A Forrest Gump Moment

Yesterday I was driving to my monthly massage appointment.  I was cutting time kind of close, so I was not very happy to get stuck at the light at Old Baltimore Pike and Delaware Route 896. 

Now it was still July, my least favorite month of all next to January and was still very warm.  The air conditioning in the truck has inconveniently chosen this summer ( possibly the hottest on record) to give up the ghost.  Therefore, when I go it is with both windows in the down position.

While waiting for this interminable light to change, I noticed leaves fluttering across the hood of my vehicle.  Suddenly, a leaf floated into the truck through the driver side window and landed itself right in my lap.  I immediately thought of the movie Forrest Gump and how the bird's feather floated right down to him.

The vehicle in the lane next to me beeped his horn to get  my attention and rolled his window down so he could speak with me.  His words were"Hey! Just like in Forrest Gump, HUH?". I was kind of surprised that he made the same connection that I had.  No, I was QUITE surprised!

I waved back at him holding the leaf up to show that I had caught it and told him that great minds MUST run along the same lines.  We were still laughing when the light changed and we went our separate ways.

Now, I have a treasure box here at home.  It contains some rather strange stuff.  I have a smooth rock from the North East river and a piece of clear glass from the C&D canal. I do have a bird feather that appeared as if by magic on the walk at the courthouse right before me last week.  There are also some trinkets from childhood.  Now there is a leaf to be added to the collection. 

I do believe in signs, portents and things that make one go "HMMMMMMMMMMM!"  Everything happens for a reason, and the things that seem haphazard  mean that you are where you are supposed to be to get the message from the Universe.  I am finding recently, that there are events coming full circle in my life now that actually have their roots some 50 years ago.  The circles have swung so far out  that now they are closing. 

I find it a comforting feeling.  Gives me a sense of Oneness with the collective, if you will.  Laugh if you must, but believe that the feather and the rock and the leaf are now ensconced in my treasure box.  They will remain  there, coincidence or not.

VICTORIA AND ALBERT

I posted this  in response to a post on my daughter's blog.  She was riding public transit in Baltimore.

She noticed the unsolicited and selfless  attentions of an elderly man to his wife.

Ah, true love !  May it live forever in bright light and fairy dust!  ( to quote a friend)


Your post reminds me of the couple I saw on my first trip abroad in 1999. I hit the ground in England armed with an instiable appetite for history and a 35mm camera.

It was a glorious Saturday morning in the park on High Street. Kensington Palace fairly shone in the sun. I was soaking up local color and listening to the myriad of accents swirling round me.

Children were painting on the sidewalk or feeding the pigeons. The ubiquitous Brits were walking the ubiquitous British dogs.

There was an elderly couple seated on a park bench in the sunlight. They were well up in years and dressed as some English people do, in both hat and coat. her hat was fashionably out of fashion. Obviously, this was an occasion for them.

Occasionally, the gent would bend his head towards the white haired woman and gesture with his cane at some far off sight that he did not want her to miss.

She would tug affectionately on his coatsleeve to draw his attention to another sight to be seen. They were enjoying both one another's company the English sunshine and the impromptu entertainment..

I realized that they had seen so much of life and history. They had survived the War, seen the devastation of their city, lost loved ones in the rubble and experienced Hitler's hate up close and personal. They were survivors, still comfortable and even pleased with one another's company some 70+ years later.

As I watched them for a while, I suddenly realized that amidst all the other goings on in the park, this was the one scene I was MEANT to see.

Here was the picture that defined the whole experience for me. When I snapped the shutter I KNEW that wonderful as the shot was it lacked SOMETHING. I quickly blew on the lens to fog it ( it IS England after all) I waited while the haze cleared from the center of the lens outward. then I snapped again.

Since this was still film territory for me I had to wait until I got back home to see the results.

The result is the most fabulous picture I have ever taken, both from a technical standpoint and an aesthetic one. The lens is cleared jsut enough to see the subjects ( the couple) clearly. The rest is a hazy watercolor fantasy.

It still hangs in my living room on the England Wall. This is a testament to unconditional love.

