RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Lowell Politics: October 18, 2026

Last Sunday afternoon, I sat at my kitchen table and filled in the ovals on my 2026 state election ballot. Earlier that day in my newsletter, I had described the eight ballot questions and the consequences of yes or no votes, so I felt well-prepared to mark my ballot. Imagine my shock when I got to the end of the ballot and found a ninth ballot question that I had completely missed when composing my newsletter.

I share that story to illustrate the complexity of this year’s ballot which contains twelve state election offices; a handful of Greater Lowell regional school committee seats; and nine ballot questions. All appear in three languages: English, Spanish and Khmer.

Whether you’re voting by mail, voting early in person, or voting on election day in the traditional manner, I urge you to review the ballot questions in advance, decide how you’re going to vote, and create a written answer key for yourself to use when you have the ballot in front of you. Doing that will increase the odds that you will answer all the questions and that your answers will reflect your intent.

That said, here is a concise statement of each of the nine ballot questions and a consequence of a yes or no vote on each. This list includes Question 9, which I missed in last week’s newsletter:

Question 1 – Public Records – A YES vote would apply the Public Records Law to the governor and legislature which under the current law are exempt. A NO vote would keep the system as is.

Question 2 – Public Defenders Unionization – YES would permit employees of the Committee for Public Council Services, the entity that represents indigent defendants in criminal proceedings, to form a union and collectively bargain, something current law prohibits. A NO vote would keep the system as is.

Question 3 – Combined Primary Elections – YES would eliminate separate party primaries and would have all candidates run together regardless of party in the primary election with the top two finishers advancing to the general election. A NO vote would keep the system as is.

Question 4 – Election Day Voter Registration – YES would allow a person to register to vote at the polling place on election day provided they present identification (including address) and sign a statement under oath that the information provided is accurate (with criminal penalties for false statements). A NO vote would keep the system as is, where registration must be done prior to the election. A NO vote would keep the current system.

Question 5 – Cap on State Revenue – YES would limit state revenue to the amount raised the prior year increased by the percentage wages increased in the prior three years with any excess being returned to taxpayers. NO would keep the current system.

Question 6 – Establish and Finance a “Nature for All Fund” – YES would divert 50% of existing sales and use taxes on sporting goods, RVs, and golf courses to a Nature for All Fund that would be used for natural conservation. NO would not create this fund.

Question 7 – Single family home minimum lot size – YES would allow a single-family home to be constructed on a lot at least 5,000 square feet in size that has 50 feet of road frontage and access to public sewer and water services. No would make no change to existing law.

Question 8 – Repeal legalization of marijuana – YES would repeal the law that made it legal to sell recreation marijuana. NO would leave that law intact.

Question 9 – Preserve the stricter gun control law passed by the legislature in 2024 – YES would retain the enhanced gun control law. No would repeal it. NOTE: Be careful of this question. It seeks to remove gun control restrictions that were imposed by the state legislature two years ago. Since the object of the question is to repeal the law, you might naturally feel you should vote against this effort which would suggest you should vote no. However, the way the question is worded, if you wish to retain the law and the stricter gun control provisions, you must vote yes.

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The ever-increasing cost of operating the Lowell Fire Department came up at this week’s council meeting and at the prior one. (The council is back meeting each week after its twice-monthly summertime schedule.)

At the October 6, 2026, meeting, Mayor Erik Gitschier and Councilor Corey Robinson had a joint motion that requested the City Manager “reach out to all tax exempt, community partners such as UMass Lowell, Middlesex Community College, Lowell Housing Authority, etc., to explain the current fire staffing situation and ask for voluntary assistance with preventing brownouts.”

The motion passed on a voice vote, although I can’t believe any of the councilors realistically believe that the entities in the city that are exempt from paying local taxes under state law will significantly help fund the city’s fire department overtime. Every one of those entities has their own fiscal challenges so other than small, symbolic contributions to be able to say, “we’re trying to help,” that approach won’t do much to ease the overtime cost crisis.

The Fire Department came up this past week (October 13, 2026) on a motion by Councilor Belinda Juran requesting the City Manager “have proper departments explain benefits and costs of having firefighters and fire trucks respond to non-fire calls (including EMS and helipad calls) and the costs and feasibility of alternatives.”

