The Witch of Maple Street

When I was in the fourth grade my older brother Allen decided to give up his serious work in detonating small explosives and take up the study of meteorology. This seemed like an odd career move to me. Perhaps he originally thought meteorology was the study of meteors and was too proud to admit he made a mistake. Or maybe he really was interested in predicting the weather. For all the years I’ve known him I’ve never been able to figure him out.

Soon Allen’s room filled up with weather equipment: weather vanes, barometers, thermometers and wind cups. Some of the stuff we picked up from around the house. Other items Allen sent away for. We even made a trek to the shabby Army Surplus store on Main Street. We didn’t find anything there, but it did give us an excuse to rummage through the piles of blankets, mess kits and canteens.

We smelled like moth balls for almost a week.

Once assembled, the equipment needed to be set up outside. Since Allen’s room overlooked the garage that seemed like the logical place. It wasn’t long until I was going EVA on the slanted garage roof festooned with equipment while desperately trying to balance myself. As project manager, Allen remained inside by the window overlooking the assembly.

It was then that I saw her: the witch of Maple Street. Actually, I didn’t see all of here, just her sun hat bobbing up and down among her sunflowers. Her name was Mrs. Phillips and she was our next-door neighbor. I only knew a few things about her. I knew she lived alone. I knew she pretty much stayed in her house. And I knew her husband was dead.

No adult seemed to know the exact cause of his death, but every kid in the neighborhood had it figured out. Mrs. Phillips had devoured him. That’s what happens to you if you are foolish enough to marry a witch.

It wasn’t long until Allen, frustrated with my natural ineptness, joined me on the roof. His focus was securing and proper placement of the equipment. There was weather to predict after all. To his growing annoyance my attention was not on the science of meteorology, but on the simple joy of being on the garage roof. How cool was that? I was on equal footing the backyard sycamore tree!

Then the magic shattered. A voice shot up from below: “You, boy.” I looked down. It was Mrs. Phillips standing in the middle of my backyard calling to me.

The witch of Maple Street was in the middle of my backyard calling to me!

I looked at Allen. He was on his knees pounding the weather vane into the shingles. He acted like he heard nothing.

“You, boy,” growled Mrs. Phillips. “Come down here.”

What could I do? An adult had commanded me to do something. I had to obey. It was like a rule or something. I climbed back in through the window and went out to the backyard where the witch was waiting for me.

“Come with me,” she said. We walked to her garden where she gave me a bucket and a pair of big yellow gloves. “I can’t bend down like I used to. I need you to pull those weeds. Do you see them?”

I looked. “Yeah,” I said tentatively.

“Pull out the weeds and put them in the bucket,” she said, and then she disappeared into her house.

There was nothing preventing me from just walking away. But I lived in a world where adults were always granted unquestionable authority. I had been commanded to “weed” so therefore I must weed. It was the grim logic of the day. To do otherwise risked grave unknowable consequences.

It took me a half hour to fill the bucket. When Mrs. Phillips returned she gave me a glass of lemonade. I drank while she inspected the bucket.

“How did you do this?”

“What?”

She pulled a dandelion weed out of the bucket. “How did you pull the dandelion out, root and all?”

I showed her. My method was not to use the gloves. My hands were small allowing me to get a sure grip on the base of the weed. One quick snap and up came the dandelion, root and all.

Mrs. Phillips looked at me then looked at the dandelion. She nodded her head then reached into her apron and pulled out two quarters. “Come back tomorrow.”

I officially had a job. Given my needs at the time, it was a relatively well paid position. True, I was working for a witch doing menial labor. And the job itself was hardly rewarding. But I figured as long as I didn’t marry her I would probably be okay.

And then I found out what happened to Mr. Phillips and how he rose from the grave.

Next:
The Resurrection of Mr. Phillips

My Favorite Books (non-fiction)

It’s Saturday morning and I’ve just finished the novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. I found the book thoughtful, puzzling, contradictory and refreshing. I’m still mulling it over which means it is everything I want in a novel. The book was published in 1962, made into a play five years later and then into an award winning film. As recently as last week I had neither read the book, nor watched the play, nor rented the movie.

I am way behind the times.

