Saying Goodbye

Eulogy

Thank you all very much for being here with us this morning. Your presence and friendship mean more to us than words can say.

You should know that my father died quietly and peacefully. In the last few months he’d had a few setbacks and my father, a tough man who’d kept a long list of ailments at bay for a long time, found that his work was done and finally went home. While he did struggle recently, we are thankful he was spared a lot of suffering. While this is a sad day, I think we can gain some comfort in knowing that my father, thanks to an indomitable spirit, a loving family and the benefits of modern medicine, lived a long and full life.

In the last couple of years and months one thing had become clear: My father was going to do his level best to refuse every possible limitation that his age imposed. To the extent that this drove my mother – when she was alive – and my sister and me to despair, I think it provided him with a level of entertainment. My dad never had as much fun as when he was giving somebody a hard time.

After my Mom died, a health care worker came to visit and assess him. “Who’s the President?” was one of the questions. He got a twinkle in his eye and shot me a sideways look. “Let’s see,” he said, playing the moment for all it was worth, “that would be Nixon.”

By the time the visit was over, the young health care worker, Mr. Sullivan, had become “Sully” and the two buddies then sat there talking about Gaton sandwiches.

As Sully left, my dad told him, “You know Sully, for an Irishman, you’re not half bad.” “Well,” said Sully, “that’s because I’m half French -- on my mother’s side.” “I knew it,” said my father.

One of my favorite memories is when I was a little boy...We had this game...I’d hear him get home from work, I’d run and hide and he would have to find me. Once he did, he picked me up in his arms and I got to rub my face into his stubby two day beard... Our good friend Joey Lopes and his beautiful new son Noah, who my Dad was quickly falling in love with, are doing exactly the same thing...

My father taught me how to swim and to sail. In a lot of ways, he taught me how to live. He tried and tried and tried to teach me how to mow a lawn properly, but I was a poor student and the best I could muster was more like a bad haircut. It drove him crazy and it probably still is.

Every life has a signature moment and my Dad had his. After he returned home from the war, after he was married and had become a father and after he and my mother opened their business, he fell in love with a battleship.

I think my Dad saw the ship in a couple of different ways; as an important part of the nation’s history. As part of the city’s efforts to attract some tourism and develop the waterfront. He saw it as a fantastic story of reclamation, from the early days when he became involved in bringing her to the city to the days not so long ago, when she went into dry dock for repairs. When my Dad took me around the ship – and we did this quite a few times over the years – one of the things he was most amazed by and proud of was the astonishing amount of work that was done by volunteers. He couldn’t get over how much people gave to that ship and the quality of their work. He never said he was one of those people, but of course he was.

I’m not sure I could walk that gangplank again without crying.

My dad marched to his own drummer. Sometimes he was easy to understand, sometimes utterly impossible. He could charm the paint off a boat, he could work a room like a professional politician and he could be about as stubborn and as difficult as a goat. I can imagine the conversation: “Dad, you’re getting to be as stubborn as an old goat.” “You think so, huh? Hey, buster. Who told you you could use my car?”

Other memories I have; my father holding my hand as we rode back from Logan to Fall River after we’d hit a rough patch and were trying to make up. My father and mother’s fiftieth wedding anniversary party. A visit to the World War II Memorial in DC and later that same week watching the Sox beat the Yankees from a hotel room in Fells Point in Baltimore. Clamboil’s at the cottage. Stories of my dad and Bill Torpey traipsing around the country on business for the port. Watching my dad wax poetic about fresh corn on the cob, native tomatoes and cukes. Watching him build us a raft, sipping a cold one with a neighbor, swimming, cutting the grass. Always cutting the grass.

For a very long time, I believed that this day was going to come much earlier than it has. You have no idea how grateful I am that I had this time. I’m grateful that my father and I were able to find each other after a long and difficult period where we were lost to each other. I loved my father very much. He was a father to me.

I want all of our extended family to know how much we appreciate and honor all the help and kindness you have brought to us in the last year and a half. I want to single out my aunt Annette and uncle Roland who have been selfless and generous beyond belief. Many, many special moments happened in the life of my parents. A lot of those moments and a lot of very special memories happened because my sister made them happen. You changed their life.

My Dad, George Pelletier, Uncle George to a lot of you, has left us. He was a soldier, a firefighter, a business owner, a union president, a husband, a brother and he was my father. Far as I can tell, he gave it everything he had. I will miss him deeply.

The Lives of Others

The setting is East Berlin, just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The best movie of 2007, The Lives of Others, sets up a series of tight, wrenching, dramatic moments that take us deep inside the hearts, minds and souls of a group of artist's, intellectuals and the Stasi – East Germany's pathological cadre of secret police. Courage and dignity are in short supply.

REQUIEM FOR A GOOD MAN

In a secret attic space, just above a fully wired, book lined apartment, a bland and lonely Stasi apparatchik, Captain Wiesler, listens in on the personal life of noted playwright Georg Dreyman and his lovely, highly acclaimed actress girlfriend, Christa Maria Sieland, in order to collect "evidence" of their supposed subversion. His "participation" in their lives changes him. He weeps, courtesy of a haunting piano piece played by Georg in the apartment below that is piped – via state supplied headphones and listening devices – right into his head. Or is it his heart? The composition is titled Requiem for a Good Man.

Faced with untenable choices, characters on both sides of a devil's divide find ways large and small to stand up, cave in, survive. It's a riveting spectacle. A life of impossible choices. Small green shoots of human dignity poke through a gray drabness. As fast as they push through, the boot of the State stomps them.

All of which brings me to a clumsy segue about human dignity and impossible choices. A current real life disappointment. My father – 84 years old - is crashing. Bleeding in the brain. Dementia. Pneumonia. Barely ambulatory. Prostate cancer. Diabetes. All systems on red alert. The near end of life in any meaningful way, or maybe not just yet. And I find myself not wanting to call him, or see him or have anything to do with him. Owing to his struggle with his own dignity. I want and don't want to disown my own father.

