I Won’t Have to Shave

I Won’t Have To Shave

By Ed DeJesus

My father, Tony DeJesus, was born in Lowell in 1910. He served eight years in the Mass National Guard until his 26^th Infantry Yankee Division was mustered into the Army in 1941 to join the WW II European forces. He was an infantryman and medical specialist, and while on furlough in 1943, he married my mother, Mary. When the war ended in 1945, he came home as a disabled veteran at age thirty-five. Like his parents before him, he worked in Lowell’s Boott Cotton Mills as a fixer maintaining the machinery. He started a family on Cedar Street a block from Saint Anthony’s Portuguese Church on back Central Street.

Tony DeJesus, World War II veteran

In 1950, the year I was born, the third of four boomers in a five-year span, Dad started a job as a nurse’s aide at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Bedford, MA. Later that year with a VA twenty-year mortgage, he bought his first and only house at 62 Cambridge Street for five-thousand dollars. Our family of six was lucky to have the ten-room, two-story tenement, which Dad single-handedly converted into a single-family home. We slept upstairs in separate linoleum-covered rooms except for my little brother and me, who shared the fourth drafty bedroom. Our steam radiators clanged through asbestos-covered pipes, heated by a rumbling oil furnace in our dungy dirt floor cellar.

We were a close-knit Portuguese family that looked out for each other. We’d gobble down our Rice Krispies while Mom packed our lunches with Wonder Bread sandwiches, Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies. When my little brother entered the first grade at the Abraham Lincoln School, I was in the third, my sister in the fourth, and my big brother in the sixth. We’d saunter up Hale St, crossed Washington and Lincoln Streets, and passed by the Lincoln Memorial Monument on Chelmsford Street. Dad proudly said, “We live in the Presidential section of the city.” Actually, it was called The Lower Highlands, and the Hale and Howard blocks where my Jewish and Black schoolmates lived in slumlord tenements were the first to be torn down for Urban Renewal.

Every day at School, we recited the pledge of allegiance to the flag. When the fire alarm would go off, we’d evacuate in an orderly fashion. Sometimes, a different alarm would sound, and we’d crawl under our desks and cover our heads. That was during the Cold War. In retrospect, it was far less disturbing than the trauma and anxiety that children endure today to prepare for an active shooter’s drill.

Abraham Lincoln Monument, Lincoln Square, Lowell

Cambridge St—which ran from Chelmsford St, crossed Hale St and then over the Hales Brook bridge before it ended at the junk yards on Tanner St—was our wonderland. We fished in Hales Brook and caught hornpout and kibbes. We’d never tell our parents when we skated on the frozen brook or swam in the dark, murky water on those steamy summer days. I remember how excited we’d get by the sound of the bells on the Ice Cream truck stopping on our street. The girls cherished Creamsicles; the boys favored Fudgesicles.

The boys played stickball, kickball, and football in the middle of our street, with cars parked on both sides. The girls played hopscotch on the sidewalks, and sometimes, kickball with us. We all played hide-and-seek together until the streetlights came on, and our parents called us in. We were never bored. We had a rotary phone with a noisy party-line that we’d listen into and eaves drop on the chatty babysitter gossiping about boys. We assumed the babies survived.

We’d sit in front of our black-and-white Zenith TV with rabbit ears and watch Lucy, Bonanza, My Three Sons, Dennis the Menace, and Ed Sullivan. My big brother was four years older and the Prince of the house. My spoiled sister was two years older, and my pampered baby brother, was a year younger. My sister and mom would tease me and say I was the Dennis of the house. As the beleaguered middle child, I was curious and rambunctious; trouble always found me!

I was eleven when the Lowell Connector being built cut Cambridge St off from Hales Brook and made it a dead-end street. When they put the first coat of blacktop on, and the work crews had gone for the day, I ventured out alone on my bicycle. I rode up past the Plain Street exit, which later was the infamous quarter-mile marker for drag racing v8s that often ended as fatal accidents. I nearly became the first Connector casualty when I discovered a steam roller by the housing projects. I climbed up into the driver’s seat and pushed the starter button. It made a grinding noise and lurched forward. I heard someone shout, “Get off. It’s ours.”  I looked over the side and saw a kid about my size waving me down.

