Category: Memories

There are narrow winding lanes of tiny shops in the Port’s center. The chocolatier has a fan above his door that sends the aroma of freshly baked fudge out into the open air. He sells ice cream, too; homemade. From the other ceramic, dress and novelty shops, especially the quiet, sequestered ones along the winding lanes, away from the busy little main street (called Myrtle Avenue), there comes the scent of patchouli, citrus and lavender, often the piped strains of guitar or harp music. You might find a busker working away at his guitar or flute on one of the little alley turns over near the water’s edge. People stop to listen. It’s busy in summer. (I noted the license plates of distant visitors.)

And then immediately south of the short row of scollop and shrimp boat docks, there is the fresh sea scent blowing in off Lucian Inlet and the view of the open ocean beyond. There is a small park, a mere patch of greenery at the water’s edge with two sugar maples for shade and benches for the foot-weary tourists and those town residents who make a point of gathering here daily, like the women’s knitting circle and some men who bring a folding table for daily games of chess. There is a small garden and a monument statue of angels at the heart of the park and at the heart of a lovely fountain. For those sitting on the few nearby benches, looking out toward the sea, there is always the gentle sound of water plashing over stone and falling into the tiny pond below. People have tossed coins into the pool. A brass placque by the pond’s edge tell you the fountain was dedicated to a long departed benefactor in 1958. A wooden sign rising up from a stake thurst into the brown garden mulchtells you in Olde English lettering that the flowers are watered and the whole garden maintained by the Port Lucian Garden Club.

For forty years, Mercy Strange has had her little art gallery halfway down Periwinkle Lane in the Port shopping district. For years, she had worked in oils, acrylics and watercolors and still displays and sells those old legacy works in her cramped but cozy space. But, sometime early in this century, she switched to working in charcoal. She said it was the light in Port Lucian that made her make that shift — a peculiar change, no question, just to work exclusively in black and gray, drawing what in real life are colorful landscapes and seascapes and, now and then, she will generously draw portraits on-the-spot of some of the people who approach to watch her work at her easel those days she goes to the park.

It seems odd to be turning everything gray in such a colorful, charming world.

I asked her about the change. She said it was the light that she sees over everything — she insists the light at Port Lucian is gray. Now, everyone else saw sunlight, although there were certainly gray days when clouds rolled over the coastline beyond the bluffs, or when winter came and the occasional snow cover would turn gray –or slushy- icy silver– on the sidewalks and in the otherwise clean gutters, and on those especially frigid days when ice would form on the masts of the fishing fleet.

But to Mercy, the whole Port, where she has lived all here 69 years, had become gray in every season. It was a singular and curious evolution in her artistic vision. It baffled many of us.

Gray light at Port Lucian: That was the name of her last exhibit in February.

Gray had become Mercy’s color of choice.

She also said the village, indeed, the whole world (according to her gray vision) had become more and more gray, crass, mercenary and materialistic as the days and summers and every season, bright or gray — even Christmas, all red and green and draped with holly — came and went and came again in Port Lucian and in the universe.

She was not specifically speaking of famine or disease or pandemic or war are political termoil. She was speaking of –well, of death. Life and death, and all the gray in between.

Some of us thought she might have suffered an ocular, or specifically, a macular degeneration that was effecting her physical vision.. But she assured us that was not the case. In fact, unlike many of her age –she is 69 — she is still gifted with 20/20 eyesight. We know this because, sensing our suspicions regarding her health claims, she showed a few of us the results of her eye examination. Yes, she was 20/20.

I see Mercy on my frequent trips to The Port. Her world has been in deep charcoal gray going on fifteen years now. I’ve been wondering about that. About Mercy, and the Gray Light….What emotional or mental — or, still I wonder if it is not physical — factors have altered her view of the world. Surely, over that period, times have been good or bad. Good and bad can be rendered in color or in black and white — or gray. Gray is more somber, more ambiguous for certain. Many of life’s circumstances seem gray. Of course, when as many movies were in black and white as in color, we did not necessarily feel our mood dampened. Those were often the filmmaker’s economic decision. Often, but not always. There is a quality rendered by black and white which color cannot convey, not to mention what gray conveys.

Mercy reminded me that DaVinci worked extensively in charcoal, including in his famous study of hands. German artist Kathe Kollwitz used charcoal to express the struggles of the working class and the horrors of war.( It was to Kollwitz’s work that her growing body of work was most often compared.) John Singer Sargent certainly let earth tones prevail on his canvasses.

So, Mercy Strange is not unique. But it was still peculiar or (forgive me) strange that she so seemingly abruptly shifted from a colorful vision of the world to a gray one.

So most of us who consider ourselves friends, patrons and supporters of Mercy Strange had accepted her shift, invited the art media to highlight her growing body of gray and black (but mostly gray) work. I personally bought one of her charcoal drawings of crows gathered on a bare and dying oak tree on the bluff at the entrance to the inlet. She called it, in complete accuracy, “A Murder of Crows,” for that is how such a gathering is known in the avian lectionary.

All well and good. Meanwhile the quaint, colorful and charming life of the waterside village known as Port Lucian continued, the coffers of her merchants rising and falling as the national economy rose and fell,buffeted by seas of contemporary political overtures, advances and retreats.

