Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Msgr. Alan Placa

MSGR. ALAN PLACA

I wonder if Msgr. Alan Placa will write a book.

I think he should.

Placa is the lawyer/priest, or priest/lawyer, who is a boyhood friend of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, although I don’t know why newspaper editors insist that we always put that in.

Giuliani gave Placa a job when Placa was suspended as a priest for seven years—yeah, who knew?—for sexually abusing a St. Pius X minor seminarian, which wouldn’t have made a difference, legally, anyway, because the statute of limitations had run out.

But that was nothing.

Placa also advised the parents of young people who claim to have been sexually abused by priests that they should meditate and pray for divine guidance (and, he did this repeatedly) and divine mercy and divine wisdom…until, incidentally, the statute of limitations ran out on criminal and civil prosecution of the priests.

Clever, no?

Placa didn’t actually say that in his counsel to the parents, by the way. He kept mum.

Nor did he say that he was a lawyer, as well as a priest. Nor did he point out that he was the lawyer for the Diocese of Rockville Center, where the priests worked. This diocese had a mammoth special interest in the priests’ getting legally far away from these parents, because the parents, besides being driven to homicidal rage by the priests’ behavior, would have sued the…all right… brains…out of them and the Church that employed them.

But, as I said, Placa didn’t mention that when he was acting as advisor, counsel, father confessor…priest, to the parents of the (allegedly) sexually abused children.

The latest on Placa was that he was off priestly suspension, this for sexually abusing a student, himself, also after the statute of limitations had expired (also, after a just-to-be-sure, 7-year investigation by the Pope).

In the book, the one I’m suggesting he write, Placa could justify, or make a logical explanation for; or, capitalize on; or, perhaps profit from his (a) lousy luck during, or, (b) his lousy luck after, the turn-of-the-century, priest-child sex-scandal on Long Island; that followed the City of Boston’s turn-of-the-century, priest-child sex-scandal; or The City of Chicago’s turn-of-the-century, priest-child-sex-scandal; or the Republic of Ireland’s priest-child…(yada-yada-yada).

Were it not for those public scandals, Placa’s handbook on the Church’s handling victims of “short-eyed” priests (a prison term, meaning, child sex-abuser) would have saved the American Church a fortune, and total credit would have gone to Placa.

Basically, Placa, in his advice to other dioceses, says the given diocese has to have an abusive priest counselor (I don’t know how to punctuate that, or what to emphasize in saying it), who is also a lawyer (but who does not say that), who (again, secretly) is also specifically a lawyer for the diocese, as well.

This priest-lawyer acts as a spiritual advisor to the victim and his parents, and should (whisperingly, is my guess) counsel the parents to meditate and pray, and, then meditate and pray, and then to meditate and pray, until the statute of limitation runs out—Oh, look at that; must be God’s divine will—or until one of parties dies (Drat, we’ll never know the truth, now.).

That’s the Alan Placa I know, not just some Giuliani lackey.

Perhaps Placa will gloat in the book, because of his absolutely incredible luck after that unwanted public attention (Well, I may consider it unwanted, come to think of it. He may rejoice in it.) when no less than the Pope, the Vicar of Christ on Earth—and two other guys, Cardinals, I think, single-handedly (well, all right, not literally single-handedly, triple-handedly)—returned him, after seven years priestly suspension, to active duty as a working priest.

Placa can work again in The Diocese of Rockville Center, here on this little island East of New York, The Pope and his committee having determined that he is not a pervert. At least not by their divinely inspired, studied view, and according to the laws of The State of New York, which was clear from the outset.

Just think of the achievement: The Pope has a folder with a case in it (I’m just guessing that they call this a, “case”), with Alan Placa’s name on top of it, and maybe with The Pope’s name on it, too.

Hey, it’s possible; there’s three guys, you know, putting notes on the margins, and they’re sitting around, reviewing the facts. They each have folders, and The Pope’s folder has Al Placa on it.

And he’s making notes, and they are talking about what Alan Placa did or did not do in Uniondale one day, or a bunch of days, with this minor seminarian, this kid. (It really doesn’t matter what his name is, they’re interchangeable, aren’t they.).

That has to be, if not unprecedented, at least unusual enough to set pen to paper (all right, keyboard fingers to hand-held, personal communication device) and message the rest of us (I mean, the rest of the freaking world, really) what it feels like.

Wouldn’t you want to know how humble (or proud) Placa is, how it has changed his—I don’t know—Saturday mornings; or, the way he prays; or whether he quit bowling…no, golf. I forgot. He’s a lawyer…whether he quit playing golf.

Hell, I say there’s a book in that alone.

Then, there’s the question of how did he manage to get in this sordid, creepy little scandal in the first place? Did a parent whose refusals to listen to reason summon Placa’s name to the Bishop, I mean, given his law degree, and everything.
Maybe his success with those parents got him a new (or maybe an old) role with the Diocese, handling other poor souls, whose devotion to Holy Mother Church and priestly respect had been undermined by their own child.

Sometimes, even, they actually believe the child—“God forgive me,”—over the priest, and insist on protesting the priest’s weird, scary (dare I say it) advances, or suggestions, which have the child so upset. Crying even. Confused. Feeling betrayed.
Did Placa protect the Church against that kind of attack?

Man.

I wonder if I can stomach reading the book.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Uh, Poof!

Uh, pooof


Your letter:

I don't know if I already answered your letter or not. It seems to be something I would carry around in (the damaged, but still useful part of) my brain for a while, but ... well, maybe I think I answered it, because I did think about it for a while.

Or, maybe I answered one like it, or eight, as a matter of fact, but it was not so haunting as yours about the book proposal. A lot of people have said that, made me think about it, anyway, but I’m no expert, I say. And then…

Now, I don't know any more, which turns out to be as good a thing as it is bad (Would make me a valuable member of a debating team.) but that may help somebody who feels stupid because he doesn’t know. “Look, Gladys, Ed Lowe, here, had a stroke, and it says that he didn’t know what to make of it, either.”

I have thought, too, about adding my paragraphs to the stroke literature, only because I think I was freed, I mean totally liberated, by one paragraph in one of them, which I can see across the room, dammit, and can't remember...oh...stroke...Stroke of Genius. No. Stroke…My Stroke of Insight. That’s it. It’s right over there, it’s just that I’m tired and lazy, and I can say what I want without the book.

The woman, the author, who was on Oprah two years ago (when I could not have seen her, because I was chatting with the angels at the time) and then last year (the paperback tour), where I did see her, because I couldn't do much but watch television and...well, watch television. She was—is—a neuro-something, a brain scientist, who had a rare kind of stroke.
The rare part was that, unlike me, and 99 per cent of the stroke patients, she had the kind of stroke that gives you a front-row seat to your own production, your own show. You watch yourself fall apart. (I passed out, and that was that.).

Once she realized what was going on, she was able to experience the brain’s changes, the losses, as her brain was filling with blood and short circuiting language, color, memory, perception, the very borders that distinguish her from the furniture, from the air. An expert who actually experienced what she studied, she knew what was happening (to the extent that you know you’re losing half your mind), and she knew what was going to happen. She had to dial while she still knew what the phone was, remember a number while her grip on, “number,” was slipping away. Say, “I’m having a stroke…” while the meaning disappeared before her eyes. It’s really…well, incredible.

I'll get her name in a minute—all I have to do is stop thinking about it. Of course, when I learn that trick, I'll...well, yeah, you'll see…I’ll be, “…more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings with a single bound…”

Anyway, she really tossed away a line in there that made me feel so--I don't know, stupid, on the one hand, and liberated on the other--that I've been thinking, “Maybe I could do that, too. Maybe I could write 50,000 words of, I don't know, funny, entertaining, nonsense, that accidentally (of course, accidentally, I mean, this is imagining something really happening; it would have to be a freak) had some phrase in it, some little joke, or anecdote that made some reader say, ‘Holy...Holy Frisbee... this is IT. This is...’” you know, the secret he or she has been looking for.

So, yeah, I have thought about that. Of course I have. And, wouldn't I want to be to him or to her the person who had the magic potion the stroke-recovered neuroscientist—Taylor, her name was. Taylor—was to me. Yeah, I would. I’m not ashamed of that.

Do I think it's going to happen? Well, come on. No.

Then again, maybe that’s the old me talking. The new me is freer to fantasize. I’ll think about that, maybe here, while I’m trying to make one finger do what, maybe six, used to do. (This, by the way, is new and self-indulgent, thinking with my fingertips. A guy who wrote today, who suddenly got Multiple Sclerosis, said I should write a bunch of columns and sell it as a book; then he says; “How in the hell do you possibly type out your column each week?” I wrote back, “Slowly. Very slowly.”)

I’m also tempted to say that I think that what happened to me was a simple thing that most people get, sooner or later. I'm just one of those thickheads that have to fall into a deep hole and be rescued from certain death, or be brought back from drowning, or spend three months unconscious with pneumonia, a heroically failed liver and a deadly stroke, before they get it.
And that, because I thought I knew. I thought I was ahead of the pack, because I realized early on that this was a fabulous life. And, it is, but it's far more fabulous than I knew, way more than what I thought, and I thought I had the lock on knowing it was. I had no idea.
The one point that got me—and, don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of points—oh, Bingo: Jill Bolte Taylor, Phd., My Stroke of Insight—was this: that the brain recovers from a profound disappointment, a crushing loss, a life-changing betrayal, in, like, two minutes; really, in less than two minutes (I just need the two.).

Think of it. Could it be true? It’s true. War, of all things, tells you; not to mention tidal waves, earthquakes, floods, Pompeii. The crushing blow is delivered, the brain reels, the old blood is replaced by new blood, you say, “Wow,” maybe, if you want, and go on.

Do you how many Irishmen’s lives, alone, would be completely different, if that got around?

Of course, you can hang onto the wound, or disappointment, or betrayal, or the loss, if it makes you feel more justified for thinking whatever you thought of it, but, really, no more than two, say, three, minutes—all right, take five, but not in combat—and you can move on. “All right, what’s next. Lay it on me.”

Do you know what that meant to me? I’d been hanging onto some things as long as 40 years.

Uh, poof.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Touchy Subject

Okay, be warned, I’m going to risk another try at humor, here, that taps on the delicate Waterford crystal window separating good taste from not-so-good taste.

We’ll be going along the lines of what-you-might-call your eau de toilette subject matter. It really means, “toilet water,” but, well, you know, it’s French, for God’s sake. I remember learning a romantic nickname that a man, a Frenchman, uses to endear himself to his all-time-favorite (?) woman. He calls her, “Ma petite chou-chou.” It means, “My little cabbage head.”
.
So, that’s French. The Waterford reference was Irish. For some reason, perhaps stemming from the questionable social behavior prevalent in all classes during the last revolution in France, the French have the edge on certain subjects, and all references to them couched in French are excused.

The Irish are another matter.

