Reed & Mayer Mysteries

Our Essays

We were both writing personal essays long before we turned to fiction. Our first website naturally featured some essays we had written for newspapers, magazines, and fanzines. For more than a decade we have been doing essays for our newsletter, The Orphan Scrivener. Here we attempt to link to the various essays that have piled up in our cyberspace attic over the years.

During the sixth month of the first year of the third millenium (according to some calculations) there occurred an epochal event. I attended the Deadly Ink mystery conference. I guess that to understand why this was an epochal event - to me - you must first understand that I'm the kind of writer who is a writer because he was the kind of child who stayed up in his room reading books. A bookworm, in other words. A loner. Someone more comfortable with words than with people.

When, in 1972, I got involved with a bunch of similar people who made up science fiction fandom, I did so via the mail. Back then science fiction fans exchanged letters, often typed out on manual typewriters. I am not, as another first-time mystery author is wont to say, making this up. We also exchanged fanzines mostly printed by mimeograph, a device which produced pages by - well, if you aren't old enough to know you are probably better off not knowing!

However, from time to time, these sf fans, isolated and scattered around the world, would congregate at conventions where they could meet each other in the mimeo-ink stained flesh. Except for me. I was a misfit among misfits.

The matter of my non-attendance became a bit of a joke. Surely I would break down and attend a con sooner or later. But five years passed, then ten and twenty and I never did sign up for a con, although I dashed briefly into the hotel where Chambanacon was being held to meet my future wife and co-author Mary in person for the first time (but that is another story). After many years, when people queried me on the matter, I would reply that if I ever attended a con it would probably be as a pro, which, given my decades of rejection slips, was as good as saying never.

The reason I allowed that I might attend as a pro had nothing to do with ego. I simply thought that I might be able to subject myself to crowds of strangers if I had some specific task to perform, beyond socializing which I knew very well was beyond me!

The day before Deadly Ink I began to have my doubts about this theory and on Saturday morning as I neared Mount Arlington, New Jersey where the conference was being held I just about turned into Allamuchy State Park instead. I had been there orienteering a few times. Orienteering is a sport where you go out into the woods alone (of course) with a map and compass and navigate between selected points or get lost, as the case may be. Getting lost sounded like a good idea.

However, I persevered on to the Mount Arlington and, to my horror, discovered that the Four Points Sheraton was about a hundred feet from the Interstate exit, dashing any idea I might have had about becoming disoriented in a maze of city streets and being unable to find my destination.

Entirely out of ruses, I emerged shakily from my Chevette, made my way into the hotel and almost immediately ran into organizer Patti Biringer. Trapped! I'd missed the continental breakfast but Patti invited me to sit down and have a cup of coffee. After talking to her for awhile I began to feel much more comfortable. Besides much of my attention was now being taken up by the task of transporting my enormous goodies bag full of books, pens, programs, a water bottle and so forth.

There were two panels going on in small conference rooms on either side of the booksellers' room. I chose the one on the changing face of publishing since Mary and I are, I hope, going to be part of it. There was some discussion of e-books and small publishers. Praise was heaped on Poisoned Pen Press, our own publisher. I definitely was feeling more confident, especially when I checked the new Independent Mystery Booksellers Association catalog and saw a listing not only for our first novel ONE FOR SORROW but for next October's TWO FOR JOY as well. We had just sent the finished manuscript for the latter to the Press the previous week.

During the day I spent some time talking with Richard Helms who has published JOKER POKER through iuniverse which uses the new print-on-demand technology. He was pulling out all the stops to publicize his book and had driven up from North Carolina for the conference. He was not alone in stressing the need for self-promotion and in expressing doubts about the Big Publishers' openness to no-name authors.

It was fortunate that I was feeling less shaky because my own panel, on researching historical mysteries was fast approaching. Mary and I share all the tasks involved in writing our fiction. That is to say, one of us is not just a copyeditor or researcher as is sometimes the case. Still, when it comes to that obscure, practically impossible to pin-down fact - did the Byzantines eat swordfish for example - Mary is the ace sleuth. Still, since she wasn't there, it was up to me to explain our methods as best I could to a - omigod - a roomful of people!

My luck continued to hold because the moderator was Roberta Rogow, author of. a series teaming up Lewis Carrol and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle She had obviously been to a few of these things before and knew how to deal with nervous neophytes. She was organized. Nevertheless, as I took my place at the table in the front of the conference room, I was about to enter the Twilight Zone.

As I mentioned, I was once a science fiction fan, and also, almost by definition, a science fiction writer manqué. (A nicer word than "wannabe," don't you think?) Many years ago, when I was very young and as yet unscarred by countless, cutting rejections, I admit to having had the occasional fantasy of what it would be like to be a real pro, to sit on a panel, side by side with my colleagues, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. That hadn't happened. I had grown up enough to understand that the reality was never much like the fantasy at any rate. Besides, now that I had written half a book, it was a mystery book and I was on a mystery panel, with other mystery writers.

Except that Roberta, I learned, had also started out in sf fandom, had written sf books, in fact. Very disconcerting. Perhaps this was all a dream. I would wake up, twenty-three, unpublished, my fingers scratched by staples from folding up the latest issue of my fanzine. I maintained my suddenly tenuous grip on reality by reminding myself that the third member of the panel would be impossible to mistake for a science fiction writer. April Kihlstrom has written Regency romances, and her book was a regency mystery. At which point she remarked that when it came to writing her settings her model was Robert Heinlein!

I might very well have been plunged into some Lovecraftian abyss of horror too dreadful to be described by words, even long, obfuscating and archaic words, except that, to be honest, I was kind of peeved because I had remarked to Mary a few days before that I tried to set the scene as Robert Heinlein had, by placing the reader right smack in the middle, along with the characters who are familiar with the world they live in and don't need some disembodied narrator explaining familiar things to them in tedious detail. Can't a guy have an original thought!

After that the panel went very well. I tried to avoid saying "y'know" more than once a sentence, didn't visibly tremble and didn't trip getting out of my chair at the end, though it was a near thing.

The dreaded booksigning was next. I say "dreaded" because Mary and I have been to a few booksignings, even before ONE FOR SORROW was published, when our John the Eunuch stories were appearing in anthologies. A booksigning, as I understand it, is where an author spends two hours displayed at the front of a store, much to the distress of puzzled customers who sidle by carefully, as they would past a largish rotweiller. The author is allowed to refer customers to the nearest clerk, watch customers'bags, or move aside so they can get at the latest Patricia Cornwall whose display the author is blocking. The author does not, however, sign books. (Maybe because, as Mary tells me, sf author Bob Shaw more or less remarked to her on autographing a book, "You can't send it back now, it's been scribbled in.")

At lunch Parnell Hall, who writes the Stanly Hastings and Puzzle Lady series, sang a hilarious song about signings at Waldenbooks, which sums the experience up perfectly. You can listen to the song at his web site. His talk was brilliant and I won't poach on it here. (And let myself be upstaged!) You have to hear him for yourself!

But on this day - Glory! Glory! - I got to sign four books! One, funnily enough, was purchased by a lady named Mary who had an English accent. Another went to a young man who said the book had caught his eye because of the movie Gladiator. Yes, I told him, Mary and I are hoping that somewhere in Hollywood someone is determined to buy up the movie rights to every single currently available book connected with any phase of the Roman Empire, just in case!

Following this triumph it was time for lunch beside the hotel's indoor pool. Not a very elegant setting since the pool was surrounded with yellow police tape on account of the body floating at one end. As Patti remarked to us, every mystery conference has to have a body.

Patti explained that three years earlier she had given herself until she was fifty to get a book published and seeing that that was not likely to happen had decided to put on a mystery conference for her birthday instead.

She called attention to our large, readable nametags. The size was to relieve people from having to squint at people's chests to decide whether they were worth speaking to. Having observed this custom at conventions, she had been tempted to wear a nametag that said, simply, "Yes, I am somebody."

I suppose I qualified as "somebody" because I got to wear the red lettered tag reserved for those of us there in some sort of professional capacity. It was a strange feeling, almost embarrassing, since I've worn life's black-lettered tag for 49 years and know too well that the difference between a published and an unpublished writer is often, simply, that the unpublished writer hasn't yet chanced to send his or her manuscript to the right editor.