He refuses – as does Georg, in The Lives of Others – to correctly assess his own predicament. "But he's sick," you say. "He can hardly take a piss by himself, never mind take stock of his own demise." Yes. But this is all a bit of an old story. He's never been able to take proper stock. And I wish he did.

He's lost all control of events and rails not at the injustice of it, not at life itself, but at the perceived agents of injustice, his doctors, his children. Unlike Georg, who is too passive in the face of monstrosity, but eventually finds his way, George believes that dignity lies in furiously maintaining a level control that he doesn't know he's lost long ago. He's Dylan Thomas hurling invectives, raging at the dying of the light. (If you've never actually heard Dylan Thomas read that poem by the way, do. It's stunning.)

So I am witness to a crummy end. An old firefighter in a corner of Southern New England is going down hard, in a blaze of fury. Maybe in the last act, like Georg in Berlin, he finds a way to make peace with his inner demons, locates an old piece of himself, the part that got him through wartime. The man has a powerful life force, no getting around that.

So here's a question. What right do any of us have to expect that our parents – or we ourselves for that matter - will age and die gracefully? My suspicion is that precious few of us go out with our dignity intact. By the time we hit the exit ramps we've been lost for decades. Too many compromises, missed opportunities, failures of nerve and courage. No coherent narrative. The wrong husband or wife, no husband or wife, too many husbands and wives. Or maybe yours was a perfectly adequate middle class American existence with the pictures, and good kids and a pile of success stories stacked up like Fiesta-ware. Or maybe you're Tony Bennett and it all adds up.

To age and die with dignity is the province of those who keep it simple. Stand up when you can. Be forthright. Be a whole person. Be honorable. Help others. Tell the truth. Buy flowers for your wife. Gracefully release control of your life when you must. Hold onto your dignity. Simple enough words, but when you are crapping your pants, you're brain is bleeding, you are hallucinating dead people in the bed beside you, feel that the people closest to you are your enemies, reason is out of stock. There is nothing left to do but howl and rail. Which unsettles the children. Because howling and railing is fear. And we don't want to be afraid. Even less, we don't want to see our parents scared shitless.

Dignity in the face of real fear is courage. Or is courage in the face of real fear dignity? Either way, how many of us will be able to claim that?

My Dad used to make a pretty strong case for being a determinist. A guy who used to say, "When the Big Book says I go, then I go. If it's not in the book, then I'm OK." Where that exists on the faith/reason continuum I have no idea. But you have a guy who survived World War II as an infantryman, (D+6 at Normandy) who never saw his high-school graduation, who is in actuality a very smart SOB who took himself farther than circumstances might have suggested, and so I sit here trying to understand.

For right now, the Big Book says he lives at the Sippican Nursing and Rehab Medical Center in Marion, Massachusetts. A really beautiful place. Amazingly good food. "I wouldn't keep an animal here," says George about his new home. And I am his Captain Wiesler. The headphones are on. I hear every word. I weep. It changes you.

The Dimming of the Day

"Any thoughts of suicide?" asked the Doc.
"Sometimes," said my 84 year old father, whose list of ailments is a depraved catalog of aging.
Prostate cancer.
Diabetes.
Congestive heart failure.
Alzheimer's.
Emphysema.
A quadruple bypass that is 25 years old.
There's plenty more, I just can't remember it all. He is going to die very soon. The heavy, labored movements. The frailty. The confusion. The loss of time.

The latest cat scan shows bleeding in the brain so he's likely had a stroke and at this moment he sits if front of the television, the junk food bags open next to him on the couch like a couple of old, drunk friends who aren't supposed to be there, but are.

His decline is steep and not pretty and is happening almost a year to the day that my mother began her ride out of town. When my mother was sick, I wanted to be here, all the time. I wanted to help. Night after night after night, my sister and I slept on either side of her to be there at the very instant she needed us. Now, I want to run away. This is a slow, angry burn. I want out.

What to make of it? I find myself without words or opinions. I stare at the wall, a little haunted by my own mortality, by the arc of this thing we have...I confess to being profoundly stumped and silenced by the sheer, unspeakable mystery of it all. We are born, we struggle like mad, if we are lucky we love and are loved and then two bulked up dudes in cheap, black suits ("I'm very sorry for your loss.") show up and bag us, like a white tail on opening weekend. Who cooked this up?

I was watching "An Inconvenient Truth" the other night. At one point, Al brings up a slide taken from the Voyager or one of the other spacecraft. There's a picture of the earth.Not the one you're thinking. Not the stunning, beautiful globe, all blue and white. This is from much, much further out. So in amongst all the stars and blackness is something that looks like a tiny, tiny spec of light. Us.

I can't quite wrap my mind around how large life feels inside my head and the microscopic sized spec of cosmic dust we really are. How do you grab a hold of the significance of life and the utter insignificance of it? Joni Mitchell wondered how to care and yet not care, but I think she was talking about men.

And speaking of men, there sits my father, dozing off, waking up, dozing off, the light dimming...his life a tiny spec now, barely visible even to himself.

Once I took my dad to a basketball game in DC, and we were traveling the DC beltway, (he would have been in his mid to late seventies) he looked out at the ocean of headlights and tail lights and asked, "Where in the world are all these people going?"

He taught me to swim, and to sail. He's a royal pain in the ass, but when it's all said and done, he's a garden variety pain in the ass who simply is who he is.

He taught me to swim. And to sail. And sail I did, as far and as fast away from him as I could get. And now I am back.

And Then There Were Three

Post Mortem

A man in the Times today
they said his wife had died
and that he'd been named the nation's
14th poet laureate-

In the picture
He sat with his arm resting along the back
of a nearby chair
but alas, the chair was largely symbolic
she was not there.

I saw that look in his eyes.
I felt the slouchy weight of him

I felt the stone walls of New England
running through him
marking time and property and loss.

I saw the lichen climbing along
the back of his calves

I saw the stone rubbing
of his poem on a headstone
Overgrown, cracked, shipwrecked.

