Okay–who isn’t? Everyone loses keys and glasses and usually finds them the same day although last week my best glasses were missing for five days and I thought gone forever. Now I’ve lost a file of reports for our business and I need them to fill out the current report so it conforms with the old. Therefore, I”m going through piles of paper and throwing out stuff we no longer, I hope, need. This is good–throwing out I mean—or bad, if I throw out the wrong items.

Then there’s my passport. I have two old ones of my husband’s and none of mine. I have the niggling feeling I threw out my old and new one while meaning to throw out both of our old ones. If I find it I can get a new passport fast and it just makes me crazy not to have it. This is ridiculous because I have no plan to go abroad. Still, I’d like to be able to go if suddenly I have a mind to see my baby granddaughter who is lost in Russia albeit in the good care of my son and his wife.

My Master Card went missing in the spring and I later discovered it had been stolen by someone with a passport. I know because he/she charged over $6,000 worth of plane tickets while in France and Italy. Thus my little card took a surprising trip from a plain old CVS in Connecticut across the ocean before I even knew it was gone. I’m sorry to say its replacement is presently missing although since nothing has been charged on it for several weeks I’ll bet it’s lurking about somewhere.

I have also lost some things of value and just hope they are just missing. I look and look and wake up at night wondering where they are. The good thing about it is I’m of an age when I can’t always remember what I’ve lost meaning I don’t always wake up at night wondering. Also I sometimes find things I didn’t know I owned. I found a jacket recently I don’t remember buying or receiving as a gift. I like it. Maybe it’s a replacement for something I don’t remember I lost.

Never mind. How to Find Lost Objects is on the way from amazon.com. Perhaps it contains the telephone number of a talented psychic or Red Lantern who regularly visited The Land of the Lost with Isabel and Billy in my radio-filled childhood. He always found everything.

Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons, another radio pal, was also a whiz in the finding arena although as far as I know I haven’t yet lost any persons so I won’t try to trace him. I realized years later the theme-song for his program was Someday I’ll Find You. I think I’ll adopt it. Dum dum de dum dum, dum dum de dum dum.

Tra-la. Positive expectation is what it’s all about.

Alayne wanted me to love her intensely. “I found you in a rosebush” she often reminded me, “and gave you to your mother.” I believed her absolutely though sometimes I wondered why, if I really was her angel child, she didn’t keep me for herself when she had the chance. Of course, that wasn’t a question I was supposed to ask and so, angel child that I was, I didn’t. We never got into who put me in the rosebush or whether I was supposed to have been a flower that miraculously bloomed into a baby but it suited Alayne to have had such an experience and it pleased me to have had so unlikely a debut. Hearing this probably annoyed the hell out of my mother and the time came, perhaps after I stopped believing in Santa-Claus, when Alayne no longer told her magical story although she continued to refer to herself as my “other mother”.

Like my mother and her friends Alayne was far more gorgeous and glamorous than the average husband required of a wife although for Lyman, her husband—a connoisseur of art, antiques and fine books not to mention women— she was probably just the ticket. They lived with their miniature schnauzer, first Jeep then Buttons on Park Avenue, the upper 70’s, in a spacious apartment filled with paintings, rare books and some priceless treasures I had to be careful not to touch or, more likely as I skipped by, jiggle.

She held court of a morning in the master bed of the master bedroom where, however, the master did not sleep. He camped out in his library and possibly paid visits when he was of a mind to enjoy the conjugal rights for which he was paying so dearly. When I visited overnight I was the one who slept in the library and Lyman went to his club. Or so I now reason because if he ever tucked in for the entire night next to his luscious wife why wasn’t he around early the following morning?

The walls and nearly invisible closets that lined each side of the bedroom were covered in a pale blue silk moiré. The bed and headboard were upholstered in blue satin, and the sheets were ivory satin between which Alayne was, mornings, magnificently ensconced wearing an embroidered, beribboned bedjacket. Over her lap was an enormous bedtray with curving cabriole legs and cubbyholes for the mail and newspaper. There would be a soft boiled egg in a china eggcup, toast and coffee.

She would send the dog to stand in the corner for some unknown failure to obey the rules. After a while she would whisper, “if there’s a little dog in this room who would like to say he’s sorry he can come here now and ask for forgiveness…”. And Jeep or Buttons, would pad over looking crestfallen, put his paws on the bed with his little head between them, wait to be absolved and fed a bit of toast.