Like Patti, I missed my own publication deadline, even though I'd given myself more time to get published than she had. When I was fifteen I vowed to be published by 21! So I missed by 28 years. Or 29, since as co-author I'll only have a whole book to my name when TWO FOR JOY comes out in October. I expect Patti won't miss her mark by that much and, in the meantime, we can thank the glacially slow workings of the publishing world for the delightful Deadly Ink!

Favorite Childhood Books

Mary and Eric selected their favorite childhood books for a Children's Book Week program conducted by the Kaubisch Memorial Public Library. Library's Director Doris Ann Norris explains: "Letters from the Youth Services Department of the Kaubisch Memorial Public Library in Fostoria, OH were sent to dozens of local officials, celebrities including authors and others. This was for Children's Book Week which was celebrated from November 12 through the 18th. These people were asked to select a favorite book from childhood, why it was their favorite and how much reading has meant in their lives and careers. Approximately 40 letters were received including one from Mr. Rogers and a number of authors, both of children's and adult books."

Eric's Favorite: THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS

For years I've named Kenneth Grahame's THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS as my favorite book. My grandmother read to me the adventures of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad and I remember those evenings spent sitting and listening beside the rocking chair in her living room as my introduction to the enchantment of the written word. Our circle of orange lamplight and the shadowy Victorian furniture beyond would dissolve into the Wild Wood or Badger's warren and my grandmother's voice might have been the sound of the River by which the animals lived. But while I recalled clearly the spell cast by the words, I recalled very little of the words themselves. So I decided to read the story again -- or rather to read it for myself for the first time -- a perilous undertaking after nearly 45 years. I was not disappointed. My grandmother's comforting voice has been stilled for twenty years and her cozy living room long-since remodeled by strangers. But Grahame's words still held the magic that had touched me so long ago.

There are the gorgeous descriptions of river, fields and woods in all their changing aspects throughout the seasons, creating a vivid, irresistible world. And of course the appealing characters, all save for some nefarious denizens of the Wild Wood, as friendly and caring a group as any child could wish, but with enough quirks and peccadilloes, from Badger's anti-social tendencies to Toad's manic irresponsibility, to appear real, hardly a bunch of boring do-gooders.

Then too, the book is mostly about home, the thing best known and most important to a child. Ratty and Mole and the rest are always safe in some lovingly described home, or going home on a cold night, or thinking about being at home in their own warm beds. Which is probably why it is so horrifying when Toad arrives back from his adventures to find Toad Hall occupied by weasels and stoats.

This is one of many harrowing scenes. Losing one's home, or being lost in the dark woods on a cold night as happens to Mole, or having one's freedom taken, a fate suffered by Toad when he is thrown in prison for stealing a motorcar, are not trivial matters. The fears they stir are deep, so THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS makes for exciting reading.

Grahame's world is not only filled with real danger, but with mystery. The Wild Woods and the far off Wide World both harbor things unknown. In one chapter Mole and Ratty encounter the god Pan, who strikes the memory from their minds. As children, like Grahame's animals, we readily accept our strange and contradictory state, creatures seeking mundane physical comforts, some cozy den, in a limitless universe full of mysteries and wonders beyond our comprehension. But as we grow older we too often take the comforts for granted and forget that the wonders exist. I think it might be Grahame's mingling of domesticity and awe that makes THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS a classic. Then again, trying to explain the book like that makes me wonder if I haven't just caught some of Mr. Toad's overwhelming conceit.

Mary's Favorite: LITTLE WOMEN

When strings of street lights sprang up in yellowish necklaces dotting along the busy roads and another sooty night began to fall upon Newcastle-on-Tyne, my sister and I would go up to our attic bedroom and draw curtains patterned with castles, ships and jesters with curly-toed shoes to shut out a darkening urban landscape of slate-roofed dwellings marching down in regular lines to the river. Ungraced by gardens or trees or any growing thing except whatever took root in the cemetery at the top of our street or on bomb-sites left uncleared for years after the war, those long grey terraces of houses stretched away out of sight in all directions, sheltering the inhabitants of the northern English industrial city known proverbially for its coal, not to mention shipyards and factories that in those days rang with the noise of machinery around the clock.

As bed-time approached we'd read for a while before the light was put out -- and for a lot longer afterwards by torchlight under the covers. Books aplenty were available to us between the city's free libraries and Christmas or birthday gifts, for we always received a book to mark each occasion. So it was that at about l2 or l3 I discovered Louisa May Alcott's LITTLE WOMEN, and later on her other novels about the March sisters' adult lives.

One thing about LITTLE WOMEN was rather puzzling. Like us, they lived in financially straitened circumstances and yet had a servant, Hannah, who had been with them for years. As a daughter of the working class, this seemed very strange to me, the more so as my mother had been a parlour maid and the notion of us having a servant was so alien as to be unthinkable, despite the fact that I was always being told that I had too much imagination. One of my favourite scenes is Beth's reaction to the beautiful piano given to her by elderly Mr Laurence, for her expression upon seeing it must surely have been the same as that displayed by my musically gifted sister when our parents managed to get hold of a second-hand upright piano for her. This piano subsequently lived in our scullery next to the copper where the original tenants boiled up their washing, our street and those surrounding it having been built for industrial and pit workers when Queen Victoria still ruled. Graced with high ceilings, picture rails and ornate iron fireplaces, they are now sold for fabulous sums as artisans' dwellings. When we lived there, there was still a working gas light in our bedroom but the entire place was also extremely damp and the only plumbing was a cold tap in the scullery, the necessary offices being in the back yard -- about as far as you can get from the brown stone March house which, although old and a little shabby, had a garden with roses and vines and stood on a quiet street in the suburbs.

Yet as thousands of readers from numerous countries living in all sorts of housing have discovered, there is much emotional common ground with this delightful tale of a family's ups and downs and its tears and triumphs. I loved LITTLE WOMEN the first time I read it and every year or so I re-read it. The four March sisters -- gentle and ailing Beth, artistic but vain Amy, quiet, dependable Meg and the tomboy bookworm Jo -- have become old friends. We see them shepherded by Marmee while their father, not strong enough to soldier and too old to be drafted, serves as a chaplain in the Civil War. Then there's their dashing next door neighbour Laurie, his grandfather Mr Laurence, Laurie's tutor John Brooke, the girls' rich but demanding Aunt March with her huge library and disrespectful parrot, plus a bevy of supporting characters, most of them types familiar to us all. Time has made LITTLE WOMEN as familiar and comfortable as a favourite pair of slippers, while that strong sense of the March family's love and emotional support for each other remains as striking as the first time I opened the book and began reading.

It is Jo, generous and good hearted although hasty in her speech until she learns patience, who has always been my favourite of the four sisters. She is the only character with whom I have ever identified and as a youngster I firmly declared that like her I was going to be a writer and furthermore intended to live in a garret. In fact, I said it so many times that it became family legend, one of those humourous stories trotted out whenever we'd gather for celebrations, like the saga of when my brother-in-law lost me at a tender age in the London Tube system.

Now, years later, I live far away from Newcastle-on- Tyne. But I still have my battered old copy of LITTLE WOMEN and I did finally achieve that long-held ambition -- only I scriven in a basement rather than a garret!

Attic: Recalling Newcastle

by Mary Reed

Sometimes, when the sun is setting but the night has not yet arrived, introspection invites the mind to wander. Leaning on the windowsill to watch melancholy bronze sunsets, my thoughts turn to flamboyant childhood sunsets, glowing scarlet a long way back on life's road, but the most spectacular I have seen.

