A Plate of Boyhood, Please

Yesterday I was dispatched up the Maine coast, another route that I once did every week but was rescheduled after the pandemic.

Most Fridays these days I’m sent out to Gloucester and Rockport at the tip of “Massachusetts’ other cape,” Cape Ann, then down along Boston’s North Shore on always clogged roads into always crowded places such as Salem and Marblehead. But the Maine run is thrown my way every couple months or so, and so when I heard last month that legendary Red Sox pitcher, Luis Tiant, passed away, I awaited my first chance for a pit stop at the Maine Diner where he feasted so frequently, they named a breakfast for him.

Takes people by surprise to hear that the Cuban defector-turned-All Star hurler enjoyed his retirement in Wells and Kennebunk, Maine, playing golf and wolfing down poached eggs on corned-beef hash with toast and a cup of bite-sized chunks of cantaloupe, pineapple, honey melon, and grapes up on US1.

The Maine Diner’s location makes it impossible for tourists to miss. Here, a state highway leaves US1 for the coast, taking you past the Rachel Carson State Park and Estuary out to Kennebunkport and the beach where Tiant may well have hung out with golfing partner George H.W. Bush, himself an acclaimed firstbaseman for Yale before giving up pastoral baseball for political hardball.

Don’t know how it was for young boys in other parts of New England, but in the gritty mill city of Lawrence, Mass., and the nearby sedate river town of Groveland where I often played ball with my cousin and his pals, Tiant was an idol before he came to the Red Sox. That he fled Castro’s revolution at great risk would have made him a celebrity in any line of work, and his joyous, ebullient personality, emboldened by a thick, black Fu Manchu, made him a favorite of ours no matter that he played for the Cleveland Indians.

Goofing off, we’d try to imitate his tilt-a-whirl delivery that had him facing secondbase longer than he faced the plate, but we never attempted it in games because it was impossible to control. There was nothing else like it. There was no one else like him, and the unforgettable photo of him from the chest up, soaping himself in the shower with his ever-present cigar between his lips was all that was needed to memorialize it.

Finally, I have savored his favorite breakfast. As I so often do (and as I mentioned in my last blog), I again ordered before looking at the menu. But look at the menu I did, wondering if other entrees were named for local celebrities. Certainly, “George’s Beef Jerky” or maybe something called “Anti-Broccoli” would be a side dish, but the name Bush was nowhere to be found. Instead, there was a sandwich named for network sports commentator Jim Nantz, a strawberry shortcake dessert called “Just the ‘Fax’ Ma’m” for pro golfer Brad Faxon, and lunches for former WEEI sports radio hosts Eddie Andleman and Dale Arnold.

That last pair may be an inside joke. Andleman and Arnold cohosted a mid-day show for a few years, “The A Team” it was called, and word has it that they wound up hating each other. The free-wheeling, snarky Andleman was dumped, and mild-mannered, meticulous Arnold survived for another ten or more years, but would never talk about it.

No one outside WEEI knows what happened, but this menu offers a strong hint. Andleman lunched on mac and cheese loaded with two quarter-pound frankfurters. Arnold preferred a lobster roll with melted butter on the side.

I checked the photos on the wall behind the counter directly in front of my seat. Arnold, Tiant, Bush Senior, Nantz, and others, including I bet the chefs at Maine Diner, were all smiling back at me, brandishing five irons. Maybe Andleman was still sitting here wolfing down hot dogs while the others strolled the fairways and greens.

The rest of the menu, unlike that of the New Hampshire joint where I dined the day before, was all straight-forward except for one entree: “She-Crab Chowder.” At first sight, my eyes rolled and my brain screamed, “For Chrissake!” But the description tells us that, rather than a crab’s preferred pronoun, the “She” is an ingredient’s natural abbreviation. This chowder offers “a hint” of sherry.

Can’t wait for my next trip up the Maine coast.

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Game Six of the 1975 World Series, considered by many sports connoisseurs as the greatest game and series in baseball history. Tiante had already won Game One, a shutout, and Game Four. But the Sox lost Two, Three, and Five to the Cincinnati Reds when a three-day monsoon drowned Boston, allowing the Sox to pitch Tiant in Game Six. The Sox won in extra innings on a nearly foul homerun by catcher Carlton Fisk, whose sideways skip toward firstbase is possibly the most shown, described, and imitated act in the history of sports. Here’s Tiant “showing his numbers” to Pete Rose.
https://www.stadiumtalk.com/s/greatest-pitching-windups-82d538b044b94cd0

https://x.com/Kartboy11/status/1400936563199053826

No, this is not the Maine Diner, but it was taken this year and is how I must have appeared, while reading about “The Eddie Andleman,” to the woman who served my “El Tiante” yesterday. Photo by Keith Sullivan, Newburyport *Daily News*.

An Appetite for the Past

Today I took my appetite into the center of Derry, N.H., to a diner where I had one lunch five years ago and to which I hoped to return.

Then came the pandemic, followed by a rescheduling of my employer’s routes. I’m rarely sent into New Hampshire anymore, and even at that, Derry is far from a strategic location for breakfast or lunch, too late for one, too early for the other.

But today was a fluke, straight up US 3 and down I-93 all the way to Plymouth, a quaint, small college town best known as the place where one of America’s greatest novelists died while in the company of one of America’s worst presidents.

To be fair, Franklin Pierce was a college buddy of Massachusetts boy Nathaniel Hawthorne, long before one’s Scarlet Letter and the other’s White House, and Hawthorne, knowing his end was near, craved another look at the White Mountains where his old friend kept out of public view.

As for Pierce, his accommodation of the slavocracy was so appalling that he returned to New England only to be shunned wherever he went, including his buddy’s funeral. Sixty years later, Robert Frost, who lived most of his life on a farm just south of Derry, penned a fond, epic ode to the state called “New Hampshire” that summed up Pierce with this:

She had one President (pronounce him Purse,

And make the most of it for better or worse.

He’s your one chance to score against the state).