Anyway, persons who find these subjects anywhere from sophomoric to morally reprehensible will be warned, at periodic breaks during our discussion, that to go further in their reading risks reading that which they would not like to read, and they should stop.

Stop. That should take care of you.

This—subject, as it were—first occurred to me at the Brokerage Comedy Club, I think in 1992, when I suspect, now, I was inaugurating my most recent life, which ended about two years ago. I thought it was the absolute best of a series of outlandish lives, and was grateful for every minute (…well, really of all of them, although I didn’t recognize that until later).

Currently, I am living what I call a, “bonus,” life, and I feel a little freer than I felt when I lived any of the lives before, and, to be blunt, freer than when I had to worry about the opinions of my mother’s friends as to my deductions and conclusions.

She was alive, then, and I therefore tried to placate the sensibilities of people I didn’t care a whit about. But she did. Some customs you care about; some you don’t.

I cared about that one.

So, this, in 1992, was the third time I performed at a comedy club, and I was nervous. Entertaining at a comedy club is vastly different than speaking, say, at an annual dinner-dance for the county medical society, or a golf outing for the Village Officials Association, or the Christmas—oops, Holiday—Party for the Suffolk County Librarians Association.

With them, if you are clever, they are really happy. If you are funny, they are ecstatic; no fewer than four members of the board will claim credit for having invited you. If you are knock-down, slap-your-thighs, can’t-even-breathe-hysterical, they’ve had one the best nights of their lives and will talk about you a year after your obit has appeared in the newspapers. Ooh. Bad reference. If you are writing for future readers, don’t use almost-dead words.

In a comedy club, only (c) is good.

So, like I said, I was nervous.

I didn’t know that nervousness would make me make up comedy routines that I’d never heard before.

I’m onstage about a minute when a guy in the audience gets the uncontrollable urge, I guess, to go.

He stands up, shrugs an apology to me, and takes fully fifteen seconds to meander his way from the left corner of the wide, wide room to the right corner, where the bathrooms are.

I stop whatever my opening ministration is, and get a chuckle for that (from a really friendly audience), for the first three seconds. For some reason, I remember the sign on the bathroom wall, and I say to him, “Don’t forget to wash your hands after you, you, uh, finish, in there. There’s signs, you know, that will tell you what to do. Pictures of a hand washing the other hand, so they both are clean, after you, uh, touch yourself. People out here are counting on you. They know, now, that you’re in there.”

The man waved--nice man, good sport--and disappeared into the dark, leaving me, suddenly, with the subject of his going to the bathroom.

I didn’t want that. I was going to talk about being an 11-year-old boy in the Amityville junior high school, with grown women all around; or catching a mouse and being forced to put it on a nun’s desk in the eighth grade; or my three observations as a student teacher (you get two. I had three, because the judge could not believe it.).

All right, stop reading right here. Seriously. You were warned.

“You know,” I said (figuring, ‘Ah, what the hell. I’m not a comedian anyway.’) I think it’s the Irish Catholic influence that made that rule, the one about washing your hands after…you know. I mean, what other culture is so convinced that a certain part of the body is dirty, so dirty, so inherently dirty, I mean, really intrinsically dirty, filthy. Even clean, it’s dirty. It’s dirtier than dirt."

I mean it. Go.

“I mean, you take a man…has to be a man, by the way…works on, let’s say, Wall Street…”

Oops. Might not be able to say that. “…works for AIG,” no, “Merrill, Lynch…” Yikes, “…works at the Postal…no…The New York…“Knicks, and he gets up, takes a shower, a long shower, where he uses lots of soap, good lather, maybe Irish Spring, so he is squeaky clean, then perhaps some powder here and…there…

“Then he puts on some laundered, folded, stacked, boxer shorts, clean, smelling of Tide. Then a T-shirt, and a white dress shirt, then some cleaned and pressed trousers, and, socks and shoes.

“Off he goes to the Huntington Railroad Station, in a cab, which is as clean as a cab can be, his hands touching the cab, touching his money, the cabbie, the cabbie’s money, the coffee truck driver’s change, the railing, the train, the train’s railing…so now he has anything from Swine Flu to leprosy, certainly pink eye and AID’s… to Penn Station, the railing upstairs from the tracks, and (damn that second cup of coffee), the bathroom, where the push plate of the door hosts Back Death plague and poison ivy, and there’s a line, and he opens his trouser with a zipper, sticks his diseased finger inside, past the tail of the white dress shirt, past the undershirt, past the opening of the boxer shorts, to this unsuspecting part of his body…

“…and we want him to wash his hand, because now he has touched something dirty.”

Monday, December 7, 2009

Stroke Strikes

Stroke Strikes

I may have reached the end of my patience with some aspects of what we call, “stroke.”

I mean, I’ll admit, the Earth and its atmosphere got a well-earned break for the years I still have to re-learn to speak. But I can name the three times my right fist hurt anyone, and one of them was my right fist. I only sang in the bathroom in recent years, and that in an empty house.

I don’t understand most of the rest, either, especially this paralysis thing.

I suppose I did give some thought to being, “lame,” or, physically, “disadvantaged,” or, “cripple,” when that was a descriptive word, before it became an insult.
But I don’t recall what I might have thought about the disadvantages of being, I guess, imperfect (Owf, that looks like what it looks like, you arrogant, self-important, “perfect,” bastard.).

In the early days, I just thought maybe that guys who wore casts, temporary casts, got a lot of enviable attention in school. I don’t suppose its news that I was among the others who envied the would-be jocks whose casts became the canvas for signatures by the girls. It’s just that…I don’t know…breaking bones? It wasn’t my style.

Otherwise, I don’t remember thinking much about it, and, now I have to—I suspect this is one of those unkind memories you have when the, “other” guy’s, boat comes looking for you—because, “There, but for The Grace of God go…etc.” I guess I got caught running afoul of, “The Grace of God.”

So, the right half of my entire body has elected to retire (or, maybe the left half of my body has withdrawn its retirement papers, without telling the right half. Whatever.).

My right half has lost its consciousness, or its will, or its interest, its get-up-and-go; leaving me alive--and ultimately well, mind you, considering what I thought a stroke was--but increasingly impatient about the disagreements between halves of my once-cooperative-self, particularly, this year, as regards the direction they each have selected to go.

One side of me decides on all-ahead-full, for instance, and sets about it as if nothing had changed (the ignorant cuss). The other meanders about and flirts, let’s say, for instance, with a strange leg.

It doesn’t bother listening to, helping out, or even reminiscing with its former partner. And the new attraction could be a chair leg, or a table leg, or, most embarrassing, a human leg (which requires the lower part of the body taking care of the removal of the offensive leg, while the upper part explains away to a possibly offended person what the lower part is doing, which he does not know, himself, but has to make up. And this while the mouth sounds like it has just discovered speech.).

Most of lower part listens inattentively, if at all, while it blithely becomes the showoff sport of wind, gravity, and, even, I am beginning to suspect, the vagaries of the barometer. Moreover, if it agrees to “go,” it wishes for some reason to go the right, of all things, instead of what the rest of the body thought was straight ahead. Somehow, it wants to go even more to the right on humid days.

I never saw anything like it. At home, my left side wants to get in the car and go to town to see what’s doing, while my right side, perhaps knowing the car has long been sold, is perfectly happy doing nothing, unless of course it is to the right of what I set my sights on.

Let me jump off, here, and re-emphasize, “well,” because, (a) I am; and, (b) I don’t believe it either. I probably need to see it in print, myself, to get comfortable with it. I like to think I am not complaining, but trying to figure things out little better, so I don’t become a complainer.

Previously, before my stroke, and for as much as a year after, I thought a guy who had a stroke was pretty well done. He simply had parts that disagreed vehemently with the finality of the sentence. The fact is, however, he had stepped too far one way or the other, caught a crippling undercut that he knew (dammit) he had flagrantly risked, and now was only waiting for the cross-punch to his aptly-named temple, which will end the era of history that had him as a cast member in it.

Until the blow’s delivery, hopefully a fast, relatively painless one--maybe, if he’s lucky, a knockout--he could see the crowd, recognize some disappointed fan’s faces, be present at some family functions and know, always know, his mistake.

The rest of his life is simply waiting, trying increasingly to attend to some of his own needs, so as to give some poor soul a break from the tedium of attending to another person’s tedium. Otherwise, he should be careful to avoid spitting, drooling, and the like, because it’s just plain embarrassing; and keep the jokes to maybe two words, tops, because he’s libel to forget one and mispronounce the other.
Actually, it is like that, at first, but somehow, it doesn’t seem so bad at all, after awhile.

What really is annoying is the brain’s taking its time to tell the nervous system what’s going on. About a year in, I decided to give the keyboard, what they used to call the typewriter, one last try. (The first two tries were beyond description. I might as well have tried to crayon the word, “antediluvian,” on a live crab.).

I fantasized that I would try to show my appreciation of some of the people (I didn’t know how many there were, nor do I yet) who helped me the night my brains fell out, and for months thereafter. I started with the word, “Communicate,” because I still was full of myself. After several hours of struggle, I gazed at the screen, and the word, “allegory,” looked me dead in the eye. There was no other word, and no other person with me.

“Allegory,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever used, “allegory,” unless it was on an entrance exam 58 years ago.”

I tried again the next day: “communicate,” I wrote, painstakingly, aiming my finger at the, “m,” and the, “u,” and the, “n.”

“Allegory,” my brain evidently spelled, with no, “m’s,” or, “u’s,” or, “n’s.” .
Eventually, I got past that, which, believe me, was frustrating. Eventually, I will feel capable of explaining it, too.

The discovery is, you recognize that every effort results in a triumph. How did that escape me all those years? Every effort. It’s really mind-blowing.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Dinsoaur Tales

by Ed Lowe



Dinosaur Tales

The gathering calls itself, “The Dinosaurs,” a loosely organized group of survivors of an era on Long Island they believe was influenced by what they did—what we did—in our day-to-day, year-to-year, suddenly, decade-to-decade, “work,” lives; chronicling what other people did in their day-to-day, year-to-year, decade-to-decade work and play lives, and trying to make sense of it.

Like, we, with our notebook and cameras, could even guess.

They meet monthly in a diner, these Dinosaurs. I unkindly equated diners with advanced age, for some reason, favoring pub-restaurants. I have described myself as a great fan of age and experience, but my evasion of diners tells a different tale.

I passed this particular diner six times weekly for, maybe, thirty years, and only this summer viewed it from the inside.

I had to use the ramp, too, to gain entry.

Most of those gathered were photographers, either because the founder was one, or because photographers see the obvious before the rest of us do. I got along well with news photographers, especially because of their devil-may-care attitude toward human subjects. The more important the human subject thinks he or she is, the more flippant the photographer’s attitude becomes, until the subject realizes that he has to do whatever the photographer asks him, or in some cases, tells him to do. And be quick about it. And smile.

I decided to join, if they would have me.