Her dressing room was lined with mirrored closets and a large round mirror was attached to the back of a swivel chair in front of the long, mirrored vanity so that she could see her face and hair from every angle

When I was about six Alayne went to an Episcopal orphanage to adopt Rosemary—a name immediately changed to Barbara—a little girl about my age –who, in the pictures I have, is beautiful and looks as if she’s about to cry. Alayne transformed the maid’s room, a small cell near the kitchen with one high window and a tiny attached bathroom, into a bedroom for her. We were to be friends and, I realized at dinner one evening when we were having a spelling bee, competitors. When I realized that I was being shown off to Barbara’s belittlement I stopped playing but it wasn’t soon enough.

After a year Alayne sent Barbara/Rosemary back to the orphanage.

She wasn’t me.

Because I suffer, to use my mother’s favorite verb, from myopia–or did—I used to think I was invisible. Now entrenched in what some might call my dotage, my eyesight has improved to such a degree that I forget to put on my glasses until half the day is gone, This unexpected improvement is a consequence of the far-sightedness of age correcting the near-sightedness of youth.

I used to like to say for dramatic effect that I was legally blind because I couldn’t make out the big E on the eye chart. Nevertheless, I could identify people by their gestures, walks, general outlines–even people I didn’t know but who took the same buses or trains as I and if they passed by me years later in another setting I’d recognize them. Of what practical use this was I can’t say since I never greeted them or was called upon to identify them to the police. And I was far from blind—a good squint sufficed when I needed to see or read something at a distance—I have never needed glasses for reading up close. Scrunching up my eyes, however, greatly irritated my mother and stepfather. The latter would mimic my squint to make me stop or ask me why I was squinting, which I would deny I was doing. Neither allowed me to wear my glasses when in public because I then no longer qualified as pretty. “Take your glasses off,” my mother said when I was summoned to the sunroom to meet her guests.

In my late teens I was fitted with contact lens. They were hard in substance and harder to get used to—a callus had to form on the inside of my upper eyelids. I rarely wore them especially after my first devastating experience when they were newly inserted and I was out with my mother and stepfather. We were seated at a table in a restaurant when I looked up from the menu to the panorama before and all around me: I was able to see everyone in the room, not simply their outlines and fuzzy gesticulations but the smallest detail of their eyes, noses, frowns and smiles. That was terrible partly because the world and the people in it were not nearly as beautiful, friendly and smooth as I had thought but mostly because everyone in the room could see me and some of them were in the process of doing just that.

One August night in my eighteenth year before I was fitted for contact lens I was about to get out of my date’s car after a evening I did not care to repeat—although I had already been embarrassed into accepting another invitation for the following Saturday—when he grabbed me without warning and kissed me. I can still see his open mouth approaching. I was not pleased—it was the first time I’d ever been kissed on a first date and this wasn’t even someone I liked. Later I looked at myself in the mirror expecting to see the face of a girl whose reputation was forever sullied but although she appeared none the worse for wear, I rebuked her silently:You have been kissed by a blind date and you don’t have any idea what he looks like.

It may come as no surprise to say this was the man I eventually married so determined was he to have me whether I knew what he looked like or not. As for me, I was and, for many years remained,  invisible to us both.

I’m sitting on a stool in my mother’s apartment kitchen thinking about tomorrow when my first child will be induced. She has no interest in departing the womb—nor will her future siblings—and is now three weeks beyond the due date and the necessary dilation announcing her imminent arrival. I am barely twenty-three; too excited to sleep aware my life is about to change forever. I have no idea what this means but I know it is true and I can’t wait to see the baby who is presently distending my middle to a believe-it-or-not degree. The back of me still shows the indentation of a waist, my sides are slim which means she, though we don’t yet know her sex, is in residence high up and out in the front of me, like a cantilevered rotunda. The skin around my navel has long-since reddened and stretched all around so that a split seems inevitable. When I carry my next baby, born eighteen months later, a hernia is diagnosed when his head presses against this area causing severe but temporary pain.

My husband drives me to Lenox Hill Hospital the next morning, deposits me with admissions and departs not to be seen again until evening–hours after our daughter arrives, I have nursed her for the first time, and she is back with the other babies. He seems pleased, places a flower arrangement and card by my bed. Good job, it reads. I don’t tell him that earlier I scream when the doctor performs an episiotomy without warning or, apologize when he chastises me saying “there’s no reason to scream,” or, when the nurse presents my fat-cheeked ruddy-skinned daughter say “hello, darling” and kiss her damp dark hair. I’ve been in love with her for months.

