Life lessons

Hello Old Friend

Years ago, Jeff found me on classmates.com. I only registered on the website, but he paid money to contact the people he knew. I hadn’t seen Jeff since we were 14 and freshmen in high school.

I was happily married with a large family. He was married with kids of his own. This wasn’t that kind of a thing anyway.

We emailed back and forth, catching up what we had done with our lives via long messages. He had done well with his. And then, he hit me with this revelation, “I have cancer.” Jeff wrote he had cancer before and now it was back. The prognosis was not good. Jeff told me his parents and brother all died from it. He said it was his family’s curse.

When Jeff was a boy, he had polio. He wore metal braces on his legs, and at times, used a wheeled chair he propelled by hand.

I first met him in fifth grade when I and other kids attended advanced classes in one of the town’s schools for science and writing on Wednesday afternoons. Then, I got to know him better in seventh grade when we were in the same classes at the town’s junior high.

When it came to Jeff, I didn’t hold back, joking with him about silly stuff. I remember once when he was teasing me, I hit him over the head with my books. Not hard, of course. But he laughed his head off. He liked that I didn’t treat him with kid gloves.

Once, I even got him to dance semi-fast with me at a school event.

Yes, I had a crush on Jeff. I knew he liked me. But coming from an overly protective family, I was timid to act on it. One time, when a group of us had gathered at a pizza place, I didn’t realize he had begun following me as I walked home. After all, we both lived on opposite ends of the town. But he fell. I honestly had no idea that happened. He and my classmates misunderstood. I felt so badly.

Jeff ended up going to a private boarding school his sophomore year. We lost track of each other until decades later.

After Jeff found me on that website, we emailed back and forth for a couple of years. He spent time in South America. He kept bees. He was interested that I was a newspaper editor, and that I wrote fiction, so I mailed him the manuscript of the first novel my then-agent was trying to sell. For Christmas, he sent me a package of grapefruit from Florida, where he and his wife had moved. I still have the special knife that came with it.

Then, he wrote his health was declining.

We spoke on the phone only once. By then, Jeff was bedridden. Although it was February, I stepped outside the newsroom so I wouldn’t be interrupted. For that hour, we shared our old and familiar connections. I tried to offer him words of comfort and to make him laugh. He told me he kept my manuscript beside his bed.

I didn’t talk with Jeff again. When I searched the internet, I found his obit. He had died a few days after we had spoken. He was only 53.

Good-bye old friend.

Standard
Uncategorized

Hot Schmaltz by Ethel Schwartz

This is the true story of how I got the pseudonym Ethel Schwartz. Of course, it began as a joke.

A group of guys were goofing off outside the college’s administration building when they decided among themselves that the next girl who walked around the corner would be named Ethel Schwartz and she would be the campus’s official sex symbol.

Yes, it was me. However, I don’t know if I fit the role of the campus’s official sex symbol.

I can take a joke. Besides the guys were in my circle of friends at Bridgewater State College, now a university. They were among those who ran the student paper, which was first called Campus Comment and then Hard Times, and the lit magazine, Roots and Wings and then Conceit. They went to the coffeehouse Friday nights and were in the middle of any protest. We all hung out at the coffee shop downtown and at friend’s apartments.

And, they were probably stoned that day. 

A few of them called me Ethel for a little while. But I went a step further. I decided to name the newspaper column I wrote “Hot Schmaltz by Ethel Schwartz.” Schmaltz is rendered chicken or goose fat. Schmaltz can also mean extremely or excessively sentimental music or art. Frankly, I just liked the way the five words went together.

As Ethel Schwartz, I got to write whatever I wanted like the time I went to a drive-in theater that was showing two Russ Meyer flicks. Meyer produced low-budget, sexploitation films like Vixen, one of the two playing that night.

Above is a clipping of a column I found tucked in an old lit magazine from long ago. (Schwartz was spelled incorrectly.) In it, I reviewed three books by Rod McKuen — in poetry form. They were: Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows, Listen to the Warm, and In Someone’s Shadow.

Rod McKuen made a lot of money writing schmaltzy poetry. The girls in my dorm — that’s where I borrowed the books to read them — loved his stuff. I thought he was a hack. In those days, I fancied myself a poet.

