Category: Ruminations

Thoughts, often rambling, on events, past and present, sometimes morphing into fictive narratives meant to continue the theme of those thoughts. For instance, I travel off occasionally to the edge-of-Boston tavern called, The Last Mile. There may, over time, be other escapes.

REQUIUM FOR A PALMETTO BUG

They are big and ugly, look like inch-and-a-half-long cockroaches, although, as my gentle Uncle Bob pointed out, they are not vermin, merely “outside’ bugs that get inside.

This is the story of one such insider.

While I was seeking refuge from the hurricane in a very clean and comfortable and safe home in the Florida Panhandle, a palmetto bug suddenly appeared late at night in front of the refrigerator. My friend Diane came upon it, gasped, and, in one of the optical tricks that befalls us in times of stress, thought she was seeing a small mouse. Palmetto bugs can appear that formidable.

Before either of us could act, it scurried under the refrigerator. (Like their cousins the verminous roaches, the magisterial Palmetto bug is fast — and, being big, has bigger, longer legs and thus can move faster than a speeding bullet.

So, we assumed that was the last we’d see of Big P.B. (Palmetto Bug), for he would doubtless find a way into the woodwork or the rafters and never be seen again.

But, no. The next day, in broad daylight, Diane came upon him(her?) trying to get out the slider to the porch. Well, they are “outside” bugs after all. Had I been there, I’d have simply opened the slider and allowed (him) to escape into his habitat. (Of course, at the time, it was raining and blowing out as the northern most effects of Hurricane Milton were lashing t he Panhandle. So, our friend The Big Bug (whom I will call Little Milton) would have escape into hideous conditions. But then, insects doubtless have their way of coping with the elements.

Diane knew a compassionate exit would be unlikely to ensue upon Little Miltons discovery. He’d scurry off at lightning speed — inside the house. So, she took a shoe and smashed the blazes out of Little Milton, presumably fatally wounding him. She cast a tissue over him as he trashed, legs up like Kafka’s famous humanoid roach Gregor Samsa following his metamorphosis. When I woke up for the day, she asked me to pick him and send him to a watery death in the hopper.

But when I lifted the tissue shroud, ole Little Milton was — gone!! Yes, though no doubt mortally wounded, he’d escaped to somewhere in that large house. Probably gone somewhere to die.

But, lo and behold, an hour later, who should turn up in the hallway, the equal of a mile away in insect terms but ugly Little Milton. I now had no will to kill him, respecting his survivor instincts and toughness. But he was clearly lame and broken and no longer able to scurry in that lightening way of Big Ugly Scary, Disgusting Bugs. So, I resolve to capture him in a jar or on a piece of paper and send him back to nature. But Little Milton misinterpreted my intentions, as bugs will. (I mean what bug thinks a person actually intends to capture and rehabilitate them, as a puzzled Woody Allen surmised in Annie Hall?) But while I tarried, Little Milton escape out of sight again into the bathroom. There I saw him hobbling along the back wall, pathetically vulnerable and exposed, pausing to rest and, he probably hoped, hid by the door jam. But then, tragically, after repeatedly refusing my offer of a sheet of paper he could cling to as an ambulance, he rushed headlong out into the middle of the room. I had no choice but to squash him with repeated blows of a shoe (I hate stepping on Big Bugs). It took three could slams. We know now why bugs will inherit the earth. They are tough, by God! Milton was flushed down the long john pipes to oblivion.

I actually felt sorry that it had come to that.

Then, tonight, back in my regular domocile, hundreds of miles to the south, I let the dog in from outside and, as I stood in the Florida room, saw something Big and Ugly scurry to the middle of the carpet. It was either Little Milton resurrected or his distant cousin abiding and surviving where he had fallen in combat.

I advance, but the bug scurried — its disgusting how they scurry! –under a chair.

I decided not to pursue. He was almost “outside” and might find his way there before the night was out.

In Little Miltons honor, I issued a reprieve.

Live on, Big, Ugly Bug. In Florida, your name is legion. We’ll never kill you all.

MOUNTAIN ELEGY

I once lived in the mountains of western North Carolina.

I have this from the North Carolina State Climate Office:

Torrential rainfall from remnants of Hurricane Helene capped off three days of extreme, unrelenting precipitation, which left catastrophic flooding and unimaginable damage in our Mountains and southern Foothills.

