http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/ en Copyright 2008 Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:00:02 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 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.)]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/08/highwater_mouse.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/08/highwater_mouse.html Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:00:02 -0500 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.)]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/08/the_writing_life_everybodys_a.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/08/the_writing_life_everybodys_a.html Wed, 20 Aug 2008 05:55:51 -0500 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.)]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/08/holy_fried_dough_its_batman.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/08/holy_fried_dough_its_batman.html Sun, 17 Aug 2008 07:22:16 -0500 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.)]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/08/hitting_bottom_and_bouncing_ba.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/08/hitting_bottom_and_bouncing_ba.html Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:16:36 -0500 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.]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/08/thanks_for_the_daysie.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/08/thanks_for_the_daysie.html Sat, 09 Aug 2008 16:28:18 -0500 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.)]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/08/my_brothers_a_keeper.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/08/my_brothers_a_keeper.html Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:21:06 -0500 Captain Hook before he lost his hand?" and "If people can have dog breath, can dogs have people breath? And what, precisely, is people breath anyway?" She was wondering about barn swallows because this year a mom and pop pair of swallows -- my wife christened them Lil and Phil -- nested on a wooden crossbeam in our barn that offered my family both a perfect glimpse of the meticulousness with which they had built the cup-shaped nest, and then the mother's care and feeding of her four baby birds before they learned to fly. It was completely remarkable. It also meant that we had to treat our three cats as if they were swallow serial killers and put them under house arrest. Actually, that's an exaggeration. The June and July incarceration was pretty lax. We simply kept a close eye on the cats when they were outside and made sure there was nothing tall on the barn floor near the nest from which one of our cats might make a desperate cliff dive whenever an adult swallow flew to or from the eggs or, eventually, the chicks. Over time, we seemed to reach some sort of interspecies detente with the birds. They seemed to realize that humans, unlike the cats, meant them no harm and so they would remain in the nest when we approached it to check in on them. During a freakish windstorm -- a near tornado -- in late June, my wife and I watched the adults shivering in fear as winds whipped the barn. Not long after the eggs hatched, a friend of ours, Amanda Bull, got close enough to photograph the mother bird feeding the four young ones. In the image, the chicks' mouths are wide open, each one shaped like an upside down teardrop, the insides the yellow of wheat. This past Monday morning, between 6 a.m. and 7:30, the four baby birds officially took flight. For a few hours, they perched, cheeping rather proudly it seemed to me, on the steep peak of the roof of our house. Their mother sat like a sentinel beside them. And now they are gone. Without wanting to make too much of a rather obvious parallel, my wife and I can't help but compare ourselves with the birds' mom and pop. Our daughter has drawn nearer to 15 than to 14 -- earlier this summer I commented on the reality that she had outgrown her swing set -- and she is inching closer every day to fleeing the nest. Her friends are learning to drive. Just the other day, her pal Bridgette appeared in our driveway at the wheel of her mom and dad's minivan, her mother -- surprisingly serene -- in the passenger seat beside her. She has friends who will leave for colleges and conservatories in less than six weeks, and others who are starting to explore where they will hope to continue their education when they finish high school. She has peers who have jobs -- real jobs that pay real money. Now that the swallows have left, our cats once more have the run of the yard. The first thing they did when we opened the front door to the house was dash like mad men and women for the barn. We're talking "The Amazing Race." My wife and I followed. There the two humans and three felines stared up at a wooden beam and a barren half-cup of straw and grass and mud. For the first time, I think, I really understood what it meant to have an empty nest. (This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on July 26, 2008.) ]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/07/a_taste_of_an_empty_nest.