Falconry? Thank you, no.

I like birds as much as the next guy.

I mean, they can be beautiful. They can make beautiful sounds. And they can fly, which in itself is something of a miracle. Bonus points that birds are what dinosaurs evolved into. 

I love seeing the first robin each spring. Of course, these days, I don't know if it's the first robin of spring, or a robin which was just comfortable to hang on during our increasingly milder winters. Still, my spirits are always buoyed when I spot a robin red breast in February or March.

I love the occasional spotting of what to me, a non-bird watcher, is a rare bird: a cardinal, a Baltimore oriole, a scarlet tanager, a goldfinch.

I love the less rare sighting of a blue jay. Sure, they make an obnoxious cawing noise, but blue's my favorite color, so...

I love seeing hawks - or are they falcons? anyway, something raptor-ish - swoop around, although I could have lived without seeing the decapitated pigeon one left on the Boston Common. And a few years ago, I saw a magnificent hawk perched on a mound of snow that had accumulated in the bed of a pickup truck. I was walking on Brookline Avenue, and there it was, just a few feet away from me, stopped at a red light.

I love seeing hummingbirds gathering nectar. (They're so tiny: how do they survive?)

I love watching starlings swirl around in their intricate murmurations. (Yes, I had to look it up.)

I used to love to hear woodpeckers pecking away in the woods next to our house when I was growing up.

I just plain love crows.

On the other hand, seagulls and pigeons...

Not to mention the stalking, terrifying urban wild turkeys that abound in this area. Talk about don't make eye contact. 

And I'm not wild about the idea of birds as pets, especially when they're allowed free range in the house. (It happens.)

But mostly I'm cool with birds.

The most interesting bird sighting I ever had was on a trip to a client in San Antonio, Texas, where I had a hard time looking at the client, given that the tree outside his window was loaded with buzzards.

That and the raptors I've seen a few times at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, where they have daily free flight raptor shows. Fascinating. 

Despite my genuine disinterested quasi-affection for the bird family, I was a bit taken aback by a headline I saw in the Boston Globe the other day: Are you a good candidate to own a killer bird?

Well, the obvious answer is NO.

Even though I could live quite contentedly without mice, rats, or snakes, and squirrels aren't my jam, I really wouldn't want to own a bird of prey, namely a faclon. So just say no to falconry.

Still, I was intrigued by the Globe article by Billy Baker on what being a falconer is all about.

First off, who knew that you can't just go out and buy a falcon. Instead:

You go out and capture a falcon. That is the law. It’s kinda weird that any of this is legal, and the fact that beginner falconers are required to capture their first bird is definitely one of the weirdest parts. (Source: Boston Globe)

Given how I feel about birds in the house, I wouldn't have been a candidate, but, in fact, you can't keep a falcon as a pet. 

Falconry is an ancient practice, but this is not about having a bird of prey for a pet. That is actually against the law. You can’t just read “Harry Potter” and decide you want an owl, though that does sound cool. Falconry is instead an active hunting partnership, where the bird remains wild the entire relationship, free to take off and not come back.

"Active hunting partnership?" The only active hunting partnerships I've been been part and partner of was when I used to haunt the Bonwit Teller sales in Filene's Basement. 

The falcons generally do come back. That's because they're trained to do so. And because it's in there self interest to have a human assist the falcon when they're on the hunt. The falconer may, quite literally, beat the bushes, rousting out mice, voles, chipmunks, and whatever else is in there, making it that much easier for the falcon to find prey. 

But there's more to this than capturing a falcon and start beating the bushes for them. Becoming a falconer is a long and complex process.

First you have to check off a painfully complicated list of legal requirements designed to discourage all but the most serious applicants. MassWildlife, the state’s conservation agency, reports that lots of people make inquiries about the licensing process each year, but only one or two become a licensed apprentice allowed to capture a bird. For that to happen, you must first pass a 100-question exam. Then you need to build a dedicated shed, known as a “mews,” to house the bird and the required gear, all of which must be inspected by Erik Amati, the state’s falconry coordinator, which is an actual job title. And finally, and most challengingly, you need to find a licensed falconer willing to sponsor you for the required two-year apprenticeship, and there are only 48 of them in Massachusetts.

I'm not generally someone who carps about where her tax money goes, but given that only one or two falcon apprentice licenses are issued each year, and that there are only 48 licensed falconers in the state, I'm sure hoping that "falcon coordinator" isn't a full-time, full-time paid position.

But once you do become a real, post-apprentice falconer, there's plenty of things you can do. 

Well, then you can buy your next bird — including owls! Or you can keep capturing them, or you can get a license to breed them, or you can become a mentor, or you can leave them alone and get a pair of binoculars and just look at them.

Which you can do without being a licensed falconer. So I'll stick with that. That an seeing if I can spot a Ford Falcon when I'm out and about. They're rarer than the hawks I see
regularly.  

DP's

My German grandparents, toddler (my mother) in tow, immigrated in the 1920's.

A lot of their landsmann also came over. One of my grandfather's brothers (he had a raft of them) sponsored my mother's family, bringing them over to join him in Chicago. My grandmother also had family in the "new world," but I think most of them were in Canada. The only one of my great-aunts and great-uncles I remember is my grandmother's sister Tante Teresa, who lived in Windsor, Ontario, and would come down to Chicago when we visited there. She also came to Worcester once, with my grandmother. I remember dancing with Teresa at my Aunt Kay's wedding in 1963. 

There was a lot of family in Canada - cousin this, cousin that - who would also sometimes show up in Chicago, including the infamous Kissing Cousin Joe, who, Euro-style, liked to greet men by kissing them. My father and my Uncle Ted - two staunch Irischers - wanted nothing to do with men kissing each other. Ted and Al perfected a stiff arm handshake so that Kissing Cousin Joe couldn't swoop in for a smacker.

Cousin Joe was also famous for his appearance in Chicago for my grandfather's funeral. As the story went, some relatives took it upon themselves to raid my grandfather's closet, and gifted Joe with his overcoat. Cousin Joe was a slight fellow, and was swimming in the coat as he modeled it for the family, back at my grandmother's post burial. "Doesn't Joe look good in Jake's coat?" someone asked. Not!

My grandparents were more prosperous than some other parts of the family, and I'm sure that Jake's coat was a nice one. Still...My grandfather had died suddenly and young, leaving my grandmother a widow at 52, with two young kids still in the house, Kay who was 7 and my Uncle Bob, who was 11. Imagine rifling through my grandfather's closet before my grandfather's body was cold...

I don't know whether Joe actually made off with the coat, but supposedly, Joe et al. also stopped by my grandfather's grocery store to stock up on food before they went back to Windsor, charging their supplies to my grandfather's account. 

Unless I was napping, I would have been a witness, but I wasn't even two and have no recall of this at all. And I have no way of knowing whether any of this actually happened IRL. You know how stories take on a life of their own...

But, Canadian relations aside, I do know there were plenty of cousins around the Chicago area, and they were always part of the scene when we were visiting. One cousin, a youngish guy named George, lived with my grandmother for a while. I can remember what he looked like, but not why he was living with Grandma.

