Patrick Egan's Blog, page 58

Passports 3: Passing Through the Fields of Death

We left Paris on a crisp bright May morning.  This was the only day-long excursion we booked in advance.  We were going to visit Mont St. Michele in Brittany.  The trip would take us four hours one way, in a northwest direction to this 850 year old Abbey mountain.

Our route took us through the hills of Normandy, north and west of Paris.  This was the precious ground, the holy ground that over a million Allied troops were to fight for in the weeks after D-Day.  It all looks so gentle and peaceful since those times, 70 years ago, when the troops headed to liberate Paris.  It took them two months to reach this city.  It took us just hours to pass through.  We wanted to visit the beaches, Omaha, Juno and others on another excursion but found the cost too prohibitive.  So, we simply passed through to make a more affordable trip to this beautiful Abbey.

The photos that are inserted below were shot from the bus window.  They are not the best quality…how could they be when you’re moving so fast along a motorway?  But these fields, hedgerows, stone farm houses and small villages were not picturesque in 1944 like they are today in 2014.  No, each hedge, each small field experienced death and conflict.  The Germans were defending the French soil.  The Allies were intent on freeing France from the tyranny of Nazism.

The very soil that now grows the famous Normandy apples trees, feeds the cows that provide the succulent cheese…were all fertilized by the blood of an occupying army and the blood of an army of liberation.

I look out the coach window and try to put myself in the head of a GI who was lucky enough to make it past the deadly sands of the landing beaches.  I tried to visualize myself crawling, walking and slogging my way south to Paris.  I tried to tap into the collective memory of any one of the thousands of soldiers who saw the same sun that I was seeing…the same clouds that I was watching…the same stone buildings that were still standing.  I tried to go back in time to be that lonely, frightened, homesick young man.  Then the thought came to me that, perhaps, if by some twist in time, I became that soldier…would I make it across the next patch of green pasture? Or, would I feel a sudden pinch in my temple or chest…fall to the ground, and watch the blue sky bleed away into the whiteness, leaving a child, widow, mother and father to grieve for me back in America…and honor me when the flags come out?  Yes, when the flags are put on the vet’s graves, by tradition on May 30,  the day before my birthday.

The coach lurched and I found myself balancing my iPad mini on my knee.  I turned away from the fields of death, now so very beautiful, said a heartfelt prayer for those who made it to Paris and eventually home, and for those who did not.  They are still here, under one of the countless white crosses in the American Cemeteries around Caen.

I went back to my solitaire game.  I was in the present moment again.

But, was I? Really?

 

The Lock Bridges of Paris

Many have called Paris the “City of Lovers”.

The Seine River is like the Aorta of Paris.  It carries the life-blood of the city past and under some of the most important buildings and architecture this sublimely beautiful city possesses.  It’s color is that of some shade of green, not unpleasant, that defies description.  By night, the river is choked with long dinner cruise boats.  There is the occasional working barge filled with sand or gravel.

The flowing water bonds the city in many ways.  I have found that the bridges or ponts are especially fascinating.  In the evenings, couples will pause while crossing the water to hold and kiss beneath a classical sculpture.  The car traffic can be heavy on many of the ponts because they connect the Right Bank with the Left Bank.  The bridges are vital.  The bridges are alive with life.  The bridges are the protectors of the romance that fills the hearts of Parisians and visitors alike.  If you are with someone close to your heart, the green waters of the Seine and the exquisite bridges will help in spinning a web around your two hearts that is both pure and sensual at the same time.

According to Wikipedia, there are thirty-seven bridges that cross the Seine in the city center.  Several of these bridges have become symbolic of love and commitment.  These are the lock bridges.  I’ve been able to discover three such ponts.  They are the Pont de l’Archeveche, the Pont Neuf and the Pont des Arts.

I chose to declare my affection on a section of the Pont Neuf.  This is how it works:

A couple purchases a lock and keys.  They write their names, the date and perhaps a message with an indelible marker.  Then they snap the lock onto a piece of the iron grating.  The final step to seal their commitment is to throw the keys into the Seine.

