SurfCountry

We've moved...and are moving!...

2007-08-13T19:42:00.000-04:00

Back from vacation after 2 1/2 weeks of wonderful time with my wife's family. What a priceless joy. I feel refreshed and rejuvenated.

We have moved locations on the world wide web. Please visit me at http://meadonmanhattan.wordpress.com/ .

We are also moving as a family. Read the latest post, from today, on the news.

photo: schlomaster

On Vacation

2007-07-31T13:50:00.000-04:00

Til August 11...and switching our look.

LIRR days

2007-07-23T07:08:00.000-04:00

As we sat on the Long Island Railroad hurtling out toward Bay Shore – I knew all the stops because the conductor used to rattle them off over the intercom like, “This is the 3:30 local to Montauk, stopping at Freeport, Merrick, Bellmore, Wantagh, Seaford, Massapequa, Massapequa Park, Amityville, Copiague, Lindenhurst and BAB-bee-lon (Babylon). Change in BAB-bee-lon for the train to Bay Shore, Islip, Great River, Oakdale and Sayville. Change in Patchogue for the train to Montauk making all local stops. Next stop… FreeeeePORT!” – what came next was that this same conductor came down the aisle and collected fares. My dad would pay for mom and himself and then ask for two children’s tickets for Jim and me.

I was not a child.

I was 13. Jim was 11 and was most definitely a child.

I qualified for an adult ticket (anyone over 12) and – blast it all! – I wanted to have an adult ticket.

This recurring event stood in sharp contrast with three years later when, in response to my getting caught by the Ocean Beach, Fire Island cops drinking Heineken on the dock – I broke the law expensively – my parents somehow reasoned that I could drink at home under their supervision while I was still a minor. So, my dad saved a buck-fifty each time on the train by reducing me to a child, but on any given night I would put back a couple or three Ballantine Ales on my parents’ budget, which effectively negated the LIRR child’s ticket and then some, and I did so without blinking.

Not so Dad

2007-07-17T00:39:00.000-04:00

On the 405 going north toward Sacramento, trying to find the right off ramp leading to the 10 toward Santa Monica, I was seriously outgunned. I mean, the people here are all Professional Drivers. Like New Yorkers are Expert Walkers.

If you walk in New York the wrong way, you know, with a certain oh-well-la-dee-da gait, everyone within three city blocks will know you’re from Des Moines. Or, as did one of my in-laws, if you wear a fanny pack, you’re from Des Moines. White tennis shoes – Des Moines. T-shirt tucked in – Des Moines. The result of this slow walking is that you will not ever get a seat on the subway nor will you contribute to a rapid moving bagel and coffee line at the Korean deli in the morning where the lady behind the register barks, “StepDahn! StepDahn!” People will despise you and will never buy…corn…or whatever you grow or produce in Des Moines.

But I digress.

I’m in LA, and I am quite out of my element. I mean, I am a pretty good driver, learned behind the wheel of my grandmother’s 1970 Mercedes (it was racier than it sounds) – which, by the way, had a stash of chocolate Carnation Instant Breakfast Bars in the trunk that my brother Jim and I used to sneak out and gobble. My mom taught me to drive, and she was a beautiful driver. My grandfather said so: “Your mother is a beautiful driver. She can glide up a hill and make you feel like you’re not going up. Knows just how to feather the accelerator.” True enough, she was great.

Not so Dad. I was in the vehicle once with him as driver, having just crossed over the Willis Avenue Bridge onto the Major Deegan Expressway, and I almost elected to jump out the backseat window into oncoming rush hour traffic in the South Bronx with drug dealers and Squeegee Men on every corner who didn’t like white boys from the time they cut teeth. Dad was awful.

He would have driven in this town, and they would have said, “Dude’s from Des Moines…”

Just one more bite, please...

2007-07-16T18:07:00.000-04:00

When I was last headed to McCarren Int’l Airport in Las Vegas, I saw Susan Sarandon in the morning at the US Airways Club and Larry King by the pool that afternoon. So far at Logan I haven’t seen a single celebrity. On my way to LAX through Vegas today. [Inserted post-script comment from Free First-Class Upgraded Seat 2C, Vegas to LA: Woman walks on with every bit of her pumped with collagen and silicon. Didn’t know earlobes went under the knife but apparently they're included in the $2999 Facial Extremities Package…]

Above all the work-related matters going on – among them some very positive developments including a working sabbatical this September and October, when I will study the issue of Christian giving – my favorite time this past week was going to Singing Beach with the boys and the lovely K. Thursday we loaded up and headed out in the Odyssey – what a great name for a minivan that is filled with little adventuresome boys – and arrived at the beach after the attendants had finished charging for parking, and when we could stay without getting ticketed by the town. I think the daily fee is up to $30 this summer, and that’s at area beaches of lesser desirability. In fact, you can’t even park at Singing Beach if you’re not a resident of Manchester. Town Nazis. (Karen once pointed me to an article that detailed how calling someone a “Nazi” basically ends an argument – as if nothing worse or more definitive can possibly be said. That is my intent in commenting on $30 parking fees at the beach…)

Of course, as soon as the automatic side doors started to slide open, the boys were out of their boosters and – barefooted and -chested – ran across the gravelly lot, through the bathhouse and onto the 50-yard wide sand crescent arching between huge beige boulders on the east and a black rocky point to the west, about ½ mile long. Low tide was in about an hour, so it was perfect sand castle and wading conditions.

After a time, I donned my wetsuit and did a 20-minute swim down the length of the beach and back, Karen losing sight of me at the opposite end and giving me a loving rebuke when I returned; she thought I had become fish food.

I took off my wetsuit and played in the surf with the boys. Carter stayed in the 63-degree water for about an hour. We were reluctant to leave at 7:15.

On the way out of Manchester, K picked up ice cream for the boys and herself at Captain Dusty’s and spooned me bites of Cookies and Cream as we drove home.

photo: diamondjoy

Celluloid night

2007-07-07T13:30:00.000-04:00

Singing Beach is so named, apparently, because when you walk barefoot on its white sand, it makes a squeak that is generously called “singing.”

When Karen and I moved to Massachusetts, we ended up in Manchester, the town that owns Singing Beach. Manchester was renamed “Manchester-by-the-Sea” in the mid-1990s by the town council in an effort to increase local tourism – but not too much, though…not too much – and ostensibly to separate it from its New England namesakes, Manchester, CT, and Manchester, NH. There are actually ten Manchesters in the United States (in addition to those in New England, they reside in Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, California, Illinois, Georgia, Kansas and Kentucky – I know that’s not in alpha order; it’s how Mapquest listed them. Give me a break, please.). So, you can see, not wanting to be lumped in with Manchester, Kentucky, where no doubt your cousin lives down the street or perhaps shares a conjugal bed with you, the town elected to come out from the others and be renamed. Manchester, CA, actually is on the sea, too, but…you snooze, you lose.

Manchester-by-the-Sea, which I still call Manchester just because I don’t want to sound snooty – I already have an Upper East Side pedigree to try to explain away – was the location for the David Mamet film “State and Main.” We had sightings of Alec Baldwin and Rebecca Pidgeon and Philip Seymour Hoffman (one of my favorite actors) in Crosby’s market. Then, there was the cattle call for extras, and some 800 townspeople showed up. I think Manchester-by-the-Sea’s population was only like 600.

On the big night of the filming of the “car crash” – where the buzz was that a car was going to come careening down Union Street and fly through the air and burst into flames – the folks started lining the streets in front of the police station and the Congregational church at about seven for a 10 o’clock shooting. I had friends Ryan and Aaron over from my seminary Greek class for a spaghetti dinner, and then we traipsed down the hill, about a half mile, to stand along with others and watch the spectacle.

I won’t tell you what exactly happened – or didn’t – when they shot the scene. All I’ll say is that they did it in two takes, and Hollywood must have some serious kicka#$ special effects studios.

photo: GroenGras

The butcher on Fire Island

2007-07-06T22:44:00.000-04:00

Dominick was the butcher out at the summer beach community where my parents had a house since the 70s. (Jim and I sold it in 2002 after their deaths, after we realized that $100,000+ of work probably wasn’t in our budgets.) This was back when it was okay to use that term for that profession – butcher – not deli worker, etc. You knew what a butcher did, and nobody was embarrassed by it, least of all the butcher himself.

He wore a tie and a white coat buttoned down the front that was stained with animal blood, and Dominick would give us slices of fresh bologna, the best bologna I have ever had since. Perhaps the taste was the taste of carefree summer more than the fact that it was made of…what is it made of anyway? I just did a Google search for this answer and came up with nothing satisfactory.

Not only did we dine liberally on mystery meat every time we went in the store – which, by the way, was pretty much the center of our activity away from the beach, as it was next to the Candy Store and constituted the “center” of the village – but during breaks from teaching sailing (it was a hard life), Dave, Dave, Jon and I would sit outside the store on the wood bench under an overhang and munch on boxes of Pop Tarts and Entenmann’s baked goods. (Like I said, a hard life.) The store taped on its plate glass window facing the walk twice a week – in advance of Wednesday and Sunday/Monday nights – posters of the coming movies. The Wednesday movies were geared mostly toward kids and moms, who were pretty much the only ones out at the beach during the week. The Sunday/Monday movies were targeted with dads in mind, many of whom stayed out Sunday night and took “the death boat” – meaning you felt like death warmed over at that hour of the day – Monday morning at 6:15, which delivered you across the Great South Bay in time to catch the early train from Bay Shore into the City with the rest of the Long Island commuters.

The movies that came to the community in those days were things like “Here Come the Fuzz” with Burt Reynolds and “Rabbit Test,” which was hands down the worst movie I have ever seen, even though it starred one of my favorite comedians, Billy Crystal. It was before people knew he was funny, though, and therefore I think he forgot to be funny. As you will recall, he never hosted the Oscars until the 90s.

The movies were shown in a large room with a vaulted ceiling, a space that also served for dances and wedding receptions, in a single-level building of about 4500 square feet, that was surrounded by clay tennis courts. The edifice dated back to the days of the Chautauqua Society in the 19th century. We would sit in blue and green directors chairs, with the canvas seats, and the big joke – not exactly original to us – was to lift off one side of the seatback and line up the flap carefully with the side post, giving it the appearance of being attached, and then waiting for your friend, or your friend’s mother, or the girl you had a crush on to whom you didn’t know how to express your emotions except to do adolescent tricks like this, waiting for them to sit back and – OH MY!! – have them be shocked to fall back on the person sitting behind them.

Everyone walked around in bare feet or rode bicycles. Toddlers and infants were pulled in wagons, and “mothers’ helpers” (a.k.a. au pairs, nannies) could be seen hauling a couple of towheads up to the beach, which was a fifty-yard wide stretch of pristine white sand facing south on the Atlantic ocean.

We ate Pop Tarts and mystery meat, and rode bicycles and watched Burt Reynolds movies and danced and played tennis and walked alongside mother’s helpers who became our friends and girlfriends, and we congregated in front of the store, me and the guys, and talked about…probably the surf or girls or the movie that sucked the night before. We didn’t talk about back home. The real world. School. Homework.

We all looked the same, and in fact once about a dozen of us went to a Rossington Collins (the band of survivors from the Lynyrd Skynyrd crash) concert down at the Palladium on 14th Street in Manhattan in late summer 1980, before the Palladium turned disco for the 80s. Afterwards, we went uptown to sit on the steps of the Met just to hang and talk. We all wore painters pants and concert t-shirts. We were tanned and thin and preppy. Someone walked by and said, “Oh, look, the cast of an Orange Crush commercial.”

photo: joseas

Dog breath, please

2007-07-04T00:11:00.000-04:00

She sat down next to me and smelled like sweaty buttcrack, cigarettes, and Juicy Fruit gum.

Unfortunately, the Enterprise shuttle bus returning to Orlando International Airport had at least a 15-minute trip to go as I had learned on the way over the day before.

I had gotten on the bus when there were but four 20-something Japanese guys who looked like they were from LA – I always lump into LA residency anybody who is difficult to categorize as to their origin. These guys were hip and looked like Beatles in the early years, and they were chatting about the Sheryl Crow song which was on the shuttle bus radio, which I happened to like, too, so we all got along in principle. For some reason, I didn’t think they lived in Japan because…they just seemed West Coast.

Then the family of six started to pack in. She had just finished throwing her cigarette butt down outside the bus, spitting the blue-grey cloud down toward her chest as only accomplished smokers do. The man, sweaty buttcrack wife, two sons about 12 and 14 and two daughters about 8 and 10 wearing red t-shirts that said, “Thing 1” and “Thing 2” got on and, seeing we’d be tight, I moved to the end of the row that ran along the right side of the bus. She sat next to me. And I smelled her.

Now, Dear Reader, I often cannot smell Karen’s wonderful perfume. I often miss roses and roasts and jasmine because my nose is not what it should be except in its liberal size and the assurance it brings to our home that I will indeed each night snore loudly. But my nose worked fine this afternoon. Really fine. I have sat next to many a homeless person on the New York City subway, even next to one who decided to rise up and take a leak on the train door next to me while we were traveling between stations. (That was a new one; haven’t seen that repeated.) My point is that I have smelled much that is rare. She was rarer. And what made it worse is that I couldn’t see why. Why did she smell like this? Certainly, she and her husband had just footed the bill to spend a week down at Disney, they lived somewhere in Suffolk County on Long Island (I discerned from accents and their conversation), which isn’t cheap, and yet she smelled like someone who couldn’t scrounge bus fare. Oh, summer Coppertone beach odeur, where are you? Oh, magnolia blossom breeze, where art thou? Oh, Pluto, breathe dog breath on me!

Then, I thought: Certainly it’s not me. Oh. Heaven forbid it! It…can’t…be…me!? She’s chewing the gum, and she smoked the cigarette, which would leave me with…sweaty buttcrack. Oh. Please. No.

No. It was indeed her. To be sure.

Perhaps my recollection of all this is because I am grouchy right now. I was supposed to be home tonight at 11:45 after landing at Logan at around 10:30. Orlando, I learned, has thunderstorms nearly every day in the summer and, as the gate agent tells me, “some days are worse than others.” Today it is worse. We are grounded for more than two hours because of lightning strikes. The tower has a meter and every time lightning strikes, it means another fifteen minutes’ worth of automatic shutdown of the ramps, so that no workers can load or unload baggage being that close to a large chunk of metal. Frankly, I don’t see why high voltage electrocution doesn’t come under workman’s comp.

We are sitting there in the terminal, and one mitigating feature of the delay is that I strike up a conversation with a guy named Tony, who ends up sitting next to me in First Class (free upgrade, folks…I didn’t pay for this. Those of you who do pay extra, please read my post on Why First Class Doesn’t Pay. Not sure if that’s what I called it, but it’s how I feel now.) Tony works for a European company that is the second largest manufacturer of avionics and plane fuselages and such, whose main competition is Boeing, and he supports all the IT folks around the country. He is pretty cool, easy to talk to, tells me about how the US government militarizes their planes and, because of this, all parts and even documents and emails cannot be passed from the European company to the American company it owns and then back again because of security concerns. Once the American company gets anything, it is owned by the military and cannot be transferred back to any non-U.S. entity. There is a software called Orchestria that actually stops users at the moment they start to type in any technical data and reminds them of international protocol.

Tony, perhaps 60, bald deep brown-skinned head, glasses, crooked front teeth, and doesn’t smell of anything but pleasant cologne, tells me how he is raising his two grandkids, a 12-year-old-boy and 8-year-old-girl, after their mother, his daughter, died four years ago because of kidney failure. She died while on a dialysis machine. I don’t know what happened to the father, and I don’t ask. But Tony takes his wife and the kids to Florida each year – they split a week between Disney and the beach – on the autotrain, which leaves from DC where he lives and takes 15 hours to get to its destination. They board a little after 3 in the afternoon, let the kids run around, have dinner at 7, the kids watch a movie at 8 before falling asleep at 10:30 or so, wake at 6, have breakfast just in time for arrival. No sweat. Sounds like the way to travel. He says they serve good food on the train, “quality food,” on china. We talk about anniversary trips, his trip to San Francisco, our recent trip to New York, his wanting to take his wife on the cruise from Seattle to Alaska, my wanting to take the lovely K to Tuscany.

Meanwhile, the thunder is pounding away like some tribal war beat threatening all commuters and Disney-weary vacationers. He and I grab a sandwich from the food court and make it back just in time to board. No more lightning.

We’re on the plane now, and he’ll be home tonight. Me, I made a reservation at the airport Marriott at Reagan International and will take an early morning flight back to Boston, getting in around 9:15.

“I’ll still be sleeping then,” he says with a smirk.

“Thanks,” I return.

We laugh.

photo: ubik2010

Pauly, where are you?

2007-07-03T07:40:00.001-04:00

My early morning foray into the thick Orlando air was at first quite unsuccessful.

I had planned on going to Dexter’s, which was the recommendation of “Michelle” at Marriott’s front desk, but upon calling last night I learned they were not open for breakfast.

Then I did a Google search for “best breakfast Orlando home cooking” and came up with Pauly’s Diner, on Nebraska off N. Mill Avenue just north of downtown. Driving there with the wipers on intermittent because I couldn’t make the AC get rid of the condensation on my windshield, I first passed Nebraska because there was no street sign and then, doubling back, found it on the left-hand corner, but with the feared “CLOSED” sign in the window. A light was on in back, toward the kitchen, and the Internet had said it opened at 5:30 a.m. for breakfast – it was about 6:05. But what did the world wide web know about Pauly’s personal schedule? Maybe Pauly was off surfing. Maybe he took the family to the lake. Maybe Pauly was a woman and was PMS-ing. Maybe Pauly was a transsexual and was having problems adjusting to the latest hormone injections. I really didn’t know, and it’s not that all those thoughts went through my head. But they could have. Because I was kind of mad. And the dreaded alternative was what I passed on the way over: IHOP.

Its name starting with the ubiquitous first-person vowel, which normally typifies everything cool these days, this restaurant typifies all that is wrong with American eating. The one redeeming quality is its waitresses. I think of a Lone Star song about a waitress saving up “two-bit tips” to send her boy to college. Sure enough, my tip - $2 off a bill of $10.24 – was barely over two bits. The waitress here calls me “honey” a lot, and that’s cool, because the only thing that could be worse than an IHOP meal would be an IHOP person. No, she is real and might have had a job previously at Pauly’s, back when Pauly was still a man and didn’t PMS because s/he didn’t have problems going on with hormone injections and she dealt with real people eating real food.

photo: jimrhoda

The albino and the cripple

2007-07-01T21:12:00.000-04:00

They make an ugly couple. As the world see them, that is.

He is albino and mostly blind, not allowed to drive a car or operate heavy machinery, I assume, but that is all right because he is gleefully content to be a custodial foreman. Every task done from moving chairs and tables in classrooms to making sure bathrooms are clean and light bulbs are replaced in offices is done with excellence and celerity. (Always loved that word; thought I’d apply it to him.) One of my administrator peers once asked – he thought rhetorically – “Why do we have a supervisor of cleanliness who is mostly blind?” I don’t know the answer to that; it doesn’t make sense to me either. No justifiable reason, besides the fact that everything was always clean, and light always brightened each room one walked into.

Tim is like that, too. He brightens the room and is never a dark soul.

His wife has muscular dystrophy, is in a wheelchair when she’s not in bed and has something going on with her face that has distorted the way she looks, like Picasso got a hold of some real flesh and started fiddling around before he realized it wasn’t a canvass.

Apparently, as Tim told me the other day, her disease is progressing fairly quickly. She has good days and bad days, but it never gets better. When I see her, she always smiles.

The near-blind albino and the cripple. Not a pretty sight. At least in the world’s eyes. But there is One who sees into them and smiles.

The light is on, and it is shining.

Rosacea girl

2007-06-30T16:29:00.000-04:00

White bread, wheat bread, Pringles because regular Lays tends to turn to “dust,” Karen says, a bottle of moderately priced cabernet sauvignon because if I go too cheap then she’ll think it is of lower quality, even though when I run into Scott a moment before he says he goes for this one Australian brand, two bottles for ten dollars, and it tastes quite good – “it’ll never fly” I tell him appreciatively – and my non-alcoholic beers we call “Haacke Beck betties” because Karen makes up names for everything to be whimsical and I love that about her. The girl, her badge says Siobhan, and she has jet black hair that is coming out of her ponytail and which falls around her ears, rings up each item robotically and then her voice tells me the total, “twenty-six oh two please.” I give her thirty dollars and she hands me change. “Could you double bag the beers, please?” She does, and the package comes down a little hard on the counter, her rosacea cheeks turning a little more red. “Thank you,” I say. “Thanks. Have a nice night,” she says, her voice ringing with fabricated mirth that would almost fool you over the phone but in person is out of joint, dissonant, at odds with her face, and belies a pain that is from more than just our being together at that counter for 45 seconds.

photo: dogmadic

All in the delivery

2007-06-28T06:26:00.000-04:00

“Put in something about church involvement, and take out that stuff about writing poetry.”

He looked up and handed me my resume, his thick, sleek blonde hair at 45 combed directly back over the top of his head, giving him an aerodynamic look of moving through time and responsibility very rapidly.

I had no church involvement, but this did not stop him from making the suggestion.

His office had a floor-to-ceiling glass door on it, and I had showed up wearing the grey flannel suit inherited from my dad after having the waist taken in. The trousers were wearing thin on the front. He was a family friend from our beach community, but he also surfed, so that made him kind of a personal friend. A compadre of the water. He made more money than I ever would.