Once when we were at my grandmother's summer house on the lake in the country up towards the Wisconsin boarder, Pete, a youngish cousin who was considered kind of a punk, showed up with some friends and wanted to take my sister Kathleen, my cousin Ellen, and I out for a ride. We were all in our early teens. These guys were 19 or 20. My father and my Uncle Ted chased them off. That was pretty exciting.

And then there were the DPs...

While some of my grandparents' large multitude of siblings had come over, others stayed behind in the old country.

My German family had been pioneers, leaving Swabia (part of what is now Germany) for the outer reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where they farmed in entirely German towns. After the first World War, the borders shifted and, while my mother was born in the same village as her parents had been, she was born in a different country: Romania.

After World War II, it should come as no surprise that the Romanians wanted the Germans out of their country. And so, a lot of my family members became Displaced Persons. I believe that those who had married Romanians were welcome to stay in Romania, and some of them did. But those who had stayed in the tribe and married ethnic Germans were booted out.

Some went back to Germany. (My mother had a cousin she corresponded with.) Some came to the United States. And some of those were sponsored by my grandparents and came to Chicago, where my grandparents, and later my grandmother on her own, put them up in property they owned, and even, temporarily, in their home, a prairie-style bungalow at 4455 North Mozart.

So throughout the 1950s, DP's were in the picture.

Do I actually remember some guy - a cousin? Caspar? - in a Wehrmacht greatcoat with the swastika buttons cut off and replaced with something neutral? Probably not. Other than for my grandfather's funeral (October) we only went to Chicago in the summer, and there ain't no one wearing a greatcoat in Chicago in July. So this may not be a real memory.

But the memory of the cousin with the French wife and the two little French daughters is definitely real. I don't recall his name, or the names of the two little girls in their stiff nylon dresses, but her name was Madeleine. What was their story? Was he stationed in France during the war? Had she consorted with the enemy? Was her head shaved for being a collaborator? Did he somehow stay in France during the war? 

Who knows...

In 1965, bizarrely on the anniversary of her marriage to my grandfather, my mother remarried: a widowed DP. He was from their home town, had served in the German army during the war - he was in his forties; he worked as a surveyor, I believe - and was part of the horde kicked out of Romania. I only met him a few times, but found him to be thoroughly unpleasant. But he was a companion to my grandmother and gave her someone to cook for and squabble with. (He outlived my grandmother, and don't get me going on what rotten, venal a-holes his children turned out to be...)

DPs. 

Do they even use that term anymore? Is there a difference between a refugee and a displaced person?

I look at all the pictures of the Ukrainian refugees.

America is taking 100,000 of them in. Yay, us, I guess. Most European countries are also welcoming Ukrainian refugees, and a lot more proportionately than we are. The stories of Polish and German citizens showing up at train stations with signs indicating how many refugees they can take into their homes is so touching. I cried the other day just reading about a woman in Berlin who had taken a woman, her two kids, and a cat into her home. A flat that had housed a family of 5 a few weeks ago, now had 8 people (plus the cat) living there. The Berlin woman had also reached out to her network and found homes for a number of other refugee families. 

Reminds me of my grandmother...

There's some chat around and about that Americans are more sympathetic to refugees from Ukraine than they are to, say, Syrian or other brown- and black-skinned refugees. There's probably something to that. (There always is.) But I think it's as much that Ukraine (rather than "just" its people) looks like us. Ukraine is a democracy. The streets, the shops, the clothing people wear. It all looks pretty American. Kyiv looks more like an American city than Aleppo does. (Or did before Aleppo was smashed to smithereens.)

And I do have to confess that, when I see pictures of Ukrainian refugees, I think that this is what my extended family - minus the puffer coats and smart phones - looked like, what they went through, what they survived, in Europe in the 1940's.

That's just the way it goes, I suppose.  

Presenting the 2022 Oscar's Swag Bag

I wasn't watching the Oscars the other night, so I missed Will Smith giving Chris Rock the open-handed slap in the face for making fun of Jada Pinkett Smith's alopecia - a slap heard round the world. However mean/lame/stupid/crass/insulting the joke was, I'm not in favor of someone resorting to violence because a comedian made them the butt of their mean/lame/stupid/crass/insulting joke. I suppose we should be glad that Will Smith, who played Muhammed Ali in the movie Ali a while back, didn't use his fist. That might have done some real damage.

Needless to say, social media went bonkers when this went down. I learned about it a minute or so after it occurred when I took at break from watching a couple of episodes of the Netflix series Inventing Anna to glance at my Twitter feed, which I do regularly to check whether Zelensky's still alive and whether Trump's been indicated. (Inventing Anna is a a quasi-fictionalized accounting of the life and times of Anna Delvey, a Manhattan scam artist and fashion icon who conned a lot of very important people into believing she was a German heiress. The show is goofy but entertaining. Sort of like the Oscars, in that respect.)

All sorts of people are weighing in on whether Will Smith was being "chivalrous" - what a word! - or should have been arrested, or at least thrown out of the Oscar audience. Which means he wouldn't have been there to win his Best Actor Award for playing Richard Williams, father of tennis greats Venus and Serena in the biopic King Richard. (The Academy is still trying to figure out what to do about Smith's non-Best Actor performance; Chris Rock has declined to press charges.)

Lost in all this shuffle was the one thing I do like to focus on when it comes to the Academy Awards: the contents of the annual swag bag.

This is a bag o' loot that those nominated for major awards get to take home, either in addition to their statue, for folks like Will Smith, or as a consolation prize for those who didn't get called to the podium and get to make an acceptance speech, in which the flap-happy Smith said "I want to be a vessel for love." Well, he could have started by not slapping Chris Rock, but maybe he meant moving forward. 

Anyway, this is the 20th year that Distinctive Assets, the marketing company owned by the brilliantly named Lash Fary - can this possibly be his real name? was he named for cowboy actor Lash LaRue, who was never nominated for an Oscar? - has come up with a bag stuffed full of goodies that make sure that everyone - at least everyone nominated for the big awards (best actor/actress, best supporting actor/actress, best director) - goes home a winner. 

The bag is always "worth" a lot - this year it's valued at $140K - and the giftees need to pay tax on it, so it's a mixed bag for the giftees. (For those whose wares are included in the bag, it's a great marketing ploy.) But I'm guessing you don't need to pay taxes on a $50K stay at a castle in Scotland if you don't actually stay there. 

That $50K Scots vakay covers three nights at Turin Castle. 

Guests who accept the offer will have full access to the 17th century castle, complete with butler service and a bagpiper welcome when they arrive. (Source: CNBC)

Alas, this gift was donated in anticipation that Denzel Washington might win Best Actor for playing MacBeth. Instead of MacBeth doth coming, it was Will Smith as Richard Williams. 

The castle stay wasn't the only Scotland-themed gift. Winners also found the deed to a small plot of land in Scotland in their bag, along with a Lord or Lady title. 