When I jumped off, my momentum carried into him, and he shoved me up against the big machine. We put our fists up and before either of us swung, I got sucker punched in the side of my face and nose by his big brother, who had come from behind the steam roller. I went down face first into the blacktop and split my lip and chin open. I covered my head with my hands, thinking they’d kick me. They stepped on my back and climbed aboard the machine. They pushed the starter button, laughed, and said, “Were going to steamroll you and your bike.” I brushed the sticky asphalt tar off my hands, mounted my bike, and raced home. My first but not my last bloody nose taught me not to mess with tough kids from the Projects.

I worried what Mom would say about my tarred and blood-covered t-shirt. I don’t think Dad believed me when I said I flipped over my handlebars. He examined the swollen bruises on my face and nose, told Mom to clean me up, then went outside to check my bike. Dad returned to the bathroom, placed an ice pack on the side of my nose, and said, “The bike’s in better shape than you. Next time, duck.”

One summer night in 1961, I was chasing my kid brother back into the house when he closed the outside French porch door in my face. My left hand smashed through one of the glass panes, and when I fell backward down the steps, the jagged glass ripped a gash through the length of my wrist. I was lying at the bottom of the steps when Mom came out hollering about me breaking another window. She saw the blood squirting out of my artery and yelled for Dad. He grabbed my arm, dragged me into the house to the bathroom, turned the faucet on and blasted cold water on the wound to flush out the shards of glass. I was screaming from the pain and lapsing into shock. Lucky for me, Dad was a medic. He a wrapped a towel around my wrist, and tightly tied another around my bicep to make a tourniquet.

Mom held a cold rag on my forehead in the back seat of Dad’s ‘58 Pontiac Bonneville while he raced to the ER at St Joseph’s Hospital on Pawtucket St. The waiting room was packed, the white towel on my wrists was saturated with blood spotting the tiled floor. The desk nurse started asking my parents questions. Dad shouted, “Later, he’s severed his artery, let’s go!”

The nurse abruptly led us around the corner to a room. Dad and the nurse lifted me onto a table, and another nurse and doctor rushed in. They put piles of gauze pads on the wound but the blood had spilled onto the floor. They used forceps to clamp off the surging artery. They shot up my wrist and forearm with a big Novocain needle. The room was spinning, while we waited for the anesthetic to numb my arm. Dad held my legs down, and a hefty nurse with big breasts leaned across my chest to hold my arm down while the doctor started stitching the nasty gash. It ran adjacent to the artery from my hand about four inches up my forearm and other cuts. It required both internal and external stitches, seventeen in all.

The Doctor said, “We need to put two more stitches in his thumb.” When he started suturing me we found out there was no Novocain there. I screamed and shoved the nurse away. She slipped on the puddle of blood and hit the floor. Her white uniform soaked with dark red stains looked worse than my yellow t-shirt. When they wheeled me out, all bandaged up, the people in the waiting room cheered.

That summer, I couldn’t play baseball in St Peter’s Little League with my brothers on the South Common, where Dad coached our teams, no matter how tired he was after taking care of his fellow Vets at the VA Hospital. But by late fall, I was playing football on Cambridge St with my older brother and his friends. I went out for a pass from my brother along two parked cars. I leaped and caught the football the same time that Johnny, who was thirty pounds heavier, tried to intercept it. I bounced head-first into the fender of an old Plymouth. Next, I remember waking up on the couch with Dad holding smelling salts under my nose. Mom held ice on my head and asked me, “Do you still want a football for Christmas?” I got my football and the first of several concussions that Dad had to tend to.

