The Town Crier Speaks His Lines

Name Tags for World Peace

2011-07-01T20:44:00.002-04:00

I’ve often said, to anyone who will listen, that if I were the Benign Ruler of the Universe the second thing I would do, after establishing an era of World Peace, would be to mandate that everyone wear a name tag. Not the cheesy kind; the ones on sticky paper that you have to write your own name on with a pen or some sort of Sharpie ™ when you go to a meeting or a fundraising event. No, I mean a really nice brass or silver engraved one, with the option of a pin or a magnetic catch to hold it to your shirt, blouse, jacket or suit coat.

Your name tag wouldn’t say anything about what you do; it wouldn’t have your job title or description or anything like that; just your full name and then, beneath that, what you prefer to be called. Mine, for example, would read thusly:

Michael G. Dell’Orto

“Michael”

From this, you now know my full name and that I like to be called Michael, not Mike or Mickey or, God forbid (and NOBODY ELSE besides my mother – and she’s dead – should ever presume to call me this) Mikey. Short, simple and to the point. Part of this comes from my own increasingly frustrating inability to remember names, even of people I’ve known for a long time. This way, whenever you meet someone, you can instantly greet them in a manner that pleases them; most importantly, you can avoid the embarrassment (and we’ve all been there) that comes from running into someone you vaguely recognize who immediately launches into a cheerful and pleasant conversation with you, all about your wife, your kids, and your coaching record on the local Little League team. During this colloquy you nod and smile, trying desperately to say something that makes some modicum of sense, vamping madly while that part of your brain that has been, up to now, screaming “who the hell is this person?” at you scrambles to come up with some sort of name to put to the face before you.

All in all, a practical and, may I say, an ingenious and simple solution to a nagging problem we all face at one point or another in our day-to-day living. There is an ancillary benefit here as well – think of how much more pleasant and polite the world would be if we could all greet anyone we meet by name. People would smile more, hearing their name and a quick “hello” called out by everyone they pass; if someone hurrying by you on the street or in a crowded corridor bumps into you and knocks what you are carrying onto the floor or the pavement, think of the potential anger and frustration normally generated by such an encounter that could be wiped away in an instant – “I’m sorry (looks at name tag), Katie; I was hurrying by so fast I didn’t see you there. Let me help you pick your things back up.” “Why thank you (looks at name tag) Steve, that’s kind of you.” “Say, Katie, I was on my way to the Starbucks for a mocha latte, would you care to join me – my treat? It’s the least I can do.” “Why, that’s awfully nice of you, Steve; I think I will take you up on your kind invitation.” Who knows where a chance encounter like that could lead?

And then it hit me. Maybe, just maybe, I had been thinking about this all backwards. Perhaps it was the name tags that needed to come first all along; and then, as their use spread from town to town, city to city, state to state, then all over the globe, it would follow, as the night the day, as inevitable as the common cold – world peace! Barriers would fall, civility would reign triumphant.

Just think, for one moment, how this might work. For example, say you are at an airport in a foreign country, waiting on line to get through security. There you are, dragging your luggage behind you, in your stocking feet, your shoes clutched in your hand. The guy ahead of you is bearded, dark-skinned, carrying a backpack. He seems to be singing, or perhaps he is praying, softly to himself as the line moves slowly forward. Leaning precariously out of a torn pocket in the backpack is what looks suspiciously like a copy of the Q’uran. The book falls out of the pocket when the bearded man moves forward; you swiftly catch it before it hits the floor, and the man turns to you: “Excuse me (you look at his name tag) Abdullah Muhammad, but I think this fell out of your backpack. I caught it as it fell.” “Salaam Aleikum (he looks at your name tag) Bob, thank you so much for not letting it touch the floor. I can’t help but noticing by your accent that you are an American. I was always led to believe that Americans had no respect for the Q’uran, but I can see I was mistaken.” “That’s great of you to say that, Abdullah Muhammad; heck, I was always led to believe that anyone who was a Muslim just hated everything I’ve ever stood for, but I can see in your face that you’re not like that at all. Hey, when we get through security let me buy you a drink!” “That’s generous of you, Bob, but devout Muslims don’t drink.” “Oh, bummer. Well, Abdullah Muhammad, how about I find us a place to get a couple of milkshakes instead?” “That’d be just great, Bob!” And they slowly head off to the airport gate area together, pulling photos of their kids out of their wallets and discussing their mutual love of World Cup soccer.

Name tags -- world peace – think about it . . .

Father's Day

2011-06-20T21:16:00.002-04:00

I’ve been having much more fun than a man of my age should be having, playing with my train set – vintage Lionel “O” gauge – set up on the floor in one end of my barn. I began building this collection over the past several years, in an attempt to re-create, as best as my aging memory would allow, the set-up my father and I had put together in our basement when I was a very small boy. Alas, all of the trains I had as a child were stolen out of my mother’s house in Jersey City many years ago; but I’ve bought an engine here and some track there, slowly snapping up 50’s era cars and accessories where I could find them at antique shops or flea markets.

This collection was recently augmented by a most generous gift from my wife’s best friend, whose own dad had recently left his house to move into assisted living. One of the things she came across while cleaning out the place prior to putting it on the market were several cartons of trains (in their original boxes), track and accessories, all dating from the late 1950’s. No one in her family wanted it, and she was actually going to throw it all out. She mentioned this to my wife while they were both attending their 40^th High School reunion some months ago, and the upshot of that conversation was that several boxes and bags of Lionel products were delivered to me (through the good offices of my daughter and her young man, who schlepped the stuff up here from New York) just in time to be a most wondrous 58^th birthday surprise.

This gift has spurred me to begin something I’ve thought about for a long while; namely, building a real train display, complete with multiple track layouts, bridges, tunnels, landscaping – you name it. It will be a while until I can properly prepare the space for all of this to occupy, and so for the time being I’ve set up some track, a few buildings, and some working accessories temporarily until I can begin the project in earnest. I’ve done this for two reasons; first, because it allows me to test the functionality of the cars, the accessories and the various switches and relays I’ve bought, and second, because it is just so much fun sitting on the floor and watching the trains go around, hearing the whistle blow, and watching the little flagman come out of his hut, waving his lantern as the train rolls by.

On Father’s Day I found a set of passenger cars; items for which I had been on the hunt for a good long while, at a local antique shop. I brought them home and took them out to the barn, where I hitched them to an engine to test them out. I watched them go round and round the track, and as I did I was overwhelmed – it is the only word I can use – by a memory. I was six years old, certainly no older but perhaps a year or two younger. It was a winter evening; in fact, it was close to Christmas. My father and I were in the basement, working on the train layout together. He was putting the finishing touches on what I think was a raised trestle so that we could run a second set of trains – those very passenger cars, as I recall -- above an already completed layout on the board. I was doing what I always did, fetching and carrying for him as he busied himself connecting and fastening down track, cutting wood to shim the trestles that held the track above the table, and running wire from the Rotating Beacon through a hole in the table, under the layout, and connecting it to the transformer. At one point he realized that something was missing, though I don’t remember what it was; perhaps we were short of track, or we needed a switch or a relay, or maybe he just wanted to go and buy another car, but he bundled me up and we set out together, walking in the glow of the streetlights through a lightly falling snow.

He was holding my hand, and what I remember most about it was the feeling of happiness I had just being with him. In those days (if I am six, then it is 1959), the shopping districts of the city were all decorated with lights, wreaths and garlands strung across the streets; the stores played holiday music and there were brightly lit Christmas displays in every window. It was so exciting, because it was almost Christmas; and it was the most wonderful thing to be out in the cold night air, walking with my Dad to the toy store, leaving a trail of our paired footprints (his so big, and mine so little) through the snow. We finally made our way there, my father bought what he needed, and we walked home as the snow began to fall harder and faster. When we got to the house we headed straight downstairs to do whatever it was with whatever we had needed that compelled us to set out on our journey in the first place. Our work done for the night, we came upstairs. My mother had made us both something warm to drink, so Dad and I sat together on the couch in our parlor; and I can still, after all these years, remember the feel of his arm around me and how safe and comforting it was just to be there with him.

The trains I've been buying, and those that were so kindly given into my care, are, after all, only objects; and objects are worthless without context or memory. These trains are a link that stretches out over the almost fifty years that he's been gone, to remind me that this man, my father, can yet be truly present to me here in the home I’ve made for myself and my family, where I am now the Dad. I find that since I’ve set them up I play with the trains almost every day. I do so, I think, because in that moment, sitting on the floor in my barn, I know he is there with me, as though he had never left. While those trains circle around and again on their track I can have him, once more, sitting beside me with his arm around me, and I close my eyes and know that I am happy again.

Child of Choice, Part 2

2011-03-24T14:36:00.011-04:00

The Search, and What I Found

The details of my adoption that I am sure of, or have documentation for, were gleaned over the course of several years after I learned of it, and are these: I was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in what -- in the days before the sexual revolution -- was called a “home for unwed mothers.” Its name was the Door of Hope, run by the Salvation Army; a name that always struck me as an admirably brave attempt to put the best face they could on what was, certainly in the 1950’s, a delicate situation. My birth mother, who had wanted to keep and raise me on her own, was convinced by friends and the few family members who were still speaking to her that the best thing to do was to surrender me for adoption; to that end she had finally gone to seek counsel (good Catholic that she was, pre-marital sex and unwed pregnancy notwithstanding) in the bosom of Holy Mother Church. Catholic Charities (then, as now, one of the largest social services organizations in the world) arranged that I be placed in St. Vincent’s Nursery with the Sisters of Charity, in whose veiled and wimpled care I was to spend the first six months of my life, prior to my adoption. This was not an easy decision for her (that much is clear from the notes and comments from her file that the adoption agency sees fit to share with me), and my desire to find her was bolstered by a letter from those files that was given to me wherein my birth mother writes for permission to come visit me in the orphanage, something she has apparently done on several occasions. If nothing else, I owe this woman the comfort of knowing that I am alive, and well, and happy.

And that’s as far as I got. In writing the story down, I mean. I tried, for a long while, to write this second half of my adoption story; how I came to glean the details of my adoption from the highly redacted information provided to me by Catholic Community Services (part of the larger umbrella group Catholic Charities, and formerly called Catholic Children’s Aid); how I tracked down and subsequently found my birth mother and my half sister, still living in New Jersey, and what I learned from her about the story of my conception and birth, and her life after surrendering me.

I began attempt after attempt at relating this story in some coherent form, but I always found that I was getting bogged down in too much detail, or not enough detail; there was always something that was nagging at me while I was writing that caused me to stop and put the project aside again and again. I figured that I just needed to get some distance, think on it a bit, and it would all become clear -- a revelatory insight, a flash of inspiration and clarity of thought, and I would be able to write it all down, finally, once and for all.

The revelation I'd been waiting for came to me, one afternoon, working in the barn. While I was repairing a hayloft door that had been damaged in a windstorm, I found myself thinking about this out loud, and out of nowhere I heard myself say “I just don’t care.” What I meant, I think, is that after I learned I was adopted, the specifics that made up the next part of the story – who gave birth to me, who got her pregnant and why – weren't especially significant to me; the acquisition of that knowledge was never an urgent matter. I suppose that’s why it took years to begin the search in the first place. As I’ve said before, the question that kept coming up when I first told friends that I had been adopted was “are you going to look for your real parents?” Their insensitivity (unintended, no doubt, but there nonetheless) annoyed me no end. I know who my real parents are, thank you. I am their son, for good and ill; I couldn't see what relevance two strangers whom I'd never met (and in all likelihood would never meet) could have to my life here and now.

The search for my birth mother was, honestly, more an intellectual than an emotional exercise. I was curious to find the answers to this puzzle; and I thought it would be good for her to know that she had done the right thing by giving me up. I was not, however, looking for parents, or a family, or an identity. I had all of those; and I'm sure this is why it took me almost eight years before I started my search. I realized, when I came to write it all down (the flash of insight I had been hoping for in telling this tale) that my difficulties in relating the story were a reflection of that initial reluctance I'd had, which was playing itself out all over again. So, this story is really about my ambivalence around what being adopted actually meant to me, as much as anything else; and it is this story, not necessarily the details of my birth, that I believe has some value in the telling.

When I began my search in earnest, several of the organizations I contacted that help with matters of this sort all told me much the same thing – keep it low key, and search as anonymously as you can for as long as you can, because you just don’t know what sort of person you are eventually going to find, and you cannot allow your desire for answers get the better of your common sense; the person you find may not necessarily be someone you would want to have in your life, or the life of your family. My own experience, fortunately, encompassed none of the horror stories I had read -- adoptees coming to rue the day they had begun their searches, finding parents who were alcoholics, drug addicted, or only interested in extorting money from their long-lost child. The reality of what I ultimately found bore no resemblance whatsoever to the one-act play that, I’ll admit, I had constructed in my mind (despite all the advice warning me not to do so lest I be disappointed) about what she might be like. Because there was the trap, you see; it was easy, at the point where you decide to begin but as yet have no information, no clues, to get caught up in the excitement of the idea of the search, and give in to the temptation to create, based on no evidence whatsoever except the endless possibilities of the unknown, a back-story for yourself into which you could handily fit all the details of your life as it is now.

