Class of '69 fifty years later

I am sitting here having gotten back from a month away from home. There was a three week tour of duty and about a week visiting relatives and attending my 50^th high school reunion.

As usual I woke up and thanked God Almighty that I did not wind up as a Dilbert in a cubicle.

The day I got out of the army I put a chunk of my mustering out settlement into a bank account where it remained until my 40^th birthday. It was enough to get me to France one way.

Had things gotten so bad that I wound up in an office I would have simply joined the French Foreign Legion. I drew that line in grammar school.

Incidentally in 1976 there was a rumor floating around that I actually had joined the Foreign Legion. It's actually a funny story I'll share with you sometime later on.

The place is a mess, there is a pile of kitty puke I just scraped up and everything is dusty. The dust can wait. It can last forever if it doesn't get wet. Of course there was a dust ring in the toilet which I instantly scrubbed. I can clean a sink or a toilet faster than most housewives can. Almost any guy that's made their living on the water or served in the military can. I've done both. Right now the Virgin Mary would be pleased to come in, sit down on my clean toilet and take a dump.

This probably sounds crude but it isn't. It's just a part of life. We put food in one end, it comes out the other. Cats vomit occasionally, dust accumulates and things get a bit messy. The amount of life spent cleaning things is a lot more than one thinks. We are born, we die and in between an awful lot of time is just spent on plain old cooking, cleaning and maintenance.

I suppose I could hire a maid. Want a job?

Outside the lawn needs mowing and my flower beds are overrun with weeds. It started raining so my gardening is on hold as is my mowing.

The lawn is bad, but not too awful bad. The kid down the street mowed it once when I was gone so today I will wander down the street with a few bucks and pay him. He's a damned good kid and I want to keep him on the payroll at least until he heads off to college.

Engineers need college degrees and he wants to go into aeronautical engineering. He's got a sharp mind and I hope he gets into MIT. That would be a good place for him. Maybe he's another Clarence 'Kelly' Johnson in the making. Who knows?

Of course the rain will play with me. It will rain enough to keep things too wet to deal with and that will be that. What explains the weeds is the rain. This has been the rainiest summer I have seen out here.

As usual I am in the middle of a book. Right now it's 'A Tomb called Iwo Jima' and it is written from the Japanese point of view. Survivors appeared as late as 1948. The Japanese commanding general is a very interesting person that spent five years in North America as a young captain and actually liked Americans. Of all of the now long dead WW2 figures he is the one I would like to have dinner and drinks with.

Learn from history or relive it. Your choice.

John Locke once described government as a treaty between governed and governing that can be broken at any time.

The only time I ever signed such a treaty is when I went into the army. I bowed my head and subjected myself to the petty tyranny found there for a hitch. Since my discharge I have pretty much ignored most of the governmental bullshit around me and and simply live responsibly. I do what I do simply because it is the right thing to do.

In short the only people I have ever given consent to govern me were the officers and NCOs of the Army. I actually did quite well there going from slick sleeved private to sergeant in a scant 21 months.

A few years back I got a ham radio license and an old surplus rig. Like any hobby there are snobs in it and a couple of radio snobs said I'd never be able to do much with the low power rig.

Inside my first several months I worked all fifty states and well over 100 countries with the little rig and have the QSL cards and certificates to prove it.

CW, also known to others as Morse code was a dying art but has seen an upswing in use. I never did get good with it, it's going to be a retirement project. Still, I can send well enough to be deciphered. Like most people, they practice the art of telegraphy by sending various random messages to each other.

One night I as bored and sent out an inane message to a friend claiming to be a Japanese holdout in New Guinea asking if the war was over yet. The skip to Japan was open that night, the message intercepted and much hilarity ensued when the Japanese Self Defense people were notified. Oh, to have created something to sell to Sherwood Schwartz to use on 'Gilligan's Island'!

A couple quick emails and we got that one quashed before the poor Japanese military went through any real time, effort and trouble. Still when you think about it, it's pretty funny. Visions of Geraldo Rivera traipsing through the jungle chasing a willow-the-wisp alongside the Japanese military comes to mind. Picture much foul language being used as they trip over the junk their grandfathers left there 75 years ago and Rivera getting bitten in the ass by a humongous jungle spider.

