It takes a while to settle into a new place when you move. The way you think furniture is going to work within a space isn’t usually how it ends up, so we spent a lot of time rearranging. We finally decided we were happy (for now) on where everything was and we would just live with it (for now).

I was meeting people at work, but it was on a professional basis and Susan was writing again, which means she spent a great deal of time by herself. We would cook dinner, have some wine and talk about what we did that day. Susan told me of the progress on her book and how she hoped to wrap it up by the end of the year. I told her stories about my boss and colleagues at the investment firm. We are settling in, we would say, finding our place here.

Warmer weather and longer days had come as we approached Memorial Day. Every morning when I got up, I would look out the kitchen window at the flower boxes. By now, the plants had grown and I could see buds appearing. The promise of summertime flowers.

One day, Susan called me into the kitchen as soon as I got home. “Hey, look at this,” she said. Across the driveway, a woman was weeding and watering the flowers in the flower boxes. She had on a light colored, flowing dress and her long hair would spill over as she tended to her plants. Behind her, I could see two place settings on the table with candles and a small bouquet of flowers. A date?

As we were cooking our dinner, a car we hadn’t seen before, a grey BMW, slowly pulled down the driveway and parked awkwardly on one side of the parking area.
As Susan finished sautéing the salmon, a man with a bottle of wine in his hand carefully made his way toward the balcony, unsure of where to go. Our neighbor appeared, greeted him and asked him in.

We ate our dinner and after the last sips of wine, decided to take a walk through town. It was still warm out with almost no breeze. A perfect evening. As we made our way back up to our place, we heard talking and laughing. We went into our kitchen and took a peek out the window. The date was going well. The candles were flickering, the wine was flowing. But before we went to bed, the BMW started, and the man was gone.

For the next few Saturday nights, this pattern continued. Spring had given way to summer and the flowers in the boxes were now in full bloom. The colors were spectacular and our neighbor made sure her plants were well cared for. Then I woke up early one Sunday morning in July. I thought I heard a noise outside and took a look out of the kitchen. A dog was digging around in the bamboo. After giving up chasing whatever he was chasing, the dog lifted his leg on the tire of the not-so-awkwardly parked grey BMW.

Later that morning, I told Susan that BMW guy had spent the night. “Good for her”, Susan said. “Good for him”, I said. We decided that we would get to know our neighbor a little. I am constantly amazed at how much information Susan can come back with after what always seems to me to be the most idle of chats. Later that week came the report: her name is Pamela, she is about our age, she works at the jewelry store in town, she likes classical music, she moved here 12 years ago and is, or maybe was, single.

August was hot. Early, before the heat of the day would melt everything and everyone, I would go for a run on the beach. On my way out, I would admire the flowers in the boxes, standing bright and colorful, hopeful before another day of baking in the sun.

Cool evenings became the norm as fall pushed summer into the past. The days got shorter. Susan’s book was almost on schedule and the editors at the publishing company were pleased with the progress. For me, it was business as usual. Markets go up and markets go down. There is opportunity in both.

Pamela and BMW guy were together every weekend. While Susan and I cooked and ate in our apartment, they would sit out on the patio, even when it got chilly, late into the night, talking and sipping wine. Good for them.

Then, for several weekends, there were no late evening conversations, no sipping of wine on the patio. Maybe BMW guy was away on business. Then, he was back for a weekend.

We were expected to get a cold snap in the last week of October. Pamela had, in the past covered her plants with a plastic cover to protect them from the cold. I was surprised at how well it worked. The flowers were still beautiful. Then, one weekend, we had a storm. The temperature dropped to freezing and the wind blew 40 miles per hour. The plastic got blown off of the flower boxes. The next day, the sun came out, but the temperature struggled to get into the 30’s.

After a couple of days, it was obvious that the flowers had died from exposure to the wind and cold. We never saw the grey BMW again.

After letting E-Z Pass into my life my resistance collapsed like a house of cards, a row of dominos, a sad little wrinkled balloon and I caved completely. I gave in, forced by circumstances, the ticking clock, the sands of time running through the hourglass of life. My fingers had long ago stopped walking through the Yellow Pages, in part because arthritis had made them useless, but mostly because the off-the rack magnifying reading glasses from Wal-Mart were no longer working. All the small print, all those useless, torn and creased, unfolded road maps impossible to refold stuffed into the glove compartment of my car. My night vision, at one time almost bionic, had gradually and subtly became non-existent around the turn of the century, when all those street signs that had once marked my journey through life disappeared. And it was getting lost once too often, taking an hour and twenty minutes for a fifteen minute drive, that sent me over the edge and forced me to buy the GPS – Big Brother be damned!

“We were going to get you one for Christmas,” my daughter Janine said, “but we figured you wouldn’t use it, just like you never use your cell phone, or never replaced your rotary phone with a push button.” Which is true. I told her that I might consider getting a cell phone if they made one that had a rotary dial.

“We were going to get you one for your next birthday,” my son Ian said when I told him.

“What kind is it? A Magellan? TomTom? Garmin? And how much did you pay for it?” Ian is a bottom-line kind of person.

“The salesman steered me away from all of those and pointed me instead to one that was on sale, so I got it pretty cheap,” I said. “It’s a new brand, a model 205 wide-screen by Amelia Earhart.”

