The Time Diana tried to Catch the Quail - Part Three

So Diana was single minded in her quest for the quail.  One fat quail for her plate, that's all she wanted. One crested little bird.  Each day before Thanksgiving hundreds, no thousands, of them perched in the Coyote bush and along the creek bed, watching her.  They stood like silent sentinels giving her a smirk and a wink.  When she grabbed up her broom and ran screaming at them, bansheelike, they'd take off in unison cackling at her foolishness. 

Her children took up with the neighbors and made plans to have Thanksgiving dinner downtown at the Community Center, where they knew dozens of families would offer sympathy and food.

Diana never missed them. Her purpose was the complete and total annihilation of the Quail.

She had given up on dinner and only wanted revenge.  She kept her broom handy and wished for a shotgun. She had never killed another living thing, except spiders and flies and the occasional rodent, but she would not be outdone by game.

The night before the big day found her crouching under the porch with a bottle of Rainier Ale and a rake.  She'd wait for the quail to take tonight's bait of fois gras which lay just beyond a sticky paper rat trap, which would ensnare its tiny feet, and allow her to rush at it with the rake pinning it with the tines.

She waited and she waited.

Time stood still. it started to drizzle.  A million quail sat in the bushes laughing at her. But she would not be forced into reckless action. Zenlike she hunkered under the porch, heedless of the rain drops oozing between the wooden slats above and plopping on her head.  She waited.

Finally, one perky little fellow ventured forth from the brush. He bobbed and weaved his way toward the trap, his crest aquiver on his tiny head. He looked left and he looked right, he cooed and murmered along his pathway, toward the waiting trap. He inched forward. Diana held her breath.

When he was at the trap, his nostrils clearly picking up the delicious scent of the expensive bait, she tensed her muscles, without making a sound.  The quail looked around him, before moving again, then he did a little quail dance and scampered onto the sticky paper pecking at the goosey morsels that awaited him.

Diana moved, fast, and sure her rake poised above the now hapless little bird. And then he screamed. He screamed like a bird possessed, so loud, so shrill, so unexpected, Diana dropped the rake and then tripped over it.  She grabbed at the bird, struggling to free his feet from the sticky paper and still screaming.  

Suddenly Diana was besieged by a scene out of Alfred Hitchcock. All the birds in all the woods came swooping down upon her, quail, blackbirds, crows, starlings, hawks, and turkey vultures, swooping and circling and showing their talons.

When she woke up it was Thanksgiving morning and foggy.  She lay in her bed, and considered the weirdest dream she's ever had.

She still had time to bake a squash pie and get to the Community Center in time for Thanksgiving dinner with the kids and the rest of the town.

In the bushes the quail chirped their farewell as she backed the VW out of the driveway and onto the main road into town.

The Time Diana Tried to Catch the Quail - Part Two

As Thanksgiving nears and the weather turns sullen, we return to the saga of Diana and the quail. This was in 1975, shortly after Diana had moved to the small "farm" that wasn't really a farm, just an assortment of buildings near the creek, where the Franklin family kept a few chickens and grew their own vegetables, but calling it farm made it seem romantic and earthy and oh so right for the 70's.

Diana rented the stand alone building on the creekbank, one large room and a loft. She wanted to do something different for Thanksgiving and besides that with three children and no job and a deadbeat ex-husband, she couldn't afford a turkey and all the fixin's. Oh, she could always go down to the Community Center, which in those days always had a big communal dinner and not just for poor people. About a hundred or so would gather for the pot luck, turkeys donated by the Community Center and drinks and side dishes brought by the community members.

When we left Diana, she had just been outsmarted yet again by the quail in a rain squall, and had dragged back inside to scheme some more. Her kids had been watching from the window, and now the oldest, the boy, said, "Mom," in that not quite squeaky voice teenage boys use when about to impart some adolescent wisdom.

The girls kept their distance, trying not to giggle at their Mom's dripping hair and soaked clothes. Diana gave them the "look" and made it even sterner to the boy.

"Let's just go to the Community Center. You already fed the pumpkin pie and the cranberries to the quail, and," he went on sensibly, "there won't be enough for all of us to eat, anyway."

She could have gone to the Community Center, with her kids and all of us who had made it our Thanksgiving tradition. Larry even brought Irish whiskey for his table, and there was always more than enough to eat and still send home to those who were under the weather, or infirm or just too anti-social to dine in public.

