(On the off-chance you're not familiar with October Moments by now, go here first...)


Old Sam was a nice man. Like so many of the men I knew during my life in New Hampshire, Sam was a big fellow, predisposed to wearing plaid work shirts and large, roomy overalls. When he walked into a room, the very floorboards creaked under his weight.

Often, the creaking floor was the only notice you had of Sam’s arrival. There were two kinds of men in our town: the merry, hail-well-met types who were given to storytelling and to shouting hellos across the town green; and the quiet types for whom conversation seemed almost painful. When they spoke at all, their vocabulary was limited to just a handful of words: Ayuh, nope, welp, and mebbe. Sam was this type of man.

At least, he was whenever he came to the post office, which is where I could be found most summer afternoons, helping my aunt Barbara, the village postmaster. Sam would lumber on in, give Barbara a jowly smile and a nod, then give me a quick wink or sketch a jaunty salute, and you knew instantly that he was a nice guy.

But like everyone in our town, he had his eccentricities. From my view of Sam through the post-office window boxes, they amounted to two things. First, he studiously read all of his junk mail. He’d stand right over the trash basket by the door and slowly, carefully open each colorful envelope, examine each shrill piece of marketing entreating him to join this book club or give to that charity. Then, one by one, he’d drop the pieces of paper into the basket. Then he’d look up. “Welp,” he’d say to us by way of farewell, then walk out the door.

The other eccentric thing he did was the thing with the keys.

Sam kept a fairly large ring of keys in the pocket of his overalls. I think it was a legal requirement for residency in our town, that every man over a certain age had to lug around this massive ring containing the keys to every car, truck, tractor, front door, and padlock that he ever owned in his entire life, even if those locks had long since rusted away to nothing. They made quite a jangle, now I’ll tell you. At town meeting, when all these men in their droopy overalls came into the hall, it sounded like a chain gang in the middle of a mass breakout.

Sam’s keys were curiously resistant to jingling, though, at least when he walked. But when he was at the post office, you could hear them. He’d take them out of his pocket and jangle them idly in his hand while he waited for Barbara to hand him his letters (he had long ago forgotten the combination to his mailbox), then put them back in his pocket to begin his careful examination of his junk mail.

But if another customer was in front of him and he had to wait long enough, Sam would stop jangling his keys and slowly shake out one particularly long, old-fashioned looking key. Then he’d carefully, deliberately stick that key--the whole shaft, as long as your middle finger--in his ear.

Whenever this happened, I always stopped what I was doing to watch him. You would have too. It is not physically possible to stick a three-inch long key in your ear--I speak from painful, experimental experience here. But Sam would not just manage to get the whole key shaft in his ear. Once he got it in position, he’d start twisting it this way and that, like he was trying to crank the starter on a cold engine. In fact, that’s how aunt Barbara and I referred to Sam’s strange habit. As he’d stand there in the post office lobby, cranking away, head quivering slightly, eyelids fluttering in some kind of strange ecstasy, Barbara would hiss to me, “Old Sam’s trying to start his brains up again!”

When you live in a small town, no one has his own unique story. Really, you all become part of the same big story, each person a supporting character in the lives of others. When I was young and stupid, I thought old Sam was just this guy I saw sometimes in the summer and would never have any real relation to, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Sam had been friends with my grandfather, had known my Dad, man and boy. His wife Edna had been Dad’s first schoolteacher, a claim many older residents in town still make today. When Sam died sometime in the late 1980s (of a heart attack, I think, but am not sure. At least, it wasn’t from any kind of key-induced brain trauma, in case you were wondering), Edna couldn’t keep up the old farm out at Four Corners and so she decamped for the southwest, to live with one of her daughters. And when she did, my parents bought her house.

It was an old Cape-style house, with massive axe-hewn cedar beams notched with the initials of the housewright who framed the place. He had also notched a date on one of the beams: 1740. The frame was sound, as sturdy as the day it was put up, but my Dad had decided that just about everything else in the house had to be torn out and rebuilt. And I mean everything: walls, floors, plumbing, wiring, the whole magilla. I know because I tore most of it out.

I had recently moved back to New Hampshire after a bitterly unsuccessful attempt to find work as a magazine man. I was almost a year out of college and was bunked up with my Big Brother, in a cramped loft of an A-frame house my parents were renting until they found a house they wanted. When Dad came home very early in the spring of 1990 and told me he and Mom had bought Sam’s old house, it was my first real understanding of how the lives of others in this place were connected to mine in ways I had not fully appreciated before. I also understood that I was not going to get to sleep in a room of my own again unless somebody got busy over at Sam’s house and began clearing the way for a major remodel.

And so my days began to fall into a predictable and comfortable pattern. I would rise late in the morning after sleeping off the effects of my night job. I’d dress in my grubbiest clothes, fill a shopping bag with a stack of sandwiches, a large bag of chips and a 3-liter bottle of Coke, then head over to Sam’s house, pick a spot and start swinging my crowbar. I’d work til about 4, go home, shower all the dust and crap off me, then go off to my job.

It was a satisfying existence, although not without its minor inconveniences. One especially vexing concern, to my Dad anyway, was that we couldn’t find Sam’s keys. His widow didn’t have them, and she assured us they had not been buried with him--in fact, she was sure she'd left them somewhere in the house--but they were nowhere to be found. It wasn’t such a big deal when it came to the house proper--we were planning to tear out all the old doors and locks anyway. But in the barn and the back shed, there were a few nice old brass locks on some doors and hatches and Dad dearly wanted to salvage those locks. Of course, he also wanted to see what was behind those locked doors and hatches (and for the purpose of ending needless suspense, I’ll tell you what we ultimately found: old hay, some firewood, a few rat skeletons, and one very startled raccoon). Days passed, no keys turned up, and we just kept on working.

A little more than a month after we began work on the house, I found myself in the narrow, low-ceilinged space of an upstairs bedroom. We were planning to cut through the roof and build out a dormer, so I need to clear out most of the plaster wall and framing on one side. I tended to work alone, banging away with my sledge and crowbar, my earphones clamped firmly to my head, my favorite music blasting away. So I just about crapped myself one day when I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. I squawked and jumped and turned, crowbar at the ready.

But it was just my Dad. “Better check your swing, Mister Man,” he said, laughing.

It was just shy of lunchtime, too early for my Dad to be here. “Why aren’t you at work down at the plant?” I asked as I took off my headset.

“Pipe fitters are on strike,” Dad said. He was a union man through and through and wouldn’t cross a picket line for love or money. “So you got another helper for today. Maybe even longer, if they don’t settle things.” He began inspecting my handiwork, noting where I’d have to saw something out, where we’d have to knock up a support beam to keep the other side of the roof from falling in while we built the dormer.

"And I want you to be real careful with these big boards in this closet wall right here," he was telling me. "Them are single sheets of pine, come from pine trees that ain’t around no more. I’m gonna woodwork them a bit and--"

He stopped talking and put his hand up. This was my Dad’s quick-quiet stance, which I knew from an entire youth of walking in the woods with him. The moment he heard a snap of twig or rustle of leaves, he’d freeze and put his hand up like this, and we’d listen. I always felt my pulse quicken at moments like these, half-expecting a large, child-eating bear to come crashing through the bushes at any moment.

But this time, there were no twigs to snap, no leaves to rustle. We stood there like statues for a long moment. Dust and plaster hung suspended in the weak sunlight, the stillness of the old house a palpable thing.

And then we heard it. The distinct sound of heavy feet lumbering across the floor downstairs.

Errrrrrrnk. Errrrrrrrnk. Orrrrnnnnnnk. Arrrrrrrnk.

Dad took his finger from his lips and pointed to the crowbar in my hand. Wordlessly, I handed it to him. He gripped it tight, his face hardening. Dad was always on the lookout for burglars and prowlers and people who might be generally out to Get His Stuff. He had a lot of expensive power tools stowed in the cupboard of the old pantry near the front door, too. They’d be real easy to carry off.

Whoever was downstairs, it sounded like he’d entered through the front door and was creeping slowly through the room that was just below us. But in the silence of the house, it sounded like he was right there with us.

Errrrrrrnk. Errrrrrrrnk. Orrrrnnnnnnk. Arrrrrrrnk.

The footsteps continued for a few seconds more, then stopped. Right below us, they stopped. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe.

Then in one sudden motion, Dad dropped to the floor, elbows and knees and crowbar all slamming with a BANG that made me scream and would certainly have scared the bejesus out of anyone downstairs--the noise would have been directly over their heads. But we didn’t hear anyone shout or scream or call out. So my Dad yelled, in his very loudest voice. “WHO’S THERE, BY GORRY?!?”

If it had been a curious neighbor, they would surely have announced themselves. Had it been a prowler, we’d have heard the shuffling of feet as they got the hell out.

Instead, we heard nothing.

Dad was up off the floor, crowbar in the head-bashing position. “You look out, see if you see anyone,” he said, pointing to the dusty, cracked window set into the wall behind me. I did this while Dad scuttled to the ladder that would take him down. I peeked out the window—nothing but trees and a glimmer of wet tarmac out on the road beyond. Dad had clambered a few steps down the ladder, then stopped dead.

He called my name. “Come here a minute, will ya?” he asked, the let’s-kick-some-ass tone gone out of his voice.

As I walked over to where the ladder was, Dad was peering down below at something I couldn’t see. He was shaking his head. “We must be the stupidest sons-of-bitches alive, ol’ fella,” he said, laughing.

“Why?” I said.

He just laughed some more. “We heard someone creaking around on the floor downstairs, right?” I nodded. I was almost to the ladder now.

