THE YEAR OF THE CHICKEN

The pig was before my time, but I remember the chickens. My sister and I sometimes helped my feed them grain and collect eggs. As far as I know, no one in the family developed any emotional connection to them, as owners of such things sometimes do. We watched with interest as Dad beheaded one or more of them, holding the body at arms length until it stopped flapping and spraying blood around. (I once asked a doctor what method of execution would be fastest and least painful, and he said probably the guillotine would have been as humane as anything. On the basis of watching the chickens meet their end I have wondered idly if guillotined French aristocrats flailed around comparably; but there are things one doesn't have to know. I'm glad, anyway, that the chickens and the aristocrats didn't suffer, except in anticipation -- the aristocrats, of course; Barbara Kingsolver says poultry on the threshold of eternity have no idea what's coming.)

We loosened the feathers with boiling water and pulled them out with tweezers. Dad sat at the kitchen table to clean the birds with a pail at his feet to receive intestines and other inedibles, and explained the internal organs to us as they came out. He kept the liver, gizzard, and heart, which he enjoyed in the fricassee that marked the chicken's final appearance on the table.

On one of these occasions I picked up a chicken head from beside the chopping block and examined it closely: reddish feathers, yellow beak, wide-open beady little yellow-ringed black eyes. I thought it was neat. I asked my mother if I could keep it. She said I could not. She maintained that it would become ugly and stinky very soon. I didn't believe her. I often disbelieved things I hadn't experienced personally. At least, I had to be able to visualize it as a direct result of what I had witnessed. I had seen Mother's dire prognostications fail to materialize. When no one was looking, I carried off the chicken head and put it in the mailbox for safekeeping. I knew, of course, that it couldn't stay there. I intended to retrieve it at my leisure and hide it in my room.

As children will, I got sidetracked and forgot about the chicken head in the mailbox. Mother found it when she went to mail a letter. She was not pleased. Of course, there was no possible question as to who was responsible. Even aside from my earlier expression of interest in the object, bizarre occurrences were routinely, and usually correctly, ascribed to me.

Mother read me the riot act. The mailman, she declared, would be within his rights in declining to deliver mail to people who kept chicken heads in their mailbox. I don't remember particularly regretting the chicken head, beyond feeling rather foolish for forgetting about it and incurring a scolding.

THE YEAR OF THE PIG

Early in their marriage, my parents kept a pig under the barn. I never made its acquaintance, but I knew the space under the barn as "the pig-hole," and I must have been told in terms I believed that Little Girls Don't Go Into The Pig-Hole. To this day, I can hardly bring myself to venture under the barn (not that there's any reason to). I wish I could say the same for the colony of woodchucks presently in residence there.

To return to 1941 and the errant pig -- I don't know how it got out, but get out it did one fine day, and proceeded downstreet toward the more densely populated part of Otter River. Mother saw it leave and set out after it, armed with a bucket of potatoes that was supposed to lure it back to its home.

It showed no interest in the potatoes, opting instead to root up a lawn in the neighborhood. The lady of the house issued forth and belabored the pig with a broom. The pig paid no more attention to the broom than to the potatoes. The resulting turmoil eventually caught the eye of some guys in a passing truck, who stopped, captured the pig, loaded it into the truck, and delivered it, presumably, to its pig-hole.

Mother, at her earliest convenience, put her foot down on Dad's pig-keeping. The pig became ham and bacon, leaving only a memory and a hole under the barn where little girls weren't allowed. 

OPTICAL DELUSION

It comes into view from the eastbound lane of Route 2 near the top of the hill in Harvard, just as you pass the closed rest area on the other side of the road. When it first impinged on my consciousness, looming up from the top of a wooded hillside, my reaction was: What is that? At first glance it looked a little like a white pine, but twice as tall as any of its neighbors; and no white pine, or any Massachusetts tree, ever grew like that. The top foot or so was about right, a symmetrical cone of green needled branches much wider than it was high; but from there to the line where the other trees hid its base, it grew straight down, all the branches the same length. There was something vaguely tropical about the shape. Whatever this thing was, I had never seen the like of it, either in the Northeast or in California.

I wondered about it every Sunday as my husband and I plied eastward on Route 2 (it wasn't visible from the other direction, except in the rear view mirror on the way past the rest area), wondering how it had managed to grow so high without coming to my attention before. Then one Sunday, two things were different: first, for once, we weren't on a schedule and thus had time for side trips; and second, most of the tree's lower branches were missing, apparently preparatory to cutting it down. If we were going to investigate this odd specimen, it would have to be now.

We turned off at the next exit, Routes 110 and 111 in the Harvard direction, and turned right onto a road that obligingly led back along the highway, exactly the way we wanted to go. A few twists and turns later, we came to what was obviously the tree we had seen from the highway, boxed in by a chain link fence a dozen feet each way on which was posted an unfriendly notice of the don't-even-think-about-coming-in-here kind.

The bark on the branchless trunk looked approximately normal for a white pine, but wrong somehow -- too light in color, or a different shade of brown. Apparently diseased or deformed, it was subtly horrible, like something in a nightmare. I turned my nearsighted attention to the branches piled on the ground outside the fence. They had proper dark green white-pine needles, two or three inches long and attached to the branches in bundles of five; but, like the trunk, they were not quite right somehow.

