Bus Ride Back In Time

Carolyn J. Rose

 In early June I went along on a school field trip to a camp up the Washougal River Road. As the crow flies, the trip wasn’t a long one. As the crow rides a school bus, the trip seemed endless.

The road twisted, turned, and doubled back, threading its way into the hills. Signs warned of slide areas and the pavement dipped and rose like swells out on the open ocean. The bus rocked along, windows rattling, students jouncing and swaying with each bump or turn.

By the time we reached the camp, my head ached and my stomach roiled. I felt as if I’d been sucked into a cosmic wormhole and carried back more than 50 years to the bus rides of my youth in the Catskill Mountains.

I didn’t measure the distance from my home in Bearsville to Onteora Central High School in miles, but rather in landmarks. There was where Eddie got on while his mother stood in the doorway watching. There the road curved along a stream and crossed a narrow bridge with chuckholes at the end. There was the spot where the bus slid into a ditch one snowy day and the older boys were allowed to have all the fun and push us out.

Tedious and nauseating as the ride to school was, what I truly dreaded was arriving at that long brick building and beginning another day of what I thought of as drudgery verging on torture. But I really dreaded the days when we arrived to find the principal and assistant principal waiting with stopwatches and clipboards.

That meant a fire drill.

A two-door drill or a front-door drill wasn’t bad. I generally sat up front and could get off without being shoved down the steps.

Back-door drills, however, were something out of my nightmares. The back door was high. An ankle-snapping height. And there was no time to cut that distance by squatting or sitting, no time to turn and lower myself.

When the principal clicked his stopwatch, the older boys swung the door wide, leaped to the ground, spun about, and reached for the next kids in line. They gripped our arms and yanked us from the bus, flinging us through the air. The unforgiving asphalt rose to meet us.

For them, it was a competition. Could they empty their bus faster than the others? And, of course, speed was important. Never mind skinned knees and twisted ankles, if there was an actual fire, their technique would get us out alive.

But back then, I never thought of it that way. Back then I was more frightened of the drill than the fire. The drill, after all, wasn’t merely a possibility. It was inevitable. It would happen. And unlike fire, there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

Another One Bites The Dust

Mike Nettleton

 

 My neighborhood video rental store has closed its doors. After 30 plus years of being the gathering place for movie lovers of all ages, Video Connections has fallen victim to the realities of today’s marketplace.  Between on-line streaming, Red Box and other methods of having movies delivered at the push of a button, the brick and mortar business model is galloping toward obsolescence.

I hate the idea that I’ve become one of those dinosaurs constantly lamenting “the good old days.” Because, face it, they weren’t always that good. Vietnam sucked. So did the brown acid, the Nixon years, runaway inflation, trickle down economics and disco. I just couldn’t pull off the open front shirt and gold chain look. Face it, my Boogie Oogie Oogie just couldn’t Boogie no more.

Without a doubt, technology has enriched our lives. Because of developments in medicine, people are surviving with afflictions that used to mean a rapid death sentence. Thanks to lasers, computers and a talented surgeon, my cataracts were sucked out and replaced by acrylic lenses. How very Bionic Man, right? But, fact is,  I’m 20/20 without glasses or contact lenses for the first time since elementary school.  Shopping online is convenient, habit forming and helps stretch our budgets. You can text people all over the world and never worry about spelling words correctly. It’s a beautiful thing. You can listen to a steady diet of your favorite music on the internet and not have to put up with the mindless blather from a local deejay.

Problem is, I used to be a local deejay. And mindless blather was my singular talent. And the movie lovers who ran that video store will have to find something else to do after being made obsolete. Your neighborhood bookstore is about to go the way of the buggy whip, typewriter and whale bone corset. The nice lady with the beehive hairdo who used to scan your groceries and call you “hon” joins the rest of the people squeezed out of the job market by our quest to minimize our face-to-face contact with other human beings.

Maybe it is a sign of creeping geezerdom, but I’ll miss talking movies with my friends at Video Connections. I’ll miss catching up on the neighborhood gossip with the grocery clerk or buying books from the dollar table outside the bookstore. I’ll even miss yelling “get a clue you hoser,” at the radio when the deejay talks over the vocal of one of my favorite songs.

I feel like what we’re gaining in convenience, speed and efficiency is inversely proportional to what we’re losing in our ongoing battle to remain human and real. Face-to-face contact is becoming rarer—conversation without keyboarding a lost art. And I can’t help feeling a bit sad about the whole thing.

Corn Star

Carolyn J. Rose 

  

 When sweet corn season comes around, I think of my father. He loved fresh-from-the-garden corn, especially corn from his own garden. And he went to incredible lengths in order to sink his teeth into kernels slathered with butter and sprinkled with salt and pepper.

The yearly struggle to triumph over dry spells, disease, weeds, marauding crows, and determined raccoons began in the heart of winter with the arrival of the seed catalogs. He’d page through them, searching for the old and familiar varieties, and for the latest hybrids that claimed to hold that just-picked sweetness a little longer.