Here’s how the column’s review begins:

At times I feel

there’ll be no flag days any more

and, then you come, Rod McKuen

waving yours.

And how it ends:

The moon is a hello navel for the sky

and beneath its belly

you write a journal of love’s top and bottom

inside and outside

under and over

down and out.

Rod, but there must be something more!

Okay, if McKuen’s poetry wasn’t bad enough, the review was, too. But it was written by Ethel Schwartz, my persona in a previous lifetime, which was the inspiration for two books: Peace, Love & You Know What and Professor Groovy and Other Stories. (By the way, Prof. Groovy will be free on Kindle on April 13-14.)

Standard
rats

Rats: My ‘Worst Thing in the World’

My grandfather once spoiled a family party by bringing a dead rat into the house. He was pretty proud he had trapped it in one of the barns.

The rest of the family was horrified. Me, too. I was just a kid. It cemented my fear of rats, which, by the way, has a name: musophobia.

I recalled that experience when I read Richard Wright’s novel Native Son. In the first scene, Bigger and his brother, Buddy, try to kill a rat in their city apartment. Their mother and sister were frantic about it. From Wright’s description, I know he had personal trouble with rats.

“He kicked the splintered box out of the way and the flat black body of the rat lay exposed, its two long yellow tusks showing distinctly. Bigger took a shoe and pounded the rat’s head, crushing it, cursing hysterically: ‘You sonofabitch!’ ”

More than any other animal, we associate rats with poverty.

Then, of course, rats make an unwelcomed appearance in George Orwell’s novel 1984. I felt for Winston Smith when he is confronted by O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party, who tells him “the worst thing in the world varies from individual to individual.” Of course, in Winston’s case, that worst thing was rats.

I could relate.

The rat at the family party wasn’t the only one concerning my grandfather, Manny. He hid dollar bills in the chicken barn, a few hundred, by my father’s telling. One day when he went to get the money, he discovered rats had eaten most of the bills.

The slum apartment I had in college was infested with rats. I heard them fighting in the walls. At night I suspected they made their way inside, and I finally had proof when a rat fell into an uncovered pot of beet soup on the stove. Large, red paw prints were everywhere in the kitchen. The landlord didn’t care. I did. I moved out. I haven’t made or eaten beet soup since.

In Mexico, where Hank and I rented a small house, rats raced across the tin roof and down the fireplace’s chimney. We stored our food in a thick wooden box we put inside the car, but still the rats searched. Hank kept a flashlight and hammer beside the bed. He blinded them with the light, and then smashed them with the hammer. The rats didn’t stop coming.

In a house we first rented when we moved to the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts, rats got through a drainage pipe in the basement and then into the kitchen. Our cat killed the first. Hank fixed it so more couldn’t get in. I heard him yelling in the basement when a rat stuck its head through the pipe’s hole.

When we lived in Taos, New Mexico, rats built nests in our stacked firewood. The clever beasts dragged leaves of cactus to the stacks and positioned them thorny side out to shield their nest. I removed the cacti, being careful as rodents in that area could have hantavirus.

Knock on wood, we haven’t lived with rats again. Mice? I don’t like them either. That’s one reason we have a cat. Our Maine coon cat, Stella, is officially the protector of our realm, and there are times she leaves mouse parts she doesn’t want to eat on the front welcome mat outside or a whole body as a gift. Early this morning, I accidentally stepped on the head of a mouse she left in the living room. Somehow the creature got inside. I kept my composure and got rid of the part she didn’t eat. Thanks, but no thanks.

Standard
Hilltown Postcards

The Plow Comes Full Circle

I wrote this post when our son, Nate, plowed roads for a contractor during the winter. He’s since moved on from that kind of work.

Nate calls while I’m making supper. “Hey, Mom, guess where I’m plowing tonight?”

From the eagerness in his voice, I’m supposed to know. “Route 112?”

He chuckles softly. I do, too.

“Yeah, how’d you guess?” he asks.

Route 112 is a two-lane paved road that’s technically a state highway in Worthington and Huntington, the town next to it, but it’s no larger than most good country roads in the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts.

