Sense and Sensibility

Audacity, Audacity, Audacity

The brokers are not like you and me.

The folks on Wall Street are miserable.

No, no, it’s not that the $700 billion bailout was too meager.

It’s their bonuses.

They’re so, well…puny.

A full 46 percent of 900 financial industry employees surveyed griped that their bonuses were too small last year.

Yes, last year, 2008, the year your 401K lost all those commas.

Some 80 percent of Wall Street bulls took home bonuses last year, to the tune of $18.4 billion, the New York State comptroller reported last week. A full 46 percent of them took home the same or more than their haul the previous year, a fact that failed to squelch the bawling.

Still unknown is whether, or how much of those bonuses came out of the federal bailout package. With apologies to Tennessee Williams, “Audacity, Audacity, Audacity.”

A rising tide of gall seems is sweeping the nation, fueled by a rush of cluelessness startling in its depth. How, for instance, did Hartford Mayor Eddie A. Perez think he could get away with $40,000 worth of free home renovations at the hands of a city contractor? (And not even a good city contractor, but one whose slipshod work is under state investigation.) Had Perez canceled his newspaper subscription the year former Gov. John Rowland was ousted over a hot tub? Did he figure the best way to avoid scrutiny was

And just how bad is the carbon monoxide in Detroit that auto executives there figured they could rush to Washington, D.C. on private jets to weep to Congress about their shrinking profit margins? Don’t they know it doesn’t do to beg in Armani?

And speaking of nervy jaunts, how about Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich self-immolating on every talk-show in America? If I have to see this guy talking about his health care plans while his expletive-laced transcript hovers above him, I’m going to scalp him myself. I cannot figure out if the man has unmitigated cheek or if he’s completely delusional. Fortunately, for the rational among us, the Illinois State Senate sent him and his Elvis statue packing [Dash] but failing to alleviate the rest of us from the televised sideshow of his distinctive implosion.

Bernie Madoff

And finally, there is Bernie Madoff. After he made off with an estimated $50 billion in what is considered the world’s largest Ponzi scheme, the 70-year-old got lucky. He eluded an attempt by federal prosecutors to revoke his bail. The prosecutors alleged that Madoff had scrambled to mail $1 million worth of jewelry to his wife and sons before he was arrested. But judge didn’t budge and dispatched busted Bernie to his $7 million Park Avenue pad, where he remains under house arrest. . “I’m a prisoner in my own house!” Madoff wailed, according to the New York Post. “I can’t go anywhere! I’m stuck here all day.”

Poor Bernie. Reduced to take-out.

When people are losing their homes, their jobs, their health care and their sense of possibility, it might seem unconscionable that the well-heeled complain about the thickness of their socks. In one week last month, the country hemorrhaged 65,000 jobs. It might seem inconceivable that the wealthy would be so bereft of scruples [Dash] to say nothing of empathy [Dash] that they would lard their vaults with greenbacks at a time when others have lost everything.

But the worm of entitlement slithers into the minds of the fortunate with insidious tenacity. Last year, the income of the 400 wealthiest Americans soared 23 percent from last year, to an average of $263 million, according to the Internal Revenue Service. Wealth and privilege like that subvert perspective. As F. Scott Fitzgerald reminds us, “The rich are not like you and me.”

No, indeed. But while there is nothing new about the princes of politics and power losing their grasp on reality, it is a novel, and indeed odious turn of the screw when those very same princes of industry mewl for a handout from folks like you and me.

To Mourn a Murderer

The Funeral of MARK COTE

They mourned a murderer Wednesday. Up the street from Frankie’s Liquor Store and around the corner from Penuela’s Barber Shop, they prayed for his soul.

They clutched resurrection prayers and offered long-stemmed roses. They anointed his coffin with gladiolas cinched with long pink crepe. They genuflected before him and looked into his ashen, waxy face. “He looks terrible,” somebody said. “My stomach’s in knots,” said another.

On a cool late-summer day, when everyone seemed to move in slow-motion under a leaden sky, the City of Waterbury buried its dead.

For a firefighter named Jamie Quinones Jr., the city closed streets. For the man who killed him, it sent one cop.

Grief dueled with irony Wednesday in the final chapter in a jagged story of love and hate. Within moments of the benediction for Quinones at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, the funnel of mourners began to trickle into a funeral home on Willow Street around the corner from the big white church. This funeral was for the killer, Mark Cote.

Cote was the man who began his Saturday morning as a timid man, and ended it as a powerful one. Dead, but powerful.

