12 Periods of Christmas

1-5 years old

You're too young to understand the concept of Christmas. Toddlers enjoy the pretty lights, the gingerbread cookies and popcorn ball treats, the songs and carols and everything fun about the holiday but they don't quite yet understand the power of Xmas. To young kids, Christmas feels like a second birthday except the gifts are doubled, there is no blowing out of birthday candles or parties with ponies taking embarrassing dumps in the backyard. At this age the toy or the box it came in is just as fun to play with. Chewing on the Christmas light cords like the dog does is also fun to do.

6-8 years old

This is the Christmas sweet spot. The age when anything...any gift, magical event, or wish is possible thanks to a fat man living up north in a house full of midgets making toys strangely identical to major manufacturers (yet no one seems to mind). The holiday also includes the greatest gift of all — a week off from school and the constant torture of teachers, bullies and the inability to take a dump for eight hours a day because no one would dare use a bathroom at school...under any circumstances. This is also the age where breaking your new toys can be fun too. This was hard at one time because Tonka make their toys out of real metal. You kids have it easy today!

9-12 years old

Santa was a lie! You had an idea a few years earlier but now all signs point to your parents shoveling you bullshit for the first decade of your life. What else have they been lying about? Oh just tooth fairies, bunnies delivering chocolate and your uncle who stopped coming by the house a few Thanksgivings ago. He’s not in the Peace Corp, he’s in jail, but they won’t say exactly what for. Maybe lying to his kids about a jolly fat dude with a perverted sounding “naughty” list and a tooth collecting broad with more singles than a main stage stripper on a busy Saturday night to dole out. This is the age where you begin to play the same game back to your parents by ever so deftly manipulating them into getting the gifts you want. This is especially easy if your parents are divorced. You can really haul it in!

13-20 years old

It’s not about asking for toys anymore, you're a teen, it’s about getting gifts to elevate social status. Designer clothes, expensive kicks, flashy tech gear and maybe even a car if you’re old man is willing to finally give up his beater of a ride, buy something built in the 2000s, and fork over the keys. You also loathe yourself for getting so excited over a Christmas gift basket filled with stuff you need at college. You just kissed your parents for the thoughtful gift of bulk toilet paper and rolls of quarters to do laundry. You also realize that getting any clothing is a great gift because you didn't have to buy it yourself. That sweater your GrandMom got you at a eleven years of age wasn't a sucky gift after all.

21-25 years old

You’re out of college. You’ve got a job. It’s now your responsibility to buy gifts for your entire family. Thankfully, Jesus invented gift cards (it’s in the New Testament) so gift buying is a cinch. Unfortunately, you spend the day after Christmas in return lines because your family has no idea what clothes you wear, your actual size, what music you like, and that you haven’t read a book since Lit 101. And seriously, what the fuck is a compact disc? You also discover that the Chinese are heathens and don't celebrate Christmas and mercifully keep open their restaurants on Christmas night so you can escape your family and go get drunk with your other 20-Something friends. You won't feel like a loser alcoholic because the place will be packed with others.

25-30 years old

You’re in a long term relationship and you're already spending the Xmas you don't even have yet on engagement rings and first homes. The holidays start feeling really different, since you don’t spend them with your own family anymore, but with her family, her friends, and maybe if there is time you can swing by your parents house to visit your mom who’s pissed you’re not spending the holiday with your family and an old man who has been drunk since his work Christmas party in early December. Stopping by with the right excuses may lessen the jealousy of your parents. Remember to leave the girlfriend home at her parent's place. Realize as well that come Decmeber 26^th, Christmas never existed nor happened as you are back to your regular workaday world and have to spend most of your attention on that.

30-40 years old

This decade sucks one massive Yule Log. You’re married, you’ve got kids, and those kids demand toys considered “hot ticket items” which oddly get released the week before Christmas that Hasbro has been hyping the shit out of all season. So you're traveling in circles around the state just days before Christmas, sometimes even across a couple state borders, to find one stupid Hatchanimal. As you frantically search each store hoping for a miracle (does Home Depot carry toys?) the only thought circling your head is the kid's disappointment because the toy isn't under the tree. You've failed as a parent. You SUCK. You’ve given them a love, a home and attention but couldn’t deliver a fucking toy every other kid will get and wave in the faces of your kid. Hopefully the arresting officer will go lightly on your situation after you punch a nun buying a cart full of Hatchanimals for an orphanage. It’s a Christmas miracle you didn’t give her a concussion.

40-50 years old

You've got kids in their teens and early 20s. The toys turn into gadgets and the holiday morphs into an event exorbitantly more expensive than ever before. As if footing the bill for six years in college and another year “finding themselves” isn’t enough of a gift. You don't like anything about the holiday — from the songs you've heard only once a month for the last four decades but annoy the shit out of you at the first note. The Classic radio stations you love now play this crap 24/7. Also the decorating, the traffic, the commercials and those Charlie Brown specials you adored in your youth but now feel like PSA cartoons about the dangers of bullying in school. Seriously, if ever there were ever a cartoon kid to shoot up a school, it's Charlie Brown. A mindful jury would exonerate him.

