Thursday, July 4, 2013

Celebrating The Non-Monday Holiday

Welcome to the Fourth of July, one of only three Holidays in this country you can count on to show up on a specific date.  We’d like to celebrate Cinco de Mayo but they tell me that’s for furriners.  Thanksgiving is guaranteed to be on the fourth Thursday of November but that could be any date, same as the Kentucky Derby’s first Saturday in May, which is only a real holiday in horse country.  Everything else is on Monday, thus expanding everybody’s weekend.  How come Monday?  Why not Friday?  Friday is much more weekendy and there’s more to do.  I wish somebody would tell me who is in charge of making these decisions, I need to have a talk with them.  I have a lot of good ideas but nobody’s listening.

If you grew up in New England, the Fourth of July was a BIG deal.  In New England, we had three Summer holidays—Memorial Day, which was the official start of Summer, Labor Day, which was the end of it, and the Fourth of July.  With the first two, you never knew about the weather.  May has its share of cold days and I have been freezing at Hampton Beach in early September, but the good old Fourth was always reliable.  If you were getting a cottage at the beach, snare that puppy in July when it was guaranteed to be hot.  We generally just drove over for the day, but one year my parents got a wild hair and rented a cottage for a week at Seabrook Beach, Massachusetts, located between the more populated (and more expensive) Salisbury and Hampton beaches.  I can’t remember what year it was, but my sister, Alice and I were very young and not allowed in the ocean without supervision.  In case you weren’t aware of this, they have things called waves in the ocean and they can knock the crap out of you if you’re not paying attention.  And, actually, even if you are.  You’ll be just innocently standing there, having a jolly old time and waving at your pals on the shore and WHAMMO!—a giant wave will dispatch your ass to the hinterlands, with the bonus of filling your gullet with a briny cocktail.  The first time this happens is pretty shocking for a little kid, tossed about like a matchstick by the wisecracking ocean.

“Whadja thinka THAT one, kiddo?  Not like your Aunt Martha’s Lake Placid, right?  C’mon, get up and fight back, you little weasel!”  And the ocean looks so nice from a distance.

In the morning, my father would trek out on the beach to find wood for the fireplace because it was still a little chilly in the early a.m.  This didn’t make any sense to me.  Where the hell does the wood come from on the beach—sunken ships?  How many of those do you think there are?  Anyway, the first time out I went with him so I could salve his wounds when he couldn’t find any burnables.  Kids think they’re so smart, you know.  My father came up with a couple armfuls of wood, however, and we hauled it back to the cottage to great acclaim from my mother.  I can still remember how the wood fire smelled in the fireplace….exotic, really.  People who don’t live up North think  everybody up there has a fireplace and burns wood all the time, but not really.  Until we had a very exciting new boiler, at my house we burned coal.  We didn’t have too many environmentalists in those days, so coal was not the blight on the earth that it is today.  Coal was kinda fun, to tell you the truth.  We had a coal yard in our neighborhood, right next to Jackie Fournier’s house.  Our mothers weren’t too keen on us hanging around there, but you know kids.  We’d go in there occasionally—well, the boys would, anyway, girls aren’t big on coal yards—and watch them unload the coal from the railroad cars which pulled up on a track adjacent to the yard.  We felt like big shots because the coal men—and we knew all of their names and they ours—taught us words like “anthracite” and “bituminous” that even some adults didn’t know.  The various types of coal were deposited in different large bins.  Later, the coal delivery trucks would back up to the bins and the coal men would shovel the stuff onto narrow conveyor belts that looked a little like escalators and carried it up into the trucks.  The trucks would then drive over to your house and deposit it through an open cellar window right into your very own coal bin.  After that, some poor sap—usually your father or grandfather—had to shovel it into the furnace.  Eventually, the roaring furnace—a scary sight when the door was open, to be sure—sent the heat upstairs to the metal “radiators,” which were strategically placed in each room.  One of the first lessons little kids learned the hard way was that radiators are goddam HOT, dammit!  After a couple of shrieking mistakes, we caught on—stay away from those bastards.  It was not a sad day for kids when central heating came in vogue and led to the eventual demise of the silver beasts.  My grandmother, who owned our house, never removed the radiators, though—as if the electric heaters might be some kind of phony mirage whose efficiency would be disproved down the road calling for the reinstallation of the radiators.  If this happened, my grandmother would be ready.  My grandmother was nobody’s fool.


