Tom Sheehan

The Ghosts of Lily Pond

 

 

 

Ah, Saugus, the town I took to Korea many years ago, savored, brought back! Images strike here, deadly accurate in their mark. Metaphors, booted and buckled and loaded for bear, ride horseback through my town, holding forever in place. At times they ride roughshod or, taking a breath, saunter a bit, smelling new-cut hay over hill, or marsh grass caught up in light appreciation of salt about the air, all Atlantic talking. Realization comes too: Times there were when our river was like an old man trying to get into bed, slow climb at banking, belt or pajamas astray, slight failures; some springs, it would be caught up in flume’s rush. Our pond, long-gone Lily Pond, comes up odd mornings of memory like a hobo rising from his varied nights; a serious master of colors, Persian red, coin gold, yellow of a wheat or a blonde, autumn in the traces, ignition’s flare. Or there’ll be April-May at explosion about that wide saucer of water, Turnpike to dam, cliff-face to Prohibition cabins now taller with cellars plunked beneath them, post WWII heaven for returning veterans, with their new brides, foreign brides, casting hundreds of skaters and swimmers and boaters and fishermen on these shores, on that horizon before any of us realized the change.

 

Diamond-faced Lily Pond, our old Lily Pond, the pond of the '30s and '40s and '50s, had many faces, sleek and choice cuts, facets that still shine a kind of brittle memory, a storehouse of vignettes, tales, small mysteries, undimmed personalities, pieces that continually show us growing up and coming this way.

 

If you’re careful, alert, patiently waiting, the larder might spill itself, tell its own tales.

 

*

 

The man was raw-boned, sleek, could skate like the wind that blew out of Canada on winter days around the corner of Appleton and Summer Streets. Hair dark, eyes holding stories, he wore a magnificent pair of hockey gloves. Great, shiny black elegant things, tools of the trade, the kind we’d not ever seen. Hockey gloves! Like a policeman’s badge, a fireman’s helmet. An image gained and kept forever. Who had money for such things, such extravagance!

 

And his stick was always new; the blade daily wound with clean tape, and his name, barely legible if you wanted to stare closely at its small letters, burned its darkness high on the handle. His neat Chinos, telling you he might be a veteran of the war newly at silence, all Pacific quelled, were neatly bloused about his bulky shin pads with rubber bands cut from inner tubes, the bottoms of the pads visible and deeply red as they hunkered above white skate laces. Only his mean skates were throwbacks into other wars of ice; scarred, ugly things, merely the blades of them shiny with the art of maintenance.

 

He was not from Saugus, not a Saugonian, and carried a few pucks of his own, never to be without. But two days during the school week, and every Saturday and Sunday in skating weather, which seemed to be forever, he was on the ice of Lily Pond. Waiting for a game, he'd fly about the pond like something out of Hans Brinker and Hans' miles of canals or a Canadian truant doing the canal at Ottawa. When a game started he was first into it, then, as the games grew in number and spread across the face of the pond, he'd slip off to one with better talent, headier challenge.

 

For the games did grow, especially on a weekend and the skaters coming out of Melrose and North Revere and Lynn to enjoy the hockey on Lily Pond with us Saugus skaters. There'd be ten or twenty games at one time spread across the pond. There’d be by the boat house where canoes and rowboats were put away, in the cove by Cliff Road where we've skated as late as May of the year in the shadows of the cliff, out beyond Fiske's Icehouse, up near the Turnpike, at the head of the Island, over by Frank Evans' Beach on Lily Pond Road, down by the dam, over by Rippon's Mushroom House that used to be Monteith's Icehouse. Hockey everywhere. Pond hockey. Wide-open hockey.   Pucks sliding out of one game and into another. Racing to retrieve our one last puck at times after we'd lost others down in watering holes where all the long day we quenched our thirsts.

 

That's what brought the dark man with the great gloves. They said he once skated with the Boston Olympics, had been hurt in the Boston Garden, once was a Bruin for a cup of coffee. But he'd shift into gear easily in a game with Lonnie Green, Brother Parker, Jackie and Charlie and Googie Prentice, Neil Howland, Eddie Ayers, Jimmy MacDougall, Mike Harrington, Billy Falasca, Randy Popp, Red Parrott, Dickie Weeks, (oh, many of them gone now) fifty or sixty friends out of East Saugus and Cliftondale and Saugus Center as the games grew, multiplied, spread to all ends of the pond like a precursor to an Olympic Village in Lake Placid or out in Utah, building up in dreams.

