Encore! Encore!

“Oh go play with your encyclopedias!” my stepfather used to say when he wanted to show what pals we were, how smart I was supposed to be, and how generous it was of him to have given me the Britannica, A-Z, for Christmas. It didn’t seem to occur to him that I had heard him say this a few dozen times before. Nevertheless. he always preceded it with the kind of wink that meant: I’m about to say something incredibly clever. Of course he wouldn’t say it unless company was around so that at least someone would believe he’d thought it up on the spot.

I don’t remember if anyone laughed, but my stepfather always did–which gave him just enough in the way of encouragement to repeat it two more times while nudging me in the side with his elbow. Maybe he should have been a stand-up comic–not because his jokes, if you can call them that, were any good but because it didn’t bother him if no one else thought they were funny, and he never tired of repeating them.

My stepfather was not the only one in my life for whom once is never enough when it comes to one-liners or story telling. Such people, I regret to tell the waiting world, frequently take more than their fair share of cookies. My husband is a prime example of both these behaviors. I’m happy to report he tells his vast repertoire of stories very well–even though he cannot help chortling and guffawing his way through them—a habit he dislikes intensely in others and refuses to believe he practices himself. The fact is that by the time my husband has finished a story he is giddy, pink-faced and aglow from his ever-escalating fits of self-appreciative merriment. Nevertheless, although the telling of his tale has taken long enough for someone to roast a small chicken, and his listeners have responded throughout with gratifying laughter, he will not pause to take a breath but instead, with undiminished fervor and the belief that those assembled are longing for this to happen rather than being allowed to have another glass of wine or tell a story themselves, he performs the entire epic word for word one more time.

You will therefore understand why experience has taught me to keep my knitting in a nearby basket. There are simply too many story-telling occasions when not only do I need to calm myself, but it simply won’t work to leap out of my chair and run screaming into the countryside or, more sedately, rise and excuse myself for a long soak in a hot bath redolent with aromatic oils. Even family and old friends would think either action, at the very least, odd. Instead, numerous afghans, sweaters, mittens, hats, funny little bears with scarves or small male dolls with beards and hats have been created. I think of them as wooly memorials to the twice-told tale.

The only time I tell a story is when something quite amusing has just occurred and I’m so inspired with the particulars I can’t be restrained without a rope whereupon the whole marvelous thing is gone never again to be properly recalled—so it is only retold by request.

That no one has made a request is perfectly fine. Or maybe someone has and I forgot. Never mind. I’ll just go play with my encyclopedias. It’s very soothing because nothing’s happened in them since 1948.

Did I mention any of this before? Please let me know, because I have a horror of repeating myself, and my children tell me I’m beginning to do exactly that.

Never mind. I’ll just go play with my encyclopedias. It’s very soothing because nothing’s happened in them since 1948.

Road Rage

Our mile-long dead-end road is not clearly defined on the local map. It appears to join another road of the same name, although they are separated by seven hundred or more feet of land and solid rock. It appears that way because on the map there’s a broken line attaching them in accordance with a long ago plan to make them one.

If they were joined, our quiet little road would become a thruway for trucks and traffic from the middle of town to an area now less easily accessible. No one on our road wants that to happen.

Agreement ends there, and we’re nose up against whether or not to pave our dirt road or not, and some residents on our quiet, neighborly road are up in arms about it. Lengthy letters with words in UPPER CASE appear in our mailboxes claiming dishonesty and scare tactics on the part of those who prefer to keep our road unpaved. If paved, say the pavers, the road will be widened and safer for pedestrians, cars and the bus one neighbor would love to see scheduled to pick up her children by her driveway rather than at the end of the street. It is probable she is the only one who looks upon this as a positive outcome.

The others want to keep it unpaved because an elected official has said if it is paved, the thruway will, lickety split, become a fait accompli.

A town employee insists this isn’t true–so what it comes down to is—whom do you believe?

