The Lowell Review 2022 by The Lowell Review

2022

P R O S E P O E T R Y I N T E R V I E W S

editors

Richard P. Howe, Jr. Paul Marion

2022 Lowell, Massachusetts

2022

editors Richard P. Howe, Jr. Paul Marion

No content may be reproduced without permission from The Lowell Review and the individual authors except for brief quotations in critical articles and media reports. Contributors retain rights to their work following publication. Published in the United States of America All rights reserved The Lowell Review is an annual publication with content from the RichardHowe.com blog, as well as submitted and curated material. Please send correspondence and work for consideration (June through October) to TheLowellReview@gmail.com Works in this issue of The Lowell Review which first appeared in the RichardHowe.com blog in 2021 are reprinted with permission of the authors. Special thanks to Billy Collins for his poem “Lowell, Mass.” from The Apple That Astonished Paris © 1988, 1996 by Billy Collins. Reprinted with the permission of the author and The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of University of Arkansas Press, www.uapress.com “Still Rockin’ in the Beat World: How Kerouac Cool Continues to Fuel Popular Music Passions as Writer’s Centenary Is Reached” by Simon Warner appeared in the online rock music magazine Perfect Sound Forever (Oct. 2021) and is reprinted with permission of the author. “Saturday Morning, Reading ‘Howl’” by Janet Egan, from Content for a Creative Revolution (Vol. 1, No.1), is reprinted with permission of the author. “The Work of a Genius” by John Struloeff, from The Work of a Genius (Finishing Line Press, 2021), is reprinted with permission of the author. “Caution” by Sarah Alcott Anderson, from We Hold On To What We Can (Loom Press, 2021), is reprinted with permission of the author.

The works of fiction are inventions of the authors.

The map opposite is reprinted from Kerouac's Lowell Places: A Guide (Lowell City Library, 1982). (1) Little Canada neighborhood; (2) Pawtucketville neighborhood; (3) 118 University Ave. (Kerouac home, 1930s); (4) Phoebe Ave. (Kerouac home, 1930s; (5) Pawtucketville Social Club; (6) Lowell High School; (7) St. Jean Baptiste church; (8) 309 Pawtucket St., Archambault Funeral Home; (9) Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto, Pawtucket St.

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contributing editor David Daniel art direction & design Joey Marion cover art Regatta Door by Richard Marion (acrylic on cabinet door salvaged on north bank of the Merrimack River, 1978). Reproduced with permission of the artist. To view this issue online or to order a hard copy, visit TheLowellReview.com

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The Lowell Review

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The Lowell Review

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Mission

The Lowell Review brings together writers and readers in the Merrimack River watershed of eastern New England with people everywhere who share their curiosity about and passion for the small and large matters of life. Each issue includes essays, poems, stories, criticism, opinion, and visual art. In the spirit of The Dial magazine of Massachusetts, edited by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1840s, The Lowell Review offers a space for creative and intellectual expression. The Dial sought to provide evidence of “what state of life and growth is now arrived and arriving.” This publication springs from the RichardHowe.com blog, known for its “Voices from Lowell and beyond.” In America, the name Lowell stands out, associated with industrial innovation, working people, cultural pluralism, and some of the country’s literary greats. The Lowell Review

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Contents ONE

Christine O’Connor Dreaming of a Canadian Jam Knot: Thoughts on Work, Thoreau, and Living Deliberately............................................................................................................. 1 Amina Mohammed Change.............................................................................................. 12 Elise Martin An Abundance of Flags................................................................................. 14 Kathleen Aponick Omen.................................................................................................. 16 Mark Pawlak New Normal................................................................................................ 17 Charles Coe Twenty-Two Staples...................................................................................... 18 Catherine Drea Beginning Again....................................................................................... 21 Malcolm Sharps The Mask of Sorrow, a Tragic Face Revealed............................................ 24 Richard P. Howe, Jr. Protecting the Capitol: 1861 & 2021................................................... 26 Paul Brouillette A Pilgrimage to Selma and Montgomery................................................... 28

T WO / I N T ERV IE W

Richard P. Howe, Jr. Interview with Pierre V. Comtois........................................................ 37

THREE

Helena Minton Daily Walk in the Quarter.......................................................................... 47 Grace Wells Curlew........................................................................................................... 48 Chath pierSath The Rose of Battambang........................................................................... 50 Tom Sexton At the Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, Massachusetts...................................... 51 Bunkong Tuon Always There Was Rice.............................................................................. 52 Kevin Gallagher Dookinella Church of Our Lady of the Assumption.................................... 54 Moira Linehan Something Has Been Lost.......................................................................... 55 Carlo Morrissey The Boulevard, July 1962......................................................................... 56 Dan Murphy Two Poems................................................................................................... 57

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Bill O’Connell Emily on the Moon..................................................................................... 58 Peuo Tuy Saffron Robe...................................................................................................... 59 Dairena Ní Chinnéide Filleadh ón Aonach / Coming Home from the Fair............................ 60 Alfred Bouchard Patched Together in the Manner of Dreams............................................. 62 Meg Smith Ducks in Heaven.............................................................................................. 63 Joseph Donahue Two Poems............................................................................................. 64 El Habib Louai Growing on a Hog Farm on the Outskirts of Casablanca............................. 67

F O U R / C R O W D S O U R C I N G T H E S T O R M B OA R D S

Crowdsourcing the Storm Boards................................................................................... 71

FIVE

Joan Ratcliffe The Incessant.............................................................................................. 77 Susan April Another Turn................................................................................................. 81 Stephen O’Connor A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day....................................................... 83 Sheila Eppolito Hearing Things Differently........................................................................ 87 John Struloeff The Work of a Genius................................................................................. 89 Ann Fox Chandonnet A Postcard from Sandburg’s Cellar.................................................. 92 David Daniel Remembering a Friendship: Robert W. Whitaker, III (Nov. 9, 1950 – Sept. 16, 2019)..... 94 Patricia Cantwell Kintsugi (A Radio Drama)..................................................................... 98

SI X

David R. Surette Favors: A Novel (an excerpt).................................................................... 107 Neil Miller How a Kid from the East Coast Became a Diamondbacks Fan............................ 113 Bob Hodge Our Visit with Bernd........................................................................................ 117 Sarah Alcott Anderson Caution........................................................................................ 120 Carl Little A Hiker I Know................................................................................................. 121 Michael Steffen Arturo Gets Up........................................................................................ 122 Charles Gargiulo Marvelous Marvin Hagler and the Godfather.......................................... 124 Fred Woods The Basketball Is Round................................................................................ 126 Sean Casey Tom Brady...................................................................................................... 127 Emilie-Noelle Provost The Standing Approach................................................................. 128 The Lowell Review

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S E V E N / T H E J A C K K E R O UA C C E N T E N N I A L (19 2 2 -2 02 2)

Mike McCormick Stumbling Upon The Town and the City.............................................. 135 Janet Egan Saturday Morning, Reading ‘Howl’.................................................................. 138 Billy Collins Lowell, Mass................................................................................................. 139 Simon Warner Still Rockin’ in the Beat World: How Kerouac Cool Continues to Fuel Popular Music Passions as Writer’s Centenary Is Reached................................................................ 140 El Habib Louai Two Poems............................................................................................... 148 Joylyn Ndungu Equilibrium............................................................................................... 150 Dave DeInnocentis Marin County Satori........................................................................... 151 John Suiter & Paul Marion Commemorating Kerouac: An Interview (1998)....................... 154

Contributors.................................................................................................................... 171

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SECTION I

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Dreaming of a Canadian Jam Knot: Thoughts on Work, Thoreau, and Living Deliberately c h r i s t i n e o ’c o n n o r

“I want to tie a Canadian jam knot.” That’s what the voice said when I first woke that morning. If properly constructed, jam knots can secure almost anything. The basic premise of a knot is the strain that pulls against it is the same force that draws it together and makes it strong. It may have been a strange thought to take from the dream world, but we were in the strangest of times. It was day seventy-two of lockdown. The world was at the mercy of a virus. Some scientists assessed that it was born of a bat and then introduced to humans at an overcrowded market of caged animals, cruelty, and commerce: what looks like another abuse collectively inflicted on the natural world and those who share it. But this time the consequences were immediate and severe. Like droplets of Covid, new, uninspiring, unnatural words soaked into our everyday vocabulary: respirators, ventilators, and PPEs. Stories of devastation, body bags, and mass graves looped through news stations and our subconscious. Maybe, in this world of uncertainty, that dreamy jam knot was a symbol of security, of the collective drawing together? Maybe it was a message from my subconscious that the adversities of these times would make us stronger. But might it have arisen from the other end of the spectrum: the dark end, where the noose tightens, and horror closes in? How do we untie the truth behind our dreams, and what lies in that space between the conscious and unconscious as the first light of day creeps beneath the shade? “It’s Not What You Look At, It’s What You See” The voice telling me to tie a jam knot was immediately recognizable, it was my own; and the message wasn’t surprising. Jam knots are a staple in the art of bushcraft, the study and practice of certain woodland skills. Over the years I had become a devoted armchair follower. YouTube is replete with a number of practitioners. Video after video has taken me along the inlets, lakes, and woodlands of North America; I’ve traversed the frozen tundra of Baffin Island, reached the Height of Land, and crossed the width of Newfoundland. Working in a city environment, I’ve found these vicarious trips to the Northwoods a release, a tonic to the demands of daily life. As a lawyer for Lowell, a mid-sized municipality in Massachusetts, I was part of a The Lowell Review

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skeleton crew reporting to work during the shutdown. Lowell is known as the birthplace of America’s Industrial Revolution, and in the nineteenth century it was the largest industrial center in the United States with nearly six miles of canals and over forty manufacturing mills, all powered by the Merrimack River. By the turn of the century, this once pristine, 117-mile river had become so polluted from manufacturing dyes, it reportedly changed colors daily. The “wet market” in Wuhan, was hardly the first assault on the natural world. There were three of us working in an office that once housed eighteen. The gravity of what the world faced was reinforced by every empty desk and darkened space I passed. Our days were filled with work, worry, and the occasional temperature check. One such morning, I was making oatmeal at my desk. Stirring it round and round till it thickened, I suddenly thought of Joe Robinet, a bushcrafter I follow. He was sitting at one of his many morning campfires, doing much the same thing. Around him the sun was rising in the eastern sky, its light flickered off the lake, a loon let out a singular cry, and old Joe whispered: “She’s a real beauty, eh?” As the sun stretched across my desk, I thought, “Yah, she is.” It was a morning to behold, yet consumed with an unrelenting sense of dread, I hadn’t even noticed. Eating my oatmeal that morning provided a sustenance of a different kind. And in the days to come, it marked the start where everyday tasks took on a deeper meaning: from the weight of my backpack as I headed to work, to each spin of the rowing machine, I followed the imaginary lines of an unseen topographic map. The naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, once said: “It’s not what you look at, it’s what you see.” Thoreau had always been a presence for me. I read his books and journals; visited the cabin site; climbed some of the same mountains; and stuck a “In wildness is the preservation of the world” bumper-sticker to the back of my Saab. For several years, I even served as counsel to the Henry David Thoreau Society, until I got too busy with work and had to give it up. But, in those early months of the pandemic, Thoreau was very much in my thoughts. “It’s not what you look at, it’s what you see.” So, night after night, as I pulled the blankets close, I slid into an imaginary sleeping bag, or a lean-to of conifers, the light of a crackling fire warming my face. The dream begins. A Case of Cabin Fever? Were these occasional detachments from reality, these moments of bushcraftdaydreaming, the result of “cabin fever?” I wondered. No one really knows the origins of the phrase “cabin fever,” other than it’s American, that it likely entered our vernacular around the nineteenth century and is the psychological response to being isolated in a small space for an extended period. As pioneers settled the western plains, farms were often up to twenty miles apart. In addition to the isolation, settlers faced snow measured in feet, temps below zero, and loud, howling winds that continued for days. Occupants grew weary, claustrophobic, and unbalanced. The affected commonly suffered from lethargy, irritability, frustration, and anger. There are other terms to describe this peculiar behavioral phenomenon. From prisons came the phrase “stir crazy”; in the Inuit populated regions of Greenland it’s known as “arctic hysteria”; and on the American frontier it was called “prairie madness.” None are recognized as actual medical conditions, but the effects of too much time on the inside of 2

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hand-notched, wooden walls is real and well documented. Now here’s the curious thing. Many in lockdown lived in highly populated, urban areas. Today’s shut-ins were connected through cell phones, satellite dishes, cable tv, and wireless internet. People joined forces on YouTube, Facebook, and Zoom, and still, many claimed to be experiencing the same symptoms of that long-ago, frontier ailment. Perhaps it’s just the nature of some individuals. In The Shining, was Johnny driven mad by a haunting or an extreme case of cabin fever? “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” he typed again and again. Arctic hysteria on the other hand, was attributed to vitamin toxicity or demonic possession. When lighthouse keepers “lost their beans,” doctors pointed to mercury poisoning. But maybe the madness in these cases merely comes from stress. Is fear what actually tightens the knot on all of us? In the Company of Solitude While the confinement of a remote cabin has driven many mad, others have deliberately sought out such places. Perhaps innately vaccinated against cabin fever, there are those for whom these cabins in the wild are curative. They’ve experienced healing, peace, and productivity while in isolated places for extended periods. For example, after the atrocities of World War I, Henry Beston built a small structure on the sand dunes of Massachusetts’ Cape Cod. He spent an entire year alone on the beach, and there took notes for his masterpiece, The Outermost House. Dick Proenneke, of One Man’s Wilderness, built a cabin in Alaska following World War II. In the summer of 1956, Jack Kerouac hiked 6,102 feet, and for sixty-three days stayed atop Desolation Peak, filling his notebooks with the material for his novel Desolation Angels. Of course, these writers, cabin-builders, naturalists, adventurists had ancestors, those who first packed a bag and headed into the wild: there were the early Christian monks living in small, stone structures on uninhabited islands in the Atlantic; the Puritans whose errand into the wilderness brought them to America; and even Jeremiah Johnson, “bettin’ on forgettin’ all the troubles he knew,” escaped into the mountains. Out of a rich lineage, Thoreau is likely the best known. For two years, two months, and two days, he lived alone in a cabin he built at Walden Pond. During that time, he wrote about a week spent with his brother John, canoeing on the Concord and the Merrimack rivers in the summer of 1839. Both rivers run through Lowell. Three years before Henry moved into the cabin, John died of lockjaw. Like Beston, Proenneke and Kerouac, Thoreau’s time at Walden was likely as much about healing as it was about writing, and while there he worked on what was to become his first publication, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a tribute to the memory of his brother. In those early days of Covid-lockdown, my dream to retreat to a cabin in the wild, was not only a necessary distraction, but a welcomed connection to those who came before in search of Nature’s refuge. We are sometimes stitched together in unusual ways. It Was Time to Suck the Marrow Out of Life, So I Got a Tent Since building a cabin wasn’t a possibility, I settled on an even smaller space, a tent. And since I couldn’t go anywhere, I decided to camp in the backyard. If Thoreau could “travel a The Lowell Review

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good deal in Concord,” I could do the same on this little patch of land. I went online and for a bit north of one hundred dollars I bought a tent, paracord, a fire-steel, and a titanium cup with a lid. I knew what I wanted in a tent: a mesh top for stargazing, and something easy to assemble. As for the esthetics, I went with a yellow, dome-shaped structure. All the items were scheduled to arrive mid-week. This gave me time to start planning. Accompanying me on this overnight escape, would be an enthusiastic, three-year old, Irish terrier named Jack. I made a list of food for dinner and breakfast, the tools I’d need, and extra clothing for bedtime. The overnight would take place over the Memorial Day weekend. Looking at the weather forecast, I decided on Sunday. I’d arrive at my site in the early afternoon and set up camp at farthest point from the house. Although much of the city’s center is densely populated, there are parts of Lowell that have a modest suburban feel. I live in a section of the city known as the “Highlands.” The backyard is mainly an open, grassy plot bordered by strips of trees and brush. Just beyond the trees and growth at the yard’s far end, is Mount Pleasant Country Club, a private golf course. In preparation, I watched some bushcraft videos: Shawn James cooking a brook trout over an open fire; Justin Barbour canoeing across Labrador; Jim Baird making a snow wall for his tent as it glowed in the Arctic night; and Joe Robinet, building a fort in the woods. The term bushcraft, like cabin fever, was an invention of the nineteenth century, and refers to the “Australian bush.” The bush was the uncleared woodland of British colonies— in other words, the part of society that remained wild. Even though I had seen all these techniques countless times, I watched them again with great purpose: feathering a stick for burning, making a bow drill, picking wild garlic, making chaga tea over a fire, and learning to tie a series of knots. I also started rereading sections of Walden. I had always thought of it as nature writing, but maybe it’s really philosophical-bushcraft-lit. “It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life,” he wrote early on in Walden. And a major part of the book is about Thoreau’s “life in the woods.” If Thoreau were around today, perhaps he’d manage the “I Want to Live Deliberately” channel on YouTube? Although maybe today’s bushcrafters are modern-day Transcendentalists? Consider that Shawn James’ channel is named “My Self-Reliance,” after Emerson’s essay of a similar title. Regardless, for as long as I can remember, I’ve loved this story of leaving society and creating a space in the woods. It’s primal. It draws us back to the beginning, to the seed and the place of growth. Confronting Only the Essential Facts of Life On the morning of the camp, I set my alarm for 5 a.m.; excited, I woke at 4:30. Although it was nearly June, it was just 42 Fahrenheit (5 C). There, at the yard’s end, was my tent. I put it up the day before to air it out. Thoreau dedicates nearly a chapter to setting up his shelter, but setting up my temporary structure took just minutes. Before the real light of morning, the yellow globe sat low, like a giant, tropical bird bent feeding. The day was beautiful, with the sky a color blue that I didn’t think was possible anymore. While gathering stones and wood for the fire, I saw and heard a countless number of birds. Not far from my tent I discovered a large animal hole. How long it had been there was anyone’s guess. But for my camping “trip,” I would never have noticed it. Thoreau didn’t 4

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need a lockdown to realize the wonder that lives all around us: “As travelers go ‘round the world and report natural objects and phenomena, so faithfully let another stay at home and report the phenomena of his own life,” he preached. I began to think of how, over the years, this narrow stretch of woods bordering the yard had seen a fair bit of wildlife. The most exotic visitor was a moose, but there were others: deer, foxes, and coyotes; hawks, eagles, and wild turkeys. Like the moose, most have involved a single sighting. They are our unseen neighbors; known only by the rustling of the bush or the sound of their movement through the trees. Our presence, on the other hand, is unmistakable. The footprint we leave is unlike theirs. It does not lead to clean waters or to an untamed woodland. Our prints do not wash away in the rain. As the lockdown continued, more and more people reported wildlife sightings. Just when we thought Nature had come undone, she grew strong. In Remembrance of Former Inhabitants After setting up “camp,” I sawed and split some wood. For my tinder bundle I used some scattered wood chips, along with some dried reeds from the previous fall. The fire pit was open in the front, had three walls, and some flat-surfaced stones laid at its base. Joe Robinet advises having a bundle of twigs at the ready to place on top, then larger kindling pieces, and eventually the quarter pieces. A few strikes of the fire steel and the tinder lit. Within seconds, fire was shooting between the openings of twigs and wood. Something in me sparked too. After a stretch of winter-like temperatures, that Memorial Day weekend held the first promise of summer. In the United States, the holiday is a time to honor and remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in a time of war. The months of food shortages, curfews, and deaths also evoked a wartime feel. The first recorded corona-death in the U.S. was in February. That Sunday’s New York Times ran a historic front page: “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss.” In a little over three months, the coronavirus had already claimed more lives than the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined. But this was nothing new. Disease has always been the big killer, at times wiping out large swaths of populations. In the fourteenth century the Black Death killed as many as fifty million (possibly sixty percent of the entire European population); and even worse, an estimated ninety percent of Native Americans died from diseases introduced by Europeans. Since the start of the pandemic, every morning in the office began with a review of Lowell’s overnight numbers: how many new positive cases; how many negative; how many hospital admittances; how many masks and gloves on hand; how many cases at the homeless shelter and nursing homes; and how many fellow Lowellians had died? Originally, we met in the Mayor’s Reception Room. Maskless, elbow to elbow, the City Manager and her municipal team sat around a thick oak table original to the 1893 building. This was likely the same table city officials gathered round in October 1918 as they faced an earlier pandemic. Commonly referred to as the “grippe,” the numbers from City Hall then were eerily similar to ours: “October 3, 1918, Thursday, Lowell grippe situation still very bad. 233 new cases.” Despite technological advances, the basic methods of controlling a pandemic changed little over the past century: the closure of public spaces; the wearing of masks; the washing of hands; the creation of makeshift isolation hospitals; The Lowell Review

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and finding space for the dead. At one time, the most feared disease in the world was tuberculosis, commonly known as consumption, and in the nineteenth century it was the leading cause of death in the United States. In May of 1862, consumption took the life of Thoreau. He was just fortyfour years old. In the months he lay dying from tuberculosis, final arrangements were made with publishers. His lectures were to appear in the Atlantic; Walden would be reprinted, but without the subtitle, Life in the Woods; and he reworked his final essays, Life Without Principle, Walking, and Wild Apples. But his last book, The Maine Woods, would be published posthumously. Struggling with its conclusion, he said: “It’s a knot I cannot untie.” Living Deliberately As the last of the daylight disappeared, I cooked over my campfire. In some foil, I wrapped small spuds, garlic, and bits of butter. I placed the bundle snug into the coals of charred wood. On a small rack, I cooked a ribeye, and like Joe Robinet, rubbed in some seasoning. Mushrooms and zucchini filled the last bit of foil. Once everything was cooked, I treated myself to a stray, ice-cold can of Double Thunderfunk IPA that had been left in the fridge from happier days. The fat and grizzle were mixed into Jack’s bowl of kibble. But it wasn’t until the sun went down, and the fire freshly stoked, that I sensed the quiet and solitude I was after. Normally on such nights I’d hear the hum of the not-so-distant highway, or even the muffled sound of speedboats bouncing off the Merrimack some two miles away. But that night, like the past seventy-two, everything was quiet. There had already been times, over these months, that I experienced the guilt of preferring certain aspects of this new life. That night, the only sound was the crackling of the fire, and as its embers rose into a black abyss above, it was impossible to not revel in it. There is something soothing about a fire. Beston described it as an elemental presence in his outermost house. I pulled aside some glowing embers and took out my titanium cup. It was like the one Joe Robinet used in all his videos, minus the graphic of Scout, his beloved and deceased Shepherd. When the water came to a boil, I cupped a few fingers around its foldable handles, and carefully removed the lid. Steam rose into the night. More than the tent, the paracord, or the fire striker, this tin cup was what excited me most. I recall as a kid getting my first “official” baseball. The packaging noted that it was the same as the ones used by the Major Leaguers. Staring at it, I felt connected to Boomer, Tiant, Fisk, and Yaz. Sometimes objects can speak to us in ways words can’t because they tell us things that are to be felt, rather than said. Blowing on my first sip of hot chocolate, I drank in this world of bushcraft. Above me that night was a new moon. A time of new beginnings, a moment in nature that could describe where we all found ourselves. From the front of my backpack I pulled out some paracord. “Two on the inside, one on the outside,” says Joe Robinet, as he teaches viewers the art of a taut-line hitch. I decided to use the jam knot to hang my food bag from a tree branch. I tied a knot about an inch from one end, and a second another inch down. This second knot is left loose. I ran the paracord through the food bag, around the branch, threaded the opposite end through that second knot, and pulled. “Bam son!” as Joe is fond of saying, I tied a Canadian jam knot! The dream had become real. Thoreau too experienced the transformation of a dream into reality. One night, deep 6

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in the Maine woods, he dreamt he caught a fish: “it seemed a fable that this painted fish swam so near.” He had been fishing all that day but had little luck. A good deal of his time had been spent tying hooks onto the fishing lines of others in his group. But his dream was so powerful, that when he woke, he got up and cast his line into the night. There beneath a full moon, his rod bent, and on the shores of Moosehead Lake he landed a speckled trout. His dream too became real. “Time Is the Stream I Go Fishing In” No bushcraft trip can be complete without a hike. With the golfers long gone, I decided to walk the nine-hole course. Established in 1910, at roughly thirty-eight acres, it is the smallest of the city’s three area golf courses. Originally the old Bartlett Farm, my campsite and backyard were once part of it. With the aid of my headlamp, Jack and I made our way over remnants of a stone wall, a reminder of the life this land once held. We walked along the edge of the first fairway until we reached the end of the course. Turning right, you cross the ninth, and then onto the second, and third. To my left were several acres of woods. Not far into my walk was a bridge. Every day, soft-spiked golfers crossed it. Like them, my steps made a hollow, echoing sound over its suspended wooden planks. Beneath this tiny bridge were the running waters of what I had assumed was Black Brook. The brook is the main tributary running throughout the Highlands neighborhood of Lowell. Like many other waterways, it begins in southern New Hampshire and eventually joins the Merrimack. There are actually over fifty rivers and brooks whose waters flow into the Merrimack as it makes its way to the Atlantic Ocean. In the dim light of the evening, however, I noticed a second tributary that flowed into it. Following along, it led to an open marshy area. The ground was soft and muddy. Dried cattails that took root in a pre-pandemic world, still stood. I was only a short distance from home, yet in these woods I suddenly felt miles from reach of the deadly virus. Beneath the canopy of trees and the sounds of slow-moving water, I felt safer than I had in months. I followed the waterway further into the woods. What tributary was this? Over a series of rocks and built-up debris, I crossed to the other side. While I carefully navigated nature’s stepping-stones, Jack splashed across. The woods were dense, and I had to pick my way through. Eventually there was enough of an opening to reveal a wild, meandering, well-established waterway. Quiet filled the woodlands, and for a moment, even Jack was still. Everywhere, low lying green shoots were breaking through. Fiddleheads and skunk cabbages glistened in the beam of my head lamp. Suddenly, there was a splash, and a circular ring grew in the water—a turtle. Deep in the woods, life was thriving. This, clearly, was Black Brook, but what of the other? I made my way back to the course and followed this other waterway as it flowed between the second and third fairways. It was different: much of it was perfectly straight; its width uniform; and parts of its embankment resembled a manmade stone wall. “It’s like a canal,” I whispered to myself. I knew that the old Middlesex Canal was somewhere in the back woods of the golf course, but it wasn’t until that night that I realized this water hazard was the remnants of that canal. Constructed in the mid-eighteenth century, the Middlesex Canal was a marvel The Lowell Review

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of engineering, and played a central role in Lowell’s early industrial success. But it was also part of a complicated history where the industrialization of the world continued to grow with little regard for its impact on Nature. Now, several centuries later, its impact was approaching catastrophic levels. Alone on a golf course, unable to travel or socialize because of a worldwide pandemic, the cost of that “success” was becoming clear. In its shallow waters, the rocks, leaves, and sediment that culminated over its long history were illuminated in my headlamp; these waters traveled over not just miles of geography, but time itself. Here is where the deer would drink, and old ghosts gather. Thoreau once said: “time is the stream I go fishing in.” Standing on the banks of the Middlesex Canal, I wondered whether the opposite was also true; whether in these, and in all waters, time gathers and connects the past and the present. On this otherwise ordinary night, the magic of the universe was shining upon me in a way I was yet to understand. “Rescue the Drowning and Tie Your Shoestrings” With temperatures dropping, Jack and I headed back to our camp. The night had turned cold, and my breath was now as visible as the smoke from the fire. Ever since the sun set, I could hear an occasional rustling in the woods. A neighbor had recently reported two coyotes living just beyond her back yard. As Thoreau went into town for supplies, and famously went to his mother’s to do his laundry, I went back to the house to use the facilities, brush my teeth, and grab my laptop. Once back at camp, I gathered a few items and headed inside the tent. The air-mat under my sleeping bag was surprisingly comfortable; and since this was never about roughing it, I brought plenty of pillows so I could sit up and read or do some writing. I got into my longjohns, wool socks, and my new L.L. Bean sleeping bag. With the warmth of Jack at my leg, my fearful thoughts of encroaching coyotes subsided. Although I was planning on rereading the conclusion to Walden that night, I was also eager to learn more about the Middlesex Canal. After googling several different search terms: the Middlesex Canal, Lowell, Mount Pleasant Golf Course, I eventually came across a 2003 article in the New Yorker, “Paddling After Henry David Thoreau.” It was a John McPhee piece, where he and a companion retraced the waterways of Thoreau’s Week on the Concord and Merrimack. Scanning through, I discovered that the brothers towed their skiff along the Middlesex Canal, including what is now the water hazard between the second and third fairway of the Mount Pleasant Golf Course. The revelation that this strip of land behind my house was part of an American literary classic triggered a burst of excitement that could hardly be contained by my now too-small tent—its pegs must have surely felt the strain. Unbeknownst to me, I had earlier been walking along the very trail that Thoreau and his brother John used in the summer in 1839. Of my many attempts to follow in the path of Thoreau came the remarkable discovery that, at one time, his path essentially crossed my own. Each autumn, after the last of the fallen leaves, our kitchen window looks out on that stretch of land Thoreau once walked. After years of seeking Thoreau in woodlands, waterways, and faraway mountaintops, on that night under the stars I learned how close he once came to my own place in this world. That this nineteenth-century, Harvard-educated, transcendentalist pencil-maker from Concord could be so important to and have such influence on a twenty-first century, 8

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second-generation, urban-living lawyer was perhaps as mysterious as that evening’s revelation. But there are places that transcend time: books. And here, I and many others have connected with Thoreau’s thoughts on nature, social justice, solitude, and those things of value in a life worth living. His writings speak to us as plainly as our contemporaries do, and what he has to say continues to be relevant in an ever-changing world. My camping experiment confirmed this was no less true during this time of crisis. Early into the pandemic, Thoreau became the poster-boy for sheltering in place, the champion of social distancing, the guru of isolation. But his relevance for these times may lie elsewhere. The longest chapter in Walden is its first—“Economy,” and it is, above all, about work: a meandering, meditative, philosophical outpouring on what is really necessary to sustain us. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he famously pronounced in this chapter. Here he asks the difficult questions of why we work, and to what end. I thought about my own work; about what I do versus what I’d love to do. And I thought back to that morning at my desk, stirring my oatmeal round and round; and daydreaming about eating by a campfire. Alone in the universe of my backyard, I was pleased at how far I had come since that morning. But perhaps the reason I was dreaming of Canadian jam knots and sleeping in a tent wasn’t the just result of a pandemic, but because of an overly demanding job filled with text messages, deadlines, and meetings gone-long. My work was consuming me, and on this I was not alone. An average full-time worker in the United States works close to fifty hours per week; and takes little vacation time, family leave, or even lunch breaks. If their days aren’t long enough, many often check and answer emails after work. These demanding work habits separate us from our counterparts in most other countries. And for all these long hours, Americans are among the least satisfied with their jobs. The pandemic has only made matters worse. While most adults were working remotely, many initially claimed to be getting more work done by not having to commute. But those hours saved quickly became filled with even more work. While technology enabled industry and commerce to continue, it further blurred the line between professional and personal time, until such boundaries completely disappeared. Vacations were put on hold, and Zoom became the new go-to destination. Martini glasses were filled with “Quarantine Cosmopolitans,” as “Happy Hours” became daily rituals in this perpetual out-of-office world. Many felt like they were drowning in it all. I too felt like I was drowning, but in fairness I had felt like that for some time. The pandemic, in all its cruelty, forced many to pause, to think about the brevity of life, and what was important to them. I want to write, I thought. Whether I was good at it, or not, it’s what I wanted to do. It is what I always wanted to do. My life as a lawyer suited me, and I seemed to suit it. But, while I was as lawyer to the outside world, inwardly I was only someone who labored as a lawyer. During those months of lockdown, life slowed, and the noise of commerce stopped. Birds chirped, and I listened. The voice I heard that morning was my own. A jam knot is not just something to tie, but to untie too. The dream was becoming clearer. Work had kept me from my dreams until my dreams spoke up. “Rescue the drowning, and tie your shoestrings,” writes Thoreau in this same chapter. If I had been drowning in the preThe Lowell Review

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pandemic, workaholic-world, a rescue now seemed possible. I secured a jam knot, tied my shoestrings, and vowed to free myself from the bind of never-ending office hours. That night beneath a new moon, I vowed to become what Thoreau describes as a “day laborer,” one whose “day ends with the going down of the sun, and [she] is [then] free to devote [herself] to [her] chosen pursuit, independent of [her] labor.” Though just in my backyard, my time in nature was becoming an adventure not clocked in miles. “Remember to Make a Knot Before Your First Stitch” Beneath a lightweight plastic lantern hanging from the center of the tent, I stuck to my plan to reread the conclusion of Walden before ending this remarkable day. “To the sick, the doctors wisely recommended a change of air and scenery,” it begins. Without realizing it, that’s what I was doing. In the face of adversity, like many others, I sought the shelter and respite of Nature. Living in a world where travel wasn’t possible, I discovered it wasn’t necessary. Nature is everywhere; be it the shade of an oak tree, or the warmth from the sky above, salvation is always within reach. After all, Walden is about more than a place, it is about the whole of the natural world and our place in it. Not far into his “Conclusion,” Thoreau describes a public lynching: “Tell the tailors to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.” They are the final comments of a man about to be hanged. His comments stayed with Thoreau because, the man said what was important to him, rather than what society expected him to say at such moments. In other words, he spoke the Truth—the very thing that sets us free, even from the grips of a hangman’s knot. But what really does it take to be true to ourselves and our dreams? Is it right to follow our instincts? I knew that eventually the morning calls of Covid cases would stop, and we would be faced with the prospect of returning to normal. It is what everyone wanted, or was it? Perhaps untangling the truth was more complicated than society was suggesting. During the lockdown I greatly missed the company of family and friends; the ease of getting groceries; the excitement of travel; of sitting in the bleachers of Fenway; of going to a brewery with colleagues; dining at a restaurant on the edge of the Atlantic; or the squeeze of another’s hand in my own. But the list was not as long as I thought. In this changing world, we immediately saw how resilient we were, and how resilient Nature was too. Fewer people on the road and in the air made our skies brighter and our water cleaner. New economies were being created and replacing older ones. Life began to change because of the virus, and there was much of this new lifestyle that held promise. Our planet was thriving under of this “new normal,” and I wondered, might we thrive too? People were suddenly more aware of how they felt than how they looked. They talked to neighbors. And all those birds, have they always been there? Instead of “going out,” there was now time to read that book by the bedside; to take the dog for a longer walk, to think. During these unnerving, horrific months, I was far from the only one asking how I wanted to spend my time. Resolutions were made to not just dream about what makes us happy, but to do what makes us happy. In an age of misinformation, the Truth became a most valuable commodity. But finding it for ourselves has not always been easy. During these months someone I knew took up the cello, another decided to raise chickens; and still another got an inflatable pool for her deck, just because it made her 10

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happy. There were record numbers of people adopting pets, reciting poetry, and improving their homes. Families were having supper together, eating healthier, and exercising more. Despite the threat of a deadly virus and a free-falling economy, many people became more relaxed. They went to bed earlier and dreamed more. And then there is Nature. There had been a surge in birdwatching, gardening, morning swims in the ocean, and sleeping under the stars—even in your own backyard. I was not alone. Others were feeling it, an unexplained connectedness to the things around us: to Nature, to those from whom we were suddenly separated, and those physically taken from us. And in these darkest of days, the thread of love that runs through us all seemed to shine even brighter. Drifting to sleep beneath the Milky Way, I again heard Thoreau’s well-known call: “If we move confidently in the direction of our dreams, we will live the life we’ve imagined.” “I want to tie a Canadian jam knot,” I replied, and bid the day goodnight.

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Change amina mohammed

(Youth Poet Laureate, Worcester, Mass., 2020-21)

It’s the only constant in life It is the most undeniable factor that we can hold self-evident In fact I tell you today that we can’t live without it So if all this is true, why are we so afraid of it Why is it that change is the most painful to the human mind I mean just the thought of it puts us on the edge of our seats The word “change” itself sends sharp blistering shock waves through our bodies It creates the oldest and strongest emotion . . . fear Fear of what if’s We tell ourselves what if everything doesn’t go as planned What if the surgery or treatment doesn’t go as planned or goes left What if this marriage doesn’t work out What if I’m not ready to be a mother What if I’m not ready for this new job position You see we’re afraid of giving up the ideal norms We tend to like things just the way they are Never giving ourselves an opportunity to get out of our compacted and suffocating bubbles But what we fail to realize is that progress is impossible without change We fail to realize that even change for the better will be accompanied by discomfort That change is not a threat but an opportunity An opportunity to expand our way of thinking An opportunity to see the world for what it truly is An opportunity to better ourselves in the most productive and proficient way Change forces us to realize that our present situation is not and can never be our final destination I mean no roller coaster just stops at its peak, no It continues on It keeps on moving, pushing through loops and twists until it gets to its final destination You see that is how life is There will be tons of loops and twists throughout this funny thing we call life But what makes us who we are is our ability to accept and adapt to the changes Our ability to keep moving past the peak Because that is what is unique about each of us So don’t be afraid of change But instead embrace and love every aspect of it Now I’m no preacher or motivational speaker 12

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But I am a human being who has been through changes Just like you and the person sitting next to you A human who has spent half of her teenage life trying to fight off this crazy thing called change You see there is no beating it It will happen so relax and take it one day at a time And like my brother always says You’ll be aight!

