From Here to There

The anti-matter of the rebellious daughter

aconcha — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:02:43 +0000

There’s no such thing as gender neutral. Or what hair salons like to call UNISEX. And don’t try to tell me there is. Boys and girls get treated differently. It starts in the family. Take mine for instance.

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Goddam sonofabitch bastards

aconcha — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:06:01 +0000

Our dad almost never talked about THE WAR. The few times I remember him talking about it he said he was at “The Mop Up At Guadalcanal.” Maybe everyone called it that because that’s what it was called. But since I never heard anyone else talk about it, I always thought that was HIS name for it. As a kid I always pictured him with a big bucket and one of those Navy swab type mops, my dad standing in some muddy canal pulling that mop from side to side, swabbing like crazy but never able to get all the mud up and out of there. (more…)

From the troop ship to the sailboat

aconcha — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:12:07 +0000

“The Mop Up At Guadalcanal” was a strange description for what he actually had to do in “The Pacific,” another phrase that went with his almost never told war stories. It seemed to me that the generation that fought in World War II always referred to where they were sent by continent. Thus his friend Jack Shapiro fought in “Africa” against Rommel (ThatGoddammKrautSonofabitchRommel, as Jack often said, as if it were one word). (more…)

From “Swim Alone” to “Stern Alone”

aconcha — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:22:34 +0000

I had been to summer camp in Maine for two years starting when I was seven. Since many of the girls came to Camp Minnehooha from cities like Pittsburgh and New York, swimming was a really important part of the first month there. Because I had spent six months a year in Florida since I was two, I was one of the best swimmers at Camp Minnehooha. I had been swimming nonstop for years by then. At the edge of the lake they had roped off swimming pens and designated these by cap color. White Caps were the kids who had lived their entire lives in a city and were afraid to go in past their knees. Red Caps were beginning swimmers. The doggie paddlers. Blue Caps were accomplished in two strokes, and Gold Caps (there were only a few) could go anywhere they liked in or out of the pens and swim freely at any time. These girls could do every stroke including that most underused (for good reason) of all swimming styles, the butterfly. Now, if you had a shark circling you in the water I maintain that the butterfly would not be your first line of defense.

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My experience at sailing — make that rowing — camp

aconcha — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:25:08 +0000

Sailing school lasted two weeks – ten mornings in all. We spent nine of those days practice rowing. I dutifully went through the same exercises I had learned at Minnehooha. On the final morning, all nine of us climbed aboard the Sea Snake, a sixteen-foot sloop, and putt-putted out to the open Long Island Sound, leaving the many pleasure craft on Five Mile River behind peacefully bobbing at their moorings. Nobody but kids ever went out during the week. Besides Captain Bill and his “mate,” a nineteen-year-old boy who had obviously given up a Supreme Court summer clerking job for the adventure of the unbridled sea, the eight other young people aboard were all twelve or thirteen. (more…)

I rowed, but at least I never capsized

aconcha — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:27:44 +0000

A year later my father gave me a sailing dingy. Well, it was actually the dingy that went with the thirty-foot Egg Harbor that he bought, but he paid someone to outfit it with a centerboard and detachable rudder/tiller combination. And a mast and sail. No jib. Just the one sail. I tell you this because it has important implications. This sailboat, and I am stretching it to call this craft anything other than a dingy with a lot of chutzpah, was not a great challenge to racing vessels of any class. Mainly because when the wind took that little sail and the tide was anything but dead low or full high, in other words when the tide was running at all, that little sailing dingy, which probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds, went straight sideways. But fast. (more…)

Trust on the water; bad boys on land

aconcha — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:28:45 +0000

My father had never learned to sail. If he had I’m sure he would have made the connection between a jib and being able to come about neatly without losing ground or running sideways against a strong current. For that is exactly what this new craft did. Very much like the dingy. Only faster still. So I could get even farther out into the Sound than with the dingy. I can still see him standing at the end of the dock, me way out near the entrance to our cove heading in at sunset, his arms folded at the waist, his legs slightly apart, just waiting to see that I was coming back. As soon as he spotted the white styrofoam ball at the top of my cat’s mast, he would turn and walk back up the hill to our house. He never said a word about where I had been or how long I’d been out or why I didn’t let them know when I was going sailing or anything like that. He just wanted to know I was safe. (more…)

My fourth-grade love

aconcha — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:00:30 +0000

I was in the fourth grade when I first fell in love. It’s doubtful that it lasted very long but it seemed an aching eternity. He seemed completely oblivious to my existence, probably the major reason I had any feelings at all towards him that fourth-grade year that was so full of complexity in my tenth year of life. His name was Mike. Funny thing was, a lot of other girls in Miss Hammernick’s class were intoxicated with the mysterious Mike, who was about as short as anyone in the class and extremely skinny. Soon I would affix my affections to another Mike, an older Mike, a much handsomer Mike, a friend-of-my-brother’s Mike and therefore even more out of my league. Mike II and my brother were in seventh grade. That meant they had graduated to junior high. Exalted. Independent. Almost-high-school Mike. Tall, lean, blond-haired, freckled, soft-spoken, elegant Mike. Who never ever said a word to me no matter how many times he came over to our house to do boy stuff with my brother. At ten, I was simply “the little sister” and there was nothing about me that would have interested any boy. But I had no idea why not.

The lethal weapon in the kitchen

aconcha — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:00:52 +0000

By twelve, when I began to have the vaguest inkling of what did interest boys, it really pissed me off. Naturally I blamed my father. But not right away. I waited until my eighteenth birthday before starting my mass campaign of revenge for the way women were treated in Western society in general and MY society in particular, by arguing with him about everything and anything. These arguments included, but were not limited to, that most beloved of all our constitutional amendments, the very glue that holds our great society together, NUMBER TWO – the right to bear arms.

The year was 1967. Flower power was budding throughout the land. THE PILL had given women certain social options they had never known before. In three years I would be bringing four pounds of marijuana through Kennedy airport. Or two keys, if you prefer the lingo of 1970. (more…)

Bloodsuckers and gun advocates

aconcha — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:31:52 +0000

For the edification of the reader I will now place in evidence the exact wording of the second amendment, proposed by the Congress on September 25, 1789, and thereafter ratified by a bunch of states over a series of years until ratification of the first ten amendments to the Constitution was completed on December 15, 1791, with the last few holdout states finally ratifying on April 13, 1939, when Connecticut FINALLY put its John Hancock to the paper. By the way Connecticut is where Lyme disease was first identified in a family that had been suffering from some very unpleasant rashes, swellings, fevers, joint pain and other symptoms. So named for Lyme, Connecticut, where this family lived. Which is not far from where I grew up, presumably with some of the same tick-carrying deer. (more…)