Author: Thomas Walters

OK.  I’ll admit it.  I’m now at that in-between age where nobody tells me “how good I look” (which I’m sure they will when I’m 85), but where getting out of a chair is an effort and keeping shoelaces tied requires deep breaths and carries an element of chance. Napping is essential because, heaven knows I’m not going to sleep solidly for eight hours any more.  We’re at that stage where “spry” replaces “vigorous” or “athletic” in descriptions of us. I called my brother last week to wish him a happy birthday.  (He’s much older than I – well, 14 months anyway.) He was on his second nap of the day – a pre-dinner nap that will carry him through to bedtime.  I’m thankfully not there yet, although it’s coming. 

Continue reading “Reminders of Aging”

For those readers that have not met our dear friend, Lady Peacock, well, you’ve missed a treat.  A little something about her for the uninitiated.  As we meander through life, one meets characters that loom large, simply begging that their stories be told.  Sometimes, these people are famous, having achieved a degree of notoriety for an event, deed, or made contributions to society and culture.  In the case of Lady Peacock, as she’s known to her friends, it’s her manner that provides endless hours of entertainment. 

Continue reading “In Quarantine with Lady Peacock”

If you’ve already been done in, don’t bother reading further into this.  However, if you manage to go through life generally pissing off almost everyone you meet, if you’re known as the village curmudgeon, if you’re the keeper of secrets, if you have a spouse or lover that tends toward maniacal jealousy, or if you have lots of money and a gaggle of needy heirs, here might be some helpful hints in protecting yourself from becoming a potential victim. 

The information here has been assembled from years, way too many, in fact, of watching television shows with a murder theme and reading lots of murder mysteries.  My faithful readers know that Herself and I are frequent viewers of Law and Order (mostly Herself), although we’ve worked our way through twenty-odd seasons of Midsommer Murders, as well as many episodes of Death In Paradise, Rosemary and Thyme, Father Brown, and Poirot.  There are some common themes that literally jump out at you in these, so I’m bringing you this information as a public service, although not in any official capacity but as close to a highly skilled sleuth as you’ll find.  We’ve offered our training and expertise to local law enforcement, which has consistently declined any outreach.  Their loss, I’m afraid.

Tip #1 – Dark Roads. 

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people foolishly venturing out for an evening stroll, somewhere between 10 and midnight (according to the medical examiner) in a small, picturesque village where a string of murders has recently occurred.  What are they thinking?  “Oh, yes.  We all heard about Mildred’s death, but I needed some fresh air before bed.”  Or, “No need to walk me home.  I feel perfectly safe.  What’s that lump under the tree over there by the brook?”  Don’t think that riding a bicycle at night is safer than walking – it’s not.  It only brings you to your doom a little faster.  The only person that seems to get around safely on a bike is Father Brown.  Similarly, if you’re driving on a dark, secluded road at night and headlights come up behind you quickly and the driver nudges your rear bumper, by all means hit the accelerator.  Don’t just tighten your grip on the steering wheel and continue on at 35 mph. This is a common mistake, and observing the speed limit is not a good strategy under the circumstances.  And a final suggestion, and I’ve sadly seen this too many times, if you’re on foot and a car is chasing you, don’t keep running down the middle of the road.  Run into the woods, get behind a tree, anywhere but the middle of the road.  

Tip #2 – Dark Alleys

This is typically the city version of the dark country road, where victims have just emerged from the back door of a bar.  Why they choose to go out that way, or step out to this natural crime scene for a quick smoke, I’ll never know. A trash can rattles or an old board cracks, and the victim calls out, “Is anybody there?”  Seldom, if ever, does the perpetrator call back, “It’s me – Pete.  All good here.”  If you’re standing on the sidewalk staring into a dark alley and you hear that same noise, for heaven sake activate that little voice in your brain that says, “run away as fast as you can.”  Investigating cannot end well.  

Tip #3 – In the Bedroom

You may not have noticed this, but I as a trained specialist have observed that a healthy percentage, and I’d estimate at least half, of all homicides happen in the bedroom.  It’s good and bad for investigators, in that the bedding very often will be a great collector of evidentiary bodily fluids, unlike the bricks of a dark alley. However, they still have a body or bodies on their hands. The message here is, lock the damned doors.  If you’re meeting a lover and the husband is liable to come home early, you’ve bought a few minutes to get him out the window or into the closet.  If you’re elderly, with your idle, worthless nephew hanging around for the inheritance and waiting for you to skip your medications just isn’t working for him, you can possibly avoid that ugly situation of a pillow over your face.  Keep the door key on a cord around your neck, so he can’t do the old “push it through onto a newspaper and slip it under the door” trick.  

Tip #4 – Poisons

They’re almost always in a drink.  Putting rat poison in the stuffed mushrooms is very 19^th Century.  No, no.  It’ll be in the wine, the ice tea, or the bourbon that you’re about to sip.  The flavor will disguise the smell, and if you notice that your drink has just a hint of almond, it’s probably strychnine.  (By the way, when I googled the spelling, the first entries that popped up were “Strychnine at Amazon.com”, followed by “Great Deals on Strychnine at eBay”.  Apparently, one doesn’t need a chemist’s license or special credentials to get this.)  Word to the wise, if you’re at a dinner party, make sure you drink something from the same bottle as the host or hostess, unless you suspect they’re also trying to “do in” each other.  If you know somebody that might have a grudge against you and they garden, with several beds of foxglove, don’t drink that bottle of homemade elderberry wine they gave you.

