An Ed Lowe Story

by: Joan Hitz

Dear Readers,

From May through October of 2010, I was supremely fortunate to share an active e-mail correspondence with Ed Lowe. It meant (and still means) the world to me. When Ed died a little over a year ago, Long Island lost a great storyteller and legions of people lost a dear family member and friend. The South Bay’s Neighbor was the last publication to carry Ed’s work. I wrote this piece shortly after he died, and I share it here in honor of him. Joan Hitz

An Ed Lowe Story     

Ed Lowe. I wasn’t exactly hot on his trail, but I was on his trail. I wasn’t following him, but I followed him. I’d lived on his street, worked in his building, and he’d sat on my lap for thirty years in parking lots all over Long Island. Okay, that was a cheap shocker. I hope it provokes laughter behind the swinging doors of whatever cosmic bar room he’s in.

But it’s also true: for three decades, while indulging my habit of sitting in the car with the newspaper spread over my legs, I read Ed’s columns. And I often thought, “I really ought to know that guy.” Then I’d turn the page.  

Then one Saturday last May (2010), on a break from yardwork, I sat under a tree and read Ed’s column about ... letters unwritten. “I ought to know that guy,” I thought (italically). 

So in a skip-the-yardwork trance, I entered the house, fixed a salad, and finally wrote to Ed. By the time I’d finished (a letter I deemed long enough to make up for thirty years), the salad was in wilt.  

I hit ‘send’ and went to my niece’s communion.

That night, when I logged back on to the computer, there was Ed Lowe in my inbox. 

He’d read my letter four times (six, he said, if he counted the interruptions, which he now called ‘godblessed’ instead of goddamned. Since his stroke, Ed counted everything, even interruptions, as events to savor.).

Ed also said he liked writing to someone who, like him, enjoyed going off on tangents. 

And then he stranded me on one.

My first e-mail from Ed Lowe ended unsigned, and with only half a sentence. He left me dangling with the pronoun “I.”

I ... what?  

Well, I thought, only half his body works (the other half affected by the stroke), so why not a partially-paralyzed e-mail too? The first half on time, the other limping in on a delayed schedule ... 

As this was Ed, I chose to wait. As this was Ed, my patience was a fake. 

All Sunday, between uninspired bouts of yardwork, I checked the computer for the words that should follow that “I.” For fourteen days, I waited for the AWOL verb of Ed Lowe. It never came, so finally I broke down and wrote again.

You left me dangling, I told him, for a fortnight in Tangentia. I ended my letter with wicked glee: I must conclude this follow-up e-mail by simply stating that I

Then for the second time ever, I hit ‘send’ to Ed Lowe.

All I wanted was the second half of my first half-a-letter. But this time he wrote me back a whole one.

A love letter. 

Now, hang on. It was the kind of love letter you write to someone you don’t know, offering up a universal sort of love: “I wish for you to fall in love,” the letter said, “with your book-in-progress, with another soul, with yourself ...” It was signed this time: Ed Lowe.

Well. Ought-to-know-that-guy became must-know. Like a shy stranger with a predestined appointment to see the king, I began to pace along the cyber-moat in front of the castle door (e-mail address) of Ed Lowe, throwing tiny pebbles, afraid to really knock. 

I couldn’t help it - all through June, I e-mailed him again and again, till finally, he actually asked me to: “Keep writing to me, for both our sakes.”

And that’s how, during Summer 2010, I sat in front of a computer and got to know that guy. Back and forth along an electronic cosmic footpath, I banged out letters and Ed zipped them back.  

All July and August we mingled at a word party, two writers romping through the funny, deep, and whimsical. We exchanged anecdotes. We sent stories. We brokered mutual encouragements too. 

Ed poured his benediction, “Holy (Unprintable)!” over a story I’d sent (I’ve memorized that e-mail), and I pleased him with a fabrication of a stroll he might one day take, talking shop with Mark Twain. 

And I began to realize something. I’d always been a writer but I’d never considered just where it might lead. Now, I knew. Writing with Ed Lowe revealed me to myself. Just like him, I wanted to do a column too. It called to me like nothing before.

And then ... his September column: The Liver.

When Ed wrote me about his cancer diagnosis, I was so crushed I told him I wasn’t going to sleep that night. Later that evening he wrote again to say: “If it wasn’t for these (post-stroke) 2 1/2 years, we would have never met. I’m tired,” he said. “You be tired too.” 

With this through-the-screen shoulder squeeze, I knew that whatever happened, the going on of days was the thing. The going on of days.

Condensing the uncondensable, Ed had surgery, began chemo, and got too sick to write. I’d been ready for that - to enter a dark place of unknowing - and all November and December, I endured it. During long days of a quiet inbox, I prayed for him, hoped he’d rally and that we’d get to connect again. 

The end of this story is longer, but the crux of it is this: I still had something to say to Ed - the giant beautiful goodbye I’d never have sent when he was newly diagnosed and trying for a cure. 

Now, I wasn’t sure I’d get to do that. And that tore at me.

Then one day in late December, a series of events unrolled with a crystalline clockwork that convinces me the universe writes poems. Without any planning, everything proceeded like a well-wrought movie script.

Hit with the sudden sense that there wasn’t that much time, I wrote a letter to Ed’s daughter, Colleen. That summer, he’d sent me her e-mail address, though I’d never used it.

The letter I wrote to Colleen was the one I meant for Ed. Could she read it to him, please? She wrote back immediately to say that, remarkably, she was driving down from out of state to visit him the very next day.

Three days later, Colleen read my letter to Ed. In it, I revealed that the correspondence had been so much more than just that. I’d saved everything - printed out the entire cyber-exchange onto a thick stack of real, permanent paper. 

Dear Ed, my letter began, your heart is a star and you used it that way  ...

Colleen said he leaned back and listened, a “satisfied small smile on his face.” 

