Withdrawal, Snobbery, and The Road

In late August and September I experienced a flurry of acting activity - beginning with extra work on films in Lowell and the North Shore, punctuated by Zombie work for Rock Media's Longwalls Zombie video, and brought to a fever pitch by six weeks of Kevin Lasit's advanced acting lab. The inevitable crash probably would have come earlier, but anticipation of the premiere of the video kept me from realizing that for the first time in over ninety days there was nothing on the horizon..  Not that I don't have other things to do, but the demands and disciplines of acting are stimulating, and prolonged exposure can be addicting.

So that's what I am feeling now, withdrawal. I check the various casting agencies daily. Boston Casting has put out several appeals for a variety of roles - but none have been a good fit (of course I have applied anyway, but was never asked to come in). In the back of my mind is a vague desire to create - with the aid of some of the talented people I have come to know, a black box experience: theatrical dramas stripped down to their essentials..  I am, to be blunt, somewhat snobbish about local theatre in general. I think that almost invariable these productions try for too much, and so sacrifice all.

I am anxious - if that's the right word, to see what they have done to Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'. This is fiction (that reads like a prose poem) that is completely unsuited to film. It is a dark, grieving meditation on futility. It is not post-apocalypic because McCarthy's takes you into the very heart of an apocalypse in progress. This is a book to read aloud over the grave of Edgar Allan Poe. But there are no scenes, to speak of in its pages: instead there is a smouldering fire that is always just about to re-ignite. There are no gratuitous scenes of familiar landmarks laid to waste. There is wasteland, and through it a dying father and his son scurry like cockroaches across the linoleum. Every page you expect the boot to come down. I am anxious because I feel protective of this book: it is a crushed and crumbling flower within the pages of the book of the dead and I worry that a film will try and give it life. 'The Road' I think, would make a wonderfully brutal play. "o-u-t-c-a-s-t.. outcast!' is the memorable refrain from Dicken's Nicholas Nickelby. We are all outcasts, McCarthy says. Life sucks, and then you die.

I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille..

Revenge is Sweet!

     In most cases the prevailing wisdom suggests that beggars can’t be choosers. Or to trot out another cliché, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
     But this is Halloween (or was). On Halloween the tables are turned, black is white and - as I remember it at least, if you don’t come up with the ‘treats’ you have only yourself to blame for what happens next.
     What used to happen – if you didn’t treat the tricksters well, was that your house might be ‘TPd’ (toilet papered), or your car egged, or some other relatively harmless but clearly punitive measures taken.
     So what are we going to do with the folks who give out pretzels – you know who you are! I am sure you rationalize that you have the dental health of the children in mind – but that’s no excuse.
     And what to do with those who dispense obviously dated, stale, job lot candy? These are certainly tough economic times, but there are other options available: inexpensive hard candies, homemade treats (popcorn balls).
     Use your imagination!
     And what about the folks that just close down early for the night: shut off the lights, skulk around their homes, pretending they’ve gone out?
     Or just as evil – in my book, those that can’t be bothered to greet the ghouls: leaving an unattended basket of candy with a note (Help Yourself).
     What fate awaits these unsavory souls? It’s become a strangely popular, strangely tame holiday, hasn’t it? The numbers are up, but the fun is fading fast.
     It’s become an industrial holiday of sorts – like all the others: a holiday that has lost its roots. I guess it just can’t compare with Hollywood’s horrific realism, or even with the Nightly News. We hear of so many horrors these days – in such gruesome detail, that I suppose that Halloween just can’t compete.
     Certainly the little candy companies can’t compete – with the big boys that is.
     My annual candy count confirms that Halloween has become a kind of clearance sale for the big three confection companies: Hershey’s, Nestles, and Mars.
     Unless you’re earning a few billion a year, the other candy companies can’t afford to cut their prices low enough to match the mass marketed confections of these three global sweeties.
     So – though most of the old brands are available online for their diehard fans, the wide variety of unique confections that used to be handed out on All Hallow’s Eve, has dwindled down to a handful of mass-marketed mouthfuls.
     Off the top of my head (while my hands sift through the bootie collected by my son) I can think of dozens of spook night staples that in recent years have – dramatic pause, disappeared!

• Sugar Daddy – and his kids the Sugar Babies, have melted away. 
• Clark Bar and his cartoon co-star Zagnut have had their series cancelled. 
• Boston Baked Beans (that lovely burnt flavor), Chuckles, Walnettos, and Rolo are not part of the food pyramid in these parts anymore. 
• Mr. Goodbar, Milky Way, Mallo Cup, and Moon Pie are missing in action. 
• Atomic Fireballs, Charleston Chews, Mary Janes and.. what were they called: oh yeah, Whatchamacallits, have dropped out of sight. 
• Wax Lips, York, and Zotz are missing from the end of the all-sugar alphabet. And taking the place of all these unusual and unique candy creations is a remarkably homogenous and limited selection. 

     In the bloody butcher’s bag this year there were at least ten pieces of ten specific brands of candy, including 24 Hershey’s Chocolate bars, 10 Hershey’s Malted Milk Balls, 13 Hershey’s Kit Kats, and 15 Hershey’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

     Here are this years’ unrefined numbers:

• Trickster: Patrick ‘Too Cool to Ghoul’ Mand 
• Treat Area Covered: From Bay Farm Drive, to Sandra Way, Dorothy Drive, Maureen Drive, and down Justine Avenue. 
• Costume: Deli Counter Butcher with Bloody Cleaver 
• Elapsed Time: 3 Hours, 11 Minutes, 43 seconds 
• Pounds of Candy Collected: 7.01 
• Total Pieces: 216 
• Residences Visited: 78 
• Average Piece per Residence: 2.99 
• Brand Leader: Hershey’s Chocolate Bar (24) 
• Top Mfr: Hershey’s (73) 

     The total elapsed time – went up by a few minutes, but all of the other numbers were at record levels.
     Average piece per residence visited went up dramatically- though a dear friend who dumped an entire basket of candy into our collectors’ bag may have been responsible for at least part of that increase.
     The clearest trend was again, the move toward total corporate consolidation of the candy industry.
          o 83% of collected candy (178/216 pieces) came from either Hershey’s (73), Nestles (71), or Mars (34).

     A distant fourth again this year was Tootsie Roll, Inc., whose 9 pieces were comprised completely of the famous Tootsie Roll. Absent this year however, was that company’s ‘cool and refreshing’ Junior Mints.
     Cadbury, the English confection giant – contributed only three items out of 216 – and not any of their famous milk chocolates (just two bags of Swedish Fish, and one of Sour Patch Kids).
     The famous regional confection company now based in Revere – NECCO (New England Confection Company), was spotted only once: a half-opened half-roll of its historic wafers in such bad shape (soggy wafers) that they had to be immediately jettisoned.
     There was again this year – as I noted earlier, one lonely bag of Utz Halloween Pretzels.
     The Ohio-based confection company Spangler, was represented by a few Dum Dums.
     And there were also two small rolls of Smarties – manufactured in Canada for the Ce De candy company of Union, New Jersey.
     The only truly unusual treats that were discovered in Patrick’s bag this past Saturday night were: a box of “Monopoly” candy, and a ghoulish, edible necklace and charms from the Oriental Trading Company.
     The necklace looked to be a tooth cracker, so we did not allow our trick or treater to try his luck on it. Still we were impressed with its purple and blue hard candy charms in the shape of a skull, a pumpkin, and a bat. Low marks for flavor – high marks for novelty.
     And we were pleasantly perplexed at the existence and oddity of Monopoly candy – a small box which when opened turned out to contain a clear bag holding ten tiny race cars in blue, and ten tiny terriers in pink: allegedly edible versions of the Monopoly tokens used to mark your place on the game board.
     Were we really supposed to eat these ‘tokens’? It was hard to tell. The box prominently declared that Hasbro had the copyright, that the candy itself was made in China, and that the Frankford Candy and Chocolate Company of Philadelphia was responsible for distributing this promotional confection. That was just more info than we could chew at one time, so these tokens too went into the trash.

     That’s the 2009 Candy Count (and Commentary).
     The numbers are up, the quality down – and the competition almost non-existent.
     Beggars aren’t supposed to be choosers but remember – especially on Halloween, revenge is sweet!