Diana was none of the above, but she was stubborn. She was determined to get that quail. Never mind that it wouldn't even feed one mouth, let alone four. It was defying her, and she would not be defied. She would not be bested by a small bird.

Or a whole bevy of them, for hundreds seemed to have gathered in the coyote bush to taunt her as they waited for the nightly feast she put under the stick and box trap. She could hear them squabbling over the bread crumbs and molasses and pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce she was tempting them with.

"You go to the Community Center," she said. "You can take the girls and ride your bikes there. I am staying here to eat my quail." She didn't raise her voice; she just made her statement and disappeared into the bathroom, where they soon heard the shower running.

Two days left until Thanksgiving.

The Time Diana tried to Catch the Quail - Part One

(Digressing and skipping ahead in time and place - Place - A Never to be named Coastal Community in Marin County - Time - The mid nineteen seventies)

One year when Diana was living on the Franklin Farm down by Pine Gulch Creek, she decided to catch a quail for Thanksgiving dinner. Now, quails are protected in those parts, the whole town being dedicated as a Quail sanctuary. So what Diana planned to do was strictly verboten. But she was determined to harvest her own dinner this year and a quail would suit her nicely, going along with her own home grown potatoes, tomatoes, carrots and the baby lettuces she cultivated in small raised beds with deer netting.

She probably would have shot a deer for a meal of fresh venison if she wasn't basically non-violent and refused to have anything to do with guns. She cursed the "rats on hooves" as we all called them in those days, while shooing them away from the garden and strengthening the fencing and netting that was supposed to keep them out but seldom did. That's why the lettuces were all babies. There was no way they would survive to adulthood with the number of browsers in the neighborhood.

Anyway, she planned to catch the quail with a box and a stick and some gourmet quail bait. The box rested on the stick, and when the quail took the bait, the box came down, slam on top of them, trapping the little entre-for-one inside. That was the theory. In practice, the quail took the bait alright - I think it was something yummy like high quality birdseed, mixed with some honey and garnished with millet, to draw them deep into the recesses of the trap - but the trap was never sprung. Each morning Diana went outside to find her bait gone, and to hear the high chirping of quail in the bushes nearby. No doubt calling on her to hurry up and replenish their supply of feed. Their chirping grew in intensity and volume each morning as more and more of them came to the backyard in search of midnight lunch. The plan was not working.

Not to be deterred, - Diana had started this quail hunting experiment in plenty of time before the Holiday to try out a variety of trapping methodologies - Diana persisted with stronger but more easily sprung traps, and higher quality and more irresistible bait, pasting it onto the back "wall" of the cardboard box with the honey to ensure her prey would knock it over on themselves while trying to scrape off every sweet juicy morsel of grain.

Yet, still the quail eluded her and each morning taunted her from their safe haven deep within the Coyote bush at the creek's edge. And each day Diana improved upon her contraption for quail capture, adding suet and blackberries ripe from the vine, maple syrup from the People's store, rich and organic, testing her stick "trigger" for sensitivity to movement and, one momentous evening, getting drenched to the skin, staking out her trap with a string tied around the stick with the other end tied to her wrist so that at the moment the now fat and quite complacent quail entered the trap, she could yank the string and secure the bird.

She lay under a makeshift tent of the remnants of an old blue tarp and some black plastic garbage bags, still as a mouse until well after midnight, when the first confident quail hopped up to the trap.

"Now I've got you," she said to herself, for she was keeping very still and did not want to alert the quail to her presence. She tensed her arm, ready for the tug, when the quail suddenly gave a little flap of its chubby wings, propelling it upwards, and knocking the box entirely over, after which the quail proceeded to feed, giving an annoyed shrieking peep that started the whole flock yelping when Diana rushed from the bushes toward the now sodden overturned trap, adding her own screams to those of her quarry, now settled into a disapproving clucking sound in the deep bushes at the creek's edge.

After that it was three more night until the quail returned to Diana's yard and only one until Thanksgiving. To be continued....

The Last One Left - Part II

So, did the phone really ring when I said it did in the last episode? Really, I don't remember. Somehow though, I found myself on a snowy Beacon Hill New Year's Eve face to face with my old boyfriend Brian, the one with the mother, the one I necked with in the movie theaters, the one I left for Billy the future minister. Brian was there in the snow, In Boston, in my apartment.