My mother appears bearing a pink satin coverlet to put on my bed in the private room I occupy for seven days where many friends and family members visit. My nursing bra is stuffed with kotex to soak up leaking milk. I have become a manufacturer of sorts. I smell like the inside of a refrigerator when milk has spilled on a shelf. I arrange and rearrange myself inside a rubber doughnut to relieve the tiny balloons of hemorrhoids I’ve acquired during labor. When I stand up it feels as if my insides are going to fall out. I have unfamiliar large, hard, alabaster-white breasts. My nipples do not turn brown but like my mother’s remain pink which I am told signifies never having given birth. My daughter sucks them vigorously and before I leave the hospital they have begun to bleed.

My sister-in-law tells me it’s disgusting to nurse. She makes a face. “Like a cow,” she says as it were a brilliant remark and then repeats it for the weeks and months to follow. “Like a cow”. It is April 11, 1956. When I sleep, I dream of my little girl.

We’re not talking weight here. If so, you’d see little jubilant exclamation points and smiley faces. No, we’re talking height. Here’s the story: I used to be five feet, eight and a quarter inches. In my day this meant people were always asking me how tall I was as if they needed to know for the statistics sign in front of Barnum and Bailey’s freak show. Others would reassure me that I could always become a model as if no other career would be open to a girl of such strange dimensions—I was also extremely skinny, the euphemism for flat-chested though even when I became non-flat-chested I looked as if I were because of my slump. Never mind. The point is I would have loved to have been shorter though I never actually prayed for that to happen— it didn’t occur to me that it could.

Well it did. I am now five feet five and need once again to redraw my self-portrait not to mention reshorten a few pairs of pants–from when I was five feet six last year. It is now completely clear to me why an older female person is often described as a little old woman. Okay, I’m not exactly little but you get my drift which is defintely southward. Where will it or, more to the point, where will I end? Will family and friends be able to find me? Will I become Thumbelina on a walnut shell? At a diminishment of one inch per year I won’t be noticeable long so take a good look or, better yet, a picture.

Note: to prevent shrinkage: put up a bar and hang daily.

Jewelry is not my thing especially when it comes to rings. Not only are they a cinch to misplace, they get in my way when I’m at the sink, in the shower or out in the garden which is why I can’t find them for the week following. Although at present my hands are naked, they have been clothed with a ring or two along the runway of my exotic life and could be still if there were a reason to pluck one from the safety deposit box where I have placed treasures, including several knock-your-eye-out finger encirclements, left to me by my mother.

When he was my fiancé, my first husband, the eventual father of my four children presented me with a small box and ring within. The stone was sallow and loose despite the four prongs that held it down and it glittered darkly. In fact, it was a fake, a stand in for the real thing, the perfect metaphor, though I had no way to know it at the time, for what my marriage would be. I wore it back to college and, for a while, pretended it was a diamond in the same way I pretended almost everything. In defense of my then self—a now unfathomable person— she lived, as did many others of that time, in the world of ’shoulds’ and ‘musts’ hoping to please everyone, and thus never got the hang of pleasing herself. As that young woman I should love the young man who pursues me relentlessly, who loves me or says he does, whose friends say he does, whose brothers, aunts and uncles are eager for us to plight our troth, whose future mother-in-law, my mother, says to me when I want to break up with him,

“How could you do such a thing to that poor orphan? He loves you.”

Ergo I should love him, shouldn’t I? It suits everyone. Approval abounds. And then in the winter before the marriage planned for August I go all the way with him.

What? Do you mean you had sex?

Sort of and having performed this act not only should I love him but also I must love him otherwise how could I have done that? And now I had to marry him.

A month later the stand-in ring was discarded in favor of a 2.5 carat round cut diamond with diamond baguettes on the sides mounted in platinum. On my thin finger it was top heavy owing partly to its size and partly to the setting which was placed high up in a way I considered ostentatious; light came from underneath the stone; it floated in space rather as if it was on display. I was appreciative but embarrassed. I would have preferred something more modest. I disliked being set apart, longed to be exactly like everyone else but I pretended I was thrilled especially since the sight of mine was usually greeted with, “What a rock!” When I told my mother what I really thought—that it was too showy, she said, “You’re crazy,” According to her there was no such thing.