“Um, isn’t she the pilot who got lost over the Pacific and was never seen again?” he asked.

“I think it’s by the same people who make her luggage. And it’s made in China, so you know it has to be good. Besides, I don’t have any plans of ever flying over the Pacific.”

So Amelia and I started out tentatively, cautiously, with short trips around the neighborhood, routes I knew and could drive in my sleep. It was obvious from the beginning that she had a mind of her own when it came to the best way to get from here to there. While I relied on my intimate knowledge gained from having lived in the same place for thirty years, she only had pre-loaded maps.

“Recalculating,” she said in her very “proper English” accent whenever I strayed. “Recalculating,” she pronounced mincingly I passed up her right turn for a shortcut I knew would get me into the back parking lot of Sonny Fong’s Chinese Take Out faster.

“Proceed three hundred feet and then turn right…. Turn right! TURN RIGHT!” she insisted.

I figured if I just politely ignored her suggestions long enough and took Amelia on a tour of the back streets of downtown Farmingdale, she would eventually learn, adapt, abandon her preconceived notions and begin to think on her feet. Unfortunately, she never did. And by the second or third week of our relationship, I could detect a major attitude in her “Recalculating….” It wasn’t anything blatant, not then anyway, just an airy sigh that seemed to increase with each incident. And once I thought I heard her whisper a comment under her breath.

“What was that?” I asked. “I didn’t quite hear that. What did you just say?”

But Amelia kept mum and we continued on our journey to Costco without further incident.

It was on our first long voyage, a trip to the “Great White North,” New Hampshire, that the “wheels fell off the wagon,” so to speak. I was headed to pick up a new MacBook computer in the state without sales tax and visit my friends Joni and Anthony who lived in Keene. Amelia got me to the Throgs Neck Bridge without incident and we were speeding along Rte I-95 just before New Haven and the turn-off to Rte I-91 when I heard Nature calling.

Despite her frantic exhortations to “Keep left… Stay left… Left… I said left!” I moved right and pulled into the rest stop where I rushed for a restroom. Fifteen minutes later, when I started the car, relieved and sated by the quarter-pound Snickers bar I got from the vending machine, Amelia was curiously silent, even after I gently tickled her touch screen several times.

“Well?” I asked when we were back on the road trying to get her out of her brooding silence. “Where do we go now, Amelia? I put myself in your able hands.”

She gave a disapproving tut and a deep sigh, which was followed by another long silence. “Don’t patronize me,” she said finally, and I recognized the tone from my many failed marriages. “I told you before, keep left, stay left… LEFT! But did you listen? No. You knew better and you went right.”

“But I had to pee,” I said. “I pee a lot. What was I supposed to do?”

She ignored my question. “Why bother buying a GPS when you aren’t going to listen?” She sounded hurt. “You might just as well use one of those old maps in the glove compartment. Or get free directions,” she added scornfully with a snort, “from the Internet.”

The truth was that I had printed up a Google map as an emergency backup, just in case of a technical glitch, but the directions had really small print and they were crumpled up somewhere in the trunk. “But, I–”

“No ‘buts,’ buster! You can put all your buts in a sack. Your ex-wives are right about you. You never listen and you won’t take direction from anybody, especially from a woman. What’s the matter, didn’t you get enough love from your mother? I suppose you were a bottle baby?”

“You leave my mother out of it!” I pouted. “She worked and didn’t have time to breast feed me.”

“Whatever.” She snickered. “Don’t look now, mister. You’ll never get up to Keene, because you just missed your left turn.” And then her tone became business as usual. “Recalculating. Proceed to three point four miles the next exit and then turn south at the cloverleaf.”

I did what I was told.

We spent the remaining hours in relative silence. I said nothing and Amelia spoke only when it was necessary, except when I turned up the radio. “Turn that down!” she snapped and my hand shot to the volume control. “I have a headache from all the aggravation you’ve caused me. And your taste in music isn’t much better than your taste in clothes, or women. How many times were you divorced?”

She delighted in taking me the long way, making many unnecessary turns, and chuckled to herself when she got me lost in Vermont. But I didn’t complain even when I had to pee again. I didn’t dare look for a rest stop. I just jumped out quickly and went off-road. We arrived at Joni and Anthony’s after midnight. They had left the light on and a note on the table: “We waited as long as we could. There are clean sheets on the bed in the guest room. Help yourself to whatever you find in the refrigerator.” I did, and then I peed and went to bed.

The following day I visited, picked up my computer, and said good-bye to my friends after dinner. On my return trip I thought it might be nice to swing through Massachusetts just for a change of scenery. So while I was programming the new coordinates, I also fine-tuned Amelia and made her French.

“Tournez à droite,” the sexy new voice, somewhere between Edith Piaf and Eartha Kitt, purred. “Continuez pendant douze milles et puis tournez à gauche.” It was a welcome change from Amelia’s hostile English.

As the miles slid by and the darkness increased, I was hypnotized by her sweet words, taken in by her cute accent. I could feel the smile on my face and at the same time there was a tingle, a curious warmth in my legs and nether regions. And I hadn’t peed in hours.

“You know,” I said, choosing my words carefully and using my throaty bedroom voice, “I could listen to you talk all day and all night. You sound so cute and I find you very – sexy.” I thought I heard her quiver slightly, so I went on. “What do you say – we pull into the next rest stop? I’m tired from all this driving and I can use a – little break, if you know what I mean.”

