Frankie, My Dear

             So, a fun fact for you reader-types out there: two hundred and two years ago on this very night, between the hours of 2am and 3am  (a fact which has been verified by astronomers who are much, much smarter than humans should ever be and can somehow actually calculate such things), a nineteen year old girl jolted out of her sleep in a cold sweat, while rain and hurricane winds lashed outside at her windows. She was staying at a Genevan villa for the summer with her poet husband, along with their mutual poet friend and a doctor, who had all challenged each other to see who could spin the best ghost yarn over a stormy weekend when they had nothing else better to do. This girl, who had come up blank while the others wrote circles around her -- the doctor, as a matter of fact, wrote the first ever work of vampire fiction, some seventy years before Bram Stoker came along with his offering -- had just had a nightmare so vivid and unnerving that, when she put it to paper, it was enough to beat out all the other participants' entries to become the scariest story produced in that one feverish weekend. As taken from her notebook: 

"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world."

          This girl was Mary Shelley, patron feminist of goths and hipsters the world around, and at nineteen years old, she had just created the genre of science fiction, over a weekend, on a dare.

           
           And now, for the biggest whiplash between settings and dramatic tableaus you're likely to encounter today:

           Over the course of my elementary-middle school years, few events in the rotation of school months could be relied on to bring me as much excitement as the annual Scholastic book fairs. In the preceding weeks, I’d comb through the advance catalogs provided by the school with a red marker, circling and prioritizing and saving up allowance money for the day when Scholastic representatives, those strange and wonderful tribes of roving salespeople, descended into the school’s tiny library with book caravans in their wake. On the day itself, I’d wander wide-eyed through the makeshift aisles and calculate (with math skills that haven’t improved much in the time since) just how far the crumpled wad of dollar bills in my fist could be stretched to allow for the biggest stack of books to bring to the register.

          It was on one of these Christmas-like occasions that I first noticed a book cover that would come to haunt my imagination in the times between lying down and falling asleep, for many nights to follow: gazing with hatred directly through the plane of the cover at unsuspecting passers-by, a stitched, mangled figure was making his way through a hellscape of a swamp, under the words Great Illustrated Classics: FRANKENSTEIN. As is sometimes the way with kids, rather than run from the frightening and unsettling content which the ominous cover promised lay inside, I immediately picked it up and added it to my stack for that year. Now, over a decade or more later, I can’t remember a single one of the other books I brought home with me that day. The ones I circled with red marker have long since been donated or stored away, but Frankenstein nestled itself DEEP into my consciousness – maybe even subconsciousness – and has lurked there ever since.

           Mary Shelley's waking nightmare descended through two centuries to land there on top of my little book pile, and realistically, I was too young for it. Way too young. There’s not much gore in the plot, so much as Gothic creepiness, but that’s what probably unsettled me so deeply; it’s not a non-stop murderous rampage of limbs being ripped apart – kids are so inundated with layers of unreality in superhero movies and sci-fi video games now, how scary would that even be, I wonder? – it’s an obsessive man trudging through misty city streets with grave-mud on his boots. The Monster (far more articulate and philosophical in his book form than Hollywood would lead you to believe) doesn’t use any R-rated language; instead, he learns language by hiding for shelter in the crawlspace of a mountain cottage and listening in on the happy family inside. That crawlspace just happened to be identical to the one on the other side of the same wall where I laid my head down on the pillow every night… so you BET I lay awake there on several occasions, certain that a wretched, reanimated being crouched down just feet away, listening through the panels to pick up snatches of language.

          What most unsettled me, however, was that the “Creature” promised by both the nightmarish book cover and general society to be a brutish, rampaging villain, deserving of fear and hatred, was nowhere to be found. This being, abandoned by his creator at birth without a name (to the headache of all English majors in the centuries since), was nothing whatsoever like the moaning, stiff-limbed, flat-topped and bolt-necked caricature known around the world. Legendary makeup artist Jack Pierce used his brush and spirit gum appliances to sculpt that interpretation onto the canvas of Boris Karloff, who then entered into immortality with his performances in the golden age of Universal Horror. It’s a totally brilliant and wonderful creation in and of itself, but in terms of adapting its source material, it may as well be a totally different character altogether. At the risk of reverting into lecturing teacher mode, the Creature in the book is superhumanly fast and strong, with flowing locks of black hair, a tendency to quote passages from Milton’s Christian epic Paradise Lost, and, most importantly, a broken heart. He should be, physical scarrings from his creation process aside, the epitome of the lonely Romantic hero that dominated the age in which Mary Shelley wrote her masterpiece, but the irony is that no one can get past those deformities, that otherness, and he is consequently reviled.

           That outcasting really got under my skin, and has ever since; yes, the Creature descends into some less-than-savory courses of action as the novel unfolds, arguably earning himself the Monster moniker he’d been mislabeled with for so long after one or two acts of revenge against his maker, but – to my reading, anyways – there was always reasoning and sometimes even justification behind such behavior. Met with horror, rejection, and oftentimes outright violence during his every interaction with humanity, it’s really only a matter of time before the empty page of his newly-reanimated brain begins to give it all back in kind. You think I’m a Monster? Fine. I’ll give you one, then. For this reason, the Creature has always been a lightning-rod of sorts for outcasts, misfits, and anyone else shunned by general society as “other.” 

