License, anyone?

I received my new NYS Driver's License the other day. I'd had to go in person because I needed to take the vision test. They wouldn't let me use my old photo, so had to pose for a new one. That, needless to say, is hideous enough, but what's more disconcerting is that there appears to be a 3-D cobweb over my face. I tried to brush it off, but it remains. I hope it's a deliberate image, but I suppose it could be my eyes. Oh, well...

In the Money

A letter from the New York State Teachers Retirement System: "Dear Ms. S., Effective June 30, 2011, the monthly net payment you will receive from the NYSTR has changed. During June you received the eligibility requirements for a Cost-of-Living Adjustment. A gross amount of $0.36 will be added to this month's benefit payment. ...Please remember you can use the Secure Area of our Web site to view the breakdown of your monthly benefit." Too bad about the postage stamp.

Default

A drunk, and let's not lend dignity by the euphemism of alcoholic, is a fetid and bloated tick that attempts to suck the life out of any host, whether victim by consent or default.

Mysterious Missives and Watty

This could be filed under Desperate for A Ride
When Dorothy was still in high school, she received in the mail a series of anonymous letters, maybe 3 or 4 or so. I think they may have been signed secret admirer. She kept them for a while, but now they're gone, so I don't know all the details any more. The letters were typed and quite lengthy. I remember one of the letters told her that hair such as hers "should never be cut but be allowed to sweep the streets." We all got quite a laugh out of that. After the first letter or so, my father became intigued. Putting his amateur detective skills to work, he determined that they were written by an adult, and an educated one at that. The letters were not obscene in any way, but contained lengthy and flowery descriptions of her and her beautiful hair. The last letter she got asked her to meet the writer at the Valley Inn at a certain time. I'm pretty sure it was after dark. I know she and Sandy went to the designated meeting spot, and nothing came of it. We never found out who the sender was, BUT

A few years later, we were college students, and of course were still living at home, commuting all the way. We discovered we had a "Peeper." That was a rather innocuous name then for what today would be taken much more seriously. A man was seen to park his car in the parking lot of the old cinder block company next door, get out, and peer into the "middle room" window through where the lilac bushes were and still are. Then the window gave a clear view into the room where the TV was, and where Dorothy ,as well as others, would sit on the couch in the glow of the TY screen, and watch TV, She would probably have been combing her hair as she watched, as she had a habit of doing. I think Joe was in the army then, because I remember watching for the Peeper from his bedroom window. I think his routine was to come on Friday nights after Sara closed the store, which was 10:00 p.m. He would get out of the car and walk over to the driveway outside our house and peek through the bushes. He always seemed to be wearing a white shirt. My father used to say he was going to throw hot water on him from the window above, but he never followed through. Again, in those days, crime was not thought of, and so, I suppose, a lot of bizarre behavior went unreported if not unnoticed. But one Friday evening Ed O. and I decided to play detective ourselves.
We sat in his old blue Buick on the other side of the river across the bridge, and waited at the usual Friday night time. Of course we had the headlights turned off. We were not to be disappointed. Sara closed her store at 10, all was dark, and we saw a car pull into the lot, a distance away from the house, as usual. We held our breaths as a man got out, and walked over to the lilac bushes, and stood looking into the window. We waited a little while until we saw him start to leave and then Ed started his car and drove slowly across the bridge, watching the peeper's car just leaving the lot and start to drive upstreet. We followed, our headlights still off as our suspect turned left at the Methodist Church and then right into the alley, where the driver got out to open his garage door, which fronted on the alley, and put his car away. The car was a maroon sedan and the driver was Watty!

Watty
John and Helen w. lived in the big old house across from the Catholic Church, which later burned, and was replaced by the modular house there today. They probably moved here when we were in 7th grade or so. We didn't pay much attention to those things then. John was a professor at RPI, Helen was stay-at-home mother to 5 children, 4 boys and a girl. The youngest may even have been born while they lived in Valley Falls. The parents were active members of the Catholic Church; the children were all really polite and well-behaved. I taught several of them years later, all nice kids, the only daughter a special joy to have in class. At one time when we were in 8th grade or so, Helen started a Girl Scout group, which I remember going to several times with Snookie, Dorothy, Lucille, and a few others, but nothing much happened so we just stopped going. So this was the background of Watty, who we later learned was "The Peeper."
We all knew by then that Watty was The Peeper. But we couldn't have been very afraid of him. When we would be waiting at Mancinelli's for a bus or the hope of a heavensent car ride, Watty would frequently drive down the hill from RPI and offer us a ride home. We 3 girls would all pile in,grateful as could be. He was a mild, friendly, soft-spoken man, as at ease and normal a person as you could find. One day, after he'd picked us up, he said he'd forgotten something in his office, and asked if we would mind if he went back to retrieve it. Of course we didn't. He left us in the car on the campus, and was gone for a very long time, maybe 45 minutes or so. It was long enough for us to talk about him, and mock him, etc., and I remember speculating if he'd hidden one of those new-age tape-recorders in his car so he could hear what we'd say about him. I think we might have addressed a few choice comments to him. We kind of recalled then that his specialty at RPI was electronics. I can't remember if that was the last ride he ever offered us, but it may have been.

Red Necks

You know you're a redneck when;
--you own 2 cars that you can't drive: one has no title, one has a lug-nut behind the wheel
--you have a swimming pool that has no water in it
---your refrigerator has a bungee cord--wait, make that 2 bungee cords--wrapped around it to hold the freezer door shut (Idea courtesy of Jake from N. Petersburgh)

College, Cars and Creeps. Part 11

During our sophomore and junior years, the commuter woes continued, though we were not alone. Rides to the city then were a hot commodity. Many working people and certainly very many students did not own cars. In today's economic climate, certainly conditions are bad, but in earlier times there was not today's sense of entitlement. If you didn't own a car, or couldn't find a ride to work or school, you had no one to blame but yourself. And that's why Dorothy and I, and I'm sure countless others, tried so hard to make the most of whatever opportunities came our way: in other words, why we didn't quit college in the face of such adverse circumstances. So for those last 2 years, we took whatever rides we could finangle, short of actual hitch-hiking. Ruth had taken an apartment on Madison Avenue for some of that time, finding roommates to split the rent. (At one time, Snookie lived with her, but that's another story.) Dorothy and I,and sometimes Joe, rode with Marge Leibert and her husband, though I don't think we could always count on a ride both ways. They would sometimes stop to grocery shop on the way home, leaving us to sit in the cold and darkened car. Anne Kelly rode with us then sometimes too, to Mildred Elley I believe. At various other times over the years, we rode with Dr, Littlefield, a professor at Albany State who lived in Valley Falls. That too is another story. We sometimes rode home with Fred Fisk; that's if we were standing at the end of the Watervliet Bridge,his having made it clear that he would never wait or go out of his way to give us a ride. I think he only charged us each $2 a week, pretty cheap even then for weekly one-way ride. He, though a seemingly conservative husband and father, drove like a madman, passing everything in sight all the way on Route 40. Bob Bott, former Marine and later manager of the Parkside, would sometimes give us a ride. (I remember one time, maybe during exam week, only Dorothy rode with him, and she told me on the way home, they stopped for coffee and a cigarette. I think she was 17 or so at the time. She started college at 16 and graduated when she was 20.) Of course, we always supplemented our rides with the train rides and countless bus rides. The train did not go through to Albany, so we had to transfer to busses and in the mornings, that would not have gotten us to our classes in time. All our classes had to be scheduled around the hours we could attend, so no early morning or late afternoon classes were possible. Many times in the evening hours, Dorothy and I and Ruth would be waiting at Mancinelli's to take the 5th Avenue bus ride home. On rare occasions, people would see us there and offer us a ride home---IN A CAR! We would leap at the opportunity, would have ridden with Satan, and so we came to accept rides from........