But six months ago, the skies seemed to darken to the edge of her twelve-by-twelve mile borders. Yet there are no clouds overhead, but the sky nonetheless seemed a deep gray. It is as if clouds dissolve the second they drift into The Port’s airspace but the sky remains gray for no known atmospheric reason, or so those who beheld this phenomenon declared.

But was it just Mercy’s mood spreading — or do we all, from time to time, even for long periods, see nothing but gray? But Mercy above all seemedd to be seeing nothing else.

It was about then that people really began to take note of Mercy Strange sitting with her easel, and sometimes sitting without any easel or drawing implements — sitting among the rocks bordering the inlet.

She would sit there for hours on end. Finally one day, I made my way out there along the waterfront road, parking my car at the base of the rocks where there was a scattering of teenage grafitti defacing the pervasive beauty. (There is always a bit of blight scattered about the world — but, of course, the reality is — there is a whole lot of it.)

I found the path Mercy must have followed through a few scrub pine and then onto the rounded, bare, sometimes slippery rock surface until I saw Mercy sitting there…

She was sitting before her easel, but she was not drawing. Her hands were by her side. She was staring out to the open water. She’d apparently set up her easel out of habit. But her canvas was empty.

I approached….I don’t think she knew I was there. She was briefly startled when I said, “hello, Mercy.”

She looked at me, standing now on the precarious rock surface to her right. I smiled. She said, “sit here for a moment, rest, though, I’m sorry I do not have another chair.”

I sat down on the rock, drew my legs up. Her folding chair was low to the rock surface. “It’s coming soon,” she said.

“What — what’s coming soon?” I said.

“The cloud,” she said. “I don’t know, it’s sort of like …..I saw this film as a child. Perhaps you saw it, too. Husband and wife along on a boat on the open water, obviously unhappy in ways you or I would not yet understand as children. The wife goes below on the small boat, the husband suddenly notices a cloud approaching on the surface of the water.”

“I think I recall this movie,” I said, “from a Saturday matinee. It made me have my first bout of juvenile depression. At least that’s how it felt. As I recall, the cloud makes the man shrink away to nothing – in a black and white movie about a black and white…and gray…world.”

“But not,” Mercy reminded me,” before he falls victim to the family cat he’d once loved so much — and, escaping to the basement where he lives inside a match box but is attacked by a spider — a small spider that, in his new universe, is a giant, hideous monster…”

Thought the breeze on the rocks was gentle, I was getting a chill. “Yeah, you’re bringing it all back,” I said.

“And he shrinks and shrinks — to an atom, alone.”

“And his wife and everybody think he was eaten by the family cat.”

“Yes.”

“Enough,” Mercy. Have mercy…” and I chuckles.

And, from here on out reader — well….the revery, the vision, the revelation, the necessary human act of understanding, of comisseration, of vicarious participation in another’s invisible suffering…. the what-have-you…

for…Mercy suddenly said to me, with great urgency…

“Look,” and I looked out where she was pointing beyond what boats were visible on the water, including a tanker far out toward the horizon. It was a consoling, beautiful scene. But she was pointing to a low-lying cloud.

“Mercy,” I said. “That’s just a cloud.”

“Yes,” she said, but clouds have been coming ashore for months now, gray clouds. In my life, anyway. How about yours?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I started to say.

“And you haven’t seen the clouds gathering out there, getting ready to push ashore?”

“I listen to the weather forecast,” I said. “Clouds come and go…”

“No clouds in your forecast?” she said, looking at me again, then out to sea — toward whatever cloud she was seeing.

“I haven’t seen any,” I said, meaning clouds – or, at least, clouds or a cloud of the kind she seemed to be suggesing; an ominous cloud. The kind of cloud that could turn the world gray, change our climate, within and without. We’ve all known such clouds. “I’ve been here every weekend,” I said with redoubtable optimism,” and sometimes during the week. I love it in the Port, I come here often, as you know. We have had nothing but sunny skies…and the world here is — colorful.”

But then, I noticed the air suddenly growing hazy. I turned and looked toward the sea, but a fog –or was it a cloud — had suddenly, mysteriously, engulfed us. I could barely see Mercy right next to me. I was suddenly terrified. What was going on? I looked back toward the village. It, too had vanished from sight. The rocks were suddenly moist and slippery.

“Mercy,” I said. “Are you there? What is happening,” as if she would know. I put my hand out toward her, and touched — nothing, not her not her easel, nothing.

She was gone…

After a solid two minutes, paralyzed by my utter bafflement, I carefully rose, crawling first, then standing once I was sure I would not slip off the rocks into the bay. My heart was pounding, for I wondered, was this a dream? A very bad dream?

I made my way back down between the patches of green to where there was dry earth and pebbles underfoot. I fumbled out my car keys, but all the while wondering — had I left Mercy up there? Had SHE somehow slipped silently into the inlet’s waters? But, no, she was gone. I looked about for her small old Volvo, but then recalled that it hadn’t been there when I arrived. Mercy was known to walk all the way out to the point.

The haze was all about me now. Yet, it was nothing I could breath. It seemed somehow–artificial, as if my sight merely needed to adjust to the condition and it would vanish. I backed up and, careful that no cars were coming around the bend, started slowly through the haze back toward the village along the waterside road.

Then, as if things were not terrifyingly disorienting enough, I suddenly emerged from the fog and the villeage was spread out before me at less than a mile’s distance….but….in nothing but gray tones….gray, black and ghastly white.