I can see that small smile. And “small” isn’t small at all. I’m honored. For thirty years, Ed Lowe wrote a “small” column. Limited by page space to approximately 1000 words, Ed had the incredible gift of tucking big-hearted stories about “small” people into a few “small” paragraphs. Very big indeed.

Ed knew what the really big stories were, and who the really big people were. Not the “super”heroes, “big” names and “super”stars; not the car accidents and fires and wars. 

Just ... us. Long Islanders with big lives lived on a small daily basis. In the small print.

So I’ll take that “small smile.” I’ll follow that unseen small smile into eternity.

Eleven days later, on January 15, 2011, Ed died.

And like the past-my-due-date procrastinator I was born to be, the day after his death, I got a stirring to return to Hamilton Street in Amityville, the place where he’d grown up and I’d once spent a year.

You see, I’d been following Ed, cold on his trail, for decades. When I was 22 years old, I spent a year living on Hamilton Street, but I’d never searched him out. And I now worked in the same school building where for two years in the 1960s, Ed taught English. 

So, in grief, and needing to do something, I decided to see his house, and where it was, in relation to the house I’d lived in. Were they close? How close?

I drove up the street to the cape I’d lived in - number 37. Surely, number 57, Ed’s house, would be much further up, very far away. But, as sometimes happens in strangely-house-numbered suburbia, the number gap didn’t reflect a space gap.

A roll of the tires and there it was - 57 - Ed’s childhood home. Same side of the street, three doors away. The lawn was covered in a thick blanket of clean untrodden snow. I gave my own small satisfied smile. I was now hot, but still cold, on his trail.

Across from my old house was an opening onto a canal. At 22, I’d stand there and gaze at the sky, searching for my future. Now, at 48, I simply gazed into today. 

Down the length of the canal stood rows of weathered pilings, free of boats for the winter. The water shifted with floating rectangles of light, and before me, the sun lit a tiny green sparkle in an oil slick. It winked at me ... and I spoke.

Into the ever-present, ever-receding sky, I lofted the name of the Long Island storyteller and man I’d ought to, and had come to, know. “Ed Lowe” ... I felt his name sail out and mingle with the air currents of the Great South Bay. I wanted the winds of Amityville to keep a part of him close, forever.

The last words Ed ever typed to me were ‘thank you,’ and the last word I ever typed to him was ‘peace.’  

Those words are universal, they are interchangeable, and they are prayers. I’m still saying those prayers. I’m still praying for Ed. I’m not planning to stop.

(first published on January 25, 2012, in South Bay's Neighbor News)

Beer, Pretzels ... and Belief

by: Joan Hitz

Every Christmas Eve, when my brother and I set out milk and cookies for Santa, my father informed us that what Mr. Claus really wanted was beer and pretzels.

Though my father knew many things, I couldn’t imagine that anyone, especially Santa, would prefer boring brown pretzels to the pink cookies we home-baked and avalanched with sprinkles each year. 

So as a young lawyer of six, then seven, I successfully argued the case and Santa got cookies. Every Christmas morning, the North Pole Superhero’s existence was confirmed, not only by pyramids of gifts from his sack of a million toys, but also by a half-drunk glass of milk and a leftover cookie missing a single bite. 

But the year I turned eight, something (a dawning cosmic suspicion stirred by the rudiments of third grade math?) made me decide to switch to hops and sourdough. 

That Christmas Eve, we finally gave Santa a tray of brown crunchy pretzels, and ... 

“Milk,” my mother ruled. (Apparently she only believed half my father’s inside scoop on Santa’s snack preference, and the beer half wasn’t the one. Dad let the motion ride.)

On Christmas morning, the evidence spoke. On the tray: half a glass of milk, and, every last pretzel - devoured.

We’d done it - finally satisfied Santa. When he’d climbed back up the chimney to take to the skies for the remainder of his trip around earth (as I recall, this trip always began in North Babylon), his belly had been stuffed with sufficient salty sustenance to last the night. 

That our chimney, encased in cement against the furnace, was fireplace-less, offering no point of traditional entry/exit for Santa, was a fact I wouldn’t consider. Nor the part about one bag holding millions of toys.

These uncomfortable “facts” melted easily against my inborn conviction that facts are often irrelevant, anyway, to that which is truly true. 

So, by disregarding, I chose to keep believing in Santa. Even a pretzel-eating one.

(My favorite quote, by novelist Shirley Hazzard, states: “Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to intelligence - to imagination, to love - than to fact. To be accurate is not to be right.” These words, and other wise ones, are pinned under magnets on my refrigerator.)

The Easter following the beer(milk)-and-pretzels Christmas, however, despite my dreamiest disregard, the awful facts of math came hopping in. 

On bunny feet. 

After the frenzied egg hunt, I couldn’t help calculating: Two dozen eggs per house, times fifty houses per street, times hundreds of streets per town. Thousands of towns per state, per country, per ... earth? In one night?  

“Mom? How can the Easter Bunny be real?”

I already knew what she then confessed. And within seconds, a more awful fact fell, with guillotine certainty, into my third-grade brain: Santa.

Oh, no. Santa? 

“Oh, yes,” said Mom. “But ... keep pretending, for your brother’s sake. He’s only four, so let’s make it fun for him.”

Welllll ... okay. Carry on, for my brother. It was still Santa - just his, now, and mine to make happen for him. 

Since this alchemy, of believing, into knowing, into, keep believing, was a loftier math than finite third-grade logic, I saw the sense of it, and carried on.

Because “facts” can dangerously muddle belief, unless you simply refuse to let them. Facts state that DNA makes up a snail, a leopard, a human. But, what’s behind the DNA? Where is all that DNA from? 

Did ... belief make it appear? And isn’t that so of Santa?

Today, when kids ask about Mr. Claus, I spin truth for them with all the red and green yarn I can unravel from my cranium: 

Santa’s roof is chocolate. His front porch is an ice-rink. Reindeer sleep in striped pajamas and eat sparkly oatmeal. On Christmas Eve, elves sit on the moon with silver binoculars to watch Santa’s ride ...

And other exquisite facts.

