Patrick Egan's Blog, page 47

Bryant Park On A July Afternoon

I remember a time, back in the 1970’s and ’80’s when Bryant Park was a certain kind of place for a certain kind of person.

I was not one of those people.

There was a public restroom…a small stone building on 42nd Street.  If you entered to use the urinal, in the day, in the afternoon and especially after dark, it could cost you your wallet, or worse.  Anywhere around the park, if you were so inclined, you could purchase a vial of crack, a needle, a joint, smack, coke or a woman.  All very affordable.

It was a creepy place and when I needed to get to nearby Grand Central Station to catch a late train back to Connecticut, I usually crossed the street.  But there were temptations there as well.  The girlie-peep shows weren’t limited to Times Square.  There were a few scattered along 42nd St. all the way to the dismal dark and dangerous lower levels of the train station.

Things change.

I took an afternoon stroll through the park a week ago on a warm Saturday afternoon.  The atmosphere and the park had done a complete 180 degree turn.  The lawn was full of people soaking up the sun.  A nearby carousel, with twelve animals to ride.  It was tucked off to the side near 40th St.  The kids clung to their parents as the ride rotated to the music of an organ, up and down, sitting on such creatures as horses, a rabbit, and a rather creepy frog.

A walk across the lawn was hot and very humid.  Thick grass puts out a great amount of moisture.  I rested at one of the plentiful small metal chairs.  I thought how much better the entire place seemed.  On Monday nights they show free movies on the lawn. (In the winter, the lawn is a skating rink).

I looked at the sycamore trees.  Strange trees with bark that was mottled and patchy.  The rows of planted trees seemed to all lean toward the lawn, toward the people, protective and guarding us from the riot of the city just outside the green boundaries.

Sitting in the middle (actually, off to one side where the shade was dense), I thought of how Bryant Park stood up against the other Manhattan parks.  Central Park is huge, complex and has as many micro-environments as small country.  Bryant was small, concise, intense, crowded and yet, still a haven.  Union Square Park had little grass, as did Madison Square.  Washington Square had fenced off mini-lawns that grew short grass just five feet above hundreds of decaying bodies that are still buried there…Yellow Fever victims…all wrapped in a particular colored shroud.  I forgot the color but I always think of the dead beneath the Great Arch.

From the 50th floor of the Grace Building on 42nd St., looking down at Bryant Park would be like examining a rare postage stamp.  At one end, on 5th Ave. was the bulk of the N. Y. Public Library where I can sometimes be found on rainy days, writing stuff like this or working on the Great American Novel.  It’s a great place to dream.  Behind the library is a comfortable place to have  cold glass of white wine or a chilled beer.

It all reminded me of the Garden of Luxemburg in Paris, only much smaller.  But the spirit was there.  Large vases of flowers and places to sit and write, read or think.

As I sat and sipped my drink, I looked across the park toward Avenue of the Americas (6th Ave.).

I sit and look at the people around me.  I can’t just sneak a photo and move on…it’s not my nature.  I have to know their life story, their pains and sorrows and reasons to laugh.  I need to invent a life for the human being I’m looking at.  I’m not invading their privacy.  All this happens in my mind only…and then shared in places like this post.  It’s fiction…probably.

I see a woman intently reading a book.  Is she reading Proust?  Grisham?  Me?  Perhaps she’s found a leaked copy of  “50 Shades”, Part XII.  It doesn’t matter.  Maybe its the Bible or the Book of Mormon?  It doesn’t matter.  She’s absorbed in someones world, maybe escaping her own.

Near me is an old woman knitting.  She’s bent and aged.  I imagine that her hand has the muscle memory to flick and work the needles without a thought of a knit or purl or a dropped stitch.  Is she thinking of her sister, back in the apartment, and is she wondering when the fever will break?  Is she think about dinner tonight?  Or, is she think about how she broke a heart in 1951?  Maybe her will to be happy left her after what happened in 1962?  Maybe she’s praying for the lost soul of her daughter? Granddaughter?  Is she still missing her father who never came home from a war?  She looks lonely among the crowds.  She seems oblivious to the crowds.

I can create an entire life for any individual I find myself sitting next to.  But, I know that whatever worlds I build for a person, their own reality, their own life is infinitely more interesting.  Because it’s real.

