It is good to be back in this corner of My Backyard again. The siege and transition the print edition paper has been through during the last six months is over. My Backyard is on the street in its print format every other week. Basically, you will find the paper in all its old places on the first and fifteenth of each month.

We are printing on demand and we will be restocking distribution spots at least twice each week. If you cannot find the paper, call me and I will personally get that edition to you. Call My Backyard at 1.508.212.4454.

That is good news. The best news is the web site side of My Backyard. We have had over 1,155,342 hits on the web side since January of this year. We are averaging 200,000 hits a month. That is over 6000 hits per week. The web site is on its way to being a solid revenue stream for the paper. We are providing outstanding sales and service packages for our advertisers. The best deals are combos in the print editions and the on-line editions.

Please go to www.mybackyardnews.com or just google my backyard and we come up page one number one. Click on the site. The site is updated throughout the day every day of the week and the search box is your friend. Join the 17,000 neighbors regularly visiting the site to keep up with the good things going on in the neighborhood. Everything you like in the print edition is on line and much more too. Thank you. 

Until next time.

If you have never attended a Northeastern University graduation you have to get invited to one. The graduations, when I taught there, were held in the old Boston Garden. The undergraduates numbered in the thousands.  Every single student marched to the podium and was handed his or her diploma by the Dean of that college.  The ceremony is conducted with military precision. When you factored in the graduate students, the faculty, honorary degree recipients and staff there were six or seven thousand people on the garden floor. The guests, family and parents added another thirteen or fourteen thousand people to the mix. There was no air-conditioning. Remarkably, I know of no students who received the wrong diploma. Now that the new garden is air-conditioned, I am certain it is a cooler event.

In the ten years I was honored to serve on school committee in Attleboro, the high school graduation was the best day of the school committee year.  There is a tradition of committee members presenting diplomas to the graduating class. There is a tradition of holding the ceremony on the football field.  Four hundred or so kids graduate each year and they are your neighbors’ kids.  You do not know all of them but you feel like they are your kids.

If you are lucky enough to serve on school committee and your child is graduating you get to present the diploma to your child.  Of our four children only our daughter Alex graduated from Attleboro High and that ceremony is one of our shared, fond memories.

I suggested that from my point of view we should line the parents up on one end of the field and the graduates at the other end. When the name is called they approach and meet at center stage and the parents present the diploma to their child.  It would work for me and I know it would work for them.  Other members of the committee thought me to be a madman.  If logistics are an issue, I have contacts at Northeastern who would be glad to come to town and whip us into shape.

My sister and my wife graduated in the same class from Stonehill College.  I first met my wife-to-be in the last month of her senior year on a day I was visiting my sister.  We liked each other.  We dated in those last weeks of the school year.  She graduated and went home to Connecticut.

I was the family camera man at that graduation.  I had my dad’s super-eight camera.  I remember when the film came back my dad asking me who the pretty blond young woman is who showed up in so many of the frames.  I told him a friend of Trish.  I am blessed with how that graduation developed.

Until next time.

The trees have gone from budding to leaf out in our backyard. The morning fog events let us know the land and water are warming. We are moving toward planting time. This may be a summer to return to family gardening. My friend Lou Lacivita would tell me to hold my horses and to remember not to put any seedlings in the ground before Memorial Day. Lou is always right about gardening.

What with the economy, I would guess I should grow some carrots, lettuce, beans and tomatoes in a sunny spot out back. I have come to consider the garden a hobby, but this year it is more about putting food on the table. Like you, I always worried about who would take care of the garden when we were away for a week or two in August. If the family budget has nixed an extended vacation, we will be here to care for the garden anyway.

If we will be spending more backyard time this summer, I can see my “honey-to-do” list growing. The picnic bench and benches will be getting a new coat of stain. No doubt we will replace our tired umbrella that shades that table. We will add a bench or two for our new garden. If I were happening, I know I would get an iPod or some other gizmo, but I think I will just string an electrical extension from the garage to the garden and listen to the Red Sox games on the radio while I water, weed and harvest.