Maybe we shouldn't have emailed the Japanese. The laughter would have been worth it.

After the Puerto Rico hurricane a while back the only form of semi reliable communication was ham radio and I spent a number of long nights relaying messages to people that I got from hams there that got themselves on the air with wire antennas.

I relayed medical information and managed to get worried families in touch with each other. It's pretty heart warming when someone gets word a relative is safe. Still, it gets kind of weird sometimes when you call someone with news about their loved one and they instantly expect a scam.

On the other hand, I recall one family that was totally sent to cloud nine when I told them their son was OK and would likely be returning home once the airport resumed service. They wanted to send me a check. I told them to send it to an organization doing relief work instead.

For all intents and purposes the law enforcement community considers the term 'vice' to cover illegal gambling, prostitution and narcotics. Personally I consider these to be victimless crimes as such. The collateral damage often isn't.

Over the years I got into a couple of penny ante poker games in the service and while commercial fishing. Once in the Seattle area I got into a small time card game and walked away with about $400 and the title to an old beaten up pickup truck that was the source of many later adventures.

A shipmate and I used to buy a couple of lottery tickets and tease each other over what we would do when we got our millions. Then we would watch the drawing, laugh and say “Oh, well!” and go back to work.

That is about the extent of my gambling.

Prostitution never caught my interest because it was so cold. Sex for money. Big deal. Besides, during the so-called sexual revolution there were so many willing women out there that it made no sense. Besides, people work harder for free than they do for wages.

While living on my sailboat I came to the conclusion that a big stick should accompany any sailboat being sold so the owner can beat the women away. I'll leave it at that.

That leaves drugs and I survived drug wars easily. I pretty much abstained and with good, solid logical reasoning.

Even in high school I saw that the 'dopers' were headed for trouble. They were generally running paranoid of getting caught and risked facing serious legal troubles. Later on what I saw was a lot worse.

It always looked to me like at the bottom of most beatings, rip-offs, shady deals and outright thefts the finger pointed toward drugs and/or drug money in one form or another.

By the time I was in my 30s I had seen four outright murders that were drug related. These are just the four that come to mind off the top of my head. I was actually questioned in connection with one however I had the ultimate alibi. I was sleeping in the town jail cell at the time of the crime.

I will digress here because this is rather funny. I had just gotten back into Kodiak from Dutch Harbor and had come home to a cold snap and an empty propane bottle. Apparently one of my friends had moved in for a while while I was out of town. The refrigerator was full of beer and there was $50 in the drawer along with a note thanking me for the use of my place.

I grabbed an empty propane bottle and headed downtown. A policeman saw me, stopped and offered me a ride. (Gotta love small town cops) When he heard my sad tale of woe, he simply said, “Make it easy. Just sleep in the jail tonight. Go get yourself something to eat and wander up the station.”

It seemed like a sensible thing to do so that's what I did. I grabbed a meal at a bar downtown, wandered up to the station and sacked out in the jail.

The following afternoon another cop asked me where I had been on the night of the murder and I got a sheepish look when I told him I has spent the night in the city jail.

Back on course.

It wasn't “Reefer Madness”, pot needles, lectures, public service announcements or any governmental crap that kept me clear of drugs. Nor was it fear of addiction or the danger to my health. It was plain and simply a case of my not wanting to live that way.

Incidentally drugs were constantly in my face during the years I fished, especially cocaine and amphetamines. It seemed that much of the fishing fleet was powered by drugs and maybe it was. For many this may sound shocking but if you stop and think it through it makes a lot of sense.

There was and probably still is a lot of money to be made fishing. It is a very high risk occupation that someone told me was 19 times more dangerous than coal mining. I believe it was. In the decade I spent in Alaska I attended three weddings and over fifty funerals and memorial services. We died like flies.

Limited entry fishing was years away and it was like a gigantic fishing contest. When the season opened there was a finite amount of crabs to be caught and when it hit the limit the season closed. It was one hell of a fishing derby.

When fishing was lousy one fished harder to make up for it and when it was good you fished harder yet to get every pound of product you could on board. I recall a couple of 80 hour days. Forty-eight hour days were very commonplace and twenty four hour days were simple routine.

