David Bowie, Glenn Frey, and Me

The past month has been a rough one for us music fans, with the deaths of some major musical figures.  R & B singer Natalie Cole, hard rocker Lemmy Kilmeister, singer David Bowie and, most recently, Glenn Frey, founder of the legendary rock group the Eagles are the biggest names among those who have recently passed away, but there have also been a number of deaths among lesser known members of popular bands, studio musicians, producers and other industry notables.  Music has been an integral part of my life since I was very young, so when artists who have been on my radar screen for a long time suddenly pass away, it is la kind of loss, like that of an old friend or acquaintance, depending on who it is. 

I can’t honestly account for myself as a true fan of either Natalie Cole or Lemmy Kilmeister’s band Motorhead.  While I respect their work, Cole’s soulful crooning and Kilmeister’s aggressive, grinding hard rock fell just beyond the furthest ends of my musical taste spectrum.  Nevertheless, when I heard of their deaths, it felt like someone had snipped away pieces from a beautiful but increasingly tattered tapestry, one that has always been a part of my life and that I too often take for granted.  I didn’t listen to Natalie Cole or Motorhead very often, but I liked the idea that they were out there making music that people enjoyed and was sadden to hear that they were now silenced.  With the deaths of David Bowie and Glenn Frey however, it wasn’t just pieces of the tapestry snipped away.  Some new large holes were added, alongside those created for me by the deaths of Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Freddy Mercury, Kurt Cobain, George Harrison, and Michael Jackson, among others.  They had put forth great music that had been a tangible part of my life, and they were still active in their careers when they died.  They weren’t done yet.  There was still more to come from them that we will now never get to hear.  I felt real loss.

There was a lot of coverage of the deaths of both David Bowie and Glenn Frey in the media, and an outpouring of reactions in social media.  The men were alike in some ways and very different in others.  Both of them came onto the music scene in the early 70s, both did some acting work in addition to music, and both gradually faded from regular public attention by the coming of the 21^st century.  And at the end of their careers, both men were still actively making music.  Yet Bowie was mostly considered an eclectic musical artist who had experienced occasional mainstream acceptance. His focus had always been on the art of music.  Frey, on the other hand, was very much a straightforward rock musician and businessman, who only stepped out of the mainstream to explore new ground on rare occasions.  The artistic side of music was not unimportant to Frey, but he was always very candid in admitting that it had to pay the bills too.  Regardless of the driving forces behind each of them, the end products that each gave us, their music, was truly great.  It was fascinating and touching following the reactions to both of their deaths, and it taught me some things about the part music plays in our lives.

Before the release of 1983’s Let’s Dance album, I wasn’t very familiar with David Bowie’s work at all.  I’d seen some of his albums at the store, but out of context they didn’t make much of an impact on me.  MTV hadn’t come to rural Maine yet at that point, and the only radio stations that played pop and/or rock in my conservative corner of the world kept their playlists firmly grounded in the most widely-acceptable hits.  Other than the rare “Young Americans” or “Heroes”, David Bowie wasn’t on the radio much in northern Maine in the early 80s.  That was about to change in 1983.  Let’s Dance was Bowie’s headlong dive into the new wave pop that was dominating the international airwaves at that time, and the album was a gigantic commercial success, due in large part to new fans like me who now had access to Bowie on mainstream radio.  

I remember hearing the title track to Let’s Dance for the first time late on a hot July night in 1983.  It was the night before my family was to go away on our annual two-week summer vacation to the Maine coast, and I was as excited as I would have been the night before Christmas.  Add to that the fact that it was a swelteringly hot night and it was a recipe for insomnia.  Sometime after midnight, I gave up tossing and turning, and sat on my bedroom windowsill in hopes of getting some cool air. I plugged my earpiece into my little FM radio (so as not to disturb my blissfully sleeping brother with whom I shared a room) and tuned in the local rock station.  The soundtrack of a small town Friday night’s squealing tires and chirping crickets played in one ear and the tinny sounds of rock and roll from a transistor radio in the other while I stared out at the moon over the houses of my neighborhood.  Before long, the DJ came on and introduced a new song by British singer David Bowie.  British acts were flooding the American music scene in 1983, and I was getting into a lot of it, so my interest was piqued.  The song was “Let’s Dance”, and it really hooked me on the first play.  Bowie’s vocals were mesmerizing, and the heavy drums and bluesy guitar solo captured my heart.  “Let’s Dance” became one of my favorite songs of that summer, and I ended up buying the album not long after that. Over time, I came to appreciate the full scope of David Bowie’s career, but to this day, Let’s Dance is my favorite Bowie album, though it is also the one at which many of the biggest Bowie fans turn their noses up.  Among many Bowie ‘purists’, Let’s Dance was just tolerable at best, and a sell-out at the very worst.  To me, it was, and is, terrific.  I was into his next two mid-80s albums too, Tonight and Never Let Me Down before Bowie’s new releases stopped gaining my attention.

Glenn Frey and the Eagles go back even further with me, literally to my earliest music memories.  My parents always had the radio on around my house when I was young, so I was exposed to a lot of music, albeit mostly just the biggest hits that made it onto the local radio scene.  The Eagles were very popular on the stations they listened to, likely because the band had a country-edge to them that gave them some crossover appeal, especially in my part of the state where country music was king.  I knew all the words to “Hotel California” before I was ten years old, and songs like “Take It Easy”, “One of These Nights” and “Already Gone” feel like they are encoded in my DNA.  The Eagles have always been there in the background of my life for as long as I could remember.  Not only was the band popular in my home, but my closest peers liked them too.  One of my favorite teenage memories is of riding around town with my buddies in my friend Jared’s battered red Volkswagen Beetle, all the windows down and the Eagles’ “Already Gone” blasting from the stereo.  Over time, I literally wore out my vinyl copies of both Eagles greatest hits albums, as well as my cassettes of Hotel California and Eagles Live.  I’ve never done that with any other records or cassettes, and I have owned a lot of them. 

I was an avid follower of the solo careers of the Eagles members through the 80s after the band broke up, especially Glenn Frey and Don Henley, and have carried my love of all things Eagles well into adulthood.  Needless to say, I was overjoyed when “Hell froze over” (as the band members had said it would have to) and the band reunited in the mid-1990s, and one of my regrets is that I never got to see them perform live.  My tastes have shifted over time, and my favorite Eagles songs don’t tend to be the biggest hits anymore.  I am more intrigued by the relatively-obscure album cuts that didn’t often get my attention in the past.  My current favorites are “After The Thrill Is Gone”, a Frey/Henley duet from the One Of These Nights album and “Waiting in the Weeds” from 2007’s Long Road Out Of Eden.  All those great songs, including those amazing and unmistakable Eagles harmonies that have been running through my head since I was a preschooler, would not have come to be without Glenn Frey.

My favorite part of the David Bowie catalogue, the Let’s Dance/Tonight/Never Let Me Down period of the mid-80s is one about which few others I’ve interacted with on the subject wax nostalgic. I got a lot of “Oh yeah, but what about the Ziggy Stardust era?”  I don’t dislike his earlier or later work, it’s just that the mid-80s were an especially memorable time in my life: first girlfriend, first real job, getting my driver’s license.  Music, then as now, was a major part of my life, and I am particularly fond of the songs that formed my own soundtrack to those times, which in turn gives a huge boost in my heart to that particular stretch of David Bowie’s career.  I first go to know David Bowie in the mid-80s.  That’s the David Bowie that means the most to me.