Some days, Life pries its fingers under the refrigerator magnets and, by hurting me, tries to trick me into ripping down my quotes. 

I won’t, though. 

Because despite all the facts that are true and aren’t right and good in this world, there are all the facts that are. 

So I hold out, carry on, and choose to keep believing. In flying sleighs, chimney-less entrances, refrigerator wisdom, and the magic behind DNA. 

In hope, and higher math.

And of course, in Santa. Who is, after all, the continual recycling and reinventing of magic, for children, by adults who care enough to make it real.

And it’s funny: Every December, my father’s Christmas present, consisting mostly of shirts, always feels incomplete, somehow. Then at the last minute, I run out and purchase ... a bag of pretzels. 

Happy New Year, everyone! May you spend it believing ... unbelievable things ... into reality.

(first published on December 28, 2011, in South Bay's Neighbor News)

The Dollhouse

by: Joan Hitz

The grandparents’ house in Freeport was a forest of moss-green carpet. The dining room held high-backed chairs whereupon the shortest diners sat on telephone books to better access their roast beef. In the dusky basement, the grandfather’s painting dropcloths were flung like ghosts concealing secrets. 

This magical house also bore a room of jewels: the art room. Whenever the granddaughter arrived, she raced there to visually feast upon the crimped oil-paint tubes with their liquid eruption of colors: ultramarine, fuchsia, burnt sienna, heliotrope, carmine. 

“Don’t touch the paints!” her parents said. 

“Let her,” said the grandmother.

(The grandmother’s grandchildren could do no wrong and that was all right.)

Inside the art room and basement-of-dropcloths, during three top-secret months when the girl was seven, an enormous home-built dollhouse was constructed. It was the only dollhouse like it in the world, and it appeared in the little girl’s living room Christmas morning, 1969.

Constructed of thick plywood, with a blue-shingled roof and red-brick sides, the dollhouse was divided into two floors, six rooms. Open-faced, a child (or a family cat) could access everything on sight. 

Leftover wallpaper and carpeting swatches from the beloved Freeport homestead covered every surface, and tiny handmade furniture filled the rooms. This included a sizable TV set, which broadcast an unending episode involving a palm tree on a tropical beach.            

But the Crowning-Glory Enduring Kid-Charming Majesty of the Whole Domestic Extravaganza was a final touch that had been installed by the girl’s father: Christmas lights.  

Along the back wall, with the click of a single switch, six fat bulbs made each room gasp with party light. Huge globs of orange, blue, red, green and yellow glow saturated the rooms in permanent Christmas-tree ecstasy.

Manhandled down to a corner of the basement, the dollhouse became the little girl’s new address. Over the years, she filled its rooms with hours and hours of her childhood. Then, one unmarked day, she grew beyond it. 

In her teens, when her father moved into his second house, the dollhouse went with him. The girl went on to college.

One recent autumn, with her grandparents long gone and her father moving from his second house to his third, he asked if she wanted it back.

For decades, it’d resided in his garage rafters, its plywood expanding and contracting through pitch black Januarys, moist Aprils, scalding Julys. 

Now, beyond its days of use, it sat, out of place, in the driveway, halfway between a moving truck and a curbside pile of debris. Like the hollow events inside history books, the dollhouse was spent, coming asunder, with no real bearing upon today or the child it’d been built for.

The “child,” however, remembered. Still saw her “people” - the plastic baby dolls, the green-hatted dad doll, the strawberry-pigtailed mom. Pool parties with plastic bowls of water, rooftop dives that no actual mother or father would permit. Her cat, curled up inside the dollhouse’s main floor.

And, the private quiet of that basement, where she’d spun her once-in-a-lifetime magic with the limited number of childhood hours allotted her. 

And all too soon, done.

Do you want to take the dollhouse?

“No,” she said, softly enough to let her father know that she’d treasured - still did - the dollhouse. And, her grandparents, now departed, now ghosts themselves.

But, real ghosts, their memory in shimmering colors, echoed voices, visions of summers and dinners and a house of moss-green carpet and a hidden dollhouse under construction. 

These were real. These were gone. And, these were still here. Simply a different kind of real.

Someday she would be real like this, too. Alive to her followers, her nieces, to whoever else stayed when it was her turn to move on. 

The dollhouse was carried to the curb and set sideways. The girl stood near it one more time, scanning the cracked wallpapers, touching each faded lightbulb, opening a little drawer.

And suddenly, something fell. With a plastic clatter from 1970, it hit the pavement. It was a round toy button with a ridged surface. When it was tilted back and forth, it gave the appearance of movement. The button featured Snoopy, followed by a line of Woodstocks, marching along. March, march, marching. Forever.

The truck was finished loading. It was time to follow behind in the car, and head over to house number three. A breath of October sent a rattle of leaves past the dollhouse and down the street.

“It’s okay,” she told the dollhouse. “You were real and you still are. Just not in a physical way anymore.” 

She picked up the button, pinned it to her car’s sun visor, and followed the moving van.  

Moving away. Always moving on.

(first published on November 30, 2011, in South Bay's Neighbor News)

The Limits at Infinity

by: Joan Hitz

It’s October, so, a tale from school ...

Unless you’re an astrophysicist reading your South Bay's Neighbor News after a long hard day at the rocket ship, the reader should know that despite my “A” in college “Calculus One” (aka “elective” ego/torture trip) my calculus skills are equivalent to yours. No, yours are better.

That “A” was the product of a childhood spent erroneously hyperventilating over academics. (2011 update: I’m cured.) 

How it occurred, I’ll never know. I studied, took the tests, and produced the “A,” but to this day, the subject matter of calculus - vertical asymptotes, parallelepipeds, derivatives of arctrigonometric functions, the “limits at infinity” (had enough yet?) - I recall only as Russian translations of Swahili poems swirling inside black holes while blindfolded and gagged. 

In short: I don’t remember Jack. I also don’t know calculus. That’s why I became a physical therapist-writer-face painter and not a calculus-tician. Or whatever they’re called. 