 

If and when it snowed, we'd shovel rinks out of the snow, and Lily Pond, from a distance, from a hill, would look like a battlefield filled with square or rectangular bomb craters. Rocks or logs would be our goal posts, and occasionally, in early spring, the ice still on the pond, you'd have to be alert for old goal posts having sunk part way into the surface. Once an old pair of ankle-high boots lasted until the spring thaw took them down, past the last goal scored. (Were they volunteered for their post, I wondered, or confiscated from a shore-line log? Did someone leave in their stocking feet?)

 

But when the pond was free and clear and the ice good, there'd be hockey all of daylight. Then at night, under the stars or the moon pressing inevitability down on us, came trysts in the making, life-long friendships being developed or remembered forever. There'd be a whip with fifty or sixty kids holding hands. The one on the end better be a good skater because he or she would be snapped off to the winds, a solid rush of breath into lungs, speed momentarily paralyzing a pair of legs. Later there'd be cocoa and doughnuts at Frank Evans' pond side camp or a game of hide and seek so you and your girl could be hidden for a while, away at the dark edges of the pond, the owls hooting at your daring, your hand slightly cupping one of the new graces.

 

But younger, when the pond began to be a thing in my life, friends and I would walk to the pond on a Saturday morning, skates slung onto the blade end of hockey sticks, shin pads slipped over the other end and paired up with inner tube bands. We'd walk up Appleton Street, the ever-wind against us, anxious to see the ice condition, hurry in our pace, a dryness in our throats as we generated our own excitement. We'd pull on and lace up skates, play hockey until noon when, in my case, my father would come often times with a sandwich and cocoa in the back seat of the car. He’d loosen my skates, rub my feet, turn me loose in half an hour, come back at supper time with the same deal, saying as he left me, “Be home before midnight.”

 

Trust was in the air, flowed about us as fully as the wind on the pond. Those were the days when a sleep was a sleep.

 

And the dark skater with the great new gloves, almost as thick as boxing gloves, dreams in themselves, would be there, just as he is in today’s memories, flying across the ice with a puck on the blade of his stick, and never looking down at it. Never once.

 

I wonder if he knows he is remembered seventy years later. Does a thing so small fall away from Time? Does it count for him?

 

*

 

The man with the beard, glasses, an old felt hat, would come in an old Chevy with his canoe tied across the top. He'd bring his gear to the edge of the pond near Fiske's Icehouse, put it on the bank or on a rock at water's edge, go back.  Like some gymnastic creature,  he would slide the canoe off his car and carry it overhead to the water, dropping gradually the prow of it to water's touch as he swung it counterclockwise from its stiff-arm tier.

 

When his gear was loaded, he slipped easily into the middle of the craft and slid off from shore.   On his knees, a few paddle strokes took him straight as an arrow out toward the deeper water.   Before you could time him, as if he did not want to lose a minute of fishing time, or too much unfished water left in his wake, his deft hands would swing and switch a rod’s line out in front of the canoe. You could see where the lure plopped into the water, where pickerel and bass abounded you were sure, as he was, for he never came back empty-handed. Some mornings the envelope of silence was broken by that single lure hitting water. I can hang my hat on it today.

 

Other canoes would leave, during all parts of the day, and rowboats too, from the gray rental shack that now would be located down below the Knights of Columbus gate, and behind Eldon Sweezey's place. People would come from East Boston and Revere and Lynn to boat and canoe and fish at Lily Pond. Sweet tooth for those carp roiling on the surface. They'd come by bus on the old Hart Bus Line or the Rapid Transit. I'd envision them getting transfer after transfer to get here, carrying their rods folded or knocked down on the bus and their tackle boxes as noisy as change makers. Or they'd come and park Hudsons and Grahams and Packards and DeSotos and Chevies and Fords where Shadowland Ballroom's cement block pile supports were still exposed after the fire. You never knew their names. You might never see them again, but would remember now and then their faces, their laughter, their gaiety as they came to share Lily Pond with us, the sun new and shiny and warm on the skin, the sky blue all the way past the Turnpike, Saturday or Sunday at hand, Lily Pond swelling its ranks of lovers.

