Alan Sivell's A Boomer Life

The summer of 1968 – after my junior year – had been a good summer. Most of it was spent working at Lincoln Dairy where I got a lot of attention from all the college waitresses who had tried to reform Page, and I had a fine time with a steady, gorgeous girlfriend, even if we weren’t quite on the same wavelength. We didn’t always have to talk.

Too quickly, though, it was time again for football camp.

Before my first camp sophomore year, I remember thinking about how much fun it was going to be. Camp, not football. Until I went and found out what really went on there, I only heard the word camp. The word football didn’t register with me.

It would.

I had never been to camp even though I lived in a town where many sent their children away in the summer to camp. Head Football Coach Frank Robinson sent a brochure home describing a camp that featured activities such as swimming and canoeing that could be enjoyed, tucked in between the practices and meetings.

But I don’t know anyone in the entire history of Hall High football in those days who had the energy for any of those extracurricular activities. The coaches wrung you out. The only free time we had – and there wasn’t much of that – was spent sleeping.

We left on a Sunday in last week of August when the sun still maintained much of its summer power and we didn’t return home until the Saturday afternoon of Labor Day weekend. It was a grueling 7 days, jammed every day with cross country runs, wind sprints, repetitive drills, hitting, hazing, mildewy uniforms and endless meetings in a WPA dining hall made of perpetually damp, rough-hewn wood.

The days started with a warbling recording of reveille at 6 a.m. While still in our bunks, we could hear the needle drop into the groove over the camp’s loudspeaker and a few seconds of hiss and pop as the well-worn vinyl spun before the music started. We then had to pour out of bed, into our Chuck Taylors and race to stand at attention at the center of camp.

Coach Robinson, dressed in gym shorts and a T-shirt that looked as if they were freshly starched at a New York laundry, would stride into our midst like McArthur coming ashore. He appeared to have been up for hours and always had a broad smile as he knew he was the only person, coaches included, who wanted to be in that particular place at that particular moment.

You had to be in line up on time. No excuses. If you were a straggler, running down the rain-rutted hill to the center of camp, even just10 seconds late, Coach would smile and make some gentle remark. But that lateness for the morning gathering would be cataloged by Coach Robinson.

And later that day, when we were running wind sprints at the end of practice, Coach would let us know by a seemingly casual remark that he remembered who had been late to the morning lineup. He’d smile and joke about the latecomer’s speed during the drills or how much he was sweating. And that maybe a few more wind sprints were what we ALL needed and wanted.

Coach, in his subtle, not so subtle way, let us know that we were all paying for our teammate who was late to the morning lineup. We learned the lessons: We were all responsible for and to each other. And don’t be late. Nobody liked wind sprints.

After taking attendance, Coach Robinson blew his whistle and we were off through the woods for a three-mile run. Coach called it Burma Road, referring to the particularly harsh, enforced march during World War II. The significance was lost on high schoolers, 25 years removed from that war.

Later in my life, running that distance at that hour became a routine for me but this was before our generation began jogging. At the end of the run, we had to jump into the chilly camp lake to wash off and race back to the cabins to change for 7 a.m. breakfast.

After breakfast, there was about an hour until we had to put the pads on and warm up for practice from 9 to 11. Then we had lunch and quiet time, supposedly the time you might be out canoeing. Every year a couple of rookies would paddle out on the first day of camp, not realizing the fatigue that was coming. But they only went on the first day. After that, quiet time was quiet time. We got in our bunks and napped like kindergartners.

And just as we were achieving REM, the camp horn would signal it was time to get up and haul your tired and sore body down to the uniform room and put on pads and jerseys that were still damp from the morning practice. Then we’d hit the field again for another 2 hours in the blazing August sun – although the afternoon practice often ran a little longer – and then dinner and then meetings at night.

The meetings were almost as exhausting as the practices. We sat in metal folding chairs for an hour while the coaches excitedly diagrammed plays. We were all given mimeographed playbooks so we could follow along. The pages featured purple ink images of horizontal ovals representing each player for each play. Then lines were drawn where each player was to go on each play.

After an hour or so, the coaches could see we were fading. That’s when they brought out the bedtime snack: a couple dozen dried out grocery-store brand cookies and a 20-gallon pot of some kind of sugary, flavorless juice. We were never sure what it was supposed to be. Lemonade? Kool-Aid? We just called it bug juice because that’s what was often floating on top.

Then we headed back to our bunks, exhausted.

But that’s when the seniors, who knew from experience how to pace themselves during the week, started hazing the sophomores, requesting that they sing songs or dance with each other. If the entertainment value wasn’t judged to be high enough, the performers were doused with ketchup and mustard that had been swiped from the mess hall.

I managed to avoid getting picked on too much because a lot of the seniors were classmates of my brother and while they didn’t hang with him, they respected him. The hulking fullback, Rich, had been pretty good friends with Page in junior high and he watched out for me. And my cabin leader was a kid whose family was on my paper route and he got a kick out of me. Even so, I got a soaking of ketchup and mustard one night to prove there was no favoritism. I couldn’t eat either for about a year.

I had no stomach for the hazing when I was on the receiving end nor when it came my turn to give it as a senior. But it seemed as if some guys lived for their moment at the torturer’s controls and only came out for football for that one week in August when they would be all powerful. I may not have liked playing very much, but I did like what the pressures of football and the pressures of peers revealed about human behavior in our little high school Petrie dish.

I only managed one complete camp. That was my sophomore year. It was a bit of a badge of honor to make it through camp. The second year was when Page died and I left halfway through the week. Senior year, I hyper-extended my knee and had to miss a couple of practices in the last 2 days.  But the worst part of football camp is that it signaled the start of the football season.

Sure, we were glad to be back in school and see all our friends and check out any new girls who may have moved to town, but it also meant for the next 3 months, the only free day of the week we had was Sunday. Every other day, we’d have to be in that locker room, putting on those stinky, damp pads ready to go out to hit or be hit. For a full two hours.

I longed for daylight savings time to end. Practices had to get shorter as the sun began to go down earlier and earlier. But Coach Robinson didn’t let up. Since the school was in the center of town, Coach figured once the streetlights came on, and he brought out his bag of brightly colored footballs, practice could go on. And on.

I was thrilled to have contacts my senior year so I could see the clock on the town hall tower to gauge how much longer the torture of practice would go on. Before, I had to squint hard or ask someone. Quietly. Out of the side of my mouth while keeping my eyes on whatever drill we were doing for the tenth time. The danger was getting caught asking because you were supposed to be so interested in what we were doing that you paid no attention to time.

I hated football.

I only played because of girls.

I figured it might up my chances with them. In those days, it was a very important line on your high school resume. Even guys not yet blessed with much personality or physical talent gained simply by being on the team. And you didn’t even have to have talent or even play in the games on Saturday. You just had to be at practice. Every day.

Because of my size – 5’ 8” and 165 – I played in the backfield as a sophomore. I actually had no idea what positions there were to play in football. Before heading up to school for my first practice, I asked Doom what position I should play. He had been a lineman in college and knew how little glory they got. So he told me to sign up for fullback.

But apparently, Doom hadn’t bothered to assess whether or not I might have talent at that position. Very soon, I was third string on the sophomore team at a small school. And if we had had a fourth string, I might have been on that. Not only was I slow but also, I was playing without glasses or contacts so everything was a big blur.

I’d run exactly where the play told me to go, whether there was anyone there or not. Frankly, I couldn’t really tell if there was a hole. It all looked the same to me and my depth perception wasn’t all that great.

In addition to being slow and unable to see, I had none of that athletic awareness that you need to be a good football player. The game is very disciplined in the design of the offensive plays and defensive schemes, but once the ball is snapped and everyone has done their initial job, the play opens up and there can be a million possibilities to consider in a split second. You need to react, not think.  And you should especially not think about what you should be thinking. Which is what I often did.

One play clearly illustrates my football acumen. I was on the sophomore squad and to help the junior varsity team prepare for a game later in the week, we were running the enemy plays against them. Basically, as Coach Robby liked to say, we were live tackling dummies. Or another one of his favorites, cannon fodder.

One of the opposing team’s plays that we were running was really well designed, apparently, because even with my lack of speed and vision, I broke loose around the end. I had never felt so free on a football field. Usually I just went a yard or two and then everyone fell on top of me. But here I was, going around the end – untouched – prepared to run the length of the practice field. Even though it wasn’t a touchdown in a game, I could sense it was going to be something I would remember for the rest of my life.

Well, I do remember it.

As I turned the corner on daylight, doing all that thinking about what a special play this was going to be, I suddenly saw Don Kandarian, a very nice, affable guy off the field and a slightly crazed, very well-built defensive back, on the field. He was speeding straight at me.

I had about half a second to react. Rather than instinctively planning my escape, my reaction was: Wow! What is he doing there? How did he get here so quick? Should I try to run out wider? Or duck my head and try to …. Bam! Don Kandarian knocked the wind out of me. The best play I ever made on a football field came to a very sudden end. I was flat on my back struggling to breathe.

When I should have been reacting, I was thinking. And it wasn’t about football stuff. Or, more accurately, football stuff that could have saved me. It was an internal discussion about how amazed I was to see him and that maybe I wouldn’t get that touchdown and maybe I wouldn’t have much of a gain on that play after all.

I decided if I were going to survive three years of football, I needed to learn not to think.