The Eagles, on the other hand, seem to be a band that people either love or hate.  They gotten massive amounts of airplay over the years, and their songs may have worn thin with some people.  They also developed a reputation for being arrogant, for being somewhat derivative at times, and for being too focused on profit, all of which has worked against them with some listeners.  Jeff Bridges’ character “The Dude” famously gave voice to this in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski when he is stuck in a taxi while “Peaceful, Easy Feeling” is playing on the radio.  “I hate the f—in' Eagles man,” he said to the cab driver, just before he was thrown out of the car.  Personally, I would have thrown him out of the car too.  I love the Eagles.  Their music has always been there, either in the background or foreground of my life, ever since I can remember.  The fact that people important to me like my parents and my high school buddies were also Eagles fans cemented their place for me.  Of course they weren’t a perfect band, but for me they are almost like family, and how many of us have a full set of perfect relatives?  The positive associations I have made with their music for over forty years far outweighs the negatives.  When Glenn Frey’s voice comes out of my speakers singing “Heartache Tonight”, I’m back to being 11 years old, waiting for that song to come on the radio so I can catch it on my tape recorder. You can’t put a price on something like that.

The passings of David Bowie and Glenn Frey have underscored for me the idea that, like most art forms, there really isn’t much about music that is absolutely “right” or “wrong”.  You might say that there are no bad songs, just missed connections.  I’ve come to believe that a lot has to do with the associations we have with music and the people who perform it.  If there is a connection between some music and something positive for you, then there is a greater likelihood you are going to have positive feelings about that music, regardless if it is something widely considered “a classic”.  If the first dance you had with the love of your life was to “Purple People Eater”, then I think there’s a good chance that even that song could one of your favorites.  And as far as today’s music being “crap”, as many in my generation and older like to say, well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.  Around the time I turned 30, most new music just wasn’t reaching my heart anymore.  But if kids today are making their own lifelong memories to a soundtrack of today’s popular songs the way I did to the music of David Bowie and the Eagles, among many others, then who am I to say their music isn’t just as good?

Snowshoeing Back In Time

It’s been a long, rough winter in northern Maine, and it’s not over yet.  The other day, for the first time this season, I got to do one of my favorite winter recreational activities: snowshoeing.  Up until mid-January, there had not been enough decent snow to do it, and since then, there has been one howling snowstorm followed by another, with extremely frigid temperatures and wind chills sandwiched in between them.  There have been a few snowshoe-worthy days here and there, but without fail they have come on days when I have been working.  When the thermometer read a tropical 25 degrees (‘nice’ is relative) on my most recent day off, I tossed my snowshoes into the back of my car and headed out into the country to my grandparents’ old place.

Much has changed on that property from the days when I spent at least a part of every school vacation there as a child.  The forest has encroached on much of the land, most of the outbuildings are now gone, and many familiar landmarks on the property like clotheslines and flower gardens have disappeared over time.  The house itself is still inhabited by my cousin, though his housekeeping and landscaping habits are worlds apart from those of my late grandparents.  As I trod around the property on my snowshoes, enjoying the exercise and lamenting the effects of the inevitable passage of time, I began to sharpen my focus a bit, and found that there were still some reminders of the days gone by.

For instance, I noticed that a pair of very old and heavy swinging gates were still standing near the rail bed that runs adjacent to the property.  The railroad tracks led past my grandparents’ place to the local airport, which was an air base and prisoner of war camp during World War II.  The gates had to be manually opened and closed whenever a train passed into or out of the base.  I tend to doubt that the gates would have kept an actual train from entering the base, but they probably provided some security that no one would be able to easily drive some other type of vehicle on the tracks into the base without authorization.  The rest of the base was ringed with barbed wire fencing, about four feet high, which is not much more than would be used to keep livestock corralled these days.  Some of the barbed wire can still be found in the woods there.  Securing a military base on home soil meant something very different in the early 1940s compared to today.

By the time my siblings, cousins and I came along in the 60s and 70s, the air base was long defunct and was now functioning as a somewhat sleepy regional airport.  The swinging gates near my grandparents’ place no longer served any purpose, but they still stood, leaning a bit with age even then.  They still swung however, and that was what mattered to us kids.  With great effort against the weight and rust, we would push the gates up to their nearly closed position, and then jump onto them.  The gates leaned enough that they would swing back to the open position on their own, providing a pretty cool ride with a very abrupt stop at the end.  The challenge of holding on when the gates crashed open against the brush that they normally leaned against was the best part of it all.

The gates were certainly not moving that day I was investigating them on my snowshoes, buried as they were in deep snow.  I would be surprised if they would move at all now under any circumstances, age having taken more of a toll on them.  That doesn’t mean I won’t at least give it a try once spring comes.

One of the gates in question. There was no swinging on it this day.

Just beyond those gates, a little ways along the rail bed, there is a small tree-covered hillock that seems out of place if you stop and think about it.  I recognized it immediately.  Underneath all that snow, and probably under quite a bit of brush, I knew there was a thin piece of steel sticking up from the ground.  My grandmother and I used to walk by there quite frequently when I was young, and she said that it was the site of a fatal plane crash years before I was born, occurring not long after the air base made the switch to a regional airport.  The pilot was killed in the crash, she said, and the remains of the small plane were left there  in the woods along the train tracks for some time afterwards.  She told me that it wasn’t unusual for people to walk in to see the remains of the plane and take pieces away as souvenirs.  My grandmother said she once saw a man carrying out a large piece of what looked like the plane’s tail.  In time, railway officials buried the remains of the plane in hopes of discouraging visitors.  

By the time I first saw the site in the mid 1970s, the railroad tracks were seldom used, and the trees still growing over the plane’s burial mound today were already taller than a grown man.  As a kid, it was quite sobering, thinking that a man had lost his life on that spot, and it still was on that snowy day of my recent visit, so many years later.

At the end of my snowshoeing trek, another memory of the days of my grandparents came upon me, also somewhat unexpectedly.  It had been my first snowshoeing adventure of the year, and that meant breaking new trails in deep snow while not being especially physically conditioned to the activity.  Quite simply, I was wiped out when I got back to my car.  Before I packed everything away to head home, I flopped down on my back in a nearby snowbank to rest and just listen, and was reminded of the sounds of being so far out in the country in mid-winter.  I used to do much the same thing when I was staying with my grandparents during the winter time and had spent a long afternoon outside playing in the snow, which I often did.

Mind you, there are not many of sounds out there in mid-winter.  The silence is almost total.  If you’ve been playing hard, as I was that recent day, the only thing you can hear for a while is the sound of your own heart beating.  There are no busy roads nearby, and all the birds have gone south for the winter or are laying low, except for some hardy chickadees.  I could hear several of them twittering in the trees nearby, calling to each other in their language.  There has always been a large population of chickadees around that property.  To my amazement, my grandmother used to be able to hand feed some of them, who were possibly ancestors of the little birds I was listening to now.  A breeze came up and blew through the evergreens with a distinctive hiss.  There are no leaves on the deciduous trees at all, and the snow has buried anything on the ground that might rustle.   The shushing sound of the wind in the pines and spruces remains the defining sound of wintertime for me.  

Before I got up out of the snow, a jetliner passed far overhead with a distant rumble. I remember hearing planes high overhead after a long day of playing hard, and wondering where they were going and who was on them.  I liked to follow them with my eyes if I could spot them until they were out of sight.  A Cold War-era air force bomber and refueling base was located about an hour north of there when I was a kid, so the sound of B-52s and KC-135s flying high overhead was very common then.  I watched the jetliner from the other day leaving contrails in its wake until it was gone behind the trees, just as I might have nearly 40 years ago in that very spot.  