This is what the poet Donald Hall, the nation's 14th poet laureate, said about his wife. Who died before she could see her husband in his moment.



without

we lived in a small island stone nation

without color under gray clouds and wind

distant the unlimited ocean acute

lymphoblastic leukemia without seagulls

or palm trees without vegetation

or animal life only barnacles and lead

colored moss that darkened when months did.


###


"I have a terrible miscellany of thoughts," is what he told the Times.


Indeed.

Islam on Hollins Street

I never really know if I want to talk with Eugene until it actually happens. Eugene is a kind of friend of ours, if you can call a homeless, crack smoking black Muslim your friend. Which I guess you can. And we do.

"Well, well, well," he said when he saw me from half a block away. I'd been avoiding him for a few days. He caught me leaving my house taking the dog for an afternoon walk. It was soft and warm and sunny out.

"King Richard, King Richard. You been sick or somethin?"
"My mom died Gene."
"Oh, Rich. My condolences. I'm sorry, if I knew I would'a got a card or somethin."
"It's okay, Gene. Really."
"When did she pass Rich?"
"Last day in March. March 31st."

Gene looks like a thousand bad alleys. His eyes are red, he stinks. He's carrying a bag full of god only knows what.

"In the Koran, you know, it say, "We each come from God, and to God we'll return. And in the same chapter, "Every soul should know the taste of death."

"How's your mom?" I ask him. "She still in the hospital?"
"She was but she back home now. I gotta get up there. I keep saying I'm gonna go, but I ain't made it there yet. So anyway, like I said, in the Koran it say, 'Every soul should know the taste of death."'

"How old's your mother Gene?"
"Seventy-four. She got diabetes, she legally blind...all kind of problems."
"How old was your mother?"
"Eighty-three."
"That's a good life, Rich. She wasn't young."

"I gotta go Gene."

"Ok, Rich. I don't know what to say. I'm sorry Rich. I don't know what to say. In the Koran, Allah..."

"Gene. It's okay. You've said enough. I'll catch up to you later."

"If I'da known I would'a gotta card or somethin," says Gene as he drifs away.

With Gene you never know who you're talking to. The man is broken but somehow he endures which makes you wonder... By which I mean when Gene comes into our house or our day, so much of the time we stand in amazement...he's smart in a street smarts sort of way, he's a scream a lot of the time and he pushes you up against yourself in ways that drive you crazy...Should I help this guy? Is he a prophet? A bum? If I help this guy, which I sort of want to do am I collecting chits on my way to heaven? Is he just a manipulator? A homeless street guy who's a little better than most? Who is he?

Gene's rap sheet: Thirty years in prison. Murder. Arson. Short stints in Central Booking for parole violations.

Last time he was in, he sent me this handwritten letter, gorgeous handwriting by the way, NO spelling errors. The short version? Send money.

Stairway to Heaven

I am back. St. Anne's Church... Baptism. First Communion. Confirmation. Death. I have hit for the cycle.

Our convoy pulled up to the front of the church and I wanted to not watch my mother's casket being carried up all these stairs because I'm afraid my relatives and the two guys from the funeral home will drop her.

A memory. I am all of nine or ten. Maybe eight. Who knows? I'm in the pew, most likely on my knees, for when are Catholics not on their knees and I can hear this amazing cacophony of voices above and behind me. But I can't see anyone. And these voices are, you know, orchestral and feminine and well, heavenly and they are most likely singing in Latin and I whisper to my mother who is kneeling beside me, "Mom, are those angels singing?"

I'm fifty-two now. It's April 4, 2006 and my mother is not beside me, but is being pulled out the back of a silver hearse and I am watching my relatives haul my mother's oak casket ("The heaviest casket we have") up these fierce, steep steps, and the day, as if on cue, was funeral weather; sunny, cold, blustery.

All the aunts and uncles and friends who are older now must find a way to get themselves up those stairs and inside... I watch my friends Lynn and Anne Marie help Lynn's mother Dot, a good friend of my mother, up the steps. I see my Uncle Renee helping his wife, Estelle. I see Aunt Lou, at 91 making her way alone, ahead of everyone. I steal a glance and my relatives in their dark suits have not dropped my mother, have made it to the top of the frigid steps and are moving inside.

We are the last ones in...The survivors. The husband, the daughter, the son and his wife and the last remaining sibling, Annette and her husband. We make our way up those windblown stairs, pull open the massive wooden doors, enter the vestibule, negotiate a few more steps and we are in and it is very nearly overwhelming, a kick in the stomach...

They have met us right at the door, like a trauma team racing to apply paddles to a recalcitrant heart. The priest is here right in front of us and my mother is in her closed casket and there is a cream colored fabric draped over her and those voices, those orchestral voices, they are above and behind me again, and they are filling this knave only now I know who they are: they are the choir we hired from the funeral director.

But they are still angelic and orchestral and moving and they are signing "Amazing Grace" which I had requested, because I love it, and because the nurse kept calling her that on account of the fact she wouldn't die, even after what seemed like forever without food and water.

And I want so badly to fold myself into Amazing Grace. I want to sob, to just let go and to touch my mother's casket and let those voices wash over me and give my self over to this moment. I want to cry like a goddamn baby.

But I have to deliver the eulogy. And I'm not going to fail.

I will deliver my mother's eulogy in this place, will deliver on my promise as her son, will honor her in front of her legions of friends and family. I have returned to this place where I'd spent a lot of time as a lost and befuddled kid who was flailing about in life and I am here to tell whoever is here to listen that I've arrived intact, in one piece and that I am put together pretty well, thank you, and I have written this eulogy and I will deliver it. For my mother. Who believed. Who never stopped believing.

And I have told myself this for weeks and so I don't give over. I close the door but leave it open. A crack.

And here comes the priest, and he is walking around my mother's casket, and he is waving his incense and he has these two altar boys with him and everybody has found their seat and they are waiting for us to make our way to the front. To the altar where my mother and her draped coffin will sit while we hold Mass and do the Liturgy, and listen to the priest tell us that "those who have faith will be far more able to absorb the loss than those who do not" and at his utterance, I check under the hood and find myself utterly, irrevocably without faith.

In fact I have less faith in these quarters than I would just about anywhere else.