Tip #5 – Be Aware of Your Surroundings

If you think you might be a potential victim, be constantly on the alert to your surroundings, particularly as in tips 1 and 2.  Someone sneaking up behind you with a raised baseball bat or ax could be a sign of danger. Don’t stand there with your mouth open, run away.  Move quickly and learn to duck. This can be practiced in front of a mirror, if you think you might need to deploy evasive action.  Cemeteries at night aren’t necessarily places of rest unless a stone marks your presence.  That gloved hand pulling back a tree branch to get a better look at you is never good.  I’ve often said that if I could see their faces, I could really help out the detectives working the case. Or the person that shows up at your front door late at night is more than likely not there to borrow a cup of sugar.  The greeting, “Oh, it’s you.  Come in.”  almost always screams “homicide about to happen.”  The dagger emerges from the behind the back, the hammer snatched from the tool shed makes its appearance, or the shovel with which to bury you makes its appearance.  You might also keep walking sticks and fireplace utensils well out of sight.

In fairness, I have taken the liberty to include a couple of suggestions for the one on the other side of the sword blade in the interests of equal time.  When you’ve already got a dead body on your hands, don’t throw it into the river on the assumption that authorities will consider it an accidental drowning.  They’ll know if there’s no water in the lungs. Of course, gunshot wounds or strangulation marks around the neck will give the game away.  Similarly, don’t take the body out to sea and throw it overboard.  The corpse almost always washes up on the beach.  Don’t put the body in the trunk of your car – blood seeps through and gets all over the carpeting.  Investigators typically call that “evidence”. It’s best not to drag the body anywhere – the drag marks are traceable and reveal the spot of the unfortunate incident.  Better to wrap and carry.  And if you’re planning something lethal, I would strongly, strongly recommend that you not buy your strychnine on eBay.

In my continuing quest to be insightful and informative, I hope that this has some informative value on both sides.  Warmest regards, as always.

I wrote some time ago about the concerted efforts of everyday objects, created to ease our lives and make everything safer and more convenient, often have the opposite effect.  They work pretty efficiently to make my life more difficult.  That attractive new soap dish that I was refilling and . . . . . you can see where this is going. More times than I can count,  Herself and The Daughter have been on the phone chatting amiably when something inanimate is misbehaving and I respond accordingly.  I can hear the conversation now – “What is dad fixing?”  I’m going to quote again that famous narration in the movie, “A Christmas Story”.  You know the one, where the father is down trying to get the furnace working.  To quote, “in the heat of battle, my father wove a tapestry of obscenity that, as far as we know, is still hanging in space . . .”   Yes, indeed.  I work in profanity the way Picasso worked in sharp angles.

Continue reading “Inanimate Objects II – Still Up by a Touchdown”

Let’s face it – Americans don’t like to wait for anything.  In recent weeks, we’re finding out just how poorly we’re dealing with the whole “stay home and wait out the pandemic” thing.  Students at the University of New Hampshire held a large party in a fraternity house.  The disease spreads rapidly.  A sports team at a local high school, unnamed and unspecified because we really want to protect the privacy of the negligent and stupid, held what is reported in the newspaper as a “social gathering” has, surprise, 18 new cases of coronavirus.  But really, we’ve waited long enough to party, to have weddings in remote locations like central Maine, where at this point 170 cases have now been reported.  And in the latest evidence that God has a sense of humor, a conservative pastor that railed against wearing face masks in his church, inviting everyone in to sit together without masks, was placed in intensive care with COVID-19 this past week. Yes, we don’t learn.  Well, maybe a little. Because after a teenage house party in a wealthy suburb north of Boston, the teenage host and parents face hefty fines. Maybe that’s the message we need. Or not. They’ll just write a check and plead innocent when the cases of illness start mounting. The experts tell us what is causing these spreads, but we’ll do what we want anyway because . . . . . we’ve been wearing face masks too long.  We’ve been social distancing too long.  We’ve been at home too long.  We’ve waited too long for the pandemic to run its course, and this virus has inconvenienced us too much.

We should have known when the first settlers came to North America from Europe and the eastern coast wasn’t enough.  We pushed westward until the Pacific Ocean got in our way, slowing our progress.  “Westward Ho” really meant, “We want more land, and by golly, we’re going to take it.”  Maybe some of it comes from our ancestral roots.  Our predecessors weren’t satisfied either, until “The Sun Never Set on the British Empire.”  Napoleon, Alexander, Hitler, Genghis Khan, all were models of “enough is never enough, and we can’t wait.”  Patiently building the Thousand Year Reich was taking too long.

We like things to be quick and easy nowadays.  Phone calls and eventually emails were too time consuming, so voila – the text.  Speed it up.  Faster is better.  Changing channels on the tv was just too much effort, so the remote was born.  Now it’s even too much to find something we like, so the tv finds it for us.  “Because you watched. . . . . . , you might also like . . . .”  Does anyone even know what a squash looks like anymore?  Of course not – it comes peeled and diced because it takes too long to do that at home.  Pretty soon, you’ll see acres of cubed squash growing in farms across the country.  “Instant” coffee was born because brewing a pot took way too long.  Even that was too much time and effort, so we use “call ahead” on our coffee app so we don’t have to wait when we get to Starbucks.  Fast food was born because, well, “slow” food implied waiting for it to cook.  We want it now.  Sometimes even waiting while a teenager slaps together a burger slows us down.  If we were meant to wait, God would never have given us the microwave.

So, what happened in human development led us to this?  Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers.  They’d stalk wildlife for days, waiting patiently behind trees and bushes for the antelope, which equally patiently would emerge at the riverbank thinking, “I’ll just have a sip – I don’t see anyone around.”  Farmers would patiently sow seeds in the spring, knowing that the produce was months away.  Here in New England, we will anticipate the arrival of “native” tomatoes because they’re better, but the flip side is that we have those other, regular alien tomatoes in the supermarket year-round.  

Perhaps technology has fed impatience into our universal genetic make-up.  The development of the assembly line created in us all, and particularly in the big-time money makers, a desire to do things faster.  It satisfied our thirst for more, but it also made us want more too.  So what if machinery lopped off fingers and hands, we’re getting more stuff made faster. Communication was a major hurdle.  Remember reading about war strategies and orders during the War of Independence coming from Britain by boat and taking two months?  They were outdated when they got here.  How can you fight a proper war that way?  So, Mr. Bell and Mr. Morse set out to fix that problem.  And now we have it – instant communication except where there’s no reception.  