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An Abundance of Flags elise martin

ovid left few of us unchanged—in my case that included a new puppy to keep my husband and me company during quarantine. Actions have consequences, and one of the consequences of bringing a new puppy into our lives was a new routine of daily, increasingly longer walks to harness that puppy’s energy. Those walks went from neighborhood blocks to beyond the neighborhood and eventually beyond our city to new places where a rambunctious pup might burn off some of her energy. That winter, the pup even accompanied us on a road trip to Florida to escape what we knew would be long winter months of isolation, pre-vaccine. Still, whether home in Lowell or on the road—in the next town or 1200 miles away—we walked, multiple times a day, down streets and in neighborhoods that soon became familiar to us. Walking with a puppy was a completely different experience for me. I had been used to walking or running for exercise, often with earbuds in, listening to music or podcasts that took me to a different time and space. Walking a puppy puts you smack dab in the moment, with a lot of meandering and stops for puppy sniffs. It also leaves you with lots of time to look around, take in details that you might have missed otherwise. One of the things I started to notice and pay attention to were American flags on display—in yards, on buildings, in windows, on cars and trucks and boats. There is nothing unusual about American flags on display in our country—we have had a flagpole in our yard or at our front door for decades, as have so many other Americans regardless of where they live. But in my pandemic era travels, and on my endless walks, I started to sense that there was now nuance involved in the display of some of these flags. Sometimes the nuance was overt— the American flag paired with another flag or banner or sign that made clear the owner’s stand on political and/or cultural issues. And sometimes the nuance was more subtle—for example, the size or the number of the flags displayed on a property or vehicle. I paid more attention, and in doing so found myself reflecting on my own sense of the American flag throughout my life. As a child in public school in the 1960s, I learned the Pledge of Allegiance by heart pretty quickly, as did my peers, from the sheer force of daily repetition. I don’t think we recognized the individual words, let alone meaning of this until years after we had it memorized. We’ve all now seen funny YouTube videos of young children (and adults) almost mindlessly verbalizing a word salad that sounds right but has little meaning at the age of five or six or seven (or in some cases, seventy!). I remember once giggling about something totally unrelated to the flag while I “pledged allegiance” as an elementary school student and feeling shame at being chastised by my teacher. The Pledge of Allegiance to our flag was a sacred ritual in public schools, not to be taken lightly.

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I also remember being an impressionable teenager during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, as the country started to simmer and then burn. I remember seeing American flags wrapped around protesters on television news broadcasts, and burned in protest of issues of the day, including the Vietnam War, the Draft, Black Americans’ civil rights, and women’s reproductive rights. In my memory, those protests were against our government and its representatives as well as those Americans who upheld the government’s stance on those issues—“the Establishment.” Still, I believed, and continue to believe, that the flag represents our vast country and its ideals. The degree to which some individuals and groups felt strongly that our country’s policies did not reflect our forefathers’ ideals was reflected in their use of the flag to express their rejection of those policies. I am sure that many Americans did not feel that their American citizenship was represented by that flag back then, and it is just as likely that this is true now. I imagine that the display of the American flag evokes a wide range of emotions in citizens as disparate as we Americans are as a people. But, perhaps naively, I have always believed that at least symbolically, all Americans were welcome under the big tent that the American flag was meant to represent as the country continuously strives to become “a more perfect union.” Somehow, the abundant display of American flags on display that I see on my walks and travels today feels different to me. All those flags waving in the breeze—on buildings, homes, flagpoles, cars, trucks, heavy equipment—do they still represent a shared symbol of American democracy—all that it is and all that it can be—that “big tent” aspiration that we as a democracy continue hold as our ideal? Or are some of those flags saying, maybe even shouting, something different at me as I pass by them? Does the flag still represent “One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all”? Or are some of the flags I see in my travels saying, “We are the true America, and this is OUR flag.” I feel the undercurrents of these unspoken flag messages as I walk past them, and I wonder, who is the “WE?” Has our country’s inclusive “big tent” ideal been dialed back? Have we become a nation of “us” and “them”—“dueling flags”?

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Omen k at h l e e n a p o n i c k

—before the Pandemic of 2020

They appeared mid-winter— a congregation of crows by the river, thousands alighting in the trees— a murmuration some call it. We were caught up in the spectacle— birds coming from every direction, cawing, flapping, leaping-frogging among the trees the way they do. Standing on the snowy riverbanks of Lawrence we were like figures in a painting by Breughel, entranced captives looking up into the trees. We noticed some birds seemed related, like members of a human tribe. At times, these separate flocks flew off returning later to the chattering mass. Were they looking for new roosting sites, coming back knowing there is safety-in-numbers? But wasn’t there danger, too, imminent if an enemy infiltrated? Snow light dimmed, it was getting late. I felt a chill settle in as we began to leave, changed in ways still hard to describe, as if we’d already entered an altered world.

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New Normal m a r k pa w l a k

“Governor announces multi-phase reopening plan.” —The Boston Globe Phase 1 Bank window: car idling outside; cash drawer extends, bills retrieved; masked driver nods to masked teller, motors away. Phase 2 Behind Jersey barriers, curbside Plexiglas igloos; busboy, setting tables: water glasses, silverware. LED candles, hand sanitizers. Masked diners waiting to be seated. Phase 3 Featured to-go cocktail: vodka, Angostura di Amaro, Strega, turmeric, ginger, lime, and sweetened condensed milk: Fauci’s Cure All. Phase 4 Main Street movie theater marquee: 1950s era lighting, 21st century message: “Vaccines: gateway drugs for music concerts.” Phase 5 Faded, block-lettered trail sign: NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES. Beneath, freshly spray-painted cursive: Choose Your Own Path.

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Twenty-Two Staples charles coe

hen you enter a hospital for major surgery the first thing you give up, or rather the first thing taken from you, is the sense of boundaries around your own body. Your clothes and possessions are bundled and shipped off to wherever, you put on a hospital gown, someone wheels you into a big, bright operating room, puts a mask over your face, and while you’re off in Never Never Land they lift the hood and get to work. No one’s asking for your advice or permission. If you’re fortunate enough to wake up after surgery, people you’ve never seen before and might never see again stroll into your room at random times to poke and prod and stick you with needles and peer at the blinking lights of the machines you’re lashed to. They bring you juice (no solid food of course) and reload your IV antibiotics bag. Just as I opened my eyes a few hours after my operation and thought, “Hey, I’m still alive. How ‘bout that?” the nurse came in to say, “So now we need to put in a catheter.” (“We?”) “Take a deep breath,” she said, “and let it out slow.” As she did the deed I realized it had been nigh on thirty years since a beautiful young woman had handled that particular appliance. But fortunately even though I was still addlepated by general anesthesia and an IV painkiller drip I managed to push-broom enough brain cells together to realize I should maybe keep that insight to myself. A couple of days after surgery another nurse strolled in and asked if I’d had a bowel movement and said, “When you do, don’t flush; we need to check it out.” I’d never fielded that particular request before. When the surgeons opened me to rearrange my giblets my system freaked and took a few days to get back up and running. When I finally did my business I felt proud and pleased, like a newly potty-trained toddler. (“I make poo-poo!”) Too bad nobody gave me a Cub Scout medal to pin on my robe . . . . On the afternoon of Election Day 2020 I’d gotten a ride to Mass General Hospital’s Emergency Room, feeling as though my chest was in a vise that was slowly cranking tighter and tighter. I could hardly breathe. I thought I was having a heart attack but it wasn’t my heart; it was my gallbladder. Which had to come out. Immediately. Nowadays a gallbladder operation’s usually done with the aid of a laparoscope, a long thin tube with a light and camera attached that lets the surgeons poke around your innards and take a look. They make two or three tiny incisions in your abdomen, maybe an inch long. Then snip, snip, ease out your gallbladder like a deflated balloon. It’s usually a minimally invasive procedure. Some people go home the same day, or maybe spend a night at the hospital. That’s the best-case scenario. But the surgeons discovered my gallbladder wasn’t just filled with stones, it was infected. So they had to open me up old school like a can of tuna fish, otherwise it might have burst. I had an e-coli blood infection that kept me in the

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hospital for six days on a liquid plutonium-strength antibiotic drip. When I awoke after surgery and flipped on the television, voters were still at the polls. My mind drifted back to Election Night 2016, when I’d dared to feel hopeful as early returns rolled in. I’d finally hit the sack late, taking comfort in the fact that Hillary Clinton had a small but clear lead in the popular vote, only to be horrified the next day to learn the antediluvian Electoral College had gone the other way and thrown the election to the Orange Atrocity. This time as I lay in my hospital bed with a belly full of staples staring at the TV, I was again encouraged by early returns but still skeptical—worried which way the electors would go. Everyone who came into my room paused to glance up at the television. There might have been some workers on my floor who foolishly supported, as some in the medical profession still do, the man whose criminal and cynical handling of the Covid-19 pandemic had caused thousands of unnecessary deaths and put them and their co-workers at risk. But no one who chatted with me during my stay said anything of the sort. Everyone seemed enthusiastic and hopeful at the prospect of That Creature being ejected from the White House. A few days passed lying on my back glued to the screen watching election commentary until the Hallelujah moment when a nurse breezed in to say, “Good news. You’re graduating from apple juice to Jello,” and a little while later someone from the kitchen showed up with a cup. Maybe I should be embarrassed to admit how happy I was to slurp that first jiggly, lime-green, gelatinous offering. Could it be I’d never shown the staff the respect and appreciation it truly deserved? I did my best to make amends. That same day a nurse’s aide came to my room, a middle-aged Jamaican woman who asked if I’d like her to wash my face. I hesitated a moment, then she smiled when I gave her the go ahead. She started by gently wiping my forehead with a warm, wet cloth, then moved on to my face and neck. “Water is healing,” she murmured. Would you like me to wash your chest”? She spoke softly and calmly, like a horse whisperer (a “patient whisperer?”) and eventually gave me a complete wipe down from face to waist. She was a shaman easing me into an ancient healing ritual I’d resisted at first but then surrendered to, magically transported to a river’s edge in some African village, surrounded by torches and incense, listening to the sounds of animals wandering about in the darkness beyond the fire’s glow. All my physical discomfort, all my anxiety about the election faded for the moment into the background. Later I heard her murmuring to my roommate on the other side of the curtain, easing him into his own ceremony. I was getting stronger as the days rolled by. I said goodbye to the catheter and was able to haul myself carefully to the john. I moved from Jello to the glories of baked chicken and mashed potatoes. And Saturday, five days after election day, I lifted my apple juice to toast the television when the talking heads called the election for Biden and Harris. Trump’s Russian pals hadn’t managed to help pull off the steal this time, and Republicans were hopping up and down screaming about “voter fraud,” doing everything but throwing feces like furious chimpanzees. No one who came into my room made the slightest effort to hide their jubilation. Smile lines crinkled above every mask. The next morning when it was time to go home, I was nervous about surrendering the safety of the hospital cocoon. I’d been well-tended for the last six days, acclimated to a comfortable routine, but I still felt fragile and now I was being sent back out into the World. The Lowell Review

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There were forms to fill out, and an explanation of release procedures I struggled to keep up with; in my befuddled state it sounded like a lecture on differential calculus. But I got through it and a kind friend picked me up to drive me home. Those first days were tricky. I live alone and though I have friends and neighbors who shopped and cooked for me, It was a little rough at first. I spent most of the time zoning out on the sofa staring at the tube, listening to music, and talking on the phone. When I had to pee I got up cautiously, afraid that if I moved wrong something might tear loose. An irrational fear maybe, but it didn’t feel like it then. One time after four or five days at home I was walking from the kitchen to the living room and as soon as I stretched out on the sofa realized I’d left my phone on the kitchen table and forgotten to plug it into the charger. I uttered a word my grade school nuns wouldn’t have liked, got up, headed back to the kitchen and realized halfway down the hall that I’d rolled off the sofa without worrying about my staples. I started taking slow and careful cane-assisted walks to the end of the block and back. I was over the hump. A few weeks later I was at Mass General once more for the post-surgical follow-up. My surgeon was a stylish, middle-aged Latino gentleman who strolled into the exam room in a sharkskin suit that looked like it would have set me back a couple months’ rent. When he asked how I was doing, he chuckled when I said, “A heck of a lot better than when we met.” Like an elegant mob boss, he stood with folded arms while a colleague picked up a set of pliers and removed the twenty-two staples from my nine-inch scar, which I said reminded me of Highway One snaking along the California coast. He smiled. “Just think of it as your dueling scar. Quite interesting that you earned it on Election Day.” Interesting, indeed. Like the caregivers on my floor who’d told me how Trump’s handling of the pandemic had made their jobs so difficult, I’d been delighted that he lost the election. But he continues to spout the lie that he was “robbed” and yammers about running again in 2024. Maybe that threat’s just a scam to milk his Trumplodytes for more cash. But the possibility that he might run again and actually win fills me with horror. He’s Yeats’ Rough Beast become flesh, scales glittering in the moonlight, doing everything he can to drag American Democracy down into the sewer. But at least it was a moment to rejoice when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were acknowledged as winners. Lying in bed in my nest of tubes and wires, I took pleasure in knowing his four-year squat in the Oval Office was finally coming to a close. That my body, and The People’s House, both had a diseased organ removed on the same day.

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Beginning Again c at h e r i n e d r e a

n the dreamtime of last winter, I had pored over maps of the Mediterranean. I was searching for ferries to cross from mainland France to the islands off the coast of Italy. Every so often I would shout some update across the room, “Wow, there’s even a boat from the southernmost tip of Sardinia all the way to Sicily!” As the lockdown drew in, Italy began to fade as a possibility. Sun-drenched villages and mountain walks, the places I saw as my eyes closed each night, were increasingly sketchy. By the first morning of lockdown, our annual pilgrimage was definitely off. Staying home was not the biggest challenge. Living in rural isolation has been my life for many years. As a child, when nothing else was certain, Mother Nature provided alternative nurturing. I am acutely aware of the preciousness of this place. The real challenge of being stilled, would be to keep moving. While being on the road, is to experience a kind of vitality that nothing else measures up to; I already knew that the simplicity of wandering on foot can also delight the soul. So instead of dreading the sameness of the path ahead, I decided to try to see each lockdown day as another fresh start. For the last ten years I’ve written and photographed everything that moves in this small rural network of townlands. At the centre is Ballyscanlon, a deep volcanic lake surrounded by an edge of pine and meadow. To the east there is Carrickavantry, a lake formed as a reservoir to feed water to the local town of Tramore and to the west, the Comeragh Mountains. My neighbours, for the most part, are farmers and their offspring. Like much of Ireland they only produce beef. While I’m sometimes guilty of romanticising nature, I am conflicted, to say the least, by the aspiring cattle ranching landscape that has emerged here in recent times. I have lived through many losses of land and biodiversity. Nature has rich cycles of growth and decline, but I am often troubled by even the subtlest changes. Why are there so many ferns this year? Why are the butterflies slower to emerge? Is my support of the bird population doing away with too many caterpillars? I know the crisscrossing tracks and trails like the back of my own hand. I know the seasons and the bloomings of everything that thrives here; every tree and plant, every bird and small creature. But I also know that I will never come close to unraveling the infinite mysteries in the place. Every day, as I decide to begin afresh, I walk. We all do. At first we are restricted to a 2k limit. After a few weeks we are allowed 5k. The outer world shrinks yet expands. I go from watching a wood mouse and a bank vole tussle over some spilled bird seed, to pursuing the

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latest political developments and Covid-19 updates from afar. Every morning, birds gather; tits wait at the feeders, chaffinches cheekily boss them around, a robin family with speckled young lines up on the branches overhead. A family of collared doves competes with nesting starlings for roof space. Buzzards are resident here for the first time. Their monotoned whistling starts at dawn. At the kitchen door, a regal cock pheasant patrols. Sometimes pheasants will tap at the window or go into one of their dramatic and loud displays. Even the shy hen pheasants eat seed from our hands. They are interlopers bred for shooting, hiding out in our long grass. In the mornings we take to the lake’s edge, wrapped in the midst of fragrant meadowsweet and damselflies. It’s a wild and deserted place to swim. Not many do it. They believe the lake is dark with mystery and danger. Maybe this is because Ballyscanlon is ninety metres deep at its centre. If only they knew the scent of wild mint underfoot and the playful butterflies that feast on their flowers. Afterwards, on the path home, there are scarlet pimpernel and blue speedwell flowers on the verges. Two bonking soldier beetles are slivers of russet orange on the creamy yarrow. Honeysuckle, called woodbine around here, sweetly drape over the hedgerows. Tracks meander around the lakes and the hills. At the very top of one hill you can look down on the sea at Tramore Bay. From the other, you look down on a pig farm. Sometimes, when it’s quiet, I hear pigs squealing. Pigs are not stupid animals, it’s we who are stupid. I am known to rant that this pig concentration camp is to remind us all about what’s going on out there “in the real world”; just in case anyone forgets about the complexities of modern life. As Spring turns to Summer, foxgloves with their faery hats begin blooming in magical drifts. I wallow in them for weeks. Bees are besotted too and creep up into the flowers, leaving nothing but their footprints inside. I am a child again and want to wear one of those flowers as a hat. I photograph these glorious foxgloves endlessly; in early morning light, in shadow, in rain. It doesn’t matter how often. Light finds their translucent petals and illuminates their shapes and their layers. Underneath the foxgloves tall daisies grow. Selfheal unfurls in the next layer under the daisies, and somewhere at the very bottom of this vegetation, silky mosses cling. Then, just as I thought I had seen everything, I spot a pine marten for the first time. I knew it wasn’t a mink. That dastardly yoke and his mate had killed five baby rabbits in front of my very eyes one day last year. Even though we tried to shoo them away, they persisted until every last one was taken. (Afterwards, I tried to forgive the minks. Maybe their youngsters were starving?) Later, I excitedly sent a friend a photo of a pine marten I had sourced in a reference book. Only one of only 2,700 recorded in Ireland, I gloated. She immediately pointed out the grisly sharp looking claws. Pine martens are also serious predators. Since the lockdown young people have been roaming like lost tribes across the land. Unused to these limited and endless days, they have taken to building fires and gathering on the hills. As usual, like primitive humans before them, they leave their mark behind. Eventually the forest catches fire and yet again the hillside is blackened and charred. They remind me of how 40,000 years ago, in a cave in El Castillo in the north of Spain, someone decided to stencil her own hands onto the walls. When I saw the resulting art 22

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last year I instantly recognized that impulse and mood. So, I paint onto my own cave wall; watercolours, photo images, words, close encounters and all the space in between. I am sorting a collection of random finds; pebbles, petals, twigs and old paints. Sheaves of thick paper become Covid-like orb paintings, with spindly arms and legs. Dozens of tiny sketches and images are emerging like the unruly spores used to illustrate the virus. In the evenings Ballyscanlon turns towards the western sky. Neighbours gather at the top of the hill. “You wouldn’t get the likes of it in Killarney” one says, gazing out over the wide valley, nothing between us and the foot of the Comeraghs. We gaze in silence as the sun goes down. Clarissa Pinkola Estes once said, there is human time and there is wild time. Here in this limbo between worlds, there is also lockdown time. We are changed. We watch the sun go down but we don’t have much to say. Now that the golden gorse has given way to bramble blossoms, swarms of local honey bees are thriving on them. The summer sounds of their buzzing reassures. Sleeping is easier now in the silence. I remember our first night here, when the hush of the land became a loud throbbing in my ears; when a hare and three leverets paused at the window in the moonlight, when three swans rose from the lake and circled past us, their wings flapping loudly. Where every morning we awaken. We begin again. And again.

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The Mask of Sorrow, a Tragic Face Revealed malcolm sharps

ere’s a name: Wolski. Veronica Wolski. An American with Slavic roots, you might conclude, not rare in itself. It’s a name that, lacking any other reason for taking note of, you might pass over without further thought and forget. So why might you have heard of Veronica Wolski in stories going back some months now? And why might that name have kept cropping up from time to time and each time you said to yourself “here she goes again, that terrible Veronica Wolski?” Well, Veronica Wolski became notorious on You Tube, amongst other internet sources, as a Q follower and anti-masker who scoffed at convention and the restrictions they tried to place on her. “If they want me to wear a mask, thought Wolski, they’ll have to accept this one.” And by wearing a Zorro (or Zorra)-style mask with no nose or mouth covering, just a simple masquerade job in black with two eye holes, to her local supermarket, she caused confusion amongst staff and customers alike. And on all the YT stuff I’ve seen of her she is gleeful about the success of her little trick in out-smarting authoritarianism, though as someone said later, she put as much effort into wearing the wrong kind of mask as she would have done wearing the right one, so what was the point? But the real point for Veronica Wolski wasn’t simply not to wear an effective barrier mask against a killer virus, it was to tell the world, and possibly to tell Covid itself, that she wasn’t falling for the sham, she didn’t believe in masks, she didn’t believe in the threat of Covid, she didn’t believe in all the fuss and manufactured case and death statistics, she didn’t believe in the multiple risks of infection to herself, though she was one year off the “at high risk” category of sixty-five and over. And lastly and certainly, as it turned out, not least, she didn’t believe in vaccination. The next time we hear of Veronica Wolski some months after her Zorra antics began, we get news of her not from her own set-up videos but from reporters on national news networks standing outside the hospital where she has been fighting for her life in an Intensive Care Unit. These are the same units which at the moment are being rationed and even denied to some potentially terminal Covid cases and sufferers from other maladies. On the tenth day of her hospitalisation things go very badly for libertarian warrior and Covid denier Veronica Wolski; her struggle against Covid-caused pneumonia fades and fails, the ventilator is switched off, she is declared by the doctors to no longer be of this world. But true to the histrionic character of the deceased, during her last days a dramatis personae of supporters assembles and bombards the hospital with literally hundreds of demands and threats (don’t the two seem to go together nowadays?). They demand, in

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particular, that Veronica Wolski be spared further torture by being administered the unproved and unapproved medication Ivermectin, more familiar as an internal and external treatment for parasites in both humans and animals. The discredited Trump lawyer Lin Wood recently admonished in court and referred to his state for possible disciplining or disbarring, charges the hospital with responsibility for her murder. “Do you understand what murder is?” he asks ominously on the phone. No comment from them, no comment from me. During the course of my searches and researches on Veronica Wolski, I did something I’ve hardly ever done in my life before, I read comment after comment on her actions and death on social media. Sometimes comments stood alone, sometimes they were follow-ons from what previous commentators had said. What was predictable was that these were all negative; perhaps less predictable for me was their universal tone of unforgiving callousness, gloating malice, and venomous delight, a veritable Hatefest, in fact. I’m not sure what I wanted. I certainly didn’t want a balanced point of view, or more correctly, an unbalanced one, that said she wasn’t responsible for her actions due to some flaw of character, perhaps writing her off as “crazy,” and therefore discounting what she did. But when a terrible person dies, there is usually one voice which speaks out like a distant conscience sounding in our heads: “remember, she was someone’s sister or mother,” or even the much more annoying Christian voice which tells you: “have compassion, the sinners suffer along with their victims.” That’s not my view, but where were those people to provide a moral balance for the rest of us too-willing barbarians? Is this what social media does to us? Turns us into stocks and gallows-side rabble baying for more blood? Anyone who supports Q conspiracy theories and follows through with opposition to science and best health practice has contributed to a movement that demonstrably leads to the death of thousands and the smearing of countless others; their hands are soiled with both mud and blood. We may rightfully wish for the death of the supporters of these campaigns before they have even more blood of innocent people on their hands. I, for one, am certainly not in the “forgiveness camp” on this one. Nevertheless, I am just a touch disturbed to find that in the social media comments I read I couldn’t find what I would even remotely term the “forgiveness camp,” much less signs of respect for the dead. Towards the end of the Second World War, with the tide of public opinion calling for revenge on and humiliation of the enemy population, Noel Coward, with his tongue in his cheek, wrote a song “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans.” Many scoffed and looked to the sky at that time. I think I would have done also. No one now is singing “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to Veronica Wolski,” but after reading a hundred heartlessly damning and unregretful comments on her death, I wonder if it wouldn’t be healthier if just someone did.

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Protecting the Capitol: 1861 & 2021 r i c h a r d p. h o w e , j r .

n April 19, 1861, about 200 soldiers from Lowell were attacked in Baltimore while en route to Washington, D.C., to protect the U.S. government from those who sought to overthrow it. The Lowell men were part of the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment that had rapidly mobilized and moved out in response to President Abraham Lincoln’s desperate call for militia troops—the National Guard of the 19th century—to hurry to Washington to help safeguard the government. The members of the mob in Baltimore that attacked the troops were sympathetic to those in the South who had revolted against the established government and sought to prevent the northern troops from getting to Washington to assist in its defense. As a contingent of the soldiers marched down Baltimore’s Pratt Street in transit from the city’s northern train station to its southern one, the mob assaulted the troops with sticks, stones, bricks, and then guns, killing four of the soldiers and injuring several dozen more. The soldiers fired back at their attackers, killing twelve of them. The events in Baltimore on that April 19 are memorialized in paintings, woodcuts, etchings and drawings but there are no photographs. Had there been, they would have looked much like the scenes we witnessed on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, when a violent mob attacked, overwhelmed, and injured members of the Capitol police force in an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. The similarities between the two deadly events are many: in both cases, a riotous mob sought to reverse the outcome of an election. In both cases, racism was the foundation of the grievances of the mob. In both cases, some government officials and some members of the police and military provided support and encouragement to the mob. In both cases, the mob was incited by demagogues who sought the overthrow of the duly elected government. And when the surviving members of the Sixth Mass finally made it to Washington, D.C., they were quartered in the U.S. Capitol, just as thousands of National Guard troops are today. There were differences: The mob of 1861 was clad in wool and cotton while the mob of 2021 wore kevlar and ripstop nylon. The mob of 1861 lacked the audacity to directly attack the U.S. Capitol (although they had the capability to attack and seize it) while the mob of 2021 violently assaulted the seat of our democracy and our representatives within it. But the biggest difference was that in 1861, the president of the United States stood firmly against the mob, called them out for their traitorous behavior, and mobilized the nation to put down the insurrection even though that effort took four years and cost

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725,000 lives. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln persevered and succeeded in defeating the mob, safeguarding the country, and reinventing it by forcing the abolition of slavery. In 2021, the president of the United States helped organize, incite, lead and assist the mob. The election of 2021 was not stolen. There was no widespread voter fraud that changed the result. More than 60 court cases were brought to challenge the results and all were dismissed because there was no evidence. Yet the president of 2021 persisted with this Big Lie, repeating it over and over again until many came to believe it. “Everyone is saying it so it must be true” is the objective of the Big Lie. Next, he invited his supporters to come to Washington on January 6, saying, “It will be wild.” Then on January 6, he gave a speech to those supporters that was riddled with violent imagery and calls to fight harder and to show strength. Even before the president finished speaking, the mob commenced its short march to the Capitol and immediately assaulted the police guarding the building and forced their way inside. American law has a concept called “proximate cause” which means that an action is considered a cause of harm if it was reasonably foreseeable that harm would result from the action. A legal textbook could use the preceding paragraph as a classic example of this concept: the president and his actions were the proximate cause of the attack on the Capitol. Even more insidious yet rarely acknowledged was the president’s role in suppressing the government’s response to the attack on the Capitol. Besides the Capitol Police and the D.C. Metro Police, every agency of the government that could lend support beforehand and reinforcements during the attack were under the command of the president as commander in chief. How many agency leaders, intimidated by the president, undercut the estimate of the threat and the preparations for it? Hardening the defenses of the Capitol in the face of a rally of the president’s supporters, led by the president himself would have been “bad optics” and would have incurred his ire. These government officials were more afraid of him than they were of the mob that sought the violent overthrow of the government. Once the attack began, the same agency leaders were slow to respond, again because they were intimidated by this president. If this seems far-fetched, ask yourself, who stood to gain the most by disrupting the counting of the electoral college votes if not the man in power who was destined to lose power as a result of that vote? A final difference between 1861 and 2021: Back then, the conflict resulted in a deadly conventional war between the United States and the five million (non-enslaved) residents that revolted against it. That same kind of war will not occur now but that is because the conflict in 2021 will more closely resemble an insurgency with a violent and deadly minority using terrorism to try to seize control of the government from the majority. It’s getting crazier and there is no end in sight.

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A Pilgrimage to Selma and Montgomery pa u l b r o u i l l e t t e

Thursday We were four members of Boston’s Old South Church who had just finished dinner at Dreamland, Montgomery, Alabama’s premiere barbecue joint, and decided to stroll back to our downtown hotel, the newly renovated Renaissance. We passed old brick storage buildings and a minor-league baseball stadium, followed railroad tracks, and walked through an underpass leading to a channel of the Alabama River. Tree-lined Riverfront Park slopes gently to the water. As we watched the sun set, we wondered what concerts and plays had been enjoyed at the outdoor amphitheater. A service building stood nearby, its utilitarian purpose masked by white ceramic tile. On one side wall, above our reach, we saw a round decorative medallion. Along the top were the words “Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement” and, along the bottom, “First Capital of the Confederacy.” This civic declaration was similar to the advertisements we had seen at the airport that afternoon, posters for the Rosa Parks Museum alongside those for the First White House of the Confederacy, and photos of the Montgomery Zoo’s lions and elephants next to pictures of the Court Street Fountain, where enslaved men and women were once sold at auction alongside livestock. These conflicting messages introduced us to the tension we often experienced during our visit to Montgomery, as Alabama’s capital continues to both confront its Confederate past and honor its civil rights activism. Among our group of forty-one participants were educators, activists, historians, and ministers, mostly white, on a trip promoted as an “educational Pilgrimage to seek truth and justice,” organized by Rev. June Cooper. Cooper is the former Executive Director of City Mission and Theologian in the City at Old South Church, two of Boston’s longstanding institutions at the forefront of racial justice issues. The Pilgrimage’s goals were broad: acknowledging the living legacy of white supremacy in our country; learning the history of white racial violence from Reconstruction to the Jim Crow era, when state laws reinforced segregation of Black citizens in schools, places of assembly, transportation and voting rights; recognizing the strengths of the African American community to resist white supremacy in the struggle for freedom; and understanding how far we have come and how far we have yet to go to achieve racial reconciliation in our country.

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Friday The morning after our arrival, we traveled thirty miles by bus on U.S. Highway 80, known today as the Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail. This designation commemorates the events of March 1965 that led to the signing and passage of the federal Voting Rights Act, which abolished racial discrimination in voting, later that year. We were joined by historian Georgette Norman, former director of the Rosa Parks Museum, who described how, following passage in 1870 of the 15th Amendment guaranteeing voting rights to Black Americans, through the mid-1960s, local Southern politicians often refused them the right to vote in state and federal elections. States passed laws subjecting Black citizens to poll taxes and literacy tests. While initial efforts to overturn these laws began in the 1920s, the momentum to rescind these laws sped up in the 1950s and 60s. Montgomery’s role in these efforts was due to an active branch of the NAACP and the protest strategies developed during the thirteen-month bus boycott by the city’s Black community in 1955, following Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Our stop at the Lowndes Interpretive Center, a U.S. National Park site in Lowndes County, mid-way between Montgomery and Selma, made clear the geographical context and historical events and locations we were visiting. Well into the early 1960s, efforts by tenant farmers who engaged in voting activities were often met with brutality; many were fired from their jobs, forced from their homes, and thrown off the land they had toiled for many years. We also heard a more personal story from Josephine Bolling McCall, a local educator and author, who described how her father, a Black leader and entrepreneur in Lowndesboro, was lynched in 1947 for his prosperous business dealings. There were many reasons the county was known as “Bloody Lowndes.” One unexpected stop was our midday lunch at the Wallace State Community College. The school’s namesake, George Wallace, was Alabama’s governor who, on the steps of the Montgomery State Capitol at his 1963 inauguration, proclaimed “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Later that year, he blocked two Black students from entering the doors of the University of Alabama. The student population and staff we saw that day were mostly Black. Soon, we arrived at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Selma. For those on the Pilgrimage who grew up in the 1960s, the name Selma conjured images of confrontations between Black citizens and white law enforcement, and peaceful demonstrations countered by violent retaliation. The imposing brick church served as a house of worship as well as meeting place for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, organizers of the marches from Selma to Montgomery. It is here that both Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X spoke to the church’s congregation in early 1965, rallying support for the actions that culminated in the right-to-vote demonstrations later that March. Five blocks away stands Selma’s historic downtown area. Some of the two-andthree story brick buildings that once housed hotels and elegant homes have kept their architectural detailing, reminders of a more prosperous past, but we could see that Selma has not benefitted from the incremental economic progress that many larger Southern cities have. A handful of shoppers and office-workers passed us in an eerily quiet area. We The Lowell Review

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wondered what route the marchers took to walk the short distance from Brown Chapel to what now stood before us, spanning the shores of the Alabama River—the bridge that played an integral role in the journey from a neighborhood church to the steps of the state capitol. A first attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery started March 7, 1965, when more than five hundred non-violent demonstrators, including organizer and future Congressman John Lewis, attempted crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were attacked by Alabama State troopers wielding night sticks, tear gas, and whips, resulting in more than fifty marchers who required hospital care for serious injuries. The violence and resulting injuries led to this confrontation being named “Bloody Sunday.” Two days later, state troopers interrupted a second attempt at marching to Montgomery. A third demonstration culminated on March 21, 1965, when a crowd of more than 3,000 left the Brown Chapel area for a five-day, fifty-four-mile march from the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. By the time the marchers reached the Capitol on Friday, March 25, and heard Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his speech “How Long? Not Long,” the crowd had reached 25,000 people. Congress passed the national Voting Rights Act of 1965 less than five months later. And so, there above the western shore of the Alabama River, aware that we were standing in the footsteps of the men and women who risked their lives to have a voice in deciding who would represent them in governing the state and nation, we stepped onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Unlike most bridges with a flat deck and a clear view to the opposite side, the Edmund Pettus Bridge deck rises gradually from its start, impeding the view to the opposite bank of the river. Like the original marchers, we couldn’t see the end of the bridge until we reached its crest at the half-way mark. At that point of a lateafternoon in June, we saw a few cars parked in the distance; the marchers of 1965, on the other hand, came upon one hundred and fifty state troopers and deputies blocking the width of the four-lane U.S. Highway. Our group grew quiet as we absorbed the enormity of the decision the marchers made during that spring more than fifty years ago, regardless of the danger and despite their fears. If the marchers’ efforts crossing that bridge in March of 1965 spoke of selflessness in service of a greater good, then we were indeed pilgrims paying our respects to their courage and sacrifice. We held hands and offered silent prayers of gratitude for being able to honor their work, and completed our journey, blessed by historical changes, to the opposite side of the bridge. Later that afternoon, as we drove away from Selma, we noted a water tower rising above all buildings in the area, with a self-assessment painted on its front circumference: “SELMA—A Nice Place to Live.” Saturday On Saturday, we visited the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both of which opened in 2018. The museum and memorial are the brainchild of Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, the non-profit organization dedicated to criminal justice reform, racial justice reform, and education. Situated on the site of a slave warehouse, the Legacy Museum chronicles the relationship between the past and present, connecting the history of 30

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slavery, Jim Crow laws, and segregation, to the contemporary mass-incarceration of Black men and women. We somberly entered along re-creations of slave holding pens. Visitors read the exhibit descriptions and listened to recordings intently. One display, a collection of clearglass mason jars filled with dirt, was initially puzzling. A closer look revealed that each jar held soil from a lynching site in the southern United States. An enlarged black and white photograph from the 1920’s showed white families picnicking under a tree where the body of a Black man hung from a branch. We learned that, at the time, copies of the photo were sold as postcards. Prison inmates, unjustly incarcerated by harsh criminal justice policies, systemic racism, or both, told their stories through video screens built into exhibits replicating prison visitation booths. The link between yesterday’s slavery and lynching, and the incarceration of Black men and women today was unmistakably clear: the bodies and souls of Black people need to be destroyed for white supremacy to prevail. The Museum’s racially diverse crowd continued to grow. The air grew heavy and warm and quiet. One middle-aged Black father admonished his fidgeting young son, saying, “This is important. You need to know this.” From the Legacy Museum, we took a short ride to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, commemorating the more than 4,400 documented victims of lynching in twelve of the United States. Unlike the museum, whose exhibits are positioned in such proximity to each other that we sometimes brushed against other tourists’ arms, the outdoor Memorial is situated on a grassy sloping hill, open to air and light and natural elements. From a distance, the structure appears to be a horizontal platform with tall columns supporting a low, flat, and continuous roof. A gravel path, beginning at the site’s entry, provided us with a first view of the Memorial in an almost serene setting; soon, however, we encountered life-sized sculptures of African men and women with outstretched arms in chains, as if reaching out to us as we passed by. We began walking along one side of a wooden platform and realized that what at first appeared to be columns were actually six-foot tall metal boxes, called monuments, oxidized to generate rusting on uneven surfaces, connected to the underside of the roof. Each of the eight hundred monuments was inscribed with the names of a state and counties where a lynching had occurred. Below each county, the names of people who had been lynched there were listed. Visitors read these names intently, sometimes placing a palm on the monument in a gesture of blessing. At one point we heard a gasp; a woman had recognized the name of a family member, a remembered cousin, lost to Alabama’s violent history. As we reached the end of the platform, we turned a corner to find that the floor began sloping down; however, the monuments remained attached to the underside of the roof. Each step down the wide wooden ramp changed our relationship to the monuments until, by the time we reached the bottom of the ramp, all the boxes with the inscribed names were suspended above our heads. The effect of the design became powerfully clear: the boxes were like coffins --- or bodies --- hanging from a tree. Other visitors spoke in hushed tones, creating the unmistakable feeling of being in a sacred space. At the end of the ramp, we faced a wall displaying multiple plaques, some etched with brief descriptions of the rationales given for the killings: “Jack Turner was lynched in Butler, Alabama, in 1882 for organizing black voters in Choctaw County.” “A lynch mob of more than 1,000 men, women, and children burned Zachariah Walker alive in Coatesville, The Lowell Review

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Pennsylvania, in 1911.” “Henry Patterson was lynched in Labelle, Florida, in 1926 for asking a white woman for a drink of water.” “Elbert Williams was lynched in Brownsville, Tennessee, in 1940 for working to register black voters as part of the local NAACP.” Outside, a gravel path led to duplicates of the monuments, all arranged in rows on the ground, like so many coffins or gravestones. The organizers of the Memorial have challenged each county represented by a monument to claim it, display it, and honor the men and women who were lynched. Only a handful of counties have started the process of reclamation. Much of the National Memorial’s power stems from its name and design. It is not simply a remembrance of one state’s social control, it is a formal accusation of the country’s disregard of the terror inflicted upon its citizenry because of race. While the hanging metal boxes may, in an abstract manner, suggest the shape of a coffin, the list of names and dubious transgressions forces the obvious conclusion—that these people were brutally murdered specifically because of their skin color. Fathers and mothers. Sons and daughters. Families. Citizens of the United States. Human beings. Reading an unfamiliar name inevitably prompted questions: Who was he? Did he have a family? Where did this woman grow up? How did she spend her days? What were their lives like? In the process, we imagined stories that humanized the victims, while feeling enraged by the “official” justifications for their murders. Sunday On Sunday morning, many of our group attended a Fathers’ Day service at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where a young Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., had served as pastor in the 1950s and preached in the literal shadow of the First White House of the Confederacy and Alabama State Capitol building, a three minutes’ walk away. Afterward, we shifted gears, from reflecting on Montgomery’s history to participating in a discussion about city redevelopment efforts, much of it inspired by the influx of visitors to the Legacy Museum and National Memorial. The event was held in the community room of the Kress on Dexter building, previously known as the S.H. Kress & Co., once one of Montgomery’s premiere retail destinations. Recently renovated into apartments and office space, the restoration is part of Montgomery’s efforts to invest in the downtown area prompted, in part, by increased tourism, as well as residents looking to take part in the city’s burgeoning rebirth. Even the name of our lodging, the Renaissance Montgomery Hotel, reflected that change. It is remarkable change in sixty years, from a Black woman’s arrest for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger, to a public shrine for the murdered Black citizens. Learning that the local economy is newly energized, in part, by the city’s willingness to confront its legacy of white supremacy left many of us hopeful that redemption may be an eventual reward for those efforts. Small but incremental gestures, like the two marble slabs, salvaged during renovation of the S.H. Kress & Co. building, are an example of the delicate balance of acknowledging the sins of the past without burying them forever. Displayed prominently at the new entry with a descriptive note, the slabs were part of the original building’s water fountains. One slab reads “White.” The other slab reads “Colored.”

