Ruminations – 19 Cent Notebook

THE BEAT (AND BEATING, IF BROKEN HEARTS) GOES ON…AND ON…AND ON……..

On the car radio on this Saturday–it must have been request hour for souls with unmended broken hearts, driving or sequestered in their Tampa Bay bungalos, eager to spread their longing and long memories over the airwave of local 88.5 FM community radio…

No one in the songs they were requesting were asking much — just…stay around….please?

Dusty Springfield sang:…You don’t have to say you love me, just be close at hand….believe me, I’ll never tie you down….

The Foundations lead vocalist Hubert Montgomery sang:… baby, now that I’ve found you, I can’t let you go
I’ll build my world around you, I need you so…even though I know you don’t need me
You don’t need me…( in fact she told him) you wanna leave me…

It were as if a profane benediction were heralding “the world’s swift passage to the fire” in the words of the obscure decadent poet (Ernest Dowson – 1867-1900) who himself endured a tragic love affair and gave us, along with Hollywood, Johnny Mercer, Henry Mancini, Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick a phrase from a poem with a name borrowed from the poet Horace “Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam” (Latin for “The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long) and which reads…

They are not long, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream.

Somewhere else, Mr. Dowson asks…

When shall men cease to suffer and desire?

And as Cher must still be singing somewhere….the beat goes on….”

THUNDER

…as the hour creeps past 9:30 toward 10 a.m., August 25, 2026

Rolling, distant thunder. Distant, yet the house seems to shudder slightly from it.

And though it be threatening, I welcome this familiar little episode of nature at Florida summer’s end–and the view out my office window of mingled blue, white and gray almost comforts me. The silent street gray, the sky still blue, the tall Florida clouds distant –and now the sun has come out.

So much processing, mixing in undoubtely dank heat out there in the small world external to my air conditioned ennui; it enters; penetrates my anxious internal world like blending liquids. Yet I am dry. Parched, even.

This Tuesday will flow on and away. Water down rocks.

Pray for peace. Pray for everything.

The thunder is gone. Silence.

AUGUST ELEGY

August is known for one of the most spectacular planetary alignments of the year, along with other notable conjunctions and lunar events, including the “six planet parade”.
From August 10 to dawn on August 13, six planets — Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — will appear in the dawn sky along the eastern horizon. Venus and Jupiter will have a spectacular conjunction on August 12, appearing almost together in the sky, easily visible to the naked eye.

Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn will be visible without optical aid; Uranus and Neptune require binoculars or a small telescope. Mars does not join this alignment in August, but the Full Sturgeon Moon will be present during the alignment, adding brightness to the scene.

Why then, can I only entertain childhood thoughts, on an August Sunday, of sad Monday sailboats leaving a rocky cove in sultry heat on a final outbound tack, and emptying piers on sad, quiet lakes? Or of another summer going away — and humanity’s parade back into gray buildings to labor and study (as we must)?

I must look up to dawn along the eastern horizon and up into the night sky.

And, once again, at August’s absolute end –Labor Day, circa 1960 — I recall the late Joe O’Donnell and I climbing the main Blue Hill for well over an hour on our bikes until suddenly we felt momenum grabbing Joe’s lead bike, then mine, and we went cruising gently for perhaps only a short time –but it felt like a good long rewarding spell — around twisting forest corners without automobiles and down to flat land, and Joe saying to me at the end of the run something like, “that was a great ride, wasn’t it?”

I saw Joe only very periodically in subsequent years — maybe at the subway station, coming from our respective high schools, waiting for the Neponset bus –until the day (at another funeral) that his younger brother told me he had died a few months before. He would have been in his fifties.

Again, my thoughts must be of the horizon, of the infinity of the night sky, of life. Memories are fine, but on our planet, we must stay in the present moment.

The beautiful hill, the horizon, the sky….the present moment on Planet Earth.

NATURE, KNOX AND RISING HEAT ANNOUNCE SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL OBSERVANCES AT THE LAST MILE

Few indeed. Meager light. The Last Mile faces west to the front. July 2nd, 10:21 a.m., not a single patron yet. The Mile opens at 9:00 for those souls who need companionship, hopefully not a drink. Thursday regulars were certain to show up by lunch time. The Mile’s owner Joe Barron had driven over from his summer home in Swampscott. He, bartender Deano and I ( who had some sense that I needed to stop by the way one might stop by a church) sat at a table by the juke box, listening to the rattle of the still defective right wall air conditioner, while we were being cooled only by the single left wall unit beside the bar.

