Last night it rained hard enough to be heard on the windows, but it didn’t rain long. Today is cloudy again. Rain is a possibility. It has been raining so much I swear my feet are webbing.

I have a couple of events on my dance card today. My teeth are getting cleaned, and I’m heading to Plymouth for a uke concert. We are playing for their Friday open streets. We’ll play an hour, take a break then play a second hour. We’re singing from our songs of the 70’s books. We have two of them.

When I was a kid, my mother made tuna salad for our Friday school lunches. The only other seafood she served was fish sticks for some Friday night dinners. She served them with French fries. I loved those fish sticks. I don’t know how old I was when I started to love steam clams. My mother would prepare them then she’d leave the room. She couldn’t watch us eat them. She found them disgusting. She loved shrimp, any shrimp dish. She liked lobster but only baked stuffed. My father would go quahogging, and my mother would make stuffed quahogs and freeze them. She’d surprise us with them. She made a fish casserole dish which was extraordinary. It had not only fish but also shrimp, of course it did. I still make that dish.

My father had a sweet tooth. He used to hide his candy under the couch. We all knew it, and we’d sometimes steal a few. My mother would buy him a large package of Hershey miniatures, and those he’d keep on the table close at hand when he watched TV. He always sat in the same spot on the couch next to the side table. On that table, his candy was in a small bowl, pewter I think, beside the lamp and an ashtray. He had a calendar on the table to keep track of special events or appointments. My dog Shauna used to sit in front of him or beside him on the couch. He always shared his goodies with her. He hid them from us, but he shared with her.

We have sun, a bright sun. I almost didn’t recognize it. We also have a blue sky. It is in the low 50’s. It is a pretty day. Today is a spring day. UPDATE: The ubiquitous clouds are back!

My father used to work for an ice cream company. He became the manager in Hyannis which brought us down here. When I was a kid, he’d bring home ice cream. Once he brought home a few pints, and my sister thought the pints, being so small, were ice cream for her dolls. A couple of times my father gave out Hoodsies on Halloween. What I remember the most was the dry ice. It was in a padded box with the ice cream to keep it frozen. My father would dump the dry ice into the sink and turn the water on. A cloud would form over the sink. It was almost like magic.

When I first went to school, I was afraid of the nuns. They wore black and white and were pretty much covered from the tops of their heads to their ankles. Only their faces and hands were visible. They swished when they walked, and the beads around their waists made clicking noises. When I was older, I came to think of the bead noise as an early warning system. The nuns were coming. Look innocent. The last thing anyone of us wanted was to be a target for their wrath. I don’t remember when they stopped scaring me.

One of my favorite places when I was growing up was O’Grady’s Diner. It was at the bottom edge of uptown. It had booths with red seats and stools at the counter, also with red seats. Each booth had a connection to the jukebox. The connection was a small box, almost a mini jukebox, with a coin slot on the silver top and pages of songs behind glass. You could turn the pages from the top to see all the songs, three songs for a quarter. Sometimes you had to wait to hear your song because it was in a line of songs, sort of a chronological list. Some Saturdays my father would take me to O’Grady’s for breakfast. He’d give me a quarter for the music. We both usually had bacon, eggs and toast. He had coffee. I had juice. Later, when I was in my teens, my friends and I sometimes went to O’Grady’s after drill practice. We always ordered brownies with vanilla ice cream. O’Grady’s is gone now. Where it stood is a hardware store.