My sister Nora's Eulogy

I think my sister Nora came out of the womb talking.
We called her “Chatty Cathy,” after the doll that talked when you pulled her string.
But you didn’t need to pull any string to get Nora to talk.
She was a natural-born storyteller. The stories she told were your stories, all of you gathered here to mourn her. She told these stories because she loved you and she found your lives fascinating and worth sharing with others.
And so …because of Nora --I knew a lot about Shane and Colby, Duane and Amy.. and Juliana, Duane the third and Hope. I knew when Stuie was cracking jokes you couldn’t understand and I got the whole story when DeeDee hit a flagpole at a garage sale. I knew what was up with DeeDee’s nieces and her sister-in-law Marcia and her cousin Janet. I knew about Chris and Keith Schueler’s love lives and career successes. I knew when Rick and Maria landed in Lake Havasu City in winter and when they returned to the cove in spring. I tried to keep tabs on the all the different folks in the Connecticut Connection…Nora knew who they all were, but I needed a big diagram.
I heard second-hand Doc Nesbitt’s medical advice. I heard about Paulette’s decline. I experienced Boots’ final hours and her funeral because Nora told me about them. I knew how bad Hurricane Irene was for Catharine and Jesse Hamilton in Vermont. I heard about Corry Heinrich and her healing oils.
Because of Nora, I knew what exquisite care Rocco took with cars and I knew each developmental milestone Rozzie, Dahlia and Daisy achieved. I followed the reconstruction of Jen Dee’s house and the progression of Nancy Shields’ husband Arne’s illness. Nora always let me know about Ernie and Lori –whom we called Sonny and Cher—and their kids. I learned about a new neighbor, the Forgers and their Dunkin Donut franchises.
Nora once walked back and forth between her house and Tom & Judy Caroon’s to ask legal advice of their lawyer daughter Julianne and relay it back to me by phone. Nora was as proud of Julianne as if Julianne were her own daughter.
I knew how Nora treasured her time this summer with Michael and Patty Peck and how pleased she was when Michael admitted he had had a crush on her when they were teenagers. I heard all about the lovelyJulia Bonaime.
When she lived on William Street in the Cape, I heard all about Sheri Hall, Bud and Ruth Constance, the Youngs, Barry and Amy Davis, the LaMoras.
Nora had married into a large and colorful family, and through her, I knew about the impeccably-dressed Uncle Charlie the undertaker and his wife Flora the former showgirl. I knew about Aunt Hilda and Aunt Elsie. And John’s many cousins –Boots and Judy and Candy, Sally and Tootie, Billy and Debbie Dermody, Judy Dermody Buffum and Chuckie Cummmings – and their richly-patterned lives. I heard about Cousin Cathy’s unexpected death in California, and how sad Nora was that she was alone when she died.
Nora also told me about all the travails of John’s friends:Angelo, Ken from Spicer’s Bay marina, Tony Lawyer, Kenny and Lolly, the larger-than-life and louder-than-life Tommy Gates, Dick Battista, and Bill Fisher…whom Nora set up on dates with a couple of her friends. In the summers before she got sick, she would routinely have ten or 12 people at her dinner table…many of whom I had first met through her stories. And she always had a freshly baked layer cake on the cake plate.
Nora came late to teaching, but she was a natural-born teacher. She loved the collegiality of working with .teachers, principals, aides and superintendents…friends like Marlene and Joe Durgin, Ann Crissley, Cathy Bell, Mike Bashaw, Dr. Slattery, Heather LeVarnway, Amy Booth, Toni Gibson, Bonnie Cooper, Joanne Faukenham. Myra LaClair, Lisa Graham, Bob Hurley, Debbie Eldredge Block, Miranda Urac McKenzie. (Nick said Miranda named her first child after him.)
She was very involved in the lives of her students. Nora would buy clothes for her students at garage sales and the Salvation Army. Her friend Marlene Durgin talked about how Nora once sent flowers to the mother of a student…the mother had never before received flowers.
Nora also told wonderful stories about her very special special ed students. I remember one student would come into school in the morning and immediately strip off all his clothes. Another student with Asperger’s did flawless weather reports in a broadcaster'’s voice.
Nora grew up in a suburb outside New York City in a family dominated by strong women. My mother sang in a deep alto and was one tough cookie. I was the oldest …they adopted my brother Lou, who was probably psychologically damaged when we made him play dress-up with us. Then came the twins,Marian and Margaret. Nora w as the baby of the family for 6 years until my late brother Tommy came along. Nora was named for my mother’s favorite aunt and Nora was my mother’s favorite because she had brown eyes like my Dad. In her twenties, Nora lived with both Margaret and Marian in Tucson Arizona.
Along the way, Nora would add on some sisters-in-spirit…Dee Dee and Maria, Birgitt and Christina Trottier, Carol DeAugusta, Debbie Solensky, Lisa Savage. And she was extremely attached to our Aunt Ann and our cousins, especially Eileen, Kathleen, Tommy, Georgie and Carol Ann .
Nora not only talked early, she sang in her crib, rocking back and forth, usually singing one or another tune from the 1920’s or 1930s that my mother had taught her…Daisy, Daisy give me your answer true…and I love you, Yes I do, I love you.
She always loved music and went to concerts with Marian and Margaret from the time she was a teen until just a couple of weeks ago. She went to many Dave Matthews concerts with Nick and Kendall. She and I and Maria liked going to concerts at the Clayton Opera House. She was scheduled to go to a concert this coming weekend with DeeDee in Long Island. The music choices at today’s service –played by my son and daughter-in-law Matt and Melany—were ones Nora chose for her funeral….Joni Mitchell and John Lennon and Kansas. We can only be thankful she didn’t request Stairway to Heaven and Innagoddadivida.
She even told stories about her pets of the barking, swimming and tweeting variety.
She often told me about her fish who lived in that big tank in her living room. And she was always shocked when the big predator fish ate the small ornamental fish.
Her Airedale Buttercup was her canine soulmate for many years. Nora thought the dog’s full name… Buttercup LaChance..made her sound like a streetwalker. Nora also believed Buttercup was lesbian, a concept I never thought about before in a dog. Nora named her Maltese Sparkle after comedienne Gilda Radner’s dog… Gilda had ovarian cancer too.
On May 4, 2006 Nora called to tell me she has just been diagnosed with stage 3C ovarian cancer. Like Nora, 75 percent of women are not diagnosed until late stage. When the cancer has spread, only25 of women percent survive 5 years.
It was a death sentence. But Nora went for 29 chemo sessions over these past 5 and a half years. She would be so sick for 10 days after chemo that she stayed in the house and didn’t talk to anyone. Each time she recovered, she got up, made dinner, did the recycling, and went out to concerts and the movies and garage sales. She was good to go until the next sickening round of chemo.
When an intestinal blockage of tumor and scar tissue made it impossible for her to eat real food, she hooked herself up to a tube in her arm each night for nutrition. During the day, she walked around with plastic piping that snaked out of her gut to a plastic bag that held bile. Her cousin Shannon made her a hunter-green pouch to hold the bile bag. She turned her disability into a fashion statement.
She was proud to have participated in the national documentary The Whisper about the misdiagnosed symptoms of ovarian cancer.
She wanted so desperately to eat again that she underwent surgery in Boston this May to bypass the intestinal blockage. But the surgeon couldn’t find enough usable intestine, and the operation failed. For 20 months, she lived on liquid nutrition. But every time I talked to her, she would ask, “What are you making for dinner tonight?”
When she joined Facebook, she found another way to keep in contact with old friends, nieces and nephews and cousins, in-laws and out-laws. She was always posting links on political issues, including medical marijuana.
Her step-children Julie and Johnny were her age and were more friends than children.
Julie, one of the most fun times we all had on the river was your wedding reception in the back yard at Rock Beach in the summer of 2005. Nora, Sue, DeeDee and her nieces, Maria, Tom Caroon, Tom McQueeny and Maeve planned and catered the reception. Nick was the bartender.

Johnny, you provided monumental support to Nora and the family in her final years. She often expressed her gratitude to me for what you’ve done. She cherished Max and Sam and Sue, and always let me know what they were up to.

Nick, Mom thought you were a genius from the time you were an infant. We’ve been talking these last few days about all your hi-jinks…impersonating a park ranger, untying a sailboat full of sleeping passengers and letting it float away on the St. Lawrence, setting coffee creamers on fire after Nanny Amoroso’s funeral and causing the evacuation of an entire hotel. You caused Mom a lot of grief but she still thought you were a genius. She was so proud that you have grown into a successful, hard-working and empathetic adult who still retains his crazy, hyperactive, smart-ass, fast-thinking sense of self.

Kendall, your mother loved you so much.. You owe it to her and to yourself to become the glorious, acoomplished and loving woman your mother was. To do that, you get out of bed every day, put one foot in front of the other, ask yourself “What good can I do for the world today?” and pray to your mother for guidance.

John, the greatest story Nora lived in her life was your love story. Like any married couple, you had your ups and downs, but she valued the tender care you took of her. You first met when you took her for a boat ride in 1975. She loved all the boat rides you took her on for the next 36 years, and she was amazed at the house you designed and built for her. Each time you parted, even if it was just while she went to shop at Big M, you kissed each other three times on the lips. She couldn’t do that when she parted this last time, but you know what was in her heart. There will be three kisses waiting for you in Heaven.

She is gone from us, but she is somewhere else: probably chewing St. Peter’s ear off, planning an exquisite meal with Mom, Dad, Tommy, Ann & Achie, Paulette, Arne, Boots and Doc Nesbitt and inquiring about setting up a celestial Facebook account
.
We are better because she loved us and told us one another’s stories.

As She Lay Dying

October 25, 2011. It was 46 degrees outside my summer home in Cape Vincent, NY at 8 am this morning. Not bad for the North Country just a month out from Thanksgiving.
I am here out of season because my sister Nora is busy dying in the first-floor bedroom of the home her husband John built for their family 7 miles away in Rock Beach on the St. Lawrence River. I use the term “busy” advisedly. It looks like hard work lying there, her eyes closed mostly. She’s on drugs to ease the pain, but it’s painful nonetheless. Her legs and belly have swelled up with fluid because her liver has been compromised by the ovarian cancer.
Her voice is high-pitched when she speaks. And when she speaks, there are gaps and pauses which I fill with questions and comments. This is a new thing. Nora was always such a rapid-fire talker (we called her “Chatty Cathy” as a child) that I rarely spoke in our conversations.
I feel so badly for her. But I know this is the process. She fought hard for five and a half years. Just last month, she came down to my house in New Jersey and had a wonderful night at a tavern with friends from Bergenfield High School. She had had her hair and make-up done and she didn’t look sick at all. She looked fabulous.
She hasn’t really eaten in 18 months because the cancer blocked her intestinal tract. (She sometimes sucked on Cheetohs to get the taste of the salt.) She’s gotten her nutrition from a nightly drip in her arm. But she’s been a trooper. In May she underwent an operation in Boston to unblock her intestines because she desperately wanted to eat again. That surgery didn’t work out.
She is still on her liquid nutrition, and for that reason, Hospice didn’t want to take her as a client. But Hospice has now agreed to see her, and so a hospice worker will come today.
Her husband John helps her to get up and urinate in a Porta-potty in her room and helps her with her meds. John and son Nick spend time each day working on a junker car for daughter Kendall and a new engine for Nick’s truck. We eat dinner together –sometimes with John and Nora’s friends Dee-Dee and Stuie, who live two doors down. We keep watch.
Is Nora going to an afterlife? If there is no afterlife, that would be okay, I think. There would be the peace of nothingness after the celebration of life in full swing.
But I’ve worked with a couple of mediums when I hosted a talk show. They seem to be reading something. It could be the energy memory in the person they are reading, I suppose.
When my mother was in her last years and suffering from Alzheimer’s, one medium said my late father told her that he and other family spirits talked to my Mom while she slept and urged her to come to the other side. My Mom, being an extremely stubborn woman, resisted. My Mom ultimately died in a nursing home while I was visiting my sister Marian in Arizona. I felt awful I wasn’t there. But it was just like my Mom not to want any death-bed scene.
I do believe there is a fulcrum, a point at which the weight of your life-force hangs in the balance between life and death. Nora seems at that point now. There is nothing we can do but keep watch and bear witness.