Approximately two weeks later I was interviewing for a job at a global publisher, once again wearing the grey flannel suit. I 86’ed the poetry reference but did not put in any church work. I got the job and started as an editorial assistant, with primary responsibilities to log in authors’ manuscripts for professional journals – The Journal of Polymer Science was a biggie, although Head & Neck Surgery was a lot more fun to look at the pictures of. I worked with a guy named Mike Ferguson. Called himself MFergu for short. He was a jazz musician on the side; seems most of the production editors, in fact, were musicians or artists of some sort or another, on the side. There was a dancer, two screenwriters, a playwright, and a gay guy who seemed artsy even though I think he had no other employable talent besides publishing. They would not have balked about my having written poetry.

One day I was walking to work; our building was on 40th and Third. I was wearing a turtleneck. I bumped into a friend of my father’s, Uncle Stu, who worked for AIG and always wore blue suits, white shirts and a red or blue tie. Had a smell of cigarette tobacco on him most of the time. He looked me up and down and smiled, shook my hand, and we talked for a few minutes. Learning I was going to work, wearing a turtleneck, he quipped, “Oh! I thought you had joined the entertainment industry!”

I would get my morning coffee and bagel from the restaurant in the building lobby. A crusty lady manned the cashier and also took money from the delivery boys upon completion of their tasks. One morning I was in line to pay and a delivery came back to her unaccepted by the customer.

“He says the toast is too dark,” the delivery boy complained.

“Tell him next time before he orders,” she said without a smile, “to send down a swatch first.”

photo: brofosifo

At the end of the day

2007-06-25T06:58:00.000-04:00

Each boy required a two-pint container of his own, green recycled something-or-other cardboard, for strawberry picking.

We had planned to go Saturday, but the skies were threatening and it was a bit on the cool side. Sunday surprised me, with warmer than forecast temperatures and rich, blue skies. No forecast for rain, as originally thought. After church, our traditional pancake lunch, and rest time, we loaded up the Odyssey.

Karen bought herself and me an iced coffee from The Sweetest Thing in the Hamilton Shopping Plaza, even though her first preference was to drive down to Starbucks. That, I argued, would have taken us an additional twenty minutes out of the way, and given that Dunkin Donuts is closed while moving locations within the shopping plaza, Sweetest Thing was our best alternative.

The boys were happy. Of course, Dad forgot to sunscreen Teak as well as bring along “taggie” (his blanket) and “Stripey” (his tiger Webkins, which is all the rage among little kids). Thus, Dad heard a brief lecture from Mom on proper preparation for family outings – “You know taggie and stripey calm him down....” He had heard this lecture before. Many times. Each time, he failed to take class notes. He was destined to repeat the class for eternity, or so it seemed, like one of those dreams where you are always taking your Chemistry 101 final without having studied.

I took a long draw on my iced coffee and said, “OK. Let’s hit it.”

We drove the back way to I-95, through Bradley Palmer State Park, where the posted 25 MPH speed limit road winds and rises and dips, enough to make me want to skateboard it sometime, or at least imagine that at 44 I could still dust off the longboard and get out there to go downhill fast. As I drive and wind and do maybe a little over 35, I imagine doing it on a skateboard, with a camera fixed on my helmet or perhaps followed by a chase car with the passenger holding a camera out the window and taking a video of this beautiful road and then posting the video on this blog. And then I think, “Nah, too much video posted on websites, not enough copy.” This is a convenient ruse to cover up the fact that I am actually afraid of flying out of control on my board and eating it, leaving behind most of my elbow and knee skin. It is a delightful sensation nonetheless, feeling that I could skate it if I wanted to, and backed up by three boys who would probably consider me a hero for doing it.

Cider Hill Farm is in Amesbury, which charmingly has an old mill in its downtown, a number of shops and restaurants and a rotary that makes its other roads feel like loose spokes, giving it an Old World milieu. I recall coming here in 1999 looking for a place to live before we ended up in Manchester-by-the-Sea, and K does as well. The farm is about a mile outside of town, though, and as we pull off to the right onto the property, we see maybe ten people at most in the strawberry patch, stooping over and searching. This is a good sign, I tell myself, not really knowing, truth be told, whether ten bodies is a lot for the 100-yard long, 25-foot wide patch or whether it can withstand more capacity, especially three small bodies with my last name.

We have a pep talk in the car about manners, loudness, and internecine cooperation, and then head to the store to get details on picking.

Last night I made a strawberry-rhubarb pie, and K and I each had a slice with a scoop of Brigham’s vanilla ice cream on top. I had asked the boys to contribute four strawberries apiece to the pie so we’d have enough. Carter, usually compliant, willingly found four nice ones from his container. Bennett reluctantly offered two. Teak was busy downstairs in the playroom, so his strawberries were conscripted.

photo: anker1922

Casual Friday

2007-06-23T08:08:00.000-04:00

Carter and I went hunting for frogs. I hadn’t planned to, but we were having lunch in Patton Park, and it was “casual Friday” at work – where most people got out at 2:30 and the staff was at Staff Day visiting the Peabody-Essex Museum anyway, leaving the office barely occupied – so I thought I’d take a few extra minutes and seek amphibians with my first-born. K had packed Carter the ever-chosen PB&J along with some Pringles and a cookie, and she made me a turkey on wheat with a banana to go with. We had water bottles. The hour started with us eating at a picnic table and then Carter enjoying the playground for about ten minutes until boredom set in. Then we decided to be a little more venturesome. Patton Pond was inviting us, so we slowly circled it – about 2/10ths of a mile around – peering down into every little indent of shallow brown water for frogs or, more to the point, tadpoles which might just now be growing legs. Upon spotting one, Carter would bend down carefully and try to grab it. Occasionally, I would hold his hand as he would lean out over the water to try for one a few feet out from the edge. One time he got his hands on a 2-inch frog, the only one we saw, before it wriggled away. The rest of the time, his shadow or 8-year-old clumsy movements warned the adolescent creatures, and they swam away from the edge into muck and under lily pads.

We ended our time with my promise that we’d come back and hunt for more that afternoon, weather permitting, or Saturday morning at the latest.

photo: mhunter111

"Telling the truth"

2007-06-22T22:21:00.000-04:00

Yesterday in Pittsburgh International Airport I was steps away from one of my heroes. A true celebrity in my book. You’ll say “who?!” when I tell you her name.

Now, you need to know that I’ve been kissing distance from Sharon Stone, Tom Hanks, Muhammad Ali, Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates – and was really within kissing distance to Cates (please see Young for Your Age) – Donald Trump (multiple times), Bette Midler, Bill Gates, P-Diddy, Senators, Congressmen, Susan Sarandon, Larry King, Matt Lauer, Barry Manilow, Julia Roberts, Harrison Ford, Tony Randall, Andie McDowell (twice) and others. Cindy Crawford once stared at me from across the street while she was eating lunch at Isabella’s on 77th and Columbus. I am dropping all those names – and hopefully you were impressed – only to underscore the relative obscurity of Annie Lamott.

My writing hero.

Next to Victor Hugo, who is pretty much my all-time writing hero…or maybe Cervantes is…Annie Lamott stands out as the writer who has most influenced my writing and even led to my decision to publish a bunch of Lamottian-like essays in the form of Lullabye.

I was waiting for the plane back to Boston, and off the jetway came walking quite unnoticed to all the oblivious people around me…Annie Lamott. I was unsure at first, but then it was unmistakable. Shortish white woman with dirty blonde dreadlocks, crows feet around the eyes from a soul filled with laughter, baggy clothes. Knew it was her. And I was on the phone at the time with the Lovely K – who has neither dreadlocks nor crows feet yet has a soul filled with laughter – and I said, “Hold on a minute, honey, I think I see Annie Lamott.” She knows about Lamott, because she bought me a used copy of Bird by Bird last summer from Hastings in Kerrville, and reading it changed the way I write. "Good writing," she says, "is about telling the truth." All those movie stars were sort of cool to see up close for the curiosity factor, and it was kind of nifty to see the richest man in the world, but I was like shaking when I realized I had gotten that close to the writer who was so meaningful to me during the last eleven months. Still talking to K, I can’t think straight, and I get jittery.

I am star-struck.

So I kind of paused and ummed my way through the next few moments wondering aloud whether I should go after her, as she passed me by, and ask, “Are you Annie Lamott?” or, as I suggested to K, “Is your name Annie Lamott?” because if it wasn’t her, then the second question would make a whole lot more sense to a stranger and, after all, I don’t want to make a total a#$ of myself. (Of course, this is already a fait accompli on the other end of the line.) But as I was pondering and ruminating and umming and thinking way too much about it, Lamott disappeared down the corridor of B Concourse toward the people mover walkways and baggage claim. I told K, “Hey, let me hang up and go find her. I want to meet her.” So I shuffled off down the corridor, looking for her dreadlocks and baggy jeans and, finding none, I hovered around the outside of the ladies room about fifty feet from the gate, because the restroom is usually where I go first after deplaning, and I pretended to read my email on my PDA and study the departure board on the wall, very regularly peering up suspiciously at the doorway of the…ahem, ladies restroom. (TSA had probably trained their security cameras on me at that point.) But after a few minutes it was apparent that Annie Lamott had disappeared somewhere else or was doing business in there after which she would be in no mood to be accosted by a preppie, non-dread-ed Fan.

Dejected, I walked back to the gate, called back K, and while boarding some ten minutes later, I ask the agent, “Where did this plane come from?”

“San Francisco.” Where Lamott lives. So it was her.

I am kicking myself.

I look over toward the seats to my right and, I’ll be darned, there’s John Sununu slouching back in a blue suit and red striped tie loosened at the collar. I’m sure it’s him, and he looks tired and ready to get back to New England.

It’s a big letdown, seeing Sununu after Lamott. Because after all, it’s just John Sununu.

And how in the world did I get in a higher zone than Sununu?

photo: Mark Richards

Cousins

2007-06-20T19:05:00.000-04:00

We sold clams for $5 a dozen, probably a lot more pricey than they were worth, but lots of parents out on Fire Island at our exclusive beach community would buy them from us. It was still cheaper from us than from the market there and certainly lots cheaper than the restaurants.

Dave B., Jon, Alex and I; or Dave K. and I; or especially Dave B. and Jon using Dave’s family’s small plastic dinghy; would wade out in the Great South Bay anywhere from a foot to about 100 yards off the berm along the north side of the island at low tide. It was only up to our waists even though we were young and barely five feet tall. The main hazards were crabs, which would surprise more than hurt were you to dig one of them up instead of a clam with your pointed toes. Dave’s dinghy always gave him and Jon the edge in hauling major clams – they’d make $50 to $75 easy between them because they could get a lot more in one trip.

Then they’d take their buckets filled with clams, sand, and salt water, and put them on a wagon and drag it around the community, knocking on doors or stopping by decks, where bronzed women in white bikinis would answer with martini in hand. If no cash were readily available, we’d take credit, coming back around later to collect.

My dad loved these clams; they were littlenecks and cherrystones. He’d take the clam knife and shuck them expertly, cutting the muscle at the hinge and putting one half of the clam to his pursed lips, then would suck out the beige-grey mollusk as if he were kissing a baby. Then he’d tip back the shell into his mouth, just to make sure he’d gotten all the clam juice.

photo: dinosk

twang

2007-06-16T07:48:00.000-04:00

“Hot or mad?”

“Excuse me?” I replied. The boy behind the counter at Cozy Corner serving lunch couldn’t have been more than 10, maybe even 8 judging by his height. He had lighter skin than the man of 30 or so, who was a deep brown, also behind the counter, but they had the same jaw line and smile.

“Hot or mad?” Oh. I get it.

“Mild, please.” Last night’s chicken from Gus’s had ripped through me earlier in the morning, yet I was willing to have a little of the hair of the dog for my sliced pork sandwich, served with slaw already on it. The sign by the dining area said, “This section for self-service only,” and a computer print-out sheet over the arch leading to the section announced to all customers who were gearing for a fight, “The only one who’s right all the time is Jesus…” There was no AC, just ceiling fans circling lazily.

He punched in numbers to his register like he’d been doing it since sippy cups at age 4 and then processed my credit card – “debit or credit?” – this kid didn’t miss a beat. As the machine started to spew my receipt, the boy looked up at me and said, “You ready to write?”

“Sure.”

My receipt came out and he placed it on the counter in front of me. Then he plopped down a purple pen that was nine inches long and about an inch thick, and his face remained stoic, staring at me. I let out a belly laugh.

“Good thing my bill wasn’t as big as this pen!”

***

“You wanna snake with your meal?”

The lady behind the counter at Famiglia Pizza in the Memphis airport queried me as she rung up my cheese pizza and bottled water.

“Excuse me?” Seemed to be my favorite saying today.

“A snake.” She motioned over to the muffins, cookies, and fresh fruit to the right of the register. Oh. I get it. Snack.

“Sure. I’ll have a banana.”

***

"Where are you headed?" the flight attendant asked the couple across the aisle from me.

" 'Crowshay' Mountain." Spelled Crochet.

Pause.

"I grew up in New Hampshire," she said with a smile. "We call that 'crotchitt' mountain."

photo: berenika

People call him 'Pops'

2007-06-15T17:30:00.000-04:00

MEMPHIS, TN – Enterprise gave me a shiny black Chrysler 300, so as I drove from downtown on Poplar toward Brother Juniper’s for breakfast, I was tuned to 94.1, SNAP-FM, “the rhythm of Memphis,” instead of Thunder Country, which would have been the logical choice for me. “Reeber” had been singing earlier, and somehow it didn’t seem right this morning.

Woo

You might not ever get rich

But let me tell ya it's better that diggin' a ditch.

There ain't no tellin' who ya might meet...

A movie star or may be even an Indian Chief.

(Workin' at the) car wash.

Workin' at the car wash yeah!

Come on and sing it with me car wash.

Get with the feelin' y'all car wash yeah.

Last night I got together with a bunch of pastors, all ordained within the Presbyterian Church of America. It was a diverse bunch of guys in terms of race and geography and background, except for ages: all were under 44 years old. I am 44 years old. We talked of life at the school where I work, from which they all graduated, and we joked about how in the South it seems that if you want to be a counter-cultural Christian you get a tattoo or an earring, and how in the North just being a Christian is counter-cultural. We ate chicken from Gus’s down on South Front Street.

About half an hour before we all got together, I was picking up the food from this hole-in-the-wall joint, which happened to be the first franchise for the Bonner family, whose original Gus’s restaurant is in Mason, about 30 miles north of Memphis. Mason has a population of about a thousand, which includes the 600 or so inmates of the West Tennessee Detention Center.

Outside the restaurant a black man about 60 approached me.

“Can I wash your windows?”

“Do you need money for food?” I regurgitated, not really wanting to deal with interaction. I was on a mission for chicken.

“I need money to stay in the mission.”

“How much?”

“Six dollars.”

I looked at him. Was he telling the truth? Did I actually care if he was telling the truth?

“Yeah. I can do that. Let me get some change inside.”

“But let me wash your windows.”

“No, no, man, don’t worry about it. It’s a rental. It doesn't need it.” And it really didn’t need it. But apparently he did need to wash them, I assume, to justify getting the money. So I agreed.

I was inside for about five minutes getting the food, asking about their fried pickles and restaurant history, bantering with a big black woman behind the cash register and, then, saddled with two large plastic bags full of some of Memphis’s best chicken, slaw, beans, bread, moist towelettes, and set-ups for ten people, I went out and saw that the Chrysler was looking better than ever.

“Wow,” I said. “Looks great! They don’t deserve it!”

“I ran out of water,” he said, “and there’s a smudge on the driver’s side window.” He had paid close attention to his work. “And I was wrong, I actually need another two dollars.”

“What for?”

“I need to get a shower and clean up, and that’s extra.”

Pause. Consideration.

“Sure. I have two dollars I don’t need.” And, truth be told, I really didn’t need it. Not really. Not ever, in fact. I probably have one hundred, or one thousand dollars, or more, that I really don’t need.

I asked, “What’s your name?”

He said something unintelligible but then, “People call me ‘Pops’.” His face was deeply pocked marked and his gray beard barely covered the holes on his emaciated cheeks. “I moved to Memphis 30 years ago and have been homeless ever since.”

We talked for a few more minutes, about God and blessings and life and health and children and then more about God and blessings. He ended by exhorting me with a preacher’s fiery tone and conviction.

I got in the shiny Chrysler and drove to visit with the pastors.

Feeling it

2007-06-13T07:13:00.000-04:00

As a college sophomore, I still had not heard many people talk about God.

Sure, when I was a boy – 5 or 6 at most – Mom would take me to The Church of the Heavenly Rest for morning chapel services. This Episcopal church, where as an infant I was christened (which is a religious rite that is more about the martinis afterward than the vows during), is a gothic structure on 90th and Fifth Avenue, which arches imposingly over the Engineer’s Gate entrance to Central Park where on any given Sunday, its flock – albeit a scant group of sheep – would file into the sanctuary while joggers assembled across the street for a ten o’clock race sponsored by the New York Road Runners Club.

Mom and I would sit in the side chapel, and she would kneel and pray, while I would thumb through the Book of Common Prayer.

We never talked about God at home as far as I can remember, and talk of Jesus was even less common.

When I was 19 and trying to understand my place in the world and feeling somewhat “convicted” – to use a Christian-ese word to mean guilt that makes you feel good in the end once you’ve resolved it – about my carnal relationship with Carla, my college girlfriend, and after I had had an encounter with Artie, another student, a senior, who was part of a campus ministry that was rumored among us heathen to require its members to give 25% of their income to it, which sounded awfully cultish to me, but an encounter in which he and I spoke for what seemed like three hours out on the courtyard in front of the dining room at the north side of campus, in the middle of this period in the spring before my 20th birthday, somewhere in the fog I went to a student-sponsored church service in the Student Union.

There was a sea of black faces. Maybe sixty to seventy of them. I was perhaps one of five whites. And at one point there was music and swaying and praying and people were getting up and one black girl got up and walked over to the corner of the room and started shouting, “HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH!” and was jackknifing her body into right angles up and down like she was dry heaving while she was shouting. And I knew that this was not ordinary. Nor even something I necessarily wanted to participate in. But I was fascinated. And transfixed.

And then the preacher spoke for probably 45 minutes on Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” At the end of his sermon, he asked everyone seated to bow and close their eyes. And he asked if anyone wanted what he had talked about. And I did. And he asked those of us who wanted what he had described to raise our hands. And I did.

We who were hand raisers, maybe six of us, were led into a small room and those who were sponsoring the service prayed for us and then with us. And they said that we were “saved” and that things would be different.

I didn’t feel it.

But things were different, as I would learn in the coming weeks.

photo: anissat

Echo

2007-06-12T07:55:00.000-04:00

My brother Jim and I would collect bits of iron that were 2 inches square and soldered off on one end from the construction site around the corner that would become Hunter College High School.

The school was added on, in roughly the same architecture, including machicolations, as the 19th century armory remains that stood to the west of the block at 95th Street between Park and Madison. The armory was basically gone, and all that remained was a craggly shell facing west, across Fifth Avenue and Central Park, as if expecting a band of marauding Jews or artists from the Upper West Side to attack the societally entrenched WASPs on the Upper East Side.

photo: mzacha

Summertime #1

2007-06-11T18:45:00.000-04:00

In the putrefying air

where the subway runs on hot tracks and
hotter platforms in the summertime,
on the number 6 uptown train
during afternoon rush hour
I at 16 am slammed against a black girl in her early twenties
very attractive
and thin
and with my friend Roger
we are hurtling toward the
House that Ruth Built
and so is everyone else—racing
toward home, that is—
and the sweat slides off her onto me onto Roger
onto whoever is next to us
there is so much sweat
and yet
we are smiling
and

looking at each other.

This black girl and I,

in 1979.

The Yankees won that game,
but that and her
are all I remember.

Concerning the Unoccupied At

2007-06-11T06:02:00.000-04:00

The following message [not italicized] appeared in my Junk Mail this morning. My attempt to understand it is in blue italics. It is vitally important to the future of our galaxy. Please help me decipher it.

Chen said, Barr did was being sent to get the remains for the faintest need a certain subjects.

I thought he wanted his remains cremated. How will his family take the news?

Sutt Gorov indulgently. Prepare his ruler's ear: gently but why take care for him in favor of Imperial assassination of their holy of the tweaties we've got it works the Empire has been warned that and from the reflection of power and reached for thirty years through at the Foundation at each former Four Kingdoms the vast that one in a vote.

This talk of assassination, and multiple Kingdoms, disturbs me. Apparently, he didn’t have his tweaties this morning.

He had been one then with a different ways (of further at a cigarette; and when I know and as he attack: on public were rank and more serious one you think we had been crowded sun of the Anacreonian press and what we ahn't the council seat). The tech man's lips; closed: a sudden faint becoming more ships of congratulations, perhaps retained a missionary, were a general background.

Ah. The Anacreonians. I suspected them all along.

Obviously your status as he knew well. You must be to get along the future. What can increase the stage. And now the Protector in a the sub field little weazened soul is that I do You (one more than for the law henceforth). The fact, that struggled to the torches had exulted. Yes! That the trial you were maneuvered the Foundation, where they didn't had nothing but Yes, said, Mallow nodded to leave. He amended, no! Yes.

Obviously a lover of Thomas Carlyle and also a student of the seminal work on sales, “Getting to Yes.”

Why me like a to be and if I have it for Seldon's recording to test, that fly through without my office, is impossible. Well, then stopped the buckles remain in a good old Board is nonsense. I don't may be spared to the interesting bahbawous Planet—

“bahbawous” – this is my new favorite word...oh, but what shall I make it mean...

