Summertime

Padanarum, Mass. 1955

This might very well be us at our next to last destination. Before we rented the farmhouse in Acoaxet, we did what my Mother called a Gypsy’s progress, staying with friends all up the Eastern Seaboard. She was a pro, getting out a folding card table at Christmas time and sending three hundred cards out. It took several days and is a task I can barely imagine and couldn’t begin to do. One of the payoffs was being able to drop in on people we rarely saw the rest of the time.

I only remember Glen Cove on Long Island, near New York City and the model when I’m reading for the setting in New Yorker short stories; big prosperous looking houses on shady streets, made for the big families in the early Twentieth Century. Fireflies, kids running everywhere even at night, like Halloween.

In the photo, Dad is forty two only eleven years older than my youngest Gloria who is thirty one. Makes almost no sense. Only thing equally absurd as that, is the eight year old me, a year after first communion and confessing "sins". It was assumed you had sinned during the week. Have been trying to remember what I came up with. Blanko. Here are some early stabs at sin by a friend: Jessica Ruby Radcliffe:

"yelled at my brother. " "disobeyed Sister Paul Adele "" took 2 cookies" and my two cents: I took burning forever as seriously as possible. My sister had no problem...just go to confession. Yeah but that is on next Saturday, until then I am vulnerable. It's Tuesday. ..just say a sincere act of contrition....not so easy if you get squished by a streetcar...The flames seemed mighty nigh, being as an angry nun had dictated in loud terms that kissing was a venial sin but French kissing was a mortal sin. I had kissed exactly one person at that time. Charlotte Dorsey made a plan to leave recess early and kiss in the cloakroom. Which we did. Trouble was, no one showed up. More kissing. Then the search for where our classmate had gone, ending in a different room.

When we drove up North in the Summer we always stopped at Howard Johnson's. A treat because we never went any other time and it was the only kid friendly restaurant in business with paper placemats modeled on the children's activity feature in the Sunday paper. I remember crayons that went with. Checking online I only find ones that are maps.

One was for the Deep South, a term I found spooky; no one could tell me what was so Deep about it. The other ‘only on that trip’ item was visiting my Mother's Father in Baltimore, something I never thought odd until recently writing these notes. We went to Charlottesville where her Mother lived more than once a month sometimes. That was because she was worried about her
Mother's health. Personally I thought staying in bed listening to the radio was kind of cool.

The Deep South

Flannery O'Conor remarked that “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

As a kid I never could get a satisfactory answer to what was so Deep about it. There were undertones. The Spanish Moss hanging from the trees wasn't reassuring. Something about 'our peculiar institution' was supposed to be a hint. All I know was that it felt like going in back in time to go even as far as Virginia.

Somebody’s idea of good clean fun

58 Chevrolet Yeoman (AKA the El Strippo) the car I learned to drive on. Thrifty Waspmobile, I don't think it had a radio.

. The only other one I saw on the road was the liquor store delivery wagon which my Mom drove home by accident one day when she was out doing errands. Wonder how many other GM cars her key worked on. She was so upset, had never accidentally stolen a car before.

And it was the same one that came to the house faithfully on Friday. Mom would put two checks on the kitchen counter for Lilliebelle to give to the delivery man. His check was for $32, her's was for #25. I found this concerning even as a little kid. In 1954 $32 amounts to $$381.61 Is that what two people spend today a week on liquor? Anyway $25 converts to $298.14 which works out to $7.25 hr. Maybe the liquor store guy didn't come every Friday, I was seven. Doubt you could find a maid today for minimum wage. Three times that is normal now

One day there was an opossum in the wisteria vine over the back porch. Lilliebelle went and got a broom and a big pot and gave Mr. Opossum a poke with the broom whereupon he played dead and flopped over on the brick wall. His prehensile tail which was hanging over the side hadn't gotten the message and carefully wound itself around the broom handle, then Mr. Opossum was swiftly transferred to the pot and got a ride home on the bus and was never seen again. I was probably eight. I looked at Lilliebelle differently after that. She was sweet, dignified and the first adult I knew who killed their food.

