 Peter Gurney. On April 1st, 2017, a new roommate moved in with me. At the time I was living in a three bedroom apartment, still hadn't filled the third room. I was in the middle of two years of a pretty serious depression that thankfully has since subsided. I was also in the middle of a graduate program for an occupation that I didn't particularly want. And I had been living by myself for the entire month of March after I had somewhat unceremoniously asked my previous roommate to move out, which had been a very emotionally difficult situation because we had been very good friends up until that point. So when my new roommate moved in, I was really hopeful that it would spark a change in my life or at least that it would give me some company and would be a really positive influence. I met Julia through Craigslist. I did a very thorough search through Craigslist, having had quite a bit of luck in the past in my life with interactions in Craigslist, whether for housing situations or buying an assortment of plants. And she advertised herself as a 31-year-old female farmer who liked to spin and knit, which sounded like someone who'd be very pleasant and easy to live with. When she moved in, I still remember the evening, I was listening to Zaido Kukou music and cooking some casserole. And she knocked on the door and she was wearing a sweater that she hadn't in. She was just very charming and just easy to interact with and we hit it off very easily. I was really attentive to making sure that I was the perfect host, at least in this new home of hers, and made her feel as welcome as possible because it had really been a really tough situation in the prior rooming dynamic that I had, so I really wanted her to feel welcome. And we did hit it off really well. We were able to converse really easily. It just felt like a really natural, easy relationship. By the second night that she was there, we started playing cribbage, and this became a nightly habit of ours. Every night, around 8.30, before we go to bed, we'd play a game of cribbage. My last roommate, who I kicked out, left a tin of hot chocolate mix, so we'd make hot chocolate and play cribbage. And now we started making a tally on the refrigerator door of how many games each of us had won. She consistently would win more than me, even though I think my cribbage skills are much better than hers. But it was a really nice, relaxing way to end each evening, and it gave me a lot of comfort at this time. All day was at UVM taking classes that I just wasn't interested in with people who I didn't particularly like. So we continued playing cribbage every night, and everything was going well. And the first weekend that she was there, this was at the beginning of April, and we had one of these 70-degree days. It was crazy. It was just nice and sunny. You could smell the earth. And after the winter, I was just taking the studded tires off my bike, and it was just like the world had come alive. One of those first really nice, warm weekends. So Julia was like, hey, would you mind showing me around town? So we biked the four miles or so into Burlington, and it was just nice and sunny. We went to the knitting shop, because she really likes to knit. And then we thought about maybe getting some food. And I was like, oh, I don't know. There aren't any places I really like. But she suggested that we get some hot dogs and go home and eat them on the lawn. And I, in all seriousness, probably my greatest vice in life might be processed meats. I like to think of myself as somewhat of an ethical omnivore, whatever bullshit that means. But I really like hot dogs, like fried bologna sandwiches, that kind of thing. So when she suggested eating hot dogs, I was like, oh, I'm in. And so we got like a blanket and put it out in the lawn. And we ate hot dogs and just chatted. And it was fantastic. I was just on cloud nine. The following day, she suggested that we spend the evening by watching my favorite musical, Show Boat, which I had recently purchased. New DVD of the San Francisco Opera had done a production of it. It's supposed to have really good production value. The musical actually wasn't so good. There were a few vocalists who I didn't think did that great job. But watching Show Boat with Julia was rather exciting. And it was around this time that I started thinking, like, you know, there might be something here. But I didn't really want that. And it was very confusing, because this is a woman who had moved across the coast after getting out of a six-year relationship. And it met me on Craigslist with someone who didn't know her at all previously. And I was like, and I was sort of involved with someone else the time. I was like, you know, if this is going to happen, I'll let her make a move. I'm not going to do anything. So I did nothing. The following weekend, we went to an event called Jazzy Yoki. It's this thing where you sing these songs and it's fun. And I didn't, you know, I didn't tell her that I like to sing or anything. And she was just like mesmerized by, you know, oh man, this guy likes to sing. And she was very impressed. And so on the way home, she insisted that I continue to sing these songs. And I was belting out all my favorite songs from Showboat. And it was really exciting. And I remember getting home and there was just like this tangible fire that you could feel. And I was really excited just to be with her. And I remember we got back and we both went to the bathroom. And I remember her coming downstairs. And I remember noticing that she didn't have her tights on underneath her dress anymore. And the two of us kind of stood there and talked kind of awkwardly. And both drank about like three glasses of water. And then we went to bed. This dynamic kind of continued on for a while. Eventually we both started kind of dating some other people. She saw this guy named Joe, whose last name I won't tell you. But it started with O and it rhymed with something dirty if you pronounce it incorrectly. This