Hands Off!

Was I there on Saturday?

Of course I was there!

In the cold, in the rain, I was there for two reasons. 

1. Showing up, making my voice heard, being around thousands of others who are willing to come out in the cold, in the rain, with their homemade signs and full-throated chanting makes me feel a tiny bit better about the dire situation our country is in. Just knowing that there are a lot of other people who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore is comforting.
2. I really do believe that if we continue to stand up and fight back when Trump, Vance, Musk, Rubio, Hegseth, Bondi, et al. do things that are amoral, immoral, illegal, dishonest, corrupt, harmful, and as often as not just plain moronic, it will eventually get through to them that we, the people, demand that they cease and desist - or at least slow down and act more rationally. And that they actually do cease and desist, etc.

After all, those mass protests against the Vietnam War were instrumental in ending that travesty of a war. 

And, of course, I was there for those protests, too. 

I'm not sure whether my first war protest was in 1967 or 1968, but I've been at it a long time.

Sure, it hasn't been continuuous. After Vietnam ended, there was some women's rights protesting to do. I think there was a gay rights protest in there, too. But after that...

I did hit the streets to protest against the Gulf War back in 1990. And there was some other war after that. I've forgotten which one.

Then along came Trump.

My first protest was the glorious Women's March in January 2017. Glorious only in that it made me and millions of others feel we had some control, some voice, some purpose, some company. Not so glorious (yet not inglorious) in that it ended up doing no damned good. There went Roe.

I stopped counting at 17 during Trump One, but I marched for better treatment for immigrants. I marched for the DACA kids. I marched for reproductive rights. I marched for the environment. I marched for science. I marched because Black Lives Matter (or should). 

Sometimes, I couldn't help but think of the lines from The Wild One, the 1950's film about a motorcycle gang. 

Someone asks the leader of the Black Rebels Motorcyle Club, "Johnny, what are you rebeling against?" And Johnny (Marlon Brando) answers "What have you got?" (Note that the Black Rebels were all white.)

But there was just so much that I opposed during Trump One...

And while it did give me Reason 1 - it made me feel better. It probably didn't do much for Reason 2. All those protests didn't really seem to matter, other than that they maybe energized voters to vote Trump out.

And then, in his full awfulness - now unleashed, now unconstrained, now even more unhinged, vicious, cruel, and stupid (Tariff's on penguins? Seriously?) - he's back. And hell bent on destroying the country, maybe even the world. (Donny, what are you destroying? What have you got?)

So in hopes that protests will make some sort of difference, I take my homemade sign, I put on my cap with the American flag on it, and head for the protest. (And I put that cap on with no little trepidation. Will someone think I'm a jingoistic, far-right crazy?)

We marched to City Hall from the Boston Common. I'm in this crowd, somewhere, holding my little whiteboard which, fortunately, didn't run in the rain.

My hope is that somehow SCOTUS stands up and Trump and his minions back down. I mean, John Roberts doesn't really want to replace Roger ("Dred Scott") Taney as the worst Chief Justice ever, does he?

I get that, unlike during Trump One, no one in the administration is going to do anything to calm the Trump and the Project 25 maniacs down. Given that the only test of fitness is loyalty to Trump, we're not going to see any truth-telling Rex Tillersons, Mark Milleys, or Dan Coats in the current gang of unqualified asslicking toadies - some of them true believers, others just do-anything for personal gain types. (Let me make that mostly unqualified. Marco Rubio is actually qualified to be Secretary of State. Boy, has he swallowed whatever integrity and spine he had to get in/stay in this adminstration. He knows better. You can see it on his face.)

But I hold a tiny bit of hope that there may be a few Republican Senators, a few Republican members of Congress, who will decide to stand up/fight back. Because that's what we're supposed to do when there's a clear and present danger. I realize that these fervently wished-for Republicans probably aren't familiar with protest chants. But surely they've heard this one, at least in passing:

Democracy is under attack! What do we do? Stand up! Fight back!

A girl can hope, can't she? 

And so, I get out there. One out of many. And when we all get together, out of many, one. E pluribus unum.

Embezzlers: good people. Until they're not.

When it comes to criminal categories, I don't find thievery particularly interesting. Cat burglar. Stick-up artist. Bank robber. Pickpocket. Somewhere along the line those cat burglars, stick-up artists, bank robbers, and pickpockets made a decision (conscious or not) to become criminals, to participate in what can be a very risky business. That homeowner whose house you just broke into may be armed. That bank guard may be trigger happy. 

Basically, I'm happy when thieves go to jail, go directly to jail. But mostly I find them a pretty boring lot. For every Willie Sutton, who may or may not have said that he robbed banks "because that's where the money is," there are probably a million garden variety dullards who decided that being a thief beats working.

Embezzlement, on the other hand, I find infinitely fascinating. 

Unlike thieves, who likely don't up close and personally know they folks they're robbing, embezzlers steal from their workplaces - their employers, their clients - so they know exactly who their victims are. It takes a special someone to rip off the outfit that pays their salary, the client who's entrusted them with their business. 

I'm of the belief - based on zero actual evidence - that most embezzlers don't set out to become embezzlers. Embezzlement is a crime of convenience, something that a person just falls into. Maybe they started out thinking they're just borrowing the money. They're short this month, there's an emergency. Sure, they've stuck their hand in the till, but in their mind, they're planning on paying it back. Until they figure out that nobody's noticed, so why not keep it up? 

Other embezzlers may be envious or resentful of their clients, especially if their clients are well to do. They want a bit of the lifestyle they're adjacent to. 

This seems to be the case of Lisa Schiff, who was a well-known adviser to high-rollers (on was Leonardo DiCaprio) looking to invest in and/or collect art. Schiff had no desire to go through life like the poor little match girl, nose pressed up to the window of the brightly lit mansion. 

She was living the glam life: a TriBeCa loft that rented for $25K a month. Buzzing around in helicopters, because who wants to wait in Manhattan traffic in a cab - or even a black car. Spree shopping in Paris for items like jeans that cost nearly $1K. Being able to keep up with her clients - flying first class, staying in luxe hotels, dressing for success - gave Schiff "more mojo and confidence." Until it didn't.

While her clients and friends saw a successful woman at the top of her career, she hid a secret. She was stealing from them. To conceal her theft, she would do things like pay one client with another’s money, or leverage their friendships to keep them believing that late payments were always almost on their way.

By the time it all came crashing down in 2023, she had stolen some $6.4 million, from at least a dozen people. (Source: NY Times)

Today Schiff is broke, bankrupt. Seven of her former clients are suing her. She's living in much more modest digs - an apartment her parents are paying the rent on. She's hoping to stay out of prison. (Last fall, she pleaded guilty to defrauding her customers. She's been sentenced to 2.5 years in prison.) At 55 - a single mother with a 12-year-old son - the life she's living is anything but charmed. 

Instead of jet-setting around and looking for and at works of art by emerging artists she deems bound for greatness, she's playing with Legos (building a replica of Hogwarts), feeling guilty about fleecing her clients, attending AA and Debtors Anonymous meetings, and worrying about what's going to happen to her kid. (The plan was that if she went to prison, her son will go live with Schiff's brother.)

But back in the day...

Schmoozing at cocktail parties and lecturing clients as an ethics authority, she seemed like the ideal art guru: getting access to hot artists before their paintings jumped in value; discreetly brokering sales with the major auction houses; and warding off predatory dealers looking to upsell and overcharge novice collectors.

Ethics authority? Hmmm.....

She was everywhere, quoted in newspaper pages and speaking at museums. But all last year, she was missing from the cocktail circuit, and absent from the auction floors, except in the fine print: Listed atop three lots in a November auction at Phillips were the words, “Property [including her own extensive art collection] to be sold to benefit the creditors of Lisa Schiff.”