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Return Our group of four got into a cab to the airport early Monday. The driver, a middle-aged Black man, told us he had worked as a nurse for many years but found driving less physically taxing. He seemed happy to make small talk, asking where we were from. “Boston! That’s a long way from Montgomery!” When he noted that he was a native of Montgomery we acknowledged the obvious: “You’ve seen a lot of changes.” “Oh, that’s right, I’ve seen a lot of changes. A lot of changes.” After a pause, he continued. “There were a lot of bad people in those days, but there were a lot of good people, too. There were always more good people than bad.” That balance of tension between good and bad seems entwined in the state’s history. For example, in his later years, Governor George Wallace appeared in Black churches and asked forgiveness for his inflammatory rhetoric and segregationist policies; in his last race for governor in 1982, he received ninety percent of the Black vote. The Edmund Pettus Bridge, Brown Chapel AME Church, and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church have been named National Historic Landmarks; so is the Alabama State Capitol, also known as the First Confederate Capital. Many cities and towns in Alabama have elected Black representatives for local government, though Selma’s first Black mayor was not elected until 2000, thirtyfive years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act; Montgomery duplicated that feat only in 2019. Following the United States Supreme Court’s 2013 invalidation of a critical component of the Voting Rights Act, which had required federal review of proposed changes to certain states’ voting procedures, Alabama, and much of the country, is again subject to a resurgence of discriminatory voting laws. And in 2017, during construction of the National Memorial to Peace and Justice, which was financed through private funding and donations, the state legislature passed the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, which “prohibits the relocation, removal, alteration, renaming, or other disturbance of any monument located on public property which has been in place for 40 years or more,” effectively sanctioning the existing 120 public Confederate statues and memorials in the state. A month following our return, the Old South Church participants spoke to the congregation at a Community Hour presentation on what we had witnessed and learned. We admitted that achieving the goals of the pilgrimage in four days was a substantial challenge but one that would, instead, require an extended period of listening, reflection, humility, self-awareness, commitment, and activism to be truly enlightened and able to take part in the act of reconciliation. After all, before the Pilgrimage began, we thought we knew. We had read the book Coming of Age in Mississippi and watched the PBS documentary, Eyes on the Prize, or the more recent Hollywood movie, Selma. Still, we didn’t really know. We assumed Montgomery had dedicated a public memorial to Dr. King but learned that, while the city featured a large Confederate Memorial Monument and even a statue of country-singer Hank Williams, no life-sized memorial to Dr. King has been erected yet. We thought we knew that the current criminal justice system had led to a disproportionate number of Black men in American prisons. But we didn’t know that, today, there are almost as many incarcerated African Americans as the four million enslaved people before the end of the Civil War. We had learned in school about the terrible personal losses suffered by the North and South during The Lowell Review

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the Civil War but hadn’t been taught about the mob violence and lynching of Black citizens that followed. So, yes, we thought we knew. But after four days of listening, witnessing, and reflecting, we had to admit: We still didn’t know the half of it. We remained pilgrims on this road.

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SECTION II

INTERVIEW

Fantastic Cinema in the Years Before CGI by Pierre V. Comtois (VBW Publishing, 2017)

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Interview with Pierre V. Comtois r i c h a r d p. h o w e , j r .

Pierre V. Comtois is one of Lowell’s most prolific authors. He burst on the scene in 2015 with Marvel Comics in the 1960s: An Issue-by-Issue Field Guide to a Pop Culture Phenomenon, fueled by the author’s long interest in comic books. Subsequent works include science fiction, history, and a young adult novel. He has edited and produced twenty-three issues of Fungi: A Magazine of Fantasy and Weird Fiction. Pierre met with me via Zoom to discuss his books and growing up in Lowell. The following transcript was edited for clarity and length.—RPH

Pierre V. Comtois, far right, at launch event for Fungi Magazine #20 with collaborators, from left, David Daniel, Dale Phillips, and Joshua Shapiro. Photograph reprinted with permission of Pierre V. Comtois.

Interviewer (RPH): Where did you grow up and what were your memories? Pierre V. Comtois (PC): I was born in Lowell in 1955 at St Joseph’s Hospital which doesn’t exist anymore. It’s now that white whale that the college built there. They took me home to Beaudry Street in Centralville where we lived for a few years. Then we moved to Salem for a year or two and then we moved back to Lowell to my current home on Desroisers Street where I’ve lived ever since. I’m the last one here. All my brothers and sisters have married or moved out, most gone to Florida. But we all still come together often. We have a big, The Lowell Review

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extended family now. Almost immediately after we moved back to Lowell from Salem was when my father became a Mister Softee. I remember the truck being parked out front and him going back and forth to the backyard to go in the cellar to get his supplies. It seemed like an insecure or vulnerable spot to leave an ice cream truck all winter. About a year later he built a threestall garage on our property for the truck. I have many memories of that truck and the garage. I must have washed it thousands of times! With my sisters, I helped to make the Chillaroos too. I had great friends. I always thought our little Desrosiers Street neighborhood was the city’s best kept secret. It was a very bucolic, suburban neighborhood. It wasn’t like the rest of Lowell that had tenements and all that stuff. We were right on the Lowell line and right down the street was Dracut which was even more spread out so there were a lot of empty fields and trees. If I walked five minutes towards Dracut, I’d be right in the woods. We spent a lot of time playing in the woods. In the other direction was downtown Lowell. No parent would allow this today, but back then, on Saturday afternoons me and my friends would get on our bikes and drive to downtown Lowell to the Strand Theatre for double features that included monster movies or science fiction movies. Across the street from the Strand was Harvey’s Bookland where I would buy or sell my comic books. I sold them because every fall, my father would make me sell my comic books before school started. It wasn’t until high school that I could start collecting and keeping my comics. At one point, after I began collecting back issues, I was probably buying my own comic books back from Harvey’s! RPH: Why would your dad force you to sell your comic books? PC: I was a C student most of the time in elementary school. My father had a rule, after supper it was homework, read or bed. There was no TV. If you wanted to stay up and you were finished your homework, you had to read. One of my father’s attempts to perk up my grades was to take away my comic books since he thought maybe I was distracted by them. So he made me sell them at the end of the summer which was a very difficult thing for me to do. RPH: Where did you go to elementary school? PC: I went to St. Louis Elementary School at St. Louis Parish. I went there for technically eight years, but I stayed back in fourth grade. For my last year, I wasn’t getting along with my siblings so my parents sent me to a boarding school, Sacred Heart School in Andover, for a year. I hated that school but I also hated the Robinson School where I went the year after. I was too late to sign up for St. Joseph’s High School so I ended up at the Robinson Middle School which was even worse. I called it the eighth ring of hell! RPH: Did you end up at St. Joseph’s High School? PC: Yeah, I ended up at St. Joe’s as a sophomore which was the best choice ever. It was a great school. I fit in and made a lot of good friends. RPH: After high school did you work or did you go right to college? 38

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PC: I worked two years for Jerry’s Army Navy Store in downtown Lowell on Central Street. That’s where I reconnected with buying old comic books because right next store was Harvey’s. I went over there and I saw an old comic book that hit me right between the eyes, nostalgia-wise. But it was a dollar and I told myself, “I’m not going to pay a dollar for a comic book.” But I did buy it and when I got home and looked through it, I thought, what a great comic book! I’d forgotten how good the older comics were. I had to have more! So after that, I’d work for a week at Jerry’s then take $10 and buy back issues at Harvey’s. That’s where I got 80 percent of my collection. The rest of the money went in the bank to pay for college. When I quit working after two years, I went to Salem State. In those days, you could work for two years and save enough to pay for your college education. I think it was only a few hundred dollars a semester. RPH: What did you study at Salem State? PC: I majored in English and minored in Communications. I always wanted to be a writer and the only employment I could think of as a writer was being a journalist. RPH: When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer? PC: Probably around the fourth grade. I was really getting into reading, I was a heavy reader. At school, they promoted it with the help of the Scholastic Book Club. If you read a certain number of books you might get a free one or a pin or a membership card that proclaimed you to be a good reader. There were a lot of incentives. Then there were the TV shows. I was into TV shows like the Outer Limits and other science fiction shows and war movies. That got me into reading science fiction and nonfiction too. I liked anything on World War II. By the fourth, fifth, sixth grades, I was reading a lot. Of course, the next thing I discovered was that reading was not enough. It just didn’t seem fulfilling enough. Something more was needed to fulfill my enjoyment of the subject matter and that was to write it myself, to write my own stories. By the fourth or fifth grade I had started writing a novel called, Gateway to the Future. I used portions of it to head my chapters in Sometimes a Warm Rain Falls. Of course, it wasn’t good! I still have the manuscript. I’ll look it over now and then and say, “Man, this is horrible!” But at the time, I thought I was doing a good job. I had an older cousin in Salem who was taking typing lessons so she would type the chapters for me as I wrote it. But I never finished the novel. That was my first attempt at creative writing. Then I tried short stories. I would send them to science fiction magazines in the belief they were good enough but they were rejected. It took many, many years for me to become good enough to finally get stuff published. RPH: Was there anyone in your life who encouraged you to write? PC: I had no real encouragement sad to say. No one in my family read my stuff. My parents probably really didn’t understand what I was reading or my creative yearnings. They were old fashioned in that they thought science fiction was crazy stuff so they had no sympathy for the things that I was interested in. The first real encouragement I received for what I wanted to write came many years The Lowell Review

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later when I was about twenty-eight years old. I opened up a comic book store on Pawtucket Street in Lowell. It lasted a year before it failed but what I got out of that store was a handful of really good friends. We remain friends today. We still get together thirty-five years later to talk comic books, books, movies, and records. A couple of them were artists so when I closed the store, I asked them, “Why don’t we do a magazine based on horror and fantasy?” They were interested and as a result, we launched Fungi magazine. We all worked on different parts of it but I didn’t know anyone else who wrote so I had to write 90 percent of it myself. That forced me to crank out articles and short stories. Eventually that honed my skills and I started sending stuff out to other publishers. I discovered that there were several small press magazines out there that published weird fiction. This was all before the internet so it was harder to find and connect with them but I eventually did and they started publishing my short stories. That gave me the encouragement to keep writing. That’s how it all began. RPH: Who are the friends involved in this? PC: The friends I met through my comic book store were teenagers while I was around twenty-seven years old. There was a huge gap between our ages but when we talked about the things we were interested in, there was no difference between our ages. We were enthusiastic about the same things and we remained that way in all the years since. RPH: Tell me a little about how Fungi magazine was produced in the days before desktop publishing. PC: The first issue was extremely primitive. I typed it on a manual typewriter. I left gaps between the text for my artists to draw directly onto the page. I took the pages to a Xerox machine I used at work when no one was around. Then we collated the pages, just sandwiched them together and stapled them. With the second issue, I found a printer who could do a cover on colored paper. We would do the artwork for the cover and back cover and they would print it on blue or pink paper or whatever color we wanted then we would wrap the cover around that sandwich of pages so it looked more like a regular magazine. We published twelve issues that way with later issues using slick paper for the covers. A few years later, when computers and desktop publishing made production so much easier, the internet was also available. That gave us the incentive to restarted Fungi. By that time, I would just take the pages right to a print shop and they would print it, fold it, and staple it so that it looked like a regular, professional magazine. In the early days, we sold about twenty or twenty-five copies of each issue. I put a little ad in the back of a magazine called Twilight Zone offering the magazine for free. We had several people respond to that including Henry Vester, who became one of my best friends. He lived out in California. We—the Fungi staff including myself, Ron Zimmerman, and Greg Montejo—went out to see him three or four times. Most of the time we drove cross country. We would fly to Texas or North Dakota and then we would drive the rest of the way to California and later Oregon. We had great trips together. We called ourselves the Dharma Bums! RPH: What was the first thing you had published by somebody else? 40

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PC: A short story for a small press magazine called Haunts way back in 1985. But aside from short stories and non-fiction, my first book would be Marvel Comics in the 1960s. The fulfillment of a lifelong dream. That book has been out for ten years now along with its two successors and in that time its sales have never slipped. RPH: Moving away from comic books, how did you get interested in science fiction? PC: Mostly through television. TV was still fairly new when I was a teenager. In the mid1960s there wasn’t a lot to watch so a lot of movies from the 1950s were showing up on TV, like “Creature Feature” on Saturday afternoons. Me and my friend would watch shows like that on TV every week so we’d see The Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Forbidden Planet and it totally enthralled us. On top of that were shows like The Outer Limits which ran right after Creature Feature. Those shows were fantastic and so influential, for me at least. I recently bought them on DVD and they hold up completely. Me and my friend would watch the movies and then we’d go out in the yard and reenact them as if we were fighting the same monsters. At about the same time we had gotten into Tom Swift books. We’d go up to the Dracut Library a couple times a week to take out Tom Swift books and read them in the front yard together. The Tom Swift books were only semi-science fiction though, not the real thing. I asked myself, “Where can I get more of this stuff?” That’s when I found the science fiction section of the library. I usually went to the Dracut Library because it was closer to my home than the Lowell one. I think I read their entire science fiction section. After a while, I started spending my own money on books. My friends read it to. We’d trade books back and forth. I remember getting Dune or Stand on Zanzibar from my friend Mike, or Isaac Asimov’s The Green Hills of Earth. That’s how I got into science fiction. Between SF, comics, and movies, my imagination was set afire and I couldn’t get enough of it. Even started writing my own stories. RPH: Are there any science fiction writers who influenced your writing? PC: Probably Ray Bradbury the most. He had a style of writing that was almost poetic, like fairy tale-ish. It wasn’t like hard science. That influenced how I wrote my short stories for The Way the Future Was and Different Futures. I wrote it in that style. That’s why the subtitle of The Way the Future Was is “a collection of science fiction fables.” They read more like fantasy than straight sci fi. Other SF writers that influenced me were Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, and James Hogan. But I liked straight fantasy too including authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, William Morris, and James Branch Cabell. RPH: How many books have you written? PC: I have many different interests so whenever something gets my attention, I’ll write that kind of story. I’ve written several science fiction novels and short stories, also a horror novel and short stories. I loved H. P. Lovecraft when I was a teenager so I wrote stories based on his “mythos” as they call it. I like fantasy but only dabbled in it until recently when an editor asked me to write something about Elak of Atlantis, a character invented by Henry Kuttner in the 1940s which was in the public domain. This editor asked me to write an Elak story for an anthology of fantasy stories he was preparing. The book was called Flashing Swords for which I’ve written a second Elak story for the next volume. The Lowell Review

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I was a big fan of the TV series, Anne of Green Gables back in the 1990s. Then I read the books and I loved the whole series. I thought, “I wish I could write a young adult novel like this!” So I thought, “Why not?” and ended up with Sometimes a Warm Rain Falls. For that, I took the admonition commonly given to writers to “write about what you know” so I took episodes from my life growing up in Lowell and weaved them into this novel. I’ve also written a lot of nonfiction. I wrote history articles for magazines like Military History, America’s Civil War, and Wild West. I wrote a lot of articles for those kinds of newsstand magazines. Then I collected them all in Real Heroes, Real Battles and Hazardous History. For a long time I wanted to write capsule biographies of the Founding Fathers. That ended up being Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor. That was a self-published book. No publisher wanted it because they said with Wikipedia, who wants these capsule biographies in book form? RPH: You’ve written a Young Adult novel, Sometimes a Warm Rain Falls. Can you tell us about the plot? PC: It’s like the back of the book says, “Oil and water, they say, can’t mix but fate, it seemed, had other plans” for characters Guy LaMond and Noel Archambault. The two characters are at loggerheads through much of the book. They both like reading but they can’t stand what the other is reading. She likes classics and he likes science fiction. They have their clashes and run ins, but eventually they come to the realization that they have more in common than they thought. RPH: From the setting of the book, what places would people in Lowell today find familiar? PC: Most of the action takes place in Centralville where I grew up and many of the characters are based on people I knew. The street names and the place names are all the same though. Most of the action takes place on Desroisers Street but it does move to St. Louis School and some downtown locations like the Strand and Harvey’s Book Land, that’s all in there. And it’s illustrated. I went around town with my niece and she took pictures of the places I write about in the book and they appear in the chapter headings. It’s very much about Lowell. I think anyone who grew up in Lowell in the 1960s would find a lot to relate to in this book. RPH: Tell us about your writing process. Do you write in the morning? In the evening? On a legal pad or the computer? That sort of thing. PC: In the early days, I would write everything long hand. I had these big pads of blank paper. I’d write on them. I still have many of those early manuscripts and I look at them now to remind myself of how difficult it was before we had computers! Once the computer came in, it saved a lot of time. The toughest thing is to find the time and then have the discipline to sit down and write. I play psychological games with myself in order to talk myself into getting to work. I used to come home from work, eat supper, and then write for two full hours. That’s how I’d get things done. Other times I had jobs that had plenty of free time at work so I’d write my articles there long hand and then come home and type them up. Generally speaking, I try to write for a couple of hours each afternoon and then for an hour or two after supper. RPH: What advice do you have for someone who is interested in writing? 42

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PC: The line I quoted from Anne of Green Gables: Write about what you know. That’s good advice. Like in my new book which is a prequel to Sometimes a Warm Rain Falls. There, a character says to Guy, “Why don’t you write something you know about?” She tells him to be like Earl Hamner who wrote about Walton’s Mountain. That was based on his experiences growing up in Virginia. Start with what you know. Don’t think “novel” right off that bat. That’s really off-putting to a beginner because of the size of the project. Start with a short story. Even if there’s no market for it, it’s good to get the brain moving and the internal gears moving. And be careful of your grammar. Make sure your grammar is right. RPH: That covers my questions. Is there anything you’d like to add? PC: People can check out my website, www.pierrevcomtois.com. That’s where all my books are listed and there’s an “about the author” section. Did we cover all my books? That’s something we could talk about. When I started, I had short stories published in amateur magazines that would publish fiction. Then I grew into newsstand magazines that would publish history articles. From there, I wrote some screenplays for TV shows. They got as far as an agent but the TV shows didn’t pick them up. I wrote them for Star Trek. Earliest of all was my magazine, Fungi. That gave me a lot of practice. Issue #23, that came out last year, is still available by the way. Eventually, I felt I was ready to try writing a novel. Working in such a long form was very intimidating to me. I wondered how I could stretch a story out to 200 pages! My first attempt at that was A Well Ordered Universe which is a science fiction novel. It’s like a philosophical treatise. People on earth discover this anomaly in space. They don’t know if it’s a physical phenomenon or God continuing his Creation. So a ship goes out to meet it. The ship is staffed by regular crew members but they also have some priests and others aboard so there’s the opportunity to have them hold philosophical discussions with each other along the way. I found a regular publisher for that, it wasn’t self-published. Next I did a collection of all of my horror stories. It was called Autumnal Tales. That was self-published. Hazardous History was a collection of all the articles I wrote for history magazines. That came with a trigger warning on the cover that it was real history and didn’t pull any punches. None of this revisionist stuff! Then there was Tales of the Outré, another collection of horror stories and Different Futures which was more science fiction. I stuck with science fiction and wrote Scheduled For Extinction a novel about people living in a dome in the future. It involves the final plan of eco-extremists that involved the extinction of the human race so the earth could redevelop on its own without human contamination. That was a fun book to write. That led to another science fiction book called Extra Galaxia which came from a novelette I wrote called Collision Course. That became the first of a series of novels with the same characters called “science agents.” In this case, one of these agents is sent to find some missing scientists and encounters a scientific paradox. When I got done, I thought, “that was a blast to write!” That was accepted by a regular publisher that also accepted the sequel: Novis Intelligence. It has the same characters as the first book except the two main characters are now married. Another one of my favorites is Strange Company which I self-published. Its features Thomas Jefferson as a detective. It begins in the halls of Congress where a British citizen has been murdered. It’s sure to cause an international incident because the British Parliament was right then considering the peace treaty with the United States. If Parliament learned The Lowell Review

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about this murder it might blow up the whole deal. So Thomas Jefferson, on the sly, has to solve this murder. Along the way he teams up with Alexander Hamilton. Although they’re natural enemies they have to cooperate to solve the case. That was also a lot of fun to write as it combined several interests of mine: mysteries, history, and Jefferson and Hamilton. One of its big fans is fellow writer David Daniel whom I’m sure you know. I like to say that he used to be Lowell’s most successful living writer but he moved to Westford so the crown passed to me! Mind if I give a shout out to Dave? How we first met is an interesting story. When I first began publishing Fungi, maybe the second issue, he wrote me a letter and suggested we get together some time. I looked at the postmark and it was stamped from Lowell! I had no idea there was any other writer within a hundred miles of me! So we got together and have been friends ever since. That was back in 1988 when his first novel, Ark, had been released in paperback. Dave helped me with my writing career, as he has for many other fledgling writers in the area. He read my early stuff and gave me encouragement as well as his own story contributions to every issue of Fungi through the decades.

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SECTION III

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Daily Walk in the Quarter helena minton

Down the Rue Franklin in her black skirt and white blouse, splattered with ochre, black hair pulled back, deep black eyes. Berthe lugs her satchel laden with pigment tubes, sketchbooks, tools of her work. To a man on the street she looks odd but full of purpose, a stark Parisian sight, striding past other women, weighed down by baskets of legumes, on the way to set up her easel In the Bois du Boulogne, her brushes determined arrows. Where will they take her? As she stabs her palette she mutters, shadow and angle, swan, saw grass, chestnut tree. Cross with unfinished sketches, she might toss them in the lake and watch them float with lilies.

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Curlew gr ace well s

“People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.” —Wendell Berry “What an unearthly aria that call was. Sometimes I would think it isn’t a call at all. But if it isn’t, what is it? Is it a spontaneity of eternity that has somehow come through into time? Hearing his voice, a god who had made the curlew would almost instantly want to remake himself as the thing he had made. Universes he couldn’t call into being with a human voice he could call into being with the voice of a curlew.” —John Moriarty

Above the beach at Kilmacreehy, ten curlews become eleven curlews in a small flock of wing and glide that I follow after like a younger child. Birds possessed of little more than sky— a sky so blue it turns the waves aquamarine, and lights the wet sand cobalt-blue, Liscannor Bay become so sheltering that I am almost fooled to forget how the curlews are fading now; the wings that fly around my head trace a fragile cusp of life, the wick of their species is burning low. So in the way that others sit at the bedsides of the dying, I accompany the curlews out to where their blue sands will surely end,

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but each soft step sinks me deeper into our Earth’s embrace, and when the curlews call, their song enchants— lifting me with them, until I am airborne, feathered, flying.

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The Rose of Battambang c h at h p i e r s at h

Lotus in a swamp by a dusty road, She stands, waiting for someone to see her. I saw her, and she didn’t know. She was in Kop Khmoung, Where blood replaced the green rice fields. She died in a temple, where they put the sick and dying. Men desecrated the sacred statues. The cruel were too savage to worship mute stone Carved into the spoken, inhabitable Buddha. But she emerged, born and reborn, With all human resilience in her eyes. She rises more beautiful than ever, pink flesh, Reticent stare, needles and thorns Which thread and stitch her life back whole. She’s a rose Sin Sisamouth had sung and praised. She’s my sister, waiting for me to return home.

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At the Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, Massachusetts tom sexton

Today I saw Bronson Alcott’s ghost wearing a frock coat made of snow in this orchard that was part of his farm not far from New Hampshire’s lingering dark. He held a walking stick made of light, and it seemed that he would soon take flight. Emerson, shepherd to the Transcendental flock, slipped river rocks into Alcott’s pockets to keep his friend from drifting away when they walked here at the break of day. A dreamer, perhaps even a fool, he believed that man could blossom like an apple tree.

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Always There Was Rice b u n ko n g t u o n

on the black greasy stove. Always my uncles and aunts left for work in factories and plants where all day they stood between what they had escaped from and what lay ahead. Always Lok-Yiey cooked Khmer sausages in a frying pan, transferred them to a red-and-white plate for my cousins and me. She always reused the same oil for the fish my uncles and aunts had caught in the Providence River the weekend before. Always there was soy sauce, fish sauce, and chili sauce on the round table in the kitchen. Always karaoke on weekends. Someone always got drunk and cursed the stars and the shadows of the humid summer evening. When my uncle and aunts returned in late afternoons I don’t remember them saying much. They ate the food that Lok-Yiey had prepared. After supper, my aunts cleaned the dishes while my uncles watched cartoons on TV. At night, all the rooms were occupied by sleeping uncles and aunts, cousins and grand52

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parents. The elders snored up dreams of a large white house in a city away from graffiti and broken bottles, sneakers on telephone wires, where we spoke perfect English, became doctors, lawyers, engineers. I don’t remember my dreams. I remember the scent of Lok-Yiey, sweat and tiger balm, dirt in the folds of her skin. How deep her sleep was, as if she had gone back to Cambodia to be with her other daughter. I put my index finger close to her nose to be sure I felt her warm breath.

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Dookinella Church of Our Lady of the Assumption kevin gall agher

we obeyed the speed limit on the way to church we saw that the leaves were changing we noted which houses needed painting we pointed out two hawks flying over we did not talk about the horrors that are happening in our church and state we didn’t have room in our day for hate we pulled into the parking lot we waved to our friends already filling inside fairly quietly and lining in our pews we sang psalms

looking sideways at our priest

we were set free when we got on our knees we prayed for god we prayed for god

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Something Has Been Lost moira linehan

Hunting for my gold dot earrings, hunting that hospital bill, whispering, Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony. Where, oh where did I leave my reading glasses? Where, my journal? How could it not be right here on my desk? Please, Saint Anthony. My sewing scissors, why not in my sewing basket where they belong? Please come around. Don’t let me lose faith in you. Years I honored your statue carried along Hanover Street and on, through the North End, streamers hanging off it with five dollar, ten dollar bills pinned to them by your devoted faithful, your thankful faithful. Now my keys, not on the edge of the counter where they should be. Hunting again, Saint Anthony, my missing, misplaced, covered over, overlooked, somewhere right here in front of me, Saint Anthony . . . it must be found, what I hold dear, hunting again my unfindable, my lost along this parade route, coming into view my beloved, ever haunting my hunting.

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The Boulevard, July 1962 carlo morrissey

It was the widest street we knew four lanes, two east, two west. We sat on the stoop, blending into seats, waiting for anything. Across the boulevard Silvio, who never spoke, paced he was thick, grizzly and looked like he could lift a house. The empty foundry buildings called to us cigarettes, cards, or wait to test our courage face the next train, stand as close as trembling legs allowed eyes shut, wind washed fears away. Silvio smoked and paced he planted roses in front of a shrine to Our Blessed Mother flowers amid the concrete and asphalt they said he was from Naples. A case of Narragansett on his porch Silvio paced and paced and paced. Then he was gone, we nodded and crossed the boulevard I grabbed the beer, ran fast down a rutted dirt street. Later, in Silvio’s parlor, the ‘gansett back on the porch we drank glasses of homemade wine. He spoke of playing the tuba in Italy, that today was the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and how he missed home very much.

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Two Poems dan murphy

Man A cloud bursts over Broadway Street. Through a car window, everything’s blurred— traffic lights diffuse a rolling glow, storefronts fog to a collection of impressions—save a man ambling slowly, clear through the strafing rain, a Boston Herald held above his head, news bleeding down his face, all those story lines that more or less the world signed off on surfacing blackly in the path of his shoes.

No Sledding Through the Lilacs Even as the icy crust of winter was finally breaking— a strangely warm day in early March— even as I enjoyed the ease my shoulders felt, a breeze through my t-shirt, I couldn’t help but read the sign on the steep and moguled slope of the Arboretum’s bald, idyllic hill— bare lilacs like flags on a slalom— and hope for a brief but substantial snow.

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2022

Emily on the Moon b i l l o ’c o n n e l l

In her house, of course: small desk in the bedroom looking out at the rising Earth, tilting her oval face to the edge where one begins to fall, and writes, dipping for ink, raising the pen and dropping it down onto the small page.

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Saffron Robe peuo tuy

Sanskrit and Pali words; we sing chants inside the prasat And I sit with Mak and Pbouk in semi-lotus, reading her lips For I am like a ditzy little girl, clueless, Forgiveness, compassion, or is it love that I’m reciting? Right or wrong, I mumble, gawk at the preah sitting on pink lotus Ooooh, soma som puth tho, but I think of Num pa chok noodles with som lar Khmer soup, mmmm, yum! My fav Reinventing scenes in my mind about Mak’s kitchen Or shall I pretend to be Buddhist for two hours? Because we are in our exotic world for a short time, I will Entertain the thought of bringing Theravada Buddha into my life.

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Filleadh ón Aonach dairena ní chinnéide

Thainig sí abhaile ón aonach lán go barra do dhraíocht na sí réiltíní beaga ag glioscarnach go gcorraíodar leis an gceol céanna thar tairseach caol na coitiantachta eisean is ise ag eitilt suan mar a bheadh codladh céad bliain cóirithe, snasta d’imigh sí ó ghort an aonaigh liontán de thuí bhuí cráite le leisce síos an bóthar ag briseadh tríd isteach san am i láthair d’fháisc sí chuichi an dá shaol in aon turas ag sleamhnú thar claí isteach sa ghnáthshaol.

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Section III

Coming Home from the Fair ( t r a n s l at i o n

by t h e au t h o r , da i r e n a n í c h i n n é i d e)

She came home from the fair full of the flight of fairy folk tiny stars shone as they swayed to the same music beyond the realm of the ordinary she and he they soared slept like some fairy tale risen and rested she left the fairground tumbleweed tufts hollowing the path breaking through to reality she welcomed both worlds at once easing into departure beyond the ditch into the everyday.

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2022

Patched Together in the Manner of Dreams alfred bouchard

before the dream monsieur I waited for the train not knowing the dream or where it would go I carried a suitcase and a little French the suitcase came from an earlier dream to dream one must carry a suitcase no in the dream she is standing by the window the glass glazed with sunlight the piano player his back to the window is bent over the keyboard deep inside the room the piano player is a stray from an earlier dream in that dream I replaced him at the keyboard she is facing me her image slightly obscured but her eyes are clear her dress a black silhouette but there is no movement no recognition I stand across the street carrying a suitcase the piano player too is immobile to dream monsieur is to see no but can one see if one is not seen is there a word for this monsieur everything is a la carte but this is a dream and my French is limited this is why I carry a suitcase this is perhaps why the piano player is waiting but there is no movement oh monsieur she is standing there but does she see me

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2022

Ducks in Heaven meg smith

A fire splashes over the Merrimack, even along its silver elbows— and nothing is taken as granted here. Well we know this view is not the same view as so many others, for whom this same river runs gray from tears, or with the passage of broken sleep. The only sure passengers are ducks, with dusty feathers and sullen comment that nevertheless does not judge. And you, scientist, and cousin of all waterfowl, reader of their laws, conduit of their sighs, flow forward. The song will sound, from rocky banks, even as cars and music blur past, even as a new call cries out from every traffic island, every memory.

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2022

Two Poems joseph donahue

Without Rent or Seam On the bedroom sill, in moonlight, a stone from the Aegean. Asleep beside it, you fly, go repair the roof of a local cathedral until dawn. From the dream’s peak, look out across the river, the falls, where, once, glittering then as now, while the search team stumbled along the riverbank in the night, a drowned friend called out. The muddy bank seems finally meant, in this entrancement,

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for more than just her dive into death. A glow is spilling down from the stars. You’re working, in the dark, replacing masonry after midnight, in anticipation of an exalted state of being.

A New Law on the Earth Moments before, they had been on the moon. It was cold there. They found a tin can, started a fire in it, leaving, until the desolation warmed up, the curiosity, how can fire burn without air? Further, where did that can come from, there in the rubble of a house on the moon? Perhaps all this mental chaos is only the meteor four hundred feet of rock that cut below the moon like a messenger in an elliptical orbit between Mars and Venus It shot past earth in the night, The Lowell Review

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at 54,000 miles per hour, beaming reflected sunlight and enough destructive force to kill a city, as in the Tunguska Event. In 1908, in Russia, a man sits on his porch. He feels his clothes burst into flame. 40 miles away, the air split in two. The whole north was fire. Then came a sound like stones falling from the sky. The dense high clouds that arose reflected the long-faded sunlight. The night sky glowed. Far off, in China, people could read their newspapers outside at midnight. This brings to mind, if only for you, a gregarious man who, one morning, has breakfast with his family, then goes out to the garage. Though an accomplished hunter he botches his final shot. (It takes days for him to die.) In dreams, friendly folk invite you places, offer you interesting but non-essential items like geodes, or antique maps. A block party continues in the rain. The sky cracks and flashes. You feel like a ghost. The barbeque tastes spectral, delicious, yes, but distant. The tingle on your tongue seems more remembered than happening now. 66

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Growing on a Hog Farm on the Outskirts of Casablanca el habib louai

Last night, I had a strange dream. I dreamed I grew up on a hog farm on the outskirts of Casablanca. I was quite different then. Guilty of nothing as I had never thought of social climbing issues, or been to meetings to oppose the new constitution. I was brutally named after my grandfather who used to say what you see is what you get, neither more nor less, but clean-limbed. Now, I realize why his shadow Was on every other door I passed through. Worries? I had very few as everything looked pure and calm through my lenses. Icy saints walked around protecting me from staggering deaths, and other crazy things that have always missed our doorstep by virtue of my grandmother’s incantations, and the luck we inherited. I kind of forgot why I came to this world Or what I wanted to say every time we came to a long Q and A period. Dreams became an earthy alternative to everything we wanted to do. They splashed on everything to make it fit in all my tedious Berber summers.

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SECTION IV

CROWDSOURCING THE STORM BOARDS A night view of the storm boards with Victorian silhouettes on the John E. Cox Memorial Bridge (a.k.a. the Bridge Street Bridge) in Lowell, Mass. Photograph reprinted with permission, © Greg Marion.

