The summer before my son turned eleven, a total eclipse of the sun crossed our planet over an area that included Hawaii and Baja California. Our former downstairs neighbor, Peter, a freelance audiophile, reviewer and writer, had begun life as an astronomer and still followed things solar, planetary, stellar and universal. Knowing of Justin's interest in astronomy, he had given him a telescope when he moved to San Diego a year or so before. He now planned to take in the eclipse, traveling with a busload of scientists going south from Berkeley by way of San Diego, and offered to take Justin along. He even offered to make the travel arrangements.
Peter put off making Justin's reservation until, for some reason, he could only order a ticket for his own use. He explained to me matter-of-factly that Justin would have to fly under his, Peter's, name, and that we would explain to the airline that Justin was Peter's nephew and was named after him. It was my idea to add to the official story that young "Peter's" middle name was Justin, which was the name he went by. I knew that Justin wouldn't remember for five minutes that he was supposed to answer to "Peter," even if I remembered, which I wouldn't. In the event, as we stood in line at the airport, I found myself reciting our usual litany to my excited young traveler: "Justin, come here"; "Justin, please don't do that"; "Justin, get over here"; "Justin, quit climbing on that, it won't hold your weight"; Justin, I asked you not to do that"; "JUSTIN. . . .!!"
Through age ten, a child traveling alone is eligible for the airline's escort service. I'm sure some eleven-year-olds are level-headed and attentive enough to get themselves onto and off a plane and even to change planes in Chicago or wherever it was. Justin's capacity for sustained attention to anything not chosen by him was just this side of nonexistent. Fortunately, he qualified for the escort service by four months, and the airline agreed to keep an eye on him. They gave him a plastic bag on a strap to keep important things like his ticket in. That didn't mean he couldn't lose it, but it improved the odds.
A day or two before Justin was scheduled to leave, he developed a sore throat worthy of a throat culture. The next day I got a call from the doctor, invoking some magic words: strep, antibiotic, contagious, immediately. I called Justin's summer school in Framingham and suggested that they keep him away from everybody until I got there. The doctor gave him an antibiotic and told us it would be all right to send him to San Diego in a couple of days.
It may have been that same day that I got a call from Peter. It had come to his attention that the Mexican government takes a dim view of foreign children traveling with adults not related to them. To take Justin out of the country, Peter would need (1) a notarized affidavit stating that Justin had my permission to go to Mexico, and (2) either a similar affidavit from Justin's father, or a copy of the divorce decree giving me custody and thus the authority to grant permission.
My affidavit was easy: I borrowed some wording from a lawyer I worked for at the time, and he notarized it for me. An affidavit from Justin's father, however, was out of the question. He'd refuse to do it just because I asked. The box of papers relative to the divorce was not in Medford, where we lived, but in my mother's attic, sixty-three miles away. I dropped everything and drove up Route 2 that night, taking Justin and his antibiotic along. He slept in the passenger's seat most of the way.
Back in Medford, I extracted three documents from the box: the final Judgment of Divorce, dated February 24 of whatever year it was (my sister's birthday; her divorce was final on my birthday in a much earlier year); a second Judgment of Divorce dated June Something of the same year "as of February 24," having to do with a loophole in the original Judgment that Justin's father tried to drive a truck through; and the all-important judgment in the child custody action, dated three years later. On the advice of my lawyers at the time, I had obtained from the Court three official copies of the custody decree, all with gold seals. I still had at least two of them. Since sending Justin's documentation along with the most scattered ten-year-old in Middlesex County was not to be thought of, I packaged up everything and delivered it to the post office before the witching hour of 3:00 PM. The post office swore that Peter would have it by the time he had specified.
He didn't. He claimed the post office was incompetent. I reserved judgment on that point; Peter has been known to mess up. I put together a second set of documents, including the remaining gold-sealed custody decree and a second notarized affidavit, and then, against everyone's better judgment, shipped out this active and selectively oblivious child with his documents (like Miss Flite in Bleak House): the legal documents in one name, and his airline ticket and related form(s) in another. If he goes astray, I thought, I wonder what the authorities who find him will make of it all.
He didn't go astray. He had a wonderful time at the eclipse, totally focused and businesslike throughout, hopping to do Peter's bidding. After it was over -- maybe eighty seconds of eclipse, after all that preparation -- he let loose and ran around saying, "That was so awesome! That was so awesome!!"
Back in San Diego, he developed an ear infection and required yet another antibiotic ("The meaning of life is infections," he said when he developed an eye infection on another trip) and was instructed not to travel until the antibiotic had done its work; so he got to hang around Peter's swimming pool for an extra week. Swimming apparently was all right, at least with the doctor Peter took him to.
When I picked him up at the airport, wearing sunglasses and an Eclipse 1990 T-shirt, he reported having learned on the bus what a German scientist says when somebody upsets a gallon of water onto his newspaper. He says scheiss. He says it a lot. I hope Justin learned more than that. At the very least, he had a good time comparing notes on eclipse experiences with his fellow astronomers at the club he belonged to. He remembers the trip fondly and thinks it may have contributed to his present conviction that complicated and difficult things can be accomplished.
