The Lowell Review 2023

PROSE POETRY ART INTERVIEWS with featured work about NATURE & CLIMATE

Copyright © 2023

by The Lowell Review

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The Lowell Review is an annual publication with content from the RichardHowe.com blog, as well as submitted and curated material. To view this issue and back issues online, visit TheLowellReview.com

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Work previously published in the RichardHowe.com blog is reprinted by permission of the authors.

Thanks to Shawn Levy, Sanary Phen, David Getty for Sarah Getty, Michael Casey, Ivy Ngugi, Gary Lawless, Alfred Nicol, Resi Ibañez, Brian Herzog, and Jay Atkinson for permission to reprint their previously published work. See the Contributors section for details on permissions.

Thanks to David Brow for permission to reprint his photographs. Special thanks to penguinrandomhouse.com for an advance copy of The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg.

The works of fiction are inventions of the authors.

editors

Richard P. Howe, Jr.

Paul Marion

contributing editors

David Daniel

John Wooding

art direction & design

Joey Marion

cover art

© Nancy Wells Woods

“Coleus” (watercolor sketch)

The Lowell Review brings together writers and readers in the Merrimack River watershed of eastern New England with people everywhere who share their curiosity about and passion for the small and large matters of life. Each issue includes essays, poems, stories, criticism, opinion, and visual art.

In the spirit of The Dial magazine of Massachusetts, edited by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1840s, The Lowell Review offers a space for creative and intellectual expression. The Dial sought to provide evidence of “what state of life and growth is now arrived and arriving.”

This publication springs from the RichardHowe.com blog, known for its “Voices from Lowell and beyond.” In America, the name Lowell stands out, associated with industrial innovation, working people, cultural pluralism, and some of the country’s literary greats.

SECTION I

“Many communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis are already experiencing loss and damage. Communities cannot adapt to extinction; communities cannot adapt to starvation. The climate crisis is pushing so many people in places where they cannot adapt anymore. . . . If you traveled two to three hours away from Kampala to a certain rural community, you’ll understand how people would struggle to find water and how people’s crops are drying up because of the extreme dry conditions. . . . In the end, we cannot eat coal, we cannot drink oil.”

—Vanessa Nakate, Uganda, Climate activist, Sustainable Development Goals, un.org, 1/22

“Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope, but I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”

—Greta Thunberg, Sweden, Climate activist, World Economic Forum, theguardian.com, 1/19

“This fight for climate justice doesn’t extend to our physical environment alone but also impacts negatively on our children’s and our young persons’ mental health environment. . . . We truly believe that there must be far greater support by the international community to us within Small Island Developing States and helping us to become more climate resilient and adapt better to the impact that the climate crisis is having on our lives today.”

—Ashley Lashley, Barbados, leader, HEY (Health and Environment-friendly Youth) Campaign, with young people across the Caribbean, un.org, 4/22

“. . . I talk about the climate movement because that’s anti-chaos. That’s a knitting-together of people. I went to a conference the other day in Barcelona, and there were, I don’t know, five hundred people. There are twenty whom I’ll probably have further conversations with. I thought, How many conferences of that scale were going on that weekend? If everybody in those conferences was making roughly the same number of connections—I get this picture of this movement becoming powerful. It’s not the David and Goliath situation we’d thought, because, actually, we’re Goliath.”

—Brian Eno, England, musician and activist, The New York Times Magazine, 11/22

“Whatever economic competitiveness, whatever set of family values, whatever sense of societal inclusiveness we achieve will be torn apart if we must fight over access to water, food, energy, and clean air.”

—Paul E. Tsongas of Lowell, Mass. (1941-1997), from Journey of Purpose, 1995

Concord River, Lowell, photo by Joey Marion

There’s Something Happening Here . . .

john wooding

We can only hope that there is no longer a need to highlight the enormous challenges and dangers to all of us and our world resulting from global warming and climate change. It is by now obvious that we face potentially devastating consequences of decades of inaction. Since industrialization in nations of the north, especially, the temperature of the Earth increased 1.2° Celsius, stressing the planet’s ice zones, rainforests, permafrost, and seas. The tipping point is not far off, conditions that can radically change life around the globe: severe droughts, brutal storm systems, and rising ocean levels. The 2015 Paris Agreement signed by 195 countries seeks to keep global warming under 1.5° Celsius and no more than 2° Celsius in relation to the pre-industrial age.

There are ways we can mitigate the worst impacts. As the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pointed out in its April 2022 report, we can work together to help prevent a catastrophe. The ways are well-known: get off the addiction to fossil fuel and switch to renewable energy sources, make cities Green, decarbonize the world’s buildings, switch to electric vehicles, commit to fairness and equity, teach well and often about how we can work to stop further damage. This can seem beyond our individual efforts, the challenges too big and far away.

It is often said that all politics is local. Much the same can be said of the fight against global warming. The more towns and cities, neighborhoods, and communities collaborate in as many ways as possible, the greater the chance that we can survive a warming world and save it for our children and our children’s children. Some of that local work is going on here in Lowell.

In the following pages, we offer several things that people are doing in the community and at UMass Lowell (UML) and Middlesex Community College. People working together to find solutions and to mobilize and educate. Interspersed are essays and poems that give us ways to look at and appreciate Nature and the daily planet.

The Lowell Parks & Conservation Trust teamed up with Mass Audubon and Mill City Grows to conserve the land and beauty of Rollie’s Farm. As Jen Myers points out, these organizations foresee a multitude of uses for the land such as restoration of the Christmas tree farm; maintaining the land as a working farm that includes a food forest and community gardens; and building a nature center for educational programming. Knowledge, green space, a place to breathe, less than a mile from downtown Lowell.

Caring for Earth shows up in many forms. The Lowell Litter Krewe beautifies public

spaces, putting in 1,426 hours and picking up 48,600 pounds of trash before 2022 was over. Six hundred unique volunteers. High school and community college students of the Environmental Youth Task Force presented their display about protecting watersheds at a Smithsonian Institution festival in Washington, D. C.

Writers from the region and beyond reflect on Nature’s power and subtle grace seen in a sugar maple, a barred owl, a brook, and a pike. We have work by legacy authors Robert Frost, with roots along the Merrimack River, and Amy Lowell of Boston, related to the Lowells whose name is on the historic city and this publication.

A group of forty or so Lowell non-profits keeps the celebration of Earth Day front and center on the streets, and in folks’ hearts and minds. The UMass Lowell’s Climate Change Initiative is led by Juliette Rooney-Varga, who, with faculty colleagues and students, works tirelessly to investigate climate-friendly technologies and promotes science-based knowledge about a warming globe.

Ruairi O’Mahony is executive director of UML’s Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy. At the Institute the team he leads transformed the campus, creating a deep commitment to shrinking the university’s carbon footprint and engaging with the Lowell community to advocate and develop a whole range of sustainable practices.

Children in Lowell schools are getting educated about climate change. UML students study climate change science and the social and political impacts of climate change. Faculty like Ingrid Hess use art and game-playing to increase awareness amongst the very young. We must teach the children well, and Ingrid is doing that.

Longtime UML faculty member David Kriebel and the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production, have, for nearly three decades, promoted the idea that to reduce toxic exposures to humans and damage to the environment we must reduce and eliminate unhealthful and dangerous chemicals and practices at the point of production. Many of those chemicals cause cancer, and the Center has been at the forefront of pushing for a cancer-free economy. That would be good.

In these pages there could be more examples of local people working to lessen global warming and its terrifying consequences. As the United Nations report argues, there are actions we can take, and we are doing so in part: using new technologies for renewable energy, finding new ways to sequester carbon, applying smart ideas about transportation, promoting locally grown organic food. But these will be ineffective unless we consider all aspects of equity and justice, as the poor here and everywhere disproportionately suffer the consequences of our rapidly warming planet. What we do here in Lowell matters. That we do it working together is the only way to succeed. There’s something happening here, and these examples make that exactly clear.

Rollie’s Farm

jennifer myers

Something or someone was feasting on Rollie Perron’s coveted corn crop under the cloak of darkness.

This time it wasn’t the usual furry masked suspects; the Concord grape jelly in the humane traps that lured the raccoons in the past remained undisturbed.

Rollie scratched his head and looked around the remains of the matted corn rows at the edge of his field. He spotted a clue. A footprint. These were not raccoons trespassing on his land, the prints looked more like those left by some sort of dog.

Rollie had tussled with dozens of critters in his decades working the farm and knew there was only one way to crack this case—catch the culprits in the act, on their own timeline.

So, he hopped out of bed at 3 a.m. and headed out to the field with his giant flashlight. He shone the light up onto the hill at the back of the property that houses his sought-after Christmas trees. It immediately bounced back at him, reflected in the glowing eyes of a pack of coyotes preparing to descend into the corn field. He waved his arms and made some noise, successfully scaring the “cornivores” away.

“Now I knew I had a real creature to deal with,” he recalled.

He headed back out night after night playing watchman, patrolling the field from 3 a.m. to sunrise to keep the scavengers at bay. He paced. He perched himself atop the Christmas tree trimming ladder. After a few of these sleepless nights, he pitched his bright yellow tent at the edge of the field and slept there for three weeks. No sign of the coyotes.

The night he went back into the house to sleep, they returned. They must have smelled him when he was out here, he deduced.

“It’s such a battle. You’re fighting nature,” he said. “A farmer is fighting all the critters that want to eat your corn, want to eat your tomatoes you’re fighting woodchucks, you’re fighting racoons, you’re fighting birds. Then you are fighting weather—too much rain, not enough rain, wind, early frost.”

Now seventy-years-old and having worked the Pawtucketville land since his parents bought it in 1953, Rollie is ready to retire.

“Every season is like a marathon for me; it is go, go, go, go,” he said. “It is time to let go.”

But this is not an ending. It is more of a passing of the torch than the end of an era.

The twenty-two-acre Rollie’s Farm on Varnum Avenue, the last family farm in Lowell, will be conserved in perpetuity through a partnership formed by the Lowell Parks and Conservation Trust, Mass Audubon, and Mill City Grows.

The coalition will pay $3.85 million for the land; $1.5 million of which has been granted to the group by the Lowell Community Preservation Committee. The land, split into two

parcels, 10 acres of which are owned by Rollie’s siblings, and the remainder by him, will be sold in two phases. The transaction will be complete in April 2024, following which Rollie will be given one year to remain living in the farmhouse before it is officially turned over.

The organizations foresee a multitude of uses for the land including restoration of the Christmas tree farm; maintaining the land as a working farm with a food forest and community gardens; and building a nature center for educational programming, as well as providing walking trails and a connection to the adjacent 1,100-acre Lowell-DracutTyngsboro State Forest.

Jane Calvin, Executive Director of the Lowell Parks and Conservation Trust said the full realization of the project will be phased in over several years and cost $6 to $10 million to do everything the three organizations want to do. They are working off of their own plans, while also incorporating ideas for use of the land collected in community listening and brainstorming sessions.

“The Rollie’s Farm project provides an incredible opportunity to demonstrate the value of working with the community to bring nature to the children and adults of Lowell,” said Renata Pomponi, Mass Audubon Senior Regional Director for Metro Boston. “Mass Audubon is proud to partner with Lowell Parks and Conservation Trust and Mill City Grows to provide an incredible new community resource built on the concepts of sustainable agriculture, ecological stewardship, and access to the outdoors.”

According to Pomponi, Lowell ranks 304 out of the state’s 351 cities and towns in percentage of protected open space, which is not surprising given the dense urban landscape found in most of the city. Preserving a swath of land as large as Rollie’s Farm, particularly in a city, is very rare, but essential for helping to offset the impact of climate change.

Pomponi said the planned ecological restoration of the Christmas tree farm, will significantly expand the tree canopy and the amount of greenhouse gases absorbed. Preserving the land, rather than building upon it and replacing grass with pavement, helps to reduce stormwater runoff into the neighborhood, lessening the impacts of severe weather events.

The farm acts as a carbon sink, meaning it absorbs more carbon than it releases into the atmosphere, which helps to counteract the effects of climate change.

Calvin said by expanding upon and restoring the existing green space, the land can have an even larger positive ecological impact.

“Both restoration of the farm’s ecology and Mill City Grows’ regenerative farming practices will enhance carbon sequestration,” she said. “Reducing tillage, eliminating chemicals, growing diverse cover crops, and adding compost all create a living soil that sequesters more carbon. This creates a positive feedback loop that will contribute to mitigating climate change and rebalancing the earth’s carbon cycle.”

Jessica Wilson, Executive Director of Mill City Grows said raising crops is key combatting the effects of climate change.

“I study and understand the effects of our global food system on the environment, so I really believe more local food is one of the many solutions we need to pursue to halt climate change,” she said. “The more time we spend actively engaging on the land, the better we can understand it and work in partnership with, rather than against, the best interests of the planet and each other.”

Photo by Paul H. Richardson

Additionally, protecting the land provides a place in the city where people can truly connect with nature through wildlife observation, summer camps, field research opportunities for students, as well as a variety of programs for people of all ages.

You do not have to leave the city to visit the country.

That is a lesson Rollie learned as a young boy. His parents, Roland, Sr. and Carole, bought the farm from the Palm family in 1953. Originally from Lawrence, Roland, Sr. met Carole when he was stationed in South Dakota while serving in the U.S. Air Force. She was the daughter of a cattle rancher. After Rollie was born, they decided to move back east, the 1952 Ford 8N tractor Roland Sr. bought from his father-in-law in tow.

Roland and Carole grew strawberries and pansies at what was then known as Carole’s Farm. She arranged beautiful baskets of flowers to sell at the farm stand. The family, which included Rollie and his siblings Mary Alice, Kathy, and Chris, had a milk cow, a steer they raised for beef named Bucky, and a horse named Ladybug.

The family farm was never a big money maker. Carole used her woody station wagon as a mini school bus, shuttling the kids who lived on Varnum Ave. to school to make extra money before she decided to go back to school herself and become a teacher. Roland Sr. worked for Raytheon. Although they both had full-time demanding jobs, they would come home and get right to work tending to the farm.

“I was dad’s little helper,” Rollie recalled.

He attended the Lexington Avenue School in Pawtucketville from grades 1-4. Before heading to school each morning, it was Rollie’s job to milk the cow, clean her stall, and feed her.

“I went to school smelling like a cow farm,” Rollie said. “I remember all of the kids making fun of me. It was so embarrassing.”

The Palm family, who had sold the Varnum Avenue farmland to the Perrons, still had a chicken farm up the street at the corner of Varnum Ave. and Trotting Park Rd. on the property that now houses the First Church or the Nazarene. Rollie recalls going with his dad to help Mr. Palm vaccinate the chickens cooped there.

“We would grab them by the legs, pull a wing out and stick them with two big needles, then toss them out the door of the coop and grab another one,” he said. “There were so many chickens there—thousands of them.”

But, growing up on a farm did have some advantages—in 8th grade Rollie rode Ladybug across the neighborhood to Maureen Manchenton’s house on Fourth Ave. for their first date. That was certainly not an experience other Lowell boys could offer.

And when he was a teenager and wanted to buy his first drum set, Rollie’s dad made a deal with him, giving him a patch of land on which to grow strawberries to sell. He could keep the profits.

Rollie spent that spring and early summer tending to his strawberry patch and then pedaling pints of the sweet ripe fruit to variety stores in the area to sell. As soon as he cleared $500, he bought his first Gretsch drum set and turned the strawberry patch back over to his dad.

In the early 1970s, times were bleak on Carole’s Farm. The thirty-eight acres was being taxed at the residential rate, leaving the Perrons scrambling to pay a $12,000 (equal to $85,000 today) annual property tax bill to the city.

In 1973, Massachusetts passed a new law—Chapter 61A which provides a tax break for

actively farmed land, valuing the land as agricultural rather than residential, therefore cutting the tax burden significantly. The Perrons were thrilled—until they weren’t.

“The City Assessor refused to recognize our farm as a working farm,” Rollie said.

In the 2010 documentary The Last Farm in Lowell, written and directed by Andrew Szava-Kovats, Roland Sr. details the four-year legal battle with the city in which the family ultimately prevailed.

“They (city officials) didn’t want a farm in Lowell,” he said.

Although the open rural landscape of the Perron land in outer Pawtucketville is the absolute opposite of the dense industrial landscape of the city’s downtown, the fates of the two have run parallel in some ways.

In the late 1960’s Urban Renewal was all the rage. In Lowell that meant demolishing entire neighborhoods like the Little Canada enclave, home to many French-Canadian families, and the Hale/Howard neighborhood that was home to many of the city’s Jewish and African American families, in the name of “progress.” Boarding houses along the Merrimack Canal at Lucy Larcom Park were demolished. It was a time of tear down the old and build new. There was even talk of paving over the historic downtown area and building a shopping mall.

In the 1970’s that changed, as visionaries like Patrick Mogan, Sen. Paul Tsongas, and others put the focus on historic preservation and seeing Lowell’s unique past as a bridge to the future rather than as a detriment. The Lowell National Historical Park was born, and the remaining old mill buildings were repurposed for housing and commercial use.

In 1973, City officials likely did not want a farm in Lowell because they would rather

Rollie Perron, photo by Jennifer Myers

see those acres turned into a housing development generating property tax dollars. That way of thinking has also evolved in recent years, as communities across the country fight to preserve open space for ecological and quality of life reasons. People have also realized the benefit and importance of locally grown fruits and vegetables.

Rollie, the only one of the Perron kids to show an interest in farming, became serious about it after returning to Lowell in 1974 following a stint in the U.S. Army. He attended Essex County Agricultural School (Essex Aggie) for a year but did not feel he was really learning anything. He dropped out.

A couple of his friends in the neighborhood told him about a really “cool” chemist working at the City’s water treatment plant named Charlie Panagiotakos.

“He was a really hip guy and all the young guys in the neighborhood would go down to hang out with him and see what he was doing,” Rollie said.

Rollie used his G.I. Bill benefits to attend night classes in water and wastewater treatment at the then-University of Lowell, where Panagiotakos taught. He eventually got a job working for the city’s water department as a plant operator.

At the same time, he was taking over the operations of the farm from his parents. Carole’s Farm became Rollie’s Farm.

A perfectionist and tinkerer by nature, he began experimenting with techniques for growing the best tomatoes and corn around. He increased his production by leasing nearby fields in Pawtucketville and in Hudson, N.H.

Rollie wracked his brain trying to figure out what to do with the sandy-soiled twelveacres on the back of the property. Then he remembered that his dad once planted some Christmas trees up there, but they were not properly cared for and never amounted to much.

“That always stuck in my head,” he said.

In 1975, he began clearing the land and planted a couple of hundred Norway Spruce trees. They take eight to nine years to mature to proper Norman Rockwell-worthy Christmas trees. Over the years he has meticulously hand-fertilized, trimmed, and sprayed the Christmas tree forest and expanded the number and variety of trees available—Balsam, Corkbark, Concolor, and Korean firs.

For the last four decades, families have been taking an annual tractor ride back in time, making their way up into the grove at Rollie’s Farm to pick out the perfect holiday tree. Seasonal staff, many of whom started working there as teens and have come back for twenty or more years, cut down the trees and shake them with the Lit’l Shakee tree shaker to evict any loose pine needles, small creatures, beehives or abandoned bird nests that may be lurking within the branches. The experience sure beats picking up a tree in a parking lot along the side of the road.

“We sell about one thousand trees each year,” said Rollie. “Things get really hectic around here from Thanksgiving to Christmas.”

Conservationists and activists began to worry about the future of the bucolic farmland in 2002 when Roland Sr. sold seventeen acres to developer Marc Ginsburg for $1.9 million to build the thirty-five-home Enchanted Forest subdivision.

In exchange for the Chapter 61A tax break, the city was granted right of first refusal when the decision was made to sell the land.

Calvin said her organization was not mature enough at the time to take on such a large

project and the price tag was too steep.

“We knew the same developer was interested in more of the land so that was always in the back of my head,” Calvin said. “We knew that was always a threat.”

She was not going to let another shot at preserving the land pass her by. In 2018, the LPCT teamed up with Mass Audubon and Mill City Grows and worked with Rollie throughout the pandemic to reach a deal that would make everyone happy.

Calvin said there are not too many urban land trusts in the country and to be able to preserve a piece of land like Rollie’s, which borders an 1,100-acre forest, is almost unheard of and a dream come true.

“I want people to come here and feel welcomed, to walk the property and enjoy it,” she said. “Every kid in Lowell should experience this property.”

It is a natural progression and perfect location for the three organizations to expand their offerings. LPCT and Mass Audubon have a long relationship running after-school and other programs in Lowell, including at nearby Hawk Valley Farm. Mill City Grows runs two urban farms, eight community gardens around the city, and built and provides educational programming at sixteen gardens at Lowell Public Schools.

Mill City Grows will cultivate vegetables reflective of the cultural diversity of Lowell on the lower ten-acres of Rollie’s property, and there are plans for a food forest with fruit trees and other plants that require less tending on the land between the fields and the upper acres of the property. The food forest will be a space where visitors can wander, pick themselves a healthy snack, and learn about where our food comes from.

“Part of our mission is also to connect people to the land, and this is the single biggest project we have ever taken on—preserving this beautiful space to be in service to the people of Lowell for the rest of time,” said Wilson. “I want this to be a space where everyone has access to healthy, sustainable, and culturally connected food, and people are defining and creating their own food production systems. That will make us a more resilient community in many ways, and we will have our own food, a cleaner environment, and strong ties to our neighbors.”

While Rollie admits it is going to be difficult for him to step away from the farm, he is looking forward to playing more tennis and getting back to drumming more in future years. He has found peace in knowing that he is leaving the land and his family’s legacy in the capable hands of organizations and people who share his values and will continue to make the space one of the city’s greatest assets.

Owl Winter

carla panciera

The ancient Romans believed that a feather from an owl revealed the secrets of a sleeping person.

It is January. My daughter will turn nineteen. Apphia likes to talk, will sit on the edge of my bed the way I sat on my own mother’s bed, and provide details of her day. But, of course, she is, as I was, as my mother was, a keeper of secrets. Why would I want to know these, when some of what she tells me is hard enough to hear?

This has been an owl winter. Apphia asks if I hear them. I don’t, so, the night before her birthday, I lay awake listening for them and waiting for those moments when Apphia needs to talk and tells me that she isn’t afraid of death, only of everything that comes after it for the living. Or that she explains how her best friend, someone she has loved since she was three years old, has left her out of things deliberately, has decided someone else is her best friend now. But Apphia isn’t surprised or wounded, only practical. She’ll just explain to her: I’m okay not being with you right now. She will say something similar to her first love. “I can be alone,” she says.

She has held all three of her grandparents’ hands this year as they have left her. She isn’t afraid of endings.

When I was a teenager, I didn’t tell my own mother that I was friendless. Of course, she knew, but if I had said it out loud, she would have had to tell me her own secret: That she blamed me for it.

In December, Apphia ran with her father over trails covered in flattened leaves. Sometimes, she broke through a crust of moss partially frozen, stumbling, not looking down as I would have looked down, not slowing as I would have slowed. She felt something. Or saw something. Maybe movement, a bigger shadow than crow or hawk. The barred owl perched on a branch. So she got a good look, the swiveling head, the yellow beak. Even when she called for her father, the bird stayed, lifting away only when Dennis finally turned.

The day after she saw the owl, she took me to the trails. I concentrated on my steps, forgot running and then paid close attention to where I placed my feet, the way, as a family, we had paid attention to breathing, to the way a body starts to cool, limbs first towards the center.

I had no faith the bird would reappear, until Apphia pointed to a blurred brown form on a bare limb for an instant before the creature disappeared.

It’s not an owl’s body that is large. It is the wings, fringe-like, silent. On the way out of the woods, Apphia reached down and picked up a pellet, furred and feathered, pierced with bones. An owl eats its prey head-first. Swallows it whole.

My mother has been dead one year.

Apphia has inherited the compulsion to dream-share in the glare of the morning sun. From my

grandmother who dreamed in Italian. From my mother who translated for us, then told us of the dead people who reappeared in her own dreams, people she might never have spoken to in real life.

During pregnancy, nightmares plagued me. My uncle who ferries souls to the next world appeared.

“I know why you’re here,” I said, standing in a kitchen where the women in my family prepared a meal at the counter and did not see him. I wanted to hold my belly the way women in movies do, but my hands were folded in prayer.

The next night, the dogs woke me barking downstairs. What kind of an owl was it that sat on a branch outside the kitchen window, that stayed, unperturbed by the noise? A cold and snowless night. A waning crescent. The unmistakable bird.

“I know why you’re here,” I said. Awake, I could hold my belly and feel the baby’s response.

My mother tucked a plastic bag of salt and a silver dollar into a diaper the first time a baby visited her home. “A blessing,” she said.

Birds flying into the window, new shoes on the table, bad luck. “Dreams of babies too,” she told me. “But dreams of the dead? Just the opposite.”

“What about birds who don’t fly into windows? Who just watch?”

She had no answer. Or she did but kept it to herself.

“Do you see why I had to end things, Mom?” Apphia said. I was driving north along old Route 1. We had a few more presents to buy before Christmas. “Do you understand why sometimes, friendship ends?”

Do you remember, I didn’t say, what I told you about the dissolution of my own friendships? Those two women who never came back? I had no idea what friendships required.

Apphia and I were in the middle of an intersection where each summer, beachgoers on their way to Hampton bought towels displayed on clotheslines strung from a van to the trees on an otherwise desolate lot, an unsightly stretch by an abandoned gas station opposite it.

I did see. Because you can’t be what someone loves. Because you don’t like the songs they like. You wear the wrong jeans. You say things you don’t mean but only out of fear.

It’s just that you’ve lost so much already, I wanted to say.

Then, we noticed the small group gathered beside the rusted gas pumps. Birders with scopes and cameras.

“There!” Apphia said. The second barred.

In the middle of our stories, in the middle of our day, in the middle of nowhere, we studied the creature and then its likeness captured by a stranger who scrolled through her images so we could see its expression. Black eyes. Unfazed by traffic and blight, a mile away from the New Hampshire border with its plethora of shops selling fireworks.

“There’s also a screech in Rowley. Todd Farm. Can’t miss it,” the woman told us.

We live in Rowley. So in the middle of errands and explanations, without what we’d come for, we headed home.

Apphia’s first dream (three years old): “There was an owl in a tree. A purple one that spoke to me.”

“Were you afraid?” I asked.

“No.”

We can’t appropriate a totem, we can only ask for it to reveal itself or notice its repeated presence. For the ancient Greeks, the owl symbolized prophecy. Wisdom. What strikes me is how they watch. How we might miss them watching.

In the grocery store, toddler Apphia would lean against my leg as I unloaded our cart and tell me people’s names. People she had never met. “But I was listening,” she said. “I saw their lips moving.”

One time, just as I reached over her bed to turn out the light, she said aloud my father’s name: Aldo. She never knew him and most people used his nickname. She said nothing else, only settled in to sleep.

When she does wake me up from my own dreams on the eve of her birthday, she says she can’t sleep because she didn’t know people died with their mouths open.

In search of the screech owl, we pulled into the former farmland, fallow pastures like dusty fairgrounds surrounded by new growth forest. The barn housed an antique shop. A car was parked outside where cows once plodded in to be milked.

“We’re to believe an owl will be just sitting in a tree? It can’t be that easy,” I said as we made a slow arc of the property where, every warm Sunday of the year, bargain hunters roamed aisles of a large flea market.

I got out and paced a stretch of woods scanning trunks and branches, wondering what I should be looking for. Apphia never had to seek the birds.

“I’m sorry,” I said, when I got back in. This is how things go sometimes, I wanted to say, but she knew that. People can disappoint you and still love you. They can leave and never return and you will have a day like this when you are out in search of cleaning supplies or potting soil or a lightweight sweater and, instead, you see something up close that you’ve never seen.

I paused at the exit to pull back onto the road, and Apphia touched my arm, pointed to an impossible iconography. In the hollowed oval of a tree, the screech owl. The Virgin’s profile caught in clapboards stained with rot could not have so inspired our adoration.

At the end of her life, my mother returned to the church.

“I know you think it’s voodoo,” she said. “But it’s a luxury to know you’re going to die. To have time to make your peace.”

After all three of our parents had died, Dennis and I divided up their rosary beads. I took none. Apphia waited patiently for her string.

Apphia caught everything when she was a girl—frogs, newts, mice. She sat for hours waiting for a snake to come out of a hole in our foundation, stood still enough for fish to nibble at her ankles before she scooped them into a bucket without a net. She asked why she couldn’t catch birds. “They have wings,” I said. “They are too fast for us.”

But one day she uncupped her hands just wide enough for me to see the sparrow. “It let me get it,” she said.

What my mother told me when I was a child: “You’re too impatient for everything. You want and want and never let things just come.”

Seeing an owl might suggest it is one’s spirit animal, a guide that allows one to see beyond the world’s illusions. Or it is the spirit of a wise person who has come back to protect loved ones. Or only that it has been disturbed from its normal routine.

On the day of her birthday, Apphia’s boyfriend was late because he was playing street hockey with boys he sees all the time. He didn’t call, and it was not the first time she’d waited for this sweet, handsome, sometimes thoughtless boy. She is not the kind of girl who cries.

Last year, he bought her silver bird earrings, tiny posts for one of her piercings. She has never removed them. Even when she said she was ready to move on.

“It isn’t that I don’t love him,” she told me. “It’s that you can’t fix some things no matter how much you love someone.”

Some believe owls, like Tarot’s death card, represent change, death of the old life, transition. From the time, for example, that you get a young man who loves you to join your high school’s new birding club, to the day you take him to see the screech owl a mile from your house on one of your last days together.

The night after her birthday, when Apphia climbs into my bed, I ask her: “How do you always see them?”

She thinks so long, I wonder if she is sleeping. But then she says: “I feel the shadow passing,” to a mother who lives with metaphors.

“Nonnie thought if I had a craving when I was pregnant and I didn’t answer it, you’d get a birthmark,” I say. “She had a lot of crazy ideas. But look how perfect you are.”

“It’s good when you hurt this much when people are gone,” Apphia says. “It means you loved them.”

The same can be said for how much you forgive them for, or fear for them, but she is here now while out there, the owl is waiting to guide her, or keep her safe, or just listening for its prey.

“Mom,” she says. Her face is turned towards mine so I can feel her breath. “I changed my mind. It’s not the shadow passing. It’s the bird. Even in the dark, I know it’s there.”

“And you’re not afraid,” I say, and she says, “What is there to be afraid of?”

Eulogy for a Sugar Maple

emilie - noelle provost

When we moved into our house ten years ago, one of the things we liked most about the yard was the large sugar maple tree growing beside the driveway. I could tell the tree was old by the thick, rough bark covering its trunk. Countless snowstorms and decades of wind and rain had caused the tree’s limbs to become gnarled and twisted. During the fall and winter, when the tree was bare, it had a spooky appearance that reminded me of the 1993 animated film, The Halloween Tree, a fantastic children’s trick-or-treat story based on a novel by Ray Bradbury.

Although many of them still sprouted leaves, some of the sugar maple’s older branches had partially died and become hollow. These, along with a few large holes high up on the tree’s trunk, had been adopted as nest sites by generations of gray squirrels, blue jays, downy woodpeckers, nuthatches, and screech owls. A hole in the lower part of the trunk, marking the spot where a limb had once been, was home to a family of chipmunks.

During the warmer months, we enjoyed watching baby chipmunks—adorable little things—pop out of the hole and chase one another up and down the tree. They would sometimes do this for hours, which always made me anxious that a red-tailed hawk—also among the tree’s residents—would swoop down and snatch one of them up.

In the heat of summer, the sugar maple’s wide canopy provided a shady resting spot for the cottontail rabbits living behind our garage. On hot afternoons, if we were lucky and very quiet, we’d sometimes spot a couple of rabbits relaxing on the grass beneath the tree. Seeing these normally skittish animals sprawled out on the ground, grooming themselves, always made me feel lucky.

The sugar maple’s bright red and yellow leaves were one of the best things about autumn at our house. They began to turn color in mid-to-late September, usually before the other trees. In the early fall, the tree’s beautiful foliage was often the first thing I saw each morning when I rolled up the shades in our bedroom.

It was during a ferocious nor’easter in late March 2018 that one of the tree’s heavy limbs broke free and landed on my husband’s new Ford Focus. It happened late at night and over the howling wind sounded like a moving car slamming into a brick wall. In the morning, when the sky had cleared, we saw that the branch, which was about fourteen feet long, had smashed the car’s rear window and had made enormous limb-shaped dents in the roof and trunk lid.

Although the car was drivable, our insurance company totaled it. It wasn’t all bad, though. We got enough money to pay off the loan. And since we both worked from home, we decided to see how we would fare with one car instead of two. It worked out so well and saved us so much money that we own only one car still.

We cut up the fallen limb for firewood and clipped off several of its thinner branches, all of them swelling with spring buds. We arranged the branches in a large vase filled with water and enjoyed a bouquet of fresh spring leaves as the centerpiece of our Easter table.

After that storm, we began to worry every time the wind picked up. There was no telling if, or when, another limb would fall from the tree. We began parking on the opposite side of the driveway, as far away from the maple as possible. If people came to visit, we’d encourage them to park beside the garage, out of the way of the old tree.

But with more storms came more downed limbs. More than once we arrived home to find a large branch in our driveway, always grateful that we had been out when it came down.

One night last fall, one of the tree’s largest boughs broke off and landed on the roof of our neighbor’s garage. Fortunately, it didn’t cause much damage. But the message was clear: The tree needed to come down.

I had to leave the house when the tree service began removing the maple’s knotty branches. I couldn’t bear the sound of the chainsaws.

Hours later, our driveway covered in sawdust, a vast hole had opened in the sky. A single gray squirrel paced back and forth along the eaves of our neighbor’s garage, searching in vain for its lost home.

In the next few weeks, we’re going to plant a new tree in the spot where the sugar maple stood. We’ve considered different kinds of trees—some tall, some squat, a few with delicate spring flowers. We still haven’t decided which one will work best, but I’m beginning to think a young sugar maple might be just right.

Environmental Youth Task Force: Smithsonian Institution Trip

Members of the Environmental Youth Task Force in Lowell, ages fifteen through twenty-one, make a difference through conservation action, advocacy, and community events. Building their skills and knowledge, they work with scientists and decision-makers on environmental projects. They work alongside leaders from the Lowell Parks & Conservation Trust, Lowell National Historical Park (LNHP), Tsongas Industrial History Center of UMass Lowell and LNHP, and Mass Audubon. Following is a report on the group’s experiences in Washington, D.C., at the invitation of the Smithsonian Institution.

We are the Environmental Youth Task Force (EYTF) from Lowell. We were invited to Washington, D.C., in June 2022 by the Smithsonian Institution for their National Folklife Festival. While at our booth, we reached out to others through the Earth Optimism portion of the festival, a special area dedicated to climate change. We interacted with the public and spoke about all of the incredible work that our group does.

One amazing part of our booth was our pollinator garden signage. In the fall of 2021, the EYTF started a beautiful pollinator garden at Jollene Dubner Park. One area of the park was littered, polluted, and overgrown. It was an amazing opportunity to transform an unnoticed part of Lowell. We then created signage to bring awareness to our garden and why it was there. It was such a wonderful experience to share with many interested people! Below are accounts of personal experiences of EYTF members who visited the nation’s capital.

Kevin Hankins (Innovation Academy Charter School)

Washington, D.C., provided us an experience found nowhere else. We shared information about ourselves and displayed a model of a watershed called an EnviroScape, a crucial part of our exhibit and a conversation piece. The bright colors and unique design prompted discussions about watersheds and why protecting the environment is essential. Meanwhile, others came to our information table and became invested in what we stood for, asking countless questions about where we were from, what we were about, and things we had done as youth in action for climate change. This experience allowed me to expand my public speaking skills. I was able to open up and talk to strangers about myself and our wonderful group. The experience altered the way I approach the world.

Kiran Maharjan (Lowell High School)

Our trip to D. C. was a unique opportunity. It’s amazing that we got to reach out and communicate with people on a national level. While there, we met local youth groups that are also focused on Earth Optimism. We even met our local Congresswoman, Lori Trahan! Our Folklife Festival booth got plenty of foot traffic from supportive passersby who were interested in the EYTF and the environment. We had a scavenger hunt with stickers and props to demonstrate pollution that trickles down into local watersheds. We also had an opportunity to speak on a panel about youth activism and local problems today, such as climate change, poor public transportation, and making a difference in our community.

Noah

Logvin (Middlesex Community College)

My experience at the Folklife Festival was fantastic. I feel so lucky to have been there. It was amazing meeting so many people from so many walks of life, and lots of other environmental groups. It felt like such a growing experience to be running the information table myself. It has made me much more comfortable with public speaking. As a group we had some unique (and confidential!) behind-the-scenes opportunities with the Smithsonian museums as well. These experiences were very special.

Daniel Guerra (Middlesex Community College)

Even though I got pretty dizzy during takeoff, my first time flying went surprisingly well, mostly because the beautiful scenery of New England/D.C. stopped me from passing out. On our first day, we visited the Smithsonian Zoo and learned about various animals. At the Folklife Festival we used an EnviroScape, which is an interactive model of a watershed to teach children about pollution and the effects of runoff. It was mostly kids who used the Enviroscape, but we got to meet a lot of different people. After we finished our work and trips for the day, we went to the Renaissance Hotel for the night. For the next three days, we split up shifts for hosting our tables so that everyone could get breaks. We went to museums such as the labyrinth-like Asian art museum with its ten-plus underground floors and the natural history museum. It was a great experience, and I can’t wait to go again to learn more about so many different cultures!

Throughout this trip we had many ups and downs with the travel, hotel, and much more, but it was completely worth it. This was such an amazing experience for EYTF. It was also so amazing to have shown off our pollinator garden signage. Our project at Jollene Dubner Park was a huge accomplishment for us! I enjoyed D.C. and its wonderful history along with its museums. I am so thankful to the Smithsonian for sharing this with us and having us be a part of their amazing festival. I am also very thankful for getting the opportunity

Jasmine Puga (Greater Lowell Technical High School)

to meet our Congresswoman, Lori Trahan, who had a busy schedule. We told her about our work in Lowell and what we were doing at the Folklife Festival.. It was truly unbelievable that we had the chance to speak with her. It was an unimaginable moment for us!

Conclusion

Our trip to Washington, D.C., was an incredible time! We are thankful to the Smithsonian for inviting us. Our optimism comes not only from our pleasant experiences at the Festival and our environmentalism, but also from the concrete facts. We can make societal changes, we can give people the hope they need in dark times, and we can come together to solve problems. With enough earth optimism, it’s possible to pull through climate change while building a better future.—The EYTF

Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us:

An interview with Brad Buitenhuys of the Lowell Litter Krewe (Spring 2022)

babz clough

Tell me about yourself.

I grew up not far from Lowell and realized I could graduate high school a semester early, but I needed to have a plan. I applied for AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC) for ten months of national service. While waiting to join, I worked with a carpenter in Reading who put me in the basement of an old Victorian house. He told me to pull out all the concrete and then dig out six inches of dirt, and then they were going to repour the concrete. It took me months but that was the beginning of my construction experience.

Joining AmeriCorps accelerated the construction thing. By the end of ten months, I had worked on 100 homes and built playgrounds mostly in the Gulf Coast area. Volunteering became something that made me happier than anything. I joined AmeriCorps to travel and to try and find a home, but I didn’t know where it was going to be. I traveled—New Orleans, Sacramento, Phoenix, Biloxi, and a few other places along the way and then came home and enrolled at UMass Lowell. Since then, I’ve been a construction manager, surveyor, civil engineer, and a carpenter. Lowell’s been home for thirteen years and I don’t see that changing soon.

Having been here this long, why now for the Lowell Litter Krewe?

The idea came from the Lowell Canalwaters Cleaners. I’d been volunteering with them pretty regularly as they clean waterways throughout the city. I loved doing it, and I loved hanging out with them. But I knew there had to be more people interested in volunteering and I wanted to share the passion and love that I have for it.

So I just thought: “I’ll add one more event each month.” Every two weeks seemed doable, and everyone would come clean up on one other Saturday. But way more people showed up and we did so much more than I thought, and everyone said, “What are we doing tomorrow?”

And that’s how it started.

How did you initiate the group?

I started with Facebook. On EforAll Merrimack Valley there was a post on a Lowell Live Feed Forum about a little triangle of grass behind a local business. One person posted, “It looks terrible, I need help, it’s too much for me to do alone.” So, we set up a meeting and

posted it on Facebook. Thirty-five people showed up. We cleaned there, and then down to the Lowell Connector, some of the backroads and neighborhoods, and just kept going. We had a blast and it looked so much better. And we had a giant pile of trash.

It’s more fun picking up trash with other people—I don’t like to pick up trash alone. Turns out there are lots of people who have more fun with other people, but there are lots of people who are picking up trash on their own. It helped that there were some elected officials at the very first clean-up, so we received a lot of support from the city.

Do you think part of the interest was your timing because you started in March 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, and people wanted to just get outside?

Yes, we did one event in the fall of 2020. Then we started every Saturday beginning on March 13, 2021. We did almost every Saturday in 2021 until it got so cold it was miserable. We tried in November, an hour at the YMCA on Thorndike Street, getting rained on, almost freezing and yet twenty people showed up. We had seventy events the first year. We were coming out of the pandemic, coming out of winter. People wanted an opportunity to rekindle community—our city didn’t look good.