           Case in point: in the Karloff films (and parodied spectacularly in Mel Brooks’ & Gene Wilder’s masterpiece spoof Young Frankenstein) Frankenstein the scientist demands for his hunchbacked lab assistant go to the local medical college to find a brain suitable for transplant into his waiting creation. A “normal” brain is initially chosen, but then smashes to pieces in an accident, causing the hunchback to double back and pick out an “abnormal” brain instead (in the Brooks/Wilder film, the hunchback tells Frankenstein it’s from “Abby someone.” “Abby someone? Abby who?” “Abby…normal... I'm almost sure that was the name”). On a macro level, that seems a pretty apt statement for the movie, and for Frankenstein lore as a whole: abnormality reigns. The movies' scenery tilts in at 45 degree expressionistic angles that seem to trap viewers within their frames, the percussion section of their soundtrack is supplied at one point by a beating heart stimulated by electrodes, the actors' performances range from camp to manic hysteria. It's all weird and mesmerizing and not quite able to be pinned down satisfactorily, a glorious tightrope between dream and Mary Shelley's original nightmare.

          That's also probably one of the main reasons I've never really been able to escape Frankenstein since that time of first discovery: it challenges you, asks the biggest possible questions about creation and death and what we owe to each other here in the time in-between... but since those questions can't be answered by any human, it remains rewardingly mysterious in the end. Assigned readings in high school, a focused college seminar, and countless late night movie viewings have all given me a greater sense of context for all things Frankenstein -- for example, did you know that James Whale, the Universal films director, filled his masterpieces with LGBTQ overtones that are now surprisingly (but commendably) overt for their release dates in the 1930s? -- but that prevailing sense of mystery and spookiness means that this story still has a primal immediacy with every encounter.  I'm still there, hardly daring to breath beneath my covers, because I'm certain some behemoth is lurking just feet away, with a soul that's even more hurt and damaged than his patchwork anatomy. Anyone who's ever had to go through periods with that same perspective from the outside looking in... aka my time in middle school when I discovered Frankenstein in the first place... aka a young woman author in Geneva whose attempts at writing a ghost story are being scoffed at by the men around her... can understand why the Creature and his situation there ring such a bell, and it's one of the things I think all Frankenstein studies deserve such attention for.

The Creature finds his solitude, his voice, his sense of self-expression through books and reading. As someone who's still chasing down the sheer adrenaline high of those Scholastic fairs all these years later, I can't thank Mary Shelley enough for crafting this book for all of us who choose to do the same.
Go find what makes you "other," abnormal, Monstrous. Go chase it down and unleash it on the world. In the end, it's what makes us each of us, and the world at large, so much more ALIIIIIIIIVE.

Pros at Cons

I hope it's no surprise at this point to anyone reading this that the Cooks, and many in their extended social spheres, are what can be kindly described as "pop culture connoisseurs." Alternatively, we also answer to "comic book fans," "movie buffs," or most succinctly, "geeks." Put some respect on it, thank you very much.

An avid subscriber to actor/writer Simon Pegg's views about geekdom for many years now, I've always worn my excitement to all things superheroes, sci-fi & suchlike on my size-medium sleeve, and I'm happy to report that, pop culture-wise, certainly, the rest of the mainstream world finally seems to be catching on to this good thing we've been raving about since we were old enough to run around the house in Spider-Man pajamas (just me?). A fun fact for any who haven't already heard it: rather than the traditional route of One Fish, Two Fish or The Very Hungry Caterpillar, this humble author actually learned to read in the pages of comic books. At a vulnerably impressionable age, my dad Patrick got me a then-new copy of The Essential Spider-Man, a black-&-white anthology reprint of twenty-five or so original Spider-Man comics from the early 1960s... that selfsame frayed volume retains a spot of prominence on a shelf in my bedroom, a decent amount of its pages bearing the chocolate fingerprint stains of six-year-old fingers, and rarely do more than a few months go past at a time before I take it down and thumb through it again.

Given such an upbringing, therefore, it should be no surprise that the Cooks and all manner of extended friends and family have added a pilgrimage to Comic-Con as part of their annual schedule for the past few years now -- and where better place to have it than our own beloved Beantown?

If you're a people-watcher (I could personally list it as a resume skill), there really is no more unique event to walk around at, open-mouthed, for the whole calendar year. We all had our cameras constantly at the ready to pose with the thousands of "cosplayers" -- people who dress up in startlingly elaborate and detailed costumes of their favorite fictional characters -- who made the convention center feel like a Mos Eisley cantina of comic book characters come to life.

Scroll through at your leisure at some of the craziest or most incredible sights we saw that day --including more than a few celebrity guest cameos! -- but just like they do in Marvel movies, make sure you don't leave till after the end credits have gone and the house lights come up.

WARNING: dad jokes, fanboy insider references, and puns galore ahead. You've been warned.

Wonder Woman, finally opting for some non-invisible means of transportation

GET YOUR STINKING PAWS OFF ME, YOU DAMN DIRTY APE

"Whosoever holds this hammer --

-- if he be worthy --

-- shall possess the power of THOR!"

For all you Neil Gaiman fans out there -- Coraline's Other Mother, because there's no way your nightmares tonight could get any scarier, right?

... Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.
"Georgieeeeeee....."

With so many things wrong in this neighborhood, who you gonna call?

Did someone call for a Doctor?

*REGENERATION*

"Come with me."

*REGENERATION*

"I am not a doctor. I am the Doctor."

"No, no, no, dear me, no. I am the Doctor. The original, you might say."

*REGENERATION*

I for one think it's about time there was finally a woman at the controls of the TARDIS. Time and space can't hurry up quick enough, Doctor 13. 

But in the meantime, Heather's content to just swoon  here over Doctor 11, the single-handed savior of the bowtie industry and Heather's major longtime crush: the super-cool and friendly Matt Smith...

And then fistbump with his bestie traveling Companion, the equally cool and exponentially more Scottish Karen Gillan (those red locks of hers are also beneath the badass purple baldness of Nebula, for all you Guardians of the Galaxy people out there!)

Far off in another corner of a galaxy far, far away, this trio had the privilege to meet and have a full conversation with the man fluent in over six million forms of communication -- the uber-posh and downright pleasant Mr. Anthony Daniels, Star Wars' iconic C-3PO himself.