Scenario # 1; or, The Story As I Would Have Written It If Anybody Had Asked Me: A young actress in New York (living in New Jersey with her widowed mother); she has a brief affair with a fellow cast member in the musical in which they are both appearing; the pregnancy, the realization that she is simply not prepared to give up the career she’s worked so hard to build for motherhood just yet; the decision, difficult but brave, to surrender me, always saying a silent prayer for the child she’ll never know every night just before she steps out on stage. It would explain my choice of theatre as a profession; I hoped that she’d be glad to know I had followed in her footsteps. Maybe we’d actually get to work together, someday; in the meanwhile she comes to see me in a show and greets me afterward, tears in her eyes, telling me how very proud she is. Nice story. Simple, and sweet. In fact, I think it might just be the plot of some old 50’s-era B-movie I saw one night on the Late Show.

Scenario # 2; or, The Real Story: In Which I Discover That God Has A Peculiar Sense Of Humor: A young woman in Northern New Jersey, growing up in a large family in very comfortable circumstances (her father owned a drapery/upholstery/decorating business); nice clothes, big house, parties. Her mother dies, and her father remarries soon after. He and his new bride, a woman not overly fond of her new stepchildren, buy a new house and leave her and her youngest sister to manage on their own; she takes work as a waitress. She had previously attracted the attention of an older man in the military, someone who had been advising and vetting small business owners (including her father) who wished to establish apprentice or training programs under the GI Bill. She is wooed, and flattered, and ultimately seduced into his bed; he disappears once he learns she is pregnant. She is dissuaded from her original intention, which was to raise me by herself, by the few family members who still deign to speak to her. She later discovers that her seducer may already have a wife and children in Pennsylvania. Finally, in a twist worthy of Dickens, he contacts her from (of all places) prison, which was the last she will ever hear from him. It seems that he and a partner had been running a little graft, a little scam on the side in their dealings with civilian businesses wishing to get GI Bill money for themselves; things had gotten a little hot in New Jersey and he managed to get himself transferred up to Fort Devins. The petty stuff proved to be not interesting enough, and so it was that he and his partner decided to rob a bank in Worcester MA, where they killed a guard in the attempt and were subsequently caught, prosecuted and jailed. Some years later, she marries and has a child – my half-sister – but the marriage fails (he is an alcoholic) and she must assume the burden of being a single mother, raising a child on her own under very strained financial circumstances. Not such a nice story, and not at all so simple.

This scenario, told to me in bits and pieces in phone conversations and, finally, on the occasion of our first face-to-face meeting is far more dramatic than that which I had dreamed up; here was a story that really did appeal to that sense of theatre I spoke of before. But still, there was this feeling of detachment -- as I've repeated many times, I wasn't doing this to find a mother or a father. There was one thing, though, that I couldn’t have known until I made the search, the only thing, I think, that I was always ready to accept, even to embrace, as a real part of my life. Something that I hadn’t ever articulated a need or desire for, throughout this whole process; but in the end the one fact more than any other I was happy to discover -- that I had a sister.

My sister is a terrific woman, brave and strong, living happily in Tennessee, and married now to a man who loves her and cares for her. She has her own story to tell, and one I would not presume to tell for her; but suffice it to say she has had her share of grief, and pain, and loss. We speak, not often, but we have grown to love each other. I’m glad that she is in my life, and I would hope that she could say the same of me; it is good just to know that she is there. Of all the reasons for entering into this search, finding that I had a sister made the whole process worthwhile.

I cannot, alas, say the same for my birth mother. Good drama comes at a price. At our first meeting, my immediate impression of her (not surprisingly, given her story) is that of an unhappy and disappointed person whose life simply did not follow the arc she had envisioned, as a young woman, that it would. In addition, the emotionality of our reunion was leavened by the unmistakable feeling, which grew in intensity the longer I spent in her presence, that I just didn’t like her. This sounds harsh, I know; but it was provoked in part by how she spoke to my sister when we first met in person -- a situation where, you would think, we’d all of us be on our best behavior. She was by turns rude, dismissive, and belittling of her during the 5 or so hours we were together. Not constantly, mind you, but enough such that I came away from that first meeting with a sense of unease that never really left me. Instead of joy or exhilaration, or even some sort of peace of mind that I assumed I would feel in discovering this long-buried truth, all I could muster up, as I drove back home, was relief – relief that she had given me up, that I’d been turned over to the care of the nuns, and delivered into the hands of two loving parents.

I tried to be good – I phoned her from time to time, sent cards on Mothers’ Day and her birthday, but I have to confess that my heart really just wasn’t in it. I had found my answers; I had done what I thought was the right thing by contacting her, but I was done now, and I felt all the worse because I really didn’t want to pursue a relationship of any sort with her, though I knew that I had to, if only because it was the decent thing to do. She’s gone now; she’s been dead for a good many years. As I said, I still call my sister from time to time; she has told me on more than one occasion that I will never fully understand just how difficult their lives were together, and how fortunate I was to have been spared their struggle.

So this is where I’m going to leave it. I was conceived by accident, born a bastard child, given over to the care of the nuns in an orphanage, and then adopted by two people who loved each other and me as well. I have a sister, and I’m glad that I found her; the rest of it, while it makes a good story to tell, doesn’t really matter to me all that much. What does matter is that my father Mike was a fine man who was, by all accounts, admired by everyone who came into contact with him; a man who loved his son and died too soon, a man I miss to this very day. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him. My mother Vickie was a funny, loving, good-hearted woman who had every right to fall apart after his death, but she didn’t – as sad as she was, and as much as she missed him, she got up every day and went to work to keep the roof over our heads and the food on our plates, doing what she had to do despite a grief and loss I cannot even begin to comprehend, because she knew she needed to take care of me. Neither of them lived long enough; and, lest you be tempted to think otherwise, neither of them were perfect, God knows, but they are my parents -- simply because I am the one they chose to be their son.

Epilogue: In our first conversation my birth mother asks me if I want to know anything about the man who had put this whole business in motion all those many years ago; was I going to look for him? Did I want to know his name? She tells it to me, that first day I meet her, and I remember writing it down somewhere. I suppose that it speaks volumes about my attitude, or my state of mind, or even my definition of what a “father” is, by the fact that I have long since forgotten it and have no idea where the paper is on which I wrote it.

Mom & Dad, ca. 1960

Child of Choice

2011-02-22T16:39:00.006-05:00

Part 1: The Discovery

I am an adoptee. In my case, it was later in life -- I was just shy of my 32^nd birthday -- and purely by chance that I learned of it; with the who, when, why and how of it all arriving in dribs and drabs over a period of ten or more years. When I first made the discovery many friends asked me some variant of the question “so, are you going to try and find out who your real family is?” That question always bothered me; I would tell anyone who asked that as far as I was concerned, I already knew who my “real” family was; the mother and father who loved and cared for me; the many cousins and aunts and uncles with whom I’d shared Easter and Christmas and birthdays, trips down the shore and up to the lake, and long Sunday dinners at grandma and grandpa’s house that began in the afternoon and lasted until well after dark. So in every case here when I talk about “my parents,” or “my mother” or “my father” I mean the people who raised me and loved me – Mike and Vickie, the only mom and dad that matter to me.

I have to say at the outset that it was mostly curiosity, coupled with a vague desire to give my birth mother some closure that motivated me to search for my biological parents. After all, I wasn’t some adolescent, confused about my identity to begin with, fantasizing about how much different (and better) my angst-ridden teenage life would be with my “real” parents, who would certainly let me stay out later or have a TV in my room or not bug me about the length of my hair. I was a 32-year-old married man with a baby and a house and the beginnings of a career in the theatre. And, at the point where this story properly begins, I was also an orphan.

My mother, who had been widowed ever since 1962, died herself in 1985 after a long illness. Despite repeated attempts over time to convince her to sell her house and come up to New England to be near me and my wife, she remained what I used to call one of the “diehards;” a dwindling group of neighbors who had clung to home, parish church and each other in spite of the urban decay that was slowly creeping in on them. Her house had been broken into on a few occasions; she had even chased off a would-be burglar, whom she discovered one day standing in her kitchen. Neither the increase in crime nor the rapid, sad decline of the condition of many other houses in the neighborhood dissuaded her from staying; she argued that uprooting herself, leaving her home – the house she had lived in for years with her father and brothers even before marrying my father -- and everything and everyone she knew, would be far worse for her than staying where she was. Which is precisely what she did, up until only a few days before she died, stubborn to the last.

About two weeks after her funeral I made a trip back to this house that was no longer my home to begin the process of sorting through her life and packing up her possessions to take back with me; I had also arranged to meet a real estate agent who would put the house on the market. What I saw when I unlocked the door and walked in showed just how much, and how quickly, my childhood world had changed. The house was ransacked; in the brief interval that had passed from the day I said goodbye to her for the last time, looters had torn out all the metal piping (copper and iron; you can get a lot of money for scrap metal) and all the radiators. They had also stolen some of the smaller articles of furniture, and had flung old clothing and other possessions everywhere. A half-empty bottle of rotgut wine sat perched on the stove in the kitchen; interior doors were torn off their hinges and windows broken. I called the police, who came right away and were very sympathetic but who could actually do very little to help me, except to promise to keep an eye on the place, while the real estate man offered to make the arrangements to secure the property from further damage until I could sell it. I spent the rest of that day salvaging what I could and packing it into my truck, and returned home to my wife and infant daughter.

In the weeks that followed I began the process of paying her last bills and settling her modest estate. This was somewhat complicated by the fact that many of my mother’s important documents, like the only copy of her will, and her insurance papers, were missing; they had been in a small, locked strongbox that she kept in a bedroom closet. Not surprisingly, given the state of most everything else in the house, this strongbox was nowhere to be found and I presumed it stolen. About a month or so after the funeral a large manila envelope arrived in the mail; it was addressed to my mother and had been forwarded to me. The note inside was from a woman I knew to have been one of my mother’s friends who lived just around the block; she had recently found a bunch of papers and documents with my mother’s name on them dumped in a corner of a vacant lot that bordered her house, so she thought to pack them up and mail them to the old address with the expectation that they would (as they did) find their way to me. It was clear that whoever stole them realized they were of no monetary value, and so just flung them away.

I was grateful to have them; so much so that I sat down right away and wrote a note to the woman to express my thanks. When it was done, stamped and mailed, I turned my attention back to the bundle, which included, to my relief, the missing insurance papers and the sole copy of her will, along with a several other documents. One particular bit of paper caught my eye; it was obviously a legal document, old and worn. On the front it read: “In the Matter of an Adoption by Michael G. Dell’Orto and Victoria R. Dell’Orto."

Now, I have to pause here to provide a bit of background – two things, actually. The first is that my parents had often made reference to a “little Italian girl” they had tried to adopt from the old country; this illusory sister was usually brought up on those occasions in my early childhood when I asked why I didn’t have a sibling. The second was an odd encounter I had when I was about 12 years old. My mother and I were visiting an aunt who lived in what was then a very rural part of New Jersey. One afternoon, we were all walking through a picked-over field of cherry tomatoes that bordered her property, along with the neighbor whose field it was. As I ran ahead in the company of my aunt’s dogs, I caught bits and snatches of the grown-ups’ conversation. At one point, as we were heading back to the house, the neighbor had remarked to my mother “He’s gotten so big – it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? I remember when you got him.” It struck me, at the time – young as I was – that this was an awfully odd phrase to use. Limited though my knowledge of the world most certainly was at that age, I knew that married people “had a child,” or “gave birth to a child,” or something like that. “Getting” a child sounded a lot like a transaction, as if I had been bought like a bag of plastic Army men in the toy aisle at the 5 & 10.

I stewed about this for the rest of that day; some weeks later I finally got up the courage to ask my mother if I had been adopted. You would have thought I had asked her if she had murdered my grandparents with an axe; she began to shout at me (as only she could; my mother was possessed of a particularly colorful vocabulary that I’m certain would have embarrassed a Marine drill sergeant), and told me that I was crazy and where did I get such a stupid idea, etc., etc. Being no fool, I let the matter drop.

Now, some 20 years on after that incident, and confronted with a piece of paper with the word “Adoption” and my parents’ names clearly printed on it, interestingly enough the first thing that went through my head was that I now had confirmation regarding this sister from Italy that never was. I opened it carefully, so as not to tear the fragile paper. I began to read, slowly; and one phrase practically leapt off the page and grabbed me by the arm: “a male child born May 12, 1953; who shall henceforth be named Michael G. Dell’Orto, Jr . . .” I sat for a minute and just laughed. “Well, that would be me, wouldn’t it,” I thought. Then I called my wife at her office, and told her that I had something I needed to read to her. She actually dropped the handset onto the floor before I was done.

