Readers and writers blog

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is an abridged version of Chapter 45 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. December 1986.

I have a memory that is more cyclical than chronological, and this is never more apparent than when the seasons change. On the first thaw of spring, my memory doesn’t go back to the previous day when there was ice on the ground but back through a series of first thaws to the spring of 1948, when I splash home from grade school in my gum rubber boots and see the sand breaking out of the ice soft and clean. In a few months, I know, the sand will be dry and warm, and I will stand again in it barefoot, as I stood in the warm sand of the previous summer when somebody told me my father was dead, killed on a utility pole when he touched the wrong wire. Daddy doesn’t ever come back, but the memory of him does, always. At the first barbecue of summer, I don’t think of the previous day when it was too cold to cook outside but of previous first barbecues of the year ranging back to 1966, a year before Peggy and I are married, when the two of us sneak off for a weekend at a tourist cottage just outside the city of Keene in western New Hampshire. We buy pork chops and beef ribs and cook them on a wood-fired grill next to a stream that runs past the row of cottages. We drink wine and eat meat dripping with juice before we fall together greasy into the cottage’s squeaky-springed metal bed. On the first crisp day of autumn, my mind drifts back not to the previous day’s heat but to previous crisp days of autumn. Like watching the first leaves of 1981 drift into the yard around the big house in Biddeford as I wait for Mary to get home from work, understanding for the first time since I have known her that she isn’t just someone attractive who keeps me from missing Sara but someone real, someone with whom I am falling in love.

The campground at Old Orchard Beach is cut into one of the best remaining stands of white pines on the southern coast of Maine. Near the front gate, the place is ugly – a plaza of asphalt connecting the office with a series of metal utility buildings and a concrete swimming pool that seems out of place so close to the ocean. But a hundred feet or so into the campground, the tall trees form a thick canopy of shade that makes the tightly spaced camp lots seem larger and more private. As it is up front, the ugliest part of the rear of the campground is what we have brought here – rectangular shells of metal and polymer to live in, tubes of twisted aluminum and nylon to sit or swing on, occasionally a fluorescent casting of a tropical bird feeding in this plastic-dotted paradise.

But it all changes with the first snow of the season. I am taking my daily walk along the roads around the perimeter of the campground when it starts, an icy snow that comes down in tiny pellets that rattle through the trees and bounce like rock salt in my path. I crunch through this new ground cover, leaving footprints in the road where my weight has melted the granules. As evening advances and lights go on, the ground begins to glow with reflections. I return to the truck and go inside without turning the lights on. I watch through the windows as the flakes grow fatter and begin floating like snow in a Currier & Ives print.

Home isn’t so much a place as it is a feeling. When I sit on the couch in the rear of the cabin of my truck, I don’t feel as if I am sitting in a conglomeration of furniture, appliances and possessions that have been contorted into the bowels of the ridiculously small white ice cream truck that I see each day from the outside. Instead, I see the clean lines and angles of wood, carpet and metal that in their regularity protect me from the chaos of the outside world and make me more comfortable as they hold within easy reach all the goods and utilities I consider necessary to my life. Safety, order, comfort and convenience. This is my home, and this is the home I see in my mind when I am away from it. Even when I am in the front of the truck, driving away from a place where I have been parked for a day, I feel as if I am driving away from home, even though my home is following me only a few feet behind. And I will have this away-from-home feeling until I have stopped at another place and am sitting in the place that I see as much in my mind as in my rear view mirror.

In this sense, my home on wheels is connected with all the other homes I have occupied in more conventional structures. Which may help explain the feeling I have two months after the first snowfall in the campground, the day the first blizzard comes. As the powdery snow swirls over the wheel wells, obscuring even the top edge of the skirting, I wonder when I will be free to get to the main road, to the interstate highway and eventually to Connecticut and Diane again. As a child in the winter of 1946, I wonder whether the snow drifting against our house will cover the second-story windows as it has the first. In storms like this, when your breath is taken away by driving wind and dusty snow, you wonder if it will ever stop. Only your memory assures you it will.

