Waiting For The Phone To Ring

Now I remember what it was like having to wait for Christmas when I was a little kid growing up on Arlington Street. Each day seemed like an eternity. Every hour was like another light year. The hands on the clock barely moved at all.

I know that feeling because we’re still waiting for that one special phone call to tell us that our place is ready and that we can home. They keep telling us it could be any day now. Every time the phone rings we just about jump out of our skins.

I kind of feel sorry for anyone else who calls. They can probably detect the disappointment in our voices when it turns out not to be the one call that we’re waiting on pins and needles for.

It is going to happen. We just don’t know when. And that is what’s torturing us something unmercifully. It’s like waiting for the second shoe to drop.

We are so ready for this. Our cute little place here in Southern Indiana gets smaller and smaller with each box we pack. We’ve got boxes stacked up all over the place.

It’s at the point where whenever we go looking for anything at all, like a spatula, or a butter knife, or the Scotch Tape for that matter, we come to realize that it’s already packed so we’ve got to go without until we get back home.

We haven’t even lived there yet and already we’re calling it home. And so we should. Granted, we’re not moving back to Everett. We are, however, moving back to the seacoast of New England within walking distance to the shoreline. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Let me tell ya something. Once we get there, wild horses won’t drag us beyond the borders of those six New England states for quite a while. We’ll be a little leery of ever venturing any further than our own backyard. And by “backyard” I actually mean all of New England.

If you’ve spent your whole life in New England, only venturing beyond her borders for brief vacations and such, then you may have a little difficulty understanding how we feel. On the other hand, if you’ve lived away from New England for any serious length of time, then you probably know exactly how we feel.

All things considered, there really is no place like home. Your home is where your heart is. So even if you were to move somewhere so exciting as the far side of the outer spiral arm at the opposite end of the Milky Way galaxy, in your heart it would never feel like home.

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool New Englander – always was and always will be. To me, New England is like a giant playground. It’s got everything that makes my heart go pitter pat. Of all the places I’ve ventured off to on this little blue planet of ours, only New England calls me home.

Because there is so much that I once took for granted. I’m gonna feel like a new born babe whose just hopped up over the crib rails for the very first time when I finally do get back home. Even the habit and routine of our mundane every day lives will feel so exciting to me. And believe me when I tell ya, I’m gonna stick out like a sore thumb when I get there.

When you’re stuck in rush hour traffic, I’ll be the guy in the next car over with that great big grin on my face because I’m actually so glad to be there. I’ll be the twenty-third guy in line at the Stop & Shop who is tickled pink because he’s buying “Hoods” milk instead of “Prairie Farms.” And when somebody flips me the bird, I’ll wave back and shout, “Have a nice day,” because I’ll honest hope that they do.

I’ll be the guy who frantically storms into Diblasi’s on Broadway and shouts, “Quick, gimme a sub before I explode!” I’ll be so excited that I’ll hop back and forth from one foot to the other like a blithering idiot in excited anticipation as if it’s taking them a month of Sundays to throw one together. Then I’m gonna plank my fat ass down right there on a stool at the front window and look out over the traffic on Broadway while I devour it like a wild savage.

After that I’m gonna walk along the sidewalk towards Everett Square, and stop in front of the Parlin to salute the engraved “Character” on the front wall. Then I’m gonna march right down to McKinnon’s and buy the biggest, thickest cut of Filet Mignon they’ve got and bring it home to Carol, because she’s a sucker for Filet Mignon.

Then I’m going down to Glendale Park to sit on that bench that’s just to the right of the gate that’s opposite Franklin Street. There I’ll relive the one hundred and one memories I’ve got tucked away in my heart from my younger days growing up in Everett.

That’s the bench I sat on after a night of partying up in the back hill terraces when I met Elliot. He was Eighty-two and I was Seventeen. On that night he opened my eyes to a wisdom that was well beyond my years. In doing so he instilled within me a sense of where I fit into the overall scheme of things in this mechanical universe of ours.

