of the other and maintain my focus on what must be done, and done well. It's frustrating to be oblique and sometimes metaphorical in this blog. What I will say is this: I'm frightened. I'm lonely. I'm tired.

That I believe in myself, that I behave with dignity, that I keep an open mind and a generous heart in the coming weeks and months, I pray to the Lord.

Please, Lord – please hear my prayers.

What goes around

2010-03-08T22:36:00.007-05:00

My friend Neil wrote on his blog a while back:

Who is honored? He who honors others. This is generally understood to mean that you get back what you give; treating others with respect breeds them treating you respectfully in return. A different take on this just dawned on me. It appears to me that you innately become a person of dignity through treating others in a respectful manner. It is not just quid pro quo…. It's deeper, you become dignified inside.

This is an arresting concept, and it rings true. Some of the loveliest – and most successful – people I know are dignified in just this manner.

Conversely, I have known highly placed folks who cloak themselves in self-importance, yet are diminished by treating others disrespectfully. "Classless" is a word that comes to mind. Surely this is not how they would like to be remembered.

Here is a photo from my friend Deb. This large and elegant trumpeter swan appears to have lost his rudder (not to mention his dignity) temporarily. "Whoahh-hhhhhhhhhhh!" Love the splayed feet and tipsy wings!

Even the proud and mighty fall, and not always gracefully. I hope if and when they do, they are reminded that we're all only human. In our short and bumpy lives, treating one another – even "the least of these" – as we ourselves hope to be treated goes a long way toward cushioning hard landings.

Blessings 3-7-10

2010-03-07T21:38:00.005-05:00

1. Friends, virtual and real-life, who get me through the dark nights. Also, my dog: always there for me.

2. Dear Kathy, who visited this week and helped me feel connected in all kinds of ways, and made me laugh and laugh.

3. Hearing Patrick talk at Brown's Mass today about his work in Haiti. Hearing Kevin tell Patrick he might volunteer there some spring break. Hearing Father B. tell salty stories about priests at bagel hour.

4. A springlike weekend with songbirds trilling and warbling their hearts out. Warm enough to sit on the front porch in my rocker for a half-hour this afternoon: Now, that is relaxation.

5. Washing the kitchen floor with the Swiffer thingie that shoots out a little jet of disinfecting liquid onto the tiles: more like play than work. Whee!

Sanctuary

2010-02-28T11:35:00.004-05:00

When the going gets tough and the writer is mute, she reads books.

This is from one of three I am reading concurrently:

Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.

– Chris Cleave, Little Bee

Note to self

2010-02-24T00:41:00.002-05:00

(And get some sleep, dammit.)

Recession humor

2010-02-12T09:28:00.001-05:00

Bleak midwinter

2010-01-18T15:18:00.009-05:00

An hour ago I woke up from light sleep in my recliner with the buzz of a snore echoing in my ears. On my chest rested two open books, one atop the other: a bestselling novel, The Help; and a poetry anthology open to Sylvia Plath. It's a day off from work and I'm sucking down books, a greedy two-fisted reader, a passed-out derelict littered with drained pages.

It is now, truly, the bleak midwinter. Gray skies, a skitter of icy rain. I'm thankful for the downy woodpecker couple that visit our suet cakes, lively punctuation marks outside the living room window. Michael returned to Connecticut early yesterday, and Melinda left for Syracuse at 7:15 this morning with a friend. The week before Christmas, our house filled up with people – three kids! a husband! – and their conversation and laughter, like a gay balloon. Slowly it has emptied. Today Kevin and I are left to our drab routines.

Yesterday as I made an omelet, I watched Mass on Channel 12. It's not something I usually do, and this was a stripped-down version. But the irregularity of these recent days – the catastrophic Haiti earthquake that has left thousands dead and a country gasping for its future, the bogeyman economy, the specter of layoffs – made me grateful to say the familiar responses. "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed." The Mass is ended; go in peace to love and serve the Lord. "Thanks be to God."

Do I believe in the power of prayer? What does that even mean? I pray not because of my belief (a shaky foundation) but because it comes naturally; it is, apparently, What I Do. Debating myself on whether prayer is a waste of time or not has become beside the point.

Sometimes a prayer has no words. One recent morning Daisy and I came upon our bay all pearly with sunrise, the sky splashed with a fan of pale light. The light reached toward us, like arms. A thought surprised me: "This is a prayer." What does that even mean?

What does it mean when a poem reaches out its arms to pull you in? Read the second paragraph above. Now, 10 minutes later, I retrieve the anthology and reopen it to Plath. I turn the page and see this:

Balloons

Since Christmas they have lived with us,
Guileless and clear,
Oval soul-animals,
Taking up half the space,
Moving and rubbing on the silk

Invisible air drifts …
Delighting
The heart like wishes

Coincidences delight my heart. What do they mean? "What you want them to," I've been told. But I hadn't thought to wish for synchronicity; it comes to me like grace.

Sometimes a single life is a poem, or maybe it's a prayer. On Martin Luther King Day, I find 17 minutes to listen to the preacher-poet's words. You should, too.

Amen.

2010

2010-01-11T20:20:00.011-05:00

• Time hiccuped me past Christmas at warp speed. Right about now I'm ready to celebrate the holiday in style. I want to make butter cookies … listen to every one of our Christmas CDs (which are actually on my iPod, which I confess I haven't learned how to use) … slowly and thoughtfully wrap each little gift in designer paper and raffia ties … do the weekly Advent wreath readings and candle-lightings in our kitchen. I want to sit in silence and admire our tree in the darkness. I want to sit in silence and contemplate mysteries in our church. I want to do it all now, slowly, savoring every holy and secular bit of a season I've loved since I was old enough to help my mother hang ornaments on a real cut pine tree. A season that escaped me this year.

Brant geese on the bay, Jan. 1, 2010

• In a mirror:
Recently I have caught glimpses of myself through others' eyes, inadvertently. Now I question my goodness, my behavior. People who know me in person "get" that I joke, I tease, I flirt. I play in the funhouse of language and culture. I employ snappy retorts and word-plays. But I've seen my words, intended to amuse, read differently on Facebook and elsewhere that I leave comments – signature tracks in the cyberwoods. It has occurred to me that some other people (people whom I admire) are serious by nature and assume I am not; that my online persona can bewilder or put off; that my eclectic interests (Star Wars! The White Stripes!) may be met with: … I have been peering through the back side of the mirror more and more, seeing what others see and thinking about who I am. Who I want to be. How I want to act and to treat others.

• Photography: I enjoy taking photographs. Perhaps even more, I find I like editing them... popping up or muting the contrast, taking out some shadows, cropping to accentuate a detail or a design. It's sort of analogous to the enjoyment I find in editing words. Sometimes I'll go a week without leaving my camera at home. It's almost a security object, and I hang on tight.

• Passages: A friend has lost his mother. Another friend has lost her job. A relative was hospitalized with swine flu. (Better now, thank God.) A friend has a lump in her breast. A son has fallen in love yet again, head over heels, o why can't he hold back a little. My husband's job is going well, the company expanding, his boss a godsend. I am on a wheel that is turning, turning, children spinning off into the world, husband away, dog aging relentlessly, people fighting for their health, for their lives, winter turning toward spring, friends leaving, friends coming back into my life. I fear we are no longer making memories, only a living, if that. I fear … yet still I hope for my children's sakes.

Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum. Is it true?

Solstice blessings 12/21/09

2009-12-21T15:33:00.003-05:00

1. All three of our children under one roof – ours – for a week.

2. Feeling alive again today after being exhausted and possibly virus-ridden all weekend.

3. Followup to number 2: Having a husband at home, and children old enough, that I was able to sleep for 15 solid hours beginning Saturday at 4:30 pm.

4. The probability, after the weekend's 15" of snow, of a white Christmas this year.

5. In spite of the violent and grotesque behavior by nations and individuals that makes news every day, the certainty that most people in most circumstances – rich or poor, religious or atheist, young or old – instinctively react with compassion and selflessness when another is in need or in pain.

I just read this on RI Craigslist today:

My faith in people was renewed yesterday, big time. My daughter got stuck in her car on Read Ave. yesterday afternoon. She called me and i said i'd get dressed and come and help. By the time i got there,3 gentlemen were digging her out and helping. 10 minutes later,Melissa was on her way. I thanked the 3 gentlemen and followed my daughter to make sure she was ok. I went back to Read Ave to thank the guys again and offer to buy them lunch and they wouldn't even accept the 20.00 i offered. 3 great guys that i can't thank enough! Thank you,thank you!! Melissa's dad

Don't ask why I read Craigslist; I just do, OK? There is a lot of ugliness on the discussion boards there, but also points of light. I paw through the muck and treasure the gems. Left to their own devices (and sociopaths excepted), I really do believe that people are good at heart. A kind word, a helpful deed... these are our gifts to give and receive.

The meaning (to me) of Christmas

2009-12-19T11:57:00.010-05:00

I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him. …
– Francis Thompson

Linus pretty much nailed it in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" when he cut short the round-headed one's Yuletide dithering and took center stage. "Lights, please." Then he recited the gospel of Luke, chapter 2, with its startling observation: "The glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid." Sore afraid. I love the King James Bible's phrasing. Not "terrified" or "scared." Afraid to the point of pain.

What, you may ask, does fear have to do with the joyous festival of Jesus's birth? Maybe this: A door opened upon searing light – the “glorious impossible” we had never thought to see.

Annie Dillard made this point spectacularly in an essay, "God in the Doorway," that can be found in her brilliant little collection, Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982). I can't bear merely to quote from it; you have to read this piece straight through.