I connect books in my mind. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie falls into a category dominated by Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Knowles’s Separate Peace. They are books where teenagers question the world around them. I suppose these novels appeal to me because some part of myself will always be a wide eyed thirteen year old.

The reason I decided to read Prime is that it was referred to in another book I am reading: How Fiction Works, by James Woods. Yes, I also read books about books.

That’s the thing about reading. It’s not static. My reading tastes change as I change. When I was an adolescent it was all spaceships and dinosaurs which evolved into Hammett's world of hard boiled detectives which transformed into historical novels which changed into non-fiction and a plethora of other subjects. Yes, a whole, complete plethora.

Everything, it turns out, is linked with everything else.

Below is an (always) incomplete list of some of my favorite non-fiction works.

Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton
One of the most harrowing books I have read on the Civil War. It concerns itself with the war’s final year, basically when Grant took control of the Union Army and, from the South’s perspective, the Civil War stopped being fun. The scope, range and tragedy of the war is laid out brilliantly. If you read this and want more, Catton’s trilogy on the Civil War is also remarkable.

Reflections on a Ravage Century by Robert Conquest
By any measure, the twentieth century was a bloody mess. Conquest examines what he considers the root cause of the horror: blind adherence to ideology. The combined madness of Stalin, Hitler and Mao ended the lives of over one hundred million people. This mind blowing tsunami of death is examined by Conquest not only as a historic fact, but as a horrifying portent for the next century.

The Uses of the Past by Herbert J. Muller
The title is out of print and the book I have is a hardbound 1952 edition. I purchased it for a buck at a used bookstore. I love this book. It is a study of past societies along with an intelligent analysis of current history. This book is reminiscent of Toynbee’s Study of History.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victory Frankl
I admit it: the title is politically incorrect. It should be re-titled Everybody’s Search for Meaning (which has a kind of Sesame Street ring to it.) But gender sensitivity aside, Frankl’s insight is that there is only one true human freedom, and that is the freedom to choose one’s attitude about a given situation. The first half of the books is the author’s first hand account of life in a Nazi death camp. The second half explains his psychotherapeutic method.

The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey
Yes, this is the same John Hersey that wrote A Bell for Adano and Hiroshima. This time he records the events at the Algiers Motel the night of Detroit’s race riot during the summer of 1968. Shots are reported to have come from the motel, police arrive, and three men are shot. What happened and how it occurred are Heresy’s concern. The book is written in a matter of fact style and is an example of what investigative journalism should look like.

The Making of a President 1968 by T.H. White
The classic, of course, is White’s Making of a President 1960. My favorite is the book White wrote on the 1968 campaign. This one includes many of the seminal events of the 60’s (assassinations, riots, George Wallace, Vietnam, the Chicago Democratic Convention) culminating with the election of Richard Nixon. White ended up writing a total of four books covering Presidential elections and, incredibly, three of them involved Nixon as a candidate. White also wrote a pretty good Watergate book, Breach of Faith.

Life on a Little Known Planet by Howard Evans
“Is the fly more a more intricate machine than he appears, or are we less clever than we suppose…?” Howard Evans will tell us in this wonderful book on insect life. Evans is both a distinguished biologist and an accomplished writer. If you have any interest in biology and insects, you will love this book.

How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture by Francis Schaeffer
Bible scholar Schaeffer looks at Western Civilization and presents a cogent analysis of the changes taking place in the late twentieth century. He opens up the treasure chest of western culture including philosophy, poetry, novels, and films, and declares them to also be the property of Bible believing Christians. Always interesting, Francis Schaefer is never pugnacious yet anxious and ready to debate his beliefs. The television series on which the book is based is definitely worth a look.

The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris
The book The Naked Ape made Morris famous, but I like his follow up work better. The Human Zoo is a sociological study of human behavior. Morris is audacious, thought provoking, frustrating and fascinating. My paperback edition of the book eventually fell apart in my hands from over reading.

Shelton College

In May of 2005 I stopped by Cape Canaveral and visited what was left of Shelton College. Reverend Dr. McIntyre’s four-year institution of higher learning had closed its doors thirteen years before in 1992. There wasn’t much that remained. The boys’ and girls’ dorms had been reconstituted into condos. The main college building was now a dilapidated sign company. And the jungle in front of Satellite Beach had been leveled. It was now a residential neighborhood filled with split-levels, basketball hoops and two car garages.