It is no wonder whatsoever that amphetamines and coke entered the picture. How I managed to avoid the temptation is practically a miracle of the order of the loaves and fishes. I attribute much of my survival to steering clear of the drug world. I saw a lot of scenes you don't see on television.

Then again, maybe I did it wrong. I saw a picture of Keith Richards with his two daughters. Just think. When those two girls are dead and gone then Keith Richards will inherit it all. He, Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler make me wonder if I did the right thing.

Later when I was cruising my sailboat and would pull into a town I used the price of vice as an economic indicator. If draught beer, hookers and blow were cheap it meant it was time to grub up on inexpensive groceries and leave immediately.

If the price was high you stuck around a while because it meant there was money-and jobs- in town. It meant there was a lot of loose cash floating around. People that are busy making money will often hire someone to do things because they are too busy to do things themselves. It was time to spin the wheels of industry, make a few bucks and fill the ship's coffers.

Cruising the Pacific Northwest was interesting to say the least. It also got me into another brief career change where I delivered sailboats off and on for a while. One such gig was a delivery from Honolulu to Tacoma. It was a celebration of life.

Delivering sailboats was not really a career, nor was it actually a job. A delivery was more or less simply a gig of sorts. I suppose you can make a living of sorts doing this if you are willing to live under a bridge which I have a couple of times. Still, lousy pay or not, it's a lot of fun.

One generally arrives a few days before sailing to ready the boat. During this time the owner generally wines and dines you in places you could never afford on your own. You are treated like royalty and then you set sail with his pride and joy. It's generally a lot of fun and you do eat well. If you are smart you get him to sign off on your Coast Guard form afterwards for future reference. I did this all of the time and was later glad I did.

Between the time I got out of the army and the time I bought my home in Pittsburgh was a fifteen year period that was like being shot out of a cannon. It was a true King Hell roller coaster ride and while I never knew what was coming next, I was glad it happened that way because at least it was interesting and I was not a Dilbert in a cubicle. Thank God for that because it meant I did not have to join the French Foreign Legion which I would have done if I had wound up in such a terrible place as a cubicle.

Incidentally when I turned forty this was no longer an option. I cringed for a second but realized the die had been cast and I didn't have to worry about the office job and cubicle anymore. My career as a Merchant mariner was in full swing. I emptied the emergency 'ticket to France' bank account and continued with my career.

I arrived in Pittsburgh at the tail end of 1989 and by January of '90 I had found a job as a tug deckhand. I immediately sent copies of a certain Coast Guard form to everyone I had ever fished or sailed with along with copies of my sailboat logbook.

One of the forms came back from the widow of a guy I had fished with. The boat had gone down with all hands a year earlier and she had thoughtfully pulled the family records and filled out the form based on them. The Coast Guard accepted this and I sent her a card along with giving her a call. Her late husband was a good guy to work for and had treated me fairly.

I hit the books and studied every off duty waking moment and in early November I tested out and became an Able Seaman, Unlimited and a Tankerman. A couple of months later I tested again and became a licensed captain, a US Merchant Marine Officer. With these credentials I have never wanted for a job.

I've upgraded a number of times.

I'm not much for titles and protocol but you would not be wrong if you addressed me as 'Captain'.

Incidentally I never cracked a book and aced the navigation portion of my tests. My father taught me everything I needed to know about, including celestial it at the kitchen table while I was still in school. He had been a WW2 B-29 navigator. He saw I didn't seem to do well in math and sprung a trap on me by offering to teach me to navigate a B-29. I took the bait and jumped at the chance. For the next several months it was three to six nights a week at the kitchen table.

The sea draws an interesting crowd.

I have sailed with people of all educational levels and backgrounds. To the average landsman it is odd to see a boat being run with a grammar school dropout at the helm and a guy with an Ivy League master's degree chipping paint. Of course, the opposite holds true, too.

It develops a rather odd breed with a razor sharp dry wit and the ability to see through and awful lot of bullshit. Religion and politics are off limits which is a joy.

Often what will draw a confused look from a landsman will draw an amused smirk from another sailor. We have to see things for what they are out there because our very lives depend on it.

Mandatory random drug testing since 1990 has cleared out the junkies yet the old reputation of the drinking, fighting Popeye still comes to the surface every now and then.

