Month: February 2026

LIFE’S YELLS (TWISTS) AND SHOUTS

There are all kinds of yells and shouts. Happy and sad ones, useful and necessary ones, warning ones.

It didn’t bother me in any way when I heard the guys out back of me briefly this morning find the need to yell. (In fact, I could barely hear this particular yell, or shout; I was just listening in fascination.) It was just one guy, in the course of his work; he was counting — counting, as in– one, two,three….

I’m surmising that he and his co-workers must have been lifting something, or lowering something. The one guy probably needed to yell so the other guys and he would be doing in concert whatever possibly risky task they were executing.

I had let the dog out and was filing the bird feeders. The men were at work beyond the parallell border of white PVC and chain link fencing and masking profusion of Brazilian pepper bushes.

I’ll bet those are hard working guys over there, though I don’t really know what they do. Move big things around., no doubt, laboring on this Thursday morning in some kind of warehouse whose function I’ve not yet — in six-going-on-seven years living here, bothered to ascertain. They ride around in bleating, rattling fork-lifts. It’s one of a million American workplaces where they perform some obscure but necessary function for the rest of us. God bless them.

Three times I heard yelled, “one….two…three….” Three times, something happened.

At the Space Center, when they work to lift off a rocket, they count in reverse….three, two, one….Lift Off!! Maybe they were lowering a rocket out back. Lift… Down!!

Just kidding.

I interviewed the retired editor of the Boston Globe and he recalled how, way back in the old days, a guy in the mailroom of the old Newspaper Row offices and presses announced the first press run of the morning edition by yelling, THEY’RE UP, THEY’RE UP, THEY’RE UP. (I don’t know if anybody was counting the papers as they rolled off. But everybody knew they were coming.

Jack Driscoll (the retired editor) sat in his wheelchair and repeated that memorable shout in the living room of his seaside New Hampshire home. It was almost as if he could hear the presses rumbling again.

I thought of that moment when I read of his death.

One of my earliest memories is a fleeting recollection of being on the streets of Boston’s North End with my parents and we were about to attend my late brother Bill’s graduation ceremonies from Christopher Columbus High School.

There was an Italian guy standing by a pushcart laden with fruit and vegetables and he was shouting.

I didn’t know what to make of it. Why was he shouting, and to whom? Of course, in time I’d know he was selling his produce, shouting for customers. Fresh tomatoes here!!!

My brother Doug worked after high school for the S.D. Warren Paper Company nestled in the heart of the city, very close to Boston’s primarily (in those days) Italian North End. He would come home and say how, every day, he heard some truck driver in the alley below –hear his echoing shout, Hey Wal-YO!”

I would learn from a history professor years later that this means, Hey, boy in Italian. It is apparently a common shouted Italian street greeting. In this case, it was probably coming from some Italo-American driver who made daily deliveries and needed someone to open a loading dock door –someone who knew their Italian. Just a guess.

Or maybe just one Italian fellow was greeting another as their round of daily work began. Shouting that greeting.

I recall being taken to my first-ever professional baseball game by my father. It was a Boston Braves game and there was a guy selling programs and, being very small and impressionable, still ignorant in the ways of theadult world (I was about six years old), I thought the guy was yelling up to the huge painted image of a feathered Indian brave on the stadium wall behind him — as if he expected the brave to answer him.

On November 9, 1957, I was barely eleven and was brought back to the same stadium, which, after the departure of the Braves for, first, Milwaukee, then Atlanta) became Boston University’s football home field . Today it is called Nickerson Field and retains some vestages of the old National League baseball venue, including the right field bleechers.

Of course, the image of the brave is long gone. But it was still on the stadium wall that November day in 1957, greatly faded. He had, in this frozen image, a feather still dangling from his hair and his mouth cupped with his hand — because he is supposed to be shouting, presumably an Indian war chant — just as he had been those four or five years before. Small wonder, in my six-year-old small and wondering mind, the program vendor and the massive Indian brave above and behind him appeared to be shouting to one another. (What could they possibly be saying to one another?)

I recall a letter written by an American soldier from Vietnam, provided me for a story I was preparinig about the soldier and his wartime experiences. He wrote of being wakened from sleep in his tented, temporary billet by someone urgently yelling, MORTAR! MARTAR! and told his father — the recipient of the letter — how he clambored into a fox hole in his underwear, undoubtedly with other soliders, and had to be pulled from the depths of the probably muddy hole when the attack was over. It was not, alas, the final attack he would witness or, ultimately, survive.

I musn’t end that way — in war, in sorrow. I must believe that somewhere now on the planet — probably in many places — someone is shouting for joy.

Beginning in 1961, The Top Notes, the The Isley Brothers, then The Beatles exhorted us, happily, to twist and shout.

And in this primordially, perpetually twisted universe in which we are afflicted by Adam’s fall, we, in great hope — in Matthew 10:27 –are urged to shout from the rooftops the Good News.

So I guess there is good news. I’ll need a ladder to get to the rooftop.

And I hear those fellows over the fence, in shadow and sunlight. They — and I — are counting on it. The Good News, that is.

Maybe they’ve got a ladder I can borrow.