Poor girl—possessor of a lovely diamond ring not exactly to her taste. Fortunately I had a kind of distance toward myself. I knew this wasn’t something to obsess about but it was a better focus than looking toward the future when I was set to marry a man who bored me to tears, slumped like a rag doll when he sat down, wasn’t funny or a great dancer, didn’t give me the time of my life and nearly always failed to hold his end up in a conversation. Because he was so silent and unresponsive I believed he must be very wise. Certainly he seldom agreed with me or found anything I had to say of interest and I concluded therefore he possessed superior intelligence. Also I thought at the very least we would have a great sex life though I can’t say why and, of course, I was wrong.

I knew I couldn’t make it to August when mother said she planned to tie a ribbon on every blade of grass and where certain people related to my stepfather would be in attendance. My stepfather said he’d rather give me the ten thousand dollars my wedding would cost—please note this was the 50’s—and suggested we elope. Also I thought I might be pregnant. We took off for a three-night, two-day honeymoon in Williamsburg, Virginia.

I got my period as we were saying “I do.” but it didn’t matter—I had to marry him because we’d slept together. I had to be as true as possible to my standards—a rigid set of commandments constructed with the help of nuns, fundamentalist relatives, my mother and the romantic movies of Hollywood where the smiling bride on her way down the aisle at fade-out was almost always a virgin, madly in love and headed for bliss.

None of it described me and I never got the ten thousand dollars either.

The first glimmer of wondering, what did he pursue me for? entered my mind when he asked for twin beds at the hotel. Later I realized he wasn’t going to kiss me goodnight—I was, after all, bleeding, but he did, finally, without enthusiasm. He played eighteen holes of golf both mornings, then daily we had lunch, saw the sights, took a few pictures, had dinner, a sexless night, no cuddling, and I returned home the same untried near virgin I’d been before except now I had two rings, the newest a plain, slender platinum band.

Those rings accompanied me through twenty years of marriage though I only wore the diamond when I got dressed up, put on contact lens, mascara and heels and went somewhere other than the schools or supermarket. I soon loved my “rock,” forgot about size and setting and often soaked it in ammonia and water to remove residue and enhance its brilliant sparkle. Alas, the ring had to go when following the divorce and after the last child graduated from high school I was forced by my ex to sell the house, half of which was mine, and needed money for fixing up my co-op. It paid for five ceiling fans, and a new kitchen built on the cheap. I should have kept the ring. Its plain consort still hangs around in my jewelry box.

My second fiancé did not burden me with a floating diamond, a down-to-earth sapphire or for that matter an engagement ring of any description. When another ring of importance was placed on my finger it was a wide wedding band of gold and platinum. Handsome. I picked it out myself, by myself and paid for it, the perfect metaphor, though I had no way to know it at the time, for what my marriage would be. Several years later the ring was so tight I doubted I could get it off—and once I did with the help of Vaseline and my husband’s determined twisting—it was unwise ever to put it back. As for a replacement, it would never occur to him to buy one and, don’t look at me, I’ve been there, done that.

Nothing. Rien. Nada.

I’m sorry but that’s the fact–even if the rest of the world finds your life story or day’s events endlessly intriguing. And, yes, it’s devastating to realize how boring you are to the very people who are the most interesting to you. If someone had been kind or wise enough to tell me this years ago I would have saved myself a lot of grief—so if you feel driven in future to send me a thank-you note you are, in advance, most welcome.

BTW, you and I should have known this from the get-go. After all we had parents with interminable moth-balled stories that bored us to sobs along with those sleep-inducing run-downs of their daily non-happenings.

For starters, your children don’t care if the thing that happened to them today happened to you when you were their age. No. And even if you can prove it was exactly the same they just don’t give a flying pony. From their perspective, your life is over and every detail of what composed it up to now and from this day forward is and will be deadly dull. I’m sorry but it’s not my fault. It’s not your fault either and I suppose if you were President of the United States or winner of the Pulitzer or Nobel prize they might give you the time of day–but only because it might make them look good in front of their friends and possibly mean a check in the mail.