The following summer I was walking back from the Boy’s club on Dutton Street with my friend Dave Normandin. We dallied under the Lord Overpass on Thorndike Street and were suddenly stoned by some kids up above. One rock hit the top of my head, it split open and was bleeding badly. Dave took off his t-shirt and held it on my head while we rushed toward Hale Street. We passed by the tenements where the Blacks lived and made it to my house. Dad iced my head, then shaved the top and bandaged me up.

At sixteen I had run the mile with my Lowell High gym class in the cold January air, and as a smoker I might have caught a touch of Pneumonia. The next night I was shooting pool at Alex’s smoke fille billiards parlor above the Dutch Team Room on Merrimack street. I felt a pain in my chest and was struggling to breathe. I thought I was having a heart attack. I called Dad. He picked me up out front and drove me to Saint Joseph’s Hospital. I’d had a collapsed lung and spent ten days in the hospital recovering. Consequently, unlike my siblings and Dad, I quit smoking and figured I added years to my life and bought a few cars with the money I saved.

Dad was always there for me. When I grew older I tried to be there for him. In 1953, he was appointed as secretary of Lowell’s US Selective Service Board on Appleton Street and served until Congress disbanded the Draft in 1973. In 1968 at age eighteen I told him I didn’t support the Vietnam War, but I’d join the Army Reserves and if it escalated, I’d fight like he did in WW II. He supported my decision, and like him, I served as a medic from 1968 to 1974, always fearful of that war that killed nearly 58,000 troops.

We were both born in April forty years apart. Dad took me to my first Red Sox game at Fenway Park when I was eight, and I took him to his last when he was eighty-eight. In 1999 at age eighty-nine Dad had a cancerous testicle removed, three weeks later he marched in the Memorial day parade. He always inspired me.

In 2000, I was VP of Engineering for a Global Supply company and returned from a business trip to find Dad in Saint John’s hospital diagnosed with lung cancer. I was at his bedside when the Oncologist mentioned low doses of Chemotherapy—an option that no one past eighty-five let alone ninety had ever considered. Dad mumbled, “Chemo, my hair will fall out.” He shrugged and said, “I won’t have to shave.”  After months of treatments his hair thinned but the spot on his lung shrunk and he went into remission. Saint John’s treatment lab hung a plaque on the wall honoring him as the oldest Massachusetts resident to successfully undergo Chemo.

Nine months later, we had just gotten Mom and Dad settled into a Rogers Street elderly apartment in Rogers Hall across from Fort Hill Park, when the cancer returned. He was on Hospice when I spent Friday night with him at the apartment. He sat in his recliner and I told him our daughter, Jennifer, was graduating Suma Cum Laude from Providence College and we’d be gone all weekend for the festivities. He was very weak and Mom wanted me to carry him to bed before I left. He asked, “Would you give me a shave first?”

“My pleasure, Dad.”  I patted his face with his electric pre-shave and did the honor.

When I got back from Providence, he’d been transported to the Northwood Nursing Home on Varnum Ave. He was sleeping when I arrived late Sunday night. I gave the night shift orderly my cell number, and he called me at five a.m. Dad was laboring. While I drove from my Chelmsford home, I called my siblings. I held his hand ‘til they arrived with Mom who joined me at his bedside. I said, “Dad, we’re all here now.” He never opened his eyes but he whispered, “Mary.” Mom kissed his cheek and Dad took his last breadth.

Dad’s was waked at McDonough Funeral home on May 27^th, 2001, Memorial day weekend. His fellow veterans arrived in uniform, saluted, folded the flag and presented it to Mom. After his funeral we held an after party at the VFW club on Plain Street. He was a lifetime member of the Portuguese American Civic League and Disabled American Veterans. He was honored in “the Workers Remembered” video program at the Boot Cotton Mills Museum event center where his interview and oration is still on display.