“Well, sir, then you tell me: How the hell could they do that when there IS no floor downstairs?” he asked.

I didn’t even have to come down the ladder to realize what he was saying. He was right, of course: We discovered early on that almost the entire downstairs floor of the place was dangerously rotted. Consequently, we had to tear out most of the floor first, leaving us with just a couple of narrow cedar beams as walkways over the pit of the old cellar. As I stood at the top of the ladder (it was a long one, extending all the way to the cellar floor), I surveyed the open area below, trying to see what could possibly have made that distinctive foot-on-floorboards sound we’d heard. But all that was down there was a lattice work of cedar beams and a couple of gravity-defying walls off in one corner that had hung onto the ceiling supports even after we tore the floor out from under them. Everything below this was stone and dirt from the cellar far below.

“Well, Mister Man,” Dad said, “If you can find a floorboard to creak down here, you’re a smarter fella than me. You ever heard anything like this going on here before?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head vigorously. Although of course, I usually wore my headphones and listened to my Walkman, or made so much noise with a saw or crowbar that I wouldn’t have heard anything, I realized a little sickly. Now granted, I was in my early 20s by this time, my years growing up in a haunted farmhouse already a fact of my life. But it had been a while since anything quite like this had happened to me. I was a little shook up.

So I did what I always do when I’m shook up; I made a joke out of it. “Must be old Sam walking around,” I said, hazarding a weak chuckle.

Dad liked this. “Ayuh! Ol’ fella come to check on our progress.” He took a breath, then bellowed. “Sam, hope you like what we done with the place! We’ll be starting on the barn next, soon as I find your goddamn keys!”

As soon as he said this, my Dad got a kind of shocked, startled look, as if he’d just remembered something. He hustled down the ladder and hopped to a floor beam that was immediately below. I started down the ladder myself, then stopped to watch as Dad edged along the floor beam until he was in the room that was right below where we had been standing, the room where we had heard someone walking on the floor that wasn’t there anymore. Along the outside wall of this room, two radiators sat on either side of the window. We hadn’t torn these out yet, so they just hung there, suspended by the strong pipes that came up from the furnace in the cellar. Dad hopped from the beam to the window and was now hanging by the sill to inspect the radiator.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“These are old radiators,” he said, staring closely at the one in front if him. “Hot-water heating. You know what you have to do every season when you turn the furnace on?”

I did. “Bleed the air out of the pipes?”

“Ayuh. And what do you need to open the radiator air valve?” He had his hand on the radiator now and was pulling on it.

I knew the answer, and by now you probably do too. “You need a special key,” I said.

But Dad didn’t hear my answer because he was too busy whooping. The moment he pulled the radiator out away from the wall, there was a loud jingle and the massive ring of keys (no doubt they had been set atop the radiator by Sam's wife and fell down the back) plummeted through the space where the floor should have been and landed in the dirt of the cellar. With a cackle, Dad let go of the window sill and dropped down to join them. He stood up and shook them at me triumphantly.

“Knew they had to be here somewheres,” he said. “Shoulda thought of the radiators. Guess I oughtta thank old Sam for jump-starting my brains for me.”

Dad got the locks open that afternoon. And I continued to work at the house almost every day for the next six months. Always with my headphones off.

But I never heard the floors creak again.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

May 1976:

I am not quite to the part of our street where the tar ends and the dirt road begins, but I can see it. It’s far, but not too far. I crank a little harder. My old green Schwinn shakes and rattles and sounds like it’s going to tear itself apart as I speed up. The dirt road is getting closer.

Then, even above the sound of my old bike, I hear my Dad’s truck. He makes a wide arc around me, but in passing he still manages to spray me with dirt and bits of gravel. I jam on the brakes and the bike skids sideways to a halt. Dad jumps out and stares at me for a moment.

“You supposed to be riding out this far?” he asks. It’s a rhetorical question, so I don’t answer. I get off the bike and wheel it over to the truck. It’s a heavy bike, but Dad effortlessly picks it up by the frame and shot-puts it over the tailgate. I open the door and climb up into the passenger seat. Dad puts the truck in gear and we roll down the last stretch of road up to where the tar ends.

“You know where this is? This is the town line. It’s more than a mile from the house,” he says, reminding me what I already know: I’m not supposed to ride my bike any further than down to the neighbor’s or up to the bridge. The town line where the dirt road begins is way past the bridge.

“I know,” I say. “It’s what I was going for.”

“Why would you? Knowing you’re gonna catch hell from your mother?” he asks as he makes a u-turn and we head back.

I can’t answer him, not completely, not at the age of eight. I’m tired of riding up and down our little span of street, tired of my Big Brother jumping out from various hiding places, trying to knock me off the bike I’ve only
just learned to ride. I’m proud of this new skill, so hard-won; intoxicated by the sense of potential, of the things I can do with it. Every time I pedal out onto our road and hear the whirring of the tread on the tar, feel the wind in my face, I become aware of an immense possibility. I could go anywhere now, I think.

“Well?” Dad asks. He’s waiting for an answer.

“I just wanted to cross the town line,” I said.

Dad shakes his head. “Your come this way in the car four or five times a week! Why--?”

“Not on my own!” I cry. I’m not supposed to interrupt my Dad--it really riles him--but I can’t help it. I feel a sense of determination building in my head. This seems like an important point to me, but it’s beyond my power to articulate. “I just wanted to see how far I could get on my own,” I say finally, as we pull into the driveway. Mom is waiting on the steps; the look on her face is the look of a woman who just got the weather report, and it’s all storm clouds. I lose bicycling privileges for a week, and also have to bear up under the supplemental punishment of being smirked at by BB. It’s a few days before I realize that my Dad never yelled at me for interrupting him.


September 1976:

It’s quite an accident scene, if I say so myself. Viewed from overhead, it must look awesome: Here are the two cars of the old ladies who went this way off the camp road, and that way into the flower bed. There’s the truck of the guy who wasn’t looking, down in the ditch, its engine ticking and smoking lightly. There are the two big tire ruts from the truck, including the big swooshy one that went right over my old green bike. Oh, and here’s the best part: the big depression in the dirt right next to the bike, and the trail of blood from the depression, leading off and away.

Yeah, overhead it’s a pretty cool scene, but probably not so much from my Dad’s perspective. From his view, pulling up in the main entryway of the campground in Skowhegan, Maine, it must have been a little worrisome. Especially when he saw the distinctive battered green bike, this far down the hill from our campsite.

The manager of the campground is out in the middle of the road, trying to direct traffic. The guy in the truck is drunk and his axle is broken. He’ll need a tow truck. Old Lady #1 is already backing her car onto the road and getting the hell out of there. Old Lady #2 has left her car in the flower bed, and that really seems to have annoyed the manager. He’s calling for her, but she isn’t answering. She’s sitting next to me. In a second, so is my Dad.

“Knew if I followed the trail of blood I’d find you, by Gorry,” he says with a laugh. But he sounds shaky, like he’s just had a bad scare, which I know is impossible. Dad’s not afraid of anything.

“Got reflexes like a cat, this one,” the lady says, then tells Dad how the guy in the truck came through the main gate way too fast and started fishtailing in the dirt road, driving oncoming cars this way and that. I just remembered seeing a truck coming at me and knew I couldn’t turn the bike to avoid him--it was a heavy, cumbersome bike, a little too big for me to steer with any speed or grace. So I jumped, off the bike and to the side, landing in a hard patch of gravel that laid the underside of my arm raw like a big piece of sandpaper. The truck must have missed me by only a foot or two, but I never noticed. I was too busy staggering over to the campground swimming pool. My arm was studded with bits of dirt and whole actual stones, sunk right into the flesh. I needed to wash it off and see how bad the damage was. So I knelt down and dipped my arm in the public pool. The chlorine stung like a mother. Old Lady #2 came over to make sure I was alive, I guess, and keep me company while I picked small stones out of my arm. After pulling out one particularly deep stone, a small but persistent spray of blood started jetting out of my wrist and into the pool. At the lady’s urging, I pressed hard against the injury with my other hand, and that’s how my Dad found me.

“Look,” I say, nodding my head at the pool. It’s not a big pool and its color has gone from sea green to light pink. “Hey, it’s a pool of my own blood. Get it?” I laugh. I feel dizzy.

“Were you headed for the gate?” Dad asks as he pulls out a clean hankie from his back pocket and ties it--hard and tight--around my wrist.

I look around and wonder absently where the old lady went. Then I look at my Dad. “Yeah,” I answer. “It’s only two miles to town. I wanted to--"

“I know what you wanted,” he says as he helps me to my feet. The old lady is back in her car in the flower bed, gunning the engine. Dad walks me to his truck. Someone comes running over to us, wheeling my bike. It has been run over by a truck and still the damn thing works, not so much as a broken gear or bent rim.

“I hate that bike,” I mutter as Dad shot-puts it into the back. “I don’t care if I can’t ride it for a week.” Not that I’d want to, not with my arm bleeding and sore the way it is.

Dad hops in next to me and start up the truck. “Well, sir,” he says, “I’d be inclined to get you a new bike if I thought you’d ride where you’re told.” He doesn’t realize it at the time, but he’s just struck a deal with me.


April 1980:


“This way!” I gasp, making a sharp left off the main street and into the alley. My best friend Shawn follows me on his bike. Shawn is the tallest kid in our class but he has to crank hard to keep pace with me. This is because I am highly motivated: the Privat boys are right behind us, and if they catch me, I’m convinced they will pull my tongue from my head.