My cousin's children. Rachel and her sister Michaela. They each deliver a reading, one from the New Testament, one from the Old (don't ask me what they were, don't know..we were just following orders) and they read perfectly. Beautifully. If you were their mother you would cry at the site of them, never mind everything else. Talk about faith. Anyway, my mother, who had no grandchildren of her own used to babysit those girls.

My time came and I took the long walk forward. I looked out at everyone and they seemed tiny and distant, too small for the space.

I unfolded my sheaf of papers that Linda had helped me edit to half the original length the night before.

"Good Morning," I said, my voice cracking. "Thank you for being here with us today."

When it was over we left our pew first and headed slowly to the back of the church and the doors... My sister, my wife, my father and me...a trail of tears in our wake.

My father could barely walk, his face a river.... My sister was on one side of him and I was on the other and we held him up and moved down the aisle. When people got a look at my father, they broke.

Outside my father-in-law found me on the stairs as we left. I went to shake his hand and instead he pulled me to him and I buried my face in his coat and sobbed. "It's a tough business," he said.

A Sense of Where You Are

Say what you will. I share your skepticism, believe me. I was having a massage yesterday. I was on my back, the masseuse was standing behind my head and she was holding my head in her hands for a really long time. She held me really still. Then all of a sudden I started to smile and almost burst into laughter. I felt weightless, as if I'd sort of taken a brief vacation from my body.

Now don't get excited.

I wasn't "looking down at myself" from somewhere else in the room. I was both on the table and sort of not on the table... I felt as if gravity had removed itself from the equation. And strangely enough, I then began to feel that I was on the same plane, sharing the same space with my mother. Not that she was there mind you. She didn't pop in for a visit or anything like that. It's just that I felt as if I'd slipped through a seam into some other place or more precisely, some other sense... Like I'd magically entered the back door of an odd house and didn't know how I'd got there. And it was utterly different from anyplace I'd been before. And I couldn't help but sense that I was sharing that place with my mother; as if she were somewhere else in that house...

The masseuse told me later that she felt my mother's presence too, although I think for her it might have an overdose of sandalwood oil.

Excellent massage with liberal use of sandalwood oil accompanied by "all time favorite" tunes of massage therapists everywhere: $60.00. Out of body experience with Mom: Priceless.

Reeking of sandalwood, my eyes burning from crying and incense and oil, I headed out the door and with my ever lovely wife, headed straight downtown for the Afghan takeout joint on Lombard Street.

The Luncheon

My father with his great niece, Michaela Gagne, Miss
Massachusetts for 2006.

Some years ago I sent my father a Father's Day
card. The cover had an illustration of a person
standing on one foot. Beneath, it said, "Life is a
balancing act."

Inside was a Gertrude Stein quote that captured
my father's fancy. Somewhat inexplicably, he
held onto the card and for years repeated that
quote to anyone who would listen.

As I try to reconcile the irreconcilable,
Gertrude seems more apt than ever.

There ain't no answer.
There ain't gonna be any answer.
There never has been an answer.
That's the answer.

-gertrude stein

Christmas 2005

"How do you find your mother," asked my father. We were outside on my sister's deck. It was unseasonable warm out. "I don't know, she seems ok, not great maybe, but ok," I said.
"No," my father said. And he just shook his head, as if he didn't exactly know what words to put up. "She's not right," he told me.
"So what's the deal? What's wrong?"
"Hell if I know."

Three months later she was dead.

Eulogy

Good morning to everyone... Thank you all for being here with us this morning. You all have been so incredibly good to my family and we thank you all from the bottom of our hearts.

I should first say that no one would appreciate more the irony of my standing before you in a church pulpit than my mother. I’m not sure whether I should thank her for this or chastise her for putting me here...

Before I begin, I want to remember a few of my mom’s friends. My mother never forgot her friends and I think the best way for us to honor her memory is to remember her friends for her. Some couldn’t be here with us today because of their health, or they live too far away and some are no longer with us. I want to briefly mention their names and then I’d like to talk to you about my mom a little bit.
We’d like to remember
Eleanor Comeau who came for a visit recently and lives in Virginia.
Ethel Norton who lives in Ohio and has been a friend of my Mom and Dad for nearly 60 years...
Rita Laghasse who is at South Point nursing home and is a friend of my mother.
Friends of my mother that are no longer with us are:
Connie Mercier
Rita Gendreau
Amelia Geary
Connie Charet

It’s a great privilege to talk with you about a woman that so many people loved so very much. My mother’s too early passing is as shocking as it is painful. It is profound and difficult and life changing for all of us. As painful as this has been, the outpouring of love, affection and kindness expressed for my mother over these last weeks and months has softened our pain and been nothing short of miraculous.

As we try to understand our loss, I feel as many of you must feel, that we should pay our respects. But we also might simply pay attention: To who my mother was and what her life taught us.

My mother received the news of her disease and faced her death with a level of dignity so great I will carry it with me for the rest of my life. After her doctor told her that her disease was inoperable and that chemotherapy would help, but not cure her, she didn’t cry, or rail or ask “why me?” She simply said, “I understand.” She then asked her doctor where he had gone on vacation, if he had enjoyed himself and if his whole family had been with him. She finished her visit by asking if she could still take Tylenol PM. In these past weeks and months my mother did not issue a single complaint. Not even one.

I think that people feel about my mom the way they do is that she was a deeply caring person who was curious, funny and light-hearted. She connected. Even on her deathbed – my mother was a person who created deep connections with others...She understood a well known truth, that love is the fundamental human experience; it pervades all our actions, and is the deepest motivating force in life.

Her life was a great gift -- a lesson in how one person can carry the hopes and longings of other people -- and her dying has been a profound example of human dignity, in how we can take our leave with courage and humor... My mother was never as funny as she was in the weeks before she died. In her last days my mother taught me more about courage and life than any person could hope for.

One of my mother’s lifelong lessons to me was simple and powerful: She used to say, “You can be anything you want to be in this life as long as you want it bad enough.” I can attest to the power of that lesson.

