December 23, 1940 - December 23, 2020

An unavoidable cliche for the year at hand - “How the hell did I get here?” Young and foolish seems like yesterday. Suddenly, it’s old and foolish. Wha’d’ya gonna do? As that wonderful song by Sondheim fearlessly puts it out there, “I’m still here”. And glad of it. Nu? Where would I rather be?

A Jewish merchant was traveling from Pinsk to Minsk. Another Jewish merchant was travelling from Minsk to Pinsk. Of course, they run into each other on the road. They know each other. They greet. So, one merchant asks the other,”How’s by you?” The other shrugs and answers, “Nu? How should I be?”

My reward? As in "Go to my"? Pass. Where am I going? My reward is already here - a tolerant, forgiving miracle of a partner of 42 years, our two children, one boy, one girl, our two and a half year old rambunctious hunk of championship grandson, two dogs, a beloved mutt and a big, black, sixty pound doodle, all right now under one roof - my roof, our roof. Brother and sister still spry and healthy. Best friends on the way. Oh yeah, let’s not forget the two goats and four horses out back. My Goddaughter and her mate bought the place only a few yards away across the creek. We're the ones with the goats. They’re the ones with the horses. Setting up shop in the Catskills, the irony being that we all once lived a quick block away from each other in Hancock Park. Very posh. BTW: “port out starboard home” - POSH. I love to do detective work on words - how they evolved, what they’ve come to mean. I was accepted by the University of Chicago as a PhD candidate in Linguistics. When I learned that linguistics was more concerned with how the tongue works rather than where the words came from, and that I had to take Latin, I bailed. Yale came next; Morgan State before that. The point of all this is that I refuse to “go to my reward”. Kickin’ and screamin’ be my middle name. Why go anywhere else? Joy! Joy! Joy! Gimme all y'got.

What I find hardest to believe is that I’ve had the life I’ve had. I wanted to be a writer, and I'm a writer. It's been a life often propelled by happenstance, but mostly by choice, not always good ones, but good enough to have made it worthwhile. There were crossroads, and I was fortunate to have found them. Sometimes they were guarded by the Black Knight from Monty Python. Other times were genuine shit shows. The punch that knocks you out is the punch you don't see. Sometimes you're out on your feet, stumbling around, with people asking you if you're all right, only you can't figure out why they're asking you such a stupid question. 

It hasn’t always been easy but it's never been boring - so many interesting people, so many challenges, so many books and boxing matches, some heartaches, more than I bargained for, some delicious happenings, more than I bargained for. My curiosity took me places I always wanted to go and places I didn't know were there. My intellect helped me make sense of it all, at least, sometimes, it did. There were times I could have been killed, once by a charging sperm whale, once by knife on the streets of New York. The whale was not serious. The knife was. Survival experiences. Aesthetic experiences. Intellectual experiences. Dumb experiences. Experiences where I was an asshole. See what I mean? Interesting. 

I've been fortunate. I can talk to anybody and have, and that includes a desert prospector, a sitting president (smack dab in the White House, no less), an Alaskan trapper, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Captain Tschirgi, USMC, Robert Lowell, Freddie Brown, Jane Fonda, a homeless lady with no teeth and a retired playmate with breasts the eighth and ninth wonders of the world. I don't feel superior or entitled or inferior or undeserving, just pleased to be doing what I do  - listening. Maybe this is why I've always loved books more than movies. A beloved Uncle Milton once gave me this advice,"If you want other people to find you interesting, get them to talk about themselves". Really. What could be more fascinating than you? I enjoy listening to the adventures of other people, their accents, their quirks, prejudices which are not mine, poses, desires. I can spin a yarn with the best of 'em and will with a wink and a nod, but I'd much prefer you show me yours.

I was three, maybe four when I had my first true writing experience. I was raised in a brick semi-detached house with lots of trees around. 3814 W. Rogers Ave., Baltimore 15, Maryland, Mohawk 2729. I remember it well, details like jumping up and down on a sofa in the club basement to the tune of "Cement Mixer, Putty, Putty" on the radio, and a breakfast nook where I sat across  from Uncle Milton when he visited from New York. We had our midnight snacks  - slugs of Hebrew National salami and and talks from places of love so good and pure, so never felt before, gone dormant until a father and his son brought them back to life, and a grandson who is life itself.