The non-pavers believe the first, of course, and the pavers, the second but no one actually knows what’s true.

Work is afoot by the non-pavers to have the town abandon the property between the two roads making the possibility of their marriage moot. If that happens, the non-pavers will join the pavers and everyone will be happy assuming the measurable amount of ill-will now floating around disappears.

I am counting on an amiable resolution so that I can continue to hope Israel and Palestine, the Shiites and Sunnis and any other dichotomy on the front page of the morning paper will—someday, somehow—achieve the same.

Yours, a non-paver,

Oh No! Am I a Misandrist?

My husband is a channel surfer and so I see snippets of many programs after dinner glancing from time to time at the TV as I chug about the kitchen. Sometimes the snippets are long enough to be called pieces. I saw such a piece the other night–it was a Western and, to my astonishment and dismay, it made my heart sing. A woman, blonde, beautiful and mad as May, was in a dusty street looking up at a fellow who was shouting threats at her.

“I’ve had enough!” she said and whipped out a gun from a fold in her voluminous skirt and shot him. He fell dead and then a number of men pointed their guns at her and she shot them—also dead. A tough-looking woman came out of the saloon with a gun and shot a few more. Dead.

“I like that,” I said without meaning to.

My husband laughed. I laughed. He surfed.

“What was the name of it?” I quickly asked from the sink. He channeled back but the info button wasn’t working. Somehow I must find out what the title is so I can rent it instead of attending an Empowering Women seminar next weekend.

Not that I’m not already empowered—especially when I compare myself today with the person I was in young womanhood. That poor creature had no clue she was a doormat. She thought she was okay. After all, she and her first husband made such an attractive couple. Looks were everything or so she’d been brought up to believe as was the appearance of a happy marriage. The neighbors across the street described them as dead-ringers for some now dead movie stars, a compliment that distracted her enough to make her think everything must be all right.

She also thought men were perfect creatures even though nothing in her experience supported such a theory. She believed absolutely in the man/woman equation of the movies: his ninety-nine percent to her one percent smart, brave and significant. And even though she graduated from a highly regarded college, she believed her most important role in life would be to make a man happy.

No, I’m not kidding.

One August afternoon in the third month of her first marriage, she jumped up to give her husband a kiss when he arrived home from his base–this was during the Korean War–and in her haste knocked over a just-poured coke on ice. It was a Hades-hot Baltimore day.

“Shit,” she murmured.

“I’ve told you never to say that,” he said.

“Sometimes nothing else will do.”

“If you say it again I’ll wash your mouth out with soap.”

“Shit, shit, shit!” she said.

She thought he was joking when he took her by the arm and led her into their tiny bathroom. He turned on the water, put the cake of soap under it; she was sort of helplessly laughing thinking he couldn’t be serious.

But he was.

Why didn’t she/I say something? I did but it didn’t do any good. Not then and not when he said he had no choice but to fly to a three day football weekend because he had tickets, leaving me with my nursing newborn, eighteen-month old baby and a nasty case of bronchitis. Or when I nearly sprained my ankle when he made me run down a hill—I was pregnant with our fourth child–and thus moved too slowly when I walked from the car toward our house. He told me to hurry up and kicked me hard in the leg—the one with the sore ankle. I don’t know what I said, but I do know I hopped around the kitchen to fix his dinner. Eventually, when I asked for a divorce, he said, “You will have nothing and the children will have nothing.” I knew he meant it as indeed he proved some thirteen years later.

Nevertheless, in the first seven years of that marriage I mostly saw our relationship as a huge practical joke and anticipated my husband would surely turn to me one day and say so. Then we would have a long laugh and start our real life together. In the eighth year I knew it was as unlikely as his giving up golf. Still we stayed married for twenty years.

All that was a long time ago and I thought I was well over my maritally induced misandry—-but my extreme delight while watching a couple of minutes of that movie told me something else. Thus, when my husband, much amused, said he might buy me a gun for my birthday, I had no choice but to come down on the side of law and order.