The route goes past the house we rented for nine years on the other side of Worthington and where Nate spent most of his earliest years. This is the Ringville section of Worthington, a cluster of modest homes hugging the road’s sharp curve. Except for the large field across the road, drivers passing through would not be impressed.

Our house, the smallest, could never hold a coat of white paint on its clapboards. We only heated with wood, and the walls were insulated with newspaper, so the windows in the kids’ bedrooms upstairs were covered inside by ice most of winter.

Nate, the fourth of our six kids and the middle son, is the one who favors me most with his dark hair and complexion. But unlike me he didn’t like school. He did whatever he could to get out of it, pretending he was sick, but I wouldn’t let him. Kids have to go to school.

Nate wasn’t interested no matter how much his teachers or I tried. Some teachers didn’t want to bother, like the band instructor who tried to kick him out his class. Nate wanted to play the drums, and I had to meet with the teacher to explain my son learns in a different way from others. And, he was going to stay in his class no matter what. Nate did, and music was the one thing he enjoyed in school. He doesn’t play the drums as much now, but he does the guitar and keyboard. He started a band that played gigs in local bars, doing the moody, thoughtful songs he writes. He records them in a sound studio he built in his home. He’s helping me create audiobooks.

As a boy, Nate was all-truck. You know the type. He was the kid in the backseat of the car, moving his hand like he’s yanking on an air horn when a tractor-trailer drives close on the highway.

In winter, he’d shout and run to the window whenever he heard a plow blade scrape over the surface of Route 112. Or, if he was playing outside he’d stand watching in our front yard as the truck’s yellow lights strobed their warning and the snow curled in one magnificent white wave from the edge of its plow.

Year-round Nate played in the yard with his fleet of Tonkas – dump trucks, graders, and backhoes, even a steamroller. He got them for Christmas and his birthdays. Sometimes his younger brother, Zack, joined him, but as Nate says, he was strictly a part-timer.

When it snowed, Nate got on his winter clothes and boots, and working by the house’s front light, he used a truck rigged with a wooden plow made by his father to clear the dirt walkway extending from the door to the driveway.

I have photos of him playing in the dark. He’s bundled up. His face is bright and interested. I know what’s on my boy’s mind. He’s inside that cab, plowing a much bigger road than the path in our front yard.

When Nate got older, we’d let him go along with the town’s highway crew when it stormed. He waited at the top of our driveway until Ernie, his friend and the crew’s road boss, stopped his plow truck. Nate rode with him for hours. Happy for the company, Ernie joked and sang off-key on purpose until he dropped him back home.

Like many country kids, Nate learned to drive long before he was of age. He helped his highway pal, Ernie, a part-time farmer, with the haying. Nate drove the pickup while men tossed bales onto a trailer. He was only a kid when he first did it, and he had to scoot forward on the edge of the pickup’s seat, so he could reach the pedals.

The day Nate turned 17, he passed the driver’s test without a learner’s permit or taking a lesson. Then, he got his CDL, that’s a commercial drivers license. He went to school for that, and his oldest sister helped him study for the test.

Nate can operate just about any piece of heavy equipment, or as some old gent remarked the time he watched him handle a dozer, “Boy, you’ve got the touch.”

Most of the year Nate works in construction for a loud and excitable man who calls everyone “Big Boy” including his own wife. He also has new Mac trucks, a real plus in his mind. Nate drives a fourteen-wheeler – just say tri-axle he tells me – with a wing plow and bulldog decals on each side of its massive hood. The truck is thirteen tons stripped down, he says. Add about five tons more for the plow and sander.

Nate has been plowing for eight years. During his first, he took care of a long stretch of Route 2 to the north in Western Massachusetts. Then he did other highways. He feels good about the job he’s doing. Often, he’s the only one on the route during a snowstorm.

“I feel like I’m the savior of the town,” he tells me.

The man from the state highway yard calls as soon as the storm starts. If it’s night, Nate can’t sleep waiting for the phone to ring although later when he’s on the road, he regrets he didn’t. He’s worked in some nasty storms, the longest 32 hours straight, pulling into a place safe off the road to nap in the cab of his truck. He missed most of Christmas one year when he got called out, and he was late to eat on Thanksgiving. We saved him a plate of food. He smelled like diesel when he hugged me hello.

Sometimes Nate calls when his cell phone has a signal, or if the timing’s right, he’ll stop at the house for something to eat, parking his truck at the top of the driveway with its lights flashing so it’s visible to anyone driving that way. Nate’s taken his father and brothers on his route. I went for a short trip to test drive a new truck. The sound of machinery was deafening inside the cab. I watched as Nate’s hands flew about the controls. It’s all second nature to him now. He says he wants me to go for the full 17-mile run during a storm.

Tonight we’re supposed to get several inches of fresh snow, nothing surprising this time of year. The hilltowns east of the Berkshires get a real winter that starts in November and lasts sometimes through April. He’s calling me on his cell phone, and soon he will lose service as his route climbs toward Worthington and then past the house where we used to live. My son is in that cab, making that big wave of snow and ready to toot the horn if he sees some small face watching through a window.

“Nate, remember how excited you got when the plow truck passed the house?”

Nate made a good man’s laugh.

“Yeah, Mom, that’s why I called.”

Standard
Moby-Dick

Call Him Ishmael

In a recent Substack post, I asked subscribers which book resonated with them. Dennis Merritt wrote a favorite is Moby-Dick, which inspired me to publish this piece.

Of course, I’m playing with the opening line to that great American novel, Moby-Dick. I was inspired by a visit to Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s home in Pittsfield where the author was his most productive. Melville wrote there for 13 years, including his most famous book, Moby-Dick.

I have a penchant for visiting the homes of famous creative people — homes such as Arrowhead, which was bought by the Berkshire Historical Society in 1975 — that are open to the public.

I want to see where these creative souls worked and lived. I want to feel their energy.

Arrowhead was definitely on my list. The photo above belongs to the Berkshire Historical Society.

First, a little background is in order. I’m originally from Fairhaven, Mass., which is steeped in whaling history along with its neighboring city, New Bedford. Every January, the New Bedford Whaling Museum holds a marathon reading of Moby-Dick, which takes 25 hours.

Growing up, I was immersed in whaling history. In fifth grade, I wrote a paper about the Essex, the whaling ship that sank and stranded 20 men in the South Pacific. Crew members survived by cannibalism. Their story is supposed to have inspired Melville.

I also read Moby-Dick as a high school sophomore, a bit of heavy reading for someone that age.

But back to Melville, he was 21 when he set sail on the whaler, Acushnet, based in Fairhaven, in January 1841. He lasted 18 months before jumping ship in the Marquesas Islands in the Pacific. He called that voyage his college education. When he eventually returned to the U.S., he drew on his experiences to write his first five books.

Melville is also supposed to have read an article about “Mocha Dick: The White Whale of the Pacific.” When that white whale was eventually killed, the crew found 20 harpoons stuck to its body from other attempts to kill the animal.

My theory: Good writers take what they know and have their way with it. I believe Melville did the same.

Certainly, there’s enough written about Melville and Moby-Dick that I don’t have to repeat it here. I do find it interesting, however, an author of his stature was unable to profit from his writing. Reviews at the time of Moby-Dick’spublication in 1851 were iffy, even negative.

In debt, Melville sold off about 80 acres. Later, he sold Arrowhead to his brother and returned with his family to New York, where he was a customs clerk for 20 years. He had a desk job, working six days a week for $4 a day.

There is certainly a lesson here for writers, like myself, who are frustrated by the writing business.

A few years ago, Hank and I toured the rooms in Arrowhead that were open to visitors. He admired the workmanship of the home built in the 1790s. I was most interested in the room on the second floor where Melville wrote.

Here Melville sat at a table facing a window that gave him a long view of Mount Greylock in the horizon. The story has it that the mountain’s shape in winter reminded him of a white whale.

The original table is at the Berkshire Athenaeum, but as I sat in that room I got it. Through the wavy old glass and the overcast sky, Greylock indeed resembled a whale. Call me nuts, but I could feel the creative energy in that room.

That night we watched the vintage movie Moby Dick, which was a bit dated. Gregory Peck plays the vengeful Capt. Ahab. The next day, I headed to the library to order a copy of the novel through the inter-library loan system.

Didn’t I tell you I was inspired?

For more on historic site, visit http://www.mobydick.org

Standard