Dancing With Shiva, Part 8

(Krishnan, center, with his cousins)

The boats for fishing just off the shore at Mahabalipuram are really no more than dugouts or logs lashed together with rope made from coconut fiber. Except for the addition of outboard motors to some of these rafts, fishing has been done here, perhaps for millennia, in these crude crafts.

We were examining some of these boats pulled up onto the sand when we met Kimathivanansio Krishnan. "This is my cousin's boat," the boy said. All of my family are fishermen. We all live in this village."

Dark-skinned, slight and strong, Krishnan, 18, wore a faded, long-sleeved shirt and a lungi pulled up to his knees and tucked in at his waist. His hair, thick and wavy, was coal black, as were his eyes. His smile revealed a perfect set of white teeth.
"Please come to my house," and we followed him into a maze of tiny concrete buildings covered with corrugated steel or thatched roofs. Kolam designs that had been painstakingly made early that morning with brightly colored powders were still visible in the dusty paths outside the front doors of the houses. We entered Krishnan's home, a few small rooms lit by bare lightbulbs hanging from the roof, and a fourth room with an earthen floor and blackened ceiling surrounding an opening to the sky.
"This is where we do our cooking when the rains come," Krishnan explained. Outside in the back, one of the boy's younger sisters was washing stainless steel pots, her long skirt and red silk blouse soaked in the effort. "She does the housework while our mother is away," Krishnan explained.

Krishnan ignored our questions about the whereabouts of his mother, but we guessed it had something to do with a superstition some Tamil people have about October being a terrible month in which to be born. To be born in October is an invitation to evil, some believe, and to prevent such births, many women move out of their homes and in with relatives in January, to be away from their husbands and to avoid temptation.

The main rooms in Krishnan's house were vacant of any furnishings, save for a cardboard box filled with books. "These are my school texts," said Krishnan. He said that he hoped to go to university the following year and to someday become and engineer.

We promised to keep in touch with Krishnan, maybe even to help him in some way to pay for his education, but after those few days, we never heard from him. I do not know what happened to him, or to his sister or his mother or to the fishermen who were his cousins, or to his village. It's not something I like to think about, because 10 years after our visit there, on Dec. 26, 2004, an earthquake beneath the Bay of Bengal a few hundred miles away caused a tsunami that became the deadliest natural disaster in human history; a tsunami that struck that very beach with all its force.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 7

Early in the morning, the sun was a burning spot behind the haze of a silver-plated sea. I walked on a path through pines, their needles sparkling with jewels of dew, to a wide beach of reddish sand. I looked at the green surf, the waves crashing on the shore, looked up and down the coast and was startled at how much it resembled the Carolinas. We had been going to beaches there every summer for many years, and this beach seemed eerily familiar.
I walked down onto the hard sand and let the water splash up past my ankles, and it was the same temperature as the surf at Emerald Isle in August. But turning around, all was different. Here was beachfront property totally undeveloped. Stand anywhere in the surf in North Carolina and look back toward America and what you'll see is a continuous row of $600,000 duplexes, owned by Raleigh doctors who rent to middle-aged newspaper editors from Pennsylvania. But at Mahabalipuram, on India's southeastern coast, no buildings crowd the beach. The only structures in sight are the gray, weathered wrecks of fishing boats and a few thatch-roofed shacks.

The beach is not a place where Indians go to spend their leisure time; it's a place for work, and a place where they go in the morning to defecate. As I took in more of the scene that morning, I saw up and down the shore, every hundred yards or so, men squatting in the sand, their lungis hiked up around their waists. When they were done, they waddled down to the water's edge to wash off in the surf.

I had been staring in wonder at undeveloped real estate. I then turned my gaze to my bare feet, sniffed suspiciously, and in the sand in the immediate vicinity saw the fresh piles that made this certainly no jogger's beach.

I mentioned work. The work being done in a village just up the beach was fascinating, mostly because it was being done in the same way it had been done there a thousand years ago, or perhaps two or three thousand years ago. Time in India, we were learning, does not follow the clock, and often it moves not at all.

Complaints and comments

C: Interesting. A day after a historic speech by the second woman VP
candidate in US history, your newspaper chooses to headline your news
article on her speech as " Palin mocks Obama in convention speech." Not
sure if you thought that headline up all on your own or just continued w/
the AP distortion line.
At any rate I thought wordsmith's like yourselves would be interested in
the English definition of "mock". "1. Treat with contempt; "The new constitution mocks all democratic principles"; 2. Imitate (a person, a manner, etc.), esp. for satirical effect; 3. Imitate with mockery and derision; "The children mocked their handicapped classmate".
I guess you are hanging your hat at the " treat with contempt" definition
of the word. Did not see that behavior on her part. On the contrary she
spoke of her opponents experience and positions--not a personal "mockery"
that she has been exposed to for the last 5 days by the news media and
components of the Obama campaign.
I guess this may be beyond your desire, no perhaps ability, but please
in the future do the citizens of Washington and Greene counties a favor.
Please present the news on the front page. Do so in an even hand and leave
the editorials to the second page. We deserve better. - J.M.

A: Our readers expect to see news on the front page of their morning newspaper. Sorry, but "Palin is second woman to be nominated for vice president" would not have been much of a headline because that fact was not news, or at least it was very old news. Our duty was to tell all of our readers who didn't stay up late enough to watch the speech themselves what she spoke about in her acceptance speech. That she mocked Obama for having less experience than she has was the most notable element of her speech.
"Mock" was the correct word, given the tone of her speech.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 6

Chennai is what it's called now, but in 1995, that city baking on the Bay of Bengal was Madras. From the moment we stepped off the plane and onto the tarmac, we knew that this was a very different place than Bombay; flat and green, a place of hot sand and coconut palms. In the days that followed, we would see a city of low buildings protected from the street by thick walls, gleaming headache white in stark sunlight. And everywhere we looked the streets were choked with living beings. The city was an ant hill kicked apart; every street just like a shopping mall the week before Christmas, every hour of every day of the year.

The cacophony and the blinding color of Madras diminished as we made our way south on the coastal highway – a long, straight, bumpy stretch that is probably the most dangerous road in the world. Our view of the beaches and low jungle was constantly distracted by the wreckage we passed: crumpled burned corpses of cars and charred remains of minibuses wrapped around trees. An estimated 275 people die every day on India's roads, and the stretch between Madras and Pondicherry is the worst of them. It was the scene of what might be the world's most deadly traffic accident about 10 years ago, when an overloaded bus attempted to pass a truck packed with people coming from a wedding and collided head-on with a gasoline tanker, killing 256 people in all.
The growing number of vehicles, inadequate licensing and enforcement of traffic laws, alcohol and road conditions share the blame for the abysmal statistics.

In a climate with no freeze-thaw cycle, the roughness of the road puzzled me. Then, in Mahabalipuram, I learned the reason. We use machinery to build roads in the West. In India, where the enormous population makes labor cheap, they use people. Where we would use a diesel roller to flatten a bed of gravel, in India it is accomplished by hand, one piece of gravel at a time.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 5

(Vegetable vendors, Crawford Market)

Soonie was the friend of a friend who had arranged for her to escort our group around Bombay. Lively and talkative, her hair cut short and her slightly plump figure tucked into blue jeans, Soonie was studying fashion design in college. Her large, dark eyes were constantly springing open as if in surprise.

She led us around - our group of five Americans and Mahendra in tow - to shops and to Crawford Market, a complex built in 1867 that to this day is the center of Mumbai's trade in fruit, fish, fowl, spices and hundreds of other goods. All the while, we were followed by a train of beggars: the one-legged and the legless, the blind, the lepers, the old, shrunken women and children with babies hung around their necks. They were attracted by our utter whiteness, and by the dollar bills that one member of our group kept extracting from his wallet and pressing into one palm after another. A dollar was at that time worth 31 rupees, and a rupee was enough to feed a street person for a day. Eventually, the mob of the needy forced us indoors where they were not permitted.
"I cannot believe it," said Mahendra. "My parents were quite wealthy, but they gave away less money in their lifetimes than you people have given away in the last five minutes."

The beggars following us were professionals, Soonie warned us, advising that our generosity only encouraged them. We darted from shop to restaurant, and left our dusty entourage staring in the picture window.

During a leisurely lunch, Soonie was asked if she had a boyfriend.
"Oh, yes, but no one can know this, Soonie said, giggling and covering her mouth with her hand. "My sister is knowing him, but my parents would be killing me if they knew I was seeing him."
"Why?" one of us asked. "You're a big girl now."
Soonie shook her head and rolled her eyes. "He is from another city and my parents are not being acquainted with his parents. My boyfriend is saying that he will have his father speak to my father, but I am being very worried."
Was the boy's social circumstances or caste the concern?
"Oh, no, his family is quite wealthy, but you see it is my mum and dad's right to choose a husband for me, and they do not know his family. Still, I am hoping for the best."

