Eclipse

This isn’t goodbye, quite.

Yesterday marked a thousand days and thus the end of this endeavor. The last entry should have been last night, but then I wouldn’t have had this wonderful photograph from Antarctica that shows last evening’s partial eclipse of the midnight sun.  And anyway, I was out with my son doing Christmas stuff.

Which has been part of the ongoing problem with A Thousand Days. It started out well, a story a night. But that’s hard to sustain because more and more life intervenes. Life profound, and life mundane. Lists of story ideas grow longer. They write themselves in my head, these stories, but somehow never make it to the page. An old friend of mine uses voice recognition software to get over this particular kind of writer’s block, but it works about as well as that stuff on your cell phone– and well, that’s one more frustration I didn’t need to sign up for.

Just Wednesday I was promising someone that no matter what I was going to make the last story “Why I Live Where I Live,” a love song to Dayton, (and an old idea borrowed from 1970s era Esquire magazine.) And I was going to do it before Friday. But there was broccoli salad and Sagaponack corn pudding to be made and  a long drive north to my uncle’s and then the festivities of the holiday. Black Friday came and went (without a visit to a box store I might add) padding around barefoot in my pajamas half the morning. Before I knew it the partial eclipse of the sun (visible only from Antarctica) came and went, along with that last story idea.

Part of this is Billy’s fault. My old friend, a magical character equal parts vulnerability and bon vivant died last fall, just before his 53rd birthday. He slumped over at his computer watching an obscure YouTube video of a Scandinavian singing “Lucky Old Sun.” He was supposed to go out to a club that night to promote his latest musical obsession, Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, but he never showed, which was not Billy’s way at all. It was such a miracle that he’d lived so long, careening around Boston on his Vespa, (and if it was after dark he was toasted) that I suppose we all thought he’d live forever. He didn’t and since the very night he died I’ve been trying to write about him and failing. Maybe another time. I was haunted though. I felt like I had to write this piece for Billy before I could get on to the veritable laundry list of other subjects I wanted to tackle.

To wit-  How to Save Christmas (I think), obituaries, stop lights, muskrats, insomnia, animal wars, Orville Wright, the aforementioned love song for Dayton, and a little piece about Lisa Spinks, a young woman who was brutally murdered by someone she thought was her friend. A half-dozen others. And Billy’s story, which finally is writing about ghosts. But there will have to be some other forum for all of those.

I am very grateful to those who stuck with me, even when I gave them little more than a gossamer thread from which to hang. The comments, support, suggestions, controversy and conversations that swirled around the blog entries have been remarkable, and somehow along the way I got to be an expert on Crooksville pottery on the strength of a single article. I’ve had heartfelt thanks and heartsick outrage left in relatively equal numbers of messages. (Only one time did I hear from an attorney, and once I took his name out he went away. Apparently he didn’t care what I had to say about his client.) If I’d had the will and fortitude to keep writing about murder victims, this really could have been something. But just like my old friend and mentor Steve Huff found, I discovered that writing about violent crime all the time eats away at your soul. Of course, other topics speak to me, and I always intended to get to them, if only I hadn’t been so busy doing whatever it was I was doing.

A Thousand Days has been as neglected and forlorn as an outgrown pony. There it sat on the Bookmark Bar, just waiting for me to click it and start writing. But I was out of the writing habit and without a deadline, I became a dilettante. I’d meet people who said how much they enjoyed my pieces and it would make me sad. I wasn’t worthy of their accolades. Jesus, a whole year went by without a single effort, and before that it had been almost six months. I needed something to make writing routine again, part of the day-to-day schedule, as regular and necessary as breathing.

So I’ve made myself a new project, 30 Days Notice. It is a very short-term blog, and I’m not sure that it will be pretty. I’ll start December 1 and write through December 30. I promise you (and myself) that I will write every single day, no matter what. What month could be more challenging than December for that– when we are all over-scheduled and trying to fit a few more hours into every day? I’ll have to train my family to stop their constant stream of interruption, or I’ll have to learn to ignore them. It’s clear that waiting for them to go to bed to have peace in the household doesn’t work anymore. In December we’ll have house guests. There may be Migraines (I hope not, but I’m a realist.) I know there will be Christmas parties, school functions, shopping, wrapping, shipping, cards, dogs, friends, family.  All those will have to make room while I shoehorn the most essential thing back into my life.

How appropriate, then, to end with something as transitory as an eclipse. Something is hidden, but only for a moment. The curtain has dropped on this show.  A Thousand Days is finished, but you get to be along for the ride (if you want) while I find my feet again, and with that, discipline and self-respect.  If we’re lucky, perhaps it will be entertaining.

Dancing with Emily Post

The State of American Manners

One evening last week we stopped in at Target to pick up laundry detergent and a birthday card. We were hardly in the door before a gaggle of teenage girls eclipsed us, shrieking with laughter.  I’d stopped to browse in a bin of inexpensive toys and they snatched and grabbed at things right in front of me, as if I were not even there.  They jammed “roast turkey” hats onto their heads and screamed with the hilarity of it all.

“It’s animal day tomorrow, we have to get these!” one shrieked. A blonde girl knocked into me reaching for something in a bin. She seemed not to notice.

“That would be freaking awesome,” another roared, doubling over with laughter.  They gobbled and cackled in their roast turkey hats, screaming with delight at how ridiculous they were, overcome with how amazing they would be at school tomorrow. The noise rolled over me in waves.

Then, like a whirlwind, they moved off towards the clearance racks in the women’s department, tossing and shrieking and laughing all the way.

I like kids. I even like teenaged kids. It hasn’t been so long that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be in the midst of laughing, silly, hysterical group of girls. No doubt I’ve irritated plenty of adults in my day.  (Though the presence of someone my mother’s age would have inhibited me a bit.) But these kids, these nice upper middle-class, well-fed, privileged girls were behaving like, well, savages.

No sooner had their whoops and wails faded from earshot,  they were replaced by something even worse.  The detergent aisle of this store is directly across from Girls Clothing. There, in a shopping cart, a little girl about five was screaming. Sobbing.  Her mother, trying to pretend that nothing was amiss, went on browsing like she was totally unaware of her daughter’s meltdown, examining the details on a sweater collar or holding up a pair of leggings for size.

It was everything I could do not to march over there and ask her what the hell she thought she was doing, and what on earth gave her the idea that it was okay to “teach her daughter a lesson” at the expense of everyone in the store.

I held on to the shelf of Tide, knuckles white.  The little girl continued to wail, hiccupping, sobbing some more.  That spot, just above my left eye, began to throb. Finally, the girl’s father came and wheeled the cart away, the child silent in their departure. I suppose she’ll grow up to think it’s okay to knock into other shoppers and shriek in public and throw merchandise around in stores.

My husband and I talked about the two sets of rude people as we drove home.  It seems we’re spending more time talking about rude people, lack of decorum, the inconsiderate among us. This is what happens all day long in public America—we’re running amok.

Drivers no longer merge onto highways, they barge. I’d point out that “yield” seems to mean nothing to people, but really stop signs don’t carry much importance either. Communities have had to install cameras at busy intersections because so many people blast through long after the light’s turned red.  (Apparently Dayton has $450,000 owed them in unpaid red-light tickets.) People speed up so that you can’t enter the roadway in front of them.

They either park so sloppily over the painted lines that they take up two spaces or they intentionally take up two spaces so their precious vehicle doesn’t get dinged by some ten year old flinging open the door of the mini-van. They tailgate.  On the interstate, they pull in front of you from the adjacent lane with inches to spare, just enough space provided you don’t speed up one more mile an hour. (Which of course they would do if you were trying to get in front of them.) They blow their horn if you don’t jackrabbit into the intersection the minute the light turns green, and God forbid you actually STOP before making a right on red. They pass on double yellow lines. They pass on city streets.  Taking to the public thoroughfare is more and more like something out of Death Race 2000.

The police promise and threaten to be more active in going after aggressive drivers. If they are, it’s not having much effect. A City of Kettering police officer once stopped my husband for driving too slowly. We were meandering home in our Saab on a Friday evening, doing about 25 mph on a quiet city street. No doubt he thought “sporty car going slow equals drinking.”  He was wrong. He said to my husband “Well, at least try to go the speed limit.”  Excuse me?

When another driver actually allows me to merge into the lane in front of them, I am always surprised, and respond with a wave,  “Hey, thanks!”

In Wim Wenders’ film,  Wings of Desire, Peter Handke wrote that our cars are our kingdoms and in them we are kings of our own tiny empires.  Tonight, a man in a minivan (arguably the worst category of drivers) pulled out from a gas station, crossing the road directly in front of us. He pushed past another car waiting for the traffic to clear and turned left across four lanes of traffic, in a cacophony of screeching brakes and blaring horns. He was on his cell phone and seemed not to notice. We may have constructed a cocoon, a paradise of “I,” but we are not islands unto ourselves. Everything we do in public affects someone else.

Not that the sanctuary of home life exists anymore.  My husband is a fan of political commentary and talking heads inundate our living room with a constant stream of lies, scandal and notoriety. I suggested once that we go on a diet from this kind of television, if perhaps that would help us feel less at odds with our fellow Americans, less despairing of their behavior.  There’s just no way that you can listen to a steady infusion of this stuff and not feel pissed-off. Just a week, I suggested, but we haven’t tried it yet.

Certainly there’s no haven from rudeness in cyberspace. It would be hard to imagine a playground where people are less courteous. The comments made on newspaper sites, forums for various hobbies and the ubiquitous Facebook go right past rude and often into the muck of verbal abuse.  And I’m guilty of the same. Without the nuance of gesture or inflection, we are quick to take offence.  Freed from inhibition by distance and a shell of anonymity, we post things that we would never in a million years say to someone’s face.

Sometimes this even happens between real life friends. A comment is made, a retort follows. Maybe the response was meant wryly or with a kind of nudge—but the recipient only sees the naked type on the screen, devoid of charm or affection, and the offense is laid bare.  Friendships, some long-standing, end over these exchanges.

Staying connected via the cell phone has become a kind of hallmark of rudeness. Not just those texting or talking while they pull into oncoming traffic, what about the people who won’t get off the phone in the drive-thru of the fast food place, or the check-out line at the grocery store?  Of course the reverse is true also. How aggravating is it to deal with a cashier who won’t look at you or speak to you or is too busy chatting with a colleague or flirting with the bagger to exert the minimum amount of grace required for his or her job?

One afternoon at Kroger, even though I was in a hurry to be somewhere else, I stomped off to find the manager to complain about just such a cashier.

“Oh, that surprises me about her. She worked at Elder-Beerman’s for forty years, ” he said, not bothering with an actual apology.  I guess after 40 years in a pretentious department store, there’s no need to acknowledge the lowly grocery store customer.

Of course, there are still the garden variety bad manners: a cousin and his wife who have yet to thank us (by note, by email, in person or on Facebook) for the wedding gift we gave them. (A really nice stockpot, but maybe they were offended that we didn’t use their registry?) Of course, they haven’t thanked us for baby gifts either.  Or the kennel club meeting to which I brought a lemon-raspberry cheesecake and one person, one person said thank you.  It’s not that we do these things to be thanked, we make these gestures out of affection and goodwill, but you know it would have been nice to have the effort acknowledged.

I don’t want to give the impression that I think I’ve been perfect in this regard. I haven’t. Sometimes I have failed terribly at etiquette.  I know the thank you notes for our wedding gifts went out far too late.  I know I have been sharp when I didn’t need to be. Once I beeped my horn at a pick up truck about to back into our car in a parking lot and the driver jumped out, rushed back and spewed invective all over me. Not knowing then what I know now, I gave back as good as I got. He went back to his truck briefly and returned with a large handgun. Thankfully, passersby intervened before our lack of manners took a tragic turn.

Though I’ve never drawn a gun on anyone, I too have indulged in a few spectacularly public temper fits.  Years ago, a man took the last table at an outdoor café, racing in front of us (laden with a tray of food) and sitting down to read his newspaper. We argued about his right to the table when he had not yet purchased food. When he turned his back to me and sat down, I slapped him hard across back of his balding head.

On an evening more than a decade ago, a woman in grocery store line behind me started piling up my groceries on the belt, so she could take her groceries out of the cart sooner. She said something about not wanting her bread to get crushed.  It didn’t amount to more than some angry words and still today, there’s a part of me that wishes I’d come even more unglued—that I’d thrown her bread on the floor and stood on it.  If you’re going to have Bad Manners make it a real production number rather than just this day to day loss of civility that’s gnawing away at reasonable discourse.

But I didn’t. And these days I think I could handle it a bit more deftly. (A lesson learned from the gun-wielding nutcase in the parking lot.) That’s a large part of what makes manners—stifling one’s emotional impulses for the greater good.

The other part is making the effort to acknowledge the others whose lives intertwine with ours, no matter how slight the connection.  A wave to an acquaintance still serves to show that we are open-handed and unarmed. A smile begets a nod, even among strangers. Holding the door for other people is still generally appreciated, though there will occasionally be louts that sail through without a word as if you are a uniformed doorman.

Among my books are half a dozen navy blue volumes, each of them a different edition of the Emily Post Book of Etiquette, ranging from the 1920s through the 1950s. I have found them in thrift shops and book sales, each one cast off as something no longer necessary. It’s amusing to read about silverware arrangements or what sort of hat is appropriate to wear to tea, or the proper wording to decline an invitation to lunch.

People think these kinds of manners are archaic, and some of them are. Gentleman are no longer required to walk on the outside of the street to protect their feminine companions from harm. (Though it might not be a bad idea.) You will not be the scandalous talk of the town if you fail to use the correct fish service.

