MUGGINS

No, not muggings. I was not accosted on the street by a desperate youth who stole my purse and ran. I said, “Muggins.”

Muggins is different from muggings because the accosting takes place at my kitchen table after lunch, not on a dark street at midnight. The accoster is not a drug-crazed youth, but a mild-mannered senior citizen. And the only thing stolen is my self-respect. After the Muggins is over, the afore-mentioned senior citizen calmly rises from his chair and walks, not runs, away in quiet triumph.

Here’s the story.

For over a year, my husband had an old gentleman named Les Simpson whom he visited at the nursing home every week. The visits started out innocently enough—Tom just started popping his head in the door for a quick visit. He had known Les for over five years because Les and his wife shared a table with my parents at mealtime when they lived at Nelson Gables assisted living. Les and his wife had moved to the nursing home in 2007, and Les’s wife had died of the complications of Parkinson’s Disease in 2008.

Those quick stick-your-head-in-the-door visits led to longer visits, and soon Les was teaching Tom his very favorite dominoes game—Muggins. Although Les was in a wheelchair, he was still a Muggins master. At first, Tom often found himself on the losing end of the score card. Eventually he learned a few tricks of his own, so he would win a Muggins game as often as he was on the losing end. Les looked forward to the weekly games, but so did Tom.

Last fall, Tom started noticing that Les wasn’t himself. He would make mistakes and miss plays. He lost his competitiveness. After awhile, it became apparent that Les’s health was failing, and the Muggins games were put aside. Tom’s visits became bedside visits, and Les died of heart disease and cancer at the age of 88 on November 4, 2009.

At the funeral, Les’s son gave a eulogy in which he mentioned how much his father had looked forward to playing dominoes with Tom every week.

A tin box of Double Six Color Dot Dominoes sat in Tom’s office for a couple of months, gathering dust. Every time I saw that box, I thought about Les. Then about two weeks ago, right after lunch one cold January day, I asked Tom if he wanted to play a game of Muggins.

The dominoes box came out, he beat me, and it’s been a battle ever since. Every day after lunch, we empty the dominoes on the kitchen table, mix them up, draw our seven tiles, and off we go. Tom always keeps score (he always did with Les, too)—a funny method that involves x’s instead of points. We usually talk about Les a little bit as we play our game of Muggins.

Right now (not that I’m keeping track), Tom is ahead of me by two games. Some of it is strategy, and some of it is the luck of the draw. But I do win occasionally.

I don’t know if we’ll keep doing this forever, Tom and I, but it has been a good way to get through some of the blustery, snowy days of the past two weeks. And in a way, when Tom and I dump out the dominoes after lunch, I feel like we’re having a daily tribute to the memory of Les, who was always up for a friendly game of Muggins.

CONVERSATIONS WITH MY PARENTS

When I visit my 90+ year-old parents day after day, the conversations sometimes meander strangely.

Take today, for example:

ME: I am training for a 5K race in May, so today I ran some 90-second sprints on the treadmill. I thought I would die.

GRANDMA: Don’t say “die” in front of people our age. (She laughed.)

My father was sitting in his chair with his finger up his nose. My mother looked at him, then at me, and arched her eyebrows critically.

ME: Is he digging for gold?

GRANDPA: (quickly putting his hand down) Mom is always going after something in her nose, too.

GRANDMA: At least I use a kleenex. I have crusts.

ME: I suppose Dad’s afraid you’ll have another nosebleed. [She’s had some serious nosebleeds because of her blood thinners.]

GRANDMA: The air is dry in here. I never had nosebleeds when I was young. I had earaches. Once when I was little, I had the measles and my ear hurt, so my father blew cigar smoke in my ear.

ME: He blew cigar smoke in your ear? What was that supposed to do?

GRANDMA: I don’t know, but it did feel better. I had woken up in the middle of the night with an earache, so my father got up, lit a cigar, put me on his lap, and blew smoke in my ear. It helped.

