This might be my last photo album (First six photos are Dan’s) . After Dan and Linda left this morning, Diane went water walking in the ocean, we shopped for and successfully bought Diane colorful clothing (my need not hers) , we bought our usual pound of chocolate (is there any other kind?) fudge , and we had lunch in a cafe which occupies the first floor of a house so you sit in what might be the living room on soft leather couches. The weather, and I hear the same is true for Boston, has been ideal. Sun, blue skies and daytime temps you can’t even feel.

Photos taken at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay.

A few early photos at Diane’s favorite place, the Lobster Co-op.

Diane called me away from my computer for this photo op. She sounded so excited I thought maybe she spied the pot at the end of a rainbow and it was in our yard. Instead, it was Matthew (and then friends) splayed out in our untrimmed bush. You can mouse through the photos, then click to see them individually, run a slide show, and even upload your own if you’re using Firefox or Safari. Otherwise, click here.

I don’t know how old Ben is. I’ve never asked. He feels forty, his hair is flecked with grey, but I know his dad is only sixty-three. He does odd jobs for me and yesterday he came by for the first time In a year.

“You’ve lost weight,” I said.

“I have, thanks for noticing.”

“How have you been?”

“Good. I’m getting married.”

“First time?”

“First time. We’ve been together for thirteen years.”

“And you think it’s about time? Or someone thinks it’s about time. Diane and I were together thirteen years before we got married.”

“Isadora’s dad died last Christmas. That woke us up. We’re going to be married in Spain, where she’s from. My two brothers will be there and a few family members, but that’s about it.”

“And you’ll go back to Hudson? Isn’t that where you live?”

“I want to but Isadora doesn’t. A close friend killed himself in the apartment below me. She hates the memories.”

“Killed himself?”

“He hung himself. I should have seen the signs. I should have done something.”

“Tell me more.”

“I saw the rope he used, it was on his couch. I said, “Bill, you’re not going to do anything with this are you?”

“Wait, a minute. What kind of rope? Like you see in Western’s on TV? What alerted you?”

“No, no, one of those yellow narrow nylon ropes you can buy at The Dollar Store. He’d hinted around about it early in the week, but when I’d confront him he’d laugh it off. The day before he tried to give me some of his furniture.”

“Still, to hang yourself you really have to want to do yourself in. People who hang themselves in closets usually suffocate. From what I know, you have to position the knot, you have to add weight, but not too much or you’ll pull your head off.”

“He broke his neck. He had it all planned. I think he wanted to me to find him. We were going out for coffee that morning. We arranged it the night before. The movers were coming and he said he wanted to get out of their way. We had the kind of relationship where I could knock on his door and if he didn’t answer I could walk right in.”

“And you knocked and found him?”

“No, not exactly. I knocked the next morning and he said, ‘Give me half an hour.’ ”

“Ah Jesus, Ben. This is brutal. I mean, I understand why but when you do something like that you lay waste to the people around you.”

“The movers got there before I did. They knocked and got no answer, and then they knocked on my door and asked where he was. I knew he was there; I’d just talked to him. I said try the basement. Four big guys from Giant Moving came running, nearly screaming, out of his place.”

“This is the worst story I’ve heard in years. This is like something you read in a book.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hey, don’t be sorry for me. It’s you who lived through this.”

“I was so glad I didn’t go down there. I was told by the guys who reconstructed it that Ben smoked one last cigarette, and then he took his glasses off and placed them on his workbench. He stood on a chair holding a suitcase full of magazines. That’s how he broke his neck.”

************

So, you’re thinking how could he write this? And I’m thinking, how could I not? In the past, both Diane and Pesky Godson have encouraged me to post these kinds of semi-stories. I usually add more than a descriptive phrase or two, but this conversation drives itself.  It’s pretty close to verbatim, however,  it’s much less powerful than hearing it first hand.  Something about the way it unraveled as we talked about his brother’s teaching job, his upcoming wedding and his feelings about his father.