After it's over and done with - prison sentence, probation, whatever - Schiff is not likely to ever be able to work as an art adviser. Most people, I believe, would give a murderer, or even a thief, a second chance before they'd hire an embezzler. She's only 55, so she's got a lot of years ahead of her. 

Ms. Schiff continues to believe that in some ways she was a good art adviser. She listed her tireless efforts to help her clients amass their collections, and claimed she often eschewed making money to steer clients toward art in which she truly believed.

Then she caught herself.

“I am the worst kind of perpetrator, because I seem so good,” Ms. Schiff said. “I’m a good person, I’m a good friend, I am loving and generous, I work hard — and I stole your money.”

Maybe this is why I'm drawn to embezzlers. Most of them probably are good people. Until they're not.

Most likely to...

There's an insatiable demand for content. There's an insatiable demand for info on celebrities. There's an awful lot of content about celebrities floating around out there. The maw of the people must be kept fed!

As it happens, growing up, I didn't know anyone who turned into a celebrity. But just think, if Michael C. had become someone that people wanted to know about, I could report that, in first grade, on the day when the boys all got their pants wet sliding in the slush, and Sister Marie Leo made them take their pants off to dry on the radiators, and had them put on girls' coats - which were longer than boys' jackets - so that they could sit there with their underpants covered while the radiators did their thing, Michael C wore my red and green plaid coat. A coat that I loved. In his underpants. Ewwww. 

This is certainly the sort of tidbit that someone obsessed with a celebrity would have loved learn. Maybe it would show up in a profile of Michael C describing how parochial school shaped his future life as a celeb. Or, if I'd become the celeb, maybe someone else in my 1st grade class - who? Paul M? Ginny B? - would have provided fodder content for a profile on me, noting that I seemed to have been more icked out than the other little girls whose coats were worn by boys that infamous day. And what was wrong with me that this little incident turned into such a trauma that, nearly 70 years later, I was still icked out by it. (Note to self: it's pretty late in the game, so it's not gonna happen, but DON'T BECOME A CELEBRITY.)

And if someone in my high school class had become a celebrity - maybe one of the other Maureens: Maureen D, Maureen O, Maureen Q - I could have sold my yearbook to Seth Poppel. 

The first floor of Poppel’s house, in Seattle, is home to some eighteen thousand yearbooks; he and his wife, Danine, advertise their holdings as “the original and largest library of high school yearbooks of the stars.” (Source: The New Yorker)

And not just the stars. Sure, they've got the yearbooks of Patti Smith and Leo DeCaprio, of Marlon Brando and Sharon Stone. But they've also got Ruth Bader Ginsburg's. Which is how I now know that Ginsburg was a high school "twirler." (Sure wish she'd twirled out of the Supreme Court at the right time.) And Harry Truman's - Independence (MO) High School, Class of 1901.

And it's not just the yearbooks of celebrities - be they stars, pols, athletes - but also the yearbooks of those who manage to grab their 15 minutes in the limelight for their infamy:

In September, it took Poppel and his son Jared only a few hours to locate Ryan Wesley Routh’s—Routh is the alleged foiled golf-course assassin of Donald Trump—and sell his adolescent portrait to the Daily Mail for about a hundred bucks. 

Seth Popell, who's now 80, has always been a collector. As a toddler in Brooklyn, he collected bottle caps. Once he could read, it was baseball cards.

Then, nearly 50 years ago, at a baseball card show, he came across a copy of Mickey Mantle's yearbook, and found that, although there were only 41 kids in The Mick's class, Mickey Mantle wasn't chosen as the "Best Athlete." Who could have been better than a future Hall of Famer? I guess he could take solace by having been voted "Most Popular."

My high school class didn't have superlatives. We were woke before there was woke, and didn't want anyone to get left out or have their feelings hurt. We also didn't list activities under the picture, as was generally done back then. Again, those of us on the yearbook staff didn't want anyone with no activities to list, or just one pathetic activity, e.g., Intramural Basketball, 1, look like a null. 

This was, of course, noblesse oblige on the part of the yearbook staff, largely composed of my friends. (I'm still friends with the editor.) We were the girls who would have had a ton of activities. As in Glee Club 1,2,3,4; Student Council 2,3,4; Student Council President, 4; Academy Star (newspaper) 1,2,3,4; features editor, 4; Everyman (yearbook) staff; National Honor Society, 3,4; Literary Society, 1,2,3,4; Latin Club 1,2...I may have been a class officer freshman year, and I played intramural basketball for a couple of years.

We did have pages at the end of the yearbook - called Everyman, a story worthy of its very own post - with chirpy little words and phrases. "Notes to Remember." Mine were Tinkerbell...lines ahead in Latin!...12-year product...merit charts..."great stuff"...SIC VITA...sincere leader. 

Most I remember. I played Tinkerbell in some class skit. My costume included black tights, saddle shoes, and bright green pettipants with silver kangaroos on them...I did my Latin translations (without a trot, so they were tortured and nonsensical) but I liked to get those lines translated well in advance)...By the end of my senior year, I was a 12-year product of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. Four years later, I was a 16-year product...I have no idea what merit charts means, although I believe that when I was on Student Council we were instrumental in getting rid of demerit charts. (Demerits were "awarded" for things like talking between classes. If you "earned" enough of them, you had to stay after school.)..."great stuff" and SIC VITA were words I used ALL the time...sincere leader. Well, yes. Yes I was.

Above is my yearbook picture. If you're wondering what those artful lines are, I just blocked off my part of the page so you wouldn't run into Mary Jane R's section above me, and Joan S's space beneath mine.

Back to the Popells. 

Over the years, the yearbook info business grew. Even pre-Internet, magazines wanted celeb content. Then the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain decided to feature celebs' yearbook photos on their placemats. Gold for the Popells' business! And there was enough business that the Popells' son Jared could join it, and by the mid-1990's, things were booming enough that Seth Popell could quit his day job. 

The Popells finds their yearbooks - the latest demand is for Trump cabinet picks (those ought to be good: White Nationalist Club, 1,2,3,4) - through Internet search and through a freelance network they've built up that scouts antique stores and other sources of old junk.

It may not be the business that's Most Likely to Succeed, but it's got to be in contention for Most Niche.

Me? I've picked up a few old yearbooks that have nothing to do with celebs, and I find them fascinating. Maybe I'll dig up a few more. And who knows? I might run into someone interesting.

Guess there's no such thing as a free cruise

To begin with, I have no - make that less than no - desire to get on a cruise. Among other things, I'd be nervous about floating on the ocean blue in a giant Petri dish. All that covid! All that norovirus! Blech. If I'm going to spend all my time at sea sitting around my cabin wearing a mask and occsaionally gulping a breath of fresh air through my porthole, I might as well stay home.

No, I don't think I'd go on a cruise, even if one were offered to me for free. 

As happened to Minnesotan Mike Cameron, who, while at a casino, won a free Caribbean cruise on Norwegian. Oh, lucky day! Whose dream wouldn't it be to escape a Minnesota winter for a week in sun and warmth?

Alas, Cameron's luck soon ran out. 

He came down with the flu and went to the ship's medical center for treatment. He recovered in three days, only to be stuck with a bill for $47K that he may well never recover from. 

“I was just flabbergasted by the whole thing. I guess I am just used to the medical system in the United States. I can’t believe it happened,” he said.

The bill came as a shock as crew members assured him not to worry as he received treatment. (Source: NY Post)

Cameron had taken out traveler's ensurance, which should have covered the bill. Little did he know that $20K worth of coverage wouldn't have covered even half of the bill. Nor would his personal health incurance. 

To pay the bill - I was going to say "cover the costs," but $47K worth of charges in no way reflects the true costs of Cameron's treatment; he had the flu, not a lung transplant - "the cruise line maxed out two credit cards Cameron had on file and he still owes $21,000, he added."