ME: Maybe it just made you feel better to sit in his lap.

GRANDMA: That was the only time I remember sitting on his lap. We children didn’t ever sit in my father’s lap. He was kind of distant.

GRANDPA: Well, at our house, we had red liniment. Sometimes we would drink it, and other times we would rub it on our joints if our knees or hands hurt.

ME: You drank and rubbed the same stuff? Really??

GRANDPA: Yes, it was out of the same bottle. Red liniment.

ME: How did it taste?

GRANDPA: Awful. We got it from the peddler who came around and sold things. He had a horse and a cart. And he talked rough.

GRANDMA: We had that red liniment, too, but our peddler drove a car.

GRANDPA: No, I remember he had a horse and a cart.

GRANDMA: Well, I’m a lot younger than you so our peddlers had cars. The Watkins peddler and the Rawleigh peddler.

ME: What did they sell?

GRANDMA: (shrugging) Everything. Medicine. Spices. Kitchen things. Things for the house.

ME: Did your peddler talk rough, too?

GRANDMA: Not that I remember.

GRANDPA: Not like Bob Dietz. Our hired man. I had to talk to him about his language. I hired him to work for us, but he used such rough language. I had to tell him that he couldn’t be around my family if he used rough language. I never heard him swear again after that. He stopped just like that.

ME: You must have scared him.

GRANDPA: He needed work. He wanted to work for me. I picked him up along the road in Carlisle—he was from Wisconsin, I think.

GRANDMA: It was during the War. Men needed work.

ME: Well, it was good of you to protect us kids from bad language.

GRANDPA: We got a letter from him a few years later. He met a nice girl and he said she changed his life. He became a minister.

GRANDMA: Yes, that girl changed his life. He became a teacher.

ME: I’m confused. Did he become a teacher or a minister?

GRANDMA: A teacher.

GRANDPA: (silence)

ME: Well, Dad, you probably turned his life around when you told him to stop swearing.

GRANDPA: No, I think it was that girl he married. (Straining to look out his window to see the parking lot.) The snow plow was through here this morning . . .

Sometimes we talk about what happened today. Sometimes we talk about what happened yesterday. Sometimes we talk about what happened 85 years ago. There’s always some conversational road to ramble down.

BLOGGERS IN NEED OF HELP

It’s a disease. It’s an addiction. When we are thinking rationally, we know we should walk away from our laptop computers and live a normal life. But then inexplicably, unaccountably, we are drawn back into the sucking vortex of blogging.

We know it’s unnatural. Like the movie, Groundhog Day, we’re stuck on December 1, destined to write an on-line Christmas letter to friends and relatives over and over and over again. We know we can’t write those long Christmas letters and put them in the mail every three days all year long. That would be irrational—mentally unstable. Certifiably cuckoo.

So instead, we blog. Worldwide, there are over 200 million of us, blogging about our lives and thoughts. Statistically, there are 1.5 billion internet users across the world, so each blogger averages about 7 readers. Since Pioneer Woman has 2 million visits a month and Paris Hilton’s blog garners about 300,000 hits a day, that makes the average audience for the rest of us to be closer to 2.7 readers.

Almost every blogger wants to stop blogging. We write a blog, read it later, cringe in embarassment, and vow to give up blogging forever. For many bloggers, it takes two or three days before the urge strikes anew. Some can hold out even longer—maybe a week or two.

Photo: www.bestweekever

But like an alcoholic or a drug addict or a two-pack-a-day smoker, bloggers need a fix; so it’s back to the laptop. Our fingers shake, sweat collects on our upper lip, and our eyes furtively seek something to blog about: an orange shag carpet, a dust bunny under the bed, moldy cheese in the refrigerator, belly button lint. We know it’s only a matter of time before we’re homeless, unwashed, slouched on a park bench, with our only worldly possession—our laptops—concealed in a crumpled brown paper bag on our laps.

