Susanís Jobian prep-the-condo-for-sale project is nearing an end as Matt, Joe, Cel, and Kristin applied almost seven gallons of pure white paint to every wall, ceiling and epidermal surface. I guessed four hours, they worked for a solid eight, stopping only for lunch from nearby Papa Ginoís.

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Shouldn’t rakkity be back from Utah by now?

So tame you can almost pet him (or her).

Painting Flo’s apartment.
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The nearby train tracks connect our house to Daryl’s, the stores in West Acton, and even Idylwilde. Matt and his friends use them and often they find things you might not stumble upon on, say, Central St. Like the head of a deer. After staring into its glassy eye, Joe claims he ëll never be the same.

Yesterday they found this snapping turtle sidled up next to the tracks and were afraid it would meet the same fate as the deer. Enlisting my help for their “turtle rescue mission,” we walked back to where it was, and then much further before finding it safely away from the speeding trains.

The turtle is larger than it appears in this photo. Separate your hands to about shoulder width, imagine the weight of a bowling ball and you’ll have a sense of its size. It also has that giveaway triangular head and a long sharp tail, and though we were three, it was clearly in control. One snapping lunge at Joe and we all jumped back, hearts a poundin’.

That snapping turtle, the tales of the deer, the time of day – dusk – and my vision of one of the boys tight roping the rails with Walkman on high inspired, “One of these days you guys are going to find a dead body back here. I guarantee it.”

“There’s a perfect place to hide one, let me show you,” Robby replied.

We walked down a few feet to a brambly culvert channeling water from recent heavy rains. I walked to the concrete lip, looked down into the swirling black water and thought, sure this would be the place.

“If I ever killed someone accidentally this is where I’d stuff the body,” Robby observed.

I backed away from the edge , said something about the mosquitoes and headed back home.

Stopped on our way to Erickson’s (yeah, we do go there quite often) to take this photo of a rainbow over Stonefield Farm. Looks brilliant? Double it and you get the real life image. Tonight is the first night of Diane’s thirty-fifth Wellesley College reunion.

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As soon as those baby ducks hit the water – each one made a resounding PLOP as Matt dropped them from the bank- they submerged in search of food. Or to simply play. They were home and we were heroes.

Diane and Susan, remembering our date to meet Chris and her kids at Erickson’s, hurried home. I hung out briefly with Bob and Joy to talk about future projects, and then I skipped back to the house. After ice cream we stopped at Shaw’s supermarket, and arrived back home in the dark, at about 8:30. When I pulled into the driveway, not quite waiting for us but following the truck up the driveway, was my neighbor, John, whom I had never officially met. John is tall, thirty something, has thinning red hair, and that nobody’s really home smile of a man with two young children. He was carrying his blonde, sad-eyed daughter in his arms.

I said, “Hi.”

John said, “Have you seen my ducks?”

I don’t have a clue how to proceed with this story. I think anyone who looked at the images or watched the Quicktime movie knows exactly how we felt at that moment. My knees wobbled, Diane lost her hearing and the blood began to drain from Susan’s head, especially as John filled in the details about his ducks. The mother who laid those fourteen eggs in his yard has never been seen; the babies are only two weeks old and way too young to survive in the wild; he had planned to set them free in New Hampshire in four weeks.

John handed his baby daughter to his wife, and I led him to Joy’s dock. As we walked down the leafy path, John kept saying, “They’ll come when I call them, I know they will.” I kept thinking, And if you go home and rub your vodka bottle, out will pop a three-wish granting genie. I saw those ducks when they hit the water. They’re playing under water tag or they’re snapping turtle food. Either way, they ain’t coming back to your yard.

Nevertheless, we stood on that dock and John blew his duck call. With the moon overhead, the deep green grasses waving in the breeze, the clear gentle stream flowing away, and bubbly John sounding like a duck, I feared I was going to have an out of body experience.

With no movement and no signs of the return of the waddling fourteen, I said to John, “I’m going home, but promise me if you get your ducks back you’ll come to my house and let me know.”

John removed the duck call from his mouth and smiled, “They’ll come, they always have.”

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Susan worries that in addition to Flo’s monthly Concord Park bills, there will be a nine hundred dollar companion fee to pay for my new found attachment to the place.