My sister, a mother of boys, says anyone but me would have abandoned the eclipse trip, if not at the first sign of trouble, at least two or three troubles down the road. My position was that the opportunity to travel to a total eclipse in a bus full of scientists wouldn't knock again, and come hell, high water, streptococcus, airline hassles, or the Mexican government, he was going.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
MURDER WILL OUT: A TALE FOR HALLOWEEN
One August day some years ago a young man murdered his girl friend. Apparently this crime was committed on impulse, since he seems not to have considered the question of disposal of the body. Until something better turned up -- one has to assume that he didn't think of this as a permanent solution -- he stuffed her into the trunk of his car.
Either this young man was slow of thought and action, or he had other matters on his mind. He didn't come up with a better plan right away but drove around for a few days with the remains of his late inamorata in the trunk of his car.
Then the car developed some problem. He took it to his mechanic and left it there for repairs. By this time, the girl friend in the trunk was, you might say, making her presence felt. The mechanic checked it out and notified the police, and the young man's arrest, trial and conviction followed.
This tale comes from a textbook for police officers that I typed for the lawyer who compiled the book. You come across the damndest things in the typing business.
Either this young man was slow of thought and action, or he had other matters on his mind. He didn't come up with a better plan right away but drove around for a few days with the remains of his late inamorata in the trunk of his car.
Then the car developed some problem. He took it to his mechanic and left it there for repairs. By this time, the girl friend in the trunk was, you might say, making her presence felt. The mechanic checked it out and notified the police, and the young man's arrest, trial and conviction followed.
This tale comes from a textbook for police officers that I typed for the lawyer who compiled the book. You come across the damndest things in the typing business.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
WAITING FOR A-163
It looks like the good old days at the Registry, with people lined up out the door and down the corridor of the Watertown Mall. I, like them, am waiting to take a number and then sit on a bench and listen to that computer-generated bedroom voice: "Now serving B-210 at Window Number Nine. . . ." Half a dozen different categories of Registry business are identified by
different letters, each with its series of numbers. I am number A-163.
At least the numbers go quickly. At least there is a take-a-number system, and benches. The air conditioning doesn't matter in this weather but would have been very material to me all the times I stood in line for an hour or two on some hazy-sunshine August day telling my unique story to a series of bureaucrats who were as hot as I was and had been there longer. Bureaucrats don't like unique stories. Mine usually involved some motorcycle. It seemed to me in those days that no motorcycle is ever more than about half legal.
Those were the days of the Woburn Registry. I remember a cartoon in the paper depicting that highly recognizable round building just off the highway in Woburn with "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here" inscribed over the door. That was about the size of it: people packed into a small space and stepping on each other, the line out the door and around the building from before 8:30 AM until closing time. It was a happy day for Massachusetts when they closed the Woburn Registry and set up all those systems for doing motor vehicle business on line and by mail.
The Watertown Registry's problem this morning is that bugbear of the modern world, the-computer-is-down. Only the driver's license function is affected, but that's enough to create a crowd of frustrated people and a feeling of hasslement among Registry personnel. A tense-looking forty-ish blond woman is trying from inside the office to make herself heard by the straggling and meandering line, over people talking and the Mall music system playing Come Softly to Me and other 1950s favorites.
Much of the line is in the corridor; the blond woman remains in the office. She doesn't know how to project her voice, and thus sounds tense and strident. After three or four repetitions, I gather that the driver's-license hopefuls are being offered some options. I'm registering my car. When I hear "license renewal" I tune out.
The bedroom-voiced computer -- was it Alien that had the computer with the sexy female voice, in parody, I'm told, of Star Trek's female but relentlessly chaste computer? -- the computer, that is, announces Number A-152 at Window Number Three. I am seated directly in front of Window Number Three. A young woman squeezes past me between the benches, weighed down with a purse, a black nylon bag, and a couple of coats. She trails a child of eight or so, the top of whose head is about level with the counter.
Boy or girl? I wonder idly. The red shirt and blue jeans and the collar-length blond-ish-brown hair, could belong to either. Then the child gives a little hop and lands, hands flat on the counter, arms straight, feet dangling above the floor, peering over the foot-high fence that runs parallel to the edge of the countertop between Window Number Three and Window Number Two. A boy then. My son would have done something like that. By the time he was at four, he could pull himself onto any counter he could get his fingertips over before I, in my slow way, caught on to what he was doing. This boy is pretty quiet, really. At his age Justin would have been doing Bruce Lee in the aisles.
At his age I would have thought about climbing the counter. I was strong in the hands and arms but too heavy to jump that high or pull myself up the way Justin did. My sister might have been light and agile enough, but she wouldn't have thought of it, or dared do it in public at her mother's elbow. That combination of strength, agility and audacity seems to be the property of slender, wiry males.