Watty!!! (TBC)

College, Cars and Creeps Part 1

Dorothy and I won NYS Regents Scholarships our senior year, a rarer feat then than now. It meant we would be able to attend college. Well, not any college, but Albany State Teachers' College, as it was then known. State colleges then had no tuition, and students had to pay only for registration and student union fees and books. The total amount of each scholarship was $1400 spread over 4 years, or $175 a semester. This was barely enough, but we made it do. My father was retired by then, on a pittance of a pension and there was no other money. So we were to go to college, but the big issue was transportation. Joe had already been at the college for one year, having been the first ever Hoosic Valley student to win one of those prized Regents scholarships. As I recall, he used to leave home at the break of dawn and hitchhike to classes or else find a person who usually drove in to Albany and would pick him up if he were on the road as he was enroute to work. I'm not exactly sure how he managed his commute but I knew it wouldn't work for Dorothy and me. Anyway, by good fortune, Ruth also enrolled at the same college. Her brother Ed had just finished his tour with the US Navy, and decided to get his Master's Degree that year at Albany State. As he didn't have a car at the start of the year, Jack Brackley, who had enrolled at Albany Business School, drove us all to Albany, Dorothy, Ruth,Ed, Joe and me, 6 in the car. I think it may have been a little out of his way, so as soon as Ed bought an old blue Buick, he took over the driving duties. There were the 5 of us until soon he was also driving his siste Ethel to her job at the state in downtown Albany. That meant for the rest of the year we had to leave really early for her to be at her job, and then fight the downtown traffic to pick her up at about 5:30 when she got off work. It made for a very long day but at least for that year, we had a dependable ride. And that was the only year that was true.

Sophomore year was a little more difficult, but not really the worst year in terms of commute. Ed still felt somewhat committed to helping his sister and us get to school. He had gotten a job as science teacher at St. Mary's Academy in Hoosick Falls, and he would drive us 3 girls (maybe sometimes Joe?) to Raymertown before his schoolday began. He would drop us off at the home of a former classmate of his, who was also out of his military service (Army), and was likewise, though a year later, enrolled to get his Master's degree. Dewey S. was a strange man, attached strongly to his mother, who kept a shotgun in her kitchen. Dewey acted kind of like "The Office's" Dwight Shroot. He was militaristic, very strongly opinionated, and really just plain weird. With no social skills, or attractiveness of any sort, he was a misfit even at Albany State, and that was saying a lot. He never had a girl friend, though I think he once asked Ruth out, sort of, and once I remember when Dorothy was in the front seat, he kind of fake-wrestled her for some reason, and got carried away enough for her to have to struggle against him and she found it very uncomfortable and did not like it at all.
Dewey had a different schedule, or agenda, and we usually did not ride home with him. We used to walk or take a city bus down to the Plaza at the end of State Street, and if we were lucky, transfer to another bus which would bring us in to Troy. Then we would go to the train station and buy a ticket to the Valley Falls Depot up at the end of town, and of course walk home from there. So on the days that we could find Dewey and wrangle a ride home with him, we were not too proud to beg.
Here is where I'm going to digress from the sad tale of how we got to school. and relate a creepy and tragic tale:
One of the reasons Dewey, as a lofty graduate student, did not want to bother with 3 mousy freshman girls, was that he had a crush on an upperclassman. She was a junior, as I recall, and a very sweet,polite, and quite attractive girl, with pretty reddish hair, possibly highlighted to look so. She lived in the Troy area, had gone to Catholic High. Like us, she commuted, as hardly any underclassmen had cars then; indeed not many college students at all owned cars back then. So she was in the same difficult-commute boat as we were. We found thst Dewey would avoid us and offer Carole a ride to her home. At first she accepted, but it grew obvious that Dewey was romantically interested in her, and she was too polite to tell him he had no chance in Hell. So on the days that she was to ride home with Dewey, and he'd be avoiding us, Carole would find us and so invite us to join her on the Dewey-ride home. She was invariably pleasant, friendly and just very nice. That would be a funny little tale except for what happened to her a few years later.

In the summer of 1960, we had just graduated from Albany State. Carole Segretta had graduated a few years earlier and was now a schoolteacher downstate, I think in Poughkeepsie. She was off to visit friends that summer day and she was shot to death in her car on the Taconic Parkway. There were no clues or reasons--I remember her mother in Troy, was upset because they reported the death of a redhead in lover's lane, but that was not true. Later reports said her car was just off on the side of the road, and she was not a wild person at all. Even then newpapers lusted for the sensational with no regard for the truth. There were no clues except she'd been shot 4 times in the head with a very rare ammunition. My father was always very interested in detective stories and crime solving. I remember his, knowing what he knew about Dewey, writing a letter to the State Police about his rebuffed advances to her. The State Police sent him a letter back, saying Dewey had already been interviewed and ruled out as a suspect. This was not surprising for several reasons, one of which was that one of Carole's best college friends, Aggie Isler, was the daughter and/or/sister of a Troy cop, maybe both. Carole's death was not solved until years later, when another victim, or maybe more, had been shot to death with the same rare ammunition. They arrested and sentenced some crazy guy who would have been only 14 years old when he killed Carole Segretta. He may well be out of jail by now, who knows. I saw Dewey several years after that, and he looked terrible and acted insane. Maybe being innocent living under a cloud of suspicion does that to a person, or maybe he just went nuts all on his own. He's dead now.

Thank you, Faithful Blog,....

