Ann left me a blank check on her dining room table with a note: “Michael, tell me if the remainder of the bill is over a thousand dollars and I’ll transfer money to cover it.” When she asked if I would work for her mother in Cambridge I said, “Sure.”

Teresa is short, dark, with thick hair cut into an Arthur Fonzerelli without the grease. What I notice most is her voice, which is crisp and deep, and on the phone it’s impossible to guess her age – seventy-four. She needed someone she could trust to work in her house.

“My daughter tells me I need a new faucet, but at my age I don’t see the point. When I go and someone else owns the house maybe they won’t like the faucet, and they’ll get rid of it with the kitchen.”

“But it doesn’t … .”

“Turn it on. The water comes out very slowly. But as I say, at my age.”

I moved closer and looked her right smack in her brown eyes, “What do you mean at your age? You’re young. My mother is eighty-seven and my mother-in-law is ninety-two.”

Teresa is self sufficient, opinionated, and very direct. Not an ounce of self pity oozes from her pores, but her husband of forty-nine years died last summer.

“I read your husband’s obituary.”

She didn’t seem surprised; I felt compelled to explain.

“I worked for a woman who lives in the same building as your daughter, Ann, and she showed me the Globe column. It said he was a giving man loved by lots of people and that’s impressive for someone who made a living as a judge.”

“He was fair and he did have friends. Always smiling, but he lingered at the end.”

**********

“I have to tell you how much I admire you. Many of the people I work for have the TV on all day. You have a peaceful house.”

“I like to read. I have to read, it relaxes me.”

“What kind of books?

“Mysteries.”

I thought Sherlock Holmes.

“Murder mysteries?” Pathetically steering the conversation.

“Like P.D. Robb.”

She could see I had no clue.

“She’s also known as Nora Roberts.”

“Okay, I know her. I just finished James Patterson’s Big Bad Wolf, but I really like Michael Connelly and Lee Child. “

“I’ve read them both. They are good.”

“So, no TV?”

“My day starts at 4:30… .”

“4:30 AM?”

“Every morning. At five minutes past five I turn the TV onto TV Five and watch the weather. I leave it on for the news and then turn if off at six when the paper comes. At seven I call my younger brother Walter. This morning I walked Ann’s dog at seven and when I got back Walter’s voice was on the answering machine. It was 7:05 and he was asking if I’d fallen and hurt myself.”

“Wait a minute. You normally call him at seven and he couldn’t wait more than five minutes to see if you were okay?”

“He’s a worrier and he doesn’t understand how much I need to prove my independence. When our parents died he moved back into their house in East Cambridge.”

“The house he grew up in?”

“The same one. When my Larry died, Walter said, ëCome on back to the house. You can have your old room.’ “

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Today’s photo from the Wayback machine. Brian, Flo, Ginger, Diane and Patti. Early seventies.

Florence slipped in the bathroom Friday night and now has a non-displaced stress fracture of her greater trochanter. Call it a hip fracture that won’t require surgery.

Flo sat (laid, squirmed, shifted) in the emergency room from 11 AM until 8 PM when a room finally became available. That kind of torture would break a far younger soul, but not Flo who had the admitting nurse on her floor laughing so hard she wanted to work a double shift.

The list of intake questions were endless with some those you would expect: “Have you had an MI?” or “Do you have arthritis?” or “Have you had surgery?”

And those you might not:

“Does anyone threaten you or cause you to fear for your safety?”

“No.”

“What time do you go to bed?”

“Seven thirty?”

“Seven thirty?” Eileen, the admitting nurse, Diane and I all repeated in unison.

“Yes, seven thirty. The place is dead. After dinner they all go their rooms.”

“What if you offered them wine to join you?” Eileen asked

“I have Cream Sherry, a full bottle.”

“Do you have friends at Concord Park?”

“I call them acquaintances.”

Her room number at Emerson Hospital : 1-978-287-3908

Kitchen Duty
My brother Brian and Diane.