dynamic went on for a while and eventually I sort of lost interest. And after living with her for about a year it got to the point where I almost even resented that she was around. She went through a period of unemployment and it was rather difficult to have had that kind of interaction. And for it never really to have come to fruition and not to have been able to communicate honestly with her about it. This past summer in August she told me that she was going to be moving out. At this point I didn't really feel too strongly about it. I'm kind of in and out of the apartment at this point and so I figured, you know, that's okay. But when she moved out it sort of felt like something was missing in my life. There's still the tally on the door, the refrigerator that shows how many Krippich games each of us has won. She's eight games ahead. At this point I'm not sure that I'd really want to be in a relationship with her or pursue anything with her. And I'm not sure that if I was in that same situation again that I would have taken any action. But I know that with Julia I darn well should have. Steve Adams. December 6, 1952. Exactly 66 years ago today one of the headlines in the Barry Daly Times read, Playmate rescues Websterville Tot from Cory Hall. I was that Websterville Tot. I was three years old. The Playmate who was actually the hero of this story was my five-year-old neighbor named Tinker. Because I think a lot of stories that have heroes have villains. I'm going to cast my mother as the villain in this story for her lack of supervision. This is actually just one of several examples of my early childhood that I could cast her in that role. But in her defense she had three kids by the time she was 19 years old. And shortly after this incident we moved away from Websterville at her insistence. So we were living in an apartment above Lawson's store in Websterville at this time. When I say we, I mean my mother and father, my four-year-old brother, Butchie, three-year-old me, and my one-year-old sister, Bonnie. Lawson's store at that time was sort of the epicenter of the granite Cory industry or community. And our family had a history with the Cory's. My dad's dad worked in the Cory. My dad's brother worked in the Cory. My step-grandfather worked in the Cory. And my dad was a Derrickman at the Wetmore and Morris Cory, which was located just up the hill from Lawson's store. And I remember there was a path through the woods that my dad would walk to and from work every day. Right behind Lawson's store, about maybe a quarter of a mile at the most, there was an old abandoned Cory hole called the Canton Cory. There was a lot of reasons why a Cory hole would be abandoned. The main reason would be that the vane of granite that they were mining would be depleted. Or simply the amount of water flowing into the hole they couldn't keep up with and the hole would fill up and they'd have to stop working it. I'm not sure what reason the Canton Cory was stopped work... they stopped working it, but it hadn't been worked for years. And it was filled to water right to the top, probably anywhere from 60 to 100 feet deep, depending on where you measured. So, the thing with memories, I mean, when I was thought of telling this story, it's like, well, I remember this, certain parts of this incident, but I was three years old. You know, that's like, how do you know how accurate that is? My mother recently gave me a clipping from a newspaper article that was written at that time. And I read that clipping and I was amazed at my memory was pretty accurate on what happened, but I was also amazed at things that happened that I had no memory of, too. So, I'll share my memory first of the incident. So, we, meaning my brother Butch and Tinker, were playing near the Canton Cory and I remember the ice looking like glass. It looked so smooth and all I could think of was I wanted to see if I could see any fish through the ice. So, the granite slab leading down to the water's edge, I remember it seemed like it was sloping toward the water and it was snow covered. So, probably slippery. And I remember being on my belly so that I could look over the edge and down through the ice. And I remember I couldn't see anything through the ice because the reflection of the sun was glaring off the ice. So, I put my hands up to shield my eyes from the sun. Being three years old, that was probably pretty smart. And it actually worked. I remember seeing right through that ice way down into the water. I also remember being really disappointed, maybe even angry, that I did not see a single fish. My next memory is I am freezing cold, soaking wet, walking home with my brother on one side and tinker on the other. And I remember being really hard to walk because my clothes were freezing. And I'll never forget the feel and the sound of the ice breaking off my arms and legs as I was moving. And that's really the extent of my memory of that incident. So, when I read the newspaper article, it seemed like the writer had interviewed us, taught kids for that story because he quoted us and he also interviewed my dad, I guess. But according to that article, the boys were playing at the quarry hole and little Stephen, which was me, went through the ice and fell into the water. And it also described how I was hanging onto the edge of the ledge with my fingertips, immersed into the ice cold water up to my neck. And the article went on to say that my brother, my four-year-old brother, Butchie did what most four-year-olds would do. He stood there crying. So, thinking of doing this story, I checked with my brother to see if he was okay with me sharing that. He said he was, but unless I had video proof, he denies there was any crying. So, the story, the writer goes on to say that Tinker told the writer that he knew he didn't have time to go get help. Imagine that a five-year-old being able to think like that in that situation. So anyway, he went on to that sloping, slippery slab of granite