2010, last day.

My year has been a good one: we are happy and healthy, our financial situation is stable, and there have been no huge/negative upheavals in anyone’s life. We are all good.

I leave this year with a comment recently made by my almost 82-year-old mother.

Eighty-two is a long time to be alive. She was born before the Great Depression to a family that eventually had eight children and no bathtub, she went to work at the age of 16 and didn’t stop until she was 67, she lost a husband to death and a child to drugs and mental instability, but she had this to say:

“Why shouldn’t we people who are comfortable try to make the lives of others a little more comfortable, too?”

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The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has a present for you.

We didn't tie a bow around it, but we did put it in a box.

For you, for me, for everyone.

It's a very nice box, though.

And the present is its newly opened Art of the Americas wing.

And what's in it is fabulous!

Five thousand pieces of art on four floors, all from, uh, us. Just the Americas, old and new, South and North, big and small, in fifty-three galleries that make so much sense your brain says to you “Of course! This was always meant to be with that.”

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If you were a woman of certain means (meaning, a lot of means) and had some fancy-do-dah where to go—your husband’s night club, say, or the Academy Awards to pick up yours—you would need a fancy-do-dah frock to announce your right to be there.

Say, you don't make anything that goes with flip-flops, do you?

And if you were amongst the ladies of stratospheric means, you would want Arnold Scaasi to come up with it.

This old thing? Really darling, you're too too much of a flatterer...

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Richard Avedon, the photographer who “invented” modern fashion photography, had a career spanning sixty years, and the MFA is hosting one stupendously fashionable retrospective of his work.

No, it's not a piece of paper stuck over her head, it's FASHION.

Put your best dress on, Martha, because you are going to want to go.

Wait, I'm almost ready!

Dorian Leigh, hat by Paulette, Paris studio, August 1949
Photograph Richard Avedon
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

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I have a curiously intimate relationship with the World Cup.

Far and Away

My first encounter with the World Cup was in Ireland circa 1990, where I was living at the time.

Wait, I thought all roads lead to Rome...

I was trying to find myself a bedsit (a.k.a. a studio  apartment), and one afternoon I left work early in order to wander the streets of Ranelagh in search of one (at least the one listed in the paper).

This place looks nice...

I noticed that I was the only creature moving in the entirety of the neighborhood. Not a person, not a dog, not a car was in motion. I was the only articulatedly living thing as far as the eye could see. Not having been in Ranelagh before it gave me a creepy feeling, and it got me to thinking that I didn’t want to live in that part of town if that’s what it was going to be like.

Someone in the office had mentioned “the World Cup” that morning but that was an inconsequential sporting event in which I like most Americans had no interest.

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My father taught me so many things, among them:

1. I wasn’t good enough;
2. Me being me was a pain in the ass to others;
3. My intelligence was something to be embarrassed about;
4. I didn’t know anything that was important;
5. I could be anything I wanted to be, as long as it was what he wanted me to be;
6. Whatever I wanted to do, I didn’t have what it took to do it.

When he died, I burst into tears, I was so relieved.

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They won’t remember that it was late, but they’ll remember that it was wrong.

Jus’ sayin’.

Even though the tragic loss of Buffy at Thanksgiving was heartbreaking and horrible, we both knew that we would, when we were ready, adopt another kitten.

We still miss you, Buff

Getting a Kitten for a Cat

One of the things we realized about Buffy was that she didn’t want/need a feline companion, but of course we only realized that after we got Buffy a feline companion, a lovely little fella named Eliot.

In spite of Buffy being entirely non-interactive with him, Eliot remained affable and happy, even though he spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Buffy to play with him.

Don't tell Buffy, but our butts are touching

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The head of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, said of the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, “The damage, destruction and loss of life are just overwhelming.”

Maybe it’s because I played Winston Churchill in 8th grade, but my only thought when I heard that was, “You are the head of the United Nations, dude, step up to the plate with strong leadership and determination to succeed, or step aside.”

Because good lord, if the United Nations is “overwhelmed” by what’s happened in Haiti, why even bother trying?

Dear Martin,

I was five-going-on-six when you were murdered.

I was a little white girl living in a nice working-to-middle-class seacoast neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts.

I can’t say I remember anything about your murder, although growing up three murders were never far from anyone’s recall. First President Kennedy, then you, then the President’s brother Robert.

I remember understanding that John Kennedy was killed because he was president, and Robert Kennedy was killed because he wanted to be president.

And you were killed because you were black.

In my seacoast community, the one where Mr. Boudreau from up the street would go out clamming on the flats at low tide, nobody was black, although I think back then the nomenclature was “negro.”

So in a way, Martin, you were the first black person I ever knew.

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