50-60 years old

You don't care about Christmas till a week ago. Your wife (if you're still married) does all of the shopping, you only have to buy for her, and yet you still manage to screw that up. Your kids visit for a couple hours, just to collect their gift cards and eat, and shuttle out the door to visit their future in-laws because they are “splitting time” between families this year. You’d all celebrate together but your in-laws are fucking morons with big mouths. You're also not allowed to eat half the food on the Christmas table because of high cholesterol or that just-starting heart failure you've been diagnosed with. You go to the buffet table in the other room alone where you can to shove all that salami into your mouth, as long as they don't see it, it can't hurt. You end the day in a drunken sleep.

60-70 years old

The holiday is slightly more enjoyable. You're older now, semi-retired, and living off a smaller salary so no one expects absurdly expensive gifts. There are also grandchildren. It's fun to watch them open gifts, get excited for Santa and get wrapped up in the festivities like your kid's did — and you — did so many decades ago. It's also enjoyable to witness your own children, now grown, slowly lose faith in the holiday while chasing down the newest piece of crap toy around the country. You're laughing your ass off, chugging spiked eggnog and grinning “welcome to the club” with a warmth that’s probably thanks to the brandy spiked chocolates and double rum cakes. If there is one thing to celebrate during the holidays it’s booze-infused baked goods. What's also good is that at this age, you can complain of feeling too cold or tired and your kids will drive you home and you get to avoid all the drama.

70-80 years old — You don't notice, or care, it's Christmas time. Many of your friends are dead, all your kids are gone during the holiday, visiting your grandkids or just refusing to spend time with a miserable old bastard like you. The good news is no one expects shit from you as far as presents because you're living off a pension or meager social security benefits. Retirement? Ha! Bigger bullshit that Old Saint Nick. Your family would rather you not buy them gifts anyway since you're terrible at buying gifts. It's because you always left it up to your wife. You'd buy gifts that had meaning to you, 50 years ago! Where is your wife? Well, it depends which wife you're talking about. Also, you spend at least five minutes a day thinking about your own death. It will kill the mood of any retirement community holiday pizza party.

80-90 years old — Christmas? You call this shit Christmas?!? When I was a kid, THAT was Christmas! You refuse to talk about the Christmas that's going on now and prefer to speak of ones that occurred right after WW2...during the German Reconstruction period. Each Christmas you manage to see keenly reminds you of the next one you, by probability, won't see.

Q-Tip Club

In my 20's I attended quite a few weddings. Why not, everyone gets married then. A few of the weddings were boring and other raucous affairs where fistfights could break during the reception. Most were S.O.P. (standard operating procedure) of the Catholic priest and the party afterwards at a hotel. I was a one time Best Man but most I attended I was part of the pack of single guys who sat 14 rows back in the church, with the others spying on the unmarried girls in their best dresses.

I could dress up dapper then too! I had three suits to choose from and preferred a European cut one (two slits in the back, not just the one). Though most of my blue collar friends looked upon it as “weird.” Then again, they thought that crossing the border of Pawtucket meant you'd be sucked into a black hole too. What the fuck did they know about tailors outside of this city?

One of the last weddings I went to, I had a camel hair coat. I just put it over a black polo and wore my best, non-stained/torn jeans with a pair of well stretched, comfy shoes. As I was was walking through the kitchen on my way out the door, my brother lambastes me on the choice.

In his dripping, acidic tone...”You're going to the wedding...like that!?”

I tell him, “Sure...why not?”

“Jeans? You're wearing jeans?” he goes on.

I finally shut him up by saying, “Look, I'm attending a wedding that's going to be mainly attended by plumbers, electricians and welders...if they show up in clean work clothes...it's a win for them!”

I was right.

All the other guys who were at the wedding were either dressed in their least worst clothing, or they had been to Sears a couple of days before and bought the ubiquitous blue suit that hung on them like cardboard. Add to that they were all very uncomfortable in them as they were scared shitless to ruin the look. They stood around like statues.

That was then.

Now..I attend funerals.

Whoa...how did I get so old?

I came back from a wake not too long ago, an Uncle who made it to 81. Not a bad run. What took me for a loop was that now, I'm part of that damn Q-Tip club that goes to these things and schmoozes with the other attendees. When you go to wakes of people who were in their 80's, the attendees tend to be closer in age to the one being sent off vs. any 20 something going to a wedding. Add to this the Irish trait of keeping our hair but it turns snow white at 40. I was in the funeral home and noticing all the white heads walking around...and realizing I was one of them. I fit right in.

