“. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone,
a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.”

—Thomas Wolfe, “Look Homeward, Angel”
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—Aylmer: early 1970s—

His name was Henry Palmer. Tall, toothless, beak-nosed, nasal-voiced, stooped and painfully skinny, old and bald, he eked out a meager existence by taxiing the Amish in his ancient rattletrap black sedan.

He was far from a safe driver, and it’s a miracle that he never had an accident while transporting passengers in his car. My earliest memory of riding in a car was as a passenger in his, on the dust-clogged gravel roads around Aylmer.

Henry was a WWI vet. He ran away from home when he was fourteen, lied about his age and joined the Army. Fought in the mustard gas-blanketed fields, the rat-infested trenches of that terrible conflict. After his return, he never married. He lived like a hermit in a decrepit little shack in the remote hills a few miles outside the small village of Richmond.

On the dash of his car was one of those little vinyl sticker labels you can punch out letter by letter, with his name. Whoever gave it to him had misspelled it; the label read “Henery Pamler.” He never knew the difference. I suspect he couldn’t read. Or write.

When I was in the fourth or fifth grade, we heard the news at school one day. Some-how, fire had broken out in Henry’s shack the night before, and in a fierce but brief inferno, it had burned to the ground. He hadn’t made it out. We stood around in tight little knots, discussing the tragedy, knowing it couldn’t be true.

It was true. Almost too shocking, too vast, too overwhelming for our young minds to comprehend. The thought of the old man collapsing in the smoke and heat and flames, alone and unheard. And that we would never see him again.

The county buried him, I suppose. He had no one. No family. No kin. No one to mourn him or mark his passing. He was the last of his line. Any shreds of personal history he might have accumulated reduced to ashes with his body. And that’s why we now briefly honor the memory of who he was, before even it disappears, fading unnoticed into the encroaching mists of lost time.
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—New Holland: 2007—

“That your truck?” she asked in a raspy voice as I emerged from Sheetz early one morning and walked to Big Blue, bleary-eyed and sipping my coffee.

I glanced at her, a rather plump, amply proportioned forty-ish, cigarette smoking bleached blonde, giving Big Blue the once-over while standing beside her powerhouse Mustang. Sleek beautiful car. Late model. Looked like it could burn some tires and move. And a shimmering electric blue.

“Yup,” I answered.

“I like it,” she said.

“Thank you. I like your car, too,” I replied, “especially the color.”

She chuckled, a full-throated rasp as she opened her car door. “Thanks,” she said. “You know what they say. Great minds think alike.”

I couldn’t argue with that. Not that I would have.
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—Aylmer: around 1973—

“The Purdy girls lived back there,” he said. “Two sisters, they had a little shack and some buildings back behind the woods there.”

Gord Brackenbury, a local logger and roustabout hauler, was talking to my Mom and sisters about the Carl Sansburn farm Dad had just bought. I hung around the edge and listened to him talk. Short and rotund, Gord chain-smoked and was all but stone deaf. And it was whispered about the community that he sometimes drank to excess. He could never remember my name and just called me “Junior.”

“That was when I was a kid,” he continued in his slow amiable drawl. “Everything’s gone now. Can’t see any sign of any buildings. As far as I remember, they never got married.”

Later Mom was telling Dad. “Gord Brackenbury said two sisters lived back there behind the woods, and they were so pretty. He remembered that so clearly after all these years. How pretty they were.”

“No, Mom,” my sister Rachel interrupted, “Purdy was their last name. He didn’t call them pretty. Purdy.”

“Ooh,” said Mom.
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—New Holland: 2007—

A summer Sunday morning. I stood in line at the counter at Sheetz with my morning cup of coffee. The lady ahead of me had two cups, and ordered a couple of packs of smokes. The clerk fetched them. Then she wanted lottery tickets. They both walked to the far end of the counter where the tickets were sold.

She was thin, probably in her fifties, with a hard worn face and the chronically tired look of the hardscrabble poor. I waited impatiently as she made her lottery ticket selections. Five of this, three of that, blah, blah, blah. Where was another clerk when you needed one? I set my coffee on the counter just off to the side of her items.

Finally she was finished with her picks and they came back to the register. The clerk rang up her purchases. She paid with a couple of twenties and walked out. I motioned to my cup of coffee.

“Oh, she paid for that,” the clerk said. “I rang up everything on the counter. I thought it was hers.” I thanked him and took my coffee and walked out.