The Blue Ridge are hurting. I’m hearing — we are all hearing –of the horrible travail there — so much and so many nearly drowned in violent, brown, debris-bearing storm floods. Seems odd to many, I suppose, that a hurricane could climb a mountain and dump all its water there — and cause its considerable river waters to rampage and overflow so catastrophically.

It can, other storms have done so before, it did last week. But never to this degree. 150 plus dead. The toll will likely grow.

An utter and historic horror, according to the State Climate Office.

It was close to a worst-case scenario for western North Carolina as seemingly limitless tropical moisture, enhanced by interactions with the high terrain, yielded some of the highest rainfall totals – followed by some of the highest river levels, and the most severe flooding – ever observed across the region.

I came and went too soon from that beautiful region where North Carolina, Virginia and Tennesee come together. The time frame was fall to spring, 1997 into 1998. I probably never intended to stay there permanently and — oh, I might as well tell you — left sooner than I wanted largely because I couldn’t make a living there. This was because it was, to a great degree, a resort area. I couldn’t earn money comparble to the cost of living — that being the bane of long-time locals who for generations have grown Christmas trees, worked trades, worked in factories, did what they could, got by, called it home.

To many in New England or around the nation, those patches of the country near Thomas Wolfe’s native Ashville and the region where I once lived 153 miles to the east in little Banner Elk are unknown terrain. They may not have known there are North Carolina mountains.

I lived in a wood hillside chalet-style house next to rows of saplings and partially grown fraser firs destined to be Christmas trees, nurtured by scores of local nurserymen. They rose slowly up beside a steeply sloaping street called Cynthia Lane. That was my street. As I looked out at those trees, I imagined them one day festooned with colorful lights, reflected in the sparkling eyes of a child on Christmas morning. It was good on Christmas morning to see so many trees still standing for Christmases future. They are harvested every seven years.

I’m a New Englander and knew ultimately I would want to go all the way home from Florida where I’d been living– for a second time — from 1990 to 1997. (So, what am I doing back in Florida, five years and, once again, a thousand miles from home? Another long story. I guess some of us have restless hearts, or are capable of seeking the geographic cure.)

In truth, my mountain time, while pleasant, was sometimes, during the winter, trecherous among steep, icy inclines, mountain highways and trails, rocks and pines — always, at a radio station, hearing and being embraced by the antic and narrative and welcome strains of country music.

I don’t know that I was listening to anything the afternoon , heading downhill in traffic, bound for Banner Elk from Boone, when I gently slid right off the road in my old Volvo. I didn’t go far — about ten feet, and to rest, though a bit unnerved.

It all remains wrapped around a place deep in my mind. And on my mind now are the region’s suffering.

One evening walking along Beacon Street in Boston beside the Public Garden and across from the famous “Cheers” bar, the Bull&Finch Pub, a woman called out to me from her van as she was stuck in traffic. She’d seen my t-shirt for the Mast Store in Valle Crucis, near Banner Elk. She knew the region. “I love Blowing Rock,” she said — another of the charming towns in the area.

Yes indeed, she knew the area.

There is, to a limited degree, a ski resort industry there on Beech and Sugar Mountains that attracts non-locals. But they were always having to make snow for the ski trails. I seem to recall some crystals from the snow-making apparatus blowing toward my hillside home on some occasions. That’s quite possibly as much a reverie as a real memory. But, yes, I do recall that you could tell when they were “making snow” which does not always fall naturally in enough abundance in the Blue Ridge to support the skiing public.

But, again, they get by, those ski trail folks.

Beach Mountain. Sugar Mountain and Hawk’s Nest ski areas — they are all there. Hawk’s Nest is where my son, during his first-ever attempt at snowboarding, wiped out on the last run of the night (after they had prematurely taken down the orange plastic protective netting), slid headlong into a trench dug for a downhill pipe line, slammed into the pipe and ruptured his spleen, landing in Wautauga County Hospital in Boone for emergency surgery. It’s where the young members of the ski patrol were so good to him in the wake of his accident, coming to visit him. It’s where I spent a night half-watching Godzilla movies in a waiting room, barely sleeping, waiting for his deeply upset mother to arrive from South Carolina, arriving near dawn. I had walked down a corridor, barely awake, as the elevator door opened and Renee stepped out and said, “where is he?” Poor Renee, she was probably mad at me, but, more than anything, worried about our son — who recovered just fine, thank God.

