Virtual Robidoux

Cheryl Maher: A life and death, tragic and complex beyond words

2011-07-18T12:07:00.000-07:00

Cheryl Maher

For more on Cheryl Maher, victim of a July 10 murder-suicide, CLICK HERE

Originally published July 17. 2011
Concord Monitor Viewpoints

I know there was nothing I could have done to prevent the tragedy of Cheryl Maher's death. But something in me flickered, like failure, when I heard she was the victim in a murder-suicide who had been bound, bludgeoned, stabbed and left for speculation.

I'd written about Cheryl in the past, after getting an SOS from her two summers ago.

She found me because I was the local reporter in Derry, where she lived at the time. We tried to meet at the always bustling Mary Ann's Diner on Broadway, but there was a wait for tables, so I followed Cheryl a few doors down to Anthony's Cucina, where there was no wait because there were no other customers.

"This is better, anyway," said Cheryl, like she was finally able to breathe.

In the time it took us to walk the few hundred feet, a huddle of friendly faces greeted Cheryl by name as we passed by the Friendship Center, a hole-in-the-wall meeting place for people in recovery, positioned between the two downtown diners.

Cheryl was known there as a woman who'd spent too many years retreating from life and escaping her personal pain through drugs and alcohol. She'd been down the rocky road of recovery and relapse. Over time she had discovered how the kindness of strangers who'd been down the same road had a way of helping you drop the crutch of your addiction as you learned to walk again, in hope of running one day, full tilt, toward life.

Back then, I wasn't able to solve Cheryl's dilemma.

She came to me concerned for her twin daughters who were about to enter high school. Both of them have steep learning and developmental challenges due to autism. Cheryl feared they'd be swallowed whole in the state's largest high school.

"Just read through this and you'll understand why I have to fight so hard for my girls," said Cheryl, transferring the armload of documents to me as a waitress refilled our coffee cups. I paged through the records of their school evaluations, noting between the lines a pattern of advocacy -- she frequently made waves during evaluation meetings, without apology. Cheryl wanted the best for them. She understood their differences. She saw their untapped potential.

She wanted me to write about the flaws in the educational system for kids with disabilities, and the frustration it creates for parents. She wanted me to write about how her daughters weren't getting what they really needed in the public school setting. Individual Education Plans are written to protect the system and secure special education dollars, said Cheryl; they rarely elevate the child in need of real life skills.

Her biggest roadblock was that she shared custody of her three youngest kids with their father, and as legal custodian, he did not agree with Cheryl's sense of urgency, that a move to a private school in Amherst would make a difference.

Looking back, maybe they both wanted what was best for their daughters, but in the end, it was the bitterness of their divorce -- the drama of their marriage, the soap opera of Cheryl Maher's life -- that got in the way.

I wanted to help her. I tried contacting the district's special education director that same week, but summer is a tough time to find school staffers to interview.

I never wrote the story.

Because, over coffee that day, Cheryl also told me her life story. The tidal wave of turmoil she shared with me was overwhelming. It was beyond my ability to navigate in a world of daily news deadlines. In that moment I recognized that the real story was about Cheryl, an imperfect but intriguing human being who was a victim of circumstance long before she was a victim of murder in Weare.

So yes, the news of her death last week shook me hard. Tears rose up in me like a reflex as I involuntarily imagined her unspeakable suffering.

As everything went dark in her world, I imagined how her helpless, frantic heart stopped beating, and how her last thoughts settled on the pain of leaving behind four motherless children.

But the truth is, I cried for the tragic life and death of a woman too complex for anyone to capture in a single news story. I cried knowing that all the stories written in the aftermath would never be enough to solve the puzzle of Cheryl Maher, a beautiful dreamer and broken woman on the mend; a resilient survivor who was stopped dead in her tracks just as she was finally learning to run.

Of Monarchs and Milkweeds

2011-07-06T05:13:00.000-07:00

In a small patch of miracles on Robert Frost Farm in Derry you might not notice that it's the season of the Monarch, a small but amazing force of nature that exists, in no small way, thanks to the humble milkweed.
By fall this season's fourth generation of the storied winged waifs will have emerged, fortified and ready to fly far from the incubator milkweeds that begat them.

The first three generations live only weeks. Their sole purpose is to procreate. They know their place -- live and die in the garden of their birth.

The autumn Monarchs are different; four times removed from the truncated life cycle of their great-grandparents, they are born with loftier goals: to live long enough to migrate south to their ancestral home in the mountains of central Mexico. Here they will soak up the secrets of life, like miniature mutant Mayans seeking some force stronger than sun. Impossibly they have found their way to a place they've never been, collecting on tree limbs like a million pulsing leaves.
In the spring, they head back in the direction from which they came, following the scent of milkweed blooms, breeding and dying along the way, sloughing off three generations as they journey home.
It is the fourth generation of these majestic flyers that will once again complete the cycle, settling among the milkweed of their predecessors, their predestined breeding ground, exhibiting a hard-wired instinct as inexplicable as it is magical.
Monarchs lay only one egg per plant. When caterpillars emerge, they feast on the milky weed, its sap laden with a chemical that renders the caterpillars toxic to its predators, even after they morph.
Through spring and summer the orange-and-black insects behave just like their less-majestic counterparts. But as the leaves begin to turn, everything changes. The last caterpillar, bred to survive, has climbed from its chrysalis, dried its wings in the sun and fluttered off to find the place where its great-great-great-grandmother wintered.
And so it is that the milkweed can finally fade, having served its purpose, as well. Its leaves shrivel against October's chill. Its pods, browned and burgeoning with fluff, provide a home for lady bugs and their tiny speckled larvae, which crawl like microscopic alligators along the thin bark of the craggy, skeletal weed.

And then it happens, one by one the pods explode, their puffball seedlings strewn in clusters, some clinging to the papery shell, waiting for the right motivation; others catching the first breeze that comes along, drifting until the air-borne seed is plucked from the atmosphere by tiny fingers that know a good wish-puff when they see it.

Some will be eaten by the birds; others will rot on fallow rock and stone. Those that find their way into the woods and weeds will wait for spring, to germinate and regenerate, and to beckon once again to the butterflies which will come back, because they must.

Maternal Magnetism

2011-07-03T09:28:00.000-07:00

7.3.11

We weren't ideal together in this world. When you lined us up, more often than not we repelled, my mother and me, like certain magnets, the highly-charged space between us impossible to bridge. Only later in her life did my mother loosen her grip on my free-spirited world enough to see me in the context of who I'd become.
Whatever rebellions I'd led against her in my youth, whatever assaults on her maternal authority, were forgotten by her in those last years.
In the end I was a perfect daughter, she would say. And I gratefully accepted the gift of her selective memory, relaxing my own notion of her judgemental world, once and for all.
She was a lefty. Her handwriting sloped downwards and her penmanship was decipherable, at best. When the dog chewed up the Valentine she'd sent that year, I didn't know it would be the last. But something in me gathered up the tooth-punched pieces for safe keeping. Once in a while on a slow morning I'd pull the scraps from the plastic bag and strain to read the looping script. Her message was hopelessly lost to me, but it was always just enough to bring me to tears, the thought that my mother's hands would never again write me a love note, Valentine's Day or not.
Anna Mary Allen was born on July 3, 1918, the daughter of Victorian parents, eldest of two. She was not like the other girls -- she moved far from home for an Ivy League education at University of Pennsylvania, mastering psychology and social work. As an aside, her brilliance led her to fluency in French and German, mainly because it enhanced her love of classical music. She knew Mozart's works by heart, and recited their Köchel chronology by ear. "Accchhh," Mom would say, uttering the sound of appreciation beyond words in any language. "That's Mozart's piano sonata K330 in C Major. First movement," as a flurry of notes spilled from the hi-fi, always tuned to WFLN, Philly's classical music station.
Her compulsions were expansive, beyond vinyl recordings of every great composer known to man loosely arranged and overflowing into a compulsive collection of storage cabinets. She also chain-smoked into the early 1970s, and collected small colored-glass vases, for rose buds, and bone china teacups, for afternoon tea. She subscribed to so many monthly magazines that the stacks were piled two-publications wide by 2-feet deep for all the 19 years we lived together. She read promiscuously and voraciously -- D.H.Lawrence to Billy Graham. She later discovered she could listen to religious cassette tapes while she read, sponging up every kernel of knowledge available.
For all the flaws I've ever ascribed to my mother, I don't know if I ever fully understood or appreciated just how boundless her capacity for knowledge was, even now.
I was more preoccupied with the idiosyncrasies of her intelligence and how she relied on regimentation to survive, just as she came to be tethered to an oxygen tank in the end. She had a specific way of watering her African violets, of hanging laundry to dry in the bathroom, of leaving herself copious, cryptic notes detailing everything from grocery items to affirmations from Jesus. She dusted around objects and vacuumed a solitary path through the living room. She drove to the supermarket, daily, in her old '55 Chevy to answer God's calling to find those in need of prayer, who would turn up in the cereal aisle, finding what they really needed -- a dose of my mother's spirit-filled, prayer-inspired social services.
When my mother gave up the writings of Edgar Cayce for the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, I was relieved. At 14, my mother was so distracted by her new-found gifts of the spirit that I could finally breath the sweet air of freedom that had eluded me, under my mother's controlled atmosphere.
So if I spun a little out of control, maybe it was because my maternal string had been so tightly wound.
I hate to think I had screwed things up for myself.
Still, when I had to tell my mother that, at 16, I was going to make her a grandmother, I did not expect her inner social worker to wrap me up in a protective blanket of understanding, but she did.
Looking back now, it was the best gift I could have given her at 58 -- I had apparently done enough to single-handedly wear down her sharp edges so that, when my first born arrived, my daughter could be received, completely and unconditionally, by her grandmother's open arms.
And that is when the secret of motherhood magnetism began to reveal itself to me. It is an organic, unflinching force beyond our ability to control it, obvious to me as I saw my mother latch onto her granddaughter with the subatomic urgency that had escaped us. I began to realize that it wasn't her, or me. Our mutual complexities interfered with the natural pull I thought she lacked. But reflecting on it all, here and now, I know my direction in life was set by the precarious pivot on which we intersected.
Like a compass needle, her magnetism pointed me exactly in the direction I needed to go, whether we ever really knew it or not. Just as the invisible moon pulls at the ocean, even through a sky of clouds, my mother continues to move me. She did not fail me. I did not fail her. We were the best we could be together, and in that way, we are ideal; the space between us no longer impossible to bridge.

