This is a true story.
As soon as my sweetie, Jim, found a job in Hanover, our arrangements for relocation from St. John's, Newfoundland, to Lebanon, New Hampshire, began. By spring of 1988 I had sold my house in St. John's, we had found an apartment in Lebanon, and all was right with the world. Meanwhile, there was the family house in Shoreham available for interim storage and temporary accommodation, so I loaded some southbound books and computers and clothes and such into my Honda and set off for this new adventure in, say, late April.
The first intimation of events to come may have been as I pulled out of St. John's. The first stop on the long trip was the Midas muffler place there on Freshwater Road where I had the obviously defective muffler replaced. The ensuing two very long days were therefore rendered quiet if not exactly fun-filled.
However, as I got closer to Vermont, the brakes began making increasingly distressing noises so when I arrived in Shoreham I rushed right down Valley Garage and had Red install new pads. When the old ones had been extracted both Red and a hanger-on loudly wondered how I could have survived the trip since there was No Material left on them which could conceivably have stopped the car. Well, I left the valley garage $50 lighter but easier in my mind.
Next project was the furnace which had been snorting and rattling and leaving a thin deposit of soot in the basement and the kitchen. This was remedied one afternoon by a brace of very large technicians and a generous infusion of parts.
Then the lawnmower, which I had hated passionately for years anyway, croaked its last (and good riddance, I say) and had to be replaced before the lawn went to hay.
After careful analysis of moving costs involving actual movers, rented trucks, trailers, etc., we concluded that our best and cheapest option was to buy a used truck and sell it once we were done, so the next step in this little drama was a trip down to Rutland to the truck place on Route 7 which sold me a Very Yellow Iveco Truck, which operated flawlessly right up until four days later when Debbie Norris wanted to borrow it to move some furniture into Middlebury, which having been accomplished, the brakes seized in front of her house and the thing couldn't be moved. It turned out to be nothing more than an idiosyncrasy of the operation of the handbrake, fortunately, and I was able to go pick it up the next day anyway.
Nevertheless, Jim, who had come down from St. John's for a quick reconnaissance, felt it would be worthwhile to crawl around under it to try to figure out why it might be doing this, and in the process the handbrake cable parted entirely due to a very old and corroded fitting. Well, naturally we rushed right back to the truck place with blood in our eye as it had only been driven about 30 miles before this happened and explained that we thought they should fix it now as they should have done before I bought it. Miraculously they did. Following which Jim went back to St.John's and I went over to Barneveld, New York, to visit my old friend Bronwyn in my old Honda with brand-new brakes.
While in Barneveld two noteworthy things happened: 1) I convinced Bronwyn that it would be loads of fun to drive a Very Yellow Truck up to Newfoundland on the July 4 weekend and 2) Bronwyn convinced me that my car was much noisier than it should be and probably had a busted wheel bearing. Thus, soon after my noisy return to Shoreham I took it in to Mike's Sunoco in Middlebury where I explained that there were noises in the front end. Mike himself took it out for a test drive lasting 2 to 3 microseconds and announced that he had seldom heard such readily discernible noises. He got it up on the lift the better to look and soon the whole staff there was gathered around exclaiming things like “Wow, what a death trap!” By and by I was allowed in to see the patient and Mike demonstrated that one of the tie rods was shot to the extent that it was hard to imagine how the thing was together at all, and also the other wheel bearing was positively rattling. It was arranged that I would get the tie rod and he would get the wheel bearing and I could bring it in in a few days for repair. So I oozed back to Shoreham, manure spreaders and bicyclists flashing by me, expecting a steering failure every inch of the way and parked it next to the sulky truck.
With a heavy sigh I then started up Thunderguts, the balky, dissipated, and heavily mouse-scented '71 Nova which was the only permanent resident at the Shoreham house. The first couple of coughs were accompanied by the eruption of pink insulation and other mouse nesting material from the tailpipe but after that all seemed as well as could be expected. The trip to Burlington to pick up the tie rod went blissfully smoothly, and then eventually I returned to Mike's in the ailing Honda, very very slowly, and spent six hours moping around Middlebury while repairs were effected. While I was paying up Mike happened to remark, “You know, you're going to have to have your brakes done pretty soon - they're almost down to the metal.” I breathlessly explained that he must be wrong as I had already done them not a month before. “Well,” suggested Mike, “then probably the calipers are gone, but I'd have them done soon.” After all the major surgery on the tie rod I had to get the wheels aligned, of course, and the man at the tire place said much the same thing, so two days before my scheduled departure for Newfoundland I limped back to Shoreham, brakes squealing and shuddering, AGAIN, and added oil to Thunderguts.
Meanwhile I had been in touch with Jim in St. John's and he explained that his elderly and ailing Corvette had succumbed to some sort of misery of the clutch and he wasn't sure he was going to be able to fix it before we got there.
The final arrangement with Bronwyn was that she would either get a bus to Rutland or a ride from somebody, maybe even to Shoreham, and we would leave from there. The day before our proposed departure she phoned with the news that her youngest son, Jeremy, whose own car didn't run for many reasons, had borrowed hers the previous night and had destroyed the transmission. Fortunately her eldest son had two vehicles, but unfortunately one of them was out of commission due to two flat tires or something, so the Final final arrangement was that her ex-husband Joey, who was in town for Jeremy's graduation, would drive her to Hudson Falls and I would pick her up there the next morning in Thunderguts.
On the way to Hudson Falls next morning while passing through one of several construction sites along the way a very major hole in the exhaust system was abruptly made manifest, so I thundered on through sleepy little towns causing heads to turn in, variously, alarm, envy, and disapproval, found Bronwyn with surprisingly little trouble and roared back to Shoreham where both cars were abandoned, hors de combat, in favor of the Very Yellow Truck into which we loaded our few selected belongings and uneasily set out for Newfoundland. The trip was very long but mercifully uneventful except for minor palpitations caused by missing our ferry by 15 minutes and later nearly running out of fuel around 3 AM in Western Newfoundland, and at long last we rolled in St. John's shortly before noon and pulled into a shopping mall so Bronwyn could go to a bank and I could pick up some beer. We then lumbered wearily back into the truck only to discover that the brakes were seized. Thinking that it was the old parking brake thing I yanked them around a bit to no avail while Bronwyn stood by looking unhappy. By and by a jolly municipal employee rolled up in a big orange dump truck and said a lot of things to Bronwyn who, between the snarl of the diesel and the picturesque accent could only understand about a 10th part of what he said, but the upshot appeared to be that this sort of thing happens all the time and the thing to do is ignore it and press on. So we groaned the last couple of miles to Bond Street dragging our brakes and had lovely baths and a nap.
Mercifully, Jim's Corvette was temporarily operational so the next day Bronwyn and I went on a toot around Greater St. John's while Jim scrutinized the truck to see if he could figure out what ailed the brakes, and reported that they were just fine. Bronwyn stayed another couple of days before she had to return to Barneveld and then the next three weeks or so Jim and I spent packing, discarding, selling, tying up loose ends, and saying goodbye to anybody we ever knew. In the midst of all this the Corvette's clutch suffered a serious relapse and was limped over to Ron's garage with Desirée in attendance in her car whose own clutch was making mournful noises, where it stayed until parts could be obtained. Jim's father, who was to help out with the driving of the truck and car back to New Hampshire was canceled, and all further transportation was accomplished on foot or through the kindness of miscellaneous friends like Bill who could be relied upon in the pinch until he blew out a head gasket and was reduced to the exclusive use of his motorbike.
Time passed rapidly and the truck, with the stated maximum load of 4000 pounds approached gross when about a third of the house contents had been inserted into it. We therefore shipped about 1200 pounds of books to Montréal for pickup in two weeks time and were more rigorous about what was to go and what was to be sold/donated/discarded. Careful scrutiny of the truck, its Vermont registration, and its owner's manual revealed that although the GVW stamped on the frame was 9995 pounds it had a registered GVW of 11,000 pounds and could be loaded up to 13,000 pounds if there was enough air in the tires, so we naturally took the latter is our limit and stuffed the thing accordingly.
We finally finished the job on Monday, July 25, having worked unremittingly all day without meals since the stove, fridge, and food had been dispatched long since. We ordered pizza and ate it sitting on the floor of the empty living room, and finally bid a final farewell to 25 Bond St. and climbed into the truck around 10 PM. The idea was to get a motel in Argentia near the ferry terminal so that we would be there very early in the day to check in for the ferry in case we had to argue since they don't allow large trucks on that ferry, and our reservation was for a van. Since our generous maximum load estimate was based on a great deal of air in the tires our first stop was to be the Petro-Canada truck stop just outside the city limit. It was drizzling and very cold and foggy. The truck was swaying and wallowing like a skiff quartering sea all the way there. We managed to top up the two front tires and the two outside rear tires, which were perilously low – say, 50 psi as opposed to the 70 we needed, but one of the inside rear tires had no air at all and wouldn't take any, being right off the rim, and the other was down to maybe 20 psi. This we filled, and phoned an all-night truck service to come repair the other. It being nearly midnight we checked into a motel next to the truck stop, say, 3 miles from Bond Street, and after Jim had coped with the repair we fell into an exhausted sleep.
In the morning, after a robust breakfast, we took the truck back to Petro-Canada and checked the tires again. The inside left once again showed no air. Clearly we could not proceed without repairs, so we set off for the tire place about a mile off, with what appeared to be becoming our customary drunken gait. About halfway there there was alarming POW! and we pulled off to look. The right inside rear had blown a 7-inch hole in its side wall. We finally crept to our destination and explained the problem. It was an unusual tire size of course but they miraculously had six on hand of which we took four to replace the four retreads in the rear, and $600 and an hour or so later we set off for Argentia again and arrived with no further excitement.
We got through both checkpoints at the ferry terminal with only minor argument about our “van,” a significant triumph since rejection from this ferry would mean a 500 mile drive across the province to the Port aux Basques terminal. So there we were, on, and deeply grateful for small mercies, in spite of the next 18 hours of epic discomfort we knew we are going to have to spend in the hands of CN Marine.
As I understand it, this particular ferry, the Ambrose Shea, was provided, as a young thing, with five diesel engines which drove four electric generators which provided the power to turn the two screws that pressed her doggedly through the sea. But that was a long time ago, and in line with their rigid policy of providing the worst ferry service possible CN Marine didn't squander a lot of resources on such trifles as maintenance, not to mention simple creature comforts for its hapless passengers. Thus
when one of the five engines collapsed sometime during the spring, it was simply abandoned on the theory that it might be useful as a source of parts for the other four. In this somewhat diminished state we steamed out of Argentia on Tuesday, July 26. Had we known this at boarding time we would not have been surprised when sometime in the middle of the night, following a very loud machine-in-distress noise, the ship essentially stopped moving. With half of the trip remaining, apparently one of the remaining engines had gasped its last along with two of the generators and we were reduced to half power, if that. Thus it was that we limped into North Sydney around noon, instead of 8 AM as scheduled. We were told that this would mean no further Argentia runs this season and were faint with gratitude and pleasure that we had slipped in under this wire.
As soon as we were allowed off the poor sick thing we pressed on south through the gentle warmth of a green Cape Breton summer, taking two-hour turns driving, and were somewhere in the neighborhood of Truro, Nova Scotia, when I awoke from a fitful slumber to the scrabble of gravel, a pursued-by-devils look on Jim's face, and smoke pouring out from under the truck. A number of concerned citizens from the lumberyard we had taken refuge in were rushing towards us armed with fire extinguishers. The brakes were Absolutely and Uncompromisingly Seized. After fairly lengthy conversations with many of our would-be saviors we were finally left in the hands of the proprietor of the garage down the road who took a look and concluded that due to the size of the truck there was nothing he could do anyway, but suggested that probably the brakes were seized because they were overheated and that if we just left it there for an hour or two it should turn itself loose and we would be able to press on at least as far as Truro where there was a truck place which might be able to help us out.
He kindly dropped us off at a greasy spoon 2 miles down the road where we had a leisurely supper. By the time we strolled back to the lumberyard, the brakes had sure enough let go, so we proceeded to Truro to discuss our misfortunes with the truck place which explained that they had no idea what could be wrong since all the trucks they had anything to do with rejoiced in air brakes and ours were hydraulic. So with a sinking feeling we pressed on towards New Brunswick. By divine dispensation, we got all the way through New Brunswick with no mechanical failures; the border crossing took a painless 20 minutes; Maine unfurled beneath our wheels; and there we were in New Hampshire.
One of the first landmarks to greet the eye of the passing motorist on The Interstate as it makes its way north into the Granite State is the largest liquor store on earth. Whole tour buses come up from Boston to stand in amazement at its portals and equip themselves with huge supplies of inexpensive intoxicants. Needless to say, us rubes, fresh off the boat from the most-expensive-booze capitol of North America could hardly be expected to pass up such an opportunity, so we pulled in and took on a few staples and a jug of Mumm's to celebrate our safe arrival. When we returned to the Yellow Peril, alas!, it was to find that the brakes had done it again. So we whiled away an hour sitting on the grass among the dog manure watching the happy citizens groaning out of place under immense loads of Party Fuel. We were only about two hours from Lebanon, so when we finally got underway again we very reasonably figured this was the Last Lap. But it was Not To Be. About 15 minutes from home we seized again and had to stop at a truck stop for another hour, gnashing our teeth and drinking Pepsi and looking at the magazines and souvenirs of air fresheners in the form of elves and all the ostentatious people just getting into their vehicles whenever they felt like it and driving away. But finally it was our turn, and we set off on what really was the last lap and arrived in the heat of that Friday afternoon (which was considerable) at Our New Home.
Our first act was to plug in the fridge and load a bunch of beer into it. Then the serious business of unloading the truck commenced. We labored mightily for as long as we could stand the heat and then went to reward our efforts with a nice cold beer only to discover that after an hour or two our so wonderful fridge was still warm. We told the landlady, drank a couple of warm beers, and continued unloading. Next morning a repairman arrived to fix the fridge and was at it for several hours. In the meantime, I had done a laundry and had slung it into the dryer. I was chatting with the repairman about the prognosis for the fridge when the dryer gave up the ghost with an ear-splitting squeal. Fortunately the repairman had the afflicted part in this truck and fixed it up in jig time before returning unsuccessfully to the fridge. The landlady promised us a new fridge Monday and we set off for Shoreham in a much lighter truck to offload goods to be stashed in the basement there.
In the ensuing week in Vermont we replaced the exhaust pipe of Thunderguts, many many parts large and small involved in the brakes and other front-end functions on the treacherous Honda, delivered up Her Majesty to the truck place to be FIXED and no kidding and arranged for the phone to be repaired which had suddenly died about 20 minutes after I had called some garage or other. We then made our way back to Lebanon where we have that phone repaired and then Jim went back up to Newfoundland with a new clutch under his arm for the Corvette.
Finally the Entropy Wave that pursued us for five months and six political units was exhausted. Jim drove all the way back (they fixed the Ambrose Shea long enough for him to get on it) in his antique Corvette and arrived unscathed in a timely manner, we sold the Very Yellow Truck a month or so later and I finally ditched the unspeakable Honda when its engine seized over the winter and that was that until the hot water heater blew. But that is another story.  

