TURNING BLUE

I bought the black Honda 90 at the end of March of 1970 from a young man in Framingham, telling him to hold off on depositing the check for a few days (in those days there were still pockets of trust in the world). Then I headed north and west to Templeton to borrow from my mother the money to cover the check.

It seemed like a pleasantly warm day when I got on the bus from Boston to Framingham. By the time I left Framingham it was around 3:30 PM, still warm but with something ominous in the air that reminded me that late March in Massachusetts is not summer, or even reliably spring. This Honda wasn't my first scooter. For half a dozen years I had experienced a rich education in the effects of wind chill; but the previous five years of living in California had blunted my respect for real cold. With the optimism of youth I set off hoping for the best, not that there was any alternative.

I had never been in Framingham before. I had a vague idea that it was on the way from Boston to Templeton. It isn't. I promptly got lost; I had no map. Long before I got to anything I recognized, night fell, fulfilling the promise of renewed winter. I hoped I wouldn't have much farther to go. I did.

I was wearing a dress. I didn't own pants at that time. I must have had gloves. I think I had some kind of light windbreaker, and a crash helmet as required by law. At some point, numb with cold, I stumbled upon a shopping mall; stumbled off the bike and into a clothing store, where I bought a pair of pants; and stumbled back to the bike, being stared at all along the way. I don't belong in suburbia - but that's another story.

Much, much later I stumbled on Route 31, which I knew eventually crossed Route 2. In subsequent years of motorcycling up and down Route 2 I learned that one of the places where the temperature suddenly drops is, in fact, at the junction with Route 31. My father confirmed from his days of plying between Templeton and Worcester on his motorcycle that Route 31 was where he well night froze. On that evening in late March, there was still snow in the woods beside the road.

When I pulled into my parents' yard -- on, as my father put it when the bike wouldn't start the next day, the last explosion -- I discovered that they weren't home and the house was locked. Thinking the people across the street might know where they were, I knocked on their door. "Mmmmm mmmmmmm mm prrnts," I said. The neighbor exclaimed, "My God, your face is all blue, come in and sit down." I had to brace my arms against the edge of the table to hold the cocoa she gave me.

I drove back to Boston the next day, in daylight, armed with Mother's check and a set of her thermal underwear, into the next thirty-odd years of open-vehicle wind chill.

PSALMS AND SODA WATER

She doesn't really like fizzy water. When she sees Daddy drinking it she politely extends her arm, indicating that she would like some, please, and Daddy pours a bit into her mouth. She doesn't spit it out; but neither does she make much attempt to swallow it. With the oddest expression on her face -- not quite distaste but moving in that direction -- she allows most of it to roll forward onto her chin. But she keeps trying. Perhaps the fizzy water experience is intriguing, if not fully enjoyable. She may have a nonverbal concept that if Daddy likes this stuff there must be something about it that she's missing.

Herb Caen, in a column in the San Francisco Chronicle, described a small boy in Chinatown setting off firecrackers at Chinese New Year. The boy would light the fuse and then hide behind a car waiting for the cracker to go off. He obviously hated the noise and the suspense. Why, Caen asked, did he continue to do it? The only possible answer is that everyone he knew loved fireworks. He wanted to do what everyone else in his social sphere did, and learn to like it if he could.

I knew one person who claimed to have enjoyed his first cigarette. Most don't -- or beer, or wine, or anything of that kind either. The world is full of foods that it's hard to imagine that anybody could enjoy. I have heard that the Scots don't eat haggis because anybody likes it much, but for reasons of Tradition (as the song says).

Intriguing if not fully enjoyable describes my experience so far with Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. We singers do our best with the angular lines and huge intervals, bristling with accidentals -- not really twelve-tone rows, but they look like it. We mutter or scream through a few sustained notes while the pianist does battle with the orchestra reduction. We listen to Stravinsky's trademark percussive rhythms, discovering that the strong beats don't always come at the barline. We struggle with dissonances and puzzle over entrance notes that are nowhere in the preceding couple of measures and have to be plucked out of the ether (or belatedly from the orchestra or, humiliatingly, from someone else in the chorus).