I understand your perspective!

MEMORIAM

Crossing the Bar

  by

     Alfred Lord  Tennyson

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have cross’d the bar.

 My good friend  Leslie crossed the bar yesterday, Sunday, October 18, 2009 at noon Chicago time.

Despite having gone to the same high school over 40 years ago, we had only become close within the last year.  Close as sisters we became, after I heard she was having her head shaved before chemo.  She did not want her lovely hair to come out in clumps.  So being not only  proactive but the bravest person I have ever known, she shaved her head.

Back in the day, high school to be exact, I envied her hair.  It  always looked so ...well..."done".  I e-mailed her and apologized for my previous covetous behavior.  As soon as the laughter subsided, we became friends for ever.

I have no words now, only tears. I have no thoughts tonight only the awful ache of grief that closes around me like a cloak and rocks me  from back to front in its grasp.  I am searching my friend the Internet for words of solace.  I do not find them.

One day, after the tears have dried and the ache inside has subsided, my inner poet will emerge. Iwill pen my own tribute to my friend.  Until then, Tennyson will have to do.  We could not be in finer company.

GODSPEED  MY FRIEND!

How sweet they sounded !

OCTOBER'S BRIGHT BLUE WEATHER

OCTOBER'S BRIGHT BLUE WEATHER


O suns and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October's bright blue weather;

When loud the bumblebee makes haste,
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And goldenrod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When gentians roll their fingers tight
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red apples lie
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields still green and fair,
Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks,
In idle golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers, hour by hour,
October's bright blue weather.

O sun and skies and flowers of June,
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October's bright blue weather.

Helen Hunt Jackson

What more needs to be said?

I think this poem appeared in my 4th grade English book entitled Prose and Poetry. It sums up the first of October very well


But then I found this in A CALENDAR OF SONNETS also by Helen Hunt Jackson.

CALENDAR OF SONNETS: OCTOBER

The month of carnival of all the year,
When Nature lets the wild earth go its way,
And spend whole seasons on a single day.
The spring-time holds her white and purple dear;
October, lavish, flaunts them far and near;
The summer charily her reds doth lay
Like jewels on her costliest array;
October, scornful, burns them on a bier.
The winter hoards his pearls of frost in sign
Of kingdom: whiter pearls than winter knew,
Oar empress wore, in Egypt's ancient line,
October, feasting 'neath her dome of blue,
Drinks at a single draught, slow filtered through
Sunshiny air, as in a tingling wine!

Hero Worship

Augustus Theodore Bowen was born a scant two months after Lee surrendered at Appamatox.  The oldest son of Elijah and Martha Bowen lived his entire life in Maryland.  He married Kate Caldwell and fathered a dozen children.  Some of the family archives say there were 13 children.  Those of us investigating the lineage have only been able to account for 12. 

He buried four of those children before they reached age two.  Like his father before him,  Gus, as he was known,  worked for the Roland Park Company.  They were developers  in Roland Park, which became part of Baltimore City after annexation in the late 1800's.  Roland Park boasted a Country Club, including a golf course and stables.

Pap worked in the stables with the horses and the mules.  He  was part of the crew that laid the roadway on Roland Avenue and again on Falls Road in the Hampden section of Baltimore.  According to my grandmother, his daughter Mary Elizabeth, he worked until he was  eighty years old.  I was told that one day representatives of the Roland Park Company brought Pap home in a company car.  He was in tears.  They told my grandmother as kindly as they could, that Pap had worked long enough.

My first memory of Pap was the man in the blue sweater, denim shirt and brown fedora sitting on my grandmother's front porch.   He always seemed to be  there when our car pulled up in front of the house.  He had white hair, what was left of it, and a white moustache.  Previously, when it was fashionable, this was a handlbar moustache.  ( I would certainly have liked to have known him back in the day!)  He must have been quite the man!

 There was a pipe and a can of Prince Albert on the table beside the  green glider.  Sometimes the bag of Red Man chewing tobacco made its appearance also.  On those days,  a rather disreputable Van de Camps baked bean can materialized.  I soon came to know its purpose and noticed the exchange when my grandmother swapped it out for a clean one.