We are surrounded by perkiness, apparently an affliction primarily of girls, but a lesser number of older women as well as men of all ages. It manifests as a chirpy tone of voice, a vacuous smile and an unshakable conviction that its practitioner is a fascinating conversationalist. It is also associated with the lamentable delusion that those lacking these symptoms are in some way infirm if not clinically depressed, and need to be snapped out of it one way or another.
I dread my biannual trip to the dentist, not out of fear of dentistry in general or my dentist in particular but rather because the first phase of any such visit is half an hour at the mercy of a perky young thing, whose name might be Tiffany, wearing a smock with puppies on it who is apparently unable to spend a single moment free of light-hearted commentary on food, dogs, her children, other people's children, the weather, today's political scandal, something that happened on American Idol, amusing anecdotes involving almost anybody, the shocking price of gasoline, and any of a hundred other topics that crash through her mind like a trapped Dragonfly in a doomed search for the exit.
I tried once just to file the tumult away as mere background racket, like bad music in another room, a meaningless annoyance that could just be ignored. It worked pretty well until, after a few blessed moments of indulging in my own thoughts, I noticed that all sound and motion had ceased. Then I noticed that Tiffany was giving me a good hard look. Clearly I had missed something, something that required a response, and now Tiffany was annoyed. I tried to look cheerful and attentive and vocalized something that I hoped was sufficiently vague that she could read into it whatever she wanted. Unconvinced, she went back to work with greater than average energy and thoroughness with one of those diabolical hooked things they use to clean the plaque out of the very marrow of your bones. Which is how I discovered that it was necessary to listen to these monologues at least well enough to respond appropriately as needed.
In another memorable instance, my ancient cousin, Chrissie, and I went to a chop house in Burlington with the idea of eating, perhaps, a steak and a salad and discussing this and that. A quiet evening for a couple of old dolls with bad eyesight to reminisce and gently gossip. So imagine our dismay when an eager associate (I believe they are now called) with a metal thing through her eyebrow and a skirt barely long enough to cover her pubic hair slid onto the bench right next to us and, with a kilowatt smile through perfect teeth announced, “HI, MY NAME IS CAROLINE AND I WILL BE YOUR SERVER THIS EVENING!” Then she slid a couple of menus to us as if they were secret messages from Chinese intelligence. Then she propped her elbows on our table and counted off the day's specials on her long, blood-red nails. “CAN I BRING YOU A DRINK WHILE YOU'RE DECIDING?” she trilled. And here she counted off all the beers they had on tap on her lurid claws. Being the bolder of the two of us, and having heard of none of the beers on the list, I ordered something completely at random, Chrissie had the same, and we were briefly left in peace.
When our beers came we instinctively moved closer together for safety, but the Lioness merely flashed us another kilowatt and left us. Then we picked out our food and waited. And waited and waited, wondering whether our lioness had been devoured by some larger predator, but finally she came, we ordered, our food arrived, and we were eating it as old farts often do, slowly, methodically, with many rest periods filled with conversation. Our Associate had an uncanny knack for sensing when we had hit a really interesting place in some story and she would materialize at that moment, crouch down so as to be at eye level and inquire “IS EVERYTHING ALL RIGHT? DO YOU NEED ANYTHING? HOW'S YOUR SALAD? ENJOY YOUR MEAL!”
She did this at least twice, apparently not having considered the notion that we might have called her over if we had found a Band-Aid under the steak or a spider in the salad.
It was never made clear whether she thought that, old and decrepit as we clearly were, we were also stone deaf, although how she thought we were communicating is hard to guess, or whether she always trumpeted like that to everybody. In any case, the volume of her remarks was not so much the issue as the delivery, which took the form of the sort of relentless cheerfulness often espoused by well-meaning nurses aids conveying information of any sort to one of their elderly charges. A jolly, happy Mickey Mouse voice announcing “Time for our bowel movement, Millie,” or “Your daughter was crushed under the wheels of a train this morning so she won't be in today, Mitch” or “I'm sorry you seem to have run out of money, so we have to throw you out into the street now, Maud.”
Here's what worries me: I imagine that time has passed, I am feeble and half-blind and evil-tempered and installed in some place that employs nurses aids. And one day one of these moppets rustles up to me there in my wheel chair and snatches away the Dorothy Sayers with the torn front cover I am reading for the third time. Then she loses my place and bleats for the tenth time that week “C'mon, Hon, you don't want to read that gloomy thing again – let's go down to the common area and play bingo.” And then I imagine gathering up the last dregs of strength left in my porous old bones, and springing up out of the wheel chair and grabbing the miserable wretch by the throat and choking the bumptious life out of her.
This is where my fantasy ends as I lose interest after this happy ending. But if there is any lesson to be taken from this story it is this: Do not tell me what kind of day to have.