I’ve seen scripts and plays and movies about how in the final analyses (whatever that is), chroniclers of a couple of decades or four sometimes render conclusions about to the, “futility of it all.” But I haven’t done that yet. I’m still having fun telling stories, maybe now more than ever. And now, I get to tell old ones.

I thought of two just recently, under the subject heading of, “God, it is easier than spit to make a boss lose it. (Too bad you didn’t know it then).”

A resident of Amityville, the first town in Suffolk County on the South Shore of Long Island, I had just transferred from the Suffolk County desk to the Nassau County desk of Newsday. Though it had divided the Island into the two different counties (I know, there are four.) the newspaper purported to cover both jurisdictions even-handedly. They, “cooperated,” with each other. No territorial rivalries.

Shortly after my transfer, my mother called me to ask if I had heard anything about a murder in Amityville, which now was not supposed to be my concern. I said, “No.” She said the, “Plectron,” a special radio tuned to the police channel my father needed in his role as Lieutenant of the Amityville Police Department, had mentioned not only a murder, which was unusual in Amityville, but a murder of six people, a whole family, in their beds, on Ocean Avenue.

She couldn’t get hold of my father, so, could I just check on it. Besides, it seemed to her (being ignorant of jurisdictional nuances), that I might want to know that this was going on.

I called the Nassau desk and asked them to call the Suffolk desk to ask if they had heard about it, and the Suffolk desk said that, no, and, “What did you say?”

I was close to home and finished my Nassau County work. I said I would check it out.

By the time I reached Amityville, I learned that The Suffolk Editor had issued a public proclamation against my involvement in the reporting of the story (He was not in favor of my transfer. Maybe that was it.).

The story could really be a competitive one, with news reporters from all over the New York area. “We,” had a reporter at Newsday who lived around the corner; who had spent his whole life there; who knew everybody; who was there, already, now.

Of course you wouldn’t want him there. It would be unfair to the other newspapers.

I hung out in a bar, the long-forgotten Henry’s, where the first revelations of the deed were revealed, and I became the prime source for other Newsday reporters, and invited the Newsday police reporter to use my house, my phone (there were no cell phones) and have a sandwich and drink some beers.

I felt no pressure at all, which was nice.

The Ed Lowe column began when the Queens edition began, which was when the Long Island Press folded, and Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post. “We,” were going to make Murdoch worry about holding onto his subscribers from Queens, before he made, “us,” worry about the Post stealing away Nassau readers from Newsday.

Murdoch evidently didn’t care about Nassau, but that’s just a detail.

The column, meanwhile, morphed to an ROP (run-of-the-press) column as the Queens Edition turned into the New York edition of Newsday, and then into New York Newsday, until a editor who was fiercely opposed to Ed Lowe stories (only thing I can figure) barred it from New York Newsday, and then spent years and fortunes of money barring it from the Newsday magazine, so, it ran in Newsday only (?).

Came a time, maybe 10 or 11 years ago, when a 13-year-old student in a Queens Junior High rescued his entire family.

His principal called to tell me. She lived in Nassau. The boy had come with his mother, looking a little disheveled, for a transfer to another school. Asked why, he said his home in Ozone Park had been destroyed.

One night, the boy awoke because his asthma was bothering him, because his house was burning. He quickly awakened his mother and one sibling, and then ran upstairs to awaken two more siblings, ushered them all outside, where he found a parked car to keep them as warm as he could. He next ran next door and dialed 911, and then, when his mother realized her baby girl was asleep in her crib, he ran back into the now-in-flames house to crawl around and rescue her.

Finally, the sight of approaching Emergency service vehicles freed him to collapse, because, after all, his asthma was bothering him.

I wrote the story, a front page story in the Nassau-Suffolk edition. Readers came with clothing, food and a house in Freeport, and The New York Knicks invited him to a game, because they wanted to meet a real hero.

The story didn’t run in the New York Newsday.

I guess somebody showed me a thing or two.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Father Lowe

Father Lowe


Friday, November 20, 2006


In the seminary, what’s called, “The Baltimore Catechism,” adherence to which makes a studious Catholic think he a studious Catholic, gets thrown out the window. Serious thought enters, and the result, sometimes, is answers that don’t make sense.

I thought I would become a priest. I wouldn’t.

Too bad.

I could feel the leather in my den chair next to my bookcase welcoming me in the evenings; listen to wintry, late-fall breezes whipping up leaves that I would not have to rake on Saturday morning; taste the one beer per day (16. oz), for my nerves, that I would reward myself for yet another day of being a good and praiseworthy priest, whose sermons were entertaining, if not hysterically funny, if not a goddamned comedy act…ahem…but serenely memorable, as well, and comforting, and understanding.

That was when I thought the salient characteristic required for the priesthood was celibacy. After all, that’s why they wore those collars; to remind anybody and everybody (and themselves too) that they were celibate.

After all, sex, whatever it was, was natural. The priest had, naturally, to remind the unmarried ladies, and, I suppose himself, too, of his promise to behave…unnaturally…wait…uh…that … the natural behavior was off limits, officially out-of-bounds, no boy-girl kissey face. Whenever the party got to that point, it was time to get sick. Or play basketball.

Since I didn’t know what celibacy wasn’t, and I had lived a long and happy life—maybe 12 or 14 years so far—without even thinking about the word, it would be no problem.

But the first thing I learned in the seminary was, it isn’t celibacy. That’s a cover. Celibacy is easy, as long as you don’t know what it isn’t. Celibacy is just a detail.

It’s obedience. There’s the rub. That was a hard lesson. Obedience is much more complicated.

You have to stop your mind from being disobedient. I tried, and I learned that my mind raced through whole states of disobedience every morning. Before I got up, the mid-Atlantic states were violated, irredeemably, not a sin left in them to speak of.

True, you can commit a mortal sin against celibacy without leaving your imagination, but you can fight it. But if your mind has just a cursory doubt about a miracle you’re supposed to believe, or hot dogs on Fridays during the World Series, or why does my mother have to go-thou-and-multiply while yours goes straight up to heaven for exactly the opposite; you have to pray to keep you mind out of the…logic, and the mind can’t keep up with its own questions. The mind can deal with the body being unnatural, because the mind doesn’t take responsibility for the body. But if a mind takes responsibility for itself, it can lose itself.

A Catholic boy, 50 years ago, was not to go into an Episcopal Church. A Society of Friends Meeting House. A Jewish Temple. Why? What if I just imagine being in there. Is that a sin?

“I’m losing my patience, young man!”

So, I figured I would be a husband.

Of course, I should have taken courses in that, but who knew?

I’ve been married, more or less, three times, the only really sterling time, the current time, when we haven’t bothered, yet, with any sort of official approval, either through a representative of a state, or a representative of one or another religion.

The first time, because I thought (well, who thinks? The first time, because I thought I thought…) a certificate of marriage had anointed me a serious member of the adult community; and because—primarily, now that I think of it—outside the priesthood or the army, it was the only way that I could get out of my mother’s house without insulting her.

I knew from my father (“You volunteer for cook; they make you a photographer; you sign up as a clerk; the army makes you a medic.”) the army was untrustworthy.

So, I’m married, at 21, to a female human, with whom (I think, mind you) I am familiar, until she reveals a whole spectrum of characteristics that make me uncomfortable and that I didn’t detect—for five years of courtship.

Eleven months later, our first daughter comes home from the hospital. I drive, just as I drove her mother and her, in uteri, to the hospital (where I could not, by the way, hold the baby).
I help them into the house, where aunts, mother and mother-in-law, and maybe a female friend that I didn’t even know, hover over the exquisite child, cooing, preening, changing and trying on clothes, mainly pajamas with little feet in them.

Eventually, I mean, after an hour, one of the women says to me: “Would you like to hold her?”

Would I like to hold her? She’s my brand new daughter, my first child. And who are you?

“Yes, I think. I would like that.”

I...I mean, I guess, thanks for thinking of me…but who are you?

“Hold her like this…” She holds the baby.

“Oh, you mean the way you would hold a normal baby?” I involuntarily blurted. Well, maybe not “involuntarily.” Maybe, I sarcastically blurted.

And then, in case I had been obtuse, I said, “I mean, not like you hold a bowling ball, or a javelin.”

“Eddie!” (My mother had detected my consternation and impatience.).

“And make sure you support the head…”

I’m staying calm. Staying calm. Aw, I can’t…

“Oh. I see. That’s important, is it…”

Oh, I see. And don’t spike her, like, “Touchdown!” Splat..gush.

“That’s right. There. Look, everybody!”

Look everybody? LOOK, everybody. What? He’s holding his own baby?

I recall some of the times wherein I gave up something, let’s say a chore that involved the baby, because, beside the suggestion that I was inherently lazy, but cute lazy, it fit the wife’s view of her dominance regarding parenthood. Plus, it was easy.Men did not change diapers in 1968, because they still got away with the idea that they would be unable to handle the smell, the mess and possibly the delicacy or the fragility of a human baby.

We co-conspired with this. We who filleted fish, gutted deer and played with dead cats, co-conspired with the idea that we couldn’t change a diaper.

Times would change.

...Probably, to be continued...

Saturday, November 14, 2009

The Witches of Greeponit

by Ed Lowe

The combined power of my mother and her sisters on the lapses in my sexual education and therefore my development astounds me to this day.

I am blessed with the conviction I am officially old, now; and if not that, that I even have died. Either way, I no longer am bound by rules of other dead members of my family, particularly females, which I have long been suspicious of, anyway.

(Some things just have to be told, and heeded by at least a couple of similarly misinformed wretches about to make fools of themselves for the next year or lifetime.

And no, I don’t think these are irrationality attributed to the Irish exclusively, and I suppose there are far worse attributed to all kinds of people, but I saw a conspiracy of shame and ignorance foisted on some of my fellows, let alone on me, and even if one in a hundred thousand males leaped through the twisted nonsense I suffered to please women, then show him these paragraphs and free him, forthwith.).

By the time I arrived on the scene, there were six surviving siblings in my mother’s family (one had survived almost ten years, a few died in childbirth or shortly thereafter), all girls except the oldest, Eddie (for a total of 13). All 5 of the girls to reach adulthood participated in the mythmaking, some with more enthusiasm than others, but I, more or less, was their experiment.

Their brother, my Uncle Eddie Dimond, who was 18 when his youngest sister was born, escaped as soon as a he could to be a band leader, for a while, with drummer Ozzie Nelson and his vocalist girlfriend, Harriet Hilliard, of later, “Ozzie and Harriet,” fame.

Uncle Eddie then became a Broadway stage manager for the next fifty years. There, I assume he shed some of more socially crippling myths, but I doubt he escaped altogether. I knew his three sons, and they have been similarly lost, though not nearly as lost as I, an only child.

