By the time I got to Meadowbrook, Connecticut, I could have
used a stiff drink. I expected it to be
a long drive, but I hadn’t counted on the cruel, violent maze that was
Hartford. Following Route 84 was like
some Godawful intelligence test: The
signs would come up on the right side of the four-lane highway and then
suddenly crop up on the left, forcing me to cross four lanes amidst the honking
and swearing of irate and merciless drivers.
Once I was out of Hartford, I had to
pull over and look at the road atlas again, where I had highlighted everything
in yellow. And then I followed the route
for another hour until I got to the gate house.
The cheerful old guard there smiled
and asked what he could do for me. “I’m
here to see the Shapiros,” I said and added, for additional credibility, “Peter
and Val.”
“Go right in!” he said, lifting the
gate. You want to make your second left,
and then an immediate right in the parking lot, and their house is on the far
side of the parking lot. “Thanks!” I said.
The houses were fairly identical
but, as far as I could tell from the fading daylight, they were slightly
different neutral natural colors—sage, tan, sand-colored, and eggshell. After I parked, I walked along a row of doors
separated by red hardwood mulch and identical shrubs. I found myself touching one of the leaves of a shrub to make
sure it was real. When I rang the
doorbell, it was Val who answered the door.
She gave me a hug. “Peter is in
helping Kyle with his homework.”
Kyle was older than I remembered--now
about 8 years old. He had been just a toddler when Peter and I had written for
the same cable show in Manhattan. I had
since moved up to a small town in Massachusetts. We thought my overnight stay at their new
place in Meadowbrook would be a great opportunity to catch up.
Kyle had what looked like math problems sitting in front of
him, and Peter was pleasantly though relentlessly goading him to try the next
problem. Peter stood and shook my
hand. “Kyle, you remember Rob, don’t
you?”
Kyle nodded but I knew he didn’t
remember me at all.
The family had made reservations at a nearby Mexican
restaurants, and we all took one car. I
sat in the back seat with Kyle. It was
sort of a novelty to watch Peter operate a motor vehicle. In Manhattan, we’d all taken subways and
taxis everywhere. Now Peter approached
driving in his usual methodical way, checking carefully when he was backing out
and coming to a full stop at every stop sign.
When we pulled into the packed parking lot of El Mariachi, Peter found a
spot and put on turn signal before pulling into it.
El Mariachi was full and noisy. “This
is kind of a local hangout!” Peter shouted over the canned Mariachi music, and
as proof, he waved to another family of three across the room.
The father came over, a trim, muscular
blonde man wearing a polo shirt. “Hi,
Jeff. This is my friend Rob whom I used
to work with back in the city.” Peter explained to him. “He’s from Massachusetts.” To me, he said, “Jeff is the head of our
condo association and coaches the baseball team.”
“Glad to meet you!” Jeff said, with
a strong handshake. I sized him up the
way I often did people. WASP. Maybe corporate law or finance. Possibly from the South, maybe Atlanta,
because he had just a trace of a Southern accent.
“Did anyone see the ducks this morning? Tucker and I were up at 6 a.m. and we
actually saw them!” Jeff said, as if expecting applause. In the town where I now lived, ducks were a
common occurrence and nothing to write home about. “We’re planning to get out and catch us some pollywogs tomorrow morning!” The Southern rural syntax, “catch us some,”
seemed affected—a forced folksiness on Jeff’s part.
“Excuse me?” Peter asked.
“What are pollywogs?” Kyle asked.
“They’re tadpoles--frog larvae!” Val
chimed in. Val was originally from a
small town in Georgia, so she probably spoke from experience. “They swim around in ponds and swamps and
kids collect them. They watch them sprout arms and legs and become frogs.”
“That sounds like a fun!” Peter
said. “How do you catch them?”
“Little nets like you use to scoop
up goldfish,,” Val informed him. “You
can find them just about anywhere.”
Finding them turned out to be a
little more involved than she had expected.
After dinner, we stopped at a convenience store. Peter ran in and came out a few minutes
later, saying, “He said to try the CVS on Hollis.”
And so we did, and a half hour
later, we were driving back to Meadowbrook with a net and a quart-sized plastic
canister.
