Thank you all for the kind words about Steve. I’m in Marblehead with my mom until next weekend.  Here’s a shot of Brown’s Island.

Some quaint streets in Old Town:

The names of the streets? I have no idea.  I lived in Marblehead from 8th grade until college and rode every street and alley on my bike many, many times (I was lazy about getting my driver’s license), but never really paid much attention to the names of the streets.  Fortunately people around here don’t really use proper street names too often, but will say things like, “Across from where Penni’s used to be,” or “Next to the Rippah” which is a great old dive called The Riptide.

Like many Massachusetts seacoast towns, there are a lot of Labrador Retrievers in Marblehead.  Really a lot.  Yesterday my sister and I were outside my mother’s house when a woman walked up with a black Labrador on a leash.

“Is this your dog?” she asked.

“No,” Meg said.  Meg lives across the street from my mother.  ”I think that’s Buddy who lives in the grey house at the bottom of the road,” she told the woman.

“No Buddy is my neighbor,” said the woman. “But I think I brought this dog here once before when he was wandering.”

“That would have been Skippy,” I said. Skippy was my mother and Steve’s old Lab and I explained to the woman that he died several months ago.  The woman then told us that her black Lab looked so much like the one she was walking that she had thought it was hers at first, and then she and Meg ran through all the names of the Labs in the neighborhood and it occurred to me that it was entirely unlikely that anyone in Marblehead has the original black Labrador that he or she started out with.  Later, my mother told us that after Skippy died, she heard a dog’s footsteps walking up her stairs and was startled when a black Labrador wandered into her office.  It was the neighbor’s dog and somebody had found it, thought it was Skippy, and put him inside my Mom’s house.

I think that Marblehead should do with its Labradors what Amsterdam did with the community white bicycles.  People can take a black Lab off the streets when they need one to walk with or to lie by their hearth, and when they’re finished they can just return it to the streets.

I think that’s actually what’s going on, anyway.

People in Marblehead are wicked nice. They’re the balls, as we used to say, and my mother and sister are lucky to be surrounded by such a caring community.

In loving memory of Stephen W. Howe

PUTTING IN THE SEED by Robert Frost

You come to fetch me from my work to-night
When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see
If I can leave off burying the white
Soft petals fallen from the apple tree
(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,
Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea);
And go along with you ere you lose sight
Of what you came for and become like me,
Slave to a Springtime passion for the earth.
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.

Yes, We’re still practicing the skateboard and ball.

Why must we we work so tirelessly at these difficult and dangerous tricks? Because we know that some day, some glorioius day in the not too distant future, we will be asked to appear on this show:

I’ve been in Boston the past few days.  A family member is in the hospital but things are looking better for him, so yesterday I drove to a small town outside Hartford, CT, at a predetermined time, because I had important business there. Important Government business.  I parked my car in front of the large office building and went inside, sweating and shivering at the same time.  I was met by a receptionist who had me read some regulations, then I was photographed and fingerprinted.  Then I was lead into an interior chamber where I was again fingerprinted and all of my personal belongings (except for my clothes) were stored in a locker.

Then it was time.

I was about to take the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians cognitive test.

This was the last of the tests that I would need to take in order to become a certified Emergency Medical Technician.  I was told there would be 70 -140 questions and that the computer asks more or less questions based on your answers (please, I have no idea). There would be two hours to take the test.

So I began.  I was introduced, one by one, to a very interesting and, I hate to say it but easily the most depressing cast of characters I have ever encountered.  I signed an agreement at the testing site that I wouldn’t share details of the test, so I can’t be specific, but there were disoriented diabetics, toddlers who couldn’t breathe, violent drug-addicts, injured cyclists and old people clutching their chests.  My job was to not be distracted by the confusing wrong answers to the questions about each patient, but instead, to pick the right answer.  It took me a few minutes to get used to the computer but then I was moving along and had gotten myself into a rhythm when suddenly the computer ended the test. I had only answered 70 questions. I had another 60 minutes!

I called Bernie, the chief of our town’s EMTs and told him what had happened and he said, “You either did really well, or abysmally bad”.  He explained that if you answer enough questions correctly, the computer decides you don’t need more, but also, if you don’t answer enough answers correctly, it’ll also end the test.  It could have been either, I decided, and I drove home.

Hours later I got an email from my EMT instructor, Susie.  I had passed!  I am now a nationally registered Emergency Medical Technician!

Many thanks to my instructors: Susie, Steve, Ellen, Demetri, Shannon and all my classmates.

And of course, thanks to this great crew, who originally inspired me:

Well, now I’ll have more time to devote to the blog and my first order of business is to choose a new book for the nightstand. Shall we do a classic?