I can’t tell you much about what we said to that point, having sat about an hour — except that Joe talked with Deano, who had a pad in front of him and a pencil in hand — about supplies for the little July 4th gathering among the gravel, weeds and scrawny oak trees along the back fence in the small back lot.

It has been very hot in Massachusetts, hot across the country and the planet. Joe and Deano decided to go out and look at the back lot, see what needed to be cleaned up out there. I felt privileged to join them. I was going to leave — what am I but just an occasional patron? But both Joe and Deano said, “you come, too, Greg.” I felt like the guy must have felt when the poet Robert Frost said (basically to all of us in that one poem), “you come, too,”as they went out to the meadow.

The inadequacy of the back lot for such a celebration immediately struck Joe. He said, “I want to invite everybody over to my yard in Swampscott, have a catered gathering for the regulars,” Joe said.

But Deano said, “that’d be fine if that’s what you want, Joe. But tradition says we have a little time out back here.”

I agreed. There had been a Fourth of July gathering for every year I could recall outback of The Last Mile.

Then came an intervention.

The artist Knox, (though we hadn’t noticed him working quietly on a canvass on his back veranda), sealed the deal when he surprised us by shouting down, “I’m looking forward to weekend festivities in our domain of sumac and oak.”

No. the three of us hadn’t notice Knox up above us– and I hadn’t ever noticed the sumac growing up in the south corner of the 50×50 lot. Red and obcure. I should have known sumac springs up everywhere, always in the city, as if its most unreconized and uncelebrated tree.

Then came a sound.

“Ah, listen to that chorus,” Knox said.

He was referring to the cicadas, their pulsating high-pitched buzz commencing suddenly from the few meager neighborhoods trees in that very crowded purlieu of gravel, weeds, cracked macadam and rows of old, crammed-together city houses. This, even though we were far from the verdant country. And it has always seemed to me that choruses of cicadas are like sirens announcing the rising of the heat. And the heat was rising. We knew it would be mounting through the day.

And Knox stood hanging over his veranda railing, staring off like Balboa.

And so — there would be a back lot gathering behind The Last Mile for America’s bigger than usual birthday.

I’ll be there.

SUMMER AND THE SOLSTICE DESCEND UPON THE LAST MILE

2026. June 21, 8:14. Sunset in 16 minutes. End of the longest day.

The light in The Lounge is soft, the trees outside green and full. Of course, not too many trees on either side of humble three-story building in which The Last Mile Lounge occupies the ground floor. A fellow named Chavez was at a middle table by himself. It was a Sunday night, and I counted eleven patrons. A new kid named Pascal was at the bar. He comes from Lynn. He teaches Seventh Grade over there, fresh out of college. School is out for the year.

“What’s up with the juke box,” one of the nurses asked, standing in front of the OUT OF ORDER sign on an 8×11 sheet of paper taped on the curved Plexiglas front of the vintage Wirlitzer. She’s the one who always likes to play “My Heart Will Go On,” by Celine Dion.

“Broken, Pascale called from the bar. “Getting it repaired tomorrow. The guy has to come up from Rhode Island.”

“It’s alright,” said Chavez, looking at the daylight on this, the year’s longest day, dimming slowly outside either side door, both opened for cross -ventilation, because everybody was waiting for the emergency guy to come and fix the air conditioner built into the wall next to the bar.

“It’s alright,” Chavez says again.

“Not as far as I’m concerned,” said the nurse.

“Nothing working tonight,” said some guy I’d never seen before, sitting with a guy I’d see in the Mile from time to time named Crowley.

“One thing’s working,” said one of the nurses sitting at the table the other n urse had left on her trip to the juke box. They were all drinking either beer except one and she was drinking a Whiskey Sour. “This one,” said one of the nurses who was drinking a Budweiser from the bottle. She pointed over the table where she with other workers(nurses or nurse’s aides or something like that) fresh off their weekend shift at the East Boston Neighborhood Health Care Center.

“Alright, it’s alright,” said Chavez, insistently. “We are at Stonehenge. (I detected a Hispanic accent now.) We are at Bethlehem at the hour of birth. We are on Everest at sunset. We are here, on our last mile.” He rose, his chair screeching on the wooden floor, and went quickly out the side door, shouting, “I must go to the beach, to the ocean, the open water, see the horizon. I must see the earth lurch away from Mother Sun,”and he disappeared out under the maple trees, his sneakered feet touching the cracked and gradually cooling sidewalk where the day’s heat had settled on a gutter littered with wrappers and flattened plastic bottles, and where it was lingering still.

