I’ll Be Home For Christmas (or maybe not)
Where is home, anyway? Is it the place we grew up? Or the place we live now? Or the esteemed locale where we spent the most happy years? Does “home” change when our parents are no more? I guess for me home is Fairfield now, but a close second is 53 Garfield Street in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where I lived from ages four to seventeen in an old New England two-story house, my grandmother and grandfather upstairs.
Some people kvetch and moan about their childhoods. Not me. We lived in a great neighborhood, kids to play with in every house and the B. & M. Railroad field nearby for sports. Jackie Fournier (Gordon, now) lived a couple houses down and was as fanatical a Red Sox fan as I was. We’d sit on his porch in the afternoons, listening to games on the radio and bitching about the tactics of whichever manager was there at the time (they never took the pitchers out soon enough). Jack was the most devoted rock n’ roll fan in the neighborhood, working his radio at night to draw in faraway New York disc jockeys who were like heroes to us in their defiance of societal prejudices against the new music.
Jackie Mercier, another great friend, lived around the corner on Boxford Street, next to a little black kid adopted by white parents (we thought nothing of it) named Mickey Murphy. Murphy had long vines in his back yard which he manipulated like “Tarzan swings.” Bobby Bennett, the neighborhood intellectual lived a few houses down, in back of Joey Peppalardo, who always played shortstop and never got tired of reminding us he was remotely related to Heisman Trophy winner Joe Bellino.
My sister, Alice, two years younger, had her own crew, notably the infamous Irene Chaff of the ubiquitous Chaff family of hundreds, who could charm the spots off a leopard. Alice was not a sports fan but she would show up at any activity if boys were there.
One day, our parents came to us and asked us if we would like a new car or a baby brother or sister. We foolishly chose the latter and that’s the only reason you’re here today, Kathy.
Except for Fournier, a shady Protestant (whatever they were), we all went to St. Patrick’s School, a ten-minute walk away, patrolled by the scary Sisters of Charity. We had a schoolyard with a fat white line down the middle, the boys on one side, the girls the other. The nuns roamed the area to inhibit comingling of the sexes. At eight-thirty in the morning, the bell would ring, the marches would play and we would tromp inside for another day of inculcation and education. There always seemed to be another reason we would all be going to hell.
It was cold as the devil up there, but nobody seemed to mind. We came home from school, throwing snowballs across Winthrop Avenue at the patrols on the other side, despite constant admonishment from the brown-nosing patrol leaders. When we got home, we couldn’t wait to get outside to construct snow forts from the roadside banks piled up by the city’s snowplows overnight. In the Spring, often with snow still on the ground, we’d go off to the B. & M. field and try to play baseball, quickly turning the stitched horsehide covers into spheres resurfaced with black electrical tape. Upon completing our efforts, everyone would traipse down to Leo Gervais’ store to choose from the fifty favors of sodas in his ice machine or the counterful of candies. In deference to Mickey Murphy, we never bought the nigger babies. Even kids are sensitive about some things.
On Summer nights, the ice-cream man came by, ringing his little bell and creating a frenzy of activity as kids ran screaming to their parents for popsicle and fudgesicle money. Summer also meant beach time. Salisbury and Hampton beaches were only about twenty miles away, but it seemed like it took forever to get there on the little two-lane roads our parents drove. Salisbury, the northernmost beach in Massachusetts, featured amusement park rides like the merry-go-round or the roller-coaster, favored by Alice. There was no roller-coaster Alice feared, but she absolutely would not go on a ferris wheel, which seemed tame by comparison.
“Why, Alice?”
“You can get stuck at the top. And they’ll never get you down.”
Years later, visiting Canobie Lake Park in Salem, N. H. with her grandchildren, Alice had not budged from her vows of ferris wheel abstinence. I pointed out to her that in this day and age ferris wheels virtually never got stuck and the children would probably enjoy the ride. Alice begrudgingly consented and we got on. I probably don’t need to tell you that on this occasion the ferris wheel, seizing an opportunity it had been awaiting impatiently for decades, stopped with Alice’s car at the very top. Suspicions finally confirmed, she looked over at me with a superior expression. “See!” she said.
I rarely left Massachusetts until I went off to college at 17. It was a very long train trip to Stillwater, Oklahoma and, with limited funds for school, I couldn’t afford to be flying home often. The first Christmas I was there, however, my fraternity brothers, Joe Alexander and John Muscato from upstate New York, offered to drive me to Albany, from whence I could bus home. It was during this drive that I realized there were worse things in this world than not being home for Christmas. Being the trip rookie, I was consigned to the middle seat in back, a brain-numbing experience I would wish on no one. It was probably someone who experienced this torture who was the original wonderer “Are we there yet?” I vowed never to repeat it—after, of course, the equally charming trip back.
