Essays

Hair Blues

June 2012

My locks are gone, shorn on a whim. If only I had read that article, you know, the one in The New York Times, which said, in short, that long hair on mature women is a “mark of liberation.’’

I’ve always wanted to be a feminist, and now it’s too late.

I spent months living with unruly hair, only to decide, in the end, that those wavy strands cascading down the nape of my neck looked stupid. I glimpsed in the mirror and saw the scraggly tail of a sickly squirrel.

I called my stylist: “I can’t stand it! Book me.’’

If only I had done the research first. I always do the research. If I had Googled “long hair on middle-aged women’’ or, better yet, “long hair is the new black,’’ I would be celebrating the growing season.

Instead, I called M, a Picasso with scissors, and in no time my mane was a bob. Don’t get me wrong. The cut she gave me was superb, as always. It is full of bounce and vigor. But it is less; the glass is half-empty.

I was hasty and failed to pick up on the long-hair trend sweeping the country, though I did notice that Hillary was growing her hair and accessorizing it, no less, in a Wellesley free-of-frills headband.

I figured Hillary was thinking outside the box.

Little did I know that she was inside, riding the wave.

The 2010 story in the Gray Lady was penned by Dominique Browning, a writer, blogger at slowlovelife.com and mother who lives in New York and on the Rhode Island coastline, hence the scratch-and-you-will-find Little Rhody connection.

She is pushing 60 and proudly sports long hair, not the kind that simply brushes her broad shoulders. No, we’re talking hair “long enough for a ponytail with a swing to it…Long enough to braid.’’ Her agent thinks she’s “hiding’’ behind something. Her sister frets over it. Her mother hates it.

Browning isn’t listening. She is crazy about her hair and hangs steady despite all those judgments from people who can’t zip it. Long hair is too rebellious. Long hair is an attempt to relive one’s girlhood. Long hair is high maintenance, what with all those wisps flying hither and thither in a mad dash to the grocery store.

Are these complaints true or false? Who cares when Browning exhorts us to consider the “wonderfully sexy way our grandmothers, those women of the prairie, or concrete canyons, would braid their hair up in the morning and let their cowboys unravel it at night.’’

Come gather ’round the campfire, ladies: Men like long hair, and what’s wrong with that?

Patience. If only I had exercised patience.

Yes, there are many things to worry about in the world today, but, really, even the most ardent feminist, the one for whom personal grooming is a patriarchal conspiracy to oppress women, must agree that one’s day cannot proceed if the hair is uncooperative. Hair is a topic from the board room to the soccer field, from the professor’s office to the kitchen table. Hair is the great equalizer among women.

When I was a skinny little girl, I had a pixie. My hair was so short a grade-school teacher once directed me to the boy’s bathroom. “No, you belong here,’’ she said, gently pushing me in line with Billy, Brant, and Sam. “I’m a girl,’’ I replied, but the damage was done.  I would never succumb to the shears again.

I still have the photo from high school. I’m sitting on a picnic table with my elbows propped on my knees and my hands cupped around a Marlboro, probably the only one I smoked that year. I’m wearing a black Mexican-style shirt embroidered with the sun, red as meat. My hair falls over my shoulders like a tent. Curls and more curls. It must weigh a ton.

Amy had a bob, but she was the exception. Most of us had long hair that we rarely pulled back in ponytails or swept up in buns. We happily wore our hair “down,’’ even during gym. The goal was to obscure the face, not all of it, just the sides, in the way of Neil Young, back when he had hair.

I had long hair in college and in my early years as a reporter for a newspaper, no small feat considering that I was always in motion, often outside, sometimes in front of a burning house spitting sparks. In my late 30s, I decided to go for a trim. My friends said I was too old for long hair. I got a mid-back cut, which led to a shoulder-length cut, which led to a bob. I felt lighter, more swift-footed.

But then middle-age came and a pang of regret swept over me. Were those comments from my elders that long hair looks “silly’’ on older women the musings of ladies who parked the car and cut the engine at 50? I began to long for my long hair and let it grow. And then doubts mounted, and I called M.

If only I had read Browning.

Long-hair foes accuse her of “living in the ’70s.’’ Browning gives her mane a flip and responds: “And why not? I like being 55 going on 15. As far as I’m concerned, we never did get better role models than that gang of girls who sang their hearts out for us through lusty days and yearning nights: Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Cher.’’

I’ll pass on Cher as a role model, but gladly take the others, especially Joni, who is 68 and still has long hair. It’s a healthy gray, and, to steal from her Blue album, as long as a river to skate away on, long enough to make my baby cry.

***

Garden Peppers

May 2012

He’d peek over the fence during his daily walks, until one day he decided to speak up. He had never seen such a lush garden in his neighborhood of asphalt and wondered how he could get a plot of his own.

He asked around and discovered that it was a community garden, a place by the people, for the people. By the spring, Cabreja Aquilino, who did not turn the soil, not once, during his boyhood in the Dominican Republic, was doting over his vegetables like a proud parent.

Now the 73-year-old grandfather is unstoppable. His days revolve around weeds and watering cans. His peppers are green and glossy. He is amazed that he can pluck one in the morning and eat it for lunch.

“If I stay home I do nothing,’’ says Aquilino. “Here, we smile, we wave. We all get along.’’

Spring is here, and so is planting season. The East Side is home to many thriving community gardens, from Brown Street to Fox Point. Now and then, it’s good to look beyond our neighborhood to find out how other gardens grow.

Aquilino’s second home is Somerset Community Garden off Broad Street in South Providence, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The one-acre of land — the site of a former chop shop — is an oasis of plants in a tough section of town.

Nothing goes to waste. Many gardeners grow enough so they don’t have to buy produce in grocery stores. Not even one pea. They often freeze food to save for the winter months.

Somerset is also known for its diversity. Once called a “Little United Nations,’’ the garden has members from all over the world, including Laos, Cambodia, Liberia, and Ireland. Many families are Hmong refugees who resettled in Providence in the 1980s.

Behind a fence smothered with vines are 72 plots of raised beds divided by chicken wire and bamboo. The garden is magical in full bloom, with narrow paths that lead to secluded spots shaded by arbors of branches and faded boards. Cats lurk in the tall lemongrass.

The garden is run by the Southside Community Land Trust, a nonprofit organization founded in 1981 by a Brown University student trying to rejuvenate the neighborhood. With a private donation, she bought a few cheap vacant lots and encouraged residents into turn them into gardens. Somerset was born.

Over the years, the land trust has flourished. The organization now has 15 community gardens, including Somerset, an urban farm that provides food to farmers’ markets, and educational programs. Every year, the land trust holds a plant sale with exotic and unusual finds.

All the gardens are unique, but Somerset is special. It’s the oldest garden and just a few steps from the land trust’s offices. Those three city blocks of green provide residents with a calm setting.

“A garden stabilizes the concept of hope,’’ says the land trust’s executive director, Katherine Brown. “Every year, you plant a seed hoping for a harvest.’’

That peacefulness is why gardeners come back year after year. Many fled violence in their native countries and appreciate the community they find at the garden. They meet for workshops on everything from composting to canning and begin each session with a group chant: My plot, our garden, our neighborhood. In mid-September, they hold a harvest party.

Phil Edmonds, a native of Ireland and a member of the celebrated local band, The Gnomes, has been planting peas at Somerset for two decades. He recalls dancing to Bob Marley turns with gardeners from Laos and Liberian during a potluck at the Amos House soup kitchen years ago.

“It was quite a sight,’’ says Edmonds. “To see these gardeners with big smiles on their faces was so beautiful.’’

Aquilino visits his plot in the morning, walking the 10 blocks from his high-rise apartment. On this day, he unlocks the front gate and enters his tidy bed of vegetables. At first, he planted everything too close together. Sara Smith, another gardener, offered advice over her cornstalks: Don’t crowd your plants.

She should know. Farming was a way of life in Liberia, where she grew up and fled in 1994 to escape a civil war. She grows sweet potato leaves to simmer in sweet potato soup, a Liberian dish.

“My lady, how are you?’’ Aquilino says to her. He holds up one of his peppers.  “Looks good,’’ she says. She lives in the yellow house across the street. Her young grandson carries the harvest back home in his arms.

“You make a garden, you eat,’’ says Smith, bending over to cut plants for the day’s meal. “It’s that simple.’’

One year, she was sick and couldn’t clear the plot to seed. Edmonds sifted the earth for her. He’s the go-to guy in the garden. He knows everyone and laughs often.

Growing up in an Irish village on the banks of the River Shannon, he tended to carrots, cabbage, and potatoes, dug up with his bare hands. A 20-year member, Edmonds is in the lanky guy in a wool watch cap who gives away bouquets of collard greens and plays the pennywhistle by the yellow cosmos on summer nights.

“I get to feel a connection to the earth,’’ says Edmonds. “And I get to eat organic, fresh food.’’

In the back, by a creeping morning glory, is Chantay Kingvlay, a gardener since opening day in 1981. She and her husband, Phan, tended their plot of bitter melon, long peas, and a pointy-leafed plant that is a staple in the cuisine of Laos, her homeland.

A storm swept through one day, nearly toppling her bamboo fence. Edmonds came to the rescue, again. He tied the fence to the arbor with frayed netting, left behind by Phan, who died last year.

“I miss for my husband,’’ she says, under the shade of her wide straw hat. “I come here and feel happy. Garden, garden, are you okay?’’

***

No Ukes at the Table

April 2012

My son Henry plays his ukulele in the morning, before the sun rises, before the curtains open, before the coffee maker purrs. I’m in bed, dreaming of dandelions, when I hear strumming so sweet and happy gray skies turn blue and birds cease their back-and-forth to listen.

He might play for 30 seconds or 30 minutes, depending on his mood and the endurance of his dancing fingers.

Around our house, we call it the “uke.’’ Initially, we used the full name, but that was a mouthful and anyway it’s more fun to talk in abbreviated form. “Where’s the uke?” “No ukeing during dinner, please.” “Yes, the uke will fit in your backpack.’’

If you walk into our house on a sun-dappled day in April you’ll probably see the uke leaning against a fluffy cushion on our sofa, with that full-of-beans attitude reserved for politicians and jazz singers.

The uke knows it’s special.

Serendipity played a role in Henry’s discovery. I took a left into the fudge shop; he took a right into the music store.

“I was on Martha’s Vineyard,’’ said Henry, “and I went into a music store and saw an unusual instrument and figured out it was a ukulele. They sounded really good. I wanted a guitar at the time, but a guitar seemed like you needed a teacher and I wanted to do something in my free time, so I decided a uke was the way to go.”

Most people associate ukes with Hawaii and raven-haired hula dancers. That might’ve been the case long ago, but not now.

First, a little history. According to my friends at Wikepedia, ukes originated in the late 19^th century in Portugal. Portuguese immigrants from Cape Verde and Madeira introduced the uke to the Hawaiian Islands.

The instrument eventually made its way to the mainland, where it was picked up by vaudeville performers, including Roy Smeck, nicknamed “Wizard of the Strings.’’ And let’s not forget the frizzy-haired eccentric who came along in the 1960s, Herbert Khaury, better known as Tiny Tim of “Tiptoe through the Tulips With Me’’ fame.

Ukes took a back seat to electric guitars in the 1960s, but emerged once again in the 1990s, thanks to the Hawaiian musician Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, whose moving medley of “Over the Rainbow’’ and “What a Wonderful World’’ touched millions.

After yet another lull, the uke is making a comeback. Eddie Vedder, the lead singer for Pearl Jam, released a solo album last year called “Ukulele Songs,” a collection of tracks performed on, you guessed it, the uke.

CNN recently reported that uke lovers are on the rise throughout the world, including New York City, where a uke subculture is thriving in bars and restaurants among people seduced by the instrument’s intimacy.

“Ukuleles are the most global instruments in the world,’’ said Ken Bari Murray, who solos during open-mike night at Maui Tacos on Fifth Avenue in the shadow of the Empire State Building. “We like to notice that and foster it.’’

For the record, Henry, who just turned 11, got interested in the instrument long before the patrons at the taco joint.

After that enlightening trip to the Vineyard music store, he parked himself in front of the computer for days and surfed the Web for uke players.

He did not find Vedder.

He found Sungha Jung, a music prodigy from South Korea with a Justin Bieber haircut. His interpretations of popular songs are astonishing. Henry also found Jake Shimabukuro, a 34-year-old Hawaiian sensation who compares uke playing to a long yoga session.

There is nothing like a good music video to inspire. Henry decided that he would have a uke and that he would buy it with his own money. Fair enough. He researched ukes and settled on the Guitar Center in Warwick.

The ukes were displayed by the front door, not far from the Strats, way far from the snares. Henry sat on a bench and strummed, just for the heck of it. He bought the light-brown one with the white edging made by Lanikai.

“I picked out one that was cheap enough that I could get with my own money, but would also fit my beginner level,’’ he said. “At the time, becoming a professional was not on my mind.’’

At first, he was lost. What’s a chord? What’s fingering? How to strum? Again, he sought help with the technology that had propelled him forward many times: YouTube music videos. For hours, he’d watch a tutorial from, say, ukeflip, on how to play Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours,’’ until he felt he had it down.

“The strings started to loosen up a little,’’ Henry said. “My fingers started to get stronger. In the beginning, I struggled to get a clean chord, then it turned into a walk in the park.’’

Ukes are shaped like pears. The instrument is easy to carry to a friend’s house or to the park. Henry brought his uke to his fifth-grade class for “Hawaiian Day’’ and serenaded students while they slurped pineapple smoothies.

What makes the instrument really special is that it only has four strings. Henry likes that; less is more. A scarcity of strings makes it easier for him to improvise and pursue his passion of composing his own tunes, like the ditty he came up with just after reading the morning paper’s headlines about our fledgling city:

I am bored.

The sun is shining no more.

The town is frowning all around.

I think it needs a merry-go-round.

Playground apparatus won’t do. Give everyone ukes. That’ll perk them up.

***

Bad Manners Cancer

March 2012

How does she say goodbye to hair ravaged by chemo?

First, she dyes her beloved locks purple. I mean, really, why not? Any sane person would. Then she strolls through her neighborhood, pulling out clumps and letting them float to the earth like rose petals.

I know everything she wants to tell me about her breast cancer. Every night, just before lights out, I click on her blog, BadMannersCancer (so rude it just shows up without an invitation), to read the latest post about that “sneaky little bastard’’ that has turned her life upside down and proved in the harshest way that life is luck, good and bad.

“It’s so incongruous that I had cells in my body dividing madly, surreptitiously, and as healthy and good and powerful as I felt, I was horribly sick, my body going haywire trying to kill itself…I didn’t have any symptoms. Cancer is the great deceiver, the trickster.”

For most of us cancer is a concept, an illness that happens to other people. We are told (and see) that chemo causes fatigue, nausea and hair loss, but do we really know how that feels. No, we do not. Nor do we know how one’s head must spin when mortality knocks, especially when children are in the front parlor.

To call this blog good is an understatement. It’s a memoir in the making, searing and heartfelt without being sentimental. Oh, did I mention that it’s beautifully written, with imagery that will haunt you and make you shift in your comfortable chair, as compelling prose should.

If literary awards for blogs exist, this blog should win one. At the very least, it should be required reading in every household where self-pity has run amok. What makes the blog even more special is that it’s penned by a fellow East Side resident, a local artisan and 48-year-old single mother of two boys, 10 and 16.

The November diagnosis comes from nowhere and whacks her silly — stage 3 breast cancer, invasive ductal carcinoma, the kind of cancer with “wanderlust.’’ She soon learns that the tumor is large — one and a half inches — and that the cancer is triple negative, the quickest-growing and most aggressive type of breast cancer, a cancer that does not respond to the hormone-blocking treatments so effective today.

“I thought cancer-schmancer sucks, yeah, but I’m tough; it will be a god-awful year and then I’ll be fine. One year. I was willing to give up a year of my life to cancer. I didn’t expect it might want a whole lot more than that. “

The narrative of her early posts fluctuates between anger, defiance and paralyzing fear, a mounting “free floating anxiety’’ rooted in her feeling that “everything is out of control, that I can’t keep up.’’ A flurry of visits ensues with oncologists and nurses. She feels overwhelmed by the new information in her “chemo class’’ and diligently reviews her “two-inch thick, 12-pound’’ chemo binder at night.

Good news comes. An MRI reveals that the cancer has not spread. A bone scan is clear. A CAT scan shows no evidence of metastases. To prepare for chemo, she is “portified,’’ a surreal procedure in which a medical device is inserted under her skin to administer the chemotherapy drugs.

“The procedure went smoothly, but I’m more than sore and I feel like Frankenstein with a slit stitched up the base of my neck. They told me not to shower for a week. LOL. Not shower for a week. That’s funny. This girl doesn’t go a day without a shower.”

To her surprise, the first day of chemo is a “breeze.’’ The nurses are sassy and smart, the chair is comfortable. Five hours of drip, drip, drip. But by evening’s end, she is nauseous with a pounding headache. The next day, she can’t get off the sofa.

“I think I was overly optimistic about this week. I’m queasy and woozy, dizzy, befuddled, confused. My vision is blurry, the lights too bright. I’m tired and teary and just want to sleep. I’ve heard about chemo-brain.”

 She is so wiped out over the next few days she considers lying down during her shower. She has “axe-lodged-in-head caliber’’ headaches. Her gums bleed. Her guts churn. And then the inevitable. Her luscious hair falls out — in one day.

She reports that she has “two jars full of hair, much hair in the trash and down the drain’’ and promptly embarks on her “ceremonial’’ walk in the neighborhood, letting go of the tufts left behind. Later in the week, she instinctively reaches for a comb after showering and stops herself, blaming “old habits.’’

“I’m afraid of how disconnected from any sense of norm I’ll be when I don’t recognize myself in the mirror.””

Still, through all the uncertainty and discomfort, she strives to be optimistic.

“When I got in bed last night, I was tired, depleted, but happy. I wasn’t worried or scared, or pissed. This is my life and it’s still a beautiful life.” 

Her most poignant posts are about her 10-year-old son, her “love bug’’, whose courage is heart wrenching. He asks her if she “will be better by Christmas’’. With a knot in her stomach, she explains the “longevity’’ of her illness.

One day, love bug spots a sign that says, “After Cancer Every Day is a Great Day’’ and tells his mother he’s excited about what most certainly lies ahead, for signs don’t lie. “Isn’t that great, mom?’’ he says. She wants to say yes.

After months of chemo, she’ll undergo surgery to remove the tumor, and then comes the burning of radiation. Her journey is long. She is asking us to bear witness, and for that we should be grateful.

***

Something French 

February 2012

On a recent afternoon, my son Henry and one of his best buds, Oren, gathered for a business meeting on the third-floor of our house. A nosy reporter (me) had requested the meeting to find out about the boys’ new company, zazogratiffi, a maker of finely-crafted duct-tape wallets.

The first order of business was to set the ground rules: One, no somersaults on the bed when responding to the reporter’s questions; two, no take-back statements along the lines of, I know I said this, but I want you to say that; and, three, no ukulele playing by Henry during the interview.

The questions were fast, sometimes furious.

Me: “How did your company get started?’’

Henry: “Well, everybody was making companies in school.’’

Oren: “Except it wasn’t duct-tape companies.’’

Henry: “Jason was making sticky notes with cool lettering.’’

Oren: “Everybody would put them on their desks so they knew exactly who they were.’’

As so it went for nearly an hour, the words tumbling out in all their existential glory, revealing what I had suspected from the beginning, that zazogratiffi was a start-up destined for greatness, at least in the neighborhood.

It’s encouraging to see a small business thriving in our sputtering economy. In bad times, customers usually bypass the mom and pop shops and head to big box stores like Target. A pity; small businesses have so much character.

The owners are usually convivial people pursuing their passions on a modest budget with no guarantee of financial success. Consider Oren and Henry. They work long hours, taking conference calls late into the night, and they just barely break even, with duct tape going for $5.49 a roll.

Unless you’ve been living in Modesto for the last decade, you probably know that these imaginative 10-year-olds have been hanging out with each other for years. They like to make stuff.  After one of Oren’s visits, our kitchen table is usually piled high with rubber bands, orphaned LEGO pieces, twisted paperclips, broken pencils, and the sliced-off tips of erasers.

On the way out the door, the latest creation, maybe a slingshot or mini catapult, is usually deep in a little boy’s pocket. That creation makes its way into a school backpack and onto the desktop of a 5^th grader equally enchanted by the bones of things. Classroom chatter ensues: Did you see Henry’s thing-a-ma-bobber? How did he make it? I want one.

This fall, Henry’s 5^th grade class was abuzz with the capitalist spirit. Jason’s handmade sticky notes were a huge success, and there was talk of making friendship bracelets. Henry wanted to get in on the action.

One night he was “traveling through videos’’ on the Internet when he came across a site about how to make duct tape wallets. Duct Tape Stuff, created by a college student who likes taping himself to trees with duct tape, was soon on favorites. Night after night, Henry would retire to the computer room with a roll of duct tape and a pair of scissors and watch the site’s tutorials, rewinding on the hard parts.

His first wallet was the “magic,’’ a no-nonsense black-and-green wallet the size of a baseball card. He showed it to Oren one day after school, and the rest, as they say, is history. Oren was wildly impressed and bought his own roll of duct tape.

“I was so amazed that you could take something that seemed so dull and stupid,’’ said Oren, “and then make something so cool out of it.’’

A company — not to mention, personification — was born. Oren settled on the name. “Zazo’’ stands for the first letters of four boys’ names and “gratiffi’’ is what happens when you are 10 years old and typing really fast. Company titles came next. Oren was appointed CEO; Henry, president and creative director. The board’s vote of two was unanimous.

“I consider myself more of a business person in this company,’’ said Oren. “When I grow up I want to be a CEO or the general manager of a baseball team.’’

Like all innovative entrepreneurs, the boys started exploring how to sell their goods online. Henry was skeptical at first, but Oren convinced him otherwise, especially after Henry’s big brother wowed middle-school kids with a purple-and-green wallet customized with the initials of the buyer, still a mystery.

“After that, we pursued the idea of a website,’’ said Oren.

With Henry’s help, Oren worked feverishly to create a site that was both functional and attractive. He took photos of the wallets and together the boys wrote captions to entice customers. The “skateboard’’ wallet is a “singular square with a flip-up part,’’ the “staircase’’ wallet “just keeps on going like a staircase.’’

The company’s site debuted on the web in mid-November. Sales are expected to climb as word gets out.

“My orthodontist is interested,’’ said Oren.

“My dad is interested,’’ said Henry.

Expansion plans are in the works. Seven rolls of duct tape in various colors — purple, green, red, orange, black, yellow, and, yes, even zebra print — are stacked in a corner in Henry’s room, awaiting deft fingers. Henry has also upgraded to an X-Acto knife and portable plastic cutting board that allows him to make house calls.

Since zazogratiffi is a mouthful, the boys are mulling over a name change.

“Our name’s a little cheesy and corny,’’ said Oren. “We might hire a phrase director.’’

“No Oren, we don’t need a phrase director,’’ said Henry.

“OK,’’ said Oren. “Never mind.’’

“We can come up with a new name,’’ said Henry. “What about something French?’’

***

Bullygirl 

December 2011

When I was girl, I lived with my family in a small Midwestern suburb. Our red brick house was nestled among oaks and maples that towered over rooftops. In winter, the trees were bare and icicles hung on branches like the fingers of an old lady.

Christmas was an especially festive holiday. Wreaths entwined with berries decorated thick wooden doors and lit-up Christmas trees sparkled in windows. I loved being inside, curled up next to a hissing radiator.

On rare occasions I left that warmth, usually to build a snowman in the backyard or trek through knee-deep drifts to play Clue at Peggy’s around the corner.

One winter, I was invited to go Christmas caroling. We would walk door-to-door, singing Deck the Halls, Silent Night and other songs to generate holiday cheer. No one else in my family wanted to go —I had four sisters and one brother — so I had to venture out alone.

That wasn’t an easy thing for an 11-year-old from a big family to do. We moved as a unit and that strength in numbers provided some protection from life’s improbabilities. The bully dare not approach our sibling army.

Winters in the heartland are harsh. The wind howls off the Mississippi and sweeps down to the suburban valleys, with no respect for wool coats or mittens. The chill sneaks under layers and cozies up to bones. In the darkest days of winter no one goes out unless it’s necessary.

My mother had to push me out the door. I had committed to a night of merrymaking and couldn’t cancel now. Besides, my friend Sarah was expecting me. I buttoned up my navy peacoat.

Sarah lived a block away in a white house with two small columns that framed her front door. She was the oldest of three girls and her father worked as a reporter for the local paper. He smoked a pipe and tended to an old-fashioned mustache that curled up at the end, making him look like the tenor in a barbershop quartet. Her mother was a painter.

Susie was my best friend; Sarah was my second-best. Some friendships among children are based on proximity, not kinship, and such was the case with Sarah. Despite all those afternoons hanging out in her bedroom listening to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, I knew we didn’t have much in common. She was an artist. I was a tomboy. She wore billowy skirts and flats. I wore jeans and desert boots. We were friends because she lived down the street.

I joined the carolers — parents and a few children — in front of our house as they belted out “boughs of holly’’ and “holy night,’’ making perfect Os with their mouths on the drawn-out notes.

I tried to feign enthusiasm. I felt self-conscious singing in public — after all, I was just a kid — so what came out of my mouth was more of a whisper. My shyness didn’t help. Who were these people? Neighbors, yes, but did I know them?

Sarah hooked up with us half way down the block. I could tell something was amiss. She seemed uncharacteristically silly, poking at her younger sisters, who had come along. Her clothes were different too — a black cape that fit her arty image and made her look exotic.

By the time we got to the Mills’ house I was miserable. I was wearing sneakers, not boots, and my feet were wet. My toes were numb. My peacoat was so helpless against the wind I might as well have been wearing my pajamas.

Still, I proceeded with the sappy songs and fought my mutinous instinct. I sang, but didn’t mean it. As for Sarah, well, she was nowhere in sight. I had lost track of her. Our group was so big I thought maybe she was on the other side and would come out later.

Suddenly, a holly bush, with sharp and pointy leaves that could draw blood from the careless, shook as if a frenetic squirrel were lost inside. Out popped Sarah, her witch-like cape flapping in the lamplight. It came with no warning: a snowball as hard as a baseball hit me in the eye.

Sarah laughed and then laughed some more.

The pain nearly knocked me over, a sting unlike anything I had experienced before. The holly disintegrated into a blur of green. Dizzy with a ringing in my ears, I felt sure I had been blinded.

To make matters worse, the snowball had hit my eye, not my eyelid. Who sings with their eyes closed?

My pride kept me from running home and I pressed on with the tra-la-las, blinking back tears, getting no apology from my second-best, only more teasing.

Later that night, I soaked a washcloth in hot water and placed it over my wound. My eye healed, but not my friendship with Sarah. At a very young age, I learned the difference between a mischievous person and a mean one.

Sarah eventually moved to Texas — or maybe it was Italy. I can honestly say that I never missed her. Not once.

I can’t remember my favorite toy as a kid or a single birthday party, but I remember Sarah’s heartless shot, so much so that I always offer a bit of advice to my boys before a snowball fight.

Never the face. Aim low.

***

Text Me  

November 2011

 I don’t have much time to write today. My phone beckons. I’ve had the phone for a year —  a beauteous iPhone — but I just expanded my coverage plan to include texting. Unlimited texting.

For those of you still tethered to land lines, texting is a cell phone perk that allows you to misspell words on purpose – I cant pik U up – and talk in code. That’s stuff like R U K? a perky phrase my 11-year-old taught me.

It means, Are You O.K.?

No, I texted back.

Unlimited texting means you are piloting a plane in an endless stretch of blue.

I know what you’re thinking. Big monthly bills. Distraction. Car accidents. Juvenile delinquents.

You are wrong on all counts.

Texting is like a shot of espresso. It charges me up. It makes me feel connected to everyone: Diane in faraway Cleveland; Gayle over there on Brown Street; my precious son roaming around like a gypsy:

where R U?

playng ftbll

K. chik for dinr

It took me a long time to come around. For years, I was a card-carrying member of The Resistance, a judgmental grammarian who derided texters and prided herself on speaking and writing in complete sentences.

Silly. Me.

My skepticism of this new technology started on May 25, 2009, when I read an article in The New York Times that began thus: “They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their backs. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.’’

Sore thumbs from pressing a button smaller than a pea! I read on. According to the paper, teenagers sent and received about 2,272 text messages per month — or 80 a day — in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Doctors and psychologists were worried. The phenomenon, the article went on to say, was leading to anxiety, bad grades, sleep deprivation, distraction in school, and repetitive stress injury from too many, What ups?

What really got my teeth grinding — again — were the comments of a psychologist who studies texting among teenagers. The MIT professor claimed that teenagers who text have trouble breaking free from their parents as they mature into adults. “You have adolescents,’’ the professor said, “who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ’’

It’s a no-brainer.

Get the red shoes.

But I digress.

OMG, I said to myself. I will never let my son get a cell, and if I ever cave I will never let him get a cell with texting. He would communicate with me the old-fashioned way — calling from a friend’s house:

Mom, it’s me.

What up?

Don’t say that.

Fine.

I’ll be home at 5.

May the wind be at your back.

Click.

The request came a few weeks before the start of middle school. My son wanted a cell. No, I said, citing the professor’s findings; you’re too young to have a phone. Being a persistent kid, he pressed on. He did the research. He suggested a GoPhone, a pre-paid cell. You buy the minutes for texting and phone calls (remember those) and when you run out you buy more.

I’m a sucker for kids who do research.

The fellow at the AT&T store at the mall was really nice. My son got a phone that sounds like the iconic game Pac Man and I added texting to my iPhone. We were kids in a candy store as we exited the shop. We decided to do a test run over ice cream cones.

hi

hi

Where does all the time go? They walk off to middle school, turn the bend and you’re left on the front steps, waving goodbye. You might stand there for a while, watching the cars pass. You might pick up a twig and toss it aside. You hope they’re safe and happy.

School ended at 2:40. 2:41, no text. 2:42, no text. 2:50, no text! And then it came: im walkin home with Noah. Minutes later, he fired off another: at bahras. Then, yet another: on my way home.

I texted back: grate

I have a bone to pick with the professor. Texting does not impede emotional growth. If used properly, it gives kids more independence and parents more peace of mind. I don’t want my son to text me every five seconds. I just want a hi-it’s-me text after school and an on-my-way-home text after football.

The truth is I’m the one who’s texting compulsively. I think it’s the greatest invention since tights. I knew I had really cracked up when I texted my friends to let them know I was a convert and that henceforth I could be reached in this way.

text me! I wrote.

When no one responded, I texted again.

pretty pls

***

Pawn Stars  

 October 2011

 Pawn Stars is making us happy.

There is nothing naughty about the program other than the title, which is too predictable to be offensive. It’s good family entertainment. My 10-year-old son Henry, a student of contemporary culture, discovered the show during one of his channel surfing exercises.

I walked into the TV room and there he was, sitting in the brown chair, remote in hand, baby blue eyes riveted to Rick “The Spotter’’ Harrison delivering the news (“first the good, then the bad’’) to the convivial woman from the Catholic charity: Yes, that’s Al Pacino’s loopy inscription in your leather-bound script of The Godfather, but, sorry, I’m only giving you 400 bucks. Tops.

“Golly,’’ the woman said. “I can do better at the church auction.’’

When the show was over Henry asked me if I wanted a peanut and then he asked me if I wanted to watch a second episode. (All of the 100-plus shows are available to us through On Demand.) By evening’s end, we had watched four 30-minute episodes, all reruns. Oh, just one more. We even ate our dinner in the TV room. I won’t apologize.

The show is what’s called in the biz a reality show. It’s probably scripted, but I don’t care.

The series is filmed in Vegas at the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, a family-owned joint run by “The Spotter” and his dad, also known as “The Old Man,’’ a rascal with well-tended hair and snake eyes who can spot a fake Rolex a mile away. Their sidekick is Chumlee, a lovable young man who seems guileless, but is not. Everyone wears black.

It’s no surprise that in this sputtering economy the show is a hit. It’s the highest-rated show on the History Channel and among the top 10 shows watched by men. I can only imagine the joy that comes from strolling into a Vegas pawn shop and discovering that that rusty buck knife from your great-great uncle Alf will pay the heating bill.

After our marathon session in front of the TV that evening, Henry asked if we had goods to pawn. Hmm. I thought about all that stuff I lugged home from my mother-in-law’s house on a dark and stormy night five years ago. Carol never threw anything out and neither did her mother, brother, uncle and aunt, so we own a truckload of fetching oddities that might interest Gold & Silver.

My husband’s uncle, Gordon Alf Lawrence Johnson, was a huge fan of the funny pages, especially the Peanuts comic strip, which he read up until the day he died, at 83.  He took great pleasure in giving Peanuts books and memorabilia as presents on birthdays and all the major holidays.

We have a dozen or so musty-smelling books by Charles Schulz from the 1960s, as well as a porcelain bobblehead of my favorite depressive, Charlie Brown. Time has been kind to him. He has a rough patch on his big head, but otherwise is in remarkable shape. The red tag on the bottom of his stand says, “Fine Quality Lego. Japan.’’

His age is a mystery. I’m guessing 50, but I’ll leave it up to Vegas to figure out.

There’s nothing better than a good signature. Reagan might titillate some; others go for Pauly D, the greasy North Providence deejay and star of the mega-hit reality show, The Jersey Shore. In our house we have Douglas Fairbanks, and his wife, Mary Pickford. In the 1920s, Fairbanks and Pickford were the Brangelina of Hollywood. Their Beverly Hills mansion was called Pickfair.