When our oldest daughter Elizabeth was a baby, I was teaching at Northeastern University and we lived at the end of the Fenway across from the Gardner Museum and not far from the Muddy River. A stroller walk across the Fenway took neighbors to the Victory Gardens. An association controlled the gardening plots. We applied for a plot.

The gardens were established on city land during WW II. Growing a vegetable garden was part of the war effort. A year later we were designated our own spot in the Victory Garden. I would like to think Elizabeth’s love of all things outdoors was nurtured on her daily stroller rides to tend our plot. In those days we were the new young couple and we were adopted by the gentlemen and ladies who had held designated plots for decades and decades. Many of them, I like to believe, have passed their plots onto their children and friends. It would seem they could and would.

At that time, we and our academic friends would jest or brag that all of us were either ‘permanently temporary’ or ‘temporarily permanent.’ I think that was a self fulfilling prophecy. It is assuring to know that theVictory Gardens are still there and the neighborhood gardeners are out this morning preparing their plots for planting.

In whichever city or town you are reading this column, there must be some land for a public garden. I mean a good piece of land with full sunshine and an accessible water supply. If you have to turn over a section of lawn or field, it is possible maybe even preferable. Get permission if you have to. If you have to have a lottery for the designated plots, do it. Start small. Eventually every neighbor who wishes to should have a garden spot.

I know that Lou has found spaces in his garden for his neighbors sometimes. That could also be a solution. Just remember no seedlings in the ground until Memorial Day.

Until next time.

I figured maybe I could find an old pair of basketball shorts.  I have long ago given up looking for old pairs of basketball sneakers.  You know ankle high and all black with black laces.  Maybe my old basketball shorts were retired because they were NBA Larry Bird style.  In any case none of those shorts had retired to the bottom corner of the summer shirts and shorts drawer.

There was an unworn pair of new basketball shorts. They are a more recent Christmas or Father’s Day gift.  They even had an Adidas logo stitched on the outside of each leg.  They still had the tags attached to the waistband.  I used a fingernail clipper to remove the tags and pulled my new shorts on right up to my navel and the leg cuffs hung below my knees.  They were designed to hang below my knees.  It was like walking around in warm-up pants with the lower half of the pants legs gone. I was certainly uncomfortable wearing my new shorts outside when the dog and I took a walk.  No one stared at me.  Maybe I was cool, but I did not feel cool.

Later on Sunday, my wife stopped at Zoots to drop stuff off and pick stuff up.  I try not to go into Zoots. I am always certain the total bill for dry cleaning cannot be the total bill for dry cleaning.  Sometimes, when items are dry cleaned three or four times, the cost of cleaning is as much as what you paid for the item in the first place. I once watched a fair lady pay one hundred twenty seven dollars for dry cleaning maybe five items of clothing.

That is why I stayed in the car.

So, I am waiting quietly in the car and a guy walks out of Zoots with a bundle.  I was guessing from the colors I could see through the plastic wrap that his wife had sent him to pick up pillow or cushion covers.  The guy walks up to his four passenger pick-up truck, puts the bundle on the back seat and removes an item.  The item is madras cuffed shorts. He holds them up and they hang below his knees.  He takes out three pair all with the identical red madras design.  He surprises me with the fourth pair.  Yellow dominates. He is pleased with the length.  He is cool with his shorts.  Who am I to question the style of the times?

I am on the lookout for classical men’s Bermuda shorts.

Until next time.

Today, while getting My Backyard ready to go to the printer, I will be paying more than half my attention to the Boston Marathon. I do know my first memory of that marathon is South Attleboro’s Jake Brederson training on the local streets and highways. Jake was a speed walker and a good one. That would be all of fifty years or so ago.

In undergraduate college, my track teammate, Larry Harmon, decided to run the marathon and so he did.  He just showed up in Hopkinton and joined in with everyone else who was running to Boston.  He was a two miler and put in a lot of distance work and did well. Things were less formal then. I think it started getting more formal when Rosie covered some of the distance on the MBTA.

