Outside the Green Parrot. In 1992, I think.

I was in a convenience store on Caroline Street, Sunday after the post-race party, a six pack of Fiji water and a laughably overpriced mini-bottle of Aleve in my hands, watching as the proprietor punched out tickets on the lottery machine and talked to the guy in front of me, a fortyish guy in cargo shorts, cap, and boat logo T-shirt.

“How’d it go, last night?” the proprietor asked.

“Bad,” he said. “Bad again. It was hardly worth going out.”

“It’ll turn around,” the proprietor said, with little enthusiasm. “I keep hearing on the news. The economy has already bottomed out.”

“Screw the economy,” the guy in front of me said. His shirt advertised Key West sunset cruises. “We’re all waiting on Cuba. Once Cuba opens up, we’ll all be sitting pretty.”

“Ah, Cuba.” The proprietor handed a couple of tickets to the boat guy. “There’s always Cuba.”

“I hear from people on the inside, it’s a year and a half away, at most. These are people who know.”

“Sure, I hear that, too. How long can it be now?”

I’ve been hearing a variation on this conversation in the Keys for twenty years. Cuba is the Holy Grail for anyone who runs a tourist boat business in Key West, and it’s a portent of doom for anyone who runs a bed-and-breakfast or a gift shop. There are very few people left on the island who remember what Key West was like when Havana was a legal destination for American tourists. I talked to one of them once, about ten years ago, on a casino boat in the waters off Key West.

Florida law mandates that casino boats have to go a certain number of miles offshore—I think it’s three—before they can turn on their slot machines and start dealing cards. We were returning from one such trip when I went to the back of the boat to count what little money I had left.

“I hope you didn’t put any money into one of those machines,” someone said.

I saw that Captain Tony Tarracino was sitting on one of the two seats in the stern. I’d seen him earlier, playing multiple hands of blackjack at a modest five bucks a pop. I knew who he was from the times I’d seen him on a barstool in the Saloon he’d run from 1961 until he’d sold it in 1989. Captain Tony is as close to an iconic character as Key West has ever had. Much more so than Jimmy Buffett, who, though associated with Key West in popular culture, moved away from the island in the mid-1980s.

“Not me,” I said. I took the other seat in the stern. The exhaust from the laboring boat engines was a miasmic gray cloud between us. Tony was wearing neatly pressed slacks and a polo shirt. It was a cool night on the water, in early January. “I stay away from the machines.”

“There’s three kinds of machines,” Tony said. “Loose machines, tight machines, and outright thievery. Those back there,” he hiked a thumb at the little gambling area behind us, “are the third kind. If they could jack the card games, they probably would. Hell, they probably do. This is a tight boat. They don’t let you go home with nothing.”

“Why do you come out then?”

Tony shrugged. “It’s the only game in town, I guess.”

I grinned at this gambler’s logic. Legend has it—and every statement made about Captain Tony Tarracino could and should be prefaced with the phrase Legend has it—that it was gambling that brought him to Key West. It’s said that Tony and a friend figured out a way to pick up New Jersey racetrack results on a shortwave radio just early enough to get bets in on those same races with Newark bookies. They won a lot of money in very little time, which earned Tony a trip to a Newark dump where goons beat him up and left him for dead. That was in 1946. Weeks later, he is said to have arrived in Key West on a milk truck with $12 in his pocket. Once there, he worked as a boathand, a captain of his own shrimper, a gun runner, and, in 1961, the owner and proprietor of Captain Tony’s Saloon on Greene Street. The bar is popularly advertised as the “Original Sloppy Joe’s Bar,” but it was standing empty in 1961 when Tony bought it. Immediately before that, it had been a gay bar that catered to sailors from the nearby naval base until the Navy placed it off-limits, thus ending its viability as a moneymaking enterprise. Tony owned and ran the bar from 1961 to 1989, when he sold it upon being elected mayor of Key West.

“It’s the only game in town until they open all that again.” He gestured vaguely out over the waters around us.

“All what?” I said. I didn’t know north from south.

“Havana,” Tony said. “Cuba. They open all that again and Key West will go back to being a few shacks, an airstrip, and a shitload of mosquitoes.” He started in, then, on one of his oft-told stories, some misadventure off Cuba during the Bay of Pigs. I recognized the story as one he’d told many times from his usual station by the cash register in the saloon that still bears his name, a saloon he visited regularly for twenty years after he sold it, to sign T-shirts and pose for pictures with tourists.

Tony Tarracino had arrived in Key West just after the worst of the Great Depression years, but he would have known many people who’d lived through the island’s lean years when virtually every year-round resident was on some sort of government relief. The history of Key West has been revised and reinvented many times, and the 1930s are now summed up primarily by tales of Ernest Hemingway and big fish stories. The truth is that the island was desperately impoverished in the 1930s and the few viable businesses on the island included a couple of bars with illegal gambling in the back, the Pan Am mail and passenger service to Havana, and a few notorious brothels at the southern end of the island.

As Tony was telling his Cuba story, two girls in their early twenties appeared in the back of the boat. Tony had been talking to them earlier at the card table. One of them had gotten a pen from one of the boathands. They had decided they wanted autographs. Tony took the pen and one of the girls turned around and lifted the sweatshirt she was wearing to ward off the chill. Underneath, she was wearing a tiny bikini bottom. Tony signed one bikini bottom, then the other. We watched the girls scamper back up the ladder to the bar above us.

“I’ve signed a lot of asses in my day,” Tony said.

Tony talked for a little while longer. He graciously shared a couple of card-playing tips with me, both of which eventually lost me considerable money until I abandoned them. When we pulled up to the boat slip, he was the first one off the boat, helped by two mates. He would have been about eighty years old then; he’d fathered his last child, with his fourth wife, a woman half his age, at the age of seventy.

In Captain Tony's. February, 2010.

The bar he owned and/or presided over for almost fifty years has always prided itself on being a bit of Old Key West, even as new Key West grows ever more upscale around it. This, of course, was never really true, at least in the years that I knew it. Captain Tony’s Saloon is one of the triumvirate of bars—the Hog’s Breath and Sloppy Joe’s being the others—that every cruise-ship daytripper makes a point of hitting on their three-hour sojourn on the island. At night, the bar is taken over by young people, kids who seemed young to me even twenty years ago, who favor the sweet rum punch doled out in souvenir Captain Tony’s plastic cups and get their bras and bikini tops stapled to the rafters. I can’t remember anything of consequence ever happening to me there, though I did see the deciding game of the 1995 Mariners-Yankees playoffs there, the thriller that represented Don Mattingly’s first and only sniff of post-season play in his between-the-glory-eras career.

