Later this month, as the 2008 Democratic convention gets under way in Denver, we'll be reading and seeing a lot in the news about the Democratic convention 40 years earlier that made headlines in Chicago. That's right; it has now been two full generations since protestors and police battled in the streets of the Windy City and much of America first heard the word Yippie as a noun and not as a synonym for "Hooray."

I was a boy in 1968, a second-grader with little interest in politics, the Vietnam War and the logistics of nominating a presidential candidate. And yet I have memories of that nominating week that are vivid, and they seem to begin and end with my brother.

My brother is five years older than I am, which means there has never been much sibling rivalry or competition between us. I figured out early on that he was always going to whip me soundly at everything. In one-on-one football, which we played often, he invented a rule where each of us could pass the ball to ourselves, which worked to his advantage since he had as much as a foot on me. In "Denny McLain Real Action Baseball," a baseball board game with a magnetic diamond and a wooden, spring-loaded bat, he was able to pitch the small marble so that it actually curved beyond the reach of the bat and plopped into the game's strike zone. And when he dealt poker, a computer couldn't have kept track of the combinations of cards he'd call wild. I spent my childhood losing to him in every sport and game we could play or invent.

But at middle age, I have come to realize something important about those years: My older brother was shouldering a lot of the heavy lifting that is usually reserved for a boy's dad. We had -- we have -- a loving father, but he worked long hours and his commute from Connecticut to Manhattan was arduous. He wasn't an invisible presence in my childhood, but he was gone by the time I got up in the morning and he would return home just in time for a late dinner. After supper he usually went right to bed.

And so although my brother was finding ways to beat me in board games and sports that ranged from devious to inspired, he was also the one who was teaching me to throw a football and what an earned run average meant in baseball. He was the one explaining to me why the music of the Beatles and Joni Mitchell mattered, and why I should be more circumspect in my affection for the work of Jeannie C. Riley ("Harper Valley PTA"). Later he would be the one who would gently offer guidance about what sorts of i.d. bracelets were best if, in the sixth grade, you were going to ask a girl to go steady (as I recall, the less expensive the better).

And in late August 1968, he was the one who would bring up the riots in the streets of Chicago over dinner and, though he was only in middle school, plant himself in front of the news at 6 o'clock and watch the chaos there both unfold and be explained. By ninth grade he would be attending anti-war coffeehouses at a nearby church, and by 10th, he would be standing in anti-war candlelight vigils.

My sense is that I learned more from him than I did from most of the grown-ups around me -- which, of course, is one of the gifts of being a younger sibling. We have extra people around us to guide and influence and inspire. Even now, whenever I watch a portion of a presidential convention, at least once or twice I will recall my brother as an eighth-grader on the couch in the dark paneled living room of our home, staring intently at the TV screen. At the time I didn't understand what was occurring at the convention, but it mattered to my brother and so I knew that it must be important -- and, thus, it should matter to me.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 3, 2008.)

Just wanted to thank the readers of the Seven Days newspaper for voting me "Vermont's Best Fiction Writer." The reality, of course, is that there are a lot of wonderful novelists and short story writers in Vermont, and so I am deeply appreciative and profoundly grateful. Truly: A thousand thanks.

If you’re a teenager or young adult, how do you know for sure you’ve hit rock bottom? Is it when you’re frustrated because you can’t TiVo the latest installment of “Dancing with the Stars?” Or is it when you realize you just chose not to go to a party so you could stay home instead and post pictures of yourself on facebook?

Or is it when you’re sleeping outside in the woods near the Burlington waterfront because you’re homeless and 20, and any money you can scrounge up goes to buy cocaine, methadone substitutes, and anti-anxiety drugs? This was precisely where Faith Foley, now 25, found herself in the spring of 2003.

Prior to that, she had, by comparison, been living large: Sleeping on the floor of a hotel in Brattleboro or crammed into a two-bedroom apartment with as many as ten other people. She had hoped things might get better in the Queen City. They didn’t and it was then, as she shivered outside, that the St. Albans native realized what rock bottom really meant. Out of options, she turned to Spectrum Youth & Family Services and trudged from the waterfront to the organization’s shelter on Pearl Street.

“It was very difficult to bring myself to go there,” Foley recalls now. “I liked to believe I was better than Spectrum – that I didn’t need them. So I went there with my tail between my legs. But they were great.”

