No Fun

Those were cold, grey days growing up in Middle Haddam. Clouds promised snow but rarely produced enough to be useful. Somewhere in the back of an imagined scrapbook the snow reaches to the window panes but in reality we kids were lucky to see a foot and that didn’t last. Only the grey lasted all winter, through March and into April. Yet there was nary a new leaf on the big maples until well past my birthday in early May, when Mom was not quite ready to put away winter coats.

There was nothing to do because it was December. The snowman melted. After a terrific fight with the neighbor kids we obliterated the snowfort. There were some hard feelings with the only likely playmate, next-door Chris, a year older. He had surprisingly good aim for a kid who didn’t play baseball and he packed a nasty ice ball. Never mind I had thrown first yesterday, ice balls were cheating. Now there was nothing to do on a cold, gloomy afternoon.

“Go play outside. Get some fresh air. Go sliding. Did you wax Daddy’s skis?”

His old hickory skis were way too long and heavy for me to actually ski and they stuck to everything. Not only that, the gentle slope behind our barn was only a few hundred feet long and ended in trees so even if you could get going, you’d have to fall down to stop before you tangled up in the brush.

You never got enough snow in Middle Haddam. Not really good, deep snow. Our sled runners had worn right down to the grass and rocks the day before. Besides, skiing or sliding by myself was No Fun, that dismal category of existence that dogged my childhood.

No Fun. The afternoon stretched into eternity. My mittens were wet and so were the linings of my five-buckle galoshes. Rexie lay curled comfortably against the living room couch, his eyes shut tight.

“Wanna go outside?” I whooped at him but he only fluttered his tail politely against the floor.

“Mom, it’s starting to rain,” I whined.

“No, it’s not. Run along now. See if Chris is home.”

“They’ve gone to the Ice Capades,” I muttered. They went every year and didn’t take me again this year because I had done something horrible such as breaking a window accidently on purpose. Or they were going on to visit cousins in West Hartford. Such a happy, jolly family piling into their back Ford sedan, the three big kids in back, baby Alice in front between David and Henny.

We never went anywhere every year. My family was No Fun. And I was all alone on a dismal day.

“Where’s Tink?” I asked, again. My best friend, my age, who didn’t throw ice balls, lived in the next town.

“She and Maggie went shopping. Why don’t you go ride your horse?”

I pulled on my cold boots and mittens and let the storm door slam as hard as it would. There at the end of the driveway stood our old white-painted barn, two stories tall, wide enough for both cars and a workbench alongside one. I pushed one heavy sliding door open enough to squeeze through into the dank gloom. It smelled of motor oil and old, raw wood, an acrid, pissy smell.

Dad’s tools lay on a gouged-out plank counter among cans of paint thinner and glue, clamps and screwdrivers, signs of his household projects, perhaps tacking a painting into a frame or fixing a lamp. I glanced at the long-necked oil can and a screw-top copper mister of Flit bug killer, paint brushes, cobwebs, signs of long-gone summer, absolutely nothing of any relevance to me there. The lawnmowers, one power, one push, rested at the end of the bench.

Dust lay on every object, testimony to it’s disuse. Beyond the lawnmowers, at the very back of the barn, just past the front bumper of Mom’s car, a stair led up to the second floor.

There was nothing of any interest to me up there, only old oil paintings and trunks of Spanish shawls and ivory combs, old letters and journals. Stuff my dead aunt Edith had brought back. We kids wrapped ourselves in those black and gold shawls with long, long fringe and tried to stick the big combs into our girlish hair but they fell right out. Such long teeth on those combs and the fancy lace carving. Some were translucent, some light and brown. No one ever asked us to even be careful. One day that would all disappear.

In summer, bright sunlight pierced the siding and the little windows of the high cupola and brightened the dark matched-boards of the walls and ceiling. And it illuminated the bodies of dying wasps littering the old, rough plank floorboards. Overhead thickets of slow-flying wasps with long, dangling legs dipped and swooped too close as they came and went from their nests in the cupola.

There was one place in the barn I liked from the first moment I let myself believe it was what it seemed. What I longed for. Beyond the lawnmower, under the space of the stairs an old horse stall remained, about five feet wide and eight feet long, just the right size for a real horse. My parents always adamantly refused to let me have a horse and it was a constant battle between us.

As a sop to my obsession and no doubt at my mother’s insistence, Dad set a barrel on home-made sawhorses in that stall, screwed a plywood neck and two-dimensional head on that. Clothesline reins dangled from a notch in this head that faced out through the heavy sliding doors. I stepped up onto the milk box and swung my leg over this doll-horse’s dusty barrel and settled myself on it’s horribly bulging, slippery shape. Try as I might, this was no live horse. I clucked and kicked my heels against the air, feeling like a fool.

Nothing happened, of course, except I had a higher view into the front seat of my mother’s car just a few feet away. So many obstacles. A terrible sadness filled me, a certain knowledge that I would never feel a live creature under me, that I would never put my hand on a warm neck, that no powerful body would gather itself to take me out of the barn and into sunny fields. Beyond, into my real life.

No, that December afternoon would last forever, all dust and darkness.

Then my mother’s voice called me from the back door, high and sweet.

“Reedie? Come on in and get cleaned up. We’re going over to Maggie’s for dinner.”

It wasn’t always No Fun. Inside my boots eventually dried. The neighbors came back and eventually it snowed enough to ski down that hill and in just a few years when I had my own barn my mother gave me $250 to buy a real horse I could sit on in his stall when the December sleet sifted down and as long as I can help it there will always be a real horse. Fun!

Talk to Christmas animals

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/20/mark-wahlberg-talks-to-ch_n_398436.html?fbwall

So, talk to them. Who? Them! Christmas animals! Aren't your reading this blog??

Talking Houses

If the walls could speak, what stories they could tell. Old houses would have many tales of lives begun and ended within their rooms. Family battles. A drunken aunt, a sickly father, money coming in and going out. Old houses remember the irresistible smell of roast chicken, the horrible stink of burnt lima beans. The time the roof leaked, the time the snow beat on the window panes and the furnace roared to keep everyone warm and safe inside.

New houses? Well, you have to start somewhere. But I don’t think gypsum board can tell as good a story as the plaster some tired man mixed with a trowel. Plywood floors do not remember the sounds of your heels as well as real oak or pine. Real wood never dies, it becomes more beautiful as it ages. And those efficient, new plastic windows that never warp or shrink certainly keep out the drafts and mosquitoes and the sound of traffic a few blocks over. Keep out the smells of the neighbor’s barbeque and the sounds of a wailing baby, too.