Lincoln Navigator Blues

It began – for me at least, with a phone message: Tiffany from the “Prize Fulfillment Center” calling to give me the good news. You have won a Lincoln Navigator or, her voice dipped dramatically here, one of our four top prizes. This is not, Tiffany stressed, telemarketing (which could be illegal) or a come-on for a time-share resort. I would not, Tiffany assured me, have to sign or join anything. This offer was, however, ‘time-sensitive’. So all right: I did not just roll of the turnip-truck. I didn’t just get off the ferry from Foolsville. I wasn’t born yesterday. I may be stupid but I’m not ignorant (or is it the other way around?) I’m not a hayseed, or a hick from French Lick, or a rube, or a boob, or a hockey puck or.. (fill in with your favorite expression here). I’m not your average idiot, right? I knew that Tiffany was simply spreading some carefully seasoned manure in the hopes that something green would sprout from some small patch of credulity. I knew that she lived in Bizarro World, where everything was the opposite: knew that despite her assertions to the contrary that it was telemarketing, would be about a time share or something like it, that I certainly would be asked to both sign and join something, and that of the four top prizes it was a million to one that I would end up with a so-called ‘free’ vacation. And yet, ‘Dear God forgive me’, I was interested. Well, maybe not exactly interested in Tiffany’s offer but rather, interested in this kind of offer, this type of business, and in the people who are so desperate in these sour economic times that they convince themselves that there is nothing wrong with doing a job that begins with deceit, passes through confusion, and quickly lands in the country of ‘hard-sell’ Interested because you see - as incredible as this may sound, just a few minutes before reviewing my phone messages I had received a call from the editor of the local paper asking me if I might be interested in a little investigative story. We’ve been getting calls, she explained, from Plymouth residents, complaining about the sales tactics of a local travel agency, by the name of Only Way to 2 Go Travel.. Was this an eerie coincidence? Were the stars aligned? Was there really a Lincoln Navigator with my name on it? Well, no, probably not. More likely the fact that I too had received the ‘good news’ indicated that the folks at Only Way2GoTravel were (naughty, naughty) working their way through the local phone book. So I called Tiffany back and, for the most part, she stuck to her story. I had won, definitely, one of their four top prizes: a Lincoln Navigator (or its cash equivalent), a 32” Flat Screen TV, $2500 cash, or 3-day two night vacation in Mexico or Las Vegas. But then, of course, it got a bit more complicated. I couldn’t come in alone: I had to come in with my spouse. We had to have an annual income of $50,000 or more. We also had to have a Major Credit card and show it to them when we arrived for our short 90-minute presentation on the ‘history’ of OnlyWay2GoTravel. I wondered why it would take 90 minutes to recount the history of this agency, since Tiffany also described the event I would attending as a ‘Grand-Opening Celebration’, the purpose of which, she explained, was to acquaint my wife and I with OnlyWay2GoTravel so that, in the future, we would consider allowing them to handle our travel arrangements. Tiffany reassured me that no one would try to take down any credit card numbers. And she told me again that ‘this was not telemarketing, not about time-share resorts’. So, with malice aforethought, I made arrangements to pick up my ‘winnings’. So okay, this story is short on drama. You will not be surprised to hear that I am not driving a 2010 Navigator. My main form of transportation is still my 1986 Camry. I didn’t even get a coupon good for two nights in a hotel room in Las Vegas. The truth is that my wife said, ‘no way’, when I tried to entice her into coming with me. I went anyway but they rejected me at the door. I did however see that the place was packed with prospective winners. Were you there? Did you get my Navigator? I know I should know better but I have this horrible feeling that if I been less cynical, a bit more naïve, a few inches taller, and drove maybe a 1999 Subaru, that they would have let me in anyway and that my winning entry code – which Tiffany said was MCG589, would really have been my lucky number. I know its illogical, but I am an American: I don’t trust the government, or the police, or even the guy at the McDonald’s take-out window, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a stranger on the telephone named Tiffany has my best interests at heart. Go figure!

On the overpass at Exit 3

I happened to be coming south on Route 3, after a morning spent at the dentist in Boston, and noticed the traffic becoming surprisingly sluggish around 1 p.m., as I passed through Norwell, over the North River and into Marshfield. At Exit 12 I saw what I thought was the reason, an accident of some sort on the other side of the highway. I muttered to myself ‘just a bunch of rubber-neckers’, and I pressed down involuntarily on the gas. But then it hit me: those cars in the grass of the cloverleaf, at Exit 11, were too orderly. There were more than a half dozen and instead, of facing north, as you might expect after a fender bender, they were fully in the grass and pointed out, towards the roadway. And – what the heck, some of the people were sitting in chairs, and clutching small American flags. I had an excuse: Novocain, in large quantities, was still affecting my mouth and lip and, apparently, my brain. But the reality finally made it through. The motorcade with Senator Kennedy and his family, coming from Hyannis port, must have been due to pass by, on its way to Boston. Still feeling a feint throbbing in my gums however, I dismissed the idea of stopping myself. All I wanted to do was get home, take a few more pills, and tune out. But as I drove south the crowds were building, on the overpasses, filling the access road that wraps around the McDonalds at Exit 5, and in most other places with a good vantage point from which to watch. By the time I reached my exit – three, I felt it would have been disrespectful to ignore this historic gathering. It was about 1:10 then, and already the overpass at Exit 3 was crowded with cars and people. For some reason though, one space was left – practically right in the middle of the bridge, and I parked right there and joined the crowd. Part of the reason for the space was that a large white banner put there by local resident Jessica Laverty – that read, “Thank you Senator Kennedy”, blocked the view of the highway below. Nearby a portable radio relayed the not unexpected news that the procession had yet to leave the Senators’ Hyannis port home. Scheduled for 1 p.m., it was probably closer to 2:30 before they actually departed. In the meantime, waiting on the bridge with a crowd that grew larger with every minute, I tried to get a sense of the mood of the crowd. Maureen Bradley had driven over from her home in Middleboro. Though the new Route 44 would have been the easiest route for her, she opted to work her way through Carver and into Myles Standish State Forest, then onto Long Pond Road – guessing correctly that the nearby overpass at Exit 3 would present a good vantage point to watch the Senator go by on his way to Boston, and to the Kennedy Museum. “The Senator has been a part of my life, of all our lives,” Maureen responded, when asked why she was standing on the overpass on this day. “I’ve been a Massachusetts resident all of my life, and I can hardly remember when Senator Kennedy was not my Senator.” Hollis Phillips was there, with her brother Chris (both from West Plymouth), and with her sister Barbara (Kunit) who happened to be visiting from her home in New York, and like many others on the overpass, she admitted to feeling a close connection with Senator Kennedy. “My dad (longtime Bourne Democrat William Phillips) actually worked on several of Senator Kennedy’s campaigns,” Phillips remembered, adding, “and he’s been my Senator for my entire life.” Her father didn’t approve of her registering as an Independent, she remarked, but “he would definitely be happy that I’m here today.” She remembered a day long ago when she and her sister Barbara were on a swing set in Marston Mills, when the Secret Service told them they had to move. Seems the swing set overlooked a paddock where Caroline Kennedy – the President’s daughter, boarded her horse. “It’s the end of an era,” Hollis said wistfully. Frank Ridge was there on the bridge, with his wife Lois, having driven the short distance from their home in the Pinehills. When asked why he had stopped, Ridge first pointed to his baseball cap, which displayed the insignia of the famed U.S. Army’ First Calvary division. “I was in Vietnam with the First, in ’68 and ’69,” Ridge said. But then he went on to recount several personal memories of the Senator, beginning in the early Sixties when he was President of the Senior Class of Sacred Heart High School in Weymouth. They visited Washington D.C. and the Senator joined them for a picture. “Because I was President of my class, I got to stand right next to him,” Ridge fondly remembers. Later Ridge and his wife were given a special tour of the Capitol, had lunch in the Senate dining room, and were escorted into the Senate itself when, unexpectedly, Kennedy surprised everyone by coming on to the floor and delivering a rousing speech. “The Restaurant lobby wanted a new regulation that would have reclassified short order cooks under the same category as chefs,” Ridge remembered. “That sounds good, but that would have made them management, and therefore, ineligible for overtime pay. Senator Kennedy got up and literally roared his opposition.” Ridge said he was afraid that Ted Kennedy was the last of his kind. “This is a tremendous loss for all of us. Now I don’t know who is left there that’s going to speak for the little guy.” Beneath the bridge latecomers had found their own vantage point – the highway itself. And when tag-teams of motorcycle police closed down the highway at the ramps, they began to move toward the center of the road, forming almost a gauntlet of well wishers. Then, just minutes before the hearse and a dozen or so assorted vehicles – including one Peter Pan bus appeared, a final squad of State Troopers forced those along the highway to retreat to the other side of the guard rails. Then, under a steady rain of applause and the unremarkable ticking of digital cameras, the Senator - as if headed to one of his favorite restaurants in Boston one last time, passed underneath Clark Road with his family in tow.

Cushy

That aint working, that’s the way you do it.
Get your money for nothing, get your chicks for free
-“Money for Nothing”, Dire Straights

‘Cushy’ is the old term used to denigrate public employees: they have (we are told time and time again) ‘cushy jobs’.
But what’s the real meaning of ‘cushy’?
According to many reliable dictionaries, it’s supposed to have a Indo-Aryan origin. The suggestion is that the Hindi word for pleasant, ‘khush’, was picked up by British colonial soldiers and the ‘y’ added on – as in the word ‘mush’ made into ‘mushy’.
I don’t think that likely. Rather, I hold with those who think there’s a far simpler explanation.
It’s cushion – with the ‘y’ ending.
A cushy job is then, just what it sounds like: a job where you sit around all day, on your posterior – and count your money. A job where you get paid to do nothing. “Government work” – people will say, and think that sufficient explanation.
But is government work really that cushy?
Consider the town employee whose salary is posted in the paper every year. Consider the government worker whose necessity is debated on live television. Would you want those jobs?
Generally public employees have a certain level of job security – for which they exchange privacy and pay. The average teacher has several advanced degrees and earns about half of what someone with the same education, longevity, and experience would in the private sector.
Which brings me to the cushy County jobs that have been in the news so often in the last year.
If the jobs at the County offices are so cushy, then why is everyone exchanging them so often?
Just last week, the Commissioners approved several new positions – but they weren’t actually new positions, they were just old people in positions that were new to them. Technically they were new appointments. Do you think these experienced County employees who, because of recent layoffs and/or retirements, had to switch jobs to save their jobs, think their new jobs are cushy?
What about the Administrative Clerk who was moved to the Switchboard? What about the Switchboard Operator who is now an Administrative Clerk? Or the woman hired six months ago who is now unemployed? What about the dozens of employees who were furloughed for months in the last few years, losing thousand of dollars and, eventually, losing their jobs altogether?
It’s a game of ‘Musical Chairs’, and none of the remaining seats are cushy. Some of the chairs are metal. Some are more like stools: hard and unsteady. Some people end up on the floor.
Is the floor ‘cushy’?
Sure, there are cushy jobs out there. The kind of job where you get a bonus even though the company is bankrupt, now that’s a cushy job. The job of Princess seems, for the most part, pretty cushy. I knew a guy in Jamaica who spent the day strolling the white sands of Negril with a few coconuts, a machete, and a bottle of Appleton Rum. Now that was a cushy job.
That was a cushy beach.
That was a cushy week… but I digress.
For the most part – from what I have seen, public employees do thankless jobs, for reasonable pay, and take an unreasonable amount of abuse regardless. Like everyone else, some are good at their jobs. Like everyone else, some are pleasant to work with. For the most part though, their jobs are not cushy.
I don’t think we should be inordinately concerned for their fate: we all have our share of troubles these days. But I do think we need to lighten up a bit. These days even the guy with the upholstered leather recliner in his office is afraid to relax. These days we’re all checking to see if someone slipped a whoopee cushy onto our chairs as we start to sit down.

