Loose Leaf Notes

1.  After my mother’s wake, Joe and I went to the local pub for some fried clams and brew. I ran into some old school mates that I hadn’t seen since high school, and we ended up having a “who can best walk like Kevin Sheehan” (my old boyfriend) contest.  Watch HERE.

2. At the pub, the men and women’s bathroom signs simply read “Stand” or “Sit.”

3. There’s a restaurant in Roanoke that has a rooster and hen signs at the bathrooms, but you’d need to be a farmer to tell the difference.

4. As someone who is no longer a practicing Catholic, I don’t receive communion, but at the funeral mass for my mother, the priest said something about it helping my mother pass freely, and my brother told me you no longer have to go Confession first, so I decided to do it.   It had been so long that I didn’t do it right and was about to get busted when the priest followed me to the pew because I took too long to swallow the host and was still holding it in my hand as I walked.

5. My brother-in-law took THIS video of a balloon release for my mother.  I was glad he didn’t catch me saying (as the pink balloons flew up and away in the sky), “They look like sperm” on the audio.

6. Losing our mother, our lives got turned upside down.   At the beach I found myself walking on the sky and ground at the same time. See HERE. 

7. THIS was my solace.

8. Speaking of bathroom signs, when my grandson Bryce was six, he rightfully got confused by the Great Oaks pool bathrooms that were marked M for mermaids and P for pirates. I thought of him later when I went to the bathroom at Mickey G’s Bistro where the lady’s room was marked with a picture of Audrey Hepburn and the men’s room has Frank Sinatra on the door. – From the 2014 One Stop Blog Hop HERE. 

9. Fascination (which, like the lottery and the roller coaster, I never played or went on) used to be part of Paragon Park, the amusement park in the Massachusetts beach town I grew up in. In business since 1945, Fascination is the oldest game like it in the country.  The game tables, originally installed at Coney Island in 1918, lined either side with games that look like a table version of skee ball or bingo. You roll the balls, light up all the circles, and the first one to light up all the circles wins a small cash prize. I believe it closed around 2011. More HERE. 

10. It was a sad day in 1984 when Paragon Park closed and was torn down soon after. The Paragon Carousel (pictured above) was the only part of the amusement park that has remained in Hull, about a block from its original site in the middle of the park across from Nantasket Beach.  Built in 1928, it was saved from auction by investors and then purchased by The Friends of the Paragon Carousel in 1996.  HERE is my 2005 post about Paragon Park, which received over 40 comments from park fans and readers.

11. There was a rumor that went around among Hull kids growing up in the 50’s – or maybe it was just in my family – that if you put your finger in one of the horses mouths on the Paragon Park Carousel, snakes would come out and bite you. I was about four years old the first time I rode it and I thought the horses were real, in the same way I thought the newscasters on our black and white TV could see me in my living room.

12. It’s my mother in me that couldn’t cry when I first heard she died and my father in me that finally broke down when I saw her.  – More from my latest poem, “Mommy,” HERE.

13. We all know we’re going to die.  We just don’t believe it.”  – From Preparing for a Beautiful End, Utne Reader

Just some of my family and dear friends at the after-funeral meal at Barefoot Bobs, Nantasket Beach. My mom was 91.  HERE is a radio essay I wrote about her in 2007.  / Thirteen Thursday