The essential elements of manners are still consideration and kindness, and they are still essential. Yet we are uncertain about them at time, reflected in the  popularity of Judith Martin’s charming “Miss Manners” character  (who has surely penned as many books as Miss Post by now) and the syndicated newspaper columns dealing with ethics. It’s as if we don’t remember quite how to behave—or we know how to behave but we want someone to share our outrage at the boors with whom we have to contend.

Living among others is a kind of dance. Sometimes it seems a series of missteps, other times we find ourselves gliding along gracefully with a minimum of effort.  You lead.

Show a little consideration. Say please when you ask your teenager to take out the trash. Turn off your cell phone and stow it while driving. Let another driver go in front of you. Count to ten. Slow down. Don’t tailgate. Stop and smell the roses. Turn off the television. Write the thank you note, or at the very least, the thank you email.  Don’t say something online that you wouldn’t say in person. Take your exhausted child home. Remember that you may be having an uproarious great time but the person next to you may be infirm or in pain.  Don’t interrupt your wife on the telephone to ask her something trifling. Give a little extra. Stop listening to angry people, especially those that are overpaid.  Smile at strangers. As our mothers instructed us when we were little more than babies, play nice.

I’m going to work at it too.

Retrieving the Pink

The Marketing of Breast Cancer in America

One bright blue Saturday morning this October, on my way home from an assignment, I made a left turn into a throng of pink, and came to a stop. On the previous blocks I had seen a few groups of people, two or three or five, dressed in pink caps, or pink t-shirts. I hadn’t thought much of it.  It’s October after all, Breast Cancer Awareness month, there’s a lot of pink about.  But here on the long stretch of Monument Avenue, the pink undulates like a vast sea before me. Muttering to myself about how poorly the Dayton media alerts us to these things, I settle in to wait.

Pink sneakers, pink wigs, pink bandanas, pink balloons. A number of women carry pink long-stemmed roses. One scowling ginger-haired boy is bedecked with a pink plastic lei. There are dogs wearing pink dresses, and men in pink sweatshirts proclaiming “Real Men Wear Pink.” (I also saw the somewhat crass “Don’t let cancer steal second base.”) Pink jackets, pink sweaters, pink feather boas.

“Pink, it’s my new obsession,” I thought, hearing the Aerosmith song in my head.  “Pink, it’s not even a question.”  But this army of pink from the blush of a petal to the violence of fuschia, this has nothing to do with that. This, this is all about one of the most successful sales campaigns of all time: the marketing of breast cancer.

Rare is the person who hasn’t contributed in at least some small way to raising money for breast cancer awareness. We’ve bought yogurt with pink lids. We’ve bought the t-shirt. We’ve bought a pink bucket of fried chicken. A few weeks ago I made my profile photo pink on a social networking site, because being one of the half a million people that did so would increase a Canadian telecommunications company’s donation to the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure to $200,000.

Breast cancer is such an easy cause to support. We think of breast cancer and we think of mothers, wives, grandmothers, sisters, daughters who might be (or are, or were) afflicted with this scourge. In truth men get breast cancer too. In 2005, 1700 men in America were diagnosed and given that the breast cancer survival rates are about equal among the sexes, more than 300 men died. Breast cancer is free of those pesky lifestyle questions that tend to dog causes like AIDS and lung cancer. People ask you and you give. The amount we’ve given collectively and as taxpayers is staggering.

One question nags at me as I thread my way through the pink. What about the other cancers?  My father died of laryngeal cancer. Is there a color for that? (The answer is: not really.) What about lung cancer victims? What about people suffering from colon cancer? Or leukemia? Or cancer of the pancreas? Where is their march, where are the yogurts and sneakers and blenders I can buy to support fundraising for them? When I got home I did some reading.

Cancer of all types accounts for about half a million deaths a year in the United States. That’s considerably less than the number of people who die from heart disease (616,067 the last time the Center for Disease Control counted.) The American Heart Association has seized their own month (February) and color (red) but it is has failed to saturate popular culture in quite the same way. When we see a red t-shirt or hat, we might be more apt to think “Red Sox” or “Ohio State;” but when we see pink garb, we see breast cancer.

Every year 205,000 people are diagnosed with breast cancer and 40,000 will die.  That’s a mortality rate of about 19 percent.  And if someone you love, or you yourself is one of those people, well that’s at least one too many. Consider for a moment some of these other deaths: colon cancer will claim 48,000 (with a mortality rate of 45 percent). 57,000 women will die from genital system cancers, of which ovarian cancer is the most pernicious, claiming 76 percent of those diagnosed. 77 percent of the 17,000 people diagnosed with a brain tumor will leave us this year. The 30,000 people that die from pancreatic cancer represent 98 percent of those diagnosed. Even with a poster boy like Patrick Swayze, the most deadly cancer there is cannot get the traction that the breast cancer industry enjoys.

The cancer that claims the most Americans every year is, hands down, lung cancer.  Although there are fewer lung cancer diagnoses than breast cancer diagnoses, there are four times the number of dead; 160,000 people annually. A hundred and sixty thousand people! That’s the population of my fair city. Every year.

Among the interminable list of those we’ve lost to lung cancer are Walt Disney, Nat King Cole, Steve McQueen, Johnny Carson, Yul Brynner, Humphrey Bogart, Edward R. Murrow, Sammy Davis Jr., Duke Ellington, George Harrison, Louie Armstrong, Ed Sullivan, Lucille Ball, Count Basie , Spencer Tracy, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Harry Reasoner, Peter Jennings. And my old friend Bobby Block’s marvelous wife, Donna. And my dear friend Noelle’s beloved father, Dan Sullivan, who succumbed to lung cancer secondary to Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

Noelle’s father (like Dana Reeve, 44 and Andy Kauffman, 35) was one of the 17,000 people who die from lung cancer every year in this country who never, ever smoked.  Where is their parade? Where can I buy a colored ribbon magnet for my car?

Other prominent causes of death in the U.S. include stroke (135,000) respiratory illnesses (like emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, 128,000) Alzheimer’s disease (75,000) diabetes (71,000) and the flu (53,000) none of which enjoys the kind of media attention and generous funding that breast cancer does.

The National Cancer Institute is one of the eleven agencies of the National Institutes for Health, a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services.  The N.I.H. allocates approximately 2.5 billion dollars a year towards research for the treatment of heart disease. The N.C.I. funds six billion dollars a year towards cancer research. So, even though twenty percent more Americans die of heart disease, it gets less than half the funding cancer does.

In a 2008 piece for the New York Times, Tamara Parker Pope delineated the amounts that NCI spent “per diagnosis” and “per death” in the most prevalent cancers. Prostate cancer got one of the smallest amounts per diagnosis, a mere $1318. But because the prognosis of prostate cancer is generally not fatal, the amount is a whopping $11,298 per death.  Colon cancer research gets $2361 per diagnosis, or $4,566 per death. Pancreatic cancer, reflecting its sad death-sentence nature, gets $2297 per diagnosis, which works out to $2200 per death. Lung cancer (remember 160,000 deaths a year) gets the worst funding of all– $1,518 per diagnosis, $1,630 per death.

And breast cancer? Breast cancer’s allocation is $2596 per diagnosis, or $13,452 per death.  The total amount of funding NCI provides to finding effective treatment of lung cancer is $261 million dollars a year. The total amount they provide for finding effective treatment of breast cancer is $538 million dollars.

This is not the money from the pink sneakers or the walk-a-thons or “DVDs for the Cure.” This is money collected from taxpayers to be allocated by the federal government. Given that this is government funding, it might be reasonable to suppose that it be allocated in accordance with the number of people afflicted by type of cancer. It’s not. Perhaps it is allocated by the deadliness of the particular cancer?  Nope. It’s allocated on the basis of the strongest lobbying efforts. There’s something morally wrong with that.

Then there’s the money from all the other sources, the “pink” money. The money from the Canadian telephone company, from the sales of pink Snuggies, pink Barbies, pink golf clubs, pink m & ms, tickets on Delta’s pink Boeing 747.

The revenue stream for the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure in 2009 was $298,685,007.  (Or about $7,467 per death.) Since 1982 they have funneled tens of billions (that’s with a “b”) into breast cancer research and awareness. Do they have any answers yet? The sad truth is no. Though the Centers for Disease Control reports a one percent downturn in both cancer diagnosis and deaths across the board, there has not been any significant improvement made in the area of breast health.

Though many people know the name “Susan G. Komen,” (and have supported the organization, either intentionally or unwittingly), most couldn’t tell you who she is or was.

Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1977 at the age of 33, Susan Komen died three years later. Her younger sister, Nancy Goodman Brinker launched the foundation in her sister’s memory in 1982. On the 25^th anniversary of the organization, the name was changed to “Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure,” and adopted the explicit (and utterly unattainable) mission to “end breast cancer forever.”  Such a pie-in-the-sky goal would seem to indicate a basic lack of understanding of the mechanism of any cancer.  They might as well express a desire to farm unicorns.

But their supposedly naïve expressed goal to “end breast cancer forever” is actually something far more cynical. They know that there will be no “ending breast cancer forever.” By hoisting such a lofty and impossible goal they can go on raising money forever, and they want to because as it turns out the commercialization of breast cancer research is very big business.

It used to be that October shopping meant autumnal colors, or orange and black for Halloween. Not any more. Take a look down the cosmetics aisle of any drugstore and what do you see? Pink. There are pink tennis balls (promising 15 cents per can donation to “a breast cancer research organization.”). There are Lean Cuisine boxes sporting a printed pink ribbon. (There’s actually no donation associated with these at all. But there’s a notice on the box directing you to the Lean Cuisine website, where you can buy a pink Lean Cuisine lunch tote, and five dollars of that price goes to Susan G. Komen.) There are pink treadmills, pink appliances, NFL players in pink cleats, pink stationery, even fishing guides on the Madison river in a pink driftboat. Pink pink pink pink.

“Don’t get me started about the “pink” money,” my friend Kelinda wrote. “I left the cancer center to work in mental health . . . night and day difference in funding.”

A woman commenting on a story in the Boston Globe about the pink phenomenon wrote: “The pink ribbon is one thing, but pink everything is way, way too much. My mother survived with breast cancer for 12 years and if I thought for one minute that a pink blender would have helped her cause I would have gone out in a heartbeat and bought one. But it doesn’t help the patient, only the corporation.”

There’s the rub. Corporations are making a lot of money off of breast cancer, and as a woman in a Toronto Globe and Mail said “It’s the commercialization of my disease.” Breast cancer research groups and activists have coined the term “pinkwashing” to apply to corporations that they feel are trying to boost their own image through breast cancer fundraising, even though they manufacture products that may (or may not) contribute to the incidence of breast cancer. Considered “pinkwashing” are BMW’s one-dollar-donation-per-test-drive  (because cars contribute to air pollution) the pink branding of many cosmetic companies (because wearing makeup can be harmful to your health) and Kentucky Fried Chicken’s pink bucket campaign, in which Yum! Brands donated fifty cents per pink bucket.

The chief objection to the KFC fundraising seemed to center on the concern that eating fried chicken isn’t healthy, and that given the location of many KFC restaurants in low-income areas that Yum! Brands was promoting unhealthy eating on the back of breast cancer awareness. (Gee, maybe they should have been raising money for heart disease. That seems like a more direct link.)

However, it is important to note that through this campaign Yum! Brands made a two million dollar donation to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. (And they sold about sixty million dollars worth of chicken in the process.) Talk of “pinkwashing” or not, Susan G. Komen Foundation lent their name to the promotion and they took the money, so they are as culpable as the businesses with whom they climb into bed.

Last Christmas I unwrapped a pink Cuisinart hand mixer, and my heart sank.  I wanted the mixer, it wasn’t that. (I have a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer, but sometimes (like whipping cream) that’s more mixer than you need.) The Cuisinart is an excellent mixer. I absolutely hated the fact that it was pink. Even before I’d looked into how much money is funneled into breast cancer research, even when I only suspected that companies were probably making an obscene amount of money on these special pink items, they felt exploitive to me. (Cuisinart gives three percent of the purchase price to Susan G. Komen, so about two bucks for my mixer.)

I looked at that mixer in my hands and I thought about how breast cancer gets so much attention and the other cancers so little. I wondered what it would feel like to have breast cancer and see so many people making so much money off of it, and I put the mixer away deep in the back of the cupboard.

Then one day I had cause to use it, and as I was fitting the beaters, I thought about how breast cancer activism and marketing has stolen pink from us. I’ve had some great pink things. A favorite pair of lace-up leather boots, pink-striped pajamas, pink lipstick, pink peonies, pink socks, a pink mohair sweater.

Pink used to make us think flamingos and bubble gum and cotton candy.  Pink should be ballet slippers and Peter Seller’s panther, pink ladies and strawberry ice cream.  That’s when I decided that my pink mixer would be the pink of pink cadillacs, of baby hats, a froth of tutu, Memphis’ Pink Palace.

We can be “tickled pink,” or “in the pink.” Let us all be pinkos and let none of us get pink slips. We can grow pinks and eat at Pink’s Hot Dog stand, listen to Pink Floyd and sleep on pink sheets. (Or get our stock quotes from them.) There is summertime, with pink watermelon, your dog’s pink tongue, her pink collar.  There are pink collar jobs, usually held by women.

And there’s the pink triangle. The Nazis made homosexual prisoners in concentration camps wear pink triangle badges. 15,000 pink-triangle wearing men were annihilated during the Holocaust. In the 1970s, the pink triangle was reclaimed by gay activists and re-invented as a symbol of gay pride. (As a side note, the Nazis had a wide variety of colored triangles: red for political prisoners and liberals, green for criminals, blue for foreigners, purple for Jehovah’s witnesses, black for gypsies, the mentally-ill, alcoholics, pacifists, and lesbians and yellow for Jews.)