The boy lunges at the top of the divider but fumbles and descends to the floor. Mom tells him he can't get up there and instructs him not to try. I note, with a smile, that she doesn't tell him to abandon the counter-top as well. I so recognize this pattern. If you sit too heavily on one of these high-energy kids, the pressure builds until there is a noisy explosion. A child like that is a crash course in picking your battles.
The boy jumps to the counter again and walks from side to side on his hands. Mom turns to pick up the coats from the floor. I catch her eye, smile at the boy, and remark, "I used to have one of those."
"We've been here for an hour and a half already," she answers. She hands the boy a manila folder and a pen, and relocates the coats to a bench behind me.
The boy's way of amusing himself with the materials provided is to stab the pen into the folder and, clutching it with his fist, carve dark blue W-shaped trenches into the folder.
"Don't break it," admonishes Mom. "If you get ink on the floor . . . ."
I turn my attention to the book in my lap and don't notice Mom and the boy again until I slowly become aware that there is unhappiness at Window Number Three between Mom and the woman behind the counter. I can't hear what they are saying; but the forty-ish blond supervisor, as I now conclude that she is, is trying to handle the situation from Window Number One, speaking loudly to Mom across Window Number Two: "Ma'am, I'm sorry, I can't take your application, you'll have to go back to your insurance company, we have to follow certain rules, I'm sorry, Ma'am, it isn't our fault, you'll have to take it up with your insurance company. . . ." Mom is determined not to leave the Registry, drive to the insurance company, return to the Registry, and go through the whole shebang all over again.
I can absolutely relate to Mom's position. I went through one of those scenes once, between the Registry in Quincy and my insurance agent in Bedford. The gigantic difference between her situation and mine is that my son was a dozen years older than this woman's counter-climbing, folder-and-pen-destroying brown-eyed mop-head. Mine was happy to take a day off from school, the more so since our old car would descend to him if we managed to get the new car registered. Even dealing with a horrible hassle -- is there, this side of Kafka or the Soviet Union in the 1950s, any hassle more horrible than those generated by the insurance industry and the Registry? -- loses its edge if Justin is keeping me company and doing the driving.
I've been in the supervisor's shoes as well, trying to keep order in some paper-and-pixel record-keeping system. There have to be non-negotiable rules, even though any such system creates absurdities and hardships in some cases. Without procedures that are always the same, a big, complicated system like the Registry will crumble and nobody will know what's been done or what's going on.
Mom eventually collects her bags, coats, and son, and leaves. I wonder if she took the day off from work to get this done. It's mid-afternoon now. She can probably beard the insurance agent in his den, get whatever the Registry wants, and make her way to the head of the line at the Registry again before closing time, if her son doesn't absolutely melt down along the way. Silently sympathizing, I return to my book and wait for A-163 to come up.
different letters, each with its series of numbers. I am number A-163.
At least the numbers go quickly. At least there is a take-a-number system, and benches. The air conditioning doesn't matter in this weather but would have been very material to me all the times I stood in line for an hour or two on some hazy-sunshine August day telling my unique story to a series of bureaucrats who were as hot as I was and had been there longer. Bureaucrats don't like unique stories. Mine usually involved some motorcycle. It seemed to me in those days that no motorcycle is ever more than about half legal.
Those were the days of the Woburn Registry. I remember a cartoon in the paper depicting that highly recognizable round building just off the highway in Woburn with "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here" inscribed over the door. That was about the size of it: people packed into a small space and stepping on each other, the line out the door and around the building from before 8:30 AM until closing time. It was a happy day for Massachusetts when they closed the Woburn Registry and set up all those systems for doing motor vehicle business on line and by mail.
The Watertown Registry's problem this morning is that bugbear of the modern world, the-computer-is-down. Only the driver's license function is affected, but that's enough to create a crowd of frustrated people and a feeling of hasslement among Registry personnel. A tense-looking forty-ish blond woman is trying from inside the office to make herself heard by the straggling and meandering line, over people talking and the Mall music system playing Come Softly to Me and other 1950s favorites.
Much of the line is in the corridor; the blond woman remains in the office. She doesn't know how to project her voice, and thus sounds tense and strident. After three or four repetitions, I gather that the driver's-license hopefuls are being offered some options. I'm registering my car. When I hear "license renewal" I tune out.
The bedroom-voiced computer -- was it Alien that had the computer with the sexy female voice, in parody, I'm told, of Star Trek's female but relentlessly chaste computer? -- the computer, that is, announces Number A-152 at Window Number Three. I am seated directly in front of Window Number Three. A young woman squeezes past me between the benches, weighed down with a purse, a black nylon bag, and a couple of coats. She trails a child of eight or so, the top of whose head is about level with the counter.
