Spindrift, Part Three

Ah the Green, the infamous Sprindrift Village Green: ground zero for street theater of the absurd and a steady stream of out of tune, self-medicated banjo players. In addition, a number of shmatah encased cafes offering braised broccoli, whole wheat pancakes, fair trade falafel, pesticide-free peas, sand sifted soy milk, chamomile mint fizzes, fennel frittatas and of course community-conscious couscous. 

The Green also was peopled at almost any hour with a vibrant host of hucksters; there were early stage terminal singing guitarists and the Especially Hairy Ones with eerie pairs of glittering eyes peeping through tangled manes- these extremely long tresses often had seen too many visions of nirvana or snorted one more spec of something ecstatic than could ever be accounted for rationally, their unsettling demeanor further emphasized by a tendency toward incredibly scary looking toenails. These truly strange ones however actually comprised a smaller percentage of the census than one might think, fewer in number but highly, highly visible, especially on weekends when they entertained the tourists and themselves with great brio and a kind of drug fueled innocence.

Frankly I just could not see Hermie Treadwell, former NYC high school teacher slightly eccentric but basically mild mannered, in any of these scenarios- it simply did not make sense. He was legendary for chiding his long-haired male students and was known to offer extra points for haircuts. He never showed any affinity for learning a string instrument and definitely was not one to hang out in public places in ripped jeans; the mere sight of pierced body parts on his students, even an innocuous, small conglomeration of two or three ear pieces, tended to kick off spirited invectives on self-mutilation. He also was the last person likely to uproot an entire family and relocate to some upstate backwater redolent of fatal nostalgia and an overdrive of fantasy but pitiably short on pastrami. 

To the best of my knowledge, Hermie had never been a pot smoker and in fact prided himself on being one of the teetotalers at the rather raucous end term parties; he called himself the designated dribbler while the rest of us abandoned ourselves to the Dionysian sensations of cheap sherry at Christmas. Still, when I think of Hermie, none of this makes sense. He was basically a very, very stable individual, not at all flashy, clean shaven, an un-apologetic caffeine addict who preferred diet cokes to green tea and never expressed any interest whatsoever in either the evils of fracking or the benefits of eliminating corn beef from the diet.

Fantasy, the retreat of last resort, or vice versa? I could picture Hermie saying something like this on the last day of school. The truth is that probably everyone at some point in their prosaic quotidian existence dreams of transforming their lives into something more adventurous and riskier. But how many of us actually get to do this? It’s just not practical. And Hermie Treadwell would have been the least likely candidate for that kind of radical metamorphosis. I understand the lure of course as I myself became seriously enamored that summer with the idea of cutting loose from the gulag and doing something rash and exciting. The real estate market already had tanked around the time of Hermie’s defection and there were zillions of opportunities for vicariously checking out new and unusual living arrangements.

Eventually I wound up seeing so many properties that year in my own escape fantasy it became more expedient to concoct nicknames for them, a convenient filing system for all the lives I had the pleasure of observing in the village of Spindrift. In order of appearance though not necessarily eccentricity, several of the more memorable encounters involved: Chotchka Lady, Corporate Nympho, Drinks-Like-A-Fish, Zen Boy, Dark Shadows, Hippie High Ho, The Shining, Incensed on Incense and Little Red Schoolhouse, to name just a few. Did Hermie also comb through sundry small town existences during vacations when he was not in school or at home marking papers or planning lessons on the rebellious colonists and the lure of westward expansion, or devising quizzes on the post-reconstruction period?  

I’ll probably never find out what drove him out or where he wound up because it seems that no one knows his exact address in or out of Spindrift, and he always kept his number unlisted, although I’m convinced he still maintains a landline. Ironically I never managed to bump into him either on the Green, though one would think he would have had to have passed through on some prosaic errand, like buying postage stamps or devouring a soft serve yogurt, and voila, we serendipitously cross paths in a marvelous stroke of synchronicity!  I suppose my ESP was not particularly in high gear at the time. In any event I finally decided against the whole moving thing for reasons of practicality, along with a good, long look at the landscape as the foliage began to wane. The dream quickly dissipated faster than a cloud of chalk dust as the trees grew bare and ominously lonesome, and I began refiguring how many more years in the gulag it would actually take to reach that final “magic number.”