Reflections on the greatest gift of all -- from a daughter to her dad

2011-06-19T12:42:00.000-07:00

(Originally published September 11, 1994)

It's never to late to be thinking about Father's Day.

It's one of those Hallmark holidays that leaves a grown woman feeling pretty small. After all, what do you give a man who has more tacky ties (thanks to his kids) than Dolly Parton has colorless wigs?

Each holiday my sister and I look at each other with that, "Got any bright ideas this year?" look, and then we resort to the usual tried but true alternatives to genius -- a box of Walnut pipe tobacco, or some peanut chews.

The notion that there's anything a kid could ever give a parent to even the score is unrealistic.The years of sacrifice and heartache that go into parenting are priceless -- not as in precious and adorable. As in costly; beyond measure.

Or so I thought.

I was flipping through this week's Time magazine when an article caught my eye. And I read with an unexplainable emotion the story of Chester Szuber, a retired Michigan Christmas tree farmer. In short, after 20 years of suffering with heat disease, living through three open-heart surgeries and enduring four years on on organ transplant waiting list, Szuber's new heart arrived on Aug. 18.

It wasn't technically his turn.

But a twist of fate brought his name to the top of the list. His 22-year-old daughter, Patti, had turned up in the University of Tennessee Medical Center, brain dead following a freak automobile accident during her vacation in the Smoky Mountains. Patti was a nursing student. She was the youngest of Chester's six children. She was a loving daughter who had probably given her dad a fair share of tacky ties and novelty gifts over the years. And she was a card-carrying organ donor.

I don't know about you, but I've never seen my pancreas. I'm not even sure if I could pick it out of a line-up on America's Most Wanted Internal Organs. I know that my kidneys look something like the beans in chili, and that my heart looks nothing like the shape of the Valentines I send every Feb. 14.

But unlike other human guts, the heart is symbolic. It is more sentimental to us than any other part of our anatomy. We regard it as much more than a squishy, pulpy mass with ventricles and arteries that get clogged from too much butter and bacon.

Our hearts rule us. They gauge our love. We are defined by our heart in degrees of feeling. Sometimes our hearts break. With any luck, they mend. And when it comes to big decisions, we either use our whole heart or half of it, in the follow through.

But these heart conditions are medically unrealistic. We know our hearts are basic biology. They pump blood through our bodies. If they stop, so do we.

I can only imagine what Chester Szuber thought about during the time it took for his daughter's heart to be transported the 600 miles from Tennessee to Michigan. What he said, according to the article, was: "It would be a joy to have Patti's heart."

The parent in me has trouble with Chester's joy. I have placed my hand over my 3-year-old Billy's chest, on demand, to feel his "heart beep." The rhythmic thump has always reminded me how fragile his life -- all life -- is. Little more than skin and bones seem to separate our physical life from certain death. I would sacrifice myself to preserve his tiny heart.

And yet, it is the daughter in me that was so moved by Chester Szuber's story. Death came to Patti Szuber too soon. She would never get to say good-bye. No more family Christmases in Michigan. No more well-intentioned Father's Day gifts.

But for every day Chester Szuber lives, he will rely on the steady pulsing of Patti's heart. He will never have to feel the permanent void felt by most parents at the loss of a child. The empty cavity in Szuber's chest, where the imperfect heart of a parent once beat, has been filled with the loving heart of his own child.

Chester Szuber's joy, as I try to comprehend it, is something too sentimental for science to explain. As a daughter, I've spent my whole life trying to give an adequate piece of my heart to my parents. But it never feels like enough.

And so it is for her final gift that a part of me envies Patti Szuber. More than the physical pumping of life-sustaining blood, Patti was able to give back to her father the precious gift of life he had first given her, 22 years ago.

I know in my heart, the real joy in that exchange between father and daughter belongs to Patti.

Postscript: June 19, 2011
I never spoke to Chester Szuber when I wrote the original column. It was harder 17 years ago to track someone down than it is today.
Over the years I have wondered about Mr. Szuber and his heart, so today I looked him up. It was easy. I dialed his number and got his answering machine, which included his cell phone number. So I dialed again, and Chet, as he prefers to be called, picked up on the third ring.
First, I wished him a happy Father's Day.
Then I had to ask him how he and his heart were faring all these years later.
"I feel like a million bucks. I pretty much woke up from surgery feeling great, and I have felt great every day since," he said.
I also asked him if it's true, what I've read, that sometimes a heart recipient finds that they take on some of the qualities of a donor.
"I don't know if it's from Patti's heart, but I have a lot more patience for people than I ever did, before getting her heart," he said.
He is back to Christmas tree farming, and still as grateful as ever for his daughter's ultimate gift.
"Bottom line is I'd much rather have this heart beating in Patti's chest, not mine. But she's taken good care of me over the years."

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star . . .

2011-06-14T06:04:00.000-07:00

“It doesn’t matter who my father was;
it matters who I remember he was.” – Anne Sexton

Perception is everything.
For example, several years ago my sister and I planned to gather up some childhood memories and present them to our dad for a milestone birthday.
After a few days of mental gathering, we conferred.
I’d come up with a boatload of happy dad stories.
Jean’s Titanic collection of moments had left her with a strange, sinking feeling.
“I remember one time I was sitting on Dad’s shoulders and he was singing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle,’ to me and I couldn’t stop crying,” my sister recalled.
“Why were you crying?” I asked.
I was sad,” said Jean in a tone that implied I just wasn’t getting her.
“Why was it sad?” I pressed.
“I don’t really know. But every memory I came up with was depressing. I’m no good at this.”
How could this be? We breathed the exact same evergreen Glade-freshened air, ate the exact same sugar-frosted breakfast cereals and shared the very same wonderful dad.
But her memories were evidently skewed by her own unique internal sentimental, little-girl perception of things.
Perhaps “Twinkle, Twinkle” evoked in her little preschool brain a twinge of man’s constant puzzling over the enigmatic nature of space and supernovas.
Or perhaps she likened herself to a twinkling star, high above the world from atop her father’s shoulders, and feared that no one would ever really understand her.
No matter.
Because the point here is that my sister’s inability to think happy thoughts about our dad made me wonder what my own little kids were storing in their memory banks about their good old mom.
I decided to take a survey:
ME: Billy, what will you remember about me when you grow up?
BILLY: How should I know? I’m just a little kid.
ME: I know that. But what will you tell your children about me someday?
BILLY: Will you be dead?
ME: Not necessarily. I just mean how will you explain what kind of mother I was, you know; what kind of memories will you have?
BILLY: (swallowing hard) Do you think you are gonna die before Dad? What will happen to me if you die before Dad? I don’t want you to die.
ME: Nevermind.
I smiled to myself and hugged my sentimental son, assuring him that I was going to live forever. Just then, Julianna came over, wondering what all the commotion was about.
JULIANNA: Why’s Billy crying?
ME: I asked him what will he remember about me when he’s all grown up.
JULIANNA: So why’s he crying?
ME: Because it made him think about me getting old and dead.
JULIANNA: Why don’t you ask me? I won’t cry about it.
ME: OK. What will you remember about me?
JULIANNA: Well, I’ll remember when you weren’t an old gramma and when you didn’t have gray hair and wrinkles and I’ll remember that you were funny and nice and soft, and how you always looked at me with love in your eyes. But will I have to push you around in a wheelchair?
ME: Only if you want to.
The moment was oddly reassuring.
You see, my kids have been breathing the same air, eating the same breakfast cereal and loving the same scatter-brained mom for their whole lives.
Despite their different reactions I know they will end up on the same page, just like my sister and me.
Because, concrete memories aside, when Jean and I look at our dad we see a tall, dark-haired, dependable, funny man, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound; a man of much integrity and few words.
We see a man who can sing “Twinkle, Twinkle” with enough feeling to make a little girl cry.
And even though that little girl may not know it at the time, eventually she’ll figure out that what made her so sad was the accompanying thought, that one day she might grow up to be too big to sit on his strong shoulders, or to simply get lost in the sweet sound of her daddy’s song.

Roving Reporter: Email scams, friendship and computer insecurities

2011-06-14T05:52:00.000-07:00

Roving Reporter Carol Robidoux

Maybe this has happened to you: You sit down with a cup of coffee, open your e-mail and scan the in box for something worth reading when you see “HELP NEEDED” with no fewer than 10 exclamation points, sent from someone you actually know.

You gulp your coffee as you click open the email, further concerned to learn that your “friend” is writing with tears in her eyes, having been mugged in a hotel park during her brief vacation to the UK. Bad guys took all her money and credit cards and now, to catch her return flight which leaves in a few hours, she needs money to settle her hotel bill. No one at the embassy or foreign police department is being particularly helpful.

She will take any help – as in money – you can wire. She'll pay you back when she returns.

She signs her name. It feels like a genuine cyber SOS. So what do you do?

That all depends on how familiar you are with the increasing sophistication of e-mail scams infiltrating our personal email and social networking accounts. I know this because last Wednesday my personal email account was hijacked and several hundred people, ranging from relatives and friends to law enforcement officials and Derry town employees, received a virtual shake down from an invisible bad guy pretending to be me.

Screenshot of an Amazon scam.

In the week that followed, I learned a lot about the nature of people, the fragility of email security, the boundaries of friendship, and the network of cyber crime stoppers working to prevent the good-hearted yet somewhat gullible masses from falling prey to such scams.

Like the group of Derry town employees waiting for me on the third floor of the town hall, just hours after my email account went AWOL, most of them relieved to see I wasn't going to miss the appointment after all.

“We took up a collection for you,” said Town Administrator Gary Stenhouse, jingling the change in his pocket. Hey, it was better than nothing, I figured, given the normally hostile reception reporters get from municipal employees they scrutinize in print.

I also heard someone from the newspaper alerted the editors of my faux plight. I later found my bosses were unanimously put off that I failed to file stories in advance of my UK vacation for the next day's paper. Even Union Leader Publisher Joe McQuaid took the time to let me know that he'd gotten two internal emails and an anonymous phone call from people wanting to help me.

He said he was personally still weighing the pros and cons of donating to the “Save Robidoux” fund.