As I was putting my snowshoeing gear into my car, it occurred to me that none of the things I had been pondering had any monetary value or even meaning of any kind to anyone, except maybe to some of my siblings and cousins.  A rusty old gate, a small tree covered hill buried in snow, and the sound of jets high overhead would likely go totally unnoticed by most people who had walked the same path I had just taken.  Yet they opened up a floodgate of memories for me that day.  I want to try to remind myself that it is never a waste of time to stop and take the time to just look around and listen.  You never know the significance that seemingly insignificant things might take on in the future.

Wheels

I was recently going over my finances for the past twelve months, and noticed that my car took a much larger chunk out of my budget than usual in 2014.  The reason is fairly simple: the car, a Hyundai Santa Fe, is a 2007 model year, which means that it has reached the vehicular equivalent of middle age.  Just as has happened with me in my own middle age, lots of things have suddenly come up needing some attention.  Luckily though, for both me and the car, most of it has been preventative maintenance.  I am known as a pretty frugal guy, so one would think that I would be bothered by all the extra cash I laid out on my car last year.  If those expenditures were on anything else, say my wardrobe for example, or my lawn and garden equipment, I probably would indeed be a bit irked.  The thing is, the primary set of wheels in my life at any given time has always held a rather special place in my heart.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say money is no object when it comes to my vehicles, but it is less of an object than it would be for other things.

Big Wheels Rolling

My love affair with things that go started very young.  At Christmas when I was almost three I got a low-slung plastic tricycle popularly known in the early 1970s as a Big Wheel.  These slick little machines were heavily marketed during children’s television shows as being the pinnacle of cool for the preschool set.  In addition to a storage box in which to keep important “stuff”, the big draw for kids like me was a hand brake on one of the rear wheels which effectively allowed the driver to spin out in the most awesome way possible.  And yes, it was well and truly awesome.  The house where I grew up had a long sloping driveway that was just perfect to barrel down at high speed and then yank up on the hand brake, spinning almost all the way around.  The end of the driveway was constantly marked by rings left behind by my spins.  I wore out my first Big Wheel toward the end of its first year by overusing the hand brake to the point where it wore through the rear wheel.  Such was my love for the Big Wheel, and my parents’ appreciation for it as an outlet for my energy, that I got a replacement the next Christmas.  It came with a parental proviso, however: Lay off the hand brake.

This vintage ad sums it all up nicely.

Big Wheel #2 ultimately received even rougher treatment than its predecessor.  Not only was I getting bigger, but since I was using the hand brake less, I needed to find another way to get a vehicular thrill, and found it in jumping the Big Wheel off whatever makeshift ramp I could concoct.  I rode it as fast as I could off curbs, low steps, or any other slight elevation, lifting up on the front end.  It was an attempt to “get air” before “getting air” was even a thing.  Heck, this was even before the Dukes of Hazzard.  Much like the spinouts, these jumps were well and truly awesome in my mind, even if they were usually only an average of four inches off the ground.

I think this was Big Wheel #2.

My second Big Wheel died when it broke in half.  Yes, you read that right.  It broke in half!  While I won’t disagree that I played pretty hard with it, it is also worth noting that in those days before video games, DVDs and the like, kids spent MUCH more time outside, at least several hours a day for me and even more in the summers and on weekends.  The majority of that time for me was spent on wheels.  Big plastic ones.  Therefore, some attrition was to be expected.  Those things got a whole lot of use before they finally gave up their ghosts.  Believe it or not, my parents did actually get me a third Big Wheel, but fortunately for their pocketbook, a market in used ones had emerged locally at yard sales, the toys having been around for a while at that point and kids were outgrowing them.  They were able to get my last one at a steep discount. 

Frankenstein's Bicycle

My third Big Wheel did not meet the same untimely end as my first two, because shortly after I got it, I got my first two-wheeler, which subsequently dominated my attention.  My first bike did not arrive with a lot of fanfare.  It was not a Christmas or birthday gift.  There was no anticipation, and I did not even ask for it.  It just kind of happened.  One Saturday in the summer before I started kindergarten, my father and I were nosing around in my grandmother’s garage and found the remains of several of my uncles’ old bicycles, which had been sitting in there for ten years or so.  It didn’t take my father very long to determine that he had all the parts he would need to assemble one Frankenstein’s monster of a bicycle for me from the remains of the old ones, and later that afternoon I had my first bicycle.  The only expenditure on my parents’ part was a couple of dollars at Western Auto for training wheels.  I only used the training wheels for little more than 48 hours, however.  The bike had a pretty heavy frame compared to most contemporary bikes of that time, and the training wheels were not made for that kind of weight, so they started bending almost immediately.  When it was pointed out to me by my friends that I was riding on two wheels anyway, I took the training wheels off by myself.

I had several bicycles after that first one, but that bike my father cobbled together in my grandmother’s garage was the best.  It was too big for me when I first got it, but that didn’t keep me off it for a second.  A shade of dark metallic green with a white banana seat and huge handlebars, it looked like no other bike on my street.  The tires were of an early 60s vintage, very wide and thick, and the frame was virtually military-grade.  That bike was solid as a tank, and many neighborhood kids recognized its uniqueness.  Sure, it wasn’t as sleek and attractive as some of their newer ones, but it was solid as a rock and remarkably fast.  I distinctly remember an older boy named Kevin admiring it and asking me how much I wanted for it, and I replied that it wasn’t for sale.  Even though I was just a little kid, I could tell that this ten year old was trying to con me when he offered me a hundred dollars, then a thousand, and then a million.  “I’ve really got it at home,” he said, counting on a preschooler’s lack of money sense.  I only had to let him have the bike now he said, and he’d come right back with the money.  Yeah, right.  My final response was that I would only sell it “for the highest number there is”, and then pedaled off, with my suspicion that I had something special on my hands confirmed.  

Bicycles were my primary mode of transportation and the symbol of my personal freedom for the next nearly ten years.  I always felt naked if I didn’t have my bike within easy reach, and it was always a sad day each year when the first snow came and my bike had to be put away for the winter.  It proved to be my parents’ most effective discipline tool in my childhood, as few punishments were worse for me than to have my bike taken away for a day, much less a week or more.  Send me to my room. Take away the TV.  But leave my bike alone.

Beloved Rustbucket

My first car came to me before I even got my driver’s license.  Living in a rural area, my parents had to do a lot of chauffeuring for my brothers and me, so my being able to get myself around would be a real plus for them.  However, they didn’t relish the idea of having to share the family vehicle with another driver, so they encouraged me to start saving for my own car as soon as I laid the subject of driver education classes out on the table.  I started working a part time job in the spring of the year I turned 15, and by that August, I had enough saved up for a very used car my father had found and approved.  I paid $575 for a rusty, 13 year-old Chevrolet Caprice with nearly 100,000 miles on it.  It sat in the driveway taunting me by its presence for the four weeks between when I got it and when I actually passed my driver’s test.  Needless to say, by the time I got behind the wheel to drive it by myself for the first time, I had polished and detailed that car to the point where it probably would have glowed in the dark, in spite of the rust.  I spent nearly as much on Turtle Wax, Windex, Armor All and paper towels as I did for the car itself.

It looked a lot like this, only less sexy and more rusty.