But...but....I'm supposed to be young! I was hip, “with it” and cool in the late '70's! Shit..the late 70's was damn near 40 years ago! I swear, for us Old Timers, the past ain't that far back..is it? Well, it feels like it wasn't. I can reach back and access it easily. Kids born in 1996 reach back to that time on Google photos and see black and white. That and ugly Disco clothing. That time has as about much meaning to them as the decade of the 50's has to me. It's a rumor!

Q-Tip! Q-Tip! I now belong! Arrrggh! Am I supposed to get a card or something? Other than the AARP one they already sent me? The Bastard Fenian Order of White Haired Irish Males card?

Age creeps. It always does. Slowly and surely. A time not too long ago I was at The Met, a smaller venue for bands and I was eavesdropping on a conversation of some young men next to us. They were bemoaning the fact that 1 AM would soon arrive. They all were hot fired to keep partying as long as they hoofed it down to Providence as fast as they could. My quiet reaction was averse to all that. Cover charges? $7 cans of Budweiser? Being charged to park? Driving home bleary eyed, probably over-the-limit on booze but barely so as I can't drink like I used too...and worrying about paying a lawyer to get me out of a DUI? Oh and this, totally not fitting in with that crowd.

Nope. I prefer now to make it to my comfy bed, comfy chair, comfy thermostat and comfy sweat pants and settle in. It's doubly more perfect now since winter has come.

I've arrived. “Welcome...the Q-Tip section is over here...Sir.”

Is it all that bad really? No..I exaggerate all this but only to make a point. As a Boomer, I belong to that rallying cry of “Rock 'n' Roll Can Never Die.” Perhaps so, but it does get older, grayer and slower.

I've yet to make that silly “foolish ol' goat” mistake so many men of age make. They, for one last time, really fuck things up by trying to be 20 again. Hell, why not? You should get that one final chance at it and blow it as all of them do. There will be a woman you know, equal in age, ready to condemn you for even trying. Women still know more then men when it comes to stuff like this.

I'll get there one day. Meanwhile, it looks like I'll attend funerals not for “payin' respects an' all” but for the social outlet it provides.

Jesus..did I just say that? Next it will be Doan's Backache pills and a loaf of bread for the ducks by the pond. “Doans,” shit...that's proof I'm my age.

KDX 500

A year or so ago, I met again the one girl who ruined me for life, D'Arby. She's called D'Arby (by me only) because she always reminded me of Patti D'Arbanville from Chevy Chase's movie “Modern Problems.” So out of nowhere, I received a phone call and from it piped, “Ronnnnnie!” I knew exactly who it was. A second or so later she complained I was still “sickeningly” stable as my phone number hasn't changed in over 25 years, but was glad that it still was the same as she found me quickly.

It had been probably a good 18 years since I saw her last.

She quickly skipped over the reason why she had called when I asked her and went straight to the “We are gonna hang out, right?” She suggested a Chinese restaurant over by Mineral Spring and I accepted the idea. We had planned to meet in the parking lot and told each other what kind of cars we were now driving, to help identify you know. God knows how much each of us has changed in those years, perhaps to the point of being unrecognizable?

So, a week went by before we could meet up and I reminisced over that meteoric romance we had had. No, it wasn't that fast, more like a bolide that just crosses the sky slowly, with flaring too bright to look at long, before it explodes in an even more blinding flash.

**

How did she ruin me? Let's go back to 1988.

D'Arby had the audacity, the confidence, to let me have the entire candy store. Nothing was held back. She had grown up loving excitement of any kind, a true adrenaline junkie. D'Arby had one hell of an addiction. Before we were an item, I once saw her tear assing around on a KDX 500 dirtbike on those trails that criss-cross the Coventry sand dunes. Cut off jeans, a tube top and pink sneakers with no helmut and ripping along the pines she was. She had more balls than a guy at times. She wasn't just a tomboy. There wasn't anything truly masculine about her except her love of chasing thrills. She was all girl otherwise. I too, loved the adrenaline rush, but in a more staid kind of way. I would make sure there were life boats, life preservers and other equipment around should I topple. D'Arby wanted none of those. She complained I was a bit restrained at times too. But she managed to get me to overcome that idea of safety at times, to my initial leaping fear.

D'Arby had a pretty face, a tight body and partied like a sorority girl from Chico State. When around her, I didn't feel I had to cover up any of my faults...I was just me, the good and the bad. We, from the outset, were very comfortable around each other. Things just fell into place w/o any trying on our part. There were no moments when we found each other being “halting” around one another. What ever our personal neuroses we had, they seemed to disappear. It was liberation to be ourselves, in an instant.

Together, we could dive into most things w/o much hesitation, including each other.