Timid men become powerful with guns, and Cote had two of them, legally obtained. With guns, the taunted become avengers. The underdogs become pit bulls. The story of Columbine High School repeats itself over and over. The weak become warriors. They don’t hang around to take questions.

On Saturday morning, according to news reports, Mark Cote, 29, called his mother and told her: “Mommy, I love you and I’m sorry for what I did. I can’t live like this any more.” Then, on one of the finest days of an otherwise wet Connecticut summer, Cote took his weapons and killed a neighbor, the man his ex-wife left him for, the mother of his ex-girlfriend, and himself.

All the people who had done him wrong.

On Wednesday, he lay in a shiny coffin in a dark suit, a large gold pharaoh pendant resting in his chest. In the coffin with him were pictures of him with his family. A picture of a German shepherd puppy. A compact disc of Prince. A copy of the magazine Musical with Prince on the cover. A dark jade Pharonic statue. And a plastic figurine of Steve Austin, the $6 Million Man.

Funerals for killers are peculiar affairs.

So much of the scene is familiar. The tears. The gladiolas. The Mass cards.

But there is that turn of the screw that twists your stomach in knots and turns your mouth dry. The act was unspeakable and so it is not spoken of. You shed your tears and cross yourself and hold the mourners tight and stifle the question until you are out of earshot. You speculate. You conclude. You accuse. You tidy the bloody, gnarly mess that landed you here in the first place.

“They asked for it,” a woman whispers. “Y’know what? They taunted him. They dogged him. They dogged him. A person who is not that strong can’t handle it.” Another woman nods, then shakes her head, “Yeah, but,” she says. “I’m not saying,” the other woman says. “I know but —,” the second woman says, and shakes her head and leaves.

Innocence is a slippery spectrum.

You kill someone and you lose it.

You are killed and you gain it.

No one knows you, but they mourn you. No one knows you, but they scorn you.

The real story is brittle and raw. It is tattered and murky. Nothing about it is clean. Nobody in it is a hero. If you listen to Cote’s ex-wife, Mark Cote was an abuser, a sinister, controlling fiend who held a knife to her throat and threatened to kill her. If you listen to his mother, Mark Cote was a depressive, devastated over his divorce from Noemi Olivieri, whom he believed was having an affair with Quinones.

In his mother’s view, he was cuckolded, and what was worse, he was taunted by Quinones and Olivieri, who flaunted their relationship in front of him.

Love braids with hate stealthily until at last they knot. And snap. This is what you learn in a funeral home on a nickel-gray day where one man gets a hero’s adieu and another gets shame. No one gets the story straight, his mourners say. It’s not like you read in the newspapers, they say. But ask them to explain it and they demur. There is a violence to their grief. A sneer. You do not understand, it says.

A killer has his reasons.

Even if he takes them with him.

c. Republican-American, Waterbury, CT

http://www.traceyosh.com

The Gentelmen Who Lunch

Talking with the gentelmen who lunch

First time he met Ernie, he was flyin’, I’m telling you, flyin’ down Bennett Avenue in this race-car contraption he made out of a pair of roller skates and an orange crate. Kid’s a nut, he’s thinking. Kid’s an absolute nut. Steering this thing with two wooden sticks. Couldn’t have been more than 10.

Dominic Mauriello guffaws, a big, gasping, phlegmatic laugh that bounces his pal Anthony Pecukonis around a little. At 85, Pecukonis is the baby of the group, a short, triangular-shaped man wearing an ecru short-sleeve shirt with an image of the Virgin of Guadeloupe pinned to his chest pocket.

Seven decades ago, these five guys were growing up in Waterbury’s Town Plot neighborhood, shooting craps against the walls of Tinker School, ripping pieces of aluminum off junked cars and hunting for mushrooms at Morris Dam. For the past four years, they’ve been getting together every Tuesday for their weekly lunch — two Tuesdays at Domars and the other two Tuesdays at a Chinese buffet whose name no one can remember. The entourage includes a couple of canes, about six hearing aids, a few dietary restrictions and a hunk of memories not printable in a family newspaper.

They call themselves the “Over The Hill Gang,” and Mauriello is the ringleader. Four years ago, this eighth-grade graduate who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day looked around his immaculate, lonely Prospect ranch and said, “What the hell’s the matter with me? I gotta get these guys going.” He picked up the phone and began dialing a few pals he knew from the old neighborhood. He hadn’t seen some of them in 40 years, but it didn’t matter. “These are my friends,” Mauriello said. “I got to get them motivated. They’re getting stale.”

