Somewhere on the masthead

An October Moment...

2009-10-18T23:57:00.002-05:00

(On the off-chance you're not familiar with October Moments by now, go here first...)

Old Sam was a nice man. Like so many of the men I knew during my life in New Hampshire, Sam was a big fellow, predisposed to wearing plaid work shirts and large, roomy overalls. When he walked into a room, the very floorboards creaked under his weight.

Often, the creaking floor was the only notice you had of Sam’s arrival. There were two kinds of men in our town: the merry, hail-well-met types who were given to storytelling and to shouting hellos across the town green; and the quiet types for whom conversation seemed almost painful. When they spoke at all, their vocabulary was limited to just a handful of words: Ayuh, nope, welp, and mebbe. Sam was this type of man.

At least, he was whenever he came to the post office, which is where I could be found most summer afternoons, helping my aunt Barbara, the village postmaster. Sam would lumber on in, give Barbara a jowly smile and a nod, then give me a quick wink or sketch a jaunty salute, and you knew instantly that he was a nice guy.

But like everyone in our town, he had his eccentricities. From my view of Sam through the post-office window boxes, they amounted to two things. First, he studiously read all of his junk mail. He’d stand right over the trash basket by the door and slowly, carefully open each colorful envelope, examine each shrill piece of marketing entreating him to join this book club or give to that charity. Then, one by one, he’d drop the pieces of paper into the basket. Then he’d look up. “Welp,” he’d say to us by way of farewell, then walk out the door.

The other eccentric thing he did was the thing with the keys.

Sam kept a fairly large ring of keys in the pocket of his overalls. I think it was a legal requirement for residency in our town, that every man over a certain age had to lug around this massive ring containing the keys to every car, truck, tractor, front door, and padlock that he ever owned in his entire life, even if those locks had long since rusted away to nothing. They made quite a jangle, now I’ll tell you. At town meeting, when all these men in their droopy overalls came into the hall, it sounded like a chain gang in the middle of a mass breakout.

Sam’s keys were curiously resistant to jingling, though, at least when he walked. But when he was at the post office, you could hear them. He’d take them out of his pocket and jangle them idly in his hand while he waited for Barbara to hand him his letters (he had long ago forgotten the combination to his mailbox), then put them back in his pocket to begin his careful examination of his junk mail.

But if another customer was in front of him and he had to wait long enough, Sam would stop jangling his keys and slowly shake out one particularly long, old-fashioned looking key. Then he’d carefully, deliberately stick that key--the whole shaft, as long as your middle finger--in his ear.

Whenever this happened, I always stopped what I was doing to watch him. You would have too. It is not physically possible to stick a three-inch long key in your ear--I speak from painful, experimental experience here. But Sam would not just manage to get the whole key shaft in his ear. Once he got it in position, he’d start twisting it this way and that, like he was trying to crank the starter on a cold engine. In fact, that’s how aunt Barbara and I referred to Sam’s strange habit. As he’d stand there in the post office lobby, cranking away, head quivering slightly, eyelids fluttering in some kind of strange ecstasy, Barbara would hiss to me, “Old Sam’s trying to start his brains up again!”

When you live in a small town, no one has his own unique story. Really, you all become part of the same big story, each person a supporting character in the lives of others. When I was young and stupid, I thought old Sam was just this guy I saw sometimes in the summer and would never have any real relation to, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Sam had been friends with my grandfather, had known my Dad, man and boy. His wife Edna had been Dad’s first schoolteacher, a claim many older residents in town still make today. When Sam died sometime in the late 1980s (of a heart attack, I think, but am not sure. At least, it wasn’t from any kind of key-induced brain trauma, in case you were wondering), Edna couldn’t keep up the old farm out at Four Corners and so she decamped for the southwest, to live with one of her daughters. And when she did, my parents bought her house.

It was an old Cape-style house, with massive axe-hewn cedar beams notched with the initials of the housewright who framed the place. He had also notched a date on one of the beams: 1740. The frame was sound, as sturdy as the day it was put up, but my Dad had decided that just about everything else in the house had to be torn out and rebuilt. And I mean everything: walls, floors, plumbing, wiring, the whole magilla. I know because I tore most of it out.

I had recently moved back to New Hampshire after a bitterly unsuccessful attempt to find work as a magazine man. I was almost a year out of college and was bunked up with my Big Brother, in a cramped loft of an A-frame house my parents were renting until they found a house they wanted. When Dad came home very early in the spring of 1990 and told me he and Mom had bought Sam’s old house, it was my first real understanding of how the lives of others in this place were connected to mine in ways I had not fully appreciated before. I also understood that I was not going to get to sleep in a room of my own again unless somebody got busy over at Sam’s house and began clearing the way for a major remodel.

And so my days began to fall into a predictable and comfortable pattern. I would rise late in the morning after sleeping off the effects of my night job. I’d dress in my grubbiest clothes, fill a shopping bag with a stack of sandwiches, a large bag of chips and a 3-liter bottle of Coke, then head over to Sam’s house, pick a spot and start swinging my crowbar. I’d work til about 4, go home, shower all the dust and crap off me, then go off to my job.

It was a satisfying existence, although not without its minor inconveniences. One especially vexing concern, to my Dad anyway, was that we couldn’t find Sam’s keys. His widow didn’t have them, and she assured us they had not been buried with him--in fact, she was sure she'd left them somewhere in the house--but they were nowhere to be found. It wasn’t such a big deal when it came to the house proper--we were planning to tear out all the old doors and locks anyway. But in the barn and the back shed, there were a few nice old brass locks on some doors and hatches and Dad dearly wanted to salvage those locks. Of course, he also wanted to see what was behind those locked doors and hatches (and for the purpose of ending needless suspense, I’ll tell you what we ultimately found: old hay, some firewood, a few rat skeletons, and one very startled raccoon). Days passed, no keys turned up, and we just kept on working.

A little more than a month after we began work on the house, I found myself in the narrow, low-ceilinged space of an upstairs bedroom. We were planning to cut through the roof and build out a dormer, so I need to clear out most of the plaster wall and framing on one side. I tended to work alone, banging away with my sledge and crowbar, my earphones clamped firmly to my head, my favorite music blasting away. So I just about crapped myself one day when I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. I squawked and jumped and turned, crowbar at the ready.

But it was just my Dad. “Better check your swing, Mister Man,” he said, laughing.

It was just shy of lunchtime, too early for my Dad to be here. “Why aren’t you at work down at the plant?” I asked as I took off my headset.

“Pipe fitters are on strike,” Dad said. He was a union man through and through and wouldn’t cross a picket line for love or money. “So you got another helper for today. Maybe even longer, if they don’t settle things.” He began inspecting my handiwork, noting where I’d have to saw something out, where we’d have to knock up a support beam to keep the other side of the roof from falling in while we built the dormer.

"And I want you to be real careful with these big boards in this closet wall right here," he was telling me. "Them are single sheets of pine, come from pine trees that ain’t around no more. I’m gonna woodwork them a bit and--"

He stopped talking and put his hand up. This was my Dad’s quick-quiet stance, which I knew from an entire youth of walking in the woods with him. The moment he heard a snap of twig or rustle of leaves, he’d freeze and put his hand up like this, and we’d listen. I always felt my pulse quicken at moments like these, half-expecting a large, child-eating bear to come crashing through the bushes at any moment.

But this time, there were no twigs to snap, no leaves to rustle. We stood there like statues for a long moment. Dust and plaster hung suspended in the weak sunlight, the stillness of the old house a palpable thing.

And then we heard it. The distinct sound of heavy feet lumbering across the floor downstairs.

Errrrrrrnk. Errrrrrrrnk. Orrrrnnnnnnk. Arrrrrrrnk.

Dad took his finger from his lips and pointed to the crowbar in my hand. Wordlessly, I handed it to him. He gripped it tight, his face hardening. Dad was always on the lookout for burglars and prowlers and people who might be generally out to Get His Stuff. He had a lot of expensive power tools stowed in the cupboard of the old pantry near the front door, too. They’d be real easy to carry off.

Whoever was downstairs, it sounded like he’d entered through the front door and was creeping slowly through the room that was just below us. But in the silence of the house, it sounded like he was right there with us.

Errrrrrrnk. Errrrrrrrnk. Orrrrnnnnnnk. Arrrrrrrnk.

The footsteps continued for a few seconds more, then stopped. Right below us, they stopped. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe.

Then in one sudden motion, Dad dropped to the floor, elbows and knees and crowbar all slamming with a BANG that made me scream and would certainly have scared the bejesus out of anyone downstairs--the noise would have been directly over their heads. But we didn’t hear anyone shout or scream or call out. So my Dad yelled, in his very loudest voice. “WHO’S THERE, BY GORRY?!?”

If it had been a curious neighbor, they would surely have announced themselves. Had it been a prowler, we’d have heard the shuffling of feet as they got the hell out.

Instead, we heard nothing.

Dad was up off the floor, crowbar in the head-bashing position. “You look out, see if you see anyone,” he said, pointing to the dusty, cracked window set into the wall behind me. I did this while Dad scuttled to the ladder that would take him down. I peeked out the window—nothing but trees and a glimmer of wet tarmac out on the road beyond. Dad had clambered a few steps down the ladder, then stopped dead.

He called my name. “Come here a minute, will ya?” he asked, the let’s-kick-some-ass tone gone out of his voice.

As I walked over to where the ladder was, Dad was peering down below at something I couldn’t see. He was shaking his head. “We must be the stupidest sons-of-bitches alive, ol’ fella,” he said, laughing.

“Why?” I said.

He just laughed some more. “We heard someone creaking around on the floor downstairs, right?” I nodded. I was almost to the ladder now.

“Well, sir, then you tell me: How the hell could they do that when there IS no floor downstairs?” he asked.

I didn’t even have to come down the ladder to realize what he was saying. He was right, of course: We discovered early on that almost the entire downstairs floor of the place was dangerously rotted. Consequently, we had to tear out most of the floor first, leaving us with just a couple of narrow cedar beams as walkways over the pit of the old cellar. As I stood at the top of the ladder (it was a long one, extending all the way to the cellar floor), I surveyed the open area below, trying to see what could possibly have made that distinctive foot-on-floorboards sound we’d heard. But all that was down there was a lattice work of cedar beams and a couple of gravity-defying walls off in one corner that had hung onto the ceiling supports even after we tore the floor out from under them. Everything below this was stone and dirt from the cellar far below.

“Well, Mister Man,” Dad said, “If you can find a floorboard to creak down here, you’re a smarter fella than me. You ever heard anything like this going on here before?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head vigorously. Although of course, I usually wore my headphones and listened to my Walkman, or made so much noise with a saw or crowbar that I wouldn’t have heard anything, I realized a little sickly. Now granted, I was in my early 20s by this time, my years growing up in a haunted farmhouse already a fact of my life. But it had been a while since anything quite like this had happened to me. I was a little shook up.

So I did what I always do when I’m shook up; I made a joke out of it. “Must be old Sam walking around,” I said, hazarding a weak chuckle.

Dad liked this. “Ayuh! Ol’ fella come to check on our progress.” He took a breath, then bellowed. “Sam, hope you like what we done with the place! We’ll be starting on the barn next, soon as I find your goddamn keys!”

As soon as he said this, my Dad got a kind of shocked, startled look, as if he’d just remembered something. He hustled down the ladder and hopped to a floor beam that was immediately below. I started down the ladder myself, then stopped to watch as Dad edged along the floor beam until he was in the room that was right below where we had been standing, the room where we had heard someone walking on the floor that wasn’t there anymore. Along the outside wall of this room, two radiators sat on either side of the window. We hadn’t torn these out yet, so they just hung there, suspended by the strong pipes that came up from the furnace in the cellar. Dad hopped from the beam to the window and was now hanging by the sill to inspect the radiator.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“These are old radiators,” he said, staring closely at the one in front if him. “Hot-water heating. You know what you have to do every season when you turn the furnace on?”

I did. “Bleed the air out of the pipes?”

“Ayuh. And what do you need to open the radiator air valve?” He had his hand on the radiator now and was pulling on it.

I knew the answer, and by now you probably do too. “You need a special key,” I said.

But Dad didn’t hear my answer because he was too busy whooping. The moment he pulled the radiator out away from the wall, there was a loud jingle and the massive ring of keys (no doubt they had been set atop the radiator by Sam's wife and fell down the back) plummeted through the space where the floor should have been and landed in the dirt of the cellar. With a cackle, Dad let go of the window sill and dropped down to join them. He stood up and shook them at me triumphantly.

“Knew they had to be here somewheres,” he said. “Shoulda thought of the radiators. Guess I oughtta thank old Sam for jump-starting my brains for me.”

Dad got the locks open that afternoon. And I continued to work at the house almost every day for the next six months. Always with my headphones off.

But I never heard the floors creak again.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which We Find the Path...

2009-09-30T23:25:00.006-05:00

May 1976:

I am not quite to the part of our street where the tar ends and the dirt road begins, but I can see it. It’s far, but not too far. I crank a little harder. My old green Schwinn shakes and rattles and sounds like it’s going to tear itself apart as I speed up. The dirt road is getting closer.

Then, even above the sound of my old bike, I hear my Dad’s truck. He makes a wide arc around me, but in passing he still manages to spray me with dirt and bits of gravel. I jam on the brakes and the bike skids sideways to a halt. Dad jumps out and stares at me for a moment.

“You supposed to be riding out this far?” he asks. It’s a rhetorical question, so I don’t answer. I get off the bike and wheel it over to the truck. It’s a heavy bike, but Dad effortlessly picks it up by the frame and shot-puts it over the tailgate. I open the door and climb up into the passenger seat. Dad puts the truck in gear and we roll down the last stretch of road up to where the tar ends.

“You know where this is? This is the town line. It’s more than a mile from the house,” he says, reminding me what I already know: I’m not supposed to ride my bike any further than down to the neighbor’s or up to the bridge. The town line where the dirt road begins is way past the bridge.

“I know,” I say. “It’s what I was going for.”

“Why would you? Knowing you’re gonna catch hell from your mother?” he asks as he makes a u-turn and we head back.

I can’t answer him, not completely, not at the age of eight. I’m tired of riding up and down our little span of street, tired of my Big Brother jumping out from various hiding places, trying to knock me off the bike I’ve only
just learned to ride. I’m proud of this new skill, so hard-won; intoxicated by the sense of potential, of the things I can do with it. Every time I pedal out onto our road and hear the whirring of the tread on the tar, feel the wind in my face, I become aware of an immense possibility. I could go anywhere now, I think.

“Well?” Dad asks. He’s waiting for an answer.

“I just wanted to cross the town line,” I said.

Dad shakes his head. “Your come this way in the car four or five times a week! Why--?”

“Not on my own!” I cry. I’m not supposed to interrupt my Dad--it really riles him--but I can’t help it. I feel a sense of determination building in my head. This seems like an important point to me, but it’s beyond my power to articulate. “I just wanted to see how far I could get on my own,” I say finally, as we pull into the driveway. Mom is waiting on the steps; the look on her face is the look of a woman who just got the weather report, and it’s all storm clouds. I lose bicycling privileges for a week, and also have to bear up under the supplemental punishment of being smirked at by BB. It’s a few days before I realize that my Dad never yelled at me for interrupting him.

September 1976:

It’s quite an accident scene, if I say so myself. Viewed from overhead, it must look awesome: Here are the two cars of the old ladies who went this way off the camp road, and that way into the flower bed. There’s the truck of the guy who wasn’t looking, down in the ditch, its engine ticking and smoking lightly. There are the two big tire ruts from the truck, including the big swooshy one that went right over my old green bike. Oh, and here’s the best part: the big depression in the dirt right next to the bike, and the trail of blood from the depression, leading off and away.

Yeah, overhead it’s a pretty cool scene, but probably not so much from my Dad’s perspective. From his view, pulling up in the main entryway of the campground in Skowhegan, Maine, it must have been a little worrisome. Especially when he saw the distinctive battered green bike, this far down the hill from our campsite.

The manager of the campground is out in the middle of the road, trying to direct traffic. The guy in the truck is drunk and his axle is broken. He’ll need a tow truck. Old Lady #1 is already backing her car onto the road and getting the hell out of there. Old Lady #2 has left her car in the flower bed, and that really seems to have annoyed the manager. He’s calling for her, but she isn’t answering. She’s sitting next to me. In a second, so is my Dad.

“Knew if I followed the trail of blood I’d find you, by Gorry,” he says with a laugh. But he sounds shaky, like he’s just had a bad scare, which I know is impossible. Dad’s not afraid of anything.

“Got reflexes like a cat, this one,” the lady says, then tells Dad how the guy in the truck came through the main gate way too fast and started fishtailing in the dirt road, driving oncoming cars this way and that. I just remembered seeing a truck coming at me and knew I couldn’t turn the bike to avoid him--it was a heavy, cumbersome bike, a little too big for me to steer with any speed or grace. So I jumped, off the bike and to the side, landing in a hard patch of gravel that laid the underside of my arm raw like a big piece of sandpaper. The truck must have missed me by only a foot or two, but I never noticed. I was too busy staggering over to the campground swimming pool. My arm was studded with bits of dirt and whole actual stones, sunk right into the flesh. I needed to wash it off and see how bad the damage was. So I knelt down and dipped my arm in the public pool. The chlorine stung like a mother. Old Lady #2 came over to make sure I was alive, I guess, and keep me company while I picked small stones out of my arm. After pulling out one particularly deep stone, a small but persistent spray of blood started jetting out of my wrist and into the pool. At the lady’s urging, I pressed hard against the injury with my other hand, and that’s how my Dad found me.

“Look,” I say, nodding my head at the pool. It’s not a big pool and its color has gone from sea green to light pink. “Hey, it’s a pool of my own blood. Get it?” I laugh. I feel dizzy.

“Were you headed for the gate?” Dad asks as he pulls out a clean hankie from his back pocket and ties it--hard and tight--around my wrist.

I look around and wonder absently where the old lady went. Then I look at my Dad. “Yeah,” I answer. “It’s only two miles to town. I wanted to--"

“I know what you wanted,” he says as he helps me to my feet. The old lady is back in her car in the flower bed, gunning the engine. Dad walks me to his truck. Someone comes running over to us, wheeling my bike. It has been run over by a truck and still the damn thing works, not so much as a broken gear or bent rim.

“I hate that bike,” I mutter as Dad shot-puts it into the back. “I don’t care if I can’t ride it for a week.” Not that I’d want to, not with my arm bleeding and sore the way it is.

Dad hops in next to me and start up the truck. “Well, sir,” he says, “I’d be inclined to get you a new bike if I thought you’d ride where you’re told.” He doesn’t realize it at the time, but he’s just struck a deal with me.

April 1980:

“This way!” I gasp, making a sharp left off the main street and into the alley. My best friend Shawn follows me on his bike. Shawn is the tallest kid in our class but he has to crank hard to keep pace with me. This is because I am highly motivated: the Privat boys are right behind us, and if they catch me, I’m convinced they will pull my tongue from my head.

I fancy myself something of a boy detective most of the time, but right now all I am is a smart-ass on the run. The older Privat boy, Larry, is BB’s age and size. He and his younger (but not much smaller) brother Craig saw me and my friend in the park. I was wearing the Army utility belt that served as my Mobile Crime Lab and had taken out my magnifying glass and a piece of paper. Shawn and I were testing our survival skills, trying to start a fire by holding the glass in the sun, above the paper. You never knew when you might be on stake-out some cold night and needed a fire, you know?

Larry called over. “What are you two little fags doing with your faggy magnifying glass?”

“Why?” I called back before I could stop myself. “You want to borrow it so you can find your ding-dong?”

And so, to the bikes.

I was riding my faithful steed, my trusty, speedy Huffy Thunder Road racing bike, complete with authentic motorcycle hand-grips and battery-powered 8-channel CB radio (working range up to 25 feet!). My parents got it for me almost four years ago when we left Maine. I had behaved myself ever since, riding only within sight of the house and using my new bike mostly to jump makeshift ramps that BB set up in the driveway. Then we moved to Kansas, to a small town with big sidewalks and quiet, untrafficked streets. Gradually, BB and I were given the run of the town, so long as we didn’t ride out on the highway past the school, over the railroad tracks on either end of town, or past the Litch farm, where the town road disappeared into the vast sorghum fields. I stayed within those limits, but made it my business to know every street, alley, and access road in town.

Halfway up the alley, I hook a sharp left and hope Shawn is keeping up. Then I veer right, across an old embedded track from when they used to back box cars up to the back of the feed store. Now we’re in a dark alleyway lined by vine-covered fences on either side. “Where--?” Shawn asks, huffing behind me. I brake hard, then turn the bike left and duck under an ivy overhang. We’re on a very narrow sidewalk running between two tall buildings. Elbows and knees brushing brick on either side, we glide along the cool dark space and emerge two blocks from where we first turned. The Privat brothers are nowhere in sight.

Shawn is impressed, and that takes some doing. “Not bad,” he says. “Did you really know where you were going?”

“Yes,” I said simply. “Yes I do.”

October 1991:

It’s mid-month and still unseasonably warm in Chicago. I’m sitting out on a bench in front of my office building, eating a tomato and bologna sandwich which, at that time in my life, I considered the second-most delicious thing ever. The most delicious thing ever is walking toward me from the parking lot, where I just watched her pull in.

“Hi,” Her Lovely Self says, sitting down on the bench next to me. I can smell her perfume, and something else. The high sweet smell of oil, of a kind that puts me in mind of my Dad’s chainsaw. She arches her back, turns her face to the sun. “It’s beautiful out,” she says.

“Beautiful,” I echo, staring at her, bits of sandwich all but falling out of my mouth, I'm that pathetic. Then I catch myself and before she can see me gazing at her with such adulation, I direct my eyes down at the ground. At her shoes in fact: a pair of off-white flats. One of them has some kind of dark scuff mark along the top. The mark looks like--

“Can I have your nuts?” she asks. I look up, startled and strangely hopeful, then see her pointing to the bag of cashews sitting nearby. “Thanks,” she says as I hand them over. “I didn’t have time to eat lunch today. Had some birthday money burning a hole in my pocket.” I nod. Her birthday was last weekend. She went out partying with her roommates and her current boyfriend, some ding-dong she met on a bus to a Cubs game. This guy seems to have locked up all of her free time, time I wouldn’t mind sharing with this vision of loveliness. But I need an in, some way to--

Then it hits me. The smell: chain oil. The scuff on her shoe: a tread mark. No time to buy lunch because she was out looking at something to spend her birthday money on. She’s buying a bicycle, I think. God bless you, boy detective, wherever you are.

“I hear it’s going to be warm all weekend. What are you gonna do?” she asks.

“Oh,” I say nonchalantly. “I’m going to take my new bike for a spin, maybe ride up the Skokie Trail--"

“Did you just get a bike?” she says, genuinely enthused. “I was just shopping for one!”