and grabbed my head to pull me out of the water. That didn't work, so he grabbed my wrist and hauled me right out of that water. And so Tinker and my brother, Butch, helped me walk home. And according to the article when we got home, my mother called the doctor and he said put me in a warm bath, tried to slowly warm me up. And I guess that worked, and I was just left with the memory of this incident. So there's no logical... Oh, and my dad actually was called home from work, and he retraced our steps through the snow right to the water's edge and the hole in the ice. So verify that that's actually what happened. But there's no logical, reasonable explanation why the headline in that paper, 66 years ago today, didn't read, two young boys go through the ice in the old Canton Corrie and drown. But instead, it read, playmate rescues what's Websefil taught from Corrie Hole. And because of that, I'm here to share this and say thanks for listening. Ipluribus unum. I've been thinking a lot about that lately. It has kind of a highfalutin way of describing the greatness of our country and how we've gotten here because of all the diversity that we have. And I was also thinking about how, you know, our predecessors used words like Ipluribus unum. I mean, if it was left to me, it would have been, yeah, it kind of takes all kinds. And, you know, luckily, that's not on your money. I'm not here to talk about politics or, well, sort of, I am. I'm really here to talk about a lesson that I learned over four decades ago when I got out of school. And I was a young adult. I was a punk-ass kid and learned about reaching from my boss, the least likely of all sources for this, in my first job after school. Taught me about reaching beyond our differences and reaching a common goal and focusing on that. When I got out of school, I basically went to engineering school. I got a job in a small engineering section of a small town outside of Newark, New Jersey. And worked with four guys, three guys, me. I was the fourth. Town engineer was my boss. I was the assistant engineer and there was a guy, a contemporary of mine who was a surveyor. And there was another guy who was like my boss. He was about 50 years old and he was a construction inspector. Each noon time we would actually just stop work, go to a table that was in the middle of the office. Howard, my boss, would come out of the office and sit down with us and he would start to opine about current events. And, you know, I didn't get it at first, being the new guy, but then I realized that this is basically almost a daily event where he would just start talking about politics and religion. And, you know, within about a week, I found out he was basically a right wing religious as that led. He was a fundamentalist Christian as the first time I ever dealt with anybody like that. All of us were basically white, middle class, entitled guys, but then that's where the similarities kind of ended. We also did all live within, we grew up around Newark, New Jersey. And so the ranker in this noon time conversation, once I started getting the feel of it, and, you know, I just started to join in on it and it was just kind of getting ridiculous because I would argue, I was just, like, diametrically opposed to him from, you know, on a religious and political perspective. And after a particularly rankerous time, about a year in, I decided it's time to actually change this track. And I came in thinking, I'm just going to talk about, when I went to school, I took this one humanities class. It was the only humanities class that I had to take to graduate. And I was telling these guys about how I didn't, you know, I had no intention of taking it or I had no interest in taking it except I had to use it or had to get it, you know, in order to graduate. So the guy that taught it, his name was Doc Estrin. I still remember that. I think I'll remember it until the day I died, but he was just a remarkable guy. And I said the class was totally different than any of the engineering classes I took because for two weeks he just talked to us and he'd just draw everybody out from the, you know, the class, he'd start talking about personal things, he'd talk about family, he'd talk about everything. And it was just remarkable. And then after the two weeks, he basically started this, he was like the circus barker and he was going up and down the aisles and tapping people on the shoulder and saying, you know, George, stand up for a second, talk to the class and after about 30 seconds he'd say, so George here, he's from, he grew up, you know, within a stone's throw of Newark, like most of you did, but I can tell he was from the suburbs west of here, just there's the dialectic tells that tell me about that. And he started to explain how the fact that even in New Jersey there's these regional dialects that are easily discernible to somebody who has an ear for it. And, you know, to me, that was remarkable because I thought you either were like north or south of the Mason-Dixon line, which kind of defined what your dialect was. And so he identified, he's going up and down the aisles and he's talking to people, he's from Philadelphia, he's from Pittsburgh, so the denouement of this whole sin thing was he calls him my friend Mike and I had known Mike since the beginning of school, so this is like three years in and he says, Mike here is from California and I said, what? Mike's from California, I thought he was another New Jersey boy, so I'm just playing that Mike had this dialectic tell, he was basically, people from California have what is called, to linguists, the perfect American-English dialect. And it just resulted from the migration in the 19th and 20th century from the the gold rush on. And it just resulted in this distillation, the melting pot of dialects so that they didn't have any real it's actually hard to tell they're from California, but Doc Estrin knew that and I just kind of sat back thinking this is a good lunchtime and as I