Boy or girl? I wonder idly. The red shirt and blue jeans and the collar-length blond-ish-brown hair, could belong to either. Then the child gives a little hop and lands, hands flat on the counter, arms straight, feet dangling above the floor, peering over the foot-high fence that runs parallel to the edge of the countertop between Window Number Three and Window Number Two. A boy then. My son would have done something like that. By the time he was at four, he could pull himself onto any counter he could get his fingertips over before I, in my slow way, caught on to what he was doing. This boy is pretty quiet, really. At his age Justin would have been doing Bruce Lee in the aisles.
At his age I would have thought about climbing the counter. I was strong in the hands and arms but too heavy to jump that high or pull myself up the way Justin did. My sister might have been light and agile enough, but she wouldn't have thought of it, or dared do it in public at her mother's elbow. That combination of strength, agility and audacity seems to be the property of slender, wiry males.
The boy lunges at the top of the divider but fumbles and descends to the floor. Mom tells him he can't get up there and instructs him not to try. I note, with a smile, that she doesn't tell him to abandon the counter-top as well. I so recognize this pattern. If you sit too heavily on one of these high-energy kids, the pressure builds until there is a noisy explosion. A child like that is a crash course in picking your battles.
The boy jumps to the counter again and walks from side to side on his hands. Mom turns to pick up the coats from the floor. I catch her eye, smile at the boy, and remark, "I used to have one of those."
"We've been here for an hour and a half already," she answers. She hands the boy a manila folder and a pen, and relocates the coats to a bench behind me.
The boy's way of amusing himself with the materials provided is to stab the pen into the folder and, clutching it with his fist, carve dark blue W-shaped trenches into the folder.
"Don't break it," admonishes Mom. "If you get ink on the floor . . . ."
I turn my attention to the book in my lap and don't notice Mom and the boy again until I slowly become aware that there is unhappiness at Window Number Three between Mom and the woman behind the counter. I can't hear what they are saying; but the forty-ish blond supervisor, as I now conclude that she is, is trying to handle the situation from Window Number One, speaking loudly to Mom across Window Number Two: "Ma'am, I'm sorry, I can't take your application, you'll have to go back to your insurance company, we have to follow certain rules, I'm sorry, Ma'am, it isn't our fault, you'll have to take it up with your insurance company. . . ." Mom is determined not to leave the Registry, drive to the insurance company, return to the Registry, and go through the whole shebang all over again.
I can absolutely relate to Mom's position. I went through one of those scenes once, between the Registry in Quincy and my insurance agent in Bedford. The gigantic difference between her situation and mine is that my son was a dozen years older than this woman's counter-climbing, folder-and-pen-destroying brown-eyed mop-head. Mine was happy to take a day off from school, the more so since our old car would descend to him if we managed to get the new car registered. Even dealing with a horrible hassle -- is there, this side of Kafka or the Soviet Union in the 1950s, any hassle more horrible than those generated by the insurance industry and the Registry? -- loses its edge if Justin is keeping me company and doing the driving.
I've been in the supervisor's shoes as well, trying to keep order in some paper-and-pixel record-keeping system. There have to be non-negotiable rules, even though any such system creates absurdities and hardships in some cases. Without procedures that are always the same, a big, complicated system like the Registry will crumble and nobody will know what's been done or what's going on.
Mom eventually collects her bags, coats, and son, and leaves. I wonder if she took the day off from work to get this done. It's mid-afternoon now. She can probably beard the insurance agent in his den, get whatever the Registry wants, and make her way to the head of the line at the Registry again before closing time, if her son doesn't absolutely melt down along the way. Silently sympathizing, I return to my book and wait for A-163 to come up.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
BLISS
The picture seems to be called "Bliss" -- at least half of it blue sky tastefully decorated with white puffy clouds, most of the other half a gentle hill, brilliant green in the sunlight, dark in the shadow of a passing cloud. At the right edge a mountain can be seen in the distance; at the extreme left, what appears to be a bit of a faraway hill. It is, of course, the background to the desktop provided by Microsoft.
Why "Bliss"? It's a pleasant enough hillside and sky, but unremarkable. "Bliss," to my mind, would be more active, and somehow more pink or luminescent light peach than blue and green (don't ask me why). For this picture, I would go with something like "tranquility," maybe, if it strikes you that way.
It doesn't strike me that way. I may be the only person in Microsoft's sphere of influence (possibly the largest sphere of influence in the history of the human race, but that's beside the point) -- the only one of Microsoft's customers, that is, to see anything sinister in this peaceful, passive landscape.
I've never seen the English downs. I know of them only that they are uplands of some kind, inhabited by humans for a very long time. I assume that any open space in England is mostly green unless I'm told otherwise. The landscape depicted in "Bliss" makes me think of what little I know of the downs, all of it fictional.
Tolkein's barrow-downs are bare and bleak, and home to creatures quite as nasty, in their small but potentially lethal way, as Sauron's Ringwraiths or Saruman's new, improved orcs. Watership Down is a pleasant enough landscape; but the book depicts enough nature red and tooth in claw that, if it doesn't quite reinforce my impression that a down is the kind of place where you don't want to find yourself after dark, it does nothing to counteract it.