As many of you are probably aware, it is no longer enough to spend months and often years writing a book. Today an author must help sell the book, and by sell, I mean she must make each and every person in the northern hemisphere aware of obsessed with the book. She must make them understand that they need the book in order to survive in today’s world. She must make them wake up each morning and ask, “if not now, when? If not me, who? If not the …”

Wait, I’m not sure those are the questions.

The point is, like many businesses, publishers are struggling these days and they like it if their authors will pitch in and help. I regret not doing more to push my last book, but never mind, today I got to help my friend Julie Klam with the book trailer for her delightful forthcoming memoir, You Had Me At Woof.

Julie asked me several weeks ago if I would direct her book trailer and of course I was wildly flattered and within minutes of hanging up the phone with her I had launched myself on yet another fantastical voyage of delusion.  I decided that the Julie Klam book trailer would be such a smash that authors would say to each other, at cocktail parties, “You have a book coming out?  Is Ann Leary doing your book trailer?  You have to get Ann Leary to do your book trailer.  She did Salmon’s! She just did Elmore’s! She did Nora’s”  Yes, I would be the Annie Leibowitz of book trailers. Julie Klam is cut from the same cloth it seems, because she told me that within minutes of hanging up the phone with me she was tearfully rehearsing her acceptance speech for the book trailer award (we wondered if there must be such a thing and it turns out, there is).

Julie had been wowed by some of my recent work, but I had to confess to her that I only really know how to use a FlipCam, and so we decided that my son Jack, an actual film student who is working on a television crew, would be the co-director/cameraman/guy-who-does-everything-but-talk.  We discussed a few ideas, but Julie’s hysterical book is all about how out of control her dogs are; how they’ve destroyed her house, upended her relationship with her husband, scarred her daughter for life, etc, so we decided that her yappy, outrageously naughty terriers would be enough to carry the film, just by being themselves.

Here was the hitch: Julie’s terriers are so bad, so utterly devious that they will do the opposite of what she wants, NO MATTER WHAT. So today they conspired to be the most well-behaved dogs ever filmed.  Just to make fools of us. They couldn’t possibly have been more angelic. They made Cesar Millan’s dog, Daddy, look like a thug.  They made Lassie look like a crack whore.  I have never seen three more well-behaved dogs in my life.  Did I mention that they’re terriers? Boston Terriers?

Still, we managed to get some funny antics and we had a blast.  I must admit, I regretted wearing a sleeveless black top, because Julie also wore a sleeveless black top, but she has the arms of a ballerina. And though her dogs are mostly black, they manage to shed only their white hairs.

Anyway, as soon as it’s all edited it’ll be on YouTube where you can see it and tell all your friends. And then it’ll go viral. Next, there’ll be calls from Oprah, network and studio heads. And, of course, Julie and I will be offered our own television show.

I usually love to blog when we go away, but I didn’t take my laptop with us to Bermuda, so I’ll provide a tidy summary now.

First, Bermuda is very close to New York. We arrived in Bermuda in less time than it would have taken us to drive to Cape Cod, so you would think that Denis and I might have ventured there at some point in the last couple of decades, but we haven’t. Denis had never been to Bermuda before this trip. I went to Bermuda once, when I was in ninth grade. It was my first trip outside the United States and so I have always thought that my memories of the island’s beauty and tropical splendor were probably wildly inflated as they can be, by the limited perspective of my youth. I remembered walking off the plane and being dazzled by the warm salty air and the blue sky and the turquoise sea that had appeared, from the sky, to lap at the runways of the little airport. I went there with a very fun friend whose family used to live in Bermuda and we ran around with all her old friends to little island discos at night and were served pina coladas and all sorts of other frozen rum drinks because the drinking age there at that time was apparently 13.

Anyway, I sort of thought that returning to Bermuda would be like what happened when I reread Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead as an adult. The first time I read The Fountainhead I, a) fell in love with Howard Roark, b) determined to become a writer and c) developed a lifelong crush on all men working at construction sites. I was in the tenth grade at the time and, well, I just thought Dominique and Roark were insanely cool and sexy with their radical idea that brilliant men should be allowed to rape beautiful women and build skyscrapers however they damned well pleased. I felt that Dominique and Roark and I were kindred spirits. I hated traditionalism with them. I denounced pretentious building facades with them. I pretended that Roark was raping Dominique with them – knowing all along that she wanted him to give her the comeuppance she so richly deserved. When I read it again, as an adult, I have to say I was a little embarrassed for my younger self. I used to rave about this book. It was one of those books that I carried around with me, along with volumes of collected poems by Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath so that people would understand that I was a  young troubled genius. Just like those authors had once been. A young troubled genius who doodled pictures of ponies and puppies in the margins of the pages.