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The Lowell Review

Section IV: Crowdsourcing the Storm Boards

2022

Crowdsourcing the Storm Boards

The following composition appeared on RichardHowe.com on March 10, 2021, and was built with comments by dozens of people in a discussion thread on social media provoked by a question I threw out to the crowd. On February 13, 2019, I asked friends on Facebook if they knew the name of wooden panels that for decades were installed in the late fall on city bridges in Lowell, Mass., to shield pedestrians from snow and wind in the months ahead. I once knew the name, but had forgotten—in the category of stuff you know but can’t name. By the end of the day, the dialogue had 165 comments. Excerpts from the discussion, slightly edited for easier reading, are presented unsigned to emphasize the collaborative effort to answer the question and accept the result. Contributors are acknowledged at the end. My apology to anyone whose name slipped by. Joe Donahue of Lowell and Duke University called the resulting composition a group poem. Special thanks to photographer Greg Marion, a far-flung cousin of mine.—PM

Question for Lowell folks. Asking for a friend. What is the name of the wooden panels that used to be installed on city bridges to protect pedestrians from snow and high winds? Storm boards? Snow barriers? The Dept. of Public Works had a name for those panels. I wrote a newspaper story about the ones at Pawtucket Falls decades ago, and I think they were called flashboards. No, flashboards are on top of the stone dam used to keep water high and flowing into the canal there. Was it wind something? Wind barriers? Wind breaks? Speaking of Lowellisms, the mounds of snow are called “snow bankins” instead of snow embankments. Is “bankin” a Lowellism, and how is it spelt? I just now realized it means “embankment.” “Bankin,” n., North of Boston. Embankment. The septic tank is at the top of the bankin, the leach field is below it. Yup. The bankin was what the kids in Dracut said when we first moved there as kids. I thought it was weird. Are you looking for what people called the wood? There was a name for the panels used by local people, something like storm barriers, but that’s not it. I thought it would be easy to get the answer. People don’t seem to have it. Me and my father say wind breakers. Thought they were ugly and useless and hated it The Lowell Review

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when the City forgot to take them down. Often painted gray. Except for a few years recently when black silhouettes were stenciled on them. People in Victorian outfits. Storm boards rings a bell. How about “smutters,” an invented word? I remember when the boards had silhouettes of Victorian figures on them. “Stohm Bahrias.” 1920s Lowell Textile School Alumni Association newsletter called them wind boards. Thanks for the research. How the heck did you track it down? We have a minor trend for boards. Just a simple Google Advanced Search with keywords wind + boards + Lowell. Also tried wind boards and storm boards. Love this thread. Of course, a scientific inquiry. I’m amazed it came up. Someone has to write about this, you or me or anybody on this thread. This is folklore, the lingo of River People, what we call stuff by custom. Have we got a winner? I remember those. Someone in City Hall must know. Can they make a ruling? I’ve been racking my brain. I just came up with wind blocks. Wind shields? City of Lowell spokesperson says wind barriers. Does not sound familiar to me. I’m going with storm boards. I think storm boards. My dad was a cop in the city. He called them storm boards. A second opinion from City Hall: storm guards. You’re over-thinking it. Just go with boards. What about storm barriers? A lifelong bridge-crosser must know the answer. I remember them being called wind panels because they were put up on the windy side of the bridge. Wind panels seems too technical a term for people talking about this in a diner with winter coming. Panels is a smart word. The storm boards were like the first robin in the spring, except for winter. When I was eight years old, I would take the bus to go downtown, from the Highlands, every Saturday morning, for my clarinet lesson in the Lowell High School basement and then walk over the Bridge Street Bridge to spend the weekend with my grandparents. My Gramps called them “the storm boards,” and they made a huge difference while crossing the Merrimack River in winter. Those winds were STRONG, but of course I was little. I still call them storm boards, and so did my grandmother who walked across the bridge daily. I keep hearing “storm boards” in my head. 72

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At the club, the members would talk about the wind panels, in French: panneau de vent. To protect “the walkers.” I love that term. We had “walkers” in elementary school. They got to leave before the bus kids. “Line up,” the nuns would say. “Walkers in front, two by two.” Ring the bell, and they’re off. Boards. In the Heritage Partnership article: “Boards went up each winter to protect pedestrians from cold blowing winds.” I loved how the boards went up on the Moody St. bridge on the west side, when all the college students hiked over on the east side. My uncle Ray was in charge of getting those up. He had an office way up in City Hall. Nice view. What did he call them? Went to the grave with him. Some people. Storm boards. Happy Valentine’s Day. That’s what my Gramps called them, and he was one of the smartest people I have ever known. I campaigned on bringing back the wind barriers when I ran for City Council. Downtown needs more foot traffic coming across the river from Bridge St. Bring back the bridge boards! For several years the City workers reused one gray panel on the Moody or Textile or University Avenue bridge that had graffiti on it that read “We Luv You David Jo,” which must have been spray-painted by someone who went to a New York Dolls concert on campus. Those boards kept the kids from Ste. Jeanne d’Arc parish from being blown into the falls whilst walking to St. Joseph High School. Lowell Sun, April 2, 1952, p. 6: “It seems only a short time ago that we were urging here that storm boards be erected on the various bridges throughout Lowell. And now it’s just about time they came down. The proverbial March winds have blown their last, and the almanac tells us that mild April showers are now in store for us. The storm boards certainly serve a worthy purpose in preventing snow drifts during the winter. We have traveled throughout New England and have seen storm boards on only a few bridges.” 1952. Storm boards. How great is this? Super research. We always just said, “The boards are up.” I called them: “I walked the Bridge Street Bridge to high school past the wind boards.” Wind breakers! Weren’t they called wind screens? Windscreen is a British word for a car windshield. Somebody else said storm guards. Or snow guards. This could show up on Jeopardy. The Lowell Public Works Department called me and said the name is wind barriers, which The Lowell Review

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have not been used for at least fifteen years. Wow. OK. That sounds official. It’s not what I remember, but I accept the answer. Thanks. I love this. You should do this once a week. Make it a challenge to identify things in Lowell. I’ll think of something for next week. The category is “Stuff you know but can’t name.” I’m going with storm boards even if it is not accurate. Storm boards sounds best to me. I’d buy something that sounds better if it comes from the city’s ancient and honorable sources. Maybe there was an official name within City Hall but people used another term by custom. Not the first time. I believe it was boards and don’t think barriers was a term used by real people. This is about the ways in which we all remember stuff that is mostly community talk and not things written down: traditions, customs, local lore. This is the coolest thread. A 1920s reference also. There’s the official designation and the popular history from those who crossed the bridge every day. I think of them as being on the Bridge Street Bridge or Cox Bridge. Were they on the Aiken Street Bridge, too, the Ouellette Bridge? In their heyday, the storm boards were on all the bridges, four bridges from Mammoth Road to Bridge Street. Say what you want about the storm boards, just don’t forget the “wrinkly tar sidewalk” on Riverside Street. You’re going deep into Lowell Mythology now, all the subterranean secrets in the Dracut diorite under the topsoil full of mammoth femurs and arrowheads and colonial coins. Speaking of subterranean, the Richardson Farm on Mammoth Road in Dracut connects with the Pawtucketville neighborhood in Lowell by way of old granite quarries and catacombs. I’m going with storm boards. Thanks to Pat Cook, Jamie Patrick Lewis, Joe Boyle, Mike Casey, Diane West, Joan d’Arc, Greg Marion, Susan April, Christina Nikitopoulos, Theresa O’Beirne Barr, Karen O’Beirne, Lynne Lupien, George Proakis, Donna Spellissy, Martha Hayden Burns, Patti Kirwin-Keilty, Brenda O’Brien, Henri Marchand, Sean Thibodeau, Marie Sweeney, Joe Smith, Dick Kenney, Russ Vivier, Marie Louise St. Onge, James Koumpouras, Stephen Conant, Paul Trudel, David Blackburn, Corey Sciuto, Dave Ouellette, Susan Sadlier Hrastinski, Curtis LeMay, Peter Aucella, Martha Mayo, Joe Donahue, and Pauline Golec.

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SECTION V

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The Lowell Review

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2022

The Incessant j o a n r at c l i f f e

can still see the sickened look on my father’s face—the twirling madness of the blue eyes unbelieving—when he told me as a teenager that “those two people”—meaning Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—should never have gone to the electric chair. And nobody in their family would even step up to adopt their two orphaned children. Dad cursed the U.S. government over and over—there was more going on in his head, appalled at every turn, than he would let out, probably for fear of being called a communist. One time, sitting in the back seat of the car as we drove through the Dracut woods returning from our grandparent’s house in Methuen, I asked him, “Dad, are you a communist?” “No, I’m a socialist.” On the way home that day, we stopped at the Finn’s house to pay a visit, and my parents went in for the first time to meet this family, who a mailman in our neighborhood had said received incriminating mail in brown wrappers. “He shouldn’t be talking like that,” Dad responded, as we passed Brox Farm, the apple orchards of East Dracut, and the entrance to the pond dotted by cabins where we swam with cousins of screen door summers. Running up the steps into the house to see my schoolmates, I was sent back out to get my parents, who came in smiling—especially my father—to greet these wonderful people who had a bunch of kids—with a great picnic table in the kitchen for the chow hounds who wouldn’t dare miss the dinner bell—the colossal casseroles of their saintly mother gone in a swoop of hands; coming out, my father grinning and finally being asked the question of all questions from his eldest daughter, and incriminating himself irrevocably in my heart, glad. He had never quite explained how it had happened—and I never understood until later— but he had somehow become the only leftist in his Republican family. But there was one story he liked to tell, which might hold a clue to Dad’s pure paranoia. During the Second World War he had been hospitalized at the Naval Hospital at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, after receiving his vaccinations to go overseas. The hospitalization went on for a year or more, during which time he had been severely ill and confined to a wheelchair. I’ve never been able to ascertain exactly what disease he had—and he had only a vague idea himself—but he claimed it had been something exotic, and possibly more than one disease. He insisted he had been a “guinea pig” for some experimental vaccine, and “they”—the “bastards”—had purposely given him the disease. Dad had a postcard of the USS Incessant—an Admiral class, the largest of the minesweepers charged with anti-submarine warfare—on which he had been consigned after recovering sufficiently enough for the government to try to kill him a second The Lowell Review

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time. He’d point to a tiny window around the middle of the ship and say with a straight face “that’s me in the window peeling potatoes”—his duty for being an incessant pain in everyone’s ass. I still look for him in that window, and one day I’ll see him again if life is not the cruel joke I take it to be. The Incessant “swept” mines—a phrase that makes it sound like a housekeeping chore— in the harbors of southern France and Italy, in spite of man-made fishes coming at them. Several different types of torpedoes were developed in someone’s killing mind—Dad had a cloth badge showing one of the mines that looked like a round black booby trap bobbing in the water. The word torpedo comes from the Latin torpere (to stun) and also from a fish called the “electric ray”—(in the order of Torpediniformes). The electric ray has a round body and two organs that can produce an electrical discharge of up to 220 volts. But a man-ray is of another order and form of fish: I refer to the human torpedo, a type of diver propulsion vehicle, which was a secret naval weapon used by the Italians before they came over to the Allied side, and later adopted by the British. Dad saw a lot of these electric man-rays flying through the water in French and Italian waters, an awesome sight with two divers riding astride. When they steered the warhead up to the ship, they would detach the incredible limpet mine and then ride the jig off, presumably as fast as possible in the opposite direction. My father to me was Billy Budd, a mutiny of one. He claims he spent a lot of time in the “brig” on the Incessant. After incessantly missing port call in Virginia and North Carolina due to drunken, mischievous behavior, my father—who was married at the time and one of the oldest enlisted men on the ship at twenty-two—was awakened one sun-up by the captain and marched to the deck. There he stood at attention in front of a firing squad, the captain’s arm raised—I don’t know if they bothered to wake the bugler—but in that second of a heartbeat passing before glazed, frightened eyes, he prepared to meet his maker. In the next second, the captain called off the bluff, saying, “I’d like to shoot you, but where we’re going tomorrow, you’ll be dead soon enough.” My brother has the theory that Dad was being punished by the Captain because he was managing the card games on the ship, which were run by enlisted men so that the officers remained clean—not touching any of the loot. Dad had been recruited to run the officer’s gambling, and he may have crossed someone or been a wise guy of some sort. Or maybe he was dealing bad hands to the Captain. Or maybe my theory is correct: Dad was just an incessant pain in the ass—a boil on the cheeks of authority. As time would tell, the Captain’s words proved true. The Incessant was employed as a minesweeper escort in the Mediterranean; into Sardinia and Palermo, Sicily, the enlisted men strode to the stares of children with moonful eyes in forever visions of redemption. The 1955 film To Hell and Back brought the invasion of Italy to the war propaganda screen in glory detail, where a slight, underprivileged American soldier, played by Audie Murphy as himself, takes over a burning tank and really gives it to the krauts. One of Dad’s essential explanations for almost everything was: “that’s propaganda.” In actuality, the Italian Campaign (September 1943 to May 1945) placed Allied troops on the European mainland for the first time, against the Italians and Germans, and it degenerated, history books tell us, into a war of attrition (I’ve seen it described as “a grinding and attritional slog against skillful, determined and well-prepared defenses.”) 78

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Yes, an attritional slog. Give ‘em hell. On the beach at Salerno, troops were met with a loudspeaker proclaiming in English: “Come on in and give up. We have you covered.” American troops were too thinly spread, and some divisions were completely “vaporized” by German tanks. By December, the conditions on land were terrible: roads had disappeared, bridges had been washed downstream, and artillery had to be pulled by bulldozer through blizzards and snow drifts. Dad said some of the men had made holes in their boots in the summer so their feet could breathe in the heat, not realizing they wouldn’t get a new pair in the winter. There were many foot amputations over that freezing winter after gangrene set in. When the bloody campaign in Italy was over, there would be 312,000 Allied deaths and 536,000 German deaths in this theater alone—bad planning, terrible weather conditions and “mistakes by commanders” were blamed for the high death toll. Dad survived this atrocity only to move on with the Incessant to perform air-sea rescue work in the Black Sea, and in the Ukrainian port city of Sevastopol. After escorting President Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference in the Crimea, “The Big Three” conference as it’s now known in history—Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin attended this meeting in February 1945—the USS Incessant returned with two battle stars. Dad told us that all these grown men cried openly when President Roosevelt passed away. Like a lot of veterans of early wars, my father didn’t talk about his experiences in much detail. He did us a favor by keeping it simple: “I thought every day was my last,” he’d say. It would take another couple of demon-inspired wars for people to realize these men needed help with their grief and night horrors. During the Vietnam era, he would say that it was about time veterans were coming home to counseling and a little empathy, since that sort of behavior had been discouraged in his time. The Incessant moved on to Pearl Harbor after the war’s end to do “cleanup” work, but by that time my father had returned home, a pacifist—never again to trust the United States government—to pick up the pieces of his young family and wife, who had been put to work in the war factories of Lawrence, Massachusetts. In the alleyways between the tenement houses of the poorest of the poor we ran snottynosed, and in the evenings shouted across fences and clotheslines to other kids in other windows. By this time, Dad had become a union leader for the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and held union meetings in our apartment. I remember men sitting around the kitchen table drinking glasses of beer and saying hello to me and my sister as Dad doled out quarters for a movie—and off we’d go across the city bridge to see Frankie and Johnny or Beach Blanket Bingo. This was a delirious time before movie ratings, when you didn’t have to be “this tall” or accompanied by an adult. We saw stuff that went way over our heads, but we filled in the blanks, as kids do, with more blanks. One day my father talked his brother into going in half on a tiny cabin he found on nearly an acre in Dracut—a suburb of Jack Kerouac’s Lowell where Jack had imagined, and I later read with glee, that the caped Dr. Sax lived in an underground bunker. The price was $500. It was to be a shared summer camp for the two families, but when my aunt got a load of the shotgun shack on the edge of a swamp—where bullfrogs croaked, crickets chirped, and mosquitoes chomped—she was too hoity-toity and would have none of it. So Dad repaid uncle on a time plan, and we spent summers there, although there was no indoor hopper and in August a dry well. The Lowell Review

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Dracut, on the border of New Hampshire—founded in 1701-1702—got its name from Draycott in England. The Pawtucket Indian name for Dracut was Augumtoocooke, which means “wilderness north of the river”—meaning the Pawtucket River. In the 1650s, Indian land in Augumtoocooke, Pawtucket and Wamesit was bought up for small sums, usually barter—which is interesting in light of what Dad paid for the property from the old man who had lived in the house. Mom—who was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec—made us a home in the old wilderness sticks of Dracut on the edge of Beaver Brook. She preferred the city—where she could leave us kids with her mother and go off to a movie for a few hours, but like a trooper she went to Dracut. Summers she gave us baths in a fold-up canvas Boy Scout bathtub in the backyard. We ran shirtless in old man Boumil’s cornfield bordering the property on Primrose Hill. In backyard memories, Dad draws love letters in the sand to a crooning voice on the radio, as I peer through the rails of a wooden pen going about my business by myself. I found great freedom in that little, muddy pen. Dad had one book, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, which he read over and over. He had no use or time for any other book, except for a bird book in which he would locate the names of the birds he saw. Over the years he added on two tiny bedrooms and a bathroom, and we learned our first swear words as he learned carpentry. He filled in the swamp one wheelbarrow at a time, and I got many joyous rides on the way back to pick up another load. He talked of many curious pieces of flint coming up—possibly Indian tools—when moving that dirt around. We eventually moved to the woods of our beloved Dracut year-round, where we escaped landlords and tenement slums and city punks—where we fished and swam and became teenagers asking difficult questions from the back seat—and where we took life one day at a time on a little patch of freedom in a world enslaved by the incessant bonds of war.

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Another Turn susan april

almost didn’t make it to twenty-three. Married at nineteen, I was dazed by the brilliance of a half-carat diamond engagement ring and the shower of gifts, especially one Sunbeam, controlled-heat, automatic frypan, with cooking guide on the melamine handle: pork chops, 360 degrees; minute steak, 420 degrees; fried chicken etc., see recipe book. How I loved that copper skillet! The husband who came with it? Not so much. In Andrew Forsthoefel’s Walking to Listen, he asks everyone he meets, “What advice would you give your twenty-three-year-old self?” For me, the answer is easy: “Don’t get married when what you’ve fallen in love with is a skillet.” Truth is, there are no easy answers. On the day of my long ago wedding, I received a gift of unexpected advice from an unexpected person: my brother-in-law Ronnie. He gave this advice in an unusual place: his Lincoln Continental Town Car, which he drove as chauffeur to the ceremony. I didn’t know it was advice at the time. August 2, 1975. A Saturday. Stifling heat. I sat in the air conditioned back seat with my white gown pouffed about me, fidgeting with my mantilla veil. The bobby pins weren’t holding it right. Ronnie was driving. We were supposed to arrive at the stucco-sided, St. Mary-of-the-Assumption Church, at exactly seven minutes before the ceremony, as determined by plan at the rehearsal. But we pulled up early. “There’s time for a turn around the block,” Ronnie said, smiling in the rear view mirror. I nodded yes and Ronnie pulled away, just as a groomsman began to reach for the car door handle. Ronnie turned the music up. It was Frank Sinatra. It was always Frank Sinatra. We took Lakeview Avenue a short way to Myron Street, followed it and Beaver Brook to Vandette, drove up Vandette, banged a left on Mammoth Road, then circled back to Lakeview and the church. By then, it was two o’clock, the start of the wedding. The guests were all in their seats and two nervous ushers ran towards the car. “People expect the bride to be late,” Ronnie said. He turned and looked me in the eye. “There’s time for one more turn around the block.” I hesitated, then found myself saying, “If you think it’s ok, then ok.” I laid my bouquet beside me on the car seat. Ronnie chose a larger block to wend around and he cranked up the air conditioning. My wedding turned out to be a literal hot disaster, the hottest day on record in Massachusetts—a record yet to be broken—of 107 degrees at mid-day. This time, Ronnie didn’t pull up to the curb. He stopped dead in the road. I don’t recall if there was traffic or if anyone honked their horn. I remember what he said. He cribbed it from Old Blue Eyes. “One day you turn around, it’s summer; next day you turn around, it’s fall.” Then finished with his own, “But it’s never too late for another turn.” He nodded at The Lowell Review

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the road ahead, his way of saying you have options, if that’s what you want. I looked towards the church and saw my sister Denise, the matron-of-honor, leaning on the archway of the open door, fanning herself with a program. I heard organ music and saw wilted altar flowers. Denise didn’t frown, look mad, shrug her shoulders, or call out “Well? Are you coming?” She just fanned herself and looked faint. I loved her for that. I loved Ronnie, too, for the advice I didn’t know was advice, but recognized as a gift to be opened by some future me in a future time and not this inevitable August. I opened the car door. “Turn the lens on yourself,” Andrew Forsthoefel’s professor told him. He writes that this was “some of the best advice I’d ever received—although I didn’t know it at the time.” I see my brother-in-law’s advice the same way. The turn we need most is inward, not away and off down the road. Andrew walked 4,000 miles to reach that understanding. I lived the equivalent of his marathon trek in the three-year brutal marriage that I somehow survived, with its Utahs of broken ear drums, Alabamas of split lips, Death Valley of negative self-image, and a Pacific Coast near suicide on a catwalk above the university quad, with me calculating the radius of my body splatter and who would be called to clean it up. How did I survive? Like Andrew’s self-talk when most exhausted, I suppose I may have simply stayed awake and just kept walking. Then one glorious day, I opened Ronnie’s gift, packed a bag and took another turn.

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A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day s t e p h e n o ’c o n n o r

“I never heard a singer as good as Liam, ever. He was the best ballad singer I ever heard in my life, and still is.” —Bob Dylan, 1986

omewhere around 1982, not long after the noon hour on a Saturday, I stopped into a nearly empty Irish pub in Boston called The Black Rose. You may know it. I took a seat at the bar and ordered a Guinness. The bartender brought it, and as I began to drink, a man sauntered in wearing a corduroy cap and carrying a guitar case. I recognized him immediately. Liam Clancy took a stool a few feet away from mine. I could not have been more awed if Paul McCartney had come in and taken that barstool. Let me explain. In 1966, I was eleven years old. My father, the son of Irish immigrants, came home with a three-record box set entitled The Irish Uprising 1916-1922, narrated by Charles Kuralt. Perhaps more than anything else in my life, I look back to that simple event as the impetus for a lifelong interest in Irish history, music and literature, and by extension an interest in music, history and literature in general. Once you realize the power of poetry, you are interested in all kinds of poetry. Obsession has a negative connotation, so I’ll say that I became intensely intrigued with those recordings, which I played over and over on my parents’ stereo in the living room. There were songs performed by Liam Clancy, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Brendan O’Duill, Anne Byrne and others. There were interviews with participants in the uprising such as Rory Brugha, Sean Harling, Joseph Clarke and Sean T. O’Kelly and a heartbreaking interview with Mrs. Eileen O’Hanrahan Reilly, whose husband, Michael O’Hanrahan had been second in command of a Dublin battalion under Thomas McDonough. She spoke of visiting him in Kilmainham Jail after the failed insurrection. I can still her the old woman’s voice: “‘Surely,’ Mícheál said, ‘you don’t think you’ll not see me again.’ Well, I did see him again, but if I did ‘twas for his execution.” There were recitations of the poetry of Yeats, the words of O’Casey, and Pearse’s famous oration at the grave of O’Donovan Rossa: “They think that they’ve purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. But the fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland, unfree, shall never be at peace.” The events of 1916, the poets and martyrs, and many of the participants were both, filled my imagination. When my fifth-grade teacher asked us to name a president, I wrote Eamon DeValera. It was marked wrong. The records in that box awakened me to my heritage in a profound way. I began to see my grandparents on the O’Connor and Leahy sides as expatriates from a land where, in the words of Patrick Pearse, recited by Tommy Makem, they’d had, “no treasure but hope/ No The Lowell Review

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riches laid up but the memory of an ancient glory.” “Papa,” John O’Connor, noticing my sudden interest in Ireland, gave me a weighty tome entitled, The Poetry and Song of Ireland, with special instructions to read the poems of Thomas Moore and Thomas Davis. “Do you want to know about the history of Ireland?” he asked me. “It was all John Bull!” Later, in my sophomore year, my English teacher, Brother Sean, instructed us to recite any poem we liked to background music of our own choosing. I stole a page from my precious record, reciting Pearse’s “The Rebel,” to the background music of the Clancy Brothers singing “A Nation Once Again.” Finally, in 1972, when I was seventeen, my father asked if I’d join him on a trip to Ireland to visit relatives and see “the old country.” Looking out the window of that Aer Lingus jet at the green fields of Ireland, I felt the stirring of some strong emotion—not a homecoming, exactly, because it was not my home; still, the realization that my ancestors had inhabited this island for who knows how many centuries or millennia was, for someone from a relatively new country, a powerful one. Irish people often have a laugh or roll their eyes at the ‘returned Yank’ or the loud Americans one might hear (I have heard) on a bus or in the National Library shouting, (by Irish standards), at the librarian, “My grandfather was from County Kerry, and . . .” I understand that annoyance; all I can say is please forgive us; it really is a thrill to return to your grandparents’ home, especially when you have heard the stories and songs of the country since you were a child, or in my case, you are steeped in the history and literature of the place. That visit with my father was a memorable one. I wanted, of course, to take in the famous pubs. The drinking age here in Massachusetts at the time was twenty-one, and as I said, I was seventeen. I stopped two young women on the street and asked, “What is the drinking age here in Limerick?” They looked me up and down and said, “Sure, you’re old enough.” What a great country! I got separated from my father for a few days while I met Dublin relatives, three of the four O’Connor brothers, my age and slightly older, with whom I made the rounds of more pubs, including the campus pub at UCD, where years later I would go to school. I wanted to see some of the sites referenced on ‘my record.’ I walked about the General Post Office, which as HQ during the uprising, had been gutted by fire in 1916, with all the reverence I thought due to what was a symbol of the indomitable desire of ‘Irishmen and Irishwomen’ for freedom. Even if it was a vicarious Irish American pride, I felt proud seeing the tricolor flying where in 1916 the rebels had drawn the fire of “long-range guns” when they “hung out a flag of war,” that same tricolor. We visited the farms of old relatives in Sligo and Limerick, in what I now realize was perhaps the last days of the Ireland that my grandparents would have recognized as their Ireland. I had played violin as a child, and I began to learn Irish tunes. Soon the explosion of Irish traditional music led me to seek out Irish musicians and Irish music sessions. On Sundays, I would go to the Village Coach House in Brookline Village, where I played with, among others, Seamus Connolly, a former All Ireland Fiddle champion and a master of the instrument. I never was and never will be in Seamus’ league, but he was such a kind and humble man that he gave me and all the other amateur musicians nothing but encouragement. He asked me to play with him once in Lowell, my hometown. I said, “Seamus, people don’t want to hear me. They want to hear the great Seamus Connolly!” He 84

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waved this objection aside, and said, “Stephen, they don’t know the f——g difference.” I played with him, but the difference was clear enough. I took the opportunity to study the Irish language with a native speaker from Spiddal at the International Institute in nearby Lawrence. At UMASS, I took all the classes I could find in Irish history, literature and folklore. For several semesters, I studied Old Irish with Dr. Maria Tymoczco, who had herself studied under John V. Kelleher. He taught Old Irish at Harvard after helping to crack the Axis code in WWII. Dr. Tymoczco had us translating pages from Scéla Muicce Meicc Da Thó and Táin Bó Cúailnge. She succeeded in getting Thomas Kinsella, who had published a renowned translation of The Tain, to come and talk to us and read his poetry. In those heady days, we also had visits from Seamus Heaney and John Montague. Later, when I enrolled in the master’s degree program in Anglo-Irish Lit. at University College Dublin, Kinsella and Heaney were again guest lecturers. Other professors included Roger McHugh, Maurice Harmon, Denis Donoghue, Gus Martin, and the recently departed Seamus Deane and Terence Dolan. The professors were as rigorous as the black robes that some of them wore suggested. I remember asking Professor Dolan if, on an exam, we had to simply identify examples of “Hiberno-English dialect,” or explain why certain phrases were examples of that dialect. His response: “If you simply identified them without explaining their linguistic provenance, I would consider that flabbiness of intellectual fiber.” Nearly all of them are gone now, joining the ever-growing crowd that gathers around us as we age, all the “dear shadows,” to use Yeats’s phrase. So, you may understand now what it meant to me to sit two barstools away from Liam Clancy on that Saturday afternoon. He ordered a Guinness, and I began to consider what I might say to him. That I could recite word for word his reading of O’Casey’s “Drums Under the Window”? How as a boy I had listened breathlessly as he sang the tragic lines, The banshee cried when young Dalton died In the valley of Knockanure. It was more than that. He and the other artists on that record had shown me the power of words, and I believe it was then that I began to love words, to want to read, and later, to write. I even heard power in words I could not understand. I had not fully realized that there was an Irish language until I heard Liam Clancy sing An Durd Fainne. The history and culture of the countless generations that preceded me opened before me for the first time. Here was one of the principal voices that had set me on the course of a life that had led to all the fascinating and brilliant people I had met. How do you thank someone for having made you who you are? I sat there, silent, beside this icon. I didn’t know how to say any of it, where to begin. I thought I’d never be able to explain it to him; I’d sound like some shmaltzy fan, bothering him while he was trying to relax and enjoy a pint. And of course, I wanted to show him nothing but respect. Finally, I thought I’d just say, “Liam, I don’t want to bother you. I just want to say thank you.” I was preparing to do this when the bartender came over, rested his elbows on the bar and began to converse with him. Now, I would have to interrupt their conversation. In the end, my fear of being obnoxious overcame my desire to communicate. I finished my Guinness, and as I rose to leave, Liam Clancy caught my eye and gave me a The Lowell Review

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smile and a nod. I nodded back, and that was it. Over the decades that have passed, I’ve thought of this incident many times; I don’t know why it seems to hold such significance for me—maybe it’s a metaphor for all of the doubts that hold us back, all of the opportunities we miss. I once related the encounter, or lack of encounter, to a friend, Tom O’Carroll, an accomplished balladeer from Dublin who now lives in Newburyport. He knew Liam Clancy. He said, “Stephen, you should have spoken to him. He would have loved to talk to you.” Well, that did nothing to relieve my regret. Sometimes in life, you get one shot. Liam Clancy is gone. I can only imagine the conversation we might have had. We could have talked about the weather, and it would have been unforgettable for me. Recently, I heard that Anne Byrne had passed away. She too had sung on that threerecord set, a voice as clear as a bell and as rich as summer interpreting songs that stirred my young soul: “A Tri-Colored Ribbon,” “Shall My Soul Pass Through Old Ireland,” and “The West’s Asleep.” I did not make the mistake of hesitating again. I was able to find the email address of her widower, Patrick Roche, and wrote to him to tell him how much her voice had meant to me. I won’t quote his response here because I don’t have his permission. Suffice it to say that I felt that I had paid some small interest on a very old debt and was glad that I had. I’ve developed interests in many things in my life. The American Transcendentalists. Sherlock Holmes. I became a mad Francophile for years and learned French and went to work in France, (bringing the fiddle to busk on street corners with Irish and American tunes). Three decades ago, I married Olga Ortiz, a Colombian immigrant here in Lowell, and learned Spanish and a lot about the music and culture of South America. I hope I will continue to find new interests and new obsessions. But somewhere in the cellar there’s a box of old records that contains, The Irish Uprising, 1916-1922. And in the bookcase is John O’Connor’s gift, which my father had rebound for me one Christmas, The Poetry and Song of Ireland. These were the catalysts for a lifelong love of language and literature, of words. In his last interview, in 2009, Liam Clancy was asked what was ‘the secret’ to being a great ballad singer. He said that great songs had a depth that he always tried to find, and that he was often frustrated in trying to express in sound what was going on in his head. “My involvement,” he said, “was always with words. I was totally in love with words, and my head was away with the fairies.” I need no record nor book to hear the words that Liam Clancy spoke and sang. And I write this now to say the words I should have said that afternoon long ago, Thank you, Liam.

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Hearing Things Differently sheila eppolito

y parents met at a party near St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, in Brighton, Mass. My mother was a nurse there, and my father was invited by his brother, who was a resident. The story goes that amidst all the singing, boozing, smoking and dancing going on, my mother noticed one guy, playing the piano, drinking a cold glass of milk. Dad never really knew how to play the piano—but his ear was so good he taught himself a few tunes. He heard things differently, more acutely, as if on a different frequency. He could identify where people were from, based on lilts and cadences too subtle for the rest of us. “You’re from Maine, but way up—maybe near Fort Kent?” He whistled with gorgeous trills and harmonies, and listened to vinyl records on his turntable—sitting in his worn red velvet chair, lost in the beats of Janis and Scott Joplin, the Beatles, Doc Watson and The Black Eagle Jazz Band. He’d feel the music—happy or sad—eyes closed to let his ears do the work. While his day job was dentistry, Dad was widely known around town as the funny guy who could do accents—English, Irish, and Downeast Maine. He was the go-to guy for all kinds of retirement and anniversary parties, before his talents were displayed on larger stages, in cities around the country. As a kid, I remember my mother using white shoe polish to age his hair— he’d add a tweed blazer with leather elbow patches, a pair of John Lennon-like round spectacles, a misbuttoned wool vest, and, bam! He wasn’t Paul Riley from Norwood, Mass., he was Dr. Wesley Smythe-Jones, a high-level English dentist hired to tell American dentists (or pulmonologists, or periodontists) why the English system of socialized medicine was far superior to the American models. After riling them up for an hour or so, he’d confess his true identity and lighten the mood with some Maine jokes. My father was bipolar, or, as it was called in those days, manic depressive. For many months of the year, he was feeling every sad note, experiencing every searing pain. He soldiered through—thanks to my mother, medication, and his own determination to support his children longer than his too-soon-dead alcoholic father. Then the cycle broke, and the mania came for a visit—usually for three months or so. During these short weeks, he was like a prisoner set free, greedily sniffing fresh air and noting flowers and friends and food. “Ribs? I love ribs!” In both conditions music was a balm. In the sadness, he’d softly crumble into the red velvet chair, and put on some Mozart, taking notes in his heinous handwriting on yellow legal pads for classes he took for fun, after working all day. When he has happy, he’d wrangle whichever of us kids was nearest to marvel at Barbra Streisand’s breath control— no matter how many times he picked up and put down the record needle, we never heard The Lowell Review

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her inhale. In a move typical of his condition, he also made extravagant purchases when he was feeling good, once including rehabbing a player piano tossed to the curb by neighbors. I’ve never seen another before or since—this machine that could interpret tiny holes in paper scrolls, and, with the help of a human pushing the foot pedals, direct the black and white keys to plunge down, (no hands!), and play a song. It wasn’t pretty like a grand piano, but awkward and brown and boxy. There it sat, in our living room, its top piled high with a hundred long, tube-shaped red boxes of musical scrolls full of tiny punch holes. The holes corresponded to notes of songs like “Hey Jude,” “Second Hand Rose,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” and “Boogie Woogie.” You’d take a scroll, hold the ringed plastic edges on either end, and tighten up the paper—frayed on the sides for the more popular ones—and wedge it into place on a spindle, hooking a pointed little section of reinforced paper onto a hook. Then, pump the foot pedals, and, sure enough, the piano keys descended, by themselves, to play the song. It required even foot pressure for the song to sound okay—too fast, and it sounded jangly, too slow and things sounded underwater. His ear was also super tuned to the mundane—God help the kid who thought he’d sneak in late. One afternoon, visiting with his in-laws in their stuffy, smoky living room, the room grew quiet. Then the mangy dog started to wag his tail against the hardwood floor. My dad, hearing music when we didn’t, began singing, “Oh When the Saints, Go Marching In . . . .”

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The Work of a Genius john struloeff

One of Einstein’s clearest memories of high school in Germany was of a teacher turning to him: You sit there in the back row and smile, and your mere presence here spoils the respect of the class for me. Upon graduating, he renounced his German citizenship and moved to Switzerland where he continued this role of brilliant rebel. At the Technical Institute in Zurich, he skipped most classes, used his classmate Marcel Grossmann’s study notes (he rarely opened his notebook in the few classes he attended), and frustrated his professors. He failed Physical Experiments for Beginners. The professors were perplexed because his answers were often correct, but the methods he used to derive them were not the methods they taught. Why hadn’t he read the textbooks they had assigned? Instead, he had somehow become obsessed with Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. He would debate for hours, smoking with his friend Grossmann at a café looking out to where the Limmat River split around a rocky peninsula. It flowed through the heart of the city and surged in two separate streams toward Lake Zurich, the white Alps beyond. This unsettling energy coursed in him every day. He played violin with a blinding focus, following the stream of notes along a journey he sensed would lead him to an answer. The stream also flowed through letters he wrote to young women in Aarau and Paradise. He smoked, journaling his beloved theoretical physics. It was all the journey. It was all leading toward an answer, a mystery somewhere beyond. One night when he was supposed to be studying for a math test, he was smoking and looking out his apartment window at a yellow streetlight, the gray rain descending around it. A piano began to play Mozart’s Sonata in C, a rapid rise and fall of notes. A technical wonder. He grabbed his violin and rushed into the night, wishing to join this wonder with his own. He found the house, The Lowell Review

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rain dripping from his hair and slipping down his cheeks. He pushed the door open, startling an old woman. She stopped playing, her eyes wide with fear. He entered carefully, as if entering an animal’s den. Please, he said gently, raising his violin in offering. Go on. The old woman paused thoughtfully, then pressed into the keys and began again. They played with focus, nodding at each other occasionally in mutual admiration, fellow sojourners on this strange voyage of life. He departed with a bow and returned to his dark room where he continued to avoid his mathematics, his mind glowing now with musical theories of physics. That weekend, after a dismal math test, his parents arrived for a visit. His father looked ill. They both carried a terrible weight. His father’s electrical light business had failed once again. Their finances were desperate, and his father felt there was something wrong with his health. Albert sat, looking at his papers, then his smoking pipe with its half-scorched contents. He hadn’t realized until that moment the depths of their sacrifice for him. They had supported him, given him money at every critical point. He had not taken much, but for them it was clearly too much. Here he was, their adult child, unable to offer anything in return when they needed it. They talked quietly about nothing for another hour, just to feel each other’s presence, then departed. What am I doing? he asked, sick with guilt. The next week he entered the laboratory determined to test himself more critically than his professor. He saw the instructions, crumpled them up, discarded them. The other students were already at work, boiling the alcohol mixture and preparing to monitor its rate of condensation. He lit the flame, envisioning the various theories of gases he’d been studying on his own, poured the alcohol, adjusted the glass beakers. It took eight minutes for the first glass container to explode. The bright light startled him. Other students shouted. When he reached for a wet cloth, he saw the vivid smear of blood on his right hand. Then it burned. His finger, his palm, his writing hand. Another beaker exploded. In the smoke haze, students threw white powder, a cloud billowing around the apparatus. His professor said nothing, not looking at Albert, as he quickly ensured the danger was contained. Albert’s blood streamed onto the floor. Everyone looked at it in horror. His pride told him to stay, but his logical mind knew that the wound 90

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must be sewn shut. He wrapped a clean cloth around his hand and hurried to the clinic. For the rest of the day, his body shook – as they sewed his split skin together with black thread, as they wrapped a bandage round and round until it was thick as a boxer’s glove, as he sat alone at a café trying to figure out how he would hold a fork, let alone a pencil. That night brought despair. It seemed so clear that his life’s river had brought him to the wrong destination. He had developed not only into a useless man, but a menace. He had strung these young women along, pretending they were sharing mutual love, he had taken essential money from his parents, he had nearly destroyed the lab at his university. He’d even frightened that old woman out of his irrational need to play music. He looked at his violin in its stand. It would be weeks, if ever, before he could play it again. For the first time, he thought of cutting more of the veins in his arms and ending his life. For hours into the silence of night, his thoughts spun around the vision of cutting a vein and ending his life’s stream. He awoke to the bright morning without realizing he’d lost consciousness. He was surrounded with his papers and books in disheveled stacks. They all looked nonsensical. A vision of incompetence. He found a slice of bread and thin wedge of cheese in his school bag and ate them, as an animal would, then spent the morning composing a letter, using both his left hand and his painfully bound right hand to move the pencil. The letter was to the mother of Marie. The poor girl had been doing his laundry via the mail service for months, believing they would get married one day, sending love letters with his bundles of clothes. It all seemed tragic, another sign of his wasted existence. Painfully he scrawled: I am writing to you so soon in order to cut short an inner struggle whose outcome is already firmly settled in my mind. It fills me with a peculiar satisfaction that now I myself must taste some of the pain that I brought upon the dear girl through my thoughtlessness and ignorance. Strenuous intellectual work and looking at God’s Nature are the fortifying, yet relentlessly strict, angels that must lead me through life’s troubles. He set the letter aside and carefully sorted his books until he found the math textbook he’d so mockingly rejected, hoping it wasn’t too late to change a deep river’s course. The Lowell Review

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A Postcard from Sandburg’s Cellar ann fox chand o nne t

(Flat Rock, North Carolina) Rabelais in red boards, Whitman in green, Hugo in ten-cent paper covers. Here they stand on shelves . . . —“Interior,” “Leather Leggings,” in Carl Sandburg’s Cornhuskers (1918) Cool. Peaceful down here: peaceful as a dog dreaming on a barn floor. Quiet: no distractions from dusty wind whisking miles of corn tassels. Visitors can scarcely move among these stacks— stories in towers right to the rafters. Sidling past the furnace, you need to hunch your shoulders. I’m moving in tomorrow. All I need is a chaise, a good lamp, a pork chop sandwich and a wedge of gooseberry pie. (Even in Illinois now, gooseberries are rare as hen’s teeth.) In the towers perch endless stories—murders of hungry crows. The towers, the stacks of books take the shape of zigzag rail fence, Of the caboose of the Limited Of Chicago skyscrapers Of a bayonet covered with rust Of chimneys, of steel mills Of blue streamers of wigwam smoke Of axe handles, rakes, raised fingers Of haystacks Of bristling, gleaming spear-handles

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The shapes of things forgotten are here: Monosyllables Pain over love Hearts blood Babylonian tablets The sinister tower of Childe Roland Wagons on the prairie on dark nights A hat on a horse Shenandoah A moonrise over the timberline. There are no bars across the way. The best time to be here rifling the stacks is when sleet pounds the 8-foot windows in the study. There is no end to the plan and the clue. I’m moving in tomorrow, that’s Thursday. Send me a letter. (Doesn’t need to be long.) We have high majestic fooling going on down here. We have red hot rivets and girders, hunger and glory. We have old longing and new reckoning. Pronunciamentos. Did I mention raised fingers? Strawberry sodas? Crowbars. Rabelais in red covers— stories on stories, songs on songs. Duck under that water pipe! Join me? Abe and Nancy are here, Karnak and Canopus. Say yes!