Jen sent me this website. It’s so far beyond the old days of hand coded html.

“The Visitor“ is a film which depicts young couples who use a Ouija Board to summon a serial killer from his bored afterlife. One by one the couples are summarily slaughtered until the killer is dispatched by the same cop who killed him when he was alive. That’s the short version.

Molly played a goth character and had the best lines (you shoulda heard her dad laugh) and the best eye movements which made me wonder how someone trained for the stage adjusts to the all seeing lens of a camera. How do you not overact?

As you can see from the photo, the theatre was full of family and friends, and many of them participated in what felt more like an event than just a movie. My biggest disappointment? Molly died off screen.

Here are more photos from our weekend. We were luck to stumble into two different weddings and I piggybacked on the official photographers.

“The Visitor“ is a film which depicts young couples who use a Ouija Board to summon a serial killer from his bored afterlife. One by one the couples are summarily slaughtered until the killer is dispatched by the same cop who killed him when he was alive. That’s the short version.

Molly played a goth character and had the best lines (you shoulda heard her dad laugh) and the best eye movements which made me wonder how someone trained for the stage adjusts to the all seeing lens of a camera. How do you not overact?

As you can see from the photo, the theatre was full of family and friends, and many of them participated in what felt more like an event than just a movie. My biggest disappointment? Molly died off screen.

Here are more photos from our weekend. We were luck to stumble into two different weddings and I piggybacked on the official photographers.

Jen’s “spankings for the bad {grade school} boys” comment swept me back to Cincinnati, to my seventh grade grade art class taught by Mr Ertel. Mr. Ertel looked like a thin-faced version of Richard Nixon with black greasy hair and bald temples. He taught us to draw and he snapped us out of our day dreams with morsels like, “You don’t kill time, time kills you.” He wanted us to be good students, but more than that he needed to prepare us for what lay ahead, and he used his own blend of hard knocks and disappointment.

Mr. Ertel’s principle project that year was Steve Kugler, a solid juvenile delinquent, who went away to military school for two years and returned to us, endlessly polite – sir this and sir that – but unrepentant. Mr. Ertel, a shepherd of Steven’s wayward soul, repeatedly sat him down at empty tables during our drawing periods to counsel him about a young thug’s dim future. I admired my art teacher’s efforts though years later Steven and his father were sent to prison for running a chop shop.

Anyway, Mr. Ertel backed up his set of class rules with a long, heavy wooden paddle that he used to send fifteen year olds back to their seats with burning bottoms and watery eyes. My transgression? I clumsily knocked my chair to the floor. “The paddle or a quarter,” he said to me. Meaning I could walk up in front of the class while he took batting practice or pay a quarter to avoid the pain. What did I do? I froze. As I used to when called upon to answer any question. Surely, in this case, I knew the answer, and surely, given that my own father used the narrow strip of leather that held up his pants to discipline his sons, the pain would be far less. Still, I froze. I knew I couldn’t cough up a quarter because I would have been labeled a chicken shit. But what if that broad piece of wood hurt more than the belt and tears cascaded down my cheeks in front of my friends? Fortunately, for me, my long lack of a response gave Mr. Ertel a chance to back off. He asked, ” Didn’t you know knocking your chair over is a paddling offense?”

“No,” I squeaked. And that was that.

Molly, Mark and Ginger’s actress daughter, is in an Indie slasher movie premiering (one night only) in Providence tonight, and we’re all going down to be part of the event. Molly’s presently in summer stock, this winter she’ll appear as young Louisa in WGBH’s upcoming life of Louisa May Alcott , and she was recently hired as an understudy for the Huntington theatre. Soon she’ll be good enough to appear in one of my home movies.

*************

The last of the Plymouth pics.

The title has nothing to do with dinner at John and Karen’s Thursday night, it just happens to be playing in the background as the thunder rumbles.