Tata: Hey, I called you yesterday.
Paulie: You did?
Tata: You don’t remember?
Paulie: No…
Tata: Your pants answered.
Paulie: What?
Tata: I called and your pants answered the phone. You were at the hospital and I could hear your dad. You were arranging your stepmom in the hospital bed.
Paulie: I was? Wait – I was!
Tata: Then it got quiet and I couldn’t figure out what that rhythmic sound was. And it was you, walking!
Paulie: That’s funny!
Tata: And the whole time I was shouting into the phone, “PAULIE! PAULIE!”
Paulie: You were?
Tata: What, you don’t remember ten minutes of your pants shouting your name?

Everyone needs a hobby. Usually, mine is trying to remember why I should come to work. Recently, I learned how to code links into my posts which, if you were born after the cut-off date, you probably learned in pre-natal typing class. Good for you! Shut up.

Tata: My link doesn’t work.
Mamie: It’s broken. I’ll fix it.
Tata: Grrr! Grrr! Arr. Grrr!
Mamie: While I’m at the conference –
Tata: The ten days I’ll spend swearing you’re grounded but in the end I’ll just be glad you’re back?
Mamie: – pester your friend Jazz. By the look of things, he’s spending too much time with grownups.

Uh. Okay. So Jazz is the reason broken things at PIC are all glued together and pristinely duct-taped. Anyway, very cranky persons have complained the wedding stuff is all backwards and interspersed with specious musings. Good for them! Shut up. Here’s Miss Sasha’s wedding, in order. If you missed it the first time, be sure to picture me with a perfect manicure and a splitting headache, because weddings are not about the Mother of the Bride. Are they?

Leading up to and including the bridal shower.
Plastic fruit aplenty.
Speak no evil. Well, maybe a little.
Shopping and sharpshooting.
When ‘rustic’ attacks and when we fight back.

The altar and the alterego! Cheers!
Percussive and concussive.
Waiting up is hard to do.
Coffin or caffeine?
The best advice you’ll hear all week.
Orchestras rehearsed on the Titanic, too.
I’m not listening! You can’t make me!
Dressed and repressed.
Get a tissue. This is the good part – for you!
Laughter, horror and a tasty buffet.
After, and after that.
There can’t be more. But there is!
Home from the honeymoon.

I still have no wedding pictures, but that’s okay. I’m not desperate to see myself in a purple blouse tailored for Ming the Merciless – and it’s not like you’ll get a glimpse of that triumph of textile engineering. Ugh. Well, unless it’s hilarious.

We’ll find out, I guess.

You there! With the opposable thumb! It is I, Larry, the little black cat bent on stealing your soul! I grow weary of your wheedling and obfuscation! Since you cannot boil water without tutelage, I suggest you take this weighty tome and discover the joy of indulging my every whim.

Prepare the shrimp!

In 1978, my father’s parents took me on a four-week tour of Italy, Switzerland and Monaco. I was 14 and generally forgive myself for sleeping through Nice, though given a second change, I’d swill some coffee, prop my eyes open and beg Grandpa to swing around the block a few times.

We went to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It’s not enough to say there’s nothing like it but the point in important. It’s vast and sumptuous and gilded and endless and candlelit and every few feet the tourist finds something he or she saw in an art book or heard about in a class somewhere. Everyone’s seen reproductions because the originals have raw power and unmistakable voltage. Our tour group through the Vatican was small that afternoon. When we came to Michelangelo’s Pieta, I didn’t just stare. I felt that sculpture ripple through me, body and soul. I felt its agony and grief, its tenderness and devotion. Four hands grabbed my shoulders and lifted me off the ground. Without any conscious thought, I’d walked toward the Pieta, and the Swiss Guard moved to intercept me – with spears. When my feet left the ground, the spell broke. My grandfather shook me.

Tata: What? What’s happening?
Grandparents talking at once: What are you doing? Did you see the guards? Are you okay? What’s wrong with you?

I had no recollection of trying to touch the sculpture, but such is the power of the image that I was not standing and looking, I was moving to comfort the grieving mother. So they told me. All I remembered was a tidal wave of loss. What the hell, I was a kid, and trying to comfort a statue is the amusingly futile gesture of the century. Woo hoo! “Cheer up, Mom! He’s touring the Holy Land as a headliner!” But I won’t blush when I think about the empathy at the root of this moment. It is not weakness that permits us to consider the feelings of others but strength; it was not too long before our trip that Grandma had started talking to me about a daughter lost in infancy. The Pieta was no abstraction, and I was starting to understand there could be no greater pain than the loss of a child.

