Novel Uncompleted Turns Reality

Looking back from so many years later it may seem silly to say I never completed a certain novel out of fear. "Fear of what", you may ask, "that some evil doppelgänger of a character might spring to life like a Stephen King plot?"
No, it wasn't that, but something a little bit like it. Perhaps the plot would become reality and that would have been terrible.

It appears a silly notion because I am not a household name author. In fact, I am a barely known, barely noticed writer, and that not even as a novelist. I have in my lifetime had quite a few stories, poems, articles, reviews and other non-fictions bought and published, as well as a song, a couple plays, some cartoons and even photography, but never a novel.

It isn't I never penned (or keyboarded) a novel. I actually did a few, and in fact, I considered one of the earliest things I wrote, when I had just turned twelve, a novel. It really wasn't truly lengthy enough to fill the bill, but in did have chapters, so a novel I called it.  I not only called it a novel, I called my novel, IT.  Yes, I beat the aforementioned Stephen King to that title. It was a pastiche or perhaps a mishmash of Robert Lewis Stevenson's Treasure Island, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Doc Savage.

(It was not the only title Stephen King infringed off me. My wife and I did a kind of graphic novel in

1968 called Danse Macabre, a title he used a few years later. Of course, that title goes way back, so we all kind of borrowed it. I even had a book of classic erotica (the elitist terminology for old-time pornography) with that title. Mr. King's book was not a novel either. It was a non-fiction about horror literature. My wife and mine concerned the rash of civil rights riots occurring across America at the time.

We used pen names as you can see from the cover, "Jean O'Heaney & Eugene Lawrence".  I was using "Eugene Lawrence" as a non de plume on what I wrote in the Underground Press during the 'sixties. I also published under the byline "Loop" in that period of time.

Anyway...a couple years after It I penned a second novel called Attention, Teacher!.   That book was pretty autobiographical, dealing with my first couple years in junior high school; although, it was slightly exaggerated for dramatic effect and the names were changed to protect the innocent or more to the point, protect me from a beating. It also was a good bit longer than my first boyhood attempt, but still fell short. It might have passed for a short novelette or a long short story with chapters.

I probably could rewrite this one and make it into an honest novel about coming of age. I think it was pretty humorous, but maybe it would be best to keep it under wraps until certain friends of mine either pass on or go into senility; although, there is a good chance I won't outlast them to those ends.

Undaunted, I made another attempt at a novel at age 16. This was a much more serious endeavor, deeper and epic in scope. The title was, "Breadth of the Earth" it was conceived to be an allegory of the end of the world.  I sort of bogged down somewhere along the line with that one and it almost became the end of the novels for me. I felt more comfortable sticking with the short story, comedy sketches and poetry.

In 1960 I did pull together three novellas into a collection under the title, Smoke Dream Road. This sounds like a drug themed thing, but it had nothing to do with drugs at all. "Smoke" was a sic-fi story of a future totalitarian state. "Dream" was a radical reworking of my very first venture, the so-called novel, It. I probably rewrote that thing every year of my teens, each time getting further and further away from the original plot, as well as using up a lot of titles going from It to Quicksand Island to Dream of Horror to just plain Dream. Road was a horror story about a dead teenager trapped where he had been killed and a tale of vengeance, original title, "Hot Rod Road".

I actually like these tales, but I never got them into the computer and they are so long I've put off the retyping. I am not only getting old; I'm getting lazy. (By the way, if my friend, Ronald, ever reads this post, he may recognize his old home on Boot Road was used for the cover design.)

"Hot Rod Road", of course, fell into a common theme in my stories during my mid-to-late teens. I was a great fan of Henry Gregor Felsen's novels at the time and also Hot Rods were a part of life where I lived then. Hot Rods and my life experiences became the basis for the next two novels I did, Come Monday and Forty-Dollar Car.

The oddity in these two separate novels written five years apart (1964 and 1969 respectively) is both were based on the same events, yet they are about as different as could be.

Come Monday (originally titled, Ronald Candle) revolves around cars and three boys who are best friends, and has tragic consequences for all three. For anyone who wonders about writer's use of self in characters, two of the main ones are based upon your's truly. "Ronald Candle" was who I believed I was; "Casey Scott" was who I wished to be. "Jerry Wakefield" was based on my very close friend at the time, Richard Wilson. Rich and I were not only friends, we co-wrote a number of pieces and stole cars together.