I recalled a time when I sat at the far corner of Bryant Park with a high school friend of mine.  We were talking of the years gone by.  Then, without warning, she turned to me and told me that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer.

I think she cried on my shoulder.

I was a man without words.  What do you do?  You say how sorry you are?  You hug?  You hope?

That was almost fifteen years ago.  She’s a survivor.

Aren’t we all survivors, to a point?  Don’t green spaces of all sizes refuel our needs?

I felt the urge to use the restroom.  This time, I had to edge my way past a large vase of fresh flowers as I made my way to the squeaky clean urinal.  Years ago, I would have tried to do the deed with one hand on my wallet.

This time, I just relieved myself to piped-in music coming from small speakers in the corners.

I think it was Vivaldi or maybe Scarlatti.

Things change.

 

It Was 28 Years Ago Today: Changing Views

I saw him when he was born.  I watched and began to wonder…even back then.  I thought about what I had seen.  I went to the Delivery Room window, looked out over the parking lot… and wept.

Taken in the long view of human life, I had just witnessed something most men have been kept from seeing…an actual birth.  But, there he was, wet and gooey.  When he could focus, it was on his mom’s face…her eyes…her expressions.  Soon he discovered there was another person in his field of view, his father.

He would look at me, straight into my eyes.

Then as he got older his view still was on his mother and me, but he was seeing other things, other people come and go into his field of vision.

I had already raised a daughter, Erin, and I was fully aware of the passage of time.  As an old song goes: “Turn around, and she one…turn around and she’s two…turn around and she a young woman going out of the door…”

I was determined to have these early memories of him cling to me like pollen in May, like sap on a pine.  I wanted to have it all just slow down or stop or encase it like an insect in Miocene amber.

But there are rules of nature you cannot alter: The flow of time is Rule #1.  Nothing to be done here…just enjoy the moment as it is.  You can’t stop the flow of a river by pushing your hands against the current.  You can’t stop the rain by pushing back at the raindrops.

Soon the moments became months and then the years began to add up.  Rites of passage occurred…he turned eighteen and began driving.  He turned twenty-one without major mishaps. (That I know of).

He wasn’t running to his daddy with a broken tail reflector from his bike anymore.  He was discussing fine wines with his girlfriend, Kristin.

His view points were changing, not about politics but about how he chose to spend time and places he travelled.  I found out he was in Jacksonville, Florida about a year ago when I first saw a photo of him dancing on a table at the local Hooters!

“Dad, can I go to Hooter’s and dance on the table?” never once left his lips.

So, a young man slowly turns from the comfortable and familiar and begins to find his way in the strange and unknown world.  I would have not have it any other way.  This is life.  This is growth.  This is maturity.  This is growing up.

He joins Mariam and I for a brief trip to Ireland.  It’s his first European stamp on his passport.  We’re driving the Burren, a place of desolate and austere limestone landscapes in the west country.  We pause to take some pictures.  He wanders toward the cliff edge.

I snap a photo of him gazing out over Galway Bay.  I don’t know what he’s thinking about.

But he’s looking away from me and into a future that belongs only to him.

I would have it no other way.  I hope as he grows older, he stands by uncountable cliffs over unnamed bays and thinks of life from the viewpoint of his own eyes and ears and imagination.

 

My Dreams Are Made Of Iron And Steel

I don’t dream the way I did in past years.  I miss that because those nighttime adventures were something to behold.  The visions of H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker and Steven Spielberg were mere cartoons when compared to the places I would go in the hours beyond midnight…when REM sleep was most active.

Very rarely do I wake in the morning with the words, “Holy Crap” on my lips and the burning desire to tell my wife what just happened inside my brain.  But, I found I couldn’t put my dreams into words that could come close to describe the worlds I wandered in while my eyes were closed and reality didn’t exist..for those moments.

Some people claim they don’t dream, but scientists find that nearly everyone does…they just don’t remember anything.  I still remember, in vivid detail, the landscapes of the night that I found myself wandering in sixty years ago.

Some of those after images are a delight to recall…but many are places I never want to revisit.

When I was a little boy, I had a great deal of trouble falling asleep.  I still do.  But, my dreams as a child were not of lambs jumping fences or riding across the prairie, bareback, on “Old Paint”.  No, I had odd dreams of odd objects that would sometimes chase me or kill someone I loved.  We had a long hallway in our house.  I had this one frequent dream that a giant ball was rolling down the hallway and if I didn’t move, I would be crushed.