“The traveler’s insurance doesn’t want to pay it until we run it by our health insurance. The health insurance doesn’t want to pay it because it’s abroad,” [Cameron's girlfriend Tamra] Masterman explained.

Norwegian sent Cameron a letter that stated "that its pricing was 'closely comparable to other cruise lines and is what we believe to be fair and reasonable.'"

'Closely comparable,' maybe. 'Fair and reasonable? NFW. Even if Norwegian claims that its ships all have "a state-of-the-art onboard medical center, staffed with highly qualified physicians and nurses, to provide care for both guests and crew while at sea.” 

No wonder I have no desire to go on a cruise.

Even if Pierce Brosnan or George Clooney crooned "won't you let me take you on a sea cruise" in my ear, my answer would be no, no, 47 thousand times no.

"Three Stars Will Shine Tonight."

One of the crappier aspects of getting older are that people start to die. Not just the people you know and love, but the people who were part of your life because you watched them run for office, or play ball, or on TV or in the movies. It's obviously not the same as someone you know IRL passing away. There are degrees of awfulness and grief there, or course. Your loved ones. Your liked ones. Distant connections who may have played a major role in your life at some point. Colleagues you were friendly with. The neighbors you chatted with but didn't actually know know. There's a continuum, but the grief, whether fleeting or permanent, is real.

And then there are the celebrities - especially those who were characters in your life's play. Here, it's not actually anything on the grief continuum. Are you really going to miss someone you a) never knew; and b) haven't thought of in years. But if they were somehow, someway, part of your growing up, their deaths are going to give you a bit of a pause - and you're probably going to take a bit of a nostalgic little stroll down memory lane.

On Saturday, the actor Richard Chamberlain died. Two days short of his 91st birthday, which would have been today.

Richard Chamberlain wasn't my first heartthrob. That would have been Dick Jones, who played Dick West, the All American Boy, on the cheesy b&w 1950's Western, The Range Rider, and later starred in the equally cheesy b&w 1950's Western, Buffalo Bill, Jr. ("He's a son, a son of a gun. Buffalo Bill, Jr.")

Richard Chamberlain wasn't my second heartthrob. That would have been Tim Considine, who played Spin on Disney's Spin & Marty and, a few years later, the oldest boy, Mike, on My Three Sons. Now there was a dreamboat and, yes, and when he died a few years ago, I did a bit of a nostalgia binge.

But as Dr. Jim Kildare, Richard Chamberlain was perhaps my first near-grown up, "mature" heartthrob.  (I was almost 12 when Dr. Kildare first came on.) And the first time I was part of a group crush.

I was probably 4 or 5 when I crushed on Dick Jones. Did I talk with my friends about how he was so cute? It may have come up in passing. When we were playing dolls, we may have pretended his was our doll's BF or something.

Ditto for Tim Considine. I was six when I fell for him. No doubt my friends fell for him, too. There were only 3 TV networks, so we all watched the same shows. And no one ever missed the daily Mickey Mouse Club (the Mouseketeers show) or Sunday Evening's Walt Disney Wonderful World of Color. Spin & Marty ran on the Mickey Mouse Club. Not that there was anything wrong with Marty - other than the fact that he was s rich snob - but Spin was the dreamboat. Still, I wasn't conscious of everyone being part of an informal Spin Fan Club.

And then, when I was in seventh grade, nearing the age of 12, Dr. Kildare first aired. And my friends were all pretty much smitten. Thursday was show night, and on Friday, before school and during recess, we stood around gabbing about the show, especially if a possible love interest was introduced. (Yvette Mimieux, come on down.)

We collected Dr. Kildare trading cards from Topps. And, unlike the boys (and some of us girls) with baseball cards, we neither flipped them nor attached them to our bicycle spokes to make that wonderful rackety-rack sound when you pedaled. On the other hand, I suspect the Richard Chamberlain cards won't ever have the value of a Honus Wagner.

White long-sleeved cotton shirts, with three buttons at the neck, were the rage. You couldn't wear them to school - we wore short sleeved white cotton blouses with rick-rack trimmed collars - but you could wear them outside of school. I didn't have one of those shirts, but I did have a pair of cotton Dr. Kildare PJ's. The pants were chartreuse. Sometimes, I'd stand in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, swooping my hair up into some sort of French twist, sucking in my cheeks and pretending I was a "lady doctor" colleague having a convo with Jim, who was, of course, my BF.

One of my friends, using her family's little Brownie camera, took a picture of Richard Chamberlain off of the TV. She brought the developed picture to school, and we pretended that she'd seen him in person, passing it around to each other, swooning.

Not all the girls were Jim Kildare fans. The same year we met Jim Kildare, the doctor show Ben Casey also came on the air. The glowering, dark-haired, dark-eyed Vince Edwards played Ben Casey (as opposed to the smiling, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jim Kildare). The tougher girls - the ones who were considered sexier by the boys: they smoked, they told off-color jokes - went for Ben Casey. The tough girls and the odd rebel also liked Ben Casey. But the nice girls, the good(y) girls, crushed on Jim Kildare. 

Funny the things you remember. One time, I asked my mother whether she thought Richard Chamberlain was handsome. She told me she thought he had "bland good looks." I was outraged. Someone whose teenage heartthrobs were Nelson Eddy and Leslie Howard thought Richard Chamberlain was bland? 

Yesterday, when I had my weekly chat with my old friend Joyce, we talked about how we had both had crushes on Richrd Chamberlain. Later in the morning, I got a text from my friend Michele - who's five years younger, and thus too young for a Kildare crush - saying "I see your boyfriend Richard Chamberlain has died. He really was handsome." And I heard from my cousin Mary Beth, who's my age, who texted me a collage of Richard Chamberlan pictures, which shse captioned "My first heartthrob!!"

By eighth grade, the group ardor for Dick Chamberlain was starting to cool. Our crushes were more apt to be classmates. (What were we thinking?) Nonetheless, for Christmas that year, I got the Richard Chamberlain Sings album. If I had that album, if I had a turntable I could play a 33 rpm record on, I bet I could put it on and sing along without missing a word of the lyrics. 

The first song on the album was "Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo," but the album also included "Three Stars Will Shine Tonight," the theme from Dr. Kildare.

Three stars will shine tonight
One for the lonely
That star will shine it's light
Each time that someone sighs

Three stars for all to see
One for young lovers
That star was made to be
The sparkle in their eyes

And for the third star
Only one reason
A star you can wish on
To make dreams come true

High in the sky above
Three stars are shining
I hope that star of love
Will shine down on you

And for the third star
Only one reason
A star you can wish on
To make dreams come true

High in the sky above
Three stars are shining
I hope that star of love
Will shine down on you

Maybe there's a fourth star for old crushes. 

RIP, Richard Chamberlain.

Happy Birthday, Eleanor Maguire.

Today would have been Eleanor Maguire's 55th birthday. Alas, she isn't around to celebrate. In early January of this year, Maguire - an Irish neuroscientist and professor at University College London - died of cancer.

I had never heard of Eleanor Maguire until her obituary popped up in a couple of papers I read regularly - The Guardian and The New York Times. And, what can I say? I've long been a devoted reader of The Irish Sports Pages, so when a death notice captures my attention, I'm there for it.

Maguire was known for her work on brain plasticity, notably a study of the brains of London cabbies, who - having acquired The Knowledge - were found to have a larger posterior hippocampus than those who didn't have The Knowledge. And the longer a cabbie'd been driving around Londer, the bigger their posterior hippocampus.

A couple of bits of info that may be needed here. (In other words, this was info I needed.)

First, what's the function of the posterior hippocampus? The posterior hippocampus takes care of spatial processing and long- and short-term memory retrieval. (As an aside, the word hippocampus comes from the Greek word for sea horse, because that's kinda-sorta what it looks like.) 