I joined Flo for a classical piano recital in the great room to the left of the main doors. Rick Scalise plays once a month, and Sunday he featured Mozart, Beethoven, and Strauss. There were twenty-two folks in his audience; I counted six asleep. Or I thought they were asleep, except that at the end of each song, eyes would open and hands would clap. Thinking they might be onto something, I too closed my eyes. That made seven of us with our chins on our chest.

I was ecstatic to be sitting so close to the performer, but there is one drawback to this venue. The sleepers are counter balanced by the talkers. Behind where Flo and I sat were two women who could have been hollering over the crowd noise at a Celtics’ game. This bothered me some, but it really irritated the dark haired woman sitting in front of us. The one Flo refers to as, “The Busy body.”

The Busy Body’s evil eye stares were completely ineffective. And there were many. Finally, she stood up in the middle of a Strauss Waltz, marched over to the talkers and with forefinger extended said, “You better SHUT-UP!”

As she walked back to her chair, in voices loud enough to be heard outside of the Fleet Center:

“What did she say?”

“I think she said to be quiet.”

“The nerve.”

“She must be related to the piano player.”

Concord Park – rear view.
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Tomorrow: More duck tales

“Look outside!” Matt yelled.

Matt and Chris had finished mowing our lawn, and had not quite finished arguing about a party they were or were not going to, and about dinner they would or would not have with us, when Matt hollered at us from the porch. Susan looked though the kitchen window while Diane and I hurried outside and looked up. Hot air balloons? Hawks? Ultra lights? Raining parts of a commercial airliner? I didn’t see a thing.

“What, where, Matt?” I yelled back.

“On the ground.”

And then we looked down. Padding towards us from the backyard near Mary Dill’s house were fourteen baby ducks.

I immediately assumed they came, parentless, from the wetlands behind Bob and Joy’s house. After a quick call to Karen, Chris’s mom who works for Audubon, I called Joy to tell her we would be herding the flock back to their home, and hopefully to mom and dad duck.

Take the: photo tour

And the short movie:
Mp4 ( 3mb – won’t play in older browsers so you may want to download it first).

Drop by in a day or so because this story is not quite finished.

This is short, but one of my favorite stories. It would have little impact if it were told by a Mr. Peepers kind of guy.

Noland’s size and deep voice gives weight to his stories. And when he talks he looks me dead in the eyes. He has often complained about “Mr. America,”the not quite husband of his wife’s cousin who wears “cheaters”(sunglasses) indoors. “I was on the road for years. If I can see the eyes, I can size a guy up in a few minutes.”

” After the war, I hauled beef for Sullivan’s in Boston. Eight cows each cut into four parts, each piece weighing about two hundred fifty pounds. I’d drive them to Essem’s where they make ëem into hot dogs and hamburgers. Since Essem’s was union and I wasn’t, I’d unload them without help. Those bastards wouldn’t lift a finger.”

Noland extended his right arm and then bent it, like on the Arm and Hammer box. “You put the leg right here in the crook and swing the beef up onto your shoulder.”

“One day I’m on route 114 driving back from Salem. I pass the new stadium being built in Lawrence. There was this crane with the name Shaugnessey’s written right across the boom. I looked up and thought, I lift more weight in a day than that goddamn things does in a week. I turned around, drove back to Sullivan’s, and gave my notice.”

Breaking camp, last day.
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Flo in her apartment listening to Peter Rodd describe how Emma was thrown from her mount during today’s horse show.
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More photos from that fateful moving day. Out of the old and into the new – Concord Park

Susan has been working hours and hours cleaning Flo’s old apartment preparing it to be sold. Next Sunday Matthew and friends will spend the day rolling on fresh coats of paint. Here, she has transformed the old refrigerator into a new one.

Maybe he’s looking into the not too distant future, but today Noland talked about his friend Frank who died while Noland was visiting him in the hospital. We were sitting at his dining room table watching “The Price Is Right,” and a guy in uniform had just won “The Showcase” worth about twenty-five thousand dollars.

“Frank had emphysema and his breathing sounded like someone was squeezing his vocal cords. Loud and high pitched. The doc walked into his room with a needle this size.”

Noland held his forefingers about eight inches apart.

“And that was the end of him. My grandmother was the same.”

I somehow missed how he tied Frank to his grandmother, with “the same.” I may have been watching “The Price is Right” winner who was hugging his new car and saluting the audience. After Noland’s mother died when he was a baby he was raised by his grandmother and a very cruel father.

