About five years ago I started writing a memoir. I kept at it for a little while, writing about 1,000 words a day for a few weeks. I hadn’t yet been to therapy and there were many things I didn’t really understand about my life, but I still find the unfinished memoir to be a fascinating look into my own past. I’ve decided to post it in installments here, with only a few redactions. You can find the other sections by clicking the Memoir category.
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18.
Lenox is also the place where my family began its decline and separation. Thinking back on my time there as a small child, I remember big family dinners with aunts and uncles, cousins both near and distant, my grandparents, my mother. We gathered around the big table in my grandparents’ dining room for meals; the adults swapping stories as one or another of my cousins chased me under the table to tickle me.
While “Lenox” survived, my family thrived. Or at least it did in my young estimation. We were all close – geographically and emotionally. We did things together. I played with my cousins, ate junk food with my grandparents, went to Friendly’s for a Fribble. The town was the like the mass of gravity at the center of our familial galaxy. It held us together, gave us a shared history and sense of belonging. Even as young as I was, I could tell that it was a special place. Our special place.
And then, in ones and twos and threes and fours, my family began to leave. Aunt Jill married Chuck Sohl and moved to Baltimore. Linda and Dick and Tammy and Todd were in Wareham on Cape Cod. My mother got remarried, and she and I followed my new dad to upstate New York, then Oklahoma, then back to New York State again. Within a few years, Denise and John and Lynne and Mike were in Kentucky. Then my grandparents left, driven out of the Hagyard building by soaring rent, but also pulled into the new orbit of one of their far-flung daughters. Inside of 10 years, everyone was gone but my grandmother’s brother, Great-Uncle Jack. The apartments in the Hagyard Building went to new tenants. And my anchor in Berkshire County came undone, leaving my ship to float directionless in new waters.
Norman Rockwell’s paintings were my image of family life – the ideal to which I compared my own family. A comparison made all that much easier because he painted people we actually knew in the place we lived. But like so many American families, mine was scattering, following work as it moved to new boomtowns in the South and the West.
We were never the same again. No more big family dinners. Fewer and fewer visits. Our relationships reduced to the Saturday round of phone calls between the matriarchs of the individual branches, as memories of cousins faded from the minds of the younger members of the families.
I miss my family.
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That’s it. That’s as far as I got five years ago. In the time since, both my grandparents have died, my parents have moved from their home of 25 years and are about to move again, my sister moved, my own little family has moved several times and is now scattered, and more change is on the immediate horizon. In fact, I’ve moved during the run of these memoir installments.
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My grandparents have always seemed more like enemies than friends. Their tempestuous relationship has been at the center of quite a few arguments in my family over the years. The easy analysis is that my grandmother is a tyrant who beat my grandfather down over the course of 65 years of marriage. She’s been the villain in most disputes, and both of her daughters tend to side with their father. 
That’s what my grandmother would say every time we pulled into the little driveway on Housatonic Street next to the Hagyard Building. The driveway ended in a squat, yellow-brick garage. The garage is now an upscale-chocolate-and-fine-art store run by a retired National Geographic photographer. Back in the 70’s, though, it was just a garage. I don’t remember ever parking the car in there.
I probably heard that record for the first time when I was four or five, and I got to know it well a decade later in junior high. Fifteen years after that, I interviewed Maynard Ferguson, one of the trumpeters on Kenton In Hi-Fi, and a legend in his own right. I didn’t ask him about that particular record, although we did talk about Kenton. He was a funny, approachable, articulate man, and he was very generous with his time as a guest on my radio show. 
Going back to music for a minute: I had a very strange musical upbringing. I listened to Nat Cole and Stan Kenton at a time when most kids were listening to disco and Kiss. As I got older, I stayed on my own course. I got some hand-me-down 8-track tapes when I was maybe seven years old. I can’t remember all of them, but my two favorites were a Kiss greatest hits collection (which I loved because Kiss was my cousin Todd’s favorite band, and thus my favorite band, too) and a collection of performances by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. I can only recall one song from that collection – and orchestral version of Burt Bacharach’s “Do You Know The Way To San Jose?†What kind of kid listens to big band, cheese rock, and the Boston Pops? Did no one in my family own a radio?
My favorite album, and the one I learned the best, was Kenton In Hi-Fi. Kenton made this fantastic recording in 1956 for Capitol Records, and it features many of Stan’s biggest hits – “Artistry In Rhythm,†“Eager Beaver,†“Unison Riff,†and “Artistry Jumps,†to name a few. It also features the very gutsy tenor saxophonist Vido Musso, a ridiculous trumpet section led by Pete Candoli and Maynard Ferguson, and the drumming of the incomparable Mel Lewis. This record swings its ass off from start to finish, and it’s a huge piece of my musical upbringing. 