But I still find myself thinking about Hermie and have begun allowing myself a few rewards on occasion, like the unselfconscious consumption, of greasy, ketchup drenched French fries, consumed unabashedly via my naked fingers-  like the song says, freedom’s just another word for no more weight to lose. . .  and do I really, really care what the decorum detectives think? As you can see, I’ve also taken to composing my own little aphorisms. I’ve been going over the various circles of hell with my seniors this year and have come up with a zinger for those who come to class unwashed: Abandon soap, all ye who enter here? Occasionally I continue to check the ads up in Spindrift as well. Recently I took an online subscription to The Sprindrift Times just to read some of the insanely absurd letters-to-the-editor. I’ve also begun taking a little more time off and using up my days because as it turns out absences definitely do make the heart grow fonder. . . .  

Sometimes when I’m meditating in between classes in the teachers’ lounge- a deserted, dank cave in the basement desperately in need of a wrecking ball- I find comfort in visualizing my inner space as a cloudless, blue mountain top with endless vistas. . . . If the universe is indeed infinite, is not anything and everything possible? Would chucking it all be such a bad thing. . . ? Why, why, must I remain at this crappy job?!? Life is short. . . .

 Nah, must stay. Nah-must-stay. Nahmustay, Naamastay. . . . Nah. Must Stay.



(12 June 2012)

Sprindrift, Part Two

 When I finally reached the town center, after almost two insufferable hours on the interstate and then trailing behind a slow moving truck for ten miles, I stopped at a local real estate emporium to use the bathroom, first having to spend fifteen excruciating minutes pretending I was an interested buyer. It was one of those homey offices housed in a ramshackle cape that was in need of major repair- large pots of leggy geraniums outside, flyers stacked in a box tacked up on the front door and a tattoo parlor upstairs. There were a few energetic carpenter ants making hay on the porch beneath two dilapidated white plastic chairs; a gaggle of rather large muffin crumbs, some still with blueberries attached, were scattered across the warped floor boards like an insect smorgasbord.

I schmoozed with a couple of the charmingly quirky local sharks casually posed at their desks trying to appear both city savvy (Oh sure we know what it’s like down there- Hey, I’m from Brooklyn) yet country free-spirited (I hiked up the mountain trail this morning- it was amazing!). Two or three other shadowy office types pretended to busy themselves around file cabinets and computers. I enthusiastically accepted a few brochures with photos of quintessential country ranches and eyebrow colonials draped in weeping willows and told them how much I looked forward to exploring the town. It was all spin of course. I knew the houses were ancient, termite ridden shacks with swamps for basements. They knew that I knew, and that I was just there to use the bathroom. I could sense their cynical, fatigued desperation when I mentioned I had another appointment.  A multi-colored assortment of wind chimes hanging from one of the rotted porch beams clanged exuberantly as the screen door bounced shut behind me.

It was lunchtime and the streets of the town were teeming with vibes of every strange hue and pitch. The scene opened before me like a colorful origami fold, albeit one fashioned by a young, somewhat uncoordinated child who did not exactly know how to neatly line up the corners- the whole flimsy construction appearing slightly off plumb. Milling about the streets and alleyways was a kaleidoscopic assemblage of crackpots whose life’s work appeared to have been  being perceived as cool although in most cases the end result fell way short of that ubiquitous term. It was the kind of place where people came to see and be seen, gawk and pose, still retro after all these years, but lively with a kind of genuine grunge.