Baggers will be able to take advantage of:

A $12,000 “Celebrity Arms” liposuction procedure from cosmetic surgeon Dr. Thomas Su...[And] up to $10,000 worth of “treatments and rejuvenation procedures” from Dr. Konstantin Vasyukevich...[And] a $1,200 life coaching session with wellness expert Kayote Joseph.

Maybe next year's bag will include some anger management classes.  

For those who don't want to travel to Scotland, there's a $15K four-night stay at a luxury resort/spa in California. I suppose you could stay there while Maison Construction works on the $25K worth of home renovations they're providing. I'm guessing that $25K worth of renovations doesn't go very far in Hollywood - maybe a closet do-over? - so four days away from home for the project to be complete should do it. 

There are a number of smaller items including tea, "gold-infused" olive oil, popcorn, kids' books, a few toys, and:

Anti-aging supplements from spermidineLIFE 

Spermidine? I'd just as soon age. 

Deluxe salad-infused skincare kit 

 Salad-infused skincare? What???? And does one use it in conjunction with the spermidine?

Limited-edition set of Trust Me Vodka bottles

Trust me, I would never accept a drink from someone who offered to make me a Cape Codder using Trust Me Vodka. 

I didn't see it on any list, but in a picture I saw of the gift bag contents, there was an inflatable orca from PETA with "Seaworld Blows" written on it.

Not sorry I missed the Oscars. Not sorry I missed Chris Rock's joke. Not sorry I missed Will Smith's reaction to it. And even though the thought of getting my arms liposuctioned into celebrity shape, not sorry I didn't get a swag bag.

What's in MY "wallet"? No crypto, that's for sure.

When it comes to cryptocurrency, I'm squarely in the skeptics corner. I do believe that, with the world - make that the metaverse - increasingly going all digital, money is increasingly treated as a digital asset, more or less. And it will eventually be regulated by banks and governments - not by bitcoin wild-westerners. 

But a lot of folks are getting into it, mostly for speculative purposes, hoping that crypto alchemy will let them spin nothing into solid gold. (And don't get me going on the celebs getting in the act by touting crypto. Looking at you, Tom Brady, Matt Damon, Larry David, Reese Witherspoon, Kim Kardashian...)

While crypto madness rages on with all the on-raging of the South Sea Bubble and Tulip Mania, it's no surprise that adjacent businesses are spring up. One such business is crypto-hacking. This service is used by those who purchased crypto and have it stored in a "wallet." But unfortunately, they've lost the super-secret password that will get them into that "wallet" - which plenty of crypto holders want to do so that they can turn their crypto into some real money. (What's the opposite of "hard earned?") And unfortunately, the Dick Tracy decoder ring they inherited from their great-grandfather isn't doing them any darned good. 

(I actually don't know how the keys/passwords/authentication works with crypto, and I'm not interested enough to figure it out. Not sure if a private key gets generated when you buy in - some long, non-memorizable combo of letters and numbers and/or whether you set your own password (as in password1234). I'm pretty sure it's the former, but you might be able to set up two-factor authentication for yourself. Belt and suspenders!) 

Anyway, it's estimated that there may be $140.7 billion in funds "stranded" in wallets. (Given the crypto market volatility, that amount may be up or down on any given day.)

If you're the owner of part that over-under $140.7 billion, and you want it back, who you gonna call? 

You might give a holler to Chris and Charlie Brooks of Crypto Asset Recovery of Durham, New Hampshire.

Chris and Charlie are a father-son duo. Their involvement in crypto wallet cracking began in 2017:

Chris, 50, who previously ran a furnace comparison website and worked as a tech executive for a nursing home ratings platform in Wellesley, was intrigued by bitcoin, knowing he wanted to start a business around it. His first attempt at the password-hacking business fizzled. But a little over a year ago, as bitcoin values shot up, demand increased, prompting him to resurrect the venture.

This time, his son Charlie, 20, a self-described “tech nerd” wanted in, deciding to drop out of the University of Vermont, where he studied computer science.(Source: Boston Globe)

They've set up a division of labor. Chris, as befits a fellow with the imagination to have held senior positions at a furnace comparison website and a nursing home ratings platform, is in charge of sales and marketing. Charlie is in charge of the hacking. 

They get paid a percentage of the value of the crypto they recover. Their take for the first 10 bitcoin recovered is 20%. After that, a sliding scale kicks in. 

Sometimes - about 30% of the times - they win; sometimes they don't even break even.

It took them 20 minutes to help out a Chicago day trader hack into her wallet, where they recovered $150K worth of 6 bitcoin. Their cut wasn't bad. And it wasn't bad for the day trader either, who'd paid less than $500 for her bitcoin trove back in 2013. (Not that I would ever have done so, but despite my feelings about crypto, I'm kinda sorta wishing that I'd laid out $500 for some back in the day. Of course, I would no doubt have long misplaced the key to my wallet...)

They made a less successful attempt to recover what was variously estimated to be worth $44M (initial estimate) and - wait for it - $3.2B (later estimate).

Apparently, three men in Georgia — a strip-mall magnate, a farmer, and a former Navy SEAL — won the digital wallet in a bankruptcy case. But they had one big problem: They didn’t know the key code to unlock the funds. 

A strip-mall magnate, a farmer, and a former Navy SEAL walk into a bar...Oh? You've already heard this one?

This treasure hunt involved a trip to Savannah and 10 hours spent trying to crack the code. Which they did succeed in doing. Alas, it turned out that all that was in the wallet was worth $10. At 20%...

The Brooks-es chalked that one up to experience. 

“It’s the wild, wild West out there,” Chris Brooks said. “Crazy things do happen.”

Predictably, because it is the wild, wild West, there are plenty of scammers out there. Recovery companies, like the Brooks' outfit, need to make sure that their clients are on the up and up.

In tricky situations, such as when cryptocurrency wallets are at the center of a divorce proceeding or estate dealing, they work with their lawyer to determine whether the person wanting to hack into the wallet actually has ownership of it. 

Good luck to Chris and Charlie Brooks. After the thrill of bitcoin, I'm sure it would be tough to get back into the furnace comparison biz. 

But mostly all I can say is, it's one crazy world, and we just live in it. 

Peak Worcester!

My hometown of Worcester is a lot of things.

The second largest city in New England - and possibly the largest city in the United States that most people have never heard of - the Heart of the Commonwealth is home to a number of colleges and universities. Clark. Holy Cross. WPI (never called by its full name: Worcester Polytechnic Institute). Assumption. So Worcester is sort of a college town. Only it doesn't feel like one.

Worcester is also the home of UMass Medical School, a major medical center, and growing biotech and pharma industries. Plus Worcester was the home of Dr. Robert Goddard, whose rocketry in the 1920's laid the groundwork for the space age. So Worcester is sort of a science-y town. Only it doesn't feel like one.