“No way!” I cry, giving her a what-are-the-odds look, even as I’m wondering where I’m going to find the money--today--to buy the bike I just told her I owned. Except...I can’t quite find it in me to beat myself up for lying. Because in that moment, I realize that I’m telling a kind of truth. “I love my bicycle,” I say. “Ever since my old Huffy rusted to bits, I’ve wanted a new bike. It’s how I find my way. When you’re on your bike, well, that’s when you really know where you are. You know?”

Her Lovely Self just stares at me. “You say some funny things sometimes,” she says, then pats me on my forearm, the one with all the scars and gravel divots. “But that’s okay. I’ll pick you up Saturday morning. You can figure out how to put my new bike rack on the back of my car.” I smile and before I can stop myself, I tell her how happy I would be to get my hands on her rack.

August 2009:

I wake in the darkened room and for a minute, I don’t know where I am. Then I feel the tension headache pulsing behind my eyeball, feel the tightness in my shoulders, the pulse in my neck. I stare at the clock--it’s almost nine--and jump out of bed. Late! I think. I can’t be late for work!

Then I remember: It’s Saturday. My first week as editor-in-chief is over. I survived it. I didn’t end up in a pool of my own blood. I didn’t have to run and hide in an alley. No one took away my nuts in a baggie. The relief is palpable.

I throw on a t-shirt and shorts and stagger downstairs to the kitchen of my temporary living quarters. I make a cup of coffee and step outside. It’s already a warm day. Runners and moms with jogging strollers are making use of the walking trail just across the way. Someone told me the walking trail connects to a canal tow path, which in turn joins up with a rail-trail that gives you access to the entire city. I look over at the side of the building, to where my old bike sits, waiting. It could be my green Schwinn, my black Huffy, the mountain bike I bought in Chicago on impulse, and that impulse was love. It's my bike and it sits and waits, but not for long.

In a few minutes, helmet adjusted and water bottle filled, I’m slowly pedaling over to the walking trail. The headache is evaporating, the tension across my shoulders easing. I may have survived my first week on the job, but I still have a city to learn, boundaries to stretch. I see a sign pointing me to the dirt path along the canal, to the city, to the future. I coast along the tarmac walking trail, onto the road, and down the hill.

I am not quite to the part of the street where the tar ends and the dirt road begins, but I can see it. It’s far, but not too far.

I crank a little harder.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which We Shore Things Up...

2009-08-13T08:48:00.002-05:00

Just a couple days from starting my new job, and so I have officially Gone Insane, between wrapping up my last few freelance projects and fixing up all the many imperfections in the Magazine Mansion.

Not sure when I'll have time to post about my new doings, but I hate to leave you with nothing to read, so I thought I would put this up. I wrote it while I was in New Hampshire and although it feels like it should be a chapter from my book, I'm actually not quite sure where it fits in. It also touches on a story I posted long ago regarding the Easter Bunny, and while I've worked hard to write as much new material for the book as possible, the fact is I'm bound to include a few elements from old blog posts. When all is said and done, my hope is the book will be about 90 percent all new stuff, 10 percent material based in some part on stories told here. Anyway, hope it keeps you occupied for a little while. I call it:

Victory Lap

We called ourselves Catholic, but if anything I was half-Catholic. Whenever I mentioned this to Mom, she got mad, although for a full Catholic, she wasn’t exactly a model of piety. We almost never went to church on Sundays. It seemed like there were whole years when we didn’t go.

Then Mom put us in a Catholic school and I had religion class for the first time. It was my worst subject, right after penmanship. My teacher was a nun named Sister Augustina, who often took us down to the little chapel at the back of the school and drilled us in our prayers, but it had been so long between church visits for me, I didn’t know any of them. I didn’t even know Sunday service was called Mass. When Sister Augustina first mentioned going to Mass, I thought she was talking about driving down to my grandparents in Boston, which both my parents hated to do, Mom because she always got an earful from Grandma Horan about how her grandsons were growing up wild; Dad because it meant getting on a highway filled with crazy Massachusetts drivers.

One morning, Sister Augustina had been having us recite the Apostle’s Creed one by one, and caught me in the act of not knowing a thing about it. I told her I’d never heard it before, but it sure was nice. “You have to know the Creed,” she said, incredulous. “Don’t you go to Mass on the weekend?”

“Oh, hardly ever,” I said. “Mom says we wouldn’t go at all if Grandma and Papa didn’t call and make her feel bad about it. But once they die and we go to the funeral, she says we won’t have to go ever again. It drives Dad nuts. Every time we go, he complains about the mean people who flip him the bird. He keeps a little bottle in his jacket pocket and drinks from it the entire time. He says he needs it to get through the whole Christly ordeal.”

After that, it was pretty clear Sister Augustina and I were never going to be buddies, especially since she told my Mom what I said. Next Sunday, we started going to church again for a while, long enough that I learned all about the Creed, and a bunch of other stuff, like Communion, which my Big Brother was going to get to do that year. Sister Augustina said that when we got to go to Communion, we would actually be eating Jesus’s body (BB said it tasted just like bread, though). “But when it is your time, children, it will be up to me to decide who gets to share in this holy sacrament. Some of you may not be ready,” Sister said, looking right at me. I knew then that I was never going to get Communion. Not a half-Catholic like me.

I was half-Catholic because Dad was a whole other religion, a Methodist. He actually never went to church. On Sundays when Mom piled us in the car in our good shirts and best plaid slacks, Dad would head out to the garden to hoe. “Does being a Methodist mean you don’t ever go to church or believe in God?” I asked him one Sunday, after we got back and I’d changed into my grubby garden clothes.

“Hell, no,” he said, stopping to lean on his hoe and look out across the tilled acre. “I’m already at church, right here in my garden. And you know, I talk to God all the time, Jesus, too. Him and me, we’re old pals.” Well, that was true. Last summer, when Dad was putting on the addition on our house, the old wooden ladder broke under his feet and he dangled from the edge of the roof. Dad yelled Jesus’s name really loud then, and asked Him to bring the long stepladder, but Mom and BB got it instead.

My classmates told me that if you weren’t Catholic, you went to hell, and that scared me. I asked Mom if it was true that Dad would go to hell for being a Methodist. She thought about it for a long minute, then said, “No, but your father probably won’t get right into heaven. He’ll have to spend some time in Purgatory first.” Mom explained that Purgatory was where people like Dad would have to wait until their name was called. I imagined him sitting in a metal folding chair, reading old magazines and looking up at a clock. It sounded like being at the doctor’s.

Purgatory didn’t make sense to me. Hell either, for that matter. In religion class, Sister told us that God loved everyone, so I took that to mean everyone got to go to heaven. Certainly I was going. But how could I enjoy paradise knowing my Dad was stuck out in the waiting room? Dad would have to get a pass, I decided, if for no other reason than to satisfy the eternal happiness of me, a perfect child. Then that spring we learned in class about the meaning of Easter—that Jesus died for our sins so we could go to heaven--and I knew Dad would be okay. He was on a first-name basis with Him, after all. His pal Jesus would get him in somehow.

I always liked Easter, even before I knew why we celebrated it. For one thing, it made a nice break there at the end of winter. Depending on when Easter came, we sometimes still had a little snow on the ground, but some years, it was late enough and warm enough that we had already started work in the garden. Once the garden was planted, Dad got up at dawn to check on the seedlings and prowl for varmints. As a rule I didn’t get up early on weekends, Easter or not, but one year I made an exception. From Sister Augustina, I now knew that Jesus rose up into heaven on the first Easter Sunday, and I got it in my head that He did it again every year after that, like a victory lap. Naturally, I just knew it happened first thing in the morning, at sunrise.

That Easter, it was still all blue outside when I woke up. I threw on a coat and ran to the door, but Mom caught me and said I had to bring a Thermos of coffee out to Dad. The garden was on the wrong side of the house to catch the sun--or The Son--coming up. But I went, trying to look up in the sky the whole way.

“Ssst! Get down!” I heard my Dad whisper. I saw him over behind the pile of chicken manure and ran crouched over to him. He was kneeling on the cold wet ground, the shotgun already up on his shoulder. Beyond him, a faint row of little green seedlings sat, tiny and pale and vulnerable. A couple at the end were bent over where they’d been viciously nibbled and three or four on the other side were just gone, only a little green nub sticking out from where Dad had just planted them.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Thought I saw a woodchuck,” he muttered. He set the gun in his lap and I handed him the Thermos. He unscrewed the lid, pulled out his little bottle and poured the contents into it, then drank it. “So,” he said, scanning the woods along the edge of the garden. “Did the Easter Bunny come?” I had been so focused on coming out to see Jesus that I’d forgotten the other good thing about Easter. “I hope so,” I said. I had to get back in soon and check. Apart from anything else, BB would be up and if he saw my basket of eggs unattended, he’d be into it like a fox in a chocolate henhouse.

I turned back to the house apprehensively then, trying to look into the living room window from here, but it was too far. Also, the sun was rising up over the house now. I stared straight into the corona of glare that lit up the chimney. Dad said you shouldn’t look at the sun because you’d see spots for the rest of your life, but I figured it was my last chance to catch a glimpse of Jesus until next year.

Just then, right behind me, came a BAM! so loud my ears rang all day. I jumped about 20 feet and turned in time to see Dad sprinting around the manure pile, gun in one hand as he ran fast along the edge of the garden. Way off at the other end, I could see bushes moving. Dad had hit something but hadn’t killed it.

The shot brought Mom and BB out of the front door. BB was holding his Easter basket by the handle. He already had a little smeary chocolate beard on his face. “Was it the woodchucks?” he asked.

But just then, another BAM! ripped through the quiet morning. We turned and watched Dad as, with a distant cry of victory, he reached into the bushes and pulled up the body of the varmint who’d been at his new garden. It wasn’t a woodchuck. Dad lifted it up by its long ears.

“Suffering Jesus!” Mom cried.

BB dropped his basket, his chocolate-ringed mouth agape.

Dad was a short man with stubby legs and long arms and a round belly that spilled over the top of his jeans, but he looked so graceful that morning as the sun rose over the top of the house and the light hit him. He was smiling that big-bearded smile of his as he completed his lap around the garden, smoking shotgun in one hand, dead rabbit in the other. He ran right up to us, set the gun next to the Thermos and triumphantly shook the rabbit in the air. Mom just looked at him.

BB started crying. “Dad just shot the Easter Bunny!”

Well, of course it wasn’t. But the more I thought about it that day, the more the Easter Bunny troubled me. Well, the idea of him, anyway, which didn’t make any more sense to me than the idea of Purgatory. I knew he was real, of course, but the Easter Bunny just didn’t seem to fit in any way with the stuff Sister Augustina was telling us about Jesus the Risen Lord. An Easter Dove, or something that flew, well, that made sense. But an anthropomorphic bunny? Hiding colored eggs? How did that fit in with the Death and Resurrection of Christ?

When we got back to school after Easter break, our first class on Monday morning was English. But instead of reading a story or learning vocabulary words, our teacher asked us to get out a pencil and a sheet of paper and write a story about Easter. It could be about Jesus, about what our family did on Easter Sunday--anything. As I sat for a moment to collect my thoughts, I absently started doodling in the corner margin of my paper. Finally, I had my opening line: “Early Easter morning, Dad sat with his shotgun, aiming carefully at the furry little bunny that was eating in the garden.” But I never wrote it. Instead, I looked at what I had just doodled on the corner of the paper: It was a little sketch of an Easter egg, sitting not in an Easter basket, but in a little box full of hay. That box looks like a manger, I thought.

Then BAM! with the suddenness of a gunshot inside my head, the whole Easter Bunny puzzle resolved itself. I saw it clearly, instantly, and it all made sense! Sister Augustina had talked about divine inspiration--God pouring words into the heads of the guys who wrote the Bible--and I knew this had to be the same exact thing. I began writing as fast as I could, afraid I would forget it before I could get it all on paper. In the quiet of the room, my furious jottings were loud enough to attract attention. Classmates stopped, looked up from their monosyllabic nothings about egg hunts and Easter Mass, whispered, pointed, giggled.

My teacher got up, walked behind me, started reading over my shoulder. Ordinarily, this made me nervous and self-conscious, but I barely noticed her. When the bell rang for morning recess, she was still standing behind me. She called for the papers, but put a hand on my shoulder even as she did this. “You can stay and finish that, if you want,” she said, her voice all funny. “You can even take it home and hand it in tomorrow. Take your time.” Her name was Miss Seaver and she was the first teacher who ever encouraged me to write. She also gave me the two best pieces of advice you could ever give a writer: Stay and finish. Take your time. I took the story home and worked on it until bed time, then took my pen light and pad under the covers and kept writing. BB teased me from the top bunk. “What are you writing down there? Love letters to a girl?” I didn’t even look up from my paper. “Shut your damn mouth,” I said. “This is holy stuff.”

By first bell the next morning, it was finished, the information God had poured into my head the day before had made its way onto paper. The Almighty hadn’t supplied me with a title for my story, so I went with one inspired by the comic books I loved. I called it "The Secret Origin of The Easter Bunny." Miss Seaver handed back everyone else’s stories and had kids take turns reading theirs aloud in class, while she read through mine. Finally, when everyone else was done, she asked me to come up to the front of the class, handed me my story and had me read it. It was the first time a teacher had allowed me in front of a class since that time in first grade when I stood up and gave a monologue about bear poop. I cleared my throat a couple of times, then began to read:

Once upon a time, it was the first Christmas. “What?!?” you say? “An Easter story, beginning at Christmas?” Of course! Because that’s when the baby Jesus was born, after all. And he wasn’t the only one.

It was my doodle of the Easter egg in a manger that did it, see. Because when I thought about it, there was only one instance I knew for sure where Jesus interacted with animals at all, and that was in the stable in Bethlehem, so that’s where I started...

We all know how the Wise Men and the shepherds and all the other dirty animals came to look at the baby Jesus, right? Cows and birds and foxes and bears and deer all sat side by side, not eating each other because they all loved Jesus. And so did a special girl bunny. She couldn’t have kids. Like my great-aunt Pat, she had a kink in her pipes. So she hopped into the stable and had a look at Baby Jesus, and prayed for a miracle. And it happened! She suddenly was having a baby. But not a normal baby bunny, no! Instead, she laid a colored egg right there in the manger, and out of it hatched the Easter Bunny.

I went on from there. I worked in a story Dad had told me, how on farms, kids used to sneak into the barn at midnight on Christmas because, according to legend, all the cows and chickens gained the power of speech, just as they did on the first Christmas...

But because the Easter Bunny was actually born in the stable along with Jesus, he didn’t just get to talk at Christmas. He got to speak and think and walk and everything for his whole life, and that’s forever. So when he grew up, he started wearing clothes and carrying baskets and hiding colored eggs around people's houses so everyone would know how he was born and who made him that way. Then people would look at him and say, “How did a giant talking rabbit get in here? Jesus Christ!”

My story was six pages long and when I got to the end, I got a reaction I didn't expect: Miss Seaver started clapping, then the whole class joined in. Kids asked me where I heard that story, did I really make it up, I didn’t, did I? There was a lot of murmuring and nodding as though I had explained a lot of things for them.

People were still talking about it through morning recess and into the next class, which was religion. Sister Augustina was annoyed at the chatter in the little chapel and demanded to know what the hubbub was about. A girl named Maryann told Sister I had written the best Easter story ever and I fell right in love with her for saying that. But then Sister Augustina turned to me and asked me what my story was about.

I got as far as the Easter Bunny’s mom laying an egg by the baby Jesus' head when I got another reaction I didn’t expect. Sister Augustina got me by my sweater vest and hauled me straight over the top of the pew. For someone who was just complaining about noise in the chapel, she sure was making a lot of it herself.

“How dare you?” she screamed. “An Easter egg in the Manger? That is sacrilege!” As I would soon learn, a lot of priests and nuns were a little prickly about the whole Easter bunny thing. But Sister Augustina was more than prickly that morning, she was a whole porcupine. I tried to tell her about my moment of divine inspiration, but that just made her angrier. “I don’t want to hear another word! Easter rabbits in Bethlehem! It’s heresy. There IS no Easter bunny!” she cried. Maryann gasped. So did several other kids. One little girl started crying. Sister looked around, rattled. Then she turned back to me. I stared at her, wondering how she could say something like that. Everyone knew there was an Easter Bunny. Why he did what he did was a mystery--one I thought God had called me to solve--but he was real. No Easter Bunny? Please. She might as well have said there was no Santa Claus.

Sister Augustina left the class alone in the chapel, murmuring over this terrible lie the nun had told. She dragged me back to Miss Seaver, who tried to stand up for me, but that just got her in trouble, too. Next thing I knew, me, Miss Seaver, and my story were all sitting outside the principal’s office, up at the very top floor of the school. Sister Augustina shrieked and hollered from the other side of the door. Occasionally, she’d be interrupted by a deep, booming voice that was too low and froggy to understand, but I knew was the principal, Mother Mary. I had only seen her up close once when I was coming out of the library and she swooped past in her dark glasses and black dress and habit. She looked like the Angel of Death. It made me wish for my own mother Mary, and I started to sniffle a little.

“Don’t cry, now,” Miss Seaver said, patting me on the knee. “Everything will be fine. You musn’t let this discourage you. I thought it was a very creative story.” But then the booming voice called Miss Seaver’s name and her face went pale and I knew we were dead. She disappeared behind the door and then everyone’s voices got too low for me to hear, even with my ear pressed against the frosted glass. I jumped away quick as the door opened and Sister Augustina stepped out. She gave me a look that could have stripped paint, then stormed off back to the chapel, where the rest of my class was still waiting. A second later, Miss Seaver, still alive, leaned out the door and called me in. She gave me a quick wink and I felt my heart lift.

But Mother Mary crushed that. The Angel of Death was sitting silently, leafing through my story, a frown on her face. As I looked at that frown, I noticed she had a little gray mustache. Now that I thought about it, Sister Augustina did, too. I wondered if this meant anything, but then Mother Mary looked up, catching me in the act of staring at her mustache. I waited for her to open her mouth and pronounce my death in that deep voice of hers. I looked down at the spot on the carpet in her office where my body would fall.

“Did you really write this all yourself?” Mother Mary finally asked.

I was so expecting her to tell me to die that I just stood there staring, until Miss Seaver nudged me. “Yes, Mother Mary,” I squeaked. “I started it in class yesterday and Miss Seaver said I could finish it for homework.”

Mother Mary nodded, then took a breath and handed my story back to Miss Seaver. “Very interesting,” she said. “As a child, I myself wondered about the Easter Bunny. I am not quite sure he was part of the Holy Nativity, but you found a very imaginative way to tie the two together. When you are older, you will understand more fully the true nature of Christ’s Resurrection and the spirit of Easter. Sister Augustina will see to that.” Then Mother Mary made a face at me, her mustache peeling back to reveal a scary row of the straightest, whitest, falsest teeth ever. I didn’t realize until later that she was smiling. “That is all,” she said, nodding. I still couldn’t move. Miss Seaver had to grab my elbow and turn me out the door.

The bell rang then, signaling lunchtime recess. Miss Seaver nodded to me and I bolted down one floor to the cloakroom, where I found my lunchbox. Then I dashed out the back door to the fire escape that would take me down to the gymnasium where everyone ate.

I stopped on the fire escape and leaned over the railing, letting the cold spring air blow over me. The sun seemed extra bright after my escape from death. Birds were singing and everything. I stood there for a moment, looking down from my great height, first at the gymnasium, then at the playground beyond and finally to the greening hills and mountains off in the distance. I watched the children stream out from the doors below, then ran down the steps to join them. Even half-Catholic, I understood the spirit of Easter just fine.

So, there you go. And now here I go. More soon...

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which We Start at the Very Beginning...

2009-08-01T19:23:00.001-05:00

A wiser man than I once said that people don't read magazines for who they are, but for who they want to be. That in every magazine there is an inherent promise to grant a wish. Spend enough time with magazine editors and you will hear people talking about "the promise." What is the promise of this story? Have we got enough of the promise on the cover? The promise is that particular piece of verbiage that tells the reader not only what the story is about, but also what they can hope to have or become by reading it.

I got into magazines by virtue of a very different kind of promise. When I was a wee lad, I was a voracious reader. When I ran out of kids' books--The Great Brain, Encyclopedia Brown, even the musty old Hardy Boys books we had in the attic--I would read whatever my parents had on hand. Often as not, what they had was magazines, new and old, piled high in a big old wooden barrel in our living room. I got into the habit of reading to my mom while she did chores. I'd start with Woman's Day or Better Homes and Gardens. Some days, Mom did a lot of ironing and I'd dig deep into that barrel, reading to her from the musty vintage magazines she and Dad had accumulated over the years: Collier's and Holiday and many others. I always saved Reader's Digest and its humor departments for last. My mom loved those little nuggets. Oh, they made her laugh. "You know," she used to tell me. "Someone writes those for a living."

I pointed out that readers sent in the anecdotes for the Digest. "Yes," my mom countered, "but someone at the magazine polishes them up, makes them sound better, funnier. They get paid to play with words." It was a compelling promise, especially for me. I loved words. Picked them apart, played off them, strung different ones together to see how they looked on a page, or hear how they sounded spoken aloud. The idea that you could make a living doing this was an arresting one, even at the age of 10.

And now, here I am, 30 years later. After two decades of writing and editing, after playing with words for a variety of venues, some you've all heard of, some you haven't, I'm here: Seven months unemployed, scraping up enough freelance work to keep the lights on and the mortgage current. Whatever promise that compelled me as a child to choose this work seemed long since to have evaporated.

Or...maybe not:

I've just accepted a job to be editor-in-chief at one of the biggest magazines in the world--or at least it used to be.

Trust me, you've heard of it.

To be sure, the magazine is a shadow of its former self, and a bit of a fixer-upper (Incidentally, it also shares something very much in common with the day, time, and basic nature of this blog entry). My job is to restore it to its former glory, to dig it out from the bottom of the musty old barrel it's been in, to help it find its voice again. To be paid to play with words.

As opportunities go, this was one of the most unexpected of my life. The notion of running my own magazine--let alone this one--was a dream I had just about abandoned. Taking this challenge on may be my finest hour—or a total train wreck. Or, knowing me, probably a little bit of both.

Either way, I may be gone for a while--the "For Sale" sign goes up in front of the Magazine Mansion tomorrow. Even though I won't be in my new office until the middle of the month, I'm already deep into issue planning, as well as wrapping up the last of my freelance and, somehow, finishing my book proposal. Oh, and spackle and fresh paint. Lots of spackle and fresh paint.

But I'll be back. As I wrote in my very first entry, "this is my attempt to cope with it all." I thought I was talking about the business I was in, but I see now that I was really talking about my life. And this blog has become a very special part of it. So I'll continue to use it as another opportunity to work with words, in whatever way seems to suit me. That's my promise.

You're welcome, as always, to follow along.

Yours (Once Again),
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which I Stall for Time...

2009-07-29T12:07:00.003-05:00

Busy day/week/life here at the Magazine Mansion, and more going on than I can articulate. So instead of giving you any news about my planets-in-alignment opportunity, I thought I would cleverly distract you with another sample chapter from my book. A lot of folks wanted to see something about my mom, and I would say this fits the bill. It's not the funniest or sharpest piece of writing I've ever done, but of everything I've written in the past few months, it's the story I'm fondest of, probably because it's the closest I've ever come to capturing the kind of person my mother was when I was growing up.

