Sense and Sensibility

The incomprehensible effects of suicide

Last week a friend of mine killed himself.

We were old friends but not close friends and in that way that life can geographically scatter you yet leave you emotionally bonded, his death left me shattered.

For days after a friend emailed me the news, I phoned her repeatedly and frantically, before realizing she was likely avoiding my questions because they were her questions, too. And she had no answer to them.

Only a third of suicides ever leave notes and the notes can tease the grieving into scrutiny. Perhaps reason is exclusive to the healthy mind. That, of course, is a faculty fatally elusive to the suicide.

I saw a man jump off a building once. Well, not jump, but land. I was in Waterbury, heading for lunch and the man’s sprawled, contorted body stretched out on a side street like a broken bale of hay. I did not know the man, nor drew near enough to see his corpse, but I could not eat that afternoon and prayed for a mother he may not even have had.

About 33,000 Americans – or 83 people a day —  kill themselves in the U.S. Most, or 24,672, are white men. Women tend to attempt suicide three times more than men but men succeed at a higher rate. Suicide is the 11^th cause of death in the U.S., just behind septicemia and above liver disease. Experts keep all kinds of statistics on suicide – the most common months – April and May – the most common manner – firearms – and the age groups most affected – older men.

You can search pie graphs and Excel sheets and collate data from any number of well-meaning sources, but you will never find the definitive “reason” – singular or plural. By its nature, self-obliteration is as distinctive as a fingerprint.

Whenever a person commits suicide, all sorts of commentary, from the predictable to the absurd and occasionally, the insightful tends to follow. People say things like “How could he have done that to his family:” “Wasn’t he getting help?” or, more productively, “He just didn’t seem like the type.”

My friend Steve would have been among those who “just didn’t seem like the type.” He was tall, urbane, extroverted, wry, sharp-tongued and outrageously successful at a young age. I knew him at college because the woman he married was a sterling singer whose bewitching stage presence captivated campus audiences and gave her the guise of a woman who was “going somewhere.” Steve seemed the only man polished, ribald and confident enough to keep up with her.

They had two children – a boy and a girl. The kids should be in high school now.

More than 90 percent of suicides have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder. In a world saturated by prescription drug advertisements, the facile can presume that a mere pill stands between the mentally ill and tranquility.

It is, of course, so much thornier than that.

Steve had bipolar disorder. I only learned of his condition after his death, when donations in his memory were directed to a bipolar support group.

I am not sure why I felt so remiss when I learned of his condition. But it is unbearable realization that a friend was mired in a quicksand of torment to which you were oblivious. No doubt it is hubris to presume that I or any body else who knew him could have done something to alleviate his anguish, could have reached out, could have dissuaded him. But the burden of suicide for the survivors is in those punishing moments of self-recrimination that turn back to just that that slippery presumption: If only.

Speaking once about the obligations of morality, the Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “in a democracy some are guilty but all are responsible.” I thought about that in relation to Steve and the impotence I felt in the wake of his death. Perhaps everyone feels guilty and responsible in the wake of a suicide.

A friend of mine, a Catholic nun, says that she always believes that on the question of suicide, something can always be done. “Yes, but doesn’t that leave us all feeling horribly guilty?” I asked her. No, she said. It shouldn’t. It should only make us a little more aware, a little less hesitant, a little insistent when we press forward and lean inward to get a better idea of how an old friend is really doing.

Do I really have homework at this age?

My son has homework — And that, in the modern parental translation, means I have homework.

So, when my son comes home and tells me he does not want to do his homework, I am puzzled. Why shouldn’t you want to do your homework? It’s your duty, I think. Ever the faithful catechist, I try to impress this on my son. “You think I want to go to work every day?” I ask. “Of course not. But I do it. I do it because I must.”

Unsurprisingly, this fails to make an impression. My son is near tears, and I feel like one of those sadistic Magdalene Sisters, absent only my cassock and rapier ruler.

Now, I am a working mother and don’t relish the thought of coming home at night and cracking the whip on my 8-year-old. There is nothing more I want to do than to cuddle up with my son and a bowl of Pepperidge Farm gold fish and read “Geronimo Stilton” for the 437th time. I am exhausted and not up for another fight.