 My first writing experience, ca, 1944. My three year old self somehow came up with the idea that if he kneeled on the seat and "wrote" in the air above the nook, scribbles and lines and circles and wavy stuff, up, down, back, forth, every morning of the year, on Xmas morning the "letters" would appear in many colors right there in the air. My parents, being Jewish, did not celebrate Christmas, so upbringing had nothing to do with this. It was my secret.  I remember rushing down stairs to the nook that morning, all excited, only to be disappointed to see that nothing was there. Not one squiggle. Blank space. Nothing. My writer's life may have begun right then and there - write the stuff, send it out, wait for an answer, get an answer, get over it.  However, there are times when the proper answer does come, and, along with it, comes the goodness of the feeling I had when writing those letters in the first place, decades and decades and decades ago when I was barely here.

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PS 

You can stop here or...

What follows is completely off the subject, or maybe it isn't. My old friend, Paul, used to refer to this type of construction as "a graceless segue". Your call.

Jamie is Catholic, and so, we have a Christmas tree. It took me awhile to get past my discomfort with having one in my own home, but, know what? Get over it. She's your wife.

The other day, my grandson, daughter, wife, self, and Joe, the black doodle, trudged up the mountain in deep snow to cut a tree Jamie had targeted this past summer. We'd been watching it grow, a young spruce, fresh and perky, just the other side of a stone wall above the creek. Dorian, two and a half, bodacious as could be, was a trooper, fearless, determined, oblivious to the twenty degree cold, endlessly curious. Madden cut the tree down and we headed back. True to the shlemiel I seem to have become, I lost my balance crossing the wall and went down. Fortunately, I was able to grab a nearby sapling to break the fall. No problem, except figuring out how to get up again. Just then, this thirty month old little person turned around, saw me, said, "Poppa, help?", and held out his hand to help me up. "Poppa, help?"

So, you tell me: is this completely off the subject? 

(NOTE: Yiddish lexicon - the shlemiel spills the soup on the shlemazel.)

Death Of A Computer

 It’s been three weeks, three weeks without my computer, the headquarters of my brain where a good two thirds of my life is stored. How did I get to such a dependency on a machine and a  machine without a soul no less? Certainly, there are folks who would dispute that, but, of course, they are wrong. Just because it talks does not mean it has anything to say. Now, some forty years after losing my virginity to an archaic, fifty pound desktop with a screen the size of a credit card, it’s become an appendage. Remember that fifties movie, “Donovan’s Brain”? A man’s brain outside his body dictating what he can and cannot do? No academy awards there, but a glimpse of something frightening and imminent. And then the internet was conjured into existence. My world became more complex at the stroke of a key. 

It wasn't always like this. Way back in the fifties when I fancied myself a Beat poet, a ballpoint pen, even a pencil stub, and the closest scrap of paper was just dandy. This method evolved to yellow legal pads and felt tip pens of many colors, then typing it up on a portable Olivetti or another brand I can no longer remember which I took to Italy where I wrote my first screenplay. Why Italy? Why not? I was Edward Albee’s stage manager at the Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto, and so I thought, what the hell? Florence was just a ways north. Stick around. This screenplay led to my first IBM, the purchase of which was one of the single most exciting times of my life, way better than my first sexual experience which wasn't very good at all. But that first IBM? Whoa, what a ride! What a high! Mazel tov. I was a success. Then along came computers. My first one was not unlike my first whirl at serious sex - ignorannce redux - awkward, confusing, frusttrating, serially unsatisfying. It was years before I worked out the sex thng, but the computer had to be mastered right away, one computer after another, until I finally got it, well, sort of got it, enough for me to pound out a manuscript anyone else could read. No more cut and paste. No more trying to read my own handwriting. No more White-Out. No more carbon paper and yellow copy pages. Revisions infinitely easier. Writing has never become a breeze, but losing the grunt work was a saving grace.

So, what have the past three weeks wrought? A huge hole where my words used to be, and devolution - scraps of paper I promptly lost, dried out felt tips, cheap ballpoint pens from local political campaigns stuck in the backs of drawers, ideas left hanging, “precious” thoughts dissipating like cigar smoke. What was the good in all of this? For starters, I wasn’t seduced by internet ads into parting with my hard earned dollars for stuff I never thought I needed. For another, I read books.