The first I heard of barrows and downs was in a story called The Long Barrow, which I read at twelve or thirteen. The downs bordering on moorland where that story is set became confused in my mind with the Welsh or Cornish setting of Arthur Machen's The Novel of the Black Seal, for no better reason than that they were in the same anthology. Even though I didn't fully understand Machen's Novel, I was hugely impressed -- overwhelmed, even -- with its atmosphere of horrid things lurking in out-of-the-way places, hinted at rather than described (Machen, a second- or third-rate writer of eerie horror stories, was a literary follower of H.P. Lovecraft). I may even, at about the same age, have confused the downs with Conan Doyle's moor and hound. At that time, Great Britain was as remote to me as Dr. Moreau's island, or Robinson Crusoe's. After reading Return of the Native in college, I may have added Egdon Heath to the mix, the moor where Eustacia Vye suffers for four hundred-odd pages before drowning herself.
Only three of these associations have anything to do with the actual English downs. The rest represent confusion in the mind of an impressionable young adolescent eagerly soaking up atmosphere with a grand disregard for geography or any other kind of reality. I am sure I am doing both the downs and "Bliss" a great injustice when I look at that gentle hill with its tiny flowers at the base and clouds and mountain behind, and wonder what lives in the neighborhood that doesn't show and what happens there after dark.
Why "Bliss"? It's a pleasant enough hillside and sky, but unremarkable. "Bliss," to my mind, would be more active, and somehow more pink or luminescent light peach than blue and green (don't ask me why). For this picture, I would go with something like "tranquility," maybe, if it strikes you that way.
It doesn't strike me that way. I may be the only person in Microsoft's sphere of influence (possibly the largest sphere of influence in the history of the human race, but that's beside the point) -- the only one of Microsoft's customers, that is, to see anything sinister in this peaceful, passive landscape.
I've never seen the English downs. I know of them only that they are uplands of some kind, inhabited by humans for a very long time. I assume that any open space in England is mostly green unless I'm told otherwise. The landscape depicted in "Bliss" makes me think of what little I know of the downs, all of it fictional.
Tolkein's barrow-downs are bare and bleak, and home to creatures quite as nasty, in their small but potentially lethal way, as Sauron's Ringwraiths or Saruman's new, improved orcs. Watership Down is a pleasant enough landscape; but the book depicts enough nature red and tooth in claw that, if it doesn't quite reinforce my impression that a down is the kind of place where you don't want to find yourself after dark, it does nothing to counteract it.
The first I heard of barrows and downs was in a story called The Long Barrow, which I read at twelve or thirteen. The downs bordering on moorland where that story is set became confused in my mind with the Welsh or Cornish setting of Arthur Machen's The Novel of the Black Seal, for no better reason than that they were in the same anthology. Even though I didn't fully understand Machen's Novel, I was hugely impressed -- overwhelmed, even -- with its atmosphere of horrid things lurking in out-of-the-way places, hinted at rather than described (Machen, a second- or third-rate writer of eerie horror stories, was a literary follower of H.P. Lovecraft). I may even, at about the same age, have confused the downs with Conan Doyle's moor and hound. At that time, Great Britain was as remote to me as Dr. Moreau's island, or Robinson Crusoe's. After reading Return of the Native in college, I may have added Egdon Heath to the mix, the moor where Eustacia Vye suffers for four hundred-odd pages before drowning herself.
Only three of these associations have anything to do with the actual English downs. The rest represent confusion in the mind of an impressionable young adolescent eagerly soaking up atmosphere with a grand disregard for geography or any other kind of reality. I am sure I am doing both the downs and "Bliss" a great injustice when I look at that gentle hill with its tiny flowers at the base and clouds and mountain behind, and wonder what lives in the neighborhood that doesn't show and what happens there after dark.
Friday, July 10, 2009
TEAMWORK
Dad was a busy man; things around the old homestead often got done slowly. One early July in the late 1950s -- Paula and I had to have been fully grown to have brought this off -- we found ourselves unable to open our bedroom windows because the storm windows were still on. We may have considered together what we could do about this, but I seem to remember that, as usual, I figured it out and then proposed it to Paula. I'm sure we didn't trouble Mother with our plans; she could be deplorably narrow-minded about my brilliant ideas. As for Dad, if he'd been available we wouldn't have had this problem.
We're not, of course, talking about modern combination windows. An old-fashioned storm window was a rigid wood and glass object the size of the entire (large) window that it covered. I had long known that I could undo the hook at the bottom of the window and swing it outward. I think I had even lifted it off the brackets at the top, just to see if I could. I also managed to put it back. How to get it off the window entirely required some consideration.
Dad used to hold the window at arm's length parallel to the ground, rotate it 45 degrees, and gently draw it backward into the house. This method requires hands and wrists and forearms that few humans, and possibly no teenage girls, are blessed with. I knew better than to try it. I considered the relative dimensions of the window, my arms, Paula's arms and height, and the distance from the bottom of the second story windows to the ground. I may even have done some measuring.