I understand there’s a Bloggers’ Anonymous support group out there somewhere. I even Googled it to try to find out when the next group meets or if there’s a support group in a town near me. I feel the shakes coming on again, that armpit sweat collecting, that light-headed, aura-like feeling that comes over me when I know I’m going to weaken and blog.

Would my 2.7 readers please get together and organize an intervention? Hopefully, that will succeed and I’ll be able to stop this madness. At the very least, a blogging intervention would provide a new subject to blog about the next time I get the shakes and need a fix.

TRAINING PARTNER

It snowed again yesterday and the streets are slick and slippery. That means that I’m stuck on the treadmill for my 2-to-4 miles today. Sigh.

Here’s the truth: I get so tired of the treadmill this time of the year that I could scream. Here’s another truth: Sometimes I feel like skipping a day. Sometimes it takes every ounce of mustered-up willpower in my whole body to force myself to tie my shoes and head down the basement to the treadmill.

After all, who would know if I skipped a session? And who really cares?

Answer: my faithful training partner would know. Good old what’s-his-name. The old guy I live with. The guy that every cold winter day, puts on his 10-year-old black mesh shorts and t-shirt and heads down those same basement stairs. Every day. He climbs on the treadmill, pushes the “Start” button, and takes off.

If the old guy can do it, so can I. Me, his much younger wife.

My husband is 65-going-on-66 years old. On Christmas day 2009, his 67-year-old brother had a stroke. Last month, another older brother had a heart attack. He had a third brother who died at the age of 68 of the complications of heart disease and diabetes. It’s a scary family medical history.

So my ‘conscience,’ my good-old faithful training partner, puts on his running shoes and goes down the basement on these cold winter days, clocking the miles. One foot in front of the other . . . getting that aging heart pumping and that smelly old sweat rolling.

I like to believe that some days it’s me who tweaks his conscience—just like other days it’s he who prods mine. But together, as my blog title optimistically says, we “dream of hiking into [our] old age.” Day after day, mile after mile, challenging each other to do everything we can to stay alive. In our old age, we want our house to smell like sweaty gym socks instead of Pine Sol and mothballs.

After all, we’ve got some grandbabies to help raise!

TOO COLD TO DO ANYTHING?

On Friday night, I caught a little of Jeff Foxworthy on the Comedy Channel (you know, the “You might be a redneck if you’ve ever lost a tooth opening a beer bottle” guy). He had just been on tour and one of his engagements had been in northern Minnesota.

Ye gads, you would have thought he had a gig on an ice floe in the Arctic Circle. It was the same old stuff we always hear: You might be from Minnesota if . . . you see people wearing hunting clothes to church (your point being . . . ?), the Dairy Queen closes from September through June (don’t all Dairy Queens close from September through June??), you’re proud that International Falls is the coldest spot in the nation 196 out of 365 days (dern tootin’).

However, I think it’s important to point out that Minnesota is not just a state of camouflage-wearing, Dairy-Queen-closing, teeth-chattering nice guys who huddle inside their igloos for six months of the year. There is a mountain of things for people to do, even when it’s January 30 and the temperature is only ten degrees above zero. Hundreds of people were out and about today . . .

Skiing at Andes Tower Hills . . .

Skating with the rink rats at Noonan Pond . . .

Tubing . . .
Snowboarding . . .

Snowmobiling . . .

Sledding . . .
Listening to Jeff James sing James Taylor songs at the Carlos Creek Winery on a Saturday afternoon . . . Watching the Blizzard junior hockey team on a Saturday night . . .

And granted, Mr. Jeff Foxworthy, it's true. There are some people in Minnesota who “consider it a sport to get food by drilling through 18 inches of ice and sitting there for days hoping that the food will swim by.” Just drive by Lake LeHomme Dieu to see the ice roads heading out to the fish houses . . .

So, go ahead, Mr. Foxworthy. Make fun of Minnesotans because yes, as you say, we think ketchup is a little too spicy—and yes, every guy has a set of jumper cables in his car and his girlfriend knows how to use them. And yes, there are 17 empty cars in the Fleet Farm parking lot with their engines running—and yes, “down South” to us means Iowa. I will give you all that.