Do you ever find yourself getting discouraged when you have to clean the same area repeatedly? Or are you seeing less to clean up?

I have gotten better about not taking it personally, but I also believe it’s happening less and less. There are always places that don’t keep themselves as clean as you’d like. That little triangle we did: took all day the first time. In the summer, three people spent thirty minutes, and it took me fifteen minutes in the fall. Now I could do it in five minutes. If we keep somewhere clean, it stays clean for longer. It’s 100 percent the broken-window effect. The neighbors are taking the hint and fewer people are throwing things on the ground.

How do you get connected with other organizations?

People reach out to us. Hosting huge, fun events that people keep coming back. People that are in networks of other groups.

So, attraction rather than promotion?

Yes, with community groups, nobody should be forced to volunteer. There are 600 devoted volunteers who have come out and picked up trash. That’s 600 unique volunteers. We keep track of people who come to the events, and who’s a new volunteer. We’ve over 1000 followers on Facebook and a similar number on Instagram.

There are two phrases you use which always make me smile. Tomorrow there will be more of us is emblazoned on the vests and seems a self-fulfilling prophecy, but what about the second one.

We can have nice things: It’s the broken-window effect. What’s under all this trash? That’s why I got the giant speakers for the truck, so people notice us. You can’t have nice things if you’re going to break them. I love this city and I want people to love it as much as me.

What’s the draw of Lowell for you?

Big food guy. Love being able to eat all the great nationalities and cultures from around the

world. I’m happier out here in my cut-off shirt and shorts with holes in them. I’d rather be able to go without shoes but can’t do that. In college, I lived in Fox Tower. I walked across the front lawn in fresh snow in my bare feet one winter. And then it iced and stayed cold and frozen. You could see my frozen footprints for weeks. Everyone knew it was me.

Where do you see Lowell Litter Krewe going in the future?

Our mission is to support volunteer opportunities and create more volunteers. Our focus is on redevelopment of underutilized open space. We want to find willing investors into public land so we can develop our parks, make them more attractive and places where people are safe and want to spend their time.

People complain, “The kids aren’t going outside enough.” If we can find some inspirational, connective aspects for our public spaces and parks, bolster our playgrounds, and enhance our river walks, we all benefit. The city is making huge strides in these areas, but as a separate group we can take on passion projects rather than “have to” projects.

We can make little wonderlands in all our neighborhoods.

Because the city has to focus on the big projects, there just isn’t the support for all the little projects. But kids live all over the city, and every kid wants to play on a cool playground.

Is there a plan for an adopt-a-neighborhood program or adopt-a-park program?

Routine maintenance is something we try to avoid. Adoption and stewardship are critical for the long-term success of the city. We offer to come in and do the first round of cleaning, but then we hope people will just adopt streets and parks. Look at Vanna Howard’s Adopt-a-Street program downtown—she has thirty-five volunteers on all of our streets downtown. We want to replicate that in other neighborhoods. We’re trying to source funding so anyone who wants to adopt a street in another neighborhood can get a picker and bucket. It shouldn’t cost money to volunteer.

What do you want people to know about LLK?

The spelling of Krewe is an homage to the second-line Indians of Mardi Gras. The krewes are Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs. We try to inspire our little trash band. It’s easy exercise and people can come out and meet neighbors who care about their city. There’s no category that we all fit in, other than that we care about this place. It’s not young/old, liberal/ conservative, rich/poor. We just want there not to be trash on the ground.

Anything else?

We’re super excited to be starting our work with significant funding from the state delegation via the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) fund on the Centralville River Path. Our first major construction project will be at Gold Star Park. Thanks to the community outreach by DIY Lowell, part of Coalition for a Better Acre, we will be doing as much as we can to construct the collective vision of the community for this place. This is not just one person’s dream but the community’s. We envision grading the trailhead to the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards, so it stops eroding every year and it’s safe for people to use. We want to make the park more open and welcoming with a better view towards the river, so people feel safe. We’re going to add a pergola and seating and start connecting the other side of VFW Highway to the river.

Who else do you want to give a shoutout to?

Coalition for a Better Acre, Lowell Canalwaters Cleaners, Lowell Dept. of Public Works, EforAll Merrimack Valley, and of course, the Lowell Litter Krewe Board: Karonika Pholy, Ami Hughes, Adam Roscoe, Tara Hong.

Statistics:

2021 (full year)

112,600 pounds of trash

4,174 volunteer hours

71 events

2022 (Spring)

48,600 pounds of trash

1,426 volunteer hours

43 events—and it’s not yet summer!

Book Review

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions

by Greta Thunberg

(Penguin Press, 2023, $30)

The book is as thick as a Harry Potter novel, which makes sense coming from Greta Thunberg’s generation. At 464 pages, it’s more a toolbox than a compilation of high-level analyses of global warming. Reminds me of The Whole Earth Catalog from Stewart Brand or Our Bodies, Ourselves from the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, being an operator’s manual. Like Thunberg, the book is no nonsense, just the facts and instructions on best practices for dealing with climate change.

I can picture millions of young people hauling the paperback around in backpacks at school or on the road. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was called a “culture-bearing book” of the 1970s, but Pirsig is cerebral as he writes: “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself.” He’s seeking a coherent life in the face of rapid technological change. Thunberg’s book is also a response to technology that has altered life on Earth. She has created a super-sized Swiss Army Knife for an immediate climate crisis response. She’s crying “Fire!” on a crowded planet.

Thunberg is more than the celebrity activist, self-taught, who launched her school strike as a climate alert in Sweden some 230 weeks ago as this magazine hits the street and web. She’s a household name and just twenty, known for her stark warnings at the United Nations, World Economic Forum, and U.S. Congress. In 2021 she “invited a great number of leading scientists and experts, and activists, authors and storytellers to contribute” to this “comprehensive collection of facts, stories, graphs, and photographs showing some of the different faces of the sustainability crisis with a clear focus on climate and ecology.”

The book is aimed at the broad public. Her all-star lineup includes Michael Oppenheimer on Climate Change, Kate Marvel on Droughts and Floods, Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty on Decarbonization via Redistribution, Margaret Atwood on Practical Utopias, and Bill McKibben on the Persistence of Fossil Fuels. The contributors deal with glaciers, insects, air pollution, denialism, rain forests, permafrost, health & climate, electric power, the truth about recycling, climate apathy, food and diets, water, and on and on.

Thunberg’s headers for intros to the various sections amount to a List Poem:

“To solve this problem, we need to understand it. The science is as good as it gets. This is the biggest story in the world. The weather seems to be on steroids.

The snowball has been set in motion. It is much closer to home than we think.

The world has a fever.

We are not all in the same boat.

Enormous challenges are waiting.

How can we undo our failures if we are unable to admit that we have failed?

We are not moving in the right direction. A whole new way of thinking.

They keep saying one thing while doing another. This is where we draw the line.

The most effective way to get out of this mess is to educate ourselves. We now have to do the seemingly impossible. Honesty, solidarity, integrity, and climate justice. Hope is something you have to earn.”

Thunberg has made a hopeful gesture with her global call to action. It’s late, but not too late to act.

—PM

A Brook in the City

robert frost

The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square With the new city street it has to wear A number in. But what about the brook That held the house as in an elbow-crook?

I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength And impulse, having dipped a finger length And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed A flower to try its currents where they crossed. The meadow grass could be cemented down From growing under pavements of a town; The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame. Is water wood to serve a brook the same?

How else dispose of an immortal force

No longer needed? Staunch it at its source With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone In fetid darkness still to live and run— And all for nothing it had ever done Except forget to go in fear perhaps. No one would know except for ancient maps That such a brook ran water. But I wonder If from its being kept forever under, The thoughts may not have risen that so keep This new-built city from both work and sleep.

from New Hampshire (1923)

The Pike

In the brown water, Thick and silver-sheened in the sunshine, Liquid and cool in the shade of the reeds, A pike dozed. Lost among the shadows of stems He lay unnoticed. Suddenly he flicked his tail, And a green-and-copper brightness Ran under the water.

Out from under the reeds Came the olive-green light, And orange flashed up Through the sun-thickened water. So the fish passed across the pool, Green and copper, A darkness and a gleam, And the blurred reflections of the willows on the opposite bank Received it.

from Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914)

Stork sky amber river

gary lawless

Inside the bear there is snow and cold water. Outside, storks fly north, from the desert, bringing good luck.

Everything comes to the river, following a map of amber ancient pine forests, resin flow, rivermouth lagoon. I will return, encased in amber, when the black storks fly home.

Nida, Lithuania

Steinbeck and Ricketts on the Coast of Rhode Island

cheryl merz

Their ghosts return on a glorious summer morning filled with plovers and red-winged blackbirds and gulls and waves over sand At this deserted Rhode Island beach.

Their voices are the wind  that whispers through the grasses. And they are the deer that gazes solemnly from atop the dune before flicking its tail And running off.

Their souls inhabit the driftwood sculptures that adorn the shore above the water line where they are an entire colony Of mythological creatures Basking in the sun.

But they are most present in the tide pools encircled by blackened boulders dressed in seaweed fringe where conversations tumble from the beaks of gulls that trip happily through the shallows As they scavenge their prey.

dawn paul

lay claim to a patch of salt marsh and watch the sea call it in, sweep it back  like poker chips in a round you lost

a bend in the creek will  pile up silt and then fold  below an ever-extending bank

which will someday take a tumble  huge chunks of mud and grass  toppling onto the low-tide flats

sandbars appear, looking like a sure thing until the tide scratches them away  grain by grain to the sea

your chart is useless, GPS a decorative item when the shifting marsh calls your bluff and your hull catches in the sucking shallows

you won’t be the first to hop overboard  muck slurping your Sperry Topsiders  as you drag your boat to open water

don’t be humbled as others ride high while you’re tapped out, mosquitoes biting you dry your luck will turn with the tide

Nature’s Oasis

sanary phen

Tucked away in the corner of urban decay

Lost in the day and sounds of crisp rustling leaves, As the calm gentle breeze softly whispers my name

And lays claim to the wispy loose threads of my hair

Lifts them in the air, drenched in the glow of the sun

Warm light has now spun straw into strands of bright gold

Such sights to behold within nature’s oasis

Whimsical places full of rich scarlet flushed fern

Lush leaves left unturned with hidden treasures to find

Somewhere behind the black shadows and dim moonlight

Dark as the night, spurning life beneath fertile soil

Springing coils of vine skimming the edges of green

Unseen and unheard beyond the winding and whirring

Spinning and spurring of human ingenuity

No More Silent Springs

john wooding

When Rachael Carson’s seminal work was published in 1962 it generated a new and profound awareness of the plight facing a planet that was rapidly being destroyed by air, soil, and water pollution. One of the major results of the movement was the creation of an annual Earth Day celebration in the U.S. and, later, across the globe.

Earth Day is observed every April 22. Its initial goals were to raise awareness about environmental degradation and promote sustainability. The momentum for Earth Day celebrations emerged out of increasing concern with the threats posed to the environment by a century of industrial development and a growing global population. Following the release of Silent Spring by Carson and the several years of active government regulation and protection of air, water, and soil that culminated in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the time was right for global recognition of the damages to the world’s eco-systems.

A key figure in this movement’s beginnings was U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin, who set out to convince the federal government that the planet was at risk. In 1969, Nelson developed the idea for Earth Day after being inspired by the anti-Vietnam War “teach-ins” that were taking place on college campuses around the United States. Nelson envisioned a large-scale, grassroots environmental demonstration

“to shake up the political establishment and force this issue onto the national agenda.” He launched Earth Day in Seattle, Washington, in the fall of 1969 and invited the entire nation to get involved.

He recalled: “The wire services carried the story from coast to coast. The response was electric. It took off like gangbusters. Telegrams, letters, and telephone inquiries poured in from all across the country. The American people finally had a forum to express its concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes, and air—and they did so with spectacular exuberance.”

The University of Michigan and its students played a key role in starting the Earth Day movement. In March 1970, students there organized a teach-in on the environment, building on the success of their anti-war teach-ins. The movement grew rapidly. The massive Santa Barbara, California, oil spill and the burning of the Cuyahoga River in 1969; the moving, first photograph of “Earthrise” taken by NASA astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission; and the first picture of the whole earth, all combined with the cultural and political moment of the times.

On April 22, 1970, rallies were held in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and most other American cities. In New York City, Mayor John Lindsay closed off a portion of Fifth Avenue to traffic for several hours and spoke at a rally in Union Square where thousands of people listened to speeches and performances by singer Pete Seeger and others, and Congress went into recess so its members could speak to their constituents at Earth Day events.

When polled in May 1971, 25 percent of the U.S. public declared protecting the environment to be an important goal, a 2,500 percent increase over 1969. Earth Day kicked off the “Environmental decade with a bang,” as Senator Nelson later put it. During the 1970s, several important pieces of environmental legislation were passed, among them the Clean Air Act, the Water Quality Improvement Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Another key development was the establishment in December 1970 of the Environmental Protection Agency, which was tasked with protecting human health and safeguarding the natural environment—air, water, and land. Those few years represented a stunning effort to regulate and protect the environment and people in the U.S.

Back in April 1970, the then-Lowell Technological Institute (LTI) [now UMass Lowell] and some intrepid members of the newly created Biology Club, driven by the Earth Day initiative, organized a session with several faculty to discuss the question of environmental degradation. The event was open to the local community and was slated for the first national Earth Day celebration. The first Lowell Earth Day was a grand affair, with activities in Lowell, Tyngsboro, Billerica, and many surrounding towns. LTI devoted the entire student newspaper, The Text, to Earth Day. Lowell State College students put together a display in the City’s public library with photos of polluted parts of Lowell. Rather quaintly, the display included a “Statement of Mankind's Inalienable Rights,” which included:

“The right to limit families; the right to eat; the right to eat meat; the right to drink pure water; the right to live uncrowded; the right to hunt and fish; the right to view natural beauty; the right to breathe clean air; the right to silence; the right to avoid pesticide poisoning and thermonuclear war;

the right to educate our children; and the right to have grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.’

No doubt, Lowell and its citizens shared the growing concern that Earth Day celebrants sought to address.

Folks in Lowell continued to recognize the value of the spring Earth Day events throughout the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, as Earth Day celebrations built across the world. In 1990, global activities involved some 200 million people from more than 140 countries, setting up the momentum that resulted in the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992.

By the turn of the millennium millions of people were demonstrating at Earth Day events in support of action on the environment and global warming. Today, the catastrophic threat of climate change drives Earth Day events and concerns, but for more than five decades Earth Day has taken on a critical role in mobilizing and educating people about the dangers facing the world’s ecosystems and humanity itself.

For years, many smaller, disparate activities around Earth Day were hosted by organizations and institutions in Lowell and surrounding communities. However, faced with deep economic and social problems, concern for the environment took something of a back seat in Lowell and Earth Day had much less of a local flavor and appeal.

The Text, Lowell Technological Institute, 1970

Bringing Back Earth Day in Lowell

In late 2014, UMass Lowell led an effort to collaborate with community organizations to create a month-long calendar of events around Earth Day. We wanted to resurrect Earth Day as a Lowell event. When we started working with our partners, the program got funding through the Creative Economy Fund of the UMass President’s Office’s, and that money helped us relaunch Earth Day. As a result, in 2015, twenty-five groups celebrated sustainability in Lowell in all of its aspects—environmental, artistic, and cultural. Key partners included Lowell National Historical Park, the Umbrella Arts Center, and the Sullivan Middle School.

Over the last few years this event has grown considerably. We now have a rich network of more than 100 community organizations and institutions, collaborating and taking part in a diverse array of collective programming across the city and region. We have established an annual collaborative, citywide, monthlong celebration of the arts, nature, and sustainability. Local businesses, community groups, cultural and artistic organizations, public schools, Middlesex Community College, and the University play integral roles in programming every year.

At UMass Lowell, we wanted to restart Lowell’s celebration of Earth Day because we believe that it strengthens the role (and perception) of the university as a central player in convening and coordinating community cultural activities, particularly as they relate to critical social, economic, and political issues such as climate change and the protection of the environment. An annual recognition of the value of the planet on which we all live raises awareness of the threat of climate change and the need to promote sustainability in all its forms. Such a celebration further raises the profile of Lowell as a leader in promoting arts, economic development, and sustainability, and provides a vehicle for engaging several critical constituencies, including: students and employees at the UMass Lowell campus and Middlesex Community College, artists currently living and working in Lowell, immigrant and minority groups, the Lowell Public School system, the Lowell National Historical Park, and economic development organizations and local businesses.

For example, our first celebration culminated in an Earth Day Parade and Festival on April 25, 2016. Events leading up to the day of the parade included puppet-making workshops at the Boys and Girls Club; Sullivan Middle School; Reilly Elementary School; and Stoklosa Middle School. We worked with the Lowell Parks & Conservation Trust and the Lowell Film Collaborative on an Eco-film series and set up a “Greener Studio Challenge” art competition for New England college students to explore the creation of art using safer materials and healthier studio practices. Numerous other activities preceded our Earth Day downtown parade with puppets made by school kids, music from area bands, and banners and flags from Lowell organizations.

The Lowell Cultural Council, the Richard and Nancy Donahue Charitable Foundation, and UMass Lowell’s Center for Arts and Ideas provided funding to support the promotion of the arts, economic development, and sustainability. In addition, the UMass Lowell’s Office of Sustainability has played a key role in coordinating these Lowell Earth Day Celebrations. Over the next three years, our Earth Day celebration and parade grew in size and scope and included a sustainability fair featuring many organizations and businesses who work and care about the earth. The pandemic, of course, severely limited our activities

and we were only able to organize some modest (and virtual) events. This was a particular loss in 2020 when we were to mark the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day. Despite these challenges and given the need for immediate action to prevent further global warming, we hope to continue and build on Lowell’s tradition of recognizing the need to protect the planet on which we all depend.

Lowell Earth Day Celebration

UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative

juliette n . rooney - varga

The Climate Change Initiative (CCI) is a University Research Center that informs and supports evidence-based climate action. Our research, education, and outreach foster a transition to a sustainable, resilient, and equitable society.

More than forty faculty from some twenty academic departments, representing all six colleges at UMass Lowell, find community and opportunities for collaboration through the Climate Change Initiative. Student leaders and staff from the Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy gather with faculty members in regular meetings, retreats, and events. Using a systems-thinking framework, they explore interactions among areas of expertise and forge new programs, projects, and policy.

Our Story

In the lead-up to the 2009 United Nations climate change negotiations, universities around the world held climate change “teach-ins” or events to raise awareness about climate change. UMass Lowell joined this effort, holding its first annual Climate Change Teach-In in October 2009. The event brought together students and faculty members from across campus to learn about a topic that, at the time, was rarely taught. Perhaps more importantly, it was designed to engage the campus and to spark a conversation about what UMass Lowell would do next on climate change.

The small group of faculty members who designed and spoke at the event held a meeting to debrief the Teach-In in December 2009. A simple question was raised: do we celebrate a successful event and move on? Or is this a beginning and an opportunity to leverage what we sensed was momentum toward a new initiative? There was a clear and unanimous decision to move forward and form the Climate Change Initiative. From its inception, the CCI has brought together the diverse perspectives and insights of faculty from across the academic spectrum to learn from each other and, in doing so, foster a more effective, evidence-based transition to a sustainable, resilient, and equitable society.

Since its founding in 2010, the CCI has become an award-winning University Center whose faculty engage almost a third of UMass Lowell’s students through our instructional and research activities. We collaborate with each other on research, teaching, and outreach activities, using a systems-thinking framework to explore the interactions between our disciplinary areas and forge new areas of scholarly work. We work actively to ensure the relevance of our scholarly work to society through our relationships with citizens,

community organizations, and policymakers.

CCI faculty share a commitment to learner-centered, evidence-based climate change education. We develop educational resources that are used by instructors in middle to graduate school settings around the world. We offer numerous courses and two crossdisciplinary undergraduate minors that are available to UMass Lowell students. Our instructional work is also integral to the University’s Gold Star rating from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

In our role-playing simulations, developed with Climate Interactive and MIT Sustainability Initiative, participants take on a role, make decisions, and explore the implications of their decisions on the physical world through computer simulations. These active learning experiences enable people to learn about the complex interactions between human and natural systems.

This approach is ideal for understanding climate change and sustainability, which includes the intricate interrelationships between climate, energy, and social systems. Role-play enables people to learn about the social dynamics of decision-making, while an interactive computer simulation yields insights into the impacts those decisions have on our energy and climate system.

The climate policy decision-support simulation, C-ROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support), developed by Climate Interactive, MIT Sustainability Initiative, and UMass Lowell’s Climate Change Initiative), is used within the highest levels of government, the United Nations, the private sector, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as by citizens and students around the world. The En-ROADS simulator builds on C-ROADS and focuses on energy policy and climate solutions. Both C-ROADS and En-ROADS are designed to make the best available science accessible to non-experts in a way that is interactive and relevant.

Working with the private and public sectors

As a cross-disciplinary center at a nationally ranked public research university, the CCI is committed to serving as a resource for decision-makers across the public and private sectors. CCI faculty serve on committees and panels that inform climate policy and action, including our own University’s Climate Action Plan, Climate Ready Boston, Somerville Climate Forward, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report. Our work has been used in the private sector to inform investors about climate risks and opportunities.

The CCI regularly hosts regional and state policymakers and offers accessible, engaging policy briefings. Recent examples include an interactive simulation we offered to the Massachusetts House Committee on Global Warming and Climate Change, legislative briefings we have offered at the Massachusetts State House on climate and bioenergy policy, and invited presentations we have given to elected officials and planning councils.

We work to engage stakeholders as partners who inform our research and education and who benefit from it. We work with community members and organizations from our local community in Lowell and with people, companies, and policymakers around the world.

The CCI is working closely with the Lowell City of Learning initiative to make climate

change and sustainability key themes of events and conversations to support lifelong learning among Lowell’s people and organizations, including events we hold on campus. We are part of Lowell Celebrates Earth Day activities every April and are deeply connected with Lowell’s leading social justice and organic community farming organization, Mill City Grows.

CCI faculty have offered numerous briefings and keynote addresses for decisionmakers in the private and public sectors. We offer face-to-face and online professional development for educators working in primary, secondary, and higher education, as well as training for first responders to climate disasters. We bring community engagement into our classrooms through service-learning projects that support students’ authentic work beyond academia.

Our research reflects our cross-disciplinary approach to addressing climate change. We work to improve scientific understanding of the causes and impacts of climate change while developing the next generation of renewable energy sources and sustainable materials, including solar, wind, and plastics. We develop and research the impact of educational resources to inform and engage students, citizens, business leaders, and policymakers beyond the University. Arts & Humanities faculty at UMass Lowell address climate and sustainability through innovations in data visualization, research on environmental history, urbanism, and environmental justice, creative work, and environmental philosophy that engages ethical issues raised by climate change.

Over the past decade or so the CCI, its faculty and students, have advocated for understanding and action to reduce global warming and its impact on the earth, its peoples and its ecology. We have developed courses for teachers in Lowell, created the COOL Science project and have partnered with numerous local organizations, including the Coalition for a Better Acre, Mill City Grows, and the City of Lowell. Our faculty and students have done research on climate-driven droughts, extreme weather events, ways to recycle plastics, on climate change communication and education, and a host of other projects. Our work continues at UML, in Lowell, and across the globe. The urgent need to understand, to educate and to act on climate change informs all we do.

Professor of Environmental Science Rooney-Varga directs the UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative and co-directs the Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy.

Go Green with UCC!

One of the most pressing issues we face today is climate change. As a citizen, I think about what I can do to help reverse this issue. As a scholar, I use my graphic design skills to create work that empowers children to be better stewards of the environment.

For important social movements to survive, it is critical to involve and educate the youngest generation. Simplifying concepts to a level where young elementary school children understand and feel empowered can be difficult. One project where I used creativity and simplicity to engage children with the environment involved a partnership with University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland.

As a Green Campus, UCC boasts a strong program in environmental sustainability. It is the first university in the world to receive the An Taisce Green Campus award. The university sees the Green Campus program as a significant component of its sustainability efforts. Centered on themes of energy, waste, water, biodiversity, and transport, this program enables students and faculty at UCC to implement and continually improve sustainable practices. But for these practices to last in perpetuity, they must filter into the community. The youngest among us need to be welcomed to and educated about this movement. Children need to understand why and how they can help protect the Earth. Elementary school teachers need materials that help them create dialogue with young students about this important topic.

In 2021, I received a Fulbright award to create a project about environmental sustainability. Because of our shared interest in protecting the environment and educating the younger generation, I chose to work with UCC on this project. Working closely with J.P. Quinn, Head of UCC Visitors’ Centre; Pat Mehigan, Energy & Utilities Manager; and Darren Reidy, I designed a card game for children that focuses on sustainability. The card game, “Go Green with UCC!” teaches children how and why they can be important participants in environmental sustainability. The one hundred cards address themes or climate & energy, water, biodiversity, consumption & waste, food sustainability, and citizenship. They can be used in three ways: as a teaching tool to begin conversations, as a source of sustainability trivia, and as a matching game. When school groups come to UCC for sustainability field trips they learn about bees, trees, and the many other things that UCC does to help the environment. These children are also taught ways that they can help. Each school group is given a card game to take back to their classroom. This game then enables the students to continue learning once they leave.

Doing this type of work raises many issues. Some are very easy to address while others are more difficult. An easy issue with regard to these cards involved paper. We decided to

A Sustainable Campus

In the Spring of 2014, I arrived at UMass Lowell to interview with the Transportation and Parking Department. It was my first time in Lowell, and I had no idea of what the place was like, no connections, personal, professional, or otherwise.

I was coming off the back of a five-year stretch at a regional planning agency in New Hampshire, and although I learned an incredible amount in the role, both professional and political, I never felt any type of connection to Central New Hampshire. The place looked different, the people were different, it felt different. The first time I set foot in Lowell, I felt at home in the city, and in particular at UMass Lowell.

The good news, for me at least, was that I was hired for that transportation and parking position and started at the University that summer. I was immediately struck by the kindness and openness of my colleagues. I also felt that I was part of something special. There was an incredible energy around the campus along with an open invitation to get involved.

I felt fortunate to have started work on the campus when Marty Meehan was Chancellor. He drove this campus forward and put a strong foundation in place from which we continue to benefit. The hockey team was winning championships, the Tsongas Arena was packed for every game, and campus was buzzing. I completed both my undergraduate and graduate program at University College Cork in Ireland, and I had zero connection to higher-ed in the U.S., no affiliation to any school. Within a month, I was a UMass Lowell River Hawk through and through!

In the year that I worked in transportation, I was on the team that worked on the Lowell TIGER Bridges project (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) aimed at upgrading bridges over the city canal system. It was an extraordinary, warts-andall, introduction to Lowell. The place, its people, the politics. I learned so much during that process, particularly from Adam Baacke at the university. Adam’s work experience with the City of Lowell was, and continues to be, extraordinarily beneficial to the sustainability work that we do. He was willing to share his knowledge, resources, and time to help me contextualize and tweak a lot of the planning and transportation technical skills I brought to our team. It was a fast-paced, and frantic process that I still benefit from.

In that first year at UMass Lowell, I heard rumblings about starting a formal sustainability program. Of course, the university had been doing significant sustainability work on the academic side for a long time. Engineers, environmental scientists, and business graduates had all made long-lasting impacts. Faculty and students were deeply immersed in the science of environmentalism and sustainability. We were developing, however, a different approach: a stand-alone Office of Sustainability that would serve as

the central point of contact and cohesion for the university’s sustainability efforts. To say I was interested and enthusiastic would be an understatement.

Transportation Services is part of Administrative Services and our department leadership at the time, Bob Barnett, Rich Lemoine, and Tom Miliano, encouraged/pushed me to get involved. Their deep understanding of the inner workings of the university, and with the support of former Vice-Chancellor Joanne Yestramski, ensured that the Office of Sustainability found its new home in Administrative Services. Without the foresight of this group, I believe that the sustainability program would not be anywhere close to where it is today. Across higher ed, every campus now has some type of sustainability program. In many instances this can take the form of a nice value-add program buried deep within a department. These leaders encouraged me to think big, look beyond the university, and develop a program that is reflective and responsive of the community that it serves. The phrase, “community that it serves”, is hugely important. We are UMass Lowell—not just UMass. Lowell is in our name, the campus is the City, and the City the campus. Everything that we do is entwined with the city itself.

During the early days of the Office of Sustainability we followed what is now a standard process in higher ed: engaging consultants to help us develop our program and goals. Many of these consultants told us at the time that we needed to have one key program that would help us stand out in an increasingly crowded space. One suggested water, which made sense given the proximity of the Merrimack River and the distinctive network of canals in Lowell. Another suggested that a key “high-value” action item would be to change the names of degree programs so we can let people know that we are “serious about sustainability”—their suggested tagline. Yet another suggested that we would always be competing with UMass Amherst, so we should look at what they were doing and go in the complete opposite direction!

Instead, we leaned into a campus and a community that had already committed to environmental and community sustainability. For example, our collaboration with Mill City Grows (MCG) shows the strong link between campus and city.

While a graduate student in the early 2010s, Lydia Sisson, working with Francey Slater, proposed a project focused on food justice and organic farming, with the right community connections to make it happen. John Wooding was her program supervisor in the Economic and Social Development of Regions program. When Lydia was looking for locations to start Mill City Grows, her main contact at City Hall was Adam Baacke (an early member of the MCG board), then the City’s director of planning.

Fast forward a few years to the formation of the Office of Sustainability. We inherited a one-acre site on East Campus that at various times served as a junkyard, a parking lot, and basketball courts. The first two people I spoke with about doing something with this location were Baacke and Wooding. They said to ask Lydia if she was interested in partnering. Today this site is a thriving urban agriculture hub focused on increasing food access and security. It has been underpinned by a consistent stream of external funding that has led to a continuous greening of the campus.

This is campus greening with substance. The aesthetics (and produce!) from our urban agriculture sites are spectacular, but beneath it all is a deep campus/community partnership that is a hallmark of what is possible when the campus and community work together. It also put our sustainability program firmly on the map—both on-campus and

beyond.

Looking back on this process of partnering with MCG is a great indication of how far sustainability has come. There was no structural or programmatic reason why this program would work at the university—other than the fact that Lydia and Francey at Mill City Grows were so great to work with.

UMass Lowell is not an agricultural school and we had scant programming that focused exclusively on agriculture. There was also a fair (and warranted) degree of skepticism from certain quarters about engaging on this program. The Office of Sustainability was new, Mill City Grows was new, and our urban campus was never exactly a hub of agricultural production!

I’m not entirely sure how we pulled off that first project—constructing the greenhouse and urban farm on East Campus—given the tight timeline and finances, but we did, and I really want to emphasize the “WE” part. The project born of the entire city, UML, and MCG, of course, but people in many departments across the university and in City offices rolled-up their sleeves to make this vision a reality.

The impact of this one project has been astounding. The greening of the campus has, of course, been huge for us at UML, but the real benefit has been the extension of the Mill City Grows growing season and serving as a vital cog in the City’s urban food infrastructure. Over the years the site has hosted thousands of eager students, community groups, elected officials from local communities, and members of the United States Congress and Senate. To my mind, this project is absolutely critical to communicating the type of sustainability work that we are invested in—a university reflective of and responsive to the community that it serves.

The appointment of Chancellor Jacqueline Moloney in 2015 was fortuitous for the sustainability program. The new Chancellor formalized our efforts and made sustainability a strategic priority. To my knowledge, she was the first university leader in Massachusetts to incorporate clear academic and operational goals focused on sustainability in a formal plan. Not only did she include them, but she also made sure they were acted upon.

The results for UMass Lowell in such a short period of time have been remarkable. The University has received over $40 million in climate-, energy-, and sustainability-related research funding since 2019, and has added degree programs around climate change, sustainability, and environmental science. Crucially, it led to the creation of more than 150 community and corporate sustainability partnerships. Our community engagement and formal campus/community partnerships are two areas that have been consistently recognized by the American Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), the most important national association for promoting sustainability in universities and colleges.

The UML campus has led the state system in energy efficiency and carbon reduction. For the last four years, we have been the highest ranked campus in Massachusetts for sustainability according to the AASHE. To this day, UML has completed the largest Accelerated Energy Program in the state, a testament to the skill and ingenuity of our Facilities Department and their laser focus on energy efficiency. We completed a comprehensive Energy and Carbon Reduction Plan that, I believe, will be a blueprint for how the state can meet its aggressive climate and sustainability goals. Our effort is not flashy; it is not fancy, but it is grounded in the daily activities of the campus and the city.

It requires hard-work, partnerships, and a commonsense approach that cuts through nonsense—a very Lowell solution.

The initial work for the Office of Sustainability now falls under the purview of the Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy. Founded in 2019 through a $1 million gift from philanthropists Brian and Kim Rist, the Institute fused the Climate Change Initiative, Center for Energy Innovation, and Office of Sustainability. Brian Rist’s experience of Lowell while a student in the 1970s gave him the impetus and context to support sustainability efforts and a clear understanding of why the campus-city relationship is critical. The first time I met with Brian, he stressed the importance of promoting Lowell and working with the community on practical initiatives and solutions. His key message encouraged us to look at developing programs in partnership with City Hall and the many tremendous agencies, not-for-profits, and businesses in Lowell. From academics to transportation to urban agriculture I believe we are meeting his vision heads-on.

The Rist Institute is co-directed by professors Chris Niezrecki and Juliette RooneyVarga. Chris is Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Center for Energy Innovation. Juliette is an internationally recognized expert on climate change and founder and director of the university’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI). Their expertise complements the operations and community engagement that are a focus of the Office of Sustainability. We are working across areas that are traditionally siloed on campuses. As we look to the future of sustainability work at UMass Lowell and in the City of Lowell, I believe that we are about to become the standout sustainability program in the country. Environmental Justice is not just a talking point for us, we are invested in finding solutions in partnership with the City of Lowell that will allow us to meet our individual and collective energy and sustainability goals.

UMass Lowell’s campus is a living-lab for how the state can meet its carbon reduction goals. We have world-class faculty and students delivering cutting-edge approaches to renewable energy. As the only public university in Massachusetts with formal observer status to the UN Climate Negotiations, we have faculty from every college at the university deciphering what these policy recommendations mean on the ground in Massachusetts.

As we enter a new period of growth under Chancellor Julie Chen, and continue to emerge stronger from the pandemic, our focus on the university and city working together will be a hallmark of what we do. In recent months we have seen movement with climate and sustainability legislation at both the state and federal levels. Now the hard work starts, and someone has to figure out how to turn these policy goals into real and scalable action. We are committed to serving this role and ensuring that UMass Lowell and the City of Lowell are no longer the best kept secrets when it comes to energy and sustainability.

Ruairi O’Mahony is executive director of the UMass Lowell Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy.

Building a Cancer-Free Economy

david kriebel and the staff of the lowell center for sustainable production

The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production

We started the Center in 1995 at the University of Massachusetts Lowell to promote the development of sustainable systems of production and consumption. The Center has grown over the years to become an internationally recognized resource in developing and disseminating tools and information to guide industries, governments, and institutions towards sustainability.

The Center’s purpose is to make communities, workplaces, and products healthy, humane, and respectful of natural systems. We use rigorous science and innovative strategies to develop practical solutions that promote environmentally sound systems of production and consumption. We reject the assumption that pollution, resource depletion, and health impairment are inevitable consequences of modern life. We also reject the assumption that the less powerful and privileged should be disproportionately harmed by practices and policies that degrade health, the environment, or human dignity. Instead, we are committed to working collaboratively with citizen groups, workers, businesses, institutions, and governments to build healthy work environments, thriving communities, and viable businesses and institutions for a more sustainable world.

The Lowell Center sits in a public university with deep roots in communities and industry and a reputation as a trusted scientific resource for both. We benefit from close collaborations with the Toxics Use Reduction Institute (TURI), a sister organization at UMass Lowell which has helped Massachusetts industries radically reduce their use of toxic chemicals through redesign of production processes rather than regulation. The Green Chemistry and Commerce Council (GC3), hosted by the Lowell Center, is an industry collaborative with over 100 member companies committed to reducing toxic chemicals in their products and supply chains. These and other resources enable us to be a credible source of information and guidance on practical solutions to the energy-environment crisis generated by the carbon economy. We work not only in Massachusetts but with regional, national, and international partners on projects that are both visionary and practical.

Why UMass Lowell? UML traces its roots back to the Lowell Textile Institute, formed to train the engineers needed to create and sustain the textile mills of Lowell, birthplace of the American industrial revolution. Lowell’s nineteenth century mill owners built their city from a grand vision of a utopian community of clean, efficient, and prosperous factories run by New England farm girls. But in less than a century, competition led to falling textile prices, over-production, and factory flight. Lowell became a hard scrabble city—betrayed of its utopian purpose but brimming with the immigrants drawn to that vision. Lowell’s

waves of new citizens brought with them a rainbow of cultures and a universal dream of hard work leading to a better life. Decades of anonymity as just another old New England mill town finally led to a brief, aborted renaissance during the micro-electronics boom of the 1980s. Wang Laboratories and its minicomputers seemed for a short time to be Lowell’s ticket back to prosperity. Then that brief flicker of economic development faded even faster than the textile industry.

But the lessons of Lowell’s past have not been forgotten, and sustainability is not an abstract concept in a city cheated not once but twice through economic development that could not last. Along with the Toxics Use Reduction Institute, Mill City Grows, and the Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy, the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production is helping Lowell, the City and its university to build a path to sustainable development.

The Cancer Free Economy Network: The Power of the Cancer Lens to Focus Attention on Environmental Threats and Solutions

In 2009, the Lowell Center identified eliminating carcinogens from manufacturing and commerce as a powerful and feasible strategy to shift the economy towards a more sustainable path. Along with partner organizations in health, labor and community development, we obtained initial funding from the Garfield Foundation to build the Cancer Free Economy National Network (CFEN), which now brings together more than forty non-profits, businesses, community-based groups, and funders to cultivate an inclusive movement with an audacious aim—prevent people from developing cancers from exposure to harmful chemicals in the places they live, work, learn and play. We identified the growing threat from ubiquitous carcinogenic chemicals as a key leverage point for putting our global economy on a healthier path.

Everyday products continue to be designed with hazardous chemicals, including carcinogens, and their production continues to expand globally. Fifty years after President Nixon declared a war on cancer, progress has been slow, and the grim reality is that 44 percent of men and 38 percent of women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes. Moreover, some cancers particularly associated with exposures to environmental chemicals are rising dramatically, especially in children and teens.

The role of environmental chemicals in contributing to the cancer burden has not been fully appreciated. Most health researchers and practitioners still pay little attention to the role of hazardous chemicals in causing cancer, even though the President’s Cancer Panel declared in 2010 that “the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.” Many organizations dedicated to fighting cancer are unaware of or dismiss the role of chemicals in causing cancer.

But we see signs of change and opportunities for more attention and action. A quiet revolution in safe and sustainable chemistry is underway. Companies, governments, scientists, and advocacy groups are creating, using, and promoting safer chemicals and products. But these efforts are rarely seen as an important component of disease prevention. They are not linked to cancer advocacy or to the large, well-funded but so far ineffective “war on cancer.”

An innovation agenda for scaling up sustainable chemistry is a crucial path for cancer prevention. But progress is slow. Relatively few funds are being spent on promising

research and strategies to replace cancer-causing chemicals with safer alternatives. We believe that the changes needed must flow from a broader array of actors, motivated by the passion to save lives. Two goals are essential:

Goal One: Increase demand for safer alternatives to carcinogens in consumer products and workplaces, as part of an expansion of focus from cancer treatment to prevention: To make an impact on cancer, the demand for “cancer-free” products must increase by orders of magnitude.

Goal Two: Accelerate development and use of safer alternatives in consumer goods: In all too many cases, the limiting factor is the lack of widely available and economical cancer-free alternatives. Our economy’s educational, scientific, and technical capacity is woefully unprepared to meet current and projected demand.

Most environmental health advocates are focused on the first goal of increasing demand and have little connection with those working on the second goal of increasing supply of safer alternatives. The vast majority of cancer advocacy organizations are focused on treatment and care. They have helped make important advances in reducing mortality but have not focused on preventing the rising incidence of many types of cancer.

Despite important successes, the environmental health movement has not stimulated creation of safer chemicals and products at the scale needed to meet the urgent need. Specific market-based campaigns have succeeded in removing certain specific dangerous chemicals, but the replacements may be no safer. While these initiatives provide important evidence that change is possible, they don’t address underlying decision making and production systems. The one-chemical-at-a-time approach requires enormous investments in resources for relatively small gains and demonstrates how a non-systems approach may not lead to the solutions needed.

In addition, there is enormous potential for resources and advocacy among people touched directly by cancer. People want to protect friends and family from having to go through what they experienced. Yet there has been little opportunity for them, as individuals or as communities, to advance upstream prevention. Among cancer advocacy groups, some that focus on breast cancer have called for reduction of environmental exposures as a critical form of prevention, but many others have not yet made similar calls.