Perhaps recognizing how complicated the fire department funding issue is, Councilor Juran sought a detailed explanation of why the fire department operates as it does with some options for how it might operate differently. In her opening remarks, Councilor Juran gave a detailed explanation of what she was looking for, so I’ll let her words speak for themselves with this transcript, which begins at 33:51 of the YouTube recording of the meeting:

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I know that residents want us in government to provide safety whenever possible, including from fire, from crime, and medical emergency. And obviously that means supporting our fire department, police department, and local EMTs. And we’d all like the necessary equipment and expertise to be immediately available to us whenever we need it. But we also know we can’t have a fire truck, a police cruiser, and an ambulance on every corner along with their related trained team members. So as we have all been digging into the fire department overtime question, I think we need to better understand how our resources are being used and whether in the long run there are things we can do differently to do them better.

We’ve heard about fire trucks responding to medical emergencies even though we have EMTs and ambulances in the city. And I think there may be good reasons why that’s the case, but there are also costs to such responses. And the city council, I and other residents need to fully understand both the benefits and the costs so that we can make informed decisions.

Answers like, “Well it’s always been done this way might be part of the explanation, but I don’t think that allows us to think about whether there are other approaches. Um for instance maybe better triaging requests for help can avoid having to send a fire truck and a police car and an ambulance to every situation. Perhaps we need more ambulances in the city so firefighters and their trucks don’t have to be called out to act as EMTs. I understand that most firefighters are EMTs, but not all of them are. So, how do we actually ensure that we’re helping people when we send firefighters to medical calls?

We had a discussion last week about the helipad at the hospital and the fact that it has or doesn’t have a fire suppression system. So would having one there, a fire suppression system at the helipad, eliminate the need to have the fire department wait for hours for a potential helicopter crash landing as our mayor suggested last week and if so what is the cost?

We seem to have a structural problem with staffing with overtime with how the resources are being used and I don’t think we can simply throw more money at the situation even if we had the money and say that’s appropriate. We may need to think about doing things somewhat differently. I know I’m not someone who tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I think we need to at least understand if we can change some things or why we can’t rather than merely assuming that the status quo is the best way. And then if changes are appropriate but it may not be possible to make them immediately or even you know over a couple of years but we should have a vision for where we’re heading rather than just continuing on a path because it’s easy. So I think you know this kind of deep discussion would benefit all of us. Thank you.

A serious response to this motion could provide important information to councilors and to the community on how to address this issue, but whether a serious response will be forthcoming remains to be seen. Bureaucratic inertia and political pressure make that unlikely.

For as long as I’ve been following Lowell politics – which is for more than half a century – the cost of operating the Lowell Fire Department has been controversial, so this is nothing new. Still, if you believe that government is capable of rational action, getting a complete picture of what goes into these decisions is critical.

I’ll suggest some questions I think would be helpful to be answered by the city’s response to Councilor Juran’s motion, but first some observations.

Here are some facts from the official Lowell Fire Department (LFD) webpage:

• The LFD (is supposed to have) 215 firefighters
• There are 13 “companies” (i.e., engine, ladder or rescue trucks)
• Those companies are “strategically located around the city”
• Besides fires, LFD also responds to “emergency medical services, hazardous materials incidents, ice and water rescues/recoveries, automobile accidents, including extrications, and technical and high-angle rescues.”
• Besides staffing the companies, LFD has specialized units for Administration, Fire Prevention, Fire Investigation, and Hazardous Materials
• 109 firefighters are EMTs and 2 more are EMT Paramedics

Although not on the official website, I believe the 13 companies are deployed to eight fire stations which are located at:

• Moody Street (LFD HQ)
• Gorham Street
• Lawrence Street
• Branch Street
• Pine Street
• High Street
• Old Ferry Road
• West Sixth Street

My first question is, why is 13 pieces of equipment deployed at 8 locations the optimum organization of the Lowell Fire Department? Did a strategic analysis reach this result? If yes, was it in writing and can it be shared with the public?

In the past, there were far more than 8 fire stations in Lowell, however, all but 8 have closed. When and why did the others close? What was the thinking behind closing them? In the aftermath of closing those stations, did response time increase? Were the consequences of closing those stations quantified in any way? If yes, can that information be shared with the public?

There are at least two unique characteristics of Lowell that must be acknowledged in this analysis. First, the city has two major rivers (Merrimack and Concord) that impede trafficability and increase fire department response time, especially of second and subsequent units. Second, much of the city is densely populated and constructed, so the importance of a rapid and strong response to a fire in a built-up area is critical to prevent its spread.