Now that I’ve got my computer back, is my world once again a delightful place to be? My little world may almost be that, but my bigger world still has Trump and his traitors in it, and will have them in it most likely the rest of my days. Anyway, I’m back now and don’t feel like kvetching , although I could at length but won’t, not this week, anyhow. Stay tuned.

When Somone You Loved Long Ago Dies

People die. I know a lot of them. Knew. Relatives. Friends. Others. No secret. It happens as one grows older. What about those who were alive to you all your life and then you discover they aren’t, discover they died years ago, all that time you assumed they were still alive. Somehow that’s even more of a shock than a sudden death. 

My father’s death was sudden, although for years his ailments forecast it,  so it really wasn’t sudden at all. One day he was here. The next day he wasn’t. But, this wasn’t really sudden, was it? It just seemed like it.

Sometimes, when my mind wanders, I wonder about those from my past with whom I was once close. Are they well? Have they had good lives? It’d be nice to check in after all the years. A surprise. A call from the blue. Someone answers. You know that voice.  “Who? My God, how in the world have you been?” That’s the way it often is. Really nice. Really fun, only once, it wasn’t.

It’s been fifty-six years. I was a social worker in the city of Baltimore. So was she. A very, very smart woman. Strawberry blonde hair. A lithe body kept trim by swimming. A lovely, warm smile. Some freckles. An easy laugh, more like a chuckle or a chortle. Sweet. She thought I was funny. And, again, very, very smart.

I was Jewish, a graduate of Morgan State College, an HBCU, where I was the only white guy matriculating at the time. She was Episcopalian, a University of Maryland graduate whose great great great aunt was an honest to God Revolutionary War heroine.You’d know her name. Her family didn’t want me anywhere near. I’d hear feet running from the living room up the steps to the second floor when I was at the front door. We dated for months, yet I never met one of them. But, she was tough, certain of her own mind, so, while it bothered her, we only spoke of it once. I’m sure she was the first Daughter of the American Revolution to work as a social worker. She did not brook inequality.

We talked a lot and laughed a lot, but I was heading to graduate school at Yale, and she was heading to law school at University of Maryland. I don’t remember how, but we drifted, and then we weren’t there anymore. I thought of her from time to time - still do - and I wondered if she ever thought of me?

It wasn’t that long ago when I took it into my head to see what had become of her. I did the research and discovered she had become a highly regarded equal rights lawyer, especially women’s legal rights.There was a newspaper photo showing her standing at her desk, older, but still, but still...I thought she looked just great. More years went by until I took it into my head to call her. I did the research, found her firm’s phone number, found she was dead. Whoa. Dead? Dead. She had died years before. It was a shock because she had just died to me.

I wanted her to be alive. I wanted to swap tales of our lives. To laugh. Instead, it was a shock to the midsection, a shock to the heart kind of grief I hadn’t yet known. I was no longer in love with her - that passed half a century ago - it was more an uncommon sadness, a befuddlement. She was just here. Where had she gone? I wasn’t looking at an empty chair or a hollow place at the table. I wasn’t looking at anything, but I could see her clearly as she had been. It made me want to share the tales of our lives. Fifty-six years ago we talked about what we wanted to become. Now, I had become what we had talked about, and I wanted her to know it. I wanted her to know how it felt to hold my grandson’s hand. I wanted her to know of my marriage of forty years and to whom I  was married. She’d have laughed and clapped her hands. I wanted her to know I became the writer I wanted to be. I wanted her to know that I’ve held onto those principles which brought me to social work in the first place. T’ain’t easy, MgGee, and there were times I wavered but recovered and tried to do my best. I wanted to email her pictures of my son and daughter, and tell the tale that brought them to us. I wanted to tell her tales of Hollywood, and I wanted to tell her I worked in the White House with George H. W.  Wrote a documentary on the american wilderness for him. I wanted to tell her that, unlike actors, the President didn’t change a word. 