We are in possession of five signed photos of the stars. They came to us through Carol, who received them from her mother, Sophie Johnson. Sophie’s husband, Capt. Peder August Johnson, was a tanker captain for Esso, now Exxon, from 1920 to 1943.

Family lore has it that he befriended the actors when his ship was docked in Long Beach, California, for a few days. Maybe they had a few drinks together. Captain Johnson, as smitten with the couple as the rest of the country, asked for autographs.

A few weeks later, Sophie received a package in the mail at her house in Smithfield — Rhode Island, that is. “To the nautical Johnsons and their tiny crew – Best wishes from Douglas Fairbanks, 1927,’’ the mustachioed swashbuckler wrote, referring to Peder and Sophie Johnson’s three children, who, in addition to Carol and Gordon, also included Stanley.

(Sadly, Capt. Johnson lost his life in June, 1943, when his ship, the Esso Gettysburg, was torpedoed by a German U-Boat off Savannah, Georgia, during WWII. We still have the telegram notifying Sophie of the tragic news.)

Then there is the fine but gloomy art from the aforementioned Stanley. In the early 1950s, Stanley, a graduate of Brown University and raconteur fluent in Russian, worked as a reporter for the Associated Press in Moscow. When he returned home he brought back lithographs of barges on a foggy Volga River.

What about my husband’s Great Aunt Gertrude’s glass knife. Or his Great Uncle Harry’s charming six-inch wooden ruler from the “Providence Electric Blue Printing Co., 86 Weybosset St., Providence, R.I. Established 1905.’’

What about that elegant amber cigarette holder, still in its red leather case. The chrome flour sifter from Benny’s with the 68-cent price tag intact. The wooden boomerang from Australia. The armadillo basket — too dreadful to reveal details in a public venue.

Maybe there’s interest in my husband’s collection of racetrack programs and losing pari mutuel tickets from Lincoln Downs, Narragansett Park, Hialiah Park, Marshfield Fair, and AK-SAR-BEN, which is Nebraska spelled backwards, a fun fact grasped only by those who know the difference between a filly and a colt.

The Vegas boys look like a betting bunch, but, who knows, maybe they don’t play the horses. If that’s the case, we’ll go elsewhere. Surely Saratoga has a pawn shop.

***

Close Call  

 September 2011

Up, up and away, and here we go over amber waves of grain and purple mountains, majestic and utterly American at 10,000 feet. They are down there, where I want to be, but it’s too late.

I’m stuck.

I am surrounded by passengers gabbing about their great aunt in Kansas or happily munching on stale peanuts in between sips of flat Coke.

I’ve got the jitters.

I am double crossing my fingers and asking the Hound of Heaven to delay the inevitable. I have that tingly feeling in my belly that comes from sheer terror. I dig deep into the front pocket of my jeans and rummage around for a tiny white pill. My sweet lady. A valium. I don’t even ask for water.

I love to sing, but I hate to fly.

A long time ago, I didn’t mind zipping through the air at 580 miles per hour in an aluminum tube with low ceilings and cramped bathrooms. I flew alone from my hometown of St. Louis to the Delaware coast when I was a mere 9 years old to spend the summer with a friend and never panicked during the three-hour flight. The breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage was delicious.

But then along came that train wreck and the sky turned from Robin egg’s blue to gunbolt gray. The deadly experience made me realize that those big objects that take you places and the people who drive them are imperfect.

Flashback to the winter of 1987: After visiting my sister and her husband in Washington D.C. for the New Year, I boarded Amtrak’s Colonial to Connecticut, where I lived during my early months working as a reporter for The Providence Journal.

The train was packed with holiday travelers, so I ended up sitting in a rear car in a seat next to a window. We left around noon, and I remember thinking that I should go to the café car to get a cup of coffee to perk up for the six-hour ride.

But the crowd was thick, and I decided to stay put.

Less than an hour later, just outside Baltimore, the train jolted to a stop. The lights flickered and then went out. I heard a deafening screech. I lunged forward, hitting my head and leg on the seat in front of me.

I got up to investigate and bumped into a man with a bloody gash across his forehead. I ran outside and screamed for help and soon realized the enormity of what had happened. The cars in front were piled on top of each other in a horrific pile of twisted metal.

Passengers, most with awful wounds, were walking around in a daze. Residents living in tiny West Twin River heard the blast from their houses and ran to the track to pull people from the burning wreckage.

I was one of the lucky ones. My decision to sit in back and to forgo coffee probably saved my life. It was one of the worst crashes in Amtrak’s history. Fifteen people — many of whom were in the café car — were killed, as well as an Amtrak engineer and café worker. Hundreds of the 600 passengers were injured.

I stayed in the town for four days, sleeping in a family’s house near the track and filing stories to the Journal. I also took photos that ran all over the world. Back then, there was no such thing as a laptop. I dictated my articles over the phone to the newsroom:

Passengers with bloody foreheads and swollen eyes called out for loved ones still trapped inside. “My husband went to get some food,’’ one woman said, weeping and pacing frantically. Some gathered on a road nearby, clinging to each other with their heads bowed. A train conductor, his face splattered with blood, sat on the ground with his legs splayed out in front of him and  a blanket over his shoulders. He stared ahead vacantly. A woman held his hand.

I even received treatment for my wound: a gash on my leg.

Rescue workers soon figured out what had caused the crash. Moving at more than 100 mph, the Colonial had rammed three Conrail locomotives that had run a caution light and failed to slow down.  Months later, the Conrail engineer admitted to smoking marijuana and eventually served time in prison for his role in the crash.

Traveling for me has never been the same.

It took a decade before I would ride a train again. Even now, when a train speeds up, I clutch the arm rests and count the minutes until we arrive — safely — at our next stop. I always sit in a rear car, and I try my best not to get up while the train is moving. I refuse to go to the café car. Can you blame me?

Flying is a challenge too. When the pilot hits the brakes on the runway my back presses against the seat and, for a moment, I feel like I’m on the Colonial again, speeding down the track. Will we make it?

Minutes after the collision, I met Eric, a 23-year-old neighbor who rushed from his house to help. I slept on a hide-a-bed in his parents’ finished basement for days while I reported the story.

Back home weeks later, Eric wrote me a letter saying that he was having anxiety attacks and nightmares. He said his life would never be the same. “The trains give everyone the chills when the whistle blows,’’ he wrote in his loopy handwriting. “The feeling is a tense feeling like you might feel when you hear a car slam on its brakes just before an accident or in a close call.’’

He told me he was going to be an architect.

I wonder if he made it.

I wonder.

***

Weekly Yoga Pose  

 July 2011

I’m sorry to admit that I know Maria and Arnold have split. Maria grew tired of Arnold’s womanizing, which included fathering a child with a household maid and, even worse, groping, a truly detestable offense. (Hands off fellows!)

I know about this celebrity breakup because it was on the front page of the greatest newspaper in the world, just below a story about those courageous rebel fighters in Libya getting blown to bits by pro-Gadhafi forces.

The Shriver-Schwarzenegger story was an all-time low for The New York Times. Mixing the trivial with death makes my stomach turn.

But these are tough times for daily papers.

With a decline in the number of people reading newspapers (or anything involving the printed word), editors across the country are scrambling to sell their product. Hence we see drivel.

We see stories about Angelina’s bump — not.

We see stories about Pippa’s slinky dress.

We see the weekly yoga pose.

The worst example of this vacuous journalism is a new column in the Times called What I Wore. Women prattle on in exhaustive detail about the clothes they wore during a week in their hectic lives, what with all those gallery openings and charity dinners. No detail is spared.

I nearly dozed off reading a recent post by Amanda Hearst, a 27-year-old editor for Marie Claire magazine: I was still kind of groggy from being in Europe for the shows, so I woke up trying to figure out a way to incorporate flats into my outfit. I just can’t deal with heels anymore. So I put on black Chanel boots over ribbed DKNY tights and a blue and white batik-print Zara tulip skirt with an ivory short-sleeved turtleneck sweater from Michael Kors. I headed to a Core Fusion class at Exhale, for which I wore black Lululemon leggings with a white American Apparel tank top.

Let’s all take a deep breath for Amanda.

So many choices. What to do?

If it’s any consolation, I, too, have had it with heels. It’s impossible to herd 11 boys off the playground wearing my black grosgrain Kate Spade pumps with 6-inch glitter spikes that light up a room when I make an entrance. Fed up, I chucked the shoes one day into the forest behind Patterson Park, where they sit today among a bed of lilies.

What I Wore should be called What A Bore.

I don’t care about Miu Miu flats or Jimmy Choo totes or Akris shirtdresses with blue watercolor prints of Capri on them. Most days I look like I just stepped off the midnight train from Fargo, North Dakota. My beloved uniform consists of cords, clogs, and a turtleneck, which I wear year-round except in August, sadly, the only warm month in New England.

Clothes are not a big priority in our house. My two young sons usually wear the first thing they touch in their dresser drawer, usually a stained Red Sox T-shirt and jeans roughed up at the knees. Now and then, I encourage them to put on a clean shirt for church. That pleading is inevitably met with, “Mom, I’m not changing. It’s my life.’’

I’ve taught them well.

When did this obsession with clothes begin? Sure, some grown-ups have always enjoyed getting dolled up, even for a trip to the market. But over the years this preoccupation with dress has trickled down to the masses, most notably to teens and young adults (like Amanda), who spend far too much time and money worrying about the way they look. Do they really need those $250 Ugg boots for a math class?

When I was kid we wore jeans, flannel shirts, and desert boots. We wore peacoats in the winter and cut-offs in the summer. Cheerleaders were the only ones who wore lime-green Pappagallo flats and plaid wool skirts with big safety pins on the side.

My advice to all, young and old alike, is to resist the temptation to be stylish. Do not search for your aesthetic. If we all dressed like slobs — jeans, comfy tops, shoes with no elevation — imagine how much time we’d save, not to mention money. A boardroom of ladies and gents in Levis!

To help others make the switch to simplicity, I’ve started my own blog about attire.

I rolled out of bed feeling achy all over so I decided to wear clothes that barely touch my body. I retrieved from the banister my black cotton sweats from Bob’s that say, “Sweet Princess’’ on the snug part. My sons were appalled by my choice and begged me to change. I did.

I put on my black cords from GAP and discovered that, to my dismay, they had a large white spot on the right knee, marred during a tub cleaning with Clorox-laced Soft Scrub. I called my best friend in Cleveland and she suggested coloring the spot with a black marker. Brilliant idea. Go Indians!

As usual, it was freezing in our house, so I put on my pink striped long-sleeved undershirt from the Layabout Laura line and a gunbolt gray turtleneck from LLBean. I peeked out the window. Torrential rain. I would need more. I picked up off the floor my two-tone sunset-orange fleece jacket from Ocean State Job Lot and a marine blue puffer coat I found in a box on our front steps one winter morning with the note, “Return to Building 19 if too small.’’

I usually get dressed in 15 seconds, but today it only took four.

My sons said, “You look great, Mom.’’

I said, “Thanks guys.’’

  

***

Critters  

May 2011

A few weeks ago, my son and I pulled into our driveway and discovered a mouse attempting to mount our stone wall. He was up on his hind legs, poking his whiskered nose into an airy crevice, oblivious to the headlights showcasing his feats. He looked well-fed, but not plump. His coat was shiny — another sign of good health — and he seemed perky. He reminded me of a Drew, the convivial high school quarterback who shows up at the party with a keg of beer.

“Look,’’ I said to Peder. “A mouse.’’

He got all jittery and wondered whether he should tiptoe or bolt into the house.

“Oh please,’’ I said. “It’s just a mouse.’’

Peder knew, of course, what we all know: If you have one mouse you have a dozen and they are all scurrying around your grounds, sniffing their way through pin-size openings in your ancient windows to reach the trash can, stinky from those pitiful kidney beans you tossed out the night before.

Honestly, I can’t get too uptight about mice. Spring has sprung. This is the East Side. The critters are out.

I dare any East Sider to come forward who has not had a harrowing experience with a wild thing. Every spring, I hear stories about the frenetic squirrel with the bad fur that sprinted through an open kitchen door or the loony bat that mistook the boudoir for a dank cavern.

The woodsy town of Foster probably has a lot of critters, but I suspect the men up there, in their steel-toe boots and flannel shirts, catch the creatures themselves, probably with leftover shiners. Around here, we call the experts for help. We call Critter Control, known affectionately at our house as CC. The guys — always guys — race over with their putty guns, ladders, and nets to calm us. You will depart with thousands before they drive off.

My earliest memory of a critter was back in ’02, when Peder and his younger brother, Henry, were still in diapers. I was nodding off when I heard a rapping inside my chamber walls. I didn’t think much of it, until I heard it again the following night and the night after that. The next morning, I called CC.

Dave was a gentleman. I described the noise — “tiny claws on a treadmill’’ — and he asked me to direct him to the backyard. He winced when he looked at the top of a picnic table. “Bat *$%!’’ he said. The news was not good: Bats in the belfry. He eyed Peder and Henry waddling around in their Pampers and casually tossed out a word guaranteed to instill panic: rabies.

“Cream in your coffee?’’ I asked.

He caulked a few holes in the eaves, covered the vents with wire, and disposed of eight  dead bats that he said had “mummified’’ in our hot and still attic — thank you Dave for that tidbit.  I don’t remember the exact cost of the job, but I do recall that it was more than the tangerine-orange Golf I bought in 1986 from an environmental lawyer who lived on Long Island.

Later in the week, I called my friend Denise to apologize. During a visit years earlier, she claimed that she had been jolted awake by a bird fluttering around her face in the middle of the night. “Sure,’’ I said dismissively, certain she’d had a bad dream. Thanks to Dave, the truth suddenly revealed itself: Denise’s bird was a bat.

Another time, I was lying on the sofa and noticed a bump moving swiftly under the insulation on our water pipes. I screamed, but by the time my sons and husband arrived the bump was gone and no one believed me.

I called CC anyway. Dave rushed over with soothing words, assuring me that, no, it was not a rat; more likely a mouse. I can deal with a mouse. A rat would’ve sent me over the edge and into a hotel. Dave inspected the house from top to bottom and then did something in the basement that would not go over well with the PETA people.

My most disturbing encounter with a critter involved squirrels. We have two century-old towering silver maples in our backyard that squirrels inhabit throughout the year, nesting inside the gutted out parts of the trees and frolicking like schoolboys amid the branches.

Years ago, I was playing in the yard with my sons, still toddlers, and a squirrel fell from a branch and landed at my bare feet, plop. It died instantly. I am skittish when it comes to dead squirrels, so I called the nearest male relative, Great Uncle Gordon, who ended his gin game prematurely to provide assistance. He showed up with his Uncle Alfie’s wood-handled shovel and nudged the squirrel into a trash bag, which, mercifully, he took home.

A few weeks later, the same thing happened. This time, I performed the grisly task myself.

Not all critters are a nuisance.

Take Rob, our raccoon. He lives inside the maple so close to our house we can practically pet his snout from our third-floor window. He emerges at dusk when he smells the bacon sizzling on the skillet and at dawn when the boys are getting ready for school.

One morning, we saw Rob and his significant other, Rachel, scaling the tree together, strolling back to their nest, a picture of domestic contentment. Henry snapped a photo and took it to school. He wowed his classmates with our new neighbors. Pretty soon, we saw little ones peeking from the nest. Babies!

I did not call CC.

After all, I’m a sucker for moms.

***

Well Done    

April 2011

Not long ago, my son Peder walked down to the neighborhood convenience store with a buck fifty in his pocket to buy candy. Instead of taking a right at the corner, he went straight, past the mailbox and bank, and ended up at an upscale market that sells fine meat and fish, as well as pastrami sandwiches.

He’d been in the shop before, usually for a breakfast of Belgium waffles, but this time he strolled up to the meat counter and directed his queries to a butcher, bedecked in a white apron tastefully stained with, well, whatever.

“Got any scallops?’’ Peder asked.

The butcher seemed surprised. Maybe he didn’t hear right. It’s not every day that a kid walks into your shop and asks for scallops. A bag of chips, sure, but raw shellfish? The butcher plopped a few slimy chunks into a plastic container and weighed them. The cost was far more than Peder could afford.

“All I have is a dollar fifty,’’ said Peder.

“What are you?’’ said the butcher. “A comedian.’’

First, let me apologize to the butcher. My 11-year-old was not mocking you. He spoke the truth. On that brisk afternoon in February, his pockets were not deep.

Second, his desire for scallops was as sincere as his desire to play middle infield for the UCLA Bruins.

He is not a comic. He is a cook. Actually, he is the sous chef, a fancy way of saying that he’s second in command in our kitchen, my husband being the executive chef. I am noticeably absent from the lineup.

I have the same relationship with cooking as I do with the makeup counter at Nordstrom. I know I should go there for a short tutorial, but I’m not going to do it. I can’t muster the interest.

Cooking skills are inherited, passed down through the gene pool. They also have a visual component. If you grew up seeing a parent stir the pot, chances are you’ll do the same. My mother didn’t like to cook and neither did her mother, so it’s no surprise I turned out the way I did.

I make no apologies and neither does my mom. Peggy spent a lot of time at home with her six kids, but she was not domestic. She mixed whites and colors and dusted with a wet paper towel now and then. We still joke about how I walked down the street to ask Mrs. Doxsie to sew a button on my shirt.

My husband was fully aware of my ineptness in the kitchen when we got married. Thankfully, he is a great cook and took over those duties, especially after the birth of Peder and his younger brother, Henry.

A typical evening in the baby years: I’m upstairs trying to put Henry to sleep while Peder and his dad are in the kitchen preparing a feast. One of my favorite childhood photos is of Peder, then 3, standing on a chair with a plump black olive stuck on the tip of his pointer finger.

Peder would toss greens and peel potatoes and gab with his dad about this and that —  how to get to the heart of an artichoke, the rising price of fuel oil, Tonka fire trucks — unaware that a passion for cooking was taking root while the pork chops festooned with capers sizzled in the frying pan.

One thing led to another and pretty soon Peder’s birthday list included can openers and wooden spoons and cookbooks, which he happily devoured, including the latest, the 397-page Good Eats by celebrity chef Alton Brown, who hosts a TV show by the same name.

I am thrilled Peder has assumed the No. 2 spot. When my husband has to work late, I simply cede the kitchen to the Little Man, who specializes in whipping up meals with what’s available in the frig and pantry. No need to rush out for ginger root.

During meal preparation, Peder is a whirling dervish, spinning from stove to cutting board, measuring, slicing, stirring, tasting, and stopping every so often at Good Eats yawning on the table.

Why do you like to cook? I asked one day.

“When people eat my food they’re happy,’’ Peder said. “I like making people happy.’’

Earlier this month, with my husband absent, Peder planned the meal. At first, he selected cheeseburgers and fries, but scrapped that after inspecting the meat, which had been sitting in the freezer too long and had the gray pallor of the ailing tubercular.

“This meat is horrible,’’ he said, dragging out the horrrr, as he removed the ground beef from the cellophane. He quickly switched gears, this time to stir fry – carrots, celery, snap peas, and chicken sautéed in two cups of soy sauce. The meal was salty, but delicious. Henry and I asked for seconds.

On his birthday Peder made cornbread and while it did not rise to the occasion — literally — it still had a unique consistency and buttery flavor that proved to be the perfect chaperone for our main course of roast.

Peder takes his cooking seriously. He’s browsing the Internet for a wok. He is also assuming some responsibility for grocery shopping. Good cooks know their way around the produce aisle and fruit stand. You need to smell the cantaloupe and so on.

That trip for scallops taught Peder that good food comes at a price. When he returned home that day empty-handed, I reached into my tin can and gave him a fin. He went right back to the shop and put in a respectable order.

“The first butcher was very engrossed in some other activity so I got another butcher,’’ Peder recalled. “He asked me what I was using the scallops for. I said I was going to sauté them for the Super Bowl.’’

That evening, we set a buffet of chili, nachos, artisan bread, and a scallop dish Peder retrieved off the Internet: Randall’s Ordinary Scallops. There was nothing ordinary, however, about the dish, an unexpected complexity of scallions, garlic, paprika, and salt.

Our guests ate it up.

Well done, kid. The wok is in the mail.

***

Henry B.

 March 2011

I am not a cold person. I am a warm person. I love sweltering days with thick and still air that never moves, except for the sudden breeze that comes in like a rogue wave.

Growing up in the Midwest, where the August temperatures soared to 100 and beyond, I learned to revel in the heat. Move slowly. Slurp popsicles. I kept the shoes at home. Walking barefoot on toasty sidewalks was a family tradition.

Up here, in New England, I go inside for the winter months, all nine of them. I put on my uniform – long underwear, a turtleneck, a sweater, a vest, a down coat – and sit by a hissing radiator in the parlor, reminding myself that nothing lasts forever, especially the weather.

This is not the case with New Englanders. They embrace winter.

Take my friend, Henry B.

His favorite season is winter. I know this for many reasons. He spends hours climbing snowdrifts in front of his house. He’s got a pretty good slider when he throws a snowball. And he likes to kick up the white stuff on his way to the bus stop.

Once I took him sledding. Not only was he fearless on the icy slopes, he didn’t seem to mind that, on descent, his calves were exposed to white-frosted winds. I shivered just looking at him.

This year, Henry took his fondness for the cold to the next level. If I were writing a book called, say, Bold in the Cold, I would tap Henry for the introduction. Don’t let the cold run your life, he might write. You have to brush your teeth, but you don’t have to wear pants.

But I’m getting head of myself.

Henry lives up the street from me in the house with the River Birch. He is 11 years old. He has blue eyes and a mop of unruly blond hair. His dog, a Bluetick Coonhound, is named Magnolia, but everyone calls her Maggie. Henry is crazy about sports: soccer, baseball, football, hockey, squash, tennis, badminton, ping-pong. He is an avid skier.

“It gets my — what’s that called — adrenalin going, especially when I go off jumps,’’ he says. “You look down and everything’s smaller. It just seems like you’re the king of the world.’’

In early fall — September 10, to be exact — Henry was walking to the bus stop two blocks from his house when an idea came to him that was so perfect he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it earlier.

He had recently read an article about a boy who went an entire year without wearing shoes to find out what it would be like to be homeless. As he scurried down the sidewalk to catch the 7:28, Henry thought:  I wonder what it would be like to wear shorts all year, even during the winter.

“I didn’t want to be homeless,’’ he says. “I wanted to do something different. I could have worn a short sleeve shirt all year, but that wouldn’t have been as hard. You just wear your coat.’’

Thus began a pledge that has captured the attention of all who know and admire him and turned him into an iconic figure among his classmates at his school, where he is a pupil in Miss P’s fifth-grade class.

“It’s kind of unbelievable,’’ says my son, Peder, a fellow student. “The cold can be painful, but Henry attacks it in the best way.’’

It hasn’t been easy.

September, Henry reports, was a manageable month, as far as shorts go. The weather was mild; the wind gentle. He fluctuated between his white khaki shorts and midnight blue gym shorts. November, however, proved to be more difficult.

“The coldness was like — bang — it just came at me,’’ he says. “It felt like I was swimming in really cold water.’’

One morning he woke up and looked out his window. The trees were bare. The sky was gray. The wind sounded like a roaring locomotive. isHis pants stared at him longingly. The temptation was powerful, but Henry reached for his shorts.

“I started wearing shorts and I wanted to finish wearing shorts,’’ he says.

During the Thanksgiving break, he had a brief reprieve when he went to visit his grandparents in Florida. Henry used the visit as an opportunity to “de-thaw’’ his legs. The balmy weather was “soothing’’ and “relaxing.’’ He came back invigorated.

Arctic temperatures are unkind to bare skin, and such was the case with Henry. Chapped calves started to appear in December and stayed with him through the winter months. Still, Henry forged ahead. He rubbed “creamy stuff’’ on his wounds at night and by morning his legs were healed and ready to face yet another frigid day.

The East Side is a small community. I know, for example, that Noah scored the winning goal for his hockey team in the final 9.1 seconds of a game on January 20, a Wednesday.  I know that Zack got white Jordan’s for Hanukah and that Theo once put pink highlights in his hair.

Not surprisingly, most people in the neighborhood know about Henry and his shorts. There are exceptions. The other day, Henry was alighting from my car and another boy, unaware of Henry’s pledge, commented about his scantily-clad legs.

“Why are you wearing shorts?’’ the boy said.

“Cuz,’’ said Henry.

Indeed, Henry’s answer to inquiries of this nature is usually “Cuz,’’ which is another way of saying, “Because I want to. Case closed. Period.’’

Without a doubt, Henry has pluck. If he has the determination to get through a winter without pants, imagine what he can accomplish at NASA, Google headquarters or the White House.

“Just do it,’’ Henry says, offering advice to others who also believe less is more. “On really cold days, you just have to put on shorts. It’s not that hard. The bus is heated and so is the classroom.’’

The challenge, he says, is staying warm at recess. Like all great thinkers, he has a solution: a rousing game of football.

***

Charlie

February 2011

My friend Charlie has moved to town. He’s the friendly guy in a Sox cap and red suspenders picking up an order of lox at Davis Deli or sitting at a table at Starbucks poring over some of the four newspapers he reads every day, rain or shine. Once a news junkie, always a news junkie.

His full name is M. Charles Bakst, and if that doesn’t sound familiar to you then you’ve been living under a rock for several decades. Charlie was the legendary political columnist at The Providence Journal, writing three, sometimes four, columns a week from 1995 until his retirement in 2008.

Now he is living in our midst. Charlie and his wife, Elizabeth, left their Barrington home after 42 years and moved in November to a condo on the East Side, over there, beyond the treetops, to a place that will remain a secret. The couple liked what the East Side offers: great restaurants, artsy shops, Brown University, a real community.

“It felt like we belonged here,’’ he said.

Charlie spent his career writing about other people; now it’s time to take a look at his life.

He’ll turn 67 on February 22. Born and raised in Fall River, he graduated from Phillips Academy, Brown and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He worked as a summer intern at the Journal and joined the paper full-time in 1968. He started covering politics in 1972 and never looked back.

He wrote about gay rights, abortion rights, immigrants, baseball, the dangers of smoking, voter apathy and corruption, including in the administrations of former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci and former Governor Ed DiPrete. His holiday greeting poems were utterly unique.

One of his favorite articles was “A Flight to Destiny,’’ a reconstruction of when President George H.W. Bush was shot down over the Pacific in 1944. Rhode Islander Jack Delaney, a crew member, was killed. Charlie interviewed President Bush by phone.

In all those years, he missed only one deadline, in 1963 when he was an intern.

“I was crazy about accuracy,’’ he said, “and the integrity of the column.’’

In September, 2008, he decided to call it quits and accepted an early buyout. He’d had a good run; now it was time to take it easy. He spent time with his three granddaughters. He went to Bruins’ and Celtics’ games. He gave away or sold hundreds of his books. He donated his personal papers and memorabilia from four decades of reporting to the Brown archives.

Who knows? he thought. Some day, probably not many years from now, a student will walk into the library and say, “I heard there was something once called newspapers. Did anyone from Brown ever have anything to do with that?’’

In March of 2009 – about seven months after his retirement – he went by himself to Fort Myers, Fla., for his annual pilgrimage to Red Sox spring training. In the past, he’d gone for six days, but this time his plan was to fulfill a lifelong dream and stay for a month. He even rented a condo.

Several weeks into the visit, trouble found him. His teeth started to hurt, and he had a burning pain in his throat. Most alarmingly, he was short of breath. Through a combination of confusion and denial, he put off seeing a doctor.

But things eventually came to a head. He almost collapsed walking home from a grocery store less than two blocks from his condo. Leaning on a shopping cart for support, he felt like “a feeble old man.’’

He knew something bad was happening. He drove himself to a hospital and staggered into the emergency room: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’’ he announced, “but I can barely breathe.’’

As he lay on a gurney, with tubes traveling from his arms to a machine, it occurred to him that he might die. His reporter’s instinct to document events took over, and he snapped a photo of his face — puffy eyes, pale skin — with his iPhone.

An hour or so passed. His jaw throbbed, his throat burned. He called for help. The machine started to beep wildly. “You’re having a heart attack,’’ the doctor said. Charlie’s first thought: “I’m alive.’’

An ambulance raced him to another hospital, where doctors inserted two stents to open his blocked arteries.

But more agony awaited him. He lost consciousness and awoke the next day to hear frightening news: his heart had stopped twice and he had to be revived.

Charlie still remembers a doctor’s funny way of saying hello: “You don’t look so bad for a guy who tried to kill himself twice yesterday.’’ The patient laughed; a good sign.

The recovery was slow. The fatigue wore him down. Once, he had to leave a Paw Sox game just after it started and when he got home to have a light dinner of a bowl of Cheerios he lacked the energy to slice a banana to put on top. Over time, he regained his strength, partly through participating in Miriam Hospital’s cardiac rehab program.

“A heart attack definitely drives home very vividly the fact that you’re mortal,’’ Charlie said. “At first, it almost obsesses you. It’s like a demon. You have to put it out of your mind and not let it overwhelm you.’’

Still, his life has changed. Pastrami sandwiches are out. Hummus is in. Easy on the salt. He exercises on a treadmill every day. He’s slimmed down to 145 pounds. He takes four prescribed pills a day; his nitro tablets are in a tiny metal bottle on his keychain, just in case.

“You have to tell yourself that you have a lot to live for and that you can do almost anything you did before,  yet in moderation,’’ he said. “You just try to get as much out of life as possible.’’

In the old days, Charlie worked round-the-clock in the newsroom pecking away on his computer, his small tape recorder spewing out the musings of the state’s famous and near-famous pols. Now he happily lingers over coffee and a slice of whole wheat bread, no butter.

Does he miss his column?

“I miss the camaraderie in the newsroom,’’ he said. “I miss the ringside seat at the political scene, but I don’t miss running around, and I don’t miss the deadlines and the writing. A column is an all-consuming experience. You’re always thinking about it. It’s a great, great job, but it’s a lot of work.’’

Welcome to the neighborhood, Charlie. And thanks for all those years of telling us things we didn’t know. Now go have fun. Live.

***

Bluebird

December 2010

My mother-in-law was not a sentimental woman, but she kept everything that came from someone or somewhere: a painted rock from Maine, her brother’s ball of twine, Uncle Harry’s stick matches.

After she died my husband and I emptied out her house and found boxes filled with her possessions, and soon we began the process of trying to decide what to keep and what to discard.

In the end, nothing much was thrown out except maybe a fountain pen and, even then, we were tempted to keep it.

Carol’s belongings were too precious to give away. No one else would understand — or care about — their history. They wouldn’t know that the walnut turned into a thimble-sized flower basket was carved by her grandfather on a sun-dappled day in June or that the rusty, hand-operated egg beater was owned by her mother, Sophie, who made everything from scratch, including her famous mince pies.

One box in particular piqued my interest. The top flap said in big orange and blue letters: Electronic Jet Fighter. There were illustrations of planes and bombs, and one side had a sketch of a radar scope that promised to “fire 1-2-3 rocket guns at moving targets!’’

My husband noticed the box immediately. His paternal grandmother, Ruth, gave him the jet fighter as a Christmas present when he was 9, and he spent many Sunday afternoons on his living room floor flying at supersonic speed. The toy disappeared long ago, but Carol kept the box to store her Christmas ornaments.

I looked inside.

No Christmas is complete without ornaments. They doll up a sad-sack tree or make a grand tree look even more majestic. Unfortunately, most ornaments today are mass produced to satisfy our consumerist culture and bear no resemblance to their unique forebears. Now you’re more likely to find a dull red ball (of plastic), than a hand-made gold pear with a curled green stem.

Carol’s ornaments were relics of bygone days. Half a century old, maybe older, they were all made of glass and wrapped in white tissue paper, faded and brittle. I don’t think it would be a stretch to call these wondrous decorations works of art.

I have no idea who made them, but I imagine he must have been a heck of a craftsman, maybe a shy old man with bad posture who owned a trinket shop on Broadway and displayed his creations on a wilted evergreen in a dimly-lit window he never bothered to clean.

Did Eddie, the neighborhood dreamer, press his pug nose against the pane every holiday season and calculate how much penny candy he’d have to forgo to buy the toy soldier with the red drum?

Par-rum-pa-pum-pum, Eddie hummed. A week with no licorice.

Nothing is truly yours until you use it, until you roll it around in your hands. You can inherit all sorts of things from a doting aunt, but if they remain in a box, untouched, they are museum pieces tucked away in storage for an exhibit that, in all likelihood, will never happen. They are safe, but unloved.

If you have children, as I do, you worry that these heirlooms could break. I am the mother of two spirited boys. The latest mishap around our house involved an antique captain’s cabinet whose glass door was shattered by a football tossed by my 10-year-old son, Peder, who was aiming for the sofa and missed.

I suppose I could have made a good case for keeping Carol’s ornaments in the box, at least until my sons go off to college, but I decided to risk it. The decorations were too charming not to share with family and friends and, anyway, what misfortune could befall an ornament dangling from a top branch, out of reach of small hands.

I took the box downstairs and we trimmed the tree with Carol’s stuff: a reindeer in snow-capped mountains; a gold vase with arched handles; a bell that went ting-ting with the slightest tap; a sky-blue genie lamp that looked like it belonged to Alladin; a pinecone so delicate I was tempted to offer it to a squirrel; a gold trumpet fit for a troll; a bluebird with a tail of yellow feathers.