The environmental health and cancer advocacy movements may be reaching the limits of what they can do using current strategies and approaches. The Lowell Center uses a systems approach, aiming to create change at a scale commensurate with the problem. A systems approach prevents unintended consequences such as replacing one hazardous chemical with another hazardous chemical. Further, the chemicals economy is complex. Chemicals are produced globally and have numerous applications. Depending on use, the same chemical may fall under multiple regulatory regimes. Catalyzing the innovation economy to create safer chemicals at the scale needed requires extensive investments in education, research, and product development. Addressing such complexity requires a systems approach to help identify critical leverage points beyond traditional legislative and market strategies.

A systems approach also expands the possibilities for comprehensive solutions. A systems approach reframes the problem. Rather than replacing one chemical with another, a systems approach asks more fundamental questions about why a specific chemical is being used. This leads to potential non-chemical solutions, such as redesigning a product or using an entirely different technology.

Finally, a systems approach can reveal additional campaign strategies for largescale change. Strategies traditionally focus on changing immediate behavior. A systems approach focuses on changing institutional culture and practices. It also reveals opportunities for new alliances that bring far greater resources and advocacy for safer materials and processes. We therefore work on three basic organizing strategies to advance systems change for the Cancer-Free Economy:

1. Increase capacity, align strategies, and support campaigns of environmental health organizations and funders around a Cancer Free Economy.

2. Work with sympathetic cancer groups to change the culture of cancer advocacy so that promotion of safer chemicals and products is seen as a key opportunity for prevention.

3. Engage additional groups focused on cancer and health, green technologies, and economic transformation. These include advocates, researchers, forward-thinking companies, government agencies, and funders.

Combining the passion, knowledge, and power of these movements will accelerate the fight against cancer and catalyze a shift towards an economy based on health and sustainability.

Climate Change and Cancer Prevention: Strategic Links

Reversing global warming requires eliminating our modern economy’s dependence on chemistries of fossilized carbon. And just as greenhouse gases are the direct result of carbon-based fuels, so too are an almost limitless array of synthetic organic compounds— both purposely invented and waste products. As we noted above, these are responsible for a growing global burden of chronic diseases including cancer, neurologic, reproductive, and developmental abnormalities. We believe that cancer is important as a sentinel illness, which can raise awareness of the real and direct threats to health of our carbon-based economy, and in turn catalyze investments in alternative technologies that benefit human and planetary health.

The great majority of the known carcinogens circulating in our economy are made from petrochemicals—from fossilized carbon. Society is recognizing that we need to move to carbon-free, renewable energy sources. However, the link between fossil fuels and the production of plastics and associated toxins has not been clearly articulated. We can prevent cancer by removing these carcinogens from plastics and other materials, products and foods, and the highly toxic chemical production cycles needed to produce them. We have already seen that alternative energy technologies represent enormous opportunities for new economic growth; and in the same way, the design and production of safer biobased, carbon-neutral alternative materials and products will generate new industries and jobs. In summary, we believe that primary cancer prevention and climate change remediation require a common, fundamental strategy: reducing our dependence on carbon

as fuel and chemical feedstock while ensuring that the benefits of the alternative materials and technologies are equitably shared throughout society. Linking these two realms, which currently run along separate tracks, can result in better technological, economic, and political solutions.

What Needs to Be Done: Three Approaches to Building Momentum to Decarbonize Our Economy

1. The new materials economy—production

The Lowell Center is a recognized leader in transforming the materials economy. This involves systems analysis, developing and disseminating tools to guide materials development and evaluation, building, and supporting networks of engineers, businesses, and government agencies. People need to see practical solutions before they will support structural changes; there is a positive message about the economic opportunities of a new carbon-free economy that does not leave communities and workers behind.

2. The new materials economy—consumption

Consumer campaigns, if framed carefully, can help the public understand and support large structural changes, in addition to adjusting individual behavior. Recycling, green products, energy conservation and alternatives to plastics are important opportunities for education about how the energy and materials economies function and how they can be transformed. Institution-focused initiatives can leverage change in consumption on larger scales. The Lowell Center works with mass organizations and consumer-oriented advocates to help them communicate messages about structural change. We work with institutions and sectors to enable them to both anticipate and respond to consumer demand by shifting their policies and practices away from reliance on toxic chemicals.

3. Cancer Prevention

Cancer is one of the most traumatic and costly outputs of the carbon-based economy. There is both need and opportunity for helping all sectors of society recognize the connection between carbon fuels and health, and the health benefits of decarbonization. As a research center of a public university with a long history in community education and economic development, and strong relationships with health scientists, practitioners, and policy advocates, we are in a strong position to design and deliver education targeted at many sectors of society ranging from cancer research and advocacy organizations to medically underserved and polluted neighborhoods to high-tech startups. The Lowell Center’s own research and our deep investment in the Cancer Free Economy Network have begun to demonstrate the potential for integrating environmental carcinogen reduction—and the decarbonization of the economy--into cancer prevention research, policy, and practice, and into initiatives focused on climate change.

David Kriebel is emeritus professor at UMass Lowell.

History of the Button Factory

gary metras

By the time the button factory depleted all the fresh-water mussel shells from three rivers and was about to shut down, the Civil War began. It switched to ripping up earth and blasting rocks to mine tin and lead, to manufacture buttons for uniforms and bullets for death. Everyone in the factory smiled for years as they paid bills, got married, bought land. Their kids graduated high school instead of working farms or mines. The owner and managers’ sons went to Harvard and Yale, became lawyers and politicians, who voted for more war. But after the war, the factory closed. The owner retired, spent months at his summer home in the woods of Vermont. Some wage workers got jobs at the new shoe factory, others stayed home watching their tomatoes grow as their wives went to work at the thread mill, while others just drank and died. When the owner died, his granddaughters funded the town library in his name. Today, the factory dam on the river still keeps shad and herring from spawning. And people hike the gully far upstream marveling at nature’s beauty, not knowing it was once a rolling hill side until the button factory tore it apart and scattered the waste around the town and in the three rivers where children sometimes catch a funny-colored bass.

Climate Signs

chath pier sath

Parched brown feet crunching grass. Vegetable bed dust blowing around. Plums, nectarines, and peaches stressed To preserve and conserve their juices.

Wild Concord grapes, raisins on vines.

Wetland, lowland, cracked dry. Is this what scientists warned about?

Desertification by the acres.

Mountains, valleys, forests, and farms. Hungry, thirsty dirt—sand and gravel.

The sun millions of miles in space, flaring madness, Preparing for its own demise, a burned-out star. Another Earth can emerge into the future, Our Earth left to robots, and the rich gone to Mars, Where there may be water and life in my time, Unless death spares me from hunger and thirst.

We can figure out how to live with floods, but thirst will kill us.

Rain, why don’t you?

Sky God of the moving universe, Churn the milk of vegetation & flora, Wake up Earth’s dwellers to empty faucets and plates. Do whatever it takes to change habits of wasting, And polluting air and water at home. Heed the signs. They are within our control. You live longer with hunger, but you won’t last with thirst.

Googins Rocks

mary bonina

On the rocks I found  childhood:

in kelp drape clinging to them understood stubborn slime filling whorls of periwinkles studding shale.

I climbed until my feet slipped.

Wet from the sea I dripped in the sun, watched minnows  in tin pails, got dizzy trying to make sense  of things.

Sixteen summers and I never knew the names of islands I stared at in Saco Bay: Basket, Garish, Stage, Negro.

I followed snail roads on a mud plain,  the flat, wet strand.

A girl back then,  thinking past the waves, glint of gold on something miraculous: a medal hanging from a chain around the neck.

The turkeys like to sleep In the trees, though It isn’t easy for them To get to bed. They crane their waffled necks, Trot a few ungainly steps And lift their plump bodies Off the earth to fly up And roost on a branch For the night, away From insatiable coyotes And men. They seek The safety of trees Like leopards Escaping lions.

Lions can climb up And eat the leopard, Our safari guide tells us, But they can’t get back down.

We are not the turkeys In this poem.  We are the lions And we have climbed Up the tree And eaten the leopard.

Fragment 06/28/20

amanda leahy

On the concrete path below Pasture backpack’d woman in black walks fast past, all arms pumping.

I watch her stop to be overcome by wildflowers.

A fistful in hand, she resumes, head down and again arms pumping.

And the little yellow heads, upside down, make wild shadowarcs

upon cement

The Language of Birches

resi ibañez

When night comes and the river water reflects glitter I chase ghosts. Storytellers, their words, songs, footsteps and dances.

I hear their voices, rhythms, rustles in the wind—the bark of paper birches.

This birch skin comes off like white paper, with Philippine brown underneath. Smell it.

Smell the earth, the forest, the green, of banyan, of pine, hear the skin rustling away into thin paper sheaves carrying words to the wind.

My ancestors talk to me  in root systems underground: synapses and pulses sent in the earth like Morse Code. Dots and dashes of life, meaning words for my skin— words spoken to the wind. Whose woods are these— Hush, hush say my leaves:

I am speaking.

Los Angeles Evening

ellsworth scott

Dusk’s smith tongs up the molten sun, slams it down, hammers, bangs spark after spark up from the city’s rim.

The smith eyes their darkening prize, the iron’s hissing edge, the sun they thrust into the ocean right where waves drop into the new night.

SECTION II

Man on a Cloisonné Vase

tom sexton

When I was still a boy with two good legs, the emperor’s men snatched me from my parents’ yard and sent me to the distant frontier to fight.

An old man now, I sit unnoticed by a small pond waiting for the tip of my bamboo rod to quiver. I’ll catch a carp my wife can carry home.

My last living son is on the frontier now. It’s whispered that the barbarians are more numerous than the stars. Night after night boots on the road, conscripts marching toward the frontier. They must come home by another road.

from One Hundred Visions of War

julien vocance (1878-1954)

Translated from the French by Alfred Nicol

Written in 1916, in the mud of the trenches, where the poet lost his left eye. Blackening three months between the trenches, the dead have lost all their hair.

Rumors of widows and orphans swarm over these poor pale bodies.

In little bundles, fanning out around the man, his flesh spurted out.

.

To reach my skin, how would bullets ever get through my crusted woolens? .

Into his flannels go his fingernails, pecking at the little beasts.

He saw his name there. He read the schoolgirl’s letter. “What the fuck is this?”

The young men’s bodies celebrate bloody weddings, clinging to the earth.

.

Strapped in the canvas a comrade shoulders—slaughtered meat a mother waits for

Scrap-metal-pierced skin

Eardrums beaten thin Home with no way in

. A beautiful glow! . . . Put your hands on your eyelids to protect yourself.

. All swaddled in white, dressed for the sarcophagus: no hands, feet, or face.

Wise, those on stretchers wait their turn before entering the cage of wild beasts.

Their eyes are shining with health, youthfulness, and hope. Bright eyes—made of glass.

. A wriggling beetle, upside down on the slick slope pinned by his pack’s weight.

.

Tunnels the mines dig extend into the forest. Cracks in the pines blaze.

Get it in the eye you’re a hero. Not me, though— got it in the ass.

Death, no doubt, dug and watered these deep furrows where men are planted.

In his dimming eyes the paralyzing memory: his wife, his children—

.

Faces gashed and scarred; pitiful, loathsome bodies  no woman will love.

.

He’s left the battle, the old vet. The post-war years will tear him to shreds.

Two Poems: War in Ukraine

bill o ’ connell

Human Kind

Today we will learn what went on in the war while we slept far from the whistle and boom of Grad rockets on Kiev— what flying steel will do to concrete, children in basements hanging on. I saw it in my mind and on TV: fireballs— the laws of physics splattered, a family with suitcases shocked to death by a blast. No darkness without the lit places— the downtown of the mind defended by partisans.

No one slept in Kiev last night where it is night again as we wake to tune in to view the damage, clucking our tongues at the invaders, wordless against Ukrainian grief, cities shot to rubble, televised war in real time, no hero coming to save the day but heroes nonetheless waiting among broken concrete and burnt tanks for the Russians.

Stop Making Sense Again (watching war on CNN)

My body thinks the mind knows something.  Fingers grip the hand: womb-wrap. Clench, clutch.  I didn’t want to own anything but  the world chased me down like an  overweight cop in a fast cruiser, wrote  me a lifetime ticket  and wrapped me up in it  like a UPS Covid package sterilized   before opening. Metaphor,

I tell my students, is how we  make sense: I am a rock, I am  an island formerly owned by Paul Simon.  Get it? Breaking News: Ukraine—Man’s Inhumanity to Man. Next up we speak  with a shell-shocked retired general brought to you  by elderly ailments and Botox.  Tired of war? Boost up  with Botox. People will notice!  Here’s Joe Namath with a number to call.  I bought a silver bullet   with a pill inside. Take it, Joe said,   take it. I was afraid it might be   a placebo.

gary metras

In dream, I am extracting bodies from the rubble of bombed buildings. There are many of us under this granite sky and charred chunks of concrete. Here and there, torn lace curtains, broken teacups, and odd shoe. No one speaks. We find a body and drag or carry it to the middle of what was a street. Bodies lined up. Others check their pockets for IDs, photograph them if they have facial features someone may recognize, then bag them in plastic so black light could not shine on the remains for a thousand years. No one speaks. After a few days, no one cries, no one feels, as we bend and lift and grunt. In each heart, a hope that there will be a body, no matter how broken, that breathes. When another signals me, I go to help him drag one more body and he points to its face. I look at it, then at him standing like a tree with drooping limbs. There, on the ground, a body with my face.

After the War: Letter to O’Connell

jonathan blake

William, we began as old songs wetly Whispered into the delicate ears

Of two young women dancing, Held tight, the faint perfume

Of their hair making our fathers

Dream, eyes closed to the yellow Moon that hung in the long skies

Of their cities, the leather soles

Of their shoes sliding across

The floor like the sound of the slow Tides that brought them home—

Listen for a moment to that music:

The lights are low but for the bandstand

Where one man in white waves

His hands into time and a woman

With a blossom in her hair steps

Forward and pretends to be broken

Hearted, is broken-hearted

Because songs mean to break our hearts, For us to pull someone close and whisper to them

Our dreams, believing even in our awkwardness

We are graceful, that our voices are deep

And beautiful, belong to the myth of that song

As we touch and move, sway like spring

Trees, promise the stars as the piano fades

Into black and we stop, still holding tight, Never, never, never letting go.

SECTION III

from A Year in the Life of Death

shawn levy

I had no appetite, then Or now, for your Prince. Ours was a Ronzoni house And would not budge, And of such prejudices Whole lives are built.

But ours was also a family Of Anthonys, After my great-grandfather, Abandoned, per our legend, By a teenage mom

In a bureau drawer In Pagani, near Pompeii, And rescued by a neighbor Who shipped him off Alone, a few years later, To America.

Big Tony Pariso, as I knew him, Who ran a junkyard in Brooklyn And had an Anthony of his own— Even bigger—who also had an Anthony. There was a cousin Anthony in Maryland, And at least a half-dozen among us Whose various names Bore an Anthony in the middle, Including me. And I, in my turn, Named an Anthony as well.

So, it wasn’t the brand of spaghetti That warmed me to you— And we called it macaroni, anyhow, No matter the shape. No, it was that holler

Out the window— “Anthony! Anthony!”

That marked you, Nameless though you were, As my blood.

Mary Fiumara, 88, Mother in a Spaghetti Ad (February 5, 2016, obituary, the New York Times)

My Symphony Sid

claire keyes

Just a student living at home, I root down  at the end of day, lights out,  and because Sid’s voice knows no end-stop, just cool,    I feign sleep in my Hollywood bed,   on its shelf my little radio beaming jazz and R & B:  another city, another continent where life’s rhythms are deliciously darker and more beguiling  than any beliefs my church has  laid on me. My God, oh my god, arms outstretched  on the cross, dying to save me.

But at night, I tune in Symphony Sid,  my raucous, outrageous DJ with his hipster lingo, his ’Trane,  his Lady Day, his Bird. He tells me, Dig yourself ! and I obey not knowing  what slow increments  of influence will do to my soul as he brings on Lady Day  her Strange fruit hanging  from the poplar trees—the words strange and fruit together  hooking me,  though I’m not able to figure the blood on the leaves blood at the root

but getting the anguish in this most unholy music:  not Gregorian Chant not in the hymnal but carrying me onward to being saved.

Isthmus

javy awan

Let’s live on the isthmus in no hideaway home— everything is exposed and balanced on stilts, on a border or bound, connecting and dividing expanses all around, of waters and lands. The isthmus is smooth, steeply mounded, and footholds are few—fertile hillocks and clifflets  that oceans cinch—farmed and wandered— an edge may give way, and we’ll scrabble down into blue seas on the left or green on the right, iceberg melts on the left, body temps on the right, pebbled shores on the left, coral sands on the right, dolphins on the left, barracudas on the right, terns flocking left, pelicans skimming right, purple grapes on one side, on the other, white— both prized for wines, in caves casked and aged— freighters and fishing boats ply opposite tides. To the south, native tongues, colonists’ up north— the isthmus connects cultures—we’ll freely move between northern industry and southern pleasures, fusing discipline and hedonism into spiritual delights. Every day a crate filled with trading goods nudges ashore—clothing, spices, ethnic foods, how-to books—and we empty it for exchange with the other coast—next day, another crate— we’re a community of Crusoes under overlapped skies of blending hues—gathering in casual groups,  we learn, teach, and compose revelatory songs  to assert and praise the elusive presence— that’s life on the isthmus. Let’s partner and love, mate and endure— let me be the key to your body,  and you the oracle of mine—rapt in a mutual music, harmonious, convivial, in orbits interlocking— perched on the pleasures of the isthmus.

IKEA

ricky orng

I dm you a sticky bun last night and ask if you wanted one from across the bedroom After we woke up we realized it rained in the morning, And wore 11am like a swim suit

Jumped in the car drove like hyperplane like time travel like we all have places to be but today we can be a little late for those other things because it was your first time

At IKEA we didn’t eat the cinnamon rolls but we knew they were there And I knew I liked you And also i love home decor

And driving all the way to IKEA by yourself was a force when you don’t need anything

Like I said we didn’t eat the cinnamon rolls

But we knew where they were and that one was only a dollar But we needed to make as much room

In our bodies for this kind of sweet

The reheated packaged meatballs

And Scandinavian democratized design

Ouu baby

we knew we were going to leave with more than what we planned on getting I mean even took the pencils that are short to write with And the measuring tape that’s too flimsy to measure with we knew to just take a photo of the furniture with funny names and aisle numbers with our phone and not buy anything bigger than the car

But when the aesthetic is cute and affordable we tried to fit a catalog in a Honda

Or tried to fit a home in a vehicle

Or tried to build something beautiful that you push around in a cart

And this cart pushes funny

See look, it’s going sideways

IKEA is like six flags

And this is really the only metaphor in the poem that matters

Took all the energy from us

To sit on everything

To open every drawer and watch them close in slow mo like someone you love walking away from you

It’s us imagining having all the things that will make us happy At the finish line we left with a lot of little things except the cinnamon rolls I didn’t know how to count And My car was obviously too small and you are the one good with numbers and I just like picking out plants that don’t belong to me

Grand Alap: A Window in the Sky

nancy jasper for Chinary Ung

A chamber  space, large  as he wants it to be, cello, Asian percussion, aggregations  of stars, and these syllables, like elementary particles, coming  and going  in the wide  space.

Spring Cleaning

sarah getty

Open the house. Let the sun roar in and corner the huddling dust. Let the March wind tear down cobwebs, sweep out crayon- and cookie-crumbs, Christmas needles, smells of Vapo-rub and smoke.

In the brisk new daylight get things straight. Clean the hall closet. Organize your desk. Go through your wardrobe, your game-plan, your old loves. Sort. Evaluate. Throw things away.

Remove the victims of winter’s grudge, littering the yard like a battlefield. Haul away the big black branch that’s lurked there, like a beached squid, since January. Lop off its limbs and stack them. Rake slimy leaf-rot off the tulip beds. Let clean heat reach the bulbs.

Root out the old hurts, the cozy unsuccesses. Forget that your sister wasn’t at your wedding, that your father didn’t seem to like you much. Get rid of the birthday party no one came to and the men who never asked you out again. Bundle the demeaning medical procedures and leave them at the curb.

Pile up the lost job, the student evaluations, the ideas of what your in-laws should be like. Burn them.

Burn the time your six-year-old came home from school and you weren’t there.

Burn the anniversary evening that wasn’t fun.

Burn the bad poems and the rejection slips.

Be ruthless as March.

Be a lion.

Under the clean-limbed trees be fierce and neat. Hunt out the beasties that fatten in the dark.

Let the sun scour.

Let the wind prowl and pounce.

SECTION IV

Finches in the ICU: Incisionettes

juan delgado

Incisions are sealed envelopes leaving me pending in the exchange. Under the ugliness of forced air, I float after the filling of cups and dry-mouth swallows of pills, a prescribed rattling and droopy eye.

Incisions turn to tingles that bite, so I keep in charge of that stinging before the nurse knocks her way in.

Awakening my lungs and splintered chest, I sit higher on my bed. Bruised, I hold on to scraps of alertness and move until my tubes tug at my monitor.

As I shuffle, the shifting of name tags. My next nurse notices my eyes first. With more tests ahead, she says, “A stronger voice is a relief to others.”

My stitching rises with my electric bed.

Beyond one to ten, I describe how I feel: My healing is unturned, a bicycle, teetering spokes. My mind is a moth trying to settle, my chest a half-opened door, visible and divided by shade.

After the ventilator, I was fed crushed ice And when the nurse applied orange-flavored

“Remedy Lip Balm,” I asked for them at the same time. I had the best snow-cone, licking my lips and asking the nurse for that taste of a street

where a paletero rings his bell unprompted. The rest of me was fastened to my tongue. After that, I knew what to prescribe myself. Above and near me there were no scattered leaves, nor a busy chorus by a bird feeder. No finches yet. *

My Tom-cat-love for Jean begins with a side-glance and laughter populating my room while I cross my arms over my wired breastbone, then brace my ribs still. *

I stand back from a sprinkler’s wide circle, a faucet’s idle talk. My shovel is halfway buried, a plan still being drawn out. At first, the rattling of bird seeds scatters the finches. Jean fills the feeders, hanging them on a cable wire between two cedars. I am intent on fall as a line of searching ants. *

On my floor, we wear the finest of cuts and relocated parts and iodined skin tugging more than ever before.

The floor’s flow is checked, the possibility of leaving spread on computers, wheeled in. The nurse’s gaze fixes on her screen, dutifully.

Each room has a doctor’s needlework on display. Stitches coil into us, half-buried and moist to the touch like worms. We keep at it, waiting to be released from this floor.

*

I retrace a path. There is a snake road in and yellow dots the ride up, the glistening of flood signs. The canyon gathers finches in fall before winter’s clinging

and heavy branches. The cones of the sugar pines sway, poised to drop. Black ants stitch a granite stone beside a misplaced and forgotten rake. The bighorn sheep, wide-eyed, float among the mountain ranges, and only pebbles rolling down the ridge give them away before they vanish. Like finches, one often hears them first.

On my first rehab trip, I linger by doors. In hallways, I can’t cast a decent shadow over the scratched and dull floors. My window gathers in the smallest of details: the sputtering of a muffler and a napkin in the parking lot waving “bye-bye.”

I desire nothing more than to cross the street, untethered from my routines, and to stroll under the midday sun, contorting my shadow and leaving behind my worn-out self-portrait.

After the number of cases and deaths dropped, our hospital started allowing visitors again. During Covid, I was lucky to have a bed; my nurses had worked during the first wave. Nadie cried in the parking lot to ready herself. Nick was going to quit, and Tami held on to the half-spoken words meant for another’s ear. She said, patients spoke by moving their lips, gesturing with their eyes. We learn to revert to hand signs, a wave to call the nurse near, a finger pointing toward the oxygen mask. I catch myself even listening with my hands. *

No one is monitoring the coldness of vents, and like my tea-stained cups at home, guerrilla patience is called for during my stay.

The cleaning crews lay in wait,

and the unlocked doors encourage them.

Hospital hours, sun-bleached stones, pile up under my bed.

The wristbands are read aloud, inked names blurring after the first touch.

Fluffed up feathers and bones, I prepare for my next tumble. Into a fog I go.

Under a wider ceiling, a numbness covers me, a floodlight swooping in.

Even then the finches feed, and a yellow-chested one arrives when the operating door swings shut.

I don’t make it easy from hour to hour for someone to whisk away their stopovers.

Unable to breathe on my own, I woke to the air-fogged tube joined to a pump, my lungs.

Later that day, it slithered out of me with a pull of a gloved hand, plucked out, my see-through snake.

I was out of breath between recurring visits.

Stricken under an air vent and trembling, I craved for a slow-rocking cure.

My chest was a sedated patch, a fastening mesh of cut nerves, but weeks later, my scar is a rooting stitch, a guiding fence along the way.

I strive to recover words fallen from my bedside. Like me, they have lost their sense of balance and are skittish, quick to scatter beyond sight. I sense a shared hurt is keeping them away.

They have recluse ways and places to perch, and I call them by whistling in their absence. I try to find the rhythm or pitch of a lost word, coaxing it to fly closer to my presence.

Too often, I am left reading a face for clues. Then I want to begin again by first showing my scar while I try to talk to a neighbor, but I don’t. Instead, I finger a button loose.

I depend on hand gestures and phrases built on gone astray words—I am not entirely understood, which makes me a little uneasy, and I whistle in public, searching for words, unique as nests, now tucked away, camouflaged, and belonging to a wide canopy of lush and evolving songs.

Day drizzle. With a moist face, I move, propping myself against a cedar, weeks removed from palpitating, A-Fib, worried about falling and my lack of arm strength.

Much of me is not beyond the needle-like leaves of my rosemary or the Monarchs, weaving a path over a patch of black oaks and migrating through a terrain’s hurdles.

The river moss is calling for a downpour. I glance at the sky, a piecemeal of clouds, a wind unbinding my steps, secure enough under the imagined smoke of a chimney stack. I am holding on for the next deep soaking when the finches seek shelter in the shrubs and clean their wings, concealed for now. *

In our canyon, the coyotes are getting closer, shadows crossing the gaps of light. They resume, voices rising, not a warning but a declaration

that their territory is wide. Their searching occupies them. With their slow yipping and falling howls, they gather, and there is no tricking them.

Unlike a well-traveled, ready to be pinned up postcard, I am not set on an address or being inked in during this on-going pandemic.

I hug my oversized pillow, a valentine heart protecting my breastbone as I take my third walk alone through the house and garden. My breath expands on the patio’s glass door overlooking the yard’s path; I study my breath lessening, a contracting cloud, open to the sky.

So abundant with blackberry vines, my hedge stitches in my morning, and a patch of yard serves to steer me to find my garden tools.

I rest next to my rake under a track of sky. There is a widening view. After the shattering and patching up, I am learning what to allow in the space I am holding unfilled, extending.

The first week of February 2022 was Beatles Week on the RichardHowe.com blog. Each day featured a post by a different author. The timing was influenced by the anniversary of the American television debut of The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, and also by the new documentary series Get Back, about the making of the album Let It Be (1970), which was airing on the Disney+ subscription video service. It is reported that seventy-three million people watched The Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan Show

“The Beatles in America,” United Press International photo

August 18, 1966: The Beatles at Suffolk Downs . . . and Me, Too

anthony “ tony ” accardi

On February 9, 1964, The Beatles appeared on the  Ed Sullivan Show. Their performance that night is a part of the cultural and musical history of this country. Two years after the Sullivan performance, The Beatles came to Massachusetts for a second time. It was 1966, and I was fifteen years old . . . and I loved The Beatles (as I still do). At the time I was living in a housing project above Glendale Park in Everett. Three of my closest friends (Kevin, Nicky, Bobby) and I were able to get tickets to the August 18, 1966, Beatles’ concert at Suffolk Downs.

I don’t remember much about that night, but the memories I do have are vivid. My friend Kevin’s father drove us to the racetrack in Revere/Boston. As you can imagine, when we arrived, the Suffolk Downs parking lot was in total chaos. The sound of young kids, like us, buzzing everywhere, car doors slamming and inaudible chattering . . . it was the sound of excitement.

As we entered the track we pushed and shoved and got pushed and shoved until finally the four of us managed to make it to the second floor of the grandstands. Of course, there were no empty seats, but we didn’t care. We were too excited to sit still anyway. Luckily, we claimed some floor space which would give us a “fair view” to watch the concert. But my friend Bobby’s view was obstructed by an older, tall kid who looked too tough for us to tangle with, so Bobby climbed up one of the steel support beams and sat above the crowd.

As we anxiously waited for the concert to begin, kids just kept pouring into the park and grandstand. The stream of bodies seemed endless, pushing, and shoving . . . but as dedicated Beatles’ fans we clung to our floor space, and refused to surrender our position regardless of how strong the shoves and pushes.

I remember it was a warm, clear, summer night. Powerful floodlights focused on the stage partially erased the dark. The scene was electric.  Several “warm up” bands performed singing nondescript songs, to a crowd that had no interest, like modern day Salieris playing for a crowd waiting for Mozart. As one of the bands sang “some song,” a helicopter flew over the crowd and landed on the track’s infield . . . a loud scream came from the crowd. “That must be them. It must be The Beatles” . . . but it wasn’t.

Finally, as The Cyrkle played their hit, “Red Rubber Ball,” a convoy of limousines came flying down the dirt racetrack, turned sharply at the finish line, and parked behind the stage.

From our viewing spaces, we could see activity around the limos. There was no doubt this time. It was them . . . it was The Beatles. Within minutes they climbed on stage and began playing. The place went wild. People scrambled from everywhere and raced toward the fence that separated the track from the crowd, Kevin, Nicky, Bobby and I included. Police Officers lined up shoulder to shoulder in front of the stage creating a human barrier to protect the Beatles as they played. Of course, this didn’t stop crazed fans from climbing the chain link fence and dashing to the band . . . . Pandemonium reigned, screaming, crying, jumping, hugging.

I remember nothing of the music. I just remember the sound of one continuous, eardeafening scream, but I didn’t care.  Suffolk Downs on August 18, 1966, is a pleasant blur in my brain. One of those events in your life in which the specifics fade, but the emotions remain keen.

Postscript: During the mad chaos that ensued when The Beatles took the stage, Kevin, Nicky, Bobby and I got separated. Kevin’s father was scheduled to pick us up after the concert, but the parking lot was jam packed with “fathers picking up kids.” I couldn’t find our ride or my friends. With no other option, I headed for the parking lot exit and began to walk home. After a couple hundred yards, I saw Kevin on the other side of the road. I yelled to him. Together he and I walked the four miles from Suffolk Downs to our homes in the Everett Projects. The next day we discovered that Nicky and Bobby luckily had found each other too and walked home together. For days all we talked about was The Beatles, the concert, and the walk home. Funny thing . . . as I finish writing this post fifty-five years after seeing The Beatles in concert, I marvel at the fact that I am still talking about it.

The Beatles Land in Little Canada

charlie gargiulo

An excerpt from Legends of Little Canada: Aunt Rose, Harvey’s Bookland, and My Captain Jack (forthcoming from Loom Press, 2023)

Not long after New Year’s Day, we started to hear about a musical group from England called The Beatles. It was annoying because out of nowhere we heard Beatles this, Beatles that, and how they were supposed to be so friggin’ great, but we hadn’t heard their music. Man, the hype was ridiculous. It always irritated me whenever some new fad was forced on us. For instance, about a year before, there was this stupid “Twist” song and dance, and then everybody had to do the Twist, which led to a million other made-up dance songs like “Loco-Motion,” “Mashed Potato Time,” and even a special Halloween song called “The Monster Mash,” which I did like. But nothing was as ridiculous as the craziness surrounding The Beatles. People were saying wait until you hear these guys, they are the greatest of all time and nothing would ever be the same once we heard them. Seriously, I hated those guys without even hearing them. My guys trashed them and couldn’t wait to hear these idiots so we could mock them like we did Elvis.

Then we heard them!

We were on the famous Austin Street stoop with a transistor radio when it happened, when we got zapped by the Beatles’ stun gun. I will never be able to describe the magic charge that ran through us when we heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and other Beatles songs one after another with no ads in between. We looked at each other with mouths hanging open and eyes bulging out a little bit more after each song. We had never heard a sound like that before. Their voices blended together made a combined sound unlike the Beach Boys or Everly Brothers or the girl groups like the Ronettes. Each song made us feel better than any song ever made us feel before. When we heard The Beatles, it was more than just hearing great music. There was something so powerful about it that we all KNEW this was another moment that would change our world. Remember when I said that President Kennedy made us believe that anything good was possible, and that when he died it made us believe that anything bad was possible? The Beatles restored our belief that anything good was STILL possible. I know this sounds stupid, but mark my words, when you look to the future, say the year 2000, I bet you’ll see I’m right. Everybody will still be talking about The Beatles.

We started shouting like joyful nuts. It was more fun to be happy about liking somebody than to trash somebody you couldn’t stand! We totally forgot how much we were going to hate these guys and now couldn’t figure out how we were going to survive until we heard

them again. We kept spinning the dial on the radio hoping like crazy for a Beatles song. Like a contagious disease, everybody caught Beatles fever, which had a name, “Beatlemania.” At school it was all anybody could talk about. The nuns made radios forbidden because everybody would whip them out in the schoolyard before school started, whip them out again at recess, whip them out yet again at lunch, and whip them out as soon as classes ended. Kids started bringing Beatles stuff to school—buttons, lunch boxes, trading cards, magazines, pictures. I think it started to scare the nuns.

Just when things couldn’t get crazier, we heard that the actual Beatles were coming to America to sing live on the  Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night. This would be an extra amazing thrill for me because I was going over my Uncle Leo and Arthur’s house in Dracut to visit for the weekend to see it live with them. Me and my mom and dad lived with them for a few years, and I missed them a lot. I was extremely close to my Uncle Arthur, and I went from seeing him every day of my life to hardly ever seeing him because he had to work all day and then rush home to take care of my Uncle Leo, who was almost paralyzed from his multiple sclerosis and needed twenty-four hour care. A guy named John, some kind of nurse, was a live-in helper, but my Uncle Arthur had to get home and relieve him after work. Since we didn’t have a car, there was no way for us to get there. But this Friday Uncle Arthur was going to pick me up on his way back home from work so I could spend the weekend with them, and he would drive me back on his way to work Monday morning in time for me to get to school.

It was a blast riding over with my Uncle Arthur because he drove a Cushman scooter, a weird golf cart thing with an actual motorcycle engine that allowed it to go fast enough to be on the streets like a regular car. It looked like a tiny three-wheeled pickup truck with one wheel in the front and two in the back. He sat on his own seat up front, with no enclosure around him and just a big plastic windshield in front of him. He steered it with handlebars, like a motorcycle, but unlike a motorcycle, he had a floor for his feet where they had gas, brake, and clutch pedals like a regular car. Behind him was the small truck bed. That’s where I would hop in when I wanted to catch a ride with him. He was the only guy I knew who drove one of these things on the street, so it stood out and people would always point and smile at us when we drove by in it. I’d sit back there acting unfazed, secretly thrilled, knowing every friggin’ kid my age looking at me was dying to be in my place at the moment.

At my uncle’s house it was sad to see how badly my poor Leo was doing. He was so skinny that he looked like a concentration camp survivor. I also felt so bad for my Uncle Arthur, because he was dedicated to his older brother, and did everything in his power to help him, but he had no cure for this horrible illness, and now that Uncle Leo’s body was just about finished, his amazingly powerful spirit was fading. Still, Uncle Arthur was there, feeding him, changing him, and keeping his composure during Uncle Leo’s worst moments of despair. One night, I heard Uncle Leo crying in his room after having another accident in his bed and murmuring that he wished God would take him, while Uncle Arthur patiently cleaned him and sat with him until he fell asleep. I have met two saints in my life, my Uncle Arthur and my Aunt Rose, and I will always love both of them with all my heart and soul.

I tried to be helpful, and it was nice to feel like there were moments that Uncle Leo felt glad to see me. He was a big baseball fan, and I think he was surprised and happy when he saw I knew the old-time players, his baseball heroes that he talked about. He had even seen Babe Ruth play and swore that he never heard a bat make the sound it did when the Babe

connected with a ball. When he had a memory like that, it felt like he got lifted out of his wheelchair and was back in Fenway Park sitting in awe of the Babe.

I admit that by the time Ed Sullivan came on Sunday night, I wanted to rein in my excitement because I was afraid acting all happy might have seemed disrespectful, given how badly Uncle Leo was doing. My Uncle Leo and Arthur, the live-in nurse John, and I gathered in the living room at the start of Ed Sullivan, and when Ed introduced them, and they broke into “All My Loving” it was like a miracle coming through the TV. Instead of worrying about looking too happy, I was thrilled to see that my Uncle Leo was smiling. Not only smiling, he had the biggest grin I think I ever saw from him. He even laughed when they sang “She Loves You” and shook their long hair and hit that high pitched “wooooo” after singing, “She loves you and you know you should be glad.” He wasn’t making fun of them, he just thought they were fun and crazy and he clearly felt my joy and energy. When they came back on again at the end of the show to sing, “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” he already declared that he liked Ringo the best and his face literally lit up when they did close ups of Ringo smiling and shaking his shaggy hair while playing the drums. The friggin’ Beatles made my Uncle Leo happy to be alive again, if it was only for the briefest time. Here I was thinking I should be glum out of respect, when what he really needed more than anything was to see me happy. Because he loved me. It was a moment I will treasure forever.

When I got to school the next morning, you can imagine the buzz in the school yard before class. If Beatles fever was hot before, it broke the thermometer after  Ed Sullivan It was funny though, listening to most grown-ups talk about The Beatles. At first, they just kind of laughed and made fun of their long hair and accents, and said it was a silly fad that wouldn’t last. Then when a month or so passed and they just kept getting bigger and bigger, the laughs started to turn into something different. Now there was almost a mean spirit developing among a lot of adults as they mocked the music and attacked them as people. A lot of my friends almost had to sneak around their parents who acted like it was dangerous for their kids to listen to The Beatles. It didn’t help that our stupid parish pastor started coming down on the Beatles and acting like they were part of some secret plot by the Devil to make us evil. I was lucky because nobody in my family fell for that crap. They liked The Beatles and thought they were “fine young lads.”

As if the music wasn’t enough, once we started reading about them and listening to them in interviews, we were stunned to find out they grew up in Liverpool, which sounded almost exactly like the same kind of dumpy city in England that Lowell was here, except bigger. Harvey used to save any magazines or reading material somebody brought to his store for us. He also seemed fascinated by them, and it didn’t take long before Harvey became an expert on everything about the Beatles and he said that the kids were on to something.

Even though we liked them all, we all started to identify with a particular Beatle. Sometime in April or so, me, Paul and Richie decided that we wanted to imitate The Beatles. I was going to be John. Richie was going to be George, and Paul, I bet you guessed it, was going to be Paul. Not because his name was the same, but because he was the cute and cuddly one, since he was a couple of years younger than us, and he was left-handed like Paul. So we looked at pictures of the Beatles and cut out cardboard guitars and colored them in the exact shapes and colors of the guitars they played, and we planned to practice

singing along with Beatles records and stage our own concert in the neighborhood. There was only one problem, we didn’t have anybody who played fake drums. That is, until Henry introduced us to a kid who lived upstairs from him called Popeye.

His real name was Al Landrieux, and nobody knew, or cared, why he went by the name Popeye. It certainly didn’t make much sense, because there was nothing about him that reminded you of Popeye at all. In fact, he was big kid, not fat, just large, or as my mom would say, “big-boned.” He was very smart but quiet. I never heard him say a bad thing about anybody. He wore a baseball cap because he had something wrong with his hair. He wasn’t bald, but it was thin and I think it bothered him. He often looked like he was daydreaming, and he might appear he was zoned out but he never was, he actually picked up everything that was said. I think Popeye was one of the best listeners I ever knew. He also probably had the most normal parents of any of my friends. I mean that in a good way. They almost seemed like one of those TV couples like Ozzie and Harriet, polite, friendly, and great to Popeye. I liked his mother, because she ended up becoming a waitress at the Holiday diner, where I would go with the guys after school to listen to The Beatles on the loud jukebox.

Popeye was a gigantic Ringo fan and thrilled to join our “Junior Beatles” group. For drums, he set up a card table and put all kinds of things on it that made different sounds when he hit them with a pair of drumsticks that he bought downtown. So now we had Ringo! We became friends with an older kid named Dennis on Austin Street whose parents owned the three-story apartment building he lived in, so we were able to practice singing and fake playing in his basement and he had a back porch where he let us hold our concert.

We made up flyers announcing our concert and a bunch of our friends and kids in the neighborhood showed up and we got up on Dennis’ back porch. He turned up the volume as far as it would go on his record player and we stood in front of our fake microphones, me standing alone like John, and Paul and Richie joining together at the other fake mike like Paul and George and Popeye hitting his card table fake drum set and shaking his head side to side and smiling like Ringo. The kids went nuts like we were the real Beatles, probably because the real Beatles were being blasted wicked loud. And the record never skipped! When we finished, we all bowed, like we saw the Beatles do, and left the stage, I mean the porch, by its side door. It was probably the happiest moment of my life at that point. Man, we were floating after that and the four of us felt like we were part of something special. We were like a real team, and we decided to be semi-blood brothers. That meant we’d be blood brothers, but without cutting ourselves open and sharing the blood part. But we all decided that we would do whatever it took to save up and earn enough money to buy our own instruments and learn to play so that we could become a real band. It was like we had our whole future planned out in front of us. We were going to be rock stars like The Beatles!