Old trees guard old houses, tall, leafy shade in the summer and bare branches in winter to catch the stars. New houses have to wait years for this sweet embrace. Old houses may once have looked alike in a builder row but they have grown wings and ells and second stories and character. Old houses have old gardens where tomatoes grow every summer and all the birds for miles around know the birdbath will be fresh every morning. Old houses’ doors may not close tightly and they don’t have garages in front but they do have porches to sit on so you can wave to the folks pushing baby carriages along the sidewalks.

If you live in an old house, that is, a house that’s older than you are, take a moment to listen to the creak of the radiator, the squeak of a certain floorboard, the sounds of water running through the pipes. You may hear the footsteps of those who came before you. Where did they go? Where do any of us go when we move on?

Our houses remember us and hold the sound of our footsteps through all the years ahead.

Old Mothers

You can be outside of Christmas, looking into the cozy scene with longing, and you can also feel beyond Christmas. Looking back at my mother’s brave efforts to make wonderful holidays for me and my father when there wasn’t much money to spend, I see the image of a woman rowing a small boat into a storm-tossed sea. Goodness, did I ever, ever, even as an adult, ask her what her life was like? Really listen?

No. The late spring bulbs of sympathy and understanding toward her are only now poking their noses up through the compost of my many years. So, Mom, this is what you went through, the joy of parenting a child, the heartbreak of watching her go and the long impatience waiting for her to recognize you. Duh.

Did she know the stockings she stuffed, the doll she made and the hip-roofed doll-barn she encouraged my father to build me, the expensive, beautiful horse books she bought me, all the more credit to her since she disliked horses in general, would go unappreciated? Sure, I was polite but I never gave up my grudge against her: that I never got the one thing I wanted which was a real, live horse of my own in our real barn. A real saddle, a real bridle with a real bit. Brushes and a hoof pick. The sweet smell of horse on me day and night.

Mom really flexed her creative muscles to make up for this permanent loss. But it was never enough for me. Selfish, bratty kid that I was.

But now, years later, I salute my long-departed Mom. Perhaps not departed altogether. Perhaps sitting on top of a snowy cloud, clicking her heels together as she peers down at me.

“You got your horse, after all,” she says. “So Merry Christmas and stop whining.”

Darkness at Solstice

Finding Christmas, leaving the year

Winter solstice is the end of a season of life and for many of us the memory of the year brings sadness and loss. When the leaves have fallen and your bare trees hold the stars at night, find an evergreen. Cut a few branches that smell of sap and set them by the hearth.

Light a bright fire to hold the longest night at bay. This will remind you that after billions of years, since before anyone imagined keeping time, our planet has spun like a top around our sun. On December 20 it begins again its endless tilt toward heat and light and growth. Every single day after is two or three minutes longer than the day before. You might ask, who pulls the string to keep this top turning?

What is Christmas, Hanukah and Kwanza but a bright passage to the new year? Make a rich altar over that fire. If you have them, set out the tiny crèche figures who promise that birth follows death. Lay greens and berries and sparkly garlands. Light candles to assuage that dread of darkness the way our ancestors lit torches around the bodies of their dead. The flames that guide the soul into the hereafter also illuminate the faces of those of us who remain behind.

Love what you have. And watch for the narcissus.

Good News

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/magazine/ideas/2009/#business-1

Just when you thought the world was coming to an end, here are some really wonderful ideas for all the problems we struggle with.

You see, our fellow citizens are ALSO smart, creative and very, very busy.

In the darkest days of the year, hope.

“I hate Christmas,” my husband said.
“Me, too,” I replied.

We are not alone. Lots and lots of people feel quite gloomy every December. Not children, of course, and probably not the parents of small children who are passing on the tradition of Christmas to those youngsters so one day they will transmit it to theirs and so on. Spending their treasure on the kids with the usual profligacy, continuing to blend nostalgia into debt.

Big news. Duh. Even we blonds know Christmas is for children. This is a good thing. We are showing how much we love children or at least, like them, or some of them. But—what if you don’t have any children around to carry on your personal, traditional, HoHoJollyChristmas role? What if there's.. no one.

Then you are in reality outside of Christmas. Of course you feel blue. Or suicidal. Outside of Christmas means you will not go shopping for fuzzy toys or buzzing motors, you will not imagine the cuddles and the shining faces around the glittering tree. No, like the Scrooge of the dreaded Christmas Past, you will suffer the long December nights, watching the phone not ring. Shuffling through the mail, grateful for a card from the car dealer, the insurance agent and a hopeful Realtor.

Not that you send any cards. Oh, you think, why bother? They don’t care. Sure, I’m a grandpa but I’m too far away. Outside the family.

Maybe you’re not even a grandpa. You’re an aunt, a perfectly healthy 60-year-old aunt with a generous heart, lonesome for your nieces and nephews. Somebody else’s kid to snuggle. But no, they are all busy ripping the paper off a thousand gifts and the ones your sent are at the bottom of the pile. You will have to call later to ask them if they like what you sent and they won't remember which was yours.

While the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings Silent Night you will spend a lonely Christmas Day in a tree-less living room. You will swig a too-sweet eggnog, then go-ahead and sweeten that glass with another slosh of scotch, all the better to enjoy your misery, your no-stocking fireplace with not even a good old dog to keep you company. You have a roaring case of the Christmas Blues.

Here’s the remedy: number one: get over it. Understand that your happy childhood Christmases were wonderful because somebody else made them that way. Those folks are gone now.

But other parts of your life were pretty damn good, too. Think of really great sex in the back seat of some boy's car. Think of that trip to Paris when you snuck off with your boyfriend, leaving the children with your clueless husband. Start planning a really good vacation for yourself.

Number Two, Nostalgia increases wrinkles. Stuff the Blues into a scrapbook you open every December first. Have a good cry but as you reach for the Kleenex, find a morsel of humor in your slobbering. Is it not ridiculous for a grown-up to pine for the stocking she once hung by a long-dead fire? Was it really that great?

Three: Stuff someone else’s stocking this year. Yeah, I know you always do. My mother always told me to bet big on the Now. So, whatever you gave last year, an old frozen turkey (a pox upon you!) or a check for $10.000, double it.

Dance all night

Here's a delightful column Sister Maureen sent me from the Philadelphia Inquirer by Francesca Serritella, an honors graduate at Harvard.

