Quitting Home: Blue Alert

By Suzanne Danforth

January 17, 2008 6:00 AM

There's perfume burning in the air

Bits of beauty everywhere

Ah, Portsmouth, I miss you, in a myriad of ways. I miss the neighbors along my block. Walking the block two times a day for the two years I have had Atticus has resulted in many nod and wave relationships, and even a few name trades.

I miss the dogs we usually see; Mollie the barker, Sadie the Smiler, Fenway sitting in his doorway, Nellie and Cinnamon with her floppy ears. And of course I miss dog Fred, though he's been without his Ginger lately.

Shrapnel flying; soldier hit the dirt

I miss living one block away from the Grab and Scram (my nickname for Pic'n Pay, where I spent many a high-school hour cashiering). I miss not being able to get out of there in under a half hour because of running into folks and chatting a bit. I miss knowing that health and beauty aids are in Aisle 5, and that I can time things just right so that a gyro from the Pizza Factory will be ready to pick up before heading home.

She comes so close, you feel her then

She tells you No and No again

I miss my coffee crew at the Islington Street Dunkin' Donuts. The folks inside are as great as the parking lot outside is bad (yes, DD iced coffee is a continued guilty non-local pleasure). They almost have my coffee ready before I ask for it and the blend of sugar, cream and lots of ice is, without fail, perfect.

You know how nights like this begin

The kind of knot your heart gets in

I miss cooking something wonderful on the spur of the moment and inviting friends and kids over to eat and hang out. I miss eating with relish, come to think of it, and I don't mean the green stuff.

Any way you turn is going to hurt.

Luckily, I did not miss the Jumbo Circus Peanuts two holiday extravaganza shows at Christmas and New Year's. Dancing is important, and there's nothing like shimmying to "Car Wash" and "Wooly Bully" as played by a bunch of wacky warm folks in dress-up clothes. Even if they won't let me play piccolo with them.

Speaking of, I miss making music with that other group in town, the Leftist Marching Band. I hear there's a girl on the sousaphone these days. How hard can sousaphone be, though? It's probably a lot like being a drummer; anyone can do it. (Don't write me about that one, percussionists-at-large, I'm kidding. I remain amazingly aware that good drumming requires independent simultaneous movement of all four limbs).

She breaks the rules so you can see

She's wilder than you'll ever be

I miss my book club. Its formation was incipient but it was shaping up to be a real monthly look-forward-to-event in my life. Smart women talking about a good read, what's better than that? That segues nicely toward the reality that I miss reading. I find that I cannot quiet myself enough to sit and read anything longer than a few paragraphs. Great, if you are used to reading People magazine, but that's not really my style. Those New York Times just keep piling up, as does the stack of books I want to read. At least the desire hasn't left, just the actual luxury of reading.

You talk religion but she won't convert

I miss my walks in the cemetery, and meandering toward the water to the site of my mother's grave. I can't always go that way, but Atticus unfailingly runs there on his own, I can see him from up on the hill. I can't reconcile if it is because he's been there often and it is just one of his stops, or whether he knows my mom is there.

You try to look away, you try

But all you want to do is get there first

I miss having horribly overpriced appetizers at pretentiously pretty swank Portsmouth restaurants. I was shocked to find it cheaper to order an entrée in Brooklyn, N.Y., earlier this year that was as good as or better than any you can find in local kitchens. Even so, I love the ritual associated with our upscale eateries, from putting on nice shoes and mascara to saying words like "seared" or "drizzled".

I miss, finally, the care-free-ness of life I didn't even know I had. Oh sure, there were things to do, rooms to clean, food to cook, income to incur and dogs to walk, but my people were safe. And that, unlike this blue alert, is what carefree means.

Blue Alert lyrics by Leonard Cohen. This Suzanne is fresh out of oranges. Send her some at sdanforth@gmail.com.

Quitting: Pot Roast, Anger and Spaghetti Sauce

By Suzanne Danforth

January 10, 2008 6:00 AM

A long winter's nap is not easy to come by. We all sometimes yearn for a good long afternoon snooze. Until it occurs, it is a romantic fantasy of carefree time during which you can hit the pillow and just be.

The reality is that a deep afternoon nap these days is usually an emotional necessity, an event from which I wake confused, initially about self then about day and time. It eventually sorts itself out.

This thing has gone in phases. I've been home in our town for a week or so, now, and I find myself in Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' stage of anger. Although I had an academic understanding of the dying process because of college courses, the sum total was "DABADD"; or denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance, depression, death.

Researchers since have been careful to point out that the stages do not go in lock-step fashion; any one of them can rear their head at any time.

And anger does rear its head, let me tell you. Woe is you if you are in front of me at the grocery store and it is going slower than I can stand. I entertain forebrain fantasies of kicking, hitting or punching. Terrific takedowns, maniacal maneuvers that were I to execute them, would land me in the police station and eventually as star of one of Elizabeth Dinan's cop shop stories.

It also crops up less expectedly, out of a dead sleep for example. Have you ever woken suddenly in a rage? It's not pretty.

With the several people who have exited my life to this point, I have yet to experience the kind of anger I have been feeling of late.

For mothers and fathers and elders in general, surely you become angry at their plight, and yours. But there is a reasonable progression about such things; older people die. They even die younger than what is sometimes reasonable. But there is still a progression that is coherent: someone older dies, someone younger grieves.

Thanatos is a figure in Greek mythology, often referred to but rarely appearing in person. Thanatos is the personification of death and mortality. Marya introduced me to the concept. She also introduced me to Hunter S. Thompson and Bob Dylan.

