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)