To and from Plymouth, some 70 miles north of the state border, I starved myself until I could feel it–and finally feed it–in Mary Ann’s Diner. Derry is about 20 miles north of Massachusetts–in fact, straight north of my native Lawrence–but I offset that with a delivery east of Concord to Chichester, a general store that would seem more at home with “Pierce for President” signs than with the ones I spotted in its neighborhood.

You find those general stores in the nooks and crannies of all New England states–just as you find diners decked out to immerse you in the 1950s mostly at interstate highway interchanges, but a few in town centers.

I had forgotten that Mary Ann’s was among them, recalling only the generous comfort dish and blue-plate price. Friends and family think I have an inexhaustible photographic memory, and I do recall odd and impossible things such as tricks made at 45s which we believed was Lawrence’s own card game, or so we thought* played under trees or on porches, who won, who lost, who looked on, the songs that played on our transistor radios while we dealt and bid and talked trash.

I can describe many of my Little League baseball games, not just my own hits and errors, and not just highlights, but who was in the stands, who was playing on the other team, the color of their uniforms, things said by the managers and umpires. But it’s a selective memory, so I may not know who won, if I played thirdbase or centerfield, the name of the other team, or if it was one of the games with a certain girl from my class leaning on the rail along Bodwell St. to laugh and wave at me–which I hope was her way of cheering for me.

As I often do, I looked at the specials board and, without looking at a menu, ordered: “Loaded Shepherd’s Pie.”

Let me correct that: I ordered before looking at the menu which proved entertaining enough to make me forget my hunger while awaiting the meal–especially to the tune of Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again” playing overhead. Quite a clever creation, but the author missed one trick: Derry is the hometown of Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut to fly in space. Shouldn’t they tweak the spelling to name their pie for him?

Still, the pie lived up to the word “loaded” which represented the menu quite well. Omelets included “Kitchen Sink” and “Philly Steak Bomblet,” while for lunch you can have “Billy’s Big Boy Sandwich” or “Dominic’s Monstah Montecarlo.”

But emphasis is on time more than size. “Fave” breakfasts include “The Elvis Presley,” “The Sinatra,” and “The 50s Special,” while the list of lunchtime sandwiches looks like one for an Autorama in the Eisenhower years: Thunderbird, Bel Air, Little Red Corvette, Pink Cadillac, Mustang, Barracuda, ’57 Chevy, Falcon, and–amazingly–Edsel.

Also offered was “Surf City,” which may or not have played on the speakers overhead while I wolfed down the pie. Seems that all I heard was pre-Beatles, popular when I was in elementary school, what we now call bubble-gum music. Beach Boys, Four Tops, Rickie Nelson, Leslie Gore, and all kinds of falsetto hallyballoo that today makes me wonder why our parents didn’t just shoot us rather than telling us how bad it was.

Must admit that, as I left, the tune overhead made my knees wobble. Nostalgia never hit so hard as I froze before opening the door and racing in the rain toward the van across the street. “Easier Said Than Done,” like Alan Shepard’s trek beyond the atmosphere, was more likely in the Kennedy years, but it was still the same vibe we danced to at parties in each other’s homes.

One party was held at St. Augustine’s Elementary School–which went to 8th grade–by the nuns who perhaps wanted to see what we were up to. What they saw were all the boys standing and sitting on one side while all the girls kept to the other. Sister Bernadette, a young woman as I recall, though the habit makes it difficult to figure, listened to four or five songs before she had had enough. She charged in our direction and grabbed one of her favorites by the arm:

“Go over there and ask someone to dance!” she demanded.

“Ye-ye-ye-ye-yes!”

Not too many years ago, at a 50th class reunion, the girl-now-woman reminded me of that dance. The years have been quite good to her, and the joy on her face and in her voice was that of a school girl as she raised her hand: “And you picked me!”

Even then, I guess, I had an ear out for irony. Despite my stutter, we danced to “Easier Said Than Done.”

Don’t know how long it will be before I return, but I do not doubt, as the local bard put it, “that I should ever come back.” That “Big Bopper Burger” sounds pretty good.

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Turns out 45s came from Ireland with our grand- and great-grandparents. For those of you in other parts of the USA, it could be a variation on Euchre.

“Easier Said Than Done”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT3ivugR2eY&t=1s

Turns out that, while Derry is where Mary Ann’s first opened in 1989, three others have opened in the nearby NH towns of Salem, Amherst, and Windham:
https://www.maryannsdiner.com/

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/559642691193698753/

A Lobby of Laughs at Life

Most weeks I’m at the Screening Room only on Wednesdays, but I fill in when the owners need a break, as I did this past Sunday for two showings of a two-and-one-half hour film.

Ever since the new owners added weekday afternoons, I’ve been packing a lunch, and on Sunday it was my favorite: chicken curry salad to have in a sandwich and a large honey crisp apple.

Before I could put it in the fridge, I spotted a stylish, dark green handbag with a note on it: “Left last night.”

The bag was snapped closed, and we learned long ago that such things are almost always claimed the next day. Perhaps Saturday’s projectionist felt it best not to invade anyone’s privacy, and give the owner some time.

A morning and early afterrnoon later, I figured, was plenty of time for the owner to panic. I’d open the bag and rifle any purse or wallet for a name and phone number. But first, I put my own stuff away–only to find I forgot to pack the bread. Spooning the salad out of the plastic container was hardly appetizing.

Letting the green handbag sit until the matinee was on the screen, I prepared the lobby, popping corn, making coffee, and heating water for tea, and I arranged the old cigar box that serves as this quaint, quirky cinema’s cash register.

That done, I realized the day was just mild enough that I might sit out on State Street for some 15 minutes before patrons arrived. As always on warm days, that’s good incentive to show up early.

Way too early for the film were two women who walked in just after I took my chair. Noticing that I appeared to bounce back out of it, they apologized for getting me up.

Made me laugh: “I need the exercise,” as I always say, though at times grudgingly.