This sounds hair-raising; but it was surprisingly easy to unhook a window and lower it between my hands to the point where Paula, basketball player and all-around athlete, could reach it, and then lower it together until I ran out of arm length, by which time she could easily control it and set it gently on the ground. We didn't have to carry them downstairs. We started with my bedroom window and worked our way, smoothly and without so much as an unsteady moment, around to the windows on the opposite side of the house.
When we confessed to the authorities what we'd been up to, it seemed to me that they weren't appropriately impressed. We may even have been allowed to repeat the procedure in subsequent years.
We're not, of course, talking about modern combination windows. An old-fashioned storm window was a rigid wood and glass object the size of the entire (large) window that it covered. I had long known that I could undo the hook at the bottom of the window and swing it outward. I think I had even lifted it off the brackets at the top, just to see if I could. I also managed to put it back. How to get it off the window entirely required some consideration.
Dad used to hold the window at arm's length parallel to the ground, rotate it 45 degrees, and gently draw it backward into the house. This method requires hands and wrists and forearms that few humans, and possibly no teenage girls, are blessed with. I knew better than to try it. I considered the relative dimensions of the window, my arms, Paula's arms and height, and the distance from the bottom of the second story windows to the ground. I may even have done some measuring.
This sounds hair-raising; but it was surprisingly easy to unhook a window and lower it between my hands to the point where Paula, basketball player and all-around athlete, could reach it, and then lower it together until I ran out of arm length, by which time she could easily control it and set it gently on the ground. We didn't have to carry them downstairs. We started with my bedroom window and worked our way, smoothly and without so much as an unsteady moment, around to the windows on the opposite side of the house.
When we confessed to the authorities what we'd been up to, it seemed to me that they weren't appropriately impressed. We may even have been allowed to repeat the procedure in subsequent years.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
THE ADVENTURE OF THE WAYWARD CYMBAL
This story was tucked away in a corner of a small publication for organ builders that appeared in our house when my father was building the organ. That makes my memory of it at least fifty years old.
It happened, if it did, at a performance of the 1812 Overture at Radio City Music Hall: large orchestra, the mighty Wurlitzer, something standing in for the cannon and Kremlin bells. According to the story, the mass of sound was too much for the leather thong attached to the center of the big cymbal. I would think that for the cymbal to land in a position to roll, its support must have given way when the percussionist whanged it. In any case, fall and roll it did.
The instrument in question is a couple of feet in diameter and most of an inch thick in the middle, tapering toward the edges -- solid, ringing metal, of course. There was no stopping it; the best anyone it its path could do was get out of the way. One fellow climbed halfway up the proscenium arch as the cymbal careened through the orchestra, scattering musicians, chairs, stands, and anything else in its path that couldn't get out of the way (not too many instruments, we have to hope). The roar of the mighty Wurlitzer fell to a whimper as the organist, turning to watch in horrified fascination, allowed his fingers to lift one by one from the keys.
The cymbal ran out of momentum, leaned, tipped, and fell in increasingly rapid, resounding clatters, like a silver dollar on the bar. That must have been the end of that concert.
If this yarn isn't an urban legend, it deserves to be. I wouldn't know how to verify it. I don't know what the publication was, or when the item appeared, or how long before that the alleged incident occurred. I do know that I didn't make it up. At no time in my life have I been familiar enough with orchestra instruments to invent a tale based on the physics of an escaped cymbal. Either this story really happened, or it was concocted by a bored percussionist waiting out many measures of rest in idle fantasy about how much damage this tool of his trade might do if it got loose.
It happened, if it did, at a performance of the 1812 Overture at Radio City Music Hall: large orchestra, the mighty Wurlitzer, something standing in for the cannon and Kremlin bells. According to the story, the mass of sound was too much for the leather thong attached to the center of the big cymbal. I would think that for the cymbal to land in a position to roll, its support must have given way when the percussionist whanged it. In any case, fall and roll it did.
The instrument in question is a couple of feet in diameter and most of an inch thick in the middle, tapering toward the edges -- solid, ringing metal, of course. There was no stopping it; the best anyone it its path could do was get out of the way. One fellow climbed halfway up the proscenium arch as the cymbal careened through the orchestra, scattering musicians, chairs, stands, and anything else in its path that couldn't get out of the way (not too many instruments, we have to hope). The roar of the mighty Wurlitzer fell to a whimper as the organist, turning to watch in horrified fascination, allowed his fingers to lift one by one from the keys.
The cymbal ran out of momentum, leaned, tipped, and fell in increasingly rapid, resounding clatters, like a silver dollar on the bar. That must have been the end of that concert.
