My friend Valerie sent this in after reading the latest posting.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Sushi Comes to Sudbury
In the summer of 1997, my parents sold the house at 187 Pratts Mill Road, a 7-room Cape called home for 27 years. I was between jobs, and in the clutches of my 20-something debt, but I knew I had to get back to Sudbury and help my parents pack up the house. With $400 remaining on my Choice Visa, I bought the ticket and headed east.
Maybe because I’ve been clearing out the drawers, closets and shelves in my house that it’s time to sweep out the attic in my brain. Usually I stay with my sister four or five towns away, not wanting to disturb or distort the memories of my perfect, dysfunctional childhood, but during this trip, I am inspired, (and perhaps brave enough), to drive the Old Boston Post Road and into downtown Sudbury.
New England suburbs are distinguished by their history, houses painted white with black trim, placards announcing the original owner’s name and date of erection and Sudbury is no different, although when I drive into town, I pass the odd juxtaposition of Selim Alptekin, DDS, who promises “Whiter Teeth in An Hour!” and Longfellow’s Wayside Inn where I had worked as a front door hostess replete in period costume sewn by our neighbor, Mrs. Bausk. Another common oddity shared by New Englanders are the town militias who dress up and recreate revolutionary war events, even marching to Concord at 4:AM every April 19th followed by a pancake breakfast hosted by the local church. In fact, Sudbury even boasts the zip code 01776. Rumor has it that the selectmen fought to get this sequence of numbers when zip codes were assigned in 1963. I imagine the men were thrilled to lord this over the neighboring Concord, (where the first of many famous battles with the Red Coats occurred), and Lexington, (where the shot heard round the world was actually fired), and probably pleased as punch that Philadelphia (where the Declaration of Independence was signed) began with 19000. Sudbury isn’t home to any famous authors where Concord is the primary residence of Louisa May Alcott, Emerson and Thoreau, (my siblings and I learned how to swim in Walden Pond), although Washington did sleep at the Wayside Inn. But let’s face it, Washington was on the move. He slept everywhere.
Despite this slight historical disadvantage, I loved the Sudbury of my youth. It was a wonderful place to grow up, to get a great public school education, to lie outside on the lawn while the breeze lightly brushed your face or play kick the can with the neighborhood kids until Moms rang bells for dinner. On the fourth of July, banana bikes bedecked with streamers, Minutemen and fire trucks lined up behind Star Market, all waiting to wave to our families sitting on the steps of friends’ houses along the parade route. Screen doors were kept open all summer long, filling the corners of the house with the soft tolling of the bell from the First Parish Church, the spire crooked, legend has it, from a musket shot. We’d spend evenings at Featherland Field watching dads compete against each other at softball; my father in center field, cigarette dangling from one hand and the worn in Rawlings glove on the other. At least a month in advance, my mother would ask us what we wanted to be for Halloween in order to give her enough time to design and sew the costumes for October 31st, trick or treating beginning as early as possible. We rode our bikes through the back roads, side streets and secret passageways behind the woody expanse of people’s yards until winter, when we would throw our skates on as soon as the bus dropped us off in hopes to chase the last bits of sunshine gliding around Stern’s Mill Pond, incidentally, where the old Babe Ruth house still stands. Probably the reason my father chose the house on Pratt’s Mill.
Driving through those densely forested parts with finger ponds and lakes, the lack of urban sprawl was a wonderful surprise. Thick, verdant tree cover hovers over the long stretches of road that join Upton to Hopkinton, Stow to Hudson and all of the townships in between. What I really treasure about August on the east coast is the lushness. The air feels soft; smells sweet, as if lawns were perpetually mowed and the lilacs forever in bloom. Summer has wound down. Football practice is in session. The Red Sox at the tail end of the season. Teenagers are anxious about starting school. At least my niece is.
While Uxbridge, Upton and Andover have retained their sense of small, Sudbury has not. The town selectmen, and the folk that have since moved in, have changed the landscape of the town forever and there is no restoration in sight, nor do I believe it possible. Although my parents saw the advantages of Sudbury, they never liked the town politics. Looking back on video I shot during the summer of ’97, they all but predicted Sudbury’s sad fate.