Why had he chosen this time warp? Maybe Hermie had always felt a bit anonymous and undifferentiated in his previous existence, a cog in the proverbial bureaucratic machinery, a grain of sand among the endless beaches of the vast civil service world, a pixel on one of the kids’ monitors. My thoughts waxed philosophical. Could anyone find inner peace while trekking each day to a gray cinderblock outer borough high school, an edifice with iron gates on the windows and fluorescent lights flickering annoyingly on the ceilings, where jarring buzzers denoted the end of a class period mid-sentence, to confront much less motivate a slightly hostile group of bored teenagers? The early bird catches more than worm, he passes the class. . . Hermie liked to warn the recidivist latecomers with this nugget, as they engaged in prolonged goodbyes with their friends at the doorway after the bell rang. Was it really any wonder he threw in his Delaney cards and fled to the north country??

The scene in Sprindrift does not appear boring at first glance. In fact it seems so crazily frenetic that it prompts newly arrived day trippers to lump together everyone on the street whom they perceive as belonging to the place, branding them as one entity; upon a closer look however the motley mob breaks down into several distinctly separate groups. The first category entailed a more scrubbed and affluent loose community whose members are identifiable through a too visible lack of the ability to truly connect, an aloofness bordering on vapidity and a preference for dressing in unique, diaphanous fabric to exude what can only be described as a vaguely non-Western elan. These folks clearly did not have their thoughts periodically hampered by the predictable piercing of shrill buzzers over aging, crackling PA systems but rather were free to enjoy an abundance of unscripted hours where they could follow each meandering impulse and idea at will. They were fortunate, moneyed individuals, now and again in their Tom Sawyer straw sun hats and handmade scarves from Nepal, who once in their youth may have traversed mountain peaks in the Himalayas, their corporeal selves cocooned in swaths of orange and vermillion silk as they enriched their universal souls; they subsisted entirely on spelt, tofu, and oms. Their aura of spiritual insouciance was mind boggling. Did Hemie aspire to this persona?

Maybe in his own youth Hermie nurtured secret and unfulfilled yearnings for cosmic wisdom, clandestinely perusing the sage reflections of Swami Satchidananda or his ilk, as he rode the subway each day to the gulag, at a time when such multi-syllabic gurus were so very popular with the proletariat. He never mentioned any of this when we met for lunch sixth period sarcastically reflecting as we stood sullenly on the line whether it was wiser to partake of the “gray” or “brown” entrée. He scoffed at the thin, dark “swill” passing as coffee but as a self-proclaimed “java junky” tended to overlook this small failing of culinary art on the part of the dietician. Perhaps he developed a taste for whole grains and quinoa somewhere along the way- even mastering the correct pronunciation of that latter delicacy early in the game- “keenwah” as opposed to “kin-o-uh- before that product left the health food stores and hit the supermarket shelves- would we have known?

Can we ever really know another person, much less ourselves? No, these former wannabe monks and high priestesses wafting along pathways of light in bright colors and scarily brighter stares definitely were the antithesis of anything vaguely resembling a Herman Treadwell, even though eventually they too did cast off their robes and end up at noisy parent teacher associations, contentious meetings of selectmen and a variety of other jobs, some with vaguely artistic whiffs: part-time volunteer at the local crafts fundraiser, obsessive writer of letters to the editor of The Spindrift Times, and other sundry occupations of moral and spiritual rectitude. Not infrequently they also landed in smallish offices around the Village Green, busying themselves with bursting rolodexes and reams of paper - forests of felled trees notwithstanding- in the pursuit of the very material perks of property investment during the boom times. Hermie would never have volunteered for anything non-paying as he considered his profession to be sufficiently sacrificial, nor was he interested in local politics unless it affected the pension system, and he had never done much travelling out of the country. Had he taken real estate courses in his spare time, and why hadn’t he mentioned any of this at the table? As for affecting poses, he hated phonies and their lackeys whom he referred to as the propriety police.

So I began scrutinizing another “demographic” to see where Hermie might fit in. This group consisted mainly of refugees from the ethnic ghettos of the boroughs, southern Westchester-notably Yonkers-, upstate New York and parts of Long Island who had come for The Concert back in the day and basically never left. Practically starving and sleeping in the muddy fields of a farm located many miles from what became the actual, “iconic” town, they suddenly found themselves in what was looking like the middle of nowhere but feeling like Everywhere.  Or perhaps they just saw the movie and were smitten.