And a good thing we did, too, or there would've been no one to shut down all the garbage mashers on the detention level for us.

Where there's C-3PO, OF COURSE there has to be his number one friend and rusty bucket of bolts, R2-D2.

Less friendly was (this INCREDIBLE cosplay of) reformed Empire droid K2-SO, who kept delivering slaps in the face to Rebel scum

"Quiet! And there's a fresh one if you mouth off again."

The costumes here were all truly of the First Order

Punch it.I gotta admit -- sitting in the pilot's chair of the Millenium Falcon (with Nien Nunb even in the background!) was, as they say, "a bit of a moment."

In a day full of them, thanks in part to these amazing Amazons.

For lunch: chimichangas all around

As prepared by the only deadliest sharpest finest adamantium cutlery.

For lunch costs, and all the other MAJOR dents in our bank accounts caused by the armfuls of swag we each brought home afterwards, the preferred method of payment was "checks with little poodles on them," property of Bikini Bottom's most ticklish reformed criminal mastermind

In terms of the wickedest being beneath the waves, however, there was only one contender. Heather and I were speechless.

Zachary, no help at all, just kept joking at the situation.

With all these villains lurking around, there was only one team who could Assemble to Avenge the day. After years and years, I finally got to join their number!

As you've no doubt gathered from this barrage of pics (chosen from out of, I promise you, dozens, if not hundreds more), it really is something of an event to be a part of. In my opinion, it's the kind of event you should want to be a part of, nowadays especially.

Simultaneous to these goings-on in our cool corner of the world, rioters and protesters were clashing in Charlottesville, VA, with heartbreaking results. While I'll take any opportunity I can to talk your ear off about the latest plot details for the upcoming Avengers movies, I can't lie and say that I was undisturbed or willfully asleep to the historic and horrible events that were happening elsewhere; they struck a jarring chord with me, deeply, as some idealistic part of me hopes also happened to all decent Americans. The narrative on display there (and on your news station of choice, most likely, in the week now since), of naked hatred, prejudice, exclusivity, and violence, should have had no business here in 2017... but we're long since past any false ideas of "there's no way this could have happened in our country" anymore.  It did happen, and in doing so, the proverbial rock of American society was upturned to thrust an ugly, ugly underside into the spotlight. As uncomfortable as it was - and is, and will be - for many of us to confront it, it's been there all along, and not everyone has been so privileged as to be able to ignore it until now, not when it exists as an entrenched part of the system for so many.

As whole ethnic groups and other minorities that make up the basic fabric of our society have faced this latest, horrifyingly blatant round of discrimination, there's been a lot of chatter to the tune of "What can we do against it? How can I, an individual, counter these kind of atrocities?" The most practical answer is probably no further away than a google search and donation (of time and/or money) to a PoC, feminist, LGBTQ+, immigrant/refugee, poverty, and/or general peacekeeping aid group who does that kind of work daily, on the front lines of their respective issues.
But what about the longer-term, harder fix of internal adjustment? What about the soul-searching that's needed to bring us to the other side of this? What behavioral model do we have that's everything opposite to what went down in Virginia (and other places across the country)?

And here's where it all comes back around.

While my Twitter feed was delivering livetime more and more discouraging updates about the state of our beloved country , I needed to look no further than my immediate surroundings at comic-con to find hope again. There, up and down every aisle, thronged dozens deep in places, were tens of thousands of people -- of every creed, color, gender and sexual identity, age, body type, and class -- gathered together, peacefully, in celebration of: what?
Celebration of creativity. Of passion. Of inclusivity. Of a shared community experience. Of modern day heroes, pillars of our 21st century culture: an undocumented immigrant from the planet Krypton who has become a literal embodiment of Americana and the American Dream; a space princess-general who has no time for your male posturing; a team of superpowered mutants, ostracized and persecuted because of their from-birth identity as outsiders; a lower-class Brooklyn kid who, after an issue-one splash cover punching Adolf Hitler unconscious, has been identified since his first appearance with defeating Nazis and everything they stand for. And forget all simple notions of black or white or brown or Asian skin color... there were people walking around that were purple, orange, green, metal, tentacled, scaly, and a whole bunch of other stuff I don't even know about (there was some weird stuff, honestly). These are the ideals we set for ourselves to reach, that we have consciously and societally raised up as the individuals and themes worthy of adoration, no matter how fictional they may be. It's pretty special to see such a large gathering have such unbridled enthusiasm for all those things and more besides, and it's a reason much better than people watching why I'll never tire of going to one of these events.

You may well scream that I've been corrupted by the "liberal Hollywood agenda," that I'm living in a ludicrous fantasy world, that all of this sad rambling is out-of-touch, privileged preaching that has no effect on the actual world we live in.

Well, ok. I respect that.

But what could happen if that comic-con mentality was applied to other things? For every hate-filled gathering by hooded tiki-torchlight, there's a gathering of superheroes populated by the part of humanity that I choose to be a part of, that recognizes, celebrates, and aims to spread positivity to as many people as possible? Could they, say, gather tens of thousands of strong, of literally every sort and type, to march through Boston in a peaceful yet awe-inspiring display of multiculturalism, love, and tolerance, drowning out and altogether preventing the hatred we saw only a week ago in Charlottesville? Or carry on the same fight in smaller, more everyday ways that seldom make the news, but which still allow me to retain hope in a country that never needed to be made great again... because it was already great?

Imagine if that could happen.

"My faith's in people, I guess. Individuals. And I'm happy to say that, for the most part, they haven't let me down. Which is why I can't let them down either. I know you're doing what you believe in, and that's all any of us can do... So no matter what, I promise you, if you need us - if you need me - I'll be there."

Stories from the Desert

We encounter each other in words, words 

spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, 

words to consider, reconsider. 