One time someone told me he had heard we were a bunch of party animals and asked what happened when we got ashore.

I told him that I generally has a 12 pack of beer, a pint of bourbon, three or four hits of acid, five or six joints, a half pint of ether, three hits of acid and a handful of uppers, downers, laughers and screamers in the parking lot and any more than that I would need a designated driver.

He got wide-eyed and told me his cousin could get me into rehab.

I told him rehab was for quitters and ambled off.

That one made the rounds of the fleet, to almost everyone's amusement.

What did he expect? It's been in the news that transportation workers have been drug tested for years. Does he really think they are going to hand over that kind of responsibility to a gang of druggies?

Years ago I hated stupid people. Then I discovered God put them here for my entertainment.

There are a handful of women out there and for the most part they fit in as equals. I've sailed under a couple of women that were absolutely competent.

For what it's worth, successful women at sea do not try and be one of the guys. It never works because they are not one of the guys. They are simply women that chose a male dominated field and are judged by most of us simply by their competence. It really is that simple.

One of my favorites is a young woman that dresses older than her thirty years, knits afghans during her off-watch time and then comes on watch and simply steers a tugboat.

One time I was amused to see a woman on the dock looking like a drowned rat. It was cold, wet and very windy. She had been put ashore by another boat to help us tie up. I looked at her and asked her the age old question of “What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

In a voice seething with annoyance and indignation she shot back with “WHO says I'm a nice girl!” I laughed myself silly. Great answer! What a sharp wit!

It's a very different world and it fits me well. Then again, there are the ghosts from the fishing years that drop in on me in the night. It's rare but they do visit me. Some day I will join them and be buried at sea.

When I left Marshfield after my 50^th reunion I hauled ass to a friend's camp in the Catskills for a day and decompressed a bit. When I left there I specifically told the GPS to avoid major highways and spent a long day cruising through the rural parts of America. I got to see a part of America that most people miss in the interest of expediency.

I didn't seal myself into the sterility of and air conditioned cab, instead I left the windows down and enjoyed the wind, the sun and the smells of rural America. I hitch hiked a lot of these types of roads as a young adventurer and remembered the people and the things I saw.

It is a land where they proudly fly the flag. Various small town squares, sections of highways and bridges are named after locals that were killed in action in our various wars. They talk about the weather because it truly effects their income and their lives directly. It means a lot more than rescheduling a family picnic.

As I wandered into Pennsylvania I went through the areas where the opening day of deer season is a school holiday so that sons can follow their fathers into the woods. I carefully passed Amish buggies as the Dutchmen in them went about their errands.

I remember a few years back when I stopped off along US 30 to watch a Pony League baseball game for a few innings. The hot dogs were a buck apiece and in return for a $3 donation one of the fathers watching his son play quietly schlepped me an ice cold beer. It was a lot more entertaining than watching the over paid pros play for money. These kids were playing their hearts out for the love of the game.

I also remember hitch hiking through rural America. I sometimes rode in the back of pickup trucks. Today that's no longer legal and somewhat of a shame. However, I am an American and Americans do what they have to do. Twice every summer for several years a small group of us would meet in farm country on a sultry night and recklessly, criminally without regard to their safety we would knowingly endanger young lives by giving them a ride through farm country in the bed of my pickup to enjoy the breeze, the sounds and smells of the country.

I stopped a couple of times along the way home to pick up a bottle of water or a snack and once I chatted with a Dutchman about a few things. He confessed he was worried about his youngest son going through rumspringa. Rumspringa is the period where young people are permitted to explore the ways of non-Amish and experiment. Most return to the fold to be baptized but a handful leave the faith.

I have been in a couple of Amish homes and for the most part they are a kind, generous and down to earth group of people.

One of the things a number of people my age discuss is travel. I have no real desires to go anywhere anymore. This is probably because I ate dessert first. I traveled when I was young enough to participate in things instead of look at them like I'm in a museum.

It never fails to amuse me when I hear of someone telling me about their cruise to Alaska. I've made the trip by boat up the Inside Passage several times, including a round trip in a small sailboat. I lived in the state for a decade and someone that went on a week's canned tour wants to tell me all about what it is like living there.

