Patrick Egan's Blog, page 37

The Blind Date

[Source: Google search.]

My wife and I arrived at a popular Upper West Side restaurant about fifteen minutes before our friends.  Mariam remained by the door to wait.  The place was crowded and noisy.  We’d been here before.  It was always like that.

I made straight for the bar to get a beer and wait for our friends and a table.  We switched our reservations from 8:00 pm to 7:00.  There was some confusion.  My wife made it clear that we couldn’t  and wouldn’t wait until 8:00.

I snagged a seat at the small bar and ordered some kind of imported beer on draught.  I took a sip.  That is when I heard the woman next to me say something.

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “Were you talking to me? Is the seat taken?”

“No,” she said. “I was talking to myself”.

I had the feeling she thought I was going to hit on her.  She clutched her iPhone in her right hand.

“Are you waiting for someone?”, I asked.

“Yes, he’s late.”  She turned to me and looked me full in the face.  I saw an attractive woman with just a bit too much red lipstick and too much hope in her eyes.  I took a risk and asked:

“Waiting for a date?”

“Yes,” she said.  “And he’s late.  He already cancelled once before on me claiming there was a sickness in the family.”

“So, you think you’re being ‘stood-up’?” I ventured.

“Yes.”

“How late is he?”

“He was supposed to be here at 6:45.”  I looked at my watch.  It was 6:48.

“Hey, it’s probably traffic.  His Uber didn’t arrive.  Give him a little more time.”

“How long?”

“Give him until 7:10 and then make a call or text him,” I said.

I sensed that this woman has been let down more than a few times on the blind date thing.  She even admitted that it was true.

“I have a lot to offer,” she said.  “I saw a guy for a year and a half.  He didn’t want to go anywhere, movies, opera, museums…I told him I wanted to get out and experience what New York City had to offer.”

“Good move,” I said.

She looked at me again, not avoiding direct eye contact.  “I’m sixty,” she said.  “I have a lot of living to do.”

Our party arrived and our table was ready.

“That’s my wife over there with the white jacket.  She was a former opera singer.”

“Interesting,” she said.  “I’m an opera singer too.”

I got up and took my coat off the seat.  It was a few minutes after 7:00 pm.

“It was nice talking to you,” I said as I made a move to our table.  I felt suddenly very sorry for this woman.  She wanted to have a date on this night.  She wanted a companion.  She most likely wanted a lover.  She was sixty and she said she had a lot of living to do.  I thought for an instant to ask her to join our group but realized it would be awkward for everyone.  I turned to her as I left her side.  She still clutched her iPhone.

“I hope he gets here.  I hope you have a date tonight,” I said.  She smiled.

I went to our table and settled into my chair.

“I met a most interesting woman,” I said to our friends and to Mariam.  “She was an opera singer.”

I ordered a Malbec and ate a thumb-sized piece of bread.

I looked over at the bar stool.  The woman was gone.  I glanced around the room to see it he did indeed arrive.  I didn’t find her.  She most likely went home alone again that night.  She would wipe off the red lipstick.  She would pour herself a glass of Chardonnay and sit alone…maybe watch an old movie…maybe call a friend…maybe go to sleep..she probably had a cat or a dog.  Everyone else in Manhattan seems to.  But it wasn’t a pet she was looking for that night.  It was a man.

She probably cried, alone and wishing for another chance to find someone to join her in life.

I can almost cry myself thinking about her hope that was dashed and her lonely night before her.

Actually, I did.

There are a million stories in the Naked City…and this is one of them.

 

 

 

Thirty Feet From My Pillow: A Tale Of Love, Sex And Perhaps Death Outside My Bedroom Window

I can’t recall seeing so many clusters and varieties of Fungi in my front yard in the sixteen years we have owned our home on the hill above Rainbow Lake.  I was on my knees examining a species that was unfamiliar to me.  I was on my knees in three inches of yellow, red and wet leaves that had fallen after a rain.  Too late to rake.  Too wet and heavy.  I also knew that when I stood, I would have two wet circles on the knees of the Route 66 jeans from the Malone Wal-Mart.