Next week:

Chapter 19: I Can See Clearly Now.

The exhilarating week of Boys’ State was over. Going head to head with some of the best and the brightest high school students in Connecticut gave me the confidence that I could compete in their world, if I applied myself. And the glamour of dancing with Bethani at the Governor’s Ball was the Lincoln Dairy whipped cream on the top of a great week.

But I quickly came back to real

That’s when I first saw Annie.

It was just after a busy lunch hour. The temperature in the Dairy’s kitchen was approaching 90 and every bit of available counter space was filled with dirty dishes and silverware – half-eaten hamburgers and leftover egg salad holding them together like cement. I scraped the food and ground-in cigarette butts off the plates into the garbage pail. Then I sprayed the rest of the gunk off with water so hot it could melt plastic before putting them in the pre-war dishwasher that sounded like a helicopter taking off.

Washing dishes after a busy lunch

After loading and

Even though I had

I pretended to be doing something – checking the condiments, checking the salt and pepper shakers – though I was really doing nothing. Then I stopped to talk to Lana with a practiced casualness, who introduced me to her friend, Annie.

Annie was gorgeous in a big

Normally, I’d have

I worked that conversation as hard as a quarterback works the two-minute drill in the Super Bowl. But I knew, inevitably, the clock would run out on me. Because I knew the truth. The absolute babes were interested in guys who were absolute hunks. It was nature.

Intellect never seemed to factor into it. And even if it did, I wasn’t headed to the Ivy League. So after a few minutes, Lana’s break was done, Annie left and I went back to the dishwasher, the dirty dishes and my dreams.

I spent the rest

The heavens,

Hello. I love you.

So we started going to movies, to the summer dances and, eventually, the back corners of parking lots, where the floodlights didn’t reach. When I showed up for those dances with Annie at the old auditorium – this is how I know she made heads swivel in large, dimly lit rooms – all the other guys went crazy, making faces and those obscene gestures teen-age boys make behind good-looking, well-built girls’ backs.

They were jealous. They couldn’t believe I was dating her. Bethani was very pretty, but she had an intellectual bite that added to her beauty and made her a knockout in my opinion, but most 17-year-old boys weren’t interested in adding up a girl’s attributes. They usually were interested in only one attribute.

What was great

“You know that big

Everyone knew it.

But after a few

After a year with straight-A

I was a teenage

Annie had none of

At 17, my

Easy conversation

While I found it

One of the longest and deepest conversations we had was about the function of the vent windows that cars had in those days. It was hot and my car had no air-conditioning. I was trying to explain how to use the vents, or as my dad called them, the “no-drafts,” to cool off. I finally gave up and leaned over her and adjusted the vent as I wanted it. Brushing against her in the tight confines of my small car as I did, my mood changed for the better immediately.

And Annie never

So, despite the lack of intellectual nourishment, it was a great summer relationship. Even better, I knew it would end when school started because Annie went to a private girls’ school out of state. It was going to be perfect for my senior year. I would have a gorgeous girl friend that I had no daily obligation to. She could come home for all the important dances and events and holidays and maybe I would go up to her school once a semester. But I wouldn’t have to call every night – maybe just on Sundays – or walk her home or take her to the library.

Then one night toward the end of the summer, Annie called, excited. She had convinced her parents not to send her back to the boarding school. She would go to the other public school in town and then we could see each other every day and talk on the phone every night. And date every weekend. I felt my heart sink.

So we broke up.

It just wasn’t going to work. I liked Annie. But not as an everyday girl friend. It turns out, I hit the panic button too soon and her plan to come home to public school failed.  Her parents had always planned to send her back to boarding school and they did. It was just as well, though. I was not telling her the truth about my feelings.

A few years later, my mom clipped an article from the paper about Annie. Apparently she had been arrested for forgery and writing bad checks. It’s not as bad as it sounds. She wanted some money, more than her parents in that big house wanted to give her, so she wrote some checks and signed their names. They were going to teach her a lesson and had her arrested.

I never saw her again. But I still think of her every time I drive down Main Street and see that big house.

That’s the final episode of “A

I enjoyed putting these stories

My plan, unless I come up with a

.Until then … I’ll say what I often say when I’m trying to get out of a situation … Gotta go.

The relationship crisis with Bethani was resolved and the junior prom was behind us. I was feeling good. It was spring. It was baseball season. Then 3rd quarter report cards came out. Bethani, of course, got all As. I got three Cs, a D and a B in gym.

Mom and Doom weren’t happy with me but they were just a few months removed from Page’s death. And they were tired of fighting with me for almost my entire school career to get my classroom performance to match my aptitude test performance. I was on my own in my final push toward college.

That week, I got the one and only invitation to my guidance counselor’s office. I sat down and Mr. Lincoln, who was retiring that year didn’t say a word. I knew the yearbook was being dedicated to him. I figured he must have helped the kids on the yearbook staff who were headed to Harvard, Duke and UCONN. But I had never spoken to him or he to me.

Several minutes went by while he

Finally, he shook his head. “I

Then he picked up a pile of papers and waved them at me. Notes from my teachers. “And your teachers say you should and could be doing much better.” His voice was rising. He expressed the frustration my teachers and the school staff had for me for about 10 minutes. But to me it seemed like a fake outrage, as if he’d been told to yell at me. So I just sat there and took it and nodded appropriately.

But as he was wrapping up, Mr. Lincoln tried to hit me with a sucker punch. He asked about my future plans and I told him college.

He leaned back and looked down his

“With your track record and the way

At the time, Mr. Lincoln’s intended

So rather than throwing my energy

It was March and school elections were

Of the guys running

One night, several

50 years later, we

Ernie was too solid, too honorable and a great guy who wouldn’t want to upset any of the people already in the race for president. John, on the other hand, while a nice guy, had a natural streak of cutthroat, political skill within him. 

So we went to John’s house. It was a school night and he was already in bed, but we managed to get by his mother, convincing her that we had something really important to discuss. We ran up the stairs, burst into his bedroom and flipped on the stark, white overhead light. We fanned out around John’s bed and began hammering him with our idea. John didn’t say anything – couldn’t really – as he tried to blink himself awake.

But John only put up about an hour’s worth of resistance.

Maybe it was because he was still groggy with sleep or maybe he actually saw the chance to be president, or maybe it was that one of the senior heavyweight wrestlers whom he respected was sitting on his chest as we made our case.

A few days later, there was an all-school assembly in which the candidates for each office got five minutes to tell their classmates why they deserved to be elected. The entire student body and all the faculty squeezed into the old auditorium and sat on metal folding chairs as the candidates for treasurer, secretary, vice president and finally president made their speeches as clever as they possibly could. 

Still, it was hard to distinguish any of these speeches from another, even when the speaker was a friend. They all promised to do things they had no power to do.

School elections were a farce. Basically, we were electing the student who would go with the principal to his Kiwanis or civic club meetings or get trotted out at events throughout the year to represent the school’s excellent students. We knew it was a meaningless position. But we wanted our guy to be in that meaningless position.

Our plan to overcome the audience apathy was to have John shock the audience by announcing he was dropping out of the race for vice president to run for president. Then people would sit up and listen.

Then we read the rules. The rules stated that each candidate was only allowed to give a speech for the office he or she was on stage for. So John was only going to be allowed to say he was dropping out of the race for VP and was going to run as a write-in for president.

The oddity of that might gain some votes, but it wasn’t going to be enough to convince a large vote. He needed time to explain himself to the students. We went to our principal, Dr. Dunn, to plead our case. But he said the rules were the rules. He was, however, intrigued by the new wrinkle in the traditional, boring school election. He told us John could use his time to withdraw from the vice presidential race and then announce that he would explain his actions in a meeting in the cafeteria after school.

Generally, kids don’t like to stay at school one minute longer than they have to. But we were lucky in that we were between sports seasons – basketball had ended and baseball hadn’t started – so we had a shot at getting the attention of the student body.

We found Walt, the head custodian, and asked him to set up the microphone and PA system. He was a bit miffed because he normally had the cafeteria cleaned by then.

“You aren’t going to need a mic,” he said. “You know and I know only about 10 people are going to show up.”

“Walt, this place

I don’t know who was more stunned, the other guys who were running for president or John. We had done our duty by getting the thing set up and helping getting the crowd there. Now it was up to John. I stood off to the side to watch it turn into a shouting match of campaign managers. The campaign manager of the heretofore front-runner – the most popular kid of the two other candidates – asked questions about specific proposals John had for his new position.

She sensed, correctly, that he had no idea what he was going to do because he hadn’t had the time to give it any thought. We had just come up with this change of plans two days before. There had been no policy discussions.

As John would step to the mic, he was clearly a deer in the headlights as he tried to formulate an answer. Jim Lenahan, his campaign manager and a future lawyer, would let him hem and haw for about 5 seconds before Lenahan himself would grab the mic and say what he thought John was going to say. The other campaign manager kept getting madder and madder and redder and redder in the face.

“Let HIM answer the questions!” she screamed as Lenahan kept working his magic, protecting his candidate and acting like a real political flak. “Give the mic to him!”

John stood back and looked presidential.

The students loved the theater. They hadn’t come for a rational debate. This was the cafeteria, after all, and a verbal food fight was almost as good as an actual food fight and it was a great way to spend a gray, late winter afternoon. There hadn’t been this much excitement at school since the fall, when we upset our heavily favored rival in football, 14-7, with our second string quarterback.