But nothing to do? No place to go? Not hardly. You betcha, eh?

NEW CHALLENGE

Okay, I’ve been retired for one whole year. My official anniversary is on Sunday, January 31.

To recap the past year: I’ve walked well over 1,000 miles, visited my 90-ish parents approximately 300 times, read 75 books, watched 50 movies (mostly on the treadmill), done hundreds of crossword puzzles, and spent 53 days playing with Colbie either in Arizona or Minnesota. In short, I did all the leisurely retired-lady activities I dreamed about while I was working.

Now it’s time for a new challenge. So here it is: I’m going to train to run in a 5K. Yes, you heard me right. I said ‘run.’

Artwork by Mary GrandPre' for the IT5K

I can easily walk 3.1 miles. But on May 15, my daughter Shannon, my 60-year-old friend Bonnie, her daughter Lyssa, and my 61-year-old self—the four of us—are going to run the Lake Harriet Autism 5K Run/Walk in Minneapolis.

So that’s my new goal. Very rarely do I set a goal that I know will likely end in death. But at age 61, I’ve learned that what doesn’t actually kill me will only make me feel like I’m dead. There’s a big difference.

I may need to rename my blog to “2 to 4 to 5k a Day.” Anybody else want to join us?

PERSPECTIVE

I can usually whip through a book in a couple of days. Just don’t give me a test on the book; I’d probably flunk it. I’m a skimmer-speed-reader kind of person, superficially humming through the description of the snow-covered fir boughs to get back to the plot ASAP.

That’s why it was so unusual that it took me a week to read a small, 200+ page book entitled When Everything Changes, Change Everything by Neale Donald Walsch. A whole week. Sometimes I’d walk 20 feet out of my way and up a flight of stairs just to avoid reading it.

When Everything Changes, Change Everything indeed.

Don’t get me wrong. It was an excellent book. Intriguing. The reason I avoided reading it had nothing to do with the way it was written.

I avoided it because I knew it made sense. You see, the message of the book was:

• We create and choose our own thoughts.

• We create our own emotions—we absolutely, positively can choose the way we are feeling.

• It is easy to look back and see the value of an event from a hindsight perspective. But we can also bring that perspective forward and view an event that way, even while it is happening.

• All change enhances life. There is no such thing as a “bad change” in our lives, even when it looks like something could not possibly be happening for the better.

• Life’s changes are neither arbitrary nor without rhyme or reason; they are part of a sophisticated pattern that sometimes takes a long time to understand.

• If people are honest, they will admit that some of the worst things that ever happened to them were actually some of the best things that ever happened to them.

• Sometimes individuals or large groups of people (even nations) experience unthinkable suffering (the Holocaust Jews, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandella, Mother Theresa). However, in time, their suffering stirred the entire world. This can also happen to ordinary people—it’s may just not be happening on a global scale.

• If we understand that everything that happens to us does so for a higher good, we no longer have to fear the future.

• It’s all good. Changes—they’re all for the good. It’s our goal to recognize and embrace that good.

What made it worse is that I knew the author was right. Dead on. Bulls-eye.

So now you see why I was avoiding that book like the plague. It is so much easier to believe that my dark, self-centered thoughts are justified. It’s so soothing to plunge into a bad mood and blame it on those around me. It’s so wonderful to submerge myself in the murky, self-pitying waters of “why is event this happening to ME, poor me???”

Darn it. Now that I’ve read the book, I can’t plead ignorance any more. I’ve been reminded that every change is for the better and constantly moves me forward. I know that I should look forward to future changes, even the painful ones, because it’s all good. It’s ALL good.

CRACKS AND BOOMS

I woke up this morning to the sound of a gunshot. Crack! Somewhere in the neighborhood of the ceiling between my bedroom and the bathroom, a Glock 22 (different sound than a Smith and Wesson) shot off a round.