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Remembering a Friendship: Robert W. Whitaker, III (Nov. 9, 1950 – Sept. 16, 2019) d av i d d a n i e l

e became friends through propinquity. Bob and his wife Anne and my wife Stephanie and I were among the first inhabitants of the regal old Lamson Estate on Nesmith Street in Belvidere when it was reimagined as condominiums. The Whitakers lived on the top floor, one above us, and since both units featured rear porches with dramatic skyline views of Lowell it became opportune, as daylight faded, to convene and watch the chimney swifts, the original mosquito squad, flying aerial maneuvers over the city. On the 4th of July there were fireworks. It was a common sentiment that from our vistas the sun never set, because we could always see the red and green neon of the landmark Lowell Sun sign. Passing through the glossily restored common areas of the Lamson Estate, I would see Bob, usually with a Nikon camera draped around his neck. I was brand new to the city, and curious about everything. I asked about his camera and learned that he worked for the Sun as a photographer—and then he unflapped a shirt pocket and showed me another camera, a small vintage Leica. In his formal role, using the newspaper’s Nikon, he covered city council meetings, local sports, entertainment openings at the Memorial Auditorium and the Merrimack Repertory Theater, auto accidents, and all-round late-night mayhem, like the great mill fire of 1987. The Leica, I would learn, was for his own stuff, the street photography which he loved: crisp, mostly black-and-white, story-laden images of the everyday. Over the course of these initial interactions, we discovered we had life overlaps. We were both from the South Shore, so there was a kinship in remembering the beaches, and woods, and the idiosyncrasies of the towns we knew. In time, other links would emerge: a fondness for art cinema, jazz, classic rock, Viet Nam war-era history (we were both veterans), and a growing enchantment with our adopted city of Lowell. He also was interested in philosophy and religion, particularly the Tao, and could discuss it with a real understanding. But what cemented the bond, made it a friendship, was our artistic ambitions. Apart from his job, Bob was chasing a passion for his personal photography. Apart from my job, teaching college English in Boston, I was writing fiction in the evenings. I think we quietly felt this duality gave us outsider status, and outside is a good place for an artist to stand. The condos in the Lamson Estate were small, and living quarters could be tight, but we each managed to fashion a creative workroom: mine a closet hung with a wall mirror 94

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to give an illusion of expansiveness, Bob’s a sloped attic space where one ducked going in. Since his was fractionally larger than mine and had a window, we’d often sit in there. The place was a-scatter with unpacked possessions, a turntable and speakers and boxes of LPs. Numerous plaques hung on the walls (press photographers’ association awards—which I learned only by reading them; Bob was modest to the point of being closed-mouthed about his accomplishments). At these impromptu sessions he’d bring out a pipe, as discreetly small and old-timey as the Leica. We were pretty low-key with the weed—a hit or two, just enough to tilt the viewfinder a bit. Then Bob would cue up an album—In the Court of the Crimson King and Mountain’s Nantucket Sleighride are two I especially remember—and we’d talk. He talked about films he loved, including movies he and Anne had watched when they were dating and in the early days of their marriage (King of Hearts and Days of Heaven), and personal favorites like Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Full Metal Jacket, and Scorsese’s Raging Bull, from which he could recite whole passages of dialogue. On his own, he studied these films, one scene at a time, entranced by lighting and framing and mise-en-scène. Our wives became good friends, and as couples we’d cook dinners together, the most memorable being savory paellas that Anne and Stephanie, each having spent time in Spain as undergrads, would create. Bob was a quiet man, friendly, but self-contained. He was witty and sardonic and a keen mimic, with a Robin Williams-like gift for mannerisms. Sometimes we’d fall into riffing back and forth, improvising, or reciting lyrics to a song we dug, like Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City.” And when Bob got going on some routine (he could do a dead-on Groucho Marx . . . “I shot an elephant in my pajamas” . . .) my jaw would ache with laughing. He had his dark places, too (don’t we all?). They wouldn’t show themselves often, but when they did there was no laughing. Each of us had a disdain for war. He had recollections of his time in the Air Force, as a crew chief on a B52, which would fly out of Guam and make the long nighttime missions to North Vietnam as part of Operation Arc Light, carrying the 500- and 750-pound bombs that would rain down from the stratosphere upon enemy supply routes and deeply entrenched Viet Cong forces; then, mission complete, would turn and make the long flight back. One of his photographic dreams was to travel to DavisMontham AFB in Arizona, the boneyard where some of the very aircraft on which he had flown were mothballed, left to sit in the desert air, and chronicle them. This was a dream he eventually realized and, as Anne reported, it was a memorable experience “not only for him but for me, seeing him like a little kid trying to climb up on the planes, examining them and telling me stories. Not to mention of course I had never seen one up close. They just let us out there all by ourselves. That was a great trip.” Dick Howe recently recalled being “. . . in Bob’s company at political and community events that he was photographing and he was a great guy, quiet, professional, dignified with a wry sense of humor.” This sums up Bob beautifully. He was a familiar figure, known and liked by legions of folks, from politicians to first responders, athletes to purveyors of coffee, always his drink of choice. Small and wiry, dressed in khaki, he moved through the cityscape with stealth. He worked at invisibility, I think. If he was visible at all in his professional life, it was at the margins, in the shadows, covering but not being the story. In another life he might well have been a spy, so easily did he seem to disappear against the backdrop. 96

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It was through Bob that I got to know and appreciate the work of his fellow Sun lensmen Dave Brow and Bill Bridgeford, and how, indirectly, I met other interesting folks, like journalists Dave Perry and Nancye Tuttle, and former Lowell cop the late Arthur “Tussy” Russell, who shared wild stories of his years on the job. Bob took the author photos that appeared on several of my Lowell-set private eye novels and made cameo appearances in some of them. Our “man caves” became nurseries when our daughters were born: his and Anne’s Suzanne in 1989, and Stephanie’s and my Alexandra in 1990. Robert, Jr. came along in 1993. Bob and I would take the kids in strollers over to Rogers Fort Hill Park, proud fathers sitting on a bench, yapping. In time, seeking space for growing families, we all moved out of the city. Bob and I lost regular contact. When I came to Lowell, I’d sometimes spot him—or more typically, he’d spy me, both on our own trajectories through the day, and we’d make a vague plan to get together. It seldom happened. When I learned he’d died, it had been some long while since I’d seen him last. In the Venn diagram that can be drawn for every relationship there are the big areas of differences, the things that make each of us one of a kind. But in the smaller intersection lies the richness of the human connection. At the memorial service for Bob in the fall of 2019, sadness was leavened with celebration. It was wonderful to see his children, Suzanne and Robert, Jr., confidently embarked on independent lives and careers, and Anne and members of Bob’s family, and his many friends. In addition to the people, he left behind a legacy of eloquent photographs, some of which were on display. In his close to thirty-five years at the Sun, and some time before than at the New Bedford Standard-Times, he mastered his craft. He came from the old days, when newspapers had darkrooms and he’d shoot the story, then develop it, then work with a photo editor… a process that changed as the world went digital. Bob would readily grant that using the Nikon was easier, but he believed that some of the magic—the “light writing” (the literal meaning of photography) was gone. I can’t comment on that point—I make do with my phone camera—but I admire the quality of the art Bob made with his mechanical Leica, with its discreet little “click.” His work is gallery quality, every bit as accomplished as that of shooters he admired, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertesz, and Robert Frank. I can easily imagine a show of his work at one of the galleries in the Merrimack Valley. At Bob’s memorial service, a playlist of songs his family had assembled was playing. I found myself falling into one of the little riffs we used to do, the voiceover at the end of “Living for the City . . .” alternating the lines . . . . “Wow, New York—” “—just like I pictured it.” “Skyscrapers—” “—and everything.” It seemed to sum up a long journey. I had to smile.

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Kintsugi (A Radio Drama) pat r i c i a c a n t w e l l

Cast List Annie (Aged 97): A resident of a retirement home, present day. John (Aged 29): Her deceased husband. Scene 1: a bedroom in the retirement home. It is late evening and Annie is preparing for bed.

ACT ONE

FX: The play opens with the music of Mick Del’s orchestra playing old-time dance music and fades …

ANNIE

They keep the lights on here at night. (chuckle) They think we’re afraid of the dark. I’m not afraid of the dark John. I’ve known the dark - worn it like an old raincoat. Isn’t it strange John, sometimes in the half-light I think I see you there, over in the corner, looking down on me. Not as you would be if you’d lived, all old and wrinkled like myself, but as you were when you left, your lovely dark hair and your laugh, ahh, your laugh, I think that was the first thing I fell in love with. Do you remember when we met? Of course, you do. The whole world was in tears. We heard of these terrible things happening in Dresden and Hiroshima and places we couldn’t pronounce. But I had your laugh and we had each other, and the dark times didn’t seem so dark at all. Do you remember the day we married John? It rained all day the day before, bucketing it down. My mother put out the Child of Prague the night before and I was up at dawn, couldn’t sleep with the excitement and the sun never shone as bright as on that day.

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And we settled into happiness, you and me. And the little girls came along. God how you loved them. I used to chide you and say you were spoiling them and all you’d do is laugh and wink at them behind my back, oh I saw you alright. They loved that—the whole conspiracy of it. Then when we thought we couldn’t take any more happiness, little Patrick came along. The neighbours all joked with you that you had your heir now and the dynasty was secure. All you’d do is laugh. And then, oh God John, when we thought we had it all, along came the darkness…(pause) Winter came early that year. Frost on the bushes in October. You didn’t feel yourself, though you never complained. They said it was only a routine operation. I visited you the night before and you hurried me off home, said the children would be missing me and I wasn’t to worry and when I came in the next day you’d be in a different room. And you were John. You were. That was a strange Christmas alright . . . .

JOHN

Isn’t it a strange thing Annie— see you as you were the first time I laid eyes on you. Your dark hair and your eyes, oh God, your beautiful eyes. My friend Jim McCormack dared me to go over and ask you to dance. You were the prettiest girl there Annie. Sure, I didn’t think I stood a chance. My heart was beating like a hammer in my chest as I went over to you. And you said yes. I thought my heart would burst. I was the happiest man there. I surely was. They say that happiness is wasted on the young, but it wasn’t wasted on us Annie. We knew what we had was precious even then and we didn’t waste it. We packed a lifetime of happiness into those six years. Six years Annie. It might have seemed unfair. I know that’s what everyone said, but they didn’t understand what we had, sure, how could they? And God, I didn’t want to leave you my darling. And I didn’t. I haven’t. You must know this … I never, ever left you…

ANNIE

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It snowed all day, the day of your funeral. The gravediggers took twice as long to dig the grave the ground was so hard. It was a hard winter. But worse was to come. The baby got sick. We thought nothing of it at first. He was always such 99

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a good baby, never a minute’s trouble. But he went off his food and didn’t look himself. Oh God John, how I wished you were here with me then. He got worse and we took him to the hospital. It was the first time I’d been there since you left. The smell of the place, I still remember it. They diagnosed meningitis. I still thought he’d be okay. I prayed to God. I didn’t think God could do it to me again. But He did John, He did. The first daffodils were showing their heads when we laid him beside you. But I had to keep going. For the sake of the girls. They missed you so much and they missed the baby. We didn’t talk about it much, people didn’t in those days. Thought it better not to be troubling their little minds, hoping they’d forget. One evening I called them for their supper, they were out in the haggard at the back of the haybarn playing and they didn’t hear me. I kept calling and calling and when I found them do you know what they had? Oh John, his little shoes, the baby’s black leather shoes, with the shape of his foot still in them . . . . JOHN

That was the worst time Annie, I know it was, but I was so proud of you, the way you put the girls first. What a strong woman you were. Little did I know when I twirled you round the dancefloor that first time what a great woman you’d turn out to be. Well, God had his plan and sure there’s no way he’d have taken me from you, and taken the baby, only he knew how strong you were, how brave you were. (sigh) I know how hard it was. Sometimes, I’d sit by the end of the bed on those nights, and I’d hear you crying. I knew you cried when the girls were asleep so as not to upset them. Great big sobs. I wished I could’ve reached out and touched you and told you everything will be alright - but in a way, I think you knew, knew that me and the baby were there, always there. Otherwise, how could you have gone on . . . ?

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Isn’t it strange John, how we never called him by his name, it was always ‘the baby’ though he was nearly four. Even the girls always called him the baby. Do you know it wasn’t till I saw his name on the headstone beside your own that it hit me, hit me right in the heart. ’John Patrick’ called after yourself. I said it over and over rolling it on my tongue like a prayer. John Patrick (she says it slowly and repeats) John The Lowell Review

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Patrick… I suppose if he’d have lived they’d have shortened it to J.P. But he’ll always be ‘the baby’ to us. After you’d gone do you know the first thing I felt? Not sadness, no, not grief, but anger, John. Hot raging anger. Anger at you for leaving us, isn’t that ridiculous as if you chose to go. And anger at God for taking you both. Those were dark days. Then that first spring, I went out into the garden, down to where you planted the cherry tree. You had always talked about planting a cherry tree and reciting a poem you learned in school ‘O loveliest of trees the cherry now’ . . . I can’t remember the rest of it. You finally planted it when we were married a year. It was well established, so you said “‘twould take off no bother”. You got it from Mick Hayes when he was clearing the garden after his mother died. You looked after it like a pet, but it didn’t seem to do any good. I think you were a bit disappointed it didn’t flower. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the spring after you and the baby had gone, it started to blossom. Not great big blossoms but blossoms all the same and after the hard winter and all. It was strange and maybe ‘twas my mind playing tricks on me, I don’t know, but I took that as a sign that maybe things would be okay. I remember too the first time I laughed again. It must have been about two months after we buried the baby. I was caught off-guard—something one of the girls said, something silly, I can’t remember, and I laughed, and I heard the girls laughing along with me. It was a strange sound. And suddenly a feeling came over me. Like I was being disloyal to you, like I had forgotten you. Wasn’t that ridiculous? Then I thought to myself if you were here, you’d be laughing along with us. And that made it a little bit better. JOHN

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Sure, I was laughing along with you, all the time, and the best was seeing you pick yourself up and get on with it, as was always your way. I hated to see you grieving and I wanted to tell you there was no need. Me and the baby are together and we’re fine. And the cherry tree, (smile) oh God the cherry tree. I thought you wouldn’t notice, but you did. You did, and I knew then you’d be alright.

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ANNIE

The nights were the worst. That’s where I’d do my crying so the girls wouldn’t see. Oh, I must tell you this John. Years later I saw a play called ‘The Heart’s a Wonder.’ I don’t remember what ‘twas about but I always remember the title. ‘The Heart’s a Wonder’ (she says this slowly, wistfully). And it is indeed a wonder. The heart, I mean. It gets broken, but somehow, we manage to gather the pieces together and make something wonderful. A bit like the little bits of broken china we used to play with as children— chainies we called them. I remember reading in the Reader’s Digest years ago that the Japanese people put more value on the broken pieces after they put them back together with gold—Kintsugi I think they call it- the art of the precious scars. And that’s what I did John, gathered up the pieces and got on with it. And I did make something wonderful out of it, didn’t I?—out of the beautiful sorrow. Your two lovely girls. God, I wish you could see them. They both have your smile and our eldest has the exact same funny way you had of brushing your hair back from your forehead. It caught in my throat the first time I noticed it. I had to turn away to hide the tears. But now it’s lovely. I love to see it now, it’s like you’re here with us. And on their wedding days, oh, I missed you then. If only you could have seen them, you’d be so proud. Like angels they were. I wished the baby could have been with us too. He’d have been a grown man by then. I think he’d have looked exactly like you. But then again, it’s kind of nice, because he’ll always be that lovely smiling baby. Never growing old. Wherever I went I took you with me in my heart. And we had great times. I even took the girls and moved to a big town. I bet you can’t imagine me doing that, and me a country girl. Well, I did, and I liked it too, all the hustle and bustle. And I set up a little shop at one stage, selling all sorts of sweets, jelly babies, Peggy’s Leg, liquorice all sorts and the rest (she laughs). What do you think of that now? Bet you never thought I had it in me? And isn’t it strange I even found my singing voice again. The first time I sang after you’d gone it didn’t sound like me at all, at least I thought it didn’t. Like the voice was coming from someone else. But in time it came alright and became my own again.

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JOHN

My darling Annie what a life you’ve made of the broken pieces. Now, know this before I go—because I must go soon, morning is creeping over the mountains and the moon has waned. So, know this—I have always loved you my beautiful girl, my one true lovely Annie . . .

ANNIE

Before you go John, I wanted to tell you this: a woman called here last week, she was talking about stories from long ago and how people got through hard times. So, I told her all about you and the girls and the baby. And I told her about Kintsugi— the art of the precious scars, the art of the precious scars . . . (this last line is spoken very slowly as the music comes up . . .)

FX: sad, slow evocative music rises and falls, then fades . . . The End

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Favors: A Novel (an excerpt) d av i d r . s u r e t t e

Palm Sunday 1981 1 The black Trans Am idled at the curb, gray exhaust, the tip of a cigarette glowing, “More Than a Feeling” soaring out the car stereo. Georgie Dolan lit a cigarette, opened the front door, and stood behind the screen door, waiting. The engine rattled to a stop, a last cough, stopping Brad Delp at “I see my Marianne.” A large man leaned out. A familiar silhouette to Georgie. He stepped into the sun; in color, he was untamed red hair and freckles. A nose like a curved hockey stick. He opened the chain link gate, closed it behind him, a squeak and a click, and skipped up the steps, surprisingly graceful. He pulled the screen door open and shoved a palm branch into Georgie’s chest, Georgie’s back smacking into the door. He stepped past Georgie into the hallway. “Got that for you in case you didn’t get to mass. Not that you earned it. That’s one long mass. Crowded too. Me and my mom almost had to stand. The Guineas love the big holy days. Just wait until Easter. Damn. No seat for us Micks. Nice place, Georgie.” Does he ever shut up? thought Georgie, and it wasn’t a nice place. It was a museum. His grandparents’ shit all still here. Family photos going back to people he had never heard of, crucifixes everywhere, seemed like at least five Sacred Hearts of Jesus, a couple JFK’s: the one on his boat and the presidential portrait. Some paint by numbers of ocean scenes. A map of Ireland. Cardinal Cushing (not Medeiros) and Pope John II. Prayer cards and cheap rosaries stuck behind and hung from every picture frame. Hummels standing in dust on multiple shelves. Were they holy figures too? Could he just smash them? Some nun was supposed to have made them, so he didn’t know. Bulky furniture, antimacassars yellowing atop them, the rug filthy over hardwood floors he meant to expose and stain but hadn’t. The wallpaper curled at their seams, yellowed by the decades of smoke, which killed the both of them: gran, lung cancer; pop, a coronary, probably would kill him too. In the corner, some toys, puzzles, picture books, a corner for Georgie’s daughter when he could get her away from the mother and her mother. “How about a beer, Georgie boy?” “George. We’re not twelve anymore.’ “No, we aren’t, Georgie boy. This place smells like old people.” “My grandparents . . . ” “Okay, dead people.” “C’mon.” The Lowell Review

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“That was low. Sorry, man.” They walked into a kitchen needing updating, the appliances wheezing in surrender when used. No big deal, Georgie didn’t cook much, the fridge just needing an extra push to seal. “When is this going to end? You’re bleeding me broke,” said Georgie. “Not my problem.” He chugged the beer, crushed the can. “Larry Bird from downtown,” he announced in an awful Johnny Most impression, the can bouncing off the kitchen counter, binging off the faucet, settling in the sink. He was aiming for the barrel. “Nice shot.” “Thanks. We were more hockey players, am I right?” He went to sit but popped up. “What’s that noise?” “TV.” “I just passed it. It was off.” “It’s in the basement.” “You got a TV in the basement? You don’t have a wife. Who are you escaping from?” “My grandfather’s set up. His tool shop is down there too. “ “My granddad’s got the same. Those guys were made small by the world. They needed to get away, build shit. Our dads too.” “I got a new big-screen Panasonic.” “Let’s see that sucker.” The cellar door already open and the siren call of the TV drew the big guy to duck and skipped down the stairs sideways, followed by Georgie, watched by his grandfather’s garden tools hanging from the stair walls, covered in ghostly cobwebs. Georgie thought he might garden someday, but why bother when Foodmaster had plenty of vegetables, and he got most of his greens from subs. Pickles were a vegetable, right? The big guy turned in a circle, scanning the room. “This your love den? Bachelor Pad. Big TV. Bar. Pretty slick. Nice couch.” He plopped on the couch. “Beer.” George turned to the mini fridge and grabbed a Miller. He handed the beer over, turned his back, pushed play on the VCR. Pretending to arrange some books over the tv, he pushed record on the hidden camera. Paused then turned, hoping the TV’s volume masked the whir of the camera. It had worked before. The visitor plopped onto the couch, scanned the shelves over the tv, books in varying positions of repose, covered in dust. “Books? You got any Hemingway. I’ve been reading him lately. I kind of skipped the reading part in school, but you know.” Georgie wanted to ask sarcastically, “Izzy, you can read?” Instead, “They’re my grandfather’s books. Mostly about war.” “That’s cool.” “I’ll get you the cash.” The big man turned to the TV unaware he faced the camcorder humming along to the VCR playing the taped tv show. “Mork and Mindy’s on?” “VCR. Taped it. Latest Hitachi. “See, you got plenty of money.” “It fell off a truck . . . TV too.” 108

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“Lot of that going around.” Izzy concentrated on the show for a few minutes. “I don’t get that guy. He looks like an asshole. And Mindy. Too skinny.” “My daughter likes it. I record it for her.” “Does that thing play skin flicks?” Georgie slid open a drawer and exposed the tapes, spines up He tossed one, Debbie Does Dallas blurring as it spun to him. “This the real deal?” “Fell off a different truck.” “Can I keep it?” “Be my guest.” Izzy tossed it back. “I don’t watch this shit. Money?” He turned to watch Mork, his hand still in the air, waiting to be filled. Georgie squatted behind the couch, grabbed what he had hidden earlier, popped up, the barrel of the gun snug against the back of the big guy’s neck. “Georgie?” In that second, Izzy knew Georgie wasn’t going to shoot. He got a word out, the name, he was fine. Georgie was serious he should have already put one shot to the back of his head. Georgie walked around the couch to face him. Now Izzy knew he was fine. Once there was conversation, there’d be no shooting. Georgie didn’t have it in him. Going about it all wrong. “Why couldn’t you just leave me alone?” “Business, man. Just business. We’re buddies besides, ain’t that right? We’ve known each other forever.” “Come on. Every week it’s more money. You take my trucks. Bring them back all screwed up. I should tell my father.” Now Izzy really felt safe. What kind of guy threatens you with their father then shoots you? Even if his father was a cop. No kind of guy. “He’d be thrilled to hear who you’re in business with. Proud you hang with the bad guys.” “Just lay off, okay.” “You’re an easy touch. It’s your own fault. Better to catch a beating than just give in. I would have got tired of beating you up, breaking your shit, and moved on. But you just hand it over.” His confidence grew; it was way past shooting time. “And sorry about what I said about your daughter. She’s just a kid. I wouldn’t hurt her.” Izzy started to count in his head from 10, 9, 8, 7. At one, he’d stand, grab the gun, and pistol whip the little shit. “Now, when she grows up” . . . 6, 5 . . . . “Look at you. You’re pissing your pants, and it’s me facing the gun,” 4, 3 . . . . A sharp report, then a red blossom on his chest. 2, 1, but he didn’t stand. He coughed up blood, choked and felt his heart seize then quit. From being wrong to being dead. He shot me. Go figure. Georgie wanted to reach out and touch the wound, maybe help the guy, take back the bullet, take back the moment. Too late for that. Georgie folded down onto the floor and sat Indian-style in front of the big man. Izzy. Dead Izzy. He felt relief and fear and disgust and relief. He hadn’t thought of what he had to do next. The blood-stained the couch, the Trans Am sat at the curb. The gun. The body. The dead body. The camcorder buzzed behind the books. The TV still playing. He turned his head to the TV screen. Nanu Nanu. The Lowell Review

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2 Judy skipped mass. A junior in high school, old enough to decide about going or not going to church, especially Palm Sunday, the longest mass of the year. Her mother had gone to the early service, already placed the palms behind the framed picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The mother busy in the kitchen, her father’s snores filling the house like an odor. She grabbed her guitar, a notebook, and stepped out to a warm spring morning. She escaped to Beebe Hill, ten minutes from her house, looming over her old junior high school, a park bench, the guitar on her lap and an open notebook. Sunday quiet. It was like most bits of nature in a city: a hill, trees, grass, acorns, squirrels, then cigarette butts, candy wrappers, maybe a used condom makes an appearance, well-worn shortcuts in the turf like no one wanted to walk where the city had paved paths. Down below her, an armed soldier from the Spanish American War guarded the entrance. She lit a cigarette and blew out a gray cloud. She squinted against the smoke and played a chord that led to another then back and back again. She sang a line, pulled the cigarette from her mouth, and crossed out the last word, and exchanged it for another, determined to have a new song for next rehearsal. She wore black jeans and a Clash t-shirt, a jean jacket dotted with band badges. Her blonde hair, finger brushed, hung to her shoulders. She, so slight, disappeared behind her guitar, a face mostly eyes, green, marked off by mascara. She breathed in and sang against the chords in a clipped voice allowing only a hint of prettiness to the last syllable of every line, a sound too large to emanate from this tiny person. I’ll sing the way I want, but I can sing, she claimed for herself. Traffic buzzed down below her. She lost track of time and place and didn’t see the boys approaching. A kid in an Aerosmith shirt sat down next to her. “You’re sitting on my bench,” he said. The other in a Kiss shirt stood behind. “Don’t you know smoking is bad for you? Give me one.” “Who do you think you are, Johnny Vicious? “Yeah. Sid Rotten.” She sat still, the fuck you loaded into her voice box. “Your singing sucks.” “Why don’t you sing some real music: Floyd! Led Zep!” “Yea. Robert Plant. You know, he wrote all his lyrics for his dying wife.” “It’s probably what killed her,” she said. The guy next to her spun the notebook off her lap into the dirt, and she sprung up, holding the guitar by the neck, cocked like Carl Yastrzemski in his latest batting stance. “I fuckin’ hate you.” “Don’t do it, girly.” “Do you kiss your mommy with that mouth?” The one behind reached to grab the guitar, and she spun towards him, but the moment had passed, the boys tired of the game, deflated, a little ashamed of themselves. The Kiss guy grabbed her notebook and tossed it back to her. She gathered up her stuff and walked away, carrying her guitar case, lighting up another 110

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cigarette. “I told you they’re bad for you.” They watched her walk away. “She lives behind me, you know. I didn’t recognize her from before. We are such assholes,” said the one in the Aerosmith shirt. “Speak for yourself,” said the other, and he was rewarded with a smack upside the head. The two plopped onto the bench and watched her retreat, adding another girl to the list of never-get-to-kiss. They both admired a black Trans Am idling at the red light below the hill, but they couldn’t see the driver but no matter. They didn’t know Georgie Dolan. Judy crossed in front of it, Georgie too distracted to even look at her. 3 “Hey, Mike. What’s with the smile, man? You got no teeth. Smiles don’t work for you,” said Charlie Regan from behind a bottle of beer. “Just heard I’m going up to the bigs. Couple of injuries.” “Reason to smile, man.” Charlie raised his bottle. “You should be too. You’re the better player.” “Not how they’re built. You’re perfect for them.” “I will fight anyone.” “You can play plenty too, man. You know it.” The night before, Charlie Regan sat, post-game, head down, sweat dripping from his forehead, creased where his helmet had sat, his body buzzing from fatigue. His forearm ached from a nasty slash in the first period. He feared his bones would dissolve like wet particle board. He looked around the room and wondered what the others were thinking. Season over, eliminated in the first round of the Calder Cup. He saw a couple of guys probably stuck in the AHL, maybe one or two going to the NHL. Too many, including himself, going in the wrong direction. Some guys kept playing because they weren’t ready to stop. What else could they do? Was he going to be one of those guys? What else could he do? He had scored twice that night. The first a breakaway, a tilted shoulder to the right, then a slipped puck, blocker side low when the goalie leaned with him. The second was classic Charlie Regan. He had picked up speed at center ice, and both defensemen assumed he was going to split them. He turned his edges like he was going to do exactly that, then shifted, slipping the puck through the left defender’s skates, and before the goalie set his angle, fired it far side above the catching glove. The red light flashing on. A couple of drunk fans banged on the glass. He circled the net in celebration. Isn’t this what I’m supposed to do? Don’t goals mean wins? He took a long pull on his beer. I led the league in goals. Again. What more could I do to earn a second chance? This toothless thug’s going up? Charlie swallowed down his beer and the feeling this was it. He looked at the guys sitting at the bar with him, most of the team, one more time drinking before heading out to wherever they go after the season, mourning an end to a season, 19 years old to 29, all somewhere in the hope of going up to the big time. It was no longer a dream, dream too The Lowell Review

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fluffy a word for the way your guts wrapped around the need to be noticed, to get some kind of credit for all the hard work, to touch the edge of your talent, to push it past that edge became harder and harder. He stood. “Listen, you losers. On your feet. Mike’s going up to play with the big boys. He’s going to pull on the sweater. Cheers.” Whatever was in their glasses or bottles raised and drained, another round ordered. Cigarettes and cigars lit up. A cloud of gray. Maybe I’ll go home. It’s been years, Charlie thought. Wow. Where the hell did that come from? Home? Six years gone. Who was he there? Another almost been? Or was he just forgotten? Charlie walked to his car, pretty drunk, but hockey player drunk. Not a worry. He sat behind the wheel and turned the key, a cough then a sputter. Tried again, a backfire but no turnover. Then just the click of the solenoid not catching. He slammed the steering wheel with the palms of his hands five times. Tried it again, Nothing. The piece of shit, his 1975 Mustang Cobra bought to celebrate his first pro contract, a flashy car for a flashy player, was dead. The boys piled out of the bar. “Need a push?” Charlie got behind the wheel, the door open, one foot on the pavement. “Where to?” “Don’t care.” “The river!” his teammates shouted in unison. With that, Charlie turned the wheel, and the guys pushed until it teetered on the bank, Charlie jumping out, letting the car slide into the inky water that ran behind the bar. It rested there, the hood half submerged among the detritus of every shuttered mill town: tires, shopping carts, fast food wrappers, even an armless mannequin. A cheer went up. “I’ll buy you a new one when I sign the big deal,” Mike promised, and all, except Charlie, squeezed back into the bar, thumping each other on the back, the car punctuation for their losing season. How was he going to get home now, not local home, but home home, back to Massachusetts? Georgie. It had been years, but Georgie, yeah, sure. He’s got vans. I’ll have him move all my shit. Get out of this town. Georgie. We were friends, once, right? Best friends. He wondered what Georgie was up to, unable to guess that at that moment, Georgie was rolling Ziggy into a carpet and stuffing him into the Trans Am’s trunk. Charlie Regan walked back to his apartment remembering it was Palm Sunday, and he hadn’t gone to mass, hadn’t gone in years, spent the morning recovering from the game the night before and Sunday night dedicated to a farewell drunk.

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How a Kid from the East Coast Became a Diamondbacks Fan neil miller

hen I was a kid growing up in Kingston, New York, in the 1950s, I chose my favorite sports teams by consulting a world atlas. My father didn’t have any strong allegiances—he cared more about golf than any team sport. My friends were all rooting for the Yankees, Giants, and Knicks, headquartered just ninety miles down the newly- constructed New York State Thruway. I was determined to be different, and loved maps and geography and reading The Sporting News, which I bought every week at O’Reilly’s stationery store uptown. As my basketball team, I chose the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Pistons. Fort Wayne sounded exotic to me; who had ever heard of the place, let alone root for its team, which actually made it to the 1955 NBA finals before losing the last game by one point? What I didn’t know at the time was that the Fort Wayne players allegedly conspired with gamblers to shave points and throw various games during the 1953–54 and 1954–55 seasons, including that championship game. In hockey, I made a shrewder choice—the Montreal Canadiens. Canada and Quebec seemed far away and very French. Their players had great names: Jean Beliveau, Maurice Richard (M-O-R-E-E-S R-E-E-C-H-A-R-D, accent on the last syllable). The Canadiens were a solid, reliable team coming in first or second in the NHL throughout the 1950s. No one ever accused them of cheating. But baseball was my true love, and here my choice mattered the most. The team I settled on was the Cleveland Indians; Cleveland was not the most thrilling place on the map but it was far away enough from my Hudson River town to count as exotic. And the team was good—very good. In 1954, when I was nine and in the fourth grade, the Indians won the American League Pennant with an eye-popping 111-43 record. They had starting pitchers who were truly great–Bob Lemon, Early Wynn, Bob Feller and Mike Garcia, all twenty-game winners. Feller, who Ted Williams called “the fastest and best pitcher I ever faced” was a particular hero of mine. I read a kids’ biography of him and years later visited the Bob Feller Museum in the pitcher’s hometown of Van Meter, Iowa (pop. 1,484), where I stared star-struck at a teenage Feller’s original contract with the Cleveland organization—a $500 signing bonus. In 1955, Herb Score came along, a twenty-three-year old left-hander, a strikeout whiz like Feller, and who was rookie of the year that year. An additional Indians’ attraction was Al Rosen at third base, who was Jewish, like me. Rosen batted .300 in that fabled 1954 season, with twenty-four home runs. All in all, it was a dazzling team, who I was sure could give the Yankees a run for their money for years. I was proud of my baseball acumen.

