Open Barr

The Bouncing Boy in the Upstairs Window.

On a hot and steamy afternoon, there was a party at the Maddequet Admiralty club  for someone who was 8 and for another someone who was 80.  8 had drawn a special t-shirt for himself that had the Admiralty porch with figures of himself and his grandfather.  80 was inside with one of his favorite Hawaiian shirts.  8 played baseball, ran for tag, and made new friends with each hit and swipe.  80 was inside with friends from childhood, work, his first  and, now, his second family.  Both had special cakes.  Both had great times.

9 did not.    9 did not want to play baseball or run.  He didn’t want to be inside.  He didn’t want to eat.  He didn’t want to meet the other kids or to play.  At best, he would follow along after his younger brother and try to inveigle him into his fractured fairy tales and cracked cartoons.  But mostly, he sat in the shade.

Autism is a long puzzle with no fixed solution.  Rourke is not sick in the way that we think of sick; he doesn’t need a wheel chair, he hasn’t lost his hair to chemotherapy, and he has had no surgeries.  From his relatives on the porch, he appears to be like his brother, albeit bigger and more quirky.  But in 71 years, he won’t be greeting his friends and families on a hot August afternoon.

Autism creates an entangling slime world of seaweed, kept at bay by firm ritual and iron habits. Within a monastic structure, joy can leap.  Without the structure, terror spirits him away.  He eats the same foods every day, wears the same clothes, and listens to the same songs.  But truck sounds, shirt labels, wet clothes, buttons, and zippers  and a whole host of irritants vex him to madness. With all its voices and demands, the challenges of a third grade classroom confound him.   In his best hours, he can chat and laugh.  In his worst hours, however, his classmates are trying to shoot him, the nurse is trying to poison him, and the classroom is a torture chamber. I have stood flustered and bewildered beside a big boy as he leapt and beat his thighs in roaring anger at a milk carton.  To him, Autism doesn’t speak, it screams.

As an infant, he would stand in his crib and bounce for hours at a time.  He had yet to escape and prowl his bedroom, instead, he pogoed relentlessly within the white slats.  On his first birthday, I place a tired boy in his crib and left him to his sleep.  But from out on the front lawn, we could look up into the second floor window and see him joyously bouncing.  Then he would disappear for a minute and we would all think him asleep, when he would reappear in mid-air.  It is how he is; intermittent, happy, and distant.

For the moment, Sesachacha Pond solves his puzzle. It has no kelp, no big waves, no scary sand fleas, and a good smooth bottom where he can stand.  He and his brother run down the sand path to the beach, kick their shoes off and wade right in. To Rourke, in particular, water gives one great, shuddering shock that sends him leaping and splashing until his legs are sore.   Our games involve swimming, throwing, or riding Papa’s shoulders until he leaps off.   After several hours of riding, being tossed, and hosting the other children, Rourke will float on the water with only his father’s hand and the love of salt water to support him.

One afternoon while his brother was at camp, Rourke and I went to the pond.  As has been this summer’s inconvenient truth, the sky held murk and mist.  We parked in a light drizzle and walked up the path in a gathering shower.  Unconcerned at trivialities, Rourke ran into the shallows and began his ecstatic leaping.  And so we stayed, in the rain and in the pond, swimming, jumping, and tossing until the fuel ran out and he lay on his back, rain beading on his face.  It was a good day.

Most days are not.  Most days have seaweed rolling in the wave or little plugs of moss and mud floating parenthetically in the pond.  The milk is in the wrong container, the Cheerios are stale, the strawberries froze in the refrigerator, and someone is trying to murder him.  I do what a Dad can.  I carry him over the muddy shore, soothe the wounded soul and, at the last, buy him a pizza.  At its essence, fatherhood is about keeping the seaweed away and I do my best.

But fatherhood is also about slowly saying goodbye.  For this moment, he remains Prince of the apple towns and Lord of the Lego people, but this moment is fading into September.  More seaweed lurks in the tides and currents of this year, next, and the decade after it.  And his Papa may not find that seaweed as easy to toss has long strands of kelp.  His work will end, just like everyone else’s.  By the time Rourke is 80, his papa will have long since drifted off on the tide.

