Due to some very bad news this week,  I will no longer consider hot dogs “processed meat”.  I will consider them delicious, which is my name for the food group with all the good stuff that’s bad for us.

Someone had the nerve to study 500,000 meat-eating men and women since 1995 and determine red and processed meat greatly increase the risk of dying from cancer and heart disease.  Kill-joys.  Heavy meat consumption increased this risk by 50 percent for women and 31 percent for men.  Therefore, since I have no intention of having cancer and heart disease, I will put myself in the other 50 percent of women who eat meat and get away with it.

I can live without red meat if I have to, having gradually weaned myself off the meat and potatoes diet on which I was raised.  But three or four times per year I do battle with my arteries with a home made hamburger, the way Friendly’s Restaurants used to make them; inside a grilled cheese sandwich.  Just fry a hamburg and set it aside while you make a classic grilled cheese sandwich.  As soon as the sandwich is done, pull apart the two pieces of toast and slip the hamburg inside the melted cheese.  Cut it in half and just watch the juice ooze out.  It is so good, those ten million calories.

Take away that piece of heaven if you must, but leave the hot dogs alone.  It’s the McCann family –my maiden name– default meal.  There is always a supply of hot dogs in the freezer and plenty of mustard in the fridge door.  Most times, I even have an onion on hand to chop. Voila.  Lunch.  Grilled, boiled, fried, from a street cart in Columbus Circle or New York City, every hot dog tastes great, but there are places where hot dogs are greatest.

With an honorable mention to Heid’s of Liverpool, the two best hot dog places in the whole world are Coney Island on Southbridge Street in downtown Worcester, and Hot Dog Annie’s in nearby Leicester.

Coney Island Hot Dogs, Worcester, MA

Coney Island looks like a dark and barren Depression-era Edward Hopper painting, only darker and more barren.  Nothing has changed since the 1930s and that includes the original tile floor and the varnished wooden booths carved up with the initials of people surely departed from this earth by now.

This landmark sign is from 1940

It’s as much as a museum as it is a restaurant.  When I was a teenager, I could get six hot dogs for a dollar.  They cost more today of course, but not much more.

Frozen in time

The second best hot dogs in the world are just a few miles away, at Hot Dog Annie’s on Paxton Street in Leicester, on the other side of the runway of the Worcester airport.  You drive along a scenic rural road, certain you are lost and boom, suddenly it’s there, the conga line of customers snaking out the door of a ramshackle old cottage that used to be someone’s modest home probably in the days of the Pilgrims.   The place has always been there for me.  People eat on the picnic tables among the trees, but it’s not very pretty.  I just get the hot dogs and go.

These places each offer their own version of barbecue sauce, or just “sauce” as they say, which never tastes like barbecue, thank goodness.  The sauce at Coney Island is predominantly ground beef with chili powder; at Hot Dog Annie’s it’s a sweet, warm onion relish.   I’m only guessing at the ingredients as both sauces are secret recipes, but suffice it to say these hot dog places and the obligatory “sauce”, are as much a Worcester institution as Holy Cross College, which means neither the college nor the hot dogs are going anywhere no matter how much tuition increases and how many studies link hot dogs to poor health.

Hot Dog Annie's, Leicester, MA

All my life, I used to beg my mother to stop smoking so she could live longer.  Her answer was always the same, “what good is a longer life without cigarettes?” , which I thought was absolutely crazy.  Well I am here to say I’ve turned into my mother.  Can anyone convince me that a longer life without hot dogs is worth it?

In 1975 I graduated from high school.  A gallon of gas cost 44 cents and Bic launched the first disposable razor.  The Alaska pipeline was begun.  Gerald Ford was President.  And my oldest, most important friend was murdered.

Lisa Nodelman was perfect, at least through the eyes of a five year old on that first day of kindergarten at May Street School.  She remained that way until her violent end as a senior in high school at 17.  She was the most popular girl in class.

Maureen, middle row left. Lisa middle right

The classmates we had in kindergarten were the same kids we had all the way to 6th grade.  We played together after school, celebrated every birthday looking just like the class roster only more dressed up,  knew whose birthday came early in the year and was therefore among the oldest which seemed important back then.  Lisa was one of those early ones.  We knew who was smart and who was dumb,  lined up automatically according to height anytime we went in and out for recess or set up for the class photo.  Lisa and I were always within one head of each other.  We started and ended May Street tall for our age.

By Junior High at Chandler Street, our little class got diluted with kids from other grammar schools, and high school blended the group even more, but by then I enrolled in tiny Notre Dame Academy and I lost touch with Lisa, lost touch in the hallways and classes each day but I did keep informed through friends and my sister Karen who attended Doherty High and ran track with Lisa.  I heard Lisa joined a fast crowd off the track too.  It was probably God’s grace that I was in a different school not able to keep up.  My parents would not have allowed it and I would have resented them for that.

Maureen and Lisa, at center

Lisa was beautiful.  She got the grades.  Except for the time as a little girl she was afraid to climb down from the tree house in our yard and I was surprised to have to summon my mother, Lisa was fearless too.    Lisa broke school track records.  She was as we say today, the total package, destined for great things, and I had no doubt those things would come to her when I saw her for the last time.  She walked into a little shop where I worked at Tatnuck Square and was her usual confident self.  High school had matured her, matured us all, and she treated me favorably, which was a relief.  I always wished Lisa would like me best.

Just a couple of months later on a cold day in January, a small item appeared in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.   A city girl was missing.  It was Lisa.   Karen said everyone at Doherty was talking about it.  No one had any idea where Lisa could have gone.