My son is a bright boy and clever, in the way only children can be. He learned to read at 4, and I’d like to take credit for it, but, the truth is it just seemed to come easily to him and he enjoyed it. Intelligence, I am quickly beginning to believe, seems coiled up in some strand of DNA and needs only a flint or two to ignite.

But discipline, where does that come from?

My youngest brother, Michael, used to get up every morning at 5 a.m., mix himself a batch of Aunt Jemima pancakes and study before the sun came up. Nobody told him to do it and nobody ever needed to rouse him. He just did it. Unsurprisingly, he excelled.

I, too, had a monkish addiction to routine and regimentation, and the quality served me well. But where did it come from? Beyond a vague presumption that my siblings and I would attend college, unlike my high-school educated parents, I don’t recall any punishing rituals or demands from either of them.

What I do recall, however, is fear. Most of my academic success was rooted in a deep panic that I would fail at school, lose my scholarship and chance for economic success and end up scooping mint chocolate chip at Friendly’s for the rest of my days.

Panic can be a motivator, but my son, the progeny of two middle-class college graduates, has none of that. What he has is presumption. Presumption that he’ll go to college. Presumption that he’ll be a home owner. Presumption that he’ll be a contributing member of society.

What it means to be a middle class, college-educated parent is that your children assume that all you have gritted your teeth, sacrificed and beared down for will accrue to him as naturally as the new pair of shoes that appear, miraculously, in his closet.

Discipline is a quality I will have to instill in him. It is no fun.

What it means is that I get to come home after an exhausting day and push him. I will sit there with a pencil in my hand and irritation in my bones and try to get him to make 89 cents with eight coins. It means I will have to try to solve for x, recite the 14th Amendment and distinguish between the Federalists and the Republicans. It has meant, so far, that I have had to hold my son in my arms and comfort him, because sometimes the homework is too hard. It has also meant that we have had some big belly laughs over Mommy’s math deficiency. It has meant making dance routines out of vocabulary lists and Mommy reduced to shouting “Think!<$>” with a condescension that disgusts me.

Some nights, I hold my head in my hands and think of my son 20 years hence remembering me as a drill sergeant. “I didn’t sign up for this,” I tell my husband. “I want him to remember me as loveable.”

He will, my husband assures me. There is a great love in discipline, even if it seems so painfully elusive.

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A Dog With Lessons Still To Teach

      For a long time, I had an old dog.

My old dog didn’t run any more.

His leg buckled one day about 5 years ago, and he became lame. He had been fielding a tennis ball, among his favorite amusements, and he looked up at me in a mixture of fear and apology and I knew he would never run again.

We had it repaired – but it was never the same. He never did run again with that ferocious fluency he had as a young dog. The way his shoulders muscled forward and the lean sinews of his belly stretched elegantly over the grass. Oh, he was beautiful to watch.

But when his left leg went, his right swiftly followed, so that when I touched his hind quarters his bones felt like dozens of little stones zippered into a purse of fur.

When he looked up at me, after he tore his ligaments irreparably, I remembered the first time I took him to the forest to run and he frolicked so hard and wantonly that he didn’t notice the ravine until he was chest deep in it. He yelped, and I ran, finding him sitting plaintively in a pool of mud, his right front paw proffered up to me as if in supplication.

I scrambled down the embankment and held his paw in my hand, feeling his coarse, plump paw pads to assess the damage. He looked at me with his chocolate brown eyes as if inquiring how extensive was the damage. I rubbed his paw and nodded reassuringly. With that, he leapt up the embankment, clawing at the rooted clay and sprinting ahead to the copse, free and exultant.

Never before or since had a touch from me healed any living thing.

So when he became old and limped and panted and slept so much more than he fetched, I found new, less exhausting ways to love. That is what you do when your loved ones age. You don’t ask about hikes or tours or concerts or diversions more exhausting than comforting. You ratchet down. You soften. You nuzzle against their belly and scratch their ears. You see their snouts widen in what you think resembles a smile.

We all know how these stories end. We know it from the beginning. But we do it anyway.