Childhood's windows were Victorian sashed. with paint which needed refreshing every year because of rampant air pollution, the same pollution which gave us such glowing sunsets. On Mondays there were specks of soot spotting drying laundry, from glowering clouds casting a pall over grey slate roofs which, in memory, seem always wet with rain. We would sit on the old steamer trunk in the attic's bay window, reading, while a damp wind hugged our row of houses. Our window looked out over the grimy industrial city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where grass and open spaces were uncommon. Uncommon, that is, unless you counted weedy World War II bombsites coloured seasonally by the ruby of rosebay willow herb and dusty yellow coltsfoot, working a little magic among discarded and rusting bicycles, battered paint containers, mattresses weeping yellowed stuffing from stained ticking, in short, the sort of household bric-a-brac about whose provenance it was probably not too wise to inquire. The wind's moaning, sweeping off the river, formed a counterpoint as we wandered through literary mist, the echoing tap-tap of Blind Pew making an eerie tattoo. Draughts crept in through cracks around windows and in walls built when the Empire coloured half the globe imperial red, and the Widow of Windsor, mourning behind a black veil, reigned over subjects large and small. Those draughts would flicker light from the gas lamp across the slope of the ceiling, the shifting black shadows mirrors of our imagined cobwebby castles, inhabited by wraiths wont to Walk At Midnight, and making our pre-war wardrobe loom even larger, always enticing us to feel around in its back, behind the clothes, looking for the way to Narnia. But we never found it.

And when another day had ended, mum drew the attic's thin post-war curtains against a night sky lit by yellow sodium lamps lining the roads, eclipsing all but the brightest stars. Through half-open windows downstairs there drifted in the cries and yells of children swarming in the street, causing her to purse her lips and shake her head over bairns up long after their bedtime. Later, as night settled on the city, would come the echoing songs of patrons spilling out of the pub on the corner, a nightly lullaby, off-key and raucous.

But our houses are long gone, demolished by a benevolent city council in its efforts to better the lot of what would now be called inner city dwellers. Families said tearful goodbyes to the street as its occupants were scattered among housing estates. They left in dribs and drabs - the Smiths, the Eldons, all the people who made up our childhood world. What happened, I wonder, to the cobbler who had a small shop at the top of the street, the grocer who ran the small grocery on the corner, the publican at the bottom of the street? Now, when twilight comes, I find myself wondering if any of them remember those long-ago scarlet and grey sunsets. Or if any of them recall the Reeds who lived at number 32.

At the Beach

by Mary Reed

It was a rite of summer. Sunny Sundays invariably saw an exodus from the city, as the electric railway carried load after load of families, older members laden down with baskets and towels, younger fry frisking at the leash, away, away, away to the windy shore of the North Sea. It was time for a trip to the seaside! To Tynemouth, perhaps, or Whitley Bay, or North Shields. Which would it be?

Fortunately for us impatient youngsters, preparations were quickly made. Mum packed a shopping bag with meat-paste sandwiches, bread slices cut thick from yesterday's loaf. There would be apples, green and crisp, which she ate with a spoon. There might be biscuits hidden below her handbag, and bags of crisps with their individual blue paper twists of salt, and, lastly, a huge thermos of tea, well-sweetened and milked. Ordinary fare, to be sure, but the food of the gods after the long walk down from the Victorian railway station, taking us past rows of boarding houses with their neat little gardens and mercurial signs flashing VACANCY or NO VACANCY. We tumbled by, the smell of the sea already in our nostrils, scorning the fairground we passed on the way, with its rides and stalls and lounging ne'er-do-wells. It was the beach which called us.

And what delight it gave! There, seaweed made a slippery carpet on limpet-encrusted rocks around dark pools of water trapped along the shoreline, microcosms of the ocean. Small, dark crabs lurked boulder-like in them, the occasional rippling fronds of a sea-urchin dancing lightly in the current. Round, raspberry-like sea creatures lurked in sinister clusterings near the waterline. Were they really the bloodsucking mutant jellyfish with which we scared each other? Taking no chances, we paddled in pools scoured clean of marine life each time the tide turned.

But the adults were less squeamish about jellyfish, more coy about clothing. Men rolled up their trouser legs to the daring height of mid-calf, slung their jackets over their arms and entered the surf for a paddle. Even dad, who was rarely seen without a tie and immaculately polished shoes, got his feet wet. We children, in scratchy woolen bathing-suits, rushed in and out of the water, frolicking loudly. We had donned our waterwear by modestly contorting winter-pale bodies behind towels held up around us by tightly permed and corseted mothers and aunts. Later, these female relatives would brave the briny themselves, holding frou-frou petticoats above their knees, Kiss-Me-Quick hats perched at a jaunty angle on back-combed hair stiff with hairspray. The salty wind cutting in from the horizon to give us all goosepimples had come 'all the way from Roosha", our parents commented, downing another cup of hot, sweet tea and munching on sand-gritty sandwiches.

But what cared we? There were sand-castles to be built, intricate fortifications topped by a piece of grey driftwood, waiting to be captured on black and white deckle-edged photographs for the family album. The castle's underground network of tunnels carved haphazardly in the wet sand were a constant snare for unwary beach cricket players. Caves which were under water at high tide had to be explored, as we scared each other half to death with tales of kids perishing in kicking agony, trapped by the raging tide.

Along the railed promenade, deckchair men sold tickets for renting wood and canvas loungers, which invariably took ten minutes of wrestling to get ready for use, with much muttering under the breath as renters grappled with the Escher-like pieces of furniture. We just sat on a blanket, if we could be dragged out of the water.

Meanwhile, a brass band played gamely on, melancholy and slow, over the sound of crashing waves, mewling seagulls and music from the fairgrounds, blended with hoarse shouts from sideshow men and the screams of teenagers splashing each other with sea-water. And over it all lay that distinctive seaside aroma, a tantalizing mixture of salt air, frying chips, drying seaweed and the occasional dead fish temporarily overlooked by the swooping seagulls.

If we were lucky, we might be treated to those delights available only at the coast. There might be paper cones of snail-like "whellecks", winkled out from their shells with a free pin. Or candy tuft, cloudy and white, sweet on the tongue for a few moments and then gone as quickly as summer was speeding by. There were long ropes of licorice, and hard-crusted toffee apples whose flat tops defied our teeth even as the apple juice ran down our wrists. And when we had eaten, we scavenged along the shore-line, booty popped into our sand buckets. There might be chalky coloured, ridged barnacles, or a weathered piece of bleached and knotty driftwood, or waxy yellow, brown or white shells which had survived the grind of the surf.. Long strands of brown-olive seaweed were collected, pulled from piles deposited against rocks, for its wetness or dryness, so it was said, accurately, predicted the weather.

And so the afternoon rolled by, as our city-pale skins were burnt scarlet by sun and salt. We played until the setting sun's liquid gold path made a bridge from horizon to shore. Then, because it was Monday the next day and that meant work and school, it was time to pack up the towels and the thermos, the shells and the seaweed, and go home. As stars twinkled and winked over the restless sea and strings of coloured lights popped on along the promenade and in the fairground, we toiled back up the street to the railway station, our shoes uncomfortable with sand. On the return journey, half asleep, we children looked out at the backs of houses as we travelled by, clackety-clack, clackety-clack, clackety-clack, all along the shining rails to Newcastle, nodding, dozing, dreaming.

Jean-Paul Cat's Memorial Tombola

by Mary Reed

Unlike Thomas Gray's Selima who was, as poetry lovers will recall, the dearest of her kind, our tabby Jean-Paul was the most daring.

His mother was a friend's Siamese cat who produced a litter of kittens which were a veritable cornucopia of cat coloring - one was piebald, one was ginger, another had spots, a fourth was mottled grey and so on. They reminded me of nothing so much as a box of feline licorice allsorts. And in there, also, was the scraggliest kitten I have ever seen - thin, striped and tottery, with a spiky tail resembling a cross between a lavatory brush and a balding Christmas tree. Compared to his elegant siblings, he was a grim sight. So was I when I took him home, as he arrived stuck as far as he could crawl up my coat sleeve, giving me a temporary Quasimodo-like appearance.

We named him Jean-Paul, after the French writer and philosopher via Monty Python. Ugly Duckling-like, as an adult he was the most handsome cat I have ever met, an opinion shared by all who saw him. His shiny, tabby coat, set off by a white bib and socks, was bookended by his mother's inheritance - a Siamese head and ears and a question-mark shaped tail. Jean-Paul was a strangely silent cat, but when he spoke his "noise" (I hesitate to call it a meow) was a combined squeak and "oo-oo", with a rising inflection on the second syllable. And speaking of inflections, it had not occurred to us when naming him that it might prove an embarrassment when calliing him in at night. It did.

On the other paw, he would sometimes respond quicker if addresed in French.

The woods behind us were fascinating to Jean-Paul; a place where he could hide, stalk squirrels, or sleep in a marvellous nest made in a bamboo thicket. And there were field mice to catch and play with if we didn't take them away from him first.