I fancy myself something of a boy detective most of the time, but right now all I am is a smart-ass on the run. The older Privat boy, Larry, is BB’s age and size. He and his younger (but not much smaller) brother Craig saw me and my friend in the park. I was wearing the Army utility belt that served as my Mobile Crime Lab and had taken out my magnifying glass and a piece of paper. Shawn and I were testing our survival skills, trying to start a fire by holding the glass in the sun, above the paper. You never knew when you might be on stake-out some cold night and needed a fire, you know?

Larry called over. “What are you two little fags doing with your faggy magnifying glass?”

“Why?” I called back before I could stop myself. “You want to borrow it so you can find your ding-dong?”

And so, to the bikes.

I was riding my faithful steed, my trusty, speedy Huffy Thunder Road racing bike, complete with authentic motorcycle hand-grips and battery-powered 8-channel CB radio (working range up to 25 feet!). My parents got it for me almost four years ago when we left Maine. I had behaved myself ever since, riding only within sight of the house and using my new bike mostly to jump makeshift ramps that BB set up in the driveway. Then we moved to Kansas, to a small town with big sidewalks and quiet, untrafficked streets. Gradually, BB and I were given the run of the town, so long as we didn’t ride out on the highway past the school, over the railroad tracks on either end of town, or past the Litch farm, where the town road disappeared into the vast sorghum fields. I stayed within those limits, but made it my business to know every street, alley, and access road in town.

Halfway up the alley, I hook a sharp left and hope Shawn is keeping up. Then I veer right, across an old embedded track from when they used to back box cars up to the back of the feed store. Now we’re in a dark alleyway lined by vine-covered fences on either side. “Where--?” Shawn asks, huffing behind me. I brake hard, then turn the bike left and duck under an ivy overhang. We’re on a very narrow sidewalk running between two tall buildings. Elbows and knees brushing brick on either side, we glide along the cool dark space and emerge two blocks from where we first turned. The Privat brothers are nowhere in sight.

Shawn is impressed, and that takes some doing. “Not bad,” he says. “Did you really know where you were going?”

“Yes,” I said simply. “Yes I do.”


October 1991:


It’s mid-month and still unseasonably warm in Chicago. I’m sitting out on a bench in front of my office building, eating a tomato and bologna sandwich which, at that time in my life, I considered the second-most delicious thing ever. The most delicious thing ever is walking toward me from the parking lot, where I just watched her pull in.

“Hi,” Her Lovely Self says, sitting down on the bench next to me. I can smell her perfume, and something else. The high sweet smell of oil, of a kind that puts me in mind of my Dad’s chainsaw. She arches her back, turns her face to the sun. “It’s beautiful out,” she says.

“Beautiful,” I echo, staring at her, bits of sandwich all but falling out of my mouth, I'm that pathetic. Then I catch myself and before she can see me gazing at her with such adulation, I direct my eyes down at the ground. At her shoes in fact: a pair of off-white flats. One of them has some kind of dark scuff mark along the top. The mark looks like--

“Can I have your nuts?” she asks. I look up, startled and strangely hopeful, then see her pointing to the bag of cashews sitting nearby. “Thanks,” she says as I hand them over. “I didn’t have time to eat lunch today. Had some birthday money burning a hole in my pocket.” I nod. Her birthday was last weekend. She went out partying with her roommates and her current boyfriend, some ding-dong she met on a bus to a Cubs game. This guy seems to have locked up all of her free time, time I wouldn’t mind sharing with this vision of loveliness. But I need an in, some way to--

Then it hits me. The smell: chain oil. The scuff on her shoe: a tread mark. No time to buy lunch because she was out looking at something to spend her birthday money on. She’s buying a bicycle, I think. God bless you, boy detective, wherever you are.

“I hear it’s going to be warm all weekend. What are you gonna do?” she asks.

“Oh,” I say nonchalantly. “I’m going to take my new bike for a spin, maybe ride up the Skokie Trail--"

“Did you just get a bike?” she says, genuinely enthused. “I was just shopping for one!”

“No way!” I cry, giving her a what-are-the-odds look, even as I’m wondering where I’m going to find the money--today--to buy the bike I just told her I owned. Except...I can’t quite find it in me to beat myself up for lying. Because in that moment, I realize that I’m telling a kind of truth. “I love my bicycle,” I say. “Ever since my old Huffy rusted to bits, I’ve wanted a new bike. It’s how I find my way. When you’re on your bike, well, that’s when you really know where you are. You know?”

Her Lovely Self just stares at me. “You say some funny things sometimes,” she says, then pats me on my forearm, the one with all the scars and gravel divots. “But that’s okay. I’ll pick you up Saturday morning. You can figure out how to put my new bike rack on the back of my car.” I smile and before I can stop myself, I tell her how happy I would be to get my hands on her rack.


August 2009:

I wake in the darkened room and for a minute, I don’t know where I am. Then I feel the tension headache pulsing behind my eyeball, feel the tightness in my shoulders, the pulse in my neck. I stare at the clock--it’s almost nine--and jump out of bed. Late! I think. I can’t be late for work!

Then I remember: It’s Saturday. My first week as editor-in-chief is over. I survived it. I didn’t end up in a pool of my own blood. I didn’t have to run and hide in an alley. No one took away my nuts in a baggie. The relief is palpable.

I throw on a t-shirt and shorts and stagger downstairs to the kitchen of my temporary living quarters. I make a cup of coffee and step outside. It’s already a warm day. Runners and moms with jogging strollers are making use of the walking trail just across the way. Someone told me the walking trail connects to a canal tow path, which in turn joins up with a rail-trail that gives you access to the entire city. I look over at the side of the building, to where my old bike sits, waiting. It could be my green Schwinn, my black Huffy, the mountain bike I bought in Chicago on impulse, and that impulse was love. It's my bike and it sits and waits, but not for long.

In a few minutes, helmet adjusted and water bottle filled, I’m slowly pedaling over to the walking trail. The headache is evaporating, the tension across my shoulders easing. I may have survived my first week on the job, but I still have a city to learn, boundaries to stretch. I see a sign pointing me to the dirt path along the canal, to the city, to the future. I coast along the tarmac walking trail, onto the road, and down the hill.

I am not quite to the part of the street where the tar ends and the dirt road begins, but I can see it. It’s far, but not too far.

I crank a little harder.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

Just a couple days from starting my new job, and so I have officially Gone Insane, between wrapping up my last few freelance projects and fixing up all the many imperfections in the Magazine Mansion.

Not sure when I'll have time to post about my new doings, but I hate to leave you with nothing to read, so I thought I would put this up. I wrote it while I was in New Hampshire and although it feels like it should be a chapter from my book, I'm actually not quite sure where it fits in. It also touches on a story I posted long ago regarding the Easter Bunny, and while I've worked hard to write as much new material for the book as possible, the fact is I'm bound to include a few elements from old blog posts. When all is said and done, my hope is the book will be about 90 percent all new stuff, 10 percent material based in some part on stories told here. Anyway, hope it keeps you occupied for a little while. I call it:

Victory Lap

We called ourselves Catholic, but if anything I was half-Catholic. Whenever I mentioned this to Mom, she got mad, although for a full Catholic, she wasn’t exactly a model of piety. We almost never went to church on Sundays. It seemed like there were whole years when we didn’t go.

Then Mom put us in a Catholic school and I had religion class for the first time. It was my worst subject, right after penmanship. My teacher was a nun named Sister Augustina, who often took us down to the little chapel at the back of the school and drilled us in our prayers, but it had been so long between church visits for me, I didn’t know any of them. I didn’t even know Sunday service was called Mass. When Sister Augustina first mentioned going to Mass, I thought she was talking about driving down to my grandparents in Boston, which both my parents hated to do, Mom because she always got an earful from Grandma Horan about how her grandsons were growing up wild; Dad because it meant getting on a highway filled with crazy Massachusetts drivers.

One morning, Sister Augustina had been having us recite the Apostle’s Creed one by one, and caught me in the act of not knowing a thing about it. I told her I’d never heard it before, but it sure was nice. “You have to know the Creed,” she said, incredulous. “Don’t you go to Mass on the weekend?”

“Oh, hardly ever,” I said. “Mom says we wouldn’t go at all if Grandma and Papa didn’t call and make her feel bad about it. But once they die and we go to the funeral, she says we won’t have to go ever again. It drives Dad nuts. Every time we go, he complains about the mean people who flip him the bird. He keeps a little bottle in his jacket pocket and drinks from it the entire time. He says he needs it to get through the whole Christly ordeal.”

After that, it was pretty clear Sister Augustina and I were never going to be buddies, especially since she told my Mom what I said. Next Sunday, we started going to church again for a while, long enough that I learned all about the Creed, and a bunch of other stuff, like Communion, which my Big Brother was going to get to do that year. Sister Augustina said that when we got to go to Communion, we would actually be eating Jesus’s body (BB said it tasted just like bread, though). “But when it is your time, children, it will be up to me to decide who gets to share in this holy sacrament. Some of you may not be ready,” Sister said, looking right at me. I knew then that I was never going to get Communion. Not a half-Catholic like me.

I was half-Catholic because Dad was a whole other religion, a Methodist. He actually never went to church. On Sundays when Mom piled us in the car in our good shirts and best plaid slacks, Dad would head out to the garden to hoe. “Does being a Methodist mean you don’t ever go to church or believe in God?” I asked him one Sunday, after we got back and I’d changed into my grubby garden clothes.

“Hell, no,” he said, stopping to lean on his hoe and look out across the tilled acre. “I’m already at church, right here in my garden. And you know, I talk to God all the time, Jesus, too. Him and me, we’re old pals.” Well, that was true. Last summer, when Dad was putting on the addition on our house, the old wooden ladder broke under his feet and he dangled from the edge of the roof. Dad yelled Jesus’s name really loud then, and asked Him to bring the long stepladder, but Mom and BB got it instead.