(I swear I spotted, one day not long ago — and despite the city’s massive street-sweepere trucks having clean up after the annual snow melt — remnants of brown fallen maple leaves mixed in with fresh springtime deposits of debris. It made me sad, for those leaf remnants had been green this time last year, then gold, then fallen unnoticed in the fall. I was noticing them now. And I looked up into the new leaves on those scrawny urban trees, casting their modest degree of shade. It is the stubborn oak leaves that usually linger, not the maples. But they were here now, and good to see, as summer in the city commenced.)

The air conditioner guy pulled up in his white panel truck by the door Chavez had just gone out.

The artist Knox, at his usual place on the usual barstool, sketching on a pad next to his half-drunk Blushing Monk, said without looking up, “He’s four minutes late,” referring to Chavez. ” Sun set at half past.”

The air conditioner guy came in out of the June gloaming with his tool box –and was greeted by a round of applause. He bowed, then he asked, “which one?” (Because the other wall air conditioner by the nurse (as noted) and directly in his line of sight, was working, though rattling a little.

“This one,” Pascale said, pointing to the dead silent wall unit by the side of the bar. “But Joe (he was referring to Joe Barron, the owner, probably at that hour in his home along the ocean in Swampscott), “he’d like you to take a look at that one, too.” Pascale pointed across the room to the rattler sticking out of the wall. Pascale, to demonstrate its inoperative state, picked up the little white remote from udner the bar and gave it a click, raising its temperature, but also its noise, to the amusement of the nurses.

“Geez,” said one of them. “Now I’m going to have to find a sweater,” and she laughed heartily. a sweater on a day when heat stroke and exhaustion were probably the order of business at their workplace.

The nurses, previously chatting among themeselves, one of them in a Red Sox blue cap, resumed their chat, cool now, talking abover the rattle of the old machine on the fortunate side of the room. (Truth was, nobody elsewhere in the room, sitting over their drinks, seemed to be noting the heat much. I had my ice water, after all. )

“I shall be delighted,” said the air conditioner guy in belated response to the request for his skills. He was, so far nameless, but exhibiting all the characteristics of a moonlighting Summer Stock thespian.

Ah! I said inwardly to myself — I who had by chance, but out of habit, come to the Mile for company on this muggy and uncomrotable day (only to find the place stricken with a dysfunctional appliance. ( I didn’t care about the juke box. I swear no one plays that much. This is, much of the time, the Last –and Silent — Mile.

Cool air would return soon to The Mile, but the outer darkness was finally gathering and thickening.

There was a glow. Yes, the gloaming. Pascale had kept the lights dim. He’s an art student. I counted eleven people in the place. I was at the bar in front of a glass of ice water.

8:39 The longest day was, yes, darkening.

Summer was here.

I went out on the front sidestreet, lthen walked to the side, looked and saw no sign of Chavez. The beach was down there. He’d be at the beach, standing in what light was left. Over my head, birds were still twittering among the maple leaves. They would be sleeping soon.

About this Chavez. We don’t see him often at the Mile. Probably a member of Lynn’s modest Chicano community, but a soulful guy –with Stonehenge, Bethlehem and Everest on the mind. Even Public Works people have their private works and reveries. (Yeah, I know he works for the Public Works Department over there. Don’t know what he does for them, exactly.

Behind me, I became aware Pascale flipped on the Mile’s overhead light illiuminating the sign above the door — and the neon Rolling Rock sign in the left front window. It was two colors, perfect additions to the Summer Solstice dusk….

(Red) Rolling

(Green) Rock

Pretty.

Chavez’s draft, half drunk, sat on the table inside.

I think it was a Molson Canadian.

My ice ice water was waiting for me on the bar as well.

THE BUGGY GRAY BEAST OF MAY

May day. Gray days.

First there was May 1st, now, May 2nd, 2026

Twenty-eight days will follow (I pray, I truly pray)

Reminding me of what Macbeth, in a despairing mood, said:

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow…

Too bad. In May, I think of flowers. But here comes gray. Then there will be heat. We are in the middle of a drought here in the Tampa Bay area. So, with the gray, everyone is hoping there will come rain. No such luck.

There is both gray and sun today. Not sun. I prefer the gray.

‘Hello, Gray, my old friend…’

Seems like just yesterday I was saying hello to you.

You come slouching again, May, a rough beast this year, your hour come round at last

Time flies. And speaking of flies…

The lovebugs (Plecia neartica) are here, climbing the restaurant window. They fly conjoined, the female dragging the male who must walk backwards everywhere. And, like all insects, the female would seem to walk aimlessly. Which might explain why the male insect could care less. His fate is not going to be a happy one. He is dragged until the females lays her eggs, whereupon he dies.