Second, what's The Knowledge? The Knowledge - also known as The Knowledge of London - is the exam that London cabbies are required to pass in order to get a license. It began in the mid-19th century, takes a few years to get through, and means memorizing thousands upon thousands of streets and landmarks within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross.

Other cities make - or at lease used to make in the pre-GPS days - drivers have at least rudimentary knowledge of their city in order to get a license, but there's nothing out there that's equivalent to the depth of The Knowledge. At least in Boston, in the pre-GPS era, I got in plenty of taxis where the cabbie couldn't find the most prominent of streets, the most well-known of locations. It was shocking how many times I had to tell the cabbie how to get someplace. 

But in London, even with GPS, drivers are still required to pass a rigorous exam. When a London cabbie is licensed, they're licensed.

Anyway, from early on in her career Maguire - who herself was navigational challenged (as I am) - wanted:

...to understand how people negotiate and recollect their paths through the world, and what happens when this capacity deserts them – as it did in some patients who had undergone brain surgery for intractable epilepsy. (Source: The Guardian)

She wanted to learn more, so:

The role of the hippocampus, not only in navigation, but also in episodic or personal memory, and in imagination, became the focus of her research. The unifying theme was scene construction theory, the idea that the hippocampus constantly builds and updates spatially coherent scenes that represent and anticipate the changing environment using information beyond what is immediately available to the senses.

After receiving her PhD at University College Dublin, Maguire -  like so many Irish folks over the centuries - made her way to London, which turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Not only was London a place where "functional neuroimaging was taking off" - so she could see what's going on in brains without cutting anything open - but there were all these London cabbies out there with brains that had aquired The Knowledge.

Maguire came upon knowledge of The Knowledge by happenstance. As a post-doc fellow in London:

...she was watching television one evening when she stumbled on “The Knowledge,” a quirky film about prospective London taxi drivers memorizing the city’s 25,000 streets to prepare for a three-year-long series of licensing tests.

Dr. Maguire, who said she rarely drove because she feared never arriving at her destination, was mesmerized. “I am absolutely appalling at finding my way around,” she once told The Daily Telegraph. “I wondered, ‘How are some people so bloody good and I am so terrible?’” (Source: NY Times)

And through her work, Maguire found that the posterior hippocampi of London cabbies grew as they mastered more and more of the streets they drove on.

The implications of Maguire's findings that "the key structure in the brain governing memory and spatial navigation was malleable" are immense. Think about how being able to grow your brain could help those suffering memory loss, let alone helping the spatially challenged. 

Shortly before Maguire's death, there "was a much-reported study in the British Medical Journal a few weeks earlier, showing that taxi drivers were somewhat protected against dementia. (Source:  back to  The Guardian)

Yay to that! 

I love that Eleanor Maguire was a Dublin girl. (Dublin Abú!)  I love that she was such a STEM girl. (STEM girls rock!) I love that she had an astounding career, and got to pursue science in a way that was so interesting. I don't love that she died so young. 

Happy Birthday, Eleanor Maguire! So sorry that there's an RIP attached to it. 

Opening Day...

It was a terrible winter. 

Colder, snowier, windier, icier than what we've gotten used to over the past few years. Long and dark. Very very long; very very dark.

But, hey, I'm a New Englander, and with all those winters under my belt, the cold, snow, wind, and ice don't really bother me all that much. I actually like having seasons. 

This year, however, the long and dark of it has gotten to me. Not the weather. The political climate.

I go to bed shaking my had. I wake up in the middle of the night shaking my head. I get up in the morning shaking my head. And throughout the day, as new atrocities are revealed, I keep shaking, and shaking, and shaking my head as I watch democracy dying in darkness. 

We need baseball. I need baseball.

And tomorrow, at 3:05 p.m., we're/I'm getting some when the Olde Towne Team opens their season in Texas, against the Rangers.

I've been baseball-less - other than reading the sports pages and sharing rumors/comparing notes with my baseball-loving brother Rich - since October 30th, when the World Series ended with the Dodgers beating the Yankees. Yay to that, but - despite my affection for LA's Mookie Betts (late of the Olde Towne Team, who decamped to LA in one of the worst trades in the history of any professional sports team) - the 2024 World Series pitted my two least favorite teams against each other. So while I could rejoice in the Yankees' loss, I wasn't all that thrilled with the Dodgers' win. But it was baseball.

My brother played baseball (on a pretty good team) through high school, and is far more astute and knowledgable about the game than I am. But for a civilian whose only playing experience was pickup games with the neighborhood kids on the dirt road that the paved street turned into just past our house, I can hold my own.

But baseball was over on October 30th, and within a week, well, things in this country took a definite turn for the worse, and I found myself in the slough of despond. Which has gotten sloughier and more despondent since inauguration day.

So despite ratcheting down my news-watching, I do follow what's going on. Thus: long, dark, slough, despond...

And missing baseball.

I tried to catch (on TV) a few spring training games, but every time I went to turn a game on, it wasn't on NESN, "our" baseball network. But tomorrow, Thursday March 27th, at 3:05 p.m., I'll be plunked in front of my TV watching opening day. 

Just as well it's in Texas as opposed to Boston, where it's still plenty chilly. And it's likely to still be plenty chilly a week from Friday when the Sox open at home against the Cardinals. And once again, I'll be plunked in front of my TV.

I have so missed baseball, and as wretched as the Olde Towne Team was last year, watching baseball was actually pretty anodyne as opposed to watching the news. And this year, I need my daily fix more than ever. I don't tend to watch every game in its entirety, but I always put the game on for a few innings - a practice which I will resume starting tomorrow. 

I don't have plans at present to go out to Fenway and watch many games in person. Generally, I take in a handful of in-person games - some planned for, some day-of decisions when the weather is perfect and I can get a cheapo last minute ticket - but last year, I went to just one game. (Noah Kahan bobble-head night.)

This year, I have tickets for the Patriots' Day game. Red Sox vs. White Sox. The Red Sox sucked last year, but at least they weren't the White Sox, who last year set an MLB loss record with 121 losses (vs. the Red Sox who ended up with a fifty-fifty 81-81 record).  The Chicago South Siders are forecast to be just as awful this season. (Sorry, my South Side family members.) The Red Sox, meanwhile, are expected to at least eke their way into the playoffs. And most of the Boston Globe sportswriters - homers! - are predicting that the Olde Towne Team will win the East Division. We'll see, but they should improve on last season's record. (The team was actually worse than that 81-81 record looks.)

For a lot of reasons, the Patriots' Day game is my favorite game of the year. Let's hope that this is one of the years when the weather is decent. It seems to be pretty binary. It's a balmy mid-April day, or in the 40's with off-and-on rain. A few years ago, we were wondering why my niece Caroline was taking so long in the bathroom. Turns out her hands were so cold, she couldn't unbutton her jeans.

For now, I'll take what tomorrow brings, W or L, BASEBALL IS BACK. 

Play ball!

Some people have way too much time on their hands

A few years ago, I remember reading about folks who make their own reusable toilet paper. Personally, I believe that the invention of toilet paper in the mid-19th century was one of the great breakthroughs of all time, replacing as it did leaves, moss, corncobs, newspapers, pages out of the Sears Roebuck catalog, et al. items that might work in an outhouse, but wouldn't quite work once toilets went inhouse. (Imagine flushing a corncob? Not to mention, where would urban dwellers get access to anything other than a newspaper or catalog? Honey, would you mind stopping on the way home for some leaves and moss? We're running low.)

Anyway, I had just one word for the toilet-paper bloggers out there debating what type of flannel to use to make "family cloth," the nifty euphemism for reusable t.p. And that word was CRAZY!

