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. . . .

Galleon Icing

Leaning back in an Adirondack chair at Wave Hill on a recent June afternoon, I was gazing up at the sky, basking in melodious, soul soothing birdy tweets. A few clouds in a perfectly clear and sunny universe, one in particular, started to resemble an old galleon ship made of frosty white cake icing gently rocking on an infinite sea of pale blue. A kind of aquatic fairyland, it you will,

It was one of those rare, becalmed moments of peace combined with the imaginary, solo playtime of a magic-infused child’s brain. A momentary regression to innocence, a mini second of pure escape.

Alas, it was not to last however, this workaday lull for the aspiring bourgeoisie. Slowly the weekend preparations began a stone’s throw from where I sat, assaulting my brief reverie.

First the chair haulers, then the floral arrangers, finally the nervous, busy staff skittering about everywhere on the grass, the awful, grating and piercing noise of sound testing, the unending chair placement, the floral arrangements, the construction of the matrimonial canopy, the folding chairs being unfolded and lined up, the equipment, the sound testing. . .

Wave Hill in its nineteenth century heyday was a grand private estate, a respite for the likes of of robber barons, a President, a great American writer. It was donated to the City of New York in the 1960’s and for a couple of decades remained a quiet and pretty neighborhood retreat from a time gone by; it offered views overlooking the Hudson River and in the distance a famous bridge that was not yet built or part of the landscape in that former century. It was a place to unwind from the everyday cares, an old fashioned simple pleasure with an aura of former elegance. It was free and there were no tour buses.  On a weekday one could conjure up pensively strolling the paths after alighting from a horse drawn brougham or some similarly patrician and sublime Edith Wharton moment. There would have been high tea no doubt and a roaring fire on late winter afternoons in the great hall, maids and butlers silently scurrying about. One could dream.

  

Eventually the city bureaucrats got hold of the place and had ideas. They quickly realized the former estate was a potential cash cow and not just an “environmental center with beautiful gardens” as the new brochures eventually advertised; now there are conferences year round, tour buses, an expansive gift shop in the newly fashioned visitors’ center, and weddings on summer weekends. These latter affairs are gross. Money, money, money is what they scream and it takes many hours and a formidable army of caterers and contractors to set up the trappings for that one, lavish night; while all this goes on, the last public visitors are allowed to continue to loll in their Adirondack chairs prior to closing time- a sort of lame nod to the proletariat.  

This past weekend being one of the last lollers to be lolling, I was able- nay, forced- to check out the guests as they began arriving, noting an astonishing array of wildly expensive and sometimes odd dresses, natty suits, hairstyles, face lifts and the occasional comforting sight of an unsculpted, overhanging belly. The robber barons were back. Many of the party goers looked like business associates.

As I was leaving I also happened to notice the wine with which the staff was filling dozens of stem glasses set upon a white table near the entrance for these thirsty arriving guests; the familiar, celebratory, red elixir being poured by the impeccably dressed young waiters attired in crisp black and white uniforms was being ladeled out from what resembled a large, plastic bucket of the kind used to wash floors. In essence, a rather worn looking, not so spiffy pail full of cheap, red stuff that looked a bit like Kool Aid or perhaps supermarket punch.

Who knew. . . ???

No place like home. . . .

Time to take a quick break and get my house in order- see you next week with a new (old) story! 

NYStoryweaver

They're Everywhere

If you wanna do something right use your own cone-

                               A Cone Head on Saturday Night Live

The other day I visited the smallish upstate town of a leafy suburb, hoping for a quick and bucolic respite from the unending repair of failing infrastructure. The city streets now often are shrouded with soil, dirt and rocks under the shadow of intimidating diggers and other humongous trucks with scoopers and dinosaur teeth that gleefully rip up every inch of asphalt. Toddlers love this, are completely mesmerized, could watch for hours. See Cooper, that’s a big, big digger!  Look what it's doing! The clanging and grinding for everyone else is pretty much unbearable and traffic basically nightmarish. Sink holes spring up in unexpected spots at an alarming rate, no doubt from the continual pounding. I figured a day away would be nice.