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/07/a_taste_of_an_empty_nest.html Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:00:24 -0500 San Gimignano Museum of Torture. San Gimignano is a spectacularly beautiful medieval village built on a hill, which pretty much describes 7,000 other villages in Tuscany. If you look at a map of Tuscany, you'll see that every other village is Montesomething. If I had wanted, I could have taken a day and biked in a circle from Montisi to Montefollonico to Montepulciano to Montalcino and then back to Montisi. The difference between San Gimignano and most villages is that it has seven massive medieval towers looming over the town, and more tourists per cobblestone than the Ben & Jerry's factory in Waterbury. Imagine Stowe at the peak of the foliage season, and then squeeze in a few thousand additional tourists, five separate parking lots and two dozen gift shops that sell nothing but maple syrup and snow globes of Mount Mansfield. And, of course, add that torture museum. While my wife and daughter had the common sense to eat gelato and relax by a fountain in the midst of those medieval skyscrapers, I paid my seven euros and went in. The museum is a collection of antiquarian torture devices, most of which involve wrought iron, ropes or very sharp points. Its ostensible message, if it has one, is that once humans had little regard for human life and were capable of inflicting frightening pain on one another in the name of religion or country or mere self-righteousness. There are the basics, of course, such as the rack and the iron maiden and a functioning guillotine -- which was actually supposed to end torture by killing the victim instantly. There is a dungeon. And there are displays of devices that only a real psychopath could have come up with, a disproportionate number of which seemed to involve impaling people. Everything is explained in five languages, and the diagrams can only be called grisly. I grew up on old Vincent Price movies, but I was getting nauseated and decided to leave. I was just wondering what sort of lunatic this travel writer must have been to suggest this museum for children, when I came across a group of six Americans: Three teenagers and three adults. They were staring at an exhibit I hadn't noticed. It was a form of water torture, and the diagram explaining the process looked inexplicably familiar. Then I remembered: I had seen an illustration a little like this in 2007, in an article examining whether American interrogators were using torture in the present. Teenagers, I believe, have pretty sound moral compasses. For every teen who thought it made sense (for example) to vandalize the Robert Frost cabin in Ripton, there were many more who were appalled. And so I wasn't surprised when one of the teens, a boy, turned to his mother or his aunt and observed, "Man. TiVo and torture. I wonder if that's going to be the U.S. legacy in a hundred years." He was a tad unnerved, as was the rest of the group, and together we all filed out of the museum. Here, it seemed, was yet another parallel between the United States and Italy -- though, unfortunately, it might have been medieval Europe and modern America. (This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on July 20, 2008.)]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/07/a_world_of_hurt_then_and_now.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/07/a_world_of_hurt_then_and_now.html Sun, 20 Jul 2008 12:53:46 -0500 Burlington Free Press on July 13, 2008.)]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/07/in_the_swing_of_things_no_more.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/07/in_the_swing_of_things_no_more.html Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:50:08 -0500 gelato and how to ask for a bathroom. But their move has worked out rather nicely. In addition to not drinking branded and bottled water, their family steers clear of aspartame, microwave ovens, and most chemical food additives they can't pronounce. And it is important to note that they have been avoiding aspartame, microwave ovens and bottled water for years -- in the case of bottled water, for instance, well before the current anti-bottled water backlash and new books such as Elizabeth Royte's, "Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It." They worry about toxins in their environment and the ecological ramifications of how they live. They reside in a town that I have always viewed as a sort of a Tuscan version of Lincoln, the Vermont village in which I live. It's small, people tend to know most of their neighbors, and they have an annual joust. Lincoln doesn't have a joust, at least not yet, but we do have two parades a year. One of those parades might last almost as long as a television commercial. And we are only a few miles from Bristol, which will have its annual outhouse races on the 4th of July, this coming Friday morning. An outhouse race is a lot like a joust in that talented athletes move at great speeds. The big difference is that instead of riding a regal steed, the outhouse athlete is pulling a homemade one-holer on wheels. In any case, sometimes I think of Greg and Pam when I am biking here in Vermont and I buy a bottle of water at a convenience store along the route. I think of them on occasion when I swill a diet soda with aspartame. And, yes, I recall their reluctance to own a microwave oven when I defrost some frozen berries at my house and the microwave emits its small ding -- a chirp that is eerily reminiscent of a child's bicycle bell. Their village is, in their opinion, the Tuscan boondocks, the town that time and tourists forgot and the Internet never quite found. And yet there is something profoundly forward-looking there. Lincoln, too. I have neighbors here who are a lot like Greg and Pam: They grow lots of their own food, they avoid bottled water, and they worry about the size and weight of their carbon footprint. Sometimes we look toward the big cities to see the trends, and often that's where they begin. Body piercing, for instance. But sometimes the trends that matter most begin in the hills: Small worlds that are not so much backwaters as they are waterfalls of fresh thinking. After all, just try and find a spigot with seraphim and nymphs on a big city street when you want to refill an empty water bottle. (This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on June 29, 2008.)]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/06/choosing_a_backwater_over_bott.