Consider Come Monday a tragedy and Forty-Dollar Car a comedy, two sides of the same coin. There were two main characters in Forty-Dollar Car, Eric Walters and Frank March. Once more Rich Wilson was the model for "Eric" and I was the model for "Frank". If ever you stumble across a story I penned by accident or purpose and you see a character named "Frank March", you'll know that is my alter ego and the story probably has a lot of autobiographical information hidden within. "Frank March" is my "Nick Adams", and Forty-Dollar Car is very autobiographical. It is pretty close to non-fiction, except for the ending. I even stuck my mug on the cover along with the real forty-dollar car that Rich had bought when he was 16. (Richard Wilson, pictured left in 1957, prematurely died in 1994 at age 53.)

After Forty-Dollar Car I didn't complete another novel until 1998 with Gray. I consider Gray a dark

and frightening story. It tells of a stranger who shows up in this peaceful community and he is never known by any name except "The Gray Man". He is there for a very nefarious reason involving kidnapping and human trafficking. The theme is no where is safe from evil or terror.

And that word terror brings us to where this whole exercise was aiming from the beginning.

In the near 35 years between completing Come Monday and Gray, I did have several ideas for other novels that I outlined. There were two on which I even did a considerable amount of writing.

In 1978 I worked on Red Moon Rapist, a story about mistaken identity,  false accusation, political exploitation and news media sensationalism. It had some basis in the growing graphic depiction of sex in Philadelphia Art Theaters and the political career of Frank Rizzo. There were a number of events in my life that interrupted my writing career during and after that year. For one, our first child was born. Life interfered with art and I never got back to that book.

But  in 1966 I had been well along in a novel when I made a conscientious decision not to finish.

Why? Why did I do that?

Well, back in 1966 I was beginning to sell what I wrote pretty regularly both in the Underground Press and in the above ground press. I still held onto dreams of making it big as a writer, you know, best sellers, Pulitzers, National Book Awards, the Nobel Prize. The culture around me was changing rapidly, too. It seemed to be bordering on revolution and the assassination of President Kennedy three years earlier appeared to be a harboring of some downward spiral for this nation. By 1966 the Civil Rights Movement had grown and was about to bleed, Medgar Evers had been gunned down, marches had occurred in Birmingham and "Bloody Sunday" in Selma and the Black Panther Party just formed. The youth of the country was drifting away from old values. The Diggers were pushing against private property in San Fran, the Hippies were becoming a movement and the drug culture of LSD was taking root. Protests were also breaking out over the escalating Vietnam War and in 1965 President Johnson had behind closed doors signed an Executive Order removing the exemption from the draft for married men without children. There was a growing need for cannon fodder in Southeast Asia. I had received my own "Greetings" from Uncle Sam almost immediately. Chaos, anarchy and riot was blowing in the wind.

All this seismic activity socially was being reflected in art, in music, in theater and film. Along with everything else, an assault on the repressive stances on sex exploded around the cities. In Philadelphia came peep shows right in Rittenhouse Square and then a spate of "Adult" Bookstores. Nudity and sex was no longer in the shadows of the red-light districts.

And I began a novel about this upheaval. The book was called,
"Raab", and Raab was a popular folk singer, pattered after Bob Dylan (left), with perhaps a bit of Phil Ochs (right) thrown in, who grew in fame, but then dropped from sight as his music became the anthem for disenchanted youth and angry revolutionaries.

Eventually a group of these Raabite protesters turn more and more violent and resort to terrorism in their efforts to change America. They used attacks on malls, movie theaters, schools, anywhere that would cause people to fear living normal lives and they used a tactic of making it look like Black civil rights groups were behind these acts in order to foster a racial war.

Then the fear set in. What if I did finish this novel and what if someone did publish it and what if it sold well and what if...what if it gave some radical group ideas? What if the schemes of the villains in "Raab" inspired exactly that kind of terrorism.

So I File 13'd it.

Now it seems the repugnant ideas I had nearly fifties years ago as fiction are becoming reality.  I don't know if the reality can be so easily trashed.

And Then...

I was on the computer at home, not particularly unusual for me in the morning. It was somewhat later than a normal Tuesday though. For most of the Tuesdays for 21 years prior to that one I would have been sitting at a desk at work by 8:30 AM. I wasn't this time because I had been "retired" the week before.