We ate behind the door to the kitchen until we were seven, birthdays included. I longed to be promoted to the grown up table only to find out it was a lengthy hour plus affair with wine and conversation. Also a glass table top making it harder to hide some of the grownup food.

Lilliebelle had a sign in the laundry room which was also her room that said BE STILL. That puzzled me. She was high up in the church and pointedly let me know what she thought of having to go to a man to get your sins forgiven. At her church you went to God yourself. A heady concept.Where we went much more talk about Mary the Intercessor. She would plead your case to Jesus. God was in the background.

I painted an enormous wave, a single wave on one wall of a her bathroom. This was the person who knew who I was on a day to day basis. She was much older than my Mother almost sixty so had a grandmother’s perspective but without the family ties. We had long conversations. Sam Cook was still doing church music. And Gabriel Heater declared the evening news about the war like a sermon or a town crier. We still didn’t have a television and wouldn’t until I was ten. This was my only peek out of the world in my house.

There’s my sister Deborah making a rare appearance in these notes. She showed up one day not two months after I was adopted and only two months old at that. I went into the garden and got some rocks and put them in her crib. And that is how Deborah ended up on the bad list. It wasn’t her fault, not that that did her any good.

It was a huge adjustment to be whisked away from this big building and small garden with a patch of grass, with rose bushes around the border behind a tall black wrought iron fence. I had never seen women with makeup, red lips, fur coats, perfume, never been in a car and never seen men. My Father never went to the adoption home. “You were your Mother’s project.” Men registered as a different species with their chest voices and stilted way with small children.

Kennedy called Washington a city of Northern hospitality and Southern efficiency. Few things illustrate it better than D.C.’s method of snow removal. They would open up the back of the garbage trucks and a crew of four or five guys would follow along making two tracks for the cars in the snow which was the consistency of 7-11 Slushie. No better was the plan for regular garbage pick up.

The trucks had the same profile as the ones today but with no fancy compactor on the back, just a simple box open on the top. No front loader as in the photo but the height of the box is right. One guy would straddle the edge and catch the heavy galvanized steel cans, smash them on the edge, empty them and toss them back down. The garbage cans developed an hour glass waist as a result. The whole time there was a field holler going on in a high pitch Gullah tenor. Magnificent, I want to be a garbage man.

Summer 1956-1957

Edgartown Harbor.

Walter Cronkite's big sailboat was anchored there. We took the ferry to Edgartown where there was still a blacksmith (with spreading Oak tree) I was very impressed by that, being a firebug and put it on the list of things to do. So far I had only gotten as far nearly setting the attic on fire when the can of white gas tipped over just as I lit a big kitchen match to light the burner for my toy steam engine. If it were not for a mattress handy by it could have been bad.

Thought of that scene with the blacksmith working by the open door in the shade of the big tree when I built a prehistoric forge. Rather than build up, I dug a trench and covered it with two slab with a semi circle cut out on each and placed them together and placed a cast iron drain cover over the hole. Then, since I didn’t know what I was doing I put electric blower way too strong and created blast furnace temperatures which was ok for what I was doing, I just had to hold the piece further away. The drain cover melted. Fantasy fulfilled never the less.

Remember the adults complaining that the Kennedys drove too fast. This was in 1957 and 8. I was ten and eleven and spent June and July with at our next door neighbors house on Chappaquiddick.

It was two hundred years old and had a hand pump for water in the kitchen. The beginning of summer ritual was to repaint the floors that had gotten scratched up by last year's sandy feet. This meant painting them medium grey and then dripping black and white enamel. The effect was an awful lot like a Jackson Pollack. Some say that's where he got the idea.

Two old sisters lived across the road. People had given them stoves and refrigerators as they replaced theirs so that the house was a living museum of appliances from the thirties and forties.

They still cooked on a wood stove which I knew about but had never seen and they still used an icebox. There was one at my Grandmother's house when I was little and I took to calling refrigerators iceboxes because I liked the word, two three letter syllables just doing their job and partly because I couldn't get my mind around the "re" part of re-frigerate. What was "re" about it, it's not as if it or the stuff in it was cold to begin with, with the exception of ice cream.

There was a hay barn and they had a cow and chickens, guinea hens and a few pigs. It's where my mind's eye has gone ever since if I am reading and the scene is a barn yard.