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark 

the will of some one and then others, who said 

'I need to see what’s on the other side.' 

I know there’s something better down the road. 

We need to find a place where we are safe. 

We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

So goes Elizabeth Alexander's spectacular poem Praise Song for the Day, composed specially for the 2008 inauguration of Barack Obama (and found here, for anyone looking for their daily fix of extraordinary poetry). And so began last Sunday's concert in Foxboro's Gillette Stadium, the lines of the poem scrolling up an enormous stage screen to begin a concert event which has finally roused me from my writing slumber. And after all this time, I have to say, it is good to be back. Now, before we delve into the specific circumstances which have revived my efforts to clutter up your social media feeds with my ramblings for the foreseeable future, first--

A story:

I was a music fan from elementary school days, but at first it only meant  listening to movie soundtracks -- with a walkman CD player, in the days when that was still the private-listening music device of choice. I'd pop in The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Superman and stare out the window on car rides while replaying that CD's respective movie in my head in near-perfect sync to the music.

But then, as per the usual rite of teen passage, my fanboy symphonies were shot through by the righteous unholy racket of rock'n'roll, and nothing was the same again. Such was its impact on my impressionable young self, as a matter of fact, that I can actually pinpoint the specific album that was the root cause of it all: a sleek black CD, near-sinister in its simple allure, with U2 18 printed in small orange block font across the bottom. I popped it into my trusty little walkman, pressed play, and "Uno, dos, tres, catorce" (that's typical Gaelic counting skills for you)... magic.

Yes, this Irish boy's first popular music exposure came courtesy of the Irish boys, the Dublin lads with a leprechaun pot of triple platinum albums and a Blarney stone-cold claim on the title of "the greatest rock band in the world." For the next however many months after finding that first CD of singles, it was just the walkman and the plastic of the headphones and U2 blasting their soundscapes through the ear canals of a scrawny Lowell middle schooler. Over the decade or more since then, and with the collected works of music as an entity never further away than the nearest smart device, my music tastes have grown and adapted accordingly (there's still only one Boss in charge of my playlists, I don't think anyone reading this will be shocked to know). But U2 will always claim that distinction in my mind of being the first ones to plant their flag, to light that spark.

 For my own voyage of uncharted discovery, it made no difference that the quartet had already been around for 25+ years at that point, or even that my parents -- the ones who had given me the Eden apple CD in the first place -- were both avowed veteran fans in their own right. Lightning had already been striking millions of years before Ben Franklin sent his kite flying, but he still needed to go out and make that discovery for himself; this was me sending up my own fledgling beacon into the musicsphere, the headphone cables acting as the kite string to usher me along to the discovery of one of the modern world's more potent electrical charges: guitar amplifiers dialing up to eleven in service of a story. 

Last Sunday night was a summoning, a re-conducting of that story all over again -- of remembering that feeling of discovery upon first listen. The Joshua Tree is U2's passion project about America, told through wonder-filled and earnest immigrant eyes which see their adopted country for all its joy, hypocrisy, potential, bleakness, and all-encompassing scope. That America and the people in it have changed in the 30 years now since The Joshua Tree's release: everyone in Foxboro sat down with older, wiser ears than the ones that first encountered this particular story way back when... I for one would wager there have been encounters with quite a few more sad stories in the interim. 

Boston: where the green, white, and orange meets the red, white, and blue

But, like the lifecycles in the desert areas from which the album draws its name and iconic imagery, rebirth's a certainty. Freshness, renewal, all that gets brought to the table when you consider, as Bono said during the night, "America's not just a country -- it's an idea." In that sense, The Joshua Tree, like so many other great stories, challenges its listeners (Foxboro attendees included) to pick up where it leaves off to begin telling an even better one; like the type of story displayed during the course of the show when an enormous banner of a Syrian refugee girl's passport photo was literally upheld across the stadium by thousands of  American hands; like the type of story  where a massive screen behind the band flashed images of modern and historical women's rights activists in their efforts for a more equal world while Bono chorused, "baby, baby, baby, light my way." 

It's also the kind of story I've been slack on maintaining on this page here for about a year now. That time has certainly been with its share of ups and downs in equal measure, and many's the time when "ok, time to get back to it!" efforts fallen have by the wayside, leading to a shamefully full unpublished draft folder. But now, the times they are a'changing, it's a hard rain gonna fall (and any other Bob Dylan song title you wanna throw in there), and it's time for met to get back out there with my kite in hand, ready to catch some new electricity and find some new stories to upend my days with in the best possible sense. With grad school all wrapped up for good, and itchy fingers ready to start writing some new stories -- mine, and with hope, more importantly, yours, ours -- I'm happy to announce my return from the desert. And how better for the purposes of this post than with the choruses from two of my very favorite U2 songs:

"I'm wide awake -- wide awake. I'm not sleeping"
because
"I still haven't found what I'm looking for."

The Last Adventure

I've put this off for as long as possible, because in the long list of things I never wanted to have to sit down and write, this one's right down there at the lowest bottom. But the lady I'm here to talk about today would suffer no such talk of putting off, so here we go.
As many of you know, my aunt Anne (Nicholson) Blake passed away this week at the too-early age of 52. Her passing has left a hole in our close extended family that, even all these days later, we haven't even begun to comprehend, and I suspect that such will be the case for a long time to come still. All I can hope to do here today is to remember my aunt by sharing a few stories with you that represent the amazing person she was as I knew her; if my poor rendering provides even a fractional impression of the extraordinary person she was, you'll have a better understanding of just what a bright spark the world has lost.