In a rather glaring example of our impatience, you will notice that transportation isn’t exactly what we envisioned.  While Europe, Japan, and other parts of the world were developing high-speed public transportation, Americans made a commitment to the highway system.  So, while Japanese commuters are zipping from place to place in no time, we’re stuck in traffic on the highway.  I know, right?  But we’re in our own cars, and not to worry, we’ll use our cells to make the time productive while we recklessly weave in and out of traffic, illegally using the breakdown lane to gain a precious second or two.  That’s the spirit.  Now we’re saving time.  Or perhaps we should just put ourselves into an Amazon box and . . . . . .

Here’s another example of America’s steadfast impatience.  One day delivery.  “Five to seven business days” is a thing of the past, except for toilet paper and sanitary wipes.  Everything else can be ordered on line and delivered in minutes.  It’s got to the point where I forget what I ordered, so I have to check the front porch each day to see if anything’s out there.  I lean over and peek out the kitchen window.  Sometimes, they deliver things to the back door, which throws me all off.   I’d even look at the delivery dates to see which items would come the fastest.  Cheaper sometimes doesn’t matter.  That one can come on Thursday, while this other one won’t be here until next week.  Next week is the new “unacceptable”.  Who can wait a week?  Our kitchen faucet broke off in my hand the other day.  I have no idea how that happened.  It’s metal and should last forever, but no . . . .  I went across the street to the hardware store and picked up a new one.  Then I called the plumber because, well, I’m not terribly handy with things like that.  My skill set plays more to watching someone else do it.  In a pleasant surprise, the plumber could come the next morning to install it.  Great.  So, twenty-four hours and hundreds of dollars later, we’re back in business.  But I’ll happily pay that to have it working again quickly. 

Welcome to the new era of instant.  Instagram, instant messaging, instant breakfast, instant oatmeal, instant jello.  All the really important stuff is immediate. “Call ahead”, banking apps, because using the ATM takes too long, and waiting for that drawer at the drive-up window to come out so we can put stuff in it, well . . . ., who in the world has the time for that?  We don’t watch television in real time because then we’d have to sit through the commercials.  On demand” is better still, as the commercials don’t even exist there.  These days, we “stream” our lives because it seems like it’s moving continuously so we don’t waste time. We can’t wait for our lives to return to normal in a health crisis, we’ll just bring back normality and whatever happens, happens. We can’t let oatmeal or picking up a latte stand in the way of our valuable use of time and productivity.  We need to be busy, busy, so that we have more time to kick back and relax – that’s what everyone on House Hunters is looking to do – and forget about how busy we’ve been.

Speed – that’s the ticket. 

A short while back, I wrote about my late father-in-law, who’s reminiscences of his boyhood on an upstate New York farm are family legend.  In a similar vein, these are family stories on my side of the bed.

I never knew my grandfather.  In fact, I never knew any of my grandparents on either side, as they’d all passed before I was born.  My mother’s father, Maurice Arthur Doyle, was from all accounts a larger-than-life character.  The numerous stories of his exploits should really be recorded in book form, and perhaps if I live long enough, I’ll write it.

Maurice Doyle, Moe to everyone that knew him, was born in Ilion, New York, the eldest of five children to Arthur and Katherine Doyle.  On a doctor’s recommendation for asthma, he moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba as a young man, where he met my grandmother, and together they raised four daughters and a son.  My mother was third, smack dab in middle.  My grandfather was a wonderfully comical character – the kind that wasn’t intimidated or phased by anyone or anything.  He was the kind of person that, when my grandmother had bought him gloves and a book for Christmas and carefully hiding them, would emerge from the closet wearing the gloves and reading the book.  My grandmother always called him “Doylie”.  

He bought a rundown golf course on Lake Winnipeg at some point, fixing it up and taking care of it himself.  In fact, he didn’t have a tractor at first, so he towed the gang mowers up and down the fairways with his old DeSoto.  Later on, when he’d sold the DeSoto, the new owner heard about the golf course incident, and came back to ask my grandfather if it was indeed true.  With aplomb, Moe Doyle replied that, of course he wouldn’t do anything like that with his beautiful car.  In a similar vein, the Revenue Service came to call about his golf course operation, which over the years had any number of family members and fictious characters on the payroll.  The Revenue man asked to borrow his books, and he replied that the man was free to take them – he had another set.

Just after my grandmother died, in the early 1950’s, my grandfather decided to take a trip to Europe with my uncle, who was 19 at the time. Grandfather had a connection in the chancery office, which resulted in the Archbishop of Winnipeg writing a letter of introduction at the Vatican for a private audience with the pope, at that time, Pius XII.  They, along with a group of people from Quebec who were speaking French in hushed tones, were escorted into the hall where the audience was to be held.  Pope Pius came through, greeting them individually and giving a blessing, came upon my grandfather, standing just over six feet tall and with a large, round Irish face.  The Pope mentioned casually, “You’re not with this other group, are you?”  “No, Your Holiness, this is my son, and we’re from Winnipeg, the western part of Canada.”  “Ah”, responded the Pope.  “That’s a part of the world I’ve wanted to visit. I don’t get to travel much.”  My grandfather, never one at a loss for words or overlook an opportunity, then quipped, “I’ll tell you what, Your Holiness.  I’m retired now, so any time you want to travel, give me a call and I’ll come and take over for you here.”  My uncle, at this point dying of mortification, related that the suggestion apparently tickled the Papal Funny Bone.  He threw back his head and roared with laughter. That must not have happened too often in a Papal audience, because the Vatican officials in attendance came scurrying over to see what this person could possibly have said.  The Pope, amusement aside, must have declined the offer because the world would never see the headline, “Canadian temporarily ascends the Throne of St. Peter.”  