Life is not chronology but cycles, not straight lines but circles. This is why our clocks keep coming back to the same hours, our calendars to the same days.

– Sid Leavitt

I’ve been traveling through territory that is — and I’m ashamed to have to say it — strange to most of us. And that is American Indian territory.

The reason it remains so strange to most of us is that the real Indian territory is still obscured by stereotypes that refuse to go away. They always surface at Thanksgiving, despite efforts by native Americans to disabuse us of them, and they still haunt movies and other products of mainstream American culture.

So a visit is in order to Joy Harjo’s Web Log, the latest addition to our blogroll.

Harjo’s blog, which dates back to July 2003, is a voluminous collection of writings about native Americans, much of it by her — all of it well written — and some from other sources that she has found or who contributed it themselves. Some of it is familiar to most of us, much of it is not. And some of it is, well, just strange.

Harjo is a poet, visual and performance artist, musician, professor, Oklahoma native and member of the Muscogee, also known as Creek, tribe. Primarily, she is a poet, and she writes like one. For example, her Sept. 28, 2005, entry:

. . . I knew the owls to the right of the car Saturday night, as we drove down after the film showing from Tucson to Patagonia, were a message, a warning. I felt death. Then, almost immediately after, a bright light fell straight to the earth in front of us. It was not the elegant arc of a star or heavenly body following a circular trajectory. It was sure fall.

. . . Yesterday the fulfillment of the prophecy came in the sudden death of a relatively young Creek cousin who grew up in Okemah but lived in the Sacramento area most of her life. Her life made a rough path. Her last stint in prison, for something stupid and not worthy of a prison term: drugs and the need for vision in her painful world — she’d emerged with a resolve to be transformed . . . Strange how life is, or should I say strange how death is — it was her mother who was in the hospital struggling for healing. It was her daughter who left first.

The sky also is prominent in one of Harjo’s more strange entries — strange not because of the Hopi belief that we’re now in the fourth world and that a comet may presage the fifth, but because it links to a weblog called Predicto, a potpourri of strangeness itself. (By the way, the original link to the comet is now missing from Predicto.)

But Harjo is open to the world’s strange elements, and her weblog encourages the rest of us to open ourselves as well. A caveat: If you’re as uninformed as I am about native American culture — the real culture(s) — you’ll be spending a lot of time in dictionaries, encyclopedias and other resources.

Just sorting out the American Indian tribes and nations is daunting. And reading census material on the nearly 2 million native Americans can be depressing. For example, while poverty among some Indian groups is close to the national average of 12 percent, a more realistic figure among larger tribal populations ranges from 15 to more than 50 percent.

Like all groups, American Indians are a diverse lot. And like Harjo, many are of mixed heritage (she is half Muscogee but a full member of the tribe). Searching the blogosphere, I came up with some other interesting sites:

• A Girl Named Turquoise, a charming weblog written by Tiffany Midge, a Hunkpapa Sioux poet who also claims German heritage.

• chimEra/saaniidotcom, written by Zoey, a Navajo poet in New Mexico.

• RezBlog, written by a young woman who lives on a Coeur D’Alene reservation in the Northwest, or, as she puts it, “somewhere on the rez.”

For a more complete list of native American writers, visit Native Wiki.

Funny, all the sites I listed are written by women. Well, maybe it’s got something to do with Mother Earth. Maybe that sounds stupid, but I don’t know.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE: In case you didn’t click on the comet link, it’s to an entry about and a picture (shown above) of Comet Holmes, which appears blue and could be interpreted as the blue star that the Hopis believe will be the kachina or life-bringer leading to a fifth and better world.

It being Christmas Day, I have a postscript — actually, a wish — for after the holidays: How I wish we gave gifts not when we’re supposed to but when we’re not supposed to.