Honoring the Genogram

This is a story about a wake and a matchmaking opportunity.

My friend Joanne’s mother Madeline died the day before Palm Sunday. Joanne is my friend from high school at the Academy of the Holy Angels. My friend Ann –who’s been my friend since first grade at St. John’s in Bergenfield –called me from North Carolina to make sure I knew about Madeline’s passing. Ann is married to Joanne’s cousin Brian, the son of Madeline’s sister.

My husband Jim attended the wake on his own early in the afternoon. He is kind of a celebrity and he actually is a very energizing presence at wakes. It’s one of his gifts.

My 17-year-old son Tom and I arrived later, having just spent time helping to set up my son Matt’s and daughter-in law Melany’s new household in Sparta.

When you step into a wake, you immediately do a kind of triage, scanning the room for the relatives of the deceased and other connected people you may have known in the past. My high school friend Louise Cook came up to me, and pointed me in Joanne’s direction.

Joanne was seated in the middle of the room, holding court. Truth to tell, Joanne is a kind of celebrity by force of her personality. She has always exuded an outsized dynamism. She was Miss School Spirit at Holy Angels. She is a flashing, rotating ball of jokes and laughter and twinkling eyes and heartfelt compliments. She was kind enough to include me –a true nerd—in her social circle in Fort Lee when we were teenagers. That was where I met my first boyfriend, Jim Forte.

Joanne pointed out others who had been in our long-ago circle of friends: Lucian and John DeLuca and Jim Cook.

I offered condolences and asked about her mom’s last days. Madeline had Parkinson’s and was a shell of herself in the last few months. But, said Joanne, “She always rallied on Sunday, the day she would visit her sisters at the old house on Summit Avenue.” It was the house where Madeline was born. When she could no longer go to her sisters on Sunday, they came to her.

I had just been talking about genograms –family trees of family dynamics – with my niece-in-law Jane Marie, who is pursuing a doctorate in social work. I believe we all come into the world with our own idiosyncratic spark of divinity, but we are poured into the mold of family. We are shaped by our parents and our siblings, our grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, our spouses and our children, and by our family story. (And those who believe in reincarnation believe we repeat those patterns over many lives and many centuries.) When you are at a wake, you are looking at and honoring a genogram during a rite of passage.

Joanne’s mother Madeline was a tough mother when we were in our teens. She had the Irish-American gift of “telling it like it is” (remember Maureen O’ Hara as John Candy’s mother in the 1991 film “Only the Lonely?”). Madeline had a throaty chuckle when she might say something completely on point but potentially devastating to the immature adolescent ego. She kept maybe 10 boxes of Entenmann’s cakes in her kitchen at all times so that none of her family would become alcoholic. Madeline felt sugar and carbs would deter the Irish urge to imbibe. (Nobody drank, but Joanne says the Entenmann calories were no good for her figure.)

And she really was a great beauty, always well-coiffed and well-dressed.

My own mother was equally tough. She once told me I could get a fever in my brain that would take away my intelligence, which she knew was the only thing I had going for me at the time.

But my mother was more tomboyish, so I never really had to try to match up to the whole “being-a-lady” thing. (Although she was furious that I didn’t want to wear nylon stockings when I was in the eighth grade and she accused me of “not wanting to compete with other girls.” I still don’t like to wear hosiery.)

At the wake, Joanne introduced me to her daughter Tara. This is where the matchmaking opportunity comes into play.

I first met Tara when she was in a stroller and was less than a year old. I was pregnant with my second son Mike.

I remember Tara at age 3 when Joanne came over to our house for dinner, and in her typically exuberant way, remained chatting until late in the night. Tara said, “Joanne [not Mom, Joanne], it’s time to go. Right now.”

The last time I saw Tara was at her First Holy Communion party at age 7.

But here was Tara, at age 25. She was in graduate school for social work. She had presence and was unafraid to interact with her mom’s friends. Like her grandmother, she was a straight shooter. She seemed to have a sense of humor and a sense of fun.

She was still bossing her mother around. “Mom, we are going out to dinner IMMEDIATELY after we leave here.”

She was beautiful, with a very mobile expressive face, like the comedic actress Katherine Heigl.

And I thought of what Joanne had said to her daughter Tara after Joanne read some funny blog entries from my son Mike about my son Matt’s wedding. Joanne wrote me and said, “I was very touched when I read Mike's blog on the wedding rehearsal. He writes beautifully, just like his mother. After reading Mike's blog on the rehearsal, I told Tara, ‘I want you to marry someone like Mary's son, Mike.’"

Hmnnn, I thought, looking at Tara. It would be nice if Mike and Tara met. My son Mike the law student is funny and caring. He likes to talk and brooks no fools. But I have no idea about how to stage a meeting. It would never have occurred to me to do this.

My mother always fancied herself a match-maker. Deep in her dementia, when she no longer remembered her four daughters were already married, she asked every doctor who treated her, “Are you single? I have a girl for you.”

I mentioned how Tara and Mike might like each other to my husband Jim. I swear he has Asperger’s, the inability to interpret social cues and social norms, because he immediately called Mike and said, “Your mom wants you to go on a date with Joanne Quinn’s daughter Tara.”

When he told me he had told Mike this, I said, ”Do you have no filters? You don’t just blurt this out. You set up an ‘accidental’ or group get-together and see how things go.”

Now I’m stymied. And Tara specifically ordered me not to write about her. Oh, well.

KNOWING YOU'RE HOME:TOM

It is something I have been saying a lot to my number one son and my number three son in the past several months.

“You’ll know when you find the place that’s home,” I’ve said.

Number one son Matt and his bride Melany have been house-hunting since the ground was buried in snow. More on their search in another post.

My number three son Tom, a high school senior, has been engaged in the college application process since September (if you don’t count the prep courses and the tutoring for two rounds of the SAT’s last year.)
I’ve been through this process twice before with my two older sons. As I’ve said before, it’s more work, more torture and more suspense than giving birth.

In September, we had a consultation with a private college counselor, Deb Shames of Upper Saddle River, NJ, to develop a list of colleges and universities to which Tom could apply. I felt confident we could handle the rest of the process…filling out the common application online, getting teacher recommendations and writing the all-important college application essay.
But Tom had taken the SATs twice, and was not able to crack 500 (out of 800) on the Math portion. I figured this was going to be a deal-breaker at many schools, although his writing and critical reading skills are excellent, and he is a fine student in many subjects.
Deb talked to Tom about his interests in creative writing, political comedy, journalism and history. She’s a big proponent of Loren Pope’s book “Colleges That Change Lives” (www.ctcl.org.).
With her suggestions and some others from Don Bosco school guidance director, Father Brendan Kilroy, we decided to have Tom apply to 16 schools: American, Bard, Catholic, Chapman in California, Emerson, Fairfield, Fordham, Goucher in Baltimore, Knox in Galesburg, Illinois, Lawrence in Wisconsin, Providence, St. John’s in Annapolis, Skidmore, Syracuse (where Tom’s brother Mike had graduated), University of Iowa (renowned graduate writing program), and Ursinus.

I was amazed to discover that a number of colleges allow you to say, “Don’t look at my SAT scores, ” including Smith, NYU, Wake Forest and Middlebury. (You can see the full list at www. fairtest.org.)

My oldest son was desperate to go to Holy Cross after he toured the college early in his senior year. But he was deferred from early decision, and ultimately did not get in there. So my strategy has become: We’ll visit a college once you are accepted.
We did, however, tour a number of colleges with Tom in the Washington, DC area in early December. When we arrived at St. John’s in Annapolis, he was given a letter telling him he was accepted. He flushed beet-red.
He stayed overnight in the dorms and went to one of the college’s vaunted seminars, when 20 students around a table pursue a discussion based on readings. There are no lectures here.
“Mom," Tom told me later, “One of the students came to Seminar in bare feet. The temperature outside was about 20 degrees. But I have to admit, he was a great contributor to the discussion.”
St. John’s has a fixed curriculum. All freshmen take the same courses, including Greek, and choir (heavy on Gregorian chant.) All sophomores, juniors and seniors also take the same set of courses. There’s no dropping a course and replacing it with something else. They’ve been doing this since the 1930’s.
Oh, and there are no textbooks. You read from the original Great Books. To study geometry, you read Euclid.
He liked St. John’s (and immediately put up the St. John’s poster with its stack of Great Books). But he worried that with a total enrollment of 400 students in Annapolis (another 600 on the Sante Fe campus), he could be limited socially fast.
And this is a school that de-emphasizes grades, doesn’t generally test, and doesn’t require research papers. Students write one long paper each spring. Tom wanted more writing.

On this trip, we also toured Goucher, which started out as a women’s college in 1885 and moved to an expansive campus in Towson in 1942. Goucher’s unique requirement is that every student do a period of study abroad. Tom really felt at home on campus. I don’t know whether it was the beautiful new student union building, or the cafeteria offerings or the fact that there were malls with Applebee's just off campus. Oh, and you can board your horse at Goucher. (Not that we have a horse.)
We also toured Catholic University (beautiful campus, nice admissions staff) and American University (big emphasis on getting political and governmental internships).

Tom was accepted at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois on December 20, and offered a merit scholarship of $10,000 a year.. He had also been accepted at the University of Iowa. (I joked to him, “There you pay your tuition in corn.")

We arranged to fly out to see the University of Iowa one weekend in January and then to drive the 100 miles to Knox College.
Iowa City turned out to be a pretty happenin’ place. The Hotel Vetro, where we stayed, had as modernist a sensibility as any boutique hotel in Manhattan. The floors were polished concrete, windows were floor to ceiling, and the bathroom with its big soaking tub had a barn-style frosted glass door that slid back and forth on a track. From our hotel windows, we looked down on street scenes of pedestrians making their way through snow in and out of coffee houses and eateries.
The campus of the University of Iowa was the city. We walked up and down streets in the freezing cold, and ducked into the university library and the student center. It was very quiet because it was winter break.

We drove out to northwest-central Illinois on Sunday. The town was founded by Reverend George W. Gale, a minister from New York State who wanted to create a college to educate ministers who would spread the gospel to the prairies. The college opened its doors in 1841, and was the site of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
On Sunday, Tom insisted we eat at a sports bar in town called “Crappy’s.” The food wasn’t crappy.
On Monday, Tom attended a number of classes. His assessment? He really liked the school, but it was in the boonies. “But you’re a train ride away from Chicago,” I reminded him.

On the drive back, it started snowing 30 miles into our return trip to Iowa City. In the final 70 miles, we passed no fewer than 25 cars that had spun off the road into ditches, along with one truck snaked into a chain-link fence on the side of the highway. My fingers were white-knuckled on the steering wheel.
When we (finally) got into Iowa City, city streets hadn’t been plowed either. “They like to do only one pass-through with the plow,” said the Hotel Vetro clerk. “So they wait for the snow to stop.”

Back home in New Jersey, we received notification from Ursinus College that Tom had been offered a $10,000 annual merit scholarship.
One of Tom’s friends had been dismissive of Ursinus. Since when is a 17-year-old suburban prep school kid the authority on colleges, I asked Tom. On the other hand, one of Jim’s partners had graduated from Ursinus.
“We’ve got to tour Ursinus, Tom,” I said.
We arranged to meet our son Mike, who lives nearby and attends law school at Villanova. Ursinus was another beautiful campus with venerable red-brick buildings co-mingling with shining new buildings, including a sports complex. This was the school that offers freshmen the chance to live in the dorm room where J.D. Salinger lived the one semester before he dropped out of Ursinus. Tom wasn’t impressed.