Watching bits of the Democratic National Convention this week, I was reminded of a certain glass-ceiling-shattering candidate's (true) suggestion that "it takes a village to raise a child." In the village body of my own upbringing, Annie was in the governing cabinet. As far back as my memories reach -- surprisingly far -- Annie is present. I can remember being two years old and heading to the movie theaters for the first time to see Toy Story, for example, an experience which has obviously had lasting staying power... and Annie was there for it. I was so small at the time that I had to sit between her and my mother, and the two of them had to literally hold down my folding theater seat on either side for the duration of the movie, or risk it folding me up into the upholstery.
Annie and my mother always seemed to be a dual act like that. They were, in my mom's own words, each other's "original best friends." They grew up in an amazing household in the small town of Paxton, MA (right outside Worcester, since you've almost definitely never heard of it) with my two grandparents and an older brother, my Uncle Don. Annie, never one to suffer fools at any age, was infamous on the streets of Paxton for walking uninvited into my uncle's all-male neighborhood games, whereupon she would tell them in no uncertain terms that they were "doing it wrong," and promptly proceed to school them all. "You throw/hit/run/do sports like a girl" never flew as an insult in my family growing up, because I saw Annie do the same in her adult life -- I knew it was a high compliment.

She was one of the more avid sports fans I ever knew. Besides watching the Sox, Celtics, Pats, and especially the Bruins, she was a fitness fiend: she took 5am spin classes, kickboxed, played soccer, even fenced during her college days. She was a fiercely proud alumna of the College of the Holy Cross (Class of '86), and was instrumental in pointing me down the path to becoming a Crusader myself. Till the end of her days, Annie was the embodiment of everything I came to understand in my own time about Purple Pride and what being a Crusader meant in the context of the real world. My "Hoyas" and "Chu chu ra ras" will always have a bit more emphasis on them from now on.
During my own time in college, nothing could make my day or even my week like a surprise care package from Annie; she was always somehow able to glean the secret information of my mailing address from an unknown source, and many was the day I'd come home from a late night studying in the library to an unannounced batch of baked goods. This sounds great already, I understand, but the true value of these packages is something I really have to emphasize: without apology, Annie was the greatest baker I have ever known. "Man-hands Martha Stewart," as Annie herself referred to the cooking icon, had NOTHING on the baking ability of my aunt. Her s'mores brownies (every crumb as delicious as they sound) and cherry jam cookies will never and can never be duplicated, despite whatever poor attempts we might try and make in the future.
I have a lot of memories about travelling to local farms every summer and fall with Annie to pick strawberries or blueberries or apples or some other kind of fresh fruit, which would then be promptly baked into one of those amazing concoctions. Looking back on those times in retrospect, it's like something right out of the sun-drenched pages of a storybook or fairytale... they seem so ideal, so perfect, I almost have a hard time believing they ever happened. I can't express in words how thankful I am that they really did.

I make this fairytale association, perhaps, because Annie was in the company of only my father and grandfather in terms of instilling my love of reading. She had a seemingly endless array of storybooks and picture books, and for a child-toddler who insisted that every single reading and re-reading be done with the exact same pacing and intonation -- "No, Annie, no, read it this way!" -- she was second to none. Perhaps most significantly, it was Annie who introduced me at age seven to a small, little known chapter book, the first of a series, by name of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The rest, as they say, is history. I don't think I actually owned a copy of that first J.K. Rowling book for a long time, because Annie lived so close and we saw her so often that I would just use hers. Every Friday growing up, on school vacations and through summers, Annie would take myself, her son John, and my sister Heather on weekly outings called "Adventure Fridays." Every week, we would pile into her well-used maroon Ford Taurus, where Annie had the entire set of Harry Potter books on audio CD as narrated by English actor Jim Dale, "the man of a hundred voices." We would drive around the entire state of Massachusetts and parts beyond, to the zoo, the aquarium, the movies, the mall, the beach, the mini golf course, even just trips to my grandmother's, Jim Dale providing "Harr-ee! Harr-ee!" narration for our trip the entire way. I remember finishing the third book in the series on an Adventure Friday and leaving Annie that day with the farewell, "mischief managed," a phrase used in the story to wipe clean an enchanted map.

As I grew older, and new Harry Potter books sadly became a thing of the past (Annie and I went to the last few midnight premieres of the series together... not the movie premieres, mind you, I'm saying we waited together in a Barnes & Noble until midnight when the new books came out), I took a college class in "detective fiction," and Annie and I then began trading off books from the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie (and not once, in all our readings, were either of us ever successfully able to predict the killer, damn it). As the other member in our book club of two, it was Annie who I then naturally turned to when I first began writing stories of my own. She was my most nit-picking editor and frankest critic, as well as my warmest reviewer and most eager audience reader. I wrote a one-off children's story for an undergraduate assignment once which I sent to her for perusal, not thinking much of it; because of the feedback and comments she gave, and continued to give for months and years and drafts upon drafts upon drafts afterwards, I will now be working with a literary agent in the fall to turn that same story into a publishable manuscript. Annie's voice will now forever be constantly in my ear as I take up a pen or turn to a keyboard, and I can't be more thankful for that.

I don't even have time on top of all this to touch adequately upon Annie's stellar career as a lawyer after meeting her devoted husband John at Vermont Law School, her epic victories as a youth league coach in the Chelmsford, MA, area, or the hundreds of immigrant students whose lives she impacted as a teacher of English as a second language in the Billerica school system; she was a world traveler, gardener, bird-watcher, fashionista (three days before my freshman year of high school she threw out my entire closet and forcibly dragged me to the nearest mall to buy a whole new wardrobe, and never gave me the chance/choice to look back after), movie buff, world-class tea barista, Downton Abbey fanatic, blogger, and party planner extraordinaire. She was the living definition of teacher, coach, friend, cousin, daughter, aunt, sister, wife, mother.
She was also, besides all these things, a fighter. A survivor. A warrior.
Annie's first bout with the insidious disease that is cancer came with a leukemia diagnosis in 2002. She underwent chemotherapy and came out smiling on the other side, the disease in remission. In 2004 she literally became the poster girl for Lowell General Hospital's annual Cancer Walk, and the entire extended family all became card-carrying infantryman on the walking team Annie's Army.