And as I drew slowly closer to the town, the distant prospect of collected, charming cluster of roofs and windows of shops did not enlarge. The whole scene stayed as small as it might seem from a mile away….

And beyond anything I’d ever experienced before came the moment I arrived on the road that had shrunk to a black two-in line and I was driving on dirt and along the waterfront was a collect of dollhouse and toy boats where there had been a full village.

And no people, large or small. I was alone. No birds, no signs of life — just a former world diminished to a toy store’s display of a village by water, that was suddenly just a pond and continuing to shrink…I had not noticed that my car had disappeared from around me. It was at below, between my feet. I went to pick it up — and the ring fell off my finger. And I was……shrinking, and was, all at once, on a wide desert where all but the burning sands were vanished. But Mercy Strange was coming toward me, slowly -smiling wistfully.

And she said, in greeting, “You know now what I have been feeling. Do they call it depression? Whatever they call it, I’ve been trying to paint it, draw it — a world gray and shrinking until there is no place for me…..

And then I woke on a bench along the village’s Myrtle Street — all restored, color life, people all around and I sitting in the cool sunlight under a chestnut tree….and I could see Mercy Strange sitting in the break between the low, charming building….sitting in the park by the shrimp boats and the bay leading out to the sea, people and flowers all around her. She was drawing…no, she was painting in bright colors. That much I could see – the colors. I rose and at the first break in the mild summer traffic, I crossed and walked toward her.

Yes, Mercy, you are back, I thought. But I must tell you of my dark vision……that, for so many years had been your lonely, crushing vision….

The cloud has lifted. The Light is shining in

Time passing. Time captured. For what little it’s worth.

But all our life’s times are worth something.

And I’m thinking of one captured moment in a life in which even uneventful moments should count. :

A restless, idle, solitary Sunday afternoon; my age (just an estimate) thirteen, circa 1960; home alone (where was everybody?), feeling as if I should be somewhere, doing something, anything; too young to be so idle, so bored, so anxious, moving around the house, but mostly just staying in my own room that had been my sister’s room until she was married and moved out in June, 1959. This therefore was probably early spring of 1960. Or maybe not.

I’m ust guessing, of course. it could have been 1961, 62, even 63. And I could have been 14,15,16…It all runs together, and that detail is lost.

But it must have been early spring, based on the little thing that happened that made it memorable. The ground was bare, the sun was shining. It wasn’t cold, barely even a little chilly — which is why what was to happen was so unusual, which is also what makes us remember things in an otherwise ordinary day.

I’m not sure why I turned the TV on, or why I didn’t turn it off if I wasn’t interested in what was on, which I wasn’t.

This I remember: Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman were in Paris. War was threatening. The movie, from 1948, was called Arch of Triumph, after the Paris monument. That’s a good a name for a movie or a monument, nes pas? Or a novel. The movie, I now know, was based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, who also wrote All Quiet On The Western Front

All was quiet — too quiet — on my adolescent front that Sunday afternoon.

But, upon reflection, this might be one of those early instances, beyond childhood and at the edge of adulthood, when one suddenly knows enough to be anxious and disatisfaction with their idleness, because there was a life to be lived, and, like it or not, responsibilities to be assumed.

Reality.

I know that, for a sustained period, for no reason, I just sat looking out the window — out over the backyard, over neighbors’ rooftops and, between the houses, at the empty supermarket parking lot. (It was closed Sundays in those days.) There were some trees here and there, leaves probably just appearing.

Then, suddenly…..

large snowflakes began swirling in the briefly darkened sunlight. It was the thinnest, briefest of snow squalls — over almost instantly without leaving a white trace anywhere on the ground. It came on like a mid-Sunday, early spring revery, perhaps unforecasted, perhaps confined to my neighborhood, perhaps even just to my backyard, just for my vision. But it was real; probably the fleeting product of a small, drifting cloud; a very localized meteorlogical anomaly.

Did anyone else — anyone in my neighborhood or anyone else anywhere see it?

And had that squall not happened, I’d have never remembered that otherwise undistinghished afternoon, that moment in that empty, languid Sunday in that empty house where I’d lived all my short life to that point.

And, for what it was worth, I feel certain I never would have recalled what movie was playing on television.

Just before or just after the squall, I became aware that the movie was reaching its sad denoument.

Pre-World War II  Paris is crowded with illegal refugees, trying to evade deportation. Charles Boyer is one Dr. Ravic, practicing medicine illegally under a false name, helping other refugees. He saves Joan Madou, played by Ingrid Bergman, from committing suicide after the sudden death of her lover. She and Ravid (Boyer), of course, become lovers, but as the movie ends, he is being deported. Ingrid as Madou must say a sad goodbye.

Charles Boyer is waiting in the deportation line with his friend, Boris, who predicts they’ll both spend time in a concentration camp but bids him an affectionate farewell. They both promise to meet at the famous bar called Fouquet’s after the war...

One could only hope so.

Drama, Romance, Make-Believe , always bracketed by Reality….and Time.

In the last shot of the film, the camera travels through Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. The Arch of Triumph. )May we all triumph over life.

And because snowflakes fell in sunlight one very idle, ordinary early spring Sunday afternoon sixty-five years ago –an ordinary moment during the running of an otherwise ordinary and forgettable movie (which flopped at 1948 box offices) was made memorable. Preserved for what little it was worth…. in Time.