When I was teaching at Northeastern University, we got in the habit on Patriot’s Day of eating lunch at a small restaurant in The Christian Science Church neighborhood and walking over to the finish line on the other side of the Prudential Building to watch the finish of the race. At that time Americans usually won the race. Bill Rodgers had a lot to do with that. Part of my interest today is that Billy is running Boston for the first time in a decade.  I am amazed at the times turned in by master’s division runners. Many of the old guys will finish within minutes of the winner.

For a while the Japanese runners were contenders and winners of the race.  Now, the elite runners are Ethiopians.  If I were still as involved with track and field as I once was, I could tell you the top ten men and top ten women who have a legitimate shot at winning Boston. Long gone are the days when some college kid from Connecticut would toe the starting line and lead the pack home. Whoever wins today will not be a surprise.

While we have taken each of our children in turn to Boston and the finish line, that will not happen this year.  If you have not taken your family in to town for the race you should put it on the calendar for next year.  I think it is the most international of days in the city.

WBZ radio or television will be my window to the world today.  There are of course races within the race.  Nothing is more remarkable than the idea that having run twenty miles in the lead pack, the big boys will test each others strength. Somewhere in the last six miles some one will toss in a sub four–thirty mile or two to intimidate their fellow runners and it is possible that the winner will be decided in a full blown quarter mile sprint to the finish.  Last year, in the women’s division the winner and the runner-up finished within two seconds of each other.

There are the other twenty-five thousand runners too. Kathi teaches with my wife at Hill-Roberts.  She is one of several runners at the school. Kathi and her husband Nick are running Boston together today.  They have official numbers and transponders that track them each mile of the race. They will have a tale to share with family and friends forever.  We wish them well.

Until next time.

The peepers have yet to find evenings consistently warm enough to stage their sustained chorus, but the ticks and winter moths are doing fine and the turkeys and deer too.  We can do without the ticks and moths, but the turkeys and deer are splendid.

Just beyond the back fence last week four Tom turkeys were strutting their stuff for three hens.  The boys were impressed with themselves and were fanning their feathers and walking the walk. At the moment, the hens just ignored the displays and went about their pecking business.  Later in the week, the pup and I crossed paths with a Tom turkey that was shepherding four hens.  I guess some guys have it and some guys do not.

Early one morning last week, the pup went on point in a stand of trees just off the street.  I looked and looked and could not see what she was locked on. I tried to smell what she could smell or hear what she heard but my sniffing is not up to par. When we moved in, she kicked up a buck and two does.  They were not forty feet away when they broke.

They had been lying down in a small hollow that was just being touched by the light of the rising sun.  It was a big buck for around here. I would guess he was around two hundred plus pounds.  The ladies were looking healthy too.

Last Saturday was opening day for fresh water fishing in Rhode Island.  I remember when we had opening days in Massachusetts.  When we were boys, we would actually camp out overnight by the stream to be first to wet our lines at first light. Since most streams we fished had been stocked with hatchery trout, it was rare to be skunked on opening day.

Sometimes, when we did not have a secret spot, there would be dozens of folks all trying to fish the same stretch of water. The result was crossed lines and lost fish.  I do not remember anyone getting angry and I do remember the kindness of the old guys sharing hooks and bobbers with us poor kids.  Sport fishermen tend to be a patient and kind lot around kids. Because of them, I have shared some hooks and bobbers in my time.

Mostly we were live bait fishermen when we were boys.  I imagine, if they are still at it, they have graduated to spinning gear and fly rods. I do not see that group of guys often enough for our conversations to get around to fishing.  I do not know if any of them still get out to the woods and streams at dawn anymore. I hope they do.

Until next time.

The corner lot on the lower end of the paper street is across the street from my parents’ home. When mom and dad lived in that house they kept a close eye on the property.  You would certainly be straightened out by my mom if you were dumping on that lot across the street.  More than one child or adult was chided for tossing a can or bottle into the woods. And you would pick up your trash and take it with you if you were caught by my mom.

Mom and dad do not live in the family home anymore. For most of a year or more, the homestead has only been occasionally occupied as we made the home ready for its next owner. I check in at the house everyday and my brother and sisters are there at least one day each week, but that is not the same as having mom and dad out working around the yard, painting the fence, raking the leaves and watching the street.