She was sitting in the passenger’s seat of an old half-rusted Chevette, about the ugliest little car ever made. A fat scruffy-faced man I assume was her husband sat squeezed behind the wheel. His great bulk flowed over onto her seat. They were scratching the lottery tickets she had just bought. I approached her side of the car.

“Excuse me,” I said politely, “but I think you just paid for my coffee in there by mistake. I had it sitting on the counter and the clerk rang it up with your stuff. I’ll gladly pay you.” I offered a dollar bill.

She looked at the bill hungrily, then quickly glanced over at her husband. He hesitated for less than a second. Then he waved his hand generously. “No, no, you can have it. That’s all right,” he said.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “It was a mistake. I’ll gladly pay you.”

“No, no,” he insisted. “Won’t hear of it. That’s all right. You can have it.”

“Then thank you very much,” I said. “That’s very kind of you. I appreciate it.”

Cigarette smoke billowed from the ugly little Chevette’s windows as I walked away.
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—Aylmer: early 1970s—

The “English” farmer and his teenage son stood there in their bib overalls in our barn, checking out a milk cow Dad had advertised in the newspaper.

“Is she sound?” The farmer asked suspiciously. “In good health?”

“As far as I know,” Dad answered.

“Well, is she or isn’t she? Not as far as you know,” the farmer retorted. His son looked on and listened, drinking it all in. “Yes or no. Is she or isn’t she?”

“As far as I know,” Dad answered again. “You can see her. You can see she’s healthy. And as far as I know she’s sound.”

The farmer grumbled and growled a bit more. But he bought the cow. For Dad’s asking price of $400.00.
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—Lancaster: 2008—

I sat there at a little table in the center of the mall, sipping my usual cup of half-decaf, half-regular. Watching the Saturday afternoon post-holiday crowds. An elderly black gentleman with a neatly trimmed mustache approached and asked if he might sit in one of the three empty chairs at my table. I waved assent.

He carried a cup of regular coffee and a small expresso cup, which was empty. He poured coffee from the large cup to the small cup and drank it. I looked puzzled.

“It’s the way we drink coffee in my home country, in these small cups,” he explained haltingly, with just a bit of an accent. “So sometimes when I get homesick, I come here and drink it like this.”

“Where is your home country?” I asked.

“Ethiopia.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Nineteen years,” he said, lifting the expresso cup and slurping its contents in one gulp. “And I’ve never been back to visit.”
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I am spending a few days this weekend at the Horse World Expo in Timonium, MD, manning a company booth. It’s always kind of fun to get away from the office for a few days, do something different. I see a lot of vendors once or twice a year, at these Expos. We always kid each other and catch up on the past year.

Speaking to prospective customers, mostly horse people, gets to be quite draining. By the time the show is over, I’m pretty much done. No more. I always resolve that whatever my future lot may be, it will not include owning or having anything to do with horses. Never, never, never.

A word to my nephews who are skiing on the vast slopes in Wyoming or Utah or some such exotic place, at an upscale resort. Have fun. Don’t break a leg. I sometimes grumble that no one ever tells me anything. Had I known that four of you, all big strong, strapping muscular young men, were passing right through Albuquerque, NM, I might have suggested that you stop there and see an old acquaintance of mine. Or you might call him a former friend. Just to say “hi,” of course. And perhaps one or two other choice words and phrases. Maybe you could still stop there on your way back. I hear he likes to hang out at “Jack in the Box” restaurants.

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“….you’ve got to ask yourself one question:
‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

—Clint Eastwood in “Dirty Harry”
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I go to the gym regularly. Five or six days a week, if I can fit it into the schedule. I’ve been going to the same place for almost six years now. And gotten to know a few of the regulars. We chat. Talk sports. Kid each other.

Doc (not his real name) is a regular, an older guy, a curmudgeon-type individual. We got to be half-decent friends. Doc grumbles a lot, but he knows a lot. He knew more than the gym staff about which exercises I should be doing. And taught me. He got me started jumping rope, an excellent cardiovascular exercise. I now jump rope for at least two minutes every workout session, which is a lot harder than it sounds. Try it sometime.

Doc was a moody guy. Some days he’d talk incessantly; the next day he’d ignore you. I learned to not bother him when he was in one of his spells. But he always came around, and we chummed like good friends.