It certainly wasn't the case when I was growing up there, but Worcester has a number of great restaurants. Part of this is the coming of age of interesting and varied restaurants. Mostly, in the old days (in Worcester and most every other place in the country), dining out meant baked stuffed shrimp, London broil, or chicken parm. But now the words "Worcester" and "foodie" are uttered in the same breath. So Worcester is sort of a dining destination town. Only it doesn't feel like one.

Worcester, to me, will always feel like the blue collar, three-decker, ethnic Catholic, no pretension burg it was when I lived there - now more than 50 years ago. 

My sense of Worcester is, of course, colored by where I grew up: a blue collar, three-decker, ethnic Catholic, no pretension neighborhood. And while I haven't lived there in, like, 4EVA, my sense of Worcester is that its fundamental "brand" (sorry about that) is just that. The men in the hood (most women didn't work outside the house back then; too busy with large families) worked in factories - there was a lot of manufacturing in Worcester back in the day, they were plumbers, carpenters, firefighters, cops, welders, etc. We had some "white collar" folks. My father, who had been promoted from shop foreman in a wire factory to the job of salesman, was one of them. 

Thus, reading about comedian Jimmy Cash confirms my sense of Worcester.

Not that, until I saw an article on him in the paper, I was familiar with this work - if someone asked me to name a comedian, the first name to pop into my head would probably be the late George Carlin - but Jimmy Cash has a lot of gigs around the New England area, and has ventured as far south as Florida. He posts popular videos on TikTok. And according to his website, "he is the recent winner of Last Comix Standing 2021, held at Mohegan Sun." 

And he's not the only comedian to hail from Worcester. Although he's often referred to as being from Boston, Denis Leary is actually a Worcester boy. (My sister was a couple of years behind him in high school.) 

What make Jimmy Cash such a Worcester guy is not that he does comedy. It's that his day job is school janitor. (Forgot to mention earlier that one of the dads on my street growing up was a school custodian.) And Jimmy Cash is keeping that day job - at least for now. 

By day, Jimmy Cash can be found collecting trash from classrooms, picking up in the cafeteria, and pushing a mop and bucket through the long corridors of the elementary school where he works as a custodian.

But once class is dismissed and he clocks out for the day, Cash trades in his squeegees and disinfectant sprays for bright lights and microphone stands, entertaining crowds at comedy clubs across the region. (Source: Boston Globe)

Cash, a second generation school custodian, has been cleaning schools since he was twenty. He's now 38. 

And while he grew up dreaming about Saturday Night Live and Adam Sandler, there's also this:

“I always say that the janitor job is my dream job, and I just do stand-up to bring myself back down to earth,” he said. 

Most people would, I suspect, have this the other way around, with the cleaning work - which is the prime source of his humor - being what brings them "back down to earth." But that's Worcester for you.

And being a janitor is a good job. Nothing glamorous, but a steady paycheck and, since they work for the city, the benefits are probably good. (Worcester custodians are part of the Laborers Union. Oddly enough, my Uncle Charlie - dead now nearly 50 years - was the shop steward for a City of Worcester Laborers local. Just not for the school custodians. At his wake, the first person in the door was Joe Tinsley, Worcester's mayor at the time. Not to mention the uncle of my closest friend from high school.)

It's a good job, and Jimmy Cash (by the way, that's a stage name taken from his high school nickname) is apparently pretty good at it: 

“He’s very special to our school; very well-respected. He’s just loved by all the kids,” said Kristy Desimone, a fifth-grade teacher who works at his school. “Besides his work ethic — and his sense of humor — I think it’s his heart. Students need to make connections with people and I think they really find that they can make a connection with him.”

He's also pretty good at comedy. (I watched a YouTube and a couple of TikToks).

Even if stardom comes, he doesn’t plan on straying too far from his humble beginnings.

“Maybe I’ll do a little side cleaning,” he said. “Keep a little mop handy.”

Always happy when a Worcesterite makes good, I'm hoping that stardom does come for Jimmy Cash.

Meanwhile: the janitor/comedian: PEAK WORCESTER!

Serves. Them. Right.

When it comes to drug addiction, I can't claim much by way of experience or authority. But through my volunteer work in a shelter for those experiencing homelessness, I see plenty of the terrible toll that substance abuse takes: the ravaged faces, the ravaged lives. I've seen Narcan administered. I've seen guests wheeled out by EMT's. A couple of times, I've been asked to call 9-1-1. 

Every once in a while, I'll ask about a guest I haven't seen lately, only to learn that they've been admitted to a program and are - fingers-crossed - on the road to recovery. 

Every once in a while, I'll ask about a guest I haven't seen for a while, only to learn that they've OD'd or died on the streets. 

During my pre-vax hiatus from volunteering, a guest that I saw and chatted with regularly got housing. Yay! C was usually stoned when I saw him, and I couldn't always follow what he was talking about. But he was kind and harmless. Other than to himself. Sadly, this fellow got a hold of some bad K2 and died. 

It's all so devastating. All so awful.

Those who take advantage of folks suffering from addiction are, in my book, lower than pond scum.

Thus, while I usually don't rejoice when someone's sentenced to a prison term, when it comes to the Markovich brothers of Florida, I'm delighted. 

For their egregious behavior, Jonathan Markovich and Daniel Markowitz will both be doing serious time.

Serves. Them. Right. 

According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, the defendants conspired to unlawfully bill for approximately $112 million of addiction treatment services that were medically unnecessary and/or never provided, which were procured through illegal kickbacks at two addiction treatment facilities, Second Chance Detox LLC, dba Compass Detox (Compass Detox), an inpatient detox and residential facility, and WAR Network LLC (WAR), a related outpatient treatment program. (Source: Justice.gov)

I don't know what's worse: "medically unnecessary" and/or "never provided." Toss up, I guess.

The defendants obtained patients through patient recruiters who offered illegal kickbacks to patients, including free airline tickets, illegal drugs, and cash payments. The defendants shuffled a core group of patients between Compass Detox and WAR in a cycle of admissions and re-admissions to fraudulently bill for as much as possible.

"Patient recruiters"? And you think your job is bad. I guess this is what you do when you can't find work in a call center preying on senior citizens, trying to get them to fork over thousands of dollars in gift cards for no reason other than the bogus one that's been concocted and given to them.

Patient recruiters gave patients illegal drugs prior to admission to Compass Detox to ensure admittance for detox, which was the most expensive kind of addiction treatment offered by the defendants’ facilities. 

Giving patients illegal drugs to prove that they needed detox. C.f., lower than pond scum.  

In addition, therapy sessions were billed for but not regularly provided or attended, and excessive, medically unnecessary urinalysis drug tests were ordered, billed for, and paid. Compass Detox patients were given a so-called “Comfort Drink” to sedate them, and to keep them coming back. Patients were also given large and potentially harmful amounts of controlled substances, in addition to the “Comfort Drink,” to keep them compliant and docile, and to ensure they stayed at the facility.

Have I said anything about "lower than pond scum" yet?

The Markoviches were convicted last fall on a variety of charges, including health care fraud and paying and receiving kickbacks. It will come as no surprise that there was PPP fraud wrapped in there as well. (Jonathan had fraudulently gotten his hand on PPP money.)