So that is why I am walking this weekend for Autism Speaks.  I don’t look for a cure or a treatment, I look for a party.  I look for a day. 71 years in the future when he can sit on the Admiralty porch with friends and family, wear his comfortable Hawaiian shirt, and watch the 8 year old grandson run the bases.  I walk for a day with no seaweed.

http://www.yesterdaysisland.com/2010/essay/12.php

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http://www.yesterdaysisland.com/2010/essay/9.php

http://www.yesterdaysisland.com/2010/essay/8.php

(Before I wrote the short eulogy for my uncle, I wrote this longer, more personal piece.  My brother correctly told me that it was too long and too individual for the Mass.  So, I will post it here instead.)

Dear Friends,

Almost everyone in this room knew Father O’Rourke with his roman collar on.  You knew him from the school, or from the altar, or from the confessional.  To you, perhaps, he was an enthusiastic, erudite priest of the parish.  You knew him from Brighton, or from St. Stephens in the North End, or from Jamaica Plan, or from Woburn, or perhaps, from South America.

To me, Father James was Uncle Jim.  In my childhood, thirty years back upstream, James was the gleeful, laughing man that came out to our house in Wakefield every Wednesday and Thursday.  We spent most of the week drifting in an eddy of swim practice, homework, and Junior High.  On Wednesday, he hit our lives in a torrent. He brought records and crossword puzzles, the Mad and Games Magazine, Doritos and Baby Watson Cheesecake.  He was our Mary Poppins, our Doctor Who, our Wizard of Oz.

Uncle Jim brought rock and roll music into our house.  My mother of blessed memory loved her show tunes.  She would blast “Mame” or “Wildcat” or “the King and I” in the quiet suburban afternoon.  In the innocence of the late seventies, she played both “Godspell” and “Hair” so many times that we sang some of those songs for the edification our elementary school classmates and teachers.  My uncle brought us into the world of John Denver, Jackson Browne, and Warren Zevon.  If Mr. Constanopolis had trouble with me singing “the Age of Aquarius” what must he have thought of “Rosie”?  In middle school, James brought me to a Jackson Browne concert at the Boston Garden.  Under the cover of his roman collar, we stood in the herbal cloud of the Carter years and sang Jackson through “The Load Out” at one o’clock in the morning.

James took us away for many field trips.  He would whisk me, my brother, and sister out to the movies.  More often than not, our matinees included appropriate childhood fare like Watership Down or Escape From Witch Mountain, or, more likely, he would usher us non-childish things like  “Blazing Saddles”, “Airplane,”or the “Pink Panther.”  Then, he would bring us to The Ground Round in Stoneham for popcorn and soda before bringing the giggling sugary batch of us back to our mother.  When we got a few years older, he baptized us into his passion for museums.  He brought us into the Harvard Museum of Natural History for the glass flowers and the skeletons, he brought us to the Museum of Fine Arts for the mummies and the Homers, and Phillips Andover Museum of Archaeology where my brother and I played with an ancient rifle while he examined pot shards.

Occasionally, James would take us all out to dinner.  Once, we went to a restaurant called “The Colorado Public Library” which had me all confused.  He was a great forager of the North End, from Galleria Umberto and a no-name café on a side street, to Mike’s Pastry and the European.

But what he truly loved to do, all those years ago, was to cook. To the Barsantis, the past is a menu.  We remember life altering events not so much by what someone wore or what someone else said, but what was served.  My mother was a wonderful woman, with great and wonderful gifts of wit, patience, and strength.  But she had the gift of the Irish in her kitchen.  She could boil meat to gray muddy perfection.  James brought our kitchen to life.  For several years, my uncle would come out to our house on Wednesday with a selection of recipes from “Bon Appetit,” “Gourmet,” and The Blue Strawberry Cookbook.  He made G.I. Joe chicken, Watermelon in Orange Juice and Beer, Steak au Poivre, Seafood Lasagna and Gellate Spazzacamino (which was neither pronounced nor made correctly.  It included Haagen-Dazs Vanilla, espresso coffee grounds and Grand Marnier en flambé).   Later, he worked his way through the cookbooks of James Beard and Pierre Franey, filling our Wednesday with shrimp, steak, scallops, and a stream of tremendous dinners and desserts.  I remember James standing in my mother’s kitchen, in our old house on Plymouth Road, peeling onions in the sink and wearing my swim goggles for protection.  He taught me the pleasures of the table, the necessity of a good knife, and the edifying industry of dishwashing.