The idea of arranged marriages seemed so bizarre and antiquated to us. It would seem less so by the end of our journey, which was just about to begin. The next day, we would leave civilized Bombay for Madras and points south, on a long road trip through what would seem like the strangest place on Earth.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 4

Two Indians led us through that vibrating mass of humanity that was Bombay: one by arrangement, the other by chance.
Mahendra Singhal had been a fellow passenger on our flight from Bombay and was also staying at our hotel. He had witnessed our frustrations at the airport concerning our lost luggage, eavesdropped on our conversations in the hotel restaurant, and eventually approached us and offered to help us get our bags back, or, failing that, at least show us around the city. "I have nothing better to do today. I must return to the U.S., but my flight does not leave until 3 a.m."

Mahendra had his own sorry tale to tell. He had lived abroad most of his adult life and returned to India infrequently on business. He didn't enjoy the trips to his native country because as an ex-patriot he was regarded with disdain by many Indians. And although he still had family in India, visiting them was out of the question.
"I studied the Hindu religion in university, but the more I studied, the more convinced I became of its irrelevancy," he said. Later, he converted to Christianity, an act his family considered unforgivable.
"I returned to India when my father died, but my brothers would not permit me to enter the house. So you see, I really have no more family here.

Mahendra continued his education in the U.S., eventually earning a Ph.D. in psychology. His business was running seminars in relaxation and stress management, which had brought him to Bombay.
"But I've come all the way from Chicago and must turn around and go home," he said cheerily. "The fellow who arranged the seminar I came to lead cannot be found. No one answers his telephone, and his address does not exist. I'm afraid I've been duped." His contact had apparently collected the seminar fee from a couple hundred people and skipped town. Now Mahendra was obliged to do the same.

We were grateful for Mahendra's help, and for his company and for his example, handling his own stress and adversity with such calm. We invited him to spend the day with us, even though his services as a guide were unnecessary. For that we had Soonie.

Whine, whine, whine

C: Some time ago you reneged on your obligation to meet the wishes and needs of your customers when you stopped publishing the weekly television schedule. The daily schedule you publish is inadequate, insufficient and incomplete. - R.F.

A: Of course the daily TV schedule is incomplete. With upwards of 500 channels available to cable and satellite subscribers (the vast majority of TV viewers these days), no one can publish a complete guide. Even TV Guide gave up on that.

The problem is: Which 8 percent of the channels would you like us to list? Not a single reader will be satisfied with our selection.

As I have mentioned before, we would be happy to print a weekly guide if it were at all useful to subscribers and advertisers would support it, but as we learned years ago, that's not going to happen. And printing a guide and selling it separately won't work either. We could never recoup the cost of the data, the paper and the printing from the number of copies that could be sold.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 3

All of India was not like that city of misery between the airport and Mumbai. In fact, few places in India are worse that what we had seen that first day. In the weeks to come, we would experience a land so complex and diverse and so very different than anything else we had known.

I had been in Russia the previous winter, and if a place can be the sensual opposite of that cold, gray and dimly-lit land, it is south India, a riot of aromas and sounds, a kaleidoscope of colors under a relentless, burning sun.

Exactly 100 years before our visit, in January 1985, Mark Twain had come to Bombay on his around-the-world trip. He wrote about his experience in "Following the Equator": "It is winter here, yet the weather is the divine weather of June, and the foliage is the fresh and heavenly foliage of June."
Twain's observations seem fresh and relevant, even today:
"This is indeed India! The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the moldering antiquities of the rest of the nations – the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined."

In our first few days, we could barely catch that glimpse because of all the people blocking our view. The Indian city teems with humans, overflowing from buildings constantly moving at all times of day in all places, piled upon one another on buses, coursing in tight masses thorough streets, their bare arms and silk saris bumping and brushing us. And in Bombay, everywhere we went, we were followed by an entourage of small, dark, tattered people, reaching out to us with thin, black hands opening and closing, their gray fingertips touching their dry lips.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 2

Exhausted and agitated, we climbed – remarkably free of luggage – aboard a shuttle bus that would take us to a hotel a few miles away. The orange rays of the setting sun penetrated the dusty windows, through which we had our first sight of India.

Bombay is called Mumbai now, and it has prospered much since my visit. But still, 7 million of its 12 million people live in slums, and hundreds of thousands are homeless, many of them squatting in an area between the airport and the city. In 1995, more than a million existed in that area under bits of cloth stretched between sticks, under plastic and in cardboard boxes or with no shelter at all.

In the yellow dust of the road and the diminishing light of day, they crouched around the glowing ash of dung fires or lay sprawled and asleep. Their numbers mounted as we sped by; scores, then hundreds of tattered souls with dirt-caked faces the color of old shoes, and matted hair, and wild, stunned expressions, then a thousand or more. Skeleton dogs skittered across the road that rumbled with frantic traffic. Men lazily pissed along the berm. The air was heavy with diesel fumes and the stench of human shit. Above the incessant blaring of horns rose an ungodly wailing of a madwoman.

A little while later, I was sitting at a hotel bar with one of my traveling companions, Jim, drinking Kingfisher beer, both of us silently staring at tears running down the cold bottles and forming puddles of condensation. Behind us, in a corner of the dining room, a combo with a female singer was plowing through a melancholy medley of Carpenters tunes.
"Unbelievable," Jim said. "Can all of India be like this?"
"All of India is probably not just like Bombay," I offered.
"You mean, it's worse out there?" he asked, in all seriousness. "I have no desire to leave this hotel," he said after a long pause.

I had arrived in India in a snit, acting as if I had undergone some real hardship. But I had money in my pocket and a soft bed in which to sleep, and I had reached middle age without ever having experienced hunger, or having to worry about where I might spend the night. Over the next five weeks I would learn something about people who must contemplate daily their own survival, and I would learn much more about myself.

Today's gripe

There are some teenagers who suffer from a syndrome and deliberately cut themselves. And there are some adults who get an odd pleasure from the eye-watering pain of plucking nose hairs. For the rest of us, there are the political conventions.

Why do we endure hours of this torture for four nights straight? We sit lump-like on sofas and witness a parade of speakers recite an encyclopedia of hackneyed political clichés as we wait for something unexpected to happen, which never does.

Wait, wait! If this is not quite enough masochistic pleasure for you, I have a suggestion: Watch the convention on PBS - completely free of commercial interruption!

Dancing With Shiva, Part 1

A scuffed and battered suitcase circled the clattering carousel a dozen times before someone turned off the switch, and suddenly Bombay's vast and shabby international terminal was as quiet as a cathedral.
We marched without speaking toward a large sign reading "LOST LUGGAGE," beneath which had formed a long line of confused an irritated travelers. Hundreds of bags were piled on luggage carts at the end of the terminal, none of them ours, none worth claiming; broken, splitting suitcases tied fast with baling twine; cardboard boxes wound with duct tape; grimy lingerie bursting from cheap, plastic valises; bashed-in boxes on which had been plastered red and white labels screaming "FRAGILE!"

Mosquitoes floated in the air in front of our faces. I slapped one on the back of my hand. I had Larium pills to prevent malaria, but they were in my suitcase, which was somewhere else on the planet.

We joined the line. The line creeped, the sun crossed the sky. Eventually, one by one, we reached the counter. There was no sign of a computer, not even a typewriter. This was a place of pencils and paperwork, carbon paper, rubber stamps and ink blotters. I was the last of our group to reach the clerk, a boy of about 20 with a wispy mustache who labored over every letter in my name with sloth-like speed.

"Country of origin?" he asked me.
"U.S. Just like the other four people," I snapped impatiently. "We are traveling together. All the information is the same, except for our names."
A little while later the clerk completed the "U" and began his meticulous work on the "S." When he finished his calligraphy, he put his pencil down and looked sleepily at me. "And on which flight did you arrive in Bombay?" he asked.

We had arrived on the only flight that afternoon, but it was senseless to fight this sort of bureaucracy or to try to quicken it. We would learn later that it wasn't just the LOST LUGGAGE counter that was so sluggish and obsessed with triplicate forms and red tape – it was the whole country.

We would need to learn to be patient, either that or go insane. It had taken us 36 hours to reach Bombay from Pittsburgh. We knew that we would eventually be reunited with our luggage. But we didn't know that it would take another seven days.

The Indians have a remedy for this maddening frustration. It is called Yoga.
First lesson: Patience. Breathe.

A new story

"Why would you ever want to go to India?" friends asked me. This was 14 years ago. At that time, India was not quite the up-and-coming, entrepreneurial outsource it is today. "All that poverty, all that misery," my friends warned.

But why wouldn't I want to experience a country so different from my own? In the previous five years, I had been to Egypt, China and Russia and yearned for more. And here was an opportunity to travel essentially for free, as a member of a Rotary Group Study Exchange team, and my employer had graciously allowed me six weeks off to do it.