I once dated a young man who kept a clipping handy in his car about his uncle. It maintained he, the uncle, had married a famous musical comedy star after his first wife died. I don’t know what I was supposed to make of it but I’m sure if his father had married the star neither I nor any of the other damsels fated to sit in the passenger seat of his car would have heard word one about it. The important message here is if you’re an aunt or an uncle your life may actually hold your niece or nephew’s attention.

Be very careful if your child seems to be actively listening to your high school reminiscences. He’s only is waiting to ask for the car keys and correctly believes that by humoring you he’ll get them as soon as you finish the end of the well-known memory. You will find this out very quickly if you take the time to wear down his patience. A swift segue into your college escapade in Florida should do it. He’d rather walk than hear that one again.

Still, you can be fascinating. Just talk about or listen to them and they will never tell you they’ve got to run or their cellphone needs recharging.

However, there will come a time when you can tell it all. This will be near or on your deathbed when the entire family or a designated representative will descend upon you begging for a complete reconstruction of your life while they video tape your every feeble gesture and record your every mumbled word for posterity. Prepare to be amusing so your children’s children’s children will write a report on you, put you on their version of YOUTUBE and play you at family reunions.

Take heart. The oral history of your life may not be, as they say, a total loss.

It is a given that you will marry the very person designed to cause you the most stress. Having been married twice and a participant in at least one long term relationship, I can go on record that anyone at all will serve–or is it just that I am truly impossible to live with? Some have put forth such a hypothesis–where they now lie buried is a mystery I won’t share until my upcoming tell-it-all potboiler “He Just Made Me So Mad” is on the shelves at your local bookstore.

What has upset me enough to write about? Answer: Everything-but to begin with—I do hope you’ll be in this for the long haul–timing—I mean timing as to when we should leave for a doctor’s appointment, a funeral, a wedding or a dinner party. When it comes to the last two my husband wears his why-do we have to go-to this damn thing for Chrissakes?-face. This means his disapproval is so great he won’t be ready on time. Moreover, he makes it clear that had he realized I came equipped with a plethora of friends who had marriageable children or gave parties, he would have walked off in the direction of the Hudson River smart as you please doing us both a great favor before the ceremony uniting us some years ago.Thus up until the last minute of our departure, he is mumbling and grumbling about having had to change out of his much loved ventilated sneakers and khakis.

When he finally joins me–I am the driver, by the way–but then we both want to live–it is already past time to leave, he asks how long we have to stay once we’re there–anything over thirty minutes is greeted with a protesting growl and then the demand of a commitment as to the exact time we will start for home. Mind you we haven’t even left the driveway and may well have an hour or more before we reach our destination. Were we in a court with a reasonable judge and I threw my pocketbook at him don’t you agree I’d be exonerated for cause? Your vote will be gratefully accepted under Comments. Thank you.

When it comes to funerals, he is perfectly agreeable–you might almost say –delighted to accompany me because it is a guarantee there will be some good cheese things to eat minus a whole lot of chit-chat. People are subdued and all he needs to do is look glum, be appropriately uncommunicative in the presence of the bereaved, pat many backs sympathetically, excuse himself to smoke his pipe as often as he likes, and after consuming as many delicacies as possible, make a fast getaway before anyone notices he has devolved into Elmer Fudd.

However, when it comes to doctor’s appointments this same individual wants to leave early–very early–nearly an hour early because it’s okay to arrive early–very early–nearly an hour early. It’s okay if he has to sit and wait on some uncomfortable chair because–please don’t ask me why–he’s happy as Saturday night to be there, and–you’re probably way ahead of me–I’m not. Mind you I want to be on time—not early—not late—but on the dot—the stroke of the hour—give or take a few seconds.

When he has an appointment, exasperated sounds start the day before as my husband demands a departure time from rather than to our hide-away. When the day arrives this inquisition continues:

“Are you ready yet, darling? he asks and asks with a one minute interval on either side.

“It’s early–we have plenty of time,” I might say–or “I’m almost ready. I just need to brush my eyebrows, find my sunglasses, charge my cell phone.”

He finds this strangely maddening and so by the time we are set to take off together—earlier than I prefer, later than he can bear—neither of us is speaking except in monosyllables. He turns off the radio set to my favorite station and, because he refuses to wear a watch, asks me for the time. I pretend I haven’t heard and, according to him, were we in a court with a reasonable judge and he threw his briefcase at me…

I have a thing about fire. Ask my ex-husband. The first time I had some money of my own, I put in a fire alarm system. He wouldn’t pay for one because he said, “Houses don’t burn down in Scarsdale.”