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/06/choosing_a_backwater_over_bott.html Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:47:47 -0500 Burlington, the Lincoln Little League team made some history of its own. On Wednesday night, for the first time in 22 years, Lincoln won the Mount Abraham District Little League Championship. "We've started a dynasty," said Turner Brett, 11, the team's second baseman, as he gazed at the championship trophy, which is almost as tall as some of the fifth- and sixth-graders on the team. Brett went three for three in the championship game, a 14 to nothing shutout of the New Haven Wildcats. Sawyer Kamman, the 12-year-old starting pitcher, hurled a no-hitter in the abbreviated contest. Sean Wood, the sixth-grade shortstop, pounded a triple. And Austin Lafayette, also 12, cleared the left-center field fence with his eighth home run of the season. (It's important to note that the New Haven ballplayers are extremely talented, too, and had an excellent year. Making it to the championship game is no shabby accomplishment and they should be very proud.) The irony, of course, is that while this may be the start of an era for Lincoln, it is just as likely the end of one. It's no easier to repeat in Little League than it is in the Major League. It's not that the star players will be lured to other teams by lucrative contracts or management will make wrongheaded trades that will undermine the team chemistry. It's the reality that little boys and girls grow up and move on. Alan Kamman, the Lincoln skipper, observed after the victory that a lot of the reason for the team's success in 2008 was simple longevity. "The team has been together for four years," he said. "They've been playing together since they were in the pee-wee league -- since the minors." Now most of them will enter seventh grade and leave Little League behind. Certainly many will continue to play baseball and a few years from now some will succeed with the Mount Abraham Union High School Eagles: Five of the Lincoln players will be on the area All Star team, which is just half of the 11-man squad. Yup, 11. That's how many players Kamman had at his disposal. ("Yeah, you don't do a lot of pinch hitting. And no pinch running," he observed.) I love Little League. I only got to see parts of three games this year, and that was a loss for me. It's not just the innocence of the players and the naive hopefulness that marks their approach. It's not their inadvertent -- and thus absolutely glorious -- mimicry of the mannerisms of their Major League idols. Rather, it's the unique idiosyncrasies that mark the fields and the fans and, yes, the players. That home run that Austin Lafayette hit? It landed in a swamp. Where do the Lincoln diehards in the stands get their hot dogs in the second or third inning? The Love Shack, a portable shanty that local pallet mill owner Dan Adam gives to the league for the season, so the moms and dads have a place to cook up the franks when it rains. And the players? Their uniforms are green and the town begins with an "L," and so this year they called themselves the Lincoln Lizards. A little alliteration goes a long way. Kamman coached with but three rules. Using his fingers he enumerated them for me: "One, have fun. Three, do your best. And two? No hurting Al. Some of those kids have gunshots for arms." Last week I alluded to the boys of summer, the Brooklyn Dodgers from the late 1940s and 1950s. This week I got to spend time with the real boys of summer -- all of whom, before we know it, will be grownups themselves. It makes building a dynasty difficult. But it sure makes for a great evening at the Little League ball field. Congratulations to both Lincoln and New Haven. Thanks for another wonderful season. (This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on June 22, 2008.)]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/06/little_league_dynasties_hard_t.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/06/little_league_dynasties_hard_t.html Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:19:40 -0500 Fenway Park: the great light stanchions, the bleachers, the towering John Hancock sign. Like me, my father is a serious baseball fan. Unlike me, however, he isn't especially partisan: He appreciates the sport in general and is as capable of rooting for the Florida Marlins as he is the Boston Red Sox. I think he is most likely to cheer for whichever team is the underdog. Put a team down three games to none in a best-of-seven series, and he is going to be pulling mightily for that team in need of a miracle. I'm a little like that, too, but I do have my favorites: My beloved New York Mets, followed by the arguably more interesting and idiosyncratic Red Sox. I should admit that in a head-to-head competition I will always be pulling for the Mets, the team of my boyhood in suburbs of New York City. Consequently, that view I had from the Commonwealth was a real treat because it was at Fenway Park that my favorite team had one of its finest moments. In 1986, down two games to none in the World Series, the Mets went to Fenway and took two of three from the Red Sox, setting the stage for that remarkable game six at Shea -- Mookie Wilson, Bill Buckner, and a dribbler up the first base line -- and the Mets' eventual World Series victory. Incidentally, I saw those three critical games at Fenway while sitting on a stool at Esox Bar on Main Street in Burlington. I had lived in the city less than three months and knew almost no one, and I watched the game surrounded by Sox fans. (I kept my glee at the Mets victories to myself.) That was a very long time ago. Ancient history. Buckner has been forgiven, and the Sox are the only team to have won the World Series twice in the new millennium. Meanwhile, those Mets? Plenty of post-season games in the last two decades and change, but no championships. My father and I went to a lot of ballgames together when I was a boy. And, yes, we really would toss a ball back and forth a la poet and essayist Donald Hall in his beautiful composition, "Fathers Playing Catch with