Tales from a Refrigerator Box

Forward The past is never dead. —William Faulkner Bats were circling the church steeple. It was dusk on South Loring Street in Lowell, Massachusetts. I was sitting on the steps of our side porch looking out over the house across the street where the church’s steeple rose above the neighborhood. It was 1968, a warm summer evening. I was ten. I liked being on the porch after dinner because then I wouldn’t have to watch the news. Ma always had the news on the TV in the kitchen at this time of night. I think she had a crush on Walter Cronkite. The evening news back then was, as it is now, depressing—even for a 10-year-old. The lead story was usually the day's body count from the Vietnam War. Riots in the big cities across the country, with downtown buildings engulfed in flames, got a lot of media attention. Grim stuff. The world scared me then. Still does, actually. But in the early evening it was peaceful and quiet on the porch, and on the corner of Liberty Street and South Loring Street where I lived with my mother, Rita Coughlin, four older sisters —Lois, Dotti, Judy, and Lee, in descending order by age—, and younger brother Dan in our triple-decker home. That doesn’t mean there weren’t bad things happening in my little world—of course there were. But there were many good things happening, and that outweighed the bad for me, many times over. I loved that house and the people in it, the neighborhood that surrounded it, Cupples Square, and the city in which I lived, Lowell, Massachusetts. I was not wise enough to know that things wouldn’t always stay that way; places wouldn’t always look the same, and people wouldn’t always just be there. As Joni Mitchell said, it’s a circle game—you can’t return, you can only look behind from where you came. That’s what this book is: a series of snapshots from my memory. You won’t find any earth-shattering events here, but rather everyday happenings. Small moments in life. It is, as author and editor Roger Angell put it, “a mélange, a grab bag, a plate of hors d’oeuvres, a teenager’s closet. A bit of everything.” Some of these stories have been in the front of my mind for years. Others are recent surprises that came to me at random times—flashbacks that found their way home. In this book you will find lots of little stories, like encounters with bears, exploding piles of leaves, streakers, lost corpses, callous dentists, a Christmas spent at a trailer park, shopping carts in the city canals, and other odd occurrences. Most families have some sort of oral history going on. Maybe a grandfather that tells the story of a certain fishing trip with his father when he caught that big striped bass. Or a grandmother that talks about her first job at the department store downtown. Or a dad that talks about how tough it was in his day, walking uphill both ways to and from school. Or a mom that tells her son's new girlfriend about the time when he was two and had explosive diarrhea. Stories. Every family has them. Like the time Ma had to buy a new refrigerator. It arrived in a huge box from one of the downtown stores. It was wintertime, and that box provided hours and hours of entertainment in the snowy side yard for Judy, Lee, and I. You can see a lot of the world from a refrigerator box. The real question is, what happens to those stories as time marches on? As these loved ones leave us? Hopefully somebody, maybe you, will write them all down.