When Timmy and I are on a long drive, and he's behind the wheel, he likes to find a "happy place", a place on a major three lane highway, that suddenly has no cars in front of you and no cars in back. You relax, look at the scenery, slow down to the speed limit and enjoy the drive. Without the rush of cars passing on either side you are suddenly tension free, if only for a few minutes or even seconds. I have been kind of in a "happy place" since Cape Cod. It started one morning, early about 7:30 I was on Mayo Beach drinking a hot cup of offee, watching the shellmen about their job. Wellfleet Harbor stretched in front of me like a cinematic screen, land, water, Jeremy Point, more water and vast amounts of blue sky. The moon had been full the night before, so it was a very low tide and the men were so far off they looked like toy soldiers, their trucks pulled to the end of the water looked like Matchbox trucks. They moved slowly, some raking their oyster beds, some pulling rowboats filled with burlap bags of oysters and suddenly I felt a peace, a good feeling watching these workers doing a tedious job in slow motion, in cold water. A happy place. Then last week in my writing class at Bard I read my piece on "I knew I grew up when..." a piece that ended with even Maria's death not accomplishing my growing up. The class applauded me, the teacher said excellent and I went out of the room feeling a "happy place". I hate to read in front of people, I inherited the Murphy shyness and this was something hard for me to do and I thought I would cry, but I wore the scarf Maria had made for me, and I think that helped. My happy place continued.

Right now our country is not in a happy place and the result of next Tuesday is all important. Sabra e-mailed me an essay David Sedaris wrote for the New Yorker on voting. He mentions the voters who are undecided and likens it to being on an airplance. The stewardess approaches with the food cart and asks, do you want the chicken or a platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it and the undecided voter asks "How's the chicken cooked?" Funny, but sad too. We need to get into a happy place and Tuesday means the difference of an over crowded dangerous highway of crazy drivers or a long stretch of calm road ahead. Please, give us the calm road.

Back from a week at the Cape - beaches, Oysterfest and a memorial for a schooltime friend. Something for everyone there. I spoke a few words at Jackie's memorial, about our long time friendship. After the speakers, there was food, snack food and a small boat decoration filled with raw oysters. Her younger sister Sandy told me how she was so angry when Jackie died too early, Sandy thought they would have so many more years to be together. A few days before I had been to a funeral for a friend in Tivoli, who died at 69. The pastor there also kept saying, too young, she died too young. Made me think of Maria at 45 but then I guess they always say too young. Not my Uncle Ed Murphy, he was 96. There they said, "Doesn't he look good?" and he did. I went to Oma's 100 birthday, but was away for her funeral, but they probably didn't say she died too young either.

Anyway, something happened to me at the Cape, something broke free and I can once again do embrodery. I haven't been able to do that since Maria died. Instead I replaced it with Sudoku, the numbers game, placing numbers 1 through 9 in blocks, filling books and books of Sudoku. I even did the ones in the newspaper each day and the one in the AARP magazine, any Sudoku I could get my hands on. I realized in Cape Cod that was because when I embroider, I think. When I do Sudoku, I have to concentrate on the numbers, nothing else, no thinking. I had my bag of assorted projects to embroider and I picked up an apron I had started before Christmas. The needle went in and out and the brain started to wander. But my thoughts weren't scarey thoughts, they weren't awful thoughts, they were just thoughts and the needle kept going until I ran out of thread and then I picked another color and it was like I had never stopped for seven months. One small step.....

I've changed in many ways, I know it. Not long ago Caleb Potter's mother wrote in her blog that Caleb had asked her, "Where's my real Mom?" She was upset and hurt, but Laura wrote to her blog, saying something like "since my sister died, I lost my real mother, the one I had before" and I know what she meant. Tragedy changes you. I told Timmy the above, and he simply said, "I lost my old girlfriend too". I know I am less tolerant, less patient. At the Cape we were in line outside waiting to eat at Moby Dick's the last night of the season it was to be open. A big van drove up and parked next to the line of waiting customers with a bumper sticker NOBAMA. "Where did you get that sticker?" asked the man in front of us."I want to get one". The people behind us piped in, "We want to get one to," That's it, I told Timmy. Let's go. I'm not eating with people that think like that and we left, with the hostess saying, "Won't you reconsider?" I wanted to yell, "You assholes want McCain. Stand in line then, like sheep, waiting to go into a restaurant" , but Timmy (who is never the conservative) said to me, "I wouldn't say anything to that group if I were you" and I didn't. But that's just an example. No patience. I can't even wait for the next two weeks to go by so we don't have to see and hear all the politicians pointing fingers and telling us how much money they are going to save us. Well, I may be impatient now, but I can once again do my embordery.