Richard’s gift succeeded in its mission. He produced a beautiful sounding record and the project lifted me up, steeping me in the creative process after a disappointment. We went deep and added six more tunes to the original promised five. We had an album! It documented a handful of my solo-songs, all written over a span of five years.

I loved – and still love – this record. It serves, like all records of events, as a diary entry, and this one, a document of my youth. This means it conjures partially my embarrassment (only some lyrics), and mostly my admiration. There’s beauty, fun, and of course, some super-powered female anger, which I can get behind, but no longer reproduce. That’s a vitality issue.

When 29 1/2 came out, I celebrated its release at a local club, “Pete’s Candy Store” in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My friend Todd Satterfield, who was the guitarist from the previous band, joined me on stage. Todd had come up to record with me that week in Boston, because, I guess he had nothing better to do, post-band-breakup, either. His voice and playing everywhere on that recording certainly makes the beauty of the record.

Soon afterward, having played a bunch of tri-state area shows, I planned a solo acoustic west coast tour. When I mentioned this to my mother, it appeared to concern her. “But where will you stay?” When I reported that there was a network of friends of friends from San Diego to Seattle, who’d said I could sleep on their couches, she either saw an opportunity for herself, or wanted to possibly protect me from this catch-as-catch-can, sleep-wherever-the-heck solo woman journey, or both.

“Maybe I’ll go with you”, she responded. “We can stay with my high school friend in southern California, and you have Jen in Santa Cruz, Chris in San Francisco, then we’ve got Christa in Portland….” As we proceeded to compile our list, we realized this was a viable plan, and within a few months the tour was booked.

I flew out first, meeting my mother after the first couple of shows. The very first one had me opening up for the mystical Tom Brousseau. It was the first time I’d ever heard him perform; he played with a friend of his somewhere in southern Cali, and I was appropriately blown away. Here I was, absolutely playing out of my league, but I didn’t care. I simply allowed myself to get lost in these powerful performances. I gave him a CD.

Following that kick-off, the mother-daughter road trip began at LAX, where I picked her up in the rental car and immediately told her all about this musician from North Dakota with a voice like Jimmy Scott. My mom, who was a singular mix of control freak and more of a rebel than me or you or anyone you know, pretended to listen to me while immediately securing her place behind the wheel. I can only assume it was her anxiety of being in the passenger seat on winding 101 that propelled her lead. Since this was pre-GPS and we had only AAA and the Texaco Road Maps to illustrate the route that we’d meticulously highlighted prior to our trip, I was responsible for navigating.

In the tight streets of a small city, she asked, “Should I do a U-turn here?” “I wouldn’t,” I said, inferring that we should probably make a right and another until we were back on track, before she whipped the car around in the middle of the boulevard, running up over the curb. “Well, I know YOU wouldn’t…” she said impatiently.

On one of our long drives to the next stop, she suddenly pulled over to the side of the road along the California coast. Ah, I thought, she finally needs a break. But she swiftly popped the trunk and stepped out, rounding to the rear of the car, from where she pulled out two bottles — one of vodka and the other of orange juice — and magically produced two plastic cups from her purse. She mixed the drink clumsily and handed the cup to me, before pouring another for her. We got back in the front seat and watched the sun descend brilliantly into the Pacific, before moving on to a seaside restaurant and laughing until our sides practically split. I don’t remember what we laughed at particularly, and it doesn’t matter; it was all just a classic case of the giggles.

Diligently each night, my mother sat at the merch table, selling one or two CDs to whomever came out for these sparsely attended shows, and running herself back and forth to the bar to get the appropriate change for buyers. I had t-shirts made for the “Where Can I Get A Good Bagel Around Here” Tour, my west coast joke that really wasn’t funny, listing the stops in the cities on the tour, with the cliche ‘Sold Out’ stamp across the back. I no longer have any of those, thankfully, so I either sold them out, or threw them out.