The next few days were taken up with phone calls to old neighbors and especially aunts and uncles. The account that emerged from these conversations was a surprise, but also not surprising. It became clear that I was the only person involved in this story who hadn’t been aware I was adopted. Everyone knew. My aunts, uncles and cousins never brought it up because they assumed that I had been told at some point; the same could be said for some of my mother’s friends and many of my teachers (both grade and high school). I spoke about it to my mother’s best friend, a woman who lived two doors down from us in Jersey City, and she told me an interesting tale. All “the girls” were having coffee one day in her house; those few women in the room who knew that I didn’t know about my birth had remarked to my mother that, now that I was getting married and might, at some point sooner or later, have children, wouldn’t it be a wise idea to let me in on the secret? My mother’s reaction was pretty much the equal to the one she’d had when I’d asked her about my origin all those years before; she swore up and down and told them in no uncertain terms that she didn’t want me to know. And that, as far as she was concerned, was that.

I’m pretty sure that no one would ever have brought it up to me had I not come across the adoption papers. As I said, a lot of people in my family just assumed that I already knew, and I would have had very little (if any) reason to remain in contact with my mother’s old friends as I got older and they, inevitably, died off. Given the circumstances it is certainly possible that the whole business never would have come to light – the papers in that strongbox could just as easily have been tossed in a trash bin and hauled off to the dump, instead of thrown into a vacant lot. I suppose I should be grateful that the thieves were inconsiderate enough to be litterers as well.

All of this begs the question as to why my mother was so adamant about the whole business; a number of people, including my mother’s friends, several of my aunts, and one of my best friends from high school (who had also been my mother’s lawyer), have weighed in on the subject, and the consensus is that it was a mix of things; a little pride, a lot of fear. One aunt told me she had been afraid that, if I knew, I somehow would not think of her as my mother any more, or I would be upset, or embarrassed, or not want to have anything to do with her and go off searching for my “real” mother. I was also told that some of my father’s family, especially my grandparents, were not thrilled about bringing a “stranger” into the fold, at least not initially (once I showed up, however, their resistance faded, if the photos of infant me with my grandparents are any indicator – I was an adorable baby, if I have to say so myself). This was complicated by the issue of “fault;” yet another aunt (my father came from a very large family, eleven in all -- six girls and five boys) told me that my mother allowed her in-laws to think that it was she who could not have children, when all of his siblings knew that it was my father who had been irreparably damaged by the malaria he contracted (and its subsequent treatment) while he was in Burma during WW II.

So now, here I was, married and with a child, already fully possessed of an identity and a family history that was, as far as I was concerned, the only history and identity I needed. Learning that I was not technically a blood relative to any of these people – mother, father, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents – was (and I know this is going to sound odd) largely irrelevant to me. They didn’t suddenly cease being my family because of this; these were the people who loved me, cared for me, educated me. Outside of the fact that I owed a certain measure of gratitude to two strangers for bringing me into being (never forgetting that I was an accident, not a choice), I felt no connection – or, rather, I felt no need for connection with them.

As I said at the beginning, two impulses motivated the search I eventually conducted. First, the idea that there could be a really interesting story behind all this was intriguing enough in itself; it appealed to my sense of theatre. Second, the reading I’d done indicated that, in general, birth mothers of this era (since all information about the subsequent adoption of a child in those days was kept strictly under wraps by the state, private agencies, attorneys and the like) tended to agonize for years over their decision to surrender a child; wondering if the child was healthy, happy, well cared-for. I thought, if nothing else, to tell whomever this woman was (if I could find her, if she wanted to be found, and if she was even still alive – three very big “ifs”) that I was grateful for what she had done. So I knew that at some point I would attempt to locate one or both of my birth parents. But there was never any sense of urgency to it. In fact, I waited almost eight years before I began.

The Good Sisters

2011-02-12T11:34:00.005-05:00

My wife and I have known each other now for going on 50 years, ever since we met in 1^st grade -- September, 1959, at St. Aedan’s School in Jersey City. We were in the same class, all eight years, taught by the same nuns; we (and all our classmates) went to church together – Mass at 9:00 AM without fail every Sunday, Mass every morning before school began on First Fridays, and every day of the months of October and May (Mary’s months) -- First Communion and Confirmation together; we were even partners on line at our 8^th grade graduation.

This has gone a long way, I think, in creating and sustaining the bond that holds us together. I suppose if someone were to ask me what I believed to be the key to a successful marriage (35 years and counting), one component would certainly be the sheer depth of our common background – our collective memory and experiences; we grew up in the same neighborhood, knew all the same people, did many of the same things, and shared many of the same expectations and aspirations about life. And one of the things that we -- and many other Catholics of our generation shared – is our experience of the nuns.

Nowadays, too many people get their images of nuns either from people like playwright Chris Durang, whose Sr. Mary Ignatius is a twisted and vindictive woman, warped by a "faith" that sees only sin and evil in human nature; or (worse yet, for a whole host of reasons, in my opinion), the "wacky" denizens of Dan Goggins' Nunsense musicals. Because of the steep decline in vocations over the last 20 years or so, even kids in Catholic schools today will only rarely encounter a nun as a teacher.

I spent the first six months of my life in a Catholic orphanage, cared for by the Sisters of Charity; and my whole educational life in the Catholic schools, each of the first eight years of which solely (with one exception in 5^th grade) under the tutelage of a Sister of St. Dominic. I suppose that, having spent what psychologists now know to be the most formative phase of an infant's life under the daily care of nuns, I am perhaps subliminally predisposed to see the whole of religious women in a positive light. Notwithstanding, I have to say that the women who taught me, as well as the many nuns I have come into contact with over the course of my adult life -- with only a very few exceptions -- were (and are) sweet, dear women who I remember fondly as teachers and exemplars, and who loved me wholeheartedly and taught me well. I even remember most of their names – Sr. Dolorosa, Sr. Patricia Mary, Sr. Ferdinand, Sr. Anthony Marie, Sr. Agnesine, Sr. Leonard Marie, Sr. Maureen James, Sr. Maria.

My mother continued to be active in the parish church and school long after I’d graduated, gone off to college and grad school, and gotten married. One upshot of this was that all sorts of random people from my childhood knew my business, and in great detail. I had a conversation with my mother one day, not long after my wife became pregnant with our first child. She mentioned that she had been speaking to our 8^th Grade nun, Sr. Maria (who had of course already known, through my mother, that two of her erstwhile pupils had married), and told her of our good news. I asked her to tell Sister that we both sent our best; and that, I thought, would be that.

About eight weeks later a large box showed up in the mail in care of us both. My first assumption was that it came from my mother, but when I looked at the return address the name on the package was Sr. Maria’s. I tore open the box, and found inside, folded carefully in tissue paper, a lovely, hand-knitted baby blanket, with a note in Sister’s neat, spidery hand assuring us of her love and prayers for us and the baby to come. We wrapped our infant daughter in that blanket when we brought her home from the hospital, and we’ve kept it ever since, stored away in a chest, should the baby it swaddled ever have need of it for a child of her own. There are a lot of reasons why women are not choosing the convent as a vocation; many of those reasons apply as well to men considering the priesthood. Modern life presents many more options, especially for young women, than were available to them when I was a child; and very few young men and women will have grown up with the kind of day-to-day interaction with religious of all kinds –priests, brothers or sisters – that my wife and I encountered in our youth, and that might serve as an exemplar or role model for them to follow. I do not know what this bodes for religious life in the Catholic Church, or what changes in attitude or established practice will have to occur to see any kind of renaissance in vocations; but I do know that a world without these wonderful women, working to help children, and the poor, and the sick, living their lives prayerfully and joyfully, is diminished by their absence.

Home Is A Journey

2011-02-01T11:51:00.005-05:00

We begin this journey with a photograph. A young couple stands smiling into the camera, their somewhat formal dress (at least by our standards) a contrast to their location, which appears to be a few steps off a hiking trail. He wears a long-sleeved shirt tucked into his trousers, replete with sleeve garters and a stiff collar, a watch chain dangling from his belt. She is wearing a long, voluminous skirt and a crisp shirtwaist, with a high choker collar set off by a small cameo. The young man holds what looks to be a straw hat in one hand, down at his side, while she has a Sunday-best wide-brimmed great mass of fabric perched almost jauntily on her head. I love her smile in this picture. It isn’t a formal smile, full of teeth and false gaiety, but a sly, knowing smile, as if she had some wonderful secret. He’s got more of an open, boyish grin on his face, and even though she’s some four years younger that smile makes her look the older and wiser of the two.

Here is what I know: It is the late summer or early fall of 1903; his name is Fred, and he is twenty-three, her name is Amelia, and she is nineteen, and they have just gotten engaged. They will wed on December 17^th, the same day that the Wright Brothers make their first flight from Kill Devil Hill at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their marriage will span almost seventy years, during which they will raise four children and live a life that was, by all accounts of those who knew them, remarkably unremarkable – full of both pain and pleasure, joy and disappointment; certainly never perfect but one of care, and hard work, and love. In 1914, Fred will come to work for Mrs. Marjorie Moors as caretaker, gardener and general handyman. Her grand house, which had belonged to her parents, the Devlins, sits in the old colonial center of the town, hard by the church and the vestiges of the town common. Just across the road from the field at the back of her house is the other place that Mrs. Moors owns, the house in which Fred and Amelia will settle themselves; the house that will shelter them and their family over the next fifty-eight years.

A house, in many ways, is only a shell that nurtures and protects the home that is created within its walls; but the home that is created therein can, in its own way, sustain – plaster and lath, wood and stone – the house that envelops it. There is a gentle irony here, in that this house, which was their home for almost as long as a human lifetime, never actually belonged to them. It is a testament to the real significance of what they fashioned here that Mrs. Moors was moved to make provision in her will for them such that, at her death [in 1966], they could continue to live in the house, comfortably and free of worry, for the rest of their lives; which was only right and fitting, since this was their home, even though it was never really their house.

This house in which they lived for so long is my house now; it has been mine for twenty-five years. That fact hardly seems to matter to most of the long-time residents of the town, who still refer to it by the name of this young couple who lived, grew old and died here more than thirty-five years ago. This too, is as it should be, since you never really “own” an old house, so much as you are simply another name in an ever-lengthening list of caretakers; people whose job it is (if they have the wisdom and good sense to see it; not all do) to safely see the house though another human generation and pass it on to those who will come after. Fred and Amelia themselves, if they knew the house at all before they came to live in it, probably knew it as “the McCarthy place," from Michael and Mary Margaret McCarthy who bought it when Amelia was about six years old and lived in it for fifteen years; and in all likelihood the McCarthys called it the “old Putnam place;” and the Putnams, well, Amos and Dorcas Putnam, who were third cousins and direct descendants of Jacob Putnam, one of the original settlers of the town, bought the house from the Widow Burton (related to them distantly by marriage), in whose husband’s family the house had been for as much as eighty years, or more, from the time it came to be built by her father-in-law, Deacon Burton, the town's first Town Clerk, who had fought in the French and Indian War.

A commemorative plaque now sits next to the old front door of the house. It is a beautiful, hand-lettered thing, and it lends the old place a dignified air; here, it says, is something that has endured, something that has remained, something that has seen the sweep of history pass like a ghostly parade through its dooryard. It gives the approximate date of construction and acknowledges two of the prominent early names associated with its origins, names that are not just confined to old road maps or given to geographic features, but names whose direct descendants can still be found in the local phonebook. It is, truthfully, a sign, in the archaic sense of that word – an outward symbol or manifestation of an inward grace, a grace that is the gift of the spirit of this house, as it was embodied in all those who took care of it.

I end this journey, now, where I began; with a photograph. An old couple, their two smiling faces creased and lined by years of work and care, are standing near well-tended flower beds. Here is what I know: Fred and Amelia have just passed their 60^th wedding anniversary; their children are having grandchildren of their own. It is 1963, and it is only for us to know that they have almost reached the end of their long lives. They will both die, only a few months apart, in 1972; you do not spend the better part of a century with someone to be content to remain behind when they embark on the final journey. Two pictures, bracketing a life, reminding us all of our own fragile, human impermanence. But now, almost forty years on after their deaths, the house remains as it has been for over 240 years. Trees and shrubs they planted and tended now depend on me to prune and water them; the septic system that Charlie dug by hand in 1941 is still nursed along lovingly with periodic applications of Bacteria-In-A-Bottle and Root-B-Gone. And so it is with the other bits and pieces of this house, added on over time, each of which is a piece of the story of those it sheltered. I’ve replaced a clapboard or two and some sheathing here and there, a room has been added, and the house, the barn and even the chicken coop all sport solid new roofs. It is in those moments when I am planting, or painting, or patching something – when I am taking care of the old place, in some large or small way – that I most strongly feel the connection, running like a cord, binding the present to the past. It links me with Fred and Amelia – and the McCarthys, and the Putnams and the Burtons – in a real, immediate way. It links me to this town, this community; a place where, in a few short years, I will have spent the balance of my entire life. I have the care of this place, for now. I have the job of seeing it safely into the hands of my child, and her children. I am a caretaker – like Charlie was.

