About Me

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Since 1984, my light commentary, Marginal Considerations, has been a feature of Weekend Radio. Moving into the 21st century (yeah, I know - a decade late and more than a dollar short), it may be time to explore the format known as "the blog." (Still on the radio, BTW.) I am the author of A Natural History of Socks, illustrated by the late Eric May, You May Already Be a Winner (and other marginal considerations) and The Nonexistence of Rutabagas, plus maybe 1K features, essays, book and arts reviews in newspapers and magazines nearly everywhere, except perhaps Kansas. I live on Lake Erie one city to the west of Cleveland with too many musical instruments, several large plants and no cats. My front door is purple. I collect dust, take up space and burn fossil fuel. I kayak, knit, hike, sing, canoe, write choral music and play hammered dulcimer, but not all at the same time. I read too much and don't write enough, but what's new?

Monday, October 24, 2011

Ideas of Heaven (the poem)

(One amongst you heard me read this in some art gallery some years ago, and asked for it, spurred no doubt by the end of the world post. Here it is.)

Ideas of Heaven

My knees don't hurt, there's no opera or chewing gum
no one wears fur or smells of mothballs and nothing
makes me sneeze but
here's the thing - it's not crowded -
you can always find a parking space
even though everyone is here
all my friends, with banjos and dulcimers, not just harps
and no one sings off-key, not even
Amelia Earhart, who was excused from the training because
she already knew how to fly.

Dante and his surfeit of circles?
We are having a much better time. Of course
Mozart is here and Dr. Seuss
Michelangelo, even if (or maybe because) he was gay
Joan of Arc, Catherine, St. Francis with all his little birds
the usual suspects, but also - get this -
Hamen, Quisling, Stalin, Machiavelli
the whole constellation of one-name villains
and Svengali, just because I like to say it
even . . . yes . . . wait for it . . . Saddam.
And the fat boy who jumped me at recess
every damn day in the third grade because
in my heaven, everyone is redeemable.
Everyone. That's what makes it heaven.

Oh, and the hot tub.
Don't forget the hot tub.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

It's not the end of the world . . . but it might be heaven

Still here. The world as we know it did not end, as far as I can tell. (This is the second time that Family Radio's Harold Camping has specified a date for our collective demise: May 21, 2011, and yesterday, Oct. 21, 2011. Let's hope that the third time is not the charm.)

If the world did end yesterday, then heaven - or hell if Camping was right about the prospects of us nonbelievers - today looks a lot like my street in Lakewood, this one block of bumpy brick pavement lined with porch-wealthy homes of a certain age, most approaching centenary status.  They regard one another through half-shuttered eyes across a mini-veldt of bedsheet-sized lawns edged with bright flowers.

We like it here. We are a sidewalk neighborhood with the library at one end of the street, the bus line at the other, a heaven of small children with harried parents, dog-walking seniors and inveterate putterers, some out of ambition, most out of necessity given the vintage of our homes. (The possibility that heaven might be different for each of us has been explored in at least two contemporary novels - very sweetly in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, and rudely but humorously in Daniel Pinkwater's The Afterlife Diet.  Who am I to argue?)

I will admit, sometimes life here is hellish, like a recent summer when virtually every home in our closely-packed enclave was being re-roofed after a punishing hailstorm. Or the year the aging water main broke repeatedly and we took to showering at the Y and setting aside jugs of water to be sure we could make morning coffee.

Right now, it's a nice time to be here, no longer so hot as to drive us into the air-conditioning and still warm enough to gossip on the front steps. (Once winter arrives, we'll wave to one another with mittened hands as we clear the snow from our blessedly short driveways and may not actually speak again until spring.) But pleasant though it may be, this lovely place is not paradise. Heaven, perhaps, but not paradise. If it were, my basement would be drier.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

The name's not the same, but the face is familiar

My GP's ever-pleasant physician's assistant called. "Doctor wanted me to let you know your X-ray results," she said. My left knee, which has been complaining about something, had posed for pictures a few days earlier. "The radiologist saw some loose floating bodies."