This is my Christmas gift to you. May Annie and her publisher forgive me.

---------------------------------------

God in the Doorway
By Annie Dillard

One cold Christmas Eve I was up unnaturally late because we had all gone out to dinner – my parents, my baby sister, and I. We had come home to a warm living room, and Christmas Eve. Our stockings drooped from the mantel; beside them, a special table bore a bottle of ginger ale and a plate of cookies.

I had taken off my fancy winter coat and was standing on the heat register to bake my shoe soles and warm my bare legs. There was a commotion at the front door; it opened, and cold wind blew around my dress.

Everyone was calling me. "Look who's here! Look who's here!" I looked. It was Santa Claus. Whom I never – ever – wanted to meet. Santa Claus was looming in the doorway and looking around for me. My mother's voice was thrilled: "Look who's here!" I ran upstairs.

Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus, thinking he was God. I was still thoughtless and brute, reactive. I knew right from wrong, but had barely tested the possibility of shaping my own behavior, and then only from fear, and not yet from love. Santa Claus was an old man whom you never saw, but who nevertheless saw you; he knew when you'd been bad or good. He knew when you'd been bad or good! And I had been bad.

My mother called and called, enthusiastic, pleading; I wouldn't come down. My father encouraged me; my sister howled. I wouldn't come down, but I could bend over the stairwell and see: Santa Claus stood in the doorway with night over his shoulder, letting in all the cold air of the sky; Santa Claus stood in the doorway monstrous and bright, powerless, ringing a loud bell and repeating Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. I never came down. I don't know who ate the cookies.

For so many years now I have known that this Santa Claus was actually a rigged-up Miss White, who lived across the street, that I confuse the dramatis personae in my mind, making of Santa Claus, God, and Miss White an awesome, vulnerable trinity. This is really a story about Miss White.

Miss White was old; she lived alone in the big house across the street. She liked having me around; she plied me with cookies, taught me things about the world, and tried to interest me in finger painting, in which she herself took great pleasure. She would set up easels in her kitchen, tack enormous slick soaking papers to their frames, and paint undulating undersea scenes: horizontal smears of color sparked by occasional vertical streaks which were understood to be fixed kelp. I liked her. She meant no harm on earth, and yet half a year after her failed visit as Santa Claus, I ran from her again.

The day, a day of the following summer, Miss White and I knelt in her yard while she showed me a magnifying glass. It was a large, strong hand lens. She lifted my hand and, holding it very still, focused a dab of sunshine on my palm. The glowing crescent wobbled, spread, and finally contracted to a point. It burned; I was burned; I ripped my hand away and ran home crying. Miss White called after me, sorry, explaining, but I didn't look back.

Even now I wonder: if I meet God, will he take and hold my bare hand in his, and focus his eye on my palm, and kindle that spot and let me burn?

But no. It is I who misunderstood everything and let everybody down. Miss White, God, I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.

Time, tide, and Advent

2009-12-06T21:57:00.011-05:00

The seasonal mash-up in the photo above pretty much sums up this November and early December. We've got summer roses blooming merrily next to Christmas wreaths and twinkly porch lights.

Here's a longer view. Note the autumn chrysanthemums on the steps. Potted geraniums nod their magenta blossoms above a smaller pot of yellow marigolds. Remnants of last night's snowfall dot the grass.

What's going on? Weird weather, that's what. It has been comfortably, if eerily, warm up until last night, with daytime temperature in the 60s, close to 70 a few times. Some of the seeds from last spring's early pansies have sprouted new little plants in the front border garden, one of which winks its shy golden face at me from its berth next to thriving blue-flowering ground cover.

Tonight it's headed into the 20s, so I suppose all balmy weather must come to an end here on the New England coast. When I walked Daisy before church this morning, I had to wear my warm parka, a hat, and a polarfleece scarf. Brrrr!

More perplexing to me than the freakish weather is the speed of time this fall. I just can't get my head around it. Surely a physicist can explain why time seems to bunch and gather and sprint, rocketing us ahead at unnerving speed; and other times (rarely), it expands, crawls, and begets a lazy long day or two. The former condition has prevailed since early fall. Last week I began to date a check "Sept. –" and had to cross it out and start over. Three months out of synch! I wait for my birthday to arrive – but guess what: It was the middle of last month, and I'm fully 58. Thanksgiving? Oh yeah; did that and have the photos to prove it.

Michael and his brothers and nephews toast my late father-in-law, Dan, with his favorite Beck's before Thanksgiving dinner.

We get a little silly while posing for the annual Christmas-card photo!

Dessert straight from Carlo's Bakery in Hoboken, NJ, home of TV's "The Cake Boss," courtesy of Michael's brother John.

More time confusion: I find myself informing Melinda on the phone that "Baby" is coming over on Friday. Listen up, Nana: That's no baby – our granddaughter turned four years old last week. Help! Does this mean I finally have to jettison the baby books and toys I've shlepped all these years and that Caroline has now outgrown?

Cousin Jake Lowenstein helps Caroline with her birthday presents.

At any rate, we went over to Leslie and Jon's house for the now-traditional birthday party for our little sweetheart last weekend. Her cousins on Jon's side were adorable and helped her open and play with her new things.

Digging into Mommy's yummy homemade birthday cake.

At Nana and Poppop's house: Big girl Caroline has a friendly visit with Blueberry.

Kevin is applying to colleges, at least nine of them (egads), all with robust majors or programs in journalism and communication. His writing score on the SAT essay was 730, and I rejoice that he shares my gift; I've always been able to make a living with words, and I also derive great joy from reading them and arranging them into articles and posts.

My 17 year old and I are the only people here from Sunday through Friday, with Michael living in Connecticut, Melinda at Syracuse, and Andrés in Ohio. Kevin and I generally get along great; we're alike in many ways (some not so helpful, such as a tendency to oversleep). He seems perfectly happy to attend Brown hockey games with his mother; we've been the most ardent fans together all these years. He also is a lector with me at Mass at least once a month, a service he began in fifth grade, to my utter shock as he was a shy kid then, and has grown into admirably, reading with good cadence and respectful expression from (usually) the Epistles for the second reading. I almost feel as if the balance is tipping from Kevin as Cynical/Flippant Teen to Kevin as Thoughtful Adult. Thank God, truly. I love my boy so very much. There were times these past five years when I couldn't imagine how he'd pull his life together. Now I'm beginning to believe. …

Next September – I can scarcely think these words, much less write them – I'll be alone here during the week save for my pal Daisy-dog and the two parakeets, while Kevin presumably is off at college. After all these years, I will be living on my own for the first time. I'm intrigued and a bit shivery in both good and apprehensive ways. I'll have more of the time for me that I've wanted, to stop after work at Planet Fitness and get some semblance of exercise regularly, to have dinner with a friend now and then, to have a salad for supper and no piles of dishes waiting in the sink. I fear loneliness yet crave a little bit of non-mommy life. Missing Michael all week is hard, but for better or worse I'm getting used to it. Maybe this on/off togetherness is healthy in some way I didn't anticipate. We are close and happy together when he's home, which makes me glad.

Interesting times. And a holy time: Being at Mass today, with the Advent candles by the altar and Father wearing his purple chasuble and the readings so joyous and anticipatory reminded me of how much I love the season. Our new choir director has a gorgeous tenor voice, and when he sang the solo part to "Panis Angelicus" today with the choir and organ, tears welled in my eyes at the beauty and mystery of our faith.

For photos of our autumn skies this past week, please visit my Sunset blog.

Prayer for this morning

2009-12-02T08:52:00.006-05:00

Wednesday, 6:55 a.m., walking the dog.

Oh world, I am grateful for this morning.

This morning
The air was windless, clear, crisp, with a tang of far-off rain.

This morning
I walked west into moonset.
The moon was round, flat, pale: a watery block print on lavender.
The moon set over the cove where a hundred geese rode at anchor.
The moon paused atop gray trees that worshipped it with grasping hands.
The moon set.

This morning
The brants warbled as they floated out toward the bay –
an armada of black, white, and gray.

This morning
I watched the moon set. Good-bye, moon.
I turned and watched the sun rise. Good day, sun.

This morning
Beauty rang like a clear sweet bell in my ears.
In my soul.

Thank you for this morning.

Gossamer

2009-11-18T22:16:00.004-05:00

In my early 30s I had pneumonia. For the better part of a week I thought I just had a bad case of the flu. Essentially I was prostrate with fever and low oxygen and dehydration. I lay in our darkened bedroom on sweaty, twisted sheets. I didn't eat for days and drank but little sips of water. I drifted in and out of sleep. Basically, I was too sick to realize how sick I was.

One feverish day I dreamed that I was sitting in a hospital bed on white sheets in a white room filled with brilliant, ultra-white light that streamed in through gauzy white curtains. Seemingly from nowhere, my former colleague John appeared and sat in a white wooden chair at the foot of my bed. That would be the same John who had died a half-year earlier of malignant melanoma.

He gazed benignly at me.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"I heard you needed company."

Hmmm.

When I awoke, I asked Michael to drive me to the doctor across town. Dr. MacDonald said I had a bad case of pneumonia. He put me on antibiotics, and within a few days I was restored.

The dream stayed with me and does to this day. It was vivid, real, eerily tranquil. It was not a nightmare … more like a vision in which I was free from fear and any other strong emotion.

Perhaps the veil – the wispy cosmic membrane between temporal life and vast eternity – had torn a bit as my condition declined. While he'd been a great guy in life, apparently I was not ready then to join my friend on the other side.

BAWWWK! Or, Life as a nursery tale

2009-11-17T20:57:00.001-05:00

"Sally Henny Penny gets rather flustered when she tries to count out change, and she insists on being paid cash; but she is quite harmless."