My grandmother, whom you know as Mother Mary, just turned 86 years old, and so I gave her a call. I sang "Happy Birthday," we discussed the usual topics, and then she asked me one of the questions she always asks: "Kitten, are you having fun?" And for once, I had a real story for her.
I answered, "I had the best night of my life."
Last weekend, my cousin invited me to a charity ball. I expected it to be a formal, bordering on stuffy, occasion, one that intimidated me. But I had a red dress in my closet, and sometimes that is reason enough.
The night turned out to live up to every possible promise a red dress can make. The event was held in a beautiful old New York building. There, I met a British man who was so handsome, so debonair, I could hardly speak when he started talking to me, much less move when he asked me to dance.
He led me to the dance floor, where we remained for the next two hours. He spun me around like a pro, and on the last beat of every song, he'd toss me into the most daring, thrilling dips, the sort of trust-me-or-die, hair-grazes-the-floor dips that make other people stop and look.
A group of us, including Prince Charming, ended the night at an authentic piano bar - a tiny place where a gifted pianist played song after song, and the waitress and bartender took turns singing long after last call.
Finally, it was time for me to bid my reluctant farewells. I stepped outside and saw that my golden coach was once again a yellow taxi, and the evening rain had released smells of the city not found in fairy tales.
Driving home, replaying the evening in my mind, I could barely believe such a night could be real. As I stepped out of the cab, I looked down at my feet and saw that both of my shoes had an ugly bit of glue exposed over the peep-toe. And then I realized I had my proof that the night had really happened:
I had danced the bows off my shoes.
"Oh, Kitten, that's marvelous!" my grandmother cried. Her tone turned serious: "But did you sing at the piano bar?"
I laughed. "No."
"No?! Why not?"
"Oh, I don't know, I'd be too embarrassed. I don't think I even know all the words to any song."
"You know all those Sinatra songs! I always used to sing at piano bars when I was young. Anywhere I went, if there was a piano, I would sing. You see, I was a bit of a show-off then."
"Oh yeah?"
"Oh yeah! I would go to a party in a great dress, and I'd dance all night in the center of the room, and I'd always sing at a piano. That was 60, 70 years ago, but I loved it. You should never be embarrassed. You should have sung your heart out."
The picture she was painting of herself was far different from the grandmother I knew, but it was one I could see clearly. I realized that inside the woman who survived an impoverished childhood, who selflessly raised two kids and worked when few women did, who despite arthritic fingers and worsening eyesight can still assemble 100 perfect ravioli on any given afternoon, inside my grandmother, was a woman who loved the limelight, who could dance all night, and who sang at a piano, always.
We said goodbye, and when I hung up the phone I had a different perspective on my night at the ball. At the time, I had tried my hardest to live in the moment, to savor every minute of that night. The next day, I had rushed to tell my friends before I forgot a detail; I'd even been tempted to write it down in a journal, get it on the record, anything to preserve a magical evening that was over too soon. But now I know it was a night I will carry with me. A night I will tell my grandchildren about - the night I danced the bows off my shoes.
I know I will remember that night, because my 86-year-old grandmother still does. But the next time I'm in a piano bar, I'll sing.

Talking Animals

It wasn’t just Christmas Eve, the talking animals. The idea that I could speak with critters always lay at the bottom of my consciousness like a persistent fog that humidified and nourished my waking mind.

Banished from Eden, Eve and her husband got dominion over all the creatures of the earth, or so they have said. I think the garden gates slammed shut on that hapless couple just before the Maker could grant the power to understand their fellow creatures. Ever since, animals have survived exactly because none of Eve’s children ever learned to really listen to them. Or ever bothered to, too busy slaughtering them, enslaving them, or, I have to admit, enjoying the great pleasures of riding them, if they are horses, although I have ridden terrified cows as a child--unsucessfully--without knowing one damn thing about their thoughts.

When I looked into my hound dog's deep, brown, forgiving eyes, I felt I was almost there, at that magic point where I knew exactly what he was saying.

The dog wasn’t asking anything for himself. He was transmitting a Superior Light of Understanding. And a sweet forgiveness no human could ever bestow.

I’m sure that’s what he meant. Said.

Running late!

Wait, wait, I'm almost finished with the barn story. Be right back.

Christmas Magic

At what age did I begin to understand that Santa is a only a dream? Five or six? By the time I was seven or eight there were dismaying inklings he might not really exist. Belief shrunk a little every year. First that Santa lived with Mrs. Santa and the elves all year, then he existed only a month or so before Christmas and then only on Christmas Eve and finally only at midnight for one magical hour. Even that was hard to hold onto.

It didn’t matter what older kids told me. By seven I had learned to ask hard questions for myself: Do reindeer actually fly? The North Pole had a definite geographical location and it was pretty darn far from my house. How could one person, if Santa really was a person, visit everyone in the whole world?

By eight I knew Santa did not visit many children especially poor, hungry children in faraway countries. Or even poor children not far from our own house because Mom and Dad delivered grocery bags to poor families down the road in Haddam Neck and sometimes grocery bags of my own toys and books that I had played with and didn’t mind saying good-bye to.

As I began to notice that Santa Claus was fatter than any grown-up I knew, he seemed to melt like a snowman. How could he jump down the chimney when I burned my fingers hanging up a stocking? Even on Christmas Eve my parents argued. The world was becoming a painful place because all my senses denied Santa Claus.

I held on as long as I could. I loved the tooth fairy and the little people who lived under the morning mushrooms. But when I stopped looking under toadstools I could still find them in books. Of all Mom’s tales, I loved best the story of how the animals talk at midnight on Christmas Eve.

Of all the magic in my state of grace, communing with the animals was dearest. Ah, I longed to hear what my dog and cat could tell me, the words of the birdsongs, the conversation among those bony cows in the pasture and when I could find one, a horse—oh, to talk to a horse that might sprout wings and fly—that would be better than a tooth fairy and little people and even dear, fat Santa Claus.

“How come animals can talk at midnight, Momma?”
“Because Baby Jesus is born. That’s a miracle. Strange and wonderful things happen when there’s a miracle.”

“But why can’t I hear them talk?”

My mother shook her head. “It’s too late for little girls. But I know they do. I’ve heard them. Now snuggle up and Daddy will read “Twas the Night Before Christmas."

She put her finger beside her nose and cocked her head as if to hear something faint. "And listen for Santa’s sleigh bells.”

Talking animals. Would they tell me they were happy? Now, the birth of Baby Jesus was mildly interesting, Joseph was the father but not really a father like my Dad. A real Dad was much better. I knew that people had babies all the time and visitors came to admire them, although not kings on camels, at least not in Middle Haddam. I knew the whole story of Baby Jesus because every year I played a small part in our Sunday school’s Christmas pageant. Never Mary or even the Angel, those star roles went to the big kids. No, the best I could do was to wear an extremely scratchy burlap shepherd costume over my undies and carry a heavy stick. There was not one live sheep or donkey in the crèche. Even Baby Jesus was just somebody’s doll.

It was cold being a shepard. My bare arms and legs froze because the rector wouldn’t waste heat on a twenty-minute kids’ pageant. Grownups in the congregation wore their coats and scarves and hats and couldn’t wait for us kids to thump up the aisle, take our positions and hold still while the choir and congregation sang “Oh Holy Night,” “Silent Night” and “We Three Kings”. Even the organist wore gloves. Then we could go home and have supper.