Ample booths, sandwiches

So twice a month, they head for the robins-egg blue and cherry-red back room at Domars on Watertown Avenue in Waterbury. It’s an old place that used to be the American Legion Hall, where Mauriello was married more than 50 years ago, with Galante as his best man. Here, the blue vinyl booths are as ample as the Italian combos — which the guys get with ham, salami, capicola, Provolone cheese, American cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and roasted peppers. It’s the kind of sandwich, Galante says, you have to pick up with a mitt.

Mauriello’s desire to bring his friends back together may be, as he says, inexplicable, but research suggests that friendships play an important role in longevity. Last year, an Australian study found that older people who have close friends and confidants live longer than those who don’t. Conversely, the same study found that having close family ties had no discernible effect on survival.

All these guys — Mauriello, Galante, Pecukonis, Pat Spino and Chuck Bredice — are first-generation Americans. With the exception of Pecukonis, their parents were all born in Italy. Every now and again an Italian phrase slips out, like “mangia e statti zitto,” or, loosely, “shut up and eat.” All the men, except Spino, who was given a deferment, are World War II veterans. Their tattoos — which Mauriello and Galante both got from a Texan with a forehead full of them — have faded to the color of carbon paper. A few of the men, like Galante, have pieces of shrapnel in their bodies. None of them, except Pecukonis, went beyond the eighth grade. Pecukonis graduated from high school. They call him the professor. He’s been engaged for 60 years to the same woman. “Her father used to get after me,” Pecukonis says about his hesitancy to name a date. Asked when the big day will be, Pecukonis winces and gives the same answer he’s given for 60 years, “Pretty soon.”

He gives a similarly equivocal answer about success. “I come into the world with nothing, and I’ve got most of it left,” he says.

The rest of the men are widowers. “Nobody wants me,” says Galante. “I just got a maid who hangs around.” Next to him, Bredice, a beefy man with a long, broad face and basset hound eyes, guffaws. “Know any rich widows?” he asks a visitor.

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, Bredice was a Class A bowler, racking up victories at 20th Century Lanes on Phoenix Avenue, which sat just up the street from the Jacques Theater, a burlesque house. “Let me tell you something, honey,” Bredice says. “If you hung around on Phoenix Avenue, you were no angel.”

“Oh! That dive?” Spino says, tossing his head back, remembering the Jacques. “I used to sneak in there as a kid.”

No full nudity, though. “Oh, no,” says Bredice. “If you wanted them to take it all off, you had to P-A-Y.” Not that it bothered Bredice. “To me, the most homeliest thing in the world is a naked woman.”

“Ah, I don’t buy that,” Mauriello says.

“Then, when we graduated from the Burlesque, we went to New York,” said Bredice, who hustled money at a third-floor bowling alley on 6th Avenue. “I saw Gypsy Rose Lee. She was beautiful. I would’ve asked her for a date. She could’ve said no. Wouldn’t have bothered me. I’m Italian. I got a lot of bananas.”

On summer days, Galante and Mauriello would head for Hop Brook Lake, where they’d swim naked and then hop in their cars and race all the way to Lindy’s in New York City. There, they’d wolf down a strawberry shortcake for 25 cents and then race back to Waterbury — Dominic in his 1931 Oldsmobile convertible and Galante in his ‘32 Chevy. Once, at Lake Quassapaug, they were thrown into the Middlebury Jail for taking the paddle boats out longer than they had money for.

And these guys had big, Italian families. Bredice had six sisters and three brothers, in addition to his parents and grandparents, living at 20 Bennett Ave. On Sunday mornings when they walked to Mass, the whole street was redolent with spaghetti sauce so aromatic it would make them drool. “When you’re feeding 10 kids, plus a mother, father and grandparents, you don’t get spaghetti every day, you know,” Bredice says.

No, most days, you’re pulling peppers from the garden and eggs from the chicken. Once or twice a week, the fish guy puttered down the street with a crate full of fish on ice, tooting a horn to attract customers. All the men grew up with kitchen gardens and often slaughtered a rabbit or broke the neck of a chicken. “Keep the blood,” Spino says. “Fry it up.”

“They knew how to cook,” Galante says of the mothers on his street. “Could make a meal out of anything.”

Bredice folds his hands across his ample belly, knits his sausage-size fingers together and shakes his head. “Oh, you don’t get soup like that any more, no sir.”

These days, the minestrone at Domars will do. For an hour, the men reminisce about their Ford Fairlanes and Plymouth convertibles, of the circus coming to Brassco Park, of coasting down hills with an empty tank of gas and sneaking into strip joints and dice games.

