God's Little Flashcubes

As I was walking Tucker in the half-light before nightfall, I watched the fireflies winking between the houses in the neighborhood and around the trees and shrubs that surround the retaining pond. One flew just under my nose and I cupped my hand and almost caught it as it flashed.

Nostalgia books talk about small children catching fireflies in the twilight, but I had never seen any in my life, at least until 1974.

Dad and Mom wanted to visit Washington, DC, in the 1970s, but Dad was wary about driving there, so we took a Colette bus tour instead. We had a wonderful time, and still remember the name of our guide, Nick, and our bus driver, Jerry. We saw many wonderful things, including Waltz of the Toreadors with Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson at the Kennedy Center (opposite which was that fascinating building in the news, Watergate!). The bus tour vacation went so well, in fact, that we went on another tour in 1974, to the Pennsylvania Dutch country. Once again on a big comfy tour bus, me with our camera in hand and my travel diary (a big bound Strathmore art book) under my arm, we visited the rolling, verdant countryside around Lancaster, Pennsylvania, popping in at Roadside America, a fabulous miniature landscape and train layout built by all one family, just off I-78; the Hershey chocolate welcome center, with its ride showing you how chocolate is made and the sweet treats at the end; and of course to an obligatory Dutch feast, complete with our first taste of shoo fly pie, which I remembered from Lois Lenski's regional America novel, Shoo-Fly Girl. The thought still makes my teeth hurt (but boy, it was good).

But the event I remember best wasn't part of the tour.

The hotel we stayed at was a big white Colonial style structure in the middle of an oasis of gas stations and restaurants, surrounded by harrowed and corn-filled fields, farm houses filled with men, women, and children wearing black and white, and livestock. There was nothing much to do at night, but the place provided bicycles free of charge to the paying guests, and our tour guide, who was a good looking young man I'll call "Phil," noticed that a couple of the youngest tour members, one fifteen-year-old girl and a sixteen-year-old, were bored. He asked their parents and myself, since the rest of the tour members were forty and upwards, if they would give us permission to go on a bike ride with him after supper. We would just make a circle of the countryside where there was little traffic and come back well before dark. Sure, they said.

I was crazy to go. I'd only been riding a bike for three years and the prospect of being able to ride through a landscape beside the road between my house and my best friend's house was intoxicating. So Phil led his little parade of young ladies into the PennDutch countryside and we rode and rode. We whizzed past fields of crops thick and green, but not yet ready for harvest (it was the first week of July, when Trifari customarily closed down for vacation); herds of cows still thoughtfully chewing on the long stems of grass in their pastures even as the sun set, glossy black-and-white bodies dotting the landscape; farmers driving teams of horses home after a long day's worth of harrowing. Handsome brown Standardbred horses pulling Amish buggies passed us occasionally, a flicking whip dancing on the dashboard. We stopped to see a train car displayed from the Strasburg Rail Road collection, parked out in a field of corn next to a post-and-rail fence right out of Lassie, advertising the attraction—it had been used in the Barbra Streisand film Funny Girl.

I think Phil got lost. I cast anxious eyes as the sun went lower, and lower, turning into a blaze of red as it balanced on the rim of the horizon and then slowly melted into it, leaving bands of pink and orange to mark its passage. The darkening blue of the sky spread from east to west to swallow the last of the color, and one by one, little lamps were lit in the sky. I knew that back at the hotel, Mom was "making buttons" and Dad was probably starting to steam. And then I completely forgot everything else.

With open-mouthed awe I noticed that the sky wasn't the only place marked by stars. In the vast cornfields we kept passing, pale green flashes appeared and disappeared, winking in and out rhythmically, and I realized with delight that these were fireflies, my very first fireflies, just like in all those books I read. We stopped for a while for Phil to get his bearings and for us to take a breather, but I paid no attention to the company anymore. My eyes were hypnotized by those marvelous little sparks of light, dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, going off again and again like flashcubes at a wedding. Until another night in the future brought us the stars of Arizona, this was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I stared at the open field until the sight was burned into my memory.

Phil got us back, tired, perspiring, and breathless, to face an anxious and angry clot of parents, including mine. I suspect he may have gotten fired after that expedition. But I went to bed with a smile on my face and stars in my eyes, all unknowingly supplied by "God's little flashcubes."

Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut...