By the time Walt finally cut the power to the mic so he could get on with his cleaning and get home to dinner, John had become the frontrunner and a few weeks later, he won the election.

It was such a

My involvement in that election caught Dr. Dunn’s attention and he nominated me for Boys’ State that summer. I didn’t realize then what it was or how prestigious it was or what it would mean to me until later. The other kids who got nominated from our school – Ernie was one – went to Tufts and Duke. I didn’t make it to schools of that caliber. I was too far behind by then, but Boys’ State sure looked good on my college applications. I didn’t have to rely on the generosity of the local community college as I got into 6 of the 7 colleges I applied to. Some good ones, too. 

I guess Dr. Dunn saw something more in me, than Mr. Lincoln saw in those papers.

When I got to Boys’ State, I realized we had only a week to make things happen and I got involved right away, with the party to which I was assigned, with the party’s newspaper and with the speeches.

I helped with

Ernie won. And he

Being the top guy has never been my style or talent. I’ve been the guy a bit further down guy who hatches an idea or does the writing or strategizing to make the idea better. I realized my place back in third grade when we picked the kickball teams. I wasn’t going to be the first pick but I wasn’t going to be the last. And when we played, I wasn’t going to be the star, but I was going to contribute. I’ve had a pretty good sense of self ever since.

It was a bit weird at Boys’ State because Girls’ State was going on at the same time on the same campus and Bethani was there. Bethani and I had gotten back together on the ski trip, gone to the junior prom and stayed together until the end of the school year. I don’t know what ended it for us then, but I’m sure it was more bickering. When school got out, we stopped seeing each other and I began working 40-hour weeks at the Dairy.

We didn’t have much commerce with the girls at State, but I managed to see her a few times and we danced at the Governor’s Ball at the end of the week. It felt good to be back in each other’s arms.

We had a good time that night and we thought about getting back together. But she was torn because she was now dating my former friend, Steve Church, who had been trying to steal her away from me almost from the time he met her. Actually, a bunch of the guys had been. I once caught Steve sitting in his car down a side street near her house, waiting for me to bring her home so he could knock on her door as soon as I left.

In stories I have told since, I snuck up behind his car and cold cocked him. But that’s only a story. And it’s only kind of what I wanted to do. But not what I would actually do.

And then I met Annie.

Next week: The last chapter of the

(I skipped over a few chapters, a few stories and my entire senior year to publish this chapter during the 50th anniversary week of Woodstock. Chapters 18-23 will appear at a future date.)

It

The ad promised a lot of well-known performers, from folk to rock: Joan Baez, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, The Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, Arlo Guthrie and several others.           

But also unknowns like Richie Havens, Mountain, Melanie, Joe Cocker, Santana, Sweetwater and several others. A Crosby, Stills and Nash was listed. We’d heard of David Crosby from the Byrds. Stephen Stills from the Buffalo Springfield. And Graham Nash from the Hollies. Were these the same guys? What would that sound like?

Still,

Bob

The

Still,

We

Our

I

Tickets

The

We

At

At

We looked at each other and with just our eyes, agreed that we needed, despite our load and weariness, to walk a bit faster so we could pass her.

It

There

After

We moved with the flow of

We thought about trying to get closer. It’s always possible to squeeze one more blanket in at a concert. But by the time the music started, it looked like all the squeezing that could be done, had been done.

So we walked away from the

The crowd kept growing. It seemed as if every American under the age of 25 was sitting in Max Yasgur’s farm. It wasn’t long before the sea of people swelled up the hillside, like a tide coming in, and swallowed us up.

I was wedged next to a guy

Richie Havens opened the concert, hours late. He wasn’t a rocker and wasn’t well-known. But at least the concert had finally started and he played with such energy, he won the audience over, especially when he got to the last song of his set, “Freedom.”

Then Swami Satchidananda gave the invocation. Even though he was only on stage

There was a smattering of boos.

We stayed at the festival for the next acts: Sweetwater, Bert Sommer and Tim Hardin.

Then Ravi Shankar played his sitar. That was hard to sit through for the crowd of rock and roll fans. The audience was polite, for awhile. Not long into his act, there were some boos. And that’s also around the time the first rain came. 

It

As

But

My

It

Still,

Word was out in our camp

It

We’d heard there was a swimming

Helicopters from the

After

When

“Hey,

“What

“Like

I

I

“Did

It was quiet for a moment. Bob, who at that point in his life had not spent much time in the kitchen, then admitted he had put a can of corn in the fire to warm up while we were gone. Unopened.

Sam and I stared at him. The can had heated and exploded, spraying corn and the embers of our campfire all over the surrounding area. I casually looked at some of the nearby tents and could see flecks of corn. And some very small holes created by the flying embers.

We

We

In

As

We

And

We

A

It

The

Yes, Woodstock was wonderful … as a cultural moment. It set a tone for tolerance and brotherhood that should be long remembered. It introduced us to some legendary performers and performances.

But it was also a wet, hot, muggy mess. If you’ve ever been frustrated at a crowded, sold-out stadium concert, remember that Woodstock was just like that, times 10. And when I think of the worst traffic jams I have ever been, I remember that the traffic jam at Woodstock was just like them all … combined.  There was little food, few facilities and very little security.

While

I’m glad I went to Yasgur’s farm and I’m glad I left when I did. My only regret (besides not taking a camera) is that I was so naive when I went. I would like to have had the experience when I was mature enough to realize what the hell was going on. But then…I might not have gone.

The fact that our high school had a ski club says a lot about the town we grew up in. Not that we were like the nearby prep schools such as Miss Porter’s or Avon Old Farms.

They had Kennedys and their ilk for alums and an actual week off specifically for parents to take their kids skiing in Europe or at Vail or Sun Valley. But we had kids that formed a club to go skiing and could afford to go.

Bethani was going

Bob was a very good skier and I wasn’t too bad, when compared to most of the kids at school. None of the guys of the football team skied so it was something I could do better than they. But Bob and I didn’t join the ski club. That would have been too uncool. You would have to sit in meetings once a week and discuss the trip from the beginning of the school year until we went on the trip in February. The serious kids would have had serious discussions about planning the event. Ad nauseam.

Bob and I would have been seriously

So we plotted. What could we do? Sam would be with Bethani all week at the ski resort and I’d be stuck at home. Then we had a flash of our future freedom.

“Why don’t we go on the trip ourselves?”

After all, we’d gone to Boston a few months before on our own. Just hopped in the car one Sunday with freshly printed drivers’ licenses and drove up to Fenway for a double header with the Washington Senators. Sat right behind home plate and saw Frank Howard hit a couple of home runs.

OK. That was Bob’s doing. He had shown up at my house that morning right after we got home from church. He had his mom’s station wagon and said he just wanted to drive around. That made sense. We were 16 and at that age, we did a lot of just “driving around.”

10 blocks into the driving around, though, he had the car on the highway heading to Boston. Just the first of the many times Bob shanghaied me.

But I was in agreement on the ski trip. We didn’t have enough money to pay for much more than the lift tickets, though.  So we came up with a plan that seemed perfect to our 16-year-old minds.

We’d sleep in the car.

In Vermont.

In the dead of

Of course that part was Bob’s idea. He was always coming up with plans that often got us into sticky situations. It really bothered my mom. Whenever Bob called the house, she’d give me a look as she handed the phone to me that said she knew we were cooking up a scheme … and Bob was the head chef. 

And she didn’t know about half the trouble he got us into. I certainly never told her about skiing through a Wyoming avalanche field at midnight, guided only by the light of the moon. She did make peace with him 50 years later – when she was suffering from dementia.

We told our parents we’d be flopping on the floor of the motel rooms the other kids had. We didn’t tell them about sleeping in the back of Bob’s mother’s Ford Country Squire station wagon, the one with a 427 horsepower police engine that we got up to 115 mph on the rare straight-aways on the roads of Vermont.

We arrived the same night everyone else did and looked around town for a place to park where cops wouldn’t notice us. We found a lot on the edge of town that had some cars in it so we wouldn’t stand out as the only car. We ate some bologna sandwiches, which were to be our standard meal of the week.

In our first night of parental freedom, they tasted mighty good. After dinner, we cranked the heat to get the interior of the car as hot as we could. Then we cut the motor, cracked a window and dove into our down sleeping bags.

As we snuggled in the warmth of the

We soon discovered, though, that cars have absolutely no insulation properties. As the temperature plunged outside, it also plunged inside – to single digits. Even in our sleeping bags, we struggled to stay warm. We each curled into a ball, with every muscle tensed.

We woke up early the next morning and didn’t want to get out of our bags. We argued, as we often did, about who had to get us out of this mess. Finally, Bob, with a great display of thrashing and screaming curses, scrambled from his bag and started the car. We were both shouting at the top of our lungs in an effort to stay warm. As if our volume could push up the temperature.

Eating bologna sandwiches for a week also had seemed reasonable when we planned it at home. We both liked bologna. And it was cheap. However, as we faced bologna for breakfast on that second day – after having enjoyed bologna for dinner the night before – we found that it was frozen solid, as was the mustard. I couldn’t eat bologna without mustard, so it was then that I started to crack – just like I would 10 years later in that avalanche field.