The only building to remain unchanged was the Under the Stars Hotel.

In September 1971 Cape Canaveral was a depressed city. The American opinion of the NASA Space Program had moved from high exuberance to the low doldrums in a mere twenty-four months after the lunar landing. A kind “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt” mindset developed. I suppose most Americans felt the way I did. We landed on the moon, hit a few golf balls around and discovered it was boring.

I had been brought up on the space paintings and drawings of Chesley Bonestell. His lunar vision had colonized my mind; the moon was supposed to be mountainous, filled with high peaks and vast, flattened seas of hardened lava. The Hollywood lunar set of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was pure Bonstell. In reality, the landscape was just an unending rolling plain of gray dust. The lime lakes down Vanderhoof Road in Majestik Township were more intriguing.

The moon turned out to be no big deal.

Interest in the space program waned, tourism fell and by the summer of 1971 businesses were fleeing Cape Canaveral. It was as if the whole city was part of a gigantic closeout sale. That’s how the Reverend Dr. McIntyre got his hands on the property. Desperate people in desperate times do desperate things. The Reverend walked away with a complex of buildings for a pittance.

The center of the complex was the Under the Stars Hotel. During its heyday in the late 1960’s it was the place to go. Partiers from as far as Atlanta would travel to the Cape just to be part of the scene. In September of 1971 it was the cafeteria for Shelton College. In those first months it was not uncommon to have a group of partygoers pull up to the hotel in hopes of fun, frolic and fornication only to find themselves in the college snack bar.

I didn't studying much during my semester at Shelton. I remember buying text books and sitting in class and doing all the stuff that you do in college, but the memory that stands out the most is of Satellite Beach.

I loved that beach.

Satellite Beach stretched for miles in both directions. It seemed endless. At the time I was there it was completely depopulated. On some days you would find a couple of surfers, but more often than not the waves were few and tepid. Every so often a stray dog would wander by, sniff at the Atlantic surf and then go on its way. Most of the time it was just me. After class, I would sit on the sand underneath a palm tree and read.

Is there anything better than that?

One October afternoon I grabbed my latest paperback book and headed for the beach. You should know that there was a paved road to the shore, but that it meandered around and around.

But there was another way.

A trail that led through the jungle seemed to be a quicker and more direct route. I had seen that path every day and had been tempted to take it. And though I had never seen anyone actually on it, others must have taken that route. I mean, it looked well traveled. It was a path, after all.

After a second’s worth of hesitation, I started walking nonchalantly into the jungle. Immediately I notice the leafy growth on both sides of the trail. Everything seemed so incredibly green. Life was everywhere. It surfaced from the jungle in twerps, tweets and chirps. In front of me a swarm of Florida love bugs flew in random, stupid circles.

At that moment I fancied my self as a kind of ad hoc naturalist, a sort of everyman Darwin. I was an exploer seeking an understanding of nature and at one with the natural world.

Halfway into this complicated maze of growth I heard a rustle off to the left. A few feet in front of me a ten-foot rattlesnake crossed my path. It turned its head, sized me up and then sped into the jungle on the other side of the trail.

It would have been interesting to observe the snake more closely. Its speckled pattern, for instance, seemed incredibly complex. Also it didn’t seem to slither, but somehow used its scales to scoot through the foliage. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to take notes. At that moment I was screaming and running for my life.

At some point while in this mindless panic I left the path and flailed through the brush towards the road. I tripped and fell head first into a nest of bristles. I lost my book. Unfazed, I pulled myself up and continued my flight. I did not stop until I was back in my dorm room with the door locked behind me.

I discovered something about myself on that afternoon.
I hate nature.

I completed just one semester at Shelton College. I returned to Akron, Ohio, in January ’72 and did not revisit Cape Canaveral until 2005. By then Satellite Beach was more crowded, more commercial, and barely matched the scenes from my memory.

One memory was from December 1971. In the early morning hours I went to the beach to view the launch of a weather satellite. The newspaper described it as a minor launching. I sat on the sand and stared across the ocean to where, supposedly, at 5:30 AM the launch would take place.

5:30 AM came and went.

Another dud, I thought. Typical of the ghost town that Cape Canaveral was quickly becoming.