In all, there were 56 ornaments, some still in their original boxes, including one that contained 12 hexagons in various shades of blue and, according to a sticker on the box, went for a mere 49 cents at McLellan’s, a five and dime at the corner of Medway and Wayland that shuttered its doors decades ago.

Other Christmas decorations were in the box too. I found a package of Christmas tree bulbs, gold, blue, and green, and although they no longer worked, I kept them anyway and put them in a fruit bowl where they looked like polished gemstones.

I found a candle holder carved from a birch tree and a foot-high cutout of Santa from a shop called The Tin Woodsman. I found a Santa piggy bank from the now-defunct Old Stone Bank and a string of tiny Norwegian flags that Carol hung across her tree in honor of her heritage: God jul.

Everything went up, and we celebrated with eggnog and sugar cookies. Later that night, after my sons went to sleep, I crept downstairs and plugged in the lights.

Christmas is a hectic season, but I have always found solace in a dark room at night, staring intensely at a lit-up Christmas tree. The ornaments come alive. The drummer drums, the bell rings.

I searched the thick branches for my favorite ornament, the bluebird.

There she was perched high, just below the star. But she was crooked, and I decided to straighten her. I reached up and touched her lightly. She came crashing down.

I picked up the pieces, but knew a repair job was out of the question. She was gone forever. I put her feathers in a dusty drawer, thinking I’d save some remnant of the past, but tossed them out a few months later.

To this day, no one but me knows what happened. Clumsy mom will keep it that way. If my sons ever ask about our bluebird, I’ll tell them the truth.

She flew away, and I couldn’t catch her.

***

Spaghetti Cowboy

November 2010

A few years ago, I was talking with my neighbor, Tom, and our conversation turned to the topic of movies. It was Oscar season, and Tom and I were discussing his picks. I think he mentioned Clint Eastwood for best actor — or maybe best director. I’m fuzzy on the details.

What I do remember is that Tom seemed to know a lot about the movie industry. He knew about producers, directors, screenwriters, and those actors from long ago with square shoulders and slicked back hair and ruggedly handsome looks that could snare a dame for the night.

I think he mentioned the name Robert Mitchum. I’m pretty sure he called him Bob.

One thing led to another and before you know it, I had a stack of old movies in my arms that all had one actor in common: Tom, better known on the big screen as Thomas Hunter.

If you’re a movie buff, you’ve probably heard of spaghetti Westerns, Italian-made films that emerged in the 1960s and were shot in inexpensive places that resembled the American Southwest, primarily Spain and Italy.

One of the films Tom gave me was The Hills Run Red, produced by the Italian filmmaker Dino de Laurentiis. I watched it that night after my sons went to bed. It had all the ingredients of the genre: covered wagons racing past the mesquite; dark-eyed women with luscious black hair; a tuneful score by the great Italian composer Ennio Morricone; gunfights; dustups; bad guys, and heroes. Tom was the good guy — and star.

It’s easy to forget that someone lived a life before you met them. Maybe the mother tending to two toddlers on the playground tried a case before the Supreme Court.  The old man walking his sway-backed mutt might’ve stormed the beaches of Normandy. The tailor could have been a track star in high school. Everyone has something that makes them unique.

Up until that late-night viewing of Hills, I thought of Tom as my kindly and courteous neighbor who always tipped his cap and waved and who liked to take daily walks down Blackstone Boulevard and play tennis  with his lovely wife.

Now I was seeing him in another light, as a young man with a chiseled face and baby blue eyes and a two-day stubble that he didn’t seem to give a hoot about because he was out to get the lousy good-for-nothing that killed his wife. I was seeing him as a spaghetti Western cowboy.

“It’s Tom!’’ I shouted to myself when he first appeared on my TV, all sweaty-faced with a red kerchief tied around his neck and a soiled cowboy hat with a three-pinch crease perched on his head. I couldn’t help but smile.

By the end of the week, I was something of an expert on the filmography of Thomas Hunter. His movies were simply too irresistible not to watch. More sidewalk chats ensued, and I soon came to discover that Tom, uh, Thomas, was pecking away on his computer day and night writing a book, Memoirs of a Spaghetti Cowboy: Tales of Oddball Luck and Derring-Do. He gave me a copy to read.

He began with his idyllic childhood in Savannah, Georgia, where one Sunday morning, while still wearing his sweetpea nightie, he walked barefoot three blocks to the Savannah River to sail his toy boat.

From there, he charged through life like a wild Appaloosa. He graduated from the University of Virginia and found work as a model in New York, where, on a whim, he auditioned for Uta Hagen’s acting class. He eventually landed a two-month job on the Blake Edwards film, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?

At the end of the shoot, he figured his movie career might be over. But one day he was rushing down a hallway at the William Morris Agency, a talent agency in Beverly Hills, and bumped head-on into the diminutive De Laurentiis.  The call came a few days later: Do you want to star in Mr. De Laurentiis’s first Western? Geez, said Tom.

The role in Hills led to 17 more movies, among them:

Death Walks in Laredo, another De Laurentiis film, this one about three half brothers who inherit a secret goldmine from their philandering father. Tom played Whity Selby, the brother with the smoking four-barreled colt.

Battle of the Commandos, a war film about a tough Army colonel (Jack Palance) who leads a group of ex-convicts on a mission to destroy German-built canons. Most memorable scene: Tom (Captain Burke) gnawing on a cigar butt while dismantling a mine. Tom was well-suited for the role; he served as a Marine Corps Captain the mid-1950s.

Anzio, a film based on the 1944 Allied assault on a small Italian port in World War II.  Tom is Private Andy, who, sadly, takes a bullet in the neck far too early in the film. Mitchum plays a news correspondent.

And don’t forget The Amsterdam Story, X-312 Flight to Hell, Escape from KGB, and The Cassandra Crossing, which starred Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, and O.J. Simpson, coached in acting by Tom for a week.

In his free time, Tom wrote scripts: The Human Factor, a thriller starring George Kennedy, and The Final Countdown, a sci-fi adventure with a young Kirk Douglas and a very young Martin Sheen, shot aboard the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier.

Oh, then there was that spooky book he wrote about the end of civilization, Softly Walks the Beast, which I wouldn’t recommend reading when you’re alone in the house and the only thing you can hear, besides the purring cat, is the dead branch of a silver maple tapping against your pane.

Along the way, Tom met the famous and near-famous. Do tell, I said one day.

Jack Palance liked to warm up with pushups, the one-arm type. “The idea is to get your energy up,’’ Tom said. “After all that sitting around in Spain’s hot weather, waiting for the next scene to be filmed, you get listless.  I’d do pushups while he did them.  Same number.’’

Martin Sheen was friendly. He liked Tom’s Countdown script and told him he’d like to star in the movie. “I remember bouncing 7-year-old Charlie Sheen on my knee, doing my best ‘Trot, trot to Boston’ routine,’’ Tom said.

Tom sat next to Ava Gardner during Cassandra: “In her 50s, still beautiful, still warm and interesting to talk to.’’

Robert Mitchum had a “great swagger’’ and always looked stoned, even when he wasn’t.  During Anzio, Tom shared a trailer with the then-fledgling Italian actor, Gian Carlo Giannini – yes, that one.

“Mitchum had a bad hangover and refused to work, playing cards in his trailer instead,’’ Tom said. “The director comes over and asks us to work, and we have to pass by Mitchum’s trailer. Mitchum gives us the finger for being ‘scabs’. Gian Carlo and I answer with the ‘up yours’ Italian arm salute.’’

Finally, there was Clint, another spaghetti cowboy. He took Tom and Burt Reynolds (“incredibly athletic’’) out to dinner one night in Rome. At a wild party a few days later, Clint and Tom watched as an Italian actor slashed a German actor’s face with broken glass.

“Blood went everywhere,’’ Tom said. “Clint and I are sipping our beers when he turns to me and says, ‘Cut. Print.’ Very cool, this guy.’’

Now we have another cool guy in our midst. Maybe you’ve seen him. He’s that lanky fellow walking the boulevard, moving so fast he’s kicking up dust in his tracks.

***

Rip Van Wafels 

October 2010

I’ve always admired people who cut out on their own. I’m talking about the guy who gives up a comfortable life and wanders into the murky river, not knowing if the current is swift or calm. He has the guts I wish I had. Many of these risk-takers are young. No surprise there. What better time to gamble than in your youth before you’re saddled with mortgages, car payments, and dental bills.

At the moment, one of my favorite risk-takers is Abhishek Pruisken, a 22-year-old Brown University graduate who, even in these hard times, turned down a high-paying finance job in London to remain in Providence and bake cookies.

It seems every time you turn your head someone is hawking a homemade cookie, hoping it will be good enough to go national. The chances of making it big are slim. Abhishek’s could be the exception. He might go all the way. His cookie is exotic, at least by American standards, and much more sophisticated than, say, a plain-Jane chocolate chip.

His cookie is a Dutch stroopwafel, a paper-thin waffle filled with creamy caramel. His business is called Rip van Wafels, a play off Rip van Winkle, the lazy farmer who wakes up after a 20-year sleep to a changed world.

Maybe you saw a stack of Abhishek’s cookies on the counter at Blue State Coffee on Hope Street or the Coffee Exchange on Wickenden. Maybe you bought a cookie and went to heaven – or took a snooze, what with all those calories in your belly.

My 10-year-old son ascended after devouring two Rips the other day.

“These are the best cookies I’ve ever had,’’ said Peder, licking his fingers. “Can we start a cookie business?’’

Rip van Wafels were born two years ago in a dorm kitchen at Brown.

Abhishek, an economics and applied math major, and his buddy, also a Brown student, were analyzing spreadsheets one day and decided it would be fun to start their own business. Abhishek came up with the idea for stroopwafels.

Abhishek was born in New York City, but grew up in Amsterdam, the stroopwafel capital of the world. He gobbled up the cookie as a kid and remembered how his college friends had fought over the stroopwafels his parents brought over from Holland during visits to Brown.

Stroopwafels are almost impossible to find in this country, so Abhishek knew there was an opening in the market. He found some recipes online and got to work.  He made his first batch on a two-burner stove in his dorm.

His cookie debuted on Brown’s Main Green in the fall of 2008. He set up a folding table and made a sign. In only three hours, he sold 200 cookies at a dollar apiece. He had always fancied himself an entrepreneur, and his success on campus sealed his fate.

He would become the stroopwafel king of America.

During a visit to his family in Amsterdam, he spent his free time questioning bakers about their stroopwafel recipes, which they refused to divulge, offering only tips. He also bought a heavy-duty waffle iron used by bakers who take their stroopwafels seriously.

Back at Brown, he perfected his recipe, which he, too, prefers to keep secret. In between baking cookies, he managed to graduate in May. And then a London consulting firm came calling, offering him a job as a financial analyst.

It took Abhishek one second to decide between cookies and consulting.

“I could have gotten a cushy job,’’ he said. “But I am 100 percent entrepreneur.’’

A lot has happened since those heady days of baking in his dorm.

Abhishek’s business partner left the company for one of those cushy banking jobs. Abhishek is alone, but as determined as ever. Consider this bold move: he talked a group of engineering students at Brown into building a waffle-making machine for him that has the potential to produce 200 cookies an hour.

“This machine could eliminate time-lag in the production process,’’ he said, sounding like a man with a business plan.

He also hopes to rent space to make his cookies at the Cookie Place Café on Washington Street in downtown Providence.

Finally, he’d like to buy a former postal truck and turn it into a roving stroopwafel bakery with cookies made on site.

“The smell of stroopwafels hypnotizes people in Holland,’’ he said. “It will be interesting to see if the cookies have the same impact on local Rhode Islanders.’’

Nothing, it seems, will stop Abhishek, not even corporate bullies.

Over the summer, Van’s Natural Foods, a food company based in southern California, threatened to sue him if he didn’t change the name of his company, originally called Van Wafels. Van Wafels is a far cry from Van’s Foods, but Abhishek went ahead and made the switch. Now, he happily calls himself “Rip’’.

Money, of course, is a pressing problem. He needs dough to expand his business and is looking for backers. I suggested he reach out to Brown alumni, always ready to lend a hand to a fellow graduate.

“I’m not going to quit,’’ he said. “I really want to do this. I have a vision that my company will grow bigger than it is currently.’’

It just might.

A video on his website, RipvanWafels.com, is so clever you might be tempted to reach into your pocket for a few bucks to bring stroopwafels to America. Abhishek is the narrator, but his cookie is the star.

We get a geography lesson (Holland is 1/200^th the size of the United States!), and we see all things Dutch: tulips, wooden shoes, windmills, Delft pottery, soccer, and, of course, stroopwafels. We see Abhishek making cookies in his dorm kitchen. We see the waffle machine built by the Brown students. We see a cookie disappearing, bite by bite, into thin air. We see a young man whose dream is so big he has become his cookie.

“My name is Rip van Wafels,’’ says Abhishek. “Enjoy.’’

***

Moon Ball 

September 2010

 This time, we stayed.

We stayed for the fly outs, pop ups, errors and lousy turns at bat, but it was worth it. There was a breeze and we got to see our first moon ball.

Sure, we could’ve left when the Orioles were way ahead during that July 4th game at Fenway this summer, but we learned the hard way a few years ago that it’s not a good idea to make an early exit at a Red Sox game.

Flashback to the summer of ’07:

I’m sitting at Fenway with my husband and two sons, Peder and Henry, then 7 and 6. The boys are starting to fidget and for good reason: the game is duller than a curling match. Pitch, grounder, throw to first, out. The Sox can’t get on base.

We try hot dogs, cotton candy, ice cream. Even a quick trip to the money pit (The Red Sox Team Store) does not satisfy. And then the dreaded words pierce my ears: “I want to go home, Mom.’’

The Sox are down, 5-0, heading into the bottom of the eighth when we say so long to our precious seats — left field, second row, grandstand — and make that lonely trek back to the car. Just before we get on the Southeast Expressway, my husband turns on the radio.

“Unbelievable!’’ shouts the sportscaster, as the Sox make an amazing comeback, winning the game 6-5. “Bedlam at Fenway!’’

You might remember that game as the Mother’s Day Miracle. I think of it as the Mother of All Misses’ Day. I still get a knot in my stomach thinking how, in our haste, we missed that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience pure jubilation at Fenway.

On this trip, we vowed to remain, no matter the score.

It was a sweltering 90 degrees, but our seats were in the shade. Only one problem: There was a pole, not the pesky “Pesky’s Pole,’’ but a towering steel beam obstructing our view. Let me rephrase that — obstructing my view. Being the sacrificial mother and all, I took the seat where it was impossible to see home plate and the pitcher’s mound at the same time.

Turned out that the other fans in section 11, right field, grandstand were a generous bunch. They took pity on us. A father and his son moved over to two vacant seats, allowing us to sit in their seats, which were pretty good. We could see Kevin Youkilis’ shiny bald head. We could see the big hurler, John Lackey. We could see Brian Hall’s rose-tinted sunglasses.

Everyone seemed in high spirits, downright chatty.

“Hot day isn’t it?’’ the kid next to me asked.

“Nice breeze,’’ I said.

“Plus we got some shade in this spot,’’ he said. “Peanut?’’

The game was going our way, with the O’s striking out or hitting ho-hum grounders easily scooped up by Sox infielders, who fired off beauties to Youk on first. But then Big Papi struck out and, in a huff, stomped his foot in the dirt.

“Hang in there David,’’ I shouted.

His next turn at bat, he struck out again. Not good.

I was sipping my son’s warm lemonade when latecomers arrived and we had to go back to our old seats. I was disappointed, but not crestfallen.

Truth be told, I was thrilled to be at a Sox game. Baseball is big in our house. My sons play in Little League, and I’m happy to report that their teams won the championships in their divisions this year — Hot Club for Peder, the mighty Nitros for Henry.

If you passed by our house this summer, you might have heard a loud thud against our backyard fence and a gaggle of boys arguing about whether the side-arm pitch by Henry “The Closer” was a strike or outside. You might have seen that beat-up bat bag from their cousin Charlie on our porch or that smelly baseball under the yew.

A ballpark beam was not going to spoil my day at Fenway.

The Sox started to flounder in the third (maybe the fourth), and before you know it the score was something like 4 (maybe 5) to zip. The Sox couldn’t get a hit against the O’s pitcher, Brian Somebody.

My mind started to drift. I’m a people-watcher, an acceptable pastime at a Sox game. It’s encouraged. What else to do while Big Papi adjusts the Velcro straps on his batting gloves for the third time?

I took an interest in the four guys and two girls sitting in front of us. It was obvious they weren’t from around here. They snapped a lot of photos of each other, with the dusty field as a backdrop, and dressed differently, as if they were on their way to a polo match instead of a grubby ballpark. I figured New York.

As the game progressed, not in our favor, they left their seats more often than not for hotdogs and beer. They were tipsy, maybe drunk.  Glassy-eyed and goofy, they belted out Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,’’ sadly, the Sox’s unofficial anthem, as it blared on the loudspeaker. How did they know the lyrics? Of course: Diamond is from Brooklyn.

Henry asked me if it was the top or bottom of the fifth. He was rooting for the sixth. He wanted to go home. I could tell. The beam was bugging him, but he decided to tough it out, like the time he pitched in the bottom of the sixth (Little League ninth), with the bases loaded and two outs. (The outcome was sweet: A victory pile-up on Henry as bedlam breaks out at McKenna-Frutchey Field!)

I looked at the filthy cement floor. It was covered with peanut shells and the empty beer cups from our New York friends. I wondered why Theo Epstein didn’t put out trash cans. I felt sorry for the poor guys responsible for cleaning up the mess.

My boys yawned.

“My head hurts,’’ said Peder.

The breeze ceased. Everyone seemed to be getting cranky. A fan a few seats down nodded off. Others veered into topics, other than baseball. “Corn is a vegetable,’’ said a man behind us. The grumps started to leave after J.D. Drew made a horrible error in right field, losing an easy fly in the sun. “Can’t take it anymore,’’ a fellow mumbled and off he went with his lady friend in tow.

We took their seats, the best in the house. Now we could see the entire field.

And then Youkilis swaggered to the plate and raised his bat. He looked like a human corkscrew, with his arms held high and legs turned at odd angles.

The pitch was fast and hard, and Youkilis took a swing. The ball disappeared into the sticky summer sky. In the end, the Sox lost 6-1, but it was a beautiful day; we got to see what everyone hopes for. Thanks, Youk. Thanks for hitting it out of the ballpark.

***

Michael

 August 2010 

We talked for a few hours and then went upstairs to her son’s bedroom so she could show me his things. The walls had a fresh coat of paint. She was getting ready to put her house on the market and wanted everything to look clean.

Back in his childhood days, the room probably showed signs of a busy life — history books strewn across the floor next to a half-finished paper on the Bosnian conflict. Now the space was tidy, nearly empty. Michael Bhatia had been dead for two years, and, over time, his mother, Linda, had been packing up his possessions or giving them away.

It’s not easy to let go of the things they left behind after they’re gone. In an instant, a simple object takes on great importance — the cheap Bic pen becomes a treasure, the tattered wallet a keepsake, the hairpin a jewel. Linda knows this is the way, though she wishes she didn’t.  A parent is not supposed to outlive her son.

“It’s not the right order,’’ she says. “It’s not natural.’’

The former Brown University honors student was killed on May 7, 2008 in Afghanistan when the Humvee he was riding in hit a roadside bomb. Thousands have been killed in the war. What made this death different is that Michael was a scholar, not a soldier. He was working with the military under a program called the Human Terrain System.

Launched in 2006, the project embeds civilian academics, like Michael, with combat units to advise soldiers on the local culture, with the aim being to use diplomacy instead of guns. A Brown professor and two Providence filmmakers made a documentary about the program that was shown at the Avon Cinema earlier this summer.

The film features Michael, as well as academics and soldiers offering opinions about the project. Opponents argued that scholars are nothing more than information gatherers for the military; supporters insisted that knowing more about the culture cuts down on fatalities.

Without a doubt, the most compelling person in the film is Michael, who was only 31 when he died on a dusty road in the volatile Khost province. Why did this robust, brilliant young man go to one of the most dangerous countries in the world? I turned to his mother for answers.

Linda still lives in the sprawling colonial in Medway, Massachusetts, where Michael grew up. The house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac in front of a forest bordered by a thriving garden of hostas, ferns and mountain laurels. We sat down in the living room. Michael’s books were on a table: War and Intervention. Afghanistan, Arms and Conflict. Terrorism and the Politics of Naming.

She told me that dozens of articles have been written about Michael since his death; she didn’t know what she could add. “Plenty,’’ I said. “You were his mother.’’ The more she talked, the more she opened up. It was obvious that she adored him and misses him.

As a boy, he liked to read and play with Legos. He was a Scout, progressing all the way to the rank of Eagle. In middle school his passion shifted to politics, and by 8^th grade he knew he wanted to study international relations in college.

In 1995, on his first day at Brown, he hung a United Nations flag across his dorm room, along with a quotation by T.E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia: “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible.”

If anyone lived his dreams, it was Michael. At Brown, Michael “exploded’’ intellectually and socially, Linda said. A gabber with a disarming smile, he attracted friends from all over the world. His brain went into overdrive. Once, a professor asked him to write a 20-page report; he wrote 180 pages.

His future was in academia, but he wasn’t comfortable cooped up in an ivory tower. He needed to be in the field talking to people. After Brown, he traveled to the newly independent East Timor as a UN observer and to Kosovo to supervise elections.

Eventually, he ended up at Oxford University to pursue his doctoral degree. He visited Afghanistan five times to conduct research, always roaming freely, often drinking tea with villagers.

In 2006, he returned to Brown as a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies. Out of curiosity, he attended a military conference on the Human Terrain program. A few months later, he signed up to work in Afghanistan.

“He knew about the county and thought he could help,’’ said Linda. “He had a big heart and mind.’’

His mother wept the day he left. He sent e-mails and called when he could. He was content. He was learning more about the Afghan people and, at the same time, serving his country, which Linda said he always wanted to do. She urged him to be careful. “Don’t worry, mom,’’ he told her. “This is safe.’’

When she opened her door on that Wednesday in May and saw men in military dress, she knew right away he was dead. She ran to her living room to get away; she wasn’t ready yet to hear the words.

The box from Afghanistan arrived a few weeks later. It contained the things he had in his last days. They were wrapped in paper or enclosed in baggies. She removed the items, held them in her hands. This was Michael’s. His fingerprints are still there.

She put everything out on his bed: his compass, his wallet, the dimes in his pocket, two cigars in tin cases that said, “Enduring Freedom’’, a ring of keys, military badges, the nametag from his camouflaged shirt: BHATIA.

And then there was his watch, still ticking on Afghan time. She kept it in his dresser drawer. Not long ago, it stopped, at exactly 2:54. What do you do with your dead son’s watch? You keep it, of course. But do you wear it?

Linda is small-boned, and this is a man’s field watch, big with a black nylon strap, frayed at the edges. That doesn’t matter; she doesn’t care about the way it looks. She could get a new battery, maybe repair the strap.

“He was probably wearing this when it happened,’’ Linda said.

After Michael died, Linda wondered for many months if she should have begged him not to go. In time, she came to the conclusion that a parent doesn’t have the right to keep her child from living the life he wants to lead.

“A mother’s love is strong,’’ Linda said. “But I couldn’t keep him back because I was afraid. He wouldn’t have become who he wanted to be. Do you know what I’m trying to say? Do you know what I mean?’’

***

Howie I Am Not

 July 2010

The other day, I read in the paper that Cate Blanchett, the movie star and mother of three boys, vacuums. That’s what she told a celebrity reporter, who went on to applaud the Australian actress for “staying real” under the bright lights.

“I enjoy vacuuming,” she said, sounding peppy. “It’s a very satisfying noise when you hear all that grit sucked up from the floor and into the machine.”

Really?

I’d bet the family homestead that Mrs. Blanchett is fibbing.

I hate to clean and so do most of my friends. I hate sucking up all those tiny Lego pieces and kernels of dried rice. I hate the way the stuff crackles through the hose of my lousy vacuum cleaner and lands in that bloated bag of dirt and dust. I hate cleaning so much that I throw out dirty pots to avoid scrubbing them.

Let’s be frank, Cate. Nobody wants to clean unless they have to.

It’s summer, and the glossies at the checkout counter tell me I should pick up a mop. I suppose this means that I should launch a spectacular scrub-down at our house, a dusty, drafty relic built in the age of horse carts.

Well, tough. I’m not going to do it.

I enjoy being a parent, but one of the things I wasn’t prepared for is the mess. It’s like falling snow; despite your best efforts to shovel the driveway, the flakes keep coming back. Make them stop.

No chance of that happening. Better to make peace with the disorder than fight it in a war that cannot be won. Too much cleaning can make you crazy — literally.

I once wrote a story about a man named Howie, who was so absorbed in cleaning his cabin cruiser he spent his summer days scrubbing and vacuuming instead of motoring on Narragansett Bay.

He kept 47 different cleaning products and supplies on board, including the Singer 3-in-1, an electric broom that sucked up everything in its path — dog hair, grains of sand, my reporter’s notebook.

I loved the guy and so did everyone else on the spotless dock at the Newport Yachting Center. Howie knew he was quirky, but didn’t seem to care what anyone thought. He reveled in his fastidiousness.

“I like to wash my boat,” Howie told me after doing just that three times one morning.  “That’s the thing I do. It’s my therapy. Some people drink, take drugs, I run the vacuum.”

If I had my way, I’d be like Howie only when I’ve got household tasks ahead of me and can’t muster the strength to get off the sofa, much less buy a sponge and can of Comet.

Take the tub. Go ahead, take it. I’m sick of cleaning it. If you have kids, you know how quickly scum builds up in a tub, especially during the summer when shoes are cast aside to go barefoot. That black footprint next to our drain is my son Henry’s after a hike in the woods.

I’ve trained my eye to ignore the grime until a Howie-like feeling overwhelms me and I get to work. I am Howie for the 15 minutes it takes to make my tub acceptable to my family and the occasional visitor. Job complete, I revert back to my sloppy self until I am seized, once again, by the urge to clean.

As I write, I see sticky fingerprints all over my computer screen. I could reach for the Windex that sits on my bookshelf for a moment such as this, but I’m resisting because my sons’ DNA will be there again tomorrow and the day after that, so what’s the point. “Rise above it,” as my mother-in-law used to say about accepting what we cannot control. Seek inner calm in the chaos. Those dust bunnies under the bed are pretty blow-away dandelions.

A quick search on the Internet revealed what I already suspected about all this housecleaning business: Women clock more hours pushing the Hoover than their spouses. Married women with three children do about 28 hours of housework a week, while men do 10 hours a week, according to a study by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

No surprise there. Howie was truly the exception. When was the last time you saw a man scrub a toilet?

My situation is unique. My husband cooks, so in our division of labor the laundry, vacuuming, mopping and other core chores fall on my side.

I could enlist Henry and my other son, Peder, and I’m going to do that once I sweep up all those crushed Cheerios on the kitchen floor and wipe the toothpaste off the bathroom mirror that arrived there via Henry, who was aiming for the sink, but missed.

By doing the work myself, I know I’m feeding the beast and furthering gender inequality in housecleaning for the next generation of women, but, to be honest, I want the kid mess cleaned up quickly and without the “one-sec, mom” refrain sung fortissimo in our house far too often.

There is an upside to life behind the broom. What the Michigan study failed to mention are the cardiovascular benefits of housework. If you’ve ever lugged a 50-pound vacuum cleaner up three flights of stairs, you know what I’m talking about. Washing the sheets on five beds in one day probably burns up more calories than 20 minutes on a stationary bike. And scrubbing hardened maple syrup off the kitchen table really gets the heart pumping.

During an annual checkup a few years ago, a doctor asked how my family was doing and I said fine and then the doctor looked up from my chart and asked if I was getting any exercise.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “I’ve got two little boys.”

“Oh,” the doctor replied, blushing from embarrassment.

Hmm. I wonder who keeps his house tidy.

***

Flip

June 2010

His name was Philip Slier, but everyone called him Flip. He had skinny legs with knobby knees and wore big circle-frame glasses. He played the mandolin and snapped photographs, mostly of his friends. I like to think he was kind-hearted, loathe to hurt people’s feelings or to impose his worries on others. If he had lived, he might have grown into the sort of man who shared his hot chicken soup with the neighbors.

I met this Jewish teenager through the 86 letters he wrote to his parents from a forced labor camp in Nazi-occupied Holland and which were recently published in a 200-page book, Hidden Letters. I’ve read the book three times and will probably read it again. I can’t shake Flip, though I’m not sure I want to. Anyone who gives a hoot about humanity should know his story.

Hidden Letters was written by Flip’s cousin, Deborah Slier, who is 78 and a children’s book publisher, and her husband, Dr. Ian Shine. Deborah’s father and Flip’s father were brothers, but Deborah’s father moved to South Africa in 1922, long before the war started, to work. In fact, Deborah never met Flip. She grew up in South Africa, and later settled in New York.

How the book came to be is remarkable.

Thirteen years ago, a Dutch carpenter was demolishing an old tenement at 128 Vrolik Street in Amsterdam; Flip, who was an only child, and his parents had lived on the third floor. When the carpenter lifted the attic floor, two bundles of letters fell to his feet. He took the letters to the Dutch National Institute of War Documentation, which tracked down one of Flip’s distant Dutch relatives, who, in turn, contacted Deborah.

I don’t know as much about the Holocaust as I should. I read Anne Frank’s The Diary of A Young Girl in high school. In college, for a course on the Second World War, I read Elie Wiesel’s Night. And, like many Americans, I saw Schindler’s List. But, beyond that, my knowledge of this incomprehensible human tragedy is shamefully limited.

A few months ago, a friend told me that Deborah and Ian were coming to Temple Emanu-El in Providence to talk about their book for a Holocaust remembrance service. The book piqued my interest. I like first-person accounts, and the letter writer was barely out of high school. I found a copy and couldn’t put it down.

Deborah and Ian spent eight years researching the book, traveling to Holland five times, talking to Flip’s childhood friends, and reading other accounts of the war, all aimed at recreating what life was like for Flip during the German occupation. No detail is spared an analysis.

And Flip’s letters, written nearly every day from April 1942 through September 1942, are not what you would expect from a teenager separated from his parents by the Nazis and sent to a labor camp to dig ditches from dawn to dusk. He was courageous and upbeat. And, in a role reversal that most parents cannot relate to, he worried more about Eliazar and Seline than he did about himself: “Ma, be strong,’’ he wrote July 24. “Then everything will be all right again.’’

At first he had no idea that his labor camp, outside of Amsterdam, was a holding pen for death factories. But in time, as other inmates in the camp disappeared mysteriously, he realized his life was in danger. Even then, he was the rock in the family. “Chin up,’’ he wrote. “Be brave.’’

We all bring our personal experiences to the books we read, and I did this with Hidden Letters. I have two boys who will one day be teenagers, like Flip. As I read, I wondered what it would be like to have your child — and your only child, to boot — ripped from your arms, without any hope of ever getting him back. I wondered how my sons would feel to be alone suddenly, living in a shack with other frightened youngsters, away from the safety of home: Are they getting enough to eat? Are they sick? Are they sad? It is almost unbearable to think about.

All the letters are poignant, but for me, as a mother, one stands out. It is a love letter to his parents. “Dear Pa and Ma,’’ he wrote August 23. “Today I’m allowed to write a letter to you again and therefore begin by asking how you are doing.’’ He was “still OK.’’  But the food was “so terribly little for us young people.”

Then he wrote of an ache that, I am sure, consumed him: “Isn’t it a long time since we saw each other? It is already 18 weeks since I left. Do you remember on the platform that Saturday morning? And when will we see each other again?’’

Terrified that he might be shipped off to Auschwitz, Flip eventually escaped from the camp and hid out in Amsterdam in a secret apartment that was not at 128 Vrolik Street. Did he ever see his parents again? I can only hope.

His life underground ended on March 3, 1943, when he was arrested at Amsterdam Central Station, waiting for a train to freedom in Switzerland. His offense was “Ohne Stern’’ — not wearing a Jewish star. He was sent to the concentration camp in Sobibor in Poland, where he died, most likely in a gas chamber. He was a mere 18 years old.

Not only is my knowledge of Holocaust literature inadequate, but so is my experience with Judaism. I grew up in the Protestant church and have entered a synagogue only a few times to celebrate childhood friends’ bar mitzvah ceremonies. I was so moved by Flip’s letters I decided to attend the Holocaust service at Temple Emanu-El.

In the sanctuary, as I listened to Cantor Brian Mayer sing haunting prayers to the dead, I thought of Flip and the tender way he ended his letters: “A big kiss, Flip.’’ Deborah was seated in front, along with her husband. She was soft-spoken, with dark deep-set eyes. Her white hair was cropped short.

Afterward, I asked about Flip. She told me that his honesty touched her. He wasn’t writing for fame or posterity, she said; Flip was simply writing to the two people he loved most: his parents.

Hidden Letters is packed with black-and-white snapshots of Flip, taken in his carefree days, long before his exile to the labor camp. He was always smiling, a wide and happy grin. It’s disturbing to look at the photos knowing that, when the camera clicked, Flip had no idea of the horror that awaited him. “No one can envisage his own death,’’ said Deborah.

Deborah told me she got the photos from Flip’s close friend, Karel, a Christian, who survived the war and is still living. All these years, Karel had kept the pictures in a box at his house in Holland. Now they are in a book for the world to see, along with Flip’s 86 letters to a place he desperately wanted to return to but never did: home.

***

Yousef and Me

May 2010

Writing is a solitary pursuit. It’s just you and the computer screen, often blank or sparsely populated, which makes the experience even lonelier. Of course, when you get something going it can be exhilarating, but the road there can be long.

