Category Archives: Uncategorized

Memoir, Uncategorized

Doing the Dishes — My College Job

Dennis Merritt shared a recent Substack post Showdown at the Pembroke Dish Room in which he wrote about a job he had in college unloading dishes in a school’s dining hall. It brought back a memory although my experience was different, especially since a dean tried to get me fired.

In my junior year at Bridgewater State College (now a university), I was hired to work in the dining hall at Tillinghast Dorm, know as Tillie. My job was in the dish room for the early morning shift, which meant I had to be there before 7 a.m. Sometimes that meant I came straight to work from a party, left a boyfriend behind in my off-campus apartment, or had pulled an all-nighter studying. My shift lasted until my first class.

But I had motivation. During the summer, I worked at a textile warehouse in New Bedford, MA, which covered most of my expenses. But I was hoping to travel to Europe. I thought I could swing it if I didn’t spend any money, except for food and rent.

As in Dennis’s experience, the dining hall had a large machine with a conveyer system. Unlike his, we used large racks to hold the contents while they were being washed. Students and faculty brought their plates, cups, and utensils to a metal counter in the dish room’s large opening. There were two of us on duty, my friend Betty and me. One of us scraped plates and loaded everything onto a rack, which then traveled through the machine. The person on the other end removed the rack and stacked it on a counter for lunch time.

The shift started slowly with the early risers, but it got very busy.

On the few days Betty couldn’t make it to work, I had the job of loading and unloading the dishwasher by myself. I had to be careful the racks didn’t back up on the end, so I was running around a lot. Frankly, the experience was rather Chaplinesque.

Then one of the college’s deans got wind that I was working in the dining hall. The woman, who shall remain nameless, wasn’t pleased about the emergence of the hippies on Bridgewater’s campus. Of course, I was one of them. So one day, she approached my boss at the dining hall. She wanted him to fire me because, get this, I was an immoral person.

I found out about it when my boss took me aside. He told the dean he wasn’t firing me because I was one of his best workers. I thanked him for backing me up.

Actually, the dean’s attempt was a big source of amusement for me. I was too immoral to scrape food off students’ plates and get them clean? Perhaps she had hoped I would fool around enough that I would get poor grades and drop out. But that didn’t happen either.

By the way, that’s a photo of me from that time. And, yes, I did save enough to travel to Europe.

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Northern Comfort, Uncategorized

Free Book: Northern Comfort

I’ve decided my book Northern Comfort needed more readers. So it is free for Kindle readers on Nov. 9 and 10. Here’s the link.

Northern Comfort is one of my Hilltown Books. It’s not a mystery, like my Isabel Long Series, but it is set in the familiar fictional hilltowns of Western Massachusetts.

This books is about the harsh realities of rural life — the haves and have nots in a small town. It begins with a tragedy and ends with reconciliation and hope. Let me tell you more.

Willi Miller is a single mother trying to raise her young son, who was brain-damaged at birth. They live in a cabin left to them by the loving grandfather who took them in after Junior Miller, the boy’s father, abandoned them. Willi’s situation is a desperate one. But she’s doing the best she can.

In the opening scene, Willi is home from her job cutting hair at a country beauty shop and hanging clothes on a line in her backyard. It’s the worst of winter, cold and dark, but the job has to get done. She doesn’t have a drier because she can’t afford one.

Willi tries to keep Cody close to her as she works. But then tragedy happens when the boy’s sled quickly takes him into the path of a truck driven by Miles Potter. Willi and Miles have known each other since they were kids, but until the moment her son dies, they were separated by their families’ places in town.

How Willi handles this situation demonstrates her resilience and the kindness of those living in her small town, including Miles. Then, there is Junior, who eventually faces his failings as a father.

That’s what Northern Comfort is about. It’s not the stuff for pretty postcards although I do include a lot of the hilltowns’ traditions like maple sugaring and making old-time music.

Here’s how the book starts. 

Willi Miller pinned her best blouse to the rope line, shaking her bare hands to keep the blood moving, as she reached into the broken plastic basket for something else. She should have done this miserable chore before she went to work this morning, but she didn’t have the time. Short and thin-boned like her mother, but yellow-haired like her father, Willi spun around for her boy, who stood a half foot away, staring at the dog whimpering and jerking its chain. “There you are, Cody. Stay near me,” she said.