One day we were back further on the property and had gotten hot and sweaty trying to start a roto-tiller that we found. Not sure what we were going to do if it started but we gave up before we were able to.

There was a barn with no windows nearby. I opened the door. It was three feet thick. Inside was totally dark made darker by the bright summer day. What light filtered in from the door revealed a mountain or ziggurat bristling with hay. It was the ice. Two foot blocks a foot thick stacked as high as the eye could see, if it had been the Tower of Babel I don't think I would have been more amazed. How could it have lasted this long, since last winter and with no electricity?

I adored my friend's father, who was our next door neighbor in Washington.A little awkward since I didn't get on with my father. Uncle Sherman had us do things like re-shingle the house, And the next year paint it. Big fun, if you are ten and eleven. One day he took us down across a little bridge and had us wreck a small shack. Just dropped us off and came back later. No worries about be careful, don't do this, don't do that. I remember hearing comments about how the Kennedys driving too fast. I think there was a bad accident. Someone hit their head on the door frame and died.

This was in 1957 and 8 so I barely knew who they were accept one of them was a state representative, John. Years later I realized that that little shack and bridge were the site of Ted Kennedy's disaster, where he drove into the water and his assistant Mary Jo Kopechne drown.

I got the first case of Rocky Mountain spotted fever on the East Coast. It's transmitted by ticks that have been on an infected rabbit. So on day one I felt like I was coming down with something followed by three days of lying in bed reading comics, then thinking it's over and feeling fine after a day or two and on the fourth day starting all over. It felt like a run of the mill flu, the bad part was getting my hopes up every time I got better and back down again for most of two months. I still remember how much I did not want to go home to Washington when asked.

I never wanted to see another comic in my life and I haven't to this day. The fevers wound down after nearly two months and were gone for good.

I kept wondering where the idealized lithe athletic bodies came from when I started working in clay, thinking I had become a follower of Rodin. About fifteen years in it hit me......it was those comic book heroes shaking off forty years of being ostracized.

The Andrea Doria sunk that first Summer. Bits of wreckage washed up on the beach. I’m going to shoe horn this account of a more recent wreck the Concordia simply because I love the element of the magician’s assistant trapped in a magic cabinet and the magician absconded.

"Yeah, the Captain said the rock was not on the chart….er, how about the lighthouse?

Passengers and crew of the ill-fated Costa Concordia have spoken of their horror after the luxury Italian cruise liner ran aground. Of the 4,200 people on board, a British cruise ship magician’s assistant was stuck in a magic box when the Concordia crashed in rocks off the Tuscan coasts, while others were toasting to their wedding anniversary.

Entertainer Rosalyn Rincon, 30, of Blackpool found herself in a predicament as the ship crashed. The magician’s assistant was trapped inside a trick box onstage in front of a room full of spectators when a crunch sounding like an “earthquake” was heard at around 9.30pm on Friday. The lights went out, the music stopped and she struggled to get out of the box, Miss Rincon’s mother told reporters. Then a pile of other props fell on her box as the ship began leaning over in the water. No mention of the magician. Maybe she is so happy to be alive she gives him a pass. Her mother didn't believe her when she called, 'thought she was being dramatic" because she was an actress and "you don't hear about ships sinking like that these days"

In 1956 the Andrea Doria which got broadsided by the SS Stockholm. Linda Morgan was fourteen and was tossed from one ship to the other suffering only a broken arm. I was nine and pieces of the Andrea Doria washed up on the beach on Chappaquiddick.

http://patch.com/.../new-images-sunken-andrea-doria...

Swimming pool, Andrea Doria

A conversation with my friend BMT:

Captain was showing off to a lady friend in the bridge, claimed the charts were wrong

BMT: sailors have been charting these waters before the Roman Empire, I bet every rock, pebble, reef and sandbar has been charted for the past 2500 years

DH: Do you remember the Andrea Dorea in 56? Stuff washed up on the beach where I was on Chappaquiddick

BMT: Yes the Andrea Dorea outside New York harbor in the fog a smaller ship the Stockholm (Ice breaker hull) crashed in to the side of The A.D. and that was the end of the A.D. sunk the next day, The Captain stayed on his ship, was the last one to leave.