I took her silence for approval and at the next opportunity I eased the car à droit and pulled into a parking spot in the darkness away from the other cars. She didn’t protest when I gently slipped her out of the cradle. She didn’t say a word when I opened the door and took her into the back seat.

“You know,” I whispered, echoing the dialogue from Casablanca, “this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” I was sitting there holding her in my arms with my pants around my ankles.

That was when a Massachusetts State Trooper shined the flashlight into the back of the car, alerted, without a doubt, by the E-Z Pass that had beamed my GPS coordinates to the black helicopter circling overhead.

Joseph E. Scalia grew up a shabbos goy in Boro Park, Brooklyn, turning on lights and lighting cooking stoves. He has published two novels FREAKs and Pearl, two short story collections, No Strings Attached and Brooklyn Family Scenes. He is looking for a publisher for his latest collection of humor, Scalia vs.The Universe.

In the documentary, these Irish girls are sent to the good sisters to atone for sins of the flesh, real or contemplated. The focus is on one of the girls who has had a baby out of wedlock. After giving birth, her infant son is taken from her and later placed in foster care. The girl is devastated. I watch the scene; I sip my chardonnay, smoke my cigarette, and weep. Black and white phantoms are doing aves in my head. Dead nuns still managing the store.

****

Of course, St. Joseph’s in Monticello was just a boarding school, not a workhouse for wayward penitents. We didn’t have to slave in a laundry like the Magdalenes; all we had to do was make our beds, clean our rooms, and on Saturday night polish our shoes for Mass the next day. Unfortunately, I had gotten shoe polish on the sleeve of my rose colored bathrobe, for which Sister quietly determined my punishment. I was to kneel with arms extended to each side and tell God I was sorry for being so thoughtless. I was in this position when my mother, who was staying at the St. Joseph’s Guest House while recovering from the operation, walked into the dormitory and saw me kneeling.

“What are you doing?”

I told her.

“Get up,” she said.

“But, Mommy. Sister said I had to kneel until she came back.”

“Get up.”

She pulled me to my feet. I was terrified of disobeying Sister. “I’ll speak to Sister,” my mother said. And she did. The following month I was sent to Ladycliff Academy on the Hudson for the rest of the school year. Mother heard the Franciscan nuns at Ladycliff were nicer than the Dominicans at St. Joseph’s.

Before St. Joseph’s and hysterectomies and nervous breakdowns, my parents and I were living in the first home I remember, at 52 Bakerhill Road in Great Neck, Long Island. I think of these first six years of my life as an idyllic time before everything crumpled into grayness. I began first grade at our parish school, St. Aloysius. Sister Mary Damien who was my first grade teacher, wanted me to learn to write with my right hand. My mother disagreed and said she didn’t believe it was good to switch. I had a huge crush on Sister Mary Damien, I would have done anything for her. If she had asked me to go the island of Molokai, the land of her name-sake, and save all the Lepers, I would have done so. The fact that my mother insisted that I continue writing with my left hand, embarrassed me. My mother won the argument. Sister Mary Damien gave in and almost seventy years later I continue to be a lefty.

After my hiatus at St. Joseph’s and later on at Ladycliff Academy, we returned to 52 Bakerhill Road and I got reacquainted with my third and fourth grade classmates in St. Aloysius. My mother was unhappy living in Great Neck, so in 1939 we moved to Bronxville in Westchester.

****

In those days, Bronxville was one square mile of Protestants. There was a smattering of Catholics and about three Jewish families living there at the time. African Americans were nonexistent, except as domestic daytrippers. There was no parochial school connected to our parish, so my parents were forced to enroll me in the public school, which happened to be one of the first progressive schools in the state. This was so exciting to me—no uniforms, no prayers, no “Yes, Sister. No Sister.” I was gung-ho to start my non-sectarian fifth grade.

At Bronxville Public School, the arts were integrated with the courses being taught. Our history class studied Peter Stuyvesant and old New Amsterdam, so we were encouraged to experience the life-style of all things colonial. This was decades before reality shows in which modern families endured the hardships of more primitive eras in history. We learned how to dip candles, weave cloth and make pewter spoons. I loved this stuff. Another godsend was an escape from math. If I found arithmetic overwhelming, I’d get permission to go to the art department to express myself. My father, upset with this curriculum, sent away to the New York Board of Education for the State Syllabus so he could coach me in the mysteries of fractions. During my year in Bronxville, I learned many things: how to make pewter spoons, dip candles, and that not all schools sang songs in Latin.

****

It’s October 15, 1940 and I’m sitting on a milk box near the side door of a bungalow we rented far away from our old house on Bakerhill Road. We moved back to Great Neck and my mother was still unhappy. Family members would say, “Aunt Mae is just feeling blue.” And she was. Many neighbors were milling about on the front lawn and an ambulance had pulled up to the curb. My father was in the house with paramedics who were trying to revive my mother who had turned on the gas and inhaled eternity. For a brief period of time, my father tried to hold things together by having himself and me, his only child, move into his sister’s home in Flatbush. My aunt was a loving, no-nonsense woman whose deeply lived Catholicism helped her endure the deaths of a husband and two children. Her remaining four sons and daughter, my father and me were in theory to live together in a family arrangement that would work for everyone. This did not happen right away. I had just turned eleven and was convinced that I was a changeling, the unacknowledged heir to the throne mistakenly left with a family of well-meaning aliens. My father, who must have been in deep despair, decided that my return to Ladycliff Academy would be best for all.