Her boy, dressed in a one-piece red snowsuit, his mittens packed tightly on his hands, didn’t say a word. He only made noises that sounded like words, and he was seven. His ‘Ma,’ Willi had decided, was exactly as an animal would say it.

Earlier this afternoon, she got Cody at the babysitter’s house, where the van took him after school. Willi was a hairdresser at the Lucky Lady Beauty Shop in nearby Tyler although the running joke among the gals who worked there was it should be called the Unlucky Lady because of the stories the customers told about their men. Cheaters, drunks, and bums, the whole lot of them, it seemed, by their complaints.

The Lucky Lady was busy today with high school girls who wanted their hair curled and piled high for the semi-formal tonight. They were fun customers, so excited about their dates and the big Friday night ahead, she didn’t mind their lousy tips. Willi remembered not that long ago she did the same.

She fed Cody cereal after they got home just to hold him until she made dinner. He ate a few spoonfuls before he began playing with it, making a mess as usual, so she dressed him in his snowsuit and took him outside after she lowered the damper on the wood stove.

Now he walked beneath the hanging laundry toward the dog, named Foxy by her grandfather, who used to own the brown,short-haired, pointy-eared mutt. Willi called to her boy, who moved step by step across the snow, breaking through its icycrust until he sank to the top of his boots. He turned toward his mother. His green eyes peered from beneath the brim of his cap. Yellow snot bubbled from one nostril.

“Yeah, I’m watchin’ you,” Willi said, bending for a towel.

Snow seeped through a crack in her right boot. Cold numbed her toes. She should put duct tape over the brown rubber, but it was her only pair, and it’d look like hell.

“Hey, Cody, where’re you goin’?”

Her boy marched with fast little feet past the junked truck to the back of their house, where his sled, a cheap thing she bought, was propped against the wall. “This is a red sled,” she told Cody in the hardware store.

Her boy uttered a sound that might have been “red” but only she would know. She understood his ways most of the time. He wanted things tick-tock regular when he ate, what he wore.

Her eyes followed her boy, dragging his sled, grunting, toward her. He dropped it at her feet and sat inside. The heels of his boots kicked up and down. “Maaaaa,” he called.

Willi sighed. Cody wouldn’t let up until she gave him a ride. Her boy liked it when she towed him in his sled along the driveway to get the mail. He made happy chirps and flapped his mittens. She wiped her hands on her black jacket, a man’s, too big and open in the front because the zipper was broken. Its bottom swayed against her legs as she walked.

“All right, Cody, but just a little ride.”

She reached for the towrope and pulled Cody in a large circle. His mouth formed a wide, sloppy smile, and he let outgleeful sounds as Willi went slowly, then gained speed. Her feet sank through the snow although the sled glided easily on its surface. She was careful to stay on the flat part of her land, away from the edge of its tabletop, where it plunged onto her neighbor’s property then to one of the town’s main roads below. When she squinted, she could see the Mercy River flowing through its snowy valley like a blue vein on a woman’s wrist.

Round and round Willi towed her son. She slipped on the packed ring of snow, and her straight, yellow hair dropped to her jaw when her knit cap fell. Cody’s head rocked back as he yelped in pleasure. After a while, she stopped, out of breath.

“I gotta finish hanging the clothes before it gets dark. Alright?” she told Cody although she did not expect his answer.

She picked her hat from the snow. The sun was low in the sky, and the dark smudge spreading from the west likely carried more snow. Willi frowned. It would be too much trouble to take the clothes down again. She hated this part of winter, mid-January. It snowed every day, not much, but enough to keep the road crews going with their plows and sanders. Winteralways has a week like this, unsettled weather, the worst of the season, of the year, as far as she was concerned. Often, it happened after the thaw, so that brief warm spell seemed like one cruel joke.

She bent for one of Cody’s shirts. She had to work faster because the clothes were stiffening inside the basket. After she hung them, they would freeze into thin slabs, like shale, and after a day or two, they’ll be dry. If she had any money, she would buy a dryer. She glanced toward her house and saw missing clapboards. She’d fix those, too.