Something caught my eye.  Something almost completely buried in the leaves inches away from the mushroom cluster I was studying.  I brushed a few leaves aside exposing a wet and empty bird’s nest.  It must have fallen from the enormous bush in our front yard.

I looked at the nest and began to think of the family of avians that had made it their home for the spring and summer.

I had suspected something was different every time I walked from our front door to the car.  There was always a bird that would flutter close to me and make me duck.  Most of our bird activity was in the back of the house, observed from our deck, with the lake in the distance.  I never gave the creature much thought…until now…as I knelt beside what was probably its home.

How did I miss it all?

The spring was full of bird songs.  It’s what happens here in the Adirondack forest.  I knew in late April and May that the mating season was in full swing.  Some male bird (I never saw it long enough to make a positive ID…maybe it was a Robin?  A Sparrow?), was desperate to find a mate.  Our yard was like a bar at closing time.  The urge to procreate was overpowering.

He must have scored.  He must have found the one for him.  I was kneeling next to the nest that proved it.

I looked from the nest to our bedroom window.  Maybe twenty feet.  Ten more feet inside the room was my pillow. I stood up (wet knees and all) and walked over to a chair on our front deck.  I brushed aside the leaves and sat down, keeping an eye on the empty nest.  It suddenly occurred to me that the drama of life, birth and loss was played out a few feet from where I slept.

The courting took place.  The mating took place.  There were a few eggs.  The male had constructed the nest.  The female would protect the eggs.  Later (I never heard anything) one egg cracked…then another.

The chicks would need food.  That was the female’s role.

I thought of the thunderstorms that shook the trees around our house on more than one occasion during the summer.  The nest survived.  Then, when the moment, that unspoken unexpected moment arrived, one of the chicks climbed to the edge of the nest.  Another followed while the female urged them, one by one, to take the risk…to take the leap…to learn to fly.

Perhaps, I thought, the weakest chick fell and was made a meal by an animal.  Perhaps they all survived.  I’ll never know but nature is often unforgiving and the rules are not weighted in anyone’s or anything’s favor.

I do know that soon the nest was empty.  A breeze shook it from the branches.  It fell to the ground and the autumn leaves began to cover it.

Where did the birds go?  Are they migrating south as I sit here and write this?  Will they survive the coming winter?

I don’t have the answers.  After all, an entire Cycle of Life took place just thirty feet from my pillow.  While the Great Instinct of Life was being played out in the big bush, I was reading, playing Scrabble, tossing off a bad dream, napping, pacing, worrying, aging, weeping, staring at the ceiling, regretting, hoping or just sound asleep.

I decided I’m going to pay closer attention to that giant bush in our yard when the spring of 2017 arrives.  I’m not going to miss out on such a great story of life again.

But, I probably will miss something, some detail and the great drama will start without me.

[The bedroom window.  The giant bush.  The nest is at the lower left of the frame…covered again by leaves.]

The Great And Silent Feast

I felt the breeze…

I stumbled on a tree root when…

Finally, we reached the pond…

Concentrate. Start over.

When I was a teacher I was often given the dubious privilege of “lunch duty”. A room, nearly the size of a gym, filled with 5th & 6th graders…or 9th & 10th graders and a hand full of teachers produced a noise level that made it impossible to carry on a conversation or to even think about the hour before you. Sometimes on days when I didn’t have duty, I would retreat to the faculty lunch room. Even there, teachers talked about the students, the administration or their Valium prescription. Still, no time to think.

As a last resort, I would take my tray to my empty homeroom and eat alone. It occurred to me that I would appear antisocial…but at least I could think.

Once, perhaps a decade or so ago, I found a guidebook to monasteries, close to our home in Manhattan, that opened their doors to travelers…like a B & B with stained glass. Mariam and I found one, run by the Episcopal church, on the western side of the Hudson River. It was a large estate-like building that sat high above the river in the Hudson Highlands. It happened that we booked our room on a “quiet” weekend.

No talking allowed.

During the meals, all I could hear was the clinking of forks and spoons on the china plates. A whisper here and there…but otherwise, silence.

I could think.

On October 7, Mariam and I with our friends took a walk on the Silver Lake Bog trail. The sky was azure. The foliage was at a peak. Brilliant reds, yellows, copper and scarlet leaves mixed with the green conifers.