Forsaking cramped family apartments and tract houses, dead end jobs and crazy relatives back home, a goodly number of these downstate refugees never finished college. These folks now comprised the Sprindrift townies, quite different from the gownies of the flowing vermillion muumuus. Being of relatively modest backgrounds, townies did not have the promise of wealth much less enlightenment, but still were intent on being perceived as cool. And so they took or gave evening classes in yoga, hemp quilting, tai die chi, the sacred art of mandala-making, nose threading and cheerful chanting to show that they were regular, esoteric guys and gals- usually after a full day’s work of retail sales in a touristy Main Street boutique or behind the wheel of a school bus or delivery van.

But in a strange irony, it was the gownies with their mantra of reverence for all things natural, those very same devotees of rushing streams and soothing birdsong, who wound up living much closer in and more convenient to the actual town- more often than not as second homeowners nowhere to be seen in the dead of January. The townies on the other hand, most of whom became full timers out of necessity, were relegated to uninspiring bungalows, some with peeling exteriors and questionable septic tanks, flimsy dwellings much further afield and not as easily accessible to the center of the universe, the bustling  and heady Village Green. Hermie would never have put up with faulty plumbing or weak water pressure, field mice and mosquitoes- and imagining him twisting his pudgy limbs into various pretzel-shape formations was ludicrous- he probably had never seen the inside of a gym since attending high school himself as a student and was completely and defiantly out of shape. This was a guy who could enjoy a cheeseburger and fried onion rings or a steak and buttered mashed potatoes without the slightest trace of guilt, then partake of a Twinkie-like confection for dessert- not the kind of fare readily available on the Green. He coined the phrases wellness widgets and veggie voodoo when they tried to include bulghar wheat on the school lunch menu. He was particularly incensed by the food fascists. “What’s next?” he said, “Will we have to give up popcorn? Try, I dare you, settling in for a good movie with a bucket of soggy edemame beans. . . ." 

   So I continued to peruse the crowds at the Green, in hopes of figuring it out. . . .

Sprindrift, Part One

This summer look for tales from the archives, posted in weekly installments. "Spindrift," takes us out of the city's wilds and into the storied north country. 

Sprindrift 

Habit. The mother of inertia!
One of the myriad, self-styled aphorisms Herman Treadwell liked to spring on his students when they repeatedly did not do their homework.

He who retires first laughs best!
A perennial favorite as we sat around the cafeteria at lunchtime in those broken little chairs with the torn vinyl seats, in what a Victorian writer would probably have termed a “desultory fashion,” trying to figure out the break-even point in our pensions. Hermie was such a pro at these calculations of imaginary accrued civil service “wealth” that he had a small cottage industry going helping people figure out their final number, his only remuneration our undying attention. It was a regular retirement posse with Hermie leading the charge and advising people on which death “option” to rope in, what figure to shoot for; it got us through the sluggish and crawling days of the spring term. He was a major proponent of what he called the hop ‘till you drop theory of beating the system.

So it’s not hard to imagine our shock when after two weeks of not seeing Hermie at his usual spot at the table and wondering if he had taken some sick days, word had it that he simply decided to pack it in early and move a hundred and twenty-five miles north! Up the thruway to the once legendary now longtime passé village of Spindrift New York, in essence, fleeing prior to reaching his target date for the maximum payout. Could this be possible? We were stunned. 

Sardonic and popular high school social studies teacher, beloved father of three grown kids and husband to Molly, lessee of a three-bedroom, rent stabilized apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side who possessed the foresight to grab the place when the neighborhood was a total dilapidated, crime-ridden dump- why on earth would he, or anyone else for that matter, want to bury themselves beneath an outdated social trend in the wilds of the Catskills before collecting the meager though sufficient “final number?” He never failed to remind that such perseverance on our part would avoid the necessity of cat food. . .okay, okay, we won’t be living like Gatsby, but neither will we be partaking of the gas pipe like Willy Loman! So we had to wonder, what was he thinking? And which death option did he finally choose? We said we were dying to know. . .  .