The American Cancer Society has an official roster of colors for the various cancers, some are a little thoughtless: yellow for bladder cancer, black for melanoma, gray for brain cancer. Lung cancer doesn’t have a color, just “clear.” Clear t-shirts? No wonder they’re not marching. And pink for breast cancer.

Except that we don’t have to go along. Fight to reclaim pink, all the Crayola colors from Carnation  Pink (1949) to Ultra Pink and Shocking Pink (1972) Tickle Me Pink (1993) Pink Flamingo, Piggy Pink and Pink Sherbet (1998).  Don’t let your daughters grow up to think that pink means fear and fighting and chemotherapy. Sing of Little Pink Houses and dream of pink elephants.  Tell your kids to turn down the P!nk CD. You can be pink with embarrassment with talk of pink canoes and pink sausages.

Give directly to charities that are important to you. Donate to heart disease research. Make a gift to fight specific cancers. Give to your local animal shelter. Spend your money to end domestic violence. Breast cancer research has already had more than its fair share of our collective wealth.  We’ve been conditioned: we see pink, we think breast cancer. It doesn’t have to be so. Reclaim pink in your own life. Stop feeding the pink pig. Stop buying. Put an end to marketing of breast cancer “awareness,” end the exploitation. Cancer can’t be cured through shopping.

Rumble

a street opera

by Larkin Vonalt

We’ve just turned off the television, the Lakers winning Game Six of the playoffs, when we hear the voices, shrill and angry.

“Don’t you touch me, nigger, I’m done with you! You get this bitch off of me!  Get —  off me!”

A male voice rumbles in answer. We can’t make out what he’s saying, but he’s angry too. I look at my husband.

“They’re at it, again,” he says.

We are assuming that the ruckus is from the brick house on the corner. A young couple lives there and their arguments are frequent and loud, interspersed with booming parties and out-of-season fireworks.

The damn fireworks had been going on all afternoon and into the evening, rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. It makes the dogs crazy.  Earlier that very afternoon a guy the next block over had one go off in his hand.  We heard him screaming until the ambulance enveloped his cry with its own.  It’s a long time to scream, and it was gut wrenching to hear him. Even if it was his own fault.

Looking out the dining room window, I can see fireflies flittering in the treetops.  At dusk, they’d risen from the grass like sparks. The house on the corner is silent.

“No, it’s not the people in the brick house.”  There are more voices now.

“Don’t you come around here, anymore, bitch. You’ve got no business, here!”

“Get the hell away from me, you ho. You better be watching your own man, you just stay away from-.”

“He ain’t yo’ man, you stupid—” There’s a loud slap, followed by screaming.

The women are on the lawn of the house across the street.  “It’s Garrett’s,” I tell my husband.

You can only see through our front door in a place about four feet off the floor where there is a flaw in the frosted glass.

“Don’t look through there, they’ll see you,” my husband says.

He’s right, you can’t look through that door without being backlit, hunched over to peer out the dime-sized area of clear glass.

Garrett Wilkerson had been the first person to welcome us to the neighborhood. He’d done some handyman type work for the house’s former owner and when he came over to introduce himself, he explained that he’d been asked to “keep an eye on the house.”  In fact, he only had one eye. The other was clouded, the result of an industrial accident years ago. A one-eyed man asked to keep an eye on the house. For the longest time, I couldn’t get my head around that. Now, when I thought of Garrett I didn’t think of his eye at all.

He’d grown up in the rambling white frame house across the street and lived there still with his brother Junior.  When we first came to the neighborhood, his mother Miss Pearl still lived there, but she has since gone on to Assisted Living. She wouldn’t be pleased with the rumble now spilling out across her front porch and on to the lawn.

“It’s that woman, again isn’t it? That woman Junior was involved with,” my husband says.  A car door slams and I peek out to see a little white car pull away from the curb and roar away.

“Yes, I think so.”

The police had been drawn to the Wilkerson’s house several times because of Junior’s lady friend.  Late one winter night, she’d gotten a ride to Junior with a guy she’d met in a Cincinnati nightclub. Turns out the car they rode up in was stolen. When they’d stopped in front of the house, a passing cop had run the tags. In a kind of “kick ass and take names later” operation, everyone in the house had been forced outside in their nightclothes, and handcuffed up against the squad car.

Garrett explained all of this the next day when he came over to return the snow shovel he’d borrowed.

“I told Junior that she wasn’t gonna be nothin’ but trouble, but he doesn’t listen to me.”  Garrett spent some time locked up when he was younger, he doesn’t like trouble.  A few weeks later he reported that Junior “was done with all that.”  Until tonight, presumably.

Our front bedroom looks out across the wide avenue between us and the Wilkerson’s. I go upstairs, turning off the hall light so that I will not be seen in the open window. It isn’t nosiness that sends me there (okay, well maybe a little) so much as concern.  They are still shouting across the street, and too often on this side of town, arguments end in a hail of bullets.

The scene before me could not have been set any better by August Wilson.  A middle-aged man leans against a porch pillar, his arms crossed. Another man sits on the front steps. In the yard, half a dozen women are in a loose circle. Many stand with their hands on their hips.  In the dark, I can’t quite make out their faces. We know Garrett so well now that I would recognize him even in the dark. He is not upon this stage.

One of the women slaps the other and she is shoved, hard, across the lawn. A man standing in the shadows steps forward to catch her, wrapping her up in his arms and holding her there.  The slapped woman is screaming at the pair.

“Bitch, I’ll fuckin’ kill you—“

That’s enough for me.  I take the cell phone out of my pocket and turning my back to the window to shield the lit screen from view, I dial 911. Later I will learn that my husband is calling the cops too.

I explain the situation carefully to the 911 operator.  She is asking me questions about us, and our telephone number and did we want the officers to come by our house too?

“No, no, no. These people are our neighbors. We like them. We just don’t want anything awful to happen, and things are definitely heating up over there.”

“Okay, I’ll make a note of that. We’ve got cars on the way.”

The first car to arrive isn’t the cops though. It’s the little white car that had peeled out ten minutes before. Oh shit. When people leave an argument and come back again it often means they’re coming back with a gun. Shit, shit, shit.

Within seconds though, the police arrive, running lights only, no sirens. Blue red blue red blue red blue red blue red blue.  When I see the officers get out of the car, I laugh a little. They’re white.  White men wading in to a hornet’s nest of angry black women.

But they move slowly, hands off their weapons, palms forward, fingers spread.  “Now, let’s just settle down,” one says, but he says it gently, like he’s talking to a group of small children. Blue red blue red blue red, the lights flash.

On the street, another officer stands next to the driver of the white car, a woman, as it turns out. She’s holding a sleepy toddler in her arms.

Junior’s former lady friend, sobbing now, walks with a cop back to the car, their faces colored alternately blue and red in the flashing lights.

“Kiss the rings, bitches!” she turns and yells at the women watching her go.  The officer pats her shoulder and she shrugs it off angrily. “Don’t you touch me!”

Another woman yells something back from the steps, but the catcall goes unanswered. Junior’s old girlfriend allows herself to be helped into the passenger seat of the little white car, while the other woman tucks the baby into a car seat. They leave in a more measured pace, given the gaggle of police cruisers still lining the avenue.

The other officers retreat down the steps, gently, gently. The blue and red lights stop. Sitting on the edge of the porch, the aggrieved woman, the one who’d been slapped,  begins to scream and howl. A cop trains his car spotlight on her, sitting there, rage pouring out into the summer night.

One of the officers approaches the shrieking woman.

“Now, come on. It’s late,” he tells her. “People are trying to sleep.” She nods at the cop, stands up and stomps off into the house, Junior on her heels.  Who would have figured that Junior, an ordinary-looking fifty-something black man would have these kind of problems?

The cops are getting back in their cars, doors slamming. One cruiser drives away at high speed, lights flashing, sirens blaring. There’s some kind of trouble somewhere else, but the others don’t follow.

On the porch, the man still lingers against the pillar watching the women on the lawn.

“Did you hear what that bitch called me? I shoulda yanked her in a knot.”

“That ho. Who does she think she is anyway. That brother is lucky to be rid of her, crazy bitch.”

“Did you see when she slapped—I couldn’t believe it”

They are playful now, shadow boxing each other. One pretends to push; the others spin away, all grace.  A big girl in a pale yellow sundress sings a line, all gospel and soul.

“Damn, she’s gonna sing now. Girl, don’t sing.”

“I can sing if I want to.”

“Oh Lordy, let’s go inside, it’s la-a-a-te girlfriend.”  The women begin to filter across the lawn, and up the porch steps.

The girl in the yellow sundress turns and faces the street. Can she see me in the window? Perhaps Tony next door is sitting out on his porch.

“Jeeeesus loves me, this I know,” she sings. It isn’t the jaunty Sunday school hymn I learned. It is something far more beautiful than that.

“For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong; they are weak, but He is strong.”  Her face is tipped to the sky, her arms flung wide.

“Yes! Jesus loves me! Yes! Jesus loves me!,” she belts out, “Yes! Jesus loves me . . . . . “

And then, with a sweet hush, she finishes “For the Biiiiible. Tells. Me. So.”  The last note hangs for a moment in the summer night. She turns and walks up the steps into the house.

Shrouded in the window across the street, I want so much to applaud.

Lobster Songs

by Larkin Vonalt

JC, this one’s for you.

On Saturday morning, I got up early and went out. I drove 12 miles to an upscale grocery in the suburbs, stood in a long line, chatted with people, bought three lobsters, stood in another long line to have them cooked, brought them home (12 more miles), took one to pieces, used it to make a lobster omelet for my husband who took three bites and said “I don’t care for this.”

That’s the story. My husband objects to this story. He says that he ate “half” the omelet and that’s more than three bites. It’s more than three bites if you’re two years old. We’re talking two eggs and about a third of a cup of a lobster. How many bites can there be?  Anyway, I finished eating it for him and he thinks that’s adequate compensation.

It was a great dilemma for me whether or not to buy the lobster in the first place. We’re in the midst of a serious family crisis involving our grown-up daughter. We need every dollar, so who am I to go frittering away the stuff on things so inessential as lobsters? And yet, they were only $10. That’s three times what they would be on the Island.  But this is land-locked Ohio, where the only lobsters usually available are those miserable creatures stacked in grocery store tanks.

I sort of remembered that when we were newly wed in Montana that my husband humored me with a special Lobster dinner date at the Grand hotel the next town over. Larry the owner had gotten a bushel of lobsters shipped in from Boston and of course they cost the earth. They’d been cooked too long and were tough. Then there was all that business with plastic bibs and drawn butter and linen tablecloths and some kind of terrible white wine.

I know that there are other songs the lobster sings, and thinking that those might elicit more enthusiasm from my spouse, I head down the garden path to the car.

The parking lot of the upscale grocery is very full. Christmastime full. Last year they were out of lobsters in two hours. Inside, the line runs past the machine where they make the fresh mozzarella, along the deli case promising an English Ploughman’s lunch, past the island of organic strawberries ($6 a quart) up to the bakery cases full of petit fours and tiramisu. I find my place at the end, behind a man in a gray t-shirt. He isn’t particularly hairy, but from behind his shape makes me think of a silverback gorilla.

The line is long, but it’s moving quickly. A man comes by with a pad and a pencil. Is there anything I’d like from the deli while I’m waiting? I’d love a stack of pancakes, but that doesn’t seem likely so I just smile and shake my head. “No thanks.”

A foreign woman comes along with a bottle of white wine (“on sale today for just eleven dollars”) offering samples. I can see in the line ahead of me that plenty of people have taken her up on it.

“Not at nine in the morning, thanks just the same.”

“Well,” the woman says. “It’s nearly nine-thirty.”

We’ve rounded the corner, and I can see the mound of lobsters up ahead, stacked up on a fixture like so many little brown grapefruit. I see the drill: tell the man how many you want, he puts them in a bag and you take the bag to the cashier, and if you like you can stop outside and have them cooked. I’m glad I don’t have to look them in their little eyes (on stalks, yet) and choose. You, and you, and you. Your luck ran out today, lobsters. Really, though, their luck ran out some time ago.

In front of the pile of lobsters is a conventionally handsome young man.  He could be a day trader or a hedge fund manager, but he is dressed very improbably in a polo shirt and a pair of melon-colored foul weather bibs. The press release from the grocery had promised that there’d be someone from the lobster boat on hand, but this is one super clean lobsterman.

“Three,” I tell the other man, the one packaging the lobsters, and I look away, down the wine aisle, as he chooses. He hands me the bag (white, with a red lobster on the side) and smiles. I take it and make a beeline for the cashier. When the bag rustles in my hand, I feel slightly ill. That’s ridiculous, I know. Look at all the people standing in line to pay for their white bag of arthropods. Over in that line a mother and her daughter, who looks about eight, are delighting over the antics of their little rustlers. I mean, what is the matter with me? It’s not like we’re leading veal calves up to the checkout.

A nice woman about my age, which means not as young as we used to be, opens up her check stand and motions me over.

“There are three,” I say, and I can hear the apology in my own voice. “I wish I could just get a ticket or something in here and pick up the cooked ones outside,” I confess. “I can’t stand feeling them moving around in the bag.”

“I know,” the woman commiserates. “I can’t either.”

Outside, there’s another line of people waiting to get their lobsters cooked.  Though this line is shorter, it’s slower, the cooking and cooling of lobsters being a bit more complex than just packing them in a bag.  I am sandwiched between a couple who moved here from New Jersey and a woman who grew up in Wiscasset, Maine and is now talking to her mother on the cell phone.  It seems the lobster guy knows the man who runs the local lobster pound. (That’s lobster-wholesaling operation, by the way, not where they take stray crustaceans.)