“It Needs Sweeping”

susan april

On November 25, 1968, The Beatle’s double LP “White Album” was released. I was twelve, in eighth grade, and I had to have it.

Wish I could say I had been swept into Beatlemania after watching their first Ed Sullivan Show appearance on February 9, 1964, but truth is I don’t remember watching that show. Sunday nights, we’d usually head over to Aunt Helen’s—she had a color TV—to view Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh was the movie that night, don’t remember it either.

Here’s how I fell for The Beatles. My sister Denise had a record player. Okay, it may have been my brother Armand’s once and she “inherited” it, but The Beatles 45s that showed up weekly were all hers. As were the TeenSet and Teen World magazines. She was twelve and into the Fab Four gossip about their girlfriends and wives. I was eight and couldn’t care less about Cynthia and Pattie.

What I cared about was an orange and cream Dansette record player and one particular Beatles 45—a Tollie label, lemon yellow, “Love Me Do” (side A), “P.S. I Love You” (side B)— recording I listened to over and over. Here’s how: the Dansette played a stack of 45s and had a j-hook arm that swung over the top of the stack. But if you only wanted to hear one record because you loved that song so very much, you moved the j-hook arm to one side. When the record was done playing, the needle arm would lift and move itself to ready-foranother-record-to-drop position, but with the j arm to the side and no other 45 to drop, the needle arm said, oh, you want that again? And it’d play the record again.

This went on for hours.

Why did I do that? I was learning the lyrics. Inventing dance moves. Lip syncing. Pretending that was me on stage. I air-played Paul’s left-handed guitar. When the harmonica part came, I became John. I was the music. I was a Beatle.

Fast forward to the fall of 1968. I got nabbed for shoplifting at Stuarts department store. Age twelve. That warrants its own essay, but it’s relevant here because two things happened. One, my juvenile probation involved some Saturday visits to 44 Hurd Street in Lowell. And two, although I was grounded in my room for what Mom said would be “forever,” Dad sympathized with the daughter who’d made a terrible mistake but would never to do that again and so bought her—me—a stereo for those lonely forever days.

A serious upgrade from Denise’s Dansette, my new Symphonic Electronics stereo system had a BSR turntable and dual speakers. I had a few mono LPs—Beach Boys “inherited” from Armand—but no stereo LPs. Learning that the Beatles would be releasing a new stereo double LP was amazing. And irresistible.

Record Lane on Central Street was on my route from the bus stop to Juvenile Court.

That last Saturday in November 1968, “The White Album” sat in the window. I walked in. I didn’t ask for the album but did ask how much it’d cost.

$9.98

Ten dollars—a lot of money. Month’s-worth of babysitting. The cost of a new winter coat. I needed a winter coat. The previous winter, Mom had bought a boy’s stadium coat, black melton wool, with a white contrasting stripe running down the sleeve. It was cheap and she figured when I outgrew it, a younger brother could wear it. How I hated that coat. I’d just started Junior High and standing at the bus stop was brutal. I tried to fancy it up with a girly scarf and white leather pocketbook with snazzy silver chain. But it was all wrong.

Is that your brother’s coat? It’s not Easter, why you carrying a white purse?

“Next year,” is all Mom said when I bugged her please buy me a girl’s coat, a nice navy pea coat, with a double row of buttons.

This was next year. End of November. And getting cold. On purpose, I ripped a bunch of tears in the black stadium coat and showed it to Mom.

“I can’t see my probation officer in this,” I said.

She opened the snap wallet that moths flew out of and handed me a ten-dollar bill for a pea coat. Saturday, December 7, 1968, I flattened that bill on the counter at Record Lane. “‘The White Album,’ please.”

But I’d forgotten about sales tax.

“That’ll be $10.28.”

“Huh?” I felt my feet melting. “That’s $9.98 plus thirty cents state tax.”

I rummaged through my pockets and found a quarter and a dime—thirty-five cents that I’d need for bus fare home.

Bus fare. “White Album.” Not a hard choice. The clerk slid The Beatles album into a thin paper bag and I began the long walk home.

Mount Everest is five miles high. From Record Lane to Catherine Street in Dracut is also five miles. One mile out, icy rain began to fall. At the Lowell-Dracut line, the skies opened up. I stashed the bag under my coat which was neither a pea coat nor a black melton wool with white stripe and slashes, but a spring cotton jacket and soaked. Also, my penny loafers were soaked. Every step sounded like this: squish-flop. As I squish-walked, I pressed The Beatles to my body for warmth. Then I stuck my thumb out for a ride.

I’d never hitchhiked before. Didn’t know I should walk backwards with that thumb out. Nevertheless, around Dracut Tire, a pickup stopped.

“You look miserable,” the man said. “Need a ride?”

I pressed “The White Album” tighter. Was the cover turning wavy already? If that man planned to abduct me, I didn’t care. I had to get my record out of the rain. I turned the door latch and slid onto the seat.

“What you got there?” he asked, motioning towards my coat.

I didn’t answer. Didn’t talk. Kept my hand on the truck door handle as we drove along Lakeview. When we got to the A&W I said, “This is it.”

“You live at the A&W?”

“I work here.” I lied.

“Looks closed.”

“It’ll open soon.” I lied.

But he let me off and when he was gone, I went home.

I listened to each side of “The White Album” and the stereo made it heavenly. One track especially had me reliving my “Love Me Do” replay days. But I was no longer a childish eight. I didn’t dance, sing, or pretend that I was George Harrison. At twelve, I had entered the world of juvenile justice, sneak-tricking my mom, and taking rides from strangers. Instead, I shivered with near pneumonia and positioned the needle to play and replay track seven’s aching guitar and plaintive voice. My new normal. I look at you all/See the love there that’s sleeping . . .

A Catholic Schoolboy Discovers The Beatles

mike m c cormick

The air crackled as my fifth-grade classmates hung up their coats on the metal racks in the back of the room at St. James School.

“Did you see Ringo’s rings?”

“I love ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand!’”

“Who’s your favorite?”

“Did you see their hair?”

I was confused. I had no idea what anyone was talking about. I asked my neighborhood friend Jim, “What’s going on?”

“Don’t you know? You mean you missed it? The Beatles!”

It was the morning of February 10, 1964. The Beatles had made their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show the night before. Seventy-four million people, including, it seemed, all my classmates, had seen the Liverpool-based quartet perform five songs on the early evening variety show.

Jim had tipped me off Saturday when he saw me at the Haverhill Lanes. His older sisters had informed him that everyone needed to watch “The Beatles.” When I asked Jim what “The Beatles” was, he said it was a group from England. Although I didn’t quite understand what he meant by that, I didn’t ask for details; I figured it might be some type of movie like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds—but with insects.

I didn’t like that movie.

I skipped the broadcast. Fortunately, I made sure to watch when The Beatles performed six songs on  The Ed Sullivan Show the very next week.

The performance captivated me. I loved how the band members bounced in front of the microphones as they shook their heads from side to side. I noticed their faces lit up as they sang; I’d never seen singers look that happy. I wanted to sing along with every song.  When the show was over, I remembered bits and pieces of refrains:

“She Loves you yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“Send it along with love from me to you–to you!”

I walked to Record Lane on Merrimack Street in Haverhill to look at Beatles records.  I found copies of two albums,  Meet The Beatles and  Introducing The Beatles, displayed in metal wire wall racks.

I reached for a copy of Meet the Beatles. I liked the cover photo of the Beatles’ shadowed faces suspended in a bed of black. I checked the track listing; I recognized three songs: “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “All My Loving, and “I Saw Her Standing There.” I looked at the price:  $3.98. I had two dollars in my pocket. I put the album back in the rack.

I picked up a copy of  Introducing The Beatles. and skimmed the song titles.  The only song I’d heard of was “I Saw Her Standing There.” Then I saw the price tag: $3.98.

I shoved that record back into the rack and walked out the door.

As I stepped past Record Lane’s front display window, an album with a blue-and-white cover caught my eye:  The Bearcuts Swing in Beatlemania. The word Beatlemania made me curious. I headed back into the store and asked the clerk to let me look at the album.

I smiled at the cover illustration—four white faces with black bangs attached to insectlike shells with six legs. The album listed three of the songs The Beatles had sung on the second  Ed Sullivan appearance plus some songs I’d never heard of including “Your Barber is a Beatle Too.”

When I saw that the album only cost ninety-nine cents, I brought it to the counter.

The clerk wanted to make sure I realized that the record I was buying was not in fact The Beatles. “But,” he assured me, “it does have most of their best songs.”

Since I had never heard an actual Beatles’ record, I didn’t know the difference between the sound of The Bearcuts and The Beatles. I played my new record’s Beatle songs over and over. The words and melodies stuck in my head. I sang the songs to myself throughout the day.

When I was alone, I belted out the words. My spirits soared. I wondered if the happiness I felt was joy.

Jim was not impressed when I told him about my Bearcut album. “That’s no good,” he said. “It’s got to be The Beatles.”

It was mid-summer before I decided I would buy an actual Beatles album. I had the money; I’d started delivering papers for the  Haverhill Gazette; I had sixty customers and made six dollars a week.

I was surprised when I walked into the record department at Mal’s Department Store. Besides the albums I’d seen in Record Lane, there were now three other Beatles albums to choose from.   Something New had a splashy color picture of the group performing on the Sullivan show; it didn’t have a single song I recognized.  A Hard Day’s Night had a red cover with black-and- white photos of band members on the front; I hadn’t heard any of the songs on that album either.

I perused a copy of The Beatles Second Album. The title confused me since I remembered seeing two other Beatles albums months before. When I only recognized “She Loves You” in the song listings, I considered walking out of the store empty handed.

But the cover intrigued me. There were a dozen photos on each side. There were shots of band members performing, pictures of individual faces, a picture of the band being interviewed . . . .

I turned the record over again and again pondering the photos.

Mal’s was a discount department store, the record was priced at only $2.67. I bought it.

From the charged guitar notes introducing the first number, “Roll Over Beethoven,” to the final salvo of “She Loves You,” the album electrified me. The Beatles sound was immeasurably brighter and more brilliant than The Bearcuts’ renderings.

I stared down at the disk as it turned on my monaural record player. I loved how the rainbow band on the edge of the label looked as it circled round and round. Even watching a Beatles’ record revolve on a turntable fascinated me!

Later that night, I took the disc in hand and read the label. I deduced that the names in parenthesis under each song title must be the songwriters. Six songs had been written by John Lennon-Paul McCartney, two of the Beatles; the other five songs had been composed by people I had never heard of.

Chuck Berry wrote “Roll Over Beethoven.” “You Really Got a Hold on Me” was credited to W. Robinson.  Someone named Holland penned “Please Mister Postman.” Drapkin contributed “Devil in Her Heart;” Berry, Gordy, and Bradford wrote “Money.” And the most explosive song on the entire record, “Long Tall Sally, had come from the trio of Johnson, Penniman, and Blackwell.

I wondered who these songwriters were. Had they written other songs too?  Did any of them have their own bands?  Had other singers and bands recorded these songs?

The Beatles Second Album sprouted a lifetime interest in songwriters. Within twelve months I’d discover Chuck Berry credited on songs by The Rolling Stones, The Dave Clark Five, and The Animals; I’d learn that one of writers of “Long Tall Sally”—Penniman—was Little Richard; W. Robinson was Smoky Robinson who first recorded “You Really Got a Hold on Me” with his group The Miracles.

I memorized the words to every song and sang them throughout the day to myself. Sometimes, when I was alone pedaling my bicycle on my paper route, I shouted them to the skies.

For the first time, I had a soundtrack for my life.

When I told Jim how much I loved  The Beatles Second Album he was not impressed.  “That record is so old. You should have got Something New or A Hard Day’s Night.”

But, by that time, I was so engrossed with the songs, including songs he had never yet heard, that I didn’t care. The fact that I loved the album was what mattered—he was missing out.

There would be plenty of time to listen to Something New, A Hard Day’s Night, and much, much, more.

More time and music in fact, than I ever imagined.

“Love Me Do”

john wooding

Ihad just made my first decade on the planet. A ten-year-old kid in a sad Midlands town. Northampton, like much of England in those days, was all monochrome, fading pubs, and forlorn shoe factories. Pretty soon the factories would be gone, and what little spirit the place had left would evaporate in the fetid air of the god-awful housing estates and shopping malls that would soon rip out the heart of the place. But in 1963 a little ray of sunshine cast a glimmer of light—enough to charge the hopes of a generation even though it couldn’t save the place itself.

At end of March that year The Beatles came to my hometown. A stop on a tour that took them all over the country. The venue? A cinema downtown. A place I would take my first girlfriend a few years later, with all the awkward and loaded love a darkened place can offer. The faded glory of the auditorium echoed with screams and adulation (although the gig was not sold out, and many came to see Tommy Roe and Chris Montez, not the four mop-tops). But this was the beginning. The band was on the verge of global fame. The lads from Liverpool played just a few songs.  The set list (and, yes, you can find this on the Web) included: “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Love Me Do,” “Misery,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret?,” “Please Please Me,” and “A Taste of Honey.” Kind of astounding that all but one of these songs were original Lennon/McCartney compositions.  The Beatles came back in November that same year. My brother took me to the concert, but I remember little of it. That set list included “All My Loving” and “She Loves You” (both recorded that summer). Would that I had better recall, or an autographed copy of the program. That would have been some set of mementos.

But I have other things that linger. Gifts, I suppose, from the boys. Hearing workingclass accents on the BBC that were like mine, holding out the hope that I might be accepted one day in a still class-bound England. The sheer energy they gave us. The joy of the music—worth remembering that over the three years since that show they would record seven albums full of spectacular music:  Please Please Me, With The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Beatles for Sale, Help, Rubber Soul, Revolver.  And, in 1967, the iconic Sgt. Pepper. It was a hell of a soundtrack for my teenage years, entwined with the music of The Kinks, The Who, and The Rolling Stones. Like many, it let me sing through adolescence.

The Beatles didn’t change everything. They were part cause, part symptom of a period that, for a short time, turned England upside down. But they changed enough to give a kid from a fading town inspiration, and a glimmer of a different world. Without John, Paul, George, and Ringo I might never have seen a future that I might own, might never have gone to university, might never have broken free from the shackles of class and place. Because sometimes, just sometimes, music sets you free.

“Little Child, Won’t You Dance with Me?”

louise peloquin

The Ed Sullivan Show was a family entertainment staple. Across the narrow hall from the kitchen, my parents would settle into their armchairs, and my brother and I would sit crossedlegged on the floor while our two younger siblings were tucked away in the arms of Morpheus. So on February 9th, 1964, tuning in to CBS at 8 p.m. wasn’t unusual.

“That new group everyone is talking about will be on,” Papa said as he turned on the Motorola in the corner room that my mother affectionately called “the study,” no doubt because of the overcrowded bookcases lining all available space. Some of the shelves were off limits to us kids, the ones Maman organized to display her husband’s medical texts and journals. Maman made sure their precious content was quickly accessible to Papa when research was required on this or that ailment. We kids had our own space with colorful children’s books in French as well as English and an encyclopedia received by post, volumeby-volume on a monthly basis. Although we devoured our “library,” my brother and I were always attracted to the impressively thick medical books labelled with disquieting titles like, “Illustrated Overview of Infections” and “Diseased Organs”. We had a lot of fun clandestinely turning the forbidden pages and frightening one another with tales of how beastie teenie weenie microbes could infect the entire world.

“Oh oui. I understand that Arthur Fiedler is a great admirer of The Beatles.” Maman stated. “Ils sont très populaires. They are very popular.”

Ours was a household of music. My father’s rich baritone filled the house with tunes, from old French songs like “Frère Jacques” to lullabies like “Fais dodo Colas, mon p’tit frère” (Go to sleep Nicolas, my little brother). Our favorites were the funny ones like “Le bon Roi Dagobert a mis sa culotte à l’envers.” This 1750s French chanson about a supposedly dignified king who had put on his royal knickers inside out, instantly turned any family sourpuss into a laughing hyena. Just thinking about now it makes me chuckle. Crooner numbers were also included in Papa’s repertoire, for example “Smoke gets in your eyes” which he sang at Washington, D.C., piano bars when he was a penniless medical student in the late ’30s.

So there we were in the study, four faithful Ed Sullivan viewers aged 45, 45, 11, and 9, about to become fans of the “Fab Four” aged 23 (John and Ringo), 21 (Paul), and 20 (George).

Ed ceremoniously announced, “Tonight the whole country is waiting to hear England’s Beatles, and you’re going to hear them, and they are tremendous ambassadors of goodwill.”

“C’est très bien. That is very good” Maman commented.

Papa responded, “Oui, la musique peut réunir le monde entier. Yes, music can unite the

entire world.” My brother and I found out later that he knew a thing or two about the question—

lessons learned during his WW2 European military tour.

The TV commercial break seemed endless. My pre-teen ears couldn’t wait to discover what the big deal was. School yard talk had triggered my curiosity. Our classical music aficionado parents hadn’t exposed us to rock & roll and mentioning it conjured up a sulphureous atmosphere. It made me conclude that this particular music had to be beguiling, and I knew the upcoming TV experience had to be a watershed.

The moment had come. Camera shots of screaming girls barely older than I was filled the screen. Maman wanted to lower the volume, undoubtedly thinking of her two little ones sleeping in the next room. But something stopped her. She didn’t want to miss a beat as she shared Arthur Fiedler’s musical assessment.

After the screams came the images and the music. It transformed us. After stating, “They need a haircut,” Papa started stamping his feet. Maman was smiling. My brother patted down his inch-long bangs and swung his head à la Ringo. I was experiencing an epiphany.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” shouted my brother at the end of the third song. Maman didn’t shush him. “I recognize the musical value here and agree with Monsieur Fiedler. In fact, some of these melodies could very well be included in future Boston Pops concerts. C’est intéressant.” Papa laughed. Little did he know at the time that his wife’s prediction would come to pass.

No one asked me for my two cents worth and I couldn’t have uttered a sound anyway. My mindset was—

“There was love all around But I never heard it singing No, I never heard it at all Till there was you.”

(Originally written by Meredith Wilson in 1957 for

the musical

The

Music Man)

By the end of the show my brother was squealing, “I wanna hold your HAAAND!”. Maman and Papa were grinning, the babies were still sleeping, and I would never be the same again. As I look back fifty-eight years, I realize that my adolescence officially began that night.

Ed Sullivan hosted The Beatles again on February 16th and 23rd. Like all of the other teeny-boppers, I wanted to scream my lungs out when John, Paul, George, and Ringo came on, but I managed to squelch my enthusiasm, afraid that Maman would find such an outburst undignified, not to mention dangerous to my younger siblings’ quality of sleep. So I just let my inner self go with the rhythmical flow and became, for the first time ever, a diehard rock & roll fan.

Two months later, my April birthday rolled around. “What kind of cake and what gift would you like ma chérie?” Maman asked.

“I’d like an angel crust pie with strawberry chiffon inside and a lot of whipped cream on top, s’il vous plaît.” That was our name for “strawberry pavlova”. As for the birthday present, I didn’t admit to coveting a Beatles album. My growing obsession, multiplied a hundredfold by discussions with neighborhood buddies, was so intimate that I just

couldn’t share the burning desire with my parents. Fortunately, my mother’s best friend, Rita Robillard Dozois, a nurse, amateur musician and show-woman, had guessed that a Beatles LP would be the most fabulous gift of all. Sure enough, thanks to “Ma Tante” Rita, it was.

Soon, “Meet The Beatles” set fire to the old Victrola each time I babysat while Maman was out on errands. Thus, the two little ones, aged 4 and 2, became fans and learned to dance. A favorite was:

“Little child, little child Little child, won’t you dance with me? I’m so sad and lonely Baby, take a chance with me . . . .

If you want someone to make you feel so fine Then we’ll have some fun when you’re mine, all mine So come on, come on, come on . . . .”

The fun we had during those blessed times has never been surpassed.

I still have that LP. The album cover is a bit frayed at the edges, but the vinyl still sounds clear and, surprisingly enough, hasn’t got a scratch. Maybe it’s worth something on eBay? Dunno and don’t care. I’m keepin’ it. Played it just before writing this piece in fact.

My 1964 birthday gifted me with a couple of bucks. Along with the dimes and quarters from weekly allowances, when they were not withdrawn because of unruly behavior, the sum was enough to purchase a piece of Beatle “merch”—a five-inch plastic Paul McCartney doll holding his guitar and smiling from ear to ear. Little Paul is still with me, and eBay ain’t gettin’ him either.

In the late ’60s, DJ’s on WBZ and other stations asked listeners to call in and vote— Beatles or Dave Clark Five? Beatles or Stones? Beatles or whatchamacallit? I never had the guts to pick up the phone, but I belted out my allegiance to my little blue plastic transistor. Never would my loyalty weaken.

Four months passed after Ed’s shows and A Hard Day’s Night came to theaters on August 11th, 1964. My brother and I had spotted the single for sale at Côté’s Market on Salem Street. We never got a copy, but one day Ma Tante Rita took my brother, a couple of cousins, and me to the Route 3 Cinema in Chelmsford which had opened for business on June 3rd, 1964 (closed in mid-1998, demolished in February 2011, and replaced by a Stop & Shop). We didn’t hear any tunes and didn’t see much of anything that day because of the deafening screaming and carrying on. Years later, my brother and I calmly viewed it. Our voices could no longer break the sound barrier and we enjoyed it completely albeit much too sedately.

So today, on February 9th, 2022, more than a half century after Ed Sullivan introduced America to the Beatles, memories flow back like a tidal wave, not one of destruction but one of rejuvenation and invigoration. I think I’ll play a couple of tunes right now in fact! The “little child” within me continues to dance with John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

Le Hibou

gregory f . d e laurier

It’s a hot summer day in 1966 and we’re on the road again. Bryan is driving his Dad’s Chrysler, The Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” is blasting from the radio. We are young, happy and excited, laughing at silly jokes, talking about girls. Free. We’re on our way from Ogdensburg, N.Y., to Ottawa. Ogdensburg was and is a small, tough working-class town. It is OK, situated right on the St. Lawrence River, and there is not a more beautiful river in the world, so the place has its charm. But there wasn’t much to do, especially for teenagers, except drink, and we did plenty of that.

But there, just across the river, was Canada, and an hour’s drive away was Ottawa. Ottawa, a real city, and not just any city, but the capital of Canada. Cross the bridge, get on 416 and it’s a straight shot to the city. And every Saturday we could, we were there.

Bryan had a cousin there who was in grade thirteen (I never have figured that one out, thirteen?), so on our early visits we had a guide. But after a while, we didn’t need him.

Ottawa’s not a huge city, maybe 800,000 people at most, so it’s easy to get around. We’d walk along the Rideau Canal, visit Parliament Hill, the National Gallery, and just walk around looking at the beauty of the city. What amazed us most was the people, all sorts of people we’d never see in Ogdensburg—black people, brown people, women in saris or wearing hijabs, men wearing outfits we had no idea what they were. And a Tower of Babel of languages; French and English of course, but also so many other we didn’t recognize . . . Arabic, Chinese, Swahili? This was, after all, the capital city, and we soaked it all up.

But there were three places we’d always go to. First, the record stores, all of them filled with LPs, EPs, singles you just could not find or buy in the States. First and foremost, the British Beatles albums, but obscure and semi-obscure bands and artists from the Small Faces and Them, to the Move, to the Bonzo Dog Band.

Second were the clothing stores, sort of a mini Carnaby Street. If the British bands were wearing them, you could buy them. My favorite was a great pair of paisley bellbottoms. On our first visit, I bought an actual Beatles jacket, the one with the collarless round top. My only mistake was wearing this to school back home, for which I received at least three punches in the mouth (difference was not well accepted at the time in my hometown).

But the place we loved, really loved was Le Hibou, a folk club, a coffee house. It was dark and dingy, with just the right amount of cigarette smoke and alienation in the air. Everybody was hip and just so impossibly cool, and we just loved it. And the best music imaginable. We became regulars. This is how we became regulars, and this takes us back to Ogdensburg.

Bryan was a talented person. He ended up going to college on a football scholarship, but also played a pretty good banjo, and was a gifted painter. One summer he’d finished an oil

painting, a landscape featuring the river. As we were walking out of the park we were in, he dropped the painting face down, paint still wet, in a pile of pine needles. Disaster? But no, as these things go, what emerged from what had been a pretty typical landscape was a masterpiece. The landscape was still there but it had become a dark and brooding piece, hope and doom together on a now textured work of true art.

Not knowing what else to do with it, we took it to Le Hibou on one of our visits. The owner or manager or whatever she was, said she loved it and immediately hung it on the wall. There it stayed until the place closed in 1979.

We saw everybody there: Bruce Cockburn, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Tom Rush, Tim Hardin, Joni Mitchell, the Howlin’ Wolf, on and on. When we saw the Howlin’ Wolf our table was only about six feet away from the small stage. It was too much; the power, the energy, his ability and dedication to put every ounce of himself into his art was overwhelming, like standing in front of a hurricane. We moved back a couple tables so I could breathe.

One night, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band was playing. And in the band, singing right in front of us, up there on the stage, just a few feet from our table, was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life: Maria Muldaur (now Maria D’Amato). She had maple syrup-colored skin, very long black hair that sepentined around her face that was all huge dark eyes and full lips. I was in love, and knew this was the woman I was meant to be with.

She was singing something—beautifully—and banging away on the tambourine when all of a sudden a ring, or whatever they’re called, flew off her tambourine and landed right on our table, almost right into my espresso. This was a sign! Yes, we were meant to be . . . one.

The band took a break, and there she was, standing talking to somebody at the coffee bar. This was the moment, I just knew it. I picked up the ring and went over to her.

“Excuse me,” I said.

Maria turned around and looked at me.

“I believe this came off your tambourine.”

“Keep it,” she said, and turned back to talk to whoever it was she was talking to. But, she had looked at me, actually and for real talked to me. I kept the ring for a long time, but, as people do, it got lost along the way.

SECTION VI

163 Pine St. in Lowell. Former Union National Bank branch, designed by Eugene Weisberg.

Photo courtesy of UMass Lowell Libraries, Center for Lowell History. See page 109.

Lowell’s Mid-Century Modern Architecture: Eugene Weisberg

marie frank

Lowell’s nineteenth-century architecture dominates its skyline and the history books. But as the city grew in the 20th century, and as the mills themselves started to close, new industries and institutions, and new growth in residential neighborhoods, required new buildings. Many of the notable structures of the mid-twentieth century can be traced back to one architect: Eugene Weisberg (1917–1970).

The son of Russian-Jewish emigres, Weisberg grew up at 19 Summit Street; his father, Norman, operated a wholesale groceries business at 145 Thorndike Street. Weisberg left Lowell to earn his degree in architecture at MIT in 1938. In the 30s, MIT instructed students in the “International Style”—a style of clean lines and no historic ornament. Weisberg’s classmates included such renowned figures as I.M. Pei who went on to design the Hancock Tower in downtown Boston.

Weisberg served in World War II as a lieutenant in the Navy and also worked for a number of Boston architecture firms before returning to Lowell. He set up his office in the Fiske Building on Central Street where he soon established a thriving practice. He designed a house for his parents on Westview Street in Lowell; and he married Hester Marmer with whom he had two children. (Hester worked for years as a librarian at Pollard Library.) His earliest works in Lowell included the Waldimer Pontiac car dealership on Middlesex Street (1953, now the home of the Lowell Department of Public Works), and a remodeling of the Lemkin’s clothing store on Merrimack Street in 1952.

By the mid-50s he took on much larger projects: the Temple Beth-El Community Center on Princeton Boulevard, and a series of branch banks for Union National Bank (pictured p. 107). His futuristic, Jetson-like design for Tewksbury Shopping Plaza indicates his lofty goals to bring Modernism to the Merrimack Valley.

By the 1960s, Weisberg joined with Lowell realtor/developer Van Greenby to design a series of houses along Lincoln Parkway and adjacent streets in the Highlands neighborhood. He also became actively involved in Lowell’s Citizen Advisory Committee for Urban Renewal from 1961-69.

Outside of Lowell, Weisberg’s buildings included a synagogue in Manchester, N.H., a country club in Dartmouth, Mass., and a radio station in Medford, Mass. He died at the age of 54, just as his design for a bank building at 489 Merrimack Street began construction. This building still operates as a branch for Santander Bank today.

Please Hold for Mr. Marek

david daniel

From the New York Times obituary, March 25, 2020:

When Richard Marek was a young editor at Scribner’s in Manhattan in the early 1960s, he was entrusted with one of the literary world’s most important manuscripts, “A Moveable Feast,” Ernest Hemingway’s intimate portrait of his life as an unknown writer in Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway had scrawled his edits in the margins of the manuscript. Mr. Marek planned to go over it at home, and carefully slipped the pages into an envelope before getting on the subway near his Midtown office.

But once he arrived home, on the Upper West Side, he didn’t have the envelope. He realized he had left it on the subway.

Panic ensued. He sobbed all night and told himself, “My career is over.”

The next morning, he went to the subway’s lost and found and saw to his astonishment that someone had turned in the envelope.

And his career was far from over. He became one of New York’s most prominent editors and publishers. Over the course of his career he worked at a half-dozen publishing houses and was responsible for shepherding more than 300 books into print.

Two of those books were mine.

It begins with my mailing three chapters of a not-quite-completed novel to an editor at St. Martin’s Press. 1982 this was, and I sent off the packet, careful to include a comparablysized envelope with requisite return postage—an exercise in inward-gazing that the modern writer, submitting with a keystroke, is spared. You spent all that money on extra postage in the hope that it would never be used. But used it most often was: Shot down on your own dime. Was it Jack London who wallpapered his writing room with rejection letters; then went on to become the best-paid writer in the world? There isn’t a dedicated scribbler anywhere who couldn’t turn the same decorating trick.

Anyway, back in ’82: weeks passed for my particular 3-chapter packet, and when one day it came back in the mail, addressed to me in my own hand, I felt my heart quail. It does that far less painfully these days, but the feeling never goes entirely away. That day, not ready to face the rejection, I didn’t open it. And there it lay on the kitchen counter for four days. Finally, braced for the inevitable, I opened the envelope.

The cover letter accompanying my chapters, on St. Martin’s Press letterhead, began, “Dear Mr. Daniel:” Yeah, yeah, I thought, rejection is coming . . . and skimmed the rest. It read: “Thank you for letting me look at . . .” Etc. etc. And then this: “While the idea

of a former operative being brought back into service for a special mission is not new, there are lots of things about your story that feel fresh and off-beat. If you haven’t already committed it elsewhere, I’d love to see the entire manuscript.”

Four lost days! That’s what inactivity and trepidation had cost me! Four days when I might have been writing the final chapters of the book! The old fear of rejection had hobbled me.

Clickity-split I finished the book in a marathon session, banging it out on my IBM Selectric typewriter. And I sent off the entire manuscript (again, with a duplicate envelope and a fruit salad of return postage).

Time passed. Then one day, the phone call: “This is so-and-so, calling from St. Martin’s Press. Is this David?” “Yes—?” I said, breathless. “Hold please for Mr. Marek.”

His voice was refined and cordial. Assured. The way you would expect a voice coming from a Manhattan office in the Flatiron Building with wood-paneling and oriental carpets to sound. “This is one of the more enjoyable phone calls I get to make from time to time,” he said. “I’d like to buy your novel.”

I tried to stay calm. I’m sure I didn’t. He mentioned a dollar amount. I was cool enough not to make the gaffe Pat Conroy says he made when he was offered a contract on his first book. “How does five thousand dollars sound?” the editor said, and Conroy so new and green to the process, replied: “It sounds okay . . . though I’m not sure I can raise the whole amount right away.”

Mr. Marek asked: “Do you have an agent?” I didn’t; not that I hadn’t tried to find one. “I advise that you get one,” he said. And I always appreciated that—the way I would come to value a lot of things about Richard Marek. He was a man of personal honor and literary integrity, and while I never had any fear that the system would try to cheat me, I came to understand that book publishers much prefer to work with an agent than deal directly with an author. It’s just cleaner.

On the strength of having a publisher’s offer on the table, getting an agent wasn’t hard. The first one I talked to—a reputable guy with a reputable agency—knew Dick Marek and said I couldn’t have a better editor. The agent’s first job was to call St. Martin’s and immediately get a better advance for the book.

Things went apace. Dick Marek and I kept in touch through the editing and revising stages—he was a fount of good advice. And then, somewhere in the process, he said, “I’m going to be up in Boston next Wednesday. Can we meet?”

After Mr. Marek’s proposal that we meet I rushed out to Macy’s and bought a blue blazer and a pair of gray flannel slacks. I borrowed my dad’s best silk tie.

On the appointed day, I arrived at the lavish Ritz-Carlton where I met the editor for the first time. He was a tall, gray-haired man. He had flown up from New York City that morning. We exchanged pleasantries in the lobby and then went into the dining room. All of this was new to me. Although born in Boston, I’d grown up a modest child of the suburbs, in a teetotaling home, so there amid the silver and crystal and white linen of the classic old four-star hotel restaurant, with its views of the Public Gardens, I felt like a bumpkin.

“What are you drinking?” Mr. Marek asked. Had anyone ever actually asked me that?

Actually, someone once had. A few years before, when a graduate school professor of mine at the University of Maine had invited me to lunch at the faculty club to discuss my thesis, the waitress asked if we’d care for a drink. I looked to my professor, and he said, “I’ll have scotch.” I said I’d have the same. Waitress said: “Black & White or Red?” In time I would come to understand that is a choice of two: Black & White Scotch, or Johnny Walker Red Label Scotch; but heard it as Black or White or Red. I said, “Black.” She and my professor exchanged a quick glance of knowing. “Very good, sir,” she said. I never needed anyone to embarrass me; I always managed that quite well by myself.

So now, when Richard Marek was asking at the Ritz, “What are you drinking?” I hesitated. “Umm . . . what’re you going to have?” I asked back.

“A Martini,” he said.

“That’s what I’m going to have, too,” I said, making it seem as if it had been my thought all along.

The drinks came. Ice cold, straight up with a twist. Silver bullets. The recipe (I inquired later of the barman) was Tanqueray #10 and a whisper of dry vermouth. The cocktail was so cold and juniper-bright that the first taste sent a spike into my sinuses . . . and warmed all the way to the stomach, where it lit something on fire that sparked along the nerve endings back to my brain.

Wow, did I grow charming, witty. Mr. Marek was fine and erudite company. Now, one Martini would’ve been plenty, or the slower buzz of a bottle of beer, on simply fizzy water— especially for a rube like me—but in such grand company, and with the high-flown literary talk of the Manhattan publishing world, a second Martini was deemed in order.

Later, going home, in my new blazer and gray flannel slacks and the spill stain I’d managed to get on the silk tie I’d borrowed from my dad, I thought of Thoreau’s warning. But then I recalled that there was more: The full line was “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes” (Italics mine)—and it lifted me.

Do I wish I’d been more sophisticated, wittier, chiller, more erudite? Mais oui. But I was different in subtle ways. A little older and wiser. And I didn’t kill the deal. In fact, Mr. Marek would work with me on one more book after the launch of that first, taking me over to E.P. Dutton with him when he went there to head that venerable publisher. Eventually, he got out of publishing to pursue independent editing. ******

That day I had my first real taste of the literary world, and it was a good one. After all these years, it still has flavor. In 2018 we would reconnect and have lunch—iced tea this time—and share stories and experiences. We talked about working on a project together, 23 years after the first one; but it was not to be. Marek died in 2020 at age 86.

“Watch Our Show?”

joe blair

We had a good, solid marriage for the month of  Game of Thrones. Likewise for the month of  Downton Abbey. And who could forget the nights—The Night Manager and The Night Of? Those were heady times. And we loved our vacation in Paris. Remember the romantic moments we had on  The Bureau? Of course, we had to come back down after it ended. It wasn’t an easy transition. We had our rough patches. We were charming and a little silly for one week of Ted Lasso, and then things became stale and not charming at all. Likewise with Cobra Kai. We lost the magic along the way somewhere. But at least we had something at the start. We can say that, can’t we? We had something at the start. Better than never having anything at all. Like with This Is Us or Squid Game But we’ve been married for thirty years. Which means something. Doesn’t it? We have staying power. We come back. And we’ve been going really strong for two weeks now with  Succession. It felt good to be heading in the same direction again. Loving each other so well again. I was happy because Deb was happy. Nine o’clock would roll around, and she’d say those three words I can’t live without. “Watch our show?” And we’d sit together on the couch, and she’d do that quirky little thing she always does, which is to put her feet up on the ottoman and wait for me find the Roku remote and then turn on the TV and go to home and then to Amazon Prime and then to  Succession and then wait for me to push play and then skip intro. And then we’d hold hands and prepare ourselves to enter the exciting new world we’d gone back and forth on for a minute or two.

At first we were a bit disgusted with ourselves. Were we really these people? Did we care so much about what daddy thinks? Were we really so greedy for power? Were we really so foolish? So weak? So incapable of love? No. That was no way we saw ourselves. We were only human. Greedy maybe. Foolish maybe. But beautiful in our own way. We needed to forgive ourselves and love ourselves. This was the only way. And we were happy for a time. Really happy. At least I believed we were happy.

Until last night, when Shiv Roy once again cuckolded Tom, who is a wheedling idiot anyway, and Connor Roy released his presidential campaign video, which put his father, Logan Roy, in a difficult political position, and Kendall Roy continued to snort coke and be a douche, and Roman Roy leaked secret plans for a corporate takeover of PGN to PGN.

And when our evening was over, I turned to Deb and said, “This is terrible.”

And she said, “What’s terrible? You mean this situation, or this episode, or . . . .”

“The whole thing. The whole thing is terrible. The characters, each and every one of them, is despicable, and their motivation changes from episode to episode, and I don’t care about anything or anyone. The whole thing is terrible.”

“I’ve always thought it was terrible,” said Deb.

“I thought you liked it,” I said.

“I thought you liked it,” she said.

“Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t like it?” I said.

“I didn’t want to be a downer. I thought it made you happy, so I went along with it. I mean, I didn’t hate it.”

Didn’t hate it.

No one’s marriage is solid. We’re all an episode away from separation. No one has the capacity to know anyone else. Each of us is floating in the vacuum of space, each in our own suit.

“You didn’t . . . hate it?” I say. “Deb, have you ever loved me?”

The Aran jumper is a style of jumper (sweater) that takes its name from the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland … The Aran stitches have a multitude of interpretations and symbolic meanings. 1

The room was so small that I could smell Sister G’s breath—that sugary, confectionary smell that, every lunchtime, wafted from the kitchen windows of that small-town convent in south County Mayo.

In the room Sister G. said, “Now, I’m really worried about you two.”

It was 1976, and “you two” were my best friend Pauline and me. At 14 and a half, I was a year-plus younger than all of my convent-school classmates. Now, standing there in her navy-blue uniform, Pauline cocked her chin and said, “Why, Sister? What are you so worried about?”

Sister pushed her hands into the space between us, then wove her fingers together.

“You’re all tied up in knots with each other. There’s … there’s something going on between you two. Something unnatural.”

Then we were dismissed back to class. Once we were out in that tiled corridor, I whispered to my friend: “What does she mean?”

“You know,” Pauline hissed, “You. Know.”

I didn’t know. But whatever I was meant to know, I prayed that it wouldn’t get reported home to our house in the village.

In that house, which sat across the street from Saint John’s Parish Church, I often lay upstairs in my and my sister’s shared room trying to imagine what it would feel like to be cuddled and hugged. I didn’t imagine Pauline’s arms around me. Nor any of the Christian Brothers School boys on the yellow school bus. Nor any of the parish men who drove their tractors past our house or who sat along the bar in our village pub.

Instead, my fantasy cuddler had long hair (a ponytail?) and he whispered my name in a foreign, cultured accent—something south Dublin or Anglo Irish. Or, actually, let’s go for full-on Anglo here. His clothes were something between Beatle, Beatnik and high-culture Irish (A collarless shirt? Yes, please). He was a writer or a poet or a musician who, like me, had read and adored the novelists stashed beneath my bed, two of whom--Edna O’Brien and John McGahern--had had their works banned in Ireland.

The (Aran) trellis stitch reflects the small, dry stone-walled fields created to shelter islanders from the Atlantic’s strong winds. 2

The week after Pauline’s and my tribunal, Sister G and the other Sisters of Mercy launched their blitzkrieg. Without warning, they assigned every girl in our class a new desk and a new desk-mate. Some of us had to sit with girls we didn’t like. Or a few prim town girls had to sit with one of us country kids.

“Why?” Everyone asked between classes.

We shook our heads and shrugged our shoulders. Who knew? Except Pauline and me. We had our suspicions.

These suspicions were confirmed when, during subsequent weeks, we got called up for imagined classroom infractions. One lay teacher said Pauline and I were always laughing at her. Weeks later, when we scored the exact same percentage grade on a proctored French test, another teacher said that “you two” must have been “cogging” (cheating) from each other.

“But Miss, now we sit at opposite ends of the room from each other,” said Pauline, while I just stood there, still wondering how much of this had been reported to my mother.