If this yarn isn't an urban legend, it deserves to be. I wouldn't know how to verify it. I don't know what the publication was, or when the item appeared, or how long before that the alleged incident occurred. I do know that I didn't make it up. At no time in my life have I been familiar enough with orchestra instruments to invent a tale based on the physics of an escaped cymbal. Either this story really happened, or it was concocted by a bored percussionist waiting out many measures of rest in idle fantasy about how much damage this tool of his trade might do if it got loose.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
HOW WE CELEBRATED MOTHERS' DAY (with apologies to Stephen Leacock)
"Why are you turning around?" I asked.
"There's a little road back there we're going to look at,"Justin said. Idle curiosity has gotten people in trouble before this. As I explained later to the first tow truck guy, I have an unfortunate tendency to think that my son knows what he's doing. So down the road we went; I didn't even try to stop him.
We had originally intended a picnic for that Mothers' Day a couple of years ago. After it rained for seven days and seven nights and counting, we agreed instead to drive to Rockport and walk on the beach, wondering in passing if we should lay in a supply of doves against the day when the waters receded.
Either we didn't look in the right places, or the beaches were under water. At each stop, I got out of the car in my motorcycle rainsuit and watched the Atlantic slam itself against rocky promontories, breakwaters, or rock-lined bays that might have been beaches if there had been less water. After ordering me not to climb out on the rocks, Justin listened to the radio and took pictures out the windows of the car.
From Rockport we worked our way south, observing flooded roads, fields and lawns, and people pumping water out of cellars. We found and briefly explored a beach in Manchester (did I mention that the temperature was in the fifties with a gale-force wind roaring in from Greenland?), grabbed a couple of sandwiches in Salem, and made our way back to Medford.
We were having such a good time, that to prolong it I asked Justin if he would mind continuing from Medford to Winchester (which often floods) to make sure the town hadn't floated down the Mystic River and out to sea. That was when he spotted the mysterious little road, if it can be called that: a couple of muddy ruts in the grass along the top of an embankment leading to the river.
We drove along the embankment readily enough, bad spots being notoriously easy to get into, stopping a few yards from the bank of the river. The tow truck guys said later that the car was about a hundred yards from the road. I wouldn't have thought it was that far, but what do I know? We watched water pouring into the river from a structure that looked like a bulkhead. We noticed that the trees that usually mark the river bank were now up to their knees, with water extending far behind them. We watched a woman walking a dog. Then we decided to leave.
We were all right until Justin backed just a tad off the straight and narrow. When he tried to pull ahead and correct the problem, the wheels spun and the car stopped. In reverse it did likewise, and skidded sideways a bit. He tried a few things, first with a couple of wooden blocks that happened to be in the trunk and then with some pieces of carpet that weren't earning their keep on the floor. The car moved backwards a little and sideways more, leaving the right rear tire not quite in contact with terra infirma.
A large tree near the top of the embankment stood between the car and any real danger of sliding or flipping over and rolling down into what is usually a meadow but had become part of the river. But I didn't like the look of things and elected to stand in the rain at a safe distance. After a few more tries, I declared that it was time to summon help.
The guys at the liquor store, maybe a quarter of a mile away, let us use the phone and even found me a chair. The tow truck, when it came, couldn't back in far enough for the cable to reach the car without serious risk of joining us in the mud (the last time my son and I got stuck in the mud, the tow truck got stuck, too, but that's another story). The driver generously drove us home, another quarter mile past the liquor store, and suggested a couple of companies that might have the kind of industrial-strength tow truck we required.
An hour, one long telephone call, two more tow trucks, and $500 later, Justin returned the car to its home. I wasn't there when it was extracted from the wilderness, but he said that all proceeded smoothly. The episode, he commented, might have been worth $30 or $40 for the experience, but no way was it worth $500. My husband and I split the fee with him. It is, after all,my car. He wouldn't have persisted in exploring that forest track if I had told him not to. He made the phone call and got wet and muddy, more than once. If he pays half the expenses, that's plenty good enough.
The following Thursday, I took myself back to the scene of the crime, noting that water levels were near normal but that we and our tow trucks had left ruts most of a foot deep in places, some of them on the side of the embankment where a truck had gone around a particularly slimy spot. No permanent damage, I don't think -- ruts fill in, and grass grows back -- but one doesn't like to be responsible for that kind of carnage (not long afterwards, I noted in passing that the authorities had blocked off access to the area). Walking back to the main road, I saw a State Police officer placing on the windshield of my car what proved to be a $25 ticket for parking there.
Worse was to follow. Justin dropped by that night and mentioned that as of the previous day he exhibited -- probably literally, since he couldn't stand to put much on it -- the worst case of poison ivy of his extremely susceptible life. He had anticipated consequences from the poison ivy that grew lushly all around the hole we dug the car into, but the event exceeded expectations. It was better now, he said, but on Wednesday, before the doctor gave him steroids, his eye had been swollen shut and his arm more crippled than during the week in childhood when three of his limbs were solid itches and oozes and scabs. He showed me a selection of healing but still sore lesions, adding that "there's some more that I won't be showing you, Mom, but take my word for it, it's extremely unpleasant."