Pigging Out!

Remain calm.
The first thing I want to say is that there is no reason for alarm.
I want to reassure you, the public, that there is no reason for panic.
Don’t panic.
This is just Step 47, in a 66 Step Public Health Pandemic Program.
Step 47 is the ‘There’s No Reason for Alarm, but If Oprah’s Talking About It We Might as Well Get In on the Action’ phase.
At Step 48 we will begin to remove all copies of Steven King’s The Stand, from bookstores, public libraries, and the bookcases in the common room at the local Bed & Breakfast.
But relax: we are a long way from Step 48.
Ironically, we are closer to Step 57, than we are to Step 48.
At Step 57 masks are issued: not to the public, but to talk show hosts, news anchors, and that crazy guy on public access television.
Step 57 recognizes the need to shut these people up, while admitting that by that Step it may be too late.
Right now though, it’s not too late, I mean to shut these people up.
Right now there are about 100-reported cases of Swine Flu in the US, and one death.
Normally you can expect about 35,000 deaths annually from the usual strains of influenza.
But this is not a usual strain. This is – at least as far as we know, an unknown but relatively mild strain. So without really very much bad news to report, the traditional media approach is to dramatize its long-term potential, give hourly updates, and offer elaborate worst-case scenarios.
You know the drill: its kind of like the way the news channels predict drought every year, based on ten days when it doesn’t rain in the spring. They show pictures of the reservoirs at low levels, and theorize how – if it doesn’t rain for another 100 consecutive days, there will be a drought. Shortly thereafter we get about 5 inches of rain, the reservoirs fill up, and the drought watch is over.
They can’t help themselves. News of a Pandemic – real or imagined, is impossible to resist.
The other day I heard a reporter tease an upcoming swine flu story by saying that – in one particular state, the infection rate had doubled overnight.
‘More after the break’.
When she gave the details later in the hour, it turned out that the cases in that particular state had gone from two to four – overnight!
Whoopee!
Did you ever play that game where you place your hands – palms down, over your opponent’s hands (both upturned)? Then the opponent tries to pull his or her hands out and slap your hands before you can pull them away.
After you get your hands slapped a few times, you are quick to pull them away. But if you flinch, or pull them away too early, the rules say your opponent gets a free slap.
That’s kind of how I see this pandemic story going.
They keep tickling our palms, as if we are about to get slapped, but then they say – don’t worry, stay calm, there is nothing to be alarmed about. And when we flinch, we get our hands slapped.
They interrupted a talk show the other morning to cover a press conference in Lowell.
In Lowell!
OMG, they had two confirmed cases: two boys who had recently been in Mexico.
The Mayor and the School Superintendent – and someone acting as a kind of MC, and various other town officials, crowded onto the steps of the Town Hall, to tell the public that there was… no reason to panic.
All across the country similar ‘Don’t Panic’ rallies were held.
The last I heard this ‘non-emergency’ had spread, to You Tube, Twitter, and beyond.
I hate to say it - because it’s a bad pun, but the swine flu has gone ‘viral’.
At least when its time to panic we should be well prepared.

Over, and Over

Did you hear the news?
I’ve been fired.
They’re not saying that of course, because that would open up a real can of worms, maybe even a lawsuit or two (Is there such a thing, by the way, as a ‘fake’ can of worms?).
But I want you – my fanatical readers and occasional stalkers, to know the truth.
The cover story is that the newspaper business is going through tough times and they need to shut down the entire paper (yeah, right!) by the end of the month.
Can you imagine that: just to get rid of me, to shut me up, they’re going to shut down the whole paper, lay off thousands.
In the last two issues I’m going to reveal the real story, the cover-up, the uugly truth (hint, hint), so stay tuned. But for now, in this the first of my last three columns, I’m just going to gloat.
Of course you’re wondering how can I gloat when I know that - in just two weeks, I will be losing my last connection to reality, my reason for being, my outlet, my vent, my last shot at local fame and fortune.
Easy. You see I know something that they don’t…
First, a little background:
Three years ago when I was hired to write a weekly column for what was then an important new addition to the Gatehouse news empire (they were actually going to call the new paper The New Edition, but I told them there was already a boy band by that name) I was promised the moon: syndication, a weekly radio show, the profits of sales of mugs with my mug on them, a barge trip on the Seine, a gold-capped tooth.
The list went on and on.
Very early on though, they began to renege on their promises, one by one.
Instead of an expense account, they issued me a Dunkin Donuts gift card.
Instead of my own radio show I got a transistor radio.
Instead of a gold-capped tooth and discount dental plan, I got a coupon good for a nipple piercing at the Pin Cushion on Court Street.
What could I do though? Their promises had all been verbal, sealed with a wink and a handshake. They knew I desperately wanted to maintain my cult status in town and they were right.
But I fought back, in my own subtle, passive-aggressive, wimpy way.
First of all there were the coded messages to my old girlfriend in Chicago that I slipped into each column: provocative, off-color remarks and double-entendre printed right alongside stories of all the good things that the Plymouth Rock studio people are doing for local residents.
Then there was my secret agreement with certain despised town officials, consignment store owners, and the local plumber’s union to subvert the cause of democracy and make Mark Lord the next Mayor of Plymouth.
Our efforts failed, but we definitely sowed the seeds of dissent.
And then there was The Five.
Though my column has appeared in this paper over 150 times, in reality it was always the same five columns, over and over.
Sometimes I changed the names. Sometimes I changed the names of places. Sometimes I changed the critters seen in those same well-known places. But every one of the columns I wrote, and they paid for (including this one) was based on five basic columns.
Check it out.
Remember the column about the caterpillars leaving their pajamas hanging from threads while they ran around the neighborhood naked? That was the same column as the one about my pet Penguin, Duke.
Remember the column about George Bush on the aircraft carrier, and George Bush on the Mayflower, and George Bush and the emotion party? Yep, just one column.
Then there was the column about the Billington Brothers, and the one about the Doobie Brothers, and the one about the Brothers Karamazov.
I actually wrote 23 columns about the ponds of Plymouth and no one – not my readers or the editors ever noticed.
The Bulletin Boys thought they were pulling a fast one by paying me only $1.79 per column. It was supposed to be $100 a week but, after they deducted for home delivery (do they still do that?), dark blue ink (it’s hard to tell the difference but I’m told the blue is more reassuring), press charges, the dental plan, piercing insurance, and the monthly conferences in Taunton on the future of newspapers, my weekly check never came to more than $2.
As I see it, since I really only wrote five columns, I was actually paid over $50 per column.
So who’s laughing now? Huh?
Well, actually, I’m not laughing. Being a ‘columnist’ was always good for a free appetizer at Unos on Free Appetizer Wednesdays, and got me a good seat at the back of Memorial Hall during Town Meetings, and – if anyone asked me what I ‘did’ I could puff up my chest and say that I was a writer.
And now – if I’m honest, I’ll have to admit that I am in fact, a balloon animal squeaker. Not that I am embarrassed by making balloon animals for a living. I actually make more in tips on a good day of balloon twisting than I make in a year of columnizing. But I don’t have to wear the striped socks, funny hat and oversized sunglasses when I am writing my column. And if someone asks me for ID lots of little orange and blue and red and green rubber snakes don’t fall out of my pocket. And writing is much easier on the ears than balloon squeaking (as those in the trade refer to it).
The truth is – though I think I have been ridiculously underpaid, totally unappreciated, and largely ignored by those I sought to communicate with, I am going to miss writing these five columns, over and over.

Going, going..

Got word this week that the Plymouth Bulletin will be ending operations at the end of this month - the final issue to be April 30th, 2009. Can't say I'm surprised - given the predicament of many more well known, long-running papers across the country. This won't be the end of this blog however, in fact it will free me from having to write (occasionally) about the town itself - so perhaps my columns will have a more national relevance. I have always thought though, that Plymouth's travails had wider relevance, and freed from the need to respond to local issues I may - paradoxically, be able to enhance that aspect of my writing. Certainly I will not hesitate to write about my life in this historic community: the day to day absurdity, the everyday annoyances, the beautiful and the bizarre. Perhaps now that your comments or criticisms will not be published in the paper, or on the official newspaper blog, you (dear reader) will feel more inclined to let me know what you think. Regardless, I will write on: it is not that I have anything important to say, it is simply that I need to express myself.

Ding Dong

How do I feel?
Yippie!
Like Snoopy with his nose in the air, his ears in the sky, up on his hind paws doing a dance, while his pal Woodstock flitters excitedly about him.
Woo-hoo!
Like the guy in the clichéd slow-mo scene of the couple on the beach, or at the airport, or on the train platform – running headlong into each other’s arms.
Yeah, Baybee!
Like the two-year old in his high chair doing a face-plant in his birthday cake.
Or like Carlton Fisk hopping up the first base line, using every inch of body English that he has to psychically alter the path of his rising line drive in Game Six of the 75 World Series and then, when the signal is given, hardly touching the ground as he circles the bases.
Curley of the Three Stooges, on his side, rotating round and round: nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.
Pete Townsend, windmilling giant power chords in front of a crowd of thousands.
Or Chuck Berry duck walking across the stage while playing Maybelline.
George Bailey strolling down Main Street in the snow on Christmas Eve.
It is, after all, a wonderful life.
Ding Dong the Mayor is Dead.

Okay, maybe I’m overdoing it a bit.
I know that there is a 100% chance that the Charter-changers will soon be launching a petition drive, and holding a bake sale, and hiring a voodoo doctor, and a priest, and adding to their hit list (and hiring a hit man), and looking up to heaven, beating their breasts and claiming they have been wronged.
I know there is a high likelihood that certain fanatical Charter-heads will succeed once again to – at the very least, muddy the waters, create a stink, turn over a few stones and - when a worm or two is discovered, express their righteous indignation like Jimmy Swaggart after a big night on the town.
I know that Saturday’s vote was in many ways, too good to be true. But I will not have my sunny disposition sullied by what may or may not happen in the coming weeks.
I will not read the comments posted to this online, or the outraged letters to the editor written in blood. And I promise that, under pain of expulsion from the ever-expanding secret cabal of know-it-alls, ambulance chasers, cultists and town meeting members, I will not at any time in the next six months pause in my cable wanderings to listen to.. well, you know who.
I want this feeling to last.
And did you notice? As soon as the vote was concluded Saturday, the sun came out, the birds began to sing, and that long-deferred spring we’ve been aching for, burst forth.
Sunday was an actual sun day.
Monday was Opening Day at Fenway.
Little Leaguers are taking to the fields.
The North Koreans sent up a celebratory rocket.
Metallica was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
“Oh frabjous day, Callooh, Callay”.
Ding Dong, the Mayor is Dead.