Earworm worthy peak New England names: Squibnocket. That’s the kind of name that I say over and over if I’m doing repetitive work like house painting or sanding. Squibnocket.

Gladys and Tillie Jeffers

Can’t believe I found this. So much for ‘lost in time’

https://www.mvtimes.com/2015/09/09/the-jeffers-of-chappaquiddick/

The way people used to talk about Tillie and Gladys Jeffers, it was as if they were one person. They were sisters, Wampanoag Indians born on Chappaquiddick at the end of the 1800s, and they lived most of their long lives together in the family farmhouse just off the main road with their stepmother, Sally Jeffers. Glady’s son, Jerry, lived there, too. My mother knew the Jeffers from the time she was a little girl. Later, my family rented a cottage from them, and then bought a piece of their land for a summer house.

The Jeffers’ farmhouse was always our first stop when my family arrived in the summer. They stopped whatever they were doing — cooking or washing or ironing — and came out to greet us. If it was a sunny day, the yard was white with sheets billowing from the clotheslines beside the house. We entered through the back hallway where two old wringer washers churned away. The hallway walls were lined with shelves on either side, full of canning jars and other bottles, and old pots and pans.

The kitchen was small, seemingly too small to produce all the food that came out of it — they cooked for other people, too. An old black stone sink, with a hand pump still in use when I was little, stood below the room’s only window. Opposite the sink was a newfangled electric stove, which didn’t seem to be used as much as the big kerosene cook stove in the front room. Off the kitchen was a pantry room with a huge freezer chest and shelves of canned vegetables and jellies. The house had an unmistakable aroma of laundry soap, kerosene, and long-simmered food that I would know if I smelled it now, more than 30 years since I was last in the house.

We always went into the front room, where Gladys brought extra wooden chairs, and Tillie carried a tray of tea or beach plum cordial and a plate of cookies or their own rum-soaked fruitcake. Sally sat in the cushioned wooden armchair, beneath the picture of her husband Moses with his team of oxen, where later Tillie would sit. Then we’d catch up on all the news, as if they had nothing more important in the world to do than visit with us.

Sally originally came to the island to cook for a summer family. She stayed and married Tillie and Gladys’s father after their and their brother Jesse’s mother died. Sally was a force of her own: powerful, leather-skinned and fierce — not someone to be trifled with. Once when she thought I was too old to be sucking my thumb, she offered to show me her drawer of thumbs, saying she was going to add mine to it. Everyone called her Mrs. Jeffers; some called her the “Holy Terror.” But we never left the Jeffers’ house without a gift of food and a sense of having come home.

Though Sally worked her stepdaughters hard, she worked just as hard herself until she was ancient. Then she mostly sat in the armchair in the front room. Whenever she’d hear a car pass, she’d lean forward and reach out a clawlike hand to lift the curtain aside. She always knew whoever was driving by and what their business was. And everyone knew Sally; most likely she had cooked or cleaned for them or done their laundry sometime in her life.

The Jeffers grew acres of corn, beans, and potatoes, and ran a popular restaurant called the Chappaquiddick Outlook until the early 1960s. There were three dining rooms, each with a big family-size table, set with blue Willow Ware dishes — some of which Tillie and Gladys later gave me when I built my house down the road. Every Sunday evening we would meet our cousins there. It was the high point of the week. Sally did the cooking, and Tillie and Gladys served and cleaned up with such grace and hospitality. It was as if we were their honored guests.

After the restaurant closed, my family would go by the farmhouse every Sunday afternoon to pick up our “Jeffers’ dinner,” packed up in worn pots and pans. There would be a well-roasted meat, riced potatoes, sweet tomato and bread casserole, a vegetable that had been simmered in butter for hours, and always a pie — apple or blueberry.

When I was a kid, my siblings or cousins and I would pick buckets of lowbush blueberries out at Wasque and take them to Tillie and Gladys, who would make them into huge mouthwatering pies for us. There never seemed to be any money exchanging hands between the Jeffers and my family, but there must have been some accounting at the end of the summer. However, many things were just gifts and favors between us.