“Thanks, honey,” I said, “but please—if you do—hold the bullets.”

 

 

A TOOL FOR LOVE

Necessity isn’t only the mother of invention, she also gives birth to women who take things apart and put them back together, or just put things together. I’m speaking of ergonomic chairs, fans with many parts, geodesic domes, particle-board bookcases and dollhouses to name a few. I’m thinking of one woman in particular who has no talent for such projects, poor thing, but has had to learn how because her first husband wouldn’t take them on and now her second husband won’t either. Both have claimed they can’t, but then neither could this woman until she’d spent many a Christmas pre-dawn on the floor with instructions, screws, bolts and tools. Have I dropped enough hints for you to know of whom I am speaking?

“Why didn’t you buy this assembled?” my ex would ask as he watched me become familiar with many tiny parts. A rhetorical question I was, nevertheless, supposed to answer.

“It doesn’t come assembled.” The recollected gentleness of this response fills me with awe.

“Ridiculous,” he’d snort. “Well there’s no point in both of us staying up all night. I’m going to bed!”

Yes, well that was in the deep past and I am grateful for the excellent on-the-job-training I received then since it prepared me so well for my present contract. Note: Although in the first instance my husband was almost never home and in the second, my husband almost always is, the handyman results are exactly the same.

“Where’s the screwdriver?” asks either husband meaning: “Go get the screwdriver and follow me to the place where the problem is. Then fix it.”

The screwdriver of this time and place, in case you may one day be looking for it yourself, is, with most of our other tools, in the giant-size Chock Full of Nuts coffee can in the cabinet under the toaster, as it has been since we moved into our house seventeen years ago.

For all I know, dear reader, you are a capable guy or, lucky lady, live with one of them. If so, I’m glad such a person still exists. I’ve been looking for him ever since I saw specimens in the old black and white days of the movies. He changed oil or tires, fixed screens or back door locks, mended Sister’s doll carriage or Junior’s bicycle, painted the house or the fence and mowed the lawn. Always with a big smile on his “I’ve got every under control, darling” face.

Where is he now? Under Classified: Services, Handyman. Reasonable.

It’s not the same.

A confession: I loved him–in truth I love him still, maybe even more than in 1960 because now I know he will never —please hand me the wrench, sweetheart—be mine.

 

On Another Note

 

Ever since Hollywood made such a mess of my book, “More Than You Want To Know About Me,”my life has been a closed pamphlet — and yet here I am writing an open letter just as if I didn’t respect my privacy and was about to let the calico cat out of the bag again. I am just so special and it really wasn’t fair the way Meryl Streep played me with a lockjaw upper Eastside NYC accent. I mean we never even met. “They” wouldn’t let me come out for a conference and a pedicure at the Beverly Hilton and if you’re at all interested – “they” are the director, the producer, the stars and that goddamn snotty little script girl who was sleeping with everybody (alternately I believe but you never know in tinsel-town) right after lunch on a daily basis. How, you may well ask, do I know these things? Well I have my sources and if I were to name names I wouldn’t have them any more now would I and then what? There have been rumors about my long term friendship with Dominick D. but there hasn’t been a murder connected with my movie yet so what our talking on the phone for two hours every night has to do with anything I’ll never know.

We’re just friends and he appreciates my brilliant, unique psychic predictions of future mayhem and — well I’m sorry to say — there is going to be another murder — big names, blood, a missing shoe and all that — and we’ve been going over the details. That’s ALL I’m going to say at this time. More later.

Disclaimer: Don’t worry–not a word is true.

 

My Apologies on the Offchance I’ve Wounded Your Feelings

“You’re sorry?” asks my husband every time I say, “I’m sorry.” “What for?” he continues.

“Oh nothing,” I say.

“Then why are you sorry?”