Vinyl wreaths with vinyl bows, Styrofoam snowmen. MERRY CHRISTMAS signage. All ready for recycling or the dumpster. Sprayed-on greetings of fake canned snow. (What is that stuff made of, anyway, and how hard is it to clean off?) Glass surfaces everywhere waiting to be January clear and rendered bleakly pedestrian again. The grim tide shall flow again, undecorated. Cigar shops (do they exist still, now that a SMOKE SHOP usually means vape or cannabis?) –even in those windows there would be a greeting. Or a cobbler’s little fake tree in his window. (Are there cobblers anymore? We’re still wearing shoes, after all.) Or greetings in the windows of forgotten plumbing supply joints down forgotten back alleys that vanishes when the buildings creating the alley vanished beneath a shimmering high-rise monolith and the plumbing supply join was, long-ago, pushed out of operation by Lowes and Home Depot. (Of course, thoxd big places have their greetings, too, until they are disassembled, along with everyone elses, and stored away.

Once, before his neighborhood turned bad and a laundrimat took over space occupied by a fish market, a guy named Ray (Fishmonger Ray who started out selling fish out the back end of a truck) used to take pains to to put up a little fake tree, year after year, until, for him, there were no more fish customers, no more customers and, also for him, no more Christmases. Somehow I imagine seeing fake trees with fake gifts among the little businesses nestled in the shadows beneath the long vanished Boston North Station overhead rail girders. Why there? I don’t know. Obscure, dark places briefly made sketchily festive for a few week — whether they existed or not, they are burrowed in my imagination, and open every Christmas season somewhere in my memory.

Christmas is lingering at the Last Mile Lounge. Joe Barron might keep the place open for regulars New Year’s Eve. I’ll stop by to see.

But otherwise, it’s all fading. Gone that unbroken, repetitive wall of Burl Ives singing Holly, Jolly…. over the CVS piped -in music.

Holidays in. holidays out. The “holiday season” this year includes Hanukkah. At least there’s that, the Hunukkah candles to brighten the darkness. And, supposedly, there are twelve days to Christmas. The Magi are still coming, right?

Right.

It Came Upon A Midnight Clear....Came and went at 12:01 a.m. December 26th. That’s the end of Christmas as Amazon, et al. knows it.

A fragile, hooded funeral procession of ghosts of Christmas passing.

At least I can go on saying, Happy Hanukkah and the world won’t think me odd. Just culturally sensitive.

It is blue and cloudless, the neighbor’s flag and the fronds of his palm are lofting and twirling and untwirling gently, so gently. In between, they are still. So very still. What more can you ask in the way of peace?

It is three days, or now slightly less than that in terms of hours, from the feast of Thanksgiving in the United States of America. It might rain where you are — rain on that big parade up north. Can’t help the weather.

Time for gratitude.

Thanks all around. God bless us, everyone! (That’s Tiny Tim and Christmas — but, whatever.)

So, I begin to let all things settle. Conflicts within and without, my own reluctant, anxious, turbulent inclinations, in traffic, at the supermarket, wherever, always looking for trouble –tamped down at this hour, like one pressing on a great bulging, pulsing surface of a dam near bursting — which is the world and me, always near bursting — but holding firm at least for the present moment. Living with it. Living with tension.

Be still!…

And it is still, a still moment in the turning earth at latitude 27,9095 north and 82,7873 west, Largo, Florida. It is one minute to five. The sun shall set at 5:35. I and every inhabitant of the planet shall barely perceptively turn away from the sun while those in other hemispheres are turning back toward it. All that I behold out a small window in this hemisphere is at peace, composed.

I choose to see and think only of that window-framed patch of universe, of the present moment in this present place, for it has been a good several hours, despite every lurking conflict, sickness, anxiety –a day in which I began helping distribute food for Thanksgiving to those who need it. ( Yeah, being a do-gooder.) And I brought one grocery bag to my partner Diane’s friend, because she needs it. We need it, for that matter. But we have enough. She doesn’t. She needed more.

Of course, who needs everything they think they need?

The friend has called to say that now, she and her multi-layered household of people and dogs will have a Thanksgiving, for she had not been entirely certain she would be able to celebrate the day, due to the presence of considerable shifting finanancial domestic fortunes.

I’m so glad of that! That she and hers might be brought together in a communal meal, abide amid the stresses and strains.

So there you have a small, good thing, as the sun around here tilts toward the horizon, or the earth away from the sun on this November 25, 2024 in the early quarter of the 21st Century in this place, time and moment.

I have a birthday in two days. I am not much thinking about it. I am in that time of life when you don’t. No, you certainly don’t.

My brother has, early in this month (in which we traditionally honor and remember the dead), passed from this earth after 89 years; finally, peacefully. And the prayer goes, “now and at the hour of our death” may we have His grace….

We go on wondering who He is.

Love, they say. Perfect love. I’ll buy that. Show me the alternative.

May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest and peace at the last. –Saint John Henry Newman

I was born the day before Thanksgiving. My father cooked the turkey for my eleven-year-old brother Bill (rest in peace), my sister Anne, just four days short of her eighth birthday (rest in peace), and my twin brothers Doug and Ron, just fifteen days short of their seventh birthday. That must have been a raucous gathering!