That year, Ireland was exactly a decade into our free secondary education and busing system. Since 1967, thanks to the O’Malley Education Act, we girls could now get the postprimary (high school) education that had been denied most of our parents whose own families either couldn’t afford the fees or didn’t have an extra bicycle to get their children from the farm to the town for school.

So here we all were in our navy-blue uniforms. And, every 45 minutes, when our lay or religious teachers swept in for the next class period, here we all stood to bless ourselves and pray.

However, if history tells us anything it’s this: It takes much longer than a decade to dismantle a deeply engrained and post-colonial classism—the kind of classism that clearly favored town girls and that forbade us farm kids (I had a good singing voice, so I had actually asked!) from auditioning for even the smallest part in the annual school musical.

In their Aran stitches, the islanders used to depict … many elements of their surroundings, such as landscapes, cliff and roads.3

In the late afternoons, we country girls lined up outside those convent walls, where we paced and waited and gawked up the road to check for that yellow bus. “Magoo,” our grumpy and bespectacled school bus driver, worked double time as a farmer and a driver, but there was always that wild hope that this evening, Magoo might get finished with his cattle and farm chores early.

Afterward, as the Christian Brothers boys yelped and squabbled in the back of the school bus, I counted the three-and-a-half miles and the minutes until I got dropped off in the village.

I say “village” here, but ours was little more than a stripe of tarmacadam road that ran between 14 detached and mismatched buildings, including our two pubs and shops, a post office, the priest’s house and the church.

Three miles to the south sat the real village of Cong, where the houses were actually stuck together, and where tourists went because, in 1952, John Wayne had played the “yank” in the iconic Irish movie, The Quiet Man

Three-and-a-half miles to our north sat our market town with its shops and pubs and

banks, a weekly cattle mart and the Sisters of Mercy and Christian Brothers Schools. The town. The school. The village. By or before my 15th birthday, they had become a trifecta of sufferance.

By my sixteenth birthday, I knew what Sister G’s “unnatural” really meant. But I didn’t know that knowing is not the same as understanding. For example, I knew that, every night, the moon rose behind the clouds or above the yew trees behind the village church. I also knew that, in 1969, Neil Armstrong had walked on that moon. But how could my young brain or heart ever imagine or understand what it felt like to step out of a space rocket?

The Tree of Life stitch is used as a symbol of strong and protective parents, represented by the roots, and healthy children, the branches, overall signifying the unity and harmony with the family.4

Before my tenth birthday we had lived, not in the village, but in a thatch-roof house that sat in a hollow behind the village, on my mother’s ancestral farm. For most or all of their marriage, my father worked double time as a lorry driver and a farmer. So on weekdays, we rarely saw him until about an hour before bedtime, when he arrived home hungry and road-weary. Or, some weeks, there he suddenly was, the man at our Saturday breakfast table.

Once we moved up to the village, we were a house of girls and women. By the summer of 1978, my older sister and my two brothers had already left for work or college. In memory now, I see us girls—my live-in grandmother, my mother, my younger sister and me—as one of those avant garde stage productions in which each actor speaks her lines while facing the walls and away from each other. With few front-door visitors and no household telephone, we rarely or never had an audience.

After our mid-afternoon dinner, we girls were supposed to sweep a floor or mow a lawn or paint a trellis or a gate. Or, when it rained, I baked bread or apple tarts or I sewed something on my grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine. Was it that summer when I converted a set of old drapes into a slipcover for our saggy leather couch?

During all my chores, I mentally transported myself from that house and village to the big university in Galway City. In my Mitty-esque (as in, Walter Mitty) mind, there I stood: dressed so groovy and drinking red wine at the college literary and French clubs.

And there was my long-haired, cuddly man. Naturellement, he spoke fluent French and Yeats and, when he discovered that I did, too, he fell madly in love with me.

The lucky honeycomb stitch is intended to be a wish for good luck and a great catch.5

That July afternoon in 1978, which is when the love thing actually happened, how did I hoodwink my mother into letting me ride my bicycle into town? Needing to buy tampons usually worked--though only once per month. Changing my library books also worked— but depending on the day and the mood.

By now, my reading tastes had turned foreign. We had read Guy de Maupassant at school. I loved Taylor Caldwell, the British-born American novelist. I had just “met”

William Trevor, the Anglo-Irish short story writer and novelist. Pauline had lent me paperbacks of James Herriot’s novels. I devoured the Galway-born author Walter Macken, and I remember lying in my twin bed weeping softly over his book, “Rain on the Wind.” Amid all these, I stayed staunchly loyal to my Edna and my McGahern.

That summer, I had convinced my mother to let me attend a few of the Friday night dances in the town hall—but only when Pauline’s father drove us there and back.

Once I escaped the house, the afternoon bicycle trip to town was just long and free and gleeful enough to set the Mitty-esque mind wild—wild enough to mentally retrofit myself and my long, windblown hair into a femme fatale. And wild and fanciful enough to photoshop that town into a place far grander than it ever was.

Between Healy’s Garage and McAndrew’s barber’s, I dismounted my bike to wheel it down Main Street between the street’s terraced houses and shops. I walked past Miss Dee’s religious goods and her window display of ceramic Blessed Virgins and plastic Irish colleen dolls. Next was Nan Biggins’ drapery with its window-full of summer blouses and packets of high-waist panties and nylon support stockings. Mrs. Crosby’s sported touristy Aran sweaters that were rumored to be discounted seconds from the Gaeltarra knitting factory over in Tourmakeady by the lake.

Half-way down Main stood Mrs. Murphy’s, where the summer mannequins were still in their winter woolies. Some weeks, one was missing a forearm or an entire limb. Or a plastic head was flopped sideways or forward, as if the poor mannequin had just been shot.

Also, if you pinged that drapery door open at the wrong time—as in, while Mrs. Murphy was still on her knees at her midday rosary—she yelled out from her kitchen to just stand there at the counter and wait.

That Thursday, I parked my bike outside Murphy’s and then crossed the street to McCormack’s Shoes, who always had the grooviest summer sandals.

“Hi there!” The twenty-something man called out to me as he closed the stretch of footpath between us. Dark hair. A clean, brand-new Aran sweater in natural, báinín wool. Levi’s jeans.

American. Not British. Not fancy Dublin. Not French. But hey, foreign was foreign. America was Taylor Caldwell.

As we chatted and flirted, my American with the monosyllabic name (Chad? Thad? Todd?) asked: “So, what’s there to do around here?”

Nothing. Nothing unless you count the Wednesday cattle mart. Or the annual town musical and the Saint Patrick’s Day céilí, both of which are chaperoned by the nuns.

On that footpath, I blathered on about our two trout-fishing lakes and our Quiet Man movie village and Ashford Castle, built in the 13th century, and once home to the Guinness family.

“And, of course, there’s the seaside at Westport,” I said, with a swish of the hair, while I already cast and saw us there—he with his Aran sweater tied around his Levi’s waist, and me in my long hair and peasant-styled skirt as we strolled, hand in hand, along Clew Bay.

He asked, “Yeah, but how’s the night life around here?”

“Well, we’ve the dance in the town hall. Every Friday night!”

A smirk. “Is . . . that where you go?”

“Oh, yeah. Every single Friday.”

“Will you be there this Friday, like tomorrow night?”

Tilt the head. Make him wait for your answer. That’s how the Dublin women on TV chat shows do it. “Ye-ees. I will.”

“—Cool! See you there!”

The local folklore states that the pattern one’s family used was so distinct that, if a fisherman happened to die at sea, he could be identified by the sweater he was wearing.6

We south Mayo women excelled at stealth surveillance—at watching the dance-hall door while looking like we were not watching that dance hall door. The first tactic: Beeline it to the Ladies toilets to comb the hair and to check out the competition. Next tactic: After the toilets, snag a good, high-visibility spot along that wooden bench on the left-hand side of the hall. Third tactic: Whether it was rock or pop or old-people’s country, jig along and pretend to be enjoying the band and not watching for a man in a brand-new, Aran sweater, so shiny clean that he’d be dead easy to spot or identify.

That July Friday, the town pubs were still open and serving, so not many men came through that door—or none you’d ever want to be seen with. Some girls were dancing with each other, their faces dappled in the dance hall’s colored lights.

11:30. Pub closing time. Any minute now.

11:45. The men were starting to dribble in. By midnight, more men pushed and jostled through, then stood along the right-hand side, just like in Trevor’s “Ballroom of Romance.” Women on the left. Men on the right. In between us stretched that dance-floor wonderland.

I needed to pee. But if I returned to those bathrooms, into that fog of hair lacquer, wouldn’t my American think that I’d stood him up?

The men were beginning to cross that floor. From my bench, maybe I should make eye contact with one and, if asked, accept a dance from a local. Then, when my American finally arrived, he would have to wait. Or he’d have to cross the floor to claim me. Then, we would sneak out that dance hall door, hand in hand, like illicit lovers in the Résistance.

Outside, I would lead him downtown to a shop doorway—not Miss Dee’s with her peering statues, and not Mrs. Murphy’s, with her decapitated mannequins. We needed someplace romantic and discreet where he could wrap his arms around me and where I could lay my cheek against that Aran sweater and where we could get all tied up in knots with each other.

Then, after just one kiss, he would declare that, to heck with the rest of his tourist’s driving tour through Ireland. He would just stay here, in south Mayo, with me.

The band played on. The last of the older men staggered in. The dance floor was crowded with couples sweating and jiving; a head on a shoulder; a hand under a blouse.

Any minute now, I will look up to see him standing right here.

The music stopped. The band unplugged. The hall lights went up, harsh and florescent against those dance-hall walls with their acne of black mildew.

When a (knitting) mistake is not too far away (say, a few stitches or rows back), one option is to unknit back to the problem. You don’t have to take your knitting off the needles, or worry about your knitting unraveling.7

Eight months later, in the spring of my final school year, Sister D summoned me, alone,

to the career guidance room. Sister D did double duty as an Irish language and career guidance teacher.

She had also taught us religion.

A year earlier, I had reduced this nun to tears when I raised my hand to interrupt and argue against her recitation about the one, true, apostolic church.

Based on her hypothesis (I said), we Catholics were supposed to be the lifelong, 10-toone favorite in every horse race (my father loved the thoroughbred races).

“And sure, that’s logistically impossible, Sister,” I added, watching the tears fill and her bottom lip quiver. “Sure, there’d have to be loads of days when all the others, the Jews, the protestants, the Muslims, et al, would, at minimum, become the short-odds bet or even the high-stakes favorite? Sure, how can we Catholics always be the one to race past that winning post, like into Heaven?”

Now, Sister inquired about my plans for college and life. I said I was thinking about English and French (and drinking wine) at the big university in Galway. Pauline was going there, too. Or, actually, I had read about this University of Limerick degree course on international marketing. International marketing. In that room I said it so grandly, reveling in her puzzled, clueless expression.

At last Sister said, “Whaa-at? Oh, God no. Not for a girl like you.”

Then, she presented the real choices and paperwork: nursing, a secretarial course and a small, teacher-education college in Dublin. The college was run by the Sisters of Mercy, and, just to snag a bilingual (Irish and English) entrance interview, you needed high grades and a good singing voice. Plus, this was where my mother wanted me to go, and getting in there would make the school look good.

That afternoon, when Sister D pushed the teacher-ed application into my hand, my 16-year-old heart knew that an issue had been decided. No, not decided. Settled.

If the knitting mistake was made a long time ago, and you need to correct the mistake, you will have no other option but to rip out your knitting to that place.8

Three years on, I graduated into high-unemployment Ireland (some of our rural areas saw a 20% unemployment rate) to eventually land a job in a tiny midlands village that sat about 40 miles south, or on the lee side, of the then-Northern Irish border.

One year, I had forty-two first and second grade children jammed into my classroom with its shiny green blackboards and rows of old, broken desks.

In an island nation, some of my little students had never seen the ocean. We had no special education services, and, when the winter winds blew underneath those windows, I wore both a lambswool and a hand-knit sweater.

By now, all my grandiose, Mitty-esque daydreams had crashed and stalled. By now, in a school with no staff bathroom, the only thing I excelled at was holding my pee.

Pauline and I drifted apart. Decades later, it was rumored that Sister G, our “something unnatural” accuser, had quit the nunnery and someone local claimed to have spotted her in sunny Florida.

One December afternoon in 1986, I joined one of the very long queues in the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) processing room at JFK Airport, New York. Most of us

in those queues were twenty- or thirty-something Irish. Most of us had country accents. I had been warned about the New York winter, so I stood there in one of my hand-knit wool sweaters. In the broiling heat of that INS room, the sweater made the sweat trickle down between my breasts.

The heat, the fear, the slow-moving queues—they all felt inevitable, as if leaving our own country was the most natural thing in the world.

1 Wikipedia

2 -6 10 Aran Stitches You Need to Know. Tara Irish Clothing Blog

7-8 How to Fix Knitting Mistakes: Three Stress Free Solutions

*The name is changed to protect the subject’s privacy.

Susannah North Martin: “A Martyr of Superstition”

juliet h . mofford

For the famous and influential cleric Cotton Mather, Susannah North Martin was “one of the most impudent, scurrilous, wicked creatures in the world.”

Nearly everyone in Colonial New England believed in witches and feared the mischief and mayhem caused by these agents of the devil. Over 200 men, women and children in Massachusetts Bay Colony were accused of the capital crime of witchcraft in 1692. This is Goody Martin’s story.

Born in Buckinghamshire, England, Susannah North was eighteen when she immigrated to Massachusetts with her family, settling in Salisbury. In 1646, she married George Martin, a widower and blacksmith, who was also an original founder of Amesbury. They eventually had nine children.

Known for her “salty tongue,” Susannah Martin was a “scold,” frequently involved in disputes with her neighbors and “reviling them with foul words.” She was no stranger to court and twice, in 1661 and 1669, had been accused of witchcraft.

William Sargent, Jr., and Thomas Sargent spread the rumor that Goody Martin was a witch. They also claimed that before marriage, she had given birth to a bastard and strangled it.

George Martin twice sued William Sargent Jr. for slander for calling his wife a witch and claiming one of their sons illegitimate. The court ruled in Martin’s favor, holding Sargent liable for slander in accusing Susannah of fornication and infanticide. A higher court dismissed the witchcraft charge but several months later, Susannah was back in court for calling one neighbor a liar and thief.

William Brown of Salisbury accused Susannah Martin’s specter (or spirit) of tormenting his wife, Elizabeth. He claimed she’d assumed bird-form “to peck Elizabeth’s legs and prick her with the motion of her wings.” These “bird spirits delivered prickling pains like nails and pins, causing Goody Brown to cry out like a woman in travail, screaming, ‘Witch, you shan’t choke me!’”

“Pious and prudent” Elizabeth Brown, later testified against Susannah Martin, who reappeared as she was milking the family cow. “For defaming my name at court,” Goody Martin supposedly threatened, “I will make you the miserablest creature in the world!”

Goodwife Brown soon “fell into a strange distemper and became horrible frantic and incapable of Reasonable Action.” Doctors declared her ailments “supernatural,” claiming “some evil person bewitched Goody Brown.”

Bernard Peach, another Amesbury resident, said he was in bed when he “heard a scrabbling at the window and looked up to see Susannah Martin climbing in. She jumped down on the floor and took hold of my feet, drawing my body into a hoop. She then lay

upon me an hour or two, during which time I could neither stir nor speak. When loosened, I took hold of her hand and brought it up to my mouth and bit three of Goody Martin’s fingers to the breaking of bones, causing her to go out of my chamber, down the stairs and out the door . . . . ” When he ran after her she was nowhere to be seen, though he saw a drop of blood by the door and more blood on the snow. No footprints were evident, which was said to prove she’d flown home.

Goody Martin’s court appearances included six lawsuits contesting her father’s will. After his death, she and her sister had expected to divide his inheritance, only to learn his earlier will had been replaced by another favoring their stepmother.

George Martin died in 1686 leaving Susannah impoverished, which further worked against her. According to the Reverend Cotton Mather, “The Devil loves to fish in troubled waters!”

Long the focus of gossip and grievance, Widow Martin was an easy target for the Salem Witch Hunt. One of the first to be arrested from the Merrimack Valley, she was taken into custody “for certain detestable arts called witchcrafts and sorceries wickedly and feloniously practiced . . . . ”

As soon as Martin was ushered into court, the “afflicted girls” were “tortured, wasted, and tormented.” Several observed Goody Martin’s specter upon the beam above. The accusers’ fits caused the prisoner to laugh out loud and mock the proceedings with contempt.

“What! Do you laugh at it?” one shocked magistrate inquired.

“Well I may at such folly,” Susannah Martin replied.

“Is this folly? The hurt of these persons?”

“I never hurt man, woman or child.”

“She hath hurt me a great many times and pulls me down!” cried one girl, causing the accused to laugh again.

“What ails these people? Do you not think they are bewitched?” one judge asked.

“No, I do not think they are bewitched.”

“Tell me your thoughts about them,” coaxed the magistrate.

“My thoughts are my own, when they are in, but when they are out, they are another’s.”

“How come your appearance hurts them?”

“How do I know? They may lie for aught I know.”

“Are you not willing to tell the truth?”

“I dare not tell a lie if it would save my life!”

“Have you not compassion for these afflicted?”

“No, I have none.”

“Do you not see how God evidently discovers you?”

“No, not a bit.”

“All the congregation here think so.”

“Let them think what they will.”

Although Susannah Martin proclaimed innocence throughout her trial, judges and jury amassed enough evidence to convict. Nine of her accusers even traveled to Salem to describe damages done them by Goody Martin that included drowning their oxen to “flinging cats through windows to gnaw at people’s throats.” These men welcomed the

opportunity to settle old scores and their desire for revenge became court testimony.

Back in 1669, James Allen’s thirteen animals drowned in the Merrimack River off Plum Island and washed up on Salisbury Beach. Goodman Allen had refused to cart wooden staves for Susannah Martin explaining his oxen were too tired.

“Then your animals will never do you more service!” Goody Martin told him.

“Do you threaten me, you old witch? I’ll throw you in the brook!” However, when he went after her, she flew away. Allen continued on his way, but his oxen were too weary to pull the load. He led them to the common pasture at Salisbury Beach to rest but when he returned two days later, they had vanished. He tracked the animals to Plum Island but when he approached them, they stampeded into the river and drowned. Allen felt sure Susannah Martin’s malevolence caused this loss of his livestock.

Jarvis Ring claimed Goody Martin had attacked him in Salisbury, seven or eight years before. She “came upon me in bed and did sorely afflict by laying upon me so I could neither move nor speak.” He’d clearly seen Goody Martin’s shape at his bedside. She “took his finger in her mouth and bit down with force, then came and lay upon him awhile.” The print of her bite could still be seen on one finger.

Joseph Ring, testified “meeting up with hideous shaped creatures,” and being “frighted out of my wits.” He was “taken to unknown places and to witch covens with dancing and feasting. The witches struck me dumb, so I could not tell anyone about their secret meetings.” They’d brought him a book to sign, but he refused to become a servant of the devil. Ring said he spotted Goody Martin at these “merry meetings and April last, she did stand by my bed and pinch me.”

John Kimball believed Susannah Martin’s sorcery killed his livestock twenty-three years before. He’d purchased land from George Martin that he was to pay for in cash or goods. When the Martins came to collect, Kimball offered them the choice of three cows and other cattle, excepting two cows he was not free to part with. Goodman Martin was satisfied but not his wife who said, “The cows will never do you anymore good (and so it came to pass), because the next April that stout, lusty cow lay with her head to her side, stark dead. And in a little while another cow died, and then an ox and other cattle.”

Goodman Kimball explained he’d agreed to purchase a puppy from the Martin’s litter, but then bought one elsewhere.

“Alas, I’ll give you puppies enough!” Goody Martin told him. And “. . . one night on my way through the woods, there appeared a black cloud . . . that made me tumble and put me in danger. Then came a little thing like a puppy . . . that shot between my legs forwards and backwards. . . Being free from fear I used all possible endeavors to cut it with my axe but could not hurt it. A little further, there did appear a black puppy somewhat bigger, which came at me with violence. It flew at my belly, then at my throat . . . I thought my life was going out and called upon God . . . . “

Sarah Atkinson told the court that “One stormy day eighteen years hence, Susannah Martin walked from Amesbury to visit her in Newbury . . . the roads were deep in mud, not fit for any person to travel . . . However, Goody Martin arrived “her skirts and the soles of her shoes not even wet. I bid the children make way for her to come to the fire to dry herself, for I would be wet up to my knees had I come so far on foot. Yet Susannah Martin was as dry as I was, so I concluded her to be a witch.”

Robert Downer of Salisbury identified Martin as the she-devil who flew in though his

window. He”d witnessed against her when she was accused of witchcraft years before and still believed her to be a witch. Goody Martin told him back then that “a she-devil would fetch him away and the next night, as he lay in bed, there came at his window the likeness of a cat that took hold of his throat and lay had upon him a considerable while and was like to throttle him. When he cried out ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost,’ she leaped to the floor and disappeared out the window.”

Amesbury poet John Greenleaf Whittier, a direct descendant of Susannah Martin, remembered his ancestor with a long poem, “The Witch’s Daughter.” Here are several excerpts:

The seasons scarce had gone their round, Since curious thousands thronged to see Her mother at the gallows-tree . . .

And still o’er many a neighboring door  She saw the horseshoe’s curved charm,  To guard against her mother’s harm; That mother, poor, and sick, and lame,  Who daily, by the old arm-chair,  Folded her withered hands in prayer . . .  Who turned, in Salem’s dreary jail,  Her worn old Bible o’er and o’er,  When her dim eyes could read no more . . .

Let Goody Martin rest in peace;  I never knew her harm a fly,  And witch or not, God knows—not I . . .

Susannah Martin was condemned to hang, even though she quoted Bible passages, something witches supposedly could not do. The seventy-year-old went to the gallows at Proctor’s Ledge in Salem, insisting she’d “led a most virtuous and holy life.”

This victim of prejudice, ignorance, and fear is honored by a memorial marker at the end of North Martin Road in Amesbury that notes: “Here stood the house of Susanna Martin. An honest, hardworking Christian woman accused of being a witch, tried, and executed at Salem, July 19, 1692. A Martyr of Superstition.” As this was later moved from its original location, “Here Stood” is inaccurate.

The Salem Witch Hunt holds a powerful message for our own time. The 1692 trials provide case studies in victimization as well as examples of the tragic results of prejudice and persecution when gossip and fear triumph over reason. At the 1992 dedication of the memorial honoring Salem’s victims, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, “We still have our Salems . . . One word characterizes what happened here three hundred years ago, and that word is fanaticism.”

SECTION VII

The Kansas Emigrants

john greenleaf whittier

We cross the prairie as of old The pilgrims crossed the sea, To make the West, as they the East, The homestead of the free!

We go to rear a wall of men On Freedom’s southern line, And plant beside the cotton-tree The rugged Northern pine!

We’re flowing from our native hills As our free rivers flow; The blessing of our Mother-land Is on us as we go.

We go to plant her common schools, On distant prairie swells, And give the Sabbaths of the wild The music of her bells.

Upbearing, like the Ark of old, The Bible in our van, We go to test the truth of God Against the fraud of man.

No pause, nor rest, save where the streams That feed the Kansas run, Save where our Pilgrim gonfalon Shall flout the setting sun!

We’ll tread the prairie as of old Our fathers sailed the sea, And make the West, as they the East, The homestead of the free!

About 2000 anti-slavery emigrants from Massachusetts settled in the Kansas Territory and were able to vote to help make Kansas “a free state” when it joined the Union in 1861. This poem was issued as a broadside on card stock in 1854 and sung to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” according to the University of Kansas Spencer Research Library Archival Collections.

Medicine Hat, Alberta

tom sexton

During the Great Depression, word spread that Medicine Hat was a welcoming place for people walking the railroad tracks, for families whose lives had blown away.

They made pottery there, and the owners of the factory allowed people to sleep in the kilns while they were cooling, but they had to be out of the kilns by dawn.

It was a small kindness if you think about it: the kilns were empty, people needed sleep. Rudyard Kipling, who once paid a visit to Medicine Hat, would have hissed Socialism

Small children, savoring the very last morsel of warmth in the morning, lingered at the door.

Paul Muldoon Day in Lawrence

cornelia veenendaal

In Moy, he tells us, some of his poems  had their origin, when he was young:  a Sunday drive with his family  round the new roundabout in Ballygawley;

or a pack of veteran beagles, pronounced  bagels, chase across fields after an old hare  that outran them and ended,“louche and lackadaisical” near the boy he was and his bicycle.

In Princeton, now, restoring a house  on the Raritan Canal, he looks through a hole  cut for a dimmer switch in an old plaster wall,  and hears shovels digging, two hundred years back;

he smells the flood plain, sees Irish laborers  resting, and watches one man while he washes  out of horse droppings a few grains of wheat  to make a small loaf of bread.

All this Paul Muldoon put together, fringed with a refrain like the long strands of horsehair that strengthened the plaster in the old wall of his house.

I Give to You What I Did Not Have

A room of your own for those days That bark and bark until you crumble; A bed of your own to stretch your legs and Arms as wide as your mind can dream; A beach trip to feel salty breeze on Your face and freedom on your tongue; A trip to Greylock’s white whale, With me guiding you down the slopes So you will never know abandonment.

It’s this giving to you what I did not have So I no longer taste the bitterness of childhood.

It’s this giving to you what I did not have So I can leave behind the ghosts of hunger and longing, the anxiety of otherness. This is the way to set this orphan free, Give him wings and let him fly. Here, Chanda & Rithy, take these and these and these.

from Précieux-Sang

steven riel

(Based on events at Precious Blood Church in Holyoke and St. Joseph’s Church in Worcester, Massachusetts)

1. LAST DAY

All I can do is to circle this chain-link fence  that bars me from the church, its ribs exposed. I hate the wrecking ball’s smudged indifference.  Today, it hangs still, as if its crane dozed off   partway through the job, hardhats leaving this huge sanctuary lanced open, with oak dross heaped on the grass. Six Stations of the Cross  on the far wall gape at tenements, disbelieving their story’s south side pelted the Pieta; ô Jésus tombe pour la quatrième fois

Shutter button set, I pace this parish block  as if I watched surgery suspended in a dream,  then, insomniac, traced along the seam  again and again to staunch and salve the shock.  The doors of the crimson-brick rectory are locked;  even its second-floor windows have bars. I gawk  at its turret’s tip: a sleek, smooth-edged metal screw— a heavenward gesture, this spiraling skewer?  Or a twisted lightning rod that recently drew  only half-hearted attention to the ever fewer . . .

The priests have fled. Lace curtains veil  third-floor windows; some nuns remain  up in what’s become an outpost. In planters on the rail  of their dark-screened, third-floor porch’s frame,  they coax nasturtium, magenta phlox.  Suddenly shepherds, they’ve two distinct flocks:  mornings, they marshal meetings en espagnol;  then walk prescriptions up to frail mémères, those vinegar widows they try to console,  advising them to seek solace in prayer.

Two Poems from All the Peaches & Mangoes I Would Sell for You

PC Compatible?

HTML your love is JavaScript coded

I’ll need a crypt of crunching code to program any real meaning

Seeing in shades of 0’s and 1’s, never twoned in with your heart’s four chambers, three of which do not belong to me

You open Windows to refresh our Microsoft wordings, hoping your newly installed virus lies crash this new tab—which you’re paying for

My Chrome heart can’t download anymore shame

And an Apple a day doesn’t keep my worries away

I have no real way of Delling with your Alien language

Growing Rosetta Stonefaced annoyed at your insistent Nike advertisements saying you just had to do it

You are the king of this, so you’ll always have it your way

That’s why you never internet explore my endless emotional filings

I don’t want to program my python poison to paint my point across

So please, please

Just print me a copy of the fax you keep hidden in your heart’s cache

Gamerboy

You play with my heart X’s and O’s

Tic Tac Toe

Tic is for the ticking time seconds you stole from me

Sweetest thief I had come to know

Tac is how you attached yourself on everything I had come to know

Your lingering scent dancing on the wind of a busy street causes my heart to ache and my eyes to wander

Trees of nature doing their best to outshine the shy hazel flecks in your luring guise—

Filling my lungs with air while always leaving me breathless

Sulci of my brain rewired and disfigured to the familiar shape of your name

And oh, how you made my eyes spin off their axes

Arms interwoven, lips locked, noses colliding

Steady melody we created; one of one, like no other

So you see, in this game of X’s and O’s

I crossed my heart and hoped to love

And there you Orrived.

Two Poems

michael casey

In Botswana, Wayne shoots the elephant

Wayne shoots the elephant

Wayne shoots the elephant

the hunter guide himself was frustrated because while Wayne wasn’t missing the elephant and the beast was clearly hurting the kill spot did not seem to be on Wayne’s target frame line of sight view finder

sniperscope should’ve practiced shooting more well aiming anyway with a creature easy to get close to (Wayne, may I suggest a cow?) Wayne shoots the elephant that is right the fourth time and the poor creature still there wherewith the guide chuckles a little and then the guide finishes it off says you really hurt him bad, Wayne

the Kong’s bug out for Jack Neary

now lost to all film archivists the giant spider scene in the movie King Kong edited out pre theater release the reason the preview audiences left the theater talking not about the giant ape but rather about the poor sailors from the working class trapped in a web to be et their horrific deaths deaths too earthy too compelling too vicious for the producers to allow (you have to be aware of unwanted irony, Coop) so how did the end turn out up there it was almost in the clouds

SECTION VIII

Coffee Shop Musings #8

bob hodge

The Boys Club

Imust have been around eight, nine, or ten when I first started going to the Lowell Boys Club on Dutton Street near Haffner’s gas station with the kicking mule logo sign. My older brothers would walk with me across the North Common by St Pat’s and the Macheras gas station along the Western Canal and also past the Whistler House and the Giant Store. It was about a ten-minute walk, and we were hardly ever in any hurry.

As kids, the club seemed like a large building to us, in reality it was tiny and most likely converted from some other use. On the first floor were a bunch of pool and ping pong tables and upstairs was the gym, which had a board track above it.

Director Bill Lapointe was a beloved character around Lowell for all the time he devoted to the sometimes-wayward little street urchins of Lowell.

He was involved in the Acre Youth Organization and its baseball league and trained boxers for the Golden Gloves and Silver Mittens. He was everywhere there were kids and sports.

One time I was at the club with my brothers, and we were talking to Bill, and he says “Bobby, why you always got your hands in your pockets? What are you playing pocket pool?”

My brothers laughed, I didn’t get the joke until they explained it to me, and I nearly started crying. “Relax knucklehead, he was just joking with you.”

I spent a lot of time there over the next few years with all my friends from the hood. We played basketball and kickball and every other kind of ball game, and we practiced for the President’s physical fitness test which included the rope climb, a difficult task for me not only because of my puny arms but also the higher I got I would get vertigo and be afraid to go to the top.

Of course, my older brothers were better at everything than I was, but I kept showing up. I mean, what else was I gonna do?

The Haffner’s gas station attendants didn’t like us cutting through on our way to the club and would yell at us, so we started pulling little pranks on them, messing with their air hose and jumping on the bell ringer hose thing that lets them know when a car has arrived for gas.

Knew a kid once committed murder, very scary dude, until someone dropped a dime on him. One day he held another kid by the ankles over the railing of a small bridge over that Western Canal and I thought for sure he was gonna drop him. Somehow, we talked him out of it.

A few times we saw the chalk lines of murder victims drawn on the ground, one time right outside our house on Butterfield.

On a Saturday morning my dad sipping his coffee and reading his paper talking to John in the Quality Donut shop across Butterfield.

Bowling candlepin on Gorham Street just up from Nicky’s Bar where Kerouac drank. I bowled with a league created by the Boys Club in a place, may have been called the Brentwood Lanes. At home my brothers and I had a whole bunch of bowling trophies, a waste of space. Photos on my bedroom wall of all my baseball heroes soon to be replaced by my running idols.

8 Butterfield, the porches, us up on the third floor, and moms and dads would call down to their kids or the neighbors, and the laundry hung out there to dry even in the dead of winter when it froze out there. I made a bow and arrow with some sticks and string and shot them from the porch.

My Dad caught me and told me to stop but I didn’t, and he spanked me which was the only time I remember him doing that.

It was a cold apartment we were in with just the gas heat from the stove in the middle of the kitchen so the bedroom would be very cold, and our parents piled every blanket and even our winter coats on top of them to keep us warm.

It all comes back sometimes, getting older by the minute.

Life’s Work

Drifting and a grifting his way along, not really out to hurt nobody I mean after all they come in here expecting to get something for nothing and I make sure they get nothing but disappointed.

Hey, follow me down rare dirt lanes and trails, follow my whimsy, just for today cause tomorrow never knows. Since I did my share of working but I wouldn’t have if I didn’t have to, and baby I never loved you but it’s all over now.

On a fixed income as “they” say, whoever the hell “they” are, I won’t be found here, right in front of your eyeballs, all but invisible. Routines now just as before, but not like before as I do what I want, no need to do anything at all or follow a schedule.

Just Being

For example, today I wrote these lines …………. And I rocked in a chair by the window in the local library and I read this tome about Russia and Europe, hardly understood a thing all murders and mayhem holy jayz-us.

Walked and jogged for an hour, laps around the park, then lay down on park bench, took a little nap, eavesdropped on people’s conversations juicy gossips.

Went through my mail, a banner hall of rejection notices for my different writings, ready for volume two of my rejected scrapbook, ya, only the best.

Ain’t Got Nuthin’ (Writer’s Cramp Covid)

jerry bisantz

Iain’t got nuthin’!” Forget the double negative, because the truth is the truth . . . that scary answer to that most frightening of all questions: “Whatcha working on now?”” Can’t a goddamn playwright get some peace in this world? “Ain’t got nuthin’,” because nuthin is going on up here. Here where once upon a time voices, actual voices talked to me while I drove my car, woke me up from deep sleeps; a pen set by my bed to jot down any new plotline or crazy assed new character that leaked out of that special part of my brain that doesn’t . . . seem to . . . work anymore!

So, I take a little drink. What will it be tonight? Gin and tonic? Sure, a gin high is great, but the headache, holy crap, what about the headache, and face it, buddy, you were never so good at this writing thing that you could actually quit your day job, so you have to get up tomorrow morning and WORK.

(mockingly) “Hey! Whatcha working on?” What am I working on? I’ll tell you what I am working on… I am working on my third Guinness, that’s what I am working on, and when it’s finished, I am going to work on my fourth Guinness, that’s what I am working on.

And still that vague feeling; it creeps in while you shower, while you drive your car, it creeps in while you’re watching a ball game, it creeps in when you see a play written by a friend, a colleague, a rival, an ENEMY, someone who actually has FRESH ideas, still has that beautiful, precarious MUSE thing going on, and you think back to a time when YOU were the one with the fresh ideas. YOU were the newly published BIG DEAL playwright seeing actors on stage speaking your words, YOUR words . . . watching the audience lean forward to hear every pearl that floated off your typewriting fingers. But now, you ain’ t being toasted, man, because you are toast! A “has been,” a “what have you written lately?” An “almost,” a “shoulda,” a “never has been.”

So, you drink; you drink, or you watch the Sox, you do other theater stuff because it fills time, it fills time, man, and you justify it because you say, to yourself “hey, that was good work,” and a lot of it IS very good work . . . get some TV commercial or some short job, an acting gig, maybe direct a few shows, produce a few shows, listen to OTHER PEOPLE’s words, but all the time you are saying to yourself, no, you are beating yourself to death with that “writer’s” thing, that goddamn “writer’s” thing.

Because you are a playwright and you are not writing plays! You used to be a writer, you USED TO BE a writer, and that “used to be” kicks your ass and lurks in the back of your mind every day.

You wonder why Hemingway off’d himself? Wonder why Van Gogh went insane? Because for some of us there’s a window. It varies in length of years, but it’s there! A window, and when it’s open it’s beautiful, it’s the most exciting, invigorating thing in the world to behold; you glide on the wings of creativity. Every person you meet is a story, every location a possibility.

But when it’s gone . . . when it is GONE it’s like someone locked the door and threw away the key. The goddamn key. How can I find that key again? A story, my kingdom for a story, and make sure it has four characters or less and takes place in the same location for a single set or nobody will produce it, but that’s a story for another day, because you still… can’t… find…a story.

Yep. A story. And they are right under your goddamn nose. They happen every day. Every day… but numb nuts here can’t put it in print.

Where’s that Mojo? (pause) Where did it go? Pfft! (snap fingers) it’s gone.

Was Neil Simon an alien? And don’t even talk to me about Stephen King! How the hell did they write so much??????

I need a drink.

And the Red Sox lose again.

Submarine Girl

jason o ’ toole

Theatrical backdrop provided by wall of graffitied boxcars. Our player sits sniffing and sobbing on her cold curb.

Parka hood drawn tight, concealing her aspect: Fake fur periscope  tracking my movements.

The director should find no culpability in my indifference to her weeping, louder behind each step away from her. She has a warm coat.

Her sturdy duck boots appear waterproof, and if they are not, perhaps she should move her feet  out of that puddle.

Cold Car

thomas wylie

dark gray 1958 Oldsmobile four-door dual exhaust soft cloth seats new car smell red lipstick-stained butts under the front seat with newspaper rolled half-pint, exposed driver’s window open taste of cigarette smoke with rush of cold air onto a backseat face of frozen  disgrace, sunken and staring with mirrored  eyes of hate

Nothing.

Empty sky   after the rain stops,   lungs drop, breathing   stops. There’s a still moment  when zero is nothing   and everything.   Infinite nothingness.   A never-ending circle   that forever loops   itself in a loop of itself.

I’m sure I still see you   sometimes. Every silhouette   yours. Every face your face.   Infinite circles of you   repeat. Every face   loops into your face,   every silhouette yours,   not looking back at me,   forever loops, negative space,   shadow after shadow after shadow,   a never-ending circle   that forever loops   itself with itself.

I’ll look for you there   in that nothing.

Dusk in the City

jacquelyn malone

Overhead a jet’s red scar broadens. The park thins out. The City Hall clock tells time an hour late. A man, cigarette smoke taking its time around his mouth, leans against an alley wall. A teenaged girl hurries past. Cop cars circle block by block. Near a darkened store, a shadow groups and grows. The sky stages a purple exit. A weathervane turns. The old lady who leaves her lights on all night stands at the screen door calling the dog inside.

Proofs

judith dickerman - nelson

One step forward moves a body away from the past that is mere seconds behind.

It’s all a blur.

Moments line up like pencil dots placed on a page that become the distance between point A and B.

Mathematical truths reveal corners in a room, and I see geometry everywhere: rectangular doorframes, square windows, the circular moon.

Two right angles side by side equal a straight line, and in tenth grade, some of this mattered. There were proofs to write and mysteries to decipher from a language unlike the ABCs.

Perhaps there are absolutes hidden beneath a thousand flat surfaces, a sense of certainty gleaned in correct answers, stars across the page.

SECTION IX

Carlton Fisk of the Boston Red Sox urging his long fly ball into home run territory in the 1975 World Series, Game Six, against the Cincinnati Reds. AP Photo/Harry Cabluck

Baseball Revival, October 1975

chaz scoggins

Sometimes, after the passage of nearly half a century, I have doubts I was really there in person and I’m only imagining I had witnessed one of the greatest (a grossly overused word I never use lightly) sporting events of all time. But then I root through a cluttered desk drawer and look at my copy of Memorable Events: 100 Years of The Sun 1878-1978, leaf through the collection of 100 front pages published by The Lowell Sun during those years, and there it is: the lead story on October 22, 1975, under my byline. Newspapers are the first draft of history, which means the events they chronicle lack the perspective that only comes with the passage of time. So nowhere in my account—or stories written by anybody else that night—about Game Six of the 1975 World Series and all its incredible drama is there the hint of a suggestion that those 241 minutes saved baseball from the same irrelevance that had awaited erstwhile immensely popular spectator sports like boxing, tennis, thoroughbred racing, harness and dog racing, and bicycle racing. But it did.

By the middle of the 1970s football was dwarfing all the other major sports when it came to fan interest. The advent of television had all but killed minor-league baseball in the years following World War II, and the major leagues were stagnating. Teams from New York and Los Angeles were dominating both leagues, playing in 18 consecutive World Series from 1949-66, and fan interest in other American cities was waning. Average attendance fluctuated between 13,000 and 15,000 fans most summers, leaving ballparks more than half empty most days and nights. Expansion from 16 to 24 teams to woo new fans during the 1960s didn’t alter those figures.

Even the Red Sox weren’t immune. Owner Tom Yawkey was seriously exploring moving the team out of Boston during the spring of 1967 because attendance was so low. The “Impossible Dream” season saved and resurrected that franchise, but the Red Sox were an aberration on the moribund major-league scene.

In 1969 the mound was lowered in hopes of generating more offense, and in 1973 the American League adopted the designated hitter—offending many baseball purists—while the National League continued to play the Grand Old Game the old-fashioned way. New cookie-cutter stadiums with artificial turf designed for baseball and football were being built but lacked the charm of old ballparks. Nothing seemed to help.