There's No Place Like Home

2011-01-23T13:58:00.010-05:00

One of the many things that makes living in my little village such a real pleasure and delight is the presence of our own genuine small-town movie theatre, located right on Main Street in Wilton's Town Hall. It is a venerable institution, tracing its lineage all the way back to 1912; the earliest days of film itself. Run by movie maven and all-around swell guy Dennis Markaverich, the Town Hall Theatre is a genuine art-house cinema as well as a showcase for the finest of first-run Hollywood. Because it offers a much-welcome alternative to the 3D-Multi-rama-cine-odeon-plex-chock-full-of-noisy-teenagers-$29.95-medium-popcorn experience, it attracts a wide audience from all over the southern part of the state, as well as parts of Northern MA. It is, as you can imagine, a really great place to see a movie -- spacious seats, two separate theatres, fresh-popped popcorn with real butter, and ticket prices that won't force you to take out a second mortgage on the house just to take a family of four to the movies on a Saturday night. What's more, Dennis runs a special program every weekend of old silent films, many times with live musical accompaniment, as well as a "Classic Cinema" screening every Saturday afternoon as a fund-raiser for local charities -- admission is free, and donations to one or all of the charities represented are gratefully accepted.

All in all, The Town Hall is one of the best places there is to really enjoy the experience of going to the movies; even more so, when the particular movie in question happens to be the one that I'm in. A few weeks ago Dennis announced that he was going to run The Fighter (see my last post for the whole sordid tale of Michael-in-the-movies); immediately plans were arranged among many friends and neighbors to descend en masse on the Town Hall to see the film. As I've said before, it's great to have even a small role in a movie; it's even better when the movie is a genuinely first-rate one. I've tried, of course, to make it clear to all and sundry how really minuscule my participation in this project is; but I also have to say that their enthusiasm and genuine excitement over the whole business is gratifying to me, heart and soul, in ways that are hard to express.

When I finally appeared on-screen, about 3/4ths of the way into the film, even before my filmic doppleganger could toss out the first of his two lines, my own personal cheering section of about 3 full rows erupted in applause and cries of delight. A tad embarrassing, I have to admit, and I suppose that this must have been awfully confusing to most of the other patrons in the theatre; the mystery only deepened for them when my little claque cheered yet again as my name scrolled by in the closing credits. While we were all filing out of the theatre, a woman turned to one of my neighbors and asked what the heck had been going on; she was told that the person walking just ahead of her, contentedly clinging to his wife's hand, was "that guy" in the movie, here in the flesh. Her surprise and delight were wonderful to see; she asked if I were "really a Hollywood movie star;" I replied that, as far as I was concerned, this was far better -- to experience the authentic, wonderful, dear, sweet, kind expression of joy that I felt in being there with all of them; nothing like this would have happened if I were in LA (or New York, or even Boston, for that matter); I'd be just another minor actor sitting in the dark in a room full of strangers. But I don't live in a big city, I live in a small town where friendship means something real and neighbors take their responsibilities to each other seriously; a place that embraces and cherishes its special little movie theatre, understanding that it is emblematic of a way of life that is rapidly disappearing under the crush of the soulless multiplex. My experience in being a tiny part of this really good movie was amplified a hundredfold by the smiles, the hugs, the shouts of "good job!" by these people I love so dearly. And that, my friends, is what it feels like to be a star.

The Fighter. . . and Me

2010-12-22T15:07:00.007-05:00

So I'm in a movie. Not only am I in a movie; I'm in, by all accounts, a REALLY GOOD movie. It's called The Fighter, and it stars Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, Amy Adams and most especially Mark Wahlberg as "Irish" Mickey Ward, a boxer from Lowell, Massachusetts who overcame a lot of baggage, personal as well as circumstantial, to win a boxing title and some measure of renown in the sport. My friends and neighbors are making a big fuss over this, especially so because I happen to appear (albeit for only 2 seconds) in the trailer for this film, which has been all over the Internet and lately on TV as well. In addition, there is a production photo that has appeared on many websites which shows me sitting next to Messers Wahlberg and Bale. All very cool, I have to say.

However, I am compelled to provide a bit of perspective here. First, I have all of two (count 'em, two) lines in this scene -- the rest of the time I am sitting quietly in Bale and Wahlberg's company in a scene representing a press conference prior to Ward's fight with the boxer Shay Neary, which took place in London over ten years ago. The role is listed on the IMDB (that's the Internet Movie DataBase, for those of you unfamiliar with the acronym) as the WBU (World Boxing Union) Commissioner; the part is so small that the two lines I utter on-screen were not even written out as dialogue in the script -- in fact, it appears only as one line in a parenthetical reference in a stage direction on one page of the shooting script. I had to look really hard for it when I was sent the script pages prior to the audition:

120 CONTINUED:

The Fighter 7/13/09 YELLOW DRAFT 94. 120

Dicky whispers into Micky's ear...Micky smiles, puts his arm * around his brother. Sal LoNano standing behind the scale, hear a commissioner shout, "Neary,-- 9 stone, 13 pounds!" Photographers snapping shots, reporters shouting questions, "Hey, Micky, what about you?"

MICKY Nah, I ain't gonna sleep on no

floor. I like my bed an' my girlfriend too much -

He waves at Charlene in the crowd. Reporters laugh. Neary glares at Micky and steps off the scale. Micky sees Alice squeezed way in the back of the room with George, both all dressed up, new clothes, hair done up.

MICKY (shouts out)

Hey, Ma, Dad, come on up here!

Alice and George start heading toward the front of the room, Alice looking at all the cameras, smiling, she's back in the spotlight. She's the belle of the ball.

In fact, I'll bet you won't be able to find it without reading through the above at least twice. Go ahead -- take a good hard look; I'll wait. . . .

(Bland "on-hold" music plays quietly in the background)

Did you find it? See? I can't really imagine how much more insignificant a role can be. I was given the second line while we were shooting the scene, since the director, David O. Russell (he of I (Heart) Huckabees, Three Kings, and others) -- who, when he referred to me at all during the course of our brief association, called me "that guy" -- felt that, if the character was going to announce the weight of one fighter, he might as well announce the weight of both. I trust you can appreciate how really minor this is, in the grand scheme of things. Because I was hired as a principal (since a line, no matter how small or parenthetical, is a line, and the Union -- God bless the Union! -- is very strict about categories and pay scales), I was paid a reasonably decent amount of money for the 8 hours I spent on set; I had my own little room in a large trailer on location, PA's (production assistants) brought me bottles of water and kept me apprised of what was going on, and I was shuttled to and from the actual shooting set in a van driven by large, friendly members of the Teamsters' Union local. I got a haircut from the hair and makeup people, and the wardrobe supervisor (a lovely and harassed man who probably wasn't paid nearly enough for all the things he had to do) was very patient as he sorted through the wardrobe I brought with me to select just the perfect outfit. In addition, I was fed really well (all film sets are catered, as you can appreciate the chaos that would ensue if the hundreds of technicians, wardrobe folks, actors and extras employed on the film had to go off to find their own meal for lunch or dinner) and had a lovely chat over dinner with my colleague and friend Dale Place (who plays referee Mickey Vann), several lighting techs and the actor playing the boxer Shay Neary (Anthony Molinari, an engaging and talented young man who, as it turns out, was born and raised in Worcester MA).

All in all, you can understand that my participation in this project was a whole lot less than even marginal. Many of my colleagues had roles much larger and more significant than mine, but none of them, alas, ended up in either the trailer or publicity photos. The lesson here, I suppose, is that the best and most visible kind of really small role to land in a major motion picture is one that puts you in constant proximity to one or more of the film's stars. So, I have been getting phone calls and e-mails from folks who have seen the film, and people I know here in my little town and at my gym have been coming up to me eagerly shouting "I saw you in the movies!" It's very fun and exciting, I have to say; and even though I have been trying to impart to all these good people how tiny it all is, I will admit that my ego has been feeding quite well these past few weeks on all the fuss.

One more observation -- as I pointed out, I spent the better part of eight hours sitting right next to Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale, not saying a thing. I was able to watch these two extraordinary young men do their work from up close, and it was a revelation. They are awfully good at what they do; dedicated and focused and determined to deliver superior work in every moment. On top of it all, Mark Wahlberg is a class act in my book -- at the end of the shoot he took the time to thank all the people who had participated in that day's work. He had spent many years trying to get this picture made, and it is clear to me that this was not one of those movies pasted together by agents and studios almost as if by committee, and scripted almost as an afterthought; with the only goal to make as much money as possible. Mickey Ward and Dickey Eklund's story was one he was passionate about telling, and that, I will contend, is what Art is all about.

Why I Like Living in a Small Town

2010-07-16T11:19:00.000-04:00

1. The volunteer firemen all know where you live. . .

2. Because once a year they drive the biggest, coolest fire truck the town owns to your house to sell you tickets to the Fireman’s Ball

3. There’s a store on Main Street where you can buy comic books, flannel shirts, and penny candy, pay your electric bill, drop off your dry cleaning, and rent a tuxedo

4. You could keep a goat, if you wanted to

5. The Town Clerk knows how many cars you drive, how many dogs you own, and how much your house is appraised for, and always has time to chat about the weather, your children, and the latest town gossip

6. The Post Office can deliver mail even if it doesn’t have the street address on it

7. Your concept of “neighbor” includes people who live more than a mile away

8. The Town Dump is the epicenter of community life; and any candidates (local, state, and sometimes even federal) who hope to have a prayer of getting elected need to spend some serious time there

9. Everybody on your road knows your dog’s name

10. If you ask her nicely, the librarian will give you a key to the building so you can get in to do some research when it’s closed

11. There are legitimate reasons to own a pickup truck, a shotgun, and a tractor

12. Church suppers have really good food, and lots of it

13. Town Meeting. The entertainment value alone is worth every nickel of your property taxes

14. Whenever you tell somebody your phone number, you only give them the last four digits

15. You need to worry about how the bacteria in your septic tank are doing

16. People still refer to your house by the name of somebody who lived in it more than fifty years ago

17. Dirt roads, especially in mud season; it’s why God made four-wheel drive

18. Flannel is never out of place, even in church

19. Folks understand that an antique is something your great-grandmother may have owned, not a toy some baby-boomer played with in 1964

20. There have been only three murders in town, and they all happened more than a hundred years ago, but people still talk about them

21. The guy at the hardware store knows you have an odd-sized valve on your old boiler’s inlet pipe, and keeps a few of them in stock “just in case”

22. The Fed-Ex lady leaves your dog a biscuit with every package she delivers

23. You don’t need to be home for the plumber or the appliance repairman since you never lock your door; what’s more, before they leave they’ll let your dog out and bring in your mail

24. It’s pretty certain that, once a week, some organization will sponsor a car wash down at the Fire House

25. Every winter there’s piles of free sand and salt in front of the DPW garage

Real Life at the County Fair

2010-04-19T16:01:00.003-04:00

I used to have a picture of my daughter at age three, a green and yellow John Deere cap – much too large for her – tilted precariously on her head. She’s sitting in my lap, and both of us are perched on the seat of a Deere Series 8410 tractor. I have no idea what’s become of it; probably stuffed into a box in some obscure corner of the barn, no doubt, but for some odd reason the image has stuck in my head all these years. I think we were at the New Hampshire State Fair in Hopkinton or one of the county fairs – Hillsborough or Cheshire most likely. I love the fairs; I love them in a way that only someone city born and bred can. In this place, where I’ve lived for the balance of my adult life, there are trees, and flowing water, and fields full of wildflowers in the summer and the hum of bees in the air. I almost always see a horse, or some cows, in the normal course of an average day. I grew up, however, in Jersey City; where all that was left of nature were these little horseshoes of dirt carved neatly out of the sidewalk, spaced about twelve to fifteen feet apart. These were the only clues that once, long ago, there had been a tall, shapely elm or ash in that spot, whose roots had buckled the pavement. They were reminders of a time when (so my mother told me) cities were still green places, not so cut off from the natural world, before the cars, the factories and the diesel exhaust slowly and inexorably choked the life out of them. A time when there was a veritable canopy of trees, arching over from both sides of the street, which stretched all the way down our block and practically every other block in the city.

This is why you’ll most likely see me on opening day up to the County fairgrounds yet again this year, I think. It is an attempt, somehow, to immerse myself fully and completely in this place, to make up just a little for not having been born here. I want to consciously distance myself, if only just a bit (because there is something to the notion that it is possible to take the boy out of the city, but not as easy to take the city out of the boy), from the time I spent growing up with the noise of busses and sirens, with concrete and asphalt and the ghostly footprints of trees long dead. I will gladly spend the day watching the Border Collie herding exhibitions, the oxen, draft horse and tractor pulls, the lawn-tractor races. I will take the time to walk through each and every stall where cows and pigs and sheep and goats are being tended lovingly by diligent 4-H-ers, admiring the hard work and patience it must have taken some eight-year-old to research and set up the poster board presentation, complete with illustrative drawings and photographs, on the different breeds of domestic hogs and how they go from farm to table.