After buying tickets, they said they’d be back and asked for a suggestion for where to get coffee, telling me they were from out of town. When one asked if I wanted anything, I started to say no, but then thought of the chicken curry: “Yes, a single roll or piece of bread, anything for a sandwich.”

“A pita pocket?”

“Yes, that will do!”

They left, and as I retook the seat on the street, I thought of how difficult such a simple thing can be to find and called after them to forget it.

“No, no, we’ll see what we can do. By the way, I’m Christina, and this is Maureen.”

As always, I repeated the names and made eye-contact with each while doing so, a memory trick that has served me well over the years, adding only, “Jack.”

Half hour later, the lobby was crowded. When that happens and I’m making another batch of popcorn, I like to point out how difficult it is for a right-handed person to pour kernels and oil into the kettle of a machine designed for left-handed people. While giving that spiel, I spotted a package of eight brioche rolls on the counter.

Somehow I managed to pour the mix without spilling it while laughing out loud. Christina and Maureen had walked in without my noticing them. With no way of knowing why a package of rolls was on the counter, people must have thought I was laughing at my own rueful joke.

While they watched the film, I had the sandwich and learned that if I can’t get to Annarosa’s Bakery across the river, I can trust Sara Lee in Market Basket.

So good, I forgot the handbag and began drafting my first Daily News column in a month. Writer’s block? Stymied by the run-up to the election? Too much time in–and exhaustion from–two days at a renfaire every week since Labor Day? Two more at Salem’s witch trial reenactments every week past Halloween? Addiction to the baseball playoffs and the start of NFL football? Stunned by the result of the election? Getting old?

Maybe all of the above, so I turned to local issues and soon found myself repeating the word “lost” which, after a while, reminded me of my opportunity to dive into a stranger’s wallet.

Turned out she was no stranger. She and her husband are longtime patrons of the Screening Room, and I got to know them a bit ten-twelve years ago in a group that led the resistance to waterfront development.

Before I started rifling her rather thick purse, I couldn’t help but notice two Hershey bars buried in the bag. Lead me not into temptation… If I didn’t know her, I might suspect they were smuggled in, but we do sell them, and she and her husband are no strangers to our concession stand.

Ignoring a few larger, wrapped-up items, I went into the purse. After thumbing through her credit cards, medical cards, group and business memberships, I had his phone number.

To my surprise, he did not know the bag was missing. “Did you two get divorced?” I almost joked, but held my tongue. He said they lived nearby, and he’d walk over a bit later.

When the first show ended, I made sure to thank Christina and Maureen by name, deliberately calling them by each other’s name, a ruse to make people repeat their names and point to themselves, all with eye-contact, making them easier to remember for weeks to come.

I suggested they take the remaining seven rolls. “No, no, we have enough at home. Freeze ’em.” I offered the container of the remaining salad, “delicious, from Tendercrop, a local farmstand,” enough for a sandwich they could split with soup. “No, no, we’re all set!”

Then, Maureen asked, “What’s your name again?”

“Jack, like in the trunk of your car!” A trick for the memory of others. In this same lobby, I once told a woman who asked my name, “I’m in the trunk of every car,” and she guessed, “Beach Chair?”

“How useful!”

“Ya, if you need a lift, come back on a Wednesday! Popcorn’s on me!”

They disappeared down State Street just as the first customers arrived. Among them was a couple who announced they had just left a party where the Screening Room owners were in attendance. That may have led me to think they were of the same generation as my employers, and they both appeared youthful enough. So I asked for general admission and ripped two GA tickets.

“Don’t I get my senior discount?”

“Well, yes,” I said while lowering the price, “but it does work better if you say it ahead of time.”

He laughed, and I forced a laugh. He paid with a credit card, which really ought not to be allowed in movie theaters where everyone arrives at the same time and they take so much more time than cash. But I’m way outnumbered on that score, and never complain to a card user–unless you count the many times I loudly thank people for using cash within hearing of those who may be about to use cards.

He introduced himself, asked my first name, and went into the theater. Five minutes later with people still buying tickets, he reappeared, asked for a $2 bottle of water, and held out his VISA card. But deliver us from evil… “Please,” I thought to myself, as if praying, “don’t let this guy ever come here on Wednesdays.”

Soon after the start of the second show, the fellow I called arrived to claim his wife’s handbag. Before I could turn to get it, he asked a question that surprised me as much as anything I’ve ever been asked:

“Were there two chocolate bars in it?”

“Hunh? Well, yes.”

“Ah! We were looking for those after the movie started.”

He laughed at my dumbstruck amazement. Finally, “Let me get this straight: The two of you looked for and could not find two chocolate bars, but never noticed that the bag was missing?”

Laughing: “I guess so!”

“Even though she put the bars in the bag?” We’re all required to speak softly in this lobby while a film is in progress, but emphatic hand gestures surely amplified that last phrase.

He kept laughing.

Well, as I told him, I’ve done worse. Full pots of hot coffee put into the refrigerator. Opening a bottle of beer when I was intending to have orange juice first thing in the morning. Perhaps a few other doozies I’d rather not put in writing.

He left, and I resumed my attempt to find Newburyport in 700 words or less until the late show as over. When the credits rolled and patrons started filing out, I was looking into the hall and overheard a cheery voice behind me:

“Hey Jack, great to meet you! See you around!”

“Yes, you too,” I turned quickly and addressed him by name, adding, “I’m here on Wednesdays.”

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Look closely and you may notice that all of the mechanisms holding and leading to the kettle (that round thing) will be on the right of anyone working through the doors on the backside. Use your right hand, and you need an unnatural contortion, but your left hand has a clear path. Photos (both of them) by longtime and faithful Screening Room patron Bob Watts.

For Him to Hear US

I met Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.

When most Americans outside of Georgia first heard of Gov. Carter in 1976, I was hitchhiking up and down the West Coast, a vagabond taking odd jobs for a few days here and there, staying in YMCAs and in dorms of colleges out of session. In Seattle, jamming with a couple guitarists on the docks of Puget Sound, I gained a lead for a job as a music therapist at a state hospital in Northern California.