By mid-December, Tom had been accepted at St. John’s, Ursinus, Knox, and University of Iowa. By the end of January, he was saying his top three schools were St. John’s, Goucher, and Knox. By mid-March, he had also been accepted to Catholic (with a $14,000 scholarship), Goucher, Emerson in Boston (which Jay Leno attended), and Fairfield in Connecticut. He was deferred from early action at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, a very good school no one ever heard of.
My husband kept saying he had a gut feeling Tom would go to Providence College. (Jim thinks he’s psychic. The rest of the family knows he’s not.)

At some point in February, on a sunny Sunday when the whole world was dripping melting snow, Jim offered to drive us to Bard College, about an hour north of us on the New York State Thruway. We wandered through the campus, particularly the library. Afterwards, we stopped at a sports bar, where Tom said he had the best cheeseburger he’d ever eaten.
Tom then asked me to book him a real tour of campus. We toured early in March and chatted with a well-spoken associate admission director who looked just like Sigourney Weaver. (“Loved you in Aliens,” I wanted to say.)
Tom loved Bard’s emphasis on creative writing and creative endeavors of all kinds, including performing. The school also requires a three-week writing course for freshmen in August, called the Language and Thinking Program. And all seniors have a required senior project, which is bound into book form and kept in the library.
The students seemed quirky and free-wheeling. But the student body was large enough that Tom felt he wouldn’t be limited to the same small group of quirky folks.
The associate admission director said the college would send out acceptances and rejections the week of March 28.
“And they are all letter-size,” she said. “No big packages for acceptances and letter-size for rejections, the way other colleges do it.”

Tom decided that Bard was his first choice, but calculated his chances of acceptance as very low. "The Fiske Guide says Bard is highly selective," he said.

As March wound down, Tom got more acceptance letters, a few wait-list offerings (Fordham, Syracuse, Skidmore, Lawrence) and one rejection, from American. He also was offered a $15,000 annual merit scholarship to Chapman in California.

On Wednesday March 30, the mail brought a letter-size missive from Bard. I could feel cardboard inside. Was it a return postcard for the wait-list?
I waited until 2 pm, when Tom usually gets home. But he didn’t pull up the driveway. I ripped open the envelope. The cardboard was an ornate red sleeve that proclaimed in gilded letters:“Congratulations!”
I texted Tom, only the second text I’d ever done. U got into Bard.
Tom pulled up at 2:03. I walked to the driver’s window.
“What did I do wrong?” he asked.
“You were accepted at Bard!” I said.
“Very good, very good,” said Tom. He is very laid-back.

Applying to college is not only a drawn-out series of steps and forms and fees. It's a psychological process as well, for both child and parent. Like a pregnancy, it all seems so unreal in the beginning. You’ve always been together, living in the same family, bound by genes and proximity and shared history and stories of crazy uncles and aunts who were the bong queen.
And now you are taking steps to separate, to wake up on your own in the morning, find your own meals, do your own laundry, live your own life, be your own person.
Come back to the womb, the mother wants to shout. Let’s do this all over again. It was something, wasn’t it?

Here, by the way, is Tom’s college application essay. I think it's why he got into so many schools, despite his Math SATs.

There’s an old saying that goes,”Hire a teenager –while he still knows everything.”
Sarcasm aside, I could identify with the sentiment. I felt that nearly 12 years of classroom education had given me a broad and deep comprehension of the world around me.
My teachers spent years sharing their knowledge and perspectives and teaching me how to see society as a product of mathematics, morality, history, literature and science – the cornerstones of knowledge and civilization. My knowledge base gave me an unshakeable confidence and a sense that little was beyond my grasp.
And then I volunteered with Alzheimer’s patients at a Potomac Homes facility, and found myself in an existential crisis. What is the use of knowledge if you can’t get at it because of gunk in your brain? Who are you if you can’t remember who you are or what you’re doing?
My venture into the hazy minds of the nation’s elderly began as innocuously as one would expect. My mother drove me outside the building and with a sigh of good luck, let me off. I casually glanced at the surrounding buildings and approached the entrance. When I was buzzed in, the exterior gate burst open and immediately there stood before me a sight I would surely never forget: A 65-year-old woman in footie-pajamas. Unaware footie-pajamas were produced for anyone over 6 years of age, I was compelled to pay her a compliment. After all, they were the first and finest adult footie-pajamas I had ever seen. Looking her straight in the eye, I said “Miss, if I may be so bold. I should think you may very well be the best-dressed in this house.”
Unhesitatingly, she responded with a warm smile and an overwhelming hug. Before I could say another word, I was treated with what seemed like an endless flow of compliments. Told I was both “a beautiful daughter” and a “handsome son” and even in some cases “a wonderful mother,” I knew suddenly what these animated ladies lacked in accuracy they more than made up for in their desire to connect.
I pushed open the door with one hand and entered the house, my other arm occupied by the woman who had greeted me. As I entered the living room, an eclectic mix of smiles was cast my way, welcoming me into their realm. Having spoken with the house manager, I plopped myself and the woman in the footie-pajamas down on the couch. As if I were the missing link, the women surrounded me, studied me, prodded me, and bombarded me with questions. Eager to rise to the occasion, I answered their questions enthusiastically, even if I didn’t know the answer. Knowing that many of the answers they desired were embedded in a sorrowfully unavailable history, I painfully concluded my obligation to their momentary satisfaction superseded any to truth. Theirs was a world of uncertainty and I could make them happy, if only for a little while. The most common questions shot at me were “Who am I?”, “Are you my son?”, and “Where am I?”. Respectively, I would answer “A wonderful and charming woman,” “ No, I’m not handsome enough,” and “Right here with me, the luckiest kid in the world to have a moment of your time.”
Sweet beyond all measure, the house was a haven for my rapidly expanding ego. Indulged with praise and acclaim from every member of the house, I began to feel almost unworthy to be among such affection and warmth.
This is not to say there weren’t hostilities and power plays, subtle or outright. The lady in the footie-pajamas, Gladys, would often pick fights. Claiming she was the boss of the house, Gladys would threaten anyone who would approach me, saying “I run this place and I’ll have them kick you out lickety-split.”
When I would ask why she was being so hostile, she would say “Because you’re my daughter,” to which I would reply “Sounds reasonable.”
Over time, the antics and wit of these sharp-tongued women began to wane in amusement as stark reality set in for me. Deprived of many of their memories and much of what some would call identity, these women challenged my understanding of the human being. Slowly, I began to grow confused over what exactly constitutes the core of personhood. Like a painting broken down into tiny pieces, I studied their mental profiles in the hopes of gaining some defined sense of humanity.
I asked them questions about current events they’d been told about but couldn’t remember. I queried them about a past that was at best a tenuous string of random events. I began to pity them. I began to dread that condition. I began to fear what they represented – the slow deterioration and prolonged death of the mind. School hadn’t prepared me for this physical and psychological draining away. If the condition of the immortal soul was dependent upon the character of the mortal mind, how could the soul be eternal? And, in the here and now, what is the self if you can’t remember the last 5 or 10 years of your life, or who or where you are?
I became angry and frustrated by the lack of answers until one day I finally realized that I could deny their mental stability but I couldn’t deny the fact that they were eagerly and happily partaking in questioning me, like scientists with limited tools. Despite what I said or what I confessed, they looked at me in the same admirable light, giving me the same caring and considerate compliments, and loving me regardless of who I was. I realized the disorder didn’t wear away their personality; it winnowed away what wasn’t their personality. Time and their condition allowed them to revert to who they really were, not bound by lies or past, but liberated into the ever-present. These ladies were not to be pitied. They were to be enjoyed as they enjoyed everyone else.
My time at Potomac Homes put me in crisis, but ultimately gave me a new comprehension and admiration for the human spirit. Experience was my teacher; hardened thought and preconceptions needed to be burned away, unlearned.
Good schooling can give you the tools to mine experience for truth and to be of service to others. I look to college to delve further into great thoughts and great minds, while understanding that the experience of curiosity and concern for and connection to others are the greatest tools for lifelong learning---even if you’re a little hazy about who you are.

When did our children get older than we are?

It was April 5, 1981, a Sunday. I was working for Channel 5 News in New York City and heading to a shoot with my camera crew when the voice of the assignment editor crackled over the radio.
“Mary, your mother called,” he said. “Your sister had the baby.”
“Which sister?” I asked.
“What?’ he replied.
“Which sister?” I reiterated.
“Dunno,” he said.
Margaret and Marian, my identical twin sisters two and a half years younger than I, had gotten pregnant roughly the same week on two different continents. Margaret was in Portugal with her husband Greg. Marian was living in Tucson with her husband Michael (or “Benny”, as we call him) and her toddler son Michael.
By the time they were ready to deliver, Margaret and Marian were both in Tucson. As it turned out, Marian gave birth first, to Louis Rocco (named after his maternal and paternal grandfathers).
On April 9, Margaret gave birth to her first child, Hannah Leah, named after her maternal great-grandmother Hannah Hickey.
Margaret and Marian roomed together at the hospital. There was some sibling rivalry, as I recall. Baby Louis initially had some problems, as I recall, including a big bump on his head. But those issues resolved.
We Amoroso girls have always been wild for babies, and there was much rejoicing over the double blessing of two new family seedlings.
Louis and Hannah didn’t really grow up together. Hannah’s family lived in Romania for two different periods, because Hannah’s dad had diplomatic postings. And they moved to the Washington, DC area, since Greg worked for the Department of State.
Louis’ family lived mostly in Arizona, though there was a 5-year period when they lived in Northern New York so that they could be near Marian’s family.
Many of us were in Maryland for Hannah’s graduation from St Mary’s College in 2003. I remember Margaret introducing us to her new in-laws from her second marriage.
My own firstborn, Matthew, who joined the pack in 1982, became very close to his cousin Lou, and they traveled through Europe together in their early 20s. Matt moved to Phoenix to live with Lou for a short time.
Lou went to work in the restaurant industry. His strong work ethic and sunny disposition have helped him advance.
After college, Hannah went back to school at Johns Hopkins to get her bachelor of science degree in nursing. She works as a surgical nurse and has had graduate training in nursing informatics (using computer technology in nursing).
Hannah lives with her boyfriend Brad in a beautifully renovated rowhouse in Baltimore. Louis patiently waded through the process of buying a “short sale” home outside of Chandler, AZ and now owns a hacienda with pool that he purchased for half its original price.
I have gotten to spend time with Hannah in recent years at my house during the holidays and at Margaret’s house in Maryland for Hannah’s twin nieces’ birthday party in May. Hannah is smart and drole and feisty, and she is the great beauty of the family (although her sisters are right up there in the looks department).
I have seen a lot less of Louis, because he is so far West. But he was here for my son Matt’s wedding, and I am happy to report that he remains a sunny, easy-going guy with awesome people skills. This is the boy whose mother insisted he was potty-trained when he was only two and who peed on my rugs. I guess it added character to the rugs.
And now Louis and Hannah turn 30 this week. They are both responsible and full of life, and are on track to put their elders into nursing homes when we dodder off into the sunset.
Happy birthday, you full-grown flowers of our family.

Finding Hannah

The family tree is a project you inevitably have to tackle when you have children. I made several forays into ancestry.com a couple of years back when my daughter Maeve had to do a family tree. A couple of days ago, my cousin Kathleen wrote me to say that her daughter Alexandra had to do a "heritage project" for her senior year of high school. Kathleen remembered I had been bugging her mother, my godmother Aunt Ann, for family information about our mothers' side of the family. Now that Aunt Ann has passed, Kathleen was hoping I still had some info.

I pulled out paperwork that had been languishing on a shelf, most notably, our maternal grandmother Hannah's 1891 birth certificate from Templeglantine, County Limerick in Ireland.Our mothers' sister, Aunt Peggy had kindly sent it to me several years back.

And I found myself on the hunt on the Internet once again. I can get pretty lost in genealogical research:It is indeed reaching through the mist to find forebears in other decades, other centuries. I also called Aunt Peggy, the last surviving of Hannah's children, to help fill in the blanks. Here's what I found.