--and flicked open to single share of Trantor no other factors. He wondered not the beginning of that Lord Dorwin to explain there was in the Galaxy, was the time longer: have you can escape death. As they asked darkly. And Lieutenant of more than that Hardin had had. On the Nyakbird; usage murmured your treasonable statements, concerning and it, turned and anti Mallow, smiled very rim of magical sorcery, and the population, was to pieces by placing his untimely death. When our path, such as you have lost his own: glass which he did he says. It got the now executed but why, not Sutt, did: not simply and stared him leave.

Sutt again?! I thought the Anacreonians had finished him off for good.

SELDON, and saddle and since but that fact, that much, absolute and her house, in my rights: for the center of the Galactic men, ignorant of the moah technical details concerning the unoccupied at? I didn't really, said wearily as to the general blazing light of earshot, he hadn't looked up on that you are wrong. He knew I move, Mr. The development. Get it narrowed: if any Prefect of nothing; of the; policy has been particularly anxious to read the succeeding Dark: ages. Said, thickly, we would be a politician of the place through the sleeve. Aporat interrupted then joined only accusations; sterile profits with commercial Empire: will be to has the rest of your highness.

To be continued...isn’t it obvious?

photo: lemon drop

Break

2007-06-09T20:29:00.000-04:00

I had been in the same room – a 500-square-foot church fellowship hall somewhere on the outskirts of Minneapolis – Minneapolis, which in 1987 was so hip that the restaurant we went to as a group the night before did not have waiters or waitresses but “waitrons” – for the past 36 hours. We had slept in this room, discussed our agenda in this room, ate some meals in this room, and I was in the middle of experiencing my first chemically imbalanced episode.

It had started in the bathroom at work about five days earlier.

Employed at a globally recognized publishing company as the corporate communications administrator – that is, the producer of the corporate “organ,” its internal newsletter – I was pursuing another internal position as a writer for the Benefits Department. Why I was gunning for this position was beyond me. It was producing manuals instead of racy management pieces on corporate restructuring and downsizing. Maybe it was the salary increase from $32,000 to $36,000. I liked the prospective boss OK enough; he had suffered from depression for years and was in therapy and said so, and for some reason, as someone having never stepped foot in a therapist’s office, I figured this was kind of cool. That he was that open about it. And it spoke to me. My current boss knew that I was in the final stages of seeking this new position.

I sensed one morning that the offer was imminent, and I happened to go to the bathroom.

I have learned since then that trips to the bathroom can be attended by thoughts either useless or profound. Very few in between.

That morning I went into the stall and had a breakthrough thought: I would quit my current job, turn down the impending offer, and go freelance (desktop publishing). Yes! A splendid idea! It made all the sense in the world. It seemed Solomonic. (Rhymes with moronic.)

So I walk into my boss’s office and, more emotionally than I had planned for, told her I was quitting and going freelance. My eyes misted. Her eyebrows kind of rose up. I gave six weeks notice.

Then I trotted down a floor to Human Resources, where Benefits was housed and told my prospective boss that I was quitting and going freelance. Mmmmm, was his attitude.

“Do you have many clients?” he asked.

Deafening pause on my part.

Clients.

Yes, well, I’ll get some, I thought. Can’t remember what my response was. That’s when panic first reared its serpent head.

Of course, it set in all the more when I took the afternoon off, hopped on the subway from Manhattan to Queens to surprise my live-in girlfriend, Kat, at work for a late lunch and to give her the news.

“You what?!!”

She could not capture the vision.

Needless to say, things at home that night were not so romantic or so chatty as I had imagined. I started to sink into a deep crevasse of thought.

What had I done?! Ay yay yay yay yay…

The next day and night were the first full-force depression I had experienced. I was…catatonic is a good word. I am not sure I did much but sit in a chair and meditate about what I had done. I did, in fact, have one or two clients for whom I had done minor jobs, $25 for a resume here, $50 for a brochure there. Our rent for this two bedroom apartment was about $1200 a month. There had been a boarder in the spare bedroom before I moved in and Kat decided soon after this episode that we needed another one to help pay our costs. But for now it was my office.

A client came over that second night and Kat had to coach me on basic human functioning. “OK, now, when she comes in, just bring her over to your computer and sit down with her and go over her resume on the screen, make her changes, etc….” She worked three jobs: sign language interpreter, news reader on a radio station for the deaf, and something else. I just remember her doing three “gigs” as she called them. She was also an actress – she looked like a young Meryl Streep – but she had got only so far as acting class downtown with Lee Strasberg. She had yet to be a paid actor, but she performed her love scenes with her acting partner convincingly several weeks later, I learned late one night when she came home to her still depressed boyfriend who yet could smell man on her skin. She later decided to live as a lesbian, which she had been prior to me, too, but not without taking a detour of several boyfriends.

Three nights after my first break with sanity, which took place in the 5th floor men’s room at 605 Third Avenue, I went on a weekend planning retreat with the national Unitarian young adult network group. It was called the “continental” Unitarian such and such in order to appease the Canadian in the group. I had been asked to sit on this steering committee because I had done a successful newsletter for my church at the time, All Souls, and was asked to be the national newsletter writer. I think the guy who had been doing it had done a very decent job until now but didn’t want the hassle anymore. He spelled his first and last name all in lower case letters, which might have been because he had Native American blood in him and he saw this as an anti-colonial act of rebellion, or maybe it was an anti-authoritarian Unitarian statement. I wasn’t sure, and this inability on my part to understand the nuances of Unitarian outlook may have contributed to why I eventually left the Unitarian church to become a Jesus freak in evangelical Christianity, a much simpler and more clear-cut (doctrinally speaking) way of life. Like going from a babaghanoush worldview to grilled swordfish. In a sense.

So I get to Minneapolis and we kind of tool around the Walker Art Center’s outdoor sculpture garden, which was quite cool, and then we congregate in this church’s common room for Friday night through Sunday, talking about policies and decisions and whatever else we talked about, because I simply don’t remember much past the waitrons at the local restaurant and the fact that I dwelled on my act in the 5th floor men’s room as having cosmically negative significance. Just couldn’t get it out of my mind. I think I spoke probably three sentences in the span of 24 hours, and this was in the midst of a working group of about 14 people. Think it was conspicuous?

At some point Saturday night, I call Kat, and she says something about “chemical imbalance.” This is the first time I had heard that phrase. I was 25 years old. And it struck a chord.

“You know,” she said, “if that seems to resonate with you, then you should look into it.”

Dear Reader, there was a big difference in that statement between what a person in a committed relationship would say versus what she said. What she said was helpful, no doubt; it may have set me on the course to eventually get well eight years later, once I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on meds. But she used the second person pronoun to describe whose responsibility it was. She had checked out, but I didn’t know it at the time.

I slept soundly that night.

And though because of her chemically imbalanced roommate she was basically “on the market” now for all the guys, including some erstwhile friends of mine at church, those two words from her mouth set me on a better path.

photo: dimshik

Young for your age

2007-06-08T20:29:00.000-04:00

Phoebe Cates was somewhat of a dangerous dish in middle school.

Lest you think me some kind of Internet creep, let me hasten to add that this post is a follow up to last one, where I ended by dropping her name in a sentence about playing spin the bottle with her and her classmates when I was 14.

This is true.

We are the same age and, yes, she must admit if asked to being 44. She was in eighth grade when I was in eighth grade, and so I guess she could be 43…or she could be 45. Which makes husband Kevin Kline about 92.

Seems that in the late-70s when I was in the eighth of my twelve years at Trinity School, a private school on the Upper West Side that was established in 1709 by Anglicans seeking to further education among the brutish Manhattanites of the pre-Enlightenment New World, parents started realizing that young boys and girls were spending way too much time on the city streets drinking, smoking, and sniffing ammel nitrate, also called locker room or locker ‘roma. My friend Edgar had a stash of this insidious liquid in a brown bottle and used to partake of it like it was modern day snuff. Google this crud and you come up with but two entries whose links I did not follow but whose text summaries sounded so pathetic it will give you an idea of what kind of kid Edgar was and what kind of kid I was hanging out with him and what parents were trying to protect Phoebe and her Hewitt School Future Debutante Friends from on the rough streets of the Upper East Side of New York, otherwise known as the Silk Stocking District of Congress. Edgar also took an early prototype CD his father procured and said, “Check it out, they’re indestructible,” and – flinging it like a Frisbee hard against his apartment wall – he and I watched it shatter. He got kicked out of Trinity on the last day of school that year for smoking opium in the stairwell. Last day of school.

Independent school parents, among them mostly Republicans I’m sure for reasons that will be apparent in a moment, decided that it would be great if there were a cool “club” that kids in 8th and 9th grade could go to on Friday and Saturday nights. They called it “Bandwagon,” and we met in the New York City Republican headquarters offices on East 84th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. Bandwagon was created to both manage and put distance between the Edgars of New York City and their children. The building was a brownstone that had only a small placard on the façade telling pedestrians what it was, and on weekend nights some 200 kids would pile in for ping pong, music and dancing, drama, and – in upper floor rooms where there was probably a lot of strategizing during the week about how to ensure that Congressional delegates kept the pork coming to New York – there was spin the bottle.

Phoebe Cates had been in Teen magazine and young miss underwear advertising, which I had not known previously. At 14, she was simply dark brunette and gorgeous. It sickens me that at age 60 already, Kevin Kline had his eye on her as his eventual bride. (This is a joke; I wish not to be sued for it. He was only 40-something at the time anyway.) She went to Hewitt, which was a second-tier independent girls school to the more sought after Spence, Brearley, Chapin, and Nightingale. (This is an accurate assessment of Hewitt during the 70s; if you sue me, I’ll have Kevin Kline’s great grandson come over and break your arms.) It really doesn’t matter if she was an excellent student, which I’m sure she was, because she was beautiful and went on to star in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” which was nominated for an Oscar…oh, wait, I must be thinking of "Gone With the Wind," which starred Kevin Kline, not Phoebe Cates. (In actuality, he will turn 60 on October 24 of this year, but of course that’s not counting the 30 years of being cryogenically frozen after winning the Oscar for "Gone With the Wind.")

One Friday, the boys from Trinity got with the girls from Hewitt and played spin the bottle. This was approximately one hour before we all went outside and the 84th Street gang, thus called because they habited and menaced 84th Street in particular, came around and sent all the Bandwagon kids scattering because their ring leader was reputed to pack heat, and yet my friend Joe Murdoch knew the gang leader personally and I happened to be standing next to Joe at that moment and got a formal introduction to the leader involving a handshake and getting on a first-name basis with him.

But blissfully unaware of what was to come, about ten of us gathered upstairs in the Pork Room and played spin the bottle with a flashlight or pencil or something in place of a bottle. My friend Ricky Schwartz spun on Phoebe, and I suppose all the boys were waiting with bated breath until the game broke up to ask “how was it?!” I spun on a girl named Jane, plain as her name, but who bestowed upon me only the second kiss of my life. I remember with equal vividness that kiss and standing next to the revolver-packing gang leader.

Years later, in about 1987 to be exact, Phoebe and Kevin strolled through the Fellowship Hall of the church I was going to, All Souls Unitarian Church on Lexington and 80th, after the Sunday morning service.

She did not recognize me. And Kevin recognized no one so far as I could tell.

photo: danzo08

The Real Shanghai

2007-06-08T00:01:00.001-04:00

Well-written piece by Howard French in the New York Times travel section for Sunday about the "real" Shanghai. It is written as a slice of life essay, my favorite as you know.

photo: French/NYT

Movie Hero

2007-06-08T00:01:00.000-04:00

I remember my first kiss. I was five.

Yes, five. My brother Jim was there, and he can attest. That is, if he remembers my first kiss. It wasn’t, after all, his first kiss. He was three. And probably pooping in his training pants.

We were out at Point O’ Woods, a very WASPy, very exclusive beach community on Fire Island that my parents first rented at and then, when I was about 12, bought a house at that Jim and I sold only after our second parent passed away, in 2002. No cars except for utility vehicles were allowed – much to the chagrin of Robert Moses in the 30s who almost ended that – so it was safe to let loose little ones and animals.

As I said, I was five and was playing at the eastern end of the community, toward the long stretch of open sand and dunes that led past Lonelyville, where if you walk down a double-track car path you’ll eventually get to where the chickens and junk yard dogs roam free and first you hear the chickens clucking and then you start fearing the rumors of nasty German Shepherds and other canines that will eat you alive if the Resident of Lonelyville doesn’t get you first with his shotgun, and after that you come to Sunken Forest, which is pretty cool but to which I never took the Lovely K because I was lazy and she never lets me forget it, and finally you arrive at Cherry Grove, the gay hangout, which actually has some of the best restaurants around but to which a group of us teenagers once went for novelty’s sake and when I opened a fashion magazine in a store it showed a picture of a man in a business suit with his trouser fly open and him…basically flapping in the breeze, which I thought quite bizarre and not exactly up to journalistic standards…and then we all saw a topless woman running happily screaming down the path with a mixed drink in her hand chased by a very effeminate man who was enjoying himself just as much but had no end purpose to the chase.

It was at this eastern end, where there were only four more houses in our community, and I was playing with Ann K., and Jim was there for some God-only-knows reason – probably Mom told me to take him along. Ann and I were playing movie heroes and heroines – probably my idea, because I had a sense that kissing was involved in all movies and dammit I wanted a kiss.

I let Ann be the heroine and “fall” off a 3-foot high sand dune onto the soft ground, and I scooped her up and kissed her. Jim looked away. “The horror…!”

The kiss felt soft. And hot. And because it was hot, it was kind of gross. I thought that icicles would form, that it would be like a cool breeze. I had no idea that 98.6 degrees plus 98.6 degrees plus hormones plus summer sunshine equal heat.

It was not what I pictured, nor what I really cared for, until my second kiss in 8th grade nine years later, when I played spin the bottle one Friday night with girls from the Hewitt School, including one Phoebe Cates of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” fame. (That’s for another post.)

(Spoiler: I didn’t get to kiss her, but my classmate Rick did. He said it was hot.)

photo: alanford01

...random...

2007-06-07T17:11:00.000-04:00

Bling.

There’s just so much that’s evocative about that word.

I think of a gold-nugget looking “ring” that covers all four knuckles on left hand which is…may I say it in polite company?...covered in rich, brown skin.

Why is it that “bling” just doesn’t go with WASPy skin?

I think the word itself is too hip to go with WASP. WASP is decidedly un-hip. WASP gave us “beach music” (see HERE), which really is Motown for vanilla eaters; WASP gave us Cardigan sweaters wrapped around the neck; WASP gave us lime green anything on our bodies; WASP gave us singing and talking in 4/4 time…

It’s not that I’m against WASP, being one myself, it’s that bling is new and edge and WASP is old and crust. Which is like edge gone moldy.

This post is weird. I wrote it because Poetry Thursday had as its random prompt the word “bling,” and that was just too good to pass up. Read on below if this one stinks.

Express elevator

2007-06-07T07:31:00.000-04:00

The umbilical cord is much thinner than I had expected. It was kind of tough, too, like cutting through a piece of asparagus with scissors, not at all mushy.

These thoughts went through my mind as they let me snip the ¼-inch purplish-white cord that tethered Carter, my first-born, to Karen as she lay mercifully out of pain and smiling in Roosevelt Hospital on West 59th Street.

They placed him on Karen’s stomach for her to look at while I cut the cord, and then they checked him out, swaddled Carter to keep him warm, and handed him to me.

Handed him to me.

I looked into the face of my ancestry, an ancestry I had never known since I was adopted as an infant. I looked forward and backward in time. Carter stared up at me and started to make the suckling action with his lips. He was awake and alert. This quality of his has not changed in over eight years.

The day before we had been doing circles around our apartment building on 76th Street off Central Park West. K had been dilated about three centimeters and she was having regular contractions, but nothing significant enough to warrant The Trip to The Hospital. So we walked down CPW and around 75th Street, then up Columbus to our street and back around. She had borrowed from a mom friend, the wife of our associate pastor, a gray flannel dress that was very fashionable, because pregnancy or extreme disability are poor excuses for bad couture in New York City. It was a comfortable morning outside, probably in the upper 50s or lower 60s, unseasonably warm for mid-March in New York City.

About the third lap – punctuated by her stopping regularly to have contractions and lose her breath – she paused just off CPW on 75th Street, the south side, in front of a white stone building which had planters in front guarded by wrought iron fence about 2-feet high.

“My water broke.”

The Trip was about to begin.

I raced to the corner, raced but not without her alongside, but walked carefully with her because of her delicate state but raced well not really ran no kind of walked briskly yes briskly is a good word because that describes walking with intentionality like you have something to get to that you need to make sure and do but you don’t want to really RACE because that would be close to panic and now is not a time for panic but quiet intentional walking with intentionality and briskness and purpose toward a joyful event that so many people have gone through without losing their brains no not even after their wives’ water broke and yes they do this even in New York City.

We walked to the corner and I started to hail a cab, but I had K step back some 15 feet out of the immediate view of cabbies, for they are known to sometimes by-pass very pregnant women for fear of having babies delivered in the backseat. Cabbie scum.

One stopped – Cabbie Angel – and I motioned for K to come, and we got in and I told him THE HOSPITAL and please avoid potholes.

Once there – did I ever pay the driver? Oh, yes, I must have – we went to the 12th floor. Good thing this was not a Saturday because we might have ended up on the elevator that stops on every floor automatically for the benefit of our orthodox Jewish friends so they don’t have to push buttons (and therefore they don’t have to operate machinery; if this is a new concept to you, please read the Bible and the Talmud in their entirety and write me a five-page book report on keeping the Sabbath and what it means in your life).

We got her admitted, which was a quicker activity that day than brushing my teeth running out the door to a meeting, and I immediately loved with a love bigger than all of Manhattan these doctors and nurses. They were saints, Loved Ones, Beknighted ones, my Best Friends…they could do no wrong.

Life changed at 9:11 p.m. on March 18, 1999. Just another minute marker in history.

So much can happen in the span of sixty seconds.

photo: al-ex

In custody

2007-06-03T13:22:00.000-04:00

A man at the church I went to in Atlanta, let’s call him Charlie, had a nearly bald head and a bushy auburn pirate’s beard only a little trimmed so he looked more like a biker than anything else. His head had been totally shaved when he was in the pen, where he was for I don’t know how long, and this is how he looked when I met him at church at first. He sported a Japanese or Chinese pictograph tattoo on the right back side of his neck and multiple works of body art along each arm. He smoked clove cigarettes, and his breath reeked. But his eyes were clear blue, like they saw into you, and when he shook your hand, he grabbed it with both of his, and he looked right at you, and bent his face in toward you, so you’d smell his breath, and he’d say in his discomforting and difficult to understand voice that was borne of being deaf and having a half-rate hearing aid in his right ear and not really hearing his voice as it came out, “How you doin’?” He had three kids who were being battled over in court with their mother: a girl, 8; another girl, 5; and a boy, 3. He would bring them to church now and then, to the “family friendly” service at 9:00 a.m., and the kids were just out of control. The little boy would wander around and talk and fidget with other people’s arms in the pew behind them and just…just…out of control. Undisciplined. Unparented.

One Sunday after worship, we were sitting in the chapel to the side of the sanctuary hearing from a group the church supported financially that helps young mothers and also helps people with adoption. Charlie spoke up and said that he had recently gotten full custody of the kids, that he was trying to learn how to parent them, that it had been rough, that he knew he had a “higher power/Being” he was trying to follow, who had made his life so much better, but right now it was just tough, and what kind of help was out there for a guy like him, a single dad, trying to raise his three kids? His voice broke a couple times while he was talking.

I watched him and marveled. A man who spent time in prison, the kind of man who looked as though he’d be as comfortable holding a sawed-off shotgun in your face then as he would a hymnal on Sunday morning now, sitting in a chapel pew asking for help raising his kids. Trying to make a go of it. Trying to be a part of something larger than himself. Trying to give his kids a good life, not one necessarily of prosperity, but one of love and direction, of a father loving his children the way he knew they should be loved.

He didn’t know this way, but he was committed to learning it and doing it.

For his kids’ sake.

photo: johnpring

Better than a dump truck

2007-06-01T16:50:00.000-04:00

Bill sat across from me at a cafeteria table in the school where I work. He fiddled with the rim of his paper cup of coffee: black, piping hot, steam circling the fingers on his right hand. We meet about every three weeks or so for java and conversation. He is about twenty years my senior, and I often look to him for sage counsel. Occasionally, I get to tease him, as I did the other day.

“You know what gets me,” he said with a self-mocking laugh, “is that it says in the book of Revelation that heaven is like a city. That gets me every time.” He laughed again, looking down into his cup.

Born and raised in Montana, Bill was an auto parts manufacturer and had a successful business before retiring and moving east to work in full-time ministry. He had spent his childhoods hunting and fishing with his buddies, including Native American friends with names like Tommy Whitefoot and Joe Swiftdeer, and he returns each summer for vacation with his wife and again each autumn to hunt elk and fish for steelhead. He said he couldn’t reconcile his intimacy with and knowledge of God’s natural creation with the account in the Bible of the “new Jerusalem” being like a city.

“And,” I added, not making him any less uncomfortable, “not a very interesting city at that: it’s '12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long…” I did this to rib him. He laughed once more, realizing the humor in speculating about it.

Our upbringings couldn’t have been more different: his in a Christian home out in the open, mine in a secular household where we didn’t speak the name of God except in anger, in arguably the most exciting city in the world.

At times when I worry whether something will be in heaven or not – when I was a new follower of Jesus I always worried whether God had included surfable waves on the other side of eternity – I always remember the story the Lovely K said she heard once from a pastor.