When she was a girl, she used to keep a mental list of what she’d get if she were rich: stuff like pink high heels and a long white coat. None of them seemed practical for a town like Hayward, where half the roads were dirt and fancy things were in other people’s houses. Now she would buy a car that worked without worry and hire a lawyer to make her ex-husband,Junior, pay child support.

Her boy bucked his body while he lay on his belly inside the sled, wailing as if he were wounded. Willi shook her hands and grabbed a pair of jeans from the basket.

“Shit, I hate this life,” she said.

My other Hilltown Books? The Sweet Spot and The Sacred Dog.

Here’s the link again for Northern Comfort.

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Hilltown Postcards, Uncategorized

Hilltown Postcard: We Build a Home

In my last Hilltown Postcard, I wrote about an unfortunate accident that delayed our plans to build our own home. Hank was so badly injured by another person’s carelessness, he was unable to work for ten months while he recovered. Until that happened, I managed to keep things going as a substitute teacher, plus the pitiful amount I made as a freelance correspondent for the local newspaper. 

Come the following spring, we secured a construction loan through the Bank of Western Massachusetts, a local bank that no longer exists. The bank agreed to lend us $60,000, which included the $18,000 we owed for the two acres of land we bought. 

That wasn’t a lot of money left over to build a two-story Cape with a full basement. But then we were fortunate to know so many people in the building industry. Most had worked alongside Hank on other jobs and knew what a hard-working guy he is. How hard working? He worked full time during the week and on our house on the weekends and sometimes at night.

Construction began with the well and then excavation for the foundation. We had to have electricity brought in from the road, not an easy task since those who handled the lines for the power company had gone on strike.

People we hired gave us great discounts for the work they did like framing, electricity, plumbing, dry wall, siding, and whatever was needed to build a house. 

And so many others volunteered to come on the weekend to work alongside Hank because they were friends and wanted to help a family with six kids have their own home.

We remain grateful to them all because, yes, we were able to build a home for $52,000. That wouldn’t be impossible today.

I have fond memories of watching the men, yes, it was all men, working together. My contribution was minimal like help with the painting. I did get a job tending bar at a restaurant in town as a way to bring in more money. (It turned out to be great research for when I started writing my mystery series years later.)

For the weekend volunteers, I brought coffee from the Corners Grocery, the general store in town, and muffins or scones I baked in the morning. I returned at noon with sandwiches, sides, and drinks, and then when the afternoon work was near done, beer. The guys always showed their appreciation.

I took photos of the progress, and later put them in a book as a gift for Hank. The title page says: “This is the house Hank Livingston built for his family.” There he is in the photo on the right.

Construction continued through the summer, fall, and early winter. We didn’t care whether we would be in our new home for Christmas, but it happened soon after in mid-January.

Our house wasn’t finished when we moved in. That took years. Hank has built staircases, cabinets and fine woodwork for other people’s homes. But this time, he did all of that for his family in a home we owned. Hank actually didn’t finish the house until just before we sold it and moved to Taos, New Mexico, but that’s another story for a future Hilltown Postcard.

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Uncategorized

Bom Dia from Madeira

The roosters began crowing around 3 a.m. They kept it up as that first morning’s light grew, stirring the barking dogs in the neighborhood. Then the church bells started ringing on the hour and half hour. Bom dia from Funchal, Madeira.

I was on my first trip back to Europe after a very long time, thanks to our son Zack who generously bought Hank and I tickets on Azores Airlines. He came along with his sister, Julia and her friend, Brian. Julia handled finding us a short-term rental and car. This was the first leg. Next, we would fly to San Miguel in the Azores, where our daughter, Emily would join us.

Visiting these Portuguese islands has special significance because of my family’s origins there.

Today, tourism is the number one industry in Madeira. The tile-roofed and stuccoed-wall homes tucked into this island of volcanic origin, its tropical vegetation, and the ocean beyond are stunning. Madeira, only 360 miles from North Africa’s coast, is 34 miles long and 14 miles wide. Ruivo Peak tops at 6,106 feet — one of the destinations Zack, who likes challenges, ran on the island.

As we walked around Funchal that first day, servers, obviously recognizing us as tourists, waved menus to lure us into one of the city’s many restaurants. Friendly staff served us seafood and coffee. I had learned enough Portuguese to greet people politely and show my appreciation, but everyone we met spoke English.