[Even the conifers lose their leaves (needles) in the autumn]

I hung back and walked alone. I stopped to listen. The gently falling leaves sounded like a light rain. I looked around me and realized that I had walked into a grand feast, a forested restaurant, a silent meal.

And, I could think.

A gentle sense of melancholy overcame me…it’s that time of year that evokes death and endings and dormant life.

[This once-living tree is now being consumed by dozens of organisms]

Nearly everything I looked at was in the process of dying…or already dead. What was alive was consuming what was dead. This was considered to be a fairly dry summer, but you would never have guessed that from that bog or our front yard.  I have seen more fungi this October that I can recall.  My copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to Mushrooms was used more than the previous decade.  It is now well dog-eared.

It was like watching “The Walking Dead” with the roles reversed. Of course I have lived a life-time of seeing this every autumn, but on that day, the Big Picture came into focus more clearly and gave me the urge to put all this into words. I was a witness to the Great Cycle of Life. I know it’s a cliché, but there it was, all around me. The ground itself was covered by a blanket of moss and lichen that were feeding and consuming the organic material. The dead logs, many cleared from the trail by a chainsaw, were helpless to resist the countless fungi, moss, bacteria and water that were breaking a once tall and stately beech or maple or oak into mere molecules.

[A dead log feeds a number of organisms]

And, all this was done in total silence and would continue even under three feet of snow and ice and temperatures of -37 degrees.

[The ground cover of moss and lichen]

In six months, a small spore, a seed, a dormant larvae of a black fly would begin to revive and then bloom and the green would return.

Everything goes somewhere.  “Matter cannot be created or destroyed…it simply changes form”.  I think that’s Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics…but I could be wrong.  I stopped being a science teacher a decade ago.  Most things return in the spring.  Some things take a longer time…but sooner or later it all comes around again.

The exception, I hope, is lunch duty.

 

Kids Bottles: Another Moral Dilemma

As I grow older, it seems to me, I am faced with some kind of moral choice nearly every day.  Then, I suppose that it’s something that’s true for every thinking person.

Should I watch Game of Thrones or search for the Vatican Channel on my Roku?
Should I continue to espouse the obvious truths of Creationism or trouble myself with science and facts by following the Theory of Evolution?
Should I be supporting Brad or Angelina?
Should I worry about the obviously faked data supporting Global Warming or continue to push for the Pipeline that will help a few zillionaires keep their children in elite private schools and screw up the environment for our children’s children?
Should I make an effort to feed a hungry family or contribute to a child’s dream of owning a bicycle?

Wait a minute!  That last bullet point sounds different…it sounds serious.  What’s going on here?

Several years ago, when I lived in New York City, I was faced with moral choices on every block.  We would be leaving a Chinese restaurant, discussing the dumplings, and then be confronted by a homeless man or woman.  I would dig in my pocket for a dollar or I would give them the left-overs I was carrying home.  With the number of street people growing constantly, there had to be a limit to my generosity.

Choices.

But, here in the North Country, one isn’t confronted by these daily dilemmas.  Unless you stopped to look around and see the trees in the forest.  Twelve miles from $6,000,000 vacation homes in and around Lake Placid there are people who live so far below the poverty line they are nearly out of sight.

My moral dilemma of late is the discovery of a sign along the Rainbow Lake Road, a mile from our home.  It is hand-painted and reads KIDS BOTTLES.  Back in Gabriels, by the main road, Route 86, are two small brown sheds.  A few years ago, these sheds were run by the local Girl Scout Troop.  People could drop off returnable bottles and cans…the money going to the Scouts.  The sheds would overflow.  Now, the money goes to the local food pantry.  The sheds still are usually filled.

I drink a fair amount of tonic water because I read that the quinine additive would help me with my painful leg cramps.  It seems to help…in a way…but it leaves me with several issues to resolve…

I could stand and feed the liter bottles into the big gray machine at Price Chopper in Lake Placid.  When the large plastic bag was empty, I would find Mariam and give her the ticket for $ .95.  Hardly helping our grocery bill (which would contain ten more bottles of tonic water and $2.50 for a copy of the New York Times).
I could take the easy way out and throw the bottles into our recycle bin (not really an option…it’s my nickel and I don’t want a nickel of mine in some account in Albany of deposits paid but not redeemed).
I could drop the bottles at the brown sheds in Gabriels, helping in a small way, to feed a local hungry family.
Or, I could stop at the hand-painted sign on Rainbow Lake Road and donate the few nickels to a family who were in the process of helping their child save for a new bicycle.