After recouping what remained of my virtual identity – and dignity – I lapsed into reporter mode and learned that this particular scam continues to swindle people across America of their cash – so far hundreds of thousands of dollars have been wired to a nameless, faceless bad guy an ocean away in the name of friendship. It's so prevalent the FBI has added “The Stranded Traveler Scam” to the Internet Crime Complaint Center's alert log.

Jeannette Toscano of IC3 explained they are sort of cyber hero justice league, a partnership between the FBI, the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) and the Bureau of Justice Assistance, all committed to fielding complaints from scam victims and shutting down the cyber villians.

“Once you opened that email, there could have been a worm in the background that allowed the scammer to get access to your contacts, which is how they perpetuate the scam,” said Toscano.

Most likely to respond are the kind-hearted friend or particularly vulnerable grandmothers and marginally computer-savvy relatives. You know them as those who regularly forward notoriously annoying emails detailing political injustice or medical calamities or warm fuzzy animal photos that can be stopped, aided or enjoyed just by resending an email to every “strong woman,” “equally fed-up American,” or “someone in need of a smile” you know.

Still a little shaken from the feeling of vulnerability, I wanted answers. I called academic cybersleuth Gary Warner, a University of Alabama at Birmingham professor whose virtual street cred includes being a card carrying member of the FBI’s Digital PhishNet and Team Leader of the Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination Squad.

I asked The Terminator how this happened to me, one who regularly refers others to Snopes.com to debunk email spoofs and never falls for promises of money from Nigerian diplomats.

He seemed to want to blame the victim, who in most cases have inadvertently given up password information through ignorance. He was puzzled to learn I use Gmail, since just about all of the 1.5 million daily spam emails he mines with his spam-catching software originate with Yahoo or Hotmail accounts.

Then he asked me if I'd received an Evite lately – that's a popular online invitation site that has pretty much eradicated the need for paper party invitations and postage stamps.

I had. But told him I hadn't had time to respond. I'd been too busy fielding responses to my spam email and changing all my account passwords to think about developing a social life.

“Just last week Evite spam was responsible for a huge amount of malware – 11,000 copies came into my spam collector alone,” Warner said. He went on to inquire whether I'd opened anything from Target or Amazon lately – two more unexpected sources that, just last week, delivered unwanted malicious software to unsuspecting computer users everywhere.

He sent me a screen shot of the Amazon scam. It didn't look familiar to me, but it also didn't look suspicious.

“The Amazon scam says something like 'thank you for verifying your new email address. Please verify it belongs to you.' Then it directs you to click a little button in the center, and if you click to start the verification process, it steals your password,” Warner said.

He wanted me to remind readers that protecting your email password is probably the single most important safeguard to preserving the integrity of your virtual identity.

“People tend to not think about their email password being important, yet the most common password people choose for their email account is still 'password.' Think of what the bad guys could do with your email password. How do you reset your bank password? By requesting help, which comes to your email, including a link back to your bank site, where the bad guy, who now controls your email, can easily reset the password,” said Warner.

“If a criminal has your email account, he can access your bank accounts, your credit card accounts,, any site you shop from, like Amazon or Best Buy. All those accounts are set up with the same singular point of failure. If I have your email password, I can reset every password in your life,” Warner said.

Masking the paranoia I was now feeling over my computer insecurities, I asked Warner if paranoia is a plausible response to the real risk here. I was thinking about the ease with which so many of us use our email and Internet accounts for work correspondences, document sharing, online banking and Christmas shopping.

“People ask me that all the time. As much as I know about online crime, do I still use online baking? Of course I do. Honestly, we are still far more likely to have an account stolen by the waiter who takes our credit card into another room at the end of a meal than by some unseen, online predator,” Warner said.

Needless to say, I've learned some valuable lessons in all of this. For one, that all my hard work building journalistic bridges in the town of Derry are enough to see me safely home, should I ever find myself stranded abroad and in need of airfare. Also, that email scams happen, and everyone can be a victim.

And most of all, I've learned that the next time someone delivers a meal tab to my table, I will be the one paying with cash
.

The power of a wilted 4-leaf clover through 16 years of marriage

2011-06-09T19:19:00.000-07:00

What do you figure the odds are of finding a four-leaf clover without even looking?
I know -- but I'm not telling, just yet.
But I will tell you it's been more than 20 years since I plucked one from the yard at my mother's house.
And wouldn't you know, there was one sitting on my washing machine in the kitchen this morning -- just in time to remind me how lucky I was to have been in Mr. Nelson's ninth-grade honors English class at Woodrow Wilson High School back in 1974.
We were in the midst of a fascinating rotation which included Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Hemingway and public speaking. And we were just getting our final pep talk on how to speak effectively to a bunch of ninth graders (talk fast and use a visual aid), when I noticed the kid sitting next to me looked a little green about the whole prospect.
"Whassamatter?" I asked him.
"Nervous, I guess," said the quiet kid who lived down the street, whom I had known casually since seventh grade.
Since it was my nature to be helpful, I had a brainstorm. I reached into my 14-year-old bag of tricks. It took a minute of sifting through some other good stuff -- notes passed to me by my friend Irene in science class, pencil stubs with big rubber erasers, loose lunch change and a broken cigarette -- but I found it.
It seemed as if I had pulled a stubborn sword from an ancient stone.
"Here. Maybe this will help," I said, offering a little green clover encased in Saran Wrap to my jittery friend.
"What's this?" he asked, perhaps thinking I was peddling some unrefined drug.
"It's a four-leaf clover. I found it the other day in my back yard -- without even looking. You can keep it. Really."
And my token was just in time.
"Jimmy Robidoux -- you're up," Mr. Nelson bellowed in his best baseball umpire voice.
And thanks to the lucky charm, Jim hit a homerun that day.
"I got an A," he mouthed the words to me, once his heart had found a normal pace again, following his dynamic speech on biblical truth and the end of the world.
Later that day, he even had the courage to stop by my house and thank me again, this time with sound.
"I thought I'd better return this -- in case you needed it for your speech tomorrow," he said politely.
I shrugged it off and told him to keep the clover. I guess I had more than enough confidence in my knowledge of surrealist painter Salvador Dali, my topic of choice.
And besides, I had a really cool visual aid prepared -- a decent reproduction of Dali's "Melting Clocks" -- just in case I didn't fascinate my peers for three minutes with the content of my research.
And I would have invited Jim in for a Fresca, at that point.
But he said he'd better get back to his girlfriend, Jennifer, who was busy digging her toes into the gravel at the bottom of my driveway.
Anyway, it only took us about three more years and a few failed attempts at finding true, teenage love with other partners until we were able to fully comprehend the power of a wilted weed.
Five years later we were married.
And this Friday will be our 16th wedding anniversary.
So when I saw the familiar little rectangle of Saran Wrap surrounding a green, four-leaf clover on top of my washing machine, naturally, I had to ask my husband, "Where'd this come from?"
"Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you. Aimee's friend, Kira, found a bunch of them. She said she was getting out of Aimee's car right in front of the house and she saw one -- a whole bunch of them, in fact. I wrapped one up for you. I have one in my wallet, too," said my husband, marveling, "What do you figure the odds are of finding a four-leaf clover, let alone a whole bunch of them, just like that, without even looking?"
I suppose it was a rhetorical question.
But as I said, I suddenly know the answer.
The chances of finding a four-leaf clover, just like that, without even looking, are probably once in a lifetime.
Unless God decides to send a simple anniversary present to a couple of impulsive teenagers who survived ninth-grade English class and went on to find each other eventually, against all odds, like a tiny miracle in a field of clover.

Originally Published June 5, 1995

Bucks County Courier Times

See the Boy, Know the Man

2011-05-29T06:22:00.000-07:00

More than a decade ago I saw a television show on PBS, a documentary about a group of boys from England who were studied over several decades at seven-year intervals. It was called something like, "From 7 to 21 Up."

For a woman who has trouble recalling her natural hair color, it seems strange that a TV show would stick with me for so long.
But this show hit me like a shot of permanent dye with a peroxide chaser.
The premise of the show was that the boy at age 7 reflects the man he will one day grow to be.
Sure enough, in most if not all cases highlighted, that’s what happened to the little Brits.
If a boy was unstable, unmotivated, lazy, aimless or indifferent at 7, he was still struggling with life at 14, 21, 28 and 35.
If he was focused, efficient, confident, inquisitive and hopeful at 7, he was on track at 14, 21, 28 and 35.
Sure, it was just another theory of early childhood development, like the critical “wonder years” theory, or birth-to-5 pre-conscious memory type stuff.
But in hearing the boys’ world view at 7, then again at 14, and so on, it became clear to me that there might actually be something to this hypothesis.
Of course, I know there are many things that can happen to a boy from 7 to manhood. That will affect his outcome, one way or another. But the show satisfied some questions about nature and nurture. Both matter, but without nurture, nature has no safety net
What prompted me to think about all this was my younger son’s 8^th birthday, which was Sept. 30.
From birth, Billy has been a catalyst in many ways. He brought me back to primal motherhood after nearly 11 years of evolving with my former baby, Neil, and the baby before him, Aimee.
Billy has always challenged me to look at the world from his point of view.
But that’s not all.
He then insists on answers, explanations, conclusions, balance and morals to every story.
Not unusual demands from a little kid, perhaps.
But what other boys might only think about or barely ponder, Billy would explore in full spelunking gear.
Sadly, it’s a trait that’s suddenly waning. Perhaps that’s why 7 is a pivotal age. Maybe it’s the beginning and ending of something irreplaceable in our development.
Anyway, in all his inquisitive glory days, Billy often reminded me of the boy Neil used to be.
Of course, Neil has nearly tripled in age since 7 and certainly qualifies for manhood by most standards.
Still, he’s a work in progress.
Over time I’ve witnesses his emotions ebb and flow, sometimes lost in tidal waves of frustration.
Other times, his childlike enthusiasm takes me over like the chicken pox.
But at 19, I sense Neil’s returning to the boy I knew at 7, the one who shared his dreams with me, always, in fine detail; the boy who sensed he was destined for something big.
The boy who held my hand in public long after it was a matter of his safety, and vowed he’d never grow too big or too cool to be my baby.
If the boy-to-manhood experiment meant anything at all, perhaps it’s that the future is not so random as we might think and that, for everything we’re fortunate to gain in life, there are other things ingrained from birth.
Which means to me that we should be conscious of how our sons are growing up, paying attention to how we respond, or don’t, along the way.
And if at 7, the boy we see before us is the least bit unstable or indifferent or unsettled, then we should know which way to push.
See the boy at 7 and know the man – that was the message of the documentary, as I recall. In some cases, it was encouraging to see how each little boy grew. In others, it was disturbing, even painful, to see the boy at 7 and know – before the camera started rolling – the direction his life was going to go by the next installment of his life.
I’ll never know, for sure, if that documentary affected the way I’ve raised my sons. But at this point, I’m encouraged.
I see the boy Bill at 8 and somehow know the man who will be honest, compromising, meticulous, confident and loving.
And the boy in Neil I knew at 7 as wise beyond his years is the man I see now at 19 – hopeful, adventurous, determined, sincere and still growing.
Originally Published:
Oct. 3, 1999
Bucks County Courier Times
Levittown, PA

Considering Romance, Parenting and a Fruit Fly with 14 Eyes

2011-05-21T05:28:00.000-07:00

This mutant fruit fly has two small ectopic eyes in the place of antennae, seen here between
the large red compound eyes. PHOTO CREDIT: EYE OF SCIENCE LIBRARY.