(While response time is critical, it is no guarantee. On July 10, 2014, a fire on Branch Street killed seven people, even though that building was fewer than 100 yards from the Branch Street fire station which promptly responded to the blaze.)

Some on the council seem focused on the fire department providing fire suppression services at Lowell General Hospital when air ambulances arrive at or depart from the hospital’s helipad. The need for contingent, on-scene fire suppression capabilities is not simply to be there in case a helicopter crashes. Certain characteristics of a helicopter (as opposed to a fixed-wing aircraft) make the helicopter uniquely susceptible to fire at takeoff/landing and engine startup/shutdown. It has something to do with a lot of flammable fuel running through hoses that might leak onto super-hot engine parts, all sitting above the passenger compartment in a place that the pilots cannot see. Still, there are options beyond having a fire truck standing by. I believe the Mass General helipad in Boston, which sits on top of a high-rise building, has an automated system much like sprinklers within a building. Before getting into the feasibility of such a system in Lowell, an important question about the helipad is, how much does supporting it with a fire truck cost the city? Yes, there’s the wear and tear on the vehicles, but if the firefighters are on duty and being paid anyway, where are the savings? Would eliminating that duty allow the city to reduce staffing and alleviate overtime costs?  I’m not sure if it would.

A similar but much more consequential issue involves the fire department responding to non-fire incidents such as car accidents and medical emergencies. Certainly, if you’re having a heart attack and the fire department will arrive with a defibrillator in five minutes whereas the EMTs will only get there in twelve, you want the fire department to respond to medical calls. However, the city could modify its contract with the EMT service to increase its staffing to the point that EMTs would arrive as quickly as the fire department. Would that save money while offering the same level of protection? Perhaps, since privately employed EMTs likely earn less than firefighters working for the city. But since the firefighters are working anyway, how much money would be saved by not having them respond to medical calls? I suppose that fewer trips for the fire vehicles would make them last longer, but would such a change enable a reduction in the number of fire personnel needed per shift? Unlikely.

And would such a change be possible even if it was desirable and would save costs? I assume such a change in working conditions would have to be negotiated with the firefighters’ union. My guess is that the union would not be amenable to such a change because it would substantially decrease the number of calls fire units must respond to, and having those numbers higher rather than lower carries more weight in contract negotiations. (I also believe firefighters who become EMTs receive a salary stipend for having that qualification.)

Speaking of the firefighters’ contract, including it or a summary of its terms and conditions in the city’s response to Councilor Juran’s motion would clarify this situation. You will recall that last spring when City Manager Tom Golden proposed laying off several firefighters, a Superior Court judge issued an injunction against doing that because the relevant contract between the city and the union set a minimum number of firefighters that must be employed by the city and the layoff would have dipped below that number.

Hopefully the City Manager’s response to the Juran motion also clarifies exactly who is a member of the firefighters’ union which is Lowell Firefighters International Association of Firefighters Local 853 (IAFF Local 853). As I understand it, every firefighter from the newest recruit to the senior deputy chief is a member of that same bargaining unit. Only the fire chief is excluded. If that’s true, it means that the fire lieutenant in command of a vehicle or the deputy chief in charge of a shift are in the same union as every firefighter under their command. In that case, can an officer discipline a firefighter? What if the firefighter files a grievance against the action? Whose side does the union take: the officer’s or the firefighter’s? (I know the Lowell Police Department has separate unions for patrol personnel and for superior officers and the School Department has separate unions for teachers and administrators, but I don’t believe the Fire Department has a similar split.)

One thing I don’t expect to find in this forthcoming report is a breakdown of the politics involved. The firefighters’ union is politically active as is their right. One way they get involved is through campaign contributions.

If you go to the Office of Campaign and Political Finance website and search the “contributor” field for “Local 853” (for Lowell Firefighters International Association of Firefighters Local 853), the site returns 280 donations totaling $45,809. Scrolling through that list of campaign contributions, you find some made to current city councilors. Here are the ones I found (using 2017 as a starting point):

• Corey Robinson
  • $150 on 7/8/2021
  • $150 on 10/27/2022
  • $250 on 9/20/2023
  • $1000 on 6/6/2025
  • $1000 on 7/22/2026
  • Total – $2550
• Erik Gitschier
  • $150 on 7/8/2021
  • $150 on 11/9/2022
  • $250 on 5/30/2023
  • $1000 on 4/3/2025
  • Total – $1550
• Rita Mercier
  • $100 on 4/26/2017
  • $100 on 10/10/2017
  • $100 on 10/4/2019
  • $150 on 6/5/2021
  • $250 on 10/14/2023
  • Total – $700
• Sokhary Chau
  • $250 on 10/30/2023
  • Total – $250
• Vesna Nuon
  • $250 on 6/24/2023
  • Total – $250
• Kim Scott
  • $250 on 6/30/2023
  • Total – $250

There’s nothing nefarious about a city union making campaign contributions or with councilors accepting them. Still, it is useful information to have when evaluating this issue.