More than all of those meals, movies, and museums, the greatest gift James left for me was a love of words.  When I was very young, my grandparents would occasionally have us to my grandparent’s house on Pleasant Street while my father and mother were otherwise occupied.  The afternoons often involved Speed Racer, Lassie, and F-Troop in the back room, but sooner or later, I would open up the Doonesbury books.  From this, we walked a few inches over in the book case for the Time Life Archaeology series.  Eventually, we would bound upstairs to prowl through his bookcases upstairs.

When I was in sixth grade, James began bringing paperbacks for me to read. Both of us enjoyed  mass market mystery/adventure stories.  So, we would trade Alistair MacLean, Ian Fleming, John D. MacDonald, and others back and forth. The first book I remember him handing me had a mushroom cloud on its cover and was titled “This Briefcase is About to Explode.”  Eventually, I reached into the world of John LeCarre and Colin Dexter, but I was never able to warm to Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, or P.D. James.  I always returned to Travis McGee on the Busted Flush. In middle school, he gave me a trapper keeper for my writing.  It had a space shuttle and a space man on the outside, and I filled it with stories and drawings for the next several years.

Assignments changed, times changed, and we changed.  Both words and meals are planned, presented, enjoyed and …gone in the current.  After leaving St. Stevens, he could no longer guarantee free Wednesday and Thursday nights.  And we had swim meets, homework, and the squalls of adolescence.  We circled the wagons at the teenaged end of the Thanksgiving table, full of jokes, puns, and ribbing while he was marooned at the edge of the adult table, eavesdropping on our tomfoolery.

The great shame of adulthood is that you become aware of all that you have thrown away like pearls before the swine; those meals, those books, all that time we gobbled up.  Now, from the slow moving deep water of middle age, I want to swim back up the stream into my youth to those afternoons in the kitchen and the evenings in the family room with his screen, his slide projector, and his voice.  To eavesdrop on those evenings again and, like Emily Webb in Our Town, “really, really listen.”

James holds the mortgage on the man I am today.  He was a man of enthusiasms and enchantments; he dove headfirst into his passions and his pleasures, whether it be at the kitchen or in the library.  And, in this weak list, I haven’t included his love of South America, of photography, of his own music on guitar, organ, or his own voice, his jigsaw puzzles and any of his one hundred other virtues.  Nor have I listed the wonderful gifts he brought us and our children, from sodas from the St. James Society to bus fare to Vermont.  In adulthood, he confirmed me, married me, baptized my children, then buried my mother and my mother-in-law.  I remain in his debt.

Godspeed James.

Dear Friends,

Almost everyone in this church knew Father O’Rourke with his roman collar on.  You knew him from the school, or from the altar, or from the confessional.  To you, perhaps, he was an enthusiastic, erudite, and generous priest of the parish, be it in Brighton, or North End, or Jamaica Plan, or Woburn, or perhaps, from Bolivia.

To me, Father James was Uncle Jim.  In my childhood, thirty years back upstream, James was the gleeful, laughing man that came out to our house in Wakefield every Wednesday and Thursday. When I was the age of my own children, he was the relative who showed up with the best gifts.   The pastor of Blessed Sacrament brought us Mad Magazine, the Pink Panther movies, and Doritos.  At Christmas and at birthdays would be Mad Libs, comic books, jigsaw puzzles and arrowheads. Later, as I advanced into middle school, we began an exchange of novels.  Both of us enjoyed reading mass market mystery/adventure stories.  So, we would trade Alistair MacLean, Ian Fleming, John D. MacDonald, and others back and forth.  In middle school, he gave me a trapper keeper for my writing.  It had a space shuttle and a space man on the outside, and I filled it with stories and drawings for the next several years.  He took us to rock concerts, art galleries, museums of natural history, and restaurants that served snails.

James’ passion, all those years ago, was cooking. My mother was a wonderful woman, rich with wit, patience, and strength.  But she had the gift of the Irish in her kitchen.  She could boil meat to gray muddy perfection. However, for two nights a week, my uncle would feed us better than a restaurant would have.    On Wednesdays Uncle James arrived with a selection of recipes from “Bon Appetit,” “Gourmet,” and The Blue Strawberry Cookbook.  He made G.I. Joe chicken, Watermelon in Orange Juice and Beer, Steak au Poivre, Seafood Lasagna and Gellato Spazzacamino (which was neither pronounced nor made correctly.  It included Haagen-Dazs Vanilla, espresso coffee grounds and Grand Marnier en flambé).