She and my mom also made the annual 13.1 mile Dana Farber walk from Wellesley College along the Boston Marathon course; I would regularly hop in with three miles left to go and then eat more than anyone combined at the finish line festivities.
In 2013, we received the gut punch revelation that Annie's leukemia had returned. The world class doctors in Boston who had kept tabs on her during remission were stunned... this was the type of cancer which, once treated, was never supposed to come back again. While the rest of the family reeled from the news, Annie, true to form, hunkered down and prepared for the battle ahead. She was at Brigham and Women's Hospital undergoing a round of chemotherapy when I ran my first Boston Marathon that same year, and our plan was then to visit her once I had finished. Because of this, my mom and sister stood on the other side of the street from their usual location, the spot where they had watched my dad cross seven times previously, since it would allow for an easier exit to the hospital... and because of this, they were spared being blown up in a terrorist attack. Even in the worst of circumstances imaginable, even unconsciously, Annie was still busy saving our lives.
Annie underwent experimental stem cell transplantation therapy a few months later, which then allowed her to kick cancer's ass a SECOND time, showing how she truly was not one to be trifled with. While it successfully treated the cancer, however, the transplant created subsequent health problems for Annie which plagued her last few years. The soft tissue cells of her original biology began rejecting the new transplantation cells, effectively rendering her blind and unable to breathe, amongst a host of other problems. These caused frequent hospitalizations and, after a minute by minute struggle for the last three years, are what eventually caused her passing. Even as her body failed, however, her spirit and mind remained unbroken, or, if anything, shone out the clearer for all the world to see. Those care packages of baked goods, those meticulous story edits and Agatha Christie novels, were somehow done even as she battled all these obstacles -- while I would of course like to remember her most in health, I think some part of me will remember Annie and be awed by her especially during these years of sickness when she was still nevertheless able to accomplish so much.

The societal custom in such a case, vexingly to me, seems to be saying that "so and so lost their battle in the end." Annie did not lose her battle. Her every waking moment was a battle, day-in, day-out, for years on end, and she won victories every new successive day. That is not defeat. Annie is now celebrating those hard-won victories somewhere, I've never been more sure of anything. Her whole life was a series of not settling, of challenging herself, of tackling adventures. When she was tired of watching the boys screw it up, she jumped in and changed the playground games; when she set her mind on it, she became a lawyer, and a damn good one; when she was oppressed by cancer, she beat it back... twice; when she wanted to make the most out of her renewed take on life, she touched the lives of countless others by becoming a teacher and excelling at it. And she balanced all these remarkable accomplishments with her favorite and most important adventure of all, her family, and gave selflessly and wholly to everyone lucky enough to be in it. That's who she was. That's who we've lost. Through the past week, however, all I could think of was, appropriately, a line from one of J.K. Rowling's most beloved characters.

"To the well-organized mind," Albus Dumbledore says, "death is but the next great adventure."

Annie, you had one of, if not the, most organized mind I've had the honor of knowing, and I know that all you've done is move on to your next and greatest adventure. I wish you all the luck and happiness I can as you embark on it. For all the ones you gave us here, for all the memories, for all the love, our million thanks and awed appreciation, which we can never repay. Love you, Annie. You will be missed desperately.

Mischief Managed.

"I'll Write My Way Out"

I can remember how a friend of mine at school told me that she'd once had a history teacher who tried impressing upon the fifteen year old minds of her sophomore class that humans only recognized history when it was printed down for us in the print pages of a textbook, rarely -- if ever -- as it was unfolding livetime before us on our television screens.

Without meaning disrespect to that teacher and her years of experience, I can cite no less than four times in the last few many weeks where I'd take it to court that I'd disproved that theory. Such has probably been the case for a while, but now especially I feel like we're all witnesses to a general world atmosphere of a powder keg ready to blow. I personally can't remember another stretch of time where every log-on to Twitter was greeted with news of yet another gun violence death or a prominent world power Brexiting stage left. These are textbook-fodder events we've been going through on a day to day basis recently, and even though I thank my stars to have been personally removed from all of it, today's age of social media saturation means the degrees of separation between primary and secondary experiences are being chipped away with every cell-phone cam recording. 

Again, I can't stress enough how grateful and how aware I am that I'm safely on the periphery of all these events, but I'll admit without shame that I can only take so much "bigness" in the news before I need to balance it out with the small-scale, the personal, the day to day. I write. I run. I draw. I listen to music, often (very often) while doing any of those. 

Last week, in the midst of an otherwise busy summer, the Cooks took a trip down to the Big Apple, where Mom and Dad had a joint birthday celebration and I checked off the bucket list item of seeing a live Broadway show. Disney aficionados that we are, we were over the moon to be amongst a sold-out performance of The Lion King (and for anyone wondering, it was phenomenal... something I can't recommend enough for your own bucket lists, if you're able).
Oddly, though, that once-in-a-lifetime experience wasn't my lasting Broadway takeaway from the trip. Nope. That honor goes to the production happening literally the next block over, which we weren't even able to get in and see for ourselves. We and millions of other Americans are alike in that regard, because the bespoken production is the most unprecedented theater phenomenon I've witnessed in my lifetime -- and I suspect quite a few people in the older generations can say the same. As you can tell from this trip being my only Broadway expedition to date, I'm far from the savviest person on the theater scene (I still to date haven't seen Phantom of the Opera OR Les Miserables in any form in their entirety, much to my sister's shame), so tolerate that I'm a late bloomer with these things, and appreciate how monumentally my small-scale, personal, day to day music life has been altered for the better:

While on Broadway, I discovered Hamilton.

