So another soap opera bites the dust. I remember my Grandmother watching this show, it was on for over 40 years. Grandma called it "All My Childrens" - cute, isn't it? Makes me worried about my show Days of Our Lives, which I have been watching for 16 years, five days a week, something like 4,000 episodes. What would I do without it?

The appeal to me is that anything can happen, the crazier, the better. This year Hope, breaking up with her husband Bo, starts taking a medicine that changes her personality at night, and she goes on a rampage, attacking men, the Mayor, other policemen (she's a cop) and even her ex, who she knocks out, pours gasoline on and is lighting him up when she is stopped. She goes to prison, where the prison matron is killing inmates and selling their body parts. Hope's cousin Jennifer gets involved and they take out her heart, put it in a cooler, then the hero doctor, replaces her heart back, and in a week she is fine. Hope solves the case, gets cleared, goes back to Bo and we go on to the next story. There are usually about 5 or 6 story lines at a time, weaving in and out during the week. Still one of my favorites is when Stefano dressed like Elvis, and seduced Susan, who had a baby EJ - Elvis Junior. Now that was early on in my watching, but Elvis is already married, divorced, married again, and has two or three kids. That's another thing about soaps, time can speed up, or slow down to a snail's pace, weeks going by and it is the same day.

People being buried alive occurs frequently, as well as babies being switched at birth. Dead cast members come back, healed and no one seems to notice. Bucky used to watch "Dark Shadows", a vampire soap opera, that my kids were hooked on as well. When in Beacon, they would all join Bucky in front of the TV every afternoon to get scared and then talk about the show for hours.

Solomon and Henry don't like Days, but they grudgingly let me watch, uninterrupted. During a commercial, Henry made the comment "Don't you just hate Judge Judy?", so I guess he puts Days on a higher scale than that. So do I.

Today feels like fall, all of a sudden the air is cold and crisp and the flannel robe hanging in the bathroom all summer is a long, lost friend. I had a memory of these kind of days, a memory of driving around the back roads of Tivoli, looking for wooley bear caterpillars. Sabra was probably three or four when she became obsessed with wooley bears. First, we found them on Clay Hill Road, taking a walk, and she picked one up and wanted to keep it. "We will need a jar or something to put him in", I told her and on our next walk we had a mason jar to hold the wooley bears. It was a good year for wooley bears, easy to find them on the road. She liked the jar, but found something even better as a home for the caterpillars - a good sized pocketbook, with a snap top.

For the next few days, we walked Clay Hill Road, up and down, looking for more wooley bears for her pocketbook. Oh, she made it nice for them, lots of grass, leaves to hide in. Wooley Bears are smart little things, when you catch them, they curl up and play dead. But in the pocketbook, they roamed up and down, looking for a way out. But still, the collection wasn't big enough.

"Get in the car", I told Sabra when she whined for more wooley bears, "We're going wooley bear hunting", and she climbed in the front seat with the yellow (I think it was yellow) purse on her lap. In those days, there were no car seats, I don't even think there were seat belts, so she had a good spot next to me to search the roads. We hit all the back roads, and when spotting a caterpillar crossing the road, I would pull over, throw the brake on, put the car in neutral and run out to catch the wooley bear before he crossed the road. Then I would bring it back to the car, Sabra would pop open her purse, and in he would go.

This would go on for hours, until we had to be home for the school bus bringing the older kids home. They would look in horror at the open purse, crawling with brown and orange caterpillars, grass all over, little caterpillar poops all over, and shake their heads in disbelief.
"Ma, how can you actually encourage this kind of behavior? This is cruel, let them all go," but Sabra would stubbornly hang onto her purse.

I can't remember how it all ended, what happened to all the caterpillars, and the crazy drives around town trying to spot a small bug crossing the road. But I am kind of glad we did it. You rarely see the wooley bears anymore, at least not in the numbers they used to be. Of course, Sabra and I might have done some damage to their numbers in our quest to get every wooley bear in the county into her yellow purse.

I've been missing Maria a lot lately, maybe because of the 9/11 ceremonies, all that grief, maybe because of fall coming, maybe because Maria the hurricane is drifting away. Anyway, after shopping at Hannaford today, I headed for the graveyard, but passed it on a whim, just wanting to see her house. As I drove up Starbarrack Road I thought of excuses I could use if anyone saw me, "checking on the apple tree in Kevin's yard" that's a good one, I concluded. Anyway, I pulled into her driveway, the house even bigger than I rememembered it. I stayed only a moment, it really didn't help and headed to her grave.