The journey I embarked upon in January 1995 with four companions was, physically, a grueling road trip through dusty little towns where no tourist would ever venture. But it was, for me, also a spiritual sojourn to the center of the universe.

I'll share some of that journey with you over the next couple of weeks, beginning Monday.

We'll call this one "Dancing with Shiva."

Followup on Enos

"Life of Enos," which appeared in this blog some time ago, was repeated as a weekly serial in the Observer-Reporter, concluding Aug. 10. It reached a much wider local audience than did the blog, and I received a good deal of oral comment on it from readers, despite the fact that the style and length of chapters were much more suitable for the Internet than the newspaper.

Charlie Begley, a contractor and member of the Washington Rotary Club, was surprised to read about Enos Christman, the ancestor of a family here in town for which he had done much work. So, on Tuesday he invited Enos' great-great granddaughter, Jackie Christman Anderson, to the weekly Rotary luncheon to meet me.

Jackie's uncle, Ron Christman, was a photographer for this newspaper until he was killed in a helicopter crash in 1973 while taking aerial photographs for our annual Progress Edition. She said that her sister lives two doors down from the home on East Prospect Avenue where Enos lived the last three decades of his life.

Jackie related one story that I'll pass along. In his home on Prospect, there was a little shelf at the foot of the stairs on which always sat a whiskey bottle and a shot glass. In the later years of his life, Enos was said to take a shot every time he ascended the stairs, and another every time he came back down.

A newspaper man, of the old school.

Whine, whine, whine

A guy left a message on my phone Monday, complaining that he didn't see the results of the weekly livestock auction in Greene County this week in the newspaper. He said he realized we might have been busy slapping ourselves on the back for being around for 200 years, but what he really needed to know was the prices at the auction, and not a bunch of self-serving history.

It's true that the livestock auction results were not in the paper this week. They weren't in last week, either, or for that matter, in any paper for the past 234 weeks, because we stopped running the results three and a half years ago.

Truth is, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture does a pretty good job of posting livestock auction prices from around the state online, and probably most people in the farming industry rely on the PDA site for their information. For some reason, the Greene auction results aren't listed there; nevertheless, the demand for this information from our readers is very low.

Sorry, wrong choice

With all the saber-rattling going on and talk of the Russians being our enemies again, I heard this morning from a Russian friend, Yuri. He is an academic, completely oblivious to world politics. His concern now is his dissertation, in the works now for probably 20 years. He's researching the individual's moral equivalent of the Holy Grail, or something like that.

Anyway, I had written to Yuri a few days ago, asking him to do me a favor. I asked him to walk down Kirova street in the evening for me. Kirova is the main drag in his city of Novokuznetsk. At this time of year, it doesn't get dark until about 11 p.m., and all evening the city's residents stroll up and down the boulevard; it is like a festival. I asked him to stop into one of the beer tents and drink a half-liter of Baltica beer for me. Baltica is the most prevalent brand of beer in Russia.

Apparently, Baltica is not exactly Yuri's favorite. "And sure I will have a Baltica, tasting of the Baltic Sea water when stagnate in pools after storm on the beaches of St. Pete," he wrote. But, at just 50 cents for a killer can, he will suffer through it, he told me. After all, what are friends for?

Whine, whine, whine

C: My friends and family dislike very much having so much paper space anywhere written in Spanish. Takes twice the space that's written in English - My grandparents learned to spell, talk, and read and write in American after coming here from Budapest Hungary. Nothing was written in Hungarian (Just English/American) for them anywhere - for any reason. Who's idea was it?" To start this Spanish stuff? Hope the O-R doesn't devote half the paper to the Spanish printing. - P.R.

A: Retail giants like Lowe's print signs in Spanish and English because they choose to accommodate their customers. Lowe's has stores all over this country, and in some of the places it has its stores, Spanish is spoken by the majority of customers. Latinos now comprise the largest minority in the country.

The reason why there were no signs in Hungarian when your grandparents came here was because there were not 54 MILLION of them. And chance are, they did not learn "American" instantly. Most European immigrants at the time - like my mother's people who came from Poland - settled in ethnic neighborhoods where native languages persisted. Young people caught on quickly to the new language, but older people took longer or did not. My great-grandmother lived in this country for 50 years and never learned to speak English.

The number of Spanish speakers in this area is very small, and there is no market for a Spanish-language newspaper. That could change. Across the state, in Reading, the Eagle is now printing a Spanish edition, and for good reason. More than half the students in the Reading public schools now come from Spanish-speaking homes. Printing a product that people will buy is just good business.

A shift in the winds of history could have easily made us French or Spanish speakers here in the U.S., but instead Britain won out in the age of exploration, and English will always be our language. But consider that we are the United States of America - "America" being that land that stretches between the Arctic and Antarctica, where the majority of people speak... Spanish.

Today's gripe

It's been four years since the last Summer Olympics, so naturally, I'd forgotten how annoying it can be watching the events on television. For the past two nights, between about 8 and 9:30 p.m., what I saw was about 70 minutes of commercial messages broken up by 20 minutes of... beach volleyball (?!) and a little synchronized high diving (?!).

I couldn't take it anymore. Couldn't handle that insipid Oreos commercial with those too-cute little moppets anymore. I went to bed and curled up with a grim Dickens novel of poverty and desperation in the smoke-darkened streets of London.

Pure misery, with no commercial interruption.

Epilogue

The Internet has made the world a much smaller and highly connected place. Already, I have heard from two people who grew up with me in the old Bronxville neighborhood. They must have Googled "Bronxville," and the series popped up.

I heard first from MaryAnne Denniston. She and her two brothers, Buddy and Tommy, lived on Meadow Avenue, close to the spiked bridge across the creek. Then I heard from Joanie Gagan, who was our nextdoor neighbor. They filled me in on the other kids and where they are now, some of them still living close by.

Was it really a half century ago that we played Hide and Seek in our back yard? They mention names and places in their e-mails, and long-forgotten things crawl out of their hiding places, and it seems like just yesterday.

Bronxville Dats, Part 12

I go back to Millard Avenue almost every day. Not physically, of course, because it is 400 miles away. I go back there in my imagination because it is the street of my youth.

All of my big ideas - the good ones and the silly ones - seem to start on the pavement of that wide and shady boulevard and to sprint down the middle of it before sprouting wings and taking flight.

My family lived on Millard Avenue from 1958 to 1962, just enough time for a youngster to collect enough vivid images to last him a lifetime. Ours was the house where 500 tulips and two huge dogwoods bloomed in the spring, the house covered with roses in summer. Ours was the yard in which kids played Red Light, Green Light past dusk.
On Millard Avenue, right in front of our house, was home plate: a manhole cover with iron lettering in a semi-circle that read, "CITY OF YONKERS." The next manhole cover up the street was second base. We marked first and third on the curbstones with chalk, and that was our stick ball field.
"Car coming!" someone would tell, and we would stop the game and move out of the way.

I can see so clearly in my memory even the flotsam along the curbs and at the storm grates: acorns, Good Humor wrappers and sticks, bits and pieces of exploded firecrackers, the seed pods of maple trees.

Sometime after the incident at the abandoned villa, I sat on the curb on Millard Avenue one summer afternoon, contemplating the debris between my sneakers. Here was a mortified and miserable 11-year-old boy who had just pieced together the mysteries of life. Now that I knew how babies were made, finally, how could I ever face my parents again? How could I ever look into their faces without thinking of their disgusting and shameful behavior?

I walked up and down the street, cut across the field, crossed the spiked bridge over the creek and into the meadow, alone. Somehow, in the heat of that awful day, I found the strength to face the facts of life, and a life made more complicated by them.

I am grown up now, to say the least, and face the miserable realities of life almost every day. I find the strength to deal with them by going back in my mind and taking that walk again.
This was my Bronxville neighborhood, and this was my street.
The street of my youth.
The thread of my life.

THE END

Bronxville Days, Part 11

Kids who grow up on farms know what the score is early on. They see horses acting up in the field, know how little horses are made, and figure out at a young age that people reproduce in roughly the same way.
Kids who grow up in the city, or in suburban towns like Bronxville, don't have that insight. And a kid like me, who was pretty dense to begin with, and spent much of his time and mental activity in his own dream world, was pretty much clueless about sex.

At 11, I honestly thought that women became pregnant automatically when they reached a certain age or situation in life. I was vaguely aware of sex but thought it was just unnatural, filthy shenanigans engaged in by criminally-minded teenagers.

I liked girls and had liked them from earliest memory. By age 11, we were going to boy-girl birthday parties and playing kissing games, but I don't think it ever occurred to me then that there could be things more pleasurable to do with girls than kissing.

Then one Saturday afternoon, one of my classmates and I rode our bikes north of town to the abandoned villa. Up a steep hill overgrown with wild rose and sumac was a house long ago given up to the elements. It had been a sprawling, two-story house with white stucco walls and a red tile roof. All the windows had been broken; saplings grew from the gutters, the floors were covered with broken glass and leaves and gravel that had once been mosaic tiles. We loved to walk through these ruins and imagine what life had been like there so many years earlier.