Also, it has the added advantage of featuring a famous incident (at least in my family) involving my brother and the time Mom tried to put him on a diet.

Hope you like it:

Iron Mom

Whenever my mother plugged in the iron, my brother and I knew we had two choices: Get very quiet. Or get out of the house.

Mom said she did her best problem-solving behind the ironing board, and I guess that was true enough, because when she wasn’t behind that board, she was busy creating whole new problems, problems that never would have occurred to me to worry about if she hadn’t brought them up. She was forever drilling us on potentially life-threatening situations—what to do if we fell through the ice, or were buried alive, or had to escape from the car if it ever flipped over and caught fire. That was the only one that really bothered me, not because I couldn’t figure a way out, but because Mom said, “Whatever you do, run and don’t stop. Just leave me behind.” She might as well have said, “Stand by uselessly and watch me burn to death,” because that was the image that stuck in my head.

But it must have eased her mind in some way, because she did this for years, constantly surprising us with ever stranger and unlikelier scenarios, needling us for instant answers to see if our survival instinct was sufficiently honed. There I’d be, reading a comic book in the back seat of the car, minding my own business as we drove somewhere, when suddenly she’d say, “What would you do if there were burglars upstairs and you were trapped in the basement?”

BB would get all rigid next to me, like one of those pointer dogs that’s finally found a bird in the bushes. “Ooh, I know! Pull all the fuses so when they came down to check the power, I’d sneak out,” he’d say, then give me a satisfied nod as if to say, Beat that.

“Not bad,” Mom would reply. “But suppose you were tied up in the corner? Then what? You think about that for a minute. Now it’s your brother’s turn. MM? Put that down and listen. What would you do if you were trapped in the basement…”

I sighed hugely across her. “Ma, we don’t have a basement,” I said. It was true. All we had was a tiny little crawlspace under the house and I was never going down there.

“Don’t interrupt. Now, listen! What would you do if you were trapped in the basement and it started flooding?” I gave it the moment’s consideration I thought it warranted. Aside from having no basement, none of us could swim either.

"Well?" Mom demanded after half a second. "What would you do?"

“Drown,” I answered. Mom got angry at me for that.

When I was little it seemed like anger—not the need to think or solve problems--was what drove Mom to iron the most. And she could be mad for hours at a time. You only had to look at our clothes to tell this. Everything in our closets, all our school shirts and pants, our jeans, even our t-shirts and underwear, were all starchy-smelling and folded or creased like they had just come from the cleaners. Even though she ironed every day, Mom’s clothes hamper in the living room was almost always full. If she pressed her way through our clothes, she moved on to her own, then Dad’s last of all—construction workers didn’t have a lot of clothes that took well to ironing. When she put the hissing iron to the arms of Dad’s work shirts, even freshly laundered, you could smell the sweat coming off them.

She used to tell us that being a grown-up was more complicated than we ever appreciated, that every day she and Dad had new problems to solve. “But often as not, I’m the only one who wants to solve them!” she’d say mysteriously, her voice rising at the end of the sentence. Then she’d slam something down—a plate or a heavy book, maybe. If that wasn’t satisfying enough, she’d go rummage around in the kitchen cabinets, usually the lower ones, where she kept the big metal pots and pans and could get some good clanging noises out of them. But after a while of banging around in there, she’d come out to the living room, set up her board, plug in her old black-and-nickel plated Sunbeam, and set the dial way over to the side marked “Steam.”

Sometimes she would ask me to read one of her magazines to her, so I’d pick my way through the stories in Reader’s Digest (I liked the humor pieces. Mom was a big fan of the “Drama in Real Life” disaster stories). I’d have to look up occasionally to see what she was ironing, knowing that if she got to my clothes, it was time to go to the bathroom and forget to come back. For Mom, there was a very literal connection between what she was ironing and what she was thinking about, mad or not. When she was working the wrinkles out of your clothes, she was apt to start working some wrinkles out of you. If I was too slow to notice that she was pressing my slacks, I’d have to sit and get an earful about my smart mouth or some pointers on how to make my teachers like me better (these pointers nearly always seemed to involve me talking less and listening more).

Not long after he sent me to the hospital, Mom spent a lot of time ironing BB’s clothes, thinking about all the times he flew off the handle and thumped me, or talked too fast to be understood, or couldn’t settle down at night (for some reason, he kept having bad dreams about being buried alive or trapped under ice). After talking with Dad about it, Mom announced that BB was going to see a special doctor, a psychiatrist. “Oh, like Lucy in the Charlie Brown comics,” I said. “You pay her a nickel and she tells you your problems.”

Dad shook his head sadly. “This one’s gonna cost a lot more than a nickel,” he said.

He was right. The doctor told my parents that BB was hyperactive, which I could have told them for free. My brother never sat still. It was frustrating. You’d be playing Hot Wheels or building a block tower and he’d freak out if a car turned over or a block fell. Then he’d smash up the track and knock down the blocks and then thump me just because. The doctor gave him some medicine—it didn’t work, it made him more hyper than ever. Then he recommended a school in Manchester for kids with special problems--like being a spaz and hitting your brother all the time. On BB’s first day of school, the teacher complimented him on his neat appearance and his crisp, unwrinkled clothes. He got a little better about the spaz thing, too. The psychiatrist had told BB that when he started to get excited or found himself in a stressful situation, he needed to take a deep breath and focus on the problem, instead of just yelling or lashing out. And it worked: I discovered it often took me five or six good insults before I got BB mad enough to actually try to hit me.

But Mom wasn’t done fixing my brother yet. One afternoon, while ironing clothes she found stuffed in the back of BB’s closet, she suddenly said to him, “You don’t wear these clothes because they’re too tight. You’re too big, that’s your problem,” she told him. “I was husky like you when I was younger, but I started watching what I ate. You will too.” That was a great week, the week she started my brother on a diet. The best part was the night he came back from the kitchen with his third helping of chicken and rice and Mom, remembering that she was trying to slim my brother down, snatched his plate away and took it back to the kitchen. “She took my food!” he cried, looking across the table at me. “Now you know how it feels,” I said, stuffing my mouth with a big load of chicken. You wouldn’t think you could smile and chew at the same time, but you'd be wrong.

In the end, the crash diet didn’t work. For one thing, BB started getting up at night and sneaking food from the kitchen. And not just sneaking, but hiding it. One morning, I reached in my dresser drawer for a fresh pair of underpants and knew something was wrong when crumbs fell out of the crotch. I yelled for Mom as I always did when there was a problem with the laundry service. She took one look at the crumbs and began pulling all my crisp, neatly pressed underpants out of the top drawer and shaking them. Towards the back, chocolate chip cookies started falling out.

That’s when BB walked in from the bathroom. He took in the scene, then took a deep breath. He calmly turned to me and said, “So Mom finally found out where you were hiding the cookies, huh?” Even in my rage and indignation, I had to admire my brother’s self-control in that moment of crisis, but Mom still saw right through him. “How could you hide food in your brother’s underwear drawer?” she cried. BB glared at her for one whole second, then collapsed. “I had to!” he cried. “My drawers are already full!” After she made him put all the food back in the pantry, Mom punished BB by teaching him how to load the washer and dryer, starting with my Fruit-of-the-Looms. From then on, it was his job to bring the fresh clothes directly to the ironing hamper and keep it topped off.

A few times a month, we’d find Mom ironing stuff at the bottom of the basket and we knew she and Dad had probably had a big fight, usually over the checkbook, which Dad kept in a secret place and wouldn’t give her. Those times, Mom would get all the way down to the linen napkins that we only used at Thanksgiving, bed sheets for the guest room, and a stack of old cloth squares that had a curious combination of faded black and yellow stains and delicately embroidered initials. “What are those?” I once asked her, when I was 5 or 6, before I was old enough to know better than to talk to her when she had an iron in her hand.

“Handkerchiefs,” she’d say grimly, mashing the iron onto them. “Vintage linen and hand-stitched. They belonged to your great-grandpa. He was a smart man. Good with money. He left quite a bit to your grandmother. He died before you were born. But these old hankies are still good. Someone should get the use of them.” I don’t know who she thought that someone would be, but it wasn’t going to be me. Looking at those old stained hankies, it was only too easy to imagine that with one blow, you’d inhale whatever killed great-grandpa and die all sneezing and bloody. Anyway, I didn’t need a hanky. That’s what long sleeves were for.

Once, in late fall, when the weather turned cold, we came home from school to find the house exceptionally bright. It took us a minute to figure it out, but then we realized that all the windows were bare, although even out here in the breezeway they were all slightly steamed over. BB and I looked at each other, then he crept into the swirling mist coming from the living room while I stayed by the front door. He came back fast, his eyes wide. “The basket’s empty. Mom’s ironing all the curtains now,” he reported. We put our coats back on and played outside until Mom called us in for supper.

That was the day we found out that Dad had no job.

“Well, you’ve had no job before. You just went down to the union hall and got another one, right?” BB said to Dad, as we sat quietly at supper that night. The table had a stiff white tablecloth on it that I’d never seen before. Cloth napkins too. They were still warm and smelled slightly of hot steam.

“That’s true,” Dad said, nodding. He wasn’t looking at anyone, especially Mom. He was staring at his beer bottle, was in fact peeling the label from the bottle, letting bits fall onto his plate. “That’s true, but there isn’t a lot of new work happening in New Hampshire anymore.” He took a deep breath and kept not looking at Mom. “And we don’t have much in the bank right now, so if we want to keep on the way we are, I’m going to have to go sign on with one of the big construction companies doing work up in Maine. Or Canada, maybe. What would you do if we moved there?” he asked.

“Canada?!?” BB cried, looking to Mom, I guess to see if this was another of her disaster scenarios. But Mom just stared down at the tablecloth, smoothing a crease over and over with her hand.

“But what about going up to Springfield? Finishing the cabin and living up on the Hill?” I asked.

Dad looked up then. “Hill’s not going anywhere. We’ll always, always have that. And you know that’ll always be home, no matter where we end up living. It’s just, if I want to make money, I have to go where the work is. And there’s none left for me here in New Hampshire. Believe me, I’ve looked.” Mom got up then, her supper unfinished. She started to go toward the living room and the ironing board that was still set up, the iron still sitting on it. Halfway between the dining room and the living room, she stopped. I could see the hamper was empty. She’d ironed everything in the house, except the clothes on our backs. She walked over to the board, picked up the iron and for a second I thought she was just going to start running the iron across the empty board, which I knew meant she’d finally had the nervous breakdown she’d been swearing we’d drive her to all these years. But she didn’t. Or if she did, it was an unsatisfyingly quiet one, because she just flipped the board closed—one-handed, like the pro ironer she was. Then, holding the iron in both hands, she wordlessly took it into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

The next morning, it was like nothing unusual had happened. Dad was already gone when we got up for school and Mom seemed fine, if quiet, as she gave us our lunchboxes and herded us out the door to catch our ride. But when we got home that afternoon, things were different again. Not different like Mom had ripped the curtains off the windows, but still, different. For one thing, there were a few dishes in the sink—Mom never let a dish or glass or dirty fork sit for more than 12 seconds in her sink. For another thing, Mom wasn’t ironing.

But she was at the ironing board. Only instead of leaning over a shirt or a pair of slacks or my great-grandpa’s hankies, she had stacks of envelopes and papers spread out all over the board. In one hand, she held a pencil, which she gently tapped on the board. In the other hand, she held a rectangular object I didn’t recognize at first. It was the checkbook. She stared at it, then scribbled something on the sheet of paper in front of her. Then she picked up an envelope, peeked inside, and started writing something else down.

“Oh, you’re home already,” she said, finally noticing us and, apparently, the time. “Well, your father said to say goodbye. He got a call from a work friend and had to leave for Maine right away. He’ll call us tonight, and if he gets the job, he’ll stay up there and come home on weekends, I think.” She looked back down at the checkbook. “I’ll start supper in a minute, but I have to finish something here, so you two can help out.” She pointed at me with the pencil. “There’s some dishes in the sink that you can wash and put away. And BB, go get the laundry out of the dryer. It’s just yours and your brother’s clothes, so please put them away in the right drawers.”

As I walked back to the kitchen and got the step-stool so I could reach the sink, I heard BB say, “You don’t want them in the ironing basket first?”

“No,” Mom said in a calm but faraway voice that made it clear her attention was on the checkbook. “Just fold them and put them away.” As BB went out to the laundry room, I got the dish soap out from under the sink, then climbed up on the stool and turned on the hot water.

Not long after that, I had a dream that we were in the car, all of us. Mom was driving and Dad was in the passenger seat. Then I heard some tires screeching like in the movies and suddenly we were upside down. I heard flames crackling but couldn’t see them. The car was filling with smoke. I couldn’t see BB next to me. Up in front, the passenger seat was empty; Dad was already gone. I should have been scared, but I wasn't. I knew the way out of this: I turned, put both feet together and kicked hard at the passenger window. It exploded in tiny kernels, like it did the time Dad locked his keys in the truck and had to break the glass. I clambered out and started to run, but then I remembered my mother.

I turned and she was still in the driver’s seat, hands on the steering wheel. The crackling got louder, then the whole car caught fire. “You go on,” she called through the flames in a voice that sounded far away, but calm as anything. “You get clear,” she said.

I ran then, my heart in my throat. I ran, even though I knew she was on fire. I couldn’t see it, but I could smell it, like hot steam rising.

---

Well, there you go.

As for other developments, I hope to have more to tell you soon, perhaps this weekend. We'll see.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which We Offer A Taste...

2009-07-23T06:53:00.001-05:00

So, here's the chapter I promised. It's from early in my book, which I guess I should tell you is sort of a memoir about growing up in New Hampshire, but is mostly about being raised to tell stories, by people who were themselves master storytellers. In fact, each chapter is its own story, each building on the next until the whole thing adds up to the book my parents always told me I'd write.

This will read a little different than my usual blog post. When I post, I give very little thought to structure; I do almost no rewriting or editing after the fact. What you get is a rough draft. This here is a first draft, a little more polished and rounded out. Or at least it ought to be. Jesus, I sure hope so.

And now that we come to it, I feel weirdly self-conscious sharing this with you. I guess it's good that I care that much about it, but weird too. Anyway, have a look:

Brubby

My parents bought my brother for 150 bucks.

That sounds like a real bargain at today’s baby prices, but in 1965, at my father’s hourly rate at the welding shop, that was more than two weeks’ pay. Dad was not an extravagant man and large expenditures—anything above, say, $17.50—were an affront to his sense of thrift, easily the keenest of all his senses, except for maybe his eyesight. But he questioned even that when he got the bill that fall from the Elliott Hospital in Manchester. He was so stunned he made Mom read it back to him to confirm the amount. Then he had to go out and rake leaves for an hour.

“Spent that hour trying to remember where the receipt was. Thought we might be able to return him,” he’d say every year on my brother’s birthday, as he’d tellabout how the 150-dollar baby came to live with him and Mom.

“Why didn’t you?” I once asked when I was seven. For $150, my parents could have bought me a good bike or a used motorcycle or something and spared me seven years of torture and pain beyond anything my parents or any other child could ever understand.

“Well, it was too late,” Dad said to me with a freshly stunned look, inviting me to share his astonishment. “We’d already named him—and after me. It’s like getting your initials monogrammed on a sweater—can’t bring it back to the store after that.” I nodded, understanding instantly. No other parents would buy a used baby like that, especially one with a name like Douglas Francis.

At some point in the annual telling of the story, Mom had to jump in and spare Dad the obvious pain of talking any more about the time he got rooked on a bad baby deal. Mom always told nice things about the birthday boy. But this was crazy for two reasons: one, it was all obviously made up, and two, the birthday boy didn’t care. He never seemed to listen to the story, preferring instead to stay hunched close over his plate to eat, hand and mouth working together like the piston and wheels of a locomotive.

“He was a beautiful baby. And healthy too. The nurses said he was the loudest burper on the ward,” she said. And the beautiful baby looked up and offered a loud belch in support of this claim. He blew it across the table at me, enveloping me in the stale smell of partially digested pork and onions. I made a face and fanned my hand wildly to ward off the death cloud. “Maaaa!” I cried, adding extra vowels to signify my righteous disgust. “He’s blowing stinky burps!” But this caused my mother to make up even more lies.

“You have no idea how lucky you are to have such an excellent big brother!” she cried. Then she told a story about how, before they went shopping for me at the hospital, she and Dad ordered a crib from Jordan Marsh over in Bedford. When the deliverymen came to set it up, my brother, who was almost 3 years old, screamed and cried, inconsolable because the little brother he’d been hoping for had not come with the crib. “Where my Brubby? I want my Brubby!” he howled. Allegedly.

When I finally did come home, Big Brubby—or BB, as he sometimes referred to himself--followed me everywhere, watching me as a baby and toddler with all the undiluted affection and awkward care of a St. Bernard. If I cried, he was often the first one into the room to soothe me. He even went so far as to check my diaper himself. “He would stick his finger in and yell out, ‘Mom! The Kid is wet! Mom! The Kid is brown!’ He loved you that much,” she claimed.

I looked at my brother, and tried to reconcile the angelic guardian of my mother’s fantasy with the reality that sat across from me, and just knew they couldn’t be the same person. When my parents left the table to go to the bathroom or something, BB often reached across and took food right off my plate. I was willing to indulge this behavior if we were having pot roast or tuna casserole, but if it was chicken and dumplings or spaghetti and meatballs, I had to scream Mom’s name with about 25 extra vowels or else be ready to fight to the death for my supper. Dessert? I had to eat that in the kitchen, or standing up, ready to run.

I had to admit, at least Dad got some heft for his money. All the grown-ups referred to my brother as husky, but I knew fat when I saw it and it was staring at me right across the dinner table, shoveling in the grub like it was being outlawed tomorrow. I was never happy about my brother’s size. It wasn’t just that he was fat—although he weighed a whole other me—it was that he was tall, too, and getting taller all the time. Mom was forever letting out the cuffs of his pantlegs and about once a month we had to drive over to the Antioch Shoe Outlet to get another pair of shoes or sneakers for him. Plus BB was strong. He had inherited our father’s long gorilla arms—at 10 years old, his were just as hairy as Dad’s and almost as strong.

This put me at a severe disadvantage when we got to arguing, because after a few heated words over ownership of a Hot Wheels car, or for control of the Lincoln Logs, my brother would just abandon diplomacy and punch me—an act he euphemistically referred to as “thumping,” as if he were a gentle bunny rabbit giving me a playful nudge. In fact, BB put his weight into it. And if he thumped me hard enough that I started to cry or bleed or both, he would panic and hide the evidence.

My parents were big ones for saving containers of every stripe. In the garage, they still had giant cardboard cartons saved from the move out of the apartment and into the house. My Dad also bought plastic garbage cans whenever they were on sale—they made great storage bins for the scraps of pipe and lumber he was forever bringing home from job sites. In the house, my mother had three wicker hampers, each bigger than an oil drum. She kept one in the living room for clothes that needed ironing, one in her and Dad’s bedroom as a laundry hamper, and one in our room for toys. We also had four long wooden toyboxes that Dad had made—using scrap lumber he brought home. They slid under the bottom bunk.

Depending on our location when the thumping occurred and how loudly I started crying, BB would sometimes dump me head-first into a musty wardrobe box, which was too high for me to escape from unaided. Or he’d throw me into the garbage can with the least amount of pipe or lumber in it, then put the lid on it and a cinderblock on top of that. It was only by poking the lid repeatedly with a length of copper pipe that I was able to lift the lid a little bit on the side and stick the pipe through and so get enough oxygen to survive until rescued.

Once, when Mom was out hanging clothes, BB thumped me so hard my lip swelled up like a hornpout’s and long stringy ropes of blood began falling out the sides. Before I could spit some evidence on the floor and scream my guts out, he put me in the wicker ironing basket, closed the thatched lid and ingeniously locked it with a bent wire hanger. As always, he hissed that he would be back to let me out once I stopped crying and promised not to tell. By then, this had happened enough that I didn’t panic—not like the time he emptied a toybox, put me in, and rolled me under the bed. I had never been in the ironing basket before and thought it was kind of nice. I wiped my mouth on one of my mother’s white blouses, then made a little nest out of the linens in there and fell asleep. Eventually my mom got to wondering where I was, and when she couldn't find me, my brother was too scared to tell her what he had done, so a house-to-house search of the neighborhood ensued. When he thought the coast was clear, BB returned to let me out, but Mom caught him.

The problem was, my brother usually just got shouted at—if Dad was home he might get a rap in the mouth. But mostly BB got sent to the bedroom we shared, and that wasn’t like punishment. I mean, all our toys were there and since I couldn’t go in until he was paroled, it was kind of like punishment for me, too. Eventually I discovered that, though BB was bigger, I could dominate him—or at least annoy him--with my mouth, which was way more satisfying than watching him get sent to our room.

When I was eight, I found a book in my parents’ closet that explained where babies came from and how they got there in the first place. I didn't understand all of it, but I gained enough new knowledge to drive BB crazy. I informed my brother that, in fact, I was our parents' first child, but that our mother and father loved me so much, they held me back. Then they had BB "first" so they could see what went wrong with a kid, figure out how to fix those mistakes and get it all perfect with me, as they so obviously had. I usually had to start running as I said the last part, because the only way BB could soothe his rage and frustration was to lay hands on me.

Once, when I was too slow, he caught me by both arms, lifted me off the ground and pulled my arms in opposite directions. Something in my chest popped like a giant knuckle. It was so loud my mom heard it in the next room where she was ironing. It even startled BB, who dropped me to the floor. I landed flat on my stomach, knocking the wind out of myself and that was how Mom found us--me gasping for air at the foot of my brother, who was already crying, “I didn’t mean to break his ribs! I didn’t mean it!” But even blacking out and half-dying, I knew he was a big fat liar.

By the time we got to the hospital, I had secretly come back from death, having caught my breath on the drive into Manchester. My chest felt sore, but not too painful. I was lying across almost the entire back seat of the car, a pillow under my head and a blanket wrapped around me. I felt as comfortable and cozy as I had been that day I was trapped in the ironing basket. BB was scrunched way over in the corner. I know because I kept him there by pushing both feet up hard against the side of his butt.

“Are you still alive?” he kept asking, his voice sounding high and warbly. I ignored him a couple of times, but then Mom would get worried and speak up from the front. “Is he breathing? Are his eyes closed? Are his lips blue?” Then I would have to answer—weakly, “I can breathe--” I waited a moment, then sighed hugely. “—just a little.” BB stared at me, chewing the nails on his first two fingers. He was always eating something.

At the hospital, they took X-rays, which was scary because I had to go in a dark room all by myself. I was sniffling a little when they brought me back to the exam room where Mom and BB waited. My brother was gazing at me with eyes I’d never seen before. He came over and—very gently—patted me on the shoulder. “Are you okay, kid?” he asked. Then Mom squeezed my hand, and changed the subject. “Good God, last time I was in a room in this hospital was when you were born. The nurses wheeled you in on a rolling crib from the nursery. You had the biggest head of red hair.” She ruffled it now. “And you still do.”

