Rolly

Someone who was mad at him ran down an old friend with an SUV several days ago. The driver was charged with Rolly's murder. It was all over the news, and when the news interviewed Rolly's brother, he said that he wants to see the murderer pay for what he has done, because when someone dies violently, it forces the family to carry around sadness and anger and feelings of vengeance at the same time, and nobody should have to carry all that around at the same time. Rolly's mom played the drums at the funeral, and she read the Christmas card he had written to her last year. He had thanked her for being a good mom, and he had apologized for screwing up a lot, and he had ended the message with, "I will win!" Everyone winced at that, with anger and sadness. There was a video playing as we filed into the church -- a loop of Rolly chatting up the camera as he fixed an old truck, clenching his fist in triumph when the engine turned over. The minister talked a lot about how everyone was kind of afraid of Rolly, who was a big wall of muscles and menacing eyebrows, someone you probably couldn't beat in a fight unless you fought dirty, hiding behind the wheel of a Ford Explorer like an asshole. I'm sad and angry, too.

I attended the funeral on Friday with my dad, who had thrown Rolly up in the air 40 years ago, accidentally shattering a lightbulb with Rolly's head. My dad would apologize for it every time he and Rolly found themselves in the same room together, and it got funny as it got old. In line to sign the guest book, my dad and I were standing behind a windburned guy in a motorcycle jacket and his girlfriend, who was coughing into her hand. "I swear Toni," the guy said. "If you get that cough on me, I'm going to twist your head off."

Toni ignored him, signed the guest book, and walked on. My dad piped up. "I'm sure not going to cough on you!" And the guy turned around and said, "Well, if she does, I'm twisting her head clear off her neck."

My dad turned to me and stage whispered, "Do you have a cough drop?"

I looked in my purse. I had only one. "I have only one," I said.

"Well," my dad said, "This is a moral dilemma, isn't it?"

I kept the cough drop, but mostly because I've been coughing for more than a month, and my dad hasn't.

Sensing

"Look," he said. "I'm not the one who has trust issues with Clorox."

In the course of the flu I've been receiving, I lost my sense of smell. It wasn't just that I was stuffed up. It was just gone. I didn't realize it at first, and when I opened a new bottle of bleach to do the laundry, I didn't think that there was something wrong with me that I couldn't smell the bleach. I thought something was wrong with the bleach. I sniffed at the bottle for a good five minutes, trying to gauge just how much the company had ripped me off with bleach so watered-down that it smelled like water -- and not even that. Bastards.

Later, when I rubbed Vapo-Rub on my chest and noticed it didn't even smell like Vasoline, I realized what the real problem was. It lasted for almost three days, and it was really weird. I couldn't really taste, either, but my tongue tried to compensate. I could feel the individual ridges of the penne, for instance, which was kind of cool, but didn't make up for not being able to taste artichoke hearts.

Holding it

While waiting for the bus home, underground at Harvard, I moved over on the bench to make room for a cringing kid and his mom, who looked like she might not fit unless I moved all the way off the bench, which I offered to do. "That's OK," she said. "But my son needs to sit down because he has to go to the bathroom really bad."

I told them that there was a bathroom in the T station. I didn't know where it was, but a couple of years ago I wrote an article about finding public restrooms in Boston, and in the course of reporting someone told me that there's a toilet in every T station, and if you really have to pee you can ask an attendant for a key, if you can find an attendant.

His mom said that they didn't need the T restroom. Nobody ever seems to have to pee THAT bad. The kid looked up at me and told me he had already wet his pants a little bit. He nodded down at the big sweatshirt tied around his waist. On top he was wearing a blue t-shirt with a skull on it. He was maybe seven, but I'm not great at gauging age.

His mom told him it was OK, that it happens to everyone, and then, to me, "Right?"

"Right," I said to her, and then again to the kid. "Right," I said. I remembered my mom's crazy brilliant artist friend Carol telling me, when I was a kid, that she had both peed and pooped in her pants on a date once, at the Drive-In, because she was too shy to tell her date that she needed to go to the restroom. Carol used to squirt me with breast milk, for kicks. Carol drank herself to death a few years ago, and when I heard about her death, my first thought was of the time she told me about soiling herself at the Drive-In.

The kid at the bus stop told me or his mom that he was scared to go home because his dad was going to yell. "He won't yell," his mom said. "He yells when you're playing at home and you keep playing even though you have to pee, and then you end up peeing on the floor. That's when he yells. He won't yell this time. This time it's my fault. I let you drink that whole soda." I noticed that he was still holding the soda, and still sipping it. She noticed, too, then, and said, "Stop sipping!"

He stopped sipping. "He'll yell," he said again. "I trust you more than I trust him. But I think he'll yell."