Roll call for collecting pollywogs was 6 a.m. sharp. Peter gave me the option of sleeping in but
it was a nice morning and I hadn’t hunted for tadpoles in probably 40 years. Peter had a backpack, even though it was a
very short hike down to the pond. Sure
enough, there were a couple of ducks near the middle of the pond. The pond appeared to be manmade, what with no
rivers or brooks feeding it and some sort of noisy machine across the way that
seemed to be circulating and aerating the water. I suspect that, without it, the pond would
get covered in algae. Peter put down his
backpack and got out the net and canister.
We all stared into the water. Sure
enough, tiny black sperm-shaped things were moving around under the
surface. “Kyle, you’ll want to take your
shoes off and roll up the leg of your jeans,” Peter instructed, and Kyle
obliged. Peter filled up the canister
and then handed Kyle the net. The
tadpoles seemed to be more elusive than any of us counted on, moving in unison
away from the net every time Kyle dipped it in the water. As per Peter’s instructions, he cornered a
bunch against a rock and managed to catch a couple in the net.
“Bravo!” called out Jeff, who was
standing behind us with his son Tucker, whom I estimated to be about five years
old. I couldn’t tell how long they’d
been standing there. They set up shop
about ten feet away, placing their own gear down at the edge of the pond.
Jeff filled up their canister and
handed Tucker the net. Tucker, somewhat
shy and anxious, didn’t seem to know exactly what to do with it. “Put her in the water, Bud, and see if you
can catch us some pollywogs!” Tucker
craned his neck a bit to look into the water.
“Come on and put your net in the water—that’s where the pollywogs are!”
As Tucker hesitantly approached the
water’s edge, Jeff asked, “Aren’t you forgetting something, big guy?” When Tucker looked even more confused, he
said, “Take off your shoes and socks and roll up your jeans like Kyle
here!” Tucker did as instructed and
gingerly put the net in the water and waved it around. “Don’t just wave it—scoop up some pollywogs
there, Buddy!” Jeff said. Tucker now waded into the water with the tiny
net, but didn’t seem to be having much luck.
Then he cried out and lifted his foot, which was draped with something
green.
It wasn’t just moss or a lily pad. It was slimey. I’m no biologist but I thought it might be
some kind of egg sac for the tadpoles.
Tucker screamed and began shaking his foot around violently. I didn’t completely blame him—it looked kind
of gross.
I had to intervene. “It’s okay, Tucker! It’s harmless!” I said and then translated it
into what little I knew of kidspeak.
“It won’t hurt you!”
“Tucker!” Jeff said sharply. “Like
the man said, it won’t hurt you. Just
slosh your foot around in the water.”
Tucker managed to get the frog slime
off his foot but he was decidedly done with this project. He threw down the net and walked a few paces
away from the pond, tears starting to run down his cheeks. “Where you going, Buddy?” Jeff asked. “We’ve got us some pollywogs to catch.”
Tucker shook his head in an
exaggerated way and put his hands to the side of his face. “Well, I’ll go ahead and get us some,” Jeff
announced. “We don’t want to come home
to Mommy empty-handed!”
While Jeff was stalking the wild
tadpole, Tucker was kicking up dirt and rocks. He picked up a handful of rocks
and threw them toward the ducks, not so much as to bean one of them as to
express his frustration. They fell well short of their target.
“Tucker!” Jeff shouted. “Don’t throw rocks at the ducks! Just for that, we’re going home!” Turning to us, he said, “Sorry.” None of us reacted.
After they had left, Kyle muttered,
“Tucker’s dad is kind of a jerk.”
Peter sighed and said, “I’d have to
agree, Kyle.”
“Me, too,” I said.
After we got our quota of pollywogs,
we packed up and headed back toward the condo.
“So, is this place a lot like where you live?” Peter asked, and it
seemed like an important question to
him. I thought about the little
town I lived in, with its many wetlands and state parks brimming with
nuthatches and herons, where many of its people had lived for generations, and
where everyone from lawyers to grocery cashiers inhabited the same five-mile
radius. But there really weren’t a whole
lot of places like that within an easy commute from New York and this was the
closest thing Peter would probably ever experience.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound
convincing. “It’s just like it.”
Robert Dinsmoor is has published hundreds of articles on
health and medicine as well as pieces for Games,
Paper, National Lampoon, and Nickelodeon
Magazine and scripts for Nickelodeon and MTV. He has written fictive memoirs titled Tales of the Troupe, The Yoga Divas and Other Stories, and You Can Leave Anytime and co-authored a
children’s picture book called Does Dixie
Like Me? His short story “Kundalini
Yoga at the YMCA” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