On another occasion, my grandfather, again toward the end of his life, came to visit my parents before I was born.  They were living in Winchester, Massachusetts, at the time, and it became imperative that he have a chance to see the famous St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Boston.  So, off went Himself with ample warning to be careful and not talk to strangers.  My mother must have forgotten that he’d managed to get himself around Europe successfully. Anyway, my grandfather was standing on a street corner waiting for the parade to start.  A long black limousine pulled up, and the back window slid down.  An Irish face, not unlike his own appeared through the open window, so my grandfather stepped over, and introduced himself.  “Hello.  I’m Moe Doyle from Winnipeg.”  “Nice to meet you.  Jim Curley from Boston.”  They shook hands and chatted amiably for a few minutes until the late, famous Mayor of Boston excused himself, and the limousine pulled away to join the parade.  Of course, the inevitable question when he got home came up.  “Did you meet anybody?”  Another grandfather story entered family lore.

Moe Doyle was an accomplished practical joker, and would go to any lengths to set them up.  Most frequently, the target was his eldest daughter, my Aunt Eileen, who never failed to provide a satisfyingly truculent response.  My aunt worked for him for a period shortly before and after she was married, minding the office, answering the phone, filing, that sort of thing.  Their office was in the back of an older office building, which had a rather difficult walkway to navigate, being essentially planks across a muddy walkway.  On the morning of April 1^st, my grandfather got a couple of smudgy pails and got them somehow smoking pretty well.  When Eileen arrived, he had his shirt collar open and managed to croak out, “Eileen – fire.  Go call the fire department.”  Off she scrambled over the planks.  Not ending there, he had set up ahead of time that in the drugstore across the street, the nearest phone, the pharmacist would be on phone engaged in a long conversation and ignoring her frantic gestures.  Several other locations down the street had the same set up conversations and tied up phone lines.  After about the third of these, it dawned on her that this was the fruit of my grandfather’s maliciously fertile imagination, so she went home in a fit of pique.  Again, not the end of the story.  For several days and weeks afterward, he’d have people call her.  They’d introduce themselves, as 

“Mrs. Anscombe, this is Captain Smith of the Fire Department.  I understand that you had a fire at your place of work on . . . . .”  My grandfather would pay them for every word they could get out before she slammed down the phone.

My Uncle Jim, mother’s younger brother, was cast in much the same mould.  Some years ago, I was working in a motel as a night clerk.  A gentleman came up to the desk late one night to register for a room.  I saw that he was from Winnipeg, so I remarked that my mother’s family were from Winnipeg.  He asked if any were still about, and I mentioned an aunt and my uncle, Jumbo Jimmy Doyle, as he was known.  The man responded that, while he didn’t know him, he told me that “he’s quite renowned in those parts.” Uncle Jim inherited the golf course, was for a period a professional golfer, and eventually built it into a summer destination resort. Originally, though, it was a series of rough and primitive cottages arranged in a semicircle behind the clubhouse.  One evening, when we were visiting when I was a child, we watched as Aunt Eileen, who occupied one of the cottages, had arranged herself with a pitcher of cocktails and a plate of snacks on her front deck.  Uncle Jim suggested that we stand and wait at a distance.  No sooner had Eileen seated herself, drink in hand, than my uncle fired up the bug fogger and did a sweeping circle around in front of the cottages.  I can still hear my aunt to this day, sixty years later, as she came back into view from a cloud of smoke, “Aw, Jim!  What are you doing?  I just got this all set up (as she stormed back into her cottage, slamming the door).”  Not to let it go, he’d try to get the young cousins to go over and ask either singly or in groups if she had any cheese and crackers.  As I recall, we all knew better than to take him up on it.  On another occasion, as drinks were flowing in the clubhouse, some wagered that Uncle Jim could play the first hole of the course in the dark, he knew it so well.  The bets were laid, and out they went.  Uncle Jim hit his drive, and off went the crew down the first fairway with flashlights.  They found the ball in the middle of the fairway, and he hit again.  Farther along, again in the middle of the fairway was his second shot.  The next one went onto the green, and by golly, the put went into the cup.  Money changed hands.  Sometime later, Uncle Jim admitted that a crew had strategically laid the balls out all down the fairway and in the cup.  The difficulty, he admitted, was hitting the shots well off the course so nobody would inadvertently come across them.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this narrative, I never knew my grandfather.  He died about six months before I was born.  I think that he and I would have been much alike and very compatible.  I’m grateful that my mother placed tremendous store in family histories, telling us about the Doyles and Kehoes coming over from Ireland at the time of the famine, settling in  New York and to move up the Mohawk Valley, and particularly colorful family histories.  Doyles were stone masons and worked on the upstate canal system. And while I didn’t ever meet my grandfather, I did meet and know his two sisters, my Great Aunts Rozella and Elizabeth, and some of his cousins, very elderly and at the time of my youth, still living in the area.  Thus are precious stories passed on like Aunt Rozella’s silver – prized and treasured.

He was an inveterate storyteller.  My late father-in-law, Alfred was a farm boy from upstate New York, not far from the Canadian border in the Saint Lawrence River valley, second youngest of ten children.  His childhood coincided with the Great Depression, which added flavor and context to a number of his tales of a small rural farming community, where everyone knew everyone and family doings were well known. Many of his stories, as well as his Alfredisms, live on in family lore and culture to this day.  When I win two dollars in the lottery, it’s, as he would say, “better than a kick in the head.”  His distinctive nickname came from our nephew, who struggled early on to say “grandpa” – it came out “Gaga”, shortened over the years to “Gug” or expanded to  “Gugster” by his grandchildren. 