Next day I started south, by thumb. Or by all ten fingers, as I often played my tenor recorder–the easiest for an on-coming driver to see–while awaiting rides. Many drivers would say that they did not “usually stop,” but since “you’re a musician,” they felt “it’s okay.”

All of this is in a chapter in my book, Pay the Piper! Here’s an excerpt that describes meeting the Carters, including what led to it and an odd sequel two days later:

Some rides came from other musicians, one of whom steered me into Salem, Oregon. Hearing my story made him think that I would fit Salem’s music scene with so many hoot nights and jam sessions in downtown bars. And he knew that his wife wouldn’t mind putting me up for a night, having listened for weeks to her urgings that he should take a part-time job in her day-care center. They needed males to work with the older boys, especially outdoors with the improving weather.

So there it was: A job, a place to stay at least one night, and musical connections all before I arrived. Why go to Eureka when Eureka comes to you?

Next day I moved into a third-floor room in the YMCA on Court. St. with a view of the state capitol one way and the very center of downtown the other, just a few doors down from the Court Jester and a couple blocks away from Boone’s Treasury, the most frequent scenes for hoots and jams.

When I think back on my busking life, this two-month stay may have been its biggest missed opportunity. Like most small cities in the Pacific Northwest, Salem boasted a clean and carefully landscaped downtown with flowers and shades of green so rich in the Willamette (pronounced to sound like: Don’t damn it!) Valley. That notorious Northwest rainfall comes mostly in mere mists easily avoided under the trees that line most streets. But I simply never thought to busk…

Unless we leave out that part of the definition that includes tips, because it is certainly a spontaneous outdoor musical performance in public that I propose to two guitarists in the Court Jester one May afternoon.

This is 1976, one of those rare years—along with 2008—when presidential nominations in both parties will not be locked up way ahead of time, and when states other than New Hampshire, Iowa, and a few populous early birds have any real say in the matter. With three Democrats still contending, Oregon’s primary looms large. Each day The Oregonian runs a side-bar with the times and locations of appearances by Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, Idaho Senator Frank Church, and California Dreamer Jerry Brown. Though they have one of our largest states geographically, about 90% of Oregonians live in the 150-mile corridor from Portland on the north past Eugene on the south, all connected by I-5 as well as the Willamette.

That day, following a session, we are just finishing sandwiches and a pitcher of beer when the radio newscaster announces an appearance by Carter at a local school.

“Is that far from here?” I ask.

They guessed 20 or 30 blocks north.

“Let’s go, “ I say

“Whaddaya wanna hear him for?”

Apparently, the idea that Carter might be the next president of the country doesn’t much matter to my new friends. Secession is, after all, a recurring topic of consideration in the Beaver State, but none of that is what I have in mind.

“Not to hear him. For him to hear us.”

They look at me as if I’ve started speaking Norwegian. I try again:

“We set up in front of the steps to the school before he gets there, and—“

They turn to order another pitcher. I put money on the table as I leave for a long walk north.

When I arrive, no more than three-dozen folks are milling about. When I take the tenor out of my shoulder bag and fit the three pieces together, a fellow in a suit and shades with a wire leading to one ear walks by, pausing to look me over. After I empty the bag by taking out the soprano and tucking it into my belt, he walks away, his eye on everyone as they arrive.

The crowd grows quickly, and I’m playing almost unnoticed until I hear a shout: “He’s playing ‘Dixie’!”

Well, it is the former governor of a southern state I’m hoping to entertain, and the radio and television crews, just arriving, take the shout as a cue. Within seconds microphones are thrust toward me. On a boom dropping as if from the sky, one is bouncing back and forth as the person holding it is jostled in the gathering crowd. Eyes wide, I rather enjoy dodging its erratic movement toward my face and begin bobbing to avoid it, eyes flaring as if to taunt it.

When I pause, I tell a reporter scribbling in a notebook that it’s my “Muhammad Ali version of Dixie.” Without any hint of noticing the irony, she dutifully writes it down, and I launch into “Camptown Races” as a car with the candidate pulls up and all microphones and cameras leave me.

Before I make the second pass of “somebody bet on the bay,” a tall, elegant, handsome woman is standing directly before me, offering her hand, and saying something I find completely incomprehensible. I stop, “Sorry, I didn’t hear—”

“Ahhm Missuhs Jimmahhy Cahhtahh.”

So transfixed by her voice I shake hands without noticing the man now standing next to her until he pipes up, pointing to the tenor:

“Ah gotta get me one of those!”

All the editorial cartoons to come during his four years in the White House will hardly exaggerate his smile, but I am still able to see that the couple has brought back all those mics and cameras. Reflexively I take the soprano from my belt and offer it to him.

He throws his head back: “No, no! Thank you, but no,” he laughs, waving his hands and moves toward the podium placed at the top of the school’s front steps. I breathe a sigh of relief that needs no microphone, and smile into the cameras.

Two days later I hitch to Portland, ostensibly looking for a job but with the recorders slung over my shoulder should I hear of a jam in a bar or catch one in a downtown corner. In the short distance from the exit ramp to the center of the city, I spot what looks like a concert in a city park and walk in while a country singer on guitar finishes a song. As soon as I join the back of the crowd, he introduces Missuhs Jimmahhy Cahhtahh.

She gives a ringing—and entirely comprehensible—speech ending with an introduction for her husband. As he takes the stage, I notice the two expressionless men—recognizing one—stage left and right, both staring at me. I have never stood so still, and Carter is no brief speaker.

They are at my sides as soon as he thanks us for coming. They open my pack and look over and through all five pieces of wood. That might end it, but they go through my wallet and find the unlikely combination of an expired Massachusetts driver’s license and a South Dakota student ID for someone “looking for work,” as I tell them, on the West Coast.

“You look for work by attending political rallies?”

“I was on my way downtown. When I heard Waylon Jennings was here, I came over.” I ad-lib the advance notice to make them think my motive is something other than “following him around.”

