I was only present at one of these two occasions, and that one was a long time ago so the details are blurry in one case and hearsay in the other, but they reminded me of each other.  And since I can’t seem to feel things about reality, but I can get quite broken up over a Kodak commercial, today I came home and watched some Youtube bits from the film Hair, and that made me all weepy and weepy – ok, I actually bawled a little,  anyway weepy makes me think of music and music makes me write stuff sometimes and so…

There was in Reedville when I was very young, a girl who was not an orphan, but was a foster child (her Mom was the talk of the town, and that took some doing).  This girl was much in demand as a baby sitter; she had an instinct for children, I think.  What became of her, last I heard, was both sort of unbelievable and common.  Life sometimes sucks.

This girl, whom I will call Crystal, was a foster child as I said, together with two of her sisters, lived at the home of a nice lady who was my aunt’s neighbor.  I am not sure really, of how I knew her in any meaningful way – whether it was some church thing or her acquaintanceship with my older cousins who lived next door to her, or what.  I really have only one very clear memory of Crystal. 

Each year our pastor capped off two weeks of what we called Vacation School, but which was that short course often called Bible School in popular parlance, with a really sumptuous and wondrous day at the nearest beach.  Father really loved kids – especially poorer ones, in the way that a pastor should, instead of the way, it turns out, that many pastors did, and this annual picnic was one of the highlights of the summer for all of us.  I guess the older kids kind of looked out for younger kids and we all wandered everywhere – these were the days before everyone believed that a child wandering 4 feet from an adult was both doomed and a victim of neglect.  We were allowed to run free and have fun without any electronic device whatever attached to our ears, eyes or ankles.

I was very young and I think perhaps I had had the first few swimming lessons (another summer tradition) and still had not succeeded in learning to backfloat or whatever maneuver I was trying to master.  I was in the water with Crystal and some others, including a girl named Joan who was younger than Crystal, but older than me.  One way or another, Joan persuaded me that she would help me master this swimming feat, and though I didn’t really trust her completely, I let her talk me into relaxing and assuming the position while she held me up. 

I don’t think Joan was a mean girl; I suspect she thought she was helping me (and she was pretty young herself), but she let me sink beneath the water and as it closed over my face, I went into a total panic.  I was completely terrified.  And I remember struggling my way to the surface and screaming, “Crystal!  Crystal!”  And I scrambled and splashed and choked my way to Crystal; I just felt completely sure this girl I hardly knew would save me and make it everything all right, which she did. 

Moving on 55 years or so, last week my mother went to the supermarket with her sister, my Aunt Bertha.  For all the years my Mom has lived at her present abode since she sold the Farm, her neighbor to the east has been a man slightly – very slightly - her junior, whom I will call Dick Jones.  The have had a friendly, distant relationship, but he assured her when a bit of trouble moved into the neighborhood (long since gone) that if she ever was in any trouble whatsoever that she could knock on his door any time of the day or night.  Years passed with a hello, a joke, a nod, but little else, though he did a few years ago say to her, “We are good neighbors, aren’t we?”  And they were.

So Aunt Bertha took my poor confused Mother shopping, and while they were in the market, Bertha either slipped out to the post office next to the market, or perhaps just wandered down another aisle (my Mom hates to shop with someone, in the sense that the two of them patrol the aisles together.  She tends to agree to meet at the checkout or wherever and go off on her own errands).  Only the world around her has become confusing and surprising and now gets all mixed up in then.  And suddenly Mom found herself alone and abandoned and unable to remember where she was.  She apparently caused a bit of a scene, crying out that she didn’t know why she was there and so forth, and then across the way or in the parking lot (the narrative gets a bit confused) she spotted Dick Jones and cried out, “Oh there’s my neighbor.” And she hurried to him and everything was OK again. 

So Mr. Jones got hold of my brother Luke and said that things were getting very dicey next door and today Aunt Bertha said that we really had to do something, because my Mom was not safe alone anymore.  And it is true, and Luke is going tomorrow to see about how to get Mom moved into a nursing facility; this woman who raised 9 kids and managed a farm where water had to be carried in from outside and where she stoked a furnace and cooked over a coal stove and canned and cleaned slaughtered animals, and who learned to drive long past the ager most people are letting some else drive for them, and who fended off an angry cow who was stamping my brother Gary to the earth and who got Liam to the hospital when he dropped barbells fully loaded onto his own head, and who got through the death of not one, but two, sons; who once walked into a Mafia meeting – true story; and who spent twenty years staying with other folks’ aging parents so these folks could go to work or get a rest or get some time with their kids and who earned $3 an hour for this work – this particular lady is going to be taken against her will to a place she will never leave, and she will never understand why or know what she did wrong. 

