Eugene Bardach

 

We're talkin' seventy years. Wow! When I was a kid I was friendly with a genius named Eugene Bardach who told me he never did any homework, and I believed him. I, of course, failed repeatedly, and Gene, of course, got into Princeton at 16, locked in his ph.d at 22. Theoretical physics. Something like that. Quarks and black holes. A real supernova, this kid, Eugene. Gene was another kid my mother wished were hers.

Why am I memorializing Eugene Bardach, a guy in my thoughts for some reason although I doubt I am in his? Why would I be? And why is he?

Now, in our corner of the woods, we are quickly approaching the peak of this Fall season. The experts say we are 70% there. I don’t know from numbers, but it's dazzling. I envision hundreds of thousands of kneeling colonial militiamen armed with muskets, firing great puffs of multi-colored smoke out from the hills. I am taken by St. Anne’s Peak across the way. Yesterday it was Summer, and yesterday it was green. Now, it’s Autumn, just a day later, it’s Autumn, and the hills are more alive to me now than when they were truly prime and vibrant, when they proudly puffed out their great, green, gunny sergeant chests. Now, we have red and bronze and yellow and orange - puff, puff, puff - volley upon volley - they detonate and push their colors . Green shimmers. Colors dance.

The hills. The hills and Eugene Bardach. Eugene and I would ride our bikes to this store that sold chemicals where we’d buy a bunch of powders like cyanide (blue), sulphur (yellow), magnesium (white), ferrous oxide (red). We’d go back to my house, make a small packet out of newspaper for each chemical, wrap the mix in a large sheet of newspaper, and set it on fire in the driveway. Vshoom! Shoom! With a great hissing sound, a circus of colors shot up in all directions as the burning newspaper triggered chemical explosions - one after another, two at once, vshoom, vshoom vshoom, two more, each packet flaming its true, pure color. The rush we felt when that little fury was unleashed was exhilarating. It was pure mischief, pure anarchism but no more so than St. Anne’s Peak right now. So, the "wondrous strange" sight of St. Anne's leaves triggers the memories of a multi-colored chem bomb built by crew cut, pre-teens in the 50's. Strange the thoughts we have and when we have them, yeah?