And then, unpredictably, the 1975 World Series—and especially Game Six—between Cincinnati and Boston, the two cities most synonymous with the creation of professional baseball a century earlier, recaptured the passion of fans across the nation and made baseball relevant again.

On paper the World Series looked like a mismatch before the first game. The Reds had

averaged 100 victories a year from 1972-75, posting a 108-54 ledger and winning their division by a whopping 20 games in 1975 and then outscoring the Pittsburgh Pirates 19-7 while sweeping the NL Championship Series in three straight games. The upstart Red Sox, who ousted the three-time defending World Series champion Oakland A’s in three straight to win the AL pennant, had not been in the World Series since 1967. Few gave the Red Sox, who hadn’t won a World Series since 1918, much of a chance, and those slim chances dimmed even further after watching the Reds put on a dazzling show of raw power during batting practice at Fenway before Game One.

“Now here comes the Big Red Machine,” Red Sox right fielder Dwight Evans recalled. “It was just a matter of how many games it would take them to beat us.”

Luis Tiant stunned the baseball world by shutting out the mighty Reds 6-0 in the first game and then beat them again, 5-4, in Cincinnati with a gutsy 163-pitch complete game. But the Reds led the Series 3-2 and were looking to wrap it up when it returned to Boston. Rain postponed Game Six for three days. It would be well worth the wait.

The delay enabled Tiant to start for the third time in six games. But this time the 35-year-old Red Sox ace wasn’t anywhere close to his best. The Reds were ahead 6-3 in the bottom of the eighth and only four outs away from winning a World Series that had featured some dramatic and controversial moments but had yet to distinguish itself from dozens of previous Fall Classics. All that was about to change.

When Fred Lynn and Rico Petrocelli reached base to start the eighth, the SRO crowd of 35,205 at Fenway stirred and dared to feel a glimmer of hope. Their spirits sagged when Cincinnati manager Sparky Anderson went to the bullpen for Rawly Eastwick, who had led the NL with 22 saves during the regular season and won two of the Reds’ victories in the Series and saved the third. Eastwick quickly retired Evans and Rick Burleson, and pitcher Roger Moret, who had relieved Tiant, was scheduled to bat next.

While Burleson was batting, Boston manager Darrell Johnson told Bernie Carbo, who had hit a pinch homer earlier in the Series but had slumped during the second half of the regular season by hitting just .224 with one homer and eight RBI in 98 at-bats after the All-Star break, to get on deck to bat for Moret.

Carbo had begun his career with the Big Red Machine and played with most of its stars with whom he had remained friendly. He was very familiar with the way the Reds played the game.

“I’m standing in the on-deck circle, and I don’t even swing the bat to get loose because I know there’s no way I’m hitting,” Carbo remembered. “I know as soon as it’s my turn, Sparky is going to bring in the lefty, Will McEnaney, and then (Juan) Beniquez is going to hit for me. Sparky always did things by the book. If he lost, he was going to lose by the book.

“So now it’s my turn to bat, and I’m still standing in the on-deck circle, looking into the Cincinnati dugout, waiting for Sparky to come out. The ump says: “Carbo, get in here!” Now I’m in the batter’s box, and I’m still waiting for Sparky to come out. I turned to Johnny Bench, and I said: ‘What’s he’s waiting for? Why isn’t he coming out?’ But he didn’t, and now, for the first time, I’m thinking I’d better get prepared to hit.”

One of baseball’s time-worn axioms is that if you’re patient enough the pitcher will give you one good ball to hit in every at-bat, and you’d better not miss it. Eastwick’s first pitch was an eminently hittable fastball, but Carbo wasn’t ready for it and took it for a strike. The

next two pitches were balls, and then Eastwick threw another meatball that Carbo swung at and missed, Strike Two. The next offering was a pitcher’s pitch, a fastball on the outside corner that Carbo took an ugly swing at and barely got enough wood on the ball to foul it off and stay alive at the plate. Eastwick went to his slider, another tough pitch on the inside corner, and again Carbo pounded it into the ground, foul.

“That might have been the worst swing in the history of baseball,” Carlton Fisk teased Carbo afterward.

Carbo was both rusty and overmatched, and he knew it. Meanwhile, up in the press box, the votes for the World Series MVP had been collected and were being tabulated with Eastwick the winner.

Eastwick tried to put Carbo away with one more fastball and end the Red Sox threat. It was one fastball too many, and it was thigh high.

This time Carbo was ready for it. He drove the ball to the deepest part of Fenway, the center-field triangle 420 feet away, and it cleared the 20-foot-high concrete wall for a three-run homer that knotted the score 6-6.

“Bernie turned fall into summer with one wave of his magic wand,” mused Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee after the game.

The fans inside Fenway Park erupted in ecstasy. In the press box, where I was working, the MVP ballots were discarded and stories being typed on deadline proclaiming the Cincinnati Reds as the 1975 World Champions were ripped from spinning platens and tossed onto the floor by grumbling sportswriters, who fed clean sheets of paper into their manual typewriters and began rewriting.

Their disgust, however, was only temporary and over the next hour or so evolved into reverential awe.

“I knew it was gone as soon as I hit it,” Carbo remembered. And during his animated trot around the bases, his arms thrust into the air and pumping, he passed Pete Rose at third base and cracked to his former teammate: “Don’t you wish you were that strong, Pete?”

Instead of being discouraged about the blown save, Rose, who was an astute student of baseball history—a rarity among ballplayers—was already ensnared in the unfolding drama.

“Isn’t this fun?” he responded. “This is the greatest game I’ve ever played in!” And when Rose came to bat in the 10th, he turned to Fisk and said: “This is some kind of game, isn’t it?”

In the press box my heart had begun pounding in my chest when Carbo hit the home run, and it would not stop until the game was over. In my 44 years as a sportswriter for The Sun covering thousands of events, that was one of only two times I ever experienced such a physical reaction to a drama unfolding in front of my eyes.

Cincinnati’s George Foster threw out Denny Doyle at the plate for a game-saving— temporarily anyway—double play on a fly to shallow left to end the bottom of the 10th. In the 11th Dwight Evans turned a spectacular leaping over-the-shoulder catch of a Joe Morgan drive at the fence in deep right field into a rally-killing and inning-ending double play, a play Anderson characterized as “given its significance, one of the two greatest catches ever made.” Then Fisk, frantically and wishfully waving the ball to stay fair, ended it at 12:34 a.m. with his famous homer off the left-field foul pole leading off the bottom of the 12th to

force a seventh game.

Excitedly sprinting from the dugout with his teammates to mob Fisk as he crossed the plate, Burleson said to outfielder Rick Miller: “We just might have won the greatest game ever played.”

Sportswriters are conditioned to show impartiality. But as Fisk circled the bases in triumph, every writer in the press box rose spontaneously to his feet and gave both teams a standing ovation. In my 50 years associated with Major League Baseball as a beat writer and/or an official scorer, it was the only time I ever saw the disciplined members of the Fourth Estate break that unwritten rule of professional decorum. We all instinctively knew we had just witnessed one of the most extraordinary baseball games of all time.

“It had to be the greatest World Series game in history,” Rose crowed, even in defeat, afterward: “I’m glad to be able to say I was in it.”

That the Reds won the deciding seventh game 4-3 and the Red Sox lost it was both anticlimactic and immaterial. Regardless of the final outcome, the ultimate winner had been baseball.

In 1975, before the World Series, attendance at major-league games averaged 15,403 across the spectrum. The 1976 season, initially marred by a spring training lockout of the players, saw a slight bump to 16,151, and, despite player strikes and lockouts and pandemics, attendance continued to swell year by year to nearly 21,000 by 1979, more than 25,000 by 1988, and more than 30,000 by 2004. The minor leagues also enjoyed a revival, attracting more than 40 million fans from the nation’s smaller cities and towns every summer by the second decade of the 2000s.

With the advantage of historical perspective three decades later, Rico Petrocelli, who played for both the “Impossible Dream” Red Sox in 1967 who most likely saved baseball in Boston and the 1975 Red Sox who may have helped save baseball everywhere, wrote: “It took us eight years to get back to the World Series, and by then fans, increasingly bored with baseball, were deserting the game in many American cities. But it has been written that the pulsating 1975 World Series between the Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds rekindled the passions of the public and resurrected baseball from its deathbed. The game has been thriving and setting attendance records ever since.”

“That was a new era in baseball history,” Luis Tiant reflected some 30 years later. “It was one of the best World Series played in the history of baseball, and I was proud to be there.”

In 2020, 45 years after it had been played, ESPN dubbed the 1975 World Series the greatest in history.

And, although I sometimes have difficulty believing it, I was there too.

That team’s racist,” said KJ, staring hard into the Topsfield dugout. The teams had finished their warmups and crowded into their respective dugouts, while the two head coaches stood with the umpire at home plate, reviewing the ground rules. Kenny looked through the fence at the Topsfield players in their royal blue uniforms, standing in clumps talking to each other. One kid snuck up behind another and squirted water on his neck.

“What did they say?” Kenny asked.

“Just look at them,” said Julian, the only eleven-year-old on Lynn’s tournament team. Kenny looked again. The Topsfield team was all white. Then again, Julian was white. Kenny was white. Half of Lynn’s team was white. KJ, Giancarlo, and the rest, except for Jesse Lopes, who said he was black though his mom was white, were Spanish from the Dominican Republic.

Topsfield’s white kids, though, weren’t like Lynn’s white kids. They were the tall kids that Kenny played against in AAU, kids who had floppy blond hair and talked about “the ghetto,” who mocked other teams for wearing their shirts tucked in, who mocked each other when one of them screwed up.

“Hey, Kenny. Good luck today.” Coach Viera, the Peabody coach, was standing behind the caged dugout, his hands in the pockets of his crisp white shorts. He wore a navy-blue collared shirt with “Peabody LL” stenciled over the heart and a navy Peabody cap.

“Thanks, Coach,” Kenny said.

Everyone knew Coach Viera, or “Coach V,” and Kenny felt a twinge of pride that Coach V had said “hi” to him. In addition to playing for Lynn’s tournament team, Kenny played on the elite AAU team run by Coach V, the Angels.

Kenny was the only Lynn kid who had played AAU, a competitive travel league separate from Little League. It cost almost 2000 dollars, but Kenny’s dad had said it was worth it. “Guys who play AAU get college scholarships,” he said. Kenny’s dad had played in high school with Coach Viera, and last fall he had talked to Coach V about Kenny joining the Angels, the AAU team based in Peabody. Kenny had been excited when Coach V said yes. He loved the idea of playing in college. Maybe he could even get drafted. Peabody baseball was legendary. Their Little League all-stars had won the district the last four years. In 2014 they won the state and nearly got to the Little League World Series. When Kenny was younger and played in all-star tournaments, Peabody would crush Lynn; they would crush everyone.

AAU didn’t have the drama of the Little League tournament. The tournament was about city pride, the all-stars from every city competing against each other for a chance to go to

Williamsport, Pennsylvania and be on national TV; AAU was about personal ambition. Even though the competition was great, the AAU doubleheaders on Saturday and Sunday were exhausting, and it didn’t really matter whether you won or lost. Still, Kenny liked learning the game. Coach V knew baseball. He had shown Kenny how to hide his curveball and how to throw a slider that actually slid. And it was cool to play with Peabody players. They didn’t screw around. When Kenny threw a ball hard, he knew they’d catch it. Kenny thought Coach V should have batted him fourth or fifth, rather than seventh, but, Kenny’s dad said, “You’re playing. You’re pitching. You’re learning how baseball should be played. Stay with these guys and you’ll be playing in college. I don’t think Coach V has ever taken a Lynn kid on the Angels.”

Coach V lifted his cap off his head and wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then ran his hand through his short dark hair. He was deeply tanned from being on the field all summer, probably darker than anyone on Lynn’s team. What did it mean to be white, Kenny thought. Coach V was nothing like the Topsfield players.

“Gonna be a hot one,” Coach V said, “Keep drinking water.”

“Gotcha, Coach.” He turned back to the field. It figured that Coach V would be at this game, scouting his future opposition. Peabody was always a step or two ahead of the rest of the teams. Kenny wondered what it would be like to play against Coach V. Maybe, if Lynn actually did well, he’d get a chance. First, Topsfield.

KJ came up to Kenny, flung one arm over his shoulder and pointed at the Topsfield players with the other one, “Yo, homeboy,” he said, “We kick their ass. They can’t touch you.” Kenny nodded. The district tournament was about to begin.

This was the year, finally, when Lynn was supposed to make noise in the tournament. If they could get past Peabody, they would even have a shot at winning the state title. “Two and screw,” was how things usually went for Lynn. They’d play two games, lose two games, and it would be over. But this year the stars had aligned. Giancarlo, a stocky Spanish kid, had moved to Lynn from the Bronx at the beginning of the season, and he was the best pitcher in the area. Kenny had only gotten one hit off him in the regular season, and Kenny could hit. Kenny was a strong number two pitcher, and together they could carry the team a long way. And then there was KJ, their second baseman.

KJ didn’t look like much. Skinny, with black curly hair that flattened out on sweaty days, he wasn’t one of those twelve-year-olds, like Kenny, who were a head taller than everyone else, but he was impossible to get out. He was so quick out of the box that he simply had to hit the ball on the ground to get on. And once he reached base, look out. Kenny had watched ESPN shows about Jackie Robinson, how he would rattle pitchers and steal home. KJ was like that, dancing far off the base, always daring the catcher to pick him off. If the catcher threw behind him, he’d just zip to the next base. If the catcher tried to ignore him and flipped the ball back to the pitcher softly, KJ would still take off. Catcher and pitcher— every player in the field—had to be on high alert whenever KJ got on the base path.

Your only hope to get KJ out was to strike him out, but that never happened. Even Giancarlo couldn’t get his fastball past him. KJ would rev up for a fastball on every pitch, and so he would get around on anything—you couldn’t jam him. But throw him a curve and even if you fooled him completely and got him way out in front, he’d still make contact,

chop the ball to third or short, and beat it out by five steps. Usually, the fielder wouldn’t even bother throwing.

And you couldn’t pitch him away either. Because he’d be so jacked up to swing, he’d crowd the plate so he could smack anything on the outside corner. It was a puzzle Kenny couldn’t solve. No one could. KJ would score nearly every time he came to the plate.

Kenny had asked about getting KJ to play on his AAU team, but Kenny’s dad said that KJ wouldn’t be as good once he got older and played on the big diamond. He was too scrawny.

“Why not let him try?” Kenny asked, “Could you talk to Coach V?” But Kenny’s dad just shook his head.

Kenny was excited to be playing with KJ, instead of against him. In Lynn’s city league, Kenny had played on the Cubs, and KJ and Giancarlo had played on the rival Cardinals. Now, they got to play together to represent Lynn. KJ’s mom, who spoke more Spanish than English, had become one of Kenny’s biggest fans. She called him “gran hombre” and KJ “hombrecito.”

This year, thanks to KJ and Giancarlo, the Cardinals had won the Lynn city league, which meant that the Lynn tournament team’s coach would be the Cardinals coach, Coach Frank. Coach Frank was another reason that it seemed Lynn’s chances were good. Coach Frank was not a legend like Coach V, but at least he wasn’t a typical clueless Lynn coach. Kenny didn’t really like Coach Frank because he lorded over the rest of the Lynn league, and because he always managed to beat Kenny’s team, but everyone, including Kenny, believed he was the best coach in the city, the only one who really knew baseball. Before the morning bell at the middle school, players on Frank’s team would complain about his extra sliding practices at the beach or the way he yelled at a kid, and Kenny would feel envious. Sure, Coach Frank was a screamer—Kenny liked how Coach V never yelled in AAU—but Frank’s teams were always good.

It turned out to be true. Lynn had a good team, a damn good team. Topsfield couldn’t touch Kenny or Giancarlo, and KJ ran around the bases like no one was in the field. They won two more before they lost a tight one to Danvers, but the loss just seemed to make them more focused. Even though Giancarlo blew out his arm (Kenny’s dad said that Coach Frank made him throw too many curves) and would have to watch from the bench, they won two more easily and suddenly they were facing Peabody in the championship.

As they had rolled along, racking up the wins, Kenny took extra pleasure in defeating the all-white teams. He recognized some of their best players from AAU, and he knew that now they would remember him, and remember KJ and Giancarlo, and remember Lynn.

As the players and coaches stood along the baselines and held their caps over their hearts for the national anthem, Kenny looked over at the Peabody team. They were all white, but they didn’t feel white like the other teams. For one thing, Coach V and his assistant coaches looked like they lived in a tanning salon. And Peabody’s team was mostly Italian, all their names ending in vowels. They weren’t like the other white teams on the North Shore, full of kids who skied and used their cell phones in the dugout. Those white kids lived in huge houses with long driveways, the ones that Kenny would see on woodsy back roads going to AAU games, houses that were barely visible, set behind stone walls and trees.

Peabody players grew up in ordinary houses like Kenny’s. They were sons of cops and

firefighters. Their fathers bought them the most juiced bats the league allowed, and they had the gear and style of the pros. They gripped their batting gloves in their fists when they were on the base paths, they wore eye black and covered their mouths with their gloves when they had conferences on the mound. They took the game seriously.

And they were impressively, even irritatingly, professional and respectful. When Kenny ripped a double against them in the tourney game last year, the shortstop had said, “Nice hit.” When a Lynn player got frustrated and flung a bat or helmet, they didn’t smirk, even though they would be winning by ten runs.

The anthem ended, and Lynn shuffled into their dugout. They seemed timid. Were they thinking of all the times Peabody had destroyed them when they were younger? A few of them were pointing out Gino, the Peabody pitcher, who Kenny played with on the Angels. “He’s a monster,” one said. Kenny wanted to say something, but this wasn’t about words. They needed to prove they could compete. He stepped out of the dugout to where KJ was taking his practice swings.

“You get us started, right?”

“No doubt,” KJ said, popping his bubble gum, “and you finish it.”

KJ strutted to the plate. He held up one hand to the ump as he dug a small gully in the batter’s box, the way he always did to brace his back foot. Then he stepped all the way in, windmilled his bat twice, pointed it at the pitcher, and got into his stance.

“Play ball,” the umpire hollered, bringing his mask down.

Kenny looked across at Coach V, squatting next to the entrance of his dugout. How would he try to pitch to KJ? Coach V made a fist, then touched three fingers to his cap. Same signals that the Angels used. Fastball high and inside. They wanted to brush KJ back early. Get him off the plate; make him worry about getting hit. The pitch came in, and KJ pulled his chest back just a few inches and lifted his chin. Kenny smiled. KJ’s feet hadn’t moved. He wasn’t going anywhere.

“Ball one.”

“You got this,” Kenny said.

Coach V called for a curveball, outside corner. The pitcher threw, and KJ leaned across the plate and ripped a shot down the third base line, half a foot foul.

Coach V had done what he wanted, Kenny knew. He was going to come high and tight again, tie KJ up, make him swing late, only KJ never swung late.

Sure enough—fastball inside corner, Coach V signaled. The pitch came in, and KJ scorched it, a line drive that shot so hard at the left fielder that he had trouble fielding it on the short hop and it ricocheted off his glove a few feet to his side. KJ didn’t blink, shooting for second when he saw the bobble, and the left fielder hurried the throw—offline. Safe by a mile.

Lynn’s bench went wild, rattling the chain link in front of the dugout. They could hit these guys. They could play with Peabody.

KJ wasn’t through. When the pitcher bounced the ball in the dirt, he took third easily. The catcher didn’t even try a throw. Kenny moved to the edge of the dugout. As usual, he was batting third, after Julian. Julian popped the next pitch to the first baseman. One out. In the third base coach’s box, Coach Frank leaned forward and said a few words to KJ. Kenny looked down at Coach Frank for a signal, though he knew there would be no signal. He just needed to rip the ball.

And he did. A rocket—but right at the second baseman. The crowd oohed, but it hadn’t accomplished anything. Two out, and KJ still on third. Was this going to be the same old story—they couldn’t catch a break against Peabody? You make your own breaks, Kenny’s dad always said, but damn.

Kenny picked up his glove, waiting for the third out, starting to feel a little queasy about facing the Peabody lineup. He knew the first five batters. He’d played with all of them on the Angels. They would be an ordeal.

The first pitch to Jesse Lopes, Lynn’s fourth batter, was high, but he swung anyway. And missed by a mile. “Make him pitch to you!” Kenny yelled.

Before throwing the ball back to the pitcher, the catcher stared at KJ, who was dancing far off the bag. Kenny wanted to warn KJ. Peabody’s pitcher, Gino, liked to grab the toss from his catcher barehanded and whip it to third to pick off runners. KJ could get nailed if he wasn’t careful. Kenny started to yell, but it was too late. The catcher flipped the ball and there was Gino, barehanding it and gunning it to third.

Only KJ hadn’t gone back. He’d dashed home as soon as he saw Gino shift his feet. He slid in with a grand explosion of dirt, which seemed as though it had been set off by the screams of the Lynn players. 1-0!

KJ popped up, pulled off his helmet, and jogged to the dugout. His face was stony, but his tongue flicked from one side of his mouth to the other. The players pounded him on the back and slapped his hand.

When Jesse struck out, it hardly mattered. Kenny was so pumped he had to stop himself from running out to the mound. He walked, like the pros did. This was going to be a fucking game.

Kenny wasn’t sure how he did it, but he struck out the first two batters. Gino smashed an opposite field double against him, but he jammed their number four hitter just enough so that he flied out to right. Lynn went 1-2-3 the next inning, but Kenny gave up a walk, a passed ball, and a two-out bloop single and the game was tied. That walk!

In the third, Lynn’s 8th and 9th batters both looked bad striking out. They couldn’t hit the curve, and they couldn’t catch up with the fastball. Then, KJ came up. Coach V kept signaling curveballs at the knees. Kenny knew where this was going. Even if these pitches worked, and KJ didn’t hit the ball hard, he’d ground it to third or short and beat the throw.

And that’s what he did—a chopper to the third baseman, who rushed in, then rushed the throw, sailing it over first base. KJ was on second, and Lynn’s dugout was howling. Standing on second with his hands on his hips, KJ blew a huge bubble, like he couldn’t be more relaxed. Gino’s first pitch to Julian was high, and KJ rushed off the base. The catcher took a few steps toward him until KJ hopped back—just one step—toward second. He was like a bird.

“Give me the ball!” Gino said, his eyes darting back and forth between KJ and the catcher.

“Don’t watch the runner,” Coach V yelled. “Catch the ball first!” Was there a little nervousness in Coach V’s voice? He sounded different somehow—a little angry, like Coach Frank.

Gino took the throw from the catcher and quickly grabbed the ball with his throwing

hand, threatening to throw to second. KJ just stared at him, mouth open, ready to bolt back.

“Just get on the rubber,” Coach V growled. He was angry.

Gino kept glancing at KJ, and his next three pitches to Julian were all off target. A walk. He was rattled, and the Lynn bench banged on the dugout fence, screaming their heads off. Kenny took a deep breath and walked to the plate. One of Peabody’s coaches had gone out to talk with Gino. Then he jogged back and said something to Coach V. Kenny put one foot in the batter’s box and looked toward Coach Frank. Really, though, he was sneaking a glance at Coach V. Kenny’s dad hated it when other teams tried to steal signs when Kenny pitched. “Not at this level,” he’d say, “’cause it’s not like you can retaliate. No one’s going to throw at a kid to send a message. That’s what they do in high school or college. Throw one right in the batter’s ear. You’ll see when you get there.”

Coach V made a fist and touched his chest. Kenny bit his lip so he wouldn’t grin. Fastball down the middle! Coach V must think Kenny would be taking the first pitch, and he wanted to get Gino back on track. Or maybe he thought that Kenny wasn’t really that good. Fastball down the middle.

Kenny didn’t quite get all of it, but he got more than enough. The ball soared over the right center fence, plunking down on the back row of the bleachers and arcing into the air like a fountain.

Kenny had hit home runs before. He had two in AAU this year, and he led the Lynn Little League with nine, but this one felt different. Maybe it was the big crowd, maybe it was hearing his father whoop, or KJ’s mother cry out “gran hombre” over and over, maybe it was how his teammates raised their voices and rushed out to meet him at home plate. Maybe it was the way Coach Frank slapped his ass hard as he rounded third, or the stricken look on Coach V’s face. This homer mattered, just like KJ’s steal of home had mattered. It mattered to Lynn, old “two-and-screw” Lynn. Kenny jumped on the plate with both feet and was engulfed by his teammates. KJ had his hand on Kenny’s helmet as they moved in a mob toward the dugout and kept yelling in his ear, “We got this, bro! We got this!”

“Second time through. Now you’ve seen him, you’ll hit him,” Coach V hollered from the 3rd base box as Kenny stepped on the rubber to start the third. Kenny glanced over at his AAU coach. Was Coach V trying to rattle him? But Coach V kept his face on his batter.

“Second time through. Just like the first time!” KJ shouted from behind him. Kenny stepped off the rubber and looked out at KJ. KJ pointed at him and pounded his chest twice. Kenny smiled. He wanted to look over at Coach V, but he didn’t dare.

The second batter pulled a fastball over the left field fence, but Kenny got through the inning with just that one run, though he walked two guys after the homer. 4-2. It was going to be tight. He couldn’t give up any more runs. And maybe he and KJ could sneak another run or two across the next time they came up.

Lynn didn’t score in the fourth, and, thanks to a nice backhand scoop by Carlos at third and a sweet running catch by Julian in center, neither did Peabody. Kenny thought Coach Frank looked anxious. He wasn’t barking at players, like he usually did, and he actually raised his fist triumphantly when Julian put the inning away with his catch. Lynn had never been this close to winning the district.

The fifth. Like the third, Lynn’s eighth and ninth batters went down easy, and then KJ came up. KJ would get to second, no doubt, and then, if Julian could get on, Kenny could do more damage. KJ went through his usual routine, windmilling his bat and pointing it at Gino.

Kenny peeked at Coach V. He had been too wrapped up in the game to look over at the signs, and he’d felt a little guilty about stealing the sign on his home run, but now he was curious how Coach V would deal with KJ.

Coach V made a cutting motion with his hand, like a judo chop.

It was a sign that Kenny had never seen before.

The catcher set up inside, nearly directly behind KJ. The pitcher fired, and a fastball shot right into KJ’s rib. The pitch landed like a punch, a hollow thud that made it sound as if the ball had somehow punctured the skin.

KJ collapsed instantly, and there were gasps from the bleachers, then an eerie silence in which Kenny could hear KJ rasp through his teeth—“Fuuuuuckkk!” His eyes were squeezed shut. Kenny felt he should do something, but the adults were already in motion, making sure things were okay. Coach Frank and his assistant, Coach Cal, had both jogged out to KJ, and the umpire had taken off his mask.

Coach Cal was talking quietly to KJ. Coach Frank looked grim. Coach V walked up to them, his navy-blue shirt separating the red of the Lynn coaches. “You need an ice pack, Frank?”

“We got it,” said Coach Frank. Cal hopped up and jogged to get the First Aid kit. Kenny and some of the other Lynn players came out of the dugout and crowded around.

“Guys back up. Give him room to breathe,” said the umpire.

“Get back in the dugout!” Coach Frank yelled. The Lynn players turned and bumped into each other squeezing back in.

In his mind, Kenny kept seeing that chopping signal. “That’s fucking bullshit,” he said to Jesse.

“What?” Jesse said. Some of the other Lynn kids were listening in.

“He hit him on purpose.”

“Really?”

Kenny nodded. He was sure of it. Through the chainlinks protecting the dugout, Kenny glared at Coach V, but he was talking to the ump about the rules about a player coming out of a game due to injury.

KJ was still on the ground. Kenny could see his body rising and falling in a slowing rhythm. Finally, with Coach Frank and Coach Cal each taking him by the arm, KJ stood. The crowd applauded, the way they always did when someone got up from an injury. KJ, bent over, winced with each step.

“Maybe a broken rib,” he heard Coach Cal say as the coaches eased KJ down on the dugout bench.

“It’s not that bad,” said KJ. “I’ll go back in next inning.”

“We’ll see,” said Frank, “keep that ice on it, and lay down as long as you need to.”

Coach Frank sent Javier in to run for KJ. Javier was as fast as KJ, but he had none of KJ’s instincts.

He wouldn’t be able to scoot his way around the bases.

As Coach Frank headed out of the dugout, Kenny grabbed his forearm. It was so thick

his hand was barely able to grip it.

“Coach,” he said.

“What?” Frank looked down at him.

“That—that was intentional. Isn’t that illegal?”

Coach Frank stared hard at him. Kenny stared back.

“I saw Coach V give a signal for it.”

“You sure?” Frank looked over at the Peabody dugout. Kenny did, too. Coach V was looking at the two of them, impassive. Frank turned back to him slowly. “I doubt that. Shit happens. Worry about the game.”

He turned away and stopped to talk with Julian before jogging back to the third base box. He shook his head and said something to Coach V as he passed him.

On the second pitch to Julian, Peabody picked Javier off first base, using the play Kenny had learned on the Angels where the catcher looks like he’s just going to toss the ball back to the pitcher, and then, if the runner drops his head and steps casually back to first, as Javier did, he guns him out. It’s a play that takes advantage of the runner not being alert.

The pickoff fired up Peabody, and they roared into their dugout.

Kenny hated them, the whole fucking team, the way they were better and smarter than other teams, better than Lynn. The way most of them played AAU, got private lessons. Sure they weren’t rich dicks like the Topsfield boys, but they were dicks, racist dicks, Kenny thought. And now they played dirty, too. KJ was their heart, their motor. KJ was fucking unstoppable. Unless you threw a ball into his ribs.

Kenny threw all his warm-up pitches full speed. He tried to throw harder than he’d ever done before, as if he could throw through a brick wall, but his pitches were the same speed as always, maybe even a little slower. “It’s all in the motion,” Coach V had taught him. “Nice and smooth. Relaxed. Let the pitch throw itself.” Kenny took a deep breath and, for his last two warmups, tried to ease up, but his body felt tight, jerky. He didn’t want to pitch. He wanted to fight. He’d never gotten into a fight in his life, just a few shoving matches at the middle school, but now he wanted to take a swing at someone.

First pitch. Coach Frank called for a fastball at the knees, outside corner. Kenny wasn’t going outside. He zeroed in on the batter’s hip, wound up nice and easy, and fired.

The ball struck right on the hip. The sound was sharper, less hollow, than when KJ had gotten hit. The Peabody kid was knocked back a step. He looked up at the sky, grimacing. Then he put his head down and wiped his eyes with his arm.

Coach V jogged down from the third base line and put his arm on the kid’s shoulder. He said a few words to him. The kid nodded and wiped his eyes again, and Coach V slapped his ass and he jogged down to first base as the crowd applauded.

Coach V and the ump started talking. Kenny just wanted the fucking ball. Come on, he thought, Come on! He’d pitch now! He’d strike out their whole team.

The ump waved to the other ump and Coach Frank to meet with him. When they had all gathered at home plate, Kenny heard Coach V saying, “My players” and “rule book.”

Coach Frank, Kenny could see, was getting angry. He leaned in toward the ump and raised his arms, his palms facing the sky. Then the ump was talking, and Coach V chimed in.

From the stands, a guy with a raspy voice yelled, “C’mon. Keep the game moving!” A few more words, Coach Frank shaking his head, the umps doing most of the talking, and then Coach Frank walked out to the mound.

“What is it?” Kenny said.

“You’re out of the game.”

“What?”

“They’re saying you hit the batter intentionally. The rulebook says you get thrown out.”

“It slipped.”

“That’s what I said, but it’s not my call.”

Kenny looked at the ump, who was dusting off the plate. Then he looked at Coach V, who was calmly staring at him.

“This is bullshit!” Kenny said, keeping his gaze on Coach V.

“Hey,” said Coach Frank. Kenny turned back to Lynn’s coach. “Under control. He’s not going to make a big deal out of throwing you out, but you’ve got to go sit. It will look like we’re just replacing you.”

Coach V had turned to his dugout and was talking to his assistant coaches.

“Hey,” said Coach Frank, louder, “Look at me!” Kenny did. “You’re going to walk off this field, and you’re not even going to peek at Viera. You’re going to sit on the bench and keep quiet.”

“But this is bullshit!” Kenny hoped Coach V could hear him.

“Don’t make this about you. We got a game to win.”

Kenny glared at his coach.

Coach Frank rubbed the baseball in his hands. “You pitched a helluva game. Helluva game. We got ‘em scared.”

From the stands, that raspy voice again—“Keep the game moving!”

Kenny put his head down. He felt like he was going to burst out crying, and he could not—could not!—let himself do that. He strode off the mound, hurrying to the dugout. The fans applauded loudly, but Kenny just wished he could walk down the first base line, out the gate, and have his father drive him home. Instead, he walked into the dugout, past KJ, who was lying on the bench, holding the ice pack to his rib, past Giancarlo, the best pitcher he’d ever seen, sitting impassive, his arm in a sling. He sat down.

Kenny felt like they were wounded soldiers, carried off the field of battle. It didn’t make him feel proud or important. It made him feel helpless. He thought about his cousin, who spent four years in Afghanistan. “One big shit show,” he’d said, “Don’t believe no one.”

He didn’t want to sit. The game was still on. He hopped up and clutched the dugout fence, wrapping his fingers through it. “Jules, you got this. Nice and easy.” 4-2. They still had the lead.

Julian got a ground out to first, moving the runner down to second, then gave up a double down the line that made it 4-3. He walked the next batter. Damn it. Coach V was clapping in the third base box. Kenny knew that clap from AAU. It was crazy loud, like gunshots.

The whole Peabody team was standing in their dugout. In the field, Lynn players were screaming encouragement, desperation in their voices. “C’mon Jules!” Kenny hollered. He closed his eyes for a second, trying to send some of his energy to Julian. Two more outs.

On the third pitch, the batter lifted a short fly behind first base. It was the second

baseman’s ball, and KJ would have had it easily, but the guy who replaced him was tentative, and Jesse Lopes, the big first baseman, called for it, backpedaling. “Jesse, you got it!” Kenny heard Jesse’s mother screaming. Still backpedaling, Jesse reached over his head and the ball landed in his glove. But then he fell backward onto the outfield grass. The ball bounced out, arcing over his head and landing on his chest. Jesse flung his hands across his shirt, pinning the ball to it. The umpire signaled out, and the Lynn crowd roared.

“Jesse! You the man!” Kenny screamed. Still on the ground, Jesse clutched the ball and raised his hand in triumph.

Suddenly, Coach Frank’s voice cut through the celebration. “Get up, they’re tagging up!” The two runners were trying to advance. Jesse scrambled to his feet and flung the ball—way too high—toward second, just as Coach Frank yelled “Hold it!”

The ball sailed over the shortstop and bounded into the left field corner, and the game turned into chaos. The runner going to third rushed home, and the runner sliding into second hopped up and headed for third. Lynn players were shouting and pointing and jumping up and down, but no one was going to the right spots. They all just watched the third baseman and left fielder run after the ball. The second runner hit third and Coach V windmilled his arms, sending him home. The throw from the left fielder came in, looping and off line, and the catcher ran down the first base line to grab it as the runner crossed the plate and the Peabody team went crazy. Kenny turned his back to the field. “Fuck,” he bellowed.

“Double-Fuck,” said KJ, who had sat up to watch. He winced and lay back down. The next batter drilled a homer to center. 6-4, Peabody.

“Triple-fuck,” said Giancarlo.

Julian doubled to lead off the 6th, but Cameron, batting in Kenny’s spot—oh, how he wanted to bat!—struck out, and the next two batters did, too, ending the game with a whimper. The Peabody team mobbed each other on the mound after the last strike. The Lynn players trudged up to the plate and stood waiting for Peabody to untangle themselves and line up for the postgame handshake. Kenny was the last Lynn kid, sandwiched between a hunched over KJ and all the coaches. “A couple bad breaks,” Coach Cal was saying to Coach Frank.

“Line up, guys!” barked Coach V, and the Peabody boys all jogged to their side of the plate. The two teams moved forward, slapping hands. “Good game. Good game,” all the Peabody kids said. The Lynn kids were mostly silent. In front of Kenny, KJ limped through the line. They’d gone through all the Peabody players, and now the Peabody coaches were slapping hands. “Great game, boys!”

“Great game,” Coach V said to KJ, “hope you feel better.” KJ just nodded. Coach V moved on to Kenny and put a hand on his shoulder. “Helluva game, Kenny. That slider was nasty.”

Kenny tried to say, “Thanks, Coach,” or “Good luck at states,” but all he could get out was a grunt and a nod.

It was all so unfair.

The line ended. Kenny stood at home plate. KJ was hobbling to the dugout behind the rest of the team. He looked like a wounded bird, scrawny. Coach V and Coach Frank were

talking about what a great game it had been. The Peabody players took off for a victory lap along the outfield fence, slapping hands with their fans.

Coach V, still talking with Coach Frank, turned to Kenny. “And I knew this guy was trouble,” he said, grinning. His teeth seemed unnaturally white. “He plays for my AAU team. Did you know that?”

Frank nodded, “I think I did.”

Kenny thought of the Angels. There was no way he was playing on that team next year, no matter what his dad said, no matter how much he had learned this year. He was done with Coach V and the legend of Peabody, their professional approach to the game. It was all bullshit. They were all bullshit. Kenny wasn’t going to play on the fucking Angels next year.

But he knew he would.

The Old(ish) Ballgame

jack neary

Istood at home plate at Shedd Park, in my mid-sixties (I’ll never specify—NEVER!), knowing that this would be the final at-bat of my baseball life. I knew that because we had determined that this would be the last game we would play. My great friend, Tom Hickey, whom I had known since I was eleven, was on the mound tossing straight fast balls—or, straight as-fast-as-they-could-go-at-his-age balls—all afternoon. I was always the opposing pitcher, and as usual, my team was about to lose for what seemed to be the millionth time since we started this thing all those many years ago. Hickey almost always won. I almost always lost. That’s the way it was supposed to go. I didn’t mind. I was kind of proud of my 4-17 record. Especially since no loss was ever my fault. We never kept track of errors, but errors abounded in these games, especially on my team. I think my career ERA was something like 1.72. Didn’t matter. I always lost. Almost. And I was about to lose again. Except this time, in the last of the last inning (sometimes we went nine, sometimes seven), my team had somehow managed to overcome a five-run final inning deficit, and there I was at the plate with the winning run on second. Two outs. Two strikes. We had decided that if we ended in a tie, it’d stay a tie. So, it was my final—ever—at bat. Hickey went into his windup. And fired.

We had started this annual diamond gathering approximately thirty years earlier. Nobody really knew exactly when it began. We were in our early thirties or late twenties back then, and we thought it might be a good idea to round up the usual suspects from our rapidly disappearing youth to play the game we all grew up with and loved, just to see if the baseball instincts hadn’t turned to stink. We scheduled the game for the first Sunday after Labor Day, to avoid conflicts with summer vacations or, in my case, summer theatre. We probably played the first game at Shedd, but over the years we moved around a little if somebody had already manned (or womanned) the Shedd diamond before we got there for our one o’clock game. I know we played at Hadley Field once or twice, Frank Ryan Field behind the Shaughnessy School off Gorham Street once, and also at Alumni Field off Rte. 38 a couple of times before the Lowell Spinners spun there. But Shedd was our home field. It’s possible that the genesis of the idea to play this game was in the games Hickey and I and my brother Jim and others organized at O’Donnell Playground when we were teens. Back then, we somehow managed to entice upwards of thirty kids to convene at O’Donnell’s afta suppah, “buck up” to pick teams, and play hard on that dry and dusty field until sundown, or at least until it was impossible to see the battered, brownish ball we had pretty much beaten into submission. (There were variations on the “bucking up” theme. We “One, Two, Three, Shooted” it. The two team captains chose “Odds” or “Evens,” then dug in and faced off, right hands shaking once, twice, and three times before the “Shoot”

shot a number of fingers out toward the opponent. The fingers were added up. Odds or Evens. Best two out of three shoots won the first player pick. Then picks alternated until all the participants were chosen. I often campaigned to be a captain, I think mainly so I wouldn’t risk getting picked too low in the order. (Then we played the game.) It was a natural evolution to try it one more time in our young adult years.

But, as it turned out, it was fun that first year. It was a blast. So we said, what the hell, let’s do it again next year. Same time. Same field. And we did. And it was still fun. It was still a blast. Not only was it an absolute pleasure to run (well, sorta run), slide (well, very carefully), catch (on occasion) and hit (more frequently than you’d expect) again, but it was also a fantastic opportunity to catch up with old(ish) friends from school or the neighborhoods and shoot the … breeze … about days gone by, days current, and days to come. A bunch of us were from the late, great Sacred Heart Parish, another bunch from Lowell State College, some friends from “work,” whatever that work happened to be, some cousins and brothers-in-law who jumped at the chance to join us for this afternoon of nostalgic sweat and pulled hamstrings. And as the years flew by, we were joined by sons— and grandsons—who sometimes showed us up, but who more often than not marveled at these ancient basstids who refused to concede to the passage of time.

We did have one standout year. In 2011, my brother organized a 9/11 remembrance to accompany the game. For the first time, we purchased T-shirts (two colors, we still “bucked up” to pick the teams). We had a little crowd on hand to watch. We set up a microphone. Announced the players. Tom Hickey was the emcee, which he is very good at. I actually sang “The Star Spangled Banner” for the only time in my life. And boxer Micky Ward thew out the first pitch! That was some special day. And we kept playing for about five years beyond that.