Oh. Yeah. Astrophysicists.

Anyway, ahem.

In 1981, my second semester of college was devoted to finalizing my divorce from mathematics.

The professor, an asymptote-loving soul named Dr. Z., must’ve expected an encore from this first semester “A” student. He welcomed me to Calculus Two with an expectant smile, then began to speak. In Russian.

“Calc Two,” I discovered, was astrophysicist boot camp. Taught in Russian, at eight in the morning, four days a week, in hard plastic chairs.

Still, I hung in. Arose at seven, trudged through Buffalo snowstorms, arrived at eight, sat stiffly, listened politely, Monday through Thursday, to the Russian. Tried really hard.

On the first of only two exams whose average determined the final grade, I got a 48.

Despite my fizzling mathematical prowess (I was, after all, a poetry lover with no joy for numbers), I did realize that, “48,” in Russian or English, was failing.

First stop: Registrar’s Office: Hadn’t I better convert to Pass/Fail, earn 52 on the final, and slink away from Calc Two with a slippery, just passing, 50?  

Yes, the registrar said, I had better. So I did.

Next stop: Breakfast. I spent the second half of second semester cutting calculus. Between the dormitories and the academic buildings, an intersection existed, where, if one wished, one could turn left, take the same number of footsteps it took to reach the calculus classroom, and reach Burger King instead. 

That was my kind of math. The sausage biscuits were wonderful, and this restaurant offered a panoramic view of the Peace Bridge spanning the Niagara River over to Canada. Great place for writing poetry.

Well, once a week, then twice, then more, the lure of biscuits at eight a.m. trumped the limits at infinity. I still sat in a hard plastic chair, but at Burger King. 

The snows swirled, the coffee steamed, I gazed at the Peace Bridge, musing.

Heck, I was “Pass/Fail” now. Just needed a 52 ... in May. I had the brain, the book, I’d cram it all in. Later.

Anyway, if I did fail, I could always emigrate to Canada. They’d take me. I was young, strong, free of ailments. I’d put down as my reason for emigrating: mathematical persecution.

Eventually, though, the snows stopped, the rains came, and suddenly, it was the dark and stormy night ... Before the Final. 

I found the book at seven, opened it at nine, crammed distractedly with a cute brilliant classmate till eleven, then went to bed. When I took the test, I didn’t know my elbow from my ... asymptote. Never was a humiliating “52” so desired. 

And when the tests were returned, there it was. Hovering above a spaghetti tangle of corrective red ink: 52.

Passsssssssssssss!

(This poet, I’m ashamed to admit, was smug. Far and wide, I proclaimed my “ace-ing” of Calc Two with the exact grade required.) 

Not till three decades later (recently), did my daydreaming, mathematically-challenged mind finally catch up with ... what must probably be ... the truth? No way had I deserved that mark. Dr. Z., in an act of infinite benevolence without limits, had given it to me. 

Oh. 

(Humility counts, I hope, even 30 years late.)

I don’t know if Dr. Z. still calculates upon this earthly plane, or, if his spirit now dwells among the limits at infinity. Regardless, I hereby entreat the Universe, Infinity itself, or the Society of Departed Geniuses Who Actually Deserved Passing Grades--Newton, Einstein, Mr. Jobs--to grant their colleague eternal forgiveness for his kindness to the wayward poet in Calc Two. 

It was a singular gift of grace from a math man to a word woman, and here’s the equation for it: 48 + 52 divided by 2 = Love.

When I enter the pearly gates, I’m going bearing gifts. For Dr. Z.: a tray of freshly-baked cookies. 

How many? 

52.

(first published on October 26, 2011, in South Bay's Neighbor News)

Boatyard Dog

by: Joan Hitz

In the late ‘90s, Nina and Jim Roy adopted a puppy - a golden Lab. They couldn’t bear to leave her home all day, so each morning Jim nestled the tiny dog, Morgan, in a basket and drove her to work.  

Jim Roy owns Outboard Barn in Babylon Village, a boatyard and marine supply at the edge of the Great South Bay. That’s where he met Nina, who owns the tiny, circa-1913 cottage next door. Originally a summer home for the Post Cereal family, the nearly hundred-year-old building is now surrounded by boatyards and marinas. Years earlier, Nina had bought it for rental income. By the late ‘90s, she worked at an accounting firm. 

Morgan took immediately to seaside life. She quickly abandoned the puppy basket to assume the role she seemed destined for: Boatyard Dog. She became a fixture--a fast-pawed, mobile one--endlessly zigzagging among the racks, marine engines and dry-docked sea vessels. 

“Morgan ran the boatyard,” says Nina. “She was the boss. And everyone - Jim, me, workmen, customers - was crazy about her.”

The golden captain was always overseeing, and, underfoot.

When the men painted the boat hulls, Morgan parked beneath to supervise. Nobody minded meeting her rigorous canine specifications. In fact, if she departed, they missed the four-legged foreman.

But sometimes Morgan, a wandering soul, did depart, simply vanishing on a secret itinerary.

“She’d be right there,” says Nina, “but somehow not there, too.” 

Despite this knack for hiding, like any master illusionist, she was usually only inches from her audience and a few slippery seconds ahead. She often turned up in funny little surprise scenes.

Once, an exiting customer who’d left his car door open returned to the store to ask if Jim owned a Lab. Morgan had enthroned herself in his driver’s seat, looking like she’d misplaced her key ...

In cases of extreme disappearance, Jim Roy did hold a key, and a trick of his own, to locate her. 

Jim was in possession of a big red forklift. And more than anything at the boatyard, with the possible exception of Jim himself, Morgan was smitten with it. 

"Whenever we cranked it," says Nina, "the dog would drop whatever job she was ‘supervising’ and race right over. So if she went missing for too long, we’d start the forklift. Instant Morgan!”  

Giant noisy machine, 55-pound dog, wagging golden tail: love story. 

While Morgan supervised at seaside, Nina clocked long hours inland. Days at the accounting firm, and nights, in her kitchen, with chocolate.  