They talk about Florida and Foxwoods and share the tiny little stray thoughts that creep into a man’s mind when he’s reached a certain age and lost the gaggle of pals he once took for granted. They talk about everything and nothing at all, until next week, when they’ll do it all again.

c. Republican American, 2008

The Fine Delicacy of Mangiapane’s Wine

The grapes are early this year. They droop lazily in the afternoon sun that sinks in deep perpendicular slabs across Anthony Mangiapane’s backyard in Waterbury’s South End. Mangiapane sits under the arbor and waits for them. He is a patient man.

People ask Mangiapane what makes his wine so sweet and he could tell them many things. He could tell them about the 50 years of pruning and tending. He could tell them about the lessons he learned from his parents, who squeezed thick, succulent plum juice into old oak barrels. He could tell them about the little leather notebook where he keeps all his secrets.

But he has the time and the heart to think poetically, and so what he tells them is this: “The vines are grown in the shadows of St. Anne’s Shrine. And at the end of the day the setting sun gives the grapes a light kiss before it descends into the horizon.”

That, he says, is what makes his wine so sweet.

Anthony Mangiapane is 83 years old and has lived here in the South End of Waterbury, for more than 50 years. He is short and stocky and wears Army green cotton shorts held up by matching suspenders clipped to an elasticized waist band. His black shoes shuffle across the narrow, neatly trimmed grass and he slumps into a white plastic deck chair under the arbor he has grown nearly too old to tend. He speaks in a gravelly whisper and his wry observations are so gingerly delivered that they are easy to miss.

Everybody made wine in his day. Now it’s a high-tech hobby, taught in college-level classes and embraced by young entrepreneurs. Mangiapane doesn’t make his wine for sale or for profit but there’s a certain pride in the process. He may be the only inner-city vintner left, which would be a peculiar distinction.

“I learned by observing my parents,” says Mangiapane, sitting cross-ankled, his short, stubby hands knitted neatly over his ample belly. “They had their own theories. They did it the old-fashioned method in open vats. Everything was by guess and by gosh.”

Mangiapane, a machine designer and draftsman for the bulk of his working life, moved into this tall, narrow house, with its old-fashioned oil stove and oak icebox, in 1948, after marrying his wife, Angeline, and moving into her parents’ house. His in-laws had a grape arbor, but most of his Italian relatives bought their grapes from the six or seven street vendors who sold the products from roadside stands or the backs of trucks. Nobody thought much of Connecticut grapes. But Mangiapane figured he could make a go of it and began tending to the thick, ropey vines that canopy over the green wood arbor.

In the back corner, Mangiapane points out the faded white letters he painted on the green pole that supports the arbor. “Fredonia,” it reads, to indicate the type of grapes planted there.

The tall houses around him snuggle close together, so close you can hear the neighbor’s conversations, and touch the clothes they hang on the line. When Mangiapane was growing up the area was mostly all French Canadian. Families lived in multi-generational triple deckers behind the city’s robust brick factories. Now the factories are gone, and most of the French, too. The area is largely Hispanic and transient.

But nobody steals his grapes any more, which was a problem back then. And his wife, Angeline, has nobody to give her homemade jam to. In the old days, she had plenty of neighbors who would return the glass pickle jars to her after they had finished the stuff. Now she saves the jam for friends and family, and guests, for whom she offers a saltine coated with the sweet jam.

Mangiapone limps up the narrow stairwell of his home. Upstairs, on a folding table in the kitchen, a wood frame holds a glass jug half full of amethyst-colored liquid.

Mangiapane grabs a plastic straw twisted in several roller coaster-like swirls. He sticks the long, thick straw into the jug and begins to suck on one end. As he does, the wine inches upward. Mangiapane places a glass beaker to his lips and tongues the straw into it. The wine snakes through the straw into the beaker. From a tattered, narrow box, he procures a thermometer-like stick, which measures the liquid’s sugar content. He aims for a 14 percent alcohol content. When it is nearly done, he pours it in plastic fruit juice bottles before he corks it in a wine bottle and labels it with his own particular code.

Every year, Mangiapane makes about 15 gallons of wine. He gives his wife first stab at the grapes because her jelly is a priority. He gets the leavings, which is fine. His wife never developed a taste for wine; but Mangiapane figures he’s been drinking it since he was five. Once or twice he’s had store-bought wine. But what’s the point, he figures.