After supper I put on my velvet dress and Mary Jane shoes to go to a real, grown-up Christmas Eve party. Handsome David and his wife, Henny, greeted me as solemnly as if I were a delightful guest and not a bratty kid that hung around with their kids every single day. This inspired me to behave like a lady for the whole evening. Every room in the lovely old colonial house gleamed and flickered with Christmas swags and wreaths, red and gold ribbons, lit only with candles. Candles upstairs and down, in every room, in every window: highly dangerous around folks tipsy on David’s eggnog. That only added to the excitment of watching the growups talk as if we children were invisible elves.

I did not horse around or almost tip over the tree or spill my eggnog cup on younger Helen or Alice to torment them. I was very, very good, good for David and Henny and my parents, maybe for Santa whose time was drawing near and especially for the animals who would talk later that evening when I would lie in my little bed up under the sloped ceiling.

After we got home, Mom and Dad puttered around downstairs, perhaps speaking to the dog, perhaps speaking with the dog. I wished they’d told me they were going to do that, wished I could rouse my sleepy self to tiptoe down the stairs to listen in on them. At that moment, as warm waves of sleep washed me into the ocean of dreams, I knew all the animals were talking and although I would miss it this year, it was really happening. And Santa Claus was really going to eat those cookies I left on the hearth. Tomorrow morning would prove it.

In the dim light of dawn, the house utterly silent, I snuck down the stairs to capture my dream one more time. Lights gleamed on the tree and there, right where I had hung it, proof: the fattened stocking.

I was nine or even ten that year when I could, for one last moment, hear the faint sound of bells as Santa's sleigh lifted off the roof.

Schloyme’s Liquor Store

“Nice little girl, Stevens,” Schloyme said, leaning against the edge of the door into his liquor shop.

My father held a case of wine. “How much’ll you give me for her, Schloyme?” he called over his shoulder, then glanced into the front seat of the car to see if I was paying attention.

Indeed I was paying the kind of close attention a five-year-old does when her father might sell her to the tall, dark-haired man with grayish circles around his eyes, a man whose store smelled of sweet booze like her parents’ left-over cocktail glasses. He was kidding. I sat up straighter and watched.

“I’ll give you five dollars,” Schloyme said, sliding a toothpick across his full lips. Purplish lips, ugh! Inside, Schloyme’s wife, Zelda, sat on a stool behind the cash register. When I went inside with my father she smiled and offered me a candy, just like the witch in Hansel and Gretel and I knew how that story ended.

“Naw, she’s worth more than that,” my father said, sliding the wine into the back seat. He closed the door and peered down at me, lanky, dark-eyed Daddy. He grinned and turned back to Schloyme.

“Make it fifty and she’s all yours,” he said.

Only a joke. Not very funny. At all! Why had I ever wanted to come with him on this errand? I was so glad to see him when he drove into the yard after work that I leaped into his arms and begged to go.

“Okay, okay, kiddo.” His pet name for me. Well, sometimes for other people but I ignored that. Wasn’t that often. He unlatched my arms and legs. “Let me get into some clothes.” By that he meant, out of the suit and tie and into khakis and sneakers.

Friday afternoons he was free to be around for the whole weekend except in winter when he might have to stoke the coal furnace at the mill where he manufactured a fancy kind of dust. Golden dust. That’s what I saw when I went to the mill with him or with my mother when she took her car for gas. There was golden dust inside the mill and all over the turnaround. The small manufacturing business my parents owned ground up feldspar, mixed it with mysterious ingredients and sold it as a floor cleaner to supermarkets.

Worth-Spar, Inc., owned the old brick mill, a relic of an earlier Connecticut economy, and a hundred-acre mine site a few miles south of Cobalt. The mill itself was only two miles north of Cobalt, home to Mickey’s Cobalt Market and Schloyme’s Cobalt Liquor Store beside it. Shared the same concrete foundation, steps and roof. Surely they were not just the only Jewish merchants for miles, they were family kin as well. Yes, memory prompts that they were brothers-in-law. Close enough that Schloyme could send his son to Sadie to change a hundred dollar bill or borrow something from her cash register. Business partners, too, then.

Mining the surface feldspar demanded a loader and a truck which needed gas so the mill had a gas tank and an old red and white pump with a round gauge on top. When Mom pulled up beside it, one of the Italian workmen, Morris or Andy, would come out, wiping his oily hands on a towel and throw the pump lever up as he unscrewed the gas cap. An ancient engine ground into life in the throat of the pump. Morris and Andy who had worked for my father for thirty years, as had all of the men, were handsome, dark-skinned guys with big white teeth. And they treated us as if were royalty.

“So Italian. Always very charming,” my mother would say, dreamily. I loved the sound of the gas whizzing and gurgling into the tank and I liked the smell of the fumes.

Mom always put her cigarette out before we even got there. She didn’t have to pay anything, of course, it was just one big holding tank all the vehicles used. Company car, gas, etc., perks of being on the Board of Directors.

If that makes you think of a large, successful family corporation, shrink that thought to a one-man with one secretary/accountant and six or eight Italian stone blasters, loader operators, truck drivers and crushing and milling machine mechanics. Which altogether produced the golden dust. My father supervised the mill and sold bags of his Worth-Spar product from Boston to Washington, D.C.. Was he a tycoon? The last year of his life, 1960, my father told me, more than once, that he had finally broken five figures. Meaning he made over $10,000. Then he died at fifty-seven.

My father took me deer hunting on that quarry land two or three times. We’d put a candy bar in a jacket pocket, find the mittens which were somewhere in a distant drawer, it being only November and not yet cold enough. Then Dad would take out his .22 rifle which smelled deliciously of nitrate—almost salty—and gun oil. He checked the chamber to be sure it was empty, reset the safety button, watching all the time to be sure I was paying attention which indeed I was, then wrapped it in a flannel shirt and laid it carefully across the back seat of the car.

It would be a typical Connecticut fall day, not clear, not cloudy, just hazy enough to take the color out of the blue sky. An enervating sky, really. But the sky I lived with and there was my handsome father, limber as a Pinocchio, telling me how to stalk a deer. How to look for, yet never find, fresh deer droppings. If we saw some little green pellets, we called to each other like scientists on a dig. Were they fresh, Dad would ask me. They had no fresh gleam, I saw. Ah, very perceptive. Now we could go on our hunt confident we would not encounter our prey any time soon.

It could have been rabbit poop, he wasn’t sure and I wasn’t sure he could pull the trigger on either one. Yet we thrashed on through the skinny swamp oak and swamp maple trees, eyes down like Indian trackers, my father carrying the gun in the crook of his right arm, muzzle down, of course, ready to lift, sight and squeeeeze the trigger. Which would blow a bullet right into the deer. Or the bunny. I never thought of that.