“Brendan Ready,” the woman is saying into her phone. “Yes, he says he knows Albert.”

At the front of the line, under a white tent, lobsters are being poured from bag to kettle and fished from the kettle into a trunk full of crushed ice and water. There’s a kind of festival atmosphere, and if you saw a photograph of the scene you might think it was taken on the coast somewhere. Standing there though leaves no doubt that we are smack dab in the middle of Ohio.

Brendan Ready is mingling with the crowd, answering questions like “How long do I cook them at home?” (Fifteen minutes.) And “How do I keep them alive until it’s time to cook them” (Put them in a crisper under damp newspaper.) And “Do you ever get sick of lobster?”  He laughs.

“No, I never get sick of it. I could eat lobster for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”  Later I will look up the “Catch a Piece of Maine” phrase that’s emblazoned on his polo shirt. It turns out to be a company in Portland that seems to have made a very successful business selling the idea of a sustainable fisheries model through direct marketing and online sales. Website photos of the company’s other lobster boat captains include those of men who look like they do go down to the sea in ships.

Mr. and Mrs. New Jersey are discussing with Miss Wiscasset the different eating habits of people when confronted with a lobster on a plate. Miss W. is shocked at the people who don’t eat every last bit.

“Well, not the brain of course,” she says, referring to a collection of ganglia that amounts to about the same as a grasshopper’s brain. We all take great relief that a brain that size is not contemplating the meaning of life as it’s tossed into a pot of boiling water.

“I can’t believe some people who just eat the tail and the claws and throw the rest out,” she continues. “There’s meat in the legs, and the tomalley is a great delicacy.” Mr. and Mrs. Jersey don’t look quite convinced.

“Well, sometimes there’s just so much lobster that you don’t have time to mess with much beyond the claws and the tail,” I say. They all look at me as if they hadn’t noticed that I’d been standing there next to them for the last fifteen minutes. “I grew up on Prince Edward Island. We ate a lot of lobster.”

We are at the head of the line now and Mr. and Mrs. New Jersey hand over their two lobsters in a bag, and someone puts two other cooked lobsters in a bag and off they go. Before I know it, I have three cooked lobsters in a bag in my hand and I am headed for the car. The three I carried from inside the store, feeling their every rustle in my viscera, those have just been dispatched to lobster heaven, and in fifteen more minutes, when I am nearly home, they will be sent home with someone else.

There was a lot of lobster for us on the Island. My stepfather was a doctor there, and at times one lobsterman or another would turn up with a bushel of lobsters fresh from the pot.  I remember one afternoon the lobsters arrived very much alive. A large pot was set to boil on the old stove and my stepsister and I tossed them in a few at a time. Though the claws were pegged with wooden plugs, the lobsters were still lively and could easily twist from your hand.

“I’d like to be, under the sea in an octopus’ garden, in the shade . . .” I sang, tossing the flailing lobster in headfirst. Splash! Children, if not cruel, are certainly callous.

Those little wooden pegs, as it turns out, were the sole industry of the tiny Acadian town of West Pubnico, Nova Scotia, where they were hand-whittled. It was an invention that revolutionized the lobster industry, and in the 1930s West Pubnico rightfully declared itself “The Lobster Plug Capital of the World.”

Unfortunately the pegs broke through the membrane of the lobster flesh and allowed for bacteria to collect there, a potential source of contamination. By the mid-eighties, 500 million wooden plugs later, the last of the pegs are gone, replaced with rubber bands.

The bands, like the pegs before them, make the lobsters not only easier to handle, but keeping them from killing and eating each other.

“Oh,” you say with dawning awareness. In fact that’s one of the reasons lobsters are not farmed like oysters and shrimp and salmon. The other is that it takes five to seven years for a lobster to reach market size and that’s a long time to be feeding something that keeps trying to eat the rest of your inventory.

Lobsters are sorted and banded on the boat, using a tool that looks something like needle nosed pliers to stretch the strong bands over the claws. This is a point where the little beasts can lose their claws, making them culls. Claws get caught, break off, and lobsters will sometimes shoot off their own claws. (There should be a joke I could make here, especially since a claw-less lobster is called a “pistol,” but it just won’t come.)

The Commercial Fisheries News has advice to minimize claw loss due to banding: “Hold the lobster in one hand by the base of the carapace while banding with the other hand. If the lobster is too large to hold in one hand, place the lobster on a surface and hold securely. Both of these options give the lobster a sense of security, for it is not dangling in mid-air.”

Lobster traps (also called “lobster pots” which leads to all manner of semantic confusion) are baited with flesh: herring, hotdogs, chicken necks, mackerel. A 1997 study in Prince Edward Island found that lobsters caught with mackerel were weak and lethargic. Perhaps it’s their version of a turkey dinner.

After the second world war, a company called LobLure (not to be confused with contemporary lobster scent bait of the same name) experimented with a wide spectrum of artificial bait ranging from women’s sanitary pads soaked in herring oil, bricks marinated in kerosene and, inexplicably, white coffee mugs.

The bait bag is tied to the sill in the kitchen, that’s the first chamber of a lobster trap, the one before the parlor. Some traps have more than one parlor. Wooden traps are still in use, though wire mesh has become popular. All of them are to have a door large enough to let the immature lobster recognize the error of his ways and show himself out.

When the traps are pulled, “shorts” and berried hens are thrown back, the others are sorted and banded; or if you’re lucky and they’re cooking on the Miss Jeanne M., are thrown straight into the pot.

An average “hen” lobster will produce 8000 eggs or “berries” at a time. It takes ten months for the “berries” to hatch into baby lobsters, or “crickets” as they’re sometimes called, and the colder the water the longer it takes. For every 50,000 eggs it is estimated that only two will survive to market size. All the lobstermen throw back the hens with eggs, along with the crabs and occasional eel that makes their way to the parlor.

Dr. Jelle Atema from the Boston Marine Biology Laboratory describes the mating of lobsters as “poignant” and involving a gentleness that is “almost human.”

When the hen is ready to mate, she seeks out the male of her choice in his lair, Dr. Atema explains.  There she molts, shedding her shell to expose “her naked vulnerability.” (Atema’s words, certainly not mine.)

At that point the male could either mate with her or just eat her, but he chooses the former, turning the hen’s vulnerable body over unto her back. The male lobster, all dominance in hard shell, pointy legs and mouthparts, inserts his first pair of swimmerets, which are rigid and grooved, and passes his sperm into the female’s soft body. Dr. Atema observes that the female lobster will remain in the safety of the male’s den for about a week until her new shell hardens.

No matter what you’ve seen on television, lobsters do not mate for life.

To ensure not being pinched by the lobster en route from trap to sorting table (or again, if you’re lucky, traveling trap to boiling pot) the lobster must be held by its carapace, the long solid shell between head and wickedly articulated tail. Being smacked by the under side of their flipping tail hurts almost a much as being pinched. It doesn’t take long to pitch one in the pot, though and lobster eaten on the boat where it was caught has no match in any restaurant.

Traps are marked with buoys identified by the lobsterman’s license number. Occasionally whales get caught up in the lines between traps and buoys, other times the lines are cut, by storm or mishap or rival, leaving the “ghost trap” on the floor of the sea to go on catching lobsters forever and ever, amen.

Giving lobsters a sense of security. Tender mating rituals and ten months to produce the youngsters (crickets!). Kitchens and coffee cups! No wonder we have such mixed feelings about consigning them to their deaths in a vat of roiling seawater and steam.

Even Alice in Wonderland is loathe to admit that every lobster she’s ever known is one she’s eaten, choosing her words very carefully as the Mock Turtle teaches her the Lobster Quadrille.  Will you, won’t you, won’t you, will you, won’t you join the dance?

Some “animal rights” radicals have repeatedly brought up the issues of cruelty (though really how seriously can you take an organization that calls fish “sea kittens”) and various theories have been floated in response to make cooking lobster more “humane.” Some suggest a gentle steaming.  Others suggest putting the lobster in the freezer for a few minutes to lull it into sleepy complacency. The truth of the matter is those are worse.

Lobsters die immediately upon contact with boiling water. Any residual twitching is a nervous response, not unlike (but less sophisticated than) the chicken running around after her head’s been cut off.  As for lobsters “screaming” in the pot, they have no vocal cords and thus no way to scream. The sound is made by air escaping the carapace.

Still, though, we don’t generally handle our food while it’s still alive. (Okay, oysters, in fact are still “alive” while traveling down my throat, but it’s really a stretch to anthropomorphize an oyster.) People try hard to disassociate the living lobster from the lobster recipe, even going as far to refer to them as “bugs,” and insects and lobsters are both arthropods. Yet whole threads exist on websites like Chowhound musing the question of how to kill a lobster.

Some recipes call for raw lobster meat—and it’s true that if you use “boiled” lobster meat in puff pastry, bisque, omelets and the like that the meat will be tougher. I’ll just have to live with that, because I am not willing to take up a cleaver to butcher a living creature even if said creature is just a step or two above earthworm on the evolutionary scale.  I’d rather have someone else dump it in a vat of boiling water and go on in my ignorant bliss.

The last time I’d had a lobster was October 2007 at the Red Lobster restaurant in Rapid City, South Dakota. I know, I know. Lobsters start to die little by little as soon as they’re taken from the sea. Their life in a tank is a kind of purgatory. Occasionally a particularly large or charismatic lobster will be “rescued” by a customer to be returned to the ocean. They rarely survive the trip back.

Of course, the Red Lobster restaurant charged “market price” which would have paid for two other entrees, and they brought out the melted butter and the bib. But they forgot to crack the tail with a kitchen knife and they couldn’t find the crackers. I asked the waiter to take it back to open the shell. When he brought it back, it seemed they’d taken a hammer to it. We didn’t end up paying for it finally, but even so, the lobster was so rubbery it was hardly edible. We had to go by a burger stand on the way back to the hotel, which is what we should have done in the first place.

Lobsters used to be so plentiful on the New England coast that after a storm, they’d pick them up on the beach and distribute them as food for widows and orphans. They made a regular appearance on the tin plates of prison inmates. Some employment agreements stipulated that the employee would not be made to eat lobster more than twice a week. Then, around the middle of the 19^th century, someone figured out how to successfully transport lobsters to urban centers around the country and fresh lobster became a luxury food. Which brings me back to the remaining three pounds of fresh lobster (at $6.50 a pound) in my kitchen in Dayton, Ohio.

I can hear the shower go off upstairs. Carrying a cooked lobster in one hand, I tiptoe up the stairs, and standing to one side, use the lobster’s claw to scratch on the door to the bathroom.

Scratch scratch scratch.

“What is it?” my teenage son asks from within.

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

“Who’s there?”

Scratch scratch scratch.

“Yes?! What IS it?”

Scratch scratch scratch.

The door flies open and I wave the lobster at him.

“Argh! Mom! You killed it didn’t you?!”  I’m laughing so hard I can hardly catch my breath.

“No, no—ha, ha, ha” I rattle the lobster gently. “They killed it for me.”  He rolls his eyes and shuts the door.

In the kitchen, I whack the length of the tail with a chef’s knife. There’s so much tomalley I’m worried that something’s awry. I know some people love the dark green goop, that which serves as liver and intestines for the lobster, but it’s not my thing. Plus, with the rise of toxins in the ocean, I’m not keen on ingesting the lobster’s filtering system. I rinse the tail meat in the sink.

The claws have a kind of milky white jelly in them, that’s the cooked “blood” of the lobster. It’s not dangerous, but has little taste and I rinse that off too.

The last lobster is also overly full of tomalley. I wonder how many calls the upscale grocery has received from people concerned that their lobster was bad. I’ve never seen tomalley in this kind of quantity, but maybe that’s the norm now.

While I’m pulling apart one of the claws, the lobster draws blood as the sharp edge of the pincer slices my thumb.

“Dammit!” I drop the claw in the sink and raise my thumb against my mouth. “Ouch.” I have to go wash my hands and find the band-aids before I can return to making the lobster salad.

Lobster salad is for lobster rolls, my idea of culinary heaven and my last attempt to persuade my husband and son into the league of lobster lovers. It’s the meat of two lobsters, a teaspoon of green onion, a stalk of celery chopped fine, the squeeze of half a lime, a teaspoon of hot sauce and a tablespoon or two of mayo—just enough to bind it together.

This is the kind of lobster I dream about eating. If I were on death row, this is the meal I would ask for. Lovingly I spoon the mixture into the grilled-in-butter hot dog rolls. My husband eats one, but there’s not much enthusiasm. Julian seems to be finishing his, so I offer him another.

“Uh, no thanks, Mom. I’ve had enough.”  When I pick up his plate, I see that he has eaten the lobster roll, but around the lobster, picking out the chunks of meat, which litter his plate.

I give up. I am resigned that lobster will join that pantheon of other things I love but They Will Not Eat. Banana pudding, coconut cream pie, crème brulee, watermelon, summer soups, tomatoes, salad caprese, steak tartare, sushi, clam chowder, mussels in saffron cream sauce, oyster stew and now, lobster.

Long, long ago in Boston, I regularly drove north to Revere Beach for lobster rolls at Kelly’s Roast Beef.  A seaside joint, it’s open nearly every hour of the day (with a two-hour break from three a.m. to five a.m.) every day of the year except Christmas and Thanksgiving. No matter the weather or the season, you walk up to the window and order your lobster roll (some people do get roast beef I guess) and bite down into absolute bliss.