The therapeutic value of writing takes several forms.
First there is the actual connection of a pen with paper. A fountain pen is best for this, and a nice smooth heavy vellum. You can lose yourself in this process, the troubles of the world falling away as the ink flows onto the paper and finally forms the loops and squiggles that convey “Worcestershire Sauce.” For best effect the W should be a tangle of swirls and eddies with a trailing banner that extends halfway across the line. It is a proud concept and should be rendered with elegance and dignity. It should lift the spirits.
For commonplace things such as “eggs” and “shoelaces,” simple script will do, but done slowly, feeling the almost imperceptible hiss of the pen as it forms the uprights and descenders. A short letter to your old auntie who barely knows what email is, bless her, should occupy about a third of your mind with thinking of things to say about the weather and your cousins, and the rest of it with the sensual pleasure of covering a nice piece of mauve paper with pleasing patterns of spikes and loops. It is a Zen-like process and a tonic to the soul.
Second there is the purgative effect of loosing a well-deserved blast of scathing ill-humor at the phone company, or the newspaper, about unsatisfactory service or the moronic or unscrupulous actions of some public servant. A really good head of steam can be developed if both can be demonstrated. Such compositions can have a number of positive effects. It is a good idea somewhere in your letter to make some reference to Myrmidons or Horatio at the bridge or the Augean Stables so as to let the buggers know that you are a person to be reckoned with. You will therefore probably have to brush up on your classics in preparation for the project and this in itself will broaden your mind. In rare cases you may even achieve redress for your grievances, but don’t count on it unless you have solid grounds for legal action and have made this clear in your letter. In any case simply putting a stamp on such a document and dropping it in the mail is a proven way to lower your blood pressure up to 20 points.
Third, writing things down enforces a rigor of thought and logic that is often lacking in speech. For example, in 1994 the Appalling Mr. Bush spoke thus: “Mars is essentially in the same orbit...Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.” Would the Pretender to the Throne actually have said this if he were writing it all down? Surely not, not even He, who later correctly observed, “Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.”
And finally there is the alchemical property of writing that can transform your personal crises into comic opera featuring airborne cream pies, hilarious pratfalls, and tumbling clowns. You may start your piece overwhelmed by the tragedy of your life, tears coursing down your wrinkled cheeks, steeped in the knowledge that your life is effectively over and nothing remains but this, your suicide note.
So you set the cup of hemlock down on your desk, blow your nose and start to compose your final jeremiad. By the time you get to the part where a family of skunks had moved into your wrecked car before the tow truck could even get there, a wry smile has crept across your puffy red face.
And when you reach the part about how your faithless lover nearly brained himself by tripping over his damned stereo system and falling face down in a heap of his precious bloody Guy Lombardo disks, breaking a good half of them, and his reptilian nose to boot, you are beginning to feel downright perky. And before you know it you notice you are aching for a cup of tea, so you pour the hemlock into a potted fern, go out for a quart of milk and by the time you get back you realize you needed a new car anyway, and what could you possibly have seen in that oaf?  So you stow your tearstained outpouring under a pile of magazines and check what’s playing at the CinePlex.

