The Lowell Review 2021

2021

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editors

Richard P. Howe, Jr. Paul Marion

2021 Lowell, Massachusetts

2021

Copyright © 2021

by The Lowell Review Contributors retain rights to their work following publication in The Lowell Review.

No part of this magazine may be reproduced without permission from the editors of The Lowell Review except for brief quotations in critical articles and media reports.

Published in the United States of America The short stories in The Lowell Review are works of fiction.

Incidents, dialogue, and characters are imaginative products of the authors and not to be construed as factual.

The Lowell Review

editors Richard P. Howe, Jr. Paul Marion art direction & design Joey Marion cover art & gallery Chath pierSath Cover drawing: Charley Todd, ink on paper, 11 x 14, 2021.

The Lowell Review is an annual publication with content from the RichardHowe.com blog in Lowell, Mass.,as well as submitted and curated material.

To view this issue online or to order a hard copy, visit TheLowellReview.com Please send correspondence and manuscripts for consideration (July through October) to TheLowellReview@gmail.com

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Contents Mission..................................................................................................................................1 Introduction......................................................................................................................... 3

THE V IRUS

Emily Ferrara ‘ We Are Really in This Now’............................................................................ 9 Paul Hudon Diary in the Time of Coronavirus..................................................................... 10 Marie Sweeney Remembering my Illness-Caused Separation, a Semi-Social Distancing...... 18 Fred Faust The Coronavirus Wedding..................................................................................21 John Wooding The Ladies of Central Sterile Supply............................................................. 23 Doug Sparks Isolation Scenes............................................................................................. 26 Richard P. Howe, Jr. Pandemic Journal............................................................................... 28

J USTICE

Jacquelyn Malone How I Came to Have an Autographed Photo of John Lewis...................... 33 Jacquelyn Malone Holes in the River................................................................................... 35 Lianna Kushi When I Heard John Lewis Speak.................................................................... 37 Chris Wilkinson Shout Out to All the Dads......................................................................... 39 Anthony Nganga Equality and Justice: What Can We Do?...................................................40 Juliet Haines Mofford When the Most Famous Woman in America Lived in the Merrimack Valley.... 42 Tooch Van Revenge or Really?............................................................................................ 45 Chath pierSath Trees of Bolton........................................................................................... 46 Richard P. Howe, Jr. Germany: Reconciling with the Past....................................................48

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R EFLECTIONS (I)

David Daniel The Waitresses of America............................................................................. 53 Jack McDonough Did Someone Say ‘Coffee’?...................................................................... 56 Charles Nikitopoulos Tomatoes, Tea, and Beer.................................................................. 58 Linda Hoffman Spring Nettles: Gifts from the Great Mother............................................... 59 Susan April Foliage.............................................................................................................61 Tom Sexton Glacier............................................................................................................ 67 Henri Marchand Home for the Holidays: Cowboy Christmas............................................... 68

PEOPLE

Stephen O’Connor Jay Pendergast: A Singular Man........................................................... 75 Dana White For Louise Glück, Poetry Was Survival.............................................................80 James Provencher Dancing with Bette Davis’s Daughter..................................................... 82 Michael Casey For John Dolan........................................................................................... 89 Louise Peloquin Bébé and Me............................................................................................90 Nancye Tuttle Bon Appetit!, Julia....................................................................................... 95 Frank Wagner Meeting Patti Smith in Texas, c. 1978........................................................... 98 Paul Marion Dick Van Dyke.............................................................................................. 103

GALLERY R EFLECTIONS (II)

Marie Louise St. Onge Sweetland Gardens 1969............................................................... 117 Joe Blair Catamount.......................................................................................................... 119 George Chigas Christos Anesti!.........................................................................................122 Kathleen Aponick Postcards from Haggett’s Pond............................................................ 129 Dave Robinson The New Old New England Halloween Blues............................................. 130 David Daniel Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number.....................................................................132 William Reed Huntington The Cold Meteorite................................................................. 136 Fred Woods Pecos Mission, New Mexico 1621, 1680..........................................................137 Charles Gargiulo Farewell, Little Canada: An Excerpt....................................................... 139

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SPORTS

Christine O’Connor The Art of Getting Home: Bart Giamatti and the 1952 Saint Patrick’s Girls Softball Team.............................................................................................................147 Geoffrey Douglas The ’69 Mets: A Time and Season to Remember.................................... 150 Prudence Brighton Suzanne Dion: She Loved the Game................................................... 154 Dave Perry Football in Chelmsford................................................................................... 156

TR ASNA

Margaret O’Brien Pasteur and Uncle Paddy....................................................................... 161 Nessa O’Mahony The Belated Discovery of a Role Model................................................... 164 Julie Ward Large Bottles and Sweet Butter Pastry...............................................................167 Clare Mulvany Towards a Wild Ecology of Being............................................................... 170 Jean O’Brien Rupture........................................................................................................173 Joe Whelan The Sheep Shearers.........................................................................................174 Billy Fenton Droichead na nDeoir......................................................................................176

Contributors.....................................................................................................................179

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Mission

The Lowell Review brings together writers and readers in the Merrimack River watershed of eastern New England with people near and far 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 new publication springs from the RichardHowe.com blog (est. 2007), 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.

An annual magazine, each issue will be available online and on-demand for a printed copy. To submit work for consideration for future issues, please contact TheLowellReview@gmail.com The Lowell Review

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The Lowell Review

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Introduction The gaze of the literary world will focus on Lowell next year for the centennial of Jack Kerouac’s birth, which he in effect describes in his novel Doctor Sax (1959).

Born on Lupine Road in the Centralville neighborhood on the north side of the Merrimack River on March 12, 1922, Kerouac lived here through high school, remained connected, and visited often, even returning to live for a short time in the 1960s. When he was a teenager imagining he might write books, Kerouac could pick up copies of the literary journal Alentour: A National Magazine of New Poetry, which was published in Lowell by poet Michael Largay and friends from 1935 to 1943.

Just as Kerouac is not the only notable writer to emerge from Lowell, neither is Alentour the only literary magazine born in the city. Nearly a century before Kerouac’s birth, The Lowell Offering, “a repository of original articles written exclusively by females actively employed in the mills” had hundreds of subscribers across New England and the United States from 1840 to 1845. In recent times, the student Literary Society of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, adopted the name The Offering for its annual literary magazine with work by campus contributors. In between, we had The New Lowell Offering for a short while in the 1970s, led by women faculty and librarians at the university.

Lowell’s late-twentieth century renaissance proved fertile ground for literary journals. In the 1990s, UMass Lowell graduates Judith DickermanNelson and Rita Rouvalis launched The The Lowell Review

Lowell Review. Judith had edited The Lowell Pearl on campus. In 1989, writer and faculty member Karen Propp of thenULowell brought back The Lowell Offering for one issue linked to the school’s Summer Writing Program.

With the advent of broad use of the internet, The Bridge Review: Merrimack Valley Culture (1997-2002) emerged from UMass Lowell Psychology Department— professors Charles Nikitopoulos and David Landrigan with then-graduate student Paul Marion. With a grant from the Building Communities Through Culture program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, they produced an online bioregional journal with writing, visual art, music, and videos.

Jim Dyment’s Vyu Magazine premiered in October 1999 as a glossy quarterly publication that for the next decade promoted local music, photography, poetry, exhibits, and “anything to do with art.”

Michael Casey, a graduate of Lowell High School and Lowell Technological Institute (now UMass Lowell) and an award-winning poet, issued The Acre pamphlet series in the early 2000s. Lowell’s embrace of the “creative economy” in the twenty-first century included the launch of Renovation Journal, edited by Kate Hanson Foster and Dennis Ludvino, which appeared each year from 2004 to 2008.

Poet Meg Smith published Red Eft, an occasional journal of fantasy, horror, and speculative literature, and Stephan Anstey published Shakespeare’s Monkey Revue. The Middlesex Community College student 3

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literary magazine is The Dead River Review, based in the English Department, while Lowell High School has its own literary magazine.

In 2011, the Cultural Organization of Lowell, the city’s cultural affairs office (led by LZ Nunn at the time), published Young Angel Midnight: An Emerging Generation in the Arts in Lowell, edited by Derek Fenner and Ryan Gallagher, with writing, visual art, reports on art spaces, and an accompanying mixtape produced by musician D-Tension. The state cultural council staff said no other community in Massachusetts had ever done anything like this for its young creatives.

There were other short-lived ‘zines, tabloids, graphic broadsides and sheets of creative writing as well as online sites.

Independent book publishers Bootstrap Press, the Lowell Historical Society, and Loom Press provide books of interest to local and national readers. Increasingly, writers use digital publishing and marketing to release and sell their books.

Poet William Carlos Williams believed that the small literary magazine plays an outsized role in American culture: “ The little magazine is something I have always fostered; for without it, I myself would have been early silenced. To me it is one magazine, not several. It is a continuous magazine, the only one I know with an absolute freedom of editorial policy and a succession of proprietorships that follows a democratic rule. There is absolutely no dominating policy permitting anyone to dictate anything. When it is in any way successful it is because it fills a need in someone’s mind to keep going. When it dies, someone else 4

takes it up in some other part of the country—quite by accident— out of a desire to get the writing down on paper.”

The success of Lowell’s creative economy strategy has been most evident in the visual arts. Western Avenue Studios in the old Massachusetts Mohair Plush Company mill along the Pawtucket Canal may be the largest concentration of visual artists east of the Mississippi River. The eclectic shops of Mill No. 5 on Jackson Street draw crowds that validate the retail strategies urged by New Urbanists.

Downtown has an enviable lineup including the Whistler House Museum of Art, the New England Quilt Museum, Brush Art Gallery & Studios, Gallery Z, Gates Block Studios, the Arts League of Lowell, and the Ayer Lofts Gallery.

Music and the performing arts are offered at the arena-sized Tsongas Center at UMass Lowell, Lowell Memorial Auditorium, Merrimack Repertory Theatre (MRT), and in intimate settings like the Olympia restaurant’s Zorba Room, Luna Theater, the Old Court pub, and Warp & Weft restaurant. The Lowell Folk Festival and Lowell Summer Music Series bring first-rate musical acts to outdoor venues.

MRT leaders are right to remind us that literature is the basis of theater. Somebody wrote the play. And somebody else wrote the words for a song.

There’s no writers’ center with workshops, readings, talks, films. But, two bookstores are opening soon in downtown Lowell.

The National Park Service has gift shops with books at the Visitor Center downtown and the Boott Cotton Mills Museum. UMass Lowell and Middlesex Community College have campus stores, which emphasize course books. Mill No. 5 has a shop for rare and used books, The Lowell Review

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Serpentine.

The Pollard Memorial Library presents author talks and sponsors book clubs; the Moses Greeley Parker Lecture Series features authors in its annual lineup; writers and singers enliven the annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! festival; UMass Lowell and Middlesex Community College create and share literature; Brew’d Awakening Coffeehaus welcomes spokenword artists; and other organizations chip in.

But compared to the robust visual arts and music scenes, literary life in Lowell seems lacking in opportunities to promote and encounter local and visiting writers and poets. There’s nothing on the scale of the Brush Art Gallery & Studios or Western Ave. Studios for writers, a locale with every day visibility.

This gap is unfortunate because Lowell has fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, playwrights, historians, and scholars in the arts, humanities, and sciences who publish.

In late 2018 and early 2019, Paul Marion wrote and posted on RichardHowe.com profiles of some two dozen active Lowellconnected writers and poets: Susan April, Jay Atkinson, Michael Casey, David Daniel, Anthony Febo, Emily Ferrara, Kate Hanson Foster, Matt Kraunelis, Jacquelyn Malone, Matt W. Miller, Helena Minton, David Moloney, Jack Neary, Stephen O’Connor, Resi Polixa, Emilie-Noelle Provost, David Robinson, Kassie Dickinson Rubico, Tom Sexton, Brian Simoneau, Meg Smith, and Sarah Sousa.

And there are more. Novels, memoirs, historical works, and poetry keep coming from David McKean, Bob Hodge, Chath pierSath, Princess Moon, Michael Boudreau, Masada Jones, A. G. Reidy, Jacqueline Cayer Nelson McDonald, Matt Fitzpatrick, and T. R. Monaghan (Theresa Batalogianis). For almost twenty years,

author Andre Dubus III has anchored the creative writing courses at UMass Lowell while doing his own recent work: Townie, Dirty Love, and Gone So Long.

Gaining steam in the Lowell writing lane is the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association, which promotes emerging and established writers of the Cambodian diaspora. They envision a network of writers active in publishing and storytelling with an intercultural, intergenerational approach. The Free Soil Arts Collective seeks to cultivate in the region a more diverse arts community and believes the narratives of marginalized peoples must be explored to ensure everyone is fairly valued. They quote the late John Lewis: “The movement without storytelling is like a bird without wings.”

They are creating more opportunities for people of color Paul’s amalgamation of literary talent made a deep impression on me and coincided with my own reassessment of the mission of the blog that bears my name.

Launched in 2007 to cover Lowell history and politics, RichardHowe.com became mandatory reading for anyone interested in city politics. That mission reached peak intensity in 2017 with the bitter fight over the location of a new Lowell High School.

People have always been passionate about politics in Lowell, but the 2017 fight left deeper scars and was more destructive to the community than any conflict I have witnessed in my fifty years of following city affairs.

Why was that so? I believe that social media was the main reason. In that, our community reflected national and global trends. Facebook primarily, but also Twitter and others, reward extremism and coarseness and diminish reasoned conversation. While we are the ones making incendiary and hurtful utterances,

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the technology encourages it and makes it far too easy. Social media also creates a vortex that sucks in most other forms of media. Viewers and listeners are drawn to outrage like junkies in need of the next high. With media companies in the business of staying in business—higher ratings mean more money—there is no incentive to throttle down the rhetoric.

In my introduction to History as It Happens: Citizen Bloggers in Lowell, Mass.

(2017), I wrote: lay Shirky, a professor at New C York University who writes and lectures frequently on the social and economic effects of the internet, maintains that throughout history new technology has tended to become available long before society figures out how to best use it. Shirky says that is exactly the case with the internet, which was a disruptive technology that drastically changed the media landscape.

He also says that these disruptive phases of history are periods of intense experimentation. I see RichardHowe.com as an openended experiment in community communications.

With the internet having become even more disruptive since writing that, I concluded it was time to pivot away from day-to-day local politics on RichardHowe. com and take a longer, more in-depth view of the world around us. What better way to do that than to highlight the writing of the many talented individuals in our midst and others with connecting threads to the region and still others “from away” who have found the blog and contribute.

“Voices from Lowell & Beyond” replaced “Lowell Politics & History” as 6

the subtitle of the blog. Stories, essays, and poems by David Daniel, Louise Peloquin, Jerry Bisantz, Susan April, Stephen O’Connor, Joe Blair of Iowa, Chath pierSath, Tooch Van, George Chigas; Marie Louise St. Onge, Juliet Haines Mofford, and Nancye Tuttle of Maine; Frank Wagner of Texas, Malcolm Sharps of Hungary, Jack McDonough; Tom Sexton and Michael McCormick of Alaska, cartoons

by Nicholas Whitmore in England, and writers from Ireland published each Friday on our Trasna feature (edited by Christine O’Connor, Jeannie Judge, and Margaret O’Brien) have replaced weekly Lowell City Council meeting reports and bulletins on local political events.

Will this new direction of RichardHowe. com make a difference in the community conversation? I hope it will, but the whole point of an experiment is to test a hypothesis, and our experiment continues.

In the meantime, RichardHowe.com has presented a stream of words. Every day brings a fresh story, essay, or poem— and yet content on the internet is fleeting even if archived. Today’s gem is pushed down the page by the next post. Because of the success of History as It Happens, our earlier “best of the blog” book, co-editor Paul Marion and I imagined a followup. The blog’s evolution to its current content suggested that a print publication modeled on traditional literary journals is the appropriate format. When Judith Dickerman-Nelson, a co-founder of the earlier Lowell Review, gave her consent for us to bring back that title, this new publication was born.

Richard P. Howe, Jr. Lowell, Massachusetts July 2021 The Lowell Review

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The Virus

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‘ We Are Really in This Now’ e m i ly f e r r a r a

“Governor ordered statewide lockdown until April 7. Nonessential biz’s to close physical operations. We are really in this now.”

—email from a friend, 3/23/2020

At Swamp Locks Dam on the downstream side the Great Blue Heron shelters in the sluiceway fishing calmly in the churning.

In a concrete crevice, a dark-eyed junco weaves her moss & rootlet nest spurred by the deafening rush.

I cross the bridge to the basin side where stagnancy belies the urgency.

A woman hauls a grocery cart down Dutton, past The Sun & the barren American Textile History Museum.

The famished rush for take-out downtown: Fuji, Athenian, Brew’d Awakening, Life Alive, Warp & Weft, Wings Over Lowell.

Snow begins to fly, ample flakes dust the pall, & the heron, sated, settles in, as still unmoored, I reconcile with nightfall.

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Diary in the Time of Coronavirus pa u l h u d o n

March 23, 2020

This Monday, the 23rd, marks the 23rd anniversary of Midsomer Murders. It is tailor-made for binge-watching in the time of coronavirus. In terms of scripts, it’s nothing so good as Inspector Morse, but several cuts above Rosemary & Thyme. Middlebrow, then, far as Brit mystery productions go. Characters tend to be of the cut-out type, but the stories do keep moving, with a turn of events nicely paced like a fresh start. You get a re-think just when your attention starts to wander. Best part: The scenery. Midsomer is a fictional county in England where the villages have florid names. My favorite is Badgers Drift. The people live in fabulous houses: vine-covered, mullion windows, thatched roofs, exposed oak beams. Houses that would cost you four or five million (pounds or dollars). And a lot of the furniture is at least two generations old. We’re talking families, lineage. There are exceptions to this. Once or twice, I’ve watched an episode where a band of roma or some such is camped outside the village.

Friction results. Worst part: The g.d music. Somebody on that production staff has a serious jones for brass. It’s loud, incessant, irritating. The opening theme is played by a theremin.

Enough said.

Twenty-three years is not quite a record in the UK. That belongs to Doctor Who, which ran from 1963 to 1989, three years longer than MM. Here in the States, Gunsmoke ran from 1955 to 1975, three years fewer. You get bored, you could take up the mysteries of numerology, conjure with that for all of ten minutes.

A toast to Midsomer Murders, episode 126.

March 24 “I’m going home and sit in a corner where I know everybody.”—Ida Morgenstern, Rhoda’s mother

March 25 Here’s irony for you, on an epic scale: The experience of social distancing will remind us that 10

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bonding is fundamental to being human. Experience is the operative word: embodied learning.

Downright somatic training. And the scale is epic because our coronavirus experience is sure to divide time, BC from AC. Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again, again.

For thousands of years homo sapiens has experienced pandemics such as the one visited on us now. But over the last century or two we’ve progressively clarified our knowledge of how this happens. As our grip on how has improved, the why of events has been restructured.

Divine agency has been crowded out. The off-planet Minder has been left behind.

Why and how have become interchangeable, though Why is still preferred in our common speech when it’s How that really captions what we know—‘‘Why are there so many traffic accidents at this intersection?’’ ‘‘Why do giraffes have such long necks?’ We use Why as the equivalent of How does it happen that. This habit of mind throws us off the scent.

This pandemic is an opportunity for us to shift our sense of location, to rejoin the original world wide web. To survive we’ll need to get real. We need to assume a radically biological predicate. Which is how it happens that le trompeur is in the way. Le trompeur is all about self, exactly what we need to leave behind.

March 26 Well, it’s a done thing. Grocery shopping has been accomplished. Haven’t been out of the bldg. since Thursday the 12th. Two weeks exactly. First stop, Speedway, corner of Wilder and Pawtucket, taking the detour. Left onto School etc. The bridge over the Pawtucket Canal won’t be finished for another year, into 2021. Don’t expect to get there.

I do get to Speedway, five a.m. Down Wilder, to Pawtucket. Looks like Hopper was here before me. Artificial light draws the scene out of nowhere, the river just barely there. A surface, at the top. Valéry’s toit tranquille.

Half ’n hour later, 5:35, I check the time as I arrive at Sunrise Plaza, Bridge Street. People.

Jesus! People moving about. Few, not one out of ten, are wearing masks, but almost all of them wearing gloves.

I do it. Do the whole list except for my brand of coffee (Bustelo) and paper towels (nothing but twelve packs; not ready for that). Otherwise, I score.

Check-out. Trouble. After several attempts w/ my TD card, am told that payment is “declined.” I gno for a fact that there are more than enough $$ in that account. Market Basket offers to hold my cartful ($120.93 worth) while I figure out how to pay for it. I call the magic phone number on the back of the card and I’m told there’ll be a wait. It could be a long one.

Brainstorm: I drive straight down Bridge to Merrimack, bang a right at Kearney Sq. and a left onto Central, another right onto Middle and there I am at the ATM, corner of Middle and Central, where I take two hundred, and return pleased as hell with myself and pay cash for my groceries. Got milk!

Now we wait and see if I’m incubating. ...

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April 19, Patriot’s Day There is a scene in HBO’s biopic of John Adams captioned “April 19, 1775, The Aftermath of Lexington and Concord.” In it, Adams is there at the tail-end of the events of the day, and is witness to some of the carnage. After this we see him return to his farm in Braintree, slumped in the saddle, looking worn-down by the experience. Abigail comes out of the house to be with him. His voice is heavy with resignation when he says to her, “There can be no mistaking Britain’s intentions now.”

That “now” at the end of the sentence sounds like closure. British troops have been in Boston for nearly a full year, since May of ’74; the port is closed, killing the town’s economy.

Behind that is a full decade of repeated confrontations between the colonies and Parliament over the same issues of taxation and representation. “Now” all that is in the past, Adams is saying. Whatever comes next will be something else, a departure. Today is the 245th anniversary of that day, Patriots’ Day. The novel coronavirus, the pandemic, the lockdown are spreading a sense of departure among us. It’s unmistakable. Not possible to say just yet how radical that departure will be, how great the disruption, to use the current buzzword.

The patriots took another year plus to decide on independence. For sure, it took more than resignation to get there. We live in interesting times.

April 20 Another scene. This one from a film version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1945). It’s a brief bit of dialogue between Dr Armstrong (Walter Huston) and Judge Quincannon (Barry Fitzgerald), on first acquaintance. It starts at the eight-minute mark and runs for about thirty seconds: “Half my patients are sick because they’re trying to escape reality.”

“And what’s your answer?”

“I build them islands of imagined security.”

“Don’t you believe in medicine, doctor?”

“Do you believe in justice, judge?” [laughter] There’s more to the scene but that’s the sense of it, the interplay between isolation and security. What could be more relevant to our situation?

The movie takes place on an island, except for the opening where all ten guests arrive by boat. Each of them has a cover story—their “imagined security”—and each has a criminal secret that leads inevitably to a failure of imagination. This island is a trap. It offers no security. These “ten little Indians” have been lured to their no-exit location, first to admit their guilt then to atone for it. At least for them there is a cause, a crime, that accounts for their fate. The comfort of fiction, and no doubt the reason even the wildest fictions find an audience in the time of COVID-19.

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April 21 You’ve Had Your Time. The title of the second volume of Anthony Burgess’s memoirs runs through my head nearly every day.

April 22 The COVID-19 pandemic is acting as an accelerant, speeding-up issues and situations already trending before the virus began its work. And that’s sure to be ongoing. Late in March, I’m shooting around YouTube, per usual, and come across an interview broadcast just five days before in France. Paul Jorion and Gaël Giraud, two writers unknown to me, are sharing their opinions with le grand public “on the economic consequences of the epidemic.”

Giraud is a novelist eager to explain the “paradox” of fiction, that it tells Truth about our collective predicament by dramatizing incidents and events in the life of individuals. Not an original thought and only incidental to the point.

Jorion on the other hand is bang on-topic. Wikipedia tells us that he is an anthropologist and sociologist by training. “He has also written seven books on capitalist economics.” Now he has a message for us Americans, about our economic future. There won’t be much of it.

Jorion reminds us that at the end of the Second World War, the United States held 75% of the world’s economy. In 1945, all other national economies were wrecked or exhausted, in no shape to compete with the America all revved-up with the war effort. Jorion then says, “I wouldn’t be surprised—Je n’serais pas étonné—if at the end of this epidemic China is holding 75% of the world’s economy.” Nor is he in doubt how this was brought to be. “Sabotage,” he doesn’t balk at using the world. Donald Trump’s‘ “sabotage’’ of the federal government is responsible for our spectacular unpreparedness. Belgian-born Paul Jorion is 73 years old.

On the same day I watch the interview, I find a piece in The Guardian by Julian Borger, ‘’US AWOL from world stage as China tries on global leadership for size.’’ A week later, early in April, there’s the report that Chinese engineers back in February argued for the creation of a new www to rival the one dominated by American firms. This was in Geneva at a meeting of the International Telecommunications Union. When we come out the other end of this pandemic, we Americans are going to have to learn the world all over again.

April 23 Every time le trompeur lets go a major brain-fart I think, Well, he’s finally done it, this time even the laziest and stupidest among the lazy and the stupid will see what a gawdawful excuse for a human being he is. And every time, I’m disappointed. Then I think of Earl Landgrebe.

Landgrebe, a Republican, was a Member of the House from Indiana, second district. In 1972, he was reelected by a comfortable nine-point spread (54.7% v 45.3%), defeating Floyd Fithian, a professor of history at Purdue. In 1974, the outcome was reversed. Fithian took the seat by a whopping 22 percentage points (61.06 v 38.9). In between is the story of Watergate, House impeachment hearings, and Landgrebe’s foolish/heroic loyalty to Richard Nixon.

Cut to the chase. August 5, 1974, a transcript of the “smoking gun” tape has been released The Lowell Review

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proving Nixon’s collusion in the Watergate coverup. Landgrebe refuses to hear the tape or read the transcript. “I’m going to stick with my president,” he says, “even if he and I have to be taken out of this building and shot.” No one was shot. But Landgrebe did shoot himself in the foot. When the House voted to accept the Judiciary Committee’s articles of impeachment, the count was 412 to 3, Landgrebe being among the three voting no. And that is how he lost the election three months later, and how he got 39% of the votes cast in Indiana’s second district.

That’s the relevant number, 39%, the point of the Landgrebe experience. That’s the percentage approval rating Trump hovers around consistently. So today, when he says on live TV that maybe injecting household disinfectants into your lungs is a cure for the novel coronavirus, he’ll have at least one third of Americans take it in without a hiccup. 39% out of reach. They’re going to stick with their president, even if it means death.

April 24 Today, management put up handwritten signs requiring that anyone entering the building be wearing a mask; and of course that applies to us tenants as well. I’ve been following that rule on my own for almost two months. Oddly, today’s the first time I notice men doing work at the grotto [Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto at the former Franco-American School being rehabbed for residences] to be wearing masks. They’re not working on the grotto itself which looks to be done. A barrier and a sign have been put across the stairs leading to the foot of the cross.

There was a couple here yesterday doing the stations. Those masked workmen came in with their own supply of boards, wood, twelve feet long or more. These they unloaded and I don’t know what with because they did it behind the roof line of the building between them and me.

There’s still a Porta Potty looking silly and forlorn at the School St. end.

Also today, from Huffpost: “Where To Buy Face Masks For Coronavirus, And What To Look For: How to Purchase a Face Mask That Can Help You Prevent the Spread of COVID-19”

by Kristen Aiken. Definitely the Day of the Mask.

April 25 Joe Biden said today he doesn’t really care to be president. He didn’t say it in those words and he didn’t say it today—I only read about it today. But he said it, and he said it twice. “Recently, Biden told MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, that even if the Congress sent him a Medicare for All bill, he would veto it. And a week later, he confirmed that position.”

April 26 Lord Manor, where I write this, sits on a piece of real estate that was a different part of my life when it was a different sort of place. In the ‘50s, from ‘52 to ’56, I was a student at St Joseph’s High School for Boys, on Merrimack Street. Every school day during those years I walked from Gershom Avenue, where I lived, to the school, and back again. I figure this means I crossed over the Merrimack on the Moody Street bridge something like 1440 times in those 14

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four years. [5X36=180X4=740X2=1440] It was still Moody Street in those years, starting at City Hall and running clear up into Dracut. Later, the piece of it on the north side of the bridge was renamed Textile Avenue, and later still it became University.

My visits to this place, 321 Pawtucket Street, were off the beaten track in the ‘50s, and certainly occasional. No more than half dozen times, if that. Three-twenty-one was the residence of the Marist Brothers who ran St. Joseph’s in some kind of affiliation with St. Jean Baptiste parish, and an arm’s-length relation with St. Joseph’s High School for Girls.

Unlike Lord Manor, the brothers’ house was situated by the sidewalk on Pawtucket, inline with the other buildings on the street. Where now there’s Archambault Funeral Home’s parking lot. It was a fair to middling impressive brick structure, probably built in the 1870s or ‘80s. Its prime feature was a tower sort of thing that stood out from the facade, forming a vestibule on the ground floor. I never got much further than that on the inside which is why my memories of the place are all about what went on outside. As I remember—keep in mind I’m now in my 82nd year and memory does not improve with age—the lot ran all the way to the Northern Canal, rusticating as it went. There was quite a vegetable garden back there, and I think chickens were kept there, possibly rabbits.

This was the domain of Frère Louis Viateur, a silver-haired gentleman who was probably out of the 1880s himself. A habitant from central casting. He taught French to all four grades at St. Joe’s. Mostly he would have us speaking or explain the rules of grammar; but two times a week he’d come in and tell us to take out a sheet of paper. It was time for a dictée. He spoke a hundred words or so from a French short story which we wrote down. He made sure, I think it must have been deliberate, that there were a dozen or more past participles in his dictation.

He never collected those papers. We boys switched papers and corrected each other’s work while he spelt it out, sometimes on the blackboard. I still have trouble with past participles.

I was living the ‘50s in the twilight of Lowell’s Québecois moment. Then came the ‘60s and it all started to come apart. I was away most of the decade, at Georgetown University, doing graduate work in French history. In 1968 I was back, my first year teaching at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass. St. Joseph’s High School for Boys closed that year, folded into Lowell Catholic High School. I never noticed.

April 27 The warrior’s life has been described as long periods of boredom broken by short, sudden bursts of terror. Lockdown, “home isolation,” feels like that.

April 28 Major fall-out in several directions from Dr. Trump’s advisory on household disinfectants at last Thursday’s presser. First direction was his own. It looked for a while like he’d decided to give it up, withdraw from his daily confrontations with the White House press corps on the advice of his team. They were having a negative effect on the polls, Parscale told him.

But character will out. The lights and the cameras and the hostilities, they’re life.sustaining to him, his native environment. So he’s back at it, and of course he denies ever saying that The Lowell Review

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flooding the lungs with a disinfectant would destroy the coronavirus. Likewise, one day to the next, he made the statement and denied the statement about having 5 million daily tests available ‘‘very soon.’’ I keep hearing the voice of Julie Kavner, “They’ll say anything when they’re courting.” (Sleepless in Seattle?) Fenton thinks Trump is totally innocent of contradictions. “He thinks in seven-second intervals, like anything feral. How can he know?”

Best one-liner came out of the mouth of Nasty Nancy, the Speaker. “They call that embalming.”

Most astute observation came from nailbender at Daily Kos. This time. Trump did not use denial, he didn’t claim that he’d never made those remarks about injections. Instead, he said it was “sarcasm.” He just wanted to know “what would happen.” Nailbender writes that Trump’s cover story, his explanation one day for what he said the day before, is no less heinous than his ‘‘lethally idiotic’’ clinical propositions.

“Let that sink in,” nailbender writes. “He was just making an incredibly cruel, tasteless and sickening joke—without even a hint that he was trying to be funny—in his comments to a nation that is reeling from death, isolation, insecurity, and dislocation, a nation that is seeking solace and reassurance.” Criminal indifference is the charge.

Say he’s not lying this time, if only for the novelty of it. “How is that even slightly less sick than the homicidal misinformation that he actually intended to say, and did indeed say, yesterday?” Thing is, I suspect that half of what Trump says, maybe more than half, he says just for that purpose. Damn the consequences for us individually, and to hell with what it does to our collective fabric. He needs to know how far he can go. He needs to move the finish line one joke at a time.

April 29 The data stream has become so dense it’s a challenge having to decide who or what is taking the lead, what the daily headline is, what the chapter titles are, and what the title of the book.

There is no doubt the virus itself is in charge. Joshua Lederberg said in the last century that only a virus could dictate terms to us humans, and now novel coronavirus has done just that.

Then too, H. G. Wells predicted it in The War of the Worlds, in 1897. There’ve been two movie versions of his novel in my lifetime. Aliens from another planet invade the earth, and nothing we throw at them will stop them. But one-celled organisms do. Aliens have no immunity in our biome.

Have we made ourselves alien? Has capital become an invasive life.form for which we behave as vector? Life is the organization of signals. That’s the definition information technology has brought us to. Do we even know that? We don’t realize it, maybe that’s the title, The species that got ahead of itself. And died there.

April 30 I’m struggling for visual recall of the looks Angela Merkel would give our president when now and then they got into the same frame and we got to see them together in the dailies. That interests me just now because I’ve seen the stats on how the Federal Republic of Germany 16

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made out in its handling of the novel coronavirus. That’s the state Germans live under, and note that it’s federal.

Angela Merkel The awful truth (but not for the Germans): Germany, population 83.02 million [2019] COVID-19: confirmed 159K, deaths 6,126 Berlin, population 3.769 million [ 2019] COVID-19: confirmed 5,638, deaths 125 I’m not quoting our stats because it’s too depressing just thinking about them, and because they’re available online any number of places.

There’s no point getting into a rant about our situation. But we need to be sure that the point is made clear: This didn’t happen to us; it was made to happen. That it was made to happen when Trump delayed a positive reaction by his administration to the threat of a pandemic because he was convinced in his own mind that the virus was part of the Democratic Party’s vendetta, a continuation of impeachment by other means. It was about him. And, too bad for us, it was part of the plan of the gods, apparently, that his pathology fell in line with that virulent contempt most Americans have for the role of the state in all this. Quite a few are gathering in defiance of “sanitary ordinances.” Some of them are armed.

Check-out “Education and Career” in Wikipedia’s entry for Angela Merkel.

May 1 When good people make for bad citizens.

No reason to doubt there were “very good people” in among the armed cohort at Lansing, Michigan, yesterday. Strictly speaking Trump had that right, as he did in August ’17 and the “Unite the Right” in Charlottesville. Problem is Americans don’t put any space between private and public. They’re idiots. The origin of “idiot” survives in “idiosyncratic,” and “idiopathic.” It means “personal,” “private,” and by extension “f.off” Not what’s needed in a time of collective threat.

May 2 The German case comes up again with this piece, “Even German Conservatives, Corporations Make Green New Deal, Climate ‘Top Priority’ after Pandemic.” What it says it that public policy in Germany is defined by a view to Germany’s survival. Here in the States, policy is directed by a claque of grifters bent on sucking up as many dollars as can be had. Here in the States, we’re on our own.

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Remembering my Illness-Caused Separation, a Semi-Social Distancing marie sweeney

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his morning a tweet from Dan Rather took me way back in time to Spring 1953. I was in the fifth grade—in Sister Mildred’s class—a double-grade that included some sixth graders as well. In fact, brothers Billy and Joe Sweeney were my classmates as were Leo White, Larry Wheeler, Joyce Collins, Joey Burns, and so many others. I was ten years old. I walked to the Sacred Heart School every school day from 99 Seneca Street where we lived just at the edge of a cluster of Veterans housing. As we got to Stromquist Avenue, our walker group grew with the Borst twins, the Kokinos brothers, the Slavins, and probably some Faddens, perhaps a Collins or Sheedy. Ma, Dad, me, brother Jimmy who was eight years old, Billy who was just six, and Agnes, three years old, and at that time my maternal grandmother, Tillie Deignan, lived in that recently constructed housing, a twostory end unit across from a fenced yard with two resident peacocks.

Dad was a breadman for Nissen who had an early time-call with Diamond Taxi—a cab picked him up sometime after 4 a.m. and took him to the Strand Garage on Market Street where he would load his truck with bread and other baked goods which came via trailer truck from the JJ Nissen Baking Co. in Maine. He was getting ready for his daily delivery route. Funny that his route was familiar stomping grounds, including all the variety stores/ markets in the Grove, Swede Village, the Flats, Back Central area, lower Highlands and more—Quealey’s, the Stolpyne Market (Ed LeLacheur), McNamara’s Market, Nichols’ Variety (owned by Bill Martin’s grandparents), Joe Bigos’ Variety, the old Demoulas store, and even a store owned by Zenny Sperounis’ dad. Then Dad was up and out early to drop off his goods even before the stores opened. He would stop for a breakfast at one of his many favorite diners or lunch carts and then retrace his drive to the now-opened stores to load up the bread racks and shoot the breeze a bit with the proprietor or clerk as they checked the receipt of goods delivered. A favorite stop was Quealey’s store at Lenox and South Whipple streets where owner Dave, Sr. held court! Dad was very outgoing, a natural salesman, and very well-liked. By the way, he could add a string of numbers faster than an adding machine!

Note: We had no car. We rode on the Eastern Mass. bus or walked or we got a ride or went for a ride with either our Aunt Pat Deignan or Uncle Bobby Deignan, especially when Nana lived with us. I remember a bus driver strike during this time.

In those days Ma was a homemaker, but she worked part-time and later full-time over 18

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the years. Trained as a bookkeeper, she was a skilled cook and baker, at one time a pastry “chef” at Manning Manse and for 25 years a bookkeeper for two nursing homes. In the early 1950s, she was at home—Agnes was a toddler—but Ma was very involved in school and parish activities. Dad was also active with the parish, which was his family parish growing-up. His grandfather was a founding parishioner. Nana and Papa Kirwin, our aunt Mary (Auntie Mimi), the great aunts, Jennie and Agnes Kirwin, the Blossom Street Kirwin cousins still lived there. Nana Deignan lived with us for about a year or so, and perhaps, it was because of me.

Why this long-narrative? It sets the stage for what happened to me and to all of us. This is the Dan Rather tweet that triggered my memory: Dan Rather@DanRather I was bedridden as a child with rheumatic fever. I could hear my parents’ words of worry as they spoke in hushed tones. But to me, they instilled a sense of purpose and hope. A particular inspiration came from a poem that steeled me then, and many moments since: “Invictus.” (it was also a video and he read the poem).

Early in the spring of 1953, I wasn’t feeling well, was listless, tired. The diagnosis was strep throat. I was put on doses of penicillin. Seemingly okay, I went back to school. Then I remember having a sore toe and not being especially active but more a paper-doll person.

I didn’t remember stubbing my toe or falling. My mother was especially close to her aunt Helen Burke MacLean, a highly respected nurse. She must have been involved in the situation as I was diagnosed by her good friend Dr. Samuel Dibbins as having rheumatic fever. I never returned to the Sacred Heart School or my classmates. I can only imagine how my parents, who were only in their very early thirties, reacted.

I have no exact memory of their conversations. I am sure they were whispered or private.

I was their eldest child, fairly responsible, and the “leader” of my siblings, the oldest grandchild. Life for my parents and my siblings was upended. The treatment in those days was exact. I spent three weeks in the pediatric section of Lowell General Hospital on a regimen of penicillin and aspirin, on strict bed rest with close watching of my temperature.