The Caprice was huge, and even in those days of cheaper gasoline it cost me a fortune to keep it filled.  I could fit a lot of my friends in it however, which was a real plus because I was one of the first in my class to get my license and one of the only ones to have his own car.  My services as a taxi driver to and from school were in high demand.  The car wasn’t very reliable.  It was always a roll of the dice as to whether it would start when the temperature dropped below freezing, and it had a habit of stalling in almost any weather.  There was a constant blue cloud coming from the exhaust pipe, and the interior smelled like burning oil, which I tried to cover up by using a half dozen cherry-scented air fresheners.  For a while toward the end of its life, I actually had to keep the passenger side door closed with a piece of rope.  It probably would have never passed inspection again, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the Environmental Protection Agency had a warrant out for its arrest.  Nonetheless, it was all mine, my ticket to freedom, and I loved it.  That Caprice had one of the smoothest rides of any car I’ve ever driven, and was so large that if I had been in an accident, it would have kept me relatively safe compared to the ubiquitous compact cars that were on the road at the time.  Plus the radio had great reception and was LOUD!  I only had that Caprice for a year before the cost of upkeep got to be too much, and I downsized to a newer, smaller car which had fewer problems and expenses.  It just didn’t live up to the standard that the first clunker had set for me, though.  I sold the Caprice to a man who wanted to use it for parts.  To this day when I smell cherries, I am reminded of the air fresheners I used in that old car and wonder if it is still around, rusting in the woods or in a junkyard somewhere.

I’ve had quite a few cars in the thirty years since I bought that Caprice, all of which came to be central players in my life.  My latest is no exception.  It’s my chariot, my set of wheels.  I travel a lot, and when I am on the road, my car acts as a mobile comfort zone when I am staying in pleasant but strange places surrounded by welcome but unfamiliar things.  There’s always a slight sense of satisfaction when I catch sight of my car in a parking lot after having been away from it for an extended period.  I don’t think it is so much the car itself that stirs these feelings, as much as what it represents: freedom, opportunity, and the ability to ultimately return to the things that mean the most to me.

A glamour shot of my current chariot, from the manufacturer.

Little Chris and the Naive Politics of Black and White

Growing up in a small town in the 1970s, there were plenty of other kids with whom I could play.  It was a less worried time, when many parents would allow their kids to freely roam their neighborhoods and beyond.  For the most part, they did it without fear of anything more than the old lady down the street calling to report to them that their child was climbing on the roof of the toolshed.

When I was about five years old, I was the youngest member of a group of about a half dozen friends who lived in the houses around mine.  The acknowledged leader of this gang of kids was also named Chris like me, so he was called “Big Chris” and I was saddled with the moniker “Little Chris”, a nickname which I loathed and despised with a white hot passion.  Nonetheless, that’s how it was.

"Little Chris", from around the time about which I am writing.  And yes, turtleneck sweaters were considered "in" at the time.

As the youngest of the group, I was the least worldly, relatively speaking, and because of that naivety and my strong desire to be accepted by the others, I was prone to being put up to things.  It was never anything terribly serious, but I was a sucker nonetheless.  If they needed someone to swipe some apples from a neighbor’s tree, I was their man.  When they wanted to see if the wooden ramp they built for bicycle jumps was too high, I was their go-to guy.  And if they wanted to get some candy from Mrs. Johnson, who always had a bowl on her kitchen counter as treats for us kids, I was the emissary who was sent to ask for it, because I was not only the smallest and presumably cutest, but also they knew I would not refuse to go.

Yes, “Little Chris” was gullible, but as I got a bit older and gained some more life experience, that gullibility decreased rapidly.  Before too long, I was on to them, and not long after that, I could put others up to doing things if I chose.  As a little more light was shed on matters through time and experience, I saw things I hadn't previously, and it worked to my advantage.

I’ve been thinking about my days as gullible “Little Chris” lately as I have read and watched the news, both national and state.  It seems like many politicians, pundits, and media outlets these days are implementing a “Little Chris” treatment on you and me, and sadly, are meeting with some degree of success.

My intent in this post is not to single out a particular person or entity, so I’ll be dealing in generalities here.

We live in an age with an overwhelming amount of information at our fingertips.  There is such a high volume of data out there, much of it conflicting, that many suffer from fatigue in dealing with it.  It’s much easier just to have someone distill it for us.  And there is no shortage of talking heads who are willing to cherry-pick information and give it to us in a way that they want us to understand it.  It is made all the more persuasive when this cherry-picked information is given to us wrapped in emotion, drama, academic language, and/or pre-conceived ideas.  The overused term propaganda would apply here, though even it has become highly charged by some of the very people who use it, with direct connections often made to the wartime PR tactics of enemy nations.

This cherry-picking approach to politics and media bias would not be so pervasive if it didn’t actually work.  But it does.  Too many of us are easily persuaded.  Too many of us buy into what is being sold to us without asking ourselves if there is more to it.  The sins of omission seem far more frequent than those of commission in politics and media.

Let me give an example that I am just pulling out of the air.  Suppose a local media outlet reports on a horrific home invasion, where an elderly woman is beaten and robbed for drugs and money in her home.  It’s a terrible thing, and a legitimate news story, for sure.  Then, two nights later, the same media outlet starts airing a series of special reports on how you can protect yourself your loved one and your property from home invasions, complete with ominous music and scary clips from the most recent incident and others that have taken place in other parts of the country.  Interviews are aired with people who have experienced such a terrible thing.  Many viewers may become fearful.  It must be a problem, or else why would the news be devoting so much time and attention to it?  (Answer: Ratings.) Not only are viewers locking their doors and keeping their drugs secure, which would be sensible reactions, but some have also become frightened when they see an unfamiliar face in their neighborhood, and may even now refuse to go for a walk down their own street by themselves for fear of crime.  Some may go so far as to install an electronic security system in their homes.  Their fear has taken away some of their freedom, not to mention money.  And here’s the kicker: lost in the midst of it all is the fact that home invasions in that particular area are extremely rare, and the odds are greater that one would have a truck crash through their bedroom than that they would actually experience a home invasion.

I’m picking on the media taking something out of proper context in the aforementioned example, but politicians and pundits often do the very same thing.  It isn’t unusual for them to create a perceived boogeyman cloaked in emotional hot-buttons as they make their case for a particular candidacy or policy decision.  Their candidate or point of view is going to be the one to put a stop to this boogeyman (or “straw man” as it is called in debating terms), and therefore is the one with which all of us in the general public should be on board.  Welfare queens, big corporations, illegal aliens, religious fundamentalists, leftist whackos, right-wing nutjobs, the list of boogeymen goes on and on.  Some of these entities portrayed as boogeymen are actual problems, and some are not, depending on your own point of view.  If you don’t have your own point of view, politicians and pundits are more than willing to give you theirs.

So what’s my point?  It’s a very simple one: Despite what we are often led to believe, very, very  few issues in our society are black and white.  If something seems too clear, too cut-and-dried, then there is likely something we are missing.  Yes, there are people who abuse the welfare system horribly, for example.  But there are also many more on welfare who do not and use it as it was intended.  Yes, there are some large corporations that exploit their workers and plunder natural resources, as another example, but there are many more of them that do not, never have, and never will.  

In other words, don't be naive.  Do your homework.  Be skeptical without being cynical, especially when you find yourself automatically agreeing or disagreeing with something newly presented to you. 

Look at all sides before settling on a conclusion.  Don’t be satisfied with letting politicians, pundits, and the media feed you only the information they want you to have.  Seek out more for yourself. Consider the source of your information.  A press release from a lobbying group or political party headquarters may be “newsy”, but it is not necessarily news.  A pundit is not a reporter.  A letter to the editor is not a news article.  Opinions should be based on facts, but they are not facts themselves.  And don’t fall prey to hot-button terminology, especially in headlines.  Words like “terror”, “sex”, and “war”, among others, are often squeezed in there to capture your attention, even if they are not the best choices.

You owe it to yourself to be a cautious, media-literate consumer of information. Otherwise, you’ll likely end up like “Little Chris”, paying unintended consequences for being unquestioning and naive.