They exchange a glance. “That was Jerry Jeff Walker.”

That mistake keeps me in their custody for what seems like hours more, although the whole scene is perhaps 15 minutes. With the warning that if they see me one more time I’ll be in custody well into November, they let me go.

Never one to say that politicians are “all the same,” I now make sure that I can tell the entertainers apart. As for the Carters, they defied the myth of “all the same” on every level.

What other couple left the White House–or State House, or Congress–and served four decades thereafter as global humanitarians? And does anyone doubt that they are hoping to hear from us in November?

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Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter hold hands as they work with other volunteers on site during the first day of the weeklong Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project, their 35th work project with Habitat for Humanity, in Mishawaka, Indiana, in 2018.
PHOTO: Robert Franklin via https://www.wxii12.com/article/photos-jimmy-and-rosalynn-carter/45878337#

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter during the 1976 presidential campaign
Getty Images

Once Upon My Attention Span

Call it a variety show, the offering of a booming, hyper-active child of The Ed Sullivan Show and The Smothers Brothers.

With a title like Once Upon an Attention Span, there’s bound to be nostalgia reaching back into the color, such as it was, of the Father Knows Best years followed by the content, such as it still is, of the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements.

Made sure to include one piece each from both Salem State and South Dakota State. Penned–actually type-writed–in 1974 and 1982, I consider them my valedictorian addresses. I wasn’t chosen to deliver one at either school, but if I had been…

For nostalgia mixed with whimsy, there’s “Dulcet Desserts” with a few accounts of my Forrest Gump-like knack for chance encounters–as well as vignettes from the Renaissance festival, the Screening Room, the Moby-Dick Marathon Reading, and spur-of-the-moment (made possible by social media) small-town demonstrations in Newburyport and Ipswich.

Also, “From the Orchard,” a few memories of my life as an apple-picker in the mid-80s when I picked a few harvests, followed by “Repasts from the Road,” one of the lengthiest entrees on the book’s menu about several cross-country trips with my daughter in her pre-teen years, ending with the toast at her wedding and her own trip into motherhood–with the comic relief of my own transition into grandfatherhood.

Perhaps the only longer entree, “Living in the Pasta” asks for a closer look at various highlights of American history, and “New World Crunch” adds analysis of the Electoral College, Ranked Choice Voting, and Russian trolling. Other entrees, such as “Coffee on the Rocks,” review films and books that remain relevant for the foreseeable future.

Never thought that memories of the Trump years might be a selling point for a book, but if you or someone you know needs reminders, Once Upon an Attention Span includes them. Given that this election will be neither decided nor secured until the day of certification in January, this might even be a reason to to consider my new book as a Christmas gift.

Kidding aside, it is a full menu of selected columns and blogs, so there may be sections that appeal to some readers at different times of day, or appeal to some more than others. There’s certainly no need for chronological order.

But if you’d like to order, PM me or send an email to the edress in the corner of the bottom photo of the book’s back cover. I’m happy to take orders with prices that cover all shipping and tax:

Once Upon an Attention Span — $20.00

Order it with either of my previous books–Pay the Piper! or Keep Newburyport Weird–and I’ll send both for $32. Order all three, and they will be yours for $40.

In Newburyport, Once Upon an Attention Span is available at the Screening Room and at Jabberwocky Bookshop. For anyone anywhere, it is available at:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CTRD2FKD?

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Random Acts of Awareness

At the Renaissance faire last weekend, I strolled though Canterbury Kitchen’s picnic benches piping jigs and reels, always good for a few tips.

Gained two right away, and then saw a form rise from a bench out on the perimeter. Was but a silhouette against the late afternoon sun, an arm rising and a finger pointing at me. The voice was that of a woman and quite loud: “Mass Bay Community College!”

Not drunk but under a slight influence, she rose, continuing to point and thrust that finger, pronouncing me “the greatest English teacher ever,” or something like that. Can’t say I recognized her, but her voice and the gleam in her eye rang a bell. She went on and on telling everyone seated that I was the reason she stopped being a wayward teen and became a nurse. That’s when I recalled her from at least 22 years ago.

Embarrasing, but nice, and from an open wallet held up for her by a friend she found $6 to stuff in my tip-mug. Had there been $66, or more, I believe she would have given it all. Fellow about my age at a nearby table was chuckling. Told him I didn’t know if I should play another jig or give a grammar lesson. That quip landed a $5 tip.

Two days later, a funny thing happened to me on the way to Salem for rehearsals of the witch trial re-enactments through the first week of November. Since the annual, long-running Cry Innocent is “immersive theater,” there are breaks in the play where the actors, in character, field questions from the audience which requires us to know about the era.

On that day, we were schooled by each other with our own chosen projects, about 15 minutes apiece. One was all about hysteria created by itself and how it spread, playing on suspicion, turning people against each other. The presentation was based on Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible, a parallel commentary on the red-scare and McCarthyism that gripped the USA soon after World War II.

That’s what I listened to just an hour after hearing, in my car, an NPR report that schools, churches, and hospitals are now under protection of the National Guard in Springfield, Ohio.

At the Screening Room last night, an elderly woman asked what the ticket cost. Obviously a senior, and someone I thought I recognized as one of our regular patrons, I quoted the senior discount.

“Ten dollars,” she cried, “that’s way too much!”

Not sure if it was resolve on my part or the fact that I was beyond surprise that kept me silent.

“I thought it was four dollars,” she finally said.

Now I struggled to keep a straight face, but I couldn’t resist some comic relief: “That was back when Jimmy Carter was president.”

She laughed and was quite pleasant in response: “Oh, I’ve been coming here all this time! I guess I just never noticed the increase.”

What I thought: “Lady, whether you know it or not, you have experienced a neurological event recently and should get checked out.”

What I said: “Most patrons here tell us how low the prices are compared to the cineplexes.”