O yes, that is a memory. A mountain memory.

Currently, The Climate Office is recording that 16.67 inches of rain have fallen on Boone.

Memories are spilling out of me the way water is now still rushing down a mountainside.

Some great, proud and independent people live in Boone and the Banner Elk area. Tiny Lees-McCrea College is located in Banner Elk. Appalachian State University is in Boone. We’ve started to hear about its football program, but I mostly recall time spent in its fine library. I worked for little WECR-AM and FM radio in Newland, which, at that time (and perhaps now) had studios located in a triple-wide trailer down the road from the Great Eastern Divide. I worked the best I could, selling advertising — not my strength –to Boone auto dealers and merchants with Buddy Carpenter, a former Trailways Bus driver who had formerly been road manager for The Marshall Tucker Band. (I learned from Buddy that Marshall Tucker was a blind piano tuner in whose Spartenburg, NC storage area the band, in its formative years, practiced and developed their distinctive country rock repertoire.) Buddy also did the morning show. A young local woman who did the show with Buddy left to work at a local factory where I believe she was offered more money.

This was that kind of place –unglamorous, real, full of native-bred Scotch-Irish folks ekeing out a living around the city of Newland, way above sea level. Sadly I’ve forgotten that young woman’s name as, I’m sure, she’s forgotten mine, and forgotten me. It was, after all, twenty-seven years ago.

But I’m thinking of her and hoping Helene has not upended her life — hers and the lives of her family members. I’ll bet she has children by now and didn’t seem like the kind of person who would move away from native turf. As for Buddy Carpenter, sadly, I don’t even know if he’s still alive. I do hope you are well, Buddy. (Maybe the last remnants of the Marshall Tucker Band could locate him for me, tell me of his fate. Buddy once told me how founding band member Toy Caldwell was on board his bus during one tour, working out lyrics of the song, “Heard it in a Love Song” on a paper bag which he gave to Buddy and which Buddy planned to donate to the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame.)

During that North Carolina stay, I owned an old Zenith radio I’d picked up at a yard sale somewhere and I recall hearing that young woman who worked with Buddy speak my name out of it, referring to my reference, the former afternoon, to a program to adopt horses in need of permanent homes. ( The information was on a press release; I was filling time during a newscast in which I had few reliable sources of real news.) I’ll always remember her saying something like, “Yeah, Greg was talking about that program….” It was every bit, if not more special than seeing and hearing myself as a reporter on TV — hearing my name, spoken by a nice young moutain dwelling woman (was her name Karen? Sue? Mary?) and spilling out over the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Sounds crazy, I know. But every little thing during those mere nine months (or so) had meaning for me.

Now I’m hearing that all roads in Western NC should be considered closed…

And that what has happened there should be considered…

on par with eastern North Carolina’s worst hurricane from six years ago.

There were, in fact, a great deal of Florida license plates on cars that appeared during the summer months in the mountains. There are gated communities nestled in the mountain ridges where well-to-do Florida residents escape Florida’s summer heat. I was told locals had a mild disdain for these transient visitors because “they poke on the roads and complain about the food.”

Of course, the visitors always bring money to the areas they’re accused of despoiling. And many nice folks appear among seasonal visitors the world over.

For instance…

I worshiped at little St. Bernadette’s Church in the town of Linville, North Carolina where one Sunday I saw retired, legendary Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula coming up the aisle from communion. I couldn’t believe my eyes! And his former quarterback and Hall of Famer Bob Griese, who led the Dolphins to three consecutive Super Bowl appearances –winning two of them (the first of which capped off an undefeated, untied season, a feat that has not been duplicted in the NFL) also worshipped at St. Bernadettes.

Griese sat down with his wife in the pew in front of me one Sunday, turned and offered me, at the appropriate moment, the handshake that is called, “the kiss of peace” (which, in my role as a liturgical curmudgeon, I find superfluous and toucy-feely but which I could not wait to exchange that Sunday as Bob G. turned and grasped my hand. It was the hand that had thrown 192 touchdowns. And the legendary quarterback said, “God Bless Y ou.”