Hannah Casey was born August 3, 1891 in Templeglantine, a village in County Limerick. Her father was Patrick Casey, an agricultural laborer. Her mother was Mary Connors Casey.
According to the 1901 Irish Census, Patrick (40) and Mary (35) had the following children: Ellen (12), Johanna (9—our grandma Hannah Hickey)), Catherine (7), John (4). Father-in-law Maurice Connors and mother-in-law Mary Connors were also living with them.
According to the 1911 Irish Census, Patrick and Mary had living with them Catherine (17), John (14), Patrick (10) and Bridget (7). Father-in-law and mother-in-law (age 90 and 85) were still with them and the grandparents could not read or write, but they spoke both English and Irish. In 1911, Patrick and Mary Casey had been married 27 years. The Census indicated they had 9 children born alive, and 8 still living. (There is no indication of Mary Casey, who became Mary O’Connell, mother of Father Dave, Father Jack and Father Francis, or of Nora Casey (born about 1894).)
Aunt Peggy Lapinski, Hannah Hickey’s daughter who is now 87, recalls Aunt Nellie Casey O’Halloran (her husband had a bar at 92nd Street and 3rd Avenue); Aunt Katie Casey (Bridie Flavin’s grandmother, very religious, all of a sudden she would break out in the hymn “Amazing Grace” ); Aunt Nora Casey (who between her first husband Mr. Mahoney and her second husband Pat Toomey had something like 13 children among them),;Aunt Mary Casey O’Connell; Aunt Bridie Casey (she came to America, had an unhappy marriage, left her husband and went back to Ireland); Uncle Jack Casey (who lived in the Bronx, but took all his kids out of school and went back to Ireland as well), and Uncle Patty Casey (married to Aunt Beatrice.) And, of course, Hannah Casey Hickey.
Her husband Michael Hickey was born May 27, 1894 in New York City. In the 1900 Census, he was listed as age 6, living with his father Michael Hickey who was born in Ireland in November of 1870 and immigrated to the US in 1891;, and with his mother Margaret Hurley Hickey, who immigrated to the US in 1886. (Hard to read her DOB, but it looks like March 1865.) Father Michael was a longshoreman. Father and mother had been married 8 years. Their address was 243 Madison Street in Manhattan. (That’s the Lower East Side near the end of Canal Street.)
Aunt Ann McGuire said Margaret Hurley Hickey died in 1912, but I would place it more between 1900 and 1902. My mother said Margaret Hurley Hickey was bending over to change the ice in the ice box when a whalebone in her corset pierced her heart. (I have a portrait of Margaret Hurley Hickey, which hung for years in Hannah Casey Hickey’s front room. Margaret Hickey looks just like Aunt Ann McGuire.)
The 1910 Census shows a Michael Hickey living on 44th Street in Manhattan in his second marriage with a wife named Mary. They are both about 38 and have been married 8 years. He is a coachman with a private family; she is a laundress. No sign of son Mike, our Grandpa. (There are A LOT of Michael Hickeys in NYC in 1910. But this one seems to fit for Great-grandfather.)
The new stepmother and young Mike didn’t get along and at some point he left his father’s house. A Mabel Hurley, age 40 is running a boardinghouse at 241 East 32nd Street in Manhattan in the Census of 1910. Her sister Elizabeth Hurley and brother John J. Hurley live with her, as do 9 boarders. No sign of Mike, who would be 16. But my mother Mary Hickey Amoroso said that the new stepmother chased out young Mike and he went to live in Auntie Hurley’s boardinghouse. That’s where he courted Hannah, who was nearly 3 years older than he. He would drop down notes on a string and a hanger to the window of her room.
How did they meet? Aunt Peggy Lapinski says young Mike Hickey drove for Bloomingdale’s and Hannah Casey worked as a domestic in charge of linens for Jay Gould, probably Jay Gould II, son of the first Jay Gould, a robber baron of the mid 1800s.
They married around 1918, when Hannah was 27 and Mike was 24. (She always shaved her age on the Census survey.)
The Census of 1920 has Hannah and Michael married and living on Lexington Avenue and 96th Street. He is a chauffeur. No children. The Census indicates Hannah arrived in US in 1915. We have a passenger listing that shows her arriving in New York October 23, 1916. (A Nora Casey arrived June 26, 1916).
The Census of 1930 shows Hannah and Michael living on 96th Street with five children: Michael (9), Mary (8) (my mom), Margaret(6)(Aunt Peggy), Patrick (4) and Helen (1). No baby Ann yet. Grandpa is listed as a commercial chauffeur. (Aunt Ann said he was a chauffeur for Bloomingdale’s and American Meter Company.) When he lost his job, he became depressed and violent and ended up at Rockland Psychiatric through WWII. I remember him as the grandfather who sat in the far corner of the kitchen in the railroad flat at Lexington and 96th Street, and played his harmonica. Through the window behind him, clotheslines stretched out like tentacles to other buildings.
The 1930 Census places great-grandfather Mike Hickey and his second wife Mary at 8th Avenue and 118th Street. He is 59 and lists his occupation as steamship company but he seems to be unemployed. Mary calls herself a housewife.
The Census of 1930 also shows Hannah’s sister Mary O’Connell (age 36) living with her husband David on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. The following children are listed: David (15), John (12), Madeline (8) Catherine (6), Leonard (4), Bill (almost 3) and Theresa (1). (David, as a Dominican priest, organized my adoption to Mary and Lou Amoroso and officiated at my wedding in 1979.)
Aunt Peggy says the O’Connells lived on 69th Street in Manhattan. Once they won a live pig in a raffle at church. They had to bring the pig home and stash it in the bathtub until they slaughtered it.
Peggy remembers a cousin Eileen O’Connell who worked for many years at the Mayflower Hotel in New York. Cousin Will O’Connell died during World War II in Guam the exact same day that roving reporter Ernie Pyle was killed April 18, 1945 in Japan.
Aunt Nora Casey Toomey lived in a brownstone at 292 Hoyt Street in Brooklyn with her many children from three marriages. St. Agnes Church was right across the street. The Hickey cousins loved taking the subway to her house. “It was like the country,” said Aunt Peggy. “There was a tree in the backyard.”
Aunt Nora was an incredible cook and baker. Aunt Peggy said that during World War II, when supplies were limited, Aunt Nora made a delicious cake with tomato soup. She also rolled nuts in cream cheese. People rushed to buy her cakes at bake sales.
Her husband Pat Toomey worked for the New York subway system. (So did Patty Casey, according to Aunt Peggy. Patty Casey also worked as a bartender.)
Aunt Nora’s son Jack Toomey died at Anzio Beach in World War II. He was my mother’s favorite cousin. “I loved Jack Toomey,” she would say plaintively decades later.
After Great-Grandfather Michael Hickey’s second wife died, his son Mike Hickey and daughter-in-law Hannah managed to get him a 6-room apartment right across the hall in their building at 1512 Lexington Avenue. I think my mother told me they called him “Red Mike.”
Red Mike would invite the ladies in, throw open his cupboards to show them his wide array of dishes and kitchenware, and say to the ladies, “All you have to do is take off your hat and move in.” He also had a piano in his apartment.
. “He talked like a dockworker, loud and bossy, “ said Aunt Peggy.“He’d go to the door of his apartment and bellow across the hall to my mother, ‘Coffee.’ One time Momma got mad and when he came through the door of our apartment, she took a broom and hit him across his can.”
He had what they call a railroad apartment (as did Hannah Hickey and her brood), where you walked straight through one room to get to the next. So each room (with the exception of the first and the last) had doors on both ends. Red Mike took off all the doors, chopped them up, and burned them for firewood.
Pretty much the whole building was Irish, and a lot was family. Nana Hickey was on one floor. My parents Mary and Lou Amoroso were apparently on the third floor after they married. There were two different McGuire families: the second-floor McGuires (little Mrs. McGuire) and the top-floor McGuires (big Mrs. McGuire, Aunt Ann’s husband Ackie’s mother.)
“Ackie’s mother worked as a nurse, and his father worked two jobs, so –unlike a lot of young men at the time—Ackie did chores. He was embarrassed and tried to hide it, but I’d see him hanging out the laundry,” said Aunt Peggy. “I’d say to him, ‘You’re going to make someone a good husband someday.’ ”
When Aunt Peggy and Uncle Walter (we called him Uncle Whitey) married, they moved into an apartment right next door at 1510 Lexington Avenue. There was a man with a violin next door who would open his window and play the most amazing Irish diddies.
“We’d all hang out the air shaft and clap and stamp our feet,” Aunt Peggy recalled.
For sun-bathing, there was “tar beach.” The girls would slip into their swimsuits, grab a towel and head to the roof for some solar rays
Nana Hickey had some trouble adjusting to her daughters’ choices in husbands. Mary Amoroso married an Italian-American, which seemed to Hannah Hickey like a kind of miscegenation. Aunt Peggy married a man of Polish extraction.
“Momma would say, “Can’t you find someone of your own kind?” ” Aunt Peggy recalled.
Nana Hickey was very social and very kind. People fresh off the boat from the Old Country knew they could find a place to sleep at Hannah Hickey’s. She had 6 children and people might sleep 3 to a bed.
And then there was Nellie Kimmey. Nellie was a widow living with her in-laws when she came to visit with Hannah Hickey over a cup of tea. Nellie headed home to find that her in-laws had packed her possessions and put them outside their front door.
Nellie went back to Hannah Hickey’s in a panic.
“You can stay here,” said Hannah.
Nellie Kimmey lived with Hannah and Mike Hickey for 40 years. She was still there at Lexington and 96th after Hannah died in the mid-Sixties.

J.D. Salinger slept here

The New York Times had a column today about Ursinus College’s clever use of the fact that author J.D. Salinger spent a semester there in 1938 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/education/21winerip.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&sq=Ursinus&st=cse&scp=1=). The college in Collegeville, PA sponsors a creative writing contest and awards the freshman winner a scholarship and the right to live in J.D. Salinger’s old room for freshman year.

My 17-year-old son Tom—who wants to major in creative writing or journalism-- was accepted to Ursinus. We toured the college in January and hooted when we heard about the contest to award J.D. Salinger’s room.

“They probably haven’t changed the sheets since Salinger slept there,” my law school student son Mike said.

Times columnist Michael Winerip took the notion a step further and asked prior occupants of the J.D. Salinger room which author’s room they would most like to sleep in. They picked Dave Eggers, Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy.

An interesting question. I asked around.
\
My 28-year-old son Matt said he’d most like to sleep in Michael Lewis’ room. Michael Lewis is the rogue financial journalist who’s looked at the gambling inherent in various financial markets. He also wrote “The Blind Side,” the story of ghetto kid Michael Oher who was adopted by a wealthy family and became a big football star.

My 24-year-old son Mike said Ernest Hemingway. “Somethings tells me his room would be in a cabin in the woods, or in a room above a bar, or in a hotel in a war-torn city,” Mike wrote.

My high school senior son Tom said Kurt Vonnegut “because there would be some weird s..t in that room.”

My high school sophomore daughter Maeve said the French social commentator Montesquieu or the metaphysical poet John Donne, “because they’re smart.”

I would like to live in poet Emily Dickinson’s room. In some ways, I feel as if I already have.

Dickinson seems to have had agoraphobia. She was reclusive, seldom going out in public through her adult years and keeping up friendships through a torrid correspondence by mail. She got to the point where she would stand in the upstairs hallway and listen to the conversation of guests downstairs in the parlor, but she would not go down and participate in the conversation. There was a lot of scandal and drama in her close-knit family—her brother Austin had a longstanding affair (Emily apparently never met her brother’s mistress), her mother had a paralytic stroke that made Emily and her sister Lavinia caregivers for a number of years. But Emily was not part of the give-and-take of the greater community.

Her home, particularly her room, was her eggshell. All that she needed for sustenance and for creativity was inside. Within her room, she luxuriated in the life and playfulness and intimacy of her own mind.