****

It’s 1997 and Schindler’s List is being re-played on TV. As I followed the little red dress weaving in and out of the gray mass of humanity, I thought of Anne Frank. Born in 1929, she would be my age today. We were adolescents together, she in her garret in Amsterdam, me in St. Agnes in Rockville Center.

That January, Jerry and I were on our way to Hamburg, Germany for the premiere of After Play, a play I had written that had been performed Off-Broadway in New York several years earlier. We decided to spend a few days in Amsterdam before the Hamburg opening. It was cold and damp and wonderful. Amsterdam, the land of Hans Brinker and legal marijuana. Our hotel was only a bridge away from the night club and coffee house area where a potpourri of herbal stimulants were available. For some reason we never took advantage of this largesse. Maybe we felt intimidated or too green to know what to ask for.

The day before we left for Hamburg, we visited Anne Frank’s House. We went up the stairs and in and out of the hidden rooms behind the bookcase, searching for echoes of Anne and her family. Anne’s room had movie stars’ pictures on the wall, similar to my bedroom in Long Island.

The secret rooms were real but mainly a re-creation of the conditions under which the Franks lived during their enforced hibernation. Did Anne love James Mason and Van Johnson as passionately as I did?

****

I’m back at Ladycliff Academy. It’s January 1941, three months after my mother’s death. By now, I was an old pro at the boarding school game. After all, I’d been out in the world a bit. I’d experienced foreign cultures like Bronxville and had an incredible working knowledge of the life and times of Peter Stuyvesant.

A new girl arrived at Ladycliff and became my roommate. She was taller than me and more athletic looking. Her Aryan hair was cropped short in what was then called a “boyish bob.” Her name was Helen Hauser. She was German and spoke English with a heavy accent. I don’t think I liked Helen Hauser. She kept to herself and tacitly let those nearby know she had boundaries. I realized this was not “best pal” material. She was at Ladycliff for about three months and then mysteriously left I say mysteriously because everything about her said verboten.

The drums of war were beating a tattoo across the Atlantic. London was already in the blitz and December 7th was not far away.

In my eleven year old imagination, I wove a sinister scenario for Helen Hauser. She is the daughter of a Nazi General who has been sent to America for safe keeping. No. Worse. She is a Nazi spy masquerading as a twelve year old. Her mission is to steal war secrets from the military and send them back to her father via coded letters.

This was not impossible. Ladycliff was in the town of Highland Falls, New York, home to the United States Military Academy at West Point.

****

So many years and so many wars ago, I’m still thinking about the enigma of Helen Hauser. Did she go back to Germany? Was her father tried for war crimes or did he escape to Long Island and start a new life under the friendly cover of neighborhood brewmeister? Is Helen Hauser even alive and if she is, does she ever think of our pre-teen contemporary Anne Frank?

On Sundays at Ladycliff, parents would sometimes visit their children. The Nun would come to the study hall or outside to the play area and tell you that you had company. I loved it when my father would make the trek up along the Hudson in his Studebaker and whisk me away from the usual parochial Sunday night supper. We would drive north of West Point to the city of Newburgh and have steak and baked potato and creamed spinach at the George Washington Hotel. Sometimes there would be a movie before this luxurious repast. I remember seeing Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator with Jack Oakie and Paulette Goddard. This wonderful reprieve would end too soon and we would drive back to Ladycliff, where the Studebaker would turn into a pumpkin and the wicked step-sisters awaited.

In my memory, I see him walking down the hill wearing a brown suit and fedora. I don’t want him to go. The path down the hill is a short cut to the parking lot. The trail is worn bare from the footsteps of parents returning to the real world after huggy, kissy, guilty visits. My Dad shrinks in the distance. At one point he turns and waves to me. I wave back.

****

“As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.” That line alone would put Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the poetry hall of fame. I’m now in seventh grade in St. Agnes elementary school in Rockville Center, Long Island and my father I are living with my Aunt and cousins at 69 Hempstead Avenue, a big brown shingled, cream trim house purchased with a loan from the Federal Housing Authority.

At St. Agnes, Sister Miriam Virginia, a humorless pinched-faced nun, who years later I learned, relaxed her face and left the convent, assigned us “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.” Samuel Coleridge, I discovered, had his own personal albatross, mainly a serious dope addiction. In those days, dope was an exotic thing that belonged to poets and Victorian ladies who assuaged their vapors with hefty swigs of laudanum.

****

It is 1949 and I am an apprentice in a summer stock company in Southold, Long Island. Being nineteen and actually getting to work in the theater was a recipe for a magical summer. We apprentices did everything—painted flats, worked on costumes, lights, and sound—everything necessary to get a new play mounted each week. Three or four hours sleep a night was the usual. Benzedrine tablets—Bennies—were available to keep us awake and invincible.