Captain Tony passed away a little over a year ago, in November of 2008, at the age of 91. He was the island’s last link to an age before Disney cruise ships and Fantasy Fest parade floats sponsored by Captain Morgan rum and MetLife insurance. He’ll be sorely missed.

So. What else?

I saw on the ride down that the Caribbean Club bar at Mile Marker 104 in Key Largo now has a massive, imposing neighbor in the form of Jimmy Johnson’s Big Chill. Johnson, of Miami Hurricane and Dallas Cowboy championship fame, is probably the Keys’ biggest resident celebrity these days, and his new venture will surely steal whatever tourist traffic the Caribbean Club was getting. I stopped in at 11:30 on Saturday morning, en route to Key West in a rented Nissan Xterra, and found the usual crowd of locals already holding down every stool around the bar. I used the restroom, bought a can of Miller Lite for a dollar and took it out back to where other locals were struggled with boats on the boat ramp. The Caribbean Club’s small claim to fame is that its location was used to film exterior shots for the Humphrey Bogart film Key Largo. They might be selling less of those Bogey T-shirts in the near future.

And the race. The Key West Half Marathon. It was a beautiful course around the perimeters of Key West and Stock Island. I realized a half hour before race time that I’d left my iPod headphones in my car back in New Jersey, so I ran the race without musical accompaniment. It was an interesting experience, something I may try again. On purpose next time. Final tally: 13.1 miles, 1:59:23.

I did manage to close down the Green Parrot one night, Monday night, though I was only able to do so by napping from 9pm to 1am, then getting out of bed and arriving at the Parrot at 2am. The Parrot has not one but two 24-hour webcams in place now—something its management once insisted it would never have—and an upscale little boutique next door that sells the T-shirts that used to be jammed into a plastic bin beneath the bar, as well as all manner of kitschy coffee cups, frameable prints, and refrigerator magnets. It’s still open ’til four, and they’ll still put your last beer in a plastic cup for the road.

That was my only late night “adventure;” I sleep a lot more now when I’m away. I find more and more that the willies have a way of seeking me out if I become stranded between here and there. I’m much more susceptible to unease when I travel alone—I feel more alone—than I ever did in my twenties and thirties. The dreads come stalking me even as the bartender in some airport or casino or restaurant bar sets a first glass of beer before me. Sometimes that unease can spiral out of control, and I’ll find myself trapped in a place I don’t want to be, watching the Weather Channel repeat itself in endless loops, and making phone calls I shouldn’t be making. These days, I find it’s best to have always in front of me some destination or goal. I don’t have to be there yet, engaged in that activity yet, but I like to know it’s there, orienting me, drawing in the slack of the unpurposed time before me.

On my way out, on Tuesday, it was 75 degrees and sunny in Key West. I like to drive into Key West, but I take the puddle jumper out. When I arrived at the airport, I saw that it has been completely remodeled and expanded. The old Conch Flyer, the airport bar that once opened onto the tarmac, is now on the other side of the airport access road, attached to a new parking deck and connected to the departure gates via a long elevated walkway.

For a long time in Key West, the Conch Flyer was the bar of last resort. When every other bar was closed at 4am, the Conch Flyer, due to some odd Keys law governing airports, was allowed to stay open 24 hours. As a result, the Conch Flyer became a haven for off-shift strippers and bartenders, late-night oddballs, and purveyors of the kind of controlled substances of interest to people who are still drinking at 6am. Tourists flying out of or arriving in Key West would sometimes find themselves in the midst of last night’s party, still continuing unabated at the Conch Flyer at 8am.

The new Conch Flyer is an anonymous airport bar with some Pan Am gear on the walls. As I finished a beer and prepared to meet my plane, the barmaid was wiping down the bar and preparing to close out the register. I was the only patron at the bar.

“Going off shift?” I said.

“Oh, no,” she said. “We close at seven.”

“PM?” I said.

She smiled at me like someone hearing the same comment for the thousandth time. “Yes, PM,” she said.

Overhead all the TV monitors were tuned to the Weather Channel, which showed an ice storm looming over South Carolina and temperatures in the low 20s back home in New Jersey. I shouldered my bag and headed for the new, improved transportation security area.

At Captain Tony's. September, 1990.

So here I am, an old man sitting under an umbrella at a streetside table, a frosty glass of MGD Extra Light before me, a plate of fish tacos on the way, my laptop open on a tiny table. It’s late afternoon, I’ve just arrived in town, and later on I’ll walk up to the marina to pick up my Half Marathon bib number and entry packet. There’s some kind of pasta dinner later, which I may or may not attend, depending on how I feel. The 6am flight to Miami and 180-mile drive from there through the Keys have left me feeling pretty fatigued.

Twenty years ago, when I first started coming down to Key West, I used to arrive at wherever I was staying, throw my suitcase on the bed and go out looking for a bar or four and a good time. Even in later years, when I started coming down for the yearly Key West Literary Seminar, there was always at least one day when I would drift away from the polite book signings and moderated discussions on “Opening Prose to the Light of Being” to start the morning (well, okay, 1pm) on a barstool at the Green Parrot. One of those days might take me to the Schooner Wharf Bar for lunch and an earful of Michael McCloud, a return trip through Captain Tony’s, The Bull, Sloppy Joe’s, and the Red Garter Saloon, a nighttime stumble southward into the waters off Smathers Beach, and another stop or three besides on the way back to the Green Parrot for closing at 4am.

You haven’t really been to Key West unless you’ve closed down the Green Parrot. Whether you’ve arrived there in the early afternoon or at midnight, by the time 4am rolls around, you feel like you’re at one with the place, in tune with its pervasive aura of good times, good people, and—as the sign above the bar points out in no uncertain terms—No Snivelling. The bartenders at the Parrot never seem all that motivated to throw you out at four. They seem as reluctant to see the night turn into the day as you are, and will usually facilitate your transition from barstool to sidewalk by handing you a big plastic cup of beer to take with you. Many times I’ve stood on Whitehead Street with a cup of beer in my hand—waiting for a cab or just waiting to begin the walk back to my room—and watched the bartenders and barbacks pull the Parrot’s big green shutters closed.

I know I won’t be closing the Green Parrot tonight. Tomorrow’s Key West Half Marathon begins at 7am sharp. I should be in bed by 10pm at the latest. I’ll need the rest and the hydration.