On Poverty

I’ve been thinking a lot about poverty lately.  If you check out the news on your TV or computer these days, you cannot help but hear about the so-called “income gap”, and it seems like we also are seeing more and more cuts being made to programs and services that benefit the less fortunate. There’s almost a demonization of the poor in some quarters. The emphasis that Pope Francis has placed on helping the poor and disenfranchised has also done a great deal to bring issues related to poverty to the forefront for me. On a personal level, I’ve been reading a biography of Robert F. Kennedy who, despite his privileged background, had strong empathy for those living in poverty, and that has also stirred my consciousness of the poor, a consciousness which put down roots many years ago. 

When I was in first grade at St. Mary’s School back in the 1970s, there was an international organization called The Holy Childhood Association that provided parochial school teachers with many educational resources.  It still exists today, though it is now known as the Missionary Childhood Association.  Founded in 1843 and supported by the Vatican, its mission in a nutshell is to help Catholic kids in first world countries to learn about and reach out to the less fortunate.  The classrooms and hallways in our school were filled with Holy Childhood Association posters and bulletin boards showing the challenges that children our age in less-developed countries were facing.  As a school and in our individual classes we undertook many lessons and activities which impressed upon us the obligation of our Catholic faith for caring for one another and especially for those who were less fortunate than us.  We learned about what poverty was, where it was occurring, and how we could help.

One of the Holy Childhood Association’s poverty-awareness activities made a particular impression on me: our support as a class of  “the pagan babies”. 

The way it worked was pretty clever really.  Our first grade class was encouraged by our teacher, Sister Eunice, to voluntarily bring in loose change from home, with parental permission of course, and put it in a canister on her desk to help children who didn’t have enough food or shelter.  The goal was to get to $10, at which point the class would “adopt” a poor baby.  As we started collecting coins toward each new $10 goal, Sister Eunice would announce the gender and nationality of the prospective adoptee, show us a photo sent by the Holy Childhood Association, and tell us a little about where and under what circumstances the child lived.  Next, she would choose two students who would be responsible for giving the baby a name once we reached the $10 mark.  Now of course no child in a far off country had their actual given name changed by a couple of first graders from the USA, but the symbolic naming of the baby made it a very personal thing for us as kids. 

It wasn’t unusual for namers to want to use some version of his or her own name, which was okay.  However, the hard and fast rule was that at least one of the two names had to be that of a saint.  It was a Catholic school, after all. 

My naming partner and I gave a boy from Chad the name “Louis Christopher”.  Louis was the name of my female partner’s French-Canadian grandfather, and we were instructed by her that it was to be pronounced “Loo-Wee”, and NOT “Loo-Iss”.  For some reason, many of my first grade buddies and I found this new-to-us pronunciation quite funny.  And I suppose you can guess where the name Christopher came from.

Donating, while popular, was strictly voluntary, with no minimum amount.  As we were settling in each morning, a few kids would always drop a few pennies and nickels from home into the metal canister as they walked by.  Thanks to the blessed innocence of our being so young, we didn’t pay much attention to who was giving and how much it was.  The rattle of change in that canister was just part of the soundtrack of our day.  The teacher kept a daily tally of how much we had raised posted on the chalkboard.

The drive was limited to coins only.  I remember sometimes finding dimes, nickels and pennies lying around the house at that time and asking my parents if I could take it in to school for the Holy Childhood. My grandparents were aware of the campaign as well and when I went to visit them on Sundays they often gave me some pennies and nickels to take in to school the next day for what they still called “the pagan babies” which was kind of politically incorrect even back then in 1976.

By the end of the school year, our classroom list contained several dozen names.  In hindsight it was a pretty powerful way to get the message through to a bunch of young kids that there were poor people in our world, that they needed our help, that it was our obligation to help, and that we really could help, even if we were only six and seven years old.

Flash forward to today.

I recently made a trip from Aroostook County to southern Maine, stopping in several cities on the way down and back.  These cities would be considered small by most standards, yet in each I saw at least a few men or women standing in traffic medians, holding signs asking for help.  It tugged at my conscience.  I wanted to help them directly, but couldn’t be sure if I was feeding a mouth or an addiction.  (I did donate to a local service organization in their honor, however.)  The plight of these people with their signs really made me think.  What depths would one have to reach in order to spend a frigid January day, standing in city traffic, begging?  Could that happen to someone I know?  Could that happen to me?

The proliferation of panhandlers sharpened my eyes to see other signs of poverty around me: the run-down apartment houses that did not look entirely safe for occupancy, the people in tattered clothing trying to stay warm in the winter cold, the sheer number of food pantries and homeless shelters in a relatively small state like Maine. If the problem is this serious here, what can it possibly be like in New York, Rio de Janeiro or Bombay?

And the biggest question bouncing around my brain: What can I really do as just one person?

I wish there was an easy answer to that question, but there isn’t.  At this point, the only answer I have come up with is DO SOMETHING!  It may not change the scope of global poverty, but every little bit each of us does, whether it’s a contribution to a charity or service organization, a donation to a food pantry or thrift shop, volunteering at a soup kitchen, or even just working to shift stereotypical thinking about the poor as somehow lesser people, adds another bright new fiber to the sometimes-tattered tapestry of what’s right with us as human beings. 

Post Script--This editorial by Robyn Merrill, recently published in the Bangor Daily News, makes many good points about poverty as it impacts Maine: Beyond the attacks, ideology: What poverty looks like in Maine

Tribute to a Teacher

One of my biggest influences as a reader, a writer, and as a person recently died after a long illness.  Sister Mona Hecker was my English teacher in parochial school from grades five through eight, which is a very critical period in one’s life in many regards.  It’s during those years that we decide a lot of things, including if reading and writing are things we do for pleasure, or become merely functions that must be undertaken to get by in day-to-day life.  Sister Mona seemed to make it her mission that her students would choose the former over the latter.  She was passionate about life, her students, and literacy, and it was easy for us as kids to see that.

Sister Mona Hecker, with that same smile I knew 30+ years ago.

Photo from the Lewiston Sun-Journal

The first thing that pops into my head when I think of Sister Mona is that she was the first teacher who read great books aloud to my classmates and I on a daily basis.  And by “great books”, I mean books of high quality yet also appealing to kids the age my classmates and I were.  She introduced us to a boy who adopted a baby raccoon in Sterling North’s Rascal, and to a girl facing many of the same adolescent trials and tribulations as us in Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.  Every year around Halloween, she read something from Edgar Allen Poe to us, and with great feeling.  “The Tell-Tale Heart” blew our young minds the year she shared it with us.  I still hear it in Sister Mona’s voice when I read the lines where the murderer confesses his horrible deed.

She of course insisted that we be readers ourselves, and showed us that being a real reader and being a student in reading class were two different things.  Up until I was in Sister Mona’s class, “reading” in school was made up entirely of going over short, mind-numbingly dull passages in dusty old textbooks, followed by doing endless and mindless worksheets.  I was a bookworm from a very young age, and read a lot in my spare time, but saw very little connection between my own reading and so-called “reading class”.  Sister Mona changed all that by asking that we read whatever we wanted.  Her classroom library was large and varied, and she made full use of the school library as well.  An occasional book report was required, primarily for grading purposes, but most of the time, she held us accountable by randomly calling us up to her desk while everyone else was reading at their seats and simply asking us one on one to tell her a little about our current book for a few minutes.  It was very low-key, but very effective.

Sister Mona never neglected the skills side of English either.  Diagramming sentences was one of her favorite things, and though such activity could have been deadly in the hands of a lesser instructor, she actually made diagramming somewhat entertaining.  I have no doubt that I learned a lot about parts of speech and sentence structure from it.  She also let us play the game “Password” as a class every Friday, which we absolutely loved.  Little did we know at the time that she was also teaching us to broaden our vocabulary at the same time.