With the exception of the reclusive writer J.D. Salinger, who reputedly wrote only for his own pleasure in the last 50 years of his life, most writers write to an audience. These people are called readers, a diverse bunch that could include everyone from the barber to the retired judge who orders the same breakfast every morning at the diner: eggs, over-easy, and dried toast.

Every now and then, I hear from my readers, usually by e-mail. I’d like to thank them — all four. Thank you Matt, Joe, and Fred for your kind words and encouragement. (Yes, I can meet for coffee next week to discuss your latest novel.) My sincerest thanks, however, go to Yousef Nagib.

The other day, I was lying on the grass at a playground trying to get some shut-eye when Yousef, who had just crawled off the monkey bars, strolled over and asked what I had planned for my next column.

“I have no idea,” I said. “Why?”

The sun was beaming down on Yousef’s back, casting the perfect light for finger shadow puppets. As he talked, a butterfly fluttered across the stubby grass. He explained that he had read a recent column, the one about my treasure box, and enjoyed it. He said he too has a treasure box.

“That East Side Monthly article ran in March,” he said, sounding very grownup.

No,” I said. “It ran in February.”

“No,” he said. “March.”

I sat up. I’ve written so many columns over the last two years they’re all a blur. Also, my memory isn’t as good as it used to be. I thought back a few months. I took my time. A rabbit hopped by.

By gum, Yousef was right. The column did in fact run in March. I was impressed. Here before me in the flesh was a loyal reader, maybe the most loyal I’d ever met. I perked up. I had had a rough day and needed to connect with my fan base.

“Did you read my other columns?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. He had read three columns, including the one about the joys of yo-yoing. “They all just made me feel happy,” he said. “Somewhere in the yo-yo one, it tickled my funny bone.”

I met Yousef (nicknamed Youyou) a few years ago through his brother, Yaseen, who is one of my son Henry’s best friends. Yousef is 7 ¾ years old, 50 inches tall and weighs 51 pounds. He has lost five teeth, including his two front ones. His lower left cuspid is “wiggly” and might fall out any day. He has jet-black hair and a button nose, but he is best known for his eyelashes, long enough to ski off. He is often the youngest among a gaggle of older boys, which might explain his gentle, reserved way. But make no mistake: he is listening.

One day, he showed up at his brother’s basketball game with a manila envelope. He asked me to peek inside and I pulled out his newspaper, Yay, My Names is NEWS! In between jump shots and rebounds, he explained how it came to be: “Well, I just thought about how fun it would be making a newspaper and passing them out on people’s front porches and they would pay me if they wanted to — one quarter — and after I finished thinking about it I got to work the next day because it was bedtime when I told my mom.”

The following day, as planned, he sat down at his dining room table, pencil in hand. First, he created a cover, essentially a table of contents of “very silly” comics; “extreme and super funny” comics; news stories, and, finally, “much more fun” stuff.

The page 1 article was about something most can relate to, young and old: “Getting Hert at Recess”: “Once upon a time Yousef Nagib whent to school. At school in the morning we whent to recess. Someone named Sally sat on my arm and almost broke my arm. Me and Rose whent to the nurse and got an ice pack.”

To assure readers of his swift recovery, Yousef ran a photo of himself smiling, his injured arm now resting purposefully — and peacefully — by his side.

A comic strip about Carl the Alien, who hates his toys and longs for a simple ball, ran on page 2. The funnies also dominated pages 2 and 3, and a dizzyingly complicated word search appeared on page 4. The last page featured Vegas-style jokes. “How does a farmer count a herd of cows? With a cow-culator.”

I dug into my pocket for 25 cents.

Yousef told me that the next edition of NEWS!  is scheduled to roll off the press this summer. He plans once again to offer comics (Carl will return, but, sadly, it will be his last appearance in print), and his in-depth piece will be about Egypt, where his father was born. I asked what he intended to cover in his reportage. He said he would write about the water god Sebek, irrigation projects near the Nile, and Egyptologists.

“This would be a nonfiction article,” Yousef said.

I didn’t think much about Yousef’s journalistic skills until we met up on the playground that day. After our talk, it soon became clear that he was not only deft in the craft of expression, but that he was also a discerning editor. He pressed on with queries about my next column. I’m a procrastinator, so I appreciated his guidance.

Given that my column about the treasure box ran in March and my column about the closing of Blockbuster ran in April, he concluded that my deadline was looming and I needed to come up with a topic for May. I told him I was drawing a blank.

“Any ideas, my friend?” I said.

He thought for a second.

“Me.”

***

The Block

 April 2010

 It was a Saturday night ritual: climb into the minivan and head down to the corner Blockbuster for a movie. After some debate, usually around a pinball machine that spit out gumballs, the boys would make their selection.

The Pacifier, Mall Cop, Spy Kids, Space Monkeys — they all made it home and into the DVD player, supplying an evening of mindless pleasure sorely needed after a school week packed with long division.

Now that weekly trip is a memory.

My Blockbuster has shuttered its doors.

I know it was a chain, but this Blockbuster had a mom-and-pop quality that made it one of my favorite hangouts in Providence. I loved searching through the stacks (remember those things), reading the case covers of films I wanted to see but knew I never would. Cliff notes for the movie-deprived.

My boys first stepped foot in the place when they were tots, little guys with big appetites for any movie that involved screaming fire engines, talking trains or Macks with fat wheels that dug big holes.

How many times did we rent Monster Trucks?

Matt might know. He was the soft-spoken guy with the spiked black hair who worked behind the counter and was always helpful, a kind of roving, in-house movie critic who could tell you whether a kid flick was good, bad or ugly. My boys trusted his judgment completely.

The scene:

Saturday night, and the Norwegian meatballs are gone. “M-O-V-I-E,” my son Henry says. “Block, guys?” I ask, and off we go. Matt is by the door checking in movies, when my boys stroll in and march through that beeper arch as if  they don’t have a care in the world, and they don’t. It’s movie night. Henry takes out his yo-yo.

“What’s new on the horizon?” asks Peder, and Matt takes the boys back to the new stuff and pulls Alvin and the Chipmunks off the stacks. Peder reads the cliff notes and says this will do and then Henry, still yo-yoing, disagrees and says he wants to keep looking because he’s already seen Alvin three times — two times with Oren, one time with Yaseen. Matt offers another, then another, a Steady Eddie to Crazy Jacks.

Change is not good. If everything stayed the same, always, I would be content and calm. I’m the kind of person who misses the creaky screen doors that slapped shut at markets (never grocery stores), where you knew the blue-haired lady at the cash register and the butcher; his name was Carl. I bemoan the loss of beauty salons, where the beauticians (never stylists) wore crisp white uniforms and sensible shoes and you had two options, short or long.

In my two decades in this neighborhood, I’ve seen so many places and people come and go I’m fairly dizzy with loss.

Let me sit down.

Cheeseburger, fries, an Awful Awful and, to distract them until the meal arrived, a package of oyster crackers; nary a day passes without wistfully remembering my Newport Creamery on Angell, the restaurant of choice for those of us with kids whose table manners were worse than food-fighting chimps.

The food was good and cheap, and you could see the cook (never chef) customize your burger to the happy side of medium. I once shook a bottle of milk during a noon meal at The Creamery and the sorry excuse for a top flew off and spears of thick, white liquid stabbed the waitress, who was forgiving and never made me feel like a jerk.

Who can forget the maze of books at the College Hill Bookstore, messy and cramped the way bookshops should be, but with enough space to hide in a corner — you know, that spot near the rear door that led to an office, up or down (I can’t remember which, it was so long ago). The patrons of College Hill devoured their books and appreciated them and, I suspect, a latte never passed their lips, only coffee, black; please.

An upscale clothing store just opened up at Wayland Square. The clothes are chic, and I’m sure they appeal to a more fashion-savvy woman than I, but let me be frank: I don’t understand them. Am I seeing our future in women’s wear? Peut-etre.

Call me plain-Jane, but I still miss the Gap on Thayer. I could buy jeans, a scoop-necked shirt, a belt, a pair of socks — all in one glorious 30-minute trip. The clothes were accessible, devoid of the artifice you might find in more upscale shops. A lace cuff is pretty, but you can’t roll up your sleeve.

I panic when I think of all the small businesses on the East Side that could close if we stopped visiting them — the used bookstore Myopic Books; Books on the Square; Wayland Square Bakery; Hope Street Pizza; the toy store Pow Science; Eastside Mart, the convenience store where Lily, the owner’s toddler daughter, greets you at the door with her dad’s cell phone; and, yes, the cleaners, Green and Cleaner, where David, an employee, exhibits his paintings of lush fruit.

The Block, I suspect, fell prey to Netflix, the online company that allows you to rent a movie without leaving the house. I’m a homebody and appreciate sofa service, but it’s important to get out now and then and therein lies my reason for missing the Block, besides, of course, the conviviality of the staff, which also included the manager, Michael, whose low-pitched, patrician voice reminded me of the droll theater critic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve.

The placard said “Everything Must Go,” and I thought many times about stopping by to say so long, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I heard from friends that the inventory was weak, like a plump woman gone thin, and all I could think about were people descending on the place for a deal (The Sandlot — a buck), lacking any remembrance of nights past spent searching for a two-hour diversion from life’s improbabilities.

The Block is gone.

Long live the Block.

***

My Box

March 2010

Later that afternoon, I came back to the old house and the porch was gone. The carpenter had pulled it up with a crowbar and the busted-up lattice and floorboards sat in a pile next to the hemlock.

The porch had had a good run, and now it was over. But first, I had to look. I got down on my knees and sifted through the porch’s underbelly of bad dirt and soggy leaves.

I found an old-fashioned glass medicine bottle, a clothespin, a hand-carved statue of the Virgin Mary, and a 1910 penny cut the way they used to make coins: thick and heavy.

I found a wingless wooden airplane with a red cross painted on its side, a blue metal car missing its front wheels, a rusty pop gun, and a yellow marble — toys that a kid in knickers probably dropped through a hole, for the heck of it.

The haul was better than I’d expected, treasures uncovered during renovations at my mother-in-law’s old house on the East Side of Providence. I dusted off the booty and took it home to add to my collection.

My things are small. They fit in a straw box. I keep the box in the bottom draw of my dresser. The only other person who knows this is my son, Henry, who is 8; he likes it when I bring the box out and explain what the items are and where they came from and why I have them.

“You can have everything in here when you grow up,” I say.

“Can I have the box, too?” he says.

I once read a story about a woman who said her books were a map of her life and that she would never get rid of them. Never. Richard Wright’s Black Boy in high school. Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead in college. Raymond Carver’s short stories in the struggling years. Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge in mid-life, and, near the end, anything by Alice Munroe.

I, too, cherish my books, but they are not essential. If they went up in smoke, I would miss only a dozen or so, the ones passed down from my grandmother, Mimi, and my mother, Peggy.

And anyway, isn’t a bookshelf really just a vanity or, as the poet Billy Collins says, “an elaborate announcement of one’s literary credentials.” Does the world really need to know that you read One Man’s Meat?

When the fire alarm rings in my house, I’m rushing to my bottom drawer. My things in my box are my map, not to mention my moral compass; without them, my memories would be cloudy and, in some cases, simply lost. My things remind me of where I was, back then.

I’ve always liked small things.

When I was a kid, I decorated my shelf with knickknacks I bought with babysitting money.

A buck and I was ready for a trip, alone and on foot, to Famous-Barr, where down the escalator I went to the bargain basement searching for something cheap, like that two-inch high glass bottle shaped like a goldfish or that yellow lamb pulling an ox cart.

My hobby continued in college (I still own the tattered coffee-colored leather gloves from a semester abroad in Florence), and got serious when I started working as a newspaper reporter, a job that paid so poorly I had to wean myself off the capitalist’s compulsion to spend.

I still bought things, but they cost pennies. The bird whistle from Chinatown, the flip card of Alice’s cat, the crescent-shaped moon molded from melted crayons, the pea-sized coffee cup — they all satisfied with their charm.

Eventually, I discovered found objects, castoffs on a street corner or a sandy beach or a rickety dock with beaten-up boats. I went through an especially productive period when I worked as a reporter on a series called “Water’s Edge,” which required me to roam Rhode Island’s beaches looking for stories. I left each interview with at least one memento, including my favorite, a silver button that could’ve been uncovered by a treasure hunter (or history buff) at Little Round Top.

For years, I displayed my stuff on a spice rack in my kitchen; then I moved to a new place, with a new beginning, and everything went into the straw box. Each item has a story that only I know. If the Hound of Heaven were to take me today, my stuff would become a meaningless pile of junk.

A catalogue is in order.

The tiny pitcher. When I first came to Providence, I lived in a studio apartment on Gano Street. My neighbor across the hall was Angela, a spirited woman in her 70s, who liked cats. We became good friends. She had a stroke, and when I cleaned up her apartment I found the pitcher I had given her as a present. My name was on the bottom. “Liz” she wrote in her sinewy scrawl. I knew Angela would never make it back home. Stealing is bad, but I swiped it anyway.

The dog. I was walking to the Gano Street apartment one day and spotted a piece of paper on the sidewalk. It was a pen drawing of a dog, a mix between a dachshund and an Australian shepherd. Masterful is an understatement. On the back was the artist’s name, Alan Tuan. It’s one of my favorites. I even framed it. Alan Tuan, where art thou?

The sea glass. Emerald green, spring-sky blue, fire-licking amber — the colors rose from the beach like a summer rainbow. I was strolling along Goosewing in Little Compton, picking up sea glass by the handful. I had never seen so much in one place; maybe a storm tossed the jewels ashore. I put them in my beach hat and took them home.

The pillow.

“What’s this?” says Henry, rummaging through my box. “Did I sleep on this when I was a baby?”

I could tell the truth — No, this is a pin cushion a friend made for me years ago — but I don’t.

I let him imagine.

***

Who Cries for the Trees

February 2010

I was trying to read a book the other day but couldn’t. It was too noisy — outside my house, not inside. That awful grinding sound was back again. Another tree was coming down, this one a lush pine that rose above the rooftops and made my view from the bedroom window more pleasant.

The eeerrrrrr was impossible to ignore so I left the house and stayed out until the execution was over. On my way home, I tried not to look, because I knew if I did it would put me in a foul mood, and I have two sons to raise. Of course, I did look, just as I pulled into the driveway, and I saw what I always see after the fall: a strange vacant space.

Tree-removal trucks are all over our neighborhood, all the time, except during a blizzard — maybe. We keep Bartlett and North-Eastern and American and all the other “tree experts” in business. Just on my street alone, we’ve lost five trees in the last few months, ones that appeared to be healthy — or at least they seemed that way to me. Their leaves were green; that should count for something.

Trees are great. I’d much rather plant a tree in my yard than a tulip. Trees improve the air, moderate the climate, conserve water and shelter wildlife. They look pretty, even the scraggly ones, and they give us privacy. We live on top of each other on the East Side. The good tree can block your neighbor’s bathroom light.

City living is hard enough for humans, never mind a tree, forced daily to contend with telephone wires and fussy homeowners and heartless trash trucks, which carelessly snap off branches and then disappear without administering first aid.

Trees do their best to live with us and our modern-day neuroses — and you’ve got to admire them for that. They hang in there like the old man limping down the aisle at the grocery store searching for a loaf of bread.

One of my favorite trees is a withered-looking something-or-other a few steps from my house. I lie on the sofa in my living room and stare at the tree for a moment of peace. If the Hindu goddess Durga, protector of the universe, were a tree, she would be this tree, with her curvy limbs waving us in (or out) in all directions.

I thought the tree was an eyesore, until a friend revealed his fondness for it and said he would be sorry to see it go.

Let her rest.

I did.

Remember that goofy question Barbara Walters asked Katharine Hepburn during an interview years ago: “If you were a tree what kind of tree would you be?” Walters was widely lampooned, but I thought it was a pretty good question. Are you a sturdy pin oak or a dolled-up Kouza? A tender Mimosa or a scrappy swamp maple? For the record, Hepburn said she’d like to be an oak; no surprise there. She seemed oakish: strong-limbed, enduring and tough, even under Spencer’s assaults.

I grew up on a street named Oakley Drive (for the oaks) in a neighborhood called Wydown Forest (for the forest). Trees ran the show, not the homeowners. Our house was built between two mighty oaks whose leafy branches cooled us down in those sticky Midwestern summers.

I remember lying on the grass in the backyard, looking up at the leaves shimmering in the sun, tracing the meandering branches, first in our yard and then to the Ellstons’ and finally over to the Fords’ next door. You could get lost in those leaves, and I did. After summer passed, they shook free and we made big piles and jumped.

If a tree is dead it should come down, but even then it’s painful. During my last visit home it was obvious that the oak in front would have to go. The branches were bare in July. Before leaving I took a long look at the massive trunk, so close to the house I could swing open our casement window and touch the bark.

It was late afternoon, and the soft light made the trunk look more gray than brown, like a night sky hastily sketched by a kid with a charcoal pencil. The oak was as familiar to me as the house’s black shutters or flagstone steps in back. I knew I would miss it. How could I not?

You don’t want a tree busting through your roof during a nor’easter. But if a tree is alive I think it should be allowed to run its course. Some people don’t feel that way. It seems at every turn there’s a stump — headless, limbless, just enough of the trunk left to stir regret. Is there such a thing as cutter’s remorse?

What about tree rights? Where are the lawyers?

I’ve never asked anyone why they’re cutting; it’s their property after all, and Rhode Island is the state of the Independent Man. Usually, I keep my mouth shut and stew about it and close my eyes and imagine that I’m living on a farm in Maine surrounded by woody specimens that topple only when they are good and ready. I like my trees in a stark New England winter — arthritic limbs with a burst of bones against a slate sky.

This winter, I looked out my window and discovered tree experts cutting branches off the pines across the street to install a new roof. I figured only wisps would disappear. The trees were butchered, thoughtlessly cut back to the fence. The delightful mess of branches is gone; now I see houses with floodlights two blocks away. Maybe I should wave: Can I borrow some ketchup for dinner?

I still miss the hemlocks. I don’t remember how many there were in front of Carol’s house around the corner, but I do remember that they were tall and feathery, limber enough to shift with the wind.

The woolly adelgid, an aphid-like insect that gets its name from its white appearance, is killing hemlocks all over the eastern United States. Scientists are trying to save them, without much success. The insect sucks sap from the young twigs and the needles dry out and drop; eventually the tree dies.

To find a stand of healthy hemlocks is an occasion to rejoice.

Carol doted on her hemlocks, spraying them yearly to keep the bugs at bay. I once walked through her house and felt as though I was in a secret garden; every window had a shade of green foliage. A few years ago, she sold her house and the new owners cut down the hemlocks, every last one.

On a fall day, I saw Carol pull up in her car to look at her new, old house and I wondered if she missed her trees. She sat there for a while and then drove off and I thought to myself that she’ll probably avoid this road from now on. She’ll find another way to get home.

***

Keep Throwin’, Boys

December 2009

The holiday season is here, and at the top of my 8-year-old son’s list is a yo-yo or, more specifically, the Legacy. If you know anything about yo-yos you know that the Legacy — the latest sensation among the yo-yo crowd — is great for grinds and long spins, dead smooth, and way better than the Crucial Cream, which, to be honest, is far too advanced for any regular use.

I’m happy to put the Legacy under the tree for Henry.

I love my kids, and I love yo-yos.

If you’re searching for a toy that exudes goodness, look to a yo-yo. It is simple, small enough to fit in the front pocket of a pair of jeans. It is humble; a spool connected to a string. And it is smart. In the right hands, a yo-yo can perform as well as a high-wire acrobat in Cirque du Soleil or a cat chasing a squirrel.

When my son is yo-yoing, doing, say, the Jamaican Flag, I feel completely at peace with my decision to become a parent. There he is in his baggy jeans and baseball cap tilted slightly to the right, twirling and talking, looking boyish and thoroughly American, a freckle-faced kid in a Norman Rockwell painting.

Henry: “Mom, do you want to see my new trick?”

Me: “Sure.”

“It’s the Trapeze Replay.”

Flip. Mount. Bounce.

“Where did you learn that?”

“I invented it.”

It all started with the Duncan Butterfly. Henry’s friend, Zack, spotted the yo-yo at Shades Plus on Thayer Street and persuaded his mother, Gayle, to buy it. He discovered that he not only enjoyed yo-yoing, he was good at it. The Butterfly accompanied Zack on a visit to our house and in less time than it takes to do the Dizzy Baby, Henry was hooked as well.

The yo-yo is simple-looking, but far from simple-minded. Early versions of yo-yos appeared in China, the Philippines and ancient Greece. Yo-yos arrived in France in the 18^th century and took off in the United States in the 1920s when Donald F. Duncan created a slip-string that enabled the toy to “sleep” — a necessity for advanced tricks.

If you think the yo-yo is easy to master you are mistaken. Try doing the Brain Twister 16 times in a row while chatting away about the one word you got wrong on your spelling test (I’m sworn to secrecy) and whether footballs are made of pigskin or calfskin.

We had some histrionics in the beginning, but eventually Henry figured it out. Yo-yos are for kids who climb beyond the first branch. I applaud my son for his persistence, a crucial character trait of any yo-yo guy. I said, guy.

Have you ever seen a girl play with a yo-yo?

No.

It is a boy activity.

That’s OK. Let’s not get in a big fight over it.

Yo-yoing also requires a skill that is underrated in our technology-driven culture: the ability to take things apart and put them back together. Yo-yo enthusiasts are tinkerers from way back.

Henry has been disassembling toys since he was a toddler. Our house is cluttered with the detritus of his life — wires from old toys, the battery box of a pencil sharpener, the chassis of a Tonka truck, and, of course, the components of yo-yos. Halved spools, o-rings, axles, ball bearings and enough string for a mop are scattered throughout the house and picked up when the urge hits to reassemble a better, faster yo-yo.

Zack is especially adept at untying knots in yo-yo strings. He is also good at untangling a fishing line. I suspect he’ll be a neurosurgeon when he grows up. Henry’s strength is fiddling with some tiny thing in the middle of the yo-yo to make it sleep longer. I’m thinking theoretical physicist.

People with a passion for yo-yos are called “yo-yoists.” We always have a bunch of yo-yoists in our house. Usually, the boys will retire to the television room upstairs and pop in an instructional video starring Outch, a fabulous yo-yoist whose real name is Brett Outchcunis. I’m crazy about Outch. He doesn’t have tattoos and he seems kind and well-mannered, the kind of fellow who would say, “Thank you, Mrs. Rau, for those delicious peas.”

I once asked Henry, Why yo-yos?

“If you had a hobby chewing bubble gum would you stop? No,” he replied. “It’s the same thing with yo-yos.”

If your child wants to get started on yo-yoing scrap that rule about no computers and check out Yomega.com. Better yet, go to the factory in Fall River, Massachusetts. Call Gayle if you want directions. She’s been to the factory so many times she keeps the route on her BlackBerry. Concerns about liability prohibit tours, but you can call ahead and have your pick of, say, the state yo-yo, Rhody-O, ready for you at the front desk.

At the factory, Zack bought a black shoulder bag that holds 24 yo-yos and still has room in a zipper pocket for homework and a pizza strip. This summer, Henry bought the Maverick at the factory and got a quick tour of the corporate office; he even shook hands with the owner, Mr. Amaral, a gregarious man who practiced law before getting into the yo-yo business.

Just to warn you, yo-yos are addictive and often become another appendage of the true yo-yoist. Those two boys you saw doing two-handed loops in the movie theater at the Providence Place mall were Zack and Henry. The yo-yo that broke apart mid-air and went soaring over the allo mutter at Whole Foods had Henry’s name all over it. And that kid in the navy blue shorts on YouTube standing in front of the Eiffel Tower doing the Eiffel Tower was Zack.

The holidays are still with us, and Henry is already thinking about his birthday in March. He’s been browsing the Internet to narrow down his choices.

“I’m thinking I either want the XConvict or the Mini Motu or the Mighty Three.”

“Mighty Three?” I said.

“Flea. Flea,” he said.

“Why do they call it that?” I said.

“It’s small, small,” he said. “Get it. Big as a quarter.”

Got it.

Keep throwin’, boys.

***

Letting Go

November 2009

Two blocks. That’s how far it is from our house to the convenience store. I know this because my son, who is 9, asked me if he could ride his bike there to get a Del’s lemonade and I said, no, not yet, and then I went outside my house to the corner a few steps away and counted.

First one street and then the next. Only three roads to cross. For my son that’s like biking to California, a freedom ride that tests his independence and ability to travel over cracks and bumps alone, unsupervised, far away from a hovering parent.

Why can’t I just say yes?

When I was a girl, I roamed. I roamed up and down the sidewalks of my neighborhood for hours, wandering barefoot through fenceless backyards to find friends or climb a tree, maybe that one at the Tallys’ with the low branches that stretched out like the withered arms of an old woman. I’d stop at Peggy’s to play with her frizzy-haired trolls and then stroll up to the school path to pick plump mulberries that left my fingertips purple.

It might sound as though I spent my childhood in the country, but I did not. I lived in a suburb of St. Louis similar to our neighborhood, with sidewalks and ancient trees and small shops where I could buy penny candy or an ice cream cone or a cotton ribbon for my hair. The difference was that I grew up when children were expected to explore the world by themselves and stay out until the sun went down — and what great adventures I had.

The woodlands near our house was really just a tangle of trees, but for a tomboy unruffled by bloody knees it was a wonderfully menacing Sherwood where I could lose myself  amid the curvy vines and towering maples that blocked the sun and made the interior as dark as a cellar. What was in the middle? I never found out. I never had the courage to go that far.

I remember sitting in the V of a branch somewhere on our block, spying on my friends like a sailor on watch, hidden by a canopy of leaves that I’d pluck off and let spin to the ground. My greatest solitary diversion involved the black metal pole in our backyard that stood eight feet high next to a fence low enough for me to mount without help. I’d climb the fence and cup my hands around the upper part of the pole — hollow and curved like a candy cane — and whisper secrets into the hole: Susie is my best friend. I love barbecue potato chips. My favorite color is green. I think the pole was an old clothesline; to me, it was magical.

Our neighborhood is safe; I think we can all agree on that. We live in a bubble, removed from the ills that plague many communities: violent crime, poverty, urban decay. I remind myself daily that I am lucky to live here. Still, I worry about a short trip to a neighborhood market and from what I can tell I’m not alone. Other parents feel anxious as well.

I think hard about two things: cars and the unspeakable.

What parent has not been tempted to hurl a rotten egg at a driver racing through our streets, oblivious to stop signs and crosswalks and the routinely violated speed limit? I have never seen a police officer give out a speeding ticket around here. Speeders speed because they know they can get away with it.

We have no lack of reckless drivers on our street. Our stretch begins at the stone wall, passes by the lemon-colored Victorian and then cascades down a gentle hill before intersecting one of the most treacherous roads in the neighborhood. Pitch a fastball from that street and you will hit our house. Our street is wide, designed that way a century ago, I am told, to allow the horse-drawn milk trucks to turn around with ease.

You try to learn as much as you can about a house before you buy it and lug all your stuff there, but it’s impossible to know everything. When we moved in years ago, I did not know that wide streets appeal to truck drivers who see open space and heavy-foot the pedal, Wheee! I did not know that our street is a cut-through to a main avenue. I did not know that teenagers like to speed down our street and accelerate to the riverbank.

I have never asked the city for anything, not even tax relief. A few years ago, I asked the city for a four-way stop. I circulated a petition among neighbors and submitted it, with signatures, to the City Council’s public safety committee. I attended a committee hearing to pitch my case. The committee approved my request and a few weeks later the full council gave its blessing.

Time passed and nothing happened. I called the city traffic engineer. An assistant answered. The request had been struck down by the traffic department. Stop signs, the assistant exclaimed, do not slow cars. Really? I felt both angry and frustrated, which might explain that very naughty word I blurted out to him. It soon became clear that the city was not on my side in trying to make the roads safer for kids playing — and so I worry.

My other concern is the hardest to shake: abduction of children. There is virtually no chance of that happening here. But there is also little chance of my plane going down, and I still get the jitters. The reality is that the number of abductions in the United States is no more than it was 20 years ago. What’s different is that the horrific details of these gruesome acts are broadcast round-the-clock by the media until parents are paralyzed with fear.

All of this coddling is bound to affect children — and not in a good way. Imagination can’t blossom and thrive when parents are always directing the show, intervening so much there is no room left for spontaneity or creativity or mistakes that can be self-corrected. I doubt I would have felt uninhibited enough to talk to a pole if my mom had been on the fence with me, eavesdropping.

This fall, my son and I went biking in Swan Point Cemetery. We had the place to ourselves. The sky was blue, the sun was strong and the cool breeze felt good against my arms. Peder led the way, biking past the pines and faded headstones with old-fashioned names like Phinney, and I felt connected to him and nature in a way that made me happy. And then my heart half-broke. “I feel so free,” he shouted. He’s been on this Earth nine years and that was the first time I had ever heard him rejoice in liberty and risk.

I thought to myself that if he races ahead and disappears from sight I’ll be tempted to call him back, but I won’t. I’ll let him go.

***

Skeletons in the Cupboard

October 2009

Halloween is here and this is a good time to reveal all those skeletons rattling around our closets. I have a few secrets, but one in particular makes me so uncomfortable I am tempted to write under a pen name.

I shall not. We have all sinned with a MilkyWay or three, especially during this sweetest of holidays.

My scary story begins long ago in my kitchen.

A friend stopped by and made the mistake of opening a kitchen cabinet that is off limits to everyone in our house except my husband. Without looking up, she closed it quickly, averting her eyes from mine, as if she had spotted a roach or, worse yet, a dead mouse.

For a moment, I considered consoling her about the discovery, if only to keep her from exposing me to the neighbors, but the look of shock and disapproval on her face was enough to kill a talk.

And anyway, this was a parent who had scolded her child in public for eating an AirHead that flew out of a busted piñata during my son’s 4^th . Surely she would not understand my husband’s affection for Little Debbie cupcakes.

He wasn’t always that way. When we were dating, he wooed me with the gourmet meals he had refined during his years as a bachelor: grilled pork chops with capers; chicken cutlets meuniere; chicken curry in a hurry with sour cream.

He knew where to buy the best fruit and vegetables, fish and bread. He enjoyed wandering the aisles of East Side Marketplace in Providence looking for condiments with un accent aigu, and he could cook for 12 people and, at the same time, carry on a lively conversation about whether it’s easier to reduce sail on a cutter or a sloop. He owned a slotted spoon.

I, on the other hand, stunned him with my ineptness in the kitchen. My culinary repertoire included a limp Caesar salad and spaghetti, no sauce, just butter and a sprinkle of bottled Parmesan. Single until 40, I never took to cooking the way my husband did when he was also without spouse and childless.

I would eat a box of kumquats for dinner. My refrigerator held only milk, a wedge of cheese, a carton of orange juice (with pulp), and a box of Cheerios. Why did I need more? I was single, a newswoman, a workaholic. Besides, Taste of India was a block away.

Although my diet was colorless, a chip never crossed my lips. I didn’t feel any righteous opposition to junk food; I simply had no taste for it. A Pringle was about as appealing to me as a mayonnaise sandwich on Wonder Bread.

In the beginning, my husband shared my indifference to junk food, which I appreciated since he not only cooked our meals but also did the grocery shopping. Vanilla ice cream was as junky as he got. Grateful for his high nutritional standards and culinary skills, I happily ceded the kitchen to him; it became his domain, the only room in the house in which he wielded absolute power.

It started with Fritos. I distinctly remember watching him unpack the groceries on a crisp fall day — one of those Miracle-Whip days when the sky is a cavernous blue with the occasional dollop of white — and place the non-perishables in a patch of sun on the kitchen table.

“What’s this?” I said, holding up a slick yellow bag.

He put the bag on top of the refrigerator, out of reach, but not out of sight, of our two boys, then ages 6 and 7, who spotted it and a step ladder and were soon eating the bag’s contents.

Horrified, I spoke of the lousy effects of junk food on teeth and asked my husband not to bring it home. A week later, he showed up with Cheetos. What’s worse, he served them in my French mise en place bowls as an appetizer before dinner.

“Look at their lips,” I said, frightened by the electric-orange powder that coated the boys’ mouths and lingered even after a vigorous face-washing.

I used another tactic: compassion. Is there any medical reason behind you craving for Chex Mix? Nope, my husband said. He wanted something to munch on at night while he watched the game. I knew then that I had about as good a chance of banning junk food as I did getting my boys to swear off dustups. I had to think of another way to get rid of the stuff.

A spring day. The scene unfolds as it always does — in his kitchen. My husband comes home from the market with the good and the bad. He unpacks everything — the milk, the cheese, the butter, the Ruffles. I am delighted we are having his famous chili for dinner. I thank him for cooking.

“Now go play catch with the boys,” I say, flashing a Little-Debbie, a sweet, dimpled smile.

Alone, I hide the junk food on the top shelf behind the ho-hum boxes of wagon wheels, bow ties, and ziti. My boys do not ask for what they cannot see. At night my husband finds the stash and indulges as the boys sleep.

Morning comes, and I check the hiding spot for bags with his imprimatur — opened, wrinkled, rolled up.

Good riddance, I say.

The sticky cotton balls in Fiddle Faddle, the corrugated metal roofs in Sun Chips, the crippled finger bones in Cheetos — they all get dumped in the trash except for a few sad-sack strays at the bottom of each bag to conceal my deceit.

That night, my husband says, “Where did all the Cheetos go?”