For a long time, Nina had wanted a home business. Then, on a trip to San Francisco, strolling in the land of Ghirardelli, she found it.  

“Everything in that city was chocolate,” she says.  

Nina enrolled in candy-making classes and was soon busy producing chocolate, servicing multiple corporate accounts from her kitchen. 

A new goal emerged: to open a store. Her cottage next to Jim’s boatyard seemed the perfect spot. 

And the store’s name? Nina would honor the family member who operated the boatyard: not Jim, but the dog.

“I always knew I’d name my business for Morgan. She was such a huge presence in our lives.”

But before the candy store became a happy reality, Nina and Jim experienced a sad one: In 2002, at only 6 1/2 years old, Morgan was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. The high-spirited retriever who’d jazzed up enough golden years for several lifetimes was going to have her actual years cut short.

Knowing what they’d have to do to spare their dog further pain, the Roys made sure to bring Morgan for one more visit to her beloved boatyard. There, among the elevated vessels, the red forklift, and slews of heartbroken people shedding enough tears to overrun the Great South Bay, Morgan had a proper seaside goodbye. Then the Roys took her home again to say the real one.

Chocolates by Morgan's Bay opened its doors in October 2009. 

Now, people can purchase confections in a large glass-fronted room where strands of sunlight sift among the reflected sparkles of baywater.  

Here, among the constant interplay of conversation and customers, Nina senses a presence: the spirit of Morgan. Zigzagging among the legs, smack in the middle of the action, supervising ... overseeing ... underfoot.

That may not be wishful fancy.  

While Nina Roy always intended to name the store after her dog, she didn’t know the actual meaning of the name, “Morgan.”

But recently, a customer informed her.

“Morgan,” it turns out, means: the edge of the sea.

And if dogs share the surnames of their people (which they surely do), then Morgan’s last name was, “Roy.”

“Roy” means: king.

So Morgan’s name, and the name of the candy store, mean: The King at the Edge of the Sea.  

Woof.

(first published on September 28, 2011, in South Bay's Neighbor News)

An Uncertain Future

by: Joan Hitz

At twenty years of age, Eric Ryan (accidentally) drove his 275-pound motorized wheelchair off a cliff in Costa Rica. But before rolling on with this story, let’s back up a bit.

To infancy.

In 1988, when Corey Ryan was three months old, a thigh muscle biopsy yielded a grave diagnosis, also assigned to his identical twin Eric: congenital muscular dystrophy.

Kathy and Larry Ryan were devastated. For two months they’d tried to ignore their uneasiness about the babies’ sluggish movements, hoping that their premature birth was the cause. 

But like a crushing boulder the diagnosis arrived--definite, immovable--and without a crystal ball. Except for stating that the babies wouldn’t walk, and might not even survive, doctors could predict nothing about the future. The only certainty was ... uncertainty.

Mourning moved in, eclipsing what should have been a joyful time. The Ryans grieved for everything they’d wished for their sons: a happy childhood, and, twenty years into the future--girlfriends, college, careers.

Hovering over everything was the omnipresent awareness the twins might not even live.

So the Ryans embarked on a journey. For answers. For hope. For certainty. 

But specialist after specialist, test after test, the diagnosis remained unchanged. And the prognosis remained ... uncertain.  

Finally, exhaustion produced a cure the Ryans hadn’t even known existed. It wasn’t life-saving, but it was profoundly life-changing.

Says Kathy: “One day, we simply decided to quit the constant agonizing. It interfered with enjoying the boys. We couldn’t know their future--it was uncertain. But the fear and worrying certainly were crippling us now.” 

So the unnecessary appointments were cancelled and the Ryans determined their own prognosis: Normal Family Life. 

The boys, tiny firebrands whose weak muscles were suffused with an excess of healthy spirit, obliged. In their own time they learned to sit up, wriggle legs, wave arms. 

And, says Kathy wryly, “they learned to use their mouths.” 

The house overflowed with the non-stop mystery-language specific to twins. At dinner, the boys spouted secret syllables to each other, then burst into knowing laughter.   When they finally enrolled in the study of English, they attained a verbal facility that seemed fitting compensation for legs which refused to walk. 

Corey and Eric’s words walked--ran--to every corner of the house.

“They cracked jokes constantly,” says Larry. “And their humor was ‘out there,’ too. They were real characters.”

When it came time, the boys used 275-pound motorized wheelchairs to power themselves through a childhood crammed with the same broken arms, broken toys and begrudging homework as “normal” kids.

Add in: dogs, chores, adaptive karate, wheelchair basketball, and pickup football with older brother Sean. (Sometimes Sean had to pick them up.).

Also: spinal surgeries, leg braces, therapy, and, every obstacle in a world designed for the walking. 

The house’s doorways were widened, but chipped doorframes offer proof that eight-year-old speed demons once passed through. 

There were other barriers. With muscular dystrophy you don’t just “hop in the car.” Your parents lift you into your wheelchair, then you use the back door ramp, hydraulic lift and van tie-downs to secure the wheelchairs in case of traffic accident. 

Every single trip. 

When mom Kathy says you do what you have to do, it isn’t to answer a sports reporter’s question about carrying oblong balls down 100-yard fields. It’s because she does ... what she has ... to do. It’s normal--these are her sons.

Eventually the twins discovered girls, attained the legal drinking age, and ... Corey acquired a tattoo. 

It says: Until We Meet Again. 

“Dad didn’t want me to,” says Corey, “But I waited till eighteen.” 

The tattoo honors the memory of a close friend.

Last year, the Ryans continued to practice non-worrying: they allowed the twins to fly to Costa Rica with a friend. At the outdoor hotel lounge, Eric mistook a ledge for a continuation of highly polished floor and drove off it.

Only one witness was bold, or inebriated enough, to help.

“Tell me how to hold ya and I’ll pick ya up, little dude,” intoned a towering drunken Texan.

“Cradle me, like a baby,” counseled Eric (to ensure being rescued in one piece).

