Friday, July 01, 2022

The Red Letter Poem 117

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.  To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

                                                                                                          – Steven Ratiner

 

 

Red Letter Poem #117

 

 

 

It is good knowing that glassesare to drink from;the bad thing is not to knowwhat thirst is for.

                  -- Antonio Machado

 

 

It seems to me Jennifer Barber knows – or, at the very least, is learning.  Thirst is the antidote for that drowsiness that veils the senses; thirst is a reagent for stripping the varnish off habit and expectation; for engaging in the complex practice that is gratitude; for learning how to wake on yet another morning, amid the everydayness of our lives, and discover new ways of discerning its unique beauty.  Thirst – and poetry, too, perhaps – is what elevates perception into prayer.

 

When Jennifer gave me two new poems from her then-forthcoming (and, I’m happy to report, now published and well-received) new collection – The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made, issued by The Word Works Press – I could feel an increased emotional and even spiritual valence in the work.  No reason for surprise.  After a quarter century, she’d retired as editor-in-chief of the literary journal Salamander which she founded in 1992.  She’d also concluded her time as Scholar in Residence at Suffolk University, stepping back from the teaching that had become a central feature in her life.  She was undergoing a time of transition, perhaps a time of harvest.  It was now a central focus for her to attend to more personal labors, knowing that (as is the case for all of us) these mornings are neither guaranteed nor to be taken for granted.  And so in the new book Jennifer was entering undiscovered territory – or, in some cases, revisiting old terrains but with a more refined and probing investigation.  I like how, in this poem for example, one perception throws the next into an altered light, and only seems to magnify our quiet thirst for more.  When her unscrolling images come to an end, I believe the speaker is reflecting the dual responsibilities of any poet: to experience, as fully as possible, the potentiality within the present moment – while, at the same time, becoming available to the potentiality that this unexpected language is revealing within the poem, within the self.

 

I’ve read about Tang Dynasty scholars leaving the emperor’s employ and going off to live in the Chungnon Mountains – a life of solitude, reflection, and poetry.  And yet it is clear in their writing that, even in seclusion, they are conscious of their ties, their responsibilities to society-at-large, or perhaps to some imagined future.  I believe it was Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote: “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”  In an age that seems to be filled with unending turmoil, it’s a good thought to keep in mind.  So, once again, no great surprise when, in the spring of 2021 – and while the pandemic bedeviled every aspect of daily life – Jennifer accepted the appointment as Poet Laureate for Brookline, Massachusetts.  Even during the time of harvesting, new seeds need to be sowed. 

 

 

 

 

These Mornings

 

 

I light a candle at daybreak.

I fill a cup with my thirst

and drink it down, and reach for more.

I’m in a flannel nightgown,

a flannel bathrobe printed with red birds.

I sleep. I wake. Another indigo

fills the window of my room.

By now the trees have shed their leaves.

I light the grapefruit-scented candle

with three wicks; I fall in love with it

and scissors and pens and paperclips.

I strip to a shadow of myself

and fill the shadow with

powders, pink and blue,

and spread them evenly across.

What I feel I feel for all of us—

the highway driver, the insomniac,

my friend waiting to hear what the doctor found.

 

 

–– Jennifer Barber

 

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

Two of our partner sites will continue re-posting each Red Letter weekly: the YourArlington news blog

https://www.yourarlington.com/easyblog/entry/28-poetry/3149-redletter-052722

 

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Far Cry Poems by Tom Daley

 

Far Cry

Poems by Tom Daley

Handmade book by Sara Lefsyk

For Ethel Zine & Micro Press

www.ethelzine.com

46 Pages


Review by Dennis Daly


Mischief meets elegiac mournfulness in Tom Daley’s new chapbook, Far Cry, in which the poet summons up the ghost of a close but estranged gay friend and searches through evocative imagery and shared memories for an understanding, a resolution, and, most of all, a final embrace. Unexpected religious and erotic juxtapositions deliver both edgy wit and good-natured humor. And, most impressively, throughout this poetic sequence, Daley utilizes impeccable word choices that result in very high-level, almost objectified, confessional pieces. In short, Daley’s diction sparkles.