I always moved.

There was a dream (?) I had in my youth that went like this: My brother, Chris and I were walking through the woods of Beecher Hill when we pushed through the trees and found ourselves in Evergreen Cemetery.  I remember being terrified enough that Chris had to carry me like a baby until we made it through to the front gates.  The odd thing about this, is that I’m not totally sure it didn’t really happen.

As a teenager, I began to have dreams that were intensely erotic.  Most males (if not all) go through this.  As I moved into adulthood, the nature of the eroticism changed, but it still left me with sweat on my forehead in the morning.  The females in these dreams were people who I knew, sometimes.  But, more than once, these beings were goddesses, sirens and dreamy forms of feminine beauty.  Alas, these kinds of dreams rarely visit me.  Perhaps its my mind’s way of giving me a visual demonstration of my lowering hormone levels that come with aging.

Too bad, I had some good times with some naughty ladies of the night.

But often, too often, my night-time travels would take me to dark and desolate places where death sat in old wing-back chairs, layered in dust.  That image comes from a monumental dream I had in the 1970’s or ’80’s.  I found myself on the edge of a city.  I needed to pass through to the other side of town…but to do so, I had to walk through an immense cemetery…a necropolis…a stone city of mausoleums and crypts.  In these large houses, I would encounter the dead positioned in the manner of their lives.  I recall a table of gamblers, covered in cobwebs and dust.

I hesitate to describe what the rest of my trip to the far side of the city was like.  Just know it wasn’t pleasant, but it was memorable.

When I went to live in England for a year in 1984, I knew I was only going to see my daughter at the Christmas holidays when she would fly over with my mother, brother and niece.  I had numerous dreams about her being in mortal danger.  Once, I was caught in a basement of a store in Owego, NY when tornadoes struck.  I looked out the windows and they appeared like black vipers, twisting and hissing and snapping at everything.  But my daughter was back at my home on Front Street.  I had to get to her and rescue her.  When I finally made it to the back door of our house I went into the kitchen and found her sitting on a stool crying.  Once, in an Owego that really wasn’t Owego, I stood and watched her being crushed by a flying Brontosaurus.

Now, that’s strange stuff, but the images are still with me.

When I moved away from New York City in 2011, I had frequent dreams of being lost in a Manhattan that didn’t look at all like the real place.  And I had these dreams over and over…so many times that I knew which subway I needed to take to get home…a home that wasn’t my home and in a city that existed only in my mind.

Well before I retired from teaching, I began to have the “teacher’s nightmare”.  It’s quite common.  I’ve spoken to a number of educators and they all say that when they dream about teaching, it’s always the same.  With me, I can’t find my class, I’m lost in the school, I’m on a field trip and something happens and I know I’m responsible for those kids.

It fills your school holidays with anxiety.  There’s no rest from a group of 5th graders.

But, the oddest thing about my dreams is that I rarely dream about the most important people in my life.  My wife shows up once in a while.  When my older brother Chris, died in 1995, I had only a few dreams about him…and in those dreams, he was almost always standing in the yard or in the room and not saying a word.  Silently, he watches.

I went through a period of intense nightmares…ones that would have me sit up in bed and scream.  Often, these involved someone or something coming toward me with a noose or a gun.  The threat was immediate.

Not at all like the one dream my brother, Denny, told me he had in the early 1960’s.  His nightmare was that he was being chased down Main Street in Owego, by Nikita Khrushchev who was shaking an axe at him.

No wonder he turned out to be a Republican.

But, I feel now that the nights of my truly fantastic, sometimes morbid dreams, of flying, falling toward the ocean or swimming with a mermaid are drawing to a close.

Maybe I’m all dreamed out.  Maybe the incredible visuals I experienced are spent.

Sleep, when it does come to me, is getting boring.

[Note: The title is a line from Bob Dylan’s Never Say Goodbye.  Appropriate.]

The Empty Bedroom

This was once my bedroom.

There was a time when this room was packed full of the stuff of life…

From a crib made in the mid-1940’s, I would look out at the flowered wallpaper.  Maybe a mobile hung just out of my reach, and moved about when a breeze caught it from a partly opened window.  Maybe I held onto a teddy bear, tightly…oh, so tightly…to keep my young boy dreams from turning into night terrors.