 

*

 

From the sloped rock face on the Island, Southwest side, in the afternoon sun in the middle of Lily Pond, the girl in a blue two-piece bathing suit arced gracefully through the air. She was sylph-like, smooth, curving her body a little bit more as she reached the apex of her dive, and slipped easily into the water of the pond when she straightened out. We'd watch her graces, my friends and I, as we lay back on warm rocks, the sun beating down on us in its July fashion. Her name was Shirley. She was the first graphic torture for many boys, left their mouths dry.

 

You couldn't beat Lily Pond on a good day! That's for sure.

 

The canoes would slip past the island the way the girl dove, just as sylph-like, smooth as creation, and silent. Rowboats, though, would clank into sight, the oars banging in the oarlocks like messages of labor. Passing our place of swimming, fishing poles would be retrieved from water, lures pulled back. Nobody ever had to say, “Look out there! We're swimming here.”

 

Of course there'd be more than one girl in a blue two-piece bathing suit, more than just Shirley. That's what swimming was all about. They'd come from Lynn and Revere and Malden and bring lunches with them and colored towels, and their combs. And there'd be our own classy classmates and schoolmates diving off the rocks, Hollywood on our own Island. There were the Stead sisters and Lila off the hill, and another Shirley all the way from Cliftondale, and Gracie, and a girl with the boldest message to her tan, who once swam in the Pit on Main Street after diving from a dead pine tree, sleek, tanned so daring, so daring.

 

At the other end of the pond, down by the dam and old Catamount Cove, as the historians call it, some sixty yards out in the water, was a rock that you could stand on and rest, and now and then pass the time of day, or evening, with another swimmer, the moon directing conversation, the silent and hidden beat of correspondence. Along the shore on many days small boys would be looking for tadpoles and frogs, among other collectibles, and would see quiet flotillas of pickerel hard against a banking, their tales barely twitching as they nosed into the shadows, digging into the work of life.

 

Every so often the boys would chase a butterfly or stop to listen to a bird singing it was a good day for hunting frogs.  

 

Once in a while Dickie or Edson Evans' long, powerful blue boat with an in-board motor would cover the dam end of the pond with a roar. It was like in mid-winter. Then, Dick Woods might fling his propeller-driven iceboat over the same route, the gasoline engine howling, a trail of blue smoke following its cutting arc across the ice, the prop snapping at cold air, at a distance a pair of iceboats silently showing off their generous white sails with the elegance of grace.

 

*

 

Much of its surface reduced now, Lily Pond of our youth has gone into that other world. It was shrunken, fill taken for Logan Airport, the perimeter declining. At times in this short life there seem to be few mysteries. Other times they overwhelm you. But there was no mystery about Lily Pond. Except how it got away from us in one fell swoop.

 

Once, in the dead of winter, Saugus frozen tightly, the pond face smooth as baby's skin, we put remnant sheets on wooden crosses, as if Jesus was with us all the way, and sailed on skates the length of Lily Pond. A number of times we'd done it, a number of days that winter, other winters, the cold plunge a solid being in itself; that cold to be borne and survived only in total exuberance, there being no other way “being about on the pond.”

 

At times that ride bore breakneck speed, wind more the sole ally, as we blew away from Sawyer's Ice House. That’s where innocently now and then, atop old strewn sawdust, orange I swear to this day, in the sweet cream of youth, in semi-darkness, at the epicenter of Saugus according to Doc Sawyer, we'd steal a light kiss or two from a dream girl. Kisses from those unfledged lips to be remembered a lifetime later, or the first touch of a breast given to your hand. Remember that breast, what face it had, if you see her today in an aisle of the mall, looking at you, remembering.

 

At the old tin shack where boats and canoes were rented out in another time, our sheeted flight would start down along a reedless shore climbing quickly to where gray cement blocks were all that remained of Shadowland Ballroom, long gone in fire. (Less than a decade later we'd pass through the infinite acreage of strung-out, geometric foundations of Hiroshima and recall the positional blocks mere Shadowland left behind.) Skirt a hockey game or two we could or scream at a snaking whip of hand-holders that we were coming through, the tone of our voice depending on the wind's force. Past the channel by The Island we'd go, being sure to stay clear of sometimes-thinner ice where water pumped below the surface.

