Popular Posts

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Live from New Brunswick via Santo Domingo...


"The thing is, that particular bit of stupidity had been over for months. Me and Magda were on an upswing. We weren't as distant as we'd been the winter I was cheating. The freeze was over. She was coming over to my place and instead of us hanging with my knucklehead boys—me smoking, her bored out of her skull—we were seeing movies. Driving out to different places to eat. Even caught a play at the Crossroads and I took her picture with some bigwig black playwrights, pictures where she's smiling so much you'd think her wide-ass mouth was going to unhinge. We were a couple again. Visiting each other's family on the weekends. Eating breakfast at diners hours before anybody else was up, rummaging through the New Brunswick library together, the one Carnegie built with his guilt money. A nice rhythm we had going. But then the Letter hits like a Star Trek grenade and detonates everything, past, present, future. Suddenly her folks want to kill me. It don't matter that I helped them with their taxes two years running or that I mow their lawn. Her father, who used to treat me like his hijo, calls me an asshole on the phone, sounds like he's strangling himself with the cord. You no deserve I speak to you in Spanish, he says. I see one of Magda's girlfriends at the Woodbridge mall—Claribel, the ecuatoriana with the biology degree and the chinita eyes—and she treats me like I ate somebody's favorite kid."

   ...excerpt from This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, New Brunswick

We are among the fortunate few in central New Jersey who have electricity, so we will not be done out of our annual viewing of It's the Great Pumpkin. Charlie Brown.  We have our own great, befanged  punkin in the window, displacing our own beagle and smiling down on the neighborhood.  Kids ar playing board games at "the big table," leftovers are languishing on the counter, and I am lurking here with you in cyberspace.  However, yet you think all is lost to the dark side, I finished a book today.  This was not an easy task, as it was preceded by a dozen glossy magazines about proper mascara application, recipes for chicken "sliders," and directions for managing stress.  Wanna know a bit about it?
This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz!  Hooray!  Central Jersey and Boston and "the island!"  What could be better?   Sad short stories written in Diaz's unique voice about the many ways to, well, lose her, whether you want to or not.  The best is the final tale The Cheater's Guide to Love, which I originally read in The New Yorker, about the one that got away, the one that meant something, the relationship you screwed up totally.
Diaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ( which I have read three times) and the collection of short stories Drown,  sets his characters in Elizabeth, Sayreville, Union City, and Paterson, as well as the student haunts at Rutgers and Harvard.  They are, nonetheless, deeply rooted in the DR, in the Bani', the land of Trujillo and memory.  The characters move fluidly among the stories, some rising out of Oscar Wao.  However, not all "Mamis"are the same.  The one who survives the story Invierno is my favorite, reminding me of Janey in Bruce Springsteen's Spare Parts.
Get this one and go back to your immigrant mind, the one that is still conscious of race and just where you rate in society, no matter how many friends at Harvard you have.  Go back and examine just how you lost her or him or them or your opportunity.  Start reading and writing again.

Best to all down the shore and in the streets of New Jersey,

Maureen

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

 Oh, Sandy...



The tree lay down
on the garage roof
and stretched, You
have your heaven,
it said, go to it.

..."The Hurricane" by William Carlos Williams, Rutherford

A sinister little poem about consciousness.  Tough times in New Jersey today. The sun just came out here briefly. You don't know what you've got till it's gone.

Keep reading and writing,

Maureen

Sunday, October 28, 2012

My Rain Soaks all as One...


Now near the end of the middle stretch of road
What have I learned? Some earthly wiles. An art.
That often I cannot tell good fortune from bad,
That once had seemed so easy to tell apart.

The source of art and woe aslant in wind
Dissolves or nourishes everything it touches.
What roadbank gullies and ruts it doesn't mend
It carves the deeper, boiling tawny in ditches.

It spends itself regardless into the ocean.
It stains and scours and makes things dark or bright:
Sweat of the moon, a shroud of benediction,
The chilly liquefaction of day to night,

The Jersey rain, my rain, soaks all as one:
It smites Metuchen, Rahway, Saddle River,
Fair Haven, Newark, Little Silver, Bayonne.
I feel it churning even in fair weather

To craze distinction, dry the same as wet.
In ripples of heat the August drought still feeds
Vapors in the sky that swell to smite the state --
The Jersey rain, my rain, in streams and beads

Of indissoluble grudge and aspiration:
Original milk, replenisher of grief,
Descending destroyer, arrowed source of passion,
Silver and black, executioner, font of life.

......"Jersey Rain" by Robert Pinsky, Long Branch

I know that I have focused on this poem before, but I just couldn't help posting it again as Hurricane Sandy makes a running jump for the Jersey Shore.  Besides, Little Silver is one of my favorite names for a town.  The leaves might do us in this time, as they weigh down the trees and clog the drains.  

However, just think of what a great day it is to read some poetry, to throw some words over your head and see if any land in your ears and slide into your mind.  Today, in this poem, I like the the word aslant.  It is an elderly preposition, yet one that describes our angry rain to come.

Keep reading and writing,

Maureen

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Snarled and Rattled in the Yard...


The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood, Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it. And from there those that lifted eyes could count Five mountain ranges one behing the other Under the sunset far into Vermont. And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled, As it ran light, or had to bear a load. And nothing happened: day was all but done. Call it a day, I wish they might have said To please the boy by giving him the half hour That a boy counts so much when saved from work. His sister stood beside him in her apron To tell them "Supper." At the word, the saw, As if it meant to prove saws know what supper meant, Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap - He must have given the hand. However it was, Neither refused the meeting. But the hand! Half in appeal, but half as if to keep The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all - Since he was old enough to know, big boy Doing a man's work, though a child at heart - He saw all was spoiled. "Don't let him cut my hand off - The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!" So. The hand was gone already. The doctor put him in the dark of ether. He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath. And then - the watcher at his pulse took a fright. No one believed. They listened to his heart. Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it. No more to build on there. And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
..."Out, Out" by Robert Frost , Boston, MA

Eagle Scout Sam Berzok, Scoutmaster Jim Berzok,
Ad Altare Dei (Catholic Scouting Award) Scout Tom Berzok
commemorate Memorial Day in East Brunswick, NJ

Today's Jersey Writer is Mark Dionno,
From The Star-Ledger this week...