We were not alone that day. When we came up through the jungle, we saw a couple of girls, sitting on the concrete railing on the portico, sharing a cigarette. We tried to ignore them, but one of them yelled, "Hey, you, c'mer!" We did not recognize them. They were not from our school and looked a little older. They must have been from Tuckahoe.
We traded the usual insults and my friend and I turned away from them to do our exploring. But they followed us. We split up, and they split and followed us still. I was not comfortable. Had these been boys, they would have been picking a fight. The girl following me was acting tough, but she was not looking to fight. She was teasing me, telling me what goofy-looking hair I had, what ugly sneakers. And then she said, "I bet you'd like to feel me up."
I screwed up my face as if I'd just smelled a dead animal. "No!" I said. "Who'd want to touch you?"
"Well, I wouldn't let you anyway," she said.

A little later, the other girl said she had to get home and they left, and my friend and I walked around the back of the house, not saying much. Those girls were gone, but something heavy, like dread, still hung in the air. I didn't understand what had happened that day, why I had felt anxious and afraid and angry and excited. Only later would I realize that my dream world had started to crumble.

Whine, whine, whine

C: I've been meaning to write concerning the "comic" section of the paper for some time. Today 8/6/08 I finally got to it.
Peanuts—enjoyable but a bit dated
Mother Goose and Grimm—sometimes hilarious
Zits—a realistic look at a family raising a teenager
Hagar the Horrible—good harmless chuckles
Dilbert—a great and too realistic view of office life
Ollie and Quentin—Dumb
Mutts—not quite as dumb as Ollie and Quentin
Baby Blues—good humored look at family life
Rose is Rose—sweet without the treacle, joyful and upliftingFrazz—humorus insights into what the young are up to
Sally Forth—whimsical view of a working mom
The Family Circus—kids can be funny
Bizzaro—great insights by a warped mind. Probably too hip for the room.
And now downhill from here, maybe on another page.
The Phantom—OK, it's the Phantom
Mark Trail—belongs on the outdoor page
Rex Morgan M.D.—It's a soap. Put it on a soapier or sappier page.
And what finally prompted me to write:
For Better or Worse—It doesn't get much worse than this. Why is this thing on a "comics" page—or using the geezer term—the funny papers. As Molly said to Magee, "Tain't funny." Most of the time Lynn Johnston opts for the depressing. A stroke victim, caring for an aging parent—the sticky sweet glurge, bitter sweet. In today's edition she ran up the banner for gay marriage—In MY comics, MY Funny Papers.
Tain't funny guys. Move it on over to the op-ed pages.
I begin the paper with an entree, the comics, or sometimes save the Funnies for dessert. Today it tasted and smelled like—how can I put this gently? Excrement. - D.M.

A: I hope you enjoy your meal.
We hardly expect that all 90,000 of our readers each day will love all of the comics. People have different tastes, interests and senses of humor. We could tailor our comics page to your personal preferences if all of our readers were just like you, but then what a boring and intolerant world that would be, wouldn't it?

Bronxville Days, Part 10

My long newspaper career had its start back in 1960, when I signed on as a carrier for the Herald-Statesman, Yonkers' daily afternoon paper. I'd pedal over to Ellison Avenue after school, pick up my bundle, fold my papers into "tomahawks," and load them in the twin baskets straddling my rear wheel. Then I'd fly down the sidewalk, flinging the folded papers at the front doors of my customers. A perfectly thrown tomahawk would smack against the door waist-high, then fall open, front-page up, on the doormat.

The money was good, for 1960. With tips, my profit was usually $7 a week. Combined with my 50-cent-a-week allowance, I had all the money a boy could need for Mad Magazines, baseball cards, punk, ammo for my pea shooter, caps, rubber spiders, Top Cat figurines, comic books, decals, Hostess cupcakes, bottles of 7-Up, yo-yos, handlebar streamers, spaldeens (those pink balls we used for stickball), balsawood gliders, candy bars, model cars and glue.

The job also made it possible to indulge in some of the luxuries available in Bronxville Proper: banana splits at the ice cream parlor, bowling, orange rickies at the drugstore soda counter, and the movies. For 50 cents, we could spend all of Saturday afternoon in the theater, watching cartoons, a newsreel, Three Stooges episodes and the main feature.

Life was so uncomplicated for a boy of 11, soaring free on his bicycle, when he wasn't being dragged off by his mom to dancing classes and piano lessons. But it would all get complicated soon enough.

Complaints and comments

C: The sensational front page photo of the grieving sister of the drowned boy was in poor taste. What possible reason could you possibly have to display such a picture other than pure meanness. How about showing some class and sensitivity for a change? This rag of yours is truly in a downward spiral. What is next, pictures of open coffins? -M.L.

A: This rag has been sending out photographers to cover news events - many of them gruesome and tragic - since we first put photographers on staff in the early 1940s. In this case, we did not send our photojournalist out to this news event so that he could get a little exercise; we sent him there to report what was happening.

A boy drowned in the river. It so happened that family members were on the scene, and as a result, their terror and grief and emotion were critical to what was happening.

Certainly, we could have simply thrown our staffer's photo away and reported the drowning without it. We could have treated this boy's death as if it were just another anonymous statistic. But of course, we would have been doing a disservice to our readers. Our job is to tell the story, to report the news as we see it. Sometimes, as in this case, it's a terrible thing to have to do.

Bronxville Days, Part 9

The main building of Public School No. 8 was built in 1896, a fortress of steel and stone and brick. The long halls, smelling of milk, floor wax, vomit and sweeping compound, were lined with tall, windowless doors and transoms. I remember most the gymnasium/cafeteria.

When the weather was nice, we had our gym class on the playground or ran wind sprints on the street at the rear entrance to the school. But in winter and on rainy days we were in the gym, performing exercises that no school district would ever allow now. I imagine that after so many ruptured spleens and broken arms, someone probably decided that forcing grade-school children to perform on the pommel horse and parallel bars was maybe not such a good idea. Ditto for climbing the rope to the top of the gym and slapping the girder to which it was attached. I get a knot in my groin just thinking about that now.

The girls dreaded gym class the most, and it's no wonder. They were required to wear gym suits: clownish white costumes that billowed at the hips; that, and also to be humiliated in relay races and dodge ball.

Every so often, there would be a dance in the gym – a sock hop, our parents called it, even though they didn't make us take off our street shoes to protect the gym floor. Girls had to wear party dresses, and boys were required to wear sport coats and ties. I was peculiarly fashion-conscious for an 11-year-old, and my idea of looking cool was white athletic socks. My parents refused to allow me to leave the house dressed up as I was in anything but black socks, so I had to hide my while socks in my pockets and change into them on my way to the dance.

Dancing with girls was exciting, although I was a little too young and a little to dense to understand why. My mother had forced me to take dancing lessons at Mr. Barclay's School of Dance, so I could do a mean fox trot and cha-cha. But I preferred the slow box step, to the sound of the Fleetwoods singing "Mr. Blue," when I could touch the crinkly material around a girl's waist and feel her soft, damp hand within mine, and smell her shampooed hair and wonder why all of that seemed suddenly so interesting.

Bronxville Days, Part 8

Student self-esteem must have been a concern to educators even back in the 1950s, because all of a sudden "F" disappeared as an option for teachers marking up report cards at Public School No. 8. A's, B's, C's and D's were left untouched, but F's, which stood for "Failure" (or maybe "Flunky") had to go. F's were replaced with I's, which stood for "Improvement needed."

The year with Mrs. Macarber and Miss Goldstein was my second attempt at sixth grade. My first time through was with Miss Cynthia Heinitz. She handed us our report cards on the last day of school, I was expecting my grades to be poor. But I never thought my report card would have more I's on it than "Mississippi." I couldn't get up the courage to give the report card to my mother, so I tossed it behind a pile of lumber in our garage.
That evening, when asked to produce it, I tried several approaches: "We didn't get report cards this period"; "Oh, yeah, we got them, but I must have dropped it on my way home from school"; "It must have fallen out of my pocket when I was sitting on the lumber pile"; and finally, after retrieving it from the garage, "That doesn't mean I failed, it just means I need improvement."

Mrs. Reilly, the principal, summoned my parents to the school, and then they sat me down and told me what I dreaded to hear more than anything: "You have to repeat the sixth grade."

Left back. Left back! How could I ever look any of my friends in the face again? They tried to comfort me. "You've always been the youngest and smallest in your class, and now you'll be with kids more your own age," my father said. "You'll make new friends," my mother added. "You'll have already done the work, so it will be easier the second time around."

That night, my mother came into my room and sat on the edge of my bed, brushed the hair from my forehead, damp from a tear-soaked pillow. "You'll get over it," she said.

And I did.