Blessed by Bob Griese! One day up in the mountains of western North Carolina.

From the Climate Office:

It’s no exaggeration to liken this to a Florence-level disaster for the Mountains, since the apparent rarity of the rainfall amounts and the impacts they produced – including large stretches of highways underwater and a plea from the NC Department of Transportation…

By a “Florence-level disaster”, I take the climate officials to be referring to the November, 1966 flooding of the raging Arno River which swamped and did horrible damage to the city of Florence and hundreds its art treasures. I had visited Florence — my one and only time so far — the summer before.

In the mountains, the masterpieces are all natural.

Beyond the glass behind the altar and tabernacle at St. Bernadettes is Grandfather Mountain, so named because, as you look at it, you see in the rocky outcroppings the enormous face of an old man turned up toward the sky. You can see God if you choose. You see him for miles as you approach the region.

Yes, for a brief, memorable time, I was part of that western North Carolina community. Coming and going so quickly, being easily identified by my lack of Southern accent as a damned Yankee. I’m sure no one there — and Bob Griese, wherever he is and whether or not he still comes to the region — remembers me. No matter, I’ve kept his blessing.

But I am praying for that region now, so utterly tormented by the rampaging, north-traveling remnants of a huge, millenial hurricane.

The North Carolina State Climate Office has concluded…

While the full extent of this event will take years to document – not to mention, to recover from – we can make an initial assessment of the factors that made for such extreme rainfall, the precipitation totals and other hazards, and how this storm compares with some of the worst for the mountains and for our state as a whole.

Have the young Christmas trees survived in Avery and Wautaga Counties?

It may be a bleak Christmas in the high country. I hope not. I spent a very nice Christmas there.

In fact, the greatest damage may be in neighboring counties and across the state line into Tennessee — death and destruction from raging water.

I pray for them as well.

May there be deliverance for the whole region by the time snow falls over the wide, welcoming beautiful face of that celestial mountain grandfather.

HURRICANE HELENE

It will be just a storm here. But as of 2:57 p.m., September 25, 2024, there is an ominous gray, a buiding steady ominous breeze, a silence, a realization that some neighbors have fled. Anxiety. The old Florida thing.

It is out there in the Gulf, freshly emerged from Cancun. It will get stronger over warmer waters. Stronger and stronger.

A widening, multi-colored, swirling electronic blob on the TV radar, embracing, it seems, everything and threatening everything and everybody with wind and water. A monster.

I pray. And I think of those quiet Gulf-front villages and roads of the Panhandle, constantly being reconfigured by these ancient, prowling, giant, all-devouring meteorological beasts. In some cases, nearly wiped off the map. Mexico City, for instance. Wiped out.

And they give these creatures names so that they almost have faces, arms, legs, lips. Female or male, they are androgenous bodies destined to dissolve into rain, fluttering and stirring branches on some northern sidestreets until the sun shines again, and all is still and all is memories and so much is broken in its wake.

I must leave my tin and vynl domicile for somewhat safer ground.

AMERICA’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, CIRCA 1975

It’s fun to look at the last chapter of old history text books to see how the authors chose to frame the long past “present moment” for the high school or college student of that hour.

Long ago, at a Tampa, Florida yard sale, I bought a thick (over 800 pages), impressively illustrated American history text book called, The American Nation by Columbia professor John A. Garrity. ( I recall how the working class, thirty-something guy selling it on his front lawn lamented his own failure as a student to value it more –at the very moment he was letting it go for a few dollars.)

The big old tome is notable, at least to me, for how heavily and not inappropriately it vividly emphasizes –right from the first chapter– the often previously neglected or underplayed history of America’s tragic interaction with the slave trade.

The American Nation was first published in 1966; my edition is from 1975. Hence, it ends speaking of Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon. And, in between, of course, the troubled history of the Vietnam War gets extensive treatment.

But back to that last chapter.