sit back in my chair the table almost came at me because Dom on the other side of the table was like what are you talking about? How the hell could you say that California's a perfect American dialect? There's just a bunch of hippies and commie freaks and dope smokers and I was like, whoa, easy, easy there Dom and Howard and Elmer who are trying to basically just calm them down there's nothing to be excited about here all this is about is how people talk in different parts of the country don't get excited about it Dom as he's saying this I'm realizing I just kind of said I realized that he wasn't really too concerned about California being the center of or the perfect American dialect he was concerned that Linden, New Jersey was not or the Jersey shore whatever and he starts calming down but Howard just calls and he just says okay guys let's go back to work George come into my office and in a year I had never gotten to his office and I'm thinking oh shit so he closes the door he goes what's going on with Dom you think he's okay I was about to answer but then I realized it was rhetorically he says hey why don't you sit down I want to do your performance evaluation I said oh shit wait a minute performance evaluation I didn't know there was such a thing to do I'm saying this to myself we just barely had this knock down drag out fight so he quickly put me at ease he said he just gave me this glowing evaluation said you're doing a good job I look at the elephant in the room and I say well Howard I mean you pretty much told me to go to hell yesterday in the argument we had during lunch he says yeah but that's lunch that's not their work you do good work and that's all you're here to talk about and when it all is said and done you can go to hell any smile and that was it so thank you Dennis McSorley this is how and when I found out there was no Santa Claus I was 11 years old I'm the oldest of the three kids at the time I have two sisters and it was my job to be the brother and to not you know to mess anything up I wrote the letter to Santa Claus because I had the good penmanship from parochial school I put the list I said we were good there was no doubt about it it didn't need a stamp it got sent off and my sisters were seven and four and our dog was like five now Christmas at our house was a spectacular event my mother is Hollywood crazy live trees ornaments the size of my ear I mean light bulbs the size of my ear we didn't burn our houses down back in those days and my sisters are wearing robes with poodle silhouettes on them I've got a robe and slippers on look like I'm 45 years old I'm 11 and and my mother is all excited and she's got the Kodak 8mm movie camera along with the four lights that get attached to it just like this spotlight and here it'll blind you it's like runway lights and she's filming every Christmas we've ever had including this one and so the letter has been sent to things that were sitting around it's Christmas Eve and I've already gotten to the point I'm thinking it through reindeer don't fly we don't have a chimney what are we talking about here how is this man actually getting around to do all of this I'm starting to question things this is the fifth grader you know logically the doorbell rings and my mother goes who could that be and you know who could it be so she says Edward my father Edward Dennis go see who it is so we go through the kitchen to the front of the house which is a dark hole and my grandma didn't believe in putting lights on she's from the depression we go outside on a porch and there he is Joe Cress it's not Santa Claus it's Joe Cress who's a cop friend of my father dressed very badly as Santa Claus he's got his work shoes on he's got these cover things that go over it he's got a actually has a pillow stuck inside this like five and dime store thing he's got a cotton beard he has a five o'clock shadow you can see all the time he's one of those guys that if he shades it doesn't matter and he's got the hat and he's got this sack of stuff over his shoulders and my father my father just goes and he says you okay and Joe goes yeah I'm okay he goes just a second so they have a cigarette my father and Santa have a cigarette they light up a chest a field and a palm wall and Santa takes a little pint out of his back pocket and they take a little pull on the whiskey and my father has a little pull on it too and they're ready to go now to meet the rest to the kids so we get down we're heading down the hallway and my father just kind of turns and just looks at me and gives a little nod so it's a father-son story he didn't have to say a word he gave me that nod like you know and then we go and my sisters are like over the moon they are like they're into this full heart the camera's going Santa's sitting down the dog is jumping around he's got ribbons on her hair and everything and all stuff is coming out of this bag nothing was on the list it was all stuff my mother went out and got anyway and football helmets I hate football chemistry set what are you kidding me and and that was so the proof was there now I have a son of my own the only child and he's well he's in his 40s now and we used to put the cookies and the glass of milk when he was growing up in the morning you know half the cup is gone the cookies gone wow Santa came you know and it was wordless it just happened that I never had to say anything to him it just sort of dissolved right maybe that's how it's supposed to go and my son now has two sons one's 14 the other one's 8 and little Alex still is a true believer and I'm sure that Jack the 14 year old is feeling like I felt to my son about this and said you know what are you going to do he says probably nothing dad we're just going to let it happen like you did with me and like my father did with me so it's sort of a family father son tradition I think and we don't spoil Christmas about it all because it's really about the spirit of love giving and being with your family happy holidays