Prologue
I drafted a story back in the
late-1990s while attending The University of Vermont. The story, as it was originally written, was designed to
fulfill an assignment for a senior level education class I took during the
spring semester of my senior year.
The story was called The Yellow Rain Suit; a colorfully written
5-pager about my first boss, Peter Mollica, and his crazy public outburst on a
dreary November day at the Christmas tree farm where I worked during some of
high school and college. The
story, as it turned out, amused my professor and many of my classmates, while
earning me a reasonable grade, which is all I was really hoping for at the
time. But for all of the practical
success that paper earned me, looking back now, I failed to answer my professor’s one and only question, which I still remember to
this day: What’s the point of the story? The answer to his question eluded me for years. At the time that I wrote the story, I
was simply too close to when the event happened to even attempt to answer
it. I had lived the story, watched
it unfold, frame-by-frame, minute-by-minute only three years prior to writing The
Yellow Rain Suit.
Time has a way of sorting things
out, cataloging memories in some kind of mysterious yet perfect order, making
sense of your world, life’s journey, the big experience. Time brings meaning to your
memories. And simply put, The
Yellow Rain Suit was an arbitrarily chosen memory from a sequence of
experiences my brain had yet to properly catalog. The memories of my life experience at age 21 were simply too
turbid, too shaken up, too new to
make sense of in 1998. I hadn’t had the chance to fail, succeed, fail, succeed,
lather, rinse and repeat enough
times. I didn’t have the luxury of nearly four decades of life
experience to answer the question, “What’s the point of the story?” It is my
intent, through this blog, to take a crack at answering my professor’s question, by tapping away on this keyboard. Of course, my life is now busier than
it was in 1998, when I originally wrote The Yellow Rain Suit. But with any luck, with some
perseverance, my story will begin to take shape, one paragraph at a time. Come along for the ride, if you like. With patience and time, god willing,
maybe I’ll get to answer that elusive question after all.
Legends of My Adolescence
The first boss that I ever had,
other than my father, was Peter Mollica, an intelligent, dedicated, hard
working, man. As a boss, he was a
complete lunatic; there’s simply no other way to put it. He may go down as the craziest bastard
I’ve ever met.
And I say it fondly, because I think a great deal of the man. I really do. Pete was a career attorney turned tree farmer, who spent the
majority of his life in northern Virginia as a lawyer for the Federal
Government. After retiring, Pete
and his wife, Sandy, purchased 90 acres of prime farmland along the Connecticut
River in Springfield, Vermont. Over time, Pete developed a plantation of
100,000 Christmas trees, while preserving, maintaining and living in the
historically registered colonial farmhouse that sits on the property.
To put it bluntly, my early days
of working for Pete were full of apprehension and fear, mainly due to his
notorious temper. Pete’s temper manifested in two predictable ways—full on screaming and hollering, gnashing teeth,
cursing at the sky, daring God to strike you dead-type behavior, or a more subtle
version, an eerie, slowly burning rage.
Often the slow burn transformed into the full on screaming rage,
unpredictably, without warning. I
personally found the slow burn to be the most unsettling form of his anger
because I knew he was investing tremendous amounts of energy to subdue his full-throttle rage.
The concentration and self-control was its own level of intensity
altogether. And once Pandora's box was
open, it was like, here it all comes, there it all goes. Imagine holding your hand over a flame
while trying not to scream, and actually not screaming. And
then SCREAMING. The slow burn
temper sometimes transitioned into hysterical laughter and absurdly frightening
statements, or threats of suicide, a staple of these performances. As the years went by, I came to enjoy
his rage, his performances, because frankly, they were master works; art by a true madman.
I began working for Pete during
April vacation my junior year of high school, planting Frasier fir Christmas
trees. That week of work turned
into seasons of employment: Spring
vacations spent planting trees, summer vacations spent shearing and
straightening leaders and fall weekends spent harvesting and stockpiling
thousands of trees which were loaded onto tractor trailer trucks bound for
upscale homes in wealthy suburbs of Boston, Hartford and New York City. Every year on Thanksgiving morning, we
loaded the last few trucks for the season, ending the wholesale operation for
the year. The day after Thanksgiving was the start of the choose and cut retail
operation at the farm, the birthplace of my story, The Yellow Rain Suit.
I started working for Pete at age
16 and worked for him until I was 20 years old. Those five summers seared into my brain a lifetime of
memories; a tattoo of male adolescence, crudeness of the finest sort—chewing tobacco and fist fights, wrestling matches and
bologna sandwiches, testosterone, sweat, tree pitch and sunburns, accented by a
cast of characters I’ll never forget.
Those five years, the extreme characters (several of whom are dead now
from risks of excess and hard living), that time in my life—the memories which sustain me now—are the legends of my adolescence.
The Tree Farm Writing Project is
an attempt capture my experiences with Peter Mollica’s tree farm, to describe those legends from that short
period time starting in the spring of 1992 and ending around Christmas of
1996. Enjoy.