Golden oak leaves crackled underfoot as we traipsed to a high point or what my father promised would be a high point but was only a rise of feldspar outcropping with a close view of more skimpy trees, some low dark laurel bushes we’d come back for at Christmas and not a sign of any living thing. I don’t believe one bird flew anywhere near central Connecticut that afternoon.

Secretly we each blamed each other. That is, I blamed him for not finding a deer and he probably blamed me for making him even think about shooting a deer for he was a very soft-hearted guy. I never considered the consequences of killing or, worse, injuring an animal on purpose. Just for the meat? Why not go to Mickey’s?

Gee, the deer hunting happened later than the Me auction. Let’s go back.

“Fifty, eh?” Schloyme turned his head to speak into the black interior of his shop. “Zelda, got fifty in the box?”

An indistinguishable sound from inside, not necessarily encouraging. Schloyme nodded as if it were, still moving the toothpick over his horrible lips. He wore grayish-pink eyeglasses. His belly hung over his belt, a little.

“Now let me see,” my father said, grinning widely now. He looked in on me. By then I was bolt upright and ready to escape. Run home right now! How could my very own father—

“I don’t know, Schloyme, let me think about it.”

He slid in beside me and held in his beautiful right hand the key to my salvation. He turned and said, “Don’t you worry, kiddo. I wouldn’t trade you for all the tea in China.”

I exhaled with relief. He wasn’t going to sell me. This time.

Mom's Meat

When rationing finally ended, I was about six, just in time to begin to feast on Sunday roast. We didn’t have much money but there was always meat: glorious standing rib roasts, tender lamb legs, crispy fatty pork loins and cheap hamburger from Milton’s once a week.

Every Wednesday Mom sent me to Milton’s store with the $30 grocery check Dad had given her. Milton would cash the check and pay off the tab we ran at his grocery-cum-post office in center of Middle Haddam, a tiny village time has yet to discover. Creaky board floors, trembling fluorescent lights and once a week, a delivery of fatty hamburger, the only real meat in the case if you didn’t count a fat roll of bologna and a smaller roll of liverwurst, sometimes spotted with blue mould. By Thursday, the hamburger would be doubtful, too.

Dust settled on Milton’s canned sardines and beets. Only the candy items moved well as we kids hung out waiting for the school bus and neighbors came to pick up their mail. Milton was an irascible old coot—probably almost fifty, then—who watched us kids like a hawk to be sure we didn’t steal a roll of Necco wafers.

“Don’t be looking in other people’s boxes, you hear?” he’d snarl if we idled too long in from of the post box wall. Each box had its four inch square glass door that opened with two brass knobs. Our combination was E1, P1. I always wondered if that combination would work with any other box. I never got to try them all but I could see who had mail and who didn’t before he drove me away.

Milton himself would unload the big canvas mail bags and furiously stuff the boxes, first letters, then junk mail. Only his daughter, Sandra, a good pal of mine, was allowed anywhere near the mail sorting room behind the boxes and he wasn’t nice to her, either. We all felt sorry for Sandra having such a father. Sometimes I’d dawdle at the postal window where I could watch him, just to annoy him. It sure did. “You got nothin’ else to do? Get outta here.”

“Why is Milton so crabby?” I asked Mom.

“Now dear, that’s not nice.” But she herself called him crabby or worse. “Probably because we don’t shop there enough.”

“But there’s nothing to buy. It’s all old stuff we don’t like.”

No comment from my mother. We did buy stuff but only last minute things like margarine or Uncle Ben’s rice.

“Do you have any cranberry sauce?”

“Of course we have cranberry sauce,” Milton would reply testily. “It’s Thanksgiving, ain’t it? Right over there next the peas.” Sure enough, the familiar purple and white Ocean Spray can, right next to the Green Giant peas but not the tiny, tender peas we preferred. We all knew better than to suggest items for Milton to stock. November was the only time Milton carried cranberry sauce.

Mom was ambivalent about shopping at Milton’s. She felt sorry his store never seemed to thrive although it was smack in the middle of Middle Haddam. But his prices were higher than Mickey’s, two miles up the road. If you google Middle Haddam you’ll find it in the dead center of Connecticut, far, far from the glorious moneyed suburbs of New York City. And yes, there is a Haddam and an East Haddam, but no North Haddam or West Haddam so I couldn’t tell you how the ‘Middle’ came to be. Take a guess.

Certainly Mickey’s store had more selection, almost as much as the A&P supermarket way over in Middletown, twenty minutes away. In Middletown (no relation to Middle Haddam at all) we could shop at an Italian greengrocer—exotic fruits and vegetables even in winter—an Italian bakery and a real Jewish deli: all three sold fabulous food. Oh, the late night pizza in the bakery after the bakers set the loaves to rise and the dripping, warm, freshly sliced pastrami on fresh, black rye bread. Artichokes, fresh string beans, brilliant tangerines, Christmas colors in the wood cases open to the weather all winter. Milton’s store would never compete with that.

Of course Milton knew it and it griped him. If more people would shop with him, he’d stock more inventory but until people bought more, the hell with us. Well, the third-class post office probably carried the store. Along with Necco Wafers.

Once a week we shopped at Mickey's. The store was brightly lit, the shelves were freshly stocked and it smelled of bread. By the cashier, those boxes of Entenman's coffee cakes, soft, raisony, thinly iced. Daddy loved these for his Sunday morning breakfast. He could eat almost the whole box. He was welcome to it. Mom and I thought they were way too sweet. And she never ate any breakfast but black coffee and a Chesterfield cigarette.

Behind the meat case, Mickey Adler or his kid Jackie, a taller and handsomer version of his old man, greeted Mom with a big smile, wiping his hands on his bloody white butcher apron. A short guy with a moustache under his big nose, Mickey could barely see over the top of the meat case.

“So, Sally, a nice Porterhouse today?” he rasped in his lower East Side Jewish accent. “Just got in some beauties. Let me show you.”

Before Mom could answer he ducked into the cooler and returned with a loin of beautifully marbled beef cradled in his arms like a child. “About like this?” he marked a spot with his fingers. “One? Maybe two?”

Mom shook her head. “One’s enough for today, thanks. Same as usual, about two inches.” She was already moving down the long case toward the pork. “And that pork loin looks good.”

Mickey nodded and set the beef down on the cutting counter. He swiped the long curved knife up and down against a sharpening rod and leaned the blade into the flesh. When the steak fell into his left hand he held it up like a gift for her to see before he slapped it on the scale.

“Sure you don’t want another?” Then he was wrapping it and fixing the paper with a yank of tape. He scribbled the price. His wife or a daughter-in-law would ring it up.