Political involvement is not limited to campaign contributions. Voting is a big part of it, especially when turnout in city elections is so poor. Remember, Lowell has approximately 125,000 residents with about 60,000 registered to vote. Yet in a city council election, barely 10,000 people vote. While councilors undoubtedly strive to do what’s best for everyone in the city, if they want to be reelected, they must reflect the wishes of a majority of the 10,000 residents who vote. In such a small electoral universe, a numerically small but highly motivated group, such as the members of the firefighters’ union, their families and supporters, can have an outsized influence in the outcome of an election.

Two final points: First, City Manager Golden has cited a small but significant number of firefighters who, statistically speaking, are abusing their sick time which in turn increases overtime costs to replace the absent firefighters. Because of employee confidentiality laws, the information forming the basis of that accusation cannot be made public. Nevertheless, if abuse is taking place, the administration must be diligent in pursuing disciplinary measures within the constraints of the collective bargaining system but should also release more information about the abusive practices. That information can be sanitized to retain individual worker confidentiality while at the same time educating the public so that voters have a full view of what’s going on.

Second, like any other municipal workforce, firefighters retire from time-to-time on a schedule that works best for them. There are no advance notice requirements for retirements so conceivably a firefighter could decide to retire, submit their papers, and be gone in just a few weeks. However, the process of replacing that retired firefighter seems to take years rather than weeks. Serving as a firefighter requires extensive, complicated training. You can’t just hire someone off the street, give them a uniform and leave it to on-the-job-training to get the new hire up to speed. However, there seems to be a substantial shortage of slots available in the state’s firefighter training academies. I assume this affects communities across the Commonwealth and not just Lowell. For that reason, pushing the state legislature to increase and fund more training opportunities for new firefighters to speed the journey from hiring a new firefighter to having that person fully available for duty might be the most important factor in curbing Lowell’s fire department overtime costs.

Hopefully, the response to Councilor Juran’s motion will address some of these issues.

Chicago, Again

Ten years ago, my family went to Chicago to look around. We had never been there. The city made a deep impression on us, so we returned last week for another look. If anything, the latest visit topped the first one. If anyone in the Lowell, Mass., area is reading this post and considering going there, I would say, Go for it! From Lowell, it’s easy to fly out of the Manchester, N.H., airport, less than one hour away. The flight is about two hours. Chicago has two airports, O’Hare and Midway. We arrived at Midway and took a taxi to our hotel downtown, about a half hour drive. O’Hare has mass transit service to the city. We stayed in the Michigan Avenue part of the city which offers easy access to most of the main attractions like the Art Institute and its superstar collection of American, European, and World artworks. If you know the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, you know what you’ll see, from American Gothic by Grant Wood to “Sunday in the Park with George” (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte) by Seurat.

Another spot not to miss is Millennium Park not far from the Art Institute. The centerpiece is a sculpture that may be the most successful work of public art in the country, Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor, a massive mirror-finished steel sculpture in an organic shape that earned it the nickname “The Bean.” The reflective surface constantly changes and the scene on land and in the sky changes by the minute.

Another day in the late afternoon we joined about 200 people on a cruise on the Chicago River with a guide who described the city’s astounding architecture, a pile up of vast warehouses, high rises, and skyscrapers in various forms. The 90-minute tour was a user-friendly seminar on Chicago history combined with an informative introduction to building design and structural engineering. On the boat we had people from around the US and nations abroad including a lot of runners who were registered for the Chicago Marathon scheduled for the next morning. In front of us were two women wearing blue-and-yellow Boston Marathon windbreakers. The tour boats run constantly, even at night with buildings lit up.