This practice to place a lock on a bridge is done in a fair number of cities around the world.  The origins are believed to date from the First World War.  The government has tried to stop the practice, but the locks keep getting snapped into place.  The few sections I saw contained thousands of locks…each with something written on the brass or stainless steel casing.

I walked slowly past the tokens of love and began to read the names and dates.  Some were simple: Andre and Marion, Aug. 22, 1990. Love Always.

I read.  I wondered.  I imagined the hearts and souls that were on display in front of me.  I closed my eyes and tried to connect with these people who felt that love had to be locked to a bridge and the key tossed away.  There’s no getting the key back and no way to unlock the declaration that was made.

Some names were both male or both female.  Two gay fellows celebrating their affection.  Two women locking their hearts together.  Ordinary couples were represented all along the railing.  But, what did I not know about the names?  What was I not aware of about these hundreds of bonded hearts?  Were a few placed after the death of a partner?  Were they prayers written, like you often see in churches, that asked God to heal and cure a soul-mate?  Were any locks put there by one person, who tossed the keys into the water, hoping against hope for an end to the unrequited nature of their love?  Were some from children for their parents? Or, parents for their children.  What did the writing not say? I will wait for you until you are free!  Until the divorce or the parole or the execution?  Were any placed there after a particularly steamy night of passion…on a one-night stand?  Were any put there by someone being unfaithful to another?

Or, were some just hopeful wishes…placed by a lonely, broken and unhealed heart…who went home to an empty apartment and an empty life?

For me, it was an intensely emotional feeling being near the locks.  I imagine it is something like running your fingers over a name carved into the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington.  Just to feel the letters of the name is to feel the person.

Merely to touch the locks or even read them is like a prayer for those who had enough faith to place them and enough strength to toss the keys into the green waters of the Seine.

Love by proxy.

 

Passports I: East and West of the Sun

The great city of New York was behind us…and the sun was setting in the west.  We flew into the approaching darkness of night.

As I was planning this blog series, I was sitting on the American Airlines 767 trans-oceanic super jet propelled airplane.  My problem, right from the ‘get go’ (God, I hate that term), was to identify exactly when did this trip begin.  Did it begin in the discussions that Mariam and I had many months ago?  Leaving Rainbow Lake? Leaving our friend’s apartment in Manhattan? The ride to JFK?  The security lines?  Boarding the plane?  I just can’t put my finger on when the ‘go’ button got pushed.  Maybe, the true roots, the ultimate origins of this journey lay in the distant past…when I took a lucky turn on a New York street?  Or, when some poor, hungry Irishman decided he had been through enough and booked a passage to the United States sometime in the 1850′s?  One could get caught up in beginnings, because rarely does it start with the sound of a gun at a track meet.  The race doesn’t start then…it started when you decided to join the team, months earlier.  Or, even when….

But I digress.

I wanted to write that I composed this post on the plane, with the laptop snug on my lap and me, curled and snug on the seat during the all-night flight.  But that would be a professional quality lie.  In truth, I didn’t have any idea where my laptop was during the flight.  I knew it was somewhere under the seat in front of me…but so was a lot of other stuff.  So, I scribbled some notes (I’m using them right now) on a legal pad (yellow).  Don’t do this at home!  Every time I had to fold up the “table” I had to shove the pad into the net thingie in back of that seat in front of me.  Before long, bits of yellow paper were tearing and shredding away.  It’s a wonder I kept most of what I noted…so you’d better appreciate this blog because it wasn’t easy!

To paint the picture more clearly, I had about 4.45 inches of leg room for my own use.  Now, I’m not a tall guy like, say, Tommy Lee Jones and anyone who knows me, knows why I never played basketball in high school.  As I sat there trying to balance my few things, I felt confident that the American Airlines people had spoken to my childhood teachers (nuns) and confessors.  I was being punished here and now for the sins of my youth.  I was going through the tortures of Purgatory on a jet plane.