“I think I’ve reached perfection with the wine you can make from backyard grapes,” he says.

Publication date: Tuesday, August 15, 2006 c. Republican-American

Explaining Random Violence to a Child

The Peculiar Resilience of LISA BOND LASKY

Lisa Bond Lasky was stabbed seven years ago outside a Dunkin’ Donuts shop on North Main Street in Waterbury. Her recovery cost her six months in hospitals and rehabilitation centers.

Sometimes, her daughter asks. She is 4, a curious age.

She points to the scar that runs down her mother’s right calf, long as a ruler and thick as her thumb.

What’s that, Mommy?

“A bad man did that,” Lisa Bond Lasky, 33, tells her daughter. It is true. And it is not.

You can’t explain psychosis to a 4-year-old. You can barely explain it to yourself. You put it behind you. Or you try.

Seven years ago, Lisa Bond Lasky was having a cigarette outside the North Main Street Dunkin’ Donuts where she worked. She was on break. David Blocker, then 36, had walked by her as he threw a quarter on the donut shop counter and asked for a donut. The clerk told Blocker that donuts were 53 cents. He walked out to the parking lot, opened the trunk of his car, pulled out a butcher knife and walked back toward the Dunkin’ Donuts. He spotted Lasky outside, approached her, lifted her left arm up and stabbed her in the chest. Once.

When Lisa Bond Lasky nearly lost her life that day, it was just an ordinary life. Within days she would nearly lose her leg because of a blot clot that formed as a result of the stab wound. For the next few months, she became extraordinary: written, photographed, prayed for and talked about.

Many people dream of notoriety, a swell of love from strangers. But for crime victims, notoriety comes uninvited. These people dream about banality. They dream about getting their life back. Even if it wasn’t an extraordinary life. They dream of withdrawing to the ordinary.

After Lasky was stabbed that afternoon, she reeled back into the shop and grabbed a sweatshirt to staunch the wound. She would need stitches. More than a few. So she figured.

She didn’t imagine that she would almost die, lose her life, her lung, and the entire month of June 1994. Asthmatic, she now breathes with one lung. She does not feel anything below her right knee. Two long scars race down either side of her calf, like tracks of a chisel. The leg injury is a consequence of a blood clot that developed in her leg after the attack. But she stands. She walks. She lists, slightly, to the right. But she has her life back, an ordinary life. A life as a mother of four and a clerk at Dunkin Donuts.

A mother who cannot run after her children.

Lasky’s story is not a story of triumph, but it is not the story of a victim, either.

Ask Lisa Bond Lasky if she still thinks about the attack and she will tell you no. She will tell you that she put it behind her. After all, the man who did this to her, David Blocker, is in a mental institute. A schizophrenic, he was judged not sane at the time of the attack and was sentenced to serve 40 years in a mental institution.

“Sicko,” Lasky concludes. She snickers ironically.

Lasky spent six months in hospitals and rehabilitation centers before she returned to work at Dunkin’ Donuts. She spent one day at the North Main Street shop where she was stabbed. That was it. She transferred to another. She’s worked at four Waterbury Dunkin’ Donuts shops in the last 12 years and said she’s never thought of working elsewhere. How could she explain what happened to her to another employer? Lasky is an ordinary looking woman, thin, of medium height with an angular, heart-shaped face. It is the brilliant blue eyes that get you. They glisten with an almost discomforting frankness. Lasky is tough, terse and non-expansive. She is not philosophical about the attack. She draws no grand conclusions, makes no extravagant claims. She is like the hundreds of crime victims who get bleached out of the limelight after the headlines, fund raisers and trials. She, and they, slip back into the margins of life. They do not claim to be heroes or courageous.

Every now and then a customer will ask Lasky, “Aren’t you the one?” and she will nod acknowledgment sheepishly. A peculiar kind of celebrity.

“I try not to think about it,” Lasky says. “I don’t like to keep thinking about it.” But the letters remind her. The state sends Lasky letters once or twice a year, informing her of changes in Blocker’s condition. The letters come certified. She used to open them. She does not any more.

“I don’t even pick them up any more,” Lasky says. She shakes her head. She grimaces dismissively. “Just throw them in the garbage.” She doesn’t have flashbacks about the attack. She did, at first. She checked her rearview mirror. She checked the locks. Now it is just the leg that bothers her. “The doctor said I should get the feeling back within a year. It’s been seven years. I don’t think it’s happening.”