It is portentiously titled, “A Search for Meaning.” Garrity evokes and somewhat demolishes what he calls nineteenth century American historian George Bancroft’s “naive assumption” that he was telling the story of God’s American Israel. Adding…

(F)or Americans had always assumed, and not entirely without reason, that their society represented man’s best hope, if not necessarily the Creator’s. The pride of the Puritans in their wilderness Zion, the Jeffersonians’ fondness for contrasting American democracy with European tyranny, what Tocqueville called the “garrulous patriotism” of the Jacksonians, even the paranoid rantings of the latter-day isolationists all reflected this underlying faith. Historians, immersed in the records of this belief, have inevitably been affected by it. Their doubts have risen from what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called “the irony of American history”: the people of the United States have been beguiled by their real achievements and the relative superiority of their institutions into assuming that they are better than they are.

(I detect here early signs of the pendulous Obama-era liberal political and academic emphasis on America’s sins and resulting assaults on American confidence that has led to the equal and opposite cry to “make American great again.” But, whatever….)

Among other things, Garrity goes on to asks:

Has modern technology (and this is 1975) outstripped human intelligence?

Has our social development outstriped our emotional development?

Garrity concludes: No one one can currently answer these questions. Nevertheless, we may surely hope that with their growing maturity, their awareness of their own limitations as a political entity, the American people will grapple with them realistically yet with all their customary imagination and energy.

In othe words, he drew up short of any predictions, but gave a nice pat on the shoulder to 1975 Americans before we ran back into the game.

How have we done in fifty years — with our “customary imagination and energy”?

Historian Garrity died on December 19, 2007 at the age of 87. I wonder how he thinks we did on the path to national maturity and emotional development –and did he perceive, in his final years, the unexampled threat Artificial Intelligence added to fears human intelligence might be on the brink of being “outstripped”?

It’s interesting that Garrity invokes the evaluation of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who is also credited with that prayerful evocation of divine trust and human limitations that has, in this increasingly and aggressively secular age, become a staple introductory prayer at meetings of many addiction recovery groups:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

The courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference.

Let me hear a big American –Amen!

SAD AND HAPPY FIGURES RECEDING IN THE REAL AND CINEMATIC DISTANCE IN ART AND LIFE

Feel like I’ve indulged in this meditation, or something nearly like it, before.

It has to do with figures, mostly meaning people, viewed as they recede in the distance. It is a familiar trope of Hollywood movies, sometimes sad, sometimes happy at the end of a drama — the hero or the lovers together or a disappointed lover alone walking off down a beach or John Wayne, at the end of The Searchers, walking off alone as the door to the house closes and THE END appears. In a John Steinbeck story called “The Mountains” in his book, The Red Pony, a child has a distant view of a man who’d been a visitor riding off into the mountains.

Edward Arlington Robinson captured such a moment and such thoughts, meditated on them over and over during the long poem, “Man Against the Sky” that begins:

Between me and the sunset, like a dome  
Against the glory of a world on fire,  
Now burned a sudden hill,  
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,  
With nothing on it for the flame to kill
Save one who moved and was alone up there  
To loom before the chaos and the glare  
As if he were the last god going home  
Unto his last desire.  

Well, I’m traveling and constantly saying hello and goodbye to people along the way. But in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, my companion Diane and I checked into a motel and then went looking for a place to have dinner. We pulled into a rather plain and ugly parking lot in front of what looked like a restaurant, but it turned out to be an ice cream place. That wouldn’t do. So we sat checking the internet on our phones in search of another address of another possible eatery. It was dinner time, or just after it in some households.

Now, I’ve been living in Florida, a very flat state with few exceptions, those being up in the panhandle. There are no mountains or notable hills — true hills. This section of Pennsylvania, by contrast, had mountains — be they the Poconos or some stretch of the Appalacian range. The motel looked off toward mountains.

The parking lot where we’d paused was ugly, as noted, and had a strange dip in a break between strip centers where one could drive or walk to a lower parking beyond which there was a steep hill topped by a neighborhood of houses.

As we sat idling in the car, a young boy of about twelve emerged from the ice cream shop with what was certainly his little sister. They commenced to walk toward that macadam dip, probably bound for those house. The boy had a bundle, probably ice cream, destined for the dessert table of one of th ose houses where parents and maybe other siblings happily awaited this post-dinner ice cream feast, or so I imagined.

