Potter's Point

For more than twenty years I have written about the fictional New England town of Potter's Point. Lately I've started taking photos of the place, which is tricky, given the fact that the town is imaginary. . .

Here's a photo of Virgil Boggs' house on Cranberry Drive.



If you click on the photo, you get whisked away into flickr-land where I've posted more scenes from Potter's Point.

How to spend our winnings

Well, we didn’t win the big Mega Millions lottery this month. That isn’t surprising considering the odds are forty-seven kazillion to one and my wife only bought one ticket. And that’s probably our one lottery ticket for the year.

We’re not gamblers. We don’t go to Atlantic City. We don’t go to the Indian casinos, not even for the buffet. In fact, we avoid most chance-taking unless you count buying a few tickets for the North Fairhaven Improvement Association’s annual Cow Chip Contest.

Every once in a while, though, when the jackpot grows huge enough to keep us in shoes, Littlest Pet Shop toys and chocolate chip cookies for life, my wife buys a ticket. Then, while we wait for our numbers to be picked, we plan what we’ll do with the truck loads of cash we’re going to win.

Keeping true to the spirit of a blog, which is to share one’s mundane thoughts with total strangers, here is what my wife suggested that she would do with $390 million.

1. Pay off the house. This, mind you, is the little, two bedroom place with the half-painted trim and the swing set in the backyard. Notice it’s not, "Buy a gigantulous new home in a fancy smancy nearby town that doesn’t have its own supermarket." Notice, also, it’s not, "Buy lots and lots of shoes."

2. Share some of it with the family. I’m hoping that this includes me.

3. Buy new cars, after the ones we have break down. We might also go out to a fancy restaurant after we’ve eaten all the leftovers in the fridge. When pressed on the new car question, my wife’s choice, after the 1995 Jeep Wrangler dies, is. . . a brand new Jeep Wrangler!

4. Set some aside for our daughter’s college education. Because she’ll need a good paying job, with health benefits, the way we’re blowing this fortune.

5. Buy a big piece of land with an old colonial house on it and start a living-history museum, maybe with a history-themed amusement park, too. Man, our friends are gonna be beatin’ down the doors to visit us, huh? We’ll have candle-dipping parties and corn husking bees! We might make the cover of Yankee magazine!

As you can see, we did not win the Mega Millions lottery because we would be a total embarrassment to other lottery winners. We’d have no clue how to handle our winnings in a way befitting true Americans. We would live long and quiet lives and die with plenty of money left over.

And we’d leave some of it to Friends of the Library. . .

Digging up our roots

My daughter had to make a family tree for school recently. It was a very simple tree, suitable for first graders, with spaces for herself, her parents and her grandparents. There was a note that additional spaces could be added for "steps" and other sundry characters. After we got the simple chart filled out, I decided that we should create a more detailed one for ourselves.

Oddly, although I’m an avid local history buff and have traced genealogies of some of the noteable people in town history, I’ve never spent much time recording the history of my own family.

Genealogy can be a complex and time consuming pursuit if you want to trace back a long way, especially if nobody in earlier generations of the family has started the task. It’s easier if you’ve got Mayflower connections, because there is lots of information on those families. That, though, is not us.

If, like us, you’re ordinary folks who have only had a few generations of family in this country, it’s more of a challenge. There are some Internet resources, but the ones with the most information charge for it. (Which is fair, because they did the legwork and archived all the records and maintain the websites.)

For now, though, we’re not interested in tracing our roots back millions of years to some homo erectus. (Yes, if you got back far enough, every family has a homo erectus. . .) We’re sticking to the simpler and least expensive method, which is basically asking older relatives for the facts. We’re recording Mom, Dad, the grandmas and the grandpas, the step-grandma, and the great-grandparents. We’re starting with very basic information: birth dates, places of birth, marriage dates, death dates, and any special facts of interest.

Once those basics are covered, we’re going to add some information on people’s occupations and other interesting tidbits. (What did Grandma Richard’s father do for a living? And has the family agreed on how we should spell Biernacha?)

These are the sorts of things that used to get recorded in the pages of the family Bible. Folks don’t do that as much these days. The idea can be transfered to other media, though.

Family history can be recorded in a computer program or used to embellish a scrapbooking project. You could add photos and/or video images and save it on a DVD. However you do it, it’s an interesting family project.

And if the young ones are bored with it all, just tell them how someday they’ll be older themselves and they’ll need something with which to bore their own children and grandchildren.

Between a rock and a hard place

Soon the town’s school department and school committee will decide whether or not to close my daughter’s school. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

The school decision was brought about by the building of a brand new, larger school in another part of town. When the new school opens next year, one of the town’s two oldest schools will probably close.

On the one hand, the main structures of both of the existing schools are more than a century old and both schools have rather shabby additions that were tacked on later when building skills had greatly declined. On the one day each week when I drop off and pick up my daughter, I sometimes feel inclined to wear a hard hat when standing close to the school.

If my daughter’s school closes, she might end up in the nice, big, brand new school. The walls and floors and bathrooms and funiture and stuff will all be new. There won’t be scary looking cracks in the bricks and the windows won’t be patched with chewing gum and Saran Wrap.