Besides telling me what it was like to take your best girl out on a horse and buggy ride along the cobblestones on Ferry Street, he left me with three rules to live by that I never forgot, and still hold dear to this very day. I’m only sorry that he never lived to see the election of our first African-American President. He certainly deserved that.

While we’re on the subject, I wonder how many of you know that the first, Afro-American, professional nurse in the continental United States lies to rest in the Woodlawn Cemetery. Her Name is Eliza Mahoney. She lived from 1845 to 1926. The American Nurses' Association erected a beautiful monument in her honor, bearing an etched likeness of her face. An award named in her honor is presented at that association's convention every year.

Now that we’ve got that little tidbit of Everett history out of the way, let me tell you something really strange about our “Growing Up Everett” web site that’s bound to cause me a lot of work.

A few weeks ago I uploaded some new songs onto the “Meet Your Host” page. Well actually, they’re not new at all. To you, maybe, but they were recorded on a 5-inch open reel tape recorder some 38 years ago during my stint at Everett High when I was only about Seventeen years old.

On a scale of one-to-ten I’d rate them somewhere around a one or a one-point-five. I posted them because I was always obsessed with recorded sound and got a big boot out of recording my own songs just for the novelty of it all. Give a listen and you’ll soon realize why the major labels never came pounding on my door.

So anyway, a few days after posting those song files - my on-line file host shut down my account and deleted all of my files. Apparently, the download count was so overwhelming that it over-clocked my allotted bandwidth. It caused a feeding frenzy on their file server. Each song was downloaded more than 3,000 times on the first day alone.

With a download count like that, you’d think I was giving away free Beatles records or something. My jaw dropped when I found out that one of my songs was downloaded more then 12,000 times in only one week. Can you imagine that?

So yeah, I think it’s funny. Can you imagine 12,000 people spread out all over the planet tapping their feet to an amateur tune performed by the paperboy who came from the bottom of Arlington Street?

Gimme a break – right?

What makes it so funny is when I think back to what was going on while making some of those recordings. All of the presently posted songs were recorded in my bedroom up on the second floor of that three-family we lived in on Foster Street, right next door to Al Vega.

Now there’s a contrast in talents if there ever was one. Al Vega is a virtuoso of musical talent. I’m little more than a six-string hack. Comparing me to Al Vega is like comparing a tin whistle to an orchestra. I kid you not.

When Al Vega recorded he went into a professional recording studio complete with sound baffles and recording engineers. When I recorded, the only thing that stood between me and the outside world was a bedroom door. And it never failed that just as I reached the pinnacle of any one recording, all hell broke loose.

It usually started when my mother came barging into my room shouting, “For cries sakes, Paul, I’m trying to hear “As the World Turns.” Either that, or my big brother, Billy, started racing his engine outside to gap the points on his Rambler American.

Then the phone rang and Julie shouted, “Ma, make Paul stop banging on that stupid guitar so I can talk on the phone.” And then my dad would swing open my bedroom door and shout, “Paul, run down to Little Ann’s for a loaf of bread.”

My original recordings often included people shouting, someone farting, phones ringing, and car horns honking. Because of that, I often sang each verse three or four times just to make sure I got at least one clean take. Then I’d go back and edit out all the commotion going on in the background.

During my senior year at Everett High I met a studio musician from Boston who no longer walks amongst us. He was the first to turn me on to analog Moog Synthesizers. That’s what I used to record some of the background drum tracks you hear in several of my recordings. I now wish I'd never done that, but I did. It seemed like such a good idea at time.

And that’s why you’ve been hit with "File Not Found! This file is unavailable because it either has had too many views or used too much bandwidth" whenever you tried to download anything. Not to worry. I’ve found a new file host with a generous amount of bandwidth and storage.