(Apologies to Jimmy Fallon)
....for being there after my mind-boggling conversation with the albatross.
He says he can't leave until the 8th. I say he must. He says he has nowhere to go til then. I tell him to get a room. He says oh, no he doesn't want to stay in a room! I say we all must sometimes do what we don't want to do. He says Dorothy would not want him to be homeless. I say then stay with your son. He says the last word Dorothy ever spoke was his name. I say Dorothy is dead. (I'm afraid that was a horrible thing to say and it makes me feel like crap.)

He said he wants to settle things in a friendly way. He wants to sit and talk. I tell him we already did that. He said he means with no lawyers. He said he could hire, or could have hired, a lawyer also. I said yes, but lawyers cost money. He said he could borrow the money.

I tell him that I'd just gotten home from spending the day with a single (well, sort of) mother of 3 kids, ages 9-13, who will be evicted June 30th also. She has no money, vehicle, or place to go, and ironically enough I have worked with the family for 11 years, since the older were a baby and a toddler, and the youngest not yet born. I tell him that I feel bad for them, but cannot help them any further. He says they are not family. He is, Dorothy's family, and therefore my family. I feel like killing somebody.
Thank you, Faithful Blog, for letting me vent further. He says that every single one of his paychecks went into their joint account, and that I should extract enough from that account to pay the bills. I tell him that I'd been to the SEFCU office, that there had never been a joint account, and that what was owed in home equity and car loans there was 25 times the amount in the account. He says he didn't know that. He says the reason he has no credit and owes $30,000 is that the economy went bad. He reminds me that Dave lost his job then also. I say that we did not go into debt then, and that I am still working at an ancient age. He says all he wants is for all the family to sit down and talk about Dorothy and their love for each other. I say the time for talk has passed and we need to take action, in the form of his leaving. And I tell him that I will need his address so that we can drive the car there and remove the plates. He says he will be driving the car, and that if I take the plates, how can he get new ones. He needs the car to be able to work. I tell him to work now, and that it will not be my problem how he gets new plates, tell him to ask his son for help. I remind him that if he's not gone by the 30th, no car, no cash. He wants to talk to Marilyn. I don't own a gun.

I plan to delete this blog, but for some reason it made me feel a little better to post it here. I don't know why. If anyone read it, they would say I'm stupid to have had still another conversation with such a manipulative bastard and I know it's true. But other things are true also, and I wish they weren't.

Irony of ironies

I am being driven crazy by a madman.

Chilling Memory

I have this written in one of my notebooks somewhere, with the accurate dates, and when I find the notes, I'll check the dates, etc., but I think it's pretty clear in my memory:
It was a hot summer vacation day in 1988, and all the big kids were involved in their own activities, leaving Danny and Jimmy, who were 11 and 10, both little kids for their ages. Danny, influenced by his brother and sister's interests, wanted to see the U2 movie, "Rattle and Hum," and though Jimmy was a little young to be interested in it yet, the 3 of us went to the Clifton Park theater, probably around noon. It was vacation time, and as often was the case in Clifton Park, the theater was not busy at all; as a matter of fact we were the only 3 people at that showing. I sat near the back of the theater in the center section, and Danny and Jimmy sat further down toward the screen. I remember that about 20-30 minutes into the movie, a man came in by himself and sat in the left section, about midway toward the screen. Danny was involved in the movie, Jimmy got a little bored and was absently rolling a quarter down the center aisle, very quietly, not bothering anyone, as he was away from the only other person who'd just come into the theater. I closed my eyes to listen to the music; there wasn't really a plot, just the filming of U-2's tour. When I looked up, the man who had entered was now seated just behind Danny and Jimmy. I guess I thought he must have wanted a center seat, but he was right behind the boys. Danny must have felt uncomfortable because he, with Jimmy, changed their seat, and after a short time, the man was right behind their seat again. This time, alarm bells went off and the boys came up to where I was seated, and commented on the man. We were in Clifton Park where we'd gone for years and felt very comfortable and safe, and I remember whispering to them that they'd encountered their first pervert. I told them not to go to the bathroom, though I'm sure my kids had done so before, and I said that instead of eating at the McDonld's that was then in the mall, we'd wait and go to the one in Mechanicville, (which we did.) So far , so good. But then, I did something, in retrospect, probably stupid and potentially disastrous. After the show, the man exited the way he'd come in--to the left. I told the boys to stay where they were, seated in the back of the theater, and I went out the exit the man had used. BUT as I was in the exit, the man had not left, but was standing about half way in the exit, with his back to the side wall, as if waiting for someone, but there had been no one else in there! I had only seen the back of his head, so I took a good look, and came very close to asking him why he was standing there, but I didn't. He seemed neither old nor young, not tall, not short, dressed in the kind of green Docker-style pants and short-sleeve button shirt that a lot of teacher-types wore in the summer. I quickly circled back into the theater--Danny was mad at me because I'd left them. I guess his instincts were stronger than mine had been. On the way out, Danny saw the man go into the bathroom, and we hurried to my car, kind of shaken, but also joking about it. Up to then, I knew that there were perverts who exposed themselves in movie theaters, and that's what we were thinking. A short time later, a man tried to grab a young girl off the street in Pittsfield, in broad daylight. She screamed, shrugged herself out of her backpack, which he'd grabbed. He was caught and in his truck were ropes and duct tape. His picture was in the papers---I recognized him as the man in the theater, LEWIS LENT. He had been studying at the Clifton Park Bible School, located in an old church across from the mall. Even eerier,one of Danny's classmates's fanily had attended that same church, knew Lewis Lent as a helpful church-goer. He had been to their Stillwater home many times, and had played games with the boy's younger sisters. Except for the boy's telling Danny, though, I don't think the family ever revealed it; they must have been terrified when they found out. Lewis Lent was accused of 2 more separate child murders, a boy, Jimmy Bernardo,whose body was found hanging from a tree, and a girl, a minister's daughter, whose body was never found. Both were pulled off the bikes they were riding. Lent was never convicted of the girl's death, but I understand Lent is presently serving a life term for the Bernardo murder. If you google, you can read more about his propensity to live in churches as a custodian, and to frequent movie theaters. Whenever I think that things are not going well, I am reminded of this and our near escape from what almost certainly was a horrible tragedy.

Word to my Bro!

One day when I used to go to what I saw as work, but now know was a type of play, (It was fun for sure,well sort of), we had to play a role to show us how hard it was to talk in a way we were not used to. All of us had to make sure not to use any long word, with a base of not more than four. It was very hard for some of us, but, not to brag my talk sped by. I had the gift to seem dumb. Now, as long ago, I try to do this to keep my mind sane. In my car, I try to show I can play that game even now. It is easy to play out what we did at the one year mark, but I still do it from time to time. It is a lost art as only one or two are left of the ones who were on the job then. (It may be more fun and apt than the "Sir" mind test.)

The News Today

Throw on the late Jeanne's bedazzled and sequined sweatshirt, and attend a gay wedding, then don a rumpled trenchcoat and go to the mobster's Boston arraignment. Hurry, before it's too late.