She told him that when they got home, he could take a bath, and nobody would have to know he had wet his pants. Nobody except him. And her. And me. He glanced up at me and then asked her mom if he could play with his G.I. Joe in the tub, and if he could look at a book while we waited for the bus to arrive. "Geez," she said. "You want everything." I thought she was joking, but she didn't look for his book.

On the bus, the kid's mom's cell phone rang. She answered it with the hand that wasn't clutching the Dunkin' Donuts bag, waited, said four times a row that she was on her way home, waited again, and then repeatedly told the person on the other end of the phone to stop yelling. The kid's face collapsed, resigned and pained at the same time -- too complicated a look for a kid that age. She offered to hand the phone to the kid so that the kid could confirm that they really were on the way home. The kid shook his head. The look on his face was killing me. I recognized it from the mirror, at the end of an impossible day, when nothing can make me smile except the ridiculous look on my face, comic because at the end of an impossible day I look like a miserable man of 80, and that's kind of funny. But a seven-year-old kid sporting the expression of a miserable old man isn't comedy. I pray that he made it to the tub, G.I. Joe in hand, his dad's mouth too full of doughnuts to yell at anyone.

School daze

The leaves aren't yet turning, but you can tell autumn has hit Cambridge by the influx of international students in line at all the coffee shops. Forgive me for generalizing, but man, for the most part, international students dress to kill, even on Sundays, and their pretty shoes always make standing in line more fun than it would be otherwise.

I have a new job, by the way, and often writing is the last thing I feel like doing when I get home, so that's why there's a dearth of anything decent here lately. I'm making mental notes, though, and I'll try to catch up. Have I mentioned that when I was a kid, when I read that someone made a mental note, I conjured up an image of someone singing, "Duhhhhh?" I wonder if kids still call each other "mental" as an insult. Was that a widespread thing, or just a Maine thing? I don't have the time to research playground insults, but they're among the things that make me wonder. Conversely, "decent" used to be the biggest playground compliment -- for a well-bounced superball or a back flip. "Whoa. Decent." Maine doesn't gush, starting from childhood.

There's a guy outside singing to his kid, to the tune of "Animal Crackers in Your Soup." He's singing, "No more crackers in your nose; that is not where they-ey go."

Tina, Katrina

It rained hard today, and maybe that's why I thought about the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina a lot more than I did last year. I wonder about Tina, whom I initially thought of in terms of her literary potential -- "the pre-op Cajun tranny who works the night shift, slinging mac and cheese to hungry strippers at the Nelly Deli...." went my mind the day I met her, greedy and hungry for gimme prose, whereas she just wanted to be a Southern lady and tell me about some of the neat things a visitor should do when visiting her fine city, which was still fine then....it was the winter before the hurricane hit. She suggested a riverboat tour. I visited a sex club instead, and I never wrote the book I was going to write. Not yet. It would be a different book today.

Tina weathered the storm in the city, escaping a week later with a stately old lady whose car is pictured here. They spent the first few nights away from home in a motel room in Alabama, I think, and a mutual friend helped me figure out how to send Tina a little bit of money. When she called to thank me, I asked if there was anything else she needed, or anyone she needed me to call, and she, less than a week after witnessing bloated corpses floating in the streets of her broken neighborhood, she told me that she'd really like a Boston Red Sox t-shirt. And today I was remembering that I never followed through on that. I can't imagine why I didn't. If I find out where Tina is now, and I'm hoping she's back home, then I'm going to follow through on that.

Hi again

On the F train I sat next to a small woman sporting a prickly mustache and beard. She was reading Hebrew from a small prayer book when she wasn't voicing her frustration at the automated voice giving us wrong information about the subway stops. It was confusing. It would tell us we were pulling into 57th street when we were pulling into 42nd, and I felt fortunate that I am both sighted and literate, because otherwise I would have been screwed.

I was sitting across from a guy in a stretched-out v-neck t-shirt. The tattoo on his chest probably said, "Forever Grateful," and maybe it said even more than that, but as it was I could see only part of the tattoo, and it looked like it said, "Forever Grated." That seemed apt.

It's really hot outside, and you should check out Adam's new project, Our Daily Sonnet, in which 154 people are going to read one of each of Shakespeare's sonnets. By the end, there will be a whole blog of sonnets, and any time you need someone to read one of the sonnets to you, all you have to do is go to Adam's blog. I love when anyone reads a sonnet to me, so I'm excited about the project. Anyone interested in participating can ping Adam.