Seriously, it's not as if washing toilet paper doesn't use up energy. It's not like laundry detergent isn't a pollutant. (Maybe the toilet paper bloggers use rocks in a river.) And then there's the obvious yuck factors involved. As an older child, I changed plenty of cloth diapers, and it was disgusting to slosh a poopie diaper around in the toilet to remove the "soil." Whirling a dirty disposable diaper away in a Diaper Genie, despite the landfill aspects, is just a lot more convenient. Out of sight/out of nose/out of mind.

Then, back in olden times, there was the ammonia smells emanating from the enameled diaper pail in the bathroom. My mother did several loads of wash every day (except Sunday, by tradition a day of rest for our washing machine and clothesline), so dirty diapers didn't mount up. And still the diaper pail smelled...

So no thanks to reusable toilet paper.

But I suspect that those with enough time on their hands to handcraft toilet paper could also be reusing their dryer lint.

According to The Spruce,  there are loads of things you can use that dryer lint for. 

The first hint: keep a resealable storage bag near your dryer and use it to collect the lint you're religiously removing from the lint trap each time you do a dryer load. (I am actually quite religious about this.) Seal the bag tightly, as you want "to keep the lint fresh and soft." Because who likes stale lint?

Once you bag a bag-full, why not make some fire starters. After all, what better use to make of something (i.e., dryer lint) that's highly flammable. You may not be able to do this if you use cloth t.p. - and, if you use cloth t.p., you're probably not using paper towels, either - as you won't have t.p. or paper cardboard towel tubing to shove the lint into. But it you do, shove away and then wrap your fire startersin wax paper and, as if you're rolling a joint (which I'd no doubt be doing if I were making my own dryer lint fire starters), twist the ends. Voila! A fire starter. Or you could tear a cardboard egg carton apart and use the cups. Once filled with lint, seal the deal with melted candle wax. (Just don't use a Styrofoam carton.)

If you're making small crafts that call for stuffing, or even for larger items like throw pillows and comforters, lint will do you. Not a good idea if the item is ever going to be washed, however. The lint will just wad up on you. And I'm thinking that something highly flamable might not be a good thing to use to stuff a child's toy. When I was a kid, I believe that most stuffed toys were stuffed with (highly flammable) sawdust. Too bad women no longer wear nylon stockings, as I've got a tip from my mother: when the sawdust starts seeping out of that teddy bear, or, in my case, my little dog Sniffy, replace it with cut up nylons. (Sniffy recently observed his 71st birthday, and most of his life has been spent stuffed with nylons from the pre-pantyhose era.)

Gardeners can toss dryer lint in their compost pile and use it to "prevent soil erosion and weed growth." Not a great mulch, but if erosion or weeds are your problem, well, there you go. Indoor gardeners can use lint to line plant pots. 

What else? Dryer lint is "a good option" for packing. Or to make papier mache. Less craftily, "dryer lint is great at absorbing spills, especially those from oil." Good to know! (NOT!)

I'm all for sustainability, for protecting the environment, but reusing dryer lint? What's next? How to use dried boogers?

Some poeple have way too much time on their hands.

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

And a tip of a papier mache chapeau, crafted from dryer lint, to my sister Kath for pointing this WTF story my way.

FIre next time?

I know all about water damage.

Twenty years ago this past February, a pipe froze and burst on the top floor of my condo building, and since water goes where water wants to go, a lot of it came cascading down into our home on the first floor. We took a real hit, and almost lost our plaster medallion LR ceiling, a hundred-year-old decorative feature that would have cost beaucoup to replace. With 17 basketball-sized holes cut in it, with four blowers blowing away - and the heat jacked up for a few weeks - we were able to save the ceiling. But we were out of our home for over a month, and had to have extensive repairwork done (first and foremost, the ceiling, but also floors refinished, woodwork - of which we have a lot in our LR - cleaned, drywall replaced, walls repainted...). Oddly, other than a framed poster over the fireplace and a few pictures, we didn't lose any furniture or other items. Trying to keep our TV - at that point one of those heavy old big box numbers - we dropped it, causing no damage to the TV, which we were about to replace anyway, but creating a dent in the floor. (Fortunately, between the building insurance and our homeowners, pretty much everything - including our hotel stays - was covered.)

Water damage, even on the small scale we experienced it, is awful, and every time I see a story about people being flooded out by raging rivers or hurricane surges, and see them in the ruins of their homes, my heart goes out to them.

The Great 71 Beacon Flood of Ought Five has created heightened sensitivities with respect to water damage, so it was no surprise when, a couple of months back, an article on the Johnstown (PA) Flood Museum caught my eye. This museum commemorates the 1889 Johnstown Flood, one of the worst flooding disasters in American history, second only in terms of loss of life to the Galveston Flood of 1900. Over two-thousand folks died in the Johnstown Flood; 99 families were entirely wiped out. 

The Johnstown Flood Museum's flooding wasn't caused by a raging river or monsoon-like storm. As with the flooding in my building, there was a burst pipe that sent water gurgling through the building, damaging walls, ceiling tiles, and carpets.

Fortunately for its patrons, the Johnstown Flood Museum said on its social media accounts that “nothing of historic significance was affected” by the interior inundation. (Source: The Guardian)

It could have been worse if not for the head's up alert sounded by:

... a volunteer docent at the museum, Nikki Bosley, who was working in the archives when she discovered the leak.

Museum officials informed the local news outlet WJAC that Bosley “sounded the alarm and allowed us to get in here and keep it from being much, much worse”. 

Unfortunately, the Museum had to do a lot of mopping up, and as of late February, it remained closed 

Anyway, while I know all about water damage, I don't have a lot of up close and personal experience with actual flooding, beyond the occasional minor bouts with water seeping into our common areas in the building's basement during really wild rainstorms. (We installed a sump pump a while back, and haven't had any water in the building since.)

But the article on the Johnstown Flood Museum got me to look up the Johnstown Flood. And got me to remember the one and only flood I actually lived through. 

I have very vivid memories of it, but I had to look up the date. And I found that, in late August 1955, in the aftermath of Hurricanes Connie and Diane, there was a flood in Worcester. (This was a couple of weeks before I started first grade, so I was five years old, pushing six.)

We still lived in my grandmother's three decker then, which was the first house on Winchester Ave, separated from Main Street by an empty lot (which in the next year or so became a Sunoco station). Worcester is very hilly, and we lived on a hill, and standing on our piazza (Worcester for porch), I remember watching water wildly coursing down the hill, heading toward Webster Square, which was where "our" hill leveled out. 

The picture here shows Breen's Cafe in Webster Square, which is pretty much exactly a mile from our piazza on Winchester Ave, and which is located just around the corner from where my grandfather's bar (Rogers Brothers' Saloon) stood. (Alas, the family saloon was a victim of Prohibition.) 

Breen's, by the way, is still in operation, and for many years now has been owned by two of the Hanlon brothers, fellows who grew up in the 'hood and were grammar and high school classmates of my brothers. One of the brothers, who was a good friend of my brother Rich, died very young. Just googled and Brian's been gone since 2002. 

Note to self: next year, when my sister Trish and I make our annual cemetery run to Worcester, we should have lunch at Breen's.

My other memory of the the flood of 1955 was that for day or so, while there was water, water, everywhere, our water was shut off. I remember taking a crap in a coffee can, and my father taking the can out to toss in the field behind our house. There were two paint stirrers in the can, I guess so my father could lift the turds out. Or something. Or maybe we got to use the toilet, but he had to remove the turds using the paint stirrers to retrieve them so he could ferry them out to dispose of. My memory is very clear of the coffee can, my poop, and the paint stirrers.

Blessedly, although we're all at present pretty much living through an unnatural disaster, I've never lived through a natural disaster, and have no desire to ever experience one. 

But all this brings to mind the words from a Black spiritual, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!” 

Watching the recent LA devastation, I don't have any desire to experience a fire, either.