I believe, as I think on it, that it might have been my godmother Eleanora Lenahan (long deceased and who I rarely saw through much of my later life) who came to help Dad. (Rest in peace –Eleanora, and dad.)

But all that is past. A memory, reported to me who, of course, was not cognicant of the universe I was entering and in which I was destined to move about. That moment is gone. This is the present moment, after moving about for many decades, edging toward sunset on a day when I will recall the two exquisitely beautiful African young women — women from another world and hemisphere — who came for their free food this morning at the food give-a-way, each dressed so colorfully. The one in particular will stay with me — her floor-length dress and her head wrap, or gele, covered with a rose pattern. She was pregnant. She was likely poor, but beauty, within and without, can abide in poverty.

But that was then, that moment, gone. This moment, sweetly, slowly darkening, is a moment in which I choose to be content; to be at peace, seeking God’s presence, peace and security against any useless anxiety. Forgetting the jerk I can occasionally be. Who isn’t a jerk now and then?

Stillness.

I am, in Newman’s words,’safely lodged’ on the earth, if not yet in heaven, the latter still to be earned, sin to be resisted.

I might watch a little news. That should burst the big ‘peace’ bubble, learn of all the sin that goes unresisted.

But, hey! Whatever! I might as well know what’s going on — I guess.

The shades are lengthening, the (Monday) evening is coming….

May we stay – in the moment. It’s all we’ve got.

And, really, is it so bad?

Hey! It’s 5:38!

I’m doing the math. The sun set three minutes ago, and it’s glowing red and pretty out there.

Now, can you ask for more than that?

Now, it’s 5:39. Getting darker.

No, you can’t stop time. No one’s figured out how to do that. If they had, I wouldn’t be having another birthday. But then, I’m gratefully glad to be having it. For time, in which we live and move and have our being, is the trial before the hoped-for, ultimate safe lodging.

Have a great evening, one and all.

And a great Thanksgiving, wherever you are lodged.

It is a narrow, thin memory, barely surviving, buried in my long, overloaded memory. My sister, with teenage friends, somewhere in Boston. They had gone to stay in town –we always called it “in town” — and, together, at a hotel. No moral compromises, no boys around, all girls, together.

I wish I’d asked her about it while she was alive — asked her, was there a time when you went off to downtown Boston and stayed somewhere in a hotel?

I picture one of those old hotels, maybe some lost places, like the Avery or the Essex or the Turraine that once stood ornate and tall deep in the city’s core. I’m imagining a time when the newer, shinier hostelries were yet to be built.

And what I remember hearing my sister tell my mother is that she went to the window in the dead of night and, though the city was sleeping, she could hear sounds –I was going to say, ‘the sound of silence.’ But, yes, it was the sound of a seemingly empty and asleep city’s breathing — just that mysterious, constant sound of far, far off traffic or wind or hidden life within a somnolent city.

And I might have thought about this as I woke in the hotel at Logan Airport this past Monday night, staying just a night in a hotel in the city of my birth. It is always a strange experience to stay in a hotel, like a visitor or stranger, in a city you once –or even presently — call home. The airport had, as always, been frantically busy with rushing strangers and vehicles and comings and goins, but I woke at 12:10 a.m. — I knew I must wake in just hours for a flight to Tampa where I roost now and would be constantly, or almost constantly experiencing a frightening kind of dementia, forgetting that I was due to fly (back) to Tampa, not “up” to Boston, where I was at that moment (and feeling like a stranger) and where I had been for two days that felt, at that moment, like a week. Perhaps it was because what I really wanted to do was to go down the elevator to the empty lobby and catch a taxi to my childhood home, walk to the door at 210 Neponset Avenue, pull out my key and let myself in and creep up the stairs to where I was supposed to be sleeping — where my former childhood self was sleeping — in the top floor bunks with the sloaping ceiling where my brother Bill, who I just saw in repose at a funeral home, would be sleeping in the front and my twin brothers in back — and I would go and quietly slip iinto my metal and spring bed pushed into the corner by the window. It would be dark and silent in the house, my mother and father on the second floor where, though so small, there is a bathroom and three bedrooms off the hallway. And my sister’s room would still the one at the top of the stairs and it would become my room once she married in June of 1959.

I would go to sleep in my narrow bed in those”top floor” rooms where my three brothers slept….

I still lived there, didn’t I? That was still the Wayland home, wasn’t it? Everybody was alive, weren’t they?

But I was back in Boston because my brother Bill had gone to sleep forever.

In truth, as I stood looking down at the silent, empty airport roadways and overpasses, all brightly lit – but empty — I could hear nothing except the air conditioning, because rarely can you open a window in a modern hotel. I would go back to the bed and, though having no memory of drifting off, go back to sleep to await the 5:30 alarm getting me up for the 7 :15 a.m. flight — to fly to Tampa. Why was I going to Tampa? This was home. I was home….

And my family is across water and fields and tall buildings in that house at 210 Neponset Avenue which I had just seen that day — but occupied now by strangers. I was coming from the funeral home where the service had been held for my oldest brother whom I had just seen lying in a casket right across the street from the former site of the Adams Street Theater, now an apartment building.

But, if it truly happened, if only I could remember more or could have asked my sister — who died in September of 2016 — just what she and her friends were doing in that hotel. Had they, in fact, traveled to another city, not Boston, with some group like The Catholic Daughters? Or perhaps this was a high school graduation trip?