For seventeen years after that, I stored the excess boxes of 29 1/2 in my mother’s basement. On visits home, she’d occasionally ask when I’d be taking them, but of course, my one-bedroom apartment didn’t allow me the luxury of storing my own stuff. But I knew in the now streaming music era, there was no way I was ever going to get rid of those CDs.

When my mother sold her house to move into an apartment three years ago, I traveled to South Jersey for a long weekend to sort through my things. On the way down, I brainstormed ideas about what to do with the CDs, at this point, mostly not wanting to throw that amount of plastic into a landfill. Other family members descended to help with the moving-out effort, and we all spent the weekend clearing and cleaning. On Monday morning, as I heard the garbage crew approaching, I watched my mother dash outside in her purposeful walk toward the truck.

“I struck a deal with the guys,” she said, wiping her feet and closing the front door behind her. “They said you can put all the CDs out and they’ll come back later when they’re picking up recycling.” I wondered, really, what was the actual “deal” my mom struck, but I didn’t ask, because almost twenty years later, this felt like a triumphant ending. I was too afraid to press her for details on whether or not these would actually be recycled, because I couldn’t risk the truth. Instead, I hauled box after box of CDs to the curb, and plucked only two wrapped copies out of an open box, deciding those would be all I’d ever need.

You can hear it now too, if you like: I just now gave it its streaming wings at https://littlesilver.bandcamp.com.

I am forever grateful to all the people who helped out with this endeavor FOR NO MONEY AT ALL, which today appalls me, but that’s what we did then — played, sang, whatevered — on each other’s records. And then there’s my mother; a good mom supports your dream when it’s happening, and helps you close it up when it’s run its course. And do I hope that somewhere in a South Jersey dump, a sanitation worker is listening to “Long Day in a Short Skirt”? I do.

In early July I drove six hours from my home in Connecticut to Maine, to pick up my mother from her assisted living facility and bring her to live with me, my husband, our two daughters, two kittens and four chickens. My stepfather had passed away at the end of June of pancreatic cancer, and none of us had been allowed to visit due to Covid-19

While my mother appeared to accept that she would die without any family near, I could not, so I broached the idea with her hospice nurse, John, of moving her in with us. I expected him to let me down easy; she was currently in the hands of experienced caregivers, not to mention the extra exposure involved in bringing her to a house with two children during a highly contagious pandemic.

 “I think it’s a great idea!” he said. “Wouldn’t she rather be with your family than live the two months she has left up here alone?” 

“So you think she’s only got a couple of months,” I whispered, turning away from my ever-present children. “And you think we can handle this…”

“I think your mom and dad were living for each other, is all. And yes, you can do this.” John said. 

The fact is, I wanted to do it, and more importantly, I wanted to be able to do it. So when we offered this new living arrangement to my mom, her vulnerable and surprised response not only flooded me with guilt, but struck me as out of character for the sharp-as-a-tack, funny and practical person I’ve known her to be. 

“I didn’t think you’d want me, and, you know, I don’t want to be a burden.” 

It’s a cliche we’ve all heard, and yet a sincere one to which I can wholeheartedly relate. I am old enough, at 48, to recognize the gradual decline in my physical abilities. Though these changes are currently minor and un-limiting, they give me an unobstructed view of the steep slope; I don’t jump with abandon on a trampoline anymore, but I’m proud to say I spend a normal day in dry underwear. The time will come, though, when I will no longer brag about basic maintenance, and I do not want to burden my children’s blossoming lives with my faltering health. 

Without any further arguments, my mom agreed. Once in our home, it didn’t take long for her to settle in. 

“Put my mirror there. No, not there, to the right. Yeah, better.” 

“Make a copy of these pages, not these,” she says, thrusting a lengthy legal document into my hands. 

Noticing me strapping on skates one glorious August day, she sees not a much-needed chance for me to get exercise, but rather an opportunity for herself. “Oh!” Her eyes brightened. “Do you wanna rollerblade to the liquor store to get me a bottle of gin?” 