Then, one day last fall, I did something that pissed him off. For the life of me, I don’t know what I said or did. Something silly, probably, or thoughtless. But he gradually became more hostile and soon completely ignored me. Like I wasn’t even there. Which was, if not fine, completely within his rights. We didn’t have to be friends. But we did have to exist together at the gym.

And so it went for about a month. Doc getting increasingly hostile. I tried to be laid back and polite when we absolutely had to interact. Politeness only seemed to make him madder and moodier. It got so we just flat out ignored each other.

Both of us use the dry sauna after working out. Usually I was done first. I always left the heat turned on for him. If he was first, he left it turned on for me. Then he stopped leaving it turned on for me, even though he knew I was coming in to use it within fifteen minutes. Sometimes he even propped open the sauna door to make sure the sauna would be ice-cold by the time I got there. I became increasingly irritated, but didn’t confront him.

Then, around mid-November, one night he did it. Pulled a trigger he shouldn’t have. Ten minutes before finishing my workout, I strolled into the locker room to turn on the sauna, knowing he had shut it off. He was just getting out of the shower. The sauna door was standing wide open. I walked in, shut it, turned on the heat and politely asked him not to touch the controls. He mumbled defiantly.

Ten minutes later, after finishing my workout, I returned. He stood before the mirror at the sink, combing his long stringy hair. The sauna door stood propped wide open again, the heat turned off.

At this point, I suppose, I should have paused and considered, “What would Jesus do?” Sadly, I did not. Besides, I don’t know what He would have done. But I can tell you what I did.

Without a word, I turned and went back out to the gym and got Rick, the attendant and we walked into the locker room. I was fuming. I showed Rick the open sauna door and told him what had just happened. That this man had deliberately opened it and turned off the heat after I’d asked him not to just ten minutes ago.

“That man, standing right there at the sink, did it,” I said.

Doc finally turned, stunned that I had actually fetched Rick and was confronting him. He began yelling loudly. Rick, poor guy, was frantic that we would come to blows. He tried to soothe us, to defuse the escalating situation.

“Doc, you’re a !#%^*!# (bleep),” I said. I was amazed at my voice. From inside, it felt barely controlled. It came out flat and calm. Doc instantly started swearing back at me.

“You’re a !#%^*!# (bleep). That’s all you are.” I said again, firmly.

Doc went off on a two-minute tirade about how I couldn’t boss him around. “I’ll sit in that sauna all evening, from 5 PM until 8 PM, just so you can’t use it. What you gonna do then?” he yelled, somewhat irrationally, since he would shrivel like a prune if he did that. I waited until he stopped to catch his breath.

“You’re a !#%^*!# (bleep).” I said flatly, for the third and final time.

By now, he’d gathered his stuff and walked out, yelling that this gym wasn’t big enough for us both. Rick bounced about like an excited rubber ball. Then Doc was gone. All was quiet. I was fuming, so furious that I shook. Then, from one of the toilet stalls came a polite cough, and the sound of a flushing toilet. Some poor guy had been sitting on the pot the whole time and heard it all come down less than ten feet away.

Still fuming, I talked with Rick for a few minutes, then sat in the slowly-warming sauna to calm down. As I left, I apologized to Rick for all the fuss. But I was still steaming mad.

In the next few days, I thought a lot about the whole episode. I had never, in my memory, done anything remotely like that. At least not while sober. I felt a bit bad for swearing, mostly that others had heard me. Doc and I both claimed to be Christians. We’d often discussed our beliefs and the Scriptures in general. But there we’d been, heatedly swearing at each other like two drunken sailors. Any way you look at it, something about that seems a little screwy.

I didn’t see Doc again for about a week. On a Saturday, as I was leaving, he’d just started his exercise routine. Against all my will, and only because that was the way I’ve been trained all my life, I walked up to him and apologized for swearing. He was surprised. But we stood there and talked calmly for a few minutes. I told him that we could have disagreements. That was OK. But I regretted the swearing. That was wrong. He then apologized for what he’d said. Not that I’d expected it.

Strangely, as I walked away, and for weeks later, I was irritated at myself for having apologized. Seemed like such a trite, formulaic thing to do. So pat. I apologize. You apologize. Now we all sing happy songs and get along. Except we don’t.

Since that Saturday, Doc has avoided me like the plague. But he doesn’t prop open the sauna door anymore, or turn off the heat after I’ve turned it on. I guess one could say we’ve “reached an understanding.”