Of course I laughed. "Sounds like the Chicago River to me," I said. Of course the ever-pleasant PA did not laugh. She must not read classic crime fiction or stay up late watching old gangster movies. But then, I think she's only twelve years old, thirteen at the most, so she needs her sleep.

E-P PA gave me the orthopedic clinic's phone number. "Doctor wants you to make an appointment." (Not the doctor, or Dr. Whatziname but "Doctor," like it's his first name or something. I hate that.)

So here I am, waiting to see the orthopedic guy. My name is called and I'm escorted into a rabbit warren of hallways and little rooms. "You've been here before, right?" asks the nurse. His name is Rocky (yes, really). No, I tell him, first time. "Are you sure? You look so familiar. I'm sure I've seen you before."

Rocky looks familiar to me, too, but we leave that and move on to matters medical. I do not favor him with my belief that by the time you reach a certain age, everyone you meet looks like somebody you used to know, or reminds you of somebody you still know. I think there's a finite number of faces and by some point you've seen them all, so everybody reminds you of somebody else. It can get confusing.

I figure out quickly why Rocky looks familiar. He doesn't exactly look like him but reminds me of the actor who played Sal on "Mad Men" (or maybe still plays Sal on "Mad Men." I don't know - I'm only up to season three).  It's not always that easy, though. Sometimes I'll see someone who looks familiar and though I know s/he is not the person I'm reminded of, I beat my head against a mental brick wall until I figure out why this person looks familiar. It drives me nuts.

It happened to me again this morning. The person in my bathroom mirror seemed vaguely familiar. I was into my second cup of coffee when I realized who she reminds me of  - it's my mother.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Homeland insecurity

I've spent every possible minute outside these last few weeks. Now that the sunny-and-clear postcard weather has given way to more seasonally appropriate fallishness, I have no excuse not to face up to the inside chores.

My goal today is merely to reach "drop-in clean": dishes washed (maybe even put away), horizontal surfaces decluttered, the Goodwill boxes I've been tripping over out to the car, my tent - still in the dining room - into the closet.  Drop-in clean, except perhaps for the muddy tracks by the back door and the beet soup splashes on the stove (I really should wipe those up), is more about tidy than about actual clean. It's a level of surface acceptability that allows you to open the front door if a friend stops by rather than hiding behind the curtains until she goes away.

Looming ahead like a grey storm front is the necessity of reaching "houseguest clean." A friend will be overnighting four weeks from now. This requires not only an orderly first floor, but clean bathrooms upstairs and down, and an inhabitable guest room. (The rest of the upstairs? Please, this is one reason bedrooms have doors. Doors that can be shut.)

Because my houseguest might wake up before me and decide to help herself to a glass of juice, I'd better mop up the hoison sauce that dribbled on the top shelf of the refrigerator - it's really sticky - and throw out the dried-up green onions that are in the vegetable drawer. Maybe I should clean out the whole refrigerator in case she goes looking for the milk. I never have any, which means she's going to go through the whole refrigerator before giving up. I should clean it. Or maybe it would be easier to just buy some milk . . .

I ought to dust off the piano, the coffee table and the guest room dresser. And Swiffer all the floors in case she walks around the house in her socks. I do that all the time, and you don't want to see what the bottom of my socks look like at the end of the day. It's all too much. (Too late - I already said she could stay here and she's not even coming to visit me; she's coming to town to see her nephew in a college play.)

I used to have a gauge by the front door with a sliding arrow on it that I moved up or down to indicate the Squalor Threat Level within. I adopted one of the TSA's slightly scrambled rainbows - green at the bottom for "no threat," rising through blue to yellow toward orange and the frightening red of "extreme threat."

Things rarely get that bad at my house but there are times when keeping conditions in the orange range is a mighty challenge. Most of the time, the squalor level here hovers somewhere in the yellow zone. On good days it slides down toward the blue, on more usual days it creeps up in the direction of the orange.
I know I have next to no hope of ever achieving the clear green of "zero threat"at the good end of the scale but I like to think that the blue of "very low threat" might someday be attainable.

I find the blue zone more desirable than the green, anyway. Not perfectly safe, mind you, but safe enough, with just a bit of an edge. We all need a touch of excitement in our lives.