The farmland has diminished as the population swelled, developed into huge houses complete with granite counters and walk-in closets. I recall my parents balking at the first house priced at $100,000. They couldn’t believe that anyone would ask for such an outrageous sum. You can guess what these soccer moms, driving around in their hands free Lexus’s in a scene eerily similar to “Desperate Housewives”, paid for the 01776 ideal. The tree farm, once part of Babe Ruth’s homestead, was parceled off in the mid-‘90s for at least a baker’s dozen of abfab homes punched on a postage stamp spread.
The main road is congested with traffic monitored by local policemen on shiny white Harley Davidsons. Imagine a cop ticketing someone for disturbing the peace while bombing around town on a Harley. I smile to myself, the pigs driving hogs!
Maroney’s, where we went for donuts, has been sold. For the three years we were Catholic, we fought with the rest of the church going population for chocolate covered custard and glazed donuts, peeling out of the Our Lady of Fatima parking lot, making a mad dash for the bakeshop. For coffee and donuts, one has the choice of Starbucks, lodged in the colonial looking strip mall (and quite unfriendly, I might add) and the uber New England drive- thru, known in Sudbury as “Dunkin’ Donuts Place”, abiding the town’s zoning ordinances about lighted signs.
I’m grateful to hear that Sudbury Pizza, my first real employer, enjoys the same weekend crowds. When I see the owner, Nick, getting out of his minivan, I don’t stop, although he’d surely remember me, having an uncanny total recall of every face and corresponding pizza order. I prefer to keep this observation to myself, an insider on the outside. It was at the Pizza Place where I learned about bribing the cops. Everyone at the shop was in on it, trading free pizzas in return for a little leniency on future driving incidents. This favor coming in handy one summer night when I got pulled out of a car where I had been sucking face with DW, (the townie/speedracer/metrosexual), my blouse moving towards unbuttoned, suddenly the flashlight blinding me. I thought for sure David would get cuffed and hauled off to jail, possibly even beat up. Instead, the officer squinted at me and said, “Hey there, you work at the pizza place, right?” I nodded. With a wink, he instructed me to get right on home. The crime rate has never been much; random robberies, drunk driving arrests and sporadic teenage assaults on mailboxes. Currently, my friend Suzanne tells me the menace is coyotes.
But the real slap and tickle is that sushi has come to Sudbury. Sushi! Imagine it! Sushi, that once decadent Far East delicacy is now a staple. And get this, there isn’t one, but two restaurants, “Oishii Too” named after it’s original Boston location and “Fugakyu” which sounds pretty suspicious when you sound it out loud. Go ahead, try it. The thing is, donuts, pizza and Chinese were always a treat; dinner out reserved for special occasions. It was the sushi restaurants, (plural), that threw me off my reverie of memories. After that, it was if my eyes adjusted to the light. I remembered how the Vanas sold their house with the driving range and miniature golf course that was their livelihood for a generation to developers who put in an upscale strip mall with the usual homogenized shops. I had picked golf balls in the wee hours of the morning with Kim Vana. It wasn’t easy work and I’m sure the range didn’t bring in much money. The Vanas were one of the larger families in town. Why shouldn’t they have some money to make their lives a little easier? I don’t blame them, nor do I fault the Maroney's, who sold their family business and home to develop “Carriage House Lane”, address to at least fifteen condos priced at 1/2 a mill each. It may not seem much, but the loss of the driving range, the bakeshop and other the other Sudbury staples of my youth have left a gaping hole where people once communed.
I couldn’t stomach driving by my old house on Pratt’s Mill Road, not with other people living in my house. This was where my brother was born, where I had been allowed to stay up late with my father to watch Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers dance on the ceiling, played hide and seek, built a tree fort, a flower garden, got ready for my senior prom in a black gown I made in home-economics class, fooled around with Paul Dalpe (a townie/photographer/metrosexual), on the stairs while my parents watched “Jeopardy” in the TV room, celebrated my sister’s marriage, and listened over the railing to my parents and their friends singing “Jacques Brel is Alive and Living in Paris” in the wee hours of the morning after one of their famous parties. It’s too painful to face those homeless memories. I loved my house. I believed in the haven it provided, the fact that there was always someplace you could go in the world, a safety net, if you will. Once it was sold, I lost that sense of security.
There’s a new Audioslave song on the radio these days, “Doesn’t Remind Me”. I love this track because I know that reminded, I can go directly to the dark places in my mind without a flashlight and become disoriented by the topography. I’m sharing a space with a presence that makes me uncomfortable, prickly. I find my way back to Siobhan’s in the dark with only the lights from the dashboard, the stars that manage to peak through the oak trees and sparse incandescent bulbs still used for streetlamps in these parts.