It was almost the end of 1967. And I had not done "it" yet. Somehow I knew I would do "it" with Brian, and that made it all ok. Brian was safe. Brian was old school, literally. And I was more than ready.

I wish I could tell you it was romantic and brought back all the old fond feelings between us, but it wasn't and it didn't. Oh, I was fond of Brian, still. Very fond, but like you are fond of your best gay friend, which I have come to have many of since then, although I didn't even know the word then.

It was safe like being with a girl friend, except that we were doing "it" in my narrow bed high above the Boston streets, and it was nothing like what I imagined it would be. It hurt, although Brian was gentle. He was kind, he kept asking, "am I hurting you?" and although yes, he was, I kept saying, "no, it's fine."

And then "it" was over. And Brian was breathing hard and I was left with a feeling of missing something, my great opportunity had come and gone and I felt only sore. was this all there was to "it"? No, of course not, but I wouldn't learn about all the good parts, the parts that made me feel good until years later, and that is another story.

Later, days later, Brian was back in Lowell and I was back at Filene's basement where I could scarcely wait to tell Gail the news.

When we both had a free moment, I dragged her aside, and said, in my best, most dramatic sotto voce tone, "Gail, you are the last one left!" and then to soften the blow, I added, "don't worry, it's not all it's cracked up to be anyway."

The Last One Left - Part One

This girl Gail Davis, who worked with me at Filene's basement and had gingivitis and stringy hair, and who lived with her parents in a high rise apartment building in someplace like Brighton, and I became good friends, mostly because we thought of ourselves as "the last two left."


By that, we meant we were the last two remaining virgins in Boston, if not on the face of the planet. Everyone we knew had done "it" by now, except for us. Well, in my less kind moments I could understand why Gail had not had the opportunity to do "it" yet. She lived with her parents for one thing. And of course there was the stringy hair and gum disease. But what was my excuse? I lived on swinging Beacon Hill with two girls who had done "it" several times. One even had a steady boyfriend we all had to leave the apartment for, when he came over so they could do "it' in the one bedroom two of us shared. The third has a converted closet all to herself and we all coveted that one.


I was nineteen years old and it was still 1967. Only months before, I had left school and immediately obtained birth control along with my job at the Harvard "Coop," and my first apartment in Cambridge with Wendy and Steve. I knew I would soon be doing "it" with the perfect hippie boyfriend who I would meet on a peace march or maybe in a writing class. I went to the marches and took the classes, but I did not meet the right boy.


I met boys who turned out to be friends, good friends, with whom I smoked dope in Harvard Square or in the Old Burying Grounds where famed poets and Revolutionaries watched over us. I met my "beautiful man" who bought textbooks for a class he was teaching at Harvard when I met him over the phone when he'd call in to order the books, and when I saw him approach with his army surplus jacket and shaggy hair, big as a bear, I knew it was him, even before I heard his soft poetic speech from the telephone.


But alas the Beautiful man was married with small children and there was that babysitting experience that ruined the fantasy for good.


My one true love of that summer was Zachary, of the I and Thou Coffee House. The I and Thou was next to the Haight Theater in San Francisco where I just had to go for the Summer of Love, hitching a ride from three boys, friends of friends, which I did not mention to my mother (I think I made them girls, in that version of the story), and Zachary could be found there most evenings. He was lean and handsome with a beard and winsome eyes. And I thought Zachary! Zachary will be the one. Alas, it was not so, and that is a story for another installment.


I moved into the apartment on Beacon Hill when I returned from my Summer of (not as much as I had hoped) Love because the roommates were moving on and the Coop job was lost to inattention and through this and that (a few more good stories and some not so good men) I ended up in a too crowded third floor walk up on the wrong side of the Hill and a Christmas job at Filene's basement.


On Beacon Hill I met Gilly, oh so cute Gilly, who I was far too naive to understand was not into doing "it" with any woman, no matter how cute. But Gilly and I bonded over a friendly competition for the best discards on trash day from the folks on the "good" side of the Hill; Louisberg Square was a haven for cast off furniture, and all you had to do was haul it up and over the Hill and up the three flights of stairs and voila, instant shabby chic. Gilly's apartment was gorgeous and so was he, another male friend. I was racking them up.