“She suffered like Frank. One day she asked me for apple juice and ice cream. I went out to the nurse’s desk, repeated her request and came back with ice cream and juice. I gave her ten or twelve small spoonfuls of ice cream and enough apple juice to wet her lips. She smiled, closed her eyes and that was that.”

“That was that? Jesus, Nol, give me a warning. I didn’t know she was going to end up dead. From ice cream to, “That was that”?

“That’s life, I could take it.”

“I know that’s life and I know you could take it, but all of your stories end like that. The boom drops. Don’t you have any boring stories?”

He doesn’t. They all finish with someone dead, beat-up, or fired. They’re short and they hit hard.

This one too, which I’ve been holding back because it’s Noland’s other side. Peter had already guessed there was more to Noland than met the blog’s eye.

“My son, Danny, was about sixteen when he asked me if he could have a motorcycle. He was with his buddy, Jim. I said, ‘I’ve taken care of you all these years and I want you alive. You have an accident on a motorcycle and the party is over.’ He turned around and left. A few minutes go by and I was about to walk back in the house, and I see Danny’s other friend John laughing. I asked John what was funny and he pointed down the street. There was Danny on the back of his Jim’s motorcycle. I got in my Olds and chased them down. Cut them off. I got out of my car, opened the back door, picked Danny off the bike and threw him into the back seat.”

Noland uses his hands when he talks, and his motions, like his words, are short and economical. He moved his hands as if he were throwing a bale of hay.

“I said to Jim, ‘If I ever see him on the back of your bike again, I’ll do the same to you.’ I drove Danny home and pushed him through the front door. I put the hassock up on the divan, took the pictures off the walls and cleared the rest of the room. I said, ‘You’re going to learn who runs this house.’ I punched him again and again. I knocked him down and then I picked him up and threw him against the wall. His head hit the wall and he slumped to the floor. I thought, I hope he doesn’t get up. He didn’t. Years later he told me he remembered that day. He said, ‘Dad, I couldn’t get up.’ I told him It was a good thing.”

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Susan treated us to dinner last night at Daniela’s Cantina, and in spite of the cold weather, we drove to Erickson’s for dessert. Shinydome will appreciate this most – she had wintergreen chip in a cone. Yes, ice cream with foreign bodies.
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The cabin porch was saved from destruction by a combination of luck and a skinny, but resilient limb that caught the crushing force of a falling tree . Adam and I spent two hours surgically removing it, section by section, and then finally swinging what was left, still clinging to its upright half, away from the roof. From that tree we crafted a bench on which to sit in front of the fire,  and enough firewood to reload the porch area for Ed’s next winter trip. Or our own next Grok Hill visit, whichever comes first.

Yesterday at the lumberyard.I walked in, picked up gate latches and hinges, and then shuffled to the desk to order the stock I needed to build a custom door in the back of an attached garage in Carlisle.

I was helped by Betty, who is small, probably in her forties, and has zero distinguishing features other than her voice. She sounds like Betty Boop — high-pitched and childlike. Betty stopped me somewhere between my ordering plywood and primed pine to complain about this wet weather breeding mosquitoes. I told her I had been camping in New Hampshire, and indeed they were ferocious. To which she said, “Tell me something. I talked to my ophthalmologist, and he said it was the light and not my eyes. Can you really see more stars if you get away from city?”

I thought to myself, you can see more stars if you leave The Home, but I said, “Of course. The further from the city, the more stars. Try Montana.”

I left, walked to the yard, loaded my truck, and on the way out I stopped to talk to Watson (known as Georgia – why, I don’t know). Georgia is a gentle-hearted guy with nothing but distinguishing features – from the creases in his face deep enough to plant potatoes, to ears like airplane landing flaps. Georgia retired years ago, but couldn’t tolerate doing nothing, and he’s now back making sure the lumber on your truck matches what’s on your slip.

“Georgia, I won’t mention any names, but someone inside asked me if you can see more stars the further you get from the city. Can you imagine that?”

Georgia reached up and pulled the bill of his Red Sox hat away from his face, thought for a moment, and replied, “You know, at my house in Littleton, there are so many trees I can’t hardly see any. But if you go to the Walmart in Hudson, New Hampshire, the sky is covered with them.”