Ma gets out of Troy.

Mary Donovan moved from Troy to Pittstown when she was about 11 ot 12 years old. Her older brother Timothy had died when the scaffolding broke at the shirt factory building where, at the age of 18, he was working to support his then fatherless family, their father having succumbed to TB when Mary was less than a year old. Their mother learned of Timmy's death in the paper, communication being what it was in the early 1900's. When she finally received the death benefit, $200, Ellen wanted to move her family out of that city she associated with the death of her eldest child, so she bought the house in the country. There Mary and her older sister Helen attended the Cooksboro school. Helen (Ellen) was a docile and cooperative student. Mary was not. She was often reminded throughout her school years that she "was nothing like her sister Ellen."

Dance with the Broom Not!
Mary at age 11 was at her adult height of 5 feet, 9 inches, the tallest person in her class, and taller than the teacher. That height was very unusual for women of her generation; all through her life, it was difficult for her to find dresses long enough, and women wore those "housedresses" at all times, never pants. So when Mary moved to her new school, she was already conscious of her height. That along with being very poor (no social services for single mothers then) and being in a new school made her feel awkward and easily embarrassed. On one of the first days in her new school, the teacher led a recess session, during which she played the piano, and when the music started, the children were all to find partners to dance with. The person left without a partner was to dance with the broom, the utilitarian broom kept in the one room schoolhouse. Mary, not knowing any of the other students besides being unfamiliar with the game, was, predictably, the child left standing alone, and was ordered by the teacher to dance with the broom. Mary may have been too tall for her age, painfully poor, friendless and socially inept, but there was absolutely no way she was going to dance with any broom. The teacher was just as determined that she was going to do exactly that. And so began a strife-ridden schoolyear for Mary. I don't know all that ensued, but one point my mother made clear----she never did dance with the broom.

Those nuns...
All the Donovan kids attended Catholic school when they lived in Troy. When they were dismissed from school, they were to walk in pairs to the end of the block, and then go their individual ways. When Matt was about 12 or 13, he was in the process of walking to the end of the block when a hay wagon passed by. He jumped on the haywagon to hitch a ride. A nun-teacher saw him and tried to get him back in line by pulling his ear. It must have been very painful, because Matt instinctively slugged the nun. That was his last day of school. He never went back, and they never went looking for him either.

Rolando

I called Rolando at his home today and arranged to drive to his home in Vermont to have him sign some papers to apply for our program's Summer PASS program. He is 18 and an excellent soccer player, runner and wrester. It had been raining all day, and when I got to his house, he was standing outside with an umbrella, and walked over to my car to escort me in, holding the umbrella over me. At that moment I loved him and his entire family.

Thunder and/or Lightning

When my brother was a boy, he had an intense fear of thunder or lightning,or both. Usually at the first sign of a storm, he would disappear into his bedroom, and pile all the blankets and covers on top of him, even if the weather was very warm, which it often was during those summer storms. If the storm struck suddenly, catching him downstairs, he would go into the deep closet underneath the stairway, and re-emerge after the storm was over. My mother used to tell him that he'd suffocate from the heat, but of course that didn't happen.

Fears of later childhood

When Dorothy was a few years older, her fear of fiddle cases and automobile tires were translated into a more universal fear. She had a horror of fire and of wind. They haunted her dreams and she would every so often wake in the night crying in terror from her dreams of fire, or of the sound of the wind. We slept in the same bed then, and while I didn't share her fear of the elements, I was frightened by her fear. I didn't understand her night terrors, but I was old enough to know they were real.

Big and Black

When my sister was very little, she was afraid of 2 things: 1)my father's violin case,which was stored propped up behind the couch. It stood taller than she was then, was black with round silver case protectors, the top 2 of which she thought looked like eyes. They kind of did too. She did not want to look at it. 2) She was also afraid of automobile tires, not those on the car, but the tires which were stored in the barn. Off the car and propped up against the wall in the barn, they were higher than her head, and of course were black. Once my parents put me on top of the tire and rolled it around the floor to show her that she didn't have to be afraid. I was thrilled at the ride and the attention. I wasn't afraid of anything then.

Frivolity

I wrote a letter the other day, for such a minor reason, all things considered, that I hesitate to document it even here. The subject was Medical Billing, in the amount of $17 and change. Since 2006, the billing agency has been including the same charge as due along with our other charges which I promptly pay, subtracting the $17.00. The issue is this: our secondary insurance (BC/BS) paid that amount, but the billing company says they shouldn't have and, according to their bookkeeping records, they will (or could) have to return that amount "at some time in the future." I say that when that day comes and they return the amount that BC/BS paid them on my behalf, I will promptly pay THEM the $17.00. It seems so cut and dry to me, but I was never very good at bookkeeping.

The law has teeth.

Law

The need was imminent
And the price was steep.
But when he learned
That the value was low,
And saw the tooth-less man,
Appearances being what they are
He wavered a little.
Just a little, but perhaps
Enough to show
That we are all too human,
And that sometimes
Things are not as they seem,
And sometimes they are.

Yuck to Corny Cupcakes

Yesterday my daughter gave me a copy of the new Woman's Day magazine---"Celebrate America" edition. The cover features a brightly colored picture of cupcakes skewered and decorated to look like corn on the cob. "Oh, what a cute idea," she said. But when the 7-year-old looked at the picture, he saw corn on the cob. When he found out that it was actually cupcakes made to look like corn, he involuntarily gagged. So much for that idea.

