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.

A Boy Scout statue in the Morganville section of Marlboro Township in Monmouth County.Noah K. Murray/The Star-Ledger

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

Sun Bank Arena, Trenton, June 21, 2012

I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I'd sit on his lap in that big old buick and steer as we drove through town
He'd tousle my hair and say son take a good look around
This is your hometown, this is your hometown
This is your hometown, this is your hometown

In `65 tension was running high at my high school
There was a lot of fights between the black and white
There was nothing you could do
Two cars at a light on a saturday night in the back seat there was a gun
Words were passed in a shotgun blast
Troubled times had come to my hometown
My hometown, my hometown, my hometown

Now main streets whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there aint nobody wants to come down here no more
They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they aint coming back to
Your hometown, your hometown, your hometown, your hometown

Last night me and kate we laid in bed talking about getting out
Packing up our bags maybe heading south
Im thirty-five we got a boy of our own now
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said son take a good
Look around
This is your hometown


... Bruce Springsteen, Freehold, My Hometown

E Street, Belmar, Mother's Day, 2012

I know that I'm a little slow on the uptake, but, until today, I did not realize that I am living in Bruce Springsteen's paracosm, or particular mini-world.  Apparently, when the Boss goes worldwide, our little state becomes his Narnia, his Emerald City, his Hogwarts.  Magical things happen every day here in a sort of landscape that he has familiarized all over the world.  Our struggles, our places, our expressions become a distinct way of viewing America, wrecking ball or no. Nobody in Europe is sprung from a cage on Highway 9, but it seems many people have stepped out over the line with us.  Woah-oh!
Here's an article from today's New York Times that tells the story of the Bruce-world that we live in and the expensive but dreamy road trip it took to visit there.

Keep reading and writing this summer.  I am working on an old novel by Joyce Carole Oates about the Adirondacks called Childwold, recommended by the in-laws.  Am also navigating The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks so that the kids can read it at school.  Good stuff.

Maureen

Snoozefest!

 New Jersey’s redundantly-named governor a break for closing his eyes during Bruce Springsteen’s “Rocky Ground,” “a kind of really spiritual song, “ according to Christie.  Snoozegate, the pundits (that trendy job choice is almost as obnoxious as entrepreneur, but not quite) are calling it. Sure, the lyrics that include Jesus, Canaan, and Hallelujah are “kind of really” spiritual, but maybe it was the 44 repetitions of the phrase “rocky ground” that the Gov found soporific. (Sorry, Bruce, but I remember counting the repetitions of “ridin’ in the backstreets” at an unfocused party in the eighties once -47.  It became a mantra.) Was Christie sleeping or in reverie? Is he just another state worker not living up to expectations? Come on up for the rising, Governor.  I’ve got your back!
There are a few New Jersey heresies worse than being born to snooze.  Perhaps ordering a salad at the New Brunswick grease trucks or asking for half a slice at Benny Tudino’s in Hoboken would be terrible.  Requesting a low-fat pork roll with egg whites would be an abomination.  Staying on the beach in Asbury Park during a hurricane?  Absolutely out! So catching forty winks in the Promised Land can’t really be that bad.  Chris Christie has been to see Bruuuuuuuuuce 128 times.  I don’t know if he has been awake every minute.  Bruce is the Energizer Bunny in a black leather vest, after all.  He mocks his entire broad demographic by letting us know that he is all up and perky when we have just come home from working all day at our daddy’s garage. And Monday when the foreman calls time, I’ve already got my Bruce tix on my mind.  I have never nodded off during the dozen times I have seen the Boss, and I didn’t even buy my tickets from Maureen Van Zandt.  It is unlikely that Chris Christie, a fellow survivor of the Nebraska album, fell asleep during last week’s paean to the 99%.
"When I was fist-pumping through “Badlands,” no one took pictures of that,'' Christie said when interviewed by the Newark Star-Ledger. "When I was singing to "Out in the Street" thankfully nobody took pictures of that. When I was contorting myself during "Because the Night," nobody took pictures of that."  Too bad.  I would much rather have seen Governor Chris “The Situation” Christie fist-pumping to “poor men wanna be rich, rich men wanna be kings, and a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.”  The contortions may have just been too much to bear, though.  Was he contorting himself because the night belongs to lovers and he forgot that his wife was at the concert, too?  These are the deeper questions that the journalists have missed and that only a true Bruce fan would pose.
Although Chris Christie and I were born to run, we have not.  We are both planted here off various exits of Thunder Road, riding on the backstreets looking for a parking space.  We are Jersey people.  We do not sleep during expensive concerts by iconic rock stars, especially the one whose pictures and guitars decorate our offices in the public sector.  We have hungry hearts, and we dance like spirits in the night.
Don’t bully the Governor of New Jersey if he entered the land of hope and dreams.  We all may be better off for it.