I was putting together some information about my career for an outsourcing meeting I was to have later in the day.

At some point I was skimming the web when a headline popped up. It said, "A plane has accidentally crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City."

How odd. I figured it was a small plane, some private jet gone astray. I left the computer and went to the living room and flicked on the TV. I didn't have to search for news. By now it was on all the channels and it was not some little plane. It was a big plane, a large commercial jet.

And then...

A second plane crashed into the other tower and this was no accident.

There was chaos, confusion, panic. Another report quickly followed, a plane crashed into the Pentagon in DC. Rumors floated in, reports of planes here, there, everywhere it seemed, although most quickly proved just false fears...except one, which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

On the TV it seemed some disaster movie was playing, one with amazing special effects. Giant plumes of smoke poured upward over Manhattan.

And then...

A tower crumbled downward, great pillows of dust rose like a poisonous fog embracing all that stood about it. People were running, screaming, down the streets. Behind them came the dark gray shroud, seemingly chasing after them, trying to swallow them up.


No one knew anything. The images just kept going on and on and I sat down and watched, unable to take my eyes off what was happening, and like the chattering reporters I listened to, knew not knowing why it was happening.

And then...

Our way of life forever changed. Things have been different ever since. There is never a true sense of real safety. Doing many once mundane things has become more inconvenient, especially flying. Wars have been begun and they go on and on and on. And I don't know who to believe about anything anymore.


During that morning I wondered about my meeting. It was to be the first of several to teach me how to get a new job. I tried calling the place, but no one answered the phone. I didn't know whether to get dressed and drive to the city or not. In the end I decided not to go and as it turned out I made the right choice.

My meeting was to be held on the top floor of the tallest building in town. Someone made the decision to cancel all activity in that building for the rest of that day. No one knew the targets. My city was a financial center, a banking town, and the tallest building was owned by a then very well known, large New York bank.

In the days afterward I talked with a friend who had also been kicked out of a job where we had been employed. He was also scheduled for a meeting in that same tall building on that day. He had other things on his mind that morning. One of his daughters worked at the World Trade Center and the train she took was scheduled to arrive at a station beneath the towers at 8:45 AM. That morning he wasn't concerned with finding a new job, he was concerned with finding out if his daughter was safe.

In one of those strange quirks of fate, his daughter had been to a party on Monday evening and coming home tired, had forgot to set her alarm. She over slept and missed her train. She was safe.

And then...

For sometime after I felt a nervousness whenever I was out walking and a plane engine caught my ear. We are on the path for landing at Philadelphia International Airport. Planes come overhead low in the sky. I would look up and wonder, "Isn't that plane much too low?" There are chemical plants all around us, and refineries, and just across the river a nuclear power plant. And so I would watch the plane move into the distance with that thought, "Isn't that plane too low?"

That is some of what I remember from that day.

Photo taken by the author.

Where Civilization Crumbles: Viewing Rockwood

So we are gathered under the spreading chestnut tree or what the heck this spreading tree is. We've been mulling time over our mulled wines and now it is time to pick up where we left off the other day when our batteries died.

This little grouping of chairs is on the front or back yard of the Rockwood Mansion. I have still not figured out what to call this yard, perhaps I'll just refer to it as The Yard. There really isn't a yard on the other side, the front of the building, just a driveway.

Now one of my invisible buddies here, probably after a one, two or few cups, chides me about this constant battery problem I keep having. He wants to know if I'm entering my dotage never being properly prepared for my excursions.

His friend, also invisible, is even more invective.

"You have two battery chargers sitting in a drawer under a virtual log jam of rechargeable batteries. Why aren't you all charged up, man?"

Good question, but to tell the truth I've found the rechargeable batteries sometimes undependable and yes, I tend to forget to plug in the charger enough ahead to assure a full charge. So I just go out and buy a pack of Duracell Coppertops. I picked up a 20 pack yesterday for $7.50. That's not a bad price. I don't get Energizers too often ever since the Bunny Rabbit United Union filed complaints about the Energizing Bunny not taken any breaks and just going and going and going. I think the last straw was when those aliens hooked his ears to jumper cables.

But enough of this chit-chat or we'll never get through this place. Let's get back on the trail where I left off last time I brought you all here. We had just swung around some evergreens behind the expanse of The Yard. That path just looks out on another wide splotch of grass, the yard beyond The Yard.