Cats---40+ years of them

Shortly after we moved into this house, my mother, discomfited by anyone's not owning a pet of some kind, gave us a little black female kitten. She was very sleek with yellow eyes, and we had the open garage for her to go in and out of at will. Our first baby was born that year, 1969, and then her brother was born the next year, so I didn't have much time to devote to the cat. We never even named her, just called her The Black Cat. Though Dave didn't have time either, the cat took a liking to him, and would be out of sight all day and appear when he got home from work. We have a picture of Dave standing on a ladder cleaning the eaves with the cat on his shoulders. The cat lived long enough (probably2-3 years) to have 2 litters of kittens, which I seem to remember taking to Requate's farm. One day I came home and saw the cat dead by our mailbox, victim of having been hit by a car. I felt much worse than I would have thought, and called Dave at work. I wrapped it in a pink baby blanket, and Dave buried it when he got home from work.
Shortly after that, when the mourning period was over, Ma gave David a little tiger kitten which he'd admired at her house. We called it Tiger, and we decided to keep it inside. But one day it sneaked out and was hit and killed by a car. I think it was only 7 months old.
One day when we were at Ma's, she presented a basket with 3 beautiful, long-haired kittens in it. She'd gotten them from a woman who needed to find them homes. She asked us which one we wanted, and we picked the prettiest little girl kitten, with pastel orange, gray and white coloring. (One of the others became Madigan's Heidi and Ma kept the orange one.) David was 3 years old and it was to replace his kitten. He named her Roger, after "roger, over and out" which he'd heard on TV. David told the girls at the bank that his cat was pink and gray. They thought he didn't know colors, but she really was a pinkish color. We kept her inside, though she escaped several times. She used to lay low around the corner in the hall, and when someone opened the door, would run like crazy to get out before she could be stopped. "Watch out for the cat!" was the word whenever anyone came into or out of the house. Though she managed to escape several times, Roger lived for 15 years, and we had her put down when David was a freshman in college. Talk about the empty nest.
On the Veteran's Day that Danny started 7th grade, I visited the Menands Animal Shelter, just to look. My mother was gone by then, so if I was even thinking about another replacement cat, it would have to be up to me. There were lots of cats and quite a few kittens. I saw a tiny little gray kitten with huge eyes, so I picked it out of the cage as you were allowed to do then. I had intended to get a female if I were to get one at all. I was told the little kitten was a male and was about to put it back in the cage, when a worker approached the adjoining cage with a cardboard box, and began putting those kittens in it. Someone said ominously that their time was up. I was horrified that they would continue to pile the kittens into the box so I could not put the little thing I was holding back in there. That is how I adopted Nike. He was so small that I drove home with him in the palm of my hand, and he was content to stay that way for the whole drive. I stopped at the school to pick up Danny, and he held him for the short ride home. They must have formed a bond then which would later be very useful. Nike was a Maine Coon Cat, and different from any cat we'd ever known. He was friendly enough, but would lie on the floor next to us, not a lap cat at all, independent and aloof. He grew very long and large with tufted ears and a kind of mane aroud his neck. On the few occasions he'd found his way outside when a door was inadvetently left open, he'd disappear into the woods behind our house. He would hide and refuse to come when we called him, but after a long while, we'd hear his distinctive voice, more a growly howl than a meow. Even more frightening than his sound was that he would resort to his feral nature in the tall weeds, and transform into a hissing wildcat. He would howl and growl and spit at anyone who approached. Danny was the only one who had nerve enough to go pick him up and bring him inside. Sometimes Nike would hole up under the end table in the living room, and act the same way. We depended on Danny to be the wildlife handler. Dave wouldn't have gone anywhere near him even if he'd had that ten-foot-pole, and I was put off by his fangs and the sharp claws on his giant-sized feet. But most of the time Nike was a docile and interesting animal; he would retrieve anything you threw just like a dog would. He also would knock all pens and pencils off the tables and paw them underneath the couch, piling up his own hoard of writing instruments. When he was 10 years old, he started to lose weight, unusual for him. We brought him to the vet's who first could find nothing wrong with him, then did extensive and expensive tests of all kinds, eventually telling us that he had multiple organ failure of unknown causes. Barbara brought us to the vet and he was euthanized. I wrapped him in a pink towel, and Dave buried him.
After a year went by, I again visited the Menands Shelter, and ended up adopting an even tinier all gray, long-haired female kitten. She was to be my cat, since the nest was totally empty by then. I named her Napster. I remember when I was doing the paperwork at the shelter desk, they told me she would need to be de-fleaed. I was surprised to see that she was absolutely ridden with fleas, so when I got her home, I put the box on the kitchen floor and went to the store to get flea soap. While I was gone, Marilyn let herself into the house, saw the box on the floor, thought there was vermin or something in it, and kicked it across the room. Napster was ok, was soon given a flea bath, and was the sweetest little cat we'd ever owned. She loved to sit on laps, and she was obsessed with water, would go into the bathroom and sit in the tub to wait for the water. She would curl up in the bathroom sink and if you left the faucet drip a little would lie there and enjoy the water. When she knew that someone was in the bathroom, she would scratch at the door and the carpet until the door was opened. (The carpet still bears the claw marks in front of the bathroom door,) Once she even turned the faucet on by herself, and she would frequently open the door of the medicine cabinet. We never knew why, but she liked to take the Q-tips and other objects out of the medicine cabinet and play with them. She never was interested in going outside, so I thought we'd have her a long time. But she too started losing weight and then her appetite. We brought her to the same vet as before, and same story. Her organs all failed simultaneously for no known reason. She died before the scheduled euthanasia date. She was only 3 years old. She died on Valentine's Day. The ground was frozen so Dave entombed her in a styrofoam cooler, completely sealed it with an entire roll of duct tape, and laid it outside until spring burial. Our dog Cosmo died unexpectedly that spring, and Dave and Joe T. buried the 2 pets in a single grave, with Napster's small coffin on top of Cosmo's. I thought maybe our last 2 cats' deaths were because they'd received their inoculations at too early an age at the shelter, so I vowed not to adopt from there again if ever I was to get another cat. Dave even had a radon test peformed in our cellar, but the reading was so low as to be non-existent.
Our present (and last) cat is Maybe. I actually bought her in a very weak moment. My whole family happened to be away that week, and I went just to look at some advertised kittens. The mother was a purebred Persian and her father was a purebred Maine Coon; she had long blondish-orange fur, the snub face of her mother and the great big eyes of her father, so I caved in, wanting to see how she would turn out. She was a little older and bigger than the other kittens when we got them. She was 7 weeks old and strong. She got out of the box twice on the way home, even after I pulled the car over, turned the box upside down and piled books on top of it. From Clifton Park, she rode home clinging to the inside of the roof of the car, and yowling all the way. I let her out of the box when we arrived home at about 11:00 a.m. She was panting, terrified, wild-eyed, and she disappeared almost instantly. I thought she was destined to die of heatstroke so I spent the whole day trying to locate her, to no avail. After 8 or 9 hours, I called Rosemary who came up to support me, then Marilyn got home and she tried to find the cat, but only heard what she thought were mice or rats in the playroom closet, and pretty much freaked out. I said "maybe" I have a cat, or "maybe" she is dead by now. Finally Marilyn called Joe T. who came up around 11:00 p.m. and turned over the couch, moved other furniture, again to no avail. Eventually he found her under the cupboard in the kitchen, her looking quite serene and composed. I'd already looked there, so suspected she must have been moving around from place to place all those hours I'd been looking for her. I said "maybe" I'll keep her. She turned 6 years old on June 9.

All those darn sheep...

.....running around make me romantic, said Marlowe's shepherd.
"Come live with me and be my my love
And we will all the pleasures prove...
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle."