Jean-Paul's favorite toys were simple things - sellotape-rings on string and screwed-up pieces of paper, which he batted around in games of feline football whose object seemed to be to get the ball under the 'fridge. He was also quite good at taking flying leaps and catching the "ball" in mid-air. Running water of any kind held a fascination to him (as a kitten he had to be discouraged from running up one's back whilst one was doing the washing-up) and this led him to tightrope-walk around the bath tub, whether or not it was occupied at the time. He would also take running leaps in an attempt to get into the hand-basin and we had to take extra care to keep the loo-door closed and latched, otherwise we might find him in it when we got home. He also took to climbing up to the top of the clothes-horse, where he would sit in regal satisfaction, precariously perched on the top rail among dripping tea towels and the like.

Jean-Paul was occasionally a bit of a trial, although it was pure coincidence that we almost sold him along with the car one time, when he fell asleep in the back seat. On the other hand, there is still, somewhere in England, a young man who believes that, as a child, he saw Tigger ride by one day, for Jean-Paul loved cars and often came along when journies were to be undertaken.

One morning, just before I emigrated, I opened the door and found Jean-Paul dead on the doorstep. The vet later ascertained that he had been hit by a car and died of internal hemorrhaging after he came home. The problem was how to dispose of him, since rigor mortis had set in. The water table was too high to bury him and we could hardly put him in the dustbin. Reached on the phone, the vet offered to cremate him. So we put Jean-Paul into an old sack and began our final journey.

It was a sunny Saturday morning, early spring, and the trees were all coming out. So were the neighborhood children. There seemed to be hundreds of them out playing in the streets, and the sack bottom started to rip. Jean-Paul was sudddenly heavier and BIGGER - his paw stuck rakishly out of the gathered top of the sack, and his tail hung a little out of its bottom. I picked up speed, trying to reach the vet before the bag ripped open and Jean-Paul was dumped on the ground in front of some unfortunate child.

We barely made it.

After he took his final journey I occasionally found the odd bit of screwed-up paper or a sellotape ring under the sofa or behind the dresser and a rather unkind friend suggested that we hold the Jean-Paul Cat's Memorial Tombola, to raffle off his bits and pieces. But we just didn't have the heart. So we gave away his feeding bowls and so on. No doubt the local field mice breathed a little easier for his departure, while, as far as we know, the neighbors did not miss our nightly calling-in-the-cat squawks of "JEAN PAUL!"

Jean Paul was such a remarkable cat that for fifteen years no other cat replaced him. But then I married into a two-cat household and observed the antics of timid tortoiseshell Sabrina and a black and lazy Tom called Rachel - but that's another story.

A Bullet Finds Its Mark

by Eric Mayer

Davey Crockett is coming back. According to a recent news story a New Jersey author is compiling a book of coonskin memories. Since I lost my job during the spring, things haven't been easy and that perfect summer, three and a half decades ago, when my friends and I sported rabbit fur coonskin caps and plastic fringed buckskin jackets has no more substance than a vaguely recollected dream. Maybe that's why I wouldn't mind being able to hold my collection of Davey Crockett trading cards in my hand now.

I collected the cards at a tiny neighborhood shop in Pennsylvania. My father was a high school art teacher, but when summer came my family packed up and moved from our suburban house to an unheated, two room cottage at the lake. For my parents "Mayer's Grove" was a business.To me it was a magical world.

I ran through the picnic grove where the slender birches had been bent and twisted by an ancient ice storm and played ball on the big grassy field. Behind the cottage, through the fragrant bergamot where hummingbirds flashed and darted, was a stream where I turned over rocks to find crayfish or fished with a plastic cup for minnows and sometimes the tiny bullheads which gathered in dark clouds. I learned to spot the green turret of a frog's head among the lily pads and to make an open handed grab, giving the frog just enough time to leap, so I could close my fingers easily around its extended legs. We had a scrap of beach. At one end, where truckloads of sand had been hauled in, I could dog paddle and splash. The other end was muck and weeds. I had to float over that on a plastic raft to avoid the leeches. When thunderstorms rolled around the lake we'd sit outside under the big pavilion beside the cottage and my Dad would tell my younger brother and me it was the giants bowling and I nodded agreement so as not to spoil the tale for Todd. Sometimes, at dusk, when I should've been in bed because we got up with the dawn, my Dad would take me across the field to the fence where we could see the drive-in movie screen at neighboring Sandy Beach. The cartoon characters would jump around, bigger and brighter than life. But the tinny noise from the distant car speakers was drowned out by the sound of crickets and peepers.

For a kid, it was just about perfect. Even using the outhouse at the end of the fieldstone walk was an adventure. And one summer I collected Davey Crockett cards.

Then you had to collect them. One pack at a time. You couldn't (or at least I couldn't) buy the sets in a box complete with every card and checklist - with the mystery and romance left out. And they were bubble gum cards. It isn't so much the hard pink slab of gum I remember as the sweet smell and the way it hit your nostrils as you peeled open the wax wrapper to check your treasures - a smell forever linked to the delight of discovery. The gum coated the cards with fine white powder that you had to brush off, like an archaeologist might brush ancient dust from an Egyptian treasure.

There were, I seem to recall, 72 cards in the set. I knew the story, having seen the tv series, but each card, a frozen frame, was a revelation. Each had its own look, its own personality. The words on the back, briefly describing the scene were less interesting, except for the name of the card and the note, on the bottom, naming the next card.

Several times a week I'd take my allowance money up to the corner store where Jim would take out from the glass counter assorted licorice whips, candy dots on paper,and jaw breakers and, finally, always, a pack or two of Davey Crockett cards from the box he kept there. He'd reach under the counter and tap the exposed packs with his finger.

"Which one today?"

I tried to guess which of the packs might contain new discoveries and which only duplicates.

All summer long my collection increased. One by one, from the mountain top in Tennessee to the Alamo, I filled in the gaps. But, as summer drew to a close and the cicadas of August buzzed, like the school bells they foretold, one card remained stubbornly unattainable. Card Number 68. "A Bullet Finds Its Mark."

I raised money by selling crayfish and minnows to fisherman who came to the park. Every day I'd walk to Jim's store up the dirt drive past the entrance where my Mom sat on her beach towel, collecting fares, finishing off her tan, looking for four leafed clovers in the grass, and finding them.

I opened pack after pack, only to find disappointment.

"Good luck," Jim would tell me, as I left the store. "Hope you've got #68 in that pack."

But I never did. The card, I knew, must memorialize the death of the gambler at the Alamo. I dreamt of finding it, but when I awoke, though I remembered my elation, I could never remember what the card looked like.

It was the last week of summer - we'd already made the dreaded trip to town for my school clothes - when I walked to the store for the last time. I slapped my nickel down on the counter and Jim reached toward the box of cards like he always did. But this time his finger tapped one pack.

"Try this one," he said.

I left the store, walked back toward the park, across the hot macadam of the highway. I opened the pack. The wax paper came off with unusual ease. Before I lifted the gum, I knew I had it - just by the narrow strip of unfamiliar, and oddly unpowdered, picture visible around the pink slab.

It was a dark picture. A clasp of the gambler, dressed in black, turning slightly, half surprised, not yet in pain, as the bullet found its mark.

My set was complete just as the summer was complete.

It was long afterwards I learned that Jim had spent hours rifling through every pack in the cartons in the back of his store until he located the card I needed.

The next year I traded the set to a friend for some plastic trucks (I think) which are long gone and hold no memories at all.

Now, in the middle of a Rochester winter, with hope running low, still looking for someone who might consider my abilities worthy of a living wage, I wish I could feel the real weight of those cards in my hand again, to reassure myself of the reality of that perfect summer.

The Day the Cows Got Out

by Eric Mayer

One July my then-wife and I took our kids to the small amusement park up the road by Lake Ontario. It was one of those days when the faint breezes and the hot, insubstantial sunlight lie against your skin like a memory of summers past - summers when, in another place, you played the child's part in the same yearly ritual. This time Fleur, who was four and a veteran of the children's rides, was impatient to become an adult. She tugged me toward the tilt-a-whirl and then toward the Jack Rabbit roller coaster.

"Not until you're older," I said.

"When? Next week?"