When I was allowed home, I was carried upstairs to my prescription of total bed rest, a daily aspirin, and daily, periodic taking of my temperature. It was my job to keep track of the temps in a marble school notebook. I was religious in my temp-taking and recording the results. I look back now and see that it was a way for me to be a participant in my recovery. The deal was one-year in bed or at least at rest, no school, no church, no activity, just a passive passing of time. I was already a reader, but that year made me appreciate my love of reading even more. It saved my life, and changed my life.

I had visitors, not being contagious. Family, of course! One of my stalwart visitors was Bobby McNamara who lived across the way with his parents; his dad Jim worked nearby in St. Patrick’s Cemetery. Although a few years older, he would play cards with me, talk about who knows what. I was ten and he was probably thirteen. He had a quiet, gentle way about him and I like to think that he developed his bedside manner with me before he later went to medical school!

My godmother Rita Deignan Karosas kept me supplied with many books. As a sewer, she made sure I had projects. At some point I was allowed out of bed but could not walk down the stairs. As Dad was gone so early as I described earlier, it was my mother who carried me down the stairs. We did a piggy-back thing most mornings. Dad would do the return trip in the evening.

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By the fall of 1953 with sixth grade impending, I was assigned a home-school teacher/ tutor by the Lowell Public Schools since I could not return to the Sacred Heart School. Miss Eleanor Carmichael arrived twice weekly by cab and guided by the SHS curriculum and her own experience, she taught me well and thoroughly. I loved her approach, strict but with a velvet glove. Later in the spring of 1954, after we moved to Burnham Road, another tutor finished the year. I don’t remember her name. By the time my bed rest/little-activity prescription was over, they had prepared me to do quite well in the seventh and eighth grades at the Immaculate Conception School. Nana was always there during my schooling.

She was also my companion as we watched day-time TV (there was little of it), including the Army-McCarthy hearings in early Spring 1954. She was an active, dedicated Democrat with strong points of view, quite appalled by Joe McCarthy, a Republican but a Catholic.

I was eleven years old but used to political discussion and positions. We were a political family, local and state politics.

I shared my room with my grandmother. She was a wonderful, loving, smart woman of great faith and patience. As I think back, she was a role model not only for her Democratic Party activity but also as a founding member and officer in the AOH-Division 46 Auxiliary, and for her love of music and her faithfulness to her church and to her family. Born in 1900, she was a traditional homemaker who got fully dressed every day from foundation, stockings, house-dress, sometimes an apron, house slippers, always coiffed with a lightly powered face. I would watch her morning ritual, just fascinated. She and my grandfather Jimmy Deignan raised three sons and three daughters. Tillie was widowed in 1948 when her beloved husband of twenty-nine years died of complications of lung surgery. She was very close to her siblings and her parents whom she predeceased, dying so young in 1957 as she succumbed to oral cancer.

I never really spoke with my parents as an adult about how they felt about my illness, about how it was to have a bedridden child, about how it affected my brothers and sister (Patti wasn’t born until 1955). How did they cope? I was one of those kids who listened to adults but conversations from that time about me are a mystery to my memory.

So, to circle back to the Dan Rather Tweet. In a similar circumstance his memory of his parents, that “they instilled a sense of purpose and hope,” resonated with me. My parents and my grandmother were strong, purposeful, and without question sure that if I followed Dr. Sammy Dibbins’ “prescription” all would be well in time.

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The Coronavirus Wedding f r e d fa u s t

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spent this past Friday respecting social distance. But on a sunny afternoon, at the end of a tense week, I decided that it would be a good thing to take a bike ride along the river. My destination was the Boott Mills and Boarding House Park in Lowell. The park, becoming greener with Spring, is a close by retreat. On the stage at the park, I witnessed a coronavirus wedding.

I had a backpack with a book and some cool but watered-down iced tea. The wedding party consisted of a presiding justice of the peace, two friends as witnesses, and the smiling young couple, apparently having chosen not to postpone this matrimonial event.

The presiding official in a cassock and with a vestment draped around his neck carried a cane and also what appeared to be a Navy commander’s cap.

In this brave new world of handwashing and avoidance of being too close to others, here was an ultimate human act of being bound together, until death would do them part. Was this to have been a church wedding? A traditional wedding with family, friends, flowers, pomp, music and dancing? Had the invitations gone out for this very day? Of course, the couple could not have accounted for the virus that had gained so prominent a place on that invitation list.

The groom served as his own ring bearer. Digging into a side pocket and leaving time to spare, he grasped the rings carefully in his hand. Summoned by the commander, he secured his ring. Then he placed the second ring on the finger of his bride to be. With a few other accidental attendees in the park, I was able to observe all of this, but was too distant to hear the words. My sense is that we all appreciated the scene, largely knew the vows, and did our best to imagine the circumstances. And then, finally, receiving permission—damn social distancing—an enthusiastic kiss. The bride and groom fully embracing each other and the moment. Then a pivot from the kiss to a lengthy, slightly twirling hug. A light applause came up from the unrelated but appreciative observers.

The couple’s witnesses took pictures but avoided hugs and handshakes. Call it a spring day’s affirmation of life and marriage. A different kind of performance for Boarding House Park. A day to be remembered on this Friday, March 27, 2020.

Afterwards, biking back home, I imagined a day at the same venue years from now.

“Dianna,” says her mom, sitting on a comfortable blanket surrounded by hundreds of concert-goers at the park.

“Do you see that stage up ahead?”

“Sure,” says Dianna, distracted and looking at her wafer slim iPhone 14.

“That is where your dad and I were married, ten years ago this month.”

“At a concert?” says Dianna, her parents now capturing some amount of her attention.

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“Well, not exactly,” her dad remarks.

“It was different then,” adds her mom. “It was a hard, hard year, 2020. It was a year of something called a pandemic. It spread across the world. It changed a lot of plans.

Luckily, we were all safe.”

“Cool,” says Dianna.

The musicians appeared on the stage to gathering applause. The music started again.

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The Ladies of Central Sterile Supply john wooding

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o, we have finally realized that a functioning health care system is critical—and that those who work in it are heroes. As the world falls apart, and we begin to focus on the need to protect and honor our medical workers, a switch flipped in my head, and I got to thinking about a job I had in England, some forty-odd years ago.

It was the mid-1970s and I was fresh out of college, looking for work along with the then millions of unemployed in England during that depressing decade. But I was lucky, landing a job as a delivery driver at Great Ormond Street Children’s hospital in central London.

While this was not the preferred occupation for a newly minted graduate, anxious to join the middle classes, it turned out to be a blessing. I had mostly forgotten about it until now.

The Children’s Hospital is spitting distance from Bloomsbury Square, home to England’s twentieth-century’s intelligentsia, and the likes of Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and all that lot. I used to think about these luminaries as the Number 19 double-decker bus took me from Finsbury Park, where I lived, down through Islington to the Square and on to Great Ormond Street. On foggy mornings, I’d be on my second cigarette, sitting “upstairs,” staring out of a rain-soaked window and thinking about the usually crappy day ahead. The working life. I used to wonder whether the author of Mrs. Dalloway had ever taken the bus.

I worked in the Central Sterile Supply Department (CSSD). I still have the ID badge they gave me. This was where equipment was packed and sterilized for use by the nurses and doctors, and the little patients above. Folks like me didn’t go in the main entrance but went around the back, next to the loading dock where the white van I drove spent nighttime hours.

A door just to the side of the dock took you into a tunnel and the dark places, the basement warren of the hospital. In the tunnel the steam pipes and cables hung from the ceiling and showed the way. I can still see the asbestos-wrapped conduits with the word “STEAM” and an arrow stenciled on the side and the string of buzzing fluorescents that made pathetic efforts to light the way. A short walk under stalactites of hangers and rusty bolts, past the main boiler room, got you to the door of the cleanroom of CSSD, my workplace. Someone told me later that the gigantic boiler had been sitting there, doing its thing, since the end of the last century. It sure looked that way to me. The basement of the hospital, honest to god, was like being in the bowels of the Titanic. People who work in white-collar jobs rarely see the underbelly of the buildings they are in or the people who labor there, and I am pretty sure that was true for the passengers on the Titanic, too. But the cleanroom was as bright and spotless as the tunnels were dirty and dark. I still remember the feeling of relief on opening that door, like getting into a warm car on a frigid evening.

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Mostly the job meant pushing a cart that was probably older than the boiler, loaded with supplies, back and forth along the subterranean path from the CSSD to the loading dock. My task was resupplying the wards and hospitals with medical equipment. Every morning I would take the ancient elevator up the floors of the old building, put supplies in a small room of each ward, check out the cute nurses, and pick up bags of used equipment.

In the afternoons, I would head out across the city to the two other hospitals in the group to do the same thing. That was the best part. I liked driving the streets of London and getting out in the air. The van I drove had a blue light for emergencies. I only used it a couple of times to get through traffic, so I could get to my favorite fish ‘n chip shop before it closed. I still feel a little guilty about that.

The original hospital building was old. It was founded in the mid-nineteenth century, by a Dr. Charles West, specifically for the care of children. Dr. West was a personal friend of Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria—connections help—and it quickly became one of the leading children’s hospitals in the world. In the 1920s, JM Barrie signed over the rights to Peter Pan to the hospital, providing it with a pretty substantial and constant source of funding. By the time I got to grace its doors, it had long been part of the NHS and is still recognized as one of the best hospitals for kids in the world. I knew none of this at the time. This was just a job.

On Saturdays, I would work in the main building only, collecting incubators and bringing them downstairs. Saturdays were great, I got paid time-and-half (we were all in the union), and the incubators were cool. I was a little bit in awe of these wombs on wheels, seeing as they had held babies who were tiny, sick, or weak. The tubes and gauges that snaked into the transparent plastic canopy had to be cleaned and disassembled. The whole unit had to be disinfected and put back together with care, a job I was eventually entrusted to do. I felt like a doctor.

But it was the cleanroom of Central Sterile Supply that was my base and my home.

It gleamed with stainless steel counters and cabinets, like an operating theater. Spaced around the room three or four autoclaves sat looking smug and intimidating. They were huge, like the base of an Atlas booster rocket, festooned with gauges and serious-looking handles and knobs. These babies “cooked” equipment in super-hot high-pressure steam.

They hissed and puffed throughout the day, tended by the five women who worked on sorting and sterilizing the medical equipment. I remember these ladies (they always referred to themselves in this way) better than anything else about the job. They were all from somewhere in the West Indies, and, for this lad from the Midlands, they were terribly exotic. They called me “honey-child,” which absolutely delighted me. They would sing reggae together as they worked, especially on the Saturday shift, when everything was a little bit different, a bit more like a party. They taught me much more than I realized at the time. The ladies were led by Mrs. Robertson, who was never called by her first name, although I think it was Elsie. Not that anyone one ever dared use it. She was a bit stern and a little scary and always immaculately dressed. I think, though I may be wrong, that she was from Jamaica.

One Friday, payday, we all picked up our wages at the bursar’s office and collected our little brown envelopes full of cash (yes, in those days, we were paid in cash), and headed to the pub for lunch. Somehow or other I lost my envelope on the way. A week’s wages!

I was devastated. The rent was due for the little-more-than-a-slum flat I shared with 24

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four others, and getting the money together for that was always a challenge. Damn near impossible when you had been stupid enough to lose your wage packet. Worse yet, no money meant a struggle to find the shillings for the electric meter so we had lights and the scant comfort of the one-bar electric fire that pretended to heat the living room. That was a rough weekend.

Dragging myself to work the next Monday, I wondered how I was going to make it through. When I got back to the clean room with my bags of used medical equipment that day, Mrs. Robertson pulled me aside and gave me a small parcel. “This is for you, honeychild,” she said, with a rare smile. The room went quiet, the ladies had stopped working for a moment, and were looking at me as I opened the package. Inside were forty poundnotes held together by a piece of tape. I remembered looking up, puzzled. Mrs. Robertson grabbed my hand and whispered, “We had a whip-round, couldn’t let you starve.”

Writing this now, I still get choked up. Six hard-working women, who had come to England in the Sixties from a much warmer place, and who did their jobs with quiet professionalism, had jointly made up the lost wages of the young white lad who worked with them. I don’t recall what I said to thank them, probably some mumbled dumb thing like “Thank you.” I do remember I was embarrassed and close to tears. Even then, I knew this was an enormous sacrifice for them. None of us working there made much money. I did know that many had families (I’d seen pictures of some of their kids), so giving away their money had to have hurt. But I remember this act of kindness was done without fanfare or pretense, Mrs. Robertson just said, “This is what we do.” The other ladies simply smiled and turned back to work.

I worked there for about a year. In addition to the wonderful women in CSSD, I also got to know the utterly dedicated nurses upstairs and the blokes who did building maintenance. These were the men who kept the old boiler running, made sure the oxygen supply got to the wards, and that the plumbing functioned. We used to gather when we were on break, sitting on a couple of old couches near the ancient steam pipes on the cold mornings, dunking our biscuits in mugs of tea and complaining about the government.

Although the job was hard and tedious (I did the same thing almost every day), it was the folks in the basement who made it worthwhile. And I think that we felt a kind of purpose, supporting the doctors and nurses upstairs because we were all part of looking after really ill kids. Can’t knock that. This sense of a common goal hit me hard when, occasionally, I made a few deliveries to the “Sunshine Home,” an old mansion that was a few miles out of London. It was the place they sent the terminally ill kids. Those trips always tore me up.

After about a year doing this, I quit. I was planning on going to America, and I left all the ladies behind, together with the lads down in maintenance. I rarely thought of them or the work again. But COVID-19 has finally awakened of us, and we realize not only how fragile life is but also how dependent we are on ordinary, decent people doing their jobs.

Across the world, there are many, many thousands of workers (often immigrants) who are packing and sorting and cleaning and looking after each other. They keep our hospitals running. They are there, in the basements, holding up the floors above, making sure that the institutions we rely upon for our survival continue to function. I thank and honor them all, especially the ladies of Central Sterile Supply. I, for one, will not forget them again.

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Isolation Scenes d o u g s pa r k s

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’ve noticed a pair of robins who occasionally perch on the roof kitty-corner to our living room. So far, I’ve been flattering myself that this is some kind of Disney idyll—that the birds are enamored of my two young girls, and are checking on them. They look ready to burst into a song about sunny mornings and silk ribbons.

Today, the illusion was dispelled when I saw the duo flitting around gathering twigs and dried husks of pokeweed. They were looking for a place to build a nest and weren’t admiring us—they were gauging our threat level.

We’ll find out soon enough what rest they chose for nest and nestlings. * There is a small hiking area in my town where I can go and be alone or nearly so.

Rarely do I see anyone there. I make the drive knowing some people would be critical of my decision, and I have my own doubts as to whether it’s the right thing to do. There are those who advocate for not leaving the home and yard for any but the most essential activities. After all, even well-intentioned humans can find an excuse to justify all manners of selfish behavior.

So, I went into the woods with a slight feeling of guilt, wondering if I was merely trespassing on land where I had no business.

As soon as I crossed the bridge from field into wood, I went off the path to increase my chances of not being seen, taking to the shadows like a thief or a hermit.

Eventually, I found two flat rocks, remnants of an old quarry—and opened my backpack. Inside was a tripod, two thermoses (one orange and small, one silver and large), and a $15 magenta-colored Morakniv (sadly, I found no Dryad’s saddle enroute—this being my foraging blade). Hanging from my pack by a carabiner was a kuksa—one of those handmade-looking cups traditionally made by the Sami people of Scandinavia, having become trendy of late with bobo campers and redneck woodworkers. A kuksa is a terrible vessel for tea—unless you’re in the woods. There, its functionality shines: durable, dutiful and unobtrusive.

With the tripod, I set up my camera and broadcast a live chat to a handful of friends on Facebook, pouring out steaming leathery shou puerh tea from the thermoses, pausing to admire a trio of turkey vultures who alerted me to their presence with slowly spiraling shadows, and spoke in my rambling way about all sorts of topics: the longevity of Greenland sharks, the documentary Hotel Coolgardie, the types and philosophies of Chinese and Japanese tea ceremonies, my own reason for being out among the trees on a 26

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The Virus

quiet Saturday.

It was Easter weekend, and the comments from friends and relatives turned to weighty matters of family, hope, and regeneration. Such was the spirit of the day. The conversation ran its natural course, finishing as I poured out the final drops of tea. A few more moments of silence. Say goodbye. Click finish. Pack up. * The music of Townes Van Zandt.

Grape-Nuts cereal.

Samurai films.

Three old interests rekindled in isolation.

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Pandemic Journal r i c h a r d p. h o w e , j r .

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t was six months ago—Sunday, March 15, 2020—that Governor Charlie Baker ordered schools, restaurants, and bars to close. Courthouses and much else closed too. Although the COVID-19 virus had been lurking in our consciousness for weeks before that, it was the mandated closings that brought home the seriousness of the disease.

Since then, there has been a flood of news about the virus, its consequences, and our collective response to it. Much of the information has changed and is frequently in conflict with other information. I don’t know how we collectively sort it out but that’s an issue for another day. For now, I thought I would share my understanding of some of the major issues related to the pandemic: COVID-19—This is a highly infectious disease that spreads widely and rapidly. It seems there are three primary methods of transmission: 1.

The surest way to catch it is by having someone who has it spray you with droplets from their mouth or nose. These may be propelled by a cough, a sneeze, singing, shouting, talking, or just breathing.

2. The second most likely way to catch it is to be in a room for more than just a few minutes with someone who is sick. In this scenario, the virus in aerosol form saturates the air in the room. By breathing in enough of that air, you ingest enough of the virus to become infected yourself.

3. The third most likely scenario is that virus particles expelled by an infected person land on some object like a doorknob or elevator button that you then touch.

The virus is transferred from the object to your finger and eventually from your finger to your mouth or nose and you become infected.

Masks—The primary reason you should wear a mask is to keep you from infecting others in case you are the one who is sick. If you cough, the mask catches most of the droplets expelled from your mouth. Same thing if you sneeze. Or shout. I cringe whenever I see someone wearing a mask begin to speak and then rip off the mask so he or she can be heard better. That is exactly the moment when you’re most likely to spread the virus and when it is most important to keep the mask on. The secondary reason for wearing a mask is that it provides some protection to you. A mask might keep out some virus particles that are directed to you but not all of them. Still, as Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), said last week, wearing a mask “is the most important, powerful public health tool we have.”

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Stay Six Feet Apart—In the Army, every weapon had a “maximum effective range” which means the distance at which the weapon may fire accurately. A bullet may travel farther and still cause damage, but not reliably. Transfer that concept to virology and the question becomes “what is the maximum effective range of a virus droplet expelled by an infected person who is coughing, sneezing or talking?” Early in the pandemic, experts concluded six feet provided adequate safety because given the weight and velocity of viral droplets, most of them would drop to the ground at that distance. But six feet is not a magical number. If you are seven feet away from an infected, mask-less person who sneezes, you will be showered with viral droplets and likely get sick. Still, the more physical distance you can maintain between you and someone else, the safer it is for both of you.

Ventilation—Unlike larger droplets from a cough or sneeze that soon fall to earth, an infected person also expels smaller, microscopic droplets by talking or even by exhaling normally. These small droplets remain in the air for a long time. Think about how the smell of cigarette smoke lingers in a room long after the smoker has left and you get the idea. So, if an infected person is in an enclosed space—even a big room—for long enough, microscopic viral droplets expelled by that person can so saturate the air that someone else in the room can breathe in enough of the virus to become infected themselves. That’s why it is safer to be outside than inside—the air outside is constantly moving. Inside, the risk of aerial saturation is much higher which is why things like open windows and doors and properly working HVAC systems that exhaust inside air to the outside are critical for spaces that will be occupied for more than just a few minutes.

Hand Washing—Remember when this all started, the advice from the CDC was to wash your hands repeatedly and each time you did, to sing Happy Birthday twice because that’s how long it takes to properly wash your hands? We don’t hear much about hand washing anymore, but it is still important. Remember transmission risk three listed above—that your fingers transfer the virus from a surface to your mouth, nose or eyes. Hand washing, hand sanitizer, and frequently washing surfaces are all still important.

Cumulative Exposure—Every other week I go to the grocery store early in the morning when few people are there. I wear a mask as does everyone else in the store. I feel relatively safe doing this. But there is this concept called cumulative exposure that I think has gotten too little attention. There are many activities I would normally undertake—getting a haircut, going to a restaurant, visiting a museum, shopping at a big box store—that I am also able to undertake during this pandemic. Considered in isolation, each of these things seems relatively safe. But a lot of slight risks add up to a big risk. Catching this virus seems incredibly random so the more times you put yourself someplace that has a risk, however slight, the greater the chances of you getting sick. The bottom line is, if you don’t have to do something or go somewhere, don’t do it. But if you do decide to go out to eat or see a movie in person, refrain from doing other things for a while.

Vaccines—Yes, it will be wonderful when there is a vaccine and we can return to prepandemic life. Unfortunately, that’s a bit of a fantasy because it is a lot more complicated.

Even the best vaccines are not one hundred percent effective. With the under-development The Lowell Review

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COVID-19 vaccines, I believe an effective rate of fifty percent will be deemed a success and will allow widespread inoculation. But that means even after getting the vaccine, if you are exposed to enough of the virus to make you sick, there is a fifty-fifty chance you will get sick. That is why it is so important for everyone to get the vaccine. If there is widespread acceptance of the vaccine, the odds are that few of the people you encounter will be sick. If hardly anyone you encounter is sick, then a vaccine that’s fifty percent effective will be sufficient. But like wearing masks, whether to get a vaccine has been so politicized that the penetration rate will be considerably less than universal. The fewer people get the vaccine, the greater the risk to everyone including those who are inoculated. (And when I say this has been politicized, I include in that the completely rational fear that this administration will unleash an ineffective or even dangerous vaccine upon the population in exchange for some perceived short-term political gain).

Long Haul—I’m not a big fan of the CDC’s Dr. Redfield, but when he said to Congress last week that next summer or fall is the earliest he sees us SAFELY returning to some kind of normal, that seemed about right to me.

September 20, 2020

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SECTION II

JUS T IC E

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How I Came to Have an Autographed Photo of John Lewis j a c q u e ly n m a l o n e

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y admiration—indeed, my awe—of John Lewis goes back to the 1960s when he was hardly out of his teens. His first act of civil disobedience occurred in Nashville, Tennessee, the place I consider my hometown (though I’ve lived in Lowell longer than any other locale).

My mother was the reason I came to follow him in the newspapers. She worked at Harvey’s, the largest department store in the South and a Nashville institution that brought tourists, Black and white, from all over the mid-South to ride the merry-goround in the infant’s department and to watch the monkeys nearby. The monkey bar had a huge room-sized cage with four monkeys that entertained audiences by swinging from synthetic trees, howling, and mugging for their audiences. There were also large cages of mynah birds. Occasionally one would startlingly and pitifully cry “Help!” in a small child’s voice. (The story went that a little boy became separated from his mother.)

And there were antique merry-go-round horses all over the store, especially beside the escalators, pointing either up or down.

Blacks were free to visit. And to buy. But they were not allowed to sit at the Harvey’s lunch counters, as they weren’t free to sit at any counter of a white-owned business in Nashville. But the city was a perfect breeding ground for young civil rights activists. It was the home of four Black-only institutions of higher learning: Fisk University, American Baptist College, Tennessee A & I, and Meharry Medical College. It was a perfect place also for James Lawson, a young man who had been to India to study Gandhian non-violence.

He established a group from all four schools that met regularly to discuss non-violent protests.

It was this group, including a young John Lewis, that showed up at Harvey’s to sit-in at the lunch counter beside the children’s department that my mother worked in. According to David Halberstam, who wrote a book about the beginning of the civil rights movement in Nashville called The Children, they were turned away politely at Harvey’s, unlike the protesters at the other large department store in town, Cain-Sloan’s, where they were treated with contempt and physically forced from the counter. But my mom was upset. A lifelong Southerner, she still didn’t understand why they had to leave.

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were beaten and arrested. Nashville was in the national news for weeks. The whole of downtown was filled with agitation, and my mother came home each night, distressed by the violence and disturbed that she was too frightened to express her solidarity with the students.

She wasn’t the only one. Nashville was, in some ways, chosen as a testing ground. It was a border state where there were more moderate voters than in the Deep South. The poll tax law, prevalent in the South, had been repealed and as a result the state had many Black voters. Nashville also had a moderate mayor, Ben West, as well as a progressive newspaper, The Tennessean. As it turned out, it had a moderate store owner, too. Fred Harvey and the executives of his store worked with the mayor and others in bringing an end to white-only lunch counters.

It was my mother’s dismay and her emotional solidarity with the students that left an indelible mark on me. As I followed the news and became active in civil rights activities myself, I began to hear again and again the name John Lewis: as he was arrested at lunchcounter sit-ins, as he participated with the Freedom Riders, as he spoke at the March on Washington, as his skull was fractured by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and as he worked in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Finally, he became a Congressman from Georgia.

So it was somewhat amazing that, when I was volunteering in the Elizabeth Warren U.S. Senate race, I met a young man from Atlanta. I asked him why he was working in a Massachusetts election. He said his boss wanted to see Warren elected. So I asked him, “Who’s your boss?” When he said, “John Lewis,” I blurted out, “John Lewis! He’s my hero!”

Two weeks after our conversation, I received an autographed photo of Lewis standing before the Capitol wearing the Medal of Freedom awarded to him by President Obama.

His message to me: “Keep the faith!”

[Congressman John Robert Lewis (Feb. 21, 1940–July, 2020) said, “When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something.”]

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Holes in the River j a c q u e ly n m a l o n e

He was my age and I met him once.

He seemed afraid of me, which made me shy.

He sat in a corner chair— his feet not touching the floor— while his daddy pumped gas at my daddy’s filling station.

My dad felt his unease and offered him a Coke.

But he refused—though I could tell he wanted one.

Maybe it was because he felt a Black child should hold back.

We swam in one hole in the river; they swam in another. Near the Black hole was a white’s man’s fishing spot.

I never knew the men who watched him struggle. I heard they laughed. I heard that, laughing, they walked away.

They didn’t have to drag the river.

He caught on a branch.

But we caught there, too, in the wide arc above the water.

And the radio did and the newspaper, and then TV zeroed in on those cackling throats.

Under the camera’s watch, everyone could see what bubbled up.

A Southern Legacy.

The farm had a history of ghosts lynched from a fence-row tree.

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had pointed to, the history slowly fading as the tree has faded in the bleach of time.

My dad’s been dead for decades, and as we drive past where the Clark Brothers General Store once stood, I try to remember which road leads to that farm—as if I would still remember which farm.

But ghosts are a stickier lot. Even time cannot erase their heft.

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When I Heard John Lewis Speak lianna kushi

In his honor our work continues. These days (and nights) I find myself, like many, reflecting on where we are as a country, as a community, and now most recently, on the incredible legacy of John Lewis. I feel immense gratitude that even though he is gone he still managed to leave us with a call to action in a recent op-ed, “Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation,” in the New York Times that he requested be published upon his passing. I have read it over a dozen times in the last week, and this part continues to ring in my ears, Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key.

The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

—John Lewis, July 30, 2020 Almost twelve years ago I had the privilege, in a relatively intimate setting, to hear John Lewis speak. I was working as a staff assistant at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Whenever famous people came to campus to speak, staff members had the opportunity to enter a “lottery” to win a ticket, and then, for the first time, I won a ticket to the John Lewis event at the Harvard Kennedy School, a graduate school for public policy.

For those who know me well, I am obsessed with the civil rights era. As a kid, I grew up in a number of New England towns, in mostly white communities, and often was the most ethnic and colorful student in the classroom. Then at the age of fifteen, my family moved to North Carolina. I went to a public high school that was desegregated in 1970.

Less than thirty years had passed in this mid-sized city since then, and for me, a multiracial “Yankee” from the north, it was my first time in a school with nearly as many Black students as white students. Junior year, I had a history teacher who dedicated two weeks to the civil rights movement, assigning each of us something to do a deep dive into. I researched the “Birmingham Campaign,” and was amazed to learn what ordinary people could accomplish. With my curiosity sparked, in college I took every Black history and studies course I could and found incredible inspiration and motivation learning these The Lowell Review

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American stories.

This is all to explain that it was an understatement to say I was excited to hear John Lewis speak. It was November 20, 2008, just sixteen days after the election of Barack Obama to be the next president. Designed like an amphitheater, the room was packed, mostly with Harvard Kennedy School graduate students, faculty, and at least one eager staff assistant from across the campus.

I remember it feeling strange to look down on him, a civil rights giant, versus up at him if he had been standing on a traditional stage. Looking back now, I realize the design was no coincidence, based on the foundations of democracy. Looking up at us, he began, “I know that I am supposed to deliver a lecture, but I think what I have to say tonight will be more like a testimony.” He took us on the journey of his life, he spoke of the injustices he faced, the community he and so many built, and the power of a nonviolent revolution, one that eventually delivered the election of Barack Obama. At twenty-four years old, I was in total awe. It is one thing to read books and watch documentaries on the civil rights movement, it is another thing to hear a firsthand account of someone who has lived it.

I was left with two things that night. First, people struggled, people suffered, and some people died to give their fellow Americans the opportunity to vote, not just in the South, but across our great country. Second, just as he has in his passing, that night, even in celebration, he knew there was more to be done, and he called upon each one of us in that room to continue the work.

“Each one of us must take it upon ourselves to pass it on, that we’ve been blessed, that more than likely we are blessed to have an opportunity here to get an education, to learn as much as possible. We have to reach back and bring others along. We all should find a way to make things better for all of the citizens who dwell on this little piece of real estate that we call America.”

Here we are over a decade later, and it’s clear: more than ever, there is work to be done.

We all have a responsibility to move his vision of a “Beloved Community” forward. This is one of the reasons I decided in 2017, while seven months pregnant with my first daughter Ella, to be a plaintiff in the voting rights lawsuit against the City of Lowell. It was the 1965 Voting Rights Act, (the federal law that was passed after John Lewis and others were beaten on Selma, Alabama’s, Edmund Pettus Bridge on the now infamous “Bloody Sunday”) that allowed us to challenge the city and win.

This history and our present day right here in Lowell are connected in many more ways.

From the cotton picked by enslaved Black hands in the South and then woven by Yankee and immigrant women’s hands here in Lowell, this is our collective history, our American story, and our Lowell story. It is a story of ordinary people overcoming incredible odds, ordinary people digging canals, ordinary people working in factories, ordinary people building community, and ordinary people speaking out to be heard.

Today our city is one of the most diverse communities in Massachusetts, and this summer thousands of ordinary people are speaking up and coming together to ensure that all our Lowell voices are heard. Let us honor the incredible and historical legacy of John Lewis and build a “Beloved Community” that will reflect my children and all the children of Lowell.

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Shout Out to All the Dads chris wilkinson

“What’s happening in the video?”

Hey, you know what was a hard conversation for the white father of a brown son? Explaining race-based injustice to an almost six-year-old (who I’m certain will have struggles in life that I can’t even begin to understand, beginning with a genetic legacy based in the trans-Atlantic slave trade that gave him his beautiful, toasty skin, that I envy)—it was tough, but after a seriously long pause I got a, “that’s bad, I’d protect people” . . . and that’s my boy. I’ve got a good egg. Sure, he can’t wrap his head around all of it, but it’s my job to help him understand what I can . . . but I can only show him the way and protect him for so long.

That is where you come in. You know what is going to be even harder? My white friends who have never dealt with this, and now need to talk to their white sons. Need to. It is your job to say something. Silence is saying something. The wrong thing. Oh, and your black box profile pictures do not do anything. They mean nothing. They are the “thoughts and prayers” of our social media, disconnected generation.

So, do something. Have the conversation. Explain that there IS a difference between sameness and e q u a l i t y. I have heard the equality gap described as a golf handicap by Trevor Noah, and I like that. I used a similar example with the height of heels on shoes in a “same-height party” in my Political Theory class.

If you are mad about windows and property before you are mad about race-based oppression, you are on the wrong side of history. If you do not think you need to have the conversation with your children, you are on the wrong side of history. History is being made, now. We have a president who has gassed and shot at peaceful protestors so he could get a photo op across the street with a Bible I am certain he has never read. He has threatened the deployment of the U.S. military on peaceful protestors, in U.S. states, if the democratically elected governors will not use the National Guard to bully out protestors . . . oh yeah, this is on U.S. soil. First Amendment in the United States Constitution: “. . . or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

“But protestors are violent.” So blanket statements are cool? Like, say, “Cops are violent”?

If you’re a police officer—I’d encourage you to kneel and listen like the NYPD in Queens listened concerning a systemic overhaul and reevaluation of how we deal with safety. I assure you it is not Law and Order bravado.

If you are tired, I get it. The pandemic has been brutal for literally everyone. If you are physically wiped out, I get it. I have cancer. If you are mad, I am too. But I am also listening— because that is my job. I cannot fix systemic, but I can talk to my children and listen to my friends of color. Do something.

I do not want this America for my children. I want a better one.

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Equality and Justice: What Can We Do? anthony nganga

The protests precipitated by the police killing of George Floyd And numerous other black Americans reveal people’s frustrations About deliberate inequalities and injustices they have long endured.

We cannot continue the same way.

As a Black man, I have had moments of reflection over the last week, Feeling lost and desperate and looking for purpose and direction.

I want to be part of the solution. What can I do? What can we do?

We know the protests will end at some point.

The status quo around racism, social justice, and economic equality Must change drastically.

To achieve real change we must take decisive and deliberate action.

All of us, white, black, brown.

Words are not enough; we must take action now.

Here are suggestions for our community members, And for political, public, and private organization leaders.

Educate ourselves about historic and systematic racist policies and injustices.

Look at the country and look in our own city.

Educate ourselves on what has been done to make a better society.

Put on someone else’s shoes and reflect on their experiences.

WHY are they protesting? WHY are they taking a knee? WHY do they feel this way?

Support and advocate for people everywhere who don’t have a chance to speak.

Silence is not an option anymore!

Give the people who work for us the opportunity To air their feelings, experiences, things they have observed.

Ask them how they feel we have done regarding equality and justice?

What more can we do?

Talk to the people we serve and ask: Do we represent racial and economic equality?

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Take a hard and honest look at the organizations we represent.

Does our staff represent the people we serve?

If not, why? What must we do to change that?

Take a look at the leadership of the organization.

Do they represent the community?

Have we been fair in promoting diversity?

Admit to our mistakes or shortcomings.

Plan deliberate and measurable actions.

Be transparent, be accountable to this plan.

If you are already doing something, it’s time to double and triple the effort!

Let’s rephrase “What can I do?” to this question: “If George Floyd was your dad or brother or son, What wouldn’t you do to achieve justice?”

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When the Most Famous Woman in America Lived in the Merrimack Valley juliet haines mofford

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t the height of her fame and literary skill Harriet Beecher Stowe was an Andover, Mass., resident. Averaging a book a year for nearly thirty years, she wrote nine during the dozen years she lived here. Famous people flocked to see her, including leading abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Former slaves Sojourner Truth and Josiah Henson came requesting “puff-pieces,” reviews to boost sales of their Slave Narratives. When her husband’s Bowdoin classmate, the pro-slavery President Franklin Pierce, came calling however, Harriet made sure she was not at home.

In a letter to her husband, still under contract at Bowdoin College, she wrote, “Andover is a lovely place—so many beautiful walks,” and told Calvin of horseback riding to Pomps Pond and climbing Prospect Hill. Local residents called the author’s residency here, “the Merriest Epoch On the Hill.”

The faculty house offered them simply would not do. It was too small for their six children, her brood of brothers, and other relatives expected to visit, and quite inadequate for entertaining. Harriet had her eye on that abandoned stone building at the edge of campus. Built in 1828 for manual training, it had once served as a workshop where students learned carpentry skills while keeping tuition down. Later, it became a gymnasium and was now used for storage.

“That’s not available,” the trustees said. “No one could possibly live there!” Harriet waved the first royalty check from her publisher before them—$10,300. “That Stone Cabin is what I shall fix up for our family home.”

“It seems almost too good to be true that we are going to have such a house in such a beautiful place and to live here among all these agreeable people,” Stowe wrote Calvin.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or Life Among the Lowly was first published in installments in The National Era. “It is as much my vocation to preach on paper as it is that of my seven brothers to preach by voice,” Harriet said. “I believe the author’s writing desk to be higher than a pulpit!” Some chapters were written at the kitchen table on paper bags while “chowder bubbled on the wood stove and the baby slept by my feet in a basket.” She read parts of it aloud to her children, and, after hearing one chapter, nine-year-old Freddy burst into tears, “Oh Mamma, what a wicked thing slavery is!”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first novel featuring an African-American protagonist.

Released as a book in March 1852, three thousand copies were sold the first day. The 42

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blockbuster was heralded and hated. Its author was labeled “a meddling woman who knew nothing about slavery.” Many believed it would cause slave insurrections. In some southern towns, one could be arrested for buying the book, having it on your person or found lying around the house.

The book inspired or infuriated Americans in a way that political pamphlets, newspaper accounts, and slave narratives never had. Harriet received so much mail that another delivery man was hired. And much of it was hate mail. One package arrived with a human ear inside, a gift from a plantation owner who had cut it off his slave.

Because pro-slavery advocates accused Stowe of writing “a tissue of falsehoods,” she was determined to document her sources following publication. “I am now very much driven to unlock “The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she explained. “It is made up of facts which my eyes have looked upon and documents I have handle . . . .”

The Stone Cabin in Andover was “transformed by Mrs. Stowe at an expense of thousands of dollars, into a beautiful country residence . . . with a very pretty piazza of Italian architecture and a fence of unique appearance surrounding the front yard.”

(Andover Advertiser, March 5, 1853) Harriet had “the home touch. ‘Here, for many years were received and entertained, many of the most distinguished people of this and other lands, and here were planned innumerable philanthropic undertakings in which Mrs. Stowe and her scholarly husband were the prime movers.’” (Charles E. Stowe, Life of HBS, p. 185 ff.)

Dominated by Andover Theological Seminary, known widely as “The Bulwark of Calvinism,” the place was much too prim and proper for Harriet.

“I see no reason why religion and long, sour faces must go together,” she complained. “I do not intend to have my children raised in this crushing atmosphere!” Harriet intended to make her home “a center of social life; an open, hospitable place of humor.” Local tongues wagged when she put up the town’s first Christmas tree and invited the stodgy seminary fathers over to receive gifts that turned out to be jokes, rather than the mementoes they’d expected from the Stowe’s European trip. Harriet took three European tours from Andover, partly to deliver lectures sponsored by foreign anti-slavery groups.

She met Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, who confessed “weeping over her book.”

Concerts, charades, and dances were frequent happenings at the Stone Cabin, and, once, Harriet was sternly chastised for keeping her daughters’ Abbot Academy classmates “out past half-past eleven!” The Stowes purchased land in West Andover, where they enjoyed carriage and sleigh rides. Harriet sponsored the Lawrence Glee Club.

After her eldest son was drowned at Dartmouth, she attended spiritualist gatherings in Lawrence, in hopes of communicating with Henry. After all, hadn’t she and Calvin heard his guitar being strummed in the Stone Cabin? From Andover, Harriet took the train to Boston to meet fellow authors at the Old Corner Book Shop or attend Founders Dinners with other Atlantic editors. And though proper women did not attend the theater, Harriet was eager to see the characters from her book brought to life upon the Boston stage. She was among the cheering crowd in Boston’s Tremont Temple on January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was announced.