When I got Sam from a shelter 14 years ago, my beloved father, now gone, said to me, “I want you to know that if you get a dog, you’re going to have a lot of dogs.” Sam was only a puppy but my father was trying to steel me, to protect me, inure me from inevitability. To love, he was trying to say, is to lose.

But in those days, Sam was so young and spry and invincible and abounding with curiosity and life. He could hear then, and every wail of a siren was followed by his yawning, plaintive howl, such that I could not think of a fire engine without instinctively waiting for his response.

So, too, with yogurt, which I probably shouldn’t have given Sam, but did. Not a lot‑ just the dregs of the plastic container my spoon could not reach. Sam would take it in his teeth to some dark lair, where he would prop the yogurt cup between his two paws and ravage the insides with his long, elastic tongue.

When he went deaf and could no longer react to words like “squirrel,” no rhythm was lost between us because by then we knew each other better than most living things could. He could no longer lunge upward to the bed and lay his wet, bearded chin on my chest. But he would sidle up to my legs and with a low, hesitant wag; offer an ear to nuzzle or a belly to rub.

Not long after we got him, I realized that Sam was a better Christian than I’d ever be. He was devoid of temper, or pride or envy. He forgave promptly and completely. His instinct was love. It was not something he had to work at.

Mostly, Sam taught me how to be old and that being old and brittle is not a cause for pity or regret, but an opportunity for solicitude and growing place for love.

What did he know about death, I wonder, that I have yet to grasp? He knew that at some point, it is time to accept with grace an inevitability that spares none of us.

I still listen for him, the tap of his claws on the wood floor, the painting of an old dog exhausted by the effort. I am hollow in the place he filled, longing for the lessons he still had to teach.  

Contact: Tracey@Traceyosh.com

Is Summer Boredom Worse in the Techno Age?

About this time of year, I start getting the summer question: “What are you going to do with your son this summer?”

The question always makes me flinch. Firstly, it makes P.J. sound like a sofa —- “Oh, I thought I’d put him in the basement with the Christmas ornaments.”

Secondly, it reveals a profound maternal deficit on my part. The truth is, I haven’t thought about my son’s summer activities. I figured P.J. would spend the summer pretty much as I had —- shooting lay-ups, catching tadpoles and watching reruns of “The Big Valley.”

But that’s not the way kids spend their summers these days. Today, kids’ summer activities are routinized, categorized and plotted on an Excel spread sheet. Nobody spends their summer lying around on the neighbor’s hill, as I did, searching for animal shapes among the clouds. Today, there’s sport camp, science camp, drama camp, art camp, Scout camp and, my favorite, imagination camp.

Brochures for all these camps clot my mailbox like pollen on the windowsill, making me feel derelict and impoverished. These camps are expensive, but, as their sales department tell you, they’re imperative. The average kid loses 2.6 months of educational advancement during the summer, making you feel as though you should sue the school department for ever considering the idea of summer vacation. If it’s not bad enough that popular culture is trying to turn your child into a cabbage whose only aptitude is shopping, the unstimulating repose of the summer is actually eroding your child’s brain cells. If you don’t sign him up for the camp where kids play hopscotch on the periodic table, you might as well buy him the Taco Bell smock now.

It’s enough to make you wonder how on earth you got through your own summer without a Blackberry.

The summer I was 11, I drafted a play called “The Giant’s Chair,” and cast every neighborhood kid in different roles. We performed it late one August afternoon, with me, standing on a tree stump, acting as narrator. I can recall nothing of the plot but we charged 25 cents to sit on the lawn and watch the thing, and when it was all over we had enough for several bags of Wise potato chips and a six-pack of Fanta grape soda.

The next year, I decided to hold a block party. True, I was only 12, but I had seen the neighbors on Paul Revere Road do it and it looked like a cinch. I rode my Columbia bike down to the police station and filled out a permit. I went around the neighborhood with a clip board and asked who would bring what. I sat down with my neighbor, Jeannie Collins, and we figured out a series of games for the little kids. I believe most of the neighborhood came just to see if a sixth-grader could pull off something like that.  