They return STILL believing that the Brawny paper towel guy and the Groton's fish stick fisherman are representatives of the state and lifestyle. Whatever. Like I said, I ate dessert first. I know what goes on there. Truth is, Alaska at least in the 70s and 80s drew people from the 'Four Ms'. The four Ms are mercenaries, missionaries, malcontents and misfits. I most likely fit to at least two and probably three of the three Ms.

Everybody that showed up in Kodiak was either running from something or looking for something. I suppose I was both. I was running from the cubicle life and looking for adventure. It was a good place for me even though it almost cost me my life several times. I had numerous close calls on both the air and the water and as an old man now I realize as I sit here that I am a fugitive from the law of averages. It was nothing short of a miracle I saw the ripe old age of thirty much less 67.

As for Europe these days? Why bother. I saw the parts I wanted to in the service. It was a freebie...AND I got paid. If you decide to see France take a side tour to Colville Sur Mer.

I entered my so-called golden years at 65 with a 13,500 foot free-fall parachute jump. A couple of weeks later I crashed a motorcycle. As I was under a pile of somewhat twisted steel, I said to myself, “Welcome to the Golden Years.” I got off light with a couple of cracked ribs.

The free fall was somewhat of a disappointment. It was just plain windy, uncomfortable and boring until I deployed the 'chute. Then things got calm and I enjoyed the rest of the ride down with its panoramic view.

My nephew later commented that I was the only person he knew that would be bored with a free fall parachute jump. One of these days I will make another only I will deploy the 'chute as soon as I stabilize and enjoy the long, calm ride down.

As I pulled into the South Shore the last time I came home and passed the North River it reminded me of keeping clean on the road and in the Alaskan bush. It was a priority and paid huge dividends.

I also kept my hair short, too. It saved me a lot of headaches because if you remember the hippie days, longhairs were always getting tossed by the police in their never ending search for that deadly killer weed called pot. It also made me more employable as appearances count for a lot.

Five years ago I came on to the South Shore and left directly from work. I was a filthy mess and drove straight through from Philadelphia. I remember pulling over in Hanover, walking upstream and quietly bathing in a quiet part of the North River. Although it had been a while since I have bathed in a creek, it was good to know that as an old man I have not forgotten how.

As I entered the niece's house she commented on how fresh I looked after such a long drive. I never told her about the creek bath.

The trip back to the old neighborhood was rather surreal. I get by every couple of years or so but this trip was truly strange. Parts of it were rather fuzzy, some parts where crystal clear.

It was strange driving through tunnels created by the trees, it blocked the sun in spots. In other places it was open. It was along the lines of a Twilight Zone episode.

It was interesting to see that the house I grew up in is undergoing a major renovation. The places that were getting shabby have been renovated and a couple of places that were really nice have started the downward slide even though the neighborhood probably costs about $500,000 to get into these days. Someone will probably wind up buying the places and will pump a bunch of money into it.

What was interesting to note is the chestnut trees that supplied us with chestnuts to throw at one another is still there except that instead of an overgrown field behind it there is a fairly new home.

Five years ago when I drove through I had a Twilight Zone experience that lasted for a second or two. I was sitting in my pickup and in my mind I was ten years old and in the middle of a neighborhood apple fight using apples from a long disused orchard behind someone's house.

Nature called and the small boy wasn't going to run home to pee. I looked at the thicket and suddenly I said to myself, “Hey! Wait a minute! You are an old man and they throw people in jail for that!”

I made a mental check in my head. The Old Main Street firehouse was a few minutes away but I realized it was the twenty-first century and it was probably locked with some kind of security system. The garage is in new ownership since one of the kids I went to school with died.

Off to the Dunk on the Driftway in Scituate.

Seeing I was in Scituate anyway, I drove through my old haunts. My Army home of record is actually Scituate as I used my now ex-wife's address. The house is still there and looks the same.

I couldn't find the place I holed up in when I moved out of the house. I had rented a room from a widow for a while during the time I worked at a concrete pipe factory in Scituate. I'm fairly sure the house is still there but even then it was secluded by bushes and trees and it probably more so now. I didn't feel like searching so I just skipped it.

Back to the harbor and another Twilight Zone moment. All of the buildings themselves were still there but most of them had changed. I parked on the pier and wandered a bit.