We were given a soda and bag of small pretzels as our pre-dinner snack.  I was unable to open the little plastic thing even though I pulled and tore at it over and over.  Finally, I gave it one more jerk and the bag popped open and several pretzels, the size of quarters, scattered onto the aisle.  I was belted in but the thought of numerous feet pulverizing the dried dough and making a mess on the carpet was too much for me.  I unhooked my seat belt and leaned over to pick two of them up.  My head came within four inches of a woman’s knee.  She looked down at me.  I think I noticed she was beginning to roll up her glossy Vogue magazine to whoop me on the head for attempting to look up her dress.  I got the pretzels just in time to avoid a smart whack on my already sore head.

I settled back in my ‘seat’ and tried to block out the pain and embarrassment by recalling the quiet moments back at Gate 14 when I was trying to charge my cell battery to the max.  I was sitting next to a group of girls who were off to a holiday in Paris.  One young woman who looked like she was about eight years old was leafing through her passport.  She had more visa stamps in her book that I had caps in my bottle cap collection.  At her age, if I walked across my hometown of Owego, NY I felt like I was crossing vast international boundaries.

Here, it could be fair to ask why I was so intent on charging my cell.  Well, in truth, I was also charging my iPad.  I had approximately 46 books downloaded to my Kindle app.  I wanted to travel light.  But, I feared that my battery would run down and I couldn’t play solitaire or listen to my iTunes.  So I packed some other reading material.  I had a book of French poetry, two pulp novels, two recent New Yorker magazines, a copy of the new Rolling Stone, a Vanity Fair (which had an article on Monica Lewinsky I wanted to read), three legal pads, four journals, a few sketching pads, a set of earphones the size of an eight-bunch of bananas and my sunglasses case.  Mariam asked why I was packing the sunglasses in my carry-on.

“It’s a night flight,” she said.

I just stared at her.  She didn’t understand.

I have to add here that I’ve had decades of backpacking experience under by belt.  I used to be so concerned about tiny bits of extra weight that I used to drill holes in my aluminum water cup to shave off a few ounces.

They brought some food for dinner.  It wasn’t so bad, considering the quality of airline food in general.  I decided that I would use the time to teach Mariam a few necessary French words…you know, so she wouldn’t have to rely on me for everything during our Paris stay.  I picked up the packet of butter and made her repeat “beurre”, I pointed at the water bottle and patiently asked her to repeat “l’eau”.  I stopped when I got to the Canada Dry Ginger Ale.  I decided not to overload her with too many words at once.

They dimmed the lights and I tried to play solitaire on my iPad but it fell from my hands twice before I realized I needed some music to sooth me to sleep.

I remember hearing only one song: “Stand By Your Man” by Tammy Wynette, before I drifted into a twenty-minute nap.

The captain announced that we were beginning our descent to the Aeroport De Charles De Gaulle.

The rising sun was in front of us and the towering cumulus clouds began to touch our wings.

These were French clouds and they were holding French rain…no doubt.

The full moon above the Musee du Luxemborg.

In the Garden du Luxemborg.

The Brick Pond

 

I grew up in a small town in upstate New York.  The name is Owego, which is derived from a Native American term that means “where the valley widens” or something close to that.  The village has everything that a typical small American town should have.  There is a beautiful cemetery on the hill above the valley that holds the grave of an Indian Maiden.  There is a stretch of road a few miles out-of-town that has a famous haunting, The Lady In Lavender.  There is a Fair Grounds, where I, as a young boy, would wander through the midway, munching popcorn and hoping for a sausage sandwich and ice-cold coke in the late afternoon.  Nearby was a half-mile oval cinder track where I ran the two-mile for the high school track team.  On Main Street was the Tioga Theater where saturday matinees cost 25 cents and root-beer barrels were just a nickel.  In the back row, in the dark, couples would kiss on a friday night.  I know, because I was one part of those that smooched through the main feature.  Across the street was the Cookie Jar (also called the Sugar Bowl) where my girlfriend, Mary, and I would share a cherry soda with a dip of ice cream.

One glass of soda and two straws.