Part 6 The Move and the Spoon

We were moving from the house on the curve into the village of Valley Falls. Everything was hectic, and again nobody had any time for kids. Our parents were piling what they could into our old car, and I think maybe Matt was helping. Of course, a moving van was not even a consideration, and anybody we knew drove only the standard passenger car. What belongings you couldn't fit into a car or on its roof, you left behind. The way of the migrant. I wanted to help, but nobody could take the time to explain or listen, so I went out to where the cage holding my pet rabbit was and started to think of how I could help move. I saw a large wooden spoon that someone had used at one time to stir green paint, so I put that in the cage, and maybe even a few other things. I thought I was doing something important and tried to tell somebody about it when suddenly some big person came along and rolled the cage end over end into the trunk of the car. I was devastated because I thought the spoon would fall out. But it didn't and when we got to our new home I retrieved it, grateful that my bit of helping had survived the move. So far, so good. But on a morning not long after,maybe the next day, I was admiring the spoon and how the green paint made it look pretty, when my mother, harried and on her way out of the door to do chores, saw me with the spoon. "What are you doing with that old thing?" she scolded, and lifted up the lid of the wood stove and threw the spoon in, as she left the house to do outside chores. Once again, I started crying and Joseph came to my rescue. Maybe he felt sorry for me, or maybe he just wanted to play with fire. He lifted the lid of the stove, reached in, retrieved the spoon, only slightly singed as the fire was low, and handed me the hot spoon. "Here," he told me, "but don't ever say I had anything to do with it." I stood frozen with fear, terrified that my mother would come in and see me with the spoon she'd just tossed in the stove. I knew I had to get rid of it. I ran out the door in the living room which then opened to the deserted part of the house that was later the store, but at the time held the remnants of what had been the old barroom. I threw the spoon down into the open floorboards, in a hot and guilty flush. I never told and I never saw the spoon again. Years later, when the store was being demolished, I did sort of look for it, but it stayed buried.

Chapter 5 Whose Angina?

In that house I became very sick. We were "playing toys." We had a big cardboard box that held all the toys we 3 kids owned, many of them hand-me-downs, but the box held all our childhood imaginary play. We looked forward to playing with the contents, except for the Erector Set parts that Tommy had given to Joe. I think Tommy had worked on a garbage truck for a time, and since he then did not have a son, donated his find to Joseph. I hated those mismatched metal parts. I didn't think they belonged with our mostly animal or farm-related collection of toys. We had 2 ways of playing with our farm animal and dog collections. One was "for real" and the other was "make on." Joe, the oldest, was always the decider and that was fine with us. except this one day, I had built a fence around my animals, and Joe changed the rules and started the imaginary where fences didn't matter. Uncharacteristically, I rebelled and left the room and went into the kitchen, crying and upset. Our parents were bringing firewood in from a tree my father had cut down. They were busy and working hard and my mother didn't have time to hear my side of the story, which made me even sadder. I remember throwing up into the woodbox behind the stove. That got my mother's undivided attention. I got really sick and Dr. Sproat had to come to the house many times. Eventually he diagnosed me with a disease called Vincent's Angina. I wouldn't eat and told my mother I wanted to die. She used to send Dorothy and Joseph in to my sick bed and have them tell me that what they were eating was delicious, but I didn't care. I was sick for a long time but eventually got better. In later years I looked that disease up and found it was another name for Trench Mouth, a disease primarily of soldiers in the trenches. I think Dr. Sproat must have guessed wrong; certainly there were no tests of any kind. When I was little though, I did used to like to chew on marbles or little smooth stones, so I guess I could have put some nasty germs into my mouth. It's a wonder I lived as long as I have. P.S. I just read my own post and Epiphany! I could have gotten those germs from that old erector set that Tommy pulled out of somebody's garbage....

Part IV The boneyard

That house had an enclosed fenced in yard, so small that it was more like a cage. In that pen was a large dog, a Doberman Pinscher I remember, and it stayed in that pen for the whole time (maybe) we lived there. It did not belong to us, but to Bill O'Neill, the very same man who we later learned was Sara's nephew. He would stop in every so often, though it didn't seem to be often enough for the dog's sake, and he would throw a bunch of bones over the fence into the dog's pen. The ground the dog walked on was a maze of old bones, the entire area was a bunch of old white bones. I don't think the dog had a name, or at least we didn't know it, (Blackie, maybe?) I don't think it was ever taken out of the pen either. It seemed pretty friendly as I remember, glad to see anyone. In retrospect, I hope my mother fed it between the bone drops, though I never thought about it at the time.

Part 111

In the house on the curve, although that house is gone now, was a room we weren't supposed to go into. We rented the house, but one room was off-limits. And not just us kids, but the room was to be off-limits to even the adults. My father couldn't have cared less about stuff like that, but with my mother it was a different story. The room didn't have a lock so to keep intruders out, there was stuff piled against the door so it wouldn't open. Don't ask me how they had managed to rig things that way, but people were creative out of necessity back then. One day my mother put my brother and me on alert: "If you see anyone coming, let me know right away,"she told us. "I'm going in." And so she did. She managed to pry open the door a crack, reach in to move the boxes and junk back out of the way far enough for her to squeeze inside and then closed the door behind her. I was so afraid that someone migh come to the door, but I was more afraid that she would not come out and I'd never see her again. But nobody came to the door; all visitors were rare. My mother did come back out and she told what was behind that secret door. "Nothing but old furniture and bits and pieces of junk," she informed us. But then she told us something intriguing----laid on the top of each piece of the old tables and dressers, there in plain sight was a nickel. She told us it was a trap, that if someone had gone into the room, they would have taken the money, and then the owner would have known of the intrusion. She was insulted that anyone would have thought her a thief,and a stupid one at that. It reaffirmed in my mind that Germans were pretty bad. P.S. Just to be defiant, my mother did take one item from the room. It was a small toy figure, a bulldog, made of tin, which was corroded at the back.
She gave it to us to play with, but we didn't like the broken and ugly thing.

Part 11 Schreib's house

Mrs. Schreib had a daughter who worked in New York City. She would come to visit her mother from time to time. The daughter (Joe may remember her name: was it Anna?) may have been an attractive woman, but I don't think I ever saw her, either. One time for some reason, it must have been some business dealing, she needed my father to drive her somewhere. My mother evidently had assumed we would all be going,(any trip was a major and exciting event), but my father told my mother it didn't look business-like to go anywhere with a carful of kids, so we stayed home. My mother was very hurt and insulted, and who knows, maybe a little suspicious---after all my father was consorting with the enemy.