The down side is that it’s gonna take me a week or so to get all of my files back up. I’m working on it. All of the downloads on the “media 3” page are back up already. So is our “EHS 1971 yearbook” zip file, and the songs we just talked about, as are all of the "Everett Doo Wop" files in Arthur Ardolino's "Everett’s Doo Wop Scene" that you can go to by clicking HERE.

The only difference is that my songs are now hosted onto their own page altogether. You’ll find the new link with all my other web site links in the upper right-hand column. Just to make it easy on ya, here’s another link right HERE.

I only ask that you download these files by using your “right” mouse button. I say that because the video and sound files will stream directly from the server if you use your “left” mouse button. What that means is that the file will play directly without downloading it. That causes more bandwidth usage than if you download it.

We do have far more bandwidth now, but I’m still a little gun shy, especially when we get more than 3,000 downloads per day. That’s mega bandwidth. We shouldn’t run into any more problems if everyone uses the “right” mouse button option to download with.

ALSO … I’ve been working on a couple projects I’d like to share with you. You may recall how I explained that the characters portrayed in my blog illustrations, like the ones in today’s illustration are fully rigged 3D models. What that means is that I can animate them.

The drawback to animating 3D characters is that it takes about 12 hours to render 20 seconds worth of animation. So a two and a half minute animation takes around 100 hours to render. By “render” I mean to output it into a movie file. After that you’ve still got to create the sound tracks and synch them up with the lip movements and hand gestures of your characters.

So in all honesty, by the time you model a character, rig it (add moving parts that work in coordination with each other), texture it (add a face, hair, and clothes), keyframe its movements (set up the animation), add lighting, ray trace shadows, create the sound tracks, and then render it all to a movie file, you’re actually talking two full work weeks to create a two-and-a-half minute animation.

And that is precisely what I’ve got to share with you. I’ve got two 3D animations about growing up in Everett. I’ve also been toying with comical voiceovers using video clips from the Coronet Films they used to show us in school, but they’re not ready yet.

So here’s what I’ve got for you to download today.

The Everett Kidz

This first animation is of the kids you see featured in our "We're from Everett" blog illustrations. In this short two and a half minute 3D cartoon I briefly demonstrate only a fraction of their seemingly endless possibilities. As a matter of fact, this animation features the two kids in today’s illustration, in the very kitchen you see them in at the top of this page.

These animations are rather small and low in resolution to keep the file size optimized for faster downloading. To enjoy this 3D animated feature, just click your "right" mouse button on the underlined title below and choose "Save Target As" to download it to your computer. After that you just "click" on it with your "left" mouse button and it will play.

3D Everett Kids

I’ve also got this second animation featuring Victor, the Microsoft Scripting Agent. These agents come built in as tour guides for software applications. You know, like that talking paper clip that pops up in Window's Word that wants to tell you how to address a letter.

Victor usually comes with Hewlett Packard computers as a tour guide to their operating systems. They're called "scripting agents" because you can rewrite their "script" to make them do what you want them to do. So that's what I did. I recoded Victor's script to re-animated him to make yet another "We're from Everett" cartoon.

To enjoy this 3D Everett animation featuring Victor, just click your "right" mouse button on the underlined title below and choose "Save Target As" to download it to your computer. After that you just "click" on it with your "left" mouse button and it will play.

3D Victor Animation

While you’re enjoying those 3D-animations about growing up in Everett, we’ll just sit here and wait for the phone to ring so we can come home. Man, are we homesick.

Before I go I want to shout out a Happy Birthday greeting to Mikey who grew up on Road B. He’ll turn 59 on Saturday. This kid could spit farther than anyone else back in our Fairfield Whitney days some 45 years ago. He’s not only a very good and loyal friend, but he’s also my favorite brother-in-law.

Please don’t ever forget that you belong to a lifelong fraternity of family, acquaintances, and friends. You never have to go it alone. We are your family. And we are all making this journey together surrounded by people who care about each other. We are that lucky because – “We’re from Everett!”