The little girl — the little sister — appeared to be about six or seven. She was pretty, wore a dress, had long hair and she was…marching! Yes, her happy stride, holding her brother’s hand suggested delighted expectations – for ice cream and for all of her still innocent life. She was marching along with big brother who was just walking, probably kind of used to the way little sister liked to happily muse and march along in life. I watched them, yes, recede from view as they headed down that black tar gully and out of sight. And I said…I’ll remember that picture.

But, as we went to drive away from that parking lot, there suddenly appeared, unexpectedly to one who for five y ears now has dwelt where the last view of anyone or anything is on a flat plane — a fond, heartening, distant vision:

The young boy and his high-stepping, pretty little sister appeared again, side-by-side with their ice cream bundle, rising distantly up that hill toward those houses, small figures now, destined to vanish from my view. But there they were, a distant, receding vision, destined to vanish from my happy view of them and from that moment — forever. I wished I could have followed them, seen the rest of their life’s drama — how life would treat both of them, praying for the very best for them as they climbed that hill, getting smaller and smaller.

They will always be walking — her happily marching, him with his bundle — and that glimpse of them will always linger in my memory. Yes that movies will always be running in my mind..

without my ever seeing on the screen of my memory the words…

THE END

A TOWN WITHOUT SAUCE

Returned to the old town, mill town, never ultimately “home” but home for a long while, but seeming less like home for this moment in time for reasons unclear to me.

Got a steak sub at the local sandwich shop. Had been there a fair number of times before. Didn’t recognize anyone.

Got the sub back to the old neighbor’s house where I was staying and found that it had no sauce on it. None. Just a scumble of beef nestled in plain white bread.

No sauce. No taste. That’s what’s missing in this old town. Maybe it never had any real sauce or taste.

I was sad, trying to remember what the town had tasted like when I was in it. I ate what I could and threw the rest away.

LIKE GLASS

Summer 2024 everything moving quickly, too quickly, toward its outer edges. Chaos, as usual, all around. Sameness. So much sameness. And fear.

I’m thinking of last summer — borne backward, against the current, by easier memories — to when I spent all of July in Upstate New York; Rotterdam Junction, to be precise, in flight from the Florida heat that I could not escape this year.

I had stayed at a friend’s house, just up a steep little protective grassy bluff from the Mohawk River, just down from Lock#9. It is a serene, fairly wide stretch traveled by the occasional cabin cruiser likely bound for the Hudson River where the Mohawk flows into it. There is a grape arbor and a shed by a fence. My friend built a little porch on the shed, facing the river.

There used to be a little boat, if I recall correctly, in a little shaded opening of trees down the slope and near the water’s edge. It was — again, if I recall correctly — gone last year, as was the little pier my friend once had for that boat. Getting on in years, he might have tired of maintaining either, and seldom, if ever got out onto the water for fishing or leisure. But he also could not bring himself to move himself and his wife away from this humble riverside haven where he’d lived happily for so many years.

I’ve never been out on the Mohawk, but loved being near it.

If I were my friend, I couldn’t have moved, either. (He did, in fact, once move to Florida, but wound up selling his mobil home down there for far, far less than its value, and hastening back to the realm of seasons, snow, ice, complex family memories. Back to the river. )

During my month on the river, on a pleasant but unaccountably anxious July evening, I wrote, simply:

The Mohawk tonight, as the light dies.

Good to be near it, to stand on the cool grass

Reflecting, on all that can be shattered.

A life, a river

Like glass.

FIRST VICTORY OF THE DAY

717 A.M. I drove by the Last Mile. There was a light on inside. It looked like it was just the light over the bar. That told me Willy Hartrey was inside. Willy is this old guy that Joe Barron, the owner, gave the key and throws a few dollars to come in and clean in the morning. (Charlie stayed down in Florida this y ear, right through the hot months. Somebody said he’s dealing with some financial issues but refuses to sell either his big place down there or his big place in Nahant up here. He must be feeling the crunch. He swears he’ll never sell the lounge, like it’s a memorial to his family heritage.)

Willy Hartrey lives on a little dead-end street about a block back from the Lounge. It’s the house where he was born. He never married. His parents died, one after the other, way back in the Sixties sometime. I guess by now he might be eighty, maybe older. He’s kind of ageless. He used to work at General Electric in Lynn, retired, then worked for a while with his older brother in a sheet metal shop, just helping him out with the books. The brother moved to Florida, then died. Willy’s sister lived in Melrose, died as well a few years ago.