I say, “I ate them.”

***

The Shrine

We live up the street from a fire station, so I am used to hearing sirens at all hours of the day and night, and this familiarity has lulled me into a shameful  indifference that, I suppose, comes with city living. When we moved into our house eight years ago, I’d rush to the window to investigate the wailing; now I barely lift my head.

One night in June, I heard the sirens and thought the trucks were responding to something harmless, like a burning pot on a stove. I don’t know why I settled on a kitchen fire, but I did, and I was wrong. The awful news was in the morning paper.

There had been a motorcycle accident on Arlington Avenue, and a man had died. The paper withheld the man’s name (that would come later), but the article did say that he was speeding and not wearing a helmet.

I had two thoughts: death can be swift and newspapers can be harsh. Why pass judgment on his last day? We all do reckless things. I dare anyone to come forward who has not allowed the current to carry him beyond the jetty to the still and metal-colored part of the ocean where there are no whitecaps.

I finished the article and didn’t think much about the man until later in the day when I drove by the spot and saw a woman holding something in her arms the way I’d hold a baby or a lost puppy — close to the chest.

She was tall and thin, and her brown hair hung down her back, loose and untangled. She was standing on the curb and I slowed to let her pass, but she tilted her head and smiled as if to say, you go first. Now I wish that I had stopped. She was the one who probably got the phone call and had been up all night, picturing him as he was the last time. What did he say? Love ya, and then a walk down a gravel driveway.

As I drove off, I looked in my rearview mirror and watched as she studied the orange words the police had sprayed on the black asphalt: “BRUSH,” “JACKET,” “LSHOE.” I saw her bend down, by the stone wall around the playing fields at Brown University, and turned the corner for home.

Nothing truly bad ever happens on the East Side. Our streets are clean, our lawns free of cheat grass. We have graffiti, fender benders and break-ins, but nothing too serious. The break-ins usually occur when no one is home, which is the way I like it. Sometimes I think I should just tape a note to the door when I leave: Take the television; I’m sick of it.

It felt strange to know a man had died two blocks away and that I was trying to get my kids to brush their teeth while he was dying on the street.

The next day, I drove by the site again and, this time, I parked and got out and looked at the ground. The woman had been carrying flowers in her arms and now they were on the wet grass: pink and yellow sweetheart roses. Fresh wildflowers exploded hat-trick style from a canning jar filled with water.

Amid nature’s bounty were hints of this man’s life: an airplane-sized bottle of Jack Daniels, empty; a blue 2010 Ford Mustang GT matchbox car; a shiny chrome axle nut that said Harley Davidson, and a medal with the inscription: Harley Davidson Festival, The Celebration, 1903-2003, Kansas City. A man who rides all the way to the Heartland on his Harley, I thought, loves his country.

Driving down the highway we see fleeting glimpses of other people’s lives and those of us who like to daydream tend to recreate without much regard for the truth: Travis Skeet abandoned that Chevy by the hissing stream after a hard night drinking; the curled hands of Mr. Rego fuss over the grape arbor on top of the hill; the walls in the Dew Drop Inn are stained dark with smoke. And then there are the memorials, those simple wood crosses, painted white, festooned with beads and plastic carnations, blue, always blue. What do people say, I wonder, as they pound the cross into the lousy dirt? Goodbye, my friend, or maybe, Look out for that Mack truck.

After my inspection that day, I left town for a week and, to be honest, expected someone to clean up the site while I was gone. To my surprise, the memorial was not only there when I got back, it was bigger. A foot-high Celtic cross initialed with “JC” and cut from what looked like the fender of a motorcycle was bolted to the stone wall. A cigar and Irish flag poked out from behind the cross like souvenirs on a cluttered curio shelf.

There were three framed photos of the man, and he had a name or, at least, a nickname: Big Jon. He had pale reddish hair and his long beard, the same color as his hair, cascaded over his belly like a roll of cotton candy. He wore his bandana as a pirate would, above the ears and knotted in back, which made him look both practical and cool. His blues eyes danced in a soft, fair-skinned face.

“Brother we will miss you,” a note said. A banner twisted through the flowers like a rampant vine on a spring-rain run. It said in gold letters: BROTHER.

The follow-up article in the paper gave Big Jon a name — Jonathan M. Conway of Riverside in East Providence — but provided no intimate details, with the exception of his age: a very young 31.

The article did, however, return to the speeding issue, saying the police believe he might have been traveling more than 60 miles per hour on Arlington when he was thrown from his motorcycle and his body crashed into a car. There were witnesses and he left evidence: a 168-foot skid mark.

When I read this I did not think, tsk-tsk. I thought, How long does it take to skid 168 feet? How many seconds? What was he thinking in those final terrifying moments? No. I’m sorry. Our Father who…

Months have passed and the memorial is still there, rained on, but still there. Thieves must know stealing from the dead brings consequences outside the law. Once I saw a man let his dog sniff at the flowers, now wilted and brittle, and felt certain he would pay for this indiscretion in some way, perhaps with a mysterious rash or an infestation of aphids on his juniper.

My boys have driven by the memorial many times, and once they asked to see it up close and I took them. My 8-year-old son, Henry, asked if Big Jon was buried in the stone wall, behind the silver cross. I said, no, that he’s probably buried elsewhere. Then why are all these things here? he asked.

I told him the truth.

This is Jonathan Conway’s resting place, and his friends want to make sure we know.

***

Dr. Ed 

August 2009

His name is Edward Iannuccilli, but I have a hunch most people call him Ed or, if they’re feeling playful, Dr. Ed. His last name is hard to pronounce, unless you’re the kind of person who flings open your shutters on a warm spring day and proclaims in your best sing-song voice, “Che bella giornata,” and then takes a sip of espresso from that little dollhouse cup you bought in Roma back in ’82.

I first exchanged pleasantries with Ed online. He heard an essay I wrote for WRNI’s radio series, “This I Believe — Rhode Island,” and sent me an e-mail saying he liked the piece: Maybe we can meet for coffee? His name sounded familiar from my newspaper reporting days, and after a session with Google I discovered he was a former chairman of the board at the local hospital. No slouch, he. Still, I knew I had seen his name elsewhere, beyond the headlines.

Down the street from my house sits one my favorite hideaways, a bookshop that manages to be both cozy and airy and is staffed by courteous bibliophiles, including Chris, the dog-dodging mailman in the locally produced movie Underdog. Rain, sleet, snow, he always says hello when I walk into the shop. Grazie, Chris.

I like to follow our local writers and enjoy fossicking through the stacks of homegrown books when I visit. One day, I came across a memoir of growing up as an Italo-American in Providence and thumbed through the pages.

If you are flummoxed and allow yourself time alone with the willow on the upland ridge, the puzzle will fall into place, and this is what happened with Ed. After that e-mail, I realized that Ed was also Edward the Memoirist, the author of Growing Up Italian: Grandfather’s Fig Tree and Other Stories, the book I had picked up weeks before. I wrote Ed back and told him I would surely like to meet and that I had seen his book and would now buy his book. We set a date.

My WRNI essay was about homesickness, an ailment I’ve suffered from since I moved to Rhode Island more than two decades ago. I wrote about my affection for the state, how I’m charmed by its sea glass and buried steamers at Fogland beach and rope swings on the Pawcatuck River, but also how I’m never quite at home, here, in Rhode Island.

My real home is a leafy Midwestern suburb and my memories are of Virginia creeper crawling up our red brick house, sun-baked sidewalks that warmed my bare feet and the grade-school monkey bars I traversed with ease. Providence is where I live, I wrote, but it’s not my home; I’ll always be a visitor.

Ed happened to turn on the radio just as my essay was beginning. He had found a kindred spirit. Ed, too, understood that we are among the lucky ones, the ones whose childhood days were filled with great adventures that are sorely missed. If only I could taste the sweet honeysuckles on my school path one more time or play hide-and-go-seek on a sweltering summer night, using the lamppost with its pear-shaped bulb as base. “Free!” I’d shout.

Ed suggested meeting at a coffee shop. “I have white hair,” he wrote in his e-mail. “I’ll be the one drinking espresso.”

The weather did not cooperate. A blizzard made driving treacherous and we decided to reschedule. Then we rescheduled again. The truth be told, I was grateful. It gave me more time to read his book.

Most doctors cannot write. That’s a harsh statement, but true. We don’t expect them to craft gems; we just want them to keep us alive. As I hunkered down with Ed’s book, I discovered that he is an exception. He can decipher a complicated pathology report to gently offer notice — and I want notice, thank you — and he can write sentences that linger after the book is closed, and I have always thought that is the mark of a talented writer.

Consider Ed’s description in his book of a man who cleaned rags for a living:

“Joe the Ragman was an unshaven, musty-smelling, gnome-like character who wore a long, gray tattered coat buttoned at the top, and a small-visored, matching hat. His horse-drawn cart was laden with stacks of rags that smelled of the dampness of a cellar. Squeaky wheels carried it down the street. His nasal twang, “Rrraggs, rrraggs,” gurgled in a voice almost too low to be heard. “Up here, up here,” residents responded from their windows. And up the stairs he went, plodding on worn, dirty boots, empty satchel over his shoulder, gathering rags along the way.”

So far, he has sold 5,000 copies, many more than he expected. He knew he was on to something when 400 people showed up at Caserta Pizzeria on Federal Hill in Providence for his book-release party.

I won’t give away details, but I will entice you. The book is a collection of 58 essays about growing up in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, where Ed and his extended Italian family lived in the 1940s and 1950s. It was a time when kids played sandlot baseball, rode their Rocket Royals on safe streets all summer long and put on their bathing suits to run in the rain.

Ed wrote about his enormous three-decker on Wealth Avenue, with his family on the third floor, his grandparents and great-grandfather on the second, and his aunt and her family on the first. He wrote about the well-swept back staircase that he raced up at “top speed,” the creaky cellar, where he made a clubhouse out of old coal bins, and the massive cast iron stove with its simmering pot of “gravy,” red pasta sauce.

Our meeting took place two months after our first exchange of e-mails. I was nervous. I didn’t know what to expect. Doctors can be intimidating. Writers can be aloof. Who would I get? I got a friendly and funny person who knew half the people at Starbucks in Providence, even though he lives in Bristol, Rhode Island. I got an Italian with a zest for life, a man on his second wind.

Ed’s journey to writing has been remarkable. Eight years ago, he submitted an essay about his grandfather to The Providence Journal, which published the piece on the op-ed page. That success gave him the confidence to write the essays that now appear in his book.

Ed and I talked for hours, about his family (his wife, Diane, is his editor), his career (he is a gastroenterologist and was the first appointed clinical professor at Brown University’s medical school), the presentations he gives about the state’s Italian community, and his plans to write a sequel, focusing this time on his high school and college years.

I told Ed that my favorite essay is about his grandfather’s ritual of burying his fig tree every fall to preserve it for spring. Vincenzo Troiano would dig a ditch beside the tree, wrap cloth around the trunk, pull the tree into the earth and then cover the grave with dirt, leaves, and, finally, wooden boards.

“Winter came, and daily, as I sat at the window, I looked down into the snow-covered garden, imagining that the hump was a sleeping elephant,” Ed wrote. “But it was grandfather’s treasure.”

Now our state has another treasure. Grandfather’s Fig Tree is 137 pages long. Read it slowly. You will miss it when it’s over.

***

Party Favors

June 2009 

I did not go into the darkness. Another parent went into the darkness and he emerged unscathed and, what’s better, spiritually reborn — or at least I’d like to think so since he had a smile on his face.

The pitch black rooms at Lazer Gate are not for fraidy-cats. They are for fearless souls who like to wrestle with tigers and swim with the sharks. In this case, they were for the 14 boys of my son Henry’s 8th birthday party, assembled together in an old mill in Fall River, Massachusetts, to shoot red beams of light at each other amid fog and chaos.

What could be more fun than that?

Even when the economy is in the pits, one activity is recession-proof: the blowout birthday party. It thrives, even in bad times. The invitations roll in like tanks.

True, I could simplify. I could throw a home fest with a no-nonsense sheet cake and a game of marbles. But I’ve had a pack of boys with sugar highs running around my living room shouting, “Get him,” or, worse yet, “Over here, pass the ball.” Parents will dole out big bucks to let someone else clean up the mess and save the Delph.

When did this excessiveness begin? When I was a kid birthday parties were modest affairs that never deteriorated into free-for-alls. We’d trot around our backyard for a while and then my parents would move the sofa against the wall and we’d sit cross-legged on the rug and watch “Johnny Appleseed,” a 10-minute motion picture on a reel-to-reel borrowed from the public library.

I always wore a party dress, white with cherries embroidered on the front, which never endured a chocolate stain or rip. The boys wore button-downs. Goodie bags didn’t exist. If you were lucky, you got a lollipop with a string handle shaped like a teardrop. Parents did not hang around; it was strictly drop-off, and only for an hour.

Enter the kid birthday party of the 21^st century: extravagant, over-the-top events so complicated that some people even hire party planners, right down to the finger bowls filled with Smarties. I have not gone down that road, but I’m ashamed to admit I browsed party-planning Web sites to come up with ideas for my sons’ parties.

After every fest I vow to simplify the next year, but the D.O.B. nears and I always relent because 1) I like it when my kids run my life; and 2) I cannot pass up an opportunity to try my luck at arcade games.

The upside of the big fest is that the kids have a blast. Some parents might tsk-tsk the lavishness, the use of guns, the gambling, the deafening noise, but the kids enjoy themselves; so I say, So what. Besides, I was a pistol-packing cowgirl with spurs as a kid who chomped on Bazooka bubble-gum and played the flippers, and I did not turn out to be a psychopath.

The birthday parties we went to and had for our sons when they were toddlers usually evolved into child-safety drills with the occasional embarrassing moment: the bald-headed clown who teased the bald-headed parent not once, but twice. (We’re twins. We’re twins.) The magician who flubbed the stupid card trick. The little girl who cried over the Apache helicopter.

All that partying has exposed me to a side of life I never thought I’d experience. At Regal Reptiles we watched a croc eat a rat — a frozen one, but, really, a rat is a rat and always dirty. A bullfrog practically jumped into my lap at a party at the leafy Audubon Society in Bristol, Rhode Island. At Battleship Cove in Fall River, Massachusetts, we walked the decks of WWII Navy warships and ate hot dogs in the mess hall.

The yoga party stands out. We did back bends and splits and then all held hands and hummed Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti. Our treat was whole wheat bread smothered in cashew butter.

At gymnastic parties my boys jumped into a pit of squishy foam balls. They tumbled in a good way at pee-wee sports fests at the Jewish Community Center. At the archery party in West Warwick they progressed from boys to bowboys in less time than it takes to say floo floo arrow.

My favorite party place is the Bowling Academy in East Providence. Henry and my older son, Peder, have both celebrated there. If I had my way the Academy would be my first and only choice. The charming, competent, infectiously peppy teenagers do everything.

You sit in a folding chair on the upper deck while the teens scurry around like doting aunts tending to your every whim. They slice the pizza, pour the pink lemonade and cut the Academy cake, always fluffy and gently iced. They even bag the presents to take home.

I tried to persuade Henry to bowl for his 8th, but he refused. He wanted a fresh venue. I suggested taking the kids on a long hike up Cupcake Mountain. He would have none of it. What to do?

My friend Denise beat me to motherhood by a decade. For years, I heard stories about Little Joe and his birthday parties, including one with laser tag. I remember thinking I’d sooner eat fried liver than throw such a fest for my sons.

Fast forward six years, three months and 14 days: I am watching Henry’s friends enter Lazer Gate’s debriefing room to learn the rules of engagement. A sense of panic overcomes me when I see who else is in the room: teenagers, two dozen hulks. I assumed my son and his friends would have the space to themselves.

My tact and decorum start to fail when the manager tells me that the laser room is open to the public, even during parties: Read the fine print. I do not feel his cheerful presence. My heart quickens. One parent from our group joins to chaperone (and play), but, still, I worry. I wonder if it’s too late to bolt. The door shuts.

I imagine all the apologies I’ll have to make to parents. What was I thinking? Second graders alone in the dark with gun-toting teens twice their size — and dressed in black. I could cry.

Twenty minutes later, the door swings open.

I see them emerge, with sweat on their foreheads (exercise!) and smiles.

“That was awesome,” says our youngest guest. “Can I go again?”

That night, I call Denise and report the news: Laser tag was a success. She suggests a paintball party next year.

“I’m not doing paintball,” I say.

“Wanna bet,’’ Denise says.

***

Fred the Barber                                           

April 2009

The day Fred closed his barbershop I felt a pang of grief; not just for the loss of yet another small business within walking distance of my front steps, but for what I knew I’d soon confront as the mother of two boys: long hair.

Fred knew how to cut hair, and how! He’d start with the clippers, gently plowing up the nape in three side-by-side paths, and then move to his silvery shears, sharp as a paring knife, and the rest was a sight to behold: A snip here, a snip there, he’d orbit around my son’s head with the grace of a maestro, all the while talking, talking about the price of gas or the shenanigans on Smith Street or the long-ago days when you went to the barber to get not only a cut, but a shave.

The end product was always perfect: even sideburns; subtle layering; and, for the boys, a tasteful up-do in front — if they wanted one.

I liked Fred’s simplicity. Three well-creased barber chairs, a thirsty fern in the corner, a stack of yellowed National Geographics and a kid drawing taped to the wall — wherever. Each boy got a lollipop and then hopped off to the black-and-white checkered floor littered with wisps and curls — tiny piles of half moons and springy coils the color of burnt orange, hayseed yellow, slingshot brown.

On the rare occasion when Fred wasn’t cutting, he was leaning outside his front door chewing the fat with anyone lucky enough to walk by: the lady in the gray cashmere swinging a shopping bag; the woman who owned the sweet shop down the street; the mailman, the window washer; Judge what’s-his-name; me.

I don’t know why Fred left. Maybe his rent went up. Maybe his feet hurt. I do know that his departure on that gone-fishing day a few years ago left me with an anxious feeling that waxed and waned amid the distractions of tending to family: What was thinking about? Oh. Fred’s gone. I need to find a new barber.

I approached the task with a determination to find just that, not a stylist, never a stylist. I shuddered to think of placing my sons in the hands of a fetching and scantily dressed Angelina or Victoria or, worse yet, Jezebel, who would dab and pouf and then draw from her hip pocket the salon version of a leaf blower: the hair dryer.

I looked for other Candy Land poles in the neighborhood, but never felt fully satisfied with what we found. I was looking for a plain-mouthed bespectacled man of medium build and sturdy frame with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair and an earnest face that could have landed him a bit part on The Andy Griffith Show. I was looking for Fred.

Against my better judgment, I took the boys to Kidz Adventure Cuts, a salon that subscribes to the theory that the only way to keep kids still during a haircut is to anesthetize them with television. A television, usually blasting a Disney movie, is in the waiting area, and if that’s not enough, each work station has a television for a movie or video game. I learned to tolerate the place and always asked for the buzz cut, a kind of self-imposed baldness.

And then the unexpected roared into our lives: H.P., also known as Harry, decided to let his hair grow. My 7-year-old, Henry, was the first to notice the cascading locks on his friend’s head.

“I want hair like Harry,” said Henry.

“Short is good,” I said. “I can see your face.”

“It’s my hair,” he said. “I can do what I want with my hair.”

How could I argue with that? Henry made perfect sense. It was his hair. I was being selfish, but, really, all I could think about was the high maintenance that long hair requires, not the least of which is daily brushing. I thought of tangles, knots, bangs obstructing vision. Would an “11” suddenly appear as a “1”? Would he read “gin” instead of “begin”?

Weeks passed. The hair grew, as did Henry’s fascination with it. It felt good to have a mop — finally. With a cock of his head, Henry would flick back his bangs or shake his head like a swimmer fresh from the lake, eager to impress the girl on shore. He was getting his first whiff of vanity and enjoying it.

This transformation into a teenager was charming until I peeked in his classroom enry’s one morning and recoiled in horror at the sight of my ragamuffin. He looked disheveled, like a farm boy on a dusty road with a three-legged mutt.

Eventually, he warmed to the idea of a cut, but always came up with excuses at the last minute: Harry has to come along. I need pipe cleaners. My foot hurts. One afternoon, I parked the car in front of Super Cuts and urged him to go inside.

“It’s my hair,” he said, glaring at me through stalks of wayward strands.

In time though, even H.P., the arbiter of cool, conceded that Henry needed a cut. I enlisted him to draw up a document. During a sleepover one night, he taped two pieces of blank paper together and wrote up the terms:

                                                                     Haircut Contract

I, Henry, solemnly swear to get my hair trimmed and styled.

I, Mom, solemnly swear that I will pay H.P. Snow $10 if he encourages this behavior toward Henry.

I, H.P. Snow, solemnly swear to guide Henry in the process of trimming and styling his hair. I will encourage this behavior toward Henry.

                       

 Henry

 Mom

 H.P.

On a Saturday afternoon — 183 days after his last cut — Henry crossed the threshold of Super Cuts and promptly instructed the woman on what should stay and go. He lost the mane on his neck, but kept the sideburns. His beloved bangs were lifted no farther than his brow.

I told him I never knew he had a freckle on his cheek.

“I look like a warthog,” he said. “I hate it. I’m not taking another cut.”

The truth is his super cut was not. It was choppy, incomplete and hastily executed; it reflected no grand plan. It was not the work of an artist. It was not the work of Fred.

 

 ***

 

I Love Cheese

March 2009

I’m looking for a job. I’ve been talking about looking for work for years, but this time I’m really searching. I put together a fancy-schmancy resume and copied my clips (I used to be a newspaper reporter), and I wrote several sharp cover letters that exude confidence. Unfortunately, I started my quest just before the stock market crashed and the economy tanked. I haven’t gotten a bite, much less a nibble. I’m lucky if I even get a rejection letter. Let me rephrase that: I’m happy when I get a rejection letter. At least someone read my application.

The last time I looked for full-time work was in 1985, when I was young and full of beans and newspapers were thriving. After a short but intense search all over New England, I found a job as a reporter at The Providence Journal, where I stayed until 2000, when my first son was born. I have not held a steady job since, unless you call raising two spirited boys a steady job.

Despite the grim unemployment news, I’m forging ahead. I spent far too much time at Kinko’s, watching a temperamental copy machine spit out my life’s work, to give up now. Besides, I have $10 riding on a bet with my sons that I’ll have a job before the first pitch of Little League this spring.

My first inclination is to go back to what I know: newspaper reporting. I told that to my friend, Jon, who is still in the business, and he told me that I might as well open a factory that makes buggy whips. Newspapers are firing, not hiring.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic. I imagined my favorite depressive, Joni Mitchell, wagging her finger and singing from her big yellow taxi: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” I never thought I would say this, but I miss writing 5,000-word stories about the state’s formula for school aid. I miss city council meetings. I miss the police log. I miss house fires.

I broadened my search, though it quickly became apparent that I can’t do much of anything but string two sentences together — and that’s even open to debate. Before my job at The Journal, I worked for a small newspaper in Connecticut and before that I worked as an assistant editor at a cross-country skiing magazine and before that I worked for the National Kidney Foundation in St.Louis, giving speeches to the Lions Clubs and elementary schools about the “bean-shaped organs that filter your blood” and “Guess what, boys and girls? You can live with one kidney.”

With so little experience in any field but journalism, the cover letters have taken on greater importance. In one sweet sentence, I have to explain why I’m qualified to work as, say, a “special events coordinator” at a local hospital, even though the only event I’ve ever organized was my son’s 6^th birthday party at Monster Golf. I have to explain why I can help raise money for a university, even though I’ve never solicited one penny in my life from anyone, including my mother.

Looking back, I realize now that some letters were unintentionally comical: “Please do not be discouraged by my lack of experience with HTML, PowerPoint, Excel, Adobe Acrobat, FileMaker Pro, and Flash,” I wrote when I applied for a secretarial job. “I’m a quick study.”

Other letters were overwritten — and perhaps a tad overwrought. In one missive to a college “good writing,” “burning desire” and “wet and stormy weather” appeared in the same sentence. Oops.

Sometimes I think my letters should just get to the point: “I won’t bore you with platitudes. I’m desperate for work.”

One problem I’ve encountered in my search is trying to understand the job descriptions, which are written in prose so impenetrable I need a linguist to translate. “Responsible for high-level correspondence in a fast-paced environment.” “Calendar management a must.” “Ability to engage in a conversation about current growth trends.” And this zinger: “Standard operational reporting documentation, i.e. — picture taking, recap completion and submittal.”

Maybe my best chance for a job is at Whole Foods, the chummy health food store near Wayland Square in Providence.

Everybody needs a hideaway, and for the last few years mine has been the store’s parking lot. That’s me, sitting in the front seat of my minivan eating an egg salad sandwich and Kettle barbecue chips and taking swigs from a bottle of bubbly water, saving the best for last: a chocolate truffle from Lake Champlain. It’s my 15 minutes of peace.

If I got a job at Whole Foods, I’d like to work in the cheese department. I love cheese. One summer back in high school, I was wandering around the neighborhood looking for work and came across a soon-to-open cheese shop. The owners were two recent law school graduates who had no intention of practicing law. The future, they said, was in cheese.

At the interview, I confessed that my knowledge of cheese was limited to slices of American, but that I would surely learn more once I got behind the counter. Instead of offering me employment, they handed me Quick Guide to Cheese, a chatty, 100-page book that still graces my shelf.

“Go home and study this,” said Phil, the more erudite of the two. “Come back tomorrow and tell us what you know.”

I memorized as much of the book as I could in one night. The next day, I knew that Gorgonzola is a creamy blue Italian cheese with a taste that ranges from mild to sharp, depending on the age. I knew that Gjetost is a Norwegian cheese that no one likes except Norwegians. I knew that Brillat-Savarin is a deliciously sinful French cheese that should be eaten at room temperature to fully enjoy its taste, and that Manchego is a semi-firm Spanish cheese that goes nicely with a glass of sherry.

The boys were impressed. I got the job. The shop eventually went belly-up, but I came away with a passion for cheese that has led me to the sample table at Whole Foods many times. I should make a “submittal” to my resume: “High School to Present, Cheese Lover.”

 

 

***

Cuts

February 2009

My son cut his finger. I was upstairs, tapping away on my computer, when his friend rushed into my room full of urgency and bad news. My first thought was that Henry had a paper cut. Kids can be dramatic; mine certainly are. Any time they see blood, even a tiny amount, they run for help.

I found Henry halfway up the stairs with a paper towel wrapped around the index finger of his right hand. He was calm, almost indifferent. Surely, this was a minor cut. We walked into the bathroom and I removed his wrapping. As tap water washed away the blood, I uncovered the enormity of what had happened: The tip of his finger was gone.

My face turned ashen. I told myself not to panic. To try to stop the bleeding, Henry shook his finger as if to flick off a bug, and red drops splattered over the white tile. Maybe it was my rapid-fire instructions or high-pitched voice; Henry could tell something was terribly wrong.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” he said, with confidence I could only envy. “I’m going to be fine.”

The first fall is always the hardest. Flashback to the fall of 2001: Henry’s older brother, Peder, is in the living room scooting along on his Thomas the Train ride-on. He’s traveling at a good pace — molasses-slow — but I think he’ll have more fun if he speeds up. I give the rear bumper a kick with my foot, the toy flips over and down goes Peder, chin first on the hardwoods.

Before then, my boys’ milky skin had been marred only by scrapes and bruises that healed quickly. I could tell right away that this cut was different — the skin parted easily, like the top of an envelope sliced open with an emery board — and the cut was deep. Six stitches in the ER.

Peder was fine that night. I felt lousy. It’s my fault, I thought; What was I thinking? The next day, I bought some cheap rugs — ugly brown and gray threads that looked like hastily crafted potholders — and unrolled them on the floor.

I didn’t stop there. I looked around the house and saw danger at every turn: the sharp edge on the window seat; the hot-to-the-touch radiator; the 11 stairs to the second floor; the banister on the landing with the 10-foot drop.

I went on a shopping spree at Home Depot. I bought gates for the top and bottom of the stairs. I bought safety locks for the windows on the second and third floors. I bought rubber padding so thick and durable my sons used leftover pieces for baseball bats.

I am certain people walked into my exquisitely baby-proofed house and murmured, “She’s neurotic,” but I didn’t hear them. I was too busy locking the gate. My husband’s uncle, the frugal octogenarian, considered my purchases frivolous and suggested the unspeakable: Buy a playpen.

Despite my defensive efforts, the accidents continued: 1) Peder climbed over the gate at the top of the stairs and tumbled down, nose over foot, in a series of descending cartwheels. (He laughed; I mixed a stiff drink.) 2) Henry fell against a door jam and split open his head. (Three staples and a scar only the barber sees.) 3) Peder lunged at three fluffy floor pillows leaning against the dining room wall and crashed into the baseboard. (Seven stitches and a fossil scar above his eyebrow.)

There were more, too numerous to count. We became best buds with the receptionist in the emergency room at Providence’s Hasbro Children’s Hospital, which, barring an ice storm, is exactly 9 minutes and 42 seconds from our house and, yes, they finally got valet parking.

All of these mishaps led to a great realization: I have little control over my sons’ lives. I can guide (don’t climb too high, wear your seatbelt, eat apples, not chips), but I am not all-powerful. Stuff happens. The branch breaks. The truck runs a stop sign. The virus finds a home and thrives. My fatalism allowed me to relax a bit — and then Henry cut his finger.

There is nothing quite as disconcerting as seeing your child without his fingertip. A part of him is gone, just like that. My first thought was to find what was missing. Maybe they could stitch it back on. I got down on my hands and knees and gently teased the rug, as if looking for a lost contact lens, and when I found what I wanted, I put it in a baggie — with ice.

On the way to the hospital, Henry asked if he would need stitches. I don’t know, I said; hold the towel tightly. I asked him, once again, how it had happened. Henry and his friend were playing. Henry was taking apart a toy (always, the tinkerer) and he needed to pry off a piece of plastic so he looked for — and found — the LL Bean pocket-knife we had bought days earlier, mostly for the tiny flashlight in the package. It was on the top shelf in the kitchen, but Henry found a chair.

As we sat in the waiting room at Hasbro, I scolded myself for leaving out a pocket-knife and, then, for buying it in the first place. I told the nurse about my baggie. She either thought I was nuts or understood the force of a mother’s love.

“Hmmm,” the doctor said, inspecting the cut. “This isn’t so bad.” It would hurt for a few days and, magically, the skin would grow back. Henry would have a perfect finger again.

I rejoiced. Henry wept, not for the joy of regeneration, but because of the tick-tock of the clock that got closer to the start time of his Boy Scout meeting. The Bears were scheduled to gather at 6:30 in the basement of the Central Congregational Church and Henry wanted to be there. The kind doctor worked swiftly.

We were only 30 minutes late. Everyone knew about the incident thanks to Peder, who is also in the den and cannot resist a good tale. Henry, his eyes pink with tears, did not want to talk about it. He only wanted to be a Scout: To do my best.

He kept his hand with the bad finger in the pocket of his sweatshirt to hide the injury and by the end of the meeting he was laughing. He was with his fellow Bears. They were playing hide-and-seek. He was not the counter; his brother was.

That night, I put Henry to sleep, and after he nodded off I threw the pocket-knife in the trash. The finger healed in a few weeks, just as the doctor said it would. Henry continued to wear a Band-Aid for the next month, long after it was necessary, as a reminder, I suppose, of his great adventure.

***

The Good Slope

 January 2009

We walked to the steep hill up the street and watched the boys and girls race down so fast their unzipped jackets opened like parachutes and let in the icy cold. Shoes flew off. Maybe the laces were loose, but I doubt it.

Peder stood on the sidewalk and tried not to act like what he was: a spectator. He knew the hill was too high (he was only 4), and I knew it, too. He had to face that fact all by himself and it wasn’t easy. At the bottom, after a harrowing ride, the big kids whooped it up. What could be more fun than that?

His hands sunk deep into his coat pockets and he stared at the others as though in a mild trance. I suggested we hunt for another hill, one with an easy slope that wasn’t so menacing. But where would we go?

As far as I knew this was the only sledding hill in the area. The neighborhood parks had modest mounds, but Peder had outgrown them. He was looking for a challenge, a hill taller than, say, the silver slide at Lippitt Park in Providence, shorter than the pines in our backyard.

We found Golf Hill.

As a kid my hill was Art Hill, a perilous descent that started outside the art museum in our city park and ended in the Grand Basin at a lake shining with frozen ice. My sisters and brother and I would pile on top of rusty Lightning Guiders and tip forward. What were we thinking?  Miraculously, we always managed to coast to a halt at the lake’s edge.

When we tired of that run, we’d scramble over to another hill, this one covered with oaks and weeping willows and Missouri red granite that we had to dodge to reach the bottom without a wipe-out. I hadn’t yet read Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton’s tale of doomed passion that ends with a tragic sledding accident, so I raced with abandon: Last one down is a rotten egg.

My sons don’t share my youthful recklessness. They’re cautious boys. Sometimes I want to push them out the door and say:  Go down to the forest and don’t come back until you find four arrowheads and the bones of a dragon.

Still, I have to respect their restraint. Sledding can be dangerous. Miss Wharton knew that; I know it, too. Years ago, a high school classmate and his girlfriend were sledding on my weeping-willow hill and struck a tree. He never walked again.

When the boys were babies, I’d drag them across our snow-covered patio on a saucer sled. Then one winter day, I took the boys to a park on Humboldt Avenue that everyone in the neighborhood called The Baby Park for obvious reasons. The park is flat, except for a small hill (really a bump) behind the swings.