After that, junior high was a snap.

I read that the recession is forcing families to cut back on vacations and summer camps. On the front page of the New York Times I read recently that a couple is having to trim expenses but hasn’t had the nerve to cut the $545 monthly bill for dance lessons.

All over the news I see stories about “The New Frugality,” and tips on how to get by in tough times.

A friend of mine, who lived through the Depression, told me recently about how his family used to make dinner for seven out of a can of soup and loaf of bread.

“Drop an egg in the soup and you’ve got your protein,” the guy said.

Meanwhile, my brother, planning my niece’s sixth birthday, tells me he’s not sure he can afford the Moon Walk this year, but he’s pretty sure he can still spring for a clown.

The other day my son came home from “field day” at school, a sort of free-for-all of obstacle courses and relay races. He spent two hours in the den with 24 stuffed animals and a dozen pencils, arranging some sort of elaborate stuffed-animal Olympics whose regulations eluded me. He kept track of the winners on a piece of paper, meticulously calculating points and scores for each team. “Mommy,” he said. “Plats’ team is up by 35 points!”

I suppose I’ll send P.J. to a few day day camps this summer; a couple of weeks won’t hurt him. I’m sure he’ll make great friends and terrific memories. One day, perhaps he’ll tell his children about them. Or perhaps he’ll still remember, as I do, the summer he tried to top his mother’s personal record for successive pogo stick jumps [Dash] 1,110.

That’s a number, like the surprisingly imaginative fertility of summer boredom, that stays with a person.

Contact: Tracey@Traceyosh.com.

Written by Tracey O’Shaughnessy, c. 2009 Republican-American

Dan and Sadie’s Magnificent Journey

No, it’s not your imagination.

That bicycle was hauling a dog. Sadie, a 3-year-old golden Labrador retriever, is enjoying the cozy accommodations while her owner, Dan McCrady, bikes 850-miles from Annapolis, Maryland to Portland, Maine.

The pair has been pedaling through Connecticut this week.

McCrady,, a 61-year-old federal government retiree, is riding a recumbent bike, complete with a commodious trailer typically occupied by toddlers, from his home in Annapolis, to Portland to raise awareness for the East Coast Greenway Alliance, which links major cities between Maine and Florida, often using old rail or canal lines, like the linear path in Cheshire, where McCrady biked Wednesday. While the Greenway is a recreational boon for fitness buffs, McCrady’s goal was not to be the poster boy for the Greenway Alliance. Not at first, at least.

McCrady, who was an Information Technology specialist with the government, is simply a guy who likes to challenge himself. Since his retirement from federal service at 55, he has returned to college to get his bachelor’s degree, run a marathon, obtained his pilot license and become a magician. And, oh, yes, he also took culinary classes at his local community college so he’s chef to his wife of 33 years.

Biking from Maryland to Maine just seemed another challenge. And what better way to do it than with man’s best friend?

“She learned how to get in the trailer instantly,” says McCrady, a medium-built man with a short-cropped gray beard. “But it took her about a week to get used to riding in it.”

Lest anyone imagine Sadie is just a trailer potato, McCrady notes that Sadie jogs alongside the bike for at least 10 miles of what is typically a 55-mile daily ride.

McCrady, who has biked a three-day, 200-mile ride with a friend every year for the last several, expects the entire bike trip will take 22 days, with two days off a week to rest. After all, he says, “I’ve never done anything like this before. The first time I got off the bike I slept for 22 hours.” Initially, McCrady figured his challenge would just be a bonding experience for him, his dog, and the bike. But he figured that it would cost more than $2,000 for accommodations alone. So he contacted the Greenway Alliance, and suggested his ride could help raise awareness of the East Coast Greenway. Only 20 percent of the Greenway is off-road; the Alliance would like to make it 100 percent.

The Alliance agreed and supplied post-card size informational cards, which McCrady hands out to interested observers, as well as flags and a shirt emblazoned with the Alliance’s name. McCrady’s recumbent bike which was donated by Sun and Solvit products donated the trailer.