In the early 1950’s, my crib found a new home in the attic where it stayed until my mother sold it to a neighbor.  I had a small single bed…a “Hollywood” bed, my mother would call it.  It remained in that room until someone bought it and dismantled it and walked away with it when my wife, my brother and I had the tag sale a year after my father died.  I could never fall asleep on that bed.  My mother tried everything.  She put in a little white AM radio and I would listen to Doris Day singing “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” so often, I thought it was the only song that existed.  I would crawl from that bed and creep to the top of the stairs.  Below me, in a dark living room, the black and white TV flickered.  I would call quietly to my mother and tell her I couldn’t sleep.  She’d have me come down to the sofa and together we’d eat chives and cheese on saltines.

Eventually she’d send me to bed again.  There was a landing halfway up the stairs.  I would almost always linger and ask her whether the war was ever going to come to Owego.

“No,” she would say.  “Korea is a long way off.”

I would linger still.  I was fearful of something.  I knew there were no monsters under my bed…but I was afraid.

“Promise me you won’t die before me,” I would ask her every night.

“I promise,” she would replied.  She never kept her word on that.

In high school, I would lay on the bed, see it?  Below the sconce.  I read Macbeth during the summer (I wasn’t even required to do so).  It put me into a dark mood of evil and murder.  I should have been reading Romeo and Juliet instead.

I spent my final night in that bed the day before I went away to college.  A few months later, I sat on the same bed with my father during the Christmas holiday and cried.  I cried because my childhood girlfriend had broken up with me.  He sat and watched.  He didn’t know what to say to me.

He was like that.

Years later, the bed was against the left wall. The empty left wall. I was living at home because my marriage had fallen apart.  I was not a teacher in Connecticut anymore…I was working as a temp in IBM and living at my parent’s house.  It was the worst humiliation you can imagine.  But it was the same old bed in the same old room that had seen me grow up and become a man.

Just around the corner, there by the radiator, a doorway led into the hallway.  On the molding of the door sill, there were many pencil marks and dates.  I had kept track of my son’s growth.  How fast it all happens.  How fast they grow.  It’s all painted over now.

In 1992, I came to the bed at 8:00 am to try to sleep.  I had been up all night watching The Robe on TV.  It was Easter Sunday morning…what else would they be showing?  Behind me, on a hospice bed, my mother was dying.

I came to that bed and closed my eyes.  Not thirty minutes passed when my sister-in-law came and knocked.

“Pat, I think you should come downstairs.  Your mother is gone.”

Now, the bedroom is empty.  The family that bought the house, sold it not too many years later.

The photograph above was taken by a real estate agent.

It shows a bare room, a radiator, a sconce and two windows.  You can hardly see the trees that are bending over the front porch.

And, you can not see the stuff that used to be in that room.

Not unless you close your eyes and try to imagine a baby sleeping there and then, quick as blowing out a candle, you may be able to see the stuff that belongs to the ages of a man’s life.

 

 

Finding Peter

[Lenny is on the left. Peter is happy to be in Pennsylvania]

It was here in the Adirondack Mountains that I walked up to the wall of a ranger cabin.  It was a far off December night, when my heart and body were young.  I had a flashlight in my shaking hand, and read by the dim light that the air temperature was -28 F.  I didn’t go back to the car.  I didn’t go back to a cabin.  I went back to the lean-to where my brother, Chris and a few friends were camping.  None of us had any down clothing or down sleeping bags.  We simply put the two bags we each carried together and pulled in the extra dry clothes for additional insulation.  Chris tied a tarp over the opening.  At least ten candles were lit.  You’d be surprised how those candles added warmth.  In our shelter, it was a comfortable -15 F. We were in our early teenage years.  I wouldn’t dream about camping in such temperatures now, not at my age.  Not when I know what cold can do.  What did I know in 1960?

One of my friends who slept near me in two sleeping bags that night was Peter.

A year earlier, in the summer of 1959, several boys, somehow got permission from their parents and set out from Owego, NY to visit one of the boy’s grandparents seventy-three miles away in Lake Winola, Pennsylvania.  I was the leader of the trip since it was to my grandparents house we were heading.  I remember spending one night in a pasture next to a small pond and amid cow pies scattered all over the field.  It was my duty to ask permission to camp there, so I knocked on the farmhouse and the old guy looked at me, my friends standing along the road with overloaded bikes and then looked out at the field.  He thought about it for about thirty seconds and then said: “Hell, I don’t care.  Just don’t burn the field down.”