Bronxville Days, Part 7

Almost from that first day in late November when she had taken over the sixth-grade class, Miss Goldstein had begun to suspect that her predecessor's mental affliction had been worsened by the behavior of her students, that it was likely they had baited her, deliberately provoked her to fits of rage just for the theatrical thrill of it.
She was beginning to realize how cruel children can be. A sickening feeling came over her when she witnessed the way her students treated Katrina.

Pretty and a little plump, Katrina had long blond hair that she frequently wore in two braids. She almost never smiled and rarely looked up from her book, or her desk, or her feet. She seldom spoke, and when she did her words were barely audible. She would have gone unnoticed and unheard if not for her German accent.

Katrina was the target of merciless teasing. She could not utter a complete sentence without inciting a chorus of giggles. Boys would follow her down the hall, goose-stepping like Nazi soldiers. They would click their heels and say "Heil, Hitler!" all the time. She was excluded from all games and conversations. Her classmates shunned her.

What worried Miss Goldstein the most was the hate she sometimes perceived. It was not obvious, more like a chilling draft from a mysterious source. Did these students inherit animosity for a former enemy from their parents, many who fought against the Germans not so long ago? Although the war had been over for 15 years, Adolf Eichmann, the "architect of the Holocaust," had only recently been captured in Argentina by Israeli agents.

One day, just before Christmas vacation, Katrina was ill and did not come to school. Miss Goldstein took the opportunity to scold the class, and she did so vehemently and passionately. The effect was that the children felt mortified and deservedly embarrassed by their behavior.
Some of her classmates made promises to themselves to be especially kind to Katrina when she returned, but the child did not come to school the next day, nor the next. Then the long Christmas break arrived, and when they came back to P.S. 8 in January, Katrina wasn't there. Her father had been transferred to a job in another city, and the family had moved.

"I hope you're all very satisfied with yourselves," Miss Goldstein said. I hope you're very happy with how cruelly you treated that little girl."
Her stinging sarcasm was not necessary. The wound had been inflicted, and there was now no chance it would heal.

I still think about Katrina. I am haunted by the desperate sadness that I imagine was in her eyes, and by regret and my own guilt about the misery heaped upon her.

Bronxville Days, Part 6

Miss Goldstein had taken over a class of sixth-graders at P.S. 8 late in the fall of 1960, just after the sudden departure of Mrs. Macarber. The explanation at the time, at least around the schoolyard, was that the latter teacher had "flipped out," but that was not exactly the case. Her mental problems were more probably deep-rooted.

Mrs. Macarber had a thing about wasting paper. She encouraged her students to write on both sides of their composition sheets and to save pieces of paper with blank sides for "scrap." But as the school year progressed, desks began to bulge with the hoarded scrap paper. Our teacher began to insist that papers with even a few square inches of blank space be saved for future use. By November, she refused to allow anything to be put in the waste cans, not even used tissues. Eraser crumbs and pencil shavings had good second uses, she insisted. Her classroom became a recycling nightmare.

Mrs. McCarver had a thick head of hair, wavy and dyed red. She would often sit for minutes at a time at her desk, her furrowed brow resting in one palm while the other hand massaged the nape of her neck as we sat silently, awaiting instructions. Then she would suddenly leap to her feet and begin to accuse us of secretly using other waste cans in the building to dispose of perfectly good paper, and of conspiring against her. That's when the school board stepped in.

It did not take Miss Goldstein long to figure out that Mrs. Macarber's madness might have been hastened by her pupils. She found them to be spoiled, unruly and incorrigible, but that made them no different than any other sixth-graders. What bothered her most was an eerie sense that these students were much worse; that what flowed in her classroom was an undercurrent of cruelty.

Today's gripe

I have little problem with readers who complain to me about grammatical mistakes that appear in the paper; mistakes are made, no matter what precautions we take, and errors are embarrassing and to be avoided. A regular segment of our monthly news department meetings is "Grammar Guy," in which I lecture my troops on such things as sentence structure, usage, rhetoric, syntax and spelling, and also pass along complaints from our readers.

What irks me, though, are comments like this one, which was written recently on a subscription form: "Spelling and sentence structure needs to be addressed." What needs to be addressed by the reader is agreement of subject and predicate. Her comment should read: "Spelling and sentence structure need to be addressed."

Bronxville Days, Part 5

Building stuff. Sleeping out. These were our responses to boredom. Sometimes we would even build stuff to sleep in. We'd find large cardboard appliance boxes, tape them together, cut windows and doors in them, attach old sheets as awnings, then drag our sleeping bags into the makeshift mansion for the night.

Although the front yard with its rose and tulip beds was off-limits to us kids, my parents allowed us to do as we pleased in our back yard, which was not visible from the street. There we dug underground forts, built huge, unfloatable rafts and assembled rockets from cardboard storage barrels. I built a shack from old doors and sheets of plywood, covered it in tar paper to keep out the rain, and painted a skull and crossbones above the entrance. An extension cord from the garage provided electricity for a light and a radio. It was the perfect clubhouse and a place to camp out at any time of year, but it didn't last long.

One night in early March, four of us were spending the night in the shed. My father came out to say goodnight and told us to quiet down and not to leave the shed. But we did anyway. It was a mild night, but snow still covered the ground. We walked toward town, then climbed a hill and started lobbing snowballs toward passing cars below. The snowballs weren't having much effect, so we packed them hard and added gravel. One of the missiles scored a direct hit on a driver's-side door, and the car braked to a stop. We ran laughing back into the woods for a few minutes, then emerged again and resumed our assault.

Suddenly, something grabbed the collar of my coat, and I was yanked to my feet. The driver had stopped his car, then circled around and crept up into the woods and caught Jimmy Paulus and I by the scruff of our necks. The other two kids took off like startled fawns. The man dragged us down the hill and put us into the backseat of his Rambler station wagon, along with his own wide-eyed, terrified children. He made us tell him where we lived, then drove us to our houses, called out our parents and told them what we'd done.

The punishment I received was severe and wide-ranging. I was forced to rat out my fleet-footed friends. I was deprived of allowance and television and sleeping out for months. Worst of all, I was ordered to tear down the shack.

You'd think that would have been enough to teach me never to deceive my parents or do something really stupid like that again, but I was, regrettably, a slow learner.

Brookland

Emily Barton's 2006 novel is set in Brooklyn in the late 18th century. It is one of those books that mixes historical fact with pure fantasy. The fantasy here is the construction of a bridge across the East River to Manhattan, something that did happen for another three generations.

The bridge is a metaphor - a big, 4,000-foot-long metaphor - that is very much belabored. And this is a tale heavy with dread; for about the last 400 pages, the reader is convinced that everything will end in death and disaster. Reading it is like watching a car crash in slow motion.

Nevertheless, this is enjoyable reading. Barton develops rich characters while still writing with economy and precision. We're left longing to follow the lives of the people she has created, and their children, and hope we may do so in a sequel.

Bronxville Days, Part 4

My mother held a match to the wine cork, which blackened and released a thin stream of dark, aromatic smoke. She held the cork until the black area cooled, then gripped my chin firmly, drew a mustache across my lip, darkened my eyebrows and added long sideburns.
"There you go, my little Mexican man," she said.

Fixing a sombrero on my head and draping a serape around my shoulders, she said, "You keep bundled up tonight, it's cold out there."
She put her hands on my shoulders and held me still for a moment, contemplating her creation.
"You're getting to be such a big boy. This stuff wouldn't even fit you last year. And I guess this will be your last trick-or-treat. You'll be too old for this next year."

The doorbell rang and I bounded downstairs. "You wait for your sister!" she yelled after me. "Aw, Ma, she's 8 years old, she can go herself," I said, but I knew it was of no use.
Jimmy was at the door, dressed as a Texas Ranger. Behind him stood two smaller children, one in a white sheet with holes cut for eyes, the other in a box with a cardboard disk for a hat – Speedy Alka Seltzer. "Sorry," Jimmy said. "My mom made me take them along.
My mother handed us brown paper grocery bags, and, kissing my sister on the forehead said, "Don't take this scarf off and stick close to your brother, and don't eat all the candy before you get home."

It was just after 6 o'clock, Monday, Oct. 31, 1960. A sliver of golden moon hung in the black sky. We shuffled down the walk, marched under the streetlight at the corner of Millard and Ellison and passed into the darkness, stumbling on the sidewalk, the cracks and buckled concrete reaching up to catch the toes of our shoes. We bounced like moths from lighted porch to lighted porch, shivering in the consuming black of night between them. Gusts of wind sent dry maple leaves skittering across the street like frightened animals and fanned an eerie red glow in piles of leaf ash at the curb. The obscure shapes of other children, their voices wafting on the breeze, passed us on the opposite side of the street.

We clambered up steps and rang bells and waited in the flickering orange light of jack-o-lanterns. Muffled noises, homey sounds of television, creaking floors and barking dogs came through the doors, which swung open, emitting the different smells of people's suppers. A woman held a bowl of Baby Ruths before us. Wait, she said. Let me guess who you are. She knew us all except Tommy Gagan, who had caught up with us along the avenue, wrapped from head to toe in strips of sheets like a mummy.