I didn’t think of it at the time, but that was probably my first experience with dope. The next time, I was already married for about twelve years and in L.A. with Jerry and our kids. We were visiting with dear friends who also had two children. Avery was a wonderful actor, comedian, and improvisation artist, and his wife Shelly worked actively protesting against the war in Vietnam. They included “grass” in their lives as easily as we included vodka or beer. I was one of those straights who inhale a joint and announce to everyone around me that, “I don’t think this is working…I don’t feel anything.” Then one of our friends would say something innocuous like, “Lets leave the kids with the sitter and eat dinner at Scandia.” I would immediately burst into uncontrollable laughter: “My God, that is so hilarious, the wit, the insight!” Jerry would get very Hasidic and claim he was allergic to marijuana, that it infected his gums or something. Our brief sojourn into the land of pipe dreams didn’t last long. We more or less went back to conventional drugs like wine or booze.

****

I wonder what my mother would think reading these words.

Before May Dempsey Meara married my Dad she used to teach third and fourth grade in a Brooklyn public school. She loved poetry and used to recite everything from “A Child’s Garden Of Verses” to Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” while cleaning our house. She would stand over the sink or stove and invent little poems. My father would take the scribbled rhymes to his office and have them typed up.

I used to know them all by heart. No more.

She loved movies and would take me with her whenever she could. I was thrilled. We would walk down Middleneck Road to the Squire theatre. The Squire Theatre was the Enchanted Wood of Great Neck circa 1935. We’d sit together in the expectant darkness. Paul Muni and Henry Fonda were May’s favorites. My favorites too. Those silvery pretenders, they were the real deal. Then we’d emerge into the cruel sunlight that ruined everything.

I am seventy-nine as I write this. If May were alive now she would be over a hundred and something. My god, that is so surreal. One old lady wanting to talk to another old lady.

But I do.

I want to find one of those time portals and go back to 52 Bakerhill Road. I want to stand next to May as she composes poems at the sink or at the stove and tell her how much I loved Paul Muni and Henry Fonda.

Born in Brooklyn, Anne Meara is an actress and comedian who has appeared in numerous roles in theater, film, and television. She is also the author of the plays After-Play (Manhattan Theater Club) and Down the Garden Path (Off-Broadway). For many years, she and her husband Jerry Stiller worked as the comedy team Stiller and Meara.

It was extremely cold when I moved into my house. Ice storms had turned everything into rock candy. Eerily-plastic trees rattled in the wind and the birds, too dumb or too numb for the trip South, landed in the branches and slipped head first into the frozen ground. Their tiny feet, blue from the cold, protruded from the snowdrifts like miniature trees. From the warmth and security behind my double-paned insulated window I watched them, huddled in small groups, rubbing their wings together to keep warm and hopping up and down to avoid frostbite. It was a pathetic sight.

Driven by my desire to save the environment and a steady diet of National Geographic specials I’d seen on PBS, I fashioned a makeshift birdfeeder from a plastic deli container filled with breadcrumbs and Rice Crispies, climbed on the top of the wooden fence and fastened the feeder to a sturdy maple branch just outside my kitchen window. Then for an hour I watched the birds feast on my generous bounty, a marvelous sight, better than anything I’d seen Channel 21.

The next morning on my way to work I picked up fifty pounds of millet from the local hardware store and two books on bird watching and bird feeding tips: a hundred dollar investment to preserve the planet. In the evening, when I pulled up the driveway, I found my improvised feeding station on the frozen ground. I knew from my new bird books there weren’t any condors or bald eagles in the area, and from the birds I had seen in the neighborhood, I knew they weren’t heavy enough to snap the string, unless, of course, they all piled on together and jumped. I replaced the string and filled the container with some of the millet while six purple finches, two grackles and a chickadee eyed me suspiciously from the trees. A short time later, nursing a bourbon-and-water, I watched the birds glut themselves, until their feeding frenzy made me hungry and I retired for my own dinner. But later, as I was washing the last of the supper dishes, I peered through the collected darkness only to discover that the feeder was down again!

“Just what’s going on here?” I called from my back door into the cold night. The drapes in my neighbor’s house parted. Curious faces pressed against the glass making vapor impressions on the cold glass, and eyes followed me in the darkness.

My fingers were freezing and already numb as I pulled myself onto the old wooden fence that complained under my weight and I caught my pants leg on a picket. I wondered if St. Francis of Assisi had started this way. It was my last thought before I crashed head first into the chunky snow.

In the morning, black and blue and bruised from my previous night’s fall, I painfully mounted the fence again. This time I tied the deli container with galvanized wire, strong enough to hold a fifty-pound canary as my neighbors watched me through their window.

In the late afternoon I raced home as fast as the frozen roads would allow and hurried to inspect my birdfeeder. It was intact! But rooted to the fork of the tree, gripping the container in one paw and dipping the other into the millet was a gray squirrel. The birds were all around him carping and squawking, and I added my voice to the din. I tapped a frantic staccato on the glass, but the squirrel barely paused long enough to regard me over his shoulder with disdain. There was such arrogance in his eyes, such contempt, and then he went back to helping himself to my millet.

“Oh yeah!” I shouted through the glass. I could have shot him if I had a gun. I hunted for something to throw, but all I managed to find was a bundle of rubber bands. Outside I shook my clenched fist at him. “You get down from there, you dirty rat!” I shouted and fired an ineffectual barrage of rubber bands off the end of my finger.