There’s some adult carry-over from this moment, razor-sharp and subtly silly: I can’t even watch Disney movies in which children are separated from their mothers. Dumbo and Bambi as a double feature could put me in the Carrier Clinic. Sophie’s Choice made me toss my waffles. TV movies about Marilyn Monroe’s childhood cause me to weep inconsolably. Everyone’s got a soft spot, and this one’s mine. So you know where I’m going with this: when I see Cindy Sheehan’s face, and I think about her losing her son, and the depth to which her pain must fill in the hollow spaces and bring her to the surface we see, I know that in her position I might drown. I might never wish to see daylight again but she does. For this reason alone, when her detractors speak ill of her, they shame themselves. For this reason alone, Centrists and the Left must embrace her, comfort her, quit the equivocating and think less about our fears. When we are afraid to be seen as passionate seekers of justice we surrender to those who obstruct it, and we are seen for what we are: cowards unworthy of our fierce history of brave resistance.

Must we shame ourselves this way?

At the liquor store in my neighborhood, the guys behind the counter display a polite interest in me as a regular customer. They see me for five minutes twice a month since 1998. They have apparently developed their own narrative for my life, which is excellent news.

Guy: Hey! Where’s your boyfriend Tony?

In retrospect, I’m Italian and never dated Italian men, but Daria did. She had a type. Daria and Todd met up in the Stone Pony one night so Todd could meet Daria’s latest tall, handsome, tanned, Italian, cologne-drenched, possessive bigot boy.

Todd: So…what’s Tony’s name?

The liquor store guy is really asking if I have a boyfriend, which is a funny thing to ask a middle-aged woman who isn’t wearing a wedding ring and whose hair was recently flaming sunset pink. He does not ask about my girlfriend Toni, but if he thought I had a girlfriend named Toni I bet I’d also have his phone number on a matchbook. You can learn a lot in ten words or less. I smile and don’t tell him anything.

Tata: Denver, I think.

I’d love to hear his version of my saga. On the one hand, I don’t want the kind of attention saying, “We broke up in October” invites. On the other, it’s hard not to sigh heavily and stare off into space.

Tata: You always have to stab people more than you think you will.

That might move things right along, or along to the Middlesex County Adult Correctional Facility, where I know the library’s marginal because I stock it myself. The antic might be worth it: Mamie left last week for a half-price shoe sale in Boston, where I wouldn’t want to be the fellow customer or unarmed salesperson when Mamie spots her fall season designer trophies. In any case, this hunting expedition occupies her full attention. I leave messages.

Tata: My mother brought me to the Falmouth Bus Station at 3:39 for a 3:40 bus and I ran into the depot to buy a ticket where I couldn’t think as the lady behind the counter said, “Round trip for two: $78” and I said, “No, one person, one way” and the ticket was $18.50 even though the bus company’s 800 number said $17.00 and I couldn’t argue because behind me Mom was working her weird verbal voodoo on the bus driver which made my brain go all swirly but I got the right ticket and dragged my two suitcases and my Dragonball Z lunchbox onto the bus and set up a cushion fort and growled everytime somebody came near but I’m on my way to get an Amtrak train back to MetroPark where Paulie will either pick me up in the World’s Largest Pick Up Truck(tm) or I’ll take a cab home for peace and quiet after two days of people talking constantly, and the voices in my head are squawking, “Mantequilla! Mantequilla!” can you tell?

Lala’s traveling the country with her glamorous car-racing son and her cantankerous ex-husband. Sharkey’s perfecting his golf swing in the Carolinas. Most of the family’s still up at the Cape or off at a trade show. Trout’s taking care of a sick friend. For Christ’s sake, I talk to cashiers for wicked banter.

Tata: Like, what?
Her: Like, like like?
Tata: Like, NO!
Her: Like, ya huh!

This dialogue takes place the same week Mom flashed her English degree at an unlikely moment.

Mom: You can really parse sentences. I never learned to parse sentences.
Tata: Did I just hallucinate a compliment? I must be dehydrated. How many fingers am I holding up? Four! No, three!
Mom: No, I never really learned until you did.
Tata: What? We’re even then because my mind’s a blank now.

While I stand around, muttering, “The fucking yellow ribbon magnets are Tony Orlando’s fault,” I worry about finding the fun, witty chatter that’s like crack for word junkies like me. But I can hush up and quit fretting. Suzette’s on the case and Mark’s got the funk.