One day last week, my younger daughter asked my mom, her Nanu, if she likes crosswords. As my husband, Steve, and I struggled to understand whether she’d said ‘crosswords’ or ‘curse words’, my mom decided it wasn’t worth differentiating. “Doesn’t matter,” she said as she eased onto the couch. “I like both — curse words and crosswords.” 

Despite the fact that the last several months have felt like one long customer service call to Xfinity, T-Mobile, Cigna, Hospice, TD Bank and a slew of others, we love that she lives with us. My husband and I no longer exist solely as toiling parents who tag-team childcare, food prep and our work-from-home schedules. With my mom around, we too get to be kids again. “You can do no wrong, Steve,” she says, reaching up to pat his shoulder as she passes him in the kitchen in the morning on her way to the coffee pot. “We’re all so lucky,” she declares, “and I’m happy and relaxed for the first time in my life.” 

Our kids have another adult in the house (and arguably the most interested, at this point?) to bounce their zany ideas off of while squirming in and out of her hospital bed all day. Our normally camp-centric, busy summer was replaced with day after day of unstructured time — even boredom. I wondered, when life resumes to a more normal schedule, how will my children categorize this time? How lucky they are to be bored, I thought. There are arguments that boredom leads to creativity, and sometimes it does. Mostly it led to more movies with their Nanu.

A week ago, my older daughter and I got into an argument, which ended with her screaming at us all, to get out of her room — a first since my mom had arrived here. Nanu easily obliged; she doesn’t get bent out of shape, but rather, spends her time doing NYT crosswords and watching serial killer shows on Netflix. After my daughter and I made amends, she went into my mom’s room for a bit, and later reported in confidence, “When I apologized to Nanu, she calmly told me, ‘You can yell at me all you want. It doesn’t matter, because I love you so much.’”

One could question — is this helpful? And in these times, I can’t imagine how it isn’t. My mom is living through this pandemic nightmare with us, throwing us an extra emotional rope. The gift of this horrible, confusing moment on earth — environmentally, emotionally, politically — is, we don’t have to miss each other now that Nanu lives with us. Everything that felt like the painful tug of impending loss before she moved here has evaporated. I will miss her terribly when she’s gone, and that will be relatively soon. She is in hospice care, is in and out of clear thinking, and ingests a timed and consistent cocktail of narcotics for pain management. She has undergone so many surgeries she doesn’t even recall all of them, but I know they happened, not only because I remember, but from the scars that line her body. Last weekend she abruptly went from bustling around the house on her own to being immobile in her bed — an overnight plummet. I thought back to two days prior, when I leaned against the door jamb in her room, observing as she slowly and quasi-meticulously made up her bed with new sheets. I had to resist the impulse to help. 

“You know,” I started, “I was wondering if you’d rally into a new life once you were here with all of us, or if you just finally feel relaxed enough in this environment to die peacefully.” 

“Yeah, I don’t know,” she said, backing herself onto the bed and reclining. “I think it’s a little of both.” 

Ten years ago today, Little Silver tied the knot. “You’re going pro” people liked to say to Steve and me. This referred to our marriage, not necessarily to an uptick in the professionalism of the band. But it is the day that, on a ceremonial level, brought our energy-toward-all-things-in-life even closer together. 

I was a late bloomer with most things, and marriage was no exception. My mom, married at 21 and divorced at 36, always advised, ‘Wait as long as you can to get married, because you’ll change so much in your 20s.”  I pushed that, and by 36, I’d lived 14 years independently, earning my money, paying my bills, etc. My expenses were few, my taxes uncomplicated. I wrote and recorded music with friends, planned and executed solo tours, and when homeopathy majorly helped to bail me out of a long-standing illness, I went back to school to study it and opened my own practice in Manhattan. I ran the daily drama gamut – good times, accomplishments, failures, loves, regrets, etc. To be honest, I barely remember much of it at this point, and I wasn’t drunk or high for 14 years, either. It just all fell under the heading of ‘the same kind of feeling.”