One such of notorious memory involved a family named Daginault.  Father Daginault wasn’t a farmer, but rather worked in a local factory.  He got paid each Friday, and upon receipt of his earnings, would go shopping for all manner of luxury foods – steaks, vegetables, desserts.  But curiously, he only bought enough for two.  Arriving home, he and his wife would feed the children some simple fare and put them to bed.  Then, Mr. and Mrs. Daginault would literally gorge themselves with an extravagant buffet. That, of course, expended the money for the week, so the family survived on scraps until the following pay day.  This, of course, led to expressions at gatherings of my wife’s family.  “Just like the Daginaults”, somebody would say at Sunday dinner, or on holidays, when my dear late mother-in-law would put out about eight vegetables, each someone’s favorite.  In later years, Alfred divided his time between Florida and his summer camp in Stoddard, New Hampshire.  When it was too early to open the cottage, he’d stay with my wife’s sister and her husband.  He traditionally went to bed early, and on one such evening, after he’d gone upstairs and while they were watching television, they made tea and popcorn.  Apparently, the scent of popcorn carried, because a voice from above came booming down the stairs, “Damn Daginaults”.  

Another wonderful depression-era story he’d circulate, and that generated another well used expression, involved a local family habitually on the short end of money.  In order to cut costs, mother would put salt in the sugar bowl, and everyone in the family knew not to touch it.  At family gatherings, mother would take an empty pie plate and drape a tea towel over it by way of dessert charade.  The pie plate would pass from family member to family member, each refusing to cut into the “pie”.  Guests, taking their cue from the family, would decline as well. On one particular occasion, so the story goes, a son, getting rather sick of the façade, allowed as how, yes, he have a piece, saying, “bring on your damned pie if you’ve got any.”  Mother, horrified, rushed the empty pie plate back into the kitchen, telling her son that he wouldn’t be getting any with that rudeness.  Another family expression was born.  After dinner, inevitably, someone would say, “bring on your damned pie (or cake, or whatever) if you’ve got any.”  

Lots of colorful stories came from this era.  Gug would tell the tale of the farmer that regularly came into the local café to have his breakfast.  I’m seeing in my mind a place much akin to Garrison Keillor’s “Chatterbox Café” in Lake Wobegon.  A stranger coming in and looking bewildered, would ask, to quote Keillor, “Where am I, and how do I get back on the highway?” Anyway, the gentleman farmer would order a cup of coffee.  He’d carefully measure six spoonsful of sugar into the coffee and then sip it, a smile on his face.  Bystanders would watch this routine with fascination.  One morning, someone screwed up the courage to ask why he never stirred the coffee.  He responded, “Oh God no – it would be too sweet.”  That’s the kind of logic that’s made America great.  Coffee traditions are intriguing.  Alfred’s brother-in-law would make a cup of coffee using instant, so popular for years.  Then, he’d stand over the sink and pour in condensed milk until it overflowed.  I can’t imagine what the taste was of that.  In my youth, I spent a summer on an exchange program in England.  My host “mother” bought some instant coffee for me, which was very thoughtful as I come from a long line of coffee drinkers.  The only problem was that she’d heat milk and pour that into the coffee cup, then mix in the instant.  It tasted very different and not particularly good.  About a week in, I showed her how I’d done it at home with water.  She remarked at how much better that tasted! 

Back to the Gugster.  Many of his stories related to his exploits with his brothers – there were four older and one younger.  Their father, who ruled the farm with a quiet firmness, told the boys that he didn’t really care what they did in the evenings, as long as they were up and ready to milk the cows at 5 AM.  They were, but often times having slipped into bed an hour or two before.  I’m guessing the cows didn’t get loving treatment on those mornings. The brothers would head into town and sing songs, passing the hat to pay for their drinks. The boys were quite renowned.  The funny part is that, when they came home, their parents’ bedroom was right off the kitchen and the back door.  According to Gug, she could recognize each son’s walk as he came across the kitchen.  She’d call out – “Is that you, Alfred?”  He’d respond, “No, it’s William.”  Back she’d come, “It is not – I know it’s you, Alfred.” They never could fool her as they straggled in. Somehow, she’d know each distinctive walk.  One night as the brothers were heading out, Alfred, the younger brother was apparently going to cramp the older siblings’ style.  They tied him to a tree so he wouldn’t be able to follow them.  It was never quite clear how long he stayed tied up, but as he made it to adulthood, he must have been released at some point.  

The other interesting bit that I remember him telling was of the late First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt.  She had a summer place in the area on Chateaugay Lake, which she visited each summer.  One year, while driving to the lake, and as the story goes, Mrs. Roosevelt was a notoriously bad driver, she hit a dog.  Not intimidated by her fame, the owner sent a letter of complaint to the White House.  A few weeks later, a representative from the First Lady arrived with a letter of profuse apology and a new puppy. 

In another historical tidbit, the family would hear trucks rumbling through town late at night or early morning, knowing they carried illegal liquor from Montreal during Prohibition.  

The Gugster’s eldest brother, Howard, who, as Alfred described him, was “an expert on everything.”  He was not as close to his brothers and sisters as the others were to each other. His younger brother, the baby of the family, tended to get ladies in trouble, and ended up going into the service and moving to the West Coast. Cousins that Susan never knew she had started popping up on Ancestry.  Alfred’s sister Stella, the oldest in the family, was chronically “not well”.  Another sister would visit her from time to time in later years, always reporting back that “Stella isn’t well.”  I asked Alfred once if she ever was well. He’d chuckle and tell me that she’d had a very hard life.  We let it go at that.  

Amazingly, Alfred and his brothers and sisters all lived long lives, well into their 80’s and some into their 90’, and Alfred was the Last of the Mohicans. They are all long gone now, but the cousins get together from time to time and share family lore, which moves steadily down to the second and third generations.

Three years ago, I started these ramblings insightful bits of writing.  I can’t believe it’s been going on this long. In this Year of the Pandemic, the coming of autumn is not quite like any other since, well, the last worldwide pandemic. Adding to the mix is widespread unrest and, of course the great fun of a presidential election. With the new season, it seems like an appropriate time to comment on the changes good and not-so-good that nature brings.