“Was I born here too?” BB asked, looking around the room with new interest. Mom nodded, giving my brother a serious look. “The doctors thought you would be stillborn.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It means born dead,” I said wistfully, remembering the word from the book I found in my parents’ room.

“You were fine, of course, but they didn’t know at first,” Mom said. “The bastards gassed me, knocked me out before I could hold you. I was bullshit mad when I woke up. Later, Grandma and Papa made a special trip up to take a look at you. They only had one other grandson, your cousin Buzzy, but since he was Aunt Barbara’s child, you would be the first one to carry on the family name,” she told my brother.

“Did they come to see me too?” I asked, feeling that Mom’s attention had wandered. She turned back to me. “Not you, dear. You were old news by then.” Then her expression hardened and she looked at BB. “Do you know, when Grandma got a hold of you, she looked you over, then handed you back and said to your father. ‘Well, at least we know he’s yours.’ Then she gave me a look and walked out. Five minutes later, she and Papa were back in the truck. Can you imagine?”

I looked over at BB, who gave me back the look we shared when we had no idea what Mom was talking about. It didn’t matter anyway, because a second later the doctor came in and said the X-rays showed nothing broken, which disappointed me a little, after all the trouble I’d been to. Then the doctor pushed his cold hands all around on my chest for a long time and listened to my insides with an even colder stethoscope. Eventually, he announced that I had a pulled muscle. He told Mom to give me a baby aspirin and a day of rest, but I knew an injury this severe would take at least a week on the couch to heal up.

I let a nurse put me in a wheelchair. When they rolled me out to the front desk, Mom remembered to be mad at BB again, especially when the clerk handed Mom the bill. Dad had lousy insurance back then. Mom had to pay for the two X-rays. “Seventy-five dollars? Each?” she cried, inviting the sympathetic clerk to share her astonishment as she fished in her purse for the checkbook.

For a moment, Mom’s eyes fell on BB, still hunched attentively over my wheelchair. She pointed at him then said to the clerk. “Can I still return this one?”

It still needs work--it's only a first draft. But I'm already committed to this thing like an insane person to an asylum, so I guess that's something.

Hope that was worth waiting six weeks for. Maybe I'll post another taste one of these days.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which We Spin The Wheel...

2009-07-21T16:48:00.002-05:00

And so, full circle, back once again at the Magazine Mansion.

I'm sorry if I kept any of you waiting or worrying. I've had an eventful six weeks. Oh, my first month or so in New Hampshire was slow enough, alternating between writing and continuing to clean out my parents' (now my Big Brother's) house and throwing out as much as I could when BB wasn't looking. I'm satisfied with my progress on both fronts—I averaged 10,000 words a week on my writing and smuggled six truckloads of useless crap out of the house and into the local landfill.

Then I left to go retrieve Thomas and bring him back to my home state for a week of camping and hiking, and that mostly in the rain. But he enjoyed it and I may tell more about our adventures, but for now I'm just trying to get back into the swing of things.

If you were to illustrate my working life (such as it is) and the way I prioritize it (such as I do) you'd find it would resemble the mutant offspring of a pie-chart and a roulette wheel, with about 50 percent of it devoted to finding freelance and 40 percent devoted to my own personal writing projects. And every day, Fate (she whose fickle thumb so often gets jammed up my ass) spins the wheel. For most of the past month and change, the wheel has been stopping in the 40-percent zone, and when I got back home last week, I knew the wheel would turn round and I'd find myself shifting away again toward the generating-freelance spots on the wheel.

And then I got a phone call that made everything spin wildly, and when the wheel came to rest, it was on the remaining 10 percent that you thought I wasn't going to mention. Though it represents the smallest slice in the weird wheel, it's an area I always leave open in my life, an area that allows me to cram in all my dream opportunities that I used to fantasize about. When I was younger and the wheel was in constant motion, dream opportunities occupied, naturally, the biggest area of the wheel.

But as you get older, and your sense of reality hardens to a thick shell, you understand that most of these things are never going to happen. Most people I know just write these dreams off, chalk them up to childish whim and forget about them. I give them the last 10 percent of the weird wheel of my life.

Some of these opportunities include:

--An international job of some kind (hey, I never said all these dream scenarios were specific)

--A chance to volunteer for any experiment involving time travel (pretty much given up on that one. I mean, if time travel was ever going to be discovered in my lifetime and I actually got to go, I know I'd leave/will leave/will have left myself a letter or sticky note--just a few words of encouragement, and possibly a lottery number or two, as proof that I made it--and I've never found such a note)

--A shot at running my own newspaper or magazine (I think my last few months at the Really Big Magazine cured me of that one)

--The opportunity to write a script (for comics or a movie, doesn't really matter)

The list goes on, into ever weirder and more embarrassing territory, but you take my point, I think. Keeping the list, allowing it 10 percent of the wheel doesn't mean I think any of them are ever going to happen. In fact, I allow that these would be possible for me only through blind luck, or circumstances for which the phrases "once in a lifetime" and "all the planets in alignment" were created.

The phone call was blind luck, pure and simple. A person I met exactly once, about 5 months ago, passed my resume to the Mystery Caller. This Mystery Caller also happens to work with a friend of a friend of a former colleague of mine who by sheer coincidence also mentioned my name in passing. So the Mystery Caller took a hint and phoned me, 24 hours after I returned from New Hampshire. We talked, and 10 minutes later, I was packing a bag and driving across the country (again) to meet with the Mystery Caller, I was that intrigued with the opportunity he wanted to discuss.

Which, if you haven't guessed by now, is an opportunity I can't tell you about yet. I hate when people do that to me, so I hope you believe me when I tell you how sorry I am I can't reveal more yet.

(I'll make it up to you by posting--in the next day or so--a few of the 20,000 words I wrote last month. Fair enough?)

I can tell you this is something I've always wanted to do, at a place I've known and admired for most of my life. When I told Her Lovely Self I was getting back in the car and driving off into the unknown, I expected her to try and talk me out of it--it really is a long shot. But she just smiled.

"I know you too well," she said. "You'll go and find out more because it's a long shot. And I think you should. Don't you?"

"I guess so," I said, stuffing a handful of socks and underwear into a satchel and throwing toiletries into a shaving kit, and trying to do about four other things at once. "It's one of those things I always leave a possibility open for. You know, in my weird roulette wheel, the 10-percent part, where it's--"

"Once in a lifetime, all the planets in alignment," she said, nodding. She's read this post before. "And how many planets would you say are in alignment right now?"

I stopped then, underwear in one hand, a toothbrush in the other. "Honestly, maybe four or five," I said. "There's a chance--a small one, but still. There's a chance this might happen."

I should know more soon. But meanwhile, you should know that I'm alive and well and bouncing off the walls. If this thing happens, it'll probably happen in the next 48 hours, and after that, the weird wheel is likely to spin off its axle and leave me wondering what the hell I'm supposed to do next.

Still.

For the first time in a long time, something massive and celestial is in the works. I can see them in the twilight, Mercury, Venus, Mars, all of them, spinning slowly into place.

Am I hopeful? Am I excited?

You bet Uranus.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

Vlog Out...

2009-06-03T07:33:00.002-05:00

Here at last. A short vlog, with none of that annoying camera motion you got while I was driving. Instead, you can have the nausea inducing camera motion that comes with walking.

I hate to tell you that this will be it for a while, because that's the sort of thing that makes me post something a day later. But I expect to be busy. I expect to be offline. I expect to have some fun while I'm gone.

So for now, I won't say "See you in a month," or "So long for a little while."

Instead, I will just say "..."

Road Vlog #4...

2009-05-31T09:05:00.000-05:00

My friend and fellow blogger Jim Sullivan (aka Suldog) has been a faithful online pal--moreso than I deserve, for sure. Certainly the man has bigger fish to fry. I have been so pleased to watch him grow in stature on the 'sphere (have you seen his numbers?), not just because he deserves it, but because I intend to cash in on his fame by using one of his many kind remarks about me as a blurb on my book.

Seriously, Jim has been a great source of inspiration and motivation to me, in ways both special and strange. On the strange side, I live in fear of being placed in the detention zone that he reserves for bloggers who have not posted in 30 days (once was enough!) On the special side: his blog also sets me in a place I do not deserve (although it of course secretly pleases me). He provides unfailingly positive encouragement in the form of his comments and emails. And he regularly sends interesting people my way, most recently through the good offices of the excellent Authorblog.

It was also because of Jim that I received the CD Mister Rogers Swings! Which absolutely SAVED my long day of driving in the rain:

Since the Brownie hijacked the CD when it arrived, I didn't get to make as timely (or as articulate) a post about it as Jim did, but we are most certainly of one mind about its excellence.

Jim's original post had this info about the CD, but such things always bear repeating:

The Amazon page to get your own CD.

Where to go to hear and learn more about my new crush Holly for yourself.

And to Suldog, I just have to say the one thing I don't say nearly often enough: Thank you, my blogging brother.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

Road Vlog #3...

2009-05-29T09:02:00.002-05:00

Still alive, still vlogging.

Sorry for the jiggly camera, the changing perspective, the surprise study of an unexpected portion of my face. I figured out one secret to successful road-vlogging: keep it to surface roads, or freeways where the traffic tends to force you to maintain speeds below 50 miles an hour. Well, that, and also be a talented and handsome performer, which I am neither.

You know how they say men tend to get better-looking as they get older? I am, sadly, the exception that proves that rule. I thought I could just train the camera on my good side, but--turns out, I don't have one. Also, I have that drooping left eyelid. It falls lower and lower when I'm tired, a feature that my tussle with Bell's palsy only seemed to accentuate. It's not the sort of thing, alas, that elicits sympathy from an audience, makes pretty girls go "awww" and involuntarily reach for a blanket and pillow. Instead, it makes people think Why does he look so wall-eyed?

But hey, that didn't stop Claudette Colbert from a career in pictures, and it won't stop me, unfortunately for you--the seven of you--who are still watching.

And since a weird proportion of you emailed or asked, I give you:

Which shows clearly, I hope, the detrimental effect of driving cross-country with no one to talk to but a dog (a real one. I think) and a camera. Don't let this happen to you, kids. You've been warned.

Oh, and for those who wondered last time: the music WAS The Waterboys (as someone correctly guessed) but was in fact the title track from the newer 2-disc "Fisherman's Blues" set. Perhaps my next vlog will be wholly devoted to what I'm listening to.

Ooh, excitement.

Yours,
From Somewhere Along the Mohawk

Road Vlog #2...

2009-05-28T08:26:00.001-05:00

Wow, really tired tonight. Either from driving or talking to myself the whole trip.

Here's today's vlog, refreshingly free of excessive nostril focus, but with brief yet diverting coverage of my right ear.

Hey, it came down to a choice between this or some ramblings about the real moral of the story of Clifford the Big Red Dog (which, while information I think every discerning person should have, was nevertheless the longer of the two vlogs, and this WiFi connection is way slow), so count yourself lucky.

And to bed.

Yours,
From Sozzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Road Vlog Number 1 (possibly Number Only)...

2009-05-27T08:02:00.000-05:00

Oh, dear lord,

As if we needed more reason to be thankful that Shane and his wonderful vlogs have returned, I offer you a video post from the road, which I originally named "Raining Cops and Dogs."

But which should really be called "MM's Nostril Theater." Especially towards the end. WTF?

Here's hoping I manage to avoid cutting off the top of my head--along with my eyeballs--in future installments. Always assuming there are any. Damn, but Shane makes it look easy.

Still, despite the rain, the brush with the law, the already-crushing longing for my family, my nonexistent camera skills, I must admit:

It is deeply cool to be on the road, headed east, knowing what the next month holds for me.

More soon.

Yours,
From Somewhere in America

In Which We Do the Math...

2009-05-26T15:02:00.003-05:00

[Operational note: If you're reading this, it seems I have successfully used the vastly complicated Blogger option and post-dated my, er, post. It's still the weekend for me, but it should be some time Tuesday for you. This pleases me strangely, especially since I am somewhere on the road now and not in a position to update the blog.

Why am I telling you this? No idea, except it's late and I'm punchy and I couldn't think of a better way to generate a scintilla of suspense about my encounter with the suspected young perverts lurking around my house, spying on my daughter and her friends while they imprudently performed a few backyard acrobatics that was causing them to flash a little more skin than a Daddy like myself would prefer.]

It's a little sad to admit, but one of the unfortunate features of being a father of girls is that I seem to have developed this distressingly overtuned pervert detector--it's a standard feature of my overall array of Daddy Senses, but easily the feature that gives me the most pause. I'm a bit like Blaze in this regard, scowling at every passing male from age 5 (okay, 4) on up, using my vast psychic powers to peel away their defenses and sniff out the slightest trace of unwelcome interest in my daughters. I analyze the merest wave of the man walking his dog (did I see a hidden salacious hand gesture in that salute he just sketched to the Eclair?), or the briefest glance and nod from a deliveryman (did he hold the Brownie's gaze for longer than my personally defined standard of one-quarter to one-half of one second?). It's an awesome and terrible responsibility, this pervert detector, because if that detector trips--it hasn't, but if it does--if the light in my tiny brain goes from green to red, someone will die.

I know I'm given to hyperbole--it's a genetic condition--but on this point I am being my least dramatic, most matter-of-fact, and completely literal. It almost goes without saying that I would kill for my daughters, and since I am not a physically prepossessing fellow, I know I would instantly use every tool at my disposal, from the teeth in my head (having a nose or ear bitten off is a reliable diverter to many perverts) to the very life in my body. It's a simple equation, the Pervert Equation: In a situation where I must solve for any Pervert, I am prepared to die. Since I am already prepared to die, you had better believe I am prepared to make any Pervert die along with me (as a busy guy, I like to express this in my head as a simple formula--P/Dy=D1+D2, where P is the presence of a Pervert, and D1 is my...you know what? Never mind. I know it makes no sense mathematically. But then, neither do I).

I wouldn't say the above was running through my head--not in any sensible way--as I surfed down the stairs on my heels, ready to intercept the little perverts I sensed were spying on my daughter and her friends. But obviously I realized there was a problem with my equation (beyond the obvious fantasy math it represents), and I caught myself. I couldn't just go tearing after those boys. I had no idea who they were, but they must live in the neighborhood (little perverts in my neighborhood!) and I was on the neighborhood watch, for Pete's sake. I had to think this through. I had to measure out a proportionate response to the situation. Aside from anything else, I didn't want to be the reason two kids in the neighborhood would henceforth go by the nicknames Noseless and One-Ear.

Oh, fuck that. At least put the fear of God in them! I thought.

But first, I decided, I needed the element of surprise. I stepped out of my shoes and tiptoed down the hallway to our kitchen, looking for Blaze (the Brownie may have dismissed him as fat and stinky and useless, but Blaze was still my first stop when it came to Fear of God. Also, in my experience, dogs can get away with biting body parts off people far more easily than daddies). But Blaze's kennel was open and empty.

"Thomas?" I hissed. I had just heard him around the kitchen--he'd been haunting the freaking kitchen every afternoon for days, sneaking Blaze treats. But no one, it seemed, was in the house but me. I stood there for a moment, silent, letting the Daddy Sense reach out through the back wall of the house to see what it could see.

A quick layout note: The downstairs on this side of the house is one open space: kitchen flows to eat-in area to family room. Just before the family room, there's a back door onto a raised wooden porch, with an outside stairway that descends quickly from view. I noticed now that the glass door was wide open, the screen door left slightly open too. Instinctively, I leaned over and silently closed the glass door--I could imagine Her Lovely Self returning (from wherever she was with the Éclair) and complaining about bugs getting in. As I backed away from the door, I looked through and noticed the very top post of the porch stairwell was vibrating. Someone, just beyond my vision, was on the stairs leading down from the back porch to the backyard. My money was on Thomas. And I had to assume the dog was with him.

Maybe Thomas IS playing some kind of hide and seek with his friends, I thought.

But then I remembered something the Brownie had said to me in a huff, back on her birthday. "Kids can do a lot if grown-ups would just go away and let them!" she had said. Granted, that was her way of declaring a little independence, but all of a sudden, it occurred to me it might apply here. What if Thomas, knowing his Dad was spending a lot more time in the basement working, decided to take Blaze and handle a situation that his father had clearly been oblivious to? If that was true, what I really needed to do was not put in an appearance (not yet, anyway), but to disappear. Like, right now!

Which explains why, a moment later, if you'd had X-ray vision, or a Daddy Sense of your own, you'd have perceived me, a 40-year-old man, in his own house, in broad daylight, dropping to the floor and crawling on his belly across his own family room rug, just like when he was 10 and playing soldiers with his brother.

Except, man! Who knew that those intervening three decades would make crawling so exhausting? It took me whole minutes to reach my destination--which were the picture windows in the family room, the ones that look out on the back yard--or at least out into the lush spring foliage of the backyard. I had just opened these windows. Curtains were swirling in the breeze. The girlish giggling and screaming wafted in. I couldn't see the girls--this time of year, there's only one window that affords a view of the swingset. The rest are obscured by shade and bushes.

Even over my exertions, even over the sounds of my own heartbeat in my ears and my own surprisingly extravagant grunting, I could hear the creak of sneakered feet on the wooden stairs outside and below me as I passed by the first of the open windows. At almost the same time, I heard from the opposite side a rustling of bushes and the sounds of two--no, it was three--boys breathing hard from their run around the front of the house. I held my breath, which my middle-age body took as an invitation to have a stroke. Blood pulsed in my ears as I waited for the moment of truth. Were we all playing soldiers together, us boys, all hiding behind the bushes (and/or family-room curtains) or was something else going on?

From just below the open window on the left, I heard Thomas, his voice normal, but perhaps a little breathless.

"You been sneaking around here all week, watching my sister," he said evenly.

"So?" I heard one boy answer challengingly from below the open window on the right. His voice seemed very loud to me--I couldn't believe the girls couldn't hear this (although to be fair, they keep up a pretty consistent racket of laughing and jabbering, which would effectively tune out all but a tornado siren). I didn't recognize the boy's voice--he sounded big (I imagined a gross fat-ass). Certainly bigger than Thomas. I waited for my son to respond, probably in a raised, slightly squeaky voice, as he gets when he gets excited.

Instead, he dropped his voice to a low, rumbling whisper. "So get the hell out," Thomas said.

Whoa! I thought, feeling the hairs rise on my neck and arms. I tell you, radio really is the theater of the imagination. Not seeing Thomas's face, just hearing this Dark Knight/Dirty Harry rasp, I suddenly wondered what kind of secret math he had running in his head for this situation. But mostly, I found myself in a state of utter shock and disbelief. Is that little Art Lad? Is that my son talking? I thought.

And almost immediately, a certain voice in my head answered back, No, ass wipe. That's a Big Brother talking.

Now, I waited for Fat-Ass to reply to Dark Lad's command but a new voice--a grating but pipsqueaky one--fired back and this was one voice I thought I did recognize.

"You gonna make us?" Pipsqueak yapped.

"Three on one," Fat-Ass added (with, I imagined, a sneer).

Ordinarily, I'd have simply been dismayed at this pronouncement, since it meant that Thomas had no doggy backup with him, that he was taking on the perverts solo. But my overarching emotional response was indignation at the very cheek of this implied threat to my son. My mouth dropped open (which was unfortunate, as I was on the floor and promptly swallowed a mouthful of lint and random floating dog hair). Suppressing a cough, I focused instead on my annoyance at this impertinence. You little (or possibly big) fat-assed shit! I thought. Trespassing on MY property, spying on MY daughter, threatening MY son? That's it!

I started to get to my knees, preparing to manifest my Dad-ness in its most awful aspect. I imagined myself looming up above them there in the open window, striking wholly justified fear in the hearts of little pervert boys everywhere. I just hoped I could do it before Thomas backed down and lost face. But I had barely raised my ass six inches off the floor when that low, rumbling whisper answered right back.

"Oh yeah?" The Dark Thomas rasped. "Look behind me."

(I couldn't help it--I looked behind me.)

At the same time, I heard Thomas clap once, hard, then yell, "Now!"

And nothing happened.

"Look at what?" The Fat-Ass asked.

Thomas' cool whisper was gone. "Now!" he said, a little louder. And I knew whatever he'd had up his sleeve, it wasn't happening. I raised my ass from the floor again.

Just as I was about to really manifest my Dad-ness in its most awful aspect, something hit me hard in the back of the head. It felt like somebody was driving darning needles into the back of my neck. My head shot helplessly forward, my brow buffing the window ledge. More darning needles in my mid-back and something very heavy landed on me.

Something fat and stinky.

I had just enough clarity for one thought to register (Wow, the sound of a window screen being punched out and the sound of a punted football are weirdly similar) and then there followed a loud clatter and much incidental noise. Such as boys screaming.

I finally got up for a look, no easy task when you first have to shift a large, hairy ass off your shoulders, and back your head out from between the two legs in the house you would least want to have straddling your head.

Fat, stinky, brave, wonderful Blaze had totally stolen my thunder. He stood, front paws and stocky chest halfway out the open window, barking his head off--and also the heads of the stunned boys. The third boy had vanished utterly, leaving me with no verbal or visual impression of him. Thomas reported later that he was just the little kiddo from three doors down, who tends to tag along and do whatever any Big Boys are doing. Fat-Ass's three-on-one scenario was pure bluster.

Speaking of, turns out I had imagined Fat-Ass accurately (if disturbingly older--12 or possibly 13--than I expected), although I had reckoned without the extreme pleasure of seeing him laying flat in the bushes, a bent window screen covering his face, his mouth open and blubbering as he stared up at Blaze, the wild, hairy, curled snout, the bared teeth, raining flecks of foamy spittle down on him. Pipsqueak was exactly who I thought he was--a kid from way down the street and around the corner. And I suddenly guessed that Fat-Ass was his older, seldom-seen brother. Who I gathered--judging from the way he teased and harangued her at the bus stop in the morning--had a thing for Kay, the 12-year-old neighbor girl who tended to shadow her young sister Bee, one the Brownie's girlfriends, all of whom were over at the swingset just a few yards away.

In fact, here came Kay now to see what the commotion was. I noticed instantly that she was wearing a peachy-colored tank top--the sort of color that a Dad (a Dad who couldn't look away fast enough) would have mistaken for flesh from a distance. What's more, it was smartly--and securely--tucked into the waistband of her shorts, so clearly she had not been exposing any skin to any perverts in training. Blaze stopped barking instantly and whined in a friendly way. He adores Kay, and really, all children in the neighborhood (from my vantage, I could see his tail was wagging even as he barked at the boys).

Kay's attention was instantly drawn to Fat-Ass. "What are you doing here?" she said, annoyed. At the sound of her voice, Blaze yipped and tried to wriggle out of the window to get to her.