Here's hoping I stay lucky. 

Welcome, sweet springtime

One of the things that I most enjoy about living in New England is that we (still, for the most part) have four distinct seasons. 

Fall is my favorite: sweater weather, MacIntosh apples, foliage color-riot, a certain melancholy air that has always appealed to me. (As a child, my favorite month was November. I loved the dreary gray of it all, the heat clicking on, trees bare of those foliage-riot leaves (as they were back in the day; now a lot of trees are still wearing o' the green through Thanksgiving).)  

But all the seasons have something to commend them. 

In winter, it's just standing there with a cup of tea, looking out the window, and watching the snow fall. It's flannel PJ's, curling up with a good book, an excuse the make cottage pie. It's the lights on the trees on The Common. (And the greens and wreathes on the doors which, I'm begging you, oh my neighbors, to finally take down. Enough is enough.)

The best thing about summer is the light in the evening. Nothing more is needed to make summer a very good season.

Spring, though, to me is a close second to fall in terms of mi favorito.

And so today, although it's not exactly spring-like yet, I welcome sweet springtime.

New England spring is not exactly perfect. We can have snow in May. We can have cold-wet-rainy right up until June. Sometimes even through June. But the good almost always outweighs the bad.

Spring means daylight savings, which started a couple of weeks ago. And there is nothing better to lift the spirits of those of us who live on the front end of a time zone, where by late fall, it's pitch dark by 4:30. Ugh! When it's dark out, I stay put. When it's light in the evening, I'll often take a stroll - 7:30 p.m., 8:30 p.m. Let there be light!

Spring is forsythia, daffodils, pussy willows, tulips. It's the trees starting to bud and then, one day, as if by magic, they're in full green leaf. 

It's the swanboats - and the gorgeous plantings -  back in the Public Garden. It's Magnolias on Beacon Street. It's baby ducklings. (Unfortunately, it's also baby Canada goslings. They may be cute for starters, but soon enough they're full grown nasty-arse, hissing, crap-everywhere demon creatures.) 

It's baseball. And this year there's even reason to be a tiny bit optimistic about the Red Sox. Glad I bought tickets for the Patriots' Day game, a morning (11 a.m.) outing where the crowd spills out of Fenway right onto the Boston Marathon route. 

And speaking of Patriots' Day, spring means Patriots' Day, one of my favorite holidays. This year is the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's midnight ride, the Battle of Lexington and Concord. I do hope that the despicable a-hole in the White House lets his antipathy toward the blue states keeps him golfing in Mar a Lago, rather than defile our celebrations with his malign presence. (There are some Massachusetts towns he might be happy to swan around in, but Boston gave 77% of its vote to Harris. For Lexington the figure was 79%, for Concord 82%. Stay the f home, please.)

Spring is peepers, which even in the city I get to hear. Sometimes.

It's a handful of balmy days in April. (If we're lucky.) And a few more even balmier days in May. (Again, if we're lucky.) It's June when New England weather is usual at its prime. 

When I was in high school, I was a member of the Glee Club. Each year, we put on two concerts: Christmas and Spring.

Our Glee Club was first rate, largely because we had an excellent music teacher, Sister Marita. Marita was very sweet, and we all loved her. (On the bus, coming back from wherever we went on a bus - basketball games, glee club competitions, a performance at the Worcester County Jail, trips into Boston for a museum or "high culture" performance - if Sister Marita was with us, we would always sing, to the tune of Maria from West Side Story, "Marita! I just met a nun named Marita." It was certainly a kinder, gentler time...) Marita (who I believe left the convent shortly after I graduated from high school) was also a perfectionist and exceedingly demanding. And she always managed to choose interesting and diverse works for us to perform. Benjamin Britten "Ceremony of the Carols." "Little Bread and Butterflies" from Disney's Alice in Wonderland. 

Occasionally, however, she picked a clunker, as was the case the year we performed "Welcome, Sweet Springtime" at our Spring Concert. 

At the time - mid-late 1960's - this song seemed so archaic to us, so draggy and dreadful. Something that my grandmother's high school choir might have sung at the turn of the century. (It was written in 1884, so...)

And with spring upon us, it's been an earworm for the last few weeks. So, naturally, I had to google it. And the first thing that came up when I searched for "welcome sweet springtime" was a reference to an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, where the Mayberry gang - Andy, Barney, A(u)nt Bea - were putting on a concert where they were singing none other than "Welcome, Sweet Springtime."  Could this have been the inspiration for Marita's choice? It's definitely the sort of cornball show they would have allowed the nuns to watch, that's for sure. 

Anyway, today it's spring. 

So welcome, sweet springtime. Especially after the winter we just had. 

I know I said that I liked winter, but this winter has been a bit too wintery. The last couple of years, our winters have been mild and rainy, and I've longed for a winter of yore with cold and snow. Be careful what you wish for. While this winter has been much more like the winters we've always had than the last couple of years - albeit with less snow - I've found that my tolerance for old timey winters has dwindled over the years. It was too cold. We didn't get a January thaw. We did get some snow - yay! or at least yay! - but we also got a lot of ice. Which kept me in. One day, I headed out to my volunteer job and got part way there when I saw the sidewalk ahead covered with black ice. I decided that giving out toothbrushes and condoms wasn't worth risking a broken hip, so I went home and spent the day on the inside looking out. 

So, yeah, welcome, sweet springtime. 

Now that's what I call a frequent flyer

I like to travel. And by that I mean I generally enjoy being somewhere else. I say generally because, when I was doing my share of business travel, I sometimes ended up in places where I didn't really care to be. (I mean, what was I doing that time in Lynchburg, VA?) But the part of travel that I'm fairly meh on is the getting there part, especially when the getting there part involves flying.

Don't get me wrong. Being able to fly somewhere is great. I certainly wouldn't have made all those trips to the West Coast if I'd had to spend a week on a train getting there, and another week getting back; all those trips to Europe if I'd had to spend a week on an ocean liner getting there, and another week getting back

But, let's face it, airplane travel is a drag. The seats are too tight. The person in the seat in front of you reclines their seat so that their head is in your lap. The man sitting next to you is a man-spreader part excellence. Or a hacking coffer. Or a nose-picker. 

The food - when they serve it - is terrible. (But you eat it anyway.)

The toilets? Well, there are no words...

Even if you're flying in the lap of first or business class luxury, where the seats are comfier and the food better, there are cancellations, reroutes, delays that don't discriminate by what class you're flying in. Red eyes that weren't supposed to be red eyes. Nights spent in an overheated, noisy airport hotel. Gate changes. Terminal changes. Three hours on the runway, eight hours at the gate.

I don't suffer from fear of flying, but to me it's a necessary evil, the means to an end.

I can't imagine wanting to be on planes all the time, and I'm just as happy that my career didn't require insane amounts of business travel. (Plenty. Just not insane.)

But Steven Rothstein was someone who traveled a lot and liked it just fine. So back in the 1980's, when American Airlines was on shaky financial footing and came up with a quick-cash scheme to sell lifetime passes, Rothstein got out his checkbook and bought a lifetime, first-class ticket for $250K. He then went and sprung for a lifetime companion ticket.

Over the following decades, Rothstein made the most of his expensive purchase, clocking up a staggering 30 million miles and costing the airline an estimated $21 million (c. A$33 million) in flight fares.