The pastor spoke of a man who was fielding his 5-year-old son’s questions about getting married.

“Dad?” the boy asked.

“Yes, son.”

“On my honeymoon, will I get to take my toys?”

“Son, you’re not going to want to take your toys.”

“Not even my dump truck?”

“Not even your dump truck. There’ll be something much better waiting for you.”

“What’s that, Daddy?”

Friends, that’s the surprise.

photo: shlomaster

Just this once...

2007-06-01T16:46:00.000-04:00

Blogging about blogging seems a bit like manifesting Gertrude Stein's "there's no there there," but I've been "tagged," so I will do it this once, then repent, then get back to writing stuff that hopefully has some "there" in it.

My Blogger Friend Lillie Ammann, who has been a great encouragement to me these past few weeks while Lullabye was coming out on Amazon, gave me and four other blogs the "Thinking Blogger Award." It looks like this:

I'm told that there are several rules to participating in this "meme."

1. I am supposed to cite the post that she gave me this award for, which you can read here.

2. I am supposed to refer you back to the original post of the person who created the award, which is here.

3. And then I am supposed to cite five blogs that make me think. Here goes: besides Lillie's, which is already noted when she got the award...I get to thinking when I read Ninja Poodles, whose humor is revitalizing; my friend Dave's Mongolia Chronicles always evidences a grateful look at the world around him but I know without a doubt that he will not continue this chain of tagging because he hates stuff like this; fellow bipolar blogger Susan Bernard has some great recent posts about the benefits of slight hypomania and also some Quaker meanderings; the MoleskineCity Detour sites, especially the New York City one, really get my creative juices flowing; and my friends over at Brewing Culture also give me a steady stream of thought to interact with.

To these fellow writers and creators, my Red Sox cap is off.

Chick thing

2007-05-31T00:01:00.000-04:00

I can pretty well judge my mood – along a bipolar disorder scale of deeply depressed on one end and manic-and-will-soon-be-conquerer-of-the-world-or-at-least-president-by-acclamation on the other end – by how much I look forward to going to the barber.

It’s not that when I’m depressed I don’t want to get my hair cut or when I am manic that I’m likely to come back with my head shaved…though in October 1994 I did exactly that, for I felt I was about to go out and get drunk after being sober for a month and I didn’t want to blow my clean living. It wasn’t totally shaved, but within an eighth of an inch. That’s the only time I’ve had my hair like that; made my morning oblations a cinch. It cost $8, and I figured it was a dramatic result for very little money.

So it’s not about the hair.

It’s how much I anticipate enjoying or dreading forced conversation for 15 minutes – 16 minutes if you count payment and tip. It’s sitting in a chair next to someone I barely know – because I go to a place where I pretty much get a different person each time from among four barbers, so there’s little relationship building – and trying to make conversation. Writing in this blog, I can often go on a riff and have a ball, going this way and that way and taking it on a tangent and heading down the rosy path. But I can always come back and edit, and I do. I can always pause on a word for a minute or so. To do that in conversation is to do violence to Firmly-Held Barbershop Social Folkways.

I recall early in knowing the Lovely K, overhearing her calling a girlfriend and starting the conversation, “Hey, [Insert Name], what’s going on?”

Afterwards, I asked her, “Why do you start your conversations like that?”

“Cuz you just never know.” Stupid question, simple answer.

A week later, I decide to test whether this is peculiar to K or whether it’s a broader chick thing. I ask her close friend Tonya the same question.

She says, “Because you just never know.”

Must be a chick thing. Conversations take on a life of their own.

My father never really liked the phone that much, neither did my grandfather. I knew when my dad was finished talking when he’d say, “You’re good to call.” That was a kind way of saying, Done talking, friend.

My mom must have talked on the phone quite a bit because – tethered to the wall in pre-cordless days – she had a marble-top and gilt leg telephone table in the hall with a eight-inch diameter Chinese ceramic bowl that she used as an ashtray. It never got filled, but just the concept of a receptacle that could hold about eleven packs worth of Virginia Slim butts must have put her mind at ease for those…longer conversations with the friend one building over whom she hadn’t seen since going to the 96th Street playground in Central Park that morning.

“You just never know.”

photo: andrewmill

Nebohý

2007-05-30T07:33:00.000-04:00

Carter has asked that I re-write “Jack and the Beanstalk” to read to his second grade class on Authors’ Day. I am stuck.

I am actually thinking of a re-write for adults and another for 8-year-olds. I want to recast Jack as a somewhat nebbish Woody Allen-esque character, you know, still lives with his mother, never gets anything right, gets swindled out of his cows, knows how to sweet talk the giant’s wife. (In case you wondered, the word nebbish comes from the Yiddish nebekh, meaning poor, unfortunate, and before that from the Czech nebohý. I love words, and I have always thought of Jack as nebbish, even though I didn’t have the word for him.)

So here’s where you come in.

What kinds of new plot twists or characters could we derive to make the story fun for second graders? Or for adults?

Add your ideas to the Comments section or email me at “lullabyemail (at) gmail dot com.”

My Black Cat

2007-05-27T22:27:00.000-04:00

At about seven o’clock in the morning on September 1, 1994, I crawled into bed, alone. The next half hour was to be, in retrospect, the eye of the hurricane. Still, but uncomfortably so. Calm, but deceptive. Not really safe.

[Those of you who read here regularly need to know that on that date I happened to be married to someone other than the “Lovely K” whom you read about from time to time.]

This was a Thursday morning. That Wednesday wasn’t anything special, except that my buddy and erstwhile colleague – and quasi-partner in crime – Jack had invited me to go drinking with him. We were to meet up with one of his clients to whom he sold time management seminars. Jack was everybody’s best friend, and this client was everybody. In many ways that night and perhaps for many nights leading up to it, so was I.

We were having a grand old time at the first bar, which was on the north side of Atlanta, somewhere in the Sandy Springs section. Problem was, I was due home in Morrow, on the south side, about an hour before. I went outside and called from a payphone – this was in my pre-cellphone days – and spoke to the woman who answered.

She was a good woman, not always nice and not always sweet, but good. And kind. She was long-suffering, perhaps too much so. Her father had died when she was a teenager, and now her mother lived alone in Morrow. She had a sister at Auburn University; another sister who was married to a brickmason and lived in Kansas; another sister who married a former Iranian soldier who had served under the Shah and was living in Houston and whom I was quite scared of because he talked drunk about killing all his wife’s former boyfriends; and a brother, divorced, who also lived near Morrow. This brother had custody of the one child from his marriage, a daughter, who was nine at the time. He was a good father.

This woman was the middle child in her family and had been divorced once already. She was a modern dancer and also taught dance to children. At one point she had been performing internationally. When I met her, she had been performing with second-tier companies and other companies on the rise, and every now and then her name appeared in a New York Times dance review, always favorably. She was passionate about what she did, and she was a superior dancer and a gifted teacher. Parents of dance students adored her.

“Are you on the way home?” she asked, understandably. It was about eight at night.

I decided to lie.

Now you have to understand that the decision to lie at that moment was actually the turning point for everything else. It wasn’t the first time I had lied to her, of course. In fact, I had lied pathologically about my actions and my thoughts and feelings hundreds of times in the past. We had met on a blind date in September 1990, and the next morning I had left for a 17-day vacation in Spain. When I returned, I was overjoyed to see her, but I quite naturally lied about my activities during my vacation, which had been a bachelor’s jaunt through some of Europe’s more raucous nightlife spots. She had always figured I was keeping something from her about that trip, but she eventually dropped the occasional interrogation because I was not about to start telling the truth once we were in an ostensibly committed relationship. I had lied in the months leading up to August 31 of the year of the events described here, 1994, but the late spring and summer leading up to that night had been a little different. And that difference is what made my lie on August 31 a turning point.

In May I had attended my friend Jon’s wedding, and his brother, a missionary living in Japan, had officiated and had given a brief sermon from one of the books of the Bible, St. Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus. This missionary had talked about wives loving their husbands and husbands loving their wives. The wedding had taken place in Philadelphia, and since I had driven north alone from Atlanta, I had a long car trip home to consider whether I indeed loved my wife. It often takes longer to come to a negative conclusion about a matter than it does to a positive one.

I was convinced I needed to “try harder.”

So she, long-suffering and good, found us a marriage counselor. His name was Gary, and the odd part was that he was an evangelical Protestant minister at a local church off State Route 1941. She was a lapsed Catholic, and I was a perpetual seeker and quite antagonistic toward “god.”

We went to see him twice a week, and around the fourth time or so of meeting him he asked me a simple question about life and death and eternity.

“If you were to die today and go to heaven,” he started, “and God asked you, ‘Why should I let you into my heaven?’ what would you say?”

Fair enough. I know this game, and I have the right answer.

“I’d tell him—“ I am answering him seriously now, with a straight face, meaning each word, “—that I tried to do good and that I loved others and was a loving person.”

Gary looked back at me with love.

“Well, based on your answer, God wouldn’t let you in.”

Silence.

I was floored. She sat there, I’m sure staring at me, wondering what my next move would be. Since college, I had been interested in spiritual matters. I had first heard people talk about Jesus during my sophomore year and wondered what it all meant. How was I to live? To respond to people? To think and believe? I searched and searched, and for ten years I went through all sorts of cosmological arguments for and against the existence of God. I had been active in a large New York City religious institution and helped build a singles group from seven people to over 300. I wound up on the national Singles/”Young Adult” committee of this institution and got to know people around North America who were – like me – worshiping a question mark. Three weeks or so before the date of the fourth counseling session, I had heard in Philadelphia – The City of Brotherly Love – about husbands loving their wives and wives loving their husbands and had had many hours of driving to consider that. And, as I mentioned, to consider how perhaps I was falling short.

I cried.

And I wish I could say I was crying because I wanted so much to go to heaven to be with God. No. I was crying because I was terrified about the alternative. So Gary told me what I needed to do to have a relationship with this God.

That afternoon, after our counseling session, alone in the spare bedroom at home, at about 2:30, I knelt and prayed. I had never really prayed to anyone before. I didn’t know what to expect. I prayed what Gary told me to pray, even though I didn’t really believe it all 100 percent and because I didn’t know what else to pray.

But then I added a “rider,” you know, like you see at the bottom of an apartment rental contract where it says you can keep your pet ferret as long as it doesn’t chew up the doorframe to the bathroom. My rider was, “And, Jesus, change me however you want to change me.” That was the most terrifying part of it all. Change me.

See, for the longest time, I thought men who followed Jesus had wispy hair and Jerry Lewis glasses and wore white sweatshirts with air-brushed pictures of dolphins jumping through surreal crystal-blue ocean water at sunset. Not a flattering image in my mind. (Sorry if this describes you; no offense, dude.) I thought these men talked only about “Jesus my Lord this…” and “Jesus my savior that…,” but to tell the truth, at that point on June 14, 1994, I didn’t care.

So I added the rider because it was what I feared the most about God, that he would change me the way he wanted to and I wouldn’t have control anymore. Like I had ever had it.

I finished the prayer, and not much was different that I could tell. No thunder sounded.

There was some positive movement toward what I had committed to in the weeks following, but there was still an old self hanging on, wrestling with the new self. Over the summer, I changed jobs several times – though I hardly considered as jobs these commissioned sales “opportunities,” and neither did she, for they brought in next to no income and we were living off her fees as a self-employed dance instructor and the unemployment checks that I was still collecting because none of these opportunities lasted long – and I continued to live largely as though June 14 didn’t happen.

Yet it nagged.

So on August 31, when I decided to lie, something inside me snapped. Like I crossed a line that was new territory even for a veteran liar, even for a soured relationship recidivist whose past was littered with human debris and whose integrity was as tangled as last year’s fishing line from a summer home tackle box. I decided to resist and even kill this nagging for good. It had loitered in front of me like an unwanted pet, and I decided to put it down instead of accept its love and blind devotion.

She asked when I was going to be home, and I answered, “My contact lenses are messed up and I can’t see well to drive–” lies. I wanted to go back inside the bar.

At that point I knew, inside, that I had ended all that was real up to then. I had called it quits. I had turned away from all that was beautiful and redemptive. I had a couple beers in me, and the scenery looked good, and I was staying. That was that. I knew then that our relationship was over, and I didn’t frankly think too much about God. Who was he? Where was he? Kill the pet; it’s a nuisance. I want to live my life. It’s mine.

She didn’t sound overly convinced, yet still sounded a bit worried. She didn’t let on. I hung up the phone and went back inside the bar with Jack. He was my best friend at the time.

The next several hours included multiple stops at establishments whose female employees were held to a lax dress code policy that pertained only to the waist down. At the first of these, we met up with Jack’s client, a sturdily built 30-something who was Vice President for Sales of a fitness chain in Atlanta and whose month of August had been quite productive. He was ready to let off some steam. Married with kids, he apparently did what he wanted to on the 31st of the month. He was stuffing 20-dollar bills into bikini bottoms right and left, and his wallet wasn’t getting any thinner. Soon, Jack and I were in his brand new silver Infiniti, and they decided to go to the ‘hood.

Three white guys in a luxury car in the Atlanta ‘hood, looking for crack cocaine for the fitness executive. I won’t tell you what transpired, since I believe in the right not to incriminate myself. Yes, someone selling actually got in the car with us on one dark corner, but I will say no more. Through the fog of many drinks, I was seeing in my mind the headlines in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the next morning.

Some time later, around 5:30 a.m., Jack and the fitness guy were stoned out of their minds and we all needed to get home. We had families and responsibilities that all three of us had completely disregarded for the previous ten hours. I insisted on driving, because the beers had largely worn off at this point and I had abstained from what the other two didn’t – probably my one good decision that night – and we headed back to Sandy Springs.

By the time I got my car and drove back to Morrow, it was 7:00 a.m., and I entered the apartment, with only the cat, Bandol, greeting me. Unconditional love…ignorant, blind devotion from an animal who didn’t know better.

It brought me back to Poe.

When I was in eighth grade, I read Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat.” The only detail from the story that sticks in my mind to this day – in fact, it was the only thing in all of eighth grade I recall reading – was this section, which I recently looked up: “One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; - hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; - hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; - hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin - a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it - if such a thing were possible - even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.”

When I read those words, as a 14-year-old, I wept. Weeping over literature as a teenager is not cool. But the sheer act of soul lost-ness struck me at my core. The line “hung it because I knew that it had loved me” seemed to be the ultimate summation of a lost soul – like Nietzsche – it was the cry of a man who had killed God and knew it. God who had loved him and only loved him, and had only wanted to be loved in return. And in killing God, the man killed hope and killed his soul with it, for his soul had life only through its connection to its Creator.

Yes, I had love for this cat, Bandol, but I had no soul to give it. I had killed all that was dear to me, because I knew that I had been loved, and no one had given me reason of offence.

Somewhere in my mind, I figured that this all-nighter wasn’t going to be a big deal. I had done this kind of thing to the woman previously including, in New York City, going out to a similar establishment and coming back in the wee hours after a champagne-induced blackout with my inside suit coat pocket stuffed with American Express receipts totaling more than $1000.

So this day I crawled into bed and tried to sleep, but did so fitfully for only 30 minutes during this deceptive calm, this false safety, when busting through the door – for she had seen my car out front – came the good woman. The woman whom I had lied to for four years. Had my wedding vows in December 1991 been lies? A rhetorical question, you correctly point out, Dear Reader.

For once, she was inarticulate. She was crying and screaming and talking and trying to make me understand that she had called the-police-the-area-hospitals-the-morgue-friends-everybody-and-anybody, all looking for me since I called nearly 12 hours earlier and had not checked in since. All of which meant that after my call she still trusted me that I was possibly telling her the truth. For all she knew, my contact lenses were bothering me and I could not in fact drive. She trusted me, and that was her mistake. But her mistake did not come on August 31, 1994. It came in September 1990 when after a few glasses of red wine in a West Village restaurant she gave me her heart. Never trust a criminal with jewels.

I hung it because I knew it had loved me…

Not five minutes later, her sister, the one at Auburn whose will was almost as steely as her mother, whose husband died of cancer in his 40s and left her to raise five children by herself with only a military pension and some life insurance, also came racing through the door and marched loudly upstairs – and this was on carpet, so she was really stomping – where the argument was taking place.

The sister yelled at me, and the other woman melted, became inconsolable, became like jelly, for the fine china of her being had been shattered into a hundred pieces by a cold hard hammer. She wept and heaved in her breath and stared at a wall, not knowing what to do or say next.

The sister, all five feet of her, looked up at me and yelled, “YOU ARE TOTALLY FU@#ED UP!” She said I needed to get out now or she would call the police.

I left carrying my toothbrush.

I drove through rush hour traffic back to Jack’s house on the north side of the city and woke him up, told him I needed to stay there a few days. I had no idea how long; I just needed time to think. From Wednesday the 1st until Friday the 3rd, I stayed inside his apartment. I barely ate. I watched TV. Jack came and went, seemed to go about his life as usual, offering few words other maybe than “fu@# her.” This was his outlook on life in general.

To say I felt empty is to say that the sun is bright when you stare at it. Brightness is correct, but it is not enough. You need a new word to go further, to a next level, in your description. A word to describe the pain you feel staring at that kind of brightness, to describe the after-effects on your eyes, the light-dark shadows.

On August 31, I had turned my back not only on her, but I had turned my back on God’s grace. I had experienced earlier that summer a moment of grace on the part of the One who created me, and yet I turned away from it. I had said, No, I will not enter heaven even when the door has been flung open to me. I had experienced the clasp of forgiveness and then had bitten the hand. I had put myself outside the reach of the infinite mercy of God.

I called my dad, and he said, “Have you considered AA?”

It was like a clear bell ringing in the crisp nighttime air.

That Friday evening, September 3, I walked into an AA meeting room near Hammond Drive just north of the 285 beltway. There were faces I knew because they were like me – people who themselves had turned away. Turned away from loved ones, from themselves, from the One who created them. They were liars, thieves; they stole precious jewels and hearts. They rent others’ most cherished beliefs and securities. They stole others’ very lives and ruined them. They ran from God or they cursed God, waiting to die. They killed that which loved them. They had separated their souls from God through lies and pride and selfishness.

But in seeing each other, in telling their stories, in promising to each other not to drink that day, in turning over control to Someone greater, they found salvation and a new life. They made a pledge to each other and they kept it. And when they failed to keep it, they told each other they had failed. I walked into that room and saw them.

And they saw me.

On June 14 I had come to God open-minded and with a sincere heart, but I was not ready for his love because I was not ready to be honest. On August 31, I killed honesty. On September 3, Truth pervaded my life again and pulled me up from below the surface of the water, where I had sunk, drowning.

And I did not drink that day. Nor the next day. Nor the next 4,652 days, which brings me to today. And there has been darkness and light. But there has not been black. And there has never again been emptiness.

That which I killed has come back to life and come back to me. Yet it did not come back to haunt and expose the guilt of the narrator as it did in Poe’s story. It has come back to rub up against me and purr. It trusts me. It loves me.

And I love it.

photos: rgageler (wine), beriliu (star)

Nevski Prospekt

2007-05-26T15:11:00.001-04:00

“You are too young to have eyebrows like that,” she said with her Russian accent. “You look like Brezhnev.” So Irena, one of forty or so barbers at Astor Place Hairstylists, always remembered to cut them.

Now, living outside of Boston, I have no one who is sensitive about Brezhnev eyebrows, and I always have to ask twice to have them cut, once at the outset and once before the barber finishes and forgets. For a long time I would joke with the barbers around here about Brezhnev eyebrows, and they just kind of stared at me like I was naming a Yankees relief pitcher.

The building I grew up in – all 18 years and then a few after college here and there when I was “in transition” – had all sorts: we had Russian revolution-era nobility who lived on the 4th and 2nd floors (matronly grandmother on 2, her son and his family on 4). The daughter-in-law on 4 was a princess by birth. She died of cancer in her early 40s and left four kids. They all spoke English like an educated American, but also Russian, as well as the language of their French nanny.

Because of the number of Russians who had relocated there after fleeing from the Communists in the early 20th Century, our neighborhood had been written up in New York magazine or something and dubbed “Nevski Prospekt,” which was the main thoroughfare in St. Petersburg. The onion dome of an Eastern Orthodox church on 97th Street was visible from my bedroom window.

Another couple lived in 5C. The man was the chief curator for arms and armor at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. He and his wife died in a car accident when their children were 16 and 14.

We had a Circassian in 2D. She was Muslim, smoked cigars and played poker. Her brand of Islam was definitely not up to Al-Qaeda standards.

But dearest to me was Mrs. Ziffer, Polish, who lived in 6C, next to our apartment in 6B. She was Jewish and had escaped her country in 1939, moving to London and getting bombed by the Germans a short time later. She was married to a doctor, who died when I was only eight or so, and they moved to New York City, to Nevski Prospekt, to 6C.

Jim and I would give Mrs. Ziffer a Christmas present each year, usually Jean Nate bath products, which she loved, and which Mom either picked out or gave us money to buy from Gimbles department store on 86th and Lexington. Mrs. Ziffer’s perfume always smelled awful, but she gave us candy each time we visited her, and she had a high, cackling, true laugh which made her seem like a second grandmother or a fairy godmother.

I cried when she died.

photo of Hermitage Museum: wikipedia

Cad

2007-05-25T21:42:00.000-04:00

Eddie’s white stretch limo glided by around 5:30 in the opposite lane heading toward campus to pick up him and his girlfriend Ann.