From Wikipedia:

Roger Williams Park, in ... Providence, Rhode Island, is an elaborately landscaped 427-acre city park and is a historic district listed on the National Register of Historic Places. ... The land for the park was a gift to the people of Providence in 1871, in accordance with the will of Betsy Williams, the great-great-great-granddaughter, and last surviving descendant of the founder to own the land. It had been the family farm and represented the last of the original land grant to Roger Williams in 1638 from Canonicus, chief of the Narragansett tribe. The family farmhouse (built in 1773), known as the Betsy Williams Cottage, and the Williams family burial ground (including Betsy's grave) are still maintained within the park.

The park also contains seven lakes which comprise approximately 98 acres. ... The park was designed by Horace Cleveland in 1878, and was constructed in the 1880s. Many of the roads, bridges and sidewalks were built by the Works Progress Administration from 1935 to 1940. Currently it contains the Roger Williams Park Zoo, the Roger Williams Park Museum of Natural History and Planetarium, the Roger Williams Park Botanical Center, the Japanese Gardens, the Victorian Rose Gardens, the Providence Police Department's Mounted Command center, the Dalrymple Boathouse and boat rentals, historical tours, a Carousel Village for children that includes the "Hasbro Boundless Playground" which is accessible for handicapped children, the Temple to Music, the Roger Williams Park Casino, large greenspaces, and many miles of walking paths.

Generations of Rhode Islanders have spent at least some time at Roger Williams Park: taking their children to the zoo to pet the farm animals and pose on the dog statue "The Sentinel," snapping wedding or First Communion or Confirmation photos in the Japanese Garden; riding the carousel or attending an Independence Day band concert at the Temple to Music, with its Greek columns (and, sadly, a white "canvas" that made it victim to graffiti artists). During the Gilded Age anyone who was anybody appeared in evening dress and furs and jewels at the Casino. The Zoo, from its beginnings as a "menagerie" with one building to the sad traditional zoo of concrete and chain link enclosures, became eventually one of the finest animal collections in the country.

I discovered the Park as a refuge when I got my drivers' license; after college classes I would flee to the zoo, which was free back then, and walk through the farm exhibit and through the grasslands to visit the Roosevelt elk. I'd always drop in at the Victorian Bird House, the original menagerie building, a steel-and-brick edifice with Crystal Palace lines and a soaring ceiling, with its free-flight cage in the center, and a flock of budgies singing and chattering in a smaller enclosure right in the front. Sometimes I would go into the museum, which still looked as it had at the turn of the century, with wood-and-glass display cases of butterflies and of minerals, all labeled by hand in brownish ink, a gallery of taxedermied wild animals from the Eastern Woodlands of New England, and a two-story foyer with a sarcophagus next to the gift shop.

On one of those post driver's license days, both my friend Sherrye and I found ourselves with a free day, and we decided to have a picnic. We had sandwiches and drinks, whether from home or a shop I can't remember, and for a snack, very clearly remembered, a bag of popcorn. I had a special place I liked, near the museum; if you parked out at the road at a tree I had "bookmarked" in my memory and headed down a grassy-and-root-gnarled slope to a certain spot under the trees, when they were in leaf you were unable to see the road at all, just the old bricks of the museum rising up behind you and the boathouse before you, across the lake, all canopied in sagging maple limbs and oak branches. It was like being in a time machine; when there was no traffic was passing to break the spell you almost could have been in the park in any age, even in the 1910s with horses and carriages winding down the park roads, or the 1920s with huge Deusenbergs and Pierce Arrows bringing excited children to play.

We stretched out our picnic blanket and had our lunch, luxuriating in the cool breeze, lazily looking up at the leaves fluttering above us, and talking about what we always talked about: television and books, Sherrye's pesty older brother, our parents and how weird they were sometimes, the usual teenage stuff. Lunch finished, we opened the bag of popcorn.

Suddenly a bright-eyed grey squirrel appeared, posting himself several feet from our blanket, looking at us in anticipation, his little nose working rapidly. "Oh, how cute!" was the watchword, and of course we tossed him a kernel of popcorn, watching him take it up in his dexterous little black paws and nibble on it. When he finished it, he scampered out of sight and when he reappeared he wasn't alone.

We laughed. "He brought a friend." Each received a kernel and we watched them eat and tossed two more.

Except suddenly there were three, and we tossed a third kernel.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a fourth furry shape appear. A fourth kernel was tossed.