Obituary Picture, the first poem in Daley’s collection, begins the festivities by invoking and connecting a conclave of words signifying church officialdom (cardinal, bishop, pope) to the processes at hand: forgiveness and healing. The deceased friend’s pictured attire strikes the poet as especially vivid and implies flamboyant powers, perhaps even those of absolution. Consider these opening and pertinent lines,


Your dear and dangerous mouth is open

to the sunlight. In your red jersey


and perfectly white t-shirt,

you are a cardinal on holiday.


No mistake that you boasted

that the bishop who baptized you


later elected a pope. Your teeth

are touching, they might be grinding


forgiveness or trust into a fine

powder. You are the chosen


vessel…


My favorite poem in this collection is Infant of Prague. Very funny, very blasphemous, and not a little bizarre, the poem strikes home to those of us steeped in the minutiae of Roman Catholic tradition. Not only did many churches have altars devoted to this ornate iteration of the crowned Christ Child back in the day, but many families had their own Infant for home-based devotions. The statue was introduced into Ireland during the 1700s and became very popular. Daley uses the decorativeness and formalness of the imagined statue to incite mock horror between two friends returning from a night’s drunk, and with it a closeness of shared hilarity, now lost in lament. Here’s the heart of the poem,


Oh my God! It’s an Infant of Prague!

Only you could have conjured


that crowned Christ Child with the orb

that the Altar Guild outfitted


in different gowns for each

liturgical season—purple for Lent,


white for Easter—on a side altar

of a Roman Catholic church,


out of a sack someone had left

on a staircase in the dim light. Only you


could knuckle my funnybone so,

you hand curling up,


fingers digging into my wrist

as if hanging on for dear life


Daley’s title poem, Far Cry, suggests both the literal (long distance) and idiomatic (big difference) definitions of the phrase. We are talking life and death here, or are we?

Passion needs release. Impulse cannot be contained by deliberation. The ritual of written poetry may span distance, but it is very different from sensual memory. Its ululations rebound and echo but are, at least directly, unconnected. One may find positive advantage here. Daley describes the experience thusly,


a truncated hiccup fused

with the urgent, inhaled coo


of a woman trying to suppress

the commotion of her passion


so as to not disturb her neighbors.

The cry repeated itself


With the heft of ritual syllable,

Accelerating, amplifying …


In his poem Death Is the Only Daley outs himself as a co-conspirator with death. His poetry not only conjures up a spirit marked with utmost urgency but disturbs the neatness and permanence of death with mnemonic traces of messy, unruly life. Words alone must, need to fail. But the poet’s unholy alliance with the beyond seems to succeed, then decidedly leads to a marvelous metaphor of resolution,


I have conspired


with death to keep

your oblivion at bay.


What is it you would wish me

To do with death?


I can hardly avoid cranking

death open to permit


the ferocity of your predicaments

to tattle me upright.


I am now, in your mind’s eye,

An excuse for death


To leave some dribs of you behind

Over the drab drayhorse of time.


Like all serious poets Daley struggles with the ineffable. His poem I Address the Virtual Impossibility of Conjuring You with Verses that Are Merely Descriptive illuminates the conundrum he faces. Mixing the profane with the pious Daley undercuts his title, winking to his readers between his “merely descriptive” lines. This poet excels in teasing out past grievances and ironies. The poem concludes this way,


To the north,


a khaki top or an immaculately

white t-shirt that you had probably ironed.


There were always men in the woodwork,

splintering or shying under the wide


rabbit trap of your eyes. Always

a feast being prepared


in the scorching pockets

of your salivary glands.


Always a haunch

waiting to be palmed,


a genuflection waiting

to be blessed.


Daley titles one of his last pieces in this collection, Am I Any Closer? And in truth he is that and more. By his skill and consummate craft, the poet has confronted the roguish admonishments, irascibility, and unwanted verdicts from his fractured relationship with his deceased friend and has factored in the sweet and moonlit jubilance of imperfect life, all within time’s poetically amendable imagery. By his very act of creation, Daley, with each reading, bridges the unbridgeable. A tour de force.