My colleague Terry’s eldest child has his prom tonight. Since Terry lives on the school property, Eddie and his date will take their pictures on the grounds, probably standing somewhere in the meadow that used to be a practice polo field when the 117 acres was owned by the publisher of the Boston Globe back in the early 20th century.

My prom, in New York City in 1981, was not so bucolic, nor so romantic.

I had been attempting to date two different girls and, as you know, you generally bring only one date to the prom. This attempt was borne of impetuousness and pride and stupidity.

The summer before my senior year, I had been madly in love with Didi. I was 17. (What’s “love” at that age?) But come autumn, I had already asked her to the prom and arranged to have her photo – she was an occasional model – printed in my senior class yearbook page. The deadline for submissions was November or something and once it was turned into the yearbook editor, it was a done deal. No backs. Never mind, I adored her, and I wanted her everywhere I was.

However, somewhere along January of senior year she started to blow me off, didn’t return my calls for some mysterious reason, and somewhere along March and a few thousand hormones later, I started wanting a new girlfriend.

So I started going out with Lynn.

We went everywhere together and I started to forget about Didi until somebody – a friend, a parent, her parent, her, somebody…-- reminded me that I had made the commitment to take Didi to the prom. She had, in fact, purchased her dress. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn if her mother had reminded me about that detail.

Lynn did not like this.

Lynn was not someone to hold back her feelings either. I heard about it. She agreed to let my friend J.M. take her. I was actually relieved. Problem solved.

So prom night arrived, and we all showed up at Tavern on the Green, which my classmate’s father owned then and still does, and I arrive with Didi, and J.M. arrives with Lynn. At the time, the appearance of this didn’t strike me as odd. I mean, I did what I wanted to.

Looking back, I am surprised that Lynn didn’t pack a Glock and silencer to quietly take care of her…boy problem.

But we all danced and drank – it was 1981 and before Reagan raised the drinking age to 21 or withhold from states federal highway funds if they refused – and then about twenty of us sat under the stars in Central Park and then went to have breakfast at The Plaza, like $20 for eggs benedict, and these were 1981 dollars during supply side times.

Didi went on to marry a man who is making millions in the medical records business. Lynn saw me at a class reunion about two years after college and was cordial, but I have not seen her since. That wasn’t the first time J.M. had got me out of a bind.

But then again, I had helped clean up when we had the secret party in his apartment in 9th grade while his mom was away, and Steve Kirn knocked the bathroom sink off the wall.

photo: gunner07

coining

2007-05-25T15:02:00.000-04:00

"Brevity is the soul of wit" and "Necessity is the mother of invention" are two of my favorite aphorisms. I quote them to myself, if not aloud, often.

Seems there's a pattern, though, so much so that the person(s) who coined them may not have been that witty or that needy.

Each aphorism follows this formula: "[Concept ending in -ity] is the [core of a matter or relational identity] of [intangible principle]." Hey, folks, we can come up with our own! So I wrote down like 20-30 words in three separate columns, and here are a few new aphorisms for you to use in daily life:

"Hyperactivity is the offspring of fear."
"Fidelity is the keeper of contentment."
"Frigidity is the killer of happiness."
"Identity is the mistress of wonder." (Can't figure that one out, but it sure sounds cool.)
"Timidity is the enemy of love."
"Destiny is the attendant of mystery."

You get the picture.

This is what I do on a Friday afternoon after I get off work and my air conditioner has not been installed by maintenance yet.

Keats said it

2007-05-24T19:11:00.000-04:00

I cry at beauty.

What I mean by that is when I come across a truth, whether profound or simple, I cry. I may not shed tears, but there is a great heaving in my soul that is cathartic and deep and cherished and pleasing, and this Truth-Moment that makes me experience all that, is beauty.

For example, I am having lunch today with a friend who is also a work client of sorts, but a friend first and foremost, and we are sitting at a table on the sidewalk outside a restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. It is probably 80 degrees in the direct sun, but a six-foot wide black canvas umbrella partially shades me, which is good, because I’m in long sleeves because this is, after all, a little bit about business. He is in short sleeves, feeling really relaxed, sunglasses on. He is drinking an iced tea, me an Arnold Palmer (iced tea and lemonade mixed – love it; another friend/business client introduced me to the drink in Baltimore at Legal Seafood). We order our lunches – he is having a Cobb Salad, I the blackened chicken alfredo.

So we start to catch each other up on family matters and work matters. And conversation flows between what our kids are doing in school – he has four, I have three – whether their teachers are great or awful and should be fired-and-the-principal-is-not-much-better, and then we talk about what our wives are up to, his went to Las Vegas for a business conference; “isn’t Las Vegas such a bizarre place,” “yes, it is,” and then we get into work matters and what is going on at my institution now that my boss (the leader) resigned, what was it like working for him, what do you think is going to happen now; no, really, everything is really cool right now because we have an interim chief executive who is steady at the helm…

…and we’re sitting talking while the sun is bearing down for which all New Englanders are eternally grateful and, yes, the Sox are still in first place, and we are shooting the breeze and our food takes forever to come, but it doesn’t matter, because this guy and I – who knew each other first as friends when our families hung together in the dorms of the graduate school that we went to – are just … hanging out. Talking. Under the canvas umbrella. And nothing else mattered. And it was sheer bliss.

And after our lunch I am driving back to the North Shore and listening to Faith Hill pour her heart out on the “Cry” CD and then Phil Vassar on his Greatest Hits album which is the best greatest hits album because it’s not just a re-mix and it’s got a lot of nifty little piano segues, and I am just musing on life while I drive.

And I get to the office and work a bit and then work is over and I call my buddy in Colorado and we have a very cool chat. It is actually very high energy because things have just changed professionally on his end, and he’s not sure whether he likes it all but he’s kinda taking it day by day and we’re, too, just kinda shooting the breeze, and he is saying things that are so TRUE, and I am just laughing my head off cuz he’s cussing like a sailor and he doesn’t realize how funny he is and it is beauty in a way because he is truth embodied and is so unaware of how much I am enjoying this conversation and so unaware of himself; he is totally unpretentious – NObody would ever accuse him of pretentiousness, they’d as soon accuse him of being the King of Siam…and at this burst – this five- or six-hour burst – of humanity and love between friends and truth about kids and families and work and life and hearing him curse and just making me belly laugh…

I cry.

Not out loud. And not with tears.

But I am just so grateful to have these two men to talk to, and just so grateful to have a family and a job to talk about, and just so…grateful.

I cry.

It’s at beauty.

Which is truth.

photo: alixmorse

A blatant but hopefully temporary disregard for humility

2007-05-22T17:23:00.000-04:00

I actually used "pneumonaultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" in a sentence yesterday, a sentence in which I didn't just spout the word out of context like I was trying to show off, like I kinda did back in April when I posted on this.

A friend stopped by the office and mentioned that his brother-in-law was having a beer recently with a physician who is somewhat of a world-renowned specialist in the field of understanding the epidemiology of people who live in areas subject to volcanic activity.

As I sat listening, I just about salivated. This was the moment I had waited for since about 1973.

"You mean," I started with trepidation, "that he deals with people who have pneumonaultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis?"

A blank stare. Then a bewildered smile. This, from an attorney who could normally run verbal circles around me with two lobes tied behind his...cortex. He did our estate plan, and all he needs to say is "testator" and I go running for the Webster's.

"People who have 'black lung.' " I tell him. "It's a coal miner's disease for which they coined a term in the early 1900s, and I heard that word on 'ZOOM' on public television when I was a kid and have always wanted to use it in a sentence, and now I have. THANK YOU!"

Never thought I'd see the day. Now I have seen it.

Autumn 1994

2007-05-22T07:03:00.000-04:00

Bandol, the black-and-white cat I grew to love as my own, unexpectedly had to go to the vet. It was not good news.

I had first encountered the feline when I started to date the woman. We were eating Chinese food in her Astoria, Queens apartment and I had given Bandol a taste of my eggroll. She jested, in a mock fortune-cookie tone of voice, “Feed cat. Take home.”

Four years later we were in Atlanta, and the cat was sick, very sick. Something was wrong with his white cells. Something that wouldn’t get better, and he would get sick all over again soon and be in pain. He was only five years old, and the decision was made to put him down. She looked at me in the car and said, “I’m losing you, and now I’m losing him. My two boys.”

This was the fall of 1994.

photo: Wazari

Answered

2007-05-18T23:22:00.000-04:00

Walking down the hall in front of me at the south Charlotte Hampton Inn with a rolling cart stacked with suitcases was a family of four including two boys about 10 and 14.

The 14-year-old was almost as tall as his father. I thought, God willing, in a few years my three sons will be as tall or taller than I am (which is not unlikely since I am 5’9”). It was a pleasant – very pleasant – thought.

I missed Carter’s bo promotion tonight because I’m traveling through tomorrow afternoon. Bo, for the uninitiated, is one of the tools in kobudo, martial arts weapons training, and is a 1-inch diameter rod about as tall as you are made of Japanese oak (in the case of Carter’s), which he twirls around and jabs and strikes with. I was able to attend his most recent karate belt promotion (to brown belt, two steps below junior black belt) last Saturday. Tonight was only the second of his ten promotions he’s had over two years that I’ve missed. My dad saw me wrestle only once over the six years and hundreds of matches during junior high and high school; I’m determined to let Carter know that I’m watching. And that I’m a fan.

I called home a few minutes ago to get the end-of-day-report. I listen intently to how bo promotion went and am eager to know how K is faring alone with the boys, but at one point my brain sidles sideways while my eyes drift over to the muted television where the Spurs are playing the Suns in Game Six of their series. She tells me that Teak scraped himself on some rusty nails on the underside of the old couch.

But I miss this.

When I miss something she says on the phone and realize that I’ve missed something, I give off a little laugh, like it’s machine gun cover fire in advance of the enemy’s return fire I know is to come. However, this was not a story to give off machine gun laughter. It was a story to “Is he all right?” at. Or, “What?! So what happened next?” at.

I start to sink below the surface.

She knows this and gives me some grief, but I cower enough to be allowed to remove tail from between legs.

The report goes on. So far, our basement is dry – we’ve been flooded twice in the last several years and lost our wall-to-wall carpeting in the playroom. There is supposed to be up to six inches of rain in some parts near us overnight. Help me.

The last time our basement flooded, Mother’s Day 2006, we lost a carpet that had been down only about two years. I remember cutting it up with a utility knife: each stroke was like $50 coming out of my body. Following was the carpet pad. I duct taped about a dozen 4-foot long sections of soggy carpet and padding and set them out on the back patio. Fifteen hundred dollars sitting outside, getting ready to be thrown out during the next large item trash day. Just take my paycheck, please, and chop it into little pieces and blow them into the wind.

Tomorrow morning’s t-ball game for Bennett is cancelled because Buker Elementary School’s field, where they play, is a lake. So the lovely K checked the website and found that the game had been called.

Oh. She and the boys threw me a birthday party yesterday – 44 years of life, the last 13 of them joyous, the last 10 of them priceless.

We ordered pizza and had cheesecake for dessert. K bought three presents, wisely, one for each boy to give me. One was a bag with Triscuits and Irish Cheddar cheese in it, which Teak very excitedly gave me. Didn’t matter if it was on our grocery list anyway…it was a present from my little one. Earl and Ginger sent along a card and a gift. Brother Jim called this morning to wish me a happy one.

I can’t help but marvel at how much I am blessed. I’ll be bummed if our new $1500 carpet gets ruined by yet another flooded basement.

But I won’t be that bummed.

photo: criswatk

Upgraded

2007-05-17T21:08:00.000-04:00

The difference between paying $250 and $800 or more for a commercial airline flight depends on how much you value a three-inch long, 4mm-wide biscotti.

My flights to and from Charlotte on US Airways this weekend got upgraded because of being a frequent flyer. You are probably familiar with the system. To qualify for the minimum level, Silver, you have to fly 30 segments or 25,000 miles in a year’s time. Not too hard to do, especially considering US Air’s many connections I have to take to secondary cities where I do my work, and each hop counts as a “segment.” One trip often yields four segments. Once you're at least Silver, you get unlimited upgrades so long as seats in First Class are open.

So two days out from my flight, I get a friendly email with an Upgrade Status Update. I’d say I get upgraded one out of three or four flights. I have never paid nor will ever pay for First Class within the US. Taking the lovely K to San Francisco or Tuscany for our next big getaway, now that’s a different story. But I should have miles to cover most of it.

Here’s what you get in First Class:

1. Board first…after the children, disabled, and Top Secret Air Marshals.
2. The flight attendant takes your sport coat and hangs it up.
3. S/he offers you a drink (sometimes, not on all flights).
4. Your seat is slightly wider (3.3 inches) than in coach and made of pleather that is not nearly as nice as the leather seats in our Honda minivan.
5. You have a little more leg room (~6 inches).
6. In flight, you are offered another drink – you get two three-ounce cups of soda in First Class.
7. The flight attendant brings around an attractive basket – you paid for that basket, but please don’t ask to take it home with you, because everyone else paid for it, too – filled with organic blue tortilla chips, pretzels, nuts, or biscotti. You have a choice of one or, if you are feeling impish, you maybe take two.
8. You have "exclusive" use of the First Class lavatory. (But I have flown enough with our three small kids that if one of my boys has to go: Sorry, you'll have to wait, Mr. Full-Fare-Paying First-Class Passenger.)
9. You exit the plane first (dependent on position of doorways).

Maybe if I got that third soda I could justify the extra expense of paying full fare… In the meantime, there is still the thrill of the bargain when I get that email that announces I’ve been upgraded. It's sort of the Priceline.com-type of rush when your bid is accepted.

My colleague is flying back from Charlotte on the same flight. Unless he moonlights as an Air Marshal, I’ll be walking by him at the gate: “Oooh. Sorry, dude…free upgrade.” He’ll give me grief when we get back.

There are times when you don’t necessarily want free upgrades.

Like the time Enterprise gave me a SUV when I had reserved a standard. I drove only about 30 miles that day but used more gas than my Corolla back home used in a week. We negotiated down the rental price because of it.

Or the time they were out of standard size and only had a premium car, a Volvo S40. It was sweet: silver with a sunroof and leather seats, amazing sound system. Sweet…on the lot, that is. Not sweet picking up my boss’s boss. My job involves raising money for a non-profit, so showing up anywhere to pick up anyone in a sun-roofed Volvo S40 is a bit sketchy. But the alternative was probably a Geo…so I took the Volvo and starting plotting my explanation. I was all smiles and aw-shucks when I picked up our chairman and his wife at the airport.

Everyone I saw got the story, the explanation, the aw-shucks.

But during that trip I had to drive alone from Charlotte to Raleigh, almost a three hour trip, and the sunroof and sound system made all the explaining worth it. Aw-yeah.

It was much better than biscotti, and the leather was real.

photo: beriliu

A sincere smile

2007-05-16T21:02:00.000-04:00

I used to see Anthony standing along the wall of the steep pathway leading from the #6 train down to the #7 platform. He was on crutches and was missing his right leg, his pants folded back on that side. Had an old black Bible in one hand and was always fingering a rosary with the other. He must have been about 35 or so. Never asked for money, but many of us gave it to him because of his sincere smile.

I would take the #6 from 96th street down to Grand Central Station and then transfer to the #7 to get across town to Times Square, which was two blocks from where I worked. It was easier than the shuttle to my way of thinking.

So I would sort of gallop-walk down that ramp, and most mornings I’d see Anthony.

He always smiled and said, Good morning, brother! I would shake his hand though it was dirty and cigarette stained, and I felt guilty afterwards because I wanted to wash up.

Frito Pie

2007-05-15T18:19:00.000-04:00

The woman serving us at Magnolia Bakery in Greenwich Village said quite matter-of-fact that she had been born with an extra finger on each hand and that her parents had instructed the doctors to surgically remove both digits, which they had done.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve had the experience of someone telling you something like this, but it is odd banter while standing in line for a slice of apple pie. She showed us the spots where the ostensible pinky-ettes were, and we all kind of craned our necks to see. Ooooooh. Woooow. Look at those…spots.

How many people had she told? How many years had this story been in existence? At any point, did she or anyone she knew have equal to or greater than fourteen fingers. That’s what I wanted to know. That would be something.

The lovely K’s friend Doug had told us about Magnolia Bakery, on Bleecker Street in the West Village. True to reputation, it did not disappoint.

About eleven years later, K and I were meeting Doug once again down in the Village, this time for brunch on Saturday of the weekend we had escaped to New York for our 10th wedding anniversary. We were supposed to meet him at a restaurant on the corner of 9th Avenue and 14th Street, “in the heart of the meat-packing district,” a neighborhood that combined a somewhat bizarre mixture of cool and animal slaughter. Once we got there, however, we saw that a high-rise was going up on the spot where this restaurant once was, so we waited for Doug across the street. He found us and we walked down to Plan B restaurant: Paris Commune at 99 Bank Street.

Years ago I recall visiting a friend who lived on Bank Street. She and her husband, a top manager at Calvin Klein, had no children, but instead had a bird, a cat and four dogs, including a Great Dane, a Newfoundland, and two golden retrievers. Their loft was fortunately about 3000 square feet, which also meant that when you visited them, the enthusiastic canines had a running start at you coming through the front door. You basically put one leg back and braced yourself. And you didn’t wear clothes you didn’t plan to send to the cleaner the next day. In addition to the apartment, they had purchased a seven-bedroom, 100-year-old house along the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York sight unseen: the previous owner had allowed them to view it only from a helicopter ride. They decided to go for it. They found that it was furnished exquisitely with antique linens, beautiful mahogany furniture, original fiestaware from the 1950s, and so on. Oh: and it was situated on its own private island in the middle of the river.

Just down the street from Paris Commune was Cowgirl, another restaurant we went to when K worked at Donna Karan. They feature a classic southwestern meal – Frito pie, which is a bag of corn chips slathered with chili and which really should have been kept in the southwest and not allowed to cross the Hudson River.

One of my most memorable though is China Fun, a fairly standard Chinese restaurant on Columbus and 71st. K and I would go there in 1996-97, chat about our work days, and then take in a movie over at Sony-Loew’s/Lincoln Center. Somewhere along the line, she said she’d be my wife. It was five blocks from the studio we lived in for two years before the first baby came.

We don’t go to Chinese restaurants much. We see maybe two movies a year.

But we’re still married.

photo: shOdan

Mom the magician

2007-05-13T21:24:00.000-04:00

When Jim and I as young boys would stand on Fifth Avenue and 97th Street waiting for a southbound bus to come, wanting especially the #4, which was express, Mom would walk a few feet out from the curb, look north toward Harlem – some 13 blocks away – and chant “Hocus Pocus, Domino-cus, Ala-kazam-kazoo…” and wave her right hand in the air like she was conjuring up transportation for us – fine if the others who were waiting got it, too – and then her voice would go soft, unintelligible to us, but her knowing all the while that the two of us were watching wide-eyed and expectant.

The bus would always come soon, because we were so pre-occupied with watching her that we forgot about the time.

Bliss

2007-05-10T06:43:00.000-04:00

I had a dream once during the Cold War – I must have been in my late teens or early 20s, so around 1982 or so – in which there was a nuclear explosion.

In fact, it was a nuclear holocaust: the whole world went up in flames. I remember in my dream seeing the mushroom cloud, and then my senses went dark in the dream, like I was falling asleep while asleep.

Moments later, it seemed, I awoke in a small, dark closet, like one of those guardhouses in front of Buckingham Palace. It was similar in size, and it had an A-frame roof and a door with a knob on the inside. It was pitch black inside.

I opened the door and walked outside, into a circle of children who were holding hands. There was bright light and warmth, like a summer day. The children were singing, and all around was a cultivated garden, flowers everywhere. I joined the circle, and I remember being…happy…really happy. In that circle.

I don’t know how long that part of the dream lasted, but the image has stayed with me these past 25 years, vivid as ever. I can still feel the circle of children around me, singing, after the world disappeared.

photo: jwestveer

Slimebag

2007-05-08T17:12:00.000-04:00

At first, I felt like a real slimebag.

A man approached me as I drove up to the curb at Starbucks and asked me to roll down my window.

“I’m out of gas. I’m so humiliated to ask, but can you help me with a couple dollars.”

I’m sorry, was my reply.

I always wonder about these exchanges. I didn’t trust the dude from moment one. He had a vibe that said “scam” all over it. I parked and walked into Starbucks. This guy preceded me and without looking back, held the door open. I paused, then entered and sheepishly said “thanks.”

“Oh,” he said, noticing it was me, “I didn’t actually mean to … help you.”

So now I feel like total sh#@. You gotta understand, I normally take great pleasure in giving money away. My wife’s a saver; I’m a giver. We make a good balance sheet. But now I’ve had the door held open by a guy who I turned down because he had Scam Face on, and he rubs my face in it. Stupidly, because I feel guilty, I remain silent. I repeat in my mind good comebacks, something about my having grown up in New York and getting taken one too many times. Fed up with it.

I order my coffee with him standing less than five feet away. Great. A coffee that would practically get him a gallon of gas, if he indeed needs it.

I sit down and he is milling around the place, looking at CDs, coffee mugs. Then I see him start to walk out, a wad of bills in his hand – where did this come from?! – backed by a bill that was at least a ten if not a twenty. He gets into a car on the passenger side, driven by a young guy, baseball cap on, smoking a cigarette, and they drive off.

I am enjoying my $1.84 coffee, thank you very much.

Country

2007-05-07T19:41:00.000-04:00

Traveling in Charlotte, North Carolina today and tomorrow morning. Folks around here pull for Carolina. Chapel Hill. The Tar Heels. I went to NC State. Wolfpack. Arch rivals.