We're going to follow this path hereabout and see what kinds of things might be happening today.

It is, as usual for me, early in the morning, not long after sunrise. There were no cars in the parking lot when I arrived and still weren't as I started this walk.

Doesn't mean we won't make some acquaintances along the way. This is on the Northern Greenway after all and people stroll in here from Bellevue and Bringhurst (remember we mentioned Mary Bringhurst last visit) and even Alapocas Run.

Personally, I often like it this way, quiet solitude. It is a funny thing how some trails attract a crowd and others leave you with plenty of elbow room. For some reason you hit more traffic out in Brandywine Creek State Park. Lot of walkers and a lot of bicyclist seem attracted there for some reason. The Little Woman and I like to walk there as well, but for the most part it is a straight wide path through the woods along side the Brandywine. It doesn't have the twists, turns, hills and thrills of this place, which may be the reason for the preference and the feeling it is where civilization crumbles and sets me free of its hold.

Oh by the way, we can see the whole back of the mansion from here.

We actually walked Brandywine Creek State Park a lot, especially back when the kids were little. We would take them there to romp. It is there we find the example of bureaucracy good mad, a handicap parking spot next to the start of the hiking trail.

I've walked Brandywine Park probably more than any other actually. Now don't get confused, Brandywine Park is in downtown Wilmington and near the start of the Northern Greenway. It is a city park, not a state park. Being downtown is why I walked it more than any other because I always went for a long walk on my lunch hour when I worked in town.

Oh, one thing you will notice, Joseph Shipley, or perhaps the Bringhursts, were very fond of gazebos and they pop up several times at Rockwood. We saw one down in the lower pasture a couple photos back and we'll come to one on the high ground later.

We just passed one at the edge of The Yard.

I had to stop here and tie my shoelaces. For some reason modern shoelaces won't stay laced. You tie, walk a bit, and have to retie.

Now where were our thoughts as we strolled past the gazebo point? Ah, we were talking about Brandywine Creek State Park and Brandywine Park. It does get a bit confusing in this region. You cross the state line going north and you can add Brandywine Battlefield Park and Brandywine Picnic Park to the list. The Little Woman and I have done our share of hiking in the Brandywine Battlefield, too. It's pretty hilly and both George Washington and Lafayette slept there at one time. That was before Rockwood was built, of course.

Oh, look, another Ha-ha, tee-hee!

I've never been to Brandywine Picnic Park under that name. It isn't really a walking park. It's a picnic park, duh! They launch a lot of tubes down the creek from there. I was there often in my youth under its old name, Lenape Park, when it was a small amusement park with a train, a roller coaster, bumper cars, big swings and a fun house. Use to be many small amusement parks once upon a time, but then Walt Disney changed that world and the little parks quickly disappeared, which I consider a loss.

Here is one of those decision points on our walk through life. Which way shall we ramble? Well, if we go right we will come up pass the Mansion to the Carriage House where we explored last time.

If we go to the left we will go down a long curving trail leading eventually back to the parking lot. I walked up that trail one day thinking it went around the woods and off to some other place, but instead it simply snaked around an s-curve by the woods and came up the hill to where we now stand.

So it is straight ahead into the forest primeval then!

It doesn't look it, but it is a little steep here and with these leaves everywhere one must watch they don't slip.

Also, the forest isn't all that primeval as the autumn leaf fall has unfortunately revealed.

See, see the house on the left. Actually, even in the full frontal foliage of summer this house can be seen, just not so much of it.

So I knew this place was here.

It looks desolate much of the time, but occasionally a light is on or a car is in the drive. It is a big house with a twisting walkway down to the edge of the creek that weaves through here.

I knew that house existed, but I was unaware of so many others. Man, its like a walk in the city this time of year. I didn't know this house was here next to that big white place. This house is earth colors and still blends in with the trees and leaves around it, but during the summer it wasn't even seeable.

I wonder who these people are hiding back here in the woods? They are not near-paupers like me, that's for sure.

They are not really hiding back in the woods either. They are the encroachment of modern society upon the woods.

I never saw this garage like building on my right before the leaves dropped. Now it rises from the underbrush to glare at me.

It is the back of some kind of maintenance building for the park. On the other side it is quite visible fronting a large gravel parking area down below the Carriage House, but its hindquarters have always been well covered by nature in the warm seasons. Now its flanks are exposed for all to see and to the nip of approaching winter.