One of those boys who rode his heavy one-speed Schwinn along the empty road was Peter.

In the high school library, if you knew the room well enough, you could squeeze between a gap in the stacks and discover a small space where there a few chairs.  All hidden behind the shelves…out of sight of those pouring over their homework or the latest copy of Hot Rod Magazine.  A few of the boys knew of this spot.  During the times when we would sign out of our study hall and go to the library, we would, one by one, push through the small opening and sit in the chairs.  Did we talk about what girl we thought was “easy”?  No.  Did we smoke? No.  Did we cause any trouble, fight or destroy books?  Again, no.  We would sit and discuss philosophical things like truth and beauty and life.  And, we would talk about the far off war in Viet Nam.  The librarian, Miss Grimes knew we were there and she left us alone.

The guy who led the discussions about such topics was my friend, Peter.

A few years later, this small group of boys had grown up a little.  There was Lenny, Greg, myself and Peter.  We were sitting in a house one evening telling stories and planning on something big.  I fell asleep on the sofa.  When I awoke, it was morning.  I realized my father would have checked my bed as he did for all of us over the years.  I would have been found missing!  I panicked and ran down Front Street, snuck in the front door and smelled coffee.  My father was up.  I could also hear the water running in the bathroom where he shaved.  Did he not check my bed yet?  I tore off my jeans and shirt and got into bed.  Less than a minute later, my father opened the door and saw that I was “fast asleep”.

The sofa I leapt from that morning was Peter’s.

One night, in Barry’s Restaurant in Owego, I was sitting with my childhood girlfriend trying to keep her from breaking up with me.  Peter came in and we sat and talked for a few hours.  He said good-night and then he left.

That was the last time I saw him.  We, who had such adventures that youth is meant to have, fell out of touch save for a brief telephone conversation a few years later when Greg, Roger Watkins and I discovered his phone number.  He was living in Batavia.  In Owego, we decided to drive up to see him.  We ran out of gas on the bridge just beyond the Treadway.  We walked home, never making it to Batavia.

Pater stayed away.  He “went under the radar” as they say.   It was like he rose like the mists of the Susquehanna on an autumn morning, rising and then dissipating into the humid air.

We all moved on with our lives.  I remained close to Greg and we would often discuss the fate of our “hero”, Peter.  He had become such stuff of legends that it was hard to distinguish the real from the dream.

Decades went by like some insane video player was stuck on Fast Forward.  But something loomed in the future for us all, all of those who walked the halls of OFA and watched the bonfires and went to sock hops (and got a hand autographed by Dion), saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and watched JFK’s funeral and went to our classmates funerals when they came home from Viet Nam…to their home in Evergreen Cemetery or St. Patrick’s or Tioga Cemetery.

Yes, there was something that many of us never gave much thought to, until we began to reach our early 60’s.

We were making plans to celebrate our 50th high school reunion!  Half a century separating us today from the pink cheeks and taffeta gowns of our prom, the Cookie Jar, the roller skating in Tioga Center and the Dick Clark Show which came to Johnson City more than once.  Many of my classmates and teachers are passed on now…but a great many of us remain…looking at our 70th birthdays coming in a few years like a spider walking on our arm.

Some of my classmates were absent from our growing data-base of email and physical addresses.

One of those whose job it was to seek out those who had not responded to the mailings or were simply “unknown”, came to me and asked if I would be willing to check out some leads on Peter.  I agreed.

I made the phone call, punching the keypad of what I hoped was the correct number.

A woman answered.  She asked who was calling.  I told her who I was.  She called to a man who took the phone.  It was the voice of a teenage boy with forty-nine years of life layered on.  I was speaking to Peter for the first time since 1966.

Unfortunately, due to personal circumstances, he will not be able to attend the reunion.

But that’s okay.  I found my long-lost companion.

It was my friend, Peter.

[In a pasture among the cow pies. 1959]

 

Unexpected Memories

Seventeen years ago today, my older brother Denny, passed away.  It was not a sudden unexpected death but a slow decline with cancer.  His family misses him terribly.  My brother, Dan and I miss him.  I think about him a great deal.