I do know that all five of the sisters passed along the story that immediately following the birth of their last sister, Geraldine, Grandma—Maimie— their mother, made my grandfather, Thomas Patrick Dimond (really, “Grampa,” or, “Tom Pop,”) sleep in the hall, for the rest of his life. Even when Mamie’s hip broke and they lived with, “Aunt Gerry,” in Lindenhurst, they had separate rooms.

I can vouch for that, also, that his last words were to a hospital nurse: “Nice legs.”

Obviously, his sexual appetite was the cause of these maniacal chorus line members and child singers on New York’s radio stations. And, after 13 pregnancies, it had to be stopped.

That was the first clue I should have noted and filed in the cabinet of my brain marked “(?):”
“Sleeping in the bed with a man makes the woman who does it pregnant.” She would have no idea what, if anything, happened, but if she removed the man, the problem would be solved.

I would have added: “Remember this; ‘You are always to blame.’”

When I was small, and playing with my (female) cousins, I would stop and listen to my aunts crack each other up with stories of living over a speakeasy, and hosting out-of-town chorus girls—and, sometimes, out-of-town chorus boys (little did I know that certain boys could be trusted as much as girls) —in their crowded bedroom, while a fight broke out downstairs.
Everything was joyous and giddy and wonderful until somebody threw in a villain, a man, climbing on the fire escape, who wanted one thing, which everyone evidently knew, and everyone nodded about, but nobody revealed what it was. Be-not-mistaken, though, the drunker he was, the more he wanted it.

Listening intently to this, I wondered, “What is this, ‘one thing?’”

And then, the ominous warning to the future: “You know, Jeannie, you’ll be first. (What? Why Aunt Jeannie? First to what?) Your oldest daughter. (Yeah, my cousin, Georjean.). You watch. The boys’ll be sniffin’ around.” (I’m a boy. You talk like I’m not here. I’m here. What am I, “Sniffin’ around,” about. What are you saying?).”

Nobody would go any further. I was left with a man, probably evil, who wanted one thing, evidently one precious thing that girls want to keep, but nobody would reveal. And now, this evil would infect boys, causing them to go, “Sniffin’ around,” like a ferret.

What’s going to happen to my cousin Georjean? What’s going to happen to me?

For years, it seemed (probably weeks), I wondered what the, “one thing,” was. Using a clever (!) reversal, I detected (the only way I could go—detecting) that if man wanted to please a woman, to honor her, to make her laugh freely like the gathered aunts, to make her so happy she could hardly stand it, he would prove that, for her, he would deny himself this one thing, whatever it turned out to be.

He would be the hero. He would be the best. He would be…me.

My first conclusion was wrong, beer. Thank God. The final beer nearly killed me, but the other beers kept me sane for scores of years. The flaw in it was that I had no other information.

But look at it. There was beer at the ball game, at a parade, at bowling, at picnics, after mowing the lawn; there was beer across the street from every funeral parlor in history; there, on the train, in the bar car…why, there was no place where men went except church that did not include beer.

When I got older—not to mention when I noticed that my Aunts Kiki and Jeannie drank beer—I discovered that, “the thing,” was not beer, but sex.

Sex? I didn’t know exactly (…even remotely) what sex was, except that it was more complicated than beer and people were inclined to hide what they knew of it. However, that actually made achieving my goal even easier. I could give that up, because, while I was somehow attracted to it, and, frankly, always felt that I could become really good at it, I could not imagine myself being so bold as to initiate contact.

“You want to do what?”

So, I would show that I was not like other men. I had more than, “one thing,” on my mind. And, I would prove it. I would make a public vow not to have it. I would be celibate, which I understood was not doing something I didn’t know about anyway.

I would be a priest.

…to be continued (I don’t know when, though)…

Friday, November 13, 2009

Paul Holland

by Ed Lowe

I’m a terrible godfather.

That, or, I was so lucky as to be chosen for the honor by parents so terrific that they had scarce need for me, and so I evaded such responsibilities as the role calls for (in which case, then, I would have been a terrible godfather).

Though I was not when they selected me, I am and have long been a non-attending, non-officially contributing church member, and therefore a seriously flawed role-model for prospective new members, as promised, by me, at a liturgy, with witnesses, many of whom obviously would have been a better choice.

So, recently, one of my Godsons calls, Brian Holland, the one who, now that I think of it, most uncannily resembles his father. He identifies himself as my godson, which I deserve, and says he sorry he has to inform me that his father has died.

Frankly, I don’t remember what he said or what I said after that.

There was some mention of kidney failure and bringing him up from Florida and the fact that Charlotte N.C. has undergone sweeping changes in the last forty years. There would be a service in Amitvyille Saturday morning with…and... I don’t know…I guess, will I come, or, “I thought you would like to know.” Something like that, alternately awe-inspirational and awful at the same time.

I think I was the one who said the stupid things about Charlotte, North Carolina. Brian said has lived there, five years, now. It’s been exactly forty years since I’ve been there. Something in common.

“Your father calls me from Florida every month,” I’m tempted to say, but don’t, because I’m thinking something hair brained, like “What are you saying, he’s not going to call, anymore?”

Paul Holland.

Paul Holland. My friend. When I first met him, I think I was little. I mean, really little. His five cousins, the Macombers, had moved into a house next to mine. He lived somewhere else. Cottage Place.

I told Brian I would call him back. I had to think. Or, what people do when they don’t know what to say.

I started to write. First, a sort of curse, that summed up the surprise I felt. And then, more or less to Brian, “I’m looking at it [the curse], staring at it, and I’m saying, ‘You're quite capable of lending more dignity to this...blah, blah, blah...’ but really, I'm not. I'm not.

“What was I, five, or seven, when he first visited the Macombers. I know I was twelve when we really tightened as a unit. I had played ball with him and stuff, but it was 1957 or 1958 when I heard that he was in the brand new hospital, Good Samaritan, which seemed so far away. It was a hernia, or and appendectomy or something.

“It was raining. There was nothing to do in Amitvyille, anyway. I had fifty cents. A quarter each way. I took a Utility Line bus along Merrick Road. I can't remember doing anything like it before. Never alone, anyway.

“The nurse in the room looked at me, and for some reason said, ‘He's not allowed to laugh.’ I thought it was strange to say, but nodded, ‘Okay.’ She said, ‘I mean it. If those stitches pop, I'm going to hold you responsible.’ I said, again, ‘Okay.’

“Paul saw me, and shot up in the bed, holding his side.

‘“I know. I know. No laughing,’ I said. ‘How are you doing...?’

“I really thought I was controlling myself, though the both of us were straining. I mean, we were at an age (twelve and fourteen) where the more serious the situation got, the more tempted we were to fall down laughing about it. Breaking wind in church, I suppose, would have killed him.

“In the next bed was what we thought was an old man,” I wrote in an e-mail. “Probably half our age, now. A male nurse came in (I had never seen one, so I was already on the edge), and he said to the old man, ‘I have to prep you.’

“Paul's eyes widened, and he sat straight up in the bed.

“I shrugged. ‘Prep? What’s Prep?’

“Holding himself tight, Paul said, ‘When they prep you, they shave you from your chest down to your knees.’

“The question came out my mouth before I had chance to trip it, or lasso it, or smother it. And what was worse, it was only one word. I said, ‘Everything?’

“Owww. Even my stitches hurt, and I didn't have any. Paul was red. He was straining so hard not to laugh, I thought maybe I would leave. I wasn’t helping. Then, the male nurse, who had pulled the curtain around his patient, but unfortunately not around his own mouth, shouted at the patient, ‘Look here, you’re going to have to hold that thing steady, or I'll cut it off.’

“We both exploded. Collapsed. The nurse appeared out of nowhere, like a nun. She grabbed me by the ear, and marched me right out of the room, and she wouldn't hear any excuses. ‘I said, ‘No laughing, didn’t I? And look at you; just look at you! When your friend's stomach blows up, are you going to be laughing then? Get out!’

“End of visit. Maybe ten minutes.

“I don't know how, but Paul made it, and he and I became friends for life.

“I'm sorry.” I wrote in the e-mail to Brian. “There’s years of memories, Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby, the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary; The Knick Trips, The Chatterbox. Basketball. Harmonizing. Then you four, Paul Michael, James, Lauren, you; and, later, the other kids—I didn’t know them.

“But that hospital is just where my head went.

“Hey, my mother is a freshman there. She died on Oct. 20th. Maybe she'll help him with, you know, the applications and…stuff.”

edlowe

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Mondays With Dolores

Mondays With Dolores

It’s almost two years since I inadvertently ended what turned to be a longtime tradition between my mother, Dolores, and me, a restaurant dinner every Monday night.

I had a stroke.

I actually thought she might have ended it years ago by a standard route, dying. After all, she was 26 years older than I, which sounded considerably older than it …sounds…now, or seems so, anyway. Besides still suffering the, I’m-going-to-live-forever fever, I suspected to near conviction that she would pre-decease me.

After all, she had undergone a triple bypass operation some 30 years ago. It was to give her as many as four years, the doctors said, maybe five, no more, so seriously had she neglected her athero-arterial something-or-other, which frightened my father to death. He, of course, died five years later, and that was twenty-five years ago.

The tradition started nearly 20 years ago, when I called her one Monday and said that I had looked at my calendar (It must have been January. I start living by a calendar every January, and by February, I’m back to the seat of my pants.) and, lo and behold, I didn’t have the kids, I didn’t have a speaking engagement, and, would she like to go to a restaurant for dinner.

Yes.

I continued, trying to talk her into it (Yeah. What was I thinking?). “It’s cold, but not terribly cold, and well go close, like, there’s a lovely place in Farmingdale called Umberto’s…”
“I said, ‘Yes,’” she said, “I’d love it…”

“I mean, if you don’t want to go to Amato’s (I didn’t know what to think about Amato’s. That was, ‘their,’ place.), or right here, at the corner…”

“I’d love to go to Amato’s. Unless you have an objection. It’s up to you.”

“No. It’s up to you. I asked you.”

“Well, Amato’s is fine with me. Unless…”

“No. No, Amato’s it is.”

“Unless you feel funny…”

“No, I don’t feel funny. Amato’s is great.”’

“Well, it’s up to you.”

“I got an idea: let’s go to Amato’s.”

We ate at Amato’s. Dolores was in her glory, either talking to a waiter or a waitress she knew or overhearing a patron who recognized her son (Look how he takes care of me, taking me out to dinner.).

The following Monday, sacre bleu, I’m facing the identical situation.

I could have eaten at home, but I had only what the boys ate, macaroni and cheese—which I bought by the acre. I think that’s what they ate through the Nineties. I can’t have macaroni and cheese in the same building, now; can’t stand the smell of it.

“Hey, Doe. Wanna date? I got the same situation I had last Monday.”

“Yes.”

“I mean, do you want to go to a restaurant…oh, I get it, you do. Ha, ha. Fast decision. Funny.”

The next Monday night, my phone rang.

“What time,” she said, “are you picking me up?”

(?)