We only had been best friends for a year at that point, but I would find over the next 40 years, Bob always made these plans that sounded great and could provide great adventure – “Hey, there’s a music festival with dozens of bands on a farm in upstate New York this summer and we’ve got to go!” – often with key elements unplanned. And I was almost always along for the ride.

I never learned. We survived some great and some harrowing experiences, so maybe it’s best I live half way across the country from Bob now.

We finally thawed

Bob had heard there were people who rented their basements for $2 a night. All you got was a cot in the basement and bathroom privileges, but we could afford that on our budget. Near town, we found a100-year-old house with 8 cots jammed in a basement decorated with a pair of bare, 25-watt bulbs hanging from the ceiling and dozens of spider webs.

We didn’t care, we assured each other as we dumped our stuff in the basement. At least we had heat. And a place to thaw our bologna and mustard.

Then we were off to the slopes. We hadn’t told anyone we were coming and suddenly we were in lift lines and slowly being revealed to classmates as they realized whom it was beneath the ski goggles and coats. I worked my way into line to be next to Bethani and got on a chair with her so she had no chance for escape all the way up the mountain. That was a pattern that continued all week as I worked on getting back in her good graces and she in mine.            

Sam was clearly upset. He thought since Bob and I weren’t in the ski club, Bob and I wouldn’t be there. Sam figured he’d have Bethani to himself all week and he hadn’t felt a sense of urgency. He thought he could just slowly let her see him in a different light – a boyfriend light – and at the end of the week, they would be going to the junior prom.

I threw a kink into those plans by

Our space in the basement of the flophouse was the best part of the trip and the worst. We were warm and we had a place to sleep. We’d ski all day, go out to eat and hang out with the kids from school. But then they had a curfew and had to go back to their rooms. We’d laugh at them and give them a hard time. After all, Bob and I had freedom. We didn’t have a curfew. We could go anywhere we wanted.

But we were 16. We

“Aw, they’re asleep,” one of them said.

“I think they’re just pretending to be asleep,” another said. He was right. I held my breath.

“Well, if we find out they know anything,” the leader said and paused before continuing, casually, “we’ll just kill the fucks.”

I didn’t move a muscle. And neither did Bob, who, he told me the next day, was also awake. Luckily for us, those guys left early the next morning, not needing to kill us. Looking back, it was probably a drug deal and their comment was a warning to the high school kids they had been sharing the basement with. They had been cordial, but not warm, to us up to that point. That night, they were very cold.

Next week: Chapter 16: School Politics … Provides a Path

You’d think there’d be no inheritance from an 18-year-old kid who was an assistant night manager, making barely above minimum wage. However, I knew Page had left something behind. But I wasn’t sure how to break it to my parents.

I had figured it out a few months before when, one day, Page left for work and didn’t walk up the street to catch the regular bus on Farmington Avenue. Instead he walked down the street, toward the Boulevard. He later told me that he liked the busses on the Boulevard better. I didn’t believe him because that was a nonsensical lie. So a few days later, I followed him down the street and continued following him as he walked away from the bus stop.

He glanced back occasionally and I thought I was successfully darting behind trees, just before he could fully turn around and see me. But that only lasted a block or two.

“C’mon, Bonzo,” he called out his “pet” name for me, the name Doom affectionately took over after Page died and called me for the rest of his life. “I know you’re there.”

I didn’t move, hoping he was bluffing.

“C’mon,” he insisted. “You were probably going to find out eventually. And I don’t want to be late for work.”

I came out from behind the tree and jogged up to him.

“I’m going to show you something, but you can’t tell Mom or Doom,” he warned. “Or I’ll have to pound you.”

We walked another block to a triplex on Prospect Avenue and walked up the driveway to the four car garage. Page fished a key out of his pocket and opened one of the doors. There was a 1962 Honda 305 Dream.

Page left a motorcycle. And a garage lease.

My parents had no idea that he had it. Since he had no license and wasn’t about to get one in the foreseeable future, he didn’t park it at home. I didn’t know how to break it to my parents after he died so I paid the rent and kept the secret for a few months. I actually thought it would be kind of cool to have my car and a motorcycle. Even if I had never ridden one.

One Sunday morning that fall, I got up early and went down to get the motorcycle out of the garage.  I figured with the light traffic on the road on that day and at that time, it would be the perfect time to teach myself to ride the bike.

But … I didn’t realize how heavy it was, how hard it was to start and how many things I had to be simultaneously conscious of: shifting, breaking, safety. I struggled to keep it upright as I started it and barely made it out of the driveway when I decided to turn around, park it and tell my parents about our inheritance.

Within a week, I

After the funeral, I thought I could just get on with life, as if Page’s death was simply a routine life event. Like being late for class, getting a flat tire, or having your morning newspaper land in a puddle. I tried to make Page’s death an aggravation, something in life that just needed to be dealt with.

I wasn’t

I didn’t realize how much it was affecting me until one day in late October, about two months after the funeral. It was near the end of football practice and I had just messed up on a play as the third stringers ran their reps well after the 1st and 2nd teams moved on to other drills.

The lights over at the town hall were on as the sun had long since slipped behind the buildings in the Center. I squinted at the clock tower to see how much longer this drudgery would go on.           

I had no passion for the game and even less after the funeral and because of that, couldn’t make up for the fact that I was slow, legally blind without my glasses and never studied the playbook. So I never knew what I was supposed to do on a particular play and therefore was often out of position. And I didn’t like to hit or get hit.

The good thing was I was third string. The only way I was getting into a game was if a building collapsed on the team. So it didn’t really matter how bad I was. Nobody cared.

Or so I thought.

Just as the town

The knuckles belonged to Mr. Chalmers – Chomps, we called him – the assistant head coach. He held on to my facemask and kept jerking my head back and forth and side to side while screaming at me.

“Wake up! Wake up! What is the matter with you? What are you thinking?” Despite the rattling of my head and my brain, I could see foam coming out of coach’s mouth. He wasn’t merely setting an example with me. He was seriously pissed. “You are in a daze out there!”

I don’t think either he or I realized how deep of a daze I was in. But there was something about being noticed that got to me. I was just a body filling a hole – I would have been fourth string if we had a fourth string – and there should have been no reason to notice me. Unless I was really screwing up.

When Chomps was

Maybe Page’s death

I was enjoying school, although that was because I had a girlfriend and car. At 16, what else could one possibly need? But Mr. Chalmers saw something else. So did my teachers and so did Dr. Dunn, the principal.

A couple of days

I had no idea why I was going to the principal’s office this time. When I got there, Dr. Dunn said he just wanted to talk. He wanted to know how I was and let me know that people in the school cared about me. I didn’t think about it at the time, but it could have been an exercise out of a teacher training manual that says a month or two after a sibling’s death, call the student in and ask them how they are doing. If that’s what it takes, great. Because it worked for me. It let me know that adults who were not my parents did notice me. They did care. I had to get it together because people were watching me and expecting things from me.

After that, I got more involved in school. I’d like to say that I studied harder and took my classes seriously. But that didn’t happen. I opened the books only when necessary and managed to hand in most assignments on time. But they weren’t done well or very thoroughly. When I came to a difficult math problem or a study question that required a more in depth answer, I skipped those and told the teacher that I didn’t get them.

At home, I was too busy reading what I wanted to read or listening to the AM DJs send out requests. I was too into the social life.

That’s what I threw myself into, being Mr. Social. The “hub of the action,” the yearbook says. I knew what social event was going on and where and who was going and with whom. I got on a bunch of school committees. I knew just about everyone in the school and they knew me.

Bethani was working at retail store in the Center, just about a block and a half away from The Dairy and we were still in the first blush of the romance, bonded even tighter because of the events with my brother. We tried to co-ordinate our breaks. She would come up on her 15 minutes of freedom even though it meant – with travel time – she got to sit at the end of the counter with me for 5 minutes. Sometimes she would stay 7 minutes but then had to run back to her store.

We always went to the weekly town dances, at the school or the Y. It was nice to have someone to go with. In years past, my only companion was the fear of rejection. I would spend the entire night worrying about asking someone to dance – while trying to pretend I wasn’t. And if the worst didn’t happen – rejection – then surely the next to worst would – acceptance – and I’d be committed to that person for the night, year, and probably forever.

We’d go to movies and parties, although I don’t remember too many of them that year. We’d finish up the night by stopping at the overflow parking lot at Fern Park, which, unlike the main lot, was not lit. We’d kiss for hours, until the insides of our mouths were sore. Occasionally the cops would come by and shine their six D-cell flashlights into the car. Of course they would ask what we were doing. I had to suppress screaming, “What do you think we’re doing?” Or, “Get some new material, flat foot.”

The cops in that

There really was nowhere to go to be alone in those days. If you went to your girl friend’s house to watch TV, there was only one and it was in living room. Her mom would have enough sense to be sewing a room or two away, although always within earshot. If that were the only parental watch dog, you could at least have a nice night of stealing kisses.

But the dad was usually in the living room with you, too, and so were all the little brothers and sisters. Under those circumstances, the best you could hope for was to sit close. If you did try to sneak a kiss while the dad went to the bathroom or the kitchen for a snack, the younger siblings would loudly announce it.

The girl’s parents watched how you reacted to the brothers and sisters to see if you were a good guy. I was a good guy, but in those days, at the age, I wasn’t interested in making nice with the little brothers and sisters. I was interested in making out.

