August 31, 2023. Woodstock, Georgia….
I knew it would fly, this summer, this year. Hot, so hot. Time in the hills and by the mountains of upstate New York. And the Mohawk. Gone. Memories now. Another summer gone. Another year going….
I write from Woodstock, Georgia (again), having made perhaps an extreme decision to go an extreme distance to be away from the first of the season’s Gulf of Mexico hurricane threats. A long drive, but some peace at the end. I’m always in search of peace.
I guess almost every Labor Day, whether I realize it or not, I think of Joe O’Donnell. He was my peer, an intelligent childhood neighbor who grew up, like me, on Neponset Avenue. We were never in any school class together, never really truly close friends, though friends for a significantly memorable period. I think he wound up a year ahead of me at the Catholic school after tonsil and adnoids removal in third grade caused me to repeat the year. So we weren’t classmates.
Joe always had a crewcut, always seemed a trifle more intelligent than his years. I watched him, at least once, be the victim of a bully. He seemed to brush the experience off. To this day, I harbor anger on his behalf for the bully whom I met some years back at a wake ( which is where people from the old neighborhood always meet over the bodies of fellow neighbors and chums). The bully had become a somber, probably harmless working class adult with a perfectly nice, even pretty, wife, although I did sense a certain hostility enveloping him — and me. He’d grown up poor with probably a poor family life. I’ll make that excuse for him. We all, most of us, grow up. He might have done a better job of it than me.
But back to Joe O’Donnell
Joe’s father had been a World War II paratrooper who’d spent time with a broken leg as a P.O.W. of the German’s. Joe, by contrast, was not paratrooper material, nor was I. Riding our bikes was about as daring as we got. We were once both on a youth basketball team and mutually fretted about not being called upon to play. But, inwardly, I knew I could hardly dribble the ball and had been spared humiliation and was masking my relief with false indignation. Joe, perhaps, the same.
Joe’s mother was a wonderful woman who, come to think of it, masked her emotions pretty well in order to deal with life’s challenges. I say this because I met her at a 1989 Catholic neighborhood reunion and learned how upset she’d been when a raised multi-pane porch window at the O’Donnell’s house slipped free of its hook-and-eye overhead latch while roofers hammered overhead and came smashing down on me, putting my head right through one of the panes, leaving a scatterring of broken glass on my head. I wasn’t hurt, or even upset. I was half amused. Perhaps I’d been nicked and perhaps there was a little blood. Mrs. O’Donnell came rushing out, obviously concerned. I asked, calmly,”am I cut?” She said, “you’re ears hanging off, now stand still.” And, paradoxically assured by this and the absence of pain, that I was fine, I stood still while she commenced to clear away the mantel of broken glass and lift the window to free me.
But at that meeting with her three decades later, I became aware that she’d been deeply upset by the incident. I assured her it was a non-event for me, and how much I appreciated and was reassured by her tough-minded intervention. It did not seem to ease her own traumatic memory and, perhaps, guilt. So, yes, Joe’s mom knew how to hide her true feelings, at least at the point of impact.
And now, as I come to think of it — why wasn’t Joe at that 1989 reunion? I believe I asked about him, and got no good answer why he was absent.
Again, about Joe, and as regards our friendship….
What is it that makes companions of people in their very early years other than proximity — people who will probably drift far apart when they move? Joe never moved — not for many years, anyway.
He seemed smart, but given to masking childhood’s typical petulance and easy emotions and tears, unlike his only younger brother Kenny or his young sister who were open books. In that sense, he always seemed a little older than his years. We were just kids who lived three houses and a short street crossing part. I don’t recall how we started hanging out together at maybe age eleven or twelve. What did Joe see in me? In him, I saw, as enumerated, a bundled up temperment that somewhat mirrored my own. Maybe that was the attraction — and the fact that you could have an intelligent, albeit still immature conversation on what we knew of the world.
Then, suddenly we were teenagers, probably both thirteen, still unathletic, perhaps only beginning to be interested in girls. There were no girls around that Labor Day weekend, though I was very interested in one. I never recall talking to Joe about girls, but we probably did. They were something else we were probably still a little afraid of.
And why do I think of Joe specifically at Labor Day? Because on our bicycles we rode from Neponset all the way out to the Blue Hills on Labor Day weekend on what I think was 1960. The Blue Hills were quite a distance, at least five miles. But I don’t recall anybody driving us there. Once there, we peddled all the way up one, probably the principle one, called Big Blue. It was not overly steep, that winding uphill blacktopped road, but still a bit arduous as he stood up to peddle and peddle and peddle, likely criss-crossing the road, on our very ordinary bikes of no particular brand.