There wouldn't have been time in a phone call to tell her all this, but some of it, and it would have been fun. Yet, there would have been no more phone calls had she been alive because this would be the one. It’s not that I miss her. Really, I don’t, but she’s tucked into a good place in my life at a good time in my life, and, like my garden, I tend my memories. I roam through my mental rolodex (that dates me, doesn’t it?), pluck out the good ones, give them a brisk watering. I try to hear voices, words said, even peculiar expressions. There is no sadness to this, no yearning, mostly huge smiles that hurt my face. Those times were, but these times are, and that’s where I am and will be for the next chunk of time, checkin’ out my world to see what’s comin’ ‘round my mountain next.

 

Just Like Being in a Corral

 When we lived in Montana we became friendly with two much older couples. Kenny and Verna Trowbridge lived a few miles south in the little town of Darby. Carl and Billie Hopkins lived there as well. Kenny broke horses for the army in WW1. He taught me how to hand load. Billie, as a bride, came to Jenny Lake in the Tetons, one of the first white settlers in the area. Billie gave Jamie her famous recipe for corn pudding which has become Jamie's famous recipe for corn pudding. 

One day Kenny and I were in a corral, leaning on the top rail, looking out over the wide Bitterroot Valley - a stupendous sight. "Beautiful, isn't it?" I said to Kenny. He hesitated then replied, "Seems just like bein' in a corral to me." One night, when the six of us were together, Billie described what it was like being a new bride in the Wyoming wilderness. After she got over her fear of a horse drawn sled falling through the ice, she grew to love the place. Imagine the Tetons and the lake. Imagine you are there by yourself. Alone, alone and filled with the delicious happiness of  solitude. "Has she ever been back?" we asked. "Once," she said, "but no more." "Why not?" "I can't recognize the place anymore. Too many roads. I get lost." A woman who could find her way through the hills and dales of the Teton wilderness when there were no roads, now gets lost and confused by them.

When we moved to the Catskills going on forty years ago, our road was a quiet country road. If three vehicles came by in an hour we'd call it gridlock, and we could often tell which neighbor it was by the sound of their engine. It started with 9/11 and continues with the pandemic: folks from NYC began buying property up here. A hedge fund guy has bought up a goodly portion of our valley and tunneled into the mountain he bought to build his getaway. A micro-brewery up the valley and a lovely inn 1/2 mile east of us are wonderful additions as is a neighbor's charming guest cottage a bit to the west, but this has helped turn our little piece of heaven into a destination venue - who doesn't want to be here? - more traffic, more money, more houses, less country. There is a push in our small town to limit further B'n'B's and slow the traffic. I've been dreaming of those police straps embedded with nails that stretch across the road. Speed bumps have been suggested, but they would make it impossible to plow. I guess, in its way, we are becoming gentrified. I can imagine now how the locals must have felt when we first moved here. Did they think, "There goes the neighborhood?" Only, there weren't that many of us then. At our end of the valley, I counted two - me and J, and then Bev moved here with her horses. At the village end, five miles west, six people, sometime eight. Barely a dent; not even a dozen. 

But, there are pluses as well. This does not include the McMansion being built by the hedge fund manager's architect fully visible through the trees 500 yards across the creek. Suddenly, a familiar old walk becomes trespassing, but I was talking about the pluses. 

People! People are the pluses. 

I've gotten to be quite comfortable discussing pick-up trucks and bullet trajectories. It's fun but it's limited. Recently, at the local farmer's market, I actually heard two people talking about the Colbert show. There are literally six writers within a quarter mile of each other. We were invited to dinner and had cuisine and proper wines. These folks are smart and sassy and don't let their city ways keep them from  diving head-long into country. We enjoy each other. Came Rosh Hashana the tiny pod of Jewish folks met on a small bridge over our creek and tossed the contents of our pockets into the water as is the ancient custom, and the larger pod celebrates Halloween and New Year's with gusto, 4th of July and Labor Day week-end. Bourbon for an hour. A snack. We even have our own brand of Meals-n-Wheels. One of the women is an extraordinarily good and adventurous cook, and very, very generous. She'll make brisket, for example, and put a serving in each of our mailboxes. Many do maple syrup come March. I love it when a local I know well stops by for a sit/chat on our front porch, and I love it when a writer or a psychologist or an architect or an artist stops by for the same reason. We don't trespass. We live off the land and the land is us. We find ourselves part of a community, and that ain't bad, not at this stage of my game. I've surprised myself by enjoying myself. I mean, aren't Russian Jewish Intellectuals supposed to be misanthropes? So much for self awareness.