My classmates told me that if you weren’t Catholic, you went to hell, and that scared me. I asked Mom if it was true that Dad would go to hell for being a Methodist. She thought about it for a long minute, then said, “No, but your father probably won’t get right into heaven. He’ll have to spend some time in Purgatory first.” Mom explained that Purgatory was where people like Dad would have to wait until their name was called. I imagined him sitting in a metal folding chair, reading old magazines and looking up at a clock. It sounded like being at the doctor’s.

Purgatory didn’t make sense to me. Hell either, for that matter. In religion class, Sister told us that God loved everyone, so I took that to mean everyone got to go to heaven. Certainly I was going. But how could I enjoy paradise knowing my Dad was stuck out in the waiting room? Dad would have to get a pass, I decided, if for no other reason than to satisfy the eternal happiness of me, a perfect child. Then that spring we learned in class about the meaning of Easter—that Jesus died for our sins so we could go to heaven--and I knew Dad would be okay. He was on a first-name basis with Him, after all. His pal Jesus would get him in somehow.

I always liked Easter, even before I knew why we celebrated it. For one thing, it made a nice break there at the end of winter. Depending on when Easter came, we sometimes still had a little snow on the ground, but some years, it was late enough and warm enough that we had already started work in the garden. Once the garden was planted, Dad got up at dawn to check on the seedlings and prowl for varmints. As a rule I didn’t get up early on weekends, Easter or not, but one year I made an exception. From Sister Augustina, I now knew that Jesus rose up into heaven on the first Easter Sunday, and I got it in my head that He did it again every year after that, like a victory lap. Naturally, I just knew it happened first thing in the morning, at sunrise.

That Easter, it was still all blue outside when I woke up. I threw on a coat and ran to the door, but Mom caught me and said I had to bring a Thermos of coffee out to Dad. The garden was on the wrong side of the house to catch the sun--or The Son--coming up. But I went, trying to look up in the sky the whole way.

“Ssst! Get down!” I heard my Dad whisper. I saw him over behind the pile of chicken manure and ran crouched over to him. He was kneeling on the cold wet ground, the shotgun already up on his shoulder. Beyond him, a faint row of little green seedlings sat, tiny and pale and vulnerable. A couple at the end were bent over where they’d been viciously nibbled and three or four on the other side were just gone, only a little green nub sticking out from where Dad had just planted them.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Thought I saw a woodchuck,” he muttered. He set the gun in his lap and I handed him the Thermos. He unscrewed the lid, pulled out his little bottle and poured the contents into it, then drank it. “So,” he said, scanning the woods along the edge of the garden. “Did the Easter Bunny come?” I had been so focused on coming out to see Jesus that I’d forgotten the other good thing about Easter. “I hope so,” I said. I had to get back in soon and check. Apart from anything else, BB would be up and if he saw my basket of eggs unattended, he’d be into it like a fox in a chocolate henhouse.

I turned back to the house apprehensively then, trying to look into the living room window from here, but it was too far. Also, the sun was rising up over the house now. I stared straight into the corona of glare that lit up the chimney. Dad said you shouldn’t look at the sun because you’d see spots for the rest of your life, but I figured it was my last chance to catch a glimpse of Jesus until next year.

Just then, right behind me, came a BAM! so loud my ears rang all day. I jumped about 20 feet and turned in time to see Dad sprinting around the manure pile, gun in one hand as he ran fast along the edge of the garden. Way off at the other end, I could see bushes moving. Dad had hit something but hadn’t killed it.

The shot brought Mom and BB out of the front door. BB was holding his Easter basket by the handle. He already had a little smeary chocolate beard on his face. “Was it the woodchucks?” he asked.

But just then, another BAM! ripped through the quiet morning. We turned and watched Dad as, with a distant cry of victory, he reached into the bushes and pulled up the body of the varmint who’d been at his new garden. It wasn’t a woodchuck. Dad lifted it up by its long ears.

“Suffering Jesus!” Mom cried.

BB dropped his basket, his chocolate-ringed mouth agape.

Dad was a short man with stubby legs and long arms and a round belly that spilled over the top of his jeans, but he looked so graceful that morning as the sun rose over the top of the house and the light hit him. He was smiling that big-bearded smile of his as he completed his lap around the garden, smoking shotgun in one hand, dead rabbit in the other. He ran right up to us, set the gun next to the Thermos and triumphantly shook the rabbit in the air. Mom just looked at him.

BB started crying. “Dad just shot the Easter Bunny!”

Well, of course it wasn’t. But the more I thought about it that day, the more the Easter Bunny troubled me. Well, the idea of him, anyway, which didn’t make any more sense to me than the idea of Purgatory. I knew he was real, of course, but the Easter Bunny just didn’t seem to fit in any way with the stuff Sister Augustina was telling us about Jesus the Risen Lord. An Easter Dove, or something that flew, well, that made sense. But an anthropomorphic bunny? Hiding colored eggs? How did that fit in with the Death and Resurrection of Christ?

When we got back to school after Easter break, our first class on Monday morning was English. But instead of reading a story or learning vocabulary words, our teacher asked us to get out a pencil and a sheet of paper and write a story about Easter. It could be about Jesus, about what our family did on Easter Sunday--anything. As I sat for a moment to collect my thoughts, I absently started doodling in the corner margin of my paper. Finally, I had my opening line: “Early Easter morning, Dad sat with his shotgun, aiming carefully at the furry little bunny that was eating in the garden.” But I never wrote it. Instead, I looked at what I had just doodled on the corner of the paper: It was a little sketch of an Easter egg, sitting not in an Easter basket, but in a little box full of hay. That box looks like a manger, I thought.

Then BAM! with the suddenness of a gunshot inside my head, the whole Easter Bunny puzzle resolved itself. I saw it clearly, instantly, and it all made sense! Sister Augustina had talked about divine inspiration--God pouring words into the heads of the guys who wrote the Bible--and I knew this had to be the same exact thing. I began writing as fast as I could, afraid I would forget it before I could get it all on paper. In the quiet of the room, my furious jottings were loud enough to attract attention. Classmates stopped, looked up from their monosyllabic nothings about egg hunts and Easter Mass, whispered, pointed, giggled.

My teacher got up, walked behind me, started reading over my shoulder. Ordinarily, this made me nervous and self-conscious, but I barely noticed her. When the bell rang for morning recess, she was still standing behind me. She called for the papers, but put a hand on my shoulder even as she did this. “You can stay and finish that, if you want,” she said, her voice all funny. “You can even take it home and hand it in tomorrow. Take your time.” Her name was Miss Seaver and she was the first teacher who ever encouraged me to write. She also gave me the two best pieces of advice you could ever give a writer: Stay and finish. Take your time. I took the story home and worked on it until bed time, then took my pen light and pad under the covers and kept writing. BB teased me from the top bunk. “What are you writing down there? Love letters to a girl?” I didn’t even look up from my paper. “Shut your damn mouth,” I said. “This is holy stuff.”

By first bell the next morning, it was finished, the information God had poured into my head the day before had made its way onto paper. The Almighty hadn’t supplied me with a title for my story, so I went with one inspired by the comic books I loved. I called it "The Secret Origin of The Easter Bunny." Miss Seaver handed back everyone else’s stories and had kids take turns reading theirs aloud in class, while she read through mine. Finally, when everyone else was done, she asked me to come up to the front of the class, handed me my story and had me read it. It was the first time a teacher had allowed me in front of a class since that time in first grade when I stood up and gave a monologue about bear poop. I cleared my throat a couple of times, then began to read:

Once upon a time, it was the first Christmas. “What?!?” you say? “An Easter story, beginning at Christmas?” Of course! Because that’s when the baby Jesus was born, after all. And he wasn’t the only one.

It was my doodle of the Easter egg in a manger that did it, see. Because when I thought about it, there was only one instance I knew for sure where Jesus interacted with animals at all, and that was in the stable in Bethlehem, so that’s where I started...

We all know how the Wise Men and the shepherds and all the other dirty animals came to look at the baby Jesus, right? Cows and birds and foxes and bears and deer all sat side by side, not eating each other because they all loved Jesus. And so did a special girl bunny. She couldn’t have kids. Like my great-aunt Pat, she had a kink in her pipes. So she hopped into the stable and had a look at Baby Jesus, and prayed for a miracle. And it happened! She suddenly was having a baby. But not a normal baby bunny, no! Instead, she laid a colored egg right there in the manger, and out of it hatched the Easter Bunny.

I went on from there. I worked in a story Dad had told me, how on farms, kids used to sneak into the barn at midnight on Christmas because, according to legend, all the cows and chickens gained the power of speech, just as they did on the first Christmas...

But because the Easter Bunny was actually born in the stable along with Jesus, he didn’t just get to talk at Christmas. He got to speak and think and walk and everything for his whole life, and that’s forever. So when he grew up, he started wearing clothes and carrying baskets and hiding colored eggs around people's houses so everyone would know how he was born and who made him that way. Then people would look at him and say, “How did a giant talking rabbit get in here? Jesus Christ!”


My story was six pages long and when I got to the end, I got a reaction I didn't expect: Miss Seaver started clapping, then the whole class joined in. Kids asked me where I heard that story, did I really make it up, I didn’t, did I? There was a lot of murmuring and nodding as though I had explained a lot of things for them.

People were still talking about it through morning recess and into the next class, which was religion. Sister Augustina was annoyed at the chatter in the little chapel and demanded to know what the hubbub was about. A girl named Maryann told Sister I had written the best Easter story ever and I fell right in love with her for saying that. But then Sister Augustina turned to me and asked me what my story was about.