I already had an escape ladder, three fire extinguishers and a plan, sort of. We had one staircase and four small children. Of course I was insane during those years. This did not escape my husband’s notice.

“You’re crazy!” he would say.

He said it on Christmas Eve of 1963. It was the first Christmas all of my children were out of diapers—and I thought they were in need of a couple of pets.

“You’re crazy!” he said.

A golden retriever puppy and black and white kitty awaited me in the next town and after the children were asleep, I set forth on a snow and ice-packed road. As I neared an intersection, the car hit a patch of ice and pirouetted three hundred sixty degrees–slowly enough so that I could imagine my husband’s wrath if the car and I were totaled while on an unapproved mission.

My husband looked almost as irate when I returned and told me I needed to see a psychiatrist and then added, “but I’m not going to pay for one.”

A couple of hours after the pets were bedded down in the basement playroom and the presents, assembled and wrapped and I had joined my husband in bed, I heard my elder son’s voice in the hall calling to his older sister.

By now, everyone was awake except my husband. I threw on a robe and accompanied the two littlest down the stairs to what was to be much excitement and confusion. I suggested they just play with the pets and not unwrap presents until the sun came up and their father came down, but instead I put a medley of Christmas songs on the stereo to muffle any sounds that might penetrate the second story of our unburnable house.

As each gift was exposed, I took the paper and stuffed it into the fireplace. We were expecting guests for champagne at ten, others for dinner at four, and my husband would be in a far better mood if the nitty gritty of Christmas was out of sight upon his descent. I checked the damper. It was open. I lit the papers and, hurrah, the flames leaped up and out, Aargh, above and beyond the screen, scorching the mantle.

Not open.

I gathered my flock into the front hall and called up the stairs in the tone of someone announcing a delightful surprise.

“Fire,” I sang.

Pajama bottoms flapping, my husband sped down the stairs and into the living room; he had never moved this quickly before. By now the flames were subsiding while the smoke collected around the perimeter of the ceiling where it left a gray mark not to be painted till spring when we ‘d saved enough money. He opened the damper, the windows, the door, groaning, and shaking his head in disbelief.

Who could blame him? It wouldn’t do much good to explain –although I tried, and, in the telling, had a laughing fit–to the delight of the children and the mystification and disgust of their father who didn’t like laughing to begin with.

“You one crazy woman,” he pointed out without a verb.

Tears rolled down my cheeks, and I collapsed on the stairs while the children held the animals and danced.

My husband, a man of few words, muttered one of them several times, “Shit,” he said again and again, stepped over my body, climbed the stairs and disappeared into the bedroom.

My present husband builds a great fire but is on the surly side when one is requested. “A fire? We don’t need one and the kindling’s up in the corncrib,” he often says.

This time, the day after Christmas, he said, “Hell, the Abernathys won’t be here long enough to make it worthwhile.”

No question it would make the Abernathys feel welcome, something he was not entirely keen to do. I persisted and once logs, kindling and newspaper were perfectly piled and tucked around one another, he could hardly wait for the Abernathys to arrive and forthwith praise his flames.

Than he disappeared. As the Abernathy’s car came down the driveway, I called his name twice. And again. He didn’t answer so I did the sensible thing—I lit the fire. He had said it was good to go. Wonderful! The wood responded immediately. So gratifying. Flames leaped up and out, Aargh, above and beyond the screen.

My husband materialized—his face redder than the fire—choking out half his barracks dictionary. He bounded to the kitchen—he had never moved this quickly before—grabbed some oven mitts, returned to the living room, thrust his arms into the fire and moved the damper to the open position while shouting the other half of his marine-polished vocabulary in my direction.

Smoke filled the living room, somewhat disguising the scorched mantel, then moved up around the ceiling perimeters of several rooms where it left gray marks not be painted till spring when we’d saved enough money. We opened the front door to assist its departure only to discover the Abernathys standing there wreathed in gray. They coughed. We couldn’t invite them in or leave them on the doorstep and since the fire still smoldered we couldn’t go out for Chinese.

As I waved goodbye, I heard my husband, a man of many words, mutter one of them repeatedly before he disappeared into his office. “Shit,” he said again and again and again.

La plus que ça change, la plus que c’est le même–mot.