But some of the atonal-looking passages are beginning to resolve into not unattractive melodies. The orchestral romps are fun to listen to as some of the where's-my-note panic subsides. The long concluding passage, low in everybody's range over a couple of trombones playing in octaves and a dead march in the tympani, is coming to make sense, although it still makes me think of Cthulhu tromping in from the outer reaches of the solar system. (That's a story by Lovecraft; if you don't know it you don't need to; you don't need to know about twelve-tone rows either, for that matter.) Performing the piece with the orchestra may yet prove to be the magnificent and rewarding experience that the choir director insists it will be. For now, I will hang in there, musing that from fizzy water to Stravinsky, it's amazing what people will put themselves through because something rewarding may come of it.

ZEN CREAM PUFFS

Making cream puffs is one of my favorite metaphors for life: Every step of the way you'd think this can't possibly work, but somehow it all does.

You start by bringing a cup of water to an enthusiastic boil. You then dump in an equal amount of flour. Obviously, the flour should glop together into an intractable bunch of lumps and defy all attempts to smooth it out. Not so: The flour and water combine nicely into a homogeneous sphere in the middle of the saucepan.

Then you start adding eggs, unbeaten, if you please, to the hot flour-and-water sphere. Oh, really, now -- this certainly would produce poached eggs, bits of hard-cooked white and yolk that can't possibly blend with anything, let alone that sullen lump of paste in the saucepan.

Again, not so. You beat the mixture like hell after every egg (don't, by the way, make a double recipe of cream puffs unless you're stronger than I was in my teens, as chances are you're not) -- but handled firmly, one egg after another slips meekly into the mix.

Then you drop the batter onto a cookie sheet in tablespoon-size lumps and bake them. Please note that the ingredients included no leavening. The eggs do it somehow, as with popovers or Yorkshire pudding. I've never understood those things either. Angel food and sponge cake depend on eggs as well, but that's whipped-up egg white that expands while baking. That at least makes sense; but please note that I've managed exactly one such cake in my life -- the first jelly roll I ever attempted -- and was never able to do it again.

Contrary to expectations, the cream puffs come out of the oven high and round, golden brown and eggy, with a nice hollow in the middle to be filled with vanilla pudding or whatever strikes your fancy.

The first time you make cream puffs you blindly follow the instructions, thinking at every turn, "How can this be right??" It never does come to look any more likely; but it works. What more could anyone want?

OF MICE AND MEN

Rather late on a weekday night in the early 1970s, I was waiting between the two sets of tracks in Park Street Station for the train to Harvard Square. The only other person visible was a young man walking back and forth on the other side of the Cambridge-bound tracks, looking intently into the pit. "What the hell is he doing?" I thought. It was difficult to imagine anything good that could come of a fascination with the underside of the subway.

Conan Doyle says of a fictional young Irishman that he had too much imagination to be a really brave man. I don't think of myself as a nervous person; but very little evidence will set the old literary imagination to conjuring worst case scenarios, which it is very good at. "Does he have some kind of explosive, is he going to blow up the train?" He didn't seem to be carrying anything, but he could have had something in a pocket, or under his jacket. "Is he going to do an Anna Karenina and throw himself under the train?"

We didn't yet have a lot of suicide bombers, but the world has never lacked violent lunatics. Watching this young guy, I experienced a wave of moral certainty that he was up to no good. Having, as Sherlock Holmes says of the Greek Interpreter, no physical courage, I badly wanted out of that subway station. I tried to figure out how I would get home if I fled up the stairs and out.

My next moral certainty was, "I can't do that." If something ugly was brewing over there that no one else had noticed, I couldn't just run off. Climbing the stairs and crossing over to the other side of the pit, even reserving as I went the right to turn tail and run if the train came before I got there, may have been the bravest thing I have ever done.

By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, the subway-pit enthusiast had been joined by another young man. I strolled over as casually as I could manage and asked what was going on.

The first guy pointed into the pit. "Mice," he said. Sure enough, little dark-colored mice were scurrying around down there. We watched them for a bit, and then I took my leave and strolled off to wait for the train by myself.

I felt, of course, more than a little foolish (although please note that at least one other person had been moved to investigate). But the ridiculous anticlimax that I barged into didn't change the initial decision to act responsibly when I would have vastly preferred not to.