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My apologies to anyone whose comments I accidentally erased. The blog receives an eviland vicious amount of spam from online poker sites, body part enhancers and viagra makers, and in my hurry to delete the three hundred or so posts to the comment sections I obliterated a few innocent ones.

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Taken at a car show in a local mall in Evansville.

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My niece, Seah, and someone few people will remember, Jayne Dearth. Jayne dated my brother, Peter, and lived with us for a short time on Beacon St. in Somerville.

Bonnie Downing, Bill Connet, Beth and Ed (aka rakkity)
Diane, Dan Downing and me.
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Our return flight, in spite of Matrix-depriving sleep, felt flawless. Brian and I sat together across from Matt and Diane, and while I wasn’t reading The Big Bad Wolf (on loan from Matt) or napping, we talked about partitioning, scsi drives,Intelligent design (described in a Globe column this morning as “Creationism in sheep’s clothing.”), the Middle East, how to destroy the earth, digital cameras (he filled a gigabyte card and drained but one battery) and the fragility of the airline industry. “One shoulder fired SAM and it all goes away.”

The single glitch revolved around the Park and Fly shuttle that ferried us from the airport to the offsite (call it cheaper, not cheapo) parking lot. A truly Twilight Zone-esque experience with a near mutiny by passengers crammed and trapped inside this dimly lit shuttle with filthy, near opaque windows and a slow moving driver who couldn’t decipher the spoken word.

We all had to yell out our vehicle ticket numbers and Diane repeated “oh938oh8” four times before Matt boomed-in with his best, and I might say on the verge of murderous, baritone, “OH938OH8.”

“Oh?” the driver asked again.

“Zero938Zero8,” Matt replied.

“OhZero938oh8?”

Matt’s arms snapped up and straight out, his hands open and a medium sized neck width apart. I grabbed the back of his belt as he boomed again, “NO! ZERO938ZERO8.” Who could blame him. He had been the perfect citizen for the last five days, but he was desperate to hang with his friends before midnight curfewed him back to Central St. It was only seven, but the walls, they were a closin’ in.

We’d waited to be picked up for twenty-five minutes at the airport while watching competing lot vans zoom by us as if we were spectators at the Daytona Five Hundred. And now we were sitting for an inexplicable amount of time at the entrance to the Park and Fly lot while the driver waited for some phantom to allow us in. We were all tired, cold and impatient, but none of us more than Matt who sat shoulder to shoulder with a sneezing, nose blowing, headset wearing, singing, all but jumping up to dance, man, who absolutely could not have been driving himself home.

At the Detroit airport grill.
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Late breaking news: Diane answered every question as a left-brained person.
(http://brain.web-us.com/brain/braindominance.htm)

“Have you ever had an MRI?’ I asked.

“Yes.’

“That’s what this plane reminds me of.’

“Without the clanging.’

John was born in Queens, lives north of Boston, attended college in Virginia and married a girl from Jackson, Mississippi, which is where he was headed. He’d been to Mississippi many times, once to Oxford. I thought, Faulkner.

“You met her in college?’

“Church. You hear about people meeting women in bars but I met my wife in church.’

That was an alley I didn’t want to walk down. It might be innocent or I might be the next pheasant locked in his conversion sights. John looked to be about forty and spoke in a softer, slower voice than mine.

“You don’t sound like you’re from Queens. Not a hint. My brother-in-law is from the city and we would have had this conversation in half the time and said twice as much.’

And that was it. No in-depth, I’m going to my grandmother’s funeral and by the way I work for your wife’s former beloved boss dialogue that I might turn into a googleable entry while sitting on Jim and Susan’s deck.

Instead, I listened to the soldier directly behind me talk about Iraq as I looked through my porthole at puffy pink clouds. I unfolded the Boston Globe and worked on the crossword puzzle before finally nodding off.

Brian said, “This was the worst plane ride.’ The cabin was small and the space between the chairs invisible. The chairs tilted back all the way from bolt upright almost bolt upright. I’d drift off and my head would then fall forward threatening to crash into the seat back in front of me. I’d wake up, jerk my head back, drift off and repeat – over and over again. I knew I looked like a bobbing wooden duck you win in carnival ring toss games, but I was so tired I had no remedy. I tried arms-as-a pillow on my seat back tray but my big head really didn’t fit.