The Myth of Sisyphus has nothing on the reality of the poor love bug. The mythical character pushes a rock only to have it roll back down the hill; the male lovebug has no worth life after mating — only to walk backwards and die.

Somedays, I feel like I’m walking backwards.

At least the female lovebug flies and takes the male with her. Do they both flutter their wings for maximum lift? Does the male get to tell the f emale, “hey, I’m sick of walking, this is pointless. Let’s take flight, babe.” (Can you hear Sinatra? “Come fly with me, come fly, come fly awayyyyy….”)

I wonder what they eat? Or do they just get eaten? (Can’t you just hear the male screaming, “hey, idiot, you’re headed right for that Toyota’s front grill!” Maybe in flight, he get to pull her around. But, as with all living things, the female’s probably the only one who knows where she’s going? But — where do they go, on land or in the air, that makes a damn bit of differnce. Do they have parties, these Airborne Pilgrims of Pointlessness?)

The lovebugs swarm over Florida every May and September; small, ant-resembling. I first visited Florida in May. Moved here the following September. The lovebugs greeted me both times.

They are my friends, therefore, these black (rather than gray), reviled, unwelcomed members of earth’s lowest class of living thing.

Yes, they welcomed me. I guess I should welcome them. Too bad they aren’t beautiful, which is what you would expect from something called —a lovebug.

Love can be ugly. But I’d expect a bug with peacock majesty. No such luck.

At the restaurant…

I ate an egg cooked medium. Outside, no flowers anywhere. They say it’s a good time to plant petunias.

SO LET ME SUMMARIZE ..AND RHAPSODIZE:

The lovebugs swarm/ the lovebugs smear/ the lovebugs swarm and smear

Which means May’s for car washes.

Rain and thunder come, briefly, at 2 p.m.

Soak the Florida Room carpet.

Briefly interrupt the drought.

So we hope for rain, we hope for flowers.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Hello, May. Hello, Lovebugs, so many living and soon to die.

(I saw one, all alone, very lost, crawling across the restaurant floor, having flown in through an open door.

Looking for a mate, that bug, no doubt.

A very bad place for that.

I gave that bug very poor odds.

Too many shoes, no mate in sight.

I wished it luck. Speaking of which

Golden Tempo won the Kentucky Derby in May ritual as certain

as lovebugs coming to Florida.

Golden Tempo.

Which reminds me

Of time’s Leaden Tempo

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace…

I think I’ll plant a petunia.

BRIEF APRIL FLIGHT

There is a bird outback, species uncertain, pecking at seeds that have fallen to the ground.

Where will that bird sleep tonight? A nest, of course. Birds make nests, though we rarely see them. I rarely see them, anyway. Will they sleep in the sand? Bob Dylan, you recall, became famous, asking in song, in that high nasal tone of his, How many seas must a white dove sail…

Sail, not fly. Interesting choice of words. It works, actually, being eupamistically better than “fly”.

And Bob goes on to ask where the white dove’s flight will end…

…before she sleeps in the sand?

“She”. Better than “it.” Better, too, than, “he”. Plummage or other characteristics can give away, to the trained eye, the sex of a bird, and this is no less so with a dove, but we don’t know about Dylan’s “white dove” and, I’ll bet, neither does Dylan — but the word “she” has a softening, peaceful touch — that female touch (though, in suggesting thus, I risk being declared “sexist” in the year 2026).

So much about words! But words –on their flight — can land smoothly, or crash.

Sea, sand and time. A dove. An answer “blowing in the wind.”

Beautiful, evocative thoughts, images, words.

But not necessarily, at least where white doves are concerned, ornithologically correct.

But such things don’t matter where song lyrics or poems are concerned. Poems and lyrics have their own flight path. I see what the songwriter is saying. The poet, too, when Wallace Stevens writes of the “gold-feathered bird”.

But it occurs to me to ask:

Do birds ever sleep in the sand? I read that some species do sleep in the sandy shallows — to avoid predators. The white dove (the symbol of peace), apparently must, like all of us, fear her enemies and is probably subject to battles and all-out wars that erupt among avian species. I know that bluejays, lovely as they are with those layers of blue, have been known to raid nests (not, I’ve read, a constant practice; just a survival strategy when food is short. And isn’t that what causes many wars? Shortages?)

How far does a white dove fly – or sail – on any given day?

