When cherry blossoms bloom in Belleville Park, it’s time to put away the snow blower. Usually by this time of April, in Belleville and Nutley, we watch the falling cherry blossoms and think, oh, they’re like little pink snowflakes. But this year, things have changed.Continue reading: Hold the Flowers, It Might Snow
Actually, I don’t care what happened to the entertainer’s stuff. His stuff was crap. My crap is stuff. He would say so himself, except he’s gone, and as an atheist, probably not far. But as for me I’ve been thinking about my stuff as I sit here in my man cave/bunker/warehouse with about 60 of those white storage boxes full of my stuff.
I’m not a pack rat. I’ve been writing for more than 40 years, and I don’t have any notes from before 1971, more or less. So, I’ve got a lot of notes about stuff I wrote about, and probably a lot more notes about stuff I wanted to write about but haven’t done so yet. And boxes of books that I used in my research. And more boxes of books I intend to read when I get some time. I can’t bear to part with any of them.
The German soldier is rolling down the hill, another is falling – dead – down the hill, the smoke is clearing, the gunfire dissipating. 'Wounded' and 'dead' are scattered along the 250 yards of beach and incline where Army Rangers and the Big Red One have taken the hill. The Wehrmacht gives up this beach, these guns, this hill representing the enormous undertaking 69 years ago on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France.
A large brown envelope arrived recently in snail mail from Ashtabula, Ohio. It contained copies of letters I wrote to a young woman named Mary when we were 14. We met in the northeastern Ohio township, and decided to keep in touch when my summer vacation ended.
I found her on Facebook, and we got in touch after four decades. When she realized I’d become a writer, she mentioned my letters in a box in her attic. Would I like copies? What could I have possible said in those letters to a relative stranger 300 miles away? And why would she save them into this millennium?
“They’re about what you’d expect a 14 year old to write about,” she said.
Would I like to meet myself at 14? Not that I could go back and talk some sense into my head, but what I think about those times now and what I was actually saying at the time, well, they’re mountains apart.
PATH commuter train travels parallel to the Passaic River in northern New Jersey. It’s the same story every week: “Ant, the house is all dusted. You can vacuum when you’re ready.”
“Aw, I got to vacuum the whole house,” I mutter under my breath.
When I’m ready, I grab the vacuum from the upstairs closet, plug it in and click it on. While the noise drowns out the rest of the world, I focus on specks of dust and lint challenging me to a duel they will lose.
Before I know it, my head is cleared of everyday life. My mind is fogged by memories of Mom and her Electrolux that slid on metal blades across our old rug in the four-room cold water flat.
There was that time when the neighborhood version of “Benny Miller-from-Cucamonga” tried to sell Mom a new vacuum. “Would you let your eight-year-old son pick up a handful of dirt outside and eat it?”
“Of course NOT!”
“But, Mrs. Buccino,” he said, “the rug inside your house is much worse than the dirt outside.”
Hey, I was eight. I wouldn’t eat dirt in the yard. Anymore. What was this guy talking about? ...