To many of you, my faithful readers, the choice may be clear in your mind already.  But, for me, it isn’t so clear.  Nothing in life is black or white…there are so many gray areas.  Of course, food is essential, but all the local grocery markets have food pantry boxes already.

The dilemma lies in the gray area of life.  Death by starvation is not something the North Country has experienced, at least as far as I know.

I hesitate with my bag of bottles.  Do I contribute to alleviating a large-scale problem of hunger or aid in the happiness of a child, who will someday own a bike?

I don’t have the answers…I only raise the questions that keep me awake at night.  How do I play out my role in the Social Contract?

Yesterday, I dropped my half-dozen bottles behind the chipboard hand-painted sign.  Remembering my own childhood and the pure innocent act of riding a bicycle.  I wanted to help the kid own a bike.  In a few weeks, I’ll probably drop my bag of returnables at the brown sheds.

Either way, someone loses and someone gains.  All I can do is alternate my actions with my conflicted conscious.

 

 

Allison, Me And The Ghosts Of Judy Garland

“Who could ask for anything more?”

                     –Ira Gershwin

Ok, so I pulled a few strings.  Actually, it was only one string.  The daughter of my wife’s boss (Dr. Chris Walsh from Mount Sinai Hospital), was playing the lead in the hit Broadway show, An American in Paris, on the night of September 7, 2016.  We purchased the tickets and made a discreet phone call to Dr. Walsh.  Would it be possible if he had a word with his daughter, Allison Walsh, to give us a backstage tour after the show?

[Allison during the show]

It worked out like it does when you have some strings to pull.  All we had to do was be at the stage door after the show and mention we were guests of Allison Walsh.  We were on the list and we were led into the bowels of a storied and famous Broadway theater, The Palace.

The show itself was fabulous.  Allison, a trained ballerina, stood out as a total professional and got a standing ovation at the end.  But, I’m not a theater critic.  I’m going to take you behind the scenes and below the stage where so much real action takes place.

[Stage door]

[Me, Allison and Mariam]

After descending miles of spiral staircases, we found ourselves in a warren of rooms and hallways filled with costumes, dressing rooms.  There were ropes and cables and sound boards and schedule lists and mailboxes.  I couldn’t imagine the action that took place down there during the show.

[One of the make-up rooms]

I thought I’d impress young Allison with the fact that we were both veterans in the Big Show, the glamorous life of a star, knowing the smell of the grease paint and the roar of the crowd.

“I had the male lead in the Senior Play when I was in high school…back in 1965,” I said, feeling confident she’d see me as another thespian as herself.

She stared at me and said: “Oh, really?”

I estimate her age to be around twenty-five.  So she would have been born in the early ’90’s.  That would be about twenty-five years since I had the male lead in the senior play.  No wonder she seemed a bit quizzical at my comment.

Allison led the two of us (and another couple who had known her in high school) through the quick changing rooms and the wig room and back up another mile of stairs to reach the stage.  I caught up with her and said: “Is this place haunted?”  I whispered the question, not wanting to frighten or alarm the others.

[One of Allison’s wigs]

“Many who work here say it is,” she replied.  “They say that Judy Garland has been seen many times.”

We five arrived at the stage.  The house was empty.  There was a “ghost light” center stage.  We posed for a few pictures and I stood for a moment, thinking I was alone, looking out at the empty seats.  I nearly strained a muscle in my neck trying to look up to where we had watched the show (the nosebleed section).

Suddenly, the empty seats became filled with 3,000 Judy Garlands.  They stood and made a deafening  applause.

“You’re over the rainbow,” I heard the Judy who sat in the front row shout.  “You were amazing!”

I didn’t think that Judy Garland ever saw my senior play…then I turned around and saw that Allison was standing in the shadow of the Ghost Light.