I was reminded of this again in an indirect way when we visited a local nursing home Sunday for our weekly music program. We have a family band, although the word ‘band’ is a bit of a stretch. We’re two guitars — my wife and I — an assortment of strings played by her father, a retired Indiana farmer, and harmony singing by her mother, who also emcees our little performances (I gave a little history in an entry in May).

What reminded me of my wish is that, surprisingly enough, the nursing home residents seemed fairly festive.

We’ve been playing at nursing homes for about 15 years, and one of the things I learned early on was that Christmas in a nursing home is not particularly cheerful.

I can only guess why. Maybe it’s that many nursing home residents do not live in the present, choosing instead to go back to other, happier times. But when the present becomes familiar again — a Christmas carol will do it — they’re reminded of the times they’re in.

Still, the old tunes we play each week during the rest of the year don’t have the same effect. Then the residents happily sing along. Maybe they’re allowing us to play into their alternate realities as long as we’re not being too intrusive.

I do know that Christmas music is a strong stimulus, too strong for many of the residents, and they can be really morose on the holidays. So this year, we played mostly old tunes, with a carol or two at the end.

It was a relief to see mostly happy faces this year. And to wish they could remain happy from January to December.

Non-holiday gifts help. They don’t have to be big. Just little ones. Like a note. Or a visit. Or . . . well, you probably know better than I.

– Sid Leavitt

I was reading Midwest Rock Lobster recently where the author, Rod McBride, was fantasizing about renting a .50-caliber machine gun and complaining that some “Volvo-driving NPR types” had forced the local firing range to move.

He’s writing from Kansas, of course, but his entry reminded me of a situation that played out a few years ago here at the edge of the New York City suburbs.

By the way, one of the reasons I read McBride’s weblog is not that he’s a libertarian but that he’s an intelligent, articulate libertarian who apparently loves to be provocative. And I like that.

And he does have both a sense of balance and a sense of humor: After stating his belief that the right to bear arms “extends all the way to nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers,” he swings the pendulum deftly back:

So the idea that owning a .50-caliber machine gun would be a criminal offense is as ridiculous as thinking you’d be wise to own one for personal protection.

No, I present no brief against McBride’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, but he did get me sympathizing with those Volvo-driving neighbors. The firing range he described — a place for “shooting junk cars” — sounded a bit ad hoc. And he said the neighbors were in a subdivision a mile and a half away.

As I recall from my Army days, an M-1 rifle can fire a .30-caliber bullet as far as two miles. A slug from a .50-caliber machine gun can travel four miles. Granted, the M-1 slug might be nearly spent by the time it got to the subdivision, but the .50-cal would make me think about moving.

Besides, some of the people I’ve seen with firearms — and I grew up with them in rural New Hampshire — remind me of celebrants on a hot day in Sadr City.

What happened here — well, the next town over where I rented a spot in a hilltop RV park after moving back to this area — was that I was driving home one day when I noticed cars parked along the road near a shale waterfall at the bottom of the hill. A bunch of guys were standing at the edge of the road, firing an assortment of guns into the waterfall.

At work the next day, I mentioned that I had seen people firing guns along a public road, but my coworkers weren’t surprised at all. Been that way for years, they said, adding that some of the shooters were probably local cops. It’s a way to “zero in” their weapons, it was explained to me.

Then I talked to the park owner. He had been fighting for years to get the shooting stopped. The hill wasn’t that high, and some guys couldn’t even hit the waterfall, he said. He had bullet holes to prove it.

I knew the police had their own firing ranges. And I wondered how those guys — especially the one with the shotgun — were “zeroing in” their weapons. In a waterfall.

Oh well, the shooting finally was stopped, but not because of the park owner or his bullet holes. No, it was somebody — a state environmental official, I think — who found the shale was so full of lead that it was leaching into the water. And the water subsequently ran into a large cornfield across the road.