My younger son, Henry, only 2 at the time, took one look at the course and refused to even sit on the saucer. Peder is my fearless one. His first run was a success; his second was not. The saucer hit a tree root and Peder tumbled onto the slushy snow and chunks slid down the inside of his rubber boots and soaked his socks. That marked the end of our sledding adventures — temporarily.

The cold makes me shiver, curl my shoulders. As a kid, my fingers turned pink under wet wool mittens and the sledding was good for a thrill, but I couldn’t wait to warm my feet under our hissing radiator at home. What I really lived for was the dense heat of a St. Louis summer so I could wear sleeveless cotton shifts and dive for pennies in the warm pool water, just how I liked it. Maybe my aversion to the cold has rubbed off on my kids. They are not winter people.

I was surprised when Peder agreed on that January day years ago to look beyond the Moses Brown hill and try something else. A friend suggested a hill in East Providence on Pawtucket Avenue across from the Boys and Girls Club.

We got there just before noon. The parking lot was jammed. Henry stepped outside the car and the wind stung his cheeks. He started to cry. I was afraid we might have to end it there. From the front seat Peder could see that the slope was gentle and ended in a wide and flat clearing. The run was safe; a mix between the Lippitt slide and our pines.

“I’m good,” said Peder and we left Henry behind in warmth and peace with his dad.

The toboggan was orange, a present from Peder’s great-uncle Gordon, who thought all boys should have two things: a pocketknife and a sled. Gordon was a man of the slopes. One of his fondest childhood memories was zipping down Log Road, a twisty country lane in Smithfield, Rhode Island, where he grew up. Back then, chipmunks ruled the road, not cars. It was always a terrifying and lonely ride, and Gordon loved it.

The hill in East Providence was packed with kids, squealing, turning, rolling around in the snow. Tubes, saucers, flyers, plastic sleds, wooden sleds, foam sleds, snowboards — all crisscrossing the slope with ease.

Nice spot, I thought. Then I spotted a sign in the parking lot: “Spring Hill. Semi-Private.” We were on a 6-hole golf course and probably trespassing. Would we all get kicked out? While I was worrying, Peder had disappeared, run off like a puppy chasing a squirrel.

He was on top of the hill, a scrap of bones even in his puffy blue parka. He was surveying the land below, considering his options, waiting for a path to open. The snow fell. The wind tore at his hat. Finally, he climbed on his toboggan, and it swallowed him up; he was so small.

He seesawed back and forth and gave one last push. Down he went, over one hill and then another, working up speed until he was going faster than he had ever gone. Ramrod straight, totally focused, he was beside himself for what he had done.  He would reach the clearing soon.eHehEH

He was far away, and he was happy.

***

You Don’t Say

 November 2008

My son told me he wanted to get “pacific.” I was just about to reach for the Atlas when he launched into a long explanation of why he should be allowed to stay up way past his bedtime on a school night. “You go to bed late,” he said. “Why can’t I? I’m ‘indistinguished’ from you.”  Good try. I told him to brush his teeth, but, I admit, I had a smile on my face when I barked out those orders. How could I not be impressed with his eagerness to take his argument to a higher plane with his use, however flawed, of the Big Word?

Raising children is hard work. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. But the other indisputable truth is that parenting is also a blast. Ask any mom or dad to describe one of those it’s-all-worth-it moments and they’ll probably come up with a list as long as a city block. (One of my personal favorites is when my sons used a Swiffer and a dash of Fred Astaire-style dancing to clean the kitchen floor.)

Lately, my good times involve the boys’ rhetorical skills.

I’m not a wordsmith and neither is my husband, so I have no idea why my kids are trying to sound like William F. Buckley, the conservative commentator who liked to toss out a florid word or two to impress his viewers — and himself. As a kid, I was painfully shy and rarely spoke, even when spoken to. Besides, as one of six children, I could barely get a word in edgewise. I was a lousy speller in grade school and even mixed up my sister’s name, writing “Umily” instead of “Emily.”

My facility with words has improved somewhat, but I’m nowhere near my friend Tom, who is so eloquent he shatters the theory that we have become a nation of dimwits. In short, I might say, “This toy is defective,” but I don’t go around my house uttering, “Look boys, the cat is in repose.”

Peder, who, at 8, is my oldest, has always been a talker. He babbled and cooed round-the-clock as a baby, and I thought that was normal until my mother-in-law told me that once Peder learned how to speak he wouldn’t stop. She was right. Our house is quiet (too quiet) when Peder is gone.

Television gets a bad rap, but, in this case I honestly believe it might be contributing to the verbosity. Sure, the boys get an earful of stupid stuff, but they also hear meaty words on channels that deal with politics, science, and history. They enjoy listening to the cable shouters, and Peder has grown fond of the military channel, which is probably where he picked up the word, “ ‘mayham.’ ”

I sensed changes in Peder’s word use last year when he came home from school one day bursting with so much energy he hopped up on the kitchen chair and exclaimed, “I have so much to tell you, you will automatically be “ ‘recombusted.’ ”

He proceeded to talk in an influential manner about a project in his technology education class that involved building a house on a $100 budget.

“We’re learning how to be ‘econominal,’ ” he said.

“Great,” I said. “It’s a good time to pinch pennies. The economy is tanking.”

Henry jumped into the conversation with news about a classmate who got visibly upset when challenged on his claim that the soles of his sneakers were made of gold.

“He’s an ‘over-reacted,’ ” Henry said, throwing his empty chip bag in the “crash can.”

My neighborhood provides plenty of opportunities for the boys to show off their intellectual chops. A recent trip downtown, for example, sparked a family discussion about the boards and poles built up around an historic church as it undergoes a paint job.

“Look at that ‘scapholding,’ ” said Peder.

“What’s ‘scapholding’? ” said Henry.

“Whatever,” said Peder.

Peder believes the graffiti around the neighborhood is scribbled by people who are “wrongdoing,” and that the creep who smashed a window at an art gallery near our house is a juvenile “delicate.” Henry refuses to sleep on the “tufon” in our guest bedroom.

Sometimes, the boys come up with phrases that are completely off the mark but sound good. The other day, I asked Peder for lunchbox advice. He requested no-frill snacks.

“Keep it low pitch,” he said.

“No problem,’’ I said.

He came up with a doozy one afternoon when he tried to wiggle his way out of responsibility for teasing his brother.

“I lit the teeny flame in the oven,” he said, “but didn’t cause the fire.”

I’m not sure if a late-night infomercial or a peek at my women’s health book prompted the most eye-popping remark from Peder so far.

“You are anti-sexual,” he bellowed one evening.

“You don’t say,” I replied.

I suppose hard-driving parents with dreams of a perfect 800 might suggest I correct my sons now before it’s too late and they end up roaming the world as adults muttering, “Where’s your ‘Arts and Crabs’ section?” But I’m not about to intervene.

Really, how can I resist Peder’s explanation of a world gone wrong?

“Today was a horrid monster.”

***

Lights, camera, no action

October 2008

I walked down the street the other day to visit my friend Annabeth Gish. Annabeth and I met more than two decades ago at an old church in New London, Connecticut, where she was filming Mystic Pizza, a romantic comedy about three girls who work in a pizzeria. I was an extra in the movie (I made 50 bucks!) and wrote about my experience for my former employer, The Providence Journal. Annabeth played one of the girls, the guileless one, as I recall.

My editors told me Annabeth was a rising star and that I should try to interview her, not her co-star, Julia Roberts, who, at that time in her career, was not even vaguely alluring to the public. This is what I remember: Annabeth was warm and talkative and accompanied by her mother, who gently pointed out that no, the family was not related to the silent film star, Lillian. I followed my editor’s advice and ignored Julia, who giggled a lot on the set and flirted with one of the male leads, Vincent D’Onofrio, better known today as Detective Goren on that television show about criminals in New York City who are truly out of whack.

Annabeth never made it into my story and I never made it into the movie, but we both managed to carry on and lead fulfilling lives. When I found out that Brotherhood, the Showtime series starring Annabeth, was filming on the East Side of Providence, only two blocks from my house, I decided to make an appearance.

If you’ve lived in Rhode Island for any length of time, you know that Hollywood likes us. Production crews always seem to be filming a movie or television show here or talking about filming one. Brotherhood has been in the state off and on for three years. Filming for the show’s third season started this summer and is expected to continue through the first week of November.

The truth be told, I’ve never watched the show. I’m usually asleep by 8. From the little I know about it though, it seems like a good fit for the state, which, sadly, is dogged by a culture of political scandal. The show is about two brothers on opposite sides of the law; one brother is a politician, the other a gangster. Annabeth plays the politician’s long-suffering wife, Eileen, who abuses drugs and booze and has an affair with the mailman. (Not the Annabeth I knew.)

Reporting is a good profession to get into if you want to meet the famous and near-famous. I’ve mingled with the best: sausage king Jimmy Dean on his hermetically sealed yacht in Newport, a pig-tailed Willie Nelson in his concert trailer in Warwick, and, at an event for an alarm company, a still-dashing Robert Vaughn, whom I knew as a kid as special agent Napolean Solo of the United Network Command for Law Enforcement.

Though their celebrity status often left me tongue-tied, most of my encounters with Hollywood types were pleasant. Some weren’t.

My Mystic Pizza job comes to mind. An editor calls up and offers to put me in the movies. The next thing I know I’m sitting in a rock-hard pew at the New London church watching Jojo (real name, Lily Taylor) and Bill (real name, Vincent D’Onofrio) walk down the aisle. Lovely dress, I think, and then Lily faints. I endure 12 more hours of Lily fainting, and when it’s finally over the director tells me that 2 minutes and 34 seconds of the day’s filming will be used in the movie.

I’m tired of gasping on cue, and I’m feeling giddy, so during a break I corner D’Onofrio in a nice way and muster the courage to tell this budding (and fine-looking) star that he was “really good”  as the dangerously unstable private in Full Metal Jacket. “Thank you,” he says, with no twinkle in his eyes. “Now I’m going to eat my dinner.”

Movie stars are different from you and me.

My time with the crew and cast of Providence, the soapy television series that aired from 1999 to 2002 and starred a house on Taber Avenue in Providence, wasn’t much better. I hung out on the set during a week of filming in the state and filed stories daily. It was a tough assignment, and I had to dig deep.

In one story, I wrote about actor Seth Peterson’s obsession with his eyebrows, how they had to be perfect arches before he exited his trailer to play Robbie, the sweet but directionless brother. Petersen’s makeup artist gave me the scoop and I ran with it. I almost got kicked off the set the day the article appeared. No one was happy with my disclosure. I now realize it was a mistake (and mean-spirited) to publicize Petersen’s idiosyncrasies. I offer a belated apology.

The Brotherhood trucks pulled into the neighborhood just as my son, Peder, was finishing his Cheerios. I asked if he wanted to come along.

“I don’t want to be in a movie,” he said.

“Hollywood doesn’t pluck people off sidewalks,” I said, lying. “Suit yourself.”

I poufed my hair and churned and whirled down the street to gawk. The grand silver trucks looked like they had been wrapped in aluminum foil. A zeppelin of a camera brushed up against a mature Pieris Japonica and survived. The film crew rushed in and out of the Community Church of Providence, and at first I thought I might witness yet another make-believe wedding.  But the action was across the street in a house occupied by Jeff Pine, of Rhode Island Attorney General fame. How did the state’s former chief law enforcer land a part — however bit — in the show? Lucky duck.

A big guy in a New York Giants T-shirt told me that the scene was an Irish wake and that Pine and his family were extras. Suddenly, Pine’s dark suit made sense on this steamy hot day. I saw other extras — fire marshals in their crisp dress uniforms and women in black — enter Pine’s parlor, but I did not see her.

I did not see Annabeth.

I was about to give up and go home when I spotted a woman strolling down the street with the pep and confidence of a working actor. Annabeth, I thought. Long brown hair. Tall. Olive skin. A closer look revealed that she was Annabeth’s twin, Leslie Sweeney, who lives across the street from Pine and used to own a handbag and jewelry shop on Elmgrove Avenue called In the Bag, now closed.

Rhode Island is so small we all know each other, or know of each other. So I wasn’t surprised to find out that Annabeth and Sweeney had exchanged pleasantries — and a few dollars. One day during a pause in filming, Annabeth stopped in Sweeney’s shop and was delighted to find Me&Ro jewelry, which, I am told, is popular among Hollywood’s elite.

Annabeth bought a piece, but I didn’t ask Sweeney what it was. Bad reporting, good manners. I learned my lesson with Petersen’s brows. Some things are better kept private. A woman’s jewels are her own business.

***

Fisherboys

September 2008

A hot summer day, and I’m driving down the highway with a bucket of minnows in my passenger seat. I’m observing the bittersweet, worrying about how this ropey vine is sucking the life out of every tree and bush in the state when a minnow leaps out and lands at my feet, plop.

It’s a lot for me to process all at once: a flying fish, the speedometer edging toward 60, and my two boys in the backseat accusing me of bad deeds: You killed it. You killed the fish. I get off at the nearest exit, scoop up the minnow with my bare hands and return it to its habitat. It is lifeless, but I dare not relay that information to the boys, just yet.

All I can think about is the man in the bait shop. Surely he must have known that my bucket wasn’t deep enough for his minnows and that attempts would be made to break free. I imagine him crushing the stub of his Camel and flicking it across the curb and looking at his watch and saying now, just about now, those fish should be airborne and anyway what kind of a lady wears a skirt to go fishing.

These are the things I carry in my car now: two fishing poles from Target; 8-pound test; snelled fishhooks; split-shot sinkers; snap swivels; needle nose pliers; red-and-white bobbers; a purple plastic bucket, a Swiss Army knife and two tackle boxes equipped with green twine, hooks of various shapes and sizes, Day-Glo rubber worms, and shiny metal sinkers so refined they looked as if they should be dangling from a charm bracelet. The car smells like rotten something; I suspect it is pond scum.

This is the year we learned how to fish. Actually, this is the year I learned how to fish so I could take my boys, Peder and Henry, fishing. They are 8 and 7, old enough to cast a line, too young, I’m afraid, to untangle it from a barberry bush. In time they will learn, but for now they need my nimble fingers to make sure they hook fish, not their right femur.

Zack got us started on fishing. Most kids celebrate their birthdays at the Bowling Academy or Regal Reptiles or Monster Golf; Zack had a fishing party. On a sweltering day in July, we gathered in Slater Park in Pawtucket for hot dogs, cake, a surprisingly civilized game involving water balloons, and fishing at a pond near our picnic site.

Only one adult at the party seemed to know anything about fishing and that was Charles, who prepped the kids’ poles, a process that involved a hook and line and lots of wrapping and then two good tugs, and, bingo, you are ready for your first cast. Charles is modest about his fishing skills, which he acquired only six weeks before the party.

He taught us how to attach hooks and bobbers and gave free demonstrations on the proper way to remove a hook from a fish’s mouth (gently) — all the while tending to the needs of his son, Alden, who, not surprisingly, was the best of the bunch and who, according to my sons, achieved a personal best at the party with 23 strikes.

The fest included two fishing expeditions, one before hot dogs, the other after cake and some goodbyes. The pre-food expedition yielded mostly weeds and crushed Coke cans, although a freckled-faced boy named Finn, appropriately named after Huck, caught a smallish fish with a $7.99 Benny’s special.

After the party officially ended, a few kids, including mine, begged for more and off they marched into the bramble and found a shady fishing hole on the water’s edge that my boys now call The Secret Spot.

The place was teeming with sunfish, and just when I thought it couldn’t get any better the birthday boy snagged a catfish the size of a large man’s foot. Zack’s face lit up, and the honors of removing the hook from the whiskered fish fell to Charles, who winced when he gripped the slimy black bottom feeder — “Gross” — but managed to toss it back intact.

We’ve been fishing nearly every day since the party, and when we’re not fishing we are thinking about fishing. One day, I ran a quick errand and left my cell phone in the car. There were three messages from Peder when I got back: Mom, can we go fishing? Mom, I want to go fishing? Mom, I really want to go fishing and that’s the bottom line.

Unfortunately, the East Side of Providence does not have a good fishing hole. The pond by the Seekonk River looks like a cesspool and although I’ve seen people fishing in the river, I’m reluctant to take my kids to a place that has speeding cars on their backside and a slippery bank that could result in a reckless cast. Henry, I remind myself, was voted Most Likely to Hook Someone at Zack’s party. The dock at India Point is more suitable for serious fishermen, the sort who bring jumbo-sized coolers to chill their Bud and know how to slice open the belly of a striper and peel off its skin. (We catch and release.)

We’ve returned to The Secret Spot at least a dozen times, and one afternoon we ventured into Riverside in East Providence and checked out Willett Pond, which was unfit for even a trailed finger through the water.

On a trip to Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, we spotted some teenagers carrying rods and they directed us to a fishing hole with the send-off, “Don’t tell anyone.” This experience was more successful, with two strikes each. Peder was certain he caught a small-mouthed bass, and though I have my doubts, I’ll give it to him since harmless embellishment is part of our rich fishing culture.

My only disappointment with this new hobby is that my boys refuse to touch the bait. When Henry was a toddler he dug up worms in the backyard after a gully wash and kept the invertebrates as pets for a walloping 15 minutes. Now, he won’t come near a night crawler, and neither will Peder. Minnows are off-limits, too.

I admit that the first time I impaled a worm I felt a lot of revulsion and some guilt, and then I got over it. No bait, no strikes. I was, however, surprised to discover that night crawlers, as well as fish, bleed red, a fact that is hard for Henry to absorb.

During a recent outing at The Secret Spot, he caught a sunfish. I struggled to get the hook out with my nose pliers but couldn’t and dug deeper. Henry watched in horror as the fish’s blood trickled down my hand. He knew his hook had wounded the fish and that it was dead, or dying. I finally completed the ghastly task, but the damage was done in the form of a gaping hole.

“I don’t want to fish anymore,” Henry said, and he set down his rod.

His brother refused to leave, and I soon realized I had a crisis on my hands: a pacifist and a hunter in the same fishing spot.

“Sorry about the fish,” I said to Henry.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “Can we get a turtle?’’

 

 

Your Irises are My Irises

 August 2008

The most beautiful yew I’ve ever seen sits in front of a stately house in Providence. It looks like the plume on a giant’s hat, all green and fluffy and full of itself. I’ve driven by it so many times over the last several months my children are fed up. “Mom,” they grumble from the back seat. “Not the yew again.” I’m amazed by the evergreen’s height (one giraffe) and girth (two baby elephants), and I’m grateful that someone had the good sense a century ago to plant it in a place with plenty of open space where it could thrive and become what it is: magnificent. Someday, I’d like to knock on the homeowner’s door and ask: Who prunes this yew? What’s her name?

Dawn, on a dry summer day, and I’m in the backyard of my house, watering my sweet woodruff. I should be sleeping, but my plants are thirsty and I want to feed them before the clouds bust up and the sun beats down. I wonder if my neighbors think I’m nuts. I know my husband does, and my children are beginning to show signs of distress now that my dalliance with gardening has turned into a full-fledged affair that threatens to slow my response to queries such as, Where’s the bike pump?

I never imagined I’d be interested in tilling the soil. I lived in apartments without backyards until I was 40, and when I finally moved into a house with land I was so busy running after two toddlers I was lucky if I had enough time to brush my teeth. When a woman once told me that her passion was “working the earth,” I shuddered. But this spring I gazed at our grounds from the living room window and turned a deep crimson. Our yard was a mess. The weeds were so healthy they were flowering. The boxwoods were entangled in tree branches. The ivy was limp and brown and leggy.

I’m reluctant to describe my early days on the land as gardening; it was more like renovation work. I pulled up the ugly stuff, cut off dead branches, clipped bushes and removed intruders the earth-friendly way — with my hands. Anyone who believes that gardening involves nothing more than sticking a pansy in the ground and going about your business is reading too many glossies. Gardening is hard work. Over two weeks, I filled 14 leaf bags and tied up two bundles of sticks. I turned over the soil and sweetened it with all sorts of healthy stuff, like cow manure. I got so close to the ground I could see worms squirm like mad snakes.

At the end of the day I was exhausted, but it was a good fatigue, the kind that didn’t pull me down.  I reveled in my filth. Stringy hair. Fingers swelled up like pork sausages. Dirt on my face, under my nails, between my toes.  “See these grubby hands,” I said proudly to my boys. “Beat that.” I pushed forward with a single-mindedness I reserve for cleaning the tub, and when it was over I stood in my tidy yard and knew that I would never again tolerate the depressing stillness of backyard decay.

Our neighborhood is a good place for beginning gardeners. We are a rarity, but instead of feeling odd we can rejoice in the opportunity to learn from others whose yards are a testament to their gardening skills. I have the Reader’s Digest Illustrated Guide to Gardening and The Rhode Island Gardener’s Companion and, my favorite, Gardening for Dummies, but I want to see a limelight hydrangea in the rough, not in a book.

The gardens around here are beautiful. Flowers, bushes, trees, ground cover — it’s all there in various stages of growth over the spring and summer months to provide guidance and inspiration and remind us that goodness still springs from the earth.

I spend a lot of time in my car taking my kids to where they want to go: the baseball field, friends’ houses, the drug store for a squirt gun. These trips give me a chance to gawk at my neighbors’ gardens so I can decide if I want a certain flower or shrub on my land. I use my Reader’s Digest book to identify plants I like, and if the book disappoints me I leave notes.

One evening, I was driving to the market when I came upon a spectacular hedge. It was stunning — 10 bushes with arching branches covered with tiny white flowers that looked like snowflakes.

I left a note in the mailbox: “I love your bushes. If it’s not too much trouble could you let me know what they are?” A few days later, I got my answer: bridal wreath spirea.

As a novice gardener I have nagging insecurities about plants. The more I plant the more I learn, but along the way I’ve made plenty of mistakes. The fern I dug up at my mother-in-law’s house belonged in the shade; I planted it in full-sun and it died. Jane’s bush wilted and left this earth when I neglected to water it on a brutally hot day.

Fortunately, my nursery of choice is sympathetic to the anxieties of new gardeners. This spring, I was looking for shrubs to hide my neighbor’s cable lines. I bought two redvein enkianthus shrubs. Moments after I planted them, I knew I had flubbed up; they were too skinny. The nursery has a return policy, and I took advantage of it in the worst way. I brought the bushes back and came home, this time, with four doublefile viburnums, hardy plants that bloom white flowers. I dug two more holes and, once again, felt regret. The leaves were big and droopy. I took them back.

I considered buying four mountain laurels (a brainy bush with petals that look like fossils tinted pink), but talked myself out of it. I was too nervous; a third mistake, I feared, would require intervention. I kept the four holes until my son, Henry, asked what could only be obvious to a kid:  “Are those booby traps?”

Gardeners like to share their plants and this generosity leads to new friendships and strengthens old ones. What better way to express kindness than to offer the better half of a divided hosta (thank you, Kathy) or four healthy hens and chicks (thank you, Holly) or a fistful of sedum (thank you, Francesca). These exchanges, however, can get out of hand. Before you know it, you find yourself with a truckload of daylilies (a common giveaway) and not enough space to plant them.

Sometimes, the give-and-take is comical. One day, I left a dozen iris rhizomes on Francesca’s porch, thinking she might want to replant them in her garden. I came home a few hours later and found a surprise on my steps — a bush of peonies, along with the same irises. I called Francesca to laugh about the mix-up, but, in the end, didn’t have the heart to reveal the truth — that her irises were my irises. I planted the peonies and took the irises to yet another neighbor’s house, and for all I know, by now, they could be in a garden somewhere in the South of France.

 

This Park is Our Land

July 2008

I wasn’t much of a park person before I had kids. Back then, it never occurred to me to stroll across the street, plop down on a city bench, and eat a tuna sandwich while a pair of frenetic squirrels played at my feet. Parks were there for me to walk by on my way to the coffee shop.

It took one broken lamp for me to realize that my sons, Peder and Henry, needed a place to run and that our yard was inadequate. It was long and narrow, good for a trike ride, bad for tag. Worse yet, it didn’t have any grass, only a patio with sharp pebbles. Two busted lips and a knee gash so deep I needed tweezers to remove the debris sent me on a quest for better grounds.

One Saturday morning, I buckled the boys into the double stroller and walked three blocks away to a park that everyone in the neighborhood called The Baby Park.

It was perfect — loaded with tots, flat and grassy, and enclosed by a tall, wrought-iron fence that looked like it belonged around the Munster mansion. The park had a sandbox filled with old Tonka trucks, swings with seatbelts, and a jungle gym with a tunnel where kids could escape from hovering parents for a precious two seconds. The boys mounted a stump and set up a fort among the withering hemlocks. We became regulars.

The parks on the East Side of Providence have been good to us; they’re one reason we’re here. Without the parks, my early parenting days would have been long and lonesome. I raise my juice box to the parks — my second backyard, a place where my kids can run free, shout as loud as they want, meet up with best buds, celebrate birthday parties, and smack a baseball without worrying about it landing on a neighbor’s rose bush.

Our biggest adventure was in The Baby Park. Peder was 2; Henry, an infant. I was gabbing with another parent when Peder, stick thin, squeezed through the fence and landed in the backyard of a house on Orchard Avenue. I didn’t know if I should panic or look at my son in happy wonderment. “Stop,” I shouted. No chance.

He took off running to the object of his affection — a swing set. The fence was too high for me to climb, so I raced around the block to fetch him. He was playing when I arrived and so was the dog, which, to my relief, was big, but not ferocious. The homeowner spotted me through her window and seemed confused to see a woman standing at the bottom of a slide begging a boy to come down. I apologized as best I could through glass, and left with a firm grip on Peder’s hand. I went back to the park the next day and was delighted to discover that during the night someone had covered the escape hole with chicken wire.

I’m sure the parks have official names but I don’t know what they are and don’t intend to find out. I like the names we’ve given them: The Big Green Park, sprawling grounds at the end of Blackstone Boulevard with a green dome and flat land for foot races; The JCC Park, a bustling place behind the Jewish Community Center that has a Little League field and community garden; and Grandma’s Park, a peaceful spot on the edge of a forest overlooking the Blackstone River. Most people call it Patterson Park. My sons named it after their grandmother, who lived two blocks away and would stop by on sunny days to watch her grandsons shoot baskets in the junior-sized hoop or slurp a rainbow snow cone from the ice cream man.

I am not fibbing when I say I’ve visited every park on the East Side. One visit, however, did not always lead to another. Take The Red Park, a small lot in Fox Point with red monkey bars that look like ribbon candy. We had fun but no one showed any interest in returning. At the tiny park on Morris Avenue I felt like I was intruding in someone’s private yard.

Some of our parks are really chunks of land that we use as playgrounds. They lack the trappings of a traditional park — jungle gyms, swings, slides — but are still good places to play if you’re looking for privacy. We like a stretch of road along the Seekonk River that has an enormous flower box at the entrance to keep out cars. I sit on the curb and watch the boys ride their bikes and when they tire of figure eights we wander to the road’s end to hunt for river life, turtles, and the occasional fish. And how can I forget the wonderfully steep sledding hill at a nearby school that offers two courses — one for the timid, the other for the reckless.

Our secret playground is on private land that we treat as public. The Big Green Field, known to most as the Aldrich Dexter Athletic Complex at Brown University, is where Peder learned how to pitch a three-fingered changeup and Henry perfected his pop-up catching.

My favorite park is The Rope Park. Some people refer to it as India Point or The Spiderman Park. Besides a wonderful view of the city’s waterfront and a breeze that makes hot days seem cool, the park has a climbing structure that looks like a giant spider web. It’s irresistible. The web is attached to a wobbly bridge, also made of rope, and a hammock sturdy enough to handle a six-kid pileup.

The Rope Park was the setting for our most memorable park experience — meeting Mika Seeger and Peter Geisser, the Rhode Island artists who made the playground’s ceramic mosaic wall of India Point’s maritime history. They were working there one afternoon when the boys showed up to play.

Peter and Peder hit it off. They are both friendly guys who like to talk. Peter, a stained-glass artist and former art director of the Rhode Island School for the Deaf, politely answered all of Peder’s questions. (“How hot is a kiln?” “What’s a schooner?’’ “How old are you?’’) Just before we left, he handed us a souvenir: a piece of the wall.

As we drove off, I told the boys that Mika is the daughter of Pete Seeger, a man who has been singing for decades about hammers and railroads and our land — all the things they love, too.

“Pete Seeger is the greatest folk singer in the United States of America, maybe the world,” I said.

“What’s a fork singer?” said Henry.

Peder couldn’t get Peter off his mind. He wanted to go back but it was late and I was hungry. (The ice cream man rarely makes his way to India Point.) We struck a compromise: Peder would bring his friend a cold drink. We bought two bottles of water at the drugstore and went back.

I sat in the car with Henry while Peder delivered his goods to the grateful artists. The tears started as he ran back to the car, and by the time he opened the door he was sobbing. He knew he had had one of the best play dates of his life and it was over.

Yard Sales

June 2008

A few summers ago, my husband took our sons on a Sunday morning walk through the neighborhood. Instead of returning home with a pocketful of rocks, the boys came back with an apple peeler. In my view, apple peelers are a luxury item and a frivolous expense. What’s wrong with a simple paring knife?

I was pleased to find out that this particular apple peeler (still in its box!) was a bargain: only 50 cents. It was gently used, but so what. For that price, I’ll take a blunt blade. Besides, the peeler made the boys happy. Henry, the tinkerer, got something he could disassemble. Peder, the fruit lover, got to indulge.

What really amazed the boys, though, was where they closed the deal: at a yard sale.

If you’ve lived on the East Side of Providence for any length of time you’ve probably been to at least one yard sale. They are so common in the summer it’s possible to spend an entire Saturday strolling from one block to another, picking through other people’s stuff.

Last spring, we were driving home from baseball practice when we noticed a pile of plush toys in a driveway. The boys asked me to stop. I did, though I wondered, as I cut the engine, if dust mites had set up house in the fur. “Please Mom,” said Henry, looking at me with superb tenderness. We bought a red-eye tree frog and a chipmunk named Chippy Choppy.

I’ve been all over the state, and I can say with certainty that yard sales on the East Side are the best. The goods are in great shape and unique. We have gallery-quality paintings from art students at the Rhode Island School of Design. We have scholarly books from Brown University professors. We have steamer trunks lugged out of moldy basements by the next generation.

I’m not looking for socket wrenches or humidifiers when I go to a yard sale. I want a set of nesting bowls from Hungary ($2; 2006) or a decorative pin made from Coke cans and wire ($1.50; 2002). I want something that satisfies (the saltwater blue Indian tapestry I bought for $4; 2004) without the Tiffany’s price.

My boys, of course, want toys. It’s rare to find toys without defects. My sons always end up at the bin with toys so disfigured I wonder why the seller doesn’t just offer them for FREE. The boys don’t seem to care. For them, it’s all about the purchase. Afterward, they rush home, heavy-hand the doorbell and shout, “Mom, look what I got,” to which I might respond, “More plastic.”

Playing cards are the boys’ second favorite find. This might have something to do with their fondness for poker. My husband taught them how to play when they were toddlers and gleefully turned their bedroom into a poker den after dinner. I can honestly say that four hands of five-card stud is a good way to wind down before bed.

Cards are popular at yard sales, and the boys scoop them up. The deck, however, is not always full. Some sellers are honest enough to warn us; the shady leave it up to us to find out. This lack of disclosure has created problems. Many of our decks are incomplete, which makes it impossible for Henry to draw his four-of-a-kind or, better yet, his straight flush.

East Side yard sales seem to specialize in high-brow kitchenware. They look good, but won’t turn a bad chef into a good one. My sons like collecting these objects and presenting them to my husband, the household cook. “Dad needs this,” Henry said one day, as he raised something that looked like a shovel for a leprechaun. It was a corn zipper and he bought it for a buck. Peder’s treasure is the “yellow thing-a-ma-thing” that chops onions and keeps our kitchen free of food-related tears.

Our most intelligent purchase was a set of dinner dishes we bought for $15. Our old set had fallen into and from the hands of two rambunctious boys and dwindled to one or two plates. The boys have been reckless with the new set as well, but my husband turned to eBay for guidance and discovered that replacements cost a few bucks and that our blue-flowered, microwave-safe dishes have a regal name: The Churchill Finlandia Georgian Collection.

Most of our experiences at yard sales have been fun. The sellers are laid back and seem relieved to purge. Now and then, we run into a crank. Take the man in the summer of  ’02. The minute Peder and I set foot on his driveway I sensed trouble. The man was wearing one of those mini carpenter aprons from Home Depot to collect his money and shadowing visitors as if they were thieves. Peder, who had recently graduated from putt-putt to the driving range, asked if I’d buy him four used golf balls for a walloping $10. I reluctantly said yes and paid a woman helping out. I gave Peder the golf balls to carry and as we walked down the driveway the man raised his deeply corrugated brow and exclaimed in a booming voice loud enough for other shoppers to hear: “Did he pay for those?” “Of course,” I replied. “Too much!”

I like going to yard sales to find art by RISD students. Their creations are unique and affordable. My prized purchase is a portrait of a pigtailed and plump young woman with a periwinkle muscle T-shirt and fierce face. Two summers ago, I bought three framed photographs from a RISD student trying to raise money to move to New York. The frames were actually tree branches, and the photos (a pine tree, a telephone pole, a screamer) were suspended from the branches with wire. I was crazy about them and put them on a high window ledge out of reach of little hands. The other day, the photos disappeared, no doubt swiped by Henry, who probably took them apart and stuffed the pieces under a sofa cushion to cover his tracks. I’ll forgive him, if he promises not to come home with any more chipmunks.