But, after thirty-something years, it was getting harder and harder to round up the usual suspects, so we made the pronouncement that this would be the final year. And this was the final game. And this was my final at-bat. Two outs. Two strikes. Winning run on second.

I’m a right-handed batter. I had been trying over the years to hit line drives down the line to the opposite field, because I knew that if I somehow managed to place that liner over the head of the first baseman, that ball would roll and roll and by the time the trundle-y fortyfive-year old right fielder (there was always a trundle-y forty-five-year old right fielder) got to it, I’d be standing at home with a four-bagger. I still could run, so I was confident I’d make it. This time, I didn’t need the homer, I just needed the hit. But I looked down that right field line again and I thought to myself, “Why not? Just one more shot at it . . . .” Bad habits die hard. Trouble was, Hickey knew I was always trying to do this and he kept pitching me inside. You know a guy for fifty years, he won’t let you get away with stuff like this. So, I abandoned my plan and braced myself for that inside fast(ish) ball. And there it was. A little off the plate, belt high. I sat back on my right leg, thrust out with my left leg and let the bat fly. I connected. The ball took off on a line to left field and dropped in. The man on second scored. We won the game. And I knew that I could retire from baseball on that single. Sure, my record was 4-17 as a pitcher, but as a hitter, I went out a winner. Tom didn’t seem to mind. His record as a pitcher was 27-4. That’s Hall-of-Fame worthy. He’d be fine.

I told my brother this morning that I was writing this article. He said he’d been talking

with some of the guys at the bi-weekly breakfast they have at The Corner Café on Lawrence Street. One of them suggested we try reviving the game. Nobody objected. So maybe I’ll still get a crack at that liner over the first baseman’s head. I can dream, can’t I?

Fishing with Walter

fred woods

Walter Wells, 1948-2022

One day Walter took me fishing in his skiff on the St. John’s River. Think like a fish he said puttering for shade as the day grew hotter. That bank, he pointed, a Timucuan shell mound cut down when the old man sold out to developers but the currents shifted ‘cuz the Corps of Engineers dredged the channel and… sun splintered through live-oaks as Walter unspooled his story of fish habitats, Army Corps, fossil beds, botany, Eldora, Bugtussle, arrowheads, and dad-gummed politicians each of interest nothing discarded all one big river.

In the end Walter got a red fish and I got a sunburn and a kaleidoscope of Florida life hauled up and spun seamlessly from Walter’s teeming cast net.

Photo: Walter Lehrman Collection © Utah State University All Rights Reserved.

“Jack Kerouac, Mill Valley, California, May 1956.” The photograph was shot at “Marin-an” (Gary Snyder’s cabin outside Mill Valley) at the three-day “going-away-to-Japan” party for poet Gary Snyder described in The Dharma Bums.

SECTION X

THE JACK KEROUAC CENTENNIAL

“—looking under the big trees out at Lowell over the field across Riverside Street—over its waving weeds we could see two miles away rooftops of Christian Hill shining red in the sun, the Kingdom was more beautiful than ever, my Baghdad Fellaheen rooftops up and down little Pawtucketville were creaming into rose for me—I was the beloved youth—blade of grass in my mouth, lying in the slope after supper, seeing—letting winds of evenin ripple hugely in the trees above, at home, patria, land of birth.”

from Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac (1959)

Requiem for Jack Kerouac

jay atkinson

One

In the extended twilight of his career, Bob Dylan is playing a concert in Lowell on Tuesday night, November 19th, and in so doing, paying tribute to his unseen sideman and collaborator, Jack Kerouac. When Dylan and his band arrive at the venue, their cortege will bookend a procession that occurred fifty years earlier. On October 24, 1969, the big touring cars filled with Jack Kerouac’s old football teammates and the few remaining Beat writers departed Archambault Funeral Home, following the hearse that carried Kerouac’s remains to Lowell’s Edson Cemetery. There, Kerouac, who was born and raised in Lowell, was interred beneath a simple plaque that reads:

“Ti Jean”

John L. Kerouac

Mar. 12, 1922 - Oct. 21, 1969

—He Honored Life—

In 1975, six years after Kerouac’s death, a then 34-year-old Bob Dylan visited Kerouac’s grave in the same windswept season of the year. Dylan was in town with his Rolling Thunder Revue, a kind of musical carnival that included musicians Joan Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Mick Ronson, playwright Sam Shepard, actress Ronee Blakly, and Kerouac’s close friend and pallbearer, the poet Allen Ginsberg. Restless after years of relative seclusion, and already keen on outrunning his fame, Dylan chose gritty, blue-collar Lowell because it was Kerouac’s hometown and his muse, and the young singer-songwriter felt a strong kinship with the Beat writer. Dylan and Ginsberg went to Kerouac’s grave the day after the show, on November 3, 1975.

For Tuesday’s show, Bob Dylan and his band will perform at the Tsongas Center, hard by the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Older now, and with a different band, Dylan’s performance will provide a resounding encore for that long-ago concert, when 14,000 fans crammed into the university’s gymnasium to see the foremost lyricist of the era. That night in 1975, Dylan dedicated “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” to Kerouac and closed the show with “This Land is Your Land,” joined on stage by Allen Ginsberg, Dylan’s mother Beatty Zimmerman, and other members of their traveling road show.

Dylan played a few more gigs in Lowell over the years, but Tuesday’s show will provide another meaning, another sort of farewell. By visiting Lowell in the twilight of his career, Dylan will compose a requiem for Kerouac, who was one of his most significant influences—

an older brother who left his modest hometown for New York years earlier, searching for enlightenment.

In the spring of 1947, Kerouac, then a young unknown writer, rode the 7th Avenue subway to the end of the line, stuck out his thumb, and began hitchhiking. His trip, and the novel that grew out of it, would change the course of American literature. His wanderings over the next several years, from New York to Chicago to Denver and back again, in freight trains, travel bureau cars, and buses; San Fran to Fresno; North Carolina to New Orleans; through Colorado, across the Texas plains, and down to Mexico City, would be immortalized in his 1957 masterpiece, On the Road, a book so important to Dylan and the evolution of his storytelling that he states it plainly on his website.

As artists, Kerouac and Dylan share a number of striking similarities. Foremost is each man’s dedication to his craft and indifference to the trappings of success. When Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, he reacted as if he’d been named Man of the Year by the Minneapolis Elks Club, not bothering to show up for the ceremony, and skipping the chance to deliver his Nobel lecture a year later, which was instead read by the U.S. ambassador to Sweden. In much the same vein, in a pair of letters to the poet Gary Snyder in 1959, Kerouac complained about “how awful it is to be ‘famous’ (fame mouse) at least in America”, and that all the hoopla and hyperbole over his 1957 novel, On the Road, had left him “fat, dejected, ashamed, bored, pestered & shot.”

Despite the fact they never met, the relationship between Kerouac and Dylan illustrates the progression of the American story. Considering that the most original contributions to the story are jazz and the blues, it’s no surprise Dylan and Kerouac share a reverence for traditional American storytelling. But just as Dylan would a few years later, Kerouac moved beyond his early influences to something new. In an introduction to his 1960 novel Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac says he “read the life of Jack London at 18 and decided to also be an adventurer,” and that his influences included “Saroyan and Hemingway; later Wolfe.”.

But in New York, the restless young scribbler discovered bebop jazz, and saxophonist Charlie Parker, in particular. Ginsberg noted in an interview that Kerouac “learned his line directly from Charlie Parker”, and Kerouac himself told Ted Berrigan of The Paris Review that he was like “a tenor man drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his statement’s been made.” Parker even appears as a “character” in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, demonstrating the importance of this American original to Kerouac’s development. In the book, Kerouac’s narrator, Leo Percepied, notes that Parker, during a nightclub performance, gazed “directly into my eye looking to search if really I was that great writer I thought myself to be.”

Kerouac described the visceral impact of Parker’s music in a March 19, 1957, letter to his editor Don Allen: “So I eschews ‘selectivity’ and follow free association of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought . . . with no discipline other than the story-line and the rhythm of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang!”

Shortly after, the harried novelist left New York in 1961. Kerouac was in New York City at least through 1959 and in nearby Northport, N.Y., and made forays into Greenwich village to see his pals until at least 1962. The young Dylan arrived, taking up Kerouac’s mantle as a kind of hoodlum saint, and banging on the same tables. In those days, Bob Dylan’s biggest inspirations were the Great American Songbook and the music of his idol, Woody

Guthrie. Like Kerouac taking stock of Wolfe’s Asheville, North Carolina, and migrating the same preoccupations with home ground, blood, and tragedy north to Lowell, Dylan’s ragged vocals, idiosyncratic phrasing, and raucous harmonica took American folk music in a new direction.

After Kerouac’s death, Dylan reportedly told Ginsberg that he read Kerouac’s book of poetry, Mexico City Blues, in 1959 and it “blew (his) mind.” Dylan was hearing “his own American language” for the first time, learning from Kerouac what he had absorbed from Charlie Parker. Dylan responded to Kerouac as one musician to another, moving from the rigid confines of the old structures and tropes to new creative vistas—the startling juxtapositions of his reality grounded in the particulars of the everyday.

In the cavalcade of rueful Americana that includes Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Leadbelly, Langston Hughes, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Charlie Parker, and Willa Cather, among others, Dylan follows close on Kerouac’s heels. At his best, Kerouac was deep into improvising, noodling over the flow of his thoughts—combining all his influences and training and just starting to play—and Dylan took up this song and continued it, a haunting melody that floats through American culture to this day.

Two

The Lowell sky is low and sodden, hanging over the city, fine lines of rain falling fast and silvery over the old mills and cobblestone streets. Zooming past Lowell High School where Kerouac was a star athlete and an exceptional student, I’m dodging cars and pedestrians on my mountain bike while listening to Dylan’s “Desolation Row.”

I read On the Road when I was 20 years old. I was a college student, living in a tiny apartment above the Acadia movie theatre in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, when I finished the book. Sometime after midnight I heard the wail of a freight train charging along the Bay of Fundy and had the most acute sensation of homesickness I’d ever felt. I was listening to Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Kerouac’s blue-collar voice was reinforced—hip, iconoclastic, with a brashness that contained notes of joy underscored by a lament. Because for all its exuberance, On the Road was a sad story and Kerouac, a guy like me, a watcher, born in Lowell, two towns over from my home ground, Methuen. I’ve been looking for Kerouac in Lowell ever since.

Earlier I’d passed the old Lowell Sun building, where Kerouac worked briefly as a sportswriter, and cruised over to the Jack Kerouac Commemorative on Bridge Street. Composed of reddish-brown granite tablets arranged in a circle within a square, the stones were cut and polished in Minnesota, then sandblasted with passages from Kerouac’s books. A buddy of mine, local poet Paul Marion, who edited a collection of Kerouac’s early works, Atop an Underwood, was one of the driving forces behind the Commemorative, which was dedicated in 1988.

Straddling my bike, I pause by a favorite passage from Kerouac’s The Scripture of the Golden Eternity:

“When you’ve understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can’t understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.”

I have to laugh thinking of Marion’s quixotic journey to restore Kerouac to his rightful place in local mythology. Among my favorite stories is the day in 1991 when Paul took

budding movie star Johnny Depp on a tour of Kerouac’s haunts. They drank cognac at the home of the late John Sampas, Kerouac’s brother-in-law and estate manager, and looked through Kerouac’s old clothes, photographs, and notebooks. “I can’t believe I’m in Lowell,” Depp said, “This is like touching the robes of Christ.” Depp’s visit concluded with dinner at a restaurant that was originally Nicky’s Bar, owned by another brotherin-law of Kerouac’s, Nick Sampas, where I’d been unceremoniously tossed out during my intemperate youth. Now I’m highballing along Pawtucket Street in the misting rain. As I approach the Archambault Funeral Home, I ride onto the sidewalk. But there’s a college kid absorbed in his phone blocking the way, so I drop back off the curb. I can feel the pressure of traffic and look to jump the curb again. My front tire catches the top edge and I’m flung to the pavement, landing hard and opening up cuts on my knee. My helmet crashes against the sidewalk, ringing my bell, and I roll into a sitting position.

The kid rushes over. “Are you okay?”

Hauling myself up, I say, “It knocked some sense into me.”

Flush with adrenaline and a bit dazed, I remount the bike in a state of satori, or Buddhist enlightenment. As I steer past the funeral home and take a ride through the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, where Kerouac’s mother, Gabrielle, would pray to the Virgin Mary, I’m listening to Dylan again and the most profound connection between Kerouac and Bob Dylan becomes clear.

In Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac riffs on “the smell of soured old shirts lingering above the cookpot steams as if they were making skidrow lumberjack stews out of San Francisco ancient Chinese mildewed laundries with poker games in the back among the barrels and the rats of the earthquake days . . . .”

Partway through “Desolation Row,” a song poem that echoes the title of Kerouac’s novel, Desolation Angels, Dylan runs through the very same “breath sentences of the mind” the beat writer learned from Charlie Parker, paddling down the stream of consciousness in Kerouac’s wake.

And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

Fighting in the captain’s tower

While calypso singers laugh at them

And fishermen hold flowers

Between the windows of the sea

Where lovely mermaids flow

And nobody has to think too much

About Desolation Row

By now, I’m cranking past St. Jean-Baptiste where Kerouac’s funeral mass took place. Suddenly I realize where I’m going, where I’ve been headed all along. Soon thereafter, I roll beneath an iron gateway into Edson Cemetery on Gorham Street. The rain has subsided, and there’s not another living soul across the leaf-scattered plain.

Not long after I finished reading On the Road, I hitchhiked home for Christmas, and late one night drove over to Lowell with two of my college buddies, Bongo and Pitch. At Edson cemetery I parked my dad’s station wagon beside a huge oak tree, and we scrambled onto the roof, grabbed the lowest branches, and swung ourselves over the fence, bottles of beer

clanking in our pockets. Bongo and Pitch and I stood around in our varsity jackets sipping beer, not saying very much. It was a pivotal moment in my life. After reading Kerouac’s novel and becoming enamored of its “innumerable riotous angelic particulars,” I said the hell with law school. I had no time for any of that, and a preoccupation with time and how to best make use of it runs straight through everything I’ve done since, fueling my career as a writer.

When Dylan and Ginsberg visited Kerouac’s grave in November 1975, the sky was framed by skeletal oak trees with dead leaves littering the ground. Ginsberg noted that the poet John Keats’ gravestone includes the epitaph, “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

The two men stared down at Kerouac’s plaque. “What graves have you seen?” Ginsberg asked.

“Victor Hugo’s grave,” said Dylan.

Smiling for a moment, Ginsberg pointed to the ground. “So, is this what’s gonna happen to you?”

Dylan continued to look down, the brim of his cowboy hat shading his eyes. “No, I wanna be in an unmarked grave,” he said.

I lean my bike against a tree and walk over to Jack’s grave. As usual, there’s several items on the ground—coins, poems, a framed photograph or two, the stub of a half smoked joint. Standing there with no one around, I say a Hail Mary for my fellow Catholic, adding “Dear Mary, please say a prayer for Jack Kerouac and ask your Son to permit Jack into His Kingdom.”

The sky has turned gun-metal gray, with a chilly wind blowing from the east. I dig in my pack for an energy bar and drink some water, glancing up at the sky. It’s getting late for biking over the crowded rainy streets—as Dylan wrote, “It’s not dark yet/but it’s gettin’ there.” Rolling out through the gate, I switch on Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” and it occurs to me that, when the seventy-eight-year-old troubadour ambles off stage Tuesday night, Jack Kerouac may have spoken in Lowell for the last time.

(November 2019)

Jack Kerouac’s Funeral

photographs by david brow

The following photographs were made by David Brow at the funeral of Jack Kerouac on October 24, 1969, at St. Jean Baptiste Church on Merrimack Street and Edson Cemetery off Gorham St. in Lowell. Dave and his daughter Elizabeth Parise gave The Lowell Review permission to reprint the images.

Among the pallbearers for Jack Kerouac were Bill Koumantzelis (front left), James Curtis (front right), Allen Ginsberg (middle left), Anthony G. Sampas (back right).

Poet Allen Ginsberg (center) with writer John Clellon Holmes to his right and poet Gregory Corso (third from right).

Writer John Clellon Holmes tosses soil on the coffin.

John Holmes pursed his lips, wept tears.

Poet Gregory Corso filming at St. Jean Baptiste Church. Poetry lines on pages 182 and 184 from “Memory Gardens” by Allen Ginsberg (Oct. 22-29, 1969)

Gregory toothless bending his knuckle to Cinema machine—

Poets Robert Creeley, left, and Allen Ginsberg, right.

Jack Kerouac’s casket, Edson Cemetery, Lowell, Mass.

Never Forget You Are a Breton: Jack Kerouac Centenary

roger west

Finistère, Brittany: a pockmarked finger of France pointing accusingly westward. Wherever you go here in whatever direction, you very quickly end up at the sea.  Even if you stay put, rivers, brooks and creeks will carry you through estuaries down into coves and bays and sluice you out into the Atlantic. It is the only part of France where you can take a direct line across to North America avoiding and ignoring England (quite wisely) and letting those tides and currents carry you seamlessly from the Celtic Sea to the North Atlantic, through what Kenneth White called that “pelagic front,” that place of “wild dynamics,” that “field of energy” where waters mix.

Which is what Jack Kerouac’s ancestor did four hundred years ago, trickling down from the hamlet of Kervoac to the town of Huelgoat and thence to Brest where he shipped out for a new life in Quebec far from that pointing finger. Under a bit of cloud, it has to be said: a little matter of misappropriation of funds and allegations of sexual assault.

Jack did give different accounts of his ancestry based on various place names— Kerwick, Quivouac, Kerneweck, Kervoach—the fluidity of orthography allowing a certain fluidity with exactitude. But his father’s words “Ti Jean, never forget you are a Breton” encouraged him to take a trip to France, recorded in Satori in Paris, to trace his ancestry, a quest hijacked by cognac, women, a missed flight, a lost suitcase, a meeting with a dissolute chancer who claimed kinship and more cognac. The disorderly state of the national archives in Paris also did not help.

Nowadays, of course, all this research can be done online, as the Kerouac or Kirouac family have done—or as they now call themselves, the Kirouac Family, Inc.—a formidably organized bunch of realtor rotarian types who have traced their ancestry back to this Breton hamlet.

On Jack’s birthday, March 12, in this his centenary year, we wanted to pay homage to Jack, to wish him happy birthday and to read to him. The place of origin of his ancestors seemed an appropriate place as we were in Brittany anyway and so we went first to Lanmeur, the small town that now includes the hamlet of Kervoac. It was here that his family inc. came twenty years ago for the inauguration of Rue Jack Kerouac and the unveiling of a plaque. It caused quite a stir according to the local paper, Le Télégramme, who reported local residents feverishly reading Kerouac’s work and feverishly not making head nor tail of it. The visitors came, they were civically received, their dollars appreciated. Today the plaque has rotted away, and Rue Jack Kerouac has disappeared; it was, from the photos taken at the time, not actually a street anyway but a field. None of the Lanmeurians we

spoke to claimed to have heard of Jack Kerouac.

We followed the route taken by the ancestor, Urbain-François Le Bihan de Kervoac, through the forest to Huelgoat (the name means “high forest”) where the Kirouac clan had also been busy unveiling. A plaque affixed to a wall beside the old windmill replete with family motto and crest rendered homage to Urbain-François and simply noted his departure from these shores.  No mention of Jack; it seems that the incorporated Kirouacs are happier to incorporate an embezzler and philanderer than they are the poet who was their most illustrious member. It also seems that this family outing was a trip for the boys and their wives to consolidate that all-important patrilineage. Jack wasn’t just a Breton, he was also umbilically a Norman; his matrilineal line goes back in time beyond the disgraced fugitive from Brittany to an established Québeçoise originating from Moussonvilliers in Normandy, France—and, for those who care about such things, with a direct connection to Céline Dion.

But that will have to be another trip. On this rainy and windswept day in Brittany, finding an appropriate spot to offer up birthday greeting to Jack was not proving easy. And a potential embarrassment too for this was to be a triangulated birthday operation.  Over in Quebec, poet friends were assembling in Rue Jack Kerouac, which Jack would be pleased to know runs into, or is run into by, Rue Voltaire, Rue Charles Dickens, and Rue Virginia Woolf, to read him poetry. In Massachusetts, other poet friends were stepping outside and facing towards the Mecca of Lowell to do likewise.

And then down along the narrow and mediaeval Rue des Cieux we found the place, the Sur La Route bookshop and cafe set up by Johann a few years ago to fill that Jackshaped hole in visitor attractions. Offering herbal teas and cupcakes—though I’m not sure that Jack was a herbal tea and cupcake kind of guy—it was a cozy, book-filled place that was celebrating Jack’s centenary month with a series of events.  Inside we met author and translator Kristian Braz who has translated On the Road into Breton and had a lively and interesting discussion about Jack’s simultaneous absence and presence. I finally got to triangulate with my North American comrades and read my suite of haikus dedicated to Jack—to real people and not to an empty signpost or a wall. And Kristian it turned out was a friend of Breton poet Youenn Gwernig who became a friend of Jack’s and for whom Breton cultural exile was embedded in the philosophy and culture of the Beats. Jack was encouraged by Youenn to return to Brittany, this time to the Huelgoat area, to make a fresh attempt to reconnect with his (male) ancestors. The two planned to go together. The tickets were bought, the trip arranged; a few days before their intended departure, Jack died. Although he never finished his quest, he did feel, according to Youenn, he’d found his satori elsewhere. For me, this short trip, inconclusive though it may have seemed, did give me a link with Jack and perhaps my own satori.

Kerouac in Lowell: Early Events

susan k . gaylord

Ilived just south of Lowell in North Billerica from the fall of 1977 until the spring of 1985 when I was in my late twenties and early thirties. It was there that I began my life in the arts with calligraphy, became part of a group of artists that gave me inspiration and companionship, and immersed myself in the writing and life of Jack Kerouac. Prior to my arrival I had read On the Road but knew nothing about its author or his other books. While On the Road had swept me up with its propulsive prose and intoxicating sense of freedom, the Lowell books and his biography made me fall in love. His inherent sweetness, his constant search for larger meaning, and his brilliance were offset by his alcoholism. He kept drawing me back to try to make sense of such promise lost.

My creative involvement with Kerouac’s words began when I met Lowell poet Paul Marion at Expo ’79, a gathering of artists and cultural organizations at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. After eight months of obsessive full-time learning calligraphy at my dining room table, I had ventured out into the world with a table at the Expo. I met some of the artists who were forming a group that came to be called Art Alive! The Greater Lowell Art Co-op and I met Paul at a reading of his poetry. As a calligrapher, I was always looking for texts to write and interpret. I liked Paul’s poems, and I liked that I would be working with a contemporary voice. With his permission, I wrote out several of his poems and exhibited them at the Lowell National Historical Park (LNHP) Visitor Center, then a small storefront on Merrimack Street. That was the beginning of an ongoing collaboration between my letters and Paul’s poems that continues to this day.

Paul introduced me to the Kerouac beyond On the Road. I responded with many years of working with Kerouac’s words: framed pieces for exhibition, poems for reproduction in Moody Street Irregulars: A Jack Kerouac Newsletter, a one-of-a-kind artist’s book called Contradictions: Lowell, Jack Kerouac, the River which was shown in Quebec City and Lowell and then reworked into a handbound limited edition book that sold for several years in the LNHP bookstore and gift shop. Most recently, I created “Believe in the holy contour of life,” from Kerouac’s Belief & Technique for Modern Prose, lettered live on three-by-six-foot paper banners for my exhibition The Power of Words in Hartford, Conn., in 2017.

The center of my creative life during those years aside from my home studio was Art Alive!, which grew out of a rare and very special circumstance—the donation of gallery space by Lowell National Historical Park who had purchased the building but did not have a use for it. We shared the former Solomon’s Fabrics building at 200 Merrimack Street (now a parking lot) with the local non-profit Human Services Corporation. I now see that there are different ways to look at our use of the space. In one way, you could say we took it for granted. In another, you could say that we lived in the moment and used it to its fullest

to support artists and bring life to the city. When it was over, it was over. Its relevance was diminished with the creation of the Brush With History Artist Studios and Gallery, with guidance and funding from the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission and National Park Service, a few blocks away.

The gallery always had a kind of makeshift quality to it. Part of the deal with the Park Service was that we would make minimal changes. The luxury was that if we had an idea, we could pursue it. In 1981, Paul and I got the idea that we should have a celebration called Kerouac Lives! in October (Kerouac’s favorite month) twelve years after his death in 1969. Art Alive! artists would have a chance to show Kerouac/Lowell-inspired work and we would put together a program.

I don’t remember how we made the contact, but we invited Joy Walsh, editor of Moody Street Irregulars, published in upstate New York, a Kerouac and Beat writers ‘zine, to be our main speaker and reader. Professor Jay McHale, who grew up in Lowell, from Salem State University, would speak, and Paul would read his poems about Kerouac as well as selections from Kerouac’s books. We borrowed a glass case from what was then the University of Lowell to display books and Kerouac memorabilia. Paul and my husband Charlie were in the back of our pick-up with the glass case. It was a freezing night and they cursed me as I slowly drove the one-and-a-half miles from the O’Leary Library to Art Alive!, worrying about breaking the glass with no thoughts of how cold it was to be holding glass in the frigid wind. Paul and I made a daytime trip to Lowell Sun columnist and Kerouac’s sister-inlaw Mary Sampas’s house to borrow noted sculptor Mico Kaufman’s bust of Kerouac which Paul held in his lap and I again drove slowly with less breakable but more precious cargo.

In the days before the internet, it was hard to track interest in an event. At Art Alive!, we never thought of asking for RSVPs or selling tickets. We sent press releases to the Sun and local papers, posted flyers, and for this event, sent out postcards and hoped for the best. In this case, the best happened. Approximately 250 people attended, including Kerouac’s widow Stella Sampas Kerouac and members of her family and his friend Joe Chaput. We gave a prize to Kevin Ring, editor of Beat Scene magazine, who had come from England. The program was a mixture of scholarship and creativity and ended on a glorious note when a member of the audience asked if he could read a poem. Twenty-two-year-old George Chigas, wearing an untucked red-and-black buffalo plaid shirt and looking like he was sixteen, read his long poem “Flashes of Kerouac” with energy and passion. It is not an exaggeration to say that everyone in the room was blown away. It was the perfect ending to the program with tangible evidence that Kerouac’s creative spirit did indeed live on.

After the event, my husband Charlie and I went to the Press Room (a bar and restaurant near the then-location of the Lowell Sun) with Joy Walsh and Kerouac’s late-stage traveling pal and fellow Franco-American Joe Chaput. He accompanied and watched over Kerouac as he made the rounds of Lowell bars and was his chauffeur on several trips—one to Rivièredu-Loup in Quebec to research his ancestry and one to St. Petersburg, Florida, with Jack, his mother, and his wife Stella. I wish I remembered more from that evening, but I know that Joe had a soft but compelling voice and spoke of Kerouac with humor, respect, and love. It’s my theory that because they came close later in life, their relationship was less haunted by the memory of the younger Jack.

Kerouac Lives! was such a success that Paul and I decided to do another program the following year. After we had difficulty finding speakers, we decided to do an all-day reading of one of his books. We knew it had to be a Lowell book and chose Doctor Sax as the most

dramatic and innovative. Art Alive! artists (minor arm-twisting applied) and community members volunteered and were assigned pages. The reading began shortly after 1 p.m. and went into the early evening. Readers sat on a red velvet chair and spoke into a microphone attached to an amplifier which rested on a coffee table. The homey feel was completed with a worn Oriental rug and an old-fashioned floor lamp. Listeners came and went throughout the day. It was not the smashing success that the previous year’s event was, but I think we all felt that we had done right by Kerouac and the community.

Because Kerouac had died so young (forty-seven), twelve years after his death many of his friends and family were still alive. In addition to his friend Joe Chaput, I had the opportunity to meet his first wife, Edie Kerouac Parker. Paul called one Saturday afternoon and asked if we’d be interested in meeting her. Of course, we would. We met her at the Town House Motel in Lowell. My first glimpse was of a gray-haired woman with a round face and arresting blue eyes. Lest we mistake her for someone’s sweet grandmother, her first words were “I’ll be ready as soon as I go to the crapper.”

Edie was traveling with a young couple who had driven her east from her home in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Lowell was the last stop on a journey that had included New York City. We went to A. G. Pollard’s, a restaurant and bar on Middle Street. I remember it as one of the few, if not only, places in Lowell at the time that tried to highlight the city’s Victorian architecture.

The young couple seemed happy to get a break from Edie and spent the evening talking to my husband Charlie. Paul and I listened to Edie’s stories. The most startling one was “Well, you know, Ken Kesey stole One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest from Jack.” I remember few of the details (and there were lots) but the gist was that Kesey based his book on Kerouac’s discharge from the Navy in 1943. It’s a less-covered chapter in Jack’s life. The basic facts of Edie’s story are that he enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve on February 26, 1943. After ten days of boot camp, he was in Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. On June 30, 1943, he was officially terminated from military duty “by reason of Unsuitability for the Naval Service.” Edie said that Jack’s story had made its way to Kesey (I assume through Neal Cassady, although Kesey points to a different source for his novel) and became the bestselling book and movie. The novel is really drawn from Kesey’s time as a low-level worker in a psychiatric hospital in California in 1960 when he was a creative-writing student at Stanford University.

In 1985 we moved thirty miles east to Newburyport at the mouth of the Merrimack River. It felt like I was closing a book but keeping a special page bookmarked. Lowell will always feel like home. It is where I learned the challenges of being an artist in our culture, the value of community, and the utter joy of the creative life.

P.S.

I need to say that this is a reminiscence from days past. I still have a soft spot in my heart for the complex, brilliant man named Jack Kerouac, but I was appalled when I tried to reread On the Road a few years ago. Forty years after the days and nights when I could feel Kerouac’s words swirl around me as I walked the streets of Lowell, the callous objectification of women stopped me in my tracks. I was as upset with the old me who read the book without questioning it as I was with the book itself. I am reminded again how slowly the wheel of enlightenment and awareness can turn and I send the next generation my apologies and my hope.

Censorship and Resistance

brian herzog

Editors’ note: Brian Herzog was a reference librarian at the public library in Chelmsford, Mass., in 2011 when he learned about a police officer, off duty, who had confiscated books by Jack Kerouac from the library after Kerouac had become popular due to his novel On the Road in 1957. Blogging as the Swiss Army Librarian, Herzog posted images that tell what happened in 1995 in response to the censorship. Thanks to Brian for allowing us to reprint his blog post and to author Kathy Cryan-Hicks who tipped us off about this remarkable incident. In September 2022, The New York Times reported that “The wave of attempted book banning and restrictions continues to intensify” according to the American Library Association. As of that reporting, 1,651 books had been “challenged” by individuals or in organized campaigns, already more than in 2021.

I think this is incredible, and apparently some of my coworkers knew about it and never told me. I work in the library in Chelmsford, Mass., which is next door to Lowell, the birthplace of Jack Kerouac. As a result, we try to maintain a good Jack Kerouac collection, but one specific book in our collection is particularly special.

The book is The Portable Jack Kerouac, which was donated to the library in 1995 by the grandson of long-time Chelmsford Librarian, Edith Pickles. Just this week a coworker showed me this book—the story Edith’s grandson recounts below in the inscription is just stunning. This is now my favorite story of censorship—and why it is very much the role of libraries to protect the public’s right to unrestricted and unmonitored access to information. I am proud to follow in Edith Pickles’ footsteps.

October 27, 2011

In Memory of Edith M. Pickles

April 14, 1902-February 5, 1995

Asst. Librarian, Chelmsford, Ma.

1949-1959

Head Librarian

1959-1972

Edith Pickles was my grandmother. A reserved, conservative, and very proper lady, she was the Librarian here during the most rapid growth period in the town’s and library’s history. She stoically endured!

Later in life, she shared this story with me. In the late 1950s–early 60s, she was approached one evening at closing time by an off-duty police officer. He asked that she “hand over” the writings of Jack Kerouac, as they were “unfit” to be in a public library. In respect for public authority,

she reluctantly handed over the books.

Although never a fan of Kerouac’s, she later regretted what she had done and realized the implication of it.

In her memory, and in honor of her willingness to acknowledge her mistake, I am giving this book “back” to the public. Maybe Edith and Jack can now relate on another level!

Given by Donny Wilcox and his wife, Islene Runningdeer

Chelsea, Vermont

May, 1995

Damaged Goods

gabriella martins Winner of the 2022 Jack Kerouac Student Writing Contest, Lowell High School

Things will get better with time

Is one of the worst lies

I’ve ever heard

It’s been 4 months

And you probably think that isn’t enough

But I’m sick of waiting

I waited 11 years

To leave a place that brought me tears

And now that I’ve finally left

The cracks in my glass are yet to mend

Maybe I’m just fractured

Maybe I’m as unwanted as damaged goods

Maybe it’s because I’ve been shattered and pieced back together

But nothing ever really stuck how it should

I tried to tell myself that I’m not my past

But that mindset never seems to last

I’m as broken into

As the pointe shoes

That left me black and blue

But I still wore them to please you

Does what happened in my past define my future

Am I really only worth the clearance aisle

50% off on every broken child

50% off on every damaged good

I spent my life on stage

Trying my best to seek praise

Being left out of the limelight

Because I wasn’t a good enough sight

I didn’t speak then but I am now

Because you want to paint me as a villain and somehow

It bothered me to think of what you’d say

I shouldn’t have cared anyway

I thought you might’ve been right

That what happened in my past will always bite

But I refuse to let what happened to me define who I am

You can’t take away what makes me human I am not a damaged good I’m worth more than your snide comments I am not a damaged good And I’m finally being honest

The Valley of the World

james provencher

You wouldn’t know it today if you were Jack Kerouac heading West the first time, entering El Paso along East Alameda, the blink-bright high-arched sky, the whole world opening up. Jack woke shouting to the morning, This is the Valley of the World!

East Alameda goes on for miles, pop up smash repair shops, Quick Loan Bail Bonds, decaying motels and cabins morphing into rooming houses for transients and day workers.

Kerouac was heading west. I am on the Avenue of the World east, where promise peters out and emptiness begins taking over.

Ti Jean

david cappella

I had your visions atop the Medicine Wheel one July afternoon and while driving Rte. 14 through Spotted Horse where I walked past a row of caged coyotes to take a piss. How the American Tao your words captured shined on me one night outside of Sheridan as I sat on a boulder with Jim and viewed the Milky Way while cattle grazed nearby.

It hurts to tell you there are no saints anymore, and not even poets dare use the word “infinity” nowadays. If it appears, it appears in glossy photos from deep space telescopes. No wonder I hear your voice now in the empty, naked sky. I want to cry. There are no angels on the road.

The Americas of Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck

rev . steve edington

This is a slightly adapted version of a presentation given at the National John Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, in August 2022, as a way of linking the Steinbeck Center to the Kerouac Centennial observance.

Iwant to thank the Steinbeck Center for giving me the opportunity to bring the Jack Kerouac Centennial here to your wonderful facility in Salinas. I’ve been delighted and honored to be a part of the Kerouac Centennial observances in Jack’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. So, I bring you greetings from the “Land of Kerouac” here to the “Land of Steinbeck.”

I discovered the writings of Jack Kerouac in the late 1960s, just as his life was tragically slipping away from him due to his alcoholism. A few years earlier, during my English major undergraduate days, I worked my way through much of Steinbeck’s writings.

In the many years that have followed, I’ve become much more well versed in the life, writings, and literary and cultural legacy of Kerouac than I am of Steinbeck. But I’ve spent enough time here in California, around Salinas and on Cannery Row and in Pacific Grove, to get a pretty good Steinbeck vibe.

I’d like to share with you, then, some of the similarities and contrasts I see in these two outstanding 20th century writers, when it comes to the America they saw and wrote about. They were born 20 years apart; Steinbeck in 1902 and Kerouac in 1922. They grew up at opposite ends of the country: Steinbeck in California and Kerouac in Massachusetts. They each become major American writers and novelists. Steinbeck went so far as to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kerouac did not win a Nobel, but as many of us in the Kerouac world see it, Jack Kerouac actually did win the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Nobel Committee just gave it to Bob Dylan instead.

At the advent of the 21st century, several literary organizations and publications, including Modern Library and Time magazine, came out with their lists of the top 100 American novels of the 20th century. The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road made it on to most of such listings.

Much of Steinbeck’s writings are set in pre-World War II America, with a major exception being East of Eden which was published in 1952. Kerouac’s works were published post-World War II and initially aimed at the generation that came of age following that conflict.

Each writer had his literary muse or inspiration who also appears in their works. For

Steinbeck it was marine biologist Ed “Doc” Ricketts of Monterey, California; for Kerouac it was Neal Cassady of Denver, Colorado and Los Gatos, California.

While their writings covered very wide ranges clear across America, their hometowns of Salinas and Lowell provided the spiritual grounding for Steinbeck and Kerouac respectively. Each locale was the writer’s North Star.

Each writer felt a deep affinity with, and a deep attachment to, the land called America, and to the “ordinary folks” who were scattered across its landscape. They wrote of the lives, the struggles, the hopes, and the dashed hopes of persons who were largely overlooked by the wider American populace. They had a real feel for, and a strong sense of connection with, the characters they portrayed.

The major difference I see in the lives and the works of these two quintessential American authors is the set of lenses they were each looking through as they did their writing. They each had their own distinctive line of sight through which they viewed the America of their day. These differing lenses largely had to do with the socio-cultural settings in which the two of them were raised.

While it would not be correct to say Steinbeck came from privilege, he was born and raised in a secure, middle-class setting. His father was a businessperson and a bookkeeper who eventually became Treasurer for Monterey County. His mother was a schoolteacher who left her teaching profession to raise her family. Steinbeck and his siblings grew up in a two-story, well-furnished Victorian house in Salinas. They also had a summer home in Pacific Grove.

While not wealthy, the Steinbeck’s were of a certain status in their community. They were known and well respected. The Steinbeck’s were Episcopalians, with John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck, 1939

later declaring himself an agnostic. Such was the setting within which John Steinbeck shaped and developed the personal identity that he would bring to his writing.

Jack Kerouac was also raised in a nuclear family, but without many of the middle-class attributes or cushions that Steinbeck knew. His parents were French Canadian emigres, having been brought, as infants, from Quebec to Nashua, New Hampshire where they grew up, met, and married. Jack’s father, Leo, had a trade as a printer in Lowell, but lost his business in a flood that devastated the town in 1936. By most counts the Kerouac’s lived in ten different locales in Lowell as Leo Kerouac’s fortunes rose and fell. They were always renters—sometimes it was a house, sometimes a tenement.

Unlike the Steinbeck household, then, the Kerouac home often teetered on the edge of economic security. Leo’s printing business was actually short-lived. He took whatever jobs he could get. And while his parents remained married, there wasn’t a whole lot of closeness in it. They largely lived parallel lives in the same house.

Jack’s mother was a very devout Catholic and saw to it that her son was raised in the faith. Her Catholicism was also her refuge, or her outlet, from a rather perfunctory marriage. Leo Kerouac was also Catholic but did not relate to the faith at the level of his wife.

In this setting there are two notable factors that contributed to the shaping of Kerouac’s identity. One was the death of an older brother from rheumatic fever when Jack was four and the brother was nine. In the Kerouac’s Catholic household his brother, Gerard, became beatified, largely at Jack’s expense. In death Gerard became the Perfect Child to whom Jack would never measure up. This loss, and its effect on Kerouac, is described in his novel Visions of Gerard.

Jack Kerouac, U.S. Navy, 1942

Then there was Jack’s awareness of his French-Canadian roots. Kerouac’s full birth name is Jean Louis LeBris de Kerouac. Jack did not begin speaking English until he was six years old and started school. French was the language spoken in the Kerouac home, and it remained the primary language of his mother. Unlike Steinbeck, then, Kerouac grew up with an awareness that he was outside the mainstream culture of his day. While his high school athletic prowess got him a football scholarship to Ivy League Columbia University, his identity struggle never left him.

Case in point: Writing in one of his journals in 1950, at age 28, Kerouac says: “As a child, trying to become ‘un Anglais’ in Lowell from the shame of being a Canuck; I never realized before I had undergone the same feelings any Jew, Greek, Negro, or Italian feels in America, so cleverly had I concealed them, even from myself.”

“The shame of being a Canuck.” That’s a very telling phrase. Kerouac’s reference to “trying to become ‘un Anglais’” could be read as “trying to become white.” I don’t mean Caucasian white—which Kerouac was—but “white” in the sense of white mainstream culture, from which Kerouac felt alienated on the one hand, while wanting—at times—to fit into it on the other. In a passage in On the Road he refers to himself, in the person of his narrator, Sal Paradise, as a “white man disillusioned” noting that the white world did not offer him enough “joy, kicks and darkness.” While Kerouac, in this passage, displays an enormous amount of racial naivete as to the actual conditions of African Americans in the late 1940s, he is actually projecting his need for an identity onto various racial and ethnic groups.