At another house, on a lonely stretch of Birchbrook Road, an old man extended a basket of apples in one hand and a bowl of pennies in the other. "Take a big handful," he urged. "Go on, dig in." Copper rained in our paper bags. We sauntered down the middle of the road, munching the apples and tossing the cores into the woods.

Halloween would never be the same after that night. For me, the spooky magic would be gone, replaced by mischief and hoarding from the candy mine of the Hotel Gramatan. And it wasn't too many years later that Halloween was ruined, buy sick people putting needles in candy bars and razor blades in apples, and by municipalities that replaced trick-or-treat with parties held not on Oct. 31 but on whatever day seemed convenient to adults, and by the adults who hijacked the simple observance and made it an opportunity to party.

Bronxville Days, Part 3

Maybe you've experimented with Google Earth on your computer. You type in an address and you zoom in from space to the exact spot on the planet you've selected and see it - perhaps the neighborhood of your youth – as a bird would, or more accurately, as a satellite does.

And so I visit our old house, at the corner of Millard and Ellison. The house and the whole neighborhood look pretty much as they did 50 years ago, except for the giant highway that now slashes through what used to be our wilderness to the east. I trace the streets along which I used to pedal my bike, past Public School No. 8, past the stationery store where we used to spend our money on Three Musketeers bars and baseball cards and Mad Magazines, past Gristede's Grocery, where we bought the white beans for our pea shooters, down onto Palmer Avenue, across from Sarah Lawrence College, where all those barefoot beatnik girls studied, and on to the Bronx River.
Surely, my parents must have been aware of how far I went on my bicycle, and which roads and busy intersections I crossed – without a helmet, I might add, as there were no such things in those days – on my way to town some two miles distant.

The river – more of a creek, really - was damned a few hundred yards upstream, and the pond was where my friends and I with bamboo poles fished on lazy summer days for bluegills and catfish.

I can smell it now, that memory: pond water, fish slime and earthworms. I can almost feel the sun on my shoulders, picture my scabby knees, watch my child hands, black under the fingernails, baiting the hook. I hear the rush of water over the dam, the barking of dogs taken for walks, the whoosh of cars on the nearby parkway.
This was happiness defined, being 9 or 10 years old and to have all this place as a playground, and to be without worry and fear, and to be so far removed from the ugly realities of life.

Bronxville Days, Part 2

Children do not invent bad behavior; they learn it from older kids. And we had our share of bad influences in the neighborhood.

Some of the tricks we learned were relatively harmless, like the Jar of Death. If you happened to have a really bad case of rotten-egg farts, we learned from Billy Higgins that you could capture and store one indefinitely in a tightly sealed peanut butter jar. The Jar of Death could then be taken to an appropriate event, like a birthday party, where its effect could be best appreciated.

Other stunts were downright stupid and dangerous. I knew better than to imitate two older boys who liked to stalk each other around the neighborhood with bows and arrows. The arrows had target tips but were still capable of penetrating flesh, which they did on at least one occasion, the victim proudly displaying his wound to all who would look.
I foolishly learned and practiced another stunt, though. In winter, when the streets were covered in snow and oil delivery to homes frequent, we would sneak behind a fuel truck as it was leaving a driveway and grab hold of the back bumper and slide down the street of the soles of our boots.

Older kids would visit the city and buy firecrackers in Chinatown. They'd set off whole packs of these. One day Jimmy Paulus and I found several unexploded crackers and decided to put one into a hollowed-out tree stump with some toy soldiers and light it and see what happened. We did, and ran a few yards away and waited, and nothing happened. So Jimmy went back to the stump and looked in, and that's when it exploded.
Something flew into his eye. The next day, it was still red and his vision blurry, so he had to tell his Mom. His eye was permanently damaged. He had to get glasses.

We were just 9 years old. You could say that we didn't know any better. But we did, and I'll never forget the shame, the guilt and remorse of that incident. My parents didn't punish me. They knew it wasn't necessary. A lesson was learned, and for Jimmy, it was the hard way.

Whine, whine, whine

C: I read the paper online, as does some of my family who live in NY and TX.
It really upsets me when I am trying to read the obituaries and there is a NETFLIX ad attatched to one of the deceased name.....THAT IS SO DISRESPECTFUL! I can't help but wonder what families must think when they are going to read a family member's obituary and an ad for NETFLIX pops up.
Is there ANYTHING you can do to correct this? - C.F.

A: It's a free site, supported entirely by advertising revenue. Obituaries are the No. 1 item viewed on the site. It may be annoying to see an ad there, but would you rather pay to read that obituary?

Bronxville Days, Part 1

We didn’t actually live in Bronxville, N.Y. We had a Bronxville mailing address, but the town itself was just one square mile, and the people who lived in that square - "Bronxville Proper," they called it - were either rich or old, or both. Bronxville was where our fathers got on the train to go to work in New York City. It was where we went to church: Episcopal, Congregational, Catholic or Dutch Reformed, your choice. It was where we went to the movies, and to buy model cars, and to eat banana splits and to ride our decorated bikes in the Memorial Day parade, and, if we weren't so lucky, to the hospital.

There was a tall building in the center of town – the Hotel Gramatan. It was where all the rich widows lived. It was a great place to go trick-or-treating. You could see the sign atop the hotel - made from red light bulbs - for miles. One night some teenagers got up on the roof and knocked out some of the lights so that the sign read, “HOT GRAMA.” I remember my mother telling a friend how hilarious that was, and then catching me eavesdropping, changed her mind and called it disgraceful vandalism.

Before moving to Bronxville, we had been Catholics. Back in West Haven, Conn., I remember going to classes taught by terrifying nuns. I don’t remember much about it, other than being told by them that someone named “Mary” was my real mother. I deduced from this that that woman in my house who raised me, “Irene” as she was called by others, was a fraud.

Anyway, for some reason when we moved to Bronxville, or near it, we didn’t go to the Catholic church but rather the big, fancy Episcopal one. In my twisted 9-year-old brain, I figured that we had been promoted.

I’ll never forget the humiliation my parents put me through in that church. I had worn my good shoes to school on Friday and changed into my gym shoes, then forgot to change back and left my good shoes in my locker at school.
“Get dressed for church, young man,” I was told Sunday morning. “But I can’t go to church today because I left my good shoes in my locker.”
The parents were tired of this excuse. “Then you’ll go in your sneakers,” they said.
I was inordinately fashion-conscious for a boy my age. The idea of dressing in a gray flannel suit and filthy high-top white Keds was repulsive.
They dragged me to church. I felt like a clown. I was mortified.
I never forgot my good shoes at school again.

A new story

Sunday was one of those rare occasions when I found myself with nothing to do. No unfinished projects to resume, no repairs to make around the house, no work in the yard to be done until the cool of the evening. The grass had been cut, the tailgate latch on the pickup truck repaired, a fresh batch of pesto prepared. Nothing left to do but sit and think, and to let the mind go back half a century and recall how a 9-year-old boy handled his idle time, inventively staving off boredom but often getting into mischief in the process.

Back then, we lived in a safe neighborhood that crawled with kids. In summer, particularly, we were wild from dawn to dusk, shooed from our houses by mothers too busy to plan our leisure time for us.
Did our parents think that we were always playing within a few block of home, or were they aware that our kid universe was much larger, the boundaries being as far as we could pedal our bicycles in half a day?

From age 9 to 12, I tested the boundaries of our neighborhood and of my parents’ patience. I did what all kids do, and what all kids shouldn’t do, and in the process, lost my innocence. It was a time of wonder and discovery. And then, it all ended rather suddenly, when our family moved north 20 miles to a neighborhood with no children, and I was alone. And after a year, I was sent off to boarding school, and a whole different universe of experiences.

So, this new series is about those last years of childhood, when our perception of the world around us begins to change. As always, please feel free to comment about your own experiences at this age.
We’ll call this one “Bronxville Days.” It starts tomorrow.

Complaints and comments

A subscriber called to complain this morning that "almost every single day" we run a photo of Barack Obama on the front page of the newspaper, and none of John McCain. I told him I thought he was exaggerating. "Go ahead and look yourself," he told me. "Almost every day. It's unbelievable."

Well, I went back through all the papers in a stack going back to July 6, and I counted four photos of Obama and two of McCain. These were all thumbnail mugshots. I also counted three of State Rep. Bill DeWeese, and two each of Fed chief Ben Bernanke and Gov. Ed. Rendell.

I expect some readers to keep track of such things, in hopes of discovering some bias on our part. And I expect some, like this caller, to not even bother to keep track.

By the way, when McCain made a visit to the area (South Park) recently, we had planned to have reporters and a photographer cover his visit, our local coverage of which would have been played on the front page. Unfortunately, the McCain campaign refused to allow our reporters and photographers to attend the event.