Human nature being what it is; some neighbors started leaving yard debris from their yards on the lot.  It started with a wheelbarrow or two and on occasion a pickup truck might off load leaves, branches and the like. I guess they were composting, but they were doing it on someone else’s private property. Bottles, cans, paper litter, kitty litter, food containers, broken tools, plastic pots and even a discarded carpet added to the mess.

The mess was edging out to the street on to public property.  Like most neighborhoods that do not have sidewalks and indeed may not want sidewalks, we mow and plant on public property right to the edge of the street.  If you are mowing around a utility pole, a mail box or a fire hydrant you are most likely planting and mowing in the public way.

Enter the good lady neighbor from up the street. She cannot even see the paper street lot from her house, but she drives by it everyday.  For most of two days she toiled cleaning up the mess.  She filled bag after bag with trash, loaded her pick up truck and took it away.  She got out her backpack leaf blower and corralled all the leaves.  She dragged sizable branches and fallen limbs to a pile on the corner of the lot.  The pile must have been ten feet by ten feet at its base and taller than she and me.  On day three, she arranged for a chipper and the pile disappeared.

She told me she was cleaning it up because what did I think people thought who drove by the littered lot.  She asked me what I thought the mess said about the neighborhood.  She was not scolding.  She worked alone.  She is a good worker.  She picked the lot clean. My mom would have been proud of her. I am. Thank you.

Until next time.

My Backyard is in its tenth year of operation. The mission remains the same.  We exist to publish good news about what is going on in each of the communities we serve. It is a family driven, multi generational approach. My Backyard will never publish a story that a mom or dad or a grand mom or grand dad would be uncomfortable discussing with a junior high school child or grandchild.

Last week, from the three hundred or so submissions for this week’s paper, we selected two hundred stories we would like to publish. With a fifty-fifty mix of advertising to copy and an average of three stories per page, we would need a sixty four page paper. We do not have the revenue to do that. But it was not bad news for the hundred plus stories that would have been orphaned.

For two years, we have been investing time and money in mybackyardnews.com and allpawtucket.com and they are successful beyond our expectations. Last March mybackyardnews.com had sixteen thousand and fifty one hits.  This March mybackyardnews.com has over eighty-eight thousand hits with two days in the month to go.

Allpawtucket.com had nineteen-hundred and one hits in March. This March it has fifty-eight thousand-eight-hundred and eight hits with two days to go in the month. Mybackyardnews.com will have over one million hits this year.  The two sites combined will have two million hits or more.  This is good news.

Most of the orphaned stories from this week’s paper made it to the web sites and the visitors came to read them and enjoyed the comments and photos.  This means if your story did not make the paper, please check out the web-site. Type the name of your school, group, town or subject in the search box and if we posted the story, you will find it there.

The best thing is you can IM Aunt Molly in Black Oak, Arkansas and she can read the story too. You could call her on the phone if you two are not in the IM loop yet. You could e-mail her. I forgot about that.  If any of this is not where you are yet in the internet world, just ask that child or grandchild we spoke about earlier to help you. I know that they will be pleased to teach you what they know.

Web advertisers love our interactive web format. We can tell them exactly how many times their ad has been imaged and hit at any minute of the day.  We can also direct our readers to each advertiser’s web site.  If a customer wants to buy from you, we can help them to your web site.  If you do not have a web site, we will build on for you.

It is inevitable the pay for paper advertisers will gravitate to free paper advertising opportunities. Free paper distribution and circulation are increasing each year.  It is our intention that there will be a print edition of My Backyard for years to come. Check out the web site.  Everything is there.

Until next time.

White Cane Day is where the neighbors make a donation to fund the Lions many projects to aid people to see.  It is an on going, worldwide effort to treat and prevent blindness.  The donors receive a small white cane token to acknowledge their contribution.  The neighbors are generous.  I always am charmed by the children who come up to put some money in the jar. They are proud and polite and their parents are teaching them a good life lesson.

Random acts of courtesy and kindness are their own reward, but it is ok to acknowledge them.  In downtown North Attleboro, it is business as usual for drivers to stop to allow pedestrians to cross the street.  Many times I have seen kids on bikes actually wave a thank you to the courteous drivers.  That makes me feel good.