But I’ve lived in this house long enough to know that a murder was not being committed. The usual suspect (Tom) was safely sleeping right beside me.

“Temperature dropped,” I thought as I rolled over for five more minutes of sleep.

A little later, I was sitting in the living room, drinking my morning coffee and wrestling with the crossword puzzle when another shot rang out. This time it was a Remington 870 rifle shot—I could tell by the zing-ing echo—right over my head, somewhere near the chimney flu in the roof. I jumped a little, took another sip of my coffee, and tried to think of a nine-letter word for a Lake Erie city. (It was Ashtabula.)

Pow! Crack! Blam! I feel like I’m in a Batman movie. The Dark Knight, I believe.

My house has gone from being in the middle of a skating rink last Saturday . . . to a snow-covered winter wonderland on Sunday . . . to a wind-whipped blizzard-warning area on Monday . . . to a sub-zero shooting gallery on Tuesday.

The gunshot-type sounds are my house adjusting to the changes in the outside temperature. We’ve gone from Saturday's 30-degree weather (therefore, the ice) to minus 6 degrees this morning, and the house’s joints and beams are protesting loudly. The colder it gets outside, the more the wood and metal joints in our house snap, crackle, and pop as they shrink and lose moisture.

I don’t know if any homeowners' houses have ever fallen down over their heads during this freeze-drying phenomenon. It sometimes sounds like that’s what’s happening. But it certainly makes the morning a little more exciting as it gets the adrenalin pumping through our systems.

KA-BOOM! There went another one. Shotgun this time—double barrel, pump-action 12-gauge, from the sounds of it. Let's see--a six-letter word for care-less attitude? Got it! a-p-a-t-h-y.

WEEKEND ON ICE

Sometimes being “On Ice” or “Iced” is a good thing: Disney on Ice, Holiday on Ice, iced tea, iced sugar cookies . . .

But this morning, with the world outside my door on ice, it means changing weekend plans.

No trip to the Cities.

No basketball game with Shannon.

No fish and chips at Cooper’s.

No visit to my sister.

I’ve been up for two hours and have only seen one vehicle drive past my house: a sanding truck that sprays a little swoosh of sand by all the stop signs so that cars have a fighting chance at coming to a halt instead of sliding through the intersections.

Even if I could safely exit my front door and step out onto my welcome mat . . .


And even if I could safely back my car out of the driveway . . .

There’s still this . . .

I see one brave soul out walking, taking tiny little baby steps with arms outstretched, like a tight rope walker teetering precariously on a narrow wire. Where in the world does he need to go so desperately that he’s willing to risk a broken neck? A fractured hip? A concussion? He must be a neurosurgeon on the way to save someone's life or a trekker practicing for an excursion to the North Pole. It's a good day to stay home and keep the dent-free car in the garage. And it’s definitely an on-the-treadmill 2 to 4 miles today.

The weekend is officially “on ice,” literally and figuratively. Disappointing. But it's definitely a weekend to hunker down and hibernate.

ME ‘N BENNY

Me ‘n Benny hung out last night—kind of a date. His mom and dad were busy with an activity for Benny’s older sister, and he needed a ride to basketball practice.

Amazingly, Benny always seems genuinely happy to hang out with me. He came charging in the door, full of ideas about what we could play before it was time to go to basketball.

Benny’s in kindergarten. I wasn’t sure if Benny’s mother wanted his picture pasted all over the Internet, so here’s Benny taken last Halloween, in disguise, with his sneering pirate look:

Arrrrrgh! Shiver me timbers, matey! I’ll make those bilge rats walk the plank!

Before we had to head out for basketball, we played a quick game of Jenga. Sometimes we cheated a little, but nobody cared. We grinned at each other when one of us pulled a wooden block out of a particularly teetery spot. ‘We are good,’ we told each other, fist pumping.

Then we headed over to the school for basketball practice. Here’s Benny and the guys warming up before practice.

