Between Christmas and New Year's

Happy New Year's Eve Day!

We had our first real snow on West Island yesterday. I waited until the afternoon to shovel and clean off the car...big mistake. It was icy and hard as rock by the time I got out there. The good part about its being so hard is that it's still pretty out there, not slushy and muddy. The bad part is that it's so hard to do clean-up. I hope it warms up enough to clear it all out so next time I'll be smarter about it.

I hate it when the old snow is hard as cement under the new snow, it creates a nightmare for shoveling. Been there a few times, a few years, not looking forward to it again.

Guess I was just playing "on vacation." I don't usually get to sleep half the day away, putter around the house, and not do anything. Not for long, though. Tomorrow I cover the Polar Plunge at Fort Pheonix in Fairhaven (10 a.m. sharp), and then it's back to the grind getting next week's issue ready.

I hope you all had a great Christmas, or other holiday if you celebrate something else. I also hope you were able to be around young children. I feel so blessed to have spent some time with a bunch of young cousins of all ages, from newborn to college aged.

One of my cousins, who has four children from 1 year to 10 years, moved into a new apartment just a few days before Christmas. What fun to be part of that chaos!

A bunch of my other cousins showed up at my sister's on Christmas Eve for a very short, but very intense party: kids back from college, the working young'uns off for the holiday, the rest of us just having a blast (that's a 70s word for a really good time). All in all, it was a great Christmas, hope you can all say the same.

Now, it's onto the new year. I hope 2013 is prosperous and fun for all my readers.

Stay positive, people, there are enough grouches out there.

I start the new year without the big fir tree that has been in my front yard since I moved here 18 years ago. We had to take it down in September. It was pretty much dead and a danger to the house and other trees. What a shock it was when it was gone. Wow. So much light. So foreign.

Some people tell me it looks better, the yard is bigger, and we all have more light. I don't know. I've decided to go through one whole year, four seasons, before deciding if I should replace it. It provided a lot of privacy, and it was where my fairies stay when they visit. I felt terrible destroying their little inn, but I had no choice. The gnome trees are still intact, though, and look pretty healthy.

The fir tree was pretty old, although we didn't count rings....hmm....the trunk it still out there. Now, if I were a really GOOD writer, I'd run out there, scrape off the snow and count rings. But, it's too cold out there. I'll wait for the thaw.

The tree was old when I moved here, I've been here for 18 years, and it took about 20 minutes to take it down. Twenty minutes to destroy years and years of growth.

Before and after pics...

Big difference, huh? Still not sure I like it. Have to decide what to put there, though. I can see right inside Isobel's house now! And when Gail's mother was hanging out on the porch yelling into her cellphone at 6 a.m., I could hear every word. I even went flying out the door to see what the problem was. Never heard her when the tree was there. Ah well.

Also said "good-bye" to Dusty, the old CB350 I had. He served me well. We (my sister and I) got him when my cousin's husband died in the 90s. The bike had been sitting in the basement collecting dust for about 8 years, my cousin told us (hence the name). And it didn't have a mark on it, except that one little dent "that you put on it, Beth," she told me.

"In 1978?" I responded with surprise.
"Yup."
Oh....figures.

Here's a picture of old Dusty, leaving my house for the last time.

The 1971 Honda CB350 was a toy for Jess, my cousin's husband. We're not sure, but we think he got it new and we think he got it just so he could take it apart to see how it worked. Those Hondas were very cheap in the day.

So, when I visited them on Bainbridge Island (which isn't really an island) in Washington state in 1978, Jess let me ride it. It was before the casino on the island. It was sparsely populated, very rural, and everyone knew everyone. I didn't have a motorcycle license, but Jess just balked at that.

So, I took the bike out for a bit, reveling in every second. What a feeling! I didn't have a bike back home, but I had ridden dirt bikes before.

I pulled away from their house, accelerated up the road a piece, took a right, up a hill, to a very quiet intersection. I slowed a bit too much on the turn, and...yup, you guessed it. I dropped the bike. I was a skinny little thing back then, about 100 lbs (don't ask how much I weigh now). I was only 21, no need to work out or anything. Just a skinny kid. I watched that bike go down, ever-so-slowly, not able to stop it. It was just too heavy.

Shoot...now what?

No cell phones in 1978.

Not a human in sight on Bainbridge Island in 1978 in the middle of the morning.

Not a house in sight.

Can't walk back, too far.

Will just have to pick that sucker up.

Somehow, I managed it. Got back to the house and there was Jess, with a pile of cigarette butts at his feet on the side of the road where he watched for me.

He said he was trying to decide if he should go look for me, but was more afraid we'd miss each other. Then he was trying to figure out how to tell his wife that he lost her cousin.

When we got custody of Dusty in the 90s, he went to my sister first. Then she upgraded and I got him. I only sold him recently to someone who is going to try to restore him. I hope so. He was a great little bike and I had a lot of fun with him. I only took him off the road a few years ago.

So, I start 2013 with a new motorcycle, a boat, and a few new pounds.