For Sunday dinner it had to be a Porterhouse steak or a rib roast. Alongside the roast, potatoes in the pan turned brown all over. When Dad carved, he first set aside a thin slice of the salty, caramelized dark outside, then worked into the pink and red center. I liked both: some of that outside and the rare inner.

If Mom was feeling fancy, she’d make Yorkshire pudding in the pan. But that meant no drippings for gravy, a high price to pay for one meal's crispy popover.

The next night would be cold sliced beef, then hash from roast bits and pieces browned in the fatty parts frizzled up with a dash Worcestershire Sauce and left-over potatoes or just poured over white bread. If there was enough, a divine sandwich in between these meals. My mother loved roast beef sandwiches. No horseradish, just salt. Her big, strong teeth ripped the rare beef like a tiger's.

Wednesday night, hamburgers from Milton’s or spaghetti with Milton’s burger in the sauce. Never, ever, any canned spaghetti sauce, only burger, tomato paste, garlic and water. Just as Lydia’s Family Table makes it. And spaghetti al dente, of course.

In the Middle of Nowhere, Connecticut, on thirty bucks a week, we ate well.

Mashed potatoes

When I die you can bury me in a coffin full of mashed potatoes and turkey gravy. Not just any old mashed potatoes but Mom’s mashed potatoes and Mom’s gravy.

I say that every year about this time. I don’t even have to close my eyes to hear the sound of the potato beater rackety-racketing in the heavy pot she used. I kept that old, wooden-handled tool for years until I wore it out.

No lumps! No ricer! No skins, either, and no milk, but real cream, baby, and butter, lots of it. My job to peel and cut up the spuds, put ‘em on to boil about half an hour before the turkey was ready. Keep an eye on ‘em so they didn’t overcook, then tell Mom they were ready. Too heavy for me to drain.

Drain and sit back on the electric burner—no gas in Connecticut then—to dry out a bit. Then the beating. If there were a lot of potatoes Dad would have to take a turn, Dad or anyone who waltzed into the tiny kitchen with an opinion about the food. Most just wanted to taste the gravy or pull a crispy bit of skin off the neck end.

When’s dinner ready? We all whined over the sounds of the football game.

Do I have time for another round? My father asked. He liked Manhattans. With a cherry in the bottom. (Oh God, Daddy.) He'd already pulled the cork from a bottle of French red from the case in the cellar.

Mom made a roux in the turkey pan and I swirled in the giblet broth until the gravy was as smooth and silky, as richly brown as the roasted turkey itself. Another glob of butter to round it out. Hope there'd be enough for tonight and tomorrow. And tomorrow.

Fill my plate, hell, fill my coffin with Mom’s mashed potatoes and just pour that gravy all over me. Then bury me. I’m done.

Ups and Downs

An alert fellow writer in Santa Fe, Tori Shepard Warner, keeps me up to date on the New Mexico literary scene now that I've left that delightful country. Tori’s novel, Now Silence, published last year by Sunstone Press, is chock full of Santa Fe history at the time of building The Awful Atom Bombs. Talking about bombs, Tori, I don’t know if you saw the horrible review last Sunday’s Albuquerque Journal gave my Santa Fe Dreamhouse. Ouch, big time.

What should an author do about a bad review? Nothing. It hurts but what can I say? He really, really didn’t like my book. End of story. But I saved the clipping.

I had lunch with another writer last week, landscape architect Jim Chadwick whose second book, Landscapes, was a hit for several months last year. It’s witty, artful and downright gorgeous. We talked writers’ doldrums while he downed a giant hotdog and I got outside a duck leg at the local Frenchie bistro in downtown Campbell. Jim sold his book at speaking engagements and then demand dropped off and the upshot is, he’s tired of flogging it. My enthusiasm for pitching my book is also wearing thin.

It’s the Famous Person whose books sell. Unless you are Sarah Palin, in the public eye again and again because she's cute and political, even big time writers have to keep up the popular persona or they drop out of sight. Alas, writers are not, per se, famous persons. Even Jane Smiley who won the Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres and has writ other wonderful books on and beyond the NYTimes best seller lists, has to do an 11-stop coast-to-coast book tour to plug her new novel, The Georges and the Jewels . Phew! Airplanes, hotels, dinners with strangers. (Although Smiley wrote that she loves travel. Perhaps before the security lines.) No way do I want to do that. Teaching is hard work and I’m too old to begin a career as a Famous Author, Professor of Writing and National Pundit. But there is some prestige and a great pleasure in being a small time author and pundit. I am grateful for old friends revisited and new friends made.

Here’s some consolation for tired authors. I had three goals in mind with Dreamhouse. #1: save my Santa Fe memories; #2: enjoy the appreciation of my readers, however many there may be; #3: sell the story rights. So far I’m two out of three.

Next book will be an E book. See of the Albuquerque Journal gets to review that.

No Cell

I felt naked at first without a cell phone although I couldn’t see the screen without my Walgreen readers and now that we can’t drive and gab I don’t really need a mobile phone. Plus I am way too old to even know anyone who texts or who would want to text me and if I talked, texted, photographed to upload to YouTube I wouldn’t have time to do anything else.

So I first loaned my cell to a stranger who needed it and when she brought it back, I accidently on purpose stashed it in the car cup holder—in case it might ring, Husband could be reminding me to pick up a quart of Lactaid, yes, that’s how old we are which isn’t all bad—only the cup had water in it and that was the end of my powerful cell phone. Kaput forever.

I do feel something is missing. Not the car keys, not my sunglasses or my wallet. I’ve lost the part of me that existed from the time I first signed a two-year contract with some gigantic phone company and delighted in the power of connecting from everywhere. That depended on a faceless network that owned a part of my life, subject to rate increases and counting minutes. In my real estate agent days the cell seemed to pay for itself over and over. But now that I’m pretty house-bound land lines are quite sufficient. Clearer, too.

Whoa, not totally sufficient. Just now the Husband cells me from a doctor’s office to ask a detail. Cells, yes. If you can Skype or Text or Message, why not Cell somebody?

What have I lost? The terrific charge into economic activity the cell allowed. But there isn’t any real estate activity and even if there were, I wouldn’t want to do it again. The business of sales owns the saleswoman. It turns every human contact into a sales lead. It changes the relationship between me and my fellow humans, makes me a shill for property sales. Forces me to edit every conversation to enhance the Pitch. In a saleswoman’s life, every friend, every family member, every person at the Thanksgiving table is a potential commission. You have to make nice, bring a pie and keep your opinions to yourself.

I am so glad to be back into my preSales life where I can be truly me, speak my mind freely and let the devil take the hindmost. It’s been seventeen years of slavery. Who says Elderhood is all bad? I can live without a cell. I’ve got a real Second Life.