Boott Cotton Mills Museum, Tony DeJesus orator

{insert Boot Mill Museum Tony DeJesus, Orator}

In 2002, I went to city hall and met with highly decorated Korean and Vietnam Veteran, Joe Dussault, Lowell’s Veterans Services Officer. We arranged to dedicate a square for Dad on the corner of Chelmsford and Cambridge Streets. My family and I honored Dad on what would have been his 92^nd birthday, April 20, 2002. I read a dedication piece I’d written for him. Led by Ron McGuane, Veterans Services, the VFW Honor guard had a seven gun salute and played Taps. It was attended by his good friend Armand Mercier and the Mayor, Rita Mercier. The national anthem was sung by family friend Bud Caulfield, City councilman and leader of the popular Highland Players singing club.

This April 20^th will be Dad’s happy heavenly 114th birthday.

Lowell Sun photo of dedication of Antonio DeJesus Square

Antonio DeJesus Square sign

But wait there’s more.

My deceased older brother Tom’s only child, Thomas DeJesus, Jr, is a contractor, who’d worked on many of my Massachusetts properties and some of my Solar projects. He lives in Pelham, NH. In 2016 he hurt his back on a job. He went to the same Pelham Chiropractor, Dr. Titus Plomaritus, a Lowellian Army Veteran who’d treated my Dad until the year he passed.

My nephew, Tom called me in Florida with exciting news. He’d met Claire Ignacio who worked in the chiropractor’s office. She mentioned that his grandfather, Antonio DeJesus had contributed eight pages to a book she published, Our Memories of Lowell. Tom Jr’s mother mailed the book to me that has a copyright date of 2015, the year I retired and moved to Florida.

Claire Ignacio’s self-published book is beautifully done with dozens of stories from Lowellians and countless photos by co-author, Dave Hudon, that spanned the first half of the twentieth century.  Dad’s contribution, HISTORIC-LOWELL-1910 by Antonio DeJesus, warmed my heart.

Dad wrote about growing up in Lowell from age four and his parents working in the Mills. He recalled in 1918, when all the bells in the mills, churches, and the school fire alarms blasted to signal that WWI had ended. He described wearing camphor powder around his neck to protect him from the Spanish Influenza. He’d sit on the Gorham street sidewalk and watch continuous pandemic funerals go by; some accompanied by a parade for a well-known person, politician or soldier. He wrote about: schools, stores, politicians, restaurants and clubs, and too many other memories to summarize here. But I’ll leave you with Claires’ author note.

Mr. DeJesus was one of my first contributors to this book (1999). He was a patient at the Doctor’s office where I worked and said he had many memories of the city where he was born and loved. Handwritten, he submitted (21 pages on lined paper, printed), although shaky it was well written.  I typed it exactly as he gave it to me. I know this dear man has passed by now, but he has family and, hopefully they will read this book and share his cherished memories. Imagine the younger generation of today living as Antonio did?

I treasure that book with Dad’s memories. Born in 1950, I fondly share my generation’s memories of Lowell that covered the second half of the twentieth century.

“Our Memories of Lowell” by Claire Ignacio

****

Editor’s Note: There are nearly 500 monuments and squares in Lowell dedicated to mostly to individuals, almost all, like Antonio DeJesus, served in the armed forces. Yet beyond the black, white and gold street signs, little is publicly known about these individuals. One of my ongoing Lowell history projects is to recapture these stories and make them public. Stories like this one, written by the son of Antonio DeJesus, are a terrific contribution to our communal memory. If anyone reading this has similar recollections of anyone else memorialized by the city of Lowell, please get in touch so we can compose more stories like this. I can be reached by email at DickHoweJr[at]gmail.com.

Richard Howe

Living Madly: Natural Wonders

Cycad Fern. Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Living Madly: Natural Wonders

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

Looking directly at the sun for more than a few seconds will damage your retina. Because I didn’t have protective glasses to wear during the solar eclipse on April 8, I used the camera on my phone to watch the moon gradually overtake the sun. Standing in front of my house, I snapped a photo every couple of minutes and looked at it to check the moon’s progress. I ended up with several cool photos.