We rounded out our trip with a visit to the Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of the city, about 30 minutes from where we were staying. You can reach it by train (subway), bus, taxi, or private ride. The central building or museum on the campus is called “The Obamalisk” for its unique shape. Inside is the extraordinary story of a man “who went from here to there” on the American civic route. His stops included Hawai’i, Kansas, Indonesia, Harvard University, and New York City before his gig as a community organizer in Chicago, where he met the equally extraordinary Michelle Robinson. Not everyone, I know, but a lot of people find his story inspiring, and moving, to the point that the museum staff places boxes of tissues at strategic locations. I got a little choked up myself reliving the 2008 campaign through video on the second floor. Once the exhibit reaches his presidency, there’s a mock Oval Office where folks can hand their camera to a staff person for a picture of themselves standing at the desk. On floor eight, the space is wide open with windows all around for a panoramic view of the region. Gary, Indiana, on the Lake Michigan shore is right out there in the distance.

The campus includes a branch of the Chicago Public Library and a large building called The Forum with art and cultural exhibits, places to eat, and event spaces. The grounds are landscaped in the Prairie style with local plants as well as formal gardens. More artwork enlivens the grounds including a water feature with two round forms made by Maya Lin, a reference to the Obamas’ relationship.

The photo below if from opening day in June 2026. We were there on a Sunday of a holiday weekend and did not find the place uncomfortably crowded. Tickets are hard to come by, however, because of the large demand. We reserved tickets last May before the official opening. Now, the tickets are released in batches to manage the attendance. Plan on getting tickets some months ahead if you want to go. It’s worth the wait.

Photo by alphabeta135 courtesy of Wikipedia

I mentioned above my initial visit ten years ago. Here’s what I wrote for the Howe blog at that time. 

Epistolary

Epistolary

By Leo Racicot

I suppose my lifelong love of letters and letter-writing began when I discovered The Letters of Emily Dickinson. I was young, maybe 15 or 16. I also at the same time came across the Letters of Vincent van Gogh.  The discovery was revelatory; the idea that the personal correspondence of the lofty artists I admired — what they thought, where they went, who they knew — had been preserved, was exciting, brought them face-to-face as living, breathing human beings, made them accessible to the degree they became like old friends. After all, weren’t they much like the rest of us? They had their dreams, their fears, their hopes, revealing who they were as people. I still pull Emily Dickinson’s letters down from the shelf every Fall, feeling that Autumn, a season she wrote much about, is the perfect season to re-read her.

When my friend, Joe went away to college, to UMass Amherst, I stayed in Lowell to attend Lowell State Teachers College. It was the first time in four years we were separated. We began a years-long correspondence, a way for us to keep in touch while apart. When he transferred to UMass/Boston and made his dream of living on Beacon Hill come true, the letters continued. Even though we were only a train ride away and did see each other periodically, the allure of the written letter remained. We exchanged hundreds of letters over the years, many of them gems of penpalship. When life took us to different places; he, to Chicago to accompany his brother, John, who was matriculating at Northwestern, me, to Las Vegas, Cambridge, Cape Cod, the habit of staying in touch by pen and paper happily continued. We both saved every letter, often decorating the backs of the envelopes with decals, photo cutouts, sometimes elaborate displays of our shared interests. What the mailman must have thought!  Who cares? We were forging a bond; snail mail creates a patience, a pause for reflection that a phone call is incapable of, especially in today’s culture where the quick click of an emoji is used to express it all. This is why I’ve loved and continue to love letters, even when the friend I’m writing to lives not very far away.

Some of my pen pals did live a distance away; when I was in my late teens, early twenties, I sponsored a young lady, Hsaih Mi-Chu, in China. What a thrill it was for years sending and receiving airmail, seeing the exotic postage, looking at the hieroglyphics of Hsaih’s Chinese script (along with her handwritten letters, a page translating her words, her life stories, her adventures, would be included) She and her letters brought the world closer…

Hsaih Mi-Chu’s letters are stored in my attic as are dozens and dozens of letters from friends (my high school & college pal, Linda Scanlon, college intimate, Roberta McAnespie, Joe’s, of course, who’d often include with his missive delightful newspaper and magazine clippings he thought I’d enjoy). I’ve also kept the dozens of epistles written by editor Winston Leyland who took editorship beyond the usual boundaries into friendship.