Fat-Ass got up, brushing the screen away. He was red as a beet and couldn't look at Kay. Instead, he looked up at Blaze, then at Thomas. "That dog's not mean," he said, in a jeering way. "He's just a fat old--"

Thomas clapped, loud, and shouted "Now!" and next to me, Blaze snapped to instantly, a low growl of anticipation in his throat (Fat-Ass jumped five feet straight backward). Smiling now, Thomas fished in his pocket and pulled out a small nugget of food--a piece of beef jerky--and tossed it up towards us. Except for one instance when he bit a bird's head off in mid-flight, Blaze has almost never displayed any talent for catching food in midair, so you can imagine my surprise when he stretched his neck out and, with a dramatic snap and click of his jaws, caught the jerky.

(And I, jerk that I am, finally realized what Thomas had been training Blaze to do with all that roast beef the past several days, prepping his canine backup to take down the little pervs. And I had almost ruined it all by closing the back door! Clearly, I deserved to have my head straddled by a dog's ass.)

I had a brief word with Kay, begging her, as a favor to me, to suggest that the younger girls tuck their shirts in before they invert themselves on my swingset (it seemed the prudent way to pass this information to the Brownie, who wouldn't have appreciated it coming from me). Then, you better believe I escorted Fat-Ass and his brother off the premises, and all the way down to their house, where their father was wondering where his kids had got to. I had a genial but emphatic Dad-to-Dad chat that cogently outlined the dangers of trespass and voyeurism (intended or not) on my property. Then, leaving the boys to their just desserts, I returned to my boys back at the house.

When I walked in the door, Thomas was striving mightily to fit the bent screen back into the window. Blaze sat nearby, tail wagging, whining encouragement. I almost reached in to take the screen from my son, then stopped. "You almost have it," I said. "Just kind of push that one crimp back--there you go! Now pull that holding pin and it'll snap back in." And of course it did.

Thomas stood back, surveying his handiwork. Blaze looked from him back to me, with an expression that seemed to say, "Well, guys, what shall we do next?" Or maybe he was just doing his own math and wondering if the answer would be more roast beef.

"You did good," I said to Thomas, clapping him on the back. "You're a really good Big Brother. I'm sorry I yelled at you when you were trying to train Blaze to back you up. I can't believe you taught him to catch food in the air."

"I've been training him to do a lot!" Thomas said, pleased as anything. "I even--"

But just then, we were interrupted by an aggrieved cry.

"Thomas!" the Brownie shrilled. "Are you still over by the window? You and those boys get OUT!"

Thomas gaped at me, his face expressing the Injustice of the World and Little Sisters. "She's been blabbing at me since you left. I've just about--"

"Tho-MAS! Are you still over there! Go AWAY! Mom! Dad! MOM!! DAD!!"

Clearly at the end of his rope, Thomas was about to yell something back, when I put a hand on his arm. "I got this. You go take the rest of the afternoon off."

I stepped to the family room window--the one that afforded a view of the swingset. The Brownie saw me and, apparently forgetting that she was an independent woman of eight who can do a lot if grown-ups would just go away and let them, began tattling.

"Thomas and some boys were watching us!!" she screamed. "He-"

"I know," I cut across her, manifesting my Dad-ness, at least enough to get the attention of her and her friends. "I know he was watching you," I said. Then I added, "We're all watching you." And before the Brownie could open her mouth again, I turned and walked away.

Which I think is how it has to be some times: A guy--be he a Dad, a dog, or a Big Brother--just has to do his job, without explanation, self-recrimination, or second-guessing. And yes, sometimes even in the face of scorn from someone he loves. I'd like to think that, on some level, the Brownie understood that.

Although...now that I look back on it, since I didn't really explain what I meant when I said "We're all watching you," the Brownie's girlfriends must have thought I was one creepy bastard.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which We Emerge from the Basement...

2009-05-22T21:47:00.003-05:00

Instead of writing about the birthdays that fall in spring in my family, I seem to be filling the space between them. Mostly that's by accident, but some of it's by design. Not my design, though.

"Dad, do you write something about me every time I have a birthday?" the Brownie asked me last month. She was asking with The Voice. Like her mother's Looks, the Voice tells me more than mere words could ever say. In this case, it dictated my answer for me, sparing me the trouble of thinking, which I suspect my elder daughter thinks I don't do anyway.

"Wellllll," I began, "I guess I don't have to. Would you rather I didn't this year?"

The Brownie did an amazing impersonation of a bobble-head doll, then gave me a "yes" that was three aggrieved syllables long. "I'm glad you figured it out!" she added.

Yeah. My daughter's kind of getting a mouth on her. She doesn't seem to have inherited it from me, because so far as I can tell, it's not getting her in trouble at school. Clearly, it's her mother's mouth. Her Lovely Self was so quiet in school, teachers would call her parents to ask if she had a speech impediment, which caused my in-laws to impersonate bobble-head dolls themselves, because they would get all kinds of sass from their eldest girl.

But it's not really sass the Brownie is giving me, so much as she's asserting her independence. That doesn't mean it doesn't sting a little. At the majestic and all-knowing age of 8, she has her own friends, her own plans, her own agenda, and they don't include us so much. By "us," I mean the males of the house.

Thomas takes it on the chin the hardest, being the closest sibling and therefore the natural object of all scorn. He cannot be anywhere within a 10-block radius if the Brownie is in the back yard, playing (or more often, talking and giggling) with her friends, although my son insists that is just fine with him. He actually does seem to bear it all with a certain quiet resolve. I had no idea just how much resolve.

Poor old Blaze, though, has fallen from the Brownie's grace, and that has been hard to see. The other day, when she got off the bus with her girlfriends, he once again defeated all doors and locks and got out through the garage to meet her in the driveway, ever the faithful companion and protector. He jumped around her and her friends in his big galumphing way, but it broke my heart a little to see the Brownie push him away and squeal, "Ew, Blaze! You're so fat and stinky!" And all the girls laughed and ran off to the backyard. Tail wilted but still wagging, Blaze watched them go and made to follow, but by then I was outside and had a hand in his collar. "Oh, don't," I muttered, dragging him back inside. "Have some respect for yourself."

And of course I've been getting my share of disdain, too, although the Brownie's latest outburst caught me a little by surprise. I didn't think she really knew that I wrote anything about her, but of course, nothing escapes her. She's known for years, and apparently has never forgiven me for it, not since the time I posted pictures of her pissed-off fish face.

"It needs to stop, Dad," she said. "If I want a bunch of people to know about me, I can write it for myself. I'm eight years old now, you know. Kids can do a lot if grown-ups would just go away and let them!" If it were any other child saying this to me, I'd be a little startled by the articulation and assertiveness, but then, this is the same woman who at 4 interrupted her own teary temper tantrum to inform me that she wouldn't have to cry if I would just follow her directions. So I quietly acquiesced and slunk off, fat and stinky, to my basement.

That's how it's been for the past few weeks, and to be honest, it's just as well I was forbidden to write about the Brownie. Because the truth is, a couple of days earlier, I had taken on a huge pile of freelance work--way more than I ever have before (or ever will again). From about seven in the morning til very late in the afternoon (and then again on into the evening) I wrote and wrote and wrote some more. My day was marked not by the passage of the sun (there are two windows in my basement, both of them well out of view from my little cell under the stairs), but by the noises that filtered down from ground level. Most of the day was punctuated by the pitter-patter of the Éclair and the steadfast clack-clack-clack of Blaze following her from room to room. Then, things would be deathly quiet for an hour or so--nap time for the Éclair, and for poor Blaze. And then, not long after that, an explosion of sound--excited paw clacking, the squealing yawn of the front door, followed by the twin Booms! of bookbags hitting the floor. Then the general mysterious muffled sounds of girlish murmuring and giggling from somewhere in the back yard. So it went everyday.

And then there was a new sound pattern. Several afternoons--and continuing for a solid 10 days--I would hear the unmistakable pounding of Thomas coming into the house, followed by Blaze. There would be some noises--Thomas talking a low voice, the squeal of what sounded like a door, some more noises from Thomas. Then I'd just hear Thomas say something emphatic...followed by nothing much. This went on and on, all through the late afternoon, it seemed. After a couple of days, I noticed (in that back-of-the-mind way you notice things when you're a parent in your house, but distracted by work) that after Thomas said his emphatic word, I'd hear a low growl from Blaze, sometimes a low growl accompanied by the briefest clatter of feet.

After a week or so of this--and in particular on a day where I was staring at the screen, trying to solve an annoying writing problem--the endless repetition of this got to me and I pounded up the stairs and threw open the basement door, just as Thomas was dropping a giant piece of roast beef into Blaze's mouth.

"This is what you've been doing? Sneaking him treats all afternoon?" I asked (okay, asked in a shouty kind of way). Thomas and the dog both looked at me, abashed, and slunk off--to the front yard, since the Brownie and her coterie had taken over the back yard.

Next day, though, he and the dog were at it again. But I had a lot to write, and I was ashamed of myself for snapping at Thomas, so I just let it go. And anyway, by then I had eaten all of the roast beef so all Thomas would have to give Blaze would have been dog biscuits, so no harm done.

And thus the routine continued, until today, when I finally finished all of my freelance work. Almost all of it was due next week, but I had decided I wanted to finish it all before my birthday, and the holiday weekend. So it was with a light heart and a full bladder that I came upstairs to stretch my legs and have a celebratory pee. It was stuffy in the house--and warm outside--so after the requisite stretching and celebrating, I cranked open a few windows downstairs, then went up to the bedrooms to do the same. I found a few other chores to take care of--putting my socks in a drawer, leafing through Wednesday's new comics that I hadn't quite got to read. Downstairs, I heard a door slam, heard Thomas and Blaze pounding around, tuned them out. Through a bathroom window, I could hear girlish squealing down in the backyard, tuned them out.

At length, I remembered to finish opening the windows, and as I was opening a side window in my bedroom, I heard a noise outside that was like boyish pounding around, but not quite. It was like giggling, but not quite. I pressed my head to the screen so as to look down at the ground below and saw two--no, it was three--huddled forms at the corner of my house. I couldn't see who it was, but I could hear them. "No! Can't see! Go around the other side like last time!" one--or all of them--seemed to say.

Just Thomas and some friends playing hide and seek, I thought, and returned to my comics.

But just then, very clearly, from somewhere in the neighborhood of the stairwell, I heard Thomas hiss, "Shh!" and I remembered he was in the house. Which was now very silent. It was the loudest possible silence, though, the silence of Children Trying To Be Quiet.

After three weeks of being buried in the basement, my Daddy Sense was tingling, permeating the very walls of the house. I knew instantly that two--no, it was three--unknown boys were now running crouched and fast around the front of my house. My son, either with them or not (I used the extra gear in my Daddy Sense and suddenly divined Not), had shushed the dog (probably locked him up in his kennel, lest he give Thomas away) and was somewhere downstairs, almost certainly near the back door, but not within view of the girls, or the Brownie would have yelled at him.

The girls... I thought.

My Daddy Sense only extends so far, so I went to window in my bathroom for a look. Because of its quirky placement high up on the bathroom wall, coupled with the fact that the yard curves down and away from that side of the house, this window commands almost a bird's-eye view of the back yard. I could clearly see the Brownie and three of her friends, another 8-year-old girl, and the neighbor girls, Bee and Kay, who are 10 and 12, but who still hang out with the Brownie. They were no longer murmuring and gossiping, but were instead making use of the old wooden swingset in our backyard, which includes a couple of sturdy swings set up high (big-kid height) and an even higher trapeze thing. It was a warm spring day today, and there in the leafy confines of our backyard, the girls, younger and older, were in high spirits, engaged in various acrobatics on the swingset.

In point of fact, they were swinging or hanging upside down from either the swings, the trapeze, or the beam of the swingset itself. I couldn't pick out my daughter from among them. Because, as I said, they were all hanging upside down. With their t-shirts or tanktops falling up, over their faces. Exposing their bare chests. Instantly, as though bleach had been hurled in my face, I averted my gaze from this unfortunate if innocent display of immodesty.

And of course, it all clicked into place. Those little peeping perverts! I thought, as I bolted from the window.

This was not a time for letting my daughter have her independence, I decided, as I surfed down the stairs on my heels. This was not a time for hiding myself in the basement like some fat, stinky dog--clearly, I'd been in the basement too long!

It was time to go all Dad on somebody's ass...

In Which We Have A Little Faith...

2009-04-29T08:53:00.004-05:00

Oh, lucky readers, sometimes I think you don't know what a good friend I am to you.

After yesterday's disastrous revelation--that in the midst of our first big vacation together, I had somehow been bamboozled into dropping Her Lovely Self off with an old boyfriend (Popeye, the old boyfriend she still seemed to have feelings for) while I went to a wedding of some college friends--you had only to agonize (as I always like to assume you do) for a day about what would happen next.

I had to agonize for two weeks.

And the throes of that agony twisted me every whichaway. I wanted to blow off my friends' wedding and keep Her Lovely Self to myself. I wanted to forbid! (which I later amended to "ask" and then to "beg") her, tell her I wanted her to go anywhere else, do anything else. I even contemplated doing something sneaky--of which I am, sadly, all too capable--like sabotage my own car, or somehow pretend that it had broken down. Nothing permanent (or God forbid, expensive), just enough to put us a day behind schedule, forcing us to cut the whole Connecticut part of our trip out of the itinerary.

In the event, I did none of these things. I had decided to be patient, as I had with so many other of Her Lovely Self's boyfriends. Patience, I'd decided, was the path to trust and faith, things I sensed I would need if I was to have any future with the woman I loved. As I've mentioned, being patient was not a natural state for me. It was a decision, really, a hard one. In fact, I look back at my 23-year-old self with a kind of quiet, slightly head-shaking pride. The decision to be patient was probably one of the first truly adult decisions of my life (what am I saying? It was THE adult decision of my life.) And like so many adult decisions, while I sensed that this decision was the right way to proceed--or at least lay in the general direction of the right way--it made me a little miserable.

Although it must be said, I had a lot of help when it came to feeling miserable. This is because I made the mistake of telling everything to Greg and Bill, my good pals and true from my Chicago days. I called them after the events of yesterday's post and we convened almost immediately for an emergency session at our favorite bar. At first, they just couldn't grasp the stupidity of what I'd agreed to do. "So, in the middle of your first big mess-up-the-motel-sheets-in-nine-states getaway with your little honey, you're going to take a break from that and drop your girlfriend off. At this other boyfriend's place. For a whole day," Greg said, very slowly, to make sure he understood.

Alas, Bill knew me slightly better than Greg, and understood only too well the kind of awful predicaments I was capable of getting myself into. "Jesus!" he cried. "I thought you were smart. What the hell are you thinking?"

"Well, the whole thing snowballed on me," I whined. "She insisted I just drop her off at Popeye's and I couldn't think of a way to stop her. I mean, what am I gonna do, leave her at a rest area for a few hours while I go to the wedding?"

"It's an option," Greg said. "Anything's better than delivering her to his doorstep like the freakin' pizza man. You think he's gonna tip you? No. He's gonna bonk her."

"No, that's not what's going to happen!" I cried.

"Actually," Bill said. "It sounds like that's exactly what's going to happen."

"I bet Popeye's strong to the finish, too," Greg mused.

"Would you STOP? What are you, Satan?" I cried. "Are you two helping me? At all? You know HLS! She's a good person. I love her and I'm supposed to trust her and be patient and have faith in her. And you guys are supposed to be the angels of my better nature and remind me of that, not wind me up!"

Bill gave me a I-don't-understand-the-words-coming-out-of-your-mouth look. Greg just shrugged. "It's not our fault you're fixing your girlfriend up with her old boyfriend." Bill just nodded. I tell you, I never had friends before or after like the ones I had when I lived in Chicago. Thank God.

So now, here Her Lovely Self and I suddenly were. Two weeks later, Chicago just a faint skyline behind us, we were on our way east in my old Toyota, planning to stop somewhere in the middle of Ohio for the night. In the morning, the fateful morning in which we were planning to make it all the way to Connecticut, so I could be there in time for the wedding the next morning--and to do that other thing--I started the car and noticed a light come on that I had never seen come on in my car before, but it was red and looked dire.

I got excited for a moment--God had stretched out his finger and stilled my car at a crucial time! But no. Directly across from the motel--and I mean 20 feet from where I had parked--was a garage with a big Toyota sign hanging on it. The guy was opening for business as I coasted across the street and, wouldn't you know it, his morning schedule was open too. It turned out my alternator was shot. I couldn't afford a new one--not without spending a massive chunk of vacation money. Why, we'd probably have to just skip Connecticut and one or two other stop and just head on up to New Hampshire and stay in my parents' old trailer or something. Anything sounded better to me than what I was scheduled to do that day. But as I was broaching this scenario to Her Lovely Self, the mechanic came out from a storeroom holding what turned out to be a rebuilt alternator--the only one he had in stock--and it worked only on my precise year and model of car. Seventy-five dollars and 45 minutes later, we were back on the road.

"Wow, that was a lucky break," Her Lovely Self said, although she sounded a bit strange when she said it.

"Mmm," I said.

"I can't believe how well that worked out. I mean, I really thought we were going to miss--well, you know, really going to have to change our plans," she said, in that same voice.

"Hmm," I said.

The next 12 hours were 12 hours I could stand to have erased from my life. It was easily the longest time I've spent in a rolling metal capsule with someone I loved and not said anything. Or rather, said lots of things, lots of useless small talk ("Look at that." "Do you need to stop?" "Mmm." "Hmm."), but not address the great big elephant in the back seat. And the front seat. We stopped for the night just outside of Springfield, Massachusetts, almost within sight of the Connecticut state line. I had driven almost the whole way and I was utterly, physically and emotionally exhausted.

"Are you all right?" Her Lovely Self asked me when we were finally settled in. There was a tone in her voice that made me think she wanted to talk, and I meant to turn and talk to her. But instead I fell asleep. We didn't mess up any sheets that night. I had fevered dreams about Greg singing "Popeye the Sailor Man" and the mechanic from earlier in the day, coming out of his storeroom with something in his hands. The mechanic had horns on his head. And in lieu of an alternator, he was holding my beating heart.

In the morning, I threw on slacks, a jacket and tie. Although the wedding wasn't til after lunch, I wasn't really going to have a chance to change. We had a hasty and rather silent breakfast and then drove on into Connecticut, down through Hartford, on our way to Groton, where I would drop Her Lovely Self off before heading back to New London for the wedding.

As we got closer, I was feeling a kind of atmospheric pressure building up inside me. Whatever odd and unhelpful compulsion--the one that had kept me from saying anything to Her Lovely Self concerning the day we were about to spend apart--was finally wearing off. I started to say something, but literally as I opened my mouth, Her Lovely Self suddenly cut across me.

"We're going to be there in about 15 minutes," she said, staring at a map.

"Mmm," I said.

There was a pause of a lot longer than 15 minutes. Of about 15 years, I think. Then she said, a trifle hotly, "And you don't have anything to say to me?"

"Hmm?" I said. "I mean--"

I closed my mouth. I was frozen. Suddenly there were a hundred things I wanted to say. "Don't go! Come with me! Let's get out of Connecticut! Forget this wedding, let's have one of our own!"

I opened my mouth again and for one awful second, I thought my friend Greg's voice was going to come out of my mouth, shouting, "Don't bonk him!" or something. Instead, I sputtered. "What--I don't--" I took a breath. "What did you want me to do? Forbid you from seeing this guy, like some caveman? A caveman driving you to Connecticut?" I don't know why I added that.

Her Lovely Self gave me a Look. It was early in our relationship, so I didn't realize it was a Look, until she said, "What are you talking about?" Then I realized what that particular Look meant (she thinks you've lost your mind) and filed it away for future reference.

I was so busy storing this information that HLS forged ahead. "I don't know what you're--what do you mean 'forbid'--" she took a breath. "I was talking about this wedding thing you're going to."

I stared at her for so long, I almost drove off the bridge and into the water between New London and Groton. "What?" I asked, totally confused.

"You're just going to go to this wedding and not say anything or, I don't know, promise me you'll behave or whatever?" she asked, her voice rising.

Now I was ready to just turn the wheel and steer us straight off the bridge.

"What?" I asked. It was the only word I could muster.

Then she gave me another Look and I had no trouble figuring this one out. She was mad. "Look. I'm not stupid. This is a wedding where all your college friends are going to be there, right?"

I nodded dumbly, thinking Please God, bail my poor ass out of this. I have no fucking clue where this is going.

"So," she said. "So your old girlfriend's going to be there, right? The one you almost shacked up with?"

"Gretchen?" I asked, in utter astonishment. It honestly hadn't occurred to me to think about Gretchen. Hadn't thought about her in, literally, a year, probably two. But now that I did, I was worried. Because, yeah, Gretchen would almost certainly be there. And the last time I saw her, she was furious with me. I had, after all, just told her I wanted to see other people (specifically, other women). I broke her heart. It was not my finest hour--certainly not one you'll find on the blog, not in great detail, anyway. What was more, Gretchen was a brown belt in karate. She swore that if she ever saw me again, she'd kick my ass. Suddenly, I wanted to drop me off at a rest area, or ask if I could tag along with Her Lovely Self and Popeye.

Her Lovely Self, not quite used to reading my face either, mistook my look of shock as one of guilty shamefacedness. "I knew it!" she cried.

There was a sound in my head of gears grinding as my brain reversed course and tried to take this in. Are you kidding me? I thought. Is my life SUCH a sit-com that we've both just wasted hours and days--and a really nice motel bed last night--each worrying that one was stupidly letting the other go off to a tryst with an old flame? I tell you, some day--a very long time from now--I will be dead. And the first person I want to see when I cross over is not either of my parents, nor any of my dead friends or relatives. The first person I want to see is the guy who wrote my life while I was living in Chicago. And I'm going to make him explain WHY exactly he felt the need to put me through such unnecessary emotional calisthenics.

But meanwhile, I was continuing not to say anything and this was driving Her Lovely Self up the wall. "God, I'm so stupid! I wondered why you were so eager to dump me with [Popeye]--I mean, what boyfriend does that? But then I realized why!" I tell you, we were hitting a lot of firsts on this road trip. Aside from getting exposure to some new Looks, I was discovering that Her Lovely Self was just as capable of crazy as the craziest women I'd ever gone out with. She was working up a real head of steam. It got scary there for a few minutes, I'm here to tell you.

"Listen--" I began.

Her Lovely Self was studying her directions. "We have to go up Route 12. [Popeye's] apartment building is a few miles north," she announced, as if she hadn't heard me at all.

Knowing a little about whoever was writing my life at this point, I realized I had just a couple of minutes to pull this one out of the fire, otherwise, the big plot twist of this episode was going to be at my expense. The way things were going, Her Lovely Self would end up with Popeye just to spite me, not realizing that I was heading off to a meeting with an ex-girlfriend where the only physical contact I was likely to get would be a round kick that sent my teeth through the back of my head.

"Okay," I said. "First of all, nothing is going to happen with Gretchen, I can assure you. Yes, she will probably be there, no doubt with the guy she's currently 'shacked up with.' And I sincerely hope she doesn't see me, because if she does, there's a good chance she'll reach down my throat and turn me inside out, anus to esophagus." Unfortunately, that amused me, saying the end of that sentence. I often amuse myself like that--it's actually quite fatuous of me. Especially at this moment, because I let out the smallest laugh. It was bad.