I still have some stories to tell about my first season with the boat, though, so stay tuned. Oh yeah, and the Coast Guard Auxiliary boating safety course. Now I know why they laughed so much at my boat posts.

Until next year, then...

Happy New Year to you and yours!

Sandy Hook and the Loss of Possibilities

I have a cousin who lives in Connecticut. She and her husband run a gourmet food shop on the coast. I emailed her after the tragedy in Sandy Hook, saying I knew it wasn’t that close to her, but that if something like that happened anywhere in Mass., I’d think of it as very close to home. She told me that it was quiet, very quiet in her shop and around town.

The quiet is very telling, isn’t it? It’s a way of sharing in it. It’s a way of showing we are all affected by it.

I couldn’t be quiet for too long, though. I spent some time with my cousins and their kids, altogether seven children under the age of 11. There’s no such thing as quiet with that crew.
But the adults knew. We said not a word, lest the older ones hear. But they knew, too. It’s the quiet that binds us.

I wish the know-it-all, so-called pundits would just shut up and be quiet, too.

I don’t want to hear about gun control.

I don’t care what his diagnosis was.

I don’t care if you think she was a bad mom or a good mom or if they were divorced or rich, or if he was a skinny awkward kid. All of those things are true of millions of people and they don’t kill anyone.
Just tell me what happened. I want to know that. I want to know how the kids are. I want to know how their parents are. Some people say the constant coverage makes the murderer a hero and people will copy him. Really? Murder little children because you saw it on TV? Surely it takes more than that.

I want TV coverage, lots of it. This is how we share the experience in the modern age. It doesn’t take three days for the Pony Express to get the word to us. CNN does it instantly. I want that. I need that in a tragedy. I want to know that other people are asking the same questions I am. Just spare me the speculation about the workings of his inner mind. And especially stop talking about “indicators” or we’ll end up incarcerating every awkward teenager who doesn’t laugh on cue or cry hard enough.

There’s a piece making its way around the Internet: “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” by Liza Long, although that wasn’t the original title. I was mortified when I read it. She lumps her son in with mass murders because he has violent outbursts. People who like the piece say it’s about the failure of our mental health system.

One of my dearest friends and I have been going back and forth on email about the article. My friend insists the writer is brave and honest. I insist that her son will think his mother’s greatest expectation of him is that he will be a mass murderer. She says I’m blaming his mother. I say, she’s simply hurting his feelings. She could’ve left that paragraph out and still made her point.

I’m not saying this writer is wrong. Maybe there is no hope for her child. Maybe he is doomed to be a loser. But does he have to hear it from his mother? Pray tell, how does that help? Who does that help?

I know it’s compli­cated when a child has severe problems. I’m willing to admit that my thinking is simplistic. But lots of parents with children who have violent outbursts expect their children to live full, productive lives. They know how extra hard it will be, but they keep at it. They are not clueless and in denial. They are being advocates and insisting that their children have the chance to be all they can be, whatever that may look like in the end. They would never allow their children to think that being a mass murderer was in the mix with tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor. They look instead for the spark that will grow into a light that will lead the way to a happy life. And when they find that spark, they make sure their child can see it.

We all need to let our young people know that they have possi­bili­ties, because they do. They have all the possibility of America. Our politicians need to stop talking about our decline and how our kids will be miserable and hopelessly mired in debt.

If this man had seen possibilities in his future, would he have thrown it all away to become infamous? His fellow classmates say he was brilliant, maybe even a genius. Why didn’t he become a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates? That’s the possibility of America. Why didn’t he believe that he could be president? That’s the possibility of America. Why didn’t he get a great job in New York like so many of his neighbors? That’s the possibility of America.

If the corporate life didn’t appeal to him, why didn’t he start his own business. Pet rock anyone? This is America. Anything is possible. If the suburban colonials of his hometown didn’t appeal to him, why didn’t he understand that he could go anywhere in the 50 states by just...going? No papers, no passes, just a ride. So many possibilities awaited him, on the ocean, in the great big country out west, in the mountains, in the cities.

So many possibilities. All wasted. All gone.

Twenty small children killed. Six women killed. He killed his mother first. That surely will mean something to the shrinks. But what? And does it matter? Will it help prevent another young loser from doing the same thing?

Possibilities. They need to know that they have possibili­ties. No matter how screwed up they are, or how unintelligent the tests say they are, or how off-the-charts-brilliant they are, or how awkward they are, or how hard they find it to read, or how hard they find it to sit in one place, or how much they hate their lives, they need to know that there are possibilities for them.

We have to make those possibilities real for them. No more leaving people behind because they can’t do something just the “right” way. Everyone can make a contribution of some kind. Just ask anyone who works with the so-called disabled.

We all have possibilities.

It’s time we started pointing them out to those who think they have none, so they stop stealing the possibilities from innocent little kids whose possibilities were still as wide as the world itself, whose sparks had not yet even been defined.

What’s next, asked Dr. Baldwin (page 4). There is no next, he said. “I don’t know what can happen lower than this.”

Surely, we can map out greater expectations for our young people than aspiring to be the lowest of the low.