As with most women, they “peel” like an artichoke (how's that for a metaphor). What I mean as I got to know her, as she allowed me to get to know her, she surprised me time and again as the layers came off. D'Arby in public, cultivated something of a dumb blonde personality. It's pretty useful around guys I suppose, as it can turn us to putty and therefore, manipulable. But as D'Arby “peeled,” I found out this girl was no dummy. She had shocked me one time on Block Island, by pointing to the horizon and saying, “Those are cumulonimbus clouds.” I turned around to her in a bit of shock as she was right. I had, at one time, had this geeky flirtation with the weather. As a boy, I had come across a Boy Scout's book on weather and in it, all types of clouds. For some reason, the weird names and pictures stuck with me. Now here was this girl, startling my superficial estimations of her...I hadn't learned everything about her yet I find out. When I learned more...more epiphanies about this girl shown themselves. She slowly revealed a labyrinthine personality that could take months to investigate.

I stood there and looked at her, learning once again, on how women can surprise you with who they really are, once they decide to let you in, a layer at a time. I came to know D'Arby as something more complex than this fun loving chick. And that was dangerous...as I crawled deeper into this newly discovered pyramid, so did my heart.

In short, D'Arby was the whole package. Or, what a 25 year old guy thinks is a whole package in a woman. For years after that blazing relationship ended, I had tried to re-create it in other women I was with. There' a problem though, there is only one D'Arby. Every other woman are what they are in of themselves too. But I could never find/recreate what I had in that time.

I once found myself dating a very stable single Mom of two girls. She was gainfully employed, emotionally stable and the kids were great. One date had us, the Mom and girls, choosing Easter outfits at Nordstroms once. I sat there in the women's department, thinking to myself..'Shit, this is what you've come too?” My time with D'Arby was sooo influential, sooo fun...that it was the litmus paper I used for other romances. The Italians call it a “thunderbolt.” It's the one girl that grabs you forever.

Well, like all blazing meteors, or bolides..they burn out. D'Arby ended it all rather abruptly with me though I had been “let in” further and further to her heart via the “peeling effect.” Shit...I had fell in love!

For a couple of weeks I couldn't let go. I wasn't a stalker but I kept trying to get a reason out of her for ending it. She was sheepish and parried my questions till she got the guts, or perhaps annoyed with my digging, to finally tell me her truth.

“I'm bored.” she said.

“Bored? Bored? With all we have been doing?” I was kinda shocked. It wasn't boring to me at all.

“Yeah..and you've changed in the past month...look..you're soo affectionate now...not that I don't like that but this is going somewhere else than what it was.”

She goes on...

“Ronnie..I don't think I was ever in love with any guy..or ever fell in love...I guess I'm broken in that sort of way...I don't know...I don't know why I am like this.”

Well, she had told me the truth...it wasn't a dodge. Shouda' seen it comin' as they say. D'Arby was not the marrying kind.

**

2014. Dragon Villa

I had gotten there early, sitting in my car and rather excited to see her again. I kept trying to tell myself not to expect a smooth skinned, tight 21 year old girl. I was 50 and she'd be 48 now. But I still romanticized what I thought I'd see. Hell, with my memories, how could I not?

She pulled in and I recognized her quickly. As we both approached one another in the parking lot, as the details of her face came into view, I thought, “Shit, D'Arby...you got OLD!”

A nanosecond later I thought this: “You do realize she's thinking the same thing about YOU too!”

Once inside, once we had received our tropical drinks, we started playing catch up. We both surprised one another about the changes that have happened in each other's lives.

“I'd never figured you'd become a nurse” I told her. “You never did like school.”

“And you? Last time I saw you were applying to grad schools..and now you work in healthcare dietary.” she replied.

We both came to the conclusion that life pushes you around in strange ways, and end up at destinations you'd never figure you'd arrive at.

“God...you still have that lion's man of hair...that was so handsome on you...but it's pure WHITE now!”

I was a bit miffed at that...backhanded compliments you know. Ah...what am I going to do about it.

I did compliment on her ability, or luck or whatever, to be thin as a rail still.

“I got fat as a cow for years.” She told me. “I got disgusted with myself, sad..for years...didn't date. I finally hired a nutritionist and with her help, I managed to get down to a healthy weight. I probably was just depressed for years and let everything go....till I got tired of it all.”

I could never imagine her obese...never. But she swore on a stack of Bibles she had become so for a good while. Still, it didn't seem possible to me. But she had assured me she had.

We talked about the old times we both had together and how she still, at 48, enjoyed a thrill now and again, but the volume on that had been turned waay down.

All of a suddne she perks up and says, “Hey, let's go to Misquamicut, to the Windjammer...let's go like old times.”

“Windjammer? That place is even still there? I had no idea.

“Maybe? Let's go anyway...remember the Huey Lewis concert...after?” she says...with a wry smile.

“Yeah..i remember.” I say.

I then say, after thinking about what she might be up to, “What D'Arby...you want to get caught fucking in my car like we did then? It's daylight out now! We'd be nailed in a few minutes!”