I have no patience for this hyperemotional response to September 11th by people who were never in any danger and now go around wearing t-shirts with pictures of burning buildings. If that’s you, just fuck off. Few things are more puke-inducing than watching an idiot wearing one of those It’s On Fire shirts run into a person whose wife, husband, lover, parent, son or daughter burned to death in Windows On the World. You should be ashamed of yourself. Throw away that t-shirt and promise you’ll never give another cent to the ghouls who made a tourist industry of disaster. And keep that promise, no matter how enticing the offer of morbid commemorative It’s On Fire coins, plates, baseball caps or potato peelers, for all I know.

There are ways to mourn and remember that offer catharsis and promote healing. Unfortunately for all of us, the Pentagon has eschewed good taste and planned a party. You can, if you’re feeling especially jingoistic, sign up for the march and the concommitant background check. Let me repeat that point: you can’t just go, should you feel a rather shocking lack of revulsion for this soiree. You have to pass a screening. I guess that will weed out anyone who’s actually thinking about what they’re doing.

The families of those lost on September 11th have ideas of their own. Many memorials are local and personal, which may not be accessible where you live. Fortunately, they also favor constructive recognition and remembrances of a more locationless variety. One of the best is One Day’s Pay, an organization that asks you to turn September 11th into a day devoted to service for others wherever you are, rather than horror and loss. Or you could contribute to the care of search and rescue dogs. That’s marvelous, really. Search and rescue dogs played a crucial role in survivors’ survival and giving victims’ loved ones the consolation of burials, and the only thing they ask is that we care for them, which is not too damn much.

The last thing anyone needs is useless, revolting souvenir crap – unless you wonder why nothing in your living room gathers dust in that saccharine way only September 11th memorabilia can. And Oh. My. God. Rumsfeld’s going to give me an aneurysm yet. What an ass! This vile trampling on and profiting from the dead is undignified and disgusting, and proponents need intensive de-programming or…a rolled-up newspaper to the snout.

I return triumphant from the wilds of Cape Cod, where strip malls are replacing pine forests, beaches act as a beautiful bone of contention and tourists issue gunpoint demands of natives being displaced by the wealthy. It’s a lot like New Jersey, except with better manners and no room for garbage dumps. This trip was educational; I learned a few things.

1. I am an idiot, but I doubt the wisdom of throwing a surprise party for a 93-year-old. Your opinion may vary.

Grandpa is one of two surviving charter members of the Hyannis VFW, and though road construction and re-engineering is a fact of modern life, my nearly blind grandfather knows every street on the Upper Cape. He corrects cab drivers and scolds Mom for second-guessing his directions. He likes things just-so and Mom ruffles his feathers constantly with detours, luxurious time-wasting and gifts of stuff he swears he neither needs nor wants.

It’s his birthday. He thinks we’re going to a fish fry at the Moose Lodge.
It’s her father’s birthday. She’s conspired with his friends and they’ve all told him lies that will result in cake.

Oh dear. He won’t be pleased.

Though we’ve stalled and walked around in circles in a drug store, when Mom, Grandpa and I arrive at the VFW hall Daria’s family is still filing into the building. Mom parks and makes an MGM production of applying lipstick. Grandpa and I, cut from the same cloth, leap out, slam doors and wonder where she is before we realize she’s fluffing her hair.

Grandpa: Lucy! The kids are waiting!
Tata: Mom! Christmas is coming!

I’m anxious to get the inevitable shouting, back-slapping, and meeting of the paramedics out of the way. Mom hasn’t thought this plan through. Before we picked up Grandpa and went shopping, Mom and I stopped at the VFW and the celebrants were already bellied up to the bar and mildly over-happy. Two hours later, over-happiness spills out into huggy drunken I-Love-You-Ness, and there’s a vet with an electric organ. Damn it, we’re gonna hear old guy karaoke of White Cliffs of Dover. And then we do.

See, when this happens at my local bar, they’re my friends; I know what to expect and what to laugh off. My family doesn’t have to know that much about me until well after I’m dead. When Grandpa’s friends put balloons down their bras – yes, women served in the Great Wars – and play not-at-all-hard-to-get I stare at my mother and hope I’m hallucinating.

It does not occur to us until later that perhaps this part of his life is private, and we are intruding, but it’s too late because Mom’s joined the Ladies’ Auxilliary, Tyler joined the post as a Marine who served in Africa during the first Gulf War, and Tyler Two has figured out how to win at Keno between kindergarten and first grade just by coloring inside the lines.