We were a family of four boys.  Denny was the second oldest, born in 1942, he was a five-year-old when my mother brought me home, wrapped in blankets…a few days old.  The 1990’s were a bad year for our family.  I lost Chris, the eldest in ’95 and then Denny in ’98.  Now, only Dan, the third born and I are all that remains of that interesting family that lived on the corner in Owego.

Everyone who has siblings is aware that each child has a distinct personality of his or her own.  That was certainly true of the Egans.  Chris was always the science guy.  Too many pens in his pocket.  Too many rocks or fossils filling his pockets.  He went on into academia.  Dan, as a teenager, was into cars and model rockets.  I spent most of my energy in a world of dreams and fantasies of writing while struggling to keep up with being like Chris.

Denny was different.  He was the quiet one.  He didn’t like to be the center of attention, but when you spoke with him, he had a sharp wit and sensitivity that most people lacked.  To my knowledge, he never got into a fight or did anything destructive.  As an older teenager, he befriended a guy named Bob.  We all knew that Bob was gay (or queer as we would have put it then).  Denny knew it.  But my brother was probably the only friend Bob ever had.

There was an introspective nature about Denny that set him apart from the rest of us.  He loved baseball and he followed the Mets from New York to Houston when he was transferred by his company, Shell Oil.  He named his son after Tom Seaver.  He would spend hours in his room playing a board game that involved shaking dice in a can to determine the way a play would go.  I recall the game was called APBA baseball.  There’s probably a video version of it around now.  But I can still hear the rattle of those dice in the can to this day.  In fact, every time dice are thrown, I think of Denny.

It’s an unexpected memory.

He kept meticulous records of players and teams in a smart neat notebook.  He wrote the stats in a perfect format.

It’s no wonder he went on to become an accountant.

Denny never made a big deal of being a Catholic as I recall.  He was an altar boy, as we all were.  But he kept his God to himself.  He was like me in one way, however.  He seemed always conscious of death; it held a morbid and fearful power over him.  There was a story that one of his childhood friends died as a young teen.  The funeral was held at the family’s house.  I think I remember Denny telling me that the boy’s mother pushed him forward to the casket and made him kiss the boy’s forehead.

Maybe this event didn’t really happen.  In later years, my mother always denied such a thing happened, but I still wonder…

Maybe it was an unexpected memory.

Denny was also the only one of our family who saw two ghosts in our house.  The details aren’t important here.  But, over the years, I asked him about those sightings and he never wavered in his description of what he saw.  He believed it.

When Denny got sick, he was fully aware of what his situation was.  On the phone, a few months after his diagnosis, I asked him how he felt about things.  He answered:

“I know things don’t look good for me.”

I was amazed at his calm attitude.  Me, I was in tears nearly every day until I got the dreaded phone call on that dreaded day in June of 1998.

Just yesterday I picked up a sachet of balsam that is a common tourist item in the Adirondacks.  I put it to my nose and the balsam scent filled my mind of memories of camping as a family here in the Park…in the long ago days of the 1950’s.  I never think of Denny as a camper, but as a child, he loved the sand and the swimming and that balsam odor that permeated the summer forest of Golden Beach and Eighth Lake Campgrounds.

I have that sack of balsam beside me now.  I can smell the 1950’s, my cot, our tent, Chris’ canoe, and the sand on my feet.

Oddly enough, I smell a memory of Denny…the demons he carried around inside himself for decades…and I think he would love to sit with me on a beach once again.  We would tell ghost stories and roast marshmallows.

Strange how powerful an unexpected memory can be.

Rest in Peace, Denny, God knows you deserve it.

 

 

A Most Pecular Tree

I stood just outside the mossy rock wall of the churchyard.  We were in a tiny English village with a name I would have to look up in my notebook.  I was making it a point to stop and look inside these old Saxon and Norman churches whenever we passed one (and where there was room to pull the rent car safely off the narrow road).

I stood and looked at the strange tree that grew many feet above my head.  I inched closer, careful to not brush against the nettles that, with a touch that lasted a nano-second, would punish your hand for the rest of the day.  It looked like a conifer with its oddly shaped needles.  Yet, there was something…

After snapping a picture, I continued to move around in the churchyard in search of unusual tombstones, interesting names, the best angle for a photo and heartfelt epitaphs that could barely be read under ages of lichen and moss.  I kept looking back at the tree.

Then I remembered.