We changed planes twice (reboarding the same one with a different flight number in Indianapolis) and landed in Evansville five hours later. Bedraggled, but happy to be back.

Our routine from the moment we touch ground is as locked in as a shuttle astronauts. We comment on how small and friendly the airport is, we rent a car from Candy (“I’m now a grandmother’), we drive to the Marriott and get checked in by, typically, but not this year, Zane, who is much too young to understand the origins of his name, and then we find a restaurant, usually Denny’s, to feed Brian’s voracious, carnivorous appetite. Stomachs full and ready for a nap, we drive to Bellemeade Ave and eat home made soup.

Last night, Jeff and Karen took us to the Gersthaus, a German restaurant in a converted hardware store. Back in its Heldt & Voelker incarnation, it was the prototypical, wooden floor, tall ceilinged, everything stored in wood cabinets or on wooden shelves, hardware store. All men over forty-five know that store. But now it is a restaurant with character, with the original stained glass windows and the old wooden cabinets displaying glass mugs, not nuts, bolts and ten penny nails.

Adventurous Diane ate weiner schnitzel, I ordered the catfish basket, Matt and Brian each devoured a blood-red rib eye steak, HO, shrimp, Mack soup and bread, and Jeffrey flapped his arms when I asked from across the table what he was eating. I don’t want to leave Karen out, but what I really remember was her dual order of iced tea and pale ale – twice Even Brian, who never drinks, asked for a “fish bowl.’ Near frozen beer served in mugs big enough to dive into.

We leave the house in twenty minutes at 4:20 AM with one stop to pick up my brother, Brian, in Cambridge, to catch a 6:30 flight to Evansville, Indiana. I hope to update the blog from afar, but who knows.

In the meantime, here is a photo that will surely raise questions such as: why (did you take it), how( did you get permission), and what (is it about your personality that weedles itís way into those you simply build things for)? For the squeamish, these are the new knees (under the staples) of a native Michigander, and longtime golf pro at our local country club. Heís only about sixty, but heís been walking backwards down strairs for years,and it is painful to even the casual observer to watch him get up from a sitting position. But no more.

I joke about the four blog readers, but this month has shown a record number of visitors. This graph shows growth in years with the tall purple columns representing 2005. Although the stats are for mainecourse.com, it is the blog that has pushed those columns up.

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Flattered by rakkity’s flower comment, I snapped another . The blue is the sky through our kitchen window.

This is a summary of a conversation we had last Saturday at our local coffee connection. It is long, it ës probably boring ñ it is what it is. I sent the nearly finished draft to busy Adam for edits. He helped with punctuation, dialogue, and he added an ending. He was reluctant to spend too much time because, “There are two people who might read it to the end, and even Rakkity won’t finish until the summer.”

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“Why are you laughing?” Adam asked as he stepped out of his BMW.

I pulled out my wallet. Adam and I had arrived at the Continental Cafe at the same time, and all I had was change in my pocket. I didn’t say a thing, just kept walking, but with my billfold open, empty. I have this reputation that I believe is undeserved. Of always showing up in a beggar’s position.

Adam grinned, “I borrowed money from Tricia before I left.”

“I meant to ask Diane, but I was late. I posted to the blog and ran out the door. You make faces when I’m late, and here I am five minutes away and not on time. And no money.”

We walked up the sweatshirt grey wood steps and through the glass and wooden doors. New artwork adorned the walls, and we stopped at a wide, oil landscape of a Montana sunset which jolted both of us, but for different reasons. I needed mountains, Adam needed the red to resemble more the color of a sunset and not a prairie fire. We continued into the room and saw that half the tables were taken, including the one next to the the black leather sofa. Too bad.

“Can I help you?” asked the young dark-haired girl behind the glass counter.

“You’ve got a lot of good stuff today.” The Saturday before Valentines Day, and in addition to bagels, muffins and scones, there were pink heart-shaped pastries and lots of chocolate covered things. Emma would’a ordered by sight, not taste.

“If you don’t like the table you can pick another one,” Adam offered as I looked to see the one he had staked out.

“That’s the one I had my eye on.”

Adam paid for our food and we sat down. Mark Queijo stayed home and Mark Schreiber was in Dedham playing tennis, which would be followed by Greek lessons. Call it house buying prep. Dan was on his way.

“We went to the Colonial Inn last night. Took Bob and Mary. You really ought to join us sometime.”

“I want to… .”

“But you have to babysit…”

“Only the nights you call us. Keep trying.”

ëI will. I think it would be fun to get a group to go. The Working Man’s Jazz Band was playing. Most of the same people, but this time with a different drummer. I don’t understand why there isn’t a fixed group.”

“Hey Dan… .”

Dan, dressed in dark pants and a coffee-brown shirt approached the table with his usual happy-to-see-you smile. He sat down to my right and laid his shiny blue travel mug on the table.

“What’s this? You can’t bring coffee into a coffee shop.”

“Why not?”

“Just because.”

Dan deflected my comment and looked at Adam, “Did you tell him?”

I knew by the tone, the conspiratorial grin, what Dan was alluding to.

“He encouraged me,” Adam replied.

“Heeeee diddddd?!”

Adam is a Mac Man from way, way back, but one who has worked in offices, including, now, his own, with PC’s, and he had just bought a new computer to replace his G4. A Dell. Dan and I have had, for years now, antagonistic discussions about the demerits of both. I don’t know why. He bought me (since reimbursed) my second Mac; Susan sold us our very first. We driveled off into a long discussion about: the Mini Mac, the cost of software, the phone-home nature of all things Microsoft, networking Macs, transferring files, and that eventually I will buy Adam’s old G4 to replace one of our computers.

“Speaking of new, I need something new and exciting. I’m bored.”

“What about the blog?” Dan asked.

“The blog is killing me. I need regular contributors. Five hundred entries… I should have stopped at one hundred. I have this idea: if Matt’s friends, like Hil, posted a not finished research paper, we could all critique it. Think of the brains focused on that one paper! Matt wouldn’t do it because he’s too private.”

“What about those of us who have trouble reading even one paragraph?” Adam raised a hairy eyebrow in Dan’s direction. Adam has his own blog standards he expects others to live up to.

Piling on, I added, “You mean those who think linking a photo is “hiding it?”

“Why didn’t you post the couch potato photo on the main page? And that was Karen, not Bonnie… ?”

“Yeah, Karen. I post so many photos. When I don’t have anything to say, I post a picture. I was striving for a text only page.”

“And what about aliases? I hate not knowing who is who.” Dan said.

“Do you think Jennifer thinks she is anonymous?” Adam is the master (okay, one of them) of pseudonyms.

“Using a made up name, but her own email address? Speaking of, didn’t you love the police blotter parking lot car-door poor-mother one yesterday? And Jennifer’s mother/daughter comment?”

“I thought I must just be out of the loop, that the story must concern someone we know,” Adam said. “I took the format as ënames-have-been-omitted-to-protect-the-berated’ and assumed the non-sequitur of the wholly unfathomable ëbad mother’ epithet would be explained. But yeah, Jennifer’s drive-to-Roche’s comment was hilarious.”

“An elaborate, plausible concoction, but one which worries me. Dan’s constant complaint — well, one of them — is how obtuse I am. That I don’t explain enough. And if you don’t get it, then he’s more than right.”

“Yes, but I like that. I enjoy wondering, hunting for clues. And speaking of clues, why did you ask about plasma TV’s earlier?”

More snapping synapses like much of this conversation. I should have ignored that one. “You know I bought Deliverance for Matthew, and I want to watch it with him. John and Karen offered their big screen, then I thought if one of you all had one, we could watch it together. But maybe I’m making too big a deal of it. I know I am.”

“I saw Deliverance when it first came out, and then fifteen years later. I guess I could tolerate it every fifteen years. But how about we all get together to watch our favorite movies? That could be the next new thing. Like a book club. No prep work, but some of the socialization of the blog.”

“A movie club.” Dan jumped in.

The number cruncher, Adam continued, “If there are eight, maybe even ten of us meeting once a month, each offering our top ten favorite movies, that would keep Mike from being bored for up to five years.”

The conversation had morphed into my own personal horror movie. Assemble all that creativity in one room and then put it to sleep for two hours. Great.

“But I guess your next new thing would have to involve participation with people.” Adam said.

“I guess so. That is my history. I’d take another writing class at the high school if they had a different teacher. I suppose I have to travel somewhere.”

“Have you heard what Linda and I are talking about?” Subjects change quickly and it was Dan’s turn. He had a this-is-big look on his face and he turned to me and asked, “Do you know what it is?” I always know what it is, and for some reason, this bugs Dan. This time, however, I was clueless.

“Yes,” I lied.

“How do you know?”

“Linda told me.” I lied again.

“When did you talk to Linda?”

“The middle of the week.”

Dan pivoted back to Adam and told him he and Linda were thinking about buying into the house on Kythira, in Greece, with Mark and Ginger. Mark has been obsessed with this house for the last month or so and explained it all in detail at Adam’s brunch. He had a local who was interested in sharing it , but who backed out. That’s when Linda said… .

“Dan, like Linda told him, Mark should just buy it.” I said “He has the money.”

“We think differently about his bank account than he does.” Adam said, and he began out loud to project the math, figuring in his own impression of Mark’s yearly salary with his benefits and stock dividends, and the number of years he’ll continue to work. He subtracted Molly’s tuition, incidental luxury items like movies and camping trips to Maine, Ginger’s alternative, holistic, woo-woo activities and came up with a figure the house in Greece wouldn’t dent. Or at least, it seems to me maybe he mentioned moneyÖÖ

“The cons for me,” Dan went on, “are the distance, the language and the weather. The latitude is about the same as it is here, so they have winters — not our winters, but colder weather. I told Mark, and he came back at me with a lawyerly bullet-pointed list as long as the Dead Sea scrolls. It included the Greek words for winter, but the bottom line is, winter means forty-five or fifty degrees.”

“Stop for a second. Is anyone else hungry?” I asked, “ I’ll buy if you give me the money.”

Adam laid his last three dollars on the table.

“What woud you like?”

“You choose.”

Dan waved me off, but contributed a dollar anyway.

I went back to the goodie-laden counter and returned with one ginger scone. It cost $1.72, $2.00 with tip. I brushed the crumbs off one of our used paper plates and onto the floor, just as I do at home.I broke the scone into multiple pieces and ate all of it but for a wedge or two. Dan listed the pros, why it was to their advantage to own a house in Greece: a foreign culture that would force them to learn new things, perfect weather in the summer, the blue seas, a place to retreat to. Adam listened but with a distant, wheels-turning look. Dan was oblivious to it, but I knew what Adam was thinking.

“That was a four dollar scone?”

“What’s a few bucks to you? You who are signing a contract to light a seven hundred thousand square foot health care facility. And Dan, whose company did two point two mil in biz last year.”

“But that was last year,” Dan frowned.

“And I haven’t signed the contract yet,” Adam added.

“How come I have more faith in the two of you than you do in yourselves?”

Dan and Adam exchanged a quick look and pounced. Oblivious to the screams of the patrons in line awaiting their own goodie selections, they lifted me bodily, manhandling me past the bystanders and the protesting teenage girls behind the counter. I had “shared” their food, then stolen their money. Maybe attacking their insecurities was too big a stick for this hornets nest. I could see floating things in the standing water of the sink full of dirty dishes as they drove me towards it headfirst.

