New Listing in Riverside

123 Riverside Avenue, built in 1899, priced today at $1.895 million, which is probably more than it cost back then.

When I was just a wee lad, my scoutmaster Art Brown lived here, and every Christmas he put up an inflatable Santa on that chimney you can see in the picture, facing Riverside Avenue. Naturally, being 13-or-so, I responded by shooting it flat with my pellet rifle. Until the third year of Christmas, when I discovered that the tricky old guy, thinking to defeat my rifle, had stuffed his Santa with newspaper. Undaunted, I returned to our house on Gilliam Lane and exchanged the pellet rifle for my bow. Back up the street again, and I placed three arrows in Santa’s chest, more or less giving it a feathered-button look.

This continued through high school, and then I thought I was done, until one Christmas Eve, home from college and sitting before the fire with my mother she asked, “aren’t you going to shoot Mr. Brown’s Santa this year?” I protested that, as I was now 21, the police would take a dim view of an adult archer on the loose, but she persisted so, sighing, I retrieved bow and arrow, dutifully trotted down the road and gave Santa one more college try.

And I thought that was the end of it, until, in 1990 or so, I was sitting on the RYC deck, a 35-40-year-old adult [sic] enjoying a beer, when a gentleman approached me and introduced himself as Bill Howland, the new owner of Mr. Brown’s house. “When I bought it from Art last year, it came with a folded-up plastic Santa Claus, and he promised me, ‘if you’ll put it up on Christmas Eve, Chris Fountain will come by and fill it with arrows’ — what’s happened?”

I regretfully told Mr. Howland, who became my friend, that I was long retired from the game, but would instruct my boy John in the ways of Artemis when he got a little older and leave it up to him whether he wished to continue the tradition. So far as I know, John never did, finding diversion in other forms of mischief, but I was amused that, all those years I’d thought I was baffling Brown as to who was attacking his poor Santa, he’d known exactly who was doing it, and, obviously, enjoying the joke as much as I did.

But I can assure the next owner that I’m now well past that stage of my juvenile delinquency, and if he wants to lash something to his chimney this year it will be safe, at least from me; I can’t guarantee that Bill Howland, who now lives next door, may not want to revive the game, but that will be between you and Bill.