When I met Steve I really liked him, and not romantically. Any of you out there who know him know he’s quite the likable person. I welcomed his mix of open heartedness, optimism and his slam dunk of a sense of humor. Many months later, when the moment came that he made it known to me that he was available, I felt every cell in my body relax at once. A full-spectrum ‘Of Course.’  When we started writing and singing together, our voices, both of which had done fine on their own up to that point, blended to form a new texture.

As a feminist, I have a problem with the ‘you complete me’ model of partnership. One reason I never liked Jerry Maguire, actually, is that clincher line lost me at the end. (Side note: it’s a weird experience to be let down by the finish line of a movie to which most everyone related so heartily, but admittedly I’ve endured worse.) But here it was right in front of me; our two voices sounding like one, but with just enough definition that you could tell who was who. I liked that, and that’s what our marriage has been like. There’s a push and pull for sure on any given day, but at the end of that day, you can tell who is who. Plus, writing and singing emotionally complicated songs about partnership with my partner keeps things just weird enough for my tastes.

Ten years in and I’m still amused by, and ever-grateful for you, Steve – my best friend and life-love, complex-taxes and all.

“Listen, my children, and you shall hear

The midnight ride of a can of beer. 

Down the alley and over the fence

And into my stomach with 15 cents.” 

Rather than trying to describe my grandfather, Oscar, I thought I’d let him introduce himself.

—-

Feb. 7, 1976

Dear Connie, et al, 

Here we are in the midst of a veritable winter wonderland… I wonder how I’m going to pay the oil bills and Betty wonders why she isn’t in Florida – the reason for which is my fault. Of course she is right as always, but her attitude does little to enlist my sympathy. What little I possess is required for my own sad state. I always save a little sympathy for myself — God knows where else I would obtain any. I tuck away any small surplus I find myself occasionally possessed of beyond that which I immediately require, secreting it in concealed little spots, and when I am alone and not pressed for time I drag them out and line them up and feel and fondle and admire them, the agonizing sobs, the tears, the pain wracked spasms. Self-sympathy is great. If cultivated with diligence and devotion it can replace all other motivations and activities to which one has become accustomed. 

Well, we had a jolly old shovel out yesterday and this AM, ridding our deck and driveway of a generous accumulation of snow and ice which had fallen and hardened into the embryo of a monstrous glacier. As I say, yesterday and today we aborted it and now the snow is again tumbling in stifling clouds of fluffy cotton and piling our deck and driveway once more to a back wrenching depth. If I get this letter finished before the mailman comes dashing up in a swirl of snow it will go out today. I can hear him when he is coming these days… the barking and yelping of his mush mush doggies. We don’t tip the mailman any more, we throw a little blubber to his huskies. 

The mail came and I didn’t hear it. The dogs were silent, choking no doubt, on a frozen herring. There was a letter from you, mentioning all the books you have read by Morris West. I know I read Salamander and the Tower of Babel. I don’t recall being extremely impressed by either of them. I did watch Roots. Mother didn’t but she has become a hostile, verbose authority on the production. I think that by not viewing the drama nor reading the book she can maintain a detached, objective viewpoint from which to offer a true, unprejudiced assessment of its dramatic value, an assessment with its faultless accuracy undiluted by any knowledge whatever of the subject under judgement. 