Every quarter for four years, Sister Mona required that everyone in the class present a Minute Talk, as she called them.  As the name implies, it was an original one-minute talk each of us had to give on a general topic that she chose, such as an important person in our lives or a holiday memory.  They were a horrifying prospect for us as young fifth graders, but as the years passed, many of my classmates and I became fairly calm about public speaking.  She was a great speech coach, and really made a difference in the presentation skills a number of us developed.  Always one for a good chuckle, Sister Mona often gave an example of a Minute Talk she never wanted to hear from us, which she said a former student of hers had once given.  It was on the topic of snow.    It went something like: “Snow is white and it is wet.  It is frozen water.  Snow comes in the winter.  You can make snowmen from it.” And so on with brief, random snow observations up until the one minute mark.  She delivered it in exactly the opposite way she would have wanted us to deliver ours: in a deadpan voice with poor posture.  It always cracked us right up.  It was a running gag in our class all four years for at least one of us to tell her our upcoming Minute Talk topic was “Snow” when she asked.  She always laughed when someone said it, even after four years of hearing it, just like we did every time after hearing her snow-themed “what not to do” Minute Talk.

Sister Mona loved to laugh, and as the Christmas season approached in my seventh grade year, she asked me and a small group of others to take on a pretty hefty assignment in lieu of other work in English class.  We were to rewrite Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol into a humorous play that we as a whole class would then put on at the school Christmas program.  She insisted that it be true to the original, but that it also be funny and appropriate to an audience of students and parents.  The final product, in which I portrayed Bob Crachit, turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself.  I think I learned more about writing for a specific audience and writing in collaboration with others from that assignment than any other I ever did in my life.  As for whether the final version was really that funny, I’m not so sure, but it sure made Sister Mona laugh a lot as we prepared to perform it.

We were required to write compositions and other assignments, of course, but much like her approach to reading and speaking, Sister Mona usually gave us some latitude in what we wrote.  She set forth page-length requirements, a time limit and other such necessities, but made sure the topic of the composition was broad enough that almost anyone could make it their own.  Instead of “What I Did Over My Summer Vacation”, she might assign the more generic “Summer” instead, allowing us to take it in any number of directions.

Sister Mona’s influence extended beyond English class for me.  My mother had had a baby just a couple weeks into my fifth grade year.  I had seen my mother and my new baby brother very briefly for a few minutes before school the day he was born, but was apparently visibly pre-occupied by the whole business all day long.  My father had to work until 5:00 that day, so Sister Mona and our principal, Sister Margaret Anne, called my father and offered to take me up to visit my mother and the baby at the hospital after school, not only so they could visit, but also to set me at ease.

In fifth grade, Sister Mona instituted a nursing home visitation program with her "homeroomers", as she called us.  Every Monday afternoon, she and a large percentage of my classmates would walk to a nearby nursing home and visit with the residents, talking and doing activities.  It was a lot of fun, as it gave my classmates and I time to spend with each other while doing some good deeds.  One of the upsides of Sister Mona’s loud laugh was that it often helped us know where she was in the nursing home at any given time.  As kids, one of our favorite things to do was to hang out with some of the nursing home residents in the TV room watching game shows.  Sister Mona would rather we be visiting people in their rooms and interacting with them more directly.  As long as we knew where she was, we could get our Match Game or Family Feud fix along with some of the residents.

After eighth grade, my classmates and I were leaving parochial school for the local high school, and Sister Mona decided that she was going to the Bahamas.  Not for a vacation, by any stretch.  She was going to do a year of mission work with the poor of that nation.  In the final weeks of our eighth grade year, she shared a great deal of material with us about the nature of her work down there.  It had very little to do with the golden beaches we imagined.  It had everything to do with shacks that were barely able to stand on their own, cramped one-room schools with too few teachers and books, and hospitals with too few doctors and supplies.  Sister Mona had to leave our parochial school for the last time that June day in 1984 one hour before my classmates and I did, so she could catch her plane to the Bahamas.  I never saw her in person again.

Sister Mona also had a fiery temper and was not someone you would ever want to cross.  My classmates and I were so fond of her that rarely did it cross our minds to do so.  When one of us did…watch out!  She was no saint, but neither were we, and as adolescents it was valuable for us to see that, especially in a nun.  Nuns at that time were often seen as holy and virtually faultless.  Sister Mona, on the other hand, was very down-to-earth.  Once, someone brought a copy of Dr. Hook’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone”, a semi-novelty record, to school and played it in the classroom during a rainy recess.  Sister Mona, whom we didn't think was listening, thought it was one of the funniest things she had ever heard.  Every Lent, when Catholics are traditionally encouraged to make sacrifices, she gave up the same thing: potato chips.  As kids, we could really get on board with something as relatable as that.  She talked with us about what a challenge it was to stay away from them for that period of time, but also about why she did it and its importance to her.  Her leading by example meant a lot to us, and taught us more than any textbook ever could.

I owe a great deal to Sister Mona, and I regret that I did not get a chance in later life to let her know that.  As often happens, I lost track of her as I got older, and never was able to share my gratitude.  Books and writing are an important part of my life, and she deserves no small part of the credit.  When the day finally comes that I publish my first book, Sister Mona’s name will be right there on the dedication page where it surely belongs.

God bless you Sister Mona, and thank you.

Heading Back to Campus? Don't Screw It Up!

“Youth is wasted on the young,” George Bernard Shaw is quoted as saying, and never is that more clear to me than at this time of year when young people are headed back to college.  People told me that whole “best years of your life” thing all the time when I was starting college back in the late 1980s, but I just couldn't see it at the time.  To me, I was spending a lot of money I didn't have, to do a megaton of studying in a field that I wasn't even sure of at first.  I was torn between education, political science and journalism when I first started at the University of Maine in Orono in the fall of 1988, and while I was registered as an education major, the other two constantly sang their siren songs. 

College Life

Source

On top of it all, I was 18 idealistic years old, and wanted to be free.  High school was over, and it was time to find out who I was and what I believed.  Yet each morning, I woke up in a UMaine dormitory, more often than not put on a UMaine t-shirt or sweatshirt, and headed off for breakfast in a UMaine cafeteria, which I ate off a tray with the UMaine logo.  Then it was off to full days of UMaine classes, punctuated by study sessions at the UMaine library and other meals at a UMaine cafeteria.  To my young mind, this was vaguely cult-like, nothing like the freedom for which I yearned.

It’s not that I didn't like UMaine.  I really did.  I don’t think I would have felt differently if I had gone to school anywhere else.  And I fully understood that I was going to need a college education to get where I wanted to in the world, wherever that was.  The problem was, I wanted to get to that place in the world right now.

My sophomore year, I made some changes, transferring to the University of Maine at Presque Isle, and getting a living situation independent of school.  These things helped me feel a bit more of the freedom I thought I was yearning for, but they also set up a sort of emotional fence between me and school.  I kept my distance from almost all aspects of university life beyond academics.  College became like a drudge job for me: something you had to do and get over with so you could enjoy other things.  That outlook was a huge mistake on my part.