I can remember twenty years ago, my first visit to Key West. I arranged the trip for me and a friend through a travel agent that operated out of the offices of my employer at that time, the Columbia House Company. That woman knew even less about Key West than I did. For some reason, we booked the trip in September, and the travel agent booked us into a Day’s Inn on the wrong side of the island. There’s nothing on the eastern end of Key West but gas stations, fast-food franchises, and Jet Ski rental shacks. When we arrived in September of 1990, we had the whole place—the Day’s Inn, the hotel bar (which we immediately dubbed the Sea Hag) and the streets—to ourselves. We hung around the pool for a while until a local took pity on us and directed us to Old Town. We thanked her, got in the rental car, and drove to the other side of the island.

When we got there, we found a riot going on.

We had unwittingly arrived during the third day of the four-day Key West Poker Run, a yearly event that brought thousands of motorcycle riders from Miami to Key West. We could hear the ceaseless roar of motorcycles from a half-mile away, out on Roosevelt Boulevard, as we approached. When we got to Old Town, we discovered that there were two events in progress. Running concurrently with the Poker Run was another event called, I believe, WomenFest, billed as a weekend-long party for lesbians.

My friend and I edged our way through the teeming crowd, past at least half a dozen ongoing brawls and scarcely concealed acts of public sex, toward the corner of Caroline and Duval. Bikers were slowly cruising along the curbs on their machines, emptying bottles of beer and tossing them into the street. Lip-locked lesbians stood on every corner. The bars we passed were filled to overflowing and adorned with banners celebrating the weekend’s twinned events. “Welcome to Bike and Dyke Weekend 1990!”

My friend and I stood on the corner and looked around. “I guess we’re not getting laid tonight,” I said.

My friend nodded, and watched as one biker, then another, came flying out of the open-air Bull bar, got up and started pummeling each other. “I just want to stay out of trouble,” he said.

There was no question of squeezing our way into any of the more popular bars on the street. We bought a couple of beers from a curbside cart and then wandered off Duval and up Caroline to a place with less flying glass and fists. And that’s how we found Red’s.

There was no sign on Red’s, identifying it as such. Later, we’d ask a bartender what the place was called. It was a wooden, brown-painted shack, with falling rain gutters and broken masonry, open to the street on the front and sides. You could tell, just looking into the place, that Red’s was functioning as a magnet for all of the most disreputable and deranged Poker Run participants. Probably half the bikes parked around it were adorned with some sort of Nazi or skinhead regalia. From our vantage point on the sidewalk, the tableau inside looked like a scene from Charlie Manson’s Spahn Ranch hideout, on orgy night.

I turned to my friend. “Well, we gotta go in there,” I said.

The cow shirt. Also, an old friend, Cindi, who made her own trip to Key West later in the 90s.

“You’re fucking kidding, right?” He didn’t say this in an indignant or disbelieving way. He said it in weary resignation, as one long accustomed to my poor judgment and untrustworthy decision-making skills.

“Sure. Why not? It’s the only place where we can get within twenty feet of the bar.”

“I wonder why that is.”

“We gotta go in there.”

So we did.

The first thing you noticed about Red’s was that it stank to high heaven of vomit. There was a reason for this. There was vomit all over the floor. I’ve been in a number of bars of ill-repute over the years, the kind of place that has a concrete or ceramic-tiled floor well-suited for hosing down after a long night of heavy traffic. Red’s was the first (and only) bar I ever saw being hosed down during actual business hours. Heavily tattooed, Wehrmacht-outfitted bikers were grumbling and making way as a barback cleaned the floor with a high-pressure hose, nudging indescribable offal toward a side door.

And then there was the clientele. Never mind the bikers, who were like bikers anywhere, though situated more toward the nihilist end of the spectrum and suffering the internal heavy weather that results from having been drunk for three days straight. Those guys had nothing on the locals. Red’s was clearly the last rung on the ladder for island residents who had long outstayed their welcome. When I went to the bar, one elderly woman leaped up and started making weird hand gestures and spastic, contorted facial expressions at me.

“Don’t worry about her,” the bartender said. “She’s giving you the evil eye. She does that to everyone.”

Finally, there was the bathroom. But, you know what, never mind the bathroom. There was only one and the less said about it the better.

“I think we should leave,” my friend said.

“Why? We’re just starting to have fun,” I said.

I probably would have said more in a similar vein, but I was accosted, just then, by one of my fellow Red’s patrons. She was tall, thin as a rail, with sinewy arms and legs, a crazed look in her eyes, and about seven teeth in her head. She gripped the front of my shirt and lifted me up, so I was up on my toes.

“I love that!” she bellowed.

“Okay!” I yelped. “What!”

She lifted me higher and shook me like a toy. “Cows!” she yelled. “I fucking love cows!”

There was an illustration of a big grinning cow on the T-shirt I was wearing. I peered over the woman’s hands, clenched at my throat, and then over at my friend.

“See?” I said. “We’re making friends!”

That woman carted me around and showed me off to her friends like I was something she had won at the fair. I did my best not to make her mad. I never learned her name.

Red’s doesn’t exist anymore. It was gone just a few years later, replaced by some sort of generic sports bar. I was in that sports bar, once, about ten years ago, and no one in there remembered Red’s at all. If you Google Red’s and Key West, nothing comes up. A lot of the old bars I remember seem to be gone now. Red’s. Barefoot Bob’s. Papillon. Even the Sea Hag is gone now, replaced by a Waffle House.

I was in the Sea Hag once more after my initial visit to Key West. In the late ’90s, I drove onto the island and I really, really needed a bathroom. I parked in the Day’s Inn lot, just over the bridge from Stock Island, charged into the Hag, ordered a beer in passing, and headed straight for the bathroom. The bathroom had one stall, and I was using it when the door to the men’s room rocketed open and rattled against the wall. Someone crossed to the stall, hammered at the locked door, groaned, and then threw up, copiously, in the sink.

Welcome back to Key West, I thought.

Photo © Frank H. Jump

When it opened in 1911 on a 23-acre city block between Broad Street and Halsey Street in downtown Newark, the Hahne & Company department store was home to over 400,000 square feet of selling space on five floors. It contained more than two acres of plate glass windows, had a formal dining room (The Pine Room), and was arranged around a massive atrium that occupied the center of the building from the first floor through the fourth. It was dubbed “The Store With The Friendly Spirit.” Two thousand people worked there.

By the time I arrived at its employees’ entrance on a gray, snow-spitting day in February of 1988, hardly anybody worked there. Hahne’s was a vast gloomy cave that smelled powerfully of rotting carpet and draperies. To get to the advertising department, I had to walk up three deactivated wooden escalators to the fourth floor and across a vast open space littered with fallen ceiling tiles and lighting fixtures. The advertising department was located in the rear area of the fourth floor and occupied itself primarily with creating ads that ran in the Newark Star-Ledger and Bergen Record. The tagline at the foot of those ads read “Hahne’s, A New Jersey Tradition.” But it was a tradition on its last legs.