Whine, whine, whine

C: I am continually dismayed to see the Observer-Reporter picture children riding and jumping their bikes without wearing helmets, as on July 3. On July 11 your editorial starts out with the saying that a picture tells a thousand words. What are you teaching our children to do with your pictures? - S.H.

A: Before I get all smarmy and sarcastic, let me say that you do have a point. The photo you cite is a good example. As Byron Smialek wrote in his column last Saturday, the boy shown jumping his bike broke his arm doing so a day or so after our photo was taken.

Our photographers frequently roam around the area looking for things to photograph. When they do so, they often capture everyday life. That is, the real world. And in everyday life, many kids don't wear bicycle helmets.

The newspaper is not an instruction manual, and it is the intention of our editors to report on life as it is, not as it should be.

But as I said before, you have a point worth considering. When old editors like me see photos of kids riding bikes without helmets, no bells go off in our heads, no flags are run up our mental poles, because when we were young and riding bikes, bicycle helmets did not exist. We should be more aware that times have changed, that safety is much more of a concern these days than it was then, and at least consider these facts when selecting photos for publication.

Today's gripe

Our politicians' answer to the high demand and price of oil and the greenhouse gases that burning it causes is this: Find more oil and burn it! Sha-la-lala-lala live for today.
The British government, in response to sharp increases in the price of food, has suggested that its people eat less. Considering that the Brits are huffing and puffing just behind the United States in the obesity sweepstakes, this isn't such a bad idea. I'm sure that if our government had any suggestion about how to get more food for our money, it would be: Supersize it! Don't worry 'bout tomorrow, hey-ey-hey ey-hey.

Today's gripe

Some people have a tendency to try to make what they say seem more important by making singular words plural. Instead of saying, for instance, that a child's behavior is bad, that child exhibits bad behaviors.

The one that puts polliwogs in my pants, however, is monies. You know, "invest your monies in these funds." I don't know about you, but I have only one kind of money to invest, and it's American. I don't have any bundles of British pounds or euros or Czech crowns to invest. Just plain old American money. But it's monies you hear about more and more, and before long you'll be hearing expressions like: "monies don't grow on trees"; "put your monies where your mouth is"; and "monies talk."

Comments and complaints

C: I am writing to ask that you please do not publish photos showing dead bodies like the one you published Thursday. Yes, it was a terrible crime and tragedy, but showing one of the poor people that died was really uncalled for. I'm sure that person's family is not thrilled about their loved ones corpse being shown all over the world either. It makes an already horrible crime seem more impersonal and horrible by such graphic pictures.

We are subscribers and enjoy reading your paper each day, it makes a nice change from the sensationalized television news, but I feel that you are trying to sensationalize it by publishing photos like that - we have imaginations - we don't need to actually look at the carnage on the front page or have our kids see it. -C.D., T.S.

A: The front-page photo was gruesome - that's real blood flowing down the street from that body. Unlike all the violence we see on television and in the movie theaters, this was real. It was news. News is sometimes awful and gruesome. We're a newspaper. Sure, we could leave much more to readers' imaginations and not print any photos at all, or perhaps just print the headlines and not bother with all those details in the stories, but then we wouldn't be doing our job.

By the way, there were six people killed in this terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Istanbul: three uniformed police officers and three attackers. I have a difficult time getting up any sympathy for one of the "poor people" who died, or for his family, when it's pretty obvious that the dead man was one of the terrorists.

The Center of Europe, Part 11

Arvydas resembles the tall grass in which he stands. He sways, from foot to foot, like the shoots in the wind. At 12 years old, he's growing quickly now, and his arms and legs are as thin as ax handles.

We're standing near his family's home, which is not much more than a shack around which chickens and turkeys peck for seeds. Arvydas is one of seven children. His toothless mother, probably in her late 30s but easily looking 20 years older, tells us that he is a good boy, at the top of his class. He is shy and lowers his head as she says this, but he can't help but smile. He smiles all the time, sparks of sunlight on his new braces.

At school, kids made fun of him for his rotten teeth that had become so bad that it was difficult for him to eat. That's when Dijana Kanciene got involved. She knew people who would be willing to help him, to pay for his dental work, for his braces. That would be us, the Washington (Pa.) Rotary Club. We'd helped before, with books, clothing and sporting goods, and sending another needy child to college.

And so, here we stand, looking at Arvydas' braces, at where our money is going. We ask where his father is. His mother tells us that her husband works at the vodka factory, the concrete silos of which are visible across the field of tall grass. He spends all his salary on vodka. He was up drinking all the night before, and as we approached this day, he fled on his bicycle.

Embarrassed, tears in her eyes, she turns away. She tells Dijana that she is sick, that she has allergies and cannot afford the medicine that the doctor prescribes. Dijana tells her she will help. We wave goodbye to them, to Arvydas and his sisters.

Arvydas is young and bright. His family situation is not good, but he has had some help and attention. We do not know yet whether he will have the strength and the will to create a better life for himself and his own family, but we have hope.

Arvydas is Lithuania.

THE END

Whine, whine, whine

C: I can't stand when there is 2 A-sections. It doesn't make sense to have them! - C.G.

A: You're right; it doesn't make sense at all. But here's the explanation:

Configuring a newspaper is difficult, in fact too complicated to explain in this space. But let's just say that the size of the sections we print is restricted by the volume of advertisement and the placement of color ads.

Now, with this in mind, consider that many of our advertisers insist on appearing in the A-section. Sometimes, we get way more ads than can fit in, say, a 12-page section. So we print two A-sections and move B, C and D back. It doesn't seem to matter to those advertisers that their ads appear in what is actually a fake A-section. It's still in section A, as far as they are concerned. Everybody's happy. Except you.

The Center of Europe, Part 10

What can Regina and her baby daughter tell us about Lithuania's future? Lots, really.

Lithuania's population at one time was nearly 4 million. The current estimate is about 3.3 million. Most of the loss is due to emigration since independence in 1991. But some of it has to do with the low birth rate.

Deaths outpace births in Lithuania 11-10 now. Lithuania is a Roman Catholic country, so the abortion rate is lower than in other Eastern European countries, but it is still significant. It is estimated there are 60 abortions for every 100 births. Women are choosing to have fewer children and later in life. This trend could have serious effects on Lithuania's ability to care for aged citizens in the future. It's a trend that has prompted the Russian government to offer financial incentives to couples willing to have more children. In Japan, the birth rate is so low that an impending crisis in eldercare is feared.

Most interesting in the Baltic countries is a shift in social attitude from east to west. In a recent Gallup International poll examining family values, people were asked whether they believed giving birth outside of marriage is morally wrong. Americans were almost evenly split, with 47 percent saying out-of-wedlock births are morally wrong, and 50 percent saying they are not wrong. In Lithuania, 75 percent said out-of wedlock births are not morally wrong, with 16 percent disagreeing.

It seems that much more than political boundaries and allegiances have changed in Lithuania, and more change is sure to come.

The Center of Europe, Part 9

If one person could represent the Center of Europe - that is, the diversity of the continent and the changes occurring at its geographic center, which happens to be Lithuania - it would be Regina Pikasi.

Regina, 32, was born in Kazakhstan to parents of Russian ethnicity and moved with her family to Lithuania at the age of 2. Like many of her country's young and educated people, she left Lithuania, where jobs and opportunity are scarce, for the West. She spent several years in England, working as a waitress and in other jobs, all the time improving her English language skills.

She met a Greek, a oil rig worker, now working off the coast of Algeria. She became pregnant and returned to Lithuania to give birth to their daughter, Sofia, now 9 months old. Regina has been teaching English in Rokiskis, and her partner visits on leave from his job about once a month. He doesn't care much for Lithuania's cold weather. Eventually, she thinks, the will move somewhere else.

In the meantime, she is raising her daughter to speak Lithuanian, Russian (so she can communicate with her grandparents) and English (to communicate with her father).

There's something old and traditional in Regina's beauty and quiet demeanor, but there's nothing traditional about her attitude, which is modern and feminist and skeptical of social norms and habits of Eastern Europe. Conversation with her is intriguing, delightful and unpredictable. From the way I see it, where Regina is going is where Lithuania is going. More on that next time.

War and Peace

If you're wondering why you haven't seen a book review here recently, here's the reason. Feeling guilty about never having read this literary milestone - make that millstone - I put it at the top of my summer reading list. Weighing in at 1,455 pages, it took me nearly six weeks to get through it. For as long as Leo Tolstoy's epic novel is, it deserves the briefest of summaries:

Stupid generals lead armies to slaughter in stupid wars, while Russia's clueless elite party on.

Actually, "War and Peace" is a little more complicated than that. Tolstoy had his theories about the "law of history" and about the philosophical battle between free will and necessity, and his historical novel (the 1968 Ann Dunnigan translation) illustrates those theories.