I will never know, because I cannot remember.

But I know that she, and maybe the other girl or girls who were her roommates, excited to be in the heart of a city, any city, and be up talking and laughing to the wee hours, had perhaps finally turned out the lights for bed and gone to a window that, in the old days, you could still open. They might have been on the seventh or the eighth floor. And they would have leaned out the window overlooking perhaps a street, perhaps an alley.

Perhaps my sister was the only one awake, a young teenager having not yet met the man she would marry, perhaps kneeling at the open window alone, listening–and fascinated by the sound coming from a seemingly sleeping city. Life out there, stirring at ever hour.

Life. My sister at the window, alone. Her name was Anne. And she called my brother Bill when she was dying. And he had said, “I was supposed to be first!”

She would have laughed. She is gone. Now he is gone, too.

But I remember her now, at 10:47 p.m., November 13, 2024.

Alone. In a dark room of sleeping girls. Listening to the city in the dead of night.

Joe Barron is heir and sole owner of a renowned little establishment occupying a square patch of earth on the East Boston/Revere, Massachusetts line, built of brick, masonry, neon and plastic and its close cousin vinyl, featuring a vintage original marble bar top, operating for 102 American years, doing business as The Last Mile (named thus principally because its founder, Joe’s great grandfather, was granted a governor’s reprieve sparing him the electric chair for the charge of 1st degree murder — and because the place was once thought to be exactly a mile from Logan International Airport (off by about 4 1/2 miles–the person making that calculation was plainly guessing while drinking). It began, given its era of origin, under a candy store, the entrance through the bulkhead in back, for it was a speakeasy until the end of Prohibition.

The Last Mile was, on October 12, 2024, the scene of a small autumn gathering for “regulars” and any souls in need of a year-end taste of what the poet Keats called that “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”

The chosen venue was the 30×30 patch of dirt, crab grass and rutted macadam out behind the bar. Not exactly the Tuillieries or Kew Gardens, up against the tumbling stockade fence and what litter Joe hadn’t been able to clean up stuck in the crevices. But everybody, when things were in full swing, was loving it and getting along, a kind of fall reunion and celebration of the dying year, before the only two back lot trees — a scrawny old maple and a very robust but no less old oak — become bare as old swamp stags casting November shadows.

We weren’t making much noise, but as a courtesy, Joe invited to the festivities the guy who lives in an old house on the other side of the stockade fence, a body and fender guy named Terry Garagiola who has a shop in Lynn. He came with his wife Teresa and his mother Angalina.

Joe, 77 years old, was up from his long-time permanent dwelling on Key Biscayne, Florida. He walked through life now under a grand breaking wave of silver gray hair, sometimes a little shaggy at the collar of his expensive shirts, looking a little paunchy this October, wearing his usual gold chains and wearing a couple of expensive-looking ring and a third one being his East Boston High School class ring. The shirt had orange blossoms on it, a Florida touch. He has always seemed the kind of guy you used to see hanging around the old Esquire Bar or the Squire Lounge. I found out, in fact, that he knew the famous Revere stripper named Taquila who famously used a boa constrictor in her act. We heard, many years ago,that he had dated her, and often took the snake along in a Styrofoam cooler in the back seat of his Elderado. One night while they were having burgers at the Adventure Car Hop, the snake got out and came crawling under the seat, right up between Joe’s legs. Taquila was able to get her “baby” –named Monty The Boa –quickly under control. Good thing!

We always wondered how Joe managed to operate a bar, since he’s got a belfry full of butterflies. We privately believe his lawyer in Boston handles the finances. Deano, his bartender, orders the liquor and runs the place day to day. Joe’s place in Key Biscayne is just the product of some good gambling revenue from a Fort Lauderdale casino he owned and maybe a few junk bonds and a couple of junk bars and laundromats he also owned down there and sold, and maybe old family money supplements his basically simple life. (When managing a combination laundromat and strip joint got too complicated, he sold it after making a fair profit. “Too many nuts,” he said of his sudsy lascivious clientele.) There’s rumors of a lingering Florida partnership with dubious Miami elements, remnants of the Trafficanti empire, that we all hope are false. If true, if he never stiffs them, they might come looking for him at The Mile.

It was great, looking around, seeing everybody.

Joe was accompanied by a new “companion” by the name of Pippa Goldflower. He simply wanted to be back, for the first time in perhaps ten years, for a New England autumn. The weather held for him. Pippa came with him, eager to experience a New England autumn as well.

This Pippa was an interesting, slightly mysterious, decidedly sophisticated lady, said to have been born in Nevada, raised in Latin America and England, daughter of a flamboyant diplomat, and a little flamboyant in her own right. She was younger than Joe, but had long white hair with magenta highlights — yes, I made so bold as to ask and she confirmed that that was the color — flowing floral skirt, lavender top — a riot of colors for every season and every state of life! Whether she was Joe’s girlfriend or not, we don’t know. Joe told us he met her in Key West while taking one of his periodic excursions down from Miami to watch the sunset at the nation’s southernmost point and drink at Sloppy Joe’s. Along the ledge over the back of the bar now, you see an array of conch shells Joe collected on the Key’s shoreline over the past year. We think this was Pippa’s idea, and probably her collection. We assumed therefore that Pippa, habitue of the world’s dazzling ports and stylish avenues didn’t find the Last Mile and its dumpy back lot too low rent for her tastes — not if she was willing to decorate it with shells. And we further figured that Joe must have charmed her nearly to death (Joe had that effect on a certain kind of woman) — or she was just slumming.