I am bemused. For two days the news media have spoken of nothing but the noisy murder of all those people in Arizona on Saturday.  We can all agree it was a Bad Thing.  My heart goes out to poor Gabrielle Gifford whose life is not likely to return to normal soon or ever.  A shame Christina Green, the little 9/11 child, was snuffed.  She should have had a 12th birthday.  And the only good thing about Judge Roll’s death is that it may lead to the execution of the skin-head who killed them all.
However, to pretend it is surprising that this sort of senseless mayhem is unusual in the country that brought you Columbine and the Beltway Snipers is disingenuous at best. And the sad truth is that this sort of thing goes on all the time.  In Chicago and New York and Los Angeles.  If we hear anything about these violent deaths it will be a 2-inch summary on an inside page.  After all these are brown people and they do this sort of thing all the time, but now we’re talking about white people in Tucson. 
Apparently two days after the main event there were flags being flown at half mast all across the country, and President Obama said the nation is Grieving and Shocked. Why?  Apparently 54 Gazans were killed or injured during the month of December last year.  No grief and shock for them?  But of course they were just foreigners, so it is understandable that Fox News would have limited interest in it.
However, each and every blessed day, 100 people across the country, this country, die in car crashes, 3 of them in Arizona.  The victims of this sort of violence were also expecting to continue their humdrum lives, much like Dorwin Stoddard who was killed protecting his wife. Do we just step over their mangled corpses without a moment’s grief and shock because their deaths are so routine?  Well, perhaps.  We cannot be expected to pay much mind to some news report that says, in effect, “100 more people crushed or maimed by their cars, same as yesterday.”  Not even a more exciting report like “Only 98 crushed or maimed, two less than yesterday. At this rate there will be no further traffic deaths in only 49 days!”
The luckless Gabe Zimmerman was tragically terminated at the age of 30, at the very beginning of what might have been a successful and distinguished career, leaving behind a brother and a grieving fiancée.  59 other people between the ages of 30 and 34 also died that day.  We know nothing about them, or about the other 60 who died Sunday while the news reports interviewed people who were in nearby shops or friends of the victims or local law enforcement folk who had lots of opinions.
There were something like 500 Americans killed in Afghanistan last year.  This number does not include those who were blinded or maimed or returned to their families back in the heartland to be warehoused like a side of beef for the rest of their lives.  This number also does not include the housewives and goatherds and school children who were sent off to their 72 virgins by the mighty American War Machine as suspected “insurgents.” 
This is an ongoing process and it would do us no harm to know more about it, beyond the occasional local news coverage of the return of a flag-draped coffin, the tear-drenched family at the airport, the stern, yet concerned, colonel saluting in a manly fashion while more flags snap in the background and the voiceover solemnly enumerates the many virtues of the fallen hero who is invariably fun-loving, inspirational, generous and sorely missed by all who knew him.  Slimy, brutal weasels never return in flag-draped coffins. Perhaps that is what set off the Arizona thug – no heroic homecomings for him.  Ever.
Meanwhile, while we are saturated by detailed reports of everybody remotely associated with the Tucson murders, the dead, the injured, the bystanders, the shooter, the shooter’s parents, the shooter’s lawyer, the first responders, the people in the next street  who heard the shots, the dog walker who had been there just an hour before, people who would have been there only their car wouldn’t start, while all these people are being documented and served up on the national news, there are other things happening.
For example, there must be something worth reporting coming out of all the ice and snow down in the bible belt.  And there’s the Annual Detroit Auto Show in full swing which the newshounds should be able to wring a paragraph or two out of.  
And we need to remind ourselves that there is life beyond us as well.  I haven’t heard much about the estimable Mr Assange recently, news from the Ivory Coast is thin and repetitive, the fuss in Sudan might actually affect us since we are bound to want to invade one side or another. There are huge floods in Australia, cholera in Haiti, stealth jets on the mat in China, Iran arresting vultures for spying, and yet what we hear about in vast and unnecessary detail is the late Dorothy Morris (her friends called her Dot), a retired secretary, and Phyllis Schneck who was a quilter and gave lemon curd to her friends.
I do not deny that these unfortunate people have been wronged.  I do not even begrudge them a spot on the evening news. What I do object to is the overwhelming attention paid to this lamentable event at the cost of other, larger concerns in our increasingly contentious world.