Later that night, as I was looking at the photographs I’d taken along with photos of the eclipse other people had posted on Facebook, I started to think about the enormous amount of media coverage the eclipse had received over the previous months. That publicity resulted in thousands of people clearing their schedules to view the eclipse, even if it meant traveling long distances, sitting in gridlock traffic, and paying exorbitant rates at otherwise unremarkable hotels that happened to be located in the eclipse’s path of totality.

A solar eclipse is a rare and awe-inspiring natural phenomenon. Everyone should try to see one at some point in their lives if they can. I find it disconcerting, however, that it takes an event of such magnitude to get people to ditch their screens and pay attention to the natural world.

I spend several hours each week outside. I hike in the White Mountains and on local trails year-round. When I don’t have time to hike, I walk in my neighborhood. Natural wonders are everywhere. I see them all the time.

At no time of year are these bits of magic easier to spot than in the spring. You don’t have to go far. Just put your phone away, go outside, and be mindful of the world around you.

A few days ago, I was walking in my neighborhood when I saw more than a dozen birds hanging out in the hedges in a nearby yard. When I got closer, I realized they were cedar waxwings, a species I’d only ever seen in the mountains. They are beautiful birds with black eye masks, yellow bellies, and red markings on their wings. Just a few feet from where I was standing, they were having a great time splashing in the puddles on the sidewalk and gobbling up the berries on a thicket of holly.

After spending the previous summer, fall, and winter in our garage, Rob and I put our mason bee houses out on our patio in late March. (Mason bees don’t sting and are important pollinators.) The small wooden structures are crammed full of bamboo tubes where the previous year’s bees have laid their eggs, each one inside a pollen-filled chamber made of mud.

One day, when the temperature is just right, the bees begin to emerge from the tubes. They break through the dried mud with their front legs and fly off in search of pollen to nourish the next generation of bees. Sometimes I stand right in front of the houses and watch the small bees as they fly in and out. I’m always impressed by their tenacity and resilience, and by how cute their little faces are.

While hiking in the mountains, I once saw a meteorite enter the earth’s atmosphere and burn up in a white-hot streak that was visible in the daytime. Layers of rainbows, created by sunlight shining through the morning mist, sometimes stretch from peak to peak for miles, often vanishing as quickly as they formed.

One May afternoon on a little-used trail, Rob and I came across an endangered eastern hognose snake sunning itself on a footbridge, its body as thick as my arm. A little while later, we spotted a chipmunk taking a nap on a branch. The little creature dozed peacefully in the springtime sun, as still and as quiet as a chipmunk will ever be.

I know when to look for the pink, bell-shaped flowers that grow on the undersides of Solomon’s seal. I’ve come within spitting distance of black bears, and have stepped in moose tracks almost twice as wide as my boot. I’ve stood beneath glacial erratics bigger than houses, and know of trees nearly split in two by lightening that still sprout leaves every spring.

None of these things are as dramatic as a solar eclipse, but all of them are worth seeing. Unlike an eclipse, which comes around once every several years, the living world is all around us, all the time. Magic is out there, just waiting to be discovered.

###

Emilie-Noelle Provost (she/her). Author of The River Is Everywhere, a National Indie Excellence Award and American Fiction Award finalist, and The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters. Visit me at emilienoelleprovost.com.

More books to delight and challenge,pt. 1-fiction by Marjorie Arons Barron

The entry below is being cross-posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

The Lioness of Boston by Emily Franklin is a lush historical novel about Isabella Stewart Gardner, Belle of Boston, an upper class young woman who refused to limit herself to the cultural norms prescribed by the wealthy social elite of her time and who, in her struggle to assert herself, made an impact on the art world and all of history. Her outspokenness and outlandishness (for late 19^th century staid Boston) and feminist spirit won the disdain of her Brahmin social circle.