By 2008, American Airlines decided they’d had enough. They revoked Rothstein’s precious pass mid-trip, breaking the news at the gate just as he was about to board yet another flight. (Source: DMARGE)

Rothstein, an investment banker, was doing his frequent flying back in the day - the golden (hah!) age of business travel - when people thought nothing of jumping on a flight to somewhere for an hour long business meeting. (Been there/done that, including a day trip to London. And I wasn't all that much of a business traveler.) Here's how Rothstein racked up his miles:

During the period when he held the pass, Rothstein would often visit the same destination multiple times. He was even known to take a return flight between his Chicago base and Ontario so that he could pick up a sandwich in his favorite restaurant. (Source: AeroTime)

Flying from Chicago to Ontario to pick up a sandwich? I have been known to bring back take-out from Shun Lee in NYC so that my husband could have our favorite dun-dun noodles and spicy cucumbers. But the take-out was incidental to the trip. I never got on a flight just be pick up dun-dun noodles. Let alone a sandwich. Sheesh. No wonder American began to feel that Rothstein was taking advantage of the system.

All told:

Over the course of 21 years, Rothstein took – 1,000 flights to New York City

500 flights to San Francisco
500 flights to Los Angeles
500 flights to London
120 flights to Tokyo
80 flights to Paris
80 flights to Sydney
50 flights to Hong Kong
and roughly 7,000 flights to destinations across the rest of the world.

Yikes, and I by that I mean YIKES! 

But the sandwich trip wasn't what caused American to crack down on Rothstein, and - once Rothstein sued the airline - to sue him back.

American claimed that Rothstein had abused the system, sometimes booking companion tickets for no reason other than to have an empty seat next to him where he could rest his carry on bag. And sometimes booking no-show tickets just for the hell of it. 

His daughter has said that sometimes Rothstein did book flights he had no intention of taking because he was depressed after the death of his son. Over the years, Rothstein had made friends via phone with the AA booking agents he had access to as part of his lifetime ticket deal. He would call them in the middle of the night, the daughter said, because he was sad and lonely. In the course of talking with the agents he'd befriended, he often made reservations for flights he never intended to take.

Rothstein maintained that he never violated the program rules.

Anyway, there were suits/countersuits which settled out of court.

Steven Rothstein wasn't the only one to purchase a lifetime ticket on American. When the program was in operation, the airline sold 66 of them. (At the time, other airlines also offered special air pass schemes. E.g., pay a fixed fee for a fixed number of flights; unlimited flights but over a specific time period. But nothing comparable to American's offer.) And Rothstein wasn't the only one whose pass was revoked for overuse.

The wonderfully named Jacques E. Vroom, Jr. also got his pass lifted in 2008 and supposedly after all this time, is still involved in suit/countersuit. Again, Vroom's claim was/is that he wasn't violating any of the original rules which, if they existed anywhere other than in a couple of heads at American, were unwritten in the original contract. Neglecting to include such fine print in that contract turned out to be costly.

Basic mathematics shows that these two customers alone cost American Airlines more than it ever made by selling the AAirpasses to begin with. Fortunately for Rothstein and Vroom, but unfortunately for the airline, it took the carrier years to figure out that these two customers alone were costing it millions of dollars annually. 

Anyway, American canceled their unlimited first class travel program in 1994 - well before they tried cracking down on Rothstein and Vroom, but apparently after they figured out the program was a way too costly one.

American did try to briefly revive the program in 2004, offering it in the Neiman-Marcus insane-luxury Christmas catalog. At $3M, there were no takers. 

Personally, I think that American should have let Rothstein and Vroom keep flying. Sure, maybe come up with new, more explicit rules. But let them keep flying. By now, they would likely be aging out of any desire to hop on a plane to pick up a sandwich.

I just can't imagine who'd want to have access to unlimited to flights. There aren't enough Biscoff cookies - American Airlines snack-of-choice for steerage - in the world that would get me on a flight if I didn't have to be on.

Connor Schoen! Love this guy!!!

I've been involved with St. Francis House, a large day shelter in downtown Boston, for a good long time. As a volunteer, I'm there 2 or 3 days a week, every Monday and Thursday, and every other Friday. My main job is handing out hygiene supplies, socks, and handwarmers to our guests. One thing I like about this job is that - unlike when I'm serving breakfast or lunch, which I also do - there's often time to chat with folks and hear their stories (or whatever part of their stories they're willing to share with a complete stranger). 

I'm not a case manager. I'm not a social worker. I'm not a clinician. I'm not a therapist. I'm not a housing expert. I'm not a job counsellor. I can't actually help-help anyone. But what the guests get from me is sympathetic ear. And, on occasion, a bit of advice.

When I'm speaking with a woman, I always make sure that they know about the Women's Lunch Place, a day shelter for women. St. Francis House assists both men and women, but in the day to day, in terms of who's hanging out there, our population skews male. And it can be a rough crew, especially if a woman is at all vulnerable. We do have a dedicated place for women set aside at SFH, and it's great. But I try to make sure that our female guests also know about the Women's Lunch Place on Newbury Street.

And when I'm talking with a kid, I always make sure to mention Bridge Over Troubled Waters, an organization focused on services for young people (up to 24 years old) who are homeless, runaways, or otherwise at risk. To me, there is NOTHING more heartbreaking than seeing some kid in their late teens/early twenties come through our doors.

As I mentioned, our guests can be a pretty rough crew, and while St. Francis House does offer plenty of support for troubled young folks, it may not be the best option for them to be hanging around with an older crowd composed of a goodly proportion of ex-cons, addicts, mentally ill, street people and others. These old hands, while they may be able to help newbies navigate "the system" - and are often genuinely supportive and generous to the young ones - may not always be the best people for the young ones to get involved with.

And now there's another organization I can mention to the "kids" who drop by the SFH Resource Center to ask for a toothbrush or nail clippers. There's Breaktime:

Breaktime’s mission is to break the cycle of homelessness by equipping young adults with the job and financial security they need to establish housing security. By providing employment, wraparound services, and financial support, Breaktime works to ensure that every young person has the tools they need to achieve job, financial, and long-term housing security. 

Co-founded by Harvard classmates Connor Schoen and Tony Shu, and now run by Schoen, Breaktime - taking advantage of the decline in the post-pandemimc office-space market -  recently bought a building in downtown Boston - 63 Franklin Street - to house its growing organization. (Shu remains on the board of Breaktime, but he's off serial-entrepreneuring, with a company called Parker that facilitates investments in trailer parks. I can't tell if Parker is trying to create more affordable housing or exploit the mobile housing market for a quick buck or both.)

Schoen, who's 26 years old, has been at it a while. In high school, he collected clothing for Cradles to Crayons, which provides clothing and other items to families in need. At Harvard, starting in his freshman year, he volunteered at a Cambridge-based shelter for young adults. There he met Shu and the two came up with the idea for Breaktime, wich they launched in 2018. (Schoen was 19 at the time, Shu 18.)

Over the years, Breaktime evolved. The original idea - a cafe for young (homeless) adults - had the kibosh put on it by the pandemic. The idea then became a job-training platform that provided job-readiness and a network for finding work. Breaktime now offers participants coaching, mentoring, and some small financial assistance. 

As Breaktime evolved, Schoen stuck with it, extending his undergraduate stay to lend some of his prodigious energy to Breaktime. And Breaktime started getting results. 

...in 2022, 126 associates went through the program, and 79 percent of graduates had found stable housing. (Source: Boston Globe)

Breaktime started attracting interest - and money - including financial support from the CEO of Moderna. 

With his commitment to the non-profit world, Schoen wasn't your typical young Harvard grad, who's in law school, med school, investing banking for two years before B-school, trying to break into screenwriting, or trying to figure out how to parlay their Harvard brilliance and connections into becoming the next bro billionaire. 

“I wasn’t fitting into the vision of what other people expect, graduating from Harvard,” Schoen said. “It’s not the normal path."

...At first, Schoen recalls, it was hard to be taken seriously, as a new college graduate asking well-heeled donors for money.

“A lot of people thought, ‘It’s great he has the energy and the creativity, but he’s not going to stick with it,’” Schoen said. “I had to prove it.”

And prove it he has done.