Marya was (and remains) always c'est la vie. This has been more popularly expressed on bumper stickers in the past few years as "s**t happens". She recognizes things (and people) for what they are, always has. She has seen my family through two important deaths; that of my stepfather and that of my mother.

In 1998, before Sept. 27 turned at midnight into Sept. 28, Marya brought a spaghetti dinner up the highway. We all converged in the dining room; Tommy's daughters, our family, all together. None of us realized our hunger during the death vigil, and we shuffled downstairs to eat together at the dining room table, courtesy of Marya. My stepfather, musician Tommy Gallant, died that night.

Fast forward eight years later, to September 2006. My mother died after 12 long days with pneumonia (a strong heart they said). Marya arrived on the 11th night of our vigil. She laughed in her inimitable Marya way to note something like, "your mother will probably die tonight because I'm here." I did not disagree. As it happened, she did die that night.

Myra (my nickname for her) arrived without spaghetti, but with her new young Labrador puppy, Phoebe in tow. Phoebe is now a 95-pound monster (a good bad dog), but that night she entered into the room where my mother was, became very calm and paid her quiet respects by climbing halfway on the bed and quietly looking at my mom for about a minute. It was a gentle act completely out of expected puppy character.

I only know how to make good spaghetti sauce because Marya taught me. Marya is Italian and Polish hybrid whose own mother's cooking made you groan. Cacciatore, Golabkis, greens with a sublime dressing of just oil, vinegar and pepper, in just the right amounts. We recently had Sunday dinner up in Greenfield where Marya's brother and partner live. Joey cooked the sauce and, unexpectedly, it was just like Marya's. And both, of course, are just like their mom's sauce. Phyllis has been gone since Christmas Day 2005.

On Christmas Day this year, my brother and I tried to resurrect my mom's pot roast. By the time we realized we should ask for her recipe, it was too late. We experimented, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. We agreed over plates of the stuff, along with brown potatoes and carrots, that we hit the 75 percent mark.

I tried again on New Year's Day, and in tweaking this and that hit the 95 percent mark. Yum. It was like a bowl of mama. A sure recipe to help anger wither.

Doesn't need much more 'splainin than that.

'Splainin welcome. Trying not to smoke. Write me at suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.

Quitting Certainty

By Suzanne Danforth

January 03, 2008 6:00 AM

"If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time."

— Chinese

Proverb

Uncertainty sunk to its nadir tonight, on my arrival home to discover the remains of an attempted burglary over the late December holiday. Not to worry, Port-citizens, these are Western Massachusetts thieves, where I am mostly residing these days.

The discovery followed a white-knuckle drive along the pike, earnestly listening to the news that another defender of democracy had joined the ranks of the slain. That Bhutto was without the proper fortification our democracy could have provided her is no longer material.

The day had begun by listening to a compassionate but realistic physician outlining specifics of chemotherapy and advising my friend that only she will know when it is time to cry uncle. (If you find yourself envisioning, reader, an image of a kindly male doctor, change it. This medico was a girl.)

I find myself, this week, quitting certainty. Certainty has been steadily exiting-stage-left over the past month, anyway, since the body of my friend Marya was found to have cancer in it (not her spirit though, no sir-ee).

Come to think of it, certainty has been leaking slowly away in a trajectory that dates back to childhood and upon inspection looks suspiciously a lot like life. Youth is wasted on the young and all that stuff.

The discovery of the burglary was well-timed if it is viewed as a variable to support my thesis that nothing is certain. I would have said, last week, that such a discovery would make me crumple, sink, curl up on the floor and sob.

Guess what? It didn't. Not only did it not force me to the floor in a headlock, I found myself beginning to laugh wryly. Then to giggle, which led to a laugh for real which ultimately led to a guffaw when I got on the phone to Marya (still in the people's republic of Cambridge) to ask where she keeps her checks.

I'm usually a strange mix of wishy-washy and black and white. I am impulsive or plodding, ready to accept full responsibility or to give it away wholesale, and full of daytime conviction that withers come night. I recognized shades of me in a recently published newspaper piece about feuding and conflict (thankfully I was more typified by emotional reactivity than narcissism, the two main personality types that tend to hold grudges).

I have assiduously ignored the smoking question since the cancer visitation. That's because I have been smoking. I smoke on the side porch wrapped in a prayer shawl made for me when my mother was dying. There is nothing relaxed about it, every move is tense and purposeful, crossed legs, crossed arms, looking at the birds and the occasional cardinal, dragging deeply.

When you are undergoing work up for cancer, the paperwork gets ridiculous. One particular intake form was exclusively about smoking and smoking habits. We have all been asked the questions: Do you smoke? How much? For how long?

Cancer historians want to know how deeply you drag, whether you take it in your mouth, down to your throat or whether you breathe it all the way in. If you are a breather-inner, they want to know how long you hold it, and if you ever blow it out your nose. They want to know if you ever smoked menthol, or cloves. Each question feels like a damning judgment, another pound of the gavel, rather than the data collection it is meant to be.

All I can do at this point is assign my own answers to these questions to the quit-if-you-can compartment. Because I am finding I cannot. Not right now.

So many apples on my family tree are gone and I am learning to forge my own way. I rely heavily on my triumvirate of angels ("In the name of my mother, my stepfather and the holy bassist, Amen"), the opportunity to write and a very small but very extraordinary set of individuals and animals for guidance.

But not even Atticus' gentle, predictable, reliable and certain ways can mask the fact that the uncertain road ahead is just not visible from here.

Here is one for Todd. Your kind demeanor will be missed. suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.