So I suspected that I’d go back to Bermuda with my jaded, somewhat wiser and more-travelled adult perspective and wonder at how I had been so enchanted by the island. But in fact, the island is enchanting, I had been right. It wasn’t like rereading The Fountainhead at all. Bermuda is beautiful. The houses are beautiful, the trees and gardens are beautiful, the people are beautiful and the beaches are unbelievably beautiful.

You can’t rent cars in Bermuda. All tourists must either ride in cabs or drive mopeds, which is what we did. The first day, on the way to the moped place, I said to Denis, “Let’s not get two, let’s get a double. We can pretend we’re in the movie The Deep. You be Nick Nolte and I’ll be Jacqueline Bissett. Only I’ll wear a bra.” Later, I said, “Actually, let’s pretend we’re in Easy Rider. You can be Peter Fonda and I’ll be Jack Nicholson.” When we saw the tiny scooter that we would be sharing I said, “Let’s pretend we’re riding on something that grown-ups would ride. Something that doesn’t look like it was taken off a merry-go-round.”

Meg, her husband Mark, Denis and I swam, ate, payed tennis, scooted about the island and on our last night there, some old family friends who are Bermudian, took us out on a sunset cruise on their boat, which was beautiful.

We’re back from our vacation. It was wonderful, but because of upcoming EMT exams (took one this morning, don’t know results yet), I spent most of the time on the beach taking practice multiple choice tests. As a result, I’ve found that the multiple choice format has replaced my former methods of thinking and communicating. Worse, I view everything as a “scenario” in which a certain protocol is required. Here’s an example taken from a real-life incident that occurred in our house this morning. Let’s see how you do:

You decide unilaterally that it is too warm in the house. You know that your kind but fragile wife loathes air-conditioning, but you have a bit of perspiration on your forehead. The thermostat is in the room where your dear wife is lying supine at her bed-desk. What is the proper course of action?

a) Beg the wife’s pardon, and gently ask if the temperature may be lowered. When she snaps at you that she’s freezing and if you want to be cold maybe you should have married Sarah Palin, you humbly ask her forgiveness and slink out of the room
b) Tell the hag that she’ll have plenty of heat where she’s going to end up, and crank the a/c.
c) Walk by the thermostat and distract her by asking if she heard a puppy yelping outside. When she leaps to the window, crank the a/c.
d) Just turn up the a/c. When your back is turned, she’ll lower it. Then just turn it back up. Never say a word but spend the day repeating these maneuvers, silently cursing each other under your breath.

The man and woman pictured above:

a) Are married
b) Are siblings
c) Really might be cousins (mothers have same maiden name)
d) Decided not to delve too deep when they learned of shared names. Kids ended up looking normal, so what’s the big deal?
e) Most of the above

While not studying, I spent my time on vacation:

a) Whining
b) Eating
c) Worrying
d) Slowly spiraling into a state of diminished mentation in which I became convinced that I might have talent as a visual artist, producing works such as this:

Two of the four people in this photo repeatedly humiliated the other two on the tennis court. Can you pick the winners? For extra credit, can you identify the losers by name? (Hint: Identify them correctly by adding a comma and then the word loser after their names)

For double extra credit, based on photos, can you guess where we went?

Okay, I think I’ve figured out how to post pictures on iPad. First I must tweet them. Annoying but in the meantime have found a favorite new way to waste time. it’s a drawing app. No more flip cam. I’m drawing from now on. Portrait of husband to follow.

In a giant leap of misplaced faith in the iPad, I have gone on vacation with my husband and left my laptop at home. It is really really hard to blog from an iPad, but I will try. Where am I? I ‘m on an island. I’m stranded on an island with no laptop. Stranded on a beautiful, beautiful island with 3 of my favorite people, and I can ‘t figure out how to post photos. But I will. In the meantime, dear Candy, please check in with us. And Mary Lynn, I know. I know.

Last winter, Holly and I were playing with a gigantic tennis ball and she learned how to move it forward and backward with her front paws.  Now I’m trying to teach her to balance on a slightly larger ball and eventually, I believe she’ll be able to walk on it.

And then we’ll be asked to join the circus.

After that, there’ll be the whole talk show circuit;  Letterman, Leno, Regis & Kelly. The Daily Show, and, inevitably, the offer to star in our own television show. It’s bound to happen, it’s all part of the big plan.

The ball we’re working with is slightly deflated but I left it that way, because it slows it down a little and lets her dig her little paws in.  I wish I could add music but the YouTube audio swap is not working AGAIN.  I’ll try to add music later.

So, without further ado, Miss Holly. If you can’t see the video, here’s the link.