The Tulips and the Stone           

 

May 2008

The day my husband found out that his mother’s cancer had spread he sat down with our boys, then ages 4 and 5, and told them the doctor couldn’t help grandma and that she was going to die. The boys knew she had been in the hospital and they had seen her at home feeling poorly, but it never occurred to them that she wouldn’t get better. Peder, my oldest, burst into tears. “I don’t want grandma to die,” he said, sobbing. “Tell her not to die.”

That night, just before bed, my husband talked to the boys about what would happen next to Carol. We would keep grandma’s old house so they could still kick a ball in her yard, slide down her bulkhead, and dodge cobwebs in her creepy basement. She’d be buried nearby in Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, where she liked to walk among the grand pin oaks. And she’d have something called a gravestone, a big rock engraved with her name. Peder asked if he could design it.

Early in his life, Peder was drawn to the arts. When he was a toddler I set up an easel in our living room and made sure the plastic cups were always full of fresh paint. He liked to paint rainbows, great arcs of blue and green with a dash of black, his dark clouds. I called the paintings his rainbow series and taped them over the windows at the top of the stairs where the morning sun comes through strongly.

His painting period ended around the age of 4 when he discovered the books of the architectural illustrator David Macaulay and discovered that an intricate drawing of, say, a stapler was art, too. Over the years, he put his pencil to paper and drew elaborate illustrations of whatever caught his fancy: bridges, fire trucks, airplanes, sailboats, football fields, golf courses, ski trails, even an old apple press. Why not his grandmother’s gravestone?

Henry, my youngest, didn’t know much about gravestones but Peder had seen his share during weekend tricycle rides on the flat roads at Swan Point. Still, he needed some guidance: Would grandma prefer a tall stone or a wide one? What color would she want: black, rose or gray?

It was Peder who decided the stone should have an engraving of tulips or roses, which my mother-in-law loved and whose remnants remained on her lawn in the form of a curled leaf or faded petal when she died just before her 80^th birthday. He settled on tulips.

Grandchildren came late in my mother-in-law’s life. Before the boys were born, I suspect she made peace with the possibility that she might not become a grandmother. I’m sure she was thrilled when her only child — my husband — married and had not one, but two boys.

She lived close by, so she saw them every day and let them run in her yard with its soft grass to cushion falls. She always had chocolate cookies on her kitchen counter and coffee milk in the clunky Hotpoint refrigerator she bought in 1949, the year she bought the house. The boys felt completely at ease in her presence. Her house was more popular than a trip to the ice cream shop. It was heartbreaking for them to lose her.

After the talk with his dad, Peder sat down at our kitchen table and drew the first of several illustrations of what he thought the gravestone should look like. He eventually chose a tall stone with a serpentine arc. He wrote my mother-in-law’s name in his best penmanship and the dates of her birth, Nov. 28, 1925, and her death, Nov. 1, 2005.

The tulips were the most challenging part of the design. How to express the simplicity of a tulip on a slab of stone? He found his answer one morning at The Providence Athenaeum after telling the children’s librarian what he was doing.  A few days later, she appeared at our door with a book about the history of tulips in Holland, complete with illustrations, which Peder studied with an intensity usually reserved for his airplane books.

One Saturday, my husband took the boys and the sketch to a Providence monument company, which my husband had passed many times as a boy during his weekly Sunday car rides to his grandmother’s house in the country, never once imagining that he would one day find himself inside the lot’s chain-link fence selecting a stone for his mother.

John, the owner, gave everyone a tour and together they selected a stone of gray granite from Barre, Vermont. My husband told John our son liked to draw and then he handed him Peder’s design.

A few weeks later, we received the layout in the mail. The name and dates were correct, but Peder complained that the flowers were all wrong. They looked more like cornstalks — without the corn. Peder asked for a new design. I chuckle when I think of John back at the drafting table, at the behest of a 5-year-old kid. My mother-in-law would’ve gotten a kick out of that, too.

The new design was perfect. My husband ordered the stone and it was delivered to Swan Point just before the first anniversary of grandma’s death. On a sunny afternoon, we made a special trip to the cemetery to see it. We drove slowly along North Way, peering out the windows, searching for Peder’s work, and when we spotted it the boys flew.

Peder inspected it first to make sure it was up to his high standards of artistry, and then the boys ran their hands over the polished granite and two tulips. They hid behind the stone and popped their heads up over the arc. They climbed on the base — Henry on one side, Peder on the other — and talked about the top’s rough, rock-pitch surface. They leaned against the stone; they hugged it.

It is always there when we go back. My boys own that gravestone. It is theirs.

Finding Zak DeOssie

April 2008

I’m always grateful when someone is kind to my kids. I’m talking about genuine kindness, the sort that goes beyond a lollipop and a pinch on the cheek. I’m talking about the kindness that gets me all choked up.

Let me tell you about Zak DeOssie.

Back in November, I wrote a story about my son Peder’s fondness for Zak, the former football star for Brown University who made it as a pro with the New York Giants. For years, Peder has been following the linebacker’s career on the field and in a riveting DVD about the games leading up to the Ivy Title the Bears won in 2008.

Last summer, Peder stood outside the First Baptist Church in America for two hours hoping to get Zak’s autograph as he marched by during his graduation ceremony. Zak was a no-show, but that didn’t deter my son. Later that night, Peder wrote Zak a letter, asking for his signature.

Months passed. Peder was about to give up when my husband, revealing a soft spot for his firstborn, dug up the Giants’ address and mailed Zak my November story. A few days later (on Dec. 5, at 4:03 p.m., to be precise), we got an e-mail that made us giddy:

Dear Peder: I just received your article/letter you sent me and I am touched. So sorry I missed you at my graduation ceremony. Keep an eye out in the mail for the next couple of weeks. I will send you my autograph as well as a little surprise for you because you were so patient. Go Giants!!! Sincerely, Zak DeOssie.

I could not hold him down. Peder was so excited he would rush up our steps after school to see if a package from New York was leaning against the door.

Late December arrived, and still nothing. I urged calmness. I told Peder that Zak was busy playing football and that he’d pull through eventually. But Peder wrote another letter and then crept upstairs to the computer one night and composed an e-mail.

Dear Zak, I think I’ve been waiting a couple of weeks for your package. Did you lose my address? Here it is again: Providence, Rhode Island. Sincerely, Peder.

The doorbell rang the morning of Jan. 18. I peeked out the window and saw the postal truck. Could this be it? I opened the door, and the mailman said, “You got something from Zak DeOssie.”

Rhode Islanders who follow pro football know Zak DeOssie. I told the mailman the story, and he said he wasn’t surprised. He said Zak’s father, Steve DeOssie, who played for the Patriots and other NFL teams, was a decent man, too.

I put the package on the kitchen table, and lured Peder there after school. He tried to keep cool, but kept jumping around like a kid on a pogo stick. He called his father at work.

“Dad, I just got a Zak DeOssie thing-a-ma-bobber,” he shouted into the phone.

The “thing-a-ma-bobber” was a Wilson Official NFL “The Duke” Football signed by Zak and other Giants: fellow linebackers Chase Blackburn, Kawika Mitchell, Antonio Pierce, Reggie Torbor, and Gerris Wilkinson, and the defensive end, Justin Tuck.

“I am not going to use this one bit,” said Peder, quickly realizing that his precious pigskin was a keeper. “I am not going to get this dirty.”

And there was more. Zak also sent a signed football card (Peder, my #1 Fan, Zak DeOssie, 51, Go Gmen!), as well as a handwritten letter on a sheet of lined notebook paper:

Peder, I am very sorry this package is getting to you so late. I have been busy with everything from football to the holidays. Hope you can forgive me. You better be watching the game this weekend vs. the Green Bay Packers. It is supposed to be -5 degrees outside. I can’t wait. Take care Peder and keep watching. Sincerely, your friend, Zak, #51.

We watched the Green Bay game (the Giants won, of course) and the next day Peder wrote back.

Dear Zak, Great game. It was a nail biter. I’m glad you are going to the Super Bowl. I guess you were happy when Tynes made the kick. Did you know there has never been a kick over 40 yards at Lambeau Field? Tynes’ kick was 47 yards. I want the Gmen to win the Super Bowl, not the Patriots. Thank you for the football, football card and your letter. I am going to show everything to my friends. My Mom is going to buy me a glass case for the football and card and letter so I can keep them forever. I have a question for you: Who is your best friend on the team? Good luck in the Super Bowl. I will be looking for you on television and cheering you on. Your friend and fan. Peder.

It was the greatest Super Bowl ever, the game the Giants weren’t supposed to win. With less than a minute left on the clock we worried that Eli Manning (Yep, we’re Giants’ fans) wouldn’t be able to complete the drive, but he came out of the pile and aired it to David Tyree, who made that incredible catch, and our Zak won his first Super Bowl at the tender age of 23. The end was especially sweet when Zak nailed a Patriots’ running back after the final kickoff and the broadcaster, Joe Buck, introduced the former Brown Bear to millions of viewers: “That’s the rookie, Zak DeOssie.”

I stayed up late watching the post-game show and almost woke Peder up when a Channel 12 sportscaster interviewed Zak about the Giants’ victory. He was just as I had imagined: a burly young man with a boyish face and a neck as thick as a redwood. “How do you feel?” asked the sportscaster, giving Zak a pat on the back. “Euphoric,” Zak said. I was smiling so hard my jaw hurt.

Here was a young man who did something he didn’t have to do. He paid attention to a kid who paid attention to him. With all the stories today about world-gone-wrong athletes (Clemens’ steroid abuse, Vick’s dog fighting, Pacman’s fistfights, Roethlisberger’s indiscretions) it’s refreshing to find someone who understands that sports are really about making a kid’s day.

Thanks, Zak DeOssie.

You’re my hero too.

 Snow Day

 March 2008

Bad weather kept my sons home from school the other day. We got only a few inches of snow, but it was enough to scare school officials, who feared a repeat of what happened earlier this winter when a blizzard brought the state to a standstill and created a giant traffic jam or, as they say in Italy, un ingorgo grosso. Via Condotti in Rome has lots of ingorghi grossi.

Snow days pose a challenge to parents. The ones who work (outside the house) have to scramble to find someone to take care of their children. The ones at home have to find ways to keep their kids busy to prevent the bickering that can occur when siblings are cooped up for a long stretch of time. I fall in the latter category and, as the parent of two spirited boys only 13 months apart, I’m aware of the potential for great quarrels.

I had two options: I could anesthetize the boys with television and the computer or I could persuade them to use their brains and bodies. I’m down on technology at the moment, so I decided to make a good-faith effort to fill our day with activities that did not include clubpenguin.com.

Most parents know it’s important to give your kids advance warning of your intentions if you want them to do something without a battle. The end of a trip to the park might be preceded by, Max, we’re leaving in 15 minutes. Before entering a drugstore, a parent might utter, No gum, only Swedish Fish. When my sons got up that morning, I made it clear even before they brushed their teeth that the day would be an adventure if they followed my lead.

My 7-year-old son, Peder, loves to cook. He learned how to cook from his dad, who prepares all the meals in our house. Peder decided to show off his culinary skills on this snow day.

By 8 in the morning, he was sitting at the kitchen table reading the ingredients for “Fifi’s French Toast,” in his Better Homes and Garden New Junior Cookbook, and was barking out orders to his brother, Henry. (Such is the fate of little brothers.)

“I want to cook,” said Henry.

“You can get the utensils,” Peder replied.

After a few mishaps (yolk on the table, yolk on the floor, yolk under the burner), we finally settled down to eat and talk about our plans. Henry came up with the idea for a list. No. 1: “Ete.” No. 2: “Brush Teeth.” No. 3: “Bored Games.” No. 4: “Arts and Crabs.” No. 5: “Shovel Snow.” No. 6: “Hot Chocolit.” No. 7: “Pizza.” I was thrilled. There were no references to Pokemon or aquatic birds. This was going to be a fruitful day, indeed.

The boys stuck to the schedule, until they got to No. 3. My boys are moving beyond the Lego phase so I thought Christmas would be a good opportunity to push them further into the book and board game phase. I’m afraid I went too far. The books were a hit; the board games received a tepid response. Last count, we owned 13 board games, but only one really sees any action: Monopoly.

While Henry was rinsing the dishes (another little brother task), I went upstairs to tend to Marvin Garden and look around for the old shoe. No sooner was the bank in order when word came from downstairs that No. 3 and No. 5 were trading places. I wasn’t surprised. Most boys I know love to shovel. There’s something exhilarating about scooping up a pile of dirt and tossing it aside. Toy stores know that, too. That’s why they stock kid shovels year-round. We own four.

Shoveling snow with kids is a humbling experience. They are relentless in their pursuit of the perfect path. After one scoop, I need to come up for air. Kids can go at it a good hour without stopping. But the path is narrow and the elbows hard; there’s always a bit of chaos on the front steps. A shovelful of snow aimed at the hardy yew might end up on someone’s face.

“Peder got snow in my eyes,” Henry said.

“I did not.”

“Did so.”

The spat led to the inevitable snow-shovel fight that stopped only when I used another common parenting tactic: change of venue. We went next door to shovel our neighbors’ steps and then walked across the street to tidy up another friend’s house.

They were prepared to shovel the entire street, but Henry brought up the topic of food. Back home, they decided to pass on No. 6 (hot chocolate) and go directly to pizza. I put in the call — half-cheese, half-pepperoni. “Thirty minutes,” the man at the pizza parlor said.

Get-togethers are easy to arrange on snow days for obvious reasons; kids are home and ready to cut loose. Arlo came over in the early afternoon. He had eaten. We had not. Our pizza was late. Henry and Arlo passed the time playing Front Porch Classics Pinball Baseball Game while Peder stood at the window waiting for lunch to pull up.

We should be forgiving on snow days. When the pizza man finally knocked on the door two hours after my call, I accepted his apology. He said he had been swamped by requests.

“Something’s going on out there,” he said.

“Snow day,” I said. “Tell your people.”

The pizza was all cheese and cold. Peder took one bite, Henry two. “It tastes funny,” Henry said. “I can’t eat it.” I couldn’t either. We had more success with dessert, chocolate cookies. Then I asked for a show of hands: Monopoly or the backyard?

They raced out the door, leaving behind a trail of gloves without mates. Working as a team, the boys built a snow fort and filled it with snowballs.

“Come see what we did,” Peder shouted into the kitchen, where I was scrubbing a pot.

I expected a tour of the fort, and instead I came under fire by three little boys in puffy pants.

“Take this,” said Henry, delivering a beauty.

“Cease and desist,” I shouted and picked up a sled to shield myself from the onslaught. I stumbled back into the house and dusted off my coat. The boys played until dark, and when they came back inside they checked off No. 6, hot chocolate. Lukewarm. No marshmallows.

“Can I have some whipped cream?” asked Henry.

You bet. It was a snow day.

***

Ruby Red

February 2008

Not long ago, my husband and I got invited to a cocktail party. Most people would welcome an evening of merry-making, but I was immediately filled with dread. For the last eight years, I’ve been taking care of two lively little boys round-the-clock and my wardrobe reflects that effort: jeans and rumpled shirts. What’s worse, the march of time has not been particularly kind to my skin. I gathered from the invitation that this would be a party for grown-ups and that I’d be expected to look like one. My black fleece jacket from The North Face would have to stay home. Perhaps I would have to invest in blush.

I’m a nature girl. The last dress I bought was for my wedding. I own one skirt. No heels, only the flattest flats. Back in ’96, I purchased a tube of lipstick and, a year later, a wand of mascara, but threw them out when I read in a glossy that cosmetics more than six months old are a breeding ground for bacteria.

For the most part, my unglamorous look has served me well. It requires no maintenance and it’s easy on the pocketbook. No surprise then that the party invitation threw me off. I had two options. I could cancel or go on a shopping spree. I gave myself an early Valentine’s Day present and took off for the mall in search of a new outfit and face.

To be honest, I’d rather drink hot oil than shop. I find the whole experience tedious and, besides, nothing ever fits. I worked as a newspaper reporter for many years and one of the best things about the job was that I could wear whatever I wanted: faded cords, an old blazer, beaten-up clogs. I rarely ventured out to make a clothing purchase and when I did it was usually for pants at a thrift shop. No surprise then that I was feeling some trepidation when I left the house that day. If fatigue didn’t crush me, frustration would.

My first stop was at Ann Taylor, a store that had been good to my sister when she worked in a law firm and wanted to look both stylish and imposing. I found the dress rack right away. I dislike trying on clothes. You have to take off all your clothes and your shoes (in this case Sorel winter boots with pesky laces), and you have to take off your glasses if you’re putting something over your head. I hate taking off my glasses.

Fortunately, the dress I picked was what they call in the business a wraparound, which means it goes on like a coat, through the arms. It only took seconds to put on, and it fit. That, in itself, was remarkable. I bought it: Happy Valentine’s Day. Surely, I thought, my next stop would be this easy.

When I was a kid, I played with a red-head named Jessica Dunn. Her white dresses embroidered with cherries were always clean and pressed, and her ponytails lacked the unruly wisps of a less tame child, like me. She had a teenage neighbor named Mary, a budding cosmetologist who liked to use us as guinea pigs. She’d brush our hair into tight ballerina buns and dust our cheeks with rose-colored powder, sometimes so furiously it seemed as if she had found the tip of a dinosaur bone and was in a rush to excavate the entire creature by sundown. More often than not, I left her chair with burns from the blush brush.

Thankfully, I grew up and out of those beauty sessions. Years later, I saw Mary in the park with friends and expected a greeting (Hey, your nose is shiny), but she didn’t offer as much as a peep. Instead she smirked and pointed my way. I used to put makeup on that kid. They had a good laugh at my expense.

I could link my distrust of makeup to Mary’s betrayal but that would be a stretch. All I know is that I came of age without a compact. I never wore makeup in high school or in college or to my first job interview or on my wedding day.

As the years went by, the temptation to try the stuff grew. I’d read magazine ads about mascara that “brightens your eyes” or foundation that promises “new life to tired-looking skin,” and wonder if the pitch was true or only for suckers. I became intrigued by the makeup counters at department stores, manned by clerks eager to do what Mary did, only better and with no contempt.

I must’ve circled cosmetics country at Nordstrom half a dozen times that day before I finally said to hell with it and screwed up the courage to enter this foreign territory. I asked for advice about the only thing I was vaguely familiar with: lipstick. I soon discovered that the options were too numerous (100 varieties; I need limits) and that I wouldn’t be able to make a decision. Paralysis set in. I could scoot or ask for help.

“I never wear makeup,” I told a clerk. “I’m going to a party.”

“I like parties,” she said. “I never miss a party.”

I could feel the sweat beading up on my back, and my face flushed. The clerk picked up on my discomfort. She asked me to sit down.

I had never been this close to a makeover and wasn’t about to bail out now. I let her go ahead and do what she’s trained to do: re-create a face. I shut my eyes. I took the cream, concealer, blush, mascara and lipstick, but passed on the eye shadow. I’m not ready for eye shadow.

The mirror turned easily.

“Wow,” I said. My lips popped and I had that dewy look. I’ve always wanted that dewy look.

I bought everything, no questions asked.

I still had on my makeup when we sat down for dinner that night. My 6-year-old, Henry, wanted to know what was up with my mouth.

“Lipstick,” I said.

“Chopstick?” he said.

I took a paper napkin, planted a Monroe-style kiss on it and held it up for all to see.

“Rose Aglow,” I said proudly.

Turns out I never got to show off my painted face outside the house. We couldn’t find a babysitter for the party and had to send our regrets. The goods are still in a little gray shopping bag hanging on my doorknob as a reminder of the things I learned: grooming is good, concealer conceals, and there are alternatives to no-nonsense wool socks for Valentine’s Day. I, for one, wouldn’t mind a tube of what could be the most reckless of all offerings in the house of beauty: Ruby Red.

Tunnels

January 2008

I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions. Over the years I’ve muttered a few to-dos: cut down on the Excedrin; cook dinner at least once; wax the brows. But I never followed through and certainly never wrote anything down. This year is different. I have two problems that need to be addressed. One resolution concerns our hamster, the other our television.

Tunnels came to our house this summer at the urging of my son, Peder, after he reminded me nearly every day during the school year that he was the only kid in his first-grade class without a pet. Jake had a frog. Alex had a cat. Theo had a dog; no, Mom, make that two dogs.

I don’t have anything against pets. Some of my best friends have pets. But, if the truth be told, I’m not ready for the big pet — the Golden, the Setter, the Lab. Like babies, they need attention and require caregivers who are selfless, especially during the house-training phase. “Your mother is selfish,” I told Peder and his little brother, Henry. “No dogs this year.”

We bought our hamster at Rumford Pet Center in East Providence. I’ve been taking the boys there since they were toddlers as a way to expose them to pets on a hit-and-run basis. They would sit in a pen and cuddle with a canine not much bigger than one of their Tonka trucks: the barks-a-lot Papillon; the plucky Cairn Terrier, and my personal favorite, the floppy-eared Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. From there, we would wander over to the hamsters, gerbils, and mice and then make a quick stop to see the birds, snakes, lizards, frogs and hermit crabs before a candy bar and the door.

At the shop, Peder chose a dwarf hamster as opposed to the fuller, more robust Teddy Bear Hamster. We also bought a wire cage and household supplies — bedding, a bag of food, a water bottle and, at the suggestion of a clerk, an exercise wheel. “Hamsters are on the go at night,” the clerk said, and it suddenly occurred to me that I knew nothing about hamsters and had no idea how to care for them. When I got home I Googled “hamster” and learned that we would have been better off with a fish. “Because of their nocturnal nature and tendency to nip,” wrote the esteemed American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, “hamsters of any species are not appropriate pets for families with small children.”

The novelty of Tunnels lasted 24 hours. We assembled his cage and let him loose among the fluffy scraps of paper and timothy hay, and he seemed happy enough until Peder picked him up. The unexpected affection startled Tunnels, who retaliated with his teeth, just as the Society said he would. Tunnels was not going to be a cuddly house pet. He spent the night in Peder’s bedroom, but made so much noise on his exercise wheel (imagine an emery board tumbling inside a dryer for 11 hours) we moved him downstairs the next day to a table in the living room, and there he sits today, largely ignored by all but me.

Tunnels has gone from being the family pet to my pet. I clean his cage, replace his bedding, refill his food cup and wipe down his wheel. He is one of God’s creatures, but he is also, as my friend, Bill, reminded me with the kind of look reserved for those who have just eaten a SweeTart, a rodent, like rats. I am wracked with guilt when I put on my garden gloves to discourage physical contact and exclaim through clenched teeth before a cage cleaning, “Just let me get through this gracefully.” Like the ox-eye daisy picker, Tunnels must be wondering where he stands — she loves me, she loves me not. Poor guy.

One evening, I wandered over to his cage to say hello. He was nowhere in sight and I panicked, thinking he had escaped or, worse yet, gone to his glory. “Tunnels,” I said softly, peering into his cage. “Are you in there?” Moments later, a whiskered nose emerged from his hay and for the first time I felt enormous tenderness for the little fellow. I thought of all the children’s books I had read to my sons over the years that featured rodents as lovable characters with families to support. I thought of the two-peas-in-a-pod mice, Chester and Wilson, best buds forever. I thought of Honey and Humphrey, those mischievous hamsters. I thought of Kipper’s friend, Mouse, who persevered and taught himself how to count to 10.

And so this year, I turn my attention to Tunnels. I resolve to be kinder and gentler to him and discover his goodly soul.

My other resolution concerns the other creature in our house — the television.

I am not a television snob. I like to disassociate just as much as the other gal. One evening, I flipped on the television and couldn’t turn it off when I stumbled upon Psycho, a movie that forever changed my comfort level in the shower. What a treat, I thought; 109 minutes of uninterrupted Hitchcock — for free.

My children, unfortunately, do not share my fondness for the classics. Their taste runs more to “SpongeBob SquarePants.” My limit is one episode at a time, maybe two if I’m folding clothes. It’s not the content I object to (SpongeBob is a sweet kid); it’s the noise. I’d rather hear clanging water pipes, the drone of the dishwasher, a vacuum cleaner on top speed — anything but the incessant chatter of television characters.

Last year, the boys brought home a flier from school urging parents to turn off the television for one week. We failed miserably. I smelled defeat on day one when Peder climbed in the car after school and assured me that he knew how to read and watch television at the same time. Later that afternoon, I found him viewing “Tom and Jerry,” with the book, The Jetsons, sprawled across his lap.

Things got worse when my husband decided to set aside our 20-year-old clunker and replace it with a flat-screen model — the latest craze, I’m afraid — which led us to the next upgrade: High-Def. The picture won over my children and reignited a passion for SpongeBob that is now veering into the dangerous territory of compulsive viewing.

At the start of school this fall I banned television after dinner, but then, in 2007, the Red Sox won the World Series and the wide world of sports reentered our lives with a bang. Why are all the games, from hockey to football, on at night? The phrase “Just let me turn on the television to check the score” has been uttered far too often in our house and usually minutes before bedtime.

And so my second New Year’s resolution calls for drastic (some would say cruel) measures to regulate television watching: Put a lock on the door to the TV room and hide the key, maybe under Tunnels’ cage. Why not? No one in the house would ever think of looking there, except me.

 

Charlie Brown Tree

December 2007

When I was a kid, we bought our Christmas tree every year from the Lions Club. A few days after Thanksgiving, hardy and civic-minded men in pea coats and steel-toed boots would set up a lot next to Commerce Bank and string up tiny lights that blinked through the night. Just before Christmas, my father would drive our wood-paneled station wagon to the lot and wander through the aisles looking for a tree, picking up, putting down, until he found one that could fit in the living room. More often than not, he chose a Douglas fir.

I’m embarrassed to admit that it took a move to New England for me to realize that Christmas trees grow on farms and that it’s possible to cut and carry. I came across this knowledge one winter when I was working as a reporter for a newspaper in Connecticut and my editor told me to grab my parka and head to a Christmas tree farm to write a Christmas story about Christmas trees.

The hills of God’s country were dotted with newborn trees that looked like the green bristles on a brand new kitchen scrub brush. The farmer told me it would take years for the trees to mature, and I knew then he was in it for the long haul. No chopping this season; still, the babies made a good front-page photo.

During my early years in Providence, I bought only one tree, a scrawny, wisp of a thing that I picked up at the grocery store. Family and friends were joining me for the holidays, and I wanted to spiff up my apartment. Bad idea. The tree took up valuable sleeping space, was the butt of cruel jokes, and came with needles that couldn’t hang on through the plum pudding. I tossed it the day after Christmas.

Children came along eventually and Christmas took on greater significance, at least the material side of it. Surely, I could do better than my forlorn fir. I consulted my husband, who wasn’t much help. During his boyhood, his mother refused to pay more than $2 for a tree and that frugality led her back year after year to a lot in East Providence. As the prices went up, my husband’s trees got smaller and smaller until he, too, was celebrating with a sad-sack.

It had never occurred to him to take the chop-your-own path; suddenly, it became the only option.

On a cold, but mercifully sunny, December day we found ourselves roaming among the firs and pines at one of the most beloved tree farms in Rhode Island, Schartner Farms in Exeter. Our boys, then ages 3 and 4, cut loose among the spruce while my husband and I sought perfection.

Anyone who has spent any time looking for a perfect teardrop of a tree on a tree farm knows there is no such thing. Trees have flaws — a limp branch, a crooked trunk, a patch of brown needles. The imperfections are what make uncut trees endearing, but I didn’t realize that at the time. I wanted a real, fake tree.

An hour into our search my husband started to show signs of distress. “If you don’t get something I will,” he said. Seconds later, I was standing beside a lovely tree that looked like a miniature version of the Norwegian spruce in our backyard. The needles were thick and soft and the deep green color of a lake up north. “This one,” I shouted. The boys gathered round as my husband picked up his hand saw and disappeared down under to commence cutting.

The saw did not move as swiftly as he had hoped. He blamed it on the sap; sticky stuff, he said, that slows a saw’s motion. Sweat poured forth and still he would not ask for assistance. A young man wielding a saw of his own asked if he could help. My husband said no, and kept cutting. It took 45 minutes (and a few timeouts) before the tree fell into our hands. It was a beauty and worth the wait. We wrapped it in twine and tied it to the top of the minivan.

Back in Providence, we moved Orange Juice and the other hermit crab to the kitchen, put a festive tree skirt on the floor and loosened the bolts on the tree stand. The boys whooped it up when their father carried the tree through the door and placed it in its new home.

Their joy was short-lived.

The tree was too tall — by about two feet. My husband stuck it in the stand anyway. The top branch poked a hole in the ceiling and scratched it so fiercely it looked as though the boys had been up there scribbling with brown crayons. Eventually, my husband hauled the tree outside and chopped off a chunk of the trunk and some bottom branches. But our conifer was never the same. It tipped to the right and then to the left and finally fell over one night, shattering the glass balls I had bought years earlier for my pathetic Charlie Brown tree.

This Christmas, we’re keeping it simple. We’re going to the grocery store.

Waiting for Zak DeOssie

November 2007

I was lying on the living room floor recovering from three hours of baseball practice when my 7-year-old son, Peder, walked down the steps and announced that he was heading to Brown University to get Zak DeOssie’s autograph.

“Oh really,” I said, turning my weary body in his direction. “And how do you plan to do that?”

“Dad,” he said.

My husband always comes up with creative ways to keep Peder and his little brother, Henry, engaged, but this was off the charts: Thrust a pen in Zak’s hand as he and hundreds of other graduating Brown students stroll into the First Baptist Church of America for their baccalaureate ceremony. With any luck, my husband told the boys, they might get to see a Nobel Prize winner, too.

Zak’s name has been mentioned so much in our house over the last few years I know more about him than I do about some of my neighbors: Star linebacker for Brown’s football team. Drafted by the New York Giants in the fourth round of the NFL draft. Works hard. Nice guy.

Peder met him through the “2005 Brown Football Outright Ivy League Championship Highlight Film,” a rousing DVD narrated by the gravelly voiced ESPN sportscaster and Brown alum Chris Berman that chronicles the games leading up to the Ivy Title the Bears won in 2008. Peder has watched it 22 times.

Zak is the movie’s star, as far as my son is concerned. His performance impressed him so much he’d come downstairs after his fourth viewing of the day and talk until lights out about those “unbelievable tackles” by not just “Zak” or “DeOssie” but “Zak DeOssie,” as if anything less than a full-name reference was disrespectful.

In the winter, Peder was on tenterhooks waiting to see if Zak made the NFL draft and when he did Peder and his father talked about it over the morning paper and a bowl of Cheerios.

Zak is so talented, they concluded, he would sail through NFL training camp and make it on the field in the fall. After all, they reminded me, the NFL is in his blood; his father, Steve, also played for the Giants, as well as the Jets, the Cowboys and our beloved Patriots.

Getting Zak’s autograph would be a real coup. We left our house an hour before the ceremony started to prepare ourselves. Peder carried three things: a pen, a photograph of Zak from Brownbears.com, and a clipboard to make signing a cinch.

Students would be marching from the university green down College Hill to First Baptist on Benefit Street, so we staked out a spot on the grass in front of the church and waited.

“How will we know it’s him?” Peder asked.

“He’s tall,” I said. “And he has a big neck.”

“Is he writing in cursive?” asked Henry.

After waiting for what seemed like hours the church bells rang out and we spotted the students in their neck-to-ankle billowy black robes, only their Birkenstocks, flip flops and pointy slingbacks hinting at who they are or want to be. Leading the pack was the baccalaureate speaker and 1982 Brown graduate, Craig Mello, smiling radiantly.

I told Peder he was a famous scientist who had won something called the Nobel Prize and that his research could help people who are very sick. Peder waved to the brilliant man and asked: “Where’s Zak DeOssie?” I’m afraid my kid wanted the beefy linebacker who led the Bears’ defensive unit in 2006 with 110 tackles, not the lanky biologist whose discovery of RNA interference could lead to treatments for HIV and cancer.

For the next few minutes, we scrutinized every young man who passed by, eliminating the ones who were too short, too skinny, too bookish-looking. As the end of the line neared, the wind picked up and we wondered aloud: Does DeOssie exist?

I saw him first. He looked just like his photo: thick neck; broad shoulders; cropped hair. A woman helping with the ceremony tapped his shoulder and explained why that blond-haired kid was standing on the grass, holding a clipboard. The big guy smiled, looked over at us, but didn’t stop.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, moments later. “He’s Brian. Another football player.  Zak isn’t coming today.”

I managed to hold back a sob. Peder was fine. “I’ll write to him,” he said. That night, my son sat down and composed a one-page letter to his football hero: “Dear Zak DeOssie, Good luck with the New York Giants! Can I have your autograph? Please. A big fan, Peder.” I delivered it to Brown’s athletic department the next day and wrote on the outside: “Please deliver to Zak before he becomes a Giant.’’

Months have passed and we still haven’t heard back. We finally spotted Zak though — on television. Peder got to stay up late on a school night to watch the NFL opener that pitted Zak against the Dallas Cowboys. Once again we waited for him to make an appearance, this time on a football field in front of millions of television viewers, including a wiry kid from Providence clutching a junior-sized pigskin to calm his nerves.

“There he is,” shouted Peder, as Zak, decked out in jersey 51, transformed himself from a linebacker into a long snapper and hiked the ball to a punter. It was a good snap, a very good snap. Zak would remain in the NFL.

Peder seemed relieved.

“That was pretty good snapping, Mom,” he said, before nodding off.

Now if only I could get the Giant to snap his fingers to a pencil and write.