In a departure from my usual procrastination, I ordered a pumpkin spice coffee when it started appearing in mid-August.  I know what you’re thinking.  Wait at least until Labor Day.  That makes it special.  Well, guess what – it’s not that special any more, and Labor Day is really late. I grow impatient. The coffee masterminds have contributed to my unrest by making seasonal coffee changes a blur.  The weather hasn’t really turned chilly yet either, but my flannel shirts and fleeces stand ready to ward off temperatures plummeting into the fifties and sixties. 

Fall is still a season for apples.  Londonderry is apple country, but apples too are suffering some overexposure.  Apple spice everything, bravely taking on the big pumpkin lobby.  Every year, I look forward to “apple cider” donuts.  I think it’s the name that carries the mystique.  The donuts themselves never quite reach expectations, because the flavors are, shall we say, muted at best, and they seem to dry out in a matter of hours.  Oh, well.  I buy and eat them anyway, just so I can say I’ve had them.  My daughter and I were out at the orchard store (it’s a huge farm store and bought a bag of local ones.  Truth be told, I not really a “pick your own” kind of person.  I’d have been lost in the “hunter/gatherer” period. My hunting and gathering is best done at Market Basket. Back to local apples, I’m told they’re the best for Apple Crisp and Apple Brown Betty.  I’m not exactly sure how Brown Betty came by her desserts, but she’s done fine work for us all. 

Last year, I wrote in detail about the evolution of the pumpkin.  The experts tell us that pumpkin essentially has no flavor of its own – it’s only when mixed with spices that it shines. I can live with that. At Halloween, we’d carve a face – in all honesty, that’s a pumpkin’s real purpose   At Thanksgiving, it would provide its last, best service and become a pie.  Now everything is pumpkin.  All day, every day, streaming live. Breads, ice cream, muffins, donuts, lattes, candles.  They’re everywhere.  We used to head to the farm stand to buy a couple of good ones for the front steps.  They’d look majestic and bold until the squirrels and chipmunks laid waste to their orange glow and turn their insides into a gooey mess. I was walking by a display of “foam” pumpkins at the dollar store.  I thought it might be rather funny to put a couple of those out just to toy with the wee beasties. Anyway, now you can buy real pumpkins large and small at the grocery store these days. They’re right next to the bales of hay.  Wait – when did that start happening?  The Great Pumpkin would traditionally fail to appear and Linus would again be deeply discouraged.   Of course, we have “great pumpkins” everywhere.  At a local county fair last year, someone brought a 2,500 pumpkin.  It was in the paper, so I kid you not. He won the title of “Pumpkin Master” or “Pumpkin Ruler” or something noble title of that sort  He used, and I didn’t believe it either, a special fertilizer for growing these massive pumpkins.  And I’ve been wasting my time with “organic compost”. What do you even do with a pumpkin that size, that needs a tractor to move?  Put it on display in the front yard, or bake like, a million pies?  The county fair, and possibly giant pumpkins too,  are probably casualties of the coronavirus this year, and the local newspaper will be forced to feature actual news on the front page.

Throughout the summer, we get a variety of fruits and vegetables that come in and out of season – strawberries and blueberries, corn-on-the-cob, tomatoes.  We usually can’t wait for the “native” tomatoes to appear.  They’re always big, intensely red, and you have to check them top and bottom to make sure they didn’t drop and the insects got them.  That’s why I don’t grow my own.  There’s that nanosecond window when they fully ripen but before they fall to the ground and some local animal or swarm of insects invade.  I planted a small peach tree in one of my gardens two years ago.  Last year, I had three bits of fruit about the size of walnuts.  Two fell to the ground, where ants fully enjoyed them. The third I brought inside as a sort of trophy for a few days. This year, I don’t see much on it, possibly victim to the summer drought. But fall brings out the remarkable as the squash family struts grandly onto the produce runway.  There are big blue ones, smaller greens, browns, and oranges and tans.  Some gourds are so colorful and interesting they look almost like something from a factory in Southeast Asia.  Oh, wait – no. There’s a trade tariff on those.

Fall also brings a true burst of color before everything fades to white, dark browns, and eventually grays. The trees here in New England put on a vivid display, which is of course what we pay them for.  It’s the first opportunity for people to over-decorate their houses since Easter.  Stalks of corn, more bales of hay, and chrysanthemums are everywhere.   As a gardener, it saddens me when, in mid-August, I see rows and rows of mums appearing in the nurseries.  I don’t particularly like them, and gravitate more to asters.  Most of the time, asters will come back next year.  Mums look spectacular for about a week, then you have to keep picking off all the dead blossoms to keep them looking even passable.  Unlike other flowering plants, each mum has thousands of blossoms, and they wilt dozens a day.  Who has the time to pick them over?  They also have tender stalks, so repotting them means you lose big chunks of flowers.

Mixed with the excitement, there’s also a time of sadness, or longing.  Coffee and my newspaper on the screened porch won’t be a “thing” again until May. The outdoor plants are looking pathetic – straggly, brown around the edges, almost begging for the compost heap.  My predecessors in this house planted Lily of the Valley.  It sprouts nicely in the spring, looks quite presentable until late July.  Then, it turns brown and rather ugly as it dies back in August.  You can’t take it out because it roots like iron, and it spreads. I’m not sure what it hasn’t been deemed “invasive”. Now is the time to put away the porch and deck furniture -umbrellas, benches, chairs.  I delay this as long as possible – in some years, I’m brushing the first snow off everything.  In recent years, I’ve bought winter covers for much of the furniture so I don’t have to lug it down to the basement.  It’s the season for putting out mousetraps in the basement, while flocks of geese are honking overhead on their way south. I’ll have to restock the de-icer, and figure out where I put the windshield scrapers. Many seniors from around here head south to enjoy the last few weeks of hurricane season.  They do a seasonal commute, get sick of packing and move down year-round, get bored with the lack of seasons and move back.