Besides, I am a bona fide tractor junkie. A day at the fair means a walk through row after row of harvesters and hay wagons, balers and brush hogs, tractors as big as a house whose enclosed cabs have air conditioning and AM/FM six-speaker Stereo CD players. I harbor no illusions, mind you. I’d make quite the lousy farmer; in fact, I’m sure that just a week’s worth of work – heck, a day’s worth – at one of the local dairy farms would probably kill me. This has never stopped me, though, from climbing up onto that John Deere equipped with a Model 338 square baler (twine or wire), and imagining for just a moment how different, and how much better, my life would have been if I’d been raised here, in New Hampshire, on a farm. It is why I take my daughter – I want her to see and smell and hear all these things that are at the heart of growing up in the country – so that they may be a part of her, root and branch, wherever she goes, for the rest of her days.

I have a clear memory of one particular visit to the fair, in 1989. I remember it specifically because the three of us – my wife, daughter and I – had just returned home from a vacation to Disney World in Orlando; a trip that I’ll return to a little further on in this narrative. For the moment, it is enough to know that my daughter is five years old, and she and I are picking our way carefully through a field full of livestock trailers, pickup trucks and RV’s. Scattered among them are small groups of two or three people each, sipping coffee in paper cups and finishing off the last few crumbs of a take-out breakfast. Several of them congregate under stained and battered roll-up awnings hanging awkwardly over the side doors of their Winnebagos. The air is full of the sharp smell of manure mixed with the sweet odors of caramel corn, fried dough and cotton candy. As we stand with our backs to the mid-morning sun, on our right in an adjoining field are pavilions full of goats, pigs and cows; and a-ways off to the left there is a fenced-in ring containing five incongruously well-dressed teen-agers of varying heights and genders, all with potentially prize-winning sheep tethered to their sides. The sheep look somehow hopeful (visions of blue ribbons dancing in their heads?), the teens all with concerned faces and furrowed brows. Each serious-looking young man or woman is making a final pass with a large, flat carding brush, or giving a last-minute clip to an errant piece of wool sticking up from an otherwise perfectly flat and impeccably groomed coat.

Fairs are noisy places. There’s an unintelligible babble coming out of a PA system a short distance away, which competes for our attention with the sound of screaming guitars blaring out from over where the carnival rides have been set up. Underneath it all, like the drone of a bagpipe, is the unmistakable dull roar of farm equipment off in the distance, warming up in preparation for the tractor pull. My daughter takes my hand and leads me, following Led Zeppelin’s siren call, towards the bright, noisy midway. I try unsuccessfully to steer her the long way ‘round so that I can get a glimpse of the tractors, but she is determined, holding on to my hand with both of hers, to bring me in a beeline to our ultimate destination. She knows, even at this early age, how easily distracted her father can get. We manage to find our way through the maze of sheds, barns, and exhibition halls (“See The Prizewinning Zucchini!”), avoiding the cow patties and piles of fresh horse manure that dot the pathways, toward the Fried Dough concessions, ring-toss games, wheels of chance and face-painting booths that are lined up on both sides of the carnival midway. The racket of the tractors subsides to a low rumble as we make slow headway up the crowded thoroughfare that leads to this portable Emerald City; loud, whirling and glowing. Each ride is outlined by hundreds of forty-watt bulbs, all lit (except for the few that are broken or burned-out) even though it is almost high noon.

We find the source of the music – two speakers that look as if someone borrowed them for the day from their brother-in-law’s stereo system – sitting in front of a large, black tentacled ride called, appropriately enough, the Octopus. At the end of each metal tentacle is an egg-shaped car holding one or more shrieking riders, hanging on for dear life with looks of intermingled joy and terror on their faces. My daughter watches the ride and its occupants for a moment, then tugs lightly on the sleeve of my jacket, indicating with a turn of her head that she wishes to move on. “It’s too loud, Daddy” is the only comment she eventually makes. She guides me towards a group of rides all enclosed with two dozen or so battered panels of free-standing moveable pasture fencing. There’s a makeshift archway over a break in the enclosure, and a brightly colored sign at the top of the arch that says “Kiddie Korner”.

An impatient pull on my arm gets me to move over to the ticket booth perched just to the right of the break in the fence. A woman with big, bleached blond hair, wearing just a bit too much eye shadow, sits in the booth smoking a cigarette. She snaps out a quick “How many?” to me as I push a five dollar bill through the curved slot at the bottom of the Plexiglas window. She takes the five and begins to count out tickets off a large roll. She looks up briefly, and makes eye contact with my child. The woman’s face immediately brightens into a great, broad smile. She asks “What ride are you goin’ on first, sweetie?” My daughter thinks for a moment and replies, “The roller coaster. Or the fire engines. Or the space ships.” The woman and I both laugh. She passes a folded wad of tickets to me through the window and says, as we leave, “You have a good time, hon!” I toss the woman a thank you as my daughter yanks me through the archway. I notice that, with only a few exceptions, these are the same rides I remember from the amusement parks of my own childhood – boats plowing around a small aluminum moat, miniature tanks and jeeps painted a camouflage green, forever circling an enemy position, red fire engines with bells to ring. I stand drenched in nostalgia for the briefest moment, until she makes her choice; she then marches us determinedly past the merry-go-round and the miniature roller coaster over to where the space ships are.

The space ships are just what their name implies – little child-sized rocket ships that look like they may have once been used as miniatures in the old Flash Gordon serials. You know (or maybe you don’t; I’m showing my age here, I think) – the ones with Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon and a wonderful character actor named Charles Middleton as his archenemy, Ming The Merciless. These diminutive Art Deco space cruisers each sit at the end of a long arm attached with hydraulic lifters to a central vertical shaft that spins them in a circle. In each ship there is a control stick that you can push forward or pull back. Pull it back, and your ship rises to what I guess is twelve, maybe fifteen feet above the ground. Push it forward, and the spacecraft floats gently back down. It is this element of control, I think, that my daughter enjoys so much.

While we wait patiently on line with four or five other children for her turn to fly to the outer reaches of the cosmos, I catch a glimpse of the young man who is operating the ride. He is of medium height and very thin, but very muscular, and seems to be no more than 20, or 22 years old at the most. His hair is long and black, a bit greasy, pulled into a loose ponytail; his face thin and somewhat drawn, with a sparse goatee. He is dressed in a black Lynard Skynard tee shirt and tight-fitting jeans. Rolled up in the sleeve of the tee shirt is what I can only assume to be a pack of cigarettes. There are several tattoos on both of his arms, the most prominent of which is a mermaid, topless, with large, round breasts. When the time comes, he flicks a switch and the rockets glide slowly down to earth. He goes around to each ship and carefully unbuckles the safety chain holding each child, watching as the older ones scramble out on their own, or gently lifting the littlest ones out and into the waiting arms of Mom, Dad, Grampy or Grammy. During this whole operation, the young carney has a smile on his face that lights up his eyes and showcases his two missing teeth. My daughter lets go of my hand and runs over to the ship she has picked out. Before I can catch up with her, the young man has already stooped down to pick her up, not saying a word, and places her in the rocket. He draws the safety chain tightly around her waist and clasps it to the eyebolt welded to the inside wall of the ship. She is nothing if not a polite child (we have raised her well), and so she thanks the young man, grinning broadly at him. He replies “You’re welcome, sweetheart, you have fun now”, and moves on to buckle up the next Buck Rogers wannabe.

I stood there and watched her, smiling and laughing while she flew her rocket ship up as high as it could go, shouting all the while “Look at me, Daddy, look at me!” In that moment I was struck, and struck mightily at the time, by the contrast between our day here at the fair and our recent sojourn to Disney World which I mentioned above. On reflection, I suppose the whole business is much too obvious and that additional comment would be (or, at least, should be) superfluous. In each case my child had a wonderful time, and so did my wife and I, for that matter, and perhaps that’s all that needs to be said about it. However, it seems that I am bound and determined to make a comparison here, so I’d best get to it.

Both places exist to entertain and, to a certain degree, instruct you. Both places are, at their base, trying to sell you something. Disney has its enormous media empire and symbiont tchotchkes; why just buy a copy of the movie The Lion King when you can also have a Simba plush toy, or pencil, or cup, or porcelain figurine, or snow globe, or. . . well, you get the point. The county fair exists to sell things too; first and foremost is agricultural life itself, along with farm equipment, vegetable peelers, Ginsu knives, Nelson’s Fudge, miracle oven cleaners and other wonders of the modern world too numerous to mention. And let’s not forget the tastiest food in the universe that is, at the same time, the worst for you by any nutritional criteria you care to name. Despite all this, however, I think it’s safe to say that state and county fairs, wherever you may encounter them, are quite possibly the antithesis of the whole Disney experience. First of all, they sound like a cross between a heavy-metal concert and a monster truck rally, and smell like an Italian street fair held in a dairy barn with a generous shot of eau du Diesel mixed in for good measure. Where the folks at Disney exercise total control to deliver a carefully crafted, slick experience calculated to thrill and delight, giving fun to all and offense to none, with no detail too small to be overlooked and everyone involved on their best behavior, the county fair is, by comparison, an orgy of chaos. There is, for one example, the whole business of manure. Now, something you simply cannot avoid running into at a fair is animal excrement in its many forms, from cow patties to mounds of horse manure to the hundreds of little pellets left behind by goats. In the Magic Kingdom horse poop, largely generated by the draught horses that pull loads of picture-taking tourists in quaint little omnibuses up and down Main Street, seemed to almost, well, magically disappear the moment it was produced.

Disney’s Main Street, for those of you who might be unfamiliar with the park, is a fascinating introduction to the wonders to come; an idealized re-creation of fin-de-siecle small-town America, an architectural as well as cultural illusion that suggests friendly neighbors waving from their porches, church suppers and socials at the Grange Hall. The irony of all this is delicious, of course, since this back lot simulacrum leaves out or simply ignores all the messy bits that are at the core of small-town life, like manure; bits that are by comparison reflected to a great degree at the fair.

Perhaps, by way of a clearer explanation of what I’m getting at, another illustration is in order. Our first day in Disney World was a fairly typical one. We had arrived at the park around one o’clock in the afternoon, and made our way up through the entrance gates to the head of Main Street. We pass through Cinderella’s Castle into the Magic Kingdom proper, one of the many parks-within-a-park, which unfolds before us like a pop-up picture book. Cheery music emanates from hidden speakers everywhere, just loud enough to be heard over the babble of the crowds, not so obtrusive that it distracts your attention. Everything is clean and bright, scrubbed to within an inch of its life. A small army of men and women are discreetly sweeping sidewalks, emptying trash barrels and tending to the flower beds, trees and shrubs planted in beautiful, eye-catching arrays all along the walkways. Characters and images from the cartoons and movies our daughter loves are all here, incarnated in brightly colored steel, wood and fiberglass, as rides and attractions. She is immediately drawn to the Dumbo ride; a whirling group of miniature elephants that can be raised and lowered at the riders’ whim. We join the end of a tightly compacted line that snakes back and forth through a maze of metal gates. There’s a sign featuring a smiling Mickey Mouse which helpfully informs us that the wait from this point is approximately 25 minutes. All of the other rides we can see from where we’re standing are continuously moving cars or boats carrying two, four, six, eight or even twelve people at a time through It’s A Small World (After All) or Peter Pan’s London. This gives their patrons at least some sense of forward progress. The Dumbo ride, however, must be stopped and its human cargo emptied out and refilled each time. Patience is a virtue, I remind my daughter. We will get there eventually.

I watch the small human dramas playing out in front of us; a child in a stroller clutching a newly-purchased Winnie-The-Pooh, newly-married young couples clutching each other (you can tell they are newlyweds because she is wearing a white headband with mouse ears and a veil; his mouse ears are perched upon a black top hat), an older couple puzzling over a map of the park, wondering aloud about the best route to the Tiki Birds attraction. Several yards away there erupts a loud wail that distracts us from our vigil. A young father, standing smack dab in the middle of the hurrying crowd that glides almost smugly past those of us waiting in line, is holding on to a child of two, or three at the oldest. The little one is making the kind of crying noises any parent would recognize as the sign of a worn-out child, who had obviously had his fun quota for the day and was more than ready for a nap. A bright, well-manicured, clean-shaven young man sporting the uniform of a Disney cast member approaches the poor, harried parent, and in the brightest and cheeriest tone I’ve ever heard come out of a human mouth, says to the child “Hey, don’t you know that there’s no crying allowed in the Magic Kingdom?” It was immediately apparent that the child, tired and irritated though he was, knew full well he was being patronized and his intelligence insulted. It was also clear that the young cast member had absolutely no grasp of the psychology of cranky three-year-olds; either that, or else he had been duped by someone into believing that telling a child he wasn’t allowed to cry would actually make him stop, because he kept repeating this sentence over and over like some mystical Mickey Mouse mantra, which only served to annoy the child into further squirming and screaming. The parent, seeing a bad situation rapidly escalating into something much worse, rips off a barely polite “excuse me” to the young man and hightails it out of there, only just able to hold on to the child who is now wailing like a banshee and actively kicking his father square in the left kidney.