I ambled into what used to be the Grog Shop and is now a mildly ritzy restaurant. Relatively speaking it IS a ritzy place when you compare it to the old Grog Shop which was the side of a restaurant.

The Grog Shop was a tumbledown gin mill and I occasionally had a beer there with my dad as a teenager. Nobody cared back then if a military age kid had a glass of suds with his old man.

As I write now, I am going through yet ANOTHER Twilight Zone moment. We're having a power outage of some sort and now it is no longer twilight. It is night as we have no power at all. I can live with that.

What happened a while ago was totally weird.

It's 0700 now and at about 0500 I was awakened to wierdness as the outside motion detector lights flashed and my CPAP machine outright died.

A few minutes the lights returned but no CPAP. The lights, I noticed, were dim. I went to the basement and grabbed a multi-meter and tested the socket and sure enough, it read about half the usual voltage of 120. This made it a brown out. Blackouts are basically harmless. Brownouts can destroy electric motors and other things.

My fear is basically the CPAP machine so I went out to my pickup with it, fired the truck up and plugged it into the power inverter I had installed in it when I first bought it. Thank God it worked.

My WiFi router was and as I write still is out and the laptop is on battery power and I am working offline.

What I discovered before the power finally went 100% dead is that anything with an electric motor is down. Most people don't realize how much that means. The reefer, A/C, microwave, garage door opener and other things. The piezo ignition for the stove is down without full voltage. The first thing I did was to unplug everything with a motor in it. Low voltage is very damaging to electric motors.

Of course, now everything is down and that takes us out of the Twilight Zone in into the darkness of night even though it is daylight. I can live with that.

Until I was diagnosed with sleep apnea I never worried about power. A loss meant nothing more than a minor inconvenience. I have lived without power, electricity and running water before and have it down pat. It's rather funny how I fall back in instincts and training.

Cancel Easter, they found the body. Stop the music!

Everything is back on line now and I can slowly turn everything back on. People don't shut things off during outages and when the power finally does come back on there is always a huge surge on the system. Sometimes it knocks it out again.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. I was seventeen in Scituate Harbor and having a beer with the Old Man.

I wandered up and down Front Street and while the buildings themselves were there they had lost most of their old time charm and were now were all chrome plated, shiny and modern. It wasn't the same. Much of the Old School New England charm was gone.

Of course there were the obligatory liquor stores and a Dunkin' Donuts. I commented to a cop I saw in the Dunk that the entire state looks like it lives on booze and doughnuts. He laughed.

While I am somewhat sure that people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts do eat other things and often drink non alcoholic beverages, it makes one wonder. If people didn't eat doughnuts or drink alcohol there would not be booze stores and Dunks all over hell.

Anyway the chat with the cop was interesting. He was somewhat impressed to hear that I had actually touched Etrusco when she grounded at Cedar Point back in 1956. Oddly enough, I actually remember it. I was an infant and it is one of my first memories.

Etrusco spent almost a full year aground and afterwards the Italians renamed her 'Scituate'. Later, in '64 she hit a mine in Haiphong Harbor and was scrapped.

I left the cop, returned to the pickup and drove off to check out Cedar Point, the former Irish Riviera. As to be expected at this point, much has changed. It is nowhere near as Irish as it used to be.

On the way to Cedar Point I drove past and old girlfriend's house. It had been recently renovated. Her face is a fuzzy memory. Her mother's is NOT. I can see her face as clear as a bell in my mind and for good reason.

When I came home for Christmas, 1976 I ran into the mother in the harbor. She was absolutely Old School Southie and came right up to me and told me outright she wished I had married her daughter! Then she went on to say the daughter had married 'one of them', meaning a black man. “We don't do that sort of thing,” she said.

What a witch!

At that time I was living in a tipi in the Rockies. The mother was actually wishing her daughter had married a savage that ran around the woods in a loin cloth.

I later found out she married a pretty nice guy and they were living in Vermont. I hope she still is and is happy.

Moving along to Cedar Point and Hatherly Road and vicinity the place has seen quite an influx of money and the houses have been not only winterized, but appear occupied year round. Many of the Irish names on the house signs have changed.