Walking through these parks is a reminder of the illusions of life. I am grateful and thankful, what with Thanksgiving just around the corner, that we have all these parks with their pleasant trails, but I know they aren't true wilderness. Modern life lurks all around and is much more a threat, isn't it, than any cougars or bears or other dangerous beasts that may have once roamed here.

Squirrels skitter away all around me, but squirrels hardly count as wildlife anymore. They skitter all about my neighborhood too and steal the sunflower seeds out of the bird feeder. They keep a respectful distance most times, but they also stand relatively close until they see whether you are carrying a spare nut their way. Squirrels are semi-domestic creatures.

As I was driving here this morning a deer did come awkwardly across the road ahead of me and then run down into Bringhurst Woods. I never met it on the trail.

More homes appear in the thinning foliage, homes big enough to be hotels, chalets at least. What do people do with all those rooms? Back when Joseph Shipley built Rockwood families could have filled them; after all, he himself was the youngest of twelve. Certainly, his mansion competes with these in size and scope. But by todays standards I, with three children, have a large family. With the kids grown and two moved away, my place is too large for us. We can't utilize the space we have. Maybe these people throw large parties with many guests staying over night to sleep it off. Perhaps these people just want to show off how successful they are. I don't know? My philosophy has always been you can only live in one room at a time. I'm grateful to have a roof over my head when it rains and walls when it is cold.

I hope these people are grateful for what they have. I hope they don't take it for granted or think it is owed to them or look down on those with less.

If you want to get over into that community beyond the trees you cross this bridge. Another path will meander up a grade and into that neighborhood and take you out to Rockwood Road. If you go along that road and under a couple of overpasses, you will come to more large estates. There you will pick up the path again and if you follow it, you will eventually come into Alapocas Run State Park.

Our little protected roadway of nature, our shelter where civilization crumbles.

I've been across the bridge and out to that road and I've come out of Alapocas toward it from the other direction. There are a lot of big houses and I keep wondering who lives in these places and how many wish they didn't since the housing bubble broke? Driving by such communities at night we see darkened shells and wonder how many foreclosed.

But we didn't come out to trouble our mind with these types of questions and cares. We came to ramble away from the cares and worries of the world, to clear our head, not clog it up, so let's chance the subject.

You know how stream of conscience is, though, just like the stream under that bridge. It meanders about and sometimes bumps up against a rock. My mind does gather a bit of flotsam hear and now. I don't know the names of these streams that pop up in these parks. I suppose eventually they feed into the Brandywine, which takes them along with it to the Delaware and eventually out the bay to the sea. All part of a self-contained hydro system. Water flows about the earth until it is sucked up by the sun, then it settles in clouds until the weight is too much and it falls to earth again. Always the same amount of water as when the planet began.

We may pollute it, but we never really destroy it.

Now our path turns 90 degrees toward the East, away from the high-end urban villagers toward the parking lots for the maintenance barn and the Carriage House.

I've ambled along perhaps a mile so far and haven't seen another soul. As I approach the cross path ahead a lady jogger comes bopping down it and by me. I say hello, but she is oblivious to my greeting, an unusual occurrence on these Delaware Trails. We Delawareans are generally a friendly tribe who always speak.

I passed this same jogger another day and she didn't acknowledge my existence then either. I do notice she has earplugs planted in her ears and an IPod hooked on her belt. I guess she is deep into her ITunes and her ITrot and has blocked out all else her IEyes see.

I turn up the trail she came down.

Here again houses I never noticed before. They're like big fat ticks on the hide of a Razorback hog, bloated and ready to pop.

There are lampposts all along the trails here. I've never been here at night. I wonder if they light them? Maybe they only put them on for special occasions. I see no purpose to illuminate the trails at night. The park is open from sunrise to sunset, so who would be wandering back here after dark except those who shouldn't be. Let those who shouldn't be fall in a groundhog hole or something in the dark. Often when I come in the morning there is a police car in the parking lot. I have never figured out if the officers are there to protect or just hiding out and goofing off. I wonder if they patrol the drives here during the dark hours. I wonder if they even drive to the parking lot in the dark hours.

There must be some who visit after closing, but not to explore the park. The other morning there was a used condom lying on the macadam when I stepped out of my car. Nature lovers?

