It was October ‘65, and it was a cold night with no moon. My father had died the previous April, and I was still pretty pissed off about that, and all that went along with fathers dying. I didn’t like people feeling sorry for me, and I started to like fighting a lot.

I’d stopped talking to anyone but Kippy. He was twelve and I was eight, and twelve seemed pretty old and worldly. He was bigger than me, by a good foot, and I decided I’d not try to fight him, what with his long arms. Besides, his dad had been in the Navy and mine was dead, so that somehow gave him authority.

Then the lights went out. Everything was black, darker than I’d ever seen, before or since. My sister was eighteen, and she came home and said the whole town was pitch-black dark. She took me out the front porch and we smoked cigarettes and she told me she was sure it was UFOs. I didn’t say nothin’, just trying to inhale those Camels and not choke.

A fireman came to our house down by the lake and yelled at my sister for giving me the smokes. Then Ma’ came out front with us all and the fireman said the lights was out all the way up into Canada. I didn’t know if I should believe him because them fireman had been coming to our house a lot since my old man died and I wasn’t sure I was ok with it. I wasn’t so sure he was even a real fireman, either, and that it wasn’t just some made up shit. I’d never seen him put out no fire. My money was on he was up to something no good. Besides, how could he know about the lights way the Hell up in Canada.

Kippy and his sister showed up at our back door at the same time and came around front and met all of us: Ma’ the fireman, my sister and me. They said we should go to up to their house. Donna, Kippy’s sister, said it was the Soviet’s and we was all gonna die. Ma’ didn’t want to go, but I was really agitated.

That summer past. I decided to not speak to no one but Kippy, and seeing how his dad had been in the Navy, I figured he’d know what to do when the Soviets attacked.

I was a bit confused and Kippy couldn’t explain, but as the dark night wore on I got more agitated because I’d never done a goddamn thing to no Soviets. And now they were attacking my lake and my dad had just died.

The lights eventually did come back on and there was not a Soviet nor a UFO to be found, but from that day on I decided I’d never trust nobody. Not even Kippy.

That was 1965 to the best of my recollection.

As the summer sadly wanes and the air picks up the northern chill, I think of my father and the Mid-December day I last visited him. The year’s last month, the coldest and darkest time. A pall thrown over those days, a poverty of light and warmth, the bare trees and dried leaves whisper of the pending snow. When the snow is coming, you can taste it in the air. It is a different, colder, dryer wind. It carries with it a sense of something dangerous and looming from from away. It’s a switchblade wind, it climbs inside you, and sets about to cut you.

I recall the arrogance of a comment shared from a friend that I should go and care for your grave and the comedy of choice, that I chose visit your hole in the ground on such a raw and ugly day.

I stand the on dirt that has grown weedy and wild in the decades that have passed since you were put here. Only the stone with your name, same as my name, artistically chiseled in the granite, betrays your bones are here at all.

Staggered and cut by the cold, I try to recall the last time I came to find myself here, before your dirt. I was quite drunk and wasted on pills. Back in the wild years, I don’t recall much from those times. I’m sure I railed and swore and broke vodka bottles on your stone and cursed god, then drove away and got more drunk, a perpetual post-teenage victim. I feel nothing hallow or ghostly in this graveyard; I feel instead the edge of a cliff, where life ended too soon and death came long before it was welcome.

There’ve not been many days spent here since that day the minister said all the words about salvation and mercy and promised lands and the love of the god who could take you from me, and the first time I said the words ‘fuck that bullshit,’ out loud and got my mouth slapped for speaking my truth.

I cursed you as they lowered you into this dirt. The slap stung my face as I squinted in that early April sun, but it didn’t sting as badly as the sting of that day. It didn’t sting as badly as trying to swallow words of the preacher.

This graveyard now is an obscenity of cheap plastic flowers and fake Christmas trees, plastic statues of Jesus and baby Jesus and angels purchased at dollar stores with lights that come on as the mid-afternoon sun sets. Some kind of marvel of cheap twenty-first century solar technology and Chinese sweat shop labor, I suppose.

