One day early last Summer Max and I sat on the front porch theorizing about why West Kill Mountain had thus far turned green only by its bottom half. It had been a brutal winter capped by a seven-foot blizzard, and both of us were ready for fat leaves and sunshine. The daffodils had flowered. The forsythia was a thousand bursts of sunlight. Lilacs were only two or three days away, but the top half of the mountain remained drab and barren. A few years ago a plague of gypsy moths denuded these mountains, and they looked like that. We felt we had been robbed of our spring. Caterpillars seemed to hang in mid-air, their silken threads invisible in the bright sun. Folks were burning larvae sacs out of their trees. They’d use apple pickers stuffed with burning newspaper to reach them. Then billions of black flies – I mean BILLIONS AND BILLIONS AND BILLIONS -- descended in an angry cloud to search and devour every morsel remotely resembling moth. Local scuttlebutt had it that the forestry department dumped them over the Catskills to counter the moths. There are lots of rumors, none of them corroborated, about what the forestry department does from bringing in wolves and mountain lions to problem bears from other districts. But, we were talking about flies. At least, the moths kept their distance. The flies infiltrated our wrap around screen porch with the skill of trained sappers and did their best to crawl into our ears.until one morning they were no longer there, none of them, none at all, not one. They’d disappeared as suddenly as they’d come.
So, Max and I, that early summer day sitting on the porch, unanimously decided that, since there were no gypsy moths around, West Kill mountain must be slow this year due to the penetrating cold. It took us two cups of coffee each to come to that conclusion. Then Andrea came running by.
Andrea is a model who lives a couple miles down the valley and runs the road when weather permits and sometimes when it doesn’t. She’s tall, from Oklahoma, a stunning mix of Black and Native American. Usually, we simply call out to each other, and she keeps going. This time she came up to the porch – the first time she’d ever done that – and she was laughing, pointing at me and Max and bent over laughing.
“Somebody ought to videotape you two,” she laughed. “Couple of local characters, all right. Couple of codgers like those guys from the Muppets.” She thought this was a riot. “I’m serious,” she said. “Talk into a tape recorder. I just know you got tales to tell. You’re livin’ history. Spill it.”
Um, wait a minute. Back up. Past beans, past living history, past stories to tell. Back. Back. Codgers! Hold it right there. Codger. Now, someone generations my junior might mistake me for one, especially if I haven’t shaved for a few days, but they’d be wrong. And anyway Andrea was looking at me through a screen that no doubt hampered her vision. The point is: I have worked hard at not being a codger, an ugly word, by the way. Codger. It sounds like you’re trying to spit up something. I like the word “curmudgeon”, its synonym, and, consequently, “curmudgeonly”. I like it’s sound and the odd way it looks, and, I admit, at one time I deemed it something to which I sort of aspired: the notion of the crotchety but lovable old geezer. I knew a guy named Bill back in Montana who aspired to some day be like his grandfather. The old man sat in the back yard with a .22 rifle and shot the pigeons that landed on the phone wires overhead. We laughed at such a cantankerous old fart, for that he was, but there was something in me that looked at this as a possibility. A cute, old guy, you know, a crank with a heart of gold. That guy.
One day – I don’t know if we were married, yet – but one day I was regaling Jamie with the notion of an old curmudgeon, convinced there was something endearing about it. I made sure to tell her about Bill’s grandfather. She reacted as if to a really vile smell. “What’s so cute about that?” she wanted to know. “You go that route, you go it alone.” I saw her point. I’ve got a notion of what I’d like to be as I grow older, but it ain’t that. If I ever flip old codger on you, kick my butt and tell me to act my age.
No comments:
Post a Comment