Lately my own neighborhood’s turn came and we were besieged by torn streets, dazed workers, unsuccessful attempts to direct foot and car traffic, and giant sections of ominous, round, black water pipe lying around; imposing tubes with a formidable presence stacked here and there at the curb, patiently waiting their own turn to be placed inside the long caverns that the large trucks and deafening drills created exactly in the spots where you normally plant your tootsies. Finally, the ubiquitous orange cones appeared, dropped almost randomly from the heavens to warn and direct you, though that also made no sense as there still seemed no clear pedestrian path.

In such cases of course you wind up zigzagging across lanes, weaving in and out of slow moving traffic manned by cursing drivers so that you can keep changing sides of the street just to keep moving. Eventually you do find a sidewalk, or at least a sizable section of one that is almost walk-able, as they always leave at least one, no matter how skimpy or narrow, to ferry you (and double strollers and people on walkers and dogs and runners) the hell out of there.  Eventually you find that lone little line of poured concrete creating a path to an intersection where finally you can cross and head back to the chimera of unperturbed civilization- always tantalizingly visible in the near distance- providing an illusion of maintained stability, a kind of  yellow brick, undisturbed paved road to the  un-wrecked familiar.

I see the cones everywhere. When they are not guiding you along a stretch of untrammeled sidewalk beneath you they're usually alerting you to treacherous roof work up above. They appear on highways and parkways to make lanes suddenly disappear. Sometimes the cones are simply plunked solo to steal a coveted parking spot. Really, they're everywhere. But back to that small, upstate town in the quiet, upscale, leafy suburb. . . .

So after lunch I decided to take a walk- a simple pleasure, yes? As I reached the center of the main street however with its little roundabout, I noticed something amiss: it was the cones, as far as the eye could see. They were placed in all four directions on all the streets leading out from the center.  So omnipresent were they in fact that they began to suggest something akin to the alien Cone Heads from Saturday Night Live, those pointy headed, ineffable beings who emanated from a far off galaxy and hilariously tried to blend in. Honestly though, these cones were not like those other, funny cones from SNL, but more like a silent invasion. We're worried about immigrants???  How about the damned orange cones?? And to make matters worse, unlike their cone headed cousins in the city, these cones were lined up fascistically straight, exactly parallel to the closed sidewalks they so meticulously straddled, not scattered randomly about like city cones; all routes were cut off  to everywhere and it remained eerily still. The four little streets that streamed out from the center were completely empty and devoid of human life, though I can't speak for the squirrels. As you can guess, these cones did not blend in but rather loomed.

As I searched for a way to proceed on foot, it became apparent that each street had been dug up and the sidewalks temporarily(?) obliterated, albeit in an oddly neat and orderly fashion- this offering a glint of solace, even though you were sort of trapped in the roundabout. The suburbs after all are not like the city, but still. . . . It was one of those strange, dreamlike moments, along with the realization that obviously there was no escape and there would be no walk here either. You just had to turn back on your heel to wherever and forget about walking in this town, ever, or at least for the moment and probably longer- you know how these things tend to go. At least in the city there is always the vague possibility of twisting an ankle as you take a few baby steps and try to navigate the debris along a much too narrow, rubble strewn trail- but still a path- as if this were any consolation.  

As I headed back to the car I began to realize how hopeless the whole thing was. How from now on you most probably always would be running into one of these cone headed detours no matter where you went or how hard you tried to avoid that little army of conical soldiers and their outlying orange troupes as you attempted to take a walk or drive somewhere. Apparently everything everywhere has to be dug up all over again and restarted, rebuilt, replaced; re-broken, re-pounded, re-sifted, re-filled, and re-aligned. Everywhere. This is not fake news, but maybe metaphor. I hope not.  In any event, we seem to be sinking fast.

So how are your sidewalks doing these days?

And the ground beneath your feet?

Our Town

 I’m sitting behind the wheel of a car tentatively parked at an “Official Parking Only” spot (whatever that means) on one of the faux side “streets” of a large, outdoor, meandering mall, a marketplace designed to look nothing like the town square it was meant to evoke. It could be anywhere in America though this one happens to be in Westchester, and as in all such places everyone seems to be running. The day is cloudy and overcast, which somehow adds a welcome and almost noir touch to the scene. Other drivers of sound mind and fully functioning hearts and limbs have parked even more boldly- a notch up the risk category- in those hallowed handicapped spots, almost flauntingly in fact.