We usually went at night. I don’t remember all the people that went with me to Kelly’s. My ex-husband, I’m sure. I know my mother went at least once because she still talks about it. Girls in summer frocks and combat boots, skinny boys with new tattoos, friends home from Paris and people I could hardly stand; all of us at the window bathed in a pale blue fluorescent glow—the sea stretching out behind us inky black.

I don’t remember all of them because when I think about going to Kelly’s Roast Beef I think about all the times I went there with Joe.  He and I worked together and every day was punctuated with theater, gossip and lunch.  We adored each other, but you know, not like that. Or maybe it was like that. Will you, won’t you, won’t you, will you, won’t you join the dance? I could count on Joe to hold my hand, to hold my head up, to keep me from drowning in self-pity and self-loathing.

He loaned me his leather motorcycle jacket when I needed to wear a leather motorcycle jacket. (And not just any leather jacket, either, but a Schott, like Marlon Brando’s in The Wild One.)  There’s a photo of me somewhere in that jacket, looking just as brave as I needed to look.

Not that there wasn’t trouble in paradise. The worst fight we ever had was over a shower curtain, and it was bad. We didn’t speak for weeks.  And when we did speak again, we got in my Volkswagen and drove to Revere Beach for lobster rolls.

Lobster rolls consumed in companionable silence in the Victorian pavilion across the street, the waves whispering along the shore. We hear the lullaby of the sea, as we go lightly across the sand. We were so beautiful then, and too distracted to even know it. Joe went to New York to be a playwright; I went to the land without lobster.

I haven’t been to Kelly’s in nearly twenty years.

It isn’t the same, quite, eating lobster rolls in the kitchen of my house in Dayton, Ohio, on a summer night, thumb bloodied and bandaged.  With my eyes tightly closed I taste the lobster roll: buttery crispy hot dog bun, cool, tangy dressing, lobster sweet and resilient, redolent in my mouth.  And there it is, the spell of the lobster’s song: I taste and just for an instant, I am again at the edge of the sea.  Will you, won’t you, won’t you, will you, won’t you join the dance?

Working Without a Net

Today I learned that this essay, which was submitted in September for an essay contest (how cheesy, anyway) was not chosen as one of the finalists. And so I am liberated to share it with you, a much better fate for it and me. Thanks to all of you for your continued interest and enthusiasm, both much appreciated. — L.V.

Working without a Net

an examination of “growing up”

by Larkin Vonalt

My mother murmurs in her sleep. I touch her shoulder, whisper her name. She looks up at me in the half-light of the hospital room. I wake her now to say goodnight so she won’t wake up later and wonder where I am.  Bending to kiss her face, I tell her I will see her in the morning, an old childhood spell. If you say it, it must be so.  I would stay later, but the parking garage closes in a few minutes.

My mother is recovering: they have reworked the roadmap of her heart.  It is a serious surgery, but also a routine one. As I push the button for the elevator, exhaustion tumbles over me like a rogue wave.

It is a wave of profound relief, of fatigue, of loneliness.  My mother’s sisters have been here too, and her brothers and cousins and friends, but they are all at liberty to go home and think about something else. I wish I could call my father, but my father is dead. It’s a long walk to the car.

These days, I’ve been thinking about aerialists. How they work with utter faith that all the connections will connect, that the ropes will hold, that they won’t look down, lose their balance and topple. At the circus, there’s a net of course, but out where men and women walk the high wire, out there over Niagara Falls, between the ill-fated towers of the World Trade Center, over the Grand Canyon, there’s no net.

That’s what this feels like: no net. For years, that safety net was such an integral part of my life that I never even really thought about it much.  Most of my life I’ve been proclaiming my independence. From the time I was old enough to walk and climbed out on the porch roof to see what that was like, I was asserting myself. As a kid, I repeatedly got into trouble for going too far, too fast, with the wrong people and never with permission.

As an only child left to my own devices, I explored empty houses, railway viaducts, the view of the world from the back of a horse. I had the moxie of the unvanquished. Even when we moved to England and the lunch ladies made me cry because of the way I held my fork, my stepfather stepped in and set them straight.

Robert Frost wrote cynically that home is where when you have to go there they have to take you in. That wasn’t my home. My home was more akin to that of Max, king of the wild things. When I got home from my adventures, dinner was still hot. Home was where you could get a Band-Aid, a dollar, an oatmeal cookie, and it was where you better be if it was after eight o’clock on a school night.  Even as I struggled against the rules, and the confinement – I wanted to fly! – my sense of confidence grew from knowing the safety net was always there.

Even after coming home meant coming home for the summer, or coming home for Christmas, I relied on my parents. They would help with the rent. I could turn to them for airfare home. Birthdays and holidays brought something wonderful in the mail.  It was almost like being a grown-up.

There were visits filled with a mix of applause and admonition over dinners I never could afford on my own. There were manila envelopes full of clippings, there was plenty of advice and occasionally strenuous objection—at those times I resisted, protesting, “Look, I’m twenty years old, I know what I’m doing!”

Once, when my Volkswagen lost its clutch, I parked it in the landlord’s garage until I could save the money to fix it. Finally after six months of being able to save nothing, I gave up and called my father, and he sent me $350. It turns out it was just the clutch cable: $35. I had money for that! I can’t remember what I used the car repair bailout for now.

One summer when I was 22, I came home for a visit. My job had been difficult; school wasn’t going well, I was in last throes of an awful relationship. I just needed to rest for a bit. When my mother and I pulled into the driveway, before me was a huge painted sign propped up along 30 feet of fence. It read “Welcome Home Baby Girl!”  That night in my childhood bed, I cried with relief at being home. But two days later, I was fractious as a racehorse, wanting to get back to my real life.

I was a girl with two fathers, and when I married, I walked unescorted up the aisle. Not wanting to hurt the feelings of my father or my stepfather, I decided I would make the trip alone. I was a grown woman, after all, how hard could it be?

I watched from the church doors as little girls, my husband’s daughters, danced and spun along the sidewalk in their lawn dresses, the skirts twirling and lifting, the bridesmaids ushering them into procession.

Then they were away, down the aisle in front of me. The Church pianist played the opening notes of Clair de Lune. Those first steps — I might have been a spindly-legged foal; they were so uncertain and shaky. I would not have been more nervous stepping out onto a tightrope. 

Maybe it would have been better to have asked all of them, a phalanx of parents to walk with me to the altar.  Or maybe it was better that I learned I could do it myself, even if I felt a little shaky. There is a kind of exhilaration in being afraid and doing it anyway.

Even newly married, with two children thrown in for good measure, and certainly feeling every inch the adult, I never had to work without the net. If we were short for a family vacation, a check arrived in the mail. Every occasion was marked not just with a stack of presents in a brown cardboard box, but a butter yellow check inside each and every greeting card. We knew the checks would come, and we grew to depend on them.

Then the unthinkable: my stepfather left us one August morning. It was eleven years ago, he was brushing his teeth in a London flat, when he shot away straight to the sun. The coroner said the heart attack was so catastrophic that he was dead before his body hit the floor.

My mother had been with us that summer, and she stayed on, and that part of feeling safe slipped away. The house on the river was gone, there were no more trips to the Florida coast, no more sitting on the porch watching the dolphins play in the water. There were no more funny postcards or elaborate floral arrangements. Never again the voice on the telephone, seeing what I needed, what I celebrated, what I mourned.

Then my father died of cancer, not unexpectedly, and yet his death took my breath away. This was the person who had been my rock, my right arm, one of my very best friends. He supported me in every venture I took on, whether hare-brained or brilliant, never letting on which one he thought it was. His death left me feeling not like I had slipped from a high wire, but like I had become untethered from a spacecraft, utterly alone in a strange place, with no idea how I might get home.

Yet, I did get home. I put one foot after another across that chasm of grief, and arrived on the other side. Now there is nothing left of my brilliant childhood but me and my mother, and that relationship is changing. I am learning to take care of her, to make sure she has what she needs, to watch her while she’s sleeping, to cast our old childhood spells for safe-keeping.

So I learn to work without a net, to stand on my own two feet, and in turn, my husband and I become the same for our children, for our son who is “Nearly fifteen, for Pete’s sake, why can’t I go” and for our eldest daughter who, though she is all grown up herself, needs us in particular right now, and for our younger daughter, who pretends not to know us, but knows in her heart that we are always there for her, as she flies through the air from trapeze to trapeze to trapeze.

The Lost Girl

This piece originally appeared in June 2008 on True Crime Weblog, the website of noted crime writer Steve Huff, and appears here with his kind permission. This case remains unsolved. 

by Larkin Vonalt

The woman is screaming into the television camera. There are words coming out of her mouth, but all you really hear is rage. Rage, and despair.  The pain is writ so large upon her face that even at a distance one cannot help turning away out of respect. The camera pans from the shattered woman back to a twenty-something television reporter. The reporter smiles, embarrassed, and with a tilt of her head, brightly offers her reprise to the night’s top story.

Hours before, Tammy Walker trod the hallways of the city morgue, her own green mile, to identify the body of her daughter. 77 days earlier she and her husband filed a missing person report for Heather Nicole Walker, age 18. The police, by their own admission, never looked for her.  Heather’s family and friends ran off flyers of the missing girl, posting them everywhere they could think of.  Now it was all for nothing.  When they’d turned out the lights the night before, there had still been hope, dangling on a string. There was still a chance that Heather would come banging through the door of the house on Gummer Street. Today, with the rising of the sun, that string snapped.

This evening Tammy Walker has returned to the alley where her daughter was found in a trashcan. Surely screaming can be the only reasonable response. 

Dayton, Ohio is a city of 157,000 people. The crime rate falls somewhere between that of Baton Rouge and Rochester though violent crime in Dayton is significantly less than both those cities.  Last year the Chief of Police was pleased to tell the media that Dayton had enjoyed its second straight year of diminishing crime. 

In the days following the discovery of Heather Walker’s body, the police defended their lack of action.

“Many adults go missing throughout the year,” Sgt. Chris Williams told the Dayton Daily News, adding that  “very few” turn out to be victims of foul play. They offer this information without apology. They are just cogs in a slowly grinding machine, one with no capacity to look for the needle in a haystack that is a girl lost in the streets.

Heather wasn’t the high school valedictorian. She wasn’t an accomplished coed at a prestigious university. When the media speaks of her they don’t use words like “gifted” or “promising” or “popular.” As if death wasn’t insult enough, they drop labels on her like stones: Troubled. Habitual. Runaway.

Heather’s parents had reported her missing before, six times in point of fact. But this time, Robert and Tammy Walker had been emphatic with the police: she had not taken her cell phone, or her wallet. In the past she had always called to let them know she was okay. Not this time. It didn’t matter that Heather’s absence was more sinister this February than on past occasions. She had passed that magic age. 18: you can’t buy a beer, but you can be tried as an adult, serve your country and be liable for your own debts. Oh, and the police won’t look for you anymore.

Mary McCarty, a Dayton Daily News columnist, chastised the police in a May 1 editorial for arbitrarily dismissing reports for missing individuals over 18, citing her own son, a 19-year old High School senior, as evidence of how childlike we still can be at that tender age, suggesting that the “cutoff” might be a little later.   McCarty quotes Kettering, Ohio Police Sgt. Craig Moore deftly sidestepping the issue: “That’s a societal thing; we’re simply following state law as it is written,” Moore said. “That would be a change for the state of Ohio to make.”

The Walkers’ coltish daughter, half-woman, half-child, had early on seized the privileges usually reserved for adults, and did not bridle easily to the very adult responsibilities of raising her young son.  The running away began when she was pregnant and reached epic proportions after Devin was born. The sixth time the police brought Heather home, just over a year ago, she left again ten minutes later. There would not be a seventh time.

Though suburbanites fear the predominantly black west side of Dayton, these blocks—east of Keowee, north of US 35—these are really Dayton’s mean streets. But like the natives of South Boston and the Bronx, the residents of East Dayton take pride in their gritty neighborhood, wearing their survival like a badge of honor. 

Largely white, it is an area plagued with vandalism, theft, prostitution, homelessness, drug abuse and murder. The kids here ape black culture, posing on their MySpace pages and YouTube videos with rolls of cash, guns, bottles of Jagermeister. They imitate the speech, the dress, the swagger of the ghetto. It might be comical if it wasn’t so deadly. They’ve got the rims, the grills, they throw up the signs, pose for photos at the gravesites of their friends.

It isn’t just Heather they mourn, but also Andy Rush, who died Easter Sunday last year, accidentally shot in the head by his best friend, Tommy. His “Moms” had died just a few days before that, of cancer. Younger brother Mikey eulogizes all of them on his My Space profile. A few days ago there was a reference there to Heather, he called her his “future wife;” but to look at the profile now you’d never know they were friends. A guy’s got pressures, you know.

Heather wasn’t much of a diarist; she started four or five MySpace pages, but was never a regular presence there. Even so, the media noted that those pages were  “laced with obscenities.”  On both the pages that she got off the ground, she fusses about Devin’s father, Justin James Holbrook. “And for those bitches who want my baby daddy, go ahead and have him. He may look good to you and everything, but the thing is he has nothing to offer you, he don’t even have anything to offer his own son.”

On one of Heather’s early, abandoned profiles, Justin commented “hey if u ever get on here n check ur shit delete me from ur friends cause i dont want u to know nething bout wat i do so do me a favor n delete me k.” Their son, Devin, was about three months old then, and Heather was out the door as often as not.

It’s the pictures on Heather’s profile that finally provide a real glimpse of the girl behind the pose. Heather, laughing. Heather scowling, and yes, Heather (and a friend) stacking gang signs.  Heather vibrant, her arms bare and smooth, a curtain of shiny hair, a wide, wide grin, goofing for the camera. Heather alive. 