I recall about twenty years ago seeing an Italian surname on one of the cottages and commenting tongue in cheek that there goes the neighborhood to one of the residents. We shared a chuckle. Apparently some Irisher's daughter had inherited the place and married an Italian.

What was funny is that he said he liked visiting them on St Patrick's Day for a spaghetti supper because it sure beat corned beef and cabbage. I agreed with him 100%.

These days I get my corned beef and cabbage from a Jewish deli in the form of a corned beef sandwich and a side of cole slaw. It's much nicer than that boiled slop I had to choke down as a kid every March 17^th.

Anyway the Irish Riviera as slowly changing their demographics. I have heard Southie is, too.

Someone asked me once what made that part of Scituate into the Irish Riviera and I blame it on Henry Ford and the Model T.

Back in the 20s as the Irish found success in Boston they wanted to escape the pre A/C heat of the city in the summer. Land along the beaches was cheap and throwing up an unheated cottage was fairly affordable. So was transportation to the new summer home.

Clancy Davis could just throw the whole family into the family Flivver and cart them down Route 3 (Now 3A), spend the weekend and return Sunday afternoon, leaving the wife and kids there so he could take care of the family business or just go back to work where he could get a little peace and quiet, drink himself silly, chase other women or whatever it was his nature to do.

The wife and kids got to summer on the beach.

I then turned the wheels of the pickup to North Scituate to see my old non-girlfriend girlfriend's house. It's still there and hasn't changed much, other than a fairly fresh repaint. My relationship with her was hilarious.

I grew up Catholic and suffered accordingly. If you are female and went to school with me and we met downtown when I was with my mother and we even said hello to each other than you were discussed.

Mom would wait until you were out of earshot and ask me if you were a good Catholic. Of course, I told her you were not even if you were. She's say it was too bad because she'd be a good catch.

One day I told her that I'd I wanted to go fishing I would have grabbed a pole and gone to Damon's Point.

It was a royal pain in the ass and she never let up on me until I was well into my 30s. It's funny, but not one single one of my female classmates was a Catholic even if she was. Especially if she was.

Of course, she was also trying to steer me to a girl from a well-to-do family so in addition to telling her the lady in question was not a Catholic I would tell her their father was a sewer worker or worked at the dump. Anything to get her off my back.

I am the oldest and by the time my baby sister later married a Jew nobody even thought twice about it.

My non -girlfriend girlfriend was the product of a date gone bad. I was getting the usual pre-date grilling by the mother and she went too far asking me about my father's income and other none of her business questions. My prospective date didn't even have the decency to even try and intercede in my behalf. I told the mother and the daughter that they were not worth my trouble and took my leave.

Her father looked at me agape as I walked out.

Surprisingly enough, the father liked me and would sometimes buy my beer for me until I finally got a passable bogus ID.

I headed straight to Scituate Harbor and saw Roxy on the sidewalk and asked her if she wanted to go to the concert at the South Shore Music Circus. She responded by simply jumping in over the door of my MGB.

I told her the truth about skipping out on my date and she didn't really seem to mind and she asked to stop off at home for a quick minute. Of course I was expecting her to take forever and a day to redress but much to my amusement and delight she came out in under a minute.

She had one arm in her blouse, one shoe on and was hopping on the other foot as she put the other shoe on. Then she put the other arm in the sleeve of the blouse and hopped in where she buttoned the blouse up.

We had a pretty good time at the concert and afterwards went back to her house and ate. Her father was a career Navy man stationed at Weymouth Naval Air Station and I hit it off with both parents immediately.

A couple of days later she was in the Harbor with a couple of girls. I had just had another donnybrook with my mother and I was frustrated. I looked at them and dryly asked if any of them wanted to be a nice Catholic girlfriend to get my mother off my back.

To my amazement, Roxy simply said, “One nice girl Catholic girlfriend at your service!”

She was a tomboy and a water dog. Her uniform was a bikini covered with cut-offs and a blouse and was constantly peeling them off to dive into the nearest body of water. It was like dating a Labrador retriever and the seat of my car was constantly damp.

She would wait until I was at work and call my mother to remind me about the upcoming (non existent) CYO dance or to have her remind me to take her to mass. Mass generally consisted of breakfast at the Scituate Curtis Farms snack bar and CYO dances meant we'd hang out together. She was pretty good company.