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Still, I might have realized something was amiss when the 111-43 Indians lost the 1954 World Series to the New York Giants four games to zero. The team was highly competitive in 1955 when it came in in second place in the AL, three games behind the Yankees. In 1956, it was still strong, again finishing second. Herb Score won twenty games that year and led the league in strikeouts. Then, disaster struck. In April, 1957, Score was hit in the face by a line drive, effectively ending his career. That same year, the Indians finished in sixth place, twenty-one games behind the Yankees. You could date the decline of the Indians from Score’s injury. Or, as author Terry Pluto did, to the Indians’ decision three years later to trade their best hitter, Rocky Colavito. Pluto wrote a book which I read avidly many years later called The Curse of Rocky Colavito: A Loving look at a Thirty-Year Slump, whose title pretty much described the many losing seasons that followed. As Pluto noted, “The franchise has been the worst funded, the worst managed . . . the worst of the worst.” A few samples: in 1971, the Indians lost 102 games; in 1973, ninety-one games; in 1977, ninety games, in 1985, 102 games once again. The seasons in between weren’t much better. I kept my loyalty to the Tribe during this period, but it was hard to stay focused on a team with a such a lousy record and so few players to get excited about. I began gradually to drift towards the Red Sox. After all, what was the reason to root for the hapless Indians while living in Boston? And I wasn’t sure I wanted to walk around town in a baseball cap emblazoned with an image of caricatured Chief Wahoo. By the time the Indians finally got back into contention in the 2000s, I had cast my lot, albeit half-heartedly, with the Sox. Still, the lure of the faraway—and that lingering childhood desire to be different than everyone else—persisted. While I still counted the Red Sox number 1, I turned to the Arizona Diamondbacks as my number two team. Arizona had always intrigued me. As a kid, my great aunt who lived there sent me a subscription to Arizona Highways magazine, with its famous photography of the Southwest. In more recent years, I’d spent some time with my husband vacationing and working on some writing projects in Tucson, where I fell in love with the desert, the landscape out of those Westerns of my childhood, the endless skies, the star-filled clear nights. Tucson also happened to be the place where the Indians used to spend their spring training when I first started to root for them. Admittedly, the D’backs were based in Phoenix, the city two hours to the north that is Tucson’s rival. Although the D’backs moved their spring training site out of Tucson to the tony Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale ten years ago, taking the Colorado Rockies with them, I tried not to hold that against them. Many people in Tucson did, however. I started watching the D’backs games livestreamed on MLB TV network. Rooting for the D’backs offered a chance to see some truly exciting teams, who played in the NL West—the Dodgers, Giants, the Padres, the always dangerous Colorado Rockies. I even got to see Mookie Betts. I appreciated the NL rules—the pitcher forced to bat, the bunts, the stolen bases. It was fun. And, in the sharp focus of MLB TV, it offered a kind of minitour of Western ball parks—Denver’s Coors Field with its clear mountain air and stunning sunsets; San Francisco’s Oracle Park, where home runs seemed to soar into San Francisco Bay; Petco Park in San Diego that looked very cool even with cardboard cutouts of fans during the pandemic. Chase Field, where the D’backs played, was nondescript but its signs advertising iconic Arizona brands—Fry’s supermarkets, Banner Health—made me feel I was still on vacation. The D’backs had a lot of potential—they made the playoffs in 2018. 114

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Then, there were the other NL teams the D’backs sometimes got to play against that I was unfamiliar with but were awfully good—the Milwaukee Brewers, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Cincinnati Reds, the Chicago Cubs. I was hooked, and the Red Sox were blacked out on MLB TV anyway. The Diamondbacks were now my number one team. By 2021, after a year shortened by the pandemic, I was ready for the Diamondbacks season. It was true that the D’backs were underdogs in a division with some very strong teams, true that almost any team was overmatched by the Dodgers, true that the Padres had paid a king’s ransom to field a contending ball club. Still, the commentators said the D’backs had a fighting chance to compete at least for the wild card. The club had players with slightly off-beat and appealing resumes: Nick Ahmed, the environmentally-minded Golden Glove shortstop who started out on the baseball diamonds of East Longmeadow, Massachusetts; Luke Weaver, the sometimes brilliant right handed pitcher who wrote eloquent articles for an online Christian magazine; first baseman Christian Walker, who looked the part of a slugger and who meditated to an online app every game. I was hopeful. Then, with the season barely underway I began to feel I was back in Cleveland in 1957. Three of Arizona’s four starting pitchers—Madison “Mad Bum” Bumgarner, Zach Gallen, and Luke Weaver—were injured and were out past the All-Star game. Merrill Kelly, their only remaining starter (until he would be out for month with Covid later in the season), would win almost every game he pitched but the team would lose all the other ones. The late-inning relievers were a disaster. Their two major sluggers—Ketel Marte and Kole Calhoun—were also injured and out for prolonged stretches. Christian Walker never got his bat going until the last week of the season. The result was mind-numbing—the D’backs lost twenty-four consecutive games on the road, a Major League record, and thirty-four out of thirty-seven total. Defeat possessed its own inexorable rhythm. By the end of the season, even with their starting pitchers returning, the Diamondbacks finished fifty-five games behind- division-leading Giants and almost as many games behind the second-place Dodgers. You couldn’t just blame injuries; it was also sloppy fielding, it was a failure to get clutch hits, it was the curse of Paul Goldschmidt (traded at the end of the 2018 season by the D’backs to the Cardinals)…who could say? Yet watching the Diamondbacks lose 110 games in one season was oddly compelling. How could a ball club with so many fine players and a very astute manager perform so poorly? It had to end, didn’t it?—even the Indians of my boyhood years hadn’t been quite that bad. Yet there were consolations. As the season waned, and the losses piled up, the D’backs brought up a host of prospects from the minors, some to replace injured players, others for a just a look. There was Tyler Gilbert, a twenty-seven-year-old pitcher who, after knocking around the minor leagues for years, pitched a no-hitter against the Padres in his first major league appearance. There was Seth Beer, called up from D’backs triple-A Reno affiliate, who hit a home run in his first major league at bat. (In one of those classic baseball stories, Beer was fly-fishing, waist-deep in Nevada’s Truckee River, when he got the call up to come to the majors; he slipped and found himself underwater, but he managed to retrieve his cell phone at the last moment). There was Jake McCarthy, who looked like a long-haired rock musician and whose ability to run the bases was electrifying. There was Daulton Varsho, another young player, who could play almost every position, including catcher, and was the team’s hottest hitter after the All-Star break; his catch of an outfield fly ball in a late-September game against the Giants provided one of the most exciting The Lowell Review

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plays of the D’backs entire season. But 2021 remained hopeless for the Diamondbacks. Gilbert never pitched another game even close to that no-hitter; Beer was injured and out for the rest of the season a week after his dramatic home run. I kept on watching, even as fans deserted Chase Field in droves. Perhaps I’d built up some reserves of patience rooting for the Indians when they fell victim to the curse of Rocky Colavito or for the Red Sox in the years before the team finally eluded the curse of the Bambino. In the very last game of the 2021 season, Josh VanMeter, a fresh-faced, Indiana-born young infielder/outfielder obtained from Cincinnati the year before, hit a walk-off home run in the ninth inning to give the D’backs a 5-4 victory over the Colorado Rockies. It was a thrilling end to what VanMeter conceded had been an “abysmal” season. But you could see the future of the Diamondbacks in players like VanMeter, and the future looked bright indeed. Josh VanMeter of Ossian, Indiana, and my childhood hero the great Bob Feller of Van Meter, Iowa. Were there echoes of something glorious here? Or were the baseball gods just toying with us again? Still, there was hope; in baseball, there is always hope.

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Our Visit with Bernd bob hodge

ernd Heinrich had not been too much on my radar. I have a copy of his book Why We Run: A Natural History, published in 2001, on my bookcase but I have yet to read it. Friends Jack Fultz, Amby Burfoot, and Bill Rodgers were planning to visit Bernd at his cabin in the woods of western Maine and invited me to join them. I viewed the trip, and our little summit, as a chance for some lively conversation with eminent individuals, all with a long life in athletics and other related fields. I knew Bernd, who had taught biology at the University of Vermont and entomology at the University of California, Berkeley, before that, based his research on a blend of his running experience with his science background and field observations. In an interview on PBS NewsHour this year, eighty-one-year old Bernd said: “We are built for running.” I was intrigued, and so I looked into Bernd a bit and picked up a copy of his latest book, Racing the Clock, which I hoped to read ahead of our visit, if it indeed ever happened—who ever thought us old fellas were all so busy? A plan was finally hatched, and I drove over to Lincoln, Mass., early one morning to meet Jack and pack up one of his fleet of cars for our journey. Bill was not able to join us, and Amby and another running friend of Bernd’s, Ray from South Carolina, would meet us there. Bill and Jack and I have been having a pretty regular get-together for dinner at some local establishments though we had some time off for Covid. Being old guys, we usually begin no later than five in the evening, only thing is that once you get us talking, well dinner can take four hours or so. We hit the road for Maine fully loaded with food and drink for our stay, thanking Jack for the gourmet selections of fine food. Bernd lives in one of two cabins he built up a steep rutted rocky road, isolated in a little slice of heaven. When we arrived Bernd and Amby met us at the bottom of the road where we all parked and loaded our stuff into Bernd’s truck for the ride up to the cabins. Ray would arrive a bit later after touring around looking for the correct address. I got to ride shotgun so had a front row seat and felt like I was in a truck commercial where they show drivers doing all kind of crazy impossible things, driving over, through, and around obstacles. We arrived, and Bernd welcomed us to the cabin where we would be staying. There is no electricity or running water and in-and-out Wi-Fi connection, not a problem. I had been thinking about going for a short run as I had only run a deuce earlier this morning, but someone offered up a beer and we all sat around for a few hours getting acquainted, reacquainted, chewing the fat. Eventually Ray showed up straight outta S.C. to join us. In late afternoon we headed out for a short walk to have a look around the woods. Bernd The Lowell Review

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knew every inch. He had been marking out American Chestnut tree saplings and told us about his efforts to reintroduce this once dominant tree before the blight. He also showed us his tree-climbing skills, which none of us tried to emulate, Bernd is extraordinarily fit and though I consider myself to be in general good shape, he is fifteen years my senior and has great upper body strength. He was even more impressive on our run the next day. It began to rain, and we headed back to the cabin to dine. None of us lacked the gift of gab, and personally I don’t get out much and also we have all been around a while, men of our experience of life—what I’m saying is we talked it up covering lots of ground. Bernd has had some extraordinary accomplishments as an athlete winning the master’s division of the 1980 Boston Marathon and setting American Records for 100K, 100 miles, and 24-hour races on the track. Of course, Amby and Jack are Boston Marathon winners and have been involved in athletics in one capacity or another for about fifty years. Bernd took in much of the conversation with a smile, quizzical or astonished look, and when he added to the conversation we listened attentively. Ray provided some ultramarathon stories, incredible feats of endurance to understand just what the human mind and body are capable of. All of our lives had some intersection, people we knew had known, events we participated in, etc. It was lively conversation especially regarding the future of athletics, I myself have some quite radical ideas for true professional athletics particularly for the marathon majors. Even though it may be a hard road, I don’t think it is unrealistic, but others feel it will never happen. I feel that the appeal of marathon racing on television is not anywhere near successful mainly because of the presentation or lack thereof. Others feel the marathon can never capture the public’s imagination as other sports have. What do you think? We called it a night, and it was an adventure getting set up in our beds using some solar lamps to light the way upstairs where there was nothing but bedding and mattresses, a few sketches and paintings on the walls, and thousands of mostly science-related books. In the morning over coffee Amby set up for a video interview he would be doing with Bernd for the Podium Runner. It was fun being in the audience for it and learning more about Bernd’s interesting life. Afterwards it was hammer time, so we got our runner gear on, walked down the hill, and hit the road at a comically slow pace. Just as I was feeling confident, maybe even cocky, on our out-and-back run I pushed an uphill a bit, just to get the heart rate up, and the hill was longer than I thought. Bernd came right up on me, by now we were moving pretty good, I thought, until Bernd smelled the barn with about a half-mile to go, and he politely said, “I’m gonna pick it up,” and whoosh he was gone, got the drop on us as Amby and I chased him to the finish. We hung around on the side of the road stretching out and taking some group photos. A car passed with some young people waving at us, and ten minutes later it came by in the other direction, fans of Bernd I take it. Bernd showed us his well originally dug one hundred years ago by the people who once farmed this land. An unfortunate moose fell headfirst into it and Bernd had to drag it out. He still has the moose skull. We headed back to the cabin for a meal and packed up to head home. Bernd told me 118

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that he would like to read my book, and I said, “Well, that is lucky because I just happen to have one for you.” I was flattered to hear from him just a day later that he had read my book “entranced to the last page.” Wow, that means a lot coming from this well-respected man. It was a memorable trip, and I look forward to further writings from Bernd and to catch up on all of the books I have missed. Bernd sent us all off with a little piece of Maine, the Chestnut saplings to plant back at home from a slice of time that once was when they grew high and mighty.

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Caution sarah alcott anderson

Do not run on this trail. Roots, hidden stones, and mistakes children made a century ago could cost you your life. Beware of falcons nesting. Their giant feathers will lead you to believe a bridge exists. There’s only air, only alluvium, only silt and you alone in this river valley. The path bends at the places where you thought they were safe, where you left their voices. Swinging toward the water could start a war.

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A Hiker I Know carl little

stacks hands on head as he walks through woods pretending he’s captured by the Cong. He does it when no one’s around moving along the path, looking side to side in underbrush, prodded by his captors toward the summit of Beech Mountain where lookout fire tower stands, unmanned, marched past sentinels into camp where he’ll rot in the cage of his imagination, MIA or POW, or forgotten, the draft a bad dream, old arms, now stiff at his sides, right one aching from Covid shot. He pays last respects to fallen trees, each day goes deeper into woods daring himself to lose his way. An Art Blakey saying, “Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life,” seems to make sense as his fingers go numb atop his head, as his footsteps fade to evergreen.

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Arturo Gets Up michael steffen

I need to erase that picture of him lying half-naked on a hotel floor in ponding blood, eyes pouched and blackened— my fiercest opponent, my closest friend, Arturo “Thunder” Gatti. Without him, no one remembers I’m “Irish” Micky Ward. Two years after retiring, coroner says he hung himself with his wife’s purse strap, his body dangling awhile before it fell. This was his final fight? Impossible. The Arturo I knew was a warrior. Most bouts, his eyes puffed like fried eggs, but even from Queer Street, he could buckle Death’s knees. The ninth round at Mohegan Sun in ’02, when I snatched his breath— I never saw a guy’s body fold up when I hit him. Arturo drops to one knee, lower lip quivering. I’m hoping he stays down, takes an eight-count, waits for the air to come back. But this is Arturo. He gets up, blood shining his gloves. I pummel him, pillar to post, hoping he doesn’t see panic in my eyes. I mean, why is this guy still standing? I’m punched out, but he’s ripping my body, backing me up. We clinch for the first time in the round. When we break, I land a right to his head, he lands a hook. Blood runnels my face. Arturo’s gone 122

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but not out. He doesn’t have the strength to fall down. His eyes are swollen shut, but he’s got no quit. Matching me with him was almost criminal: someone would’ve had to quit for us, but who— the ref, our trainers, the announcer biting his white towel? I was horrified and thrilled whenever I’d watch tape of Zale and Graziano pounding each other senseless, Ali getting waylaid by Frazier at the Garden. It’s rare to see fighters like that blending into each other—a plodding dance, beautiful and ugly at once—revealing who they are with each punch. I thought it was nothing fancy— just who’s more willing to die—but now I believe there’s something beyond that willingness, beyond wins and losses, bone and muscle, some invisible sinew binding fighters and fans. When the last bell rang, I hugged Arturo.

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Marvelous Marvin Hagler and the Godfather charles gargiulo

y Uncle Arthur was more than an Uncle. He was my Godfather, which is like being picked to become Vice-President. You get an important sounding title but you never have to do anything unless the main guy dies or fails to do the job. My father didn’t die, but he split in 1963 when I was 11 years old, which meant my Uncle Arthur was supposed to step in as the “father figure.” Most guys who get picked as Godfather treat it like being the best man at somebody’s wedding. They show up for that one event and move on with their lives. Not Uncle Arthur though, when he accepted the part, he took his vow seriously. I missed my father and it hurt when he left, but I lucked out because I would have picked Uncle Arthur over any other father I knew. Some of my friends had horrible fathers, others had okay fathers and very few had great fathers. None of them had one better than my Godfather, Uncle Arthur. He wasn’t great like an old spit-and-polished ‘50s sit-com dad who reeked of middleclass respectability. He was great because he never pretended to be my father and remained the kind and loving Uncle who always made me feel special for just being me. Uncle Arthur was a quiet guy who usually didn’t have a lot to say. But instead of being awkward or uncomfortable, his silent ways had a calming influence. We’d hang out together, watch a little TV, then take a walk to the local variety store where he would insist on buying me a snack and a comic book. He never made much money grinding away at his factory job, but he was a really generous guy. He loved to treat me to a couple of outings each year to go see the Red Sox. We’d board the train to North Station in Boston, hop the subway to Kenmore Square, walk over to the sacred grounds of Fenway Park and watch the Sox find an agonizing new way to lose a game. We’d fill up on hot dogs, junk food and Coke, hit the souvenir shops at the end of the game and take the train home grumbling about how the Sox blew it again. Although he enjoyed baseball, his favorite sport was boxing. I think he liked it the most because he had an eye operation when he was young that left him with extremely poor vision. His eyeglasses were so thick, when I tried them on, it looked like I was trying to see through water. It was much easier for somebody with poor vision to watch the action of boxing on a small black and white TV than other sports, so Uncle Arthur used to tune in religiously on Friday nights to watch Don Dunphy broadcast the Fight of the Week, and was saddened when it was cancelled in late 1964. He turned me on to his love of boxing and I have fond memories of watching those Friday night fights with Uncle Arthur and hearing 124

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his tales about all the old boxing greats he saw in his day and his reverence for Joe Louis. The only argument I think I ever had with Uncle Arthur was when I told him I thought Muhammad Ali was the greatest. He always insisted Joe Louis would’ve defeated Ali. But to his credit, he grudgingly admitted that even Louis would’ve had a hard time beating Ali after he saw what Muhammad did to Cleveland Williams. As I grew into my teen years, Uncle Arthur morphed from being the grown-up guy I could count on into my best friend. My quiet companion who I needed to be around to make any important experience feel complete. I knew I came of age to him when he bought me tickets to see the Golden Gloves tournament. This was not bringing your kid to a ball game. When you entered the Lowell Auditorium to see the Golden Gloves in the late ‘60s, it was like entering at least the fifth or sixth ring of Dante’s Inferno. Loud, cursing men pushing and shoving through the corridors, filthy restrooms with drunken guys not even trying to aim at the urinals and cigarette smoke thicker than a foggy swamp scene from an old Universal horror movie. The place was packed, over two thousand strong, and the atmosphere was dangerous and exhilaratingly electric, where the drama of each bout played out like a passion play in the dramatic spotlight. Uncle Arthur and I were never happier. I missed those nights with Uncle Arthur when I joined the Army so I bought us season tickets for the Golden Gloves my first year back and every year after until he finally became too old and frail to attend. We had the same two seats in the third row at ringside every year. Since they were season tickets, we knew everyone in the packed seats surrounding us. However, every year there were always two vacant seats near the aisle on our left. That all changed one night in the late ‘70s when a buzz started up as middleweight contender Marvin Hagler ventured through the crowd. He was looking for a place to sit when he saw the two empty seats and asked if he could join us. He said his brother Robbie Sims was going to be fighting next and he wanted to cheer him on. We shook hands and became the envy of everyone by inviting him to join us. Marvin needed no introduction, so after exchanging pleasantries I said, “And this is my Godfather, Uncle Arthur,” the way I always introduced him formally to somebody. Every boxing fan knows Marvin purposely projected himself as an intimidating warrior who scowled at the world. But the man who joined us was straight out of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. We talked about his brother and had a great time rooting as we high-fived him on to victory. Then as Marvin was saying goodbye, I pointed to my Uncle Arthur and winked, “Oh, this guy doesn’t think you’re so tough,” and my Uncle Arthur, who didn’t hear what I said, gave him a little smile and wave and Marvin laughed with exuberant joy. Marvin returned the next year to see his brother fight again, the same two seats were empty and we greeted like old friends. Then he smiled and winked at Uncle Arthur and said, “It’s the Godfather! How are you doing, my man!” Shortly after he became Champion of the World. Like every other boxing fan, I was shocked and saddened when I heard the Champ had passed away last March. However, when others remember Marvin they usually associate him with Thomas Hearns or Sugar Ray Leonard. But for me, my lasting memory will always be of Marvelous Marvin Hagler and the Godfather.

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The Basketball Is Round (NBA Playoffs 2021) fred woods

I find comfort knowing that Steve Nash, a very great basketball player now coaching the New York Nets —purchased by a TaiwaneseCanadian billionaire from a Russian oligarch— was born in South Africa and plays pick-up soccer with Thierry Henri and Derrick Irving played basketball from Boston University to Buleen’s Boomers and his son Kyrie born in Australia burns sage pregame to honor his Lakota mother and their great Greek antagonist Antetokounmpo once sold watches on the streets of Athens to support his Nigerian parents’ family of large boys. And all are honored by Chevrolet and weathered men heaving hay bales onto brawny trucks where once roamed buffalo Lakota Sioux and tumbleweed blown half the world around from Russia’s steppes.

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Tom Brady sean casey

If you are from New England, you might have a question: Who is Tom Brady? In society today, a lot depends on Tom Brady. It’s Tom Brady this, Tom Brady that, but few New Englanders know just who or what Tom Brady is. You can’t beat the facts, but can you find them? As a boy, Tom Brady played on the same team as the young Abraham Lincoln and tutored him in the perfect spiral Abe threw years later at Gettysburg. At Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, Tom Brady played Sega Genesis all the time. His comefrom-behind win on Altered Beast inspired Henry’s whole non-violent hustle. Tom Brady’s still smiling about that. He’s got great teeth, a forehead like a Plains state. Some say he is the GOAT, but there are so many GOATs: global warming, Khabib Nurmagomedov, supply-side economics, Johann Sebastian Bach. And let’s not forget the hamburger. How do you choose? Do you like goats? Who are you? How are you doing? Do you collect seashells? You see how this gets complicated. New Englanders advise you to stick with the basics: Who is Tom Brady? Does he have braids? After all we’ve done for him, what’s he going to do for us? When will it stop? Will he put another ring around the Rosie? Who will catch the bouquet? Maybe Tom Brady should get a life. We can get one too.

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The Standing Approach emilie- noelle provos t

June 2020 article in the New York Times offers helpful tips for women who find themselves having to pee while spending time outdoors. “First, check that you’re not flashing anyone,” the article’s author, Jen Miller, writes. “Then find a spot that is clear of things like poison ivy, wasps nests, fire ants, and sharp debris . . . squat low to avoid splash back.” When I started hiking in March 2019, after my mother was diagnosed with stagefour lung cancer, I didn’t realize that peeing in the woods was something women needed instructions to do, but some of the tips are helpful, if not obvious, such as “try to pee downhill.” In early 2019, I was sadly out-of-shape, having worked desk jobs for nearly twenty years. But I didn’t start scrambling up rocks and climbing over fallen trees to improve my health. Listening to the soft rustling of hemlock boughs and beating the hell out of myself were the only things that helped me manage the white-hot rage and resentment that became my constant companions after my mother’s diagnosis. AnnaOutdoors, a blog for women who climb, camp, and hike, gives detailed instructions for getting your clothes out of the way when peeing outside: “Pull your pants and underwear down so that when you squat they sit around [your] mid-thighs to knees. It is harder for the stream to clear your pants if they are around your ankles, and you are more vulnerable to tripping and losing your balance.” This one also seemed self-evident until one day when I was hiking with my friend Liz. After an hour on the trail, she stopped and said that she had needed to pee since we left the car, but had been holding it because she couldn’t figure out how to avoid getting her pants wet. My mother chain-smoked for nearly sixty years. She smoked when she was pregnant with my three siblings and me, and after her own parents died from lung cancer in the early 1990s. She refused to quit even when my extended family and I cleared our schedules in order to make casseroles and drive her to chemotherapy appointments. Six children, ranging in age from two to twenty-one, called my mother “Grandma.” As a daughter, and especially as a mother, I sometimes still feel angry about my mother’s unwillingness to participate more fully in her cancer treatment. If she couldn’t quit smoking to save herself, why couldn’t she do it for us? One of the reasons hiking helped me deal with my mother’s cancer is because in order to do it safely you need to be mindful of your surroundings at all times. You can’t think about anything else. Being in the woods also reminds me of when I was a little kid. I have fond memories of the swamp near the house where I grew up. It was a great place 128

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to look for tadpoles. I used to scoop the little guys up in one of my beach pails and watch them swim around in circles. Sometimes I’d tie a piece of string to a stick and pretend to be fishing. I was almost always covered in mud by the end of the day, and more often than not was not allowed back into the house until I took off my shoes and most of my clothes. The first time I remember peeing in the woods was on a camping trip when I was six years old. My mother, who despised camping and most other things having to do with the outdoors, had gone on the trip reluctantly, but my sister, Nathalie, and I loved it. I can still remember looking at the moon through my uncle’s telescope and thinking it was magic. I now know that my mother smoked, in part, as a way to help manage a severe anxiety disorder that went undiagnosed for most of her life. She grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s, when even discussing mental health disorders was taboo. Until she was in her late 60s, my mother’s anxiety dictated where she went, what she did, and with whom she spent time. Most of her days were spent sitting at her kitchen table leafing through catalogs or in her basement workshop in front of her sewing machine. She rarely talked to anyone. Peeing in the woods is especially challenging when there is heavy snow cover. Finding a suitable spot off the trail can be treacherous if you’re not wearing snowshoes, and even if you are it’s not uncommon to sink up to your knees with every step. If you squat down too low, you sometimes run into the issue my friend Sue refers to as a “snow bidet.” This is only funny if it happens to someone else. My mother’s anxiety also caused her to harbor a deep dislike of authority figures, most of whom she believed were not to be trusted. This was especially true of doctors, but not without warrant. In the early 1970s, an IUD birth control device passed through the walls of my mother’s uterus and lodged itself against one of the discs in her spine. This caused her debilitating pain. Her gynecologist decided that surgery was needed in order to locate and retrieve the device. They never found the IUD, but they did remove her appendix, just for the hell of it. After a glass of wine or two, my mother would sometimes talk about how, while she was recovering in the hospital, one of the surgeons repeatedly questioned her about what she had done to cause the device to migrate. In the late 1980s, after my youngest sister was born, my mother stopped going to doctors entirely. She managed to avoid them for more than two decades, until a few years ago when she contracted a serious case of pneumonia. The doctor who treated her suspected early-stage lung cancer might have been a factor, but she refused to be tested. Several products that aim to assist women when peeing outdoors are now on the market. One of these is called a Shewee. The device, which is designed to allow women to pee standing up, consists of a funnel-like contraption, which is the part you’re supposed to pee into, and a long detachable tube that evidently diverts the flow away from your body. It costs fifteen dollars and comes in several fashion colors. I’ve looked at Shewee’s website, and for the life of me I can’t understand how the device could possibly make the task easier, not to mention that it’s just one more thing you have to wash. But I guess it might be helpful if you have to pee in the snow. There’s also something called a Kula Cloth. The manufacturer calls it a “washable toilet wipe” (more washing). It’s antimicrobial, padded, and looks kind of like a potholder. After you’ve peed and used it to wipe yourself, you’re supposed to attach the Kula Cloth to the exterior of your backpack in order to let it dry. I’ve met women who swear by these things, The Lowell Review

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but I prefer the AnnaOutdoors method: “After you are done, wave your hips a little in the air to shake any lingering drops off.” In September 2020, a few weeks before my mother died, we learned that her cancer had metastasized, spreading to her brain and nervous system. She could no longer walk, talk, eat, or pee on her own. Nathalie, who is a registered nurse, took a leave of absence from her job in order to manage our mother’s medications and help her shower each day. Nathalie also regularly emptied the urine from the plastic bag that my mother’s catheter drained into. My sister is a warrior. The sport of hiking has its roots in the Industrial Revolution. In the 19th century, people who had the means began flocking to the woods to escape the dirt and noise of cities. From its outset, hiking has also been inclusive of women. At their second regular meeting in 1876, the members of the Boston-based Appalachian Mountain Club voted in favor of allowing women to join. Women were also frequently among the earliest groups of hikers ascending peaks in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In the 1820s, three young sisters, Eliza, Harriet, and Abigail Austin, became the first women to summit Mount Washington. They hiked up the Northeast’s highest peak over a period of five days and three nights, wearing long wool dresses, petticoats, wool stockings, and button-up shoes. Last April, I summited Mount Washington—wearing a thirty-pound pack, a merino wool t-shirt, and a pair of Tubbs mountaineering snowshoes—in a little more than five hours. One of the biggest potential pitfalls when peeing in the woods is what my friend Sue and I call “the standing approach.” This is something you need to think a lot about when you’re done peeing and are ready to pull your underwear and pants back up and continue on your way. If you’ve been sweating, and you most likely have, it can be extremely difficult—nearly impossible in the summer— to get your damp hiking clothes back up over your sweaty thighs. Forget it if you’re wearing yoga pants. Your standing approach needs to be timed just right in order to avoid being seen by other hikers while you’re hopping up and down half naked trying to make yourself right again. My mother always stressed the importance of being ladylike and polite. Swearing and “bathroom talk” were frowned upon, as were certain wardrobe oversights, such as letting your bra strap show. For most of my life, I dreaded saying or doing anything that might upset or offend another person, even at my own expense. For the first time in my life I’m healthy and strong. I’ve lost so much weight that people I’ve known for years often don’t recognize me. Even my husband sometimes has trouble finding me in the grocery store. I never hesitate anymore to tell people my opinion, and am no longer worried about what someone might think if they catch me changing my clothes in the car after I’ve been hiking. Nothing is worth having to wear a wet sports bra. I’m pretty sure my mother never hiked anywhere, but she used to like it when I would text her pictures of wildflowers or views from the tops of mountains. Last summer, when I hiked to the summit of Bondcliff during a twenty-mile traverse of New Hampshire’s Pemigewasset Wilderness—the last of the state’s forty-eight four-thousand-footers I needed to climb in order to complete the list—I wore a locket with her ashes in it around 130

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my neck. According to Nathalie, a few minutes before my mother died, more than a dozen mourning doves flew down and perched on the porch railing outside her bedroom window. When she saw the birds, Nathalie told her it was time to go, that the doves had come to bring her home. Sometimes I wonder where they took her, and whether the doves I see sometimes on the trail might know. Alissa Bell, the author of a September 2021 article on the Exploring Wild blog titled “14 Ways to Pee in the Woods for Women,” offers this advice: “Don’t dribble. Commit! It’s more likely the stream will go straight (instead of dribbling places we don’t want it) if you let it out fast.” I couldn’t agree more.

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SECTION VII

THE JACK KEROUAC CENTENNIAL 1922-2022

“It was in Centralville I was born . . . .”

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Stumbling Upon The Town and the City mike mccormick

ne Sunday in late April 2021, I wandered with my friend Matt as he pointed out his favorite businesses in an upscale shopping district on Bainbridge Island, a thirtyminute ferry ride west of Seattle. As we sauntered, I remembered days during my teenage years when my girlfriend and I drove out of Haverhill to Cape Ann’s seacoast towns. We browsed art galleries and boutiques. I never found anything I wanted on those jaunts. The sun beamed brightly as we sidestepped oncoming walkers. I was ready to get out of the crowds when Matt cut a sharp turn onto a narrow passageway. “Follow me,” he commanded. “You’ll love this place.” I was far from thrilled when I realized we were entering a used record and bookstore. Since I am close to seventy years old, I am at the stage of life when I am trying to pare down oversized collections. A cardboard box full of discarded record albums from the ‘60’s and ‘70’s sat on a chair near the entrance. Seeing the beat up albums, I concluded that the store would have nothing of interest. I reluctantly followed Matt down a short hall into a large room with bookshelves and racks of used records. A thin, middle-aged woman greeted him from behind a glass display case. As Matt introduced me to the clerk, my eyes homed in on a book propped face forward on a shelf inside the case. The Town and the City by John Kerouac. I froze. I’d never seen a hardcover edition of one of my all-time favorite novels. Since discovering Kerouac’s first published novel in my twenties, I’d read and reread it countless times in a 1978 paperback edition with a green cover. Although this was my first encounter with the hardcover, the sight of it seemed familiar. I’d seen photos of it in Kerouac biographies. I asked the clerk if I could take a closer look. “Certainly,” she said, as she reached for the book to hand to me. I studied the cover. The title, printed in white blocky letters on a black field, reminded me of the introductory scripts at the start of mid-century cartoons films. Black-and-white line drawings of an imagined small town scene on a sickly green background triggered memories of a children’s book about Paul Bunyan. As I peered at the white scripted words “A novel by John Kerouac” on a rusty backdrop, I remembered that this was the only book where Kerouac did not use the name Jack. It occurred to me that the book I held might have passed through Kerouac’s hands at a book signing. My adrenalin surged. By some stroke of luck, might this be a signed first edition? The Lowell Review

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My right hand quivered as I carefully turned to the title page. I stared at the spaces above and below the name of the author: John Kerouac. There was no signature. I turned the page and verified that this was indeed a first edition. Only ten thousandfive hundred copies were printed and bound when the book was first released on March 2, 1950, exactly three years before I was born. I flipped the book to its back cover. The black-and-white publicity photo of the twentysomething year old author in a conservative suit coat struck me as impossibly formal. I attempted to evaluate the book’s condition. The spine seemed firm. The pages were clean. This is a lightly used book I thought. Perhaps the former owner read it once, or received it as a gift. I imagined the book wedged untouched for decades between other novels in a floor to ceiling bookshelf. As I fingered through the pages, I pictured it on a shelf in my own basement amongst my thirty-two other books by and about Jack Kerouac. “How much are you asking for this?” She opened it and thumbed through a few pages. Since I am not a rare book collector and have never shopped for books as investments, I had no idea what the quoted price might be. My gut expected it’d be about three hundred-fifty dollars, though a five- or sixhundred dollar quote would not have surprised me. “I think he’s getting one-fifty,” she said alluding to the owner who set the prices. Her response triggered a surge of desire. I suddenly wanted the book. And, knowing I had withdrawn four fifty-dollar bills from a cash machine only a few hours ago, I had enough money in my wallet. But should I give into my emotions and make a totally impulsive buy? I had no desire to flip the book on the rare book market for a profit. And although I would enjoy telling Kerouac-loving friends about my find, I had no interest in purchasing the book to impress them. The clerk held the book in both hands and looked at me as she waited for my next words. I knew if I walked away from the purchase I’d feel remorse. Still, it seemed irresponsible and irrational to make the purchase. “Could you hold it for a week while I decide?” I pleaded. “I will give you my contact information and if someone comes in for it, just give me a call and I’ll decide right away.” She pulled a business card from a pile of them on the counter and handed it to me. “That’d be fine,” she said to my relief. “Write your contact information on the back of this.” I set the card down and grabbed a pen from a cup beside the business card stack. As I started to write she asked, “Do you have cash?” “Yes.” “Tell you what. How about you buy it now, and I’ll give it to you for a hundred thirty-five dollars?” I stopped writing and looked up. I blurted, “Yes!” After buying The Town and the City, I tried to understand the reasoning behind my compulsive purchase; I thought about what the book has meant to me. I first read The Town and the City in Anchorage, Alaska, at a time when I missed New England. The book brought me right back to my hometown of Haverhill. Many 136

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of the attitudes, challenges, and dreams of the people of Galloway (Kerouac’s fictional representation of his hometown of Lowell) seemed identical to those I encountered growing up. I understood that the story was thinly fictionalized; for the most part Kerouac based the book’s stories on real events and actual people including himself. The tale of Peter Martin and his dad taking in the horse races at Rockingham Park moved me. Throughout my youth, my dad bet on Rockingham’s “daily double” through his bookie. Each day after work he poured a beer and tuned the kitchen radio to the voice of Babe Rubenstein calling the races he ‘d bet on. I listened along with Dad and imagined how he’d react if he hit the “big money.” When I read about Peter Martin’s dad winning more than a hundred dollars on a last ditch, long shot bet, the scene filled me with pleasure. I imagined the joy of traveling to Boston for a splurge at a fancy restaurant after winning at the track. I loved Kerouac for writing the scene, for capturing and elevating an experience I might have only dreamed into literature. As much as the Rockingham Park adventure spoke to me, Kerouac’s writing about high school football captivated me even more. From the first time I saw Haverhill High School’s football team, I wanted to play ball for them. Like Peter Martin, I struggled for years to become a better player. Like in Galloway, working-class kids in Haverhill dealt with favoritism and snobbery. Like Pete Martin, I had my most notable high school game in Galloway’s “concrete stadium” (I started for the first time in my high school football career there in a Haverhill- Lowell clash). Kerouac, more than any other writer, captured the importance of high school football to working-class and poor teenaged athletes and their communities. He was the first writer to treat the sport as a suitable topic for serious literature. Although others have followed in his footsteps, no writer has written about high school football with as much skill or imbued the topic with Kerouac’s love and passion. The Town and the City, like so much of Kerouac’s writing, is infused with love. The bonds between Pete Martin, his friends, his siblings, and most of all his father are palpable. Although Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” style had yet to emerge in this Thomas Wolfeinfluenced novel, his zest and compassion for friends and family already shine. Devouring the novel for the first time four thousand miles from the Merrimack Valley, I filled up with pride. Reading it these days, I feel as though I am looking into a mirror. I see my past as I seek clues to the man I’ve become. That said, I still don’t yet understand my visceral urge to purchase a first edition of The Town and the City. However, I no longer think it matters. Just holding the book brings me joy.

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Saturday Morning, Reading ‘Howl’ janet egan

If everybody takes one page from “Howl” and you all read it aloud at the same time in front of the Kerouac Commemorative at Bridge and French streets it sounds like a Buddhist chant. It feels like a prayer in the mouth. Vibrating. Urgent. Impassioned. Cacophonous. If you look up from the Commemorative you see the outline of the old Keith’s Theater in the red brick wall. In true New England fashion, you can read what “used to be.” If you listen you can hear Allen Ginsberg reading by candlelight at the dedication of this monument to his good friend Jack. And you’re glad somebody taped it. You’re glad to be here now in the cold morning dampness among granite columns etched with prose and poetry. If you drop a stone into the still water of the canal, you can see ripples go out and out and out wrinkling the reflections of the warehouse, the mill, the fence, the pipes, the bridge . . . outward and outward until you can’t see it anymore, but it’s still rippling all the way to the Merrimack River, down river to Newburyport, and out to sea.

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Lowell, Mass. b i l ly c o l l i n s

Kerouac was born in the same town as my father, but my father never had time to write On the Road let alone drive around the country in circles. He wrote notes for the kitchen table and a novel of checks and a few speeches to lullaby businessmen after a fat lunch and some of his writing is within me for I house catalogues of jokes and handbooks of advice on horses, snow tires, women, along with some short stories about the deadbeats at the office, but he was quicker to pick up a telephone than a pen. Like Jack, he took to drink but beatific to him meant the Virgin Mary. He called jazz jungle music and he would have told Neal Cassady to let him off at the next light.