And of course, I can’t omit my letters from writer M.F.K. Fisher. Before our friendship blossomed into an enduring love and visits out to her home, Last House, in Glen Ellen, California, we sent letters back-and-forth. Her letters bristled with personal stories, gossipy anecdotes, recipes, scintillating tales out-of-school. My letters to her tried hard to impress. When we first began corresponding, Mary Frances said she thought my writing style made her think I was a wise, old professor in a small, college town, “so polished is your prose”. (later on, she even crafted a short story about an old professor’s last days, The Reunion, in her collection, Sister Age). Wasn’t she shocked when a young fellow in his early thirties showed up at her door! And, wasn’t I shocked, when, following her death, the literary executors of her estate, notified me that our correspondence would be housed along with others in her collection of papers at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe! Through the years, whenever I need a lift, I visit Schlesinger, spend an afternoon poring through the words of my beautiful friend, my words to her….The M.F.K. connection lives on, in part, with a 30 year continuation of wonderful letters from Mary Frances’ former staff members, good friends, Pat and Marsha Moran. Pat is a fantastic writer in his own right, Marsha, his live-in editor, who also happens to be his wife. In a way, my heart still lingers in bonny Glen Ellen thanks to the epistolary magic they’ve conjured regularly throughout the years; I just had a long, good letter from Pat yesterday.

Looking back, I see I was blessed to become pen pals with several well-known people (If I like and admire someone’s work, I am compelled to write to let them know).

The gay writer, Edmund White, by the time I wrote him, wasn’t much for letter-writing; the culture had made it easier to communicate by email and social media, especially for one as busy as he was. But I have literally thousands of emails from Ed filled with his brilliance, his quick wit, his naughty asides. I treasure them.

Also, in the famous category is travel writer, Jan Morris whom I met during her lecture/book signing at Cambridge Public Library in 1988 when she made the startling comment, “What a joy it was staring out at the audience, seeing your lovely, androgynous face!” Good grief!  We, too, became years-long pen pals, she, often telling me I “must come to my home and share tea and scones with my wife, Elizabeth and me” It seemed wildly improbable that I could ever make a trip to the enchanted woodlands of Wales where they made their home but it was so nice to be invited, whether ingenuous or not.

It was said that the actress, Katharine Hepburn, didn’t like to sign autographs, answer letters from fans. But I have many from her in reply to my sending her a screenplay I’d written specifically with her in mind, Walking Song. She initially warmed to the script and the part I’d designed for her.  She did express concerns that some of the character’s monologues were too long, that at her age she would have difficulties memorizing them. She asked me to trim them down. Long story short — many edited versions of the manuscript travelled back-and-forth to her Turtle Bay home at 244 East 49th Street. She’d always send them back saying, “Still too long!”  Ever hopeful, I kept cutting and cutting and cutting until the day came when she said, “It’s too short. You’ve whittled this thing down to a nub!”  By the time an in-person visit came to pass, I’m afraid the great actress had “gone away with the fairies”, as the Irish say, and that, as they was that re Walking Song which is gathering dust in the attic.

The English wit and eccentric, Quentin Crisp and I exchanged notes and letters in the 1990s. In one of his to me, he said something that has stayed with me all these years. In response to my moaning that my love life was a disaster, Crisp wrote, “My dear boy. There is no more to be said for loving one person than for loving the whole world.”

I found the life and work of the Canadian gay liberation figure, Jearld Moldenhauer fascinating, wrote to tell him so. His place in that movement has, I feel, gone unsung. Activist, journalist, horticulturist extraordinaire, founder of one of the first, if not the first, gay bookstore, The Glad Day bookshops, one in Toronto, one, here in Boston. The list of his credits and talents is endless. My letter found him living in Fez, Morocco, in an architectural wonder, Dar Balmira, an ancient guesthouse with a legendary rooftop garden and art gallery. I thrilled to his descriptions of life among the natives there, so different was it from anything I knew. Jearld, a restless nomad, moved to Manila in the Philippines and we fell out-of-touch.

My whole life, I’ve been lucky to find pen pals who like snail mail as much as I do. For over twenty years now, my good friend, Bob Stone (who managed the Shea household for twenty-six years) and I have been exchanging weekly letters, I throw a movie quiz in with each letter because I know how much he likes the movies of The Golden Age of Hollywood, has the answers to practically every question I throw at him. I love seeing his letters in the front hall.