Spring can be fickle in the Catskill Mountains, toying with gardeners, teasing them with mild days followed by snow or hail or plunging temperatures. But, finally, the time would come to hook the plow to the tractor. He’d turn the rocky soil, cart off large stones worked up by the frost, harrow what he’d plowed, cart off more stones, then spread fertilizer and lime from huge brown paper bags. He did that with his bare hands. Having survived World War II and the perils of flying a supply route from India to China, he wasn’t worried about a few chemicals.

Level land was at a premium on his acreage, so it wasn’t a huge field—at least not by the standards of the Midwest, where corn is serious business. He’d stake out rows, carve furrows and, when the leaves on a white oak were the size of squirrels’ ears, space out the seeds and cover them with just the right amount of soil.

In a few days, he’d pace the rows in search of the first pale green sprout. That became an evening ritual, walking the rows, checking progress, planting a second wave, yanking out weeds.

By the time school was out, the weeds were ferocious, and my brother and I were tasked with crawling among the young plants and pulling them out. The best time, according to my father, was early in the morning while the dew was on the ground and the weeds came up easily, root and all.

For me, there was no “best” time to weed. There was only the wrong time—and the wrong time was any time, but especially early on a summer day. Only the threat of allowance withheld got me out of bed and into the corn.

By August, the ears were fat and the tassels turning brown. The corn was nearly ready to pick. And the raccoons knew it. Night after night they came, climbing the stalks, tearing off the husks, dining on milky raw corn.

Day after day my father plotted ways to halt their forays into the field. On visits to the general store/post office he commiserated with other gardeners and came home with fresh ideas.

He mixed hot pepper with lard and painted it on the ears. That night the raccoons ate more.

He hung aluminum pie pans from the stalks hoping the clatter would deter the masked marauders. Apparently it was music to their ears.

He ran a string of extension cords and set a strong light in the center of the field. The light shone through my bedroom window and cast shadows of cornstalks on the wall above my bed. One night the shadow of a raccoon appeared and I ran to alert my father. He seized his rifle, raced to the edge of the field, and fired. The raccoons escaped unscathed.

The next night, they returned, but I slept through their shadow show. Finally, by offering financial incentives, he enlisted us to sleep in the field. We, in turn, recruited friends and, armed with a battery-operated radio, soft drinks, snacks, sleeping bags, and canvas tarps, set up camp.

The raccoons stayed away.

What I remember most about those summer nights is going to sleep damp from the dew and waking up to find some manner of bug crawling on me.

What I remember most about summer dinners is the taste of sweet corn just out of the garden and the fleeting feeling that it was all worth it.

You Must Remember This. Or Possibly Not.

By Mike Nettleton 

The other morning at the gym, I was watching the Today show on one of the overhead flat screens they provide. Since my I-pod was pumping Sly and the Family Stone into my headphones (boom, shakka lakka lakka, boom shakka lakka lakka boom), I had to follow the show with the text crawl on the bottom of the screen. Mental multi-tasking as it were. (Since the young thing with the dreadlocks on the elliptical was wearing an interesting new leotard, it moved the degree of difficulty into the stratosphere.)

Featured were a gaggle of Hyperthymesiacs, including the actress Marilu Henner. Hyperthymesia, as it turns out, is the condition of possessing an extremely detailed autobiographical memory. These folks, ranging in age from about 10 through serious geezerage can bring back specific memories the way we…the way we…uh, can’t.

They gave the ten-year old a date, say July 17, 2010 and asked him what day of the week it was. He knew instantly that it was a Tuesday (random example), could tell you what he wore and what he did that day. In great detail.

If hard pressed, and after due deliberation, if someone asked me what I wore yesterday, I could probably come up with “clothes.”

Apparently the Hyperthymesiacs have the ability to instantly retrieve stuff from the part of the brain that stores memories. We all have that stuff stashed in there, but most of us can only bring back small percentages of it. Some of us go in looking for it and need help finding our way back out.

Memory is tricky. While I can memorize my lines for a play I’m performing in and recite them at the proper times, there is almost always one word or short phrase that hovers at the doorway to consciousness and refuses to enter, no matter how often it’s invited. At those times I rely on a mystical and ages old actor’s technique. I say something else. Trying of course to keep it near the topic at hand. For example, if my line, as Christopher in “Shadowlands” is supposed to come out “Congratulations, Jack, you seem to have found a soul mate,” and I couldn’t retrieve “soul mate” from the vaults, it would probably be detrimental to the show if I substituted “female praying mantis.” But, if I inserted “Interesting match,” no one would notice.

Once, when living in Eugene, a man of about my age bustled over to my aisle in the supermarket and started telling stories of things we had done together in college. (Several might still involve outstanding warrants in Jackson County.) As he told the stories, with my bemused wife standing by watching, I simply nodded and smiled. After he wound down, he shook my hand, told me how great it was to see me again and hurried off.  