"The old scoutmaster had a blunt answer for an obvious question, but Neil McAneny was always direct that way.
"Of course, this is a horrible, horrible black eye for scouting, and it does stain those people who very dedicated to the scouting movement," said McAneny, one of several million men whose name does not appear in the Boy Scouts "Perversion Files."
McAneny was a boy scout himself in the 1950s, and when he graduated from Fairfield College, his old scoutmaster called on him to serve.
"We had a big troop and he needed an assistant scoutmaster," McAneny said. "So he talked me into returning. Then he had a heart attack and there I was, stuck with 50 kids."
McAneny guided Troop 67 in Summit — which is still in existence today with "the same amount of kids," McAneny said – for the better part of the next decade.
There were overnights to the wilderness camp on Allamuchy Mountain, and Jockey Hollow where Washington’s troops roughed it two hundred years earlier, and a piney campground near Englishtown where the boys could hear the roar of the dragsters through the woods. Camp Watchung in Glen Gardner was where the boys went in summer, sleeping on metal spring cots in open lean-tos. There were canoe trips on the Rancocas and Delaware. And there were always plenty of fathers around.
"We had a very active group of fathers, which made for a strong troop," he said.
And a safe troop, not that McAneny ever imagined otherwise.
"It was inconceivable to me that anyone would be involved in scouting for the wrong purposes," he said. "It never crossed my mind."
That was an age of innocence.
Good people with good intentions doing good work – millions and millions of them – and the parents who trusted them could not fathom there were creeps among them.
This makes the Boy Scouts "Perversion Files," which started being kept in 1947 — at the very start of the baby boom, at the very start of the height of scouting’s popularity — all the more egregious.
boy-scout-statue-morganville-nj-star-ledger.JPG.jpgA Boy Scout statue in the Morganville section of Marlboro Township in Monmouth County.
While the number of scout leaders named in the files is miniscule when compared to the overall number of well-meaning men and women (about 2 in every 100,000), the Boy Scouts’ shielding just one pedophile was a betrayal of trust, a trust so innocent we cannot fathom it today.
"You can call it an age of innocence, but it was also an age of denial," said Rush Russell, executive director of Prevent Child Abuse New Jersey. "This is why we call (child abuse) the silent epidemic. People are uncomfortable that these things can be going on in their families, in their own schools and communities."
One particular case shows in the "Perversion Files" shows the extent of Boy Scouts’ denial.
In 1971, a Rhode Island assistant troop leader named William Lazzareschi was caught in a sex act with a boy by the scoutmaster. The man admitted it and was expelled, but police were not called. Instead the boy was counseled by a Boy Scout chaplain named Rev. Edmond C. Micarelli.
"Upon Father Micarelli’s recommendation, the parents were not notified," the file says.
In 1990, the priest himself wound up in the files, after a former scout accused him of raping both he and his brother. More victims came forward and in 2002, the Diocese of Providence paid $13.5 million to 36 victims of Micarelli and 10 other priests.
As for Lazzareschi, he was convicted of sexual assault in 1997 and possession of child pornography in 2005.
'Of course, this is a horrible, horrible black eye for scouting, and it does stain those people who very dedicated to the scouting movement'
Scouts, church, sports teams, music programs. The new stories of sex between adults and children under their supervision keep coming. It is depressing and alarming, and Russell thinks the publicity is ushering in an "age of vigilance."
"I think we’re in the starting blocks for a movement of vigilance," he said. "I think we’re beginning to understand we can’t expect kids to protect themselves.
"However, I think most people still see the major threat to their children as coming from strangers. But 90 percent of abuse comes from people they know, and people they trust."
Trust, like innocence, can no longer be taken for granted.
Eagles in the Adirondacks
Edward Dragan, a career-educator expert who has been called as an expert witness on many sex abuse cases, says the all the attention now paid to sex abuse must bring increased diligence.
"We’re not going to eradicate the behavior, or the impulses," said Dragan, head of Education Management Consulting in Lambertville. "You can do all the background checks you want, people are still going to engage in inappropriate behavior.
"What I’m generally seeing is these inappropriate relationships are becoming more secretive. Parents have to be more diligent about these relationships."
Almost all have two things in common: isolation and trust.
"These victims are groomed by adults they trust. Then, when that kid is isolated, the secret activity starts," Dragan said. "The private music tutoring … the coach who says, ‘I’ll give (a kid) a ride to the game."
Sometimes, the "secret activity" can happen in plain sight. Dragan worked a case a few years ago where a female high school coach would ride the bus next to a particular player, throw a blanket over their laps and fondle the girl.
"Didn’t anyone ask why (the) coach always sat next to that girl?" he said.
Maybe no one thought to.
But, like they say, that was then, this is now."

Much remains to be said.  As a teacher, a scouting mom, and a Catholic I am appalled by the continuous stream of verified accusations against men  to whom we have given our trust.  I know, though, as a teacher, a scouting mom, and a Catholic I have not knowingly encountered them.  They are secret, devious people.  Lots of good men have been cast in a harsh light because of them.  Let's protect our kids and learn about the other adults with whom they interact.

Keep reading and writing,

Maureen