Though we will always remember this time with fondness, we have reached a point at Monadnock Underground at which it is necessary to pack everything into trucks and move it, piece by piece, to monadnockunderground.com. That’s a big part of what we’ve been doing over the last month and a half.

The new site affords us more flexibility in terms of layout and categorized content, makes things simpler for our writers (who no longer have to create medium accounts to upload final drafts prior to posting), and allows us to sell print and digital copies of our publications directly to you, our friends and supporters.

Come on in, the water is warm!

We Have Moved was originally published in Monadnock Underground on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Shannon is a beautiful dancer,” said Miss Adrienne, the studio director.

Then Shannon got a boyfriend, and quit dancing.

“I’m not feeling it anymore,” she told Miss Adrienne, who cried that day.

Miss Adrienne was a ballet purist. The other teachers knew (as did she, very well) that outside New York City, ballet was not enough to keep a studio afloat. Tap, Acro, Modern, Hip-Hop, and Jazz were equally essential. They paid the bills. Shannon’s strengths, primarily in ballet, were that she was thin, not too tall, concise, and easily instructed. Anyone who took the time to actually converse with her might also realize she was an utter doofus.

Each Christmas season they did the Nutcracker, which was a pill, and which was voted ‘Best of’ every year in a wide and varied field of local arts productions. Internally, they knew they killed it most years. Miss Adrienne considered Shannon the best Clara ever.

Debatable, though when Shannon returned to help backstage, everyone was glad to see her.

All the girls were unique (as were the boys.) Unique talent, personality, disposition. Stage acting also counted: in this case having a presence without voice, no simple feat, and difficult to learn. In support the music, lighting, backdrops, and costumes were all essential to a performance, along with the many classes leading up to casting and rehearsals. Tears might flow, and sometimes, though rare, the bubble truly burst in the form of a child melting down, or simply not showing up, the reason invariably trouble at school or home.

When the Spring recital hit, it was a pretty tight ship. Most students found a well-structured community, discipline, beauty, precision, and — above all — fun.

“I have no money,” Adrienne complained.

No one believed her. They had a lakehouse, and by now she owned the studio outright. With two small children of her own and a reliable stagehand husband who nonetheless wasn’t a pushover, she had it all. Except contentment.

“I’m just not a people-person…” she’d say to other teachers.

Well, you’re kinda in the people-person business…

As the owner, she was a target for every little thing that hurt, often parents. Certain helicopter moms would only be satisfied if choreographed above the stage.

In truth, students and parents might find Adrienne to be cold. The other teachers made up for it when possible. And despite any faults, she grew the business, awarded an annual unlimited scholarship, and stayed true to the principle of the original director, her very first teacher, Miss Michelle: no dance competitions.

Competition existed for featured parts, only so many of which were available no matter the scale of a show. The little ones — and there were many — could be shepherded in semi-learned squad as adorable angels, meerkats, fish in the sea, whatever the production and everyone was happy, the audience most of all. Dance classes were expensive though, especially for older students, and one who basically grew up in the studio believed she deserved to be Alice in Wonderland her senior year. A junior was much more deserving, and the senior got a supporting role. She just wasn’t good enough.

Lexi loved dance, and partying. A wonderful comedic turn sophomore year as the clock in Beauty and the Beast, as a senior she was fine taking any old part. One night after class she drove Hannah, a fellow senior, home at an alarming speed along a back road.

Split with her boyfriend, she told Hannah: “Right now I’m feeling just as homicidal as suicidal.”

They both made it home alive, and from then on, whenever the dancers got together, they made sure Lexi did not drive.

Once, after mistakenly cutting her finger in the studio, she touched her naturally red hair and asked: “Is it too Metal if I dye my hair with my own blood?”

¨Oh, Lexi,¨ was the general consensus. That whole year she and other departing seniors Chlöe, Hannah, Victoria, and Tamara met up all over the city. They created a calendar as ice skaters, bridge photo bombers, park acrobats, for Miss Adrienne and other teachers. Five of the months each held one individual pose.

Miss Adrienne, and others with studio experience, said they were the best class ever.

Chlöe (Mary Poppins), would return to visit every now and then, talk Miss Adrienne off the proverbial ledge with sage moral support. Chlöe was fortunate, her mother happened to be the studio´s most dynamic choreographer and teacher, and like other teachers’ kids all her classes growing up were free. Her mother and Miss Adrienne held the same timeless artistic vision: childhood wonderment can never be overstated.