There was no champagne or vintage beverages for this confab. The cooler was full of Model, Budweiser,Miller, Bud Lite, a few Heineken. Nothing too fancy for wine, either — Almadine, Yellow Tail rose’and chardonnay, and four jugs of apple cider and a little lemonade. These were on three card tables along with what passed for hors de’oeuvres — cheddar cheese and crackers, salami, pepperoni, little wieners, pickles, pastry. Stuff you could get at Stop&Shop up the street, and Dunkin Donuts. Anything fancier would have ruined it. Keep it Simple is Joe’s motto.

Knox, the artist, came down from his apartment above the bar with his usual alcohol concoction known as a Blushing Monk. He was probably breaking Joe’s rules, drinking the hard stuff on the property out of doors. But this was a special occasion. Joe had put out folding beach chairs, about a six or seven.

This back lot was all that The Mile had for a parking lot, but everybody parked on the street on this Saturday.

When I arrived, Kenny Foy was there, Athena Leroy, the Greek American realtor from Lowell who had her little epiphany at The Mile and always came back, usually on Saturdays. Bo Cherry Burkhardt was there with Charlie Simmonetti. And, of course, Sticky Sammartino and Jackie The Crow Kantner. Willy Hartrey who walked up from his house a few blocks away.

A nice little gathering. Very modest. Cozy.

Technically, Joe Barron needed a permit to do it, because serving food and beverages outdoors was not part of his Massachusetts common victualers license. He got a quick permit from Revere City Hall, where he has connections. As noted, The Revere/East Boston line runs right through the little bar, one of its charming claims, entirely verified, that put it in some guidebooks. I never noticed the white town line that ran wall-to-wall across the old tile and well-worn pine planks of the Mile’s well-oiled floor.

Also Joe could have rented the Lithuanian Club hall. But this was happily working class impromptu, Joe’s surrender to a small, romantic impulse. He just got a little sentimental about autumn and his childhood memories of Columbus Day and all that — playing halfback in high school football over at Chelsea Stadium in autumns of yore –and every autumn memory you can think of (the old “cool, crisp days” thing and the early darkness and scuffing through the leaves). For him, it was perfect just to be in good company under the scrawny little maple out there, which had just enough foliage left to spread some color. The oak was doing okay, but very autumn looked like it would be its last for that maple, but the leaves –you could probably count them — kept sprouting green in spring. Thank God for that.

As for the oak tree, not a lot of color, as oaks go. But the leaves were turning dull yellowish brown and would fall and still be around on the snow all winter, and Joe stood under it and recited “The Village Blacksmith,” by Longfellow. (“Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands….”) He intoned it in a grandly resonant voice for everybody to hear! Twice, in fact, after a requested encore from the Garagiolas. ( Once was enough for most of us.) And there were plenty of acorns in the dirt crunching under foot and on the macadam to make it feel, if you used your imagination, like we were in Concord or Lexington — or some little village in northern New England. Joe happened to know through his mother that the gas station up the street had once, in fact, been the site of a blacksmith’s stable until the mid-Twenties. He cherished those memories of old geography.

Joe told us he learned that Longfellow poem as a kid, at the bidding of that same mother who loved it, and he had recited it before his 7th grade class at St. Anthony’s elementary. In fact, he’d made himself look a little like a poet at this gathering, wearing a tweed jacket over his Florida regalia. At one point he had his arm around The Man Outside which is what we call this guy who was kind of the resident poet — and all we can ever get from him in the way of a name is the Man Outside because (as I once told you) he stands outside the Lounge all the time smoking French cigarettes, then comes inside, sits at a back table and write his poems.

A week before the event, Joe pinned up a notice about the gathering in the hall by the bathrooms where people like to keep adding flourishes to Knox’s portrait of the Maltese Hairdresser. GOLDEN GLORY TIL THE GLOAMING, the poster read. OCTOBER 12, NOON TIL DUSK (or the gloaming) OUT BEHIND THE BAR. We initially speculated that this Pippa Goldflower looked like the type to come up with word “the gloaming.” That definitely wasn’t in Joe’s vocabulary, even if he liked watching the sun go down — a habit probably born of watching sunsets on Revere Beach.

Joe had invited an Irish guy who played the concertina along Revere Beach Boulevard all year long, earning enough to keep body and soul together to get a little food at Kelly’s Roast Beef. He brought his own folding chair and sat and played. We all put copious donations in the guy’s overturned cap. I think Joe dusted him off pretty good, too.

Folks in those folding chairs, or standing around the card tables were also drifting over by the dumpster when they wanted to talk politics or sports or smoke. The dumpster was green and relatively new. Knox had long ago declared it to be a work of contemporary art. A Motif #1

“I wish I’d designed it,” he said. “Full of civilization’s refuse.” For the rest of us, it was just a dumpster. I lifted the lid at least once to deposit some of the trash we were generating that didn’t go in the recycle bin Joe had set out. Joe was very environmentally conscious.

Somebody noted that The Outside Man had posted his latest work, as he always did, over the urinals in the men’s room. He’d written an autumn haiku:

Puddles golden reflection

Grackles at the gloaming

Their blackness

Sticky Sammartino read it out loud as he emptied his bladder.