Next day, the (sober)Texan walked by, spotted Eric and squinted. 

“Dew Ayh know yew?” he drawled.

Stories like these allow the Ryans to lose sleep while never regretting a minute of letting their boys go. Boys who were once three months old and diagnosed with an uncertain future.

The message? Sometimes, wheelchairs fall off cliffs and all is well. Sometimes, it just takes a drunken Texan to get things rolling again. 

Or, a brave decision by young parents.

Ten days ago the “boys” graduated from Briarcliff College with accounting degrees. They’re going to open their own firm.

Look out, Uncle Sam.

(first published on August 31, 2011, in South Bay's Neighbor News)

Gunpowder

by: Joan Hitz

In June 1968, foreseeing another Fourth of July in which another two or three youthful Long Islanders would declare their independence through the use of illegal pyrotechnics, thereby creating newspaper paragraphs for themselves courtesy of lost fingers and hands, my school presented a lecture, aimed at the big kids all the way down to the kindergartners, of whom I was one.

Never touch fireworks, the lecturer warned. Never never. I hadn’t yet heard the Churchill speech, but my five-year-old brain got it: Never.

It’d actually never occurred to me. I was a non-pyromaniac-in-training. In my family, Fourth of July entertainment peaked when my father squirted lighter fluid at the barbecue. Touching matches? Unthinkable. “Close cover and strike” confused me. Strike ... what? The matchbook, against a rock?

No--as an impending kindergarten graduate, my focus bypassed dynamite in favor of rapid-fire phone-number practice: seven recently memorized digits, in sequence, spit out like watermelon seeds.

So the next morning, arriving at the bus stop, I meant not to commit a crime, but to eat a cookie: a pineapple creme, beginning its mouthward launch.

“Look!” screeched my best friend, C. Near a telephone pole was a bottle rocket with a burned out tip. 

“Pick it up,” C. said, fiendishly. 

(Following her kindergarten year in public school, C. was next sentenced to a dozen-year haul with the nuns of St. Something. She probably meant to stick it to me, in advance, for my bright, nunless future.)

“But,” I said, “they said not to. Never.”  

And on the stroke of never ... I snatched up the rocket.

The bus arrived. Instead of simply dropping the firework, I chose to embark upon my life’s mission: to complicate the mundane. Still clutching my cookie, I obscured the bottle rocket beneath folded arms, then mounted the steps to perdition.

At school, a prosecutor-in-training saw the rocket tip projecting from my armpit and announced: I’m telling. The teacher accepted none of my (I still feel, defensible) logic (It’s used! It’s not real anymore!) and deposited me, logic and all, up the river--the principal’s office.

The maroon-suited principal and curly-haired nurse who interrogated didn’t seem hungry for the death penalty, but as bureaucrats, they had to hold a trial.

They sat me on the sick-kid stretcher in the nurse’s office, where the nurse, as ineffectual at interrogator-ing as I was at criminal-ing, hammered me with gentle inquiries.

Can you tell me your phone number, honey?

(For some reason, my phone number wasn’t on file. As a newly-hatched criminal, I thought I’d found my escape. I didn’t yet know about the “note home.”)

What’s your number, dear?

Seven watermelon seeds whirled through my mind in perfect sequence. But I wouldn’t spit.  

Do you know the first three numbers?

I shook my head.

What’s in your hand?  

I tightened my fist around the cookie, which had incubated back to flour. 

Show me? 

I clutched the cookie tighter. Never had a cookie in my possession remained uneaten for so long.

Finally, the nurse peeled open my fingers.

She and the principal peered at the tiny pile in my palm, and consulted. What do you think? Gunpowder?

Even a rookie criminal had to marvel. Gunpowder? These tall persons running the school didn’t know gunpowder from a cookie? I kept a straight face.

And then came the question, and answer, that bewilders my parents even today: Did your mother give you the firework?

A convict on the gallows will seize a rescue from anywhere, no matter how ludicrous.

Yes!!! shot from my mouth. Yesssssssss!!! Of cooouurse--my mother gave it to me!!! 

Confession obtained, they released me to the land of crayons. Scot-free. 

I soon learned, however, that trouble, forestalled, isn’t actually avoided.

Later, after reading the “note home,” my mother called the principal, then hung up with a face displaying the kaleidoscope of emotions specifically related to the raising of children.

“I gave you a cookie,” she said. “How ... did you get ... gunpowder ... ?”

I don’t remember another trial. I don’t remember hard time. There was a little something, rightly so, about not turning stool pigeon on one’s mother, especially when it wasn’t the truth. 

But my parents must have remained committed to my upbringing, because I do remember that each day, for the rest of that school year, I was still given a cookie for the bus stop. 

I never touched fireworks again, though. Never never. 

Next September, C. got shipped off to the nuns. For the remainder of childhood, I found a new best friend--Janet. 

Janet dared me to eat hamster food once, which I did. It didn’t make me sick, though, and she never got me sent up the river.

(first published on July 27, 2011, in South Bay's Neighbor News)

Top Notch

by: Joan Hitz

In 1974 June Laakkonen was my sixth-grade teacher. She was that one teacher who bursts immediately into memory when you’re an adult and someone asks, "Who was your favorite?" She gave us all her love, every day. And while she certainly understood love in the large sweeping conceptual sense of the word, most importantly, she attended to it, in the minute, detailed sense, where its impact was greatest.  

“Top notch work,” she’d spout all day. “The sky’s the limit.” 

Our class was enrolled in an environmental education program that had us continually strolling beaches and woods, measuring soil temperatures, spotting owls, collecting algae.

“Oh, beauuuuutiful ...” Mrs. Laakkonen crooned. “What a gorgeous piece of algae. What an amazing stick. Top notch.” She drenched you with waterfalls of admiration.

As far as that lucky school year went, it would’ve been enough just to have had it, to reach back across time, for the rest of my life, to remember her.