The college world is very different today than when I started back in 1988, but some things hold up no matter how much time passes.  If I could go back and give my freshman self some advice about starting college, I’d tell him/me these five things:

• Study.  It goes without saying that an education is what you are in college for (and what you are paying those steep tuition bills for), so taking your classwork seriously should be a top priority.  I’d qualify this, however.  I spent a LOT of time studying, but it was not necessarily the best use of my time.  Develop some study strategies, set aside regular times to study, and maybe even find a group with whom to study.  More is not necessarily better when it comes to studying, though.  Quality counts more than quantity.
• Diversify. College is a great time to broaden your horizons.  Take advantage of opportunities to get to know people who come from different ethnic, religious, and/or socioeconomic backgrounds than you.  Try listening to some different music.  Read different books.  Go to different movies.  Sample some different foods.  It’s a very big world out there.  This is the time to open your mind wide and check it all out. 
• Do active stuff.  Most likely, you are never going to be in better physical condition than you are in your late teens and early twenties.  Take advantage of that!  Ski, skate, run, hike, swim, dance!  This is the time in your life to climb mountains or ride your bike across the state during summer break.  Trust me, when you get older it will be a lot tougher to do these things.
• Take concrete steps toward your dreams. Okay, going to college is one example of this, but I am speaking about more specific things.  I recently read about a pair of siblings who spent their summer interning in Texas where they worked directly with wild tigers and bears.  They were over the moon with enthusiasm about their experience.  Keep your eyes open for internships, exchange programs, volunteer opportunities and similar things that give college kids the chance to start living life more fully.
• Get out there. These are the years when some of the best lifelong memories are made, and college usually provides ample opportunities do make them.  Go to concerts, lectures and sporting events on campus on a regular basis, and bring people with you.  Attend parties (responsibly!) and other social events.  Join groups and organizations that interest you.  Get involved in social causes that mean something to you.

During my own college years, I dreaded Labor Day Weekend and the whole back-to-college thing, due to faulty thinking on my part.  College was just work to me, a means to an end.  Getting a degree was something to get out of the way so life could really start.  Little did I know at the time that life had already started and I was letting some very important parts of it pass me by.

Now in my mid-40s and firmly ensconced in the world of work and middle age, I find myself envious of the young people I see on the roads in early September who have packed their stuff into cars in a physics-defying way, headed off to campus.  I just hope they see that it’s an adventure they’re on.  A really great one if you choose to make it that way.  Take it seriously, but never, ever forget to enjoy it!

Happy Mother's Day!

Me and my mother (expecting my younger brother), circa 1973.  Dig those groovy pants!

Me and my maternal grandmother, circa 1971

Me and my late paternal grandmother, circa 1979

A Tribute to Uncle Ralph

My father's brother Ralph  passed away recently after a period of illness, and what follows is what I said at his funeral.  It took a while to write and I got a lot of good feedback on it afterward, so I thought I would share it here on the blog as a further tribute to him.

Ralph was with us for 75 years, and all of us have mental snapshots of some segment of that time with him.  My own go back to the early 1970s, when I was a young kid.  Ralph was not yet married, and spent the vast majority of his time then driving truck for his god friend Joe up and down the east coast.  It didn’t make much sense for him to have a place of his own to maintain if he was only going to be there a few days a month, so when he was in town, he lived with his parents, my grandparents, Mark and Verda.  I was a frequent visitor to my grandparents then, so I saw Ralph often when he was in town.  He was always easygoing and loved to tease me, my brothers, and my cousins.  As kids, we could always count on Ralph to be light-hearted and fun.

When he wasn’t on the road in those days, Ralph liked to catch up on the sleep he didn’t get much of when he was on the road.  Trouble was, Ralph could sleep very long and very deeply, and an alarm clock just wasn’t enough to roust him.  So it fell to my grandmother to wake him when he needed to be up and getting ready to head out again.  Waking Ralph up was a very, very difficult thing to do.  I can still hear my grandmother upstairs, in a sharp voice that was not at all in character for her, saying “Ralph! Ralph! Time to get up!”  She’d learned long ago that the gentle approach got her nowhere when it came to getting Ralph out of bed. He’d typically ask what time it was, she’d tell him, and then she would head back downstairs.  Five or ten minutes would pass with no stirring from above, and she’d go back up and try again.  By the third or fourth time, you could almost see the smoke coming out of her ears as she went up the stairs.  There were days I’m sure when she would have picked him up and lugged him out of bed herself if she could.  My grandfather, wisely, stayed out of it.  Eventually Ralph would get up and have to race around to get out the door, and even then he was usually running late. 

If any of the grandchildren were around and willing, Gram would send one or more of us up there to try to rouse him.  I personally found that yelling and drumming on the foot of the bed tended to do the trick, though that was one of the times when I think I saw Ralph’s easygoing attitude start to waiver.  It wasn’t the gentlest way to be awakened, but he’d already had his chance to get up peacefully when Gram had tried.

Procrastination was a part of Ralph that sometimes drove those around him bananas, but it was part of what made him who he was.  Gram liked to say that Ralph was probably going to be late for his own funeral.  Well, he passed away 13 days ago and we did not have the funeral until today, so you be the judge if she was at least partly right.  She usually was.

Ralph drove a tractor-trailer for 45 years, and as a young kid I was always intrigued by Ralph’s truck.  I always kept my eye out for it when we drove past Joe's place on the way to my grandparents’ house.  His truck and Joe’s looked identical, except that Ralph’s was blue and Joe’s was red.

Ralph often liked to tell us about the things he saw and did when he was out on truck.  Being the tease that he was, some of what he told us was kind of “out there”, especially if his audience was quite young.  Gram always made sure to monitor his tales and didn’t hesitate to step in and set it all straight if Ralph got a little carried away.  Nonetheless it was clear to us that he enjoyed his job and his life.  Sometimes the stories he told about his trips into cities like New York and Boston made them sound like fun and exciting places I’d like to see someday.  I remember being very impressed that he had seen the Statue of Liberty and Bunker Hill in person, even if it was through the windshield of his truck. 

At other times though, his stories made the big cities sound like places I never wanted to set foot in as long as I lived.  The shady characters and dangerous situations he sometimes encountered on some of those trips to the inner city were pretty hair-raising.  I believe Ralph was robbed more than once while loading or unloading his truck in dark city depots late at night, but in the retelling it never seemed to bother him.  It happened, he was smart and survived it without injuries, and he moved on. And it never scared him away.

To the young kid that I was at that time, Ralph made driving a tractor-trailer seem like quite an adventure.

Years passed, and lives changed, as they always do.  Ralph got married and had a family.  My cousins, siblings and I grew up, moved on and started lives of our own.  I didn’t see nearly as much of Ralph in my adult years as I had when I was a kid, but when I did, he still seemed like the same old Ralph that I remembered, right down to the procrastination for which he was so well-known.

One of my most recent memories of Ralph is from the winter before last.  We had just had a large snowstorm, and I had driven out to his place one morning to do some snowshoeing.  The plow had come by while I was out on the trail, and my car got stuck in the pile of snow at the end of the driveway as I went to leave.  Even though it was brisk and windy, and the snow was deep, Ralph didn’t hesitate to come out into the cold with a shovel and offer to help me get my car out of the snowbank.  It made more sense for my bulk to do the digging and pushing, and for him to get in the car and work the accelerator.  That car was very mired in the heavy wet snow, and it took us quite a while.  I was getting frustrated and was ready to call my father with his four-wheel drive and a chain, but Ralph kept his cool.  He had some ideas, we tried a few, and eventually we got the car unstuck.  Incidentally, the following spring, I traded that car in for an all-wheel drive. 

It’s kind of nice that one of my last interactions with Ralph was like that.  For me, it was a good representation of the man he was: kind, easygoing, helpful and giving.

There were good times and bad times in Ralph’s life, some easy ones and some very difficult ones.  Through it all, he stayed true to himself, and I respect him for that.  You always knew what you were getting with Ralph.  He missed his wife Carol a lot over these past 11 years.  It’s time now for him to rest in peace with her, and time also for those of us who knew him to hold on to the fond memories he gave us.