One summer, my father and some other men reshingled the Jeffers’ roof, and during other summers, he helped shore up the old barn where our pony stayed when Tillie and Gladys looked after him during the winters.

There was one other room downstairs in the farmhouse, one that we never went into. It was where Tillie and Gladys did the ironing. They had a machine called a mangle that pressed the sheets and all the linen. I used to imagine getting caught in it and coming out flat as a cartoon roadrunner. The only time we were allowed in that room was to see Gladys once when she was recuperating from an illness.

Tillie and Gladys slept up a steep, narrow staircase in two small dark and simple rooms with not much more than a bed and dresser in each. I don’t remember why I went up there when I was grown, but being upstairs felt almost like doing something forbidden. For many years I had vivid dreams that took place in those rooms.

As I got older, in my twenties, I saw less of Tillie and Gladys. But one Halloween when I was living on the island, my sister, a friend, and I dressed up in all the odd bits of clothing we could find around my parents’ house and went over to the Jeffers’. They didn’t seem to know what to make of the strangely dressed characters on their back stoop, and stood there looking at us anxiously. When they finally realized who it was, they laughed hard and invited us in for beach plum cordials. Later, when my husband and I got married on the island, they were part of the ceremony’s big circle of family and friends on the green grass of Wasque Farm.

Gladys died first. I remember visiting Tillie in the farmhouse soon after, and having the thought that it must be hard not to have anyone around to say your name out loud. I couldn’t imagine her feeling sorry for herself, though. She kept cooking and ironing, and kept the farmhouse going.

I was glad that Tillie lived long enough to see my first baby — the fifth generation of my family to know her. I remember Tillie standing there in the warm aromatic kitchen, an apron tied over her flowered dress, as always, hair pulled back in a bun and smiling as she cradled my daughter in her strong warm arms.

Canoe Caper & School Days

Dick's Mother was taking us out to dinner. There was no reason that she should but we were hoping she definitely wouldn't look down at the canal because that is where we had moored, well, chained a canoe to a tree that was growing on a little bit of dry ground at the bottom of a stone wall which we then climbed up. . This was our way of securing it so nobody would steal it.

His Mother had rented it for us several hours before but we went the easy direction with the wind and current all afternoon and then decided to ditch the canoe rather than have to paddle all that way back.

Dick was always good for schemes like this. His Dad had died when he had car trouble crossing the desert out west. Whether this was a factor in his endless plotting or whether he would have done these things anyway, it was anybody’s guess.

I however, couldn’t resist having a look down at the spot. I was just in time to see the not so little tree fall over on to two canoes, the abandoned one and right next to it the one from the boatyard carrying the guy who got stuck with retrieving the canoe. Made me wince; if we’d passed seconds earlier I was sure the falling tree would have caught his Mother’s eye.

She had waited hours for our return to the rental place so she could have a ride in the canoe. I was in awe. No long lecture. Dinner.
There was a hatch in the closet of his room that let on to the roof which gave on to the roof of a out of business warehouse; handy for hurling grocery bags of heavy snow down at cars down below.

This was a one time affair because, after a half hour of mayhem, we tagged the windshield of a city trash truck and a short time later a small black foreign car drove up and a lot of cops jumped out circus style. They of course couldn’t get into the warehouse which was not in use so we got away with it that time.

The windows on the side of the house are making a surprise face. My window would be the right eye. One summer seven stewardesses rented the house across the way. Rushing in for a quick shower and then changing their clothes and rushing out again, sometimes twice daily. With seven of them this could afford hours of entertainment as they had no time it seemed to deal with the Venetian blinds. (forgive me I was twelve)

Our house has peeling white paint which was a style I didn't quite get as a child in any case our version was more like worn out white paint. The truly crusty versions have the gruesome name, bleeding brick. At the end of the alley was a partly burned down house that smelled of wet charred wood. People still lived there. The impression I got was that the straight and narrow was indeed very narrow

Jackson School in the next block. I went to kindergarten here. I thought the witch hat architecture made it look sinister like an orphanage. Indelible memory: This was where Charlotte Dorsey who went on to be a successful model in Milan, plotted to give me a kiss in first grade. Her plan was that we'd go in ahead of the class which changed rooms after recess and kiss in the cloak room

.