“Who was that?” My mate asked.

 I shrugged. “No clue.” I admitted.

“Did any or all of those things actually happen?” She reached up for something on the shelf and put it in the cart. 

“Possibly,” I said. “The part where everybody at the party took off their clothes and sang boom shakka lakka lakka, boom shakka lakka lakka, boom, sounded vaguely familiar. 

I Wanna Take You Higher--Sly and the Family Stone  

Geology, Wonder, and Lunch

Carolyn J. Rose       

Recently I spent a week in the Catskill Mountains where I was born and raised. I visited with friends and relatives and, on an amazingly clear and warm day, walked along the edge of North Lake with my brother Lorin, his wife Shirley, my cousin (and book cover designer) Dorion, his wife Jeanine, and their dog Chanel. 

 I’d proposed this walk for research purposes. The third book in the Catskill Mountains Mysteries series will feature an erratic—a boulder carried along by a glacier. The area around North Lake, according to Robert Titus’s book on the geology of the Catskills, is the current resting place of several of these massive chunks of rock. (I say “current” because the next glacier could shift them again.)

I’d seen pictures of some of them, but I wanted a more personal experience. I wanted to press my hands against an ancient boulder and wonder where it came from and how far it traveled before the glacier retreated and abandoned it. I wanted to see furrows sliced into rock by pebbles dragged along by a towering sheet of ice. I wanted to feel the weight of the past, imagine the landscape as it was more than 20,000 years ago.

Winter in the Catskills had been long and cold. Patches of snow still lingered among the trees, and frozen cascades of water marked the outflow of hillside springs. Except for a few open patches, ice still gripped the lake. Geese stood on the slushy edges of that ice, calling across open water.

 The sun was bright and the sky a brilliant blue. A breeze whisked across the frozen lake and soughed through the pines. Dorion snapped photos and, knowing it might be years before I returned, I filled my mind with images, scents, sounds, and sensations.

I felt insignificant. My lifespan wouldn’t register as even a second on a clock marking the passage of geologic time.

And I felt small and powerless. Like those boulders, forces beyond my imagination and understanding plucked me from somewhere, shaped me, and dropped me among those blue hills.

The why of it all was far beyond me. So I put that wondering aside and focused on the glorious day, on stories from our youth, and on the deli sandwiches my brother brought along.

Life is short and time is fleeting. But good food and good company seem to add hours to a warm afternoon.

To see more of Dorion Rose’s stunning photographs, visit:http://brokencork.blogspot.com

You know who you are. Or maybe you don’t.

 

Carolyn J. Rose

A few weeks ago I spotted an article about one airline cracking down on the size and amount of carry-on luggage.

Thank you!

It’s about time!

Those of us who check our bags and abide by the restrictions are fed up with watching others flaunt the rules. We’re tired of watching you try to wedge cases the size of young hippos into the bins above our heads. We’re tired of you squishing our backpacks and satchels in the process. We’re tired of you moving our things to inconvenient bins to make room for your excess. And we’re tired of not getting as much as a shrug of apology.

I’d say you all know who you are, but the fact is that many of you probably don’t. You’re too oblivious or selfish or entitled to notice your own behavior—or to care about the effect it has on others.

You’re the same people who halt your cart in the center of a supermarket aisle to have a phone conversation in an outdoor voice. You’re the ones who park straddling two spaces and abandon your grocery cart in a third. You’re the people in line with twelve items more than the posted limit. You’re the ones who don’t get out your wallet until everything is tallied and sacked. Then, without a glance at those waiting, you dig for a coin purse, pour out a collection of nickels and pennies, and count them. Slowly, of course.

You’re the folks who back out of your driveways without looking, zigzag across lap lanes at the swimming pool, never bus your table at a food court, and toss litter along the highway. You’re the folks who walk your dogs by my house every day and don’t bother to scoop up the poop.

If any of this is describes you, isn’t it time you got a clue? Or got your own planet?

The Overflogged Memory

Okay, okay, so maybe the music/dates quiz was a little over the top. But I'm surprised there weren't any music junkies or even out and out cheaters who'd use the internet to come up with the right answers. Here they come. 

 May 10th.                  The Night They Drove Old Dixie           
                                  Down--The Band.

July 4th.                    Saturday in the Park--Chicago  

December 23rd.        I Wanna Roo You--Van Morrison

September 3rd.         Papa Was a Rolling Stone--Temptations

June 3rd.                  Ode to Billy Jo--Bobby Gentry

July 4th.                    Born on the Bayou--Credence 

April 4th.                   Pride (In the Name of Love)--U-2

June 6th.                  Convoy--CW McCall

September 21st.       September--Earth, Wind and Fire

September 1963.       Run Baby Run--Cheryl Crow 

December 1963.        Oh, What a Night--Four Seasons

December 3rd.           Sweet Baby James--James Taylor

Christmas Day.           Levon--Elton John