Charles Stowe, the youngest Stowe, was a regular “Dennis, the Menace.” The entire family, including Nanny and Cook, was continually frustrated by his antics, which Harriet reiterated in “Our Charley, And What to Do With Him,” the column she wrote for The Lowell Review

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the Andover Advertiser that published as a book in 1858.

“He makes a locomotive of the worktable and a steam whistle of himself . . . Or greater horror, company is expected and he must put on a clean suit just as he had made arrangements for a ship-launching down by the swamp.” Charley’s habitual lying became such a serious concern that Harriet sought a phrenologist to analyze his character and the cause of his problem by reading protuberances on his skull.

When “War came like a whirlwind, amazing even those who foretold a bitter harvest of violence . . . ,” Professor Stowe and his wife sent local forces off with speeches and a hymn Harriet wrote for the occasion. Impatient for the emancipation of slaves, Harriet went to the White House. “ I am going to Washington to see the heads of departments myself, and to satisfy myself that I may refer to the Emancipation Proclamation as a reality, not a fizzle out . . . I mean to have a talk with ‘Father Abraham’ himself. ” (HBS, Letter to James T. Fields, Nov. 13, 1862) Harriet’s trip to Washington also presented the opportunity to see her son Frederick, who had dropped out of Harvard to enlist and was now stationed near the Capitol.

Later, the Stowes would learn of Fred’s terrible wound during the Battle of Gettysburg from an item in the Andover Advertiser. Calvin immediately caught the train to New York where Fred was hospitalized. Shrapnel had lodged in his ear from which he never fully recovered nor escaped pain. The PTSD suffered by Frederick Stowe caused him to seek relief in alcohol, even among the bars and streets of Boston. He horrified his sisters by staggering about Andover, embarrassing all three so they refused to speak to him. A decade later, Fred boarded a ship out of Boston and was last seen on a San Francisco wharf before disappearing forever.

Harriet Beecher Stowe died in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 1, 1896, and is buried beside Calvin and their son, Henry, in Chapel Cemetery on Phillips Academy’s campus in Andover. Harriet remained controversial even in death, for her three surviving children installed a non-Puritan Celtic cross their mother had admired in Scotland above her grave. And a group of former slaves and their descendants left a wreath with a banner reading, “From the Children of Uncle Tom.”

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Revenge or Really? t o o c h va n

Khmer Rouge soldiers not killing me Was a mistake of their mission that night. This is what I believe.

I am in debt to my parents/family and other Cambodians And their families who died in the genocide.

The responsibility of sharing my family story And what happened in the Killing Fields is my obligation Even with the struggles and challenges every time I share it— But I will continue sharing it until my last breath.

My own children, Winston & Franklin, and younger generations Like you and your children and grandchildren deserve to know & to learn What happened in the Killing Fields comes not only From written or printed materials but also from the power of sharing, Through weaving words into storytelling.

My true aim is not to get you to lament for me and my family Or the Cambodian families who died, But to get you to learn about how genocide Affects the lives of people/survivors lives like ME! I hope you pick up the torch of responsibility and courage And pass it on to others through poems, films, books, songs, or short stories To prevent genocide from happening again.

And I hope you enrich yourself with personal integrity, morality, critical thinking, As well as a compassion for others every time you make a decision.

If you do that, you will be a source of inspiration and hope.

You will do your part for social responsibility, You will make a difference in our community.

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Trees of Bolton c h at h p i e r s at h

Trees of Bolton, this 2019, Beneath clear American sky, after rain, no rainbow, But despair & regrets, yesterday without the clown In festive mood of a Hollywood Scream on screen.

Clown on clown, the illiterate rule earth and sky.

What the clown does, crazier than what can be believed As doubts loom higher to reveal how father-sky is a liar.

In the tear ducts of certain Americans, Insanity, greed, and self-centering are a way of life, Staring at a baboon who can set the forest on fire, Bringing havoc and tyranny to the jungle.

Fools are sycophants out for attention, Money, and presidential power, Makeshift democrats in disguise— Republicans’ dire hunger for the return of a Savior, Their clown-eyed devil smiling the saddest, scariest Smile, making holes the children can easily fill with stones.

Self-boasting is very American, The “me” culture of an X generation, A technological illness on the prowl Smearing human goodness the world needs To fight the insatiable power A party can use to bleed the republic, Crack open the sky and earth— Self-annihilation or self-flagellation, Like fanatics castrating themselves for faith and purity.

In Christ, this fleshy body of paradise awaits holy men.

Dirtied and stained, Sin removal is very difficult on natural laws and urges.

The blood of man, salt and sterile in stagnation, Hate driven wild, men gone mad, delusional, 46

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Nature itself will spin his head, Take out his eyes storm by storm, Hurricane by hurricane, Weathered pillows and flooded beds, Houses in the wind, sky-rise glass shattering, Shrapnel from hail like bullets of mass shooters.

Nature can’t or won’t be ignored.

Why does man tear up the sky and mold earth into his shape?

Nature can do better.

In his own tears, man will drown.

Climate change is the collective nuclear bombs All the nations possess to mass destruct in one sweep, Everything in its way, including the current president, Out golfing so he can tweet how great he has made America again.

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Germany: Reconciling with the Past r i c h a r d p. h o w e , j r .

H

ave you heard of the concept of a “second country?” I heard this recently: The country in which we live is our first country, but we usually feel a connection to a second place. It could be the country that we or our ancestors came from. Maybe it’s a place we have visited. Or it could just be a place we read about or saw in a movie.

My second country is Germany. On November 15, 1980, I landed at Frankfurt’s RheinMain Airport and spent the next three years living there while serving in the U.S. Army. I lived in two major cities, first Stuttgart, then Nurnberg, and traveled throughout. Most of the time I was with other Americans but I spent enough time “on the economy” to develop a feel for the place unlike the experience of a typical vacation trip. Germany is also where I met my wife, Roxane, who was stationed there as well.

We’ve gone back twice: in 2007, joined by our son Andrew, we returned to the places where we had been stationed and re-visited other places that had left a positive impression on us. In 2013, Roxane and I spent a week in Berlin, a place that would have been exceedingly difficult for us to visit during the Cold War of the early 1980s. I hope there are more visits to Germany in our future.

One of the most interesting aspects of going back was to see how things had changed in the twenty-five years since we had lived there. Merrell Barracks, the base I was assigned to in Nurnberg, had become the German government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.

And Flak Kaserne in Ludwigsburg, Roxane’s home for three years, was abandoned, padlocked and overgrown with weeds.

Perhaps the biggest and most substantial change I noted was the attitude of Germans towards their involvement in World War II. In 1980, no one really spoke about it, except for sixty-plus-year-old men after several liters of Lowenbrau at the local beer fest. And while the concept of “political correctness” had yet to be acknowledged, what they muttered was off the charts by that measure. A few places, like the former German Army barracks at which I worked, still had walls pockmarked by American .50 cal. rounds from 1944. In Nurnberg, the great marble reviewing stand at the Nazi Party Rally Grounds was intact and in good repair except for the swastika that had been dynamited off the roof by American Army combat engineers after the city’s capture.

Then there was Dachau, the concentration camp on the outskirts of Munich. When I visited it in 1982, the remains of the camp were still there. Some of the original buildings stood although you could only view them from the outside. There may have been a few signs but no detailed labels telling you what you were looking at. There was

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a newer building, something like a Quonset hut, that held some photos and artifacts.

But rather than an interpretive museum, it was more like a storehouse for items that had been donated from a variety of people and entities. Regardless of the lack of museum formalities, I was still overwhelmed by the somberness of the place and the powerful knowledge of the enormous evil that had occurred there.

What I found upon my return to Dachau in 2007 was startling—in a good way. The boarded-up buildings from 1982 were now open to the public. There were plenty of multilingual signs and labels. A large vacant area in the middle of the site now held replicas of the foundations of the inmate barracks buildings. There were so many of them that it gave you a better sense of the scale of this concentration camp.

The large administration building, closed in 1982 like everything else, was now a firstclass museum. It did not sugarcoat the story of Nazism in Germany. Far from it: the story told in that museum was one of evil and horror that took place at that very site. It was a story told by the descendants of those who had committed the terrible acts, or who turned a blind eye and did nothing to stop them.

We found a similar museum in Nurnberg on the grounds of the Nazi Party Rally Grounds. In 1982-83, I passed by this site nearly every day—it was on the course of our morning PT run—and it was always locked up. In 2007, this same mammoth building had become the Dokumentationszentrum (Documentation Center), a museum that explored the causes and consequences of Nazi Germany, especially the city of Nurnberg’s substantial role in Nazism. The museum was very somber with dark gray floor, cement ceiling and red brick walls. You moved from room to room and station to station, pressing the corresponding numbers on the audio device to hear commentary.

A few days later, we were in Salzburg, Austria. Just back across the German border was Berchtesgaden and the Kehlstein Haus (Eagle’s Nest) which was a residence used by Hitler before and during World War II. The Americans occupied this area at the end of the war and renamed a hotel that once housed members of the Nazi regime the General Walker which was for the exclusive use of members of the U.S. Military and their families. (Henry Kissinger once said, “the Russians seized the key cities; the Americans seized the key ski resorts.”). In fact, I had stayed at the General Walker Hotel a couple of times in the early 1980s.

When we visited in 2007, the Eagle’s Nest was still there, attracting as many visitors as ever, but the General Walker Hotel was gone. In its place was another Dokumentation Center which told the story of Hitler’s rise to power, the strategy and tactics he used and the war and destruction wrought by the Nazi regime. Some of it was content covered at the Nurnberg museum, but new material included information about low-or-no interest loans for families that were intended to allow women to stay home and have children (they got awards, Iron Crosses of bronze, silver, and gold depending on how many children they had). Also, getting women out of the workforce lowered the unemployment rate.

The story of the post-war life of the site was interesting, too. Much of the Nazi construction was destroyed except for the Eagle’s Nest house which was built to impress foreign visitors and presented to Hitler on his fiftieth birthday. The General Walker American Hotel closed in 1996 and was torn down in 2000. It was replaced by this museum. There seems to be an ongoing concern that the Eagle’s Nest not turn into a pilgrimage site for Nazi sympathizers.

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A few years later in Berlin we visited the Holocaust Memorial which opened in 2005.

The Memorial is a field of large gray cement rectangles of uniform size and shape but differing heights. The pathways between these blocks, paved with cobblestones, descended and rose. There were no words or markings anywhere. The design seemed part of a trend towards horizontal memorials such as the Vietnam Memorial and the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial. The museum itself was underground. Climbing down some stairs you pass through metal detectors into a lobby. Then there are several rooms that tell the story, very bluntly, of the Holocaust through words and pictures. Family and individual stories personalized what happened. Especially moving were lit floor panels in an otherwise dark room. Each had an excerpt from a diary, letter or note of one who was murdered— which is the word the exhibit uses repeatedly, to powerful effect.

The contrast between Germany’s public reckoning with the Nazi era in 1980 and in 2007 was striking. At the earlier time, society seemed to acknowledge it, but only grudgingly, like a very embarrassing episode in one’s past that would rather be forgotten.

In 2007, the country confronted its evil past head-on. These exhibits weren’t cookie cutter replicas put up to pacify an external audience. They were a clear public acknowledgement of what had happened with no revisionism, no feel-good explanations, no celebration of the heroism of the ordinary soldier, nothing remotely positive other than the honesty of coming to terms with the past as a way of ensuring it not happen again.

I came away from my recent visits to Germany impressed with how the country was reconciling the Nazi era of the past with the country’s future self-image. And I couldn’t help but compare that with America’s continuing unwillingness to acknowledge the evils of slavery and the harms that it caused in an honest and straightforward way.

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SECTION III

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The Waitresses of America d av i d d a n i e l

T

he trucker crumpled his napkin, dropped it on the Formica counter, and rose. “You’re brave, young lady,” he said.

The waitress smiled tentatively. “I am?”

“Serving food this bad? Shit, yeah.”

From where I sat three stools away I saw her cheeks warm, her bashful spirit shrink. The man pawed the wallet tethered to his belt by a chain and strode tight-jawed for the cashier. I inventoried what he’d left on his plate: a half-gnawed chicken leg, fat congealed on the gray skin; some pallid green peas; a pasty dinner roll. The problem though was the baked potato.

Partly unwrapped from crinkled gray foil, one bite gone, it was small and shriveled, and it was sprouting eyes.

“That was wrong,” I said to the waitress. Her eyes flicked my way. “Blaming you for the food. There’s the culprit.” I pointed. “No telling where that guy’s from, but this is Maine—if anything on that plate’s gotta be right, it’s the spud. Again, it’s not your fault, but folks come off the road looking to eat. You’re the public face of this diner. You should take it up with the chef.” A bit of her smile returned.

That was in Skowhegan. There have been other times, other places. A pizza joint outside Utica; a pancake house in Altoona; a catfish shack in Biloxi. And the time in Galveston where, after a chicken-fried steak, I inquired about dessert.

“Pecan pah,” the waitress said. “Homemade.”

“That’s for me. And can you serve it a la mode?”

Her bluebonnet-blue eyes widened. “Pecan pah Alamo?”

It wasn’t Texas humor. She didn’t know. I explained about the scoop of vanilla ice cream, and she was happy to bring it.

Some of the confusions are regional, or historical. Like the time explaining to a Maryland waitress that a cheeseburger “royal” used to mean with lettuce and tomato. Or that New England seafood favorites quahogs and scallops are “co-hogs” and “scollops.” And how in Massachusetts “tonic” is what elsewhere is soda or pop.

It seems most everyone’s worked in a restaurant at one time or another, so shouldn’t we all learn from each other and share the wealth? I had a kindly waitress (who reminded me of my mother) correct me in a voice as quiet as the sound of her foam-soled shoes, so as not to embarrass me in front of others, that “Croquette” was pronounced with a hard t, and not like the lawn game. I doubled the tip. Eating is the heartbeat and the breath of being alive.

Kindness is the key.

Which brings me to the night I sat in a 24-hour diner with coffee. It was in Lowell, Kerouac’s town, late, just the waitress, the cook back there with his white paper hat askew,

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and me, nothing on the grill or the jukebox. The waitress looked tired but she never stopped: wiping down, restocking napkins and silverware, hefting a big rattling tray of downturned cups, which she stacked on a shelf above the coffee urns. No tips in any of that, but it was work that needed doing.

“Can I get you something else?” she asked me.

I said I was good for now.

“I’m going out for a smoke then—be back in a few.”

I sipped coffee, drifting, a nighthawk stuck between midnight and dawn. Outside my car sat under the diner’s sign, a chameleon in the alternating red, yellow, and green blink of the neon.

When the waitress came back, I knew what kind of smoke she’d meant. She smiled preemptively. “I’m quitting the others.”

“Any luck?”

“Jury’s still out, but habits don’t change by themselves. This puts a squirt of oil in the gears. Makes the next few hours flow.”

“He okay with it?” I nodded at the man behind the grill.

“It’s Lenny’s stash. He’s cool. We’ve been here together for years.”

“When you say years,” I said, “how long is that?”

“Five maybe? Which in waitress years you multiply by half your age then divide by three . . . there’s a formula.”

I liked her. “I’m sure it gets busy at times.”

“Crazy busy. Then times like now you could set off firecrackers. It’s a graveyard.”

“With only ghouls for patrons.”

She smiled. “No, I only meant . . .”

We laughed. Then I surprised myself. “Can I buy you a coffee?”

She shrugged. She got a cup for herself and warmed mine.

“This time of night,” she said, “I’m worn. Trouble is, I get home and I’ve got that greasy feel. A hot shower helps, but I’m wired. Don’t sleep. You?” “Sleep?” I said.

“There’s a bunch of questions in that, I guess.”

“I’m passing through,” I said. “Heading out.” The lighted sign had drawn me. “Are you and Lenny . . . ?” I let it drift.

“He’s happily married—or reasonably. With three kids, a pot belly and a mortgage. Not that anything’s wrong with that. More than I’ve got.”

“I’ve got two of those.” I sucked in my stomach. “One. Mortgage.”

She smiled. Stitched in blue on her white blouse was “Jo.” Was she forty? Her thin arms were smooth as a girl’s, though there had to be muscles hiding in them the way she’d handled that tray of cups.

“My mom was a waitress,” I said.

“No kidding? Mine too.”

“Know what mine used to call a cheeseburger with lettuce and tomato?”

“The works?”

“Cheeseburger royal.”

“Hmm. Is that what you want? I can tell Lenny.”

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“No, just remembering.”

“Know what my mom called a morning cigarette and a cup of coffee?”

“Uh uh.”

“A harlot’s breakfast.” She laughed. “Quaint, huh?”

“I was going to say, ‘not the healthiest way to start a day.’”

“True. Or end it.”

Which I guess is what we both were doing.

“Bu-ut,” she said, “it’s what I’ve got.”

Her life, I supposed she meant. The lonely hours, the sore feet and the greasy feel.

Insomnia. “Well, I better get back to it,” she said.

I thanked her for the company.

“Please call again,” she said with a weary smile.

I finished my coffee and left money. Outside, moths were bumping at the buzzing neon.

Beyond lay the siren-wailing night. I got in my car but I didn’t start the motor. It was 170 miles to Albany, I knew the route by heart, and I had all night. What were the events that had led me, road by narrowing road, to the things of my life? To all the sales travelling across the eastern U.S.? The God-blessed and sometimes cursed relationships? The small nudgings that prompted me ever closer to the solitary path I was on, like a habit? Beyond the windshield, through the glass of the diner I could see the waitress inside, Jo, doing the things a waitress does, whittling a span of time before she walked home to her place and hoped she’d fall asleep.

I watched her. High overhead a quarter moon lay tilted rearward, scratching its back on the night.

I sat a while longer.

And a while beyond that.

Then I got out and went back into the diner. The waitress looked up. I put coins in the jukebox and selected some songs. Van Morrison began to sing.

I asked her to dance. Her name was Johanna.

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Did Someone Say ‘Coffee’? jack mcdonough

E

arly in my married life I made coffee in a Proctor Silex which, if I’m not mistaken, consisted of an arrangement whereby the coffee flowed from one glass section to another, up or down, I don’t remember. I probably used Maxwell House coffee that came in a can. The resulting cup of coffee was unfailingly excellent. Then the PS broke.

I believe I tried unsuccessfully to replace it (“Sorry, we don’t make those anymore.”) or I possibly found some non-glass replacement that wasn’t as good.

Fast forward an indeterminate amount of time, and I remember complaining to someone that French Roast coffee was too strong. However, I corrected that character flaw and have enjoyed Starbuck’s French Roast for many years now. Dinner guests are consistent in their opinion that my coffee is too strong. The fault clearly lies in my selection of guests.

Millions of people obviously like Dunkin Donuts coffee. I very much dislike it and will drink a cup only if there’s no other coffee available anywhere in the world.

Two experiences with coffee: 1.

I had lunch in a Boston hotel some years ago and the coffee was so good that I asked the waiter what brand it was. He didn’t know, seemed surprised that I even asked the question and, as a matter of fact, appeared a little angry about the whole thing.

2. Sometime about thirty years ago the phone company was hours away from a strike and I, as a management person, was to remain in Boston overnight to be available for something or other early the next morning. Leaving the office late, I could find no restaurants open for dinner in our part of town. So I checked into a hotel near the office and called room service for a cheeseburger and a pot of coffee. The cheeseburger was excellent and the coffee was so good that I drank the whole pot. Naturally, that left me staring at the ceiling far into the night with a system full of caffeine. It was worth it. The coffee was that good. The company did go on strike but I have no idea what I did the following morning.

I have had some success using French press coffee makers. Done right, they produce a cup that shouts COFFEE. However, the process has to be carried out with perfectly ground fresh beans, the exact amount of water and the precise steeping time before pouring. Otherwise, you can end up with another cup of piping hot coffee-flavored water.

When all is said and done, here’s what actually happens in my kitchen circa 7 a.m.

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daily. I grind three scoops of Starbuck’s French Roast beans and put the ground coffee and two cups of water into my Black and Decker coffee maker and press the button. Voila!

I enjoy the wonderful aroma of Juan Valdez’s mule and a steaming nectar that catapults me into the day. You probably wouldn’t like it.

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Tomatoes, Tea, and Beer charles nikitopoulos

Every summer I grew my father's tomatoes.

I trimmed, weeded, and watered, And planted in the most sunny spaces, Usually, to no avail.

Every summer in a shady yard Behind a five-family on Lombard Street, My father grew his giant super-red tomatoes.

I remember him sitting in his chair, Sipping Lipton tea while tomatoes grew.

This summer, after an inconvenient illness, Rainy weather, and non-weeding, I discovered that tomato vines dutifully Support morning glories. Sometimes, Sipping a Sam Adams in my backyard chair, I marvel that Polivios never grew more morning glories.

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Spring Nettles: Gifts from the Great Mother linda hoffman

S

quatting in a patch of stinging nettles with my foraging basket, and rubber gloves, I was snipping young stalks to sauté for dinner. Some people react with alarm when I mention stinging nettles, but the truth is nettles are beloved by wild foragers and herbalists.

Mother Earth offers this gift packed with vitamins, minerals, and protein. In Making Plant Medicine, Richio Cech writes: “Practical Uses: Legion.” The Greeks and Romans cultivated fields of nettles more than any other crop.

Nettles sting because they have hairs on the stems and undersides of leaves that break off when touched, exposing the tiniest sharp needles that pierce the skin and inject a toxin that causes a burning rash. Fierce protection! For nettles are so nutritious, animals would devour them before they grew large enough to flower and bear seeds, the driving force in a plant’s life.

An old adage says, “When in doubt, use nettles!” Their beneficial uses include: a natural detoxifier, an anti-inflammatory, a treatment for gout, anemia, joint pain, diabetes, hay fever, urinary tract issues, and prostate issues. Flogging with stinging nettles for arthritis, joint pain, and to increase blood circulation is the one recommendation I am nervous about trying.

But when I am without energy and need a dose of friendliness, I reach for the jar of dry nettles and make a cup of tea. It’s magical how this plant restores my balance.

And, of course, what’s good for me is good for the orchard. Part of being a good orchardist is learning how to take care of the trees with kindness. In late spring, when I want to boost the trees’ immune systems and help provide an extra boost of minerals, I turn towards nettles.

When the plants are about eighteen inches tall, I cut a wheelbarrow-full, enough to fill a fiftygallon barrel. Then I add water and let the nettles sit for a few days. Sometimes, I add comfrey leaves for added minerals, horsetail for its silica, and garlic scapes, if I feel the trees need insect protection. After a few hot days, I drain out the liquid and fill my three-hundred-gallon sprayer. The gooey remains of the nettle plants go onto the compost pile, and I set out for my tractor tour of the orchard pulling the air blast sprayer with its peacock’s tail of spray fanning out to touch every leaf.

Nettles reduce heavy metals in soils, in fact I remember hearing that if you plant a rusty agricultural tool, it will attract nettles to grow there. Mostly I find nettles pop up where they choose. At the farm, they don’t seem to care whether it’s a dry berm in full sun, against the peeling paint of the old chicken coop, or in the dappled light of the streambed. When nettles have finished what they came to do, they pack up and move on. Wild plants are like that.

Now is the season to gather and cook young nettles (they will regrow for fall harvesting.)

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Try steaming them and adding a little lemon juice and olive oil, and some parmesan or other favorite cheese. Or sauté them with onions or shallots, add some garlic powder, and a bit of cream. For nettle pesto, most people suggest you boil the nettles and dry them with a towel.

Then fill your food processor with the nettles, walnuts, pecans or other nut, lemon juice, salt, a couple of peeled garlic cloves, and some hard cheese like asiago or parmesan. Once it becomes the consistency of a paste dribble in olive oil till it is smooth and the consistency you’d like.

If you make a lot, freeze some for the middle of next winter to serve over fresh linguine and bring spring back into your life. Don’t be alarmed: nettle pesto is iridescent green.

In midsummer, I cut some of the tall nettles, tie them bundles, and hang them in my studio. Once they are dry, I take a cardboard box or large paper bag, and with gloves on, run my hands along the stem to remove the leaves. The dry leaves can be stored whole, but I put them all through the food processor and store them in a couple of gallon jars. We sell small packs of dried nettles at the farm stand along with bags of freshly picked. And because some readers have asked, I also sell small watercolors unframed for forty dollars.

Out of the soil of friendliness grows the beautiful bloom of compassion, Watered by the tears of joy, Sheltered beneath the cool shade of the tree of equanimity.

—Longchenpa, fourteenth-century Tibetan Buddhist teacher Nettles are a curious teacher. They sting! But when we appreciate them, we receive nothing but gifts.

Happy Mother’s Day!

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Foliage susan april

O

ne weekend every October, Dad would pile the family into the station wagon and take one of his “long short cuts” to New Hampshire to see the leaves turn. I didn’t understand that meant leaves changing colors. I thought they’d literally pirouette on their stems, like the ballerina in my jewelry box. Never happened.

When I got the concept of fall foliage, I was sad. Because leaves changed from green to another color meant they were going to die. Except, it didn’t happen to all trees. Some tall and straight ones would keep their green color, even after the snow came. Dad informed us these were called evergreens. But mom laughed and said, Voyons, Charlie, don’t be so highmighty. They’re Christmas trees.

I didn’t know the names of trees. Not until my sister and I went on our own fall foliage adventure. Denise was four years older—technically, three years and eight months. Our expedition happened in October 1965. It was close to Halloween, but not exactly. Perhaps, the weekend before. Denise was working on a Cadette Girl Scout merit badge, patch number 9-444, Plant Kingdom, Trees. I was nine, almost ten, and in fifth grade. She was thirteen, turning fourteen the end of March, a freshman in high school.

For the merit badge, she’d have to go out and collect leaves, seeds, acorns, pinecones, etc. and carry them home in something—a paper bag would do nicely—then press the specimens between sheets of wax paper, using a hot iron. I didn’t one hundred percent understand this process: can you iron a pinecone? The activity also involved carrying a notepad, a pencil, and The Golden Guide to Trees. Denise fanned its pages in my direction. I saw tree pictures fly by and along the trailing edge of the last page, two paper rulers.

Hey, can I see that?

See what?

Those rulers in there.

Never mind about that. Do you want to help?

I considered the alternative: I could stay behind in the fenced yard with my brothers, who seemed to live in a tree house which they called a fort. It was stocked with rocks, plums, smashed bits of brick and, most importantly, Dixie cups filled with sand that they lifted from the sandbox after the neighbor cats would—you know—use it as a sandbox. But it wasn’t the sand they pitched at my head. It was the things in the sand.

Or I could walk with my sister whom, let’s be frank, I wished I could be not more like but exactly like, with her curly blonde hair, nonstop girlfriends and boyfriends, that forest green Cadette skirt and matching shoulder sash and its tale of merit badges, silver and gold stars, felt troop numbers, and oval cloisonne pin that spelled the Girl Scout Council name out in letters so small I couldn’t read them, but knew it meant she belonged.

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I accepted the job. The gate clanged when I closed it, and my brothers peeked out of their fort. Perhaps, I stuck out my tongue.

Where are we going?

What will we do?

Can I carry your book?

How about that tree?

What’s wrong with this one?

I prattled and pointed to the trees that lined our Osgood Street sidewalk. Denise didn’t answer; she only walked faster. In my memory, she wore her Cadette skirt, starched white blouse with the three-quarter sleeves, patent leather shoes with medium heels, and that merit badge sash. As this was late October, in Massachusetts, my memory must be wrong, but it’s a good wrong, so I keep it.

Where are we going?

Tyler Park.

How far is it?

You’ll find out when we get there.

Can we walk slower?

No. What’s this street?

Pine.

What’s that school?

The Morey.

Hey, isn’t that Dad’s old— Firehouse? Yes. Tyler Park, Lowell, Mass.

We waved to the firemen sitting in their tilted back chairs. The firehouse doors were wide open and the hoses had been laid out to dry.

You’re Charlie’s kids, aren’t you? they called, as we approached.

Denise smiled. Nodded. We walked even faster.

I thought: This isn’t much fun. I had imagined we’d walk around the block, poke from yard to yard, ask our neighbors, Mind if we take a few leaves? They’d bring out trays of cookies and apple cider. With Denise in her scouting uniform and me with a pencil behind my ear, a cub reporter, it’d be like trick-or-treating.

But we didn’t go around the block. Wherever we were heading, it was far and I lost the breath for questions.

After many right and left turns, down streets I didn’t know the names of, I noticed the houses got larger and fancier. They sat on big lots and had wide, wraparound porches and castle-like turrets. Their lawns smelled clean. Pianos played inside. I’m not sure if I heard music, but pretty sure I saw pianos in the parlors behind lace curtains. Dogs sat on 62

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the porches and did not bark or jump three steps off in one leap and charge, teeth bared, towards us on the sidewalk. Instead, they yawned. I’d never seen such a place.

I didn’t notice we’d arrived. I’d been running my hand along a tickly hedge of leaves and squishy red berries. When I looked up, I saw my sister standing with hands on hips. Well then, she said. She wasn’t talking to me. She wasn’t even facing me. She was facing a broad lawn with park benches and trees. So many trees. Tyler Park.

Well then. *** “We have purchased and set out at Tyler Park six Bass trees or American Linden (Tilia Americana) and a corner bed of Spirea and Hydrangea, along with a Barberry hedge at the upper end.”—City Documents of the City of Lowell, Massachusetts, for the year 1913-14, Park Commissioner’s Report.

Designed by Charles Eliot, and constructed by the firm of Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliot, Tyler Park at 2.74 acres is the smallest park ever built by Frederick Law Olmsted’s famous landscaping firm. Before the 1880’s, this area was part of Chelmsford and consisted of farms and open fields. In 1884, it was annexed to the City of Lowell and within ten years, the streetcar line was laid up Westford Street. Fashionable, suburban homes in the Queen Anne Style and a few in Richardsonian Shingle Style were built to accommodate Lowell’s growing middle class. Around 1893, Mrs. Samuel Tyler sold a large pasture to William Bent, attorney, for the purpose of a residential neighborhood called Tyler Park Lands Subdivision. Mrs. Tyler and daughter donated 2.74 acres at the heart of it for a public park.

Thank-you, Mrs. Tyler.

At age nine-almost-ten, I knew none of this. Here’s what I did know—or discovered— that afternoon with my sister: Catalpa leaves look like elephant ears.

Shade can be everywhere even with many leaves gone.

Hawthorns are small trees with thorns.

My sister does not hold my hand.

There may have been birds, but I couldn’t see them.

The granite boulder was a friend.

My sister trusted me to hold The Golden Guide.

The winged things that fall from maple trees are called samara.

My sister is like the granite boulder, but she moves.

The bark of the Juniper is scratchy.

If I pick up too many acorns and put them in the paper bag and jiggle it, my sister will say stop that!

The bubbler was dry.

Someone, somewhere, was burning leaves.

If there were birds, they remained hidden.

Leaves when they rub together sound like applause.

I tasted salt and I didn’t know why.

There’s a tree called Sweet Gum and its seed pods are a big ouch.

I shouldn’t ask can we come back here again too many times.

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The bubbler at the other end of the park was also dry.

I can decide to taste leaves, but I won’t like it.

The walking paths led to more walking paths like the game Chutes and Ladders.

When resting on the granite boulder, a thought crossed my mind that no one mowed the park lawn, but at midnight goats and small ponies came off the porches and fed themselves.

Samara of maple tastes not one bit like maple.

Samara of maple is fun to wear on the bridge of your nose. *** In time, we returned home. I don’t remember the route. Seemed shorter going than coming. Denise, at some point, pressed her leaves without me. She wrote, on three-by-five cards, little notes that went with her waxed paper displays. Text taken from The Golden Guide. This is American Basswood, or Linden, a handsome shade tree. She pulled it all together in a scrapbook with a soft red cover. If leather could be velvet, that cover was velvet. She may or may not have gotten her patch. I’m not sure. Something else happened.

A few weeks after our adventure, the Great Northeast Blackout happened and it lasted thirteen hours. But that wasn’t the something.

During the Blackout, Denise sat at the kitchen table with a kerosene lamp doing her Latin homework. I sat across from her and watched. My brothers, I don’t remember where they were or what they were doing. Her hair, which in damp weather got frizzy, was frizzy and weirdly lit. She might have said, Stop staring at me, but I didn’t hear her.

What I did hear, three days after that—I’m guessing the number of days; I have no true accounting, only that what happened after the Blackout and before Christmas—was our parents speaking in French. Whenever there were secrets, they spoke French.

It happened like this: a photo was placed on the table. Mom and Dad stood back, examining it from different angles. It was from our summer camping trip in the White Mountains. The campground was Gitche Gumee. The photo was taken in front of the campground sign. In the photo, Denise stood to the left of the sign, I was on the right, Chuck and Joe with their Daisy air rifles, crouched in between. Good old Gitche Gumee.

The four us, smiling, hamming it up. Only there was something wrong with the picture, a problem with Denise. One shoulder stood higher than the other. Much higher. My shoulders were even.

Then, Denise and I were told to stand back-to-back. It was weird. Mom was smoking a cigarette and her ash fell on the kitchen floor. Dad circled around and around with a yardstick, measuring and comparing us. Then I was told to step back. The rest was all about Denise. Her back. The lump on her shoulder. They spoke more French, then left the room and all was as quiet as the night was dark during the Blackout. I don’t remember if anyone cried. All I know is that I wanted to hug Denise’s Latin book. Not hug Denise. Her Latin book.

I’ve felt bad about that all of my life.

Before Christmas, Denise went to the Boston Children’s Hospital to get put in a wholebody cast. I never saw her like that, not even in pictures. It was a long drive from Lowell to Boston and kids couldn’t go visit—that’s what our parents said. Puzzling to me why children 64

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couldn’t go to a children’s hospital. The theme of my tenth year was me being puzzled.

I simply couldn’t understand a thing. When our parents came back from their hospital visits in Boston, they spoke Latin. I guessed Denise was teaching them that language. My brothers spoke a kind of pig Latin, but I just called them silly.

When Denise comes home, you’ll have to move.

My parents told me this and I thought they meant I’d have to leave the house. Stop being their child. I had done something wrong. They wanted me to have been the one in the Gitche Gumee photo with the lump on her shoulder and not Denise. I cursed my even shoulders. Sometimes, I’d take Denise’s soft leather scrapbook of leaves and go cry.

What my parents meant, which I later discovered, was that I’d have to move out of the bedroom Denise and I shared. She needed a special bed. A room to her own. I don’t know what month it was, perhaps June, when the bedroom set got delivered. It had a full-size mattress and box spring, headboard, tall bureau, mirror and dresser. It was pecan. It was beautiful. It belonged in one of those friendly-dog, piano-parlor houses near Tyler Park.

Our twin beds got removed. There wasn’t an extra room in the house for them, or for me— well, there was but it was haunted. That’s another story.

I slept in my brothers’ room for a time. That was hell. Then I wandered around a bit.

There was a narrow, unheated, closet-like room next to what used to be Susan and Denise’s bedroom, but would be only hers when she came home from the hospital, that I moved into to try out for a while. It didn’t have a door, so Dad tacked up a sheet. The headlights of cars driving at night down Osgood bounced off that white sheet and made it spookier than even the haunted room. I gave that room a fail. Not sure where I ended up.

When Denise came home, she wore something called a Milwaukee brace. I was more frightened of it than the sheet. Ten was turning out to be one awful year. But it was more awful for Denise. Only I didn’t see it that way.

I wasn’t perfect.

I should have been better.

She also got a record player to listen to records in her room.

I asked Mom if she could ask Denise if I could have her bike since I didn’t see her using it anytime soon.

I won’t tell you how she responded.

I should talk about the scrapbook which I kind of loved to death. The wax paper unwaxed itself and things began to fall out. I didn’t know how to fix it. The Catalpa was what I was most upset about. I loved those elephant ears. My sister’s perfect penmanship index card read: Catalpa is a handsome tree. The wood is coarse but durable. It has heart-shaped leaves and bean-like seed pods.

But the heart was brown and in pieces; the long, once-straight, seed pod was curled up and had poked a gash in the paper. I tried to Scotch tape repair it. Didn’t work. The Catalpa was a wreck. I was a wreck.

I stole my sister’s bike. *** The Tyler Park central fountain—a concrete monstrosity with water shooting out of a carp’s mouth—was dismantled in 1906 for the creation of a rockery. Olmsted had always The Lowell Review

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envisioned a rockery for the park, but he died, and Eliott designed a fountain instead. When Eliott died, John-Charles Olmsted resurrected his father’s idea and installed a rockery.

Olmsted Senior’s most famous rockery was built in North Easton Center, Massachusetts.

Called The Rockery, it stands today on its granite outcropping and rises organically into the landscape with long arms of English Ivy and other plantings surmounting. It survives, but apparently requires a lot of maintenance. Because rocks fall down.

The granite boulder at Tyler Park is all that remains of the Tyler Park rockery. The single rock is about ten feet long and four feet wide. It has a hollowed-out scoop in the middle shaped like a hammock. Two smaller rocks on one side of the boulder make a natural stairway. Everyone who rides past the boulder on a blue Columbia, fixed-gear bike with metal wire basket and blue, yellow, and white plastic streamers streaming out of the handlebar grips has to stop, lean their bike down, and climb up on the bed-boulder to rest.

It’s home. A place all your own from which you can watch trees leaf out and measure the cloud-piercing height of spruces, or daydream that the spruces are rocket ships and you are sitting in a catcher’s mitt. It’s where you belong.

Denise showed me Tyler Park. Her bike brought me home. Denise’s arc of life no longer seemed to have a place for me. I had to find my own.

I stole The Golden Book as well. Wasn’t it a perfect day to lay on a boulder and read? To learn that “seeing” means knowing when to look, where to look, how to look, and what to see? That trees belong to the same plant family as many herbs, flowers, and shrubs.

That the palm and lily families include over a dozen unusual trees. That over eight hundred species of native and naturalized trees grow wild in the United States, including broadleafs and conifers. That roots anchor trees to the soil. That within each seed are the tiny beginnings of a tree. That trees do not grow in an entirely haphazard fashion. That trees are with us all year long.

I didn’t keep the bike forever.

In summer, the bubblers ran.

In summer, there were sugar ants.

Elephant ears taste better as a pastry.

Crows cawed, even if I couldn’t yet hear them.

Denise had her own life and I loved her.

A box of Pine Brothers Glycerin Cough Drops will keep you from starving.

Samara of maple can taste like maple sometimes.

Sassafras leaves are a mitten.

Certain trees have crooked trunks, but it’s not their fault.

Some prefer sun, some prefer shade.

November came.

I turned eleven.

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Glacier tom sexton

We stood on the deck of a ferry at dawn fifty years ago and felt the cold breath

of a glacier that was mirrored in the icy water.

Harbor seals disappeared as we approached.

When the air filled with the thunder of the glacier’s calving, we gripped the rail. The ferry shuddered.

Who would have imagined then how easy it would be to turn a glacier to mist, to make a glacier disappear?

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Home for the Holidays: Cowboy Christmas henri marchand

“

T

he memories of childhood have no order, and no end,” wrote Dylan Thomas in Reminiscences of Childhood. A popular holiday song claims that, “There’s no place like home for the holidays.” These lines come to mind as my family prepares to celebrate Christmas, 2020.

We cannot see nor can we celebrate Christmases yet to come, but even as we create new Yuletide traditions and experiences, we easily recall and readily share stories with family members and invite the comforting spirits of Christmases past to adorn another Christmas season. In so doing we gift pieces of family history to our children and grandchildren and family members yet to come.