People think I was good to my mother because I was good to my mother. I’m good, more or less, but not that good. I didn’t know how to get out of it. What do you say, an only child, to your widowed mother: “Yeah, well Ma, I…I’m going to watch, uh, the, Emmy Awards…”

So, I took her out for dinner. I figured that eventually, something would come up, like a series of Monday night soccer games, or a seasonal blitzkrieg of Monday night speaking engagements, something to break the spell.

The first Monday night to come up where I had a conflict, I feigned disappointment. “I’m going to be busy next Monday night, Ma, I can’t take you out for dinner.”

She took it like a soldier. No, like a general.

“Oh, that’s all right, we can go out any night next week. Wednesday, maybe. Should I put down Wednesday?”

Should you put down Wednesday? What is this, a scorecard? Not knowing what else to do, I said, “Uh…Yeah…put me down for Wednesday.”

“Then we’ll go back to Monday next week.”

I think I did 15 years of Mondays.

And if a holiday fell on a Monday, she would want to go out on Tuesday, as well, because Monday, well, that didn’t count. It was a holiday.

She eventually settled on Captain Bill’s in Bay Shore, as a favorite, though when the Duck Inn became The Lakeside, she liked that. A long-gone restaurant in Brightwaters, a few more on Montauk Highway, in that general area, Il Classico in Massapequa (when my nose was stuffed, and I sounded like I needed a curative Fish Soup), Runyon’s, Vittorio’s when that opened, Hudson’s Mill, when that opened, Dick and Dora’s, Catfish Max, The Brown Osprey, to name a few. I said, “to name a few.”

My mother then developed new traditions for holidays. She made Thanksgiving dinner, so I and whatever kids I had that year were, “invited,” to her house. If I didn’t have kids that year, she asked me to make restaurant reservations, for two. I would take her up to Peppercorn’s, or even Abel Conklins, have Thanksgiving dinner, take her home, and drive to Susan’s house for late coffee, which I couldn’t drink, because it would keep me awake all night, wondering how all this happened.

Then, I made Christmas Dinner for eight or nine years, and alternate Thanksgiving dinners.

And the holidays kept increasing. All right, Mother’s Day is a given, and Christmas, Thanksgiving, maybe Easter. But, Father’s Day? Veteran’s Day? What’s next, Arbor Day?

Then, I had the stroke.

Then, a year-and-a-half went by, and she died earlier this month.

Wow. Where did it all go?

Saturday, October 24, 2009

The Green Thumb

The Green Thumb

Oct. 29, 2009

The Green Thumb

Dear Ed:

I have been reading your articles for many years.

As a matter of fact, when I was young, you were writing about your garden and I suggested you get a guinea pig. You found that quite a hysterical idea when you mentioned it in your column.
Glad you're better and glad I can now read your column in the South Bay's Neighbor.

Lori

Babylon, NY

Wow. That goes back to 1973.

The editor who assigned me to do it was an, "investigative reporter," by self-declaration. And he proved it time after time. If he were investigating you, the only hope against your going to jail was if you gave up somebody higher on the ladder of crooks.

And then, he just might break his word and bury you the next year.

He had been promoted, as many of us seek to do, according to, “The Peter Principal,” to the final step in his hierarchal work life, his level of incompetence.

Thus, the greatest seller in the world seeks to be the boss of the sales force. He or she always has that achievement in mind, “boss of the sales force.”

He is a genius at selling, a marvel to behold, as natural as Calvin Hobbs was in legend. He could sell shoelaces to fish, landing gear to eagles, French fries to Frenchmen.

He would be—well, is destined to be, if he buys into it—a horrible boss of other sales personnel. He simply doesn’t understand what is difficult about selling. He is impatient with a rationale or an explanation of it, as if it were a proven argument against man’s ability to fly. “It doesn’t make sense,” he will say, “look up, see that B-747 with the Al-Italia painted on it. Of course you can fly.”

Boss of the sales force. He is seduced into that ambition by hierarchal superiors who themselves have been seduced to their level of incompetence. They think he can get them out of a jam by whatever characteristics made him a top seller. He can’t.

This one wanted me to, "investigate," whether the statement by then-Secretary-of-Labor Peter Brennan, was correct. Brennan had said that Americans could save money on the rising cost of food by, "...growing victory gardens, like we did during the War."

Of course, Brennan had been promoted to his level of incompetence too.

I had never grown anything, and when I found that you didn't throw seed on the lawn and come back a few weeks later with a salad bowel and dressing, I howled in protest.

“I have roots in my back yard with truckloads of passenger roots, just going along for the ride,” I whined. “I have roots for trees the Northeast never hosted. I have roots under my yard from China, roots asking my roots to sign their passports. My roots have roots.”

Maurice Swift, the new Sunday Suffolk editor, of the new Sunday edition (before April 1972, Newsday appeared only 6 days a week), heard my complaints, and laughed.

Swift never sought to be an editor. It was thrust on him, for a while. He was a, “rewrite,” man who could put together a front page 800-word story from notes gathered from four reporters at a midnight insurrection at the State University of Stony Brook, with the deadline looming and him lighting a pipe.

Now, in the new job, Swift was trying to fill a paper every Sunday, beginning the Tuesday before. He had to go into Garden City with ideas for a paper 5 days in advance. He figured my garden could be a feature he could count on, if he had to write it himself. He told me to write what I had told him, and he then told the Nassau desk that he'd come up with an idea for a feature called, “Green Thumb,” based on the Secretary of Labor's statement.

The investigative-reporter-turned-editor was not happy, but the idea turned out to make him look good, so he went along with it, begrudgingly.

I managed to squeeze 24 Sunday columns out of that idea, including one about not smoking in front of your tomato plants, and another about a late-night TV product called, The Hula Hoe, basically, a hoe with a gaping hole in it.

In one of the columns, Secretary of Labor Peter Brennan visited my house (He only lived in Massapequa.). That was my mother's doing. She wrote Mrs. Brennan and invited them (really, him) to my house to see, “their” victory garden. Mrs. Brennan, who had become a fan of the column, made her husband do it.

"You never ask a man to do that sort of thing;" my mother said, "you ask his wife."

I visited a guy in Stony Brook—Nicolas Christ was his name, a Long Island fisherman who buried fish heads behind his garage—who had tomatoes growing over the top of his garage. I also held a contest for the ugliest vegetable grown on Long Island in 1972. One entry was a tomato with Richard Nixon's nose growing out it. Another entry won my Hula Hoe, as a prize. The over-all winner was from Rosedale, a head of cabbage, being devoured by bugs.

I thought I ended the series when the series ended, and I couldn’t think of any more columns out of my six-by-four-foot piece of backyard. My investigative reported turned editor, though, still wanted what he wanted, and I had to write about whether the cost of labor, time, and materials—including the Hula Hoe—was worth the effort. I honestly don’t remember what I said.

Lori, thanks for the memory.


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Friday, October 16, 2009

Tom (The Bear) Taylor

Tom (The Bear) Taylor



October 22, 2009


Tom (TheBear) Taylor


In September 1964, he was a transfer student at Marist College from two semesters at The University of Connecticut.

I was a transfer student to Marist with one semester from Belmont Abbey College, North Carolina. Nice place, Belmont, but North Carolina in 1963 tried to kill me. Really.

I was crossing the bridge over I-85 one fine day, my freshman beanie folded in my belt (I read the rules; no where did it say we had to wear the beanies on our heads), when a late ‘40’s or early ‘50’s Pontiac came ‘round the cloverleaf and pulled parallel to me, on the railroad bridge over the Interstate.

A young man got out, yelled, “Hey, yank!” and fired one, maybe two shots—the one, given that nobody was available but me, was sufficient—and catapulted me into a flat-out run back to Belmont Abbey.

An English Benedictine brother listened to my breathless tale and asked me if I had taken down the car’s license plate number. I stopped breathing and looked at him. He shrugged and said, “Son, do you how many cars they got around here look exactly like that?”

At Poughkeepsie, we transfer students wound up together in the luggage rooms of Leo Hall, which we called, “The Pit.” I think he and I, apparent opposites, shared the same sense of humor.

His name was—is— Tom Taylor. “The Bear.”

He was from Bethel, Conn. (the approved abbreviation in those days). He had gone to UCONN on a football scholarship, pledged for TKE, and quit in disgust over the Animal House atmosphere, when Animal House wasn’t even a script, yet.

We were both 18 years old, days apart in fact. We both took 18 credits a semester and picked up required courses at schools closer to home in the summer, I, so I could graduate with my class; he, so he could graduate a year ahead of time and get busy.

In 1966, he and his close friend, Bobby Finn, and several other business major/football enthusiasts, founded the Marist College Football Club as a private company.
They got permission to use Marist’s name. They hired a coach, Larry Levine, and played in a small league of all-new football clubs that included St. John’s University (which had dropped football as a school sport years before, after a player died on-field), St. Peter’s, Manhattan College, Iona, Sienna, and Seton Hall University.

I was Marist’s equipment manager. I shudder to recall that I actually issued a high school football helmet (painted by a local auto painter and purloined along with much other equipment from a defunct, Mid-Hudson, Catholic High School) to protect the likes of the head of Mike Botty, a returned USMC Vietnam veteran with two steel plates inside his otherwise unprotected head, which, being a Marine, he used as a weapon.

Botty’s head survived. I think Botty is now—if he hasn’t retired—the PR guy for the NY area U.S. Postal Service.

After 1966, Finn and Taylor bought a Poughkeepsie nightclub called Willie’s and did extraordinarily well with it. I joined John Casserly and his friends in befriending a group there called, “The Pigeons,” who were coming out with a recording, but not under the name, “The Pigeons,” but under a stupid name, a crackpot name, a no-count, forgettable name, from which I tried desperately to dissuade them: “Vanilla Fudge.”

Finn also started his insurance business, which has served him well, too.

Taylor went to work for Modern Printing, in Norwalk, which was owned by his father and two partners. Tom had worked summers there since elementary school in every capacity.

When he started with Modern, 85 per cent of the company’s business was printing the mail-order texts for a company called Famous Artists/Famous Writers Schools. Tom immediately went to work diversifying the business, buying new, “web,” presses and selling contracts to the likes of the Hilton Chain and other big companies that had begun to rely heavily on direct marketing (junk mail).

When, “Famous,” went bankrupt, five or six (or eleven, who knows) years later, their printing needs comprised only 15 per cent of Modern’s business. Tom had saved the company.

Eventually, he bought out all three partners. Also eventually, every time you or I opened a Newsweek or a Time Magazine and cursed at the postcards that fell into your lap, Modern had printed them.

Tom hired a president for the company, (which he sold a decade later) and started an industrial-commercial-MR residential development business that now puts him in the position of owning industrial parks, condominiums and...well, he told me at the last President’s gala that he’d sold off his construction company.

(Yeah. Me, too. I got rid of my construction company.).