I have to fight off my own tendency toward agoraphobia. I feel I have pretty much everything I need for a rich and fulfilling life, between my own thoughts, the written words of others, and field reports from my family in their walks of life. Add music and trips outside to see the sky and the moon and the water in the stream rushing over the rocks, and trips to the recycling center to see what other people are casting off. You have a daily kaleidoscope of experience to be grateful for.

Imagine if Emily Dickinson had the Internet, that thing with digital feathers, the richness of so many minds in a virtual reservoir invented by an American vice-president in a time far in the future. She could only hope.

Roots, Snakes and Magic Hands

My husband called on his cell phone Sunday as he was taking his daily walk on the road past our front lawn.
“There’s sewer water on the lawn,” he said.
I went and checked and ,indeed, a clay chimney-shaped pipe that protrudes from the lawn was spilling out dirty water.
I knew what this was. This happened once before, maybe six or seven years ago. Tree roots invade the pipe and cause blockages. You snake it out and the water goes through. But I couldn’t remember who did the work for us
The next day, I called a plumbing company we’ve used before that advertises in the yellow pages as handling main sewer lines. I had no idea who to use.
The guy came. He tried to pry open the sewer cover at the base of our driveway near the road, but couldn’t get it open. He tried to clear out a white plastic PVC pipe that protrudes from the lawn some 30 feet up from the base of the driveway but couldn’t. He noted another protruding plastic pipe 50 feet up from the first pipe.
“Are you sure this isn’t a septic system?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s city water and city sewer.”
He said, “I can try snaking out the line, but I have only 110 feet of snake. It’s maybe 175 feet from where the water is leaking out by the house to the sewer cover at the base of the drive. If the blockage is located more than 110 feet away, I’ll have to call another man and a truck.”
I jerry-rigged a heavy-duty extension cord for him from the back deck to overflowing clay pipe. He hooked up the snake –a spirally metal tube 8 feet in the length –to an electric-powered drill, and began feeding it down the throat of the pipe. The black water spilled out as he rotated the snake and drew it out to add more lengths of tubing. But the water did not go down.
I watched him, as he lengthened the snake to maybe 40 feet. He kept feeding and rotating the tubing, but the water didn’t budge.
“This isn’t working,” he said. “Too many roots in the pipe. You’ve got to replace the pipe in the ground under the lawn. It will take two men and a backhoe.”
“How much will that cost?” I asked.
“Six thousand,” he said. “I can do it this week.”
“I have to talk to my husband,” I said. The time-honored ploy to avoid committing to repair people.
I talked to my husband. He didn’t know any more than I did.
“Should we get another bid?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“Well, I guess we better get it done,” he said. “We don’t want to pollute.”
I set up the appointment to dig up the lawn and replace the pipe for the following week, since I was going to Boston on Wednesday to go to my sister’s colorectal surgical consult. Nora, who is an ovarian cancer survivor, has a blockage in her intestines. (Another blockage of waste material … Is the universe trying to tell me something?) She’s been living on liquid nutrition administered through a tube and a port in her body, but she wants to get the intestines unblocked so she can eat real food again.
As I sat in the waiting room with Nora’s husband John, a real mechanical whiz, I told him the story of the sewage seepage and the fact that I was going to replace the sewer line under the lawn.
He said, “ I wouldn’t do that. I would try another company to snake out the root blockage.”
John, who helps take care of our summer house properties in Northern New York, had just gone through the process of snaking our sewer line for the summer house in the village of Cape Vincent. (Once again:Is the universe trying to tell me something?) . Our summer house basement had backed up with two feet of water. John called a company that snaked out the sewer line. He watched the water in the basement recede immediately,
Nora got good news from the surgeon about the practicality of unblocking her intestines. I went home to cancel the appointment to put in a new main sewer line and to call another company to try snaking once again.
The woman from Roto Rooter went online to look at the outlines of my property ( and my long front lawn and driveway) on Google Earth.
“I’ve got a gut feeling we can fix this,” she said after hearing my story about the failed snaking. “It sounds to me like the first plumber was looking for a big-paying job. I’ll send out my guys tomorrow morning, so they have plenty of time to investigate and act.”
An hour later, a Roto Rooter truck pulled up in my driveway.
“I thought you were coming tomorrow,” I said.
He said, “ I wanted to scope the place out today.”
I showed the Roto Rooter man the metal sewer cover in the front of the driveway, the two plastic PVC pipes pressed into the front lawn, and the clay pipe overflowing with dirty water very close to the house.
The Roto Rooter guy shone a flashlight down one of the PVC pipes in the ground.
“This looks like a clean-out pipe,” he said, referring the the pipe one could send a snake down to clear out blockages. “But it should have a cap to block debris from getting into it.”
“We’ve owned this house 17 years, and these plastic things have never been capped,” I said.
He yelled into the PVC pipe. “Listen to that echo,” he said.
The Roto Rooter man got a hammer from his truck and asked me to bang on the metal sewer cover at the base of our driveway.
I banged, and he put his ear down very close to the PVC pipe 30 feet from the sewer cover.
“I can hear the banging through the pipe,” he said, “That means there’s no blockage between the sewer cap and the first PVC pipe, because a blockage would interfere with sound transmission.”
“Try the second PVC pipe,” I said. I liked being part of the mystery-solving team and I like banging on metal.
He put his ear down by the second PVC pipe, and I banged on the sewer cover. Eighty feet from my banging, he could clearly hear the sound through the pipe, which meant that long stretch of pipe was clear.
“So the blockage is between the second PVC pipe and the clay pipe,”said the Roto Rooter guy. “ No more than 30 feet. That’s good news. We’ll snake that area tomorrow.”
We were saying farewells when the Roto Rooter guy said he wanted to try one more thing. He took, his 8-foot length of spirally metal snake tubing and he jabbed it by hand into the throat of the clay pipe where the dirty water was spilling. He jabbed and he stirred by hand, no power drill. In no more than 15 seconds, the water dropped down in the pipe. We moved to the next clean-out pipe—the PVC pipe 30 feet away-- and we could hear water rushing through. The clog was broken.
“You have magic hands,” I said..
I suggested he come back the next day to do a thorough snake-out anyway. He said he would bring his pressurized water blower to move any debris in the pipe down to the city sewer line. And he would cap the two PVC clean-outs.
I called my brother-in-law John to tell him the story and thank him for his cautionary advice.
“Call me anytime,” he said.

The Gang's All Here

On Sunday, I went to a ladies’ lunch with women I’d worked with at my newspaper back in the day. Two were still at the newspaper. Two had moved on to the NY Post. One is now teaching at a local college and I am not doing much of anything except helping my number three son get into college and working phlegmatically on some fiction pieces.

These are women I’ve known since my 24-year-old son Mike was an infant. Women whose pregnancies I remember. And now a couple of them are empty-nesters. We are at the stage where, as my friend K has just done, we help our young adult children move into their apartments, arrange the furniture, maybe even paint the walls.

As we ate eggs and fruit and coffee at the Governeur Morris Inn in Morristown, we provided, in Facebook parlance, “status updates.”

Actually, we talked about Facebook. Some of us were on it. Some of us weren’t. (B talked about how she was a “Luddite” about the new online world. Nice word choice..she was always a good writer.) O said she had seen horrible, vile things on one of her sons’ Facebook “wall” (nothing he had written, but an interchange between two of his friends) and so she insisted that he “friend” her so she could see what was going on. My teen-age children refuse to “friend” me.

We talked about how we shudder at the insipid sweetness of some of the messages. (“Love you, honey.” "You are the best!") We are all journalists, so we think of ourselves as kind of hard-edged. We also talked about how, as the Baby Boomers have come to Facebook in the past couple of years, the younger generation has migrated off, to a certain extent.

I was asked, as the only mother with a married child, how to behave as “mother of the groom.” J was upset with her own mother-in-law, who had recently failed to host the rehearsal dinner for J’s 42-year-old brother-in-law.

“Well, that is the one thing you’re supposed to do,” I said. “As parents of the groom, we hosted the rehearsal dinner and the post-wedding brunch. And we contributed some money. My son and daughter-in-law made all the decisions, which was how it should be. They even helped us pick the rehearsal dinner site.”

I noted that one of my friends whose daughter is marrying in May said that the new wedding contribution formula is not 99 percent the bride’s family, but now one-third bride’s family, one-third groom’s family, and one-third the couple.

This was a group where sons predominate, and they clucked a little at that formula.

We talked about the apparent rootlessness of some of our children who’ve graduated from college. It is a stage of life where there is no clear path to move on, and the poor economy and high jobless rate only muddy the waters further. Some of my friends said they told their children they would pay for college, but not for graduate school.

O said that her oldest son –in the middle of college—had decided to go to boot camp and join the California Highway Patrol. She displayed a photo of him, handsome and sober-looking in his uniform. He assists disabled cars, deals with drunks, and escorts lost pets off the highways. He makes a very good salary. She said he’s been interested in firefighting and law enforcement and community service since he was 3. It warmed the heart of every mother around the table to hear about a young man who’s pursued his dream and found his place.

I asked about B’s husband. An investigative reporter on our newspaper, he was the older man entranced by a younger woman when they married some 20 years ago. He always had great energy and enthusiasm. At age 73, he still teachers aerobics classes.

B said she had recently interviewed Jane Fonda, also 73, who talked about how good the sex is with her new partner. We didn’t have much to say about that.

We had talked about my bio-siblings (children of my birth-mother) who came to my son’s wedding. S told me about a story she had done on New York lawyer Seymour Fenichel who ran a baby-selling adoption business starting in the ‘70s and whose now-grown adoptees are searching out their roots through a Facebook forum. “I read that story,” I told her. “It came through an adoption listserv I’m part of.” You can tell S lives her stories.

We talked about the state of local journalism. My friends said the precipitous decline of newspapers seems to have eased somewhat. My old newspaper is even hiring to replace reporters who have left. Rupert Murdoch’s New Corps iPad app online newspaper is hiring.

But the atmosphere at work is different, they said. There used to be a great sense of camaraderie, of fun, of constant conversation. Now the new reporter hires may be “mo-jos”—mobile journalists, who work out of their cars. My old newspaper moved out of the building it owned, decommissioned the newsroom.

“It’s like working in the insurance industry now, everyone in his own cubicle,” said one of my friends.