So TV at the girl’s house was a last resort. And boys did not bring girls to their house. It simply wasn’t done. Unless your parents weren’t home.

Once we drove to a dance club in Manchester with my best friend, Bob,  and his girlfriend, Becky. Bethani’s parents didn’t know about it. They reluctantly let her drive with me, but only in town. Looking back, I can’t blame them. I was 16 and had just gotten my license. But there was no dance in town that week and we wanted to dance so we went to the club. We had a great time and I can’t believe her parents didn’t know as she got more dressed up for that than she usually got for town dances. I still remember that she wore a white dress with red polka dots that night.

Christmas, though, was the beginning of the end of our relationship. I knew Bethani wanted a bangle bracelet. But I was still a kid, not a mature romantic. When I got the bracelet, I put it inside a catcher’s mitt and wrapped that. So when she opened the present, she thought it was a glove she was getting. It took the edge off the romance all right. Even when she saw the bracelet, she was pretty mad and embarrassed, since we exchanged presents at her house, with her parents there.

I still do stuff like that. I don’t know why. Maybe I will never grow into that mature romantic. But at least after Bethani, I was with someone who – if she didn’t appreciate that side of me – or at least tolerated it and didn’t make me hear about it for days, weeks. And appreciated the thought behind the gifts. Bethani gave me a silver ring with a black “stone.” I was already wearing my mom’s high school ring and my dad’s college ring. How many more rings could I wear? It was unusual for a kid that age to be wearing that many rings. But I began wearing it. And I still have it.

We kept on dating through Christmas, but after the first of the year, we were arguing all the time. It wasn’t fun like it had been. Whatever I said was wrong. I wasn’t deep enough. I wasn’t serious enough. This was a girl who studied every moment she wasn’t in school or talking to me. She was locked in a to-the-death struggle with Marilyn Ducette, the school’s other genius, for school valedictorian. And there was still a year and a half to go in that battle.

I, on the other

She said I was

Let’s face it. She was a very serious person and 1968 was a very serious year with the Vietnam War intensifying with the secret bombings of Cambodia and the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy. But I felt it was my job in my circle of friends to put a light touch on things, to make the wise crack or put the ironic twist on the craziness of life.

She wanted someone deeper. Today I like to think I combine both. But she wasn’t going to wait 30 days, let alone 30 years. So we broke up.

Which was great for a while. I felt free. I didn’t have to wait for her to finish studying in the library and take her home after school. I didn’t have to call her at precisely 9 o’clock and talk for 15 minutes when there was nothing to say (those calls were just an argument waiting to happen) and I was free to talk to other girls. It is amazing that when you are going out with someone, there are always so many more girls attracted to you and you to them. Maybe you seem more attractive because someone else finds you attractive. She had elevated my status. I was datable material.

But the junior prom was coming up. That was the big social event of the spring semester. You had to go and you had to go with someone that didn’t make you look desperate, like a friend or neighbor or worse – a relative. This wasn’t a throw-away date. I liked a bunch of other girls, but none that I wanted to commit to. And if you asked a girl to the junior prom, that was almost like getting engaged, at least high school engaged. You were obligated to take her out again. And probably date her for the rest of the year, an eternity at age 17.

When the school year ended, you could always stop seeing each other because summer caused a lot of break ups. That was natural. Just pour yourself into work and stop calling. When you get back in the fall, you just look the other way the first few times you see each other in the halls and within a few weeks, it’s as if you never went out.

So it would be a lot easier to go to the prom with someone where you knew the situation. And for me, that was with Bethani. The problem was, a couple of my close friends liked her and had wanted us to break up so they could date her. Steve Church and Sam Bellow.

I didn’t worry at all about Bob even though girls were and still are Bob’s main preoccupation. Bob had been friends with her because of the summers they spent at Fern Park as kids. He thought she was cute. But Bob and I were best friends and there was a code – you don’t date the other guy’s girl. Even after they break up. It just wasn’t done. That worked pretty easily for me, because despite the astounding numbers of Bob’s girl friends. There were never any that interested me.

Then I started to hear that Steve and Sam were interested in asking Bethani to the prom. Sam seemed to be the big rival. He was serious, smart, played an instrument and could be very dark and brooding. Bethani liked dark and brooding.

I started to

Although, when you are 17 and you break up because of all the fighting, you should stay broken up. It’s part of the growth process. Oh, sure, everything seems great when you get back together, but within days or weeks, the old patterns come back. You aren’t capable of mature change at that age. It’s just too hard trying to grow up and find out who you are while at the same time trying to mold yourself into someone your partner wants you to be. There are a lot of hormones and not a lot of smarts.

But I didn’t have

Next week: Chapter 15: Cold … and Calculated

Most of the time Page was out of it. Mom spent all her time at the hospital but Doom had to work. Having a child hovering between life and death didn’t seem to matter to his bosses at the home office in Minnesota.

A few days after I

But this

I hated the Lord of the Flies aspect of football camp. In just a few days, under coach-imposed harsh conditions, some people would turn whatever values they had been taught at home on their heads to survive the upperclassmen who ran the jungle when the coaches weren’t around. But the first two days that year are a blur because on the morning of the third day, the whistle had just blown on a play during practice when I was called to the sidelines by the head coach, told to shower and get up to the kitchen.

I immediately knew why. Even if it hadn’t been such an obvious break in routine, I would have known.

I took my time

It was inevitable.

He told me in a very kind way that Page had died that morning and that someone was coming to take me home. I heard the words coming out of his mouth but it didn’t seem real.  A numbness crept around my scalp and it seemed as if there were a swarm of cicadas buzzing just outside my ears. I tried to take the news matter-of-factly, as if he were telling me that I wasn’t playing well and needed to remember the blocking schemes better.

But my lip began to quiver. I didn’t cry, but just about. Then I latched on to the sight of those 5 or 6 strands of hair on the bridge of Mr. Desalvo’s nose and I just kept staring at them to maintain my composure. And I began an internal dialog that resulted in the pledge to myself to always to be vigilant about my appearance. Even when I got old.

That was a mean thing to think about a man being so kind and caring to me and I began to feel guilty about thinking it. I was just trying not to think about Page.

I tried to reassure Mr. DeSalvo that I was all right and that we had expected this. That was true. By that point, Mom and Doom knew he was going to die  – after all he’d been lying in the hospital for three weeks not getting better, not saying anything – and they had begun to prepare me by saying things that indicated that he wasn’t going to make it. They didn’t come right out and say it, but I had known. 

“You are never prepared when someone you love dies,” Mr. DeSalvo said. He knew about death. He had been shot down in the war and spent a year in a German prison camp. “No matter how much you try to prepare yourself, you’re never prepared.”

Of course, he was right. And I’ve thought of Mr. DeSalvo and his words a lot over the years. I’ve never been prepared for the deaths of those I’ve loved. Be it Page, Doom, Mom or my friends George and Ernie. I think Mom – who I was closest to – was the easiest because I was there. I was holding her hand as she died and it seemed as if my sister, Liz, who was holding her other hand, and I were guiding her up some steps. I was sad to lose her – although my real mom had been lost several years before to dementia.

Mr. Hudson came to camp and drove me home. The Hudsons, who lived at the end of the block, were a very proper family, rather like the Cleavers come to life. Mr. Hudson was Ward in his physical characteristics and he always seemed to have a tie on, even on weekends. When I got my paper route, the Hudsons asked if I could deliver their paper because they were unhappy with their carrier and even though they weren’t on my route, I did it. I just made up an address on my regular route and got a paper for that house, but dropped it off at the Hudson’s on my way home.

When we got home, I

“Go upstairs, honey,” she said. “You need a good cry.”

That’s the best advice I’ve ever received.

I hadn’t cried

I was wrong. I ran

I cried for my mom and dad when they died some 40 years later, but nothing like I cried for Page. For the first time, I realized what it meant to release feelings. We were not a huggy, talk it out kind of family. We were pretty buttoned-down, holding things in, figuring it out on your own.

I cried for everything about Page. He was such a handsome, charming, smart guy and he just had one little thing in his brain that couldn’t be satisfied and it kept getting him in trouble. I cried because of his lost potential. And I cried because I lost the guy who knew me better than I knew myself. The guy who was supposed to be my life-long friend. We only had 16 years together.

We weren’t best friends at the time of his death, but I admired him for all his positive attributes and he liked mine. He liked my normality and my ability to get along with people – although he did warn me about my smart mouth. I learned from Page that I didn’t always have to be first with the wise crack and sometimes it is better to just keep your mouth shut. Because sometimes when you get noticed, you get knocked down. So pick and choose your moment.

And the “What ifs” started that day and continue still almost daily in my quiet moments. What if seat belts had been mandatory or even commonly used in 1967? What if today’s surgical techniques and equipment had been available then? What if Robby, his passenger who walked away from the accident, had insisted on driving? It was his car and his license.

And if Page had lived, what would have happened to him? He was already drinking heavily. At that stage of his life, he just couldn’t stop himself. Would he have outgrown it? Would he have survived the next 10 years with all the drugs that bathed the youth culture in the late 60s and early 70s? And if he had survived and had continued on that path he was on, would my parents’ relationship have survived the strain? I have replayed his life and his choices over and over for the last 50 years, often substituting a variety of “what ifs” but the end is always the same.

Reality.

Page dies. And we are heartbroken.