I got as far as the Easter Bunny’s mom laying an egg by the baby Jesus' head when I got another reaction I didn’t expect. Sister Augustina got me by my sweater vest and hauled me straight over the top of the pew. For someone who was just complaining about noise in the chapel, she sure was making a lot of it herself.

“How dare you?” she screamed. “An Easter egg in the Manger? That is sacrilege!” As I would soon learn, a lot of priests and nuns were a little prickly about the whole Easter bunny thing. But Sister Augustina was more than prickly that morning, she was a whole porcupine. I tried to tell her about my moment of divine inspiration, but that just made her angrier. “I don’t want to hear another word! Easter rabbits in Bethlehem! It’s heresy. There IS no Easter bunny!” she cried. Maryann gasped. So did several other kids. One little girl started crying. Sister looked around, rattled. Then she turned back to me. I stared at her, wondering how she could say something like that. Everyone knew there was an Easter Bunny. Why he did what he did was a mystery--one I thought God had called me to solve--but he was real. No Easter Bunny? Please. She might as well have said there was no Santa Claus.

Sister Augustina left the class alone in the chapel, murmuring over this terrible lie the nun had told. She dragged me back to Miss Seaver, who tried to stand up for me, but that just got her in trouble, too. Next thing I knew, me, Miss Seaver, and my story were all sitting outside the principal’s office, up at the very top floor of the school. Sister Augustina shrieked and hollered from the other side of the door. Occasionally, she’d be interrupted by a deep, booming voice that was too low and froggy to understand, but I knew was the principal, Mother Mary. I had only seen her up close once when I was coming out of the library and she swooped past in her dark glasses and black dress and habit. She looked like the Angel of Death. It made me wish for my own mother Mary, and I started to sniffle a little.

“Don’t cry, now,” Miss Seaver said, patting me on the knee. “Everything will be fine. You musn’t let this discourage you. I thought it was a very creative story.” But then the booming voice called Miss Seaver’s name and her face went pale and I knew we were dead. She disappeared behind the door and then everyone’s voices got too low for me to hear, even with my ear pressed against the frosted glass. I jumped away quick as the door opened and Sister Augustina stepped out. She gave me a look that could have stripped paint, then stormed off back to the chapel, where the rest of my class was still waiting. A second later, Miss Seaver, still alive, leaned out the door and called me in. She gave me a quick wink and I felt my heart lift.

But Mother Mary crushed that. The Angel of Death was sitting silently, leafing through my story, a frown on her face. As I looked at that frown, I noticed she had a little gray mustache. Now that I thought about it, Sister Augustina did, too. I wondered if this meant anything, but then Mother Mary looked up, catching me in the act of staring at her mustache. I waited for her to open her mouth and pronounce my death in that deep voice of hers. I looked down at the spot on the carpet in her office where my body would fall.

“Did you really write this all yourself?” Mother Mary finally asked.

I was so expecting her to tell me to die that I just stood there staring, until Miss Seaver nudged me. “Yes, Mother Mary,” I squeaked. “I started it in class yesterday and Miss Seaver said I could finish it for homework.”

Mother Mary nodded, then took a breath and handed my story back to Miss Seaver. “Very interesting,” she said. “As a child, I myself wondered about the Easter Bunny. I am not quite sure he was part of the Holy Nativity, but you found a very imaginative way to tie the two together. When you are older, you will understand more fully the true nature of Christ’s Resurrection and the spirit of Easter. Sister Augustina will see to that.” Then Mother Mary made a face at me, her mustache peeling back to reveal a scary row of the straightest, whitest, falsest teeth ever. I didn’t realize until later that she was smiling. “That is all,” she said, nodding. I still couldn’t move. Miss Seaver had to grab my elbow and turn me out the door.

The bell rang then, signaling lunchtime recess. Miss Seaver nodded to me and I bolted down one floor to the cloakroom, where I found my lunchbox. Then I dashed out the back door to the fire escape that would take me down to the gymnasium where everyone ate.

I stopped on the fire escape and leaned over the railing, letting the cold spring air blow over me. The sun seemed extra bright after my escape from death. Birds were singing and everything. I stood there for a moment, looking down from my great height, first at the gymnasium, then at the playground beyond and finally to the greening hills and mountains off in the distance. I watched the children stream out from the doors below, then ran down the steps to join them. Even half-Catholic, I understood the spirit of Easter just fine.

So, there you go. And now here I go. More soon...

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

A wiser man than I once said that people don't read magazines for who they are, but for who they want to be. That in every magazine there is an inherent promise to grant a wish. Spend enough time with magazine editors and you will hear people talking about "the promise." What is the promise of this story? Have we got enough of the promise on the cover? The promise is that particular piece of verbiage that tells the reader not only what the story is about, but also what they can hope to have or become by reading it.

I got into magazines by virtue of a very different kind of promise. When I was a wee lad, I was a voracious reader. When I ran out of kids' books--The Great Brain, Encyclopedia Brown, even the musty old Hardy Boys books we had in the attic--I would read whatever my parents had on hand. Often as not, what they had was magazines, new and old, piled high in a big old wooden barrel in our living room. I got into the habit of reading to my mom while she did chores. I'd start with Woman's Day or Better Homes and Gardens. Some days, Mom did a lot of ironing and I'd dig deep into that barrel, reading to her from the musty vintage magazines she and Dad had accumulated over the years: Collier's and Holiday and many others. I always saved Reader's Digest and its humor departments for last. My mom loved those little nuggets. Oh, they made her laugh. "You know," she used to tell me. "Someone writes those for a living."

I pointed out that readers sent in the anecdotes for the Digest. "Yes," my mom countered, "but someone at the magazine polishes them up, makes them sound better, funnier. They get paid to play with words." It was a compelling promise, especially for me. I loved words. Picked them apart, played off them, strung different ones together to see how they looked on a page, or hear how they sounded spoken aloud. The idea that you could make a living doing this was an arresting one, even at the age of 10.

And now, here I am, 30 years later. After two decades of writing and editing, after playing with words for a variety of venues, some you've all heard of, some you haven't, I'm here: Seven months unemployed, scraping up enough freelance work to keep the lights on and the mortgage current. Whatever promise that compelled me as a child to choose this work seemed long since to have evaporated.


Or...maybe not:


I've just accepted a job to be editor-in-chief at one of the biggest magazines in the world--or at least it used to be.

Trust me, you've heard of it.

To be sure, the magazine is a shadow of its former self, and a bit of a fixer-upper (Incidentally, it also shares something very much in common with the day, time, and basic nature of this blog entry). My job is to restore it to its former glory, to dig it out from the bottom of the musty old barrel it's been in, to help it find its voice again. To be paid to play with words.

As opportunities go, this was one of the most unexpected of my life. The notion of running my own magazine--let alone this one--was a dream I had just about abandoned. Taking this challenge on may be my finest hour—or a total train wreck. Or, knowing me, probably a little bit of both.

Either way, I may be gone for a while--the "For Sale" sign goes up in front of the Magazine Mansion tomorrow. Even though I won't be in my new office until the middle of the month, I'm already deep into issue planning, as well as wrapping up the last of my freelance and, somehow, finishing my book proposal. Oh, and spackle and fresh paint. Lots of spackle and fresh paint.

But I'll be back. As I wrote in my very first entry, "this is my attempt to cope with it all." I thought I was talking about the business I was in, but I see now that I was really talking about my life. And this blog has become a very special part of it. So I'll continue to use it as another opportunity to work with words, in whatever way seems to suit me. That's my promise.

You're welcome, as always, to follow along.

Yours (Once Again),
From Somewhere on the Masthead

Busy day/week/life here at the Magazine Mansion, and more going on than I can articulate. So instead of giving you any news about my planets-in-alignment opportunity, I thought I would cleverly distract you with another sample chapter from my book. A lot of folks wanted to see something about my mom, and I would say this fits the bill. It's not the funniest or sharpest piece of writing I've ever done, but of everything I've written in the past few months, it's the story I'm fondest of, probably because it's the closest I've ever come to capturing the kind of person my mother was when I was growing up.

Also, it has the added advantage of featuring a famous incident (at least in my family) involving my brother and the time Mom tried to put him on a diet.

Hope you like it:

Iron Mom


Whenever my mother plugged in the iron, my brother and I knew we had two choices: Get very quiet. Or get out of the house.

Mom said she did her best problem-solving behind the ironing board, and I guess that was true enough, because when she wasn’t behind that board, she was busy creating whole new problems, problems that never would have occurred to me to worry about if she hadn’t brought them up. She was forever drilling us on potentially life-threatening situations—what to do if we fell through the ice, or were buried alive, or had to escape from the car if it ever flipped over and caught fire. That was the only one that really bothered me, not because I couldn’t figure a way out, but because Mom said, “Whatever you do, run and don’t stop. Just leave me behind.” She might as well have said, “Stand by uselessly and watch me burn to death,” because that was the image that stuck in my head.

But it must have eased her mind in some way, because she did this for years, constantly surprising us with ever stranger and unlikelier scenarios, needling us for instant answers to see if our survival instinct was sufficiently honed. There I’d be, reading a comic book in the back seat of the car, minding my own business as we drove somewhere, when suddenly she’d say, “What would you do if there were burglars upstairs and you were trapped in the basement?”

BB would get all rigid next to me, like one of those pointer dogs that’s finally found a bird in the bushes. “Ooh, I know! Pull all the fuses so when they came down to check the power, I’d sneak out,” he’d say, then give me a satisfied nod as if to say, Beat that.