2. Weirdness in the present invariably hints at a weirder past.

Mom: What’s your friend with the French last name?
Tata: Johnny.
Mom: Are you still in touch with him?
Tata: Nearly every day. He’s moved to Santa Fe and learned the tango.
Mom: Is he related to Marguerite of the same last name?
Tata: That’s his mother.
Mom: Really? That’s exciting! How long have you known each other?
Tata: Since the summer I was 14 and saw him painting a giant metal box green.
Mom: My goodness, that’s quite a while! Is he married? Children?
Tata: He’s got a hot veterinarian wife, a houseful of pets and a new tattoo.
Mom: Isn’t that interesting! I met her in radiation. Did you know she was in treatment?
Tata: After 28 years of living an eighth of a mile apart you meet her in a waiting room in the next town?

3. Around the family, peace of mind is gonna cost ya.

I don’t have small children but Daria has three, and three is the magic number at which the noise is too much for me. By lunchtime, I’ve had enough and sit outside with my cup of coffee. Each member of the family is spinning like a top inside the house in his or her own special way and talking the whole time, not necessarily to anyone else. There’s no time to do a whole yoga practice before we go kidnap Grandpa, though the exercise would calm my anxiety. This is the moment when my obsessive-compulsive nature miraculously works for me: the garden my late grandmother tended daily is inches from going to seed. I stand up. I fold in half. I weed in self-defense.

At first, I pull up weeds. As I relax into the stretch, my toes in the dirt feel strong. Upside down, I have always been fine and happy and wildly alive. I gather the weeds into a pile, tear them into shreds and pile them around the roots of larger shrubs against the house. Then I see hollow, woodier stems that once used to be favored plants or flowers and pull them up. Then I pull up grasses and shoots, tear them and place the shreds around the older shrubs. Time passes. The ground is clear and even. I give the house its due, the past its place, and muscles the bloom muscles want and love. You’d think this would quiet the mind. Nope.

Daria: What’s wrong with you? Where are your shoes?
Mom: I have gloves. You can use my gloves. Do you want gloves?
Tom: Can you stay for a week?
Tyler: Are you dressed for this? Should I get power tools? What will this do to property values?
Tyler Two: Mommy says you’re allowed to get dirty – just this once.

Daria, who was a barefoot commune kid with me, can’t stand to touch dirt. We grew vegetables. We spent summers touching the ground. Daria gets hysterical when her kids use their Tonka earthmovers to move earth. Personally, I don’t get it but I haven’t figured out why people care about Britney Spears either so the universe remains mysterious. And hey, what’s a brother-in-law for?

Tata: Tyler! You bastard! Do you know what song is stuck in my head?
Tyler: (Weary) No, Ta. What song is stuck in your head?
Tata: God damn it, it’s Sister Christian and it’s all your fault!
Tyler: (Perking right up) That’s a shame! “Motoring…”

I’m going to make him move my couch after I stick weights between the cushions. Yup, love stinks!

4. Luggage: on wheels, period.

Life is short. Run through the terminal and nap so you can see America from the bus or train. It’s wonderful, you know. There is so much of it and only so much of you.

I’m invisible! And on guard against my mortal enemy: the shower curtain! I save you time and time again but do I ask for thanks? I do not!

I stalk you! I’m stalking you!

It’s Grandpa’s 93rd birthday. Mom’s family is migrating to Cape Cod. Planning has been fraught with slim peril but abundant indecision. Though I recently started trusting my arthritic hands to hold a barbell and took up weightlifting again, I don’t trust them enough to attempt the six-hour drive. Since I can’t drive alone, I’ve looked at planes, trains and buses and they’re all byzantine routes and prohibitively expensive. Daria offers me a seat in her Ford eighteen-wheeler with her husband driving, and her three children in car seats. I’ll have to take a local bus from the Cape to Boston and Amtrak back to Metro Park but when it comes right down to it, I’m still sitting in a car for six hours with my sister.

Look forward to this scintillating exchange over the sobs of frightened children:
Daria: Sweetheart, Mommy didn’t mean to make Auntie Tata sound like a $2 whore!
Tata: Honey, Auntie Tata doesn’t really think your Mommy’s a judgmental bitch!
Daria: Sweetheart, close your eyes and go to sleep. Auntie Tata’s hairstyle won’t turn to snakes!
Tata: Have sweet dreams, darling, and don’t give Mommy’s apparently forgotten past a second thought!