Long-Term No Care

I don’t have Alzheimers but I might as well because I visited a neurologist in June to check myself. Mom had it. It wasn’t pretty and I’d like to spare Jim from having to tie me to the bed and change my diaper. That would sure cast a shadow over our lifetime romance. And break the retirement bank.

No Alzheimers, just normal, age-related cognitive disorder. Dis-fucking-order? Well, who cares? I forget a few things but I know where my keys and my glasses are and I can do the crossword and play bridge and recall your name. And the doctor says, no Alzheimers.

Great. Until I applied for long-term health insurance. That visit to the neurologist cost Medicare two hundred bucks but it may cost Jim and me thousands because no insurer will write a policy for anyone with any cognitive disorder.

Moral of story: if you visit a doctor for possible Alzheimers—or diabetes, the other NoNo—don’t ask your insurance company to pay for the visit. If it’s true that 70% of folks over 65 will require long term care, in or out of the home, then Jim and I are rather screwed.

Temperature rising, security falling

Ach du lieber (that means, 'heavens' in German, I think), my snorting and hacking and noseblowing cleared several checkout lanes at Trader Joe's this morning. I feel too warm. I tink I em catching a cod. Good time to go beddy bye with "Golden Dreams: California in an age of abundance, 1950-1963,” Kevin Starr’s surprisingly lively perspective on that generation’s economic, social and cultural forces. I’m only a hundred pages into this seventh volume of California history and I haven’t read any others. Yet. But this is good information for those of us who hope to live another fifteen years.

If you don’t live on the Left Coast you may not give a damn about the state's past or present. But you ought to. California is the eighth largest economy in the WORLD and we're in dire straits here because, Starr writes, it's the last territory of global abundance. Of plunder, if you like. That means, folks, that the good times are over. Forever.

Not just because of W. Bush or Wall Street’s greed but because we are at the end of empire.

Reset your expectations and hunker down.

Beware what went before

Writing from my old houses opens the forgotten files of memory. What comes up when I look into “New Hampshire”, that darling old Cape Cod in Epping, the first house I owned on my own? (You don’t really own a house if you share title.) Small, it had room for me and my kids, the dog and cat and a pair of guinea pigs, those boring little rodents people eat in South America. Probably taste like chicken, what doesn’t? Oh, and ten acres of worn-out pasture for my mare. All that remained after He went off with his Secretary.

A darling old house, I said. Do I recall stockings hung by the chimney, happiness closing over the wounds of divorce like frosting on a cake? Did we recover our aplomb and move into rosier futures?

No indeed. The events that come to mind are stark and brutal and the feelings these memories evoke are just as strong as thirty, forty years ago. The bleak loneliness of the empty cornfields, the misery of a tangled new growth woods, black as old bones in winter rains. Where was the value?

Oh yes, some jolly evenings by the fire and a very exciting chimney fire where I threw out the fire department and doused the flames myself. Power! In this house I learnt the intoxicating joys of home ownership, learnt that property makes a citizen the fire chief had to obey. Learnt that I could make it alone.

Memoirist, beware. The old dogs you have put to rest are only sleeping between some juicy brain cells. We are all the sum of our days and all the other days of our time here, newspaper headlines, shopping lists, phone calls to people whose names we could not recall even under hypnotism along with the flat tire on a deserted street, the horrible tantrums we threw for no good reason, things we lost, remorse.

Writing a novel must be easier. When those old dogs nip at the novelist’s elbow, she can throw them a little bone, give them a minor role, sleep on it and delete them the next day. Not so with memoir.

Unless you are writing only from the top of your pretty head.

“I grew up in a happy family. Mother and Father did not divorce nor did they bless me with siblings. They gave me everything I ever needed and a lot more.”

Riveting, isn’t it?

No, if you want to write your life, be prepared to suffer the old slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and at the same time suffer the remorse of knowing now how futile it all seems.

First Lust

So much for my grand teacherly theory. Getting my memoir to fit into this blog is like stuffing boa constrictors into a pillowcase. One little distraction and they’re all out. Now I’m not sure I can blog a whole memoir. If you’d like to try, post your ravings as a comment here and let us see if we should shoot it or feed it.
Now, having said that, I feel better. I can tell you a little more about that knee wall house. It was the location of my first lust.
I was ten and chubby. Thick glasses, stringy ponytail. No sibs—not with those parents—and clumsy. Felt large, dumb, always opening my big mouth to say wrong things. I was grateful for the well-adjusted four kids older and younger than I right across the field next door. Yes, field. Middle Haddam, a village in Nowhere, central Connecticut. Woods, big Connecticut River down the hill half a mile away, remains undeveloped to this day.
When the neighbors got hay for their sheep these kids and I played Doctor and Giant in the neighbors’ haybales. That is, we took down our pants and lay on on the scratchy hay top of each other for no reason I could think of, our legs opened the way we did for the doctor. Like babies having their diapers changed. Unconcerned. Being poked between the legs was rather pleasant. Being noticed by Big Kids was even better. But this was not lust, this was wanting to be one the Big Kids.
The older girls, ten or so, I six or seven, were nervous about a Grownup finding us. Which they did. Their mother called my mother and my mother smacked me hard and made me walk home across that field without even my underpants. I was angry, embarrassed, perhaps shamed, for the first time. I began to understand the Great Grownup Secret: Things done with bottom parts were bad.
“Oversexed.” My mother and father were grim. “We must control this.” Serious spankings, tears, vows to never again, but then again a few more times, furtively. Still, not a twinge of lust, just shameful, secret playing at sex.

But when I was ten, chubby and foolish, I fell in love with a younger brother of a friend of my parents, an older teen my mother said was just a dumb farm boy. He never said a single word but who cared, to me he was a god on long blue-jeaned legs. A younger version of Daddy, now that I look back on it. I flung myself into his surprised lap in our living room, right under my childish bedroom with the cowboy wallpaper and snuggled up to his newly bearded chin. I loved feeling his lean body under me. His manly body stirred something in my bottom parts. I ground my ass into his lap. I wanted to crawl all over him.

Oversexed, all right. My mother must have had a heart attack watching me try to seduce him. He was probably horrified. In spite of her fierce scoldings, the hairbrush, even the belt, the farmboy lit the flame in my groin. A flame she could never, in spite of mighty efforts, extinguish.

How to begin a Memoir

Gosh, your whole life: do you start with your diapers? First grade?

Find a structure. Think of three to five conditions of your life for example, as Shakespeare did, and make them chapter headings. Infancy, childhood, youth, young adult, middle and old age.

You can start with the old age and go back or just stick to one category. You could follow a pal or school or your dogs or cars..

Houses make an excellent structure for my story so I'm going to try writing from the Houses I've lived, sticks and bricks which have protected and nourished me.