So I, because I go numb when faced with real things, will sniffle over some old songs from Hair and West Side Story and some old shots of Grace Slick and Janis singing when they were young, whose passing from the public eye and my daily world seem to be able to stir emotions in me that real tragedy can’t really unlock – I will do this for a while and then go to bed and then go to work tomorrow and 150 miles away a gallant, gallant lady is sleeping tonight – if she can sleep while the strangers she imagines are coming in and out of her house moving things in the night she is sure, because she surely doesn’t remember moving them herself – is spending one of her last nights in the home that has been hers for nearly 30 years.   And I feel so mean and conniving and helpless – knowing I am agreeing to doing the right thing doesn’t help at all.  And finally there will be no familiar faces ever again; no Crystal, no Dick Jones; no kids she recognizes, no nothing. 

And who now, when I am sick or scared or disappointed or uncertain, will I find there to tell me it is all going to be all right?   

I have taken to leaving the under-construction-every-ten-miles superhighways (While summer to most folks means “let’s play baseball and have a picnic”, in NY and PA it means “hey, let’s go tear up the road”) and to driving instead to and from Reedville on the weekends via the local highways that were good enough for our grandparents.  Unfortunately, on these two lane by-ways, I often get behind our grandparents for several miles, but hey – into each life…   Really, New York, in those sleepy rural fastnesses between the Finger Lakes is incomparably beautiful.  Already the trees are getting those bronzy hints of autumn and in a month or so, the drive will be breath-taking.  Then, of course, I’ll be stuck behind those grandparents who have decided to slow down (if such a thing is possible) to enjoy the view.  Oh, and the other great thing about being off the big highways – less troopers. 

Long stretches of these roadways are marked by signs depicting a deer in full flight with a notice of how many miles you have ahead of you to enjoy the prospect of running full tilt into one of these creatures, or he into you.  I have always thought the last of any series of these signs in the deer-infested stretches should have a ‘last chance’ notation, like the sign at the Wyoming border in the good old days which informed you that you were passing your last opportunity to purchase Coors beer.   In the olden days, Coors was sold only in 11 western states, and thus became legendary in the thirsty East, where you could not purchase it for love or money.  Enterprising travelers would buy a case or two and bring them back for resale in the East.  Or at least everyone of a certain age (the 20s) and sex (male) spoke of doing so – I'm not sure how many actually followed through.  Having been both 20 and male, I’d guess that a couple of cases of Coors in the car pre-MADD days wouldn’t get past Omaha. 

Around the town of Dundee, NY – in an area which is so beautiful it has to be seen to be believed, the signs depicting running deer with the miles containing them yet to be traveled give way to signs depicting a horse and buggy with a similar warning about how many miles ahead are fraught with the danger that one or more of these might suddenly leap out in front of one.  I am not familiar with the niceties of the various cults, but one wonders why these folks would represent such a danger to drivers.  Most of the sect and cult members I have known represent a greater danger to the stranger when that stranger is sitting still in his or her parlor, rather than when he is faring on the highway.  I wonder too if these folks, like deer or Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons or nuns, travel in pairs.  I know everyone always says that if a deer crosses the highway in front of one’s car, one must be cautious because there is always a second one poised to follow.  I don’t know if this is equally true of Amish or whatever they are.   

Near me in Reedville, I frequently see signs warning that I am in a Deaf Child Area.  There certainly seem to be quite a number of these – either an awful lot of deaf children reside in Western NY, or the same one has a lot of favorite hang outs.  No one ever puts up a sign for deaf adults.  One wonders if they are considered expendable, or whether most of them are done away with by errant drivers before reaching full maturity.  Apparently it is perfectly acceptable to run over children who can hear you coming.  It does seem fairer.  There is also, over near Charlotte to the north of Reedville, a sign on one side street depicting a pair of children on a teeter-totter.  Why on Earth, I wonder, must I be warned of this activity?  Do they tend to do this in the street?  Might I come around some sharp corner and find myself bearing down upon a carefree and presumably unsupervised pair of teeter-totterers?  I know most parents, excepting the most fatuous, have odd moments when they darkly consider setting up a play area on a highway, but I had not heretofore thought there was any danger of them actually doing it. 