Sorry we have to tell you about your ancestors. On your mother’s side, they were a rotten, degraded bunch. They weren’t exactly horse thieves, a relatively honorable vocation. They stole horse manure. They could always be found marching in the rear of a parade. Your great, great grandmother was a lovely Celctic druidess who had an affair with a baldheaded ape who had fuzzy red hair growing between his shoulder blades. This has been a family characteristic ever since. We try to catch the kids and shave it off when they are quite young. When they get a little older they scamper about like Hell and is it he devil’s own job to capture them. On your aristocratic father’s side you are the descendant of a long line of blue-blooded nobility. The first one who crashed the pages of history came to England from Normandy with William the Conqueror. He was known as Sir Oscar of Cavendish, and is remembered for his famous quote “Willie I will be behind you all the way.” And William’s equally famous answer, “Sir Ozzie, if I hadn’t known you were behind me I would never have conquered England, and if I had known how far behind you were, I would never have attempted it.” William was a great kidder. The Candages fought in every war the United States ever engaged in, but the only one they ever volunteered for was the Whiskey Rebellion. It was a sobering experience, so he deserted. It was during this fierce conflict that he wrote a song called “Getting Bombed on the Potomac”. This was later revised and the name changed to “The Star Spangled Banner”. They deleted the three hiccups which followed “…the land of the brave.” A Candage was one of the most popular soldiers in the Civil War on both sides. He will long be remembered for his strong penchant for wearing ladies’ underwear.

I enjoyed Esther’s book. The people she mentioned and the archaic activities she described recalled things to my mind I had not remembered for many years. Sights, smells, tastes, etc. Chopping wood with Dad and George was a strong point of recall. The clear air, the smooth snow in the woods until we broke a trail with our boots, the smell of the pine and the spruce trees, the tracks of rabbits, foxes, deer, porcupines and now and then a bob cat, the bite of the axe blade in the trunk of the tree and the scatter of the chips. The hot fire to warm our lunch at noon, the neat piles of cord wood placed to assure easy loading on the horse drawn sleds when the cutting was all finished for the winter. A real nostalgia kick! We didn’t know what an energy crisis was. In the winter the automobile was jacked up on blocks and the battery and the tires removed for purposes of preservation, and the jingle of sleigh bells replaced the raucous blast of the horn. And the only exhaust was contained in the steamy breath of horses or oxen expelled from the velvety nose of the horse or the rubbery nostrils of the ox. The world was just emerging into the mechanical age and we so foolishly labeled it progress. Instead of ecological disaster. And we all wanted to get away to the city where the “action was”.

I will now go to get the Monday morning papers and mail this. 

Lots of love. Write when you get the time, but don’t feel compelled. 

Dad

——-

This is one of a hundred or so letters Oscar Candage wrote to his daughter, Connie—written in such volume that many were simply dated “Monday” or “Thursday”—after he retired from his 30 year career as the Providence Journal’s photoengraving superintendent. Alex and I were toddlers, soon to move with the family to Little Silver, NJ, where Oscar himself would come to live during the last four years of his life.

Early in 1973, Atkin’s job transferred him to Chicago, so he and a pregnant Connie packed up their things, me among them, and headed to the midwest. I suppose Oscar’s letters began at that point, when the long distance phone charges seemed formidable. Bi-weekly, he planted himself before the Smith-Corona typewriter that sat at his desk, overlooking the Long Island Sound in my grandparents’ small coastal Connecticut house. 

A little background: Oscar (born 1909) grew up the son of a veterinarian in Blue Hill, Maine. Young “Doc Candage” accompanied his father in a horse and buggy on his rounds to the farms, and the nickname stuck with the old timers throughout his life. Of course, by the time he died, his memorial service was populated by teenaged kids in Little Silver, none of whom called him Doc.

The original Doc Candage, the veterinarian, died of Bright’s Disease when Oscar was 6 years old, and his mother remarried a strict Baptist, which was one of a few reasons why Oscar snuck out of his house at night to drink moonshine with his Native American friends who worked the Maine fields. And like many men of his generation, Oscar was a WWII Veteran. He was stationed in the south of France until he landed a head injury and a purple heart medal, the former from an incoming bomb that crumbled ruins over the dugout where he and his cronies were playing poker. A direct hit, and everyone covered with bricks. When they dug through the rubble, Oscar was the only one still alive and after a brief hospital stay, he was released to a family in France to recuperate for nearly a year. My Grandma Amy, saddled at home with their one-year-old daughter, wasn’t too happy to see the pictures he brought home of him cuddled up with the daughters of his French host family, but when Oscar finally arrived in New York Harbor, he met then two-year-old Connie for the first time, and the three of them moved from Jackson Heights to Rhode Island to start his job and family life.