The May Department Stores Company had purchased Hahne’s parent company, Associated Dry Goods, in 1986 and immediately closed the badly deteriorated Newark store, leaving nine other stores in the chain. It was widely understood that May’s purchase had everything to do with Associated’s crown jewel, Lord & Taylor, and absolutely nothing at all to do with Hahne’s, a shabby retailing sister whose own golden age had petered out in the ’70s. It was said that Hahne’s had doomed itself by remaining too closely committed to Newark in the ’60s while its competitors made the leap to the suburbs. For a good number of years prior to the sale, Hahne’s had ghosted along in Lord & Taylor’s queenly shadow, ostensibly catering to upper-middle-class shoppers in a handful of northern New Jersey cities. The May Company would put a quick end to those pretensions.

Hahne’s former flagship store wasn’t the only edifice that had seen better days in Newark in 1988. The entire city was at its absolute nadir at that time, having staggered out of the post-white-flight ’70s only to be walloped in the mid ’80s by recession, AIDS, and crack. Hahne’s had been the second of Newark’s “Big 3” department stores to close. Kresge’s closed in 1964. Bamberger’s had become Macy’s in 1986, and was operated as a clearance outlet until it finally closed six years later. By 1988, downtown Newark had no department stores, supermarkets, movie theaters, nightclubs, bars, or restaurants. The security gates on the few enterprises that remained—lunch counters, furniture “rent-to-buy” operations, beauty schools, check-cashing storefronts, health clinics, discount outlets—came rattling down promptly at 6pm. After that hour, Newark was a ghost town. Indeed, its desolation was so pervasive even muggers, purse snatchers, and derelict panhandlers were in short supply. At 6:30 on a summer evening, you could cross little Military Park and walk down Raymond Boulevard to Newark’s Penn Station and not encounter a single soul.

I knew nothing about retail, advertising, or marketing in 1988. I scarcely knew how to dress myself. I was two months out of state college, sitting in a big empty office in a big empty building in a big empty city because I’d answered an ad in the Help Wanted section of the Star-Ledger. Entry Level Advertising Position. Organized, detail-oriented, flexible, hard-working. EOE. Two months after I was hired, Macy’s consolidated its Northeast and Southeast advertising departments, putting a few dozen advertising professionals out of work. My new boss, Ted, a tall, lean, fashion-model-handsome man who chain-smoked constantly at his desk, told me, “I’d never have hired you if I’d known Macy’s was going to cut staff.” Nevertheless, I rose from proofreader to copywriter to senior copywriter in a scant six months.

Ted was one of many retailing pros who’d been brought in by May Company corporate to shake out the cobwebs at Hahne’s. You could always tell a May person from a Hahne’s person at first glance. May people were young, aggressive fast-trackers newly arrived from Pittsburgh (Kauffmann’s), Hecht’s (Virginia) or Boston (newly acquired Filene’s), and openly disdainful of Hahne’s faded-lady company culture. I spent a lot of time reading ad copy to them over the phone for sign-offs because they avoided the old Newark flagship store like the plague, preferring to work out of branch stores in Livingston, Woodbridge or Westfield.

Hahne’s lifers were older and always in their offices. They liked nothing better than to muse solemnly over ads on deadline while young ad guys like myself itched to get the mechanical into a manila envelope and out the door to the Star-Ledger. A few of the old guard had been with Hahne’s twenty, thirty years or more and could tell you what Hahne’s had been like when the Newark store was a lunchtime destination for a generation of clerks, secretaries, and housewives. Emotionally, they ran the gamut from wistful to resigned, and you couldn’t blame them. They’d seen the ever-consolidating future of retail, and they weren’t in it.

I wish I’d taken more time to wander the dark recesses of that building. It wasn’t easy to stray too far from the escalators near the atrium at each floor. The gloom at the perimeter of each floor would swallow you right up until you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I’d be edging carefully across the tattered carpet, only to step into some mysterious hole or knock over a display fixture. It was said that there were rats on the first two floors, but I couldn’t imagine how’d they survive. The air was so dry and dusty it would scorch your sinuses and your lungs after a while.

Some of the best areas (the Pine Room, the basement, the areas behind the old display windows) were completely off limits, barricaded off with metal accordion-fold security fencing. And then, too, there was really no legitimate reason to be on any floor but the fourth or the third, where some buyers (shoes, outerwear) still kept their offices. More than once, I was shooed back to the fourth floor by a security guard with a flashlight.

In June of 1988, May Company announced that they were moving Hahne’s corporate office to a strip mall across Route 1 from the Woodbridge store. I’d be lying if I said I was sad to leave Newark and that old warhorse of a retailing emporium. It was a time-consuming and expensive commute, via train from Edison to Newark. Woodbridge was a fifteen-minute drive from my apartment. For a little while, there was talk of Hahne’s surviving as some kind of down-market alternative to Lord & Taylor. In the end, however, that’s all it was. Talk.

May Company moved us all into expensively renovated offices in Woodbridge in September of that year and then pulled the plug on the division four months later, after January inventory in 1989. By April, I was working in the shoe department of the Woodbridge store, selling mismatched shoes to bargain hunters bused in from Camden and watching as novelty T-shirts and shoddy plastic toys were sold out of boxes on Hahne’s floor for a buck a piece. In May, I was back on the train, to Manhattan’s Journal Square. I’d been hired as an advertising copywriter at Macy’s. “Juniors,” they called us.

That’s how retail worked back then. Everything was consolidating so quickly that managers at every corporate level were variously ignoring, duplicating, or countermanding the plans and directives of managers at other levels. It made for a pretty hectic decade or so, until seemingly the entire department store universe, including May Department Stores, was consolidated under Federated Department Stores and the Macy’s Inc. banner.

It’s been twenty years since I’ve set foot in any part of Newark other than the airport. Newark has experienced another boom-and-bust cycle in that time, and I hear that the Hahne’s flagship is still standing, still boarded up. I have to get up there, I tell myself, get off the train at Newark Penn Station (How many NJ Transit trains have I taken in the last ten years? Four? Five?) and walk up Raymond Boulevard and across the little park to where that faded lady is brooding silently to herself between Halsey and Broad.

When I was in my late teens and twenties, the record stores I shopped in were packed with people just like me. We’d all be shoulder to shoulder at the record bins, flipping through vinyl, occasionally plucking out a potential purchase while smirking at the hopelessly uncool selections of those around us. Later, in the ’90s, as I entered my thirties, I never really stopped buying records (though they were CDs by then) and I would often notice that I was the oldest shopper in whatever store I was in. I was a man among kids.