McBride describes Kansas as “flyover country.” So are parts of New York, even near the city. (I hesitate to mention that one of the Sept. 11 airliners flew right over us on its way to the World Trade Center.) And farmers still have a voice here, too.

Now I don’t believe any neighbors ever got shot as a result of the waterfall fusillades, although I couldn’t swear to it. But I don’t think even that would have gotten the town fathers to tell the police to put a halt to the shooting.

But the idea of heavy metal in their sweet corn . . . case closed.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. The weapon shown at the top is an M-2 machine gun, a belt-fed .50-caliber gun that here is mounted on an armored vehicle but also can be operated from the ground on a tripod.

2. McBride continues the conversation in a followup entry. I don’t necessarily agree with him, but as I said in a comment beneath his post, I like the way the guy thinks.

As a newcomer to blogging, I’m learning about web statistics — specifically, those free programs that count your site’s visitors. So what do these so-called stat counters give you?

The word ‘hit’ is involved, but only because that’s what the answer rhymes with.

If that sounds crude, so are the statistics we’re getting here at Readersandwritersblog.com. I mean, what else are we to conclude from the two stat counters we’re now using? Either we’re conversing with several hundred readers a day — on one day last month, nearly 700 readers requesting nearly 2,400 page loads — or we’re listening to crickets out there.

The trouble started when we installed that second stat counter. We were happily cruising along with the hundreds of daily readers shown on our original stat counter, Analog 6.0, when we finally gave in to a nagging question:

Does the counter count us? That is, when we go into our site administrator to post entries, make corrections, let in comments (and weed out spam), does Analog 6.0 count us as visitors?

We still don’t know the answer to that question, despite reading and rereading about inclusions and exclusions in Frequently Asked Questions, Section B: Basic Configuration, No. 7 (How do I ignore accesses from my site?) of Analog 6.0’s introductory Readme page. Whew.

I suspect Analog 6.0 is counting our visits, but if you understand how we’re supposed to prevent that (see the instructions here), then stop reading this blog and go get yourself a job as a senior computer programmer.

(I should say right here that I have no complaint about Analog 6.0. It’s a great program, always accessible, and it’s free. My complaint is that I don’t understand it, but that’s a reflection on me, not it.)

So we installed StatCounter. It’s also free, but what’s more to the point is that it’s blessedly simple to exclude your own visits to your site. A few clicks and you have your IP address blocked from the count. How do you find your IP address? Well, you visit the website WhatIsMyIP.com, and there’s your address.

Problem solved, right?

Wrong. Because according to StatCounter, our visitors are a few dozen a day, not Analog 6.0’s few hundred. And it’s not clear why.

In a post similar to this one but predating it by more than two years, writer Daniel J. Solove in his Nov. 17, 2005, entry on the law blog Concurring Opinions asked his readers, “Is anybody out there?” He then went on to discuss some of the factors that can skew the numbers on stat counters — search hits, spammers and web robots or bots, all of which can add numbers that aren’t visits by readers.

The one that chilled us was the one that takes away numbers, numbers that may represent the most devoted readers — those who use RSS network feeds that notify their computer when something new is posted on a website they’re following. According to Solove, an experienced blogger, readers with RSS feeds are not counted as visitors unless, after reading the new content on a site, they also click through to its comments section. That drastically reduces the count for RSS readers — that is, those readers who care enough about a site to subscribe to it through RSS — and virtually eliminates the RSS reader count for new sites without comments.

We were so enlightened by Solove’s piece that we stole the photo he used to accompany it — a couple sitting in an otherwise-empty auditorium — and posted it above.

We still have no idea what’s going on out there. Frankly, we don’t visit our own site that often. I write the blog entries on Notepad and paste them into the site with little editing there. The comments directory is checked a couple of times a day. We keep a parallel blogroll off the site so I can check our blogger friends every day without opening our site. All in all, we visit our own site, even on a busy day, maybe a dozen times.