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Still Rockin’ in the Beat World: How Kerouac Cool Continues to Fuel Popular Music Passions as Writer’s Centenary Is Reached s i m o n wa r n e r

n the Spring of 1978, I arrived in the Massachusetts town of Lowell, a one-time milltown of industrial importance, with textile production employing significant numbers of its population. But this young Englishman in New England was then largely unaware of its blue-collar past beyond its entanglements with an author who grew up there in the 1920s and ‘30s. Not that anyone in those anonymous afternoon streets had any real grasp or knowledge of its most famous son. My friend and I, recent college graduates who had spent the previous year labouring on construction sites to fund this transatlantic journey, were on a mission to track the trail of Jack Kerouac. But initial exchanges left us feeling despondent. Kerouac, already dead by almost a decade when we arrived in his boyhood streets, seemed to have made little impression on the ordinary men and women we met in shops or cafes or in bars as we played pool in a bid to fit in with the Main Street ambience. Had they heard of him? Did they know members of his family? Where was he buried? The responses were disappointingly unhelpful, even deliberately deflective. Either he was already forgotten, or locals were determined to blank this individual they saw as a runaway drunk, a man who had spent much of his errant life leaving Lowell, from their minds. The day was gray, and we were tired travellers, having quite recently arrived in New York City and then Greyhound bussed to Boston and on to this relative backwater. We were, in our small way, living out the highway-hopping dream of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty— the fictional names of Kerouac and his great friend Neal Cassady—in the ground-breaking 1957 novel On the Road, the figurehead account of that radical literary community known as the Beat Generation. But I suppose we lacked the sophistication, the confidence, the persistence, to turn our literary pilgrimage into a transformative homage. As the evening fell dark, we finally discovered Nick’s Bar, the pub where the brother of Kerouac’s third wife, Stella Sampas, held court. However, just as we arrived, we encountered a friendly reporter for the Lowell Sun. He was pleased to make our acquaintance—Anglos were less familiar in the American hinterland then—yet he was more concerned about our welfare, warning us that two outof-town longhairs were not likely to be that welcome in this brawling, bruising boozer. In 140

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short, he recommended we get out of town tout de suite and offered us a ride to a bus depot where we could take an overnight ride into Canada. We took his tip. The decades rolled on, but my interest in Kerouac never really dipped. Early in the new millennium, I befriended his nephew Jim Sampas, one-time singer-songwriter who became a successful record producer, and, in 2009, I returned to Lowell and, with this relative as my guide, finally visited the novelist’s grave, not to mention the impressive commemorative garden that now proudly celebrates his connection to this reviving community. And then, forty years after that initial, unproductive foray, I co-edited, with Sampas, by now Literary Executor of the author’s estate, the book Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack, a celebration of the ways in which the writer and music have shared such a fertile connection: firstly in the author’s own immersion in jazz particularly, and secondly through the impact he has had on several generations of singers, songwriters and bands from the 1960s onwards and well on into the new century. In this article, I intend to consider again that relationship, specifically Kerouac’s association with a stream of important artists, operating in the fields of rock and folk, country and blues, punk and new wave and beyond, not genres with which he had any direct association or affinity but styles that drew on his creative power, his writerly energy, his vision of individual possibility, that has inspired so many to not just read his words but to transfer the passions of the page into many realms of popular music of the last fifty and more years. From Dylan, perhaps most notably, to Tom Waits, maybe most diligently, from the Grateful Dead to the Doors and Van Morrison, David Bowie and Patti Smith to Sonic Youth, 10,000 Maniacs and Death Cab for Cutie to the Hold Steady, the Low Anthem to Fences, there is a potent, genre-vaulting genealogy of composers and groups, major and minor, keen to acknowledge a link or debt to that frenetic Kerouac consciousness, as determined traveler and voluminous documenter of his own picaresque life. Worth noting, too, that there is an ongoing and living list of examples of Kerouac— and Cassady, too—being cited or mentioned in recordings of the later 20th -and early 21st -century: an incredible 450-strong gathering to date, which reflects an enduring desire in the broad rock’n’roll community to celebrate this excited, expansive, frequently exuberant, often experimental wordsmith. It is particularly poignant that we do so now: Kerouac’s centenary is on us—he was born in Lowell in 1922—and I want here to examine his enduring influence, focusing on the reasons so many musical voices have been marked, been charged, been driven, by the novelist’s passionate expressions in print—his multiple autobiographical novels, his vivid essays and travelogues, and his highly charged poetry--and powerful spoken word records. I’ve been in conversation with journalists and biographers, historians and commentators who have written about Kerouac and music, too, to get a sense of why his influence persists, what it is about the author that attracts rolling phases of young musicians to pin their affiliations to his reputation. What is it with respect to this innovative prose master, this saint of the open highway, that continues to light the blue touch paper of inspiration over five decades after his premature demise at the age of forty-seven in the early autumn of 1969? What, in Kerouac’s writing, life and art, beliefs and attitudes, has managed to so capture the imagination of so many generations of popular-music makers? The Lowell Review

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Says Marian Jago, Lecturer in Popular Music and Jazz Studies at Edinburgh University and currently preparing a book dedicated to the writer’s relationship to jazz, “Kerouac stands as an embodiment of the American dream of freedom. A freedom which is so often expressed as freedom-in-mobility. America’s sense of itself as exceptional in part rests upon the idea that if things get too bad you can always just head out and try your luck someplace new.” She adds: “This idea is at the heart of Turner’s 1890s frontier thesis and is written into every American hero from Daniel Boone to John Wayne to Bruce Springsteen. Movement and second chances.” Brian Hassett, a Grateful Dead specialist and author of “the Beat Trilogy”—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac, How the Beats Begat the Pranksters, and On the Road with Cassadys—distils the message still further: “Kerouac is The Road. Kerouac is freedom. Kerouac is the search.” He points out: “Even Barack Obama, when discussing his latest book in 2020, said, ‘When I think about my own work, I have been shaped—just as my character has been shaped—by that quintessential Jack Kerouac open road, lookin’ west, seeing what’s next . . . or in the case of . . . Frederick Douglass, lookin’ north to see what’s next, but in either way, wanting to break the chains of whatever constraints we were born into and bound to.’ “Kerouac has sort of replaced Mark Twain as the quintessential go-to American Adventurist,” Hassett believes. “And music is about adventure, and exploration, and emotion, and going furthur (as the Kesey gang spelled it). Music is about passion, and playfulness, and breaking the rules, and singing in all its meanings, and expanding on themes, and dancing in rhythms. These are all things this Beat Generation writer has in spades.” Matt Theado, Professor of American Literature and Culture at Kobe City University, Japan, who has recently overseen a major Kerouac exhibition in his adopted city, comments: “Most songwriters who know Kerouac read On the Road at a formative time in their lives. When they were young and aspiring performers, they got ahold of On the Road and saw a possible life. “Get up off that couch, Kerouac told them. You can go out, you can meet people, you can live it up. And if you’re blessed, somewhere along the way, the pearl will be handed to you. In the 1960s and ‘70s most rockers were young men, and like Sal Paradise, they knew they’d find ‘girls, visions, everything.’” The author’s rejection of convention is also picked up by long-time music journalist Holly George-Warren, who edited The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats and is working on a major new biography of Kerouac, with the writer’s estate archives opened up for her investigative scrutiny. She explains: “He embraced ‘the other’ during post-World War II America when the mainstream message was the opposite: conformity, upward mobility, and materialism. His call that ‘the road is life,’ his musical ear and literary innovations—spontaneous prose and ‘sketching’—have resonated with readers and musicians since the late 1950s and in the ensuing decades as they discover his work.” Yet, for all this talk of ground-breaking resistance to expectations and the norms of the day, few would disagree that Kerouac descended into rambling conservatism in the 1960s. He took great exception to the counterculture and its anti-military position in 142

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Vietnam demos and was particularly affronted to be identified as a talisman by the new hippy nation. He even took the view that LSD was a communist plot to pollute and corrupt the minds of young America. Mark Bliesener, who organises Denver’s annual “Neal Cassady Birthday Bash,” coined the band name Dead Kennedys, and is a fifty-year veteran of the music business, offers a more controversial take on the writer’s perceived radicalism. “Since Kerouac’s 1950s coronation as the angriest of the ‘angry young men,’ writers of both music and literature have been attracted to Jack’s jazz-influenced, improvisational use of language, along with the overhyped perceived cachet of Kerouac’s ‘cool.’” But Bliesener counters the perceived wisdom: “In reality, the heart beating inside this hedonistic ‘rebel’ was actually that of a classically conservative, French-Canadian Catholic ‘mama’s boy.’” Kerouac famously drifted back to his mother’s kitchen each time his crosscountry odysseys left him tired, penniless and hungry, so the image of the freewheeling journeyman is something of a misnomer. That said, Paul Marion, publisher and poet with deep Lowell roots, editor of the Kerouac collection Atop an Underwood, and advocate of both the writer and the city, calls for a more balanced understanding of these Oedipal tensions. He argues: “The rendering of Kerouac as pathetically mother-tied is a portrait that might be touched up by now. There’s no arguing with the life facts. However, a more sympathetic or even practical view might see Kerouac as single-minded in his devotion to writing, which requires making financial and even personal sacrifice.” Marion expands: “Holding on to the hearth with meals and heat and laundry service and a cat at close hand can be seen as making your own one-man writer-in-residence setup. He did his field work, took notes, and circled back to the stable domestic scene to do his focused writing. This is not without exception, of course, but there is a pattern.” Meanwhile, author Pat Thomas, the man behind the acclaimed countercultural histories Did It!, the Jerry Rubin biography, and Listen Whitey!, a survey of black power and its musical soundtrack, has a simple theory why Kerouac’s later life views have not deterred progressive music makers. “His classic books do not contain that kind of political conservatism,” he explains, “and you’d have to read a few biographies and some essays to know that. So personally, I don’t find it surprising that it’s been overlooked.” Setting aside these anomalies—and which star, whether literary, cinematic, or musical, doesn’t have contradictions in their personality—what do we think a singer or a songwriter is doing or trying to say by referencing Kerouac? What is the motivation and where is the value? Jerry Cimino, founder of the Beat Museum in San Francisco, remarks: “When someone references Kerouac, they’re telling the world that they’re hip to what he represented to so many and for so long. Whether they know his whole life or not, a casual observer likely appreciates that he was important to the culture, they have some idea of his influence, and that he had a big impact on many other people.” Brian Hassett cites a chain of influence. “They’re leaving breadcrumbs, baby. That’s how I first found him. One person mentions him, and it’s just some guy mentioning a book. Then you see the name again. And then again. And pretty soon it’s like, ‘I gotta find this book!’ That’s what these musicians are doing. They know their thousands or millions of fans hang on their every lyric. They’re leaving clues and pointers. Just like Jack kept The Lowell Review

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mentioning Charlie Parker. He was intentionally directing his readers to another great artist in a different medium.” Hassett goes on: “Jack stressed Whitman and Wolfe and Proust ‘cause he knew he didn’t come out of nowhere. It proves that these musicians are aware they’ve just taken the baton and are carrying it for their short run—and that this flame has been touched off from one to another since art began.” Ronna Johnson, long-established Beat scholar and Professor of English at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, describes a number of messages that can be encoded when the Kerouac myth is summoned, including “bohemian deracination” or homelessness, the “antibourgeois” roots of a singer-performer, an “antidomestic ethic,” American Romanticism itself, also the spiritual concerns often entwined with this literary territory, from Catholicism to Zen Buddhism. But if the ideology is potent and the ideas expressed through the novels and the poetry in the songs they inspire authentically sought and powerfully wrought, isn’t the actual medium—young men with guitars in amplified bands—all too gender-specific and rather limited in its artistic canvas? Pat Thomas cannot help but agree. “Come on! It can’t be that surprising it’s a man thing! It’s all about men! Men having sex with women, men having bromances with other men. Men leaving their women behind for kicks, thrills and what-not. I wouldn’t call it homoerotic, but men often enjoy hanging out with other men—go to a bar or a football game or on a fishing trip and tell me what you see!” Further, Mark Bliesener argues that the Beat crowd were actually rock stars before the concept had even taken shape. “Long before the coinage of the often-misused term ‘rock star,’ Kerouac, Cassady, Burroughs, Ginsberg and others were already such forces. Via their nonconforming outsider stance, drug use, sexual liberation, and rejection of the existing status quo, they conceptualised for the masses an image of the stand-alone outsider rebel or ‘rock star.’” “Like the swashbucklers and cowboy heroes predating them, the Beats, and Kerouac in particular, came to represent this manifestation of a ‘pirate’ or alternative lifestyle, which in the late 1940s offered a dangerously flamboyant and visionary roadmap to the more psychedelic and apocalyptic times and writers to come.” However, Brian Hassett cannot concur with the view that the music that has grown out of the Beat soil is so guitar-centred or indeed just about men expressing themselves. “I don’t see it as ‘guitar-centred.’ Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Donovan, Graham Parker, Ian Dury, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, David Byrne, Natalie Merchant, for instance, are all singers. “Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, David Amram, Mark Murphy, Fatboy Slim, the Beastie Boys, Lydia Lunch, Billy Joel, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Everything But the Girl, Rusted Root and so on sure as hell aren’t ‘guitar-centric.’ “Nor is it just ‘rock’ by any stretch. Ramblin’ Jack, Paul Simon, Eric Andersen, Jeff Buckley, the Waterboys, Loudon Wainwright, Richard Thompson, Aztec Two-Step—that’s all singer-songwriter folk, man. “And not fer nuthin, but it ain’t just ‘men’ either. Get this straight, man, and don’t keep perpetuating the male myth. I mentioned Ella & Patti & Natalie & Lydia—but also Julianna Hatfield & Maggie Estep & ruth weiss & Dayna Kurta, or Gretchen Peters. “This is not gender-specific. Don’t present it as such. The striking thing is the very 144

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opposite of this question’s premise. Yeah, some musicians who cite him play rock—but the beautiful thing is he inspires people in hip hop, jazz, pop, folk, alternative, fusion, you name it.” Nonetheless, despite Hassett’s reassuringly upbeat reading of the current state of play, might the decline of the guitar-focused rock band in the opening decades of the 21st century mean that Kerouac’s reputation as an inspiration will decline? Marian Jago is not so sure. “Not necessarily,” she comments. “I also don’t think the decline of the guitar-focused rock band is properly as big a deal as people sometime claim (jazz is also dead, right?). I think if Kerouac faces trouble/potential lessening of influence it will be due to the treatment of women and African Americans in his work, which, while appropriate to their times, are now quite questionable to the extent that, for many, Kerouac won’t be able to be read without considerable unpacking.” Jonah Raskin, a leading Beat historian and poet, and the author of American Scream and the novel Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955, puts it in more straightforward terms: “I think his influence has already declined in the Black Lives Matter era we are in. He’s a white guy.” Pat Thomas surveys the bigger picture, stating that “for so many reasons, it will decline. Some now see Kerouac as politically incorrect—and I don’t mean because he voted for Richard Nixon as president! I mean because of the perceived lack of respect for women. Also, when I was growing up, we did not have cable TV or internet or video games or cell phones or social media—so reading books and/or listening to records were pretty much my only two choices growing up in rural America. Now, teens have about fifty choices of what do with their time, and sadly, rarely do many of them pick up a book.” Yet Mark Bliesener, while acknowledging that the once predominant rock band model might well be diminished in 2021, isn’t pessimistic. “The fact that the guitar-based rock band is a last-century idea fast fading in our collective rear view mirror does not necessarily diminish Kerouac’s impact and importance going forward. The liberation he brought to literature strongly impacts the post hip hop world of today’s more rhythmic or beat driven popular culture and music.” And Hassett, once more, remains bullish based on his own experiences on the road. “You could argue he’s never been bigger. And that’s with pretty much all the originals being dead. I do shows all over North America, and the audiences literally span eighteen to eighty years old. “He has crossed over some line that an artist does not fall back from. Liz Taylor, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot, Baryshnikov, Mozart, Dizzy, Andy Warhol, Frank Lloyd Wright . . . Once an artist enters that kind of stratosphere of mass public consciousness, they never cease to be there.” But to tear open another crucial can of worms in our contemporary life: Has the image of macho bravado, linked to the author and numerous of his friends, and the bromance adventures that inhabit many of his stories alienated women from Kerouac and his homosocial world? “No, I think some women identify with Kerouac’s male characters,” says Holly GeorgeWarren. “In her new book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Alison Bechdel describes the impact that Kerouac’s mountain hiking scenes in Big Sur had on her. Amber Tamblin, a leader of #MeToo, is one of several women who have described Kerouac’s influence in the documentary One Fast Move or I’m Gone. I think many female musicians see beyond gender The Lowell Review

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when being inspired or motivated by characters in novels.” Nonetheless, Ronna Johnson faces negativity toward Kerouac in the university classroom. As she explains, “Young women, generationally, even those in or now contemplating earlier generations such as Gen X and millennial, reject Kerouac. I now have female students who take my Beat seminar who want me to argue Kerouac’s relevance/ importance as post-war literary artist. They are entirely offended by On the Road itself, alone.” Yet Brian Hassett urgently challenges this general thesis of female alienation: “That is so NOT true. I noticed it in line for the premiere of the film of On the Road at Somerset House in London in 2012—how two-thirds of the people were young women. And I talked to a bunch of them, and they were not there for Kristen Stewart but were citing Lonesome Traveler and Dharma Bums as well as On the Road as pivotal books for them. Also, “Lowell Celebrates Kerouac,” year after year more than fifty percent of the people who come solo to the festival are women. And at my many live shows a year it’s damn close to a fifty-fifty split. It may seem surprising, but it’s true. “Also, think of all the women biographers and memoirists—Carolyn Cassady, Edie Kerouac, Joyce Johnson, Ann Charters, Ann Douglas, Brenda Knight, Joan Haverty, Jan Kerouac, Diane di Prima, Helen Weaver, Hettie Jones, Eileen Kaufman, Anne Waldman, Regina Weinreich, LuAnne Henderson, Anne Murphy, whose praising book of Neal has yet to be published, and soon Holly George-Warren doing the ‘official’ Jack biography—and who, not incidentally, all wrote GREAT books!” Marian Jago speaks from personal experience. “I’m not sure that I want to speak for all women, but I’ll say that as much as I’ve enjoyed Kerouac (and the other Beats), I have always had to read him knowing that I was on the outside looking into a somewhat hostile room. I think a potentially more interesting question might be formulated around the treatment of African Americans in Beat works.” Mark Bliesener attempts a more historical perspective: “The Beats, like many significant societal influencers of their era, were almost exclusively and aggressively male. However, though likely under-reported, many women in the 1950s did read On the Road and were as equally incited by its vision of emancipation and kicks. Following the cultural upheaval of the women’s movement in the 1960s and ‘70s, women were no longer ‘shamed’ for worshipping at the same altar of liberation as ‘the boys.’ “In their time the Beats were strictly a boys’ club, but owing to evolution and revolution, women now openly embrace a more natural affinity with the hedonism and deliverance espoused by the Beats. The same simplicity of language and unflinching honesty which heralded the Beat renaissance certainly appeals to contemporary female taste. The plethora of new women writers now telling their personal, unvarnished truth in song, stories, and film stand as testament to this seed change.” Jerry Cimino comments: “Some people can’t get beyond the dated, even misogynistic attitudes of the Beats. Plenty of people have difficulty with that, and for good reason. On the one hand, they were products of their time, and inextricable from the circumstances and attitudes of those times. Nonetheless, in the 1940s and ‘50s, Kerouac was one of the more enlightened, or at the very least open-minded people at the time. “When it came to diversity, inclusiveness, racial and gender equality, the Beats were ahead of their contemporaries, even though their language and attitudes often seem dated 146

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by modern standards. In 2021, it’s easy to cancel someone because they said something fifty or seventy years ago that modern sensibilities can no longer abide. But anyone who takes that position is extremely short-sighted, in my opinion.” The debates about this literary movement and its influence on half a century of music-making not to mention the critical topics of gender and race and their relation to this surging cultural flow will go on for sure but let us close this attempt to wrestle with these intriguing, and in some ways intractable, matters with a final quote, from the Beat Museum’s Cimino once more. “I don’t think Kerouac’s reputation will suffer, regardless of changes in styles and fads and trends. Yes, his reputation has enjoyed an enhancement by the famous people who loved him and want to make a nod to him. At the same time, his reputation is very broad and deep outside of the musical world, and outside the world of lead guitarists. “The Beats, and especially Jack, seem to recapture the energies of every new generation. The themes of the Beats are youthful, experimental, adventurous, a quest for understanding, transcending things like sexual identity, or the desire for non-traditional alternatives to the status quo.” Note: Beat specialists Dave Moore and Horst Spandler have compiled a remarkable list of popular songs that reference Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. ‘Jack & Neal on Record’ can be found here: http://www.beatbookcovers.com/music/

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Two Poems el habib louai

A Prayer to End the War Tonight I shall refuse to argue or shout: “My loss is greater than yours!” Or even complain trivially: “My pain is more valuable!” As if we have not dodged the same bombs together. As if we haven’t looked the same enemy in the eye. Tonight I will not marry the empty bed in the empty corner of the empty shelter. Tonight our dry skins and worn bones that survived immeasurable distances, that outlived sickness unto death will unite in eternal embrace & I shall eat you with kisses.

Killing Time in Times of Oblivion Nothing gives me hope anymore save the haggard eyes of the youth in plastic sandals. The distant smile on their shabby faces, hoping they will make it through life with less commotion.

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A thousand times broken, I drift into frozen bars in the narrow lanes of the city when all the mourning cars have vanished. And because I refuse to avenge time as it kills us in times of oblivion, I went out in the night, escorted by the remaining angels, to purchase new copies of things I have already acquired. Curiously, I bought Italo’s Cosmicomics to position myself in a world obsessed with global warming, while innocent children freeze in refugee camps on the borders, I bought le vicomte pourfendu to learn about the paternal ingratitude ex-colonies show to their mummies. And just because I am walking after midnight on a mindless journey, I thought I would purchase voyage au bout de la nuit, to leaf through nocturnal memories of another familial mort à credit. Alas, “there is no midnight mystery and no coconuts to see.” I would rather sell orphaned chrysanthemums on the untrodden ways, than besmirch my hands with bleeding red roses.

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Equilibrium j oy ly n n d u n g u

(Winner of the Jack Kerouac Student Poetry and Prose Contest, Lowell High School, 2021)

Are all men created equal? Are men with fair and skin rich such as the soil and the ones in between, equal? Even a man and a woman? Are all men created equal? Are they equal by size, intelligence, class, passions, interests, background, spirits, and anatomy? Oh! or do you mean by rights and being made in the image of God? But why is life here so compassion-less to men whose skin seemed to have a long conversation with the sun, why is it that like deer they are targeted, chased? Then BOOM. Shots fired. Silence. But a fair-skinned man roams around claiming and inhabiting whatsoever his heart desires. A king he is “Hello sir, how may I help you today, can I carry it for you?” “I wish you a pleasant day sir” But on the contrary, the others are waiters, waitresses, Servants. “Make sure you check out for that one, he looks suspicious” “Check to see if anything is stolen.” ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL! Insulting. If such a statement would be true, my heaven, my earth would be the same as yours. My brothers’ and sisters’ lives would not be gambled and be put at a price. Their skin would be appreciated and loved for its uniqueness and not seen as a weapon. Maybe, only, it is in God’s eyes that men are created equal.

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Marin County Satori d av e d e i n n o c e n t i s

ay 1968, our Bobby is all in, he’s going to end the Vietnam War, maybe end racism and injustice and inequality on the way by, he needs to win California, he needs help. And I’m free. I grab my least worn shoes, roll up the old Korean War surplus sleeping bag, hustle up a few bucks and head for the turnpike at Mass. and Newbury, thumb out and heading west. A week later, and adventures including being escorted outside of Ogallala, Nebraska by the sheriff onto a gravel road alongside some long deceased decomposing cattle, otherwise known as the local hitchhike-free zone, a job offer in Mountain Home, Idaho, to help bring in the spring calves from the back country, withdrawn after I confess I can’t ride a hoss, never mind pronounce it, I’m on a jungle road somewhere near Mendocino when The Cheech and Chong Prototype Wagon pulls over populated in the back by a local tribe of semi-dressed young pilgrims, in front by a big, bearded guy opening the door and luring me inside with an engaging grin. They’re all trucking their way to a commune, and I seem to be invited. That evening, a campsite. After a memorable dinner of hippie potluck-au-few, I become allied with the big guy, an affable and still and mellow and gentle dude and the only other person in this outfit reasonably evolved, who tells me he lives in Haight-Ashbury, is travelling to visit a woman friend, and is a good listener who wants to hear about all the affairs and exploits of being on the road. In an authentic Lowell accent. At dusk he becomes very spirited, tells me he’s discovered a plant growing near the campsite, you can make tea from the leaves and get buzzed. I’m dubious. It looks like ordinary mountain laurel to me, but he steeps the leaves in creek water, pours the liquid into a cup, and offers it forward. Gentleman that I am, I say, “You first.” He brings the cup to his lips, drinks it down in one swill. His eyes immediately roll back in his head, he collapses into the creek, head bleeding from a rock, face under water, mouth bubbling. He’s no lightweight, but I drag the fool out, make sure he doesn’t choke on his vomit, clean the forehead gash, oversee the slow return to lucidity. Later, lying among the redwoods, I realize I’ve probably just saved my new scruffy-bear friend from drowning. Sunrise, minus a few defectors, and we arrive at the commune. The big guy has a joyous reunion with his lady friend who seems to run the place, and in time we have a great endless softball game, Marin County Rules, with a goat playing third, some stoners in center, a few naked girls in left, a sheepdog the designated runner for both sides, and of course, under local rules, both sides win. After a farm grown dinner there’s a bonfire, instruments come out, the big guy grabs a guitar, someone hands me a tambourine. Even a sax materializes. Music envelops the hills and we’re singing about Love Lights and Letting It Shine and maybe The Lowell Review

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some songs that haven’t been written. A perfect day on the road, a perfect night. Another sunrise and I’m poked awake in the morning dew-covered Korean bivouac by the big guy’s friend. She hands me a glass of breakfast fresh from a goat’s udder and informs me that my friends left in the middle of the night, had to get back to The City. She’ll give me a lift down the mountain to the paved road. I’m not great at reading people’s thoughts so early in the morning, but I suspect she was so non-conversant driving me down because she didn’t appreciate that the first head that popped out of the sleeping bag when she woke me was her California-bred and commune-raised sixteen-year-old daughter. I go in peace. And the first car that comes chugging along is a strange, alien-looking little thing called a Toyota. A young Raggedy Ann of a girl pulls over and asks if I could drive. When I agree, she gets out and lets me squeeze into the cockpit. As I get rolling she reaches into the back and produces an infant who’s lying hidden across the seat. She explains that she needs me to drive because it’s feeding time and her breasts are bursting, and while fueling the baby she tells her story, punctuated by her San Francisco destination because her nineteen-yearold big sister has promised her a well-paying job in a massage parlor. I decide any advice I might give will be worth a lot less than the proverbial two cents and hop out at the first exit over the bridge. The next few days transpire in the Marin fog I carried south. I get a very part-time job unloading a truck for a little Jewish Deli owner originally from Boston who pays me in salami and jack cheese and sourdough rolls and oranges, sustenance for a week. A day later around noontime I’m wandering the Haight, oranges hidden in my roll, when a mass migration of freaks, hippies, long-hairs, friends of the devil and the less reputable of my tribe begin moving towards Golden Gate Park. Like a modern day flash mob. Something is happening, so I enlist in this little army and find a shady park bench to watch. A shirtless kid plops down next to me looking to cadge spare change, and we recognize each other as associates of the recent commune expedition. I ask him what’s going on and he tells me my pal’s band is giving a free afternoon concert in the park. I don’t comprehend. He says, “Your pal Jerry. From last week.” Throughout my life I’ve been challenged at recognizing people met “out of context.” The person seen in suit and tie behind a desk every day becomes a ghost when seen in jeans and t-shirt in the supermarket. The uniformed ballplayer on television becomes invisible on the street. I was once picked up on the One-Oh-One in Hollywood by a guy who after hearing my accent just wanted to talk about Kerouac and I didn’t realize it was Charles Bukowski until I was getting out. I push through the ten-thousand strong Golden Gate horde to the stage to see this Jerry. The band is still setting up but there was the big guy. And there was Lesh. And Weir. And the Pigpen. We make eye contact and he nods a familiar grin, a bandage still over his eye, but he’s a bit busy. I feel humbled as I melt back into the swarm. Primary Day looms. I make my way to Chinatown to do my share of official campaigning, consisting of donning my entire collection of found Bobby buttons and making as much noise as possible as the motorcade passes. The crowd is massive, dwarfing the free concert in the park. Bobby is standing with his wife in the back of a convertible. Every window of every apartment is filled with screaming faces. Kids are setting off Chinese firecrackers ahead of the parade adding to the din, occasionally causing Ethel to drop and cover. People who can’t speak English are climbing over each other to touch his hand on the way by and 152

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Bobby is trying to touch them all back. This is Scarlet Begonias and Sugar Magnolias for real. There’s no way we can lose. Election evening, and the word on the street is that Bobby’s winning big. Down near where the cable cars turn around I hit a favorite wide window ledge I can climb to, too high for the winos to vex, and settle in for a desolate night with my oranges and a stale roll and my blizzard-proof bag, happy and gratified over our victory. I’m above the street and slightly hidden from sidewalk traffic, but the Tenderloin is unusually quiet in the witching hours. The next morning I appropriate an early Chronicle off a stoop, printed before any late news but declaring Kennedy a winner. No way is Tricky Dick going to stop our momentum. I see a friend in the street and ask how it’s going. He says, “Robert won, so they shot him.” Fifty plus years later, and I still hear those words clearly. “Robert won, so they shot him.” In a typical city involved in a typical daydream. It was only a week prior that I was merrily joining the tribe singing about what a long strange trip it’s been. Now I’m the Do Dah man. That afternoon I dig into my bedroll, find my tattered old Phillips 66 road map, and figure out the best hitchhiking route to Chicago. There’s a convention scheduled, and they need help. And I’m free.

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Commemorating Kerouac: An Interview (1998)

I first met Paul Marion not long after the dedication of the Kerouac Commemorative. I was living in Boston at the time and read his name in the Boston Globe, in their reporting on the years-long movement in Lowell to honor Jack Kerouac with a public monument. I had been reading Kerouac for twenty years at that time, but I had never been to Lowell. I felt like I needed a guide to point me in the right direction. I got Paul’s phone number from “Directory Assistance” and called him cold, to tell him of my interest in photographing “Kerouac places” in Lowell, and to ask his help in finding whatever locales still existed in the city from Kerouac’s time. Paul was open to meeting with me, and we sat down one afternoon in a Greek restaurant on Market Street. I remember him telling me, “Growing up here and being a poet, Kerouac—as a creative influence—is a piano on your back, almost overwhelming. You can’t write anything about this place without taking him into consideration.” Born in 1954, Paul’s first home was in the Centralville section of Lowell, around the corner from Kerouac’s birthplace. The author was in New York then, but sometimes made nostalgic visits to wander around his old neighborhoods. I used to joke that Kerouac probably walked past Paul in his baby carriage, throwing a shade that predetermined the rest of his life. When we met, Paul had two books of poetry (Strong Place and Middle Distance) and his own small publishing operation—Loom Press, which is still in existence, and thriving, in 2021. He gave me copies of his books, and I went straight to a poem with an obvious Kerouac connection, “Big Sur,” in Middle Distance. Kerouac-influenced, it was; but not Kerouac-dominated. The poem echoed the title of one of Jack’s books, but it was not about California, it was about the Kerouac Commemorative. Paul clearly had his own voice, even then. “Kerouac’s back in the news”— it began . . . his hometown elected his art. There’ll be a fresh green lawn with his breath set in polished red-brown stones that will sing to those come to find him. I was certainly one of “those come.” From late 1988 until the fall of 1993, I visited Lowell regularly, walking along the walls of the mills with my cameras, praying for good photo-luck at the Grotto, climbing over the rocks under the Moody Street bridge, shooting pool at the Pawtucketville Social Club, even getting to meet Jack’s old high school girlfriend, Mary Carney, still living in the same house on the bank of the Concord River where Kerouac wooed her. In 1989, on the twentieth anniversary of his passing, I published my first photo-essay of 154

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Kerouac-related pictures in a ten-image spread in Bostonia magazine (“Kerouac’s Lowell,” Bostonia, Oct. 1989). Paul wrote the accompanying text. Two years later, I had an exhibit of thirty photographs, called Rumors of Kerouac, at Lowell’s Whistler House Museum of Art and the Boott Mills Gallery in the Boott Cotton Mills Museum of the National Park Service. Paul introduced me at both openings. Over the next several years, Kerouac and the Beats boomed as they had not boomed since the late Fifties. In the summer of 1998, we thought it would be good to record some thoughts on the explosion of interest, and to remember some of the key moments and people in the lead-up to the dedication of the Kerouac Commemorative . . . . —John Suiter, Chicago, 2021

Above: Original invitation for opening ceremonies. On the following pages: The Jack Kerouac Commemorative in Eastern Canal Park, Lowell, Massachusetts. Photo © 1989 John Suiter All Rights Reserved. The Kerouac Commemorative (granite and steel) was created by Texas-based sculptor Ben Woitena in 1988.

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Why don’t you talk about the 1970s, after Jack Kerouac died, and where you were . . .

PM I was a sophomore at Dracut High School in the fall of 1969, and I don’t recall hearing that he died even though it was on page one of the Lowell Sun, our daily paper in Dracut, the next town over. I was into baseball and The Beatles. The Abbey Road album was released in September 1969. A year later, Kerouac’s name popped up in a high school history course, an elective on Lowell-Dracut history. I still wasn’t reading Kerouac’s books. When I entered Merrimack College in 1972, I began to think about being a writer. Reading John Updike and Katherine Anne Porter in a short story course made me consider writing prose. And then I found the poems of William Carlos Williams, opening up the poetry lane. I didn’t know I had wandered into the root system of the Beat writers with Williams. At that point I delved into Kerouac, especially interested in his novels set in Lowell. I was fascinated by the way he made world-class art out of a place and people so familiar to me. His presence locally was limited to his grave at Edson Cemetery and better known books like On the Road and The Dharma Bums sold in Prince’s Bookstore in downtown Lowell. The Ann Charters biography of Kerouac would appear in 1973. JS

Did anybody that you knew visit the grave?

PM I doubt it, probably a few college students from Lowell State and pilgrims getting off the highway at the Lowell exit. I didn’t go to Edson Cemetery until years later. My wife Rosemary’s mother went to the funeral Mass for Kerouac with her father, who years before had won a contest at the public library with the first prize being a Kerouac novel—he asked the library director: “What’s the second-place prize?” People paid attention to Kerouac’s passing, and there was regular news about him from Charles and Mary Sampas in the Lowell Sun, both of whom had columns. For example, when Kerouac blew through town in 1962 after Big Sur was published, his long weekend was chronicled by Mary Sampas. There was a consciousness about Kerouac among people his age, but as a teenager in the area there was not much for me to hook onto. JS So when do you think it started happening in terms of, not so much with people of his generation, but when did the idea of “Let’s honor this guy” gain traction? PM A couple of things. A benchmark event for me, and it was a big deal in Lowell, was Bob Dylan landing with the Rolling Thunder Revue in November 1975. I was at UMass Lowell (then ULowell), and Dylan showed up out of the blue with Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, and a troupe of musicians. Lowell would not have been a stop for the Rolling Thunder Revue if not for Kerouac. Dylan came to pay homage. The well-known photo of Dylan at Jack’s grave ran in Time magazine this month [June 8, 1998] in a souvenir issue honoring the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Dylan is singled out, and one of the three photos is Dylan with Ginsberg at the cemetery. JS

So, Kerouac was dead six years at that point.

The event was seized on by the media. There were images of Dylan in Lowell in Rolling

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Stone, an article titled “The Pilgrims Have Landed on Kerouac’s Grave.” Mary Sampas had a scoop on the visit. Her husband’s brother, Tony Sampas, brother-in-law of Stella Sampas Kerouac, the author’s widow, had guided Dylan and his crew around Kerouac sites. He was filming for his movie Renaldo and Clara. They went to the Franco-American School and the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes behind the school, a heavy-duty spiritual site for Franco-Americans that Kerouac wrote about in Doctor Sax. Dylan was photographed in color standing under the large crucifix topping the Grotto. As a young aspiring writer it was powerful to see Dylan connecting with Kerouac. A few years later the Lowell Museum, which had a history exhibit in one of the old textile factories, before Lowell had a national historical park, hosted a Kerouac night. That was the first public Kerouac event in the city since 1950, when he had signed copies of his debut novel, The Town and the City, in a department store downtown. The museum drew a standing-room audience with dozens of fans left outside, some banging on the windows. The museum director asked the Fire Chief to come down and explain to people why they couldn’t get in—fire safety laws that limited capacity for attendees. I was inside for the readings from Kerouac’s books, tapes of Kerouac talking, and a display of foreign editions. In 1974, hometown English professor Charles Jarvis had published his biography Visions of Kerouac, and he was the lead person in the museum program. Barry Gifford’s book Kerouac’s Town had come out in 1973, a pocket-sized book with photos of Kerouac places and an interview with Stella Kerouac. There was a building awareness in Lowell topped by a pivotal public event with a couple of hundred people in 1978. In 1980 and 1981, members of an art co-op called Art Alive!, a magnet for interesting young people who had signed up for the cultural renaissance in Lowell, produced Kerouac events. We put together a program called “Kerouac Lives!” It was another packed house, a few hundred people. Speakers included Professor Jay McHale from Salem State College, a Lowell guy who in 1973 had hosted at Salem the first academic symposium on Kerouac with Beat writers featured. We had Joy Walsh from Moody Street Irregulars, the Kerouac ‘zine based near Buffalo, New York. George Chigas recited his sprawling opus “Flashes of Kerouac”; we played a tape of Kerouac reading “The Three Stooges” bit from Visions of Cody. Artists hung works that responded to Kerouac. On a pedestal was a bust of Kerouac by Mico Kaufman, an artist in Greater Lowell. The plaster cast was meant to be bronzed. Art co-op president Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord and I drove to Mary Sampas’s house to pick up the bust, which we wrapped in a blanket and placed on the car seat for the ride back to the gallery. It was weird to have Kerouac’s “head” on the back seat. The next year the same group did a marathon reading of Doctor Sax with volunteer readers. In 1981, I was at the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission (LHPC)—the culturalaffairs programs assistant. An early project of the LHPC was the so-called “Lowell Play.” David Riley of Vermont won the contest with a pageant play called If the Falls Could Speak. There was a play-making aspect to this in that he worked with us as he developed the script. In this play, you arrive at the second half of the twentieth century and there’s Kerouac in the flow of Lowell history, talking under a street lamp at night.

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Promotional card for “Kerouac Aloud: A Live Reading of Dr. Sax,” Art Alive! Gallery, Lowell, Mass., Oct. 23, 1981.

JS So that’s interesting. That was the first official recognition, where you had government backing. PM Yeah, although Art Alive! was housed in a former fabric shop on Merrimack Street, since knocked down, owned by the National Park Service (NPS), which supported the artists. But the play was commissioned by the LHPC, U.S. Department of the Interior, an agency collaborating with the NPS in making a new national park about the Industrial Revolution, immigration to America, and the process of deindustrialization. JS The Lowell Historic Preservation Commission was really key to the funding for the Kerouac rehabilitation, or the honoring of Jack. In my experience, the Commission was everything you would want in a cultural preservation organization—people like Julie Mofford—generous, knowledgeable of the subject, on mission, but also totally respectful of the recipient’s artistic expression. [Suiter received a cultural grant in November 1991 to create the photographic exhibit Rumors of Kerouac, which was shown at the Whistler House Museum of Art and Boott Mills Gallery of the National Park Service in 1993.] PM Another thing that happened at the LHPC around that time, early ‘80s, was the awarding of cultural grants to stimulate heritage and arts activities. Grants went to the public library for the first guide to Kerouac places, written by Charlie Gargiulo of Lowell, and to filmmaker John Antonelli, who had grown up in Greater Lowell but was based in California, for script development for a documentary, Kerouac. In 1985, the film premiered in Lowell at Merrimack Repertory Theater, three sold-out showings, on the same night that it opened at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge.