Skip forward again, as I closed in on my forties, and a funny thing happened. The kids disappeared. It didn’t happen gradually. One day they were clogging the music store aisles, clutching their Smashmouth and Offspring CDs, and the next day they were gone. Today, there are three record stores within a day’s drive of my house (Princeton, Red Bank, and Fords, NJ) and when I go to any of them, I know who I’ll find there before I enter the door. People just like me. Fortyish guys, fiftyish guys. Record collectors. Old music geeks who never gave up the habit. Once again, some thirty years later, I have only my own contemporaries for company.

Where did the kids go? They went home to their computers, where all the music is free.

A few years ago, my wife and I were trying to come up with Christmas gift ideas for the younger cousins on her side of the family. I can’t remember what we’d given them before, but they were in their late teens, and we needed some new idea. I suggested iTunes gift cards. Hey, they must listen to music, right? My wife took this idea to the kids’ mother and then reported back to me. No good, she said. They don’t want to go to iTunes. “Not even to get free songs?” I said. They get their songs from something called LimeWire, my wife said.

Compared to downloading free songs on LimeWire, even using an iTunes gift card was too much of a needless hassle for them. I don’t follow the whole file-sharing P2P thing very closely, so for all I know, LimeWire has gone legit now, the way Napster once tried to go. If it has, then surely there are another dozen grey-market P2P file sharers out there, an MP3 Rocket or some such, taking its place. There are people in their late twenties today, people who love music and own untold thousands of songs, who have never purchased a song in their lives. Purchasing a song for their listening pleasure would be like purchasing a newspaper to read the news. It’s an inconceivable notion.

All of which brings us to the literary marketplace. Compared to the megastore major-label music biz of twenty years ago, today’s literary marketplace is a mom-and-pop store with licorice whips in glass jars and three-for-a-penny taffies in a wooden barrel next to the cigar counter. It’s so small that most high-finance wheeler-dealer types don’t regard it as a business at all. Asked recently about Amazon’s Kindle, Apple CEO Steve Jobs dismissed all of publishing in a sentence. “People don’t read anymore,” he said.

However, unlike yesterday’s major-label music empires, the big-time publishing houses still exist (though exclusively as subsidiaries of behemoth corporations).Why? Because the bookstore’s core customer—a late-fortyish or fiftyish woman fond of cats, book clubs, and the Lifetime Channel—is resistant to new technologies. Prognosticators in the halls of high-tech keep proclaiming the advent of the e-book, but it keeps not happening. All those middle-aged women are still browsing the Oprah’s Book Club table at Barnes & Noble and taking their kids to the library on Saturday afternoon. But now, finally, that’s changing.

This year for Christmas, my father-in-law gave his daughter a Kindle. They both, giver and receiver, seemed a little perplexed by the Kindle. Neither is what you’d call a technology “first adopter.” They aren’t book collectors, either. My wife simply likes to read books and then she has to put them somewhere. My father-in-law reads books and then gives them away to anyone who’ll take them.

My wife is an acquisition editor’s dream. She’s the kind of reader who picks up one Jacquelyn Mitchard book, likes it, and then goes out and reads every other Jacquelyn Mitchard book. When we moved into our house, we put most of her paperbacks in boxes in the attic and put hundreds more in bookcases in the guest room. In a short time, maybe a couple of years, the shelves of those bookcases were jammed two-high and two-wide with more paperbacks, and books were all over the floor in boxes. I had to take all those books and throw them out. Libraries won’t take them, not even for charity book sales. You can’t give them away on eBay. No one will take them. These days, my wife gets all her books from the library.

I still buy books, but I don’t read like my wife reads. I’ll sit and mull over Mark Helprin’s “Winter’s Tale” or Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres” for two months. And I’m a geek about books the same way I am about records. I only buy hardcovers, new or used. I like a good, tight binding. A few years from now, who will still buy books in their bulky physical form? The same people who buy records today. Collectors. Hobbyists. Geeks. The changeover will occur as swiftly as it did in that autumn of 1999 when all the kids disappeared from the record stores. Indeed, given the fact that today’s publishing industry stands in relation to the 80s-era music biz as a guppy stands to a whale, the changeover should be even quicker.

The day after that format changeover, the first grey-market P2P Book Napster or BookWire or MP4 Book Rocket will open its cyber doors and hang out its cyber shingle. All the middle-aged people who have just grown accustomed to reading their books on a handheld monitor will very swiftly grow to like the idea of getting all their books for free. They’ll happily trade books with people in Paris or Indianapolis the way people in my wife’s family easily trade books among themselves.

And the publishing marketplace—the entire notion of money attaching to literary content—will vanish except, perhaps, for a small handful of Costco-approved, WalMart-validated authors at the very top of the food chain who can count on pre-publication movie deals and McDonalds Happy Meal tie-ins.

Whew. Feeling a little lazy today. I was running on the treadmill at the gym and I noticed there’s quite a bit of excitement over a Uruguayan man who uploaded a $300 home-produced video short to YouTube. It’s a CGI thing called “Panic Attack,” and it’s about big alien robots trampling a big city.

Everyone in Hollywood is slapping their foreheads in disbelief and wondering aloud, “Why didn’t WE think of that? A CGI thing about big robots trampling a big city?” Sam Raimi’s Mandate Pictures seems to have beaten everyone else to the punch by Fedexing the “Panic Attack” creator a check for $30 million.

Forbes Magazine says that “Panic Attack” is J.J. Abrams’ “Cloverfield” meets “Transformers.”

This, clearly, is exactly what we need.

Another Cloverfield.

And another Transformers.

And another War Of The Worlds.

And another The Day The Earth Stood Still.

And another Terminator 2, 3, 4, 5, or VI The Continuing Adventures.

Big robots. They’re big. Stick some vampire fangs on one of those suckers and this could be really big.

For Pete Townsend, it could be worse. At least he isn’t living under a bridge.

On New Year’s Day, a Florida-based child abuse prevention group called Child AbuseWatch.net called on the NFL to replace the featured musical act in its upcoming Super Bowl halftime show. That musical act, iconic ’60s classic rock band The Who, is led by Townsend, who was arrested by British police in 2003 on charges of possessing child pornography, later cleared of those charges by London’s Metropolitan Police, and eventually placed on the UK Violent and Sexual Offender Registry for five years as part of a formal police caution.

In making his request to the NFL, Child AbuseWatch.net founder and CEO Evin Daly stated, “I’m a fan of the band, I grew up with The Who. Pete Townshend is the only issue, and the issue is that he’s a former registered sex offender. The issue is, it sends the wrong message to American families.”

When he was caught up in that police undercover operation, Townsend claimed he had attempted to enter a child pornography website (using his own credit card to do so) as part of research for his autobiography.