After she got dressed up and went to mass with Mom and I the bickering stopped. She cleaned up really well. I was stunned at how good she looked. That was the only time I ever saw her out of her usual tomboy outfit consisting of a pair of cutoffs and a blouse over a swimming suit. Usually she was either barefoot or in flip flops. A semi formal occasion meant she'd put on a pair of Topsiders.

In return we were both 'accidentally' spotted in one of the parking places along the Driftway. We were seen holding hands and I had a blanket over my shoulder. That cinched it down. Word went out she had a boyfriend from the next town over.

Truth be known 50 years after the fact, she was a gay Methodist.

Nobody could fool my father and inside of a week or so he had figured out the relationship was a sham. He didn't know how, but it was a sham. He cornered me quietly and asked what in the wide, wide world of sports what was going on. I told him and he looked very confused.

Why was his oldest son hanging with a woman that would probably end up in a Boston marriage? I told him we were covering for each other to get mother off my back in exchange for me covering for her sexuality. He turned beet red for a second and told me it was a stroke of genius. He hated to see my mother and I bicker.

Later Dad told me I had a lot of moxie taking her to mass with my mother. I responded that sometimes the best place to sleep is in the lion's mouth. When I said that it was the first time I ever saw him speechless.

The following summer I proved it to be true again when I was on the road hitch-hiking. One night I happened to be passing a police station well after dark. I simply walked up to the station, looked at the shrubbery and put my sleeping bag between the building and the shrubs and slept there.

Who would have looked for me there?

Come September Roxy left for an engineering school. A year or two later her father retired from the Navy and mover the family back to Alabama.

About ten years later a mutual friend told me she was an engineer of some sort in either Georgia, Alabama or Mississippi, I have forgotten which. I wished her luck. I still wish her luck.

There are a number of things these days that I wonder about because they had been solved decades ago when I lived in Kodiak.

The whole gay/transgender/which bathroom to use problems were solved in Kodiak decades ago, in the early 80s.

Personally I always figured that a person's sexuality was hard wired into them in the beginning and it did no good to try and change it. I think I learned that from Roxy.

Kodiak drew different types like the moon draws water and because of it, there was pretty much a live and let live attitude among most of us. A number of gays and early transgenders moved there just because of that. They knew they would pretty much be left in peace.

The transgenders knew when it was about time to change bathrooms and pretty much did so with few problems. Then again, my libertarian nature figured that if it didn't break my leg or pick my pocket that it was fine by me. I always figured that the person that was looking under a stall to see which way the feet were pointing had a bigger problem than the person that was in it.

I think it was about then I learned to settle complaints by asking then how much money is if going to cost them or where they got hit.

The gay marriage issue didn't bother me once I sat down and thought about it. I never really thought the government should be in the marriage business to begin with. If you want to get married then go see the preacher. If he won't marry you, find one that will.

Instead I figure the government should award a civil union to any two people that wanted one. Everyone should be able to pass their life's accumulations on to someone else on their demise without interference from anyone, including government. Two people also should have the right to form an alliance and face the world as a couple.

There is a doe outside about fifteen feet from me with her fawn still in spots. Every year one of the does throws her fawn about thirty feet from where I am sitting. The deer let me approach them to about ten feet often before they slowly wander away. I do not know why this is but it happens often.

Seeing the deer is has a calming effect on me and brings out the warm side of me. On the other hand I do like venison and it is a great source of low cholesterol organic meat.

I have no desire to harm a suburban deer but over the years I have harvested a few out in the wild. Much of the meat went to local homeless shelters and charities. As I sit here I do wish I had some venison in my freezer. As for the local deer? They're safe.

Some years I dedicate to fun things. One year I dedicated to flowers and birds. I made quite a number of bird houses and planted my annual marigolds from seeds and they took off.

As for the bird houses, I made some simply by eye and some by the plans I read printed by some birdwatcher group. I also put out a couple of feeders. It was a pretty summer but it didn't take long for unwanted animals to plunder the feeders.

I think I am going to draw this epistle to a close.

One of these days I should write the adventures of the old '62 Dodge half-ton pickup I won in a stupid poker game. It's enough for an entire book, especially the trip to Las Vegas. The trip it made up the Alaska Highway was another tale in itself.