And then, in the distance, there was a spark followed by a growing roar. A brilliant column of fire appeared. Light flooded the horizon changing the sky into a false dawn. The fiery column rose higher and higher becoming a brilliant sun, then a white comet, and finally a shooting star.

There is only one word I can use to describe this.
Unforgettable.

Next:
My Favorite Books (Non-Fiction)

Hurricane Doria

Well, for starters, it was never really a hurricane. It was almost a hurricane, but not quite. Yet, in the 1971 Atlantic hurricane season, it was the costliest tropical storm of the year. Total damage in 2009 dollars was around eight hundred million bucks.

It was the season for political storms as well. In the summer of 1971 the Nixon Administration enacted wage and price controls. Earlier in the year, in April, 175,000 war protesters marched to the steps of the Capital. But worst of all, in the same month, the American table tennis team played in the People’s Republic of China. That would be red China. Godless Communist China.

The Reverend Dr. McIntyre was beside himself.

As an employee at his hotel in Cape May, Jersey, I had a ring side seat to the ongoing political brouhahas of the day. Of course he raged about surrendering to communism. But the important thing about McIntyre was that he did more than just rage.

McIntyre did things.

To show his disapproval, McIntyre and a few hundred of the faithful marched on Washington with the intent of playing ping pong in front of the White House. The plan was for Reverend Dr. McIntyre to bat the ball around with a Taiwanese team thereby demonstrating his condemnation of the Nixon Administration pro-Red China foreign policy. When informed by the Capital police that a stationary protest was prohibited, McIntyre had the table slowly carried as they played ping pong. No mere regulation would stand in his way.

When it came to staging ridiculous protests, the man was indefatigable.

I don’t remember having an opinion about Nixon’s China policy. I had my own interests that summer and protesting the Nixon administration was not one of them.

Mostly, I loved just hanging out.

During my time off from washing dishes, I would walk into downtown Cape May and browse a bookstore I had discovered. It sold mostly paperbacks of the beach book variety. But it also sold other, less mainstream, fare. It was there where I picked up a copy of Charles Reich’s Greening of America.

I loved that book. It was the first time I read a political analysis of the United States. Reich first outlined the historical path of America, then detailed its many flaws, and finally provided an answer. In the nutshell, to cure America’s ills all one had to do was to don bell bottoms, smoke weed, and channel Bob Dylan. Of course it was a ridiculous proposition. But the seventies were a time for ridiculous propositions. One more wouldn’t hurt.

On August 27th, Doria was 200 miles off the coast of Daytona Beach, Florida. It gathered strength, and made landfall on the North Carolina coast on the 28th. By the 29th, it was in Virginia, and by the evening of the 29th it was pounding Cape May, New Jersey.

All during the day, preparations were being made at the hotel. I noticed a slight more hustle and bustle around the front desk. As the largest brick structure in city, it was the one place people could seek refuge. As the blankets, towels, food and others supplies were being gathered, I went about my day as if nothing unusual was happening. I was in the middle of a book, after all. I didn’t have time for all this hurricane stuff. And besides, in the whole scheme of things, how bad could it get?

It turns out, it was pretty damn bad.

I was in my eighth floor room the night the storm hit. Bob, a busboy from down the hall, burst into my room. “Are you watching this,” he cried.

“Watching what?”

“The storm, man, the storm! It’s unbelievable.” Bob ran to my window and opened it up. “Come over here and check it out.”

I put down my book and went to the window and looked out. Bob was right. It was unbelievable. The waves were nearly ten feet tall, and crashed over the sea wall. The streets of the town were flooded. Numerous cars had stalled in the water leaving the drivers stranded in a roiling sea of rising water.

“Look at that guy, look at that guy,” Bob screamed. A car drove down the street at high speed virtually hydroplaning across the water in a desperate attempt to reach the hotel. It didn’t make it. The car twisted and turned in the flooded street, stalled and began floating in the opposite direction.

“What an idiot,” Bob declared.

The wind was impressive. As I watched, branches, paper, and miscellaneous flotsam spiraled passed my eighth floor window, circled, and then came back around. I was like a scene from the Wizard of Oz.