(Note: For those of you not here, in America's Home Town, this post may be difficult to relate to. But know this - Plymouth has been in existence for just shy of 400 years, and through all those years it has been governed by a town meeting form of government - with an elected Board of Selectman and annual meetings at which a representative body deliberates on the expenditures for the coming year. Over the last ten years that form of government has been under attack by fans of alleged 'efficiencies'. The recent defeat of the third or fourth attempt to switch to a Mayoral form of government is what prompted this article. Though forward thinking in many ways, I strongly believe that the more people involved in governance, the better, and that especially in this historic community we need to do everything we can to keep the town meeting form of government intact and effective.)

Looking for Spring

Ellisville Harbor parking lot: 12:40 p.m.
I’ve never been ‘here’ before.
I’ve been by here a hundred, maybe a thousand times.
It’s human nature. If I had been on vacation I certainly would have stopped, looked, maybe even gotten out of my car and explored this historic site. But because I live close by, I just drive on by.
Until today.
I’m making a point of walking all of Plymouth’s parks and conservation lands this year. I started in late December with a few visits to the Eel River Preserve off Long Pond Road, then had a wonderful afternoon tramping through fresh-fallen snow on New Years’ Day on the Gramp’s Loop trail off Mast Road. But then this recently concluded roller coaster of a winter interceded, with snow falling almost every week, ice everywhere, frost heaves and tortured trees. It was all I could do to make it out of my driveway, much less find time for a leisurely stroll through the woods.
I couldn’t wait any longer though.

I needed to get away. I needed to get out. I needed to replenish.
Not that I expected Ellisville Harbor to do all of that – but I thought it would be a step in the right direction.
Right away I am disappointed.
It’s too close to the road, and to Cedarville. On a gray Wednesday afternoon there are five cars in the small lot – most with people sitting in them, eating their lunch. I don’t begrudge them the view or the time off, but I was hoping to be alone. I was hoping to be able to get out of my car, take a few steps down a path, turn a corner, and be completely alone.
Instead there is society to deal with: mostly workers taking a break, but a dog walker and a couple, arm in arm, that I see heading into the woods.
Through the trees bordering the lot I see a rusted old piece of farm equipment: I suppose it has been left as a reminder of the history of the family farm that once thrived here, but on this misty afternoon it simply looks like junk.
I get out, and move to a display where there is history of the site, and a rather vague map.
Stop critiquing, I tell myself. Just shut up and walk.
The path is wide, graveled, easy to follow. Too easy, I think. Shut up and start walking.
To the right of the path the old salt pond is visible through the still bare trees, a hundred yards or so below, and beyond that steel gray water.
My sense is that things should be greener, warmer, brighter by this time of year, but that the repeated blows this past winter rained down on us, have taken a toll.
The forecast was for sun, and temperatures well above 50. Instead it is overcast, misty, and a strong, cold wind cuts right through my jean jacket.

Stop whining, I tell myself. But in the woods and farther below in the pond, geese, grackle, and smaller, unseen birds, seem to squawk in agreement.
I look around for something aesthetically pleasing. I try taking a few pictures with the small digital camera I take everywhere I go – looking down the hill through the trees, toward the water. But the pond and ocean - which the brain easily discerns through the gaps, don’t stand out in the lens of my camera.
I walk on and the path remains too wide, too easy to follow, too public.
To the left there are dry, dead meadows with clusters of crumbling trees. I notice a dog walker has taken that direction. I guess that these so-called meadows must be minefields of uncollected droppings.
In the midst of a clearing a rusted wellhead surfaces like some strange religious totem. Ahead a few tall cypress punctuate overgrown rhododendron bushes. It doesn’t feel natural. It doesn’t feel alive. The trees are not in bud. Almost every limb is dotted with one or two brown stragglers: shriveled leaves that have refused to let go, even after so many limb-bending bouts with ice and snow.
Instead of finding myself deep in dark woods, closer to silence, and alone – as I would have hoped, the path winds back toward an unpaved public street – Gracie’s Road, and passes over the driveway of a shingled, nondescript home used – I think, by State Park employees during the warmer months.
With little additional effort I come to the point where the path angles sharply to the right, abutting a private home, narrows, then descends downhill before ending at a twisted, suspect staircase to the beach.
On the beach at first I sense only the disarray. It’s a lost and found of ocean items.
But as I walk slowly over the sand and stone and wind-scalded seaweed, gazing down at each arrangement of cast away ocean plunder, I find I am pleasantly distracted by the subtle varieties of seaweed, stone, and trash available, and impressed by the casual indifference with which the beach has been decorated.
The rockweed’s pods have as much variety and color as gemstones: in places they are pink, in others gray, black cherry, or blue-green.
A scroll of serpent green kelp is tangled and twisted, half-submerged in the sand like wet knee socks discarded by a skinny dipper.
A thick ribbon of – what I take to be gray polyester insulation, has somehow been looped like a holiday bow in and out of a mound of green weed.
Brown and white and green and amber, even pale pink, coin-sized stones are clustered together at a rise in the sand, licked by the foaming tide, forming an accidental Apian Way that stretches the length of the beach, leading the eye toward the distant stack of the power station at the canal.
A jogger suddenly streaks by behind me – and I jerk back to attention.
I maneuver back up the Escher-like staircase back to the pathway and, this time, meander purposefully into the dead brown meadow. In its midst, at a distance, I notice a cluster of short, wire-limbed trees, their highest branches pleading with the gray sky.
I move into their midst and find that they are all dead: the last bits of clinging bark slipping from their ivory limbs like sleeves that have lost all elastic.
I empathize with these trees.
It has been a long winter. My unused limbs seem to have lost their elastic as well. It would not surprise me if my skin sloughed to the ground, leaving me with just the husk.
At least the calendar tells me its spring.

Get Your Goat!

We need a bigger goat.
Much bigger.
We need an oversized patsy, a certified whipping boy, a forty-foot fall guy.
Any suggestions?
Sorry, local officials won’t do this time. You can only get so much mileage out of taking pot shots at poor Dicky Quintal, or demeaning Larry Rosenblum, or adding snide comments about any elected official whose name appears online.
Local Government as a whole is the proverbial broad side of the barn: hard to miss but in the end, not quite what the people require at this historic moment.
AIG?
Sure, Aiggie and its stooges - and the other oversized financial institutions as well, are an ever bigger, fatter target. But personally I can’t relate to a trillion dollar company and its billion dollar blues. And then there’s the sad fact that we need AIG, and Wall Street, and all those banks. So to make financial institutions the sole target of our anger and frustration is just, well, spitting into the wind.
What about the Commander in Chief? The President always makes a nice fall guy. But this guy Obama has the unusual habit (for a politician) of apologizing when he makes a mistake. It took the last guy six years to even admit to making any mistakes at all.
And speaking of the ‘last guy’, let’s get it out the way: we can’t blame him either. It would be giving him more credit than he deserves to say he was personally responsible for our present state of affairs. In eight years he really didn’t do much of anything, except flash that famous grin as the world around him went to hell.
Okay, so where was I? Oh yeah, looking for that oversized goat.
Did you know the term ‘scapegoat’ comes from the tradition, in Biblical times, of driving off a goat with the sins of the world loaded (symbolically) on to its back? The ‘escape’ goat or, "scapegoat" is now understood to mean a person, often innocent, who is punished for the sins of others (usually as a way of distracting attention from the real causes.)
Whatever happened to the Red Chinese anyway?
When I was a boy you could always blame the Red Chinese or the Soviets if you were feeling a little anxious. In my Dad’s time they had the Rosenbergs. In my grandfather’s time there was Sacco and Vanzetti. Say what you will, but I don’t think that Tim Geithner measures up against those great goats of the past.
Still I would agree that a good show trial might make us feel better, for a time. We could put Dick ‘Chainsaw’ Cheney in charge: he’s just the man if you’re planning to burn someone at the stake.
But even if we waterboarded a few Wall Street execs, put a little buckshot in the behinds of a select group of politicians, and tarred and feathered anyone suspected of eating imported pistachios, the effects would be short-lived. And we still wouldn’t be able to rid ourselves of the nagging suspicion that it was – not AIG or Notorious B.I.G., it was you and me who were responsible for this fall from grace.
That’s the secret of successful scapegoating too: it’s got to be our apathy, our sloth, our sins that are offloaded onto something or someone else in order to achieve the full effect. Most of your modern scapegoats - even Dick Darth Cheney, just don’t have enough trunk space to accommodate all of that.
Remember, we’re not talking about the sins of a few; we’re talking about, like Mikey Jackson used to sing, “the man in the mirror”.
We were the ones that were too complacent to fight against the waste of Iraq. We were the ones who were too busy fishing from our new boats – bought with a little ol’ equity loan on our overvalued homes, to get out and vote. We were the ones who were too fat and happy to care that our country was being split down the middle into the haves and the have-just-enough-not-to-cares. And heck, let’s not be chauvinistic about this: our friends in Europe and Asia had their own personal Ponzi schemes too.
Even those among us whose heads weren’t completely buried in the sand for the last decade, usually had them buried someplace else. Can we be forgiven for the hours and hours, and hours spent role-playing in World of Warcraft, or fine-tuning our MySpace pages, and text messaging our friends while the walls crumbled around us?
Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but a lot of us Twittered while America tottered.
So if we all have played a part in this debacle - and it’s not just the fault of some remote corporation or government official or Brittany, we need a scapegoat the likes of which has not been seen for years.
And come to think of it, I know just the guy: that is, I know just the goat.
There is one all-purpose, super-sized, professional, time-tested, certified scapegoat who has the ability to take on all of our guilt and anger and frustration and blame, and do so without complaint.
Yes, I know it sounds blasphemous, but I think we really need to make a big sacrifice if we are going to get out of this hole we’re in without tearing each other to pieces.
Let the call go out.
Billy Buckner, we need you again!