As a juvenile, Heather Walker had brushes with the law; shoplifting a pair of shoes, joyriding in a stolen car, the details carefully spelled out in the local newspaper days after her body was discovered.  There is no record for her as an adult. She had dropped out of Belmont High, but she wasn’t alone in that. Four out of every ten students there don’t make it to graduation.  On “academic watch,” the Dayton public high school features a “computer technology theme,” but has no school website.  93 percent of its students are considered “economically disadvantaged.”

On Wednesday, February 6, Heather is thought to have been on her way to a birthday party for her older brother, Rob. She is seen about 7:30 in the parking lot of Sam’s Market, a down-at-the-heels corner grocery on East Third Street, two miles from home, three blocks from where her body will be found.  By Saturday morning, she has still not come home and her parents turn to the police.  The police follow procedure as for any missing adult, other than those considered “endangered.” They issue a 72-hour alert, and when it expires, they forget about her.

Eleven weeks later, on a warm April morning, three passersby wend their way down an alley half a block off East Third.  One of them spots a pair of shoes hanging out of a city-issued trash bin. Deciding to take the shoes, they cross thirty feet from the alley to the edge of the abandoned building where the green plastic can rests. Reaching for the shoes, they make a horrible discovery. The shoes are still on Heather’s feet.

Heather’s friends bring balloons to the site. Balloons, and stuffed toys. Letters, poems, photographs of their lost friend. It is raining, the notes run, the photos smear, the candles flicker. In the rain, in an alley in a gin-soaked neighborhood, her friends weep, stunned with grief. A photograph of Devin visiting Heather’s shrine shows a beautiful and bewildered little boy.

Heather’s father has mapped his grief upon his chest, an image of Heather; peaceful, contemplative, is newly tattooed there.  Two dozen of his Mixed Martial Arts students file past, their heads bowed. Bushi Combat, where he teaches, honors Heather on their website. All that combat training, and no one to save her.  Robert Walker does not rage into the television camera as his wife does, but it is clear that the death of his baby girl has broken him.

The coroner issues a statement that Heather Nicole Walker had been dead “for a while,” yet her parents identify her in the hours immediately following her discovery. While her father concedes there was decomposition, he ventures that “her head hadn’t been bashed in or anything.” It’s unlikely Heather spent eleven weeks in the trash can, as the mild Ohio spring would have rendered her to state that no one would ask a parent to contemplate.

On the box that houses her ashes, the date of death is March 1, 2008; an estimate arrived at with the help of the medical examiner.  It begs the question. Where was Heather for the 23 nights between February 6 and March 1?  Was she captive? Was she frightened? Was she cold?

No cause or manner of death has been established. There were no signs of trauma on her body. She was not stabbed or shot or strangled. There was no blunt force trauma. Determining asphyxiation after a certain point of decomposition is very difficult. Life isn’t like CSI: lab tests take weeks, sometimes longer, to complete. Sometimes the answers never come.

As if rushing to pre-empt the media’s speculation, Robert Walker muses to a Dayton Daily News reporter that his daughter might have died of a drug overdose. Without the toxicology reports, the Montgomery County Coroner is not willing to make that leap yet.

The Coroner’s office director Ken Betz told the paper that he “cannot support that, because pathologists have not officially determined when and how Heather Walker died.”

If the cause of death is revealed in the toxicology report, it may well put an end to any homicide investigation. Without evidence of having been dosed against her will, the best the D.A. can offer her parents in that circumstance is the possible charge of “abuse of a corpse.” That is, if they ever find anyone to charge.

Drug overdose or not, no one is buying that Heather climbed into a trashcan on her own. Why would someone go to such lengths to conceal an accidental death? Or was their means of disposing of the body some kind of cruel joke?  Though the house near the site is empty, the grass is kept mowed. Heather’s father said he talked to the people who had cut the grass just a few weeks before his daughter’s body was found.  “They said that trash can was not there when they mowed,” he told the Dayton paper. “Someone killed Heather. I am staying on this.”

Heather Walker: daughter, mother, sister, friend.  Not just lost, but stolen.

A Death in the Family, Not Our Own

Observations on the Death of Edward M. Kennedy

My eyes are tired from crying. They feel tight around the edges, and gritty. I don’t know why I’ve been crying, really. I didn’t know the man. I’m sure I voted for him a time or two. But since Wednesday afternoon I’ve curled in my velvet armchair with a tissue in one hand and a cup of tea or a bit of toast in the other and I have watched television and I have wept.

My husband woke me early on Wednesday morning, touching my shoulder. He’s been downstairs to make coffee, watch the morning news. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Senator Kennedy died,” he says quietly, setting a coffee mug on the table next to the bed.

“Oh no,” I mumble, still sleepy, trying to process. That’s right, he’d been ill. Cancer. Some pundits speculated that he might make it back to the hill for the health care vote. No wonder the President wanted to see a vote on the bill before the recess.  “I guess he didn’t have as much time as they thought,” I say to my husband.

Drifting back to sleep, I dream about my father. In the dream, I am sitting with him and with his wife and we are looking at a calendar for this October.  I am trying to work out a time to visit with them again before October comes, and I am asking if Dad will have enough time, if there will still be time then. When I wake up, the coffee is cold. My father has been dead for more than three years, from cancer.

We’d thought there would be a bit more time. I’d said goodbye to Dad just before Christmas, we’d rushed back to Montana so that our 11-year-old son could fulfill the obligations of his role in the school play. Why didn’t the school tell us that someone else could have filled in? Why did we even care?  It doesn’t matter now. There were plans to go back before New Year’s, but on the day after Christmas the call came. 

The dream has left me feeling unsteady.  It was the worst of times, in some ways, that parceling out of Saturdays and holidays and the weeks that may or may not be left. Dad had already been robbed of his speech by then, his larynx taken in an aggressive attempt to stave off a more aggressive cancer. It made the difficult discussions nearly impossible. Emails had gone misunderstood, or unanswered, or sent back too quickly in anger.

I am scattered, unable to work, or concentrate. I can’t get comfortable in my Aeron chair, I keep thinking about the 800 miles between here and Massachusetts. I don’t understand why I want to go.  On most television channels, nothing has changed; it is a normal Wednesday afternoon– soaps, Judge Judy, Ellen deGeneres.  But my husband is watching MSNBC, and there they have begun to bang the funeral drum.

In the kind of fortuitous timing that television producers only dream of, Chris Matthews (the host of Hardball, the man who never lets his guests finish a sentence) has just finished a documentary about the Kennedy brothers, and he has been promoting its debut for Thursday.  They’ve moved the first showing up to Wednesday night, and they will air it every night for the rest of the week. I carry the laptop into the living room to watch the talking heads talk about Ted.

I could catch a 3 a.m. train out of Toledo, Ohio that would get me to South Station at 9 p.m., with a return on Sunday that gets me into Toledo at 11 p.m. It’s a three hour drive from here to Toledo. I can catch a flight on Friday, out of Dayton. Do I really want to spend $350, though? I mean, why is it I want to go?  It’s an 800-mile drive, 13 hours no matter how you cut it. When I picture myself driving to Boston, I am not behind the wheel of my Saab, but rather in the driver’s seat of my 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit. The one I bought new in Brookline, Massachusetts 25 years ago.

Boston. My old town, a hodge podge of memories, pieced and crumpled; some things stand in sharp relief, much more is faded from an 18 year absence.  I might have met Ted Kennedy then, or not. Like Duvall Patrick says at the Memorial Service, “I knew him long before I ever met him.”  I worked campaigns for Mike Dukakis and Mel King and Walter Mondale.  I remember meeting John Kerry and Joe Kennedy. Perhaps I just saw him at a distance. It doesn’t matter.  He belonged to Massachusetts and Massachusetts belonged to him. His death is like that of a distant family member; we grieve regardless.

And there is that other thing, that Kennedy thing. Seeing those patrician faces drawn in sorrow, to hear their strong voices crack and tremble excavates memories, milestones of a childhood in turbulence.  I was not quite two when President Kennedy’s life came to an abrupt close. A Friday, around lunchtime, in Murray Kentucky. My father would have been teaching. Perhaps my mother had put me down for a nap. Though I think I have no memory of the assassination, I’m certain that memory resides within me: my parents bowed with sadness, that sense of order shattered forever.

The June morning after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy I jumped out of bed, six years old, braids flying, ready for another summer day and found the house silent, my parents stunned and weeping, the world turned topsy-turvy once again.

The melody of this death is different, but similar. He is the only brother to have lived anything like a natural life expectancy; a man who must have expected at any time that he might be gunned down by some lunatic. He’d cheated death twice before, in a plane crash that left his aide and the pilot dead; he was pulled from the wreckage with a broken back and negligible pulse.  And again in the notorious car crash that took the life of Mary Jo Kopechne, he was left physically unscathed. When they review his length of life, they compare and we remember, and we grieve again.

Now we are spying on his great barn of a house in Hyannisport. They tell us that last week Teddy was rolled down to his schooner, the Mya, in a wheelchair, and that, somehow miraculously shielded from the press, he was taken for one last sail.  We watch one young grandson (Teddy III, as it turns out) pull faces at the camera crews as he flops and flounces around the driveway, killing time. He’s 11. His hair is to his shoulders. Another grandson, young Max, a year older, comes out in a Navy blazer, khaki shorts and flip-flops. No wonder the world is going to hell in a handbasket, even the Kennedys can’t get their children to cooperate.

The casket comes to the hearse borne by the honor guard, who move precisely in that strange shuffling half-step that looks like they might break out into a Busby Berkeley routine at any minute, though of course they never do.  The family flows out from the house, cascading down the steps and out across the lawn. They stand together for a moment, in a brittle silence as the casket eases into the hearse, and then disperse again, like a spilled drink spreading out across the floor. A couple of the men pat the flank of the funeral coach as they pass by, the way you might pat the neck of a willing horse.

We watch the journey from Hyannisport to the Library, as people line the roads and the overpasses and stop their cars and getting out to stand as the hearse passes by. We watch thousands fill the sidewalk to the presidential library, waiting. They mop their brows in the August heat. I am glad that I decided not to drive out, putting pragmatism over sentiment: my father would have been proud. Later, we watch ordinary men and women, those constituents that Kennedy long championed, file past the flag-draped casket. A few dip in reverence, or make the sign of the cross, hand flashing brow to chest, shoulder to shoulder. Others simply stand and stare.  

Friday is punctuated with real life interspersed with television commentary. I don’t have much to say, though my husband is more and more responding to the unending parade of stories with remarks like “That’s so sad,” or “I had no idea he did that, wasn’t that wonderful.”  The rants of talk radio hosts outrage him. I am just too tired to feel rage, and besides, why would they change their stripes now? Occasionally I help him sort out one of the Kennedy clan from another. Joe. Carolyn. Rory. Patrick.

That evening we tune in to the Memorial Service at the Presidential Library, which MSNBC brings us without commercial interruption. I laugh long and hard at the stories told by John Culver, a former Senator from Iowa who had been Ted’s longtime friend and classmate at Harvard. His account of crewing (fifty years ago) for Kennedy on the Victura (now berthed outside the Library) could have been out of an old Shelley Berman routine. As someone who has been dragged out in heavy weather to sail with someone who promised there was “nothing to it,” I understood his tale very well.  As the stories unfold across the evening, the people who love Ted Kennedy breathe life back into the memory of the man.

We hear about how Kennedy loved to paint, and sing. The “history trips” on which he shepherded his children and his nieces and nephews, escaping from the last one (a camp out) and seeking refuge in the Ritz. We hear of his never-ending concern for the common man, his generosity, his astounding memory for names and faces, and his larger than life gestures. Duvall Patrick tells a story of inviting Senator and Mrs. Kennedy to dinner at their house in the Berkshires. By the time the event rolls around, the Senator has added six or seven more dinner guests, including musicians from nearby Tanglewood, amidst Mrs. Kennedy’s aghast apologies. There’s a familiar bell in that story.

We weep along with Orrin Hatch, and note the catch in Joe Biden’s voice when he talks about the comfort Kennedy brought him after the deaths of Biden’s wife and young daughter in a car accident. We argue gently about what race is Brian Stokes Mitchell. (Black, as it turns out.)  He is there to sing “The Impossible Dream,” but his rendition is so perfect that it doesn’t stir me the way I expected. Perhaps if Willie Nelson had sung it instead.  At the end I sing back to them an occasional snatched phrase of “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.”  The broadcast ends, but the song goes on.

I knew another man who lived like this, larger than life. A man who loved to paint and sing, one alternately adored and despised by those who knew him. The kind of man who invited people to someone else’s dinner party. My mother married him; he became my stepfather who was not quite my father, just as my father became somewhat not my father either. A British physician, he also sailed an enormous schooner (the 62 foot Charlotte Jean, as compared to Kennedy’s 50 foot Mya).

He made me believe I could do anything and he instilled in me a great deal of confidence. That is, when I wasn’t wishing I could crawl under some rug to escape his booming enthusiasm, his demanding standards and all the eyes upon us. He too had never-ending concern for the common man, often treating patients without charging them, should they not be able to pay. He took in the stray, the wounded, the faint at heart and he gave them jobs, a place to sleep (sometimes in the guest room, and if that was full, on the sofa) he challenged them and encouraged them, rode them hard at times to make them better.

The stories about him still are legion. How he drove through the worst snowstorm in 20 years to deliver a baby. How if you admired something he’d give it to you. The way he’d hand off twenty dollar bills to panhandlers in the street. I heard echoes of those stories in the Kennedy library. I know what a man like those men are like, and it makes for wonderful tales, but it’s also a very hard way to live, in the shadow of the Lion. And yet, I would not have been what I am today without him.