At my end of town was a very special place.  It was called the Brick Pond.  Apparently, there was a certain clay in its banks that was used to make bricks.  It was just a few steps from my front porch and it became a second home to me.  Even though I had the great Susquehanna River in my back yard, I could often be found at the Brick Pond with my friends.

The water of this shallow lake stretched from the railroad tracks which bordered its west shore, to a marshy wetland to the east.  The Pond never was a swimming hole because it had too many lily pads and the bottom was very mucky.  At least I assumed it did.  I wouldn’t know, because I never went barefoot into the water.  To enjoy the area, we would walk the partly hidden paths that edged alongside the railroad and a small wooded section.  In the summer, it was buggy.  From my back porch, I could hear the crickets buzzing in the late afternoon and into the evening.

No, in the summer the Pond was interesting and adventure-filled…but in the winter, the Pond became a fantastic new world of snow, ice, bonfires, skating and…romance.  Puppy love romance.  The earliest and the most exciting kind of romance.  We were at the cusp of adolescence.  Holding the hand of your girlfriend was a mind-blowing experience and a kiss, well a kiss was beyond description.

The heart-pounding ‘high’ that came with young love was often more than my head and brain could contain.  Nothing else seemed to exist.

Yes, it was the winters of my youth that I recall the most when I hear or think about the Brick Pond.

Only a handful of people in town ever visited the place when I was young.  There was a small group of us, perhaps six or eight boys and girls, that had the pond pretty much to ourselves.  The names of David, Angie, Greg, Toni, Marie, Jim, Peter and Chuck come to mind.  Jutting out into the pond from the woods near the tracks was a small peninsula that had a very small mound on it.  There we would build a bonfire and skate.

Someone’s father would come over and shovel the snow away, leaving a smooth surface to do figure 8′s.  There was a small shack just below the RR tracks that functioned as a place for the train men to store tools.  We used it to put our skates on.  I remember every eyelet of my girlfriend’s white skates and I had her put her blade on my thigh while I tied her laces.  Not too tight, not too loose.  It had to be just perfect…like the white fuzzy hat she wore and the mittens (were they red?) that kept her hands warm.  As I led her onto the ice, I missed her bare hand but I knew her fingers were toasty.

After we would skate with the others, Mary and I would break off and skate the lonely stretch to the east.  Along the way the channel narrowed but the wind kept the snow off the ice.  We would come to a fallen tree, naked of any bark, and we would sit.  We would sit and I would kiss what little bit of face that peeked out from the fuzz and hat.  Her cheeks were cold.  Her lips were cool but just beneath the skin, I could sense the warmth of her inner being.

Sometimes, the moon would light our way.  On those nights, it was pure magic.  We held hands and skated farther away.  I turned back to see the bonfire.  No one was worried about us.  They knew where we were.

I felt dizzy.  I was standing on the edge of something but I didn’t know what it was.  Time passed like cold molasses in those days.  I thought I would never grow up.  But I was holding hands with my future, that I knew.

When I think back on those nights, I know now what made me light-headed.  It was the impossibly open future of my life.  Mary, myself and my friends back at the fire were about to be launched like Sputnik, into a vast unknown place called adult life.

In the years that have passed, I’ve felt those wings of happiness flutter, but not in quite the same way as they did when I was twelve.

Many years later, the Brick Pond was turned into a protected wetland that is watched over by the Waterman Center.

In the late 1980′s, when I was going through a very rough time in my life, I found myself living with my parents for a short time.  I had a son who was two and a half years old.  Visits with him were set for Sundays.  Once, I took him over to the Brick Pond.  The Waterman Center had put a board walk across the eastern end of the Pond.  I took my little boy over the bridge and stopped half-way.  He tossed sticks into the melting ice.  I sat and saw the ghost of a young couple skate right through the bridge, as if it wasn’t there.

I know them, I thought.

No, I thought again, I knew them.

[Top photo from the Waterman Center]

Good-bye Blip

I will miss the blip.

The blip and I go back many, many years.  I saw the blip when I was very young but I didn’t know what it was back then.  Over the years, the blip took on a special significance when I would look for it in dark movie houses, from the next-to-last row of the balcony, where I was smooching with my childhood sweetheart.