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I was at the Orson Welles.

PM So that’s another example of the LHPC supporting that public interpretation of Kerouac as a historical figure. JS What was the Preservation Commission’s take on all this? Did they just think that Kerouac would be good for tourism? Or was there someone on the Commission besides yourself who was a Kerouac aficionado who believed that this native son should be honored? PM The LHPC’s mission was “To tell the human story of the Industrial Revolution in a nineteenth-century setting by encouraging cultural expression.” This differed from the standard goals of the National Park Service in that there was a particular emphasis on the community telling its own stories in various ways. This reflected the grassroots origin of the “Park” in Lowell. The Kerouac theme was a strand that local and outside people put forward. At the LHPC, most of the staff members were young, progressive, culturally sophisticated. The first cultural-affairs director, Jim St. Clair, was a writer who admired Hemingway. From 1984 to 1989, I was the cultural-affairs director. I had left Lowell to go to an MFA writing program at the University of California, Irvine, and returned when my former boss left his job. We had two staff members with deep roots in the local FrancoAmerican community, executive director Armand P. Mercier and operations director Ray LaPorte. The LHPC board of directors, the commissioners, were federal, state, and Lowell appointees. The Lowell folks saw Kerouac as a figure of national and international status. The Commission began its work in 1978, and by 1982 Kerouac was in a play that the LHPC funded, and then cultural grants were awarded, and later came the Commemorative. Kerouac is not mentioned in planning documents for the national park, but the federal agencies responded to public interest and made room for him. After Armand Mercier, LHPC executive director Peter Aucella strongly supported Kerouac initiatives. JS Okay, so from contributing to Antonelli’s film, what further steps did the LHPC take? PM In December 1985, I recommended that the LHPC establish a permanent outdoor tribute to Jack Kerouac. JS

So this was your proposal.

PM Yes, encouraged by Armand Mercier and backed by commissioners like Clementine Alexis of Lowell and the cultural committee. The idea of a permanent tribute had been discussed in years past by others, but we had a specific proposal. JS So what prompted you at that point to go from events and performances to creating a monument—putting it in stone?

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PM In 1981, U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas of Lowell initiated a public art program and asked businesses and public agencies to put up money for original monumental sculptures in the city. The first was Homage to Women by Mico Kaufman, which was dedicated in the fall of 1984. JS

Oh yes, down at Market Mills Park on Market Street.

PM Right, some people call it the Mill Girls Sculpture, a large bronze with entwined figures reaching upward. Paul pictured a collection of artworks. He said his children enjoyed monuments and outdoor art in Washington, D.C., and felt that Lowell kids should have that where they live. He saw the effort as aspirational, a way to “raise sightlines” for young people who would encounter fine art around the city. Sculpture was a new way to accent the historical interpretation in Lowell—contemporary artworks related to Lowell’s heritage. We had history-themed murals in the past, but not large-scale sculpture. JS

You were presenting the Kerouac project within this framework.

PM There was a logic to the effort. It began as another public art project, not a standalone thing. Initially, we imagined a modest project, possibly plaques with text excerpts that would be incorporated into a small canal-side piece of land that the LHPC owned off Central Street. The idea was to create something of interest for that site, and in January 1986 the full commission approved the concept, saying, Go ahead, pursue this idea. The cultural committee had approved the idea in December ‘85, and a month later the commissioners signed off on it. JS

Were you soliciting designs at this point?

PM The LHPC had approved $50,000 for the federal project. Lowell has a national park and a state park, both with historical activities and sites around the city. As you know, this is not vast open land fenced off like a traditional wilderness park or recreation area. At some point during that year, planner Steve Conant of Lowell Heritage State Park approached me and said, “We’re going to demolish the Curran-Morton warehouse on Bridge Street . . . .” JS

The “great gray warehouse of eternity” . . . .

PM Bingo. They were going to create a new city park, small “p,” off Bridge Street, where it intersects with French Street. Steve asked the LHPC to consider that for the Kerouac project. And Steve, again, was someone of our generation, interested in Lowell’s history, literature, and hip to Kerouac. He thought we should do something in a more visible place, which was good. The logistics had to be figured out. JS Well, it was not only a more visible place, but was a more Kerouac-related place. What we just said about “the great gray warehouse of eternity” was a line where Kerouac described that place [from Visions of Gerard]—where the character Big Bull Balloon . . . .

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PM Right, Jack’s father and W.C. Fields playing cards behind the B. F. Keith theater, adjacent to that warehouse. Leo Kerouac’s print shop had been nearby. The Lowell Sun building is right there, where Kerouac worked as a cub reporter. You know, tremendous connections. JS

Yeah, it was much more his turf.

PM The only reason the other site had been put on the table was that the LHPC controlled it. We didn’t have to ask permission from another property owner. We had to do something to improve the property, to landscape it. Let’s do the Kerouac thing there. But then an opportunity arose. Bridge Street was a much bigger site, and knowing the cost of outdoor sculpture and construction I was afraid $50,000 would not be enough. Other public art projects in Lowell were costing about $100,000. I said to our commissioners, “I’ll recommend the move if you double the budget to $100,000.” They did. JS

But which is still low.

PM The $100,000 didn’t cover what we eventually accepted as the design, and park construction funds helped cover a portion of the cost, which went back to Steve’s wise recommendation that we do it as an integrated project within the new park. We were able to capture money for the site preparation, the paving stones, and more. JS

So this is all happening around mid- to late 1986?

PM The process became a three-way partnership between the Preservation Commission which wanted to do a Kerouac artwork, the Heritage State Park which controlled the larger piece of land, and the City, which received a large state grant to demolish the warehouse and make a new green space. Part of the rational for the warehouse demolition and green space was to reveal the old Massachusetts Mills textile factory complex, which would be renovated for apartments. Everything was contracted through the City planning department, overseen by project manager Ed Trudel. In late 1986, we needed the Lowell City Council to accept the $100,000 from the Preservation Commission for the park construction budget. JS Before we get into that phase of the discussion, I just want to double back for a minute and talk about some of the concurrent things which were happening. I’m thinking particularly of the input of Roger Brunelle and Brian Foye at this point. When did you meet those guys and what were they doing along about this time? PM We had two sources in separate places generating energy for Kerouac. Brian Foye of Lowell had degrees in history and English from Boston College and UMass Amherst. My understanding is that he had recently seen Allen Ginsberg, a friend of his brother Raymond’s in New York, and Ginsberg had just come back from China. This is 1985. Ginsberg said, “They’re reading Kerouac in China. You guys in Lowell ought to do something to recognize Kerouac.” Brian created the Corporation for the Celebration of Jack Kerouac in Lowell, a The Lowell Review

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nonprofit organization with a board of directors. Roger was on the board, as well as Mary Sampas, former Lowell City Manager William Taupier—a heavy hitting group, which was a message itself. One of the group’s purposes, aside from raising awareness about Kerouac and promoting literature in Lowell, was establishing a memorial to Kerouac. JS Yes, I remember that they published a very useful walking guide to Kerouac places in Lowell. [A Guide to Jack Kerouac’s Lowell by Brian Foye with photographs by Jeffrey O’Heir (1988).] I carried that book in my pack for two years while I was making the photographs for Rumors of Kerouac. Brian did a great job. Had you met him before? PM No, because Brian was away at school, and he’s younger than me. I went to an event that Roger organized in the mid-‘80s through the Franco-American Day Committee, a night of reminiscences and discussion about Kerouac in the parish hall of St. Louis Church, Kerouac’s birth parish. The Franco-American Day Committee was established in the mid1970s to preserve the Franco-American heritage. JS Roger was another guy who was very generous, very helpful to me when I began hiking around Centralville, which he said is pronounced “Center-ville,” pointing out places, telling stories that no one but a lifelong Franco-American from that neighborhood would have known. I recall him reverently pointing out a particular boulder in Beaver Brook where Centralville kids jumped in the creek when learning to swim. He spoke of it like it was the rock where Moses stood. PM Right. And I recall that night at St. Louis because Stella Kerouac at the end made moving remarks. So we had the Franco-American Day Committee, Preservation Commission, Art Alive!, Lowell Museum. We premiered the Antonelli film at the Merrimack Repertory Theater. David Riley’s “Lowell Play” was first performed by the professional actors of the Theater, and a couple of years later by Lowell high school students at Lowell High. You are starting to have a lot of organizations that have raised the Kerouac flag. JS A critical mass was building . . . . Now tell me, when did you first meet Stella Sampas and where does that fit? Or does she come in a little later? We were talking about the City Council vote . . . should we go back to that? PM I met Mrs. Kerouac to say hello that night at St. Louis parish. I was in touch with her during the development of the Commemorative. What I do remember is that shortly after that City Council vote, I spoke to her about the text that might go on the Commemorative. JS

What was her response?

PM She was very open from the start. Very supportive. I believe she had endorsed the Lowell Museum program years back. She knew this would be a major remembrance of her husband. We reached out to her early to get her permission to use Jack’s writings. From early 1987, I was in regular touch with her until June 1988. To step back for a moment. On the City Council vote, it became important that Brian 164

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Foye had organized the community group because then it wasn’t only the government bureaucrats coming to the table saying, This is a good thing to do. Community members testified that night, the people from the Kerouac corporation and others. City councilors spoke favorably. JS Who was the person on the City Council who was so vocal against the Commemorative? And what was his particular objection? PM It was a lifestyle issue. In three official votes approving the creation of the Kerouac Commemorative, two were unanimous and one was 7 to 1. There were three votes by public officials, two at the Preservation Commission—one to support the project to start, and one later to approve the design. And in the middle there was a City Council vote with one dissenter. There was a local consensus by 1986 concerning Kerouac, but because of the nature of public discourse the one opposition voice caused an outsized media response. I told a Wall Street Journal reporter who had come to Lowell that the news angle was the community agreement about Kerouac’s literary achievement, but she said her editor wanted the controversy not a feel-good story about a consensus. JS

Who was this politician, again?

PM City Councilor M. Brendan Fleming, a long-time city councilor, one-time mayor, and a mathematics professor at the University. JS Did he ever soften his opposition or change his mind at all? What exactly was it that he objected to? PM He didn’t think Kerouac was a model of exemplary living. He didn’t separate personal behavior from art. He wasn’t against art. Later, he supported an effort to recognize actress Bette Davis, also born in Lowell. When we presented the Kerouac project both to the LHPC and to the City Council we were aware of opposing perceptions of Kerouac, that there were people who remembered him as a disruptive alcoholic from his last pass through town in 1967-68. Some older people had either heard stories or knew people who had been around him. There was gossip about how he had behaved badly in a visit to Lowell High. The police had a file on him that’s been copied and passed around. JS

Yeah, in his last glorious binge.

PM The human Kerouac was uppermost in the minds of a lot of Lowellians. Kerouac had been described in the press as a controversial writer questioning mainstream American values. JS

Sure, “the drop-out who started it all . . . .”

PM We were aware of the possible criticism, even though support for Kerouac had grown since the late ‘70s. The Lowell Review

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JS Yeah, but I think you’re right when you say that the real story was that there was so little opposition, and that the other votes were unanimous. PM If you go back and look at the remarks. One councilor missed the meeting because I remember a 7-1 vote, and there are nine councilors. If you look at their remarks, you can see the seven other councilors got it. They knew we were talking about Kerouac as a top American author with books in print in many languages. That council motion passed at the end of 1986, generating enormous media attention. One classic headline in the New York Post, anticipating the vote, had read: “Hip Park May Be a Bust.” For months it was Kerouac, Kerouac, Kerouac in the press. The discussion in Lowell ignited a global debate about Kerouac’s value. JS I think you’re right about the worldwide discussion. So then you opened the competition for the design. PM The landscape architects for the park project were Clarissa Rowe and Nina Brown of Boston. Ben Woitena of Texas won the design competition. That wasn’t without controversy. Some of the same folks who had supported the Kerouac project at City Hall objected to the design selection. The Lowell Sun wrote an editorial pushing the LHPC to reconsider Woitena’s design. The commissioners stood by the selection committee’s vote. JS

What were some of the other comments?

PM There was interest in a life-sized statue. And complaints that the process had gone too fast, that it wasn’t wide open enough, and that certain notable artists should have been invited to submit designs, concerns by people who, I’m happy to say now, are in favor of the Commemorative. JS Back to the issue of a human figure in bronze versus the abstract panels with text cut into them. It was an interesting thing that happened. I remember reading a letter, I think it was to Jim Curtis, a Lowell attorney, in which Kerouac seemed to have a prescient feeling, he wrote: “Someday this town will put up a monument to me . . . and I’ll even pose for it naked if they want!” So he was thinking along the lines of something representational— probably like Rodin’s naked Balzac with the big gut!—but the whole thing is reminiscent of the arguments around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Some outspoken people, including some veterans, wanted human figures, and of course, it eventually got some on the orders of the Commander-in-Chief Ronald Reagan, who was such a great soldier himself. PM It is reminiscent of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin. I remember going there and seeing the names, the text incised in the black stone . . . . JS

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Yeah, and the reflective surface of the stone . . . .

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PM For the Commemorative, the winning design would have to include the text passages we had specified. I had a run-in with an art consultant in Boston who said we’d never get big-name artists to buy into the design competition because of the requirements. JS

You were specifying that it had to include Kerouac’s words, cut into stone . . . .

PM Not cut into stone. And we didn’t rule out figurative work. One artist proposed a Stations of the Cross-type sequence with episodes from Kerouac’s life. The challenge for artists was to display the text. We had proposals for steel and bronze artworks. To the art consultant, I said, “That’s our vision, the words must be there.” That’s what I presented to the commissioners. I had been to Salinas, California, to see the John Steinbeck Library with the Steinbeck bronze figure out front. Another general on a horse, in a way. I was convinced that a word-based piece was the way to go. A portrait in language. When he saw the finished artwork in Lowell, poet Michael McClure said it was “subversive” to have that kind of writing in stone. JS

And how do you think it’s played out?

PM Most people have come around to the position that this is a good solution. With all the words and Ben Woitena’s mandala design for the granite panels, steel-and-stone benches, and paved plaza, the site is aesthetically coherent. Woitena greatly increased the number of words. We had emphasized the “Lowell books” because we were a historical agency. We wanted the Commemorative to reflect the Lowell side of Kerouac, which had been neglected. It was always On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and you didn’t hear much about Maggie Cassidy and Doctor Sax. The passages from the Lowell books are social history of the twentieth century. Woitena’s text selections enhance the experience, however, adding dreams, scriptures, blues choruses, writing that’s metaphysical and spiritual. JS It was a wise move to put the emphasis on his words versus how he looked, because if there had been a statue people would come by and look at it and say, Oh, so that’s Jack Kerouac, but it wouldn’t tell you much about him. PM The Commemorative is an antidote to the cult of personality that damaged Kerouac. Fame was not a good thing for him. With this approach, we say to people, Look at the words, and then make up your mind. One problem in Lowell in past years had been too many people too quickly judging Jack Kerouac and having not read a word of his. Media people would drop into Lowell, stop at a barber shop, and ask the first person, “Did you ever hear of Jack Kerouac?” and the person might say, “No,” or they’d run into somebody on the sidewalk who’d say, “Oh yeah, he was a drunk.” But reporters usually failed to ask, “Have you read a book by Kerouac?” JS I often heard that when I walked around his old neighborhoods with my camera and tripod, back in the early ‘90s, even after the Commemorative. “Why do you want to make a big deal out of that drunk?” The Lowell Review

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The Jack Kerouac Commemorative by Ben Woitena (1988), Lowell, Mass. Cover illustration, Bell Atlantic Yellow Pages, Lowell Area with White Pages, Nov. 1997 – Oct. 1998.

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JS How do you judge the success of the Commemorative? What criteria do you use to tell if it’s been a successful installation? PM One question is, Has it taken its place in the life of the community? The answer is yes. It’s been integrated into the annual Kerouac festival. It appears in promotional materials about the city. JS Didn’t you tell me that it’s even been used for the cover of the Lowell area phone book? PM [Reaching for the phone book] Yeah, right here—the 1997-98 phone book has the Kerouac Commemorative on the cover. JS I know Lowell High School kids go to the Commemorative. I asked one player on the football team if he knew who Jack was. He said, “Kerouac? Oh yeah, that poet guy.” PM There’s an elective course in the high school English department called “Lowell Writers” which covers Kerouac. Brian Foye takes his classes there when he teaches Kerouac at Middlesex Community College. It’s not unusual to see somebody reading the passages. JS

I’ve bumped into people from England there, from Sweden . . . .

PM The Commemorative is showing up in books. It’s in the new Fred McDarrah photo book, the last picture in his Beat retrospective. Sean O’Connell is complimentary in his Imagining Boston literary overview of the area. It’s in regional guidebooks. That people are going there is encouraging. I see people filming and making photos. Every day someone goes there. Lowell, Massachusetts June 29, 1998

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Contributors

Sarah Alcott Anderson’s first collection of poetry, We Hold On To What We Can, was published in 2021. Her work has appeared in North American Review and Raleigh Review. A high school English teacher for eighteen years, she lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, with her husband and two children, where they run The Word Barn, a space for literary and musical events. Kathleen Aponick is a former teacher and textbook editor. Her poetry books include The Descendant’s Notebook, Bright Realm, The Port and Near the River’s Edge. With Paul Marion and Jane Brox, she co-edited Merrimack: A Poetry Anthology. Her poems have been in Poetry East, Notre Dame Review, and Potomac Review. She lives in Andover, Mass., with her husband, Tony. Born in Lowell, Mass., Susan April grew up in the Highlands neighborhood and later in the Collinsville section of Dracut nearby. Recent work has appeared in A Tether to This World: Stories and Poems About Recovery and When Home is Not Safe. Her essay in this issue of TLR, “Another Turn,” won the Shepherd University Common Reading Program essay contest in 2021. For many years, Alfred Bouchard has lived in Lowell with his wife, the painter Lieby Miedema. His book The Fogg features a probing sequence of poems written in response to artworks in the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, along with other work dealing with the relations between men and women, existential questions that arise on the street, and dreamscapes that beg meaning. Paul Brouillette is an architect living in Somerville, Mass. His interests include American literature, the design and impact of public monuments, and travels in the desert Southwest. His previous essays appeared in French Class: French Canadian-American Writings on Identity, Culture, and Place. Patricia Cantwell has taught drama and produced and presented a daily radio program. After twenty years as a lawyer, she sold her solicitor’s practice to concentrate on writing. In 2016, she won the “Emerging Poet” award at Carrick-on-Suir Writers Weekend while two of her poems were short-listed for the prestigious Bridport Prize, UK. Her poems have appeared in local collections.

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Sean Casey was born in Lowell a few days before a gnarly nor’easter. His stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Massachusetts Review, and The Lifted Brow. He is an MLS candidate at Simmons University and lives in Easthampton, Mass. Ann Fox Chandonnet grew up in Dracut, Mass., and attended (what was then) Lowell State College. Her new and selected poems, The Shape of Wind on Water, will be published in 2022. Previous poetry collections include Auras, Tendrils, and Ptarmigan Valley. Her latest children’s book is Baby Abe: A Lullaby for Lincoln, which takes the form of a poem. She lives in Missouri. Charles Coe is the author of All Sins Forgiven: Poems for My Parents, Picnic on the Moon, and Memento Mori. He was selected as a Boston Literary Light by the Associates of the Boston Public Library and is a former artist fellow at the St. Botolph Club of Boston. He has been poet-in-residence at Wheaton College and is an adjunct professor of English at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island and Bay Path University, where he teaches in the MFA programs. Billy Collins is the author of twelve collections of poetry including The Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Sailing Alone Around the Room, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. A former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Collins served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2001, Collins told The Paris Review: “Both of my parents were born in 1901 and both lived into their nineties, the two of them just about straddling the century. My father was from a large Irish family from Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town, incidentally Kerouac’s birthplace and the site of his first novel. I’ve never been to Lowell, but I was just invited by an editor of a magazine to go up there and write about my father and look at the Jack Kerouac place. I have a poem called ‘Lowell,’ which is about the coincidence of my father being born in the same town as Jack Kerouac.” Pierre V. Comtois, who grew up in Lowell, is the prolific author of Marvel Comics in the 1960s: An Issue-by-Issue Field Guide to a Pop Culture Phenomenon and works of science fiction, horror, and history, as well as a young-adult novel, Sometimes a Warm Rain Falls. He has edited and produced twenty-three issues of Fungi: A Magazine of Fantasy and Weird Fiction. He is the subject of Dick Howe, Jr.’s interview in this issue. David Daniel is the author of more than a dozen books, including White Rabbit, a novel set in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967, and four entries in the prize-winning Alex Rasmussen mystery series. His most recent book is Inflections & Innuendos, a collection of flash fiction. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Dave DeInnocentis has lived in the Merrimack Valley for five decades. A youthful enthusiasm for a certain native son of Lowell led to eighty-two drives and hitchhikes across country horizontally, east to west, and countless more vertically. And counting . . . .

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Joseph Donahue’s most recent volumes of poetry are Wind Maps I-VII and The Disappearance of Fate. He is the co-translator of First Mountain, by Zhang Er. With Edward Foster he edited The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry, 1970-2000. Two volumes of his ongoing poetic sequence, Terra Lucida, are forthcoming, and a collection of haiku-inspired poetic suites, Infinite Criteria, is due this year. Catherine Drea is a contemplative photographer and writer in rural County Waterford, Ireland. Her blog Foxglove Lane, www.foxglovelane.com, has won four awards in photography in the Irish Blog Awards. After working in the Waterford Institute of Technology for ten years, she trained as an Integrative Psychotherapist and co-founded Framework, a community support organisation, NGO, and charity. Janet Egan is the author of Content for a Creative Revolution, a chronicle of Kerouac activities in Lowell over the years. A writer and photographer, her work is inspired by the rich literary tradition of the Merrimack Valley, nature, and baseball. She has been a steady presence at the Untitled Open Mic at Brew’d Awakening Coffeehaus in Lowell. She lives in North Andover, Mass. Sheila Eppolito of Chelmsford, Mass., has worked in writing and public relations roles in corporate and educational settings and has published three plays, The MOMologues, MOMologues 2: Off to School, and MOMologues3: The Final Push. Kevin Gallagher lives in Greater Boston. His poem in this issue of TLR will appear in his poetry collection The Wild Goose, forthcoming in 2022. His previous books are And Yet it Moves, Radio Plays, and Loom. He edits spoKe, a Boston-based annual of poetry and poetics. Charles Gargiulo grew up in Lowell public housing, joined the Army, went to UMass Lowell on the GI Bill, and graduated summa cum laude in sociology. His memoir about growing up in Lowell’s Little Canada just before most of the neighborhood was demolished is forthcoming. His work has been in Merrimack Valley Magazine and Résonance, a journal about Franco-American culture at UMaine, Orono. Bob Hodge is the author of Tales of the Times: A Runner’s Story, about his youth in Lowell and his life in athletics. Hodge finished third in the 1979 Boston Marathon and was a member of the United States Track and Field and Cross Country teams in 1982 and 1987. He is the library director in Berlin, Mass. Co-editor of TLR Richard P. Howe, Jr., created RichardHowe.com, a hyperlocal blog about Lowell that has become a broader platform for ideas and creative writing. His books include a history of veterans’ organizations in Lowell, the photo-documentary Legendary Locals of Lowell, and History as It Happens: Citizen Bloggers in Lowell, Mass., which he coedited with Paul Marion. He lives in Lowell, where he is the Register of Deeds of Northern Middlesex County, an elected position. The Lowell Review

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Moira Linehan is the author of four collections of poetry, If No Moon, Incarnate Grace, both named Honor Books in the Massachusetts Book Awards, Toward, and & Company. She has been featured in Trasna, which showcases Irish/Irish-American writing at RichardHowe.com The author of Ocean Drinker: New & Selected Poems, Carl Little has been featured in Maine Sunday Telegram’s “Deep Water” series and “Poems from Here” on Maine Public Radio, as well as in 3 Nations Anthology: Native, Canadian, & New England Writers and Local News: Poetry About Small Towns. In 2021, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation awarded him a Lifetime Achievement Award for his art writing. El Habib Louai is a Moroccan Amazigh poet, musician, and high school teacher of English. He has a doctorate in English studies with a focus on the Beat Generation. He studied creative writing at the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Colorado. His articles, poems, and translations of the Beat Poets have appeared widely, including in America America: An Anthology of Beat Poetry in Arabic. He contributed with Arabic translations to Seven Countries: An Anthology Against Trump’s Ban. His books in English are Mrs. Jones Will Now Know: Poems of a Desperate Rebel and Rotten Wounds Embalmed with Tar, a finalist for the 2020 Sillerman Prize for African Poetry. Photographer Greg Marion’s images of Lowell have been described as “so stunning they look like paintings.” His work has been exhibited at the Lowell Folk Festival and other city venues. Paul Marion, co-editor of TLR, is the author of Lockdown Letters & Other Poems, Union River, and Mill Power, the story of Lowell’s modern revival. He is the editor of Jack Kerouac’s early writing, Atop an Underwood. Recent work has appeared in Café Review, PoetsReadingtheNews.com, and So It Goes, the journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. With his wife, Rosemary Noon, he lives in Amesbury, Mass. Lowell artist and art educator Richard Marion has been active in Lowell’s cultural life since his student days at Mass College of Art and Chicago School of Design. His Gallery 21 anchored the contemporary art scene through the 1970s. His work is available at RichardMarion.net Elise Martin lives in Lowell with her husband, Brian, and their basset pup Maisie. She was Dean of Assessment at Middlesex Community College and prior to that a project manager at Education Development Center in Newton, Mass. In her years as an administrator, she said she was an aspiring writer without enough time. Now, with more time, she’s writing. Mike McCormick grew up in Haverhill, Mass., where he played high school football against Lowell in 1969 and 1970. He moved to Alaska following college graduation from UMass, Amherst. He has worked as an educator, concert promoter, and newspaper columnist. 174

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Neil Miller of Somerville, Mass., was news editor of the Gay Community News, the first weekly gay and lesbian newspaper in the U.S., from 1975 to 1978, and a writer at the Boston Phoenix in the 1980s. Two of his books won Lambda Literary Awards, including In Search of Gay America. His book Kartchner Caverns, about the discovery of limestone caves, won the 2009 Arizona Book Award. In 2010, he published Banned in Boston, documenting 100 years of censorship in the city. Helena Minton’s poem in this issue, “Daily Walk in the Quarter,” is from the series “Undeterred: Poems on the Life and Paintings of Berthe Morisot, 1849-1895,” in Thinking of the Anhinga: New and Selected Poems, which is due in 2022. Her chapbook The Raincoat Colors was published in 2017. She is a former librarian and lives in Andover, Mass. Amina Mohammed of Worcester, Mass., is a student at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She is the last of four children of immigrant parents Amuda Issifu and the late Johnette B. Dennis. Her parents sacrificed their all to make sure that she and her siblings had a better future, she says. The first Youth Poet Laureate of Worcester, and first person to hold this title in Massachusetts, she served from January 2020 through December 2021. A retired school psychologist, Carlo Morrissey is an adjunct faculty member at Quinsigamond Community College in Massachusetts. His writing interests include longer fiction and poetry. He has two novels, If You See Your Father, Shoot Him and Lavender Skies. Dan Murphy teaches at Boston University. He was recently Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. A past Robert Pinsky Global Fellow at Boston University and a Grace Abernathy Scholar at Emory University, his work has appeared in Sugar House Review, The Summerset Review, The Adirondack Review, and Panhandler Magazine. Joylyn Ndungu was born in Kenya and migrated to the U.S. with her family for unity and a better life, she says. She didn’t always love writing, but discovered this talent when she realized she couldn’t stop. A member of Lowell High School’s Class of 2022, she won the annual Jack Kerouac Student Poetry and Prose Contest in 2021. She was interested in entering the contest in her freshman year, but didn’t have the courage until her senior year, she explains. Although she has written countless poems, she hopes to one day be a bestselling author and impact literature and the many lives that will come across her work. Former broadcaster and journalist Dairena Ní Chinnéid is a bilingual poet from Ireland who has published eleven collections, the most recent being Tairseach by Éabhlóid. Her books include Deleted, her first collection in English; Fé Gheasa: Spellbound; and Cloithear Aistear Anama, Coiscéim. Among her awards is a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship. She was Irish Language Writer-in-Residence for Dublin City University in 2017-2018. She has performed her poetry at events in Ireland, Europe, and the U.S. The Lowell Review

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Bill O’Connell has lived in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts between the Connecticut River and Quabbin Reservoir since 1984. A retired social worker, he teaches literature and writing at Greenfield Community College and runs a small handyman business. His books are Sakonnet Point, On The Map To Your Life, and When We Were All Still Alive. Christine O’Connor is completing a collection of literary-themed essays, as well as a memoir about her grandmother and the Titanic. A former board member of the Henry David Thoreau Society, she recently presented a paper at its Annual Gathering: “In a Lake of Rainbow Light: Where Thoreau and the Irish Meet.” She is chief legal counsel for the City of Lowell. Stephen O’Connor of Lowell is the author the novels The Spy in the City of Books, The Witch at Rivermouth, and This is No Time to Quit Drinking, as well as the short story collection Smokestack Lightning, now in its third printing. A new collection of stories is due in 2022. Mark Pawlak is the author of nine poetry collections and the editor of six anthologies. His latest book is My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov, a memoir. His work has been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, and Polish. Chath pierSath is a farmer in Bolton, Mass., author of three books, and a self-taught painter who has shown his work in Paris and Phnom Penh. His book On Earth Beneath Sky was named a Must-Read title in the Massachusetts Book Awards for 2020. He has poems forthcoming in Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. He says, “There are many ways to be human, as there are many ways to be Cambodian.” Emilie-Noelle Provost is a writer, magazine editor, avid hiker, and the author of the middle-grade novel The Blue Bottle. A longtime Lowell resident, she lives with her husband, daughter, three long-haired rescue cats, and a well-worn Dyson vacuum cleaner. Her second novel, The River Is Everywhere, the coming-of-age story of a Franco-American teenager, is due in 2023. Joan Ratcliffe grew up in Dracut, Mass., and lived in Lowell for many years, before going on the road to Las Vegas, and landing later in Providence, Rhode Island, where she founded Newspeak bookstore, Paranoia Magazine, and Huntergatheress Journal. Her stories and articles have appeared in under the pseudonym Joan d’Arc. She has a new short story collection, Friends of Apis Radio: Fabulist Fiction Tales. She lives in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. Tom Sexton is the author of many collections of poetry including Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems and Li Bai Rides a Celestial Dolphin Home. He is a former Poet Laureate of Alaska. Born in Lowell, Tom graduated from Lowell High School, where he is a Distinguished Alumnus.

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Born in Liverpool, England, in 1953, Malcolm Sharps studied sociology before entering the rare postage stamp trade in London. After disillusionment with business life in the capital, he has lived mostly outside England in France, Lithuania, Estonia, and Hungary. His short stories and articles are often based on places he has lived and interests in music, world literature, and social and cultural issues. He taught English as a foreign language for twenty-five years, and now translates Hungarian texts on classical music. Meg Smith is a writer, journalist, dancer and events producer living in Lowell. Her poetry and fiction have recently appeared in The Cafe Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Raven Cage, and Dark Moon Digest. She is author of five poetry books and a short fiction collection, The Plague Confessor. Michael Steffen’s fourth book is Blood Narrative. New work has appeared, or will appear soon, in Rogue Agent, Panoply, and the Red Fern Review. He lives in Buffalo, N.Y. John Struloeff grew up in the high rainforest of northwest Oregon. He teaches English and directs the creative writing program at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. He is the author of The Man I Was Supposed to Be and The Work of a Genius, a life of Albert Einstein in poetry. His poems and fiction have appeared in The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA, and Prairie Schooner. He lives in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. John Suiter is a writer and photographer in Chicago. From 1975 to 2005, he lived in Cambridge and Boston, Mass., and often visited Lowell, photographing Kerouac locales. He is the author of Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades. David R. Surette is the author of six collections of poetry including Stable, which was named an Honor Book in the 2016 Massachusetts Book Awards. His poem “Kennedy Compound, Hyannis Port” has been featured in From the Farther Shore: Discovering Cape Cod & the Islands Through Poetry. He lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian-American writer and critic. He is the author of three fulllength poetry collections and a chapbook. His work has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, Chiron Review, Massachusetts Review, and Atticus Review. He writes for Cultural Daily. Tuon is Associate Professor of English at Union College, in Schenectady, N.Y. Peuo Tuy is a spoken word poet, creative workshop instructor, and community organizer. Her poetry collection Khmer Girl is inspired by the traumas of her family escaping the killing fields of Cambodia and enduring the inequities of life as immigrants in America. A founder of the Lowell-based Cambodian American Literary Arts Association, she has appeared at Harvard Law School, Miami Book Fair, Minnesota Fringe Festival, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and Harlem Book Fair. Simon Warner is Visiting Research Fellow in Popular Music Studies at the University of Leeds in the UK. He is the author of Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock The Lowell Review

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Culture and co-editor, with Jim Sampas, of Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack. In 2021, he launched the web newsletter Rock and the Beat Generation. Nature, spirit of place, and ecological concern have been themes in Grace Wells’ writing since her debut children’s novel Gyrfalcon, which won the Eilís Dillon Best Newcomer Award. Her first poetry collection, When God has been Called Away to Greater Things, won the Rupert and Eithne Strong Best First Collection Award. With her second collection, Fur, she moved more deeply into eco-poetics and eco-feminism. Her poems are sometimes accompanied by a sequence of eco-poetry-films, Wells’ Home Movies. She lives on the west coast of Ireland. Photographer and filmmaker Robert W. Whitaker, III, grew up on the South Shore of Boston. Following service in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, he attended Bridgewater State College. He was an award-winning photographer for the Lowell Sun for many years. Fred Woods has lived in Cambridge, Seattle, and New Mexico, and has practiced law, politics, and filmmaking. Retired, he bikes, sails, poetizes, and recounts tales from the first Tsongas for Congress campaign, a victory for Paul E. Tsongas of Lowell.

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T H ELOW ELLR E V IE W.C O M

15 USD / 18 CAD / 13.5 EUR / 11 GBP

Sarah Alcott Anderson Kathleen Aponick Susan April Alfred Bouchard Paul Brouillette Patricia Cantwell Sean Casey Ann Fox Chandonnet Charles Coe Billy Collins Pierre V. Comtois David Daniel Dave DeInnocentis Joseph Donahue Catherine Drea Janet Egan Sheila Eppolito Kevin Gallagher Charles Gargiulo Bob Hodge Richard P. Howe, Jr. Moira Linehan Carl Little El Habib Louai Greg Marion Paul Marion Richard Marion Elise Martin

Mike McCormick Neil Miller Helena Minton Amina Mohammed Carlo Morrissey Dan Murphy Joylyn Ndungu Dairena Ní Chinnéide Bill O’Connell Christine O’Connor Stephen O’Connor Mark Pawlak Chath pierSath Emilie-Noelle Provost Joan Ratcliffe Tom Sexton Malcolm Sharps Meg Smith Michael Steffen John Struloeff John Suiter David R. Surette Bunkong Tuon Peuo Tuy Simon Warner Grace Wells Robert W. Whitaker, III Fred Woods

The Lowell Review 2022

Articles inside

John Suiter & Paul Marion Commemorating Kerouac: An Interview (1998

Contributors

Dave DeInnocentis Marin County Satori

Joylyn Ndungu Equilibrium

Music Passions as Writer’s Centenary Is Reached

El Habib Louai Two Poems

Janet Egan Saturday Morning, Reading ‘Howl’

Billy Collins Lowell, Mass

Mike McCormick Stumbling Upon The Town and the City

Emilie-Noelle Provost The Standing Approach

Sean Casey Tom Brady

Fred Woods The Basketball Is Round

Patricia Cantwell Kintsugi (A Radio Drama

Michael Steffen Arturo Gets Up

Charles Gargiulo Marvelous Marvin Hagler and the Godfather

David R. Surette Favors: A Novel (an excerpt

Neil Miller How a Kid from the East Coast Became a Diamondbacks Fan

Sarah Alcott Anderson Caution

Carl Little A Hiker I Know

Bob Hodge Our Visit with Bernd

David Daniel Remembering a Friendship: Robert W. Whitaker, III (Nov. 9, 1950 – Sept. 16, 2019

Ann Fox Chandonnet A Postcard from Sandburg’s Cellar

Sheila Eppolito Hearing Things Differently

Joan Ratcliffe The Incessant

John Struloeff The Work of a Genius

Meg Smith Ducks in Heaven

Susan April Another Turn

Crowdsourcing the Storm Boards

Stephen O’Connor A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day

El Habib Louai Growing on a Hog Farm on the Outskirts of Casablanca

Alfred Bouchard Patched Together in the Manner of Dreams

Dairena Ní Chinnéide Filleadh ón Aonach / Coming Home from the Fair

Bill O’Connell Emily on the Moon

Dan Murphy Two Poems

Peuo Tuy Saffron Robe

Carlo Morrissey The Boulevard, July 1962

Bunkong Tuon Always There Was Rice

Moira Linehan Something Has Been Lost

Grace Wells Curlew

Chath pierSath The Rose of Battambang

Richard P. Howe, Jr. Protecting the Capitol: 1861 & 2021

Paul Brouillette A Pilgrimage to Selma and Montgomery

Helena Minton Daily Walk in the Quarter

Richard P. Howe, Jr. Interview with Pierre V. Comtois

Amina Mohammed Change

Catherine Drea Beginning Again

Living Deliberately

Elise Martin An Abundance of Flags

Mark Pawlak New Normal

Malcolm Sharps The Mask of Sorrow, a Tragic Face Revealed

Kathleen Aponick Omen

Charles Coe Twenty-Two Staples