After those dinners, he put his slide shows on.  Through our childhood, James would orbit with a collection of cameras, snapping and whirring away. He enjoyed ambushing my mother at her most candid and capturing her with a fork to her lips.  But the slide shows were the props for his stories.  In the darkened space, we heard the lore and sagas of our cousins, the Phalons.  Jimmy did this, Maureen did that, and Timmy made them all laugh until Patrick pulled a prank.  Later, when we had children, James had put the slide projector away, but he would bring out the glassy prints.  From those, he told stories of Roury’s maturity, Kyle’s smarts, and Jack’s ability to manipulate his grandfather.  Grace and Charlotte melted his already soft heart.   And had he met Baby Eleanor, she would have trilled his heart as well.

James was the great gift giver: he gave us many things. When we were children, his presents were toys, books, and puzzles.  When we had children, his gifts were savings bonds, silver bracelets, and Legos. Underneath all of these things, below the robin’s egg boxes and the ribbon and the wrapping paper, were ineffable gifts of praise, of passion, or enthusiasm, of license, and of an adventure beyond our mother’s windows.  And beneath all of that in the blood and sinew and bone was love.

http://www.yesterdaysisland.com/2010/essay/7.php

Hi all,

I have a technical question and I would like your help with it.

I have spent the last several winters writing novels.  I understand that one has to write four bad novels before one finally gets a good one.  Well, I have written the four bad ones and the current one, “Maria’s Baby”, is okay.  My usual cast of volunteer readers has read all fifty chapters this winter and they have pronounced it fit for human consumption.

Set on Nantucket in the fall, the novel centers on a pregnant high school sophomore named Maria De Salvo.  Her delicate condition is kept secret from parents and adults, although her Brazilian lover is overjoyed.  One evening, with her lover, she witnesses a horrific beating by two of her classmates.  She stays with the victim, makes a statement to the police, and becomes the next target of the two boys.  Under pressure, Maria and her lover make plans to leave.  At Steamship Wharf, the two boys find the couple, beat her lover and kidnap her.    While Maria is quickly found in a few hours, her lover has disappeared and the punks who assaulted her before are making more plans.  While she waits and searches for her lover, her life becomes intertwined with a 280 pound freshman football prodigy named Elvis, his very ill father, a druglord named Lollipop, and a pacifist, alcoholic police detective.  (There is much dancing and comic mischief.)

I am readying some packets to go off to literary agents in New York and London.  But as my novel does not feature vampires, lesbians, or three hundred pages of Aquavit fueled Swedish family history, I don’t feel that it will get picked up.

This is where I need your help.  I am lucky enough to be published regularly in Yesterday’s Island and to have a fairly large crowd of regular readers—you.

I suspect I will be looking at self-publishing again.  Were you to be interested in reading or purchasing this novel, would you prefer it in electronic form (Ipad or Kindle) or in old fashioned paper?

There are many arguments for both.  People who buy books on Nantucket tend to buy them as souvenirs or artifacts.  Yet, the kindle has taken over many of the active readers I know and they haven’t gone back to paper books.

I look forward to your opinion.

While the numbers show some movement and improvement, the great ship of sand has yet to change course significantly.  Most of the numbers are similiar to last year’s–and last year’s were horrendous.

The bad news:

There are the same number of jobs available (7) this year as last year.  (Contrast: 2005 had 53 jobs: May 2000 had 160 jobs)

There are roughly the same number of year round rentals available (11-13) this year as last (2005 had 0 year round)

There are a steady of stream of 4-8 foreclosure notices in each paper.

The good news

The paper has more pages now than they had last year ( 60-48).  Most weeks have been right on the numbers but advertising has increased (to my uncounting eye)

There are fewer summer rentals (8-21)  I suppose there are many ways to read this, but I choose to think that more houses have rented this year. (In 2005, there were 40 or so summer rentals listed.  From 1999-2003, in May, the paper averaged 35 summer rentals.  I think this market has changed a great deal.)

The Landbank has almost double the funds of last year (1.7 -3.2) showing that some real estate is moving.

Conclusion

The island is doing better, but not by much.  Again, this is three years in a row of tough times.

One last, interesting, note.  From 1999-2003, in May, the paper averaged 25 cars for sale a week.