Celebrating The Fourth

If you were anywhere near Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, there were fireworks every Wednesday night, with a massive show reserved for the Fourth.  There was even a parade, with bands and floats and tons of flag-wielding veterans in funny hats.  Everybody knew the words to Yankee Doodle, which us kids thought was a hilarious title, what with the Doodle and all.  Back in Lawrence, the city held a July Fourth celebration in the football stadium, not far from our house.  Unfortunately, these things always started out with fifty-three speeches from politicians, grandly exaggerating the benefits they had performed for the community since last year.  My father had particular antipathy toward all politicians—except, oddly, for a guy named Tommy Lane, our congressional representative.  Even after they put good old Tommy in jail for not paying his taxes, my father remained loyal.  “All those big politicians don’t pay their taxes,” he scoffed, “they’re just picking on Tommy.”  Maybe they were.  After he got out of jail, Tommy Lane ran for office again and won in a landslide.  This still bothers my sister, Alice (the Republican), who is not one to forget a grudge.

We were talking fireworks here.  The first time I ever saw fireworks, I almost wet my pants.  The fireworks were beautiful, of course, but they were so scary loud they almost knocked you over.  And I used to worry about the residue from the fireworks falling down on top of us.  My mother assured us that this could never happen, but guess what?  One time, it did and several people got piddling injuries.  Up until then, I thought my mother was always right about everything.  When the fireworks fell down on everybody, I looked at her and she looked at me.  She never said anything but her eyes seemed to say, well, okay, Billy, nobody’s perfect, for crying out loud.  I was always careful around fireworks after that.  Me and Alice got extra ice-cream at Glennies after the horrible fireworks trauma.  They had 28 exotic flavors at Glennies, but Alice always had vanilla and she wouldn’t be talked out of it, either.  What the hell’s wrong with you, Alice?  A Republican who only eats vanilla!  I know you had a good upbringing.


Newfound Lake Days

Although we only spent one Fourth at the beach, our parents rented lakeside cottages on two occasions, once at nearby Canobie Lake, New Hampshire, the other at Newfound Lake, same state.  Canobie Lake, despite being in the middle of nowhere (Salem, N.H., on the Mass. border), was not only a lakesite retreat—it also featured a giant amusement park and drew in tons of people from the immediate area.  Alice loved the big roller coaster but she would not, for the life of her, get on the ferris wheel.  “The ferris wheel can get stuck and stop,” Alice would say, “and I’d be right on top for weeks until they got it fixed.  The roller coaster doesn’t fool around.  Slam, bam and you’re done.”  For years, everybody tried to talk Alice, who was actually a pretty daring kid, onto the ferris wheel.  Every time, it was no dice.  Finally, several years ago when she had grandchildren, she finally agreed to go.  I mean, what are the chances something untoward would happen in this modern ferris wheel era?  Well, actually, pretty good.  After a couple of unexciting revolutions, the ferris wheel snickered, slowed and stopped, finally capturing its long-awaited prisoner.  Oh, and right at the top.  Alice looked with a knowing glare, as if I were complicit in this act.  I don’t think she has been back on one of the critters yet.

Newfound Lake is a large, scenic lake located in Grafton County, New Hampshire, in the Lakes Region of the state, abutting the small towns of Alexandria, Bristol, Bridgewater and Hebron, not far from the larger city of Plymouth.  I can’t remember the name of the small cluster of cabins we stayed at but I do remember one of the others was occupied by the family of my mother’s lifetime friend, Ella Miller, there with her husband and two boys, David and Reid.  The year was 1956, something I only remember because that was the year Johnny Cash’s I Walk The Line came out and was played on the radio six hundred times a day.  I like to remember Newfound Lake because I was almost a hero there.  Twice.  Once, while playing first base in a softball game, I dived to my left to haul in a line drive and save a couple of runs in the final inning.  Not a hero there because we failed to score and lost anyway.  Next chance was at shuffleboad, a game I had never played before.  The previous year’s champions at the annual Shuffleboard Tournament were David Miller and his dad, Eddie.  David, however, had hooked up with another partner this year, leaving Eddie without.  A wise judge of potential talent, Eddie recruited me to join him.  I did and we avidly dispatched all comers, reaching the championship round against David and his new partner.  Naturally, Eddie was delighted with this turn of fate.  If we won, David would never live it down.  As the game progressed, nobody was able to pull away from the other team and it was coming down to the wire.  On my last shot, I blasted the opponents’ disk to oblivion, giving us the lead.  Eddie was bouncing up and down, trash-talking his oldest son as the imminent victory loomed.  David, a serene and confident type, pushed his disk forward.  It barely grazed mine, but displaced it, giving David’s team the win.  Eddie Miller would not be deterred.

“I almost beat you with a rookie!” he exclaimed to all who would listen.  “Next year, you’re toast!”  Eddie told me to go home and practice, as if that were possible.  If there was one shuffleboard court in the entire city of Lawrence, I failed to find it.  A moot point anyway, since Ella and Eddie soon parted and we spent the next Summer at home.  My promising shuffleboard career was over, something I regret to this day.  I hate to seem immodest but I just gotta tell you:

Not unlike my friend Marlon, I coulda been a contender.



That’s all, folks….