The Prodigal Cat Returns

The cat is back!
My son Mike called me when I was browsing the Suffern Furniture closing sale Sunday to let me know our cat Atticus had returned after vanishing outside ten days ago.
We are not cat people. The cat adopted us.
In mid-September, my 17-year-old son Tom had heard determined meowing outside his bedroom window. When we investigated, we found that a kitten had taken up residence behind a shed that sits against the house by the side door to the basement.
We shone a flashlight into the crevice and saw the kitten’s eyes staring at us. We meowed and the cat meowed back.
We bought cat food and kitty litter at the A&P. We began leaving food for the cat in a dish outside the shed. We angled the dish so that we could watch from a window in our dining room and see the cat eating.
But the kitten was extremely skittish and ran away when we ventured near. Even when the cat was eating, she would feel our eyes upon her, turn around and then skedaddle back into the shed.
Once I surprised her climbing in a tree. She made a mad leap from six feet up in the tree to the shed.
Another time my husband Jim saw her playing with squirrels. I say “her” now, but at that point we couldn’t tell whether she was male or female. My daughter Maeve named her Atticus after a character in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” My son Matt and his then-fiancé Melany came one Sunday and sat outside the shed, waiting for a glimpse of the cat. Melany comes from cat people.
For a couple of days in October, Atticus seemed to have vanished. Her nests in and around the shed were empty when we shone the flashlight in. So we didn’t put out her food. Then she walked up the steps to the back deck, meowing insistently to express her hunger. She ran away when we opened the kitchen door, but we got the message. We put her food out.
By December, it was starting to get cold, and we worried about Atticus surviving in frigid weather. (Although Jim’s brother Kevin’s fiancé Cindi – a true cat lover with four cats of her own--- said feral cats seemed to be able to survive in the cold.)
About two weeks before Christmas, with a combination of “meowing” and a bowl of food, Jim (who thinks of himself as a cat whisperer) succeeded in getting Atticus to scamper through the open front door. She still wouldn’t let us near her. But she took over the house, going everywhere but the kitchen, where the dogs were ensconced. She quickly learned to go in the kitty litter, but also liked to poop in the houseplants on the front staircase landing. (Melany’s mom Susan –a true cat expert—suggested putting ground black pepper into the houseplant soil to deter the cat, but that didn’t seem to work.)
We’d wake up in the middle of the night to find Atticus standing over us in bed or curled in the crook of our knees. If I were writing out checks for bills on the dining room table, she would come and sit on the table and watch me. If I were doing laundry in the basement, she would materialize down there, somehow getting through the back hall with its open door to the kitchen and the ferocious dogs.
She loved to run in front of you when you were walking down the stairs, running with loud and heavy footfalls for a 5-pound cat. She loved to run and chase balls down our long second-floor hallway. She ran like a squirrel.
As she settled in, we bought cat toys, a couple of fluffy mats for a bed, a scratching post and a carrier (pink, it was the only small carrier left at PETCO) for the day when we could bring her to the veterinarian.
A week or two after she came indoors, we managed to get her into the carrier and take her to the vet. The vet did a quick check and announced, “It’s a girl.” Atticus tested negative for feline leukemia and feline AIDS. We had her spayed the next day. (My neighbor Mei Ling, a nuanced animal lover, had begged me – even if we didn’t adopt the cat—to have her spayed before returning her to the wild.)
The vet felt that the cat---estimated to be 6 or 7 months old – had probably been a house kitten in her early months, because she seemed comfortable around people.
Jim, an avowed dog-lover, had a soft spot for the cat. I would find him laughing over her in the bedroom some nights. Maeve would cradle and kiss the cat with all the pent-up intensity of an adolescent. Tom had contradictory feelings: He would meow at the cat, but also was distressed when the cat peed on his bed.
And then, after all the snow and the freezing temperatures of this winter, came two days of delicious warmth (in the fifties and sixties) on February 16th and 17th. I brought the dogs out to romp in the warmth, and it seemed a shame to imprison Atticus indoors. I opened the front door and let her out. She moved a couple of steps out onto the porch, hesitated and then tried to run back inside. But I had shut the door. She scampered down the steps and around the side of the house.
And that was the last we saw of her.
Temperatures dropped to 14 degrees. It snowed six inches on top of at least a foot of frozen snow. Had she fallen through and been trapped in the snow? We shone the flashlight in and around the shed where she had previously taken shelter. No cat.
We would walk onto the front porch and meow suggestively. No response.
We put out Meow Mix, angling the bowl of food so that we could see from the dining room window. The food was gone by next day, but we never saw the cat. Jim said the squirrels had eaten the food.
We saw tiny footprints in the snow, four paw-like spherical impressions. Jim said they were squirrel footprints.
My daughter Maeve blamed me for losing the cat and I blamed myself. Jim said he would have let the cat out under the same circumstances.
I just thought we had established some bond with the cat and she would have come back. When our dogs escaped, they always came back. True, when Duke (our Border Collie mix) was younger, he might range far and wide, and 8-year-old Tom would be chasing him through snowy backyards. The very agile Fella (our Rhodesian Ridgeback mix) escaped every day for a while last year –he could jump up an 8-foot-high stone wall and land on top – but he would just run around the perimeter of the house and wait patiently on the deck until I opened the kitchen door.
Jim thought another family had found Atticus and taken her in.
“But how could that be?” I said. “You couldn’t get close enough to her to get her inside.”
Melany, by now Matt’s wife, said that one of her cats would sometimes disappear for two days at a time. Jim talked to a work friend who seems to be a cat hoarder (10 cats) who told him cats could disappear for 10 days to two weeks.
“So is the cat an indoor cat or an outdoor cat?” Jim asked the work friend.
“Well, if the cat disappears for two weeks when you let it outside, I guess it’s an indoor cat,” the friend replied.
My husband has unresolved grief issues which tend to make him jump to the worst conclusions. When the possibility arose a couple of years back that Duke had ingested rat poison, Jim just said,”He’ll be dead by the morning” and continued eating his dinner.(Instead of concurring, Matt took Duke to the vet, who stuffed the dog full of charcoal to absorb any poisons and vitamin K to promote clotting. Duke lived, although I think he hadn’t actually eaten any rat poison.)
So I think my husband really thought the cat was dead or lost to us forever. Within days of Atticus’ disappearance, Jim fed the dogs all the canned cat food he himself had bought for Atticus ( a rare thing and a sign of Jim’s devotion because Jim doesn’t buy pet food, or human food, for that matter).
The rest of us still harbored hope. On Saturday, Maeve dug through the snow and found a metal pet gate that we had stored outside. She set it up in a corner of the porch. On Sunday morning, I bought more canned cat food. Maeve dumped a can into a bowl and set it inside the fenced-in area. A little while later, she saw Atticus pawing at the gate and meowing with hunger. Mike ran out the kitchen door and around the side of the house to track the cat if she bolted. The cat ran into nearby bushes. Maeve grabbed the bowl of food and lured the cat back inside.
As I write, the cat is getting a little shut-eye on his fluffy mats. (His tail is stirring slightly:Is he dreaming of running with the squirrels?) It is as if the disappearance never happened. (Although with the wisdom of recent experience, we will now take the cat out only on a leash, something our vet does with her cats.)
Jim thinks the cat’s whiskers have grown exponentially during her sabbatical (sa-cattical?) And the cat seems to have gotten bolder toward the dogs. The door to the kitchen remains firmly shut, but Atticus sticks her paw under the door, full well knowing that barkers (maybe biters) reside there. And Duke, whose new position is as sentinel on the other side of the door and whose new goal is to kill the cat, sits mesmerized when he sees that disembodied cat paw flailing around under his nose.
I guess we have become cat people.

The Best Man Remembers: The Speeches, The Dancing, The After-Parties

These are brother Mike McQueeny's reminiscences about Matt and Melany's wedding...

WEDDING RECEPTION, DECEMBER 31, 9:30 p.m. immediately after Mike's speech:
The maid and matron of honor gave touching speeches about Melany’s friendship throughout the years. Melany’s mother would give a beautifully elegant speech about the strength and courage Melany’s shown whilst dealing with the heartbreak of the loss of her father. They all touched on the person Matt is, and how those similar levels of compassion exist in both of them, and are only amplified by their love for each other.

And then came the other McQueeny speeches. As fellow groomsman JIG would come up and tell me afterwards, “Jeez, you McQueeny’s are rough. I don’t want none of you guys giving me any speeches. You know these are TOASTS, not ROASTS, right?”

My mom would get up there to highlight the years Matt lived at home without a glimmer of hope that he would meet someone as magnificent as Melany. About how, despite the fact Matt and Mel had been dating for months, Matt had not told my parents about her, and had to give my mom a “cheat sheet” of quick facts about Melany to make it seem as though he had been telling us about her the entire time.

Then my dad, ever the competitor with his sons, got up and tried to outdo my roasts by highlighting how glad he was that Matt finally married Melany. Mainly because of how wonderful Melany is, but also because Matt’s dating record pegs him only as “a once-a-decade dater” and that if they didn’t end up getting hitched, there wasn’t much hope until the 2020’s. This prompted my mom to give the classic TV producer move of dragging her thumb across her neck, telling my dad to cut it out.

Then came the dancing.

Or more accurately to say, the over-30 dance party. As myself, along with my cousins, and Matt and Mel’s friends in their 20s looked on helplessly, our mothers, aunts, and uncles poured onto the dance floor. They were not “partying like it was 1999” so much as “dancing like it was 1969.”

For the first and last time in my life, I watched mortified as my dad attempted to muster any kind of dance moves that his genetics of Irish-Catholic blood had for centuries been successfully able to suppress. My Uncle Benny tore it up, doing his best Saturday Night Fever, or at the least, Saturday Night Headache. Even Grandma Betty put all of us young 20-something wall-flowers to shame, as she boogy woogy woogied til she just couldn’t boogie no more. Then came Pastor Stephens. (Despite all the varied Unitarian jokes I could throw in here, for the sake of Melany still feigning tolerance of us, I’ll avoid these jokes at all cost.) While I have no clue what the actual tenets of Unitarianism are, after watching Pastor Stephens, I can say dancing is undoubtedly their 11th commandment. Despite the fact that the dance floor was made of linoleum, all these characters nevertheless effectively cut a rug.

I spent my time walking around, saying hello to as many friends and family members as I could. Suddenly, Ralph, one of the members of the WSITS (Winning Strategies Internet Services) family, came up to me, showing me a coat check and goes, “Mikey, whenever you’re ready, bud.”

At the bachelor party I had introduced the group to a now-illegal drink called 4 Loko, which is basically a heart attack in a can. JIG had been joking around ever since that he was going to smuggle a case of 4 Loko’s into the wedding. I kept informing him that 4 Loko was now illegal in New Jersey, and rested comfortably in the knowledge that this task was close to impossible. On the wedding day, he continued these statements, and told me, “Don’t worry, I got my best man on the job.”

As Ralph approached me that moment, JIGs words rang even truer when I realized that the man he was referring to was Ralph. Even on the bachelor party night, Ralph was like the special forces of partying, no task too tall, no mission too dangerous. Upon being pressed, he’d further tell me that after scouring North Jersey, he finally found a bodega in Newark that had the goods. The fact that “goods” were coming from a “bodega in Newark” should have been alarm enough of the trouble to come.

By the end of the night, JIG and Ralph’s table became like a bootlegging distillery. Table 12 became 1920’s Atlantic City, with JIG standing as Nucky Thompson and Ralph his muscle. For the rest of the night, every time I passed by the table, Ralph would run up to me and go, “Mikey, let me top your drink off.” By the time I’d get back to my table, all my drinks would be bright neon blue, green, or orange. 4 Loko, a mixture of strong caffeine and alcohol, slowly pervaded their corner of the wedding. Within an hour, I’d look over to their corner and notice that it was now home to much of the most emphatic and enthusiastic dancing in the entire room. By the time they started breaking out into choreographed numbers, I knew that all the 4 Loko had been drunk.

Matt was by far the funniest character at the wedding. This was Matt’s day, and he was enjoying every moment of it. Normally a restrained and calm individual, Matt was smiling, dancing enthusiastically, really enjoying himself in a way that I had never seen before. Part of the job of the bride and groom is to go around and thank each person individually for coming to the wedding. In that right, part of the job of the best man is to make sure that throughout this socially strenuous process, Matt always has a fresh drink in hand. I stayed loyal to the mission.

Matt was never out of control, and never visibly seemed drunk. However, the day after the wedding, I was chatting with Matt and Mel and Matt was commenting how his only regret of the wedding was not getting a chance to sample all the varied desserts that had been laid out close to the end of the night.

I looked him in shock. I said, “Matt, are you serious?” He goes, “Yeah, I barely ate anything.” I then filled him in on the fact that not only had every single dessert on the premises been placed at the bride and groom’s private table, but that also, Matt had plopped himself down at the table for a solid 15-20 minutes STUFFING his face with pastries. “Oh,” Matt said, in a moment of confused realization.

The wedding continued for hours, and there was never a lull throughout the night. Everyone danced, ate, drank, and enjoyed themselves. As the night dragged on, I increasingly became exhausted. Exhausted from the nerves I had felt the previous three days, from the lack of sleep from the previous night, from the constant activity of the entire day, and from the fun and excitement of the wedding itself. As the night began to draw to a close, I looked forward to nothing more than simply lying down.

However, everyone still energized from the night wanted to continue the party at the hotel. Groups had brought their own stockpiles of alcohol and personal bars, and I was continually invited and implored to go to various after-hour parties. Given the fact that I’m in my young 20s, and I wanted nothing more than to avoid more fun and simply go to sleep, I became evasive.