I must have scrutinized this thing, trunk, branches and needles, for all of a minute before I realized that I was looking at a tree made of plastic. I explained this to my husband, who didn't see well and was willfully ignorant of things botanical. He,a ham radio operator and electronics aficionado, then recognized the structure as an antenna -- probably, he suggested, a cell phone tower -- made up to look like a tree.

I have lived all my life in a world of technological wonders and plastic fakery. I knew from the first that this thing wasn't any kind of white pine. It wasn't even meant to look enough like one to fool anybody. The intent was to camouflage the antenna, not to disguise it. But never having encountered such a thing, I had no mental category other than "tree" to put it in. That it took me as long as it did to figure out what I was seeing confirms that we see what we already know about and can easily misinterpret the unfamiliar.

DOWN IN THE VALLEY AND BACK THE SAME DAY

In my youth the way to get a Christmas tree in Otter River was to hike along the logging road around Bell Hill, descend from there into the pathless wilderness of Christmas Tree Valley, select and cut a tree, and hike out with it. Bell Hill is part of the family property in Otter River; Christmas Tree Valley is an adjacent swamp. Such terrain is now called "wetland," but if you have any agenda there other than documenting flora and fauna or monitoring water levels, it's a swamp. In December, though, with a firm frozen footing and often a nice coating of snow on the trees, the swampiness of it isn't obvious. I'm not sure we ever went down there for any reason except to cut a tree, so "Christmas Tree Valley" it was.

Most of Bell Hill is covered with beech and hemlock; the spruces for Christmas use seem to prefer the lowlands. At some late point, when we were no longer stalking Christmas trees in the wild, Dad compared notes with the owner of the abutting property and discovered that Christmas Tree Valley is not, in fact, on our land and that we had been stealing Christmas trees for years. No one was particularly concerned about it

Dad always liked to cut a tree that was grouped closely with one or two others. If we take one of these, he said, the others will grow better. If ours has a flat spot, he continued, we'll put that side next to the window. Paula and I would lobby for a free-standing tree; but if Dad had already settled on one of a clump we were overruled. We were often further dismayed that he wanted such a small tree, until experience taught us that a tree in the living room is a lot bigger than the same tree in the woods.

None of us but Dad knew exactly where Christmas Tree Valley was in relation to the rest of the world until the summer between my junior and senior years in high school when I was to be a counselor at the girl scout day camp on Bell Hill. (Ah, for those innocent days, when you could have a hundred or so of other people's kids running around your property for a couple of weeks, including swimming every day at the Otter River Pool, and ruin by personal injury lawsuit never occurred to anyone). I wanted to be able to take groups of campers on the modest hike that Dad used to do with us: along the logging road behind the hill to the end; up the hill to the right to another logging road; up that to the top; then forward to the front of the hill, which overlooks Route 68 and a good piece of Otter River. Dad walked me through that route and on the way pointed out the Horse Cemetery (deceased horses were buried there at one time) and Christmas Tree Valley. Being focused on learning and remembering where things were on Bell Hill, I then knew where Christmas trees were to be found.

My best guess is that it was the Christmas of my senior year in high school that Paula and I, deciding that our father didn't look like providing us with a Christmas tree at all soon, undertook to handle it ourselves. Booted and hatted and gloved and armed with our choice of weapons, we walked down to Bell Hill after school one afternoon.

We found the valley and selected and cut a tree without incident, but somehow, dragging this heavy and unwieldy object through the underbrush, we found ourselves unsure of the way out. The casting about that one does in the woods, hither and thither until something looks familiar, had limited appeal, burdened as we were, and we weren't eager to separate and chance losing each other. At some point I intersected with a fir-branch full of recent snow and coated my face, including my glasses. Whatever I was wearing included nothing dry and accessible enough to wipe eyeglasses on. So Paula, with her contact lenses, could see but didn't know the way, and I knew the way but couldn't see. Since we'd started sometime after three o'clock within a few days of the winter solstice, it wouldn't be long before neither of us could see much of anything.

The way out had to be uphill. We picked a piece of hillside relatively free of brush and started to climb. To our vast relief we did come upon the logging road, a good deal farther toward the street than I was prepared for. Even in near-darkness we could hardly stray off the logging road. We trudged out of the woods and toward home in, by this time, complete darkness -- our mother must have been ready to call the National Guard -- and very glad we were to see the lights of the house ahead.

HEALTHY COOKIES

You can't substitute oil for solid shortening in a cookie recipe. It seemed, as the saying goes, like a good idea at the time, because oil is widely considered to be healthier than fat that's solid at room temperature. There are, it seems, other factors to be considered.

Oil is fine in muffins and pancakes, and all right in a cake if you aren't particular about the texture. The trouble with cookies is that as the dough softens in the oven the oil runs out in all directions. In a cookie sheet with sides, the result would be oatmeal-and-raisin islands floating in oil -- more or less deep-fried. The flat cookie sheet I used allowed the oil to escape off the edges and onto the floor of the oven, where it caught fire.