So, Willy’s alone.

I decided to pull up on the side and pop in and say hello to Willy. The front door was open. Once upon a time some hard luck guys chasing a bad booze addiction would sleep in their cars and come into the Lounge for an eye-opener. Willy would help them out. That would be a little later when the place really opened for business, maybe ten o’clock. Willy never stays around that long now, and those old drunks all disappered, all those guys and a couple of women. It was sad. But Charlie, who was still around in those days, used to feel bad for them. He’d get them help if they’d take it. Get them to rehab or treatment. After they were steady enough, they’d go hang out under the old pavilion on Revere Beach.

Willy was sitting at a table by the hallway to the johns with a cup of coffee in front of him. The place smelled clean. He always made himself a cup of coffee after he was done cleaning. I went over and poured myself a cup, too. That’s kind of the ritual when I drop in like this before business hours and Willy’s on duty. He was sitting there in a flannel shirt and khakis. He’d gotten pretty gray, the hair’s thinning, face and hands a little rough. But he seems to stay about the same weight, a good solid guy, an old 9th Division Army veteran.

The place was clean. Willy probably did all the cleaning before dawn and put away the mop, broom and the rest.

I sat down with him. “How you doing, Willy?”

“How you doing?”

“I asked you first.”

“I’m fine. Now, how about you?”

“I’m fine, too.”

“With you, I know that means. That means you’re not fine.”

“Right. Not fine. Worrying too much. About everything and nothing. You don’t seem to have that problem.”

“Did once, Still do now and then. But today — which is the only day that counts, I’m peaceful. Got a good bill of health down at the V.A yesterday. Taking it all a day at a time. Couple of small things here and there. Grateful, you know what I mean? And this gets me up and going, coming down here, opening up, pulling out the mop and bucket.”

I was honest. I told him I had a lot of anxiety. I told him there was a lot on my mind, a lot on my plate, but maybe a lot of unnecessary worry, too. Some money worries, who doesn’t know about them! But mainly just a lot of decisions that needed to be made that I wasn’t making. Coming to grips, getting business done. The old wobbly Hamlet, Prince of Denmark routine. Procrastinating with a lot of decisions. Some things I want to change but can’t change right now. That’s how I happened to be out early. I was going to go up the beach and walk along the tide line, try to relax.

And the truth is, sitting with Willy can be like a calming day at the beach. He landed at Normandy Beach, second wave. That was hell. But, as he always said, in the first wave, he might have been gone. A lot of guys he knew went in the first wave.

And….Hell! Thinking about that That made me realize Willy just looks eighty. He’d got to be over ninety. Like I say, he seems ageless.

“I tell you what,” Willy said after taking a sip of coffee, which he takes black, like me. “You got to remember the first victory of the day. My mother liked to write poetry, nothing special. Published little things in little religious magazines now and then. She used to go visit this nun in a monastery someplace. This nun wrote books. Spiritual books. She was maybe a little famous in her order, very holy. She used to help mom with her little poems. She told my mom something she never forgot. She told her getting out of bed was the first victory of the day.”

That sounded stupid on it’s face, until I thought about it –honestly. “Funny you should say that,” I said. ” It was tough for me this morning, especially where I wake up a lot in the night.”

“Me, too,” Willy said. “A lot of useless worrying, you know what I mean? I look out the window, I look out at the yard, dark everywhere, quiet except maybe for a train whistle far off or some wind in the trees. I think for a couple of minutes, really drowsy, then I put my head down and I go back to sleep. I know the vicory is coming — when I rise. I’ll rise as long as I can rise and the day I don’t rise, well the battle’s over.

“But just remember, good buddy, about that little victory tomorrow. It’s too late today. You’re up and already feeling beat down, not even knowing you got a victory under belt.”

“Well, since I’m not working anymore, I do tend to sleep in.”

“Don’t do it, buddy. Make like you gotta get off that landing craft and hit the beach, no matter what.”

“Whoa, that’s kind of tough. I prefer to think of just getting out of bed.”

“Okay, well then. But think of it this way — you’re in a monastery and you got to be up and down in the chapel praying. Praying hard. That’s another battle.