 

Cat in the Closet

June 2006

 My son Henry is learning how to read. He knows plenty of so-called sight words — dog, jump, funny and so on — but he doesn’t have the confidence yet to tackle a lengthy chapter book on his own. Books have a lot of type and pages and chugging through all that alone can be daunting, not to mention frustrating, to a little boy who doesn’t like to flub up.

One afternoon, Henry was on the playground and a friend told him a joke about Garfield, the lazy, self-indulgent, plump orange cat that has been gracing the funny pages for nearly three decades. I don’t remember the joke, but it made Henry laugh hard enough to ask if we had any “Garfield” at home. By golly, we did.

My husband’s uncle, Gordon Alf Lawrence Johnson, a descendant of robust seafaring men from Norway, was a big fan of the comics. On first impression, you wouldn’t think so. A lifelong bachelor, Gordon was a taciturn and scholarly man, lanky and broad-shouldered like his forebears, who liked to wear his English bowler hat to dinner parties and scour the newspaper for grammatical errors, which he would underline in red ink, rip out and send to friends with notes attached: “sp?” His birthday wish-list always included reference books. On the rare occasions when he let his guard down his boyishness revealed itself, mostly through the twinkle in his pale blue eyes. He was really a grown-up kid.

He died recently at the age of 83 after a long bout with pneumonia. In his final days, we had conversations about his favorite book (Margery Allingham’s More Work for the Undertaker), his beloved Red Sox, and Gloria, a retired schoolteacher from Ithaca, New York, who was the love of his life. I’d sit on the edge of his bed at Hallworth House in Providence, the nursing home where he lived in his final days and read him the obituaries so he could find out if anyone he knew had, as he put it, “kicked the bucket.” He couldn’t sip water, much less eat, but still felt certain he would be going home soon: Get the wheelchair ready. He was a dying man who wanted desperately to live.

When I emptied his apartment I found collections of poetry by Wallace Stevens, novels by the American writer and sometimes Providence resident Elliott Paul (just months before he died Gordon re-read, Linden on the Saugus Branch, Paul’s memoir of growing up in Malden, Massachusetts) and five dictionaries, including the grand 1902 edition of Funk & Wagnalls A Standard Dictionary of the English Language, which Gordon insisted was one of the best dictionaries ever published.

One literary genre stood out: collections of comic strips (58 to be exact) that included a dozen musty-smelling “Peanuts” half a century old and a stack of newer, glistening “Calvin and Hobbes,” “Dilbert,” “The Far Side,” and “Garfield.” I packed them away in a cardboard box and stuck them in a closet, where they remained until Henry and I fished them out one evening after our playground visit. Garfield Eats Crow soon found its way onto Henry’s lap.

In his first few minutes with the cat it became clear that Henry had finally found reading material he could master without help from his parents. He’d read an episode, rush downstairs, read it to his dad, run back upstairs, read another, descend, ascend. Panting, sweaty, cheeks flushed, he breathlessly reported to me on that first day that he could read six “Garfield” comics — all on his own. I taught him how to dog-ear the pages he had conquered so he could remember them and wrote a “C” for correct in my best cursive at the top of each page.

“Garfield” soon became preferred reading at bedtime. At first Henry chose episodes with few words. In one, Garfield falls down a chimney, landing with a “Whump,” Sitting in a fireplace covered with soot, the cat turns to his wimpy owner, Jon Q. Arbuckle, and utters: “Needs more lard.”

“What’s lard?” Henry asked.

“It’s like butter,” I said. “Slippery stuff.”

“I get it,” he said.

As his confidence grew Henry selected strips with more complex sentences. “I’m pretty much sick of winter,” Garfield mutters as a blizzard engulfs him. “Enough with the snow already,” Miraculously, the snow stops except for one stubborn flake; it gets a nasty look from Garfield and makes haste heavenward. Under the sway of “Garfield,” Henry’s vocabulary improved greatly. He learned big words — “soggy shorts,” “stomped flat,” “venomous fangs” — but gems came his way as well. Whack. Smack. Poink. Harrumph. Aaugh. Slurp. Sheesh. Zip. Zap. Finally, prose he could enjoy.

My husband and I have been reading to Henry and his older brother, Peder, since they were born. I loved the lyrical writing in the early childhood classics — Goodnight Moon, Time for Bed, Harold and the Purple Crayon — and never tired of reading those books to my sons. How could I resist this? One evening, after thinking it over for some time, Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight. As the boys got older, they sought out books about firefighters, construction workers, airplanes, motorcycles, boats, knights, and, of course, superheroes. Gone was the rhythm of Harold. I thought I might wilt if I had to read one more time that Bruce Wayne was one of the richest men in Gotham City. In grade school the boys discovered Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House books, stories about two siblings who travel through time to places as varied as the Wild West and the Ice Age. The books were all the rage; I tolerated them. They seemed contrived, and were too long.

My favorite children’s book is Amos & Boris by William Steig. Amos, a mouse, builds a boat and sets sail one day to see faraway places. He falls overboard and is rescued by Boris, a whale. They become the best of friends. Boris returns Amos to land, and they say their goodbyes. Years later, Boris is flung ashore by a hurricane on the very spot where little Amos lives. This time Amos saves Boris’ life by recruiting two whales to push him back into the waves. Their final parting is heartbreaking; they know they will never meet again. Every time I read the book I get all weepy at the end. I want all children’s books to be like Amos & Boris: simple, funny, profound.

“Garfield” is rarely profound but it is always simple and funny, and I’ll take that over tedious and humorless. I’ll take a wild “Whump” over a predictable “Wow” any day. I wish Gordon had lived long enough to see the gift he left Henry: his playful sense of humor and his 58 books of comics. I suppose it’s fitting that Henry’s middle name is his great-uncle’s first. Now, after a laugh with the cat and just before lights out, I tuck my reader in and tip my hat to the old man who loved the funnies: “Goodnight, Henry Gordon.”

***

The Thief

I stole. When Viv was in the storage room, I’d swipe coins from the cash register and drop them in my pocket. I’d think of ways to keep her there longer. I’d drum up chores. “We need more spoons…. We’re out of chocolate syrup….Bring back some peppermint.” By the time she had returned, carrying our goods in her plump arms, I had shoved the bullion into my safe.

I was 15 years old, working every Friday night as a soda jerk at Velvet Freeze in St. Louis, a five-boothed ice-cream parlor next door to the pet shop where my brother, Richard, bought his first salamander. Viv was the night manager — and my boss.

Had she known of my thievery — and I am certain she did not — I’m sure she would have turned me in to Mr. Martin, the bald-headed owner who called me by my last name, “Rau,” and made it clear with his stern face that he had no tolerance for juvenile delinquents.

It was a real coup to land a job at The Freeze. The pay was good — back then, about $2.75 an hour — and dinner was free: a hamburger, plate of fries, and medium Coke with a squirt of cherry syrup.

So why did I steal?

Before I got to The Freeze, I’d stolen twice.

My friend Nancy owned a jewelry box with a tiny ballerina in a chiffon tutu that popped to attention when the box opened. I had a jewelry box, too, but no dainty dancer.  I wanted Nancy’s, so I took it. While Nancy was downstairs, I ripped away the prima donna, leaving a tiny hole in the box’s pink velvet lining.

What a foolish thief I was. When I got home, I showed my mother my acquisition; she showed me the door. Nancy never noticed that her pointy-toed ballerina was missing, but thanked me anyway when I returned it, shortly before dinner.

A few years later, when I was 13, I continued my thievery at Famous-Barr, a department store on the edge of Clayton, the quiet St. Louis suburb where I grew up. I had been there many times before, to fire spitballs off the top floor of its parking garage, but now I was on a mission.

In those days I’d decorate my shelves with miniature colored-glass bottles shaped like fish and urns and stars, and plugged with pea-sized corks. They had no useful purpose, other than to sit day after day, in different poses, looking as if they belonged in a museum.

I had bought them with babysitting money, and even though my piggybank was full, I decided I ought to snatch some for free. I marched over to Famous-Barr, took an escalator to the knickknack section, in the basement, and slid two bottles up the sleeve of my peacoat.

I had planned my getaway in advance. To put on a charade of innocence, I’d stop by the glove-and-mitten counter, on the first floor — to browse, of course — then I’d slowly stroll out the front door, clean and straight, like a churchwoman.

But I was too terrified to dally. Instead, I made a beeline for the basement door, losing one my bottles along the way.

“Miss, you dropped something,” a sales clerk shouted.

I never looked back.

I hurled the second bottle into a woodland near my house, and vowed, as I stood looking at the gnarly branches, to end my life of crime.

That vow was broken at The Freeze.

Not long after I started working there, I began lifting nickels and dimes from the narrow compartments in the register’s drawer. I kept my take to about a dollar-fifty a night, but, eventually, I got greedy. I devised an elaborate scheme to ensure that the register always balanced after my shift. I’d charge customers the proper amount, but ring up less and pocket the difference.

Sometimes, I wouldn’t even bother to ring up the purchase; I’d set the customer’s money on top of a freezer and then begin a task, like scrubbing malt powder off the shake machine, until Viv was out of sight.

No one ever suspected me — not Viv, not Mr. Martin, not the customers. During work, my white apron covered the bulge in the front pocket of my baggy jeans, and after work, while ostensibly using the bathroom, I transferred my night’s loot to my cotton coin purse.

At home, I’d stash the money behind books on my shelf. Never did I feel a pang of guilt — until I calculated one day that I had amassed close to $50 from Mr. Martin. About the only words the cranky owner had ever said to me were “Buff the freezer lids,” but I still felt lousy. How could I return the money?

At the bank, I exchanged the change and small bills for crisp currency, and I folded the money into my back pocket before going to work. When Viv was in the storage room, searching for tubs of Rocky Road, I stuffed $10 in the register.

I never gave the rest back, and I never stole again. The thrill, the way my insides moved around just before I did it, was gone. For good.

***

Hard News

 

I lived on Jail Hill.

Officially, my home was at the Warren Apartments, on Cedar Street in Norwich,

Connecticut, a dying mill town on the Thames River. But as far as the old-timers were concerned, I lived on Jail Hill, named for the prison that used to sit there. I liked the way it sounded, and when I wrote letters to my friends, I’d say, “Come visit me up on Jail Hill.”

Apartment 41C had green shag carpeting and a nice view of the town, way down

below. I slept on a bumpy mattress and used a beaten-up suitcase as a dresser. A wooden milk crate was my nightstand, and when it broke, I found a dusty trunk. I rented the apartment for more than a year, but never furnished it properly.

Truth is, I was rarely there.

Most of the time, I was pecking out stories on a computer in the cramped newsroom of the Norwich Bulletin. I’d gotten a job there in the spring of 1985 as a features editor, but failed miserably when I designed a special section with so many typefaces my boss said it left her dizzy. One afternoon I suggested a switch to reporting. She agreed. By the fall, I was covering Ledyard, a rural town outside Norwich.

I wanted to be a great reporter. I wasn’t.

Although I dreamed of becoming a muckraker, I was loath to hurt anyone’s feelings. And I was easily gulled. Not exactly qualities that would make me the H.L. Mencken of southeastern Connecticut.

I’d rise early, rush to Ledyard in my rusty orange Rabbit, wander around Town Hall, then return to the newsroom with two or three story ideas in my pocket. I wrote about everything, even the creamy cheese Danishes at a local coffee shop.

Within a few months I knew almost everybody in town, and went to pains never to offend anyone. When I wrote about the Indian tribe’s secret plans to sell open space to developers, I begged the enraged chief to forgive me. When the school superintendent remarked during a telephone conversation about the school budget, “Gosh, you have a sexy voice,” I said, “Thank you.”

My first investigative story began when I got a call from Amos Banks. He was in a tizzy over “black stuff” bubbling up in his backyard. I sped to his house, thinking I was onto the biggest story of my fledgling career. Banks pointed to the ground. I got down on my hands and knees, scooped up some dirt, smelled it.

“Fuel oil,” Banks said.

“Fuel oil,” I said.

The only oil I had ever smelled was suntan oil, but I was sure Amos Banks knew what he was talking about. And by the end of my visit I was convinced that leaky oil pipes were at fault.

I must’ve written a dozen stories, castigating the oil company so frequently that its owner once shouted to me on the phone, “I don’t care what you put in your little paper.” The real culprit was identified a few months later: a cracked fuel tank buried in Banks’ backyard ages before he lived there.

I was mortified. Surprisingly, I still got good assignments, some even beyond Ledyard’s stone fences.

One day I was sent to do a story on homeless people in Norwich. At a soup kitchen on Main Street, I met Adelmo, a 29-year-old native of Portugal who had lived on the streets of America for eight years. We talked for hours, and I was charmed by this man with two gold loops in his left ear.

“Dying is like losing a full glass of water,” he told me, as he wrapped his skinny fingers around a half-filled glass of water.

I had no clue what he meant, but scribbled down every word.

“Fantasy can trick your mind and put you in misery,” he said.

“Are you in misery?’’ I said.

He asked for my phone number, and I was tempted by this charming street philosopher, but said no.

Later in the day, I reconsidered. When a photographer went to the flophouse where Adelmo was staying, I cheerfully went along, hoping he would ask again.

“Adelmo, it’s me,” I shouted, standing in the dark hallway outside his room.

He was pulling down the sleeves of his sweater when he opened the door. He was courteous, as usual, but tense.

As the photographer took his picture, I glanced into his bathroom. A curled spoon — the kind used to cook heroin — lay on the sink, next to spent matches.

His life was more complicated than I had thought, and when I said goodbye in that dreary hallway I meant it.

I was still in the newsroom when the Sunday paper with Adelmo’s story on the front page rolled off the presses, just after midnight. There he was, standing by a dirt-streaked window, his arms crossed tightly, his glazed eyes fixed on the camera.

I tucked a paper under my arm and went back to my apartment, with the nice view, up on Jail Hill.

***

Bedside Manners

 

“Open up,” I said to the old man, and lifted a spoon to his cracked lips. I was sitting on the edge of his stiff hospital bed, feeding him mashed potatoes, boiled squash, and Jell-O — soft food he could chew and digest easily.

His long arms lay at his side, left limp by a stroke. His legs, lifeless, were covered by a crisp white sheet. A paper napkin was spread across his chest, like a bib, to catch food that dripped down his chin.

I scooped up a spoonful of mashed potatoes and decided to play a game, a

child’s game. Why not? It was just the two of us, and he was the child, or so it seemed.

My job that day was to care for this man, who was in his 70s, and a handful of other patients in the neurology unit of a small private hospital, where I was working as a nurse’s aide to make money while in graduate school.

To become an aide, I’d taken a six-week course at the hospital, where I learned how to give sponge baths, empty bedpans, and listen to the heartbeats of people who couldn’t lift an arm to scratch their face, much less a spoon to feed themselves.

The neurology unit was one of the more demanding floors at the hospital; nearly all of the patients had suffered some kind of brain damage, through a stroke, tumor, or nerve disease, such as Parkinson’s. Most were bedridden, unable to roll over on their side without assistance from us, the nurse’s aides.

Many, including the man I was feeding that afternoon long ago, had lost the ability to speak clearly.

“Water?” I’d ask, holding up a cup with a flexible straw curled in his direction. He’d growl when he wanted some, and say nothing when he didn’t. I figured this was all he could manage.

My day had started when I put on my uniform, a white polyester shirt and pants,

and rode my bicycle to the hospital, arriving just in time for the head nurse to hand me a list of patients who would come under my care.

The man’s room was at the end of a corridor.

I remember that he was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, when I walked in, about 8 in the morning. I turned a lever underneath his bed, and his torso rose high enough for me to brush his teeth, comb his matted hair, and give him a sip of orange juice.

I pulled the lever again, and he went back down for a sponge bath, and later, as

I rolled him onto his side to change his sheets, dampened by the soapy water, I remember thinking he was the heaviest patient I had ever dealt with.

By the time a hospital orderly had delivered the man’s lunch tray, I was tired, and preoccupied with schoolwork. I still had five hours left in my shift, and all I could think about was going home. The last thing I wanted to do was spoon mashed potatoes into the mouth of a man who couldn’t move or talk.

“I hate this job,” I muttered to myself.

Though I knew I wasn’t supposed to, I was shoving the food in the man’s mouth much too quickly. I didn’t care; no one was around to watch.

It was a boring routine: Scoop up the mushy food. Put it in his mouth. Watch him slowly chew. Wipe his lips. Give him a sip of water. Wipe his lips. Still so much food remains for this baby of a man.

That was when I thought of the game I used to play with children I was babysitting for as a teenager.

“Mashed potatoes,” I said, cheerily, as if that were the greatest food in the world.

My spoonful of mashed potatoes was a jet, diving through the air, coming closer

and closer to the hangar, the man’s mouth.

“Vrrrrooom,” I said, as my jet, his spoon, moved toward his chin, then started its descent.

But instead of opening his mouth for the food, the man spoke up, for the first time.

“Whainahellaryadoin’?”

I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He glared at me and tightened his lips.

My face turned red, and my cheeks felt hot. I lowered the spoon onto his tray. What am I doing? What in the hell am I doing?

His body was a mess. I had assumed his mind was, too.

I wanted to rush out, climb on my bike, and pedal home as fast as I could, and never come back.

But I didn’t. I picked up the spoon and tried again. No words were exchanged between us as I fed him the rest of his lunch, slowly.

After he took his last sip of water to wash down his last spoonful, I wiped the man’s mouth gently and removed the paper napkin from his chest. A hospital worker came in a few moments later, to collect his tray.

I went back to see him the next day, and he was gone.

***

Fit

Everything President Nixon demanded of me I could do, except the softball throw.

I could leap across a pile of sand, speed down the blacktop, raise my scrawny body from the gym floor dozens of times. But my arms were as thin as sugar cane, too weak to hurl a softball from home plate to the giant maple that shaded our school soccer field.

I was 11 years old, a kid in Mr. Zeitz’s sixth-grade class at Maryland School, a tomboy — and proud of it. My bedroom shelves were stocked with baseball bats and mitts, not Barbie dolls and tea sets. Susie Ouellette and I competed to see who could get more cuts on her rawboned legs. Abigail Gross and I played soccer, not house, on Sunday afternoons.

One day, Miss Stock, our lanky, white-haired gym teacher, summoned the class to her office to tell us about the Presidential Physical Fitness Award, which Nixon was bestowing on schoolchildren to honor their athletic prowess. We could win it, too, she promised, if we excelled in certain fitness tests.

Getting the award was the only thing I thought about all spring. I had to propel myself several feet in the long jump, run the 50-yard dash lickety-split, muster 100 sit-ups, and shinny up a rope dangling from the ceiling of the school gymnasium. I mastered everything but the softball throw.

Again and again, I’d skip sideways to the starting line, arch my right arm, grunt, and let go. The ball would soar through the air and land with a thump. Miss Stock would mark the spot with chalk, then size up the distance with a measuring tape she kept in the pocket of her powder-blue Bermuda shorts, pressed and with a crease down the middle. At the end of the day I’d go home broken-hearted; the ball was always a few inches short.

But Miss Stock didn’t give up, and neither did I.

She plopped a ball into the palm of my hand and told me to go home and practice. That night I took my baseball mitt off the shelf. For weeks, I played catch with our clunky oak garage door, making so much noise that Mrs. Ellston came out of her house next door and asked what I was doing.

“Practicing,” I yelled, never missing a pitch.

During my short breaks, I wondered if Nixon knew that I was bulking up my arm just for him.

Those days of hard work paid off. One afternoon I ran to the line and hurled the ball with all my might. It seemed that Miss Stock was miles away when she took the measuring tape out of her pocket and then shouted out the good news. I had made it.

At my elementary-school graduation, I basked in the applause as Miss Stock presented the presidential certificate and a blue patch to me and my classmate Sylvia Agnew, the only other student in the school to win.

Standing before hundreds of people in my white party dress with bell-shaped sleeves, I remember hoping that everyone would notice my scabby knees: the mark of a true tomboy. It was my last athletic achievement for many years.

I dabbled in other sports but never had the drive to see them through. My career on the swimming team ended abruptly when I stopped in the middle of a 50-yard freestyle event during a meet at the Shaw Park Pool in my hometown, Clayton. Thinking I was drowning, a lifeguard — nicknamed Itchie for the way he scratched his side before he dove in for a race — jumped in to save me. Sorry Itchie, I whimpered; I got tired.

Cheerleading kept me on the sidelines in junior and senior high school, an activity that consisted mostly of slapping my hands against my thighs and belting out, “We got a team over here, we got a team over there, but our team’s going everywhere.” The team might have been going somewhere, but I was off the field.

A stroll to the dining hall was the extent of my exercise in college. I preferred to curl up with a good book — and a few slices of cheesecake — than to swim laps in the college pool. At a decaying bar near campus, I filled my belly with cheap beer.

And so the years passed, and I came up with lots of excuses not to exercise: I didn’t have time; it was boring; I didn’t need it. By my 30s, I was so out of shape a leisurely walk uphill from the office to a restaurant left me out of breath.

The next trek was to a health club.

My first visit to the club’s Fitness Room — with its mirrors, shimmering weight machines, and high-tech aerobic equipment — was humbling. Like the straight-backed Miss Gulch in “The Wizard of Oz,” I pedaled furiously on the Lifecycle, trying to make up for those years of neglect. It was a spin to nowhere. Huffing and puffing, after 10 minutes I slid off the bicycle’s slippery seat and shuffled to the locker room.

But Miss Stock taught me that persistence pays off, so I went back. I’m still going. Now I can jog 15 minutes on the treadmill, bench-press 40 pounds, climb 20 minutes on the Stairmaster.

Sometimes, as I head into the final stretch of my routine, I feel like giving up and curse the red dots blinking inside the computer console like warning lights.

Other times, exhilarated, I kick up the speed and let ‘er rip. I’m not good enough to be the pick of the president anymore, but that’s okay. Sweat is pouring down my face, dripping onto the handlebars, the pedals, my sneakers, the floor. My legs — fuller now, and smooth — are burning.

And my arms are pumping, again.

***

Details

I slid three large pepperoni pizzas onto metal racks, shut the door of my oven,

and turned the dial to Broil. My guests were scheduled to arrive any moment, and I wanted to keep the pizzas hot. I did that — and more.

A few minutes later, while blithely talking about a newspaper story with my friend, Jon, who had arrived early on that winter night, I saw flames fluttering against the greasy oven window.

“Fire!’’ I screamed.

Smoke engulfed my small apartment, as Jon and I raced around the three rooms, half hysterical, half laughing, opening windows and filling empty trash cans with tub water, which we foolishly threw at the closed oven door.

My blue jeans were soaked when discretion overtook valor and I finally telephoned for help. Moments later half a dozen firefighters with portable extinguishers strapped to their backs like scuba gear arrived and put out the blaze.

One fireman gingerly opened the blackened oven door and quickly deduced what had gone wrong.

“You got cardboard in there,” he said.

He was right. I’d forgotten to take the pizzas out of their boxes.

Later that evening, after I had scooped tiny piles of ash from inside my oven and scrubbed the soot off my kitchen floor, I called my family to tell them about my drama. No one seemed surprised.

“That figures,” said my sister Emily.

I have children now and would never dream of putting cardboard into an oven. Kids have a way of snapping you into shape, turning the lazy mind into a steel trap of to-dos. You either teach yourself to multi-task — or your kid doesn’t get to his baseball game on time.

But, thankfully, the child-free years are self-indulgent, in both body and mind. You can space out; I certainly did.

A typical day in those careless years: I pay for my clothes at the cleaners and rush out the door empty-handed; I leave my purse on top of my car and drive off into the night; I lose one shoe.

“Dizzy Lizzie,” my childhood friend and soccer partner, Abigail, would call me when I’d forget, for the hundredth time, whether my birthday was on the 24th or the 25th of September.

Sooner or later, I’d confer with my mother, who got so confused by my repeated inquiries that she started to doubt her own memory.

“Mom, is my birthday on the twenty-fourth or the twenty-fifth?”

“The twenty-fifth, honey.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so.”

In the end, we’d retrieve my birth certificate from a big Manila envelope in the top drawer of her mahogany desk and settle the question, at least for that day.

Sometimes, I’d misplace things. Emily still teases me about those frantic searches for my wallet, the one I had plunked in a drawer at night only to forget, the next day, where I had put it.

Mornings were a treasure hunt as I rummaged through dozens of drawers, shouting to my brother and sisters, who were devouring Rice Krispies at the kitchen table, “Have you guys seen my wallet?”

Other times I’d succumb to a kind of dreaminess. In Nancy, France, where I

studied for three months during college, I gained a reputation for having my head in the clouds.

I never had answers for my tweedy French professor, probably because I never

heard his questions. “Je ne sais pas,” I’d reply, shrugging. I don’t know. Conjugating French verbs was the last thing on my mind. I was daydreaming about smoking stocky Gauloises cigarettes in a cafe with deep booths at the Place Stanislas; about the steak de cheval on sale at the butcher shop; about the seedy section of town with the risqué posters pasted onto crumbling walls.

At the end of my three-month visit, the professor told my French professor back in the United States that I was doomed in the real world.

“She is a dreamer,” he wrote in his evaluation; “not very keen in realistic details.”

I was a dreamer, and proud of it. And I was a fan of details, just not the ones he had in mind.

When I nearly burned down my apartment on that winter night long, I was probably thinking about a good book I’d just read or a movie I’d just watched. Maybe I was thinking about the one letter missing in the neon sign of the diner down the street: “INER.’’ Maybe I was thinking about that feta cheese in the fridge.

I have two boys to take care of now so my Dizzy Lizzie days are over. Every day, I will myself to concentrate, to focus, to pack an apple for Peder, a granola bar for Henry.

Still, sometimes the fuzzy problem returns with a vengeance. The other day, I dialed a phone number and then couldn’t remember whom I had called.  A man picked up on the other line.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” I said, flustered. “Can I help you?’’

“You called me,’’ he said.

Too embarrassed to admit my mistake, I decided to put an end to it quickly.

“Sorry,’’ I said. “You’ve got the wrong number.”

And I hung up.

***

Stolen

 

The morning of the attack, she rose, as she always does, at 8 o’clock sharp.

Breakfast was the usual: juice, toast, coffee. She fed her two cats, fluffy Persians that hide under the flowered sofa in her three-room apartment; then she read the paper. It was a chilly day, so she dressed in pants, instead of her usual skirt, to keep her warm on her 15-minute walk to church — the one she has been going to for most of her 70-plus years.

After she had dressed she selected her most comfortable walking shoes, loafers, and settled on a pocketbook that matched them — the leather one hanging on a hook in her bedroom closet. She filled the pocketbook with the things she would need that morning: tissues, a comb, her keys, her bus pass, and two checks for $10 each, donations for the church. At the last minute, she threw in her black change purse, thinking she would pick up some warm dinner rolls on the way home.

Wearing a khaki raincoat that fit snugly on her petite frame, she left her apartment at 10:35, giving her plenty of time to make 11 o’clock Mass. Five minutes into her walk, the straps of her pocketbook fell off her shoulder, so she wrapped them around her fingers and wrist, and clutched the pocketbook to her chest.

She took the same route she had taken every Sunday for the last 12 years. Passing rows of stately houses in the neighborhood where she grew up, she reminisced about playing in those houses as a child, running after her childhood friend, Esther, in a game of tag.

Esther, she thought. You can’t catch me.

She never heard his footsteps.

He came up from behind, wrapped his brawny right arm around her neck, and pinned her to his chest, so she couldn’t see his face.

“Give it to me,” he said.

“No,” she said.

He grabbed her pocketbook with his other hand and tried to yank it away, but couldn’t. The straps were still tangled in her fingers. Now she wanted to let go, open her fingers and give him what he demanded, but the straps tightened as he pulled harder.

No, she thought. This isn’t happening.

He pulled again, this time with such force that he ripped the pocketbook from its straps, leaving them dangling on her fingers. As he fled up the street, she begged him to give her back what she needed most.

“Just give me my keys,” she shouted. “Please.”

He was bigger than she had imagined — 6 feet tall and 200 pounds.

She ran after him, after her keys, but he was faster and disappeared around a corner.

Too frightened to knock on a stranger’s door and ask for help, she rushed to her apartment, seven blocks away, trembling all the while. Near some bushes in the front yard, she dug up the extra apartment key she had buried months earlier, in case she locked herself out. She dug in the dirt for what seemed like hours.

Once inside, she called the police. They asked her what he looked like.

He was big, she said. He was wearing a red shirt.

They asked her if she wanted to go to the hospital.

No, she said. I’m fine.

But she wasn’t.

After the police had left, she knocked on my door, across the way, as she does nearly every day. But this time there was a sense of urgency.

“Open up,” she said.

She was leaning against the wall, crying. She rubbed her fingers, now a light shade of purple, and held up two thin brown straps: the only thing left of her pocketbook. We went to her apartment and she sat down on her flowered sofa; she was shaking so much when she told me what had happened that I gave her a glass of brandy.

Two hours later, she got a call from the police. They had found her pocketbook on a street about a mile from where it had been snatched. Her tissues, comb, keys, bus pass, and checks were still inside, but her money, $28 and change, was gone. So was her peace of mind.

The next Sunday, she took a different route to church, but kept looking over her shoulder, wondering if he was following her. He could have her address from the checks and watch her as she left the apartment; this much she knew.

She is still looking for him and his red shirt — at the bus stop she goes to almost daily, at the mailbox by the bank, at the crossway near the grocery store.

She can’t get him out of her mind, this menacing man, with his broad shoulders, short black hair, and round face. He’s hiding behind a dumpster, a bush, a tree. He sees her coming, an old woman, alone, on a deserted street. His eyes are drawn to the pocketbook held against her chest. He waits until she passes, then creeps up behind her.

He’s so quiet, and she can’t hear him.

***

Long Distance

My best friend, Diane, has been sleeping on a raft for 35 days. I know this because she called one night from her new apartment — the one she moved into after leaving Scott — to describe her furnishings. I was lying in bed with the phone tucked under my chin, and Diane was sitting in the middle of her bare living room, grading students’ papers from her introductory Italian class. It was close to midnight, and she was lonely. Fourteen years is a long time to spend with someone, Diane said: Scott and I had a history.

I suggested that things would get better because they have to, and anyway they couldn’t get any worse. We talked until we both couldn’t talk anymore, as we always do, and then, just before hanging up, she gave me a tour of her apartment: My carpet is the color of a celery stick, my shoes are lined up on my bookshelf, my travel alarm clock wakes me up in the morning, and there is my bed, an inflatable raft. I asked Diane if a real bed was in the cards someday. “Forse,” she said, in Italian. Maybe.

That night, I imagined Diane arranging her shoes in a row, pulling out the stem

on her clock to set the alarm, lying back on her pillow of air, staring at the ceiling, hoping the emptiness would pass. It would be a long night for her, but I knew she would call the next day.

Diane and I met in Florence at a small school for foreigners called Dante Alighieri, where we were studying during a college semester abroad. There were too many distractions, and we never took to the books. We spent a lot of time hanging out in a cafe on the Piazza Nazionale, smoking Italian cigarettes called Muratti, drinking cappuccino loaded with sugar, and pretending to read Corriere della Sera, the Italian newspaper. At night, we roamed the streets fearlessly, even the dark corners by the swift-flowing Arno. By the end of our first month, we decided Florence was too beautiful to leave after only a semester. We stayed a year.

We took a leave from our college and found jobs. Diane worked at Ricci, one of

the many little shops that cover the Ponte Vecchio, Florence’s fabled bridge; she sold silver pocket watches and coral rings and cameos. I sold leather coats and purses and paper-thin wallets at Casini, a shop across from the Pitti Palace. Our ground-floor apartment on the Via Romano was damp and dim and crumbling — plaster fell from the walls every night — but it was close to work, the rent was cheap and we had a shower.

Our workdays were longer than we expected, but the summer light was longer, too, so we continued promenading the streets, a habit we had picked up from the Italians. “Andiamo fuori, Elisabetta,” Diane would say, after a dinner of tortellini, her specialty. “Si, andiamo, Diane,” I’d say, and we’d loop arms and rush down the narrow, bumpy streets to the Ponte Vecchio, where at dusk, after the shops had closed, the free spirits would gather on the cobblestones to sell bangle bracelets and wooden crosses and ruby-red dresses from Pakistan. Then we would cross the span and go past the open market with the bronze boar to the steps of the Duomo, where we watched people pass by or feed the pigeons or play the flute to earn a few lire.

It’s been decades since our Italian days, but our friendship is as strong as ever — a miracle, considering we live in different parts of the country. We use the phone to keep things going, calling at least once a week, and, in a crisis, once a day, sometimes twice. Our conversations always start with simple matters and then develop into lengthy, almost philosophical talks. Diane’s guilt over flunking a student in her Italian class turns into a talk about kindness. Her news that she’s sleeping on a raft, away from Scott, her one and only, turns into a talk about love.

Lately, Diane and I have been asking ourselves why we got lucky: why we haven’t gotten sick of each other, why we expect to grow old together. Truth be told, we don’t have an answer. The only thing we know with certainty is that our friendship is not a chore; listening to each other is a good way to end the day. And, of course, we have our history.

Not long after Diane told me about her raft, she called again. This time, she had a different story. She had taken the wrong highway exit on her way to tutor a student in Italian, and had gotten lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Too stubborn to stop at a filling station to ask for directions, she drove around for an hour and ended up missing her appointment.

Diane was too embarrassed to tell anyone what she had done, except me. I told her not to worry, that I would have kept driving and gotten lost, too.

She said, “I know.”