So why are we getting different stats from the two counters — different by factors of 10 to 20 times? We don’t know. But we really can’t complain. Even in the worst-case scenario, our visitors are in the dozens. In our house, that’s a crowd.

And it means that you, dear reader, are one of that very select group of people.

– Sid Leavitt

To counterbalance any cynicism you may have sensed in our Dec. 16 post about Christmas, I report the following:

Some friends have invited us and others over to their house this weekend to take turns reading Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol aloud. What a great idea. In case any of you want to do the same — or just read it for yourselves or have your children read it — I’ve posted it in our fiction section.

Here’s a direct link.

Unlike some abbreviated print versions — or any of the television or movie productions of the story — the original is a rather long piece. About 25,000 words. We and our friends call ourselves the Woodstock Readers Group, but we’re really just an ad hoc bunch of whatever writers, artists, publishers and others can make it to our infrequent gatherings.

But we’re a dedicated bunch. And we’ll slog through as much of the Dickens classic as we can. We hope you can, too.

Or print it out and save it for next year.

– Sid Leavitt

Some people have a lot of complaints about Christmas — commercialism, loss of religious meaning, too damned many carols on radio and TV — but I make only one: It comes at the wrong time of the year.

Let’s move Christmas to Feb. 25.

Now before you go all traditional on me, consider the following drawbacks of our current Dec. 25 system:

• Holiday overload. In the five or six weeks between late November and January, we Americans face three major holidays — Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s — at great trauma to our fiscal and physical beings. We all know the cost in dollars. And setting aside the fact that a lot of us live in regions where travel is difficult and sometimes dangerous at that time of year, there are other perils. I mean, how much fat food and booze can you cram into your body in a short period before your gall bladder and liver cry out for help?

• Mercantile uncertainty. A good many American businesses live or die according to their holiday sales. The day after Thanksgiving isn’t called Black Friday just because many of us find it the most depressing day of the year to go shopping. It also has come to mean the beginning of a profitable sales season when ledger ink turns from red to black. Not always true, of course, but imagine where it is so — waiting 11 months to find out if you’ll still be in business a month later.

• New Year’s depression. Without mentioning the effects of overspending and overindulgence in the previous short weeks, looking out on the Jan. 1 horizon can be gloomy indeed — months of bad weather leading to no major holidays until July 4th. At least the Quebecers have the fat snowman, Bonhomme Carnaval, to amuse them. What do we have? Groundhog Day? Valentine’s Day? Come on.

• Arbitrary date. This is the most important point both historically and theologically. Because nobody knows when Jesus was born. There’s no biblical or other contemporaneous record of the day of his birth. (In fact, tradition also has the year wrong. It’s now generally accepted as 6 to 4 B.C.)

Dec. 25 in the days of Julius Caesar and his calendar was the winter solstice, celebrated roundly by the Romans as the point of the year when the days started getting longer. For whatever reason, the early Christians either adopted — or co-opted — the date to celebrate Christ’s birth.

Now don’t go all puritanical on me, either. For I will remind you that it was the early Puritans in America who outlawed Christmas — for many of the same reasons people today complain about the holiday. Of course, the Puritans, who were among the most fundamental of the fundamentalists, also were opposed to most of the other holy days observed by Catholics. (Interesting that today’s rightwing Christians can’t get enough Christmas references into our holiday activities — q.v., the ‘war’ on Christmas.)

Now consider the following advantages to a Feb. 25 Christmas:

• Midwinter cheer. Christmas decorations could still go up in December — even after Thanksgiving, if you want — but would stay up through much of the winter. I like Christmas decorations. And there’s nothing sadder in early January than seeing a cut evergreen with bits of tinsel stuck to it lying in the roadside trash.

• A real New Year’s. As calendars go, this should be an important holiday, one that we could look forward to all through December as we plan — and fortify our resolution — for a better year ahead. Now it’s mostly an occasion to drink alcohol and forget about those huge credit card bills coming due.

