“He was the man who read with me. I didn’t know he was famous.” That was some child in Washington, D.C. I was on Cape Cod the week Ted Kennedy died, was glued to every bit of the coverage. The Cape Cod Times was filled with stories of Kennedy’s life in Hyannis. “He waited for his turn in line.” The man at the bakery. “He helped us when we were at risk of losing our house to the bank.” A couple nearing retirement. “He remembered to call my family every September 11, ever since my boy died in the towers.” A Massachusetts constituent. “He was father to 11 extra kids after our father and Uncle John died.” One of the late Robert Kennedy’s sons.

I was glued to the news coverage of Kennedy’s funeral– newspapers, television, radio. A child of the Sixties, I bathed in nostalgia. Outside, Hurricane Danny whipped the National Seashore lands the Kennedy family had fought to preserve. Two days before the senator was eulogized and buried, the sun had shone on Cape Cod, and people– natives, wash ashores and first time visitors– had lined the roadways, stood on the bridge to the mainland with placards. They waited for hours to see the entourage carrying his casket, his family, for a few seconds. They stood in the sun with children on their shoulders, with elderly and disabled relatives in wheelchairs, thousands of “regular people” wanting to bid a last farewell to a man from a family that the press dubbed “American royalty.” At night, the senator laid in-state in the Kennedy Library in Boston, I followed his journey off Cape to pick my husband, Steve, up at the airport. Along all roads, construction signs were lit and read “From the People of Massachusetts: Thanks, Ted.”

I arrived at the airport red-eyed and full of Kennedy stories to share, but when my husband jumped in the car, the first thing he told me was that he’d started the morning comforting our neighbor, Sue. Sue was pretty distraught, had to put her beloved cat, Sammy, down the night before. When Steve got to work, he stopped in the coffee shop next door to his office for his morning coffee, and saw his usual waitress weeping over the dog she’d lost the day before. “It was a day for comforting people, I guess,” he said.

“He accomplished so much in his lifetime,” my husband says as he reads the litany of legislation for which Ted Kennedy is given credit. “I’ll never do what he did in his lifetime.” I thought about all those kids who will remember the old guy who came to their school and read with them when no press corps was taking notes, the Ted Kennedy I’ve been mourning. I thought of those bereaved pet owners comforted by my busy lawyer husband who has always meant to change the world. “Sure you will,” I say.

I did something good for myself the other day. I stood up for a cause. I am not going to extol the firmness of my belief in the cause. This is not a political forum.

But I almost didn’t go through with it. I saw the opposition, gathered with their signs and sneers, on the corner opposite the one I was headed for. I saw police. A woman of the opposition goaded me. “Are you honestly going to hold that sign up in public?” I told her I was. And then she told me she remembered the days when… You can flesh out the ellipsis. She held a sign that had a plastic bunch of bananas attached to it and said something disparaging about our President.

I heard someone yell, “Who bussed you people in? There can’t be that many of you.” But there were that many of us. We outnumbered our opponents 3 to 1. I marched on and took my place with the other members of the rally. I stayed out in the hot sun for two hours embracing my right to gather peaceably with likeminded countrywomen and men.

I recommend that you go out and rally for what you believe in. It could be in support of a candidate or of a traffic light at a problematic intersection. It could be in protest of a proposition or a news channel. It could be anything at all you feel must be brought to light and set right.

I felt like I was twenty again. You will, too.

I confess to liking—perhaps more than I should—doodads, gimcracks, and tchotchkes. I even like the words themselves for being so felicitous. Sometimes, though, I attribute unreasonable powers to these objects of my unreasonable affection, and they become charms.

Consider the case of Nodding Panda. I bought him at Mitsuwa, our local Japanese market, ostensibly because I thought my students would enjoy watching the light-activated toy nod away on my desk. And, indeed, they were amused by him all school year long, at which point I brought him home to spend the summer on the desk in my study.

Now that school is starting again, I have a problem. For two months, Nodding Panda has kept me company while I wrote, mused, emailed, drafted, planned, fumed, doubted, despaired, deleted, and recovered. I often looked to his dependably nodding countenance for the wherewithal to continue when what I was doing seemed pointless. His little mechanical head kept telling me, Yes, or Keep going, or That was pretty damn good, wasn’t it? He was quiet, encouraging company, and I no longer want to share him in my public workplace.

But, I will share him with you. When you find yourself doubting the enterprise of writing or your ability to carry on with it, conjure up the image of Nodding Panda. He is telling you to finish that paragraph or page, before you go to the refrigerator. He is saying, Good things come of hard work. He is cheering you on, and any kind of light keeps him going, even fluorescent.