He’s a trooper. I loved watching him warm up. He made four baskets—and he ran over and told me after each one of them.

After basketball, Benny came over to my house for a half hour and we played. All of my toys are kind of low-tech or old, but Benny doesn’t seem to care. We filled a 9 x 13 cake pan with wild rice (looks more like dirt than white or brown rice) and plowed it around with all the little Matchbox dump trucks. We built roads out of Jenga blocks. We just kind of made things up as we went along. Benny provided a running color commentary on our activities. He’s got such a good imagination that it made our dump-truck-rice-in-a-cake-pan scenario seem exciting and dangerous.

Me ‘n Benny. Hanging out.

SPEAKING OF BEING MARRIED FOR 36 YEARS . . .

Tom and I once got fired from teaching a marriage preparation class at our church.

It’s true. We got fired.

First we got audited—the coordinator of the marriage preparation class sat in the back of our classroom. Listening. Taking notes. Scribble . . . scribble. We thought he was so impressed with our teaching skills that he was writing down all our golden words.

At the time, I was Lutheran; Tom was Catholic.

We said to the engaged couples in the class, “Mixed-faith marriage? No problem! We’ve been married a few years and it works just fine. Listen to each other. Respect each other’s views on religion. Support each other. Encourage each other.” That’s what Tom and I were teaching in our class.

I don’t know what made me think of it again, right now, after all of these years.

They did an intervention on us. After we had taught the class, we received a visit in our home. First someone from the church office called, if I remember right, and said, “We would like to come and have a little chat with you.” The priest and the head of the marriage preparation class wanted to chat with us.

We were naïve. We thought maybe the evaluations on our sessions were really terrific. I think we thought we were going to receive an award—like a Nobel Peace Prize—for being such great marriage preparation teachers. So we said, “Sure!!” Come and visit.”

We had coffee and doughnuts because the visit was on a Saturday morning. I made sure the kitchen was clean. I think I even scoured the kitchen sink with Comet. I made sure there weren’t water spots on the coffee cups. I put folded napkins on the table. We didn’t know they were coming to fire us.

“Come in!” We welcomed them warmly, the priest and the head of the marriage preparation class. It was all polite chit chat and friendly conversation for the first few minutes. I poured coffee. We all sat around the kitchen table. We passed the doughnuts. We modestly waited for our praise.

Then the boom was lowered (as in ‘they lowered the boom’). We weren’t teaching church doctrine, they said. We weren’t in line with the “true church” message. We were radicals. We were teaching acceptance of mixed marriages. We were teaching support for each others’ religion. We were supposed to teach conversion. The non-Catholic needed to become Catholic.

So we were fired.

Well, actually, Tom threw them out. You should have seen him that day when he defended me and all my Lutheran relatives. He told that priest and that marriage preparation coordinator that he thought Lutherans were every bit as Christian as Catholics. And if they thought differently, they could just leave his house.

He threw them out. “Begone, vessels of Satan!!” (He may not have said it exactly that way. He’s not exactly a vessels-of-Satan kind of guy.)



Wow. I hadn’t thought of that in a long time. I think this was nearly 30 years ago, give or take.

In August 2010, we will be celebrating our 37th wedding anniversary. Eventually, I did become Catholic, but not because Tom “converted” me. The guy that was the head of the marriage preparation class and his wife moved away. We heard later that they were divorced. The narrow-minded priest, Father What’s-His-Name, who sat at our kitchen table, was transferred to some parish in outer-Slobovia. Or Mars. Or maybe he runs the Vatican. I don’t know what happened to him.

Times have changed. The priest we have now is very cool. His favorite band of all time is Creedence Clearwater Revival. Once he managed to work CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” into his sermon. He would never, ever fire us for teaching religious tolerance or respect for other religions. He would probably give us a standing ovation and invite us over for dinner.

I don’t know what made me think of that just now. It had to have been nearly 30 years ago. I just remembered it last night when Tom walked through the room. He’s just a short little guy; but sometimes he forgets he’s short and throws a priest out of his house, defending my honor. Then he’s ten feet tall.

I’VE GOT WHAT SHE WANTS

This morning I was reading an article written by a woman who, five years ago when she was in her 30s, was diagnosed with a particularly virile form of cancer. Her high-grade, rare form of leiomyosarcoma had the doctors giving her only a 30 percent chance of living. It was tough, but she fought like a samurai-warrior-on-steroids to beat it.

The good news is that now, five years later, she is cancer free. But she still goes in for regular CT scans to make sure that the cancer hasn’t recurred. And every time she goes in for a scan, she experiences anxiety: What if the cancer has returned? What will happen to her four children and her husband if she becomes sick again? Would she have the courage to go through the radiation and chemotherapy a second time?

As she goes in for her CT scan, she prays. She doesn’t waste a single prayer on having a fabulous career, a beautiful home, money in the bank, an album full of travel pictures, or a membership at the country club.

Here’s what she prays for: She prays that she will be able to live to see her children grown up. She prays that her husband and she will be able to retire together. She prays to be one of those little old couples she sees in the grocery store, married for forty or fifty or sixty years, tottering along behind their cart with their handful of cents-off coupons. She prays to see a day when she will have grandchildren playing at her feet.

The astonishing part? She is praying to live long enough to live the life I am currently living.

Imagine that . . . just imagine that.

“THE HOUSE IS A MESS” IS ALL RELATIVE

The next time you find yourself thinking, “My house is a mess,” pick up a copy of the book Homer and Langley by E. L. Doctorow. I guarantee, your mess is nothing compared to that.

I’ve always been morbidly fascinated by hoarders and their garbage houses, knowing that they suffer from a form of OCD. E. L. Doctorow’s book about the brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, is a fictionalized first-person account dictated by Homer. However, the brothers were real, and their real-life story is probably even more bizarre than the novel. Theirs was the extreme garbage house.

Their true story begins at the end, in 1947, when the police in New York City received a phone message from an anonymous caller stating that there was a dead body at 2078 Fifth Avenue in a single-family, three-story brownstone building.

However, police attempts to enter the house were futile; all entrances to the house were completely blocked off with trash. Police could not get through the doors.

Finally, a day after the anonymous phone call, police used a ladder to enter the home through a second-story window. There, surrounded by stacks of trash, they found the body of Homer, the blind, partially paralyzed Collyer brother, who (autopsy showed) had died of a heart attack and starvation. But his caretaker brother Langley Collyer was nowhere to be found.

It wasn’t until three weeks later that authorities, sifting through the 136 tons of junk in the three-story home, found the rat-gnawed body of Langley. There was so much “stuff” in the house that the brothers had resorted to making tunnels to get from one room to another. The more reclusive the brothers got, the more paranoid they also became. Langley had rigged burglar/intruder traps around the house. While bringing food to Homer, who was eventually confined to his bedroom, Langley had tripped one of his own traps, and had suffocated under a huge pile of newspapers and other garbage.

E. L. Doctorow’s novel tries to help us understand what happened to the two brothers to lead to this scene in 1947. He takes the Collyers from their well-to-do childhood with their physician father and musician mother to their trash-filled existence at the end of their lives. What made Langley want to “collect” other people’s discards? Why the thousands upon thousands of bundled newspapers? What was the purpose of a disassembled Model T in the dining room? Ten pianos? The junk upon junk upon junk?

Langley collected and hoarded until the entire brownstone was completely filled, from top to bottom. He didn’t pay bills so eventually the two brothers lived without electricity, water, or heat. Langley left the house only at night—to buy groceries at a little neighborhood market and to sift through garbage and piles of discards, looking for ‘treasures’ to bring home.

Perhaps no one will ever know exactly what went on in the minds of these two brothers, but E. L. Doctorow makes an attempt to explain their mental journey in Homer and Langley.