"You always think everything's a joke," she muttered, and I realized I hadn't said the thing she needed to hear, which was that I had no interest in my former girlfriend and that even if she begged me, I'd just turn my head and politely but firmly decline all amorous overtures. I started to add this, but she interrupted me with terse instructions--"Turn here"--and I saw that we were at Popeye's apartment complex.

"Listen," I tried again. "It's just, I'm relieved," I lied. Actually, I was feeling dizzy and nauseous at the thought of what stupid ideas we'd been laboring under. I pulled us into a parking space that was far from the apartments, and then I just spilled my guts, told her everything I'd worried about the last two weeks, how hard it had been to resist the urge to say anything to keep her from doing something she might regret (well, anything that I might regret). How I was trying to be all grown-up and patient about these kinds of things.

Her Lovely Self seemed to be coming back from crazy, but not entirely. Finally, she said, "Why didn't you say any of this before? I don't know any man, [Popeye] included, who would just drop me off at the door of another man without being a little jealous. What were you thinking?"

"Honestly? You said it was something you wanted to do, instead of going to the wedding. I want to give you what you want," I said. "I want to let you do what you want to do. Even if it's something I'd just as soon not have you do. In this case, I figured I'd just have to trust you."

"Oh," Her Lovely Self said, looking kind of stunned herself.

"But if you'd rather," I added, "we could just make a little pact: I'm happy to promise not to bonk Gretchen at the wedding if you promise not to bonk Popeye."

She laughed at this. Evidently, "bonk" amused her in a way that "anus to esophagus" did not. "No," she said. "I liked your first answer better." And then she kissed me, which was fantastic for two reasons. One, just on general principle, because my girlfriend was such a great kisser (almost as good as my wife). And two, I suddenly understood that we were going to be fine, and in that moment all the agonizing I'd done the past two weeks seemed almost worth it just to get to this moment. I guess sometimes the guy who wrote my life back then actually knew what he was doing.

Also, I lied. The kiss was fantastic for a third reason: Her Lovely Self planted it on me just as a certain sailor man was peering in through the back window, scowling at me as though I'd just stolen his favorite can of spinach. Which I like to think I did.

And that was that.

I went on to my friends' wedding. And yes, Gretchen was there, but my digestive tract remained in its original configuration (it turned out she was actually not too mad at me anymore. But I still didn't bonk her.)

Her Lovely Self spent an uneventful, if sadly awkward day with her old flame. I guess he tried pretty hard to get her to dump me and stay with him. He made so many disparaging remarks about me that she quickly kicked the shim out from under the door she's had propped open in her heart for him all those years. She may have also made some comparisons about petty boys versus grown-up men, as well as a few remarks about the abiding virtue of trusting your woman and having a little faith, instead of resorting to jealousy and possessiveness. In short, Popeye pretty much hanged himself, ruining whatever chance he might have had with Her Lovely Self.

At least, that's what she told me when I picked her up late in the day and we continued our vacation back into Massachusetts and on northward to the next motel. After we got back, I told my friends Greg and Bill what happened. They just crowed at me, told me I was gullible and naïve.

But I knew what I knew. And what I didn't know--particularly where she was concerned--I was just going to have to trust, to take on faith.

That strategy has worked pretty well ever since.

At least, I think it has.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which We Wonder Pointlessly About A Near-Miss...

2009-04-28T07:19:00.002-05:00

So I had some time before a story interview today. It wasn't quite enough time to work on my other writing or really do anything constructive, but it was plenty of time to indulge in some pointless rumination. Specifically, I found myself thinking of the dream Her Lovely Self had a few days ago. You know: the dream about marrying her ex-boyfriend. I didn't tell you this, but the ex-boyfriend in my bride's dream scenario was not just any old ex-boyfriend, but the one I will call Popeye, for no particular reason, except that this guy and the eponymous spinach-eater were both sailors, and both terribly unattractive, each with a cartoonishly screwed up face and a chin like a baby's ass. I suppose I could be misremembering some of the details. I only met the guy the one time, and really, once was enough.

You'll have to forgive my animosity, considering he only popped up in dream form, but you have to understand: Popeye was a real near-thing deal. He and Her Lovely Self met in college, harbored secret affections for one another for years, but only got over themselves and started dating towards the very end of their last year of school. At one point, Her Lovely Self told her parents, "That's the man I'm going to marry." (Something that, incidentally, she never said about me. Me. The man she actually did marry.) To me, that's a worst-case scenario.

Thankfully, Her Lovely Self did little more than voice this idea, and then only to her parents (and later, alas, to me. Many times.). Popeye went off to fulfill his financial-aid obligations to the Navy and Her Lovely Self proceeded to Chicago where, as you may recall, Fate had already expertly guided me.

But after putting me in the path of Her Lovely Self, Fate took a powder and left me to fend for myself, which sucked. First, I had to endure being just pals with my future wife, which is ordinarily a process I enjoy. But Her Lovely Self, in case I have never otherwise left you with this impression, was Different. I wasn't friends with her very long at all before I realized that I had been struck--but good--by the Thunderbolt. So it was sheer agony to have to listen to her moan about all the awful guys she was dating, of which there was quite a dismaying lot. This was during the phase of my life when I was known as Every Woman's Second Choice on a Friday Night. Certainly I was hers.

But I was patient, which actually is not a natural state of existence for me, at all, ever. Nevertheless, there's no other way to put it: I was patient. I waited these guys out. Instead of coming off all jealous and crazy, I just let them pay out enough rope to hang themselves, let them reveal themselves for the cads, churls, and mashers that they turned out to be.

I didn't wait forever, of course. Some boyfriends proved to have unfortunate adhesive qualities--not unlike wet sand, say, or a globule of snot--when it came to getting up against the woman I loved. Thus I was compelled to act. In particular, I'm thinking of Joe, the boozing frat boy who couldn't keep his hands off Her Lovely Self during a party. While I watched. No man should have to stand by and be subjected to that kind of thing, so I have long since forgiven myself for following Joe to his car, ambushing him, and locking him in his trunk (details here). Really, it was protective custody. If he had remained at the party any longer, I would have been forced to light a match in his face, igniting the alcohol in his breath, burning him from the inside out.

Trouble is, Chicago's a big place with too many guys and not nearly enough trunks, and so, when I decided that patience had gotten me as far as it was going to, I declared my feelings, which, in yet another example of my impeccable timing, I did while Her Lovely Self was waiting for her current boyfriend to come pick her up, which rather diminished the effect I was going for, and forced me to resort to overkill (details here). Don't ever let anyone tell you that overkill is a bad thing when it comes to wooing a woman, boys. Overkill works.

You know, so long as you don't already have a reputation as a stalker.

I know I've written before about the lengths I went to, well to win Her Lovely Self (which, ladies, let me just say here and now that I meant that in the kindest non-objectified I-know-she's-not-a-Kewpie-doll-at-the-carnival way), but I never really told you about Popeye. Recalling what happened with him sometimes makes me a little ill, because in the early days of my romantic involvement with HLS, Popeye was a great threat. If things had gone just a little differently, if I'd been wrong about how I chose to deal with him, he'd be writing about his wedding anniversary and stuff instead of me (although I like to think you wouldn't be nearly so entertained. Popeye was a terrible writer. I know this because one night at her apartment, after Her Lovely Self fell asleep on the couch, I had a good look around her room and found all his letters to her).

The big problem, see, was that Popeye and Oliv--I mean, Her Lovely Self dated just briefly at the end of their senior year of college and never really got a chance to explore that relationship as fully as they might have had they started going out a little earlier. In short, they went off carrying a bit of a torch for one another. Which is why Her Lovely Self would bring him up, just pop him into conversation whenever things looked they might just be getting serious. Popeye had become the Ideal Absent Boyfriend. I'd already had some experience with girls with IABs, and I really, really, really did not want anymore. The woman who holds a torch for an IAB is a woman who has a door propped open in her heart, and as long as that door is open, no one else really has a chance at getting all the way in. Well, at least I didn't have a chance, if my history is anything to go by. Your romantic mileage may vary.

And while we're on the subject, I have to say that I didn't think being an IAB was any great thing. In my recent past, I had been an IAB, which was disastrous in my case, since the woman with whom I was conducting this long-distance relationship had ultimately decided she liked the idea of me more than my actual physical presence, something I did not discover until I had driven 22 hours and a couple thousand miles to see her. But I digress.

I gave Popeye a lot of thought, more thought than I had ever devoted to any man, then or since. I finally concluded that, since I had a sort of home advantage--I was in town; he was off somewhere in Europe finishing up his tour of duty--I just needed to continue to run my own race and do my level best to avoid Popeye as a subject of conversation.

That worked well enough for a while. My relationship with Her Lovely Self seemed to grow stronger. She stopped mentioning Popeye altogether. She began openly to refer to me as her boyfriend. Indeed, by that summer, we decided to take the big step of going away on vacation together—10 days, a long time for your first vacation as a couple. Her Lovely Self had never been to New England, and I guess I talked about it a lot—it was home, after all—and she was keen to see it.

Unfortunately, right about the time we were finalizing our plans, Fate came back into town and decided to play a little trick on me. It came in the form of a wedding invitation. Friends from college, now living in Connecticut, were getting married and I was invited to the wedding, which would fall within the very 10 days that I was already planning to be there. Alas, my friends were young and poor and many invitees were given solo invites. No "and Guest" on the invitation. I presented this unfortunate turn of events to Her Lovely Self. I hated the idea of leaving her somewhere for a few hours while I went off to a wedding without her (in case you were wondering, I offered to pay whatever the per-head fee was that the wedding caterer had determined so that HLS's presence wouldn't pose a financial burden, but was rejected out of hand as it was a small reception space and there actually wasn't any more room for additional guests).

But before that could even become an issue, Her Lovely Self informed me that she was perfectly happy--relieved even--not to have to go to a wedding where she didn't know anyone except me.

"Also," she added, almost as an aside. An aside as big and looming as a skyscraper, "I looked on a map of Connecticut, and the wedding is one town over from where [Popeye] is living now."

"Oh?" I asked, all Joe Cool. "I thought he was off the coast of Europe or something." Clearly I had not found all the letters.

"No, he's back in the country. He called me the other day. I mentioned I was coming east and told him about this wedding, and so he invited me to spend the day with him while you're at the wedding with your friends. Isn't that great?"

"Mmm," I said, noncommittally.

"Well, you don't mind do you? I mean, you're not going to get upset if I spend some time with him, are you?" she asked, pointing her loaded question right at my head.

"Hmm," I answered.

"Well, okay, then," she said. "I'll call him and make my plans."

Sweet Jesus, what the hell do I do now? I thought...

In Which the Past Is Prologue...

2009-04-26T13:10:00.005-05:00

Well, if you've been here even once or twice, you know what today is (and if you don't, jumping back two years in the archives will solve the mystery for you). But instead of dwelling on the last chapter of my parents' lives--I won't even bother with a link--I find myself looking in other directions, including back beyond my parents' beginnings to, well, their prologues.

Alas, I don't know how my Dad's parents met (it's a gap in my story catalog that I really need to fill, and hope to this summer, when I go on an extended research trip to New Hampshire), so that's a tale I can't share yet. How my maternals met--my mother's prologue--that's fairly well documented.

Mom was from Massachusetts, although that was something her New Hampshire relations tried very hard not to hold against her. There was no saving her father, though, not the mighty Papa Jim. He was a Massachusetts flatlander bastard to his core.

(I know it rankles some Mass. folks to hear that label, and there are a stunning lot of you who read me, so please accept this parenthetical as an apology. But I just have to say: To me, it sounds less like an insult and more like a gang of cool badasses, like a Civil War regiment. The 57th Massachusetts Flatlander Bastards)

Papa was proud of it, too. As I've mentioned before, he grew up in South Boston and took no shit from anyone, except his mother, who talked him out of accepting a baseball scholarship to Colgate (Papa Jim was, by all accounts, a stunning athlete in his day). So when he graduated from high school, he quit baseball and in 1938 got a job tending bar at the Statler-Hilton hotel in Boston. No more fastballs or curveballs for Papa Jim--only highballs.

If my grandfather ever regretted not going to college, he never admitted to it. In fact, I suspect he was just fine with the way his life was going at the hotel, because in short order, Jim took notice of one of the hotel's chambermaids, a statuesque woman with raven-black hair and a regal bearing. Grandma Catherine--known in her family as Kay--lived near Cambridge. Her mother's family worked in publishing at the Riverside Press--one grandmother was a copy editor; her husband a skilled marbler--creator of those beautiful colorful wavy designs such as you never see now on the endpages and edges of books. Her father's people were horsebreeders and trainers and young Kay was brought up as something of a thoroughbred herself. As well-heeled as she was, her parents were by no means wealthy, so they had taken care to impress upon her the importance of making your own way. When she enrolled in college for her nurses' degree in the fall of 1938, she took a part-time job making beds and cleaning bathrooms at the Statler. It was good work--in those days, hotel guests almost universally left tips for chambermaids in the room. The only imposition Kay had to suffer was the attention of the cocky young bartender with the Southie accent. She found Jim to be déclassé, and did everything she could to ignore him. "Back then, I wouldn't give him the steam off my oatmeal!" she famously remarked one Thanksgiving, which made me laugh so hard that gravy came out of my nose. It still makes me laugh.

Both of them were devout Catholics. Both went to Mass every Sunday and Holy Day, and both of them prayed to God every night. I imagine my future grandmother appealing to the Lord for the strength to resist the mashing advances of the drinkslinger from Southie, while across town, Jim was asking God for a little help, a small miracle to win the woman of his dreams.

I've always understood that Papa Jim was good pals with God, and if proof was required, this is the story that does it for most folks. You see, God answered Jim's prayer, and not with a still, small voice, either. God pulled out all the stops. God went Old Testament on my future grandfather.

He sent The Great Hurricane of 1938.

As I bet my Massachusetts readers (you are still there, right?) could confirm, that storm still stands as one of the worst in New England's recorded history. It was no answer to a prayer for some people--casualties of the storm range from 600 to nearly 1,000, depending on your source--but it did Papa Jim a big favor.

Jim was walking to work the morning that the storm hit Boston. The streets were practically deserted--Papa later said the only other person he'd seen on the way in was a man who'd been blown literally off his feet and into a doorway, which quickly opened and allowed him shelter. But Jim wasn't stopping--he had to get to work. In minutes, the wind was so ferocious, he was rappelling from lightpole to mailbox to get to the door. In the front windows of the hotel, the rest of the staff already there--Kay included--watched Jim's slow, almost heroic progress. They really shouldn't have been standing anywhere near the windows, but Jim was very popular on the staff (with the one notable exception) and they couldn't look away. Which was just as well, because really, they hadn't seen anything yet.

Then it happened: Just up at the corner, a metal sign tore from its post and came flying down the street, heading straight for Jim like a killer Frisbee.

The staff watching from the window let out a terrible moan, except for Kay, who screamed as the sign whistled past. Jim's head was bent slightly, so he didn't see the sign until about one half-second shy of Too Late. And in that split instant, whether it was his baseball instincts kicking in or a nudge from his old pal God, Jim ducked. The sign came so close, he said later, that he felt it cut his hair. But that was all it cut. Jim scrambled on all fours through the hotel door to safety, and I like to think, a round of cheers and applause.

Like many people caught in the Hurricane of 1938, the staff and guests of the Statler-Hilton were stuck there for a couple of days--even after the storm abated, there were downed power lines and broken gas mains everywhere. I guess for want of anything better to do, Catherine finally spent a little quality time with Jim and came to realize that, coarse Irish bastard that he was, he was evidently her kind of coarse Irish bastard.

They dated for a couple of years, then married during World War II. By that time, my grandfather was in the Army and due to ship out to Alaska and then Colorado to train with the 57th Massachusetts Flat--er, I mean the 10th Mountain Division. He and Kay didn't have a lot of time or money, so they went for a cheap honeymoon, up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. There they spent a happy week in one of the many tiny but snug tourist cabins up there, before Jim had to get back to Boston and ship out.

Nine months later, my mother was born.

To the extent that I've thought about it all, (and really, I haven't. The only thing worse than contemplating the death of your elders is contemplating their sex lives. Parents, grandparents, it doesn't matter--it really is the very definition of Too Much Information.) I guess the fact that my mother was likely conceived in New Hampshire gave her a certain immunity to flatlander bastard-ness. From a young age, she loved New Hampshire and often begged her father to take the family--which would grow to include her sister, my aunt Cathy--on vacation up there. Something about the place must have appealed to Papa--with a take-zero-shit attitude like his, I'm sure the "Live Free Or Die" motto of my home state struck a chord in his heart--because almost every summer, he brought the family up to a little inn in the Lake Sunapee region of New Hampshire. My mom loved that inn so much, that when she turned 18, she started working for the proprietors, paying her way through college exactly as her mother had.

The chambermaids at the inn were composed of local girls and several from away, including my mom. She and several other girls stayed in a kind of loft in a long shed at the back of the property. When they were off-shift, the girls hung out in their loft, smoking cigarettes and playing records, and were often joined by the local girls, who often as not were being followed by a bunch of local boys.

One night, the guys were in a triumphant spirit, and brought another boy who was the center of their attention. Partly this was because the fellow had brought two six-packs of beer with him, but mostly because he was the main character of a really good story that happened that day, and he was warming up to tell it.

An awful thing about being the storyteller of your particular branch on the family tree is that your predecessors are always better than you. They knew more, remembered more, and told it all so much better than you. And then they go away without completely filling in all the details, forcing you to leave big gaps in a story or else make up the truth, which is of course the storyteller's greatest skill, and one I have yet to master.

Which is my long-winded way of saying I don't know what story my Dad told that day. It's possible he related the tale of how he shot a hawk through the eye--while it was in flight--with a .22. He might have told the story of the drag race on the New London road, or of the mountain lion he'd glimpsed in the woods, despite there being no confirmed sightings of the beasts in a century or so.

Whatever story he told, he must have told it with hurricane force. My mother was certainly blown away by it. It led to her going with him on a date to the movies (Mom fell asleep in the middle of the film and drooled extravagantly on Dad's sweater. It was a Friday the 13th, forever after a lucky day in our family) and things just went on from there.

So it's probably better that I don't know the story that won Mom over. For one thing, young love deserves its mysteries (especially when your parents are the young lovers. Like I said, TMI). What's more, the stories you don't know have a way of making you appreciate the ones you do, so you might as well be grateful.

And anyway, it hardly matters, because we're well past my parents' prologue. What happened next is really prologue for someone else. And after today, he's not looking back at his story.

After today, his eyes are fixed forward.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which We Count to 15...

2009-04-23T21:07:00.003-05:00

This morning, the morning of our 15th wedding anniversary--the Crystal Anniversary, if I'm not mistaken--my wife announced that she'd had a wedding dream.

"Oh, wow. What are the odds?" I said.

"Yeah, I was getting ready to marry my old boyfriend."

This wasn't the dream-wedding scenario I'd had in mind. "Oh. Where was I?"

Her Lovely Self just waved her hand and made a Pff! noise with those perfect lips of hers. "No idea. You were just gone. Outta the picture."

"Oh. Well, that's a nice way to start your anniversary," I said.

"Stop it. I can't control my dreams. It was just a dream. It's not like he e-mails me. Not like all your old girlfriends."

Well, this was a fair point. Over the past 15 years, I must confess that I have received electronic mail from at least four--no, it's five--women who at one time or another qualified as being, howsoever briefly, girlfriends (for our purposes here, a "girlfriend" is any female I’ve had amorous contact with at any point along the American Male Baseball-Field Scale of Sexual Conquest. Which, if you really must know, involved me spending a lot of time between first and second, and, alas, setting a league record for the number of times I fouled out along the first-baseline).

"Yeah," I finally said. "But they're not emailing me to get married, you know."

"Well, how do I know?" she said, baiting me.

"Because you read all my e-mails," I countered.

That got her. "Oh. And how do you know that?"

"Because I know you. Just like I know them," I said. I meant that I'd always started out as friends with every girl I'd ever dated, and friendship is weirdly durable, often able to survive even the worsts of events, including break-ups, and so it was only natural that I might get some e-mails, not from old girlfriends, but from old friends. But based on The Look my wife gave me, that wasn't what she heard. So I hastened quickly to add a clarifier, which was a mistake. "Well, obviously, I know you QUITE a lot better than I know them," I sputtered on. "And of course I don't KNOW know them the way I know you. Like, you know, Biblically, or anything. At least not anymore. I mean—"

Truly, no one digs himself into a hole faster than me.

Thankfully, one of us had some crystal clarity for her 15th anniversary today, and she let me off the hook. In a moment, things degenerated pretty quickly into one of those not-quite arguments that's just so ridiculous you have to laugh.

At least, I think it was.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go spend the rest of my anniversary with the woman of my dreams.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which We Count to Two...

2009-04-21T12:13:00.002-05:00

Dear Elizabeth Claire,

Well, my little Éclair, you're two years old today. The idea that there are no longer any babies in the house fills me with the most contradicting feelings of stark relief and utter despair. But really, there's no arguing the point. THIS is no baby:

Like your big sister before you, you jumped from babyhood right to small womanhood, only you did it faster. You do everything faster. When I think back on your big brother's baby days, everything took longer. Your brother (and can I say here how much I love that you call him "Brubby" and not his given name? Which is exactly what I did to my Big Brother when I was two, at least according to our parents) was a baby for years on end. Then the Brownie came along and I thought she grew up rather quickly. But baby, she was a slowpoke compared to you.

I know it's mostly a birth order thing (well, birth order and sheer genius), but you did everything earlier, from walking and talking to climbing the pantry shelves to the high place where the M&M's hide to wrapping the males in your house around your stubby little fingers.

In the nearly four months that I've been home, you have inexorably bent me to your tiny will, much to the shrill exasperation of your mother. Incidentally, it really bugs her that after asking her anything she tells you "No" too, you immediately turn on your little heel and seek me out to ask for (actually, what really cheeses her is that I tend to give it to you. Except that crème brulee torch. I'm drawing the line: It has to wait til you're at least three).

These past few months--a whole twelfth of your life--have been hard for me, in a way I hope you never experience for yourself. It's a terrible thing to find that I have become a walking cliché--the unemployed middle-age middle manager, the out-of-work father of three. But rather than let me dwell on that, you fill my days with a constant, noisy, messy, frustrating, wonderful, joyous string of demands. I love how you approach me for things, wandering in past me, as if you were looking for your Elmo doll or the little piano thing the childless couple gave us, and then veering and coming at me from ambush to yell, "Daddy! Want you!"

Actually, like you're doing right now.

I love how you insist on having the first bite of whatever I'm eating (I warned you that enchilada was hot, though). I love how you yell for me and Blaze--not Mommy--to come rescue you from your afternoon nap. I love how you can't let me do my work without being a micromanager, to the point of sitting in my lap while I type.

Like you're doing right now.

