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.

HARMONY AMID HORROR

Harmony, as it happens, is the name of a seriously topical musical of the same name. I wish I’d seen.

It came primarily from a seemingly unlikely source — Barry Minilow, who (though I was not aware of it) is Jewish and in the brilliant twilight of his career, though its most public manifestations were melodic juke box hits like “Copacabana.”

But Harmony is serious business about a seriously discordant period of modern human history.

Why am I writing this?

Because I just happened to stumble on a two-year-old review of the show. (It is my habit never to visit the bathroom, public or private, without something to read. Thus, before heading to the privvy, did I pick up a two-year-old magazine from one of my pack-rat-stacked piles of obscure journals (these admittedly being fire hazards which I insist on keeping around for the fire they ignite in my brain).

On this visit to that periodical, I turned to the “stage” section.

And there it was. Something old but still new on a subject that is, sadly, eternal — the undaunted human spirit amid state tyranny, bigotry and terror. And it was, further, a musically relevant offering from the world of show business that did not have its origin on The Voice or America’s Got Talent –and was not seeking to push some politically correct “message” into my ears and down my throat.

Harmony is about a six-member 1930s comedic German singing group with three Jewish members that gets caught in the raging Nazism of Weimer-era Berlin. It’s based on fact and set in the same milieu that is the setting for Cabaret, among the most celebrated stage and screen hallmarks of Seventies America. The group became so famous that they appeared in more than twenty films and toured internationally with the likes of Marlene Dietrich. Manilow and librettist/lyricist Bruce Sussman, according to the review, “tweaked” the show for a quarter century and “devised a cunning range of songs for both the boys’ cabaret act and to illustrate their off-stage drama.”

If Jersey Boys about the The Four Seasons can offer compelling drama in its contemporanious American context, I can only imagine how much off-stage drama can be drawn from the story of a mixed Jewish/Gentile troupe “stayin’ alive” and hiding in plain sight in the world of the Third Reich.

Again, from the review I learned that the show offers songs ” ranging from “snappy, sometimes slightly naughty comic numbers suitable for debauchery-seeking Weimer nightclub audiences to lush ballads such as the standout duet called Where You Go,’ which is sung by the wives of two of the singers.”

Of course, life on and off stage gets complicated for the group and their families, such as when a fan who also happens to be a Nazi officer informs the singers that they “project the image that Germany is amusing and non-threatening.” (Reminds me of how current Russian, Chinese, Iranian or North Korean shills now and then proffer similar, transparently false assurances that their dreadful societies are fun boxes of freedom and light-hearted amusement.)

Among the group’s edgy efforts while on tour to project the truth about their country’s growing agony — in this case, during a show in Copenhagen — is inclusion in the score of a “witty but chilling song” entitled “Come to the Fatherland” which concludes, Or we’ll come to you.

They survived during Germany’s twelve-year Nazi nightmare. In 1933, they came to Carnegie Hall and the NBC airwaves and were tempted to stay but reluctantly, probably wrongly, feared they would not be welcomed here (this according to this review which, by the way, was written by Kyle Smith for the journal New Criterion in June, 2022.)

The show’s narrator,apparently paralleling Joel Gray’s memorable role as Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret, is an amiable group member named Chip Zien. I get the sense that that was the name of one of the actual group members, the last of whom died in 1998. Some of his commentary, according to reviewer Smith, is “tense” and “regretful.” His “younger self” wishes it had made different choices than, perhaps, to have stayed home during such a dangerous, horrific time for all Europe and the world, thereby giving any measure of aid and comfort to Nazi oppressors.

The the show is also obviously a tribute to all long-suffering Jewry, to all who shielded and protected the singers, and to Holocaust victims. In fact, the 2022 performance took place at the National Yiddish Theatre in the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan.

Barry Manilow is on record saying Harmony is the career achievement of which he is proudest.

Rightly so.

But have there been any subsequent performances of Harmony over the last two years?

Manilow, Sussman and coreographer Warren Carlyle apparently staged the 2022 version on a very limited budget with minimal sets and scenery changes, relying heavily, according to Smith, on video and photoraphic images.

Some college, or even high school drama department or community theater somewhere should take note. A musical that finds a way to seriously yet entertainingly illuminate the problem of anti-semitism would be very timely indeed.

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.

WHAT I LEARNED AT THE PICNIC

Nothing like a bright, sunny day at the end of August to get you thinking about the environment. I want to save the environment. I like wind and sun. I doubt we can live by wind and sun alone.

But who am I to say so? ( My former colleague Tom Matteo in Massachusetts heats with solar and says he hasn’t had a power bill in three years.)

I’m sure he’s not alone among solar –or wind — boosters. In time, their individual testimonials may heat up the push toward reliance on sun power or turn the blade on wind.

There are skeptics, millions of them, and those whose life-long livlihoods and skill sets and knowledge of the pitfalls of wind and solar are generating abiding objections and warnings about the limitations of sun and wind power. Beyond that, they, like I, would warn against extremes and government coercion when those in power decide they will force us off reliance on fossil fuels.

A weekend ago, I attended a picinic of Local 7 of the United Association of Plumbers and Steamfitters in Upstate New York. There were hot dogs, ribs, wings, the works.

I wound up with a copy of the Association’s trade journal containing an editorial by its General Secretary-Treasurer, Derrick Kualapai.

Seems in our time, I’m not the only one warning against the extremes. Kualapai is the man issuing the warning here — against those who insist adamantly — and sometimes intolerantly –that alternative clean sources (ACS), must be limited to wind and solar. To insist on these sources solely – and I don’t doubt there are many in the environmental movement who do — is, in Kualapai’s words, to insist on “extremely narrow and unrealistic approaches” to the quest for a cleaner environment.

Of, course, Kualapai is a major stakeholder here.

One must always be suspicious of the motives of any writer — of those arguing any point of view — be the motive financial, ideological or what have you. So I invite everyone to be skeptical right along with me. The union for those who earn their living by traditional ways of doing anything might always have ulterior motives for their arguments. But, of course, that does not automtically make their point of view wrong.

Kualapie says his union supports policies that protect and preserve the environment. “Let me be clear at the outset,” he writes in the Journal ( of the United Association), ” we are not climate deniers.” He insists, with the same vigor as those who might attack the union on these grounds, that the union and its members “advocate fiercely for smarth, sensible, decorbonization strategies, including green hydrogen, bioenergy, geothermal and thermal energy networks, as well as advanced nuclear systems, including small modular reactors, and carbon capture utilization and storage.”

Sounds great to this layman, though I don’t know what “capture utilization and storage” is all about except maybe, as the awkward phrasing suggests, the capturing and re-use of carbon that the power industry has managed somehow to store? (Can you tell I was an English major?)

But I’m being told here that these are all options to a narrow focus on wind and solar as exclusive alternative clean sources of energy. Industry stakeholders actually like these alternatives. But I’m being told many in the environmental movement do not.

And Kualapai concludes, “while the UA recognizes the push for wind and solar energy, we’ve also learned that –even with maximum development –they will never solely provide enough power to ensure a sufficient supply of reliable energy for the future.”

“Never” is a challenging word. But that’s what he says, while I’m sure the Green Movement is insisting, ‘never say never” when it comes to wind and solar.

But I ‘m glad I went to the picnic. In the interest of balance, I guess I’ll have to watch for the next picnic held by the Green Lobby. After all, a hot dog is a hot dog, whether you heat it up using gas, wind or solar.

Charcoal briquettes are best.

And in all liklihood, at a Green Lobby event, I’m not likely to be eating meat.

A corn dog will do.

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.