My neighbors came outside to watch the show.

The squirrel moved off, not in fear, but rather in annoyance, after hurling what I interpreted to be an obscene squirrel gesture in my general direction. I stretched my last remaining rubber band and aimed at his retreating rump, but the elastic broke, recoiled and caught me under the eye.

“You got troubles,” my neighbor called. It was the first human contact I’d had with anyone since I’d moved into the house. “A squirrel decides to stay, you can’t get rid of him no matter how hard you try. Out-smart you every time. And this one’s a real smart one.”

“Oh yeah!” I felt the welt under my eye. “I’m a college graduate!” I called back. “What do you think of that?”

“Tell it to the squirrel,” he said simply.

I didn’t go to work the next day. Instead I called in “sick” and bought a squirrel-resistant birdfeeder. The salesman said is was “guaranteed to discourage unwanted pests.” It cost me another eighty-nine bucks plus tax, but I didn’t care. This was war and I was going to prove something to that squirrel, and to my new neighbors.

When I hung the new feeder I had an audience. My neighbor, his wife and two kids watched from the perimeter of their property. The birds were interested too. And squatting serenely in a branch just out of firing range, the squirrel was grinning at me.

“You might as well toss your money down the sewer. Those squirrel resistant feeders never work,” my neighbor called. “It would be easier and cheaper in the long run just to feed him. Won’t take him long to figure out. Squirrels can read you know.”

I smiled graciously, tipped my woolen winter hat to his wife, and hurried back inside to the warmth. They were all tittering behind my back – neighbors, birds and squirrel.

As soon as I was gone the squirrel came down to check things out. Through the window I watched as he circled the feeder a couple of times and then went directly to where it was attached to the branch. Quickly he grabbed the wire in his paw and slid backwards down the tree, pulling in the feeder as he went. In another second he was munching my millet with complete abandon! I pounded the window with my fist. The squirrel spit the last remains of a sunflower seed that would have hit me in the eye if not for the window glass.

“Told you so,” my neighbor said as I came out in time to watch the squirrel’s retreat.

But I didn’t want to hear it. I vaulted onto the fence in two quick strides, pulled the feeder from the tree and carried everything back into the house.

In the morning I called in sick again and I spent the whole day hatching plans. By noon an idea occurred to me. It was so simple – if I straightened a metal clothes hanger and fastened it to the branch, then attached the galvanized wire and the feeder to the end of the hanger, when the squirrel grabbed the hanger and pulled it in, the suspended feeder would hang free and remain out of his reach. In theory it couldn’t fail. But as a second precaution, in case my neighbor was right, I taped a message to the feeder. I lettered the words carefully: “BIRDFEEDER! NOT FOR SQUIRRELS!” If that squirrel could read he’d get my message.

“Good afternoon,” I said to my neighbors on my way back from the tree, but they just stared silently at me with amused grins.

When the squirrel didn’t show up after an hour, I showered leisurely and shaved. Upon my return to the kitchen window, towel wrapped around my wet hair, I discovered the empty feeder swinging in the breeze. I ran outside to investigate, my damp body steaming in the cold air.

“What happened?” I demanded from my neighbors who were reading my note no longer attached to the feeder.

“Did you miss it? It all happened so fast. That squirrel grabbed your contraption and swung it like a trapeze. Caught the feeder with one hand when it swung back, ate some, then dumped the rest. He read your note too, before he sent it into the breeze. You got a real smart squirrel there.” Their four heads bobbed up and down in unison.

I snatched my note out of his hand. My head was spinning, my face hot and my throat sore.

The next morning I was truly sick. I had all the symptoms of the flu. But during the night, in the feverish delirium of my dreams, the solution had crystallized. Bundled in a sweater, overcoat and fur hat, I made my final trip up the fence. I pulled everything down, discarded the hanger and I rested. The exertion had exhausted me utterly.

“Decided to give it up, did you?” my neighbor called. “Smartest thing you’ve done yet.”

I paid him no attention. Instead I looped a new length of wire to the top of the feeder and tied it to the branch. Then from my pocket I took a small threaded eyehook and twisted it into the fence directly below the feeder. Next I tied another piece of wire to the bottom of the feeder and secured that to the eyehook on the fence. The feeder was anchored from both ends, totally immobilized!

Inside, in the warmth of the house I sipped tea with honey and lemon, and I waited. When the squirrel arrived my heart was pounding more than my head. He studied the situation and tugged on the wire, but the secured feeder didn’t move. The squirrel’s tail vibrated frantically as he appraised this new situation. He examined the brass eyehook and the wire, tested the anchor, pulling it with both paws, and biting it with his teeth. The wire was too thin to climb and too strong to break. Over and over the squirrel circled the feeder from top to bottom. He was stumped, defeated. I had won!

I couldn’t resist. I tapped my fingers gently on the windowpane until I had his complete attention. His squirrel face was a furrowed frown — mine was a broad smile. When our eyes met I held my hand against the window in a gesture I was sure he understood.

The squirrel left the tree, dejected, crushed.

I rushed outside to savor my success. I danced a little jig under the tree, throwing up my arms and legs with reckless abandon, my overcoat flung open, my hat forgotten on the kitchen table. There was a light snow falling. I shouted for my neighbors to hear, “I won! I won! I won!” It became a chant, a taunt hurled into their grinning teeth.