The German House

Part 1: We lived in the house on the curve outside the village before we moved into the village. I remember a lot of things that happened there, even though I was four years old for most of the time we lived there. I suppose most of my memories could be faulty but I think they're pretty accurate, as from a 4-year-old's perspective. No one ever discussed much with us, but I listened whenever I could. We had no electricity, so no radio even. The owner was Mrs. Schreib or maybe Schribe. I never saw her, but it seems her house was on a hill which we could see from our house. Rumor was that when the blackout siren blew, and everyone was to put out all lights and/or cover their windows, that she would leave her lights on, thereby letting the German airplanes know where to drop their bombs. They never did, though, but I remember being very scared hearing those sirens in the night. I seem to recall some of us hiding in a closet during those dreaded Blackouts. Daddy served a term as a "Warden" as it seems every man had to or was expected to do. He used to cut a piece of cardboard to place over his headlights so the light beam was directed downward and then do his duty of driving around to see if people were complying with the blackout rules. He took that responsibility very seriously, though now it seems so absurd that any foreign bomber planes would target as sparsely a populated area as we lived in. I also remember his rolling up pieces of tinfoil but I didn't know why, maybe to drop off at collection center.

English, please

I like the English language and hate to see it misused. I don't mean misuse through slang or technology, or any needed adaptation, but how does any woman get to be called another woman's wife, and how would it sound if Karen Carpenter's song had been titled "Close WITH You?

Girl in a Cage

To my great joy, my bantams Dick and Polly reproduced. Polly hatched the tiniest, cutest little chicks ever. Since Dick was a pure black Cochin (maybe) and Polly was a Silver Seabright, the babies were all different colors, and I was fascinated with them. I had given each chick a name, and they were very tame. I would go into their enclosure, (chicken wire sides and top since they needed to be protected) and I would nestle all the babies in my arms and the skirt of my dress, where they would cuddle down and go to sleep. I'd be reluctant to move when all(probably 6 or 7)of the chicks were sleeping at the same time. I'd just sit there in the sun and watch them. The chicken cage was at the bottom and in front of where our garden was then, and in full view of the sidewalk in front of our house, which had Sara's store on the front part of the house. One day, while I was lulling my chickens, I heard my mother who was in the side yard, call out to someone on the sidewalk, "No, she's just playing with the baby chicks." A man going into the store, a salesman I think, had asked her if the little girl was locked in the cage. When I think of it, a great many of my early memories had to do with my feeling embarrassed, guilty, or ashamed. It's a wonder I'm able to function as well as I do.

Dandelion Wine and Dick

My mother did not approve of alcohol by all accounts, but for years, she made and bottled dandelion wine. We used to help her pick the dandelions. She would buy oranges and lemons and let the brew ferment for what seemed a long time. Then she would bottle the brew and give it to friends and relatives. Everybody seemed to like it. Since she made it herself, and from fresh natural ingredients, she probably didn't regard it as an alcoholic beverage in any real sense. We as young kids were allowed to drink it; I remember it as tasting kind of fruity and very sweet. Anyway, when the time came to bottle the brew, she would strain the liquid and throw the fermented oranges and lemons out into her flower garden right outside the kitchen door. The year I got my pair of bantams, they were what would now be considered free-range poultry. Dick always scouted for food for Polly, so gallant on his part, and as it unfolded, almost so deadly. Dick found the fermented fruit slices, and clucked for Polly to join him, sampling each tidbit as he invited her to taste. We found Dick in the flower garden, and I thought he was dying---he was staggering, walking in circles, falling onto his side, and most alarming of all, he was throwing up. I hadn't even known it was possible for chickens to do that. He lived through it though, and never again was a drunken chicken.

Another Poultry Story

When I was about 7 years old, my mother ordered for me a pair of Bantam chickens from Murray McMurray Hatcheries. She'd ordered baby chicks from them for years; a lot of people did. They were shipped by mail, and in the spring when you went into the post office, you could hear the peeping from the baby chickens. The boxes had little round airholes punched in the sides. But my chickens were not to be the little baby chicks that would grow into adult barnyard hens and roosters. My chickens were to be already grown adult purebred Bantams. Every day since my mother told me they were coming, I would run down to the post office, located on the corner then, which now is all apartments. Sometimes I would check several times a day; the waiting seemed like eternity. One day on a Friday afternoon, I ran down to get the mail and all that was there was a single yellow postcard, which I put on the kitchen counter, having lost all hope of the chickens coming before the weekend. The next day my mother picked up the postcard, and read that "Your birds are ready to be picked up at the Railroad Depot", upstreet in the Village. I guess they must have been too big for post office delivery. And because that office was closed on Saturday, I had to wait til the next Monday to get them. I felt embarrassed for not having read the postcard, but when we finally got the bantams the next day, I was so excited I forgot the agony of all the waiting. The rooster was all black with very red comb and wattles; we named him Dick. The hen was tan flecked with silvery white, smaller than Dick; she was Polly. I loved owning those bantams; I had them for a long time, and in a perfect world, I would still own bantams today.

Church thoughts

Sometimes when I sit in church, there are long periods of time when nothing is happening or else I am not paying attention. During the lull of those times, I honestly think that everything I've ever done in my life and evey single thought I have ever had pass through my mind. It is like eternity, and it is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, just a kind of recognition of how everything happened.

Lassie

When my dog died, I was 19 years old and I had had her since I was 8. I took her collar, wrapped it in tissue, put it in a box, and stashed the box away in my dresser drawer. Now, too many years later, I still have Lassie's collar. It's in my file cabinet, along with with what I thought were important papers when I placed them there over the years. The other day I opened the box with my dog's collar. It looks the same as when it was filed, and it even has that doggie odor. I don't know what to do with any of those things. Maybe all that stuff will self-destruct, kind of the way Grandfather's Clock stopped tick-tocking.

Death Wish Hoarder

Sometimes I want to take everything that was hers, or my mother's, or every single thing that belonged to my children and store those things safely in my home forever. And sometimes, since there is no such thing as forever, I wish every single trace of all that I have saved would just disappear, self-incinerate or something, and take away all the memories that I thought would bring peace and joy.

What I Saw, by Dorothy

The eyes of my sister,
full of fear,
of hope
of love
of courage
Calling out, yet silent,
while she spoke the words
needed to recount the story.
With courage the victor
made possible by hope and love.

The eyes of her husband,
when first they met mine,
fighting, struggling to deny
the sight of bitter reality.
Haunted by anguish,
yet veiled by bravery,
He knew the loneliness of man.

The eyes of the child,but a baby,
half-open in narcotic slumber, yet shining.
Sparkling with the glow of life,
That radiance warmed my heart with hope.

My mother's eyes,bewildered, questioning,
With faith her life-long support,
Still her first words to me
Phrased the question as old as man,
But which no man will ever answer.

My husband's eyes, sympathetic,helpless,
Afraid of life when things go bad,
But too proud to admit it.
He tried to hide his shock, For others' sake.

The eyes of his sister,
When first she saw him,
Home fom the hospital,
Just waking up,
She smiled her beautiful smile.
But I saw her eyes flash
upward for an instant,
As though she looked for an
answer or support.