Since 1975, my wife and I have celebrated Christmas in several homes, for the first five years by ourselves, later with our children and grandchildren. We spent the latter part of each Christmas day at what we considered the extended family home where I grew up. We returned regularly to celebrate not only Christmas but other holidays; birthday, graduation and special theme parties; and weddings.

Three generations of my family lived under one roof, creating moments and memories tied to the space and structure, giving our home something like a soul if that can be said for a house. Over the years, the house, a large, roomy Colonial Victorian, sheltered our nuclear family that included Mémère Brouillard and Aunt Rose. Lowell Tech students rented two rooms from September to May, and relatives visiting from Quebec, usually when an elderly aunt or uncle passed away, stayed with us.

Prior to my parents purchasing the house at 118 Riverside Street in 1953, five other families called it home. The house was built in 1896 by George C. Osgood, a doctor and apothecary who bought the lot in 1891 from the estate of Ezra B. Welch. Welch acquired the land and earlier buildings from a family named Pierce when the area was still farmland. The gnarly remnants of an apple orchard held out in our neighbors’ back yards in the 1960s. Osgood and his wife Louisa had three children—John, Harry and Mary.

They called the house home until June of 1903 when they sold it to Louis Olney, a Lowell Textile School professor of dyeing technology. Olney and his wife Bertha also had three children—Edna, Margaret and Richard. They reportedly kept a pet monkey and a goat.

I picture the Osgoods and the Olneys celebrating the holidays in their own times, in more formal attire and the home’s more formal furnishings, navigating heavy snowfalls and the still thinly developed area in sleds and sleighs. Recently posted photos on Facebook capture Riverside Street across from the Osgood’s home on February 1, 68

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1898. The view is towards Moody Street (now University Avenue), the sky is cloudy, the ground covered in deep snow and there are only three homes all along that side. Young trees, presumably elms line the street and the streetlight is a gas lit Victorian. A woman poses on the front porch of the gambrel house overlooking the Merrimack River. A child, half obscured by snow, plays in the yard. Some fifty to sixty years later that would be my siblings and our neighborhood friends.

There were three other, short-term owners after Louis and Bertha Olney died in an automobile accident in 1949 and before my parents moved in when I was two weeks old.

It was a large home and over the years my parents filled it with eight children—Monique, Gerard, Henri, Andre, Louise, Rene, Paul and Anne Marie. It became the place where our extended family gathered for informal visits and for holiday celebrations. And where childhood memories were created and where they reside still.

An early memory is of watching Mom and Mémère prepare special meals, bake pies and cakes, and fry doughnuts. An incentive to behave as we observed was the promise of raw pie dough and cake batter treats. We each took turns visiting Mémère and Aunt Rose who lived upstairs in an in-law suite created by a previous owner in 1952. They were my parents’ live-in child support, and we happily joined them for lunches and seemingly endless games of cards, checkers, and Parcheesi.

Halloween was a memorable season as the home lent itself to our imaginations and to the telling of ghost stories with its long hallways, nook stairwells, connecting rooms and passageways and the not-so-secret, secret room in the library Olney added in 1922.

My dad had a flair for embellishing stories whether fact or fiction. He claimed that the Olney’s pet monkey was buried somewhere in the yard or beneath the basement floor; that ghosts wandered the halls and resided in the secret room; that a squirrel who camped out under the hood of his car dashed out clean-shaven one morning after he turned the ignition. He spun tall tales of treasure hidden within the walls and in as-yet-undiscovered secret spaces. The storytelling tendency was inherited by at least one family member. My sister Monique, not one given to lying, to this day swears that she saw Dad chatting and shaking hands with Santa Claus one Christmas Eve. She recalls her memory in fine detail, insisting that she heard the sound of bells as Santa flew up the chimney.

Christmastime evokes the most vivid of home memories, with tinseled, Charlie Brown-trees strung with colored lights, yuletide aromas of baking pastries, roasting turkeys and C7 bulb-warmed balsam scents. There were white Christmases and bare-lawn Christmases, rainy Christmases and warm ones, but in my selective, disordered memory they all appear white. There remains, stored in boxes, unsorted collections of black-andwhite snapshots of our earliest holidays and color prints of later ones, some dated, some not, so that attaching an exact year to each memory is difficult and perhaps wholly beside the point. Nor is the memory of a particular holiday tied to the gifts received—Popeye Colorforms one year, a Boxer dog model another, and a visible man model later when I had expressed interest in becoming a doctor. But try as I might I could not figure out what organ went where, and the patient was never made whole. Whatever the gifts, it is the memories that endure and give added richness and meaning to our family’s celebrations and the requisite disputations of dates and names and whose memories testify to the official record.

One Christmas in particular stands out, Cowboy Christmas, as my older brother Gerry

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and I came to call it. We were six and seven years old, our younger brother Andy five.

The parlor that year was in what we later determined to have been Olney’s waiting room outside his library. The tree was another beautifully scrawny and heavily tinseled, glass adorned specimen. Gerry, Andy and I received cowboy hats, holsters with guns, faux leather gloves, a banjo, and a ukulele. In memory, we also received matching homemade flannel shirts that year to complete the singing cowpoke look but the memory is disordered, like the photos stored in shoe boxes. In recently unearthed black-and-white glossies, we pose proudly, ready to gallop off on our imaginary steeds not in flannel but in long-sleeved jerseys. No matter, it was the high noon of TV westerns and we spent that Christmas vacation chasing each other and yippee ki-yaying around the house. I imagine now that my parents may have regretted their gift choices. It remains one of my fondest childhood Christmas memories, and even now, with an aversion to guns as gifts, I happily recall and replay Cowboy Christmas.

It wasn’t until several years ago that I learned that my cherished Christmas memory was created at a difficult time for my parents. I was visiting my Mom, reminiscing as we often did in her later years. As we spoke of the holidays, I expressed how I remembered that Christmas as a wonderful time. She seemed pleasantly surprised and shared that for her and Dad it was a season of struggle. Dad, a self-employed painter and paperhanger, had been hospitalized and out of work. But they were determined to provide gifts for each of their children which by then included four sons and two daughters. They were equally determined not to let their worries diminish our joy. So they purchased inexpensive felt hats, six-shooters, and plastic cowboy instruments for my brothers and me along with other simple toys for our siblings.

As we got older Christmas memories shifted from toys to traditions. At some point, around ages eleven or twelve, we began attending Midnight Mass and enjoying a Réveillon, traditions carried down through New England from mostly farming communities to factory towns by our Quebecois forebears. The Réveillon followed Mass with an early morning buffet of Franco favorites—tourtière (pork pie), salmon pie, apple and squash pies, homemade caramels, and fudge. Once done, it was off to the parlor for the sharing of gifts.

Over the years Christmas celebrations evolved as we each left the family house. We continued to return with another generation after time spent with our in-laws and at one point fifty-plus showed up at what was now a more reasonable time (4 p.m. rather than 1 a.m.) to feast, exchange gifts, and delight in an ever growing, ever lively Yankee Swap.

In the late 1990s my parents began a new, adults-only tradition as a way to spend relatively quiet time with us. Two weeks before Christmas my brothers and sisters and significant others gathered for dinner with Mom and Dad, joined by our cousin Rick, who was by then living in Atlanta. Each of us was responsible for one course of a dinner that often broke with Franco-American cuisine traditions. Between the main meal and dessert we formed a production line to cut and wrap several batches of homemade caramel (with regular testing for quality control) and decorate the family tree. Mom and Dad delighted in these annual gatherings. Dubbed the Christmas Progressive Dinner, it was initially conceived as a traveling feast with a different course served at each of our homes, but a blizzard the first year convinced us to abandon the travel part.

We have known for a few years that our long run of celebrations in the family home

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was nearing its end. As the years passed and we all had our own homes, the family house remained the common ground, our parents the center that held, and their being and nurturing drew us all back at Christmas. Dad died in 2001, Mom in the spring of 2019.

We agreed that we would not sell the home before one more Christmas season, one more round of gatherings to celebrate the memories and to say goodbye to the spirit of the place.

Our family house passed on to another owner this past spring and after sixty-seven years will no longer host our family’s holiday communal gathering. But it remains with us in muddled memories that “have no end” and in stories of Christmases past and of the people who have called it home. There is no longer a home spacious enough to accommodate fifty of us for a single holiday celebration, so we will atomize and gather in cautiously smaller groups.

COVID Christmas 2020 will be celebrated with new traditions and family members, likely via new technologies. Photo moments will be saved with screen shots. Still, we will remember those that came before and will look forward to passing on, as one passes on family heirloom ornaments, those endless memories of Christmases past. Even as we look back, we will look forward to 2021 and to “Cowboy Christmases” yet to draw near.

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L

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SECTION IV

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Jay Pendergast: A Singular Man s t e p h e n o ’c o n n o r

M

y best guess is 1978. Summer workers for the Neighborhood Youth Corps had painted an Irish-American themed mural on the back of a building facing Worthen Street. Naturally, after the dedication, the crowd meandered over to the Old Worthen. It was a beautiful day, a Saturday if memory serves, and I joined the throng. I found myself standing outside the tavern in front of a table, upon which sat an old set of war pipes, a silver breastplate, a steel targe or buckler shield, several swords, a waist belt buckle from the uniform of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, and a somewhat disjointed but fascinating collection of Irish antiquities.

Behind that table stood a gray-bearded, barrel-chested, pony-tailed man with rosecolored sunglasses, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. This was clearly someone with whom one had to converse. The odd assortment of rarities together with his arcane knowledge of historical artifacts suggested a professor emeritus, but his ready smile and easy manner belied the stuffy seriousness I usually associate with such a person. When, finally, I introduced myself and asked his name, things began to fit into place. “You’re Jay Pendergast?” I had been hearing about this guy for a long time. It seemed that whenever anyone in Lowell discovered that I was interested in Irish history and literature, they would say, “You must know Jay Pendergast.” I didn’t. But here, at last, was the man himself. And this, as Captain Louis Renault told Rick Blaine in Casablanca, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Jay lived just beyond the Tyngsborough Bridge in a house perched on the bank above the Merrimack River, with his wife Maire and their children, Ciaran, and at that time, the baby, Cait. Maire is a Dubliner from Ship Street in “the Liberties” neighborhood, known in popular song as “the rebel Liberties.” (At the age of eighteen, Maire would go to Slattery’s Pub to listen to a gathering of local musicians, some of whom later formed a band called “The Chieftains.”) Jay met Maire during his five-year stint in Dublin, where he was working on a PhD and absorbing Dublin through every pore.

I became a regular at Jay’s Tyngsborough house, where I met a fascinating collection of people, including, of course, the aforementioned Maire; Dave Hardman, the horticulturist, Dr. Kiersey, the anesthesiologist, Rolly Perron, the farmer, Phil Chaput and Hank Garrity, collectors and antique dealers, and Jay’s long-time best friend, Charlie Panagiotakos, the chemist, and his wife, Marie.

Charlie had been granted a double promotion and entered Lowell High at the age of 12, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. He wasn’t into track or football. (I don’t believe Jay ever watched a competitive sports contest. He once expressed some confusion over whether the “Orioles” were a baseball or a football team and had little interest in the

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answer. When I told him that a new local soccer team was looking for a name, he suggested “the Poodles”).

At Lowell High, Charlie and a group of intellectual students who liked to talk about chemistry, math, and art, formed “The Barf Club.” A friend of one of the Barfers who attended Keith Academy came to one of their meetings, and brought another Keith boy, Jay Pendergast. Charlie describes himself in those days as “an oddball, brainy kind of fellow.”

And of course, Jay would always hit it off with a smart oddball.

They graduated in 1955 into a rapidly changing America. Charlie tells me, “I became a beatnik. Then I became a hippie. Then finally just a mental case.” He still makes me laugh, and he made Jay laugh, too. They became great friends, shooting Super 8 movies in downtown Lowell in the ‘60s and playing in an improvised garage band. (Jay played flute, but as he would admit, relied heavily on visual effects).

These were some of the characters who hung out on Riverbend Road, with Jay holding court, talking until the wee hours with some or all of these friends, often with a blazing fire in the wood-burning stove. If a party piece were necessary, he liked to recite “Sir Patrick Spens”: The King sits in Dunferline toun, Drinkin the blude-reid wine ‘O whaur will a get a skeely skipper Tae sail this new ship o mine?’

Jay was a collector, probably from the time that his mother, a college librarian, brought home books that awoke his interests. He collected prints, coins, books, swords, military uniforms, arrowheads, and memorabilia of all kinds. He was in love with anything old, with anything that spoke to him of a vanished past. Every time I visited him, he had some new bit of history to show me: a clay Egyptian lamp, a signed letter from Edmund Kean, pages from a fifteenth century incunabula. One day, he produced an old silver spoon and handed me a jeweler’s loupe. The PR, that became clearly visible on the back of the tapered part of the handle, he said, stood for Paul Revere. “He sometimes used the Revere mark, and sometimes the simple PR.” The shop owner, unaware of what she had, had asked twenty dollars. “I almost hurt myself getting the money out,” Jay said, and he added, “That’s the whole game. You have to know what you have, or you have nothing.”

Jay always seemed to be grabbing at a past that might well vanish before he could collect it—save it from an oblivion that it didn’t deserve. One of the ceiling lights in his house wore the old POLICE lamp cover that once proclaimed the police station on Market Street. He always wanted to run in to any condemned building that was about to be taken down to see what he could salvage, to stop at any construction dig to pick through the piles of dirt, looking for arrowheads, shards of pottery or the polished stone head of a war club to add to his collection. When I complimented Jay and Maire on what I thought were new couches of a beautiful golden velour, he said, “They’re not new. I managed to purloin the curtain from the Strand Theater before they tore it down and had the couch and love seat re-covered with the material.”

These days, it’s difficult to be a Renaissance man. If you don’t have a degree in whatever it is, you’re pursuing or opining on, people refuse to take you seriously. But Jay was interested in everything, wanted to know everything. A table at the Hollis Flea Market didn’t bring in much revenue, and Jay had quit his job at the Bartlett School. (He used 76

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to take his boat to work there—shoving off from his own dock, cruising down the river, tying up at the Lowell Motorboat Club, and walking across the street). After he quit that job, he became what he referred to as “a gypsy professor,” teaching an array of classes at a dizzying number of universities and community colleges. He taught Film, Mythology, Archaeology, Literature, Art History, Cultural Anthropology—the life of a gypsy professor was a struggle—more than a full-time workload with part-time pay and no benefits. His car, an old (naturally) Mercury Comet, was full of boxes of books and papers, and he told me he sometimes had to stop and remember what class he was going to teach. He said, “I’ll teach anything. Calculus? Yes. Give me the book. I’ve got a wife and two kids. I’ll learn it and teach it.”

I remember my father laughing one day as he read The Lowell Sun. “That friend of yours is quite a guy,” he said. “There’s an article about Jay Pendergast, amateur archaeologist.

Two weeks ago, there was another article about Jay Pendergast, amateur filmmaker.” He was both, and more. As an amateur archaeologist, he got a team from Harvard University to come to Lowell to excavate the stone circle in LeBlanc Park in the Pawtucketville neighborhood, to try to determine if it might have been built by early Celts. They decided it was not so old as that, but who built it or why remains a mystery.

In ‘79 I was accepted into a master’s program in Anglo-Irish Lit (literature written in English as opposed to Irish), at University College, Dublin (UCD), where Jay was still enrolled in the PhD program. He showed up, with Maire and Ciaran; first, there was a meeting with Roger McHugh, a department head at UCD about the status of Jay’s doctoral dissertation on Charles Maturin. Jay always had more than one iron in the fire, though.

He was also working on a new scheme to import Irish gin to America. He had achieved a meeting at Irish Distilleries, to which he wore an ascot, thinking he would impress them with his urbane sophistication. Unfortunately, he said, “They kept staring at the ascot as if I had a big coke spoon hanging around my neck.” So, the Irish gin was left to later importers. However, Jay proceeded to introduce me to another great collection of people on the other side of the pond.

They were all very fond of Jay and Maire. As long as I was a friend of theirs, I had the key to that society. There was Captain Hood, a retired Aer Lingus pilot, Tadgh McSweeney, the whimsical Cork artist, a defrocked Jesuit whose name I forget, and, in particular, a distinguished sculptor and restorer of paintings for the National Museum, George Laffin.

These people took me under their wing after Jay had left, and I had another reason to be grateful for his friendship. (Note: There is a wonderful photo of George Laffin with one of his sculptures in Jim Higgins’ new collection of Irish photos, Ireland: North and South).

Jay and I were stopped by a Guard in Dublin. Jay was driving a Morris Minor, for which, of course, he had not bothered to get the necessary insurance sticker. He gave an Oscarworthy performance of the clueless, dumb Yank who had no idea about . . . insurance stickers? “I’m sorry, Officer! I’ll get one tomorrow!” The Guard was mollified and said, “Well, I should write you up, but I haven’t got me biro.” I think Ireland was where Jay learned valuable lessons about how you could get a lot done with “a bit of chat.” I should note that the Hibernian capital in which Jay had moved was truly, as the song puts it, “Dublin city in the rare ould times.” At McDaid’s Pub, for example, he might have a pint with Paddy Kavanaugh, Pearse Hutchinson. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Brendan Behan, or Liam O’Flaherty. Maire recalls how, working as a waitress in another Dublin bar/restaurant, she The Lowell Review

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saw a drunken Peter O’Toole come in one night with a severed pig’s head under his arm. In Dublin, Jay learned to live by his wits; Maire recalls how he would stock the car with items he had purchased at Ging’s of Dame Street, (“theatrical costumier, fancy dress, carnival and novelties”). They would drive out to the Cliffs of Moher, where, out of his trunk, he would resell his purchases to French and German tourists while Maire built a fire by the side of the road and cooked up scrambled eggs.

When I finished my degree in Dublin, I had the opportunity to work in France, and ended up staying there for a year or so. Jay sent me a letter requesting that I search out used furniture stores that would be willing to export French armoires to the U.S. I did spend some time in France hunting around antique stores and talking to managers of various magasins d’ameublement. Finally, I sent Jay a report which I’m afraid was not optimistic, and the armoires went the way of the Irish gin.

One afternoon after my return, I drove down the rutted moonscape of a road to his house. Maire was tending her plants. The kids were playing with the dog, and below the steep bank, the broad Merrimack swept by. “Would you like a glass of Jamie?” he said.

(Jameson was his drink. A bartender at some Lowell dive we stopped into once said, “We don’t have Jameson. You want Murphy’s?” Without batting an eye, Jay responded, “No. Murphy’s is filth.”) So, on this afternoon, Jay poured a glass of Jamie and we began to talk about James Joyce. “I wonder if his grandson is still alive,” Jay mused.

“I believe he is,” I said. “I think he lives in Paris. He’s Joyce’s literary executor; all the Joyce scholars hate him.”

“You think we could contact him?”

A few minutes later I had procured a number through French information of a Stephen Joyce in Paris and Jay urged me to dial. A man answered. “Allo, oui?”

Holy shit! “Je cherche le Monsieur Stephen Joyce?”

“Oui. C’est moi! Que voulez-vous?” he barked.

“Vous etes le petite-fils . . . ” It struck me that if he was James Joyce’s grandson, he surely spoke English. “Then, you are James Joyce’s grandson?”

“Yes! What the hell do you want?” He sounded angry. I handed the phone to Jay. This is where my old friend shone. He wasn’t just a bullshitter. He was a master bullshitter, an imaginative artist. On the spot, he concocted a story: he was part of a committee representing a few local colleges in Massachusetts who were organizing a celebration of James Joyce, and this committee had decided to extend an invitation to Stephen Joyce, the great writer’s grandson and literary executor. They could offer a stipend, and air fare would be paid for. There was a bit of negotiating over Mr. Joyce’s wife’s air fare, and Jay offered to provide for that as well. They exchanged information, and fifteen minutes later, Jay and I were sitting there, in shock. James Joyce’s grandson was coming to Lowell. I said, “But Jay—there isn’t any committee. There isn’t any money.”

“Jayzus, O’Connor!” he said, disappointed in my lack of cunning. (He had picked up the Jayzus expression in Dublin. He was also fond of Elizabethan oaths such as, “God’s teeth!”)

“Jayzus! There’s no committee now! But when I tell them that I have Stephen Joyce on the line, there will be a committee in short order!” And there was. Jay got a few colleges to ante up, and Stephen Joyce spoke at what was then the University of Lowell, the University of New Hampshire, and the Harvard Club of Cambridge. (Note: Stephen Joyce died in January, 2020).

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Another of Jay’s projects was to make Lowell and Kilkenny sister cities and bring the Lord Mayor of Kilkenny to Lowell for Irish Cultural Week; I believe that would have been in 1986. I went along with Jay to visit Mayor Robert Kennedy, who loved the idea. It was done, and not long after, we were all doing a pub crawl with Phil Hogan, the Lord Mayor of Kilkenny, and his wife. After leaving Kantakis’s Bar, I remember leaning over the bridge railing with the His Honor and talking about the Irish who had dug the city’s canals. Within a week, the Mayor seemed to know every old lady at St. Patrick’s Church and what it was that ailed her. Phil Hogan is today the European Commissioner for Trade and confirmed on June 9th of this year that he will run for Director General of the World Trade Organization.

Another interesting person we would never have met if it were not for Jay Pendergast.

Jay was finally awarded his PhD from University College, Dublin, sadly, a bit late to do his career a lot of good. He never lost his interest in Irish literature; he was the only person I knew who read the entire three volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, but, in what turned out to be the later years of his life, he refocused on an interest he had had since boyhood: Native Americans. He published two books, The Bend in the River, a pre-history and contact period history of what is now Lowell and its surroundings, and Life Along the Merrimac: Collected Histories of the Native Americans Who Lived Along Its Banks. He took his research seriously and once drove up to St. Francis in Quebec to meet with some of the descendants of those who had been Lowell’s Pawtucket Indians.

The last time I saw Jay, we sat on his porch, with a glass of Jamie of course, watching the river flow by. He did look a little tired. He had had one heart attack a couple of years before, but he never changed his lifestyle much. He was so full of life that he refused to consider death. I remember that final conversation well. We had heard that a guy we knew had left his wife, and Jay shook his head and said, “I could no more leave Maire than I could cut off my own arm.” He went on to say that he loved his home by the river. “As soon as I get up on Frost Road, there are people on my bumper—they’re in a rush to get up to Ayotte’s and get a case of Bud Lite or something. I could stay right here perfectly content and never leave.

You know, I’m rereading Samuel de Champlain’s five-volume memoir describing his early explorations of the New World. Unbelievably interesting! Honestly, I’m at the point now, where, if it happened after 1680—I’m not interested.” I laughed. A remark that only Jay would make.

Not long after, on Memorial Day weekend of 1997, Maire called me with the news that Jay had died. In my life, only the death of my own parents struck me with such a sense of loss. I feel it again as I write these words. I drove out to see Maire; the emptiness in the house was palpable, and, as we all know, there’s really nothing to say. At his funeral, I went up to the church loft and played the old lament, “Lochaber No More.” I saw Maire and Ciaran and Cait in the church below me standing near the polished casket, and my tears rolled down onto the violin as I played. I was sorry for them, and to be honest, for myself, too. An era in my life was over.

Jay’s family and his friends have met for lunch every year in June since his death, except of course, 2020. We’ve all gotten older, and sometimes, talking to Ciaran, I have the odd feeling that I’m talking to Jay. In any case, when I see him and Maire and Cait and Charlie Panagiotakos and Marie and Coco and Rolly Perron and Dave Hardman and Phil Chaput— in some way—I’m back in the house on the riverbank enjoying this rare collection of people.

And I feel that Jay is there too, maybe just in the next room, pouring a Jameson.

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For Louise Glück, Poetry Was Survival dana white

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hat was the year? 1983? I hadn’t been a poet long, but long enough to know that Louise Glück was one of my idols. With Plath and Sexton, she fit into a type of brilliant, complex women I imagined myself to be. Without the transcendent talent, but good enough to fall into the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. When poet Charles Wright of the MFA program faculty announced Louise Glück would be a visiting professor, I couldn’t believe my luck.

She was tiny, and nervous. Charles Wright was very solicitous of her, almost gallant.

The students were in awe. By this time, she’d published three books of poems, Firstborn, The House on Marshland, and Descending Figure. Perhaps she saw in me the same tendency to place every word just so, the short lines, the near obsession with line breaks and oblique meanings and sexually charged imagery.

As the New York Times put it recently, “It’s part of her greatness that her poems are relatively easy to access while impossible to utterly get to the bottom of. They have echoing meanings; you can tangle with them for a long time.”

As a teacher she was never cruel or sarcastic in her criticism, but encouraging of everyone, regardless of style.

One day in class she said she needed a volunteer to teach her undergraduate workshop because she had another commitment. Only two of us raised our hands. She asked us for a few poems and then chose me, saying something like she felt more of a kinship with my work. I went home and cried.

On the last day of the workshop, I asked her to sign my copy of Firstborn. She literally recoiled, saying, “That book embarrasses me. I was so young!” Yes, a youthful prodigy who drew on her inner pain to produce breathlessly beautiful poems. “But I love it,” I said, and she acquiesced. She jotted an inscription and gave it back: “For Dana, with admiration for your sharp intelligence and gusto. Not many better combinations. Warmly, Louise.”

She threw a party at her house in Laguna Beach. I remember she wore a colorful offthe-shoulder peasant blouse and served a lovely tray of tomato and fish, maybe salmon.

She put on music and danced and flirted, which surprised me, since her poems denoted someone who sat around all day smoking cigarettes and wearing black. Her poems were dark and stark, but she clearly relished life.

I didn’t stay a poet long enough to have early work to be embarrassed by. The poetic muse deserted me, though I enjoyed the entanglement while it lasted.

The summer before entering the MFA program at UCI, I interned at a big newspaper 80

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in Southern California. While there I dated, quite briefly, a reporter who told me, “Poetry always struck me as a parlor trick.” Perhaps he was right. For me it was. For Louise Glück, I believed, poetry was survival.

I ended up a journalist of sorts. But over subsequent decades, every time Louise Glück released a new book, I bought it, and read it. These volumes occupy an entire shelf in my library, a testament to one who survived.

And now I can say when I was twenty I sat in as a teacher for a remarkable poet who went on to win the Nobel Prize forty years later. Which is something, I guess.

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Dancing with Bette Davis’s Daughter james provencher

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ight away I wanted to quit. What did a Westend streetkid like me think he was doing there?

That Christmas my aunt had good intentions I guess when she gave my brother and me a year’s course at Dorothy Mason’s School of Dance. We were to be polished up into gentlemen. Something that would not naturally happen on the wrong side of the tracks on the western edge of Portland, Maine.

The lines of class and wealth were sharply drawn. West of us was Libbytown and the Libbytowners were toughs who regularly beat the shit out of us along the border line between the Westend and the nether zones that quickly petered into jack-built shacks, and finally ending in cinder-carpeted railyards and claypan hobo jungles. That was our playground where we hopped freights to Rigby Yard or listened to yarning bindlestiffs while they sizzled franks over sputtering fires and spooned beans cooked in cans they came in. In winter we rode ice cakes out into the stinking harbor on the quirky tidal currents of Fore River or skated up the Stroudwater on black pristine ice.

You have to know this to appreciate where I was coming from when my mother said you and your brother will be going to dance school. You’ve got to be kidding. We used to hide and ambush Phil Simmonds when he came out of his weekly piano lesson because we saw him as a cultural traitor. His mother wouldn’t let him play football because he might injure the fingers destined to tickle the ivories. Later Phil was allowed to be the kicker—and a good one—on our high school football team, but then he was an affront to our simplistic code.

And yet we, unlike the Libbytown Tartars, were caught on the border, we were being pushed over the line. *** Over, under, around—that’s it, and pull tight. Now that’s a perfect Half-Windsor, my father said. This was harder than learning to tie a bowline. Then came the loud sport coat you could play chess on and the freshly shined shoes you had to see your reflection in. The final touch: white cotton gloves, the kind museum archivists use, so as not to soil the girls’ taffeta. My brother and I knew it was to keep flesh from flesh exposed by backless gowns, the flesh we secretly wished to touch.

The dance floor was a waxed sheeny parquet that mesmerized my eyes. I was glossed out by it and dreamed of chasing pretty pony-tailed girls and roller-rinking on it. But there 82

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we were meant to be proper dandies who bowed to seated ladies, politely requesting, May I have this dance? Problem was, it was all a set up. We were partnered up by some Big Brother design from Dorothy Mason’s random shuffle. Occasionally we were permitted a view of the backwater goddess of dance. Her name was sculpted in 3-D gold-leafed letters in the iconic Greekish logo with trumpets and fig leaves. Like Mr. & Mrs. Arthur Murray who were the big TV dance host hits beamed into our black-and-white lives, Dorothy and her eponymous partner floated around like celestial beings. Her hair was bleach-blond, and her body was more bangled than Cleopatra’s. Her visage was pulled taut with surgeon’s skill and her eyes bugged out like our sixth grade teacher’s when she was mad. I looked longingly at the dance teachers, grown women with curves who foxtrotted and rhumba-ed with elan. They were out of our ken and we were assigned pre-pubescent partners whose carriage pretty much resembled our own.

My partner like me kept her gaze averted, preferring the mantra of polished parquet. Shy. We had no choice. Of course, we had up to then no choice anyway, no choice of who or where we were. What of it should we worry? Everything was to come. Or so we thought.

The first thing I noted was that she had hair on her arm—more hair than I had on mine.

That fact scared and enticed me.

The reason you must wear gloves, gentlemen, is to keep your sweaty palms from soiling the girls’ dresses. I had to admit, looking at the hirsute forearm of my partner was making my palms sweat.

I made it through the first night okay. We learned the box step which allowed us to mechanically negotiate our way around the floor. The girls looked nice in their rococo-colored dresses and the boys looked sharp in their new outfits and crewcut flat tops. We didn’t fuck up as my uncle predicted and we audibly phewed our way back home in the backseat of my aunt’s Chevy.

But then that’s when the trouble began.

Don’t you know, you were dancing with Bette Davis’s daughter!

Who’s she?

Bette Davis! My aunt and mother were squealing in high-pitched laughter. Bette Davis!

She’s a star, a Hollywood star. She’s married to Gary Merrill, the actor, and they live out on the Cape. They even bought the old Lighthouse at Two Lights. You were dancing with Bette Davis’s daughter!

My brother and I glanced at each other with a shoulder-shrugging look and dismissed these two women with tightly curled permanents and puffing on menthol cigarettes as loonies. We were hoping to get home in time to catch the last half of the Red Sox game on the radio.

The next morning at breakfast my father was slurping his percolated Maxwell House out of his big fat mug, his head buried in the sports pages of the morning Press Herald. My mother was dancing around the kitchen, cooking up blueberry pancakes and sausages which we would smear with butter, drown in Log Cabin syrup, and garnish with brown sugar.

Walter, do you know that Jimmy was dancing with Bette Davis’s daughter last night?

Harumph. Burp. Gulp of steamy coffee. What?

Dancing. With Bette Davis’s daughter. Your son!

You better not step on her toes!

He’s going to be dancing with her the whole year! You should have seen Gary Merrill!

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Everyone saw him turn up. His hair was all over the place and he was unshaven, wearing an old wrinkled London Fog. He looked hungover. His eyes . . .

Give the guy a break. They just moved here. He went to Bowdoin. He knows the score.

These people are open slather targets for everybody. So what.

He looked like a bum!

Good on him!

My brother and I liked Dad. He was no Puritan. He killed Japs on Iwo Jima and liked his grog and took us places we weren’t supposed to go and Mother wouldn’t approve of, especially given her new polishing campaign. When she hatched the gentleman-making regime to Dad, he just said leave them be, they’re just boys. Dorothy Mason School of Dance wasn’t in his vocabulary. That’s not to say my father didn’t like dancing. He loved to dance. But not this white-gloved hothouse ballroom scene.

The next Friday night I screwed my courage to the sticking place and vowed to speak to my partner. Stiffly, robotically, working our way across the floor, I murmured: What’s your name?

Bee Dee. What?

B.D. That’s what they call me at home. My real name’s Barbara.

The D stands for Davis, doesn’t it?

Yes, but my real name’s Barbara Davis Sherry. My mother’s divorced. She remarried though. I think my new stepdad’s trying to adopt me, but he said it’s going to cost him. What’s your name?

I was looking at her forearm and feeling the beginning of her breasts brush against my chest. My palms were definitely starting to sweat under my still-pristine white gloves.

My name’s Jimmy. That’s what they call me at home. I didn’t really want to come here. My aunt made me. It was a Christmas present. I wouldn’t normally be doing this.

They made me come too. I guess we’re where we’re supposed to be. You got to do this stuff to grow up. Do you think we’ll ever get to the jitterbug?

Nah, it’s like we never ever get to World War II in history. We never get to the best part. We got stuck in Egypt and Greece almost the whole year. I liked the Spartans though.

Where do you go?

Nathan Clifford. Over in the Westend.

I go to Wayneflete. Up on the Western Prom.

I thought, jeez, that’s where we steal bikes and pull our favorite capers like making a dummy, tying a rope to each arm, laying it in the road at night and hiding in the ditch where we wait for a car and then pull it up suddenly from each side, scaring the bejesus out of the driver and giving him a heart attack.

The Prom, yeah.

I have a pony.

I had a goldfish once, the kind you bring home in a Chinese takeaway container and put in a bowl with some gravel and plastic ferns in the bottom and it dies in a week and you flush it down the toilet.

Where do you live?

Which-Way. Which way? What?

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Which-Way, that’s the name of our house. We used to live in Butternut in Malibu. That’s in California. Mum gives names to all our houses. My mother said she called it Which-Way because a witch lives there. She’s the witch.

She’s not a witch, she’s a movie star.

She’s a witch. I don’t like her. I don’t like my new dad either. I like Which-Way though.

My house doesn’t have a name. Maybe we should give it one. My grandfather built it. My grandma makes bread for the corner store. My grandfather delivers ice and grows his garden out back. He still uses horses. Sometimes he gives us a ride on his rounds.

I think this dance is over.

How old are you?

I’m twelve.

Me too.

Well, I guess I’ll see you next week.

You will. We’re partners.

Barbara! Barbara Davis. Barbara Davis Sherry. Bette Davis’s daughter. I’m dancing with Bette Davis’s daughter . . .

There’s my mum, got to go.

I looked where she was looking. Her mum didn’t look anything like mine. I mean her hair did, the same sculpted permanent hairdo. She had on what today would be called a dowdy drawn-in-at-waist dress, the obligatory pearl necklace accentuating the V-neckline, the heavily made-up face scrimmed and half-hidden by a fishnet veil attached to an impossibly floppy hat.

But the face, the face was not like my mother’s. My mother’s face was warm, kind, open.

Everyone loved my mother, all the children of the neighborhood flocked around her. She threw them fresh-baked treats from the kitchen window and then shooed us away saying, Go play! No, this woman, this Hollywood icon, her face was a cold, horridly stiff mask. She stared out of it with blank doll eyes. Maybe she was a witch, for she looked like old Mrs. Dandeneau across the street whose windows we soaped at Halloween and who took revenge on us by offering us on pie plate tins heated in the oven, pennies that scorched our eager fingers. She cackled at our howls of pain. My mother wanted to call the police; my father said, it served us right.

Everyone, all the parents, were stealing glances at Bette Davis just as they had at Gary Merrill the week before, only there was more whispering. *** What you heard, you think it’s true?

It was my father, after supper, in the kitchen, talking to my mother. Lingering in the dark of the next room like little boy lost, I listened.

She was in court on a drunk driving charge last week. She got off.

The cops were out to the house on a domestic violence call, but she wouldn’t press charges.

She charmed them with some smart remarks. They said she was smoking and drinking champagne as if nothing had happened. She had a black eye. The kid was crying upstairs.

The little one, B.D.’s half-sister. I heard Bette was drunk and dropped her on her head.

They shouldn’t have moved here. What were they thinking? Everyone knows everybody.

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It’s a fishbowl.

Gary walks around half-naked most of the time. That’s what they say. He plays hockey with a kilt and no underwear. He drinks martinis for breakfast.

He’s an eccentric. You know how these people are. They don’t have to conform.

Yeah, Bette, she’s the queen of the vixens, combs her hair, lights up a carton of cigarettes, snaps her fingers, bites her consonants, like a nightclub impersonation of an actress is what she’s become. Pitiful.

“Present is Perfect,” the article in the paper said. What goes on behind closed doors, well Peyton Place comes home to roost. I feel sorry for the children though. That girl Jimmy has to dance with every week, she looks so sad.

The whole thing’s sad, gone to smash. It’s the way they live. *** It’s me again. Same time, same dress.

Same white gloves. Ha. Is it the foxtrot this week?

I think so.

Is your mum coming to pick you up?

That’s all they ever ask about, my mum. I dunno—whoever’s not too drunk.

Your dad’s coming then?

He’s not my dad. Not yet. But maybe the adoption’s coming through. He gave them five grand.

That’s a lot. I guess it must be worth it.

Worth it? You don’t know anything. My mum only spanks me twice a year, like clockwork.

When she loses it. But my dad . . .

One-Two, One-Two, Three-Four . . .

These dances are old fashioned. You’ve got to know them in order or something. I hope we can get to the jitterbug.

I just hope I can make it to December. *** Hi, it’s me again.

Is your mum coming to pick you up tonight?

My mum, my dad, who knows. They’re drunk. Maybe they’ll send the cook.

My dad would never come. But my mum likes it, the dancing and all. She says my brother’n me will be gentlemen by the end of the year.

They just send me here to get rid of me so they can fight. Mum starts going off at Dad, why I don’t know because she knows how it will end up. Pretty soon he’s beating up on her and then the broken glass, drinks on the floor, cops even came the other night.

I heard.

I know. It was in all the papers. I suppose we’ll be moving again. I might not make it to the jitterbug, let alone the twist. I bet we’ll be going back to the West Coast. In spite of everything, my mum likes it here, the fireplace, steamers and lobster cooked down on the beach, the old lighthouse.

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Yes, it’s neat, like a castle inside. Have you ever gone to Whale’s Cave at Two Lights? It’s the best rock-skimming beach. The rocks are smooth as saucers. Knock them together, they make a hollow clink! They’re not too heavy, the shape of old hand soap. You can make them skip a mile. They go like sixty. The foghorn, when it blows, you just jump. The sound gets inside you. When you can hear the foghorn on a winter morning, you know it’s going to be a snow day, no school.

I’ve never been down there.

You should go. We go there all the time. *** She’s spoiled rotten. Simply runs wild. Behaves like a pig.

They treat her like a doll. You should see when Bette picks her up, she smothers her as if she hasn’t seen her in years and hustles her off to the car. The driver just waits, keeps it running.

I think Gary’s looking worse. What’s the matter with him? He had that TV show, but he hasn’t made a film in years.

You don’t see either of them much anymore. It’s the cook or nanny that picks her up now. *** Hi. This is my last time.

What, are you moving away?

Back to California. There’s a problem. My dad. I’m officially adopted now.

One-Two, One-Two, Three-Four . . .

My Dad came home, and he hit my friend and then he hit me. I wasn’t supposed to have anyone over. He got out of it. We have to leave. My friend’s parents dropped the charges. Dad said it cost him more than the adoption. He said not to tell.

I won’t tell.

I got a bruise. That’s why I got a different dress on. My mum, she’s lost it. She’s committing suicide about once a week just to get Dad to love her again. He just hits her. She hits him. I think they like it. I’ll miss Dorothy Mason though.

Dorothy Mason, she’s an old cow!

The dancing, I mean . . .