By the second day, the article on Lisa got longer.  Authorities expanded their search to Cape Cod for the suspected teenaged runaway.  The stories I heard about Lisa made a run to the Cape seem plausible even in winter with everything shut down.  But at the same time, in the same newspaper, there was another story about a woman’s body found in a snow bank outside the campus of Anna Maria, a small college in a Worcester suburb.  She was nude and had no ID.  Thank goodness it’s a woman I thought.  Lisa was no woman, she was just a girl.

Maureen at left, Elise at right

The next day all the dots got connected when Karen came home from school out of breath from running up the driveway with the afternoon paper in her hand and fighting tears to announce Elise is dead; the news not only confirmed but hammered on the front page in bold black lettering I still can see. “Paxton Body Identified As Missing City Girl”.  The most famous headline of my life.

I was too stunned to do the right thing, so I did the young thing.  I carried on with my busy little senior year.  I didn’t take time for the funeral, didn’t feel the need to expose myself to all that sadness.   In fact I heard Lisa’s mother turned hysterical at the burial and starting kicking dirt all over the place, so grateful to have missed that messy scene was I.  There were college applications to fill out.  Life was waiting for me.

They arrested a man some time later, I don’t recall if it was weeks or months after the murder, but he stood trial and was sentenced to death until the Governor overturned the death penalty and I felt the guy got off easy.  I don’t remember the murderer’s name anymore, so I don’t know his fate, but I suspect he probably did his twenty years in prison and got out around 1997.  I recall he was young to be a murderer, only about 23 years at the time.

Side by side in 6th grade

On the night Lisa was murdered she got into a fender bender while setting off for a party across town.   She exchanged license and insurance information with the man she bumped into, and went on to enjoy the last night of her life.   With Lisa’s address in hand, the man drove around the corner and waited outside her home on Havelock Road.  In the cold, all night long, he patiently anticipated the return of the pretty girl to whom fate had introduced him.  When Lisa pulled into the driveway around 4 am, he grabbed her before she could even turn off the engine.

The next morning, Lisa’s Mom got up to go to work and found the car in the driveway, engine still running, radio blaring and warmth floating from the dashboard vents through the open driver’s door.  A few blocks away, police found one of Elise’s shoes.  Further down the street, they found her purse.  By the time they found her days later, she’d been raped, stripped, strangled and dumped in the snow by the side of a rural road.   No more Lisa.

I should have gone to the funeral because I’ve been saying goodbye in my dreams ever since.  Lisa makes periodic appearances in nocturnal story lines that make no sense, but I’m always living my life and she’s not living hers.  She looks exactly as she did when I last saw her, age 17, younger than three of my own children now, just a baby to a 51 year old.  And I always wake up so sad for Lisa, for the college she never attended, the career she never started, the husband she never met and the children she never had.  I’m sad for the class reunions she didn’t make and for the chance meeting at the grocery store with an old acquaintance who is the only one who gets to be old.  She never got that far, getting herself killed so young.

There are all kinds of lessons to be learned and I focused on them early.  Friends used to say, “that could have been us”, but I didn’t say that.  My parents never would have let me go to a party on the other side of Worcester.   They gave me the curfew of an eight year old.  So I didn’t learn how close I was to being a victim of rape and murder like Lisa.  My life wasn’t set up like hers.

Mostly, I’ve learned how life takes fairness off the table again and again.

Life in the northeastern U.S. offers many benefits and one of them is snow sledding.  Growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts, some of my fondest memories of winter involved sledding down our steep front yard.  Our house sat atop six acres of undulating land with a driveway that was a half-mile in length.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, my dad plowed the driveway himself with a 1947 Ford tractor that was a great source of pride. It was the tonka toy that actually worked and dad loved bouncing along on that thing.  After a big snow, dad placed a sawhorse at the bottom of the driveway to prevent any cars from driving up, and gave us the green light to sled from the top of the front yard,  down many  bumps to the last curve of the driveway and finally to the bottom at Chandler Street.  It was the best sledding anywhere.  Better yet, dad used to meet us at the bottom of the driveway, attach a chain to the sled, and pull us back up with the tractor.  I never knew anyone who got a tow at the end of a run.

Now I’m in Syracuse, New York where we had a horrible sledding accident in our town.  It was so tragic, that the Boston Globe referenced it in an article about the increasing municipal restrictions on sledding in Massachusetts. 12-year old Taylor Denson slid head first into a parked car here and died three days later.

Since then, city hall moved to ban sledding at the popular hill and at all other hilly public land in the city.   Enforcement will be nearly impossible as we get an average of 120 inches of snowfall every year in Syracuse and it’s unrealistic to think a police officer might be posted at every hill after every storm.

It’s interesting that in spite of it’s history of accidents at the water tower location where the Taylor Denson died, parents keep bringing their children to sled there.  Many say they keep watch over their children to make sure they slide feet first and don’t practice risky behavior on the hill, but I think it’s something more.

In this sedentary age, some parents recognize sledding as a rare and novel way to get kids off the couch and into the fresh air.   Sliding down the hill is a thrill, but that walk back up is rigorous exercise by any measure.

Sledding is available to so few children in this country.  You have to live in a location with snow and with hills.  Sledding is special.  Yet statistics show sledding is dangerous too.  Nearly 23,000 people are injured every year while sledding, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.   That’s a lot of wounds for an activity available to fewer than half the people in the country.

I would be sad to see sledding go away.  It’s fun, it’s exhilarating, and when practiced with some common sense, perfectly safe.  For a society that mandates helmuts for bike riding and car seats for all young children, let’s not become too afraid of the risks of sledding and prevent a good run down a steep and bumpy hill.