Maybe because I’ve been clearing out the drawers, closets and shelves in my house that it’s time to sweep out the attic in my brain. Usually I stay with my sister four or five towns away, not wanting to disturb or distort the memories of my perfect, dysfunctional childhood, but during this trip, I am inspired, (and perhaps brave enough), to drive the Old Boston Post Road and into downtown Sudbury.
New England suburbs are distinguished by their history, houses painted white with black trim, placards announcing the original owner’s name and date of erection and Sudbury is no different, although when I drive into town, I pass the odd juxtaposition of Selim Alptekin, DDS, who promises “Whiter Teeth in An Hour!” and Longfellow’s Wayside Inn where I had worked as a front door hostess replete in period costume sewn by our neighbor, Mrs. Bausk. Another common oddity shared by New Englanders are the town militias who dress up and recreate revolutionary war events, even marching to Concord at 4:AM every April 19th followed by a pancake breakfast hosted by the local church. In fact, Sudbury even boasts the zip code 01776. Rumor has it that the selectmen fought to get this sequence of numbers when zip codes were assigned in 1963. I imagine the men were thrilled to lord this over the neighboring Concord, (where the first of many famous battles with the Red Coats occurred), and Lexington, (where the shot heard round the world was actually fired), and probably pleased as punch that Philadelphia (where the Declaration of Independence was signed) began with 19000. Sudbury isn’t home to any famous authors where Concord is the primary residence of Louisa May Alcott, Emerson and Thoreau, (my siblings and I learned how to swim in Walden Pond), although Washington did sleep at the Wayside Inn. But let’s face it, Washington was on the move. He slept everywhere.
Despite this slight historical disadvantage, I loved the Sudbury of my youth. It was a wonderful place to grow up, to get a great public school education, to lie outside on the lawn while the breeze lightly brushed your face or play kick the can with the neighborhood kids until Moms rang bells for dinner. On the fourth of July, banana bikes bedecked with streamers, Minutemen and fire trucks lined up behind Star Market, all waiting to wave to our families sitting on the steps of friends’ houses along the parade route. Screen doors were kept open all summer long, filling the corners of the house with the soft tolling of the bell from the First Parish Church, the spire crooked, legend has it, from a musket shot. We’d spend evenings at Featherland Field watching dads compete against each other at softball; my father in center field, cigarette dangling from one hand and the worn in Rawlings glove on the other. At least a month in advance, my mother would ask us what we wanted to be for Halloween in order to give her enough time to design and sew the costumes for October 31st, trick or treating beginning as early as possible. We rode our bikes through the back roads, side streets and secret passageways behind the woody expanse of people’s yards until winter, when we would throw our skates on as soon as the bus dropped us off in hopes to chase the last bits of sunshine gliding around Stern’s Mill Pond, incidentally, where the old Babe Ruth house still stands. Probably the reason my father chose the house on Pratt’s Mill.
Driving through those densely forested parts with finger ponds and lakes, the lack of urban sprawl was a wonderful surprise. Thick, verdant tree cover hovers over the long stretches of road that join Upton to Hopkinton, Stow to Hudson and all of the townships in between. What I really treasure about August on the east coast is the lushness. The air feels soft; smells sweet, as if lawns were perpetually mowed and the lilacs forever in bloom. Summer has wound down. Football practice is in session. The Red Sox at the tail end of the season. Teenagers are anxious about starting school. At least my niece is.
While Uxbridge, Upton and Andover have retained their sense of small, Sudbury has not. The town selectmen, and the folk that have since moved in, have changed the landscape of the town forever and there is no restoration in sight, nor do I believe it possible. Although my parents saw the advantages of Sudbury, they never liked the town politics. Looking back on video I shot during the summer of ’97, they all but predicted Sudbury’s sad fate.
The farmland has diminished as the population swelled, developed into huge houses complete with granite counters and walk-in closets. I recall my parents balking at the first house priced at $100,000. They couldn’t believe that anyone would ask for such an outrageous sum. You can guess what these soccer moms, driving around in their hands free Lexus’s in a scene eerily similar to “Desperate Housewives”, paid for the 01776 ideal. The tree farm, once part of Babe Ruth’s homestead, was parceled off in the mid-‘90s for at least a baker’s dozen of abfab homes punched on a postage stamp spread.