Tweedle Dee and Twitter Dumb

Tweet!
I'm writing a column about Twitter.
10:49 AM Mar 14th from web

I’m Twittering as we speak.
I’m writing about Twitter and Twittering about writing about Twitter.
I’ve linked my Twitter account to the blog for this column. As I write about Twitter, and Twitter about Twitter, my ‘tweets’ automatically appear on my blog.
I think, to be fair, that I should also blog about Twittering. Twitter only gives you 140 characters at a time, so I could use the extra space on my blog to expand on my thoughts about Twitter.
Of course I could have used this column to expand on my thoughts about Twitter, but I thought it would be more amusing to use this column to write about how amusing it is to, well, try and explain what Twitter is.
I am not going to email anyone, however, about my column about Twitter, or my Twittering on my blog: unless, of course, someone emails me and asks me about it.
And that’s final.

Tweet!
I'm still writing.. well, I took a few breaks: just got back from Staples.
3:23 PM Mar 14th from web

They call people who sign up on Twitter, and then agree to follow other peoples’ Twittering, Followers.
Real imaginative, huh?
You can follow me on Twitter.
Yeah, you’re right: I’m not sure why you would either, unless of course you want more of the same material, in smaller, byte-size pieces. Then again, as Lotus founder Mitchell Kapor once wrote, ”Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.” So maybe there is something to be said for getting your information from Twitter’s ‘bubbler’.
There are other Twits though, that you really might want to follow, regardless of what they have to say.
But you have to be signed up on Twitter to follow the Twits on Twitter: unless of course you’re following me, and then you can just read this.
Are you following me?
There’s actually someone on Twitter who goes by the name, Hitler, and he or she has quite a few Followers.
There’s a Mussolini too.
And of course, Mickey Mouse is well represented (he and Minnie have been expressing themselves in less than 140K for years).

Tweet!
I'm revising the Twitter piece: usually get it in to the paper Sunday night.
About to sit down to Nana's Chicken: an old family recipe.
6:49 PM Mar 14th from web

There are even quite a few Senators and Congressmen who Twitter.
When Obama was giving his first television address to Congress, a lot of those Twits were Twittering while he spoke (or they had their aids Twitter for them). That’s rude behavior in the real world, but in the world of Twitter it’s like saying ‘gesundheit’ when somebody sneezes. It’s the natural thing to do!
I think it would be strange to have my own Followers.
Then again, if my Followers were just friends, it wouldn’t be so strange. But then would be they be Followers, or Friends?
Mostly people on Twitter who follow at all, follow famous Twits. They get to hear what this famous Twit had for lunch, or that famous Twit thinks of Obama, or how this other famous Twit has a new book, or an upcoming show, or a tee shirt for sale.
In the real world I think they call that stalking.

Tweet!
I've given up on that first version. Going to start over.
It's already Monday morning. What the hell is Twitter anyway?
00:17 AM Mar 15th from web

I probably got into Twittering a bit too late.
I missed the Golden Age of Twittering, when there was a real spirit of idealism.
Rumor has it that for just under seven days - sometime in 2007, all Twitterers were expressing their innermost thoughts, revealing their hopes and dreams, and offering their prayers up like a burnt offering to the gods: a small, 140-byte burnt offering, but a sincere one.
But on the day I signed up a girl, or a company, or a Twit called Scandalouswoman signed on as my Follower right away, then offered me her link.
And besides Hitler and Mussolini, I noticed that my fellow Twits also included radio stations and grocery stores and pizza parlors. all of whom had their own Twitter IDs and their own Followers.
I got the impression that Twitter was a kind of mall of the mind: there are some nice things if your credit is still good, but mostly it’s pushy Eastern European immigrants trying to sell you cosmetics from their overstuffed carts.
Or maybe Twitter was like the kid with Tourettes: you know sooner or later he’s just going to blurt it all out.
Or Twitter was like one of those scrolling message marquees that they put in store windows, except this one is strapped to your head and lit up 24/7.
Hell, I really don’t know what Twitter is. Give me a few more weeks.
And yet somehow, miraculously, I am Twittering as we speak!

Tweet!
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” - Arthur C. Clarke
7:25 AM – from the web

Clockenspiel

Start now!
Okay, no matter where you are, and what time you think it is, while you’re reading this it’s Hammer Time.
No, not M.C. Hammer, - the guy with the harem pants who was secretly funded by the Ritalin Manufacturers of America, but instead, an actual hammer. A hammer with a wooden handle and a metal head to be gripped firmly and brought down like Thor’s Hammer on any and all clocks in the room, the house, the neighborhood.
In my personal time zone where I am writing this right now, the glass and plastic opaque faces of three alarm clocks are in pieces on the floor. In this region, 21 hands, representing seven analog timepieces – hours, minutes, seconds, have been broken off and piled like kindling in the fireplace. In each of three computers, the prying eyes of digital time have been banished from the screen.
I’ve had all I can take and I just can’t take it anymore.
While you’re reading this the moments that you are wasting cannot be catalogued under Eastern Standard or Rocky Mountain or Greenwich Mean or any government controlled time.
This is my time.
I’ve got all the time in the world.
This is my world.
And you are free now - while you read this, to count off the moments on your own. How long have you been reading this now? Sixty seconds? Are you beginning to feel a little skittish? Do you feel the pressure of Big Brother’s time, weighing on you?
Relax. If you are usually bound, which most of you usually are – like the White Rabbit by his Red Queen, know that here and now the Queen is dead.
If last Saturday night you dutifully switched all your clocks one hour forward or two hours back, or stood on your hands or your head, or barked at the moon because that’s what the weatherman said you should do, know that this is a duty free zone.
That sound you hear is not a bomb about to go off, or a race about to begin, or a life about to end. That sound is the ticking of your own heart. You can move to its beat, you know. You don’t need to jump up at the alarm, make a mad dash to fit the train schedule, eat your lunch within the time that other’s prescribe for you, or take your week’s vacation at the same time every year: is there even such a thing as the same time every year?
And God knows you don’t need to save any daylight.
The sad truth Chuckles, is that you can’t save any daylight: never could. It is a ruse, a game, a joke on you my friend. It was originally the Kaiser’s bright idea, don’t you know: a way for the Prussians to put one over on the French. They wanted a little extra time to blow each other into eternity (now that’s my idea of daylight savings time). Daylight Savings was and is an absurdity worthy of Dr. Seuss – like the Butter Battle game. And now, war or not, it is a joke played on you to demonstrate how gullible you are – and always will be.
They move the clock forward, they move the clock backward, and you go right along with it like the life-sized figures that dance under the Glockenspiel on the Munich Rathaus tower.
Today the Kaiser and his descendants are sitting up there in their Dirigible Pilots Men’s Club drawing room on the uppitiest floor of the emptiest building on Wall Street, clinking glasses and having a laugh at your expense.
And do you think for a moment that these Helium-voiced lords abide by the conventions of time that they have you dancing to? Of course not. They are floating on the ether, far above the clouds, eating bonbons and petit fours, drinking absinthe and peering out the window at the peons far below. The faster they make you run, the more time they have to kill.
But at least here, and now – within the white spaces between each word you are free to spend your time any way you choose. You don’t have to spend it all.
I personally prefer to use a stopwatch, letting out only as much time as I need for the things that I love.
My time is my own.
I will not, under any circumstances, bend my time to suit your schedule.
I will not rise a moment earlier or go to bed a moment later.
I refuse to save time, or Leap years, or celebrate any of their fabricated holidays.
I can spare only so much.
And guess what: your time is up.

