A Rite of Passage

There are times in a man's life. This is one of those times. I bought a Mac. A G5 to be exact. A twenty-inch screen. It's like having a Mercedes Sports Car on my desk. This thing is so cool, and so beautiful I can hardly stand it. I've been waiting ten years for this. It's everything and more.

This was the kind of weekend that Richard Ford has written about and Ian McEwan is writing about in "Saturday." A fresh tossed salad sort of couple of days sprinkled with friends, a leg of lamb, and good tidings and a spiffy new toy. Life is good. It must be, because my 83 year old father took a dive off a ladder today and lived to tell the tale. It was only a two stepper but he went headlong into the floor...Must have been the Sox loss to Seattle that caused him to lose his equilibrium.

The French Connection

Imagine the French. The annoying, haughty, food, sex and fashion obsessed French. My people, I love them so. Being French is an affliction, a reward, a curse, a badge of distinction. (A distinction only if you had nothing to do with Vichy France.) Being French means you are bound, at some point in your life, to wear a beret. Those of us who are French struggle mightily against this impulse. We are French so we must wear a beret. But a beret is so, well, French. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. I have one, -- navy blue -- but where it is I'm not sure.

But I digress.

I'm here to report a curious discovery. That battery under the hood of your car? Invented by Gaston Plante, (1834-1889) as French a name as you are ever likely to hear. The year was 1859 and Monsieur Plante (Perhaps he is an ancestor of the incisive chronicler of French Canadian life, and Columbia University creative writing professor, David Plante?) was a professor of physics at the Polytechnic Association for the Development of Popular Instruction in Paris.

So when your car won't start on a bitterly cold morning, when your country has to go to war by itself, when your waistline grows ever larger because you are addicted to "fries", you know who to blame -- blame the French.

What a people. Batteries, culture, extra-marital affairs, slim, attractive, perfectly coiffed women, Les Miserables, collaborators, baguettes and fries. Viva la France!

Love and Will

So I ambled through downtown, took a quick turn through a used furniture shop, walked down by my old high-school (BMC Durfee) where the socio-path and sometime high-school football coach Don Montle, once carried me down a flight of stairs by my hair. I was around seventeen and I was pretty much designed to deliver a one-note message to all authority figures: "Fuck you." Coach Montle being the sort of guy who didn't take these things lying down, needed only the tiniest provocation, and I being posssessed of neither brains nor brawn, gave him exactly what he was waiting for: I was smoking in school. I remember nothing other than taking flight at the top of the stairs, his fat meaty rage-filled paw gripping my (very long) hair and not touching another stair as I landed at the next flight down. It was as close as I'd ever come to literally, well, never mind.

I walked around the block and a few minutes later landed inside a nifty little place where I sipped a decent latte... Cafe Arpeggio is on South Main street somewhere around where the Cherry & Webb building was, near the old McWhirrs. So I'm sitting there and they have these books on the shelf for customers to read...They come from Baker's Books a few doors away. And there is Rollo May's Love and Will on the shelf. This is Fall River, mind you. (His "Courage to Create" is a classic for you artistic types that can't get your brushes out....) Anyway, "Love and Will" is May's opus and is about love as the fundamental human experience...If you want to feel and understand what it means for a human being to bring every possible tool to the party, read May. If you want to know what it really means to be human, if you want to see what an illuminating intelligence, in service to knowledge, understanding and humanity, is about, read May. And, if you want to know how utterly stupid and bankrupt the United Theocratic States have become, read Rollo May.

Summer is coming. Bring it to the beach. But listen. You don't need to read the whole book. You take dips, as if the book was the whole wide ocean, which it pretty much is.

I finished my latte and walked home to my parents house. Their house, or rather their marriage, is a place where the meaning of "Love and Will" is wrinkled and stained, cheapened and stale like an old polyester suit that no one wants anymore. It hangs limp on a rack in a store no one goes to.

In the Nick of Time

Well how could I not at least pass by? In Fall River for Mothers Day, I went out for a walk, headed straight for downtown...I pressed my nose against the screen door and pulled a long, deep draught of -- boiled dogs and steamed buns. A distinctive signature, no doubt about it...familiar, vaguely appealing and finally, utterly repulsive. It smelled like fat laden water. I am here to say that the fragrances wafting my way were not coalescing. Or maybe they were...Let us note: the menu has grown. Chourico and chips are available now, Fish 'n Chips too.... "Buy five, get one free," says the sign. A young clerk anxious for me to come in and give her something to do watched me snif the doorway...

Charles Conniry, the highly articulate son-in-law of current Nick's owner, Fred Beaudry has taken Nick's Coney Island Dog's to a higher level. History, culture, flavor, food science and America's favorite tube shaped ballpark meat are now the stuff of legend. Nick's has left the realm of oral history (so to speak) and entered the national conversation. Six packets of sauce: twenty-one bucks. How Nick's came to be known as "Dirty Nick's: priceless.

Everybody thought food in Fall River was about Emerill and Chef Machado and Marzilli's and the cooking school and Billy's Cafe, which I want to remind everyone is owned by my cousin, but it is so very much more.