Recently an online customer-service agent answered my email query and commented about my e-address, which has the word hennypenny in it: "I see you're a Beatrix Potter fan."

Now, I love me some Beatrix Potter, especially that bad boy Squirrel Nutkin, but I had never known a Hennypenny connection to Potter's work. So I Googled. And there, in a Potter story called "The Tale of Ginger and Pickles," was a feathered character named Sally Henny Penny who owns a shop.

The Henny Penny I was familiar with was the one in the very old English tale of an fearful fowl who, upon being bonked on the head by an acorn, leapt to the conclusion that the sky was falling. In later print versions, she tells her friend Chicken Little, and they are joined by all manner of panicked barnyard denizens in apocalyptic feather-flapping and hysterics.

My email address derives from a high school nickname bestowed by my best friend Reese. She affectionately morphed my maiden name, Hinman, into "Hinny" and thence to "Henny," from where it was but one small chicken-scratch to "Hennypenny." So Hennypenny I was for a year or so in my late teens. Decades later, when I got my first home email account, I brought the moniker back to life to rep me on the Internet.

Last night on the Web I found some illustrations and book covers for the acorn-bedeviled Henny Penny, and I had to laugh: My nickname might be apter than I'd realized.

There runs the squawking lady chicken, freaking out that the sky is preparing to fall and bring life as she knows it to an end. And here I am, assailed by periodic anxiety attacks and jumping to catastrophic conclusions at every rupture of a kitchen sink pipe, every unwelcome phone call from a high school dean. If I can laugh at that silly Henny Penny, I'd better be able to laugh at myself.

The sky is falling, indeed!

Reverie

2009-11-16T07:35:00.005-05:00

I was on a gilded boat floating on a copper river toward purple hills and an apricot sun.

No. I was on an ebony steed bounding noiseless on a blazing trail past emerald meadows and illuminated trees.

I was airborne, gliding, senseless with the shining. Ahead the fabled mountain exhaled gold – unearthly incense.

I drove home last evening from Edgewood, headed west into a sunset that suffused the air around me. The little homes I passed were like a fairy town, like shrines. Everything was magic, or do I mean holy.

Oh, let it be like this when my day comes. Bear my soul in clouds of knowing; bathe my eager heart in love.

Lights. Camera. ... Tree

2009-11-01T19:52:00.005-05:00

When I was around 25 years old, in the midst of my mind's awakening (the one that was supposed to happen in college, but oh well, I was always a late bloomer), I became something of a freestyle autodidact. I tore through books about spirituality, mysticism, nature, philosophy, more nature, physics, religion, nature. And then I read the book that changed everything: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard.

Aside from being gutted with envy that Dillard had written such a masterpiece when she was not much older than I at the time, and won a Pulitzer for it no less, I was captivated by the book. It seemed that with every turn of a page, my socks got knocked off by a description, an observation, a tying-together of seemingly disparate anecdotes or qualities that yielded some stunning insight. The thing about chlorophyll and human blood? Whoa. The giant water beetle sucking the frog dry before her eyes? Damn. The long riff on fecundity and the lavish redundancy built into reproduction of most species: yikes.

Seriously, if you haven't read Pilgrim yet, please do so now. If you like it, move on to Dillard's slim volume Holy the Firm and then her essay collection, Teaching a Stone to Talk.

Late this afternoon I saw something that made me think of Pilgrim for the first time in a while. Dillard had written about the sudden blazing sight of a tree in the sunlight, and used this anecdote about a blind girl who regained her sight as a guidepost for seeing the world afresh:

Many newly sighted people speak well of the world, and teach us how dull is our own vision. To one patient, a human hand, unrecognized, is "something bright and then holes." Shown a bunch of grapes, a boy calls out "It is dark, blue and shiny.... It isn’t smooth, it has bumps and hollows."

A little girl visits a garden. She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer. (She) stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names by taking hold of it, and then as "the tree with the lights in it.”

No lanterns hung in that little girl's tree, nor in the one Dillard saw in West Virginia back in the 1970s. Nor was electricity involved in lighting this towering golden tree that stood out from among dark pines in the setting sun this evening.

I was in the parking lot at Stop & Shop. I had a long shopping list, and it was growing dark. But there was time – there had to be time – to stop and see. To see the tree. The tree with the lights in it.

If you click on this photograph, you won't be sorry.

What did you see today?

I needed that

2009-10-28T22:13:00.009-04:00

It was 8:30 pm by the time I headed down Oakland Beach Avenue toward home last night. I'd been at work since 8:15 in the morning and had stayed in the city late to attend a pastoral council meeting at our church. The darkness alongside the highway seemed to menace the swath of illumination from my car lights, and I felt vaguely apprehensive. We had had a long a discussion at our meeting about dwindling attendance at weekend Masses, shrinking contributions in the offering baskets, the abrupt resignation of the organist that has left us temporarily without music, the fact that our stewardship weekend two weeks ago had yielded just one new volunteer. We were all thinking: What's to become of our dear parish?

On my way home, I saw storefronts with large "FOR RENT" signs in their windows. The Blockbuster across from our Stop & Shop is closing; posters advertise half-price DVDs.

Then, I came to Oakland Beach itself. When we bought our house here in 2006, and moved down in 2007, the economy hadn't yet taken its worst nosedive. Real estate was plateauing, for sure, but at neighborhood association meetings we discussed block grants and a new master plan, improvements to the area, traffic calming and street trees. A real estate investor was buying up properties with exciting plans to rehab houses and build new ones, and eventually to improve the main commercial strip. Growth! Improvement! Aesthetic touches! Everyone was on board the progress train.

Now, the same ambitious investor is selling off some of his properties, including a cottage on our dead-end road. His dream of upgrading the area is another victim of the floundering economy. One of the rehab projects sits half-finished, its upper story finished and sided, the first floor desolate, unsided, with gaping holes for windows. I had been reading earlier about the desperate plights of Detroit and Flint, Michigan, which are turning into abandoned wastelands. What happens, I wondered, when towns and cities go under? When it all collapses, when people leave or become homeless, when investors run away? What happens when more people lose their jobs and, eventually, their homes? How will people survive?

We baby boomers are entering older age in a far different reality and frame of mind from those we enjoyed for more than a half-century. Our postwar childhoods and our prime working years were prosperous and forward-looking. Incomes went up steadily, city and federal services were plentiful, public education in the suburbs was excellent and well rounded. We dreamed, and we spent.

It all seems decadent now, even for those of us who lived solidly middle-class lives. To think that I used to shop for recreation! Go to flea markets! Plan vacations! Today, in contrast, life seems circumscribed and grim. I know we are still fortunate compared to most of the world's souls, but in the dark evenings of autumn, scary and oppressive thoughts of decay, ruin, and potential poverty are powerful bogeymen.

Such were my dreary thoughts as I drove, bone-tired, down the avenue toward home. Out of the darkness, a puddle of light shone around the entrance to the Congregational Church. I drew closer and noticed a sign hanging outside the church's front door. It was one of those simple white grooved boards that you stick black letters into.

The sign said: HAVE FAITH.

Have faith. Have faith. The words seemed spoken into my ears, not just silent black symbols on a sign. I was so struck by their message, I actually went back this morning to photograph the sign at the church. But ... it was already gone.

Signs mean what we want them to, and I try to keep a lid on my tendency toward magical thinking. But every once in a while, in times of confusion, fatigue, or despair, we may round a corner and see a message that is eerily apt for our situation.

Have faith. What can I do but try?

Blessings 10-25-09

2009-10-25T21:13:00.006-04:00

1. The irresistible mystery of a long-stemmed rose on the sand.

2. Shopping for clothes with Kevin. He's developed his own funky style and likes bright colors. Check the Nikes we got him at Bob's today. He bought purple laces to replace the white ones.

3. Bill Harley's fun, sassy songs for kids. I downloaded a bunch from iTunes tonight to make a CD for Caroline. Bill lives about three miles from Providence and was a member of our pool club, where he'd give an outdoor concert for the kids every summer. Kevin's favorite song was You're in Trouble. We all loved Freddie the Fly-Eating Frog.

4. Figuring out which things in life constitute the "small stuff" that we shouldn't sweat. (My list keeps growing longer.)

5. Autumn colors, autumn light.

Blessings 10-24-09

2009-10-24T14:12:00.007-04:00

This little blessing will be four next month.

1. Watching people grooving to music in their cars. The neatly-coiffed blonde soccer mom in a BMW in front of me at a traffic light bobbing her head and shimmying her shoulders ... The dreadlocked guy in a rusted-out sedan bouncing in his seat to a beat I couldn't hear but could see ... The ponytailed teen, all alone, singing out loud to her radio with a rapturous smile. … I used to think they looked silly. Now I smile – I know just how they feel – and am more certain than ever that music is a common code that connects us all to life, the universe, and everyone. No wonder we dance.

2. Caroline (with an Amanda Pig book in her lap) in reading-readiness mode: "Nana, which word is 'said'? [I point and sound it out.] Sss. Sss. SAID." Pauses to scan the page. "Nana, why does this book have so much 'said'?"

3. That big hug from Kathy on Thursday.

4. Sunrise as I drive to Brown on Smith Street, from La Salle. For a little state, we sure have an impressive state house.

5. Sunset from my west-facing office window. I sure have a great view, if you can ignore the screen.

6. Bonus blessing: Getting into bed at midnight, cold; snuggling up to Michael's warm back. His feet twining with mine. Breathing his unmistakable Michael-ness. Snuggling as close as I can and being surprised by the joy it brings after all these years. Falling sound asleep within minutes: safe, warm, loving, loved.