I slammed the oven door on the flames and subsequently explained the situation to a pleasant fellow who answered the phone at the fire department.

"So, what should I do?"

"Call us."

I think that was the time that, as Laurie rounded the corner on his way home from work, a fire truck rumbled past him and he heard its radio say something about "36 Circuit Street" -- our address. Somehow the possibility of fire didn't occur to him. He was afraid that I had been injured and was greatly relieved on arrival to find nothing much the matter.

I think that was also the time my sister called in media res.  "It's a wonder you're alive," she said.  She's probably right.

The fire department cheerfully extinguished the flames, and I now know enough not to try to make healthy cookies.

PANIC ON GOUGH STREET

For financial and logistical reasons I avoided dealing with my motorcycle's slipping clutch until it failed entirely, leaving me and the motorcycle stranded on Gough Street in San Francisco. A precipitous hill dropped off behind us; the summit was a few staircase-steep yards ahead.

First priority had to be to discourage the bike from going into free-fall backwards down the hill and taking me with it. Between us, the bike and I weighed about six hundred pounds. As long as I stomped the brake as hard as I could with my right foot and maintained a death grip on the hand brake, we stayed put. If I let up at all on either brake, we started to roll. My left foot, of course, had to stay on the ground to balance us.

I might have lowered us to the bottom of the hill a few inches at a time, releasing the brakes and then grabbing and stomping them again, probably hundreds of times. I might even have managed it without ending up in the hospital. But I felt strongly that there was more potential energy in the system than I wanted to risk releasing at a rate that I wasn't at all sure I could control.

I tried to back up and turn around, or at least park; but I couldn't support all that weight at anything like the angle that was developing between the vertical line of the bike and the dizzily tilted pavement. Long before I made any progress toward the curb, the hill fell away dangerously under my foot. Nor did I begin to have the strength and agility to get off the bike and lay it down or drop it.

I looked around for a pedestrian, preferably of the young male persuasion, who might be willing to help. There was no one in sight, not even any cars. I thought about bursting into tears, but it wasn't clear what good that would do. So I sat there for a few minutes, immobilized, my mind racing and coming up empty.

Then, exactly because I couldn't think of anything to do, I gingerly let the clutch out. It caught, sort of, and we moved slowly and tentatively up and over the hill (I was told later that the plates in the clutch must have cooled off enough to function). I drove home by the levelest route available between San Francisco and the Peninsula, and continued to hang out in the lowlands to the extent possible until I was able to get the clutch fixed. I'm not sure I ever came home from the Avenues by way of Gough Street again.

EIGHT PIANOS

Sanders Theater at Harvard University reopened in September of 1996 with a concert of piano music, after renovations and the purchase of a nine-foot Steinway concert grand. The finale was Rossini's overture to Semiramide as arranged by Carl Czerny for eight pianos, thirty-two hands. The nineteenth century liked multiple-piano concerts and has left us these arrangements of orchestral works for massed pianos. In America particularly, a visiting conductor would propose such a concert, and the local citizenry would round up as many as twenty or thirty pianos and haul them in from the surrounding countryside on wagons or whatever was available.

A few weeks before the Sanders concert, Laurie told me what was planned and described what his role was to be: to select the pianos to be used and tune them all to each other. Many times in his career he had tuned two pianos to be played together; I don't think he had ever done more than two. He seemed to have no doubts about his ability to bring it off, and I'm sure no one else did.

I asked him how the promoters of nineteenth century piano orchestras, with visiting conductors and not much lead time, tuned all those pianos -- especially since pianos don't respond well to being moved by nonprofessionals and bumped around the countryside. Probably not very well, we decided.

Laurie came home every day with a progress report as the pianos were assembled on the stage and tuned. It took him a total of thirteen hours to tune them all together, and seven hours to keep them in tune until the concert.

At some point, I remarked, "We're going to this concert, right?"

"Oh, it's for honchos at Harvard," he replied, "It isn't for the general public."

"I can't believe," I said, "that Lew couldn't get you a couple of tickets if you asked him." Lew was head of the piano shop and Laurie's boss.

Laurie said, Grumble.

"Laurie," I said, "I've got to hear this. Please get tickets for us."

So he did. When I met him at the Oxford Street entrance to Sanders Theater, he had that look of impending doom that I'd seen once or twice before when he expected some ax to fall. "Now," he said, "I get to find out whether I walk out of Sanders Theater, or crawl."

The nine-foot Steinway D, of course, was in perfect tune -- Laurie's pianos always were -- and performed splendidly for its part of the program. Then sixteen young pianists, all students at Harvard, took their places for the Czerny/Rossini piece. To our satisfaction, the mistress of ceremonies hailed the piano tuner by name as the real hero of this piece.

The sound of eight pianos played together is metallic and percussive but also, due to tiny discrepancies in timing, suggestive of sustained strings. Laurie observed that the tuning wasn't perfect, as many things in this world aren't, but I can't believe anyone heard the flaws but him. He got to walk out of Sanders Theater with pride in a job well done. The recording of the piece that Harvard gave him is one of my prized possessions.