I’m not very good. I’m pretty good at football but that doesn’t count. I need to work on the foxtrot.

It’s not just the dancing.

It’s not just the dancing. *** Years later, much later it seemed, I happened to open a copy of Look magazine and there she was, old B.D. A big photo layout. It was 1962, and she was sixteen. She was in a movie with her mum, something called Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Something happened to B.D. She was beautiful.

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I was in high school, stumbling through my awkward existence as best I could. My girlfriend came from Libbytown. She lived in a house that used to be a corner store. She was Portuguese. Her surname was Vespucci. My parents hated her and said she was a hussy. I had to look the word up in the dictionary. *** Later that year, I read in the paper a small article tucked away in the back blocks of the news, that Barbara Sherry Davis had married a man twice her age whom she had met at the Cannes Film Festival. Her mother was quoted as saying, “It won’t last six months—I hope!”

Gary Merrill, her adoptive father, it was reported, gave his daughter black silk sheets for her wedding night. She was sixteen and Mr. Jeremy Hyman was old enough to be her father.

The marriage did last more than six months, but Mr. Hyman turned out to be a bankrupt who had to be bailed out more than once by Bette’s fortune. That year also, Gary Merrill, Bette’s fourth husband, divorced her.

Years later, in 1985, B.D. would write a vengeful, mean-spirited memoir titled My Mother’s Keeper. It was a bestseller. In it B.D. shocked the celebrity-thirsty world with harrowing tales of domestic violence, alcoholism, and the suffocating prison of twisted mother-love. Mother and daughter never spoke again. One quotation stood out: “Mother always said I was the one thing in life she loved most—the operative word there was ‘thing.’” That accurately catches the tone of the book.

There were Bette’s defenders. One said: “B.D. had a mouth on her, a mouth like a truck driver.” Was it that mouth I had wanted in my boyish dreams to kiss? Was it that mouth that said these things? Bette refused to read the book, but when she did, she cried. As she said, for the only time in her life. Everyone said she was tough as nails, that she didn’t have a maternal bone in her body. The only thing that mattered was her career. She nearly carked it on stage in her last public appearance at the Oscars. Wasted by cancer and a stroke, she had to be carried off. She died the next day. I guess she was always a fighter. You had to be a fighter if you were an intelligent woman is what she said when accused of being abrasive.

Gary Merrill, who still lived in the lighthouse at Two Lights, picketed the Portland bookstore when B.D.’s book came out and took out an ad in the New York Times, saying: “Don’t shell out $20 for this book.”

D.B., it turned out, had become a Born-Again. She needed something. She also, it turned out, never found a cure for her kleptomania, being constantly picked up and arrested on petty shoplifting charges. By 1985, her strikingly wholesome good looks had faded, a change that could not be airbrushed away in her book jacket photograph.

My second love did not come to be. My parents forbid our relationship and refused to have her in the house. She was west of Westend. Eventually, what young love we had withered in the face of narrow-minded hypocrisy.

Just about everyone’s dead now. My brother’s memory of that year is just a blip. If I start telling someone the story, they laugh dismissively and say you’re telling porkies again, Jim. Still, it hurts my heart when I remember. When I look back, I miss everything, even the dancing.

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For John Dolan michael casey

I talked to friend Dorothy Morganti In the office why I was out for a couple days it was to clear out the apartment of my cousin John Dolan who’d died at the Lowell General he lived in the senior citizens place across the street from the Immaculate John had lived very frugal and had a twelve inch black and white TV on top of a bar stool in his sitting room this thirty years after the entire world had color TV’s Father Sannella at the funeral service gave me an option of readings and told me on the altar to lighten up I mention to Dorothy all this stuff and that it was the strangest thing to me that there was a check made out to the Immaculate on John’s kitchen table for exactly thirty-two dollars and twenty cents clear as day to Dotty, a Mormon convert he was tithing, Mike you know what that is? she adds she is teasing me we had discussed this matter before yes, I know, Dotty and it’s before taxes, right?

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Bébé and Me louise peloquin

M

y mother lost her first child, a girl. Two years later, I showed up at Saint Joseph’s Hospital, another girl. Both my parents were thrilled with their strong, healthy child and gender didn’t weigh in on their love at first sight. The little girl I became was not as spectacularly striking as my four elder cousins Michelle, Monique, Denyse, and Renée. Nonetheless, I was said to be “as cute as a button,” a label I never found particularly pleasing. I simply couldn’t figure out how buttons could be cute. Kittens and puppies and chicks are cute, but buttons? Why couldn’t people just use “cute” and drop the button part? Anyway, I knew this label wasn’t up to par with “charming” and “stunning.”

I had to make do with button cuteness. Fortunately, Maman and Papa had no doubt that buttons could be very cute and their little girl was the proof.

Three-and-a-half years after my arrival, to my parents was born a son, the first son of the first son who was my father. A son eclipsed the button to shine forevermore within the family galaxy.

We only had two grandparents at the time of my brother Antoine’s birth: my father’s parents, both immigrants from Québec who had made a good life for themselves in New England. Joseph my grandfather, a self-made man with a primary school education, had begun his professional life at the age of eight working six days a week in the wool mills of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. He and his father had left their family in Canada to try to make good in the then booming textile industry.

Father and son worked, ate, and slept in the mill and were allowed to meet on Sundays when they attended Mass together and spent the afternoon sharing stories as they walked around town. In the early evening. Joseph would get back to the warehouse where his “bed”—a bale of wool— was waiting for him. House rules stated that family members had to work and lodge in separate buildings. Joseph missed his father’s company but he always kept a stiff upper lip, feeling lucky to be able to send the two dollars of weekly wages to his mother back in “le pays”—the old country. The foreman quickly noticed the youngster’s quick reflexes and decided to take him under his wing to train him. Joseph climbed up the proverbial ladder and, a half century later, he ended his career managing Lowell’s Tool and Dye Company founded on the success of his inventions. He was very proud of his life’s journey as a self-taught engineer.

My grandmother Marianne, after her own stint in the mills, married her seventeenyear-old beau at age sixteen and soon had her hands full raising two boys and seven girls on the top floor of a Merrimack Street tenement. Honest, hardworking, and lovely people, they reflected the traditional values of the times in which they lived. They made it a point to keep their French- Canadian heritage alive by speaking French, living their Catholic 90

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Faith and continuing many traditions like the cuisine and the way to raise children. When their elder son presented them with his first son, it was as if their universe had welcomed a new planet.

I revered my little brother and prided myself in the new role of big sister and soonto-be playmate. Never was I disappointed that he turned out to be a boy rather than a girl. Playing was playing after all. As a girl, dolls were part of my entertainment for sure. But I often found them too pretty to roughhouse. Wrinkling their starched dresses, messing their hair and dirtying their little faces would have displeased them. So, I usually proceeded to make my dolls perfectly content by displaying them on the dining room table in a miniature pageant for everyone to admire. I also gave them orders to behave daintily at all times, to practice their piano scales and to sketch and color very carefully.

I had heard those instructions ceremoniously given to my cousins Denyse and Michelle.

Their mother insisted on their using their time wisely. Playing with me, a younger child, would waste precious time and couldn’t possibly be beneficial.

Maybe my dolls mirrored my accomplished cousins too much and discouraged me from building a real playmate relationship with them. So naturally, I was drawn to other toys and games which fired up my imagination: plastic farm animals with accessories like tractors, silos, fences and barns; little figurines representing all kinds of trades from artists to scientists as well as doctors and nurses, firefighters, soldiers, whatever the toy shop stocked. My all-time favorite were my hand-sized plastic horses. With them, I was a girl centaur before even knowing what centaurs were. My collection of a half dozen horses all spoke just like “Mr. Ed”, the TV show star horse. They were the very best of companions and I gladly shared them with my baby brother whom I affectionately called “Bébé Antoine” or just “Bébé.” The big problem was that I couldn’t always understand what Bébé was saying. It was all goo-goo and ga-ga to me. On the other hand, I always understood my horses.

The months slid by and my brother and I were both growing fast. When I was with him and my parents, I never once felt overlooked or under loved. I was my father’s princess, and my mother continued to find me as cute as a button, even after I knocked one of my front teeth out falling off of the stool I was perched on, reaching for the forbidden fruit, AKA, the cookie jar. Life was good.

As we were growing in height and hopefully in wisdom, I became more and more aware of family members’ attitudes and reactions towards us children. The feeling became acute and pervasive. I was increasingly sensitive to this during our Sunday lunches at my grandparents’ house, now on Stevens Street. Grand-mother Marianne, whom we called “Mémère,” was an excellent cook, her cuisine largely inspired by the hearty rustic dishes of her native Québec. A favorite meal was the tenderest of pork roasts accompanied by potatoes sautéed in lard and generously buttered mashed turnips and carrots. During summer harvest time, green lettuce leaves handsomely cradled the slices of pumpkinsized beefeater tomatoes that grandfather, “Pépère,” grew in his garden. Warm dinner rolls, homemade relish, piccalilli and pickles also adorned the dinner table.

The lunches required our dressing in our “Sunday best”—carefully pressed trousers with a white shirt and tie for Bébé and a fluffy-skirted fancy dress for me. Maman knew that our appearance would be scrupulously evaluated and would lead to judgements on how successful and accomplished a mother she was. Mémère expected us at noon on the The Lowell Review

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dot. The threshold barely crossed, rich, heady aromas of simmering food embraced us. I called this “the Food Fairy’s hug.” Our mouths watered and there was never any need to coax Bébé and me to sit straight, with elbows off the table and napkins around our necks. After saying “Bénisseznous, mon Dieu . . .” – “Bless us Lord . . . ,” steaming platters of food were passed around as the Food Fairy continued to flit about. Cheery conversations abounded as compliments to the cook resounded. Generally, Maman passed the fit mother test mainly because Bébé and I always cleaned our plates with minimal mess and without coercion. Enjoying, one could even say respecting good food, was in our French- Canadian genes.

Then came dessert, or rather multiple deserts. There were always a couple of pies: pecan, cranberry-raisin, apple, blueberry, banana or chocolate crème. Then all sorts of pastry squares. One couldn’t call them simple brownies lest the Food Fairy be insulted.

The flavors varied from chocolate to coconut to date, fig, caramel, toffee and yet others which had no specific names because they were Mémère’s secret concoctions. Bébé and I had a favorite desert—homemade butterscotch ice cream sundae topped with a generous dollop of freshly whipped, slightly sweetened double cream.

The ice cream came from Kimball’s farm and melted quickly causing the topping to slide down the sides of the bowl and dangerously threaten the white linen tablecloth. As soon as the ice cream tower began to lean, Bébé and I were allowed to rescue the cream with our fingers. The procedure entailed licking, slurping and tongue-clicking, certainly not part of proper table manners. The sight of our little fingers oozing with sweet white liquid horrified Maman who thought she would lose her rank as a good mother. But no.

Mémère allowed this violation of dining etiquette simply because she was thrilled to see that her creations were so very much appreciated by her grandchildren. Maman didn’t dare contradict the lady of the house.

It was during one of these epic Sunday lunches that I began to observe that I was treated differently from my little brother. I have to say that from the earliest age, he was a precocious talker, singer, performer and storyteller who constantly put Mémère in awe.

She showered compliments on him commenting how he was “un beau grand garçon très intelligent,” a handsome, very intelligent big boy. It wasn’t that she ignored me. I received my smile, hug and kiss upon arrival but not much else, not even the abhorred “cute as a button” comment. At first, I just brushed it all off thinking that favoring the younger child was in the natural order of family displays of affection and never was I jealous. But when I saw that Bébé’s sundae was systematically garnished with far more butterscotch and cream than mine was, perplexity set in and I started tuning into the adult conversations for confirmation of my suspicions.

Sure enough, Mémère talked incessantly about “Antoine, le fils,” the son who would insure the family’s future. She punctuated her tirades with loving glances towards Bébé, catching his eye and beaming. When I tried to make eye contact with her, she usually turned away, not out of hostility but rather like someone who glimpses towards a familiar inanimate object like a table or a chair. It’s there. It’s useful. But otherwise it’s devoid of interest. More details of the sort cropped up – rather unpleasant words relating to my resemblance to “the other side of the family”, observations about my uncontrollable, baby-fine brown hair and my missing front tooth which marred my smile. These times never once triggered animosity against my brother or even against my grandmother.

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They just made me feel sad inside. I felt like a multicolored birthday balloon which had once delighted but was now in a corner, ignored.

My yearning for recognition must have been born when I was about five. As early as three years of age Bébé was the life of the party. He was a hard act to follow, not that I had any intention to do so mind you. But I was tired of being invisible so I thought I’d do something to be noticed. I knew where Mémère kept all of her kitchen utensils since I had always enjoyed watching her meticulously prepare our Sunday feasts. As a good grandmother should, she warned us about the danger of handling knives and getting too close to the hot stove. Although very young, both Bébé and I obeyed because not doing so would lead to butterscotch sundae deprivation and we certainly didn’t want that.

I had observed that Mémère kept all kinds of scissors in a special drawer, conveniently reachable by “une petite” like me. So one Sunday, while everyone was in the parlor listening to Bébé sing Gene Autry’s “Back in the saddle again”, I thought I’d come out of the wings and take center stage for myself. I removed the black patent leather shoes Maman forced me to wear on Sundays, although she knew they were uncomfortable and irritatingly noisy when I walked. I slinked into the kitchen, opened the scissor drawer, examined all of the pairs and chose the large bulky instrument Mémère used to cut chicken parts. It was larger than my hand could properly maneuver but I was sure it would work fine. Determined and strengthened at the thought of implementing my plan of action, I grabbed those scissors and quickly proceeded to do what I had set out to do.

As Bébé’s song was coming to its final crescendo, I entered the parlor where the family members were gathered for his performance. No one saw me at first because I hadn’t put my shoes back on and the plush oriental rug muffled the sound of my stockinged feet. The applause following the singing recital resounded so I wouldn’t have been heard anyway.

The performance ended and the Food Fairy returned to make all of our mouths water again. Everyone rose and turned their gaze from my brother to the welcoming dining table beyond. Smack dab in their line of vision, there I was, proud, smiling and liberated from most of the long, fine, brown hair that never managed to hold a banana curl for more than five minutes even after a whole night wearing those uncomfortable, pink plastic, spoolie curlers. The poultry scissors had worked quite well I thought. Tilting my head this way and that, I awaited the expected compliments. After all, my new “do” was quite similar to Bébé’s close- cropped head.

My mother, dumbstruck, swooned. After a lightning bolt of shock in his green eyes, my father picked up his princess to give her the softest, most tender of kisses on both cheeks while whispering in her ear, “tu es toujours la plus belle,” you’re always the prettiest. Pépère laughed heartily, without malice or mockery. After all, no serious injury had occurred.

My Mémère, the person whom I sought to impress the most, turned beet red and shouted: “You fished through my kitchen drawers. You knew very well that this is forbidden. You used my scissors. You may have damaged them. You got into mischief rather than come listen to your little brother sing. You failed to be a good example for him. And now, you look even worse than you did before. You won’t be able to go out in public without a kerchief on your silly little head.”

This reaction was bad enough and I really couldn’t figure out how my baby hair could have possibly hurt scissors which cut chicken parts. The worst came afterwards when my The Lowell Review

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grandmother scolded Maman: “You’ve obviously failed with her. What can be done with such a girl? She must be disciplined more, punished more. I know very well that you’ve never spanked her, although I’ve told you that it’s a necessary child-rearing procedure.

Now you see the result of your laxness. She’ll turn out bad. Mark my words.” Maman had miserably failed the fit mother’s test for the first time and it was all because of me.

Fortunately, Bébé was thrilled with my new do. “You can be a good cowboy with me now! Not a squaw!” With a mischievous giggle, he helped the whole family move forward from a distraction which could have ruined our appetites.

My hair grew back with its fine, flat, silky sameness. I never again sought out the limelight during Sunday lunches. Today, as I plow back through the years, I see the source of many things to come. Most of all, I remember those rich and plentiful French-Canadian meals at Stevens Street when the neighborhood homes were flanked by impressive vegetable gardens and nearby Chelmsford was still largely rural.

Mémère, Pépère and too many others have passed on. The house on Stevens St. was sold and my grand-father’s extraordinary garden was turned into a buildable lot. Urban sprawl took over the surroundings. But family traditions have lived on and the Food Fairy never forgets to give us a hug as we gather anew.

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Bon Appetit!, Julia nan cye tut tle

L

ong lines snaked around the bookshelves and aisles at Lowell’s downtown Barnes & Noble bookstore on a warm Friday afternoon in May 1997, right before Mother’s Day. Waiting patiently, some folks carried grease-stained, dog-eared cookbooks entitled Mastering the Art of French Cooking, while others bore new volumes called The Way to Cook. A few wore t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Life itself is the proper binge.”

All chatted excitedly as they awaited the arrival of Julia Child, the author of those culinary bibles and creator of that scrumptious slogan.

Yes, indeed. Julia Child, everyone’s favorite French chef and star of numerous PBS cooking shows, was coming to the Lowell bookstore to sign books and meet her many fans, including me, a lifestyle reporter at the Lowell Sun. Maren Solomon, B&N’s manager, had arranged Julia’s visit in honor of the store’s first anniversary. The only stipulations, Maren recalls, were that she give Julia a ride to Lowell from her home in Cambridge and back and that attendees not ask her to write long salutations in the many books that they brought.

Julia, nearly 85, was near the end of her long, illustrious career. She no longer drove, and she also had painful arthritis that made handwriting difficult. Her fans didn’t mind the signing restrictions. They just wanted to meet their idol and show her their love.

One lady, arriving before the store opened, camped out in a lawn chair so she’d be the first in line. Another brought Julia organic eggs, freshly laid from her backyard chickens.

The folks at Ymittos candles crafted a candle for her that looked and smelled like fruitcake.

Anna Jabar-Omoyeni, owner and executive chef of La Boniche, the beloved Lowell bistro, got in on the action. She and her excited staff prepared numerous dishes from Julia’s cookbooks, passing samples out to people waiting in line. And Julia, herself, relished the eatery’s delicious pate and cheese plate, salmon cakes and signature black bean soup.

“It was exciting and a thrill to serve her,” recalls Anna, looking back on that day.

I was thrilled to land this plum reporting gig, too, waiting patiently along with the rest of the crowd for Julia’s arrival.

I had been a huge Julia Child fan since the early 1960s when her first TV show, The French Chef, aired on Saturdays on PBS. Ada Tuttle, my future mother-in-law, and I huddled in her TV room in Vineland, N.J., enjoying Julia’s culinary antics and expertise in black and white as she flipped omelets, slurped wine, never got flustered or ever missed a beat even if the plump chicken she was stuffing slid off the table and onto the floor.

“No one will know,” chirped Julia, with a wink, in her well-known warble, as she scooped the chicken up and kept on stuffing. Ada and I roared in laughter and rarely missed a show.

My encounters with Julia reached a peak 18 years later in the early 1980s. By then, I

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was a young reporter/editor at the Beacon papers in Acton. One winter day an invitation turned up in a pile of mail on my cluttered desk, addressed simply—Staff Writer, Beacon Publishing, Acton, Mass.

Little did I know then, but that invite would change my life.

“You’re invited to lunch at WGBH studios in Boston to preview Julia Child and Company and to help Mrs. Child launch her new PBS series,’ the invitation read.

“Oh, my God,” I screamed to the reporters and editors hunched over their computers in the cramped newsroom. “It’s an invitation to lunch with Julia Child. I’ve got to cover this.”

I already had my dream job—or so I thought—working at the weeklies, covering selectmen and staying up late, on deadline, every Tuesday night.

I loved my job, but knew there was more to the journalism career that I craved than budget hearings and zoning board appeals.

I wanted fun people, cool events and more glamour and glitz than the mundane town meetings that I covered provided.

That invitation to lunch with Julia Child was the key to my moving on.

My kindly editor, Dorris Hilberg, looked up from her keyboard, smiled and told me that the story was mine. She then assigned my colleague Vicki Pierce, a spit-fire photographer, to shoot the lunch event for the Beacon’s weekend features paper The Sunday Independent.

Dorris was as excited as Vicki and me, since back then, it was the city dailies that landed these scoops, not a little weekly paper tucked in the suburbs. So she eagerly started planning a dynamite layout for the weekend edition.

On our big day in Boston, Vicki and I joined fellow journalists in WGBH’s comfortable conference room, eager for lunch with Julia.

Red wine flowed, and there were ample bowls of the star’s favorite nibbles–Pepperidge Farm cheddar goldfish crackers—to munch on as we awaited Julia and her entourage’s arrival.

Soon, we heard a commotion in the hallway, accented by the familiar, high-pitched voice that preceded her entrance.

And then there she was, all six feet of Julia Child in my presence. A shock of wavy brown hair and full of good cheer, she towered over all in the room, including her diminutive husband Paul, following devotedly behind her.

Julia greeted us and led the way to the buffet, set with salad, bread, and steaming cauldrons of rich cassoulet, a hearty peasant-style meat and bean casserole she would prepare in the TV episode we soon would preview.

I was totally star-struck, I admit it. But Vicki, my diligent photographer, knew what to do—and set my wine glass on the table right beside Julia’s.

And then there I was, sitting next to the legend, sipping wine and enjoying a friendly one-on-one chat.

“So, Ms. Child,” I started in, a bit meekly. “I’m making creamed chicken for a dinner party I am hosting this weekend. My recipe calls for canned mushrooms and chicken soup as the base for the sauce. Do you ever used canned ingredients?”

“Well, dearie,” she said, leaning in with a smile and not the least bit condescending, “believe me, fresh is always best. So, use fresh mushrooms and your own cream sauce. It’s not hard and your dish will be better.”

I took to heart what she said, committing myself to her fresh is best suggestion. Then 96

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the light’s dimmed, the show started, and Julia, in all her glory, cooked cassoulet and sipped wine with gusto.

“Bon appetit!” she warbled in her classic sign-off, lifting her glass to the camera while the credits rolled and the lights came up.

Paul Child, dozing in his chair after his hearty lunch and several glasses of wine, quickly came to and snapped to attention when Julia swiftly kicked him under the table.

Julia was delighted with our applause, then answered our questions with candor and charm. She signed the press kit to my mother-in-law “To Ada, Bon Appetit! Julia Child.”

And then she was gone—but not without leaving a lasting impression on me and affording me my first celebrity feature.

It ran the next weekend under the sixty-point headline “Lunch with a Legend,” with my bolded byline directly below.

I sent a copy to Gail Perrin, the Boston Globe food editor who’d attended the lunch.

“Nice job, well-done,” Gail wrote in a lovely note that bolstered my confidence.

Julia was my first celebrity interview—and my feature on her opened the door to my landing the lifestyle staff job at the Sun three years later.

By the time I met her again in Lowell on that warm May day seventeen years later, I’d interviewed dozens of celebrities and written hundreds of feature stories.

But Julia was my first and still my favorite. And I told her so that afternoon at Barnes & Noble.

“Julia, here’s a picture of you and me,” I said, sharing the treasured photo of us over lunch that Vicki had taken.

“Well, dearie, we look a bit different, don’t we?” she quipped with a droll smile as she sampled cheese and pate.

She signed it “Bon appetit! to Nancye! Julia Child” and then graciously gave me the flowers someone had given to her for my mother-in-law, who was living with us and still a big fan.

“Wish her a happy Mother’s Day for me,” she said kindly.

Twenty-three more years have passed by in a flash. Julia is gone. So, too, is Gail Perrin and Ada, my mother-in-law. And I’m in the waning years of a long, satisfying career, nearly forty years writing features, profiles and reviews for papers and magazines in Massachusetts and Maine.

But, whenever I’m asked about my favorite interview, I always answer, “My first—Julia Child.”

And whether I’m flipping an omelet, grilling a burger or tackling a three-course dinner party, I always recall her wit, kindness and her sage advice that fresh is best, be it in cooking or writing or a life well-lived. Bon appetit!

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Meeting Patti Smith in Texas, c. 1978 fr a n k wag n e r

I

t’s strange perhaps that when your world falls apart, when you are devastated and think you’ve got no place to go, it is the very time you get a treasure delivered to your doorstep.

I went off to college in the fall, really late summer, of 1973, still infused with plenty of 1960s idealism about changing and rearranging the world. We knew the world back then. An insanely corrupt president at a time of extreme world tensions, oil embargoes, and always war. By the time I graduated from what was then Southwest Texas State (now Texas State) in San Marcos, in December of 1977, I felt I was the last one standing for the peace, love, and understanding times just ten years earlier.

On the other hand, I was flat broke and I did not have the courage of my new-found hero, Jack Kerouac, to hit the road and head out to San Francisco to write. Instead, I thought I’d do what I wanted to do as a kid and make a name for myself. Then, once known, I would write and get published.

That the economy was down in the dumps actually helped. Much to the disgust and disappointment of my dad, I couldn’t get a decent job, maybe at a law firm, or selling stocks. I went full bore for the career my dad never wanted me to go to: a radio disc jockey.

A rock and roll radio disc jockey. Through a long series of incidents, I ended up with a parttime job at my hometown’s AOR (album-oriented rock) station, C101. For those in south Texas, this station is a legend for its legal ID at the top of the hour: “The time is 1:01 at C101, KNCN, Sinton, Taft, Corpus Christi.” Always intoned with a deep, resonate, very hip sounding voice. “We just heard from the Doors, the latest from Queen, those Fat Bottom Girls, and there is something from a new artist, Ricky Lee Jones.” Again, sounding hip, well almost as if I was just a little bit stoned.

Here I was, the part-time midnight DJ, for THE STATION, the really cool, really hip radio station, in MY HOMETOWN. It would be like say, for this blog, a kid growing up in Boston, and his first job was to play centerfield for the Red Sox, or power forward for the Celtics. That’s the way I felt about being the midnight jock for Corpus Christi’s C101.

The pay was almost nothing, but there were perks, something I learned about as I took over. I got into to every rock concert in town. I had only been on the job for a few weeks, really only working weekends, when the program director, Debbie Lee Miller, told me that Sunday night, before I went into the midnight shift, I should go to the old Ritz Theater downtown and see Patti Smith.

The Ritz was once the premier movie house in Corpus Christi. In the days before multiplexes, it was the place that the big blockbusters would play first. I saw Dr. Zhivago, 98

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The Sound of Music, The Longest Day, and even Dr. Strangelove there. Times changed, and the Ritz closed down as a movie theater. For a few years its overdone ornate fixtures went without repair. Now it had been renovated for a concert venue, and that’s where Patti Smith was playing that summer Sunday night. Plenty of work had been done on the theater, and its grandiose presence was fully restored.

Patti Smith, well, I didn’t know about. I had seen her perform and interviewed on television. She had stringy black hair back then, and almost was unaware of her surroundings. She sounded more than a little bit stoned. I did think that it would be performers like her who would resurrect my beloved Sixties. No Beatles this time around.

We had Patti Smith, who always spoke in a slow deadpan voice, about how rock and roll was “kinda like Christianity.”

Debbie told me all I had to do was go to the box office, tell them that I was Frank from C101, and I’d get in, and even get backstage after the show. “Wow!” I thought. “Now I know, I’m a star.”

Not really. I was on from midnight to six mostly Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. The guy in the little box office did not work for the theater, now concert hall. He was from New Jersey and had never heard of C101. He certainly never heard of the station’s new weekend midnight disc jockey. He didn’t know of anybody from C101, Debbie Lee, Bobby Reyes, Fazio, Mando. “Sorry, we don’t have a pass list. Not for you, anyway.”

I still held to some stereotypes of the Sixties. I thought a guy with a tie-dye shirt, torn and faded jeans, and shaggy hair would sympathize with a guy like me, also attired with an old t-shirt, faded jeans, and shaggy hair. He held as firm as any old guard ticket-master. He didn’t know me, he’d never heard of me, and he wasn’t going to let me in.

“I’m Frank, Frank Wagner, with C101, you know the album rock station, that’s the one.

I work with Debbie Lee and Fazio. I’m one of them.” The man in the box office stood firm and was not hearing of it. I was feeling more and more awkward.

My answer for any type of situation like this was call somebody. This was 1978. Cell phones were unheard of. Even having a phone in your car was a novelty reserved for the very rich. I begged the box office man to call the station and see. Box office man rolled his eyes but made the call. I sensed that he was really in a quandary. He didn’t want to offend a real jock who might want to play some of Patti’s records.

In fact, I already had. “Because the Night” was becoming a big hit for her, and several more obscure songs on the album got some airplay. I loved to shock people by playing: “Jesus Died for Somebody’s Sins but Not Mine.”

He got a ring on the station’s phone, but the call was not needed. At that moment Debbie Lee showed up and she had a list in her hand.

“Luke?” She questioned the box office guy.

“Yeah.” He replied.

“I’m Debbie Lee.” She said in a sultry voice so family to the afternoon listeners of C101.

“I’m with C101, the sponsors. This is our guest list.”

“So, you know this dude?” Box Office Luke asked her.

“His name should be there.”

He looked at the paper she had handed him. Under the neatly typed names of the rest of the staff, my name was scribbled at the bottom.

“So, you’re the guy at the bottom.”

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“Didn’t expect you to come so early.” Debbie said. “There’s no need. Come any time before the show and you’ll get in. It’s no problem.”

Debbie Lee Miller was short with a near shapeless body topped with dark brown hair cut in a page-boy style. On the radio she sounded downright sexy, enticingly announcing the latest records with a breathy, Marilyn Monroe-styled voice. Everyone was always surprised when they met her. One thing I knew. This was not uncommon behavior for her. She was always there when I needed her. I doubt I would have spent 36 years in radio and television had she not been my first mentor.

Sure enough, I was among the first in the newly renovated concert hall. I liked being there, this arena reminded of the hundred or so movies I had seen there. The interior of the Ritz still had the same overdone artwork that theaters built during the golden age of Hollywood. It was made to look like a grand opera house including balcony boxes on each side of the stage. Both boxes were decorated in the excessive gingerbread style, intricate railings. The pink walls featured fanciful abstract paintings on them. The paintings seem to be a large thorny bush with a red heart in the middle. I never did figure this out. I sat in the third row and watched as the theater/concert hall slowly filled.

After what seemed to be an eternity, the lights dimmed on the capacity crowd. They had waited a long while and had not learned that rock concerts always start long past the time stated on the tickets.

But there she was, Patti Smith. Black hair, stringy and yet to be addressed by any sort of a comb. Tight black pants and a buttoned-down white shirt. Her singing was characteristically loud and barely melodic, aggressive. She’s no Joni Mitchell. There was not a moment in which she seemed to want to be warm and friendly toward her admirers.

This was the beginning of the New Wave or Punk Era. For the first time I saw girls with hair dyed black and purple, with streaks of orange and pink. I saw nose rings, rings on lips.

These were Patti’s people. Her followers.

She was almost fighting her audience. She wrestled with her microphone and danced with the mike stand. At one point, after just a few songs someone threw something on the stage. She found the offender and shouted: “Get him out of here!” And, yes, in a moment, some members of her crew wrestled the young man out of the concert hall.

At the end of the song, she paused. “Let’s get something straight,” she said angrily. “I’m giving you my heart and soul. Sharing myself and being with you. You are here to be a part of this experience, it’s a communal thing like Christianity. Any more of that kind of shit and all this is over.” She paused again. Then came the first notes of “Because the Night.”

She did not hear the expected appreciation.

“Ok, now, this is our big hit.” The crowd yelled its approval. I was a regular concert goer. Most all of the performers, from Springsteen, B.B. King, Triumph, to Black Oak Arkansas, even the Doobie Brothers, all wanted the crowd to love them. Patti Smith didn’t seem to care. I thought about this as she sang her last encore and went backstage. The lights at the Ritz were back up, the girls with purple hair with orange and pink streaks had left with their boyfriends sporting diaper pins and rings in their noses. Me, I was an oldstyle hippie, shoulder-length hair and t-shirt and faded jeans. I had felt out of place in a lot of places, but this time I was the one feeling kind of square, old-fashioned.

I lost sight of Debbie Lee after the concert started. I didn’t see any of the C101 jocks around through the performance, either. Then I saw a line on the steps to the stage. Debbie 100

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Lee, Mando, Fazio and Bobby were all there. Debbie Lee waved for me to come to them.

“They’re having us backstage,” she told me. “This is the kind of thing you’re expected to do.”

Now I was getting the “big shot” feeling again, mindful that I had been fooled before.

A few years earlier, the summer after high school, I went to a Seals and Crofts concert and was amazed that they invited everyone to meet them after their show. It turned out they always did this. They wanted to evangelize the Baha’i Faith. It was not a gathering of screaming groupies and crazed fans. Just a nice talk about a religion whose ideals no decent person could possibly take issue with.

This was different of course. I was one of a select few allowed to go backstage, and Patti Smith was not talking to everybody. She was talking, but no one was sure to whom. She seemed intent on uttering words directed at no one. She was sitting alone in the middle of the dressing room in a folding chair. She stared straight ahead, making eye contact with no one.

Patti Smith was not warm or engaging. She never indicated she was glad to see us nor did she thank us for attending her show. She was possessed of a personality that shocked, maybe intimidated. She kept her stare straight ahead.

I was there with Debbie Lee, Mando, Bobby, and Fazio, all of whom had done this many times. All had been backstage after a concert, listened to a tired rock star speak, trying to sound profound. I wasn’t used to this and was downright giddy. I had the biggest, broadest smile on my face while trying not to sound stupid.

Listening to her talk, it occurred to me that she was continuing her show without the music. Straight, deadpan talk about the communal nature of rock and roll music. Again, she compared rock music to a genuine experience of Christianity. I was there, and forty plus years later I remember. I doubt she would have remembered my presence forty seconds after she got up from the folding chair and left my presence. She simply got up and disappeared.

I had a long drive out to the station. Our studios were way out, about twenty miles from town, at the edge of a large field of sorghum. I could spot the tower and its flashing red lights once I got over the high bridge over the Corpus Christi Harbor. The near-midnight drive took almost forty minutes.

This studio was always kept cold to protect the transmitter. Even though it was late June in south Texas, I needed a sweater. Donal, a sailor from the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, was there, finishing up the Jazz Show he hosted every Sunday night. I would take over at midnight. I would put on a show from midnight to four and then play a couple of hours of public affairs programs. I encountered a problem I never thought I’d have to deal with: trying to find four hours-worth of music to play. I couldn’t play an artist I had already played. I couldn’t play an artist that had been played in the last two hours. I couldn’t play a song that had been played in the last three days. And, for midnight to six, none of the heavy metal.

It must have been right after two when I got a rare phone call. It was Box Office Luke.

He said he wanted to apologize for the trouble he caused me when I was trying to get into the concert. It seemed to me though that he wanted me to be grateful for allowing me in.

He suggested, to make amends, to play a request for him. I believe he wanted to hear David Bowie’s “Fame.” Then he kept talking, telling me that Patti was really on her game that The Lowell Review

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night and I had seen one of her better performances.

“I heard you started off with playing something from Patti.” I looked at my music log.

I had played “Godspeed.” He hung up and I played a David Bowie song. I don’t know what I played, but I made certain it was not the song he requested. When the public affairs programs began, I went to the production room with her latest album, Easter. I played the whole thing, including the most shocking tune of all “Rock n” Roll Ni**er”—I would never be allowed to play that one on the air.

Charlie Palmer, the morning drive jock, came in right before six. I put the album back in the records shelf. By now, the sun was coming up over the bay.

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Dick Van Dyke pa u l m a r i o n

Past New Rochelle & the Pelhams, an Erector Set substation, Knob-and-tube style with ceramic insulators on juice boxes, The wound-up wires fenced with chain-link, compact setup Shipping a jillion volts to citizens who pay transmission fees, Dozens of energizers along the railway in back of Eastman’s Corridor. Laura Petrie in capri pants needed a county lineman And coal-fired amps to fill her shape in the face of cathode rayBathed sectionals with two-point-five average kids. Mel Cooley’s After-image is tattooed inside our skulls. Web reruns at 4 a.m.

Sourced Downtown per the seat-back screen looping cooked data Radiating from a tower, sleek vectone inscribers pulsing. In skinny Suit, soft-peak hat from 1963, Oh, Rob, don’t trip the circuit.

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SECTION V

GA

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f e at u r e d a r t b y c h at h p i e r s at h

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“The Merrimack,” watercolor, acrylic on a French LGBTQ+ travel guide, 2020.

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“Untitled,” from “The Book of Names,” acrylic on paper, 5 x 11, n.d.

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“Untitled,” from “The Book of Names,” acrylic on paper, 5 x 11, n.d.

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“On Earth Beneath Sky,” acrylic on foam board, 33 x 24, 2019.

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“Ancestral,” acrylic on paper, 11 x 23.5, 2021.

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“Untitled,” cyanotype print on a journal page, “The Book of American Blues,” 4 x 10, 2018.

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“Untitled,” cyanotype print on a journal page, “The Book of American Blues,” 4 x 10, 2018.

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SECTION VI

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Sweetland Gardens 1969 m a r i e l o u i s e s t. o n g e

“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

—Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) Inside the rows of ancient brick, shuttles flew back and forth, a rapid measure followed by the dull thunk of beaters on looms the size of rooms. Canals spooled through the city inky and restless, reaching for the wider waters of the Merrimack and a salty mouth to set them free.

Each day I crossed the town common and went to a job that freed me from a ceaseless summer, the ache of the news, and the vapors of a worrisome home. Walking, I’d take time to wish myself up into the giant arms of oak trees older than the smoking men on benches leaning on canes, and I’d fly away the way a dream does in morning.

At work, I’d take orders—same thing every day: English muffin with butter and tomato for a woman who arrived daily at 11 and sat in the same booth, coffee for the debauched insurance man who knew where to prey, Cokes for kids my same age who never left a tip, and frappes for the older girls with blonde beehives who told me I should shave my legs and put on lipstick.

The days curled aimlessly through the long summer heat in the same way smoke eased out of mill workers’ mouths and dark waters stretched toward some imagined relief. Next door, the tailor repaired things eleven hours a day six days a week, sitting with his head down at a tiny table, as suit coats and shirts wearing paper tags breezed by overhead on a trolley that went nowhere.

On a shadowy October day, Kerouac was buried in Edson Cemetery in Lowell wearing too much makeup and holding rosary beads. A nun who taught English at my school snuck out to attend his funeral. She crossed the street (and the principal) but didn’t take her students. All this played out on one of the grandest boulevards, upper Merrimack Street, p’tit Canada, Lowell, Sweetland, Kerouac and white roses.

The summer after they buried Jack, I was restless. Sweetland Gardens wasn’t so sweet anymore. I went to work in the Wannalancit Mill. My tasks were simple The Lowell Review

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and taxing. The boss was a small man with a pathetic mustache, dingy short-sleeved shirts and a loathing attitude. On a sunny Tuesday morning, bewildered by my routinous duties and unsure, I quit before the first break’s bell.

From there, life unraveled with predictability and surprise. Confused about almost everything, I tried everything. I tried too hard. Some things held the promise of an April robin, others held the lack of an empty baptismal font.

Inky canals, trolleys and boulevards take us somewhere, they take us on a trip around the world, to the small planet called home.

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Catamount joe blair

I

t was thirty-five degrees and raining when we arrived at Catamount Country Club in Williston, Vermont. Catamount is a nine-hole track that includes a fancy double-decker driving range. “They’re only open till two,” I told Dave before he set out from Turner’s Falls, Massachusetts. That was at about ten o’clock. It takes three hours to drive from there to Williston.

“I don’t know whether they mean they actually close the course at two, or they stop taking tee times at two,” I said.