In my next counseling session, I ran the whole thing by my counselor, sparing no details, including the exact swear words. But, I insisted, I called Doc exactly what he was. To my surprise, the counselor seemed little concerned with my reaction or the whole episode, really.

“It shows that you are alive,” he said. “After all that’s happened to you this year, that’s a good thing. Not that you swore. But that you’re alive. And reacted like you are alive. Bristled a little.”

His analysis made sense. Seemed valid. About having life, and not being a doormat. Not that I plan to walk around swearing at people or anything. Unless you really work at irritating me. Then I might.

I’m not quite the same person I was when I posted my first blog back in April of last year, and throughout last summer. I’ve been a fairly passive, easy-going guy for most of my life. Probably still am, mostly. Except for a few small changes.

Now, if you bray incessantly at me, or launch poisonous life-draining arrows at me, I will shut you off. And cut you off. From my life. And my site. Just like that. Which is no big deal, not a huge important event, one way or the other, in the big scheme of things. But it’s important to me in that it affects how I choose to live. And I will do it.

I’m done with all the sly, sneering, caustic drivel disguised as “open inquiry” when it’s really just manipulative BS from small-minded people who have actually become what they claim to loathe. And have developed an elaborate art form of tearing others down. I’m done with all the crap about fulfilling others’ expectations about who and what I should be. And what attitudes, from hateful to barely tolerant, I’m supposed to harbor for the culture from which I have emerged. I deeply respect that culture and always will.

I’m done with all the condescending blather, all the subtle mind games, about what I should or shouldn’t write, and how it’s written. I’ll make those choices. Some may be wrong. Inevitably, some will be. I’ll live with that. And learn from that. Because the choices I make, right or wrong, will be my own and not the result of trying to appease the cynical disdain and colossal ego of some bitter, washed-up armchair critic who can dish it out by the pound but can’t take it by the ounce. And who couldn’t get 35,000 hits on a personal blog site from now until the next century.

It’s negative, draining noise. It’s just bluster. And it’s just bullying. I reject it. I rebuke it. And it’s gonna stop. It in fact already has. Because I’ve shut it down. As of about 10:45 PM last Saturday night, with the help of my “nephew network.” (Thanks, guys, with special thanks to Howard.) It really is like killing swarming rats trapped in a barrel. Just easier; point, click and delete. I don’t touch the vermin. Or read it. As do none of you. And you won’t. Not on this site.

I write what I want, about whatever catches my muse that week. I appreciate all readers. I try to respect my audience. To be honest. Not talk down to you. Or preach. You are welcome to agree with what I say. Or disagree. Or have no opinions what-soever either way. You may be horrified that I swore at a guy at the gym. You are welcome to post a comment stating that. Agree or disagree, or call me stupid or silly. Or wicked, even. As long as you respect the person you are addressing. If you don’t, you won’t participate. As some of you won’t, because you can’t. And that’s how it is.

How’s that for some bristling? I think my counselor might approve. If not, he’s got some work to do.
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A few words to Buckeye fans. You’re good people, most of you. Salt of the earth, and all that. Great to hang with. And that string-cut potato salad you make, it’s the best in the world. You’re always welcome at any of my cookouts simply on the quality of your potato salad alone.

But your football team. Ahem. This is a bit awkward. Two years now. In a row. Blown out. In the Championship Game. Maybe it’s time you gave it a rest for a year or two. Regroup a little. Let Michigan, or even Iowa, have a shot. I’m just saying, is all. I was going to watch the entire game, but was so embarrassed for the Big Ten that I went to bed early in the third quarter. Score at that time: 31-10 LSU.

It was too much to expect, I suppose. That the Dems of the “Live Free or Die” state would have enough sense to rise up and drive a stake through the heart of the Wicked Witch’s campaign. Nah. Would’a simplified things too much, to do that. Now we’ll be inflicted with her screeching for another few months, or heaven forbid, the entire Presidential Race. New Hampshire Dems should just adopt a new slogan, “Enslave me ’til I die.”

Republicans there didn’t show much more sense, giving McCain the win. McCain is a sleazeball, and I won’t soon forget his gratuitous demonization of my Alma Mater, Bob Jones Univeristy, in the 2000 campaign. Or that he placed restrictions on the most valuable of expressions, political speech, in his unconstitutional and soon to be over-turned McCain-Feingold Act.

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