We didn’t even have an American Dream until 1931 when some guy made it up to put in a history book along with a lot of other stuff that was pretty borderline.  But what the heck – it has provided politicians and motivational speakers with a rallying cry for 80 years.  The charm of it is that it can be kneaded into pretty much any shape and flavored with whatever you are trying to sell, and your eager audience will throw their hats in the air and cheer.
Politicians were probably the first to realize its potential.  You’ve got your Republican standing up there among all the flags and bunting promising the dream of a tax-free Shangri La where all those welfare mothers have been starved out, and all the brown parasites have been sent back to wherever, and all the true, hard-working Americans are busy building pick-up trucks and automatic rifles to sell to each other. The speech doesn’t touch on the knotty problem of paying for the military necessary to backdrop all this, not to mention the police, the prisons, and the cost of relocating all the undesirables.  And the proud Americans who would prefer to spend their days kicked back on the La-Z-Boy burping Bud Light.  Not to mention the fact that a great number of the brown folk slated for removal have been here a good deal longer than the crackers who want them removed.
Not that Democrats are innocent of flamboyant excess.  Imagine The Great Man standing in front of the murmuring crowd in the school gym, self-consciously clad in a red flannel shirt to demonstrate that he is Just Like Us.  His American Dream involves free schooling, right up through the PhD level, free health care for all, social security to include an annual holiday in Florida, subsidized housing for the poor, public transportation, cheap gas, a chicken in every pot, and free beer. The cost to be absorbed by the rich.  There is no mention of what the rich might think of all this, nor of who the rich are considered to be.  No limits placed on medical conditions or procedures covered, or who are considered poor.  This is the democrats’ dream and they’re sticking to it.
All of this is loosely based on a very broad interpretation of The Constitution of the United States which, like the bible, can be called upon to support any position a clever orator can call to mind.  Thus it is hardly surprising that revival tent preachers and suchlike have their own view of the American Dream.  I deduce from the tracts I find tucked in my door or the trumpeting of some of our southern congressthings that their received wisdom is that this perfect world involves pretty little Christian white girls in freshly pressed dresses playing wholesome schoolyard games with happy little freckle-faced boys with parts in their hair.  There are lambs in the background, and trees, and a clean red barn, or perhaps smiling brown people all set to give them oranges or towels.  What this happy fantasy lacks is the housing projects and the flies and the massage parlors and all the countless features of the reality of the majority of American, not to mention the world’s, children.
For the most part, though, to people living ordinary lives, spending their days in a cube farm and their evenings driving their children to sports events, people with mortgages and 5-year-old cars, the American Dream is that any day now one of their children will demonstrate a unique and bankable skill that will lead them out of their tedious lives and unattractive subdivision and into a McMansion with an in-ground pool.  This hope has led to the pernicious notion that anybody can do anything, that no matter how dull-witted the child, it can be badgered into the Harvard School of Business and from there to CEO of whatever bank survived the depredations of previous waves from the Harvard School of Business.  This hope leads many of these people to oppose medical, educational, and tax reform, and various financial, commercial, and environmental regulations, since they know in their bones that one of their own is sure to make it big in one of these arenas and lift them up to the life of ease and excess that is their American Dream.
And then there’s the American Dream in all those distant fly-blown places we have bombed back to the stone age.  They have seen postcards showing tall buildings with no bullet holes, rolling green hills, handsome people in expensive cars.  They have seen the movies of people living in enormous houses, supermarkets bulging with food, running water, paved streets.  They sell everything they have, borrow the entire net worth of their extended families, promising to pay it back as soon as they get to the promised land and earn their first million by year’s end. What must they think when they actually arrive and move into a tiny apartment in a poorly maintained building along with two other families from the old sod.  Soon the parents find work in a sweat shop, the daughters ply the oldest trade in very short skirts and wobbly heels, and the sons go off to war and wind up bombing somebody else’s country back to the stone age in the name of peacelibertyandfreedom, which means no more to them than the lie of The American Dream.

I love ships. I love the sea. I love the throaty roar of marine diesels. I therefore thought I had died and gone to heaven when I managed to talk my way on board the HMCS Cormorant, a Canadian Navy sub tender bound for Lancaster Sound for various reasons, including sending its little sub down to the seabed off the Labrador coast to look for places where icebergs had hit the bottom and carved trenches in the sediment. I attended meetings to discuss the work. With earnest expression I spoke of dropstones and relict scours. In private I skipped and whistled sea chanteys.
Finally departure was imminent. I had packed and repacked a dozen times. Although I had never been troubled by seasickness, everybody involved in the trip warned me that it was lunacy not to start the trip with a Gravol, just to be sure. So I did. And I soon discovered that the primary effect of Gravol is drowsiness. A deep and insurmountable drowsiness. I first noticed this about the time we dragged our last box down into the hold. I flopped down onto it and was all set set for a little nap when a crewman bustled in and told me I had to move since he had to tie everything down. I shuffled back up the ladder to the deck and spotted a big soft coil of rope in which I made a nest and was just about sound asleep again when another crewman chased me off it, offering the weak excuse that he needed it. A lifeboat caught my eye and I was headed for it when yet another busybody threw a canvas over it and tied it down. I finally found a nook right up in the bow next to the anchor chain and went right to sleep for two hours, completely missing our departure from St John's harbor. But I wasn't seasick.
The HMCS Cormorant, it turned out, started life as an Italian fishing trawler. The Canadian government got a deal on it and made it over into a sub tender, which means that they added a large, heavy enclosure to keep the sub in and finally the large, heavy sub itself, which effectively moved the center of gravity a good deal higher than it once was. The result of all this was a very slow-moving little ship that wallowed like nobody's business in almost no sea at all.
There was to be another ship in our little convoy which was the HMCS Protecteur. This was a much larger, more serious navy ship, with guns and secret handshakes and no women. As we steamed out of port, the HMCS Protecteur was down in Halifax having a last minute repair. Nobody was concerned by our head start since we were such a pitiful scow and they were such a big sleek ship of the line and would catch up with us in a couple of days as soon as she was clear of Halifax.
So we settled happily into our routine of dining in the officers' mess, partying with the chiefs and petty officers, and chatting with the folks on watch.
We had put Newfoundland behind us and were on our way up the Labrador coast when word came that the mighty Protecteur was still stalled in Halifax. Our new instruction was to slow down until further notice.
Meanwhile, a storm had begun to form and seemed to be heading our way. The swells had already caught up with us and we wallowed constantly. Some of the crew started skipping meals and the first pea-green faces started to appear. After a couple of days the storm had developed as a tight little well with howling winds and green water over the bow. After the deafening crash of a thousand pieces of crockery at lunch one day we sustained life with sandwiches on paper plates.
Meanwhile, back in Halifax, the majestic Protecteur had developed another problem which might be fixed tomorrow if they could get the part. I was up on the bridge when the news came and so discovered that the Canadian navy was given to exchanging bible verses in a conversational sort of way. My father had told me that this was common during WWII when he was plying the North Atlantic, and that one of their favorites was Ecclesiastes 9:4 which explains “A living dog is better than a dead lion,” which I thought was entirely suitable for our situation. I think they might have used it if the Protecteur's captain hadn't outranked ours.
At length the storm passed. We took the sub out for a romp at some unscheduled location and started getting hot food again. We received orders not to cross 60ºN. We did another dive and another, and before you knew it, a month had passed. The Protecteur had still not left Halifax, and ice was beginning to form in Lancaster Sound. So we were called back. The trip was cancelled.

After another small storm we arrived in the Straits of Belle Isle, and steamed south between Newfoundland and Labrador. We saw a little iceberg. There was a chill in the air. The crew oscillated between ill-tempered crabbiness at being stuck out at sea for so long, and giggling euphoria at being so close to port.

We entered the long fjord leading to the Corner Brook harbor early one morning. It was sunny – a beautiful day. I went out on deck to admire the unfamiliar lumps on the horizon. Then I smelled the pines. Until that moment I had not understood how much I had missed the smells of land. As we steamed slowly down the fjord we passed hay-scented islands. And finally the homey smell of a fish plant.

I loved that cruise. Even the storm. I would do it again in a flash. But one of the most euphoric moments of those six weeks was standing on the dock at Corner Brook with the gulls squawking overhead and the querulous growl of rusty pick-ups in the distance, still swaying gently with the rhythm of the ship.