“They’ll take our money,” Dave said.

We pulled into the parking lot at 1:30. The wind was gusty. I wore my work shirt and the Old Mill insulated hoodie I bought at Menard’s for eighteen dollars. Dave wore his paintsplattered Carhartt pants and his paint-splattered Carhartt coat. Dave’s an artist. He’s broke. And all his clothes are flecked with colorful oil paints. I unloaded my clubs from the back of the Honda Element and set out to see if we could get on. The lights were out in the clubhouse. Doors locked. I googled the number and dialed it.

“Catamount.”

“Yeah. I called earlier. I’d like to pay for a round? There’s two of us.

“We’re around back. Just pull around back. We been down here since June.”

Black Ping bag slung across my back, I clattered down the concrete stairway to the lower level and circled around on the outside of the high wooden fence separating the driving range from the lower parking lot. At the far end of the driving range I found a small concession stand window. A teenage kid slid the glass aside and said, “That’ll be twenty.

Apiece.” I handed over two twenties and looked around for Dave. There was no sign of him.

I decided I wouldn’t be walking back up the hill to look for him. Why would I do that. He’s a grownup. He can find the first tee.

I turned and headed for it. The ground was soggy. I heard there had been snow last week and then rain. At present, the rain felt like ocean rain, not stopping or starting but fading in and out in time with the wind gusts. Almost unnoticeable but soaking.

The first hole at Catamount is a par-four dogleg-right with two bunkers short punctuated by a large granite boulder. There are two or three giant burial mounds straight away and left from back in the day when giants roamed the earth and played golf and asked to be buried in the rough of the first fairway at Catamount. It’s an easy driving hole, especially if you’re a fader of the ball like I am. You could hit a big banana slice here, and if you can carry a couple hundred yards, you’ll have a pitching wedge to the small, flat green.

I teed up a ball and looked around again for Dave. Here he came, sauntering around the driving range fence just like a fucking artist. No hurry.

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“I guess they’re going to let us play,” I said when he planted his bag next to mine.

“Should I park down here?” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “What if they lock the gate?”

“That’s true,” he said.

The hardwoods and thorn bushes have taken on the hue of winter — that purple, grey, and black ensemble. The land is ready for the next thing. I choose my three wood and pull it slightly. My ball lands beyond the fairway and halfway up one of the giant burial mounds. Dave yanks his driver even further left. His ball settles at the feet of another of the mounds. We shoulder our bags and set off trudging through the standing water on the gravel path toward the left-hand rough.

The Masters golf tournament wrapped up yesterday. It’s the first time it’s ever been played in November. It was odd to see the course sans the extravagant makeup of spring.

And no galleries. These circumstances stripped away some of the pomp and bullshit from the broadcast. It was just a course after all. A long, hilly course in autumn. Dustin Johnson won it going away. Nobody could catch him.

I don’t like Dustin Johnson. That’s what I told my mother early on Sunday. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know him. Do you?” This statement annoyed me. I used it against her later on Sunday when she reiterated her distain for Phil Mickelson. “He’s such an ass,” she said.

“And those buggy eyes.”

“Well,” I said. “I don’t know him. Do you?”

I got no reaction. I don’t think she connected the dots.

I tried again after she later mentioned her favorite, Jordan Spieth. “I don’t know what happened to him, poor Jordan. I think it might have been that Masters when he hit it in the water on that hole. He hasn’t done anything since. He’s so sweet.”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know him. Do you?”

“Why do you keep saying that?” she said.

I don’t know why I drove all the way to Vermont. I think it was because I wanted to drive somewhere. Put me in a vehicle and give me a reason to drive, even a stupid reason, and I’ll drive. Happily. For fifteen hours at a stretch. Cracker Barrel after five hours on the road is a high point of my life. The Sampler: Eggs, bacon, ham, grits, biscuits and gravy, baked apples, cheese hash browns, coffee and toast. Sometimes they have a wood fire going inside that giant fireplace and I’ll watch an old timer stand there facing his friends at a nearby table and warm himself. The best part is when they set the plates down in front of you and you crack open your biscuit like a bible and butter it and spread raspberry jam on it.

Everything is in front of you then. You’re on the edge of it. I know it’s not the best thing for me, all the cheese and bacon and potatoes. I look around at the other patrons. There isn’t a single slim one I can see. I also know that driving a car for no practical reason isn’t the best thing. Watching The Masters golf tournament with my mother isn’t a practical reason. But I did tell her I would come. And so, I reason, either I’m a liar, or I’m going to go ahead and drive across the country, that old familiar route, once again. The same familiar series of towns and cities. The same Cleveland salad bowl of a baseball stadium, whatever it’s called now. Progressive Field, I think. Those same familiar exits. Wildman Road. Shortman Road.

Vrooman Road. I don’t mind it. In fact, I love it. I keep driving and driving. Toward my invented destination. Carrying with me my invented purpose. Stopping off at the everpresent Angola rest stop in New York State. I’m walking, once again, across that trampled 120

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footbridge that spans Route 90. Once again placing my order at the weary McDonalds.

Once again on the road. I listened to David McCullough on the way out. He’s always good.

I’ve already chosen a book for the way back, Open by Andre Agassi. A change of pace.

The golf ball is well below my feet, and I top my second shot. It dribbles about thirty yards ahead. Dave tops his ball as well. We eventually finish the hole with workmanlike double bogies. The rain stops altogether after the first hole and the temperature rises a few degrees. We’re not cold. We’re walking over the wooded, hilly landscape of a northern New England town, my twin brother and I. Dave smokes a cigarette. Soon sunset will bring our round to an end. We’ll drive the Element back to our mother’s house on Casey Lane and we’ll eat meatloaf sandwiches and drink water and small glasses of bourbon. Our mother will say things that annoy us. She’ll tell us how we were in her womb for eight months. How she knows us better than anyone else ever could because we were in her womb.

I don’t know why my mother annoys me. If anyone else were to talk about her womb, or to question my dislike of Dustin Johnson, or tell me how to load the dishwasher, or how to fry an egg, I wouldn’t be annoyed at all. Maybe it’s because my mother’s voice rang out so loudly in my head for so many years. I hated her telling me what to do. How to do it. Where to go. How to get there. I still hate it. But I suppose I need to calm down. Grow up.

Dave, who has fallen in love recently, will drive back to Turner’s Falls in the darkness and I will watch The Night Manager with my mother and then hug her goodnight and then sleep.

Soon It’ll be five o’clock in the morning and I’ll be driving westward again. Google will direct me to take backroads through Northern Vermont and across an especially narrow spot on the southern tip of Lake Champlain and into the hills and the forsaken summer towns of Upstate New York with their empty cottages and empty dry goods stores with green tin roofs. It will snow. The snow will seem to bend in the direction of my oncoming windshield like stars at warp speed and I will be transfixed by this illusion. Through the forest. On the winding road. Alongside the winding stream. Alongside the finger lake. Not knowing where I am or when I need to turn until the Google woman tells me so.

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Christos Anesti! george chigas

Christos Anesti!

Alithos Anesti!

Christ has risen!

Indeed, He has risen!

S

aying that to people as they arrived at the house was about as religious as it got for our family at Easter. I think Aunt Filitsa was the only one who really made it a point of going to church. The men of course have a built-in excuse. We have to start the fire for the lamb. But it’s true. The women in the family are much holier than the men. And that’s a good thing. It compensates for our disproportionate evil. Thanks to the women in the family we can still look God in the eye and be reasonably sure he won’t strike us dead, even if we do deserve it. And the men are needed to start the fire for the lamb, which is why God always waits until after Easter to strike us dead.

Starting the Easter fire is not something you do well the first try. It takes years of practice to learn the finer points of starting and more importantly tending the fire as it’s cooking the lamb. It’s a knowledge that’s passed down from father to son over generations.

It’s like fishing or certain odd mannerisms like grinding one’s teeth that become a family trait and get printed on your forehead as if to say, “I’m Bill’s son.” It’s like the suffix at the end of English names: Richardson or Robertson, for example. If fact in Greek “-opulous” means “son of,” if I’m not mistaken. So, for example, “Eliopulous” means “son of Eli.” But I may be wrong. You see my generation didn’t learn a lot of the language. We went to Greek school when we were young, but that was pretty much useless.

A few years ago I felt guilty that I couldn’t speak the tongue of our ancestors, so I bought some Greek language tapes and played them in the car on the way to work. I learned a couple sentences like, “Ti hora fevgi sto layoforio,” which means if I remember correctly, “What time is the resurrection?”

But yes, the fire that cooks the spring lamb is crucial, almost as important as the lamb itself. And attaching the lamb to the spit is perhaps the most important ritual of the Easter holiday. It’s done the night before in the kitchen with wire and pliers. It takes two people, two men, to pull the wires tight enough to secure the lamb so it won’t come loose. It’s definitely a man’s job like starting the fire. (That makes two reasons God has to keep us around until at least after Easter: to start the fire and fasten the lamb to the spit.) And now that I think of it, the whole process of laying out the lamb and tying its legs and body to the steel spit is very much like a crucifixion.

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On Easter, we men, the sons of our fathers, crucify the son of God, our Father who art in Heaven. It’s kind of creepy. But that’s not at all what we’re thinking when we do it. I’d say what the men are thinking (and maybe the women too) when we crucify our savior is a bit more secular you might say. Especially as the night wears on and everyone’s had two or three drinks. When the time comes to shove the spit up the backside of the lamb and pierce its skill (I’m sorry there’s no other way to say this), it’s the Greek shepherd jokes that come to mind more than anything else. Hey, did you hear the one about the Greek and Italian shepherds? (Perhaps we’d better save that one for another time.)

But it should be duly noted that the procedure of fastening the lamb to the spit is taken very seriously, like a life and death operation. And that’s just how my father and Bill (his cousin) approached it, as surgeons. Bill in fact is an orthopedic surgeon and my father (before he retired) was a dentist like Bill’s father, my father’s uncle, was; and my father’s father was a doctor. (I say this to underline the idea of skills passed down from father to son over generations.) So when my father (whose name is Bill too) and Bill (my father’s cousin) performed this vital operation, the kitchen was magically transformed into an OR and the kitchen counter where the lamb was laid out an operating table. The two doctors were the servants of God who performed His will to resurrect the patient, His son, the very dead lamb, who’s been in the basement freezer since Good Friday when I picked Him up from the Demoulas market.

The whole task of ordering the lamb from DeMoulas’s is another story that warrants I think another short digression. (After all isn’t the business of telling a story is a digression in itself? There’s no straight shot from beginning to end, it’s all a meandering meditation of mind and meaning.) Anyway . . . it’s illegal I think to buy a lamb with the head still attached. But for Easter it’s critical to have the head. First of all, it wouldn’t look right if it were just the body turning around over the fire without the head. It would be sacrilegious; something the French might do, but not a God-fearing Greek. No, the lamb must definitely have its head or it isn’t really Easter. You might as well call it “a cookout” or a Bar mitzvah.

But as I say, it’s illegal. The SPCA or someone made it their cause to undermine the very foundations of Greek culture and paid off the governor to pass it into law. Some people in the family think it might have been a Jewish conspiracy. And that theory has yet to be convincingly disproved. But not to worry Mike Demoulas saw to it that all the Greeks in the Lowell area could get a lamb with a head for Easter as God intended.

To do this you simply have to go to the Demoulas market meat department about two weeks in advance and put in an order. But it has to be done discreetly. You don’t just walk up to Dimitri at the meat counter and announce for all the world to hear, “Dimitri, reserve me a lamb for Easter. And don’t forget the head.” You never know, an agent from the SPCA might be recording the whole thing. No, you have to be discrete, almost secretive like a spy. You have to go up to the meat counter and catch Dimitri’s eye. And when he sees you and recognizes who you are by the name printed on your forehead that says, “I’m Bill’s son” which only Greek butchers can see- (It’s completely invisible to the Irish and even the Italian butchers, but the Greek butchers can see it as clear as the nose on your face, especially Dimitri who has such extraordinary vision he can see three generations back.

So when Dimitri looks, he sees: “Son of Bill, son of George, son of John, etc., etc.,” just like a verse from Genesis. So when Dimitri gives you the nod, you go to meet him at the swinging doors that lead to the back room and you shake hands and say, “Hi,” like you The Lowell Review

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were just talking about the weather or the dog races or something, and then you kind of lower your head and talk under your breath in Greek. It has to be in Greek as another layer of precaution, so even if the SPCA has somehow bugged the conversation, they won’t be able to understand. And Dimitri takes your order, and a few days before Easter Sunday you come back. When no one is looking he passes you the lamb wrapped up in cheesecloth inside brown paper, and you put it in your shopping cart where it kind of slumps against the side. It’s best to go with two or three other people who can walk beside the carriage, so other people can’t see that you’re pushing the dead body of Christ wrapped in a cheesecloth shroud to the checkout counter.

When I get home I put the lamb in the freezer in the basement, where there’s also bags of ice that we’ve been filling for weeks from the ice maker that Papou found somewhere and fixed-up somehow. And on the night before Easter I go down to the freezer and lift the stiff body over my shoulder and carry it up the stairs like Mt. Canaan and lay it down on the kitchen counter to be “nailed to the cross.” And, like I said, my father and Bill, both of the medical profession, take this quite seriously. They have all their instruments laid out on a white cloth: two pairs of sturdy pliers for pulling the wires tight; two pairs of needle nose pliers for suturing up the stomach after the procedure is finished; two sharp knives for making slits for the garlic cloves; and a spool of heavy gauge wire. Then to the side there’s a bowl of sliced lemons; and a bowl of lemon juice mixed with pepper for rubbing down the inside of the abdominal cavity; and another bowl full of peeled garlic cloves for inserting into the slits they make in the shoulders and legs. When all of the instruments are materials are neatly laid out, they scrub up and put on latex gloves and bend down to their task. My brother and I and our cousin, William, the sons of Bill and Bill, stand to the side watching carefully, trying to remember each step of the procedure, each movement of the hand, the timing of each sip of ouzo. We assist when called upon to do so; otherwise, we stand to the side in respectful silence like good altar boys. During the procedure the two Bills talk to each other using a medical terminology that only they can fully comprehend: Bill (my father’s cousin): Bill, I’m making an incision along the River Styx just above the marsupial lip.

Bill (my father, cautions him): Slowly now. Beware of temptation.

Bill (his cousin): Right . . . a little more . . . OK . . . perfect. George (he calls me) give me some light here please. (And I quickly grab the large six battery flashlight and shine it on the patient.) Hmmm . . . just as I thought. See that!?

Bill (my father): Yeah . . . looks like melanoma of the redemption.

Bill (his cousin): Right. The sins of man did him in. We’ll have to perform an endoectomyocaridoscopy to determine the extent of metastasis of our sins this year.

It’s vital that they remove all our sins or risk eternal damnation for the entire family.

Depending on the extent of our sins for that particular year, the operation can take up to two hours including short breaks for more ouzo.

Fortunately, the virtues of the women compensate for our vices and the size of the tumor is usually manageable. During the ouzo breaks my brother Charles and cousin William and I are told to rub down the patient with lemon juice and garlic, and we jump to it like the pit crew of a professional racing team. When the operation is almost finished and before suturing up the stomach, Bill places three or four lemon halves inside the lamb’s stomach. The next day as it’s turning over the fire, the lemon rinds bounce against the 124

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stomach wall like against the head of a drum, like its heart trying to come back to life, dedump . . . de-dump . . . de-dump . . . his tongue hanging out, sweet brown skin peeling off his back.

The fire has to be started early in the morning. While everyone is still sleeping off the beer and wine and ouzo from the night before, my father gets up, puts on his work pants and Greek sailor’s hat and goes out into the chilly gray dawn. Everything’s already set up.

There’s a stack of wood to start the fire and bags of charcoal to keep it burning slow and hot throughout the day. We’ve got plenty of wood around because we burn wood for heat during the winter, and today is either the first or last Sunday in April. Easter goes in a fourweek cycle. There’s actually a very specific formula for determining which day: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. It seems simple enough, but to be sure we refer to the Greek calendar hanging inside the kitchen cabinet at Papou’s house.

He hangs a new calendar there every year. One of Papou’s hobbies is keeping track of time.

Every Easter he saves one of the dyed red eggs we use after dinner to crack with the person sitting next to you until there’s only one uncracked egg left and that person will have a lucky year- and he keeps it in his refrigerator. So if you opened Papou’s refrigerator door you’d see the red eggs lined up in the egg tray with the date written in black magic marker: 80, 81, 82, up to the present year. For sure, Papou knew time. (Maybe that’s why they call those big hallway clocks grandfather clocks.)

And Papou could fix anything. If something were broken, Granny (we didn’t call her Yiayia, we called her Granny.) Granny would say, “Give it to Papou. Papou fix.” Perhaps his greatest achievement was building the family’s first electric spit to replace the old hand crank one brought over from the old country. We used the hand crank version until the year after we moved from Lowell to Chelmsford in 1969.

That year, since our house wasn’t finished yet, we held Easter at Uncle Vess’ and Aunt Filitisa’s house on Bartlett Street. In the family picture from that year all the kids are wearing bell-bottom pants and have long hair and everyone is lined up along the length of the old wooden trellis that A.G. Pollard had built when he built the house and which years later gradually rotted and buckled slowly under its own weight.

But after that year we used the electric spit that Papou made from the motor of an old refrigerator. He fitted the motor inside a chest of drawers salvaged from the junk yard and rigged it with weights screwed to the metal propeller of an old cooling fan, so you could adjust the ballast to make the spit turn evenly. His invention was unveiled the year we moved into our new house. Papou attached a long extension cord from the house to his invention. Everyone stood around like they must have done when Thomas Edison first demonstrated the first phonograph or telegraph or electric light bulb. We were all filled with tense anticipation wondering if Papou’s new contraption was really going to work.

And when he connected the extension cord to the electric motor and the lamb started to turn around by itself, for about ten seconds everyone was speechless. Then we cheered in unison , “Hooray! It works!” It was wonderful. No more turning the lamb by hand. Papou had liberated us from slavery. He was like Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt. Papou had ushered in a new era. It was the immigrant spirit and New England ingenuity all wrapped up into one. “God bless America!” we thought smiling to ourselves.

We’ve been in our new house for about three years now. It’s just starting to look settled.

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clearing out the trees and brush around the house to make a lawn. We dragged the branches and made huge piles that my father set on fire. It was so hot it singed your eyebrows from fifty yards away. It was drudgery for my brother and me. But my father knew that in the long run, we’d thank him for teaching us the meaning of WORK. The second summer, my father planted the grass and built a beautiful big brick patio off the back of the house. My brother and I had the job of filling the concrete mixer with sand and carting the bricks from the pallets over to where our father was building the patio walls. “C’mon!” he’d called to us. “More bricks!” And my brother and I would race back and forth with the wheelbarrow until it was time to break for lunch and we’d slip away to the tennis and swimming club to meet our friends. But Easter was like a deadline for our family. All the spring projects had to get done in time for Easter. It was like judgment day.

If the projects weren’t finished by then. . . Actually there were no “ifs. The projects had to get done by Easter. Period.

It’s finally Easter morning and my father’s up and it’s drizzling outside and he’s wearing his Greek fisherman’s cap and a maroon Chelmsford High School wind breaker, and he’s pushing a wheelbarrow stacked with wood to the fire. He started the fire about an hour ago and even though he’s got enough wood and bags of charcoal to cook three lambs, he wants to be sure there’s enough wood so he won’t have to use the charcoal too soon. Tending the fire is tricky business, and nobody is ever satisfied with how hot on not hot it is. In fact, it’s a running joke that the first thing that Uncle Vess will say when he arrives (after my father hands him a mug of hot coffee) is: “That fire’s not hot enough. At that rate the lamb won’t be ready until five.” And they’ll have a short debate about how hot the fire is, and to appease his older brother who’s been like a father, brother and best friend to him, my father will rake the coals into a pile and add some more wood. But it’s still early and no one has arrived yet, and my brother and I are just waking up and getting something to eat in the kitchen, and out the window we can see our father and Uncle Vess standing at the edge of the lawn talking and smiling and drinking their coffee. Uncle Vess will hang around for a couple of hours while Aunt Filitsa and their two daughters, my first cousins, are at church, then he’ll leave before other people start to arrive and go home to change his clothes then come back with the family, and in the early years my cousins Diana and Daphne would be wearing the same outfit that Aunt Filitsa had sewn for them with her own hands.

Over the years Easter’s been pretty well documented. My mother was the first to commemorate the event with personalized photo albums with made-up conversations beneath the pictures. In the 1969 album for instance, there’s a picture of seven-year-old Daphne sitting on the swing next to Dr. Shore, and beneath the picture the caption that reads: “Dr. Shore, what’s a generation gap anyway?” “Beats me, Daphne. But whatever it is, I hope it’s not contagious!”

Cousin Basil was the first to record the day on video. That was before the days of palmsized camcorders. So it was a little intimidating to see him appear with his suitcase-size camera perched on his shoulder and the lens sticking its nose in your face. To his credit, Basil would try to break the ice by asking you a disarming question. He catches Bill coming down the patio steps. “Hey Bill!” he calls out from behind his camera, and Bill stops. The video is recording him in black and white in a way that will look surreal when we watch it on TV later as he stands in front of the camera with a drink in his hand, looking a little annoyed at having to make this stop on his way to the dessert table. Basil asks, “What’s the 126

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matter, Bill, you look pale. What’s the matter?” And Bill, who’s good at thinking on his feet, answers, “What’s the matter? There’s too many non-Greeks here, that’s what! Who invited all these barbarians?” At that moment my father appears, and Basil pans the camera to frame his flushed face in the lens and asks, “Uncle Bill! How about you! What do you have to say to future generations?” And my father who’s been up since dawn and drinking ouzo since noon replies, “Me? Say?” And Basil tries to help him along. “Let’s start with your name. What’s your name?” And my father replies, “Me? My name? What’s my name?”

Basil tries another line of questioning and asks, “What day is it?” Still recovering from the previous questions my father says, “Day? What day is it?” And Bill who’s still standing next to him lets out a hardy laugh and throws his arm around my father his first cousin and says, “C’mon Chigas, let’s get you a drink.”

But the main and central event of the day—besides of course removing the lamb from the fire after it’s cooked—is the family picture on the big rock. After everyone’s finished eating but before people start to go home, my father now many sheets to the wind sets up his 35 mm camera on its tripod in front of the big rock and calls everyone to gather there.

But it’s not easy to get everyone moving in the same direction at the same time. Usually, he has to tell everyone two or three times before they stop nibbling on leftovers or baklava and move in the designated direction. He starts to get a little impatient. He calls me, the first born, “George! Would you please help me get people on deck for the f-a-m-i-l-y-p- i-ct-u-r-e.” And I turn to the person next to me and call out, “All hands on deck!” and soon the word gets passed around and the momentum gradually shifts enough so people do start moving toward the big rock to take their places for the family picture.

I can’t help thinking that the rock is like an anchor. It keeps us rooted to each other. To this place and day. Or maybe it’s like the capsized hull of a boat that we cling to. It has that shape. It’s gray like a whale breaking the surface of the water. Rounded. Smooth. And we stand on its back perfectly balanced as the whale breaks through the new green lawn and freezes there like a statue. The whale stops in mid-plunge for everyone to take their places.

And the tree beside it is like a fountain of water it blows out its spout. “There she blows!” my father shouts standing behind the camera. He quickly sets the timer and presses the shutter and runs to take his place on the rock next to the tree before the shutter releases.

And “snap” the day is recorded for posterity.

History will know who was there for Easter that year. History will know how many socks William was wearing. You see him sitting in the front row. One year he’s got one sock on his left foot and no sock on the right. The next year it’s reversed; the next no socks at all. He’s smiling deviantly. He wonders if History will notice his ankles. He’s planned this out far in advance. When he heard my father call for everyone to take their places, he slipped into the bathroom and took off one of his socks and stuffed it into his pocket. As the picture is being taken, he crouches in the front row with his bare ankle exposed. He can barely keep from laughing as he holds the pocketed sock in his pocketed fist. Thanks to William, when we think back over the years and try to distinguish one Easter from the next, we have this reference. “Oh yeah, that was the year William wore one sock on his left foot. What a year!

Perfect weather. Remember how calm the sea was that day?” Or, “Do you remember the year of no socks? What a day that was! The wind was vicious! It nearly blew down the blue tent and sent us all adrift!”

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Arthur, the tallest, a former star quarterback for Lowell High School then Yale, is looking far off into the distance. He sees someone open in the end zone and throws the game winning pass. Uncle Dino is grinning ear to ear. He knows he’ll live the longest and retire the youngest. He drives a shiny Lincoln down to Florida to wait out the winter. This year I’m Jack Kerouac. I’m wearing a red flannel shirt and baggy pants. Charles, my brother, is wearing a red cashmere V-neck sweater and Brooks Brothers underwear. Basil is holding his newborn son in his arms. Daphne has a beer in her hand. We’re all holding onto the hull of the same capsized boat that brought our parents and grandparents from the old country across the deep blue sea teaming with whales surging forward. And even though the hull of its back is kind of slippery and it’s hard to keep our balance, we manage to stand still just long enough for the shutter to open and wink shut. You’d never know that we were all hanging on for dear life. You’d think it was clear sailing. You’d think we were all just skipping over the ocean like a stone.

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Postcards from Haggett’s Pond k at h l e e n a p o n i c k

—after a recurrence of cancer I’m by the water on a path once a railroad bed thinking of trains whizzing by, passengers deep in thought, tense perhaps over work, family problems, the nation’s turmoil until, that is, they glance over the pond to see and hear the squawking Canada geese. * At a wetland marsh, reeds: thousands of pale stalks like a ghost army waiting for orders. Nearby, someone—or was it the wind?—tried to twist off the thin bough of a gray birch but it hangs on.

I look down to its base—bright green moss, the leafy beginnings of mayflowers. * On the hillside, trail caretakers have piled up fallen boughs and small uprooted trees.

Reflections of sturdy aspen ripple a shade-black pool.

Was it here I heard the piercing sounds of birds high in the trees? Why were they so upset?

Was I the intruder threatening their nests? * Heading back, a woman going by smiles, restrains her young dogs, eager to engage me.

We exchange greetings and continue on into the years: days of clouds and snow, peace or war, sunlight falling through the trees, days of unexpected changes, without and within.

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The New Old New England Halloween Blues d av e r o b i n s o n

Their quiet root hairs floss the rocky soil, these paper birches slouching in brownfield sun.

Industrial dyes reduce to dregs of lead and mercury to be swept up to sway in pent-up buds. An unofficial flag of urban areas—the shredded, snagged plastic bag—crackles low in the yellow shade.

In the highest limbs, jostling bright like quicksilver, a half-deflated balloon bouquet.

In the lowest drains, nestled like deaf and dumb kits, used needles hole up till the first false thaw.

Young drunks smeared pumpkins across the cobbles last night and the whole scene has the look of a rubbish orchard.

But there are no hayrides, corn mazes or “PickYour-Own . . .” enticements in sight.

I point my car

north to the Green Mountains. Gold and red, orange and bronze are smashed brown paste on the road’s slim shoulder. Two strange, too-tropical patterns tore peak foliage to wet shreds in mid-month rainstorms.

October yields a bumper crop where roadkill’s strewn among streaks—steel-belteds melted down to veer off then burn the median’s rocksalt weeds.

(Roadkill and baseball have long been our two true National Pastimes.) The scorched and dead are swept up to sway our minds toward rush hours and commutes as safe austerities of daily life.

Vermont’s highways are edged with blood-stained sands, alluvial plastics and autumn’s last wild blooms— catching me off-guard!

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But traffic coagulates to parade pace, and scattered blue flowers are just bunched-up latex gloves—stained brown and dropped in wilting goldenrod by EMT’s.

Pine trunks, guardrails or blasted granite cliffs welcome the unwitting multitudes in huddled masses of metal, bone, glass, leather and flesh.

Yet we smug Yankees wear the guise of the herd: the mask of the “Oblivious Rubbernecks.”

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Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number d av i d d a n i e l

~1~ We were a small, tight-knit crew of nine, linked by the dance that is youth. When high school graduation came, we didn’t want us to end. That autumn I went off to a small Christian college not far from home.

The one who kept in closest touch was Erika—Rikki, as we called her. Small, quick, with tortoise shell glasses that sat on her freckled nose, and high levels of energy and humor, we thought of her as “interesting” more than pretty. We agreed she might have been the most successful of us in college had she chosen to go. Instead, she continued to live at home and took a job in town as night clerk at the Cape-Way Motel, so named because it was on the old route to Cape Cod. The work suited her, she said; it was quiet and gave her time to read. What she didn’t say (but I suspected) was that the job kept her out of the house where warfare between her mom and stepdad was constant. “God, they give me headaches,” she confessed.

By simple proximity I was her link with our old crew, and she was mine. She worked nights, and some days would take a bus over to visit me. We’d sit in the campus snack bar and relive the adventures we’d all shared. One time we went over to Wonder Bowl on the Southern Artery and rolled a few strings. Neither of us broke 100.

Without the routines and the people that had knit high school days together, things weren’t the same. Phone calls and occasional letters among the rest of our group dwindled.

When I’d complain to Rikki that life had grown too complicated since graduation, she pointed ahead to the holidays. “Everyone’ll be home, and things will be great again. You’ll see.” It was something to hold onto.

I was restless and growing bored with college. I sensed the war going on in Southeast Asia was contributing to my malaise, but my student deferment was keeping me out of the draft.

In mid-October, Rikki had an idea. We were in my dorm room, sitting on my bed (with the door open, as campus rules required) eating pizza. “After everyone finishes college, and that includes you, Dave”—I’d never been a scholar, and she was on my case about not studying enough—“depending on what money we can pull together, we should buy a small island and all go live there.”

“An island.”

“Maybe in Maine. All of us together, the whole crew. And if people have girlfriends or boyfriends, they’re welcome too.”

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Rikki and pulled her close and kissed her. It surprised us both. Nothing like that had ever happened before. It lasted only a moment, and then we retreated to who we’d always been.

But her scheme, as improbable as it was, had provided the idea that we would all reunite sometime, somewhere, and it gave me hope. For a while I managed to refocus on school and tried to be a student.

Rikki began to change, too. She’d show up with a bottle of Mateus in her handbag (in high school she almost never drank), and we’d pass it back and forth. She was also concocting odd plans.

Like the Ax in Walden Pond idea.

With the slow nights at the Cape-Way Motel, she’d been reading a lot. One book was Thoreau’s Walden. She told me that Thoreau, ice fishing on Walden Pond, had accidentally dropped an ax into the water. She had this idea that it was still down there. As she described it, I could picture the ax there in the green depths, its steel head on the sandy bottom, the handle upright, wavering lightly in the currents of the pond. Wouldn’t the wood have rotted away by now? A lot of time had passed. But she insisted that the cold water would have preserved it. Her idea was that we should try to locate the ax. “Literary archeology,” she said.

I pretended the idea was plausible, though I knew it wasn’t. My doubt was confirmed when I mentioned it to a professor who taught a course on the New England Transcendentalists. He rubbed his chin reflectively. “The ax incident is where Thoreau returns it to his neighbor, sharper than when he borrowed it, which makes the point about being a good steward. I don’t recall anything about it falling into the pond.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell Rikki, and in time the idea seemed to fade on its own. ~2~ It was growing ever clearer that college wasn’t my thing. My parents were bugging me to take business courses, which would be practical, but I had no interest. Sometimes I cut classes to hang out with Rikki. She would lecture me on what an opportunity I had being in college and how I should grab it. My roommate, an amiable pre-med major from Hong Kong, who apparently spent all his time in the chem lab, told me to feel free to bring my friend to the room, even push the twin beds together if we wanted. But it wasn’t like that with Rikki and me. We would talk and drink Mateus and make out a little, but it was a way to alleviate our boredom. Our convenient little passion lacked the heat to drive it to the next level. Rikki had always been one of the crew, but no one’s girlfriend. After, both of us slightly tipsy, I’d walk her to the bus stop for her ride back to our town, and I always came away feeling a little sad for the gone past, and sad for Rikki who, like me, didn’t seem to be getting on with life.

With the changing of the season, traffic to the Cape had fallen off, and Rikki had even more time at the motel for reading and making mad plans. I suspected some of this was an escape from the turbulence at home. One evening in early November she came to my dorm clearly buzzed and excited. She’d been reading Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and she was eager to go to Greece. She wanted to find the cave and build a theater in it and project films on the wall. Movies that’d make people think about “the true nature of things,” she said.

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of the two classes I was still regularly attending. I pointed out that the cave was something Plato dreamed, not an actual place. After a silence, she said quietly, “That’s what they said about Troy. That it never really existed. Until someone discovered it.”

“I know, but—” “It’s real, David!” She was getting agitated. “The fucking cave is real!”

I acknowledged that it could be, just to calm her down.

There were other ideas, too, that Rikki had, some of them pretty whacked out, and I’d listen without resistance to avoid argument, and then we’d fall to groping on my bed. We talked about our old crew of friends less and less.

As December came, I knew she wasn’t the Rikki of old. Feeling and humor had always been her number and we’d all loved her for it, but that was missing now. She rarely made eye contact when we spoke. Her chestnut hair, once always so vibrant, seemed dull, unbrushed, pushed under a winter cap, which she never took off, even indoors. She’d get argumentative for no reason. One time, she confronted a rep for a big chemical company who was on campus, recruiting. She asked a question and, not liking his answer, began shouting at him, telling him to shove his napalm up his ass. We laughed about it afterwards, but my laughter was nervous.

Our friends would be coming home for the winter holidays. Rikki and I decided we would plan a party for us all. But as break approached it was clear that Rikki was sinking.

She would drift from frenzied energy into fogs where I couldn’t make her smile. I noticed scratches on her inside left wrist and let her convince me they were from a cat. I thought about reaching out to her mother, but the two were on openly hostile terms.

What I did finally was go to the campus health center which offered counseling services.

I asked if someone could see my friend. Because Rikki was not enrolled as a student, they couldn’t. However, one of the therapists had a private practice and she offered to do a free session if Rikki would call and set it up. I got the woman’s contact info. When I called the Cape-Way I was told Rikki wasn’t there.

I was planning to study that evening (I had final exams next day in the only two classes I had any prayer of passing), but as I sat at my desk, my mind wouldn’t stay on the notes.

My roommate had just flunked out. All that “lab time,”—“labial time” I secretly dubbed it when he told me—was apparently spent having sex with a forty-year-old cafeteria worker off campus. Increasingly restless, I borrowed a car from a classmate and drove to the motel.

The small lobby was hung with cheap Christmas decorations and seasonal music was playing softly. A man about fifty was at the registration desk. When I asked for Rikki, he grew uneasy. I explained that I was a friend, and he finally offered that she was no longer employed there. Something must have shown on my face. He cleared his throat. “She was missing shifts. We had to let her go.” As I started out, he said, “She left these.” He handed me a small stack of paperbacks.

I telephoned her house, and after many rings a woman answered. No, Rikki wasn’t there—“And she’s goddamn not welcome!” the woman snapped and hung up. ~3~ It was going on ten p.m. when I got back to campus. I returned the car and headed for the dorm. Rikki was sitting on floor in the hallway outside my door, her head tipped 134

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back against the wall. I felt both relieved and afraid. I’d never seen her looking so undone.

Seeing me, she sat up and gave a faint, uncertain smile.

“Come on in,” I said.

With my roommate’s departure, I had the room to myself. I told her the story, not sure what else to do. “I’ve got your books,” I said.

“You know then.”

I took off my coat and threw it on my bed. “You want to talk?”

She sank onto the other bed. Slowly, as though her mind was far away, she started to speak again about the idea she had first laid out back in the fall, of an island where we all could go. Only now it wasn’t just one island. We were all scattered around, on our own little islands. And it was evident that she was letting go of the idea of our enduring connections, and so was I. Her eyes grew wet.

“I can borrow a car and take you somewhere,” I said, not sure where that would be. Not her home certainly. Was the ER a possibility? My parents’ house? She said nothing. “You can stay here tonight if you want.”

“Don’t you have tests to study for?”

“I already studied. I’m going to ace them.”

I hadn’t, of course; and wouldn’t. I would fail both classes, whereupon my GPA would have sunk so low the college would inform me that I was no longer in good standing. In February I would get my draft notice. But that was still in the future.

I told Rikki about the counselor who could meet with her. I gave her the woman’s card with the contact number. For a moment she seemed paralyzed, then she looked around for somewhere to put it and finally set in on the desk by the bed.

“Here, I’ll hold it.” I didn’t want her to lose it. “We’ll call in the morning. I’ll go with you.” I leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Get some rest now, okay?”

She gave a smile that was maybe only just a little less frightened than the one in the corridor. She lay back and shut her eyes. After a moment, she opened them. “David, maybe sometime . . . we can go bowling again?”

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The Cold Meteorite william reed huntington

While through our air thy kindling course was run A momentary glory filled the night; The envious stars shone fainter, for thy light Garnered the wealth of all their fires in one.

Ah, short-lived splendor! journey ill-begun!

Half-buried in the Earth that broke thy flight, No longer in thy broidered raiment dight, Here liest thou dishonored, cold, undone.

“Nay, critic mine, far better ‘t is to die The death that flashes gladness, than alone, In frigid dignity, to live on high; Better in burning sacrifice be thrown Against the world to perish, than the sky To circle endlessly a barren stone.”

First published in The Century Magazine, October 1893 William Reed Huntington (1838-1909) was born into a prominent Lowell family, William was the son of Hannah Hinckley and Elisha Huntington, a doctor who served eight terms as mayor and one term as Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. An Episcopal priest, Rev. Huntington wrote and edited liturgical works such as the Standard Prayer-Book (1892) and Short History of the Common Book of Prayer (1893) as well as a book of poems, Sonnets and a Dream (1899). To learn more about the reverend-poet, read his sister Mary’s memoir published in 1910. Having been a rector at Grace Church in New York City for more than twenty years, Huntington’s death in Nahant, Mass., in 1909 was reported in detail. The New York Times wrote that “he went about doing good” and that he had been class poet when he graduated from Harvard in 1879. “Strong in conviction, clear in thought and expression, a remarkable debater, he was at the same time of a poetic and almost mystic temperament.”

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Pecos Mission, New Mexico 1621, 1680 fred woods

Not even bright sierras ponderosa high stacked thunderheads or drafting eagles were enough for Fray Andres Juarez who had Cicuic women mold earth to bricks and layer on layer build higher up to please dear God out-glorying nature with a church not big but biggest and six towers directing eyes to moon stars heaven and away from heathen ways beneath bare earth humble useless save when shaped to bricks to build a church.

Until those congregants rose up tore it down dug a pit built a kiva and returned to earth.

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When Spanish settlers and missionaries first came to Northern New Mexico in 1598 they found people living in more than 70 villages, “pueblos,” in and around the Rio Grande Valley. Pecos, or Cicuye, pueblo with more than 2000 inhabitants was one of the largest. Over the years Spanish occupiers grew increasingly oppressive, and 1680 the pueblos revolted, driving the Spanish out of their territory and destroying all the mission churches except one. Freed of the Spanish, the pueblo people again built underground kivas and resumed their traditional religious practices.

Conflict among the pueblos paved the way for the Spanish reconquest in 1692.