Goodnight moon

2009-10-21T22:57:00.003-04:00

Kevin took this dark, painterly shot of a crescent moon over the Bay tonight, with my camera. Please click on it so you can better appreciate the subtle color of the sky and the necklace of sparkling lights from the far shores.

To see what else our teenaged son captured while I was still navigating rush-hour traffic from work this evening, please please take a quick look at my sunset blog.

I am proud. I think he has an eye for this.

That's my blessing for tonight.

Blessings 10-20-09

2009-10-20T23:35:00.002-04:00

1. Friends: Having lunch with a local friend tomorrow at PhoNatic; tea with a longtime friend from out of state on Thursday. I don't get out much, between work and home duties, so it is a special treasure when I can spend even an hour with a woman dear to me. We always end up racing through a day's worth of empathetic conversation and laughter.

2. A hot shower right after work: the sinus-clearing warm dampness, pummeling of water on an aching back, clean silky hair, honeysuckle body lotion, cozy bathrobe. Ahhhh.

3. Spending the night curled on the couch with newspapers, watching DVR'ed TV shows: House from three weeks ago, NCIS recorded earlier tonight, and Curb Your Enthusiasm for laughs.

4. Kevin putting away the clean stuff from the dishwasher; me reloading it and washing a bunch of pots and Pyrex dishes. Empty sink and countertop = peace!

5. Approaching home just after the sun set this evening and seeing, to my right from Seaview Ave., ink-black ripples scribbled on the reflective lavender water of Brushneck Cove. In silhouette: a single-masted sailboat at anchor. Some kind of visual haiku lurks there....

Blessings 10-19-09

2009-10-19T22:18:00.004-04:00

1. Crossing things off the longstanding to-do list: Ship Kevin's busted guitar to Epiphone via UPS. Pick up two 12-packs of Daisy's venison dog food at the vet. Complete another Stewardship Sunday at church, with attendant publications, announcements, etc. WHEW.

2. Easy supper after work and errands: Salad and a leftover piece of the broiled fresh swordfish we had last night.

3. Finishing a good book: The Hearts of Horses, by Molly Gloss. It's really about people and place and change; secondarily about horses.

4. Beginning a funny book by a very funny woman. (I Feel Bad About My Neck, by Nora Ephron) Thanks, Cheryl. I need this!

5. Knowing when not to comment on someone else's blog. In general, thank God for the little voice in my mind that whispers, "Wait. Do you really want to do this?" And for heeding it.

Blessings 10-18-09

2009-10-18T21:33:00.006-04:00

Sunset from our beach, October 14, 2009.

Yes, we're featuring a return to the "Blessings" series here at Anne Notations. I've detected the beginning of an emotional rut, seasonal or otherwise. Onward and upward with the antidote.

1. Gotta start with Los Lonely Boys, whose acoustic show last night at the charming Zeiterion Theater in New Bedford emphatically dispelled my worry that a non-Stratocaster version of this great band would be boring or wimpy. Even on hollow-body acoustic guitars and a stripped down drum kit, Henry, Jojo, and Ringo rocked the house – including my brother and his wife, and two of their friends, who pumped their fists and danced alongside me. I felt my funk dissolving in the face of the Garza brothers' musical talent, funny patter, and sheer happiness.

2. In the same vein: Discovering, thanks to the above show, the amazing musicianship of former punk-rocker and veteran songwriter Alejandro Escovedo, who brought two virtuosos to the stage with him – a crack lead guitarist named David Pulkingham and a gypsy-like violinist, Susan Voelz, whose haunting counterpoint to Escovedo's vocals sent chills up my spine.

3. My husband, who – despite an aversion to rock in general and to live shows in particular – went with me to the above concert when a friend had to cancel at the last minute. He even missed most of the Yankees epic playoff game on TV. Thank you, dear.

4. The MBTA commuter train, and the "T" (Boston subway), which took Kevin and me to Boston for a blitz visit to two colleges – Emerson and Northeastern – last Wednesday. The ride from Providence was especially pleasant due to a chance meeting with a former colleague and the ensuing conversation. Also: Boston was beautiful and alluring in its fall finery on an especially bright, crisp day. The gorgeous old architecture of the buildings that house Emerson College was a delight to the eyes. Not least, I inwardly warmed with pride when my often-shy boy Kevin raised his hand and asked a question at one of the information sessions.

5. An afternoon nap in my comfy recliner, under a polarfleece blanket, on this very cold, rainy, windy fall day. Those stolen two hours exemplified the line from MacBeth: “Sleep that knits up the ravel'd sleave of care.”

Get by with a little help

2009-10-17T13:10:00.003-04:00

A friend referred me to a Web slide show with lovely photographs and quotes. Things have been very stressful for me lately, and I've felt constrained from writing here.

Images and quotes like this one help. Thanks, Liz.

This time of year

2009-09-28T10:32:00.020-04:00

A dock on Brushneck Cove, mid September.

Ahhh, this weather! Nights in the 50s, days in the 70s. Everything is beautiful. If there is a heaven, I would like it to have this climate all the time. Beyond time, that is.

Daisy and I took a brilliant morning walk up Seaview Ave. one morning last week. Well, the walk was normal, but the sights! Water like a mirror; bright houseboat against vivid blue. I love seeing twice: once as I walk and see something that quickens my heart; again as I look into the viewfinder and get ready to click. I never tire of the combination of outdoors, exercise, nature appreciation, and art.

Fowl play
This morning as I walked Daisy up to Danger Bridge, I saw Mama Swan sailing like a white ship up Brushneck Cove with two large, gray cygnets trailing her. Formerly there were five babies. Can I hope the other three have ventured off to new lives?

Father Swan, alas, was less fortunate. His body washed up alongside Seaview Avenue several weeks ago. Our friend Bill said it appeared to have been run over by a boat; another man I chatted with last week as he walked his fat old dachshund claimed local kids had stoned it to death. Both fates are horrific, but I prefer the boat accident version. When you get up close to an adult swan (which can be risky!), it's hard to imagine wanting to kill something that magnificent, proud, and graceful.

Little old Lily doing her best "I'm a big fierce dog" snarl at Daisy.

Feed us! Feed us!

On the pond side of Danger Bridge, the other swan family (mother, father, one cygnet) were climbing down the grassy embankment and shaking their feathers out before launching into the still waters. That family has become so tame, I worry about them. They hang around in people's yards now (see above) looking for handouts, emitting the occasional hiss just to show who's in charge.

Also this morning from the bridge, I saw a large flock of mallards paddling near the shore, with several lone males winging up the cove just feet above the water. Here come the over-wintering waterfowl! Next will be the Brants, followed by the hunters with their death machines. Yes, I'm a wimp about hunting. Yes, I know it helps control overpopulation of species.

We have had an influx of white egrets this year. These are the graceful creatures that seem to have stepped out of a Japanese print. I saw one near the mallards this morning and two more across the cove. Compared to ducks, they are slender and balletic as they mince on stick legs through the shallows, stabbing their long, needle-sharp bills at fish under the surface.

The formative movie of my childhood, redux
My parents bought our first TV when I was around four. I was addicted to "Captain Kangaroo" every weekday morning.

One of the best things about having a TV back then was our annual January date with The Wizard of Oz. I was too young to have seen it in a theater, and born decades before "videos" became a commonplace consumer purchase. Our own children watched the video repeatedly. For me, there was something oddly unsatisfying about being able to shove a cassette in the VCR and watch Dorothy and Toto and the sadistic Miss Gulch any time we felt like it. Gone was the rapturous, shivery anticipation of the annual TV showing.

The magic returned, for me anyway, with a one-night-only large-screen showing of the remastered, high-def (a relative term) Wizard in selected cinemas around the country. Of course I bought tickets as soon as I read about the event. Last Wednesday evening Peter and I sat near the front of the theater and watched the familiar story unfold.

How pretty the young Judy Garland was on the big screen! Her skin, luminous; her eyes, large and expressive. Special effects were primitive in the 1930s, but that screaming dark tornado was vivid, reminding me of the derivative twister nightmares I endured for decades thereafter. And the Wizard! – a huge head hologram moving its lips on a curtain, bellowing at the poor cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr owning the iconic furry character), reprimanding plucky Dorothy – "SILENCE, whippersnapper!" Oh, yikes. As a child I watched that scene, trembling, from between my fingers, ready to snap them shut when it became too much.

"I'll get you, my pretty. And your little dog, too!" Was there ever a witchier witch in childhood cinema?

What was remarkable to me was the way the audience responded with instant recognition to lines that have become part of the vernacular: "Toto too?" "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." "There's no place like home." Like my beloved Star Wars, the Wizard of Oz is a splendid, timeless piece of cinema - and a fecund source for all manner of popular culture and sayings.

Little critters
The end of summer brings animals and insects out for last-ditch feeding and mating frenzies. Daisy learned this the hard way when she walked up to a skunk in our road late one night and got drenched face-first with the foulest smelling spray I've ever had the misfortune to inhale – or wash off.

This big bad girl is polishing off a fly next to our garden shed.

Around the gardens we see the frantically busy insects and arachnids. As the shadows deepen each day, female garden spiders create a last elaborate web and eat hearty, then tuck precious egg sacs in safe places.

Two mantises intent on hanky-panky?

Fascinating, chameleon-like praying mantises roam our yard and streets like latter-day dinosaurs, chowing on (sob) butterflies and fattening up for the fall egg-laying ritual.

What's the winter rule about woolly bear caterpillars? I saw one near the beach path yesterday that had a reddish-brown band at least an inch long around his middle. Cold weather on the way?