My mother liked tea, wine, chocolate, scrabble, books but above all she liked people. She liked to work out. She was charming, smart and devoted. She was cool. She loved Book TV on CSPAN. When I was growing up, she was wild about college basketball, yelling at the TV... She loved small portions of good food and loved it all the more if someone else had prepared it.

My mother seemed able to change with the times but one thing never changed. She always remembered to care.

If someone’s mother was in the hospital, my mother remembered. If someone’s mother’s third cousin’s uncle was in the hospital, my mother remembered. If you changed jobs, moved to a different state, remarried or lost a spouse, she carried your sorrows, your dreams and your hopes around with her like a necklace.

My mother never wanted to impose on anyone for anything and it is no stretch to imagine her feeling guilty for having gotten sick.

A lot of you know that my mom was a maker of beautiful things. I have this picture in my mind when my sister and I were young... my Mom would be on her hands and knees, a dress or coat pattern laid out on the floor of my sister’s bedroom. She’d be holding a bunch of pins in between her lips as she pinned cloth to pattern for a dress or a coat or a suit. Later came these very beautiful tablecloths, Afghans and blankets made of patience and love and talent and more patience. You look at one stitch and the next one and the next one and soon you see the pattern of a whole life come into focus. One stitch at a time, one row at a time, one blanket, one friend, one niece or nephew at a time, she carefully, patiently and lovingly stitched together a beautiful life for herself and the people she loved and cared about.

My Mom was a world-class listener with a million stories – stories of kindness, of struggle, of triumph. Funny stories and sad ones. Every friend, niece, nephew and acquaintance was a story and every story was instructive.

My mom’s most impressive quality – her caring - was one that may have given her some trouble. My mom didn’t know how to detach so well.... It’s no small trick to know how to care deeply for people and to let go a little at the same time... The other side of caring is worry, and worry has a way of becoming a constant companion.... Like a lot of Mom’s my Mom was a championship worrier, and all that worrying took its toll...

Even though my mom would tell you she wasn’t assertive enough and had a tough time standing up for herself, she had an extraordinary and powerful will. I think my Dad can attest to that. Like many women she underestimated herself. She was far, far stronger than she gave herself credit for.

There are moments from these last few weeks that I will never forget.

My mother’s hospice worker was Mary Jo. She and my mother bonded on a very deep level. One night she told us, “Your mother is so strong it’s unbelievable. In all my experience I just don’t see this. After this many days, I just can’t believe it.” At the time, my mother hadn’t had any food to speak of in eighteen days.

Quite a bit later when my mother was barely speaking at all, Mary Jo came in to bathe her and she leaned in close to her friend’s ear and said, “Hi. I love you.” My mother whispered to her, “I love you more.”

Anyone who knew and loved my mother can only feel a deep sense of gratitude and relief that her suffering is over. I can tell you that the rest she has found has been deeply earned.

No one can presume to speak for others in a moment like this. But I know how much my father loved my mother and I have seen him struggle to cope with the loss of his wife of nearly 60 years. I have seen him cry and I cannot begin to imagine how he feels right now. He will need our love and support. My sister is as close to my mother as a daughter could possibly be. They are bound together – the way mother and daughter should be. She has stood beside my mother through very difficult days and long nights, holding her, lifting her, comforting her, making her beautiful... I saw in my sister’s devotion to my mother a deep well of love that was a crystal clear reflection of my mother’s being...When you leave here today, I ask you to hold my father and my sister in your thoughts and prayers...

We say goodbye today to a strong woman. A kind, lovely and gracious woman. I am proud to stand here today as her son. My mother made it her life’s work to live and love well, to make beautiful things, to make this world a better place, to love her children and her husband and her extended family day in and day out. My mother was a woman who never, ever stopped trying; to stretch herself, to keep learning, to stay healthy, to keep in touch, to nourish her own humanity and the humanity of others...Those are the lessons she leaves us.

I’d like to close with a brief and beautiful poem. It appears in the very last book of a very great writer. I never dreamed I would read this work at own my mothers’ funeral. It’s called Late Fragment, it's by Raymond Carver, and it goes like this:


And did you get what you wanted from this life even so?
I did.
And what was that?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Our friend Jean was born on June 20, 1922. She was 83 years young on March 31, 2006, when she bade us farewell on a beautiful, soft spring day. Mother, you were truly and deeply beloved on the earth...We loved you more.

Had I the Heavens

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
-WB Yeats

March 31, 2006

The sister, the daughter, the son, the husband, the daughter in law, the hospice worker who was as beloved as anyone...

The blue sky was blue, the March wind was surprisingly warm and her breaths came slower and slower and slower and then, as we all knew they would, they stopped. It was morning. 10:50 am or so. A Friday. TGIF. We had laughed hard right at the end. She, my mother that is, my mother who is dead now, was breathing but there were long, long pauses and we knew that one of those pauses would be eternal...And we were sure that this pause, this long, long pause that we stood taking in, the pause that made us hold our own breath, we were sure this was it, and so we waited and watched her and then poof!!! one last breath and the tension had built up and we just all laughed really hard because again, she had defied all the odds...no one had expected her to live this long, this many days after not eating...what was it now, fifty days or more without food, yet she hung on?

Every day the nurse came and every day, she'd say, "I probably won't need to come tomorrow," but the next day she'd be there in complete amazement. "I'm going to call you "Amazing Grace" said the nurse to my mother.

For at least ten days we spoke in whispers. We whispered in the kitchen. We whispered in the dining room and above all, we whispered across the bleak terrain of my mother's deathbed...at night, during the middle of the day, whenever. "She seems quiet now." "I wish we could move her head." "I don't blame him for everything." "This can't be happening." "I can't help thinking this is all a mistake and we'll nurse her back to health." "I asked her to give me a sign."

We stood for a while and Mary Jo, the beloved hospice worker - the one who said urgently, "It's happening," - quietly left the room to make the call. The nurse who'd left only minutes ago, was back. She placed her stethoscope onto my mother's stillborn chest and listened. Nothing. She filled out the pronouncement...