A parent could stay on the periphery: run a taxi, go to shows, experience the spectacle from the audience, bring a bouquet of flowers or more for afterward if one’s kid was featured.

Or they could get more involved. Volunteer parents and other adults (students, some of them), were integral to a large performance. The Nutcracker’s adult party guests and harried house staff were splendid each year along with the children in front of the tree which soon grew majestically with the music as the audience entered Clara’s dream.

Backstage, teachers, volunteers, former students helped coordinate. A quick wardrobe change, Bluetooth communications with theatre tech staff, readying the angels or dragonflies. It was a total team effort.

In the summer, following dance camp, they’d do a little piece in the park.

New challenges and changes cropped up almost constantly. Kids left to do cheer, sports. Kids got injured, and more often, sick. Drama abounded.

“Sadie might have pneumonia, and there’s no stand-in.”

They always seemed to get through it.

Sadie tried anyway.

“It was a hot mess.”

“Oh, did you hear about the other thing, that whole kerfuffle?”

Fin

A Hot Mess Kerfuffle was originally published in Monadnock Underground on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Oh how I envy the fine people of New Hampshire! You don’t know how good you have it. You get to go second in the presidential primary process (I know you think you go first but who are you kidding), remind everyone you aren’t Iowa, and enjoy a year-plus of candidates and media pandering to you as if you actually mattered. It must be nice.

While my friends in the great Granite State regale me with tales of Tulsi Gabbard attending Super Bowl parties, Bernie Sanders hosting ice cream socials, and Joe Biden actually existing, I’m down here in New Jersey with a whole lot of nothing. We get bupkis. Candidates barely even pass through, let alone avail themselves to us at the level to which you’re accustomed.

What I would give to have a congresswoman from Hawaii stop by and compliment my mom on her buffalo chicken dip or to discuss the mouthfeel of Breyer’s Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream with the socialist senator from Vermont. My lifelong dream of having a former vice president yell at me? That is a dream that shall remain deferred forevermore.

It’s not fair, damn it!

New Jersey’s primary is on June 2nd, which in case you didn’t know is almost dead last. Only the US Virgin Islands go after us. Even Guam gets to go before we do. When it finally gets to us there’s a considerable sentiment of “Why bother?” By then it doesn’t really matter, the nominating conventions are only a few weeks away, and everything is already more or less set in stone. So no Tulsi, no Bernie, no Biden. No nothing.

I admit, I am one of those independent socialist types that doesn’t care much for the American two-party system. I’ve voted in a primary only once, in 2016, for Bernie Sanders. And I did so knowing he only stopped in New Jersey one time and was likely to lose both my state’s contest as well as the nomination. That was about the limit of what my participation in these sorts of things can be. They don’t care much for us, so why should I for them?

There’s a pretty good chance I might’ve ended up differently. I could have become a real fan of the process. I have a degree in political science and am in fact a huge nerd when it comes to electoral politics. But the experience here vastly differs from what you in New Hampshire are used to. In the end, there’s not much to enjoy about it.

Other than the fact that we, too, are not Iowa, that is.

The Gabagool Primary was originally published in Monadnock Underground on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We break the padlock and open the door. I can taste the air before I smell it. My goggles are pinching my nose closed, and I feel the air, stale and thick, sticking to the inside of my mouth.

“Watch for needles,” the geologist tells me. “They’ll go straight through your boots.”

I’m the tallest person on the crew, and the low ceiling of the abandoned building compels me to slouch. The exterior walls are composed of crumbling brick, with portions that have been torn down and shored up with cinder blocks. Light peers in through the seams. The interior walls are bare drywall featuring the odd hole and spraypainted obscenity. As we pass through empty rooms further into the building, the drywall gives way to bare, rotted wooden frame, and the columns of sunlight through cracked walls eventually must be supplanted with headlamps. We come to a wide open room in the center of the building which gently slopes towards a grate in the floor.

“Alright, this is the spot” the geo calls out. “We’ll do one bore about…here, then another maybe two feet that way.”

I have been unraveling Ariadne’s golden thread behind us as we go, in the form of an extension cord connected to a winch hooked up to a generator outside. The three of us begin to set up the drill and start boring a hole in the concrete floor, about four inches across. The drill has an unslakable thirst, and must be supplied with water through the whole process, but eventually the concrete relents and we reach the ground beneath. A folding table has been set up inside the building, and as we begin to remove cores of soil with a hand auger, the geologist proceeds to examine the samples.