Bees humming, jamming pollen in their leg sacs, bumblebees and honeybees and wasps, all over the flowers. I move among them without fear, snipping dead flowers right in among the fuzzy buzzers, telling them, "I won't hurt you. I'm here to make new flowers grow." Honestly, we seem to groove on the same wavelength; they are docile and calm as I snip and pinch the plants.

Day's end
The tradeoff for the lovely cool nights is shorter days. No matter. The evening skies become canvases for an unseen Artist, and again, there I am with my camera, hopping onto boulders for a better view, looking for new ways to see the waning of the light. With summer beach crowds and partiers no longer hanging around, our screen doors admit quiet sounds of the early autumn nights: crickets, soughing wind in the trees, the "mew" of a feral cat.

Autumn arrives, and I am its lover, witness, besotted chronicler. "O World, I cannot hold thee close enough...."

I am an enthusiast

2009-09-20T12:43:00.011-04:00

Two weeks ago our department played a game at work: Guess the Colleague. We each submitted a sentence about ourselves that was something our co-workers probably wouldn't know. Then everyone filled out a combined questionnaire, guessing who owned which feat or trait or experience. Shouting out guesses was fun. Along came this clue:

"This colleague owns a sweat-stained handkerchief thrown by Tom Jones at the Warwick Musical Tent."

In a millisecond, all eyes turned toward me. People smiled and shouted, "Anne! It's Anne!" Not because I've ever expressed love for Tom Jones. No. Clearly the answer had to be the department's best known fangirl. Yours truly.

I quickly denied the connection, putting my foot in it by exclaiming indignantly, "Tom Jones? No way!!! Never Tom Jones," only to learn that it was our boss who had caught and kept the Tom Jones relic. The same boss who was sitting mere feet from me. Sorry, boss!

Last night on Facebook a cyber-friend and fellow Brown grad commented on my reference to the delightful Web site Cute Overload, a trove of hilarious animal photos and videos with clever captions. I had said on my FB wall that CO.com was where I go to relax and laugh at the end of the day. Robert replied: "It's one of your many sources of mirth and de-stressing – photography, food, Jack White, Federer, other pop culture, other silliness. You've embraced life as FUN. I like your style."

Even though he missed some biggies – Star Wars, ice hockey, dogs, kids, books, Los Lonely Boys – Robert gets it: I am an enthusiast. Not fangirl. Although I've occasionally described myself as the latter – it's more contemporary and kooky sounding, an image I'll admit to cultivating up to a point. But really. I'm nearly 58 years old! Too old to be a "fangirl." Right? Am I right???

I know to some I appear silly and lightweight because of my numerous and varied enthusiasms. (And that "some" includes, at times, my own kids and husband.) Those who roll their eyes should know, however, that my hobbies were hand-holds by which I pulled myself, inch by inch, out of years of anxiety, panic, and depression. Once, not so long ago, I was too agoraphobic to attend concerts or even movies. Now, I am a virtual club rat. Once I couldn't travel without my husband at my side. But in 2005 I went, alone, to Indianapolis for Star Wars Celebration 3, a week that rocked my world. I met my online Star Wars sisters, found my way by myself in a strange city, and for the first time in 15 years was myself – Anne – instead of Mom.

It can't be bad, or wrong, to love Jack White's music so much that I'll travel around New England to see any of his three bands, and the same goes for Los Lonely Boys. Certainly shouting myself hoarse at a close college hockey game, riding the rollercoaster of triumph and defeat, is a useful catharsis and stimulant. The giddy fun of the Star Wars universe, my worship of Obi-wan Kenobi (particularly in the person of Ewan McGregor, ha ha), the way good electric blues-rock moves my body and soul: these passions help me through the other stuff, the times I resolved not to dwell on here – the nightly melancholy of missing my husband, my worries about Kevin's schoolwork and Melinda's discipline at college and Andrés's continuing lack of a real career, the self-loathing my weight evokes in me every single hour of every day.

A fellow mood-disorder sufferer is fond of noting, "Depression hates a moving target." So I say no to the bleak aspects of life when they try to grab my ankles and pull me down into a black lagoon, yes to my passions. Yes to being an enthusiast.

Yes to life as a fangirl at any age.

Says it all

2009-09-11T20:52:00.002-04:00

Source: Floating around the Internet

This new year

2009-09-10T10:54:00.007-04:00

Some readers (bless your hearts) have checked here looking for new posts. Between our kids going back to college and high school, and the revved-up pace at work as Brown begins a new academic year, I have felt depleted when it comes time to blog at night.

However, there are several new posts on my sunset/sky blog, so please take a look.

Even as I feel harried by the busy-ness at the end of every summer, I also enjoy the clear days, cool nights, and the energy – all those young people learning like sponges, except more actively.

I took some photos at Brown's Opening Convocation yesterday and enjoyed being up-close to the excitement of the new freshmen and grad/med students. I've been busy switching my important dates and appointments from my old datebook to the academic year 2009-10 one I bought at Staples.

What do you like about this time of year? Is it all sadness for summer ending too soon, or is fall the real "new year" for you as it is for me?

Go with the ebb

2009-08-24T20:52:00.012-04:00

Tidal pond off Seaview Ave. Click photos to see larger.

Summer is winding down. You wouldn't know it from the weather – hot and humid. But you can see it in the changing angle of the sun from morning to sundown, the different shadows, the surprise splash of red foliage among the green along the bike path, the swelling pods of the milkweed. You can smell the crisp browned grasses and hear the heartfelt swan song of crickets in the wild meadow across the road from us.

Speaking of swans, our local pair has almost finished raising its last cygnet (above). He's as big as an adult, but he seems reluctant to leave the nest.

The swans have become rather tame, and like to hang out on Doreen and Chuck's lawn near the little salt pond off Seaview Ave. One day as I drove by in my car, I laughed as the father swan chased a pretty tabby cat across the grass, running pellmell on his black paddle-feet, neck outstretched, flapping his enormous wings. "Get off of my lawn!" you could imagine him hissing. All he needed to be swandom's answer to Clint Eastwood was a shotgun.

Wandering around with my camera Saturday evening, I saw families cooling themselves along our shore. Kids searched for crabs and clams along the rock jetties.

A mother and her brood sat comfortably on the old foundation wall at the entrance to the cove.

A woman who'd been lying on the beach got up for one last swim in the shallow, warm low-tide water.

Daisy, less apt to frolic and pull than in her younger days, takes her time in the heat, snuffling among grasses on the bike path as Kevin waits patiently.

Looking west at the cove: there's that light. That filtered late-summer light. It hints of autumn, but my heart says "summer" still.

Plus ça change...

2009-08-19T16:56:00.003-04:00

"There's nothing new under the sun." My mom used to say that, and I would invariably roll my eyes. What did she know?

A lot, apparently. Recent years have seen the return (sadly) of bellbottom slacks, bangs, Spam (the kind in a can) as a viable meal staple, and even the popularity of vinyl records.

Today an online ad from J.Jill Clothing promoted a "new" boyfriend fashion look – shown at left. I say: "I've seen that look before." And by "before" I mean "in 1977."

Can you say Annie Hall?

On the porch

2009-08-13T09:43:00.004-04:00

While I am grateful for the near-ubiquity of air conditioning – I'm not a hot/humid person by constitution – I dearly enjoy sitting outside in an Adirondack chair or "granny rocker" on the front porch, even on hot days. Almost always there is a fragment of breeze that helps cool a sweaty brow.

As a very young girl, I spent time on my grandparents' front porch in Fairhaven, Mass. I'd sit in Grandma's lap and we'd rock.. rock... rock. Neighbors would stop on their way up the street, and everyone would catch up on the town gossip. During the Hurricane of '54, Grandpa and I stood on that porch in our slickers and watched firemen in rowboats paddling up and down the flooded streets. The porch was like a reverse stage, a balcony where we watched things happen. We saw and were seen. I have loved that prospect ever since.

All of the five houses Michael and I have owned in 34 years have had front porches or decks; it's one of those requirements I have for my living space. For two years while Michael finished his PhD we rented a really nice, big second-floor apartment in Providence. But there was no porch, and I felt trapped, hemmed-in, cut off from life at street level. I vowed we would never again live somewhere without same-floor access to the outdoors.

Front porches seemed to have been favored on both sides of my family. Photo albums hold many a sepia image of great-great ancestors on porches, like the German-Americans photographed, above, in St. Louis early in the last century. The woman on the right was my maternal great-grandmother, Elizabeth Brune Girthofer. When it was hot, the women would sit and rock in the evenings and cool themselves with pleated paper fans adorned with Japanese motifs – peonies, kimono-clad ladies, cranes.

I have a few of Grandma's paper fans still, but they feel overly dainty in my big strong hands, relics of a time when ladies bathed and powdered themselves on hot days, then sat in fresh, light dresses on the porch with glasses of homemade lemonade. I'm a shorts-and-tank-tops gal myself, broad-shouldered like my dad's side of the family, tall, solid, outdoorsy. Filmy dresses and flowered fans really aren't my style – or anyone else's in this day and age. But porches – ah, they will never go out of fashion, thank God.

Late this hot afternoon, Kevin and I walked down our road to the beach and went swimming as the evening tide surged in. The water was just right – cool enough to be refreshing, warm enough not to shock my body as I walked into the low surf. We floated and bobbed for a half-hour, luxuriating in the cool waves and the bay views, then returned home and sat on the front porch, me in the Adirondack chair, Kevin on the railing. The air was still heavily warm, but my wet bathing suit and a slight breeze cooled me. Mumbling bees and the bright tissue-paper wings of excited butterflies darted around the flowering plants to my left; our just-turned 17 son, tall and strong and suddenly manly, lazed to my right. There really wasn't anywhere else I wanted to be.