A NORWEGIAN VISITOR TO ‘THE LAST MILE’ RECOUNTS CHILDHOOD MEMORIES OF RUSSIAN DARKNESS

She entered quietly on the arm of a periodic visitor to The Mile who lives a block away and occasionally comes in for a hot dog at lunch tme. The neighor’s name is Ingrid and we knew her to be Norwegian-born. The woman, a striking-looking figure with gray hair and sharp, clear features, was named Sigrid. I’d come to find out that she spoke clear, faintly accented English. I knew the neighbor well enough to be greeted by her as they entered and she saw me chatting with Deano at the bar. “Come meet my aunt,” she said.

I sat with them for a full hour, ordered a hamburger at the bar (no table service in The Mile) , and was so glad I’d stopped in and so glad I spent the time — for Sigrid, it turned out, is a very stalwart and healthy and beautiful 90-years-old and, as a small girl, visited all over Europe and Scandanavia and was speaking of her Russian sojourn — of having seen crowds at Lenin’s Tomb. She spoke perfect English though she’s live in Oslo most of the year. She visits her neice, I learned, at least once a year and loves Boston.

“I did not see Lenin’s mummy,” she said of her long-ago Russian journey. “But I saw the queque which stood for hours and waited to get into the mausoleum. And I have seen the Red Square lie as barren as the steppes of Asia when the mausoleum was closed -but along the outskirts of the square the river of people would stream. The side streets poured their tributaries into it, and people walked, walked, walked. I have never been down in the Moscow subway, but a time or two I tried to board with my mother the packed street-cars with people hanging in clusters inside and outside. It would be a hard ride, for at that time, the streets everywhare in Moscow were full of holes and humps, probably heaped and broken by the cold weather such as you here in the United States are having now, and by war.”

“What were you doing in Moscow?” I asked. “The Soviet Union at the time, of course. It could not have been easy to get in and there might have been a fear of getting out.”

“I believe my mother — Ingrid’s grandmother –was on some kind of a misison of charity for her church. She never spoke of the reason for her travel to me, a child, and I, sadly, lacked the curiosity to ask.”

“Was it a secret, why she was there?”

“I don’t believe so,” said Sigred, “but there were a great many secrets in those days in eastern Europe. And I believe the devil had come to visit that region and has never left. And my mother might have feared speaking of it so long as there might be agents, even in Norway. Communist agents, that is.”

A somber remark, to be certain. She went on.

“For a child, there was something hypnotic to finding myself, a child, walking among streams of total strangers in the cold, for it was winter. I have not been a stranger to cold or to winter in my native Norway. But, beyond the weather, there was something cold about the people I saw. My mother spoke to no one, and the faces I saw when I looked up were empty. I was perhaps nine-year-old. I did not see one Russian who smiled, except the attendants on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

“The English word ‘stolid’ might best describe the expressions on the faces of the Russians I encountered. Not ‘solid’ –though they were solid in a way, but ‘stolid.’ And there seemed to be no individual differences in the faces and demeanor. In an American or a Eurpean crowd, one encounters all manner of persons. This has been my experience during a long life. But my childhood impression of the Russians I saw was very bleak–and this was immediately after the end of hostilities in the World War when much of Russia had been ravaged by the German Armies whom Russia and the Allies ultimately defeated and drove off. There was rubble everywhere. But the weight of the dictator and the shadow of Lenin fell once again over the vast Russian territories. For Norway, under the heal of collaborators and for America and the West, victory meant freedom. Not so for the Russians. My mother later told me how she had been told stories of both glory and of wretchedness. But if you wish to know, I believe what my mother ultimately believed was that we were walking in a universe of miserable lies.”

I reminded myself of the definition of “stolid”: unemotional, expressing little or no sensibility.

And then, darkening my mood at this narrative, Sigrid began to speak of what had perhaps most impressed her about the heart of the Soviet Union she experienced with her young senses: it was the unaccountable stench– that made her welcome, on the day she and her mother departed Moscow, the distant rumble of thunder somewhere distant from their hotel room, and the sight and sound of warm summer rain falling on the city of millions and hoping it was washing it clean.

And, as I sat there with aunt and daughter, I thought of the stinking darkness that closed over the vast Russian heartland after 1945 and that has yet to depart entirely, though I have not been there and dare not judge too harshly the Russian soul when we all know there have to be good, brave, noble, pure souls in that nation always longing to be free either to defeat their overlords or to escape, as we may need someday to escaape — if we’re not careful –from our own country. I know how so many feel about the current government. But what of the alternatives to which an alarming number seem drawn.? I can see New Yorkers one day, even in this present day, choosing to flee that grand city by degrees — escaping the slow imposition of a kind of rancid socialist dream that, again, by degrees, might be realized by its handsome, smiling elected acolyte. New Yorkers and, potentially, all of us might come to know what the late Arthur Koestler wrote of in Darkness at Noon.

Far-fetched? Maybe. Maybe not. I leave the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Doestoyevsky and Tolstoy to go on post humously warning us of the horror that crept over their homeland and was hatched out of a Faberge’ egg that was Tzarist Russia, and that finally spilled its yoke out onto the streets in 1917 and that keeps spilling onto all manner of places around the globe, doing horrible things — Vietnam and Cambodia come to mind — and that is constantly seeping into new places, far and near.

Dumb metaphor, I know. But you get the point, I hope.

I thanked Sigrid and Ingrid for that bracing hour of conversation in the cold monthy of February at a little table in the little place called The Last Mile.