I found myself in the kitchen. Out the window, a half block away, was the schoolyard filled with running, playing children on lunchbreak. In the backyard, on the clothesline in the late March sunlight, wafting in a strong warm breeze: my mother's beautifully crocheted tablecloth.

It fluttered and flapped on this dreadful and beautiful day - the death of winter and birth of spring. "Remember me," it said. "I was beautiful once and I am your muse. Remember me."

I ran outside and took pictures for the first time in ages. The hearse was parked at the curb and two burly men waited in the front seat waiting for a sign; a sign that it was time to come inside and take my mother away from us.

Carry Me Home

And all that I want, and all that I need
and all that I've got is scattered like seed.
And all that I knew is moving away from me.

"Sadie"
Joanna Newsom

Vigil

Silence. My mother in her golden yellow sheets on her deathbed, a soft, warm light breathes a golden glow into the room.... She is hollowed and beautiful. The only sound - the ever slower rising and falling of her breath. You watch the sheets. They move, then they don't. They rise again. You wait for the next breath which is a long time coming. Shallow, shallow breaths like a wafer thin cloud passing by a cold, bright moon. My father, my sister, my wife and our great and good friend are sitting around her. My father cries.He holds his head in his hands. No one moves. She will not wake up again, will not whisper "water" to us again, will not ask for ginger ale ice cubes or gatorade or ice cream, or whisper sweet nothings that we cannot make out.She will not play scrabble, tell my father he shouldn't drive, make a sandwich or laugh. That's for us, the living, to do for the dead.The sheets rise softly again...

"Water"

Saturday, as if the day or time or the place matters. All that matters is water. Parched and spent my mother lifts her eyes every once in a while with a single plea: "Water." She can hardly swallow so we give her an ounce or two via a small syringe.
And she drifts back into the ether, into sleep, into dreams.

She gather me, man.

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

-Toni Morrison

A Dream

A dream. A light bulb overhead. Bright, so very, very bright. I reached up and pulled on the small chain and that bulb, that bulb of light exploded into an inky black darkness. POOOFFFF!!!!!!
I nearly flew out of my bed.

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

-Raymond Carver
May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988

The Conversation

I forget the day. It was a few weeks back. I was alone with my mother and she could still speak at short lengths... "Make sure you tell her what you need to tell her. Make sure." This sentence had been ringing in my ears for weeks...ever since a friend of mine told me.

I thought in the course of my life I had said everything but who has said everything?

She was doing okay at the moment. No nausea or vomiting. She was beyond exhaustion but still wanted to see my sister and me as much as she could...

I knelt by the side of her bed and took her hand.
"I want to tell you something."
"Uh-oh," she said softly.
"No, no," I said. "It's a good thing."
"Oh, okay," came the low throaty whisper.
"I want to tell you how big this is for everybody. This is so huge. So many people are so deeply affected. You have no idea. It's truly, truly unbelievable. It's incredible."
She cried.
"But why?"
"Because you took the time to care about people. To love them."
She closed her eyes and tears ran down her face.
"I'm not finished," I said.
"I want to tell you that your belief in me was so, so huge.
I carried that belief with me every single day, every minute, every hour.
It never left me. It changed everything. You can't believe how big that was."
I was crying now.
She lay her head back and cried and cried.
"Isn't it wonderful we can be here and say this to each other," she finally said through her tears.
"I know, I know," I said through mine.
"I always knew you could do whatever you wanted to do."
Her shoulders sagged in relief as if the weight of an entire world of worry had suddenly been lifted away.
"Oh my god, you've made me the happiest woman on earth."

"I Love You More"

A woman on her deathbed. She has not eaten in five weeks and takes only tiny spoonfuls of ice water and microscopic portions of ice cream. She is a picture of unspeakable exhaustion. My mother lives on and no one knows why or how.

Her hospice care person is Mary Jo. Mary Jo's heart is as big as my mother's is strong. A few nights ago she arrived to bathe and change and care for her patient as she always does.
She went directly into my mother's room and bent down close to my mother's face and in that lyrical and kind Mary Jo sort of way, softly said,
"Hi. I love you."

And my mother's eye's barely lifted and she whispered to her friend,
"I love you more."

As I Lay Dying

children
husband
mother
father
brothers
sister
nieces
nephews
cousins
FRIENDS
marriage
world
birth
life
love
tears
water
forgiveness
worry
fear
memory
guilt
laughter
time
dream
regret
joy
heartache
pride
work
struggle
Rose
Roma
Muriel
Annette
Alphonse
George
Collette
Richard
home
shadow
light
sleep
breath
heart
"Water."

This Boy's Mom

Poems & Stories written by Richard & Jeannine Pelletier ~ The little haiku style poems below are a sneaky collaboration. I took my mother's emails and simply played around with the language and found in them some poems that told her story in another way. I worked on these a couple of years ago and had to put them aside to pursue other things. I had thought about calling this tiny collection of odds and ends

M o m m y + D a d a

The Shirt by Robert Pinsky is here simply to pay homage to my mother's time in life as a seamstress (relatively short) and her heritage in the trade...


Our Father is Sleeping
A chow mein liberal
In the company of salty, exhausted friends

Dust mops, cat scans
Keyboards, cooks

Somehow it
Does not always work

No doubt my desperate eye
Needs a clean window


Music to my Scotch Ears
Like a bad penny
I am getting old

I was quite sure
Seabiscuit called this morning
Wishing you more success


What Done Him In
It is cloudy and cool
Felt good after
All that sleep

The word housewife
should not apply
I certainly am not a cook

Do you remember this sixtyish woman,
alphabetizing her canned goods?

Carry on my son,
Carry my regret

I am chagrined
All my telling-

I recall my elderly mother person


Another Fifty Years
You are sad
the two of you
the power, the traveling
all the traveling,

switched relays, procedures, information

Luckily
I am sure it is
nothing drastic, this outage.


Hearts Out
The telephone interrupts a nice lunch
seems to me
everything is always about the money
is that not so?

