Bonne Nuit et Bonne Chance

It’s the 44^th annual French Festival in Cape Vincent, the little village along the St. Lawrence in upstate New York where we have owned a summer house for 30 years.

French Festival commemorates the French people (especially the nobles) who came here at the start of the French Revolution in 1789. Land companies with vast holdings in upper New York State (notably James Donatien LeRay de Chaumont, after whose son Cape Vincent is named) were actively soliciting settlers from France.

The wealthier French people aimed to recreate grand estates here in the wilderness, with manor houses and servants, gardens and fountains, liveried footman for their carriages and afternoon musicales.  In Cape Vincent, they built a house for Napoleon, who unfortunately never made it here. But by the early 1830s, when the then-cutting–edge Erie Canal had shifted the commercial boon 90 miles south of here,  most of those wealthier French people moved back home to la belle terre that wasn't so freakin' cold. (There would be other boonlets, when wealthy New Yorkers and Southerners took the train up to summer in the Thousand Islands….there were hotels on virtually every corner of our little village…but those boonlets passed too.)

Nearly two centuries later, the vendors set up along the village streets and on the green are hawking handcrafted art and signs (“Up here we don’t skinny dip …we chunky dunk”), handmade jewelry and sweaters , handcrafted spices and dips, local artisanal wines.

I buy some things for my sons’ birthday. (Matt, now 30, was born July 13. Mike, now 26, was born July 14.)

I remember French Festivals of the past.  One year, I recall browsing vendors’ stalls with one – and maybe two --strollers. Matt was in one stroller, his cousin Louis Benedetto was in another. We dragged Lou’s brother Michael , then maybe 4 or 5, by the hand.   Lou’s and Mike’s mom, my sister Marian –who lived in Tucson – was spending part of the summer with me. We were young mothers then, not women of a certain age.

I remember my father happily running to the firehouse where they sold French pastries on FrenchFest day, so he could score his Napoleons and French horns before they ran out. After my parents retired, they left New Jersey and moved a block away from our summer house to a year-round home. After my dad died in 1998, my mother slowly evaporated in that house until we figured out what to do with her in her dementia.

Cape Vincent is such a small town people know who you are even if you don’t know them.  One day two years back I forgot to retrieve my ATM card when I was getting cash from the machine outside the one bank on the one commercial street in town ( a street with many empty lots where stores and hotels have been demolished, for instance, the Red-amd-White Grocery, run by the Wiley brothers and burned to the ground in the  Eighties.) Hours after getting my cash and still unaware I had misplaced my card, I was riding my bike past the bank when a bank officer stepped out and called to me: “Hey, you forgot your ATM card.”

And they know you even when you are forgetting yourself. I remember Cape Vincent neighbors disapprovingly telling me how my mother would stand at the intersection by the one village grocery store still in town, looking east and west, north and south, trying to remember where she lived. She lived two blocks from the store.

I remember one French Festival Day, when I drove my sister Nora’s kids Nick and Kendall from Cape Vincent to their home near Sand Bay 7 miles away. All the kids in the car – Nick and Kendall and my children Tom and Maeve, then maybe ages 6 and 5 –were smirking and snickering. I didn’t know why. Turns out Nick had gotten a kitten from some other kid at the Fest, and was transporting it in his backpack. Turned out the kitten had fleas. My sister Nora was not happy.

Of course, FrenchFest is not the same without my sister Nora, who was our guide to the people, stories, tragedies, scandals and bargains of the North Country. She didn’t come to French Festival last year – by that time, she wasn’t waking up until 2 or 3 pm – but she always came in years past. Nora died October 29^th of ovarian cancer.

This year, it is just my husband Jim and I at French Festival. Matt and his wife Melany were up here for the Fourth of July. Mike is studying for bar exams in New York and New Jersey. Tom and Maeve, now 18 amd 17, are home in New Jersey and were supposed to drive up here together. But Tom says he can’t stand being in a car with Maeve and her negativity for 5 hours.  And Jim won’t allow Maeve to drive up by herself. She got her driver’s license only 2 months ago.

I miss having my children here for French Festival, and the ways they are drawn to the eccentricities for sale that resonate with their own eccentricities. I call Maeve to remind her she would be missing the fresh-squeezed lemonade.

My oldest, Matt, on the phone with me the other day, said, “You and Dad are getting a taste of the post-apocalyptic world.”

Matt’s speech is sometimes a little overwrought, but I understood what he was saying: That Dad and I are getting a taste of what it will be like to be empty-nesters. We’ve had so many people around us for so long that just the two of us seems a little….empty. So many of the voices that ricocheted off the walls of our summer house are gone – grown up and moved away, or silenced like those long-ago musicales in the wilderness.

Maeve called me last night to tell me she had run into our neighbor, Mrs. Corrado at TJ Maxx in New Jersey. Mrs. Corrado, a chatty, beautiful woman in her forties, said, “Maeve, I can’t believe how grown you are. And I can’t believe I have two children in high school. I’m almost an empty-nester myself.”

And, according to Maeve,  Mrs. Corrado dissolved in tears.

“She’s a good-hearted, emotional woman, Maeve,” I said.