Michael Nichols, who runs the Downtown Boston Alliance, wasn’t that familiar with Breaktime when Schoen began looking around about a year ago. “But I think Connor has proven to be a force of nature in the work that he’s doing ... and clearly was able to identify supporters of his vision,” Nichols said.

Breaktime's new building - which was purchased for $6.3M in a blessedly (for them, at least) soft commercial real estate market - is in a central location in downtown Boston. They'll be retrofitting the building for their needs, and included in their plans is space for a Healthcare for the Homeless outpost. Among other things, Healthcare for the Homeless runs the medical clinic at St. Francis House. 

Is everything in life just a few degrees of separation from everything else?

Case in point: Breakpoint's new home is just down the street from 45 Franklin, which was for years the HQ for Christmas in the City, another non-profit focused on the needs of those experiencing poverty and homelessness. Christmas in the City was founded by the late (great) Jake Kennedy, and 45 Franklin housed his PT clinic. I got roped into volunteering for Christmas in the City when I was a PT patient of Jake's, and spent a ton of time at "45" - our shorthand name for it - over the years. I can't help but think that Jake would have been thrilled by having Breaktime as a neighbor.

And I'm pretty sure he would have loved Connor Schoen. 

I know that, without having met him, I sure do.

And now I have a new place to mention to the young kids who stop by the SFH Resource Center.

“Being a social entrepreneur has been a natural fit for me,” Schoen said. “It’s certainly not the easiest job. It can be taxing emotionally, physically. It’s a lot of stress. It’s a lot of pressure. But I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else."

Good for you, Connor Schoen. Good for you. 

Happy St. Patrick's Day (to those who observe it)

In my Twitter bluesky profile, I say that I'd rather be in Ireland. And these days, I sometimes actually mean it, or at least kinda-sorta mean it. In my old age, would I really uproot my existence and plunk meself down in a country far away from family and friends, hearth and home? Sure, I've been to Ireland plenty of times but have never lived there - or any place outside the United States. So it's probably not going to happen (unless fascist putsch comes to fascist shove, in which case...) That's Galway in the pic, by the way, which would be my first choice of a place to live in Ireland.

I have no illusions about Ireland being perfect. To quote my Grandmother Rogers - the daughter of Irish immigrants - "If Ireland were so great, we all wouldn't have had to come over here." True that. The country my Irish great-grandparents - Matthew Trainor, Bridget Trainor, John Rogers, and Margaret Joyce - fled in the 1870's was poor, backward, repressive, priest-ridden. (Not to mention still under Britain's tyranny.) They found a much better life for themselves and their progeny in Amerikay. 

But over the last several decades, with remarkable speed, Ireland has done of very good job of throwing over its poor, backward, repressive, priest-ridden self, and there's certainly an argument to be made that today's Eire (for all its problems, including a nasty right wing nationalistic movement) may be a lot more comfortable, open, and sane place to live than, say, the USA envisioned by the white Christian nationalists. So if I were going to live in another country, it would be a) Canada if New England merged with it and I didn't have to move; or b) Ireland. 

The first time I went to Ireland, in 1973, I have to say I felt right at home the minute I stepped off the boat in Dun Laoghaire in the pouring rain. (I grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood and went to Catholic schools - through college - largely populated by Irish-Americans students and teachers, so the fact that everyone looked like everyone I ever lived around just made Ireland seem like home. The gestures, the manner of speaking - it was all pretty familiar.) 

Ah, Ireland...

I love the music. I love the tea. I love the brown bread. And I love the literature, which this year I've been reading a bit of.

So far in 2025, I've read five novels written by Irish authors.

I don't know why I had a copy Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September sitting there in one of the piles on the cedar chest in my bedroom. But there it was. So I picked it up and read it.

Bowen was a well-to-do member of the Anglo-Irish (Protestant) Ascendancy that dominated/exploited Ireland, and kept the Irish Catholics in their (downtrodden) place until that particular yoke was thrown off in the twentieth century. The Last September takes place in a "Big House" in County Cork in 1920. The Irish War for Independence is revving up around them, but the Naylor family and their friends and relations are keeping up the idle rich life they've always lived: House parties. Tennis games. Dances. Condescending to the locals (Irish, Catholic), who as servants, laborers, tradesmen, and peasant farmers, made their lives of jaded leisure possible.

My greatgrandfather Matthew Trainor was one such servant, working  as a stable boy in the grand Protestant manor house in Ballymascanlon, County Louth, until he emigrated. The Big House where Matthew labored is now a hotel and restaurant. When, a few years back, my sister Trish and I had lunch there, Trish commented as we walked in that "this is probably the first time anyone in our family used the front door." 

The manor house in Ballymascanlon survived to become a hotel; the manor houses in The Last September met a different fate. In the final pages of the novel, they were burnt to the ground by Irish soldiers during the war to get the Brits out. The novel is dated but beautifully written and, while some may read it fearing the impending doom, I was rooting for the boyos to get in there with the petrol and light a match. About 300 Big Houses were burnt down to the ground in Ireland between 1919 and 1923, with very little loss of life, as the families were given warning and allowed to get out and sit in their lawn chairs to watch their homes burning. (Up the Republic!)

I am a big admirer of his (The Barrytown Trilogy, Paddy Clarke HaHaHa, etc), so I can't imagine why I hadn't read Roddy Doyle's Paula Spencer Series. I came to it backwards, picking up the third novel The Woman Behind the Door (2024), and then immediately Kindling The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996) and Paula Spencer (2006) for my February trip to Tucson to visit my sister Kath. These books chronicle the life of a working class Dub (Dubliner) woman through her turbulent marriage to a "charming" wife-beating thug, her struggles with alcoholism, her up and down relationships with her four children, her motherhood, her friendships and relationships with her family (especially her sisters), her crappy jobs, her financial struggles. This all sounds pretty bleak, but in Paula Spencer, Doyle has painted a nuanced, sympathetic but never patronizing portrait of a modern-day Irish woman who's plenty smart (although spectacularly dumb at times), plenty funny, plenty observant (except for those blindspots), and plenty tough. I loved these books, and loved Paula Spencer, her kids (Nicola, John Paul, Leanne, and Jack), her sisters Carmel and Denise, her friends Mary and Rita...The only one I hated was her shite husband Charlo. I was delighted when he got plugged by a Garda. Good riddance! In the third book, Paula's in her sixties. I hope there's at least one more Paula novel in Roddy Doyle. High praise to him for doing a feckin' brilliant job. 

The fifth Irish novel I've read so far this year is Time of the Child by Niall Williams which is pretty much set plunk in the middle between the demise of the the Protestant Ascendancy (Bowen) and the emergence of modern Ireland (Doyle). It's the Christmas season of 1962, and Ireland is still plenty poor and plenty backward, especially in the remote backwater Clare town of Faha, which has only had electricity for a few years and where life is carried on by indirection yet with plenty of room for everyone to be up in everyone else's business. I've read a number of books by Williams, including the two prior novels set in Faha, so I was familiar with some of the characters from minor roles they'd played in those earlier books. Williams is a beautiful, lyrical writer, and his characters and settings are memorable, but his work generally has a fairy tale quality to it that I'm not fully enamored of. (The miraculous abandoned baby showing up...) Not that he ignores the harsh realities of life, but even when dealing with them, the corners are a bit rounded and gentled. I prefer Roddy Doyle's straight-on grit. Still, I much enjoyed this book (and thank my cousin Ellen for the recommendation).

All I can say is that, when it comes to writing, Ireland (population: 5.6 million) sure manages to punch above its weight in producing wonderful writers. No wonder there are times when I'd rather be there.

Roundabout way to celebrate Ireland's national holiday, but Happy St. Patrick's Day to those who observe it.

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

I've often written about my Irish (-American) identity and my affinity for Ireland. Here's a roundup of my St. Patrick's Day posts over the years.