Let’s face it.  Fall is not a time for children, in particular this year.  School, that traditional benchmark of fall, is a vast uncertainty.  “Hybrid” used to refer to cars, but how it’s school schedules.  What days do they go in, and which days can parents not use the computer?  Some parents are struggling to remember trigonometry, and wish they’d paid more attention twenty five years ago. Cases of facemasks arrive. How far apart is six feet? For teachers, it’s a “worst nightmare” scenario. Fall traditionally was tailor-made for us older, retired folks.  The roads are less traveled and we could get into restaurants for breakfast without an hour wait. Now, of course, many of those restaurants aren’t open, or just taking small percent of their normal capacity. There’s still a world of color for us to explore – at 35 miles per hour, our preferred speed, in the Grand Marquis, and gas is cheaper. We could employ our summer deterrent, road construction to encourage social distancing.  We’ll just start repaving every road in New England that wasn’t being mauled by a backhoe over the summer.  And once they’re back in service, we can block off lanes randomly to dig up the shoulders.  It’s really essential that we have heavy equipment dispatched to every highway and byway and keep the orange cone people busy.As the fall embraces us, savor an apple cider donut or enjoy a pumpkin spice latte while we can. Peppermint mocha is bearing down on us like a trailer truck in the onramp.

The postal service has been getting bashed up a lot lately, or in particular, the new Postmaster General.  He deserves it, but I’m not completely sure the Post Office overall does.  That’s a topic for another day.

Over the course of the pandemic, we’ve taken, as have many or most of Americans, to ordering things online. Amazon has been an attractive choice because it’s been typically pretty reliable and it’s fast.  By golly, they’ve rewritten the rule on speedy delivery.  Forget the “7 – 10 business days”, which then run to two weeks.  In the early days of “tracking”, it was such fun!  Ah, pillow cases we ordered are in Des Moines.  Three days later, they’re still there.  Next day, they’re in Denver.  Wait . . . . . they’re going in the wrong direction.  We’d call Customer Service (which is often a misnomer), to find out they were rerouted because of storms in the mid-Atlantic.  OK, makes sense.  I don’t want my pillow cases blown out to sea by a Tropical Storm Umberto.

The fine folks at Amazon Delivery are doing yeoman work.  Each driver is dropping off, like, 8,000 packages a day, so they have to be efficient and work quickly.  They also now have to take pictures of the packages on my front porch to verify that they reached their destination.  So, funny story.  I ordered a book a while back for a friend – we share books regularly.  This was one I thought he’d particularly enjoy. I then, in my advanced stage of forgetfulness, received the email confirmation with the package sitting proudly on his front step.  Only, I looked at it and said to myself, “That’s not my front porch – what’s up with that?’’  The bottom line here is that I had to contact Amazon and apologize profusely for forgetting where I had had the package sent.  I also had to promise that I wouldn’t do it again any time soon and that I’d keep a detailed log of what I send and to whom. That’s only fair.  If I expect superior service from them, they should expect it back from me.

Amazon trucks are flying in and out of our neighborhood like hummingbirds in a rose garden. Where are they going?  Who ordered something?  Did I?  Or on the days that something is expected, each truck must be for me, only it isn’t.  The driver is running into the house across the street.  Dear God, those people are ordering stuff all the time.  They must be made of money.  Then, he’s back with something for me.  Ok, my stuff is essential.  Not something from Publishers Clearing House, because I only ordered it last week.  It won’t be here for at least a month, and then they’ll put it in a package box at the mail house.  Now I have to try to decipher the box number on the key tag because it’s all smudged.  I usually get it the fourth or fifth box I try.  

Back to Amazon Delivery.  When we first started ordering that way, there had been an element of whimsy in where they left the packages.  Sometimes the package would sit smugly on the front porch or steps.  Every so often, though, they were left in front of the garage door.  Had one of those in a rain storm.  It turned out to be for my neighbor.  Not only did the delivery guy get the house number wrong, . . . . yup.  Soaked through, and I had to deliver this soggy mess next door.  I was apologizing, and I didn’t even make the mistake.  They’ve misdelivered a number of packages to our back door, so I had one of those adorable slate plaques made that have our name and house number on it.  People have said it looks so nice, and I have to explain that I had it made especially for the delivery people.  

Our house sets down a bit, so we have a small brick terrace out front and stairs going up to the driveway.  If you’ve read my blog on the newspaper delivery person, you’re acquainted with the setup.  He tosses the paper conveniently under the bushes or, if he’s in a hurry, up the hill about 50 yards away.  Recently, the package delivery folks have taken up his approach and are leaving things at the top of the steps.  Perhaps they’re unaware that we share those steps with  three other homes.  They can’t walk a few extra steps to put it by the front door?  Now it’s fair game for whoever happens to walk by first. Not an ideal situation.  

I was listening to a program on public radio a few weeks back.  They were talking about “shadow” delivery trucks whizzing about urban and suburban areas.  Apparently, they are able to track regular delivery trucks, or maybe they just follow them at a safe distance – probably ex-KGB – and these shadows look the same except they don’t have the corporate logos on the side.  They wait until the regular delivery trucks have made their stops, then they swoop in and take the packages.  Apparently, that’s why the Amazon folks are now taking pictures ON the front porch.  Yes, we were actually there, in case you don’t believe me. It’s proof that it really was delivered.  We’ve all heard about the stories of Christmas packages being lifted from entry ways and front doors.  This, I guess, takes theft to the next level and makes it more organized.  How desperate are these thieves that they’ll buy a cargo van to steal my pillow cases?  I can understand the ten rolls of toilet paper, but really.  