I remember reading a short but interesting science article in a 1995 Time Magazine. This kind of mutant-breeding information was right up the alley of my older son, Neil, who back then was 15 and a dedicated X-Men comic book collector and connoisseur of news stories about oddities of nature. So I figured the article might present a great opportunity for a quality mother/son conversation:
ME: "Did you see there was a neat article in ... "
NEIL: "I read it."
He was, as usual, short on words and way ahead of me.
The article, "Jeepers! Creepy Peepers!" appeared in the April 3, 1995 issue of Time and described the latest scientific adventures of researches from the University of Basel in Switzerland.
In a "serious effort to understand how nature fashions something as magnificent as an eye," these scientists created a swarm of fruit flies that had multiple eyes -- not just on their heads. These gnats sprouted eyes on their legs, antennae, wings -- the article says some of these test-tube flies had as many as 14 eyes.
Fourteen eyes! I find that as repulsive as it is intriguing,
I guess it could be that Neil inherited his interest in science from me. After all, I've always been one to linger just a little too long at circus sideshows featuring bearded women and dog-faced boys.
Anyway, I was just wondering what Neil thought of the whole thing. So I asked.
ME: "So, Neil. What did you think?"
NEIL: "I don't really get it. What's the point?"
Well of COURSE Neil didn't get it. He hadn't lived LONG enough to get it. But this mother of four and student of life saw the possibilities, even then. I understand the value of a mom genetically predisposed to actually having eyes in the back of her head, which is how I know those Alpine developmental biologists are standing in some mighty deep and fertile pay dirt.
First, of course, it helps if you understand the origin of this scientific breakthrough.
As the article explained, it seems there is a gene known as eyeless. Fruit flies lacking this gene don't develop eyes. That's why the gene is called eyeless. (And you thought science was so technical.) So they take these eyeless genes, insert them into teeny tiny fruit fly embryos and -- poof! It's a family of bugs with more eyes than Mississippi.
The thing is, the experiment worked just as well when they tried it with an eye-related gene from a mouse instead of the eyeless fruit fly gene. The result was the same: Fruit flies with multiple eyes.
This is amazing news for all of us.
For scientists, it suggest that mouse genes and fly genes are so similar that they must share a common ancestor -- a "sea-dwelling worm that lived 500 million years ago."
To molecular biologists, it means we are all basically just big flies.
And while I'm not certain how you go from mice and fruit flies to prehistoric worms, I do see the mammal /worm connection. It's believable, even from a layperson's point of view.
After all, haven't we all met our share of people we could accurately refer to as sea-dwelling worms?
But what makes this even more amazing news is that, with just a little imagination, science can use this "eyeless" research to benefit the entire human race.
For example, you know that guy who cut you off in traffic yesterday? The one you called "brainless?" It's not what you really called him, but it's what you meant." Scientists could simply isolate his brainless gene and -- poof! Before you know it, a new and improved breed of driver is born with built-in common road courtesy AND the ability to parallel park.
Or that person you just phoned for assistance at your favorite utility company? The one who was rude? The one who kept you on hold for five minutes only to disconnect you? One successful Swiss-scientist procedure on her tactless gene and you are practically guaranteed a Utopian world where people who answer business phones are never rude.
But it doesn't stop there, folks.
Suppose your kids won't help around the house. Get some professional gene splicers to isolate their choreless gene and before you know it, a generation of children is born instinctively beating each other with brooms for first dibs on household chores.
You say your husband hasn't sent you flowers or surprised you with reservations at a nice restaurant since -- well, he's just never done it? It's not really his fault. It's that damned romanceless gene. Send him off to the University of Basel so they can reconfigure his DNA.
Oh sure -- it will take a generation or two for romantic husbands to flourish. But it's worth the wait.
And think of it this way: While you're doing your part to create perfect husbands for your children's children, imagine, just for fun, how it would feel to have the following conversation at a party:
PARTY GUEST: "Where's your husband these days? I haven't seen him around."
YOU: "Him? Oh, he was a real nice guy, but he wasn't genetically predisposed to romance. So I donated him to science.

Of Wishes, Hoop Dreams and Simple Prayers

2011-05-14T05:54:00.000-07:00

Wishing stars: overrated.

Wishing stars, Y-shaped poultry bones, fountain-strewn pennies, birthday candles – my Billy’s not buying any of it, anymore.

“Mommy, know what? Wishing is fake. All of it,” he declared during a recent car conversation.

At the time of his revelation he was breathing heavily on the passenger-side window, tracing the letters of his first name in the fog with his finger.“Whatcha mean, Bill?”

“I mean FAKE! You know, PHONY!?!,” my son was looking at me as thought I’d just questioned the true identity of Batman.

His emotion caught me off guard. I made eye contact and smiled generously in hopes I could head off the tears that were lodged in his throat and, by my calculations, six seconds from his tear ducts.

“No, Sweetie – what I mean is, how do you KNOW wishes are fake?,” the surety of his words still stuck in my craw.

“Because all my life I been wishin’ to be a famous athlete and it hasn’t happened. So I’m through with wishes!”

And with that, Billy was smearing his carefully formed letters into a blurry fistful of car window smudge.

“Billy – you’re only 5. How many famous 5-year-old athletes do you think there are?”

All my son could do was shrug. To him, a wish is a wish. There are no loopholes or hidden clauses that should preclude a 5-year-old from becoming a famous athlete, if he wishes for it hard enough.

I had to think fast.

Because wishing falls into that huge vat of complication we parents concoct when we encourage our kids to believe in things they can’t slide into their pockets or hold in their chubby little fists.

And we all do it.

Like the airborne fluoride sprite who will exchange a worn-out baby tooth for its fair market value, in cold cash, at the drop of an incisor.

Or the irrational connection between bestowing your heart’s desire onto a Lincoln-head penny and tossing it into a chlorinated pool at the mall.

We coax them to wish on stars, to dabble in dreams.

But we fail to provide a safety net for their errant wishes – the ones that float away, leaving them to plummet, face first, into some dark place, beyond wide-eyed innocence, we hoped they’d never have to find.

Right then and there I didn’t have time to invent the right glue to mend my child’s broken spirit. First, I asked God, “Why me?” Then, I settled on a simple prayer: “Get me outta this one gracefully. Just send me the right words.” Then, I reached over and intercepted the tear stuck midway down Billy’s cheek.

“Well, if you’re thinking of famous athletes like Michael Jordan or Shaquille O’Neal – I’m pretty sure they had to do way more than wish on stars.

They had to practice dribbling and shooting. They had to learn the rules of the game and how not to be sore losers. They had to grow up into men before they got rich and famous.”

My wisdom was falling on plugged ears. Billy’s fingers were wedged tightly into his ear canals, the thing he does whenever he doesn’t like the way I toss advice his way.

My words landed like dead fish near a nauseated seal. They were stinking up his half of the car, too. I could tell by the sour look on his face.

I pulled out my big gun, a whopper of a phrase that sometimes coaxes sensibility from my stubborn son.

“Billy – do you want to be right or do you want to hear the truth?”

And on cue, my queasy little sea mammal was getting his appetite back.

“All right, Mom. I want the truth.”

“OK, the truth is that you’re right: Wishes are fake.”

He was all ears, sans the fingers.

“There’s nothing wrong with making wishes, because they come straight from your heart. As long as you understand there’s no magic; no place for wishes to go that make them come true.”

And then came the words I’d more than wished for, the spiritual Krazy Glue my fragmented son needed to repair his NBA dreams of grandeur.

“You know, wishes are a lot like prayers. Only we know prayers have someplace to go. You send a prayer to God and have faith that he hears it. Then, you do your part. You wanna be a good athlete? Be patient. Practice and work hard.”

“All right, Mommy.” Only Billy was distracted by a fresh batch of window fog. Still, I think he was happy to know the truth about wishes.

I sent my smile heavenward, along with a silent postscript to my earlier prayerful S.O.S.

“Thanks, God. And one more thing: Next time let it be Jim trapped in the car when Billy needs the truth. I’m drained.”

Originally published Sept. 1997

Bucks County Courier Times

A Mother's Day Gift Like No Other

2011-05-08T09:29:00.000-07:00

Amy Marturana, left, and her mom, Joan, Sea Isle City, NJ, summer of 2010.

"Is this Carol?" said the voice with the familiar Bucks County twang. "You used to write for the Courier?"

It was a man named Dave Marturana, of Newtown. He remembered me from my years writing a weekly column for this newspaper. He found me, long distance, in Manchester, NH, where I've been living and working for the past decade.

He had a story to tell me, and I'm still a sucker for a good story.

Occupational hazard.

"Do you remember writing something called 'Happy Birthday, my Beloved"?

I still had one eye on the TV as I sifted through my unreliable memory banks.

"Well, I wrote a lot of stories in my life, Dave," I said. "Can you give me a little more to go on?"
He said it was something I'd written on the occasion of my daughter's 21st birthday.

"That makes sense, because I have a daughter named Aimee, and Aimee means 'beloved' in French, so yeah, I'm sure I did write something like that," I said, moving into the kitchen for a quiet space.