“We loved you, Allison!”

I stood back and realized that my moment in the spotlight was long ago.

“Not to be mean,” said one Judy,in the third row, addressing me, “but you aren’t over the rainbow…you’re over the hill.”

I knew the real star of the evening was Allison.  She made a gracious bow to all the Judy’s…waved and then left. Stage right.

“Hey, wait for me,” I called as I hurried to catch up with the others.

[The Ghost Light]

[Allison poses with an aged tourist]

We thanked her and said our good-byes.  I nearly got run over by a taxi as I stepped out to get a shot of the marquee.

I am grateful to Dr. Chris Walsh for arranging our tour.  I thank Allison Walsh for taking the time to show us around, knowing that she was probably exhausted after the performance. (I would have been heading for the nearest pub if I were in her place).

So, what did we do then?  Mariam and I headed for the nearest Irish pub to reflect on our strenuous tour of a great Broadway show.  If you haven’t seen it…go!  It’s closing in a few weeks.

And, just in case you think I made all this up…

The Masts…Oh, the Masts

Here I am once again. I’m sitting with friends at the Naked Turtle for dinner.  It’s located on the shore of Lake Champlain in Plattsburgh.  I listen to the conversation but I’m drawn to the eastern view, toward Vermont.  The marina is filled with boats of all sorts…but it’s the sailboats that attract me.

Where are they going for the winter? North to the St. Lawrence River and out to the open ocean?  Will they head south to Lake George?

I wonder…

If they go north, they can use a series of canals to reach the Atlantic.  From there, they can make for the Intercoastal Canal and eventually end up in the Caribbean…on some island…in some port.  Sipping latte or perhaps a margarita. And they can use the wind, however it blows.

Are these journeys behind me (in my dreams?) or in my future?

I look at the boats.  I count the cabins.  I’d like four berths and a decent head.  I don’t favor anything more that I and my wife can handle.

But, a guy can dream, even at my age, a guy can dream

Some of us will sail away and some of us will wait until the right boat comes in,

To All My Blog Followers And Friends

I just want you to know that I appreciate the “likes” and the “follows” that have made my blogging experience exciting and fulfilling.  But, I’m going to take a hiatus from “pumping out the posts” for a few months.  You deserve to know why.

-I’m still exhausted from the 50 or so posts I published during our 13,000+ mile road trip.  It wore me out more than you can imagine.

-I’m still suffering from the vestiges of viral bronchitis that came on at the end of the trip and hasn’t let me go.

-I am going to spend time working on a collection of Adirondack based ghost stories.  I have ideas, I have titles…I’m just working on the endings.

So, stay with me on Facebook, and stay with me on my blog site.  When I’m back on WordPress with some blogs…I may get a brilliant idea, you never know….you won’t miss a thing.

Follow me on Instagram (patrickadk) and see that I can actually take a picture or two.

Take care and don’t unfriend me…I’ll be back with more and better stuff.

Love to you all……Pat

 

Two Trees

A man and woman have four children–two boys and two girls.  The same seed…the same egg.

One boy grows up, attends college and eventually becomes a doctor and later joins Doctors Without Borders.  His brother sits in a small cell at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, NY.  He did something unspeakable to an eleven year old girl.  He has tats that identify him as a member of a gang based in Albany.  Many of his friends sit in similar cells–in similar jails–in three different states.

One of girls grows up and after sampling life in an New England college decides to join a cloistered convent and eventually will take a vow of silence and chastity.  Her sister walks the streets of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  Anyone can buy her love and affection for $50.  She has several dozen needle marks on her arms and thighs.

The same seed…the same egg.

Two trees started life in a forgotten corner of the Adirondack forest.  They are rooted only nine inches apart.  Perhaps both from the same white pine that dropped its seed-laden cone seven years ago.

Now, one tree has added three inches of new growth to its needles in the Spring of 2016.  The other tree, a brother?…a sister? has turned completely brown.  It will not be utilizing photosynthesis again, ever.  It is the only dead tree in this small part of the forest.

Why does one living entity flourish and the other, linked by a genetic code, lose the spark of life?

Didn’t the alluring Cinderella have several despicable sisters?  Jeffery Dahmer had a sibling.  Cain and Abel were brothers.