Even the name of the place sounded a bit pretentious if not totally idiotic. Spindrift is nowhere near water. The desolate, bumpy access route you catch as you come off the highway- ten hideous miles of depressing scenery before exiting onto the side road that winds its way into the quaint town center- is lined with a couple of broken down delis, an abandoned farm stand, the remnants of a defunct Exxon station and a used car dealership with those red and blue little plastic flags waving haphazardly along the roof line; there’s also a motorcycle store on the route that can attract a fairly raunchy and tremendously overweight crowd on weekends. Every now and then on the way to the to the town you see a makeshift billboard advertising the miraculous musical reappearance for one day only! of some burned out, barely alive human relic from the early days of rock. It’s not the kind of place where you spin your dreams but it does have a fair number of drifters. 

If truth be told though, what did we really know about Hermie? Can we ever really know what goes on in another person’s thoughts?  Even in his absence however he had gotten us to think- his familiar “modus operandi.” One lunchtime, while obsessing over whether I should assign “The House of Seven Gables” or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to a particularly apathetic group of juniors, without so much as glancing up from his neat and parallel rows of tiny numerals, dug ferociously into a paper napkin with a ball pen, he chimed in, ‘This is an easy one, Huck Finn of course! Are we not a nation of rugged individualists? Hawthorne was a pure fatalist.” Several teachers smirked as the bell rang and they hoisted up their messy Delaney books full of unmarked homework assignments to shuffle off to another forty-five minutes of pure stress in what we affectionately termed “the gulag.” Styrofoam cups flew lethargically into the garbage can one by one as we dragged ourselves into the crowded, noisy hallway.

Consumed with curiosity over Hermie’s spontaneous act of recklessness, I swore off inertia. He was especially fond of calling “screen time” scream time, so I stopped surfing the net and watching the news. It was incredible. After the initial withdrawal period I found myself almost magically imbued with a dose of the same pioneer spirit that he routinely outlined on the board for his American History One freshmen; I was determined to drive up to Spindrift and check it out for myself.  It finally happened on one of those idyllic, wisteria scented weekend mornings early in June, when the teaching day countdown is a heartbeat away from the bitter end and anything seems possible, images of life in the gulag giving way to visions of big sky and open road. Trees were in full leaf, wildflowers ran amok, delicate snowballs of hydrangea cozied up to uneven, sloping doorsteps.

It was lunchtime when I arrived and the streets were teeming with vibes of every strange hue and pitch. The town opened before me like a colorful origami fold, albeit one fashioned by a young, somewhat uncoordinated child who did not exactly know how to neatly line up the corners- the whole flimsy construction appeared slightly off plumb. Milling about the streets and alleyways was a kaleidoscopic assemblage of crackpots whose life’s work appeared to have been being perceived as cool although in most cases the end result fell way short of that ubiquitous term. It was the kind of place where people came to see and be seen, gawk and pose, still retro after all these years, but lively with a kind of genuine grunge; there did not appear to be a laptop, an ipad or a smart phone in sight.


Maybe Hermie had always felt a bit anonymous and undifferentiated in his previous existence, a cog in the proverbial bureaucratic machinery, a grain of sand among the endless beaches of the vast civil service world, a pixel on one of the kids’ monitors. My thoughts waxed philosophical. Could anyone find inner peace trekking each day to a gray cinderblock outerborough high school, an edifice with iron gates on the windows and fluorescent lights flickering annoyingly on the ceilings, where jarring buzzers denoted the end of a class period mid-sentence, then each day to confront much less motivate a slightly hostile group of bored teenagers? The early bird catches more than a worm, he passes this class. . . Hermie liked to warn the recidivist latecomers with this homey observation as the kids engaged in prolonged goodbyes with their friends at the doorway after the bell rang. Was it really any wonder he threw in his Delaney cards and fled to the north country?? I was determined to find out more. . . .