Keep reading and writing,
Maureen

On St. Joe's of the Palisades...

A few weeks ago, I walked around the dusty building where I used to go to high school a few decades ago.  There were still some things I recognized, some worn down beyond care and past use.  In the former guidance office of St. Joseph's of the Palisades High School, West New York, a sculpture of trophies lay in the middle of the floor, scattered golden memories of skinny fast kids who ran the streets and tracks of Hudson County.   My former classmates and I were told that we could take whatever we wanted (we made a donation at the end of our adventure.)  I took the heavy cross off the wall.  I am looking at it right now- INRI.

The school hung on for a while through the beginning of this century, but it has finally come it its end.  With our great history of fine athletics, St. Joe's could have become one of those elite Catholic jock schools that feed the NBA, but it did not.  It could have become an academy of learning and scholarship, if anyone were interested in that.  It did not go this way either.  It went the direction of many Catholic Schools, it went to join it patron saint.  Someday it may resurrect itself, but the Catholic Schools of the 20th Century were special schools for a special time, and that time has passed.
Most of the kids who attended St. Joe's and other schools like it - St. Mike's in Union City or St. Pete's in New Brunswick, for example - are third-generation European immigrant kids.  Our grandparents were born in some well-loved but hard-to-live-in place that made them have to leave.  Some of them saw this country as a wonder, but were wary of the anti-Catholic bias abounding here.  They also, like all immigrants, wanted to hold onto the most important remnant of home and their religion.  Parish dances, the Knights of Columbus, the Holy Name Society, throat blessings for St. Blaise Day, green mashed potatoes in cafeteria food on St. Patrick's Day all helped them to connect.  Each of these tangents became less relevant as we Catholics became more assimilated.  The primary source of new immigrants is not even European at all.  The culture of the church is evolving, as it should.

I miss St. Joe's - Bluejays are the best!  Hit 'em in the chest! - but I still hold on to the feeling that being Catholic is being something special.  A chance, as Mother Theresa said, "to do something beautiful for God."  If I got that message, then St. Joe's is still alive, and the real trophies are piled somewhere else.

Glad to be back on the blog,

Maureen

*I usually try to include a poem, but this article put me off it today.  However, you've got to love that Kanye uses the word spiel.

The Blue Chapel Blues- Union City

When I was a kid attending St. Francis Academy in Union City, I walked home some days past the cloistered home of some Dominicans nuns  who lived in the mysterious Blue Chapel.  That was back in the old days, when St. Michael's Monastery was the centerpiece of Union City architecture; when Veronica's Veil played every Easter season; when the Passion Play at the park Theatre was a Lenten obligation never to be missed.  Union City was a monument to the European Catholic diaspora - Irish priests, Italian customs, French nuns, and the German Fritz Rueter Altenheim on Union Hill.
The Blue Chapel was a place we went to buy religious articles -rosaries, cards - or to see the vestments that would sometimes be purchased and displayed along with the flowers at a funeral.  I never got the past the gift shop.  My mother did all of the talking.  I just remember that it was very quiet, and that I had to stand very straight and still.  To this day, it remains a curosity to me.
This article about the Blue Chapel appeared in this week's Star-Ledger.  The connected videos are great, too.  Give it a read, and remember when you were little and didn't know whether or not nuns had legs.  Better yet, place yourself in the time when there was a church dominated by some ethnic group in your neghborhood, a neighborhood candy store, and you walked to the neighborhood school -Catholic or public. The world was smaller and more familiar. What was your Blue Chapel? Like Blondie, what's the power and passion of your Union City Blue?