I conffffooffess iiiii wishdh you dintttttttttt inssssist @$#%thyryeurooooo on mashingggjsl;kg the keyyss whilllxlkjbl while I type, because it forces me to get you in a right-armed bear hug and type one-handed, which is slow and annoying. But I'm willing to put up with it for a bit. A paragraph, anyway.

You probably don't know this--although you're so scary smart I wouldn't put it past you--but there was a point in time when your mom and I didn't think we were going to have any more than two children. And then when we came back from New Hampshire that last time in the summer of 2006 and found out you had snuck aboard for the ride, we weren't quite sure we could handle it. I've talked to a lot of parents over the years who have counseled me on the dangers of letting your children outnumber you, so I admit I was a little worried. Then you showed up--two years ago today--and it was as though every last tumbler in my life had finally clicked into place.

Almost from the first day of your life, I've said that you resemble your grandmothers. When you get worried or put out, you look a lot like Grammy N. But when you've decided it's time to get me off my dead ass and do something, you have a look that is a pure distillation of my mother, the Grandma you never got to meet. You were only on the same planet together for five days. Grandma got to hear you (I held the phone to your hospital crib when you were about two minutes old) and she and Papa at least got to look at some pictures of you. But it's small consolation when you remember (as I always will) that she and Papa were just eight or nine hours--a mere business day--from getting to see you before they died. That was a hard thing for me to deal with, especially with a recovering mommy and a new baby in the house. Actually, it's still hard. In fact, I know there are days over the past two years when it would have been downright unbearable, so bad it would have brought me to my knees permanently.

But somehow, having you around made it all easier to bear. I don't know whether that's because it's hard to focus on death when you're around a baby with so much life in her, or you just decided I needed to be kept busy so I couldn't stop and feel sorry for myself (something your grandmother was also rather skilled at). But either way, I have to tell you, in perfect honesty, that I think your being here saved my life. In fact, every day you continue to save my life.

Like you're doing right now.

So, Happy Birthday, baby. I know the kids have already given you a thousand nicknames--Zuzu, Puppy, Turd-face (that one was from you brother), Stinkypants (your sister), Harooo (the noise Blaze makes only when I go to get you from your nap), Buggy, Lil Bit, Bitty, Bumpus, and many others. These days, you are almost universally regarded as Little Bizzy (when you say your name, it comes out "Bizzet," which your brother and sister quickly modified to "Bizzy" and my God it suits you. You are the busiest--and occasionally dizziest--baby I've ever met).

But no matter how many names you go by, no matter how old you are, no matter how big you get, you'll always be my little Éclair.

Love,
Daddy

In Which I Ask YOU For A Favor...

2009-04-20T06:00:00.001-05:00

I had an interesting week last week.

Was it a good week? Well, I guess, insofar as I finally felt like I got going on my Work. I've been pecking away at a big piece of writing for a while, trying to find my way back to the headspace for this material. It's been a bit of a slog, finding my groove on this material, which was, let me tell you, pretty goddamn dismaying at first.

And then, Friday morning, I got up, went downstairs to my computer in my pathetic little office/Harry Potter space under the stairs. I started typing...and the next thing I knew, the kids were home from school. But I wasn't nearly done, not nearly ready to abandon this magic. So I kept on. I ate dinner downstairs. I finally called it a night--for so it suddenly was. I had worked from about 8:45 in the morning til about 7:45 that night. I wrote 10,500 words in one sitting. I haven't done that since I was in my 20s (and believe me, my aching ass was reminding me of the fact the moment I stood up). Walking Blaze that night, I realized I was exhausted, but man! It felt good, the way it feels after a long day of doing something hot and dusty and supremely satisfying. There is nothing that compares to that feeling of contentment.

I was planning to dive right in this morning and see if I had another 10,000 words in me (although, really, I'm thrilled to get 3,000 of a day), when the phone rang and I realized I was about to have another interesting week. Good or bad, well, we'll see.

Because my life is nothing if not ironic, the call I got was from an editor, asking me if I had time to do a quickie piece of freelance. Are you kidding me? I already have work. I have The Work. I'm writing Magic Words now! Where were you two weeks ago when I realized I wasn't going to get a teaching job this year and started freaking out about money?!? I screamed back. Fortunately, I screamed it in my head.

And because my life is nothing if not richly ironic, the quickie writing assignment is--you will SO love this--a family story about how to help kids cope when Mommy or Daddy has lost a job.

And just to add a little topspin of unmitigated gall to the whole affair, guess what magazine it's for?

I'll give you a hint.

Its initials are RBM.

I shit you not.

So you guessed it, sports fan, the very magazine that cut me loose three months ago is now assigning me freelance. And not just any freelance story, but a freelance story about how to help your kids cope when you have lost your job.

I know, I know, can you believe the nerve?

I was so utterly disarmed by this stunning display of thoughtless corporate cheek that, of course, I accepted the assignment immediately. Hey, between this and our tax refund, it'll cover the mortgage for almost the rest of the year.

And anyway, I'm sure they see it as a kind of combination olive branch and helping hand (although, really, did they have to give me this particular story topic?). So, I'm going to plow on this story. If I can line up the right sources, I ought to be able to hand it in before the week is out.

But I need a little help, which is why I'm turning to you, kind readers.

I know from the comments in my first post about being laid off that many of you have suffered the same fate, and those of you who haven't know someone--probably several someones--who are in the same pickle. I really don't want this story to be just a list of tips from experts. I'd like to get real, on-the-ground, this-is-what worked for me advice from real folks.

So, here's the part where you can help. If you or a spouse/partner have recently lost a job and have kids (anywhere from about 8 to teenage), I would love to know what you told them, or what little rituals or traditions you came up with to help them feel safe and secure in what is, let's be honest, a pretty scary situation (and I speak not only from current experience, but as a 6-year-old kid whose Dad had to explain what "laid off" meant.)

Actually, I suppose it doesn't have to be a recent lay-off (although that would be my preference). If you lost your job at some time in the past and had a REALLY good strategy that put your kids at ease, I'd be willing to hear you out.

And if you haven't lost your job, or you don't have kids, but are reading this and thinking, "Hey, I bet my sibling/friend/neighbor/parole officer would be perfect for this," then I ask you--pretty please, with sugar on top--to check with that person first, then contact me and let me know.

Sometime this week, please.

So bottom line. If you'd like to help and you have a lead--or you have advice of your very own to offer--e-mail me. My e-mail should be somewhere on this blog (I just checked: click on my profile and you'll find it), but just to make it easier--and also because I've never once written out my address in that weird, let's-all-prevent-spam way, it's: magazine dot man at gmail dot com.

One last thing: Whoever gives me tips or tells their story has to be willing to have their name appear in print. If you're a married woman and you changed your name, I'd agree to quote you under your maiden name, I guess, but otherwise, I don't do anonymous sources or name-withheld deals.

Said the blogger who calls himself the Magazine Man. I told you the irony was rich here.

Actually, I promise: Anyone I connect with for this story will know my real name and where this story will run. It's not like my secret identity is so secret these days, you know?

Anyway, that's the gig. Please don't feel obligated to help--we all have things to do. But if you could spare the time and had some nuggets of wisdom or a good source to pass along, you would earn my undying gratitude. Also, I would owe you A Favor. And I do not forget about favors.

And now, I have to make a call: I have an interview lined up with a social worker who specializes in counseling unemployed families.

After that, I'm going to go back downstairs and see if the magic is still there.

Thank you, one and all, and know that I am, as ever,

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which We Offer Up Some Odds and Ends...

2009-04-13T11:45:00.001-05:00

Egad, what a week. Well, actually, it was only the end of the week that felt like a full week. Like a full month, come to that. So you'll forgive me if I just make this a short post. And not merely short, but also a largely unconnected glop of doings (with some pictures--we're overdue, don't you think?) in the Magazine Mansion.

It all started early the morning of Good Friday, when Thomas awoke us for what I called Vomiting Vespers (oh, no pictures here, in case you were snacking). The poor little shit (and, sadly, I mean that all too literally) was exploding from both ends and had tried to deal with it on his own from the time he woke up at 3:30 to the time he woke us up at 5. By then he was so weak, he couldn't even climb back to his bunk, but just fell asleep on the floor. I feared dehydration and made him drink water and stuff, but he spent the rest of the morning shuttling between the sofa and the bathroom.

And then, about an hour before lunch, we got a call from school that the Brownie had taken a dainty little hurl into the teacher's waste basket, so we had to go get her, then bring her back and prop her up against Thomas. I know they were both really sick, because they didn't caper around or play with toys or videogames or do anything they normally do when they're stuck at home with a head cold or strep. Neither one really stirred from whatever spot they happened to collapse in after their latest trip to Great Porcelain God.

Her Lovely Self ordered me to stay away from the older kids--she knows how lousy my immune system is--and put me in charge of the Éclair for a chunk of the day. I tried to argue with her that from a logical--indeed, from an epidemiological--standpoint, we'd all already been exposed to this bug. Generally, it's very hard to spread a flu bug to someone else when they're already showing symptoms, because most people don't want to be within the splatter zone of a flu sufferer. Viruses know this and have adapted over millions of years to infect well in advance of making you sick. It's a survival thing.

Her Lovely Self doesn't believe my logic--or possibly believes that I am incapable of logic--so she ignored this little nugget of information gleaned from my health-reporting days and let her orders stand.

Not that I mind. I mean, who wouldn't want to spend the day with this charming container of pure, undiluted cuteness?

But by evening, I was feeling decidedly worn out--23 month-olds are intensely demanding of your time and attention, which I guess I remember from the two earlier kids, but not to this extent. So I was more than happy to get to bed early. Only to wake up around midnight and find myself impersonating Thomas from the night before.

Man, that night was nothing I want to repeat in a hurry. Easily the worst stomach flu of my life, even worse than that time I aspirated bits of--well, you know the time I mean.

The silver lining in all this is that the Éclair seems to have missed the bug entirely (knock wood, dear God, knock a forest of wood). While at the other end of the spectrum, I'm still sipping broth and staying within five steps of the can.

Despite the outbreak, we had a decent Easter. The Brownie and Thomas bounced back Saturday morning and by Sunday, they were ready to color eggs and devise an egg hunt for their little sister (the first I knew of it was when my new boss toddled over, shoved a basket in my face and said, "Daddy, we goin' egg look. Hold on to this!")

Later, since we were getting all Catholic about it anyway, the Brownie decided to model her new dress from Communion (which will occur in about a month).

I have to say, it was one of those rare moments in the Magazine Mansion where everyone was speechless. Even the Éclair couldn't say anything; she just stood real close, gawking at her big sister (whom she worships like a wise goddess).

I always knew my elder daughter was a woman--even when she was just a 4-year-old woman--but seeing her this way made me understand afresh that she was only going to get bigger and older and more independent and (because it's all about me) less in need of her Daddy.

I understood that this would happen--it was in the original parenting job description--that you were to love and protect and raise kids so that they could go off in white dresses--the daughters, anyway--and leave you. And it was that last part of the job description that really hit me on Easter, because there's a very strong likelihood that the next time I'll see her in a white dress, it'll be...

You know what? Let's move on.

Yours,
(hey, I said it would be short)
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which I Remember Every Word...

2009-04-02T00:02:00.001-05:00

As a child, I was always in awe of my mother's great presence of mind. She never seemed to be caught flat-footed, never lacked for just the right thing to say in any verbal confrontation, especially when she was standing up for someone she loved. But if I thought my awe of her could get no stronger, I was dead wrong. I discovered this when I became a parent, in particular, when Thomas got old enough to get in trouble himself.

Readers may recall that my son had an unfortunate incident of his own in second grade (which, in looking back through the archives, I'm astonished to discover happened almost exactly three years ago this week), when a self-styled "dean of discipline" gave my little guy detention (for a second-grader!), and all because my boy had stuck up for a fellow classmate.

I told the story in some detail at the time. What I didn't tell you then was how much I sweated over every phone call I made to that dean of discipline, the hours I spent sitting up in bed, not sleeping, going in over in my mind every possible permutation of my anticipated encounter with the man who had it in for my son. I wasn't worried about letting my boy down, see--I didn't want to let my mom down. I wanted to be every inch the staunch and articulate defender she had been for me and my brother when we were kids. I wanted to make sure I had just the right words to say, the proper tone, the appropriate response.

When that incident was all over, Thomas came out on top, but not because I had managed to turn the tables on the guy--in the end, it was my son's friends who ultimately came to his rescue. That unexpected outcome was so exciting, it was a few days before I got around to beating myself up for my lackluster performance, but I did beat myself up. For a little while anyway. But in the end, you know, I had to let myself off the hook. Because my mom had a rare and special gift that few parents could hope to match.

Or so it certainly seemed to me, especially on that late afternoon in 1978 in the hated Mr. F's classroom, when my mom had engaged in her very best Waiting in an effort to get this teacher to apologize to me for his terrible bullying, yelling, sausage-fingery poking of my person, and all-around comportment as a first-class asshole.

But Mr. F had out-Waited her, it seemed. I should have known--there was no way this guy was going to apologize to me, even though he had been SO in the wrong. And when my mom broke off her Waiting gaze and turned to face me, I felt for a second like something had broken in my chest. It was a feeling ten times worse than the humiliation I'd felt that morning under Mr. F's bullying, harrying glare.

And then, she winked at me.

And she said, "Now remember this, MM. Remember how small it makes you look, to be wrong, and to be too proud to admit it. Especially when everyone else knows it."

In that moment, I understood that she was trying to tell me something important, something to remember. But all I could really process was the excited fizzy feeling that instantly welled up behind my eyes, seeped through my brains, out my ears.

She had totally got Mr. F!!

He certainly thought so. He literally rocked back on his heels as though struck. And now he was shouting. "You don't talk about me this way, not to a student!" He spluttered, utterly unmanned in the moment.

My mom didn't even turn to look at him. She just kept hitting him with her back as she grabbed my elbow and in one smooth move, spun me in front of her and ushered me out the door, Mr. F still gibbering behind us. "You come back here! I have not--did not--there IS no apology owed to--"

But all of a sudden, his booming voice seemed diminished to me. In the time it had taken my mom to turn on one heel, this man had ceased to matter.

That incident stayed with me a long time, not just as a moment of composure to emulate someday if or when my own kids got in trouble, but just because I never admired anyone so much as my mother when she bearded Mr. F in his den.

And it was a moment, as you might expect, that I would need to call on. We never again had anything quite like the confrontation that we'd had that morning--I liked to think Mr. F had decided on a line that he would not cross, lest he hear the clack of my mother's sensible shoes on his linoleum again. But for the next two years, Mr. F almost never gave up in his attempts to make my life miserable (or at least more challenging than they needed to be). Long-time readers may recall that he tried to trip me up in my efforts to win the district Spelling Bee, for example. I really could have done without him, to be perfectly honest. Kids have a hard enough time growing up, negotiating school. They get plenty of crap from their own peer group; they certainly don't need to be bullied by a grown man in an authority position.

But there was another moment that stayed with me longer, and it occurred about a minute and 40 seconds later, when we were out in the parking lot, in our car. Mom was about to start the engine--it was a little nippy out--but she thought the better of it. She reached over, rifled through her purse and handed me my book.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

I nodded silently, staring only at the cover of my book. I thought I could see the greasy indentations of Mr. F's sausage fingers on my Story Book.

"Look at me," she intoned, and I did. My mom's brown eyes were no longer aflame, but they were intent.

"You have a special talent, and talent will always have enemies. Do you understand what I mean?"

I nodded.

"There will always be people like Mr. F--and you will find them everywhere in your life--who are afraid of talent. Who are threatened by it, and who will do anything then can to squash it. For no other reason than one sad, pathetic fact: Because they can't do what you can do. I'm sorry you had to find this out now. But it's just as well, because the sooner you understand something, the better."

"Understand what?" I asked.

She grabbed me by my arm. "That you will always have to fight these people. That if you are not always vigilant, eventually they will get to you. And if you aren't careful, you will start doing their job for them. You will start to doubt your talent. And if you do that, then you will lose it." She shook my arm, and for a moment I was almost in tears again. And here was the thing: so was she. "Don't you ever let anyone do that to you, do you hear me? I won't have it!" she hissed.

"Okay! Okay! Jeez!" I cried.

My mom let go of me then and started the car up. "Now, don't go getting a swollen head about this. I would never have said this to you at your age if it hadn't been for that...that...ass!"

My mom said this last with her Boston accent coming on strong and thick, so the word came out "ahhhhhhhhssssss," which was always funny to me, and I snorted. Then she cracked a smile and I knew we were out of the woods.

I hesitated to tell you about this conversation, although for me it was easily the most important part of the whole story. I hesitated because it sounds so self-serving, to repeat all those wonderful things my mom said to me, said about me (and you better believe I remembered every word). It was quite heady stuff for anyone to hear, and it did give me a bit of an inflated head. On the other hand, I guess Mom figured that, given the kind of opposition I was attracting, maybe I needed to be built up a little. And while she was maybe not so big on babying her sons with mushy sentiment and general coddling, building us up was definitely one area of motherhood at which my mom excelled.

I said earlier that I really wished I could call my mom about now, tell her what's been going on, but she obviously knew what she was doing when she raised me. She did such a good job that now, coming up fast on two years after her death, I can hear her just fine.

So I can hardly complain about my sad life, lament my coming up empty-handed on freelance and academic jobs. That would just lead me to moan about how worried I am that my skills and talents are bleeding away. And the moment I hear those words start to form in my head, I almost laugh at myself. Because I know it isn't true. And I only know that because she knew it wasn't true.

If that sounds self-serving, well, I apologize.

But my mother wouldn't have had it any other way.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which the Waiting is the Hardest Part...

2009-03-31T22:37:00.002-05:00

My mom marched me down the hall to the classroom where Mr. F held court. And with each step--especially when we passed the spot in the hall where only a few hours earlier I'd been made to stand, and cry, and surrender my Story Book--I began to rethink accompanying my mom to talk to Mr. F. I knew from experience that my mother could be hell on wheels and would not tolerate anyone having at her child, especially for a wrong he had not committed. In fact, judging from her muttering as we walked, I think it's safe to say she was in a state of disbelief over the man's behavior.

She wasn't the only one who was incredulous. Up until that point, I naively understood that there was only one kind of teacher--the beneficent, wise adult who loved all children equally and who only lost their tempers in the face of the most outrageous childish behavior--and even then only to children who really deserved it. It had never occurred to me for one minute that there might be a teacher who would take an unreasoning dislike to a kid--to me in particular--and who would so utterly lose his cool in the presence of that child, and of other children, never mind another teacher. It was an awful thing to realize, I can tell you. It had a way of making the floor beneath my feet feel unsteady somehow. I felt that I had uncovered some kind of secret I was not really meant to know and the knowing of it made me feel terrible and small and scared. I can still recall the utter misery of that feeling on that day.

Although, I must say, it was wonderful having my mom with me. As a child, I was much closer to my mom than to anyone else in my family and having her by my side--slightly leading the way, in fact--made me feel hopeful, despite my intense trepidation. True, she never coddled me or was mushy or drippily affectionate to me--certainly not in the way she would be to my offspring some two decades hence. But she never failed to tell me and my brother that she loved of us, and she had always made it clear that we could count on her at any time for anything. She was the very definition of "unconditional," and I just knew that, long before I was even aware of the word's existence. That knowledge made up for rather a lot in my life.

My father, for example, sobering up after some awful night's tirade against me or my mom or my brother, could be disgustingly lick-spittle in his fawning affections and cozening attentions, in a way that I sometimes, to be completely honest, wouldn't have minded my mother displaying. But I had come to decide that these emotional states were apparently an either-or proposition as far as parents were concerned, and it would be years before I had my mind changed about that. For the moment, though, I was all too glad to take the quiet confidence and fortitude that my mom excelled at displaying, even if it came with a rather less florid demonstration of her love.

Heavens, wasn't that a digression? And not at all what I know you came here for. So let's jump right to the action in Mr. F's classroom.

The man himself was sitting at his desk at the head of the classroom, diligently--one might even say, studiously--ignoring the door and focusing on some papers on his desk. Next to him, within reach of his right hand, was my Story Book, closed and sitting flat on the desk, although I noticed with a certain proprietary annoyance that a few pages were sticking out at odd angles, as though they had been pulled from the book and placed back haphazardly.

My mom's sensible shoes made a hard clacking on the linoleum floor as she strode smartly up to the desk, and this noise prompted Mr. F to look up. He glared, hard, at me first, then looked my mother in the face, his eyes brightening.

"Well, good afternoon, Mrs. M," he began, a broad, beaming smile on his face, and as he said this, all I could think was that Mr. F was some kind of comic book super-villain, the kind who could seem superficially sane and lucid and even friendly, but the moment you turned your back, he'd become the Joker and start spraying you with acid. I wondered if my mom would be fooled by this show of false bonhomie, possibly even think I'd made this all up (I had, in my brief panic and confusion, forgotten that I had my teacher as a witness to Mr. F's bat-shit craziness).

My mom smoothly cut across him, her Boston accent sharp in that tiny Midwestern classroom. "Oh, are we feigning kindness and civility for this exchange?" she asked. "Or would you rather resort to raging and screaming and shouting, which you evidently prefer when dealing with students? Because I'm perfectly happy to address you either way."

Mr. F's smile faltered only slightly. "Oh, now Mrs. M, aren't we going to be friends? I just need to talk to you a little bit about MM's attitude, and then--"

Well, to her credit, my mom heard him out, and I'd relate it all for you here, but of course you heard most of it in my last post, and from the big man's mouth. I did note that he'd changed tack a little. Instead of going with his original accusations--that I was making up stories about my classmates and then passing the stories around school--he instead told my mother that he'd noticed that I was getting too big for my britches (I swear that was the phrase he used) and that he felt I was doing myself no favors to draw attention to myself in my obvious grandstanding way.

"I've seen the way MM uses his little book here to get a lot of attention and I think that sort of thing can go too far," he concluded, patting the book.

If his speech had flummoxed my mother (I can tell you it had me gaping a little), she didn't reveal it. She simply snapped her hand out. "That book was a gift from me to my son and I'll thank you to give it back," she said.

Mr. F hesitated for a moment, looking darkly at me, then put his hand on the book.

"Oh, but first--" my mom said, causing Mr. F's hand to linger a moment on that yellow plaid cover. "I'd like you to point out to me the pages where my son engaged in his 'malicious mischief-making,' as you called it this morning. I'd like you to point out to me the parts where he wrote anything remotely negative or untrue about any child in this school."

Mr. F froze, which I noticed only because I froze too. It was only then that I made a mental scan of every page, every story in my Story Book. In the stories I wrote, I had included nearly all of my classmates at one point or another. I had written in some goofy things about myself and my best friend Shawn, too. I might have even gone so far as to include my Big Brother in a story or two and to make mention of the fact that he was a bit of a tubbo (which, you must understand, wasn't malice. That was factual reporting.) Had I said anything that Mr. F, crazy as he was, would have construed as malicious towards my classmates? On the one hand, I knew I hadn't--I had always taken special care to make the villains of the stories entirely fictitious. But Mr. F had completely unseated me, made me doubt myself.