When I lived in Western Pennsylvania, finding my first red maple leaf in mid-August always sent me into despair. Oh no. Summer was coming to an end. The days were growing shorter and the mornings were growing darker. Soon school would start and I would be beset by routines and schedules and commitments. I would lose the lovely sense of freedom and light-heartedness that was synonymous with summer.

While some folks seek only to beautify their feet and toes with soaking, exfoliating, trimming, filing and painting, I have a philosophical commitment to pedicures. I acknowledge that we depend on our feet to support us our entire lives, no matter how much we weigh. There are whole humans who can’t or won’t fulfill that need for us, though we expect these boney little platforms to do so. You have to admit, it’s a lot to ask of a body feature that probably comprises about 3 percent of our total bulk. If we were buildings, we would collapse once we reached puberty.

And yet, we don’t. Our feet carry us on our way, wherever that may lead us. So I’ve promised my feet that I will take care of them, and that means a monthly pedicure at RoseyToes Mani/Pedi Lounge. It’s pricier than other cattle-call, pick-color-you-pay-me-now salons. What you get in this loft of pampering is much like a facial for your feet. Plus, they use stainless steel tubs, which they scrub and sterilize after each use. My favorite part of the process is the ten-minute foot and calf massage, followed by a hot towel wrap. Oh, sweetness. The gallons of angst that wash away down the drain of that place.

So you will understand my dismay when, on my last visit, the customer sitting next to me answered her clamoring cell phone, right in the midst of my massage. The ring was the first couple bars of Rod Stewart, singing “Maggie May”: Wake up, Maggie, I think I got something to say to you… I used to enjoy this song, but it’s ruined forever for me, because a squinchy-faced, ultra-apologetic woman (“Sorry, I have to take this, I’m buying a new computer.”) held forth 20 minutes with techno chatter, including an argument with her teenage son, to whom she wished to give the old, restored computer, but the son was having none of it. He wanted a new one, just like the machine she was purchasing. I don’t know if I was angrier with the woman or with myself because I was too polite to suggest she save her business for later.

But now I’m using our blog for that very purpose: Wake up, lady, and all other cell phone zealots, I think I got something to say to you. Unless there’s an emergency, you don’t HAVE to take a cell phone call. You don’t HAVE to make the dribs and drabs of your personal life public. All of it can WAIT an hour until you are home or hermetically sealed in your car. Here’s another tip: a bathroom stall doesn’t qualify, nor does a booth in a restaurant.

I have a pedicure next Wednesday. I pray that I can care for my deserving feet in peace, and that you will do your part to protect sacred American spaces from the yammering national compulsion of cell phones.

Happy 4th of July, everyone!

We drove to Derry on the wide River Foyle, where our tourguide talked openly of the city’s history with The Troubles and pointed out the memorials to Bloody Sunday. At the Ulster Folk Park outside Omagh, exhibits portrayed the Irish farmers and weavers who sailed to America when faced with eviction, hunger, or religious and political persecution. Many, like my own ancestors, went to Pennsylvania.

Then we went into Omagh city center. I knew about the Real IRA car bombing that killed 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins, in 1998 – well after the start of the peace process — and I expected to see memorials similar to ones in Derry. The town map from the visitor centor listed a memorial garden, but I remembered the explosion as being in the middle of a busy shopping area. On Market Street I did find a tall blue pillar with a heart etched at its top, but there was no hint of its significance.

I went into a bookstore and, finding no books on the local tragedy, asked for a local newspaper. The shopkeeper shuffled through various stacks of papers before offering me one. “This is local,” she said, “and it presents both sides of the community.”

It set me back a bit to think that in a town of that size there might be a newspaper that only Catholics read and another strictly for Protestants. Rather like Americans reading only Republican or Democratic papers. And it made me wonder if the shopkeeper had hestiated in choosing a newspaper for me because she feared handing me the wrong one.

Back in Fivemiletown, I fell into conversation with the Methodist minister, a woman who spoke proudly of the new church windows. “The old windows were destroyed in a bomb blast. Not a bomb in the church, of course, but in the village.”
“Why here?” I glanced over my shoulder at the usual shops and pubs and houses.
She shrugged. “It happens.”

No where are we safe from violence. Or paranoia. I understand that. But I have difficulty imagining car bombs in the small American towns where I lived most of my life. Nor in Richmond, Virginia, where I live now. And while I try to avoid offending my Republican friends, I don’t live in fear that they will have me killed. All of which brings me to a toast: