LEGS AND CORN CHOPPERS

My great-grandfather, Ephraim Wyman, lost a leg in the Civil War. I accepted for years, having been told as much by someone who I thought would know, that the wicker box under the canopy bed in one of the back bedrooms contained his wooden leg --possibly both of them. He had two, even though he was only missing one leg. Maybe he had one for everyday and one for best? He also left behind a pair of crutches. My father, in need of large, sturdy crutches after a skiing mishap some decades ago, retrieved his grandfather's from whatever closet they had come to live in. Sometimes the family accumulated stuff comes in handy, although I haven't heard of anyone wanting to borrow Ephraim Wyman's leg.

I never bothered to look in the wicker basket, not being particularly interested in wooden legs. The basket migrated around that back bedroom: under the bed, in the closet, in a corner. I'm not sure it wasn't downstairs in the living room for a while. When my sister lived there she sprinkled her rooms with"anti-queues" (her pronunciation) that I understand were supposedto be decorative. The large basket containing half a dozen small organ pipes has been retired. The rectangular thing on wheels at one end of the living room, covered with little cutesy objects of which I have no distinct individual memory, remains.

For a while, I muttered threats to pack Paula's bric-a-brac in a box and consign it and its anti-queue to the attic. While Iwas getting around to doing so, I discovered that my son approves of the whatever-it-is and its cutesy objects and votes to leave it alone. Since I can't move it myself, it will have to stay until I need the space for something else, which may never happen.

At one time I had an impression that that Paula called the object in the living room a "corn chopper." I never could see how it would go about chopping anything, but what do I know? It has since come to my attention that the "corn chopper" is a different family artifact -- the one that sits on a structure at the side of the house that I think of as a porch but my mother, for reasons too complicated to recite here, calls a "stoop." So the conversation piece in the living room must be something else.

When my son came upon Ephraim Wyman's leg-holding basket and I related to him my understanding of it, he, of course, opened the basket and looked inside. It proved to contain, not the leg, but the leather apparatus for strapping in on. "There ain't no leg in there," Justin said in disgust. Scratch one family heirloom. I put the basket with the leather strapping under the bed in the back bedroom. It goes without saying that such things should never be discarded; but I don't see the need to put this one on display.

Dear Santa --

I know this is late -- I was distracted by the ice storm and subsequent snow -- but since I'm asking for miracles, not package delivery, maybe that's all right.

If you have up your sleeve for me a line on the Matthews-Berkeley edition of the Diary of Samuel Pepys, offered at a knockdown price by an academic widow who can't wait to get rid of all those books so she can have a sewing room for her quilting club -- if you really have arranged this, please disregard the rest of this letter. I promise I'll give more money than I can afford to Rosie's Place, or that shelter in Cambridge for homeless women and children that our church activists have been beating the drums for.

If not -- I'm afraid this will sound ungrateful. I don't mean it that way. It's just that from principle and long habit, I'm not big on wanting things. Sure, I could use a food mill, even though the large ones don't seem to exist any more and the small ones cost $100. I'll probably get around to springing for one one of these weeks, hopefully before all those apples in the woodshed begin to soften and develop spots. But the food mill can easily retreat to the back burner where such things live in my life. I certainly don't need for you to provide it.

What I would like you to do for me is this: Please take whatever you have in mind for me and apply it to someone else's account. Find a single mother in failing health with a little kid or two and an ex-husband who's making all the trouble for her that he can. Give her a lead on a job that she can live on, that won't demand her whole life in exchange. A lead on an affordable but decent place to live would be nice, too. A single mothers' commune would be ideal -- I stumbled on one or two such things in the early 1980s, so they may still exist. (While you're at it, you might provide a high-paying job for the ex, in Alaska, maybe, unless he's really seeing the kids when he's supposed to. If he's being even that much use, distract him with the girl of his dreams instead.)

Please don't try to solve this mother's problems by sending her romance and a second husband, unless there's no alternative. Romance fed by desperation so often winds up out of the frying pan back into the divorce court, with another set of kids in tow.

That's all for now. I'll go back to looking around on line for that Diary. I hope you had a very merry Christmas yourself.

Your old friend,


Aunt Stanbury

FLAT TIRE

It was raining. I wasn't well and was counting the minutes until I could take a nap in the chair in my office. My son Justin and his friend Nathan and I were traveling the twenty-five miles from Arlington to their school in Framingham, by way of a customer's house in Weston where I was picking up some work.