. A good plan except the class never showed up, they all went to a different room that day. So a kiss turned into many and then we, somewhat sheepishly, had to go find where the class went.
There are so few children in that part of town that it is now an art center and there is grass under the swings in the park across the street.

Right next door was a school for deaf children. You could see a teacher ringing a bell and yelling a word at a student right across from her at the desk. They filed to the park across the street single file with the right hand on the shoulder of the one in front, chain gang style. This was not a helpful memory when I found out my son was deaf.

Where I waited for the school bus. I can only remember it cold. I like the Maxfield Parrish sky in this picture. This was also the site where Dick and I found out that if, say, a car should run into the whole neighborhood's bundle of Sunday's newspaper, they don't just scatter as you would expect, they explode covering the entire intersection in a second.

This looks exactly as it did when my school bus parked here at night. I lived a block away so I was the first on and the last off. I thought I could get some extra time in the morning by chaining the bus to an anchor chain fence. Being as it was parked at a gas station they cut the chain in two minutes, I'm lucky Russell didn't pull the fence down. I tried again by letting the air out of the tires. The result was the same.

I thought this bank looked like an elephant. If I am reading fiction or a news story set in a bank this is the one that the action takes place in. It was part of errands with my Mother.

i wasn't sure how things fit together. The neighborhood had been prosperous then poor and was still changing back in 1949, so that artifacts from the poor period were still everywhere. Winos would be laid out on the ground a block away. There was a rendering plant so the smell of boiled horse drifted over town sometimes getting pretty far up the hill.

One of the last times I was there with my Mother we saw John Foster Dulles who was wearing bed room slippers "Poor man, he has gout"

Longfellow School for Boys, Bethesda Maryland

When we got there in the Fall there would be a motley pile of football uniforms , all sizes, shapes and colors. I thought we looked like the team from a bargain juvenile delinquent home, possibly an orphanage. We lost every game. In every sport, well all four counting tennis.

Longfellow was a proprietary school, that is a reverend needed something to do when he got booted from the ministry. There were few frills. For instance when they needed a bus driver they tapped one of the kitchen workers who may not have had much practice driving a car, let alone a school bus. He had an accident a day the first week, once hooking the back bumper off an Oldsmobile which went spiraling down the street with a huge amount of ringing and clattering.

One day the library fell into the basement. Seems it wasn't a good idea to put the shower room in the basement below and the years of steam did their work. This was the end of Longfellow School and it was sold to Sidwell Friends where Amy Carter and Obama’s girls went.

Jean Marais and Cocteau The Testament of Orpheus

Triggered a nice memory of drawing eyes on the eyelids of all my classmates during recess and organizing a little theater for the teacher we were torturing. He was met with a whole roomful of staring eyes when class started.

Once my partner in crime(s). Dick Woolbert and I snuck out of our houses and took the trolley out to where our school was right outside D.C. and painted a thirty foot cock on the nice dark green tennis backstop that faced all the classrooms. Being ignorant middle schoolers we added some words about the assistant Principle's sex life, I believe incest was mentioned. He was a weird OCD sufferer who liked to knee boys in the ass. Once a new boy who didn't know this thought he was supposed to turn around when ordered to march to the end of the aisle of desk. Barlow had already entered the rapture and didn't notice in time. His knee hitting the cast iron radiator made a satisfying THUNG sound that I can still hear. Our artwork was painted over or rather traced over so we did an excellent job of joining our class mates deciphering it. "Barlow does what? Is that a canoe" etc.

Rags to rip For my follow up I brought a piece of cloth for everybody. We had an old, very eccentric lady substitute teacher who appeared to have one wool suit which she had relied on putting on more powder in lieu of cleaning it or herself. She was very sweet natured so I hated to do it but it’s the law: substitute teachers must get the treatment. I knew if I put the erasers on the floor she would pick them up rather than demand a student, preferably the perp, pick them up. It went off without a hitch. She came in, bent over to pick up the erasers, a loud ripping sound was heard, she jerked back up feeling around if her skirt had ripped. Being a heartless middle-schooler, I hadn’t put much thought into her reaction so I was a little caught off guard when all she did was laugh quietly to herself for a bit, gently deflating the whole thing and then carry on with the day.