But it is the characters - up to 500 of them - that makes this one of the world's greatest works of fiction. They are people of the early 19th century, written about in the 1860s, whose personalities are so familiar and contemporary that it is impossible not to imagine them with the faces of people we actually know.

What surprises me most about this book, which I should have read 40 years ago, is that it is not really about war, or about peace, but rather about forgiveness.

But back to the 1,455 pages. Tolstoy has a habit of beating his reader over the head with his theories, and just in case you didn't understand them the first time, he repeats them, several times. Had I been his editor, there would be about 200 fewer pages to slog through.

Today's gripe

We've grown pretty thick skins here and can handle criticism. Hey, answering complaints is part of my job description. But I get a little weary of taking the heat for all of society's ills.

The same guy who complained yesterday about the use of the American flag in an advertisement wrote again, this time sending clippings of photographs we have published recently showing people wearing the American flag: a Wild Things player in a uniform decorated with the flag, and a woman decked out all in red white and blue for the Canonsburg Fourth of July parade. "Shame on you," he wrote in notes attached to the clippings.

Shame on me? Shame on us? A newspaper is a mirror of society. Why smash the mirror for the image on its surface of which it has no control?

Whine, whine, whine

Right off the bat this morning, I received several complaints about the Consol advertisement in the July 4 edition. It was a full-page, color ad of the American flag, with some coal miners lifting up the bottom corner of it.

The flag should have been hanging with the blue field on the right, not the left, one caller complained. "How could you allow this to happen?" she demanded.

Another objected to the flag being touched on the bottom by the coal miners. "The flag should never be used for advertising purposes. Shame on you!" he scolded.

Hey, complain to Consol, and their ad agency. And, I'm sorry, but have you been living in a capsule below the earth's crust? Have you not seen the American flag in thousands of TV ads, adorning clothing, flying on lapels, waved in celebration of causes both lunatic and righteous? The image of our flag is everywhere; it is inescapable; and so sadly, it is overused.

The Center of Europe, Part 8

To find evidence of the animosity Lithuanians feel for their former Soviet overlords, you needn't look farther than the city of Siauliai (pronounced show-LAY) and the nearby Hill of Crosses.

This is a flat land, and it doesn't take much to be called a hill. Back in the 14th century, for defense against invaders from the west, a wooden castle occupied this little hump. After the uprisings of 1831 and 1863, local people began to erect crosses on the hill where the castle once stood in memory of those rebels who were killed or lost. By 1900, more than 100 crosses stood on the hill, and the people regarded it as a sacred place, the hill of the Crosses and Prayers.

In 1961, Soviet authorities destroyed the hill. The people rebuilt it. And it was bulldozed again. And the people rebuilt it. Every time it was destroyed, it was re-erected. Then the occupiers diverted the sewage from the city into a stream that flowed past the hill and transformed the area around it into a stinking marsh. This made no difference.

On Sept. 7, 1993, Pope John Paul II visited the Hill of Crosses. He ordered a crucifix to be sent to the hill from the Vatican and a monastery to be built within view of it.

Today, tourists are encouraged to buy crosses from vendors lined up in the parking lot, and hundreds of thousands of crosses adorn the hill. It is a tourist attraction, but the crowds that ascend and descend it are muted by the spectacle. It is still a sacred place, and always will be.

The Center of Europe, Part 7

Some people seem to be able to do everything. Raimondas Sirgedas - Raimis, for short - is one of those people.

That's him playing the accordion a couple of weeks ago. He's pretty good. At his Rotary club's Presidents Night celebration, when he turned his gavel over to his vice president, he grabbed the accordion from a member of the band and serenaded us we were leaving.

He can speak English pretty well, and when he visited us in May 2007, he gave a long and moving speech to the Washington Rotary Club. He can speak Russian, too, not just from being forced to learn it in school, but from being forced to serve in the Soviet army. And he can speak a little Latvian, the native language of his wife, Daiga. The couple have two teenagers, who seem as gregarious as their parents.

He is a businessman and entrepreneur, having started a retail computer business shortly after Lithuania's independence. He now owns one-third interest in the local newspaper.

And he is an organic farmer, growing peas, beans and grains on a 400-acre farm without the use of pesticides. He is somewhat discouraged, though, by the lack of interest in organic produce. He says the buyers of his grain don't market it as organic but simply mix it with other grains.

Although Lithuania is still a poor country, there is wealth there now, and many new millionaires. You notice that familiar Third World juxtaposition of lavish manor houses surrounded by hovels. Raimis is campaigning to use that new money to fix old problems. His current interest is a pre-school in great need of playground equipment for children with physical and mental disabilities.

Raimis attended this school; the broken, rusted jungle-gyms and see-saws are the same ones on which he played as a child. His Rotary club is working to replace them. This pre-school is different now. Children with special needs, once confined to their own homes or institutions, are now taught and cared for along with "normal" kids - a fairly new concept in Eastern Europe. The school is well-staffed and in reasonably good physical condition. But the playground is another story.

Raimis will fix that. some people can do everything, and he's one of them.

The Center of Europe, Part 6

On January 13, 1991, Soviet troops moved in on the Vilnius TV Tower, occupied by dissident Lithuanians bent on independence. Thirteen of the protesters were killed, but the Soviet army lacked the will to continue the crackdown and withdrew. Lithuania had won its independence, and the last of the Soviet troops were gone form the country by September 1993, even before they had pulled out of East Germany.

The bitterness, even hatred, that many Lithuanians feels for Russia is understandable.
After a few years of independence that began in 1918, Poland occupied a large chunk of The Soviet Union annexed the whole country in 1940. From 1941 to 1944, Lithuania was occupied by the Nazis, with whom Lithuania sided, out of disdain for the Soviets.

I have found it difficult to get Lithuanians to talk about World War II. They're not at all proud of their collaboration. Five years ago, I pressed Zigmus Mackievicus, the superintendent of school in Rokiskis, to explain what occurred in his town then. "It's nothing something that we choose to remember here," he said. "What happened was that the Germans came, they gathered all the Jewish people together, took them into the forest at the edge of the town and shot them."

More than 240,000 Jews died in Lithuania during the occupation.

But it is the Soviet Union, more specifically Russia, that is the object of Lithuanian ire. The Soviets built resorts for their communist party faithful here, sucked away its agricultural produce, drafted its boys into its army and forced everyone to learn Russian in school and to use that language in education, business and government.

My friend Julia Machlina is hesitant to visit Lithuania and the other Baltic states, for fear that she will be treated badly as a native Russian and a Russian speaker, even though her father is Jewish and her mother Ukrainian. But all Lithuanians I have met have told me that they feel no animosity toward Russian people, only for their former government.

Being an American abroad these days is no different. I have been in countries where American foreign policy is decried, where our president is considered a villain and a war criminal. Yet I have never been treated anything but cordially; no one has ever blamed me for the actions of my government. Most people can make the distinction between the rulers and the ruled. And we can be thankful for that.

The Center of Europe, Part 5

Vilma Meciukoniene was fresh out of college and teaching school when she wrote to Books for the World and asked the local organization for a few books to put in the "English corner" in her classroom. That was seven years ago. Despite the fact that English had become the most popular foreign language to learn since independence in 1991, there were few books in English in all of Rokiskis, Lithuania. The only resources for English teachers were a few tattered, dog-eared texts produced by the communist government that served the purpose of anti-American propaganda.

As the founder of Books for the World, I wrote Vilma back and told her that our organization doesn't send boxes of books - it's too expensive and inefficient that way; we send shipping containers instead. I explained that if she was willing to get together with teachers and librarians from an area large enough to make use of, say, 25,000 books, we'd be happy to consider her proposal.

To make a long story short, Vilma did that, and five years ago Books for the World shipped $1.2 million worth of books in English and teaching materials to northeast Lithuania. and it didn't stop there. A little later, and with the help of the Washington Rotary Club, we sent another container, with another 10,000 books, school furniture, clothing and sporting goods, to help not just schools and libraries but Arteities Vardan, a community organization in the village of Obeliai that operates a safe house for abused and neglected children.

Vilma was the force behind all this, the organizer, the cheerleader, the efficient administrator. She never really got the credit or respect she deserved for this because she was so young - just 22 when it all began.

Now 29 and still inspired and active in humanitarian activity, Vilma has moved on from teaching. She went back to school and earned a master's degree in business and now works for the city's planning department. Her marriage fell apart three years ago, and now she lives alone with her daughter, Fausta, 8, in a comfortable first-floor flat at the edge of town. She's not entirely satisfied with her new job, but she feels it's best for her and her daughter.

Vilma loves to travel. In fact, Vilma and Fausta are now in Turkey on a week-long group tour with other people from Rokiskis. For years she has dreamed of visiting the United States. But, she explains with a sad smile, "that's not possible."

As a divorced woman, young and educated, she would never receive a visa from the U.S. Our immigration officials think she is too much of a risk to stay in this country.

You know all that stuff written at the base of the Statue of Liberty? Well, it just doesn't apply anymore.