• Better balance sheets. Now merchants would know early in the year about holiday revenue — and have time to do something about it, if necessary, during the rest of the year.

• Easier shopping. Three months instead of five or six weeks. Less congestion in the stores. Costs spread out over a longer period. And finally, a corollary . . .

• More time. To celebrate all these major holidays. At a pace easier on our bodies and minds. And even for grinches whose hatred of the holidays would be extended into late February, there would be at least one redeeming factor:

Spring would be just around the corner.

– Sid Leavitt

So what’s it like being retired? Well, I’ll give you the same answer I’ve given my former coworkers over the past four years. Retirement is, in a word, great.

But it’s not for everybody. And for those of you who are planning to do it someday, I’ll have some free advice¹ a bit later on.

Being retired is waking up in the morning — at any damned time you please — and knowing that the hours ahead are for anything you want to do within your physical and fiscal limits.

As I am writing this, I have just finished visiting our blogroll. I spent 10 minutes at dooce watching a video about a Japanese girl and her dog and then wiping away the tears behind my glasses. I spent five minutes with the pseudonymous Conrad H. Roth recounting his five-minute visit with British writer-translator-raconteur Stanley Chapman and then another 20 minutes looking up all Roth’s references to Victorian writers. (He wonders, by the way, why we have forsaken much of Victorian culture.)

I also spent an hour slogging with Don Croner through the wilds of Mongolia on his camel trip to Ülzii Bilegt, a remote ruins in a southern province on the Gobi Desert. A century ago, this was a hideout for Dambijantsan, a legendary leader who claimed to be a Buddhist lama but is remembered chiefly for his military and political skills fighting for Mongolia’s independence. On the way, Don and his native crew survive a camel stampede, confront a rare Gobi bear and visit with sinister spirits at the ruins. (God, I wish I had a better map of Mongolia.)

Meanwhile, I wrote part of this entry while walking on a treadmill.

Now, some retirees complain that they are prisoners of their easy chair and television. Me, I love our easy chair, and I love TV — especially Mike and the Mad Dog, an afternoon sports radio program that’s simulcast on the Yankees cable network. I don’t care so much for sports, but I love watching guys talk about them, especially in New York, a place that still seems exotic to a country bumpkin like me, even though I’ve lived here off and on over the past 30 years.

The rest of the day? I don’t know.

That’s a common complaint of retirees — facing hours that they no longer have to work. All the hours of the rest of their lives. Hours that will be empty unless they can find some way to fill them.

Well, I love empty hours. But that’s because I’m basically a lazy guy. I like nothing better than to dawdle, or, as my grandmother would say, to lollygag around. Because it gives you time to think, to dream, to savor just being alive. Yes, it also gives you time to think about dying. But that’s a subject I resolved some time ago: It wasn’t so bad before I was born. I expect it to be just as comfortable after I’m gone.

So here’s my advice:

1. Get a good education. And don’t stop with graduation.

2. Pay attention to your health. Try not to eat too much junk food. And walk. To nowhere. For at least 20 minutes a day. I’m no physical specimen, but as I approach 70, that treadmill is looking like a good investment. The arthritis has now moved into my hips, but I just walk slower.

3. Learn to live frugally, however you define it. I define it as simple clothes, simple foods like beans and brown rice, an out-of-date but serviceable car. I learned about frugality by retiring once when I was approaching 50. I lived in a truck for five years, then went back to work. I don’t recommend this to everyone, but it’s a good way to find out what material possessions you really need.

4. And this is the most important: Be lucky¹. Here’s how I have been:

• My parents were poor, but they gave me good genes, including a healthy body and an innate ability at languages. I was drafted during the Vietnam War, but I was sent to a mountaintop in Turkey to listen to Soviet tank maneuvers.

• My work history was mostly moderate-paying jobs, but it was long. (Another advantage of growing up poor — you start working early, all through school.) And since I’m basically frugal, I can live on Social Security.