Monday, June 27, 2022

WHO BUT! (The Birth of an Iconic New England Brand)

 




 A good friend of mine --Somerville Bagel Bard Paul Steven Stone sent me an article about the birth of a brand-- the W.B. Mason brand and logo that he created.  An accomplished novelist and children's writer, Stone has created a bestseller, as his logo and copy appears on trucks throughout the country. Once when I had Paul lecture at Endicott College, a W.B.Mason truck pulled up outside my office even before he did. "Who But!" Paul Steve Stone could pull this off! I think this story says a lot about the mystery of the creative process.


 



WHO BUT! (The Birth of an Iconic New England Brand)

By Paul Steven Stone




A Dream Or A TV Commercial?

I dreamt last night I was at Fenway Park. The Red Sox were on one of their customary losing streaks but, with the bases loaded in the bottom half of the ninth inning, they were poised to rally back from a one-run deficit against the Yankees. There were two outs on the scoreboard, so the next batter would either be the game’s hero or its final out. Then, as if the dream were one of my cornball W.B. Mason TV commercials, the man of the moment stepped up to the plate and it was none other than W.B. Mason.

Yes, here was the personification of the W.B. Mason Company—‘W.B. Himself’ as I used to call him on the nameplate beneath his official portrait—the man I had fashioned from my imagination into dozens of heroic roles in print and TV advertisements: W.B. Mason as Prizefighter, as Hercules, Atlas, Genie of the Lamp, Broadway Star, G.I. Joe, Doo Wop Singer, Low Price Assurance Detective. And now, walking to the plate with a murderous gleam in his eye, W.B. Mason, Red Sox Slugger

Standing at home plate, W.B. tugged at his famous mustache, surveying the scene on the field before him. Red Sox runners were waiting anxiously at every base. The Yankee infield was playing him close to prevent a bunt. And there, most conspicuously splashed across Fenway Park’s left field wall, a sign proclaimed, as if in silent encouragement, “Who But W.B. Mason!”

Since 1898 Or 1986?

“Since 1898,” the sign declared, and that much was historically true. The W.B. Mason Company has been in existence since 1898, starting out as a print shop. But the company whose distinctive “Who But!” brand is blazoned across the Green Monster in Fenway Park has only truly existed in its present persona since 1986. I know because I am godfather to their now ubiquitous brand, the man whose fertile imagination originally spawned “Who But W.B.Mason!” If we can leave my dream baseball game briefly, even at such a melodramatic moment, I’d like to share with you the true story of the birth of W.B. Mason’s iconic brand.

A Brand Born Out Of Torture And Pain

It’s axiomatic in this ever-changing world that chaos and destruction usually precede rebirth and creative inspiration. So it was with the creation of my most famous, recognizable and singular brand identity.

Surely, these days, “Who But W.B. Mason!” is highly familiar and understandable to most people in W.B Mason’s sales territory—today when its’ wavy-type logo can be found on outfield walls in baseball parks throughout the northeast, and on trucks that crisscross city streets from San Francisco to Miami Beach, but there was a time when we would get stares and looks of disbelief as our ads first appeared in newspapers around Boston’s South Shore

“What the hell is that all about?” sums up the gist of most of the remarks I would hear in response to the half-page newspaper ads we created for the introductory phase of our branding campaign.

The ads, curiously resembling circus posters, were half page illustrations depicting W.B. Mason in heroic metaphorical guise. W.B. Mason as a prizefighter boxing a Boston furniture dealer; as a balloonist flying a hot air balloon across Brockton skies, as a Mason truck driver flouting speed limits to deliver a much-needed conference table. All with headlines grandly declaring, “Who But W.B. Mason Would Battle Heavyweights To Furnish Your Office!” or “Who But W.B. Mason Would Leap A City Block To Furnish Your Office!” or “Who But W.B. Mason Would Break The Law…” Well, you get the idea.

And that’s our brand in a nutshell: W.B. Mason as hero, as daredevil adventurer and, yes, as earnest and upright businessman. W.B. Mason, the quintessential purveyor of old-time American values. A man, a company and a brand one can believe in.

Who But, Indeed!

You’ll notice from these headline constructions that back in 1986, office furniture was W.B. Mason’s principal line of business. Office supplies were merely a sideline, while all their other product lines—coffee, school, snack room and janitorial supplies—were years away from earning a place in the Mason catalog.