Well, I guess not technically. Because I don't live in a vacuum, I of course had some general awareness of composer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda's hip-hop musical about America's "ten-dollar founding father without a father." I'd seen snippets of a 60 Minutes feature about it, had seen Miranda carpool karaoke it with James Corden, and most impressively, had heard it discussed during the last twelve months or so in reverent tones, by some of the unlikeliest people I'd have ever imagined to care about such a thing. That these ripples existed, and were able to reach me way out on the far outskirts of theater "know," signaled to me that Hamilton was already something different entirely.

So when we drifted into a Broadway store in a Hakuna Matata daze and I happened to see the Hamilton cast album on a shelf , I figured that "when in Rome," I might as well see what all the uproar was about. I popped it into the CD player during the drive leaving NY, and suddenly I find myself here ten days later, attempting to flawlessly karaoke hip-hop lyrics about the Battle of Yorktown (or, more accurately, the lyrics of all three principal leads, simultaneously), without any explanation as to how. The CD being without a warning label, I was unaware and unprepared for the all-consuming effect it's had on my life in the time since the Broadway shop. I get that I'm far from the first to discover this, but with only the evidence of the cast recording to go on, I want to state for the record that this thing is, in a word, flawless. 

Besides chronicling the majority of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's remarkable adult life, rising and falling through his pivotal role in the tumult of the American Revolution and the subsequent implementation of the government system that's come down to us in the years since, the musical has some of the most ingenious and densely-packed writing I've ever come across in any form, and is actually in many senses a love letter to writing itself (you can understand my attraction). That it also accomplishes all these things through the use of race-blind casting and 21st century hip-hop sensibilities isn't just a novelty trick to put bodies in seats or gain a spot atop the charts -- it's integral to what Hamilton's all about. To paraphrase Lin-Manuel Miranda's own words, it's a perfect synergy of America NOW telling a story about America THEN.
Listening to Miranda and his castmates rap battle and freestyle in debates about government control, the United States' uncertain role in foreign affairs, and the devastating effects of gun violence in the form of both war and honor duels -- when a black actor portraying Vice President Aaron Burr drops a showstopper angrily bemoaning how he's left out of "The Room Where It Happens" as country-changing deals are cut inside without his inclusion -- it becomes harder and harder to delineate where that line between then/now even actually is. 

Most haunting, both in my first listen and the near-incessant listenings that have come since, is General George Washington's warning to Hamilton that "I know that we can win/I know that greatness lies in you/But remember from here on in/History has its eyes on you." It's a reminder to his young right-hand-man that every subsequent decision he makes, public and private, big and small, historical and personal, will be remembered and scrutinized by the generations to come. How, then, should he act, given this warning?
How, then, should we?
When generations look back at us in their history-teacher-approved textbooks, how will what's printed remember what it is we've been seeing on our TV screens? What's going to be our legacy? It's a problem that vexed our founding men and women themselves as they  navigated their own powder keg atmosphere, the ramifications of which changed the face of the earth in its burning, and I don't think it's a stretch to say that we continue their struggle with it.
Works of lightning-in-a-bottle, straight-up, flat-out (and any other way you want) sheer genius like Hamilton, while helpfully reminding us of this legacy, are therefore more important to me for another reason altogether. They are instances where art -- where creativity and passion and talent and even love -- fulfills its most inspirational role of uniting people... of taking human experiences (of which Alexander Hamilton's was unquestionably one), warts and all, and alchemizing them into something universal and remarkable. That is a legacy to be proud of.
Ironically, I'm jumping onto the Hamiltrain here right at a close of sorts: although the show goes on stronger than ever, it will do so without  Lin-Manuel Miranda and a sizable part of the cast, who don their revolutionary gear for the final time tonight, actually, before leaving to pursue other projects for a stretch. Mr. Miranda et al, please allow this to be my Alexander Hamilton-length thank you letter for reminding us all how music, theater, words retain their most important power, even -- especially -- amidst historical happenings like ours. So go. Get out there. Come up with your own.

Don't throw away your shot.

On Orlando

While I was in England last October -- a long story better explained in a previous posting -- one of the unbelievably kind people I was fortunate to meet was, besides a great chili cook and a speed demon runner, an English policeman. As I suspect is how most English-American conversations go down, we eventually got around to comparing-contrasting details of our daily lives. As he talked about his job as a policeman, there was no talk of Kevlar vests or shooting range training that comes up a lot when talking to American cops.
"You don't carry a gun?" I eventually had to ask him.
"Why would I carry a gun?" he responded, genuinely meaning it. "Your voice is always the best first line of defense against the bad guys"
It's a writing cliché, but I was literally stunned silent by this. I just stared at the guy for a few seconds.
"But what if the bad guys have a gun?" I asked eventually.
Now it was his turn to look confused.
"Erm... they don't."

I've perhaps never been more painfully aware of my American upbringing and identity than I was during that conversation, and I think that's disgusting. Even with all the blatantly touristy things I saw and did over in another country, nothing marked me as an outsider as much as my inability to grasp the concept that guns were just not a reality of everyday life in that part of the world. I literally couldn't comprehend that world view, and I've never looked at ours the same way again afterwards.

I'm not ashamed to be a proud U.S. citizen, and hope never to be anything otherwise until the day I die. I'm thankful every single day for our basic constitutional rights, not least of which because they allow me the freedom of speech to maintain this silly blog here and tell you stories about the ridiculous things I get up to sometimes (and which similarly allows you to read -- or not read -- it of your own free will).
A lot of people have been exercising their own freedom of speech over the last few days to try and make sense of or express their grief for the monstrous attack in Orlando, FL. Social media is just a stream now of people sharing talk show hosts or screencap'd tweets articulating those thoughts for us in a very public way. I'm usually of the mind that such talk is better left to people who actually have business talking about it -- "give every man thy ear, but few thy voice" is usually my go-to for not contributing to the overwhelming wall of white noise that often marks the aftermath of these kinds of national tragedies.