No matter what his reasoning or motivation, what Townsend did is—and should be—a crime. Townsend has admitted as much. In fact, prior to his arrest, Townsend had been waging a long-running and well-documented campaign to alert British authorities to the proliferation of child pornography sites and to request that they be shut down.

But Townsend did what he did. Though he was absolved of any felony by the arresting authorities, he submitted to sex offender registry anyway, and has since seemed to stay out of any subsequent trouble. So that’s the end of it. Right?

Well, no. Because when it comes to sex offender crimes, it’s never really over. Sex crime conviction in the US has become a kind of one-strike-and-you’re-out-forever offense. Hiring these people for any sort of meaningful job, putting them in any position of authority, or giving them any means to start anew would, unfortunately, “send the wrong message.”

In 2007, a news story featured in CNN and Newsweek revealed that the area beneath a bridge on Miami’s Julia Tuttle Causeway had become home for a small group of men (less than a dozen) who were registered sex offenders in Florida. State law prohibits such people from living within 2500 feet of schools, parks, swimming pools or any other places children might gather. Faced with these restrictions, the men simply had nowhere else to go. In 2008, the state of Florida handed down an injunction ordering the men (then numbering 19) to move somewhere else. The Florida Board of Corrections stepped in and tried to offer the men housing alternatives. But there was nowhere else to send them. As of late 2009, the handful of tents under the bridge had grown to include dozens of tents and shacks, and there are now more than 80 men and women living there. Authorities in other states face similar problems with their own sex offender populations, which continue to grow swiftly.

Perhaps some of the people living under the bridge may need watching forever. Maybe there’s another Phillip Garrido, biding his time before kidnapping a Jaycee Dugard. At least some of them, however, are like Homer Barclay. From an NPR story on the sex offenders under the bridge:

“Homer Barclay came to live here a year and a half ago. Barclay was convicted of attempted sexual battery in 1992. Last year, after a parole violation, he says probation officers gave him just one option. “They told me that I had to live up under the Julia Tuttle Causeway,” says Barclay. “I said, ‘How come I have to live under the Julia Tuttle Causeway?’ They said, ‘If you want to go home, this is where you got to go.’ “

Pete Townsend is one of the lucky ones. He has an income, a place to live.

But what of the tens of thousands of other sex offenders, people who are guilty of a single sex-related offense years or even decades ago? What of other people like Townsend, who have been convicted—or, like Townsend, accused and exonerated—of a single non-violent crime? Should we be watching them forever, too?

There was an ad on TV during a break in Thursday night’s NFL game. A man identified as Ty Pennington was addressing the audience directly, making a charity pitch for disadvantaged families. I wasn’t really following the message, but something in it—some disconnect between the images and the words—kept drawing my attention. Here’s what the man was saying:

“I want to tell you a story about a little girl. A little girl who’s going to wake up on Christmas morning and her daddy won’t be there. But will Christmas be there? Will she have a warm jacket to wear? Will she have shoes that fit? Or even a toy?”

And it took me a while to realize that the narrator wasn’t talking about victims of a disaster or orphans in some distant, impoverished country. This Ty Pennington was talking about the children of active-service military personnel. The missing daddy was in Afghanistan. It was an ad for a Sears charity program called the “Heroes at Home Wish Registry.” Viewers were being encouraged to send gift cards to the children of military personnel.

And I was puzzled. Why do the children of active troops have no coats or shoes? Why are they pining away for a toy this Christmas? So I did something I almost never do. I got up and looked up the ad online. I couldn’t find the commercial on the Sears gift registry website. I had to go to YouTube to find it. But I did find out that the charity function of the program isn’t limited to active-duty personnel. Veterans are also eligible to receive gift cards through the charity. In fact, the site features this statement, in a bold-type callout: “New veterans can face unemployment rates higher than those facing non-veterans.”

Because I was watching a football game, I didn’t have to wait long to see one of the TV ads in the massive “Go Army” campaign. The NFL’s target demographic—young, male, middle class, struggling to get by in our latest job-shedding recession—is tailor-made for armed forces recruitment. The games are often sponsored by the US Army or Marines, and the ads run during virtually every break in the action.

You won’t hear anything about the apparently dismal employment situation facing newly returned vets in these “Go Army” ads. You won’t hear about the surprising number of families of active-duty troops who qualify for food stamps. You certainly won’t hear about charity programs intended to help army families get through the holidays. Instead, these relentlessly upbeat advertisements position volunteer service in the armed forces as a means of self-empowerment, as a pathway to a meaningful and well-paid career, either in the service or in private life.

There are plenty of aspects of army life that are not glamorous. The danger, the stress, the boredom, the isolation. Given all the responsibilities and drawbacks that come with it, you would think that a job in the Army would at least pay a decent living wage that would enable you to put a coat on your kid’s back.

Look, we all have our own opinions about the relative value of America’s many military ventures around the globe. Some people believe that “freedom isn’t free,” and that if we don’t fight our enemies “over there,” we’ll have to fight them “over here.” Some believe that all warfare not conducted in immediate defense against an invasion of one’s homeland is immoral. Some take a longer and more expansive view of what constitutes “national defense.”

But we all support the troops.

By the reckoning of our own Congressional Budget Office (CBO), America’s military budget is almost equal to the combined military budget of every other country on earth. US military spending in 2008 totaled $711 billion. The rest of the world combined spent $762 billion.

Too bad there’s nothing in that $711 billion for a kid’s coat. Or a toy.

Am I one of the last people to get around to watching that Al Gore film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth?’ It’s been out for a while, I know, but I just didn’t get to it until now. I have to say, I enjoyed it immensely.

Al’s film (directed by Davis Guggenheim), is entertaining as heck, although, regrettably, it’s been transformed into laugh-a-minute time capsule material, a fairy tale about the all-importance of preventing global warming and saving the environment, paper-airplaned to us direct from the far-off care-free era of 2006.

I say this despite the fact that I live at the Jersey Shore, close enough to the sea that a mere two meter rise in sea levels (considerably less than those estimates cited in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’) would have the surf rolling through marshy Belford, across US Route 36, and right up to my doorstep. So much for my property value.

The truth, sadly—call it The Unfortunate Truth—is that ten or twenty years from now, no one’s going to give a rat’s ass about the environment. Why? Because we’ll all be dying off en masse. Probably over as short a time frame as five years or so.

In 1962, the year in which I was born, the world population stood at 3.12 billion, give or take a few million. That was a lot of people. If you were a kid in the early 1970s, you heard a lot about the Population Explosion. Approaching famine and disasters and Soylent Green and such. But that reckoning never came. It was put off by a growth-facilitating factor that threw a monkey wrench into the system, delaying the comeuppance we had already earned. Call it the Oil Factor.