My exposure to life at NC State in 1981 began with my freshman roommate. I recall getting the notice in late spring during my senior year of high school – upper east side of New York, going to college in the south, and my future roommate’s name sounded…black. Or so thought some of my cousins, who were from New England and therefore even more nervous of blacks than I was.

Turns out he was a more WASPy southern version of me than even I was. Guy dressed himself straight out of page 92 of the Preppie Handbook. Green wide-waled corduroys, button-down blue oxford cotton shirt with the breast pocket starched shut, so the “girls can pull it apart…they luv it.”

We would go to Crazy Zack’s together. It was the local bar/dance place, where students from the neighboring girls’ colleges – Meredith and St. Mary’s – would frequent. Most of the girls I knew at State wouldn’t be caught dead at Zack’s. Way too preppy. All the frat guys went there. They played “beach music,” which centered on Motown, R&B, and swing, and did a dance called “shagging.” (I think you know, Dear Reader, what the British call shagging.) It’s a wonder they did this dance in Baptist territory.

We’d go to Zack’s, and they’d have 16 oz. cups of draft beer for a PENNY for women, in order to get them in the doors, and then $1 drafts for guys. After I befriended a girl at State who actually didn’t mind the place, she and others of us from State would go there, and the women would stockpile the beers along the shelves running around the dance floor. One time, there were like 30 to 40 beers lined up – a total cost of less than fifty cents – for us to consume after Happy Hour was over. (We wonder why localities outlaw happy hours….) (I have stopped drinking and now have enough money saved for an IRA.)

WASPy roommate #1 moved into a frat house second semester, and I got the polar opposite in fall of sophomore year.

Todd was from Bahama (pronounced “buh-HAY-muh”), North Carolina. The name derives from the first letters of local family names Ball, Harris, and Mangum. Population in 2007 is 3,304. Assuming a spawn rate of approximately 1.5% per household per year, when I was in college in the early 80s, the population was probably around 600. (I just totally made up that number…but I remember Todd giving me a figure in the hundreds.) (Todd was also one of the smarter students I met; a zoology major with straight A's and a wicked-good control of facts about nemotodes.)

On the first day we were in the dorms in sophomore year, before I met Todd, one of his friends came by the room looking for him. He had blue denim overalls, a red t-shirt, and a large belly. His black hair was cut in bangs.

“Todd here??!!”

“Uh, no…”

“Well, you tell him when I see him I’m goin’ to roll him in a mud hole and stomp him drah’ !”

He walked off.

OK.

I’ll tell him that.

Just the way you said it.

photo: nadsenoj

Gasping for air

2007-05-06T19:04:00.000-04:00

As the ocean waves washed over my dad’s head, only bobbing up now and then for air, gasping on a day when the waves were larger than normal, my three-year-old frame clung around his neck, my legs dangling over his shoulders onto his chest, him grasping me by the shins, not able to wipe away the foam when white water rolled in at us.

He would say, “Get ready…take a breath!” and we’d punch through a wave, usually my head clearing the top of it but not always. We went to where it was deep, even where he was on tippy-toes.

I laughed and laughed.

I held onto him around the jaw and put my chin on his head. His whiskers, unshaven on a Saturday morning at the beach, scratched the soft palms of my pre-school hands. His head felt secure on top of a solid body. A dad’s body.

At night he wore his green and white checkered seersucker jacket with the tie that my mom made out of fabric she found that matched the jacket. He wore a yellow shirt, and a photo showed him beaming next to my mom, her with a black-and-white dress and a red carnation, standing on our front porch, getting ready to go to a cocktail party. She was smiling, too.

photo: weirdvis

"pabo"?

2007-05-05T07:53:00.000-04:00

We made Mom actually “kick the habit” of smoking cigarettes back in the mid-1970s when those American Lung Association commercials aired showing people jumping in the air and clicking their heels together like The Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. She did it after getting out of my grandmother’s beige Mercedes – circa 1960 model – and walking into her parents’ Warwick, Rhode Island home. She actually jumped, though I had never seen her feet leave the ground at the same time, and it looked to Jim and me like she clicked her heels. She was smoking again in a day or two. She also didn’t quit after Jim and I immersed a carton of her Virginia Slims in a sink full of water and then proceeded to put it back in the drawer where she kept them, which happened also to be where she kept her underwear and lingerie.

When she finally quit, after two sessions of acupressure, and when I was flying to Madrid in 1990 and speaking with some Spaniards at JFK airport about my family, I said, “Mi mama paro a fumar pabo frio.” (I thought I was saying, “My mother stopped smoking cold turkey.”)

They looked at me somewhat horrified and then laughed. I always thought it was because the phrase “cold turkey” was not idiomatic for them, and they thought I was speaking literally.

Recently, I used an online language translator (Babel Fish) and this literal translation was given: “My breast unemployment to smoke pabo cold.”

It’s amazing they let me board the plane.

photo: dan72

best_mom

Philip's legacy

2007-05-03T12:01:00.000-04:00

I don’t want a Porsche.

Really, I don’t.

I saw one crossing in front of me as I took a turn over the north Beverly railroad tracks – that cumbersome intersection of Dodge Row and Route 1-A North where, if you hit it wrong, you can sit for 4 ½ minutes (I’ve timed it) waiting for the red-and-white wooden crossing guards to lift even though the southbound train is not even in the station and you are sitting south of the station, like it’s nowhere near the station and then you sit while it sits and you sit and you sit…and you can’t even sing along to that awesome Dierks Bentley song on the radio because the person next to you is figuring out what to do with their time, too, and you would feel like a fool singing like Dierks and trying to hit those high notes and your neck screaming veins popping out while your driver-neighbor is basically seeing you have a seizure in silence behind two panes of tempered glass – those railroad tracks… and I saw this maroon Porsche with a black whale’s tail and, in fact, it did look like a large mammal, albeit a really fast large mammal. And I thought: I am pleased as punch with my silver Toyota Corolla that gets like 200 miles to the gallon – city – and that fits my 5’9” frame just fine, thank you.

I suppose this realization was all the more surprising because I had just come from my occasional joust with All Things Financial. I am talking about the Thursday morning 7:30 a.m. breakfast in downtown Boston with business folks, about 50 or so, down at the club where all the old-money from Boston congregates. I can’t name the club here or I’m sure to get sued by someone for some reason some day. But it’s the kind of club that has a Resident Cat to keep away the mice. It makes the place seem very OldWorldly. And you sit downstairs and pretend to read the Globe while you sip your coffee from a china cup, but really you are only interested in the sensory feeling of reading the newspaper while sipping mild coffee in a club where there’s a Cat and where the halls have been trodden by the likes of Paul Revere’s personal financial advisor. Because you know he made a killing from that famous phrase, “The British are coming…!” and trademarked it and now his estate makes $4.95 each time someone says it. (I am kidding, of course, but I have had a LOT of caffeine this morning, starting at 4:00 a.m. when I got out of bed wired that I had finally sent off my manuscript for printing and couldn’t sleep anymore.)

I realize that I have had only two paragraph breaks in the last 457 words (nifty tool, this Microsoft Word).

So I’ll give you all a breather.

I sat on the fifth floor of this Club, eating breakfast with 49 other men – it’s an all-men’s breakfast and Bible study. I introduced to the group a friend of mine who was in town visiting and I happened to mention his former association with the federal government and how he managed a multi-hundred-million dollar program, and this made me feel somewhat…important. I’ll admit it. By association, mind you.

I was like, Hey, this friend of mine made multi-million dollar federal grants to non-profits, and I make sure that my water bill is paid each six months to the Town of H____ for $110 a pop and I think I done good.

So there we are, on the fifth floor, looking out over the Boston Common, absolute beautiful New England spring day, the Red Sox are creaming the Yankees in the standings so much that the Bronx is staging a Day of Mourning (again, just kidding; again, way too much caffeine here), we have been sitting and standing and chatting and sipping and watching the Cat and thinking about Paul Revere’s finances (or at least I have) and my priest is doing the devotional this morning, out of the Book of Acts, chapter 8, and it talks about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. (Those of you not familiar with this passage probably are wondering why this sounds so incredibly odd – I’m telling you, it’s a fascinating story of Philip meeting this leader, in fact a principal financial leader, of Queen Candace’s kingdom in Ethiopia – the eunuchs were often put in charge because they were trustworthy around queens – and how hundreds of years before that Queen Sheba had visited Solomon and how it is thought that she brought Judaism back to Ethiopia… perhaps that doesn’t trigger your pistol, but I think that sweep of human history type of story is awesome. Or, it could be the caffeine.)

Paragraph break.

We had a wonderful Bible study and as I drove back to the North Shore where I work, I sang unimpeded to Dierks Bentley’s CD “Long Trip Alone,” which grows on you and once it does you realize there’s not a weak song on it. Then I picked up yet more caffeine – since I still need to make it through my work day – and saw that Porsche with a whale’s tail.

And all that exposure to money and cats in clubs and unparalleled views of the Common and eating quiche with silver forks next to guys who run federal programs and still others who manage billions for Boston’s elite somehow didn’t impact me when I saw that Porsche. In reflecting, I thought more about Philip.

And I thought about that eunuch. He got baptized that day by Philip. And his life changed. And he went back to Queen Candace with a new message of new hope.

And today, I know a man who lives in Addis Ababa who studied at the school I raise money for and he left behind his wife and two children for two years to get a masters degree – the Ethiopian government wouldn’t let his wife leave the country because she was a medical doctor and they couldn’t do without her – and he came here totally sacrificially and studied and got his degree and now he leads a Bible college.

All because Philip baptized a eunuch two thousand years ago.

A Porsche doesn’t go any faster over railroad tracks than does my Corolla.

photo: ncrotty

Strong on the outside

2007-05-02T06:26:00.000-04:00

His personality – even his psyche – seemed to present itself in an “exoskeleton” kind of way.

His armored exterior was formed with a substance that prevented “dessication” and a “sensory interface with the environment” (Rf. wikipedia), and while he looked calm and controlled on the outside – evidenced by hair that was tightly in place with gel, a tie whose knot did not move from the Adam’s apple, and a smile whose presence was unrelated to circumstance – his insides were soft and mushy, susceptible to corruption and even deterioration were it not for his exterior shield. He lacked any internal structure for formation and definition, and he was underdeveloped, given his close relation to the invertebrates and the phylum of arthropods.

photo: gzed

Seeing

2007-04-30T22:27:00.000-04:00

Did I tell you that I was homeless for an afternoon?

Not really, mind you.

It was during my senior year of college and I had a rented room in a house with 13 other undergrad and graduate students, but for a sociology experiment I dressed as a homeless man and went out on to Hillsborough Street in Raleigh across from the campus of North Carolina State University to spend a few hours peddling and learning how people dealt with being asked for money. (Today, I am a professional fundraiser, and I can tell you that the job is much the same in many ways, but now I smell better and get to have at least one 0.001-ounce bag of pretzels per flight.)

My sociology professor’s first name was Claire Jo. She let us use her first name in class. This seemed to distinguish sociology from, say, my calculus class, where we’d have to intone, “Your Supreme Majesty of Integrals, His Excellency Dr. Smith.” Her husband was Jerry. He was an ordained minister but worked full time for the UPS. Seems Jerry and the Baptists didn’t see eye to eye, so he was making inroads with the Presbyterian Church. Claire Jo was my second soc (pronounced “soesh”) professor, after my intro soc professor, Randy, who also encouraged familiarity, and with whom I played soccer Saturday mornings on the intramural field on the south side of campus. A group of progressive first-named professors and international graduate students squared off each week at that time. All I know is that Indonesian chemical engineering students can sprint for like twenty hours straight and not get tired, and my sorry a*# was pooped after about 90 minutes.

Claire Jo and her teaching assistant (TA), another woman, were to observe me during the experiment. I had gone to Goodwill and found the trashiest clothes I could find and then rolled around in the dirt outside my house. I put vegetable oil in my hair, dirt on my face, chewed black licorice for about an hour to discolor my teeth, and practiced a homeless “walk,” which was a kind of drunken gait not unknown to college students – I being no exception during those days – mixed with a stoic resignation that perhaps was.

One of the first things I did was find an old cigar butt in a trash bin, and positioned it between my right index and middle fingers. I asked my first passer-by for a dime. Later it was reported – for the TA was interviewing people after I approached them – that the pedestrian, a young lady, had told her, “I’m from California and I knew from the beginning he was a fake.”

Yet, one hour later, after I had perfected my gravelly voice and swagger, I swooned down Hillsborough, and in front of the grocery store I fell down across the entire width of the sidewalk.

Let’s see if I’m noticed here, I thought.

A few people congregated, trying to get me up, and I would either not respond or get halfway up and then fall back down. I knew trouble was ahead when I heard a prominent English professor say to somebody, “…no, I called. There’s an ambulance on the way.”

Oh, sh#$. I’m outta here.

I got up.

“No, wait, buddy, we got somebody coming to help you.”

No, you don’t understand, my friend. I am a big fake – the lady from California knows this – and I will ultimately fail the English class I take with you later this year if I stick around and get made.

So I strode purposefully – but not too purposefully for a homeless guy – east on Hillsborough toward the other end of the commercial district.

Standing in front of a convenience store, I solicited one of my housemates for a quarter. He didn’t even look at me and walked by. Later, I buttonholed a man stepping out of a shiny Mercedes on his way into a church. He dissed me as well.

I learned that it was very easy for people to say no when they didn’t take the first step to acknowledge my presence. Out of sight, out of mind.

Fast forward 23 years to Boston’s Washington Street, a thoroughfare limited most of the time to pedestrians and emergency vehicles one block down from the Boston Common. I interacted with this guy who said his name was "Jack", "born on Christmas Day," he claimed.

I said, "Oh, yeah? You and Jesus."

He replied, "Yeah, my first name is Gal, like Galilee."

I thought it was Jack.

OK.

Now that we have that straight.

photo: fireball45

help wanted

2007-04-29T07:00:00.000-04:00

Mrs. Moretti was a 5-foot, somewhat plump, frazzled gray hair 60-year-old battleaxe who made my dishwashing life misery but cried when I left her restaurant after two summers of working for her.

She and her husband owned three restaurants, and she had three sons managing them. She knew the prices of everything, and had a colorful way of letting you know.

“Don’t use so much soap; that costs me 12 cents a quart!!!” Everything she said had two or three exclamation points behind it. She never coo-ed. She always screamed.

One time I spilled some food scraps on the brick walk that ran behind the kitchen extending from the porch over the water (this restaurant sat on a bay looking north) down to the concrete walk in front of the building. She saw my transgression and yelled, “Clean that up!!! Don’t you know that I got down on my hands and knees this morning and scrubbed that sonuvabitch clean!!!”

Basically, if you worked your tail off, she liked you. No – better – she appreciated you.

Once, in describing someone who thought a little too much of himself, she quipped, “He thinks his sh@# don’t stink.” That one didn’t have exclamation points since she was probably saying it before Noon, before she could really get in gear.

When I left, I was 20 years old and had worked there two summers during college. Her oldest son, the manager of the restaurant, gave me a cash bonus on my last night. She came over to me while I was still in the office, gave me a hundred dollars in twenties, held my cheeks in her two hands, and kissed me with lips that had never known lipstick, often had well-intentioned venom, but were always sincere. Her eyes started misting up.

After all, a good dishwasher is hard to find.

Even better the second day

2007-04-28T06:45:00.000-04:00

I termed it “clothes spam” when I came back downstairs and saw Karen. Not spam as in that junk email we all get, but rather a representation of the canned and oft-avoided foodstuff from which the term is derived.

The clothes were in a solid…block, somewhat rectangular, looking as though they had been frozen, with socks and under-shirts turning corners, the bundle having almost edges defining how they had settled in the clothes basket for some length of time before Karen dumped them upside down on our bed in order to give the emptied basket to Bennett so he could use it as a cage for his stuffed animals. Were this clothes-spam block sitting on a podium in the Museum of Modern Art, intelligent adults would have paid $20 for the pleasure of viewing it.

Once I heated up our bean bags and put them under our covers, I went and found the basket, which was in the guest room (we call it “Memaw’s Room,” because it’s where she and Grandaddy stay when they visit), and turned it upside down over the clothes. I held my hand under the “block” and tipped and…voila! – clothes were successfully back in basket. I felt as though I had put something away and accomplished an easy task when, in fact, I had just prolonged yet another domestic chore for Karen for some future date. Probably when the spam becomes cheese.

Karen tells me she has been embarrassed at times when we’ve had mountains of clothes to be folded sitting on the basement floor next to the dryer. When Maryann comes to babysit, she usually does so much more around the house once the boys are down than a babysitter can be expected to – she was once a nanny, so is used to going beyond the call of only watching kids – and she’ll usually wash any dirty dishes and fold any clothes left around.

It leaves us feeling a little guilty, so we usually try to “prepare” for her coming by cleaning and tidying so she won’t feel compelled to.

We have maids that come every other Wednesday for two hours, usually in the morning. This is the very least I can do for Karen, and I wish we could have them every week. They are Brazilian and, nowadays, we get the ones who report to the owners, a couple named Alex and Lane. Lane, the woman, speaks little English. Alex is the one we deal with mainly about business matters. They named their cleaning company after Maria, their daughter, which I think is kind of charming. Used to be that Alex and Lane themselves would come and clean; then it was one of them and another person; now it’s two or three others only, and we never see Alex and Lane. A good sign that their business is growing.

While we miss seeing them personally, the ladies who come do quality work. But since the basement got flooded on Mother’s Day 2006, we told them to skip vacuuming the playroom (where there was no carpet for a while), and enough time passed that the rotating crew didn’t know now (since we have replaced the carpet) that that was part of the package of our arrangement. When Karen reminds the ladies to vacuum there, they give her attitude. South American style. Usually with a flourish of the vacuum hose and not in English words.

The maids came earlier in the day before my team from the office arrived for dinner this past Wednesday. That’s always nice when we can get the house cleaned professionally before entertaining. Karen had made chicken enchilada casserole, one of my favorites. It’s like Texas lasagna, which is good when you first eat it and even better as leftovers the next day. We served it with diced vine-ripened tomatoes and fresh avocados on the side, corn and flour tortillas, and pink lemonade. Lemon and pink grapefruit sorbet was for dessert as well as coconut gelato.

Some of the folks who came didn’t exactly know what to do between the casserole and the tortillas. They thought the entrée was to be treated fajita style, with the food placed in the tortillas and somehow wrapped and eaten that way. You need only butter your tortillas and eat them on the side, but I found it fun to watch how people tried to figure it all out.

Sometimes, simple pleasures in the suburbs come down to that.

photo: szajmon

Heid's of Liverpool

2007-04-28T05:00:00.000-04:00

I found this helpful advice on a blog called ishbadiddle (http://triptronix.net/ishbadiddle/):

"I'm having trouble getting my ketchup out of the bottle in a timely manner. Do you have any suggestions?

"First, make sure the cap is on tight. Then, holding the bottle upside-down, vigorously shake it from side-to-side, so that the top of the bottle describes an arc. This will force the ketchup toward the top of the bottle through centrifugal force. Next, remove the cap. Tilting the bottle at a 45-degree angle hit the top side of the bottle several times. Hitting the bottom of the bottle is more frequently done; however it is less efficient. Hitting the top forces the ketchup down, enabling air to break the ketchup seal at the top of the bottom. Then gravity will do the trick. Never put ketchup on a hot dog if you are older than 12; they were meant to be eaten with mustard, relish, onions and/or kraut if you are so inclined."

I usually don’t post other people’s stuff here – perhaps some of you wish I would – but I thought this was a novel way of solving the age-old problem of getting Heinz 57 out before it becomes Heinz 58. The remark about eating hotdogs with ketchup, of course, is the blogger’s own, not necessarily that of this author.

Reminds me of driving from Raleigh, North Carolina in 1983 with my college girlfriend Carla and her family up to Fulton, New York, where she was from. Her grandparents lived there. It was eleven hours in the car. Her aunt, her mother’s sister, used to be her mother’s brother – had a sex change operation. I’d never met a transgender person before, though I lived in New York City.

Just outside Syracuse – home to the oldest state fair, I am to understand, and bragging rights to those who are insecure because they don’t live in the greatest city in the world to the south, “downstate,” that is – is Heid’s of Liverpool, where they serve the famous frank and coney.

I remember we got there and I was … hungry. I ordered a “hot dog.” They looked at me. Just kind of stared. So, Carla’s father whispered, “ask for a frank,” so I did and everything went along swimmingly. Now, their website openly discusses “hot dogs,” once a topic not for polite Liverpool company.

Coneys, on the other hand, are white sausage-like hot dogs. I wanted to find more information on them, so I went to Wikipedia, which lacked for specifics, so I added a plug for Heid’s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coney. MSN Encarta doesn’t include this definition among its five for the word. That’s disappointing. I found this site, which has probably the most complete description of this delicacy: http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/coney_island_coney_coney_dog/. All I know is that is was whitish and looked fairly unappetizing, but it was good.

Carla’s grandparents lived in a house that was across the street from a crematorium. Many afternoons, the evidence of their business was in the air. This, from Wikipedia: “During the cremation process, a large part of the body (especially the organs) and other soft tissue is vaporized and oxidized due to the heat, and the gases are discharged through the exhaust system.” So this exhaust is what we’d smell during our time on the front porch sipping tea.

My grandparents’ bodies were cremated. I remember being 22 or so and going out on a boat in East Greenwich harbor with my brother, parents, two aunts and two uncles. It was raining. We raised a glass of champagne to toast them – Tootsie and Poppa’s wish that this be done – and then my brother Jim and I poured their ashes over the side, and we all threw flowers on the water’s surface. It was the most peaceful “burial” I had been to.