It was now past Christmas. I went home to Methuen, my mom, my sister and the new dog Gretchen, a present for my sister's birthday from my wayward father. And back to the Hill before New Year's, where I had the apartment to myself. I planned a cozy New Year's alone watching it snow and staying up to hear the famous ringing of the bells at midnight.


And then the phone rang.

Brian Jones and Big Fat Brenda

One day a fat girl on the fringes of our little rebellious teenage crowd of losers, shoplifters and uncool hipsters announced she was dating Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones.

"Oh, yeah, sure you are, and I'm dating Paul McCartney," said Elaine, the coolest one of the crowd, the one who taught me the sleight of hand in Russem's that netted the daisy ring that my boyfriend, Christian Billy, made me throw away in the parking lot of the church. But this was before that, before I met Billy and the Church and folk music.

The girl, was her name Brenda? said, in a very smug way for a fat girl, "Yes, I am too, and i can prove it."

"Prove it," challenged Elaine. And we all echoed, "Prove it, prove it."

How would fat Brenda even get to meet, let lone date Brian Jones, or any of the Rolling Stones, or any boy of interest at all for that matter? I wondered. I knew the Stones had been in Boston the previous week, and I had not been able to see them, because of no money and no ride, and so forth. But others went, including Elaine and fat Brenda, although they did not go together. They were not really friends, and Elaine had her eyes out for boyfriend prospects all the time, especially ones that lived out of town, and did not want someone like Brenda holding her back, someone fat and unhip and needy.

Brenda was on a roll, "Doncha want to know how I met him?" she demanded, petulantly. Sure, sure, but get to the good part, the proving part.

So she told us. She went to the concert with some older girls from another town. Head nodding and eyerolling from Elaine. Older girls taking Brenda anywhere? Unless it was her older, fatter sister Betsy, forced to take Brenda by their enormously fat mother, Bernice. Bernice was so fat, she waddled in the aisles of Karls' market, obliterating the shopping cart, which was inevitably piled high with frozen TV dinners, on top of big tubs of ice cream and gargantuan sides of beef, or so it seemed.

Brenda ignored our disbelief and told how she and the older girls went to the side door after the show to catch the Stones as they left.

"Everybody goes to the side door, stupid," interrupted Elaine. "All the cute girls from Boston go there and flash their panties for the stars; they're all groupies and Brian Jones could have his pick of any of them. Especially the Catholic girls. They put out the most. Everyone knows that."

Well, except for me. I was shocked to hear that anyone our age "put out" even for big British rock stars. But then, the logic of what Elaine was saying struck me. It wasn't the putting out, it was the fact that Brian Jones could have his pick of the cutest, sexiest, fastest girls in the whole Boston area, and would never in a million years choose fat Brenda, whose panties must be the size of one of her mother's two gallon tubs of ice cream.

But Brenda was undeterred by our skepticism and continued her tale of meeting Brian outside the Music Hall where he chose her over all the skinny, loose Catholic girls because he could tell she had "soul." Not for Brian the one night stand, the one hour, stand in the dressing room, before the girl's parents sent her older brothers scouting for her. No, Brenda would be a real girlfriend, someone he could talk to, could count on to wait for him between performance, be a soft landing after the grueling road trips.

Soft landing indeed. Maybe he liked them round and plump, fat. Fat Fat the Water Rat, we used to chant, and never knew it was a song by Dave Van Ronk. Only years later did I Google it. A word, a process not invented or dreamed of outside of unknown to us computer laboratories that even then were springing up along Highway 128.

So Brenda set up a little proof for her doubting Thomasina friends. We all gathered at Elaine's house one evening with Brenda, who had arranged for Brian to call us. Right on time, the phone rang and Elaine jumped for it before her mother could get the extension, "Got it Mom!" she yelled.

Then silence, as she listened, her eyes growing round, head nodding. "Here," she handed the phone to me, "Hello doll," said a distinctly British accent. Too British I thought. Fake.

"Who is this?" I blurted out.

"It's me, Brian," said the voice.

"No, really who is it?"

"I'm Brian, Brian bleeding Jones," getting impatient.

Girls were jostling for their turn, while Brenda looked annoyed. She grabbed the phone out of my hand. "HI Brian," she listened and giggled, and turned to give me a dirty look. "Elaine believes you," she said into the mouthpiece

Elaine was looking less sure by the second. "What do you think?" I whispered to her, as other hands snatched the phone away from Brenda's ear.

"It could be her cousin. He went to England last year."