You will be glad to hear the interchange usually ends there, although in my mind I’ve always done something to be sorry about but can’t remember exactly what. I tell the dogs I’m sorry, too. “Oh dear,” I hear myself say, “I’m so sorry,” every time I bump a head or step on a tail—easy to do I admit with four dogs running around or lying about in a place they weren’t a second ago. But still they have feelings and always appear mollified when I apologize and pat their heads. Nevertheless, it’s just not smart to apologize to them when other people are around especially people who have no pets. They might think you’ve lost your software.

My sister-in-law came for a visit the other day and is now of that exact opinion. After dinner I got up to clear the dishes and, when I returned for another stack, collapsed and landed on my knees so as not to fall on and injure the dog that had just crossed in front of me.

In the process I nudged him slightly. “I’m sorry, Casper,” I said.

Stacy was indignant “He was in your way, “she said, helping me up, and then, “He’s a dog.”

Well, I know that but so what? Anyway my sister-in-law is not a dog-lover. She doesn’t like to be poked by their noses or licked by their tongues. She wants them to go away for the rest of her stay, which of course makes them want to climb onto her lap forever. And she certainly isn’t going to bury her face in their fur and hug and kiss them to death.

In any case, who’s to say who’s in whose way? Our kitchen is a wider-than-normal- galley-type and has two perfectly satisfactory lanes. There are moments, however, when three or four would be more suitable because some dog or person is always in some dog’s or person’s way. Anyway, most in my generation of women were brought up to say I’m sorry whenever we were in the way or bumped someone accidentally and so forth. Some, or maybe only one of us took this polite behavior to include animals and furniture.

Thus when I say I’m sorry, I can’t help it and, the truth is, I’m sorry I’m sorry.

 

 

Without Warning

But isn’t that always the way? Does your dryer deliver notice before it stops revolving, or your refrigerator before it stops cooling? Of course not–none of them do. You can clean them and service them and still, when in the mood, they go on the blink without so much as a mechanical whimper. And what about those no-maintenance items the salesperson neglected to tell you would inevitably fail someday–without any…?

Yesterday, thirty minutes from home and wanting to return there ASAP, I approached my car and pressed the remote. Nothing happened. I pressed again and again and again and every time nothing happened. What to do? I was stranded but cool. I took out my car-towing card and my cellphone. Then I remembered my car’s personal dealership’s number was in my giant pocketbook on my giant telephone list. I called.

“It’s probably the battery,” said Dave. “You’ll have to bring it in. It’ll cost sixty dollars.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “I can’t bring it in. I’m stranded. I can’t get into my car!” My voice was rising. This was the third time I’d told him.

“I see,” he said–and I have to give him credit for not having a you are an idiot tone in his voice when he added, “Use the key.”

Sheesh. Use the key, use the key. Of course, use the key although I’d never used the key in the car door before. I didn’t think of it as a car door key–just an ignition key. Aargh. Okay. I recovered my dignity, sort of, after saying duh twice so Dave would know I knew I was exactly what hadn’t been in his tone of voice–and then made an appointment for the following day. Dave had informed me that only trained service people for my kind of car could unravel the mysteries of remote battery replacement and synchronization.

By coincidence, I already had an appointment the following day for a premium oil change, filter replacement, lubrication of chassis and hinges, tire pressure setting and anti-freeze check-out at a local certified master technician’s shop I’d just heard about. I called to ask if it were remotely possible the master could fix my remote? It was. I took it down for him to have a look-see to be sure. He removed the battery so as to buy a match. It would be no problem.

I canceled the appointment with the dealership and the next day the master technician inserted a new battery, performed the synchronization procedure and did all of the previously scheduled tasks. The battery cost $3.99, the replacement of same and procedure was $15.00. The rest was $34.95 for a total of $53.94 before tax.