And the other day, the Brothers Markovich were sentenced. Jonathan will be doing 188 months, Daniel 97 months.

Serves. Them. Right.

Those living on the streets can be tough and wily. They have to be. But they're also vulnerable, and to exploit them out of sheer greed is just despicable.

Jonathan Markowitz is 37. His brother is 33. 

If Jonathan serves his full sentence, he won't be out until he's in his 50's. Daniel will be in his early 40's.

What their greed and evil has brought them is the loss of prime-of-life years. 

Serves. Them. Right. 

They'll be missing out on career-building, family life, going to restaurants, playing golf, taking vacations, driving with the top of the convertible down, raiding the refrigerator, tickets for the game. All of what makes life enjoyable and meaningful. All of life's little pleasures.

Serves. Them. Right.

Did anyone die on their watch? Did anyone overcome their addiction? 

So many questions.

I'm a big believer in recovery, in redemption, in second chances.

A lot of the guests I talk to have been in prison. I don't need to pry to find this information out. Many folks announce that they've just gotten out, or that they don't want to use Bob Barker soap to take their shower because the Bob Barker company is a major provider of prison supplies. Mostly, I don't know what someone was in for. Once in a while, I find out. 

"My" homeless shelter helps people with records find housing and jobs. And sometimes the folks we help really do turn their lives around. 

Whether they do or not, they deserve our support as they try to rebuild lives lost to addiction and/or criminality and/or mental health problems AND (and it's always AND) bad luck. 

So I hope the Markoviches, when they're released from prison, can rebuild their lives. They'll still be young enough, with plenty of life ahead of them. 

In the meantime, given how many lives they've ruined, going to prison Serves. Them. Right.

Sometimes the artificial friend is still human

I'm currently reading Kazuo Ishiguro's recent novel Klara and the Sun. Set in the vague near-future, the story is told from the perspective of Klara, an AF. An AF is an Artificial Friend, a solar-powered companion for lonely kids. Klara is a particularly sensitive and (artificially) intelligent one, and machine learning keeps making her smarter and smarter.

We're not quite there yet, but the more I read about robotics and AI, it's coming. Robotic technology has been deployed (and has been replacing humans) in factories for years. There are already robotic pets keeping company with the elderly. And a fast food place in downtown Boston where the food is prepared robotically. Guys in Japan are dating anime robots dolls, or  - even worse - anime holograms. And I've read about robot teachers, which I'm sure the Betsy DeVos's of the world would just love to replace unionized human teachers with. 

So, warning: the singularity in your mirror is closer than it appears.

But it's not quite here yet, and it looks like we're going to have to put up with humans for a while longer. 

Still, sometimes you need companionship, and who you gonna call when you need someone on your arm?

For years, there’s been a cottage industry in Japan and South Korea of renting strangers to impersonate friends, family members or other acquaintances, as a way to save face at social functions where plus-ones are expected. (Source: Washington Post)

And inevitably, an industry super star has emerged.

...over the past four years, Shoji Morimoto, 38, has built a cult following by offering himself as a warm body who can simply be there, liberating his clients from the social expectations of the spoken and unspoken norms of Japanese society. Morimoto — nicknamed “Rental-san,” incorporating an honorific — has inspired a television series and three books and has drawn international attention through his viral social media posts.

Rental-san recently accompanied just-divorced Akari Shirai out to lunch at an old favorite restaurant, where he was paid about $85 to sit there and do nothing. Akari asked him a few questions - the replies were curt - and told him a bit about her marriage. But mostly Shoji just sat there. 

Shoji doesn't just do meals and social occasions. Someone hired him to wait at the end of a marathon course to greet a finishing runner. Sometimes his clients use him as something of a low-budget shrink. 

One woman hired him to accompany her as she filed her divorce papers. He once sat with a client for a hemorrhoid surgery consultation — with plenty of graphic photos. Someone hired him for a dramatic farewell as they boarded a bullet train to move from Tokyo to Osaka; he showed up and waved goodbye.

I find this incredibly sad - hiring someone to wave goodbye to you - but sometimes you just don't want to bother a friend or family member. Next time I have a colonoscopy, I'd be fine if the person who came to check me out was from Task Rabbit. But that's a situation in which a human is required. 

Dining out? Running an errand? Attending a medical consult and not doing anything but just sit there? Admittedly, I'm a loner, but I don't quite get the need or the desire to have someone with me at all times. 

Sure, I'm not wild about eating out alone. But I've done it plenty of times, mostly on business travel but occasionally just because. And it can be a tiny bit awkward to show up on your own when everyone else is coupled up. But whatever. There's always someone to talk to (and, at a wedding, to dance with, given that the women invariably get up to dance even if their husbands just want to sit there, as do-nothing as Rental-san).

Shoji didn't set out to be a "do-nothing guy." After all, there's really not a job description or place to get trained and credentialed. Instead, he:

...stumbled into the role after being told in previous jobs that he wasn’t doing enough and didn’t have enough initiative to succeed.

...“I was often told that I wasn’t doing enough, or that I wasn’t doing anything, so this became a complex for me. I decided to take advantage of this and make it into a business,” he said.

Well, he showed some initiative when it came to succeeding at doing nothing, somehow managing to prove HR both wrong and right. 

For Shoji, it's paying off. While pre-pandemic, he might have three to four gigs a day, and is now down to one or two, he "makes enough to do his part in maintaining a dual-income household and raising a son." So far, he's been the "do-nothing guy" around 4,000 times.

Shoji better be on the lookout, however. As robots get smarter, more human, more humane, and better looking, there'll no doubt be some version of Ishiguro's AFs out there to replace him. Maybe he can start a business...

Palm-size invasive spiders? Another little something to look forward to.

I don't mind spiders. 

They're not wasps. They're not snakes. They're not cockroaches. They're not rats. Or even mice.

Spiders make nice. 

They have a fun kids' song written about them.

They star in books, like Charlotte's Web and Miss Spider's Tea Party. 

They give us Spider Man. 

And they make spider webs, which are beautiful - and quite a feat of engineering - however annoying it is to spy one in an out-of-reach corner of the ceiling. (I have 12 foot ceilings in my LR, making out-of-reach out-of-reach.)

So I'm okay with spiders.

And yet, I'm not St. Francis of Assisi. 

Not that I would ever pull the legs off of a daddy-long-legs, but I have been bitten a few times by spiders and am not particularly enamored of them. And, rather than let them stroll around my house unimpeded/univited, I've stepped on a few eensie weensie black spiders in my time. But I may have to step up my spider-stomping game once the joro spiders arrive in Boston. That might not be for a few years, but I'm a big believer in being prepared.

The joro spider will be a lot bigger a stomp than a black spider, as it's anything but eensie weensie.

 ...native to Japan, [it] can span 3 to 4 inches with its legs outstretched and has a bulbous abdomen. (Source: Boston Globe)

Between the span, the bulbous abdomen (described as "about the size of a grape") and the bright colors - I must say, the joro is a lot more vibrant-looking than your average bland and boring daddy-long-legs - they should be easy enough to spot. 