“Look there, look there,” Bob yelled. Below, workers from the hotel had formed a human chain, reaching out to rescue people fleeing to the hotel. Not everyone made it to the other side without incident. More than one slipped and fell into the frothy water.

We both found this to be hilarious.

In self defense, I would like to point out two things. First, all humor is based on some form of human pain so, technically, there is something innately funny about seeing someone slipping and falling into the sea even if it is during a raging storm. And secondly, I was nineteen at the time and was both young and stupid. The defense rests.

I suppose we could have remained in my room laughing and screaming insults at the people below for the rest of the evening. But the fun and games came to an abrupt end when the door crashed open. Standing there, drenched from head to foot, was Brazilian John, my fellow dishwasher. He had a facial expression that could freeze water. Apparently he was one of the people in the human chain and had looked up to see us laughing at him.

John was not amused.

The only thing that saved us was the fact that Brazilian John was a devout Christian and he was restrained by the Ten Commandments. He looked at us with disgust.

Then he uttered two choice words that aptly fit the situation. Apparently Brazilian John's tenure as dishwasher had increased his vocabulary in colloquial English to include personal invectives. He tuned and left, slamming the door on the way out.

The next day there was mostly cleanup work at the hotel. Not only was there debris to remove, but the tourist season was ending. Some of the help had already left. It was time to rejoin reality.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t.

The Reverend Dr. McIntyre had just purchased the Holiday Inn in Cape Canaveral, Florida. He was starting a college. Tuition was low and admission requirements liberal.

Now THAT sounded interesting…

Next: Shelton College.

My Summer of 1971

During the summer of 1971 I worked at The Christian Admiral, a three hundred and thirty-three room hotel in Cape May, New Jersey. The owner and operator was the Reverend Dr. McIntyre, an old school anti-communist fire breather and a fundamentalist minister. He was considered by some to be the “Dean of the Radio Ministers,” a kind of politically bent Presbyterian Oral Roberts minus the faith healing rigmarole.

Of course all of this meant nothing to me. I was nineteen at the time and more interested in escaping home than right wing politics. By nature, I am conservative. I was brought up thinking that people should work for a living and equated welfare with failure. I was a child of the middle class and a holder and defender of the middle values of Middle America. The world seemed pretty much black and white

In other words, I was clueless. If the Reverend Dr. McIntyre was an anti-communist, well, that sounded pretty good to me.

The hotel closely resembled Rev. McIntyre’s anti-communist movement. Both had seen better days. Built at the turn of the century, The Christian Admiral was originally called the Hotel Cape May. It incorporated many of the architectural features that were used on the Titanic: winding staircases, Victorian facades, and skylights. And where the Titanic sank on it’s maiden voyage, the Hotel Cape May’s best day was the first day it opened. After that it was all bankruptcies and sheriff sales until finally the whole complex landed in McIntyre’s lap some six decades later like over-ripe fruit.

I worked that summer in the kitchen as a dishwasher. My job was to run glasses, plates and silverware through an antiquated dishwasher. I never really understood the inner workings of the contraption. There was a conveyor belt of some sort, a valve that controlled the steam, and a pressure gauge whose needle seemed to be perpetually in the red zone. Lacking any mechanical skill, I left the management of the equipment to my fellow worker, John.

John was from Brazil and only knew one word in English: his own name. Whenever he needed help, you would hear him shout “JOHN!” and there he would be, waving and gesticulating trying to make himself understood. I rarely knew what the hell he wanted, but it didn’t seem to matter much. The problem generally resolved itself. And if it didn’t no one seemed to care.

We worked all shifts, scraping, cleaning, stacking and occasionally breaking all manner of dishes, saucers, bowls and cups spending most of our workdays totally drenched. At the end of the day I stank like a concoction that was two parts ketchup and one part body odor.

The interesting thing about working in a hotel was that you could see everything from the inside out. There were connecting hallways to all points of the complex, hidden closets that stored all manner of goods, and elevators with access to floors that were not available to the “guests.”

Though technically the Admiral had seven floors, the kitchen help had rooms on the 8th floor. We each had our own room with a sink, but the bathroom and showers were communal.

My room looked like something out of a George Orwell novel. The mattress on the bed was lumpy, the sink facet dripped, paint peeled off the wall. The only personal fixture in my room was a Peter Max poster I taped above the bed. But from my window I could see the Atlantic Ocean, the boardwalk, and the summer cottages eight stories below. In the morning I would breathe in the salt air from the sea and feel as if I had a million dollars.