Everyone reading this has seen the blip, everyone that is except those who have never been to a motion picture.  You won’t see it when you slip your next DVD from Netflix into your video player.  Those blips have been removed.  No, the blip was only to be seen and enjoyed by those who sat in the dark recesses of the Strand or the Rialto.  And, I would wager that a fair number of movie goers never took notice of the blip.

Now they’re out of luck.  They’re extinct like the Allosaurus.  They’re gone like the Edsel.  They’ve vanished like Judge Crater and Jimmy Hoffa.  The blips are washed away like our sins in the waters of the Jordan River.

What the hell, you might ask, is a blip?

Officially, they were known as “changer marks”.  When a movie was being shown in all the cinema houses across the country, there had to be a way to notify the projectionist the exact moment to start the other projector with the next reel.  Remember those flashes in the upper right corner of the screen?  Those were the blips.  They gave the person in the projection booth 11 seconds to prepare to start another reel…and it had to blend seamlessly.  The blip might be during a critical scene between lovers or a good-guy/bad-guy moment.

99.9 % of the time, the casual viewer never noticed the reel changes.

I can say with pride and distinction that I was present for that 0.1% mistake.  And, it almost caused a riot.

The place was in a revival house in Northampton, Massachusetts.  The time was the early 1980′s.  The movie?

It was ‘Casablanca’.  The one and only time I ever saw it on a big screen…in all it’s glory…the way it should be seen.  (You pick up on things that are lost on the small screen).  The scene?

Well, it had to be the most ‘classic’ movie moment, an iconic moment, a legendary moment.

Rick is sitting at the table with a half-empty bottle, a glass and a cigarette.

The reel ended just when he was to utter the line: “In all the bars…”

The projectionist must have been napping.  He or she missed the split-second moment and Bogey’s line was broken.

The crowd booed with gusto (I think some buttered popcorn was thrown).  Finally, the fans settled back and tempers eased.  But the magic cadence was gone.

If only the projectionist had used those 11 seconds to prepare for this…but, that’s life I guess.

Don’t look for the blip.  You won’t find it anymore now that almost all the theaters have been forced to go digital.  No need for the ‘changer mark’ now.  I would hope that revival houses would still show celluloid somewhere.  That’s your last and only hope for experiencing the blip.

Shakespeare wrote that “all the world’s a stage”.  A movie house has a stage of sorts.  So, if you are going to have changes in your life.  Watch for the blip.

And be ready for the next reel.

The Thing

A few months ago, I stopped at a small country deli for a turkey and swiss cheese sandwich.  The store was in Keene Valley, New York.  There are fine views of the High Peaks of the Adirondacks from the porch of the deli.  I had some brown mustard and low-fat mayo on rye bread.  The sandwich also came with nice, crunchy chips and a pickle.  I really love pickles.  I even make my own.  You should try my pickles someday, you’d like them.

In a small yard beside my car was a really interesting thing.  I took several photographs of it from various angles, trying to get the best view of the thing.  Now, this thing was very rusty…but that happens when you leave metal things out in the rain.  I’m not very mechanically minded, but from the wheels and gears, I could ascertain that the thing moved at some point when it wasn’t so rusty.  There was more rust on this thing than there was eye-shadow on a hooker I met once on Eighth Avenue in 1986.  And she had some serious eye-shadow that day.  If it hadn’t been about noon, I would have thought she had been dead for about six years.

But I digress.

I have a college degree, you understand, so I could tell in a minute that this thing in Keene Valley was put there from wherever it was when it did whatever it was designed to do.  I highly doubt that this thing was always in the yard.  I mean, how could you work on anything in the middle of winter or on a rainy day?  The thing would have gotten rusty a lot earlier than it did, although I wasn’t sure when it did start to get rusty.