It is now abundantly clear my dealership has been grossly overcharging me so that, despite my gratitude to Dave for teaching me how to open the car door with its key, I will never allow him to lighten my wallet again. And, should I darken his service department in future, it will be in the unlikely circumstance something is still under warranty.

Presidential Philosophy 101

You can’t go wrong with W—not when he dusts off his philosopher’s cap and gets to thinking big-time, chin in hand. This is a pose to take seriously because it’s not a pose—it’s what you would call the position of compassionate realism. See–he’s compassionate toward insurance companies and realistic toward health care because it’s clear health care is not necessary for children or it would be in the constitution.

Anyway, they can go to the emergency room for every ailment, big and small, and we will all be glad to foot the bill their parents can’t pay. True, it will be more expensive than underwriting their health care but it won’t be in the budget and it won’t offend our national philosopher.

Besides–what else can W do when it comes to choosing between the children of low-middle-income parents and the ceo’s of high-upper income insurance companies? Is it fair to judge him when the the future of our nation has nothing to do with the future of non-affluent children but, rather, the future of rich ceo’s?

You might argue that it won’t damage insurance companies if W supports health care for such children because if their parents can’t afford to buy health or any other kind of insurance how could it cut into insurance profits? But come on, people–get real! W is our very own philosopher-king-president (are we lucky or what?) and as such should be supported whenever he’s philosophically for or philosophically against anything.

I shouldn’t have to tell you this.

In Memorium

Although my Mother was nearly ninety-three when she died, she was never old enough to receive Modern Maturity, the AARP monthly sent to every member, like it or not.

“God damn it to hell,” she would shout when it arrived so as to be heard as far as the duck pond across from her townhouse in El Reno, Oklahoma and the cemetery down the block where her ancestors slept. The publication was so repulsive that several days passed before she could lay a hand on it. Then suddenlyshe would stub out her cigarette, rise from her prone position on the couch, pick up the despised magazine and toss it with extraordinary precision–considering she was not athletic, hated to walk or move about unnecessarily–from some distance into the wastebasket.

“I’m not mature enough!” she’d say and then, as if she’d heard a chorus of protestations. “No, and I never will be either. So there.”

She must have had her last cigarette on the evening of September 3, 2000, because the next morning I found her, via telephone which she answered as if nothing were wrong, by her bed on the floor where she’d fallen, following, as I later learned, a Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA). The only upside of this episode was that she never smoked again. Before this it was useless to protest her habit even though I found burns on tabletops and burned out cigarettes in ashtrays whoseinch-long ashes drooped menacingly. It also did no good to mention my throat got sore from second hand smoke.

“Why that’s not true, dear,” she said, disappointed at yet another confirmation that I had failed to inherit her good sense. “There’s no such thing as second hand smoke.”

One evening after I coughed and coughed twice more, she stood up, glared at me and said, “That’s just ridiculous and I don’t want to hear about it ever again.”

She was firm, confident, unyielding. I don’t recall her being in doubt ever about anything except once. After an evening when she said she’d had “a snootful,” a self-compliment because people who didn’t
drink were of no consequence, she wondered if she’d behaved quite as she should have the night before.

“Still” she said, upon a brief reflection, “I did it–so it must have been all right.”

When it came to politics or bias my mother never held back. At the height of William Jefferson Clinton’s undoubted scandal, my Mother said she had characterized the President to her younger sister, a woman as far to the right as she was to the left, as “that sweet, darling Bill Clinton.” Her sister allowed she wouldn’t be in touch for a long, long time.

“I don’t care one bit if she didn’t like it–that’s how I feel. Anyway,” she continued with accidental clairvoyance, “she didn’t have to make such a federal case out of it.”

The mini-stroke affected her profoundly, and, unable to be on her own any longer, I brought her home to Connecticut. Although she lasted another nineteen months I knew my mother had turned a final corner when she said nothing about the Florida ballot dispute or the ultimate determination of the election of 2000. As often as W appeared on the screen, I was never again to hear her say,”I don’t know what it is–but I just cannot STAND that man!”