In his spare time, Tom also beat Las Vegas at blackjack, I mean, beat ‘em, and wrote an $88 per copy book about how to do it, and quit. He also beat alcoholism, I think before the 1970’s had ended.

And he also did what I said he would do. From the age of 18, he wanted to be rich, and a high school football coach.

(Impossible. I know, I know. You think I don’t I know this.).

Since they were mutually exclusive goals, he first got rich, then handed himself over for $1 a year to a local high school, and coached them from the very bottom of the state rankings to state champions, at least twice.

Then, he moved over to the small, private Canterbury School, where he and Alice (high school sweethearts, married over 40 years, now) built a house they live in on campus.

By that time, Tom taught a few courses on business and the Vietnam War, and maybe one or two other subjects, and brought that school’s football team from statistical nonexistence—I mean, non-existence—to, first, Connecticut State Champions, then, the All New England championship.

The opponent coach for that final All-N.E. game made the mistake of answering a TV reporter’s on-air question about how he thought the game would go. He said, “Well, all I can say is, this is a long way to drive for a trophy.”

Oops.

I’m meeting him at end of this month at Marist, where he’s now in his first (or second—(I misplaced a year; can’t find it.) year coaching and recruiting and teaching and inspiring kids, and I hear they’re considering making a big deal of me, because I can talk through a stroke.

Hell, I wrote one of Tom’s lit. papers.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Engineers Laughing

October 14, 2009


Engineers Laughing

By Ed Lowe

I was to speak at the Crest Hollow Country Club, in Woodbury. That’s all I remembered.


It was maybe the 50th or the 70th time. The Crest Hollow Country Club was the largest room on Long Island. I hadn’t any idea to whom I was addressing my…address…or what I would say, but I knew I was speaking at the Crest Hollow, and that was good enough for me.


A couple of times during those decades, I had shown up at the Smithtown Sheraton when I was supposed to be at The Garden City Hotel, or at the Marc Pierre on Route 110, when I should have been at the Salisbury Restaurant in Eisenhower Park (which had changed its name to the Carlton on the Park, just to drive me crazy).


So, my being sure of the location this time probably staved off the eventual stroke by a day or

two, at least.


Just as an aside, you should see the looks on the faces of the Marc of Dimes committee, who last heard that the speaker was seen asking the befuddled owners of the Captain Bill’s Restaurant in Bay Shore where are all the Golden Apple Award Education winners.


The education award winners are selected by the committee of the March of Dimes, who then hold a dinner, to whom the speaker is supposed to present the golden apples before making his speech.


He at long last enters the room at the Hilton Huntington just in the nick of time.
Actually, it is quite rewarding, like rescuing somebody from certain, imminent death.


I found out on arriving at the Crest Hollow that I was addressing 500 retired engineers from Grumman Aviation Corp., or whatever corporate name it was then called—they knew who they had worked for—and it was one of the very few times I was left speechless.


I’d addressed dentists, medical associations, bar associations, the joint meeting of associations of sheet metal and air conditioning contractors of New York and Boston, and all kinds of what I thought was the hardest group ever—accountants.


But I realized I had nothing for engineers.


Somebody took the microphone and told 500 engineers that they were in for a real treat.
What could I tell engineers?


Introduced, I approached the stage.All engineers knew more than I did, and if they didn’t know it, another engineer could tell them faster than I could.


They wouldn’t laugh at anything, because they didn’t laugh at anything at all. Laughter presupposes a problem. Engineers break down a problem to its component parts, solve it, and pooft, no problem.


First step.


Where did I get that, anyway? I don’t know any engineers.


Second step.


Michael Graziano. Holy smoke.


Third step. Saved.


“Thank you. I want tell you a story that came to me on that step, there, the second step, kid you not.


“It happened somewhere between 1970 and 1973, and the details of it are filling up my brain as if it happened yesterday.


“Bill Burns was running for re-election to the Assembly. He would win. He was a Republican from Amityville. He was Amityville mayor before becoming Assemblyman, and the district at the time voted 2 to 1 Republican.


I don’t remember who the Democrat candidate was or the Conservative, but I had to interview all four of them and write an election story.


On the northwest corner of West John Street and Newark Avenue, in Lindenhurst, lived a gentleman named Michael Graziano. He was running as the Liberal Party candidate. I phoned him, and later showed up at his house.


He was big man with a little mustache, which made me chuckle, because I was a comparatively little man with a big mustache.


To ease his mind, I told him that I had relatives all over Lindenhurst, and I had taught junior high school there, too.


I then blew all that away by telling him I was from Amityville, and that my father was the Lieutenant of the police department in Amityville, and my father drove trucks now and then for Burns Truck Sales.


I suppose the reason I didn’t tell him my grandmother’s maiden name was Burns was that there was no relation, but I might as well have.


I realized the mistake and said quickly there was an Amityville cop named Graziano, which sounded so lame that I didn’t wait, but just asked Graziano what he did for a living.


“I’m an engineer,” he said.


“Really,” I said. “In that case, can I ask you a really dumb question before we start. I mean, really dumb.”


“Shoot.”


“Well, I have never met an engineer. I mean, I know they’re smart, and I know they don’t wear that railroad engineer’s hat, and I know they make a lot of money, like a doctor, but I don’t know what an engineer does.”


“Well, an engineer is basically a problem solver. A manufacturer has a problem with a product—let’s say, it doesn’t work well when it’s heated, and that’s when it’s most valuable—he gives the problem to the engineering department, and they apply the old scientific method. They create the problem in a lab, attack it with few choice solutions, select one, and give it back to the manufacturer, case closed, hopefully.”


“Wow. Where do you work?”


“Well, I’m an engineer. I’m out of work.”


That was true. I knew that. Damn.


“Oh. Sorry. Where did you work when you did work?”


“My last job was at Grumman. I worked on the LEM. Heard of that?”


“I…the LEM…the Lunar Excursion Module?”


“Yep.”


“Wow. I feel like I’m interviewing a movie star. What was your…I don’t know…problem?”


Graziano knew that he had talked himself into a spot, and he knew where this was going. I didn’t.


“Well,” he stammered, “Travel in space presents some problems that you don’t encounter otherwise. Like, well, in an atmosphere without gravity, you have to consider, for instance, the proper and clean disposition of solid human waste…”


There was a pause. It got longer. Finally, I said, “So, you have to first create the problem…”


Some of the 500 Grumman engineers were laughing.


“Right. I had to create the problem…”


“And you therefore had to make…”


“So, I had to make…well, with gluclose…”


More engineers laughing.


“You had to make, uh, sh…”


“A shitmaker. I was a shitmaker.” He laughed.


Again, a pause. Then I started to laugh. I said, “You know you’re going to loose this race…”


“Yes.”


“And you’re the only one qualified to do exactly what the job calls for…”


“I didn’t, but yes, in manner of speaking…”


“And you know I can’t write this…”


“Well, I didn’t think of that, but, yes...”


Laughter. I mean, laughter.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

October 7, 2009


Engineers Laughing

By Ed Lowe

I was to speak at the Crest Hollow Country Club, in Woodbury. That’s all I remembered.
It was maybe the 50th or the 70th time. The Crest Hollow Country Club was the largest room on Long Island. I hadn’t any idea to whom I was addressing my…address…or what I would say, but I knew I was speaking at the Crest Hollow, and that was good enough for me.

A couple of times during those decades, I had shown up at the Smithtown Sheraton when I was supposed to be at The Garden City Hotel, or at the Marc Pierre on Route 110, when I should have been at the Salisbury Restaurant in Eisenhower Park (which had changed its name to the Carlton on the Park, just to drive me crazy).

So, my being sure of the location this time probably staved off the eventual stroke by a day or two, at least.

Just as an aside, you should see the looks on the faces of the Marc of Dimes committee, who last heard that the speaker was seen asking the befuddled owners of the Captain Bill’s Restaurant in Bay Shore where are all the Golden Apple Award Education winners.

The education award winners are selected by the committee of the March of Dimes, who then hold a dinner, to whom the speaker is supposed to present the golden apples before making his speech.

He at long last enters the room at the Hilton Huntington just in the nick of time.

Actually, it is quite rewarding, like rescuing somebody from certain, imminent death.
I found out on arriving at the Crest Hollow that I was addressing 500 retired engineers from

Grumman Aviation Corp., or whatever corporate name it was then called—they knew who they had worked for—and it was one of the very few times I was left speechless.

I’d addressed dentists, medical associations, bar associations, the joint meeting of associations of sheet metal and air conditioning contractors of New York and Boston, and all kinds of what I thought was the hardest group ever—accountants.

But I realized I had nothing for engineers.

Somebody took the microphone and told 500 engineers that they were in for a real treat.
What could I tell engineers?

Introduced, I approached the stage.All engineers knew more than I did, and if they didn’t know it, another engineer could tell them faster than I could.

They wouldn’t laugh at anything, because they didn’t laugh at anything at all. Laughter presupposes a problem. Engineers break down a problem to its component parts, solve it, and pooft, no problem.

First step.

Where did I get that, anyway? I don’t know any engineers.

Second step.

Michael Graziano. Holy smoke.

Third step. Saved.

“Thank you. I want tell you a story that came to me on that step, there, the second step, kid you not.

“It happened somewhere between 1970 and 1973, and the details of it are filling up my brain as if it happened yesterday.

“Bill Burns was running for re-election to the Assembly. He would win. He was a Republican from Amityville. He was Amityville mayor before becoming Assemblyman, and the district at the time voted 2 to 1 Republican.

I don’t remember who the Democrat candidate was or the Conservative, but I had to interview all four of them and write an election story.

On the northwest corner of West John Street and Newark Avenue, in Lindenhurst, lived a gentleman named Michael Graziano. He was running as the Liberal Party candidate. I phoned him, and later showed up at his house.

He was big man with a little mustache, which made me chuckle, because I was a comparatively little man with a big mustache.

To ease his mind, I told him that I had relatives all over Lindenhurst, and I had taught junior high school there, too.

I then blew all that away by telling him I was from Amityville, and that my father was the Lieutenant of the police department in Amityville, and my father drove trucks now and then for Burns Truck Sales.

I suppose the reason I didn’t tell him my grandmother’s maiden name was Burns was that there was no relation, but I might as well have.

I realized the mistake and said quickly there was an Amityville cop named Graziano, which sounded so lame that I didn’t wait, but just asked Graziano what he did for a living.

“I’m an engineer,” he said.

“Really,” I said. “In that case, can I ask you a really dumb question before we start. I mean, really dumb.”

“Shoot.”

“Well, I have never met an engineer. I mean, I know they’re smart, and I know they don’t wear that railroad engineer’s hat, and I know they make a lot of money, like a doctor, but I don’t know what an engineer does.”