Against all this as backdrop, Oscar was an artist. He painted watercolored nature scenes on anything he could find, and he drew cartoons; all of our birthday and holiday cards consisted of slightly perverse depictions of the occasion: my grandmother holding a knife in a stand-off against a turkey, or us rolling down a hill toward a giant Christmas tree, or two frogs at a candlelight dinner in France, unaware that their legs were being observed by the chef from behind a curtain. Oscar was also color blind, so his cards and cartoons depicted, for instance, red or purple candle flames—not orange and yellow—which made his greetings a bit more intriguing to Alex and me.

As for the realities and intensities that life inevitably tosses up, Oscar appeared to meet them with a level-headed gentleness, perhaps a touch of alcohol, and always with a sense of humor. He saw the world around him through a slightly absurd lens, occasionally riding his dentures out on his tongue, mid-conversation, for example. And when he drank his daily cocktail(s), he seemed to get a little sillier and more joyful, the sign of a gentle, if not slightly detached heart. Granted, I was his grand-daughter, but I never heard him raise his voice to anyone. And all of us—from my and my brother’s adolescent friends, to my father, to my mother’s friends, to the woman who cleaned the house—adored him. After Oscar bought out Atkin’s half of the house and moved in with us, my father would drive him to his doctor’s appointments and come over to chat for an hour here and there while my mom was at work. My dad really came to life during those visits and, I think, especially loved Oscar not only because Oscar was kind and reliable for an entertaining conversation, but also because he was fatherly—and Atkin’s own father had been decidedly absent throughout his life.

By the time he lived with us, Oscar spent his days reading the New York Times, drawing, writing, singing loudly through his oxygen tubes (he had emphysema from 30 years of smoking, and lugged a carrying case of oxygen throughout the house), and devising entertaining ways to ask my brother, me, and our friends to microwave his TV dinners or mix his drinks. Our house was close to the high school, and friends would often stop over for a few minutes on their way home to have a word or two with Oscar. My friend Jeanene, in particular, loved to wait on him. “Let’s go home and make a banana bread for your grandfather!”  One day, in describing a visit to the doctor, he referred to the nurse as a “hot sketch” at which point Jeanene doubled over in near-hysterics and refused to leave the kitchen for the rest of the afternoon. As you may have noted from his letter, he was able to make a day where absolutely nothing happened sound colorful, so you can imagine what he could do with a small encounter.

My brother, who was only then a budding recluse, probably spent the most time with him. While Alex peppered the conversation with one-word prompts, Oscar regaled him with stories of his childhood. This is noteworthy because Alex otherwise, no matter the company, spent almost all of his time hidden away from us. It was from Alex that I learned of Oscar’s midnight escapes to Native American moonshine get-togethers, his war stories, and his and his step-brother George’s shenanigans when they were boys in Maine. Oscar was not one to interfere or try to teach lessons; as a matter of fact, if he had one lesson, it was “take a risk”.  And while he tried to toe a line if pressed (“listen to your parents”), his stories often implied, “…but not too much.”

I regret that I was a pretty self involved teenager during the time Oscar lived with us. He had just turned 81 that December, and on an early January afternoon, he uncharacteristically called to me from his bedroom. I cracked the door and he looked to be in pain, seated on the corner of his bed. “I think you’d better call an ambulance,” he said flatly. I didn’t question it, and one pulled into our driveway 10 minutes later, carting him off to Riverview Medical Center where he died 2 weeks later of kidney failure.  My mother and her friend Peggy read him T.S. Eliot poems each night as he twitched—and, we thought, smiled—from his comatose state.  Alex and I accompanied Connie on each hospital visit during those two weeks. I remember my mother’s conversation at the nurse’s station, asking what she needed to have in place at home for him when the nurse finally told her softly, “He’s not going home.”