“Just wait until spring,” he countered. “Squirrels have better memories than elephants. The war isn’t over yet.”

His words were enough to slow me down in my dance, just a bit. Perspiration trickled down my face. I felt dizzy, light-headed, but I picked up the tempo again. I circled and kicked until my body was soaked with wet. And then I fell faint into the snow.

My neighbors brought me to the hospital, where I spent the next five weeks recovering from pneumonia. They came to visit me there almost every day, and later, when I returned home they brought me magazines and chicken soup, crossword puzzles and chewing gum. They were really very nice people.

**** 

The seasons have changed. It is springtime now. The buds have formed on all the trees, and I’m feeling stronger. I can see my neighbors from my window getting their garden ready. The squirrels are there, too, gangs of them, in the trees and at the corners of my property. I know that they are watching me and waiting, formulating their little rodent strategies. I have decided to put my house up for sale, and take my chances once again with the city.

Joseph Scalia has published 2 novels, FREAKs and Pearl, and 2 short story collections, No Strings Attached and Brooklyn Family Scenes. “Squirrel in the Bird Feeder” is from his latest book, Scalia vs. The Universe or: My Life and Hard Times, a collection of humor to be published in 2009.

He wore those boxers with a matching shirt for eighty years, maybe more. He ate a Danish pastry every day at four and listened to the six o’clock news. I never liked tomato soup after we moved from that beach, pushing those islands back like stones that weighted like vomit, on its way up, when it makes sense to take away from.

Every time I dream about beaches I am four and save my baby brother from drowning. My mother says of course she saw him.

There’s a spot in Brooklyn that’s commemorated with a plaque. It’s impossible now to get a feel for the place, to realize how special it was, how racial barriers were broken and underdogs triumphed, how so many kinds of people came together to root for one thing. The players themselves weren’t millionaires. They played for sport. Many of them lived in the surrounding neighborhoods and could be seen walking to work. It was truly something remarkable, the harmony of athlete and region. Then it was over and Ebbets Field became Ebbets Housing.

The commute from Brooklyn to the Hamptons is quite a haul, and not just in terms of distance. It’s often like driving through your favorite social studies lesson as the city gives way to former boomer developments and the last strip mall is overtaken by pine barrens and baby deer. Then along that final stretch, if you hurry, you can make it back in time to watch history repeat itself.

It’s difficult to walk the campus of Southampton College these days without that obnoxious real estate mantra ringing in your ears. It’s loud enough to cancel class, block that final shot at net, and make the baby deer flee deeper into the woods.

Location. Location. Location.

Somebody somewhere is reciting these lines louder than any actor at Avram Theater, louder than any coach on a soccer field. The sound of it is deafening and we can only hope that once the bulldozers are through they’ll be kind enough to erect a plaque.

Citing a $9 million deficit as its root cause, Long Island University has decided to relocate Southampton’s undergraduate programs this fall to its C.W. Post campus in Brookville. The general feeling on campus is that the property will eventually be sold to the highest bidder in order to make up this deficit. LIU denies any such plan exists. Aside from the many classes, plays, and lectures that will vanish this fall, the East End will no longer have ties to a NCAA sports program.

“The news came as a complete shock,” said Mark Dawson, a Southampton college graduate and the last coach the women’s soccer team will ever have. “One minute the school was telling me to push recruiting, tell them about the new library, tell them about the gym. Then I get an e-mail saying I have two hours to tell my team it’s over before the news hits the papers. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do.”

The team responded to the news by having the most successful season in Southampton history. They went undefeated and won their conference (NYAC) then competed in the NCAA playoff tournament for the first and last time. “It was just this magical ride,” Dawson said.

Like his players, Dawson was offered a chance this fall to be absorbed by Post’s athletic program. He accepted a position as an assistant on the women’s team. “The only reason I’m going,” he said, “is because I want to see my players through. I promised them.”

The athletes at Southampton were never mercenary superstars. They were students who loved sport. They played soccer and basketball, lacrosse and softball, and they played them well. They came from all over the country, all over Europe, and all over Long Island. They rented housing in the surrounding neighborhoods and could often be seen walking to class and practice. They were a wonderful part of the East End community, that rare harmony of athlete to region. Then it was over and Southampton College grew as dark and silent as any old neighborhood in Brooklyn.

My family had always called me “big boned.” My classmates had other terms for me, and they certainly were not half as nice. In my elementary school gym class there was one record used for special occasions to humiliate the fat kids and all the songs had to do with being fat. I still cringe when I think of it. One song that stands out in my mind is: “You can have her, I don’t want her, she’s too fat for me.” I would be singled out along with the other fatties while we were forced to do extra sit ups and leg lifts for our own good.

Although genes had a hand in my corpulence, I loved food more than the average person, and I have always been one of those people who lives to eat. I have been a chocoholic since early childhood, a habit that started in front of the television set of my parents house. I’d wake up early to watch cartoons and eat as many Ring-Dings and Devil Dogs as I could get my hands on before anybody woke up to bust me. I would hide the boxes under my bed until Sunday night when it was my turn to empty the trash.