Lowell historian, Richard Howe, too, is so kind to reply to my maybe too-frequent letters. A polymath, Dick’s interests and work are endlessly fascinating to me and bring a contented pleasure to the winter of my days…

____________________

Pat and Marsha Moran with Barley

Winston Leyland, 1990s

Bob Stone working on my movie quiz

Postcard from Quentin Crisp

Katherine Hepburn at home

Jan Morris, Harvard Square, 1988

Garden rooftop at Dar Balmira

Edmund White on his laptop

M.F.K. Fisher’s typewriter

Roberta McAnespie

Linda Scanlon

Joe writing a letter on the train

The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

Letters of Emily Dickinson

Richard Howe

Living Madly: Crazy Ed

Courtesy of Peter Dyllong

Living Madly: Crazy Ed

Emilie-Noelle Provost

When I was growing up, there was an older man who lived in my neighborhood named Crazy Ed, at least that’s what everyone called him. I never knew his real name.

Crazy Ed lived in a basement apartment in a working-class tenement next to the corner store. Everyone in town knew who he was, mainly because he always wore a women’s skirt, usually plaid but sometimes denim, and high heel shoes, usually red. Every day, he would walk all over town dressed this way—miles and miles—pushing an old shopping cart full of rusty car parts and dented soda cans he’d collected from roadsides and weedy parking lots. At night, Crazy Ed would park his shopping cart outside the door to his apartment with a handmade sign on it: Do Not Touch. As far as I know, no one ever did.

Crazy Ed covered so much ground that you got used to seeing him. He was a fixture in town, so much so that his attire and shopping cart were in many ways just part of the fabric of the place, unremarkable in the way that familiar things tend to be regardless of their normalcy.

Although Crazy Ed wore a skirt and heels (I never saw him dressed any other way), he didn’t identify as female. He had a scraggly white beard and always wore a men’s shirt or sweater. During the colder months, he sometimes wore men’s athletic tube socks, the kind with the stripe at the top, with his high heel shoes.

Sometimes, kids would taunt Crazy Ed, especially young boys. Once, while walking to the corner store from my house, I came across a group of neighborhood boys throwing rocks at him. They were shouting homophobic slurs, and laughing whenever one of the rocks hit him. Unable to run in his heels, Crazy Ed took shelter behind his shopping cart. But the attack was so relentless that Crazy Ed was eventually forced to take his shoes off and hide. He cowered behind a parked car while the boys overturned his shopping cart and tossed his red heels into a nearby trashcan.

At the time, I was nine years old. I felt so sad for Crazy Ed, and I was angry that the boys were given license to treat another human being so brutally, that they felt justified in doing so. Even at the time, I knew none of them would face consequences for it. And none of them ever did.

When I was in high school, I worked in a coffee shop downtown. Crazy Ed was one of our regular customers. Almost every day, he would park his shopping cart outside on the sidewalk, sit down at the counter, and order a black coffee, for which he would pay with a handful of grubby coins. He would often sit there for a half hour or more, keeping an eye on his cart through the window. He almost never talked, at least not any more than was necessary, unless someone spoke to him first.

Usually, other customers would just say hello to Crazy Ed, but if someone asked him a question, especially one about why he was wearing a skirt and heels, he would get angry and defensive, often causing a loud argument.

At the time, I found these exchanges, and Crazy Ed himself, pretty frustrating, especially considering the frequency with which they seemed to take place. The coffee shop was almost always busy, and it was easy to fall behind if something took your attention away from your work. The other employees and I eventually started trying to discourage Crazy Ed from sitting at the counter by putting his coffee in a to-go cup, but it usually didn’t work.

After I went away to college, I would still spot Crazy Ed around town sometimes when I was home on breaks, but not very often. A few months, after I graduated, I moved to Boston to attend graduate school. After that, I don’t think I saw him again.

In the years since, I’ve often wondered what drove Crazy Ed to live the way he did. Did he suffer from some sort of mental illness or was he just eccentric? What was his life like before he moved into that basement apartment and took up roaming around town with a shopping cart full of junk? When and why did he start wearing a skirt and heels? Did he have a family? Did he have enough to eat? Why didn’t anyone ever try to help him?

When I think about Crazy Ed these days, it’s almost always with a wistful heart. Although I’m not particularly religious in a conventional Western sense, my memories of him often bring to mind the Parable of the Sheep and Goats in the Gospel of Matthew, which says the way we value and care for the most vulnerable among us—the poor, the hungry, the sick, those who are discriminated against for one reason or another—is, in the end, what reveals our true character.

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Émilie-Noëlle Provost is the author of The River Is Everywhere, a National Indie Excellence Award, American Fiction Award, and American Legacy Award finalist, and The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters. Visit her at emilienoelleprovost.com.