McCrady travels with a computer and blogs about his experience daily at www.firstgiving.com/danandsadie. That site also allows supporters to make donations to the Greenway Alliance. Since he began his ride on May 23, McCrady says he’s raised nearly $4,000. He hopes to raise $10,000 for the organization by June 13, when he expects to finishe in Portland. On Wednesday, McCrady stopped in to Cheshire Bike and Repair Shop to adjust his bike and true his wheels. Sadie ambled over to the sidewalk, where she slept, her chin resting on the cool cement. “The first week was awful,” McCrady said of the ride. “It was hot; it was humid; there were hills. By day eight it was fun and it’s still fun today.”

While riding through a sketchy section of Bridgeport earlier this week, McCrady said he noticed a toothless, gesticulating man running toward him, shouting. “I seen you!” the man hollered. “I seen you.” McCrady was alarmed but the man said, “I seen you on the 12 o’clock news.” McCrady stopped, shook the man’s hand and let him pet Sadie. As the man walked away, McCrady heard him mutter, “I done caught me a celebrity.”

For more information, visit www.firstgiving.com/danandsadie.

 

 

 

 

 

The Double-edges Sword of Identity

 A Jewish friend of mine is a worried.

Her daughter has fallen for a man who would be considered a “catch” by almost any measure: Tall, dark, handsome, erudite and considerate [Dash] he is a young man in a lucrative profession with an auspicious career ahead of him. But there’s a catch to this “catch.” The young man is not Jewish. He’s Hindu.

For my friend, this presents a problem. If the romance proceeds apace, will her daughter’s Jewish identity erode? This is a prickly issue for Jews, who have endured the Inquisition, pogroms and the Holocaust. To lose another Jew to the fancy of romance can seem a little capricious. This is far more portentous than my marriage to Protestant [Dash] an occasion for excommunication in my grandfather’s day that merited a shrug from my father.

I thought about my friend’s conflict in relation to two recent events that have underscored the difficulty in preserving one’s cultural identity in the face of a rising tide of homogenization. The first was the release of “Unaccustomed Earth,” by Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who writes about the chasm between expatriate Bengali parents and their American-raised children. The second was last year’s Irish rejection of the monumental Lisbon Treaty, which the European Union is promoting to reconstitute its cumbersome bureaucracy.

The events may appear unrelated. What, after all does a wistful Bengali immigrant have in common with an Irish electorate mucking up the clunky works of the European Union? More than you might expect.

The Irish, who have benefited from millions in EU subsidies, remain peevish about all this “European” business, worrying that Ireland has struck a Faustian bargain that will dilute not only Ireland’s political voice, but its identity. They’re not the only ones. Nobody but the poorer European countries seem aflutter about their “European” identity. As my Irish cousin says, “Who’s Irish anymore?”

A similar question might be asked of the characters in Lahiri’s novel “Unaccustomed Earth.” As she did in her debut collection of stories,”Interpreter of Maladies,” Lahiri wrestles with melancholy of the Bengali immigrants, struggling to inculcate their culture in the hearts of their defiantly Americanized children. It is a battle that leaves them with a longing for an identity they had taken for granted.

The Indian father of the title story is baffled by his tow-headed grandson, who has yet to see India and seems more comfortable in an L.A. mall. “The more the children grew, the less they had seemed to resemble either parent-they spoke differently, dressed differently, seemed foreign in every way,” Lahiri writes.

This, I think, is what we fear most when we talk about an erosion of cultural identity [Dash] that the people who come out of us will have nothing in common with us. We will have no points of communion, no exceptionality of experiences that we use as a shorthand to communicate. Something of our cultural essence will slip away.

Because her faith is important to her, I suspect my friend’s daughter will cling to her religious identity, regardless of whom she marries. But I suspect she grew up in a household that was less redolent of the Jewish heritage than that of her mother, just as my own Irish-Catholic girlhood was less dogmatic and definitive than my grandmother’s. Inexorably, we distance ourselves from the particularity of our culture, to an agreeable indistinctness.

What that means is that today I am free to be enriched by my friendships with Jews [Dash] friendships my grandparents would never have considered. But a certain intensity of identity is gone, and we cannot be surprised by those who continue to mourn it.

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

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.