Today Foley is a residential manager at the Spectrum One Stop Shelter, and this December she will receive an associate’s degree from Community College of Vermont. Her long-term plan is to get a four-year diploma and then a master’s degree in social work. She works at the shelter from late afternoon until somewhere around midnight, helping to care for the dozen young adults who are living there. Sometimes that entails giving out medicine and sometimes it means administering a breathalyzer test for alcohol. More often it means talking with them about their lives, and how they wound up homeless in the first place – and their plan to get back on their feet. Most of them don’t know her personal history, but when she thinks it will help the teenager, she is happy to share it: “Sometimes I’ll tell them I know it stinks to have to come in at nine o’clock. I know it stinks to have to do a urine screen [to test for drugs]. Hey, I had to do it too, I’ll tell them.”

Foley credits the case workers and therapists at Spectrum for the way her life has turned around: They weaned her from her dependence on drugs, helped her get a job, and encouraged to go to college. “Spectrum makes a huge difference,” she says. “Unfortunately, I think the public just sees a lot of kids hanging out. But we show a transient population that there’s a better way to live. I don’t want to sound like a cliché, but we change lives. I’ve seen so many people come through here who are doing valuable things now.”

The hardest part of her job is the reality that she simply can’t help everybody. The shelter has 12 beds and often there are a half-dozen people on the waiting list. “It’s horrible when someone shows up in the middle of winter and we don’t have a bed. I give them food and blankets and refer them to COTS (the Committee on Temporary Shelter), but it’s heartbreaking.”
Moreover, as a result of the weakening economy, in her opinion it’s only going to get worse. Lately, in addition to seeing young adults who are coping with substance abuse or mental illness, Spectrum is seeing young adults who simply can’t pay their bills.

It’s never been easy to be a teenager, and my sense is that in some ways it’s even more difficult now than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Fortunately, there are organizations like Spectrum out there and people like Faith Foley who have seen rock bottom – and, now, the view from the mountaintop.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 10, 2008.)

When I was a little boy, I jumped from a second story window while pretending to be Batman and wound up pretty bruised.

Clearly this was not the smartest thing I did as a child. Believe it or not, however, it also wasn't the dumbest. I did much stupider things. To wit: I also dove over the railing that ran along the second floor corridor of our house and rode my pedal-powered fire truck down a flight of stairs and through the plate glass living room window.

These other maneuvers, I should note, had nothing to do with Batman. But I think I am indeed Vermont's second biggest fan of the Caped Crusader.

The first, of course, is Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who had an absolutely terrific cameo in this summer's "The Dark Knight," and remarks in his big scene "We're not intimidated by thugs." (Just for the record, he is talking to the Joker and not to either the vice president or a former attorney general. He tends to have far choicer words for both of them.)

In any case, the Champlain Valley Fair opens in a mere six days and Batman will be there. As a matter of fact, he will be there every single day, signing autographs and getting his picture taken in Expo South at noon, 2, 3, 4 and 6 p.m. (This much time off the job doesn't bode well for Gotham City, but Essex Junction sure will be secure.) I tried to schedule a phone interview with Batman before he arrives in Vermont because opportunities like this don't come often and I have some pretty serious questions:

Why don't criminals outside of Gotham City ever wear clown makeup?

Is it hard to get respect wearing tights?

What's really the deal with you and Catwoman? Or, for that matter, with you and Robin?

Alas, DC Comics -- the ultimate enforcer in the world of superheroes -- said Batman doesn't do interviews. Apparently, he's too busy fighting crime and checking the weekend grosses on the latest film to talk to the press. Consequently, one of my first stops at the fair this year will be a visit to Expo South so I can meet Batman in person. Yup, even before my annual fix of fried dough and fried onion rings -- with a quick detour to Fletcher Allen Health Care for my annual pre-Fair angioplasty -- I am going to meet the Dark Knight.

I must confess, I will be a little nervous. Sure, I have met my share of comic book superheroes in the past. I met the real Spiderman at a shopping mall in Florida. I asked him why they had chosen Tobey Maguire to play him in the movies, since the real Spiderman seemed to have a bit of a beer belly and Maguire does not. I also met the real Wonder Woman in the days immediately before Halloween last year. In fact, I met her four times in four different venues, noticing for the first time that Wonder Woman apparently is capable of changing her height and weight at will, and standing perfectly still for hours at a time in the window of Old Gold on Main Street.