Like a sentinel, he manned his post on the glider every day from the first blush of spring until the chill of autumn sent him indoors.  As I grew old enough to play on the sidewalk in front of the Baltimore rowhouse, he took over monitoring my welfare and behavior.  He also, without knowing it, undertook some of my earliest education.

If  no neighborhood children were available to build forts in the backyard, or dress the Fox Terrier in baby clothes and attempt to push her down the street in the pram,  Pap was recruited to keep me occupied and out of trouble.  This he did by spinning tales of the "old white houseon the hill" filled with animals.  We had Puppy, Kitty, Booby (the owl) and Mousie and Polly.    He had a white horse and I had a black and white pony.  There were cud chewing cows ( which he demonstrated until I fell over with laughter) calves, a donkey  and rambunctious and ornery cowboys.

When the chores of the farm were done, we rode our horses down the hill to the Picnic. That is where they had rides and entertainment behind the white fence.  Occasionally,  we were accompanied by the cowboys. They always got into trouble at the Picnic.  Then, the sheriff was summoned to quell the disturbance.  The cowboys always wound up incarcerated in the city jail.  Sometimes, when they had been particularly unruly, the sheriff would turn the water on and they were showered in their cell.  

On other occasions, we went for walks together.  He wore his fedora and carried his "stick" as he called it.  Arthritis had rendered him bent and slow but had not yet stopped him.  It was not unusual to see the once robust man and the short, chubby, blonde child walk the four blocks to the Wyman Park ballfield on Beech Avenue.  We had dubbed this "the old wire fence".  We spent many summer mornings watching the morning glories on the chain link backstop behind home plate open to meet the sun.

He mystified me with the  feats he could perform seemingly at will.  He always carried a pocket knife.  The purpose of this eluded me until the day that the boy down the street, my secret crush at age 5, named Billy,  decided he wanted to play cowboys with his friend Leonard.  No girls were allowed.  HUMPH!

I was desolate.  My tears were unstoppable and my  moans and wails threatened to wake my grandfather. He worked the graveyard shift at Black and Decker and slept during the day.  Waking grandaddy in the middle of the day would not bode well for my enjoyment of the afternoon.

Pap took me by the hand and led me sobbing into the house.  He produced an apple from the refrigerator and the knife from his pocket.  He admonished me to keep my eyes on him as he made a slice at the stem end of the apple and began to peel the shiny red and yellow orb. 

I was astonished!  My tears dried as I watched  in amazement as the red stripe of skin began to get longer and longer as the apple turned whiter and whiter.  In a minute, the apple was denuded and the single, intact, perfect piece of red skin lay curled like a snake at his feet.

Well, that definitely changed my outlook on the day.  Who needed Billy?   Bet me Billy could not have performed this feat of legerdemain. I had Pap.  Who needed Billy?

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

No Crabby Patty today.  We ( spouse and I) are doing a little personification to the website.  By the time we are finished, it should reflect the all that I can be!

MURDER WE WROTE, OR THE COLD CASE CHRONICLES

The story you are about to read is true. The names have not been changed to protect the innocent. Nor have they been changed. so as not to indict the guilty.

This happened one lovely day in June, 1966. My graduation from high school was history. Searching for a job was in the future. the present was spent kicking back and just enjoying the fact that after 12 long years of Catholic School, I was FREE AT LAST! GREAT GOD ALMIGHTY! FREE AT LAST!

Sometime in Sophomore year, when pondering on the history of World War II, someone in my group of cohorts commented on Hitler's book burning. Wondering if the man had something going for him after all, we decided to have a burning of our own at the end of the year. Once begun, this became the annual rite of passage at the end of the school year.

For the past three years, my friends and I had saved all our written school assignments, workbooks and handouts, anything that was deemed to be ours from high school. This amounted to a considerable sum of paper from each one of us. There were four participants at the beginning.