I believe this to be true: there is a magic in strangers. These mysterious beings have far more potential than the flesh-and-blood people we actually know. That dark-haired man at the airport picking through the NASCAR monthlies at the news vendor could be the next in line for the Swedish throne. Who knows? Or he could be the money man for Al Quaeda on his way to New York to assemble the funding needed for the definitive conquest of western Europe. Or maybe a high school social studies teacher from St. Louis come east for a quick visit with his mother who has been hounding him since last August to come see her. I know which identity I would prefer and which one is most likely but, most importantly, not which one is true.
People we don't know before we encounter them as part of a known group don't really qualify as strangers because right off the bat we know something about them. We may only know that they are members of the Baptist Curling and Garden Club, or friends with our old classmate, Adelaide, or take courses in renaissance poetry, but this is enough to assure us that this new untested person is probably not an ax murderer or a Columbian drug lord, since such people would not be present in these groups. A true card-carrying stranger is one about whom we know absolutely nothing beyond what our eyes tell us.
Any one of the plodding throng in the airport concourse could be a saint or a genius, a monster or a villain, while people who are actually known to us, with few exceptions, are merely humdrum. They may be comforting or abrasive, considerate or clever or dull as ditch water, they may complain or burp or slurp their soup, they may laugh at the wrong things and tell us we are wonderful, but for all their faults and virtues they lack the immense possibility of strangers.
I was jostling down a wide crowded sidewalk in New York once, scanning the oncoming throng for any signs of psycopaths, cutpurses, or gang rapists, which are known to prevail in such places, when I spotted a woman through the mobs. She had unremarkable clothes and no discernible make-up and was the most beautiful human being I had ever seen. She was tall and graceful and had a soft brown face that could launch a thousand ships. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I wanted to stop her and stare, but she saw me gawking, lowered her eyes and was gone. Now, in reality, she might well have had the voice of Marje Simpson, robbed poor boxes, and beat her children, but she will live forever in my mind as a perfect being, a goddess.
Then there was the young man at the Calgary airport. He seemed to be part of a group of university students headed for the slopes. The girls giggled and pushed to impress the boys with their light-hearted wit, while the boys romped and pushed and pretended they didn’t notice the girls. Meanwhile, my young man just stood waiting for the plane, neither a part of nor apart from the others. He possessed a massive dignity and self-possession that most politicians can only dream of. I imagine him transfixing crowds with speeches of great conviction and wisdom, stepping up to the podium to accept his Nobel prize, moving confidently through the board rooms of the nation solving intractable problems and settling labor disputes. Actually he probably sells pre-owned cars during the day and relaxes in his undershirt with a brew in the evening, but I'll never know.
Once I was travelling by train through Europe. The trip included a stopover somewhere and my understanding was that I would have to move from the car I was on to another car on the same train when we stopped since the car I was in was going somewhere else. Either that or I would have to change trains entirely. I wasn't exactly sure.
The carriage was one of those quaint arrangements favored by foreigners where you got to sit in a compartment with up to 7 other people with their bundles and boxes threatening to spring from the overhead rack into the startled faces of the other occupants. We were just about to pull out, and we were all casting optimistic glances at one another, thinking that we might get away with fully occupied rather than jam packed when the door slid open and a large businessman stepped in and stared at a too-small small gap among the passengers. Hoping that he would go somewhere else, the people next to this gap stood their ground until he headed right for them, kicking aside baskets and umbrellas on the floor. Then he rearranged the overhead rack to make room for his suitcase and sat.
Now we were moving, everybody had made themselves as comfortable as possible in the suddenly diminished space. After a minute or so the Interloper burrowed unto his jacket and came up with a big black cigar about the size, shape, and aroma of a dog turd, which he lit, with much puffing and cloud formation. In our tiny crowded compartment with all the windows closed. Happily I was sitting right next to one of the windows, and opened it as far as it would go, while some of the others glared daggers at the completely oblivious monster of depravity. The unruffled Interloper announced that he was sensitive to draughts and demanded that it be closed, ignoring the daggers, and so we rattled our way through rolling fields, picturesque woodlands and distant mountains, trying not to inhale.
At last we approached our destination. People started gathering up their coats and packages. I groped out my ticket to see if I could make sense of the instructions and laid plans to find an anglophone somewhere to tell me where the next train, should it not be this one, left from.
As I was gathering up my luggage the Interloper said something in German, of which I understand 3 words on a good day. I made a Gallic sort of “Dunno, sorry” gesture and edged toward the door. Then he snatched my ticket and was out the door and onto the platform. I picked up the pace and set off after him wondering if I should scream for help, hit him with my purse, grab him by the collar and what? It soon became clear that he was headed for a ticket window with a huge line. He stormed up to the front of the line, shoving aside all the people who had been standing there since lunch time and shoved my ticket through the bars barking commands or noisy explanations or something. It is really hard to find a suitable reaction when you have not the least faint clue what is happening so I just stood among the hostile customers clutching my luggage with the alert intelligent expression of a squirrel wrapped up in an anaconda.
Soon the fracas at the ticket window ended and my guy came out with a different ticket. He had discovered that as long as he had my ticket I would follow him anywhere like an imprinted duckling, so off we went at a great rate of knots past ticket windows, food kiosks, many platforms, finally turning down one of them until there was a conductor. Now he said a lot of things in German, he pointed to me, to the ticket, to the train, and then he was gone. The conductor helped me get my luggage onto the train, found me a seat, and in about 10 seconds, this new train had left the station. This final leg of my trip was long enough to reflect upon this bizarre interlude. I realized at last that this appalling loud, aggressive man with his disgusting cigar and complete disregard for his fellow passengers must have got a glimpse of my ticket with its final destination and, being familiar with this route, had known that there was a tight connection and for no reason beyond pure untainted kindness had done what would have taken me the rest of the week to do to get me on the right train headed in the right direction with seconds to spare.
What it comes down to is that a stranger is a sort of larval form, since it seems true that the transition from unknown to known necessarily involves some sort of transformation. My savior on the train morphed from mystery to brute in a matter of seconds. But then underwent a backflip and there he was applying for sainthood within a very short time. Most people make the transition invisibly. They start out essentially invisible, and slowly assume shape and name and then there they are, unique and startling, and we wonder why we can’t remember our first meeting.

My husband was the flip side of this. I noticed him immediately, tall, dark and handsome. This aura clung to him right up until we were married. This somehow triggered the transformation, which continued through a couple of years of squabbling and whining, and now, years later, all I can remember is the intestinal gas.

What record is left of the lives, aspirations, tragedies, and desires of the early members of our species? A footprint in beach sand, some bits of bone.These uncommunicative folk crept up out of Africa and percolated across 5 continents leaving only mysterious piles of stones, sharpened flint fragments, and a genetic heritage still evolving. Finally one of the more garrulous offshoots of the westbound throng babbled some frolicking buffalos onto the walls of a cave, the first step toward the New York Times.The Style and Financial sections still a long way into the future.

The first record keeping on a manufactured medium was a grocery list. Since the medium was manufactured out of clay it is easy to understand why they didn't get chatty with it, but still, they left a lot of details about their life and times to the imagination and deduction of graduate students past, present, and unborn.