Two-year-old Tristan balked at first, while Fleur traveled nowhere by car, plane and caterpillar. But eventually his curiosity overcame his fear and he let me lift him into a boat ride. The circle of wooden boats, moved by spokes through a shallow concrete pool, went round and round at a slow walk. Tristan, at first wary and then grinning hugely, hauled at the steering wheel, unperturbed, or perhaps unaware that his efforts did nothing to divert the boat from its predestined course.

Looking down at my son I remembered taking the same ride 30 years before. I remembered things that disappear from the adult perspective - the slickness of the worn black wheel and the way it squeaked when turned, the sensation of coolness and of nearness to the water, where small waves folded and unfolded bright swatches of sunlight. The inch-wide gap between the hull and the concrete wall seemed portentous then.

These sensations returned wordlessly, as I must have experienced them. But as I reflexively touched each with a word - "coolness" or "nearness" - it vanished like a touched soap bubble.

After we got home, Tristan wandered around the house repeating, "Go on boat, Daddy. Go on boat., Daddy, " in various inflections of wonder. It was not, I realized, a maddening repetition of words; it was an incantation that called forth all the wordless joy of his ride.

When it was time for me to read to Fleur that evening, she chose "Rabbit and His Friends" by Richard Scarry, an old favorite of mine about a "roly-poly platypus" who finds his place performing at a circus.

"Roly-poly," Fleur repeated, her eyes widening, a smile working behind the favorite blanket she had stuck under her nose.

I knew she was savoring the new word, just as I had, as an entity with a shape and sound as peculiar and amusing as the creature it described. At first we expect so much of words, expect that they will capture the wordless mysteries we sense all around us, but then we learn to use words in narrow ways. The verbal tangle of civilization obscures whatever deeper meaning lies beyond.

Fleur went off to sleep and left me recollecting one of the last times I found myself surrounded by the unspeakable strangeness through which the very young move.

I was not yet ten, and lived in a small town. If you turned up my street, it took you to the center of town - the drugstore, the bank, Tony's barbershop - and beyond that to the white wooden schoolhouse.

But if you turned down the street you reached another world. Abruptly you were on a country road that wound past a shady cemetery and over the tracks where a passing locomotive could transform a penny into a flattened, gleaming, talisman. Further on, the road led through pastures on its way to that other amusement park, where I had ridden those other boats. One pasture held a pond; in winter the goldfish trapped in the ice glimmered beneath our skates. I heard that they resumed swimming, magically, when the pond thawed. But I never checked, because in the spring the cows were let loose in the pasture.

The worlds at either end of that street - the real and the fantastic, the world of childhood and adulthood - coexisted and never impinged on one another. Except for the day the cows got out.

There's little to say. At ten, more often than not, I turned up the street and into town. That day I was doing my homework in my bedroom when I heard lowing. I looked out my window and saw the cows in the driveway. They must have found a hole in the pasture fence. My friends and I met outside and ran from yard to yard shouting, "The cows are out! The cows are out!" Our parents already knew. It was no picnic for them, having cows in the rosebushes.

The cows moved slowly through the suburban neighborhood, their ponderous hooves leaving gouges in the carefully rolled lawns. We kept our distance as we followed. Out of their place, they looked huge. We were all giddy with the strangeness that had invaded our world. By nightfall the cows were rounded up, but for days afterward we searched out signs of their visitation - backyard gardens where cabbages had been chomped off like brussels sprouts, hoof prints behind swimming pools, piles of manure next to the breezeway.

When I re-enacted with Tristan and Fleur the everyday rituals of my own childhood - the amusement park visit, the bedtime story - I sometimes had a glimpse of their world, a world perhaps closer to reality than the one invented by adults, a place perpetually illuminated by the preternatural twilight preceding the storm.

Watching their wonderment, I sometimes heard a lowing at the edge of consciousness and felt passing nearby those shapes too large to be comprehended by the words of maturity.

Squirrels I hvw KNown

by Eric Mayer

As winter winds down many of us will have to admit defeat. Once again we failed to keep the squirrels out of the bird feeder. I've had my fill of squirrels - quite literally when I was a kid and my parents hunted. I still recall how they used to sneak the stuff onto my plate. "What's this?" I'd ask, tentatively prodding a succulent chunk of rodent with my fork.

"Looks like liver," offered my father, ingenuously.

"It's black," I noted. "And it smells funny."

I turned the horrid slab over, until it fell with a greasy plop amid my peas. As I forked the stringy, glistening flesh and raised it toward my face I could see black spots in the dark meat. Could I be imagining things? They looked like entrance wounds.

"It's been shot," I said. "Shot and sliced."

"Oh go on, " said my mother. "Why don't you try some?"

"Because," I said, my ten-year old brain reeling with horror, "...It's SQUIRREL!!"

"Well, try some with the mint jelly."

How can I describe the sensation of sinking my teeth into a piece of juicy squirrel? Let me put it this way...rabbit might not sound appetizing but it just tastes like chicken. Frog legs, they say, taste like chicken. Iguana tastes like chicken. Even rattlesnake meat tastes like chicken. I'll bet giant crunchy locusts stuffed with fried ants taste like chicken.

Squirrel doesn't...

Even with the mint jelly...

The last house I lived in had squirrels in the walls.

The previous tenant had mistaken them for burglars. To me they sounded, at night, like very agile and angry sumo wrestlers. Though I doubt sumo wrestlers could have survived falling two stories from the attic to the basement 234 times every night. When it came time for me to move the squirrels had to go first. Bill, the exterminator, was a real pro. His beady eyes fixed quickly on the gaping hole under the porch roof where the rodents entered . Smiling a sharp toothed little smile he set several traps along what he calculated to be their preferred route across the roof.

The idea was to trap them and then transport them. "At least five miles, or they'll come back," he said.

Within days he had coaxed and caged several overweight sluggards. Then the real test of wits began. One squirrel was quick and smart enough to scamper up the teeter-totter device at the front of the cage, snatch the peanut butter bait and escape before the device tipped enough to let the cage door slide shut.

Bill began adjusting the length of the teeter-totter. He tried buttering crackers and tying them with string. The idea was to slow the squirrel down. Day after day he would pull up in his van and climb his ladder onto the roof to find he had been outwitted again. I soon learned all the newest advances in squirrel entrapment technology. Unfortunately the people who make a living figuring out how to kill squirrels hadn't progressed to satellite guided lasers so eventually Bill turned to psychology. He seemed to have an uncanny ability to get into a squirrel's mind.

"What I'll do," he explained, "is leave the trap baited but not set for a few days, until he gets used to it. Then...bam...I'll surprise him."

The squirrel however had long since learned that there ain't so such thing as a free lunch and this stratagem also proved unsuccessful.

I don't recall how the squirrel was finally captured, after almost a month. I suspect it simply got fat and slow on all the peanut butter.

Usually, with squirrels, it's a matter of getting them out of the house (or bird feeder) but when I was a kid we took one in. (I can't recall whether this was after or before I was asked to eat its relatives). The baby squirrel had been abandoned. Why else had it run up to me as I crossed the lawn one rainy afternoon? Wet and bedraggled, it was a pitiful sight. When I scooped it up it barely bit me.

My parents placed the squirrel in a cardboard box next to the table in our dinette. I added a bit of a branch for it to climb. We gave it a bowl of water. Having done our best we waited for it to die, like the wounded birds, rabbits, mice, moles and so forth always did. All the squirrel did was lose its fur.

A bald squirrel is not a pretty sight - grayish skin stretched over a bony shriveled body, the sharp rat tail sticking out like an exposed bone.

The vet my parents consulted was not alarmed. "Squirrels always lose their fur indoors," he told them, matter-of-factly as if it was a natural part of a squirrel's life cycle to take a hotel room for the winter. He suggested protecting its naked skin with calamine lotion.

If there is anything uglier than a hairless squirrel it is a hairless squirrel caked in thick layers of pink calamine lotion.

As the squirrel grew, so did its home. A four foot tall branch sprouted upwards, along with a crude cage of chicken wire. Bored with its diet of protein supplement from a baby bottle, the squirrel would sit on the top of the branch and chatter and flake as we ate. Sometimes it escaped the cage and scrabbled wildly across the table, knocking over salt shakers and scattering silverware, leaving pink paw prints in the mashed potatoes. "Quick, grab your milk glass, the squirrel's loose again!" It's remarkable how soon you get used to such things. (I don't recall having anyone over for dinner during this period, however).