Wampum's War

I’m not surprised that many residents of Plymouth are convinced that there is a cancer in our ‘body politick’, a malignancy that needs to rooted out, and that only a wholesale change in our form of government will do the trick.
Plymouth’s history is filled with instances of paranoia, of intolerance, and fear mongering.
Like most people who have, at one time or another, been treated unjustly because of how they looked, what language they spoke, or what religion they practiced, given the opportunity the original settlers of this community transitioned quickly from being oppressed, to repressing others.
For decades after the original landing in 1620, it was illegal to bring ‘outsiders’ to Plymouth, or for recently freed servants or even single people to build their own homes, without the knowledge and consent of the local government, and to do so could earn you a time in the stocks, a hefty fine, or even expulsion from the community.
In the latter part of the 17th century residents were forbidden to even ‘entertain’ Quakers, three of whom were actually hung in Boston at the peak of the anti-Friends hysteria.
And when the revolution against England began, there were numerous instances where otherwise upstanding citizens with long, respected histories of service and loyalty to the community, were tarred and feathered, hoisted to the tops of polls, beaten and otherwise abused for expressing the belief that the colonies should retain their allegiance to England.
And of course all this was in addition to the dismissive attitudes, disenfranchising ordinances, and outright injustices experienced by native peoples.
The paranoia and xenophobia of locals came to its dramatic, and somewhat comical climax on March 30, 1741, when Joseph Wampum – a native who then lived in what is now known as Manomet, told churchgoers gathered in Plymouth that day that he had been visited in his home the previous night by eight Spaniards.
He might as well have said that devils had descended from the sky. England was at the time, officially at war with Spain so – despite their philosophical and physical separation from the motherland; Wampum’s words became the spark that ignited the tinder of the community’s fears of all things foreign and unusual.
Bells were rung, and drums sounded to alert the populace, and the militia gathered in full regalia in the town square, awaiting instructions, ready for war. Don’t scratch your head and tickle your chin, trying to coax forth some lost elementary school lesson describing the carnage that followed, for your instincts are correct this time: there was no war.
Despite a century of, often-justified paranoia, the colonists were able to keep their ‘powder dry’. The hardships they had endured had done something more than filled them with fear: it had given them a deep respect for pragmatism and rationality.
They did not immediately launch their boats, or march off in search of a fight.
No one was strung up.
No one was taken off to Clark’s island for interrogation.
And the government and rules that had governed their lives for the last 120 years were not suddenly abandoned, and martial law put in its place.
They waited, watched and, when no confirmation of the Spanish Armada’s approach was received, no smoke seen on the horizon, and no sign of troops descending over the Pine Hills was detected – they unbuckled their swords and went back home and had something warm to eat.
The event itself was known from that day on as, ‘Wampum’s War’.
And that is how I choose to think of the decade of whining, personal attacks, and fear mongering that is coming to a climax now, in present day Plymouth, with the latest call to throw out our historic and – by objective standards, effective form of government.
This is just another Wampum’s War.
If the rumors and whispered innuendos – the alleged ‘talk of the town’ were true, an army of volunteers, board members, and town government employees should already have come screaming over Cole’s Hill, looking for our scalps.
If even a small portion of the dire predictions of the fear mongers had come to pass, Plymouth should already be a smoldering ruin.
And yet, even in these grim economic times, the schools remain intact, the lights are still on, and the Mayflower is still afloat in the harbor.
Still, maybe it is a good thing, this irrational fear. Maybe it is a natural phenomenon.
Perhaps we need to be brought to the brink of disaster every generation or so, so we can look out over the harbor, up into the Pine Hills, and over the State Forest and take note of… the absence of an enemy.
Perhaps Wampum was just giving the colonists what - though they didn’t realize it themselves, they most wanted in their lives – drama! There were many accounts during the first hundred years of the Plymouth colony, of the native inhabitants deliberately lying to locals for effect. Wampum’s warning may have been one of those. On another occasion natives informed the Pilgrims that Edward Winslow had died of fever, while on a mission to Connecticut. When he arrived in good health a few days later, the natives were surprised that the Pilgrims were angry with them for their ‘little lie’. After all, had not the Pilgrim’s joy at seeing Winslow alive, been all the more sweet for their sorrow at his supposed passing?
I believe that the natives realized that feelings like fear and sorrow were the kind of emotional seasoning favored by the ‘English’, and they knew that salty tears bring out the flavors of life that we often take for granted.
Certainly we can now see more clearly – as we consider this momentous change in our historic government, that Plymouth is a community that has been blessed in many ways.
Certainly now, with the cries of those who claim our community is in disarray still reverberating in our ears, we can see that few if any other towns can boast of so many recreational opportunities, so many natural wonders, so rich and authentic a history – and how few of us take advantage of all that this town has to offer.
And certainly now, we can grudgingly admit that despite their lack of perfection as both individuals and administrators, those who have served as members of elected boards and committees in the past 10, 20, even 100 years, have done a remarkable job of preserving our resources. Just look around, for comparison, at the untidy sprawl of the communities that we are supposed to emulate, Braintree, Weymouth, and Taunton.
But the alarm has been sounded, and sounded, and sounded again.
And certain militias have been assembled and waiting in the town square for nearly a decade.
We have to put someone in the stocks, don’t we? We have to burn a witch or two, right?
If, as we have been told time and time again, our demise is imminent and inescapable, we need to root out the infidels amongst us and institute a kind of permanent martial law: government by the fewest, for the loudest!
Then again, considering that there are really no devils on Lincoln Street, maybe we should just unbuckle our swords and go home.

Vocabulary Lesson

I made the mistake of loudly smacking my lips and licking my fingers as I devoured Cormac McCarthy’s devastating novel The Road, last spring.
I’ve always told friends and family ‘you can’t afford what I want’, when they query me on my Christmas wish list. So last year they were able to take a kind of revenge, confidently gifting me with almost everything written by that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.
I am only now beginning to dig myself out of this self-imposed prison of words.
Most recently I finished McCarthy’s 1979 opus, Suttree, the story of a debauched, usually drunken, mystical apologist for the South-that-never-was.
It is not an easy read. The novel begins with a kind of bio-sociological incantation, and ends with an amusing near-death experience. In between there are drownings, murders, the accidental death of children, police beatings, bewitchments, a great deal of sewerage, and characters who if not fully etched, are completely wretched.
If pressed I would have to say I was disappointed: it was not as satisfying a read as The Road, written twenty years after Suttree.
But on another level, it was magnificent. I have never read a book that had more words that I didn’t understand or couldn’t immediately suss out from the context. It was two books in one: the novel and the vocabulary lesson.

Gout, from the archaic ‘gutta’, meaning drops but in modern usage specifically crystals: crystals of uric acid in the blood that lead to painful swelling of the extremities, the knees, the elbows. We hear ‘gout’ and we think of wigged men in satin knickers mincing about to baroque music while, unbeknownst to them, their hostess with the hair piled high has ducked out for a rendezvous with Errol Flynn.
In Suttree though, it is apparently gout in that first, archaic sense, of a drop, or a droplet, of a spray of rain and blood and other biological fluids and even – on page 27, spiked clumps of sawdust bursting through the torn stitches in the belly of a stuffed lynx.
Sere. Where withered might have done admirably, perhaps substituted by McCarthy because of its homonymic association with seer - someone who prophesies, foreshadowing Suttree’s failed attempts to establish any kind of life. He is a failed fisherman, husband, father, son, friend, lover, pimp, Catholic, and auto enthusiast. He fails at everything.
At first I failed as well, to find a ‘sere’ in my Oxford Annotated. But then I looked under ‘sear’ – to burn into, and found the archaic spelling and secondary definition that McCarthy uses to describe bones, claws, flowers, foliage, hopes, and lives, all withering or dead on the vine.
Knacker: a slaughterer of spent or sickly animals. A writer might be said to be a kind of knacker: a re-processor of useless ideas, unusual words. The Knoxville that McCarthy depicts is certainly a slaughterhouse, and the characters that McCarthy invents create what lives they have, out of the waste. Most have built their homes from flotsam and jetsam. There, along the river, under the bridges, in the caves, they sleep in abandoned vehicles, in cast off rail cars, in boats made of old signage. They are the wretched refuse, washed upon the shore. Suttree is a knacker’s dream: literally crammed with the abandoned, the maimed, the mad, and the delusional. On page 457, in the last fits and fantasies of a typhoid coma, Suttree’s alter ego reads from an imagined indictment in which he accuses himself of consorting with..

“thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spallpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots, and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes and other associated felonious debauchees.”

Tellurian. You and I, as it turns out, are Tellurians, which simply means ‘of the earth’. There is though, a hint in its root, which suggests that McCarthy meant to imply someone not simply of this earth, but bounded by it, restricted to it, even imprisoned within it. For the root word is ‘telo’, meaning flat. Flat earth?
The list – kept in my everyday journal, went on and on: Concatenate, talus, warfarined (poisoned by a water soluble rat poison), dishabille, sacerdotal (the Jesuit schooled boy must have slept late that morning), cataphracted, crepuscular, spalls (just chips), purlieu, quoits, ‘breeks of kingscord’ (corduroy pants!), and triturations.
At first I just wrote down these mysterious words. Then, when the definition was not immediately available, or did nothing to help me understand usage, I began to write down the page number. Then I included the sentence in which the word was found. In most cases I had to have my Oxford annotated open on my lap, the novel in my hand, and my notebook at the ready, before I was satisfied I had a reasonable understanding of what the author intended.
Soricine. In the context in which I found this word - within a description of a wizened black Geechee witch preparing and administering a potion, I assumed it was a variation on sorcerer, or sorceress. But still unsure, I noted it in my journal. That evening I quickly found that soricine simply meant ‘shrew-like’. I thought back to the many instances in which McCarthy describes the reliance of those living in and along the river – the lower reaches of Knoxville, on the animals and fishes at the lower end of the chain. They ate roots, rabbits, rodents, bats, pigeons, turtles, shellfish, and often resembled the same.
Spelaean. I dug deep for this one and came up – if not empty handed, unsure of what I may have grasped in the darkness. I came up with ‘spae’, a wonderful Scottish word with Norse roots, which may be the root of our own word ‘spy’. A spae-wife is, in Scottish, a sorceress, or fortune teller, and I suppose I wanted this to be the correct inference. The reference itself in the book is to a ‘spelaen darkness’ which could – in the context of this novel, fit. But in the light of day I saw the root I was digging for was not ‘spae’, but rather spelae. So down I went again, and after a while uncovered ‘spalax’, which is the Latin term for a mole rat. As the chapter concerned a certain rat-like character spelunking beneath Knoxville, this seemed a quite plausible solution.
Perhaps ‘spelaen’ might also describe the process of reading: that is, a burrowing through the darkness and a grasping for meaning.
I can’t think of a better way to spend these last drab days of winter, than burrowing through this spelaean darkness. But then, that’s just me.