Kerouac, along with fellow writer, and long-time literary companion, John Clellon Holmes, is credited with coining the term “Beat Generation.” For Kerouac, one definition of “beat” meant persons who had been beaten down, or beaten out to the societal edges, by the mainstream culture of post-World War II America. It was in these persons, who’d been beaten out to the margins, that Kerouac sought to find himself. He later came to connect the term “beat” with “beatitude”—as exemplified by Jesus of Nazareth; a person who, in Jack’s Catholic mind, tried to live a simple life of love and care and compassion as he moved among the fringe, or marginalized, people of his day. In Jesus, Kerouac saw a combination of beat and beatitude.

I’m sure that Steinbeck, like practically all of us, had his personal trials and tribulations, and internal struggles that he wrestled with. But there is very little in his life, that I can see, that would have led him to express sentiments like those of Kerouac’s. I see Steinbeck as writing from a more secure and settled identity. Kerouac is seeking in his writing to answer the “Who am I?” question in a way that Steinbeck did not need to; or at least not to the extent that Kerouac did. Steinbeck wrote from the perspective of someone who knew who he was, while Kerouac kept trying to figure himself out.

Granted, we all encounter the “Who am I?” question at various points in our lives. For Kerouac, however, it was a much more pressing question than it was for Steinbeck.

Kerouac, then, usually writes as a first-person narrator, under various names: Sal Paradise in On the Road, Ray Smith in The Dharma Bums, Leo Percepied in The Subterraneans, and Jackie Duluoz in four of his Lowell-based novels. It is through his narrators that Kerouac seeks his own identity.

Steinbeck, on the other hand, wrote as an omniscient narrator. He describes his characters, their stories, their lives, their struggles from a “God’s eye view” as it were. By

omniscient I do not mean detached. Steinbeck was not detached from the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, or the Trasks in East of Eden, or from Mac and The Boys in Cannery Row; but he did not feel a need to be one of them. He made it a point to spend a lot of time with the kinds of people he wrote about—to get a feel for their lives and all they were dealing with; and to develop a strong sense of empathy for them. He spent time in the Depression Era work camps he describes in The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle. Like Kerouac, Steinbeck based many of his characters on persons he’d met, but in the end Steinbeck’s characters have their lives and he has his.

Kerouac, on the other hand, saw something in two of his iconic characters that he wanted for himself. In his companion of the road, and long-time confidant, Neal Cassady, the shy and repressed Jack saw in Neal a kind of free-wheeling, uninhibited way of life that, in many ways, he envied; even as he was aware of Neal’s often times exploitive and irresponsible side. Neal, as Dean Moriarty in On the Road, is the alter ego to Kerouac’s Sal Paradise. In The Dharma Bums the character of Japhy Ryder—who is Kerouac’s portrayal of poet Gary Snyder—embodies a Buddhist spirituality that Kerouac, in the person of his narrator Ray Smith, wants for himself.

Steinbeck had a deep and long-lasting friendship with Ed Ricketts, similar to what Kerouac had for Neal Cassady. But Steinbeck didn’t need a “piece” of Ed Ricketts, in the way that Kerouac did of Neal Cassady or Gary Snyder.

Okay, let’s get down to a few cases. Even though they wrote from the differing perspectives, Steinbeck and Kerouac, each in their own distinct ways, produced some remarkable American stories. They each held up a piece of America that was largely hidden from mainstream American society. We’ll probe into just a couple of them.

In the early chapters of On the Road Kerouac’s Sal Paradise meets a young Mexican farm laborer, Terry, (her real name was Bea Franco) on a bus ride to Los Angeles. One thing leads to another, and they end up sharing a tent, with Terry’s young son, in a work camp picking cotton. At first Sal/Kerouac thinks he’s found his dream: “We began picking cotton. It was beautiful. Across the fields were the tents, and beyond them the sere brown cotton fields that stretched out of sight to the arroyo foothills and then the snow-capped Sierras in the blue morning air.” For a while there, Sal Paradise thinks he’s actually found Paradise.

Then there is the episode where Sal learns that one of the camp workers had been beaten up: “From then on,” he wrote, “I carried a big stick with me in the tent in case they got the idea we Mexicans were fouling up their camp. They thought I was a Mexican, of course, and in a way I am.”

There’s that identity thing again. The “white man disillusioned” now wants to be a Mexican as Sal Paradise keeps trying to figure out who he is.

In the end it all falls apart. October comes and Sal gets restless to head back East. He’s no Mexican at all. He realizes that Terry’s little boy can pick cotton better than he can. He comes to feel his aches and pains from cotton picking more that he does taking in the beauty of the arroyo foothills and the snow-capped Sierras. He and Terry make vague plans for her to come to New York, even as they both know it won’t happen. The episode closes with Sal saying, “Well, lackaday, I was on the road again.”

There are some very touching moments in this Terry narrative. Kerouac, as Sal Paradise, captures well the plight of the farm laborers—of Terry and her brothers—and even, for a moment, seeks to be one of them. But finally, he has to go. “Everybody goes

home in October” as he puts it.

I can only speculate as to how Steinbeck would have handled this story. Perhaps he, too, would have spent some time in this work camp. Its actual locale was in the town of Selma (Kerouac calls it “Sabinal”), which is about 150 miles east of Salinas. Steinbeck would have told us more about Terry’s life, and what life in the camp was like overall. He would have told of how Terry met up with a handsome white guy from back East who wants to be a part of her life and of her surroundings. But then he breaks her heart when he feels he has to move on. Unlike Kerouac’s Sal Paradise, however, Steinbeck himself would be nowhere in the story.

Moving the focus now to Steinbeck, perhaps his best recognized work is his novella Of Mice and Men. Its story has been recast for the stage, for the movie screen, and for madefor-television dramas. The way Steinbeck takes his readers into the lives of George and Lenny, as well as into the lives of the hobo farm hands with whom they share a bunkhouse, is truly remarkable.

The compassion George has for his strong-as-an-ox, but childishly slow minded companion Lenny, comes through as the plot of the story unfolds; and as the eventual plight of Lenny becomes pretty well foreordained. It’s hard not to weep as the story reaches its terribly tragic, but well-nigh inevitable, conclusion.

Here again, I speculate. This time as to how Kerouac might have put Sal Paradise into the story Steinbeck tells in Of Mice and Men:

“Before I headed back East, I decided I’d try to make enough money to cover my trip so I wouldn’t have had to bother my mother back in New York again for help. I got hired on as a farm hand to do some harvesting up near Salinas. We workers were all housed in this big rickety bunkhouse. The workers were the usual kind of beat characters I’d seen in other such places; just bumming around guys trying to make it from one job to the next. The owner of the place had this attractive, and bored, daughter who seemed to like to hang around the workers, who couldn’t keep their eyes off of her.

“There were these two guys named George and Lenny, who caught my attention. George seemed to have more smarts than any of the other workers, and somehow, he’d found himself as Lenny’s caretaker. Lenny was this big, strong, and rather dim-witted, guy who mostly wanted to please George. I overheard them talking a few times about how they were going to get enough money together to buy themselves a farm and grow their own food, and raise animals and, as Lenny kept putting it, ‘Live off the fat of the land.’ Lenny also kept talking about how, once they got their farm, he was going to take care of the rabbits.

“As soon as I made enough money for a bus ticket back to New York, I took off. Sometimes I wonder whatever became of those two beat characters of the American road.”

To move to another angle: Steinbeck and Kerouac were roundly criticized by the mainstream societal, cultural, political and literary establishments of their day for their two major works, The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road. Steinbeck was castigated by social and political conservatives for presenting what they claimed was a distorted picture of the plight of the American workers he portrayed. He was accused of being a Communist sympathizer. One US Congressman from Oklahoma, who apparently did not like how Steinbeck was treating the plight of some of the residents of his State, said of The Grapes of Wrath: “This book exposes nothing but the total depravity, vulgarity, and degraded

mentality of the author.”

Kerouac fared no better with On the Road. He was seen as the barbarian at the cultural gate, undermining—via his Neal Cassady/Dean Moriarty character—all that was good, right, decent, and proper about 1950s America. Speaking at the1960 Republican National Convention, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warned the nation that the three major enemies of America were, “Communists, eggheads, and beatniks.” Social critic Norman Podhoretz used On the Road as his major case in point in a very mean spirited, small minded, essay, largely directed at Kerouac, entitled The Know-Nothing Bohemians. When Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, was published some six months after On the Road, Time Magazine labeled Kerouac “The latrine laureate of Hobohemia.” (Whatever that was supposed to have meant). This was the same Time magazine that some 50 years later would place On the Road on its list of the top 100 American novels of the 20th century.

But the two writers also had some important advocates. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, responding to Steinbeck’s critics, said that his descriptions of 1930s work camps were very much like the ones she’d visited herself—that he wasn’t exaggerating or distorting anything. And then there was an iconic photograph that made the popular media rounds of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy stretched out on a seat while traveling by plane, reading her copy of The Dharma Bums.

Whoever their detractors may have been, both Steinbeck and Kerouac had a First Lady in their respective corners!

I should also add that Steinbeck, in his lifetime, did gain a significant measure of acceptance and respect in the literary world and establishment, that Kerouac never got in his lifetime. It has only been in the decades since his death that Kerouac has achieved the recognition and the affirmation of his literary skills that Steinbeck got to see what he was still alive.

One case in point: Steinbeck developed a friendship with President Lyndon Johnson, and the Steinbeck’s were LBJ’s guests at the White House on occasions. Johnson even turned to Steinbeck for help in writing his acceptance speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Kerouac never came anywhere close to moving in those kinds of circles.

I’ll move to a close by noting what I consider to be the key passage in On the Road and what Steinbeck’s version of it might have been in The Grapes of Wrath.

The line in On the Road that gets on the posters and T-shirts and coffee mugs is the one that goes, “The only people for me are the mad ones, mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn. burn, like fabulous roman candles…”

It’s a good line, but the key passage in On the Road, as I read it, comes much further along in the book: “Whither goest thou America in your shiny car in the night?” The setting for it comes when four of the novel’s key characters, including Kerouac’s Sal Paradise and Neal Cassady’s Dean Moriarty, have made a completely crazy, cross-country mad dash in a newly purchased 1949 Hudson. They arrive In New York just in time for the onset of the New Year of 1949. They invite “Carlo Marx”—Kerouac’s name for Allen Ginsberg—to join them for a New Year’s get-together.

But instead in getting into the spirit of their mad journey, Ginsberg, as Carlo Marx, takes them to task: “What is the meaning of this voyage to New York? What sort of sordid

business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou?”

Kerouac then adds, via “Carlo,” an additional line: “Whither goest thou America in your shiny car in the night?”

Whether Ginsberg actually spoke those words cannot be determined. But that’s the question, I would offer, that Kerouac and his fellow Beat Generation writers and poets and artists were asking of post-World War II American culture: “Whither goest thou America in your shiny car in the night?”

That is to say: Where are you going now, America, as a world power, with your military strength that includes atom bombs, with all your new and shiny gadgets and gizmos that supposedly improve the quality of your lives, and with your so-called “American Way of Life”? Whither goest thou America, following this horrific War you just won, in your shiny car in the night? What is the meaning of this journey you are now on?

These were the kinds of questions, however, that mainstream American culture did not want to deal with in the 1950s. The cultural imperative was to get back to normal— understandable actually after a Depression and a World War—to find one’s niche, to get the house in suburbia, to settle down and fly right. But beneath that veneer of normalcy was a restlessness, a searching, a nameless kind of energy, that the Beats—for all of their sometimes crazy and sometimes misguided ways—embodied. In an ironic way, J. Edgar Hoover was right: To raise such questions was to be an “enemy” (so to speak) of the kind of America he spoke for.

To ask: “Whither goest thou American in your shiny car?” did have a subversive angle to it; and it was also a question that would gain a great deal of currency, and come up to the surface, as the 1960s got underway and went forward. The Beats were the seeds that produced the flowers of the Sixties.

Turning to Steinbeck, and to the America of which he wrote in the 1930s: He may not have used Kerouac’s imagery of the automobile in the way that Jack did, but to put it in Kerouacian terms, I see the central question in The Grapes of Wrath as: “Whither goest thou America in your beat-up jalopy with its beaten down family that has been driven from its land, and who are pursuing an impossible dream by heading West where they will be terribly exploited? Whither goest, thou, America in your jalopy as it desperately crosses the desert at night searching for an elusive promised land?”

The America’s of John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac. Each writer, with his own style and in his own time, held up a piece of American society that had been largely hidden. This is one of the tasks, one of the callings, of the artist, the poet, and the writer in whatever time and place he or she may be living. In response to the criticism of The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck said: “I’ve done my damnedest to rip a reader’s nerves…I tried to write this book the way lives are being led…”

With their signature works, Kerouac and Steinbeck—each in his own way, and each with his own motivation—ripped at some societal nerves. And the America’s in which they lived and wrote were not quite the same for it thereafter.

In the 100th and 120th anniversaries of their births, we owe Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck our gratitude.

Contributors

Anthony “Tony” Accardi, adjunct professor of English and Journalism at Middlesex Community College, is the former assistant Register of Deeds at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds in Massachusetts.

Susan April grew up in the Highlands section of Lowell and later in the Collinsville area of Dracut, Mass. Her work has appeared in A Tether to This World: Stories and Poems About Recovery and When Home Is Not Safe. She lives in Maryland.

Jay Atkinson’s new book is The Tree Stand, about which Chuck Hogan writes: “The stories of love and loss play like great songs from a favorite radio station, carried on the powerful FM frequency of Jay Atkinson’s clean, precise prose.” Other books include Massacre on the Merrimack: Hannah Duston’s Captivity and Revenge in Colonial America and Paradise Road: Jack Kerouac’s Lost Highway and My Search for America. He lives in Methuen, Mass. His article here about Dylan and Kerouac is reprinted from Boston Magazine with permission of the author.

Javy Awan lives in Salem, Massachusetts. His poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Ghost City Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and the London-based Long Poem Magazine.

Jerry Bisantz is a proud “blow-in” Lowellian by way of Buffalo, N.Y.  Since 2005, he has produced more than 100 writers and playwrights at Image Theater in Lowell. He is a published playwright, an actor, singer, and his two films, Fred and Emile and Memories for Sale, have been in film festivals worldwide. In 2022, he co-produced El Encuentro: The Latino Film Experience film festival.

Joe Blair lives in Iowa where he is an HVAC mechanic. He is the author of By the Iowa Sea: A Memoir, a story about a family in a small town, which Oprah’s magazine “O” described this way: “So raw and true you’ll gasp.” On his Facebook page, Joe posts short prose pieces a few times a week. “Watch Our Show?” is one we wanted our readers to see.

Jonathan Blake of central Massachusetts follows the gospel of his heart. A writer, educator, arts activist/organizer, he teaches in the English department at Worcester State University. His poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, Amoskeag, and The Worcester Review. He has had the privilege of fashioning his public readings in collaboration with fine jazz musicians who also call central Massachusetts home.

Mary Bonina is the author of two poetry collections, Clear Eye Tea and Living Proof, and the memoir My Father’s Eyes, all from Cervena Barva Press. Her completed novel My Way Home is in search of a publisher. She was the finalist for the Goldfarb Prize and is a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, which also awarded her a residency at Moulin à Nef, in Auvillar, France.

David Brow is a retired Lowell Sun photojournalist, having worked for the paper for fifty years. Known for his artistic, social documentary style photography, he won numerous awards including the New England Society of Newspaper Editors’ Master Photographer. Brow connected with people from all walks of life, which earned him the title of “Unofficial Mayor of Lowell.” He was twenty-two years old when he photographed Jack Kerouac’s funeral on his own time. He is archiving images for use in future exhibits and photography books.

Brad Buitenhuys is the co-founder and executive director of Lowell Litter Krewe. He is a member of the City of Lowell’s Conservation Commission and the Lowell Community Preservation Committee. He holds a degree in Civil Engineering from UMass Lowell and a master’s in Construction Management from Wentworth Institute of Technology and is a former AmeriCorps volunteer.

David Cappella has co-authored two widely used poetry textbooks, Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day to Day. His Gobbo: A Solitaire’s Opera appeared as a bilingual Italian edition with Puntoacapo Editrice in 2021. The English edition appeared with Cervena Barva Press in 2022. His novel, Kindling, has been called “a powerful and devastating coming-of-age story.” His current project is a memoir, Tugging the Mayflower Home.

Michael Casey is the author of Millrat: Poems, The 25th Anniversary Edition, and other poetry collections, including There It Is: New & Selected Poems. He is a graduate of Lowell High, Lowell Technological Institute, and the University at Buffalo. The journal about his military experience in the Vietnam War years earned him the Yale Award for Younger Poets (Obscenities, Yale Univ. Press, 1972). His two poems in this issue appeared first in Misfit magazine.

Babz Clough of Lowell is a writer, storyteller, and aspiring poet. She recently spent three months researching her ancestors in Ireland and finding herself. In addition, she regularly participates in StorySLAMs for The Moth, and recently participated in her first Moth GrandSLAM. Her writing has appeared in HerStry blog, Women Under Scrutiny, One Sentence Stories, Ireland of the Welcomes, and Peach Velvet.

David Daniel is the author of more than a dozen books, the most recent being Beach Town: Stories, set on the South Shore of Massachusetts. His novels include White Rabbit, awash in the 1967 Summer of Love, and four entries in the award-winning Alex Rasmussen crime fiction series. He lives in Westford, Mass.

Gregory F. DeLaurier is a retired professor at UMass Lowell (Political Science Department). While much of his previous work has been academic, including the coauthored book The Cotton Dust Papers, which was named an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association, he has also published book reviews and memoirs in The Boston Globe, Boston Book Review, and Peace Review. He writes fiction and memoirs.

Juan Delgado is Professor Emeritus at California State University, San Bernardino, where he chaired the English and Communication Studies departments and served as interim provost. He is the author of Green Web (Univ. of Georgia Press), which won the Contemporary Poetry Prize; El Campo (Capra Press), a collaboration with the Chicano painter Simon Silva; and Rush of Hands (Univ. of Arizona Press). His book Vital Signs, a collaboration with photographer Thomas McGovern, won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award.

Judith Dickerman-Nelson is the author of Spirits Dancing into Light, a poetry book published by Loom Press, and Believe in Me: A Teen Mom’s Story, published by Jefferson Park Press. Her writing has appeared in various journals and anthologies. She lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, with her husband and has two grown sons.

Stephen D. Edington has been a UUA Minister for over 40 years. His books include Kerouac’s Nashua Connection; The Beat Face of God: The Beat Generation Writers as Spirit Guide; and Bring Your Own God: The Spirituality of Woody Guthrie.

Environmental Youth Task Force of the Lowell Parks & Conservation Trust, offered in partnership with Mass Audubon and the Tsongas Industrial History Center, includes Jasmine Puga of Greater Lowell Technical High School, Daniel Guerra of Middlesex Community College, Kevin Hankins of the Innovation Academy Charter School, Noah Logvin of Middlesex Community College, and Kiran Maharjan of Lowell High School. For their project, EnviroScape ®, funded in part by the Smithsonian Institution, they created environmental education models that show how water pollution can be prevented through shared responsibility. The team presented its work in Washington, D.C., last year.

Marie Frank is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Architectural Studies Program at University of Massachusetts Lowell. She holds a doctorate in Architectural History from the University of Virginia. Recent work has appeared in Histories of Architecture Education, Buildings and Landscapes, and The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.

Robert Frost (1874-1963) was born in San Francisco and grew up in Lawrence, Mass. He remained in New England, but in later years kept a winter home in Florida. At his peak fame in the mid-twentieth century, he was the country’s favorite poet, with a world audience as well, having won four Pulitzer Prizes and been awarded forty honorary degrees. His keen examination of nature and people’s lives gives us a poetry that endures. Frost said a poem offers “a momentary stay against confusion.” His poem “A Brook in the City” reprinted here is in the public domain.

Charlie Gargiulo is the author of Legends of Little Canada: Aunt Rose, Harvey’s Bookland, and My Captain Jack, a teenager’s adventures in the last years of Lowell’s Franco-American enclave. The book is due from Loom Press in Spring 2023. His work has appeared in Merrimack Valley Magazine and Résonance online journal at the University of Maine, Orono.

Susan K. Gaylord’s roles in Art are many: artist, teacher, speaker, writer, designer, and publisher. She works in multiple media focusing on sculptural bookmaking and calligraphy. She has exhibited at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, University of Indiana Art Gallery, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and Seungnam South Korea Book Fair. Her work has been featured in 1,000 Artists’ Books, 500 Handmade Books, Cover to Cover, and Handmade Books and Cards. She is internationally known as an advocate for the educational and personal value of simple bookmaking.

Sarah Getty (1943-2009) was born in Illinois and lived many years in Bedford, Mass., where she taught writing workshops for the Bedford Center for the Arts and Bedford Free Library as well as in her home. She also led a workshop in Naples, Italy. Her first book, The Land of Milk and Honey, won a Cambridge Poetry Award in 2002, while her second collection, Bring Me Her Heart, and third book, Clap Hands, earned high praise from reviewers. Her poem “Spring Cleaning” in this issue was introduced at First Parish in Bedford and spread widely in the Unitarian community. Sarah’s husband, David Getty, gave permission to publish the poem.

Áine Greaney is an Irish-born author who lives on the North Shore of Boston. In addition to her published books, her personal essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Boston Globe Magazine, The New York Times, NPR/WBUR, and Books Ireland. As well as writing, she designs and leads creative and wellness-writing workshops at academic and community locations.

Brian Herzog is a former librarian in Chelmsford, Mass., who blogged for a time as the Swiss Army Librarian. He moved on to a library in Ohio in 2020. He kindly gave The Lowell Review permission to reprint a remarkable blog post from 2011 that seemed fitting to include in the second part of our special feature on the Jack Kerouac Centennial.

Ingrid Hess is an award-winning children’s book author and illustrator. Her work focuses on using design to empower young children to make a difference. She has been awarded two Fulbright placements in Ireland (University College Cork, 2022, and Mary Immaculate College, 2018) and two Erasmus placements in Portugal (UMinho, 2019, 2022) She has worked with both Acadia National Park and Wollemi National Park in Australia to teach young visitors about being good stewards of the environment.  She is an associate professor of graphic design at UMass Lowell.

Bob Hodge is the author of Tales of the Times: A Runner’s Story, about his youth in Lowell and his life in athletics. Hodge finished third in the 1979 Boston Marathon and was a member of the U.S. Track and Field and Cross-Country teams in 1982 and 1987. He is the library director in Berlin, Mass.

Richard P. Howe, Jr., co-editor, is the author of Legendary Locals of Lowell and a history of veterans organizations in the city. He co-edited History as It Happens: Citizen Bloggers in Lowell, Mass., featuring the best writing from the first ten years of the popular blog RichardHowe.com

Resi Ibañez is a Filipinx genderqueer writer, maker, and community artist currently based in unceded Pennacook land (Lowell). They have been featured by Mass Poetry, the Emily Dickinson Museum, and the Free Soil Arts Collective of Lowell. Their writing has been published in LOAM magazine, bklyn boihood, and Marias at Sampaguitas. The poem reprinted here appeared in the anthology Writing the Land: Windblown II (NatureCulture, 2022)

Nancy Jasper is a retired clinical social worker, now living in North Andover, Mass., with her partner Janet Egan.  Nancy has published numerous microchaps with the Origami Poems Project.  Her work has also appeared in Leviathan, The Wrack Line, and the Arts League of Lowell’s Shelter exhibition. Nancy and Janet are devoted members of the Untitled Open Mic in Lowell.

Claire Keyes of Marblehead, Mass., is the author of two collections of poetry: The Question of Rapture and What Diamonds Can Do. Her chapbook, Rising and Falling, won the Foothills Poetry Competition. A second chapbook, One Port, was published by Derby Wharf Books. A professor emerita at Salem State University, she has published recently in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Turtle Island, and Tipton Poetry Journal.

David Kriebel is an epidemiologist and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He has been a researcher at the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production from its beginnings and was one of the founders of the Cancer Free Economy Network. He co-authored A Biologic Approach to Environmental Assessment and Epidemiology, with Thomas J. Smith (Oxford Univ. Press).

With Beth Leonard, Gary Lawless co-owns Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, Maine, and is the publisher of Blackberry Books. After graduating from Colby College in 1973, he studied with poet Gary Snyder in California, where he learned of the budding bioregional movement. In 1987, he organized a Gulf of Maine Bioregional Congress, gathering backto-the-land and “green” folks from northern New England and eastern Canada for four days of workshops. His many books carry the theme of ecological integrity and spirit. His poem in this issue is reprinted with permission from Caribou Planet by Gary Lawless (Blackberry Books).

Amanda Leahy is a native of Lowell and a graduate of the MFA writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Thin Air Magazine, Crack the Spine, and MoonPark Review. She lives in Carlisle, Mass.

Rodger LeGrand has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and is the author of the poetry collections Studies for a Self-Portrait (Big Table), Two Thirds

Water and Seeds (both from Flutter Press). His work has appeared in Evening Street Review, The Cortland Review, and the Boston Literary Magazine. He has taught writing at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania and designs curriculum for the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Harvard University.

Shawn Levy is the bestselling author of In on the Joke: The Original Queens of Stand-Up Comedy, The Castle on Sunset, Paul Newman: A Life, and Rat Pack Confidential, among other biographies and pop culture histories. He lives in Portland, Oregon. His poem about the late Mary Fiumara is from A Year in the Life of Death: Poems Inspired by the Obituary Pages of the New York Times (University of Hell Press), which is reprinted with permission.

Amy Lowell (1874-1925) of Boston was from the extended family of high achievers for whom the pioneering factory city of Lowell, Mass., is named. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, she wrote poems, criticism, and a biography and published translations of Chinese poetry. An early Imagist poet who worked in various forms, Lowell is the author of A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds, and Pictures of the Floating World. Her poem “The Pike” reprinted here is in the public domain.

Jacquelyn Malone’s work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cortland Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry Northwest. Three of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she recently won the Tupelo Press broadside award for her poem “Revival at the Diana Church of Christ.” Her chapbook All Waters Run to Lethe was published by Finishing Line Press in 2011.

Paul Marion, co-editor, is the author of Lockdown Letters & Other Poems and Union River: Poems and Sketches and editor of Jack Kerouac’s early writing, Atop an Underwood. He lives in Amesbury, Mass.

Gabriella Martins is a freshman at Lowell High School. She became interested in poetry during a poetry unit in the 8th grade. This poem is about her experience in a toxic environment and learning to value herself after leaving. She won the 2022 Jack Kerouac Student Writing Contest at Lowell High School.

Mike McCormick was born in Washington State, grew up in Haverhill, Mass., and has spent most of his adult life in Alaska. His family concert promotion business, Whistling Swan Productions, has received multiple awards for its hundreds of concerts. Mike’s love for and involvement in music are rooted in his pre-teen years growing up in Haverhill’s Acre.

Ed Meek has had poems in The Baltimore Review, The Sun, and Plume. His latest book of poems is High Tide. He also writes essays, book reviews, and short stories. His collection of short stories is called Luck. He lives in Somerville with his wife Elizabeth and their dog Mookie.

Cheryl Merz has been writing since she was a child. She focuses on poetry because it allows her to create a tableau with language. Inspired by nature and everyday experiences, Cheryl strives to create a strong poetic experience for her readers. In her daily life, she is a school administrator who resides in Lowell.

Gary Metras is a retired educator, having taught high school and college. His poems have appeared in America, The Common, and Poetry. His newest of eight books of poems is Vanishing Points (2021), which was selected as a 2022 Must Read title in the Massachusetts Book Awards. He is a fly-fishing enthusiast who wades the streams of western Massachusetts as often as possible.

Juliet H. Mofford has eighteen books in print, two of which received national awards from the American Association of State & Local History. A former museum educator, she has developed programs and produced plays about the Salem Witch Trials and slavery. Her books include Abigail Accused: A Story of the Salem Witch Hunt and Captain Redlegs Greaves: A Pirate by Mistake (based on her late husband’s Caribbean ancestor) She lives in Maine.

Jennifer Myers was a journalist at the Lowell Sun for more than a decade, where she won nine awards from professional organizations and was the first reporter honored by the New England Society of Newspaper Editors as a “Newsroom Rising Star.” She is the Communications Director for the Lowell Public Schools. As a freelance writer and photographer, she has worked for Harvard Business School, Phillips Academy, and Howl Magazine.

Jack Neary’s plays have been staged across the United States and in Canada. His recent play Trick or Treat was produced off-Broadway and featured NYPD Blue Emmy-winner Gordon Clapp. His thriller Auld Lang Syne was produced by New Century Theatre and Gloucester Stage. Kong’s Night Out was presented at the Lyric Stage in Boston and Michigan’s Meadow Brook Theatre, featuring TV’s Cindy Williams. His short story “The Boss” was named Best Short Story of 2006 by the Catholic Press Association. Jack grew up in Sacred Heart Parish in Lowell.

Ivy Ngugi (Ngo-gee || she/her) is a Kenyan-born writer who is passionate about impacting this world with tools of communication (prose, essay, script, motion and still pictures) and local organizing. She believes in the power of communing as one to communicate and living to trust the noise dormant in our blood. Her Ivy Prints LLC, a publishing & creative marketing agency in Mass., provides multilingual printed & virtual goods and services. Her two poems in this issue are reprinted with permission from All the Peaches & Mangoes I Would Sell for You (ivyprintsllc.com)

In 2022, Wiseblood Books published One Hundred Visions of War, Alfred Nicol’s translation of Julien Vocance’s Cent visions de guerre, a series of haiku, or hai-kai, as he called them, written in the trenches of WWI in 1916. Vocance’s poems, some of the earliest haiku written in the West, break traditional rules, including the requirement that

haiku speak of the beauty of Nature. Alfred Nicol is the author of Animal Psalms, Elegy for Everyone, and Winter Light, for which he won the Richard Wilbur Award in 2004.

Bill O’Connell lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts with his wife, Robin Marion. His most recent book is When We Were All Still Alive, from Open Field Press.  A retired social worker, he runs a handyman business and teaches writing at Greenfield Community College. His previous poetry collections are Sakonnet Point and On the Map to Your Life. A graduate of UMass Lowell, Bill has a master’s degree from Colorado State University.

Ruairi O’Mahony is executive director of the Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy at UMass Lowell (UML). He established a formal sustainability program through the Office of Sustainability in 2014. He has overseen UML’s emergence as a leader in sustainability at the state, national, and international levels. Through innovative partnership programs, Ruairi has positioned the campus as a living lab for climate, energy, and sustainability.

Ricky Orng is a Cambodian American organizer, designer, and storyteller who works with youth groups on arts and social justice projects using photography, film, and poetry. In Lowell, he coached the youth slam team FreeVerse! to the finals at Louder Than the Bomb Massachusetts. A familiar host at Lowell’s Untitled Open Mic, he also organized the long-running Asian American Pacific Islander open mic, East Meets Words. He writes about love and relationships. Ricky tours with Anthony Febo as a duo, Adobo-Fish-Sauce, a multi-sensory cooking-poetry show.

Jason O’Toole is a member of the North Andover, Mass., Poet Laureate Committee, and a founder and judge of the Anne Bradstreet Poetry Contest. The author of two collections of poetry, his work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Boog City, and Loud Coffee Press. He was the vocalist for the N.Y. Hardcore Punk band Life’s Blood and continues to collaborate with musicians such as Alec K. Redfearn and Miro Snejdr.

Carla Panciera’s Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir is due from Loom Press in Spring 2023. She has published two collections of poetry; the most recent is No Day, No Dusk, No Love. Her first story collection Bewildered received AWP’s 2013 Grace Paley Prize. She lives in Rowley, Mass.

Dawn Paul is the author of two novels, Still River and The Country of Loneliness and a chapbook of poems about scientist Carl Linnaeus, What We Still Don’t Know. She is working on a collection of poems about the Great Marsh, a salt marsh that originally stretched along the southern New England coast, of which remnants remain. She lives in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Louise Peloquin was born at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Lowell where her father, Laval U. Peloquin, was a physician. Her mother, Marthe Biron Peloquin, a community leader, transmitted to her a passion for the French-Canadian bilingual heritage. She studied at

Assumption and Middlebury colleges and the University of Paris and enjoyed a career in France, where she published two books. Her novel about a Catholic boarding school in the 1960s is forthcoming. She writes from Groton, Mass., and Paris.

Sanary Phen is a poet, writer, and storyteller born in a refugee camp in Thailand during the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia. She and her family emigrated to the U.S. in 1981 and resettled in Lowell, which has been her home for more than 35 years. At the Coalition for Better Acre in Lowell, she is the Workforce Development Coordinator. She is a committed volunteer for the Cambodian American Literary Arts Assoc. in Lowell. Her poem reprinted here first appeared in the anthology Writing the Land: Windblown II (NatureCulture, 2022)

Chath pierSath is a farmer in Bolton, Mass., whose most recent book of poems is On Earth Beneath Sky, which received a Must-Read shout out in the Massachusetts Book Awards. A self-taught painter, he has shown his work in Paris, New York City, and Phnom Penh.

A poet and photographer, James Provencher was born in grew up in Portland, Maine.  He served as an Army journalist and worked in the Artist-in-the-Schools Program in Maine and Florida. A resident of Australia since 1986, he was active in the Sydney Perfomance Poetry scene and also a poet-in-residence at the Winona School and the Castle Crag Glenaeon School.

A former magazine editor, Emilie-Noelle Provost is the author of The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade sea-monster adventure tale set on the New England coast. Her new novel is The River Is Everywhere, the coming-of-age story of a Franco-American teenager. When she’s not writing, she can often be found vacuuming up cat fur or hiking in the White Mountains.

Photographer and writer Paul H. Richardson, born in Lowell, attended the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he studied Comparative Literature, and the University of Grenoble in France. He pursued photography at the Essex Photographic Workshop in Essex, Mass. His work can be seen at paulhrichardsonphotograpy.com

Steven Riel is the author of two books of poetry: Fellow Odd Fellow (Trio House) and Edgemere (Lily Poetry Review Books). His most recent chapbook Postcard from P-town was published as runner-up for the inaugural Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. Riel is editor-in-chief of the Franco-American online literary journal Résonance at UMaine Orono.

Juliette N. Rooney-Varga is an internationally recognized expert in climate change and sustainability. Through her research, advocacy, and educational efforts, she is teaching— at the state, national and international levels—what it takes to understand and take action to mitigate climate change. She develops interactive simulations for her work at UMass Lowell, where she is a professor of environmental science, directs the Climate

Change Initiative, and co-directs the Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy. These simulation-based, interactive approaches enable decision-makers at all levels of society to learn about the complex climate and energy systems.

J. D. Scrimgeour is author of two books of nonfiction and five books of poetry, the most recent being the bilingual collection, 香蕉面包 Banana Bread (Nixes Mate). His essay collection Themes for English B won the AWP Award for Nonfiction. Recent work appears in The AWP Chronicle, The Common, Fourth Genre, and The Lily Poetry Review. “Racist” is from a manuscript of short stories, Hit By Pitch, that explores the dynamics of race and class in a small Massachusetts city using the lens of youth baseball.

Chaz Scoggins of Lowell and Florida reported on the Boston Red Sox for the Lowell Sun for 40 years, and last fall hung up his last scorecard after 44 seasons as the official scorer at Fenway Park. The Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy offered best wishes to Chaz with this note: “Scoggins scored 1,895 MLB games, including 15 World Series games. That’s a lot of phone calls to the press box from angry infielders who think that every error was really a base hit.” Now billed as a historical novelist, Scoggins is the author of several WWII-based books, among them JV-44 and The Dark and Wrathful Skies. His Bricks and Bats is a history of professional baseball in Lowell, 1870 to 2000.

Ellsworth Scott has published poems widely since graduating from the MFA writing program at the University of California, Irvine, in 1984. He lived in Jinzhou, China (19851988), Kyoto, Japan (1989-2004), and various places in the U.S., ending up in Baltimore, Maryland, where he is a tutor for Baltimore County Public Schools, working one-on-one with students too sick to go to school.

Tom Sexton is the author of many collections of poetry including Li Bai Rides a Celestial Dolphin Home and Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems. He is a former Poet Laureate of Alaska and a Distinguished Alumnus of Lowell High School.

Bunkong Tuon, a Cambodian American writer and critic, is the author of Gruel, And So I Was Blessed (both published by NYQ Books), The Doctor Will Fix It and Dead Tongue. His debut novel, Koan Khmer, is forthcoming from Curbstone/Northwestern University Press. His prose and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, and Paterson Literary Review. He teaches at Union College, in Schenectady, N.Y.

Cornelia Veenendaal, a former teacher at UMass Boston, is one of the founders of Alice James Books. Her four collections of poems are The Trans Siberian Railway, Green Shaded Lamps, What Seas What Shores, and An Argument of Roots. She lives in the North Country of New Hampshire, where she is finishing a fifth manuscript.

Scottish by birth, now living mainly in France, Roger West is a poet, singer, performer, and songwriter—and a punk long before and long after it was fashionable. He performs at poetry festivals, including in Massachusetts where he has a number of poet friends. He has been at the Kerouac festival in Lowell a few times.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) of Haverhill and Amesbury, Mass., is best known for his long poem Snow-Bound, about a rural family riding out a blizzard The book earned Whittier at least $10,000 in royalties, selling at $1.25 per book (he didn’t get $1.25 each). The son of farmers, he had made his own way as a writer. In his time, he went on to rank among the poets Longfellow and James Russell Lowell. He was a close friend of and editorial collaborator with writer Lucy Larcom who had worked in the Lowell textile mills when young. A politically active Quaker who served in the Massachusetts legislature, Whittier was a fierce abolitionist who for a time edited the anti-slavery newspaper The Middlesex Standard in Lowell. In Pennsylvania, where he edited another abolitionist paper in 1838, a mob set fire to his office while chanting “Hang Whittier.” His poem “The Kansas Emigrants” reprinted here is in the public domain.

John Wooding is the author of The Power of Non-Violence: The Enduring Legacy of Richard Gregg and co-editor of Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell and the sequel, Atlantic Currents II. The president of Mill City Grows, an urban food justice program in Lowell, he lives in Medford, Mass.

Fred Woods has appeared in the first three issues of The Lowell Review. He moves between Cambridge, Mass., New Mexico, and Seattle. A retired lawyer, filmmaker, and political wise man, he travels east and west with his wife, Nancy Wells Woods, and on occasion sails the Atlantic off Cape Ann in the Bay State.

The cover artist for this issue is Nancy Wells Woods, who worked for the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, on the Lowell Park trolley system and later with the National Park Service. A lifelong photographer, she started watercolor sketching ten years ago to document her travels. She lives in Cambridge, Mass., and elsewhere, and served as a trustee of the Cambridge Public Library.

Thomas Wylie of Bradford, Mass., is a member of the Haverhill River Bards. He is the author of Cold Car and a faculty member at Northeastern University’s Graduate School of Education. His career began as a teacher with the Peace Corps in the Philippines.

The Lowell Review brings together writers and readers in the Merrimack River watershed of eastern New England with people everywhere who share their curiosity about and passion for the small and large matters of life. Each issue includes essays, poems, stories, criticism, opinion, and visual art.

In the spirit of The Dial magazine of Massachusetts, edited by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1840s, The Lowell Review offers a space for creative and intellectual expression. The Dial sought to provide evidence of “what state of life and growth is now arrived and arriving.”

This publication springs from the RichardHowe.com blog, known for its “Voices from Lowell and beyond.” In America, the name Lowell stands out, associated with industrial innovation, working people, cultural pluralism, and some of the country’s literary greats.

Anthony “Tony” Accardi

Susan April

Jay Atkinson

Javy Awan

Jerry Bisantz

Joe Blair

Jonathan Blake

Mary Bonina

David Brow

Brad Buitenhuys

David Cappella

Michael Casey

Babz Clough

David Daniel

Gregory F. DeLaurier

Juan Delgado

Judith Dickerman-Nelson

Stephen D. Edington

Environmental Youth Task Force

of the Lowell Parks

& Conservation Trust

Marie Frank

Robert Frost

Charlie Gargiulo

Susan K. Gaylord

Sarah Getty

Áine Greaney

Brian Herzog

Ingrid Hess

Bob Hodge

Richard P. Howe, Jr.

Resi Ibañez

Nancy Jasper

Claire Keyes

David Kriebel

Gary Lawless

Amanda Leahy

Rodger LeGrand

Shawn Levy

Amy Lowell

Jacquelyn Malone

Paul Marion

Gabriella Martins

Mike McCormick

Ed Meek

Cheryl Merz

Gary Metras

Juliet H. Mofford

Jennifer Myers

Jack Neary

Ivy Ngugi

Alfred Nicol

Bill O’Connell

Ruairi O’Mahony

Ricky Orng

Jason O’Toole

Carla Panciera

Dawn Paul

Louise Peloquin

Sanary Phen

Chath pierSath

James Provencher

Emilie-Noelle Provost

Paul H. Richardson

Steven Riel

Juliette N. Rooney-Varga

J. D. Scrimgeour

Chaz Scoggins

Ellsworth Scott

Tom Sexton

Bunkong Tuon

Cornelia Veenendaal

Julien Vocance

Roger West

John Greenleaf Whittier

John Wooding

Fred Woods

Nancy Wells Woods

Thomas Wylie