I had nothing except a few books and some clothes.
But in some ways, I had everything.

As a worker at the Christian Admiral I was required to attend at least one Bible meeting each week. There was always a vast array of speakers at these sessions. Strom Thurmond, I’m certain, spoke there. Most of the speeches and sermons were a combination of old time gospel along with a generous dose of patriotic nationalism. (There was never a loss of topics to expound on. After all, Nixon was president and Vietnam was raging. The world, as always, was a mess.)

Today I probably wouldn’t mind sitting through a good right-wing diatribe. If you are in the right state of mind, they can be fun in their own way. But in 1971 I was still a teenager. My nerves hadn’t settled yet and I needed to be on the move. I would walk in the front door, sign in, and then sneak out the backdoor.

The boardwalk awaited me.

It really wasn’t much of a boardwalk at all. It had a few places to buy hotdogs and pop and a gallery of pinball machines. Usually somebody had a radio playing the Beach Boys. Most evenings I ended up sitting on a bench, looking at the ocean and enjoying the evening sea breeze.

It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
It was magic.

Then, sometime in the middle of August, Hurricane Doria began her destructive march up the east coast.

Next:
Hurricane Doria

How Grocery Stores Preserved Western Culture

I honestly enjoy shopping for groceries.

I usually shop off a list. True, my accuracy rate isn’t high; I bat around 80%. I’m more than willing to substitute generic chickpeas for garbanzo beans and iceberg lettuce for romaine. I’m also not too particular what kind of toothpaste I buy. I mean, really, how different can Aqua-Fresh be from the Giant Eagle brand?

But I draw the line at generic toilet paper.
With some products, quality matters.

I like looking at how items are displayed on the shelves. Most are heavily marketed and pleasing to the eye. I especially enjoy products with mascots such as Little Debbie, Uncle Ben, Tony the Tiger, Mr. Peanut, Captain Krunch, Charlie the Tuna, and Aunt Jemima. They seem like family. We should, however, have a moment of silence for the Frito Bandito. He last appeared on a package of corn chips in 1971 a few days before the Frito Bureau of Investigation deported him back to stereotypeville.

The price we pay for political correctness is large indeed.

Most of all I enjoy spying on my fellow shoppers despite this being a major breech in shopping etiquette. According to the unwritten rules of crowd behavior, we should all politely ignore each other. But how can you ignore those people who wagon train their carts, or the fastidious shoppers who fuss over each purchase while calling their significant others on their cell phones reporting the latest shopping outrage (‘But dear, they are all out of angel hair spaghetti!”)

Perhaps the most outlandish of all are the scooter people.

I have no idea when grocery stores started letting shoppers drive through the aisles, but it must be a recent phenomenon. The scooter people seemed to just appear one day. I can understand the store’s point of view; they were trying to impress the local community with their humanitarian efforts. Who can argue with attempts to assist the physically disabled?

It turns out that most of the shoppers who use the scooters are not physically disabled at all. They’re just too lazy to walk.

(And while I’m at it, I also have a problem with how the stores are organized. Why are eggs in the dairy department? They have nothing to do with milk or cows or cheese or yogurt or anything dairy. The only thing a hen has in common with a cow is that both live on a farm, and with big agri-business taking over the food industry even that is a question mark.)

My infatuation with grocery stores emerged from my shopping experiences as a kid. Our family shopped almost exclusively at the A&P. Kroger’s would do in a pinch, but my mom insisted that A&P products were more economical. What she did with the pennies we saved, no one knows.

I suspect not much.

(She also collected S & H Green stamps: she would paste them in books and then redeem them for cheap-o household fixtures such as a framed print or an end table lamp. I seem to remember a special store where we went to exchange the stamps for crap. Our house was littered with such items.)

In the late 50’s intense competition among grocery stores forced them to use more and more creative marketing techniques. Some stores sold plates. The idea was that you bought a dish each week, and after eight weeks or so you had a whole set. You couldn’t miss a week or you would miss a plate.

Most grocery stores did stuff like that. In 1960 our local A&P sold the Golden Book Encyclopedia.