Ebay has been a godsend
I keep forgetting
Mother said enjoy
Do not lift a finger


The Shirt
by
Robert Pinsky

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band
Of cuff I button at my wrist.
The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze


rhea quintin 14 years old
At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes--
The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
up to the windowsill, then held her out
Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.
A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her.
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked
Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord.
Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans
Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,
Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt.
The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.


1938
I was unaware
The sudden wonderful sea
of Reading and looking
And memories-

A most destructive storm
Called today
More news tonight


Remember Where They Live
Good morning
Did you get paid?
Of course
I am kidding
Was there any significance
to the message?


I am Angry
All circuits were busy
Dad was long gone
We had forgotten you

The weather, however
Was beautiful
Daylight is quite funny
At 7pm

Further south tonite
We tried to reach you
You did not answer
Sandwiches, scrabble


This was written for a writer’s workshop. The assignment was to find a way to get “Maraschino Cherry” into some sort of narrative.It is largely true. Up to you to figure out which part is true and which isn't.

The Fall River Herald News
August 11, 1982

Retired French Canadian Bookkeeper to Inventory Entire Kitchen
In a brief interview today sixty-two year old Jeannine L. Pelletier spoke to reporters about her intention to catalogue in alphabetical order every food item in her tiny, avocado colored kitchen. Armed with a mountain of 3 x 5 inch index cards and a quiver of sharpened pencils, the newly retired mother of two stood before the vast empty plain of retirement fully prepared to engage her senses and manage the household.

“My husband’s a nutcase,” she sighed. “If I’m down to one can of tomato soup, I’m saying two hail mary’s, an act of contrition and the Lord’s Prayer on the way to the Stop & Shop. Hopefully, I can get back before his highness runs out of soup.”

Cleverly color coding her inventory, (yellow cards for soft foods, green for hard) the softly spoken former bookkeeper acknowledged her family was struggling with the new system.

“Well you know, they’ll be flipping thru index cards looking to see if we’ve got something and they’ll yell at me “’Mom! Pringles! Hard or Soft?
And of course I tell them, Pringles are hard food. They crunch. They’re really confused about eggs. For instance I classify hard-boiled eggs as a soft food, but eggs in the carton as hard.
“I’m much further along in my hard food inventory than the soft stuff,” she said wistfully. “I’m well into the P’s in my hard foods but I’ve only got to ‘M’ on soft foods. Here’s the card right here see? One-half jar maraschino cherries.”




Within
No word from you all day
Just please say yes

Time and reason can no longer
Help me

What happened was going to happen
He is older than I
Puttying up disappointment and hurt

You buy your own
Only ninety-nine cents.


Sometimes He Can Get Civil
There is still some inflammation
They will send us
all the pertinent information
waiting patiently

I was a sewing machine operator
Batting zero
On my first day

All these women,
painful sleeves, tiny flowers.


It is Always Time for Lunch
So many will suffer
Before I go to bed

The days are so much shorter now
I guess you owed me
that three pints of blood

Dad will pick up our sandwiches
Talk, talk, talk

The Heart Has Its Reasons

A bare whisper and then nothing, like three dots at the end of a sentence..."Whatever happens to me..." my mother whispered to our miracle friend Lynn who is here to help us. The rest never came or was too faint, as if she were on the dark side of the moon.

A quieter day than yesterday as this dear, sweet woman who simply wanted to be kind to others is taking the long way home. She'd made up her mind early on that she was not going to prolong this but her heart has other ideas.

The heart has its reasons of which reason has no knowldge, said Pascal who was one Frenchman who knew what he was talking about.

Here's what I wonder: I wonder if my mother is trying to forgive my father. My mother had worked up a lifetime worth of anger at a man who in spite of endless attempts to get through, could not be made to understand. He couldn't understand that his wife was not his mother, his domestic, his chief cook and bottle washer. He could never understand that his wife was not only his equal, but in a lot of ways his better. His pride, that stupid male pride that has brought down many a better man, would never let that stand.

Our friend Lynn was talking to my mother today. Reassuring her, stroking her forehead, saying her name. My father came into the room and sternly told Lynn, "Her name is not Jean. Her name is Eva. She has never been called Jean."

His mother was Eva. Later he said to Lynn, "Have you figured out who your patient is yet?" And Lynn tells him, "George. Your wife is named Jean. Your mother was named Eva. But the woman in that bedroom is Jean and she is your wife."

Somehow the words found their way home. "Ohhh..." And then the capper. "I'm so sorry for arguing with you." George does not often apologize. But when he does, it is only to people outside the family.

Who can say what love is? You watch an old man crying, almost beside himself with grief at the suffering his wife is living with. But the world is full of men who break at these moments and grief is no indicator of virtue.

My father is not a bad man. My father is a man of his time, a complicated man who, in his own way loves his wife but was fastened too tight to the mast and held his course steady for the whole trip. No course changes allowed...

The tragedy here is that his wife knew they were badly off course - and that the cost would be high - and she was fighting for all she was worth to take a different route, but no...And she became angry and bitter and sick.

My mother had many aliases. She was Jean, Jeannine, Jerky Lucy, jlp620@peoplepc.com, and she was Mom. In more ways than I will ever understand, she was my muse.

I have this disturbing thought. I am afraid I did not fully appreciate and celebrate how profoundly unique and special my mother was.

As she lay dying, she told me I ought to give the 'too big' sweaters that my father got for Christmas to "Eugene." Eugene is a poor black homeless man in Baltimore that my wife and I help out sometimes. I told her, "Mom if we give the sweaters to Eugene, he will sell them."

"Oh," she said. "Ok."

Dance Me to the End of Love

Words fail utterly. But words, along with each other, are all we have. My mother is sputtering and coughing and vomiting to a hot, sickening, exhausting end. She is half in this world, half in the next. But after thirty years of going to the gym, she is surprisingly strong even on the doorstep of death.

The tiny hospice worker comes each day with a smile, a warm knowing hand and each day her eyes grow big as half moons and she says the same thing, "Unbelievable. Your mother is unbelievable. So strong." The nurse says much the same: vital signs after forty plus days of no food: normal. Heart rate, blood pressure are surprisingly good. That well developed muscle, the one responsible for the flood of cards and calls and countless acts of incomprehensible kindness and generosity, beats on. Her pulse is normal. My mother's heart is betraying her.