By and by somebody found a sheepskin and wrote some bible stories on it. Word spread about this miraculous feat and others strove to duplicate it. This was progress.These stories related details about people: kings, prophets, generals. Even some mention of women; colorful women to be sure, like Jael and Deborah and Ruth. But as to their domestic arrangements or childhood diseases, hobbies, food fads, all of this is largely lost in the mists of time.

As time passed literacy spread beyond the scribes and clerics and before you know it people were writing diaries and books and poems. Many of these offered glimpses into the thoughts and lives of their authors.This private information was supplemented by pictures, paintings by young men with no useful skills. In general, the authors were men, since literacy was not high among the women and they were probably kept busy mending the Master's shorts and tending to the croupy babies and choosing an appropriate snood for tea with the bishop. Thus we have only the masculine account of life's annoyances and triumphs not only because most of the accounts were written by men but also because women had no voice except for the occasional queen or significant mistress. For this reason the conditions of childhood are virtually unknown, since children were entirely invisible, along with their nannies and the numerous mothers who were not queens or mistresses.

Before long, however, literacy began to spread, starting with the rich or at least the comfortable who didn't have to work 16 hour days, and soon the feminine slant emerged in the form of stories of romance: handsome brooding heroes and sensitive heart-broken heroines with a tendency toward the vapors. We get a good long look into the details of the household – what the upstairs maid did, what went on in the scullery, who slept with whom and what happened next.

The next phase of our plunge into self-revelation was the appearance of the penny-dreadfuls and the ladies magazines, closely followed by the confessional magazines, crime stories, specialized periodicals dealing with every imaginable interest: cookery, home décor, automobiles, pets, electronics, science, antiques, literature, travel, soft porn, baseball, agriculture, knitting, warfare, hard porn, and the intersection of any or all of these. Not to mention the movies and the TV shows, the miles of celluloid capturing interviews and stories and the behavior of giraffes. It is impossible to imagine that anthropologists of the future would have the slightest trouble finding out anything at all about Us and our world in the middle of the 20th Century.

One dares to hope that the trend has peaked with the recent spate of public airings of a startling variety of personal flaws and peculiarities ranging from certain bizarre misunderstandings of the law as revealed to Judge Judy to the barely credible psychological kinks retailed on the many salacious interview shows in which seemingly normal people tearfully reveal to the panting viewing public their most private and embarrassing problems and perversions.

And then, among all this, there came the internet, and the slow rise of the online access to almost anything, and suddenly these media have started slowly slowly to transplant themselves from the grocers' shelves and tape libraries to The Cloud, byte by byte shifting from prime shelf space to some humming, windowless server farm, from a tangible, curatable object to electrons. All of the juicier segments from Dr. Phil and Oprah are currently available on YouTube and subscriptions to most of those special interest print publications are available online, with the rest either soon to follow or soon to fold. But where will all this information be in 20 years? 50 years? Files created less than 30 years ago on an obsolete computer and stored on the 8" floppy disks common at the time are gone. It is impossible to guess what improvements in operating systems or storage media will render today's archives unreadable, but for all our hypercommunication, social media, widespread literacy, online news outlets, it is entirely possible we have come full circle. That we will leave behind no more evidence of our lives for the archaeologists of the future than our forebears in the stone age. Such a tragic loss to Posterity that our descendants 100 or 1000 years hence will never know of our struggles to achieve orgasm, to cope with hair loss, to stamp out the evils of socialism. Will be denied the timeless wisdom of Geraldo and Rush Limbaugh.

I  picked up a Seven Days the other day because it was there on the way out the door and so that I could then huffily assure my detractors that yes, of course I read the papers.  And the price was right. 
Then when I got home I put it on the counter to ripen for a few days and finally sat down with a cup of coffee to look it over.  Of course I started at the back where the funnies are, but even before I got to the funnies, there were the Personals. 
Now I enjoy the peculiarities of my fellow creatures as much as the next creature, but for sheer overload you cannot beat the Personals, each one an astonishing little story.  This week's issue offered up 6 categories to satisfy most tastes: 
Women Seeking Women 
Women Seeking Men 
Men Seeking Women 
Women Seeking ? 
Men Seeking ? 
Other Seeking ? 
Even just allowing the mind to strum these possibilities gets the imagination aware if not fully alive.  Why no Men Seeking Men? Are they all already paired off? Do we, like Iran, have no gay men?  Are they too timid to seek companionship in print media?  Then there are the Men/Women Seeking ? categories.  That "?" opens whole worlds – the variety of needs, goals, desires they might be seeking could leave a person dizzy with possibilities: exotic pets, bicycles, depilatory cream, happiness, butter churns, riches, barnyard animals, depression glass, playwrights, wild, panting, sweaty, screaming sex in an elevator. All things considered, the last is most likely, but still... 
And then finally there is Other Seeking ?  There are 7 items in this category which I will save for dessert. 
But back to the beginning, of the 27 people seeking other human beings of the same or different gender, if you believe what the ads say, all are just looking for somebody to go to the movies with, except for one bold female who is “looking for a discreet girlfriend for fun times in and out of bed,” and a 44 year-old gent named bigboots looking for “...someone to play with...”  Pretty tame stuff.  
But next up we have women seeking ? and it finally becomes clear that ? means “sex,” and who'd have guessed there would be so many variants and acronyms. Several querents were looking for others interested in BDSM which apparently has to do with bondage, dominance, and sado-masochism.  Others were looking for “NSA summer fun.”  That would be “No Strings Attached,” and is being sought by a young thing who is turned on by tattoos, among others. 
One ad explains that her husband is dull as ditchwater and she is looking around for “discreet encounters to leave us breathless and wet.” Another suggests a torrid threesome, adding “Taped for personal use only.” No details given as to what is considered personal use – training sessions for future threesomes? An amusing entertainment for the next Christmas party? A bit of light-hearted blackmail in case one of the participants runs for office? 
The Men Seeking ? offer a wider spectrum of desiderata than the girls did. One message entitled WOODLAND CREATURE posted by a party named foodofthegods says, in its entirety, “A mole in the field of existence.” I guess this must be code for something, but I can't imagine what. At the other end of the spectrum we have  “I'm just an aspiring college freshman looking for a one-night stand.  That's all, nothing else.” No code there. 
Apart from these, most of the rest of the Men Seeking ? are looking for slap and tickle of one sort or another especially pappahobbit, a 49 year old navy veteran, whose message, entitled LOVING SPANKING DADDY invites contact from a submissive female (no age range given) or “select male between 18 and 29 that needs or wants regular spankings.” 
Finally I dipped into Other Seeking ? and was disappointed to learn that the members of this group were couples looking for some recreational swapping. Almost all demanded that applicants be clean and many insisted that they themselves were. Most seemed to be looking for just a bit of vanilla swapping, although there were a couple of ads called HYPERSEXUAL COUPLE NEEDS THE SAME and INSATIABLE APPETITES FOR SEX!!! who seemed to be looking for variations on the theme including “toys,” whatever that implies. One of these even invited “those with ethnic background” which surely demonstrates their sophistication. 
Reading through these little paragraphs gives me a glimpse into the lives and hopes of strangers I will probably never know. But the other half of the equation is the people who actually answer the ads.  I try to imagine them sitting there at their kitchen table with their sticky fingers following the lines of print and thinking what fun it would be to be spanked by pappahobbit, pushing their smudged glasses back on their nose and reaching for the phone. An exercise for another day.