Godspeed, Ralph.

The Gang Who Couldn't Rake Straight

I was part of a gang when I was younger.

Wait…that’s not what it sounds like.  You have to understand that I was a kid in a small town in northern Maine in the 1970s.  In that context, a “gang” could be defined as “a bunch of kids in roughly the same age group from the same general part of town, playing together spontaneously because they had all been thrown outside by mothers or sitters to get them out of their hair”. That’s the kind of gang of which I was a part.  At any given time, there were usually five or six of us in my neighborhood gang, the core being me and my friends Andy and Rick (names changed for privacy, of course).  There was also a rotating cast of other characters of both genders that included siblings, other kids who lived nearby, and kids who often visited the neighborhood because they had relatives or friends there.

Almost the entire neighborhood was our playground.  There were always one or two of the “you dang kids stay off my lawn” types around, but for the most part it was a less suspicious and litigious time, and people were not as hung up on kids playing on their property as they are now.  It was not out of the ordinary, nor particularly worrisome, for one of our neighbors to look out the back window and see upwards of a dozen kids gathered at their picnic table devising plans for a game of Whiffleball or British Bulldog.  The neighbors knew us and our families, and we knew well what the limits were for our activities on certain properties, having been warned numerous times by our parents to be respectful of them.  The main rules were pretty simple: Don’t play too close to the house or cars. Stay out of gardens and flowers. Don’t play with outside “stuff” (e.g.-hoses, decorations, tools, etc).  Leave no sign you were there when you were gone.

There was a notable exception to that last one, however, and it typically came up at this time of year.  Everybody’s fallen leaves were fair game for us kids, and no one in the neighborhood minded a bit if we gathered theirs up and hauled them off.

Our usual home base was Rick’s house, mainly because it was centrally-located and had a large, flat backyard that was perfect for many activities.  Rick’s yard, and most others around, had numerous large maple trees in or around it.  As the leaves first began to fall, we’d ignore them in favor of touch football, a favorite autumn pastime.  They became harder to ignore when they became a carpet several inches thick.  At that point, Rick’s father would break out a couple of rakes while the gang was playing nearby, and leave them strategically placed against his garage while he raked up a small pile of leaves and let Rick’s younger brothers jump and play in it.  Obviously taking a page from Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Rick’s father was trying to make a mundane chore seem like a barrel of monkeys for his unsuspecting son and his friends.  And it worked.

For a span of about three years, my friends and I were old enough to do a good job at cleaning up the leaves, and young enough not to care that we were not being paid to do it.  Rick’s yard alone yielded a massive pile, which we would then jump into in the most outrageous manner possible, emulating our two heroes of that time, Evel Knievel and the Six Billion Dollar Man.  We’d jump from the deck or tree low tree branches, we’d bail off our bicycles, or we’d catapult each other in.  I will not confirm or deny that we may have even found ways to jump off a garage roof into a particularly large pile one year.  There were no limits to the number of ridiculous things we would do to ourselves and each other in the name of taking a cool dive into a gigantic pile of leaves.  It’s amazing that none of us ended up in wheelchairs.

Source

There was more to it than jumping in, however.  Hiding in the leaves and leaping out to scare some unsuspecting person was also great sport.  One member of our gang was a pretty blond girl named Darcy who lived in the house next to Rick’s and was very cool.  The problem was, Darcy had the most sour and irritating older sister in the world.  The sister’s name was Karen, and all she ever did was complain, look down her nose at us, and tattle on every little thing that she didn't like, which was most everything we did.  We loved nothing more than teasing our neighborhood party-pooper.  I wouldn't be surprised if Karen works for the I.R.S. now.

Late one afternoon when it was nearly dark, Darcy told us that Karen would be coming home any minute from some after-school activity she had been attending.  She thought we ought to do something to scare her.  (You can probably see why we liked Darcy so much.)  My friends and I hurriedly relocated our large pile of leaves to the edge of the lawn near the sidewalk, where Karen would have to pass on her way home.  Darcy, Andy and I buried ourselves under the pile, while the other kids acted as lookouts, milling around the yard, tossing a football and looking as innocent as possible.  We didn't time things out terribly well though, and the three of us were sweating under the pile for what seemed like forever.  It was probably more like 10 minutes, but that’s a long time to hold still and be quiet at that age.  Eventually, we heard stage whispers from the others that Karen was coming down the street.  A low whistle by Rick was the agreed-upon signal to act.  The three of us who had been hiding under the leaves in great anticipation immediately jumped up, waving our arms, screaming and lunging at Karen.  Her reaction was absolutely electric.  She screamed louder than anyone I had ever heard in my life and reflexively swung her full bookbag at us, missing by a mile, before running at top speed down the sidewalk to her house.  It was priceless, especially the look on her face.  Did I mention that the three of us were also wearing gruesome Halloween masks when we popped up?  If we’d only had a video camera in those days, I know we would have become YouTube sensations.

After a while, however, our large pile of leaves was not nearly as large.  All of our jumping in them and moving them around eventually shredded the leaves into pieces the size of a quarter.  Undaunted, we would just go collect more leaves from nearby yards.  Not surprisingly, none of the neighbors had a problem with a group of rake-wielding kids descending upon their yards to clean up all their leaves for free and carry them away on a large borrowed tarp.  Little old ladies who normally shooed us away from anywhere near their homes would step out onto their porches and summon us over.  “You can have all these leaves if you want them,” they’d tell us, feigning great benevolence and generosity.  “Just take them back to the pile you already have.”  The rest of the year, these ladies only gave us dark looks and occasional threats, but for a few days in the late fall, they acted like they were our best friends.

Now while my friends and I were just kids, we were not stupid.  We knew full well that collecting all those leaves was providing a handy and apparently free service for the adults in the neighborhood.  However, we were young, full of boundless energy, and there were quite a few of us in our group.  The actual amount of work done by any one individual kid was not that great really.  And, the payoff we got from the things we could do with such a huge pile of leaves was plenty of recompense at the time.  There was nothing more satisfying than having a pile of leaves so large that your could stand upright in the middle and still be covered.  Granted, we were not that tall, but still, it was a lot of leaves.

There was one linchpin to this whole endeavor that made it feasible: the willingness of Rick’s dad to allow us to cart all the neighbor’s leaves onto his lawn.  Why would he allow such a thing, you might ask?  Two words: avid gardener.  Rick’s dad had the largest and most prosperous vegetable garden in that part of town.  He spent hours and hours working in it during the growing season, and even after everything had been harvested he was testing soil composition, adding fertilizer, planting cover crops and generally fussing with it.  By the time we kids had grown tired of the leaves we had collected, they had been chopped into a fine mulch from the beating we put on them.  The pile that had once been as tall as we were was now just a few inches high.  Before the ground froze for the winter, Rick’s dad would back his pickup truck onto the lawn, shovel the shredded leaves into the back, and then take them out back to his garden, where he would spread them around and till them under.  It was very much a mutually beneficial arrangement between Rick’s dad and his son’s gang of friends.

At this time of year, as I am raking up the leaves in my yard, I like to think back to those days when piling up leaves was a game and not a chore.  Even now in middle-age, when I've accumulated a particularly large pile, there is a temptation, deep down inside, for me to take a running leap into it.  Of course the temptation not to break a hip is even greater, so I don’t do it, but that doesn't mean the thought hasn't crossed my mind.  Like most things in life, it’s our perspective that makes a crucial difference in the things we undertake.  I believe we’d all be better off sometimes if we could only see things through the eyes we had when we were at the age when we could stand upright and yet hidden in a large pile of fallen leaves.