The moral of the above sorry story was pronounced by the first tow truck guy as we rounded the corner toward home: "You can't go off-road with a Grand Am."
"There's a little road back there we're going to look at,"Justin said. Idle curiosity has gotten people in trouble before this. As I explained later to the first tow truck guy, I have an unfortunate tendency to think that my son knows what he's doing. So down the road we went; I didn't even try to stop him.
We had originally intended a picnic for that Mothers' Day a couple of years ago. After it rained for seven days and seven nights and counting, we agreed instead to drive to Rockport and walk on the beach, wondering in passing if we should lay in a supply of doves against the day when the waters receded.
Either we didn't look in the right places, or the beaches were under water. At each stop, I got out of the car in my motorcycle rainsuit and watched the Atlantic slam itself against rocky promontories, breakwaters, or rock-lined bays that might have been beaches if there had been less water. After ordering me not to climb out on the rocks, Justin listened to the radio and took pictures out the windows of the car.
From Rockport we worked our way south, observing flooded roads, fields and lawns, and people pumping water out of cellars. We found and briefly explored a beach in Manchester (did I mention that the temperature was in the fifties with a gale-force wind roaring in from Greenland?), grabbed a couple of sandwiches in Salem, and made our way back to Medford.
We were having such a good time, that to prolong it I asked Justin if he would mind continuing from Medford to Winchester (which often floods) to make sure the town hadn't floated down the Mystic River and out to sea. That was when he spotted the mysterious little road, if it can be called that: a couple of muddy ruts in the grass along the top of an embankment leading to the river.
We drove along the embankment readily enough, bad spots being notoriously easy to get into, stopping a few yards from the bank of the river. The tow truck guys said later that the car was about a hundred yards from the road. I wouldn't have thought it was that far, but what do I know? We watched water pouring into the river from a structure that looked like a bulkhead. We noticed that the trees that usually mark the river bank were now up to their knees, with water extending far behind them. We watched a woman walking a dog. Then we decided to leave.
We were all right until Justin backed just a tad off the straight and narrow. When he tried to pull ahead and correct the problem, the wheels spun and the car stopped. In reverse it did likewise, and skidded sideways a bit. He tried a few things, first with a couple of wooden blocks that happened to be in the trunk and then with some pieces of carpet that weren't earning their keep on the floor. The car moved backwards a little and sideways more, leaving the right rear tire not quite in contact with terra infirma.
A large tree near the top of the embankment stood between the car and any real danger of sliding or flipping over and rolling down into what is usually a meadow but had become part of the river. But I didn't like the look of things and elected to stand in the rain at a safe distance. After a few more tries, I declared that it was time to summon help.
The guys at the liquor store, maybe a quarter of a mile away, let us use the phone and even found me a chair. The tow truck, when it came, couldn't back in far enough for the cable to reach the car without serious risk of joining us in the mud (the last time my son and I got stuck in the mud, the tow truck got stuck, too, but that's another story). The driver generously drove us home, another quarter mile past the liquor store, and suggested a couple of companies that might have the kind of industrial-strength tow truck we required.
An hour, one long telephone call, two more tow trucks, and $500 later, Justin returned the car to its home. I wasn't there when it was extracted from the wilderness, but he said that all proceeded smoothly. The episode, he commented, might have been worth $30 or $40 for the experience, but no way was it worth $500. My husband and I split the fee with him. It is, after all,my car. He wouldn't have persisted in exploring that forest track if I had told him not to. He made the phone call and got wet and muddy, more than once. If he pays half the expenses, that's plenty good enough.
The following Thursday, I took myself back to the scene of the crime, noting that water levels were near normal but that we and our tow trucks had left ruts most of a foot deep in places, some of them on the side of the embankment where a truck had gone around a particularly slimy spot. No permanent damage, I don't think -- ruts fill in, and grass grows back -- but one doesn't like to be responsible for that kind of carnage (not long afterwards, I noted in passing that the authorities had blocked off access to the area). Walking back to the main road, I saw a State Police officer placing on the windshield of my car what proved to be a $25 ticket for parking there.
Worse was to follow. Justin dropped by that night and mentioned that as of the previous day he exhibited -- probably literally, since he couldn't stand to put much on it -- the worst case of poison ivy of his extremely susceptible life. He had anticipated consequences from the poison ivy that grew lushly all around the hole we dug the car into, but the event exceeded expectations. It was better now, he said, but on Wednesday, before the doctor gave him steroids, his eye had been swollen shut and his arm more crippled than during the week in childhood when three of his limbs were solid itches and oozes and scabs. He showed me a selection of healing but still sore lesions, adding that "there's some more that I won't be showing you, Mom, but take my word for it, it's extremely unpleasant."
The moral of the above sorry story was pronounced by the first tow truck guy as we rounded the corner toward home: "You can't go off-road with a Grand Am."
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