Oscar’s memorial service took place in our family room a month later, and we have a kid-filmed VHS tape of it somewhere. Sixteen teenagers and eight adults, my dad included, sat in a circle talking about the character he was, what everyone had learned in their time with him. The event was filled with laughter and wonder before Alex closed by reading a poem of Oscar’s that showed, I guess, how he had felt in darker moments, and why, I suppose, he met the world with a combination of sensitivity, humor and ultimately, irreverence.

“Dreams of nothing surround us

An instant in time is forever

A century less than a second

and eons are endless, but never.

We raise our arms unto heaven

And wave them aloft in the air

And heaven can have no existence

For nobody answers from there.

We’re lost in an ocean of nothing

Adrift on an endless expanse

Our minds discern figures where nothing exists

As we whirl in a meaningless dance.”

Alexis Fleisig made this li’l number for “One Stepper.” And here’s some background on the song, sung through clenched teeth, from Live for Live Music.

For five years after Atkin and Connie split up, it was a revolving door at 301 Rumson Road in Little Silver. Connie had taken an executive assistant job in the Big City of Hope and Dreams and hired a host of elderly women to look after Alex and me during the work week.

Number one was Lita, an endearing Filipino lady in her 60s, who wore big glasses and an even bigger bun on top of her head. She used wide, toothy smiles to communicate with us, and since she didn’t speak English and Alex and I spoke no Filipino, this was the most positive non-verbal communication we could all manage. I imagine that she understood us, but I found it awkward, I guess, milling around the house and smiling.

“But don’t you love her baked chicken?” my mother encouraged. I paid special attention after that, finding it just okay — mostly, I wanted it to be great so I could agree with my mom. When Friday finally arrived, Alex and I breathed a sigh of relief and looked forward to Saturday morning when my mom, brother, Lita and I would climb into the car to deliver her back to her husband in Carteret for the weekend. And so on it went, week by week, until it was Atkin’s turn to move back into the house, at which point Lita gave her notice because her husband didn’t want her living in the house of another man.

Our next score was Aunt Jill, the Rock of Gibraltar. I’ve published an entry solely about her so I won’t go into more detail here, but she became a bonafide member of our family for the next three years before she retired, at which point Connie resurrected her ad and up turned Maria.

Maria was Hungarian, again in her mid 60s, and another whose thick accent Alex and I struggled to understand. She too made a mean chicken dish and was overall a fabulous cook and seamstress to boot. For fun, she spent her days hemming and mending our clothes, and one evening when Connie arrived home from work, Maria surprised us all with thick, heavy, yellow curtains for our den, a room that drew in the heat of the afternoon sun, Hades-style. My mother, unable to filter her initial reaction, said softly, “But I don’t like them,” to which Maria responded, “Well, I’m the one who has to sit here, not you,” and up the curtains went.  But again, Maria’s tenure came to a close when my father was due to return for his 6 months, because (as we’d heard before) her husband didn’t want her living in the house of another man. Nobody seemed to want to cop to the fact that my father was in his early 40s and these women could all have been his mother, but we were living in the old world, I guess.

This time around, it was on my dad to hire somebody and along came Pauline, an Italian close to 70. She drove a royal blue Lincoln Continental and owned a trailer behind the mall. Pauline wore housecoats and sprayed her tower of fake-blonde hair into a fixed, un-moveable bun that rested on the tippy-top of her head. She did our family’s food shopping at the Fort Monmouth Commissary, since her late husband had been a member of the armed services, and this alone made shopping suddenly fun for Alex and me because you had to cross through security to get in.