She laughed...and felt absolutely no shame in it now..nor then as I remember it.

“God...the times we had...ahh..that didn't bug me that the loading crew saw us.”

“You haven't changed, D'Arby”I said.

“Neither have you...I mention going to Misquamicut and already you are looking to be cautious.”

“Ah, it was just a joke, we can't go...I have to see my sister later on...I can't be that girl anymore anyways.” she said.

**

We promised to keep in touch, but you know how that goes. Work schedules, life interfering, the fact we had changed and trying to recapture the past is futile. We both were much wiser now. We drifted apart again in time.

Do I regret ever knowing her? Do I regret the ruination I had for being able to have the entire candy store to myself, again and again? How I tried to recreate that later on. Do I regret how she opened me up, made me grow by leaps and bound and also how she made me sting when she ended it all?

Do I regret being treated as a KDX 500 dirtbike, or how I treated her likewise? Tearing around being young and irresponsible?

Nope.

        Patti D'Arbanville from Modern Problems...pretty close approximation 

Desolated Angel

“I have nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion.”

Kerouac

This happened a long time ago...

In this blog I've written about Traci, the runaway from Zanesville, OH that come into our crew that hung out in Slater Park around 1982. God, so long ago now. At 15, she was eased out of her house when her mother remarried and both Mom and the new beau, decided they didn't want the baggage of a young teen around them. Traci was ignored and abandoned while the couple had a year long honeymoon, taking off to Chicago, parting and otherwise enjoying the idea of being a “childless couple” by choice. It went on to the point where Traci finally lit off on I-70 east to New York City.

“They didn't want me around anymore.” was the repeated phrase she would tell me often enough.

She hadn't made it to NYC when I had met her. She'd hitchhike her way east and be picked up by truckers and what not and be deposited at their destinations, none of which was anything like a Big City. As I got to know her and the teenage runaway lifestyle, it was “Gas, Ass or Grass: No One Rides for Free” that got her her rides. She was ditched in Pawtucket by some guy she met in Foxboro who just got rid of her once he was done. She had ended up in Foxboro after a trucker ditched her at a Greasy Spoon restaurant. She was still trying to make it to NYC, where she believed she could make a fun life there. In her young teen head, NYC (specifically Greenwich Village) would fix everything, if she could only get there.

“I want to be an artist...and the best artists are in Greenwich Village.” she told me.

Traci was one of those girls who never grew past five foot two. When I had met her, she was lucky enough to have been born rather pretty, albeit too short for model status. She had shoulder length sandy blonde hair with a shaved patch, straight back from her left ear for a few inches. That was a short lived hairstyle for girls who aped the 80's punk style. Add to that feather earnings that hung down, tight ass jeans, Pony sneakers and a green/black flannel shirt that accentuated her breasts. To my 18 year old boy's mind, she was hot, although teenage runaway dirty. A boho dirty if you will.  She had one strange aspect about her though, her eyes didn't track right. I'm sure you've seen people where one eye tracks you fine but the other is just ever so slightly off. I paid little attention to it then but years later when I was working for the deaf I had told this very same story to one guy who was stone cold deaf and he perked up. He signed, “That's strabismus...girls who have that are fucked up in the head beyond belief, and they put out like hell too.” I took that as gospel and the only reason why I did was that the deaf population can read body language like a book. I have found them to be right more often than not. But I didn't know that in 1982.

When she first met us, she worked rather quickly at determining which boy could offer her a place to stay, shower and wash her soiled clothing. I couldn't take strays home as there was no way my Mom nor brother would allow that. Damn! Jack, who's parents didn't give a damn what he did, nor who he brought home, managed to get her to stay with him. His home was a sort of bus station for the occasional down and out brother, sister, cousin, friend or whatnot. They'd stay there for a while then zip onto somewhere else.

She worked us boys with her skills at flirtation, which looking back on it all, was pretty advanced for a 16 year old. She managed to get free food, free lodgings and some newer clothing from us just by giving the boys the right amount of attention. “Hmm..you're cute...I might fuck you if things go well.” The mere hope of getting into her pants, was enough for us teens to bend over backwards for her. Like I said, she was good. But then again, she apparently had to learn these skills well as she hoofed it across all these miles. She had learned all about female sexual power quick.

One day, by the pond in Slater Park, I was talking to her about Zanesville, as I never had really traveled before. She had told me her favorite spot there was a bluff overlooking a muddy colored river that ran north to south there. I had told her that a favorite place of mine, where I could get away from everybody, either to fish, catnap or just stare into space was a hilly area near the Central Pond that was way in the back of Slater Park, where the Seekonk/Rehoboth woods really began. She perked up and wanted to see it.

Traci never went anywhere w/o her backpack. She treated it like I treat my wallet, you never leave it anywhere and I suppose she couldn't, her entire life was in there. She picked it up and off we went.