It is business as usual at the South Attleboro Post Office for patrons to hold doors for older folks and moms with small children in tow.  The e-bay crowd always gets a helping hand with their myriad bundles and boxes as they negotiate the doors. The post office is a place where polite “Good mornings” always gets a friendly response.

Of course, it appears the post office is going out of business.  It is increasingly expensive to use their services. Why snail mail when you can email or text? You have noticed we have raised a generation of children who seldom if ever put a pen to paper. I do not believe our youngest child has ever had a penmanship lesson. I wonder what happened to the Palmer Method and the typing class. I do not think that there are classes in texting.  Each of the kids I observe has developed a unique style for that communication form.

I heard Frank on the local television news this morning report that forty-two percent of people surveyed no longer subscribe to newspapers for news. They are getting their news exclusively from television and on line.

I am amazed that mybackyardnews.com has seen our hits increase over one thousand percent in one year.  Last March we were getting thousands of hits per month.  This March we are getting thousands of hits per day. Everyone has learned to use the search box to get right to the news they need now.  I think the some of the growth in our audience is among the older generation.

I was talking to a My Backyard reader the other day about an announcement from the PEAL Club. I asked her if she could go on line.  She answered no, but her husband could.  She proudly told me he is adept at using the internet and that he is eighty-four years old. He should be the poster guy for People Enjoying Active Living.

Until next time.

Saint Patrick’s Day is special in our extended family in both a general and specific ways.

Both my maternal and paternal grandfathers were Irish.  My mom’s dad was a Mellen and my dad’s dad was a Hanley.

Joe Mellen married Mary Grenier and George Hanley married Ann Bell.  For their generation, I find that odd.  In the Irish Pawtucket, Rhode Island community I would have thought that at the beginning of the twentieth century, there would have been more clan weddings.

My Grandpa Mellen was a braider mechanic and textile worker and came to Pawtucket to work in the mills.  My Grandpa Hanley drove horse drawn coal wagons for Cockerel Coal that was on the other side of the river from the School Street homestead. Later, he became a Pawtucket Motorcycle Police Officer. I have more pictures of Grandpa Hanley than I have of Grandpa Mellen.

When my spouse and I announced our engagement and impending wedding to her Italian grandparents, I am told that Grandma Minnie told my wife-to-be that she liked me and it was ok that I was Irish. 

My wife and I attended her paternal grandparents’, Mike and Minnie’s, fiftieth wedding anniversary in Middletown, Connecticut.  I mentioned to my wife-to-be that I found it respectful that we were introduced by Grandma Minnie to elderly guests in Italian. I was informed that many of the guests had little or no English.  Even in the later twentieth century in certain neighborhoods in Middletown you could shop, work and pray in Italian. I doubt those enclaves exist much anymore.

With the children all away from home carving out their young lives in places to far away to ever be included in a definition of our neighborhood, we ate our corned beef and cabbage dinner alone together on Sunday afternoon. It was not as grand an occasion as when my mom and dad would have all the family over for Saint Patrick’s Day dinner.  No doubt while my spouse acknowledges our family Irish heritage, we will do something this week to acknowledge Saint Joseph’s Day.  You remember her Middletown heritage.

Everyone showed up for my mom’s corned beef and cabbage, but here is where the day becomes specifically special.

My sister Patricia was born on Saint Patrick’s Day. The dessert was always cake and ice cream. The cake was always in the shape of a shamrock.  My mom always made a special dress for Tricia for her day.

For going on a year now, Sharon, Maureen, Colleen, Patricia, Ron and I have been at the work of settling the family estate.  A major issue was the family homestead, two houses down from where my spouse and I reside.  What should we do with the house in the market of today? Tricia and her family are buying the house and should be in by late spring or early summer.

Should she need help with organizing a Saint Patrick’s Day dinner at her family’s new home, I shall be first to volunteer to help her celebrate her birthday.  As I know, “One can be taught to be smart. One cannot be taught to be lucky.” Our family is blessed.

Until next time.