"Right. I know that because I also have a daughter, Amy, only we spelled it differently," Dave said.

"When you wrote that story it really touched my wife. She cut it out and saved it so she could give it to our daughter on her 21st birthday. She said it really captured everything she felt about motherhood, and expressed all the things she wanted to say to our daughter when she turned 21."
I was really starting to like Dave.

"Aw, that's so cool," I said, still wondering why someone would travel across 10 years and 350 miles of airwaves to remind me that I have a way with words.

"In fact, our Amy is going to be 21 on Thursday," and as Dave went on, I did the mental math, concluding that I must have written that column back in 1997.

"My wife actually has the same birthday as our daughter. Unfortunately, she died a few months ago," said Dave, collapsing my ability to subtract in my head or wallow in the glory of my lingering fame as a memorable columnist for my hometown paper.

"Oh Dave, I'm so sorry," I heard myself saying, still not sure where we were going.

Then he explained how he'd come across the yellowed newspaper clipping in a box of stuff he had been sifting through, things left behind by the woman he'd married not long after meeting her back in 1981, on the job at Betz Laboratories. She was a lab technician and he was an engineer.

"I was going to throw it away. My wife was a real collector. But then I started reading it, and it was like, 'Oh my god, I remember when she cut this out, and why she cut it out. I have got to give it to Amy for her birthday. I've got to do what her mother intended to do with it ."

At this point Dave didn't really need to finish his story. My mind had already raced ahead. I knew exactly why he'd called me.

"My wife had also bought a birthday card ahead of time -- that was Joan -- and it was in the box, next to the clipping," said Dave.

I couldn't say anything. My heart was in my throat and tears were taking me over.

"Anyway, the reason I'm calling is just because I wanted you to know how much it meant to my wife, how much it means to me that, even though Joan can't be here for Amy's birthday, I have this to give her, a last gift from her mother."

Dave told me that in a couple days he was going to drive to Syracuse University, where his daughter is a journalism student, and hand deliver the card.

I learned that Joan Marturana was only 55 when she died on Valentine's Day, just two years after her cancer diagnosis. She also left behind a son, 23.

I thanked Dave again for finding me, and we hung up.

Now, I needed to know what it was that I had written about motherhood that was so important.

My own four kids are mostly grown now. Yet, after 34 years in the trenches, I still find myself questioning my ability to get it right.

I knew my old Courier Times clips were in a shoebox in the basement. Despite my disorganized attitude toward most everything, I had filed the little manila envelopes chronologically before stashing them, which made it easy to find the one marked September 1997.

I unfolded my own yellowed copy of the column that, turns out, was a letter to myself. I read it and cried again -- not just for Joan, but for all the moms still in the trenches, who are never quite sure if they're getting it right.

And so, with permission from my former editor, Pat Walker, I'm sharing Dave's story -- and that old column, which seems like a fitting Mother's Day tribute for Joan Marturana, who couldn't be here this year to soak up the love and gratitude from the family that must somehow find the strength to go on, without her.

Happy Birthday, My Beloved

If only I'd known then what I know now, I could've written myself this letter 21 years ago and saved myself a lot of guesswork, not to mention guilt:

September 12, 1976

Dear Carol:

It's a girl! But then, you knew she would be, somehow, didn't you?

First things first: Stop looking, because there's no owner's manual, no deposit, no return and no money-back guarantee.

Pick a name that seems to suit her. It should be meaningful and, hopefully, pay tribute to someone special in your life. Something like Aimee Jeanne -- Aimee because it means 'beloved;' Jeanne, for your sister who, with any luck, she will grow up to favor.

Now, let the fun begin with your first bonding moment.

Take her gently, apprehensively into your arms and size her up.

Make sure you hold her firmly by her fragile pink blanketed body and kiss her no less than 10 times, covering cheeks, mouth, nose and forehead thoroughly. She will instinctively root around for anything that feels like a food source. It's OK -- let her gorge herself on your chin. It's a phase that won't last long enough.

When no one's looking, check for digits -- 10 extraordinarily long fingers, 10 incredible toes. Then, take off all that hospital garb and open up that diaper. See for yourself what a full-bodied miracle looks like at close range.

This would be a good time to thank God for your perfect, wondrous child -- and let Him know He's officially on call until further notice.

The next year will be hectic. You'll spend most of your spare time informing your friends and relatives of how truly gifted she is. They'll want to know about all her firsts. First burp, first smile, first solid food, first saliva bubble, first unintelligible babble. Write everything down in her baby book. Believe it or not, you'll forget the particulars.

Also, you'll need no less than one roll of camera film per week. It's an expensive habit, but there's just no other way for you to capture every average, expressionless moment for posterity.

In two short years you'll learn the difference between spirited and spoiled. The definition of discipline will become suddenly, strangely ambiguous. She'll destroy every theory on child rearing you subscribed to in your childless years.

Fasten your seatbelt.

At 5 she'll impress you with her maturity on the first day of kindergarten. She'll baffle you a week later when she buries her head in your lap, begging you not to make her go back.

Make her go.

You'll cry through her first band concert, the melody of "Hot Cross Buns" barely recognizable above the din of squeaks, toots and misplaced quarter notes. But that's not what prompts your tears.

It's the way she's straining to find your face in the sea of parents. It's the self-satisfied smile she flashes during the roar of the crowd. it's the indelible song she's given you that will resonate on your heart strings for life.

And just when you think you're handling things pretty well, puberty strikes.

For the next five years nothing will look familiar, from her hairstyle to her bedroom decor.

Though you swore things would be different between your daughter and you, suddenly uncomfortably familiar one-liners are spilling forth from your gut. Once you catch your breath, you'll despise the sound of your words as much as you did the first time you heard them -- when your mother spoke them to adolescent you.

But you'll survive.

Go ahead -- enjoy her youthful spirit. Marvel as she overcomes the pain of growing -- her first romantic heartbreak, her bad hair days, her bad decision days, the days you wonder if she'll ever straighten up and fly right.

Then comes graduation. As your daughter walks the walk, clutching a delicate rosebud, you'll have trouble holding back your tears. It's everything -- the road you've traveled, the road ahead. It's more a beginning than an end -- and yet, it's not easy to watch her so ready to sprout wings and fly off, direction unknown.

All it not lost, though, because at 18 she's still your woman-child.

Out more than in, her phone messages pile up faster than her laundry.

Don't take it personally. She's just preparing you for adulthood.

Hers.

And 21 will come with no mercy.

Now, your job is done.

It's time for the final, selfless act of motherhood: Accept her for who she is. Forgive yourself for the things you could've done better. Love her unconditionally. Find the strength to gently, apprehensively, let her go.

By the Time He Gets To Phoenix, You'll Need a Double Snapple

2011-04-08T08:41:00.000-07:00

I didn't expect to hear from Cousin Katie so soon. We usually try to get our families together around the major winter holidays. Or whenever something worth celebrating happens.

Snapple and the Stuff of Life:
Perfect together.

So when she called in the dead heat of this off-graduation summer, I had to wonder what was bringing us to Audubon, NJ, this time.
Last summer both our families celebrated high school graduations when their Derek and our Aimeé managed to crawl across their parallel scholastic finish lines just in time to get a validated diploma. We won't be doing so again until 1998 when their Jason and our Neil get to balance simultaneous mortarboards on their little knowledge-laden heads, too.
"We're having a going-away party for Derek this Sunday." Katie's voice caught me off guard. "He's moving to Phoenix."
Phoenix. Capital of Arizona. A big dry state somewhere near California. The place Glen Campbell was headed to in the 1960s -- right before he landed that job as a Wichita lineman. Also, the home of Katie's parents.
"When is he leaving?" I asked.
"Next Wednesday. It's time. I think it will do us all some good," said Katie, hinting at the mixed motherly emotions that I, too, have experienced during the advanced stages of custodial parenting.
Not custodial, as in winning custody in a divorce hearing; she and Cousin Chuck are still in good standing, maritally speaking.
I mean custodial as in taking care of, guarding, maintaining and sustaining the child you've made it your business to hover over since birth.
And I say advanced stages because, when your live-at-home teenager finishes high school, turns 18, looks and feels grown up and still lives at home -- you become a terminally incredble parent.
That's right; I hate to shock those of you custodians out there still in the prime of your hovering stage. It's just part of the fine print you didn't dwell on -- along with sleep deprivation, financial ruin and chronic stomach knots. You still have to deal with losing all your credibility. And you thought you were so smart. This is something that even Doctors Spock, Drew and Brazelton can't solve for you, not even with an assist from Dear Abby.
"OK. We'll see you then," I said, remembering the last time we had spoken about Derek's future.
His mind was set on Rider University. But that changed when the financial reality of higher education caved in around him. So he settled for some affordable night classes at the local community college and survived his first post-high school year working, studying and looking for the next step up.
Phoenix seemed to hold promise. After all, Derek could stay with his grandparents for a while, establish residency and attend a state college there for a fraction of the $18,000 it would have cost him to live at Rider, right in his own New Jersey back yard.
At least going to Phoenix is going someplace.
And someplace is better than no place, especially for a young person like Derek, whose birthright is full membership in Club Genreation X.
Cousin Chuck said he knew Derek needed some wings. The best he could offer was a choice: another semester at the community college and some wheels of his own to get back and forth -- or a plane ticket out of Audubon.
Derek took the golden ticket.

Postscript: Derek turned out fine. Found himself
a great wife, Bridget, and is living happily ever after.