• Before it’s too late, find a good spouse². One who doesn’t mind a lollygagger, who understands that while you may be absolutely charming in company, you basically like to stay at home and . . . lollygag.

Well, I’m exhausted. Time for more dawdling, dreaming and staying alive.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. See? Now you know why the advice was free.

2. You’re the best, hon.

Back in May, nearing the first anniversary of his death, I wrote a post about former newspaper colleague Rob Borsellino and the power of his words. The post included a snippet from a Christmas column he wrote for the Des Moines Register that later was reprinted in his book, So I’m talkin’ to this guy¹.

Now nearing the holiday season, I offer a larger excerpt from that column, all in the spirit of Christmas:

No Pulitzer, but a new way of
looking at Christmas season

By Rob Borsellino

Dec. 24, 1998

This one’s for those folks out there who just want to pull the covers over their heads and pray for Christmas to go away. I can relate. I felt that way all through my teens and well into my 20s. Then I met an interesting kid and he helped turn me around.

It happened in the late ’70s at the Kingston Daily Freeman — my first newspaper job. Kingston is in New York’s Hudson Valley, about 90 miles north of Manhattan, and the 20-person newsroom was an odd collection of misfits, alcoholics, aging journalists and reckless young bucks looking to make a name for themselves.

(This was) the post-Watergate era, when every reporter was certain a Pulitzer Prize was behind every closed door in every City Hall in the country. The Freeman staff was infected with that disease. In a three-year period, the paper’s constant hounding drove the mayor, the sheriff and the chairman of the county legislature into retirement.

The editor decided we needed something to show the community we had a heart. So she started a Christmas fund. She went to the county welfare office and got the names of families in need who would be willing to have their hard-luck stories plastered on the front page — with photos. Then each of the paper’s reporters was expected to knock out one of these tear-jerkers every week between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, making sure there was one in the paper every day.

And like everything else at the Freeman, this became a competitive exercise among the staff. We’d try our damnedest to write the saddest, most heart-rending story. After work, we’d have a few beers and a few laughs and argue over who had written the most maudlin piece. Late in the season, I was sure I’d locked up first place. I interviewed a father and son living in a shelter and they only had one coat between them.

My story ran under a 6-column banner headline — ‘Father and Son Share Overcoat.’ The outpouring from the community was exceptional. So was the response from my colleagues, most of it punctuated with that sick newsroom humor: ‘Hey, Pop, can I borrow the coat tonight? I’ve got a hot date.’

I was about to claim victory when, a few days before Christmas, a reporter named Rick Remsnyder came into the newsroom with a tale to tell. We gathered around his desk and Remsnyder — a quiet guy who last I heard was writing for Golf Digest — seemed shaken.

He’d just come from the home of an elderly couple who lived in a two-story walk-up on the seedy side of town. And they were raising their 8-year-old grandson, a kid who I believe was named Ricky.

The only sign of Christmas in the apartment was an anemic plastic tree that they’d found on the street, dragged home and propped up in a corner. The only sign that a child lived there was some overused toys strewn about the living room floor. They were the kind of toys they give out at the fast-food places when you buy kid meals.

The couple didn’t have much to say, but Ricky did. He said he’d have a happy Christmas if his grandma could get a robe and if Grandpa could have warm slippers.

‘What about you?’ Remsnyder asked.

The kid said he didn’t need anything. But he was going to wrap up his old toys and put them under the tree so he’d have something to open on Christmas morning.

We stood around Remsnyder’s desk and tried not to let each other see the tears.

The story ran, and the community response was just what you’d expect. For weeks after Christmas, folks were sending gifts and money.

There was other fallout. That was the last time we handled the Christmas Fund as an exercise for our amusement. And closer to home, not a Christmas goes by when I don’t think about that kid.

Some column, huh?