Keep reading and writing, especially during Lent when you are not eating potato chips or pretzels or olives,

Maureen*

*Thanks, Judy, for directing me to this article

Borrowing Lent

shore



By Rima Vesely-Flad



there were no roads in the Sahara


we rode out into the desert, into vast


space, searching. Tuareg nomads,


makeshift tents, camels in the distance.


a soft sun sank and the desert


rose into its own fire. wind licked


my skin, sand blew into the crevices


of my body. scalp, ears, toes.



that was the time in which i


hungered, when every movement in


my life was an act of leaving. i began


to want boundaries, a shore, an edge.


containment. a place to land.



beyond words, beyond a horizon, there


was a way of moving into the wind.


opening to the presence of Jesus on


water. rowing to shore. just


believing a shore existed.



This poem is a reflection on the 21st chapter of John's Gospel.


Is New Jersey the best state for Lent? There is certainly enough guilt to go around - and well-deserved guilt it is, too. We have madated that it is not okay to be a bully here, yet Jerseylicious and Jersey Shore, and the ghosts of The Sopranos still role model that for us at every click of the remote.


I feel a little Lenty in New Jersey and will spend some time over the next forty days walking down that ashy street to the intersection of Palm and Tenebrae.  God tries to enter our hearts in various circuitous ways throughout the year.  Sometimes he tries to sneak in a meaningful moment during a crackling hymn on Christmas morning, before the house is filled with crumple wrapping paper and purple plastic from Little Tykes.  Sometimes He's hiding in a pink candle on an Advent wreath, waiting to drip down on some fake ivy.  During Lent, I think He's waiting for us to come to Him, being present in the nothing special, the emptiness, the no decorations, the lights that are turned off.
I like Lent.  It makes me feel like starting something wonderful.  I have given up some unimportant things that have become too important, but I am mostly looking forward to moving toward the center.  I just started the Stephen R. Covey book The Speed of Trust.  I am going to begin there.  For Lent, I am giving up not trusting.  Let's see.

Keep reading and writing,

Maureen

Spellbound in New Jersey...

The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;

But a tyrant spell has bound me

And I cannot, cannot go.



The giant trees are bending

Their bare boughs weighed with snow.

And the storm is fast descending,

And yet I cannot go.



Clouds beyond clouds above me,


Wastes beyond wastes below;

But nothing dear can move me;

I will not, cannot go.

...Spellbound by Emily Bronte (not from New Jersey, but would have been great on the Palisades)
 
 

This is a short, creepy poem about things we can't escape from.  For me, I guess, it's writing.  I have missed this blog and the opportunity it provides to get some ideas out.  God gave us this gift of a snow day -  I have enjoyed snow days since 1961 when I was in Kindergarten at St. Francis Academy in Union City - and I have promised myself to post here today. 

Nemesis looking rather aggravated...

 
Lots of reading and writing since we last met, most notably Philip Roth's Nemesis.  This "alternate history" novel is centered on a deadly outbreak of polio in Newark during WWII.  (Newark was actually beset by polio in 1916.) The disease is surely a metaphor for the Holocaust and the impact of surviving a nightmare.  The protagonist is a good-natured soul who becomes beaten-down by the disease he tries to escape and who himself becomes the "method of transport" for the physically crippling polio.  Nemesis, in Greek mythology, is the agent of punishment and balance.  A "nemesis" cannot be defeated; it is one's undoing.  This novel is the story of a guy who has gotten just one too many breaks and whose good luck catches up with him.  He has missed the chance to be a hero.  He carries his nemesis on his back by being a survivor, living in a world of shame and darkness of his own making.
 
It  is reminiscent of Roth's earlier story Eli the Fanatic, which appears in Goodbye, Columbus.  ("What do we do with survivor European Jews who have landed here in suburban Long Island?")  It certainly is connected to Roth's The Plot Against America, the story of President Charles Lindbergh and his election's impact on the Jews of Newark and the nation generally.  Roth asks, "What if?" in these stories in which new historical heroes and villians emerge when opportunites are presented for both courage and disgrace.
 
Ever think about your own "what if"?  Consider the chess pieces on the board of your own life.  What would have happened if you made a few different moves?  More importantly, what would that difference mean?
 
Glad to be back.  Keep reading and writing,
 
Maureen