 

Breaking out into the openness at The Point, Arctic bareness the challenge, a white almost never-ending expanse ahead, the wind a howl in our ears and at our backs, knowing the practical certitude that our blades would not find a crack in the ice, we faced the ultimate transition. Now pure speed became the entity, sheer speed, demanding that blades be light and controlled, knees slightly bent, arms the mast and tiller, eyes though air-struck on full alert. In a fraction of a second gauge all the other skaters on the pond. Calculate where paths might cross. Beware of mothers with babies in tow, doting fathers, the elderly, or the ankle-wearers who could not handle skates yet, who did not know this most savage of joys.

 

Keep an eye out again for Dick Woods' iceboat, roaring gray monster of the slick deep, with that wooden airplane propeller behind it pushing larger than life. Sometimes we surprised him! Swooping in silence out of the all-white shoreline, like a Finnish ski-trooper the Pathe News had shown us at the State Theater or someone from our own 10th Mountain Division on the same theater screen.  We had to be sure of residue rock goal posts between which players had the day before slung the black puck with both skill and vengeance, sometimes so hard it could be picked up and carried unsullied and dauntless in another game, or fly clear across the pond.

 

On special occasions, in that Arctic waste, we had to be aware; truancy, your sheeted cross the only sail on that vast sea of near-black ice and Buck Murray buzzing the pond in his Navy Grumman Hellcat, after he did the Town Hall, after coming out of Quonset Point: the Truant Officer, in his car, intending to meet you at destination, across from the White House Restaurant on the Turnpike, people reporting the capricious pilot.

But past The Point, where the wind tunnel came to full effect, the exhilaration was the game. The free flight, near frictionless. The almost, free-fall sensation. The Turnpike shore riding to meet you, cars and trucks out there on that black patch of road, commerce and usual care passing by in an endless Morse Code, and you here, where speed and freedom counted more than anything.

 

To stop all you had to do was drop your cross.

 

Or have someone take down the dam, to grovel at gravel!

 

Let Lily Pond float down-river! Past Salter's Mill and the old Scott's Mill, past the foot of the Ironworks, past old Indian burial grounds, past the fleet of lobster boats at the end of Ballard Street, past the red brick stacks of the General Electric, going all the way out of town. As if the Atlantic needed another droplet. Loose much of that great ice surface. Let loose all the swimming at The Island or at The Dam. Forget the winter donuts and cocoa or hot cider at Frank Evans' camp on the far side of the pond. Forget the midnight swims from there to the rock on The Island. Turn a goodly part of Saugus onto runways or extensions of Logan Airport, by the thousand truckloads.

 

All this was a conscious sadness. All this was savaged.

 

Generations of Saugus youth have missed that godly speed. It sits there now, mindful, trying not to let go forever, the cut of the wind often sharp as honed edges, the spar and sheeted sail pulling at wrists, at shoulders, a cluster of skaters madly dispersing at your approach. It was all of time and memory being pulled along by a hidden wind.

 

*

 

If you ask a hundred old-time Saugonians about our town, those that have moved about this world of ours, many still moving, the chances prevail that you'd receive many different approaches to the meaning of a town. For sure, of this town. Saugus, Massachusetts, 12 miles north of Boston on the historic North Shore.

 

It keeps exclaiming itself in the back of the mind, again and again and again. Saugus it says in a way that never lets go. They tell me this by poem, letter, music, you name the medium and they use it. Saugus they say. Friends say it by poem and book, by disc or tape, in words and music.     

 

From a corner of Cliftondale Square by Surabian's Store the recalls would spring, or from the old Morrison Drug Store on the corner of Smith Road or a house on Morton Avenue or Myrtle Street that somehow won't let go its grip even to this day. They’d come from a cliff-face up in the still woods of North Saugus or a late skate on Lily Pond or the Anna Parker when it used to be flooded for winter fun. Or from a game of playing tag on the rising form of the Post Office when it was being built in the Thirties. 

 

All this reverie might begin with the ghost of a father's lilting voice calling across the cool air just after darkness started its descent. The tone of that voice, its song of airy stubbornness and care, settling its primal demand across a goodly piece of town, across Main Street to the deep end of a hay field near Gustafson's Florist (where Chuckie Shipulski lives now and where Shipwreck Ed used to live). It would cross a section of the railroad tracks leaning from Lynn through the heart of the town to Revere on the Linden Branch. It would be a voice calling more than one person home, calling more than one person to memory. With sound there comes images, perhaps faint and distant, but ever real, freewheeling a stream of consciousness. The recallers might remember a summer cottage, and little more than a shed at that, in Golden Hills or high on Henshit Mountain, having a cellar constructed underneath, getting elongated, widened, being winterized, the walls becoming warmer, becoming home.