A Phoenix Rising From The Ashes At Arnold & Co.

But let’s return to the chaos and destruction I mentioned earlier. Back in 1986, before anyone outside of Brockton ever heard of W.B. Mason, I was working at Arnold & Company, one of Boston’s largest advertising agencies. Arnold was going through its own form of chaos and destruction, reeling from the loss of two of its largest accounts, Fayva Shoes and John Hancock Insurance. In those days, Arnold was one of the area’s largest agencies, but it was not highly regarded for its creative punch or ingenuity. In award show competition after competition, Arnold would lose out to Hill-Holiday or Mullen or to smaller-sized, but mammothly-creative Leonard Monahan from Providence. So, by the time Arnold went through the pain of losing both Fayva Shoes and John Hancock in the same year, the agency was already suffering from a massive and deeply cutting creative inferiority complex.

For a painful period, six months at least, the creative department at Arnold was in a shambles. Our creative director, a likable fellow who came from J. Walter Thompson in New York, was allowed to retain his title but almost none of his authority. Outside advertising pros were brought in to supervise the agency’s creative underlings, to show us what “real creative advertising” looked like. Those interventionist supervisors, none of whom had any actual management experience or interpersonal skills, would block all our ads and commercials from leaving the agency until they themselves had a chance to come up with ideas that were better or more creative. If an ad wasn’t ‘hot’ according to their inner creative thermostats, it would never get served to a client.

You can imagine how demoralizing it was to walk by the office of one of these creative “supervisors” and see, through the glass door, one of your ads being dissected, belittled and used as a jumping off point as they struggled to create something they deemed sufficiently more creative.

For six torturous months, I could not get a single advertisement or commercial out of the agency and presented to a client. By the time my work was sufficiently massaged and tweaked by our supervisors it was hardly recognizable and usually not measurably more creative than my original concept.

My Escape From Arnold

So, you can easily understand why I decided to leave Arnold for an advertising agency that was just starting up down in Hingham, on Boston’s South Shore. A highly risky career move, to say the least, leaving a big Boston agency to work for an unknown and unformed entity out in the burbs. But aside from escaping the craziness of an ad agency disintegrating under the crushing weight of its own identity crisis, I was also reaching for a chance to create something new, something special for myself, working with nothing but raw ingredients and simmering ambition. As creative director I would not only have the opportunity to help create a new advertising agency, but to re-launch a seemingly stagnant advertising career.

Or so I assured myself.

Out Of The Frying Pan Into The Fire

My new agency, TJ Clark, was located in a recently constructed office condo. A condo so new, in fact, I had never seen it before, having interviewed for the job in an office the agency owner borrowed for the interview. Which is why I was totally surprised—shocked, actually—when I came in that first morning to discover the agency didn’t have a single stick of real office furniture to its name. Long rectangular tables from Taylor Rental were set up everywhere, reminding me more of a runaway Bar Mitzvah than a professional advertising agency.

My first thought as I stood there surveying this fledgling, wannabe advertising agency was, “Could this be the end of my advertising career?” Then, after a day filled with mounting evidence to support the reality and threat of that question—an art director who didn’t know how to spec type (a critical function later made obsolete by the advent of desktop publishing), a paucity of clients, an agency owner whose only real advertising experience was as ad manager at a supermarket chain—I went home to confront my demons in a sleepless night that saw me write down a list of Ten Commandments: 10 actions my new employer needed to undertake for me to stay at his agency.

Number One on the list: buy real office furniture!

First thing next morning, the second day on my new job, I presented my list. I can’t recall if I issued an ultimatum with the list, but I’m certain my new employer understood he and I were at a crossroads. To his credit, he accepted my list of action steps with grave silence, afterwards spending most of the morning phoning Boston office furniture dealers, attempting to get just one to come out to Hingham and meet with him.

Around noon, my new boss left the office without a word as to where he was headed. Two hours later—and this is one of those indelible mental images one holds onto for the length of one’s days—he returned with an entire crew from W.B. Mason in Brockton hauling loaner office furniture—desks, chairs, tables—into our office.