Some of us get settler’s ennui and go back to France. Some of us evaporate into dementia. Some of us remember flea-bitten kittens and strollers long trashed, even as we laugh at the pre-school sisters boogeying ferociously in their double stroller at the FrenchFest parade to a marching band rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching in.”

We all ride or repress our emotions --or some mix-and-match thereof -- as we spiral through the years.

FROM CUBA TO SPARTA TO CAPE MAY

June 13, 2012: My family is scattered all over, and I feel a little like an air traffic controller keeping tabs on them. I am a sentinel keeping vigil for news of family removed from home base.

My husband Jim is in Cuba.

My number three son Tom has been on a 238-mile solo bike trip through New Jersey, a self-assigned challenge that his father feels is excessively and pointlessly risky.

My number two son Mike is sequestered away in Edgewater, as he studies for the New York and New Jersey bar exams.

My number one son Matt and my daughter-in-law Melany are preparing to host a joint 30^th birthday party for 70 people at their home in Sparta, NJ. Yesterday morning they were in crisis, because the caterer they hired cancelled (by e-mail) 4 days before the party. They were both working, so I got on the phone to hire a new caterer, rent the tent and outdoor tables and chairs, and engage a server. Mel’s mom Susan was already handling the cake and the décor.

My son Mike was considering whether we could sue the original caterer.

As I concluded my last call with Matt on the house phone around 7 pm, my cell phone trilled. It was Tom, telling me he had arrived safely in Cape May. Here are my daily posts to family about Tom’s four-day trip.

TOM-SPOTTING DAY ONE: Tom just called at 8:30 pm Saturday night, after having started his bike adventure at High Point State Park in extreme northern New Jersey. He traveled five or six hours and covered 55 miles of his 238-mile projected journey to Cape May. He popped up his one-man tent in a wooded area off Route 206 in Roxbury Township. Today he ate protein bars, candy and soda. He said so far he is not feeling the weight of his big backpack on his shoulders...but tomorrow will tell. He had to walk his bike up steep hills, because the gears on his old bike (Jim's old bike) aren't so responsive. He figures he has only about another 30 miles until the grade turns flat. His 17-year-old sister Maeve told him to beware bears, snakes, perverts and murderers. He says he needs to buy bug spray because the bugs are bad. He said a lot of people talked to him, asking where he's going . (Probably the questioners were pervs and murderers, but hey... it's nice to be sociable.)

TOM-SPOTTING DAY TWO: Sunday 5:30 pm: Tom called from just outside Princeton. He traveled about 50 miles today. He slept for about 5 hours last night on a rocky berth in the woods...He didn't get to sleep until 3 am ( his college schedule) and then was awakened by the light at 8 am. He went to a Subway, changed his clothes and brushed his teeth in a restroom, and had a chicken-and-bacon sub for breakfast. He had two slices of pizza for lunch. He is staying tonight in a Holiday Inn for the shower, the TV, the soft bed and room service. Tomorrow night he hopes to sleep in a campground. His only awkward moment was last night when a guy on a bike stopped and stared at him as he sat near his pitched tent. Tom said, "Hi, how's it going?" And without a word, the guy rode off.

TOM-SPOTTING DAY THREE: Monday 9:30 pm Just heard from Tom. He’s In Egg Harbor City. He travelled 70 miles today and blew a tire. He hopes to be in Cape May within a day... day and a half..

TOM-SPOTTING DAY FOUR:: Tom arrived in Cape May late afternoon/early evening Tuesday. He called me from his friend Tim's grandmother's house, his final destination. He travelled about 80 miles by bike today.

This morning, he was expecting to wait until 11 am when the local bike shop opened, to get his blown tire fixed. He went to a coffee shop around 9:30 to get a donut, and saw a guy sweeping the sidewalk in front of the bike shop. He went over to ask the guy about his problem. The tire was fixed and he was on his way by 9:40.

The rain was tough, and at Mays Landing, he stopped to put plastic shopping bags on his feet. A lady in a deli saw him, and gave him a plastic poncho. His ride was pretty seamless after that.

I'll pick him up tomorrow afternoon in Cape May. I'm glad he had his bike adventure, but I'm glad it's over...

Meanwhile on Tuesday morning, the paterfamilias was heard from via email. Here are Jim’s first impressions of Cuba:

 ‘Well, a day in Cuba. We're going out to dinner in a few minutes. Weather is really hot but great, such a scenic country, but in total ruin. Looks like when I first went to East Germany when I was 20 years old. It was still devastated by the war. In this case, it’s being destroyed by rot and the embargo, the latter of which seems like a total un-war war on people's lives here. There are barely any streetlights on for any of the streets, and barely a bulb lit inside all the decaying buildings. At night, it looks like a zombie movie. Today, we went to the university and a bunch of other places, including a place for lunch under a thatched roof by the sea that was tremendous. Had chicken, black beans and white rice, plust plantains. I grimaced at the black bean goop, but  it had cardamom and a whole bunch of other plain spices I liked and it was great. Everybody was raving about the stupid chicken they gave the table. The waiter said "This is what chicken tastes like without the antibiotics and drugs they put in them back where you live."" When someone said that’s just communist propaganda, and the waiter overheard it, he said "No, we don’t have the money to PAY for the antibiotics." Anyway, I get only 29 minutes on the hotel computer, and there's a line so I think I'll dump off now. I've been to 70-some countries, including Bangladesh, which had the worst poverty, but this actually seems worse because there are all these buildings that are grand (everything in B/desh was a corrugated mess except for the government buildings and the mosques), so the poverty looks more harrowing. In fact, I went across the street from the hotel here in the middle of the city to avoid paying five bucks for a bottle of water at the hotel. I went into the store, and got accosted by beggars, flocks of them! like mosquitoes you have to swat away. But, they're actually nice people, not dangerous. That made it all the worse. And it’s really clear our blockade is starving them. The wheezer commies from a half a century ago are all but forgotten. Yet, we still keep the screws on. I don’t get it.”