I loved the Golden Book Encyclopedia. The sixteen volume set offered information on such diverse topics as aardvarks, parasites, quicksand, volcanoes, and, naturally, dinosaurs. Personally, you can have the Encyclopedia Britannica. Most of it is a pretentious bore. I would much rather read the profusely illustrated article “How Rubber is Made” in my Golden Books any day of the week.

Volume one of the Golden Book sold for two cents. Volume two sold for forty-nine cents. There after successive books cost a buck. Some families dropped out at that point (often capping their children’s knowledge at “Cereal,”) but not my family. Once started we hung in there till we completed the entire set, index included.

My Golden Books were a true treasure. My older brother Allen had his pup tent and pocket knives (which was a pretty scary development in itself.) My younger brother Lowell had his toy garage and his “binkie.” And I had my books o’knowledge. I carried them with me everywhere, cracking one open whenever I wanted to read about the Aztecs, the solar system, the US mint, or the presidency of Millard Fillmore.

I still have them with me today.

Over time grocery stores sold classical records, science books, atlases, American history and high school encyclopedias. I understand why grocery stores took it upon themselves to transmit western culture to its shoppers. It was a business move to insure customer loyalty. But I loved them for it just the same.

Now, in the post grocery store encyclopedia age, there are other channels for cultural information: CNN, Rush Limbaugh and wikipedia come to mind. The grocery store encyclopedia is dead.

And we are the worse for it.

Next
My Summer of 1971

Rudy Zallinger and the Canvas of the Past

Lately I’ve been thinking about the past and reworking it in my mind. In one pile are the things I should have done, but didn’t. In the other are the things I did do, but shouldn't have. I wonder if the piles somehow could switch places if things would be a different in my life.

Probably not.

In order to stop the first pile from becoming a bigger mountain of regret than it already is, I gave serious thought to what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. After a few moments of introspection I discovered that I always wanted to as travel.

So now I go places.

In 2005 I visited New York City for the first time. Forget anything you have ever heard about the place. I found the city complex, friendly, endlessly interesting and alive. I visited all the tourist traps: Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Central Park, Grand Central Station, Ground Zero. At first it surprised me that Ground Zero was even considered a tourist attraction, but then perhaps that how Americans deal with tragedy- drop by, look around, buy a post card, move on.

(Come to think of it, other sites of man made disasters have become tourist stops: the Alamo, Gettysburg, and Jimmy Carter's birthplace come to mind.)

Most important of all, I visited The American Museum of Natural History. Founded by Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the museum is a gigantic brick structure adorned with columns and rows and rows of steps. Inside were a myriad of exhibits that included polar bears, insects, a blue whale and DINOSAURS.

I love dinosaurs.

(Some of the more traditional religions question the existence of the “thunder lizards.” Why, they ask, would God create such pointless and silly creatures? But then, He also created the platypus, parasitic wasps and conservative republicans. Not everything in this universe, it seems, has a point.)

The dinosaurs that live in my imagination inhabit a world conceived by Rudy Zallinger. A Siberian-born American (1919- 1995), he painted the famous mural THE AGE OF REPTILES that hangs in Yale’s Peabody Museum. Pieces and parts of the mural were used as illustrations for many of the dinosaur books I read as a kid. Life magazine in December 1952, in an article entitled The World We Live In, made liberal use of Zallinger’s paintings. These pictures made a lasting impression on me.

When I think about past, this is what it looks like.

To me, this mural is a surrealistic masterpiece. In the center stands the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex, it’s body a walking contradiction of teeth, anger, and impossibly small arms. It’s both fearful and ridiculous.

The Natural History museum displayed the reassembled dinosaur bones in a great hall. All my favorites were there: the gentle Stegosaurus, the well armored and turtle-like Ankylosaurus, and, of course, the Tyrannosaurus Rex. I walked silently by, staring at each and taking as many photographs as I could.

I was slightly disappointed; they looked strangely domesticated frozen and nailed to the floor as they were. The dinosaurs that raged in my mind were massive, viscous, crawling, flying, fighting, living and dying. These skeletal displays were more like static x-rays that belonged in, well, a museum.

But that’s the nature of time and memory. The past is frozen in place, immutable and chiseled into the stone of long-ago. It can only be altered through the force of imagination.

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