For a long time now, most of my life, I've felt a part of more than one world. I've always been able to talk with anyone - a president of the United States and the state trooper whose mother I've known forever, movie stars and mercenaries, book worms and jocks. I've tried to raise my children to be comfortable anywhere with anyone. We're no better than the next guy, and we're certainly no worse. A dear uncle, Uncle Milton, once told me that if I wanted other people to find me interesting, get them to talk about themselves. I've discovered some great stuff that way. I know what I think, but what do you think?

Back at Yale, Sartre's, "No Exit", seemed profound to me. Its last line - "Hell is other people" - struck me as God's proof. Years and years later, I've changed my mind. Heaven is other people, too.

 

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Fall, 10-10-2020

This is the time of year I feel most alive, ironic since so many things are beginning to die, an easy and delightful death, the most exuberant, most colorful, most playful of deaths.The thrill of honking wild geese hidden by heavy cover, the symmetry of their V formation when they clear the weather. The startling explosion of grouse from cover. Bears scavenge their last bits of food for winter. White tail coats darken. Heavily racked stags fight for domination. You rarely see this, if ever, but sometimes you hear the muffled crash of racks somewhere in the deep woods. Trees flush with color, "cotton candy", my kids used to say. Other seasons seem to last forever compared with this one. From the day it begins we mourn its end. Of course, other seasons change, too, but those changes are so subtle they barely seem to change at all...until they do. There's a beautiful melancholy in the air. It's easier to see. We're coming into hunting season, although good local hunters  have been scouting since August. I am one of those local hunters, although it's been awhile since I've been out there taking game. Even so, I am hunting, always hunting. My eyes automatically focus on the edges, where fields meet woods. I'm studying my world in a different way for another purpose. It doesn't matter that I'm not out there this year or last year or next.

The nerves are never so alive, the senses never so keen. The air teems with whispers and ten thousand scents, each one a driblet of information. They become attuned to the tiniest movements in the thickest brush. You don't look for the whole but the piece, for the ear that twitches, for the sun glinting on a tine, the flick of a tail. You're aware of the shifting breeze, the breeze you always want to keep in your face. You walk the way you walk in the woods - glacially, flat footed. White-tail deer. Their hearing is beyond human comprehension. Where do they bed down? What are they eating, and where do they eat it? Where do they water? When? Is that scat fresh? You'll know everything a bear's been eating by its scat, but not deer. Details. In the morning when they are still bedded down on some high slope, your scent will carry up. If you're on that high slope late in the day, your scent will carry down. Oak has made a resurgence and has been migrating down the mountain, so there you will find fresh acorns. Details. And the rifle you will carry must be sighted in so as to assure accuracy. Know what your rifle can do. Does it pull? Which way? Know the bullet you use - its weight and purpose. Know its trajectory at 25 yards, 50 yards, 100 yards. Details. When I was in the Marines we had to take our rifles apart and put them back together again - in the dark. In sand. It's your responsibility. Details. All this, and then what you must do is, "Sit still". If you're gonna do it, do it well. Sit still.

Every year is new but like the year before and the years before that. Was this the genesis of reincarnation? One tree engendered the tree growing next to it. Each creation propagates itself. Ontology recapitulates phylogeny. If I were an ancient telling legends from before time told time and time again and again, what conclusions would I come to? What stories would I concoct? Metamorphosis happens atom by atom. Becoming a part of all this simply means, "Be here now". This state is not limited to monks and seekers, the more earthiest of us can experience it, too. 

The First Night of Autumn, 2020

Leaves fell last night, a sampling, not too many, spackled against the still green grass, the start of it all, flurries day by day until a big wind takes every last one, and the leaves are deep enough for a toddler to stomp through. Remember? Throwing yourself into a huge, thick mess of leaves raked by your dad? The smell of the neighbor's burning pile? Air as crisp as the leaves?

Back in the days of newspaper comics - the funny pages - I followed a strip called, "Our Miss Peach", about a kindergarten teacher and her students. One of her students, Arthur, kept a garden, a weed garden. All the kids made fun of him; he didn't care. He just went on tending his weed garden. It was amusing to me then, and I get it now. I have a weed garden, not because I intended, not at first, anyway, but because it's the end of growing season. Didn't plant much this summer, so most of the garden was left fallow. Weeds grew, and I let them, as long as they didn't threaten what I did plant. And then I let them grow because I was curious about these things that we're always so anxious to kill. Now, as we move into Fall, there are no more vegetables to pick but a jungle of weeds so thick and varied it's like walking into another world, a Garden of Eden from an alien planet. I stand in the midst of them, so they're all I can see. Some are ground plants. Many come up to my chest. Some grow over my head, I mean really over, like wild lettuce! Huh? That soccer ball sized clutch of smooth leaves started off as wide, jagged leaves on a thin stalk ten feet high.There are gold and purple flowers, purple thyme, deep rose pink echinacia, purple loosestrife, white caterpillar shaped flowers with stripes of blue like a spine on its dorsal side, vines everywhere, stuff I recognize, stuff I don't, but all of it fascinating for me and Arthur. I wonder why more of them aren't cultivated? Probably, because nobody's thought of a way to use them. I wonder which of them have been cultivated, lettuce aside? Of course, I love a lush, flush, tended vegetable garden. It's wonderful, and it pleases me aesthetically as well as materially. I love to stand in the middle of it and watch it grow. Nothing like eating an acorn squash that you've planted yourself, or a radish, or an eggplant, but they're not exotic. That's my point. Salads are wonderful,  but they are commonplace; no matter how fancy, no matter how much smoked duck is on the plate, they're still salads. The beauty of a garden is that it gives us a harvest that we've expected and looked forward to time and time again. The familiarity is the magic. Here comes an old friend. Let's have lunch.

But, it's not exotic, it's expected, it's what we know, we're safe! Weeds aren't safe. They've entrenched exactly where you don't want them. Wild, untamed; they strangle their rivals, suck their essence. However, it's not helpful or pleasant to think of weeds as "weeds", enemies to be demolished by any means, but as exotic creations with properties as yet to be discovered.You're surprised by what comes up and where. You're walking along and spot wild strawberry which looks a lot like a weed. Dark green leaves. Nearly flat to the ground. Tiny, tiny berries. Then there's thyme on the hillside and golden rod in the meadow. Recognize these weeds do have purpose: they support other creatures. Milkweed, for example, prime rib for Monarch butterflies. RoseHips, M & M's for grouse and deer. Wild berries hoovered by bears. Dandelions for bees and swallowtails. Actually, I like dandelions a lot, a whole yard full, gold buttons, pixie caps, little smiles. They make me happy, and then they become puffballs absolutely perfect for a mouthful of air blown by a curious little boy of two. There was a time when dandelions all over the lawn were valued and preferred, even cultivated. Their leaves are good in a mescalune salad. Once upon a time, every plant on earth was a weed. The Garden of Eden must've been flush with weeds except for that sinful apple tree, the Tree of Knowledge. Adam and Eve were not allowed to know anything. Keep 'em ignorant, right? No words. Just grunts. Accept your happy lot. Nothing to worry about. Anxiety disorders millions of years in the future. Barefoot and naked. Don''t ask questions. They did. Their punishment was eternal. Does any of this sound familiar? A lot of people accept the answer without ever asking the question. That's where we break with tradition. Two Jews, three opinions, right? You can actually argue with God and win. My sentiment is that if I can argue with God I can argue with you. Ready?

Labor Day Week-end , 2020

Spring came on so slowly this year it seemed the planet stopped moving. Up here Spring teases you. One day bright, clear, temperate; the next, two feet of snow. More snow. A little sleet. Bone breaking ice. Temperatures that freeze the hairs in your nose. Not as bad as Alaska where your piss freezes before it hits the ground. Winter has its place. It's part of the package. The other parts wouldn't be as bright without it. Even so, it stays too long and comes too soon. Right now, Winter is out there slinking slowly towards us like a predator in high grass.

When Jamie and I first moved here thirty-seven years ago, we were the new timers, the young new timers. Lloyd and Floyd, twin brothers in their nineties, were still alive. Every day, twice a day, they'd drive at maybe 5 + miles/hour, up and down the seven mile length of our valley. They could tell you where the first TV antenna once stood, where the wells were, who died where and how, just about every piece of local minutiae one could imagine. Except this one. The one I'm going to tell you next.