“Not bad,” Mom would reply. “But suppose you were tied up in the corner? Then what? You think about that for a minute. Now it’s your brother’s turn. MM? Put that down and listen. What would you do if you were trapped in the basement…”

I sighed hugely across her. “Ma, we don’t have a basement,” I said. It was true. All we had was a tiny little crawlspace under the house and I was never going down there.

“Don’t interrupt. Now, listen! What would you do if you were trapped in the basement and it started flooding?” I gave it the moment’s consideration I thought it warranted. Aside from having no basement, none of us could swim either.

"Well?" Mom demanded after half a second. "What would you do?"

“Drown,” I answered. Mom got angry at me for that.

When I was little it seemed like anger—not the need to think or solve problems--was what drove Mom to iron the most. And she could be mad for hours at a time. You only had to look at our clothes to tell this. Everything in our closets, all our school shirts and pants, our jeans, even our t-shirts and underwear, were all starchy-smelling and folded or creased like they had just come from the cleaners. Even though she ironed every day, Mom’s clothes hamper in the living room was almost always full. If she pressed her way through our clothes, she moved on to her own, then Dad’s last of all—construction workers didn’t have a lot of clothes that took well to ironing. When she put the hissing iron to the arms of Dad’s work shirts, even freshly laundered, you could smell the sweat coming off them.

She used to tell us that being a grown-up was more complicated than we ever appreciated, that every day she and Dad had new problems to solve. “But often as not, I’m the only one who wants to solve them!” she’d say mysteriously, her voice rising at the end of the sentence. Then she’d slam something down—a plate or a heavy book, maybe. If that wasn’t satisfying enough, she’d go rummage around in the kitchen cabinets, usually the lower ones, where she kept the big metal pots and pans and could get some good clanging noises out of them. But after a while of banging around in there, she’d come out to the living room, set up her board, plug in her old black-and-nickel plated Sunbeam, and set the dial way over to the side marked “Steam.”

Sometimes she would ask me to read one of her magazines to her, so I’d pick my way through the stories in Reader’s Digest (I liked the humor pieces. Mom was a big fan of the “Drama in Real Life” disaster stories). I’d have to look up occasionally to see what she was ironing, knowing that if she got to my clothes, it was time to go to the bathroom and forget to come back. For Mom, there was a very literal connection between what she was ironing and what she was thinking about, mad or not. When she was working the wrinkles out of your clothes, she was apt to start working some wrinkles out of you. If I was too slow to notice that she was pressing my slacks, I’d have to sit and get an earful about my smart mouth or some pointers on how to make my teachers like me better (these pointers nearly always seemed to involve me talking less and listening more).

Not long after he sent me to the hospital, Mom spent a lot of time ironing BB’s clothes, thinking about all the times he flew off the handle and thumped me, or talked too fast to be understood, or couldn’t settle down at night (for some reason, he kept having bad dreams about being buried alive or trapped under ice). After talking with Dad about it, Mom announced that BB was going to see a special doctor, a psychiatrist. “Oh, like Lucy in the Charlie Brown comics,” I said. “You pay her a nickel and she tells you your problems.”

Dad shook his head sadly. “This one’s gonna cost a lot more than a nickel,” he said.

He was right. The doctor told my parents that BB was hyperactive, which I could have told them for free. My brother never sat still. It was frustrating. You’d be playing Hot Wheels or building a block tower and he’d freak out if a car turned over or a block fell. Then he’d smash up the track and knock down the blocks and then thump me just because. The doctor gave him some medicine—it didn’t work, it made him more hyper than ever. Then he recommended a school in Manchester for kids with special problems--like being a spaz and hitting your brother all the time. On BB’s first day of school, the teacher complimented him on his neat appearance and his crisp, unwrinkled clothes. He got a little better about the spaz thing, too. The psychiatrist had told BB that when he started to get excited or found himself in a stressful situation, he needed to take a deep breath and focus on the problem, instead of just yelling or lashing out. And it worked: I discovered it often took me five or six good insults before I got BB mad enough to actually try to hit me.

But Mom wasn’t done fixing my brother yet. One afternoon, while ironing clothes she found stuffed in the back of BB’s closet, she suddenly said to him, “You don’t wear these clothes because they’re too tight. You’re too big, that’s your problem,” she told him. “I was husky like you when I was younger, but I started watching what I ate. You will too.” That was a great week, the week she started my brother on a diet. The best part was the night he came back from the kitchen with his third helping of chicken and rice and Mom, remembering that she was trying to slim my brother down, snatched his plate away and took it back to the kitchen. “She took my food!” he cried, looking across the table at me. “Now you know how it feels,” I said, stuffing my mouth with a big load of chicken. You wouldn’t think you could smile and chew at the same time, but you'd be wrong.

In the end, the crash diet didn’t work. For one thing, BB started getting up at night and sneaking food from the kitchen. And not just sneaking, but hiding it. One morning, I reached in my dresser drawer for a fresh pair of underpants and knew something was wrong when crumbs fell out of the crotch. I yelled for Mom as I always did when there was a problem with the laundry service. She took one look at the crumbs and began pulling all my crisp, neatly pressed underpants out of the top drawer and shaking them. Towards the back, chocolate chip cookies started falling out.

That’s when BB walked in from the bathroom. He took in the scene, then took a deep breath. He calmly turned to me and said, “So Mom finally found out where you were hiding the cookies, huh?” Even in my rage and indignation, I had to admire my brother’s self-control in that moment of crisis, but Mom still saw right through him. “How could you hide food in your brother’s underwear drawer?” she cried. BB glared at her for one whole second, then collapsed. “I had to!” he cried. “My drawers are already full!” After she made him put all the food back in the pantry, Mom punished BB by teaching him how to load the washer and dryer, starting with my Fruit-of-the-Looms. From then on, it was his job to bring the fresh clothes directly to the ironing hamper and keep it topped off.

A few times a month, we’d find Mom ironing stuff at the bottom of the basket and we knew she and Dad had probably had a big fight, usually over the checkbook, which Dad kept in a secret place and wouldn’t give her. Those times, Mom would get all the way down to the linen napkins that we only used at Thanksgiving, bed sheets for the guest room, and a stack of old cloth squares that had a curious combination of faded black and yellow stains and delicately embroidered initials. “What are those?” I once asked her, when I was 5 or 6, before I was old enough to know better than to talk to her when she had an iron in her hand.

“Handkerchiefs,” she’d say grimly, mashing the iron onto them. “Vintage linen and hand-stitched. They belonged to your great-grandpa. He was a smart man. Good with money. He left quite a bit to your grandmother. He died before you were born. But these old hankies are still good. Someone should get the use of them.” I don’t know who she thought that someone would be, but it wasn’t going to be me. Looking at those old stained hankies, it was only too easy to imagine that with one blow, you’d inhale whatever killed great-grandpa and die all sneezing and bloody. Anyway, I didn’t need a hanky. That’s what long sleeves were for.

Once, in late fall, when the weather turned cold, we came home from school to find the house exceptionally bright. It took us a minute to figure it out, but then we realized that all the windows were bare, although even out here in the breezeway they were all slightly steamed over. BB and I looked at each other, then he crept into the swirling mist coming from the living room while I stayed by the front door. He came back fast, his eyes wide. “The basket’s empty. Mom’s ironing all the curtains now,” he reported. We put our coats back on and played outside until Mom called us in for supper.

That was the day we found out that Dad had no job.

“Well, you’ve had no job before. You just went down to the union hall and got another one, right?” BB said to Dad, as we sat quietly at supper that night. The table had a stiff white tablecloth on it that I’d never seen before. Cloth napkins too. They were still warm and smelled slightly of hot steam.

“That’s true,” Dad said, nodding. He wasn’t looking at anyone, especially Mom. He was staring at his beer bottle, was in fact peeling the label from the bottle, letting bits fall onto his plate. “That’s true, but there isn’t a lot of new work happening in New Hampshire anymore.” He took a deep breath and kept not looking at Mom. “And we don’t have much in the bank right now, so if we want to keep on the way we are, I’m going to have to go sign on with one of the big construction companies doing work up in Maine. Or Canada, maybe. What would you do if we moved there?” he asked.

“Canada?!?” BB cried, looking to Mom, I guess to see if this was another of her disaster scenarios. But Mom just stared down at the tablecloth, smoothing a crease over and over with her hand.

“But what about going up to Springfield? Finishing the cabin and living up on the Hill?” I asked.

Dad looked up then. “Hill’s not going anywhere. We’ll always, always have that. And you know that’ll always be home, no matter where we end up living. It’s just, if I want to make money, I have to go where the work is. And there’s none left for me here in New Hampshire. Believe me, I’ve looked.” Mom got up then, her supper unfinished. She started to go toward the living room and the ironing board that was still set up, the iron still sitting on it. Halfway between the dining room and the living room, she stopped. I could see the hamper was empty. She’d ironed everything in the house, except the clothes on our backs. She walked over to the board, picked up the iron and for a second I thought she was just going to start running the iron across the empty board, which I knew meant she’d finally had the nervous breakdown she’d been swearing we’d drive her to all these years. But she didn’t. Or if she did, it was an unsatisfyingly quiet one, because she just flipped the board closed—one-handed, like the pro ironer she was. Then, holding the iron in both hands, she wordlessly took it into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

The next morning, it was like nothing unusual had happened. Dad was already gone when we got up for school and Mom seemed fine, if quiet, as she gave us our lunchboxes and herded us out the door to catch our ride. But when we got home that afternoon, things were different again. Not different like Mom had ripped the curtains off the windows, but still, different. For one thing, there were a few dishes in the sink—Mom never let a dish or glass or dirty fork sit for more than 12 seconds in her sink. For another thing, Mom wasn’t ironing.