"I think he sounded fake. I mean, Brian Jones and Brenda!?" I gestured toward her sprawled across Elaine's pink sateen bedspread like a beached whale.

"I dunno."

We never did find out if it was really Brian Jones that fall of 1965. There were no more phone calls but Brenda went on mysterious overnights and told her mother she was staying with Elaine, until in early 1966, coinciding with the end of the Stones' American tour, she said, "Brain's gone back to England. I guess he's gone," and sighed a very large sigh and asked, "Anyone want ice cream?"

In 1969 Brian Jones died, drowned in his swimming pool, one month after being replaced by Mick Taylor in the band. Or was his heart broken by a fat girl named Brenda in Methuen Massachusetts in the fall of 1965, and he just never got over it?

Folk Music and Me -a High School Romance

Folk Music

Everybody in my high school crowd was into folk music. We played guitars, and sang Bob Dylan tunes and Peter Paul and Mary tunes and Joan Baez tunes and my boyfriend Billy was obsessed with Tom Rush, who lived in Cambridge, so was close enough to go see a lot. We both liked Tom Rush, but he was in love with him, like a total crush. I was more in love with Cambridge itself and the Club 47 where we went to see Tom Rush, and later, Joni Mitchell, who was from Canada and a compete unknown, until Tom Rush brought her to the US, after introducing her songs to the Club 47 crowd over the past year. The Club 47 was dimly lit, with a tiny stage and really teeny tiny little tables with candles in old Chianti bottles, so the place always smelled of wax. We drank grenadine, a red drink made of pomegranates, which was the thing to drink while listening to folk music. They didn’t serve alcohol in the Club 47; at least not that I can remember, but then I was a Christian teenager from a dying mill town and what did I know?

My Birthday Surprise

On my birthday one year, Billy said he had a surprise for me; we were going somewhere for a great surprise. So excited, we headed off to the east and I tried to imagine what my surprise would be; this was great. Billy even brought clean clothes home from the shoe factory where he was working for the summer; all the kids worked in the factory during the summer between high school and college, so they’d have some money to start off with; and he changed in my kitchen.

We finally reached the destination, a cool looking club in the home of the Ipswich clam, Ipswich. I was sure we were seeing some famous act, Bob Dylan, or Pete Seeger, or maybe Peter Paul and Mary. One summer night we had gone to Canobie Lake Park, a really seedy amusement park in New Hampshire, and were thrilled to be entertained by Sonny and Cher singing I Got You Babe. My expectations were high.

So when we stood outside the ticket window of the small, out of the way club, and I saw that the headliner for the night was Tom Rush, I completely lost it. And not in a good way.

“Tom Rush is my birthday surprise!?” I hissed not under my breath at all, as we moved up the line toward the ticket window. “This isn’t any kind of surprise; we see Tom Rush all the time.” I whined. I stomped my feet. I was disappointed. Billy was embarrassed that his girlfriend was pitching a fit in front of the fans. I had never heard of “groupies" in those days, but that’s what Billy was, and he thought I was too, but I wasn’t. Tom Rush was all right and Joni Mitchell was even better, but not a birthday surprise. 

I can’t remember if we stayed for the show or not, but we didn’t stay together as a couple past the first trimester of college.

Hosting the Folkies

 

However this story is about something else, another time Billy and I went to a concert, a show, at the Club 47, where we usually saw Tom Rush or Joni Mitchell, or both together, the first time we saw Joni Mitchell, it was both together. This time we knew that Sandy and Jeanie Darlington were coming and we for some reason - what reason? who knows? That’s just something you say when you can’t remember what could have possessed you to do such a reckless thing - for some reason, we wrote to them and said we’d like to take them to dinner before the show. And they replied. They accepted the dinner invitation, so we had to do it; two high school students, going to dinner with big time folk musicians! We took them to some kind of hofbrau type place in Harvard Square, where the food was hearty and cheap, and Germanic if I recall. 

We tried to act cool and look older. And they were totally gracious, pretending they went to dinner with high school age fans all the time, acting like we knew what and who they were talking about, as they discussed their act and the other musicians who'd influenced them, asking us who we liked. They even let us pay for dinner without making the usual adult fuss or giving each other knowing looks over the bill.

Other than those details, which are seared on my brain, I don't remember a thing about the meal; or the concert afterward. This was my first encounter with famous people.

Except of course for Brian Jones. But that must wait for the next chapter.

Tom Hale

I never knew what Tom Hale did, really did, for a living. I knew he owned a card shop called Green's where grandmotherly old lady with white hair waited on customers, one, two a day, tops. Old lady, not grandmotherly but Moberly, married to the mob, old lady widow of Mob boss, working for a living, or more likely, charitable intervention of Tom Hale.

The building stood on aide street Boston, all canyons and dark, a bagel shop across the street, around the corner, the Park Street Station and the Common, around the other Raymond's "Where you bot the hat."

Up some narrow stairs to Dotty's Balcony, where sat I, young and dumped by blonde Rick, who, up another flight of stairs ran the head shop; paraphernalia that sold only marginally better than cards, then junk in the balcony cracked glass case.

Tom Hale, who was he, then, and later, when still performing charity, he took in the homeless, the in-between boyfriends and jobs and mothers, the post-Sanctuary Bill Chase and post Resistance Walrus, with his droopy mustache and, heaving chest, from climbing two, three, four flights of stairs to narrow, dark, rooms over snow bound Boston streets.

It was winter 1968 or '69. No apologies for the way dates and events get scrambled over years and miles and people lost and found and brain cells rearranged by drugs and time and straining to remember, just a story without an end.

Tom Hale, Peter Pan to lost boys, and girls, who once said, "here is a new thing we are trying out; it could be big, it could be marketable," and me, gullible, popping purple pill in my mouth, thinking, why would anyone want to take their wine in tablet form, and miss the ritual, passed bottle, or paper cups, with company on couches, is the point.

And then trails of colors and laughing and impish grins told the truth, and ok, it was fun to trip with friends in comfortable, wintry Boston, with history heaped upon history and Revolutionary soldiers, padding on ghostly feet down cobblestones and up these very stairs maybe, hiding and taking careful aim from windows at advancing redcoats, never mind the building we imagined was not the same as the one we inhabited, 100 years or so too late.

There were meeting with ragged haired men in clerical collars, with earnest faced youth, and elderly friends of the Mayor, when I was sent to Raymond's for provisions, and history was being made. And Tom Hale just shrugged when asked, and the men spoke in hushed tones, coming and going and every time, I am sent for provisions.

Then, in the way of youth, new callings, new boyfriends, my own politics, Women's Liberation, and moving in with new friends, taking new job with newspaper back to Cambridge where I started the journey. And disloyal, I drop Tom Hale from memory until years later, a vague reference to disappearance - int jail, death, the backwoods of Vermont, witness protection? I never knew. I want to.

Spring Tableaux!

One day Jane and Damien and I found some thrown away bits of window dressing from one of the downtown department stores. Filene's or Jordan's. Fake branches and flower parts, very well used. Stomped on twigs, maybe a bird's nest. Just the ticket for our Spring Tableaux.

Spring Tableaux was what you did when, bored, you borrowed someone's top vent VW bug and crowded inside with your fake greenery and drove through the streets of Boston's labyrinthine downtown.

Who drove? Was it Jane, with her mouth full of mystery, her eyes full of spying, her throaty cackle of delight, head thrown back, laughter like the smallest living animals freed from between her lips to sail toward the Heavens? Or was it Damien? he of the wispy beard and imp's small toothed grin, hair flying out the window in the faintest scented spring breezes. It could have been me, with no skills, lurching the clutch, pounding the brakes, sending them all flying and the decorations to, toward certain fateful collisions and policemen's Irish disappointment.

But no, not I that day in spring, as the car glided, not hunched along, the narrow Boston streets, no longer cobblestone, not where the stores were, the big department stores, with their multiple basements, each one cheaper and darker and less civilized then the last, like the deepest darkest circles of Dante's Hell. Only on this earth and voluntarily entered for purposes of bargains. Women with arm wattles elbowing each other for the choicest spring frocks, wrinkled and worn and tossed on heaps, dressing and undressing right there in the warm bowels of basement no. 3, young extra-hire clerks busily stuffing bags full of treasures hidden under counters and down underfilled bras and hips and crotches of clothing.

It was April in Boston; cherries budded and robins breasted and VW bugs sprouted garlanded plastic branches through their sun roofs, while we three leaned out of windows and chortled "Spring Tableaux! Spring Tableaux" to the imagined delight of passersby on their frenzied way to shopping Nirvana.