Part of her wishes the letters didn’t come. But she says she has not tried to get them stopped. She wants to know when he is released. She will be 66 then. Her children will be grown. Maybe then she can tell them. Maybe then she can explain. About the bad man. And what he did to Mommy.

Published, September 16, 2001. c. Republican-American

Children’s Movies Put the Sass in Crass

When my son turned 2, a generous relative gave him a copy of the movie, “Shrek.”

“This is hysterical,” said the chirpy relative. “You’ll love it, too.”

Well, I did. Sort of.

“Shrek,” like its cousins “Dr. Dolittle,” “Finding Nemo,” and “Monsters, Inc.” are marketed to kids, with the gentle suggestion that adults will enjoy them, too. And you will enjoy them, particularly if you loved “Blazing Saddles,” “Porkys” and “Animal House.”

Don’t get me wrong. “Shrek” is a funny movie with a redemptive message about the power of love. But in its unapologetic vulgarity, it is emblematic of the crassness and incivility of children’s movies that has gone virtually unnoticed by the country’s self-appointed finger-waggers. While the religious right is busy fulminating about which Teletubby is the gay, and assailing PBS for including gay parents on one of its most popular children’s programs, the real threat to children’s sensibilities goes unchecked.

In 2005, Warner Brothers introduced a meaner, leaner Bugs Bunny, a raging rodent whose beloved buck teeth now look like two glinting bayonets. The retooling of the wry sophisticate into a rampaging warrior is part of an updated Looney Toons series called “Loonatics,” set in the year 2772. Those affably daffy vaudevillians have gone the way of Lassie. No kid worth his weight in Game Boys is going to buy a Shakespeare-quoting bunny rabbit. That is, like, so yesterday.

“Sexual content seems to be of more concern than gratuitous violence,” Marsha Williams, a vice president for research at Nickelodeon told The New York Times. But while parents debate which is worse violence or sex a more subtle, but arguably more pervasive, threat stalks the nation’s youth. It’s incivility.

Listen, for a moment, to the way characters talk to one another in top-grossing “family” films like “Shrek” and “Dr. Dolittle.”

“Two words,” the ogre Shrek says to his companion, the Donkey, “Shut. Up.”

Two words that you would likely not want your child to use, and two words that have become all too commonplace in movies from “Toy Story,” to “Shrek.” It is not merely those two words, but a whole manner of speaking to one another that is less articulate, less civil and generally more coarse than the days of “Sleeping Beauty” or “Bambi.”

“Excuse me,” says Shrek, to a put-upon Princess Fiona, “I have to save my ass.”

Funny. Funny to an adult who understands the double-entendre. But does a 5-year-old understand that? Should they? Ever since Bart Simpson made it OK and even hip to say “This sucks,” absolutely everything sucks, from chicken nuggets to “Chicken Run.” Mean people suck, says a popular bumper sticker. School sucks, says a popular Web site that sells term papers to desperate students.

Just as advertisements directed at children bank on a more adversarial relationship between parents and children, so, too, children’s films today celebrate a sharp-edged antagonism between characters. Sarcasm is the lingua franca of children’s movies today, sullying the dialogue and sending the not-too-subtle message that he who comes up with the most smart-ass remark wins the day.

And then there are the, ahem, poop jokes.

Scatalogical humor has become the mainstay of most children’s movies, meaning that a parent is likely to endure more jokes about flatulence, to say nothing of flatulence itself, at home than any frazzled working mother has any right to endure.

“Man, you gotta warn somebody before you just crack one off like that,” the Donkey says to Shrek, as he follows the ogre up a mountain. “My mouth was open and everything.”

All right. It’s funny. But what message does it send to children about humor? As Mark Schone lamented last year in The Boston Globe, “Now you can’t watch a kids’ flick without stepping in poop. Potty humor has become de rigueur for movies aimed at children.”

Schone cites movies like “Dr. Dolittle,” in which Eddie Murphy’s character wrinkles his nose as he treats a rat for a gas attack. In the new “101 Dalmations,” a puppy named Whizzer pees on a picture of Cruella De Ville.

All of this leads to a crasser, less civil environment in which what we say to one another is judged not by its courtesy but by its derisiveness. How we speak to one another is the foundation on which we build social behavior. When it is spoiled by nasty slurs and sharp-edged digs at people supposed to be our friends we have no one to blame but ourselves when our children haul off and crack us.

Shrek, the adorable vulgarian.

My Son Doesn’t Want a Bedtime Story

Last week, my son came home from school with the latest in the Magic Tree House series.

“I got ‘Dark Day in the Deep Sea,’” he exclaimed.