Once we got to the escarpment overlooking the pond, she began to unwind, talk more deeply about who she was. All I heard were stories of a lost soul type of girl, who never did have any anchor of any kind. No family stability, no stability in school, not even any real order in her head. As we talked further, out came dreams and fantasies about what she wanted her life to be. As she talked, the look on her face changed due to her own delving into that deep water of forgetfulness. You go down so deep the truth of your own life disappears. Years later I learned that this was called “dissociation.” We all do it, it's called daydreaming, but some of us take that and make a full length movie out of it, she did. As she spoke of what/where she wanted to be, she in her own mind, actually “went there” and it shone all over her face.

I suppose she thought me trustworthy, or at least no threat at all, or perhaps on her own wavelength when she asked me if I wanted to read her poetry, see her drawings. She trusted me enough then to let me see a bit closer. She dug into her backpack and took out a sketchbook and a beat up five subject notebook for me to read.

I now know, when a girl hands you her own written poems, you're in.

What I read was a mess. A mess in syntax and structure and of subject matter. Poems to me are rhymed or just free versed. I think she had no idea she was doing free verse, let alone if she even know what it was. Many of the poems were all about her loneliness, her inability to find the right way, to even live life successfully. A “I Don't Know Who I Am or What I Want Out of Life” was the jist of many of them. Her inner life was of confusion and one of escape. Add to that the teen girl fantasy, a princess fantasy, of finding that guy who would solve all her problems just with love kind of poems.

“What do you think?” she asks.

Of course, I couldn't tell her what I really thought. I white lied a comment that could be taken for what it was. “Traci...this stuff is really frantic.” I said. And it was.

“Ain't it though? I just let my mind run wild when I write!” she said.

I flipped through her sketchbook and to my surprise, she really could draw. The pictures were all charcoal drawings, fantastical, mostly of girls in some DreamLand-scape. Below is an approximation of what she drew. 

“You really can draw...I can't...never could. You probably could do something in art.” I told her. She was truly pleased with my view.

For a while, we didn't talk, just lay on that grass, looking around when she said.

“Ronnie, you're really nice..kind...I haven't met a lot of kind guys at all...” I had no answer to that, just perhaps a “thanks.” She had sized me up and told me her verdict of me.

I wasn't expecting the next statement though.

“You want to fuck me though, don't you?” she said.

Being 18..my only answer to that was an emotional, sort of drawn out, almost plaintive, with a rising intonation...”Yeaaaahhh..” I was starting to like her more and more..but not just in a sexual way and I suppose she could tell too.

She broke off eye contact with me, looked in her lap when she says: “Ronnie, you don't want to know me, not really...you don't know my past...” She had an awful estimation of herself, apparently. I later could only guess she wasn't too happy with all she had done in the past months to “make it” all the way out here being a runaway. Though with her being spaced out 24/7, her desperate attempts to forget the “now,” she turned and was completely with it, completely engaged for a few minutes when she told me, warned me about who she was. She had to have some moments of lucidity I guess...to make it this far.

I was let down by her saying this, but it was true from her heart I now know. Here she was, with perhaps some morals left, perhaps some heart...protecting me from herself. “You don't want to know me...”

Then in keeping with ability to fly into fantasy, she gets up, starts twisting around in a sort of dance saying, “See! I can dance like that redwing!” Being 18, seeing how a female can just smoothly turn and twist w/o so much of an effort, was hypnotic. “Yeah..tons of redwings here..they're all over this pond!” was all I could say.

**

Then one day she was gone. She had left us, just poof...and that was it. Our little group hadn't figured out who she had met to move on but she had met someone, perhaps another trucker, or some car she had hopped into and off she went, perhaps to Greenwich Village...perhaps Stonington, CT...ever closer to NYC.

She'd be 46 now..or dead, I have no clue.

It's funny how you meet some people, even just for a short time, and you don't forget about them.

Lock Your Diaries!

My brother Ken aspired to be a writer and to some extent managed to find a niche in a couple of RI monthly magazines. He wrote many comedy pieces, some serious articles and had a decent hand at cartooning. He got his start by keeping a journal (not a diary...diaries for guys are too sissified! Jack London kept a journal, Richard Simmons kept a diary). Ken was pretty forthcoming and truthful in his entries. How do I know? Because his jackass little brother (me) would secretly read them all. I was pretty good at ferreting out all of his hiding places within the house and it never did take too much work to discover hidden gems.

In 1976, my Dad was wanting his oldest son to acquire his first job, get a feel for the workaday life and learn to manage his very own money. Ken, then 16, caved in and got a job as a busboy at a place called Ponderosa Steak House on Washington Street (Rt 1) in South Attleboro.