 

Sometimes a clubhouse in those Thirties, in the tough times, became a full-fledged home, and stands in place yet in part tribute to its young carpenters. Frankie Parkinson and the Petitto boys among others used to talk about their memberships in such clubs, how they came by their building materials, how they got into the real estate business in the first place. Those were marvelous stories of another time, of another liberty and another persuasion; the lumber floating across Lily Pond from a special source, or hauled by sled on mid-winter's ice, cover and darkness key words of the narratives. After a while taxes were imposed on these crude structures by the police chief, which forced the boys to move, to redraft plans, to rebuild, architects at the outset.

 

Among old timers, chances are a number of them might recall Blind Leonard living alone in his small shack near what is now Camp Nihan's waters, across from the North Saugus School, now a professional building at what is now the newest traffic control point in town. Leonard would walk again for them along Water and Walnut Streets, the cane tapping its steady tap, coming from the bus stop, coming from Lynn, from music, from Danvers where he visited his brother, or from another relative's house where the lights were kept low, a survivor for the longest time, a marvel for getting done what could not be done. Citizen Leonard.

 

Too, some of them would remember an eleven-year-old boy at the wheel of a tractor on the family farm alongside Spring Street, where the Full of Bull now sits facing the Turnpike, the sun beating down on him, sweat-generating high August at its work. (The old Ford tractor went off to war in 1942 as part of a pile of junk metal collected on the lawn of the town hall or the pile near the State Theater and the railroad tracks, becoming Corsairs and tanks and LSTs pointing straight at Normandy or the sands of Saipan or Kwajalein, keeping Saugus boys company out there in The Big Noise.) Once, they'd remember, there was a freedom and an independence and an initiative for the young to grow quickly, to do the manly thing, with whatever consequences waiting to happen. War does that, and the stretch of a town and its young people towards the next level of age. Citizens growing. 

 

But in all of these acts of definition there would be a universal feeling underlining each approach. For the truth is you don’t grasp Saugus outright. You don’t jump in up to your knees and know right off what you’ve jumped into. You don’t get to the heart of a town as if a rapid transit has dropped you at the heartbeat’s center. You can see a hundred pictures of what we’ve been, what we’ve come to be. Lily Pond and the dam can leap out at you, as can the Sweetser School and the Felton and the Armitage and the Mansfield and the old North Saugus School. But they’re all gone in their initial sense. The old high school is gone. The State Theater. The Adventure Car-Hop. The Drive-In Theater. All gone. Reverend Gray is gone and Father Culhane. Dave Lucey is gone and Buzz Harvey and Hazel Marison and Walter Blossom and John A.W. Pearce. Albert Moylan is gone and Vernon Evans and William Smith. And Adlington’s and Hoffman’s hardware stores. And Graham’s Market and Braid’s and Sherman’s and the Economy Store and Louis Gordon’s Tailor Shop and Joe Laura’s Barbershop and Ace Welding and Herb White’s Diner and the Slop Shop and Warnie’s Restaurant and Butler’s Drug and the Rexall and Charlie Hecht’s in the Center.

 

Bill Carter’s Bar is gone and Chickland and Ludwig’s Cleaners and Heck Allen’s.

 

The perishable perish.

 

They’re all gone, veered off the face of the earth, but we’re still here.

 

For the time being.

 

We too shall pass on, yet in the meantime, in the moments of pure reverie of recall, we assess and measure and realize what we’ve become and what we came out of.

 

We remember what we’ve taken out of a place. Taken out of Saugus!

 

Through the gifts of Ellis Island, through the pouring out of people from Europe and all the continents, this little town on the North Shore in its day was becoming a little piece of America, a reflection of the larger mirror of this country. We, as a town, as a community in the truest sense, had become an amalgam at one time; but we were not complete. At the ports of Boston and New York and New Orleans through the terrible times of fever and along the cool St. Lawrence Seaway, the boats unloaded their cargo, the load of precious charges destined to continue the rising of the New World. With them, of them, came the character upon which this town, as with many other towns along the North Shore, finally fixed its form and content.