“Oh yeah, there’s definitely going to be a lawsuit here,” he says, examining the first foot of soil. “There’s no way they didn’t know about this.”

There are six different locations we’re taking samples from in the same few city blocks. Some, like this one, are abandoned structures fallen into decay, but others have already been demolished and the sites “cleaned up.” For these, we have to dig deeper — thirty feet or more — and for this we have a massive, self-propelled drilling rig that, by my estimation, could easily get us halfway to Hell. It’s loud — damn loud — and leaks hydraulic fluid from a crack that must be attended like an open wound. We will routinely pull the sample from its casing to discover a cross section of old bricks inside the core. These bricks are nearly a hundred years old, but under the ground they seem to have fared better than those forming the tenement buildings surrounding us.

Everything in this section of the city seems rotten. The sick-sweet smell of old garbage lingers in the alleys. The nicest building I have line of sight to is an old church, a Romanesque basilica dominating the next street over. On the third floor hangs a white X inside a red square, indicating the building is structurally unsafe. A “For Sale” sign sits behind the locked fence that surrounds the lot.

The drill has struck till — a mix of different sediments compacted together and deposited by a glacier — and has slowed to a crawl. It’s been about an hour after lunch and I have the desperate need to use the bathroom. I have, to put it mildly, “lived an interesting life,” and do not consider myself at all squeamish. I have both seen and done some positively disgusting things in my life, but after using a construction site port-o-potty the day before, I discover that even I have my limits, and set about finding a public restroom to relieve myself while the drill chugs on.

A ways down the street from the abandoned church is a McDonald’s, and I make my way there past boarded-up windows and discarded shopping carts, past the back stairs of an apartment building where four or five people every hour go up to the third floor and return ten minutes later, past the young woman who has been sitting atop a retaining wall, silent and motionless, since before we arrived at seven that morning, past a 1995 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera left to rust on its wheel-bearings in an alley.

I enter the McDonald’s and go straight for the bathroom. I pull at the handle and meet resistance. It’s not locked, but rather someone is holding it from the other side. A second later, the door opens enough for me to see a single eye staring back at me, and from behind the door a voice asks “what do you want?”

The nature of the situation hasn’t hit me, and I answer reflexively: “To shit?”

There’s a pause, and the door opens. The urgency of peristalsis overcomes my better judgment and I enter. The eye is attached to a man in his late thirties or early forties wearing black track pants and a Boston Red Sox jacket. He seems as confused by the situation as I am, and kicks a dufflebag on the floor behind the door before saying, “yeah, yeah — you go.”

I quickly take care of business in the only stall, then make to leave, but the owner of the eye calls out to me: “Hey, wash your hands.”

“Yeah, my bad,” and I quickly wash up while studying the mirror for any sudden motion.

As I walk out the door, he closes it behind me and says “hey, be cool, alright?” I leave immediately.

On my way back to the site, I’m walking down the sidewalk when a guy in a black denim jacket and dark, messy hair peeking out under a tight blue beanie crosses the street coming towards me. “Hey, how you feelin’, man?”

I know immediately what this is about and answer him, dismissively, “just fine, boss.” He begins to turn away, but stops mid-step and faces me again. “Hey, what you building over there, anyway?” I’m wearing my bright green safety vest, my hardhat is clipped to my belt, and goggles hang from my neck.

“Uh, we’re not actually building anything, just checking the ground.”

“Yeah? For what?”

“Pollutants. Stuff that could make people sick. We need to know where it is and how bad it is so we can get it out.”

“You guys are doin’ that? That’s real cool of you man. Thanks.”

When I get back to the rig it’s still struggling with the till, and there isn’t much for me to do. I climb on top of the rig to get a better view and sit, watching the sun reflect off the windows of the old church, and down into the alleys, and spill at the foot of the stairs.

Thanks.

It was such an odd thing to say. “Thanks.” My undergrad was in Criminal Justice, and while I specialized in Forensic Science, I took a fair amount of Criminology, which I largely regarded as pseudoscience. I’ve answered maybe a dozen different exam questions about “Broken Windows Theory” — the idea that if petty crimes like vandalism go unremedied, they’ll escalate to more and more serious crimes as the community becomes filled with a sense that they won’t be addressed, that no one gives a shit. The answer to “Broken Windows,” my professors always told me, was strict enforcement, stop-and-frisk, increased police presence.

I saw plenty of police over the two days we worked that site, but the windows were still broken.