Ponderosa Steakhouse was this cafeteria/Old West saloon-looking place that served nothing but various kinds of steaks. You got steak, a baked potato and a salad bar...that was it. It was also awfully lit up with yellow fluorescent lighting that made it feel like a bus station. My Dad loved the place as Dad discovered that eating red meats, a lot, was the path to nirvana. So, as a family, we went there more than often enough. Due to my having weak teeth, even then, I never did want to get the regular steaks as they seemed tough to me. I wanted what they called the “chopped” version. Think of it as those cube steaks you see in the meat display at Stop and Shop. It looks like a 2 ton metal press was rammed on top of it. Those were great...pre-chewed steaks! If my damn teeth weren't so mobile I suppose I could've had the Delmonicos and ribeyes.

My brother hated the job and kept it as long enough to satisfy my Dad, who then got him a position in the bank as a teller afterwards. As long as he was working, that was enough for Dad.

One night, while my brother was out with his friends, I was in the house, bored and a thought hit me. “It's been a couple of weeks since I read his journal, wonder what he's been up to?” So I find it again in the same place, on the floor of his closet, pushed to the back, with a few pennies on top to show if it had been moved. I, being a smart cookie, always put the pennies back in place after I read it.

I'm paraphrasing this because it's so long ago...but it's true!

May 18, 1976

(the usual stuff going on at St Ray's that day..) Then this funny thing about Ponderosa:

“I was asked by Paul, my boss, to take this vat of gravy from the kitchen out to the line. As I was carrying it, I felt this sneeze coming on. But because I was carrying a gallon or so of flaming liquid, I couldn't just put it down anywhere or whatever. I sneezed and I shot, from both nostrils, two globs of snot right onto the top of the gravy. I knew Paul was a stickler about food waste so I wasn't about to tell him about it. I found a table, put the gravy down and mixed the snot into it with a paint mixing stick I found nearby. No one saw it happen and I said nothing!”

When I read that, I busted out laughing. So much so that my Dad, irked by it downstairs, yells up, “What's so funny??!” I shouted back down, giggling, “This Mad magazine!” He shouted up to “keep it down.” I managed to do so but I kept giggling to myself at the idea of blowing snot into someone's dinner.

So, if you were a patron at Ponderosa Steakhouse on Washington St on May 18^th 1976, there was a small chance you ate a teen boy's snot. Those weren't roux balls floating in the gravy!

What's interesting about reading other's very private thoughts is that at times, they talk about YOU! I manage to find out what he thought about me. A few areas my brother was concerned with then was:

1. My hair was far too long, even for the late '70s.
2. My choice of friends he called, “sketchy.” How, at 11 years old, could I have sketchy friends? Well, I did I guess. Little pre-criminals...all of Pawtucket was full of pre-criminals.
3. That he probably, shouldn't have, maybe...given me my first pot to smoke.
4. My brother knew he a great reputation out there in the world, most liked him. One time, he wrote after we two had had an argument that, “Ronnie threatened to tell everyone just what kind of person I really was, behind closed doors.” This is true, I can remember this argument. I had found out my brother was gossiping about me to his friends out in the real world and it got back to me. I then threatened to alert everyone he knew just what a bastard he really could be. My brother responded by threatening me to beat my head in if I ever did. I said that perhaps we two should make a bargain, you shut up and I'll shut up.
5. That he was going to play MatchMaker and set me up with Gail, the girl who I bashed in the stomach a year earlier when I was 10 . She had split my lip with a balled up fist. The fight was a draw. When I read this, I was shocked...I didn't like the thought of him pushing me towards her to kiss her! We two might have been happier, at 11, to punch each other out instead.

A year or so after he had died, I violated the shit out of Ken's privacy once again. I had collected all his property, things and what not and had to decide what to do with them. One of the journals I wanted to share with his best friend, Tom. Tom was mentioned over a hundred times in his journal and I figured, hey, why not...give this to Tom and he can have a pretty intimate remembrance of Ken when those two were teens. A month later I get a phone call: “Jesus, Ronnie...all those memories...all those times...I hadn't known he wrote them down...but there's shit in here I'd never admit to anyone..even to my grave...even so...this was soo cool!”

I figured he'd like it.

HERstory of Pawtucket

The women's movement didn't hit Pawtucket, the girls or me till 1976. It was introduced to us in Miss Mara's 6^th grade class by part-time, younger nurse in training, Nurse LeClair. For years in residence, we had a fat, bitchy, white clothed nurse. She would admonish us, rubbing salt into the wound, when she patched up skinned knees. “Well, that's what you get for jumping off the fence!” Those kids who got “sick” during the school day had better have proof for her, like vomit on the floor, because w/o some kind of tell-tale sign, she sent you right back to class. She trained in '76, the new nurse who we found out did time with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone. She didn't wear the usual white garb of nurse at all but regular street clothes with a white lab coat. Add to that her outspokenness.