I didn't quite fall asleep at the wheel; but my concentration slipped badly and I veered just far enough off the road to smash a tire against a rock. In my muddled condition, with darkest suburbia spreading for miles all around us, I couldn't come up with any better way of getting to a telephone than to drive into the center of Weston on the flat tire, certain damage notwithstanding. Justin protested: "Mom, don't do that, you'll wreck the tire. Me and Nathan'll go ask if we can use somebody's phone."

I looked at these two fourteen-year-olds with the heightened awareness that strikes when one's belongings are in danger of scrutiny by the world: their intense eyes -- Nathan's a striking green, Justin's warm brown under a thick uni-eyebrow (his word) -- their shoulder-blade-length hair, and their clothing.

Nathan was wearing a trench coat of his father's, a desirable item in its day, his mother maintained, but by that rainy morning it was shapeless and tired, the pockets awry somehow, the lining draggling in back. It would have gone around this lanky six-foot kid at least a couple of times. He wore it hanging open with the belt dangling. He would, as usual, have been wearing one of his collection of wolf T-shirts. "Wolves are nifty," Nathan maintained.

I mercifully don't remember what Justin was wearing. His footgear, then and long after, would make strong persons weep. Nathan's appearance was a fashion statement, I suppose. The only statement Justin's clothing ever made was, as he once matter-of-factly told his grandmother: "I look as if I don't care -- and I don't."

Even though they had both been in the car and were as dry as I was, there was an indefinable ambience of drowned-rat about them. I pictured this team knocking on doors of some of the most expensive real estate in Massachusetts, and settled myself down for a long nap.

Maybe five minutes later they were back: "Uh, Mom, we found somebody who'll bring the cordless phone down to the garage." I followed them to the nearest house, probably the first one they had tried. The homeowner was pleasant and affable, willing to give the benefit of the doubt to this mother in distress with her scraggly kids (people who didn't know us, and some who did, were apt to assume that Justin and Nathan were brothers). We called AAA and took our leave of the homeowner, with many thanks.

The AAA guy arrived and, in the phlegmatic way of tow-truck guys, changed the tire in the rain and accepted our thanks and my signature. I've made the acquaintance of a lot of tow-truck guys, and one tow-truck lady, but that's a bunch of other stories.

We were all outside the car, of course, during the changing of the tire. When I turned to get back in, Justin planted himself between me and the door, telling me I was in no condition to drive and that he was going to take us home.

He knew how to drive. From lessons in the family field and in cemeteries as soon as he could manage the pedals, he graduated to piloting us home from astronomy club meetings on back-ish roads in the middle of the night. The route from Weston to Medford lay along city and suburban streets in broad, albeit rainy, daylight. I expostulated as best I could, but Justin was adamant and in some sense clearly right: I had demonstrated a certain incapacity to keep us on the road.

I let him drive as far as Nathan's in Arlington, where they continued their agenda of self-education in the ways of computers. I continued another two miles home to Medford and went to bed.

THE MASK

Halloween brings out the best in eleven-year-old boys. The year Justin turned eleven -- his birthday on November 1 has always heightened our awareness of Halloween -- we stopped in to a costume shop on Moody Street in Waltham. Of the extensive display of rubber heads, his heart's delight was one called Rotting Corpse, a new addition to the collection, we were assured. It was and remains the ugliest thing I have ever seen. It was also too expensive. Presumably I had already bought him a birthday present, probably also too expensive. But you can't fight love at first sight. From the moment he saw this hideous thing he had his heart set on it and was blind to everything else in the store. We cut a deal whereby he paid for some of it himself; even the magic phrase your own money didn't deter him.

On the way home we stopped at Friendly's. Before we left the car he insisted on laying my coat on the back seat, with the mask tucked into the collar, face up. The coat must have been stuffed with something: nobody would be impressed by a dead guy in the back seat that's as flat as Judge Doom (the paper-thin evil Toon who framed Roger Rabbit).

All the way home he kept thinking of ways to improve the mask. I firmly vetoed any modifications. I know what happens if you compromise the integrity of substances like whatever kind of rubber these things are made of. I put my case as strongly as I knew how and hoped for the best.

An indeterminate while after we got home I was sitting at the computer in my office, focusing on work for a customer, when what should walk around the monitor but Justin in that grisly, overpriced mask with a steak knife protruding from one eye.