Now don’t get me wrong – I love Disney World. I’m still enough of an eight-year old myself, with a vivid memory of the longing I had as a child to visit Disneyland – fueled, I know now, by Walt’s incessant marketing of the place to my impressionable mind every Sunday evening via his television show – even though I knew full well that my parents could hardly afford a real vacation anywhere, let alone the trip across country to Anaheim. Now that I was an adult with the means to travel, it was great fun to go ride the rides (I once rode the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride twelve times in a row) and watch the Audio-Animatronic Presidents and buy my daughter that Davy Crockett coonskin cap my folks could never afford to get for me. Where some see the heavy hand of American cultural imperialism, frankly all I see are some damn funny cartoons, many of which border on Art. And even the most unsophisticated visitor to the place understands on some level, I think, that a trip to the World Showcase in Epcot Center is not a substitute for spending a few weeks in Spain, Morocco or Italy. But I suppose, if one had to put a label on it, the county fair has by virtue of its chaos what I guess you’d call character, or perhaps charm or quirkiness or something, which the Disney parks lack. The desire to please everyone by filing down all the rough edges creates an experience that, while entertaining, isn’t quite as exciting or immediate as the kind of experience you get on the midway. It’s the difference, I guess, between spending an evening at a friend’s house where everything is just so, right out of Martha Stewart Living Magazine, every detail thought through and the whole place “design-schemed” to a fare-thee-well, where you are afraid to sit on the furniture lest you knock a pillow out of whack and ruin the whole mise-en-scene; and going to another’s home where the place actually looks lived-in – books and magazines scattered in piles hither and yon, the smell of the last meal cooked in the kitchen still hanging in the air, and a large dog (or two) curled up on the comfortable chair or in the middle of the living room rug. Is one better than the other? What do you mean by better? Is it unreasonable to think that some people might be put off by a young man with a tattoo of a half-naked woman coming into contact with their children? Perhaps not, but I have to say that the tattooed young carney at the fair just might be more likely to ask a small child who was crying what was the matter, and actually listen to the answer.

Letter to My Daughter (or; My Life in the Theatre)

2010-04-19T15:46:00.003-04:00

Hey Kiddo: So I go into work for the matinee today (Sunday), and as I'm getting dressed I hear Lin (our ASM) announce the following:

"Uh, actors? Can you listen up for a minute? Just so you know, if you need to use the bathroom, you shouldn't use the stall on the left hand side as you walk in, because there's a dead rat in the toilet. OK? Adam (the BCA facilities manager) will be here in a few minutes to fish it out. Thanks!"

You should pass this on to all your friends who are in the acting program at Tisch; they should have at least some small idea of what they'll be in for when they get out into the real world.

I love you!

Daddy

PS: Thankfully, the rat was gone by the time I had to go to the bathroom myself, but just to be on the safe side I'm not going to drink or eat for at least two hours before a show.

Sing Out, Louise! (More Letters to My Daughter)

2010-04-18T10:51:00.001-04:00

Hi Kiddo: OK, so as of yesterday, when my copy of the new revival cast recording starring Patti LuPone came in the mail, I now own 7 separate recordings of Gypsy (8, if you count as a separate recording the re-issue of the Merman Original Cast recording with all the extra stuff on it) on CD alone, not to mention at least 3 LP’s (two of the Merman O.C. recording and one of the Angela Lansbury revival).

I have no idea why I’m not gay.

Maybe its because I don’t own either the movie soundtrack (with Rosalind Russell – an atrocity from start to finish) or a copy of the movie itself (see my previous mention of atrocity); I do, however own both a copy of the video and the CD to the TV version with Bette Midler (I count the CD of her version as part of my eight, as well as the CD burn of my live recording of the whole show with Merman).

It is a strange world I live in, my dear.

I love you with all my heart.

Daddy

More Letters to My Daughter

2010-04-18T10:45:00.002-04:00

Hey Kiddo: Came across a “Mr. Rogers Sing-Along” on YouTube; the following is (verbatim) one of the comments that was posted on this video:

I don't like being a grownup :< Can I be a kid and watch Mr Rogers again?

I know how this guy feels. . .

I love you with all my heart.

Daddy

Never work with small children and dogs. . .

2010-04-17T11:10:00.009-04:00

For more years than I'd care to count I have spent the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas trussed up in chains and hauling strongboxes, locks and ledger-books in my ghostly wake as that well-known Dickensian spectre Jacob Marley in one or another production of the perennial holiday warhorse, A Christmas Carol.

I always loved playing Marley for the sheer theatricality of it all -- I have entered stage to the cacaphonous wails of the souls of the damned, surrounded by clouds of liquid nitrogen smoke; in another production I rose up out of the floor, lit from below in the oranges and reds of the very fires of Hell, accompanied by a blast from the dry-ice fog machine and a deafening peal of bells. This last particular entrance was far enough downstage that I could witness, for a brief moment, the effect Jacob's apparition was having on those unlucky souls seated in the front row of the theatre. It amused me no end to see people practically jump out of their seats night after night; in fact, I was disappointed if I didn't cause at least one patron to let out an involuntary yelp. On one particular night I saw two small boys, seated on either side of a woman whom I can only assume was their mother, who upon my arrival simultaneously buried their faces in her lap and started screaming. I was wired and my voice was amplified and digitally altered --- but I swear those two poor young boys were louder than I was.

Common to most productions of A Christmas Carol are the hoards of small children who fill out the ranks of the cast, taking on the obvious roles like Tiny Tim (and other members of the Crachit clan), Little Fan and, my favorite, the Turkey Boy. Depending on the size (and budget) of the particular production, these children also serve as London urchins, street carolers and assorted hangers-on that are used to flesh out such scenes as Fezziwig's Ball or the half-dozen or so musical numbers that producers invariably introduce into the story to liven things up. The state of the performing arts being what it is in this country, the addition of so many children to the mix is usually done with both eyes firmly fixed on the box office. The reality is that each child in the cast will generate massive revenue: tickets sold to parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors. One theatre had the brilliant idea of having three separate, rotating casts of kids; this was ostensibly done to accommodate the youngsters' busy schedules -- what with sports, ballet, music lessons, school -- it was reasoned that each group of kids would then only have to rehearse a few days each week and perform in 3 or 4 instead of a full 8 shows per week. A logistical nightmare for the production staff, to be sure, but a bonanza for the bottom line. Instead of, oh, say, a total of 15 children in the cast rehearsing and performing all the time, you would now have 45 kids total, each of whom (as detailed above) would potentially generate sales of 8, 10, even 20 tickets each to family, friends and neighbors.

The presence of a large number of children in a theatre environment presents its own host of problems, of course; but in one way, I guess you could say that being cast in a play in the professional theatre is a highly educational and enriching experience. For example, it can expose these children to a vast and very colorful new set of vocabulary words, many of which I can almost guarantee will not be seen anytime soon on the usual standardized tests. But I digress.

The story I actually set out to tell here involves the family of one of the children in a company of Christmas Carol I was in some years ago. One evening, about half-way through the run of the show, I arrived early as usual to the theatre, since the elaborate make-up I was doing for the role took about an hour to apply. As I came down the stairs into the lobby, I noticed one of our young charges (I believe she played one of the Crachit children; we'll call her Janie), in the company of an attractive woman and a much younger child. The woman spotted me and immediately came over with her hand extended. She introduced herself as Janie's mom and we exchanged a few pleasantries. She then proceeded to explain to me that the whole family, including Dad and another, older sibling, had come to see the show on opening night, sitting right in the front row. They had all (with one exception) enjoyed Jacob Marley's ghost immensely, and it was pretty obvious as to which family member wasn't next in line as president of my fan club. Janie's younger sister (we'll call her Suzie), stood behind her sister and mother, with both arms clasped tightly around one of her mother's legs. Janie's mom went on to explain that Suzie had been so frightened by Marley's ghost that she suffered nightmares; this in turn had traumatized her so much that now she absolutely refused to sleep in her own bed but had insisted on spending every night since in-between her parents, awake in fearful vigil awaiting the re-appearance of the spectral Marley.

It was clear from the haggard look on Mom's face that this situation had reached critical mass in the last several days; there was also a desperate tone in her voice that she could barely keep under control. Neither did it escape my thinking that, implied but not stated, the ongoing lack of something other than sleep was also a factor here. She asked if I wouldn't mind speaking to little Suzie to reassure her that it was all just make-believe. So, in my best Dad voice, I knelt down by Suzie and introduced myself. "Hi", I said, "I'm Michael! I work with your sister in the play. Your Mommy tells me that you came to see us." Not a word from little Suzie, who kept her head buried in the crook of her mother's knee. "Your Mommy says that you thought that Jacob Marley was really scary. I'm so glad! He's supposed to be scary so that he'll make Mr. Scrooge see that he's been a very bad man." Still not so much as a peep; however, I did notice that she was finally beginning to actually look at me. "You know, I have a daughter too; when she was really little, just like you, I used to take her here to the theatre with me all the time so she could see me put on my scary make-up and know that it was always really just Daddy, so that she wouldn't be afraid." Still nothing. "If you come and see the show again, maybe I can show you how I put the make-up and the costume on so you can see that it's just me and not a real ghost, OK?"

All through this, Suzie and Janie's mom looked hopeful; Suzie was looking right at me now and not trying to hide. Despite not saying a word, she certainly seemed reassured and her mother thanked me profusely for taking the time to try and undo the damage I had inadvertantly done. They all walked off and I continued on to my dressing room. It was the way Suzie stared at me, as we parted, that made me understand, finally, that nothing had really changed. No, I wasn't fooling her, not one bit. While I was rambling on, trying my best to be sweet, charming and (above all) non-threatening, little Suzie had an unmistakable look on her face. It wasn't fear, but neither was it relief or reassurance. It was, instead, the look of a child who was simply waiting. Waiting for my forehead to split open and the shrieking, howling, green-faced monster wrapped in chains -- the creature she knew in her heart of hearts was lurking inside of me, biding its time -- to burst forth from its smiling human guise and carry her off to Hell.

For all I know, Suzie is still sleeping with her parents.

A Memory of My Father

2010-04-03T16:18:00.001-04:00

It is an old photo, worn and a bit stained, missing a chunk here and there, as if it had spent much too much time in a plastic sleeve in the dark recesses of an overloaded wallet. Which, in fact, it had, until I decided to pry it out and digitize it, in an attempt to save it before it was lost to me for good. Framed neatly in the center of the picture are a small boy and a tall man, standing by a fence near some body of water; there seems to be a large bird in the background as well. It’s hard to know for certain, but I think that we’re somewhere at the Jersey shore, on a pier or jetty. The little guy is me, at what I’m guessing is age 4 (which would make this 1957); the big guy is my dad, who in ‘57 would have been 45 years old, a decent bit younger than I am now. The shore was a favorite day-hop getaway for my folks, even in winter. You can tell it’s winter by the outfits; in addition to his coat my dad is wearing his gloves, and I’m wrapped up head to toe in a suit I still remember – a wool cap with earflaps, wool coat, gloves, wool pants and leather leggings (something which, as I look back on it, must have resembled the leather putees that soldiers in World War I wore). I think I looked pretty spiffy, if I must say so myself. I certainly was warm, if maybe a tad itchy. It could be Atlantic City, since I recall that even in the off-season there were some things on the Boardwalk that stayed open; a few souvenir shops, some restaurants,the penny arcades.

Those pre-electronic age arcades had lots of things to amuse a four-year-old. There were the mechanical baseball, hockey and football games, real clanking, clunking pinball, shooting galleries, wheel-of-fortune style games of chance, and one of those booths that, for a few quarters, allowed you to make a short recording of your voice on a 45 RPM disc. My father and I made one of those recordings, perhaps the very day this photograph was taken. I do remember being bunched up in the tiny booth with him; he was hugging me tight so that he could both maximize the limited amount of space available to us, and, at the same time, hoist me up close to the microphone, as my mother looked on from outside. He asks me to talk all about space and rocket ships, a favorite subject of mine at the time. He also encourages me to sing a song, which I do, although by then it becomes clear that the novelty of this recording session is wearing off and I’m getting eager to move on to something else.

I still have that old recording, sitting on a shelf with the Beatles, the Stones, Herman’s Hermits and all the other 45’s I had as a kid. It is hard for me to listen to it now; not only because the disc itself is difficult to play on my modern stereo turntable, and almost unintelligible as well, but also because there is too much of me on it, and not enough of my dad. It is the only thing I have that has his voice on it, a voice I haven’t heard in almost fifty years. Nowadays we are awash in home audio-video; most kids born in the last 20 years will be able, with a bit of editing, to assemble an entire documentary multi-episode mini-series of their early lives, running only about 3 hours shorter than the real thing. Most of these video kids will have hours upon hours of Mom and Dad on tape and DVD as well, beginning with the wedding video and progressing through the gruesome details of their own birth and beyond, until it may well be that it gets to the point where no one will notice that their parents are actually dead until they get around to viewing the footage shot at the funeral.