He took his leave over ten years ago, his heart exploding in his chest, dead before his body reached the floor, roaring out of this world and into the next. A scientist will tell you that energy is never destroyed, that it is merely transformed into some other sort of energy. His energy was prodigious and it spilled over into more than a year’s worth of strangely comforting if somewhat disturbing array of phenomena. He left quickly, but he did not go gently.

No wonder I weep now.

On the fourth day the cameras train their gaze on the familiar face of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The basilica where Kennedy is venerated is a block down the street from the house of an old friend. When you walked down the hill from his house, towards the college we both attended, it was as if we were walking to the church. Once we reached Tremont, we’d turn and continue down the hill. Online now, he complains bitterly about his freedoms being curtailed due the funeral. He is reminded that the entire government sits in the basilica on this rainy Saturday, all three branches. His inconvenience is a minor thing in light of that. He wonders aloud how the Kopechne family must feel about all this.

Around the corner, on St. Alphonsus, some jerk had come careening through a stop sign and wrecked my little Volkswagen. That was more than twenty years ago. Both my father and stepfather were very much alive then, would be with us another decade, longer. Ted Kennedy too. I didn’t realize how rich I was, back then, afforded the luxuries of sweet time.

Seeing the Bushes and the Carters and the Clintons and the Obamas gathered together in the pews, the rarest of fraternities, drives home again the way in which so many people felt connected to Edward Kennedy, and serves to underscore how they were the closest we ever had to a royal family.  There’s not another political family where we can name most of the siblings and who they married and how each one died and can name at least some of their children, and their accomplishments and their failures. It seems that Al Gore must not have cared much for Uncle Teddy; his absence among the pols is conspicuous.

The boys are deft at eulogizing their father; Teddy Jr. polished enough to set the pundits speculating that perhaps he could carry the Kennedy torch, even though it is Patrick who has a reasonable career in the political spectrum. It was the pundits that thought the older brothers were the brighter lights back when it was Jack and Bobby and Ted, too.  Grandson Teddy (III) is courting the press now that he intends to follow in Grandpa’s footsteps, he says. When, in the line of cousins, he steps forward to speak, he parrots his grandfather’s 1980 concession speech  “the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”  Without the thunder, it’s only words.

When we return to the television late in the afternoon, the body of the Senator has not yet arrived at the Capitol steps. As has been the case from the beginning, the schedule is awry.  Senator Robert Byrd, age 91, sits on the curb in his wheelchair, wiping his eyes, holding a small American flag.

Many of the Hill staffers have gathered here, for more than an hour in the muggy August afternoon. They are quiet and orderly, standing patiently as if for an enormous group portrait. On the Washington mall, more people wait. Along the boulevards of the District, they wait, along the bridge over the Potomac, in the Lincoln Memorial, lining the path to Arlington, they wait.

When at last the family does arrive, utterly exhausted, finally crumpling from the weight of their sadness and the endless duties of public mourning, the crowds erupt in a brilliant show of admiration. The only “off” note comes here in the form of an officious and awkward Congressional chaplain, who takes Vickie Reggie Kennedy firmly by the elbow and steers her away from the people she has come to meet so that she can stand at attention while he makes his fussy speech. As the motorcade drives away through the streets of Washington, people call out–  “Thank you!”  “We love you!”

At Arlington, the sun is beginning to set, just as it was for the burials of the two brothers. Cardinal Terrence McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, gently leads the last rites in the deepening gloam of evening. The images on the television become grainy and dim, until finally the cameramen give up and focus instead on the bugler playing taps, outlined in the light from Arlington House; lingering on the vibrant dance of the eternal flame.

Teddy’s granddaughter steps up to speak. Kiley Kennedy, just 15, begins, catches herself in a sob, and cries out “I can’t say anything!” But she pulls herself together and goes on to recount the happy hours spent sitting with her grandfather early on summer mornings on the porch of the Hyannisport house. But she is cloaked in darkness now; we can’t see her, even if we can hear the anguish in her voice.

When it is all over, I turn off the television before yet another replay of a Kennedy documentary. Enough is enough. I am exhausted, as if I too had waited in the line, as if I had sat in the pew under the soaring arches of Our Lady, as if I had stood on the steps of Congress waiting through the afternoon.

I carry my cup of tea outside and sit on the patio in the dark, looking up at the stars. I miss my father. I miss my stepfather.  Even though I won’t feel Ted Kennedy’s absence, I will miss his guiding hand and heart in the senate. I keep thinking about how the funeral ran late at every turn, and I wonder if that was perhaps by design. Surely it is more secure not to stick close to a well-publicized itinerary?

Most importantly, though, it gave the family an opportunity for a private ending to a very public life. In the end, in the dark they make their peace and say goodbye. They reclaim their own, and we release him.

Homecoming

When I open the door of the empty house, the dog rushes in ahead of me. He barks, shouts of joy, but they die to nothing. He looks back at me, quizzical. Where is everyone?  Perhaps they are out back, he must think, racing to the back door, begging to be let out. I unlock the door onto a patch chest high with weeds. He does not go out. Instead, he looks up at me, circles and sinks into a dejected heap.

We’ve come back to this house many times, Dog and I. Returning from journeys that crossed the country from border to border: family occasions, dog shows, girl journalist and her Dog in search of stories. Each time the door had opened on a cheerful cacophony of singing hounds, the television, the boy jubilant at our return. There was always someone there to embrace us, usually a meal on the stove, another dog or two rushing up to touch noses.

Not so this time. Now the house is silent, inhabited only by mice and memories. A fine layer of dust covers every surface. One door has blown open sometime over the winter. The Dog leaps to his feet to follow me as I move from room to room; not a chance that he’s going to let me out of his sight. He doesn’t know what’s become of the other dogs, but he is doing his best to avoid their fate.

Four days before we’d said goodbye to those dogs and husband and son, leaving Ohio for a few weeks in Montana to clean out the old house. He knew that. But dogs don’t think in abstract. (One of our dogs is very upset to hear a family member on the other end of a telephone; she’s very distressed that her person is locked up in that tiny box and how did they get in there anyway.) The dog knows only that they have always been here, and that they’re not here now.

I haven’t been in this house in a year. I haven’t lived here in two years, having taken our son in advance to start at a performing arts high school in Ohio. It’s a very complicated thing to move nearly two thousand miles across the country, leaving a pack of hounds, a coven of barn cats, a pair of crotchety ponies in your wake. My husband stayed on sorting out these conundrums: the ponies free to a family that found them delightful. The barn cats to a woman who’d just lost hers. One dog with cancer (Edward the Terrible) gently dispatched by our wonderful vet.

A few days before Christmas, on a morning when it should have been too cold to snow, but was snowing anyway, my husband loaded up the remaining three dogs in a minivan stuffed full of clothes, shoes, books, television, crockery and Christmas presents, and made his escape. The Dog and I have come to deal with what he left behind. Mail still on the kitchen table, a dozen chain link dog runs, letters from my late father, old toys, chipped coffee cups, books.

I did not choose this house. My husband’s ex-wife had insisted on it, a miner’s cabin with a singlewide trailer addition, creek side in the shadow of the Absaroka Mountains. Her twin sister still lives a mere quarter mile down the road. Then Merrilee decided to take their daughters and leave Elmer, and the proximity of her sister wasn’t so important anymore. We tried to sell the house 16 years ago but the market hadn’t boomed, and when we finally got an offer, we would have had to borrow money to accept it.

So I relented and moved in. First the trailer had to go. Then the green and tan shag carpet. The accordion door. In the end, we took the house down to the studs, moved the kitchen and the bathroom, put in a new stairwell. And then we stopped, leaving unfinished sheetrock on the walls, window moldings stacked in the barn. Elmer was working double shifts at the railroad; my newspaper work kept me away all hours. We were too damned tired when we got home to do anything other than the essential. And dry wall mud never reached the level of essential.

Montana was home for 17 years, longer than anywhere else. Two years ago when I set out behind the wheel of the Penske truck I didn’t look back. Our son had overstayed his welcome at the country school he attended. Elmer had retired from the railroad. I’d long finished my work as a journalist in this town. There was nothing keeping me in that little house in the shadow of the mountains.

Now it was very strange to be back.

In my return, I have fallen into the arms of friends, I have driven slowly up and down the streets of the town before going west to the house, a little panicked that I am touching the tar baby and will not be able to leave.

This is the house where my child was conceived. This is the house where he took his first steps. It is also where he fractured his leg badly in a freak accident. He was two; it was the day after Christmas, in the middle of a blizzard.  The ambulance wasn’t running, our tiny truck cab was too small, we had to call Jane and Roger to help us get him to Bozeman, and they struggled out to collect us and sat around all night in the hospital while the orthopedist saw to Julian’s leg.

This is the place where we welcomed foals on wobbly legs, watched them grow into promising yearlings. Watched in horror as one hung herself from one leg from a round pen panel, pressured there by a ranch hand who thought he could train horses. When we pulled the pins the filly kicked the panel free. It hit my mother square in the face, knocking her unconscious. Paramedics knelt in the muck to ease her onto a stretcher.

Horses are buried there and there and there; a young stallion that tried to jump a neighbor’s barbed-wire fence and bled out; an ancient mare down with colic, a foal crippled from birth— a Northern Dancer grandson. His mother had gotten into astragalus; it causes birth defects. When he was tiny he could outrun half the horses on the place.

Up on the ridge is a spot where I took off my coat on a winter day to wrap it around the a calf half-dead from hypothermia, rubbing him hard all over to bring back the circulation while someone else ran for the phone.  Just a day or so old, the little white-faced guy had fallen through the fence and rolled a bit down the hill. His mother, a first-timer, wandered away and left him.  When the neighbor drove out along the pasture edge in his pick-up the calf was starting to respond. We put him in the warm cab of the truck, and I retrieved my coat. I heard they nursed the calf a day or so and he was good as new. That next fall he went off to slaughter, because well that’s what becomes of calves.

I was sitting at a desk in that corner of this little cedar shake house when the phone rang with the news that my mother in law had died. It was Elmer who answered when a call came from England that my stepfather was found dead in his apartment.  I was sitting there curled in an oak desk chair, waiting for the call that my father, my anchor, had taken his leave, and when it came the world tilted dangerously beneath my feet. 

This big mailbox used to be affixed to a large Poplar trunk we’d pulled out of the grove on the other side of the creek. In time, it rotted and broke off. We stuck the broken post in a galvanized trashcan full of river rocks and travertine. Every time it snowed the plow knocked it over, and it is lying on the ground now. 

That’s where I’d get the mail, get out of the car, open the gate. If there was something promising, I might open it walking to the gate. That’s where I opened a very ordinary looking envelope with my name scrawled across it. It was a letter telling me I’d won a prestigious fellowship. And that’s where I read the letter of acceptance welcoming Julian to a performing arts high school.  From there you could see the snow capped peaks of the tallest mountains in Montana.

The task before me is enormous. It is not just packing up a few books. It is room after room of dust and memories and objects that require my attention. Every day I take a load of stuff to the storage unit. Every day I take a load of stuff to the county dumpsters.  We’ve decided to seek a renter, and that means restoring water to the winterized house. Which means buying a new water heater and having it installed. And when the water is restored, I find a pipe, cracked, that had somehow missed the winterization process, and I have to find a plumber, and then find the money to pay him. 

Every day starts before seven, with McDonald’s breakfast for the Dog and me.  Without fat and protein, I won’t last half the day; the regular restaurants don’t open for another hour.  At that hour McDonald’s trade is tourists headed south to Yellowstone Park, no one to stop me and inquire, where had I been, what was I up to.

Work continues each day until I am filthy and exhausted, walking in circles because I am too tired to think straight. On the good nights, I go back to my friend’s house and stand in the shower, before we repair to Park Place, the only decent bar in town.

The very first evening my regular drink is set before me with precision. The bartender still knows me well enough he doesn’t have to ask, so he asks other questions instead. Where had I been, what was I up to. The Martini is perfect, silver in my mouth.  On the last evening there I will tell Glenn, the proprietor and bartender that other than seeing my friends, sitting at his bar was the absolute best thing about being back in Montana. I regret the qualifier now; sitting in Glenn’s bar was seeing my friends, my past, and comfort was in the company, and not just (as on that last chilly night) Irish whiskey in the glass.

On the other nights, it’s not so good. Once the water is restored, I stay at the house; in the brass bed I slept in from the time I was 15. The Dog sleeps across my feet so that I cannot escape in the night.  The work is taking so much longer than I thought it would. I had thought that there would be people to give me a hand, and there are.

Jane and Roger stop by every couple of days, hauling trash, washing down walls, helping me drag out decades worth of junk. Jane’s mother died last year; she and her sisters were charged with the task of cleaning out the family home, and Jane knows what I’m up against. Their teenage daughter Emily comes out one morning and runs the Bush hog to knock down the waist high grass around the house.

It’s a cliché almost, that when you really need them that people will help you. The truth is that people are busy. They are busting their asses all day running a restaurant. She is a writer, looking after three small children and an elderly, compromised mother in law. She is working in a law practice 60 hours a week and putting up hay in the few hours of daylight left before and after a grueling workday. She is the only vet tech at the county’s very busy animal shelter. This is part of why I love them anyway, because they’re interesting people with full lives. I am grateful for all they give me.

But what about the others? How many stories did I write to support the opening of new businesses? How much free advertising did I give away? What about those Community Thanksgiving dinners I started and ran that fed 700 people each year? We gave whatever we could to every charity auction, every event, every theater production, every time someone needed us . . . but this is Montana, a place where it’s unseemly to ask for help.