Now found in the southeast:

New research from the University of Georgia suggests the joro spider could eventually colonize much of the East Coast. The spiders can use their silks to fly through the air — a behavior known as ballooning — and get carried by the wind to new locales. They’re also capable of hitching rides with humans on cars or in luggage.

The good news is that, even though the joro is pretty good sized, they're not likely to attack. 

“They are really very timid, and, their fangs are quite short, so if a person were to run into a web (which is quite likely), the spider will probably just run away,” [University of Georgia research scientist Andy] Davis said. “Even if it wanted to bite you it probably couldn’t!”

Wonder what they mean when they say that it's "quite likely" that a person would "run into a web?" Will the joros be so omni-present once they colonize that we won't be able to avoid close encounters with them? 

Alligators are also making their way north. Wonder if they eat joros?

Fair play to the girls from Maryfield!

Throughout grammar school and high school, I wore a uniform. A dark green jumper and a white blouse.

In grammar school, the green jumper was scoop-necked, and worn with a short-sleeved, round collar blouse with scallop trim. And don't forget the bowtie and beanie.

In high school, the green jumper was v-necked, and worn with a long sleeve blouse, which - ah, the freedom - could be worn buttoned to the neck or with the lapels flared open. 

I found this pic on my high school website. This is Class of 1956, but things looked exactly the same for the Class of 1967. During my era, most other Catholic schools switched to the infinitely more modern and hip uniform of plaid skirts and blazers, but not us. At least they allowed us to wear our shirts buttoned, an option apparently not offered to the Class of 1956.

In both grammar school and high school, we also wore green knee socks. 

I don't remember if we were allowed to wear sweaters in grammar school when it was cold. Maybe with 50 kids in the classroom, the body heat kept us warm

In high school, they would announce in the morning whether we'd be allowed to wear a sweater for the day, which had to be either white or dark green. One day, when the boiler was out, they announced that we could wear our coats. By mid-day, they sent us home.

Little kids in grammar school - primary grades, 1-3 (maybe) - wore snow pants to school on wintery days. As we got older, we just toughed it out, shivering there in the schoolyard with our cold legs and thighs while we waited for the bell that alerted us to line up and march in. Shivering during recess, where I guess we kept warm by running around. Shivering on the walk home. 

In high school, were it not for pettipants, we would have been shivering as we waited for the bus, and walked to and fro from the bus stop.

Ah, pettipants: long, close fitting shorts made of nylon or polyester that came to a few inches above the knee, worn under our jumpers, over our undies. 

Thank God for those pettipants, which kept us from freezing to death! (Do pettipants exist any longer? According to Wikipedia, today "they are most likely to be worn by square dancers or persons involved in historical reenactment." I know I'm getting old, but the thought that there might be historical reenactors out there reenacting Catholic girls' high school of the 1960's. Wow. Just wow.)

I had a number of pairs in different colors and patterns. I recall a dressy pale yellow pair, and some blue and white striped ones. But my favorite was a pair of bright green pettipants with a black border, and silver kangaroos on them. I loved them! I even got to wear them as part of my costume when I played Tinkerbell in some skit. (You had to be there.)

In those days, of course, girls did not wear pants to school. Even public school girls - and we know how lax the standards were among the pubs - wore dresses or skirts. 

Tough luck if we were freezing! It's how girls rolled. 

But some high school girls in Dublin have decided that they've had it with the skirt wearing. 

...the chilly, open-window policies in classrooms during the pandemic proved the final straw.

Students at Maryfield College, an all-girls school in Drumcondra, Dublin, have launched a campaign to end what they describe as cold, impractical and discriminatory skirt-only uniform policies.

While a growing number of Irish schools allow girls to wear trousers, many continue to insist skirts are mandatory.

Students argue that the policies are uncomfortable, outdated and hinder exercise and cycling to school. (Source: Irish Times)

Exercise and cycling to school? In my day, neither existed, so we just had to worry about freezing while we waited for the bus, or when the heat was on the fritz. Exercise? My high school has become something of an athletic powerhouse, but when I was there, that wasn't the case. We barely had gym. As for cycling to school, I can only imagine how weird we would have thought it if someone actually rode a bike to school. The implicit rule was that you stopped riding your bike anywhere when you graduated from grammar school.

Maryfield is going to allow uniform pants to be worn come fall, but the students want an end to gendered school unis across all schools. 

The girls are arguing that say over school uniform is their right, not the purview of those in charge. 

The Irish Second-Level Students’ Union says it is a growing issue in schools and is due to be addressed at its first women’s conference on Tuesday.

 “Gender-specific uniforms are the one issue we see come up time and time again when consulting with students,” said ISSU president Emer Neville. 

“... There is no argument in favour of gendered uniforms that is good enough to justify it. It’s time this outdated practice is brought to a much-needed end.”

The issue is even being debated in the Irish parliament.

The girls at Maryfield conceived the campaign during a Young Social Innovators module, which encourages students to come up with solutions to real-world problems.

Their teacher Margaret McLoughlin said the girls agreed that the notion of uniforms making girls appear “ladylike” was outdated.

Indeed it is! (If there's ever a word that needs retiring, it's "ladylike.")

So fair play to the girls from Maryfield, who know a crock when they see it. Good on ye! 

Trunk, Part II (Refugees)

Yesterday, in honor of St. Patrick's Day, I wrote about my four Irish great-grandparents. They were young Irish men and women who came to America as immigrants, not as refugees. They weren't driven out of Ireland, fearing for their lives. They were driven out of Ireland by the poverty of the land, which could only support so many members of any large family. The rest had to leave. Mine left for America. 

One of my great-grandmothers, Bridget Trainor, brought everything she possessed with her in a small trunk, a trunk - now 150 years old give or take - that my sister Trish still uses. 

The other side of my family, the German immigrants, weren't refugees either. They came for the same reason the Irischers did: economic opportunity that wasn't available to them in their large families in their small farming communities.

But they were closer to being refugees than my Irish antecedents were.  

My German grandparents, Magdalena (Folker) and Jacob Wolf, my mother a toddler in tow, emigrated from Romania in the 1920's. My grandfather, a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had survived trench warfare in World War I. Several of his brothers - he came from a large family, mostly boys - weren't so lucky.

Strapped to the undercarriage of a train using his heavy belt, he made his way back to the little town of Neue Banat, which was an entirely German-ethnic own, only to find it was now, with the divvying up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, part of Romania, and now called something else. (I can't find the spelling. It's something like Penata Nou.)

So my grandparents saved up, packed up everything they had, and left the once and future war-torn Europe for Chicago, by way of Ellis Island.

They took everything they had with them in a large, sturdy trunk that my grandfather had made by hand and painted battle-ship gray. I knew that trunk quite well. For years, it sat in the basement of our family house, repository for cartons full of Christmas decorations. Opening the lid each December, and there was a delightful smell of balsam and must. 