After that it was sort of like the Sorcerer's Apprentice; somewhere out of sight Mickey Mouse in spangled robes was raising his wand and Deems Taylor was conducting the orchestra. As if by magic a fifth squirrel appeared, and a sixth. We really didn't mind initially, and flung each of them a kernel and then another, each time aiming well away from our picnic spot, but when numbers seven and eight materialized we started looking at each other. We were both too well-versed in the reality of life, especially Sherrye, who entered college knowing she wanted to become a nurse: sure squirrels were cute, but they were still wild animals with the usual wild animal ticks and fleas, they were rodents and did bite if provoked, and they occasionally carried rabies. This could be a problem.

So when number five (or maybe it was number two or number six, since by now with eight squirrels to keep track of it was impossible to tell each little identical furry grey creature apart) was emboldened enough to come to the edge of the blanket until he was shooed back, and then turned right back around and approached again, one of us turned to the other and said, "You know, I think we'd better go," and our little time-travelling luncheon was swiftly concluded. We snatched up the trash and the bag of popcorn, shooed the squirrels with a flick of the blanket, and dashed back to the car with at least one of the squirrels in hot pursuit. We sprang into the car and shut the door and then laughed and laughed.

Even today, I can never see squirrels without thinking of that funny picnic under the trees, and wondering just how many we could have gathered if we'd been crazy enough to have stayed on. I think I'd rather not know the answer!

Books I Have Loved

Title: Johnny Tremain
Author: Esther Forbes
First Read: Stadium Elementary School
When: 1966

When I went to Stadium School in the 1960s, most of the teachers were older. Even the kindergarten teacher was an older woman; I believe Mrs. Marandola might have been the youngest teacher in the school when I had her for fourth grade. However, Mrs. Grady, who was in charge of both the second and the fifth grades, trained student teachers, so in my seven years of elementary school, we had four student teachers.

I have forgotten the second of the two second grade teachers, but I vaguely remember Miss Fisher, who I startled so much by screaming when someone threatened to tear up the construction paper Easter bunny I was making in art class. The second of the teachers we had in fifth grade was Miss Ockelowicz (sp?), who was sweet and pleasant, but I particularly recall the first of the two student teachers that year.

Her name was Miss Greenberg, and she wore her blonde hair in a bouffant hairdo just like on television. She bought smart, fashionable dresses, as close to a miniskirt as schoolteacher dress regulations allowed, and I remember pretty flowered prints and geometrics. I wonder if we scared her at all, her first class, a bunch of kids mostly of Italian descent with names like Lanzi, Maiorano, D'Ambra, Iacobbo, Calabro, D'Agostino, and Campanini, plus a smattering of Callahan, Chatburn, Miller, and Leung, the boys in cotton or corduroy pants and collared shirts and scuffed Oxfords, the girls in dresses or skirts/jumpers with blouses, ankle socks, and strapped shoes (or, like me, in Hush Puppies) with hair held back with headbands or barrettes, or pulled back into a pony tail. Most of us had stay-at-home moms, dads who worked blue collar, and some pesky siblings. (The lucky ones, I knew, also had a dog.)

Soon after Miss Greenberg arrived, she told us she was going to try something different for us after lunch. Predictably, after being free to converse and goof off in the lunchroom for a half hour, we had trouble settling down to the next class. She thought she'd create a settling-down period, as well as expose us to something creative, by reading a book to us.

In our yesterdays, before televisions and radios, it was common for families to sit in the "parlor" after supper and have someone read to them as entertainment. Today we have psychologists and people like Jim Trelease telling parents it's a good thing to read to children, even older children. But in our day, it was chiefly little children who were read to, those who couldn't read for themselves yet, or not yet read well. It brought to mind Mom reciting nursery rhymes or reading from A Child's Garden of Verses or Dr. Seuss or your children's Bible. To us it sounded a little—well, patronizing! We were ten- and eleven-year-olds, and we'd be in sixth grade next year and old enough to graduate elementary school; wasn't reading to us kind of "baby"?

That first day, after lunch, she opened the book, and began.