Farewell to the horse I rode in on

Woke up at 8:21, too late for Mass, because of a dream. In the dream, we went to our summer house…(or maybe it was my sister Margaret Opatrny ’s house on the Long Island Sound, because my brother-in-law Donny was there building my nephew Spencer a bed from Ikea and Spencer was smiling in his silent Cheshire-cat-like way). The house next door had just been demolished, an ancient stone building from perhaps 1740.  One minute (or perhaps 270 years) it was there, and the next it was gone. And I wondered why historic preservation protections hadn’t saved this house.

But in my dream, the house also had NOT been demolished, because as nosy neighbors, we all went through the vacant place. Obviously, someone had gone through the house and tagged all the valuables for an upcoming auction. I was in the comforting presence of elder females…maybe my aunts or my biological grand-aunts (whom I never met) or more likely my son’s in-laws, Grandma Betty, Aunt Jayme and Susan. Somebody held up an old bed coverlet in blacks and greys and whites she wanted to bid on. There was a wealth of old milk pitchers and vases, some in lusterware, the kind of stuff I am drawn to. They kept asking, “What do you want to bid on?”

But I said, “I have pretty much one of everything that’s here. I don’t need any more.”

I did see a couple of pieces commemorating the year 1952. One was a hot plate that said “The Lord only knows what will happen in 1952.” And I said to the woman I was with, “I happened in 1952. There are a couple of 1952 pieces here. That must have been the year the couple married.”

I think this dream relates to the work –and emotional work—I have been doing. I have been working hard at clearing things out this week. On Saturday, we traded in my 2004 Ford Explorer, a car I’ve had for 8 years. I was very devoted to that SUV. It had a sun roof, a hitch we installed in the back so I could carry a trailer, a DVD player so the kids could watch movies on long trips, and keyless entry, so I could lock my keys in the car and get in without keys because I knew the digital combination. (Very important: Once Jim locked an earlier car of mine, not realizing the keys were inside. And another time, I inadvertently locked in my sleeping baby Mike, and had to have the gas station across the street from where I was parked pop the lock.)

Now, all my kids have their own cars, and most of them no longer live with me.

Over the years, my Ford Explorer has become absolutely cluttered with detritus:Books, magazines and music CDs,  clothes for the cold and the rain, extra shoes, first aid kits, makeup. It held 5 or 6 or 7 snow- and ice-scrapers, and maybe 40 shopping bags (beautiful shopping bags) from the dump. You never know when you’ll need shopping bags. A couple of years ago, the front passenger seat was also bulging with stuff. But I cleared out enough to keep the front seat clear more recently. Nonetheless, when I found old books at the dump, or magazines for my sister Margaret’s 5-year-old grandchildren Jocelyn and Abby, the middle seats would fill up. The two back seats were completely filled. I couldn’t tell you what was at the bottom. It was like an archeological dig.

I  just decided on Friday that my Ford was a gas guzzler and the car was probably on the brink of new repairs, because it was sticking when I tried to move the gearshift out of park. I told Jim I wanted a new car.

New cars are among his favorite things, so by 11:30 on Saturday, we were buying a 2011 Toyota Prius, a hybrid car that runs on electric and gas. My son Matt bought a Prius the month before, and he raves about his car. (He’s a little OCD  so he is constantly telling you about his mileage.)

The moment we decided to buy the Prius (and now they give you the car immediately to drive off the lot), I faced the really daunting task of emptying my Ford. The rear trunk area was easy because everything there was in plastic bins. But the rear seats, the middle seats, the side pockets and the pockets behind the front seats were jam-packed. When I picked up the Ford to bring to the dealer (we had first come in Maeve’s car), I cleared out the middle seats. When we decided to purchase, I brought the Ford back home and started dumping things into Matt’s old car (which we bought from him to give to my hapless brother-in-law Billy.) Then Jim called saying I had to come back to the dealership…they were waiting for his checkbook.  At the dealership, I was dumping everything willy-nilly into bags, as Jim sat next to me in the new Prius, reading the owner’s manual and talking on the phone to Matt, who was heading to Atlantic City for his high school friend Chris Kerrigan’s 30^th birthday party.

So now I have to go through bags and bins, and clear out. I haven’t even driven the Prius yet. I put all the music CD’s (in maybe 6 or 7 bags from the Ford) into a big plastic bin and put the bin into the trunk of the Prius. Then I found more CD’s, and decided the bin takes up too much trunk space, so I carted the bin back into the house. I went through some of the CD’s and created a compilation book of CD’s, using a book with plastic CD holders I found in the dump.(And, yes, I know, no one uses CD’s anymore; they all have iTunes downloaded onto MP3 players.) I removed mountains of coins from the Ford, and I am using the change to buy my morning coffee. I still have a lot to throw out and organize.