When I was about out of tears, Mrs. Hudson came into the room. Unbeknownst to me, she had come upstairs and stood outside while I followed her advice. Then, as the sobs subsided, she had come in to help me collect myself. She sat down and let me talk about Page and she told me about how my parents were doing and what the plans for the week would be.

I remember the day of the funeral, partly because a couple of pictures were taken that have helped me keep it in my head. We used the Ahearn funeral home. They lived up the block and across the street from my friend Danny Austin’s house and, since they had a cute daughter, we spent a lot of time trying to get her attention. Mr. Ahearn took a shine to me for some reason – maybe it was my manners around adults – but he always stopped to say hi and talk to us and he seemed to focus on me. He was very kind at the funeral, which I know is what morticians are supposed to be, but it wasn’t unctuous.

I’d never been to a funeral before so I didn’t know what to expect. Usually the younger the person dies, the larger the funeral because they are in the flower of life and they have lots of friends. But Page was a different cat and he didn’t have a wide circle of friends (and those he did have were not approved of by my parents, with good reason) and the death and funeral happened in August, before we had gone back to school. So the attendance wasn’t especially large. It was mainly adults who had come to support Mom and Doom, knowing how hard it must be to lose a child. Even a child as wild and as troubled as Page.

When people get back to the house after a funeral for a person who has lived a long life, it’s a bit of a celebration. Stories are told about the deceased and families catch up and vow that it won’t be so long next time they see each other (and after a certain age, that is true because people start dying with some regularity). When a young person dies, it’s more somber. There aren’t a lot of stories and there isn’t a lot of laughing.

What stands out

Except for Page. He came back from one of his escapades to the shore and told me he had stopped in to see Carol. It was very exciting. He had made contact with the “enemy.” I don’t know how many times he stopped in and saw her but they made a connection that they didn’t always have when we were kids because they were now both outlaws. I can’t remember how many times Carol had to beat him up – you didn’t mess with Carol when we were kids, not even Page – because she didn’t like the way he was picking on Liz or me. But during her time away, they were both rebels.

So when Carol showed up with her little baby girl, Jen, who was just 3 months old, it changed the atmosphere. It was all about the baby and rebirth. There is a great picture of Carol holding Jen out in front of the house with Mom and Liz smiling widely and admiring Jen. I hadn’t thought there would be any smiles in that house for a long time. But Carol’s coming with Jen signaled a shift from grief to getting on with life.

Bethani is also in that picture, sitting in the shadows of the porch, her head resting in her hands, taking it all in. It’s a poorly developed photo that is creased and has been fading a bit each year. It’s one of the few pictures I have of her and I long wondered what she was thinking that day, a teen-ager thrown into the maelstrom of another family’s deepest grief.

40 years later I found out. 40 years later I got a clear picture of what others saw that day.

We were cleaning the house out after my mother died in 2007 and in her dresser next to her bed was a book she had been reading, before her dementia put an end to that. We thought at first it was a cherished book, to be inside the dresser and not on top of it. But it wasn’t the book that was cherished. It was the bookmark: two neatly folded sheets of paper, featuring a poem Bethani had written after the funeral. At the top of the page she wrote: “For Alan.”

The screen door banged shut

And shook the wisteria

That held the porch to the old stucco house.

Opening an eye,

I threw back my head

To see blue patches flash

Among the mass of green and gold

That rustled high overhead.

Swinging my feet off the banister

Onto the smooth, cool planks;

I dragged the chair to the sunny spot

Where I could peer in through the screen.

What I saw

Was the same comfy living room,

With furniture a little too worn

To give it that special occasion look.

But on that day

Every flower in the world

Seemed to have found her in that room,

Like the little boy in Paris

And the red balloon.

One by one

She opens a pile of envelopes,

Giving each a moment of quiet concentration.

And after awhile

She lit a cigarette,

With the same deliberate calm

That controlled every line of her body.

A swirl of smoke slowly veiled

Her dress of simple black.

And there was grace

In the simple lines of her face,

And the age she had gained in one day.

Company came

And walked quietly across the living room rug.

Her husband stood by her side

As she took each caller by the hand;

Talking in an even tone

And laughing gently now and then.

Her husband watched her,

And when she caught his eye,

They shared an instant of despair…

A lifetime of courage.

She stood and went into the dining room:

The company filed in behind her.

The screen door banged shut

And he dragged a chair

Up to a spot in the sun.

And he said the things his mother could not.

I think that I understand…

I think I may never understand

What I saw.

Next week: Chapter 14.

When my parents got the call, they put everything down and left immediately for a hospital in rural Connecticut.

Page and Bobby Higgins, a guy with whom I had played baseball and still stares out at me, frozen at age 14, from an old team photo, had gone to New York where the drinking age at the time was 18. It was legal for Page, who by then was 18.  But Bobby, his partner, his bagman for that day, was my age – 16. They had taken the shortest way there, on the dangerous Route 44, a ribbon-candy road through western Connecticut.

It must have seemed like a good plan at the start of the trip, but then they had to face those same treacherous roads on the way back, when it was dark and they were drunk. Page, who had no license and wouldn’t be able to get one until he was 25 for all his previous legal problems, deemed Bobby too drunk to drive. Well, Page was too drunk to drive, too.

They made it just

I didn’t know any of this at the time. I had no idea that it was as serious as it was. It didn’t sink in. When the phone rang and Mom and Doom left, I thought: Hey, they are gone, I can go driving around in my car. So I grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a small cooler that I filled with beer and ice and went for a drive.

It was raining

Page was alive, but critically injured. They brought him to Hartford Hospital and he kept holding on. I kept waiting for him to get better. Kids weren’t allowed to visit and having Liz and me around the house to worry about was taking a toll on my parents. I don’t know what happened to Liz at the time – she was 10 – but a friend of mine’s mother called and said she’d take me with them to the Vineyard early. I was only supposed to go for the last week of their vacation, but Mrs. Winston realized it would be better if Mom and Doom didn’t have to worry about having me around. So I got two weeks on the vineyard out of Page’s accident.

We had a great time on the Vineyard. I met Ginny, a girl from Columbus, Ohio, who became a pen pal throughout high school. I hardly thought about Page because in my mind, I didn’t think I had to. He was going to get better. When you are a teen-ager, no one dies.

I came back from the Vineyard and everything was still the same. Page kept hanging on. When I got back, I was finally allowed in to see him. Hospitals kept a tight reign on visitors in those days and Page could only have two visitors at a time. Doom stayed in the car while Mom and I went in.

As we were walking down the hall, everything began to hit me: the seriousness of Page’s condition, and the smell and the look of the hospital. I never had been that deep into a hospital. In fact, I’d never been in one before. I got to Page’s room and looked in. I saw a body on a bed almost completely wrapped in bandages with a bunch of tubes sticking out of him. It could have been anybody. Only the name on the door told me it was Page.

Then everything went blank.

The next thing I

Doom was sitting

About the only thing Page had said after the accident was uttered early on when Mom went into his room and in a kidding reprimand demanded, “What do you have to say for yourself?” She was mostly kidding because it is hard to yell at someone wrapped like a mummy and hooked up to a bunch of tubes in a hospital room.

Page tried to shrug his shoulders the best he could and managed to whisper, “What can I say?” with as much of a smile as he could muster.

But that had been it.

Next: Chapter 13: The News is delivered.

I got the job at Lincoln Dairy through Page. It paid much more than the paper route so I didn’t mind starting on my 16th birthday. On the other hand, I really didn’t want to give the route up. It had been my identity for four years and it was April, the best time to deliver papers. The moist, spring air captured the fragrance of the season and held it in place overnight before the winds of human activity dispersed it.

 But with school, baseball practice and now the

It took me more

Learning how to work a real job with co-workers, a direct supervisor and minute by minute expectations was a lot of work, but it was fun because we had a dozen part-timers from several different high schools. Racing to meet the expectations of lunch and dinner rushes, we worked as a team and and became friends, for the most part.

We did have a few older, full-time

Louie, who was from Puerto Rico, did dishes in the morning and worked the grill at breakfast and lunch, working the 6 a.m. – 2 p.m. shift Mon – Friday. His accent was so strong, we couldn’t understand him. Since he always seemed to have a smile on his face, we would just laugh with him knowingly whenever he spoke to us. At the end of his shift, he’d hop on a bus out front headed for home in the city.

Georgie, the

Katty, the only

John was the

Duane, the

As my brother got more experience, he got more responsibility and the manager would let Duane leave early and allow Page to close up. I thought that was amazing. Little did I know that within a year, I’d have my own set of keys and would be opening on Sunday mornings. It wasn’t Tiffany’s with diamonds and gold. It was Lincoln Dairy. Burgers and ice cream. But still.

When Page was in

The Doors had just burst on the scene and “Light My Fire” was on the radio constantly. I listened with earnestness as the cutest waitress – who was a college woman, attending Eastern Connecticut College (which I had never heard of before) – marveled at the lyrics as the band came out of the break on the extended version of the song: “Now the time to hesitate is through,” Jim Morrison sang. That was so cool, she said.  I had to agree. After all, she was in college and knew things.

At first, my job was to bus dishes and wash them. Once in awhile, I would help if we got busy by bringing food to people, but I didn’t like that very much. I also learned to work up front. There was a small parking lot right in front so people could make a quick, convenient stop on their way home from work.

 We sold a lot of milk and dairy products and I

We also scooped a lot of ice cream.