That of course was my first glimpse of W.B. Mason and their aggressive, climb-any-mountain, swim-any-sea commitment to winning a client’s business. A business attitude that stood in bold contrast to the arrogance of Boston’s big-shot furniture dealers who thought TJ Clark too small and insignificant to merit a sales call. That hungry sales stance of Mason’s was made indelible in our first Mason newspaper ad depicting W.B. Mason as a prizefighter punching out the lights of one of those Boston dealers: “Who But W.B. Mason Would Battle Heavyweights To Furnish Your Office!”

A Relationship Grows In Hingham

I realize I’m getting a little ahead of myself, and my story. Before we arrive at the period where I would conceptualize a branding personality and advertising campaign for W.B. Mason, there were weeks, perhaps months, where two consecutive lines of communication were being developed and nurtured between TJ Clark and W.B. Mason. On one side, Mason was providing both office supplies and furniture to our small but growing agency, at one point even supplying the trucks and manpower to move us to larger digs. On the other side, I was developing a friendship with Mason’s VP of sales (today, CEO and President), Leo Meehan, whose strong interest in marketing and advertising led him to drop by for an early morning visit almost daily on his way to Mason’s in Brockton. During those visits we would smoke chains of cigarettes, drink vats of coffee and talk about Leo’s growing vision for Mason juxtaposed with my understanding, crude at the time, about advertising and marketing.

My understanding about marketing and advertising may have been crude at the time, but it was definitely informed and enlivened by the six months I had just spent in creative Siberia at Arnold & Company. Having to defend one’s creative ideas everyday, having to watch others slap down your work on a consistent basis, having to live under a constant state of creative storm warnings and alarms, had fashioned me into a ferocious creative animal and a surprisingly adept branding philosopher. Once I was able to hire Bill Dahlgren, a talented art director I had known at Arnold, TJ Clark unleashed a reign of creative advertising upon the South Shore’s business community unlike anything ever seen before.

We Don’t Do Ads!

“We don’t do ads!” I would proclaim to prospective clients at TJ Clark, my way of saying I didn’t believe in creating individual ads for a client if there wasn’t an underlying brand personality to give them direction and a unique voice. And so we refused to create ads on a one-shot, brand-less basis. Somewhat arrogant for a young man of 40, but I was empowered and inspired by the crucible of fire I had survived at Arnold. And so, rather than creating an advertisement for a W.B. Mason sale or to help sell their Lite Price line of furniture, Bill and I created an entire branding and advertising campaign that displayed the “Who But!” brand in all its circus finery and “fun-ery” emblazoned on everything from business stationery to newspaper ads to trucks.

And maybe because the folks at Mason didn’t know enough to realize how weird and different this campaign was— or perhaps because it was obviously a branding concept with great potential—or maybe they were just desperate for any advertising that might set them apart from the pack…for whatever reason, they bought into “Who But W.B. Mason!” and bought into it big. So big, in fact, that within months at the most, they, the company, “became the brand.” By that I mean Mason took on the personality of the campaign at all levels within the company, rising to a level of service, value and friendliness promised by their brand’s unique expression of old-fashioned American values and cornball entertainment.

Two Men Playing With Toys!

So, how the hell did I ever come up with something as distinctive and bold as the “Who But W.B. Mason!”campaign? Looking back with the hindsight of history there were three principle ingredients I can credit:

1. My burning drive to prove myself as a creative powerhouse after my humiliating experience at Arnold; I would try anything in those days to stand out or create excitement, break down any doors to prove my worth;

2. Leo Meehan’s burning desire to create a company that was different, better and more memorable than everyone else’s and…

3. The remarkable, enjoyable and wholly fortuitous chemistry Leo and I experienced working together. We were kids with keys to the toy store and, at some level, we knew it. For the first few years after the Mason brand was launched, we would occasionally spend a few laugh-filled moments (usually with drinks in hand) reliving the high spots of this most enjoyable collaboration. Together, as the saying goes, we were unstoppable.

The Circus Coming To Town

One other element should not go unmentioned: old-fashioned American circus artwork. Before Bill Dahlgren and I started developing the Mason brand, I went to the Hingham library and borrowed a book of circus posters, most of them from the late 19th century. As mentioned earlier, I had had the idea that Mason because of its aggressive posture and its commitment to providing superior service and value was the embodiment of old-time American values,

What better way to convey old-time American values than by using materials that reminded everyone of 1890’s America? 19th Century America was a much simpler time in people’s minds, a time when advertising language sounded corny and stilted, and the public expected a dollar’s value for a dollar spent. ‘Who But’ must have come directly off one of those old posters, describing some feat of dare-devil artistry or unexplainable legerdemain.