 

The enclaves, of course, came into existence. Almost like estates of a sort, they were, like seeking like, economies of kinship, sea fares being paid, sponsorships coming into bloom, cousins coming from the Old World to help with the new farms along Walnut Street and Main Street and Vine Street and Whitney Street. They came to help in the shops and mills at the center of town and along Lincoln Avenue, and the character of East Saugus developed beside that of Cliftondale. West Cliftondale bloomed in its own way as did Golden Hills and Lynnhurst, and North Saugus being molded in its near-sovereign outland independence.

 

Then, eventually, with charisma, with fusion, the edges were joined and the amoebae fully assimilated. We had, at some point, become Saugus.

 

Once the core of the town had come into being, once the character had been formed, and the energy flowing through it was live and vital, something else happened.

 

No longer was it what the people had given to the town; from its becoming Saugus, the measurement we had to make therefore came to be what we took from its being: what we took away from it when we left. It became much like looking back and trying to say what you carried away from a school you had attended, that school continuing long after you've passed through it.       

 

This was addressed many years ago in my poem about one of Saugus' memorable characters, Frank Parkinson. The poem, “The Hill of the Blue Goose,” appearing in the Louisville Review, said in part; (This Vinegar) Hill has transport. Pieces left in Hwachon Valley of the Iron Triangle. In Verdun. On the Ho Chi Min Trail. Waters near the Marshall Islands, Sitka. In flecks of blood aged in a Walpole cell. An unmarked grave in a dead town in Iowa, or a cave wall scratched up with doom in the California Sierras. Almost near Tobruk, (where Frank Parkinson was left for dead vs. Rommel and where he walked out of that Sahara deadness to come back home. Oh, Frankie!).  

 

All were pieces of Saugus carried away from her heartbeat. Like Lily Pond, as it was, gone!

 

That those taken pieces keep getting regenerated is a marvel of township. It is why Saugus is loved by so many, and by so many more who have not yet found out what they carry with them, waiting to steal away in this lifetime, to go the way of Lily Pond.         

 

                               

 

Tom Sheehan served in the 31st Infantry, Korea 1951-52, and graduated Boston College in 1956. His books are Epic Cures; Brief Cases, Short Spans; Collection of Friends; From the Quickening; The Saugus Book; Ah, Devon Unbowed; Reflections from Vinegar Hill; This Rare Earth & Other Flights, and Vigilantes East, the new Harry Krisman Mystery from Hammer & Anvil Books. eBooks include Korean Echoes (nominated for a Distinguished Military Award), The Westering, (nominated for National Book Award); from Hammer & Anvil Books are Murder at the Forum (NHL mystery), Death of a Lottery Foe, Death by Punishment, An Accountable Death, and Vigilantes East. Co-editor of A Gathering of Memories, and Of Time and the River, two collections about our home town of Saugus, Massachusetts, both 400+ pages, 4500 copies sold, all proceeds from $40.00 each cost destined for a memorial scholarship for my co-editor, John Burns, in the Saugus School system as director of the English Department at the High School for 45 years. After conception of the idea for the books, and John putting out the word for material to be included by former students, and with a proposal of actions and schedules he prepared for a local bank, ten of his former students signed a loan for $60,000 to print two books not yet written!

 

Tom has work in Ocean Magazine, Rosebud, Linnet’s Wings, Serving House Journal, Eclectica, Copperfield Review, KYSO Flash, La Joie Magazine, Soundings East, Vermont Literary Review, Literary Orphans, Indiana Voices Journal, Frontier Tales, Western Online Magazine, Provo Canyon Review, 3 AM Magazine, Vine Leaves Journal, Nazar Look, Eastlit, Rope & Wire Magazine, The Literary Yard,  KYSO Journal, Green Silk Journal, Fiction on the Web, The Path, Faith-Hope and Fiction, The Cenacle, etc. In the Garden of Long Shadows and The Nations (2014), and Where Skies Grow Wide (2015) published by Pocol Press, and Six Guns, Inc., 2015, by Nazar Look in Romania, as a surprise 87th birthday present, print copy as well as an eBook. Some reviews may be found on Serving House Journal. He has 28 Pushcart nominations, and several Best of the Net and other awards.