I thought about a lot of things, sitting atop the drill rig. Policing policy, the logistics of the heroin trade, how goddamn lucky I was to come from a neighborhood and a background not all that dissimilar to this one but still make it out.

I don’t go to work thinking I’m helping people. I do this job because it pays moderately well compared to what I’m used to. My coworkers were eager to pack up and leave the site every day before it got dark, afraid that the area was “dangerous” at night, but I would come home and have difficulty washing off the aura of despair I felt. That place hurts, and I don’t know how to fix it.

But somebody’s gotta give a shit, or the windows are going to stay broken.

Thanks was originally published in Monadnock Underground on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Note: this is an updated 2020 version of a 2004 piece that appeared in Chester College’s literary magazine.

Imagine my surprise when I checked my answering machine and heard a familiar voice: “Hello, this is George W. Bush…”

Beep. That was the only message. Oddly, the then-President forgot to leave a number where I could call him back. Half an hour later I received five other callers urging me to vote for them instead. Even James Earl Jones rang me up that night, though he was just trying to get me to switch my phone service to Verizon. With all the politicians trying to reach me, I’m surprised he was able to get through.

It was 2004, and that was my introduction to the joy, or perhaps the curse, of living in New Hampshire during a political year. Most of the time New Hampshire is just one of those small, unobtrusive states east of New York, but every fourth year politicians of all stripes stampede across the state line because of our early primary. Some wear suits and ties, others prefer business casual or blue jeans, and at least one wears a boot on his head. Suddenly you can’t turn around without bumping into someone who’s running for president.

Back then, the phone bombardment started in earnest well before the primary. My phone started ringing off the hook, and most of the calls were from Joe. Senator Joe Lieberman, I mean. But he called to chat so often, I feel comfortable calling him Joe.

He probably needn’t have bothered calling so much. According to the polls, the only contenders with a real shot at winning New Hampshire that year were John Kerry, Howard Dean, John Edwards, and Wesley Clark. Their voices sore from campaigning in Iowa, they flew into New Hampshire for more speeches. A joke making the rounds referred to them as “the four hoarse men of the apocalypse.”

One week before the primary, the up-and-down swing of the polls was interesting — if dizzying — to follow. I decided to conduct my own, private, unofficial poll. Like a bird watcher, I started counting the number and types of posted campaign signs springing up in my neighbor’s yards.

If the winner had been determined by who had the most signs, then John Edwards might actually have won New Hampshire that year. Someone stuck a flock of at least 300 Edwards signs in the snow banks overnight. I suppose those signs didn’t reflect the candidate’s true level of support, since one dedicated person supplied with an arsenal of signs and a reliable vehicle could have put them all up in just a few hours. But the signs popping up in residential front yards did count. Dean and Kerry were neck-and-neck, with Clark “four-star” signs not far behind.

There’s a strange fascination with watching these small, colorful rectangular signs spring up out of the January snow. A Kerry sign here, a Clark sign there, and, oh look, there’s even an odd Gephardt sign.

One afternoon I spotted my first rare and elusive Kucinich sign. In ornithological terms, that was almost as startling as sighting a jack pine warbler perched on a moose antler. Then I saw the yellow-throated “Firefighters for Kerry” sign, also rare, mingling with the more common “Kerry blue.”

The next morning I discovered and logged three whole species of Dean sign: the common yellow-on-blue Dean, whose habitat ranged from private yards to roadside snow banks; the extremely rare blue-on-yellow Dean; and finally the hybrid “Hope Not Fear” Dean.

On this latter sign, the word “fear” was printed directly above Dean’s name. That was perhaps a poor design choice. Competing campaign signs often were clustered together, so portions of the signs were obscured. When the left side of this particular species of Dean sign was blocked, what passersby first saw was “Fear Dean.”

Fortunately for the Dean campaign, this species of sign only migrated into New Hampshire in the last few days before the primary, and didn’t find many niches left to occupy.

By primary day, the Gephardt sign, much like the passenger pigeon, was thought extinct. I spotted a single Gephardt while driving to work, but it disappeared the next time the snowplow went by.

Before I knew it, the primary was over. Almost all the signs vanished. Like migrating birds, they flew south for the winter — south to South Carolina, the next big primary on the election calendar. But they’ll be back. Any day now. Every four years the migration and stampede begin anew.

For now, though, New Hampshire sure seems quiet. Hardly any lawn signs are up, and my landline isn’t ringing 20 times an hour. I wonder what Joe is up to these days. For some reason, he never calls anymore.

Signs of the Times was originally published in Monadnock Underground on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.