Thanks to Neil for the inspiration.

Blessings 8-11-09

2009-08-11T21:58:00.005-04:00

1. An only-in-Rhode-Island Monday holiday, which gave me a lovely four-day weekend.

2. The exquisite crispness of air conditioning on muggy summer nights. Ahhhhhhh.

At a Revs-Galaxy soccer game Saturday night: Eric, Kevin, and Melinda

3. Cousins (see photo, above). I loved spending holidays and vacations with my cousins on both sides; our kids totally enjoy getting together with theirs. There is something timeless and comforting about cousin friendships. Also, two of my very early crushes, c. age 10-11, were on boy cousins! (blush)

4. My generous Maine friends, the owners of six dogs (five of them rescues), who always have room in their home and hearts to foster one more – like this sweet older Sheltie awaiting adoption.

5. Watching reruns of Bones with Melinda while sipping cold limeade.

Mon jardin, mon coeur

2009-08-09T12:03:00.014-04:00

How I love our small, colorful gardens! On nice days, I am outside for hours: fussing, pruning, pinching, weeding, smelling the luscious roses, admiring the palette of yellows, pinks, purples, blues, and white (with a dash of orange lilies at the moment) that splashes across our front yard.

This year the perennials are so robust, it's hard to believe it was just over a year ago that we started these gardens from scratch.

Late June 2008:

Early August 2009:

Please click to see this larger for best effect.

The small, forlorn Asiatic lily stalk I plucked from a markdown table and planted late last summer has turned into this showpiece:

Can you spot the tiny shiny green bee? Click to see the photo larger, and you can't miss it! I didn't notice it until I was editing this batch of photographs.

In the mid 1970s, my colleague Martha M. gave me a sprig from her mother's variegated impatiens. She told me they were miracle plants, and she was right. I've grown these hot-pink babies from cuttings ever since – descendants all of that original plant in Pennsylvania. They grow several feet high and bushy without needing to be pinched or deadheaded, and do equally well in the ground and in large containers. Each October I take cuttings to root indoors and pot over the winter, continuing the cycle. I love these plants for their own exuberant selves, and for the memories and friendship they evoke.

Our backyard raised bed yields delicious things to eat.

A garden is more than patches of soil containing plants. In my case, it's a living, moving, breathing grove for joy and contemplation. It's a window into my heart. It restores my soul.

Blessings 8-5-09

2009-08-05T14:30:00.006-04:00

1. Last night: The tingly whoosh and bang of fireworks on our beach.

2. This morning: a platinum lozenge of sun melting through fog.

3. Trying to think constructively, not defensively, about my shortcomings regardless of whether they are real or merely perceived.

4. The richness of writing on the Internet. There are so many intelligent, fascinating words on blogs, in reader comments on media sites, and really, all over the Web. Yes, there is lots of dreck and coarse harassment, too. But prose diamonds are scattered generously. If you have something to share in your own words, no publisher or agent is required. The Web is the Wild West, the new frontier, outer space, and (metaphorically) the Library at Alexandria – all as close as your keyboard.

5. Speaking of keyboards, I will always be grateful that my mother signed me up for typing class in summer school between ninth and tenth grades, decades before anyone knew we'd all be communicating via personal computers. My own school assignments were always neatly typed on my Hermes portable manual machine, and I made a good chunk of spending money in college by charging 50 cents a page for typing other students' papers.

How do kids learn to type nowadays? Our daughter was taught touch-typing in her (all-girls) middle school and can type close to 90 wpm, but our sons hunt and peck. Shouldn't touch-typing – the kind where you don't need to look at the keyboard as you work – be taught universally in middle schools as befits the most basic of today's necessary skills?

Blessings 8-3-09

2009-08-03T23:58:00.003-04:00

1. Dinner this evening with three friends: the company of simpatico women, conversation both funny and thoughtful, nice wine, absolutely perfect food, a lovely screened porch in a tranquil suburb.

2. Finding the perfect dog-loving young woman to walk Daisy this week while we're at work and Kevin is away.

3. Gaga's Lemon Sherbetter: cool ambrosia in a pint container.

4. The almost-full moon illuminating the bay tonight when I pulled into our driveway.

5. The only reality show I will watch, and it's a doozy: Cake Boss! Mondays at 10 on TLC. You can't help but smile. And crave some cake.

Blessings 8-2-09

2009-08-02T22:35:00.004-04:00

1. The words, from Caroline, "I love you, Nana."

2. The words, from my husband, "You look young and pretty to me."

3. Baking a blueberry sour-cream coffeecake in my 30-year-old harvest-gold bundt pan.

4. A phone call from my friend (and mother of my first boyfriend) Peggy, now 83 and going strong, that ended with her saying "I love you" and me saying it back.

5. The way gardens thrive here in the soft air of the bay.

Blessings 7-28-09

2009-07-28T22:49:00.003-04:00

1. Discovering a little market in a low-income neighborhood on our way home from work with amazing produce prices (dark sweet cherries, .99/lb) and deals on meat and fish: fresh scallops $4.99/lb.

2. This song by Kelly Clarkson, performed live.

3. Being able to smile at life's ups and downs and round and rounds. Click image to read.

4. Heading to bed on time.... Good night!

Blessings 7-27-09

2009-07-27T19:47:00.003-04:00

1. Taking Kevin to the photo studio for his senior yearbook portrait this afternoon. His outfit: crisp white dress shirt, striped tie, navy blazer ... and madras shorts and flipflops.

2. The relief of a sea breeze at home on this very hot, muggy day.

3. Supper prepared a day ahead: homemade chicken salad and a tossed salad. Tortilla chips optional.

4. The people at my office who came by to welcome me back from vacation and stayed to talk for a while. They remind me why I love working where I do. And they remind me that most of us – not just poor pitiful me – have invisible challenges and rough patches in our personal lives. Hang in there, everyone!

5. Looking ahead to a poolside potluck reunion with my high school besties at the end of August.

Blessings 7-26-09

2009-07-26T21:44:00.005-04:00

1. The woman parishioner at St. Sebastian's who volunteered to lead us all in singing, in the absence of choir or organ at the 11:00 mass. Thank you, aptly named Joy with the lovely soprano voice.

2. My 16 year old son reading the Epistle and the Prayers of the Faithful from beside the altar. To have a teenaged son who volunteers without embarrassment to read Scripture at mass is truly a blessing.

3. The loaves and the fishes. This gospel about a miracle is alluring to the very young – look, Jesus made lots of food for a crowd! – and humbling for adults. When Father Hayman read it today, what I heard was: Do more than expected. Give more. Interrupt your own agenda to minister to those in need.

I'm not sure God intended Jesus to do these very literal things in his public life – heal cripples, cast out devils, produce food for 5,000 from five loaves of bread. Personally, I'm not comfortable assuming that Jesus did them to dazzle the people of Palestine with magic tricks in order to further his ministry. Rather I believe that at times love simply overflowed his heart. Jesus the man couldn't help himself – the power of the Divine within him burst forth and manifested in merciful, miraculous acts. Not: Look at me! But: I see you.

4. The hydrangea in our garden finally blooming bluer than blue.

5. Having an actual sit-down Sunday afternoon dinner, all four of us, before Michael left for his week in Connecticut.

Bye, honey. I love you. See you on Friday.

Saturday afternoon roundup

2009-07-25T15:12:00.011-04:00

I got a little derailed from my Blessings posts, but will resume. Meanwhile, I have been:

1) Vacationing. Two weeks' worth, here at home. The first week we had amazing weather, mostly sunny and clear but not too hot. I got a good tan (I know; tans are bad), slept late some days, decompressed from the spring crunch at work, and finished reading some books. I did find it weird and lonely to be home for two weeks without Michael. Even when we don't go away on vacation, we usually do some fun day-trips together. Next year.

2) Driving. On Wednesday I drove about an hour to Mystic, CT, to meet Internet friends Di and Don, from Ontario, who were visiting her mother in Connecticut. It was our first face-to-face meetup but, as I said to them over lunch, we've "known" each other for so long online, I really didn't feel any strangeness at all. They are lovely folks and I was so happy we could get together.

The latter is especially true because we all suffer from variants of anxiety disorder. Ten years ago, such a get-together would have been impossible or at least highly fraught. Last week Di bravely pushed through her crippling agoraphobia to come to CT and see her family. Ten years ago I would not have been driving on any highway whatsoever; it was one of the chief phobias caused by my panic disorder.

I used to creep along at 55 mph, max, due to my highway phobia.

So it is certainly a blessing that I drove, alone, on 95 South to Mystic, just as I can now drive to Boston and back, as I did for several concerts this past year. I took photos to document my drive this time, given the occasion – a mini-convention of people who battle anxiety!

3) Reading: Just read and enjoyed two novels by Dani Shapiro recommended by fellow bookworm Cheryl; am finishing Terrorist by John Updike, and took four more books out of the library this morning. Time to read is pure joy.

4) Gardening: The sugar-snap pea harvest is dwindling to an end, and the first several cherry-sized orange tomatoes ripened this week – sweet as sugar. Thanks to the rainiest July on record here, the gardens are lush and towering. Heavy rains break the stems of my roses frequently, but I just cut the blossoms and bring them inside for the kitchen counter.

5) Taking photographs. There have been so many splendid evening skies – not necessarily sunsets, although a few of those, too. Impressive cloud formations... stark contrasts of white against black or steel gray ... clouds reflected on the surface of the waves.