A month after her death I went to get the mail across the street from the end of our driveway and found my Mother wedged in above the circulars, junk mail and bills, in a box. It was a shock despite the fact that I’d been expecting her. I thought she was going to be delivered by UPS, a dispatch I would have preferred as more dignified and less trivializing although there’s nothing dignified about having ashes delivered by any means, then to save, inter or sprinkle them, as I would do when I decided where. I thought it might be appropriate to take some to Park Avenue where she lived for many years although itdidn’t seem environmentally correct. What if everyone did that?

I could also have sent them down to Oklahoma where my mother was born, and where she lived fifteen of her last seventeen years. Courtesy of one of my many cousins, her ashes could go in the duck pond or around her parent’s graves. But mailing her again would have been “too macabre” as my mother liked to say–that always made me want to ask if there were such a thing as just macabre enough? Of course I knew full well that she just liked saying the word, glamorized with the “too” asin “too fabulous” while stretching out the second “a” in macabre for a bit longer than was endurable. It was also her way of not having to discuss something as unpleasant and, to us both, unlikely as her death.

She went so far, however, when lost for a more controversial topic, to remind me she did not want a funeral or a burial–that she wanted, never mind the disapproval it engendered among her siblings–my mother thrived on disapproval–cremation.I thought I might put her in the Atlantic Ocean where she’d sprinkled her husband’s ashes in 1980 off the Westhampton shore, their summer residence. That had to be the place because as soon as I thought of it I heard her come to life in my head and respond in five of the many voices that accompanied five of her many roles:

The baby, “Oh goody, swimmin’ with the fishies;” the grande dame, “Absolute perfection, darling girl;” the hillbilly, “Shucks, this old country gal’s not fussy;” the kindly gentlewoman, “Bless heart, what a sweet idea;” or herself, “Goddamn it to hell, I don’t give a shit!”

So my inimitable mother was reduced to ashes–as we will all be, one way or another, to be delivered–as we will all be, one way or another, back to earth. It is very ordinary. It is very strange.

Neatness Counts

I hate to admit it, but I’m not coffin-ready. Even if there’s nothing of consequence to bequeath, my children shouldn’t be left with their mother’s files and papers, letters, tax returns, recipes, memorabilia, balls of yarn, photographs, AC adapters, computer cables or, to put it more succinctly, you name it.

Coffin-ready, by the way, assuming you are still with me, and not keeled over in green-faced horror at the thought, is an old New England expression and concept whereby one gets rid of everything superfluous so as to make way for a clean exit from this mortal coil. Sort of an end of life Feng Shui. I have,by the way, eight books on the latter and as many on how to organize one’s life, desk, and closet so it’s clear I possess the intent to have everything in its proper place or tossed away.

I find such books irresistible, read them when they arrive and make attempts to follow their guidelines. For example: Think of your overall goal as an elephant you must consume. Obviously you can’t eat an elephant in one day but you can take little bites until it’s gone! Reasonable enough–though not to my partner in the category of “for better or worse….” He is dead-set against my eliminating, for example, his tuxedo purchased at age fifteen long before most people living today were born.

“Throw it out? he shouts. “It’s in superb condition!”

“Well then, give it away!”

“I can’t do that — I may need it.”

“But it doesn’t fit and anyway you don’t want to go anywhere.”

His silence lasts the day.

I should have asked more questions before we joined lives such as:”Do you save things?” or “Assuming you save things do you become apoplectic when someone suggests you dispose of stationery printed with a former address?”

At the very least I should have visited his office. That would have permanently stopped our impending union and perhaps my heart–death by the sight of extreme disorder: Boxes filled with spreadsheets, stationery, brochures, and who the hell knows what, sit atop other boxes. Mugs, one-third full of ancient brown liquid, grow large specimens of mold. Piles of papers and manila envelopes cover all surfaces and, close your eyes if you’re squeamish, the floor. My husband’s desk is invisible under stacks of unopened mail, unopened Fed Ex letters, unopened notices from the IRS and state government agencies, and small packages. Several years worth of the same have spilled ankle deep on the floor, under and around his desk somewhat disguised by layers of sedimentary dust as is everything else in the room.