Several things were going on here. First, I was concentrating on something else and entirely unprepared. Second, the visual impact of one's child with a knife sticking out of his eye gets a parent's attention even if this can't possibly be for real. Third and perhaps most important, the mask is so distorted that it isn't obvious just where the eye holes are. I was sure he had put the knife through the fabric of the mask, in direct defiance of my firm and unambiguous orders. Not to mention that walking around with a knife in that position while wearing a mask that, as he had already told me, interferes with one's vision is a really, really bad idea. I blew my top.

To this day, Justin has a tendency to lead with the most dismaying aspect of whatever he has in mind, like the time he announced that he and Nathan were going to Connecticut for the weekend. Fine -- by then eighteen, he could go to Connecticut with Nathan with my permission or without it. But the night before they left, discussing his arrangements by telephone from Nathan's, he said nonchalantly, "Oh, by the way, we're taking your car." On that occasion, as on many others, once I stopped screaming and listened, what he was proposing wasn't as outrageous as it sounded. He and Nathan and my car went to Connecticut, after some tense after-midnight negotiation.

In re: the mask, we established (1) that the knife was in fact through a hole representing an eye that had fallen out or fallen in or whatever eyes do, i.e., there were no newly created holes; but that (2) walking around with a knife that close to your eye when you can't half see is as aforementioned very ill-advised, don't do it any more. He saw the force of my argument and didn't, nor did he mess up the mask in any other way.

He wore that ghastly thing that Halloween and from time to time since, in combination with various garments. I haven't seen it since he moved out; he must have taken with him.

MISSING IN ACTION

It was Rosh Hashanah and my son was about seven when he lost himself on the Brandeis campus and I had to have the University police find him. I didn't know it was Rosh Hashanah. Working at Brandeis on a flexible non-schedule, I had keys to the building and could come and go at will and bring Justin with me as necessary. On that lovely fall day we had his bicycle as well. A college campus is a marvelous place for a kid with a bicycle. Knowing he'd be at least as safe there as in our neighborhood in Medford, I focused on my work until I was ready to go home and Justin was nowhere in sight.

I drove around looking for him; but the very thing that makes the campus good for bicycles -- all those paved non-automotive roads -- makes it hard to cover in a car. I tried it on foot, asking from time to time if anyone had seen a seven-year-old with a bicycle. There seemed to be an unusual number of dressed-up older people strolling around the campus in the sunshine. One woman mentioned that she was there for the holiday. Holiday? She gave me that what-planet-are-you-on look that I'm so familiar with, and explained. She, like the others I inquired of, was sorry I had misplaced my child but couldn't tell me anything about him.

At a loss for what to do, I enlisted the campus police. The officer who subsequently appeared with Justin in the car and the bicycle in the trunk was not pleased at being troubled with a kid whose mother didn't know better than to turn him loose on his own recognizance. He had found him at the chapels, bicycle dropped nearby, playing in the pool in a wet and dirty and disreputable and thoroughly happy condition. I thanked the officer, trying not to picture the contrast between this goyische ragamuffin desecrating the chapel pool, and the nicely-dressed middle-aged parent-types celebrating the New Year.

Before our next trip to Brandeis, I bought him a watch and instructed him to report to me every hour. Thereafter, he turned up reliably enough that I didn't have to bother the police again.

REDWOODS AND HIPPIES: THE FLORA AND FAUNA OF CANYON

Canyon was my favorite place in Contra Costa County, California, in the late 1960s. I don't know what Canyon is like now; probably I would rather not know. In those days it was a small settlement along a creek whose water supported a modest redwood forest. Fascinated since childhood with the West Coast's giant trees, I was delighted when I arrived in Berkeley in the fall of 1965 to find a redwood or two here and there on the campus. Redwoods need more water than they could get clinging to the semi-arid hillsides that make up much of the East Bay. My first redwoods in the wild -- doing their thing, as we used to say -- grew in Canyon.

It wasn't always 105 F beyond the ridge of hills east of Berkeley, but I think of it that way, the grass scorched straw-hat-beige and rarely a tree to be seen. On open-air transportation -- first a Lambretta, later a Honda 90 -- the desert-quality wind sucked the moisture out of my skin and hair, compounding the sunburn I was getting if I hadn't thought to bring something with sleeves. But I never felt hot except at traffic lights. At 45 miles an hour you don't, and by the time you notice a burning sensation on your skin, you're already in for a bad night. I bought Noxema by the pound in those days. Under most circumstances my bikes and I have avoided the path of lawn sprinklers; in those desert conditions, the spray felt like dew from heaven. To my New England-bred eyes, the moist shade of Canyon was like a dip in the swimming hole.