As I stood looking at this really rusty thing, I wondered if there were some old-timers around who knew what it was, or what it did.  I speculated even further…was there someone still alive that had actually used the thing?  I thought about going back into the deli and asking the person who took my sandwich order if they knew anything about the thing in their yard, but I decided that I would risk looking like a fool.  Maybe the thing’s use was obvious to everyone, everyone but me?  This wouldn’t be the first time that something was known by a large number of people and not by me.  Like the talent of Miley Cyrus.

Besides, I was a man, and we don’t ask questions about things very often.

So, when I drove by the deli the other day, the thing was still there.  I felt bad about how lonely the thing was, sitting in that little yard all by itself.  I felt that way about a hair brush once, when I was a little boy.  I found it on my little bed and so I tossed it to the top of my dresser.  It hit the top but bounced off and fell behind a chair.  I lay there thinking about the brush and I began to feel sad.  I didn’t want it to be lonely, so I crawled around in the dark trying to find it.  I did and I put it on top of the dresser.  In the morning, I saw that it had caught a giant dust bunny.  I should have left it there.

I finally located the photograph of the thing.  It’s shown below.  But, I’m still confused about what it is and what it was used for.  If anyone of my faithful readers know what this thing is, please send me an email.

Or, maybe it never did anything.  Maybe it was just one of those things.

Sunday Rock

It was raining as I drove along the western edge of the Adirondack Park recently.  It was around the time when my thoughts turned to how much weight the Yankee pitcher, C. C. Sabathia, had lost during the off-season.  Or, perhaps I was reflecting on Colbert replacing Letterman on the Late Show.  More than likely, however, I was keeping an eye out for a public restroom (or a nicely protected tree).  I had just finished a large coffee purchased in Tupper Lake.  Let’s just say that my mind was covering a lot of ground that afternoon, like Kudzu in Virginia.

That’s when I was jolted back to real-time by the sight of an unusually large rock, standing upright beside the road.  The remains of the Earth Science teacher in me kicked in.  I made an about turn in a muddy driveway and went back.  Mariam snapped a photo of the rock at my request.  I read the historical sign.  Not all large rocks warrant a historical marker.  I was hoping there would be some significant story to this rock.  I was hoping the sign wouldn’t say “Large Rock”.  It didn’t.  instead, I found out that I had stumbled across a landmark that dates back hundreds of years.

Actually, the rock itself dates back thousands of years.  It’s a glacial erratic…a remnant of the Ice Age.  The rock had gotten a free ride from somewhere to the north and was left behind when the Great Thaw came and the ice receded.  That would be approximately 15,000 years ago (or, about six years ago if you’re a Creationist and don’t quite get on with the “Long View” of things).

The rock was used by the First People, the Native Americans, as a marker in their travels.  Later, when roads replaced footpaths, the rock also served as a landmark for the settlers, loggers, miners and woodsmen approaching the North Woods.

It became known as “Sunday Rock”.  Why, you may ask, was that name given to a stone?  No one, it seems, has the final answer.  But, in general, it was said that beyond the rock, in the woods, there were “No Sundays” and, by extension, no holidays (and very little law).

Life past the rock was carefree and few actions and pursuits were restricted.  Camps flourished and the freedom of the trails, brooks, mountains and fields reigned.  One could compare it to the life beyond the Mississippi River in the early 1880′s.  The law took time to catch up to the real pioneers and backwoodsmen.

I believe that in everyone’s life, there is a Sunday Rock.  Something we see in our view that beckons and reminds us of our goal.  A lake,  cabin, mountain, tree or a bend in the trail we are walking.

Or a rock.

[Winter photo source: Town of Colton]

The Rivers of my Life: Episode 1–The Charles

The river rolls on, like a sad lover’s song.

But is it the beginning or the end?

[Lyrics taken from an educational film I used to show my students when I taught Earth & Space Science in the 1970's]

Flowing water has always held a fascination with me.  I grew up with the great Susquehanna river drifting past my backyard.  Sometimes, during flood time in the Spring, it would be in my backyard.

The Susquehanna begins it’s journey to the Chesapeake Bay at Cooperstown, New York.  Otsego Lake is the source of this historic drainage.  I took part in the first General Clinton Canoe Regatta in 1963.  Since then, the race draws thousands of fans and hundreds of paddlers.