This last day of winter, a sunny, cold and windy Sunday in late March, blew my father to the far reaches of his own sanity. He stood helpless at the foot of his wife's hospital bed and watched her wretched and racked with nausea and bile and sweat and shit and piss and found himself nearly broken in two at the sight of it...He stumbled to his place on the couch, placed his 83 year old head into his bony hands and wept. We all did.

For the last 72 hours she was back with us. Clear headed, funny, focused, engaged. But the nasty bargain had to be made... As she slips closer and closer to her end, she was relentlessly sick. Relatively clear headed, but agitated and profoundly restless. "I need to go the commode." So we would lift her out of bed and put her on that humiliating potty and wait. She cannot stand without help and struggles to bend her knees to sit. My sister would clean her and we would lift again and put her back in bed. Then 15 minutes later. "I have to go again."

It's a "stage."

As in "Your loved one will become increasingly restless. He or she will pick at things that are not there, will shove blankets aside, speak of people long since passed. They may ask to do one thing, and then ask to do it again. This is normal. Try not to be alarmed as your loved one is simply reacting to the changes occuring in the body and mind."

We are alarmed. We are very much alarmed. Her limbs jump and shake. Her eyes do not focus. She can barely speak and we had to do it.

We gave her the powerful suppositories that give her the only peace she will know until she dies. She grows quiet, calms down and her mind and senses go south as the pharmaceuticals take over and do their work and that loving, charming, funny little woman recedes. Somewhere...she is somewhere between hither and yon, neither here nor there. Not fully alive, not yet gone...

Her sister-in-law visited. Estelle. Her mind is half eaten away by Alzheimers, yet she wanted to see her good friend Jean. She sat by her bedside and held my mother's hand and sang to her. Over and over the same song. She sings it all day long. "I love you," she said to my mother over and over. Finally the visit was over and she and her husband and my father all ambled out of my mother's cramped sick room, with the Tibetan Prayer flags and the card filled mirror, and the humidifier and the Kleenex boxes and the flowers and the TV that no longer works and they were all singing from

"Ain't Misbehavin"

Be sure it's true when you say
"I love you"
It's a sin to tell a lie
Millions of hearts have been broken
Just because these words were spoken

I love you
Yes I do
I love you
If you break my heart I'll die
So be sure that it's true when you say
"I love you"
It'a sin to tell a lie

Slowly and gingerly down the front steps they went, Uncle Renee and Aunt Estelle. I helped him put her in the car and she sat happily singing..."It's a sin to tell a lie...."

A woman named Pat came to give my mother Reiki massage. My father told her, "I'm angry because the love of my life is dying." We told him that Pat was from hospice because if we told him the truth, that Reiki is an alternative form of healing, he might have thrown her out.

I'm hanging with Leonard Cohen tonite in my old bedroom where I used to play "Louie Louie" and "Stairway to Heaven" and "Southern Man" but the night belongs to Leonard.

"Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance Me to the End of Love."



(This entry marks the very beginning - or end, depending on your approach - of these posts that focus on my mother's death.)

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.

Secret Sauce Author Revealed!

Ladies and gentlemen...With a great deal of sleuthing I have discovered the name. The author of nicksconeysauce.com is Chuck Conniry. Mr. Conniry, you have our deepest admiration. May the flavors coalesce, may the toppings top and may "Dirty Nick's" live forever.
Six dogs to go!

A Coney Island Love Dog

Few things in life are better than a good recipe. Seems that my hometown of Fall River, Mass, already breathing heavy from its 15 minutes of fame as the birthplace of the ubiquitous and growing more tiresome-by-the-minute chef, Emeril Lagasse, has even more to offer the discriminating palate. My friends this is what food (and great copywriting) is all about: the miracle of topping, blending and flavor coalesence. To wit:

First-generation Coney Island sauce makers crafted their product to combine with the other ingredients of the Coney Island hot dog. Nick’s Original Coney Island Hot Dog SauceTM both “tops” the dog and “blends” the flavors of the other ingredients into a single whole.

No one part of a true Coney Island hot dog—which is “correctly” made with a steamed bun, wiener, mustard, onions, and sauce—can be distinguished. The real secret of Nick’s sauce is its ability to soak into the bun enough to produce the miracle of “flavor coalescence” without making the bun too soggy to hold in your hand.

The real secret is in the mouthwatering copy. I hereby nominate this mysterious copywriter to the New England Copywriter's Hall of Fame. Read more at nicksconeysauce.com

BAM!

(Thanks to EM!)

The Roundup

Welcome to Friday, lads and lassies...Baltimore is cool and gray this morning, kind of like Seattle in early May without the ferries, the mountains, the coffee, the cutting edge technology and the perfectly precious and hip worker bees sheathed in black. I am not nostalgic for the West Coast...No. Not at all. I love the East Coast. Really. It's very genuine. Authentic even. The West Coast is narcissistic. Kind of like that first girlfriend or boyfriend you had. So attractive. So sexy. You gain by association. But then you come to your senses, realize that your parents were right all along and move back East. Common sense comes to all of us at one point or another, doesn't it? My good friends D & F are soon to make a trip to the coast of Oregon. I hate them for this. Two weeks on the Oregon Coast. I told "D" you will not have an easy time coming back. "Who says we're coming back?" came the reply. Who indeed?

Middle Ages ~ Laments

So I am 52 today and what that means exactly,well who can say...I am one of about, what is it, 40 million other boomers? My back hurts, I walk three miles a day, I do a little yoga and I am in the early stages of a new career... That could describe oh, about 40 million people. On this day, my step-daughter is traipsing around Thailand and the last communique said, "Off to get a Thai massage." I'm the one that needs a Thai massage, but middle age has it's demands and for the moment there will be no massage, Thai or otherwise...Dinner out tonite. Maybe Thai...

Willie Nelson

Who knew? Willie Nelson sings Stardust? Incomparable...Of course Ella owns that song lock, stock and barrel. But we shall celebrate Willie for he has delivered...