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Farewell, Little Canada: An Excerpt charles gargiulo

W

ithin a couple of weeks of school starting another bombshell hit. City officials announced a whole bunch of new buildings were going to be torn down in Little Canada, including all the apartments on our side of Ford Street. This included the building that Al and Henry lived in on the corner of Ford and Austin Street. So, it was goodbye Henry. When his family moved to Lawrence, he was gone for good. Fortunately, Al and his family got a place on the other side of the North Common, about a half a mile away. Although he wasn’t going to be around every day, he was at least close enough that we could still get to see each other occasionally. But this news was the worst blow yet. Only a miracle could save the rest of Little Canada from the wrecking ball. I kept wondering who these “urban renewal” people were and how they could get away with this and why, WHY wasn’t anybody stopping them?

They had already started destroying things on the other side of the canal and farther down Moody Street, near Downtown, and now the number of buildings being abandoned or being readied for demolition was increasing like plague victims. People remaining in Little Canada must have felt like people in the Middle Ages when the Black Death hit, watching their neighbors dropping like flies and wondering when they and their loved ones were going to get it. We had no idea what was behind it or how to stop it.

I was afraid to visit my Aunt Rose because I didn’t know what to say to comfort her. She wasn’t stupid, so I knew she must have figured out our backs were against the wall. “Urban renewal” was almost on our doorstep. I’m not proud to say I avoided visiting her for about a week after the Ford Street families were thrown out. I was so depressed about everything that I was afraid she would see how upset I was and it would make her feel even worse.

More people were leaving all the time. It seemed like every week when I did my tonic bottle collection route there would be more empty apartments where families moved out.

Very few new families took those vacant places. It was not only sad, it started to feel creepy.

Not only were we surrounded by abandoned and boarded-up buildings, the properties that had people living in them seemed to be slowly dying. Tenements once filled with tons of families bustling up and down the stairs greeting each other in the hallways and streets now had a trickle of people living in them. Empty apartments were inhabited by the memories of friendly neighbors. People who greeted each other on the streets and talked about all kinds of things now just barely said hello. If they stopped at all it was to tell the other person that they had received their notice to move or to share stories about who they knew in the neighborhood who were gone or going.

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Businesses started moving out. Ouellette’s Diner closed, which meant Harvey must have been looking for another place where he could buy meal tickets for Captain Jack.

The stupid tiny gas station closed, which meant Mr. Berra had to find some other place to terrorize kids. And then the Holiday Diner shut down. That was my favorite place to eat and where I got to see Al’s Mom while she was working.

One place that was busy though, was the stupid “Urban Renewal” office. Families who were being thrown out had to go there after they got their notice so these creeps could “help” them relocate. The worst part of that damn place was that it was on the corner of Austin and Moody streets, in direct eyeshot of my Aunt Rose when she sat looking out the second-floor window in her Austin Street apartment. She could see all the people being forced out of Little Canada marching into and out of that place to get sent on their way.

They might as well have put up a big neon sign flashing in her face saying, “We’re Coming to Get You Rose, and your little Doggie too!”

I finally got the nerve to visit her and, sure enough, when I got there she was sitting in her chair by the window, clutching her rosary beads, with her eyes fixed on the Urban Renewal office. Even though it was only a little over a week since I saw her, she looked like she was a lot older. I’m sure you think I must be imagining it, but I’m telling you she had aged years in just that time. There were dark circles under her eyes, her hair had more silver streaks, and her face was sagging so much it looked like she was melting.

But when I heard her voice, it really broke my heart. I could barely hear her speak when she told me Uncle Clarence and Daisy were out shopping. She sounded as weak as somebody who had been pushing a boulder up a mountain and had no strength or energy left. She asked me how my broken arm was and how school was going, so I lied and told her they both were going very well. I also didn’t tell her anything about Al or Henry being kicked out.

She told me she had missed watching me playing outside on Austin Street since I broke my arm. I told her not to worry and that I would be out there again doing things as soon as it healed. I felt so bad because I knew that the main reason I wasn’t out there as often was because so many of my friends were gone. In fact, I only had Richie, Paul, Billy, and Dave left. The day I visited her I learned that Donna, Frenchie, and Bum were all moving. They’d be gone in two weeks. Bum’s father would still be running Benny’s, but they were moving to Centralville across the river. Donna’s family was moving to Shaughnessy Terrace, the same tough housing project where Dicky relocated. Unlike Dicky, however, Donna could take care of herself. Frenchie and his family decided to move back to Quebec. I still hadn’t taken this all in when I was visiting my Aunt Rose. I was miserable about losing so many friends. We had the best gang in history, and it was being blown apart by this lousy Urban Renewal. But as bad as that made me feel, it was nothing compared to the pain and fear I felt about them taking our building and forcing my Aunt Rose out. This was killing her. I could see it.

I asked her if the priest was still coming to see her, and she said she was very upset with him. She said that when she asked him if they were finally going to stop throwing people out, he told her that it was up to God. I saw her face get red, and for a moment she got angry and snapped, “Up to God! The nerve! I told him that was blasphemous. I told him God had nothing to do with it. PEOPLE were doing this, and the church didn’t care and was letting them do it and hiding behind God. They knew what was happening, and they lied to us 140

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when we kept asking them if our homes were in danger of being taken. I told him to get out and never come back and that God would judge them someday.” Then she started crying.

Just as I started to hug her, Uncle Clarence and Daisy opened the door to the apartment.

They both rushed over. Uncle Clarence already knew what was wrong as he patted my head and kissed Aunt Rose’s cheek and told her that somebody downtown told him that certain buildings would not be touched, and we needed to pray that our building would be spared.

He heard that the Club Passé Temps and the row houses on Cabot were not going down, and since they were close to us maybe we’d be okay. He was told that was definite.

This seemed to calm Aunt Rose a tiny bit, and then he said, “I just bought some food, and I’m going to bake my special apple pie that you love. I got one of Daisy’s favorite soup bones at the market, so hang around Charlie and we’ll have a special dessert together.”

Daisy slowly nuzzled up to Aunt Rose like she always did. After Aunt Rose petted her, she came to me so I could pet her, but I noticed she didn’t bound over like she usually did because she seemed sad. After I petted her, she went right back to Aunt Rose and stayed by her side every second, instead of hanging out with Uncle Clarence in the kitchen while he was making dinner as she usually would do.

When I went home that night, I felt like my whole world was falling apart. It was a real live nightmare, and I felt helpless. I started praying myself, begging God to help us and spare my Aunt Rose, protect my Mom and give me the strength to not lose my temper at school or with my friends. I tried to focus on the one important bit of good news I heard from Uncle Clarence. He said that the row houses on Cabot Street were not coming down, which meant my best friend Richie was safe because that’s where he lived.

When I visited Richie one Saturday morning, his oldest sister Arlene answered the door and I knew something was wrong right away because she didn’t insult me like she always did but quietly let me in and said that Richie was in his room. The house was very quiet.

Richie’s place was never quiet.

Upstairs in his bedroom, Richie was sitting on his bed doing nothing. He looked up and said, “Did you hear about it?” I said, “No, what’s going on? Arlene looked like she didn’t hate my guts, and you look like you’re waiting to go the electric chair.” Richie said they had to move out. When I said I thought they were safe because the Urban Renewal guys were not supposed to tear down his row house, he said that they were only going to chop off the last two apartments nearest Ford Street and leave the others standing.

Richie’s apartment was one of those two nearest Ford Street. Bye, bye Richie.

My face must have turned pale, like Casper the Ghost, and I felt like I would faint. It was like I was in another bad movie. This was crazy. How many rotten things could go wrong?

With all the things I had to worry about, one of the only bits of good news I had heard was that my best friend Richie’s home was safe. That at least I would be able to count on having him around. But as soon as I let down my guard and took his being there for granted, “WHAM!” like Charlie Brown I landed hard on my butt after Lucy pulled away the football . . . again.

It was so sad. Saying nothing for the longest time, we sat on his bed with our heads hanging, staring at the floor. It was like we were both hoping that maybe if we were quiet, we’d wake up and find out it was just a nightmare. Then when it became clear it was real, I think we both began thinking about how much we meant to each other and how much this was going to change our lives.

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My mind replayed memories of our times together, meeting him for the first time, going to Harvey’s Used Book Store, hanging out with the gang, my fight with Roger, getting grab bags and peashooters at Benny’s, hanging out with the rats at the Royal Theatre, running from crazy Mr. Berra, almost drowning together in the canal, fighting with his sisters, hearing The Beatles for the first time and planning to become rock stars. I shared everything with him, and it felt like we were a team that could make magic happen when we put our minds to it. And that’s what kept haunting the wonderful memories running through my head, realizing that, although I was grateful for being able to remember what we did, I now had to wipe out the part of my brain that looked forward to all the things I imagined we would do together in the future.

Richie was now going to join my Dad, Midnight, Noel, Ronnie, Dicky, Henry, Bum, Donna, Frenchie, and Bill as people no more real to me than characters on a movie screen.

Memories are overrated. I would much rather have a future with the people I love than a past. And it was getting harder to feel secure about having a future with anyone that I loved.

It didn’t take long for Richie to move. Within a week or so, his dad was able to find a place way out on the other side of Billerica. It might as well have been Australia because I was never going to be able to hang out with him living that far away. I spent as much time with him as I could before he moved. We hung out a little bit with Paul, David, and Billy, but we mostly tried to spend as much time alone together as we could. I won’t get into all the things we said to each other, because we shared a lot of things about really personal stuff.

The kinds of things guys usually never share with each other like family things that worried us or how scared we were about lots of stuff we didn’t want other people to know. I won’t give away his secrets, but Richie was the first person I swore to secrecy and talked about my mom’s drinking. Obviously, he couldn’t fix it, but somehow just being able to know I could trust somebody that much meant a lot to me. Especially, knowing that he cared. About both me and my mom.

The day before he left I took him over to Poitras Hobby Shop, his second favorite store, across the street from his favorite store Harvey’s on Merrimack Street, so that I could buy him a going away present. He picked out a “Creature of the Black Lagoon” plastic model after we wandered this cool place that had a million different expertly built and painted models on display as well as electric trains and other cool hobby stuff. After that we went over to see Harvey.

Harvey’s was empty when we dropped in, and it allowed us a lot of time to hang around chatting with him. It was amazing all the memories we had hanging out with ol’ Harvey, and we laughed or got choked up over just about every one of them. Harvey told Richie how great he was and let him know that he would always have a special place in his heart because he was his first regular customer when he opened his old store on Aiken Street.

After talking for at least two hours, Captain Jack popped in to make Richie’s last visit to Harvey’s perfect. When Captain Jack found out Richie was moving away, he pulled an old silver dollar out of his pocket and told Richie it was a good luck coin he had kept from an old treasure chest he found a long time ago, and that he wanted Richie to have it. He said to keep it and give it to somebody else he met someday who was sad and needed a little cheering up. Richie hugged him and started crying and said he didn’t want to move, that he loved Little Canada and all of us. We all did our best to console Richie, and finally Harvey 142

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was able to get Richie feeling better with that special gift he had of knowing how to say the exact right things. I don’t need to tell you that Harvey wouldn’t let him leave without making him pick out a bunch of free comics and 45 rpm record singles.

Our last stop on the way back to his home was dropping in one last time together at Benny’s, where I first met Richie, so that we could bug Bum’s old man one more time, hemming and hawing over picking out penny candy. Of course, we bought ourselves a famous Benny’s rip-off grab bag on the way out. We hung out the rest of the day at Richie’s place, and after going on about how much we meant to each other I said goodbye to his mom and dad and then, to my surprise, realized I was even going to miss his snooty sisters as we shook hands and wished each other well without even saying one nasty thing to each other. Now they were gone, and the shadow spread even larger over Little Canada.

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SECTION VII

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The Art of Getting Home: Bart Giamatti and the 1952 Saint Patrick’s Girls Softball Team c h r i s t i n e o ’c o n n o r

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o one has ever written about the game of baseball with more intelligence and beauty than former Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti. In one of his many essays on the subject he described the narrative of baseball as “the story of going home after having left home.” My mother, Martha, has always loved baseball. Maybe, part of the reason is that the narrative Giamatti describes—that journey around the bases as ancient as the Odyssey and as new as America—appealed to her. Perhaps it was reflective of the story of her own family, and that of her many neighbors, all of whom left their homes to cross an ocean and find a new home here, in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Her best friend growing up was Athena Letsou, her parents came from Greece. Across the street was a Jewish man, Morris Malenski, and next to him, Stanley Koweski, an immigrant from Poland. This depth of ethnic diversity was reflected in my mother’s home as well. One side of the family were Russian Jewish immigrants, the other side emigrated from Ireland. If Lowell was at one time a melting pot, its ingredients were mainly from this neighborhood, the Acre. It was a densely populated area of three-decker homes, backyard gardens, coffee shops and corner stores. In the Acre, residents walked everywhere, women swept even the sidewalks, and in the streets, kids played baseball, which brings me back to my mother.

She was called Annie back then, and grew up playing pickup games of baseball. As she recalls, she was the only “girl” who played, but she could hit, run, yell, and chew gum with the best of them. With a hand-me-down glove from Billy Letsuo, (Athena’s older brother) Annie caught line-drives, grounders and pop flies. In that space between the granite curbing, she learned the game of baseball and likely something of herself. After all, as Giamatti says: “Home is where self-definition starts.”

At night, with her father Dan, they’d play cards and listen to the Boston Braves over the transistor radio. In 1935, the year she was born, the Braves acquired Babe Ruth. But not even the Bambino could save the Braves, as they recorded the second worst record ever in baseball that season. For a time, their third baseman was from Lowell, Skippy Roberge.

The Manager, a Southerner, didn’t care for Skippy: “I don’t like you Yankee-Catholics,” he reportedly said before shipping him out. It wasn’t until 1948, that the Braves turned things around, winning their first National League Championship. But something even bigger happened to the Braves that year. Sam Jethroe joined the team and became the first

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black player to break the color barrier on the Braves. A reminder that “the tale of leaving and seeking home is told in as many ways as one can imagine.” Yes, Giamatti said that too.

In addition to listening to baseball, she occasionally took in some local games with her father, Dan. Together they would walk down Broadway and Fletcher Streets to the South Common. On the way to the game, they’d stop at the corner store, picking up a couple of Moxies and a brown paper-bag of Pete’s chips. In 1905 the city had built a baseball field at one end of the Common. Bowl shaped; the park was blessed with natural bleachers. The Twi-League played there and the games were free. The players were all semi-pro. It must have been a joy to watch these games from the green grass of a hillside in the cool of a summer night. On the way home, Dan and Annie would stop again at the corner store, and buy a five-cent dill pickle for her mother, Sally. The simplicity and magic of such evenings cannot be replicated in today’s world.

By the spring and summer of 1952 things changed for my mother: she went from spectator to player. Baseball wasn’t an option for her, or any other girl. In 1931, after a girl struck-out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, a much earlier Baseball Commissioner than Giamatti, banned women from professional baseball. But the relatively new game of softball opened a variation of the game to female players.

A junior in high school, my mother joined the first-ever, Saint Patrick’s Girls Softball team. For Annie and her teammates there were no role models; what they were doing was as new and bright as the red stitching on the ball. The things my mother later taught me how to catch and throw, and grip a bat—her mother couldn’t have taught her. My mother use to say: “knee down! knee down!” in explaining how to stop a grounder. If only she had met Bill Buckner in his formative years.

Together the Saint Patrick’s Girls Softball team ran down pop-flies, threw strikes, hit homers, made double-plays, argued with umps, and genuinely cheered for each other.

That summer, they met every morning at the North Common and played and practiced till supper. She remembers all her teammates: “Ann Charity was at shortstop; Mary Purtell was our pitcher. There was Betty Davis in center; Rita Davies in left; Doris Levasseur in right; Mary Shattuck was the catcher; Carol Archibald was on first, Joan Davidson on second, and I was on third base.” According to my mother, Ann was their best player. I remember meeting Ann when I was a kid. She was a Notre Dame nun by then. But back in those days, her specialty was home runs. As Giamatti says, it’s at home plate, that “teammates are . . . all true family.”

That year they played nearly every Catholic school team between Lowell and Boston; schools in Ayer, Brockton, Medford, Arlington, and Tyngsborough. The success of that season is in the many headlines taped to the yellowed pages of her scrapbook: “Saint Patrick’s Swamps ND 22-2,” “St. Patrick’s Tops St. Raphael’s 10-1,” “Betty Davis hits ThreeRun Homer,” “St. Patrick’s Girls Win Another,” “St. Patrick’s Girls Still Undefeated.” By the time they reached the playoffs, the Sun described “a large motor caravan” leaving from the rectory to the away game. As it turned out, they were more successful than the Braves of my mother’s childhood. “St Patrick’s Wins Girls’ CYO Crown” reads another headline, this one in big print.

But there was still more ball to play that summer. After defeating nearly everyone, (one game ended in a tie) a special post-season game was organized. Earlier that year, they had played, and won, a non-league game against the WACS (Women Army Corps) of 148

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Fort Devens. These players were older, generally bigger and, as required by the Army, were “physically fit.” The game would be at the South Common under lights. As reported in the newspaper, “it was the first softball game played under the lights in [the] city.” It was estimated that some “4,000 to 5,000 people jammed around the playing field” to see the game. One paper claimed it “was one of the largest crowds [they’ve] seen for any event at the South Common.”

Giamatti has described baseball as the “Roman Epic of homecoming America sings to itself.” That night beneath the lights, beneath the open skies of the Common, the memories of past summer nights with her father must have crowded over Annie as she stood at the plate. I thought too of my grandfather as he sat somewhere in the crowd with a cold bottle of Moxie and Sally at his side, watching his Annie reach for the fences.

In honor of their triumphant season the girls were given a banquet. Mayor Geary addressed the gathering and each player received a white team sweater. It was a great night of celebration for the Saint Patrick’s Girls Softball team. My mother says she misses her teammates. The first she said goodbye to was Ann. A non-smoker, Ann was just in her forties when she died of lung cancer. Most, if not all, are gone now.

“Home,” writes Giamatti, is “the place where reunion, if it ever were to occur, would happen.” Whether in baseball or in life, home is what we often seek. It’s intended to be a place of safety, and where we can reunite with friends and family. Perhaps on some endless summer night, when moonlight stretches across the field in the Common, faint sounds of a long-ago game will again lift into the nighttime sky, and the girls of the Saint Patrick’s Softball team will again gather in celebration at home plate.

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The ’69 Mets: A Time and Season to Remember geoffrey douglas

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s a school-kid in New York City in the early 1950s—the years before the Giants and Dodgers both left town—the purity of your baseball loyalty was measured mostly by the size of your Topps collection. The Yankees’ and Dodgers’ cards were always the most available and easiest to trade for—Mantle and Berra were at their peak then, along with Peewee Reese and Duke Snider in Brooklyn—while the Giants, definitely the city’s caboose team, seemed (with the exception, of course, of Willie Mays) perennially short of stars.

Most of the kids in my class were Yankees fans. I liked the Giants—loved them, really, was passionate about them, and would trade for any Giants card that came on our thirdgrade homeroom market. (I remember that I once traded several Dodger cards for a single Monte Irvin, a transaction that earned me weeks of scorn from the class’s in-the-know traders.)

I can’t say for sure why I felt such loyalty toward this luckless team—maybe because on my only trip to the Polo Grounds to watch them, in 1952 or ’53, they’d beaten the Dodgers (which rarely happened), and a mid-game foul ball from one of their hitters had landed within a seat or two of me. Of such small moments, in the life of an unsure eight-year-old, is devotion built.

But mostly, loving them was a pretty thankless affair. While the Yankees made it to the World Series eight times through the ‘50s, and the Dodgers four times (this was in the day of eight-team leagues), the Giants managed it just once, in 1954—then followed that with three years of losses. Fan interest waned; thousands of seats went unsold. Then in August 1957, a month after my 13th birthday, came the death knell: the Giants were moving to San Francisco, the Polo Grounds would be razed. I’d gone away to school by then, but had never stopped rooting, or traded away a single Giants card.

For a long time after, I didn’t know what to do with my loyalties. The Dodgers had left the city too (transplanted to LA the same year the Giants left), and I couldn’t bear the thought of rooting for the Yankees, whom I’d hated at least since first grade. For a while I pulled for the Chicago Cubs, who’d signed an all-star outfielder named Bobby Thompson I remembered from his Giants days, but they never even managed a .500 season, so there wasn’t much future in that.

Then in 1962, to huge fanfare, came the Mets. The League’s newest expansion club, they seemed to have been created as a kind of hybrid, a consolation prize to New Yorkers for their double-whammy loss of five years before. With team colors that combined the 150

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old Dodgers’ blue with the Giants’ bright orange, a mascot—“Mr. Met”—whose goofy face on an oversize baseball-head made him look like a giant bug on human legs, an inaugural yearbook cover that featured a toddler in baseball cap and diapers; and a 71-year-old manager, Casey Stengel, whose acceptance speech turned on the line, “Most people my age are dead at the present time”—they were an instant sensation all over the League. The fact that they would play at the old Giants’ Polo Grounds, which had been spared the wrecking ball but had been derelict since the end the end of the ’57 season, sealed the deal for New Yorkers. Including this one. I loved them unconditionally from the day they took the field.

Their line-up was a colossal tease. Though relying mostly on a bench of journeymen who’d toiled for years in obscurity (and would remain there), it was headlined by a handful of former all-stars—Gil Hodges, Richie Ashburn, Clem Labine, all now approaching forty— whose career credentials seemed enough to draw the crowds back, at least for a time, and to offer a measure of hope to those of us so in need of it.

Their first game, a dreary, error-filled 11-4 loss to the Cardinals in St. Louis, would prove a mirror of what was to come. They lost the eight games that followed, to open the season 0-9, then seemed for a while to settle down, then lost 17 straight to bring them to 12-36. They finished the season in last place, 60 games back, with 120 losses (and 210 errors)— you have to go back to 1899 to find a team with more losses.

It got no better. Last place again in ’63, ’64, and ’65, never with fewer than 109 losses.

They were awful, atrocious, abysmal, as bad as any team had ever been. But something about them—their gargantuan ineptitude, their record-setting errors, “Marvelous Marv” Throneberry’s comical goofs at first base and on the base paths, the outrageous stuff that came out of Casey Stengel’s mouth—won the fans’ hearts and kept the seats mostly filled. By the end of the ’63 season all of New York had come to love them. The worst professional team in any sport that had ever played for the city (maybe for any city), by the end of ’63 they had earned the title, pretty much officially, that you’d been seeing for months on the T-shirts all over town: “The Lovable Losers.”

Then in ’68, a sliver of progress. They finished that season in ninth place — second to last, with a 73-89 record, their best ever—24 games back. By the standards of the prior six years, it was more than respectable. It was a triumph. And they had a new manager, Gil Hodges, who actually said intelligible things; and a hot young pitcher named Tom Seaver, who’d won 16 games the year before. Going into the ’69 season, it seemed they might be getting close to contending.

I was 24 by then, a hotshot freelance writer in New York, very sure of the ways of baseball and the world. And I was a lover of underdogs, and of the Mets —and convinced of what I saw coming. I was also, on this particular April evening a week or so before the season opener, three or four bourbons past objective thinking.

“They’re gonna take it all this year,” I said, very knowingly I’m sure, to my cousin Stuart, on the adjoining barstool, somewhere around eight or nine o’clock.

He made a funny noise in his throat that sounded like contempt. “They finished ninth last year,” he said. “Ninth. Ninth out of ten.” That was all he said.

I told him I knew where they’d finished—but the pieces were all in place this year. They were going all the way, they were gonna take it all. I’m not sure if I believed it or not, but you say those sorts of things in bars.

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twenty to one. I said I wanted thirty. We settled on twenty-to-one for the pennant, thirty if they won the Series. The bet was ten dollars—three hundred for me if they went all the way. Which by this stage of things I was thinking they probably wouldn’t. But it was only ten dollars.

We shook on it. “You might as well just pay me now,” he said. I thought he was probably right.

You know the story from there, maybe too well. How they opened the season in standard clunker fashion, then reeled off eleven straight to pull close, then cooled again and were 9 1/2 games back of the Cubs in mid-August—by all accounts out of contention— before ripping through the last eight weeks of the season (“like a blindsiding nighttime tornado,” as one old-time scribe recalls it), winning 38 of their final 49 games to close out with 100 wins and leave Chicago in the dust. Then a 3-0 sweep against Atlanta to take the NL pennant, followed by four out of five against Baltimore in the Series to win it all.

Then the ticker-tape parade, the interviews, the books, the screenplays, the “Amazin’s,” the “Miracle Mets”—the whole six months of hoopla before the next season’s back-toearth, third-place finish.

Most of the details of that ’69 season have blurred in my mind all these years later (I just had to check online to confirm whom they’d beaten to take the pennant)—but the memories of the moments stick like glue: Tommie Agee’s four-hit, two-homer late-season game against the Giants (against my Giants!); Seaver’s 10-0 run to close the regular season; the night they struck out 19 times, committed four errors and still somehow beat St. Louis; Nolan Ryan and Jerry Grote rolling on the mound together, pounding each other silly, after the last out of the pennant win against Atlanta; Ron Swoboda’s full-tilt, sprawling catch to save Game 4 of the Series; Tug McGraw’s gritty late-inning relief work; Donn Clendenon’s near-daily heroics. So many more. They play back sometimes spool-like in my mind.

I was on a fishing trip in the Adirondacks the day they closed out the Series against Baltimore in October, though I listened to every out of Curt Gowdy’s radio play-by-play.

Three or four days later I saw Stuart in New York. He was chagrined, but gracious; he paid me $100, all he could afford at the time (he was in business school, working parttime, and barely had enough to make rent.); he promised the rest when he could manage it. Two months went by with more promises. By December I was feeling remorseful. And Christmas was coming—so I wrote him a poem, and arranged for him to find it under the tree. It began: Oh Stu, are you yet a believer In the arm of Mets pitcher Tom Seaver?

Has the bat of Agee yet caused you to see That the Mets are a costly deceiver?

It went on a while longer with several more lines of gentle taunting, then closed in the spirit of the season: But now for your folly you’ve paid; From your conscience at last may it fade.

As of Christmas this year, Stuart, be of good cheer, And know that your debt has been paid.

A week or so after Christmas a large, flat package arrived in the mail for me. It was from Stuart—a framed copy of the front page of the October 17th Daily News, Above a photo of 152

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Game 5 pitcher Jerry Koosman on the mound in the arms of catcher Jerry Grote, it featured the headline, in two-inch tall bold caps: METS ARE NO. 1 I kept that picture, first on my wall, then in successive attics, until it literally fell apart several years ago. Stuart tells me he still has the poem. Some memories, sweet or bitter, are just worth holding on to.

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Suzanne Dion: She Loved the Game prudence brighton

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eLacheur Park was Suzanne Dion’s summer haven—a place to celebrate the Lowell Spinners’ victories, to grieve their losses, and to simply enjoy nearly twenty summers of minor league baseball just ten minutes from her home.

Suzanne was a highly intelligent woman who likely found all the intricacies of baseball and its history a worthy challenge. But she was also thrilled just to sit in the stands watching the antics of Canaligator and his fellow mascots, the offbeat video and cartoon clips played season-after-season on the jumbotron, and especially toddlers racing the Canaligator around the bases between innings.

Hall of Fame shortstop Cal Ripken, Jr., once said, “You could be a kid for as long as you want when you play baseball.” Suzanne would amend that to say, “as long as you’re watching baseball.” Like the accomplished editor she was, she’d also have tweaked Ripken’s grammar while she was at it.

She and her father, the late Norman Dion, were among the very first to hold season tickets to Spinners’ games in 1996, when the team played at Alumni Field off Rogers Street. They followed the team to LeLacheur in 1998 and had seats in Section 107, four rows above the dugout.

When her father felt he could no longer manage the bleachers, she kept both season tickets and shared them with family and friends, most often sharing them with me, a friend and former colleague at The Sun. Her father was a die-hard baseball fan, and he conveyed his passion for the game to his daughter. She learned how to keep a baseball scorecard—which baseball writer Chaz Scoggins calls a lost art—under her father’s tutelage. Sitting in her seat above the first-base dugout with a scorebook on her knee, she drew attention from adults and children alike as she filled in the boxes with Ks. She knew the careers of many legendary and some not so legendary players. She also knew the rules of the game probably better than many umpires. When I got home after a game, I often opened my computer and googled a rule she’d just cited, and found that I still didn’t get it.

By the first game of a Spinners’ season, she had done her own “scouting” of new players and would tell me which ones to watch for potential careers with the Red Sox and other major league teams. Among those she pointed to were Kevin Youkilis, Jonathan Papelbon, Jacoby Ellsbury, Clay Buchholz, Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley, Jr., and Andrew Benintendi.

These players and many others became part of her bobblehead collection. On “bobblehead night” at the park, she would be among the first at the gate to make sure she scored one.

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After the 2012 season, she was offered seats in section 108 in the first row above the dugout. That move changed her involvement with the team because she became friends with a group of fans who serve meals to the young players after every Saturday night home game. She contributed a huge volume of potato salad to those meals under the bleachers.

The young players—many in their late teens—devoured the meals ravenously. Players from visiting teams noted sadly that their supporters didn’t feed them.

Truthfully, it wasn’t just the game that drew her to LeLacheur. The park is a perfect place for people watching and eavesdropping on loud conversations from the rows above.

Sometimes the conversations were silly as people who knew little about the game tried to explain it to other novices. And sometimes they were lessons in being careful what you say in public places—city employees, for example, complaining about their bosses.

Even in the last weeks of her life—she passed away on April 19th–she kept her eyes on the Spinners and worried about the team’s future at the hands of major league baseball owners. She fumed about the stupidity of owners who were blind to the role that minorleague teams and games play in developing fans of the game.

She loved the game, and I think the early lessons from her father informed her conviction that fans are developed when they are quite young. Without teams like the Spinners, the game she loved would be in danger.

As Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella said in Field of Dreams, “If you build it, he will come” (not “they” as it is often quoted). Suzanne’s father built a baseball fan in his daughter, and she wanted to see youngsters in the stands at LeLacheur grow into fans, too. Fans like she was— someone who saw the game with the wonder of a child but with an adult’s appreciation of its rich lore.

2020

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Football in Chelmsford d av i d p e r r y

A

nd so it begins. The first white SUV pulled up on the grass behind the backstop at the Parker Middle School field.

Football is here in Chelmsford.

It is a sunny 83 degrees at 6:35 p.m., and there are more than 100 kids on the field, which slopes lazily from home plate along Crooked Spring up to Graniteville Road, where other trucks and SUVs are pulled off the road and onto the grass. This is football, sport of flatbeds. No parking lot can contain them. If there are rules for others, fine.

Parents, mostly moms, are clustered aside the field in folding chairs, protected by visors. Daughters run in gaggles around the action, surveying it without noticing a bit.

The dads mostly stand in little circles, talking football. Hands on hips, legs open as if they will sprint at any moment. One of them is always twirling a whistle in a circle, like a cop on a beat once did.

Another one inevitably holds a clipboard.

Every one of them wears a cap.

From somewhere, a whistle blows at five-second intervals. Nothing on the field seems to be happening in five-second intervals. This is just the order of things, an ambient annoyance.

The kids, in helmets, run. It is not clear if there is a specific pattern, just around, and they have already devised coping mechanisms.

“Slow down, slow down,” says one, lagging in the sweating pack of what look to be middle-schoolers, far from their coach.

There are packs of them, presumably teams.

Another pack gathers in the corner nearest the beacon of butterfat, Sully’s, kneeling.

“You RUN ON MY FIELD,” barks a coach. “NO WALKING!” They approach—running now—a tall man with a kind face.

“How we doing boys?”

He is the head coach.

Toot!

You always loved baseball. The subtleties. The leather, the wood, the way you could make a curveball break. You love the time it took, the thing everyone else hates. You did some of your best work on a baseball diamond, and some of your worst.

Football was something your dad leaned in and said, “Hey, just give it a try.”

Easy for him. Star quarterback. Went to UC Berkeley to play after a couple years at J.C. No one really knows or said much about it, but you have a photo somewhere of him, one of those official team pictures, of him in a “Cal” uniform, hair perfect.

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And now your parents were sort of worried you didn’t have enough to do. Everyone your age played Red Raiders. You didn’t. You did Boy Scouts. And baseball. Man, you played baseball, relished it.

There were touch football games at a field near your house with Fitz and Krauss and Bert. But that was about it. You yearned for no more.

Finally, when freshman football rolled around, you figured, what the heck. You had grown a bit, though nothing near others. They all knew the game and you found a way to avoid being cut the first time by lurking in a pack. You didn’t play. You survived.

You could not learn the plays. You did not know why. But they didn’t make sense to you.

It was a code and it was foreign and you didn’t much care.

We are learning some rough lessons from football now, catching up to injuries that revealed themselves in horrible ways. Brains concussed into mush.

And in 1970 or so, when you were sleazing through tryouts, the coaches had a way of seeing who you were. Boy versus boy.

Mano a mano.

You stood 10 yards apart, your teammates’ cheers revving you up like a supercharged bulldozer. When the coach blew the whistle, you ran straight at your opponent, head down.

You have no doubt seen the nature film of the rams butting heads.

It was that.

And so the coach, wanting to eliminate me for good, knowing full well I was an impostor, set me up against a boy who was built like an anvil.

No neck.

Shaving since age four.

“Perry” screamed the coach. “Your turn!”

You remember the tweet of the whistle.

The sound of helmet on helmet, a rich CLACK. There were stars and a rush of air.

And you were okay. The coach praised you for doing as well as you did, though he could not see the fireworks finale going off in your skull.

“Not bad, Mr. Perry, not bad,” said the coach.

You wanted to be cut.

The next day you were.

Relief. You sucked at football. Your discussion with the sport never really got to the stage of where you might play. Your dad seemed fine with it.

Your little brother did not suck. He did amazing things as a lineman. You went to watch him whenever you could, scrambling over offensive linemen, stretched out like a spider to block a pass. But you could only stay so long. It was the clack of the helmets.

You never liked it. You still sit in rooms of men and pretend to like it. But they know.

Just like the coach knew you were a fraud. They know. You are the vegetarian at their barbecue. They can sniff you out.

Tweet!

There is a kid like you in there somewhere tonight at the Parker School. In that pack, there is a kid hiding.

Kid, there is always baseball.

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SECTION VIII

TRASN

A Introduced in 2020 as a weekly feature on RichardHowe.com, Trasna explores the well-traveled routes between Lowell and Ireland, introducing Irish writers to an American readership. Trasna, which means “across,” promotes work by new, emerging, and established Irish writers.

In addition to the concerns of today’s writers, the focus is on Irish traditions and customs that have been lost to time or to an ocean crossing.

The editors are Christine O’Connor, Margaret O’Brien, and Jeannie Judge.

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Pasteur and Uncle Paddy marg ar e t o’b r ie n

Today much of the world is still in the grip of a pandemic because of COVID-19, the deadly coronavirus. Although it has claimed many lives and disrupted economic and social life around the globe, it is not the deadliest virus. That distinction goes to another, the bullet-shaped rabies virus, which kills nearly one hundred percent of its hosts, both human and animal. Unlike the coronavirus, which spreads by droplet, the rabies virus needs a host animal and it must cross from animal to human through a bite.

I

t was Ireland in the summer of 1898. After police shot dead the dog that attacked and bit two-year-old Paddy Cullinane, an order came from the local Inspector that the dog’s head must be sent to the Veterinary College in Dublin to be tested for rabies.

In the previous year, 1897, measures had been put in place to reduce the incidence of rabies in Ireland. The Disease of Animals Act was updated and all dogs in public places were required to be muzzled. More stringent measures were also enforced and stray and unmuzzled dogs were seized and destroyed.

Dogs were, of course, an essential part of working farms, smallholdings and Irish rural life in general. Paddy’s family, the Cullinanes, along with their neighbours in rural Ireland, could not have been unaware of the threat of rabies and its impact.

The marauding dog attacked the little boy as he played outside his house on that warm August day. The dog caught Paddy’s right hand in its jaws and bit into his forefinger as the boy, shocked and frightened, struggled to escape. Blood appeared on the terrified little boy’s hand as the dog’s teeth punctured his skin. Alerted by her son’s screams, Mary his mother, rushed from her kitchen and with frantic efforts managed to fight off the dog and rescue her son, despite being seven months pregnant. In the struggle she also suffered scratches to her own hand. Mary was my great-grandmother.

The Cullinane family lived near the tiny village of Mothel in County Waterford. Today Mothel consists of the remains of a sixth-century abbey, a nearby Holy Well and is just a meeting of some minor country roads with a scattering of houses and a single pub. Then and now this is farming country, a mixture of dairy and tillage, the green fertile fields overlooked by the heathery purple of the Comeragh Mountains.

Despite having three children by the summer of 1898, and later several more, Mary Cullinane worked occasionally in the stillroom or pantry at the local big house, Curraghmore, owned by Lord and Lady Waterford. The Curraghmore estate lies to the south of Mothel near the village of Portlaw. Mary’s husband John worked as a labourer on a local farm, Prendergast’s.​Mary and John Cullinane were my paternal great-grandparents, Paddy my granduncle.

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Two days after the bite Mary brought Paddy to nearby Rathgormack to be treated by Dr. Dwan who used the only first-aid available, cauterization of the wounds with caustic soda.

The doctor made a note of a puncture wound on the forefinger of the boy’s right hand and some scratches on the back of the left hand. Having tended to Mary and her son, Dr. Dwan reported the case to the Board of the Poor Law Guardians in nearby Carrick-on-Suir, who at that time had a public health responsibility. Rabies typically has an incubation period of from one to three months, and that can also vary from less than a week to more than a year.

But until they had the test results on the dog from Dublin, definitively indicating rabies or not, the Board’s hands were tied.

The rabies virus is most commonly spread through the saliva of an infected animal by means of a bite and, unlike any other virus, it bypasses the immuno-protective defense system of the human bloodstream, moving inexorably through the central nervous system, via the spinal cord to the brain. It is lethal. In late nineteenth-century Ireland, there was no effective treatment for this killer disease. Progressive, fatal inflammation of the brain and spinal cord would develop and with it the most feared symptom, ‘hydrophobia’ and the worst possible death.

However, in 1885 the French scientist Louis Pasteur had developed a vaccine to treat rabies, laying the groundwork for all modern vaccines and beginning a new era in medicine.

Pasteur had successfully tested the rabies vaccine on nine-year old Joseph Meister who, similar to Paddy, had been viciously attacked by a grocer’s dog in his village in Alsace. By 1888 the success of this vaccine led to the establishment of the Institut Pasteur in Paris, as a centre for rabies treatment and for research on other diseases. From as early as 1886 word had spread about the success of this vaccine and people travelled from as far away as the US, Algeria, Russia, India and from all across Europe to Pasteur in Paris for treatment.

Most had been bitten by rabid dogs or cats, but some by rabid wolves.

Back in Co. Waterford the test results from Dublin eventually arrived and were definitive.

Yes, the dog was rabid on the day it attacked and bit two-year old Paddy Cullinane. On the instructions of the Board the sanitary officer for the district, the appropriately named Mr. Power, was directed to go to Mrs. Cullinane’s home with the news of the results and inform her of the sole option available to save her son. She would have to bring Paddy to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. This was the only place in the world where such cases were treated successfully. Mary received Mr. Power, heard his news but declined to go to Paris.