We had some competition from the Farm Shoppe on the other side of the Center, although it was a bit higher end. Our advantage was that we were local and they were not. Everyone knew where our main plant was on New Britain Avenue so they knew the ice cream was fresh. 

Page was in charge of the shift on my first day and while I was listening to his instructions, I was distracted. After all, I was behind the counter and within reach of more than a dozen varieties of ice cream and multiple toppings. After we closed for the night, Page said as soon as I finished washing the dishes and cleaning up, I could make my own sundae.

Wow. Getting to touch the equipment

You had to work at

Page said I could make anything I wanted. I got the biggest bowl, the one for banana splits, and loaded it with ice cream. Then the toppings. I loved hot fudge. That went on. Butterscotch was also a favorite. So a scoop of that. Strawberries were next. They were expensive and we didn’t always have them at home. Maple syrup was too much to pass up.

It was topped with whipped cream, a Lincoln Dairy specialty. We whipped our cream every day, several times a day. We had a machine that burped air into the cream from the bottom of the bowl. We’d add some simple syrup and start whipping with a big whisk. It wasn’t difficult although it took time and we always seemed to run low just as a couple of little league teams crowded into the booths. But people really liked that it didn’t come out of a can.

With the whipped cream the finishing touch, I began to eat. Strange, I thought, even with all these wondrous ingredients, it doesn’t taste very good. But I kept eating as if I had discovered a new taste sensation. Page could tell what I was thinking.

“Not very good, is it?”

“Are you kidding,” I bluffed. “This is the best sundae I’ve ever had.”

“Well, you haven’t had very many sundaes then,” Page said. “Everybody does what you just did when they get their first opportunity at the fountain. But some stuff just doesn’t go with other stuff, even if it is all sweet stuff.”

He came over and put his hand on my dish.

“Want any more?”

I shook my head.

“You just learned a very valuable Lincoln Dairy lesson,” he said, sounding very grownup as he scraped the glop from the bowl to the garbage. “Our sundaes have specific recipes, kind of like Mom’s lasagna. Stick to the recipes. There’s a reason we have them.”

I worked hard and the store manager and the assistant began to trust me as they trusted Page and I’d occasionally be left in charge. Not to close or open, but the managers felt they could leave the store for a few hours while I was there.

Once, when I was in charge and scooping ice cream at the front counter, some junior high kids, after they got their cones, were goofing off and annoying customers. Kind of like my friends and I would have done at that age. It escalated a bit and I finally told the kids to go outside. They stayed out in front of the store laughing and, I soon realized, plotting. One of them suddenly smeared what was left of his ice cream cone all over the front window and all three began to race up Farmington Avenue.

I was behind a horse shoe-shaped counter so I had to go back around the counter before I could go forward. But I gave chase. I was out of that store as fast as I could go. I soon had them in sight. I was focused. I couldn’t see anything but them. I even think I was beginning to gain on them a bit. Then they split up. The three of them took off in different directions and I had to choose which to follow. So I chose the one who had tossed the ice cream. Unfortunately, he was the fastest and he was faster than I was.

As he pulled away, I realized I was

The rage turned to embarrassment. After

I stopped and began the long walk

She was mad and

“What the heck are

“Well,” she said, “you ran right past me this afternoon and didn’t stop to say hello or acknowledge me.”

She had been with her best friend, Mary Montanya, and they were heading to the Dairy to see me. She saw me running up the street – apparently hadn’t seen the kid I was chasing – and assumed I was running toward her. But I was so focused on the chase that I had run right past them. I tried to convince her what was going on and that I hadn’t seen her – truly – but it took a couple of weeks to win back her trust. Which should have given me a clue as to where the relationship was going.

Another time Bethani came in to the store and I did see her so I made her an ice cream cone. When she tried to pay, I refused her money. That’s one of the things the store owners in the Center really worried about with so many teens working there. They knew we’d be serving our friends and the profits could go out the window. I followed the store rules pretty strictly, but this was my girlfriend so I waved off her attempt to pay.

I didn’t see a woman standing at the other side of the counter who was closely watching what I had done. When I turned to help her, she wanted to know if that girl had paid. I didn’t know who this lady was, but luckily, I didn’t give her my usual wise guy answer like it was none of her business. I was in customer service mode. I told her that I was going to put it on my employee bill because she was my girl friend and I got a 10 percent discount. She seemed to buy that.

I was lucky that

I made $1.25 an hour. The paycheck for the full week’s work from those days came out to about a dollar an hour after taxes. But I felt like I was loaded. I worked at Lincoln Dairy throughout high school. I wasn’t allowed to work school nights because my grades were so bad. Mostly on weekends. During football season, I only worked Sundays – all day – and made enough to put gas in my car and take Bethani to a movie or a dance.

Page and I didn’t work together often, but when our shifts overlapped, we worked well together. It was good for Page to meet girls at the Dairy because it wasn’t a party situation. He had to get to know them through their work ethic and he developed friendships with some of them. There were a couple of college girls that treated him like he needed some reforming and he took to it a bit. They treated me like their kid brother.

But for Page, friendship with a girl or going steady with one was not enough. He liked action and he attracted girls who wanted what he wanted. And that often led us to the Sleepy Hollow Motel down on the Berlin Turnpike.

It was the kind of motel where traveling salesman selling cheap products out of cardboard suitcases stayed. Several of us would pool our money and rent a couple of rooms.

The beds were so swayed, they looked

But by May of that year, Bethani and I were spending a lot of time together. I stopped going to the motel parties, stopped going out drinking with Page. I didn’t stop drinking completely, but I did it in a more mature way – for a 16 year old at least, in a not-in-danger-of-going-to-rehab kind of way. I wanted to hold on to my girl friend and I wanted to hold on to my money.

The summer went by pretty quick. I finally had about 500 dollars to spend on a car. I had been saving my paper route money and then the Dairy money. Doom helped me look and it came down to two 1962 Oldsmobile F-85s.

A tall, thin shirtless guy in his

The other option featured dull,

The cars were the same price but Doom thought the old lady’s car would be better because she wasn’t a hot rodder. Maybe he was right. But I had a lot of trouble with that car. And since I didn’t know anything about cars and neither did Doom, I had to learn on my own or get one of the greasers at school, as we’d referred to gearheads behind their backs, to help.

I didn’t get my license right away at 16. You got a discount if you took driver’s ed in school so I signed up to take it during the summer. I’d go to work at Lincoln Dairy – I was filling in for Louie the fry cook – and work the 6-2 shift. Except for those few weeks of driver’s ed when I would skip out at 9 and beat it down to the high school for an hour.

During this time, my car just sat in the driveway. It was a temptation too big not to take and Page and I would go joy riding when Mom and Doom weren’t around. One time we drove around the Center and pulled up at the store where Bethani was working. She thought it was cool on one level but very bad on another. Page looked at his watch and said we’d better get home before Mom and Doom got home.

We drove back down Farmington and turned right on Beverly. As we approached our house going down the street, we could see a very familiar car coming up the far end of the street. Doom’s company cars always seemed to be large, yellow, Plymouth station wagons. It was hard to miss a car that big and that yellow. Page put the pedal down and we peeled into the driveway, jumped out of the car and dove into the backyard. We tried to look as casual as we could, pretending to have just finished an exhausting game of tetherball when Mom and Doom pulled in a minute later.  They never said a thing to us. And at the time and for years afterwards, I thought about how we had narrowly escaped and had fooled them. Now that I am a parent I realize, they probably weren’t fooled. They were not stupid people. They just didn’t want the confrontation.

A few months later, after I was licensed to drive the car, I had to dive into the yard again.

Some guy on a motorcycle was tailgating me and I gave him the finger as I tended to freely do when I first got my license. It takes a few years – a lifetime for some folks – to learn to treat fellow drivers with the same courtesy you would a fellow pedestrian.  So I was flashing my finger around like a 16 year old does. But I flashed it to the wrong guy. And he followed my all the way down Farmington Ave.

No matter how fast I tried to go, I couldn’t shake him. I tried slowing at lights until they were about to change and then I’d charge through them, hoping he’d get stuck. But whatever I went through, he went through.  It was a bit like the movie Duel – the guy was on me and wasn’t going to let go. When I got to Beverly Road, I didn’t signal. I waited until I was almost past the street and then turned very suddenly, sped down the street and pulled into the driveway and dove out of the car and barely made it into the house in front of this guy. He began pounding on the door and Mom had to go out and calm him down.

That wasn’t too uncommon in those days. I was a bit of a hot head. And I did a few stupid things. One time I was at a friend’s house and I was fooling around about letting him get in the car. Suddenly lurching forward as he tried to get in. One of the neighbors saw us, wrote down my plate, called the DMV found out who owned the car – my mother was the co-owner – and the lady called our house. So when I got home, my mother let me know that a car is not a toy and I lost it for a week. I was pretty upset at the time, but I learned a lesson. And I don’t think it was to behave, at least, not right away. I was just a bit more careful and tried to pay attention to see who was around when I was doing stupid stuff.

1967 has gone down in history as the Summer of Love. I wasn’t getting that kind of love, but I was in love for the first time. Bethani and I would go to our jobs in the Center – which is where everyone wanted to work because that is where the action was. When we were younger, we’d all spend our Saturdays walking around the Center. Now we were getting paid to be there.