“Fantastic,” I said. We had been reading the popular Magic Tree House series since my son was 4. He’s now 7 and we’re on our 39th volume. “We can read it tonight.”

“No, Mommy, I don’t want you to read it to me,” he said. “I want to read it myself because I can read now. I’m a good reader. ”

Such an articulate blow to the heart is not easily withstood while standing in the kitchen, holding a spatula and a box of Egg Beaters. But there it was, a clean, clear assault, leaving me feeling, not for the first time as a mother, unnecessary.

From the Magic Tree House Series

I had been reading to my son since the day he was born, dutifully and desultorily reciting poems of Mother Goose to a mewling infant who seemed indifferent and vexed by my performance.

A book is just another geometry of otherness to a child and, as we went through the nightly ritual and he began to understand that this object had words and that the words meant something and were often, though not invariably, connected to pictures, we developed a nightly routine that neatly framed the day. At twilight, after a bath, his hair still damp and skin still slick with lotion, he stared up at the flickers of primary color lights scudding across his crib, and I sat beside him, reading “The Runaway Bunny” and “Goodnight, Mr. Night.”

Not every night was precious. Often, I was hasty and begrudging, and scuttled my way through books as if I were calling out a laundry list. But, oftener than not, we would linger over the little bunny who wanted to run away, and marvel at his mother’s tenacious ingenuity in following him. “Again, Again,” he would cry, and I’d go through the whole neat plot with reanimation.

I’m sure that my mother read to me as a child, although in those days the ferocious parental panic that has come to accompany child rearing was not as robust. Every now and again, my mother read us Dr. Seuss, boisterously guffawing at her own clumsy recitation of the knotty words. But my mother didn’t have the same routinzed fidelity to reading that we have in our house. Reading was not a duty but a diversion, delectable for its own snug satisfactions.

All the same, the vision of my mother, snuggled in her pine green velour robe, devouring fistfuls of popcorn while gobbling up Mary Renault, was one of the most serenely self-nourishing of my girlhood.

Not long after we started dating, my husband began reading to me [Dash] Twain, mostly, of whom I was not fond, but also John Updike, Tobias Wolf and the poems of Kenneth Patchen. For the most part, what he read was not nearly as important as that he read. At night, in his basement apartment, the only other distraction a 12-inch black and white television, my husband read “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyville,” night after night, an entrancing and bewitching entertainment that remains among my most cherished memories.

When I was in labor with my son, my husband read the stories of John Cheever aloud, impervious to the bleating consolation of the infant heart monitor nearby. It was a delicious distraction, and perhaps the earliest inspiration for my son’s robust reading habit. It’s impossible now for me to think of my son’s birth without recalling Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio,” an allusion that would surely have surprised the author.

The whole point of reading to my son at night, I consoled myself, was that he would learn to read himself. That he did so with facility and eagerness should be to my credit. But the thought of not having him snuggled against my chest, his soft, regular breaths brushing against my skin, left me with an almost physical emptiness. “How about if I just read you one page,” I suggest, tantalizing him with an edition of “Stuart Little.”

“I don’t need you to read to me anymore,” he insisted and I saw in an instant, the critical use of the verb “need,” Reading is just the first of many things he will not need me for, as he will soon not need me to put on a band-aid, or clip his nails, or part his hair, or come to him in the middle of the night to assure him that it was just a dream. Mothering seems a constant renunciation of necessity, the whole course of which is to render you obsolete.

In the end, though he rebuffed my entreaties to read to him, my son scrambled up in my bed, brushing my shoulder with his flannel pajamas, leaning against me while he quietly paged through his Geronimo Stilton. I picked up my Isabel Allende and read quietly beside him. We spend most nights like that now, quietly reading together [Dash] but alone.

His Mind is Alive But His Body Isn’t

What was the “Miracle on the Hudson”

As a Catholic, I learned that a miracle is a a supernatural intervention in human events. It is , to quote New Advent enclyclopedia, a wonder “performed by supernatural power as signs of some special mission or gift and explicitly ascribed to God.” More specifically, it cannot be produced by any human power.

And yet what we saw on the Hudson River last week was a miracle of human making. It was all too human, in its achievements and its grace. It is difficult to read of the shattering stillness that occurred after the U.S. Airways flight splashed into the icy river and the sudden, deliberate altruism that ensued, without chills.