Married in her early twenties to businessman and philanthropist John “Jack” Gardner, she suffered from social exclusion. Deep and searing personal loss compounded it when their young son, “Jackie,” fell ill and died. A subsequent pregnancy ended in miscarriage and deprived her of the capacity to have more children.

The book is about ISG’s lifelong quest to fill that emptiness and find purpose. In pursuit of knowledge, she made friends with Harvard intelligentsia, attended lectures and began to collect rare books. Gradually she moved into the realm of art, meeting artists, buying paintings and objets d’art.  Her “out there” style earned her constant coverage and mockery in the society columns. She traveled constantly, to Paris, London, and especially to Venice to acquire the great masters.  Her acquisitions eventually found a home by the Fenway in Boston, in a Venetian-style palazzo we now know as the Gardner Museum.

Franklin has done a splendid job using a treasure trove of letters to bring to life Gardner’s relationships with Harvard art historian Charles Eliot Norton, artist John Singer Sargent, author Henry James, and Bernard Berenson, the art historian who facilitated many of her acquisitions. Steeped in history, The Lioness is still a novel, and Franklin colorfully imagines scenes of Gardner with Oscar Wilde, Berthe Morisot and luminaries.  She brilliantly captures the late 19^th and early 20^th cultural scene in Boston and beyond. Finishing this wonderful book leaves the reader wanting nothing else but a speedy return visit to the Gardner Museum to share the essence of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s lasting gift to the world.

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger is a spellbinding coming-of-age novel that is also a murder mystery.  Set in New Bremen, Minnesota, a rural town outside of Minneapolis/ St. Paul, it focuses on the family of Nathan Drum, a W.W. II veteran who has given up the practice of law to become a minister, one who preaches every Sunday at three churches and whose top priority is helping families in crisis. His wife, Ruth, and daughter, Ariel, are gifted musically. His 11-year-old son Jake, is a stutterer who doesn’t talk much but astutely observes the comings and goings in the community. His 13-year-old son Frank, who is inquisitive, bold and often impulsive, throws himself into uncovering truths that adults don’t always want revealed.

It is Frank who tells the story, some 40 years later, of the summer in 1961 when three young people die violently. There are suicide attempts, domestic abuse, alcoholism, class tensions and other societal ills. But there are also moments of grace, ineffable beauty of the season, glorious traditional and newly composed music, the loyalty of brothers and military comrades, the sheer fun of community celebrations.

Small-town America is a rich backdrop for a host of wonderfully drawn characters, a mix of good and bad, smart and dumb, unthinking and deeply philosophical, selfish and generous, religious and agnostic, optimistic and cynical. Most especially, this book is about anger and forgiveness. Ordinary Grace is one of those novels that this reader didn’t want to end.

The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft is intense, richly literary, surreal, sometimes exotic, challenging and frankly bizarre. I rarely give up on a book once started, but, at 50 pages in, I didn’t think I’d make it to the end though I was eventually drawn to finding out its mystery.  The main story line follows eight translators gathering for many weeks in a town near the Bialowieza Forest in Poland, near the Belarus border, to translate the most recent novel by acclaimed Polish novelist Irena Rey.  They only know each other by the native language into which each is to translate from Polish.  The Argentinian narrator is translating into Spanish; we come to know her as Emilia. (Author Croft is herself a translator.)

The setting is at the edge of a deep forest, heavily populated by birds, other animals and insects and densely covered by trees, ferns and funghi, in a constant cycle of growth and decay.  There is granular recounting of the condition of the flora, the changing of the seasons, the impact of climate change and government-run logging. In addition to snakes, frogs and bats, there are also mythical creatures and suspicion of ghosts.

One of the book’s several themes is the creative process and the role of translators (mostly unheralded) on an author’s literary success. There are subplots of sex, jealousy, even a duel. But the story is driven by the sudden disappearance of “Our Author,” Irena Rey, a manipulative irascible character whose home is filled with art, photos, memorabilia and stolen antiquities, through which the translators sift for clues to her disappearance. None of the characters are particularly relatable, and, though I did make it to the end (no spoiler alert here), I can’t recommend the book with any enthusiasm. Reputable reviewers have called this book a “romp.” Not I, despite its moments of satire.  If you do read it, please let me know what I’ve failed to appreciate.