But this is Batman! I worshipped Batman as a child. My fifth birthday party was a celebration of all things Batman, the centerpiece of which was a cake shaped like the Bat Signal -- the distress symbol sent high in the sky via Klieg light. I would have worn a cape to kindergarten if my parents didn't think it was a fashion statement likely to get me beaten up.

My sense is that Batman is used to this sort of veneration. I'm sure people tell him all the time that they've jumped from second story windows trying to replicate his feats of daring. Nevertheless, I will try to remember that I'm a seasoned journalist when I meet him and will focus on the important issues: Fighting crime. The Joker's future. And whether I can try on his cape.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 17, 2008.)

The other day my daughter, 14, saw me hunched over a laptop, cringing at the customer reviews of my novels on Amazon.com and bn.com. "Why do you insist on tormenting yourself?" she asked. "It just can't be good for you."

She's right. And yet torture myself I do. I'm drawn to the online book forums for my novels the way tabloid photographers are drawn to Britney Spears: It won't be pretty, but it is pretty irresistible. My friends who are writers lurk around these sites, too. That snapping sound you hear this summer? It's not the electric bug zapper on the porch; it's novelists everywhere getting stung by the viper-like postings that readers and customers leave in any number of nooks and crannies on the Web.

Don't get me wrong, most of the time I appreciate the way that the Web has made possible an intimacy with the public that didn't exist 15 years ago -- that Mesozoic era before the Internet -- when the writer was a distant abstraction to most readers. Now I have regular correspondence about my books with readers around the globe, most of whom I'm never going to meet. I have an active discussion board for any one who's interested on my own Web site. But there are few worlds as barbed as the digital one, and people say savage things about my work online that they wouldn't dare say in person. Such are the privileges of anonymity and distance.

To wit, a recent post at Amazon for one of my novels is headlined, "Not getting better." The reader concludes "In a word: vacuous."

It gets worse: "The writing is crude, the yarn slack. He's not been 'Oprah'ed' for nothing."

Or this from another customer review titled "Ugggghhhhhh":

"I was asked to read this book for my job," the reader volunteers, and then explains why he gave the book just one star out of five (I have not added the following typos to impugn the critic's qualifications; they were already there): "I proceded to read it untill i got to chapter 7, and when i found that no plot has even erupted yet. The entire chapter was about a deer. How can a book be seven chapters in, and about 100 pages in, and still have expostition material. this book was terrible and would never suggest to anyone."

And, finally, I offer this newly posted review from "Amy in Denver" about an 11-year-old novel of mine:

"Apparently writing about a subject such as birth from the point of view of a fourteen year old girl is too much of a stretch for this male author. . . . His unimaginative writing style is also lacking. He doesn't trust his reader to remember an event that happened twenty pages prior, like restating the fact that the trial was difficult for the family, which is obvious. All in all, disappointing and irritating."

It only takes one thorn like that in a rosebush of 30 or 40 flowers to leave me bleeding and wounded and thinking to myself, "Wow. You really aren't very good, are you? You're certainly not good . . . enough." Am I thin-skinned?

Perhaps. Vulnerability and creativity don't always go hand-in-hand, but often they do.

In the early years of the online bookstores, we writers scanned these sites only to see the sales rankings of our books. And while that was toxic and demeaning (there is nothing like being the 158,314th bestselling book on the Web), we could always tell ourselves that that store represented only one venue for sales. We could always delude ourselves into believing that perhaps we were selling better in the actual world -- at bricks-and-mortar bookstores or at airports or at a certain gift shop in Santa Fe.

But these reviews? I find them spellbinding, the frescoes of the damned inside Brunelleschi's great dome in Florence. That review from "Amy in Denver" may have finally sent me off the deep end. I responded with an embarrassingly pathetic comment of my own beneath hers: "Wow, you are one of the only readers to feel this way -- and to have such rage toward me. I am so sorry! Fingers crossed someday I don't disappoint you." I thought this was both a peace offering of sorts and a way of defending the book, which, in all fairness, had 536 other reviews and a four-star rating at Amazon.

Well, I never heard back from "Amy in Denver." But a nanny in Tennessee chimed in: "She's very much not one of the only readers to feel cheated by the book. I have been consistently disappointed by your books, and I doubt I'm one of the only ones to feel that way, either."

