Ann Fiore:  

I've just finished my first year of half-time studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that I spent five years in half-time studies at Chestnut Hill College as a science major. I love nature and music. Now and then I do a violin study with a teacher who's from Tokyo. With her round eyewear lenses and hair down to her wazoo., she reminds me of Yoko Ono. I started into a piano study with an instructor from the Temple Music School, but rather unfortunately, not long into the study I came down with pneumonia and had to withdraw; and I haven't had the time to pick this back up. I regret this. I don't know about you, but for me, time is really flying by these days: the time I spent at North seems almost like yesterday.... I'm still around though; and I pass by the school fairly often on my way to University City. The track out back is still there just as it was, and I can recall the many days I spent walking around it at lunch. I'm smiling as I say this but, when I'm on my deathbed, I think some of it will flash by before me. We can never truly escape who we are or what we've been born into. Hey, get this! Sometimes I feel like a message in a bottle that's been thrown out to sea at high tide in anticipation of reaching some important destination, but that somehow never gets carried away. With regards to my "student status", I write fairly often. In a Moral Theology class, for example, the teacher says to me: "I want you to write me a paper on the morality of the mobsters in the movie "Goodfellas." Well, it was an interesting assignment. Of course, for the mobsters, their morality (Or should I say immorality?) is essentially an appeal to power. I would like to get into a longer exposition on this sometime, but not now. Instead, I'd like to take you back into the distant past to share with you a little bit of my family life so that you may perhaps get to know me a little fuller. Given now that the people concerned are now mostly gone, there appears to have arisen in me a pressing need to share this with someone. These were the '60's. These were the NC years. I'm sort of sentimental. Even seemingly insignificant moments way back from school reside in my memory. Not long ago, in the provocative idea "one swallow does not make the day nor one day the summer," I started thinking. I had stopped at a flea market and had picked up a charming pair of old, diminutive, hand carved, Holland shoes, a little too small to be a child's--and I hung them up on the kitchen wall. They're kind of clunky and they have a real nice patina from age. Why? I remember many years ago my late grandparents had a pair hanging on the wall in their cozy, little Italian kitchen-- These were among a number of things, as I recollect, which set the "mood domestic”. A plastic checkerboard tablecloth adorned the small kitchen table, being most practical in the small kitchen that, on warm, lazy summer nights had to witness a lot of work. It was the place where on Friday nights the family would gather to share Grandmother's homemade “ pizza Italiana” --and the kitchen and the dining room adjacent would overflow with hearty laughter and the wonderful smell of the baking. Mama mia! Friday nights were good when Dad was off from work, as being a detective for the city, he worked shifts. True, it's all gone now, but the shoes, like magic, took me back. I suppose I presently feel a need to recapture in my own kitchen what's long been lost, that joyful mood now so forlorn, so distant. My mind seems so fixated. How many of us would give anything to recapture it back? To regain the gaiety in our youthful vibrance that's long since lost? As I now look back, growing up was fun. Is this not the way it is now for our long ago tenures at North Catholic? Why? I remember many years ago my late grandparents had a pair hanging on the wall in their cozy, little Italian kitchen-- These were among a number of things, as I recollect, which set the "mood domestic”. A plastic checkerboard tablecloth adorned the small kitchen table, being most practical in the small kitchen that, on warm, lazy summer nights had to witness a lot of work. It was the place where on Friday nights the family would gather to share Grandmother's homemade pizza Italiana€ --and the kitchen and the dining room adjacent would overflow with hearty laughter and the wonderful smell of the baking. Mama mia! Friday nights were good when Dad was off from work, as being a detective for the city, he worked shifts. True, it's all gone now, but the shoes, like magic, took me back. I suppose I presently feel a need to recapture in my own kitchen what's long been lost, that joyful mood now so forlorn, so distant. My mind seems so fixated. How many of us would give anything to recapture it back? To regain the gaiety in our youthful vibrance that's long since lost? As I now look back, growing up was fun. Is this not the way it is now for our long ago tenures at North Catholic? I hadn't seen my brother for some time when, this past Christmas (December, 2013), I did an online people search. Well, I went into shock when his listing came back "deceased". A little bit of me died right then and there. He died six years ago, on the New Years Eve of 2006. He was probably celebrating. Life can sometimes throw you a real curveball. I still love life, though .... Who can help me here? What else can I share with you? Well, if you're dying in a different sense, dying to find out why I am the way, I am not ready to discuss that just now. Maybe sometime. I need to relax and feel you out first. But rather, for want of something better to say to you at this time, I'd like to share with you a little adventure I and a friend had this summer past along the Appalachian Trail in Northern New Jersey. I don't know if you've noticed: I like to write. Would you believe I've spent 13 years in full and part time studies in college, though I started college late (Commencing with the fall of '86 I went to LaSalle for 3 years.). Upon graduation from North, I spent about 10 years as a decorator for store windows--a display artist--which I did with my brother. Following this I sat for some real estate courses and thereafter worked briefly selling real estate. I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who said that characteristicallly Philadelphians may find themselves in any number of assorted occupations in the course of a lifetime. It is in his/her nature.This does seem applicable to me: I am still trying to find myself. Presently I'm pondering a concentration of studies at Penn geared towards "wildlife biologist". It was a pleasant, sunny afternoon last summer along a section of the Appalachian Trail in northern New Jersey. The trail here was fairly vigorous, as it inclined upwards from the trailhead to the crest of a mountain at a fairly steep angle of about 40 degrees. Each step seemingly felt invisibly weighted, heavier with each passing step. Here gravity was the antagonist. At times the trail was precariously narrow as it ran haphazardly alongside the very edge of a steeply inclining ravine dropping down to a clear, rushing, cold water creek below, The water sounded heavy as it coursed forcefully through the rocks in the basin below--and peculiarly ominous. There were long stretches of trail here not more than a foot or two in breadth where loose gravel made the footing unsure. At our final destiny on the trail came a real challenge. It was about 3.5 miles from the trailhead, a place at the top of a mountain where a small, shallow lake of perhaps 20-25 acres, and with no incoming tributaries, had been carved out by a glacier an estimated eighteen thousand years ago. We had not very long to stay here, It was the point where we would rest after our vigorous uphill hike, and from where, the constraints of remaining daylight considered, we could return to the trailhead before dark. As it turned out, though, our time here became overextended in the discovery of something curious. A cursory inspection of the lake in the late afternoon sunlight brought us to the conclusion that the lake itself, in spite of its crystal clear water and its absence of potentially contaminating tributaries, was devoid of fish. The underwater vegetation was sparse in all but a few scattered areas of the shoreline with extensive expanses of the lake floor entirely void, muddy and barren. Our tentative diagnosis was acid rain deposition. Yet this pressing mystery would need to remain unresolved until another return, as it would not be too long before the late afternoon sun over the lake would give way to nightfall.. . The sun was getting lower and lower. (Some of the story missing here.) We weren't too long upon the return trail when we surmounted a brief hump and lo and behold! On a slope falling slightly downward away from the trail for a very short interval before dropping off abruptly into the steep ...Expand for more