Mad World and Hallelujah

"I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad,
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had."

"I've been here before. I've seen this room and I've walked this floor.
I used to live alone before I knew you."

A Poultry Story

And there are quite a few. This one is from the time we lived in Schmidt's house, as I recall. Tommy and Agnes were visiting. Tommy was kind of a wild man for his time, kind of crazy and unconventional. I think there was a time he didn't have a job,and later he worked nights. Anyway, we were all out in the back yard, and we had chickens running around all over the place, free-range they'd be called nowadays. My mother said one of the hens was acting sick, and she picked it up and showed it to Tommy and Agnes. They'd felt its crop, and evidently determined there was a too-large foreign object that the chicken had swallowed---you should know that chickens will eat almost anything. The chicken was in distress. "I can fix that," Tommy offered. My mother held the chicken while Tommy took out his penknife, cut open the crop area (bloodless surgery as I recall, or maybe just lost in the feathers) and they fished out the offending obstruction. I think it was a stone. Chickens need grit to grind their food, but this chicken had gone too far, sizewise. My mother used a large sewing needle and thread to sew up the incision. They put the chicken down on the ground, the chicken took off, operation a success. The only thing was that my mother must have sewn the incision a little too tight and the chicken walked with a limp for the rest of its life. Picture this---chicken takes a step, its head goes down,next step, head goes up, and so on. We always knew that chicken.

The Buffalo

This is not my earliest memory, but it's one of the earliest. We were living in the yellow "tenant house" on the Bates' farm in Melrose. My brother and I were outside on the porch when he told me to look at that buffalo on the porch of the main house, brick as I recall, across the driveway. "A big black buffalo,"he said, "just standing there." So I looked and saw the big black buffalo, just standing there, exactly as he'd said. I don't think I thought any more about it: I definitely wasn't scared, thought it was interesting. But later, I remember my mother questioning me in a serious tone: what had I seen? It turned out, it seems, that my brother had become sick and was running a fever, one of the few things my mother was terrified of. She had been inside--Dorothy must have been a little baby then, or maybe even not yet born. Joseph had been raving and talking about the buffalo on the porch next door, as well as (I think at that time) being very afraid of the furniture legs that had animal carvings on them. I have one of those vivid memories of being questioned by my mother as to what I'd seen , and I knew it was important, though didn't understand why. You should understand that back in those days, and certainly in our family, adults seldom asked children questions about anything, what answers could kids possibly have? I know I told my mother I'd seen the buffalo, remember describing where it was standing, what it looked like. I don't know whether I reassured her or not. I was so little at the time I'm thinking I just accepted whatever my older brother told me. I have a memory of my mother saying it must have been a large black stray dog that we'd both seen. But you know, in my mind, I can still today see the image of that big black buffalo. It was standing at an angle facing toward the back part of the porch. And I'm not scared.

How to--fix that fridge

Ironically, or is it coincidentally. the first day I went back to doing what I do, I was in a home where I noticed that the family's refrigerator had a cord tied around the freezer of the refrigerator. The door wouldn't stay closed, they told me, so we put a cord around it and fastened it to a hook on the wall. I can relate, I said, but the way my refrigerator is placed, it's open-ended with no wall nearby. "No problem," the man of the house replied. "What you do is you drill a little hole in the edge of the door, insert a hook, and tie a bungee cord around the freezer." He even offered to do it for me, but I think I'll stick with the duct tape for now. The more I think about it though, maybe that will work. But should you drill a hole in your freezer door, I wonder.

Duct tape on fridge

So since life abruptly dealt a much stronger hand than dealing with a refrigerator that has a faulty freezer door, we had to come up with a quick fix; even in despair you can't have your refrigerator dripping water all over the kitchen floor, and destroyed food in your freezer,so we were forced to come up with our own solution. That is duct tape holding the freezer door shut. Otherwise, every time you open and then close the refrigrator door, the freezer door pops open, and the open-door alert has softly beeped itself out so we have no warning. Duct tape holds the door shut, but once you peel it back to open the door, you can't count on its being sticky enough to re-hold the door. So besides having had to eat those 3 Friendly Sundae Cups in a row, I have given up putting frozen blueberries on my morning cereal, and I don't even remember now what else is in the freezer. But help may yet be on the way. Read on...

Fridge Part II

Customer Service: I called to inquire about the warranty on my year-old refrigerator. The rep identified herself as Amber, and then pronounced a statement in a language I couldn't understand. I told her I didn't know what she said aand she answered that "it didn't matter" and asked for my telephone number. I did so and when asked the reason for my call, I said I was calling about the warranty on my Kenmore refrigerator. "The warranties do not apply to refrigerators," she told me. I answered that I was looking at the warranty. Then she said I'd had a service call on the fridge, and decided not to repair it. I'd done that once on another refrigerator, but never on this one. I don't know how that information even came up , if indeed it did, so I said that isn't true. Today is May 26 she said, you purchased it on May 23,2011, it was delivered on May 25, the warranty is effective from date of delivery, not the date of sale. I tried again, "For less than 24 hours, the warranty does not apply? And the refrigerator has been malfunctioning for about a month. May I speak to someone else?" She put me on hold while she went to contact another person. Some Bollywood-type music was playing, and if I had not hung up after a very long time on hold, I have the feeling I'd still be listening to that music.

The Refrigerator

In 1970, we bought a new Coppertone GE refrigerator. It never needed repairs to keep it working, though the glass shelves had cracked and were duct-taped together. Parts of the plastic interior trim were broken and even missing, but the refrigerator kept working. I'm sure it cost dollars more in energy use, but we were never aware of it. But in 2oo5, my son replaced the old GE with a brand new Maytag bottom freezer refrigerator. It had a four-year warranty and a mere month after the warranty expired, the refrigerator stopped cooling. We had a repair call, bought a replacement part and all was well for a few months when the great meltdown recurred. Enough, we decided and bought a new Kenmore, and trashed the 4 1/2 year old Maytag, as a lemon. We bought a brand new Sears Kenmore bottom freezer type on May 23, and it was delivered May 25 of 2010. The freezer door didn't really have a satisfactory feel to it when you went to close the door, but it beeped gently when ajar, so no problem. Or so we thought. One day in late April there was water on the floor, and the inside of the freezer was covered with frost. Shut the door, make sure it's tight. Repeat process a week or so later and then the next. One day the refrigerator's door was ajar long enough to soften the ice cream and I had to eat 3 Friendly's Sundae Cups in a single afternoon because you shouldn't refreze ice crea. By now the beeper door ajar signal is no longer working. Maybe it beeped itself out during the night. It turned out that every time the main door was closed, the freezer door popped open. So it's time to check the Warranty---next post.