How could this be? My husband is a genius, an encyclopedia of information, a guru of the municipal marketplace–but I now understand–so wrapped up in thought and smoke from his pipe that he has never been able to locate a battery, make a lot of money or notice his surroundings.

So I’ll have to get coffin-ready on my own–taking daily bites out of our Elephant of Stuff until it’s all gone. When my husband has a haircut or a doctor’s appointment–mum’s the word– I’m off to the dump or the Salvation Army bearing gifts. Don’t worry. He’ll never know. The poor fellow’s a genius.

 

Ho Hum—Millions Will Die

Or is it only thousands? Never mind–don’t make yourself crazy–the administration knows each and every one of them is expendable and you should know it, too. They are either collateral damage (cd) or soldiers (s) and either way they’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. War is hell (h) and this is what happens when you have one. Get real, folks. People die and people are horribly injured but they are brave and happy to pay the price and do whatever is necessary to bring democracy–or if not that– then stability or if not that–then a stand-off in Iraq. W and C know this. Didn’t they put their lives on the line in the 60’s–or if not–aren’t they suffering and unable to sleep every night agonizing over the troops–or if not–don’t they fast on Sundays?

If I remember correctly, wasn’t it the God of their choice (TGOTC) who backed their plan to take us down the high road of nation-saving and building? Clearly, TGOTC must be the old Testament God with an eye-for-an-eye mentality (Saddham tried to kill W’s father, for Pete’s sake). And, let’s be fair–doesn’t the Decider of yore have a tradition of overlooking, when He feels like it, just about anything including mendacity, incompetence even arrogance?

If He is, indeed, the One, He must be tickled to death to see his little earthling son, W (POTUS), give the Constitution of the United States (COTUS), outdated and irrelevant as it is, the finger? After all, there may not be a whole lot to laugh about in eternity, so He must find entertainment, however brief, whenever and wherever He finds it, since for Him this administration is around for only a nanosecond.

From His perspective to our moment in time.

Missing Words

Some words have gone missing in our collective lexicon and, I can’t help myself, I miss them. Actress and heroine, hostess and sorceress—poof—they all disappeared in a twinkling and, as far as I know, without a word of protest. On the same sad note, where have the stewardesses gone? I believe their absence is one of the reasons flying is no longer as civilized as heretofore. The stewardesses in my memory were equipped with tender smiles and willing hands. “Of course I’ll find a pillow and a blanket for you– poor old thing.”

I notice no one has yet removed goddess, empress, princess, governess or Baroness doubtless because there are so few of them. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m for equal rights, equal pay etc., but why can’t we keep our dedicated words? I don’t see that it makes sense to throw away chairwoman unless woman itself is going to be deleted. Isn’t wo, as a sylabic prefix to man politically incorrect? If so, the absence of woman will designate man by default as the human template. When that happens. ladies, we’re in big trouble and I suggest we stop going to gynecologists and having mammograms since we won’t technically exist in our present form.

It seems to me the more words we have the better and clearer communication will be and so I would like fat, skinny, dopey and the skin colors people sport to be reinstated. Blandness in the written word is unappealing and I wonder if children have stopped reading because books have been bowdlerized. Why read if nothing is described properly? Besides isn’t it “bor-ring!” as JoAnne Worley used to bellow on Laugh-In?

I haven’t any tips today except to mention that it’s not a good idea to buy sweets for a husband who needs to gain weight when you don’t. I bought muffins and cornbread (I used to make both on a weekly basis–wasn’t I wonderful?) for mine today but, thank the Lord, no worries–giantesses are kaput.

All the Best,