I don't know if you recognize this path. It was the one I snapped from the porch of the Carriage House and put in my last post.

This path is going to take us into the woods and up to the top of Rockwood hill. This is what I call the gradual climb. There is a steeper way up the hill, but I prefer this one. I generally return down by the steep path.

I have come up that other way, but I have to confess I was panting by the time I reached the top. I'll leave that way to the younger crowd.

Not that I totally shy away from hills. These trails are full of up and down slopes and I like that. It helps in keeping one somewhat fit. Maybe in another ten years I'll feel different.

There is always the chance in ten years I won't be walking over grounds, but lying under them.

It is important to keep the body as fit as possible these days. After all, one never knows when you'll have to walk through an airport scanner.

Funny how we have turned ourselves into our own terrorists. People aren't so much afraid to fly anymore as they are getting from the ticket window to the boarding zone. Ten years from now the only people in airport security will be perverts, pedophiles and Bill Clinton, meanwhile real terrorists will be out blowing up trains. They don't call it Washington DC for nothing; Washington Dumb and Confused. We need to get our security peoples hands off our privates and looking in our eyes. We don't look for terrorists so much as we look for things. We have a nice collection of threatening baby bottles, pudding cups, nail files and nose hair clippers to show for the effort. I feel so much safer.

To show you how stupid our great security thinkers are, they even subjected the pilots to the same groping and voyeuristic scanning. Apparently they thought any pilot who wished to crash the plane needed to smuggle in a devise to do it.

Not everyone gets subjected to the peek-a-boo or the hands-on-grab. Here is another great mind at work. We select our subject at random. In other words, we play the lottery and hope some time we win a terrorist.

And the terrorists play the lottery and bet the odds are they won't get caught. I mean, think about it. You got a bunch of terrorists who want to repeat 9/11. So six of them head for the airport and spread out in the line. here comes a terrorist with his skivvies loaded up with plastic explosive. he is closer and closer to security and then a guard snatches away the 93-year old grandmother for a pick your poison moment, body scan or body pat. Meanwhile, the terrorist signs in relief for he know he is just going through the metal detactor and he is safe, and we are not. Maybe we even pick one of these dudes by random, but all six? Lotteries don't work that way.

Now here is where I could use some security. Some paths are so leaf covered you can't see where the path ends and the ground begins. It is easy to slip off the edge of the path and twist an ankle. I've done it about three times on narrower paths. You suddenly hit partway on the lip of the macadam and your foot twists over into the soft soil beside it. I am fortunate to have strong ankles. Otherwise I would have to lay moaning by the path until some jogger happens along, hopefully not the lady with the earplugs.

Obviously this is the path less traveled and in all honestly, I didn't travel it either. It would have led up to the parking lot for the Carriage House. I am on my way up the gradual hill to the summit.

As you can see we have left any houses behind. It would appear we have entered deep woods, but appearances would be wrong.

If you look closely at this photograph you may be just able to pickup something right along the horizon behind the trees. You'd never notice in the summer because in the summer you can't even see that horizon.

What you might catch in the summer a little further up this path is an out of place splotch of green that doesn't match anything in the forest.

You can clearly see what that odd green is in this picture. Follow the fence as it bends right and there halfway up above the fence is the green, a highway  exit ahead sign.

The thing that ran along the horizon that could barely be picked up was a guard rail. The infamous I-95 rolls right along side this upward path. It is easily exposed here in the autumn. Not only can you see it, you can hear it. In the summer the full trees and thick brush muffle the sounds of traffic to a few big trucks and noisy motorcycles.

And we won't escape the overhanging shoulder of I-95 on this side of Rockwood. I am walking up this hill and over to my side people are whizzing along in their cars, rushing where I do not know.  I stand on the edge where civilization crumbles.  Maybe we will see cars lined up over there while their turkeys grow cold upon the table, trapped by the inefficiencies of rebuilding the toll booth on the border, perhaps twenty mile backups the newspaper warns.

They are spending $32 million dollars on toll booths. Gonna have to collect a lot of tolls.

Is it necessary? Why not just throw open the gates for the holidays, give the weary travelers a gift. I always have the nagging suspicion the tolls go to maintain the tollbooths and pay the toll takers.  I hope on Black Friday I'm not stuck in any such backup. I exit not far from the toll plaza, far less than 20 miles. Heck, the state is only 30 miles wide at its widest, which is this part at the top and who wants a backup of traffic across two-thirds of your state?