The other big mystery is the timing of my deliveries.  Why is it that my neighbors get their packages at like, 10 AM.  Mine never arrive much before 5 PM.  I’m usually on the lookout all day.  Like right now, I’m waiting for a new door latch for the screen door out back.  My daughter saw a chipmunk coming in and out of the back porch, it’s little furry face peaking in through the glass slider, and as she doesn’t interactwell with nature, took exception.  So, I fixed the hole where the screen had come away from the frame, but noticed that the door didn’t really stay shut too tightly either, so I ordered a new latch to keep it closed.  Anything to thwart those plucky little chipmunks that live in the yard. They’re the same ones that eat my tulip bulbs, so I’m not terribly sentimental. Amazon to the rescue because I’m not allowed to go to the hardware store.  When I suggest it, she gives me a look of exasperation and shakes her head. The latch is arriving today some time – probably just before I go to bed. They say they deliver any time up to 9 PM.  Wow, these folks work late, although they’re probably sharing in Amazon’s abundant profits.  Yesterday was Sunday, and I had a delivery due.  By dinnertime, it hadn’t arrived, so I thought, oh, well . . . . . . Checked the tracking and it said “out for delivery”.  And it was.  Somewhere about 7:30, it arrived.  They didn’t ring the bell, but a picture popped up on my phone.  I don’t believe that we’ve yet missed a delivery and on the day it was promised.  I’m thinking, . . . . . . well done!!

Back in May, when COVID-19 looked like it was gradually getting under control, I wrote an insightful and enlightening post about wearing face masks.  I said, in so many words that folks unwilling to wear face masks were too stupid to live.  Ok, not in those so many words, but something less threatening, less harsh, less Trumpy. 

Well, folks – well done, America.  You stopped wearing masks in public, you started gathering in large numbers – at the beach, in bars and nightclubs, you moved back into restaurants and shopping malls.  You got tired of the inconvenience. You wanted a quick return to normal. Nice job.  Fifteen hundred deaths in one southern state alone.  The President telling us confidently, as he did in March, April, May, June and July that he’s fully on top of the problem and that his administration has risen to the occasion.  Meanwhile, the pandemic experts, including his own people, are saying the exact opposite.  

We’re now heading into the start of the new school year.  We could have been preparing for a not-quite but slightly modified soft landing.  Instead, we have Secretary of Education DeVos telling us that all schools can and should be fully returning to classes, because “children don’t get the virus.”  Not sure exactly what planet she’s on.  In an opinion letter to the editor yesterday, a teacher, no less, stressed the importance of students being back in the classroom.  This person teaches in one of Boston’s elite exam high schools, so perhaps it will be safer there than in all of the other public schools in the city.  I doubt it.  Is it more important to save young lives or reach arbitrary academic achievement benchmarks?  If America’s students end up a bit behind, is that irreparably damaging their lives?  Won’t they catch up at some point, or are their lives permanently scarred? I’m of the view that young people are remarkably resilient and they will catch up. As a local representative wrote today, “what happens if one student gets sick?”  There’s the question, isn’t it?  We know how highly contagious this virus is.  One case rapidly becomes dozens, becomes hundreds, spreading like the wildfires of California.  Stopping the spread in our schools once it starts, where even “social distancing” is more dream than reality, will be terribly risky and dangerous, and very difficult to achieve.  No, we should have been spending our time since June improving the quality of internet learning, bringing back only the special learners and those few that can’t survive online.

An article in the paper this past week mentioned that a high school age hockey player from Massachusetts participated in a tournament in Connecticut back at the end of July, and thoughtfully brought the virus home with him.  This despite the Massachusetts ban on sporting events across state lines.  Apparently, there were players from New York at the tournament, and that was the tracked source.  To make things better, his team played in two tournaments here in New Hampshire after that.  Just great. Is youth hockey really that important that it’s worth risking lives?  We’re just starting to understand that there may well be other health risks far beyond recovery from the virus, particularly among athletes.  Yet professional baseball players are sneaking out to bars and football players are sneaking companions into their hotel rooms. What does it take for people to understand that this is very, very serious?  

Still another news release detailed how a fundamental church just a few miles down the road from me, resumed services in June and held a youth summer camp in July, and since then has had 16 church and family members test positive for COVID-19.  The state Department of Health is investigating the possible causes, but all of the infected people belong to that church.  I’m not a specialist, but I don’t have much trouble connecting those dots. The senior pastor was puzzled.  Really?  Apparently, God wasn’t protecting his flock quite as thoroughly as he thought.  And isn’t that the point?  So many of ministers, pastors, and churchgoers think that there’s an invisible force field protecting them from all harm, because that’s what God does. Only he doesn’t.  God doesn’t seem to work that way.  I guess these deeply religious people figure that the rest of us are on our own.

Then, of course we see the unmasked face of Herman Cain, sitting surrounded by people with no effort to distance at a Trump rally, just a few weeks before he mysteriously contracted coronavirus and died.  The poor man, but wasn’t he challenging fate just a bit?  And will it change the way a president chooses to campaign?  Probably not.

We in America are at a crossroads.  We hold the record for most cases and most deaths of any single country in this pandemic.  We’re not allowed to travel to most places in the world now, and probably won’t be for some time to come. The Canadian Prime Minister won’t come here. Our healthcare system, which we thought was the envy of the world, is overworked, undersupplied, underfunded, and exhausted.  I’ve come to believe in the t-shirt that says, “Science doesn’t care what you believe.”  Isn’t that the truth?  Infectious diseases in the forms of viruses and bacteria are learning to adapt, grow, and reappear in ways that we’re still trying to understand.  We do know that these diseases don’t pay much attention to religious beliefs or political principles. The Black Plague centuries ago raced from Asia to Europe because people didn’t know about basic hygiene.  Now we know quite a bit more, but we’re still in first grade about this one.  We do know, though, that this one is airborne, and that wearing face masks could prevent hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of infections if we would just pay attention and listen to those that do the research.  Issues of “liberty” and “freedom” don’t even enter into the discussion.  One doesn’t have the freedom to stand in the middle of a shopping mall and yell, “fire”.  It’s not about freedom of speech, but about safety.  One doesn’t have the freedom to drive at whatever speed one wishes on the highway or in a neighborhood without consequences.  Again, not freedom but the safety of those around you.  So too is the mask.  It protects you, and more important, it protects everyone else from you.  So, to the freedom fighters among us, save it for voting rights, access to medical care, rights of immigrants, peaceful assembly.  Just remember to stay safe, wash your hands, and for heaven sake, WEAR A MASK!!