And then last weekend I was flummoxed while driving on a back street over near Hagerty to see a sign that depicted nothing more than a wheelchair (no mention of how many miles this threat lasted).  I feel like I am under siege; what next will fling itself in front of my car?  But then I got to thinking that it would, perhaps, be instructive to have signage depicting all the issues suffered in each of the homes one passed.  I imagine a temporary sign with black dots on it where someone has the measles – does anyone get measles any more - or are they too lazy?  Or we could see a spinal cord with a kink in the middle for folks with a bad back.  Or a frowny face where a grouch lives.  Or a series of half-smoked cigarettes marking homes of those folks who try, but just can’t seem to quit.  And god knows they wouldn’t be able to keep in stock the ones which had a sort of Kilroy figure preceded by an extended middle finger marking areas containing a fucking idiot.  Although these last mentioned signs might better be mounted on the backs of most of the cars ahead of me on these back roads – sort of like those ‘Baby on Board’ signs. 

(The use - twice - of the word 'depict' leads me to think - shouldn't this be 'pict'?  If a sign depicts something, shouldn't that mean there was a picture of it there once, but now it has gone, perhaps faded by sun and weather?  So don't these signs pict deer or wheelchairs?  If they depicted them, wouldn't the signs be blank with just the number of miles given, leaving drivers to proceed with a kind of formless dread?) 

The road that leads through Dundee has, at two points at least, signs warning “Low Flying Aircraft”.  How am I supposed to react to such a warning?  Is this just for truckers and highly piled vans, like warnings that a bridge has a 14-foot clearance?  Am I actually in danger in my tiny Miata?  Why are the aircraft flying particularly low just there?  Surely Amish women are not prone to sunbathe in the nude, thus attracting the randy male pilot to dip more lowly than he might do elsewhere?  And what evasive action should I take if I am confronted with a low flying aircraft?  I can’t think of much I can do other than scream like a little girl.  Why do they bother warning me, since there really is nothing I can do to save myself in a low-flying aircraft encounter; is it just so they can say, "I told you so"?  So I find myself driving along squinching my neck; I for one cannot think about things landing on my head, or coming flat-out towards my face (although I guess they could also zip up behind me), without kind of ducking. Does this make for safer driving? 

One hazard I encountered in Watkins Glen yesterday should have been marked miles ahead before one found oneself too late stuck on Highway 14 in stopped traffic.  Watkins Glen thought a parade at rush hour on the main highway through town would be a nifty idea.  True, rush hour in Watkins Glen is a relative thing, but still…   Half an hour of inching through Watkins Glenn along side streets put me in the mood to aim for those horses and buggies just up the road toward Dundee.  And on this trip I saw none.  Lucky them!  Usually I do see one or two tooling down old highway 264 (I think it's 264 – I get the numbers mixed up – which usually ends me up on something paved with gravel, if paved at all.)  Maybe it is 364.  Or 263.  I know there isn’t an 8 or a 9 in it.  Whatever.

Other signs I frequently tend to notice are those announcing entry to a polity of some sort.  Some have these huge “Welcome to Podunk” type signs with fancy lettering and a floral display – often the only evidence that Podunk exists.  It appears Podunkians used up all their wood and energy building the sign and were just too plumb tuckered to actually build Podunk itself.  Some places would have you know that they are a ‘friendly’ or ‘caring’ community.  You are, I have discovered, no less likely to get a speeding ticket in friendly places than in others presumably less friendly.  Then there are the no-nonsense places; Potter announces firmly that building permits are required.   I am wondering, do I need one to drive through?  Because there surely is no evidence that Potter suffers from an overabundance barbarian hordes looking to build anything.  Either that or the permit process has fended them off a great deal more successfully than Rome did the Visigoths, something, now that I think of small town bureaucracy in Western NY, that seems highly likely.  “Them there folks elected me to do sump’in and by gar, I ‘m a-gunna do it.”   Oddly, as far as Potter is willing to disclose, no permits are required to tear anything down.  Or maybe that eventuality will not arise until someone actually manages to build something there.   One step at a time for Potter.