Standing beside the Falls of the Niagara, I become fascinated with the sensory overload and the hypnotic effect massive Falls can be.

I’ve camped at the highest lake source of the Hudson River when I was a young strong backpacker.  It lies tucked against Mount Marcy, the highest peak of New York State.  Later, I would live three blocks from that river as it entered into New York Harbor.

I’ve stood on the south rim of the Grand Canyon and contemplated what millions of years and a river can do to a landscape.

I rolled up my pants and waded, illegally, from Texas into Mexico.  The surprise to me that day was the frigid temperatures of the Rio Grande.  The other surprise was the handful of Mexican soldiers that began to descend a hill to intercept us.  We waded back into Texas.

Today, I sat in stalled traffic along side the Charles River in Boston.  I was trying to get back across the river to the Cambridge side.  As I sat in the car, listening to a woman talking about death on NPR, I looked out at the various watercraft that were moving about the river on this Sunday afternoon.  There were crew teams from M.I.T., Harvard and Boston University.  Tour boats ran about.  Kayakers and canoeists that were working out in small groups, like a line of ducklings following the mother.  There was the occasional Turtle boats that can drive on the roads and then move to the water.

The Charles River, flowing past the gingerbread boathouses of the college crews, is a vibrant river.  Towns that are lucky enough to have a water artery flow nearby should make as much use of them as they do with parkways, bike paths and jogging paths.

Rivers.

To carry ashes of the dead like the Ganges.  To deposit life-giving fertile soil like the Nile.  To move pioneers westward like the Missouri.  To gamble on and drain the major part of North America like the Mississippi.  To cross and make history like the Delaware.

To drop into the cool water of a river from a vine or rope is something every child should do once their lives.

I know I did.

 

The Skeleton in the Taxi

The Division Head in the private school where I taught was very adamant.

“All this stuff has to go, Pat.  Everything you don’t use in a year should be cleaned out.”

I looked around the Middle School lab and began to make mental notes of what needed to be tossed.  The chemicals, of course, had to be disposed of in Hazardous Waste bags.  The old equipment that had been sitting in the cabinets before I came to join the faculty was outdated and clearly obsolete.  Technology had changed the nature of a school science lab in just a few years.  Sure, we would always use test tubes and beakers, but old dusty kits of projects whose educational value was obscure, had to go.

It was then that my eyes fell on Seymour.  He hung, silently, on a metal rack facing the student tables.  I felt sorry for Seymour, he had his own special corner of the lab to himself for decades.  He had to go.  His educational potential was spent.  For years, the students (mostly 8th grade boys) would abuse him.  And, he was helpless to prevent this bullying.  Someone stuck his thin finger into his nose.  Another someone placed his hand over his pubic area.  His toes and feet had suffered being stepped upon by the passing students for years. More than once he was found by me to have something between his teeth that was either obscene or downright goofy.  Sometimes, I thought it was funny, but other times I would just shake my head and return his hands to his original position…by his side, like a doorman of an apartment building of this wealthy part of the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Seymour, you see, was a skeleton.  Not a real skeleton, mind you, but a plastic model colored to look real.

But, he had to go.

I just couldn’t see myself putting Seymour out with the rest of the detritus.  No, I had formed an attachment of sorts with him and I couldn’t put him curbside like so many girlfriends had done to me.  He deserved better.  I went to the Division Head and asked if she would approve the purchase of a new skeleton.  She agreed.  I then popped the question.

“Could I have Seymour?”

“Whatever,” she said, not looking up from her paperwork.

I called my wife and broached the subject.  She asked, rather directly, if I thought we had room in our one bedroom apartment for a life-sized skeleton.  I thought about it.  She was right.  On the one hand, it would be an interesting conversational piece over wine and cheese.  On the other hand, once the conservation ended, having the likeness of a dead person standing quietly in the corner could be a little off-putting.

Now, my son, Brian, lived in Binghamton.  He was in sixth grade and attended a public school.  I knew public schools were always having budget issues and within minutes I had a plan to have Seymour continue to “live” on in upstate New York.