When the film ended, she waited for me to descend from the booth to apologize for the earlier exchange, telling me what a good film it was she just saw, what good films we always have here. I felt this nagging urge to tell her to get a neurological test, but just could not bring myself to do it. Instead, I assured her that no apology was necessary, and that we hope to keep showing provocative and inspiring films.

She danced, smiling, out the door. I longed for a stiff drink.

The film she saw was War Game. Set on January 6, 2025, it imagines, according to the blurb, “a nation-wide insurrection in which members of the US military defect to support the losing Presidential candidate.”

Hardly a flick to send you home smiling and dancing. Everyone else left looking like they also were in need of stiff drinks, though they all told me the film was riveting, enlightening, convincing.

Yes, I nodded in agreement on all three points, and off they went to think it over. What I didn’t say is what I now think over: War Game never mentions, never ever hints that the very real-life possibility of a MAGA insurrection–the very real-life reason the film was made–already has the tacit support of one of America’s two major political parties.

I don’t know if I should play another jig, write another opinion column, or drown myself in drink until this is all over.

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This pic is at least ten years old. Who took it? My daughter? Nancy Cushman? Paul Shaughnessy?

Effect Without a Cause

Far more attention must be paid to a line Republicans are using to discredit Kamala Harris.

True, we hear and see it often enough in conversations and on social media posts. But that’s simply repetition to reinforce a point, a repetition geared to hide a non-existent foundation for that point. This is why the Republican presidential candidate makes the charge in his rallies–and made it in the debate–without ever mentioning the cause of the effect that Republicans want us to accept.

In the debate, it sounded like this:

She’s had four years to do all the things she says she’s going to do. Why didn’t she do it then?

Downtown yesterday, overheard:

If it was Trump in the White House, they’d be whining about why he never got anything done!

On social media:

I’m not going (in) the direction of someone who isn’t fixing the issues while they are IN OFFICE with the POWER to FIX the issues right NOW!!! They have had close to 4 years….

I’ll estimate that the latter two quotes are from people in their 40s, maybe 50s, although the all-caps emphasis on “right NOW” might suggest someone younger. Was civics erased as a subject in American elementary and high schools that long ago? Have we already raised two, maybe three generations of Americans who are completely unaware of the relationship between the three branches of government.

Or do some people just fall for this because it is so simple? Legislation is complex, demands attention, demands an attention span. And it is hard to grasp compared to the superficial ease of seeing prices go up and blaming the guy in charge, oblivious to any complications such as war, a pandemic, corporate price-gouging, diminished crops due to climate change.

Just how unaware or gullible can the American public be? Well, back in May, a New York Times/Siena poll revealed that 17% of us blame Biden for the overturn of Roe v. Wade because he was president at the time of the Mitch McConnell-stacked Supreme Court’s decision.

We might wonder what percentage of the American public is aware that a Republican-controlled House of Representatives has blocked much of what the Biden-Harris Administration attempted to do. This is most of what Harris is now offering–and what she could accomplish if the Democrats pick up a few House seats and hold the Senate.

The claim’s implied effect without a cause also ignores how much the current administration has achieved regarding infrastructure, job creation, and higher wages. Republicans making the claim want us to ignore how they themselves show up for the photo-ops when factories open or a bridge is about to be built or repaired after they themselves voted against the funding that made it possible.

In the debate, Harris reminded us of the bi-partisan immigration bill that satisfied almost all Republican demands–moreso than it did progressive Democrats–that would have passed if not for phone calls from her opponent instructing Republicans to kill the bill. Chaos is more useful as a campaign issue, what’s right be damned.

When you hear any version of “Why didn’t she do it already,” you are listening to someone who either pays no attention or who expects you to pay no attention.

Of the three quotes above, the last two are from people who have been fooled, people who have forgotten the most basic lessons in American civics–if they ever knew them. The first quote is from someone who is out to fool you, and with control of the House or Senate, Republicans will continue to play this game even if Harris is elected.

Only solution is to start emphasizing the Democratic candidates for the House and Senate. Both Harris and Tim Walz need to be making more appearances with them, which means campaigning in states that are not considered battleground, such as Texas where Colin Allred has a shot at unseating Ted Cruz if the national party put more effort into it.

Wherever they campaign, winning the Senate and House should be as prominent an issue as restoring Roe v. Wade. Why, a good 17% of the American public might wake up to the reality of cause-and-effect relationships if those two issues were mentioned together.

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https://sharemylesson.com/collections/civic-participation-youngest-citizens

Props from Cradle to Grave

If it’s difficult to describe here at home after all this time, it was nearly impossible to talk at all while at Arlington National Cemetery twenty years ago.

The place demands silence. No talk above whispers to share and confirm the palpable awe all around you. If the concept of a memorial wasn’t enough to keep us quiet, there was the sight: the whiteness of the gravemarkers, the ordered rows both parallel and perpendicular, the exact distances, the cut of the grass, the appearance of guards, even the trees seemed uniform as they stood at attention casting generous, merciful shade.

Many tourists were there that late May day, warm enough for t-shirts and shorts. My friend and I were just as casual, but I marveled at the sight of several t-shirts with images and messages you wouldn’t want at a family gathering, and others so silly you wouldn’t want to be seen with anyone wearing them.

Sure seemed an insult to the place, and considering what the place is, an insult to the country. But the teens in them were well-behaved, quiet enough, and no-one objected, so on the tours went–with or without any expected reverence or deference.

And as we saw this week, it’s those in suits and ties whose desecration of hallowed ground forces us to speak out loud. Reports have since surfaced that the event itself was staged by the Trump campaign so they could slam Kamala Harris for not attending. That explains JD Vance’s seeming nonsequitur of a reaction, accusing Harris of “not bothering to show up,” even after the stunt, complete with abusive treatment of a cemetery official, was exposed. In effect, JD gave the game away.

Never seems to be any bottom to how low these characters will go, which is why I’m so tempted to dismiss the incident by seconding if not plagiarizing a friend who “did not mind him entering a cemetery. I did not like him coming out.”