But here’s the kind of synchronicity that makes me know that tracks of magic--pure connective magic--run through our lives, at least at certain junctures.

In 1994, I'm thirty-two years old, in a time-pressured search for an apartment. One apartment I tour is in a house on Woods Road in North Babylon; I tour it with the homeowner (call him “Fred”).

Well, I don’t like it. It isn’t awful, but it’s on a busy road and there’s only one tree in the yard and I like trees, so, I've decided to say “no.” Before departing, I chat with Fred in his driveway, a blacktop which blends with the neighboring driveway.  

We’re winding down, and I’m about to say "No thanks," when up zips a car into the neighboring driveway, and who steps out but ... June and Ralph Laakkonen.

I know them on sight. I say my name, so they won’t have to fumble, but they recognize me, too, and in milliseconds we’re embracing, fiercely, while poor Fred is left standing in his unhugged dust. From the midst of the smothers, I grin at Fred like I love him, and shout, “I’ll take it!” 

The rest is a magical ten years during which I got to be adult friends with two of the best people I’ve ever known. They cooked me Finnish pancakes, I cooked them some disasters (they ate my botched corned beef anyway). They attended my soccer games like proud parents. We shared 5,642 things I’d never have experienced if I’d exited Fred’s apartment one minute earlier/later and missed their car pulling up.

June said, “Call me ‘June,’” so I did, but the portion of my brain labeled “Eleven-Year-Old,” silently reframed it: "Mrs. Laakkonen." Since June didn’t drive, she sat, buckled in, while I chauffeured us to yard sales, bookstores, restaurants, fairs. 

When we drove places, we had to pass Woods Road Elementary School, just up the block from her house. In my secret mind I thought: I'm ELEVEN ... years OLD!! ... and ... DRIVING!! ... my TEACHER!! ... past my SCHOOL!!!!! It was an unbelievable surreal reality.

We had a blast. June was the same as ever, madly in love with people and sparkling all the way. An enormously reluctant retiree, she remained on the substitute "call list" for various districts. Over coffee, she'd launch into enthusiastic detail about a troubled student she'd taught that week, and the ways she’d tried to intervene to turn his life around.  (She'd only substituted in that particular classroom for the span of ... two ... life-changing ... days.)  

That was June Laakkonen. Every minute counted. Every person counted. Every problem deserved her best attention. Even for a two-day run. It was all so utterly, utterly worth it.

Then, in 2003, June and Ralph died, within two months of each other. Though my heart broke, I reminded myself to be grateful I’d had them twice--once by entering sixth grade, once via driveway magic. 

Actually, I’ve “had” June more than just twice. There is, you see, that little thing called ... forever.

I now work in a sweet little elementary school a lot like the one June called home.

Sometimes when I'm with the kids, I consciously try to channel her. I look into their trusting eyes and deliver compliments, June Laakkonen-style: "Top notch! Top notch! The sky's the limit ..." 

But, sometimes, a “top notch” simply slips out, unbidden.

In those moments, I sense that June is beaming down on me from somewhere, happy to be so remembered, to have her words slip through invisible gates in the ether back to where they belong--the sunny golden hallways of an elementary school. 

Then, she gets to come out of “retirement” and continue her work--top notch work. Thank you, Mrs. Laakkonen. The sky is the limit.

Because, it’s limitless.

(first published on June 22, 2011 in the South Bay's Neighbor News)

The Last Puff

by: Joan Hitz

In 1951, a thirteen-year-old boy walked into a convenience store in Rockaway Beach and purchased his first pack of cigarettes, unfiltered, for fifteen cents. An industrious boy, who already had a fifty-cents-an-hour summer job at a hot dog stand, and a dollar weekly allowance, his pack-a-day habit was comfortably fundable, and, when funds were low, helped along by the practice in those days of the storeowner breaking open a pack to sell “loosies.”

The boy’s parents smoked, too. Back then, smoking was sanctioned. Cigarettes dashed about like white hyphens, connecting a huge percentage of socializers everywhere you went. 

The boy grew, and so did his intake. By his thirties, two packs daily. They cost more now, but his grown-up, post-hot-dog-stand job, in the air freight business, had a post-hot-dog-stand salary.

Even supporting a wife, two children and a three-bedroom house, cigarettes didn’t dent the budget. The children grew up watching, and breathing, the man’s habit. It was still socially sanctioned--no one knew. 

In every way that was important, the man was a great father. He worked long hours away, but when home, he taught the kids to fish from the docks, to eat raw clams, to do cannonballs in the pool.

Sunday mornings, he sang, while cooking a “gashouse” egg (a fried egg covered with toast, a hole cut from its middle so the yellow popped through). He’d give the buttery circle of cut-out bread to whichever begging child hadn’t received it last Sunday.  

And on the topic of, well, yes, gas, he also did that universal “dad thing”--extended his finger and said, “Pull.” The ensuing ... gashouse ... was room-emptying. 

Twice during the children’s childhoods, the man tried, hard, to quit. By the 1970s, commercials were broadcasting the dangers of smoking. The man tried gum. Hard candies. Fake cigarettes. The man really tried. 

The daughter remembers looking out her bedroom window one night and witnessing the second “failure.” Her father leaned, in black silhouette, against the old gold Chevy. A shimmering cigarette tip moved like an orange-colored taillight on a stealth plane sneaking through the night. The daughter even remembers the smoke signals rising with each puff: Smoking again, said the puffs. 

Smoking. 

Again.

The daughter crept back to bed in a state of confusion not unlike smoke itself, wavering, shifting between discouragement and understanding, realizing the bleak intractability of this habit but hoping it could still be stopped. 

By the man’s forties and fifties, stressful times jolted the habit into the six-pack-a-day stratosphere. The goal wasn’t to quit. It was to survive, day-to-day, even on 120 cigarettes. 

The children grew up, got educated, got homes. Their paternal grandparents died, the grandfather of smoking-induced emphysema. The man kept being what he was--a very good person, well-liked for his sweet and steady kindness, and, a man who smoked. A lot.