“They call this a ‘ hey you,’ right?”

“A haiku,” I said. I was taking care of business at the adjacent cracked and ancient vertical porcelain trough. I decided then and there that it must have been the Outside Man, not ole Poppa, who gave Joe the word Gloaming for his poster. I’m pretty sure of that now.

“I don’t get it,” Sticky said of the haiku.

“Me neither,” I said. “But it’s art. And you know what, Sticky? A famous artist named Marcel Duchamp once made a work of art out of a urinal”

“Now that I can appreciate,” Sticky said, zipping up.

The Last Mile may not be much, but it does have two urinals. Hence, two works of art; three, if you include the dumpster.

“This poet of ours got a thing for birds?” Sticky ask. “Maybe he’ll write something for Jackie the Crow.”

We went back outside to the gathering — to the Golden Glory til the Gloaming. I had another cider. It was good stuff — from New Hampshire.

There was a breeze, no wind. Just fine. Clear skies, a few puffy clouds. A nice Autumn Saturday.

“What do we know about poetry or art? “I said to Sticky as we both downed our cider (I’m pretty sure Sticky had put some rum in his.) “We’re just guys on our Last Mile.”

And pretty soon, I was thinking –don’t ask me why — about beauty…of poetry and Keats’s “mellow mists and fruitfulness..”, of that scrawny little maple with its scarred trunk, leaning against the stockade fence. We wish our poet laureate would take that as a subject, too. We all love that tree. A Charlie Brown maple.

Sticky, doing another cider, took a crack at a haiku, and said out loud:

Skinny, crooked little goldie,

waiting for a big, fat bird.

Haiku don’t come any worse than that.

The scrawny, sickly maple was an old but surviving remnant of the walking trees (as Joe Barron called them) — the maples that, years by year, he claimed had marched –yes, marched, or walked — away from this very neighborhood where he grew up a block away, not far from the beach. Trees uprooting and marching away!! A childhood reverie of the kind that could only pass through Joe’s noggin.

“I swear that’s how it happened,” he said. “I saw them one midnight, leaning out my window on Blarney Street. I was maybe five. Maybe it was Christmas Eve and I was waiting for Santa Clause. They just up and march away, probably to Vermont, to be with relatives, right?”

Yeah, right.

I said, “Don’t the gospels say something about a man regaining his sight from Jesus and seeing people who look like walking trees?”

“Yes! Yes, indeed,” said Joe, who, I knew, was reading the Bible these days, getting, as it were, ‘right with the Lord.’ He believed in miracles. And walking trees.

Amen to that. Meanwhile…

Joe, after three beers, shared a few more childhood visions too strangely complicated to relate. He was enjoying his cider (definitely spiked.)

Owning a little bar straddling a town line probably just seemed to Joe as a young man like a romantic way to keep the family heritage going for his father and grandfather who had owned the joint before him, going back to 1922. He’d run it as a luncheonette but there was a speakeasy around the back, down the bulkhead and in the basement. Now Great grandson Joe fought every effort to close it or buy it. We were glad for that.

Meanwhile, for this son of an Irish mother and Italian father, telling tales, having vision, fantasies was a way of being. Not a bad one, either.

Everybody who was coming was out there by two o’clock, under the scrawny maple and spreading oak (or chestnut), including a couple of local boxers and wrestlers, including a female wrestler known as Christy the Crusher, last seen talking to The Outside Man. The cheese and crackers and cider donuts were going fast. Lots of good conversation.

I asked Joe what drew him away from Boston to Florida back in his thirties.

“I loved the song, ‘Moon Over Miami’,” he said. I go down there, and sure enough, there’s a big bright moon over Miami. I fell in love, had a nice girl and put down roots.”

“So why didn’t you get married?”

“She took off. And the moon took off, too. Every time I looked up, she wasn’t there anymore.”

I was drinking some cider, sober, being a non-drinker, but enchanted by the moment. I said, “maybe they’re up in Vermont, the moon and the girl. They ‘ve got moonlight and ladies up there.”

Joe nodded. I don’t think he wasn’t exactly sober anymore. He probably figured I was drunk, too. I was talking like a drunk, that’s for sure. “You’re probably right.” he said. “And all them walking maples.”

“Up there with all their relatives,” Joe said. “How’s your life these days, Wayland?”

“It passes gently,” I said.

“Drink up,” Joe said, and tipped back his little plastic cup of cider. I saw him and Knox –after he polished off his Blushing Monk –freshening their cider with the bottle of Captain Morgan right inside the back door. Just as I suspected.

Pippa Goldflower was drinking wine and cranberry juice.

The Glory went on until, as advertised, the gloaming –when we set out a few candles in the cool purple remnants of daylight.. The Irishman and his concertina had departed by now. All was silence save a little rustling in the two threes.

Total darkness, typical of autumn, came early. Joe Barren and Pippa went inside, arm-in-arm. Everybody left, one by one. I watched a leaf twirl down through the dark from that lonely little maple. I wondered if, after its long life, it might finally walk away that night. Walk up to Vermont to be with all the other maples. I sat in the last folding chair and drank the last of the cider. The light was on in Knox’s apartment upstairs.

Joe Barron’s autumn celebration — and homecoming — was in the memory book.

I blew out the candles.