I started fashioning my “Irish Exit,” which is a term for when an individual is at a party, and then just leaves without saying goodbye. Once we got back to the hotel, I promised others that I was simply going to change out of my tux. As people became suspect, and asked what room I was in, I started giving fake room numbers. I even took a back staircase to go up to my hotel room, lest I be followed.

Soon after, my cousin Monica, also avoiding participants from the wedding dogging her to hang out, came to hide in my room. After the long hours, I was finally in my bed and able to relax. However, my phone continued to ring and outside my room groups of people scoured the hallways looking for us. Every time I heard a voice in the hallway, I implored everyone to stay quiet for a minute, and at one point, even shut off the lights. There we were, on my brother’s wedding night, and I was hiding away like Anne Frank, afraid of the drunken forces searching me out.

I would find out the next day that one group had been busily knocking on all the fake room numbers I had given them. My Uncle Billy would come up to me the next morning and say, “Mike, some guys were looking for you. They knocked on my door, and virtually forced the door open once I unlocked it.” The worst was that Mrs. Felsen, and Grandma Betty were now sleeping in the room Matt had been sleeping in the night before. This was also the room where all the groomsmen had gotten ready before the wedding. The search party dispatched after me now went to this room, and not only did Grandma Betty open the door for them, but at 3 in the morning, also invited them in to chat for a little bit.

My mom, sister, cousin, Tom, and I sat around in my room and debriefed about the night for a while, until eventually it was easier for me simply to become blunt. “Listen, I like you guys, but you have to get the hell out of here, I need to sleep.” I looked out the peep hole to make sure the coast was clear, and soon after, everyone left. I shut the door, locked it, and with that, the wedding, at least for me, was officially over.

Then, I slept.

Matt & Melany's Wedding:Part 5 and Final

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The reception, 9 pm, New Year’s Eve:Once again, Crystal Plaza event coordinator Nella lined up the bridal party outside the doors to the ballroom where the wedding guests waited. One of the vocalists from the reception band Cashmere was moving through the group taking names in order to announce each pair as we came through the doors.

The wedding party had spent perhaps 45 minutes having photos taken in various combinations and permutations by photographer Joseph Lin and his assistant. I was especially happy to be part of the photo that included bride and groom, my adoptive family and my bio family . I also enjoyed the photo of Matt with his uncle (my bio-brother) Patrick. The two of them met for the first time around 2006, but they have an uncanny resemblance. Pat could be Matt’s father or older brother. As Pat said to Matt, “You’re lucky the good looks got passed down to you.”

Just before he left, Father White said to Melany’s mother Susan, “ I hope these two last.” This mightily annoyed Susan. But Matt said that was just Father White’s silly, wise-cracking style.

While we took photographs, the wedding guests partook of cocktail hour, which included a fish station with shrimp and smoked meats, a carving station of turkey and beef, a pasta station, an olive station, a potato station, an Asian station, a.quesadilla station with homemade tortilla chips and guacamole, a crudite station with veggies, and a martini station with 3 backlit ice sculptures. The stations were set up around a highly-mirrored large room with a beautiful, mahogany bar. Waiters stepped through the crowd, passing around hors d’oeuvres like duck spring rolls, Thai coconut shrimp and spinach wrapped in phyllo. The word that comes to mind is sumptuous. Uncle Billy was probably stuffing food in his pants.

But I didn’t eat. There were so many people for me to greet, including my handsome godson Nick and his beautiful and smart girlfriend Jane (She's getting her Ph.D at SUNY Binghamton), my beautiful and accomplished Knight nieces(I am so proud of them although I had no role in their upbringing) , my wonderful bio-sisters Margaret and Libby and their spouses Donny and Ed and the impeccably good-looking Patrick and his lovely wife Deb. Our blast-from-the-past friends Bob C. and Dianne D and Ellie and Vince R.. Our financial advisor Bob Traphagen and his charming wife Kristi, longtime family friends. And all of the folks from Winning Stratagies, where Jim and Matt work in Newark. My sisters Margaret B. and Marian were looking especially fine. Uncle Benny and his son, cousin Lou were by the bar, meeting and greeting and trading wisecracks. (They’re both in the restaurant business, so they know how to work a crowd.) Uncle Robert was talking about walking off with the Crystal Plaza silverware. (But he didn’t.) Uncle Kevin in a suit with his long hair looked like Howard Hughes, the later years.

During the cocktail hour, a duo playing an upright bass and a keyboard provided a jazzie mix. All of the musicians –during the ceremony, the cocktail hour, and the reception—came through the auspices of Barry Herman(www.barryherman.com), whose own band had played at Melany’s parents’ wedding in the early Seventies.

Picture-taking ended, the cocktail hour at a close, guests migrated into the grand ballroom, and the wedding party stood just outside the ballroom doors waiting to be introduced.

This ritual introduction has become a lot more stressful since the YouTube video of the unknown bridal party boogeying down the aisle (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0), which they later reprised on the plaza at the Today Show, and which the cast of the sitcom “The Office” spoofed at Jim and Pam’s wedding (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jqk5I236DQ).

Everybody –even the mousiest, the most reserved, the least limber—is expected to shake your booty and strut your stuff as you cross the room. There can be no stragglers. We all acquitted ourselves to the strains of The Who’s “Who are You? Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo.”

And then Matt and Mel were introduced. They entered to the song “Baba O’Riley,” also by The Who (who are more a musical fixture of the Baby Boomer generation) and ducked under the linked and outstretched arms of the bridal party.

Their first dance was to what I considered an odd song: “Fix You” by Coldplay.

When you try your best but you don't succeed
When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse

And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you can't replace
When you love someone but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

And high up above or down below
When you're too in love to let it go
(But if you never try you'll never know
Just what you're worth

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

Tears stream down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace
Tears stream down your face
And I will try to fix you

Tears stream down your face
I promise you I will learn from my mistakes
Tears stream down your face
And I will try to fix you

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

I asked Matt why they chose what seems to be such a depressing song. He said it was a kind of inversion:The song is about loss and sadness and Matt and Mel’s relationship is about togetherness and happiness. Plus, he said he was able to help Melany during her time of great loss when her dad died.

Then the mother of the bride danced with the bride to the Martina McBride song “In My Daughter’s Eyes.”

In my daughter's eyes I am a hero
I am strong and wise and I know no fear
But the truth is plain to see
She was sent to rescue me
I see who I want to be
In my daughter's eyes

In my daughter's eyes
Everyone is equal
Darkness turns to light
And the world is at peace
This miracle God gave to me
Gives me strength when I'm weak
I find reason to believe
In my daughter's eyes

And when she wraps her hand around my finger
Oh it puts a smile in my heart
Everything becomes a little clearer
I realize what life is all about

It's hangin' on when your heart
Is had enough
It's givin' more when you feel like givin' up
I've seen the light
It's in my daughter's eyes

In my daughter's eyes
I can see the future
A reflection of who I am
And what we'll be
And though she'll grow and someday leave
Maybe raise a family
When I'm gone
I hope you'll see
How happy she made me
For I'll be there
In my daughter's eyes

Very touching lyrics, and in case you haven’t figured this one out, Susan adores her daughter Melany. The feeling is mutual.

Then Matt and I had our dance to the Carly Simon song “Coming Around Again.” I had played this song endlessly on my car audio system when I was picking Matt and Mike up after school 19 or 20 years ago. We’d interpose our own words like this:
Baby sneezes (“That’s Kendall,” we’d shout.)
Mommy pleases (“That’s Aunt Nora”)
Daddy breezes in (“That’s Uncle John”)
So good on paper
So romantic
So bewildering
I know nothing stays the same
But if you’re willing to play the game
It will be coming around again
So don’t mind if I fall part
There’s more room in a broken heart..

We sat to eat dinner and to listen to toasts. We dug into fresh mozzarella, roasted pepper and plum tomato with basil-infused olive oil and balsamic reduction accompanied by arugula, radicchio, and Belgium endive served with balsamic vinaigrette. For entrée, we had a choice of Chateaubriand steak, herb-roasted chicken, herb-encrusted salmon, or vegetable lasagna.

And the speeches began.

My number two son Mike—the best man—has already recorded his speech in this blog. He did a great job. I especially liked the line that a crazy night for Matt in college was when Mom ordered him two pizzas instead of just one. And that Matt’s toughest breakup was when Mike and the Mad Dog split up and ended their show on WFAN sports radio and Yes network television. This was particularly poignant to me because I remember all those weekdays after Matt had graduated college and had not yet gotten a job when he would come into the family room right before 1 in the afternoon when the show started and begin singing the theme song to “Mike and the Mad Dog.”(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KFKU-rIvHw).

Mike’s voice broke when he talked about how Melany had helped me get surgery for trigeminal neuralgia –face and jaw pain that was debilitating for me. I was surprised by his emotion. McQueenys are more wise-crackers than weepers.

It is indicative of Melany’s great loyalty to her friends that she had two witnesses:Matron of honor Celeste Zazzali and maid of honor Jessica Zelizo.

Celeste is a tiny woman with beautiful brown eyes who runs marathons. (Melany made Matt go to Celeste’s party after the NYC marathon even though it was the day after his bachelor party and he was feeling the pain.) Celeste is an oboist and an elementary school music teacher and a scrapbooker. She and Melany met as undergraduates when they were both hired to work for the Director of Bands at the College of New Jersey. They didn’t really like each other when they first met in August of 2000.

But, says Melany, “ Celeste always tells a story that one day we were in our office working together toward the end of our first semester and she asked me something and I gave her a sarcastic response. It made her laugh. As soon as we became friends we were inseparable. We were a package deal. She has been there for me no matter what.”

Celeste rose to offer her toast as matron of honor, walking around the “sweetheart table” where Matt and Mel sat.

“Good evening! Tonight is the best of nights because there is so much to celebrate. Before I say my piece, I want to thank Melany & Matt for allowing me to stand by their side on the most important day of their lives; I want to extend my gratitude to their families for their love and support of this fabulous couple and for making this day possible; and I want to thank all of you for indulging me in the next few minutes. Since I am one of three speeches tonight, I will do my best to keep this brief. Melany has always been a role model for me and I suspect I am not alone in saying that. In the ten years that we have been friends, I have had the opportunity to laugh with her, seek comfort from her, and learn from her. She is the best person I know, and I admire her in so many ways. Tonight I’m going to discuss what makes Melany the person who she is and why she is someone to look up to as a role-model.
“Everything about Melany is beautiful. It goes without saying, but her outer beauty is obvious. Melany, you look absolutely stunning today! And as gorgeous as you are on the outside, you are infinitely more beautiful on the inside. Melany’s character is one that I strive to emulate in my life.
“Melany is strong. Life has thrown her more than her fair share of challenging times. She has handled all of these situations with grace and strength. The strength in Melany’s heart will keep your marriage together for a lifetime. Her strength has been portrayed in many different ways. Whether it was putting Dr. Silvester, an intimidating band director, in his place; never letting her health concerns pull her spirits down; or sticking up for her friends like the time the hotel tried to pull a fast one on us in Vegas. Whenever I find myself in a situation where I have to fight to get what I want, I channel my “Inner-Melany” and think, “What would Melany do?”
“Melany is selfless. Melany has never had a problem taking care of others. She does it like it is her job, her purpose in the world, and she does it without asking for anything in return. Such as the time I was sick and I wouldn’t admit it. We were at my parents’ house and I was stubbornly insisting that I was fine. Melany nodded and handed me the TheraFlu. Or the time before my wedding, she made me feel special even though her knee was on the brink of yet another surgery. She never complained even though she was in pain. She was more concerned about the smile on my face.
“Melany is a listener. Whether we’re meeting up for a cup of coffee or catching up on one of our weekly phone calls, Melany is a master in the art of listening. No matter what is going on in her life, and we all know there have been some turbulent times, she will give you her undivided attention. There have been countless hours where I’ve told her every detail about the next race I want to run, or the exact shade I want to use in a scrapbook I’m making. The same conversation that causes my husband’s eyes to glaze over, Melany absorbs every detail and endures it because she knows how important it is to me. And then during our next phone call, she’ll ask about it in such detail showing you just how well she really was listening.
“Those are just a few of Melany’s best characteristics: beauty, strength, selflessness, and the ability to really listen. I could go on, but I think I’ve already made my point that Melany is an outstanding person, is a role model, and she attracts good people to her like a magnet. Matt, this is where you come in. The same qualities that you saw in Melany that made her fit to be your wife are the same characteristics that drew her to you. You are also strong, selfless, an excellent listener, and you two are going to have some good-looking kids!! On top of that, you have a great sense of humor, an overwhelming amount of patience, and are an honest man whom we all trust with Melany’s heart. When you put two incredible people like Melany and Matt together the result is a beautiful marriage. Future couples will look up to you both as role models and see an example of a first-rate marriage that will last a lifetime.
“With those thoughts, I wish you both the best that your marriage has to offer. Let’s all raise our glasses high and drink to the happiness of this beautiful couple. Cheers!”