Sons." My father had been a pitcher when he was teenager, a leftie. At least he was usually a leftie. He was ambidextrous and a part of the family lore was that he would become a rightie when he needed to drop a curveball on a right-handed batter. In any case, I still think instantly of my father whenever I am near a Major League ballpark. I've noticed this in Cleveland, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and most certainly New York. Partly that's because he actually appears in the Yankee Stadium stands in the background of an old Curt Blefary baseball card. But the main reason, pure and simple, is that my father and I went to a lot of games when I was growing up. We didn't live all that far from Yankee and Shea Stadium, and back then a family could visit a Major League game for less than the cost of a Ford Explorer (or, these days, for less than the cost of filling the tank of a Ford Explorer). Even now, there is no more verdant green in my mind than the grass of a Major League outfield when you first emerge from the dark of the tunnel. And so while we are usually contemplating the players themselves when we refer to the boys of summer (and, in fact, to one specific team from a bygone era), I think when we visit a ballpark we are reminded that once, long ago, we were all boys or girls playing catch with our parents. Happy Father's Day. (This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on June 15, 2008.)]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/06/the_dads_of_summer.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/06/the_dads_of_summer.html Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:04:54 -0500 In the Summertime”), Bow Wow Wow (“I Want Candy”), and Charlene (“I’ve Never Been to Me”). Just for the record, that final song has some of the most ridiculous lyrics in the history of pop music. To wit: “I’ve been to paradise / But I’ve never been to me.” I have absolutely no idea what that means. In any case, Griff had the talent to go beyond the theme from “Morning Edition,” but her heart belonged to NPR and it was to that music and to that music alone that she would howl. Late last month, at the age of 15 and change, Griff joined such other renowned songbirds in the sky as Edith Piaf, Judy Garland and Billie Holiday. She died at her home here in Lincoln on the Sunday morning of Memorial Day Weekend. She was surrounded by her owners, Dan and Sally Ober, their daughters — Emma and Casey — and Sparkle the Duck. Some of you might recall that Sparkle the Duck has appeared in this column, too. She is the duck that still hasn’t figured out that either she isn’t human or Sally isn’t a duck. She clearly views Sally as her own Mama Mallard. Griff died of lung cancer early on the day of Emma Ober’s 10th birthday party, which isn’t the way most children want to start that sort of big celebration. But the sun had just risen and the sky was a cerulean blue, and Emma and her sister Casey, who is 8, helped bury Griff beside one of the family’s lilacs — which were at their most aromatic and colorful that weekend. The girls sprinkled dirt on Griff’s grave, as well as small, blue forget-me-not flowers. Emma found a large stone in the garden that she somehow managed to lug around the house for a marker, and then she placed upon it Griff’s collar. Meanwhile, Sparkle pecked at the worms that had been unearthed when Dan had dug Griff’s plot. In the last two weeks, Sally has been living with a reality that anyone who has lost a dog or a cat or even a hermit crab knows well. “It’s just so hard after pets die,” she says. “You don’t realize how much they’re with you. There’s such an empty hole.” Sally thinks it is possible that even Sparkle has noticed Griff’s absence: “Griff had an outdoor bed that she would doze in some days, and we kept it on the front porch. Now Sparkle is up there, missing her and looking for her.” All of us in Lincoln who knew Griff will miss her, too. She was a terrific dog — but even more than that, she was a mighty gifted vocalist and precisely the sort of cabaret act we need in hound heaven. Indeed, as the Righteous Brothers sang back in 1974, “If there’s a rock and roll heaven, Well, you know they’ve got a hell of a band.” Now those are some lyrics I understand. (This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on June 8, 2008.)]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/06/swan_song_for_a_song_dog.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/06/swan_song_for_a_song_dog.html Sun, 08 Jun 2008 09:07:37 -0500 no one has mastered time zones because no one's sure what time zone they're in. Eastern? Central? Hoosier? It seems to change annually there. Likewise, it would be one thing to presume Washington, D.C., was near Seattle if you were 7 years old. But 27? So, here's a solution. Imagine if before any of us could log onto Facebook or iTunes, we had to watch a 15 second edu-bit: One moment it was a map that showed us where Estonia was, for instance, and the next it might be the definition of "ablution." After that there might be a fact about Iraq. Imagine if all television shows (especially reality TV shows) had to offer a 30-second edu-mercial every 30 minutes that taught us something about the Constitution. Or Vietnam. Or ... time zones. Can we reverse the trend toward imbecility? Probably not. But we can at least encourage adults to know what time zone they're in. (This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on June 1, 2008.)]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/06/does_anybody_really_know_what.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/06/does_anybody_really_know_what.html Sun, 01 Jun 2008 08:09:55 -0500 Burlington Free Press on May 25, 2008.)]]> http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/05/not_just_kids_say_the_darnedes.html http://chrisbohjalian.com/blog/2008/05/not_just_kids_say_the_darnedes.html Sun, 25 May 2008 07:54:22 -0500