Fry Baby

Lipstick is up.
Chewing gum is through the roof!
Whittling is making a comeback, especially now that chances are good that your local hospital has someone on staff that can reattach a finger or two.
When we can’t afford to waste our money on the supposed finer things, we return – like the Prodigal Son, to those tried and true, simple, straightforward pleasures of life: corn on the cob, a long walk through the woods or, in my case, the French fry.
To be honest, I’ve always thought that a good French fry was one of the finer things, but was hesitant to admit it. After all, its basic components are on the list of politically incorrect ingredients: oil, potato, salt!
Yes, there are alleged French fries that are made without one or more of those ingredients, but what they actually are is really anybody’s guess.
And now I am going to admit a belief that may remove what last remnant of respect you had for me:
The greatest French fry in the world is the McDonald’s French Fry!
That said, I should note that not even McDonald’s can make a great French fry on a consistent basis.
I actually remember my first McDonald’s fry. We had just returned from Berlin – where my father was stationed, and like a kid on Christmas morning ‘the Colonel’ scooted us around metropolitan Washington D.C. eager to show us all of the innovations we had missed living overseas. There were Mustang convertibles, Boeing 747s rising up over the Potomac from National Airport, and – on the Baltimore-Washington Expressway just south of Beltsville, an odd, rectangular glass building with ‘Golden Arches’.
There were no drive-thrus then, but neither were there long lines, and with its limited menu fast food could also mean hot food- including those remarkable fries.
Timing is everything. In the last 20 years I would estimate that - out of 2000 visits, I have tasted properly cooked and served McDonald’s French Fries at most three or four times. You see, to wring the perfect flavor out of those emaciated strips of pale yellow tuber everything has to be perfect. They have to be cooked in the hot oil for exactly the right amount of time: no more, no less. They have to be immediately removed from the oil and, after a cursory rapping of the metal basket to remove excess grease, scattered in a thin layer over the serving area. And they have to be quickly and thoroughly doused with salt so that the tiny crystals adhere to the remaining patina of oil.
And then of course – perhaps most importantly, you have to place your order just in time to have those perfectly prepared fries scooped up and served to you – as the old saying goes, ‘piping hot’.
You eat these fries with your teeth – not your mouth, breaking each tiny shaft open with a kind of Irish step dance: quick jabs with the heels of your incisors, releasing the captured steam, crunching the salt, savoring their ephemeral vinegary tartness, and noting the remarkable balance of flavor that is possible in a simple recipe.
You need to eat these miniature two-by-fours quickly too. They should always be the first item out of the bag, beginning before you have even left the parking area, using your fingers like chopsticks to clutch a half dozen or so at a time and shoveling them quickly into your open mouth.
It’s like walking on hot coals: a potentially spiritual experience but, he who hesitates is lost. If these fries cool they are better used to build a miniature yellow picket fence round the houses on your train set in the basement. Once cooled these fries are like the trilobite uncovered by an archaeologist: fossilized fodder for the scientist to examine and file away. Not food at all.
But don’t get all exited. As I said, chances are that they – the fries themselves, will never have a chance to devolve from a perfect state.
Everything is working against you.
If you are in a long line, or the fries have languished under their tanning lights for more than a moment, or they have lain a few seconds too long in the hot oil or – and this happens very frequently, the salt has either been niggardly applied or not at all, then perfection will never pass through your lips.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who – though regular customers of Mickey D’s, have never tasted these fries at the peak of their potential.
When they are good they are emblematic of the majesty of simplicity – in all things.
And when they are not, they are like most of life: disappointing.
Yes, there are other fries, some with highly desirable qualities.
I remember fries from the base PX in Berlin. They served them fresh from the fryolator, dripping with grease, dropped them right into a plastic bag and – after I first pumped a good portion of vinegary catsup right into the bag, I would ride my bike home in the dark, one eye on the road, the other in the bag with my cheek and mouth.
I remember as well, Thrashers, in Ocean City, Maryland. On the boardwalk there they serve only one item: Large, roughly cut, always freshly cooked French-fries in several sizes, with salt and vinegar the only available condiments.
Trashers' fries were – as I remember them, like the big brother of the McDonald’s Fry, though far more consistently produced, far more substantial. I think they were great fries, but I have to admit that my memory of their flavor is hopelessly entangled in the smell of the ocean, the creak of boardwalk, and the hormones of youth.
Still, you can’t help but be impressed by Thrasher’s dedication to the fry: despite 80 years of success, they have never added additional items to their menu: they have never had to ask, ‘you want fries with that?’
I think that if McDonalds wants to expand – in recognition of the power of their small fry and, acknowledging the need for simple, less costly diversions in this economic environment, they’d devise little kiosks for the beach, or the boardwalk, or along the popular streets of picturesque tourist towns, where a single, apron-ed huckster would serve only French fries: fresh, hot, always overflowing their paper holster whatever the serving size.
Simplicity is clarity.
Simplicity is honesty.
Simplicity can help us survive the tough times ahead. That, and a belly full of hot, salty fries!

Heave, Ho

It’s like the baby alien, bursting out of John Hurt’s abdomen – smiling for the cameras, then high-tailing it for the bowels of the Nostromo.
I’m talking about frost heaves.
Frost heaves are just the symptom though, of a deeper, and more disturbing phenomena.
No, I’m just kidding.
Frost heaves are actually alien cocoons, deposited by visitors from outer space billions of years ago, and timed to hatch just prior to their next visit: high-tech locusts, of sorts.
Nah, I’m just kidding again.
Frost heaves are really just the Earth’s version of adolescent acne. Our Earth is younger than it looks, and is actually going through puberty right now. Because of our recent economic woes, we can’t afford the eight billion dollars worth of Pro-Activ that it would take to be acne free.
Today, as I drove along Halfway Pond Road, rocking back and forth and up and down as if I was on a small ship on a stormy sea, I started to see ‘frost heaves’ in everything, from my personal life, to the universe.
There are scientists who believe that the universe began with a big frost heave: first there was nothingness, then the nothingness started to swell, and bubble, crack and distend and – in a blinding flash of light..
Others - with less education, believe that our universe was a kind of small car cruising down an alternative route in an alternative universe, when the pavement cracked open, and a pothole as big and deep as a black hole, swallowed that fuel-efficient universe entirely.
Certain religious fundamentalists hold that the world could have been created in six days, but frost heaves delayed the delivery of certain animals.
Still others believe that frost heaves are like Beano, held every Wednesday night in the basement of the French-American Club in Jay, Maine.
I actually met a guy named Jo, from Jay, who said he was the state record holder for heaving frosts. I think he might have meant heaving frosties, which is less impressive by far, but which proves (I think) that we have nothing to fear from frost heaves. If Jo from Jay in Maine – where they claim to have invented the Frost Heave, isn’t worried, why should we be?
Personally, I love the frost heave. It reminds me of, well me.
I was born in a little wooden shack, on a lake in northern Minnesota. My mother was an avid ice-fisherperson and, though she was in her eighth month, off she went to Lake Wherethehellarewe to get her weekly quota of Northern Pike. Overnight the weather changed, and when she woke up she was adrift on a large ice flow. Maybe it was the weather, but I was born that same day. My father used fishing line to yank me out. They were going to rescue us, but several days later the weather changed again and the lake was frozen over and - after a few more days of ice fishing, we drove the Winnebago home over some pretty rough roads.
Was that believable?
No? Well actually I was born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, on land, on a seasonably warm late spring day. But I really do relate to frost heaves. My head is filled with bumps and cracks and evidence of unseasonable weather. My face was once pocked with pustules and now bears the tiny scars of a tumultuous teenage-hood. And I have that flushed, phlegmatic look that seems to portend future eruptions.
You too?
I think we all carry the seasons around with us: the warm and the cold, the wet and the dry, the confident and the neurotic, the plausible and the fantastic. I think we all recognize – even though we may not publicly admit it, that the seasons of our souls are not nearly as predictable, as consistent, as the seasons of the Earth – however much we’d like them to be. So to see the roads erupting – like an adolescent’s once unblemished skin, is comforting. To see the ground bubble and burst through the tar is to realize that our own neuroses and uneven-ness, are as natural and normal as the allegedly more predictable seasons we pass through.
The lesson of frost heaves might be that, no matter how hard we try to pave over it, the core of our being is defiantly irregular, consistently unpredictable.
We are all little baby aliens, chewing through the ice, pushing through the tar, anxious for the winter to end, so we can head to the beach and heave a few frosties.

Mission Central

When did we become a fit meal for missionary zeal? I ask this now, having been visited this week by two handsome, respectful, earnest young Latter Day Saints.

I wondered, later, if it didn’t have something to do with my driveway?

I know what it’s like to have a mission, of sorts, a door-to-door mission, and to be confronted by what might be a ready excuse: a long, winding driveway that disappears into the woods before it reaches a visible destination; a barking dog, or worse, signs warning thereof; and the lack of any apparent point of entrance or exit.

To the pollster, the census taker or even for your average campaign worker these traditional impediments are sufficient rationale for moving on to the next number on the list.

But these two young men – Johnny Cashed all in black – might have unconsciously considered my Bering Strait of a driveway an easy way to confirm, to themselves, their zeal. That is, this is not Botswana or Turkmenistan. In general, the audience here is, relatively speaking, understanding of their purpose. It’s easy to knock on the doors of the houses on the street, with their short little driveways and their obvious front doors. But to walk through the woods, over the hill, across an ice-bound creek, up an overgrown path to a darkly shingled gray gambrel, well, that’s dedication, faith and youthfulness, or a combination thereof!

But I’ve already strayed from my original point, or question. Why us? That is, apart from the challenge of my driveway, why the challenge of my town, my state, our East Coast intellectual position on the theo-political map.
Are we so wayward?
Are we so out of the way-ward?

Are we in some not altogether obvious manner depraved, or deprived?
Is it a general malaise that they seek to address?

Is it simply a matter of sect? Is it our sectual proclivities: the likelihood that, left to our own pseudo-religious devices, we would in all probability end up in a traditional steepled structure, surrounded by traditionally steepled people (here is the church, here is the steeple)? Are we on the list to be saved simply because of our Catholic-ness, our Presbyterianism, our Unitarianosity?
Is that really it?

I raised this question, sort of, with the two nice young men who came to my door. Actually, I asked if their appearance was reflective of a change in the world that I was not aware of.

I remembered, I told them, that when I was a boy you didn’t see men-in-black bicycling about American suburbia. In my old neighborhood (Colesville, in the White Oak section of the city of Silver Spring, in the state of Maryland) there was a Mormon Temple with golden spires and a sizable selection of Latter Day-ers. But,when the young men from that Temple missionaried, they did so overseas.

They didn’t answer the question, not directly. I don’t think they knew, or cared. They had a live one on the hook, at least metaphysically speaking, and were intent on getting in their pitch (though I barely gave them enough time to clear their throats).

I came to the door a bit breathless, having just come in from my driveway moments before they arrived, having just moments before that been pulverizing the larger driveway bergs that blocked passage, with a 30-pound sledge. My pants were spattered with pongy driveway water, my hair a bit wilder than usual. I may have startled them by my openness, my frenetic manner, and by how close I came to them, moving out onto our small, porch-like wooden front steps, closing the door behind me and immediately breaking into a mad ramble about the driveway, poetry, my lapsed but intransigent Catholicity and then, as I said, indirectly asking why they had been posted to Pilgrim land, and not a more traditional den of heathenism.
And then I gave them my bible – John Berrymans’ 67 Dream Songs.