I’ve read that a carrier pigeons can fly as much as 400 to 600 miles in a day. In 1982, the skeletal remains of a carrier pigeon were found in the chimney of a home in Bletchingly, Surrey, England, believed to have been among the 250,000 carrier pigeons trained by volunteers of the British National Carrier Pigeon Service and provided in World War II to the invading British armies during the 1944 D-Day invasion. Attached to it (we’ll say “her”) leg was a red cannister containing an encripted message believed to have been intended for a Royal Air Force Bomber Command. She likely had flown from the heart of Nazi-controlled Europe on her vital mission carrying her messager when other forms of communication between armies were deemed less reliable.

The message in the cannister was addressed to XO2. Whoever that might be. It was, as noted, encripted and has not, to this day, been de-coded.

(One could only wish it had said….Commander, how about you lay down your arms, and, for God sake, don’t send over any more bombers. These German guys told me they’re damn weary of war. When I left them, they’d flocked — like birds of a feather — into a beer hall./ The last I heard them, they were singing psalms, getting loaded..

Unlikely, of course.

We know no one at that point was weary of fighting. Pace, Bob Dylan, they weren’t about to ban any cannon balls. Who uses cannon balls anymore? Rockets, missilnukes, missiles, drones….those are our modern weapons of choice.

The poor bird never completed its mission. One can, of course, fantasize that during her long flight over the North Sea or maybe over the White Cliffs, her little pigeon’s heart grew dispondent with advancing the purposes of war; that the white dove in her longed to sleep in the sand. No telling why she died, ( broken heart? homesickness? –or why she chose a chimney for her final rest carrying her final message. Perhaps, despite her presumed keen sense of direction, she’d become lost. Lost and despondent.

And somewhere, a bomber commander, code-named XO2, stood waiting at the aerodrome for a message from the front that never arrived. He probably died wondering why he never saw that small gray-feathered spector winging toward him out of the blue.

But, of course, I’ve gone from orthonological reality to bad poetry here. Skylarks, Nightingales, Crows, Flamingoes, Mockingbirds, Wallace Stevens’s “gold-feathered bird” whose “fire-fangled feathers dangle down”. They’ve all had their turn as poetic motifs in the hands of real poets. Why not the lowly carrier-pigeon, service her country? Or even just those wobbly-footed, head-bobbing urban dwellers devour peanuts in every park, now and then summoning enough motivation to take flight and deposit white streaks down office windows, earning them the derogation “flying rats”?

How long does any bird live?

I’ve read three to ten years, depending on all those factors one can imagine — weather, predation, disease, hunters. (I once failed to save the life of a cedar waxwing that, drunk on some purple variety of berry, crashed into a store window, maybe seeing itself, thinking she’d found a companion, or mate, and rushed toward it. End of story.

I could go on about birds. Continue my flight.

But I won’t. And you should be glad.

Except to say — how blessed it would be to be able to fly!

But how blessed to know we are likely to live more than ten years.

Wallace Stevens gets to close us out, for he wrote, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” A)mong twenty snowy mountains, and among many other places. And he gave to the lowly pigeon the honor of concluding his famous poem, “Sunday Morning,” writing how at evening, casual flocks of pigeons make/Ambiguous undulations as they sink,/ Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

CRUMBS

The wall clock gongs inacurately. It might give you two gongs for seven o’clock. It just, at eight o’clock (which it is, or was a second or two, or three ago) gonged out the Westminster chime as a prelude, as it always does, but gave no gongs for eight o’clock.

It can’t be fixed. A clock repair person told me that.

But it’s a nice clock, so it will stay there on the wall, irrespective of innacurate –or no — gongs to count out the hour.

Who needs to be reminded of passing hours, of passing time? This clock doesn’t tick, either, like many old clocks.

Tick, tick, tick, tick….

No. Utterly silent.

But just hearing the Westminster chimes, as if in some beautiful sqaure in sunlight or fog, in London, or New York, or Boston, is enough — imagining time stopped eternally. This side of time is the only time we have to worry about time.

In 2023 I did a post, Last Day of February. I’m always conscious, perhaps too conscious, of passing time, of my failure to advance, to finish projects –conscious of getting older. Last night I was thinking how it was the last day of February again. The last hours. Three years later. Not a lot of progress in my life, as I see it. There is much that has been begun, but not finished.

Now it’s March 1st — again.

In 2023, my Last Day of February post began:

The short month. Two months into the new year. The kitchen butcher block rolling table always seems to have crumbs on it.

Lost time. Nothing left but crumbs.

Time leaves crumbs — crumbs and memories.

I just checked the butcher block table. Still crumbs on it.

I’ll wipe them away.

I’ll keep the memories.

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.