Be that as it may, those objecting to Bonespur’s use of Arlington for a photo-op are forgetting what he and First Lady I-Don’t-Care staged in an El Paso hospital days after the mass shooting in a shopping mall in August 2019.

Tempting to say the same about those who rationalize their hero’s turning the grief of others into self-promos, but their forgetfulness has proven to be more deliberate or maybe selective than natural. I’ve been calling this willful ignorance, but events such as Charlottesville, Jan. 6, and the crude exhibitions at the El Paso hospital and now Arlington suggest that it is more like unwitting hypnosis.

Call this what you will, but you cannot call it normal, much less good:

An infant survived the shooting when both parents shielded him from the rapid, automated fire of an impressionable young Texan who drove 650 miles under the influence of Bonespur’s anti-immigrant rants to wipe out as many brown-skinned, black-haired shopping mallers as he could with a weapon designed for war-zones.

Thanks to the NRA’s hysterical, anti-historical, high-financed and selective interpretation of the Second Amendment, “war-zone” is defined as anywhere between the Canadian and Mexican borders. Over which of those borders or into which of our oceans the term “well-regulated” jumped to escape the NRA’s interpretation is anyone’s guess, but it’s worth noting the term’s abject failure to mean anything in the supposedly English-speaking USA–and never mind who penned it.

But I a-gress. Back in bi-lingual El Paso, both parents perished while protecting their son and are now surely enjoying Republican thoughts and prayers for their efforts. Their protection was so thorough that the baby was quickly released from the hospital into the custody of an aunt and uncle.

Apparently under the hypnosis of “Make America Great Again,” when they heard that Bonespur was making an obligatory visit to the hospital, they returned with the boy. Likely they are Catholics, possibly among many Hispanics for whom abortion is the first and foremost political issue. Be that as it may, they jumped at the honor of being photographed with a man who compares himself to Jesus Christ, autographs Bibles and offers them, upside down or rightside up in return for campaign donations.

And so the pic was taken. Bonespur couldn’t resist adding a thumbs up to his smile. Assigned to display the living, breathing prop, I-Don’t-Care thoughtfully left her jacket on the plane.

At Arlington, he did the same following an invitation to the cemetery from a Gold Star mother who has been convinced that Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris killed her son in Afghanistan, proving that, under hypnosis, you can be led to believe and say anything.* I-Don’t-Care, not needed for a display, stayed home with her jacket.

To think that 20 years ago I was shocked by people wearing frivolous, nasty, suggestive, and at times border-line obscene t-shirts at Arlington when walking in groups around the tombs, the crosses, the markers! I recall thinking that neither “evolution” or “intelligent design” could be applied to what was in front of me.

Today I see a man use a cemetery and a hospital as photo-ops, graves and orphaned babies as props, while knowing he has the presidential nomination from one of our two major political parties and has a reasonable shot at returning to the White House.

Many Democrats claim that the November election will be a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. While I do not disagree, I suggest that another dichotomy may be more to the point:

Democracy vs. devolution.

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Here’s what her news sources never tell her:

Oh, you villain, villain, damned, smiling villain! Where’s my notebook? I should write down that one can smile and smile, and still be a villain. Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/orphan-thumbs-up/
Image courtesy of Office of First Lady I-Don’t-Care

What the Cruck?

By now you’ve seen pictures, and many of you are now posting your own pics of first sightings of the car or truck–or maybe cruck–that Joseph Goebbels-wannabe Elon Musk has inflicted on our streets and highways.

If millions of people believe anything the wanna-be Fuhrer says, then it falls to unreason that a few hundred thousand of them may want to drive around in the automotive equivalent of a middle finger to the world.

I’m among many whose first reaction was a comparison to the equally preposterous HUMMER (1992-2008), an undeniable middle finger to anyone who cares about clean air before its resurrection as an electric vehicle in 2021. However, the new Tesla Cybertruck bears more visual comparison to the ill-fated Pontiac Aztec (2001-2005), a mobile monstrosity that the late and great Click & Clack of NPR’s Car Talk called one of the ugliest cars in automotive history. Pull up behind it at a stop sign, quipped Ray, and “it looks like a large farm animal about to take a dump on your hood.”

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/design/autocars-ugliest-cars-ever

Panning it head-on, the British magazine Autocar called the Aztec a “bucktoothed dinosaur”:

Elon’s Cybercruck, however, looks like nothing that ever lived or breathed. Could be a badly programmed robot on steroids or spite architecture set on wheels. Could be the HUMMER without all the pretense of being some kind of Super Jeep. Closest comparison to anything alive would be the high and tight haircut–called “fashy” as in fascist–popular in Nazi Germany and briefly appearing on “very fine” Bonespur supporters during his campaign in 2015-16 and his first years in office, most notably in the neo-Nazi tiki torch march in Charlottesville. You may still see one, just as you catch sight of a HUMMER every blue moon: Shaved on the sides, but long on top, greased, combed to one side or pulled back and tied. Like that haircut, Elon’s convoluted codswallop makes me wonder if the foremost freedom these folks crave is the freedom to be ugly–in both senses of that honest word.

As many say, the new Hypermuck likely appeals to fans of video games who, looking the part, can now fashion the roads before them as scenarios in Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto or Warcraft or Dumpster Fire. Sorry, I couldn’t resist that last bogus entry. But I do have a friend who spotted one up against a wall in a parking lot, mistook it for a dumpster, and started toward it with trash from her own car.

Whether the Tesla Vipersucks’ embarrassing design will cause an added aggressiveness behind the wheel as happened with HUMMERS remains to be seen. I can already hear objections from HUMMER owners: Cars don’t kill people. Drivers kill people. Well, of course, but some drivers, those who can afford its $81K-$101K price, now have a vehicle that screams a willingness to kill anyone who gets in its way.

Not long after the appearance of the HUMMER–which was also not long before its disappearance–Doonesbury captured both its symbolism and its reality with a comic strip depicting it as a tank, turning a family into an army unit, a dad into a commanding officer, a neighborhood into a battlefront, and riding roughshod to a supermarket where mom is deployed under heavy cover.