But she was at the ironing board. Only instead of leaning over a shirt or a pair of slacks or my great-grandpa’s hankies, she had stacks of envelopes and papers spread out all over the board. In one hand, she held a pencil, which she gently tapped on the board. In the other hand, she held a rectangular object I didn’t recognize at first. It was the checkbook. She stared at it, then scribbled something on the sheet of paper in front of her. Then she picked up an envelope, peeked inside, and started writing something else down.

“Oh, you’re home already,” she said, finally noticing us and, apparently, the time. “Well, your father said to say goodbye. He got a call from a work friend and had to leave for Maine right away. He’ll call us tonight, and if he gets the job, he’ll stay up there and come home on weekends, I think.” She looked back down at the checkbook. “I’ll start supper in a minute, but I have to finish something here, so you two can help out.” She pointed at me with the pencil. “There’s some dishes in the sink that you can wash and put away. And BB, go get the laundry out of the dryer. It’s just yours and your brother’s clothes, so please put them away in the right drawers.”

As I walked back to the kitchen and got the step-stool so I could reach the sink, I heard BB say, “You don’t want them in the ironing basket first?”

“No,” Mom said in a calm but faraway voice that made it clear her attention was on the checkbook. “Just fold them and put them away.” As BB went out to the laundry room, I got the dish soap out from under the sink, then climbed up on the stool and turned on the hot water.

Not long after that, I had a dream that we were in the car, all of us. Mom was driving and Dad was in the passenger seat. Then I heard some tires screeching like in the movies and suddenly we were upside down. I heard flames crackling but couldn’t see them. The car was filling with smoke. I couldn’t see BB next to me. Up in front, the passenger seat was empty; Dad was already gone. I should have been scared, but I wasn't. I knew the way out of this: I turned, put both feet together and kicked hard at the passenger window. It exploded in tiny kernels, like it did the time Dad locked his keys in the truck and had to break the glass. I clambered out and started to run, but then I remembered my mother.

I turned and she was still in the driver’s seat, hands on the steering wheel. The crackling got louder, then the whole car caught fire. “You go on,” she called through the flames in a voice that sounded far away, but calm as anything. “You get clear,” she said.

I ran then, my heart in my throat. I ran, even though I knew she was on fire. I couldn’t see it, but I could smell it, like hot steam rising.

---

Well, there you go.

As for other developments, I hope to have more to tell you soon, perhaps this weekend. We'll see.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

So, here's the chapter I promised. It's from early in my book, which I guess I should tell you is sort of a memoir about growing up in New Hampshire, but is mostly about being raised to tell stories, by people who were themselves master storytellers. In fact, each chapter is its own story, each building on the next until the whole thing adds up to the book my parents always told me I'd write.

This will read a little different than my usual blog post. When I post, I give very little thought to structure; I do almost no rewriting or editing after the fact. What you get is a rough draft. This here is a first draft, a little more polished and rounded out. Or at least it ought to be. Jesus, I sure hope so.

And now that we come to it, I feel weirdly self-conscious sharing this with you. I guess it's good that I care that much about it, but weird too. Anyway, have a look:

Brubby


My parents bought my brother for 150 bucks.

That sounds like a real bargain at today’s baby prices, but in 1965, at my father’s hourly rate at the welding shop, that was more than two weeks’ pay. Dad was not an extravagant man and large expenditures—anything above, say, $17.50—were an affront to his sense of thrift, easily the keenest of all his senses, except for maybe his eyesight. But he questioned even that when he got the bill that fall from the Elliott Hospital in Manchester. He was so stunned he made Mom read it back to him to confirm the amount. Then he had to go out and rake leaves for an hour.

“Spent that hour trying to remember where the receipt was. Thought we might be able to return him,” he’d say every year on my brother’s birthday, as he’d tellabout how the 150-dollar baby came to live with him and Mom.

“Why didn’t you?” I once asked when I was seven. For $150, my parents could have bought me a good bike or a used motorcycle or something and spared me seven years of torture and pain beyond anything my parents or any other child could ever understand.

“Well, it was too late,” Dad said to me with a freshly stunned look, inviting me to share his astonishment. “We’d already named him—and after me. It’s like getting your initials monogrammed on a sweater—can’t bring it back to the store after that.” I nodded, understanding instantly. No other parents would buy a used baby like that, especially one with a name like Douglas Francis.

At some point in the annual telling of the story, Mom had to jump in and spare Dad the obvious pain of talking any more about the time he got rooked on a bad baby deal. Mom always told nice things about the birthday boy. But this was crazy for two reasons: one, it was all obviously made up, and two, the birthday boy didn’t care. He never seemed to listen to the story, preferring instead to stay hunched close over his plate to eat, hand and mouth working together like the piston and wheels of a locomotive.

“He was a beautiful baby. And healthy too. The nurses said he was the loudest burper on the ward,” she said. And the beautiful baby looked up and offered a loud belch in support of this claim. He blew it across the table at me, enveloping me in the stale smell of partially digested pork and onions. I made a face and fanned my hand wildly to ward off the death cloud. “Maaaa!” I cried, adding extra vowels to signify my righteous disgust. “He’s blowing stinky burps!” But this caused my mother to make up even more lies.

“You have no idea how lucky you are to have such an excellent big brother!” she cried. Then she told a story about how, before they went shopping for me at the hospital, she and Dad ordered a crib from Jordan Marsh over in Bedford. When the deliverymen came to set it up, my brother, who was almost 3 years old, screamed and cried, inconsolable because the little brother he’d been hoping for had not come with the crib. “Where my Brubby? I want my Brubby!” he howled. Allegedly.

When I finally did come home, Big Brubby—or BB, as he sometimes referred to himself--followed me everywhere, watching me as a baby and toddler with all the undiluted affection and awkward care of a St. Bernard. If I cried, he was often the first one into the room to soothe me. He even went so far as to check my diaper himself. “He would stick his finger in and yell out, ‘Mom! The Kid is wet! Mom! The Kid is brown!’ He loved you that much,” she claimed.

I looked at my brother, and tried to reconcile the angelic guardian of my mother’s fantasy with the reality that sat across from me, and just knew they couldn’t be the same person. When my parents left the table to go to the bathroom or something, BB often reached across and took food right off my plate. I was willing to indulge this behavior if we were having pot roast or tuna casserole, but if it was chicken and dumplings or spaghetti and meatballs, I had to scream Mom’s name with about 25 extra vowels or else be ready to fight to the death for my supper. Dessert? I had to eat that in the kitchen, or standing up, ready to run.

I had to admit, at least Dad got some heft for his money. All the grown-ups referred to my brother as husky, but I knew fat when I saw it and it was staring at me right across the dinner table, shoveling in the grub like it was being outlawed tomorrow. I was never happy about my brother’s size. It wasn’t just that he was fat—although he weighed a whole other me—it was that he was tall, too, and getting taller all the time. Mom was forever letting out the cuffs of his pantlegs and about once a month we had to drive over to the Antioch Shoe Outlet to get another pair of shoes or sneakers for him. Plus BB was strong. He had inherited our father’s long gorilla arms—at 10 years old, his were just as hairy as Dad’s and almost as strong.

This put me at a severe disadvantage when we got to arguing, because after a few heated words over ownership of a Hot Wheels car, or for control of the Lincoln Logs, my brother would just abandon diplomacy and punch me—an act he euphemistically referred to as “thumping,” as if he were a gentle bunny rabbit giving me a playful nudge. In fact, BB put his weight into it. And if he thumped me hard enough that I started to cry or bleed or both, he would panic and hide the evidence.

My parents were big ones for saving containers of every stripe. In the garage, they still had giant cardboard cartons saved from the move out of the apartment and into the house. My Dad also bought plastic garbage cans whenever they were on sale—they made great storage bins for the scraps of pipe and lumber he was forever bringing home from job sites. In the house, my mother had three wicker hampers, each bigger than an oil drum. She kept one in the living room for clothes that needed ironing, one in her and Dad’s bedroom as a laundry hamper, and one in our room for toys. We also had four long wooden toyboxes that Dad had made—using scrap lumber he brought home. They slid under the bottom bunk.

Depending on our location when the thumping occurred and how loudly I started crying, BB would sometimes dump me head-first into a musty wardrobe box, which was too high for me to escape from unaided. Or he’d throw me into the garbage can with the least amount of pipe or lumber in it, then put the lid on it and a cinderblock on top of that. It was only by poking the lid repeatedly with a length of copper pipe that I was able to lift the lid a little bit on the side and stick the pipe through and so get enough oxygen to survive until rescued.

Once, when Mom was out hanging clothes, BB thumped me so hard my lip swelled up like a hornpout’s and long stringy ropes of blood began falling out the sides. Before I could spit some evidence on the floor and scream my guts out, he put me in the wicker ironing basket, closed the thatched lid and ingeniously locked it with a bent wire hanger. As always, he hissed that he would be back to let me out once I stopped crying and promised not to tell. By then, this had happened enough that I didn’t panic—not like the time he emptied a toybox, put me in, and rolled me under the bed. I had never been in the ironing basket before and thought it was kind of nice. I wiped my mouth on one of my mother’s white blouses, then made a little nest out of the linens in there and fell asleep. Eventually my mom got to wondering where I was, and when she couldn't find me, my brother was too scared to tell her what he had done, so a house-to-house search of the neighborhood ensued. When he thought the coast was clear, BB returned to let me out, but Mom caught him.