Nature or Nurture?

Or, is it just an inexplicable aspect of life in general?  A question that has no answer–a riddle that has no solution–a prayer that has gone unheard…

[Source: Google search]

 

Where Are The Castles In The Sky?

When I was a young boy, my mother would walk with me down through our backyard and toward the river.  There was a decline on the property that, in very old times, was the bank of our river.  Now, it was simply a gentle slope down to a lawn that took my father decades to transform from a field of weeds to grass…that had to be mowed, of course.  I often wished he’d left that part of the yard alone and allowed it to grow into a forest of wildflowers and small birches.

My mother would usually stop and sit on the highest part of the slope and lay back…looking at the sky.  She pointed to the cumulus clouds that were usually present in the afternoon above Owego.

“Look,” she’d say.  “See that cloud?  It’s shaped like a whale.”

I’d look and wonder.  Then I began to see the shape she was still pointing to.

“Yes, mommy, I see the whale,” I said and I did indeed see the hump and the tail.

“The clouds can take on all sorts of shapes if you let your mind free to imagine.  Right now I see a ship…a ship that will one day come in for me,” she said wistfully.

I think this is what she said.  I don’t remember exactly because I was too young to remember her words.  But, from that day on, I used to keep my eyes aimed at the clouds and I began to see that what one minute was an amorphous shape, become a dragon, or a knight, or a horse…or an angel.

I did this through my teenage years when I would stretch back in the same place where my mother and I would sit and sit and think and begin to see the shape of castles and eagles and great ships and more knights.

In the late 1970’s, I would take my daughter, Erin, down to the slope in the backyard, to the same place my mother sat with me…when I was a little boy.

“What do you see?” I asked Erin.

She stared at the sky for a time and then said she thought one looked like a mountain…a volcano…with the sun edging over the peak.

“It’s a beautiful mountain,” she said.  “Daddy, do you see it?”

“I don’t see it now,” I said, “but maybe someday.  That cloud is only yours to imagine.”

Years later, I took my son, Brian, to the slope in the backyard, to the same place my mother sat with me…when I was a little boy.

“Daddy!” he said as soon as he looked up.  “I see a big building, a skyscraper like the one you showed me in a book.  It looks like the Empire State Building,” he said.  ” Do you think I’ll ever see it in real life?” he asked.

“Maybe someday,” was all I could say.

Many years later, I would  manage to look up…the trees were thinning out now…and find objects and shapes in the clouds while I mowed the lawn my father had created.  My children are both adults now.  I saw only shadows of happiness in the faces of the dragons and knights.  The castles I saw were dark and menacing.

Even later, after a heartbreaking divorce, I still continued to look up to the clouds and try to find fanciful and dreamy and mythical shapes.  I only saw only puffs of water vapor…simply clouds.

After my father passed away, I continued to mow the lawn and look up.  I saw only dark clouds and vague images of those I loved who had passed on.

I took one last walk to the river the day I handed the keys to 420 Front Street to a woman named Lauren.  It was overcast and nothing distinct appeared in the sky.  A vague shape of an hour-glass formed in the lower clouds that were building over the southern hills.

A year or two ago, I took the walk…perhaps for the last time…to the bank of the river.  I was with my wife.  The house had been empty for a few years and the lawn had suffered through two devastating floods.  When I had mowed it, it look like the 17th hold of Augusta National Golf Course.  This day, it was shoddy and overgrown and almost unrecognizable.  But, this time I saw visions of King Arthur, Roy Rogers and cowboys and indians and brave soldiers and angels that seemed to smile on me once again.

Mariam and I sat and looked at the sky.  She told me that when she was a child, she would lay back and make images of the cloud shapes.  I asked her what she remembered.

“I recall the image of an old man…with a crooked nose and a cane,” she said.

“Maybe someday,” I said.

Walking back to the house, I looked at my wife.  Then I looked at the very spot my mother would make me sit.

“Yes, mom,” I said.  I see it all.”

The Night Of The Living AA’s: Report #3

I’m sitting on the sofa in our screened-in porch listening to the rain falling, heavily and with vigor, on our deck, roof and the new leaves of the maples.  I want another mug of Dorset tea, but that would mean going into the kitchen one more time.