All is silent in the records regarding Mary and her answering “No” to Mr. Power. We can imagine that she looked at him with dismay and disbelief, no doubt mirroring his reaction when he heard her response. Here she was, a young mother with three small children and very close to the end of her fourth pregnancy and there was this authority figure on her doorstep telling her she must travel to Paris? Mary’s world up to then was circumscribed by the distance she could walk. She had never even owned a bicycle in her entire life, but always walked everywhere—to Curraghmore for work, to Rathgormack or Carrickon-Suir for provisions. As a twenty-five-year-old mother in 1898, I would guess she knew little or nothing about vaccination. Going to Paris might have been beyond her wildest imagining, not to mention the practicalities of the trip and the domestic arrangements to be put in place for her other children.

But then something changed for Mary over the course of the following two weeks and 162

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we can only speculate on what that was. Interestingly it doesn’t seem to have been any deterioration in Paddy’s health.

Two weeks later the Board of Guardians of the Poor Law Union in Carrick-on-Suir were again discussing the Cullinane case but this time there was a request before them for help.

Mary had changed her mind and was apparently now very anxious to get her son to Paris for treatment. In response to her request for assistance the Board had summoned Paddy and his mother to appear before them. The boy was brought before the meeting by his grandmother, Mary’s mother, to the surprise of those present. Colonel Stuart asked, “Why is the mother not here to support the application?” to which Mr. Power replied, “I believe she is working at the harvest.” Bear in mind that young Mary was now heavily pregnant. The boy, Paddy, was described by the report of the meeting as a “fine healthy child”.

The discussion by the all-male committee weighed up some of the issues relating to sending the boy and his mother to Paris. There was a concern that Mary was within six weeks of giving birth again and this was a journey that would take her and her small child through Ireland, England and then to France by rail and ship, followed by an extended stay in Paris. But the stark reality was that there was no place other than the Pasteur Institute where a person suspected of contracting rabies might be successfully treated. Mr. Britton, a Justice of the Peace and member of the Board, probably summed up the feelings of those in the room when he said, “Should anything serious turn out to the child, as a result of the bites he received, we would be open to very great censure.” At that meeting on Saturday 27th August the decision was made that Mary and her little boy would begin their journey to Paris on the Monday. A cheque for £20 was written to buy Thomas Cook tickets and their journey began.

Paddy was treated for two weeks in September 1898 at the world famous Institut Pasteur in Paris. Mother and son then made the return journey to Ireland where a few weeks later Mary gave birth to her daughter, Bridget, and seems never to have referred again to her heroic journey. Although Mary was my great-grandmother my discovery of this event was almost happenstance, there are no family sources to corroborate it. But in the archives of the Pasteur Museum in Paris there is the record in a ledger of Paddy’s treatment.

In 1898, the year Paddy was bitten, there were four human deaths in Ireland from the disease – the last recorded human fatalities in this country due to rabies. By 1902 rabies was considered eradicated in Ireland and the country has remained rabies-free ever since. ​However, we can only guess if we will ever be free of the Coronavirus. It may not be the deadliest virus but it is certainly one of the most virulent. As I write scientists are researching an effective vaccine but until it is developed, tested and widely available life as we knew it is utterly changed. We can be certain of this, when the vaccine is developed we will not have to travel half-way across the world to access it.

As regards my Granduncle Paddy and his mother Mary? Both mother and son lived healthily into their 80s and neither travelled out of Ireland again.

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The Belated Discovery of a Role Model nes sa o’mah o ny

T

he lack of women role models in Irish literature has often been commented upon.

When I studied literature in University College Dublin in the early 1980s, you would have been hard pressed to find examples of women writers on the curriculum. I do remember we studied Maria Edgeworth and Emily Dickinson, but when we entered the twentieth century, the reading lists were determinedly masculine, set with great confidence and conviction by a predominantly male faculty. Indeed, the nearest we got to the feminine in some classes was when a lecturer described Leopold Bloom as a ‘womanly’ man. If there was a living, breathing source of women writers whose texts we might study, they weren’t sharing that information in the tile-floored corridors of Belfield. The fact that the three Es—Eilis Dillon, Eiléan Ní Chuileanáin and Eavan Boland—were already well published Irish women writers—was neither here nor there.

But I didn’t see myself as a writer then, so my concerns about lack of exemplars were retrospective. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to question the bias that was to become so evident in later years. Great writers were male and dead, and that was that.

And so it continued until I made my first tentative steps into the world of literature in the mid-nineties, and began to discover that not only were there living, breathing women writers out there, they were in plentiful supply in Ireland. Their words could be found in pamphlets, collections, the occasional anthology. And even if some of those anthologies had to be published to redress the balance of the absence of women in other anthologies, they were still providing opportunities for me, and others like me, to get myself heard.

And yet when I first read Eavan Boland (1944–2020), her memoir Object Lessons, not a collection of poetry—I could still be shocked that a woman might write so seriously about her own poetics, be so concerned with her own position as a poet and a woman in Ireland.

That seemed to me to be man’s work—a woman positioning herself in such a way seemed unseemly to me. The conditioning of a third level education had yet to wear off.

But as ever, with poetry, the cure for such lack of awareness is to read, and to listen. I remember attending a reading of Eavan’s in Dublin in the late 1990s—I think it must have been around the publication of her collection The Lost Land. The venue was the Royal Irish Academy on Dawson Street, I seem to remember, and Eavan’s reading was typically lucid, precise and provoking. When the reading had ended, the crowd gathered for the book signing, and yet I felt there was a distance between us and the poet who had engrossed them over the previous forty minutes. Shyness, perhaps, or diffidence, on both sides. We hadn’t yet learned how to read this poet, this woman whose purpose had a seriousness we 164

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didn’t know how to navigate, used as we were to the hail-fellow, well met smiling public men of poetry.

Perhaps I’m mis-remembering. The next reading of hers I do recall was a much smaller affair in the back-garden of a bookshop in the leafy Dublin suburb of Rathgar. Eavan was reading the poem, “The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me,” whilst a piece of artwork a young artist had made responding to the poem hung on a stand beside her. There was no lighting outside, so as the late Irish summer gave way to dusk, Eavan needed candlelight to complete her performance. She held the book in one hand, the candle-holder in the other, and her voice, that uniquely precise tone, gave the event an ethereal atmosphere. It felt intimate, and those listeners felt very lucky to be there.

But still I didn’t know her, and wouldn’t have done had my friend and colleague Siobhán Campbell not approached me with the idea for a scholarly work she’d long been planning—a book of essays responding to Eavan in the context of the poet’s seventieth birthday. Incredibly, such a work had not yet been produced, in Ireland or elsewhere.

Siobhán wanted to fill the vacuum, and we had little difficulty persuading the poets, scholars and academics we approached to write a response. The project gave me a reason to read everything Eavan had written, and to finally understand the consistency of her vision.

To my deep surprise, I shared some of her obsessions. Although my political awareness was still blunted, as a student of history I could respond to her preoccupations with what history can teach us, and more importantly, how the omissions from the historical record needed to be put right.

We didn’t consult with Eavan during the production of Eavan Boland: Inside History, but it was important to us that she be happy with the concept, and her demeanour on the night it was launched, two years after her seventieth birthday, at a crammed Poetry Ireland, indicated that she was. The reserved, serious person I’d first seen nearly two decades earlier had been replaced by a smiling, approachable woman who had time for everyone there to celebrate a lifetime’s achievement. And she took nothing for granted. As the evening drifted into night, and she was still surrounded by fans and well-wishers, I felt that my job had been done and I was ready to leave. As I was going out the door, I heard her voice behind me, calling me back. She’d wanted to tell me how grateful she was to Siobhán and me for the work we’d done. I stuttered back how grateful we were for the work she’d done, for us, and for women writers everywhere.

Our paths crossed a few times after that—she’d taken on the role of editor of Poetry Ireland review, and attended many of the launches of the journal during that time. It felt as if she had embraced the Irish poetry scene as warmly as it was embracing her, after decades of shyness and distance. Under her editorship, the journal became a more inclusive and diverse space—each issue introduced new names and shook our assumptions of what Irish poetry was, or should be.

Then in the summer of 2017, I was asked to undertake a public interview with Eavan in London. The prestigious Irish Literary Society was hosting the London launch of Eavan Boland: Inside History, and Eavan had graciously agreed to be interviewed at the event. I was to be the interviewer.

That might have been reason enough for the nerves to flutter as I walked in the steps of the Bloomsbury. In fact I was quite sanguine at the prospect of conducting a public interview. I’d done my research, prepared my questions, and was fairly confident that I The Lowell Review

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would acquit myself well.

No, what was bothering me now was the suggestion I’d made some weeks earlier that I and Eavan should have a cup of tea to chat before the event, an invitation she’d graciously accepted. And whilst I’d met her several times before at poetry events, I’d never actually spent any time alone in her company. The social responsibility was terrifying.

I’d googled suitable places close to the Bloomsbury Hotel, where the interview was to take place, and had found one that seemed eminently appropriate. Tea and Tattle was a tea-room over an antiquarian bookshop and was resplendent with mahogany tables groaning under tiered bone china cake-stands and an eclectic mix of Crown Derby teacups and saucers.

I arrived first, Eavan shortly afterwards, and there followed a simply delightful sixty minutes or so of a little tittle, quite a lot of tattle, and not much solemnity at all. The incisiveness so many have commented upon was there, when the talk briefly touched on infamous anthologies of the past, but the overall tenor was warm and witty, light and companionable.

There was, I came to realise, a public and a private Eavan. The public persona was impressive if austere, the formidable intellect breath-taking in its allusiveness; the private person could be giggly and mischievous. She was a very human and humane person, of great kindness and consideration.

I would go on to interview the public persona that evening in Bloomsbury, but what I’ll remember most are those sixty minutes over tea and buns when we set the world to rights.

I learned about her sudden death, on the 27th April of this year, like many did, through social media. Around teatime of that day, my twitter feeds began to fill up with news of her passing; tweets were sent and resent, comment was laid over comment as a community, not just poets and writers but readers and thinkers and anyone who had ever been touched

by Eavan Boland’s words, began to express what she’d meant to them.

My first feeling was shock, a genuine sense of bereavement for a woman I barely knew.

Over the intervening months the shock has been replaced by a sense of being cheated, not just out of a friendship, but out of all the wonderful poems I knew she was yet to write.

The Poet’s Voice for Eavan Boland At the moment her voice became archive, I was clicking an email link and your tones filled the attic space, sultry, thyroid-low, rewarming, reminding us of the limitless in this digitised cell we call home.

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Large Bottles and Sweet Butter Pastry j u li e wa r d

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t is no surprise to me that my two earliest childhood memories relate to food and drink.

It was the late Sixties, and growing up over a busy family pub and grocery in the southeastern Irish city of Waterford meant all hands on deck. My father, like many other publicans at that time, was still bottling the iconic large bottle of Guinness on his own premises and I, the youngest of five children, was of course keen to help.

He wore a full-length brown oilskin apron over a grey wool suit, crisp white shirt and muted tie. His shirt sleeves were carefully folded back and held in place by elasticized metal bands. On occasion, he would allow me, aged no more than three, to help.

With the flat serrated bottle cap, picked from a box of thousands, clenched firmly in the palm of my small hand, he would carefully instruct me to place it on the cap receiver plate.

“Stand back now,” he would say with great command as he firmly lowered the large metal arm down to connect the recently filled stout bottle with the cap, the serrated edges now bent tightly hugging the bottle. Removing it carefully from its secure nest, he would then guide my hand to place the bottle in the crate. This act was repeated until the crate was full. Later, when I started school, I didn’t need to learn how many was in a dozen; I already knew.

After two crates or so, he would tell me to run along. He had possibly eighty dozen to bottle that day, one of three bottling days each week. I didn’t mind, I was happy; I had seen the magic performed again.

As the decade of the Seventies rolled in, it was clear that the practice of local bottling would come to an end. Guinness’s were making it clear: they wanted bottling centralised, mechanised, and standardised. The weekly stout barrel deliveries, horse drawn up Summer Hill’s steep incline from Plunket Railway Station, would soon be a thing of the past. Not however without significant resistance from many provincial publicans.

Labour intensive and a huge consumer of time, the lengthy bottling process was a source of tremendous pride for the publicans who gloried in all its elements. Although they knew it inevitably would go, none were going to allow the label displaying the family name on the bottle disappear without a good fight, and my dad was no exception.

Of course his resistance did not make him popular with the man from Guinness’s, but the enormous volume he sold meant he held the cards for a little longer than they would have liked.

We like our large bottle in Waterford to this day; but in those days, a large bottle off the shelf was an institution, the name on the bottle they chose a mark of honour, a measure of quality in the house and indeed the skill of the publican and his men.

When it did end some short years later, my father wasn’t happy but he accepted it. He knew

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when a battle was over, and this one was over. The large bottles no longer bore the name over the door, Michael Norris, but he continued to take pride in receiving them, storing them in rotation, each one carefully wiped with a damp cloth before it was placed on the shelf each morning. As a responsible ten-year old, I was tasked with this important job each Saturday morning and received ten pence for my work, an absolute fortune.

The change was a subject he returned to over the decades that followed, and even in his last years he still talked about some of the anger he felt at the time. He was never a fan of Guinness’s afterwards and went out of his way to support the smaller breweries, something he may have passed on to his children.

As time passed, draught Guinness became more popular, and the younger generation viewed the large bottle as the drink of their fathers. The weekly cleaning of the beer lines, done unfailingly each Monday morning, was no chore to Dad. In an elaborate network of tubes that travelled from the keg to the pouring tap, a cleaning solution circulated like an intravenous medical drip flushing all in its path. Any stout residue that thought it had found a comfy home here was in for a quick shift. It was often said that Norris’s poured one of the best pints of Guinness in Waterford. My Dad could only take their word for it; the man never took a drink in his life!

My dad’s pub had its counterpart in a treasured bakery. “Suzie’s,” as it was known locally, was a cake shop on one of the main streets in Waterford. Owned and run by confectioner Suzie Phelan, a formidable woman whose loosely bunned hair in my memory was made only of flour, had trained many a girl to bake and, though she was stern, the girls all revered her.

Trips to Suzie’s were special occasions. Always long anticipated and prized when they happened, the visits were redolent with the rich, warm smell of pastry, cream and sugar, a buffer to any grey winter day outside. Stretching high onto my four-year-old tippy toes to gaze in awe through the polished cake display glass, the worries of my small world weighed heavy on my shoulders as I tried to decide which cake I would choose when my mother finally finished relaying news of her sister Breda, a novice nun in New Zealand, who had worked for Suzie before she left.

There was every type of cake to choose from: enormous cream sponges, filigree iced custard vanilla slices, small iced fancies, but the ones that fascinated me most were the seasonal ones.

Depending on the time of year and what was in season, we could find fresh berry tarts in summer, snow covered, tinsel trimmed cakes and mince pies at Christmas, Simmel cake at Easter with uniform toasted almond icing, the twelve almond paste balls carefully gracing the outer edge. On seeing me so entranced, my mother would once again explain the religious symbolism of the Simmel cake, the twelve balls representing the twelve apostles. She would voice this lesson slightly louder than needed, to announce her ecclesiastical prowess to all. She was good that way.

Cakes chosen, we would be ushered up a steep set of narrow wooden stairs to the sitting area. The tea and the cakes were presented on delicate china and placed on the light table, which, in company with the unsteady chairs, I feared would be the end of my cake someday.

The girl serving us seemed a beauty transformed when away from the business side of the shop and the scrutiny of Suzie’s watchful gaze. She had worked and was friends with Mum’s sister Breda, and news of Breda in New Zealand brought such a change in her manner it was almost impossible to concentrate on the much prized and as yet untouched cake.

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I could see the delight in this woman’s whole being as she heard tales of life on a continent too far away from her own to imagine.

Even religious life seemed brighter than life in Waterford she would joke, adding each time that of course it would with “Breda’s fun and sunshine ways.” We would leave with messages of love, news, and regard to be included in the next letter to Auckland. Eating at Suzie’s was not just about cake and, as young as I was, I knew that.

Food and drink has been an integral part of my life ever since, and I’ve worked in the field in many guises. In recent years I started working with wine, a subject I once had only modest knowledge of but one which offers much for a person who wishes to read, learn, and drink of course, but most of all to listen. The beauty of the online world means you can now be in a vineyard, a bodega cellar, a Solara, and hear the voices and practices of those who have gone before the present generation and know that those same practices and voices will be valued by those yet to come.

The sound of wine bottles reaching the shelf is a soothing one; glass on wood is likely among the first sounds I heard, maybe even before I joined this world. I know I am lucky to have this connection with the past and I value it.

Like the seasonal gooseberries that lay encased in sweet butter pastry in Suzie Phelan’s or the pride that was felt by my father in the quality of the stout that rested under his bottle label, we must stay connected to where our food comes from; so that those who produce it can do so with care, cause no harm, and receive a fair price for their work.

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Towards a Wild Ecology of Being c l a r e m u lva n y

Located primarily in the northwest of County Clare, the Burren is one of the world’s unique landscapes. The name means “great rock” in Irish (Boireann), and the place is dominated by thick successions of sedimentary rocks, often compared to a lunar landscape.

E

ach step is a careful one, and a miraculous one. At foot level, wild orchids, the Spring gentians in pink and lighter pink, like dreams rising from a dreaming land, are dotted across the Burren landscape in effervescent rarity. From deep crevasses cut through the limestone, ferns and alpine avens are scattered between the slabs of rock, which at first and distance glance appear barren, but upon closer inspection yield a tapestry of yet more wild and soft bloom.

“Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths/ Enwrought with golden and silver light . . . ” A W. B. Yeats poem comes to my lips. “ . . . Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.”

The cuckoos’ calls reverberate from the mountain face, a pied wagtail bounces by; then a pair of swallows dip and dive, cavorting above the limestone karran. This is a word I have just come to know, a word to name an ancient thing: the network of tunnels and grooves, markings and erosions on the limestone. Karran. The rock itself was laid down some three hundred-and-forty million years ago. Here I am being astonished by wind-song, and rocks older than I can think. “We are walking in a dreamscape,” I say to myself, and I feel the dream stir. *** The ecology of the Burren is both ancient and fragile. Alongside the spring fauna, six thousand-year-old dolmens reside; mere babies on the timeline of their context. Standing “erratics”—glacially deposited stones—are rising from the rock, in prayer or supplication.

I do not know. Their presence tells of an older ecology from a time when the ice retreated and left them stranded. The rock itself is comprised of the compressed skeletal bodies of the marine life, from a time when the sea held this space. The waves of time have passed, leaving a fossilized quilt of memory. The land reads like a sacred text. “Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.” *** In ancient places we are all young bodies. May our footsteps be light.

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*** A friend has been visiting from the U.S. We have been on walkabout. Across meadows, under electric fences, through hazel woods and dense bracken, mud on our faces, mud under nails. An orchid, small and powerful, shares its glory with us. It beckons my tears. A few fall onto the rock, looking like rain or offerings. Among the hills there is nothing but astonishment.

We avoid a bull in another field and a herd in the next. We are trekking across fields in search of a holy well. I have an image of anointment and absolution. The well is to be the place from which newness can rise in me, or at least this is what I hope for. Another orchid, devastatingly beautiful, is tipping at my toes. I step aside, a whisper in my feet, to take another route. Each step here is a matter of life or death, and each step counts.

“More stones,” I joke with my friend. She laughs. I seem to have this thing with stones.

Earlier in her visit we had kneeled at stone circles, and kissed the hag’s stone in Beara, West Cork—a mythical stone rendered magical by virtue of the story attached to it, the one about the petrified spirit of the Calliach, the wise woman of the Celtic lands, who invites us to leave offerings there too. I placed a strand of my hair under her weight, then read her poems under a great expanse of transgressive sky. Over the weeks we’d walked out to more standing stones, and touched burial ones. But now, in the Burren, Co. Clare, we have the story of this holy well to find, and my bones are determined to take the next step.

More cuckoo song. The swoops and forks of swallow wing. The summer migrants are back and giving voice to the wilds, calling us to keep going. We follow. The light is hitting the grey stony hills, sending back beams of amplified glistening.

“A hare,” she says. It was gone before I saw it.

“A faerie,” I say, and you’d almost believe it.

The hawthorns—the faerie trees—are putting on a show for us. It’s all cabaret and plumage in their branches; white pops bathe the landscape in May bloom. In Celtic mythology, the hawthorn were considered sacred homes of the underworld folk and portals to the otherworld. A circular stand of them could indicate a consecrated spot. A lone one would not be cut. I scan the horizon looking for a circle of blossom. There are hawthorns everywhere. The land is text and the lore is still luring. I tread softly. Another bull. Our route needs a detour. But there was no set path in the first place, so our route was always pliant and free. Beyond another stand of trees we spot a glimpse of the monastery and follow its gable as if it’s a prayer flag. *** In ancient places, there is honour in the remembrance of ancestry. May the rocks speak well of our walking. *** In the corner of the field, a stile. I clamber through and there, after the nettles, most unassumingly, the ruins of the tenth-century monastic site holding themselves in a silent, contemplative reverie. Their presence holds a secret, of this I am sure. My bones exhale.

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the rustle of blossom and branch. So I sit, and sit some more. Something close to the fragmentation in my being—worry, insignificance, smallness—shifts. A peace which speaks to the perfection of this moment, this landscape, enters. A longing for the well unlocks itself.

We search. Is it here? Or there? I feel a bit hyper or high. More hawthorn and stones.

Could this be it? We search. More pink gentians. Some bluebells. More sky chatter. We search, laughing for want of a well.

Another stone presents itself for sitting near the ruin. I fall into the embrace of it, then read a poem about this place, the one David Whyte, the poet, had caught and placed in his books for safekeeping:

“ Be taught now, among the trees and rocks, how the discarded is woven into shelter, learn the way things hidden and unspoken slowly proclaim their voice in the world.

Find that far inward symmetry to all outward appearances, apprentice yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back all you sent away, be a new annunciation, make yourself a door through which to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you” We read again. We let some secrets in. Then read again. I can feel the poem enter into the ether of this place, and the place enter into the ether of us. There is nothing but poem now, and my need to find the well is released. The swallow cavort. The sky still dances. I am forever braided into the poetry and place. And the stones rest still.

“Another time,” I say to my friend, knowing we will enter this time out of time through another portal; knowing the door has been opened to welcome ourselves back to ourselves.

We have crossed the threshold. The door does not shut.

It is time to return to clock time and to the world which some call real. So we let the shape of the fields and the hint of a bull plot our course back out. The well was just a lure.

It was the walk that mattered in the end. It always is.

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Rupture j e an o’b r ie n

At first we shy away from the fallen tree its huge span of root mass exposed, then gather courage and move closer, drawn as if by a magnetic field despite ourselves curious to view its inner workings, its maze of connections.

Usually we only see trees rise skywards from the earth, growing always towards sunlight and forget how, at the same time they throw out searching roots, that burrow deep and deeper still.

Some say the Thuata Dé Dannan use these erupted places, these pockets of splintered shadows as portals from the underworld.

We learn now in these strange days that anything is possible. The tribe of the goddess and gods seem to rise like plasma from the ruptured earth.

Their other worldly voices sound like the soughing of branches, or rustle of leaves. We cannot see them though they cloak the very air about us offering a sheltering place, a crucible where we can catch our collective ragged breath.

It is said that the Thuata Dé Danna promised to return from the underworld to help Ireland in a time of great need. Some say that they represent an empowering aspect or our psyche.

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The Sheep Shearers joe whelan

The morning sun had me removing my own fleece, 22 degrees and it wasn’t yet 11 o clock.

The flock were in and we waited on the men from the Nire

“Guiry’s men rise late but they’d work all night,” the uncle said.

“They’ll be there be dinner time” In Harney’s Cross the table was set for one o clock.

So, we readied sheds in case of rain Corralled pens and darned wool bags We tied gates with baling twine.

And ran cables for the shears.

I opened two new tins of raddle,* Blood red for the pole, Ink blue for the hip Stripes on an American flag.

They arrived at the crack of noon Just as the spuds were ready.

I couldn’t tell if it was their breakfast or dinner, But when they finished there was little left for dogs.

“We better make a start,” says Guiry And four machines collectively whirred.

Dogs worried sheep And flies annoyed men, But the buzzing of the razors Drowned out all other pests

I always struggled with the first ewe.

She’d waltz me across the pen In some obscure tango.

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And sit her up like a teddy bear.

Guiry, effortlessly pulled her to him, Making light of my work

The razor lifted the grey coat of winter, A plough pushing away dirty snow Leaving ivory trails on spent ski slopes.

Flecks of crimson betrayed his unsteady hand, A consequence of a break for “a couple of large bottles.”

He called for Dettol. As flies shrouded the wound.

I felt the relief of the sheep as her shorn fleece was tossed in the pile.

I raddled her pole and hip Our colours, like a biker’s badges of honour, Marking our territory. “Whelan’s ewes outa Harney’s cross,” I said, Guiry jolted me out of my trance as he called for another sheep.

I left one daydream and tangoed with another across the pen.

*raddle is a coloured marking for sheep

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Droichead na nDeoir b i l ly f e n t o n

Droichead na nDeoir (Bridge of Tears) is in the Donegal mountains. In the nineteenth century, emigrants to the U.S. said goodbye to their families at this bridge. Many of them would never see each other again.

A stream bites through Muckish gap.

At the bridge, you can’t see back, or forward. Only the slopes. Heather.

Sky. Like it has always been.

We crossed it each morning on our way to work. Each evening when we returned. Maybe a thousand times or more.

We planned a home. Argued.

Sometimes just sat in silence.

Every evening we came back, to the rest of our lives together.

I cross the Bridge of Tears, lean over the wall, stare at the pictures tossed back by the water. Your hospital bed.

You wake. You touch my face.

I touch yours. Fall back into sleep. Never guessed it was our final goodbye.

Above me at the mountain gap, the road vanishes. Hands in clay.

New plants growing. Dirty wellies.

Blue boat skimming the waves.

Two naked bodies under the sky on a bed of mountain heather.

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Contributors

Kathleen Aponick has published two poetry collections: Bright Realm and The Descendant's Notebook. She lives in Andover, Mass., and has worked as a teacher and an editor. Her poems have appeared in Potomac Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, and Still Point Arts Quarterly.

Susan April was born not far from Tyler Park in Lowell. She attended Keith Hall and is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and the University of Chicago. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and is forthcoming in two anthologies. She is an Environmental Consultant and writes from Maryland.

Joe Blair is the author of the memoir By the Iowa Sea. He lives in Coralville, Iowa.

Prudence Brighton may not be a Lowell native, but she has lived there for fifty years. She came to the city as a general assignment reporter for The Sun and stayed when she went to work for Wang Laboratories and other high-tech companies. A freelance writer, she works mostly for The Sun. Michael Casey is from Lowell and attended public schools there. He received a B.S. in physics in 1968 from UMass Lowell, where poet William Aiken taught modern poetry. The journal of his military experience became the book Obscenities, published in 1972 by the Yale University Press. His book Millrat, on blue collar work in a textilemill dye house, will be reprinted by Loom Press in 2021. Casey taught for many years at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, Mass.

Born in Lowell, George Chigas’ paternal grandparents came to the city from Greece in the early 1900s and settled in the Acre neighborhood. His maternal grandparents lived two streets away. Although his parents grew up close together and graduated from Lowell High School, they didn’t know each other until they met and married as college students in Boston. Chigas teaches at UMass Lowell and lives downtown.

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, 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.

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Geoffrey Douglas is an author and journalist and former adjunct professor of writing at UMass Lowell. His books include The Grifter, The Poet, and The Runaway Train, a collection of his stories in Yankee Magazine; The Game of Their Lives, about the 1950 FIFA World Cup soccer match between the United States and England, which resulted in a movie of the same name; and The Classmates: Privilege, Chaos and the End of an Era. His article “The Double Life of Laura Shaw” appeared in Best American Sports Writing 2001.

Fred Faust came to Lowell as a radio news reporter and went on to be an assistant to U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas of Lowell and in 1978 the first executive director of the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, U.S. Dept. of the Interior. He helped develop the national park in Lowell. In the private sector, he founded The Edge Group, a real estate consulting firm.

Billy Fenton, from outside Waterford City in Ireland, writes poetry and short stories.

His work has appeared in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Crannóg, Honest Ulsterman, Galway Review and others. He was shortlisted for a Hennessy Award in 2018, and for a Write by the Sea Poetry Award in 2019. He was chosen as a mentee for the Words Ireland National Mentoring Programme in 2019.

Emily Ferrara is the author of the poetry collection The Alchemy of Grief, which won the Bordighera Poetry Prize and was published in a bilingual edition. At UMass Medical School she teaches students creative writing as a form of reflective practice. She is the editor and publisher of Pendemic, an online journal. She lives in Lowell.

Charles Gargiulo grew up in Lowell public housing, joined the Army, went to UMass Lowell on the GI Bill, and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in sociology. His memoir about the loss of a longtime ethnic neighborhood in Lowell, “Farewell, Little Canada,” will be published by Loom Press in 2022. His work has appeared in Merrimack Valley Magazine, Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell, and Résonance, a journal about Franco-American culture at UMaine, Orono.

Artist Linda Hoffman lives and works at Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio, a place for agriculture, art, and community in Harvard, Mass., where she is the fruit grower and curator of an annual outdoor sculpture exhibition. A Zen Buddhist, she practices at Zen Mountain Monastery in Mt. Tremper, N.Y. Her memoir, The Artist and the Orchard, is forthcoming from Loom Press in 2021.

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 co-edited with Paul Marion. He lives in Lowell, where he is the Register of Deeds of Northern Middlesex County, an elected position.

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Paul Hudon is the author of The Valley & Its Peoples: An Illustrated History of the Lower Merrimack Valley and a poetry collection, All in Good Time. A former professor of history and museum curator, he earned a Ph.D. at Georgetown University. He lives near Pawtucket Falls in the city, not far from where he grew up.

William Reed Huntington was born in Lowell in 1838 and entered the Episcopal ministry after college. He was the rector of churches in Worcester and New York City from 1862 until his death in 1909. He wrote and edited several books of prayers and a collection of his poetry, Sonnets and a Dream (1899).

Lianna Kushi earned a B.A. from Smith College and an M.A. in economic development from UMass Lowell. A director on the Greater Lowell Community Foundation board, she is also an associate member of the U.S.-Japan Council. An advocate for entrepreneurship as a means for social change, in particular to uplift the underconnected and underestimated, she co-founded EforAll’s nonprofit accelerator and is executive director of one of ten sites.

Jacquelyn Malone’s poems have been nominated for the independent presses’ Pushcart Prize three times. Her chapbook All Waters Run to Lethe was published by Finishing Line Press. She is a recent winner of the Tupelo Broadside Prize and has been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry. She has played a key role in the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

Henri Marchand has written freelance human-interest stories for Merrimack Valley Magazine and the Lowell Sun, essays for WUML’s Sunrise radio program, and fiction for The Bridge Review. He has also written historical pieces on his family’s home and Jeanne d’Arc Credit Union.

Paul Marion 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, SpoKe Seven, PoetsReadingtheNews.com, and So It Goes, the journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. He lives in Amesbury, Mass.

Jack McDonough has spent his entire life committing prose and editing the prose of others. His work has appeared in such disparate sites as Foster’s Daily Democrat, Runner’s World, and the wires of United Press International. He makes his home in Tewksbury, Mass., a gated community.

A graduate of Tufts University, Juliet Haines Mofford taught in Japan, Spain, and Puerto Rico prior to a career in museum education. From 1988 to 1995, at the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, she managed the cultural grants and community exhibits programs and served on the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! festival committee. The author of eighteen books, including two that received American Assoc. for State and Local History awards, she lives in mid-coast Maine.

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Clare Mulvany of West Cork, Ireland, leads transformational learning programmes across the globe, weaving strands of creative practice, service leadership, spiritual ecology, and social justice. The author of One Wild Life: A Journey to Discover People Who Change the World, her writing and documentary photography have appeared in On Being and The Irish Times. She teaches at University College Dublin’s Innovation Academy and is a trained classical hatha yoga instructor. Aside from everything else, the sea and her dog bring her infinite joy.

Anthony Nganga is the founder and principal at Studio 26 Associates LLC, an architectural firm in Lowell and also active in the community, serving on the boards of EforAll Lowell-Lawrence, The Lowell Plan, Common Ground, OffBeet Composting, Boys and Girls Club of Greater Lowell, and FreeSoil Arts Collective.

Charles Nikitopoulos (1941-2019) was a professor in the Dept. of Psychology at UMass Lowell for many years. A charismatic community organizer in his day, he co-founded the Hellenic Cultural and Heritage Society in Lowell and promoted the Flowering City environmental project among other local initiatives.

Jean O’Brien has five books of poetry, her latest being Fish on a Bicycle: New & Selected Poems. Among her poetry prizes are the Arvon International and the Fish International.

She is taking part in former UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s online Covid Diary with Manchester University (UK). Her poem “Child,” about the scandal of the Irish Mother and Baby Homes, was chosen by Poetry Ireland for their Poems on the Dart (Rail Transport). She holds an M.Phil. in creative writing/poetry from Trinity College Dublin and tutors in same.

Margaret O’Brien lives on the Tipperary/Waterford border in southeast Ireland. She co-founded The Story House Ireland (2014-2018) and lectured at Waterford Institute of Technology. She curates the Brewery Lane Writers’ W/E and runs the open mic Poetry Plus and her workshops, Writing Changes Lives, in Brewery Lane Theatre, Carrick-onSuir. An affiliate of Amherst Writers & Artists, she has had work in Southword, RTE/ O’Brien Press, The Pickled Body, and The Irish Times.

Christine O’Connor is a practicing attorney who serves as chief counsel for the City of Lowell. She co-edits Trasna, which means “across,” a weekly feature on the RichardHowe. com blog that showcases fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Irish writers.

Stephen O’Connor 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. He lives in Lowell.

Dublin-born poet Nessa O’Mahony has published five books of poetry: Bar Talk, Trapping a Ghost, In Sight of Home, Her Father’s Daughter, and The Hollow Woman on the Island. She won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and Hennessy Literature Awards. She received an Arts Council of Ireland literature bursary in 2004, 2011, and 2018.

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Louise Peloquin was born at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Lowell where her father, Laval U. Peloquin, was a physician. Her mother, Marthe Biron Peloquin, a respected local leader, transmitted to her a passion for the French-Canadian bilingual heritage. She studied at Assumption and Middlebury colleges and the University of Paris and enjoyed a career in France, where she published two books. Her novel about a Catholic boarding school in the 1960s is forthcoming. She writes from Groton, Mass., and Paris.

David Perry owns Vinyl Destination, a record shop in Mill No. 5 in Lowell, with his son Dan. A veteran journalist, he writes for the UMass Lowell Alumni Magazine and other publications.

Chath pierSath lives and works on a family farm in Bolton, Mass. His three collections of poetry are On Earth Beneath Sky, After, and This Body Mystery (with his paintings). His artwork is featured this inaugural issue of The Lowell Review.

A poet and photographer, James Provencher was born and grew up in Portland, Maine. He served as an Army journalist and worked in the Artists-in-the-Schools Program in Maine and Florida. A resident of Australia since 1986, he was active in the Sydney Performance Poetry scene and also a poet-in-residence at the Glenaeon School.

Dave Robinson is the author of Sweeney in Effable, a multi-book volume. From Lowell, Mass., he is represented in the anthology Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell.

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. Tom was born in Lowell and graduated from Lowell High School where he is a Distinguished Alumnus.

Doug Sparks is editor-in-chief of Merrimack Valley Magazine and host of The 495 podcast. His many interests include mycology, tea culture and books. He lives in Chelmsford, Mass., with his wife, two children and small chihuahua.

Marie Louise St. Onge was born and grew up in Lowell; she is pleased to be included in this inaugural issue of The Lowell Review. Her writing has appeared in anthologies and literary magazines across the country. A writer and editor, she has read her poetry at universities, art and community centers, and bookstores throughout New England; she now makes her home on the coast of southern Maine.

Marie Sweeney is an original contributor to RichardHowe.com. She is a long-time activist in local community, civic, political, and cultural affairs, as well as an advocate for education, human services, and volunteerism. A retired teacher, she is a graduate of UMass Lowell (Lowell State College).

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Nancye Tuttle, a journalist since 1978, is a former staff lifestyle reporter and current arts correspondent for the Lowell Sun and Fitchburg Sentinel. A resident of Wells, Maine, she has interviewed dozens of celebrities, from Tom Hanks and Oprah to Tom Cruise and Fabio. Julia Child, her first, will always be her favorite.

Tooch Van was born in 1975 in Cambodia at the start of the Genocide. The Khmer Rouge killed his entire family because his father was a teacher. He moved to Lowell in 1996 and owned a home in South Lowell for twelve years. He loves and cares deeply about Lowell.

Born in Corpus Christ, Texas, Frank Wagner grew up in his hometown’s racially mixed west side. His father was a chemist for Celanese, and his mother was a civil rights and education advocate who worked to integrate the city’s school system. He earned English and political science degrees at Southwest Texas in San Marcos, where he discovered Beat literature. He spent 36 years in radio and television broadcasting.

Julie Ward is a native of Waterford, Ireland. A mother to two boys, she works as Food and Wine Customer Advisor in Ardkeen Quality Food Store, Waterford, who specialise in Irish artisan & locally produced food. Her writing explores food and drink heritage and happenings in Ireland. She is a wine contributor to the Business Post newspaper.

Born in Clonmel, Ireland, Joe Whelan spent much of his youth on his grandparents’ farm at Harney’s Cross in Co. Waterford, outside Clonmel. He became an apprentice plasterer at fifteen and in 1987, like many others, went to America to work. In 1991, he returned to start a construction company until the financial crash of 2009. On his farm near the Comeragh Mountains, he raises sheep and is building timber-frame glamping pods for people who want to experience country life. A fan of the Moth Radio Hour, he has been on the Dublin Story Slam podcast.

Dana White lives in Ossining, New York, where she was the village historian for five-anda-half years before transitioning to elected office. When she isn’t pondering municipal policy, she is trying to finish a novel.

Chris Wilkinson is a husband, father, and total geek. For the past decade, he’s been teaching and lecturing on food, cryptocurrency, technology, and the intersection of interactive media and politics. In his spare time, he likes to write, play guitar, spin, practice his archery skills, and very much enjoys exploring planet earth with his family.

John Wooding is the author of The Power of Non-Violence: The Enduring Legacy of Richard Gregg and co-author with Kristin G. Esterberg of Divided Conversations: Identities, Leadership, and Change in Public Universities. From Northampton, England, he graduated from the London School of Economics, later earning his doctorate at Brandeis University.

He is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

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.

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

The Lowell Review brings together writers and readers in the Merrimack River watershed of eastern New England with people near and far 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 new publication springs from the RichardHowe.com blog (est. 2007), 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.

15 USD / 12 EUR / 10.5 GBP

Kathleen Aponick Susan April Joe Blair Prudence Brighton Michael Casey George Chigas David Daniel Geoffrey Douglas Fred Faust Billy Fenton Emily Ferrara Charles Gargiulo Linda Hoffman Richard P. Howe, Jr. Paul Hudon William Reed Huntington Lianna Kushi Jacquelyn Malone Henri Marchand Paul Marion Jack McDonough Juliet Haines Mofford Clare Mulvany Anthony Nganga Charles Nikitopoulos Jean O’Brien Margaret O’Brien Christine O’Connor

Stephen O’Connor Nessa O’Mahony Louise Peloquin David Perry Chath pierSath James Provencher Dave Robinson Tom Sexton Doug Sparks Marie Louise St. Onge Marie Sweeney Nancye Tuttle Tooch Van Frank Wagner Julie Ward Joe Whelan Dana White Chris Wilkinson John Wooding Fred Woods