Miracle on the Hudson

A patio salesman named Bruce Wentzell, charged over to a mother with an infant, bear-hugged them, picked them up and said, “you are coming with me,” The New York Times reported. Outside, in the frigid air, his palms found the wrist of a 62-year-old investment banker and he wrenched him to safety.  A 35-year-old man found himself out on the wing of a sinking plane with no seat cushion to preserve him from drowning. Another passenger,a woman, handed him hers. As a 60-something woman struggled to retreive her belongings from an overhead compartment, a male passenger picked her up and heaved her bodily on to safety.

What happened on the Hudson is being treated as a miracle and there is nothing short of astonishing that all of the 155 passengers aboard that jet were alive. But this was the ordinary selflessness of ordinary human beings, selflessly putting their safety at risk for strangers. That may be divinely inspired, but it is not miraculous. It is the very real, very terrestrial self-sacrifice to one’s fellow man that is essential to our survival as a people and as a country.

The only way we will get out of this crash is to grab hold of each other’s wrists and heave as hard as we can.

Here’s where I say U.N.C.L.E.

Your satellite is bigger than mine

The man from U-verse came yesterday.

I thought door-to-door salesman went out with Willy Lohman and the Milkman, but here was U-man, at my front-door, clipboard in hand ready to Sell Me Something.

Or actually, not to sell me something, as he pointedly protested while the door closed on his face. He was there to Save Me Money. A bundle of money, to be exact.

AT&T U-verse, is AT & T’s foray into the competitive TV provider business. If cable and Internet companies can dangle phone lines in front of your eyes, AT &T wants to be able dangle TV in front of them. This TV would come over fiber-optic wires and would provide IPTV — Internet Protocol Television — which would compete directly with cable and satellite TV.

(And, by the way, if you’re still among the fossils with TV antennae, you are entirely within your rights to be confused.)

The buzz word today is bundle. Today’s companies want to provide you with a bundle of savings by bunching up your cable, cell phone and Internet bill into one, tidy package. It’s a bit like a car package. Sure, all you want is air conditioning. But you’re going to get the automatic windows, Rear Window Wiper/Washer, satellite radio and automatic eject button – all for one low price.

But for a thrifty, a-la-carte admittedly high-maintenance New Englander like me, these prix fixe meals seem a little excessive. If all I want is air conditioning, I should be able to get it and it should cost less. This bundling feels a little gluttonous. I feel like I ordered the chicken and got the pork, meat and ziti diner all for $1 more.

The first thing I told Mr. U-verse was “I don’t want cable.”

Perhaps it was the queerness of the statement that threw him off. Yes, I have rabbit ears Yes, I’m an anomaly. No, I don’t miss cable. Yes, I can live without “Sponge Bob Squarepants.” Call me stoic.

This seems to be the right time to be thrifty, puritanical and cheap. But with a national economy that is 70 percent dependent on consumer spending, this kind of attitude seems no only miserly but unpatriotic. And yet improvidence seems even more gauche, which is why retailers are trying to eke out as much as they can from you in the guise of saving you money.

It’s no wonder that consumers, the engine of the economy, are filling a tad flustered. We’re told spending is imperative to resuscitate the economy, yet chastised for our years of wanton extravagance.

The U-verse bait seems to epitomize this dysfunction: To embrace frugality – that is, lower my bill – I have to buy more – not just the phone, but the Internet, cell phone and cable. Such a bundle will purportedly save me all kinds of money, but it doesn’t really square up to the central question, which is: Do I really need all this stuff?

Much of the economic boom years were sustained by blurring the distinction between want and need, which may be why untangling the two now is so prickly.

Over the last decade, spending on entertainment outpaced overall expenditures, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. The average American spends more on entertainment than on gasoline, household furnishings and clothing – and nearly the same amount as spent on dining out, according the BLS.

Unsurprisingly, among the 20 percent of households with more than $77,000 a year in pretax income, more money is spent on entertainment – $4,516 a year – than on health care, utilities, clothing or food eaten at home. How is that possible? Largely because we have given the luxuries the same degree of indispensability as necessities.

Not long ago, The Washington Post reported that the average consumer riffles “through an average of 12 bills a month for such frivolous diversions as TiVo, the Internet and cell phones.” Add up the phones, Internet, cable, satellite radio, iTunes, streaming music and the TiVo and you’re looking at an easy $200 a month.

Here is the Gordian’s knot of the financial collapse writ small. I’d like to help Mr. U-verse build the world again, but I’m growing exhausted by the ceaseless updating, revamping and redefining of household essentials. It has made me exhausted and a tad jaded. I’m more than willing to get this economy humming again, but not at the expense of sacrificing my reason – or my check book.