I’ve never liked the home video camera; ours is one of the few families that doesn’t own one. Its presence always felt so intrusive to me, especially at formal occasions like weddings, First Communions or graduations, since almost everyone present (including, in some cases, the direct participants) are standing up or roaming about, straying into aisles and up onto platforms, thrusting their cameras out like so many ill-mannered papparazzi. Nobody is actually paying attention in any meaningful way to what’s going on; it is as if the reality of the event will be defined solely by its existance on some sort of electronic media, and not really experienced by those who were there until they sit down in front of the television, hours later, and finally watch what went on. Anything and everything is grist for the video mill: soccer games or afternoons lounging in the backyard pool, school plays or a Frisbee toss with the dog, trips to Washington DC to see the sights or to grandma’s house for Sunday supper; it all gets put on tape or disc for posterity. The ubiquity and sheer quantity of this unending documentary footage will have the effect of ultimately diminishing the genuinely special moments in our lives; any true significance lost in the morass of the blow-by-blow banality of it all.

Photographs, though, are different. Since they freeze selective moments in time, and are not simply transcriptions of an event the way a video can be, they serve almost as a mnemonic; a clue or a hint that opens up a whole host of memory and associations. “Every picture tells a story”; so goes the old phrase, and the older the photograph the more of the story we know, especially how parts of it inevitably end, while others go on and form the basis of yet another narrative. I know all too well how this one comes out. If this is 1957, as I think it is, then the 45 year-old-man in the photograph, my father, will live for only another five years. My mother took very few photographs after he was gone; I have some of my confirmation, taken by an aunt and uncle, but none of birthdays, or proms, or graduations. Perhaps it was best that my mother in her grief gave up on the taking of pictures; they would have only re-inforced his absence at these turning points in my life. Those few pictures I do have, especially of him, are triggers for a host of images and memories; fragile, imperfect, unsure of the details. At some point during one winter day in 1957 my mother stopped for a brief moment to take a snapshot of her “boys,” before the three of us went on to do the things we always did when we went to the shore in winter: walk on the Boardwalk, eat lunch in a restaurant, spend a few coins in the penny arcade, buy a box of saltwater taffy, stop in a booth to make a record of the four-year old me pontificating about the future of space travel and singing a verse of “Camptown Races”. This picture, and that old, barely comprehesible recording, is all I have; but it is enough. Memory is flawed; there are things I’m not sure about, details that are fuzzy. In a way that I can’t even begin to explain, though, it is enough. Perhaps it is precisely because the memory lacks the detail a video would have, I get to re-create and recast that day again and again in my mind, each re-imagining allowing for the serendipitous recall of a hitherto long-forgotten moment, or smell, or sound, or feeling, each adding another layer to the story. A man and a boy; a father and his son, a cold winter’s day at the shore that will end with a ride home in our 1950 Plymouth DeLuxe, the boy tucked between his mom and dad on the front seat, eased slowly into sleep by the steady rumble of the tires on the pavement, the static-y lullaby of Perry Como on the AM radio, and their hushed conversation. As I said, I don’t really know, for absolute certain, if this photograph was taken the same day I made that recording, but it comforts me to think that it might have happened that way. All this, from one cracked and faded image. All this, from memory.

The Best Day of My Life

2010-04-03T14:36:00.002-04:00

I’m getting older. I don’t quite know how this has happened. Lest you think, however, that I’m just another whiny, graying baby-boomer, I have to make it clear at the outset that I don’t mind getting older; in fact I rather like the accumulated wisdom and experience that the years have conferred upon me. But let’s face reality -- at my age birthdays are freighted with weight and significance, a certain gravitas; the damp hand of the Grim Reaper coming closer and closer, that sort of thing. By comparison, you don’t see some twelve-year-old getting all depressed on his birthday, thinking about how he’ll never see eight again. But despite a sort of detached, intellectual appreciation of my chronological age I don’t feel old, and so I’m convinced that the guy with the gray hair – slightly balding – and the on-the-verge-of-craggy face that stares back at me in the mirror each night as I brush and floss, is some sort of sick joke optical illusion perpetrated on me by my wife and daughter for their own perverse amusement. I realize this doesn’t reflect well on my family (if you’ll pardon the pun), but I can think of no other explanation since the guy – no, the kid – inside me still feels, well, like a kid. Because of this, there is a part of me that still expects my birthday to be, somehow, the way it was when I was a boy. Special. Set apart. A day to be anticipated, savored. A day when the mundane is replaced, if only for a while, by the astonishing.

Oh, sure, your friends and family try to make a big fuss over the milestones like fifty and sixty. There are plenty of “over-the-hill” jokes and snide references to the state of your sex life, but for the rest of them, the reality is that people are busy, wives have important jobs and kids aren't kids anymore, but adults with real jobs and lives of their own, and so a grownup’s birthday can come and go in an anticlimactic blur of one or two cards and some chocolate cake. Presents become an issue as well, the further you sink into middle-aged material comfort. I suppose this says something profound about the ultimate inadequacy of a materialist lifestyle; however, I think it has even more to do with how we perceive the world as adults as opposed to our view of it as children. Adults are a tough audience. Our lives are in many ways (sad a commentary as this is) defined by the stuff we accumulate, and after a while simply getting more “stuff”, no matter how “special” or expensive it is, just doesn’t do anything for us any more. It gets to be a lot like the arms race; all about bigger, better, faster, but not always truly wanted or needed. When you’re a kid, though, it seems that there’s little or no effort required in taking one ordinary day out of three hundred sixty-five other ordinary days and transforming it into something wonderful.

All of which leads me, by an admittedly circuitous route, to one birthday in particular: May 12, 1964, the day I turned eleven and the year of the opening of the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. In March of that year I had my first taste of the Fair in the company of my fellow Cub Scouts (Pack 43, Den 1, Saint Aedan’s Parish, Jersey City) on a chilled, windy Sunday morning. We stopped first at the Vatican Pavilion to fulfill our Sunday Mass obligation, where I eagerly volunteered to serve as an Altar Boy (I was that kind of kid; always with the hand up in class. I’m surprised I wasn’t murdered by my peers at an early age). Not for the Pope, I hasten to point out; just for some poor parish priest from Long Island somewhere whose turn it was to say Mass there that day. It was still pretty cool, though.

We emerged an hour or so later, after Mass and a quick trip on a moving walkway past Michelangelo’s “Pieta”, beautifully lit and housed behind three inches of bulletproof glass. By now it was eleven AM or so, and the Fairgrounds were packed. I mean jammed. I mean waiting-for-an-hour-and-a-half-just-to-take-the-five-minute-ride-in-the-Johnson’s-Wax-Pavilion crowded. Most of our time was spent slowly threading our way through the crowds, like trying to wade upstream in a river of overcooked Cream of Wheat. We slogged on from exhibit to exhibit, looking for a line where the wait was only ten minutes less than forever. Grateful as I was just to be there, the day somehow lacked that certain sense of carefree fun I’d always assumed outings of this nature were supposed to have. So, jammed cheek-by-jowl with the rest of humanity who had come to gawk at corporate America’s vision of the clean, well-lit, and brightly waxed (but, surprisingly enough, fairly computer-free: who knew?) world of the future, I was pushed along by the rising tide of bodies until I found myself at the entrance gate again. We had gone into five pavilions (none of the interesting ones, mind you) and ridden on one ride. So much for my day at the Fair.

The next day I was back in class, up to my eyeballs in fifth-grade math, geography and science. A return trip to the Fair simply wasn’t on my radar. However, my mother, whom I never would have pegged as the adventurous type, began to concoct an elaborate scheme for a revisit almost immediately after that first ill-fated trip. She arranged to get a day off from work and then cleared her plans with the Sisters of St. Dominic who were my teachers. When I awoke the morning of my eleventh birthday, I assumed I’d be walking the six blocks to school as usual. Instead, to my utter surprise and endless delight, we ate a hurried breakfast, caught a bus to the waterfront in Jersey City, and boarded the special World’s Fair Ferry which shuttled passengers from a wharf near the Colgate factory (home of what was, at the time, the largest clock in the world) across the mouth of the Hudson River, then up the East River, to Queens, and docked right at the fairgrounds.

When we got there, it was as if we had been given the keys to Palisades Amusement Park after the place closed. Objectively, there had to be several thousand people at the Fair that day, but you hardly noticed them. Everything I wanted to see, every ride I wanted to ride, every hands-on exhibit that had been twelve or twenty or fifty people deep the Sunday of my first visit, was empty. No waiting. We ambled from building to building, going through the exhibit or on the ride twice and even three times, just because we could. I’ve had a lot of time to think, in the intervening years, about why this particular day is so special to me. I have always said to my family that it was without a doubt the best day of my life. Even the great milestones like graduation, marriage and the births of children don’t compare, since each one of those events were Important, with plenty of time to plan and therefore plenty of time to worry and fret over them. I suppose if someone had just whisked me to the church one day on a whim, where there was a full blown wedding ready to happen, it would have been a lot more, well, fun than it was. This day at the Fair was special for a lot of reasons: it was totally unexpected, and so out of character for my mother to have done such a thing as taken me out of school just so we could enjoy ourselves for a day. I realize now that it certainly must have been quite a sacrifice for her; my father had died two years earlier and money was tight. The total for the day, including transportation, passes to the fair and lunch, had to have equaled the day’s wage she was missing, probably more. More than anything though, was the sheer serendipity of it all. It was my birthday and every one of my friends were in class, but here I was at the World’s Fair! And best of all, it was as if my mother and I had the place all to ourselves.

At that moment, on that day, in that place which promised a glimpse into the “World of Tomorrow” (just as its predecessor had done in 1939), I had the once-in-a-lifetime privilege of being so totally immersed in being eleven years old, with all that implies; while at the same time seeing clearly (or so I thought at the time) how wonderful my adult life was going to be, shiny and filled with promise. I thought the AT&T Videophone was the coolest thing imaginable. I was fascinated by an almost room-sized contraption full of whirring tape reels and blinking lights that the folks at the IBM exhibit called an electronic computer, a fascinating gizmo that would have interesting (but limited) uses in science. I wanted so badly to drive one of those magnetically-controlled cars through GM’s City of Tomorrow, which, I still claim after all these years, was the neatest ride there. Because at the time I still believed I would grow up to become an astronomer, I easily pictured myself living in one of those domed colonies on the Moon or Mars. Everything I saw that day was a quick glance into one small bit of the infinite variety of futures I could imagine for myself.

But this day, this amazing day, this day unlike any other for the sheer surprise and wonder of it all, came to an end. We rode back to Jersey City on the ferry and the bus, and the next morning my mother went back to cooking lunch for three hundred hungry high school boys while I returned to my fifth grade classroom, full of stories to tell and with the hope of being the envy of all my classmates, if only for a few hours. The next day passed, and the next, and before I knew it I was graduating high school and then college; there was marriage and children (and the death of a child); and my mother had long gone to be reunited with my father, the man she loved and had missed so much. Other birthdays came and went, but it was never the same.

All this time later, I readily confess that I still harbor a full-blown disappointment that despite what I saw that day the “world of tomorrow”, my here and now, has no colonies on the moon and Mars, no atomic engines the size of typewriter cases, and even the videophone has had tough sledding. This shouldn’t be surprising though, since the one bit of wisdom (or insight) I’ve gained in my middle age is the knowledge that the future is something that sneaks up on you out of left field somewhere. Humankind’s vision wasn’t far-reaching enough, in 1964, to hold things like the Internet, and personal computers, and five dollar wrist watches with more power on one little chip inside them than in all the computers in all the Apollo space capsules. My own vision at eleven wasn’t broad enough to encompass all the day-to-day miracles I encounter now: a loving wife, a beautiful child on the brink of her own wondrous adventures in life, good neighbors, good friends.

But the fact remains, plain and simple, that when Spring is in the air and my birthday comes rolling around yet again, something is missing. While I wouldn’t trade my life or my family for anything, the part of me that is still eleven (that will always be eleven, no matter how old the face in the mirror grows) is waiting for something. I’m not exactly sure what it is that I expect, or hope for. Maybe I’m just hoping that this birthday will be it – that special, wonderful, day when I will feel eleven again and each moment is full of wide-eyed anticipation of what’s around the corner or in the next pavilion at the Fair. Or perhaps I’m simply waiting for one, just one, of those astonishing marvels of the future I saw spread across Flushing Meadows all those years ago to come true. Whatever it might be, the one thing I’m certain of is that it is this anticipation and hope that keeps me young; it is what reminds me that my life’s journey is far from over. It is what keeps me going, every day. Oh, and one more thing – thank you, Mama. I love you.

"Mama D." ca. 1964

Orphans In The Storm

2010-04-03T14:29:00.001-04:00

While I was singularly blessed with two parents who loved me beyond all reckoning, neither of them lived long enough. My father died only four days after my ninth birthday. My mother, at least, was able to see me graduate high school and college (and grad school, for that matter), and be there for my marriage and the birth of our first child. She died soon after; I swear to you that she held on long enough to hold her granddaughter in her arms, and then figured she was free to go in peace. I miss them both to this day. The next two posts are stories about these two remarkable people.