Who But The Amazing Houdini could escape alive from the Sealed Box of Doom!

Match that against Who But W.B. Mason would leap a city block to furnish your office!

A Headline, Logo And Call To Arms

As for how I came to actually create the line “Who But W.B. Mason,” there’s no way for me to accurately reconstruct it. The creative process is more often a chain of linked impulses, one leading to another, than a singular Eureka moment. As I mentioned earlier, I had the impulse—quickly acted upon—to borrow a book of circus posters from the library. Did I know I’d be creating a campaign fashioned in that distinct look? I doubt it. More likely I was looking for inspiration. Even once the campaign was fully formed, it was always subject to the litmus tests of “Does it Work?” and “Is it great?” As happens so often with the creative process in developing ads or campaigns, you go down many avenues before you decide which road will go the distance.

Most likely, Bill Dahlgren and I designed the look of the introductory ads first. I just usually work that way; probably because one can say more (and learn more) in an ad than in a logo or a billboard. After the ads we would have tackled everything else. As for the line, “Who But W.B. Mason!” it was never intended to be a logo. We wanted headlines in our ads whose look mimicked circus poster headlines. But once we had created Mason’s distinctive wavy type headline, we realized we had a great looking logo on our hands as well as a circus poster-like headline.

The only aspect of the process I can testify to with certainty goes back to how I usually work. At the very beginning of a creative process, I usually play all sorts of games to get the juices flowing. Sometimes I’ll just free associate, typing up words that come to mind in response to the client’s business or their stated mission. Other times I’ll take the initial letters of a client’s name and see whatever word constructions they would lead me to. For instance, Monroe Community College (MCC) ultimately became “My College of Choice” in a branding campaign. After almost 40 years as a copywriter and creative director, I know myself well enough to be certain I would have started off the W.B. Mason creative process playing with the W.B. “W.B.” would have quickly taken me to “Who But,” given the way my quicksilver mind generally works. And the rest, after many hours of additional sweat and inspiration, is history.

Our old-time circus artwork is why—according to my theory— everyone notices our Mason trucks. When you see one of our trucks with its “Who But W.B. Mason!” logo and with W.B.’s giant portrait framed by American flags, you almost naturally feel the way children feel when they see the circus coming to town. It’s an almost primal childhood experience. Back in the beginning, when Mason had only four trucks, people would tell us “I see your trucks everywhere.” Now that Mason has over 400 trucks, people actually do see them everywhere. Another case of the company catching up to the brand.

As godfather and keeper of the Mason brand, I periodically have to remind people what the W.B. Mason brand stands for—what its soul is all about. Whenever someone in the company or on the creative team starts to take W.B. Mason too seriously, I remind them W.B. Mason is the circus coming to town. Repeat: the circus coming to town, and nothing more. Doesn’t matter that Mason has grown to two billion in sales, or that they now employ a few thousand people, rather than the 30-40 who worked there when we first created the brand. W.B. Mason was, is and always will be (I hope) the circus coming to town. Our ads, our TV commercials, our catalog covers were all meant to be as corny as the circus and as American as apple pie.

Start up the calliope, pop the popcorn, put on the clown makeup, W.B. Mason is coming to your office or your town. And don’t mind if he dresses up as a cinema noir detective, Hercules or Jack Dempsey.

And by the way, going back to that dream ballgame we interrupted with bases loaded in the 9th inning, turns out W.B. Mason walloped the ball out of the ballpark to score four runs and win the game against the Yankees. No surprise there. Just another magical feat in the heroic and mythical life of W.B. Mason Brand Personality.

A grand slam home run against the Yankees! Now, who could do that?

Who else?

Who But W.B. Mason!

———————————–

Paul Steven Stone is a former creative director who retired to write novels and live a simple life on a pond with his wife Amy. Stone is a member of The Bagel Bards, a much vaunted Boston-area writers group.