At the party, Derek seemed happy enough. He said he was packed and counting the days. Several of his friends stopped by with offerings of cards, gifts and bear hugs. Chuck and Katie were busy restocking the taco dip and fetching Snapples for the hot and thirsty summer crowd.
A week later, I had the unusual pleasure of seeing my cousins again, this time at Cousin Arn's house. Cousin Arn, who also lives in Audubon, is Cousin Chuck's younger brother, and three weeks my junior. He and his wife were celebrating their baby's first birthday. And in 17 summers, I suppose we will be celebrating mutual graduations for their Morgan and our Julianna. Guess it's never too soon to plan.
"So, how'd it go?" I asked Katie, sipping a Snapple.
"I cried for three days. In fact, this is the first day I've been able to say his name without -- "
"-- You talking about Derek again?" Cousin Chuck interjected.
Katie's eyes filled with tears.
"I was fine until the night before he left. Then it hit me -- all of a sudden I couldn't stop crying. It's just that Derek and I would sit around at night a lot, talking about things. You know? Now he's gone to Phoenix. Then you start wondering things like, 'Did I do enough for him? Did I give him enough while I had the chance? Will he be OK?' It's just been harder than I thought."
Katie struggled bravely under the weight of her sentence.
And for a few minutes, on Cousin Arn's moonlit deck, we cousins and our spouses sipped Snapples just to beat the hot summer night, wondering out loud about the state of parenting.
Surely it hadn't been so hard for OUR moms and dads. We marveled at the cost of living, the cost of college, the cost of taking a chance on parenthood without reading the fine print.
Then, we drank another round of Snapples and I offered up a silent toast, to Derek and the future. I think Katie made hers a double.

Confessions of a Prom Mom

2011-04-05T12:55:00.000-07:00

Harry S Truman Prom, 1994. Andreas Scheerer and Aimeé, in blue.

I want to start this by saying I can comfortably write a column about my 17-year-old daughter and our perfect relationship because we share a unique understanding that would make most "regular" mother/daughter duos extremely jealous.
But why resort to blatant lies?
Truth of the matter is I can write comfortably about my daughter because she's out of the country. She's in Canada with her high school chorus. And since the bus isn't due back in Levittown until later tonight, I should have enough time to curb the Sunday paper this is printed in, along with the trash and recyclables, before her dirty laundry hits the hamper.
Next weekend is her senior prom. These are the six scariest words in the Maternal language.
What's so scary, you ask? Perhaps, you, who have never been a hormonal teenager girl, would need to ask. Me? I've been to that party, pal, and I know when to pass the onion dip.
Not that I don't cherish the opportunity to share this once in a lifetime moment with my daughter. But I've barely survived the Prom Mom preliminaries. I'm not sure I have what it takes to make the final cut.
First, there was pre-decision purgatory. That was the month I spent emotionally suspended between Audrey "I Could Have Danced All Night" Hepburn and Sissy "Doesn't Carrie Make A Lovely Prom Queen" Spacek. While all of Aimee's friends were talking about prom gowns and the fashion risks they were considering, from hair to toenails, my daughter refused to throw her hat into the ring. She waffled on her potential prom candidacy with the eloquence of a young Republican.
"I don't know if I want to go. I hate all that catered food. And anyway, it's really just an expensive dance. And I hate to dance."
So I get used to the idea of playing cards and eating mass quantities of Ben & Jerry's with my daughter on prom might when, out of nowhere, she says, "I want to go dress shopping on Saturday. Are you free?"
Am I free?
Would Naomi come of out remission for Wynona?
We decide to hit the rent-a-dress place on Route 1. That way we don't really have to make a commitment. We can sort of scope out the fashion trends and see what styles we like. And if we should happen to find the perfect dress, we grab it. After all, with only four weeks left to dress hunt, our fashion rifles are loaded; we will shoot to kill.
Without dwelling, I'll just say that it was the most traumatic experience of my life. She tried on one dress. THE dress. Long, black, beaded, elegant, sophisticated. It was magic. it was expensive. It was already reserved for her prom night by another hunter, an out-of-town prom-goer.
I learned that in the rent-a-dress jungle, there is only one of each species. Even the assault weapons shoot blanks.
It felt like the part where Cinderella loses her shoe and the coach is a pumpkin again. I was in mourning. My daughter shrugged it off like a household chore.
Suffice it to say that four bridal shops, two major malls and one week later, I found myself hoping for some mice and birds with well-developed sewing skills to whip something up just before an ugly step-sister says, "The carriage is here."
I even considered dusting off my old senior prom dress and offering it to my daughter as more of a sentimental bonding gesture than a last resort. But I found out that the beautiful navy blue dress I left hanging safely in my mother's closet had been sabotaged by the fashion police. My daughter broke it to me gently.
"It's tacky."
I'll admit that it does have more tiers than a Richard Simmons infomercial, but tacky?
Well, the shopping safari finally ended when we bagged a shorter, more practical version of the dress I had loved and lost. It has cobalt blue sequins and beads. Maybe she can make a case for it in 30 years when her 21st Century daughter has trouble finding the dress of her dreams after a few frustrating trips down the fashion Information Highway.
With one week to go, it's not over yet. There are hair and nail appointments to keep. There are still pantyhose to buy (in triplicate, in case of runners or manufacturers defects).
And there are all those overblown, over-analyzed Prom Mom fantasies that I am about to lose.
I bet, if I asked my own mother, she would remember the kind of stuff moms remember, like how long I spent in the bathroom doing my hair, or how nice it was to see me out of my faded Levi's and in a dress for a change. Or how it felt to see me walk out the door in that navy blue layered chiffon gown with the boy she'd one day know more intimately as the father of her grandchildren.
If I could look back, without all the romantic fuzzy edges that time adds to our memories, I would probably see a 17-year-old girl in heels too high and too uncomfortable to walk gracefully in, never mind dance. I'd see Sterno trays filled with food groups I'd never had a first person experience with. I'd see an expensive dance.
In a way I'm glad Aimee won't get a chance to read this.
I have to admit it's really not so bad, being a Prom Mom. And, quite honestly, my daughter packed most of her annoying hormones away in the same box as the New Kids On The Block memorabilia and her entire ninth-grade fluorescent wardrobe.
The scary part is really that anticipating her senior prom means she will be graduating from high school in four weeks.
It means she will be turning 18 in September, and starting college. It means she is pretty much grown up now and, the real truth be known, I would just like one last chance to pick out her shoes, or dress her in something frilly, or rock her gently when she cries.
This prom night, for her, will one day be a memory of how great her friends looked, all dressed up, without big T-shirts, baggy jeans, or backward baseball caps.
And this prom night, for me, will forever be the last ritual of mother/daughter relationships, that reminds me of what it was like to be a hormonal teenage girl.
Maybe, if I hurry, I can make it to the drug store for extra film and a big box of tissues, before the Canadian tour bus gets back to the school parking lot.

Editor of the Year

2011-03-30T07:08:00.000-07:00

For all the witty headlines.

For all the patient plucking of misplaced punctuation.

For all the late nights waiting for deadline meeting stories.

And for all the mental gymnastics spent twisting and contorting over why a career as an editor seemed like a good idea at some point in time.

Click here for examples of Dana's editing work, ad nauseum

Dana Wormald has been named this year's

EDITOR OF THE YEAR

overwhelmingly and unanimously by your minions*.

And Click Here to see how deep it goes.

When he's not cutting, pasting and perfecting, he's thinking out loud.

*The Minions:

She was guardian to a 'hero'

2010-11-07T13:16:00.000-08:00

Henry and Me, strolling through the WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C.

I met Henry Stad on a retrofitted school bus bound for Boston Logan International Airport.

It was 5 a.m., and before I even sat down next to him, Henry offered me fair warning."My wife says I talk too much," said Henry, who, at 91, had a lifetime of stories to keep me entertained for the next 15 hours. Our journey together -- from the Bedford VA Medical Center in Bedford, Mass., to Washington, D.C., and back -- was courtesy of Honor Flight New England, which for the past 18 months has been flying World War II veterans round-trip to the nation's capital to see their memorial, part of a national network that launched five years ago.

Although I'd been on previous Honor Flights, including New England's inaugural flight, this was the first time I went without the usual trappings of a news reporter -- leaving my camera and notebook behind meant my professional objectivity was suspended.

Henry Stad

I was there to serve as Henry's "Guardian" -- a pivotal part of the program that matches veterans with someone who will be "no farther than an elbow away," making sure they are safe and having the time of their lives.

That would be a tall order, considering the life Henry Stad had experienced so far.He was drafted into the Army Air Corps at 22 and served in the European/African/Middle Eastern Theater. I expected his arsenal of war stories would include tales of great heroism and tragic loss.

What I quickly learned about Henry was that the circumstances of war itself did not faze him. Rather, it was his own brush with death after contracting malaria that changed the way Henry would live the rest of his days.

"My parents died when I was just a kid, both of them one after the other," said Henry. "So I always figured my days were numbered anyway. When I got sick in Africa, they didn't know what to do with me, so they shipped me back home. I had lost so much weight nobody knew how to cure me. They said I was a goner, and they pretty much left me to die."

But Henry's wiry body wasn't quitting. For no good reason, he recovered from whatever strain of exotic disease he'd contracted. He'd come close enough to death to appreciate life, and so once he was discharged, his only mission was living life to the fullest.

"I was fond of gambling," said Henry, who explained that he spent the next several years in as many tropical and exotic places as possible, chauffeuring high rollers and rubbing elbows with some of the most colorful characters imaginable during the 1940s and '50s.

"I didn't think about getting married or starting a family because I really didn't think I was going to live much longer, given my parents' short lives and the toll being sick had taken on my body," said Stad.But life went on ... and on. Henry finally came to terms with the fact that maybe life wasn't so temporary or fragile.

That's when he met Maria, a woman who had, like Henry, given up much of her childhood to care for siblings after her parents died young. She is 10 years Henry's junior, but they are a perfect match. They have been married 52 years, and Henry says thanks to his later start in life, he still has grandkids small enough to sit on his lap.Age has left him with little padding around his knee joints, so Henry used a cane to stroll around Washington.

True to my oath as his Guardian, I linked arms with him and we strolled together, usually bringing up the rear during walking tours, Henry spinning tales about his worldly adventures, and me soaking it all in.I can't give you the details -- Henry's also a fast talker -- and I didn't have a pen handy. But when I asked him what the highlight of his trip was, he skipped over standing in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial and counting the gold stars on the Freedom wall that represented the war dead -- including his own brother, a bomber pilot who was killed in action.

"All the fanfare, all the special treatment. To have people asking me if they could take a picture of me with their children. That's never happened to me before. I felt like a hero, and I had tears in my eyes," said Henry.

I guess the thing about being a Guardian is that, despite your best efforts to be the caregiver, you are susceptible to being schooled. I will never forget what I learned about life from Henry on our journey together:

War is hell, but what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. If you're lucky, you'll learn early on that life is a crapshoot: Surviving isn't enough; you gotta play to win. Gambling a little along the way might pay off, so take a few chances. And when you least expect it, you'll find what you didn't even know you were looking for, as long as you've been following your heart. Be open to love. Marry well. Tell your story to anyone who will listen.