What did they bring with them? Their clothing, and whatever portable possessions they had in the small farm house they were leaving. I'm guessing that there were probably feather pillows and a duvet stuffed in there. Maybe a couple of pots and pans. My grandfather became a butcher. Did they bring some knives along with them? They also brought with them the sampler my grandmother embroidered when she was 12. (It hangs in my bedroom.) And a poster with the picture of all the young men, tot und lebendig, from the town of Neue Banat who'd fought on the losing side in der weltkrieg. The dead are in one section, the living (including Jacob Wolf) are grouped in another. 

I never questioned why and how the emigration trunk ended up in my family's basement, but I'm guessing it accompanied my parents when they moved, just after World War II, from Chicago, where my mother grew up, to my father's hometown of Worcester. (They met when my father was stationed at Chicago's Navy Pier. They married in November 1945, and came to Worcester in March 1946 when my father was discharged after four years in the Navy.)

What was in that trunk? My mother's clothing, including her wedding dress and her mouton fur coat. My father's Navy uniforms, frugally saved for later use. My father wore the khakis to do yard work; my mother cut down the dress whites and blues to make clothing for me and my sister Kathleen. One Easter, we wore Navy blue coats, lined with a spritely red taffeta with white polka dots, that she'd made for us.

All of the contents of my mother's hope chest - including pillow cases my grandmother had embroidered for her, and some tea towels may mother had embroidered for herself (tea towels? what was she thinking?) - were in that trunk. Her engagement and wedding presents would have been in that trunk, too, but this was back in the day when an engagement present was a dishtowel, and a wedding present was a serving fork. So the gifts wouldn't have taken up all that much room.

One of her friends painted two sweet New England-scene water colors for my parents as a wedding gift. They were no doubt in that trunk. They're now in my bedroom. 

What else was in the trunk? My mother's year book from Alvernia High School - I have it in my living room - and her scrapbooks, including one dedicated to Nelson Eddy, which we as kids managed to destroy. We did find a picture of Shirley Temple on one of the pictures of Nelson Eddy, which we liked a lot better than the prissy and effete Nelson Eddy. 

Lots of family pictures. My grandparents were picture-takers supreme, and one of our favorite family activities was, once or twice a year, taking out the carton of old black and whites photos from the thirties and forties and trying to figure who was in them.

Watching the refugees flee Ukraine, I've been thinking about that big old trunk. It was a trunk that my grandparents, who didn't have all that much, had plenty of time to pack. They weren't fleeing, they were emigrating. That's why I have my grandmother's sampler hanging on my wall.

My mother had time, too, to pack up her things for the move to Worcester. That's why I have those charming little water colors, and the Alvernia High Class of 1937 yearbook.

The Ukrainians are fleeing with next to nothing (other than their kids and their lives). A backpack or roller bag stuffed with essentials. Some of them just have a small carrier bag, or a plastic bag from the grocery store. Some have nothing. Don't look back. The place you lived, and everything you ever owned, may have already been bombed to smithereens by the Russians. Or it may be in the sites of Russian artillery any day now.

What do you grab when you've got to grab it quick and stuff it in a backpack? Your smartphone charger. A change of clothing. Your baby's ear medicine. Maybe a picture, a small memento or two.

Your life is at stake. Your kids' life. 

Stuff doesn't matter. Lives do. And for most of the recipe, the lives they are fleeing with mean that they're leaving not just home behind, but family. Men between the ages of 16 and 60 aren't allowed to leave. They have to stay and fight. So the women and children, the elderly, who are making their way to safety are leaving behind husbands, sons, fathers, brothers, uncles, friends. Imagine kissing your husband, son, father, brother, uncle, friend goodbye, knowing you may never see him again. Knowing that life for you and your children may well go on without the love, caring, support and companionship of these men in their lives. In your lives.

The refugees have lost their homes, their jobs, their communities, their churches, their clubs. The shops they stopped in each day. Their favorite restaurant, the corner bar. All that is familiar. Their day to day.

Immigrants like my Irish great grandparents and German grandparents make the deliberate decision - whatever duress they were under to make that decision - to leave all this behind and start anew. They left knowing that, if the ever went back to visit - which most of my antecedents didn't - the old hearth and home would still be there. Refugees have no such choice, and if and when they go back it may be to nothing.

Beyond terrible. 

Given all this, stuff doesn't matter. And yet it does.

What do you take with you? Probably not the sampler your grandmother embroidered when she was 12, or the Alvernia High School Class of 1937 yearbook. 

My heart aches for those Ukrainian refugees. 

Maybe things will turn out okay. Maybe they have already. (I'm writing this on March 7th. Here's hoping.) Maybe someone will toss Putin over and the generals will withdraw. Maybe afterwards there'll be a 21st century Marshall Plan to rebuild the cities and towns that the Russians are so insanely and mercilessly destroying. Maybe people will be able to go home again. Or, like my non-refugee family, Irish and German, forge new lives for themselves elsewhere. 

But something will be missing. Sure, it's only stuff. Just one more thing to be sad about during this incredibly scary and sad time. 

----------------------------------------------------------------

When I saw the sunflowers at the grocery stor, I bought them. Then, on Sunday March 6th, I ran into some friends at the rally in support of Ukraine, and they gave me the little flag, which I put with the sunflowers.

On my way to the rally on the Boston Common, I walked through the Public Garden, where I saw that someone had made a little Ukraine-themed sweater for one of the Make Way for Ducklings statues. That made me smile.

While I was walking, I heard the bells from the Arlington Street Church chiming out Mussorgsky's "Great Gate of Kiev (Kyiv)". That made me tear up.

There were a lot of people at the rally. That made me proud.

Slava Ukraini.  

Trunk. (St. Patrick's Day, 2022)

It's Saint Patrick's Day. So of course, I'm thinking of my Irish roots.

My Irish great-grandparents all "came over" around 1870. 

Bridget Trainor of Ballymascanlon, Co Louth. Matthew Trainor of Ballymascanlon, Co. Louth. Margaret Joyce of Ballintubber, Co. Mayo. John Rogers of Ballintober, Co. Roscommon. 

I don't know a ton about any on them.

Did Bridget and Matt, who surely knew each other back in the pokey little town of Ballymascanlon, marry in Ireland, or in Amerikay? (And just how close were these cousins, anyway? Or did everyone in Ballymascanlon share the last name Trainor? ) Did Matt come over first and send for Bridget? Or what? 

All four of my paternal great-grandparents came over around 1870, so they weren't famine Irish, fleeing starvation on coffin ships, with nothing more than their grass-stained mouths and the rags on their back. And when they got here, they didn't live in hovels, in teeming slums, at bare subsistence level. 

But just what did Matthew Trainor do when he got here? I know that, as  a lad, he'd been a stable boy in the big Protestant manor house in Balllymascanlon. He had family in the Worcester area - cousins? brothers? sisters? - which is how he ended up there. Eventually, he became a foreman in a mill, where most of the workers were Irish immigrant girls. But what was his first job?