As usual, no one was around. I began deadheading the cosmos on her grave and a few tears were falling. Moving slightly, I looked up and there standing before me was the largest buck I have ever seen. Great big rack of horns, looked like something that had escaped from the Catskill Game Farm. I spoke to him, told him what a beauty he was and warned him about the upcoming hunting season. He stared at me, motionless for what seemed forever, but probably a minute of two and then slowly trotted back into the woods. "Did you see that?" I asked Ria, that probably was the sonofabitch that ate all your sunflowers. (Nothing but the stalks remain among the cosmos.)

The moment was gone, almost as if I had imagined it. But like in Harry Potter, the deer had changed the mood from sad to excited. Was it a sign, or was it just a curious giant buck that came out of the woods to see who was sniffling in his territory?

This morning, after bringing breakfast upstairs to our guests, I noticed hundreds of spider webs in the grass. Timmy hasn't cut the grass for over three weeks. His right leg hurts (actually makes a grinding noise) so he has avoided this task, though he can go to the gym twice a day, for over four hours. Go figure. Anyway, I pointed out the webs to him. They are funnel webs, made by the funnel spider, and in the center, hiding in a hole is the spider waiting for a bug. Timmy then told me that one of his earliest memories of my grandmother is her swiping away at the spider webs in her hedges. He thought that very brave as his whole family seems to be afraid of spiders. But that made me forget spiders and think of those hedges.

They were high and surrounded her house at 28 Washington Avenue. So high that Poppy would stand on a step ladder, waving hedge cutters that were attached to a long extension cord. As Poppy cut the hedges, Grandma would pick them up and cart them away. I grew up in that house with the hedges and can remember trying to peek through them to watch passers-by.
A perfect safe playground for kids.

Mrs. Chase, the next door neighbor, did not have hedges, but an iron fence, but her yard was so grown in you could barely see the house. Next to her house, the Lotsko's had the same high hedge that Grandma had. My most vivid memory of that hedge is when Tommy Lake's grandfather dropped dead in them. I remember it was a while before his body was removed, and for a long time, whenever I passed those hedges, I saw the indentation of where his body had fallen. Today I would say quite a nice way to go. I also bet Poppy and Grandma were happy that the old man made it past their hedges safely.

So, that's how spiders got me to Grandma's hedges. I think Timmy might be cutting the grass today and there will be a lot of spiders out of work for a while.

For some time now, I have been thinking about conscience. It started in July in the church in Wellfleet when the priest was giving his sermon. He was quite the character, taking the microphone off the dais and pacing back and forth, like on a stage, doing a monologue. Well, I guess he was doing just that. Anyway, he said when he was growing up his nun teacher said they should examine their conscience each night, searching and reviewing their day's actions, both good and bad and asking if they were mean or good to others. He made a joke that most people today examine all the bad things other people did to them that day, not the other way around.

Growing up, Bucky use to say that we had a devil on one shoulder telling us bad things to do, and an angel on the other, leading us in the right direction. I can remember her saying to one of the kids, "I see that devil on your shoulder", and they would twist their head and try to look at their shoulder to see him too. When I was working in IBM we each had a white board in our office, supposedly to figure out complicated formulas or jot down ideas. No one used it for that purpose. My girlfriend was religious and she would put Bible quotes. It drove our manager nuts because they are not suppose to criticize anyone's religion, but also not to promote religion. I found a quote I liked and wrote it on my board: There's no softer pillow than a clear conscience. My manager would frown when she read it, trying to figure out what it meant and how it applied to IBM. I looked that saying up recently and it is attributed to almost every country, so I guess it is not original. But I liked it then, and still do.

You must have to lose your conscience in war. I just finished reading "Unbroken" about an Olympic runner that is captured by the Japanese during the war. What they do to him and the other captives made for difficult reading. War IS hell and anyone with a conscience would have a hard time in it and for years and years after.

Maybe they should start teaching about conscience in the schools. Walt Disney did it with Jiminy Cricket and that old devil on one shoulder, angel on the other is also a good place to start.