Alison

Alison

By David Daniel

At six p.m. the bar in the hotel lobby in Montego Bay is already busy, revelers tuning up to ring in the New Year. Passing, carrying my suitcase and a large gym bag, I hear someone call my name. Carl and Babs, a couple I got to know when Leah was still with me and we all met the first night on the island, are motioning me to join them. I say I have to get to the airport.

“When’s your flight?” Carl asks. He a pudgy former Wall Street guy, his graying hair in a man-bun. Babs is a laughing earth mother about forty, with sun-bleached dreads and a made-for-bikini body. I tell them 7:30.

“Go with the flow, bro,” says Carl. “It’s a five-minute cab ride. Sit.” Babs is already signaling the waitress. What the hell. One drink.

Leah and I came down eight days ago, a Jamaican escape from New England winter. My intention was to make a dent in a long reading list ahead of the Graduate Record Exam in English I’m going to take in April, but the only reading I’ve done is the labels on Red Stripe bottles and two Ross Macdonald paperbacks I picked up at Logan when we left. Now there was a writer; though the chance of Macdonald turning up on the GRE is zero. Not that he shouldn’t. In his understanding of the human heart he’s a peer of Faulkner and Joyce. But he’s a mystery writer. When I told Leah this she seized it to make her case against my going for a graduate degree in English. “You don’t even like the books you’re supposed to like.”

I had no comeback.

“You’re almost thirty years old, Kent. It’s time you got practical.”

“You mean go to law school?” She’s second year at BC Law.

“Doesn’t have to be that. Get an MBA. Or an accounting degree. Something with a payback. God, what are you going to do? Teach high school English?”

It devolved from there and two days into the vacation (capped by her “I hate to say it, Kent, but in some ways you’re a screw-up”) Leah abruptly left to fly home. Stung, stubborn, I stayed.

The first day after her departure I was at loose ends. I considered leaving, too. But I didn’t. Leah and I have been together two years. True, we haven’t made anything final yet. We have our own apartments, mine a ratty little walkup in East Boston, where I can reach up and practically scratch the bellies of departing jumbo jets. Maybe a little time apart would be healthy for us. As for the start of a new year that ends in a zero . . . well that could bode good or ill.

My mood improved after a night at the hotel bar. From then on I had a routine. Mornings by the pool reading. Afternoons I combed the rocky beach on the far side of the resort. I stayed away from the ganja; it makes me paranoid. Evenings it was Red Stripes and rum punch in the karaoke bar. That’s where I got better acquainted with Carl and Babs. Not kids—Carl’s got to be fifty—but they live younger. He made a bundle in bond sales and she inherited one, and they dropped out for the beachcomber life. They’re generous, too. I’ve had to threaten to step on their flip-flops if they didn’t let me pick up at least a few of the bar bills. If they wonder where Leah is they keep mum.

It wasn’t long before I shed the winter coat of stress I was wearing for the past months and started to relax. Then, three days ago, walking on the stony beach, I met Alison.

She was lying among the rocks and I saw the glisten of sun on her skin. As I got near I noted blood oozing from a gash in her side. Her eyes were shut and my first thought was she was dead. But when I bent close I realized she was alive, though just barely.

Carl is signaling for another round, but I’ve gotta get a wiggle on. He rejects my offer to pay and throws me an amiable shaka. “Hang loose, brother.” Babs hugs me, her breasts joggling warmly against me. I leave them to their frozen margaritas, castaways still looking for the lost shaker of salt.

Apparently New Year’s Eve is not a big travel night. Sangster airport isn’t the chaotic scene I expect. The airline rep tells me I’ll have a row to myself. After stowing my suitcase, I make sure the gym bag is not in the aisle. While the plane slowly fills, a stewardess comes through with complimentary champagne. Happy soon-to-be 1980!