Oh, we have reached the top of the hill. Here is an intersecting path that came up the steep side of the hill. Its level through the gap in the stone wall and a bit further, then it dips down.

In reality this isn't quite the apex. This is the high point of paved paths, though. If we go a little beyond the intersection we will find this unpaved path to our right.

Yeah, I know, it's hard to believe there is a path, but there is.  You step over the fallen log, go past the marker sticking up and wind in around those trees to be on it. This path will take you to the actual crest of the hill where you can look down over a sort of cliff.

Its pretty peaceful up there because few seem to make the short trek. You can see how undisturbed the path is. How buried by leaf fall.

Next time I'll take you up there and then show you the ways down and we'll talk to some dogs upon our way.

For now we have rambled far and wide and long so let's take a rest. If I don't get you back here before tomorrow, let me wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving. I hope you have much to be thankful for.

Meanwhile try to see what sits atop this hill. It is in this picture.






                        

On My Fences

0.032

Perhaps the biggest handicap in life is wanting everyone to like you. It fences you in and is a hard rail to climb over. It isn't logical and it borders on insanity.  It's a syndrome. It is self-suffocation.

And along the line The Kid caught this disease.

There was a period of forced isolation in his early childhood.  (See the posts in "Bends of the Brandywine" such as:  Swamp Rat, Snippet Scenes,   From the Snows of the Himalayas to the Rails of Glenloch and Real Nightmares or the short story Ground Dog Day in "Currents of the Whiskeyrye". [Click on the underlined titles if you care to read any.])

The Kid was born six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Thus like many of his generation separated from his dad in my infant years by war. He was isolated from fatherhood and his dad did not really impact The Kid’s life until age six, when dad returned from battle. Even then there remained separation for his dad became a long-distance trucker and was seldom home. In those first years of his return he moved the family to the solitude of a swamp.

Solitude, with its constant companion of loneliness, can be a bountiful garden for growing a child's imagination, even for fertilization of the developing intellect, but it is a desert of uncultivated social skills. The Kid’s social abilities were on the level of a cactus, too prickly and unlovely to encourage the embrace of others. When he finally moved back to the relative civilization of town life he may have been physically contemporary in age with other children, but they were hardly social peers. 

So after the isolation came the ostracization.

It began with verbal insults. He was constantly ridiculed about his clothes, his hair, his speech patterns and even his cap; that is if classmates or neighborhood kids even deigned to speak to him at all. The counterbalance to the mocking was ostracism. In other words, he was not allowed to join in the reindeer games, unless forced by authority; i.e., school teachers. When this was the circumstance and he could not be simply ignored, The Kid would be kept waiting until the end of choices before being picked.  He couldn't blame them; he had no experience with team sports.

It isn't that he didn't make friends, just that they came slowly with caution and most were also on the outside because they were also "different" somehow.  Many of his friends did not fit the mold of what was small town mainstream society. He was by definition a WASP, by heritage a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant and a male, and although still too early for this to be recognized, a heterosexual. Many of his friends did not share in whole or part what he was born.

If The Kid was suffering the slings and arrows of unreasonable ridicule, his friends were on the receiving end of cultural prejudice. Whether any of them were ever further stigmatized by association with The Kid he did not know, but as he grew older he began to share the bigotry toward them. This was especially true as he crossed paths with more kids in junior high school.  Very nasty epithets were sometimes hurled his way. They usually came hyphenated, such as "friend-of-%$#&@" or "*%^$&#-lover".

Then came the bullying.

I suppose most people have been bullied sometime in their lives. If you never were or it happened very infrequently you need to understand how terrible it can become. There is an old cliché, "Bricks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you". Yeah, right, probably coined by someone who never suffered either.  The Kid reached a point where he feared to venture from his block and walk the streets of town alone. But sometimes he had to.

The Kid had a paper route. He avoided one street because when he rode his bike thought it objects, as well as words, were thrown at him. Twice older, bigger kids jumped him in the field next to his home. One time he managed to fight the kid off and escape; the other his dog broke free and chased the varmint away.