When I shed my “baby fat,” at the age of fourteen, I shattered all the bones in my right ankle while roller-skating. The break was so severe that I was in a hip cast for over six months and then several subsequent smaller casts; this ordeal lasted for close to a year. My orthopedist told me it was the worst break he had ever seen in his 40-year career and he prepared me for the worst–the possibility I would have a permanent limp. As luck would have it, I grew another two inches and the bones were able to bond together nicely. My big bones cooperated for once, but I was now bigger boned than ever and I had gained over 40 pounds from being sedentary for over a year. I was miserable and my parents felt sorry for me. They blamed themselves for the rusty old roller-skates I was wearing the day I broke my ankle and I did nothing to alleviate their guilt.

When I first saw an ad in the New York Times Magazine for Camp Camelot, I laughed about the prospect of going to a fat camp. After repeatedly looking at the picture of the obese girl in the “before” photo to a bikini-clad babe in the “after” photo, I changed my mind. This could be the answer to my problems. I too could be a bikini- clad beach bunny after only six weeks of Fat Camp. Sure, it might sound humiliating, but only my closest friends and relatives had to know. It would be well worth it in the end.

I showed the advertisement to my mother and made it clear that I was going to harass her about it for as long as it took. After a few days when she told me that she and my father had agreed to let me go, I was shocked, but ecstatic. I began packing immediately.

Camp Camelot was located on the campus of Southampton College in Long Island, New York during the months of July and August. Summer school students were attending Southampton College during this time, but their dorm rooms were on the other side of campus. The staff tried to make us wear the distinctive T-shirts with the Camelot insignia to distinguish us from them, even though it was pretty obvious who was who. (Although not everyone there was morbidly obese, some of us could pass for having gained the freshman forty.)

Upon arrival, the counselors arranged a “before” photo of me. The photographer had me stand on a table in my bathing suit and shot the picture of me from below. I had never photographed well in a bathing suit, but I had never seen a picture that was so unflattering. I looked like the fat lady in the circus.

My roommate was Sherri Schwartz and she had the face of an angel and the mouth of a truck driver. The first thing she said to me was that if she was as @#$%^& thin as I was she wouldn’t be there. She smoked cigarettes and had an evil streak and I liked her right away. I decided she was to be my lifelong friend. After a long night of bonding with Sherri, I assumed we would sleep until noon and join an exercise class at our leisure, if we felt like it. I was wrong.

The pounding on our door nearly gave me a heart attack, and it was only 7:00 a.m.! We were ordered to put on our Camp Camelot T-shirts and sweatpants and meet on the track in ten minutes.

They made us run around the track until we were hyperventilating, which took only once for most of the campers. I was able to make it twice before being winded; this was the first time my athletic abilities appeared better than average. Camp Camelot was also the first (and only) experience I had ever encountered where people came up to tell me how thin I was. The staff at Camelot consisted of a handful of ex-cheerleaders who seemed to enjoy being around overweight young women with low self-esteem, if only to relive the superiority they had once treasured in high school. More than once I saw them laughing at students too fat to get into the lotus position at 10:00 a.m. yoga.

Breakfast consisted of one tiny box of cereal. That was the biggest meal of the day. For lunch we were served an appetizer–a small cube of Swiss cheese and two pieces of melba toast on a piece of wilted lettuce and a few grapes for garnish. The first day there I was shocked to find that it was the entire meal! This routine made Weight Watchers look like child’s play. After lunch we were escorted to disco aerobics class for an excruciating hour and a half of jumping up and down to Donna Summer. Then we had to jog around the track until we dropped and finally, we were allowed to go to the beach for two hours before heading back on the bus for dinner. I thought surely there would be something substantial for dinner like a baked potato or a piece of bread, something to sink my teeth into. No such luck. The menu was similar to lunch, but we did get an apple for dessert.

A shuttle bus took the summer college students into the center of town. Sherri and I easily passed as students once we took off the Camelot garb. One Wednesday afternoon, we’d had it and decided to cut disco aerobics and get ourselves a decent meal. I will never forget that slice of pizza. I devoured it faster than anything I had ever eaten in my entire life.

Our next stop was to the candy store to pick up some chocolate. I jokingly said to Sherri that if we were to sell chocolate in the camp we could make a fortune and she immediately made me give her all my money. We bought twenty Hershey bars and stuffed them in our bags and headed back to Camelot. The response to the chocolate was overwhelming. We didn’t have enough to satisfy our customers, and it was no wonder, considering that everyone was practically starving. There was this one girl named Sally that didn’t have any money and wanted us to give her the chocolate for free and we practically had to rip her fat little hands off of the merchandise. I’m sure she told on us, although I can’t be positive.

Our parents were called in to deal with our punishment. I would rather have cleaned the toilets with my toothbrush than deal with my parents. The guilt that I had cultivated at home was now gone due to the exorbitant price they charged at Camp Camelot. All the months of my limping around the house were now history. They had paid their price. They gave me the “disappointed” speech and that was it. Sherri and I were to be put on probation, and that was fine with us. We didn’t want the stigma of getting thrown out of Fat Camp. Sherri and I grew apart after the “chocolate incident” and blamed each other for bad judgment.

When it was time to leave Camelot they took an “after” picture of me where the photographer stood about a mile away so you can’t really tell who it is, but it’s a much more flattering picture than the “before”. Whenever I need a good laugh I look at my before and after pictures while eating a big chocolate bar and think of Camelot.