I was shown this strange plant in 1975, on my first trip to England.  I was with a friend and he pointed out this awesome tree.

“Wager you don’t have many of these in the States,” he said.

“You win, Malcolm.  I’ve never seen anything like this before,” I replied.

“It’s a Monkey Puzzle tree,” he said.  “You don’t see many of them around.”

A Monkey Puzzle tree.  What an interesting name, I thought.

Over the years, I forgot about this strange tree that is native to Chile (it’s the National Tree of Chile).  Just a few weeks ago, I saw another one.  And now, I’m seeing my third.  I googled the tree and found that its population is declining.  It’s on the Endangered Species List of the IUCN (whatever that is).

Then little bits of my memory fed me snippets of the tree being mentioned in popular culture.  One of my favorite movies is The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.  Mrs. Muir had a Monkey Puzzle tree cut down and replaced by roses.  This made the spirit of the sea-captain quite angry…he had planted the tree years earlier (when he was alive) by his own hands.

Wikipedia mentions a novel Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer.  The female character, Emily, manages to climb the tree.  This is no small feat, since the tree is called “Monkey’s Despair” in France.  It’s not easy to climb.  Emily learns that a young boy who once lived in her house had climbed the tree…but was too afraid to climb down.  He later died in WWI.

I get a certain odd and creepy feeling when I stand and gaze at this tree.  Strangely, I often find them near graveyards.

They’ve been called “Living Fossils” because of the age of the species.

I found one an hour ago on eBay.  Perhaps I will buy one and have the only Monkey Puzzle in the Adirondacks (most likely).

But, then again, I don’t think I will.  I might be tempted to climb it.  I might be afraid to climb back down.  I might discover what it was that drove the monkeys to despair while they pawed their way through the odd and spooky branches.

Reflections in a Sad Eye

Originally posted on patrickjegan:

The last bus stopped running an hour ago.  The publican has rung the bell in the nearby pub, calling out “Time gentlemen, please.” The night‘s action is most definitely over out here in the ‘burbs of London. The streets may be quiet and the locals are at home…but it’s still light out!

It’s only a bit after 10:00 pm.  In truth, the nearest pub will be remain open until midnight so it’s not entirely an empty neighborhood.

Meanwhile, the late flights from Capetown, Rio, New York and Paris are approaching touchdown…their wheels are lowered and they are slowly approaching the runway about 255 feet above my head.

Yes, my head that has been hit with a massive case of hay fever or some sort of allergy since I walked through customs a few hours.  I can’t use my handkerchief any more; it needs to hang out to dry.  I’m down…

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Reflections in a Sad Eye

The last bus stopped running an hour ago.  The publican has rung the bell in the nearby pub, calling out “Time gentlemen, please.” The night‘s action is most definitely over out here in the ‘burbs of London. The streets may be quiet and the locals are at home…but it’s still light out!

It’s only a bit after 10:00 pm.  In truth, the nearest pub will be remain open until midnight so it’s not entirely an empty neighborhood.

Meanwhile, the late flights from Capetown, Rio, New York and Paris are approaching touchdown…their wheels are lowered and they are slowly approaching the runway about 255 feet above my head.

Yes, my head that has been hit with a massive case of hay fever or some sort of allergy since I walked through customs a few hours.  I can’t use my handkerchief any more; it needs to hang out to dry.  I’m down to using a roll of toilet paper to stifle my sneezes.  Even the woman tending bar at the pub noticed my agony and offered her own personal pills she claimed worked for her hay fever.

I tend not to take pills from people I never me before.

The flight from Shannon was only about an hour.  The “food” was a box of crackers, some cheese, a small chocolate bar, some vegetable pate, small can of tonic, and a glass of water.  All for €7.50.  Aer Lingus must be in financial trouble.

We’re in the very B&B we used in 2012. It was cheap, near the airport and provided a free shuttle to the terminals.

I doubt we’ll travel this cheap again.

The room’s light was dingy, quite brothel-like.  There was no shower curtain and only one towel each.

I’m writing this with my iMac Air and using it like it’s supposed to be used…on my lap.  But I have a bad back and I’m leaning against a pillow that is, if I’m lucky, two inches thick.

I’m a hugger.  I don’t know, maybe my mother took my teddy away too soon, but I need something to wrap my arms around.  I’m going to be forced to use my neck cushion.  The kind of thing that looks good in the W.H. Smith store but is difficult to pack…like a football.  People  sleep with them on planes and trains.  Mine’s blue in case you’re interested.