Street scene in Funchal, Madeira.

But Madeira wasn’t a draw for tourists during the early 20th century when so many people, including my mother’s parents left for the U.S. (My father’s parents came from the Azores.) The island’s people were impoverished and there were economic opportunities elsewhere, such as New Bedford, Mass. with its textile and fishing industries. Grandmother Angela, or vovó as we called her, was 16 when she came by ship with her older sister. She met my grandfather Manuel, avô, who came from the village of Gaulo. Both worked in the textile mills and had a house with enough land to raise vegetables, grapes for wine, and hay for their goats.

That first day we explored Funchal’s center. A point of interest was a museum for Cristiano Ronaldo, the superstar football aka soccer player from Madeira who is a forward on the Portugal national team and Al-Nassr FC. Julia and Brian wanted to get shirts, especially since the Portugal team would be playing Scotland in a few days.

(I give kudos to Brian who managed driving a rental car that accommodated five people through the incredibly steep, narrow, and curvy streets of Funchal without a mishap.)

This trip, staying in a comfortable rental and eating seafood in restaurants, was a far cry from my first trip in Europe, when I hitchhiked, traveled on the money I had made washing dishes, and was taken in by perfect strangers. Someday I may write about that experience. But this trip was special, spending time with family exploring these Portuguese islands. For the next few posts, I will share my observations. Obrigada.

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Memoir, Uncategorized

Father’s Day at the Mental Hospital

My grandfather was hauled off to a state mental hospital after he went after my grandmother with a hoe. The story goes my grandmother knocked him out with a bucket and thought he was dead. When the police came, he was taken away to one of the state mental hospitals that existed then. His diagnosis, I believe: clinical paranoia.

I didn’t see Vovô, as we kids called him, very often after that incident, but I recall visiting him at the hospital on Father’s Day. (Vovô was the grandfather on my mother’s side of the family, which included two sisters.)

On that day, my father drove our family to the hospital. My uncle brought his, which included my aunt and two cousins, plus my grandmother. One time, another aunt, my mother’s youngest sister, came.

The family brought Vovô a carton of cigarettes and made a picnic of the visit on the hospital grounds, with food, croquet, and a game of Wiffle Ball. Vovô insisted on taking us kids to the canteen for Hoodsie Cups ice cream and to introduce us to his friends. I felt half-afraid and half-curious by the experience.

By the way, the photo above is a family portrait my mother took on one of those visits. Vovô wears the suit. My grandmother, Vovó, sits on the bench holding my brother. I was only 12 and the girl on the far left.

Let me tell you a little about Vovô. He came over on the boat from Madeira when he was young and married my grandmother, who came from the same island, here. They worked in the textile mills of New Bedford, Massachusetts. A hard worker, during the Depression he bought a home in the small town of Acushnet, where the family grew and raised much of their food, plus took in boarders. He and my grandmother took English lessons and converted to a Protestant religion. Vovô made his two oldest daughters drop out of high school so they could work in the textile mills or watch the house when he and my grandmother were at work.

I don’t recall Vovô being a warm man. But then again, I imagine it was a huge adjustment emigrating to a new country and one so different than the Portuguese island where he once lived. One of my cousins told me recently our grandfather was bullied by his co-workers.

Vovô spent the last years of his life at Taunton State Hospital. He made a life for himself there. He had a job working in the laundry and even a girlfriend, whom we kids met one Father’s Day. She waited beside a tree on the grounds to meet us. My grandmother refused to divorce him.

He tried coming home once but that didn’t last long.

Vovô died while he watched a movie at the hospital. The lights came on and he was already gone. I went to the wake but not the funeral. I was a teenager then.

Years later, I worked and lived in a psychiatric halfway house, which took in patients from state and private hospitals. At that time, Massachusetts was closing its hospitals and placing people in such places. The staff was untrained and inexperienced. We were supposed to be role models and helpful roommates, I suppose. That experience inspired a novel I wrote, The Swanson Shuffle, but have yet to publish.

The halfway house’s staff had a ring of keys that unlocked every ward in the closest hospital, Foxborough State, so we could come and go freely. When I did, I thought of my grandfather and how he got used to living in one.

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