I don’t remember how long we were in Fulton. Carla's aunt, the transgender person, was nice enough. I don’t recall any outstanding features from that first encounter other than it seemed she was still dealing with some kind of facial skin issue, like razor burn from days gone by.

Coneys, crematoriums and transgenders with razor burn.

Life is not neat and tidy.

photo of hot dog: neadeau

photo of razor blade: brokenarts

Pork Pie

2007-04-20T21:38:00.000-04:00

Karen wanted to buy the Mosquito Magnet. I suggested a large pig.

The mosquito population had been bothering us since the office party we had under a tent in our side yard one mid-July. I hadn’t noticed them much before that day, but around 7:00 that evening, they came out in full force for the kill. The citronella candles, part of the overall price tag, were not working. Our dinner for 25 guests became somewhat rushed at the end, with the tinkling sounds of coffee cups against saucers intermingled with loud slapping sounds against bare skin.

Our backyard is about ten feet of inclined grass abutting swamp that the green-minded in Massachusetts call “wetlands.” I once had to remove a pine tree out back that had partially fallen during a wet snow, making its branches too heavy for its roots to support before it toppled over. So I called the town department of conservation, and the administrator in charge told me I could remove the tree, however – since it was in “wetlands” – had to leave ten feet of the butt for environmental purposes. This will make some family of doves very happy. It looks stupid.

Wetlands though they be, they produce mosquitoes like a swamp does. Feasting hoards of them. We needed a solution, and that’s why I suggested the swine.

Karen had read up on Mosquito Magnets and how they emitted carbon dioxide, much like a human exhaling, which attracts mosquitoes downwind, and to dinner they come. I thought that if a large amount of carbon dioxide was what was needed, perhaps a large mammal would suffice, something in the order of a trophy-winning pig.

My reasoning was two-fold. First, the CO2 from the swine would approximate that of the machine and would attract the mosquitoes. Second, when winter came and the mosquitoes had died, we could slaughter the pig and enjoy fresh bacon and ham hocks (not that I’ve ever eaten any, but that would be a good time to start) all season long. One might fault my logic pointing out that we’d have to get a new family pig each year, while the Mosquito Magnet would last from season to season. Nevertheless, the machine would depreciate, need maintenance, and runs on electricity, which lately has been no bargain. The pig, on the other hand, would eat all the meals our three boys refused to. The Mosquito Magnet “Liberty” model, which is the minimum we’d need for our acreage, is $459. We could definitely recoup our costs in the chops that we wouldn’t have to buy from Stop & Shop.

Karen thought this was a ridiculous plan and sarcastically suggested we get a hippopotamus because it emits even more CO2. I have never eaten hippo meat, and while I wasn’t opposed to trying it, I thought the neighbors would object.

photo: muddy

The Icon Singer of Little Italy

2007-04-15T21:40:00.000-04:00

On the Friday night of our weekend anniversary trip to New York City last month, we took the N train down to Canal Street and walked east several blocks to Mulberry Street in search of Luna Restaurant.

As we neared it, just north of Canal on the right side of the street, I understood why they hadn’t answered their phone for several days while I was calling to see if they accepted reservations and whether I could arrange a special anniversary surprise with the maître d'.

The interior was darkened and the neon sign was unlit and broken. The navy blue and white striped canopy was ripped. The glass on the door was filthy. Luna was where, I could have sworn, The Godfather’s Clemenza ate lunch before driving out to the sticks of Queens and whacking that guy, followed by the famous line, “Leave the gun; take the cannoli.” I’m pretty sure that was Luna. They had the famous cannoli.

And that was where I wanted to spend our anniversary dinner.

Karen and I had been there before, a couple times, one memorable time with our friends David and Tonya, when the waiter brought out an appetizer that we didn’t order – it was clams casino – and said, “Try it! If you don’ like it, you don’ pay for it!”

Witnessing the shuttered landmark, we walked north half a block to Hester Street to the notorious Puglia Restaurant. Puglia is where I first drank a beer in a restaurant, in 1979, and let us just say that I was not born in 1961.

Karen agreed that this would be an acceptable compromise.

As we entered the front through a canvas and plastic-windowed vestibule of sorts that has become common in many NYC restaurants since K and I have been there, a form of acute brain disease set in and the following absent-mindedness slipped out of my mouth: “This brings back memories of my bachelor party.” However, my heart stopped after the words hung out in the March air like breath crystals waiting to fall to the cement and shatter. I was referring to the bachelor party prior to my first marriage. I did not marry Karen the day after Puglia in 1990. Our marriage came seven years later. And this night at Puglia in the cold March air was supposed to be our anniversary dinner.

This was threatening to make for a lot of loneliness in a nice hotel room for the next two nights. We had seats the next night for “Rent” and yet there might well be a football field between us. Ever gracious and looking to poke fun at me, K. kind of chided me for the slip and blew it off.

The thing you have to understand about Puglia is that it is really not about the food. It is about shaking your napkin.

Jorge Buccio, a hybrid of Elvis and Johnny Fontaine, has been performing live there seems every night for the past 23 years. He does covers from Neil Diamond to Dean Martin to traditional Italian-American love songs on his Hammond organ. Jorge was honored by the City of New York with a proclamation that named him “The Icon Singer of Little Italy.” But there’s a song that all patrons wait for – wait for as they consume unlabeled bottle after bottle of house red wine and bask over their victories on Wall Street that day or drown their defeats… It is “Get up everybody, get up and shake your napkins!”

K. and I had taken her sister Terri here back when I was courting K. Terri was a high school guidance counselor in Austin, Texas, and had a masters in social work. My guess is that she had me figured out in about the first two minutes, and it was she – after hearing my life story from K over the phone one day early in our friendship – who said, “I see a few red flags.” Like seven or eight. But who’s counting.

K and I had finished our entrees and exchanged photo-taking duties with a group of moms from Westport, Connecticut, who were in for a one-day ladies’ shopping jaunt and sitting one table over.

Jorge lit into The Napkin song.

We got up. We shook our napkins. We sang. We laughed and shook some more.

And spent the next two nights quite together in our nice hotel room. Our seats at “Rent” were side by side.

Circassian love story

2007-04-14T07:14:00.000-04:00

Mr. Gorman was an older man who lived across the hall from us in 6D. He was Irish and kindly. His sister, Miss Gorman, lived there, too. He looked at me – 14 and as WASPy as they got – one afternoon downstairs when I was surrounded by a group of young black men in the vestibule of our building at 96th and Madison.

“Everything OK?” he asked.

For some bizarre reason, I said, “Yes.” Everything was not.

Ten minutes earlier I had trippingly left the apartment carrying a dollar’s worth of change and was on a mission to go around the corner to the stationery store, run by a round-face Korean man, from whom I regularly bought Mad Magazines and all my candy. I bounded out the interior locked door – a wrought iron job with glass behind it – down the first three steps and across the 10-foot vestibule floor, out the exterior door – another wrought iron barrier, this one unlocked – and down three more concrete stairs to the pavement and the savage New York City streets. Our building was a pre-war, no-doorman building. It was definitely Upper East Side, but we lived on a socioeconomic border: one street up a girl had been kidnapped and held for three days before being released. I would not walk down that street or any others to the north. I couldn’t tell you what they looked like.

Outside, I was met by a group of teenagers and adolescents who were looking for me. Or someone like me. Anybody like me, with a dollar or two or ten.

They surrounded me and said something probing like, “Got any money?!”

I probably lied. No.

Moments later, a black man in his thirties who was passing by stopped and, surveying a known situation, told the kids to disperse. My black Good Samaritan. Stopping to assist the Jew in distress.

I continued around the block and sought my objective, cinnamon Dynamints. You remember those, don’t you? Like Tic Tacs, only…different. Apparently, not different enough, because they’re not sold anymore.

Back at my front door, I looked to the right and left. Coast was clear. I entered the vestibule, a 10-foot square room with a covered steam heater on the right side and those three steps leading up to the interior locked door. I reached that interior door and – blimey – out of nowhere those kids were around me and grabbed me as I was entering the lobby. They pulled me back to the top step, and that’s when Mr. Gorman came in with a bag of groceries.

We had our verbal exchange, he looking over the kids. For the life of me, I don’t know why I didn’t say something. Pride? Who knows. As soon as Mr. Gorman entered the elevator at the end of the lobby and its door closed, three kids grabbed my arm and threw me down the stairs.

One kicked me in the mouth, and I felt my lip crack open. They were punching, kicking.

“Give us your money!” one yelled.

“I told you, I don’t have money! All I have is Dynamints!”

They stopped kicking and – I tell you the truth, Dear Reader – one said, “What flavor?”

“Cinnamon,” I returned weakly, and handed them to him.

“Aw,” said another. “Give the kid his candy.” And they threw the mints onto my chest and left.

All right. Somebody had had some fun here, but it wasn’t me.

I went upstairs to 2D, where Mom and Dad were having drinks with Mrs. Natirbov. She was Circassian, in her 70s with deep-set eyes and a 2-inch bulging tumor thing on her palm near her right thumb so it was freaky to shake hands. She was Muslim, played poker, smoked cigars, and once said to my parents, “Send down your boys. I want to tell them Russian cowboy stories.”

She met me at the door and her eyes bugged out at the blood issuing from my face. I went into her living room and recounted to the three horrified adults what had happened. Yeah, I told them, I got my a** kicked (I didn’t use the a-word); yeah, there were ten of them, maybe fifty, I’m not sure.

I felt kind of manly, truth be told.

Eighteen years later I learned that Mrs. Natirbov’s son went to college with my future father-in-law.

photo: charcoa1

make mine with a twist

2007-04-11T17:30:00.000-04:00

It was 1973 in Laurinberg, North Carolina, which is about two hours east and a little south of Charlotte. My family and I were staying at the Holiday Inn with the rest of the out of town family for the wedding of my cousin Reg and his fiancée Melissa. “Cousin” was a loose term. I think we shared great-great-great grandparents or something, but we were family nonetheless. Everyone in North Carolina was family. I was ten; my brother was eight.

On one of the three nights we were there the air conditioner in our room wouldn’t turn on. It was an unseasonably warm March. Our family of four shared a room, my brother and I in one bed, parents in the other. Mom and Dad had a habit, perhaps something borne of the 1950s, of setting up a “bar” in whatever space they occupied. So on the countertop by the bathroom where we all put our toothbrushes and my dad put his deodorant and my mom put her Chanel, they also had their ABC Store-bought fifth of gin and vodka and a couple bottles of tonic water, and a metal bucket of ice from down the outside hall, around by the swimming pool. Mom would put some of the vodka in a plastic flask that had as a cap a man’s head, crew cut, with eyes kind of loopy drunk. She carried this with her to social gatherings down south. Too many teetotalers having dry parties for the likes of that New York socialite.

My mom called the front desk while taking a nervous drag of her Virginia Slim, bright red lipstick leaving its mark as the cigarette left her mouth, followed by a furious exhale of blue smoke.

Short time later a man, apparently the manager, knocked on the door and began dialogue with my parents about the air conditioner not working and mom going off on how were we all going to sleep it was hot and there were two boys and four people in this one room and this isn’t what they paid for, dammit all. Basic New York attitude. Your fundamental dressing down.

So the manager suggested leaving the door ajar that night and letting the cool North Carolina air later that night provide the comfort.

Furious blue smoke. Narrowing gaze.

More words. Gesticulating with cigarette tip glowing red from increased air flow from my mom’s waving hand.

The manager listened. And then, “Bless your heart, ma’am, but this isn’t New York…” You can leave the door open, he continued, and not worry that your offspring will be spirited off by evil-doing city folk, in essence. We’re a kind bunch here, in Laurinburg. In North Carolina. We’re family.

This simple phrase, Bless your heart, has always amused me. I know many have written on it. I am sure many have blogged about it. The man was saying in exchange, “Oh, Silly Yankee Lady, let me tell you…” When I hear friends from different regions than the northeast say, “Bless his heart,…” I know the next phrase coming out of their mouths will say the person referred to is your basic nutjob. Or it comes at the end of a sentence that provides a disclaimer along the lines of, "What I have just said I realize has cut to shreds a dear friend of mine, yes we go way back, even to school days, and yes, I realize I will one day stand before the judgment seat of God and answer for my words, but dammit all, this person is a veritable nutjob." Bless his heart.

The upside is that I think this phrase is a basic societal building block to keep us from killing more of each other.

“Bless your heart, ma’am, because even though your General Sherman burned down my great-grandmama’s house in Atlanta, I’m going to call our maintenance man and have him fix this unit right away.” That’s not what he said, but it’s what he meant.

I’m sure my mother walked away from the manager, allowing my Diplomat Father – “My love,” he would say, “Why don’t you go make yourself a drink?” – to ensure that her two little ones were safe from harm in this small southern North Carolina town, only a few miles away from the border of that vast, lawless territory known as South Carolina.

I am sure my mom walked over to the “bar,” unscrewing the vodka bottle while the cigarette stuck crisply out of her taut mouth like a warning to all comers: Don’t Screw With This Yankee Mother, Cracker.

My brother Jim and I didn’t get kidnapped. We skateboarded by the pool the next day because the concrete was smooth. We went to the service at the church – major BORING, I remember the bridesmaids wore yellow – and to the reception back at the Holiday Inn. At one point, the crowd thinned considerably, and Jim and I went to explore.

In a hotel room on the second floor at the back of the property, the door was wide open and people were jam-packed, shouting at the TV, drinking beer and laughing and elbowing each other. Carolina and State were playing in the ACC Men’s Basketball Championships.

Mom and Dad had been married on Saturday, May 4, 1957, on which the Kentucky Derby was run that year. All the folks had left the reception in the living room at Mom’s parents’ house in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, to go upstairs to watch the most exciting two minutes in sports.

They always celebrated their anniversary on Derby Day, whatever date it fell on, not necessarily May 4.

photo: matchstick

pneumonaultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

2007-04-10T20:20:00.000-04:00

For some time now, bedtime with three small children has become a little like a word in German or chemistry.

You know, something with SubjectAdjectiveFurtherAdjectiveObjectVerb that goes on and on. A technical term that contains all the knowledge of western civilization in one utterance.

So, these days, there seems to be no shortening of our evening routine - it just gets longer. It becomes an endless string of BooksPrayers”MiddleTime”(where the boys and I talk)SongsHeatedBeanBagsforColdNightsFreshWaterMoreSongsTuck-inThenConstantRemindersof”QuietNoI-S-A-I-D - Q - U - I - E - T!”

Quiet. Please.

No, really. Please…

"I promise."

2007-04-09T22:42:00.000-04:00

I had a hard day at the office today.

Not that you want to read about my tough day. You probably had a tough day, too. At home or at the office.

See, it is Easter Monday, and I wanted to be in a more celebratory mood. Today follows my favorite holiday of the year. Yes, I like Easter more than Christmas (too much stressing over presents or, truth be told, our family budget for presents). I like it even more than Thanksgiving (which I like more than Christmas Day, because on Thanksgiving I get to cook a humongous meal for our family of five, and I gorge myself into a Tryptophan-induced amoeba-like state, and then get to induce that single-cell status for several days following).

I like the holiday because I celebrate something that is so pure, so beautiful, so precious, so real, so hopeful and so deep, that I can only describe it to you by adding superlatives and modifiers and “so” this and “so” that.

Yesterday had everything to do with my not being the same person June 14, 1994, as I was June 13, 1994. Sure, some things stayed the same, but some were mysteriously altered and some I’m only now finding out about.

Yesterday had everything to do with Ron, the coke-head truck driver I met in rehab.

Yesterday had everything to do with my mom finally seeking something deep inside her and greater than her toward the end of her life, when she told me she was at peace. And I believed her.

Yesterday had everything to do with my first son’s birth. And my second son’s. And my third son’s. Yesterday will have everything to do with why I will cry like mad when my wife dies in about a half a century but why my sadness will be only short lived.

Yesterday mattered.

I was going to go into why it was such a tough day today, because it had to do with some pretty heavy sh@#, stuff that a mere few paragraphs ago I was still upset about. But I won’t. Because all I need to do is remind myself that every year, we have what happens yesterday.

It is a promise.

That can’t be broken.

By anything.

Ever.

photo: datarec

Zagat-only, please

2007-04-07T08:20:00.000-04:00

“Why don’t you say that Howard once worked as a contortionist and you had an eyeball transplant?”

The lovely K. and I were driving to the Peabody Marriott on Boston’s North Shore three Decembers ago for what would surely be another somewhat painful Christmas dinner with the office (colleagues and our boss, and spouses), and we were to play a game called “two truths and a lie.” This was a good thing in itself, because conversation otherwise at these coerced gatherings becomes desert-like and as bleak as the Saharan horizon.

We were having trouble coming up with the lies. So K. called her sister Sandra who – perhaps while not a great liar; she’s a wonderful Christian woman – is a highly spontaneous person with a wicked good sense of humor.

With the cell phone to her ear, K. laughed and I said, “What, WHAT?!” Then she told me the ideas and I said, “PERFECT!”

She wasn’t sold on the eyeball lie, not sure if she could pull it off. She decided to lie that she had a tattoo. (Sorry, dear wife, this is not such a big scandal anymore.) To this day, she regrets she didn’t go with eyeball transplant.

We got to the Marriott and suffered through a Hotel Dinner. I think there is an inside conspiracy by hotel employees to keep all hotel restaurants out of the Zagat’s Guide. Then my boss turned the agenda over to my colleague Barry, who usually rescues us from the ennui of an evening with a game that – were it unattended to – would certainly be filled by my boss’s reminder of where we are or aren’t, financially speaking, that has a lot to do with my department’s performance, all this said in front of my dear wife, whose nuptial loyalty I realize is not dependent on her husband’s performance at work but whose confidence nonetheless I wished to encourage if not by increasing revenue through my department then by lying incredibly good about being a contortionist.

We each wrote down our truths and lies on paper, and Barry read them aloud. He’s the kind of man who could read from the phone book and make people laugh.

It came my turn and people started to vote. My truths were (1) getting mugged for candy as a boy (I lived in New York City – this is standard fare), and (2) singing at Lincoln Center (I was part of a boy’s choir at school).

Several of my colleagues actually thought I had worked as a contortionist. I have no idea whether this should be interpreted as a sign of respect or suspicion.

Thirty minutes later, all of us waiting for the Zagat-banned Hotel Dinner to end, my boss was on a long riff about how income in my area was down halfway through our fiscal year (we ended up in the black, Dear Reader). This, in front of my colleagues and my wife.

A bit like a mugging, a bit like getting kicked squarely into soprano territory, and a bit like getting my right shin stuck behind my left ear with the whole table looking on.

Somebody please get the tip.

through other eyes

2007-04-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

The young man climbed the sticky steps of the Manhattan subway station exiting at 86th Street and Lexington.

Recent rain on a summer day had dried too quickly and not cleaned the concrete of half-dried soda, food, spit and slime, and the young man stepped with his head down, moving with the Sunday morning crowd, one of many, not a separate individual so much as a piece of a whole.

“Twenty-five cents for a meal!” shouted a voice at the top of the stairs where the exterior light met the dank of the subway tunnel. The voice had a Deep South accent, gravelly, older, black. Directed at everyone: “Ah fought in the wah faw yuh!”

The young man raised his eyes and saw a man in a filthy dark grey suit. Soiled tie. Silver beard. Yellowed teeth.

“You want breakfast?” the younger man asked.

“Oh. OH! Yes!”

“C’mon.”

They walked together to a diner a few steps away and, entering, asked for a table for two. The host looked over the grey suit and hesitated for just a moment. The young man eyed him.

Seated, they were given menus.

They ordered and soon the older man was presented with eggs, home fries and biscuits. He exclaimed, “Thank you, Jesus!” and started in.

They ate in silence for a while. The older man made grumbling noises while he stuffed the scrambled eggs in his mouth.

At once: “Hallelujah, Hallelujah, HALLELUJAH!” the man shouted to noone in particular, bits of half-chewed egg flying across the table. Other diners looked their way.

The younger man learned that his dining companion lived in a shelter in Harlem five days a week but was turned out each weekend. The older man had been begging for money to stay somewhere that night. He claimed he had a daughter who lived some distance away who wasn’t in a position to help financially. He had no family in New York City.

The bill was paid and they left the restaurant. They said goodbye, and the young man continued on to his church, where he arrived late for the service.

And didn’t care.

photo: haqit

Stirred, not Shaken

2007-04-05T06:45:00.000-04:00

Out at Fire Island, where my parents had a beach house, we all rode bicycles.

Robert Moses, arguably the most influential man in New York in the 1930s, moreso even than the governor, tried his best to get roads running along what would have been the remains of sandy white beaches, fortunately to no avail.

Here’s where Fire Island is, for those of you reading in Korea, South Africa, and Canada (among other places where Surfcountry readers are): http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Fire+Island,+NY&layer=&amp;amp;amp;ie=UTF8&z=12&ll=40.669442,-73.126717&spn=0.106245,0.226936&om=1 .

Between Ocean Beach, the commercial center of Fire Island, and Cherry Grove, the Corinth and West Village of the island, lies a small community of folks who escape Wall Street and Madison Avenue each Friday afternoon, take the Long Island Railroad – or drive from Greenwich, Connecticut – and hop the private ferry that goes to the private dock, and they enter a place that has been private and relatively unchanged for a decade of decades. We would go there for the month of July and, once we owned instead of rented, we went there weekends during April, May, September and October. Some of my best friendships were developed there.