As the road wound along the creek, deep shadows from the trees broke up the hot, dry glare. I was familiar with the light-and-shade effects on Claremont Avenue, my favorite ride in Berkeley, where the trunks and leaves of the eucalyptus trees threw long, variegated shadows across the road. The contrast between light levels could obscure real objects; bends in the road could come up startlingly quickly. Sadly, a year or two after I left Berkeley an unusually hard winter killed the eucalyptuses; native to Australia, they're not prepared foranything like frost. When I saw Claremont Avenue again, it looked like all the other roads that wind through the East Bay hills. The shade under the redwoods in Canyon had a different quality, darker and solider in places, freckled and speckled in others.

On one of my excursions looked ahead to where the road curved around and then back again and saw, for just a second or two, three hippies gathered beside the road as if waiting for a ride. They were at the end of the driveway in front of an undistinguished house that I remember as being rather large and set back from the road. One of the guys was wearing a striped shirt. The other had long, dark hair and was bending over a guitar, one foot on what might have been a rock (if, come to think of it,they have rocks in Contra Costa County; they don't have the large chunks of granite and quartz that I was used to). The girl was seated on something else. Another curve of the road and they were out of sight; another, and I was at the spot.

The house was there, and the driveway, but no hippies. In the few seconds that had passed since I spotted them from down the road, they couldn't possibly have gone anywhere. They had been an optical illusion suggested by the complicated patterns of light and shadow. I accepted this mini-hallucination as a curiosity. In the vicinity of Berkeley in the late 1960s, phantom hippies weren't alarmingly out of keeping with the order of things.

RIDING WITH THE ANGELS

They may not have been Hell's Angels. They could have been another, similar bike club, or an ad hoc group of scruffy and dangerous-looking guys on bikes. But at the time I thought they were Angels, and maybe they were. The Angels' colors were often seen in the East Bay in the late 1960s.

On the first warm, sunny day of spring, everybody who owned anything on two wheels with an engine was in the Berkeley Hills enjoying the absence of rain. I was piloting my 125cc Lambretta northward on Grizzly Peak Boulevard between ClaremontAvenue and Dwight Way, my hair braided against the wind, the California sun broiling my skin. (I never learned; I would come home from exploring the countryside with sun- and wind-burns covered with a fine film of greasy road grit. And in those days before crash helmet laws, my friend Natalie and I punished our hair with what she termed "combing parties.")

To my left, a ridge of brushy vegetation with an occasional small and wandering tree rose a few yards above the road. The hills of Contra Costa County rippled eastward on my right and lost themselves in the distance. Usually resembling tan suede(as columnist Herb Caen said of the landscape of Marin County, north of San Francisco), they were now green with the winter rain. Mount Diablo rose above them on the horizon, toward Stockton and Tracy. When I misplaced myself on one of my jaunts, I would make my way to high ground and survey the horizon. In that treeless landscape, Diablo or Mount Tam -- Tamalpais, in Marin County --were as visible as a lighthouse at sea. Between them, I could figure out where I was, more or less.

Chains of bikes going south leaned successively around the curves, straightened up, and leaned the other way, following the undulations of the road. One such group came up behind me, traveling faster than I was, but not by a lot. The Berkeley Hills were home to me. The Lambretta got 60 or 70 miles to the gallon. With gasoline going for 25 cents a gallon it would be hard to suggest a cheaper form of entertainment than driving around exploring. I was as familiar with the hilly and curvaceous terrain above Berkeley and beyond as I was with anything at the time, except maybe my recipe for nutritionally fortified white bread. I hopped right along, slowed down mainly by the limitations on leaning around corners imposed by the Lambretta's design.

On anything like a straight and level road, those guys would have stomped down a gear or two and roared past me. Genuine Angels in a hurry might have done so even on Grizzly Peak Boulevard. But basking in the genial weather like everyone else, they pulled out of line and passed me one at a time like normal people. One or two even glanced my way and smiled. I may have looked as strange to them as they did to me: a college-y twenty-something, hair pulled tight and braided down my back, wearing a dress -- I didn't own any pants at the time -- driving this little thing with a floor, and the gearshift on the handlebar. Yes, Angels might take note of such details, even at thirty or forty miles an hour, especially if they'd ever bothered to steal a Lambretta.

For a few minutes I had the heady illusion of riding in a pack of Angels. Then the last one passed me and (with apologies to Walt Whitman) we took our separate diverse flight, I mine, they theirs, pursuing.