6) Riding my bike! Short rides around the area are all I can manage right now, but it feels great to glide along and see the sights from a bike seat.

7) Cooking. I made gazpacho yesterday, and we can smell the rich aroma of a Browned-Butter Banana-Chocolate Bundt Cake in the oven at the moment. I stumbled upon a great food blog, Bunny's Warm Oven, and copied a bunch of recipes from it. Lime-cilantro chicken is in our near future, too.

8. Eating: fresh cherries, plums, peaches, nectarines, blueberries in abundance. This is the best time of year for my favorite fruits.

9. Worrying about my Aunt Jo, who has cancer and just fell and broke a leg. My brother and I had planned to visit her yesterday, but her fall put the kibosh on that trip for now. She is our last close relative in that generation. My maternal grandfather's cousin (second cousin, I think: my mom's generation) just died out in Colorado last month. My grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and other deceased relatives live so vividly in my memories and dreams, I sometimes feel as if I can feel or hear them. Whether it's an actual presence of their [soul/energy/plug in your own term] or just the imparted glow of memory, I am strengthened by knowing they love me.

10. Being invited to dinner with friends tonight at a swanky country club. Not something we get to do often! Time to get out of the shorts and tank and sneakers and into something feminine for a change.

I loved watching this little girl doing a happy dance/prance on the rocks at the beach. Click on the photo to see it larger:

Blessings 7-20-09

2009-07-19T18:23:00.007-04:00

1. Kevin rushing in the front door breathless yesterday evening, cupping in his hands a tiny nestling, all soft feathers and bug eyes and wide-open mouth, that he'd found on the walking path. The two of us consulting the Internet, then locating the cries of its probable parents in a grove of lilacs and trumpet vines, and restoring baby bird to a secure perch in high branches inside a shallow Rubbermaid container.

2. Hoping that the parents will, as promised by the Audubon Society's Web site, continue to care for said nestling when they recognize its hungry voice.

Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father's knowledge. – Matthew 10

3. Last night's spectacular skies just before and during sunset.

4. The blue neon star on our chimney.

5. A muggy summer day to be lazy, to read a novel, to get take-out Chinese food for supper.

Blessings 7-19-09

2009-07-19T17:01:00.008-04:00

1. Being able to drive to Boston, and back again. (’Twas not always thus.)

2. Cozy concert venues like the House of Blues (above) and Paradise in Boston, and Lupo's in Providence.

3. Jack White's new band The Dead Weather.

4. Jack White playing guitar or drums, and singing.

5. Not being "too old" for rock and roll ... or funky green soda and hamburgers with Peter at a brew-pub in Boston.

Blessings 7-17-09

2009-07-17T23:07:00.004-04:00

1. The song "Summer Breeze" -- lyrics more poignant than ever.

2. Giving the parakeets' cage a thorough cleaning. They actually sound happier.

3. Caroline from 6:30 til 4: on the prowl, on sunflower patrol, on the go, on the beach, on her Dora the Explorer plastic chair, in the baby pool on the sidewalk. On! And then: the deepest sleep at naptime.

4. A last bittersweet Friday visit from Andrés, who leaves early Sunday morning for (fingers crossed) a new job and a new life in Ohio. I already miss him but am proud of his guts.

5. A shower (ahhhh) and then a glass of white wine with an ice cube on a sultry Friday night.

Blessings 7-16-09

2009-07-16T21:26:00.004-04:00

1. The glint of golden hairs on a tanned arm.

2. Every Thursday: 5 cents off per gallon of gas at Lukoil on West Shore Road. ($2.48 a gallon today.) There were lines, but everyone was polite and patient.

3. Several dozen giant spools of thread in rainbow hues next to a sewing machine at the dry-cleaners.

4. The Amanda and Oliver Pig books by Jean Van Leeuwen with charming illustrations by Ann Schweninger: favorites of Melinda and Kevin, and now Caroline.

5. Reading light summer page-turners. Bemused that the same crime-novel author who could write a clunker like this – "We turned off the highway and headed into the rural." – could also toss off a neat description like this one: "A dozen police cars were angled in front of [the] clinic, all pointing in various directions like darts thrown by a drunk."

Blessings 7-15-09

2009-07-15T22:59:00.003-04:00

1. It's true that you don't forget how to ride a bike.

2. The little dingie-bell I installed on my bike handlebars. The merry "ch-ching" sound brings me back to the sidewalks of Elmhurst, Ill., where I first learned to ride a two-wheeler.

3. Getting up earlier. As I feel more relaxed with each vacation day, I sleep better and wake up at normal times.

4. Downloading The Dead Weather's first album, Horehound, from iTunes. Anticipating seeing them in Boston this weekend.

5. Being told by a passerby as I chatted with her from our front porch yesterday that I couldn't possibly be old enough to have a child in college. Bless her!

*Thanks, Dad, for the good-skin gene.*

Blessings 7-14-09

2009-07-14T20:31:00.005-04:00

1. Sunshine on my shoulders.

If I had a day that I could give you
I'd give to you a day just like today

2. My right hand aching from using my extension grabber to fill four garbage bags with beach litter.

3. Reading one whole novel; starting a second.

4. Making plans to visit an elderly relative and some Internet friends next week.

5. Three six-inch pots of snapdragons at 99 cents each, now planted out front.

Bonus: The hands in the photo belong to Jack White.

Blessings 7-13-09

2009-07-13T22:04:00.003-04:00

1. Discovering that sunflowers have grown unnoticed – perhaps from feeder seed scattered by birds last winter and spring? – among the weeds and lilies across the street.

2. Walking Daisy on the beach first thing in the morning when everything smells fresh.

3. Getting my ancient Italian 5-speed bike repaired. It's back home tonight, somewhat rusty on the fenders but in working order and with new tires. Tomorrow I will ride!

4. The way I feel like a different person – energized, light, springy – when I wear my favorite sneakers. Which I will do more often this summer, instead of sliding into flip-flops all the time.

5. The first local butter-and-sugar corn on the cob. Not quite at peak sweetness yet, but still a treat at supper tonight.

Blessings 7-12-09

2009-07-12T23:21:00.002-04:00

1. Thirty-four years ago, Michael and I faced the Rev. Donald Finley at the front of the austere Mattapoisett Congregational Church in my Massachusetts hometown and exchanged "I do's." This morning we exchanged anniversary cards, one of which included a fart joke.

2. Reading in the New York Times Magazine about whales that seem to seek connection with humans.

3. Taking my old, 5-speed granny bike to be tuned up by a local repair man. Buying a wicker basket to hang from the front handlebars.

4. Freshly shampooed hair drying outside in a warm breeze.

5. Two weeks of leisure stretching before me like the yellow brick road: no deadlines, just a stack of library books and the promise of good weather.

Blessings 7-11-09

2009-07-10T07:48:00.006-04:00

1. Post-dinner naps in the recliner.

2. Surrendering to the "garden flag" thing.

3. Caroline playing in her new, tiny inflatable kiddie pool wearing just her undies, in yesterday's warm sunshine.

4. Ben & Jerry's Vanilla Heath Bar Crunch.

5. Perennials on steroids. This year's rains have yielded humungous hedges of plants that last year stood only 3' to 4' high.

Blessings 7-08-09

2009-07-08T22:24:00.002-04:00

1. One more day until I start my vacation.

2. Gas prices coming down 7 cents since last week.

3. Big, fat Crayola crayons on my desk, waiting for Caroline's visit this Friday.

4. The weeknight freedom of sprawling across our queen-sized bed; the weekend joy of sharing it with Michael.

5. Living in a state small and connected enough that my library card works in any Rhode Island city or town.

Blessings 7-7-09

2009-07-07T21:51:00.003-04:00

1. Friends who understand, and friends who help me understand.

2. The way flowers look even brighter on a rainy day.

3. Homemade chicken salad, prepared the night before.

4. Clipping articles from the Providence and Warwick newspapers for Michael to read when he comes home on weekends.

5. Picking out favorite board books as a gift for a friend's baby that will be delivered tomorrow. (The baby, not the books.)

Blessings 7-6-09

2009-07-06T22:45:00.001-04:00

1. Two working women out for lunch at a brick-walled bistro: Melinda and me.

2. Praying at the beach jetty one evening last week; seeing (suddenly! instantly!) a fragment of rainbow in the sky. Hi, Mom.

3. Discovering Curtis Salgado when his blues song "Twenty Years of B.B. King" drifts over from a neighbor's July 4 cookout.

4. This quote from Michael Jackson's memoir, Dangerous:

Consciousness expresses itself through creation. This world we live in is the dance of the creator. Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on. On many an occasion, when I am dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred. In those moments, I felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists. I become the stars and the moon. I become the lover and the beloved. I become the victor and the vanquished. I become the master and the slave. I become the singer and the song. I become the knower and the known. I keep on dancing and then, it is the eternal dance of creation. The creator and the creation merge into one wholeness of joy. I keep on dancing...until there is only...the dance.

5. A long holiday weekend featuring:
• Granddaughter Caroline's first fireworks, watched in her jammies from our upper deck
• An all-American supper here with good friends from Providence, featuring hamburgers, Saugy's hot dogs, my potato salad, and Melinda's flag cake (decorated with blueberries and strawberries on a field of whipped cream).
• The first weekend of glorious weather we've had in months. It made my heart sing.
• Three days and three nights of Michael being home.
• Families and couples and neighbors and everyone from miles around, it seemed, coming to Oakland Beach, strolling the bike/walking path, buying clamcakes at Iggy's, setting off a zillion firecrackers and rockets, and being mellow and friendly.
• Our Take a Photo on July 4 group on Facebook. (This was the followup to the very successful Take a Photo from Your Porch on June 1. Stay tuned for Take a Photo on August 1.)