Hard to believe but, yes, that’s exactly who I was some ten years ago when I painted our house with the help of Peter G.. He did the second story and the windows; I did the first story–there’s more of the that than the second—and over thirty shutters. Still, you could say he did the hard part and I’d agree but the fact that I did itat all struck wonder in my heart and the hearts of people I told—some of whom I’d just met on line at the supermarket.

“Wow!” one woman said to my great gratification until I noted she was wowing the fact I had bagged my own items preferring to arrive home with the sherbert next to the Lean Cuisine rather than the bread.

Since my days of self-consecration, I’ve painted several wicker and wrought-iron chairs–or rather, spray-painted them, which probably doesn’t count. I still have my clean but paint streaked shirts and pants folded in a drawer on the offchance old scrapers and brushes call to me as I lie about eating peeled grapes.

In truth, I know my painting days are over and if I want more gloss on my image I’ll have to roll around in some leftover enamel. Madonna blue, if I can find any, would be perfect to complement the golden halo only I can see.

The trouble with reading about writing is it takes up one’s writing time. If you have to choose between writing and reading about writing the choice is clear. But what do you do when someone sends you a book on writing as has just happened to me? The book is excellent but I have decided to put it face down—pages spread helplessly akimbo—while I write about not reading it.

Or not reading it now—bedtime is okay because that’s not my writing time. Why not? I don’t know. Perhaps it will become my writing time even though it isn’t yet. When you read about writing it appears that it’s hard to feel comfortable about any time not being your writing time. I suppose mealtimes are exempt, but I need to check.

Of course. if you write about food professionally, spearing a flower of broccoli dripping in garlic and olive oil is research and you may need to write or take notes while you consume it. Which reminds me–food is never far from my writing-because while writing I’m either having a snack or thinking about what I’m going to have for dinner.

I feel sure my characters are a hungry lot. I’ll have to ask them later-maybe do a little rewriting to get in their three squares between all the scenes of sex, murder and mayhem. In any case. they surely all have refrigerators even if the fact of it doesn’t appear on the page. Perhaps that’s been the trouble with my writing all along—not enough refrigerators, not enough food—even though there’s been plenty of rewriting. Puh-lenty.

Rewriting is what writing is about as you probably realize if you’re a writer but no one’s going to tell you that up front if you’re a writer wannabe. You may think you can just go ahead write your heart out, check for spelling mistakes and publish. I couldn’t agree more—that’s the way it should be but since it’s not, you need my book entitled The Joy of Rewriting. Here are some chapter headings:

Blather and tripe: how to recognize and remove.

How to rewrite when there’s nothing left after removing blather and tripe.

And so forth.

I anticipate this will be a best seller when I finish rewriting it.

I love to read. More than that, I have to read. Stuck with neither book nor newspaper, I’ll read the small print on labels or the large print on advertisements. When there’s nothing left, I’ll find words in words–two letter words, paper and pencil not allowed. Give me a word like restaurant and I’ll stay happy until rest, test, nest, stare, rare, utter, ratter, arrest, attune, etc. have been discovered. This is all well and good and you’d think my brain would be appropriately exercised through the years to qualify as up to par in my dotage. But no. I do almost everything at least twice: I unhook a cup for my tea, only to find a cup is already in position; I buy a tube of toothpaste and find four at home. Like that.

However, the main complaint I have about my brain is—- remembering what I read. Or rather not remembering. Most mornings I read the op-ed pieces in the Times but can’t tell you what they said an hour later. Scratch that–five minutes later. At night I read books or magazines. The following day–gone with the moon.

Moreover, thoughts enter my head and vanish like the bubbles I used to blow in my first childhood, about which I remember everything. Okay, not everything–but a lot. This would be great if anyone was interested in hearing about it. How strange none of my grandchildren has inquired. The only time I find any interest at all in my past is when I try to access a bank for my account or credit card on-line and a program demands to know the name of my mother at birth, my first dog, first school, or first best friend.

I should be grateful to have software care about my facts of life but lately after I type in the answer, it tells me I’m mistaken. What does it know that I don’t know and when did it know it? Have the details of my childhood been commandeered for the sake of national security?

Did I say Sondra, Yvonne or Linda was my first best friend? Oh, dear, I just remembered–her name was Beverly. You can tell my grandchildren, if ever they should ask, but don’t bother mentioning it to the banks because, obviously, they already know.