Shards of night race in to fill in the gaps between the elongated shadows of headstones that just moments before shined with the low and failing sunlight. The junk trinkets shine and give this lonely ground a feeling of a low budget circus.

You didn’t live long enough to see many marvels after the transistor and after all this time, I suppose, now decades later, that’s OK and the way it was supposed to be. But, I see no need to try to dress up your tomb and make it anything other than exactly what it is; a barren and stark and cold and lonesome place slowly being consumed by lichen that is working every moment to turn your headstone back to dust. When that day comes, there’ll be no one left who knows your name, or mine and I suppose that is also fitting into some grand scheme I long ago lost interest in understanding.

I can tell the friend who passed the comment I visited your bones and found everything exactly as it was and always will be.

“There was one month in one summer what I felt me any good at all, there was a girl. You remember the camps up the road. All them Jewish people from down in the city would come up here for the summer? Most was up in the Catskills. A couple was here. The nicer ones was in the Catskills, the poorer families come to this ridge. The cult called them the ‘Jew camps,’ and told us all to stay away. One day, I’d run off from my mother’s house and the church and the beatin’s, and I was hopin’ to run away for good. I was walkin’ up by them summer camps and I come across a girl. She was the prettiest girl I ever saw. We was kids, twelve or thirteen, I guess. She had red hair, kind of red-brown. I said to her I never seen a Jew girl with red hair and she got sad. We sat on a big, flat rock by a little dribble of a stream runnin’ down the hill. It had them ferns growin’ out by the little puddle of water the stream made and it smelled like moss. She smelled sweeter than the moss or the ferns. We sat there on the rock, and we talked, and she said her grandma wasn’t no Jewish at all and she was seen as a kind of outcast, and I said I was too. We sat on that rock the entire afternoon and we talked about bein’ outcasts, and I told her about the church basement and the beatin’s and the ass fucking sons a bitches in that place and we got to be real good friends. James, we even snuck off into the woods a few times, if you know what I’m sayin’.

“That was the best summer of my life. Then one day we was supposed to meet on our rock, and she wasn’t there. The next week she was, and I could tell she’d been told not to see me no more and we both sat there and cried. Her daddy, some big shot in the camp, heard she’d been talkin’ to me, and I guess they wasn’t even supposed to touch us that wasn’t Jews, so fuckin’ was some big crime. I never told nobody about her, not even you, and you was my best friend. I told her I was goin’ to go and torch the whole camp, but she asked me to not do it and she said she loved me, and she got up from our flat rock and walked away. Bein’ with that girl was the best time of my life. The other time my life was ruined and wrecked by somebody’s religion.

—- Mose Tester, The Berry Pickers

Here is a free downloadable sample of the book



Remembering that first summer tasting the freedom of school as a memory, mine largely the stuff of night sweats. I spent too much time alone, trying to write songs on a guitar I’d never learn to play.

Rock music had gone missing, presumed exiled in France with the Chuck Berry and The Stones. The void was filled with singer songwriters—just much better than me—and southern-rock, and even kids who’d never been south of Jersey adopted a twang and drawl.

You and me, never a thing, just us. We spent that summer riding around till past sunset, in my ‘67 Chevy with the windows wide open bathed in that hot summer air. June and July nights till well past nine, almost ten in the evening after the sun was set. We stole us a few of the last beams of the day and watched them paint the water of the big pond by your house. Some nights the air was fresh and clear and sometimes sticky as syrup. I looked at you that one time, as we were coming down that gravel hill by the still water and it was late, maybe quarter to ten, but the sky was still a light blue and a bit of gold tinged the edge of the darkness and that gold and blue was reflected in the perfectly calm water. And I wondered which half I lived in. You said maybe neither was real, and we were just here for a while—just here, not in either scene, and we were alone.

I wanted to say something romantic or poetic or profound but the words always escaped me so I said if I died here and now, and my last memory was this perfect moment with you I’d die a happy man, or a boy, depending on my behavior in the present.

You laughed, and jumped from behind a big maple tree and pushed me into the weedy end of the pond, down by that cut in the shoreline before the dam, where all the green muck collects. Because it seemed you weren’t much for poetry or romance either.