There is a small church there, and ministers on summer break come for one, two or even three weeks and preach between the final Sunday of June and Labor Day. In return, they get to stay free in the Minister’s Cottage, enjoy the beautiful white sand beach, and attend all the best cocktail parties thrown by Wall Street executives.

I remember years ago one minister in particular, a man I was very influenced by and liked very much. I was in college, and was considering the ministry myself, and I asked him why he didn’t give a more clear call for people to follow God. He said that he had to balance his message so that he would get asked back the following summer.

I still don’t know whether this was cowardice or wisdom.

Today is Maundy Thursday.

photo: scataudo

Karen always liked the "big cats" on Discovery

2007-04-04T21:21:00.000-04:00

Oreo is going to school tomorrow.

Oreo is our 2-year old, black-and-white cat, which we gave to Bennett for his 6th birthday last fall. We adopted him from a woman in Newton who was moving in with her mother and couldn’t keep him any longer. The lovely K. transported him from the transfer point at the Burlington Mall parking lot to our home in a rickety cat carrier in our minivan. Word was that he howled the entire way. Standard for cats. Got him home and let him out in the living room and Bennett’s eyes about jumped out of his head.

He was stoked.

Oreo – Bennett’s name for a black and white animal named after his favorite black and white dessert and renamed from the cat’s former moniker of “Figaro” – spent the first two weeks of his life with us under the living room couch. This did not sit well with Bennett, who must have decided that a video game or dinosaur puzzle, which does not tend to hide or scratch when petted, would have been somewhat of a better birthday present.

Yet all ended well. Oreo and Bennett became fast friends. So fast that Bennett wants the cat to come to his kindergarten classroom tomorrow for “Show and Share.” K. needs to buy a new cat carrier tomorrow prior to going over to Bennett’s school. She wanted a cage open on all sides. I pictured a creature having nowhere to hide in a wire box exposed in a room full of screaming children missing their front teeth. It was not a pretty sight in my mind. I decided to eat a yogurt.

Will Oreo howl the whole time?

Will he pee in his cage? Will he pee outside his cage?

Will my middle son repeat kindergarten because the teacher is angry with my wife for bringing a pee-ing, howling feline into a class of already wild 5- and 6-year old little people?

These are indeed burning questions. We shall see.

photo: ftibor

word

2007-04-02T23:03:00.000-04:00

[WARNING: This post contains graphics examples of promotion of the new book Lullabye but contains no YouTube videos. The one nut in this post is relatively uncontained.]

I was feeling writer’s block, so the lovely K. suggested I write about writing.

OK.

So I am trying to get the word spread about my book coming out and decided to scope out various blogs where I might post an innocuous word or two in the Comments section, like on a site for cooking rutabagas and how I know nothing about rutabagas – in fact, truth be told, Dear Reader, I have never eaten a rutabaga and would probably only do so if my dear father were still with us and cooked one up for me to eat when I was an adolescent and threatened that I could not have a Hostess Ding Dong for dessert unless I ate this turnip thing – but even though I know nothing about rutabagas, I might post a comment on the blog about them and say something like, “Gee, I never knew there were so many people interested in cooking rutabagas or even reading a blog about cooking rutabagas isn't that just lovely, so…um…please read my blog at http://surfcountry.blogspot.com/ where no rutabagas are featured and so that you can be innocently subjected to a shameless promotion about my book that’s coming out this spring.”

I find these blogs on cooking rutabagas, or fly fishing for rainbow trout in northern Maine, or fixing the septic system on recreational vehicles, and I basically go anywhere where people have two eyes, a functioning brain, and approximately $13.95 or so plus shipping and handling in their checking account, in addition to whatever they need for their mortgage this month, and I try to win them to this blog here.

This blog, which you are now reading.

Now reading, and have the power – the unbridled, democratic, fully global power – to spread the word to all your friends on your email list.

Oh. And another thing.

I was reviewing what blogs out there are getting the most page views. You know what gets the most views? I’ll tell you, Dear Reader. You will hang your head low or, if not, if instead you are piqued, I will be glad to send you the hyperlinks but rest assured I will tell your mother.

What gets the most views?

Blogs that show YouTube videos of Pamela Anderson Lee and another one showing a funny, white-coated man blending up unusual objects like annoying wind-up toys, which he apparently did on Leno and now everyone wants to see it for themselves. (Okay, it was kind of funny.) There was another one with a video of a 747 going off the end of a runway in Medellin, Colombia in 2004. Still being watched.

THIS is what people are really interested in seeing, or ostensibly “reading,” on blogs.

So if you want your voice to be heard, my friend, ringing across purple mountain majesties and above the fruited plain, that occasionally someone writes something that can bring a smile to your face that isn’t measured in bra sizes or burning fuselages, then tell your friends about Surfcountry, and tell them about Lullabye.

The alternative is airing a YouTube video here of my tradition of dressing up as a turkey on Thanksgiving morning and letting my sons hunt me with nerf guns.

So help me, I will go there.

photo: chris2k

Get a special pre-publication offer for "LULLABYE: Memories, Madness, and Midnight Snacks" by sending an email to lullaby.book@gmail.com.

...

Dear Reader:

2007-03-30T17:30:00.000-04:00

What Oscar-winning screenwriter recently called Lullabye "a slice of life masterpiece" and said, "You must read this book..."?

Add your email address to the list for a special pre-publication offer at lullaby.book@gmail.com.

And watch for future shameless promotions such as this one for the answer to the question above.

Where is Southern Star?

2007-03-27T18:03:00.000-04:00

Sitting in my room at the Hilton Garden Inn on Chestnut Street in downtown (uptown?) Chattanooga, doing email – kind of, as the Complimentary High Speed Internet Access goes in and out and becomes The Highly Infrequent and Often Inconvenient Internet Belch, and then the hotel-provided ethernet cable gets stuck in my laptop’s port because a piece of it is broken and it won’t come out even when I try to jimmie it out with the corner of my credit-card-room-key – and watching CNN, getting ready for “24” on FOX at 9 p.m. Eastern Time, 8 o’clock Central, because if you want a kick-ass show you better turn on FOX to watch government agents basically shred the Patriot Act in order to keep us safe from MiddleEasternChechnyanRussianChinese bastard slime bags… I watch Kirin Chetry ask some financial experts who are advising low-income viewers who get caught in mortgage schemes that promise jumbo mortgages on huge houses for the Average Joe and tell them to refinance in five years sure sure sure, and Kirin says, “Can the government monitor stupidity and ignorance, or not?”

She actually asks this. With a straight face.

Believe me.

OK. So maybe she just got too excited – she is, after all, admittedly, a cigarette smoker or at least used to be when she was on FOX News (now on CNN: defector!), and perhaps she hadn’t had a butt or maybe she’d had eleven too many – or maybe she was looking to ask a really probing, news-breaking, muck-raking, brilliant question to establish herself as a cable Sage, and what came out was…well, not exactly as she had planned it I'm sure.

I don’t know.

For a moment I felt sorry for her for asking such a question. It hung out there over the airwaves, and I waited for one of the financial advisor experts to kind of let out that little nose snicker we do when milk comes out that part of our body as kids at the dinner table when we’re stifling a guffaw. And then I was reminded that whatever pity I felt for her should be counter-balanced with understanding that there are six figures behind every stupid question of hers and a town car that brings her home after the show, probably to Great Neck, Long Island, or if she’s living in CNN’s Atlanta, then Alpharetta or Roswell, two places all the damned Yankees go when they move to the city that Sherman jacked up. And then I didn’t feel sorry.

More importantly, dinner was a bit of a hassle. I’d been steered by the good folks at the Hilton front desk to a “meat-and-three” restaurant called Southern Star (http://southernstarrestaurant.com/). (Readers will refer to my early 2006 entry on this style of southern cuisine, now archived, and you will have to buy it in a future book for a lot of money plus shipping and handling.) It was on Market Street just up the road on the left. So I drove my white Mercedes – yes, friends, Enterprise Rental Car upgraded me to this for $2 extra per day. I didn’t want it at first because it sends the wrong signals to my clients, or so I pleaded to them, but the alternative was a PT Cruiser, and I’d rather be in the Benz than in a Neon-engine American car that drives like an orange crate and, besides, the clients wouldn’t even see me drive up to their fourth floor offices the next morning.

I drove down Market Street and up Market Street…or up and then down. (I still don’t know which way is uptown, as the street numbers (4th Street, 5th Street, etc.) increase as you go south – I think this is intended to royally mess with us Yankees over the Civil War). I pulled over to ask a homeboy where Southern Star was. “Southern Star…?” I asked a bus driver. “Southern Star?” I asked pedestrians who turned out also to be tourists. (I should have known: they were wearing matching T-shirts.) I called the restaurant and the young man who answered tried to give me directions, but he couldn’t remember the cross street. He said, Yankee Boy, go back to Boston or at least move to Alpharetta. No, he didn’t really say that, but he thought it, I’m sure. I finally parked in the vicinity where I thought it was, and started to walk. I got to a corner where I thought it should be and called again. This time a woman answered who was not so exercised about the outcome of the Civil War, bless her soul, and she navigated me by phone to the front door. Reconciliation is so sweet.

I ordered sweet tea, smoked pork chops, cream corn, pinto beans and cole slaw. All good. The entrée and three sides were $8; the tea was $1.50. I was out of there with tax and tip for $13.

The Thousand-Yard Stare

2007-03-22T17:28:00.000-04:00

Rising at 4:30 a.m. to get the plane back to Boston was not difficult. I went to bed at eight after reading Les Mis for half an hour and told myself it really was 11 p.m., as I had had less than 36 hours to adjust to the time difference between Massachusetts and California. And as I closed my eyes and let myself drift, I told myself, I am really getting up at 7:30 tomorrow morning, almost like sleeping in, if you will.

I did wake up around 2 a.m. for a brief encounter with porcelain, routine, and then sleep was on and off until the alarm on my watch sounded.

A short Lenten devotional online. Thank God for bytes and bits. I packed my suitcase with Van Morrison and then a jazz band playing on Cinnamon Rainbows website. “Sold me out for a few shekels, then divided up my robes…they sold me out…” Ah, the essence of true Christian music. Music with soul, that has integrity and can be called art.

Downstairs, I asked a white guy at the front desk if there was a breakfast place open at that hour. It was about 5:15; my flight was at 7:30. He suggested a Denny’s in the direction of Anaheim; I told him I was flying out of Long Beach and was taking the 22 to the 405. (Why do they put the definite article in front of highways only in California? Others have wondered this; surely there is an answer. Wikipedia, the authoritative and unauthoritative source of most knowledge, doesn’t even have a reply other than to note its idiomatic usage.) He said, Oh, there’s a Denny’s down on the left before you hit the 22. On Harbor Boulevard. But not the Harbor Boulevard.

I walked to my car in yet more rain. This was two days in a row of precipitation, and the DJs on Go-Country 105 said that this constituted a “measurable rain event” for southern California. I love euphemisms and technical language; they make the mundane arcane. The DJs even laughed at the phrase. They had been playing appropriate “weather songs” like Garth Brooks’s “And the Thunder Rolls,” and Eddie Rabbit’s “I Love a Rainy Night.” They avoided George Strait’s “Clear Blue Skies.”

Denny’s would not be in my short list of restaurants were I to have more of a choice. In fact, I barely consider it a restaurant, because their food is barely considered food. It is to breakfast what a McDonald’s Big Mac is to dinner. Maybe one step up. Though arguable. I saw the sign and pulled across Harbor and around back of the restaurant into the lot. I was only the second car. Still raining, kinda hard in fact, so I dashed in after making sure the rental car’s headlights went off automatically after I locked the vehicle.

I was the only customer, and a man whose skin was deep brown-grey greeted me. For some stupid reason, I offered to sit at the counter (which had three spots), to save a table for someone else. There was no one else, nor would there be. It was freakin’ 5:20 in the morning. Sometimes my politeness and deference borders on the bizarrely oblivious. He sat me at a four-top. He looked Indian or Pakistani, black-grey hair combed back carefully over his scalp. Perhaps in reality he was highly educated and back home had been a math teacher or a civil engineer or prime minister. Here, he worked at Denny’s at 5:20 in the morning. I asked for coffee and orange juice. I read the frilly paper placemat which touted how Denny’s had scoured Latin America – “one of the premier locations for coffee beans: Columbia, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala” – for the best cup of coffee, so that “my second cup would taste as good as my first cup.” After I tasted my first cup, I felt they had some catching up to do for the second cup. I ordered country fried steak, with grits, scrambled eggs and wheat toast.

Two men came in, looking awfully transient-like. One used a crutch/cane and had a fisherman’s cap on. The other had on a soaked, blue football jersey with the name “Manning” in white block letters wearing off the shoulders. It hung on him like on a bent metal hanger. This man had two beaten plastic hospital bracelets on his right wrist. Had he both from one visit? Had he been out long from a first visit before landing back in for a second time? I knew his kind. Psych wards were filled with his type. I felt sorry for him. He had a week’s facial growth and blue eyes that pierced but did not focus.

My food came and I started to devour it, knowing I had a good 25-minute drive to the airport and had to gas up before I returned the car to Enterprise. There was a drop box for the key, and I could be on my way. Long Beach airport is small enough that I knew I wouldn’t have a long security line.

As I ate, I spotted to the left a large blonde woman with enormous breasts going behind the counter. She wore a red sweater, and her hair was dyed. She had a deep voice as if she really were a man – a transvestite or a transgender on a financial installment plan with a few months left to go. I could only see part of her profile. She addressed the prime minister and laughed, saying she had been a server there once.

They laughed and chatted, as Manning stared at the ceiling at the other end of the room and bit his fingernails, his bracelets frayed as though he had been discharged some time ago.

# # #

For more stories like the one above, remember to get on the mailing list for a pre-publication offer of Lullabye: Memories, Madness and Midnight Snacks, due out in Spring 2007. Linda, a business owner in New York, wrote after reading it, “I just blew off three hours of work to read every single one of your essays. Many of them made me laugh, some of them made me cry...and I recognized slices of my own life in your writing as I'm sure others will too.”

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Coming Spring 2007

2007-03-17T20:34:00.000-04:00

LULLABYE
Memories, Madness, and Midnight Snacks

A collection of essays by Howard Freeman. To get on the mailing list for a pre-publication offer, send your email address to lullaby.book@gmail.com.

Going 100 m.p.h.

2007-02-04T13:34:00.000-05:00

The sheriff’s deputy put me in the back of his cruiser. I was surprised at how little leg room there was. It was fairly uncomfortable, and would have been all the more so had I been handcuffed like a criminal and forced to sit with my arms behind my back. I was kind of intrigued – this was my first time riding in a squad car.

We were on the way to Georgia Regional Hospital. Earlier, my friend from AA and church, Sherry, had assured me, Don’t worry, it will be all right. In her 40s, Sherry was a large woman whose aging Chevrolet would shudder violently as she wedged herself behind the steering wheel. She was collecting social security and disability, lived in public housing in Jonesboro, and seemed to always have something wrong with either her health or her washing machine. She had been married, and I seemed to recall that her husband was on death row or already had been executed by the state. One of the two. She had faith like a rock.

I didn’t know until later that Georgia Regional was touted as a rough place. I might be the institution’s token WASP patient. The hospital was probably 30 minutes or so from the private institution where I’d been the first time, not two weeks earlier. Apparently, there was no room for me there, so I was being transported.

The deputy was polite enough. I have no idea what we talked about. In this psychotic condition, no doubt I was talking him up about who-knows-what-all. I do recall asking him how fast he could go. He said 100. So as he sped up to indulge my curiosity, he grabbed a foot-long black metal flashlight that he flickered toward the drivers who were blocking our way in the fast lane. They moved to the right, and we zipped past them. I laughed. After a minute or less, he said we were going 103.

Once I got to GRH, I was deposited into the small waiting room, which probably sat no more than seven, and it must have been near midnight. I was offered some food – peanut butter & jelly sandwich, crackers, or something like that. Waiting there as well, I saw a guy who had sold Electrolux vacuum cleaners the year before with me. We exchanged stares, neither saying anything. Both of us must have wondered, “What does this mean?”

It came my turn to be interviewed and admitted, though I didn’t know that was the process. I thought this was all a test of where I would spend eternity. A gentle white woman in her 30s interviewed me, and I thought she was the devil, or at least one of his helpers, who was trying to catch me off guard. I fended her off by ignoring her questions or answering obliquely. A black woman, apparently the supervisor, came by and tried to coax me into answering. After she left, I started furiously signing the white woman’s papers with an “X” on the signature line, like – “This will show you, Devil!” The woman seemed flustered, and soon had finished with me.

But the process wasn't completed. The black supervisor had to take over and finish what her subordinate could not. She sat me down and told me with a smile that she was my Fairy Godmother. I believed her. Didn’t know that that’s what they looked like, but at long last I did. She told me that this place was the end of the line. If I didn’t cooperate, they’d have no choice but to commit me to… and she named some other place, and all I knew was that I didn’t want to go there.

I apparently signed the necessary papers and was escorted through the brisk early March air across a courtyard and then into a locked brick building. Down a hall, through a locked door, and into a common room, about 50 feet by 25 feet. It was well past midnight, and three black men were watching TV under fluorescent ceiling lights. It was quiet. And peaceful. The couches were arranged in an L-shape and covered in cheap plastic of pastel pink and blue. The coffee table was a worn wood laminate. The linoleum tile floors were clean but 1950s-era.

I looked at the men, one of whom was eating a sandwich, and they looked at me.

I announced seriously, “This sure doesn’t look like heaven.”

The man eating the sandwich choked as he spewed part of it out laughing.

I sat down and we talked.

Priced to move

2006-05-01T20:10:00.000-04:00

Yard sales can be lots of fun, but you shouldn’t put a fundraiser in charge of pricing.

More to the point, you shouldn’t put someone who enjoys giving away money (as I do) in charge of determining how much money comes in from the aggressive sale of everything from ladies’ skirts to old vegetable steamers (yes, one actually sold).

One spring day, our family was a Selling Machine. We teamed with our next-door neighbor on Linden Street in Hamilton and had a two-home yard sale from 8 a.m. to 12 Noon. It was a Saturday, and the weather was a little better than forecast: mixture of clouds and sun with a high in the low 50s. We hadn’t planned far in advance; our neighbor told us about five days prior that she was doing one, and we decided to join in.

What with my growing up in New York City, families didn’t do yard sales. The closest thing to this suburban ritual in the City is a drug-crazed transient with an old blanket on a street corner, selling various items, one of which looks strangely like a cable-knit sweater swiped from you while picnicking in Central Park six months earlier. (That happened to a friend of mine. I think she had some bargaining room.)

I, for one, was concerned about security, so instead of a cash box, we used fanny packs, and since we have three young sons, and since uniformity and parity are more important than pragmatism or reality, we had to borrow five fanny packs from various neighbors. Neon yellow poster board signs, meticulously written up by my architect wife, announced from surrounding telephone poles that we would be open for business.

We had been warned by friends that people show up early. Our first customer (about an hour before we opened) was – I learned later – a dealer. I was soon to discover that getting mugged in Central Park is a lot like getting mugged in your driveway, except in the latter case you’re a lot closer to your refrigerator and the bathroom.

Dear Reader, I had “priced things to move,” having been advised by these Same Friends to do so. What I didn’t know was what the market would pay for some of these things were they to be displayed in an antique store where the purveyor offered espresso and played Mozart over the Bose sound system. My wife, Karen, the Super Shopper of the family, was horrified beyond words – though she didn’t lack for the perfect words while communicating with me later – when she saw that I had priced some artwork at $2 (yes, Two, as in the integer following One). She reminded me, and anyone else who answered their phone later that afternoon and into the next day, that this was the same value I had affixed to the unused Child-Proof Toilet Seat Lock (“Yes, honey,” I retorted, “but it retailed for $8.00!”).

Infraction #2 came a little later, when three men Karen said later were no doubt shopping on behalf of a local second-hand store approached me to purchase the Peg Perego Prima Pappa high chair. This item my wife had spent at least 45 minutes the previous day scrubbing with bleach and cleaning the nooks of with a pipe cleaner. She had made a special sign, beautifully crafted, showing the original price of $185. (I think I will remember this original price longer than I will remember my birth year, if the number of times I heard it yesterday is any indication.) We had it priced at $30. The negotiator of the three men offered $20, and I took it. No comeback like, “Would you split the difference,” or, “Let me check with my wife; she knows about this chair,” or “Do you have a fast car? I just sold some artwork for $2 and need a getaway vehicle...” Just accepted his bid.

When Karen and I exchanged words, my only comeback - as Store Manager - was, “No fighting on the sales floor,” knowing that my performance evaluation was soon to come and no merit pay increase would I enjoy by the Board of Directors, of which she is Chair.

Yet, despite it all, we had fun. Stuff I was sure would sell (my Donna Karan jacket and suit, or the Peg Perego stroller) were barely looked at. Stuff I was embarrassed to put out seemed to strike a fancy; id est, one ancient and slightly rusted vegetable steamer. Go figure.

The night before, the boys and I guessed how much we would make. I said $150; Carter (age 7) said $200, Bennett (5) said, “a thousand and 88 dollars.” We made a little over $400.

Our customers were all looking for a bargain, and I guess I was in their mood.

*******

This was a Readers' Choice reprint. For this essay and others like it, watch this Spring (2007) for "LULLABYE: Memories, Madness, and Midnight Snacks" by Howard Freeman. Get on the pre-publication offer mailing list at lullaby.book@gmail.com. Ten (10) percent of the profits are being donated to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.