Unless you’re dying or something, then you get a spaghetti dinner and a silent auction. 

On the very worst night, hungry and dirty and tired and dispirited, I break down and cry, asking my husband these same questions, tears running down my face and spilling over the telephone. Where are they? Why won’t anyone help me? What about everything I gave to this community?  He is quiet. And then he says, “You didn’t do it to get anything in return.” That is absolutely right. I didn’t do it to get anything in return, and somehow that makes me feel even worse.

In truth, it is his friends that disappoint me the most. Men he worked side by side with for twenty years, every one of them has pretended that they don’t know that I’m in town. They don’t return calls. They don’t come out to the house to see what’s going on. It is a measure of them I did not expect, and it leaves an ugly stain.

My mother, ever the pragmatist, tells me I have to hire someone to help, and I do. The word goes out that I’ll hire as many people as show up for nine bucks an hour, just be at the farm at 2 p.m. One guy turns up, a transplanted east coast carpenter and musician that I’ve known for years.  He laughs at my duct tape belt. I’ve lost so much weight over the last few weeks that I had to fashion it to hold my pants up.

We take a load of furniture and boxes of books to storage. It pours rain, the kind that soaks you to the skin; we stand inside the open door of the storage unit watching it come down in sheets. After the rain abates, and after a few slices of pizza, Alex helps me load the Ohio bound U-Haul trailer with all the things I know I cannot possibly manage on my own: the washer, the antique filing cabinet, a heart pine dresser, Aunt Moe’s Persian carpet. He leaves with his little Saab full of stuff for the community thrift store, and he will come back a few days later to take another load to them. The money I pay him is money well-spent.

Many things leave the house bound for the landfill. The haymaking hard working attorney brings me her horse trailer one Saturday morning and we fill it with garbage and take it to the transfer station where they weigh it and charge me $12. The transfer station attendant pulls a sled out for her grandkids; my friend snags an air-conditioning recharge.  The broken Dogloo and the worn out mohair chair are dumped without ceremony into a giant dumpster, set in a pit at ground level, the roll-off box. I paid more than $100 for the Dogloo; I used to really love that chair. Now I could care less.

Using the volume and weight of the trash that day for comparison, I figure that the amount of garbage I’ve taken from the house must be around 3000 pounds.

Other things leave in an estate sale that runs all day Wednesday without pause. People come to buy dog kennels and crates, an old FIAT convertible half-eaten by mice, tools, trinkets, crockery, the desk where I sat when I learned my father was dead.  I am happy to take their money; there is nothing that they carry away that I am attached to anymore.  It disturbs me that one woman steals things from me; a chain saw, a silver bracelet, whatever else she slipped in her pockets. Walking out to the outbuildings, I’m shocked to see how people have literally thrown things around while going through them. So disrespectful, just to get to that set of socket wrenches or that half empty can of WD-40. It’s hard to fathom what might have been stolen out of the sheds, so I don’t even think about it.

Loading the last of the boxes, the flowerpots, the bathroom scales, the floor lamps onto the trailer as the light fades from the sky, I muse about what makes someplace home. Is it all this stuff I came back for, that I set aside and wrapped and have used to fill every last space in the trailer? It’s a good thing I don’t have a bowling ball left to go in, because there is no room for it. Had the house fallen down where it stood we would have missed a few things we lost, but it is different when you’re standing there with the teacup  (or the letter, or the painting or the spice rack) in your hand.

Is it your history in a place that makes it home? That you can’t go to the grocery without seeing someone you know? That your memories of that intersection or the post office steps or the sound that the doors to the county courthouse make is somehow embedded in your cells, is it that familiarity?  It used to be that I felt like I belonged to this place. I wrote about it, championed it, I knew most of the people in town, and most of the people knew me. Big fish, and all that. It’s not like that anymore. But I don’t think that was what made it home.

Filling the water bottles for the Dog for the long trip home, I am thinking how much I’ll miss the water. Always extra cold, it came from a well hand dug into a spring (with pick axes and shovels the records read) in 1923, and it never ran dry, not even that time we forgot and left it running all day in a horse trough while we went to the movies. It is good, sweet water, perhaps the best I’ve ever had.

I do not number the dogs I am leaving behind. Buried under poppies, under daffodils, under the aspens, under the apple tree. If I stop to think about them, their slender bones wrapped in quilts, and gently bundled into the earth, it will be harder to walk away. If I think about their wagging tails, and eyes, blue and brown, their muzzles cupped in my hand, this place may seize my heart again.

Instead I think about the other dogs, the ones waiting 2000 miles across the Great Plains, and the husband, and the boy. I am overdue there. The Dog settles into the truck. As the house has emptied, he seems to understand that we are not staying on there with the ghosts, that we have just come back to pick up a few things.  Gently, gently, pulling a fully laden trailer, I creep up the driveway, hopping out to close the gate behind me one last time. I do not look at the house, or the meadow, or the barns, or the poppies. I just look at the latch and make sure it catches on the ring.

I point the truck to the east and we head for home. A front is blowing in, and by the time we crest the hill out of the town, the sky behind us is black with rain.

The Peculiar Tale of Jimmy Dean Johnson

How a Boy Lay Nameless for 35 Years

This week, a new monument was laid at the grave of “Boy X.” It is a modest stone of red granite, matching the one that has marked this spot in the Dayton Memorial Park since May of 1974.

The old one reads “On Behalf of Those Who Cared Boy X Died May 20, 1974.” The new one has a name, and a date of birth and finally answers a mystery nearly three times as old as the boy whose bones lie below.

He was James “Jimmy” Dean Johnson, a handsome sandy-haired boy with a wide smile and big ears that stuck out just a bit. He was born on the 3rd of September 1960, to a woman named Cora Walls.

Jimmy must have been among the last of her eight children (six boys, two girls) as when he was just a baby, his mother is said to have stepped out a window during an epileptic seizure. She didn’t die. In fact, she remains alive today, though her mind is clouded with dementia.

In the 1960s epilepsy was considered a non-remitting, progressive disease. Treatments were rudimentary and often not effective. By the time her baby boy was two years old, Mrs. Walls’ children had been placed in foster care.

For a period in the early seventies, three of the siblings, Rosie, Wayne and Jimmy, were reunited in the care of their mother’s sister Sarah in Cincinnati. But in 1973, Sarah Zuern left her husband, took her children and moved to Dayton. Her niece and nephews returned to foster care.

This week, little Jimmy’s cousin, Esther Zuern told the Dayton Daily News that she remembered the boy as “sweet; not rowdy or mean like most kids in foster care.” More than one relative recalled that he was small for his age. Nonetheless, Jimmy apparently became something of a “behavior problem” and in a matter of months found himself a resident of the gothic campus at Longview State Hospital. He was just 13.

In March 1974, all hell was breaking loose over Watergate. We were in the clutches of an oil embargo. Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” was the number one song. And little Jimmy Dean Johnson walked away from the Longview State Hospital and disappeared into the Ohio streets. His absence was not reported to any authority, and apparently no one ever looked for him.

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The incidents of Monday, May 20, 1974 are not precisely recounted anymore. The coroner’s report is reported as stating that the body of a male child was found at 1853 Stanley St, on a railroad embankment, behind a warehouse.

The news media has alternatively reported the body found on the banks of the Great Miami River near Leo and Stanley Streets, at 1383 Stanley; still others say the body lay up against the railroad tracks. Whoever had the unhappy discovery is long forgotten (though no doubt it is etched irrevocably in their own memory.) Perhaps it was a dockworker clocking in on Monday morning. Perhaps it was a brakeman on a passing train, or a beat cop patrolling the area late at night. It doesn’t matter anymore.

What was found was the body of a male child, somewhere between 11 and 14 years old. With sandy hair and ears that stuck out a bit. He had a homemade tattoo on his arm depicting a cross with three teardrops. His skinny little broken body was naked to the elements. He had been beaten and strangled; he was still bound when they found him.

There were no active missing persons cases matching the boy’s description. Ken Betz, the director of the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office told reporters during a February 2009 press conference that records show five different families came to see if the child belonged to them, but none of them could positively identify him. For their sakes, one hopes that some were able to positively say that he was not theirs.

Among those families was Sarah Zuern, who is said to have arrived with a photograph of her nephew, missing from the state hospital in Cincinnati. Sarah’s family claimed she never heard back from the Coroner’s office. Even in the seventies a forensic anthropologist could have made a positive identification, a reasonably good medical examiner could have made an almost certain one. Of course, none of the Coroner’s office personnel are the same now as they were thirty-five years ago.

These cases weigh on the men and women that work them. The death of a child is not something easily forgotten, and an unidentified child even more so. No one would have carelessly lost a photograph of a potential match, or overlooked calling the presumed next of kin. But the boy remained nameless, and finally, through the generosity of the community, his small body was buried in Dayton Memorial Gardens under a red granite stone that read “Boy X.”

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Rosie Johnson, Jimmy’s older sister, lives in Alabama now. Last year she saw Jim DeBrosse’s retrospective story in the Dayton Daily News about the mysterious “Boy X” and she wondered, again, if that boy could be her long lost brother. This time she contacted the Montgomery County Coroner’s office.

Jim DeBrosse is owed a great debt in the work he did to help Boy X regain his identity, his history, his belonging. In remembering Boy X and making his readers remember Boy X, he helped to nudge Rosie Johnson to find the answer for her decades-long question about her little brother. His thorough research into who that child was in life is very touching, and his coverage of the family’s memorial to that boy has been remarkable. Every community should have someone like DeBrosse who so eloquently keeps the unidentified lost from being forgotten.

The Coroner’s office took the photograph that Rosie Johnson supplied them, and they took a DNA sample from her. They visited Cora Walls in a nursing home and took a DNA sample there too. They exhumed the body of Boy X, and on January 28, 2009, they had a match.

Ruby Simpkins is the daughter of Sarah Zuern, and the cousin to little Jimmy. She became the focus of media attention during the memorial held in Dayton this week, as it seems she is the most readily approachable family member for sound bites and quotes.

She told Jim DeBrosse that the family had held out hope that they’d run into Jimmy somewhere, all grown up, a handsome young man.

“But,” she said brightly, “We’ll see him again in heaven.” The television media coverage was upbeat, the anchor pursing her mouth in a little moue at the bittersweet nature of this resolution. A child is murdered, and yet he is at long last returned to his family. Comments to online print stories and websites devoted to missing persons were equally simple-minded. Even the biddies at websleuths.com didn’t seem to get it.

But the Dayton Police Department certainly seems to get it, and Detective Patty Tackett made a statement to the press that the investigation into James Dean Johnson’s murder has been reopened. She urged the public to get in touch if they have any information that may be useful. She added that they are particularly interested in “a situation of sexual assault that may have occurred on a boy of 13—we’d like to have them come forward.” The original autopsy showed no evidence of sexual assault per se, but when a body is found nude, it certainly isn’t ruled out.

The local NBC affiliate carried an interview with Ruby Simpkins in which she offered up a graphic vision of her cousin’s death. She imagines him “lying there crying as they beat him,” but “as his spirit slipped away he saw Jesus coming toward him with arms outstretched. Finally, he found the love he’d searched for so long. At last Jimmy’s home!”

Rosie Johnson didn’t make it to Ohio for her brother’s memorial. Sarah Zuern was planning to read a poem at the service, but she slipped away on April 26th.

Her obituary lists her age as 73, and notes among her survivors her daughters Esther and Ruby, her sister Cora. It quotes the words spoken with her last breath: “Before she passed on, she said ‘I hope to see you all again someday, in Heaven. I’ll be waiting.’”

There is a list of those she expected to find waiting for her in heaven, having been pre-deceased by her ex-husband, three of her special friends, Jesus Christ, (way predeceased by him) and her three sons, James, Johnny and William. Her recently identified, long dead nephew does not merit a mention. Something about the names in Sarah Zuern’s obituary stands out though, something no one seems to have noticed.

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It is the name of her son, William Zuern. William Zuern who was executed by the State of Ohio on June 8, 2004 for the murder of a Hamilton County Sheriff’s deputy, Philip Pence.

The deputy was killed while Zuern was incarcerated awaiting trial for the murder of Gregory Earls, an informant who had testified against Zuern’s father. Zuern was angry with prison officials because he didn’t get his full five minutes of telephone time.

Authorities had been tipped off that he had a weapon and three of them had gone to search his cell. Zuern got off his bunk naked, and lunged at Deputy Pence, stabbing the officer to death with a 7” shank he’d fashioned from a bucket handle.

William Zuern’s life of crime officially began when he was 13, with the “malicious destruction of property.” He’d gone on a tire-slashing spree in Cincinnati. His 2004  request for clemency details his many brushes with the law, including his juvenile record: burglary, drugs, delinquency, and as adult: theft, felonious assault, murder, murder, murder. On the cover of the Request for Clemency Report, a notation is written neatly, by hand, in the upper right hand corner: EXECUTED 6/8/04

In December of 1973 William Zuern had been released to the care of his mother in Dayton, Ohio. In September 1975, he was remanded to Ohio Youth Services. A photograph displayed by Ken Betz at a press conference shows Jimmy Dean Johnson among the Zuerns: a slight blond boy surrounded by enormous people. William Zuern, at 15, had a significant height and weight advantage over his younger cousin.

Real life homicide is not so much like fictional murder mysteries. Rarely found are those clever twists, those surprising endings where the villain turns out to be the last person you’d suspect. Most of the time the answer to the mystery is the most depressingly obvious one.

Rosie Johnson speculated that perhaps her little brother had headed for Dayton looking for his aunt and cousins.

It appears that he may have found them.