This nanny, I saw, had also reviewed baby books and can openers for Amazon. She liked both the baby books and the can opener -- especially the can opener -- a lot more than my novel. That's the thing about the great people's democracy of the Web: Everyone's opinion has, more or less, the same value.

And while I usually champion that sort of egalitarianism, there is a small part of me that thinks like Napoleon the Pig: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." Well, all critics are equal, but some critics are more equal than others. I confess that I put more stock in the opinion of the novelist who questions whether an ending in one of my books is fully earned in a Washington Post or New York Times review than I do in "Bic Parker" at Amazon, who wrote about one of my novels, "Stoopid."

And yet Bic Parker's vote counts. It affects both book sales and, yes, my self-esteem. Certainly, there are lots of enthusiastic reviews for my work by readers online, and there are plenty of critics -- and I am not using that term facetiously, I promise -- who understand a book in precisely the fashion I intended. That, too, is what draws novelists to pore over the Web reviews. In that mosh pit of online commentary, that galaxy of single-star and five-star reviews, a lot of people who are far smarter than I have said things about my books -- both good and bad -- that left me humbled.

Nonetheless, it is hard to resist a review that uses the word "Stoopid" or to argue with someone who calls himself "Bic Parker." And, alas, it is nearly impossible for a book to hold its own with a really good can opener. ·

(This entry originally appeared in the Washington Post Book World on August 17, 2008.)

Far be it from me to impugn the hygiene of a mouse, but the other day I met one that treated the silverware drawer like a bus station bathroom. The mouse was living in a house on an island, a modest dollop of evergreen and rock in a lake with four small cottages upon it. My family and I were visiting friends there one weekend this summer, and the mouse was a guest, too.

Unlike us, however, the mouse wasn't invited. Also unlike us, the mouse had no interest in cards or swimming or taking the family's boat for a spin around the island. The mouse was interested largely in eating our bread and cereal and cardboard and then pooping on spoons. This is not the worst thing a guest can do, but it's certainly not as helpful as offering to do the dishes or bringing your hosts a bottle of wine.

Consequently, one night we left a humane mousetrap out on a kitchen counter -- the sort of trap in which a mouse can walk in but then can't escape. The next morning, we found the mouse trapped inside it with only a lump of banana bread for company, and he was not a happy camper. He was clawing at the plastic walls and trying to push his snout through the top.

It seemed to all of us that he had, by mouse standards, a lot of facial hair, and so my wife named him Whiskers. He was pretty big: Not rat big or cat big, but sufficiently robust that keeping him in the humane trap any longer than necessary would verge on the inhumane.

The problem, of course, was that we were on an island: A small island. We couldn't release him near the house because Whiskers would come right back and use the teaspoons as toilets. But if we went a hundred yards in any direction, we would be unleashing the serial pooper on neighbors. And it seemed like a lot of work (and gasoline) to fire up the powerboat and ferry him to the mainland. We all agreed that the mouse was perfectly pleasant -- other than his bathroom habits and the fact he gnawed holes in containers of food -- but we also agreed that he had to go.

Meanwhile, Whiskers rattled his trap. I began to wonder if he was one of those horror movie rats from the 1970s. Think "Ben." Or "Willard."

Now, my wife has a heart big enough for any stray cat, spider, or freakishly big mouse. She actually liked his sideburns. She is also an excellent swimmer.

And so while the rest of us debated what we should do, she slipped into her bathing suit and found an inflatable seat cushion. In the distance was another island: An almost perfectly round discus with evergreens packed tight as moss. She took Whiskers in his trap, placed him in the center of the seat, and proceeded to tow him across the channel to that other patch of land. The waves were pretty choppy and so returning him to the wild and swimming back to our island took about 20 minutes.

"When I had about 30 yards to go, he really started struggling," she said later. "He had his nose almost all the way out and I thought he was going to escape. I liked him, but I really didn't want a mouse clawing his way up my hair so he wouldn't drown. That would have been kind of gross."

Fortunately, he didn't get out, and so my wife was able to set him free amidst the moss and the roots at the edge of that island with all of the fanfare and dignity that accompanied the release of Elsa the lion in "Born Free."

OK, that's an exaggeration. There was no crescendo of strings in the background -- just the waves lapping against the shore. But my wife reported that it was nonetheless very satisfying to watch the mouse hightail it into the underbrush. And while all of us missed Whiskers for the rest of our visit, none of us missed having to sanitize the spoons.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 24, 2008.)