Mr. Kasairee, our sixth grade teacher, took all our books away, locked them in a closet and played Elvis Presley and read us Edgar Allen Poe. This was great. He did however have one quirk (well, aside from having a nervous breakdown) which was he needed everyones legs to be under the desk and carried a yard long dowel to enforce the idea. This went on for two months. No parents objected. Then he was gone. Too bad because he was on to something.

Further along M St by Wisconsin Avenue is Crazy Eight Alley, convenient for bootleggers in its day because of escape options. It was a squared figure eight pattern and came in handy when Dick thought it was a good idea to drop pebbles down from the Key bridge on a guy rowing a scull many feet below.

He rowed under the bridge out of range and we had walked on a while when a guy on the back of a Vespa carrying two tall oars drove up and barely gave us time to run through traffic to some stairs on the other side that led down under the
highway that carried the bridge traffic away to the South.

We thought we were home free and headed to Dick's house a few blocks away. Not to be: here comes the the guy, the Vespa, the oars sticking up. On the right was the river but on the left a two story pile of gravel, our next escape route.

This time the guy put the oars down and started chasing us on foot. Escape by gravel pretty well replicates those dreams where you are trying to run away and the ground is churning under you and the faster you go the behinder you get. But getaway we did and at the top was crazy eight alley where, by good fortune we zigged and he zagged and me made in the back door of Dick's house.

Where the bank of gravel was located

There was an abandoned factory a block away that was easy to break into, which we did regularly. There was a five story atrium perfect for hurling things off of, the most memorable being long fluorescent tubes that hit so fast it looked like they were piercing the concrete floor.

One day I found a gold window display partial bust, the kind used to show bras. I was twelve so this was an interesting find and I decided to take it home. I put it in a paper grocery bag and started up the hill to my house, a mile away. It began to rain. Then rain harder. The paper bag wasn’t taking this very well. I was young enough to be embarrassed when with a loud clatter my golden prize burst from the bag and bounced eccentrically across the sidewalk and into the street. Passers by thought it was a lot funnier than I did. So now I had to cover it as best I could with pieces of the bag and arrange to carry it with both arms in front of my chest such that it did not look like I was sporting golden tits.

As contraband goes, my new find was rather large and hard to hide. I did cut away the bits blocking off the end of the arms, so I could wear it but that was a dud. It looked dumb and registered more like armour than anything sexy.

Dick’s Mother worked for Senator Pell of Rhode Island and Pell Grant fame. About the only non-mischief thing we did was snooping around the Capitol and Senate Office Building. We’d go in the Senate Chamber and see what was up. Often some hard to understand yammering to a nearly empty chamber.

The clearest memory was of Vice President Lyndon Johnson presiding, talking to an aide on the side, reading something, then whispering to a different aide on the other side and then cutting in on whoever was droning away apparently having followed every word, or so I thought. He might just as well have known what the esteemed member was going to say before he opened his mouth. I was impressed anyway. I enjoyed the funny old fashioned manners they used. Barely disguised withering insults were prefaced by “The honorable Gentleman from Tennessee might wish to skirt the pitfall he has dug for himself with the suggestion that….”

In those days Washington had only just gotten the vote so elective politics was a passing show and one that we’d had no say in. For establishment types, there was no up side to joining the fray; they had to deal with whatever show came to town.

I stayed out of it to the extent that when I got on the school bus and heard everybody talking about somebody named Castro, I wondered what could be so interesting about Castro Convertible Sofas, the only Castro reference I had.

As for our life of crime, it ended when, for once we were not doing anything, just out for a stroll at one in the morning and got chased by cops the length of a parking lot next to where on an earlier night we had chained the school bus to the fence in a failed attempt to cause a delay. It was parked at a gas station so all I got was a dirty look from the bus driver. Few things feel dumber than running on foot while being “pursued” by a big American car with two cops inside. We ran out of parking lot, the only remaining escape route was over a pile of construction material which slowed us down enough to give up. We had to go to court. Dad was not happy. His instructions were “Don’t get caught.” Now this. About then Dick moved to the suburbs where there was nothing to do but steal his Mother’s car and go joyriding.