This new nurse had “modern” ideas. Every time she'd come into the class to hold a talk about health, cleanliness and whatnot, we'd learn them. One time she had us all chew those red dye pills, then brush out teeth and admonish, the boys mostly, for doing a shitty job. The boy's teeth had gobs of that dye still stuck to where we missed teeth. The damn girls were always showing us up because they did a far better job.

“Nutrition Day” I got busted for once. For years, I had an addiction to Coca Cola (and still have!) and I admitted to something that got her on my case fast. She was going over the four food groups and then started to ask each and every one of us what we had for breakfast that morning. When she got to me I stupidly told the truth.

“...and you Ronnie? What did you have?”

“A glass of Coke and a Flintstone vitamin.”

“What?”

“A glass of Coke and a...” I repeated before I was cut off.

“Who lets you have Coke for breakfast?”

“I let myself have Coke.” I say.

“But doesn't your Mom cook breakfast?” she asks.

Shit, time to divert this conversation, don't want any pesky questions about my home life. I tell her that I was never ever really hungry when I got up. I managed to change the subject just enough to prevent the nurse from calling DCYF with charges of neglect. To this day, I still don't have breakfast. I ain't hungry when I get up. I'm 52 and still have Coke for breakfast instead.

“Open your mouth.” she demands. So I do. She looks in, inspecting it all.

“There's eleven fillings in your teeth!” she says.

“Yes!" I proudly say, like it's some badge of honor.

“All that soda you drink is doing that to you! You should drink water instead.” I respond to that by saying I couldn't stand water. It's true. As a kid, I hated it. Want to know why? Pawtucket chlorinates their water so much that it tastes like a YMCA pool.

**

There was sex education in 1976, for the girls...a one time only “talk” from the nurse. We boys got nothing, nadda, zilch, zero. Any sex education we learned was from friends and older siblings who opened our eyes to how babies were made.

“I have to stick it in where? In her? Augggghh....Grosssss!” we eight year old boys would shriek.

I'm sure the girls were just as thrilled at the prospect of filthy, rambunctious boys trying that.

Nurse LeClair came to our class one day and after a quick, quiet chat with Mara, she said, “OK, all you girls follow me to the library.”

We boys were perplexed. Why not us?

After an hour, the girls came back. Every.single.one of them walked in in dead silence, sat at their desks and not a peep was heard. All of us boys really began to wonder just what talk had happened. We later found out from one of the other girls what it was all about. YUCK!

A minute or so later, LeClair comes in and starts to speak mainly to the girls of what they want to do when they grow up. It felt like a continuation of a conversation they had just minutes before. I swear LeClair wasn't quite done with the girls yet.

All through grammar school, there were three occupations the girls said they wanted to be, nurse, Mommy or secretary. You rarely heard anything about being a CEO of biomed company.

LeClair takes note of the Mommy occupation. “You just want to be a Mommy...” She had repeated this answer of one girl when asked. “There are a lot of things you can be....than just a Mom.”

She went on on how the girls were just as good as the boys and could attend college, get a degree and be engineers for NASA, doctors or business women. She went on on how the women won the vote, did the jobs during WW2 and that any girl in this class could do the same or better.

“But won't we have to join the Army if there's a war?” one worried girl said.

“If you want to be EQUAL...yes! It's a great career! And there isn't always war.” she goes on.

“My Mom said that I'd be a great mommy one day. I can already cook 'n' clean 'n' I babysit!” one girl chimes up.

“Does your Daddy clean the house?” asks LeClair.

“No...”

“Why not?” LeClair let that question hang in the air.

The girls didn't really know what to make of this talk, gauging from the looks on their faces. I doubt they ever entertained an idea of anything else but what they saw their moms, aunts and sisters do. We boys felt a bit miffed as we were totally cut out of the conversation. We could easily feel that the nurse had turned coat and had joined the girls against us boys. Or at least that's what it felt like for a bit. What about us?

But I'll tell you this, by 8^th grade, two quick years, most of those sixth grade girls became harder core feminists. By then, the saturation on TV and media was complete and it was personally introduced to the our local girls by a Peace Corps nurse in our classroom. The girls at 14 began to really shove it in the boy's faces then. This was Second Wave feminism reaching Pawtucket finally. Some of those girls I went so to school with then, one runs a real estate agency, another became the bond desk manager for Merrill Lynch and one other a dentist. Not bad.

Some, not all, of the 20 Something girls I run into at times today, are steeped in that Third Wave Feminism that's here now. Long since ditched are the ideas about work, equal pay, pornography and the such. Now it's all Lesbian Theory, retaliation against any sexual repression and slut shaming. It's all niche rights now and fractionilized to a Baskin Robbins 4,504.6 flavors of sexual identity. 

I don't care what you do in your backyard, if it involves sheep, great, go for it, rape them all! But please don't ardently dump your lifestyle into my backyard. There is a reason for the word "tact" being in existence. Don't molest your sheep in my driveway please.