BARBERSHOP HARMONY

On a Sunday evening in the late 1950s, Laurie and his father were sitting together at a meeting of the Men's Club of the Unitarian Church in Kingston, Massachusetts. The program was a concert by a barbershop quartet -- professionals or semi-professionals or at least very experienced amateurs. After a lively and enjoyable performance, they asked for four volunteers from the audience for the purpose of demonstrating that extemporaneous barbershop isn't as easy as it sounds.

The first volunteer was a bass from the choir, followed by a baritone, both excellent musicians. Then there was the question of tenors. (Tenors often are a question.) Laurie, a high school kid with an excellent ear inherited from the paternal side of the family -- his mother was severely musically challenged -- exchanged a glance with his father.

"Should we?" Laurie was always up for musical adventures.

His father shrugged his shoulders. "Why not?"

So Laurie and his father joined the church quartet as first and second tenor respectively.

The performers assigned the volunteer quartet a well-known song from the barbershop repertoire and started them off together in the four-part close and charmingly hokey harmony of the genre. Then they dropped out. Left to themselves, the church singers were supposed to become uncertain, wobble, flounder, and go down to ignominious defeat.

They didn't.They sailed right along as if they'd been doing exactly this all their lives.

The performers, as Laurie told the story decades later, "realized they'd been had" and joined back in again. "By the time we finished," Laurie said, "we were singing in eight-part harmony."

There must have been technical informalities, unplanned dissonances, and a few shaky moments. But they got away with it, everyone had a good time, and the church singers vindicated themselves. It is to be hoped that the performers learned a lesson about underestimating amateurs.

GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

The cat loved the butterfly chair. She -- by convention, cats seem to be "she" unless known to be otherwise -- would race into the room, leap high in the air, and do a graceful (as a friend of the family put it): curl herself into a doughnut in mid-air and drop into the lap of the butterfly chair, positioned for a nap.

One day she raced into the room as usual, leapt, did a graceful, and dropped; but no nap ensued.

Someone had left a pinecone in the butterfly chair.

The cat, with the agility and quick reflexes of her kind, rebounded as if from a trampoline and fled the field.

The following day she again raced into the room and toward the butterfly chair; remembered in time; and stopped. One pictures a Saturday-morning-cartoon-style screeching halt, cloud of dust behind, and four little furrows in the floor.

She crept up to the chair and sniffed each leg in turn. Then she pulled herself up on her hind legs and peered cautiously into the depths of the chair. Seeing no sign of her enemy of the previous day, she climbed with great deliberation into the chair, rolled herself up, and went to sleep.

It was a long time before she again allowed herself to race to the chair, do a graceful, and drop.

HANDSOME IS

Viewed dispassionately, poison ivy is nice-looking stuff. All summer its shiny-leaved vines trail along roads, up trees, and through the underbrush, the picture of prosperity and well-being. In fall its dark green leaves shade into red and gold while retaining their characteristic thriving and healthy aspect. You rarely see poison ivy looking ragged and run-down. It doesn't, as you might expect, maintain its health and vigor by poisoning any creature that tries to eat or otherwise interfere with it. Only humans are bothered by it; birds perch on it, presumably looking for bugs, and deer eat it.

William Cullina, in Native Trees, Shrubs and Vines (to whom I am indebted for all the specific information in this piece) concedes, rather grudgingly, that poison ivy and its relatives are attractive in autumn. He goes on to relate with incredulous disgust that since 1640 poison ivy has actually been cultivated in some English gardens for its fall color. It's understandable that a naturalist, who comes into close and sometimes regrettable contact with his objects of study, might be no fan of the toxicodendron genus.

One summer I did see poison ivy that looked discouraged, yellowing in the August drought. I had to wonder if it had been sprayed to spare humans the dire consequences of messing with it -- and decided probably not. The yellowing vines extended too far along the road, across too many town lines. And anyway, killing poison ivy and leaving it in place doesn't stop its nefarious activities. You can get poison ivy in January from dead stems masquerading as random sticks. Cullina reports that "the toxin is extremely decay resistant, and a sensitive person came down with a rash after handling a 200-year-old herbarium specimen!"

But the stuff does make an impressive display. One has to admire, from a safe distance, the effect of those red and gold vines trailing along an old gray stone wall in bright sunlight under a blue October sky.