I’m sure what Rob’s wife, fellow Des Moines Register columnist Rekha Basu, and their two sons would like for Christmas is to have Rob back. But since they’ve had to face the sad impossibility of that, I think they might feel better to know that his words have encouraged someone to help the less fortunate. Of any color, ethnic background, religion or no religion.

Maybe the someone is us.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. © Copyright 2005 The Des Moines Register. Hardcover edition $24.95 plus shipping (about $6), available from the Rob Borsellino Book Fund, The Des Moines Register, 715 Locust St., Des Moines IA 50309. Telephone: (800) 247-5346. Visit the newspaper online at http://desmoinesregister.com/.

2. Bottom photo: Rob, wife Rekha and their sons, Romen, at left, and Raj.

3. Again, in the spirit of the season, you may be interested to read a piece Rob wrote for USA Today just last year about Jesus.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is an abridged version of Chapter 21 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. June 1988.

So just what is this National Sanitation Services? In a word, camouflage.

Although tiny by motor-home standards, a 1985 Sunrader Monterey as it comes out of the factory still looks like something people take vacations in. In many places I want to visit, the authorities are wary of such vehicles, fearing that they will, without warning, disgorge a couple of adults, at least as many children, a family dog or two, and that this crowd, already half mad from the joy of vacationing, will quickly strip the local vegetation of twigs and branches, build a bonfire, break out the styrofoam and cellophane junk food, crack open the beer and soda and then, just as quickly as the horde descended, leave the area in a smouldering, littered ruin, punctuated by piles of turds flapping toilet paper streamers. That’s an extreme case, but such things do seem to happen now and then. More common but equally squalid, litter will show up as a piece or two at first, then in an increasing flow as succeeding groups of litterers see that their predecessors didn’t care. Sometimes the damage begins innocently – a bag of food waste left in a roadside container is an invitation to animals to strew the trash around – and then the other stuff follows. Besides this legitimate concern about litter and damage, the authorities in many places I want to visit also seem to believe that tourists should be kept out of the way of all local folks except those who plan to milk them in rows of restaurants, motels, gift shops, bars and other points of interest where people can be lined up and squeezed. Also a legitimate goal, I suppose, but it doesn’t fit into my budget.

So I plan to travel quietly and cleanly.

That’s why National Sanitation Services seems like such a natural idea. Nobody objects to sanitation – we claim to put it next to godliness – but nobody is likely to be attracted to a sanitation truck, either. A perfect cover, dead neutral.

National Sanitation Services. It sounds official enough to discourage all but serious inquiry, yet it’s vague enough to be construed as anything from a government sewer agency to a private diaper service. To add one more small touch of meaninglessness, I will call the truck a “field survey unit,” a perfect excuse for being anywhere. Even the words “national,” “sanitation” and “services” are about the same length, making it easy to bank them over one another in a block on the front door panels.

To choose a color for the lettering, I take a paint-store color chart to the Biddeford Post Office parking lot and match the blue of the lettering on postal trucks. I do my own lettering – before I got into the newspaper business, I once apprenticed as a sign painter – and this probably saves me a few hundred bucks in professional fees, even though some of the lettering is a little shaky if you look at it up close. Besides the door panels, I letter the front across the prow of the loft and the back above and below the rear window. The letters are simple, straightforward, understated. But I can’t resist making up a logotype – an oval with the mythical company name around the rim, surrounding an outline of the United States with a glitter burst over the state of Maine – that I center in white areas on either side of the exterior cabin walls just forward of the side windows.

A few weeks before I leave Maine, I am parked outside a convenience store near the campground one night when a car full of young men pulls up. They seem to have been celebrating and run short of supplies.

“Well, well, sanitation services,” one of the young men says as he walks toward the truck on his way to the store. “What do you have in the truck, sanitation man, a lotta garbage?”

No, I say, just a little toxic waste, not too radioactive.

He looks at me, not sure if I am joking. He takes a wide path around the truck.

– Sid Leavitt