Today, world population stands at 6.7 billion. This is an anomaly, a calamitous statistical deviation caused solely by the availability of oil. Oil is to humans on earth as several industrial-sized vats of honey would be to a sealed warehouse full of fruit flies. It has created an artificial and temporary environment in which human population has expanded far beyond the capacity of the earth to sustain it.

This anomaly is about to be corrected by a sharp decline in the earth’s obtainable oil resources. “Peak Oil” is the term for the tipping point at which our ability to pump, process, and transport oil stops growing and starts declining, even as demand continues to expand. Some people think this correction is already occurring. Other people—optimists in the crowd—think we have another twenty years or so until we start feeling the pinch. No one anywhere—from the worldwide scientific community to Al Gore to Dick Cheney to Sarah Palin to the oil companies themselves—believes that the total collapse of known oil reserves is more than fifty years away.

“Pinch,” it should be said, is used here as a euphemism for global war followed by a massive die-off of the vast majority of the human population. Oil is the answer to virtually every possible question you can ask about human existence in the 20th and 21st centuries. Without it, there is no energy, no food, no potable water, no medicine, no Paris Hilton, nothing. When the end comes, it will be swift. We won’t have a lot of time to regret turning so much of our oil into trash can liner twist ties, McDonalds Happy Meal toys, and cellophane shrinkwrap.

But, hey, what about solar and nuclear and wind power and wave power and hydrogen power? We’ll still have those things, right? Yes we will! Some of these power sources will still exist in the refreshingly uncrowded world of the future. After the mountains of fresh human corpses have decayed into moldering heaps of fairly fertile topsoil, there will undoubtedly be small tribes of people living along the rivers and coastlines of what was once America, using wave power and paddlewheels to generate small amounts of power. Solar grids will prove helpful until their parts wear out and can’t be replaced. Hydrogen and nuclear power technologies, however, are inextricably bound up with oil. They consume energy, provided by oil, in order to produce energy, in the form of electricity. Once the power goes out, these technologies will cease to exist.

Who will survive the massive die-off of the human population, even for a short while? People with skills that can be bartered for goods. Well diggers. Plumbers. Farmers. People with flocks of birds and herds of sheep. People with guns. That’s pretty much it.

Soon, the power will start to go out. It probably won’t go out in America first. (We don’t have all those troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else for nothing. We still, to this day, have 35,000 troops in Japan, of all places.) But all we’ll be gaining for ourselves in that year-or-two interval before the power outage reaches our shores is a better seat from which to watch a fantastically escalating global war for resources. Again, some people believe this war (now located in Iraq and Afghanistan, soon to spread to Iran and Pakistan) has already begun. After it’s over, the power will really go out. And the darkness will be really, really dark.

Which, on the bright side, will put an abrupt end to our global warming problem. The seas will probably still rise for a few centuries, but hardly anybody will be around to see it.

In my mind, soap operas are forever linked with a flushed, overheated feeling of low-grade fever, the briny taste of chicken noodle soup, and the peculiar impossibility of ever getting quite comfortable while lying on a living room couch, no matter how many times you’ve arranged and rearranged your pillows and blankets.

When I read today that CBS has cancelled the last of the old Proctor & Gamble soaps, ‘As The World Turns,’ I immediately experienced again that metallic cherry taste of Robitussin cough syrup and that damp, clammy feeling of a water bottle gone cool against your chest. I remembered, too, the magic and wonder conveyed by the first bulky, rotary-dialed cable decoder box ever to sit on top of our family TV. Spiderman cartoons on Philadelphia TV! Home Box Office movies in the middle of the day! Oh, the future had arrived and it was going to be very, very good.

In the days before cable television, VCRs, movie rentals, and DVRs, soap operas were a calamity visited upon boys who were too sick to go to school. Weekday television from 8am to 11am offered slim pickings (mostly syndicated reruns of early-’60s-era sitcom fare like ‘Father Knows Best,’ ‘ Dennis the Menace,’ and ‘Hazel’) that were an entertainment feast compared to the network soap opera programming that followed. The soaps were enough to leave any young boy slack-jawed with despair. What are all these women in elegant dresses yelling/crying/simpering about? Why is that mustached man in polyester suit separates shaking that woman like a ragdoll/eavesdropping/whispering into the phone? Why is everyone throwing glassware/fainting/slamming doors? Why is EVERY OTHER SHOT a high-and-tight closeup of someone’s face?

In my childhood home, the TV channels were 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13. CBS, NBC, WNEW, ABC, WOR, WPIX, and public television WNET. After 11am, channels 2, 4, and 7 were a soap opera wasteland. If you were home alone, you could seek some meager refuge in the programming content on channels 5, 9, and 11, which consisted of syndicated talk shows, midday news, and low-budget game shows like Bowling For Dollars). If your mother was home with you, you got the soaps.

My own kids, by the way, find this whole vanished state of affairs—a bizarro world where you couldn’t watch any show you wanted to, at any time—both unlikely and hilarious. They lump these tales in with my accounts of having had dinosaurs for pets and clothespins for toys. (Oh, Daddy, you’re lying again!)

I probably haven’t seen thirty minutes of soap opera broadcasting in the last twenty years. Hospital and auto repair waiting rooms all show Oprah or E! TV, CNN or ESPN now. I knew soap operas still existed, though, because I still see copies of Soap Opera Digest in supermarket checkout aisles. But now the soaps are all but gone.

Oh, there are still a few soaps left. General Hospital. One Life to Live. But they’re a dying breed. Their audiences are small and old.

From the New York Times article I read:

“For the most part soaps these days are watched by older women. Every network soap now has a median viewer age over 50 and only ‘General Hospital’ on ABC is under 53. ‘As the World Turns’ has a median age of 57.8.”

This tells us that some of the women who started watching the soaps in the ’70s and ’80s are still watching them today, but no one new, no one younger, has joined their ranks in the ensuing two decades. Interestingly, the statement that follows the above in the New York Times article is an excellent example of burying the lede:

“That is older than most of the network averages in prime time, during which NBC’s programs have a median age of 48, ABC’s programs 51.4 and CBS’s programs 54.1.”

If the viewership of ‘As the World Turns’ skews far too old to be profitable at a median age of 57.8, what are we to make of an overall prime-time CBS viewership median age of 54.1? It seems like only a matter of time, a few years perhaps, until CBS cancels itself in entirety, with the other networks right behind it.