Moreover, I thought later, my mom was taking a big chance. It dawned on me only then that she had never once asked me if I had ever written anything bad about my classmates. Like I said, the word "unconditional" was not in my vocabulary then. But I already had a living definition.

(Also, I found out years later, my mom was in the habit of regularly reading through my assorted story books and folders at night when I was asleep, which must have taken a serious bite out of her evenings. By the time I started high school, I had written enough of these stories to paper the house.)

"I'm waiting," my mom said now to Mr. F. And I noted when she did that she was using the Mom Voice. Mr. F noticed this and he didn't like it. He squirmed for a long moment, torn between maintaining his smiling façade and turn into the man I was already coming to think of as Crazy F. Finally, he grabbed the book and handed it back to my mom. "Well, I haven't really had time to go through--" he started. Which, by the way, couldn't have been true. He must have read enough to realize he'd been severely misinformed about the nature of my writing, and just couldn't admit it. Which left him only one other option: to feign disinterest and claim he hadn't really had a chance to read my little juvenile pootlings. Which was actually an even bigger mistake.

My mom knew it. And she pounced.

"So, let me get this straight: Based on the accusations of one of your students, you accused my son of writing lies about his classmates. You accused him of this in a loud and terrible voice, to the extent that I'm sure most everyone in the school must have heard you. And now, you ADMIT you haven't even bothered to prove your accusation?" My mom was seething now--there was no steam coming out of her ears or anything, but the temperature of the room had risen by about 20 degrees.

I waited for my mom to say it, to point out what was obvious even to me: that Mr. F had just done the very thing he'd falsely accused me of doing, the great big sausage-fingered hypocrite.

But she had too much class to point out the obvious. Instead, she simply said, "Mr. F, do you have any idea the ridiculous position in which you have just placed yourself?"

Mr. F was standing up now. Somehow he didn't seem so tall. "Mrs. M," he began, "I don't think there's any need to get so riled up about this--"

"I'm waiting," my mom said, once more. It seemed like a non sequitur, and it shut Mr. F right up. He looked at my mom quizzically.

"Waiting?" he said.

Mom threw her head to the left, to where I'd been standing like a statue for the past minute or two. "For your apology to MM."

And then began The Waiting in earnest

The thing about my mom was, she could Wait like nobody's business. Her Waiting was more like Weighting, like a damn dwarf star had just landed on your back. Her Waiting pressed you into the ground, made your eyeballs squeeze out of your head until you couldn't stand it anymore and you gave in and did or said whatever she wanted. If Waiting had been an Olympic event, my mom would have been Mark Spitz.

We must have stood there, the three of us, long enough for someone to sculpt a statue, for someone to paint a commemorative plate (The Waiting). My mom Waited and Waited and Waited.

Thing was, Mr. F, who was, after all, crazy, seemed strangely resistant to the Waiting.

I could sense that he must be feeling the crushing pressure--God knows I was ready to spring up and apologize to me. Whole minutes passed. Some students came in and collected books from their desks and left (not without first offering some quizzical looks). The janitor came in and mopped the floor in the back. Darkness began to fall.

At least, it did in my mind. With growing dismay, it was dawning on me that I was about to see my mother lose. That she was going to blink first, break the silence, let Mr. F get away with not apologizing for the shit he'd put her son to.

Mr. F continued to stare her down, mouth unmoving.

Finally, after an eternity, my mom shifted and turned. I could swear I saw a smirk on Mr. F's face as my mother turned to face me.

I couldn't look at her. I couldn't believe she'd lost.

And then, she winked at me...

In Which My Writing Days Are Over (circa 1978)...

2009-03-30T16:31:00.002-05:00

Having a tough Monday, for some reason.

I'm coming up fast on my third month of unemployment, having exhausted the freelance work I drummed up, and come to the end of the job opportunities I sought in academia. Well, to be fair, I haven't heard back from the last place I interviewed with, but they were supposed to call me by Friday and it occurs to me that the only reason they didn't call me by Friday was because they offered the job to someone else and they're waiting to hear back from that person before they cut me loose, so it comes to the same thing as far as I'm concerned.

So, having a lousy day. I wouldn't say I've struck rock-bottom, but if I were to let go right now, I wouldn't have very far to fall, you know?

To top it off, today is my mother's birthday, which is just something I'm throwing in there because I can. Honestly, there's no reason it should be weighing on me, except for the fact that she should be alive to celebrate it. Or not celebrate it, as was more often the case. My parents were never big on celebrating their birthdays. But I still would have called her. I could stand to have a chat with her about now, come to think of it. Not because she would be comforting to me in that way that moms can be to their sons. Just the opposite. My mom knew, all too well, that feeling sorry for oneself was a bad habit to get into, worse than cigarettes or heroin or not returning your movies to the video store on time, and I can't think of one instance, ever, where she poor-babied me.

I hope that doesn't sound bitter, because I don't mean it as such. The truth is, some of the defining moments in my life occurred when I was brought low and my mom refused to let me feel bad about it.

In particular, I'm reminded of a grammar school teacher who, for a time seemed to take a personal interest in crushing me.

This would have started some time in the fifth grade, which would have made me nine going on 10. My family had only six months earlier moved from northern New England to the Middle West. I was therefore the new kid, and while I was braced to be treated with a certain amount of animosity, in fact my classmates welcomed me with exemplary kindness and equanimity.

It was Mr. F who made my misery his personal business.

Mr. F was not even my teacher--he taught the next grade up. But because our classes were so small--this was a very tiny town in the middle of Kansas--we 5th and 6th graders had many classes together, as well as recess and lunch. This gave Mr. F a chance to observe me and what he came to see as my "attitude problem" without going to the trouble of having me as a student and actually getting to know me. Then it was just a matter of waiting for me to step Out of Line. Or close enough to what passed for Out of Line in his fevered imaginings.

But the first I really knew of any of this was a wintry spring morning in late March. The morning Mr. F completely blindsided me.

In those days, my brother and I walked to school. It wasn't far, but on that cold morning, carrying my bookbag all the way over the bridge and up the slightly steep hill to school, I was a little winded. And as soon as I stepped into the corridor of our school, my glasses immediately fogged over from the heat. So I really was blind when I felt a strong hand grab me through the shoulder of my big old padded parka and shove me roughly up against the wall.

I peered over the top of my glasses to see a furious blur glaring back at me.

"Don't you give me one of your smart-aleck looks!" Mr. F boomed.

For some reason, I wasn't allowed to set down my bookbag, so I was forced to swipe my glasses off my face with one hand and rub them awkwardly on my sleeve. When I put them back on, I got a good, if slightly smeary, streaky look at Mr. F glowering down at me.

He was a big man. I recall that he stood taller than even our tallest basketball players, and those included some eighth graders who'd been held back two or three times, so I'm thinking Mr. F stood over six feet. He was a bulky fellow, with a great bulbous nose, and fleshy, jowly face. His grey hair was cut very short and square in flattop fashion. He looked like nothing so much as a drill sergeant gone slightly to seed. But with his towering presence and great booming voice, he made quite an impression when he was right up in your face like that, let me tell you.

Despite my tendency to be a bit of a smart-ass, I had never really been in terrible trouble as a kid. I was not a discipline case. I was generally respectful to teachers and could count on the fingers of one hand the times I'd got in trouble, and usually those amounted to a short rebuke shouted across a classroom or hallway for an unthinking moment of childlike carelessness or exuberance. Up to that point in my brief life, I'd never done anything to warrant a teacher actually laying hands on me and throwing me up against a wall and bellowing at me like a lunatic. I was scared shitless.

"What--? What--?" I tried.

"You don't say a word! Not. One. Word! To me!" he yelled, spittle flecking my glasses as he stabbed a great sausage-like finger in my face. "You get enough chance to run your smart-aleck mouth as it is!"

I shut right up and just looked up at him. Peripherally, I was aware that we were beginning to attract a bit of a crowd. It was first thing in the morning, after all, and lots of kids were coming through the door I'd just entered and we were sort of blocking the hall. A few boys--sixth graders who were actually students of Mr. F's--gave me little smirks behind their teacher's back, then passed on into their classroom. My own big brother, who had been only a few steps behind me, had entered, walked behind Mr. F, gave me a look of concerned curiosity that seemed to say What the hell did you manage to do in the five seconds you've been in school? then walked on. BB was my great protector for most of my elementary years, but it was understood that helping me with a teacher--especially a possibly unhinged one--was well beyond his powers.

A few of my own classmates had passed as well and one of them must have said something to my own teacher, because after a few awful moments of Mr. F staring at me, saying nothing (yet allowing me to say nothing), Mrs. B, my teacher, appeared meekly at Mr. F's side.

"Is there a problem?" she asked. "Did MM do something?"

Mr. F smiled an awful leering smile as he looked down at me. "Well, you tell us, MM. You just tell us, mister! You want to tell your teacher what you did?"

Seldom have I felt more helpless. Here I was, just a nine-year-old squirt with this towering great (and, I was beginning to feel certain, crazy) authority figure hunched over me, having only moments earlier shouted me into silence. Now he was asking--daring--me to speak.

"I don't--what??" I spluttered.

Mr. F narrowed his eyes. It was a terrible, dangerous expression, and I felt fear as I have never felt in my life. I had dealt with grown-ups with bad tempers--my own father, then pretty well embarked upon his career as a drunk, could have his mean, mean moments--but this was the devil I didn't know. And that uncertainty preyed on me.

"Where's your book?" Mr. F demanded, his hand suddenly held out, sausage fingers hinging in a gimme-gimme gesture.

I stood there, pinned to the corridor wall, only too aware of the growing weight of my bag, which was full of books of every kind.

"Book?" I repeated.

"Don't play dumb with me!" he bellowed, stabbing me in the breastbone with a sausage finger. "Your little yellow book that you write all your malicious thoughts in! Your writing days are over!"

I'm sure I gaped when he said this. Mr. F could only be referring to the book I simply knew in my mind as The Story Book. It was a hard-bound book with an unfortunate yellow-plaid design on the cover. But I didn't care about that. What I liked about the book--which had been a gift from my parents--was that it was full of blank pages. The previous year, my last teacher in New Hampshire had remarked to my Mom during a parent-teacher conference that I had a gift for storytelling. This didn't come as much of a surprise, I shouldn't think--both of my parents had brought me and my brother up on stories and it was natural that we should start telling a few of our own. But my teacher's novel suggestion had been that my parents encourage me to write mine down. So they got me the book and that's what I had done. Initially, I had tried to keep a travel diary of our trip from New Hampshire to Kansas, but that got boring fast (drive to Kansas yourself and you might understand why). So I started writing fiction. Mostly I wrote adventure stories--just one or two pages long--starring myself and my old friends from New Hampshire, who I missed.

But just lately, I had discovered that my new classmates were great fans of the Encyclopedia Brown stories and a series of books in our library which we referred to as "Minute Mysteries" (although this wasn't quite their correct title). In any case, sensing an audience for solve-it-yourself stories--which I quite liked too--I tried my hand at writing a few during lunch, over recess, and sometimes during class when Mrs. B would give us a chance to do some creative writing. Those first stories were, I'm sure, terribly derivative of the Encyclopedia Brown stories--probably even plagiarized. But what made them special was that I included myself and other kids from our class in the stories. That little hint of verisimilitude made them very popular and in short order, my distinctive little yellow-plaid book regularly made the rounds among the fifth graders. Only a few days earlier, on a rainy day in which we'd been forced to have recess indoors, I had enjoyed the quiet pride that came from watching my classmates jostling for rights to read my stories next as several of them sat on the bleachers in the school gymnasium. To be fair, the older kids had hogged all the basketballs in the gym, so there was a distinct shortage of distractions, but still it had been a fine moment for a young writer, to see his reading public clamoring to sneak a peek at his latest work. My only regret was that I hadn't had the forethought to charge my friends money for reading privileges.

But unbeknownst to me, my work had drawn an unintended audience, which in turn brought in the critics, a moment that any writer should expect, I suppose, but which had caught me completely off guard. In the event, one of the sixth-graders had asked my classmates what they were reading and he got a garbled answer, or one that was beyond his ability to fully grasp. Instead of understanding that a young new talent in the school was writing entertaining mystery tales that included his classmates as characters, this fellow gleaned only that the new kid was making up stuff about other kids in the school. And it must be bad or embarrassing because why else would people be lining up to read it during recess? So this kid passed his intelligence along to his teacher, and that was it. I was officially Over the Line.

When Mr. F relayed the "fact" of my writings to my teacher, it's hard to tell who gaped more--Mrs. B or me. To her credit, Mrs. B--who had read one or two of my stories and liked them (or to be more precise, liked that one of her students was taking an interest in doing something creative) haltingly tried to explain the true nature of my writing to Mr. F, he wouldn't hear it. He demanded the book there and then, assuming I suppose, that he would be able to prove in a trice that I was the malicious nine-year-old libeler he took me to be.

I have to admit, as scared as I was--and I was pretty goddamn scared by this point--some little voice in the back of my head rose up in indignation. Bad enough that I had been falsely accused of writing the grammar school equivalent of tabloid journalism, but I was now being asked to give up a personal possession--a gift from my parents--unfairly.

I hesitated for a long moment, long enough for Mr. F to turn bright red in fury and begin screaming his head off, his spitting lips only an inch from my sweating forehead.

"How DARE you defy me, you little busy-body! You malicious mischief-maker! You had better GIVE me that book. RIGHT. NOW. RIGHT NOW DO YOU HEAR ME?" I swear, he was practically gibbering.

It's actually a good thing Mrs. B was there, not just because I think it was only her presence that kept Mr. F from tearing my limbs from their sockets, but also because she provided a sober, nodding witness later after school when, still shaking and sobbing like a trauma patient, I related the whole awful story to my mother.

Who, when I was finished, instead of drawing me to her breast and stroking my hair and letting me get snot all over her sweater, simply put a steadying hand on my shoulder and said, "All right, pull yourself together."

Sniffling, I looked up into her eyes, and almost instantly, I stopped crying. Not because I saw an impatience and hardness in my mother's gaze that told me my histrionics were no longer going to be tolerated.

No, instead, I saw actual raging fire in her eyes, and understood that very shortly Mr. F was going to find himself in the likely unprecedented position of wishing he'd never been born.

And I thought that was something I rather wanted to see...

In Which We Sweat It Out...

2009-03-27T13:50:00.001-05:00

Well, that's the problem with realizing you're not going to be offered a job you're interviewing for while you're still in the middle of interviewing for it. The problem? Rampant, virulent apathy sets in. I'm enough of a pro that I think I could have put on a brave face and given it my all, but I was already given to understand--in some strange and overwhelming psychic way--that the search committee had decided for themselves that I was not job-offering material. Had perhaps NEVER been job-offering material. Had perhaps only been a token Other Candidate they felt compelled to bring in, just so they could say they had cast their net wide.

How else to explain the almost casually indifferent way they were treating me, making me eat dinner in the airport food court (and paying for it out of my own pocket, did I mention that?), trying to put me up in a hotel where the electricity had gone out, forgetting to let me (or anyone else) in on that fact, or on the fact that they had put me up in another hotel? Or could it just be that the committee was the most colossal assemblage of fuck-ups this side of my own extended family? In which case, actually, you'd have thought I was a shoo-in.

But no, whatever the reason, it was clear they didn't want me, and so the apathy set in pretty badly by Wednesday night, when I was back at my hotel. Indeed, I think it's fair to say the apathy has not gone completely away even at this late date. Honestly, I can’t think of any other reason why it's taken me so long to muster the will to write this final installment.

My body evidently felt the same way, too. Felt that things were so godawful and that tomorrow--the day of my so-called research presentation (which the search committee had insisted I make, despite my telling them I had no research agenda, having been working in the field for the past two decades)--was going to be even worse. Thus it was, I think, that my body decided to make things just a little more interesting.

Which is why I awoke at about 5:30 the next morning with severe chills and what turned out to be a 103-degree fever.

It was the flu, of course, and it was so bad that when I turned on the news that morning, the first thing I saw was an item from the local broadcast station telling me that all area elementary schools had actually canceled classes because too many kids were coming down with this flu. And it was hitting people with the speed of a bullet train. One moment they were fine, the next they were sprawled sideways across a bench or large piece of furniture, sweating profusely into the fabric and complaining of the bed-spins.

I can't honestly tell you if I do well with fevers or not, because in the event it's all pretty much a blur. On the one hand, I'm generally aware of how sick I am and, if the circumstances demand it, I can often pull my shit together for brief intervals--usually no more than a few hours--before collapsing in a moist, gibbering heap. I would consider that an argument in favor of "good." On the other hand, if I get a fever that goes anywhere above 102, I start hallucinating, and that can be bad. Not just bad, but potentially embarrassing. The last time I had a fever like this, I was at Disneyworld with my family and I was holding conversations with multi-colored giraffes. Given the venue at the time, I pretty much fit right in. But what was I going to do if I started seeing giraffes in the middle of this research presentation, which I was going to be delivering in about three hours? The entire faculty would be there. Granted, one of my last lucid thoughts the night before had been the realization that, honest and for true, I didn't have a prayer of getting a job offer, and after the way I'd been treated, I wasn't even sure I wanted an offer. Some sixth sense just seemed to tell me that I wasn't going to be able to play nice with these people if I had to deal with them on a professional basis every day.

And yet, I seemed to understand that I was already on a path here and I owed it to myself, if to no one else, to see it through.

So I threw on some clothes and staggered off across a busy road to a nearby convenience store, where I paid an extortionate amount for a small bottle of Tylenol--at the price per pill they charged me, I think I could have bought some crystal meth for cheaper. I swallowed half the bottle in one great gulp, figuring my liver would just have to deal with it, then staggered back to the hotel, stopping only once--in the middle of the busy street, of course--to notice that all the cars and all the people in them were beginning to glow. I often see haloes when I have a high fever. Well, I thought, at least that should make my interview more interesting.

By the time my ride came for me, I was dressed and packed and checked out, although it must be said I was checked out in more ways than one.

"Are you all right?" my ride asked. She was another member of the search committee, actually a very nice woman who taught graphics at the school and was a little younger than I. I had spent a lot of time with her yesterday and this morning could only hope my proximity to her the day before hadn't dosed her with the bug as well. But she looked okay to me now. In fact, she had a lovely purple aura around her.

"Pretty good," I finally answered her, in a cracking voice (high fevers for some reason always take my voice back to around puberty, and suddenly I'm Peter Brady, singing "Time to Change.")

Well, evidently I didn't look fine. In fact, it turned out that, despite (or perhaps because of) having ingested about five grams of Tylenol, I was sweating profusely and no doubt my eyes were dilated so wildly that my upper face must have been all eyebrows and pupils.

"Oh my, you've got this flu. It's really going around," she said, as she more or less poured me into her car. "My kids have it and this morning my husband woke up with it."

Oh, well, gee, I wonder how I got it then? I thought to myself--at least I hope I thought to myself. Then there was a jump cut in my memory.

When I came to next, I was walking down a hallway in the communications building--no idea where my luggage had gone, or the 20-pound messenger bag I'd been toting on my shoulder for the past 36 hours. I didn't care about the suitcase, but I did need that bag, as it contained my laptop and a folder full of copies of my resume and several positive student evaluations from classes I had taught as an adjunct. I had hoped to hand these out at my research presentation as a way of making my point that, while I may not have vast research experience and have only been pottering around the last 20 years writing books and magazine articles and things, I had at least made an effort to get some academic experience under my belt.

And then I rounded the corner and found myself in a conference room full of scowling academicians with assorted auras, most of them wavy and pinkish, reminding me of nothing so much as a baby with conjunctivitis. I sat down, noting then that my messenger bag had somehow preceded me into the room, then remembered that I had already been in here, but had postponed the beginning of my presentation to lurch off to the bathroom to mop my brow. And possibly to throw up.

Well, all I can say is, I don't recommend giving a presentation to a room full of college professors when you have a raging fever and no control over what is coming out of your mouth. Unless, of course, you're pretty certain you're not going to get the job, at least. I honestly don't recall what I said--I'm pretty sure at one point I referred to my 20 years in the industry as "real" work, compared to academic publishing, which I suppose is not the most diplomatic thing to say.

Ah, but what the hell? If I was sure of anything at this point--aside from the certainty that I was really sick--it was that I had absolutely no hope of changing anyone's mind about offering me this job. So perhaps it's just as well that I have no real recollection of what I said.

And before I knew it, I was out of there. My next clear memory is of running through the Cincinnati airport, wondering if I was even supposed to be there. I only knew I was in Cincinnati because I remembered it as being the airport where you can spend time riding every moving conveyance--an escalator, a tram, and even a bus--except, it seemed, an airplane. And then, after another blank interval, I found myself fumbling with a key, trying to open the door to my car in the airport parking garage, until it dawned on me that I was trying to get into someone else's car.

Then I drove home in a quite unexpected state of perfect lucidity, which lasted long enough for me to get through the door, tip the contents of my bag into the laundry room, take a long, hot shower, have a lavish vomiting spell in my own bathroom (and to wonder idly when exactly it was I'd managed to have a meal of red beans and rice). Then I fell into bed and slept for the next 18 hours.

When I awoke late the next day, I felt a bit ragged around the edges, a bit shaky still, but my fever had broken, never to return. Neither did my memory of my last day interviewing for the job, alas. Just the same, it came as no surprise later that afternoon to get an e-mail (and I just knew that, after the hospitality I'd experienced, these were not the kind of folks who would actually call me up and tell me anything themselves) announcing that the school was going to extend their search for their new professor. Wow. So not even could they not bring themselves to call and speak to me, they couldn't even properly reject me, opting instead to leave me dangling. Except, of course, that I refused to dangle. I could read rejection between the lines. I had been told more than once that they had planned to make a decision--and an offer--within 24 hours. So my performance--and I have to admit that here I DID wonder what I might have said during the final stage of my interview--had served only to tell them that they needed to keep looking.

Which was just as well, Her Lovely Self and I decided, after I recovered a little bit more over the weekend and related to her everything I could remember about my two-day interview. To her everlasting credit, my wife was disgusted on my behalf, and wondered aloud whether I should continue to subject myself to academic interviews, if this was how I was going to be treated. I was so touched by her show of solidarity that I actually agreed with her.

Until another college called me almost exactly a week later and asked if I could come and talk to them about their open faculty position.

Which, incidentally, is where I've been between writing parts two and three of this post. I apologize for the delay and wish I could tell you anything about the latest interview. I can tell you that I was treated infinitely better than the first school, but I seem to have become a little superstitious about these things, and I don't want to fill you in on any details until I get word--yea or nay--from these folks.

In the mean time, I'm just going to try to work on some personal projects. I have a book proposal that I am patently NOT making any progress on, for one thing, and the Éclair has decided that potty training is something she's interested in, and God knows if I'm qualified for anything these days, it's dealing with pantloads of shit. In fact, she just appeared by my side, and announced her desire to visit the bathroom, although judging from the conspicuous load in her little overalls, I think it's safe to say that her timing is a mite off.

But at least she's giving it the old college try.

And so am I.

Have a lovely weekend, all.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead