Brian C. Moynihan, CEO
Bank of America
Charlotte, North Carolina 28202
April 19, 2012
Dear Mr. Moynihan:
I have been a writer all my 71 years, twice published as a novelist, produced as a screenwriter, teleplay writer, and playwright. At one time I made too much money in Hollywood, and now I make too little in Greene County. My wife and I have struggled to make a living but we’ve made it, and raised two fine children who call our place home. We have an old farm in upstate New York that our son and his bride intend to work again. My daughter lives in Boston but is rooted here. It’s a comfort for her to know she’s always got a home. My grandchildren will be raised here. We have holy places on our mountain, special places where trees have grown, ashes have been scattered, ginseng has been found, deer have fallen. Now I’m looking at the end of all this? My life has suddenly taken on the most ghastly elements of reality TV: Bank of America has me in a death grip. It is an ironic tale, and horrifying, and has been thrust upon my family like a blitzkrieg. I am a Greene County, New York resident of more than twenty-eight years, and now I wake up every morning faced with the nightmare of losing my home. Please listen.
What follows, noted by bullets, is a summary of my situation.
· In the Summer, 2010, I applied for Home Affordable Mortgage Modification through Bank of America. B of A was not my original lender but bought my mortgage from Countrywide who bought it from the original lender shortly after it was granted. I felt somewhat swindled because I hadn’t chosen them in the first place. Nonetheless.
· I was not in trouble with my mortgage at the time of my Home Affordable Modification application, but I wanted a better interest rate. My interest rate was then at 7% and the current rate was 4%. With the exception of a single glitch many years ago when a payment was paid forward instead of backwards, I have paid my mortgage faithfully for twenty-eight plus years. My mortgage when I began the process of modification was $1,842.60/month.
· Shortly thereafter Bank of America paid my insurance and yearly taxes. I did not request this but figured I was certainly on track for a modification.
· I was approved for modification twice. Two times. The process took a year and was nerve wracking. Mistakes were made but we got through it. Except for the exorbitant balloon payment ten years hence, the modification was fine and I accepted it. It included my taxes and insurance. After years I was finally getting my finances under control.
· Was told via phone telephone call that all my documents were in place. It was on a day early in April when my usual customer relations person was off. My usual customer relations manager is Jennifer Rainey, 800 669 6650
· April 13th – Informed I was rejected due to a typographical error. While the notary had the correct date, 4-10, and it was faxed on 4-10, I had mistakenly written 8-10 instead of 4-10 under my name. My wife had no date at all under hers. Document is enclosed.
· Because of the rejection my mortgage has skyrocketed by more than $600 and will go up even further to a figure that, I was told, the bank will reject – in the neighborhood of $2,800 --which means, even if we found the means to make the payment, we won’t be approved and we will lose our home. Can it be there is no appeal for a typo?
Sir, can you believe the irony of this situation? I don’t need to tell you this is truly a waking nightmare. How does it happen that I apply for a home affordable modification, get it, and wind up losing my home when originally I was in no trouble whatsoever? My family has worked hard to stabilize our finances, and now this. Why does Bank of America need my house? You, sir, can pick up the phone and rectify this situation for me, and I pray you will do so.
You should also know that Senator Gillebrand’s (NY) and Congress Gibson’s (20th District, NY) offices have both launched investigations as has the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the executive editor of Rolling Stone has passed my information to Matt Taibbi. I also intend to publish this letter on my blog. Friends will take it from there. And I do have a lawyer. Mr. Moynihan, this is simply too important to not meet the crisis head on. You’re a hard charger. You must know that!
Please, sir, make that phone call!
Respectfully
Stephen H. Foreman
shf@wildblue.net
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Thursday, December 22, 2011
WHAT KIND OF JEW PULLS A TRIGGER? -- part 3
Sam Hermanson, butcher by trade, saw this mountain country as a business opportunity and accumulated enough cash to buy a piece of property in the new world. This was where he decided to set up shop. North Fork, West Virginia. He would not budge, and here, finally, is where the Hermanson side of the family settled, and here also is where the narrative pretty much runs out, replaced by snippets and snatches of hearsay and recall. Katie Rose, my grandmother, mother of Elizabeth and five other children, Katie Rose and Samuel Hermanson were newly married before he left the Pale. Eventually, she joined him in West Virginia, and a flock of Jews descended on North Fork, most related to them both. I know very little about them other than there was a cousin so ugly she was called “Scheine der Monkey”, beautiful like a monkey, and there was the time my grandfather and his buddy, Chiel Shorr, were chased by robbers. Sam jumped over a downed tree trunk and dropped to the ground behind it, hiding himself from view. Chiel had no place to go but over the log and on top of my grandfather where they both hid, stacked, until it was safe to stand again. Chiel Shorr had been so scared he peed all over my grandfather. Of course, Uncle Milton, who would have told me this story, would never have said the word “pee”. He probably said, “Make a shoosh” which is how that particular function was described in my family, as in “Do you have to make a shoosh?” When I was growing up a mother across the street called it “tinkle” as in, “Go tinkle” which horrified me. Shoosh! Get it right. How hard is that to say?
My grandmother, besides raising children (one of whom, a boy, died at an early age, two, I think), cooked and served kosher meals in her house to the Jewish peddlers who passed through the region. My mother emphasized that her mother had servants in West Virginia, and my best guess is that they were “shvatzas” from Cinder Bottom, the Negro section of town. I get the feeling Nana had airs. Certainly, Elizabeth, her fourth child, did.
Katie didn’t take to life in North Fork. One doesn’t hear that Sam had any complaints. His butcher shop was successful but she wanted to move up to Baltimore where favorite relatives lived, like Tante Pesha and Sheine the Monkey. My grandfather didn’t want to leave, but the fire changed all that.
The town fathers concocted a secret plot to make a fortune. They planned to take out fire insurance then burn down the town, collect, get rich. Why I do not know, but my grandfather didn’t want anything to do with it. He was the only merchant in town who didn’t buy fire insurance. A gross miscalculation. One night the town burned down. Everyone collected. My grandfather was wiped out. To make matters worse, he was drunk the night of the fire. People tried to help him. They’d go into the shop and bring all the tools and furniture out whereupon Sam dragged it all back in. This is how my mother, Elizabeth, remembers it. The other thing she remembers was being carried across a bridge at night away from the fire. She would have been four.
The only place the family could go for help was Baltimore, and that’s how we got there. A man who spoke eight languages but could not read one was never again a success in business. I posit no cause and effect, just a simple truth as I received it. Sam wanted to go back to West Virginia, but Katie wouldn’t go with him, so they stayed in west Baltimore on Holmes Avenue, a brick, row house. Whenever I visualize the house I see my grandfather, sloppy drunk, staggering home on the sidewalk, supported by another man who for some reason I picture as Italian. Later that day he was found upstairs on his knees with his head in the gas oven, just in time. My mother is ninety-seven and still wishes she had named me after him. Samuel. Stephen. Samuel. Stephen.
I like my own name better.
My grandmother, besides raising children (one of whom, a boy, died at an early age, two, I think), cooked and served kosher meals in her house to the Jewish peddlers who passed through the region. My mother emphasized that her mother had servants in West Virginia, and my best guess is that they were “shvatzas” from Cinder Bottom, the Negro section of town. I get the feeling Nana had airs. Certainly, Elizabeth, her fourth child, did.
Katie didn’t take to life in North Fork. One doesn’t hear that Sam had any complaints. His butcher shop was successful but she wanted to move up to Baltimore where favorite relatives lived, like Tante Pesha and Sheine the Monkey. My grandfather didn’t want to leave, but the fire changed all that.
The town fathers concocted a secret plot to make a fortune. They planned to take out fire insurance then burn down the town, collect, get rich. Why I do not know, but my grandfather didn’t want anything to do with it. He was the only merchant in town who didn’t buy fire insurance. A gross miscalculation. One night the town burned down. Everyone collected. My grandfather was wiped out. To make matters worse, he was drunk the night of the fire. People tried to help him. They’d go into the shop and bring all the tools and furniture out whereupon Sam dragged it all back in. This is how my mother, Elizabeth, remembers it. The other thing she remembers was being carried across a bridge at night away from the fire. She would have been four.
The only place the family could go for help was Baltimore, and that’s how we got there. A man who spoke eight languages but could not read one was never again a success in business. I posit no cause and effect, just a simple truth as I received it. Sam wanted to go back to West Virginia, but Katie wouldn’t go with him, so they stayed in west Baltimore on Holmes Avenue, a brick, row house. Whenever I visualize the house I see my grandfather, sloppy drunk, staggering home on the sidewalk, supported by another man who for some reason I picture as Italian. Later that day he was found upstairs on his knees with his head in the gas oven, just in time. My mother is ninety-seven and still wishes she had named me after him. Samuel. Stephen. Samuel. Stephen.
I like my own name better.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
WHAT KIND OF JEW PULLS A TRIGGER? -- part 2
My grandfather, Louis, my father’s father, chose to leave Russia instead of serving in the Tzar’s army. He would have been about fifteen, and he traveled with a brother, whether older or younger I don’t know. Also, I don’t know my grand uncle’s name. What I do know (although I don’t know how I know) is that the two brothers decided to separate, my grandfather to stay in Baltimore, and my grand uncle to go out west and look for employment with the railroads. There must have been some correspondence between them because the story goes that my uncle actually did get work with the railroad. First payday came, but as the list was called out my uncle realized his name had been omitted. Same time he noted one of the names called belonged to a dead man he’d seen dead with his own eyes. Uncle’s hand shot up in the air, and the pay envelope went right to him. He took the dead man’s name as his own, so, right then and there, a whole chunk of family disappeared down the rabbit hole of immigration history.
My grandfather, Samuel, my mother’s father, is the root of another story. I tell you this as it was told to me by my Uncle Milton, the first scribe in our family. These were coalfield Jews, part of an immigration wave that came over from the Pale of Settlement in eastern Europe throughout the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century and settled in southern West Virginia, North Fork, to be exact, a small town on the north fork of the Elkhorn River. The Pale where Jews were forced to live by law included Lithuania, Poland, and western Russia. The way my family got to West Virginia was a love story, sort of, perhaps in the manner of one written by Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Enemies: A Love Story.” Here at last is the Hermanson version.
Somewhere in the vicinity of eastern Lithuania and the Russian border (what today is Belarus), love bloomed between my grandfather’s brother, Mischa Lazar, and Tante Pesha, a distant cousin and the daughter of an important man. According to Uncle Milton, their love was like a flower: it budded, it bloomed, it died, it rotted. Again, according to Uncle Milton, Mischa Lazar was a shlemazel, not to be confused with a shlemiel, the difference being that the shlemiel spills the soup on the shlamazel. Soup, Soup, Soup, Soup, Soup! One spilled soup too many and Pesha became a raving maniac, shrew of shrews, a bite like a weasel. She tore into him from tooth to tuchos. If people were around (as they usually were), she implored them to see how cursed she was: Mischa Lazar, the dunce, the dim, the damned. Who didn’t hear her?
One day Mischa Lazar disappeared, vanished as if he’d never been. Dogs were brought in. Trackers sent out. No sign. No sign never at all. It was assumed he was set upon by robbers and no doubt smoldering in a shallow grave by now. Pesha herself was sure of this. Ever since he disappeared she’d been getting chills in bed at night that meant a ghost walked over her grave. Who else could it be but him, that despicable lowlife, that “vantz”, that “shtucke drek?” But, the chills abated, and the days began. Days. Weeks. A month. Two months. Nothing. And then. Something. Word came back from a distant town, Vitebsk, that Mischa Lazar had been spotted, so the family sent my grandfather, Samuel, to bring him back. Samuel actually found him in Vitebsk (a town of some size) even though Mischa Lazar did not want to be found, and wanted even less to go back to Pesha. How my grandfather persuaded him to return home I do not know, but within a week he took off again, stole a horse in the middle of a moonless night, and disappeared into it. Remember, Pesha’s father was an important man. A big shot. A man of influence. He thrust a fat wallet at my grandfather and ordered him to bring that “mamser” back. So, this time, Samuel tracks Mischa Lazar all the way to Scandinavia, Sweden, where it was. That’s how we got the “son” tagged onto our name. Hermanson. How hard could it be to find a Jew fresh from the shtetl in Sweden (long black beard, long black coat, muddy clodhoppers)? Well, Samuel found him again. That night Mischa Lazar produced a bottle of aqua vit, drank his brother blind, and took off once more. Samuel wired Pesha’s father for instructions. “Find him,” bellowed the important man. Pesha wailed that she missed her Mischa, but no one believed her.
This time Mischa Lazar’s trail led across the ocean. He did not enter this country through Ellis Island, we know that, and some think he might have come through the port of Galveston. If so, why go all the way up to Baltimore, because that’s where my grandfather found him next, rather, found of him next: Baltimore, Maryland; the Hebrew Free Burial Society. The name Mischa Lazar was on its books. No last name. A nobody. A doctor claimed the cadaver for his experiments. My grandfather took to his room at the boarding house for seven days without shaving or shoes and sat mourning on a low and uncomfortable stool, the Jewish way: he sat shiva. On the eighth day, Samuel took stock and decided here was a business opportunity.
Sam outfitted a peddler’s pack with notions, gadgets, candy, toys, overalls, and other assorted ready to wear clothing, nothing fancy, just good quality. His plan was to head south and sell his wares on the way with hopes of setting up a business whenever he got to wherever he was going. By trade he was a butcher. The pack weighed a hundred pounds, so my grandfather bought a horse, too. While piecing together the bits of information about my grandfather’s travels, I came upon the most surprising old photograph: a well dressed young man on horseback – clean shaven, jacket, tie, fancy boots – with a huge smile on his face and a cigar in the side of his mouth like a big shot. Both horse and saddle were fit and fine. This young man was ready for business. This young man was a pack peddler! Why was I surprised? Because for years I had carried the image of an older, bent over, rabbinical type with a beard and clothes from the old country who trudged the hills and hollows of the south peddling his wares. The young man on horseback was anything but that. He was sure, confident, ready for the world. “Here I am,” he seems to be saying, “Just watch me!” He had an uncanny resemblance to my Uncle Josh, Samuel’s first born.
Samuel traveled across Maryland and down into West Virginia, way down deep to the Tug River, just this side of Kentucky, feuding grounds of the Hatfields in West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky, right there across the river from each other. My mother was actually delivered by Dr. Hatfield from this same clan. Early into the fever that propelled the world into its first world war, Dr. Hatfield came across a Negro giving a stump speech about how the “colored men’s gonna get all the white womens when their mens be away at war.” Hatfield pulled his pistol and shot the speaker dead. That same Dr. Hatfield was shortly thereafter elected to the U.S. Senate.
Anyone who has ever fully experienced Elizabeth Hermanson, fourth child of Samuel, will understand the irony of this situation.
By the way, Sam Hermanson actually ran into Mischa Lazar again. He had paid the funeral parlor to have his name put in their books. Sam wasn’t looking for him, but there was Mischa Lazar in West Virginia with a peddler’s pack of his own.
“I’m not going back to that “chalerya” again,” Mischa Lazar told my grandfather,
“Go where you want,” said my grandfather, “I’m staying here.”
He did, and brought the family over to join him, the only kosher butcher in North Fork, West Virginia.
My grandfather, Samuel, my mother’s father, is the root of another story. I tell you this as it was told to me by my Uncle Milton, the first scribe in our family. These were coalfield Jews, part of an immigration wave that came over from the Pale of Settlement in eastern Europe throughout the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century and settled in southern West Virginia, North Fork, to be exact, a small town on the north fork of the Elkhorn River. The Pale where Jews were forced to live by law included Lithuania, Poland, and western Russia. The way my family got to West Virginia was a love story, sort of, perhaps in the manner of one written by Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Enemies: A Love Story.” Here at last is the Hermanson version.
Somewhere in the vicinity of eastern Lithuania and the Russian border (what today is Belarus), love bloomed between my grandfather’s brother, Mischa Lazar, and Tante Pesha, a distant cousin and the daughter of an important man. According to Uncle Milton, their love was like a flower: it budded, it bloomed, it died, it rotted. Again, according to Uncle Milton, Mischa Lazar was a shlemazel, not to be confused with a shlemiel, the difference being that the shlemiel spills the soup on the shlamazel. Soup, Soup, Soup, Soup, Soup! One spilled soup too many and Pesha became a raving maniac, shrew of shrews, a bite like a weasel. She tore into him from tooth to tuchos. If people were around (as they usually were), she implored them to see how cursed she was: Mischa Lazar, the dunce, the dim, the damned. Who didn’t hear her?
One day Mischa Lazar disappeared, vanished as if he’d never been. Dogs were brought in. Trackers sent out. No sign. No sign never at all. It was assumed he was set upon by robbers and no doubt smoldering in a shallow grave by now. Pesha herself was sure of this. Ever since he disappeared she’d been getting chills in bed at night that meant a ghost walked over her grave. Who else could it be but him, that despicable lowlife, that “vantz”, that “shtucke drek?” But, the chills abated, and the days began. Days. Weeks. A month. Two months. Nothing. And then. Something. Word came back from a distant town, Vitebsk, that Mischa Lazar had been spotted, so the family sent my grandfather, Samuel, to bring him back. Samuel actually found him in Vitebsk (a town of some size) even though Mischa Lazar did not want to be found, and wanted even less to go back to Pesha. How my grandfather persuaded him to return home I do not know, but within a week he took off again, stole a horse in the middle of a moonless night, and disappeared into it. Remember, Pesha’s father was an important man. A big shot. A man of influence. He thrust a fat wallet at my grandfather and ordered him to bring that “mamser” back. So, this time, Samuel tracks Mischa Lazar all the way to Scandinavia, Sweden, where it was. That’s how we got the “son” tagged onto our name. Hermanson. How hard could it be to find a Jew fresh from the shtetl in Sweden (long black beard, long black coat, muddy clodhoppers)? Well, Samuel found him again. That night Mischa Lazar produced a bottle of aqua vit, drank his brother blind, and took off once more. Samuel wired Pesha’s father for instructions. “Find him,” bellowed the important man. Pesha wailed that she missed her Mischa, but no one believed her.
This time Mischa Lazar’s trail led across the ocean. He did not enter this country through Ellis Island, we know that, and some think he might have come through the port of Galveston. If so, why go all the way up to Baltimore, because that’s where my grandfather found him next, rather, found of him next: Baltimore, Maryland; the Hebrew Free Burial Society. The name Mischa Lazar was on its books. No last name. A nobody. A doctor claimed the cadaver for his experiments. My grandfather took to his room at the boarding house for seven days without shaving or shoes and sat mourning on a low and uncomfortable stool, the Jewish way: he sat shiva. On the eighth day, Samuel took stock and decided here was a business opportunity.
Sam outfitted a peddler’s pack with notions, gadgets, candy, toys, overalls, and other assorted ready to wear clothing, nothing fancy, just good quality. His plan was to head south and sell his wares on the way with hopes of setting up a business whenever he got to wherever he was going. By trade he was a butcher. The pack weighed a hundred pounds, so my grandfather bought a horse, too. While piecing together the bits of information about my grandfather’s travels, I came upon the most surprising old photograph: a well dressed young man on horseback – clean shaven, jacket, tie, fancy boots – with a huge smile on his face and a cigar in the side of his mouth like a big shot. Both horse and saddle were fit and fine. This young man was ready for business. This young man was a pack peddler! Why was I surprised? Because for years I had carried the image of an older, bent over, rabbinical type with a beard and clothes from the old country who trudged the hills and hollows of the south peddling his wares. The young man on horseback was anything but that. He was sure, confident, ready for the world. “Here I am,” he seems to be saying, “Just watch me!” He had an uncanny resemblance to my Uncle Josh, Samuel’s first born.
Samuel traveled across Maryland and down into West Virginia, way down deep to the Tug River, just this side of Kentucky, feuding grounds of the Hatfields in West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky, right there across the river from each other. My mother was actually delivered by Dr. Hatfield from this same clan. Early into the fever that propelled the world into its first world war, Dr. Hatfield came across a Negro giving a stump speech about how the “colored men’s gonna get all the white womens when their mens be away at war.” Hatfield pulled his pistol and shot the speaker dead. That same Dr. Hatfield was shortly thereafter elected to the U.S. Senate.
Anyone who has ever fully experienced Elizabeth Hermanson, fourth child of Samuel, will understand the irony of this situation.
By the way, Sam Hermanson actually ran into Mischa Lazar again. He had paid the funeral parlor to have his name put in their books. Sam wasn’t looking for him, but there was Mischa Lazar in West Virginia with a peddler’s pack of his own.
“I’m not going back to that “chalerya” again,” Mischa Lazar told my grandfather,
“Go where you want,” said my grandfather, “I’m staying here.”
He did, and brought the family over to join him, the only kosher butcher in North Fork, West Virginia.
Friday, November 11, 2011
WHAT KIND OF JEW PULLS A TRIGGER? -- part 1
My father must have known the difference between a stool pigeon and a buzzard. He certainly knew the difference between a bob-tail and a jackass. However, he would not have known a wild duck from a canary, or a rack of antlers from a rack of lamb. Why then was I forever giving him birthday cards and father’s day cards that featured men of Anglo-Saxon character with sensible pipes clenched in their mouths and a smidgeon of grouse feather in their hatbands? If they were sitting in armchairs in their studies, there would be a brandy snifter on a side table. A fine double barrel would be displayed above the mantel. The men stared up and out yonder without blinking as they followed flights of mallards far above no doubt thinking of hunts past and hunts to come with their Eagle Scout sons whose names were followed by numbers.
Reuben Henry Foreman was not that man (and my Boy Scout career went south without ever going north). He smoked El Producto cigars, a five pack for a buck, drank a single shot of Four Roses in the morning and one again in the afternoon, put a quarter on the numbers every day, and was the only white man I ever saw read the “Baltimore Afro-American”, the city’s only Black newspaper. He didn’t do it for any particular reason other than he liked to read newspapers. If he could have read Chinese he’d have read a Chinese newspaper. One time I did see him with a book -- “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. It was upside down in his lap, and he was asleep. The men depicted on the greeting cards I gave him read “Field and Stream.” If you had asked him, Ruby would have told you his firm belief, but if you never asked him you’d never know.
Many years after his death, Jamie and I went to Baltimore so she could meet my family for the first time. My mother kept some old photographs under a glass top cut to fit her bureau. Jamie called me over, pointed out a photo of my father, and asked, “Who’s that?”
How could she not know who it was?
“My father, J. Who d’ya think?”
“You never told me he was crippled.”
“Who’s crippled?”
“Your father.”
“My father was not crippled.”
“Is this man in that snapshot not your father? Come here and look at this,” she insisted and pointed to a frayed, black & white photo of my father standing there smiling at the camera. The metal canes with arm support attachments that he used are clearly visible. They made a soft, clanking noise, pocket change, when they struck the ground. He was never without them
“Yeah, what’s crippled about him?”
“He’s got crutches! Two of them.”
“Canes!”
“OK. Canes.”
“Thank you. He got around just fine.”
“Yeah, Stephen, the man in this picture might’ve gotten around just fine, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a cripple who did it. Look at him. If the man in this picture is your father then your father was a cripple.”
The man in the picture is my father is a cripple. That man. There. Got it?
Finally, I did. Wow, did I! I was well into my thirties, but, not until that moment, did I ever think of my father as a cripple. Trying to grasp it for the first time staggered me some. I had never even heard the word “cripple” used in our house. It wasn’t avoided. It simply wasn’t, as if the word were magically deleted from every book and magazine that ever followed us home. If the word occurred within earshot outside of the house, if it registered with me at all, I would never have associated it with any image of my father.
I’m trying to find words to describe my feelings as this information made its determined way through to the bedrock of my heart. Little by little I got it. If you wanted to change a single word and only one single word in a manuscript of thousands of pages, millions of pages, you’d start on page one, program your computer, and instantly it would adjust. He would be She. Her would be Him. Past tense would become Present tense. It might become You. You’d feel the change – register a ping on the radar -- but you’d go on, and everything will be what it is.
Many years later (not to mention many years ago), I sat in the Los Angeles Public Library in downtown LA at a carrel stacked with books doing chump change research for a textbook company in Virginia and fondly remembering those by-gone days when people actually paid me real money to write things. I needed a nap. It came upon me suddenly like mustard gas. My head went down, I’m guessing with a thunk. I was gone, bodily gone, time gone, Dorothy in the poppy field gone, nothing there gone. I was deep inside that silence when the pocket change sound of my father’s canes was suddenly as real and immediate as it had ever been. My father was here, there, right next to me – Where? -- and what was happening instead was that an old woman with two metal canes was walking by. My father had never been more real to me than in the instant it took for my eyes to open. I heard him. He was there.
Reuben Henry Foreman was not that man (and my Boy Scout career went south without ever going north). He smoked El Producto cigars, a five pack for a buck, drank a single shot of Four Roses in the morning and one again in the afternoon, put a quarter on the numbers every day, and was the only white man I ever saw read the “Baltimore Afro-American”, the city’s only Black newspaper. He didn’t do it for any particular reason other than he liked to read newspapers. If he could have read Chinese he’d have read a Chinese newspaper. One time I did see him with a book -- “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. It was upside down in his lap, and he was asleep. The men depicted on the greeting cards I gave him read “Field and Stream.” If you had asked him, Ruby would have told you his firm belief, but if you never asked him you’d never know.
Many years after his death, Jamie and I went to Baltimore so she could meet my family for the first time. My mother kept some old photographs under a glass top cut to fit her bureau. Jamie called me over, pointed out a photo of my father, and asked, “Who’s that?”
How could she not know who it was?
“My father, J. Who d’ya think?”
“You never told me he was crippled.”
“Who’s crippled?”
“Your father.”
“My father was not crippled.”
“Is this man in that snapshot not your father? Come here and look at this,” she insisted and pointed to a frayed, black & white photo of my father standing there smiling at the camera. The metal canes with arm support attachments that he used are clearly visible. They made a soft, clanking noise, pocket change, when they struck the ground. He was never without them
“Yeah, what’s crippled about him?”
“He’s got crutches! Two of them.”
“Canes!”
“OK. Canes.”
“Thank you. He got around just fine.”
“Yeah, Stephen, the man in this picture might’ve gotten around just fine, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a cripple who did it. Look at him. If the man in this picture is your father then your father was a cripple.”
The man in the picture is my father is a cripple. That man. There. Got it?
Finally, I did. Wow, did I! I was well into my thirties, but, not until that moment, did I ever think of my father as a cripple. Trying to grasp it for the first time staggered me some. I had never even heard the word “cripple” used in our house. It wasn’t avoided. It simply wasn’t, as if the word were magically deleted from every book and magazine that ever followed us home. If the word occurred within earshot outside of the house, if it registered with me at all, I would never have associated it with any image of my father.
I’m trying to find words to describe my feelings as this information made its determined way through to the bedrock of my heart. Little by little I got it. If you wanted to change a single word and only one single word in a manuscript of thousands of pages, millions of pages, you’d start on page one, program your computer, and instantly it would adjust. He would be She. Her would be Him. Past tense would become Present tense. It might become You. You’d feel the change – register a ping on the radar -- but you’d go on, and everything will be what it is.
Many years later (not to mention many years ago), I sat in the Los Angeles Public Library in downtown LA at a carrel stacked with books doing chump change research for a textbook company in Virginia and fondly remembering those by-gone days when people actually paid me real money to write things. I needed a nap. It came upon me suddenly like mustard gas. My head went down, I’m guessing with a thunk. I was gone, bodily gone, time gone, Dorothy in the poppy field gone, nothing there gone. I was deep inside that silence when the pocket change sound of my father’s canes was suddenly as real and immediate as it had ever been. My father was here, there, right next to me – Where? -- and what was happening instead was that an old woman with two metal canes was walking by. My father had never been more real to me than in the instant it took for my eyes to open. I heard him. He was there.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
I HEARD A SOUND I SHOULD NEVER HAVE HEARD
This was originally written last August before the flood devastated our mountain top and took precedence over everything else. People are still out of their homes, some for good. Prattsville is struggling to survive. Some believe it will. Some don't. The homeless are a topic of conversation now that winter is for sure here. One woman's reaction? "Let them live in tents."
Outside my office window, the first snowfall -- heavy and wet -- is blinding white in the afternoon sun. I think I'll send this now.
Our old farmhouse has a huge wrap-around screen porch that separates us from the insects but not the sounds and sights of the valley. I sit there every morning I can with my first coffee of the day (laced with a spoonful of hot chocolate and too much sugar) and gradually reach lift-off. The other day I heard a sound I should not have heard this time of year, barely into August. Blue jays! They’re at least a month early – a cold weather bird – but they were out there shrieking to mar the peace of that morning. But why are they here now, and why are the seedpod propellers dry and ready to fall from the maples, and why am I beginning to see red and copper leaves already in grass that’s still tall and green? Just askin’…
I live where there is peace, yes, but very little silence. Only after a three day blizzard when the river is frozen and covered over with five feet of snow is there quiet – shh, the whole world white and still. When I’m in the city sounds tend to muddy together like a child’s fingerprint painting with too many colors. So many sounds out here, too, but they seem distinct to me. Like a medieval book of hours different sounds at different times help define the day. Each waking thing makes a sound. Each waking thing joins the world at its appointed time. Human sounds are the ones least heard, such as the occasional car or truck that passes our place. Like the residents of wartime London who could tell the type of plane flying over by the sound of its engines, I can tell which neighbor is driving by the house without looking. Max always honks, but still I know him by the squeaks and rattles of the tow-trailer behind his Dodge truck. I can tell who’s brush-hogging their field, who’s using the chainsaw, who’s building a new shed, who’s sighting in for hunting season. You get to know the valley’s dogs, too, especially at night when a bear walks across their property or the coyotes yip and howl, but the sound of an owl at sunset is the sound I treasure most.
I have a secret place. It’s on the mountain behind my house, an old stone wall in the woods, once a field, now second growth timber. I wander up there often and sit, look out over the valley and smile because no one knows where I am. Last Spring I sat there at dusk and heard an owl call from across the valley – hoo, hoo – haunting – and another owl from the woods somewhere around me called back. I don’t know what they were saying but they said it a lot, back and forth, their calls echoing across the valley. The river was too far down the mountain to hear, and the woods were as quiet as always when night comes on. But the owls were calling. And then they weren’t. I waited until I was satisfied that they had gone somewhere else, and then I walked home in the darkness, the only sound being that of my boots as they pushed aside the dry grass.
Outside my office window, the first snowfall -- heavy and wet -- is blinding white in the afternoon sun. I think I'll send this now.
Our old farmhouse has a huge wrap-around screen porch that separates us from the insects but not the sounds and sights of the valley. I sit there every morning I can with my first coffee of the day (laced with a spoonful of hot chocolate and too much sugar) and gradually reach lift-off. The other day I heard a sound I should not have heard this time of year, barely into August. Blue jays! They’re at least a month early – a cold weather bird – but they were out there shrieking to mar the peace of that morning. But why are they here now, and why are the seedpod propellers dry and ready to fall from the maples, and why am I beginning to see red and copper leaves already in grass that’s still tall and green? Just askin’…
I live where there is peace, yes, but very little silence. Only after a three day blizzard when the river is frozen and covered over with five feet of snow is there quiet – shh, the whole world white and still. When I’m in the city sounds tend to muddy together like a child’s fingerprint painting with too many colors. So many sounds out here, too, but they seem distinct to me. Like a medieval book of hours different sounds at different times help define the day. Each waking thing makes a sound. Each waking thing joins the world at its appointed time. Human sounds are the ones least heard, such as the occasional car or truck that passes our place. Like the residents of wartime London who could tell the type of plane flying over by the sound of its engines, I can tell which neighbor is driving by the house without looking. Max always honks, but still I know him by the squeaks and rattles of the tow-trailer behind his Dodge truck. I can tell who’s brush-hogging their field, who’s using the chainsaw, who’s building a new shed, who’s sighting in for hunting season. You get to know the valley’s dogs, too, especially at night when a bear walks across their property or the coyotes yip and howl, but the sound of an owl at sunset is the sound I treasure most.
I have a secret place. It’s on the mountain behind my house, an old stone wall in the woods, once a field, now second growth timber. I wander up there often and sit, look out over the valley and smile because no one knows where I am. Last Spring I sat there at dusk and heard an owl call from across the valley – hoo, hoo – haunting – and another owl from the woods somewhere around me called back. I don’t know what they were saying but they said it a lot, back and forth, their calls echoing across the valley. The river was too far down the mountain to hear, and the woods were as quiet as always when night comes on. But the owls were calling. And then they weren’t. I waited until I was satisfied that they had gone somewhere else, and then I walked home in the darkness, the only sound being that of my boots as they pushed aside the dry grass.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
IRENE -- FLOOD -- AFTERMATH
“Losing your house means everything to people. I know that, but if you’ve lost your child…” She shrugs. “What does it mean? When it looked like we would have to evacuate, all I took were my son’s ashes and his pictures. I couldn’t have lived without them. The rest doesn’t matter.”
Sandy Kiley and I stood talking in the spacious wooden shed that serves as their family’s farm stand. They grow the best fingerling potatoes in Greene County, and service the finest restaurants on the mountaintop which is what we call our small nook of the world. Sandy and Bob, her husband, owners of RSK Farms, consider it fortunate that they’ll have potatoes for the next two months. Their other crops were destroyed in the flood caused by Hurricane Irene. Their lower fields, the ones bordering the river, a flood plain, yes, but the best soil, those lower fields are nothing now but twenty-eight acres of fist sized gravel. What will the Kileys do? Sandy shrugs. “One day at a time,” she says.
The Kileys live and farm in Prattsville, New York, the hardest hit village on the mountaintop, a small, old town of 650 where I often shop at Jim’s American Supermarket and the Agway, Prattsville, now gone. The Kileys along with the rest of the town are in survival mode. Main St. with its FEMA tent, portable showers, food pantry, clothing drop-off, and port-a-potties looks like a refugee camp. Houses gape open. Porches in shreds. X’s spray painted on houses set for demolition. Small mountains of muddy debris outside of ruined homes display contents that were once belongings: waterlogged rugs, splintered furniture, possessions now junk, less than junk, worthless. Mud all over. What will these people do?
They are doing it. They are not the type to back down. Rebuild or what? They see no choice. One family, completely isolated from the road, constructed a make-shift bridge across the water. The DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation) came in and ordered them to take it down. The family refused. This is how they had been surviving. A confrontation brewed. The National Guard called in the state troopers who were thought to back the DEC, of course. Not at all. The troopers arrived and backed the locals, their neighbors, and told them to continue doing whatever they needed to survive. Morale is surprisingly high. Neighbors help neighbors, and there are volunteers from as far away as Michigan. In my valley, twenty-eight neighbors trapped for a week without phone or electricity, cooked dinner as best they could and ate with each other every night.
Certainly, the horror stories are many: the Chassidic old man who watched his wife drown in their kitchen when he waded out to snag a boat and couldn’t get back to her; she had been a Holocaust survivor; the farmer who watched two hundred dairy cows drown; houses literally floated away; trailers torn in two. But the aftermath – how these people are surviving and rebuilding – is an equally compelling story. The core values of these people, when not inflamed by irresponsible politicians, are strong and resilient, the kind of work ethic that made the United States the dominant industrial power in the world. Rosie the Riveter, tillers of Victory Gardens, teen-aged members of the Civil Air Patrol, Junior Achievement (Remember that?) – these are symbols of American strength. These are the people of Prattsville working to rebuild their lives in the face of a national economic crisis as well as a natural disaster, now caught in a political shoot-out between wealthy politicos who tie emergency aid to cuts in job programs. True, FEMA has a large tent in town as its headquarters. They are here to help, but word is getting around that a woman who lost her home valued at $102,000 was handed a check for $560. People are angry. No one seems resigned. The goal is to survive, to survive and go one better, and that’s what they will continue to do. Most do not want to go anywhere else. This is home. There are so many entities at play here. Other nearby towns suffered dreadful devastation as well: Lexington, Windham, Fleischman’s, Margaretville, Arkville. Looks on faces are the looks of the shell-shocked. Still, they are determined to go on, to make it better than it was before. I am privileged to be in the midst of them. People want me to tell their stories, and I intend to do just that.
Sandy Kiley and I stood talking in the spacious wooden shed that serves as their family’s farm stand. They grow the best fingerling potatoes in Greene County, and service the finest restaurants on the mountaintop which is what we call our small nook of the world. Sandy and Bob, her husband, owners of RSK Farms, consider it fortunate that they’ll have potatoes for the next two months. Their other crops were destroyed in the flood caused by Hurricane Irene. Their lower fields, the ones bordering the river, a flood plain, yes, but the best soil, those lower fields are nothing now but twenty-eight acres of fist sized gravel. What will the Kileys do? Sandy shrugs. “One day at a time,” she says.
The Kileys live and farm in Prattsville, New York, the hardest hit village on the mountaintop, a small, old town of 650 where I often shop at Jim’s American Supermarket and the Agway, Prattsville, now gone. The Kileys along with the rest of the town are in survival mode. Main St. with its FEMA tent, portable showers, food pantry, clothing drop-off, and port-a-potties looks like a refugee camp. Houses gape open. Porches in shreds. X’s spray painted on houses set for demolition. Small mountains of muddy debris outside of ruined homes display contents that were once belongings: waterlogged rugs, splintered furniture, possessions now junk, less than junk, worthless. Mud all over. What will these people do?
They are doing it. They are not the type to back down. Rebuild or what? They see no choice. One family, completely isolated from the road, constructed a make-shift bridge across the water. The DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation) came in and ordered them to take it down. The family refused. This is how they had been surviving. A confrontation brewed. The National Guard called in the state troopers who were thought to back the DEC, of course. Not at all. The troopers arrived and backed the locals, their neighbors, and told them to continue doing whatever they needed to survive. Morale is surprisingly high. Neighbors help neighbors, and there are volunteers from as far away as Michigan. In my valley, twenty-eight neighbors trapped for a week without phone or electricity, cooked dinner as best they could and ate with each other every night.
Certainly, the horror stories are many: the Chassidic old man who watched his wife drown in their kitchen when he waded out to snag a boat and couldn’t get back to her; she had been a Holocaust survivor; the farmer who watched two hundred dairy cows drown; houses literally floated away; trailers torn in two. But the aftermath – how these people are surviving and rebuilding – is an equally compelling story. The core values of these people, when not inflamed by irresponsible politicians, are strong and resilient, the kind of work ethic that made the United States the dominant industrial power in the world. Rosie the Riveter, tillers of Victory Gardens, teen-aged members of the Civil Air Patrol, Junior Achievement (Remember that?) – these are symbols of American strength. These are the people of Prattsville working to rebuild their lives in the face of a national economic crisis as well as a natural disaster, now caught in a political shoot-out between wealthy politicos who tie emergency aid to cuts in job programs. True, FEMA has a large tent in town as its headquarters. They are here to help, but word is getting around that a woman who lost her home valued at $102,000 was handed a check for $560. People are angry. No one seems resigned. The goal is to survive, to survive and go one better, and that’s what they will continue to do. Most do not want to go anywhere else. This is home. There are so many entities at play here. Other nearby towns suffered dreadful devastation as well: Lexington, Windham, Fleischman’s, Margaretville, Arkville. Looks on faces are the looks of the shell-shocked. Still, they are determined to go on, to make it better than it was before. I am privileged to be in the midst of them. People want me to tell their stories, and I intend to do just that.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
IT WASN'T KATRINA. IT WAS IRENE
August 30, 2011
The following was intended to be a brief response to an e-mail from my friend, Ellen Stern, who'd seen the news that my piece of the mountain had taken a pounding and wanted to know how we'd fared. Judging by the length, I guess I got carried away, but so did Irene. We've seen many a Catskill mountain thunderstorm, tyrannical things with sheets and bolts of lightning coming from both earth and sky, an awesome show of force. But they don't last very long. Then came Irene: no thunder, no lightning, not even much wind, just relentless rain. Twelve straight and constant hours of it. It was like being trapped in a room as the water rises above your neck. In some cases, that's exactly what happened. A Poe story. The Titanic. I was going to say that other natural disasters, like earthquakes, are, at least, quick, hit and run, over fast, but they really aren't at all, only the earthquake, and that feels like eternity.
This seems to be more of a blog than an e-mail, so let's call it that. A blog. Working on a computer almost as old as my daughter and can't access usual blog format. So this is it. I'm writing in Boston as the phone and power are still out back home in Spruceton Valley. I'm a little discombobulated due to the evacuation -- can't quite get my bearings -- but the kids are their usually sterling selves making me feel very comfortable. I do feel uneasy at having left some of the neighbors behind. My intent had been to stay as well. The storm was over. The river was dropping. The danger passed. Why not? The weather was exquisite.
The morning after the rain subsided I was out on what used to be the road lugging flotsam to the creek side when my neighbor from the lovely little horse farm up the road walked down drinking her morning mug of coffee. We bad-mouthed Irene for awhile as she slurped her coffee, and I started salivating because I hadn't had coffee in three days. "God, what I wouldn't give for a cup of coffee," I cried. "Wait here," she said, walked back to her house (She had a generator and was using it two hours a day), and returned in a few minutes with a pot and a mug, lots of 1/2 & 1/2 and sugar, just like I like it. Two of our young volunteer firemen managed to get up the valley in ATV's to check on us. They came up during that seven foot blizzard, too. The owner of a small cabin down the road collected firewood tossed up by the river, lit a bonfire, and invited the rest of us. At another time his place was the one room schoolhouse. That night the sky was radiant.
Jamie, from her side of the country, followed the news on both CNN and the LATimes. She'd heard reports of old people trapped on back roads and figured I must be one of them. Might've been trapped. Didn't feel old.
As for her side of the country, I'll be there soon, 9/13-9/21, speaking at the Screenwriting Expo, Friday, 9/16, 4pm, LAX Westin Hotel. Topic: Your Screenplay;Your Novel. Hope to see some of you there and elsewhere.
Sorry for the digression. Had to get that in there.
Now.
A few of you have already seen a version of the following. It has been tinkered with, however, so not exactly the same. I wouldn't mind if you checked it out again.
Dear Ellen:
No matter the adventure, it usually comes down to this: don't mess with Mother Nature. Of course, Michelle Bachman said it was a message from G-d to cut the budget. From my POV the message from G-d was: you're on your own, Stevo. I'm fine and now in Boston with the kids, but this Irene lady was the real thing. Our house survived with no damage but a flood in the basement, but the old, hand-built stone retaining wall to the stream next to the house was turned into rubble, and the water came over the bank and inched toward the house as the downpour dribbled out: fourteen inches! Twelve hours. The river in front of the house slammed at a harsh angle into our stream emptying into it, and the road basically buckled and blew. At one point I watched the river breach the bank it had just battered away -- this was fast stuff, wave-like, no trickle, no slow flow -- hammer its way over the bridge, and make the road its own. Move over, sucka! Road never had a chance. Mind blowing destruction everywhere. A farmer nearby watched 200 of his cows drown when the river took out his pasture. Prattsville, where I often find myself, was destroyed. Not an exaggeration. Jim's American Market took in four feet of water. Agway pushed off its foundation and filled with mud, friends stuck on the roof watching the water rise as the Nat'l Guard sent for more boats. Jamie followed the flood on the news from Los Angeles! Over in Windham, the Catskill Mountain Country Store -- you, Katie, & I ate lunch there -- gone. Drew, the owner, watched a wave push a car through his building. It's transfixing to watch big maples and ash trees churn by at high speed as boulders grind along the bottom. You have to believe what you are seeing but you can't. Power and phone were (and are) out in Spruceton Valley. Friends stranded up the valley walked out to where they could be evacuated by the Nat'l Guard who were everywhere they could be although that wasn't nearly as many places as they were needed. I opted to stay figuring I had enough food and water for a week which was the estimate we were given. There would be others within walking distance, and, anyway, I had to find a way to the auto mechanic to have my brakes fixed at 8am next.
I hear of a possible route, so, fingers crossed, I drive down the valley astonished at the destruction, cross the final bridge past a sign I ignored, and took a bunch of back roads (cf: Robert Mitchum, Thunder Road, ca. 1953) which eventually got me to Haines Falls Auto. Palenville, one more town down the mountain, could no longer be reached due to landslide and blow-down. OK. Got the brakes fixed, bought food and dog food, and headed back over the mountains to a great view of the valley, but, more importantly, I thought I could get cell reception there, did, called Jamie who was relieved and said the family wanted me to pack up and drive to Boston. I know the kids love me but are they gonna love me for twelve days in a row? After that I'm going to LA to give a talk at the Screenwriting Expo.I wouldn't be home for weeks! I told her to tell everyone I was fine and so was the house but let me think about it. I just bought food, etc. etc. So I drive back to the valley conflicted, reach bridge #1 -- Remember the sign I ignored? -- am stopped by a roadblock of state police, Nat'l Guard, and highway guys who tell me that if I go in I can't get out for a week plus I had to leave my car and walk. Not one more vehicle was going over that bridge. Four miles up through a flood zone? With shopping bags in one hand and my ancient, crippled dachshund under the arm opposite? "Come on, Brad!" (I know the fellow. His father used to have a dairy farm on Jenkins Flats). It didn't matter I knew him. Or his father. The bridge had a one foot tear in it since I crossed that morning and was twisting counter clockwise. A plan developed. There was a government truck on the other side of the bridge. He'd give me a ride up and leave me there, or he'd wait fifteen minutes for me to pack my bag. OK. Seven days ("Maybe," said Brad). Seven days -- maybe more was Brad's subtext -- seven days without being able to communicate with the family, and the family having no idea what's going on. "Twenty minutes, " I said to Brad. "Fifteen." "Come on!" "Just go." Twenty minutes later after packing a bag and turning off all the power switches so the sudden whenever-it-would-come surge of electricity wouldn't blow our whole house out the instant Central Hudson gets it going, I'm in a truck being evacuated from my own home. Who said we were in charge? The good stuff was neighbors helping each other out. The only service station with gas and power jacked his prices up a dollar a gallon. A caller announced this on local radio, and when I finally drove out of here I saw his prices were again the same as everyone else's. So now I'm in Boston with the kids, on my small level a refugee having been given 15 minutes to pack and leave, but this is by no means the worst of what could have happened to me, did happen to many of my neighbors, or what has happened other times and other places. I'm the fortunate one, but I can imagine those times and places like I never have before. So much stuff to remember to pack. So much stuff forgotten. I left my computer glasses on my desk and a Hebrew National salami in a beer cooler on the front porch. A Chassidic man in his eighties watched as his wife of a lifetime drowned in the kitchen. He'd waded out to snag a boat and couldn't get back to her. She had been a Holocaust survivor.
The following was intended to be a brief response to an e-mail from my friend, Ellen Stern, who'd seen the news that my piece of the mountain had taken a pounding and wanted to know how we'd fared. Judging by the length, I guess I got carried away, but so did Irene. We've seen many a Catskill mountain thunderstorm, tyrannical things with sheets and bolts of lightning coming from both earth and sky, an awesome show of force. But they don't last very long. Then came Irene: no thunder, no lightning, not even much wind, just relentless rain. Twelve straight and constant hours of it. It was like being trapped in a room as the water rises above your neck. In some cases, that's exactly what happened. A Poe story. The Titanic. I was going to say that other natural disasters, like earthquakes, are, at least, quick, hit and run, over fast, but they really aren't at all, only the earthquake, and that feels like eternity.
This seems to be more of a blog than an e-mail, so let's call it that. A blog. Working on a computer almost as old as my daughter and can't access usual blog format. So this is it. I'm writing in Boston as the phone and power are still out back home in Spruceton Valley. I'm a little discombobulated due to the evacuation -- can't quite get my bearings -- but the kids are their usually sterling selves making me feel very comfortable. I do feel uneasy at having left some of the neighbors behind. My intent had been to stay as well. The storm was over. The river was dropping. The danger passed. Why not? The weather was exquisite.
The morning after the rain subsided I was out on what used to be the road lugging flotsam to the creek side when my neighbor from the lovely little horse farm up the road walked down drinking her morning mug of coffee. We bad-mouthed Irene for awhile as she slurped her coffee, and I started salivating because I hadn't had coffee in three days. "God, what I wouldn't give for a cup of coffee," I cried. "Wait here," she said, walked back to her house (She had a generator and was using it two hours a day), and returned in a few minutes with a pot and a mug, lots of 1/2 & 1/2 and sugar, just like I like it. Two of our young volunteer firemen managed to get up the valley in ATV's to check on us. They came up during that seven foot blizzard, too. The owner of a small cabin down the road collected firewood tossed up by the river, lit a bonfire, and invited the rest of us. At another time his place was the one room schoolhouse. That night the sky was radiant.
Jamie, from her side of the country, followed the news on both CNN and the LATimes. She'd heard reports of old people trapped on back roads and figured I must be one of them. Might've been trapped. Didn't feel old.
As for her side of the country, I'll be there soon, 9/13-9/21, speaking at the Screenwriting Expo, Friday, 9/16, 4pm, LAX Westin Hotel. Topic: Your Screenplay;Your Novel. Hope to see some of you there and elsewhere.
Sorry for the digression. Had to get that in there.
Now.
A few of you have already seen a version of the following. It has been tinkered with, however, so not exactly the same. I wouldn't mind if you checked it out again.
Dear Ellen:
No matter the adventure, it usually comes down to this: don't mess with Mother Nature. Of course, Michelle Bachman said it was a message from G-d to cut the budget. From my POV the message from G-d was: you're on your own, Stevo. I'm fine and now in Boston with the kids, but this Irene lady was the real thing. Our house survived with no damage but a flood in the basement, but the old, hand-built stone retaining wall to the stream next to the house was turned into rubble, and the water came over the bank and inched toward the house as the downpour dribbled out: fourteen inches! Twelve hours. The river in front of the house slammed at a harsh angle into our stream emptying into it, and the road basically buckled and blew. At one point I watched the river breach the bank it had just battered away -- this was fast stuff, wave-like, no trickle, no slow flow -- hammer its way over the bridge, and make the road its own. Move over, sucka! Road never had a chance. Mind blowing destruction everywhere. A farmer nearby watched 200 of his cows drown when the river took out his pasture. Prattsville, where I often find myself, was destroyed. Not an exaggeration. Jim's American Market took in four feet of water. Agway pushed off its foundation and filled with mud, friends stuck on the roof watching the water rise as the Nat'l Guard sent for more boats. Jamie followed the flood on the news from Los Angeles! Over in Windham, the Catskill Mountain Country Store -- you, Katie, & I ate lunch there -- gone. Drew, the owner, watched a wave push a car through his building. It's transfixing to watch big maples and ash trees churn by at high speed as boulders grind along the bottom. You have to believe what you are seeing but you can't. Power and phone were (and are) out in Spruceton Valley. Friends stranded up the valley walked out to where they could be evacuated by the Nat'l Guard who were everywhere they could be although that wasn't nearly as many places as they were needed. I opted to stay figuring I had enough food and water for a week which was the estimate we were given. There would be others within walking distance, and, anyway, I had to find a way to the auto mechanic to have my brakes fixed at 8am next.
I hear of a possible route, so, fingers crossed, I drive down the valley astonished at the destruction, cross the final bridge past a sign I ignored, and took a bunch of back roads (cf: Robert Mitchum, Thunder Road, ca. 1953) which eventually got me to Haines Falls Auto. Palenville, one more town down the mountain, could no longer be reached due to landslide and blow-down. OK. Got the brakes fixed, bought food and dog food, and headed back over the mountains to a great view of the valley, but, more importantly, I thought I could get cell reception there, did, called Jamie who was relieved and said the family wanted me to pack up and drive to Boston. I know the kids love me but are they gonna love me for twelve days in a row? After that I'm going to LA to give a talk at the Screenwriting Expo.I wouldn't be home for weeks! I told her to tell everyone I was fine and so was the house but let me think about it. I just bought food, etc. etc. So I drive back to the valley conflicted, reach bridge #1 -- Remember the sign I ignored? -- am stopped by a roadblock of state police, Nat'l Guard, and highway guys who tell me that if I go in I can't get out for a week plus I had to leave my car and walk. Not one more vehicle was going over that bridge. Four miles up through a flood zone? With shopping bags in one hand and my ancient, crippled dachshund under the arm opposite? "Come on, Brad!" (I know the fellow. His father used to have a dairy farm on Jenkins Flats). It didn't matter I knew him. Or his father. The bridge had a one foot tear in it since I crossed that morning and was twisting counter clockwise. A plan developed. There was a government truck on the other side of the bridge. He'd give me a ride up and leave me there, or he'd wait fifteen minutes for me to pack my bag. OK. Seven days ("Maybe," said Brad). Seven days -- maybe more was Brad's subtext -- seven days without being able to communicate with the family, and the family having no idea what's going on. "Twenty minutes, " I said to Brad. "Fifteen." "Come on!" "Just go." Twenty minutes later after packing a bag and turning off all the power switches so the sudden whenever-it-would-come surge of electricity wouldn't blow our whole house out the instant Central Hudson gets it going, I'm in a truck being evacuated from my own home. Who said we were in charge? The good stuff was neighbors helping each other out. The only service station with gas and power jacked his prices up a dollar a gallon. A caller announced this on local radio, and when I finally drove out of here I saw his prices were again the same as everyone else's. So now I'm in Boston with the kids, on my small level a refugee having been given 15 minutes to pack and leave, but this is by no means the worst of what could have happened to me, did happen to many of my neighbors, or what has happened other times and other places. I'm the fortunate one, but I can imagine those times and places like I never have before. So much stuff to remember to pack. So much stuff forgotten. I left my computer glasses on my desk and a Hebrew National salami in a beer cooler on the front porch. A Chassidic man in his eighties watched as his wife of a lifetime drowned in the kitchen. He'd waded out to snag a boat and couldn't get back to her. She had been a Holocaust survivor.
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