“That’s easier for sure. I can just pray right where I am. That’s easy.”

“Not really, buddy. Prayer is work if you do it right. You gotta be a prayer warrior. That’s what all the other warriors tell me. You rise up, which is your duty as long as you’re alive. And when you put your feet down on that cold floor, just make like its the sands of Normandy, buddy, and that’s your first victory of the day. Then start praying.”

“I guess, they’ll be shooting at me,” I said, chuckling, “if my bed is a damn Higgins boat.”

At this point, I’m thinking Willy’s a little crazy. Everybody says he’s a little crazy from the war, but everybody likes him and nobody ever really sees much of him because after he cleans up the Lounge, he kind of disappears in daylight, like a ghost.

“I’ll have your back, buddy. I’ll be right behind you, running up that beach, praying hard. You won’t see me, but I’m there.”

Willy said that like his prayers were rifles. Which for him, I guess they are.”

We finished off our coffees, chatted a little more, but mostly just sat thinking and, maybe, praying.

And so it went this morning at the Last Mile with Willy Hartrey. I’ve got to watch for that light on inside next time I drive the Lounge. I’ll go in, see him sitting there, a ghost made visible until full daylight, and I’ll tell him I just had my first victory of the day.

I’ll tell him that, and a whole bunch of things. Willy’s good company.

THE STORM, A FRENZIED DRUM…


It’s here. It’s dark. The wind, so much wind. Rain, constant rain….

A lake has formed out back where the grass dips into a swale. Water in the street. There was, briefly, a tornado warning. Seems a water spout might have moved on shore. It dissipated, happily.

That was not that close to us, but it might have been moving this way.

Those were uneasy moments.

Storms can urge you think, not alone of thepresent danger, but of the future — of this house, the people and the animal in it. Of life in Florida. Of children.

And in 1919, W.B. Yeats wrote, amid the storm,

A Prayer For My Daughter…

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid

Under this cradle-hood and cover lid

My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle

But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill

Whereby the haystack-and roof-leveling wind,

Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;

And for an hour I have walked and prayed

Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

He continues….

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour

And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,

And under the arches of the bridge, and scream

In the Elms above the flooded stream;

Imagining in excited reverie

That the future years had come,

Dancing to a frenzied drum,

Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

Yeat’s daughter Anne was a sickly child, but she became a painter, constume and stage designer and lived until age 82 and died on July 4, 2001. As such, the poet’s prayers amid the howling storm were answered. His daughter lived a long and apparently happy life. Yeats died January 28, 1939 at age 73. Another storm was brewing then — in Europe. But then, if I’m to continue, I’d have to get into Yeat’s complicated politics, and complicated life, which mingles with the stormy history of the 20th Century — which his daughter managed, from those infant moments in 1919, to live well beyond — dying before the 21st Century Age of Terror began in earnest at 8:46 a.m., September 11, 2001

It is 9:25 on this Sunday night, and THE TELEVISION IS BLARING ANOTHER LOUD, URGENT ROBOTIC VOICE telling us that four-to-eight inches of rain have fallen and flash flooding is imminent. The announcement is interrupting the televison drama Diane was watching for comfort and escape from all the nerve-shattering danger abroad in the air. She yells at the TV in frustration. PLEASE STOP!

I hear either thunder, or the tin roof bobbing in the gale. Will the power fail? Bringing silence? No escape?

Call this A Prayer For Us All, agitated and menaced by tropical turbulence whipping empty streets of wildly dancing palms and bobbing street lights. And here we sit in the most fragile of tin and vinyl domiciles.

THE LOUD ROBOTIC VOICE AGAIN, THIS TIME ANNOUNCING A TORNADO WARNING TO THE SOUTH AROUND SARASOTA. “DON’T WAIT TO HEAR A TORNADO,” THE VOICE SAYS. “TAKE COVER NOW.”

Where, people down there must be asking?

The dog, at least, seems calm, under the influence of CBD Cheese Bites.

Weather bites tonight.

Poetry sooths.

O that we could be in Gregory’s Wood now, where it’s probably calm.

But then, Yeats was writing in a time of violence political turbulence.

So am I.

But we still have power.

And the power of prayer in troubled times.

(THE INTERNET FAILED JUST AS I POSTED THIS)