Lloyd and Floyd (Jamie called them Lloyd and Freud) were interviewed by a local reporter who asked them to talk about the biggest change they'd seen around these parts in their life times? Both of them thought for a bit, nodded to each other, then Floyd said, "They's less cows". 

The twins were also famous for driving their truck into a ditch during a snowstorm.This happened once, twice  a year regular. They told folks not to call a tow. It was too late at night, cold as hell, and why bother anybody? Come back in the morning. We got this covered. It happened before and will again. Lloyd brandished a bottle of apple jack from under the front seat and handed it to Floyd who took a drink and passed it back. Come back in the morning, boys. Case closed. 

J and I are the old timers now, and there aren't any cows anywhere to be seen. Used to be we'd have to stop at the cattle crossing at Jenkins Flats for the herd  to cross. Used to be there was a party line and an operator who knew our voices. Who even knows what that is any more? Party line? Primo coke, perhaps? Used to be if three cars passed our house in an hour we declared gridlock. Usually, we could tell who it was by the sound of the engine or rattle of the chassis. Now, given the fact that our valley has been "discovered", traffic has increased in both sound and volume. West Kill Brewery, the result of many generations on the same land, and Spruceton Inn, both destination businesses run by terrific people; still, the traffic can be a nuisance, but walk behind the house and it no longer exists, just the mountain in our backyard and Herdman Creek a few yards East.

The biggest change, however, is the demographic.  We've enjoyed our isolation. My concept of a good neighbor is someone who's there when needed but doesn't need to hang in your living room. I didn't want to set myself up as an outsider, but as someone there to live in peace and pay his taxes. Call me if you need me.

9/11 began the great migration. Covid-19 has accelerated it. Lots of new people in the nabe. City people. Bright, informed, appreciative, fun...All of a sudden we're eating "cuisine" and drinking wine from goblets. Land Rovers and Lincoln Navigators crowd out pick-ups and Ford Fairlanes, and the occasional  re-claimed ex-police car. NYC. Jersey. Suddenly, there is a community at this end of the valley, and we are surprised to find ourselves a part of it. I'm not sure when it happened, or how, but it did. We slid into place, albeit our own place. For example, I'm well known around here to never stay at any event more than two hours max. This has nothing to do with principle. My ass starts to hurt! "OK, J, ready?" Great time. Thanks, everybody. See you guys soon. The door closes behind us. Our Subaru Forester takes us home. Ah. Yes.

We came here as "new timers". We'd weather the winter and wonder who or if anyone had died? Because that's what happened over the winter. Old timers died, not all of them, of course, but enough to whittle down the species. Seems like now it's been whittled down to us.  Except us and the folks back then have startling differences. An extraordinarily beautiful and talented young twenty-three year old woman with a delightful smile and the kind of body that could make a grown man weep were he so inclined...to weep, anyway...this young woman exclaimed just yesterday that I didn't look older than fifty! I'll live off of that one for at least two weeks. Beer, grueling work, bake sales, far flung medical care, and mashed potatoes have taken their toll, not on us, thank goodness, but on the "old" old timers. At one time, suicides of elderly farmers were quite common. When the man considered himself worthless, unable to do what he had always done, he shot himself in the head. We knew one of them, the man who butchered our sheep. He did a great job, and since then there's been no local who does what he did. I think because Jamie and I live in our heads to a great extent, certainly, I do, so far, we have survived intact, still standing.  I don't think there's any secret to share except my kids wonder how I've survived in this condition on a daily diet of pretzels, ice cream, and beer. Maybe that's the secret? Why fiddle with what works?

The garden has pretty much been harvested. Some tomatoes left and lots of pumpkins on the vine waiting for my grandson on Halloween. Our trees are lush with apples and pears. They might not look pretty, but they sure do taste pretty. Another month and his Dad will carve his first pumpkin. I'll carve the second. When Sevi, my son, was just a bit over two, I took him to a community Halloween party at which Jamie, at some predetermined point, burst through the door costumed and cackling like a witch, "terrified" the children, gave them candy then "flew"back out the door. A little later, when Sevi and I got home, he ran to Jamie crying, "Mommy, Mommy, there was a witch!" Worth the price of admission, right? And now, with a dollop of good fortune, I get to do it again.