"On rocky islands gulls woke. time to be about their business. Silently they floated in on the town, but when their icy eyes sighted the first dead fish, first bits of garbage about the ships and wharves, they began to scream and quarrel.
     The cocks in Boston back yards had long before cried the coming of the day. Now the hens were also awake, scratching, clucking, laying eggs.
     Cats in malt houses, granaries, ship holds, mansions, and hovels caught a last mouse, settled down to wash their fur and sleep. Cats did not work by day.
     In stables horses shook their halters and whinnied.
     In barns cows lowed to be milked.
     Boston slowly opened its eyes, stretched, and woke..."

And we awoke to a new world, day by day: Colonial Boston, talented and conceited Johnny Tremain, small but plucky Cilla and her sickly little sister Isannah and older sisters Madge and Dorcas, devout Mr. Latham, brisk and brusque Mrs. Lapham, lazy and oafish Dove and shy Dusty, avaricious and equally conceited Jonathan Lyte, the headstrong and determined Lavinia Lyte, Mrs. Bessie the cook, and the dedicated, full-of-life Rab Silsbee, who works for his Uncle Lorne at the "Boston Observer." We gasped when Johnny "broke the Sabbath" and burned his hand, were sad as he despaired at his handicap until he became an outcast, admired his courage as he learns to ride the beautiful horse Goblin, followed the ins and outs of Boston law and society and listened as the beginning of the Revolutionary War came to life in the story of a boy just a little older than us. I think, until then, we thought the American Revolution had been fought by a "bunch of old guys" (people in their 30s) who were perfect, two-dimensional characters who just existed in history books. We learned from Johnny Tremain that Samuel Adams and Paul Revere were no plaster saints, but people with faults just like ours, that the British weren't all bad guys, but folks who loved horses like Lieutenant Stranger or were flirting noncoms like Sergeant Gale.

Within a few weeks the two copies of Johnny Tremain in the school library were taken out and stayed out. No kid in the class could wait for Miss Greenberg to get to the end. Unable to even get on the waiting list, I pleaded with my mom to get me a copy for Christmas. You can walk into any bookstore today or order off any website that sells books and get a copy of Johnny Tremain, but back then it was out of print. Mom, who was unsuccessful finding a copy of Charlotte Baker's The Green Poodles for me, got someone—the Paperback Book store maybe? Read All? The Outlet Company or Shepards department store?—to order her a copy of a teacher's edition of the book and I had that for years until I finally bought a hardback copy. I still have the map of Boston from that teacher's edition taped in that hardback.

It wasn't until some years later that I actually saw the Disney film of the book, and I was so disappointed. Oh, it tells the story all right, but it's so much the Reader's Digest condensed version that it's colorless (except for the Liberty Tree song, and I like the actor who plays Paul Revere), and some of my favorite characters, like Isannah, Lavinia Lyte, Mrs. Bessie the Lyte cook, Pumpkin the deserter, Lieutenant Stranger, and Lydia, the African-American washerwoman at the Afric Queen who saves Goblin from being commandeered by the army (she is one of the first positive African-American characters I remember reading about) are missing. Film Cilla is amazingly buxom; she's supposed to be a skinny 13-year-old with a sharp tongue and a thirst for reading. Film Johnny is dark-haired, not blond. Film Goblin was black, the book horse was a magical creature, "a tall, slender horse, so pale he was almost white, but flecked all over with tiny brown marks. The mane and tail were a rich, blackish mahogany. His eyes were glassy blue." (And he was a Narragansett horse! From Rhode Island!) {SPOILER} Plus it's missing the sequence that gives the novel its punch, and even as fifth graders we knew it had to happen even if we were sorry that it did: Rab dies after the battle of Lexington. It was Johnny's final lesson of the story: that freedom is not won lightly, it sometimes takes the lives of those we care about, or of ourselves.

Miss Greenberg finally finished Johnny Tremain. She tried another Revolutionary War book on us, Hay-Foot, Straw-Foot I believe it was called [N.B.: it actually takes place during the French and Indian War], but the spell was over. After Christmas Miss Ockelowicz took her place. In eighth grade, we read Johnny Tremain "for credit" in Miss Wright's English class. We had to do a project of it, with a folder collecting all of our quizzes and tests and exercise papers, and decorate the cover. Of course I drew Johnny on a rearing Goblin, with his post bag slung over his shoulder.

And some time during junior high school I found Miss Greenberg's engagement announcement in the newspaper. It may still be in one of my boxes packed up when we cleaned up the house. I always wonder if she is happy. So if you're out there, Miss No-Longer-Greenberg—thank you. Thank you for Johnny Tremain.