About Honor Flight New England:

Launched in June 2009 by retired Manchester Police Officer Joe Byron of Hooksett and sustained by a core group of volunteers, Honor Flight has made 13 flights taking 365 veterans -- otherwise too old or infirm to go it alone -- to Washington to see the memorial completed in 2004 in their honor. Passengers have included a dozen sets of brothers, 18 POWs, a vet who was blinded while serving and a double-leg amputee.

Flights will resume in April. In the meantime, Byron is focused on fundraising, the only way the program survives. He is hoping to find a corporate sponsor.His sense of urgency in making sure the program continues is grounded in the fact that WWII veterans are dying at a rate of about 1,000 per day."Unfortunately, we have to take the winter off, due to the weather, and face the fact that in that time we'll lose some of our veterans who are on the waiting list, so it's kind of sad," Byron said. "But it's an incredible thing. I just had a call from a son whose father just returned from our last flight. He told me that his father cried himself to sleep, he was just so happy to know that everyone cared for him so much."

For more information, go to honorflightnewengland.org.

Honor Flight vets part of 'Pacific;' splash in D.C.

2010-03-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

Story and Photos
By CAROL ROBIDOUX
New Hampshire Sunday News

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Tonight's premiere of HBO's 10-episode miniseries "The Pacific" is the latest cinematic offering by executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, a third take on the bloody battles of World War II and companion film to their previous collaborations, "Saving Private Ryan," and "Band of Brothers."
On Thursday, when Spielberg and Hanks addressed 250 veterans from around the country at the memorial constructed in the vets' honor, 35 New England veterans were there, including five from New Hampshire. It was a journey made possible thanks to HBO's urge to make a meaningful splash, and to Honor Flight Network, a remarkable national effort that has flown more than 40,000 WWII vets to Washington in the past five years, for a proper thank you.
Joe Byron of Hooksett, founder of the Honor Flight New England chapter, and his volunteer board had only about a month to organize the two-day trip, which was all expenses paid by HBO.
Byron's now seen to it that 142 local veterans have made it to see the World War II Memorial. With a waiting list of well over 300, Byron is doing his best to schedule 10 flights this year. He has enough in the donation till for about two flights, even though there are already five on the calendar.
He hopes the national exposure this week will increase awareness of the urgent need for donations, as veterans from that era are dying at a rate of 1,100 each day.
James Goins of Portsmouth was thrilled to get the call about the trip. He survived the war and went on to retire from the military in 1971. Surviving cancer is his current mission. He spent much of the trip taking it easy, suffering from fatigue and upset stomach. One of the younger veterans on the trip, Goins was 15 when he volunteered for service in 1943, slipping through a huge military crack that, in wartime, was enlisting most any able-bodied male who could vouch for himself.
"I had an older brother already in the Army, and I just wanted to be there, too," said Goins. "I didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was. I just knew I wanted to be part of it."
Whereas most Honor Flight trips are whirlwind one-day affairs, corporate sponsorship allowed for bells, whistles and fanfare this time around.
At Boston's Logan Airport, New England veterans were whisked through security to a double line of American flags leading to a room jammed with family, friends and strangers, all waving flags and cheering. The U.S. Air Force Band of Liberty, from Hanscom Air Force Base, played on as cake was served and tears flowed.
Paul Lindstrom of Hampton was there to see off his dad, Ed Lindstrom, whose personal story is as compelling as any character Spielberg or Hanks could conjure.
"My mother was engaged to his best buddy, and he had to break the news to her, that (the buddy) was killed when their ship was sunk. That's how they got together," said Paul Lindstrom. It was a marriage that lasted 62 years. "There's a reason for everything," Lindstrom said.
The group flew into LaGuardia Airport, picking up an Honor Flight group based in New York, then on to Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, where the call had gone out to all active-duty military and the public in general to come and welcome the fleet of chartered Honor Flights arriving all day.
Robert Curtis of Bar Harbor, Maine, walked slowly under the archway of yellow balloons that led to a path lined with supporters that snaked through the terminal as far as the eye could see, all the way to the tour bus waiting to take the vets to the Crystal City Marriott in Arlington, Va.
He tried to take it all in.
"I've been to a lot of conventions, seen a lot of things, but I've never seen anything like this. It overwhelms me. Really brings a tear to my eye," he said, shaking endless hands attached to strangers, each one leaning in close to thank him, personally, for his service.
"You spend a lot of years thinking about those days, and then you get to an age where you start to wonder if it mattered all that much. We never knew how much we did, until now; now we know. This is once in a lifetime, for me. It has restored my sense of how great this country really is," said Curtis.
The climax of the trip came at the memorial, where Spielberg and Hanks spoke about the why of their movie-making efforts. For Spielberg, it's personal. His father, 93-year-old Arnold Spielberg, is a WWII veteran.
"With each passing generation, more and more people are forgetting about World War II," Spielberg said. "This is why I made 'Saving Private Ryan.' This is why Tom Hanks and I made 'Band of Brothers' and 'The Pacific,' because all of you are the greatest stories ever told, and we are honored to be able to tell these stories to our kids, to your grandkids, your great-grandkids and the world at large. We celebrate, we commemorate, we memorialize your stories so the world you saved will never, never forget you."

For more about Honor Flight, visit honorflightnewengland.org; write Honor Flight, P.O. Box 16287, Hooksett, NH 03106; or call 518-5368.

What's your New Year's Solution?

2010-01-09T13:48:00.000-08:00

Mummers kickin' it Philly New Year style.

The thing about New Year’s day is, unless you are heading to Philadelphia for the annual Mummer’s Parade, there isn’t much left to do, what with Hanukkah and Christmas under your belt — and around your hips, thighs and abdomen. Nothing much to do except update your New Year’s resolution list.
So there you sit with your hand in a bowl of leftover onion dip, thinking about your life. And once you start dwelling, there’s no end to the remorse you feel over all the obvious bad things you do.

Time to make some new friends?

You secretly smoke. You eat chunks of real butter. You curse at the dog. Regular exercise means brushing in a circular motion twice a day after meals. Your best friend lives in a bottle and his name is Bud Weiser.
And now, just because the clock has struck midnight for the 366th consecutive day, you decide you’ve had it with your unhealthy lifestyle. Again.
Well, before you crush your last pack of Marlboro’s or pay the MasterCard bill for that Wii Fit you charged in a moment of desperation, I have to tell you something very important: DON’T DO IT!
That’s right. This year, I’m urging the public at large not to make a bunch of noble resolutions they will fail to keep.
First of all, take a look at the word “resolution.” Break it down, as your high school algebra teacher would say.
Re-solution. Sounds to me like solving a lifetime of mistakes again and again, year after year.
And the reason that we make New Year’s resolutions each and every year?
Class?
Anyone?
Do I see a hand in the back of the room? Yes, you there, with the light bulb over your head.
That’s right. We haven’t been using the correct dictionary.
So now that we’ve broken it down, let’s look it up. I’m using Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary:
“Resolution: noun; 1. the act or process of reducing to simpler form, as the act of analyzing a complex notion into simpler ones.”
Ah HA! It seems we’ve been approaching this New Year’s resolution thing all wrong by asking, “What bad unhealthy habits can I break this year?”
The obvious answer is: none of them. If making resolutions every year worked, we’d all be living a clean, sober, bad-habit-free life. We’d all be rich, due to our bountiful savings accounts. We’d have rippling abs, low cholesterol, and be working part-time as a volunteer at the local homeless shelter.
If only we’d looked it up sooner in Webster’s Ninth, we’d have known that to have a happier new year, all we have to do is reduce our lives to a simpler form.
Consider the stressors that lead us to overeating, overdrinking, oversmoking, overworking, oversleeping, underexercising and generally underachieving, especially when there’s something good on HBO. It’s really not the basics of life that lead to our frustrations — working or parenting or being married or being single. It’s the complications that get us.
We smoke because we think it calms our nerves. And our nerves are shot because we haven’t figured out how to simplify our lives. We drink too much because the buzz feels better than the burn we endure after working out. We settle in and watch others' lives pass before our eyes on the latest reality TV series because, frankly, we’re too tired to have a live of our own. After clocking out, stoking the home fires, and scrambling after the loose ends du jour, we're lucky to make it up to bed before falling asleep on the couch.
We eat too much because it’s the only productive thing we can do when life feels overwhelming. We don’t need better eating habits. We’re all familiar with how to right our toppled food pyramids. We just need to be underwhelmed.
Workaholics know, deep down, that the only thing really gained by overworking are more reasons to overwork, leaving less time to enjoy the life you’ve worked so hard to achieve.
And often, we oversleep when we’ve spent half the night staring at the ceiling, counting our worries like sheep. So enough with the worries already.
I’ve come to the conclusion that this year should be the last year anyone will have to labor over which resolutions to make, keep and break. I urge you to start this New Year by getting your hand out of that bowl of onion dip in a hurry. It’s time to find your New Year’s Solution.
If it’s a kinder, gentler, simpler life you need, then figure out what you can do to simplify your life this year.
I should start by cleaning out all the closets in my house. Then, I’d have a place to put all the stuff that piles up everywhere which makes me feel overwhelmed by how messy things are in my world. That’s not just a metaphor. But I know that endless clutter isn’t the underlying reason for my other bad habits.
By definition, all I have to do is make it simple, once and for all.
So, here’s my five-step solution to reduce stress and guilt in 2010, which should do it, once and for all:
1. Prioritize my daily to-do list, making sure I never again lose sight of who and what is most important to me.
2. Hug the ones I love every chance I get.
3. Be honest. About everything. Especially to myself.
4. When things feel overwhelming, take a deep breath and say out loud: “In the scheme of things, this is not a big deal. I can handle anything.” Then, go and handle it.
5. Lay off the onion dip.
Now it's your turn; what's YOUR New Year's Solution?