I used my grandparents’ stereo for another important thing – listening to the adventures of folks like Superman and Spider-Man and the Six Million Dollar Man on book-and-record sets. Remember those? Back in the 70s, Marvel and DC put out oversized comic books with LP records. These were dramatized versions of the comics, complete with actors, sound effects and music. You could follow along in the comic book while you listened. 
I went to preschool in Pittsfield at a place called Wee Kare Kiddie Kollege, which was a good school in spite of the staff’s apparent inability to spell simple words. There was a big tree, or maybe just a tall stump, in the yard out back of the school. I remember throwing up during naptime after eating too many Friehoffer’s Chocolate Chip Cookies (Original Recipe). We took naps on red mats, and I threw up on mine while lying down. I felt it on my cheek for a few seconds before one of the day care workers – Kollege Perfessers? – took me off the mat, cleaned me up and called my mom.
Comic books. Now those were a big factor in my childhood – and I still like them as an adult. Across the street from my grandparents’ apartment was a convenience store and newsstand, and it had a comic book rack. My cousin Todd liked comics, and he and I would go across the street to pick up the latest issue of his favorites. Top on his list in the late 70’s was The Man Called Nova, the quintessential 70’s story of an outsider kid who gets zapped by an alien and gifted with superpowers. He fights crime while fighting with his parents. I fell in love with Nova and with his alter ego, Rich Rider. Years later, I collected every issue of Nova and all the other series he’d been featured in.
We were having a big family dinner, and my Irish Catholic family was coloring outside the culinary lines and having spaghetti. My grandmother had a tall pot of sauce simmering on the stove, and she picked it up to pour it into a serving container.
On one trip to Lenox, I went to the Hagyard Building with a mission. My cousin Denise (whom I refer to as my Aunt Denise) told me that the front door of the Hagyard Building still bore the doorbell nameplates of Bernard Flanders and John Coughlin, my grandfather and great-uncle, respectively. She asked whether I would try to get them off the building, and of course I agreed.
My grandparents lived in an apartment building on the corner of Main Street and Housatonic Street in Lenox. The building was known as the Hagyard Building, because Hagyard’s Pharmacy was on the first floor. My grandparents had the second floor of the building, and my great-uncle Jack and his second wife lived on the third floor. (As did a solitary elderly woman who lived in the back room of the third floor until they discovered her dead one day.)
I go back to Lenox and look at the Hagyard Buiding every chance I get. The pharmacy is long gone, that space occupied now by a real estate office to sell the outrageously priced homes that are now the norm in Lenox. I no longer know anyone who lives in the building. I’d met the trio of elderly women who moved into my grandparents’ apartment in the 80’s, but they’re long gone – maybe from life itself. In spite of all that, though, just being in the presence of the building gives me a sense of calm, coupled with a painful yet pleasurable longing for a time gone by, for a childhood not to be regained, for roots in a town.
One memory I have is of a small round Dairy Queen with those frosted block windows around the bottom half. I can see my mom and I walking to this Dairy Queen, although we don’t go inside. In my hazy recollection, there’s a window on the side of the stand, and it’s propped open. I can just make out someone through the window as we get closer. The memory stops before we order anything. I have no idea where we are, although somewhere in Berkshire County would make sense, given my age at the time. To be honest, I’m not even sure it’s my mother that I’m walking with.
One of the many houses my mom and I lived in flooded, and the firemen came to pump it out. I wore a fireman’s helmet – either borrowed or plastic, I can’t remember which – and rode my Big Wheel around the flooded cellar as the men worked. The cellar is lit by exposed bulbs in the ceiling, and the walls are made of cinder blocks. My mom has told me and others this story so many times that I’m not sure if I remember it or if I’m recreating it from her memories.
Corbett’s Glen started out as a Native American trail; evolved into a train track that carried the body of the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln as he moved toward his final resting place; and ended up as a very naturalistic town park with a creek and the odd bit of private land. As you pass through a long tunnel under the road and enter the glen, you’re greeted by an expanse of lawn leading to a lovely home that’s for sale as I write this. Ringing the lawn is a model train track, although our friends said the train stopped running years ago. 
I was born in the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts. There was no hospital in Lenox, my hometown, so I came into the world in nearby Pittsfield in early September of 1973. Pittsfield was the home of General Electric, started in the 1890’s by William Stanley (although it was called the Electric Manufacturing Company at the time). At one point, more than 10,000 people worked in the GE plant in Pittsfield, my grandfather and mother among them.