The house next door is a rental property, one of the few in my neighborhood. It’s empty now, vacated last month by a family that stopped paying rent in January. The owners—siblings who grew up in the house some twenty years ago—have been carting an astonishing amount of left-behind junk out to the curb for weeks since the eviction. Clothes, dishes, broken furniture, bedding, toys, wastepaper, food. Pretty much anything the occupants couldn’t fit in their sedan on the morning they drove away. At night, people in vans and pickup trucks stop in front of the house and pick through the refuse, looking for something, anything, of value.

The family that lived there experienced one of those calamitous implosions that are no less inevitable for being slow and lengthy. They were a married couple in their forties, with a young daughter who was seven years old when they moved in. There was an older child, too, a girl old enough to move out shortly after the family moved in. I thought that she might have been a child from a previous marriage, though I could easily be wrong about that. My wife might know better, but I hesitate to bring the subject up with her.

The man, whose name I never knew, was on disability. One of his legs had been amputated at the knee, the missing portion of limb replaced by a steel rod and prosthetic foot. I sensed that his disability was the result of some chronic disease, like diabetes, rather than an accident. He had the look of a man with entrenched and ongoing health problems. We didn’t see him very much, but we often saw his wife, puttering around in the yard or getting into her car to run errands.

We saw their daughter all the time. In fact, it was a rare day in which she didn’t ring our doorbell at least two or three times, directly after school on a school day and as early as eight am on a non-school day. This, in itself, would constitute unusual behavior in our neighborhood, where kids tend to have highly regimented and organized daily social calendars. For better or for worse, the notion of young children “dropping in” at other kids’ houses has been replaced by the ritual of supervised and scheduled “play dates.”

And then there was the matter of age difference. When our new neighbors moved in, our daughter Abby was three and a half. Abby was, not surprisingly, thrilled to have a seven-year-old friend. My wife and I thought that our new neighbor’s enthusiasm for “dropping by” would wane once she got settled in and developed friendships with kids her own age. But that never happened. Instead, she was perfectly happy to spend hours at a time at our house, in our family room or out on the sun porch, playing with Abby and even our son Owen, who was one year old.

She was impervious to hints. If you said, in your best bluff and cheerful tone of voice, “Well! It’s time for dinner! Thanks for stopping by!”, she would immediately counter, “Can I stay for dinner?” It wasn’t so much that she was unaware of common social conventions, but rather, I was convinced, she didn’t believe she could afford to abide by them. If you said, “Well, I think your mother would have to give permission for that,” the girl would reply, “Oh, it’s okay with my mother.”

My wife often wondered aloud about that. About where the girl’s mother thought her seven-year-old daughter was all day. I didn’t have to wonder. I knew more than a little about the dynamics of that sort of household.

As Abby grew older, this situation began to correct itself. Abby cultivated her own circle of age-appropriate friends and began to take on more and more extracurricular activities, so there was less time for our neighbor. But nothing ever really changed for the neighbor girl. By this time, we knew that there were a couple of houses in the neighborhood where our neighbor was no longer welcome. If she rang our doorbell and Abby was out somewhere, she would ask, guilelessly, “Can Owen come out and play?” Owen might have been three years old to her nine years. While this was out of the question, both of our kids were still allowed to play with the neighbor girl, if Abby was home and wanted to play, a situation which occurred less and less often. At those times, the neighbor girl would sometimes function, cannily, as a sort of intermediary between Abby and Owen, who, like many brother and sisters, will bicker endlessly. The neighbor kid had many, many disadvantages, but she also had a survivor’s instinct.

And then her father died. There had been a couple of instances of ambulance visits to the house next door and then, one day less than two years ago, that was it. He had passed away. We stopped seeing the neighbor kid’s mother. She just closed herself up in the house. There must have been some money—her husband had been a member of an electrician’s union—but it didn’t seem to make any difference. The lawn went to seed, the mother’s car never left the driveway, and the neighbor kid took to pedaling the streets on her bike for hours at a time. We had her over to our house maybe twice a week, but Abby is nine now and her life is moving on. The visits didn’t always go well. Eventually, the neighbor kid showed up at our door with plastic jugs in hand, saying her mother had sent her over to get some drinking water. Then she came asking for money. Twenty dollars. A few weeks later, they were gone.

I said earlier that I hesitate to bring any of this up with my wife, even to clarify details about which she is surely familiar. My wife has a great deal of empathy for the misfortunate. She organizes yearly drives that provide food and toiletries for the homeless. She’s a Girl Scout troop leader and a regular participator in the kids’ after-school activities. She has a tight network of friends among our neighbors, some of whom have turned to her in times of difficulty. But this one subject is a sore spot with her. Just bringing it up can set her off on a half-hour monologue about the responsibilities of parents to their kids and neighbors to neighbors. She never had much patience—or much empathy—for the woman next door.

I, on the other hand, could never muster much outrage at our neighbors. In part, this was because I have difficulty maintaining much interest at all in the doings of those around us. And I certainly didn’t have to keep an eye on the neighbor kid when she was visiting. My wife did that. But mostly I couldn’t get indignant about the whole business because I recognized their plight all too well.

I knew from my own experience what it was like to discover—at all too young an age—that my parents were not only less than infallible, but essentially untrustworthy. I knew what it was like to live in a house where the bills went unpaid and services were turned off and nobody but me was around to answer the door when the bill collectors showed up. I knew what it was like to go—again and again—to the same neighbors to borrow some pancake batter or spaghetti sauce or five dollars to pay some of what we owed the newspaper boy, to borrow things that we never returned, to go to neighbors who never had to come to us to ask for anything. I knew what it was like to live in a house you could never invite anyone back to because no one was there and the rooms were all empty and it was all too evident that no one gave a crap.

I moved out of my parents’ house when I was eighteen and I never went back. Three decades later, I rarely speak to my parents and I can’t help but think that all of our lives are better for this arrangement. There’s too much back there, in the past, that doesn’t need revisiting, and too little here in the future to build anything on.

My neighbors were here for four years or so, and then they were gone. When they left, as I’ve said, they must have taken only what would fit in a few suitcases and bags. They left a dog with a neighbor and two cats to fend for themselves. My wife fed the cats for a while and then made arrangements to bring them to a local pet shelter.

At night—after work, after my daily run—I stand in my back yard and I can see into the house next door. The painters took down the curtains when they started to paint and the owners promptly added those yards of cloth to one of the hills of junk at the curb.

There are lights on in the two bedrooms that look out on the fence that separates the adjoining properties. I look into those empty rooms and I think of that neighbor kid and I wish for her a future much like the one I’ve been granted, one in which she can look back over the decades at all she has escaped and feel what I feel. No regret, no anger, no sadness, at last, nothing but an abiding sense of relief.