Can’t find the Doonesbury strip, but here’s another popular take on the HUMMER now being revived for the Tesla Ugh’n’yuck:

But it was neither the satire of comics nor the scorn of critics that sunk the HUMMER. No, it was the Bush/Cheney Crash of 2008 compounded by the luckless Bush/Cheney wars in the Middle East. The price of gas went up like Space-X, another Elon toy. Can’t recall just what the numbers were, but when I spotted one over at Salisbury Beach with California plates, I calculated the cost of gas for its roundtrip at upwards of $2,400.

Worth noting here that the president at the time was a Republican, and so no one blamed him for the inflated prices–even though he started the war with what we all now know was a bogus pretext. Only Democrats get blamed for corporate price-gouging and the collateral damage of the military-industrial complex. Considering that the HUMMER appeared at the tail end of the Reagan/Bush reign of “you can have it all,” we may wonder if the Diaperstuck may be the product of Elon’s anticipation of the convicted felon’s return to the White House.

That would explain the names critics are calling the Ottaluck. Car & Driver called it “cyberbeast,” but a woman in Plymouth, a friend of a friend, offers something much more specifically visual with the most exquisitely sarcastic endorsement I’ve ever heard:

No better way to announce to the world that you have a micropenis than to drive around in this rolling trash compactor.

As Barack Obama joked at the Democratic Convention–his hands mimicking the felon’s spastic, ever-present air-accordion–Bonespur does have this weird fascination with size.

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In Boston’s Chinatown. Photo by Michelle Ryan DuChesneau
https://www.caranddriver.com/tesla/cybertruck

You be the judge:

A Drop into Drill & Dodge Diner

Driving long distance is ideal for thinking long thoughts.

Martin Luther King once said that about jail, but he can keep his barred windows. I’ll take a smashed-bug windshield anytime.

And I’ll take the choice eateries along with it—from Wagon Wheel way out on the Mohawk Trail, to the Bolton Bean House on the way there, then south to Rein’s Delicatessen deep in the heart of Connecticut, over to Percy’s on Buzzards’ Bay, zig-zagging back up for a snack at the Boston Bean House in Maynard, then through Beverly for the Depot Diner, or perhaps the Early Bird in Plaistow NH, before landing up north in the Maine Diner, and perhaps letting Wild Willy’s in York intercept me on my return.

Lately I’m overhearing a lot of political talk where I often stop while making my weekly rounds.

Though I’ve been making those rounds for over 25 years, this is new. Few of us ever talk politics in public, or if we do, we keep—or kept—our voices down for fear of argument.

Exceptions were few and far between. The outpouring of patriotism following September 11 was loud and unanimous. Too bad it turned into a pretext for war, and anyone not going along was painted as an ally of Bin Laden himself.

I recall walking into a Plymouth restaurant for breakfast and looking up, as I always do, at the “specials” board. Among them was “French Toast,” but with “French” crossed out and “Liberty” placed above it. I turned, taking my liberty of the place, and haven’t set foot in it since.

More recently, the horror expressed following January 6 was unanimous until Republicans offered up their “alternative facts”—a “normal tourist day” and “Antifa did it” and finally “an act of patriotism!”—and pay no attention to the glaring three-way contradiction of those claims.

Now, I hear political chatter everywhere. JD Vance’s “cat-lady” slur and Donald Trump’s gaslighting of VP Kamala Harris’ ethnic identity both seem to have detonated a nerve.

One was the subject at the counter of the Iron Town Diner in Saugus where I took the lone empty chair. With two men on each side of me, I listened as three drilled one about his apparent defense of Trump’s dodge regarding Harris’ race.

The Trumper kept repeating, “But he was just answering a question.”

Did he think there was a difference between an interview and a speech? They wanted to know.

Over and over: “He was answering a question.”

Finally, I popped: “Are you suggesting that the person who asks a question is to blame for the answer?”

All fell silent. Though I had been seated long enough to down a sandwich, I noticed they hadn’t been served, and no waiter had appeared. Then I saw the waitstaff was few and far between among the crowded tables.

Conveniently, I broke the silence: “Sorry, I’d love to stay for the conversation, but I’m driving a delivery van, with perishables, and I’m on the clock. Good day!”

Though the van was already empty, I wasn’t taking any chances. And giving up on the tastiest spanakopita in a hundred-mile radius and settling for an Italian sub down the road is hardly a good day, but the aborted scene serves as grated Parmesan atop my Mass Pike musings while racing my appetite to Iron Town’s best dish.

All talk of race—as well as any talk of gender and religion—is naught but smoke for the Republican screen.

Behind that screen? A presidential candidate who last month urged his supporters:

Get out and vote just this time… Four more years it will be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.

Those last three words? Smoke, although the possessive pronoun is telling. This month, he’s more blunt:

Don’t worry about voting… we got plenty of votes.

Only one explanation for this: Team Trump is counting on Republican state legislatures to prevent certification.

Sure, Democrats can bring it all to state courts where they will win, but MAGA will appeal each case to the Mitch McConnell-stacked and Trump-controlled Supreme Court. And now we have Elon Musk hinting at the chaos that may be unleashed coast to coast in the two months before Inauguration Day if Election Day doesn’t go his way. British journalists believe that the social-media infused violence that has just gripped their country was a “practice run” for what awaits the USA.*

Instead of talk about India and Jamaica, Democrats need to focus on Madison, Lansing, Harrisburg, and other state capitals where this refined and sanitized version of Jan. 6 will be staged.

Otherwise, even at the rate of nine votes per cat, all the cat-lady votes Harris can possibly get will not survive the nullification that Republicans already have in place.

Nor will my appetite survive any other diner’s refusal to believe their own eyes and ears as they grasp at straws as flimsy as “tourist day,” “Antifa did it,” “he was just joking,” and “he was just answering a question.”

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*https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/18/inciting-rioters-in-britain-was-a-test-run-for-elon-musk-just-see-what-he-plans-for-america?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other