Meanwhile, I am (very slowly) clearing out the computer room (the back bedroom on the second floor) as well as a closet in Matt’s old room (loaded with carefully marked bins holding shoes and sweaters). I have been to Goodwill with donations twice this week.

The feeling I got from this morning’s dream was acceptance with sadness. I no longer need the things I so intensely once needed, saved and preserved. And while I once gave great value to possessions I obtained for myself, my husband and my children, I no longer need many of those possessions. It’s blank-slate, holy open-space time. It’s saving on energy and travelling light.

Charmin' Charlie

At the gracious invitation of my cousin Kevin and my sister Libby, I drove up to Providence last week for the wake and funeral of my Aunt Jane’s husband, Uncle Charlie. (Chah-lee, as they pronounce it in Rhode Island.)

I met Charlie Donoghue only once, at Libby’s house to celebrate Aunt Jane’s late January birthday maybe three years ago. He already was living in an extended-care facility, and he was quiet. Not the Charlie of old times, my family said.

The Charlie of old--the ever-smiling working-class son of Irish immigrant parents --had movie-star good looks and the charisma of a Kennedy. He was a Providence firefighter and a Navy veteran who served on the battleship U.S.S. Boston in World War II. He was also a member of the Jewish Brotherhood: He had done maintenance work for a local synagogue, and, true to form, became part of their social scene.

Everyone knew him as “Charmin’ Charlie.” (Chah-min Chah-lee.)

His sons Kevin (also a Providence firefighter) and Michael eulogized Charlie as the kind of guy who, when he went out to eat in a restaurant, would head into the kitchen to meet and greet the kitchen staff.

“He loved people who worked with their hands,” said Michael, a college professor. “Cooks and carpenters, roofers and repairmen. He wanted to see how the work was done.”

Michael recalled that, in the middle of a storm that caused a power outage in Providence, Charlie went out to the utility workers getting ready to climb a pole. He carried a bottle of Seagram’s V.O. Canadian whiskey and a stack of plastic cups. He gave them each a shot before they went up the pole.

“When I was small, I asked him once what VO meant,” Michael said. “He told me, ‘Very often.’ ”

Michael said Charlie was motivated by three principles:Loyalty, equality and fraternity.

“Today, a lot of parents tell their kids they are special,” said Michael. “My father drilled into us that we were NOT special, that we were no better than – and just as good as— everyone else. He believed to his core that everybody was equal.”

Although I met him only once, I felt a connection to Uncle Charlie. When my unmarried 21-year-old mother Ann found out she was pregnant in the spring of 1952, the first person she told was Charlie’s mother, (Ann’s sister’s mother-in-law) Sarah. They called her “Saintly Sarah” because she was kind and comforting.

“My mother was really a social worker without the certification,” said Charlie’s sister Alice. “She fed homeless people passing through Providence during the Great Depression. I think they left a mark on the house to let others know they could get fed if they knocked on the door. My mother and father lived on a main road, and I think her fantasy was that a Greyhound Bus would break down, and she would usher all the passengers into her kitchen and put the tea on.”

I also felt a connection to Charlie because he and my Aunt Jane visited my mother at the unwed mothers’ home in Massachusetts after their wedding. Charlie was one of the few people who knew my mother’s secret. He kept the secret for a half-century, even after my mother Ann died in 2000.
My mother’s son Peter found me on the Internet in 2004, and the lost offspring was out of the bag.

Charlie’s funeral repast was held at Ladder 133 Bar & Grill, the building which, in 1946, housed the ladder company at which Charlie had begun his fire-fighting career. A couple of my sisters said that Charlie’s sister Alice might know something about who my biological father was. So my brother Terry, my brother-in-law Donnie and I headed to the room behind the bar to ask Alice what she knew.

Alice said she didn’t know much. My mother’s official story had been that a stranger at a house party in Boston put a mickey in her drink and took advantage of her when she was unconscious.

Alice told us:“Once, Charlie let slip that Ann might have known him. But later Charlie said that wasn’t so.”

My sister Margaret’s husband, Donnie, a marriage and family therapist, chimed in.

“I also have adoption in my family,” said Don. “My grandmother was adopted. Her name was Mulvey, and one of Jim’s aunts married a Mulvey. A lot of coincidences.”

Soon, it was just Alice and I chatting. I asked her where in Ireland her parents had come from.

“My father was from Cavan,” said Alice. “My mother was from a small town in Leitrim, Ballinamore.”

As she was saying Leitrim, I was thinking, “Couldn’t be Ballinamore.”
My husband’s father James McAweeny (as the family name was spelled in the 1901 and 1911 Irish Census) was from Ballinamore.

My third connection to Charlie:We both had close relatives from Ballinamore. His mother. My father-in-law.

“That is spooky,” I told Alice. “My husband Jim’s father was born and grew up in Ballinamore. My husband’s first cousins still live there.”