Letters to My Daughter, Part 1 (of many)

2010-04-03T14:17:00.000-04:00

Dear Kiddo: One night, while I was still a boy, I dreamt a dream of you. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time, and I certainly wasn’t in love, or anything that passed for love. It wasn't at all the thoughts of girlfriends or romance, or even the impulses of just-burgeoning adolescence, that caused me, asleep in my childhood bed, to be graced with a "vision" (because that's the only word I can think of to describe what this was) of someone whom I knew to be, without having to be told, my own daughter. In the dream I saw myself, as if in a movie, asleep on the sofa in my parlor. A small girl, with dark eyes and long dark hair in pigtails, a toy clasped in her hand, ran into the room, came up to the napping figure and threw her arms around him, and whispered in his ear. “Wake up! Wake up and play with me!” That was all there was; almost as if it was at her bidding, I awoke from the dream to the familiar darkness of my own room. I remember lying there, for a considerable while, awake and puzzled as to what it might mean. The dream neither frightened nor upset me; it just left me with a feeling I can only describe as an odd mix of contentment and wonder. I drifted back to sleep, and went off the school the next day, and thought no more of it for a very long time.

I had for several years known (or thought I did) that I wished to enter religious life, and to that end I entered the seminary only a few years later. I had always figured I'd be spending my days as the beloved (and somewhat eccentric) Father Michael, dispensing sound counsel to all who came to me, delivering Sunday sermons full of trenchant theological insight and peppered with my trademark self-deprecating dry humor. Well, like the old saying goes, we make plans and God laughs. As you and Mommy well know, I did not stay, and at the time there were reasons, good reasons, for that choice, none of which had to do with being in love or wanting to marry. Perhaps, all those years before, I should have interpreted the dream as a sign; it seems to me that, if there is anything to the notion of an immortal soul, then it is quite possible that our souls are in existence long before it is time for them to incarnate. All I know is something that I have told you over and again from practically the day you were born and I first held you in my arms: the life I had chosen for myself was not the life I was meant to live; I was meant to be your father. So you came to me one night in a dream, when I was still just a child myself, to tell me that you were waiting for me. I carried that with me for many years afterward, not really understanding what it might mean or even thinking about it consciously, until the day you were born and I saw you for the first time, again, and with a rush realized that I had always known it was you.

I love you, Kiddo.

Daddy

King for A Day; or The Lear Chronicles

2010-03-30T20:00:00.003-04:00

The following are exerpts from a correspondence with my esteemed colleague, Maestro Les Marsden -- actor, director, composer, wit, bon vivant; founder and conductor of the Mariposa (CA) Symphony, and one-time candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. I had just informed him that I had been engaged to direct a production of Shakespeare's King Lear. . .

From Les Marsden, dated 6 June 2007:

I replied to your e-mail, which was immediately bounced back to me in [a] somewhat summarily rude manner. Why, I oughta...I trust you'll ensure this NEVER happens again. Or if it does, is at least accompanied by a REAL, non-simulated box of chocolates. Hence, I'll try this address of yours; if that one fails too - well, then: I think you know what you can do about it.

[Anyway] I'm afraid your claim --- Marsden – Proof (if ever you needed it) that I am WAY crazier than you --- just doesn't hold water. Yes, you're quite f---ing nuts to direct Lear; however: I am FAR more insane than you because I would have insisted you cast ME in the title role....see? Me WAAAAY crazier. Good hearing from you, even despite the unfortunate fact that it was you I was hearing from. Have an incredible time directing that show, even with a hack in the lead who obviously couldn't begin to think about holding a candle to me....quite seriously, Lear was a role I someday looked forward to (click onto the attached pic of me getting ready to give a downbeat - see? Lear!) as I did also hope someday to do Prospero, but now: ain't gonna happen....
Okay. That's it. Oh - and did you ever work with Charles Nelson Reilly? He was a very dear friend....and so [read the] tribute I wrote which has managed to circulate here and there on the net.

. . . and my reply, dated a few hours later the same day. . .

Ah, Marsden, if only I DID have you as Lear. . . but that’s a story for another note.

Sorry about the bounceback; my primary ISP is (and I’m not kidding) a guy who runs his computer business out of his barn in the next town over; he was one of the first people in this area to offer internet access and I’ve stuck with him just because he’s the kind of New England eccentric that should be encouraged. Unfortunately, his idea of spam blocking is to bounce random e-mails from folks like yourself (an address that’s unfamiliar to him), while letting through at least 15 or sixteen dozen solicitations from on-line gambling sites, off-shore pharmacies, and some guy named Nkwome who claims that he is more than willing to cut me in on a chunk of 30 million (USD) that he’s trying to transfer into the States.

The piece on Charles Nelson Reilly was wonderful; I never worked with him (I’m lucky I got to work with YOU, nevermind anybody REALLY famous), and if I do drop dead tomorrow (an event not out of the realm of possibility, given the circumstances), it’s good to know that my grieving widow could count on you for an eulogy that would convince my friends and neighbors that the nice, sweet old guy they thought they knew was someone who made Jeffrey Dahmer look like the latest winner of the Pillsbury Bake-Off.

I’d love to make this note longer (and funnier); I’m glad to see that you, your family and the Symphony are all doing well. And remember – at least the dumbf--ks watching your hair bounce showed up to listen to the music. Lear as a summer’s evening entertainment in New Hampshire – my guess is we’ll play the whole run to about twelve guys from the English Department at Dartmouth, all of whom will be sitting in the dark, making “tsk, tsk” noises and taking notes. When I come up for air in a few weeks I will bring you the whole sordid tale that is me directing King Lear – right now I just need to get some sleep and pray to God nobody slices themselves in twain during tomorrow’s daily fight call.

Adieu, Hackenbush. May your hair grow ever longer.

Michael

Finally, the show opened, and, as promised, I had a long, sordid tale to relate to my old friend. . .

My Dear Hackenbush:

Not that you care, but my production of King Lear was a triumph; excellent audience response, kudos from all who saw it for the flawless direction and brilliant acting, etc.; but that’s not why I am writing you. I am writing to tell you a story that began this past Friday at around noon. The show only runs for 7 performances, barely time to get warmed up and really going with the piece, but that’s the result of all kinds of factors out of the control of the hired help. This past Friday was our 6th scheduled performance. I had planned not to haunt the theatre that night, figuring the kiddies were doing just fine without me coming around simply to take a nap in the balcony during the show. Around noon, my stage manager extraordinaire M ---- L---- calls me to say that J--- ,our Lear, the Artistic Director of the theatre company has laryngitis and might not be able to go on that night. We both of us agreed that trying to send some poor dope on as Lear with a book in his hand would be the height of folly; and besides, we didn’t know anybody who was (a.) Available, and (b.) Stupid enough to do it. J--- was heading off to his local quack to see what could be done with sprays, shots or other nostrums to get him in shape to perform; but we figured if by half hour he was not recovered enough to go on, we’d just cancel the show that night.

At 5 PM I get a call from the Producer. J--- still has no real voice and is in no shape to perform. The producer, a nice enough fellow possessed of no real experience in live theatre production but a VERY fat checkbook has, despite his inexperience, nonetheless read and memorized Rule 1 in the Producer’s Handbook – NEVER GIVE BACK THE MONEY. He goes on to say that he has consulted with members of the Board of Directors, the head of the Educational Outreach program (a 27 year old kid who is also running the fly rail for our show), and several of the members of the company, all who agree that I should be the dope that goes on tonight (cold) with a book in his hand. I give him at least 23 reasons why I don’t think this is a good idea, but he’s not buying any of them. So finally, provided he understands that I think this is a REALLY BAD IDEA I will suck it up and take one for the team (and the evening’s box office receipts).

By now, after talking with the producer and the stage manager, it is 5:30 PM. It takes me at least an hour and a half to get from home up to the theatre, which means I will get there (barring flood, fire, famine, accident or moose sightings) at about 7 PM just in time for Fight Call. Somehow on the way up I manage to simultaneously drive a stick-shift car and say ten decades of the Rosary. I arrive and am greeted by my cast, every man-jack of which asks “how are you feeling?”, the answer to which is “I don’t know yet, ask me in three hours.” I go to great lengths to assure all of them that this was not my idea and I was all for giving them the night off. I am hustled into the costume, my script in hand (fortunately, since I made them, it has all the cuts in it); and I have just enough time to work the slap Lear has with Oswald and to make a few test hoists of Cordelia (a woman who weighs all of 100 pounds) while figuring out how I’ll manage to hold on to the script while howling and trying to set her down on the floor without dropping her on her head for the last scene. She offers to hold the book in her teeth (an offer I momentarily consider); but I figure if I just keep howling until we get downstage I can put her down, extract the hand with the book out from under her skinny little tush, and then start the lines. The Company manager makes an announcement to the assembled multitude about the substitution, and all of a sudden I hear somebody who has a voice which sounds a lot like mine saying “Attend the Lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester.” The rest is a blur. I didn’t fall down, and I didn’t throw up, so I figure that’s a win.

I am told it went well; the actors all claimed it was good (but they’re probably all just suck-ups hoping I’ll cast them again, so I can’t really rely on that). What I know is that I was reasonably audible and not particularly subtle, but I never lost my place even when turning pages and I actually remembered all the blocking.

I never want to have to do that again.

So I’m sorry, Marsden, but I can now say without fear of contradiction that I am WAY crazier than you.

Mikey

Epistling -- vbl. sb. Obs.

2010-03-30T11:40:00.008-04:00

The Oxford English Dictionary (one of my favorite bits of light reading) defines Epistling as: Epistolary matter; correspondence. As if that weren't wonderful enough on its own, there are other great words like:

Epistler (the writer of an epistle), epistolarily (also epistolarly or epistolatory, in the manner of a letter or epistle); epistoler or epistolean or epistolist (the writer of an epistle), epistolet (a small epistle); and, my favorite, epistolizable (that which may form a letter).

All this is to say that much of what I will be sharing here are letters, as I mentioned before -- mostly to my daughter, many to friends. Letters are wonderful things, and while I'm not one of those Luddites that descries e-mail because it has allegedly ruined letter-writing as an art (I find I'm more likely to write longer, and better, in an e-mail than if I had to commit pen -- or typewriter -- to paper), I do think that too many people now are content to use a shorthand form of communicating, whether in text messages or e-mails, rather than putting in the time and the effort to craft a message, no matter how short that communication might be.

I send my daughter long letters, short notes, and random observations on a regular basis; I will post and share a number of these in the days to come.

In the interim, I do urge anyone who may read this to think about putting in some serious time when you write to someone, no matter how trivial it may seem at the time. You never know who might read it someday.

Disclaimers, Caveats, and The Fine Print

2010-03-29T16:27:00.006-04:00

I don't do fiction. In general, what you will read here are true stories that involve many real people, and me (I make no claims as to my own reality; I leave that for others to judge). The events and characters may have been exaggerated for effect (especially if I was writing to a friend who knew the folks involved), but what you will read here did, in fact happen, and does involve all of the individuals named or hinted at. Because of this, while I do hold a grudge (as those who know me well will attest), I plan to exercise a certain level of discretion regarding the use of real names and places. My suspicion is, however, that if any of the people involved actually do read this, they will recognize themselves immediately. My hope is, in changing names, dates and localities, that they won't have grounds to sue.

In the Beginning. . .

2010-03-29T15:25:00.007-04:00

I realized some time ago that I had amassed a great deal of written material from the last 30 years: essays, detailed letters and e-mails to friends and family , and other random jottings that I, at least, found reasonably amusing and perhaps worth sharing with the world at large. So, seeing as how pretty much everybody and their brother-in-law was taking to the Web to self-publish anything -- from what terribly cute thing their cat did the other day to novel-length manifestos (manifesti?) advocating apocalyptic revolution -- I figured, "what the hell, what's a few thousand words more charging around out there in the ether?" I've tried to keep a sense of humor in my life; it has certainly helped to keep things in perspective, and I've been aware that for a long while (probably the result of reading too many volumes of the Collected Letters of the Great and Near-Great over the years) I tend to write as if (I hope!) it will be read by a wider audience somewhere, someday. Some of it is funny, some of it wallows excessively in nostalgia and/or sentiment, and most of it is probably indicative of serious psychological disturbances that really ought to be looked into someday by a qualified professional.

And so, good people, despite all that -- or, perhaps, because of it -- I've decided to post this stuff to see if anyone else might see in it anything of value. Besides, I promised myself a while ago that I would write more and oftener, because I just enjoy the process so.

Like Hamlet says, "If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come -- the readiness is all." I have no idea what the hell that means in this context (well I do, actually, as you will see if you keep reading), except that a good quote, especially from Shakespeare, is always a fine way to round off a bit of writing. And, as the playwright/director /actor George Abbott once wrote :"If it's good enough for Shakespeare, it's good enough for us!"