The man also became a grandfather, to two baby girls who arrived on earth bearing free admission to his heart.

On June 28, 2002, the grown daughter received a gasping phone call from her father: come ... quickly ... can’t ... breathe. 

Breaking traffic laws along the streets of two towns, she raced to his house to rush him  to the emergency room. But not before ...

He leaned against her car, sent an “I’m-still-your-father” warning look, extracted his lighter from his pocket, and lit up.

From a wreath of fumes, he said, “They’ll admit me. It’s my last chance for one.”

The daughter, in forbearing pain, let that cigarette happen.

But inside the gigantic memory of the million that’d been smoked before, the man was silently, and deathly, frightened. Later, at the hospital, when he received the diagnosis of pneumonia, he startled his son and daughter by tossing his hands up in celebration. 

“Thank God,” he said, “it isn’t emphysema.” 

And then he promised to quit. Really. He wanted to watch his granddaughters grow up.

Today, 2011, a sealed carton of cigarettes lies on the man’s kitchen table. Taped to it is the old plastic hospital wristband, with a slip of paper which says: “Reminder--June 28, 2002, 12:25 p.m. Last puff.”

Cigarettes ... habits ... are heartbreakingly tough to stop. But sometimes, it’s simply time. After fifty years, the man finally quit--cold turkey--on a hot June day. Victory.

The man was (is) my dad--Andy Hitz, Sr. He’s coming up on nine years without a smoke.      

The granddaughters, now 11 and 8, continue to grow up while he continues to watch.  My father has also acquired, through my brother’s marriage, an extended family composed of legions of tumbling children and upright adults.

And every one is very glad he’s here.

(first published on May 25, 2011, in South Bay's Neighbor News)

Vital Organs

by: Joan Hitz


Jo Ellen Elsener likes high places. At age 44, she scaled Kilimanjaro--19,341 feet. At age 4, she scaled a piano bench--20 inches. 

“I saw the keys ... I had to play.”

A love for song propelled Jo Ellen through a college music major, a stint at composing, and twenty-five years as a church organist. During one of those years, the climbing mood struck again. 

“How can I do this?” she asked the pipe organ repairman as they chatted in the church. 

“You become an apprentice,” he said.

So she did. Beginning as a runner for coffee and tools--three sugars, wouldja get me that red-handled screwdriver?--Jo Ellen “did” time pressing down keys while the masters tuned the grand instruments. 

One day, finally, she was invited to climb into an organ and learn the craft herself.

Twenty-eight years later and counting, she’s still at it. “When the company I worked for dissolved, I bought the equipment and set up shop,” she says.   

“Shop” is Elsener Organ Works, a massive warehouse in Deer Park crammed with machines, pipes, hardware, four cats, two rabbits, and a tiny field mouse named Fred. The cats, like Jo Ellen, are climbers. “Teeter” got his name by getting lost, then found, atop a skyscraping stack of boxes. One-inch tall Fred, rescued near a garage this December, seems plumply unconcerned to find himself safe and well-fed among a scattering of cats and organ pipes.       

“A pipe organ’s a simple thing,” says Jo Ellen, perched inside one, peeking through a cityscape of squared and rounded tubes. She waves her silver tuning stick like a wand, and continues: “The organist presses a key causing a cover below the pipe to open. A bellows underneath blows air up that particular pipe. And you get a tone.” 

The pipes come in groups of columns called ranks. Each rank makes a certain kind of sound to mimic instruments such as flutes, trombones, and trumpets.

And that’s it.

Jo Ellen exits the organ, then tickles a tune on the keyboard like she’s done it all her life. Oh ... yeah ... she has.  One down, on to the next. 

The life of a pipe organ installer-repairer-builder is complicated. Housed in churches across Long Island and the tri-state area, each organ presents unique quirky demands. Some organs are over a hundred years old. When one malfunctions, there aren’t any home improvement stores for replacement parts. Every broken piece must be analyzed, considered, custom-built in the shop using a clever mix of skill and imagination.

The hours are long. There’s no such thing as a “routine” day.

“Sometimes it’s so hard,” says Jo Ellen. “I think: just walk away, get a relaxing job ... rest.” 

But she smiles, envisioning dozens of organs across Long Island. Surely she’s seeing faces, too, of unknown people who file into churches every week to have hymns poured into their souls. 

“They have no idea,” she says. “They hear music, appreciate it, think about it maybe, but they’ve no idea what goes into making it possible.”

Or, who. 

Who wrestles open a small entry door, scrambles sideways in her trademark purple sweatshirt, scuttles up ladders to wooden perches like a Kilimanjaro climber, taps a pipe--down or up--tap tap tap--poised, listening, for the smoothing out of vibrating air that signifies a note in tune, a tube ready to deliver its mellow, sweet resonance into the beaded gaps of time that form a song.

“That’s why I keep doing it,” says Jo Ellen. “They’re like my babies. I know them. Each of these organs has secrets. You’ve got to know what they need to stay whole, to function purely.

“Few people do this work anymore. If I stop, that’s one less. Who’ll care for them? The music will suffer, the songs won’t sound rich. People will lose this experience ...”

So, Jo Ellen stays. Logging sixteen-hour days, she sweats it out at a job that both fulfills and consumes her. Travels from the furthest tip of Long Island to all the way upstate. Wields a hundred different decisions daily. Chomps dozens of Swiss cheese and lettuce sandwiches on the go. 

And commits herself to late nights tapping on dusty pipes in the dark holy air of empty churches.

These days, instead of playing the keyboard, Jo Ellen’s music is the unheralded labor she performs inside complex instruments that spin simple air molecules into magic. It’s all done for the ears, and hearts, of people she’ll never meet, songs she’ll never hear.

Because Jo Ellen, a natural-born climber, is by nature down-to-earth.

Tucked in his tank among the towering pipes at Elsener Organ Works, Long Island’s tiniest parishioner, Fred the rescued field mouse, would agree.

(first published April 27, 2011, in South Bay's Neighbor)