(Last) Flight of the Bumble Bee

2009-09-22T16:27:00.000-07:00

All summer I have watched as small piles of sawdust accumulated just beyond my backdoor. I didn't know there were carpenter bumblebees, until I got up close and personal with their handiwork: perfectly bored caverns in the wood railing outside my door, where future hordes of carpenter bees are bred.
Not the greatest discovery for a housewife who has longed for a carpenter husband from time to time. Not that I'm complaining. But he has his hands full without having to patch up bee-sized holes in the woodwork.
Which is why I was surprised at the compassion I felt for the disoriented carpenter bee when I almost stepped on him, his wings moving in a flightless frenzy as he slowly crawled across my back porch.
I think he was trying to scare me, but it was futile. Oh dying carpenter bee, where is thy sting?
His dance of death coincided with the first day of autumn, and it made me feel kind of sad. Not that I will miss the miniature dunes of dust and resulting holes that, no doubt, will remain as a monument long after he is gone.
No, I think it has something to do with the wonder of nature and the symbiotic pull of such a small critter. Without my wood porch, he would perish. Without his daily presence, I would have missed another one of those moments, in which the big world stops spinning long enough for me to get my bearings and actually see something otherwise indiscernible.
Get close enough to a carpenter bee and you will fight the urge to pet him, once you are lost in the fine detail of his furry yellow thorax. Study his fat body and impossible filigree wings long enough and you will wonder how this specimen gets off the ground. Scientists have concluded there is no mechanical truth, no aerodynamic reason, for their success. It is a matter of brute force; sheer will to fly. Theirs is a busy existence involving digging holes, breeding a sophisticated society of drones and queens, pollinating plants and making it possible for humans to harvest fruit and vegetables across the globe, to ensure our "5 a day."
We have learned, with colony collapse in honey bees, that there are no small players in the food chain that binds our mutual existence.
So it was, watching my carpenter bee in a death spiral outside my door, that I felt obliged to linger as he tumbled around, wings gasping for air, abdomen glistening in the autumn sun, his will to bore, to fly, to pollinate, to procreate -- to live -- exhausting all at once in a brilliant, valiant moment of truth for both of us.

Three-minute Fiction

2009-07-17T06:01:00.001-07:00

Hovering is for the Birds*
A short story
By Carol Robidoux

Ramona+ hovered daily over the nest hidden in the rhododendrons. In her heart it was no coincidence that the sky-blue eggs arrived on Mother's Day. Robins nested there before, next to the gladiola stalks and papery daffodil rot. Two days later three of the four eggs hatched, and she started snapping photographs.

She did a cursory search for the fourth egg but never found it.

Every time Ramona curled back the sturdy green leaves and burgeoning fuscia buds to snap a one-handed portrait of the feathering chicks, the mother bird's frantic screams echoed from a telephone wire as she hopped from ground to perch and back.

“It's OK,” Ramona told the puffed-up bird. “I won't hurt your babies.”

Ramona Googled “robins” and found that her adoptive brood would fledge in 14 days. Incredible, she thought. From invisible life form encased in porcelain shell to fully feathered red-breasted predator of worms in two short weeks.

Daily photographs were posted online. Ramona's social network liked the photos, and thanked her for sharing. Someone commented on the construction of the nest – perfectly formed cradle of sticks, leaves and bird fluff.

Such brushes with nature always stirred Ramona's humanity. Her thoughts spiraled deep into the substance of life, how every little facet of every little ecosystem is equipped to handle itself. Birds somehow know what to do to keep their species going. Without a network of friends and family or an information highway, they figure out nesting and hatching and feeding and protecting.

By day seven the babies were ruffled, their diamond-shaped beaks stuck in overdrive, expecting worms instead of zoom lens hum whenever Ramona visited.

Still at an impasse with mother bird, Ramona tried sitting on the porch steps, hoping mama robin would trust enough to nest while she was present. It never happened.

“I wonder why she doesn't do more to protect them if I'm such a threat?” Ramona thought, switching mental gears long enough to consider her own human brood of four.

In a few more years, her youngest would be off to college. Ramona figured bird years to be condensed dog years. In two weeks the robin was accomplishing what Ramona had spent more than two decades doing.

“You're obsessed with those birds,” her oldest son said in passing one day. Fully grown, he was between adventures, staying on for only a few more weeks before flying to Tokyo to take a teaching job.

“I'm not obsessed,” Ramona said, defending her right to be fascinated by a nest full of birds. “It's just that I know they're only here for a short time, then I can't hover anymore.”

Her objection to the word her son has used to describe her maternal instinct didn't override the fact that he was right. Whether measured in bird years, dog years, or humanity, the part of motherhood that requires vigilance ends almost before it begins. After training yourself to nest, hatch, nourish and nurture, all the while deflecting danger, eventually they fly.
Day 11 her younger teenaged son arrived home from school. “Your birds are gone, huh?”

Ramona rushed to the rhododendrons. One forgotten, perfect blue egg inside a masterful cradle. On her knees she probed the weeds for signs of life.

They should have been there, testing their wings.

As she turned back toward the house, she heard an unnatural shriek, overshadowed by a shrill caw, caw, caw. Ramona's heart raced. In the time it took to turn around, her eye glimpsed a crow in flight, a limp bundle of blue-gray feathers in its talons.

She searched the wires for mother bird.

Ramona gasped in vain, knowing that her vigilance had served the crow well.

+ ramona: spanish in origin, means "Wise Protector"
*Inspired by the birds in my rhododendron bush. Fiction prompted by NPR's "3-minute Fiction" spot. Many will enter, few will win...

When it comes to lemonade stands, the glass is always half full

2009-04-10T15:54:00.000-07:00

I was driving pretty fast on Mammoth Road. It had been a long afternoon of working my beat in Derry and I needed a bathroom, not a drink. But something about the kid with the crazy glasses made me turn the van around. Actually, it was more the sign in his hands: "Lemonade. 22 Ashley Drive." I saw him leaning it against a fence. He looked like he was being stealthy. He was gone by the time I made the U-turn.
Honestly, if I hadn't seen him with the sign, I would have missed the sign completely. It was barely readable at 50 mph.
I followed my heart and my inability to pass up a lemonade stand to a small side street where I found a mob of kids swarming a makeshift storefront -- a couple of girls with paper bunny ears hopping about, but mostly boys-- all kinds of boys. They were pumped.
"Wanna buy some lemonade?" One of them said, sticking his face right into my open passenger side window.
I was ready to pay top dollar, or at least, a dollar, for a small cup of ambition.
"How much is your lemonade?" I asked.
"Sixty-five cents," said the kid, who seemed like maybe he was just picking an arbitrary number.
Then another kid came up and asked if I wanted a small or a large. I asked if there was a difference in price. He hesitated.
Too late, my large cup of fresh-squeezed entrepreneurial spirit was coming toward me.

Frank.

My dollar didn't seem so generous at these inflationary prices, and what with all these salesmen.
I fumbled for another dollar. That's when Bunny Ears hit me up for more.
"You didn't buy any candy. Do you want some candy?" she said, like a spritely Frank to my not-so-Donnie Darko. "Aren't these cute?" she said, wiggling one of the gray-stuffed critters she and her friend were traveling with up near my face.
"What'cha got?" I said, grabbing my change purse through the open van window as I followed Bunny Ears toward the stand, as if I had no power to resist.
They pointed to a Ziploc bag full of random, somewhat melty-looking candy. I saw a candy necklace, some Snicker's minis, and a few tiny Twix bars.
"Twix," I said firmly. "How much?"
"That's 50 cents," said the tallest kid who looked like he was changing the numbers on the sign, from 45 to 50, at that exact moment.
I dumped all the change from my change purse and handed it off to another kid. I estimated it to be about another $1.67. He needed two hands to hold it.
"Do you think this is enough?" he asked the kid with the erasable markers.
"Yeah," said the number cruncher, scribbling "tips accepted" at the bottom of the sign board.
"Woo Hoo," yelled another. "Our first customer! We're rich! I'm gonna go get a money box." And he was gone.
During the transaction, I noticed a dad step outside of 22 Ashley to make sure the stranger his kids were giving candy to didn't seem like too much of a creep.
I smiled at the dad and drove off after snapping a photo of this industrious gang of nine.
Maybe it was too much to pay for 2 ounces of lemonade in a 20-ounce cup and a bite-size Twix, but I never get over the thrill of reinforcing the notion to a bunch of kids that there is great power in stepping outside yourself, offering something to the world and waiting to see if it matters.
Because it matters.

Being the hawk

2009-02-19T13:39:00.000-08:00

Nothing is random, at least as far as I can tell. Like the time I saw what looked like confetti floating through the air as I made my way through the Hannaford parking lot. As I followed the trail of white fluff back to its origin, I spotted a hawk plucking a seagull it had just swooped in on. I got as close as I could and then automatically reached for my camera. Something about the moment resonated. The hawk only let me watch for a short time before dragging the seagull to relative safety (see video below), stopping at the corner of the parking lot to finish what he'd started. What stirred in me at first as pity for the poor seagull quickly turned to admiration for the hawk, for doing what he had to do to survive -- even in a crowded supermarket parking lot, without the usual privacy of brush or woods to devour his prey. It was as unnatural as it was natural.
The next day I was heading to the bank, in the same shopping center. As I turned the corner I could see the remains of the seagull scattered across the mulch-covered dirt divider. I instinctively pulled off the road and parked the van, getting out for a closer look. As I examined the errant wing, the disembodied head, the inedible remnants of the sea bird, I realized that some days you are the hawk, and some days you are the seagull, as natural as it is unnatural, as random as it is necessary to survival.

New Shoes

2008-10-21T10:41:00.000-07:00

After a quick visit to the Employment Office today, which in my head has always been the Unemployment Office, I headed over to the new Goodwill Store.
Employment and goodwill are important concepts, even just psychologically speaking, when you have no job and no idea where your next paycheck will come from.
I bought some shoes for $6.99, size 10. They are black synthetic made-in-China shoes with clunky last-century heels. The toe part is kind of angled like toes, which is not the way shoes normally look.
I am unfashionable enough to not know if they are good shoes or bad shoes.
To me they looked quirky yet sensible.
They were someone else's shoes. I'll never know whose shoes. They haven't traveled far, from the look of the sole.
Philosophical interlude: It's hard to know how far one has traveled based on their soul mileage. If only there were an inner odometer we could access.
Not that the knowing is any indicator of one's soul purpose, or value.
Point being, I'm unemployed and officially walking in someone else's shoes, thanks to the goodwill of some other woman.
It won't take me long to go a mile. After that, we'll see what's changed.