When ever he went into the next block up on his street it was carefully, with constant looking every which way and if necessary hiding behind trees, cars or shrubs, for on this block was a gang. Oh, they weren't gangs as we probably picture today. They were a half-dozen guys, all a year or two his senior in age, who lived on that block. For some reason only they know, it was their goal in life to torment The Kid, to threaten and to chase him. He lived in constant fear of meeting one or more of these guys anytime he was out and about.

The Kid also came to hate going to junior high school. It was often a game of dodging abuse and ridicule. One time a group of guys grabbed a friend and him, forcing them into the empty locker room behind the gym.

While a couple held his friend, the others took The Kid into a darkened changing room. One held his right arm and another held his left. He had no idea what they planned to do, but for some reason he began to joke about the situation. He was probably so scared he didn't know what he was doing, but he learned a lesson that day, which was humor could be a weapon or at least a defensive tool. After a while of not taking them seriously, they let him go. The Kid was pushed out of that space and his friend was brought in. The Kid didn't know exactly what they did, but whatever it left his friend trembling and crying.

There were times The Kid wished to die rather than face another day of such torments. Although I don't think he would have ever committed suicide, he certainly thought about it. More often he expressed to his mother or just to himself the wish of having never been born. Oddly, no guardian angel trying to win its wings ever showed up to show him how much he would have been missed.

You don't know the relief he felt when my parents moved out of that town.

Now there have been those who retreated into such self-pity they did end up killing themselves. There have been those who became embittered and so angry they inflicted pain and suffering on others as a form of revenge. The Kid never succumbed to deep self-pity or outrageous anger at the world. What saved him were those years of isolation. He had learned how to be by himself and survive in loneliness.

And yet beyond all of this and that, what The Kid really wanted was to be liked. He was catching that disease.

A Vat of Feral Cats

Maybe I shouldn't even write this. By doing so, am I being vengeful? I hope not. I'm not really a vengeful person, I don't hate anyone and I don't hold grudges. But I do sometimes get frustrated, if not always angry, with people.

I don't think being angry with people who have been cruel to you is wrong. Nor do I think if you could punish the people who were cruel to you is being cruel in turn. There is a difference between being mean-spirited and seeking justice. Seeking justice is also different from seeking revenge.

I'm not generally interested in "getting back" at cruel people. I just want them to stop being cruel.

This has not been a particularly good year for me and mine. I will admit to anger in the last few months and that only adds to the irritation of dealing with cruel people. And I don't even really know these cruel people.

The most disturbing is the egg-man (or perhaps egg-woman), but it somehow seems a more masculine act, although hardly a manly one. After all, the acts were done in secret, perhaps under the cloak of night. The person is a sneak and a coward. It began in mid-may when my son left for work and discovered someone had egged the side of his car. I didn't realize my car had also been egged until after I  finished work that day and was walking back to my car. Then I saw the goo down on the bottom of my windshield at the wiper bin. It had been so low I hadn't even noticed it while driving.

We were egged again during Memorial Day weekend, but this time no egg apparently hit the cars, but there was broken egg in the driveway.

I reported both instances to the police.

Yeah, like they care.

Then in July it happened again, this time eggs hit my windshield just below the roof line and drizzled down over the glass. I spend a good deal of time scraping and washing and scraping again and washing again to get this gook off so I could see to drive. It was hot. Some of the egg actually cooked. I still have traces. It is a hard material to remove. And it can leave a film you don't notice until one day it rains and you turn on your wipers. Swish, swish and you have an opaque smear across your line of sight.

Again I reported this to the police, who I am sure take it as a minor bit of vandalism. But since there is no apparent reason for anyone to do this and we don't have any known enemies it is a random act of terrorism. Who knows if it has stopped or if it could escalate.

The Little Woman has a theory that the perpetrator is not actually egging out cars, but is trying to hit stray cats that may have been wandering about or snoozing atop the cars.  If so, then the miscreant is even more vile, an abuser of animals.

A  _ _ _ _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ in other blanks.

During the initial eggings we also discovered someone had thrown beer bottles into our yard, probably the same _ _ _ _ _ _ _ again with the possibility they were tormenting  Hobo Joe, who was still just a stray cat at that time.

The beer is the brand that "most interesting man in the world" drinks. I didn't find this action interesting at all.

These acts of cruelty are most personal, directed at us or at some poor creature wandering across our land.

You know what I would do to such a person?

Strip them naked, smear them with tuna oil and throw them in a vat of feral cats. And then throw eggs at them.

Now that would be interesting.