Last night, facing the end of vacation, I had a moment to wonder about Alison. She’d spent the past three days in my room, recuperating. Could I just leave her? Then, surprising myself, I wondered: could she come back with me?

“Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has turned on the ‘No Smoking’ signs as we prepare for takeoff. Put all table trays in an upright position and …”

I unzip the gym bag a couple inches and nudge it under the seat ahead of me. In four hours I’ll be home. Time enough to get a decent buzz on, which I will need to face the Boston cold—face Leah, too.

When the plane is aloft people light up and the attendants begin to make their way along the aisle with the drinks cart. In no time the cabin is full of tobacco smoke and high-spirited chatter. Several rows ahead of me is a group of optometrists and their spouses who were staying at my same hotel. They were in Jamaica for a professional conference, though judging by the amount of time they spent at the pool bar—eye docs getting cock-eyed—it seemed a pretty loose affair. I order a rum and coke and let my mind drift. Soon, the drone of the jet’s engines and the drinks are working to calm me, to let me see possibility in the impossibility of everything.

The name Alison—not her actual name—came to me one night in the karaoke bar when Babs got singing the Elvis Costello song. When I first found her the gash in her side made me think she was in a fight or maybe got sliced by the propeller of a passing boat. The bleeding had stopped, and the sun seemed to be sealing the wound, but she was barely responsive. On the spur of the moment, I decided to carry her to the hotel.

I didn’t take her to the front desk but went straight to my room. She seemed to improve. I brought food and she managed to eat a bit. She spent her time sleeping, and I would admire her beauty. She liked lying in the bathtub, and I would sit on the tub’s edge and talk softly to her. I have the idea that she understands. If not my words, maybe the rhythms.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the captain interrupts. “we’re passing over the Outer Banks. If you look from the port side of the aircraft you’ll see the lights of Cape Hatteras.” I’m on the starboard, where all I see is darkness. I go back to musing.

Alison was sluggish today, so getting her on board wasn’t difficult. There’ll be some adjustments when we get home. Leah’s going to freak out, but I’m forming a plan. The high whine of jet engines and the clitter of ice in my plastic drink glass as I sip fade to white noise.

Sometime later, something causes me to sit up. Was I dozing? I glance down at the gym bag and discover it’s halfway unzipped. I bend and open it all the way and . . .

For a moment of freakout I sit frozen, then unlatch my seatbelt. Awkwardly, pretending I dropped something, I kneel in the narrow row and peer beneath the seats ahead. There, several rows on, moving slowly forward in the dimness among a forest of passenger’s legs and feet, is Alison.

For a moment, like a man at prayer, I remain. Evidently, in the warmth of the cabin, the 25-inch-long iguana has revived. She’s harmless, of course, gentle; but no one will be expecting her. Seen through the lens of their utter shock as they glance down she might as well be a salivating eight-foot-long Komodo Dragon hungry to rip into human flesh.

Growing aware of the thrum of the engines through my knees, I’m suddenly struggling with questions. Is Leah right? Am I a screw-up? Is studying for an exam that values writers no one ever reads outside of grad school versus a genre craftsman as skilled as Ross Macdonald stupid? Is being a lawyer or a CPA or even a salesman a more sensible life choice? Is bringing an iguana on the plane an act of idiocy?

But this is all just mind noise now. Mostly I’m feeling my betrayal of Alison. None of this is her fault. There are airline rules against bringing certain fruits and vegetables on board, but nothing about lizards. And actually, I’m happy she’s come fully back to life. And what are the airline people going to do, throw her off the flight? Maybe it’ll all work out. One thing’s sure—this’ll be a New Year’s Eve none of these people will never forget. Like Carl says, go with the flow, bro. I buckle my seatbelt and wait for the first scream.

~*~

David Daniel is a regular contributor to richardhowe.com. He remembers the days when you could bring almost anything onto an airplane.