I called Brian and asked him to check with his science teacher to find out if he would appreciate such a donation.  He did and the teacher did so it was a done deal.

Now the problem was to get Seymour out of the school and across town to our apartment for the eventual trip to Binghamton.

I hailed a taxi and told the driver to hold at the front door while I went back into school to fetch the bones.  I came out the front door pulling Seymour like a prom date on an IV drip.  I placed him next to me on the rear seat.  No trunk for Seymour.  That was a little to “mob” like for an educational tool.

The driver kept eyeing me through his rear view mirror.

“So, whose your friend, pal?” he asked with a smirk.

“Seymour,” I said.

“Hey, Seymour,” he said.  “Had a bad day, I see.”

I pushed the plexiglass sliding door closed.  I didn’t want Seymour to have to deal with off-handed remarks from a cabbie from Queens.  Knowing that my boney friend only had a view of the East River and the north tip of Roosevelt Island for many years, I decided to point out some of the interesting sights on the way home.  It’s about time he saw the city.

“Look, guy, there’s the Metropolitan Museum, this is Fifth Avenue.  Remember the song, “On The Avenue, Fifth Avenue?”.

Somewhere halfway across Central Park, he nodded off.

Seymour’s head tilted to my shoulder.  I put my arm around his bony back and held him tight so he would survive the sharp turns of the taxi.

The driver turned his radio volume up.

Harry Nilsson was singing “Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me.”

A Missing Image But Still A Memory

 

The photographic frame, measuring 3″x5″ sat on the flat surface of the headstone.

It’s a small quiet Catholic cemetery on the edges of the village of Saranac Lake, New York.  The winter snow was gone but no grass or Spring flowers had the courage, or time, to begin their life again.  Cemeteries are full of living, growing entities.  Flowers bloom.  Green turf covers the ground.  In this cemetery, fallen branches from tall pines, still green, sit on the ground.  There are hundreds of pine cones scattered about.

Amid all this growth and life, there are the mute stones that mark the resting places of people who walked the very streets and paths that I stroll.  Each stone has a name or names of those who lay below.  The dates carved into the stones tell the passer-by how long this man, that woman or this child had spent among the living.

Dead flowers, plastic flowers and potted shrubs adorn the stones.  Sometimes at night solar-powered votive lights glow with a spooky aura in the darkness.  Some enterprising funeral-industry worker thought it would be a good idea ($) to get the grieving family to pay for the small lights.  To some driving by after dark, one can perhaps make out Uncle Tony’s grave by the green light by the tree…just there to the left.  To others, like me, it’s a ghostly reminder of the loneliness graveyards can be when the sun sets.

Some stones have elaborate laser etched photo quality images of the couple, a daughter, a son, a grandparent, a set of golf clubs, a guitar, a pickup truck, a semi, a forest scene or the path leading into a setting sun.

This particular stone had a photo mounted in a frame.  The frame was separated from the backing.  The glass was dulled by abrasion and there was no reflection.  And, there was no picture of the deceased.

Who removed the photo?  A vandal? A parent? A sibling? A fiancé? A child?  Perhaps this was the last image…the only surviving image of the departed one.  I’m thinking is was too personal to leave out in the elements and best kept in a pocket, close to the heart.

Someone had the picture.  Someone carried the photo around with them.  They left only a broken frame.  I looked close and could almost see an after-image on the grey glass.  I couldn’t quite make it out.

But, it was of a person who, for years, had his or her likeness visible to anyone who cared to look.

Now, no one can see who lies six feet below the stone.

Only a name, dates and a block of granite are left.  But I did not miss the picture.  Instead, I thought how lucky this person is…to have something as a proxy.

I thought of the millions of people who lie, unmarked, in the soil of war-torn countries, famine stricken regions, roadsides and river bottoms.

The picture may be gone, but something is there for us to see.  Something for us to lay a flower upon.  Something to touch.  A place to pray.

On a morning, celebrating re-birth, I stand and think of these things.

Too many human beings don’t have such a luxury.