Bright eyed and tough as nails, Pauline pedaled around Little Silver on my dad’s bicycle in her housecoats, for daily exercise. When Alex and I arrived home from school, Pauline routinely asked ‘whadda-ya-wanta-forra-suppa?” I must have said something cheeky to her one day, because she looked straight at me over the kitchen counter and held my gaze for a minute before saying, “Oh. You think you’re smarter than me because I have an accent. You think I’m stupid.” I’m embarrassed to admit that Pauline was right, though I hadn’t realized it until that moment, and I treated her with full-on respect after that. As a matter of fact, it was precisely then that we became friends. The day my brother, while following me on his bike across the street was hit by a motorcyclist, she called my father right away at work before slamming down the receiver and whisking me off to the hospital, her Lincoln Continental only a few cars behind the ambulance. The nurse asked me multitudes of questions and there was only one I couldn’t answer; “Were his pupils dilated at the time of the accident?” I looked at Pauline, who fixed her blue eyes on the nurse, put her arm around me and said, ‘She’s not gonna know that.”

Pauline ran a kooky household and became like a mother figure to my father, who, believe me, desperately needed one. And in keeping with all her predecessors (except for Aunt Jill), Pauline was an amazing cook and excelled in the chicken category. My dad was in heaven. Her four year old granddaughter used to come over to spend the day with her, and with all of us once we were home from school, and things seemed overall to be running smoothly and consistently when Pauline got her pancreatic cancer diagnosis.

At the time, I didn’t recognize that diagnosis for the death sentence it was, and I listened doubtfully to my father’s explanation for why Pauline wanted to leave right away to live with her daughter. Silent and expressionless, he looked as he always did except for the tears that trickled a path down his otherwise stoic face. I had seen this before — once when our family dog died, the day the divorce was final and he showed up at my soccer practice, standing quietly next to the goal I was tending, and once more when we pulled out of the driveway after our last visit to Pauline. By that point, she resembled a forward facing skeleton, as if in a trance, breaking out every now and then to flicker her gaze over us.

Though it seems a sacrilege to follow Pauline up with anyone, well, such was our life. I introduce to you, Marge, the final character in our lineage of sitters.

This time my mother’s mother, Grandma Amy, conducted the interviews and hired Jersey-born Marge, who weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds and smoked like a chimney. Marge wore a significant amount of caked-on make up, had dyed red hair and drove a pea-green bomb of an automobile. Despite Alex’s and my pleas to walk to school as we had for years, Marge insisted on driving us. “I wanchaz in the cah.” Why, we didn’t know, but we were prisoners who resorted to shrinking our bodies down as far as we could in the backseat of the guzzler, and scrambling out as quickly as possible at every drop-off. When we begged to walk home from school, Marge hit us with the same line and waited in the parking lot in the green bomb, a plume of cigarette smoke billowing from its barely cracked windows.

One summer day, bored, we consulted Marge on an idea for something to do. “Why donchas put some buttah on yah bodies and lie in the sunshine?”

“What?” We asked partially out of disbelief, and partially to savor the shocking absurdity again. That evening, she made a chicken soup that sent Alex choking before he pulled the small bone from his throat, and I suppose the most profound takeaway of this story is that it’s amazing that we both still eat chicken.

That night, Alex and I called a summit with our mother. Sitting on my bed, we rolled out our list of grievances and unprecedentedly, asked her to please, PLEASE…. fire Marge.

“Well, I think we need to give her a chance,” Connie replied in a thin voice — a voice that sounded foreign coming from her, and a voice that made me think we could finally, legitimately get away with it.

“How about no more babysitters? I’m twelve — we can take care of ourselves.”

Connie, I think surprised by our request and also seeing dollar signs, looked at me. That weekend, she took Marge aside, told her it wasn’t working out, and we were free.

Later that year, Grandma Amy died and Grandpa Oscar bought out my dad’s half of the house and moved in with us. Our gamut-ranging chicken dinners now were reduced to Swanson Chicken TV Dinners and Alex, Oscar and I were totally cool with that. And Oscar, as you will come to know, was delightful character who not only didn’t impede our freedom, he expanded it.