Once free, the rambunctious rodent careened through the house, under, around and over furniture. The living room curtains hung in shreds. Catching it was difficult, especially since the reward for success was a set of razor edged incisors on your thumb. Not that the squirrel wouldn't come to people when it wanted. What it liked to do was climb. If you have ever been climbed by a squirrel, from pant cuff, to belt, up the back of your shirt to your head, you know how it is that squirrels can climb vertical tree trunks - they have very sharp claws which they dig in. It is one thing to know this theoretically, quite another to live it. The best thing to do was to stand still as a tree on a calm day and hope the squirrel didn't decide to tighten its grip. I can remember making the mistake of grabbing the squirrel by its back and pulling as it clung to my skin for dear life.

But the days of bandaged thumbs and lacerated calves couldn't last forever. The squirrel regrew its fur and we set it outdoors. It survived. For several years afterwards it occasionally came across the lawn to receive a peanut.

I suppose, when it comes right down to it, we could all learn a lot from our experiences with squirrels - but I'm not sure what.

The Baseball Player

by Eric Mayer

When I read about the coming layoffs, I couldn't help thinking about my grandfather. It was from him I derived my unfashionable distaste for those people who make a living off the work of others and then discard them.

It wasn't anything my grandfather said. He wasn't much of a talker. A self effacing man, his only vanity was the battered gray hat he wore perpetually to hide his bald spot.

He was born on a farm and left school in the seventh grade. In his youth he played baseball. Once he faced the barnstorming Yankees as one of two locals on an all star squad that included Pepper Martin. He never talked about those days. I heard it from my Dad and my Uncle.

"Best pitcher I ever saw," my uncle told me. "And the best fighter too. Back then there was a brawl after every game. We played some tough crews, but Charlie never lost a fight."

When his ball-playing days were over and the family left the farm, he married and moved to what had once been a summer cottage, nearer to town. He took as much of the farm with him as he could. Using a wagon and a team of horses, he hauled rocks from the fields to build a wall, walkways and a rock garden, where, as a child, I was amazed at the "hens and chickens" growing from the stones.

He brought apple and pear trees from the orchards and since there wasn't as much room as on the farm, he grafted them so that each tree bore two or three different kinds of fruit.

He also went to work for "the Judge". For thirty years, for 25 cents an hour, he tended the judge's flower gardens, then took the bus home to tend his own.

I've seen old photographs of him, in his hat, standing in front of massed peonies, hollyhocks and snapdragons faded like hand tinted postcards. When I was a child only remnants remained, a few rutted paths between beds of phlox .

By all accounts my grandfather was generous with his talents. He supplied half the neighborhood with vegetables from his garden. No small thing during the Depression. Years later, an old neighbor pointed out to me the towering row of pines along the edge of his property."Look at that windbreak - your granddad planted that for me."

The Judge was a staunch Republican. He couldn't abide Roosevelt's giveaways and never enrolled my grandfather in the social security program. So it was, that when he left the Judge's employ, in his mid-sixties, my grandfather went to work as a janitor at the telephone company office down the street in order that my grandmother would qualify for benefits, so that she would not have to give up their home.

I was in grade school and thought it was the best job anybody's grandfather could have. After business hours, he let me into the big, deserted, brick building and led me through offices in the dim light that seeped through closed venetian blinds. He bought chocolate milk for me in the cafeteria and then allowed me to peek into the Board Room.

"Better be quick," he admonished, and I'd duck back, away from the angry stares of the oil painted owners on the paneled walls.

Best of all was the switchboard where Mabel, the night operator, let me take over and perform what then seemed technological miracles, like placing three way calls to astounded playmates.

"But watch out," said my grandfather, pointing to a socket next to a red light. "Don't plug into that 'un. That's the boss's home phone."

The chilling realization that a slip of my hand might bring us to the attention one of those baleful faces from the Board Room made the game all the more exciting. My grandfather managed to stay on the job for the required time. It was a hard struggle.

During that time he climbed a ladder to get to the fat, Bartlett pears that only grew in the upper branches of the pear tree, fell, and was never right afterwards. Towards the end, I would see him limping home, half crippled by arthritis and an ulcerated leg that never healed.

My parents urged him to collect unemployment. He had a right, they said.But he was too proud.

"I oughtn't tell anyone I'm looking for work," said my grandfather. "I can't work a lick anymore." He took off his hat then and didn't put it back on.

As a kid, I was fascinated by the family legend of his ball playing. For years, his ancient catcher's mitt, perfectly round and inflexible, and his 42 inch bludgeon of a bat, sat out in the barn, next to the chicken coop - set aside but not discarded. Sometimes my friends and I would take the bat outside, though we could hardly lift it. We'd save it for when we needed a "big hit." There was something magical about a bat that had existed in the era of Babe Ruth.

As I've grown older, though, and read the latest news of business, I more often think of how he worked for the Judge, and then the phone company. And how terribly old he looked coming home at night, in the years before he died. I remember how my grandmother lived in their home, caring for their gardens, for 20 years more.

And I remember my uncle telling me, "Charlie never lost a fight."

Face to Face

by Eric Mayer

Go back a lifetime. A sweltering late September afternoon in Rochester, New York. I'm driving down Titus Avenue, in the old Colt, with my now ex-wife Kathy. My daughter Fleur is only two. Son Tristan is six months. We pull up to the House of Guitars and turn into the sixties, or what passed for them, a few years late, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Go back another lifetime, when a long distance call to the Kinks' Manhattan hotel got Kathy as far as their manager. It probably says something about the band's plight that a lame tale about an interview for a nonexistent newspaper could get a teenage kid that far.

"He called me 'Ducky'."

And whatever their position under the Billboard charts, to us the Kinks were near enough God that it was like being called 'Ducky' by the Pope.

In the car we chatter like kids. What's Dave really like? Dave Davies is in Rochester to promote his new album. Once inside the store, we find we are the only fans queued up with babes in arms. This is a startling revelation. It was only yesterday, wasn't it, we spent our first night together, in the concourse of the New York City Port Authority with Joe Potera. The store is stifling inside. The kid ahead of us has brought for autographing a picture of Dave made up like a mime.

"Do you think he'll be in make-up?" he asks us.

In make-up? Dave. Mime make-up? Dave, the on-stage brawler, forker of his own brother, over a plate of fries? What does this child know of our Dave? To him he is nothing more than a glossy photo, a couple of albums. To us he was already twenty years of albums, awaited and listened to, magazine articles, bits of news laboriously searched out, expectations. He was the guy who played lead guitar on "You Really Got Me" no matter what anybody said. He was, in short, someone we'd lined up to shake hands with.

And we had seen him before. The first time at the Fillmore East, in the early seventies. We went with college friend Joe Potera and since none of us had been to New York before we arranged to meet there with Joe's friend Suzy, who was spending the weekend on a class trip. Her supposed familiarity with the big city was mostly based on her arriving the day before we did. We were at the age when people are eager to throw themselves into the hands of unreliable guides.

From the Trailways bus we caught a glimpse of the fabled skyline, as unconvincing as the skyline of the Emerald City, plunged into the Lincoln tunnel and emerged in a street lined with tenements that might have passed for Wilkes-Barre without the culm banks.

The air in the Port Authority tasted of metal. Buses steamed and roared in the low ceilinged caverns. It was November and the concrete platform radiated a numbing cold up into my holed sneakers. My spirits soared. We had left behind the deadening provincialism of our childhood home. We were where we belonged.

Within two minutes a polite young man who looked less Hindu than I sold me, for five dollars, a color illustrated copy of the "Bhagavhad Gita" which weighed just less than thirty pounds. So when our guide arrived, business-like but late, having taken the wrong escalator, I headed out into the big city with cold feet and a heavy load of eastern mysticism.

Five years later I went for a time to live in a place called New York City. It was not the city I visited that first time. This first New York was a fantasy city of nameless streets where subways propelled us through the abrupt scene shifts of dreams. When I lived in New York I was never able to find the stores clerked by pontytailed men in beaded vests and girls in granny dresses, full of tooled leather and handmade jewelry, all too expensive, or the cramped record store where I bought a copy of an album by a group named Juicy Lucy for no reason other than it was one I'd never seen at Joe Nardone's Gallery of Sound.