It might have been the first year before full-fledged adulthood that I understood or cared about Labor Day’s significance as summer’s end point, and, accordingly, felt, again for the first time, that wistful sense of seasonal passage to fall and the end of unbridled childhood freedom and the looming return to classroom drudgery. For though technically now a pubescent teenager, I was still, in essence, a child who’d relatively belatedly mastered the balancing act that was riding a bike. It was still three years before I would be old enough — and more or less required — to “labor” for money, five years before I had a license to drive a car.
But it was still a time when summer was understood to be a period of unburdoned childhood freedom and, for me, that coming start of the school year registered an inordinate sense of dread, for I did not like school. (In retrospect, I sense that Joe O’Donnell, on the other hand, probably enjoyed school.)
It was warm. There were a good number of people out enjoying the weekend at the picnic areas we passed and at nearby Houghton’s Pond. But we peddled laboriously in tandem and in solitude on the shoulder of the two-lane road, for probably for over an hour, wondering when the ascent would ever end for us.
Then –suddenly — we felt ourself briefly to be on more or less level ground, still peddling gently for several yards. Then came our reward, a slow, steady downhill coast, riding about twenty-five yards apart, Joe in front…a slow, gently winding journey of –how long? Was it just a half mile? As much as a mile? It seemed, happily, very long, and cooling to us in jerseys and jeans we still called dungarees.
When it was over, I pulled up next to Joe and he said, like an adult, “it was a great feeling, wasn’t it?”
So, I guess Joe DID share his feelings. He did then, at least.
In our subsequent teen years, Joe and I drifted apart. He went off to Latin High School, the very best public high school in Boston and the oldest public school in the nation. I chanced to see him perhaps just once at Field’s Corner rapid transit (now MBTA) station, both of us either enroute or coming back from school (I was at Gate of Heaven in South Boston.)
I talked to him about the way famous authors’ stories we were being taught, as I recall, and how I disapproved of the method of the teachers. And he said, in that slightly sententious boiler plate adult way he had –“no, that is no way to enjoy a book.”
I presume he did well at school. He was bright. But somehow, I sense that science or math probably interested him more than literature, regardless of how it was being taught.
Flash forward….I learned he became an accountant….and flash further forward….
In 1999, six firefighters died in the burning of the Cold Storage facility in Worcester. Joe’s younger brother Kenny had become a Boston fire captain. I met him outside the church where the first of the six funerals for the men was being held. He was there with hundreds of other Boston jakes, paying his respects. I was covering the event as a Boston TV news reporter.
“How’s Joe?” I asked.
“He died,” Kenny said.
I was shocked. He would have been just a little over fifty, like me.
This was December. It had just been a matter of months. Pancreatic cancer. All very quick. Joe had become an accountant and a father. He was living up in New Hampshire. Kenny said he’d been fishing with him shortly before the diagnosis.
So I was doubly sad on that sad day of a funeral — for a fallen firefighter, and for Joe, now a figure in distant memory. I wondered, did he still have a crew cut? Did he still enjoy riding a bike? Obviously, he’d taken up fishing
But, again, almost without fail, I think of Joe on Labor Day. I pray for him. There must have been a widow and children. I pray for them, too.
And I suppose there are people enjoying the day all these years later in the Blue Hills where we made that little memory. I wonder if Joe recalled it as fondly as me — or recalled it at all.
So….time…..memory
Tonight, here in Woodstock, Georgia, I’m due to go to a high school football game. It’ll be some other kid’s memory.
The hurricane has swept off. Wind, a precarious life, a movie playing in the next room. I’m feeling it all, anxious, not quite at Labor Day rest.
What was that about boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past? (Fitzgerald)
(And I wonder as a matter of fact –why wasn’t Joe at that 1989 reunion with the rest of the family? Okay, he lived in New Hampshire and now had a family of his own. Distance puts up borders. But sometmes family borders go up, too. Was he keeping his distance for other reasons? His mother, now also deceased, told me (when I met her long after that reunion and when she again brought up her trauma over my head through the window) that Joe’s death deeply affected his ailing and seemingly tempermentally far more rugged dad. Again, hidden emotions.
And now I remember — she told me this at the father’s wake, for she’d lived on past both her son and her husband.
Rest in peace, Joe O’Donnell — and all O’Donnel family members.
Wishing Labor Day peace of mind — to workers, and to all of us who labor, compulsively, at remembering life’s little joys and sorrows at summer’s end and all through the year. They don’t always make for a Happy Labor Day, or peace of mind.
Let’s settle for gratitude. A grateful Labor Day. We’ve made it to another September. Go for a bike ride.
Amen.
19 Cent Notebook 