No one left to ask. The last of my father's first cousins on the Trainor side - and there were a ton of them - was Ned McKeon, who died about five years ago. 

My grandmother Rogers, Nanny - born Mary Jane Trainor - had a few stories about her parents. I got the sense that she got along better with her father than she did with her mother. But for a family of talkers, there were things she never spoke about. It was only when I went poking around on Ancestry a few years back that I found out that my grandmother was one of eight children, not one of six. With the exception of Mag, who died before I was born, I knew all of my grandmother's siblings, at least the ones who still existed. Roseanne. Pat. Alice. Arthur. No mention of Delia and Matthew, who had died as children. Oh. They were never mentioned by my grandmother. Never. One died in infancy, but the other was five. (I've forgotten which was which.) Can you imagine having a brother or sister who died as a little kid, who you knew, and never acknowledging their existence?

My father's cousins on the Trainor side - first, second, third, distant - were all around, and popping in and out of my awareness throughout my childhood. A lot of them lived in the parish. We'd run into people related to my father all the time. How were we related to the Trainors on Eureka Terrace? What were they? Third cousins once removed? Neil Hanlon? What was he to us? And the McDermott brothers - who were the only vocations in the history of our family - what were we to them?

I could probably figure out all of the above if I resubscribed to ancestry.com. But it wouldn't tell me the stories I wish I'd asked my grandmother, or my great-uncle Arthur, or my great-aunt Alice, who were the sibs closest to Nanny, and who I saw on occasion throughout my childhood. (Arthur was a retired cop who moonlighted as a hearse driver for O'Connor Brothers Funeral Parlor. When he had a funeral at Our Lady of the Angels, he'd swing by my grandmother's (where we lived until I was six) for a cup of tea. Timing things so that he'd be back to the church by the time the funeral Mass ended. In his shiny black shoes and formal garb - did they really wear cutaways? - I thought he was rich. In any case, he was always good for a nickel for a popsicle, so we'd scrounge around when Arthur was at Nanny's. 

Since I didn't ask Alice or Arthur - I was way too young. And since I didn't ask my grandmother, who died when I was in my late twenties, so I should have, I should have asked my father's cousin Ellen, the baby of Alice's large family. Thanks to my cousin Barbara, I saw her on occasion over the years. Or I should have pumped another cousin, daffy Mary Hanratty, when I saw her at wakes.

Instead, I'm left knowing precious little about my great-grandparents. 

I can fill in some blanks. They were all country people, from large Irish families. They were all, if not famine poor, then still poor enough. There was little choice, when it came to emigrating. Someone in the family led the way, and most of the rest followed. American Wake. And, boom, you're gone.

Who brought Matthew Trainor over, or was he the pioneer? Or did Bridget Trainor get here first?

And what about Margaret Joyce? And John Rogers?

How in god's name did they end up with their dairy farm Barre, Massachusetts, the back-arse of nowhere?

What did John Rogers do when he first arrived? Did he work in a mill to save enough up to buy that farm in an area that looks an awful lot like Ireland, by the way? 

I believe Margaret Joyce had some brothers over here.

Coming to Worcester I can understand. A large city, full of immigrants, many of them Irish, and full of mills. But what brought anyone to god-forsaken Barre? 

While there were Trainor relatives galore, there were fewer relations on the Rogers side to begin with. Two of the sons of John Rogers and Margaret Joyce, my grandfather and his brother Jim (Ann's grandfather) both fled Barre, moving to Worcester, where they owned a saloon. They both died young. The other brother, John, had "absconded with the milk money" to Hammond, Indiana. (Thus, from a young age, I knew the word absconded.) I.e., he had stolen the proceeds from the dairy farm and taken off, seen only when he came back for his mother's funeral. According to my grandmother, he arrived with a suitcase that contained a clean collar and donuts. Who knows what to believe.

The one to ask there is my cousin (second cousin) Ann, who I think has the Rogers' history down. 

But she wouldn't have much more first-hand knowledge than I would, other than that she's a bit older than I am so may have met the one Rogers sibling who lived beyond their forties. 

That would be the only Rogers sister, Lizzie, who never married and who died before I was born. Lizzie ended up living with Ann's family. Ann would have been a very little girl at the time, but there may have been stories she heard, from Lizzie or from her own mother. 

My grandmother, Lizzie's sister-in-law, had nothing to do with Lizzie, even after Lizzie decamped from Barre to live with the Kellys, just down the hill (in the same parish) as my grandmother. They didn't get along. I suspect they were both strong-willed, opinionated, tart-tongued. Both were "career women" in an era when most women didn't work outside the home. Nanny was a school teacher; Lizzie was, I believe, a bookkeeper. 

Back to my great-grandmothers. 

Bridget Trainor may or may not have worked as a maid in someone's big house when she got to the new world. Margaret Joyce may or may not have worked as a maid in someone's big house when she got to the new world. At least one of them did. Thanks to cousin Ann, I have a copy of the reference letter that Father Brown, the parish priest in Ballintubber, County Mayo (not to be confused with Ballintober, County Roscommon) wrote to recommend Margaret Joyce for what sounds like domestic work.

There was some talk about Margaret - or was it Bridget? - working as a maid in the house of some lace curtain Irish relations, who were either Hagans or Whites, putting us in relational proximity to the late, great mayor of Boston, Kevin Hagan White. 

It's Saint Patrick's Day, so of course I'm thinking about my Irish forebears. 

This is Bridget Trainor's trunk, the trunk she took with her. It contained everything she took with her when she left home. Not a lot, but not nothing either.

It's a pretty little trunk, lined with pretty little wallpaper. Was it wallpapered in Ireland, or later on? And those decals? Did they have decals in Ireland in 1870, or were these added by my grandmother or my Aunt Margaret (who had the trunk before my sister Trish got it)?

It's also pretty fancy, so someone had a few punts to spend on it. 

What could you fit in the trunk? A few changes of clothing, a second pair of shoes, a coat, a hat. A pillow, a blanket, a sewing kit, a mirror a comb? Did the leprechaun doll that my sister Trish inherited come over with Bridget, or was that sent to her by her own mother. My grandmother did tell us that her grandmother - something-or-other Trainor - would send a clump of shamrocks, kept alive for the journey across the pond wrapped in damp newspaper, each St. Patrick's Day when Nanny was a girl.  

Although I'm half German, I grew up Irish. 

My neighborhood was largely Irish American. Virtually all the nuns and priests who staffed the parish were Irish American. We sang corny Irish songs in school, and were taught that the very best ethnic group was - ta-da - the Irish. 

My German family, my mother's side, was back in Chicago. We saw them once a year. There were no Germans in Worcester. Plus this was the 1950's, not long after the end of World War II. If you were going to pick a side to identify with, it sure wasn't going to be the Germans, who in most people's minds were equated with Nazis.

So Kiss Me, I'm Irish. 

And a glorious Paddy's Day to you. 

Just wish I knew a bit more about Bridget, Matthew, Margaret, and John, those four young souls who packed their trunks and ventured off to America.