Open Wide

Chris tells me she thought of both Diane and me when she read Love Song: I And Thou (below). I believe it mostly reminded her of me. Last night after reading the poem, I dreamed I built a second story addition onto my friend Rob’s ranch-style house. He lives in a three story Colonial, so go with the dream here. When I finished with the stud framing, and had yet to sheath the house in plywood, I stood back to look at my creation. To my dismay, the blowing wind was shaking the house as if an invisible giant were trying to dislodge dinner. I worried about the wind toppling the house once the walls were completed. Anxious to mend my mistake, I thought maybe I can’t nail one floor on top of another without some kind of massive vertical beam connecting the two floors. As with my last house dream, I mostly felt dread.

What Chris sent, she excerpted from an article entitled A Little Anthology of Love Poems, by Robert Pinsky. Had I read the entire piece I might have dreamed different (thanks Apple).

Pinsky offers a rich collection of non-traditional love poems, most of which I find unsettling and/or difficult to grasp. It hammers home, though I read (compared to most men with blue eyes in their fifties who are not poets) a lot of poetry, my likes are pretty darn narrow.

I couldn’t warm up to Her Triumph by Yeats, and I didn’t agree with Pinsky’s interpretation of Mock Orange, a poem I know well, by Louise Gluck, until Diane tutored me. I got hung up on

ìsealing my mouth,
the man’s paralyzing body-

I did love the final two poems, especially this one by William Carlos Williams:

The Act

There were the roses, in the rain.
Don’t cut them, I pleaded.
They won’t last, she said.
But they’re so beautiful
where they are.
Agh, we were all beautiful once, she said,
and cut them and gave them to me
in my hand.

I might ask Chris: For a lover of rhyming poems … .

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Pinksy:

Another tradition of love poetry celebrates the beloved with a kind of inverse compliment. Shakespeare says his mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun, and that black wires grow on her head; Shakespeare’s contemporary Michael Drayton begins a sonnet, “Three sorts of serpent do resemble thee.” That sort of compliment-by-complaint was already a conventional move when Shakespeare and Drayton were writing. It compliments the loved one by crediting her with a sense of humor, an appreciation of irony, and the ability to see through trite praises.

Something of that courtly reverse praise caps a contemporary poem I like, by the late Alan Dugan:

LOVE SONG: I AND THOU

Nothing is plumb, level or square:
the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
I am no carpenter. I built
the roof for myself, the walls
for myself, the floors
for myself, and got
hung up in it myself. I
danced with a purple thumb
at this house-warming, drunk
with my prime whiskey: rage.
Oh, I spat rage’s nails
into the frame-up of my work:
it held. It settled plumb,
level, solid, square and true
for that great moment. Then
it screamed and went on through,
skewing as wrong the other way.
God damned it. This is hell,
but I planned it, I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can’t do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.

Days after Diane’s hawk sighting she fell ill (is that better than she got sick?). Real ill/sick. Two eye infections and bronchitis that raised her core to about 103. She continued working until long after raspy whispers replaced her voice.

I accompanied her to her doctor’s appointment at Acton Medical, which was the day before our scheduled flight to visit my folks in Evansville. The waiting room is square with a partioned glassed-in receptionist area, multiple chairs, and doors leading in, out, and into various doctors’ offices. We sat in the waiting room, Diane slumped, coughing quietly, peering through rheumy eyes – less than an infected shadow of her former self. Finally, the nurse opened the door behind us and called, “Diane.” I put down my magazine as Diane, as if the voice were St. Peter calling her home, looked up at the ceiling and squeaked, “Yes?”

This a clear and only semi-humorous memory, and it returns in technicolor because we’re about to embark on this year’s trip to my hometown. In the office, she asked her doctor about flying to Indiana. He said, “I can get you there, but I wouldn’t want to sit next to you.” He should have said, “I wouldn’t want to be you.” An excruciating plane ride preceded four days in bed at the Marriot.

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Matthew’s reward for his years of dutifully accompanying us to art exhibits.

At 1 p.m. a woman called the police to report a disagreement she had had in the parking lot of Roche Bros. Supermarket. The caller reported that after she accidentally hit a parked car with the door of her car, the owner of the car yelled at her and accused her of being a poor mother.

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