If you want more information on these two reclusive brothers, there are some good web sites: Collyer Brothers Syndrome, Langley Collyer, and Squallor Survivors .

As for me, well . . . I suddenly have a strong urge to clean my house.

IT’S A BOY! IT’S A BOY!

No, I’m not being redundant. It really is a boy and a boy!

The ultrasounds don’t lie.

Next spring, we will have two new little boys in the family—two cousins, two sons, two grandbabies, two nephews, depending upon who you are—less than a month apart.

I’ve already started fantasizing . . .

Let the fun begin!

Colbie will still be the princess. She will still rule the kingdom. Now she’ll just have a little company. Colbie doesn’t mind company. Company is good, just as long as they do whatever she tells them to do.

Bring on those lil’ cowpokes.

FLASHBACKS AND WALLY LAMB

I hope that someday, I will be able to have it completely slip my mind that today is the first day of the semester at the college where I used to teach. I’m hoping there will come a time when that first day will just pass me by and I won’t have that nagging feeling that I should be somewhere doing something.

Retired teacher flashbacks, I guess.

It’s January 11—the first day of Spring Semester 2010. All my former co-workers spent last week in diligent preparation for today while I enjoyed a fairly empty calendar. All of my former co-workers probably had a “spastic colon Sunday” night, anxious and anticipating the next morning, while I calmly watched a football game on t.v.

At 5 a.m. this morning, when normally my alarm would have gone off, I was still sleeping.

At 6 a.m., when I would have been putting on my coat and getting ready to leave for work, I was sitting in the living room with a cup of coffee, still in my bathrobe, reading Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed. I was on page 582, and the narrator of the book was teaching an English class in a two-year community college. Ironic.

At 8 a.m., when I most likely would have been standing in front of my 8 a.m. class for the first time that semester, I was on page 671, where the narrator finally finds out the source of the mummified baby in a suitcase stashed in a crawl space of the attic.

At 9 a.m., when I would have already started teaching my second class of the day, I finally closed the Wally Lamb book—all 734 pages of very small print—and sighed a sigh of relief. As Wally Lamb says on page 685, “Life is messy, violent, confusing, and hopeful.”

While my former co-workers were scrambling to organize class materials and get to their 10 a.m. class on time, I was still trying to mentally digest Wally Lamb’s book.

It stretched credibility a bit that the narrator of Wally Lamb’s book, Caelum Quirk, had a life that was directly connected to the following events and people: the Civil War, Columbine High School shootings, Hurricane Katrina, Miss Rheingold Beer of 1950, the Korean War, the Iraq War, the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, the Prison Reform Movement of 1840, Abolition, Women’s Suffrage, the 1942 Boston Cocoanut Grove fire that killed 480 people, the surrender of Geronimo, an Iraq veteran’s posttraumatic stress disorder shooting rampage, anger management, divorce, abortion, drug addiction, alcoholism, spousal imprisonment, mental illness, Louisa Mae Alcott, Mark Twain, poet Christina Rossetti, Dorothea Dix, Conan O’Brien, a weeping statue of the Virgin Mary . . .

It was like Lamb had material for about four books but decided to get it over with in one huge story.

It was a very good book. Long, but good . . . multigenerational . . . a man with so many problems, he made the biblical Job look like an amateur of suffering. I’m guessing Wally Lamb was absolutely exhausted when he got done writing it. I felt like I’d run a marathon just reading it.

So while my former co-workers met their new students for the first time, reviewed class syllabi and textbooks, stumbled through pronouncing lists of unfamiliar student names, I was home reading (and reading and reading) Wally Lamb. While his characters were having flashbacks, I was having flashbacks of my own.

I guess I just wanted to prove that even though I am retired, I am still trying to do something challenging and productive with my time, still expanding my brain.

But I continue to feel like I should be somewhere today, doing something . . . should be teaching . . . like an amputated limb that still itches and tingles a little, even though it’s not really there.