The problem was, my brother usually just got shouted at—if Dad was home he might get a rap in the mouth. But mostly BB got sent to the bedroom we shared, and that wasn’t like punishment. I mean, all our toys were there and since I couldn’t go in until he was paroled, it was kind of like punishment for me, too. Eventually I discovered that, though BB was bigger, I could dominate him—or at least annoy him--with my mouth, which was way more satisfying than watching him get sent to our room.

When I was eight, I found a book in my parents’ closet that explained where babies came from and how they got there in the first place. I didn't understand all of it, but I gained enough new knowledge to drive BB crazy. I informed my brother that, in fact, I was our parents' first child, but that our mother and father loved me so much, they held me back. Then they had BB "first" so they could see what went wrong with a kid, figure out how to fix those mistakes and get it all perfect with me, as they so obviously had. I usually had to start running as I said the last part, because the only way BB could soothe his rage and frustration was to lay hands on me.

Once, when I was too slow, he caught me by both arms, lifted me off the ground and pulled my arms in opposite directions. Something in my chest popped like a giant knuckle. It was so loud my mom heard it in the next room where she was ironing. It even startled BB, who dropped me to the floor. I landed flat on my stomach, knocking the wind out of myself and that was how Mom found us--me gasping for air at the foot of my brother, who was already crying, “I didn’t mean to break his ribs! I didn’t mean it!” But even blacking out and half-dying, I knew he was a big fat liar.

By the time we got to the hospital, I had secretly come back from death, having caught my breath on the drive into Manchester. My chest felt sore, but not too painful. I was lying across almost the entire back seat of the car, a pillow under my head and a blanket wrapped around me. I felt as comfortable and cozy as I had been that day I was trapped in the ironing basket. BB was scrunched way over in the corner. I know because I kept him there by pushing both feet up hard against the side of his butt.

“Are you still alive?” he kept asking, his voice sounding high and warbly. I ignored him a couple of times, but then Mom would get worried and speak up from the front. “Is he breathing? Are his eyes closed? Are his lips blue?” Then I would have to answer—weakly, “I can breathe--” I waited a moment, then sighed hugely. “—just a little.” BB stared at me, chewing the nails on his first two fingers. He was always eating something.

At the hospital, they took X-rays, which was scary because I had to go in a dark room all by myself. I was sniffling a little when they brought me back to the exam room where Mom and BB waited. My brother was gazing at me with eyes I’d never seen before. He came over and—very gently—patted me on the shoulder. “Are you okay, kid?” he asked. Then Mom squeezed my hand, and changed the subject. “Good God, last time I was in a room in this hospital was when you were born. The nurses wheeled you in on a rolling crib from the nursery. You had the biggest head of red hair.” She ruffled it now. “And you still do.”

“Was I born here too?” BB asked, looking around the room with new interest. Mom nodded, giving my brother a serious look. “The doctors thought you would be stillborn.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It means born dead,” I said wistfully, remembering the word from the book I found in my parents’ room.

“You were fine, of course, but they didn’t know at first,” Mom said. “The bastards gassed me, knocked me out before I could hold you. I was bullshit mad when I woke up. Later, Grandma and Papa made a special trip up to take a look at you. They only had one other grandson, your cousin Buzzy, but since he was Aunt Barbara’s child, you would be the first one to carry on the family name,” she told my brother.

“Did they come to see me too?” I asked, feeling that Mom’s attention had wandered. She turned back to me. “Not you, dear. You were old news by then.” Then her expression hardened and she looked at BB. “Do you know, when Grandma got a hold of you, she looked you over, then handed you back and said to your father. ‘Well, at least we know he’s yours.’ Then she gave me a look and walked out. Five minutes later, she and Papa were back in the truck. Can you imagine?”

I looked over at BB, who gave me back the look we shared when we had no idea what Mom was talking about. It didn’t matter anyway, because a second later the doctor came in and said the X-rays showed nothing broken, which disappointed me a little, after all the trouble I’d been to. Then the doctor pushed his cold hands all around on my chest for a long time and listened to my insides with an even colder stethoscope. Eventually, he announced that I had a pulled muscle. He told Mom to give me a baby aspirin and a day of rest, but I knew an injury this severe would take at least a week on the couch to heal up.

I let a nurse put me in a wheelchair. When they rolled me out to the front desk, Mom remembered to be mad at BB again, especially when the clerk handed Mom the bill. Dad had lousy insurance back then. Mom had to pay for the two X-rays. “Seventy-five dollars? Each?” she cried, inviting the sympathetic clerk to share her astonishment as she fished in her purse for the checkbook.

For a moment, Mom’s eyes fell on BB, still hunched attentively over my wheelchair. She pointed at him then said to the clerk. “Can I still return this one?”

It still needs work--it's only a first draft. But I'm already committed to this thing like an insane person to an asylum, so I guess that's something.

Hope that was worth waiting six weeks for. Maybe I'll post another taste one of these days.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

And so, full circle, back once again at the Magazine Mansion.

I'm sorry if I kept any of you waiting or worrying. I've had an eventful six weeks. Oh, my first month or so in New Hampshire was slow enough, alternating between writing and continuing to clean out my parents' (now my Big Brother's) house and throwing out as much as I could when BB wasn't looking. I'm satisfied with my progress on both fronts—I averaged 10,000 words a week on my writing and smuggled six truckloads of useless crap out of the house and into the local landfill.

Then I left to go retrieve Thomas and bring him back to my home state for a week of camping and hiking, and that mostly in the rain. But he enjoyed it and I may tell more about our adventures, but for now I'm just trying to get back into the swing of things.

If you were to illustrate my working life (such as it is) and the way I prioritize it (such as I do) you'd find it would resemble the mutant offspring of a pie-chart and a roulette wheel, with about 50 percent of it devoted to finding freelance and 40 percent devoted to my own personal writing projects. And every day, Fate (she whose fickle thumb so often gets jammed up my ass) spins the wheel. For most of the past month and change, the wheel has been stopping in the 40-percent zone, and when I got back home last week, I knew the wheel would turn round and I'd find myself shifting away again toward the generating-freelance spots on the wheel.

And then I got a phone call that made everything spin wildly, and when the wheel came to rest, it was on the remaining 10 percent that you thought I wasn't going to mention. Though it represents the smallest slice in the weird wheel, it's an area I always leave open in my life, an area that allows me to cram in all my dream opportunities that I used to fantasize about. When I was younger and the wheel was in constant motion, dream opportunities occupied, naturally, the biggest area of the wheel.

But as you get older, and your sense of reality hardens to a thick shell, you understand that most of these things are never going to happen. Most people I know just write these dreams off, chalk them up to childish whim and forget about them. I give them the last 10 percent of the weird wheel of my life.

Some of these opportunities include:

--An international job of some kind (hey, I never said all these dream scenarios were specific)

--A chance to volunteer for any experiment involving time travel (pretty much given up on that one. I mean, if time travel was ever going to be discovered in my lifetime and I actually got to go, I know I'd leave/will leave/will have left myself a letter or sticky note--just a few words of encouragement, and possibly a lottery number or two, as proof that I made it--and I've never found such a note)

--A shot at running my own newspaper or magazine (I think my last few months at the Really Big Magazine cured me of that one)

--The opportunity to write a script (for comics or a movie, doesn't really matter)

The list goes on, into ever weirder and more embarrassing territory, but you take my point, I think. Keeping the list, allowing it 10 percent of the wheel doesn't mean I think any of them are ever going to happen. In fact, I allow that these would be possible for me only through blind luck, or circumstances for which the phrases "once in a lifetime" and "all the planets in alignment" were created.

The phone call was blind luck, pure and simple. A person I met exactly once, about 5 months ago, passed my resume to the Mystery Caller. This Mystery Caller also happens to work with a friend of a friend of a former colleague of mine who by sheer coincidence also mentioned my name in passing. So the Mystery Caller took a hint and phoned me, 24 hours after I returned from New Hampshire. We talked, and 10 minutes later, I was packing a bag and driving across the country (again) to meet with the Mystery Caller, I was that intrigued with the opportunity he wanted to discuss.

Which, if you haven't guessed by now, is an opportunity I can't tell you about yet. I hate when people do that to me, so I hope you believe me when I tell you how sorry I am I can't reveal more yet.

(I'll make it up to you by posting--in the next day or so--a few of the 20,000 words I wrote last month. Fair enough?)

I can tell you this is something I've always wanted to do, at a place I've known and admired for most of my life. When I told Her Lovely Self I was getting back in the car and driving off into the unknown, I expected her to try and talk me out of it--it really is a long shot. But she just smiled.

"I know you too well," she said. "You'll go and find out more because it's a long shot. And I think you should. Don't you?"

"I guess so," I said, stuffing a handful of socks and underwear into a satchel and throwing toiletries into a shaving kit, and trying to do about four other things at once. "It's one of those things I always leave a possibility open for. You know, in my weird roulette wheel, the 10-percent part, where it's--"

"Once in a lifetime, all the planets in alignment," she said, nodding. She's read this post before. "And how many planets would you say are in alignment right now?"

I stopped then, underwear in one hand, a toothbrush in the other. "Honestly, maybe four or five," I said. "There's a chance--a small one, but still. There's a chance this might happen."

I should know more soon. But meanwhile, you should know that I'm alive and well and bouncing off the walls. If this thing happens, it'll probably happen in the next 48 hours, and after that, the weird wheel is likely to spin off its axle and leave me wondering what the hell I'm supposed to do next.

Still.

For the first time in a long time, something massive and celestial is in the works. I can see them in the twilight, Mercury, Venus, Mars, all of them, spinning slowly into place.

Am I hopeful? Am I excited?

You bet Uranus.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead