"After sunset, the Jersey mosquitoes appeared in starving squadrons searching ravenously for the warm blooded."

Summer peaches

  "I couldn't remember falling on the floor, or the other time, when the bed slid away from the wall and I fell into a dark cavernous hole with no way out except 'screaming bloody murder' as I'm told by more than one person in Aunt Julia's house."

Sleeping Over

  "I slipped my small feet into dad's big boots and clomped around the room dragging the huge heavy boots with all my strength. I put on his heavy coat and it covered me completely and dragged along on the floor."

Antnee's shoe store  

"Now all the worms in my neighborhood have breathed a collective sigh of relief . . . but my daughter has locked up her Barbie collection -- even though she hasn't used the dolls in years, she won't let me take Barbie fishing."

Not Where You Fish

  "He said something about where the ram roam and that there were three ways to fix it. He said I could give him a lot of money and he could give me some chips to improve my memory. People get arrested and go to the prom with a guy named Bubba for deals like that, so I asked about option two."

Lawn Labors Lightener  

  "Cousin George came to mind. If anyone could unlock the mystery of the Pumking, it would be Cousin Georgie. He was a few years older than me and had gone through his whole life with people who called his father Lou. My Uncle Lou's real name was, are you ready?, George. How they got from George to Lou is likely another story. In fact, Cousin Georgie is not his real name. It is, of course, Lou."

Great-grandpa Was A 'Pumking'

"In the top drawer under the balled socks was a folded newspaper clipping of the first article I ever had published in the newspaper. It was something about the goals of the long-haired generation, and the newspaper people had left off my by-line -- who knows why? Dad cut it out and took it to whatever construction job he was working at and showed it to the guys. "Hey, my kid wrote this," I can hear him say, as he beamed. They doubted him because my name wasn't on it. But he never questioned it...

"... And in this top drawer on a string are bands he never placed on the leg of a struggling squab. Jingling here, his dog tags from World War II. In a silent slice of his life, other things, the carpenter's apron, a skeleton key, a pocket knife, a pocket watch and fob and the battered old carpenter's ruler and a box of those flat carpenter pencils. So, he never saw the book I dedicated to him, the one with his photo on the cover, twice. And also on that cover, the string of bands, the dog tags, the carpenter's apron, the pocket knife, the pocket watch and the battered old carpenter's ruler."

Magical top drawer 

  "When mom was on the phone with Grandma was a good time to ask for stuff she would usually tell me no to if she weren't so distracted. It turned out that from 6:15 to 6:30 was always a good time to ask, "Can I have a pony?" or "Can I go bike riding out of the neighborhood?" or "Can I have a puppy?"

Do we ever stop missing our folks

  "In no time at all I had circled the parking lot and found a spot within a half-mile of the store entrance. A greeter gave me directions to the lighting section. In no time at all I had found every kind and size of fluorescent light bulb except, of course, the 18-inch 15-watt cool white that I needed."

$110 light bulbs

  "The morning crew was thrilled to be working on my furnace. They had two workers and three or four observers. It seems that the gas company had recently provided a course for these technicians on just how to deal with this kind of problem. The crew and observers wanted to see if the classroom theories applied in the basement of reality."

"The chimney sweep fellow turned out to be a nice guy named Bob Harris from Skyline Chimney. He had moved here from Michigan and told me all about being a chimney sweep, the different tests and licenses he had to obtain. It was interesting stuff. Guys like to hear about other lines of work, often mentally comparing it with the line of work presently engaged in."

Bob Harris fan club

"If dressing up like the Cleavers on weekends would help sustain the tourist trade, I'm sure a lot of Nutley-ites would turn out for the hay ride. If it could help pay our property taxes, many of us would endure the yokels peeking into our windows to espy a genuine Nutley family watching the black and white TV mounted with lag bolts into the wall."

Martha Stewart doesn't live here -- anymore

"It's a little known secret that what made Jason go mad and kill off all those promiscuous teenagers was when he learned what went into the bug juice."

"Anyone who did not pass the swim test had his nose painted red with mercurochrome. Once we were painted with red noses, even if we learned to swim the next day or the day after that, the dye didn't wash off till it was time for our parents to pick us up on the last day of camp."

It's Catfish Pond now

  "It's the parents who are sitting on heavy blankets, wearing thermal underwear, thermal socks, thermal neckwear, thermal hats and special gloves with places for the charcoal hand-warmers that activate by shaking. Sometimes the hand-warmers activate as the music parents shiver in the stands trying to sit on the cushion on the blanket on the iced-over metal bleachers..."

"Seriously, band parents sit in the middle of the stands on cold, icy-damp, foggy nights because their kid is on the field. And though the child on the field thinks that anyone in those cold stands is nuts, some day the child will realize that these were the best days of their lives -- cold, foggy, rainy damp and all the rest."

No Saturdays off

  "As one who brown bagged it 99 percent of the time, I often pitied the bus kids who had to buy the hot lunch in the school cafeteria. Theirs was an endless stream of mystery meat in brown gravy with vegetables no one could identify. Plus Jell-o, of course. Surely, at that price, it was a bargain, but what it was, was anybody's guess."

Yellow crackers

  "We sneaked a look back and waited for the Russian's A-bomb to come crashing through any one of the many windows in our school. Oh why, we wondered, did they have so many windows in this school building. We could have a much better chance of surviving a nuclear holocaust if only our school had no windows."

Air raid drill memories

  "Perhaps it is a long-forgotten English class and I have to give an oral book report. I'd rather be in the Navy chipping paint on the side of a battleship than do an oral book report."

A test, Peggy Sue?  

  "All of us non-essential actors realized that as long as we were working on this silly little play, then we would not have to learn anything in English class."

Peter Pan revisited again

  "There you go again: old girlfriends, girls whose good looks crushed the hearts of quiet souls, quiet girls whose beauty and loves were unrequited in those dark days; the obnoxious few who thought who they were, the bullies and the bandits; all of us looking for something we left behind in that jumble of bricks called high school."

Reunion trepidation

  "She is happy to see me, I think. She tries to spin her welcome as she did for so many years but now only her black head circles slightly and her long ears flop a bit. Her front legs jog in place and her hind legs wobble as if confused by messages being sent from her senile brain. Those hind legs are unable to help her dance the happy dog dance."

Happy dog dance 

"With this black bird in my yard, I refused to pick it up, or even encourage Stormi to pick it up and fetch it. I thought it might have the dreaded childhood "cooties" disease and that by handling it I would contract that icky illness."

Blackbird