When I got back home to New Jersey, I went looking for “Saintly Sarah” on ancestry.com. I found Sarah Wynne (her age listed as 18) on the passenger list of the ship “Arabic” which departed from Queenstown, Ireland on April 24, 1912 and arrived in Boston on May 2, 1912. Her neighborhood or village was listed as Drumaney or Drumraine in Ballinamore; her closest relative was listed as her father John. Her ultimate destination was listed as Providence. Charlie’s sister Alice had said Sarah was going to go on the Titanic, but the ticket agent told her father she would be better off going on this ship because there was another girl from the next village going on the Arabic and it would give Sarah company on the voyage.

There were actually three other girls from Ballinamore heading to Providence on the boat: Sisters Mary Kate(21) and Lizzie Agnes (17) Smyth from the Drumaney neighborhood of Ballinamore . Their father was listed as Thomas Smyth. And then there was Mary Anne Mulvey, whose closest relative was her mother, Mrs. Mulvey and who was from Corrabeher in Ballinamore. (The 1911 Irish Census says Mary Anne lived in Corrabeegher with her widowed mother and two younger brothers.) Yet another Mulvey heard from.
As Donnie said, a lot of coincidences.

The next day, I woke up and recognized my fourth connection to Uncle Charlie. Aunt Jane said that when my mother revealed her pregnancy to her and their mother, Aunt Jane –who was set to be married two months before my birth – offered to adopt me. My mother chose to have me adopted out of family and out of state.

But, had Aunt Jane adopted me, I would have been a Donoghue, and Charlie would have been my father.

The Great House-Hunt

This winter’s mild weather conjures up reminiscences of the “Great House-Hunt” in last winter’s miserable ice and snow.

My oldest son Matt and my new daughter-in-law Melany started looking for a house a year ago February, just a month past their New Year’s Eve wedding. Two years ago, Melany moved into the Edgewater co-op apartment Matt bought in July of 2008. It’s a beautiful little nest with views of the Hudson, but it was much too long of a commute to her teaching job in a Morris County middle school. So, once they recovered from their wedding and sent out the thank-you notes, they started house-hunting for a place midway between her job and his job in Newark. Since I have an interest in real estate and have written about real estate topics for the past couple of years, I volunteered to go along with them.

We started with open houses in Morris County. The very first place we looked at that sunny but cold Sunday early in February was a tiny Denville Cape, maybe 50 to 60 years old. Pretty much vacant, it looked like an estate that the heirs had upgraded with nice neutral paint colors, refurbished wood floors, and new countertops, tiled backsplash and new gas stove in the kitchen. The dining area – punctuated by big, bright windows – looked as if it had been the back porch in its earlier incarnation. The living room – the room you immediately stepped into when you passed through the closet-size front vestibule – was dominated by a beautiful fieldstone fireplace, but the room itself was tiny. Matt said he couldn’t fit his new sectional sofa in the room. (This became his rallying cry for dismissing certain houses as we went along: “Couldn’t fit my sofa in here.”) There were 3 tiny bedrooms, one of which had a staircase to a carpeted loft, a very odd configuration.

The backyard bordered the river, and I could imagine flooding and the need for flood insurance. Right beyond the river, separated by a fence, was a highway. The home’s price: $282,500.

It looked to me like a “starter house”: A house you could live in until your first child started to walk and maybe you were pregnant with your second. (Matt was very clear about the need to have his own “man-cave” and/or home office, and the third bedroom might have to take on that role.) And it seemed like a lot of trouble to get a mortgage for a starter house, go through closing and settle in, just to have to do it all over again in a few years.

We looked at a house with a first-floor master bedroom sheathed in dark knotty-pine: it was like going into a batcave. And another house with 4 bedrooms, 2 full baths, a finished, usable basement (read “man-cave”), a kitchen with a beautiful enormous center island of light marble, two-wood-burning fireplaces and a 3-season room with sliders to the deck and in-ground pool on 1.75 acres. Price:$439,900. But many parts of the house seemed tired. (Note to sellers:Many of you have gotten the message to de-clutter, repaint rooms in neutral colors, upgrade the kitchen, and get the oil tank out of the ground. Kudos. But those window treatments in teal and coral that you paid good money for in the ’80s look dated today. Bare windows are timeless.)

We ended up at a very interesting home in Randolph opposite a Little League field. Nice new kitchen and nice flow to the dining room. Two bedrooms and a bath downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs. Master bedroom had a Palladian window and cathedral ceiling. Master bath had a skylight. And a third full bath upstairs. On more than an acre. Price $429,000.The real estate agent said the owner was back living in her native Croatia.

But, as the agent pointed out, there was no interior access to the basement except through a hole in the floor of the mudroom. There was no deck or patio and no garage. The agent asked what Matt and Melany did for a living, and when Mel said she was a music teacher, the agent said that she had been a substitute teacher.

We struggled our way back over the ice-and-snow-encrusted driveway. As we were plugging the next open-house address into the GPS, we saw the real estate agent running along the treacherous driveway in her heels. She was coatless. She stood midway on the driveway and looked around.