After all, what perspective do I have to offer that makes my opinion worth a damn here? I like to think of myself as a LGBTQ ally, but I myself am not gay (and furthermore, I'm not a PoC in either of those communities, a fact which I feel has been unfortunately overlooked in a lot of this); I've been to Orlando several times on family vacations, but I can't say I'm too familiar with the town outside the boundaries of Disneyworld; hell, I can't even say I've ever been a regular on the club scene. Those are the kinds of voices that should obviously speak loudest here, not a societally-privileged adventure chronicler with a Pixar-themed blog site. But even though I'm not a LGBTQ clubbing Floridian...
I'm an American citizen.
And today, that makes me just as susceptible to an attack like anyone else.

I'm having a hard time right now believing I live in a country where that ugly, ugly "fact of life" is par for the course, so today I need to take a break from the stuff I usually post and get my thoughts down here instead.

In my year in the world of teaching now, I've had to make peace with the possibility of an armed threat on any given school day; of the reality, in a day of reading stories to kindergarteners or 3rd graders, that there have to be contingencies for mass shootings. "How am I gonna save the kids today if a psychopath gets into the school?" is a real, actual thought I have actually had go through my brain.
For the last few years, every trip to the movies for me has begun with a general environment sweep to find the closest means of exit in case of an emergency, and every person who gets up out of his or her seat during the course of the movie makes me inadvertently tense up, when in fact they're just going to the bathroom.

This is my script now. This is the script of 21st century American society. And I'm horrified by it.

Even the counterarguments are scripted now. One that I'm frankly sick and tired of hearing is that, "guns don't kill, people do," or, better, "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." To me, both are maddeningly reactive measures, steps to be taken once an incident has happened/is happening which will, hopefully, put a stop to it. To me, it's as if the general attitude is like, "Chemotherapy is the only thing we can do against cancer." Chemotherapy is undoubtedly one of the greatest medical advances in history, and it's the reason several friends and loved ones are still with me today. But having had to witness loved ones and friends alike go through their unbreakable experiences, I can attest even secondhand to the fact that it is a devastatingly RAVAGING treatment which, absurdly, often makes the original problem seem small in comparison. Chemotherapy saves lives, yes, but other parts of the body are destroyed in the meantime. Not for one minute has the scientific community ever gone, "Yep, job well done, we've done as much as we can, this is all we have to work with now," and washed their already-scrubbed hands clean. Not for one minute. Isn't it far, far better instead to ask:
What if we could just cure cancer in the first place?
What if we didn't have to worry about chemo, because there was no cancer necessitating its use?
We haven't solved that problem yet, but dammit if it's not the Holy Grail of modern medical research. We as a country raise BILLIONS of dollars every year in fun runs and walkathons and buzzcuts to fund research towards that end. It's a PROACTIVE strategy that recognizes, yes, there's a problem at hand, yet is optimistic enough to dare and say "Let's not accept this as the status quo. We can do better. We will do better."

So what the hell's the difference?

In my opinion, gun violence has become a cancer on a national scale. Terrorist or mental illness or homophobe or just general garbage, it doesn't matter -- nothing about any of those motivations makes a person dangerous to others so much as putting a rapid fire assault rifle in their hands, an occurrence which borders on unbelievability in its ease and frequency. It's become essentially as convenient now to buy a kitted-out assault rifle (I maintain that it's literally impossible for something to wear its statement of intent as conspicuously as "ASSAULT rifle") and a Call of Duty sized bag of ammo than it is to buy an advance ticket for the movies ... and like I've said, those purchases are becoming more and more likely to come into contact. It's laughable, except for the fact I've probably never been more scared by anything.
Sure, your second amendment rights that allow you to carry a gun are no less valid than my first amendment rights that allow me to say all this. I just maintain the fact that the second amendment was written at a time when our defense against an invading redcoat force consisted of "Hey Sam, grab your musket and meet us down on the common at 9am if it's not too big a problem," and you were lethal with said musket if you could fire off more than a round a minute. I truly wish there was a way (outside a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical) that the founding fathers could somehow lend their opinions to the actual debate that somehow still persists today of "does a military-grade AR-15 automatic rifle still fall under the umbrella of it's just for self-defense?" when that same weapon has been singly responsible for five high profile mass-casualty shootings in as many years (not to be confused with the other 133 U.S. mass shootings that have taken place just within the 165 days of 2016 thus far).

Those more world-weary or experienced than I have all the right in the world to sneer at me now, and maybe this is your evidence that I should just have kept my mouth shut about things I have no business talking about. Maybe guns are just too ingrained in our culture, and too many people adhere to an absolutist extremism, that we'll just treat the Orlando tragedy like every single one that's come before it... send "thoughts and prayers" to families torn apart beyond the help of either, observe obligatory moments of silence, and vaguely vow to do better the next time. In other words, nothing. Because as I've just said, without a change of any sort, the implication is that there is going to be a next time, for certain, unchangeable, unavoidable, scripted.

I'm a writer. I use words, blog posts like this, as a sort of self-helping cleanse to organize my thoughts about complicated issues like this (and if other eyes but mine get to read it, hey, I count it as a bonus). As a writer, when I see a script with problems, I put on my editing hat and get to work revising it. I don't know or even care what it is, but we, together, need to revise this script, cure this cancer, before it does any more irreparable damage. I'm rarely outspoken, angry, like this in any kind of public form, but I'm sick and tired -- hell, I'll even admit I'm jealous -- of seeing other countries with other scripts that have already been cured, looking at us, seeing ours, and asking "what are you waiting for?" Because at this point, I'm just not sure what the answer to that question is.