History and histrionics aside, Paulie Gonzalez is a scientist at heart. When he watches TV at all, it’s usually the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters. Stuff blows up every seven minutes. This show may be the best thing that ever happened to crash test dummies and ping pong balls. It’s science! And Paulie is a big thinker. One night last year, he posed an intriguing question.

Your picture goes all swirly and woo-woo.

Paulie: Plastic surgery seems like tricky stuff. I mean, if you have regular surgery and you go back to work, people give you flowers and whisper when they walk past your desk. People get you coffee. They’re all very nice. But what if you get liposuction? Suppose you get your ass lipo’d on Friday. When you come to work on Monday, what? Don’t people see you in the break room and say, “Treesa! Last week, you had a fat ass. What the hell? What happened to your fat ass?”

You get a grip and your picture regains horizontal hold. It’s all about the love, no?

You: Ta, dahhhhhhling, your time-travel unnerves my pet hedgehog.
Tata: Lovey, I understand they enjoy a leisurely swim, but read the manual first.

Last week, Paulie was on a flight to Denver when the airline went all Julie, Your Cruise Director and organized a game: Guess The Plane’s Weight.

I know: how rude!

Certain hints were offered, like the number of passengers and weight limit on bags. Paulie did that blasphemous math stuff the righteous are trying to remove from schools, then some educated guessing, wrote down an answer on his game piece, which is – yes – what all the kids are calling it now, and turned it in. Next thing he knew, he’d won by guessing within 500 lbs. of the crew’s right answer, and the second-best guesser was protesting. His prize was two tickets to the Las Vegas production of Mama Mia. Travel produces exciting new varieties of bad behavior, as does ABBA.

Yesterday, I noticed strange and sneaky movements on the parts of my co-workers, the Nice Ladies. They’re in their forties and fifties. When I caught a bunch of them tiptoeing past my cubicle I was suspicious. Five minutes later, they tiptoed in the other direction. I hate when someone beats me to a good prank, so I tiptoed after them. My student worker, whose name sounds like the sudden opening of a brilliant parasol, reflexively followed. They were whispering to each other. We were silent.

Tata: Whatcha doin’?

Turns out that when well-behaved people who work in libraries are startled while furtively holding water balloons they juggle like the Brothers Karamazov. Two balloons took brief sojourns above our heads. One Nice Lady stuffed a balloon down her bra. In the ensuing but arid chaos, it became clear that Chinese children may not fill balloons with water and fling them at one another, and I say this because my curious and delighted student worker, whose name sounds like the tinkle of bracelet charms, stared at the balloons as if they were the coolest things ever.

The Nice Ladies were intrigued and answered all questions. How does the water get inside? Where’s the air? What do you do with these? Why do they feel so funny? Can you make them bigger? They gave her one to hold she soon discovered felt weirdly alive, as water balloons do. The Nice Ladies made a big production of taking the balloons to the restrooms to meet their fates, but they gave my student worker, whose name sounds like the taps of raised glasses, a fresh balloon she could take home and try filling herself. This, I thought, was a charming example of how travel broadens a person, and inflates.

This morning, my path to work was blocked by a hastily cobbled-together police roadblock. A truck driver forgot to play “How big? Sooooo big!” with his truck and plowed into the train trestle I see from my living room window. This meant Amtrak riders snickered across state lines about the trailer curiously right outside the train’s window. For me, it meant a two-block detour and a thump on the forehead from the Cosmos: last week when Daria, Sandro and I looked at the new apartment, Daria drove through the parking deck next to the library. I’ve parked at least eight different cars and trucks in this deck on and off for nineteen years and never gave clearance a second thought. Last week, as Daria inched through the deck, I broke into a sweat and wasn’t sure we’d make it. That’s how big SUVs have become.

So there’s hope we won’t be able to slug each other across the DMZ of car seats and luggage. I mean, as long as there’s no ABBA.

Mostly, we are used to feeling but not seeing cowardly people skittering in the dark and manipulating our lives through fear and innuendo. Sometimes we see an evolved soul doing what needs to be done, regardless of the risk to herself. Our impulse is to look away and pretend nothing special is happening, because if that person can act, we might take ourselves to task for not doing the same.

Well, if you haven’t, please meet Cindy Sheehan. Many on the right will accuse her of – frankly – any vile thing that fits through a narrow mind, but don’t believe any of that, not a word of it. If you have children, believe in what you feel for them and ask youself as I do: shouldn’t we all be sitting on that dirt road in Texas?