I lowered my window and asked, “Are you looking for us?”
She said, “I could drive you around to some houses. I’ve got my lock box key.”
“But don’t you have to finish your open house?” I asked.
“I’ll close early,” she said. “What kind of house are your son and his wife interested in?”
“Well, they liked this house,” I said.
“They do?” She seemed utterly surprised. “Really?”
“It’s nice and it’s updated and they liked the two rooms that could be offices on the first floor,” I said.
“You could come back at 4 pm when the open house is over, and I’ll take you to some more houses,” she said.
“I don’t think that will work out for us today,” I said. “But we’ll call you to set something up next week.”

I told Matt and Melany she would probably be a good real estate agent for them because she seemed anxious and would do a lot of research and she seemed rather guileless so she would be less likely to lie.

Melany said she seemed like a classic substitute teacher:No class of her own, no curriculum of her own, and relying on the vagaries of others’ schedules. I guess that can make for a good real estate agent.

The following Saturday, we meet Realtor Diane for a tour of homes in the Randolph-Roxbury area. I had suggested that Matt and Melany get themselves pre-qualified for a mortgage, so they had an idea of how much they could spend. Armed with the pre-qualification and a good-sized down payment, they were looking at houses in the $400,000 to $450,000 range. The mortgage broker said they could afford more, but they felt it would be better to look in a lower range and –as Suze Orman recommends—live below their means. Anyway, taxes on houses in the $400,000 to $450,000 range seemed to be about $12,000 a year, which, as I pointed out to them, meant another $1,000 a month on top of the mortgage payment.

Over three or four different weekend days, we looked at houses in Roxbury, Randolph and Succasunna in Morris County and then moved out to Byram and Sparta in Sussex County. We found that the farther west you go, the more house (and the newer house) you get for the money. (And clearly, we weren’t looking at the priciest houses in places like Chatham and Mendham.) We saw one house with a beautiful new kitchen but the rest of the house was unrenovated. We saw another house from the 1970’s with the most exquisite great room –soaring stone fireplace surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows, but the rest of the house was sad and insubstantial. “If only you could just live in the great room,” my son Matt said. Melany rolled her eyes.

A couple of houses were up steep hills. This gave the homes commanding birds'-eye views, but with snow on the ground, the driveways were extremely treacherous. Our Realtor Diane called one listing agent as we sat at the foot of a hill upon which stood a house for sale.

“How do we get in?” Diane asked. “The driveway is not plowed.”
“It is plowed,” the listing agent insisted. “My husband was just there this morning.”

But alas, it was not plowed. (We’d seen a couple of unplowed driveways, which meant the sellers had moved out or the bank owned the house, or both.) My son and Realtor Diane said they would try to climb the steep, unplowed driveway on foot. Melany and her mother and I decided to stay in the car. We watched as first Diane and then Matt slipped and fell. They slid back down and announced it wasn’t worth it.

Another extremely beautiful house had its front door on one street and its back door and driveway up a hill from another street. From the pictures on the Internet, we couldn’t believe this 3500-square-foot house –priced at $450,000-- hadn’t been snapped up. But when we got to the home’s driveway, we saw a sheer 45 degree slope and a narrow passageway shoveled clean, with mountains of snow on either side.

“Oh, I don’t think you should drive up that driveway, Diane,” I said to the Realtor. “You’ll never get back down.”

But Diane was nothing if not intrepid. Reckless even. She gunned her engine, and smacking this way and that against the piled snow like a pinball, the car achieved the top of the drive.

It was a beautiful 12-room house on 3 levels, with intricate moldings, beautiful flow of space, great lake views, soup on the stove in the modern kitchen, and a fire crackling in the fireplace in the bright family room. Four bedrooms, 3.5 baths, office, study, 5 skylights, and Palladian windows.

“This is my dream house, ‘ said the thirty-something woman owner. “My husband’s in artificial turf, and his company transferred him to the Midwest. He’s out there already. I hate to sell.”
“But don’t you get stuck up here when it snows?” I asked.
“Nah,” she said, flexing well-developed biceps in her tank top. “It’s easy to go out and shovel.”

As we got back into the car, Melany said, “No way we’re buying this house. My family could never make it up the driveway.”

And we backed our way down the drive, smacking and getting stuck in piles of snow on the way out.

Just a little while later, we were backing out of another driveway, and we heard a dragging sound, as though Diane’s car were towing a downed mailbox, or, even worse, a lifeless body. Matt got out of the car, and discovered Diane’s front fender was dangling by a sliver of metal, probably as a result of the dust-up with Mrs. Tank Top’s driveway. Diane ripped off the fender and tossed it in her trunk.

We saw another beautiful house that Matt and Melany would certainly have considered, but the house was located just yards from massive overhead power lines.

House-hunting is really like a sociological investigation or a reality show. Either you’re told something about the seller’s motivation and circumstances, or the house tells you. We were in one house –half renovated, half not -- where the dad’s police uniform was hanging on a drying rack in the kitchen. The kids’ rooms were cheerily painted (baseball stripes on the walls of the son’s room), but the master bedroom looked uncared-for. Probably a divorce.

We visited another home where the wife had raised her family, divorced, and married a new love. She and the new love decided to chuck North Jersey and move to Puerto Rico. That was a very romantic and adventurous motive for selling.

We saw a number of short sales, homes for sale for lower than what the seller owed on the mortgage. I advised Matt and Melany to avoid those houses, because I had done a number of stories on buyers who waited months for the seller’s bank to approve the short sale. Also, with a short sale, you buy a home as-is, with no negotiating to repair defects in the home.