The main road is congested with traffic monitored by local policemen on shiny white Harley Davidsons. Imagine a cop ticketing someone for disturbing the peace while bombing around town on a Harley. I smile to myself, the pigs driving hogs!
Maroney’s, where we went for donuts, has been sold. For the three years we were Catholic, we fought with the rest of the church going population for chocolate covered custard and glazed donuts, peeling out of the Our Lady of Fatima parking lot, making a mad dash for the bakeshop. For coffee and donuts, one has the choice of Starbucks, lodged in the colonial looking strip mall (and quite unfriendly, I might add) and the uber New England drive- thru, known in Sudbury as “Dunkin’ Donuts Place”, abiding the town’s zoning ordinances about lighted signs.
I’m grateful to hear that Sudbury Pizza, my first real employer, enjoys the same weekend crowds. When I see the owner, Nick, getting out of his minivan, I don’t stop, although he’d surely remember me, having an uncanny total recall of every face and corresponding pizza order. I prefer to keep this observation to myself, an insider on the outside. It was at the Pizza Place where I learned about bribing the cops. Everyone at the shop was in on it, trading free pizzas in return for a little leniency on future driving incidents. This favor coming in handy one summer night when I got pulled out of a car where I had been sucking face with DW, (the townie/speedracer/metrosexual), my blouse moving towards unbuttoned, suddenly the flashlight blinding me. I thought for sure David would get cuffed and hauled off to jail, possibly even beat up. Instead, the officer squinted at me and said, “Hey there, you work at the pizza place, right?” I nodded. With a wink, he instructed me to get right on home. The crime rate has never been much; random robberies, drunk driving arrests and sporadic teenage assaults on mailboxes. Currently, my friend Suzanne tells me the menace is coyotes.
But the real slap and tickle is that sushi has come to Sudbury. Sushi! Imagine it! Sushi, that once decadent Far East delicacy is now a staple. And get this, there isn’t one, but two restaurants, “Oishii Too” named after it’s original Boston location and “Fugakyu” which sounds pretty suspicious when you sound it out loud. Go ahead, try it. The thing is, donuts, pizza and Chinese were always a treat; dinner out reserved for special occasions. It was the sushi restaurants, (plural), that threw me off my reverie of memories. After that, it was if my eyes adjusted to the light. I remembered how the Vanas sold their house with the driving range and miniature golf course that was their livelihood for a generation to developers who put in an upscale strip mall with the usual homogenized shops. I had picked golf balls in the wee hours of the morning with Kim Vana. It wasn’t easy work and I’m sure the range didn’t bring in much money. The Vanas were one of the larger families in town. Why shouldn’t they have some money to make their lives a little easier? I don’t blame them, nor do I fault the Maroney's, who sold their family business and home to develop “Carriage House Lane”, address to at least fifteen condos priced at 1/2 a mill each. It may not seem much, but the loss of the driving range, the bakeshop and other the other Sudbury staples of my youth have left a gaping hole where people once communed.
I couldn’t stomach driving by my old house on Pratt’s Mill Road, not with other people living in my house. This was where my brother was born, where I had been allowed to stay up late with my father to watch Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers dance on the ceiling, played hide and seek, built a tree fort, a flower garden, got ready for my senior prom in a black gown I made in home-economics class, fooled around with Paul Dalpe (a townie/photographer/metrosexual), on the stairs while my parents watched “Jeopardy” in the TV room, celebrated my sister’s marriage, and listened over the railing to my parents and their friends singing “Jacques Brel is Alive and Living in Paris” in the wee hours of the morning after one of their famous parties. It’s too painful to face those homeless memories. I loved my house. I believed in the haven it provided, the fact that there was always someplace you could go in the world, a safety net, if you will. Once it was sold, I lost that sense of security.
There’s a new Audioslave song on the radio these days, “Doesn’t Remind Me”. I love this track because I know that reminded, I can go directly to the dark places in my mind without a flashlight and become disoriented by the topography. I’m sharing a space with a presence that makes me uncomfortable, prickly. I find my way back to Siobhan’s in the dark with only the lights from the dashboard, the stars that manage to peak through the oak trees and sparse incandescent bulbs still used for streetlamps in these parts.
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