Now I'm going to include some photos to make up for omitting my blessings blogs this past weekend. Click on any photo to see it larger.

Thursday, 7/2: A lightning/thunder mashup a block away startles Daisy!

Caroline, our "flower girl," exploring my gardens in her waterproof boots. (7/3)

Orange daylilies are now in full bloom.

A splendid July 4. i thank you God for most this amazing day …

Three cheers for the red, white, and blue. And for prescription sunglasses so I can actually see this day in all its glory.

Evening moonrise, Oakland Beach (7/4)

People linger, savoring the cool clear air.

A young couple snuggles dreamily on the beach jetty as the sun sets.

Our house in its July 4 finery, seen from the bike path; Michael on porch.

Day is done; the flag waves on.

I absolutely love this photo Michael took at the beach during our walk on Sunday. (7/5)

What's going on here?

It's Daisy's preferred position on the second-story deck, looking out toward the bay. (7/5)

Beautiful boy

2009-07-01T22:14:00.006-04:00

Watch this live (not lip-synched) performance by the Jackson 5 on Merv Griffin in 1974, when Michael was a vibrant young black man of 16. He is James Brown ("ha!"), Fred Astaire, Stevie Wonder; beguiler of audiences; consummate showman. Knowing now that he was gravely mistreated by his father to produce such performances makes me sad, but it doesn't diminish the joy of seeing a bright talent ascendant. You literally cannot take your eyes off him.

It will be one week tomorrow since Michael Jackson died, and until today I have passed somewhat lightly over the news, alternating in my comments between casual snark and obligatory praise for the man's talent. To be honest, he looked so terrible in recent years, I wasn't surprised to learn of his sudden death. He had ceased being a performer and instead become, in my mind, a loony scarecrow living an unthinkably odd life.

Why, tonight, do I suddenly care? Why am I sitting here watching Michael Jackson music videos on YouTube and feeling myself clench in ... what, grief? For ... a freak? Am I crying at this very moment for his glorious youth? For mine?

Perhaps I've read too many debunkings of the child molestation charges; read evidence of the tortured, lonely existence of a closeted gay man-child; read a short but soul-shaking commentary by columnist Andrew Sullivan that begins, "There are two things to say about him. He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child."

How could I have forgotten my immersion, in the early 1980s, in Jackson's seminal solo work on his breakout albums Off the Wall and Thriller? The giddy abandonment of dancing around our living room with my then-teenaged stepdaughter to "Billie Jean" and "Beat It"? The rush of watching him, live on the MTV awards show, glide into his patented moon walk?

A long, fantastically choreographed video of Jackson's song "Smooth Criminal."

I can't help but think that, despite the comfort of his three children and the adulation of fans around the world, Michael Jackson's gentle soul was as tortured in the last decade as the poor flesh of his catastrophically carved face.

This evening on the Web, I've revisited the Michael Jackson who entranced me 25 years ago. That's how I choose to remember him: young, lean, on fire, alight with androgynous sexuality, lifting his gorgeous alto-soprano in song, whirling in an explosion of vitality. Rest in peace, beautiful boy.

Blessings 7-1-09

2009-06-30T22:54:00.003-04:00

1. The sea.

2. Smell of the sea: brine, faint diesel fuel, seaweed.

3. Breeze off the sea, gliding its soft skin over mine.

4. Color of the sea: deep blue, pine, tea, white-riffled, steel.

5. Sound of the sea: shushing waves, seagulls' barks and mews, boat horn, sailboat-race cannon.

6. The sea, the sea, the sea.

Blessings 6-30-09

2009-06-29T22:38:00.003-04:00

1. Evenings on the beach, just wandering, watching, smiling at other walkers.

2. Night sounds outside our house: crickets chirruping. The shushhh of gentle waves on the nearby shore. The crazy mockingbird atop a street light that sings his heart out in the wee, dark hours.

3. Big fat juicy blueberries.

4. Mary next door emerging with a cheery wave in her purple pants set, red knee-highs, red patent pumps, and red straw hat – hot to trot with her Red Hat Society friends.

5. The evocative names of my new Yankee candles: Island Spa, Beach Walk, Evening Air.

Blessings 6-29-09

2009-06-28T22:03:00.003-04:00

1. The perfect spinach calzone from Picasso's Pizza.

2. My first ATM card. "Wow, look. Free money!"

3. Being able to read the New York Times Magazine on the Web.

4. My husband, who gets up and walks the dog on weekends, leaving me to sleep luxuriously late.

5. The way our neighborhood goes all out for the 4th of July.

Friends share wisdom and smiles

2009-06-28T19:57:00.009-04:00

Timely, thoughtful quotes and comments I've received recently:

1. Posted by Deirdre on Facebook

“A great deal of chaos in the world occurs because people don't appreciate themselves. Having never developed sympathy or gentleness toward themselves, they cannot experience harmony or peace within themselves, and therefore, what they project to others is also inharmonious and confused. Instead of appreciating our lives, we often take our existence for granted or we find it depressing and burdensome. …

“Certainly we should take our lives seriously, but that doesn't mean driving ourselves to the brink of disaster by complaining about our problems or holding a grudge against the world. We have to accept personal responsibility for uplifting our lives."

– Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Sanity We Are Born With

2. Psalm written by Neil, a rabbi

G-d Almighty please help me to help myself and to get the help I need, to appreciate what You've given me, and to serve you for real. Help me remember that I must be for myself, must love myself, need to work on that. You haven't taken me this far to abandon me now - I know. There is no reason to give up hope.

If only I could see myself more the way others see me. If only I could see the good that I put forth for others while questioning myself. Sometimes it's hard to pray. I pray through my pain. I pray through my writing. I pray through my essence.

3. From a blog entry by Frances, whose mother is very ill

I have to realize not only that this is what life is and that food doesn't solve it, but that This Is What Life Is. Parents age, and they die. … Separations occur. I suffer from depression, food and nicotine addiction. I have talents. All of these things require day-to-day responsibility and acceptance. And none of them are the end of the world. At worst, they mean periods of great grieving -- but my life will probably move on if I'm not hit by a truck or something. There will still be lilacs each spring, Neapolitan mastiff puppies, yogurt, naps.

4. Posted by Cathy on Facebook:

"Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness." – Carl Jung

To end on a light note...

5. From a circulating email forwarded by Cheryl

A kindergarten teacher was observing her classroom of children while they were drawing. She would occasionally walk around to see each child's work. As she got to one little girl who was working diligently, she asked what the drawing was.

The girl replied, "I'm drawing God."

"But no one knows what God looks like," the teacher said.

Without missing a beat or looking up, the girl replied, "They will in a minute."

Thanks, friends!

Blessings 6-28-09

2009-06-28T16:54:00.004-04:00

1. Sunshine! – after weeks and weeks of clouds, rain, and fog. And the very cool air show down the bay. Please look here.

2. Two old men with canes sitting on a bench at the beach, earnestly discussing the late Michael Jackson's issues with young boys. "He finally had to stop because he ran out of money to pay them off."

3. Our teen son's reasonable response to the dreaded Tough Talk we had with him last night.

4. Spectacular clouds, lightning bolts in the distance – the full complement of summer sky phenomena in a single day.

5. Tux the neighborhood cat believing he was invisible in a neighbor's garden.

Blessings 6-27-09

2009-06-26T10:04:00.005-04:00

1. My fortune from Thursday night's Chinese supper.

2. Heady, heavy honeysuckle scent from the wild shrubbery down our street.

3. White lifeguard chair on an empty beach; gray water, gray sky, gray gull.

4. Caroline sharing her Cheerios with Daisy: "Oops, I dropped another one."

5. 8 pm, from our front porch: Lightning veins sparking across the western sky; red sun peeking out from under a skirt of roiling clouds.

6. Last night's dreams welling up as my eyes begin to close.

I was going to limit each Blessings post to five items, but why hold back when a day is rich in small pleasures?

Blessings 6/26/09

2009-06-25T10:52:00.006-04:00

1. Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream. The best.

2. Memories of dancing to "Thriller" in the living room of our house in Little Compton with my stepdaughter and her best friend.

3. Having Peter over for Chinese food and extra helpings of laughter.

4. The tremolo of a train whistle from across the bay on our first non-rainy night in a week; crescent moon hanging low over Buttonwoods.

5. Bringing out my cheerful Vera Bradley fabric handbags for the summer.

Blessings 6-25-09

2009-06-24T21:09:00.004-04:00

1. Zany ads on craigslist, like this one:

organic free range fire wood (providence)
Date: 2009-06-24, 2:03PM EDT

Organic, free range, cage free, humanely harvested, fire wood. Mostly kiln dried eastern white pine (some mahogany). I will fill your pick up bed at my loading dock. Will provide you with THE BEST fire pit/bonfire/campfire known to man.

2. Michelle Kwan skating the freestyle of her life in 2002 to "Fields of Gold," sung by the lovely, late, lamented Eva Cassidy.

3. Heart-to-heart mother-daughter talks on the commute home from work.

4. A surprise goody box in today's mail, from Cheryl. <3

5. Granddaughter Caroline's crayon drawing of "kids pulling leaves off trees."

Blessings 6-24-09

2009-06-23T14:06:00.008-04:00

1. Never getting tired of hearing "Summer Breeze" by Seals and Crofts.

2. White Citrus body cream from Bath & Body Works.

3. Reading about day-spa packages online. Ahhhh.

4. My girl Queen Latifah, gorgeous woman of all entertainment trades.

5. Sweet black cherries.