On a Friday afternoon before Matt and Mel went on a weekend vacation, Matt and I looked at more houses while Melany finished her school day. Matt found their house.

Located in a neighborhood of executive-style homes in Sparta, the 4-bedroom, 2.5 bath house, built in 1993, sold for $635,000 in July of 2005, and $438,500 in September of 2000. It was listed at $450,000.

It had beautiful floor-to ceiling windows in the kitchen and family room overlooking a woodsy, rock-terraced and landscaped backyard.(Deer routinely visit the home's acre of land, to look in the windows and gaze at the humans inside.) The kitchen probably had the nicest layout of any kitchen we’d seen. The first floor also held a dining room, living room, office, family room and half-bath next to the two-car garage.

The entryway was the typical two-story-with-chandelier space and a curving stairway leading to the second floor. The master bedroom had a big bathroom renovated in about 2008, done in rough-cut tan stone and brown tile. The family room had a two-story brick fireplace and a staircase running up the side wall to the second floor. Matt’s sofa would definitely fit in the family room.

And, best of all from Matt’s point of view, there was a nicely finished basement that could serve as man-cave.

We parted, and Matt went to fetch Melany for their weekend vacation. Once I was home, I called him while they were still on the road. They had seen on a mobile app what I saw on my laptop: The Internet listing proclaimed it was a short sale. Which Realtor Diane had never mentioned.

But the listing said the bank could grant approval for the short sale within 48 hours, because the loan was owned by a community bank that had never sold the loan to investors.

Melany and her mother toured the house the following week. Matt and Mel decided to bid, offering slightly below the home’s selling price in September of 2000.

It took the seller’s bank a week to decide to approve the short sale. But, all in all, it wasn’t long. Matt and Melany learned a lot about home maintenance from the home inspector. They moved in at the end of April.

There is some sadness in a short sale. This was somebody else’s dream home and clearly they lavished a lot of money on renovating the master bath. The sellers were also divorcing. It was the demise of a number of dreams. Matt and Melany think they’ve seen the sellers drive by the house on occasion, perhaps pining for their lost reality.

But Matt and Melany are enjoying developing new routines together in a new home and new area. Melany bought a baby grand piano so she can give private piano lessons at home. They’ve bought a lot of gym equipment for the finished basement, so they can exercise at home. This summer, I bought Matt a sit-down mower for his 29th birthday. The little boy who obsessed over various childhood geegaws now obsesses over the patterns he mows in his grass.

They are also refinancing the mortgage, because interest rates are even lower than when they first closed on the house. They’ll save a point of interest, and a couple of hundred dollars a month.

I just checked on the status of Mrs. Tank Top’s home, the beautiful 3-story Roxbury home up the killer hill. The house, which was listed at $450,000 when we saw it a year ago, finally sold for $369,000 on January 19 of this year. Maybe the mild winter sealed the deal.

Aunt Peggy and Uncle Whitey

February 1,2012: I called my Aunt Peggy today for her 88th birthday. I sent her a card a few days earlier. But I made a commitment to myself to call her, because it is something my sister Nora would have done. Nora died October 29 of complications of ovarian cancer. I would always say to Nora, “Aunt Peggy left me a message. Would you call her back?” Aunt Peggy is a big talker, and Nora had more patience than I.

My Aunt Peggy is the last of my mother’s sisters, the last of the whole family really. My mom. Aunt Helen, Auntie Ann, Uncle Mike and Uncle Pat are all gone now.

I loved my mother’s family. I know that Mom – when she was around 20 or 21—would bring home whiskey and deli meats on Friday night to their tenement home on East 96th Street in Manhattan to “make a party.” I hear my mom’s words in my head, “Let’s make a party.” It’s a testament to her optimism and to her love of family.

My mother especially loved her mother and her baby sister Ann. I have letters she sent Ann when Mom was first married and in the Coast Guard with Dad during and right after World War II. She clearly loved her baby sister—who was around 14 years younger—and gave her lots of fashion advice.

Mom’s relationship with Aunt Peggy..who was 2 years younger than Mom..was more complicated. She thought Aunt Peggy was a hypochondriac, always complaining about imaginary ills. (But I would have to ask my Mom in heaven, “Who is still alive at age 88?")

And Aunt Peggy is still very clear in her thinking. My mother died of Alzheimer’s, but Aunt Peggy knows the name of the new place where she has moved, and she know what state my husband was visiting when I spoke to her a month ago. Bravo for you, Aunt Peggy.

My Aunt Peggy lived a half-block from our old home in Bergenfield, NJ before we moved when I was age 6. (We moved a couple of blocks east, closer to Tenafly, in 1959 or 1960, I think.) I remember Aunt Peggy making me incredibly smooth tuna fish salad in her blender when I stopped there for lunch when I was little. I remember exceptionally orderly built-in cabinets in her second-floor bedrooms built by Aunt Peggy’s Polish father-in-law. I remember my 2-year-younger brother Lou stopping at her house after he bolted from kindergarten, saying he had to help my mother hang diapers to dry.