Most of the day we had no idea where we were. We kept congratulating ourselves on being in Greenwich Village, although that was by no means certain. Our hair was long and we strolled around gawking at everything and everyone and feeling "with it." When the street lights came on we decided to stop in a pizza place. I wasn't hungry. Food was nothing to me then and I would go for days on unsweetened tea, but I was glad enough to put down the "Bhagavad Gita."

We sat at a booth in the back where we could watch the traffic, the real New York traffic, moving along the street beyond the glass doors. We were extolling the virtues of New York pizza, as opposed to the poor Wilkes-Barre imitation we had subsisted on until now, when a nun, dressed in a simple black habit and carrying a collection plate, came through the doors and moved from booth to booth, meeting the rebuffs she received with equanimity. When she arrived at our booth I saw that she was young and not unattractive, although there was in her eyes a certain hardness, evidence, perhaps, of her long struggle with the evils of the city.

"Please excuse me," she said. "Could you spare something for the needy children?" Her eyes lit upon the "Bhagavad Gita" beside me. "I see you are a person of faith. Surely you could spare a dollar?"

We all could.

"It doesn't matter what you believe in," she told us. "So long as you believe in something. Bless you."

Yes, I thought, watching her leave. We could all live together, Catholic and Hindu alike, even if we weren't really Hindus.

The business-suited man in the next booth leaned over towards us and announced in a loud voice. "You realize you just made a donation to a prostitute?" Hurriedly I got up to leave.

"Heh, buddy," the man yelled out. "You forgot your Bible."

Maybe we were shaken by our encounter because we immediately became lost. We had, it is true, been disoriented ever since we arrived, but in the daylight we had been exploring. Now, in the dark, with the streets deserted, dark doorways gaping menacingly, we were simply lost. It was windy, and no matter how many corners we turned, the wind seemed to stay in our faces. The cold helped keep our minds off sudden, violent death.

Suzy lead us on and on. Finally, by sheer luck I suspect, we found ourselves on the wrong platform of a dank, empty subway station, forced our way, the wrong direction, through a one way turnstile and emerged into the heart of the sixties.

That Fillmore East show was the high water mark of my career in the counterculture. For the most part, I observed the sixties from the back row. Although the idea appealed to me, there was no real chance of my "dropping out," joining a commune or living outside society. I was as likely to climb a beanstalk and slay a giant. But for that one evening I left the back row for the front row. It was wonderful, to be part of a milling crowd, not one of whom could have walked down the River Street in Wilkes-Barre without attracting stares, or worse. And when I nearly dropped my ticket in my excitement, and the bell-bottomed usher said, "Heh, man. Cool it, " with perfect seriousness, I had to pinch myself.

I don't recall the concert well and can't reconstruct it accurately. Once I had a program booklet, but after I moved to Rochester I lost the manila envelope in which I kept it, along with the minutes of the Horseshoe Club and my Junior Safety Patrol Captain lapel pin. I recall that a group called Quatermass led off, featuring arty organ with light show amoebas crawling over the stage and walls. Love followed and toward the end of their set Arthur Lee trotted out onto the stage for a surprise reunion appearance and I pretended to be as delighted as everyone else seemed to be, though I had no idea who he was.

The Kinks were an artistic triumph, I'm sure. I remember quite distinctly that Ray Davies wore an outrageous bow tie and performed "Waterloo Sunset." The actual sound is irretrievably jumbled with the sounds from the albums I've played so many times. The people in front of us smoked spliffs the size of stogies and we left the theater ecstatic and half stoned.

There was no way we could return to Wilkes-Barre in our exhilarated state, so instead of catching the subway back uptown to make our bus, we pooled our money and bought tickets for the second show. We killed the time between shows in an earnestly Bohemian coffee house where a sensitive looking fellow sat on a table and plucked a guitar and the barefoot waitress told her there was a minimum charge of $2.50. On the way back to the Fillmore we passed a flower vendor. The girls decided they must buy the Kinks flowers.

Again we sat in the smoky balcony. This time, when the Kinks arrived on stage the girls took off, clutching their bouquets. They reappeared far below, and approached the stage, tiny and unreal as the Kinks themselves, as if they had entered the same fantasy world as the Kinks, a world Joe and I were only observing. When they returned to their seats, the flowers still lay on the front of the stage, where they had left them. And at some point during the set Ray reached down, picked up a single flower and held it briefly to his face.

"I just love roses," he told us, and the crowd cheered.

Later, at the end of the set, after all the encores, he sat on a stool, alone, with an acoustic guitar, and played "You Are My Sunshine."

We missed the last bus home. Hotel security wouldn't let us into the room where Suzy was staying. We counted our change in front of a warm looking Chock Full O' Nuts in Times Square and found we didn't have enough left for a cup of coffee. We spent the night in the main concourse of the Port Authority, our backs to the cold tile walls, dozing, while cops strolled by without curiosity.

And so back to another lifetime, back in line, and Dave bounds out onto the stage at the House of Guitars, which is usually filled with amps for sale, accompanied by an entourage of local DJs and H.O.G. owner Armand who dressed entirely in black save for a T-shirt silk-screened as tux. Dave is not wearing make-up and the kid with his mime photo is disappointed. Dave sits down at a table and someone slides the rock star standard issue Heineken over to him.

I remember I have forgotten to wear my "God Save the Kinks" button. The line begins to move. When we climb unto the stage daughter Fleur stands and gapes, more amazed by the crowd of people staring at her than the man seated at the table.

I have brought "Chosen People." I set it on the table. I am on the same stage as Dave Davies and I am speechless.

"We saw you at the Fillmore," says Kathy.

"Cor," says Dave. "That was a long time ago. You're not that old."

Kathy thrusts Tristan towards him. "Will you hold him while I take your picture?"

Dave looks surprised. But he takes him. Tristan boggles. Dave holds him up over his head and the crowd cheers.

"I love kids," says Dave. "I have five."

Then we are back outside, in the heat. Storm clouds are building up over Lake Ontario. A breeze turns up the white sides of the tree leaves. The air is suffused with the dull coppery light that sometimes precedes a storm. It is the weather of the late sixties, our adolescence, when we saw the world in a mysterious golden haze, even as we listened fearfully to the thunder in the distance. But the storm passed us. For better or for wors, the lightning struck elsewhere.

Now the signed album is gone, the snapshots of Dave and my six-month old son are gone, my kids live somewhere else. But, when I think back, Ray still sits on the stage at the Fillmore East, the night I lived through the sixties, and plays "You Are My Sunshine." And I guess the sun still sets over the Waterloo Station I've never seen

It Wasn't the Cat

by Eric Mayer

At Halloween I always recall my childhood brush with the supernatural. My parents had taken my grandmother to visit relatives and so my grandfather had been left in charge of my brother Todd and me, not to mention my grandmother's very fat black cat. My brother and I were fed easily enough. My grandfather carted us down cellar, opened the furnace door and we roasted hot dogs over the coals while conjecturing cheerfully about what might be lurking in the dark coal bin, behind the boxes of earth where the dahlia roots were buried for winter.

The cat was another matter. After futilely calling, my grandfather shoved an opened tin of Puss N' Boots under a kitchen chair.

"The cat must have got out. If he shows up he can eat." He preferred looking after his tomato plants. He always knew where to find them.

"Maybe something eat kitty," piped up Todd.

The expression on my grandfather's face became, as my grandmother would've said, "sour as pig swill."

"What would do that, here?"

"Don't know...something," said my brother, giving the final word a certain alarming twist.

My grandfather did not lack imagination. In later years, after he'd cleared the pigs and rabbits out of the barn and had some spare time in the evening, he'd often don his spectacles and launch himself into a book of flying instructions which, while not as current as they had been during the bi-plane era, were every bit as adventuresome.

No, what he was against was the febrile wool gathering that during his boyhood had been a prime cause of tuberculosis in obscure romantic poets. When he saw Todd threatened he nipped it quick as he'd pick a cut worm off a cabbage.

"My razor strap will something you," is how he put it.