On the other hand, the main structure of her present school is more than a century old. I said that already, I know. But what that means in my daughter’s case is that she is in the same school that her father (me), her grandfather and her great-grandfather attended. Four generations in the same classrooms. My wife is volunteering in the school library the same way my mother did forty years ago. And I know that my family is not alone in having strong and longstanding ties to this neighborhood school.

If my daughter’s school closes, it will end a one-hundred-and-ten year old tradition of the schoolhouse "up the hill." Thousands of children have walked to that school since 1896, many of them first or second generation French-Canadian, English, Polish and Portuguese. For a majority of residents in my part of town, that school and activities that have taken place there have been focal points for the neighborhood. For some, like my grandfather, it was the only school they went to. It has stood there longer than all but one of the town’s churches.

So closing that school might be a bad thing.

Or it could be a good thing.

And whatever the school department eventually does, about half the people will think it’s the wrong thing.

The death of nobody

On one of the Internet forums I belong to, a very weird thing happened a couple of weeks ago.

The forum discusses a particular historical mystery. There are only about 300 or so registered members of the forum and of those, there are maybe two or three dozen who participate regularly. I’ve been a regular for a couple of years now. There was another regular, who I’ll call "Audrey," which, it turns out, is not her real name.

Over time, the members of this close-knit cyber-community got to know a lot about Auds. She was born in France, came to America at the age of 17, attended college in Boston, and ended up as the wife of a prominent dentist in Iowa. She was about 39, intelligent and attractive. She had six children, including a set of triplets. Her husband operated a rather large dental clinic and the well-to-do family lived in a large house.

From time to time we saw photos of the home. And of children. And of a husband. We learned more details about Audrey’s life than we did about anyone else on the forum. Audrey and another woman on the forum became the Internet equivalent of best friends. My family got Christmas cards from Audrey. Two years ago she sent us a CD of French Christmas carols.

Then a while back, another woman on the forum became suspicious. Every once in a while, parts of Audrey’s life story didn’t quite add up. The clincher came after Audrey had made arrangements to travel across the country to meet other forum members at a gathering. Just before this trip, Audrey reported that her mother had died in France unexpectedly and Audrey had to cancel her trip to Massachusetts.

The suspicious member began a little investigation. So did the forum’s administrator. And the results are in.

It turns out, Audrey does not exist at all. Audrey was, in fact, a man. One with a criminal record. "She" is now banned from our forum.

To say that our group was taken aback by this revelation is an understatement. It was like the death of a friend, but we were left with an odd, abnormal emptiness because there had never been a real person for whom to mourn.

This incident also reinforced the fact that on the Internet one cannot take anything for granted. The case of "Audrey" is by no means unique. Fortunately, we were not hurt and swindled in a physical or financial way as others have been when dealing with anonymous Internet contacts.

Beware. The person you think you know might not be real.

Tooth Fairy's first visit

The Wonder Child, who turned six a month ago, lost her first tooth at about 8:00 a.m. today. She starts first grade in three weeks.

Where does the time go?

Goodbye my sweets

Voluntarily, I have been cutting down my intake of chocolate chip cookies lately. It’s not pretty.

I say voluntarily because so far my blood sugar test results continue to remain in the normal range and my doctor has not ordered me to make any dietary changes, but the family has a history of being rather sweet. And my pants and belts started shrinking at an alarming rate last winter. So, I have opted to reduce my intake of sugary goodies.

Unfortunately, sugar is my only vice at the moment. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I’ve never touched a controlled substance. For much of my life, though, I’ve been known for my fondness of Coca-Cola and of chocolate.

I’ve almost completely cut out the regular cola. A typical can of cola has around 160 calories, which it would take about a half an hour of brisk walking to burn off. I would have to walk more than an hour a day to burn off the two cans of cola I typically drink each day. So I’ve switched to diet iced tea.

Bleah! I’m finding that diet beverages generally seem to taste even sweeter than the regular ones. Maybe it’s just the way artificial sweeteners work or maybe manufacturers have found that people who turn to diet beverages prefer the extra sweetness. I’m trying to adapt, because while I don’t like my drinks too sweet, I prefer some flavor over plain water.

Halfway good diet beverages also seem to cost a lot more than the plain old "high fructose corn syrup" kind. I hate that it costs more to be healthy.

But back to the cookies. There really are no acceptable diet alternatives to real, live dark chocolate chips. Since the Keebler elves took the yummy palm oil out of their factory made cookies, when I can’t have homemade chocolate chip cookies, I have relied on my grocery store bakery’s "Tub o’ Cookies." These vary in quality from batch to batch, but they’re somewhat closer to homemade than other commercial cookies. One gets four dozen cookies in a tub. They have enough chocolatey goodness to satisfy me, though they’re not a good as chocolate chocolate chip muffins. . .

The bad news is, when I cut my cookie consumption in half—from about seven or eight a day to three or four a day—the tub lasts too long and the cookies get too stale. So I’ve had to start buying the factory made cookies because they come in smaller packages. And factory cookies, even with chocolate chips in them, have all the flavor and texture of pavement.

So I’m going to be healthy and live longer, but I’m feeling pretty miserable. I’m snapping at my wife and daughter. The only reason I’m not kicking the dog is that we don’t have one. The guinea pig is too quick. It’s worse than when I quit smoking. They don’t make a chocolate patch. . .

So I’m sort of stuck halfway between physical health and mental health. I guess I have to decide which I prefer.

Right now I’m going to the kitchen to ponder that over a bowl of ice cream.