My mother was uncomfortable with her sister Peggy. When we stayed overnight at Aunt Peggy’s house for some reason, my Mom remembered Peggy joking about all the little shoes in the mudroom. Mom had 6 children, Aunt Peggy two.

But Aunt Peggy is all we have left. And, blessedly, she still has her memory and some sense of perspective. Last year, I called her to put together a family tree and she remembered everything.

When I called her today, she said her husband had been through surgery overnight for blood clots in his legs. She calls him Uncle Walter. We called him Uncle Whitey for his very pale hair.

I, strangely enough, remember my Uncle Whitey when I was working in television in my mid-twenties. (That was 30 years ago.) I saw him in the subway in Manhattan joking with his friends. He was a printer for magazines then. He did not see me. I didn’t want to interrupt.

Aunt Peggy says the doctors say she has to agree to allow for amputations of his legs (because of blockages) or he will die. She doesn’t want to agree to amputations, too much for him to go through. She says, if we believe in prayer, we should pray for a speedy death. I remember Uncle Whitey in the subway, and know I shouldn’t interrupt. Prayer is what you do when there is nothing else to do. Prayer is powerful, and you do not control it.

Newt and Asperger's

I read the most fascinating story in the NY Times, about Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, and currently running for the Republican Presidential nomination, about his involvement with his 3 wives.

Gingrich, who went after former President Clinton for lying about his sexual hijinks with intern Monica Lewinsky, was—at that time –engaged in a six-year affair with an aide and cheating on his second wife, Marianne. Marianne was just interviewed on ABC, saying that Newt told her he wanted an “open marriage” that would allow him to be with both women. The aide became Gingrich’s third wife, Calista. (Newt’s first wife, by the way, was his high school geometry teacher, seven years his senior.)

Gingrich responded to Marianne’s recent interview, saying he never said any such thing to wife number two, and that he went after Clinton not for the sexual hijinks, but for lying under oath about the sexual hijinks. A too-fine distinction for the masses, perhaps. I think he went after Clinton because he was in position to do so: It was fun and it moved Newt’s chess piece along the board.

Gingrich was forced to leave the Speakership –and then resigned from Congress altogether —after allegations that he laundered charitable donations through his charitable foundation for his political action campaign fund, and that he had given the Ethics Committee inaccurate information. He was reprimanded and fined $300,000. Many saw it as payback for the vicious way he went after Democratic leaders.

Here’s the thing: I think Newt Gingrich has Asperger’s Syndrome, the mildest and highest-functioning form of autism. My first tip-off was when the NY Times story quoted from an interview Gingrich gave the Washington Post in 1989 in which he “estimated that the union [with his second wife Marianne] had a 53-47 shot of lasting.” This dispassionate application of mathematical odds to an emotional relationship is apparently typical of Asperger’s folks, according to the Asperger message boards.

Folks with Asperger’s can be brilliant, creative, out-of-the-box thinkers and strategists. They tend to be loners and can be cranky and abrupt ( rudely honest) but nonetheless can also be charming and are smart enough to pick up social skills by watching and mirroring other people’s behavior. I have been researching the syndrome for five or six months. Right now I am reading animal behaviorist Temple Grandin’s book “Thinking in Pictures: Life With Autism.”

Grandin says she indeed thinks in pictures and can see patterns more clearly and more quickly because the Asperger’s differently-wired brain isn’t slowed down by processing through the language center. Asperger folks tend to fixate on a couple of interests, issues, or goals. They know everything about what they are interested in, and persevere where a less fixated person might give up and move on to something less frustrating. Grandin believes Einstein; the philosopher Wittgenstein; the artist Vincent Van Gogh, and more recently, Microsoft chief Bill Gates have had Asperger’s. (I won’t say “suffered from” because many so-called Aspies are proud of their superior abilities and not that interested in deep interpersonal relationships. They are more turned inward to what they perceive as a rich interior life.)

Grandin says a person with Asperger’s has the best shot of developing a personal relationship with someone who has highly similar interests and maybe even Asperger's as well.

She writes:”I talked to one lady on the spectrum who met her husband at a science fiction book club. She writes technical manuals and he works in the computer industry. … Their idea of a wonderful romantic evening is to go to a really nice restaurant and talk about computer data storage systems.”

And perhaps that is why Gingrich turns his wives into unpaid advisors and sounding boards, making sure they are always with him, and that their prime interest is strategies for furthering Newt.

I think a member of my extended family has Asperger’s and that has motivated my research. My biggest question is: Can an Aspie really love you? My sense of Asperger folks is that they don’t have empathy because they can’t comprehend what other people are feeling. They have a hard enough time hearing other people and seeing other people’s facial expressions because they so easily experience sensory overload and can’t tune out extraneous stimuli the way “neurotypicals” can. So if a person can’t hear you, can’t see you and can’t “feel your pain,” can you have a mutually supportive, emotionally reciprocal relationship?

And, if Newt’s an Aspie (and even if he’s not), can he be an effective leader if he verbally beats adversaries to a pulp because he doesn’t “feel their pain?” and it seems like appropriate gamesmanship to him? He may have visionary policies and a sense of historical destiny, but can you lead a democracy if you are so detached from the feelings of the populace and so unwilling to acknowledge that your rivals have any redeeming qualities?