Next up was Melany’s friend from childhood, maid of honor Jessica Zelizo. Jess looked especially fetching in the black bridesmaid’s gown, with her dark eyes and her dark hair curling down her back. Melany and Jess’ friendship dates all the way back to the womb.

Jess talked about how her dad had walked up the street when Susan and Steven Felsen moved into their lake community, and had told the pregnant Susan that she better give birth to a girl because the Zelizos had a brand-new baby girl. They spent their childhood playing, talking and dreaming in each other’s homes.

As the best man,, and matron/maids of honor were giving their speeches, Susan and I were formulating what we were going to say. Crystal Plaza event coordinator Nella had told us our speeches were next and,for some reason, neither of us had quite comprehended in the days before the event that we were supposed to give a speech.

When Susan was introduced, she talked about the joy Melany has brought to the family, and how her gift of music has given them so many wonderful memories of concerts, recitals, and performances She talked about how proud she is of Melany and how she has handled the challenges life has given her. Susan thanked Matt for helping Mel’s heart heal after the loss of her dad, and she closed with something Grandma Betty always says, "May your joys be many and your sorrows few."

(There’s really no kinship term to describe the relationship between two families brought together by marriage. Susan, Betty, Aunt Jayme, and Cousin Jayme are Matt’s in-laws, but what are they to me? It feels like I have been blessed with another set of sisters, and I am most grateful.)

I had scribbled just two words on a piece of paper for my speech: “don’t ask, don’t tell” and “cheat sheet..”

When I rose to speak, I started out by talking about how Matt, as our firstborn, was always the prince of our family. I talked about how Matt and Melany shared a love of music and a love of baseball, even though the Felsen-Innes family are Yankee fans and the McQueenys are strictly Mets fans.

However, I told the group, I didn’t even know about Melany until perhaps 18 months after they began dating. I explained that, in the McQueeny household, much as in the US military, we have a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” when it comes to romantic relationships. I said I don’t have any idea of the identities or numbers of girlfriends Tom has had, even though I’ve sat outside numerous girls’ homes late at night waiting to pick up Tom before he got his driver’s license.

And so, even though Matt had been to Susan and Melany’s home many times and even to Grandma Betty and Aunt Jayme’s home many times, and even had his own seat of honor in Betty’s TV room when they all watched sports, Matt’s family had no idea he had a girlfriend, let alone a SERIOUS girlfriend. (I explained that I had found a Christmas card signed “Fondly, Melany” when I was cleaning out his room after he moved out to his Edgewater co-op. So sue me, I’m nosy. But I didn’t ask and he didn’t tell.)

But Melany was pressuring him to meet his family, and so Matt finally told me he had been dating a girl for a while and she wanted to meet us. He e-mailed me a “cheat sheet” of factoids about Melany, so that it would appear he had been telling us about her all along. On the “cheat sheet”: She was a middle-school music teacher and band director, graduate of The College of New Jersey with a masters’ from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins. She was slender and pretty. She was occasionally a model. She was a great cook. She played the clarinet.

We met Melany at a PF Chang’s –Matt’s favorite restaurant at the time—and she was all of the above and more. We met Susan at a “Cheeseburger in Paradise” in Wayne in September of 2008, and we met the rest of the family around Christmas.

Fast-forward to another momentous dinner in early December of 2009. Matt and I had gone to Melany’s student Christmas concert, and after we heard her band perform, we snuck out to get dinner. Matt told me how, on their tour of the California wine country the month before, Melany had suggested they go ring-browsing. Not ring-shopping, mind you. Ring-browsing. And they had met a ring salesman who had really put the screws to Matt, saying that if Matt really loved Melany, he would have no trouble spending thousands of dollars on her ring, since traditionally a man spends three months of his salary on the engagement ring.

(“The salesman asked,”How much is your love worth?'” Matt piped in from the sweetheart table.)

At our post-concert dinner, Matt told me that he had balked at the ring salesman’s pressure tactics and told Melany he thought it was a waste of money to spend so much on a ring.

“But she’s been crying a lot lately, Mom,” Matt said. “I don’t know what to do.”

I could understand his quandary, panic even. McQueenys aren’t criers, and when faced with crying, we have no adequate response.

I told Matt that maybe he should do what Dad did when we were dating.

“Dad told me that if he kept dating me we would end up getting married and he didn’t want to get married, so he was breaking up with me,” I told Matt. “After about two weeks, he said,’I guess we should get back together.’ Maybe if you break up, it will reveal your true feelings.”

“But I don’t want to break up, Mom,” he said.

“Well, then, if the ring is important to Melany, man up and spend the money,” I said.

And thus, I told the wedding group, I have another beautiful daughter. I am so glad Matt manned up and we are here tonight.

Finally, it was Dad’s turn to speak. Jim is a seasoned, easy, entertaining speaker (I always say I married him for his stories), but he has one serious character flaw. And in a family where humor is a core family value, this is a serious character flaw: He tries to ride the coattails of a successful joke. So, if Matt has told a really funny joke or Mike has uttered a riposte that leaves us weak with laughter or Tom has done a dead-on imitation, Jim tries to milk the laugh they’ve generated with a lesser joke, a junior joke, a runt joke.

(This reminds of the time when Jerry Seinfeld went into the Catholic confessional box to complain to the priest that the Catholic dentist Tim Watley had converted to Judaism for the jokes. “And this offends you as a Jew?” asked the priest. “No,” said Seinfeld. “It offends me as a comedian.”)

Jim started off his speech nicely enough, saying that between Matt’s parents and Mel’s parents, we represent 65 years of married life, so they can look to our experience. Then he tried to jump on Mike’s previous laugh lines, saying that he was surprised we were here at Matt’s wedding, because Matt dated so infrequently he was a once-a-decade dater. (I thought this was a low blow, not at all nuanced the way Mike’s roast was, and so I gave Jim the “cut” sign.)

Jim said the McQueeny family avoided public displays of affection, and it took some getting used to to rise to the Felsen-Innes level of open affection. But, said Jim, “I’m taking training, Melany, so that I can hug more.”

And Melany got up and hugged Jim.

After that, it was dancing. I love to dance, and was dancing up a storm. I danced the pretzel dance with my brother-in-law Donny O. I danced around Maeve and Tom, because it’s a parent’s prerogative to embarrass her children. My children and nieces and nephews didn’t dance much. They watched us boomers make fools of ourselves.

But the most stellar dancer of the evening was the Unitarian minister. He bogeyed, twisted and slithered his way through fast and slow songs. I mentioned his prowess to Susan, and she said, “We Unitarians are a diverse bunch.”

Matt and Melany cut the cake, a beautiful five-tier cake by Ace of Cakes of Baltimore shaped like the New York skyline and emblazoned with the Yankees and Mets insignias, with fireworks in the sky and two champagne flutes for a cake topper. There were two different flavors: mint chocolate chip and apple cinnamon with butter scotch topping.

They then did the traditional feeding of the cake to each other. Matt voiced his fear that Melany was going to smash the cake into his face, the way some brides and grooms do. But she did not.

The cocktail-hour room had been transformed into a dessert palace, with a Viennese table of pastries and cookies, an ice cream bar, a chocolate fondue bar, a coffee bar, and a zeppoli station complete with paper bags so you could shake the zeppolis in a bagful of sugar.

Melany then ascended to the Juliet balcony overlooking the ballroom, and as the band sang the Beyonce song “All the Single Ladies,” she threw her bouquet. Jessica Zelizo snared it. Maeve’s friend Myrna said, “That was a set-up. There was no chance we were going to catch it.”

At some point during the festivities, Cousin Jayme—who is getting married in September -- told Melany, “Remember, you are the bride only until 1.01 am, when your wedding ends. At that point, I become the bride and you become the bridesmaid.”

Another transformation was imminent: It was almost midnight. Susan and Melany handed out the noisemakers Susan had gotten for New Year’s Eve. Melany and Matt were wearing glasses that said 2011 and Melany was adorned with a black-and-pink boa. As it hit midnight, we went around kissing family and friends. What a nice way to welcome the New Year. Photographer Joe Lin climbed to the balcony and took a photo of the crowd from on high.

Finally, it was time to wrap up. My nephew Lou Benedetto departed for the airport to head back to Arizona. Hotel-bound wedding guests were waiting in the Crystal Plaza entry for the shuttle. Grandma Betty was upset that a waiter clearing her table had inadvertently spilled a drink on her outfit.

Because Jim had his car, we were conscripted to ferry big aluminum trays of desserts the Crystal Plaza staff had packed for us. We loaded in a couple of bags containing Melany’s veil and Susan’s veil, and the poster-sized card describing the menu.

I chatted with Mike, Tom, Maeve and Monica in Mike’s room for a while. I was just getting ready for bed around 3 – Jim was already snoring --when my cell phone rang. It was Matt.

“Mom, did you take Melany’s bouquet in your car? She wants to preserve it, and she’s supposed to keep it refrigerated.”

“Matt, I frankly don’t know what’s in the car, but, if it’s in there, it IS refrigerated,, because it’s cold out.”

“Melany is worried. She doesn’t know where her bouquet is.”

And I thought, welcome to marriage, Matt. Her worries become your worries. I also empathized with Melany, who had attended to so many details to make this wedding work. This was one last detail she wanted to get right. It was keeping her from getting to sleep.

“Put Melany on the phone, Matt,” I said.

“Melany, I’ll just go down to the car and check for the bouquet,” I said.

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble, Mary,” she said.

“It’s easy,” I said.

I threw a coat over my pajamas, and put on my flat dancing shoes. Maeve came with me. I went through the contents of the car. No bouquet. We couldn’t open the door to get back into the hotel with our key card. Luckily someone was walking through the back hallway and opened the door for us.

I called them back. “The bouquet isn’t in the car,” I said. “But I can drive back to the Crystal Plaza and get it.”

“There won’t be anyone there at this point,” said Matt. “It’s pointless. We’ll get the bouquet tomorrow.”

“You sure?” I said. “It’s no trouble.”

“We’ll get it tomorrow,” Matt repeated. I prayed Melany got some sleep.

The next morning, the wedding guests still in residence at the hotel joined us at a breakfast we had arranged. When Matt and Melany entered the room in jeans and sweats, they were like royalty on the down-low. Everybody cheered. Grandma Betty told us about the inebriated men in tuxes who had knocked on her bedroom door in the middle of the night.

When the bill came, the maitre d’ gave it to my sister Libby. I guess she looks like the boss or the family matriarch. Everyone said their good-byes. My husband, brothers-in-law and children dispersed to their cars. My niece Monica went to get her babes.

I drove out of the hotel, passing my son Matt talking to his high school friend Chris Kerrigan. I went a mileor two when I got a call from my sister Margaret B. asking for a ride. I doubled back to the hotel, and picked up Margaret. Matt was still talking to Chris Kerrigan.

I put my car in gear and drove out of the wonderful wedding bubble and back into normalcy.