There is not an available, illegal, outside space to be found! I lucked out because I was cowering in the fire zone before the miscreant in front me sashayed back to his car like an insouciant mafia don and languidly pulled out, allowing me to creep up into the area’s last non-spot spot a notch down from the emergency vehicle lane. We rebel outliers have decamped here on the faux streets of the faux town because either we are sociopaths with total disregard for sign warnings, or more likely we wish to avoid the monstrous cave of a garage that swallows drivers into its gaping maw then frustrates the hell out of you as you try to get it to spit the car back out- in large part because the scanners never work. Some of the more devil-may-care insurgents simply walk away from their illegally parked vehicles on the street and nonchalantly stroll to their destinations. Most people run. I am out here waiting because the person I am with “ran in” to make a purchase. Run, run, run. . . .

Even those who come stumbling out of the multi-leveled, dark cavern of a giant parking structure with an assured “legal” spot seem to be hurrying in a kind of semi-somnambulant state. The air is filled with a sort of droning background noise passing itself off as a "song" that’s a simulacrum of the original Muzak simulacrum (remember the tunes of the Beatles homogenized to a cool whipped, barely recognizable melody in a freezing supermarket as you checked out the eggs? That would be like Beethoven compared with this stuff). The track or channel or outer space station from whence this horrible sound blasts a wavy, repetitive series of dissonant grunts, unintelligible moans and repetitive lyrics- some fast, some agonizingly slow- cuts through the sporadic rain slowly beginning to gently splatter the windshield and wafts overhead.

Visitors wander back and forth under the spell of the sleep inducing, indecipherable beat, trance-like and weary, weaving or running toward one or another of the stores on the snaking trail of wares stacked horizontally and lining the way; it’s a series of neat corporate igloos with brand names. I think people think they’re having fun. Well, maybe not. But they’re definitely acquiring stuff.

Like everyone else, I too like to acquire stuff and throw it out. But why can’t this happen like in those earlier, twentieth century Hollywood comedies and romances that take place on a fashionable New York avenue? Cinematic shopping outings with well dressed, perfectly coifed, silly women in little hats, elegant suits and impossibly high heels who breathlessly balance a stack of gorgeously wrapped and festively ribboned parcels in their arms as a doorman suddenly appears out of nowhere to graciously open a taxi door. So relaxing, so much fun! A kind of languorous shopping, no running! Can you imagine such an extravagant bout of retail therapy, at full price no less, with doting shopkeepers clucking over you and the most pretentious, smarmy, Fifth Avenue department store adding a touch of shock and awe; or much less envision squeezing your bunions into those painful, toe pinching “pumps” of yesteryear. . .  and yet it still seems a much more desirable fantasy!

Or perhaps a classic “Shop Around the Corner” jaunt in slightly faded black and white would be more to your taste, where the staff is like a family, the owner the mustachioed, beneficent patriarch, the setting a quaint little pre-WWII European town, the longtime salespeople comically competing; a place where Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan fall in love with each other in and out of the stock room by means of  some wacky pen pal plot device, where there are no parking garages because people walk everywhere, and personal attention is paid to each and every shopper, no matter how obnoxious the customer or small the purchase . . . .

I am whisked back to reality as I continue to wait and the rain drops start to hit the glass methodically like seconds ticking away in a Hitchcock film. Some of the people in the simulacrum shopping town I observe through my windshield- a goodly number of them mildly or wildly overweight and not very well dressed- are carrying little and bigger bags with recognizable brand lettering stamped across the stiff paper. These wrappings with the company names proudly ensconced on them make the purchases seem more important than they are; but the bags are all recycled and not nearly as glossy and shiny as in the good old days of planet destruction. Somehow this makes me sad.

But really, what are my choices? Spending hour after hour blearily sitting in front of a screen at all times of day or night, obsessively browsing and doing the work of store employees by typing in scads of  style or “sku” numbers, addresses and credit information? Then weeks later desperately hunting around the house for tape while grappling with the repacking of a hopelessly and messily torn open box, after you’ve even forgotten you ordered the damn thing in the first place because it took so long to arrive.  And all this so that you can run to the post office and return the defective merchandise as you curse out the seller and swear never to order online again???

Oh wait- gotta go!- a fifteen minute loading zone just opened up and I need to run in for something. . . .