Page seemed to be doing well in his

Bethani and I went

My plans were to quit working full-time hours in early August and go to Martha’s Vineyard with the family of a good friend. It was a great summer.

But then the phone rang.

Next week: Chapter 12: Page’s Accident.

When I was 15, my life passion switched from baseball to girls. To this day, I don’t know if it was a natural evolution or if it was because my favorite players, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, were limping to the end of their careers and my favorite franchise, the Yankees, had been sold and were soon destined for last place.

My new passion

We first

I was the only kid in West Hartford wearing a beret at the time and her boy friend would always give me a hard time about it. I would, of course, let him try my beret on and endure a predictable ribbing from him so I could steal glances at her.

I thought she was a doll. I couldn’t breathe, think straight or say anything resembling a complete sentence when I was near her. Yet whenever I would go to the Center, I hoped to see them, even if I had to listen to his witless teasing.

The next year, when we were sophomores, they split up when he went to the other high school in town and she wound up in mine.But it was high school, a bigger building with more students, and it took time for us to find each other.

That’s where Mr. Riemer and his speech class came in. I was enrolled in a 7th period speech class with a bunch of the most popular seniors. I didn’t like it in college when I got in a class with a bunch of older kids – but in high school, it was worse. The difference in age, brainpower and their ability to shave were even greater.

My mother signed me up for the class partly to overcome my shyness. I may have been the social director for my group of friends, but she long remembered and often told the story about my first effort in front of an audience.

I had come out to recite a sentence

Still, she signed me up for the

Even though I was only a sophomore, the seniors treated me like one of them. A lot of these kids – to me, they looked like adults who could smoke, drink and go off to Viet Nam at any moment – had gone to school with my brother and knew he was away at reform school. At first it was as if I was their kid brother (after all, I was Page’s kid brother): they were going to pay attention when I spoke and they were going to laugh when I tried to be funny.

Mr. Riemer

These

Mr. Riemer would use me as an example in class and every once in awhile he would mention this girl in his 6th period class and how good she was. And he kept mentioning her. Then he got the idea to play matchmaker.

It wasn’t typical teacher behavior,

This attempted matchmaking by Mr. Riemer went on for several weeks. I was feeling the pressure of my classmates who joined in, especially the senior girls, so I decided to see who this girl was before I agreed to make a move.

 So one day in late fall, I beat it out of my 6th

Mr. Riemer had apparently been saying the same stuff in her class about me and putting the pressure on her to meet up with me. She was a lot smarter than I was and had figured out whom he was talking about.  We locked eyes, there was a pause and then smiles. She knew why I was arriving at class early. We both knew then that we’d be going out.

She probably thought it would be sooner than later. But it would take several months for that to happen. Because I am slow about these things.

We started talking whenever we ran in to each other in the halls. These were meetings I had to engineer. You get into patterns in those 3-minute passing periods. But, once there was a reason, like when a girl with long, reddish brown hair and a sly smile liked you better than any other guy at school, you changed your routine, no matter how far off track it took you. Because at 15 years old, even a five second glance seemed worth the effort and if you added up all those five second glances during the day, well, that could be close to a minute spent with the person you dreamed of at night. 

At the end of the fall semester, Mr. Riemer, who also taught drama, was working on the Christmas Concert and wanted me to accompany the orchestra by reading passages of the Bible. He was so enthusiastic and encouraging about what he saw as my talent that, despite my public shyness, I had to say yes.

It was the

Of course, as would prove to be a pattern, I didn’t do anything about it. The two-week Christmas break came and went and I didn’t call her. Oh, I went down to the basement and paced around the phone we kids used when we didn’t want our parents to hear us. I even picked up the receiver a few times and imagined how a conversation might go if her mom or dad answered. But in my imagination, and reality, I never got through to her.

Then the spring semester started and any momentum on the romantic front was stalled by my penchant for thinking, not acting. I was sure she liked someone else. I could imagine impediments with the best of them. Maybe she still liked that dope who kept teasing me about my beret and they were getting back together. Even though I was now cool with the seniors, I was sure she was too pretty and too smart to want to go out with me.

I made a million excuses.

We

It was the middle of May and the big, end-of-the-year dance was coming up. I figured I had better do something or school would be over and any imagined progress I had made in our relationship during the year would be lost. But I was still too chicken to ask her to the dance. If I had put the effort into my school work that I put into worrying about asking Bethani out, I probably would have gotten in to Yale.

My biggest and best excuse was that I had too much going on to go to the dance. We had an away JV baseball game right after school on the day of the dance. And it wasn’t across town or in the next suburb. It was a half hour bus ride away, in Manchester. And after the game, I was scheduled to work at Lincoln Dairy, until 9. And the dance ended at 11.

That gave me just 2 hours after the store closed to clean the counters, wash the dishes, mop the floors, dress myself up, calm down, get to the dance, find Bethani and win her heart. A lot to do. Not a lot of time. 

Whenever I’d work myself into a state of nerves about calling her and finding the words to ask her out, I’d calm down by telling myself that I was excused from asking because I was too busy.

Unbeknownst to me, Bethani had begun to worry that I would never call. She was a smart girl, vying to be first in our class, and my months of inaction pushed her to action. She told a friend to tell me that she liked me, hoping to light a fire.

Well, it wasn’t a fire, but it warmed me up a bit. In one of our brief encounters in the hallway late in the week, I asked if she was going to the dance. She said yes, and I told her I wanted to go but I had obligations until 9 at the earliest, but could maybe dance with her after that. She said that would work in such a way that it was obvious she would wait for me.

The day of the dance was busy. Only perfect timing allowed me to fulfill my scheduled obligations.

At the game, our starting pitcher got in trouble early. The coach, having used all his other pitchers earlier in the week, was out of his reliable pitching options, so in the second inning, after scanning the bench up and down twice, hoping a Bob Gibson might suddenly appear, he saw his only option: me.

As much as I loved baseball, I knew, just as the coach knew, that I was not a very good player. And it’s no wonder that the coach took until the umpire was yelling at him about a delay of game to make his decision. Reluctantly, he put me in.

To his surprise and mine, I had the game of my life. I didn’t have a fastball, curve or slider. I only had two pitches: balls and strikes. And on this day, I was able to throw strikes. And every time they hit one of those strikes – hard – it was right at one of our fielders.

We rallied and were up by one run, but by the bottom of the final inning, I had run out of gas. The bases were loaded with 2 outs and I had a 2-2 count on the batter. I did not want to go to 3-2 because then there would be great pressure not to walk the guy. So I just aimed a ball right down the middle of the plate and the batter crushed it.

I couldn’t see it, but I heard it whiz by my head, headed for center field, destined to win the game for them. But Joe Morley, who was playing 2B, took two steps to his right and dove as far as he could, stretching from  5’ 10” to  6’ 5” and making a diving stop and a great throw and the game was over. We’d won.

On the way home, the guys attributed my success to the fact that I threw the ball so slow, the batters fell asleep before it got to the plate. I laughed. Even at an age where there are few limitations on your dreams, I had no illusions of a great athletic career. I knew I was destined to be third string.

We got back to town, I showered as quickly as I could, and raced over to Lincoln Dairy just in time for the dinner rush hour. It was a busy Friday night and the time flew by so I didn’t have too much time to be nervous about the dance and Bethani. As the crowds thinned out and the clock moved toward nine, I began to tell myself that maybe it was too late and I probably shouldn’t even bother going. That calmed my nerves.

But Page knew I might be chickening out and he told me to change out of my uniform and get over to the dance. He would clean up and clock me out. He wouldn’t hear any excuses. Page always had several girlfriends and he thought I needed one, too, so he hustled me out the back door.

The Dairy

Everybody

“You should see who Bethani is dancing with,” Sam said.

Immediately, I was deflated. She was going to start going out with someone tonight and since I was late, she already picked her guy. She wouldn’t stay on the shelf too long and because of my game and work, she was taken.

But one of my other friends scowled at Sam for his lame attempt. 

“She’s dancing with Locker,” Jeff said.

I felt relief. Joe Locker was a senior, the hulking star fullback. He had been friends with my brother and I helped him in speech class. He knew what was up that night and he was dancing with Bethani so no one else would dare move in until I got there.

So I went in and stayed in the shadows for as long as I could, scanning the crowd and then the dance floor, looking for her. I finally saw her. It was a moment when romance novels talk about hearts fluttering. I guess that’s what was happening because it wasn’t butterflies in my stomach. It was higher. And I was having trouble breathing. There was a numbness in my head and a buzzing sound in my ears. I began to question why I had wanted this and how I could get out of there without being seen. 

Suddenly Bethani appeared at my side, grabbed my hand and said hi and that she’d been wondering when I’d show up. Did I just get there? Thankfully, she did most of the talking.

We talked while the band took a break and it was different than the fun conversations that we’d had in the hallways all year. Those had flowed easily and we didn’t have to worry about what to say. After all, then we only had a few seconds each time we saw each other. Now we had a couple of hours to spend and there was actually something at stake.

The band started playing again and I didn’t move.  Didn’t talk and still couldn’t breathe. Some senior came up and asked Bethani to dance, but she said thanks, but no, Alan and I are dancing and she dragged me out onto the dance floor. And we danced the rest of the night and we held hands until her dad came to pick her up.

Everything seemed to go right on

Next week: Chapter 11: Summer Doesn’t Last Forever