I sat in the slimy water and a frog jumped out of the weeds and I felt somehow baptized and washed free of the sins laid upon from the crimes and tribulations of our day’s past. The sexual baseball metaphor all boys at the time lived by had me clearly sliding into home just a few days before. We happily found ourselves free of any of the requisite quilt.

I looked at you, muddy and smiling and laughing on the shoreline. I splashed my hands in the muck and said, “I have been in love with you since the first grade…”

And you didn’t say anything, but you smiled your secret smile. You were quiet not because you were mean, but because no one at your house expressed stuff like that and I knew that, just like I knew your daddy hated me for liking you when we was only five and six years old. And I saw your mom sometimes in town and she always looked like she’d been crying. I’d felt the chill of your house sitting in your front room waiting on you. Your daddy was big and mean and he liked beer and cigarettes and quiet. I couldn’t be quiet even sitting still and I knew just my breathing pissed him off.

That was the one soft and sweet summer of my life, the same year we celebrated the bicentennial. And everyone was full of American pride and flags were everywhere and we got drunk of PBRs and Jimmy Carter’s brother’s Billy Beer and Mexican weed. My world was one big party, and everyone was there but you. You left town in July with your mom, as she escaped your father’s factory-drunk-pain.

After ‘76 life happened at full speed. I went and got a job working on trucks full of produce, and become quite skilled at swearing in Spanish, and it took me a lot of years to stop thinking about you, but I did. I knew you leaving with your mom was for the best. I wasn’t much better at being a man than I’d been at being a boy, and truth be told, not a lot better at all than your daddy.

You and me, we were forgotten to the rain and snow of a long line of winters, whose cold makes you forget about things like soft-sweet summers.

I forgot all about you, and even your name for a time, until one day for reasons I’ll never understand I found myself walking down that gravel hill by the big pond and it was late in the evening, and the last golden fingers of day that touched the night sky were reflected perfectly in the glass-still water and for a moment I wondered, in which reality did I live, and I recalled your words, and realized we were just here for a while, and you were right all along.

My friend Dave Castner is dead. As I age, news like this is more frequent. It’s sad news. It feels like a herd is thinning and I’m waiting on my turn.

I’m drawn to a certain type of men for close friendships. Many of these relationships span three, four, five decades or more. They are a kind of Renaissance man. Some are software engineers and database managers and professors or guys in very technical positions, but they are multi-faceted. Men, with whom I can discuss a complex tech problem or an article I read on quantum theory or troubleshooting my lawn mower or PCV blow by on a small block Ford, or how best to build a set of stairs.

Dave was a Renaissance man. We connected on many levels, maybe fifteen or twenty years ago. We both loved bicycles and old cars and antique motorcycles, pretty much anything mechanical, being outdoors, working with our hands.

He was on his bike, a Harley I’m sure, or maybe an old Indian. A truck failed to yield. That ended Dave.

He was a hard-core union man, a sheetmetal worker, a welder, and totally in line with his personality, he served on the board of directors of a local college.

We had conversations that a man who can tear down an engine and rebuild it should not be viewed as uneducated; quite the opposite. Don’t discount the man who can rebuild your car’s automatic transmission, or hand fabricate your buildings’ HVAC duct work. Dave was one of the best educated guys I ever met. Multi-faceted education was important to Dave. It is to me too.

We shared the rush you feel in driving an engine you’ve torn down to its smallest bits, and putting back together and listening to it roar.

Like me, he was a political moderate, and I was always a bit shocked that this guy, deep died blue-collar, held many progressive views. He was a mick and understood what it meant to have Celtic blood in your veins.

I broke a dozen ribs in a bicycle race crash once. He was the first one to make me laugh about it, and it fucking hurt to laugh.

An avid reader, he read every book and essay I ever wrote, and commented and gave me honest criticism. He messaged me last month and said he’d just read The Berry Pickers. I said, “Oh, you’re the one…” I owed him a hardcover copy.

He called me Lobbster and the last time we talked we were still laughing about the dozen ribs and a question on one of my books

The world just lost a good man. Dave had some rough edges he wore like a badge, and a really good soul.

I’ll miss you, my friend.