I’m not very happy right now.

This was meant to be a reflection of a wonderful trip.  But, as usual with me, it’s bittersweet.

We said good-bye to Brian on Sunday.  Ireland seemed to be a little emptier without his companionship, wit, charm and sense of amazement at what he saw and what we shared.  I’m quite proud of myself for planning a trip that included a medieval banquet, being on his own in a few pubs in Cashel, and climbing to the battlements of our ancestral castle in County Tipperary.

Thinking back on the entire trip, I can recall some awesome sights and some frustrating moments.  I’ve looked down haunted wells where a violated youth was thrown.  I’ve seen the withered hand of a saint who founded the Abbey that later became Ely Cathedral.  We’ve rubbed fingers with mummies in a crypt in Dublin, threw a pence into the Liffey from Ha’Penny Bridge.

Up in County Sligo, at a cemetery in Enniscrone, I stood at the grave of Tom and Kate Egan who once served me tea from water that had been boiling all day over a peat fire.

That was over thirty years ago.

I’ve looked out over the fields my people plowed and had their cattle graze for decades.

Stone walls don’t change much in human life times. The hedges grow for centuries. The rains fall and the people keep smiling.

In England, our friends edge toward retirement and think thoughts about where it would be a nice place to live.

To me, I couldn’t think of any place more in tune with the beats of my heart and yearnings of my soul than England or the west of Ireland.

Being of Irish background, I thought of what it would be like to live there.  My body is pulled two ways.  My blood says to go back to the soil that first made you who you are…melancholy and love of the written word are my genetic markers.

But, I’m happiest when I’m walking.  And, there is no place with footpaths that lead to all my dreamscapes than England.

If you drive six miles through Wiltshire, Somerset or Dorset and not pass a dozen “public footpath” signs, then you have a bad case of tunnel vision.

My adventure is over and I’m a sadder man because of it.  In the coming weeks, I will sit and tell funny stories of our trip, but deep within me, I’ll long for the footpath.  I’ll long for the place when the biggest decision I need to make is which direction to walk.

Yes, the Adirondacks have hundreds of miles of trails and I live in the center of it all, but somehow it lacks the ancient history and mythic lore that stirs my soul as I stand inside a stone circle that was constructed before the Great Pyramids.

I am cursed with restlessness.

But the posts will go on. I’ve not shown you things or told you stories of many things.  Some will keep you awake at night. Some will make you smile and some will make you cry.

If I can do all these things…I’ve succeeded in what a writer most wants.  Getting people to read.

Right now? I’m going to shut the dingy overhead light off and switch on my Barnes & Nobel reading lamp.  I’m working my way through Dickens at the moment.

Its title is very appropriate:

“Great Expectations”.

 

[This post is written in England but it will be posted from Penn Station when we get back. This hotel wants £4.00 for Wi-Fi. I have never paid for that service before and I’m not going to start now.]

 

Slán

THE CLIFFS OF DOONEEN

You may travel far far from your own native home

Far away oer the mountains far away oer the foam

But of all the fine places that I’ve ever seen,

There’s none to compare with The Cliffs of Dooneen

Take a view oer the water fine sights you’ll see there

You’ll see the high rocky slopes on the West coast of Clare

The towns of Kilrush and Kilkee can be seen

From the high rocky slopes at The Cliffs of Dooneen

Its a nice place to be on a fine Summer’s day

Watching all the wild flowers that ne’er do decay

The hare and lofty pheasant are plain to be seen

Making homes for their young round The Cliffs of Dooneen

Fare thee well to Dooneen fare thee well for a while

And to all the fine people I’m leaving behind

To the streams and the meadows where late I have been

And the high rocky slopes of The Cliffs of Dooneen

—Christy Moore

 

[This is my final post from Ireland.  I saw and experienced far more that I had put into words.  At the end of the day, I often had no plan for a theme or a topic to write about.  On many nights, my energy to sit and think was not there.  I won’t go into details about the rather dicey WiFi connections at our B&B’s.  I will be catching up at some point…so you’ve not read the last of the tales I can tell about this island of mist, magic and myth.  They say there are twenty-eight shades of green in the hills and glens.  I never counted.  One shade of true Irish green is enough to satisfy my soul.]