I’m reluctant to do that.  There is something going on in the kitchen that causes me to suffer the most prolonged insomnia and induces the more horrific nightmares when sleep does finally come to my weary and reddened eyes.

I have only myself to blame…

I’ve always wanted to own an indoor/outdoor thermometer.  I wanted one even as a young child.  While the other boys in my neighborhood would be playing catch or stealing apples from the old orchard or riding their bikes around the block singing: “Back in the Saddle Again”, I would be dreaming of owning a device that would let me know what the temperature was both inside my home and outside in the yard. The only problem was that these instruments weren’t yet invented.  If I wanted to know how cold it was, I would have to don a coat and flannel-lined jeans and trudge out to the wall of the garage and look up at the mercury column, inside a glass tube that was attached to a Coca Cola advertisement.

Now, sixty years later, I own three of these wonderful little units.  There’s one in my “man-cave” in the lower level of our house.  There’s one still in the box, just as it was when I bought it at a Costco’s in Jupiter, Florida.

And, there is the one in the kitchen…on the narrow sill just above the sink.  It’s small.  It’s accurate.  And, it simply terrifies me.

I’ve written two posts on this Radio Shack model before (or maybe one blog and a Facebook post, I can’t remember).  So, for those who have been following me over the years, you may know what’s coming next in this particular report.  For those of you who are more recent “followers” of my stuff here on WordPress, then be afraid, be very afraid.  Do not let your children read this post.  If you’re weak of heart or a faithful church-goer, you may want to stop here.

You’ve been warned!

You see, my friends, my wife and I bought this house in 2000.  We used it as a vacation home for a number of years, renting it out to people willing to come to the Adirondacks and get bitten by black flies and deer flies and mosquitoes while enjoying the hiking, boating and swimming that the Park offers.

We were living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at the time.  It was the perfect weekend get-a-way retreat for us when we felt the need to escape the artistic and cultural life of a vibrant city.  It was only a mere six and a half hour drive (305 miles) from our front door on W. 93rd St. to the driveway at 58 Garondah Road.

Within a month or two of buying the house, I happened to be in the Saranac Lake Radio Shack.  I was looking over the radios and kits of all sorts when I spotted it.  There it was.  An indoor/outdoor thermometer!

Naturally, I bought it and within an hour I had it up and running.  I carefully placed the outdoor sensor outside our kitchen window and behind a shutter…in the shade.  It was this very same thermometer that I glanced at one evening while we making a quick winter trip to use our new L.L.Bean snowshoes, and saw that it was -36 degrees.  This was probably the first time that I began to question why we had chosen to live this far north.

I put in two AA batteries.  It was 2000.  At first, for a year or two, everything went smoothly.  Then, I began to notice something strange…something sinister…something that has grown more terrifying as year came and went.

The indoor/outdoor kept working!

“What’s wrong with thing?” I asked Mariam.  “It should have needed new batteries by now.  Nothing made since 1957 was made to last more that a few years.”

I knew this was especially true of batteries.  Why else would places like Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Radio Shack sell them in packages of sixty?

And, this, dear reader is where the story becomes unnatural…eerie…and downright frightening.  It’s been sixteen years since I put in those two AA batteries…and they are still working!  It’s not my imagination.  I will swear to the good Lord above that I have not replaced those two batteries.  I want desperately to open the back of the indoor/outdoor thermometer and check on the brand, but I am afraid to open the small plastic door.  I’ve seen enough Steven Spielberg movies to know that when you open certain items, unholy things come, like smoke from a clay Churchwarden pipe and the demons of the Other World are released.

I have enough guilt in my heart already…I don’t need to unleash Satan or whatever into this world.  It’s already too violent, religiously insane and terrorizing…and I’m not just talking about Donald Trump here.

But, something is powering my indoor/outdoor thermometer. Something sinister and unworldly.  It certainly can’t be the AA batteries…sixteen years is fifteen and a half years beyond their expected lifetime.

I still want a second mug of Dorset tea.  I think I’ll ask Mariam to go into the kitchen to make it for me.  I can claim my back hurts.

And, it does.  I have an MRI to prove it.