Todd chose not to pursue his theory. The razor strap wasn't as mind bendingly awful as what might be lurking in the coal bin, but it stung worse.

"Kitty just out," he agreed.

I suppose I was somewhat responsible for my brother's flights of imagination. Being five years older I felt I should take some part in his education. I decided to teach him useful words. A selection of everyday items would be laid out on the table in front of us.

"Scissors," I'd explain, pointing. "Apple ... orange ... banana ... bandanna (I was a tough taskmaster) ... amorphous horror."

Todd cast a bewildered look at the empty air I pointed toward.

"Can't see."

"Exactly," I said, giving the word a certain alarming twist.

My grandfather marched us upstairs early. The unfamiliar bed was high. More than high enough for something to have slithered underneath. But before we could check, the light was switched off and the room plunged into darkness.

As with all children, we spent our last moments of wakefulness waiting for sudden shrieks, eerie glows, disembodied voices and things that dropped off the ceiling smack into the middle of your bed. I generally slept with the covers pulled up over my head, snorkeling air through one partially exposed nostril, fingers clutched at the bed sheet in case something tried to pull it off.

In the strange dark of my grandparent's spare room our sensations were heightened. For awhile we listened for telltale scratching from beneath the bed. It struck me that this was a good time for a favorite diversion - recounting recent nightmares.

It's been a long time since I've had a nightmare worth remembering. My dreams have grown gray and mundane. But when I was younger my nights were filled with killer robots, werewolves and skull littered plains stretching endlessly into the distance beyond my closet door. This evening I plunged into the "barn dream."

"It was dark," I began. "When I climbed the stairs I suddenly felt another presence. Something waiting. Something indescribably horrible. Waiting for me...behind the boxes piled in the corner."

Todd's face floated in the dark before me like a gibbous moon. His eyes were round with fear. It took few words to call forth that consciousness of inexplicable horror shared by the young and submerged later in life beneath the paltry annoyances of reality.

When I paused the room filled with a terrible quiet. There was a sudden rush of breath from my brother's side and then, from somewhere all too near, there came a distinct, hideously loud THUMP.

When he spoke, Todd's voice was heavy with resignation. "There it is."

"And it isn't the cat."

For a few seconds we both contemplated this mind numbing truth in mute terror. Then my brother regained his voice.

"A morpus horror!" he cried. We both started shrieking.

My grandfather came upstairs and cleared the air with his razor strap. Next morning the cat was nowhere to be seen, but the cat food had been eaten.

I'm glad I didn't see what ate it.

Rachel

by Eric Mayer

For our fifth anniversary Mary bought me a Kit-Cat Klock.. He hangs on the office wall, black tail flicking, bulgy eyes darting back and forth, a big grin stuck between his whiskers and his bow tie. Quite pleasant, so long as you haven't been drinking. Years ago I purchased another Kit-Cat, at an eerie little store in Jersey City - a dim, cobwebby place piled with dusty bottles, Victorian knick-knacks and genie lamps, the sort of place you'd expect would have vanished when you returned the next day. That clock ran backwards, of course, but that's another story.

As Mary and I admired our new Kit-Cat, we couldn't help thinking it would make a suitable final resting place for our old cat, Rachel, whose ashes have been sitting in a tin in the spare room since he died in mid September, the week after Pincess Diana and Mother Theresa.

I'm not prone to sentimentality over animals - we should be more worried about people - and the current commercial craze for cats, in particular, has become ridiculous. (Before long it won't be possible to choose either a cat-free greeting card or mystery novel.) But at times the loss of a pet can be keenly felt, maybe because it is less overwhelming and numbing than human tragedy. Maybe because we are grieving, really, for something more than the pet.

Rachel was the last link to the life I was supposed to lead, but didn't. He reminded me of a time before my first marriage ended and my kids were taken away.

He lived in my household for fourteen or fifteen years. I don't recall exactly which cold November it was when he arrived, a starving black stray, mewling under the back window. First my ex-wife and I set a tin of food - we already had an older cat named Luna - on the icy ground beside the door. We did so grudgingly, knowing that we would inevitably open the door. Which we did.

From the beginning Rachel was a "character." For the first week he was, as the old Doublemint gum commercial might put it - "Two! Two! Two pets in one!" The second pet being the enormous tapeworm which made the mistake of sticking its head out into the light.

The medicine prescribed by the vet removed the tapeworm from Rachel's intestine but not from his psyche. He ate like he was starving for the rest of his life.

My kids, Fleur and Tristan, named him Rachel, mistaking his actual sex. He had a rakish look, thanks to the single fang that protruded from the corner of his mouth, and he had a slightly crippled leg which he stuck straight out when he sat down, maybe a result of his adventures in the wild, adventures he never spoke about.

Someone had owned him once - he was declawed and neutered. And we never knew if he had been turned out, or simply wandered off, and why. Once he came in from the cold he became an "inside cat." Over the years I had seen too many cats killed by cars.

Rachel dreamed of returning to the wild, but didn't seem to remember why. The few times he darted out the open door, he was immediately bewildered and easily corraled, except for the one, memorable occasion, when he was outside an entire night. Mary found him in the yard the next morning. Maybe he had had great adventure during his hours of freedom, maybe not.

In his youth he was rambunctious, compared to the older and more placid Luna, although he was always extremely tolerant of the kids who roughhoused with him as toddlers will. I never recall him scratching. As he got older, he mellowed, becoming lazier and slower and more and more like his old, departed friend Luna. After Mary arrived she nicknamed him "Flubbycat."

I recently drew some cartoons of Flubby, which my nephew Warren got a kick out of. The Flubby character was actually derived from "Bad Cat" a mini-comic I had drawn in the mid-eighties, based on Rachel and Luna.

The comic was not Rachel's greatest claim to fame either. Shortly after we acquired him, my ex-wife experienced some allergy problems which she thought might be related to the new, shorthaired cat (Luna being a longhair) She spoke about this with Mary, who was living in Illinois, and from these conversations Mary derived the idea for "Cat's Paw," her first published story, which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and was later anthologized in MYSTERY CATS.

At the time, Mary had no way of guessing that she would one day be privileged to share a house with the inspiration for her professional career!

We often wondered how old Rachel was. The first year I had him, two vets gave differing estimates of his age - maybe 2 years old, maybe 4. And I couldn't recall whether he'd arrived in 1982 or 1983. He had shown up in countless family photos, posed with Tristan and Fleur, in the living room at the old house, in the playroom, or playing with them, or just sitting in the background by chance, because, he was, after all, a part of it. But all those photos have been taken away so I can't examine them for clues.

Rachel doesn't show up well in photos. Black cats seldom do. The most striking thing about him wasn't his looks - despite the jaunty fang and gimpy leg -but his character. He loved people and greeted strangers with a dog-like eagerness. Maybe he saw them as possible food sources. For whatever reason, he was the friendliest cat I ever knew. During the past few years, with the problems and uncertainties Mary and I have faced, there was something comforting about Rachel's placidity and predictability, even though some might say his demeanor was no more meaningful than the plastic smile on the Kit-Cat.

Sadly, time might sometimes run backwards for Kit-Cat Klocks, but not in the real world. In his final year Rachel began having thyroid problems. I purchased his prescriptions at the Pharmacy, signing, as required by law, as "Guardian" for "Rachel (Cat)."

"Do you have any questions about side effects?" I was asked. I should have asked whether he could take the medicine and still operate heavy equipment.

Finally the pills Mary had been forcing down his chops stopped working. Though we swore we wouldn't waste a lot of money on him when the time came, we did anyway. He spent two days at the animal hospital, but the prognosis was bleak.

Then we brought him home for a visit while more blood tests were done. He lay at the foot of the futon, in his usual spot, that evening, and Mary combed him, as she had been in the habit of doing. When it was time for him to retire to the basement for the night he tried dutifully to get up but was too weak. Mary carried him to his sleeping place by the stairs and when we woke the next morning he had gone.

Mary misses him, especially his loud and continually happy purr. She says it is a good thing the Lord of the Cats came for him while he was at home with his buddy. Our younger cat, Sabrina still looks for him occasionally, but she has taken on the boss cat role and the characteristics.

I recall, as I bent over him in his terrible stillness I could hardly believe that he was gone and all the life he had been part of was gone. I could only think how good he had been with the kids.

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