That first house, for starters, the one where my bedroom ceiling sloped down on one-side to a knee-wall. A knee-wall is a low interior wall, perhaps three-feet high. In my house, two sticky doors in one bedroom wall opened to a very low attic above an end of the living room. The air in this attic smelled like old, dry, raw wood the way a summer cottage at the lake smells when you open it in June for the season.

Inside this dark space my parents parked the battered luggage they rarely used. But one night after a nasty fight where my father's voice rose almost to a shout, Jesus Christ, Sally! and my mother ranted at him about their miserable lives in Middle Haddam, his measley earnings, broken promises, dreams unfulfilled, the usual marital excoriation, I hid with the covers over my head. Suddenly Mom stormed into my bedroom, jerked open those low doors and yanked out a suitcase.

"That's it! I'm leaving!"

Memoir: Rexie

How shall I keep Mother from trying to write my memoir herself? Her ghost is pushing my fingers on the keys.

"Tell them about the time your father brought Rexie home." Yes, that's good story, brave father, sensitive mother, thrilled child. A happy ending story and it takes place when I am very young, exactly the right age to have dog of my own.


Ever notice you don't get to choose the breed? It's only a kid's dog so who cares if it's a mutt or a Wolfhound. Okay, a Wolfhound would take up too much room in that little house in Middle Haddam, three rooms down, three up and a single bathroom. The first house my parents owned. and they couldn't wait to have a mortgage burning party. I was six. And that was the house Daddy brought Rexie home to.


"Sal," he called up the stairs. It was late, Sally, my mother, and I were in bed. Dad had stopped to whet his whistle on the way home from somewhere down at the shore where he taught Coast Guard navigation as his part of the war effort, being too old to join up to fight. "Sal, come down and see what I brought home."

My mother obeyed the urgency in his voice and so did I. Barefoot, we felt our way down the steep, painted stairs into the livingroom where Daddy had a brown and white Walker Foxhound on a short chain. The frightened dog made himself as flat as he could and edged toward the door.

"Oh look, he's scared to death," Mom said. "Now be careful, Reedie, just show him the back of your hand. Let him sniff and he'll know you. I hope," she added, offering her own hand.

"Son of a bitch was going to shoot him,"Daddy growled. "Said he wouldn't hunt. He was nasty, he kicked the poor dog. At that tavern in Chester, you know the one." Mom was patting the trembling dog.

"Water," she said, rising to get it. "Don't try to drag him through the living room. I'll bring it. He can stay on the porch tonight. If he doesn't go through the screens." She put a pot of cold water on the porch and folded an old blanket. "Here." She patted the blanket but the dog cringed away from her and headed toward the outside porch door. "You think he needs out?"


"Nah, he piddled when he got out of the car. Water and a bed, that'll have to do it until morning."


"No, honey," Mom turned to me, closing the inner door. "He'll be here tomorrow. You can feed him and make friends with him. Poor guy, somebody's been awfully mean to him. He's terrified of us and this new place."


Daddy told us the man bragged about how he beat the dog to teach him to hunt but it didn't work because the dog was stupid.

When Daddy offered five dollars the man refused. Daddy insisted and again he refused to sell at any price. My tall father stretched his six feet four inches over the guy who was by then too drunk to argue, handed him a fiver and just took the chain.


By morning Rexie would stand almost all the way up, trembling hard. We had removed that awful chain and now tied a clothesline on his collar so I could lead him outside. With his ears flat back he sniffed and gazed around the unfamiliar yard, found a bush and lifted his leg. Watching me very cautiously, he ventured around the yard, poked his nose into the old barn, then backed out as if he sensed a trap.


There were no traps, no cages or kennels. We hadn't had a dog since Rastus tried to bite my face off when I was two. I don't remember what Mom made for Rexie's breakfast, probably milk toast, our Sunday night supper.

This was her comfort food, hot milk pour over toast with a lump of butter melting on it. Proper dog food would come later that morning.


Rexie let me stroke his tan satin head and his long, long ears. His deep brown eyes were sad--well, no wonder with a master like that. We clucked our tongues and thought Daddy was quite a hero to rescue the poor boy.

In a week Rexie was comfortable in the house, certain his water bowl would be in that exact corner of the kitchen and that dinner, kibble and thawed horsemeat (half a Hills one pound frozen package) would appear every night right on schedule. My job and I loved it.


I loved every hair on his body. The black saddle, the white breast and legs, the white tail tipped with black. For the rest of his life Rexie ducked if anyone raised a hand to pull a light switch or just stretch and he spent Fourths of July under a bed but he quickly learned how to sit and sit up and come and go in the cars with his head out a window, ears flying, black nose wet in the wind. We took him everywhere, even on the boat. He became the darling of village. He completed our family.

Ah, that boat. And Rastus, there's another tale for another day.

What the devil is "Psycho Doughnuts" the world wants to know? Psycho is a small, cheerul, themed doughnut shop--you figured that out yourself, did you?--in my small town near San Jose, California. They bake and sell doughnuts with cutsey names such as "obsessive compulsive" and "clinically depressed". Said items are decorated with way too much sweet frosting and colorful candies. The cashier wears a nurse's outfit and there's a table called something like "the rubber room".


Local mental health advocates, that is, folks who advocate on behalf of the mentally ill, not those who advocate becoming mentally ill, have been on the warpath. They've picketed. They petitioned City Hall to force the shop to change the evil message it conveys to the community that mental illness can be a joke. So far they have not succeded in shutting the shop down.


Beignets? Yum, but not these cloying artery busters. Yet, I wave, I honk for "Psycho Doughnuts" because the MH-ers are stepping on our right to be vulgar, to be silly, to be even a little mean-spirited. Come on, righteous MHers. Laugh and get over your hurt feelings.

If you don't like "Psycho" on a sign, don't go there. Tell your friends not to go there. But don't ask my/our city to shut them down. I don't like pornography or adult video stores that sell them but I wouldn't shut them down. Where would that lead? Censoring movies at the local 7-plex?

Of course mental illness is an unfortunate condition and of course underfunded (who isn't?) but a good laugh is often the best medicine. Sweeten up!

Beginning the Memoir

The first try being rather thin, Just a Teaser, Folks, no one's watching, anyway. The ether must be chock full of our mistakes.

But enough about you! This is MY glob, I mean, blog, and I'm going to demonstrate exactly how to write a memoir about your own life. How boring my childhood, humid Connecticut summers, long sunlight on the wallpaper, no bro's, no sisters. Cat always outside, dog afraid of slippery stairs. How many hours did I stare at the slope of the pitched roof ceiling?

But I digress. Memoir, now! My mother, departed since 1992, stands squarely on the keyboard. She is not smiling! Mom, sit down, you're in my way!