No, I didn’t. But now I think that I might, that I could, maybe even that I should. I could make up my own book, and a summary of that book, with questions and answers about the origins of my agnosticism, and have it ready to give it out when missionaries knock. Certainly there can be nothing wrong with proselytizing those who come to my door.

But I’m not looking for an argument. And when I am visited by such as these – be they Java Witnesses, Jack Conwayites, or Latter Day Country Western singers, I am almost always polite, deferential, complimentary.

God, they were nice young men: healthy and upright, well dressed and well spoken, and not at all zealous in their manner.

I couldn’t help but love their obvious goodness. I loved their idealism, too.

I felt a little like the witch living in the house made out of candy. They were so young and sincere and good that I, by comparison, felt a bit wicked, a bit dangerous (a bit envious, too).

I wished, for a moment, that I were so young and bright and energetic.

I wished, at that moment, that everyone should have a chance at their age, to work for some idealistic goal – perhaps not as lofty as the salvation of souls, but in that direction.

We need to have our growth directed at the earliest possible age toward the welfare of others so that, when the other tropisms we encounter begin to yank us in more selfish directions we will know, or feel, or have at least a vague remembrance that our roots were once grounded in concern for humanity.

Maybe the presence of these young men in our town is simply a sign of the abundance of idealism, still out there.

Perhaps Mormons are simply multiplying at a rate sufficient to have enough to go around, enough for each poor country abroad and for each of our isolated, suburban, sometimes soul-less little towns as well.

When I finally shut up they said what they needed to say and went on their way, though first gifting me with a densely worded book, and a pamphlet summarizing the book.

I told them their gospel was, perhaps, wasted on me, but they insisted I keep it, said they had plenty.

As they navigated their way out, I called out a friendly warning. Be careful, I said, many a missionary has come up my driveway and lost sight of the road. It has subtle twists and turns, and the branches from the encroaching trees are known to consume an occasional side-view mirror. And then there are the thorns, like tiny serrated teeth along lengths of tangled, wispy, evergreen vines, almost invisible, dangling from the trees, eager to nibble at the apple of a rosy cheek, or pluck the sleep from the folds of an unsuspecting eye.

Weather Tip: How Not to Go Arse Over Teakettle

Shoes. Don’t put them on. Stay inside. Look out the window and say, “Holy mudhead, mackerel, the whole finger-lickin’ world is one big sheet of ice!”

Downhill. Ice makes everything downhill, including uphill. With that in mind, if you really have to go outside walk with your legs spread preposterously wide, and lift and place one foot at a time like some tipsy Sumo wrestler.

Rails, bars, limbs, fence posts, parked cars… Find something, anything to hold onto (preferably things that are set permanently into the ground). Do not under any circumstances get into your car without a firm grasp of the car door, itself, so that when, inevitably, your feet come out from under you, you don’t end up wedged half-way underneath.

All fours, as in “down on all fours,” as in “you don’t see dogs slipping on the ice, do you?” But, actually, if you were foolish enough to take your dog out on the ice both Fido and you would soon be doing the Electric Slide. Consider, instead, getting down on all fours like a turtle. A turtle might not make much headway, but it isn’t likely to go arse over teakettle either.

Swimming. You might even consider “swimming” (on your belly on the ice, like a turtle without a shell) to the mailbox, or the shed, or to the aide of someone who has already fallen. It may be cold but your fall will be much shorter if you are already on the ground.

Pedestrians. Steer clear of them. If at all possible, don’t go out on the street, or onto a sidewalk, or anywhere outside when there are any other people in your vicinity. If you do, no matter how level your stance, how flat your feet, and how slowly you move, a less careful pedestrian is going to lose their balance and after pin-balling off a few parked cars, fire hydrants and other pedestrians, will find you and knock you down.

Crunch. The sound underfoot is a good indication of the degree of danger of slipping. You are safe if, when you walk, you hear a “ca-runch.” A slight “ca-rinkle” is indicative of a relatively high degree of traction. A “ca-rink” without the “ul” is potential trouble. A straightforward “reenk”, without an initial “ca” is the sound of a large amount of down insulation about to go airborne. A “reenk,” followed by a “yikes,” and ending with an “oof,” is the sound of someone with a large butt landing on same. A “reenk” followed by a sharp “crack” is generally followed by an ambulance.

Flight. Birds aren’t particularly bothered by ice. I’ve never heard of the air being slippery. So, if you can, get airborne until the neighborhood thaws out. Or, if you can afford it, have somebody carry you to your car, drive you to the airport, and fly you someplace that doesn’t have any ice, someplace where, coincidentally, you don’t need any shoes.

Kat Hair

I’m looking for Kat. I’m pretty confident she spells her name that way, though it could be spelled with a ‘C’. I called the place where she worked a week or so before Christmas, and they told me she no longer worked there. I asked, politely, if they could tell me where she had gone but they were – at least to my ear, less than friendly.
They don’t know and, it’s obvious, they don’t care.
My sense is that this is not unusual, in the salon business. Stylists are independent contractors, and if they get a better offer, off they go. Still, it was a shock to me. I’ve been getting my hair cut – off and on, for over 50 years, and Kat is the best I ever had. I foolishly thought she would be around, when I needed her.
Have you seen her?
I’ve reached a point in life when I can take or leave most things: including my hair. If I can’t have it cut by someone I trust, I just won’t have it cut at all. I’ll leave it to its own devices, which is a bit like knowing a hurricane is headed your way but refusing to evacuate.
It wasn’t always this way. There are pictures that suggest that for the first few years of my life my hair was tame, shiny, and – as the commercials say, ‘easy to manage’. And, like most two year olds, I could care less.
I remember though, when I first cared, or was aware, of my hair. Pants that year were bell-bottomed, belts were preposterously wide, the Stone’s “19th Nervous Breakdown” was echoing out from the youth center at Ramstein, and I wanted my hair just a little longer. Those details would place this epiphany somewhere around 1965. Unfortunately my father – the Colonel, and the barbers ‘on base’ had a secret pact to deny me even that small sign of independence.
Remember the old electric clippers – the way they hissed and popped like a snake in the grass?
Remember the look and smell of the old barbershops, with their shiny checkerboard tile floors, seats that came out of Dr. Frankenstein’s ‘Catalogue of Surgical Apparatus’, and the barbers themselves out of American International (the film studio responsible for wonderfully awful movie versions of Edgar Allan Poe’s more gruesome stories)?
Those barbers were circus lion tamers, going after every follicle with a whip and a chair, and a cap gun.
A good haircut then was the one you avoided.
Nothing much changed until the late sixties, early seventies when the crew cut prisoners were released and the barbershop morphed overnight into a unisex salon. Barbers didn’t do this willingly: they were forced by economic realities. Young men had learned to avoid them for months, even years. I had personally let “my freak flag fly” for over a year by the spring of 1970 but Holly – my girlfriend at the time, loved Rod Stewart and was doing everything she could to make me over in his image. Under her tutelage I acquired tall, lace-up black boots, a short suede jacket, and a variety of oddly colored corduroys. All that remained (besides plastic surgery) was to get the ‘shag’ haircut.
For Holly’s sake, and believing that stylists were different from barbers, I made an appointment; only to discover that the White-Smocked Meanies I had known as a child were still there – in disguise. They had longer hair themselves, but the same barely repressed anger. They served beer, had art on the walls, but they took a razor to your hair – often leaving it looking like something that should be on the floor, underfoot.
Gradually it became less and less about the style, and more and more about the stylist. When you’d first meet a new stylist they’d ask you a series of perfunctory questions - implying they were interested in your opinion, but when the smoke cleared, your hair looked suspiciously like theirs.
My favorite stylist of this period was Henny, as in ‘Henny color’ (an old Stooges joke).
Everything about Henny was on the cutting edge. His body was tattooed from head to toe, his face (and other regions) were liberally pierced, and his tri-color hair held about a pound and a half of ‘product’ - which actually made his head list a little to the left.
Henny - no surprise, thought I should try a little product too, and a little color, and have my upper lip stapled to my forehead. Over the course of a year, and perhaps seven or eight visits, I tried several variations on his theme and, well, let’s just say it never took. I wasn’t Henny, and Henny wasn’t actually himself. I needed a haircut that didn’t require product, or prep-work, or a bi-weekly visits for minor adjustments.
I needed a haircut that let my freak flag fly, without getting in my eyes or taking up too much time. That wasn’t much to ask, but still between 1966 and 2006 I probably had two haircuts I actually liked.
And then I met Kat.
Kat used to come into a cafe that I did some freelance marketing work for. I liked hanging out there: they let me make a few lattes for customers who couldn’t tell the difference, have my fill of espresso and - if they were busy, even work the register.
Kat came in to get their famous triple mocha lattes for the crew back at the salon, and let slip that she cut the hair of every one of the cafes’ workers too – except mine.
Why not, I thought: how bad could it be. Besides, at that point I had a lot of material to work with: I’d been avoiding scissors for over a year by then and my hair was halfway to the Cape.
So I let Kat at it.
I’m not exactly sure how she did it. I know she washed my hair, but that’s not unusual. I know she gave me a quick massage, fingering the back of my neck, the top of my spine: sort of the way that lobsters are hypnotized. After that it got kind of hazy. I know I must have gone from the shampoo station to her chair, and I do have vague recollections of a conversation, and of the monotonous sound of hairs being snipped. But that’s about all I can recall. All I really know is that, when I came back to full consciousness, it was me I saw in the mirror: not a mini-me version of the stylist, or a motif out of stylist school. Me.
. For over forty years I left the barbers’ chair hair feeling – at best, as if an uneasy calm had descended over a battleground, as if a truce had been declared between my hair and head, a temporary end to hostilities.
All that changed, with Kat.
And now she’s gone and I’m holding out again. Now my hair is headed south, again. Now Mary is threatening to send me to the lion tamers.
If you seek Kat, let her know I’m looking for her.