The following year, my weirdest Christmas, I remained in Stillwater. As the days crawled by, I found myself writing more into the night, eventually all night long, and sleeping through the lonesome days. Stillwater was a very small town despite the college campus and you could walk the streets for blocks during this time of year and see almost nobody. Lonely or not, it still beat driving a few thousand miles in the back seat of a car and I never regretted the decision. On Christmas, I telephoned home and talked with about fifty people. For a little while, it was almost like being there.
Years later and despite a dubious $300 car I bought expressly for the purpose, Marilyn and I headed for Lawrence for another Christmas. We thought we had enough money to make it but we didn’t reckon with the tolls and we ran out of cash on the Connecticut Turnpike. We couldn’t take the back roads or we would never make it in time, not to mention being in a blizzard which would compromise all but the best highways. So we pulled up in the exact change lanes which had no tollbooth operators, tossed a few pennies out so they would spill on the ground (but noisily), and be impatiently waved through by adjacent operators as the alarms announced their displeasure.
This was all well and good until we began experiencing a little knocking from the engine. We had enough gas, but no money for oil even if we had known that oil was what we needed. Oh well, we were almost there, how bad could it be? Pretty bad, it turned out. Shortly after the rattling increased to a thundering roar (think of yourself encased in a revolving clothes drier with a thousand loose nuts and bolts), POOF, all the noise stopped. And so did the car, which had thrown a rod. It was only 10 miles from home. Eventually the State Police picked us up and, it being Christmas Eve, handed us off to the sympathetic Lawrence cops, who took us the rest of the way to Garfield Street, where everyone celebrated our arrival with great acclaim and the drinking of ceremonial nectar.
The neighbors probably thought “Well, here comes Billy Killeen….brought home by the cops yet again.”
Fairfield
The current homestead is in Fairfield, an unincorporated little hamlet equidistant between Gainesville and Ocala in northern Marion County. It takes about 25 minutes to get to either city. The slogan here should be (and maybe it is): “Not Much Happens In Fairfield—And That’s The Way We Like It.”
We’ve got horse farms, of course. And our own Post Office, run by long-time postmistress Julie Dare, who will commiserate with you over the plight of the Gators or any of your own personal issues. Julie is also very helpful in directing newcomers to your house should they become befuddled. This is not always so great.
Once a Canadian goofball named Serge came bicycling down from the hinterlands, looking for Siobhan. He was a distant relative of one of Siobhan’s clients, was somehow involved in veterinary medicine and wished to “ride around” with her as she visited her various clients. This was not an unusual request—Siobhan was often asked by high-school teachers, etc., to take on a student with a predilection for the practice, usually with good result.
We were a little leery of Serge, though. He would e-mail long messages of appreciation and expectation for this future venture which bade concern for his intellectual capacities. Then, one day, the person who recommended him called Siobhan to advise her that Serge had arrived in Tampa and said he was coming to Ocala to kill the recommender, another woman, and, oh yes, also Siobhan. Huh?
We called the Sheriff, of course. And Siobhan, who didn’t like having guns around the house, allowed that, well, under the circumstances….
I went out and bought a shotgun.
Serge showed up in Gainesville at the vet school, looking for Siobhan and scaring everybody with his weirdness. They called her to register their unhappiness,
“Keep him there,” she said. “I’ll call the cops!”
You know as well as I do, however, that the crazy guy always leaves before the sheriff arrives. It’s a fact of life. So Serge headed for Fairfield, arriving at the Post Office, where that helpful rascal Julie Dare told him how to find our place. As often happens with crazy people, however, his muddled brain confused the directions (maybe Julie is cleverer than we thought) and the next thing we knew Serge had been arrested in Key West, his father notified and he shipped back to Canada for incarceration. Julie says she won’t do it any more.
Old College Magazine Joke (from 1964):
A Texas A&M lab technician was assigned the task of providing an exhaustive study about fleas. He agonizingly trained a good-sized flea to hop over his finger every time he said “Hup!” Then, he pulled off two of the flea’s six legs. “Hup!” he shouted, and the flea jumped over his finger. Off came two more legs. “Hup!” repeated the technician. Again, the flea jumped. Then he removed the flea’s final pair of legs.
“Hup!”
No response
“Hup!”
Still none.
The technician nodded wisely and finalized his report.
“When a flea loses all its six legs, “ he wrote, it becomes deaf.”
That’s all, folks. And have a great Christmas.