Hole in one

My friend Steve took me out to dinner last week to thank me for being his key buddy and bringing his key to him at 1am, after he realized, upon landing, that he had left his keys 3,000 miles away. I wasn't very gracious about it because I just started a new job with office hours and have made kind of a big point about going to bed when the normals do. I scowled at him when I handed him the key, but he took me out to dinner anyway, a barbecue place that I still love even though I got a rubber band in my chili there once. It was chili verde, and the rubber band was verde, so I understand how that could happen, but it felt icky in my mouth. Similarly, I got bitten on the gum yesterday, by a gnat. I thought I had bitten my lip, but it turned out I was tasting blood because a gnat had drawn it. I figured this out when a friend, Steve again, actually, told me that I had something in my teeth. We thought it was a piece of cupcake, but it was a gnat.

"Huh," Steve said. "Gross," I said.

Anyway. We got a terrific waiter who asked if we'd like him to go over the ribs with us. I've been going to this place off and on since like 1991 and nobody had ever offered, unsolicited, to go over the ribs with us. I was touched. I'm easily touched when I'm tired.

I ordered brisket and an Arnold Palmer.

"An Arnold Palmer is half iced tea and half lemonade, right?" Steve said.

I said yes, just as my drink was arriving, in a Mason Jar.

"So, what's in an Amanda Palmer?" Steve said.

"Arnold," I said.

Steve's one of my friends who will set them up so I can knock them down fast and feel good about myself. I went on to say that Amanda Palmer isn't actually a drink, but a singer in the Dresden Dolls. It turns out, though that one of the coffee shops in Cambridge actually has a drink called Amanda Palmer. He couldn't remember which one. It's probably named after her.

High School Reunion

I realized this weekend that I grew up with the kinds of people who are more interested in how you're doing than in what you're doing, and I appreciated that.

The love song of monkeys

I'm sorry I haven't posted anything for a week or so. But while I'm on the museum kick, I'll mention that I finally visited The Museum of Sex in New York, which is both very silly and captivating, just like actual sex. On the silly side: an "educational" video in which a couple is learning how to talk dirty to each other. "I want to suck your cock," says the woman. "You DO?" says the man. (I didn't stick around long enough to find out if they get better at talking dirty to each other.) On the captivating side: a photograph of gay manatees and a video of bonobos, which are the monkey equivalent of a hippie commune circa 1969. Free love abounds and they solve most of their conflicts with casual sex. The best clip involved two female bonobos rubbing their genitals together (the scientific term is called "G-G") while a male bonobo danced around them, trying, unsuccessfully, to get their attention until he danced so hard that he fell off a small cliff.

On the disturbing side: I realized how much I already knew about the sex lives of ducks.

The Love Song of Cyrus E. Dallin

So anyway, the aforementioned weird waxing experience was, at least, really efficient, and because I had some minutes to kill I decided to peek into that museum in the middle of Mass. Ave. in Arlington, at the beginning of the Minuteman bike trail.

The museum is the Cyrus E. Dallin Art Museum, and if you decided to peek into it, you should know that you're committing yourself to a free, unsolicited tour. The old guy who apparently runs the place followed me around from room to room, spouting facts about Cyrus E. Dallin, winning me over at the second room when he cleared his throat and began to recite "Paul Revere's Ride," but substituting "my children" with "young lady" because he was directing the recitation at me. At this point, anyone who calls me young anything is aces in my book.

So anyway, the guy who gave me the tour is arguably the biggest fan of Cyrus Dallin, who, I now know, is the artist who created that Paul Revere statue in the North End. According to the guy, Dallin actually created seven versions of the statue, an ordeal that took 58 years due to typically Bostonian politics and whatnot, and now his name isn't even on the statue. (Dallin also sculpted the "Appeal to the Great Spirit" statue in front of the MFA.)

Furthermore, Dallin also created several busts of people who are famous to those of us who had a better American History education than I did. The tour guide made me feel bad because I didn't know why Julia Ward Howe was famous.

"Quick," he said, "Without looking at this plaque, tell me why Julia Ward Howe was famous."

I tried to stall. "She's buried in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery, I think," I said.

"Well, yes, she is, but that's not why she's famous," he said. "She's not famous for being dead. A lot of people are buried in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery."

So I gave up. He said something derogatory about American education today, which, again, made me feel good because he was implying youth on my part.

It turns out that Julia Ward Howe wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," at least the lyrics. It was originally published as a poem in The Atlantic Monthly, where I interned in college, so I felt bad for not even knowing who wrote it. "....trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored" is a pretty great line, my aversion to the passive voice aside.

William Steffe wrote the music, which I know only because of Wikipedia, and which I never would have looked up if I hadn't visited the Cyrus E. Dallin Museum. If Dallin's an accurate artist, then Julia Ward Howe was a fierce-faced woman who looked a little bit like Jason Robards in the 1988 version of "Inherit the Wind."