Rushville informs us as we enter that Marcus Whitman was born there (it does not add that it was actually called Federal Hollow at the time of the event; which is a much cooler name, I think, than Rushville).  I had no clue as to who this was – it sounded like a basketball player, but Rushville looks singularly unlike a place where a seven foot black man might have been born.  I actually had to look Marcus up, and it appears that M. Whitman was a singular success as a missionary to the Cayuse Indians.  While most missionaries can only dream of completely destroying the target of their efforts, the Whitmans (he had a singularly unpleasant wife) actually managed to utterly destroy the Cayuse.  Happily, Tiloukaikt, the chief of that tribe saw what was up in time to destroy the Whitmans, an act for which he was hanged, but he did this too late to save his people.  In the article where I looked up the story of the Whitmans, it actually states that they “agreed to be married and the Board in turn offered them positions as missionaries” – am I the only one who finds this hugely amusing: straight from the wedding to missionary positions?  The article said Marcus’ father’s name was Beza – one sees that this wacky name fad that seems to grip the USA is nothing new.  I always think of elderly men and ladies at the Presbyterian Home for the Hopelessly Old, doddering around with names like Banana or Kripsie, covered with racy tattoos.  Do the parents who name their kids these cute names actually expect them to grow up?   Or do they plan to take them on a trip to Portugal and kind of lose them?   Anyway, as Tiloukaikt was about to be hanged for his public service, he observed acutely, “Did not your missionaries teach us that Christ died to save his people? So we die to save our people."  And this he did (died, I mean; his people were beyond saving by then) – the irony, no doubt lost on the faithful, although unlike the late J Christ, he managed first to kill his actual tormentors, rather than provide followers to ravage the thinking populations of the world for two millennia.  I am always astonished at the acuity of the supposedly untutored and uncivilized.  One gets the impression, if one is not vigilant, that a Western-style education is a prerequisite to wisdom, or at least eloquence, and in that impression one errs.  It is so easy to assume that one’s way is the best way, if not the only way.  There are scadillions of records of American Indians expressing extremely complex and insightful ideas, usually rendered quaint or faintly comic by the patronizing reporter who tries to render the phrasing as rusticly as possible.  Sort of a “Confucius says” with buckskin.  You try expressing a thought in the language of an Iroquois or Shoshone some time and see how profoundly you can phrase it.  All of a sudden “me no like…” doesn’t sound so dumb, eh? 

Ah well.  I awoke this morning to the sound of pounding rain, a sound I love so much – and on a weekend day, too when I could lie in bed and listen, which I did until I remembered that I had left my car parked outside with the top down.  I leapt to my feet and scrabbled about looking for some minimum body cover – enough to avoid arrest, at least.  Because – and I apologize for the unfortunate visual here – I am used to sleeping sans anything in the way of body cover.  This renders possible that habit of waiting until the very last critical minute to zip to the bathroom when that last cup of evening coffee leads to its inevitable midnight consequences.  I love rain, although it has never quite been the same since we left the farm.  All of us kids seem to equate rain with the memory of the sound it made hitting the tin roof that covered our front porch.  My brother Liam, who is a song writer, sets a scene in one song with the line, “The rain fell on the red tin roof”, and that sound was one of the melodies that threaded through our childhood.  I have always been vaguely disappointed since that the rain is not as audible anywhere else.  I now realize that it wasn’t really the sound of raindrops we remember, it was that of a torrent from an upper eave where the gutter was clogged.  We were hearing something more in the nature of a waterfall than a raindrop.  I don’t know that anyone ever thought to unclog the downspout – we’d have missed the sound, if so.  Anyway, once I got back into bed after closing my car, the rain stopped.  Ultimately I had to go out and put down the roof again to let the pond inside it evaporate.

And that is the vastly exciting news from these parts.   

In other news, I see that Leona Helmsley substantially raised the average quota of human decency by dying this week.  Gee, it’s been a great week AND I have a three-day weekend!  I really wonder if there is a single person on Earth who had a single moment made better or easier by the fact that Leona was born.  And she even managed to leave one last act of spite behind her, cutting her grandkids out of the will.  Not just omitting them, but making the mean-spirited observation that they know why she did this.  Too bad that she couldn’t stem entirely the almost certain wave of pleasure they must have experienced at her departure.  She chose, understandably, to leave her money to her own species.  Fair’s fair.  Probably the animal stuck around her even when others did not.  There is a reason dogs are some times referred to as dumb creatures.   .