Each summer after the semester ended, we would gather at some one's home, have a party, and burn the year long collection of papers and junk we had accumulated. There would be burgers on the grill, soda in the cooler and chips in hand. This final party, the one after graduation, was the most special and splendid conflagration of all.

If I recall correctly, the crew had grown by three by the end of senior year. Along with Betty, Mike, Kathie and myself, we were joined by Colleen and Kathy W. The party was held at Mary's house on Moravia Road across from Holy Redeemer Cemetery.

For the final blast, there were not only the obligatory cook out foods, but a bushel of steamed crabs to boot. The afternoon started with the ceremonial laying of the newspaper and progressed with the eating and drinking and picking of crabs, hot dogs, hamburgers, sweet stuff and soda. The Beach Boys, Beatles and Rolling Stones were on the radio. Of course, there was the burning of the books. It was Nirvana.

As the sun lowered in the sky, we began the final, closing ceremony of our high school careers. It would include a candle lighting and a funeral of sorts..

Those in the Honor Society, had the candles from their induction ceremony. We began our funerary liturgy with the candle lighting. Then the uniform jumpers, blouses, berets. and finally the ugly, wear like iron but look like hell sandals were produced by each participant.

The school had changed the traditional beanie for a softer, larger beret style hat. The things actually had two (one was not enough?) stickpin like objects that were supposed to hold the hat in place. In the four years I wore the thing, those infernal pins pierced my scalp every time I put the hat on. Adding insult to injury, the beret slid off more than once.


We decided that the burial of the uniforms and shoes and the hats, would take place in the empty lot behind Mary's home. There was nothing there. It was composed of dirt, weeds and stones. A shovel would be needed. My father's tool collection provided this.


After we donned the stupid green berets with the stickpins proudly waving from the button on top, we then gathered the by now threadbare jumpers, blouses and the offensive shoes. ( I couldn't wait to see the last of these things. They were the ugliest brown color I had ever seen. Since the grade school uniforms at my parish school were brown, I had seen a lot of brown in eight years, believe me.) The service began.

Laden with the clothing, candles and the shovel, and wearing the berets, the cortege began to process around the block to the burial ground. As Honor Society members, Kathie and Mike led the group with candles lit. as we reached the lot, we chose a place near the hedge and dug the grave. With great ceremony and several incantations as to where these goods should go, we lovingly laid the clothes, shoes and finally the hats in the hole, commended them on to another existence and filled in the grave. We left the tomb unmarked.

After that summer we went our separate ways as schoolmates always do. Many, many years passed. At the thirty-fifth class reunion, we regrouped and gathered at a local restaurant for dinner and storytelling.

All but one of the original crew were in attendance. There were some additions. Trudy and Paula joined us. Over Italian food we talked old times and caught up on new times. We shared child and grandchild pictures and told tales until the evening got late.

As Colleen ate her ice cream (let me tell you she was the ONLY one able to eat dessert) I remarked on the burial so many years ago. The result was hysterical laughter from Mary and Kathie.

As I looked confounded, they recovered enough to tell me the rest of the story.

It seems that all was well hidden until some time in about 1989. Mary had married and moved on but her mother was still living in the family home. This lot was owned by the city of Baltimore ( WHO KNEW?) One day, a crew came out to the lot with the intention of clearing it and erecting some sort of structure.

As the digging began, the workmen uncovered the long passed over mound of uniforms, hats, and of course the shoes. Completely mystified and shocked by the discovery of what appeared to be a mass grave, The city employees called the city police.

That elicited a response of a sea of blue uniforms and yellow crime scene tape. The tape stayed up and the digging continued until the authorities were satisfied that human remains were not included. Honestly, the uniforms were so unique that I wonder if the police contacted the school to see if they had any idea who belonged to what was hidden for so long. Obviously, no one was talking.


I laughed at this until tears were running down my face. As my glee subsided, I found that was not the end of the story. It seems that the recovered relics, buried for over 20 years, were in just as fine shape as the day we buried them. Even the shoes were none the worse for wear.

The final disposal of the mess is not known to me, but the fact that all this is true and actually happened can be verified. Just ask the Baltimore City Police Department!