“Well, an engineer is basically a problem solver. A manufacturer has a problem with a product—let’s say, it doesn’t work well when it’s heated, and that’s when it’s most valuable—he gives the problem to the engineering department, and they apply the old scientific method. They create the problem in a lab, attack it with few choice solutions, select one, and give it back to the manufacturer, case closed, hopefully.”

“Wow. Where do you work?”

“Well, I’m an engineer. I’m out of work.”

That was true. I knew that. Damn.

“Oh. Sorry. Where did you work when you did work?”

“My last job was at Grumman. I worked on the LEM. Heard of that?”

“I…the LEM…the Lunar Excursion Module?”

“Yep.”

“Wow. I feel like I’m interviewing a movie star. What was your…I don’t know…problem?”

Graziano knew that he had talked himself into a spot, and he knew where this was going. I didn’t.

“Well,” he stammered, “Travel in space presents some problems that you don’t encounter otherwise. Like, well, in an atmosphere without gravity, you have to consider, for instance, the proper and clean disposition of solid human waste…”

There was a pause. It got longer. Finally, I said, “So, you have to first create the problem…”
Some of the 500 Grumman engineers were laughing.

“Right. I had to create the problem…”

“And you therefore had to make…”

“So, I had to make…well, with gluclose…”

More engineers laughing.

“You had to make, uh, sh…”

“A shitmaker. I was a shitmaker.” He laughed.

Again, a pause. Then I started to laugh. I said, “You know you’re going to loose this race…”

“Yes.”

“And you’re the only one qualified to do exactly what the job calls for…”

“I didn’t, but yes, in manner of speaking…”

“And you know I can’t write this…”

“Well, I didn’t think of that, but, yes...”

Laughter. I mean, laughter.

Monday, October 5, 2009

SueB and Phil

Oct. 07, 2009

SueB and Phil


It is October 2009.

I am alive, which still strikes me as unusual, and both my daughters, T.C. and Colleen, are with me at Abel Conklin’s restaurant.

The, “girls,” (they are 41 and 40—yes, Irish twins—) are taking me out to lunch, and, in Huntington, which almost is more unusual than the fact that I am alive, because they are South Shore girls and never visit the North Shore. (I am an exception, because of my job, wherein Long Island became my entire pencil, as it were.).

I look across the room, and SueB is our server.

Colleen will like that, because she waited tables at Abel’s for a year or so and went to a few parties at SueB’s and Bear’s on the bay in Lindenhurst. TC will like it, too, when she hears my introduction of SueB and the story.

How do I begin to explain the complicated connections.

“I want to tell you a story,” I start, in full anticipation of the unspoken, “Oh, brother’s,” I am to either get or imagine I get, both because I deserve them as well as because every father gets them, anyway, whether he deserves them or not.

(I, of course, secretly know I do not, and by the time I finish, they are going to be amazed not only at the story, but at their part in it, which essentially makes it somehow their story, too. That is my fantasy, anyway, and that is why I am telling it.).

Back in 1973, I begin (cementing the notion that this is going to be a long, arduous, give-me-some-toothpick-to-keep-my-eyelids-open tale), I went fishing (Oh, God!) with five guys from Buddy Toomey’s Pearl Grey Fishing Station and Tavern on the Crick, in Amityville, including Buddy Toomey.

We went, of course, to Montauk.

I would love to say that I went lots of times to Montauk, but if the Speaker of the Assembly of State of New York, Perry B. Duryea, didn’t have a lobster business there, or if the Congressman Otis Pike didn’t make occasional political speeches there, I might remember a small boy’s family trip to the lighthouse, once, and then only vaguely. Otherwise, no fishing trips to Montauk, not much to Freeport or Captree, not much fishing trips at all. I don’t need proof to establish I’m an Islander.

In fact, I remember telling Buddy that I don’t fish, really, and Craig Starke, the clammer, that I really ought to give my seat to somebody more deserving, but Craig Starke said that the more deserving person had backed out; in fact, two of them backed out, and that was how we both got on board.

So, we met at some ungodly hour and drove from Amityville to a Greek Restaurant at Montauk called Salivar’s and loaded our gear on a boat called the, “Dawn,” where we met the Captain, Bob Tuma, and his mate, Phil Lewis, and we set out in the ocean to catch some striped bass, which we most assuredly did. I reeled in so many 20-30 lb. striped bass I tried to hide whenever my turn came up in the fight chair.

“Is this fun!” I finally bellowed, my arms screaming in pain, “Are we having fun yet? Get me back to work!”

It became an annual event, and I became a fan of, especially, the mate, Phil Lewis, who got his own boat, The, “Adios,” a year or two later, when the Drug Enforcement Administration sold it to him in Florida at auction.

Lewis, a quiet, Brooklyn-raised, shaved-head, gold earring (one), monster-fisher, electronic whiz-kid brought me back to his Montauk house a couple of times for dinner with Dina (of the Salivar’s family), and a session of classical tunes on his acoustic guitar, or a showing of his latest watercolors of fishermen, and I felt about as special and as privileged as you could be. While the other customers were customers, I was a guest, once the boat was in.

In later years—well, I’d taught junior high school English, in ’67 and ’68, where I became close to Ron Polacci, who married Lindenhurst art teacher Irene Georgiados, whose sister, Nota, was married to a restaurateur, Tom Violagas, and the four of them founded the Wine Gallery Restaurants in Forest Hills, East Meadow and Massapequa.

That’s a handful of divorces ago.

In East Meadow, once, Tom Violagas asked me if I ever took my daughters fishing, because he had paid for a, “six pack,” fishing trip—six paid guests plus a mate and a captain—and he only had himself and his two sons, and it seemed a waste to not use the other three.

I said, “Where?” He said his cousin Dina’s husband was a captain out at Montauk...
“Whoa…Dina? Dina of Salivar’s? Phil Lewis?”

“Why, yes.”

Well, not only did we go, but Colleen caught her first fish ever—a 185 lb. blue shark—TC (a veteran, having flounder fished with her fourth grade class out of Amityville) caught a 65-lb. blue shark (both of them were cut away), and I got to hang out on the bridge with Capt. Phil Lewis.

“I don’t get it,” Colleen interrupted. “Where’s SueB?”

Well, first of all, SueB is a former married nickname. It really is Sue D’Aleo, though when I was first introduced to her I said, “Suzie,” which I never do, although I learned years later that “Suzie” was her older brother’s name for her, a special name that only he used.

His name was Phil Lewis, and her name, SueB’s maiden name, was Caponigri. He went from Erasmus High School, she, Holy Cross, both in Brooklyn. He was born on 03/3/33. He was 14 years old when she born.

And I found that out here, at Abel Conklin’s, 10 years ago, when somebody mentioned fishing and somebody else pointed out that the funeral for SueB’s brother, which was supposed to consist of one boat, the, “Adios,” sprinkling ashes over a favorite spot for striped bass, drew an ad hoc parade of some 54 mourning boats bearing customers, friends, relatives and strangers, the largest water-borne funeral procession Montauk had ever seen.

“Wait,” I said. ‘The Adios?’ “Did you say the, ‘Adios?’ I went fishing on the ‘Adios.’ My daughters went fishing with me on the, ‘Adios.’ Oh, my God, SueB!”

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

LONG ISLAND GEESE

September 30, 2009

LONG ISLAND GEESE

By Ed Lowe


About 35 years ago, having caused, and then perhaps inflamed, a personnel problem in the upper echelons of Newsday, I was assigned to work as a general assignment reporter to the Nassau Desk, then held fast by Sylvan Fox, late of The New York Times, The State of Israel and the New York City Police Department.

We got along famously, Sylvan and I, because I thought I had escaped a bad situation with a legendary, big deal editor in the Suffolk office; and Fox thought (rightly) that all he had to do was give me crummy story ideas for four years, which was the length of my sentence, and otherwise not bother with me, unless I bothered with him.

I didn’t know about being sentenced, which still strikes me as strange. I mean, if you want to punish somebody, then let him know about it. Don’t keep it a secret.

Then-Newsday editor David Laventhol told me of the sentence years later, when he was moving up in Times Mirror Corporation, and I was a columnist.

I was poised to thank him, but he interrupted and told the story, and said, “If you tell anyone I said it, I’ll deny it, but you put in me in the position of having to choose between him (the editor) and you.”

I understand it a little better now, I guess, but it seems to me that he would only see a profit in it had I noticed it then.

Confused, I changed subjects and said something I thought amusing about an assignment to determine what individuals on Long Island were doing while the Presidency changed hands from Richard Nixon to Gerry Ford.

I was about to say, “What did the editors think people on Long Island were doing…?” when Laventhol interrupted and said, “You did a good job on that.”

I stopped.

“Know who’s idea that assignment was?”

I stayed stopped. As it turned out, wisely.

“Mine,” he said. “I told them, ‘Send Ed Lowe around to learn what Long Islanders were doing the moment Ford took over for Nixon.’ That was a hell of a job.”

I said, “Uh, thanks.”

Sylvan Fox gave me a host of made up, terrible assignments, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know they were made up or that they were terrible, like, “A View From Bellerose Terrace,” about the part of Bellerose that was in Nassau County, and, “A View From Lakeville,” which was the same thing, but on the North Shore.

He insisted that I take three days to do them, too. Three days for a half day’s work. I thought I was being rewarded.

The first day I hung around playing pool, drinking beer, and talking with a saloonful of people.
The second day I interviewed people, along with playing pool, and drinking beer. The morning of the third day, I wrote the piece, taking a second lunch hour with (the late) columnist John Pascal, before handing it in.

Meanwhile, Sylvan Fox moved to a bayfront condominium in Copiague, right near my house, right where I grew up, in Amityville, on Great South Bay (If Newsday editors bought property, it was up north, in Port Washington or in Huntington.).

So, when Fox called me, at home, I figured that Long Island was sinking, fast, or that someone at Newsday had told Fox if he wished to know anything about the South Shore, he should call Ed Lowe.

“You’ve got to come over here,” Fox said.

“What!? Why?”

“You’ve got to see what’s outside my kitchen door.”

I’d never been to an editor’s house.

He paraded me through the condominium and to the kitchen’s sliding glass doors. There, outside, was a Canada Goose, right there, prancing, shaking water off himself, struttin’ his stuff, as if he were in Toronto, Canada or Crisfield, Maryland.

“Holy smoke,” I said. “I’ve only seen photographs of them. They use the Eastern Flyway, but they never come near us. Gunners see them once in a while, but I’ve not. They never come here.”

Fox seemed satisfied at his discovery, too.

In the last 35 years, Canada geese have decidedly settled on Long Island. Many have given up migration and surrendered their passports. Their descendents have never seen Canada or the Chesapeake Bay.

They maybe move from the North to the South Shore for the difference in snowfall, but that is it.
They have taken root, have bought property, have had public meetings about when they will open sports fields and when they won’t; they have negotiated playing-times for golf courses, and have demanded signs for busy intersections.

Generations of people and ducks and dogs and birds have no recollection of Long Island without our, “Long Island,” geese.

And, oh, yeah, this year, the 35th anniversary of their arrival at the canals and creeks, the soccer fields and golf courses, the neighborhoods and busy highways, the guys who run the airports have finally noticed them, too. Highly paid guys.

“Look,” they exclaimed at the results of a study four months after a jet airliner pilot landed in the Hudson with shovelfuls of chewed-up Canada Geese sticking out of it’s engines, “Canada Geese. Where they did come from?”


Friday, September 18, 2009

MRS> YIZZLE

The Greek is one of a dozen people, maybe two dozen, who’ve been helping me out in more ways than I can count—in fact, probably in more ways than either he or I know—and I keep him supplied with oatmeal and raisin cookies in, uh, trade.

Cookies from BJ’s Wholesale Club, don’t you know, not just any oatmeal and raisin cookies.
Big cookies, with maybe a quarter-to-a-half box of raisins inside every one. Suz gets them for me.

Fresh, too. Fresh.

I make sure. I eat the cookies fast, so they’re replaced fast, so The Greek never, never suffers stale cookies.

All right, it’s not that much of a trade, but he likes them, and I like them, and that’ll have to do for a while, at least.

And stories, now that I can talk.

Yeeesssh! That a was tough year. The back half of it more than the front half. Because, if memory serves (and mind you, it does not. Does not serve at all. It has tricks to fool both itself, and later, you, just when your preparing to show off.), you know that you’re blithering the first time you blither. Maybe the second time, too. After that, well I don’t understand how it works.

At first, you notice something, let’s say, the TV remote, over on the table you’re about to learn you can’t reach, and you hear something, a gargoyality—I had to invent a word for that, because, I don’t know what made the sound—coming from you. It was an awful sound, sort of an old man’s howl, which you know wasn’t you, but, well, who was it, then?

Maybe that’s it, you’ve scared yourself. And now, whatever is going to come out of your mouth is going to be screened and reworked, so as to not frighten you into not speaking. However, nobody else is going to understand it when you are speaking, and you will not know that.

You likely will be repeating bolardoford, over and over, and not know it, because your system refuses to accept it. The people who love you will just smile, so that you will think that they are crazy.

Anyway, that stage is over.

So, here is a story I recently told the Greek, on the ocassion of the passage of Mrs.Yizzle, which my mother, with her incredibe memory and dedication to the obituary page, alerted me to.

One of my many crazy aunts lived in Lindenhust—636 North Erie Avenue—and when my mother got her license and my father let her use the car, she and I would drive from Amityville to visit her mother and her youngest sister.

Next door to her, when a next door got built, lived a woman whom I understood to be Mrs.Yizzle.

I would be reading, or putting on my coat to go outside, or taking it off, having come inside, and occassionly hear my Aunt Gerry, in the kitchen, mention Mrs. Yizzle, quote Mrs. Yizzle, even imitate Mrs. Yizzle’s high, funny-sounding voice. But I never saw Mrs. Yizzle, not once, during those trips.

One day, a warm day in late fall, I was out in front of my Aunt Gerry’s house, instead of out back, my normal haunt. Suddenly, Mrs. Yizzle’s front door opened, and there was activity inside that indicated a rare sighting of Mrs. Yizzle. I stopped whatever I was doing, and waited.

She appeared. It had to be her. She was calling in some kids to dinner.

“Hi, Mrs. Yizzle,” I said. Cheerfully.

She paid me no heed. Perhaps she hadn’t heard me.

“Hi, Mrs. Yizzle! Mrs. Yizzle, hi!”

No response. What was wrong?

“Hey, Misses Yizzle, over here. Hi. Hi, Misses Yizzle. Hello, Misses Yizzle…”

Suddenly, the red front door of my Aunt Gerry’s house blew open, followed by the aluminun storm door. Except for the abject horror in their expressions, I recognized the faces of the otherwise attractive mid-thirties women, one, my Aunt Gerry, and the other, my mother.
Both tackled me and lifted me backwards and up and over the stoop and into the living room and into the kitchen where they deposited, no, flung, me onto the floor.

They fell down beside me gasping and laughing, and then more laughing, and then more, and then, gasping desperately for air, trying to say something, but, interrupted by laughing.

Finally, one of them said, “Honey, Mrs. Yizzle! Mrs. Yizz…Her name is not Mrs. Yizzle!”

“Not Mrs. Yizzle!” the other one said. “Not Mrs. Yizzle!”

Followed by a return on both their parts to peels of laughter. “Not Mrs. Yizz…”

“It’s not? But you always call her Mrs.…”

Bedlam. Both of them, on the kitchen floor, laughing.

“No. It’s not her name. It’s just that…well, when she calls the kids…”

I think I was laughing, now, but I didn’t know why.

“…she tells them, ‘Come in and put on a sweater. Yizzle catch pnuemonia. I don’t what’s wrong with yizz…”

The other one chimed in: “Look at yizz, without a coat. Yizzle catch pnuemonia!’”

More laughing. And more. They laughed until they were exhausted.

And I never said, “Hi,” to the woman again.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Ed Lowe, Himself

How Am I Doing?

Here’s how I am (and by the way, I do appreciate the inquiry, so if was pure patronizing, please keep it a secret from me.).

I fell asleep January 5, 2008. I was in girl’s dorm room (first time—hey, class of ’67, we still wore ties and jackets) with my daughter, Colleen, who was to read from a work of her fiction, culminating a long and tough course of work, including creative writing, critical thinking and criticism.

Colleen turned 40 this Aug. 8.

I had just arrived, after 6 hours of driving from Long Island to someplace near Burlington, Vt., a ride that included some snow, near the end, which I did not know was not snow, but an early, ominous sign from one system of my body to another. I guess I didn’t get it. The idea of snow falling in Northern Vermont on January 5 was too subtle a hint for me, at least it was that night.
Doctors who much later let go some information that they shared only with Susan, my trusted Health Care Trustee, whom I designated only a month earlier, said that I had a bad case of pneumonia. But that was just a detail. As if I showed some poison ivy on my heel during the autopsy of third degree burns.

Colleen and her boyfriend, Chris, arrived, and we chatted while I finished a hamburger. I think we waited for a fourth member—a big, funny friend of theirs—before I then followed them to the campus.

I remember a stairs, a room, and a really welcoming bed.

I entered the room, met a few young writers, felt a little dizzy, asked if I could rest on the bed, and matter-of-factly said, “I think I’m having a stroke.”

That was it.

I’ve never before had a stroke, and don’t know what made me say that, but it worked out to be an accurate diagnosis. I didn’t pick up the pneumonia. Didn’t even hear it about until around May.

So, without knowing about the pneumonia, I lost consciousness until late March.

I never heard Colleen do the reading. She did it, I am told, in tears. One of my more cynical acquaintances asked if she thought it improved her grade. I think newspaper people, by and large, are not nice, and after 40 years, I keep only a few as friends.

A series of stories follow that incident, and I am learning them yet, and probably will until I re-visit whatever…places, if you can call them that...I then toured in Purgatory. The stories all are alternately embarrassing and, well, beautiful, depending on who you are and where you were at the time of both the doing and the accounting. But, that was not the question, and I already have tested your patience in trying to stick to that.

I next recall a scene as a sort of dream I had just before I regained consciousness—this is after two-and-three-quarter-months of slumber, so any part of this may be just my imagination, But I only recall six or seven dreams in my life, so that counts for something—and this voice, which may have been my own voice, asks, “Well, what do want to do?”

A voice that really sounds like mine says: “What, do get I a say in this?”

Long, I guess pregnant, pause.

“What do you want to do?” the disembodied voice persists.

This time, I took him—or, me—seriously. It was a him, though.

It got funny, in retrospect.

The first thing I said was, “Well, my car is paid for.”

I’m leaving the known world, and say proudly that I don’t owe money on the Honda.
I bought my CRV cash. Only time ever. I was angry with the Saturn dealer. All dealers, really, and I went to the savings account, and withdrew whatever amount, and got a bank check, and never went to a dealer again.

“…and the boat is paid for.”

Christ, Edgar (the boat) is almost 25.

Then, more seriously, “The kids will get, maybe $400,000 for the house, plus my retirement stuff. I should have taken care of Susan, dammit, but her four have grown. She’ll be sad, but she won’t have to put up with my shit, either, and she knows, now, that she’s terrific.

“But I couldn’t ask for another minute, God, I’ve had the best life. The best life.

“You can’t imagine,” I said to no one in particular. “I grew up on the Bay. We were poor, but I didn’t know it. We lived in a tiny room, a studio apartment over a garage on the Bay. I grew up to teach, then spent 40-years writing true stories. Beat that.

“You do whatever you do,” I said, “whoever you are. I couldn’t ask for another minute. It would be unconsciously ungrateful.”

I really was full of myself.

When I woke, if you call it that, I was in fetal position, and everything seemed worse the more I learned: can’t move; can’t speak; can’t get up; I can’t even my wipe my own ass? Really? A diaper? What else. Can’t read, can’t write, can’t talk. Can’t sing? Can’t SING!”
Hey, I said, “Go ahead, Take me.”’

“You said, ‘Whatever you want.’ I think I said.

“Oh, yeah. Shit. I said, Whatever you want. But, I meant…”

I’ve learned so much since then. No, begun to learn. But it’s kind of hard to hold onto, because it’s impossible, and couldn’t be. What hell, I’d also accepted death.

Yet, more than anyone, I knew it was real. And, I think, anyway, that I knew I had a lot to learn, too, and didn’t want to.

I was on an emotional roller coaster for months, but going from down to really down. I kept asking, “What’s the point? I made a lot of people happy. I hurt nobody…well, a couple of ex-wives didn’t like the beer, but they knew that from the get-go. And, well, that’s worth, what, a toothache, a violent cold.”

Maybe seven months ago, something crystallized that I’d been hovering over, but it slipped away as soon I got near. And about seven months ago, I caught hold of it, and can cling to it, most days.

It saves me, often—not today, unfortunately—but maybe the next two or three days.
Today, believe it or not, writing to you has saved me.

I decided, me, that this life after the stroke was in addition to the life before the stroke.
Simple, but it changes my life to two lives.

And the life before the stroke was spectacular, a life that millions would envy. And I had it, and I remembered it, and I even was smart enough to know that I had it when I had it, and said so, which made it even better, just when you think that it couldn’t be better.

So, this life, the life with a little extra challenge to it, is the bonus. A bonus.You lived a spectacular life, and the reward is a bonus.

So, that is how I am. Mainly.

As for appearing in person, I’ve done that twice already—once, in early May, at the theatre in Bay Shore, where I introduced the Jim Small Band; and once June 3 to an outfit called The Patricians, basically the Seniors of St. Patrick’s Church, to whom I did a comedy routine a few years ago.

I did all right. Got a few laughs. Not good enough to charge anything
for it, but good enough to keep at it.

I have to charge, in this life. There’s no newspapers any more.