I recently read Kathryn Stockett’s extraordinary book,The Help, set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early days of the civil rights upheavals. The primary protagonists are some black domestics and their white employers. As the story unfolded I kept flashing back to the distant untroubled years of my childhood in Buckingham, Pennsylvania, just 50 easy miles from the Mason-Dixon Line. Any resemblance to Jackson was thin at best. We did not have lynchings and everybody used the same toilets and buses as far as I know. However, there was a black community, although I don’t recall seeing many of them except for a very small number, some of whom played starring roles in my early maintenance and instruction.

Howard Blackstone, for example, who worked across the road for my grandfather on a small, diverse farm. His primary skill was blacksmithing and he made a wide variety of things like horse shoes and hinges and cart wheels and such. But it was a small farm with limited needs for blacksmith products, so Howard did other things as well.

One late fall day in, perhaps, 1938 or so my father, a young man at the time, and Howard were sent to Brown Brothers auction to look for something or other for the farm. It was the sort of auction where just about anything might turn up – shovels and tractors and poultry and tedders and yokes and plows and watering troughs, a wide variety of stuff that some farmer somewhere in the county discovered that they didn’t need anymore. They wandered back and forth along row after row of rusty implements and anxious goats until they got right to the back where the small items were displayed, or dumped, depending on your aesthetic sense, and there they found a great chain, a large, robust chain suitable for pulling stumps and freeing mired tractors. Their bid was successful and so by and by they returned to the distant reaches of the auction yard to collect their prize. My father took one end of it and Howard took the other and they started winding their way back to the parking lot. It was not long before my father noticed that their little parade was attracting attention. Gaping stares, in fact. When he turned around to look he discovered that Howard had wrapped his end of the chain around his neck and was staggering tragically along, arms raised heavenward.

Some years later when I was very small we had a sleigh, and a horse to go with it and enough snow in the winter that Howard could take us kiddies out for a toot around the neighborhood. There were bells attached to some part of the harness and we jangled along just like something out of a Bing Crosby movie. I don't remember where we went but photographic evidence still exists that we went somewhere. Mostly I remember just starting out from the barn leaving brown streaks in the snow until the rust was cleaned off the runners.

It was about this time that Nancy came to us. She lived in the room over the kitchen, a large spacious affair that she referred to as her house, as in “Don't you come into my house before you wash your hands!” She previously worked for the neighbors across the street who always resentfully accused us of poaching her away from them, but I once got a look at the broomcloset she lived in there and can't imagine that it was a difficult negociation.

She was a Jehovah's Witness, a strike against her which I think caused some parental discomfort, but she was made to understand that the children were to be washed and fed, not converted. And so it was that our religious instruction or lack of it was left up to my parents and the Buckingham Friends School. However, she did take us with her when she went around peddling Watchtowers and I have always wondered what her customers thought when this young black woman turned up at their doors with two little white tykes in tow.

I think she was secretly appalled by the bad habits my parents lavishly indulged in like drinking and smoking, but she had the good sense never to say anything about them. The only hint came one morning after the annual traditional cocktail party the parents always held for the neighborhood during which all their respectable friends, doctors and bankers and stockbrokers and such came and drank themselves blind and then wobbled and swerved on home in the great swaying behemoths issued by Detroit in those days. The residue after these extravaganzas was an unimaginable number of bottles. My father was struggling out to the end of the driveway with great clattering sacks of these one day when Nancy appeared on some errand.

My father boyishly observed “If anybody were to look into our trash, they'd think we were a bunch of lushes.”

“They got no business looking in your trash!” replied Nancy indignantly.

At one point she fell afoul of the IRS. It couldn't have been a catastrophe on an absolute scale since she didn't have the assets for it. But it was a catastrophe in her eyes and she was nearly undone when she finally asked my father to help with it. It took a while for him to understand what the problem was partly because of her non-linear and barely comprehensible account of the matter and partly because all IRS personnel involved were referred to as “the man at the post office,” which apparently stood in for any functionary she had been in touch with. The matter, whatever it was, was finally resolved after a few more conversations with the Man at the Post Office, and ever after that I think she considered my father to fall somewhere between saint and genius and slayer of dragons.

Nancy was a city girl. She lived in Philadelphia when she wasn't with us. She also had a son. That was a long story I didn't hear until half a century had passed. She had relatives in Philadelphia who looked after this child while Nancy was with us, during the week. Then she would return to the city on the weekends. In the summer she would take along armloads of vegetables which my father grew in abundance, including a row of okra grown especially for her since none of the rest of us would touch it. In fact the only cruel thing she did to us during our long association was to make us eat that stuff, and, to her credit, she only did it once.

We also had animals, some sheep, a couple of steers, a couple of horses. These were, for the most part well-behaved creatures. They stayed within the boundaries alloted to them except on those rare occasions when a fencepost fell down or a gate was left open on which occasions they would taste the heady brew of liberty and other peoples flower beds and steps would have to be taken to get them back. In a clear demonstration of the existence of cosmic pranks, these daring escapes most often took place 2 or 3 days after my parents left on a 3 week trip to the back side of the moon, leaving Nancy in charge of our small world with the promise of help from my grandfather, if necessary and available. It was a monument to her courage that she was prepared to face down these large creatures that terrified her with the implacable dignity of a Masai queen, armed only with her trusty broom, her weapon of choice in the face of all perils.

I went to visit her once in South Carolina where she was living in retirement near her brother. Her house was small, cluttered and cleaned to within an inch of its life. There were framed photographs here and there of various events and family members, and I was surprised to discover that during the time she spent with us she was drop dead gorgeous. Why hadn't I noticed this at the time?

It was during that visit that she told me about her failed marriage. She was married at the age of 19 or 20 soon after completing her nursing training. Her husband was in some sort of business that took him and his new bride to Toronto. They got a small house in the sort of place where the back fence is about 10 feet from the kitchen window and she was left in it to wash the dishes and dust the furniture while he went off into the Great World to ply his trade. She hated it. It was cold, grey, and she didn't know anybody. Soon she was pregnant. Then one gloomy day she was standing at the sink looking out the window at the neighbor's trash cans over the back fence and realized that now she was Absolutely Stuck. She would be bound to this dreadful place by her husband and soon her child and then no doubt other children and she would never see her childhood friends again, never feel the intense summer sun of South Carolina on the back of her neck, never experience the joy of her church back in Philadelphia. And so it was that one day she packed up her clothes and returned to Philadelphia where she was taken in by her many friends and relatives. How she came to work out Beyond the 'Burbs I never did learn.

In any case, Nancy and Howard and a small number of others, casually met, represented all black people to me. So when the race riots and civil rights upheavals hit the headlines I was mystified. I could not imagine why anybody would want to exclude these people from the country's mainstream. At the same time, I have come to understand that I actually know nothing about the reality of these people I thought I was so close to – where did they go to school, what were their prospects, how did they come to live the lives they did. Were they happy?