Nothing was familiar. The buildings themselves were featureless, with glass-like sides rising several stories into the air. There were no signs or markings to identify them as to function. No entrances, I saw no entrances, and that bothered me. Reasoning that because I was standing on grass, these were the backs of the buildings, I thought this must account for the lack of doors. Yet I saw nothing that would even pass as an emergency exit or a service entrance. Continuing to look around, I saw that there were people around and about, but like the gentleman who first approached me, I saw no faces. I was otherwise alone and getting edgy. What was this place and what should I do?
As with the first time we met, the man was suddenly at my side. “I’m glad you came,” he said, “come with me.” As we walked along, the same sense of expanded space which I had experienced at the house almost overwhelmed me. The buildings, as we approached and passed them, retained the same perspective regardless of our position. They just were, unchanging. We finally stopped before a low, one-storey stone building and an entry way appeared as we approached the building. “Was this how the doors worked in this place,” I wondered, “appearing only when you needed them and maybe only allowing recognized individuals to enter. Maybe that’s the reason I saw no doors on the other buildings.” Entering, I saw that the interior was brightly lit with no obvious source of light. I saw no one else about. The man indicated a door opposite the entrance and, opening it, he ushered me into a small room which was devoid of furnishing except for a small table and a chair. A book lay on the table. The room had no windows and was as brightly lit as the outer chamber.
Motioning me to the table, he asked me to sit down. “We have a legend,” he began, “that our civilization was destroyed several of your millennia ago. There are several variations to this legend to explain this destruction but we believed them to be just that, legends. Thinking them to be children’s tales, we did not take them seriously, considering them a way to explain a gap we knew existed in our history.” Pausing briefly, he touched the book lying before me on the table. “We had no records from before this supposed destruction and were beginning to consider that the written history of our people only comprised those years after the supposed destruction. What occurred before the destruction, the oral history, we considered myth.” Beginning to pace, he continued, “recently, a mine excavation uncovered the remains of a city. From the ruins we have seen thus far, we consider it quite advanced and, the archaeologists say, it dates to the time before the legendary destruction.” Stopping with his back to me he said, “we didn’t expect this and now wonder just how much else is buried that we don’t know about. The discovery of this city was quite accidental, nothing on the surface suggested its presence, which is not the case for those ruins of our recorded past.” Turning to face me (his lack of identifying features was disconcerting), he pointed to the book, “this book was found in a sealed box, a box with the same design on the lid as the box which brought you here. Inside was this book, which we can’t read.” Continuing, he said, “I won’t bore you with the details of how we found you, it is a result of our ability to travel between worlds and we detected a resonance between the box here and the box in your possession. The discovery of the box here seems to have triggered the appearance of your box. Which brings us to now.”
Sitting on the edge of the table, he looked down at me and said, “because of the affinity between the boxes, we believe you can read the book. That is why we have asked you here, to read the book for us.” I wanted to protest that I didn’t know where the box in my closet came from, that I probably wouldn’t be able to help them, that I probably was as ignorant as they, but he held up his hand to silence me. “Just open the book before you state your objections.” For a book of such antiquity, it looked remarkably new. The binding was plain and had no apparent markings. Opening it, I stared at the script for a moment. It was foreign and I was about to protest that I could not read it when the text reassembled itself into a readable narrative and I read words that could have come from our own creation stories, such as those from Sumer or Genesis. I was silent for some time and then told him what I saw. “Good,” he said, “then read to me.”
I read to him of the creation, the creation of everything, of first peoples, of jealousy, envy, of death, of the rise and fall of empires. The stories would sound familiar to you, echoing, as they did, our own mythology. The author of the book wrote as if he were viewing a vast mural stretching into the distance, a mural which he described as he walked along. I read of successes and failures, discoveries and losses. It was history not written by the victor nor the vanquished but by one commenting on what was and what is. He neither judged nor censured the pride and arrogance of those who sought to impose their will on others, but told of their deeds and the misery that was their sometime result. He described how they came to understand the existence of other universes parallel to their own and the discovery that they could travel between those universes. Not through time or through space, but sideways to another dimension, like going through a door; the blurring and twisting that I experienced. Describing their first curious forays to other realities, he described their amazed understanding that all of these universes were inexact duplications of their own, how they came to understand that if they kept searching that they would eventually would come across the duplicate of their own world, their twin, in a manner of speaking.
And he described how, in their curious pride, they stumbled onto a world as opposite to theirs as could be imagined. In their explorations up to this point, they had taken little trouble hide their presence. Physical similarities allowed them to move mostly unmolested in the other world although occasional contacts with the inhabitants gave rise to fantastic stories on their part of aliens and unidentified objects flying in the sky. As I read this, I couldn’t but help think of our stories of similar phenomena. My guide must have surmised what I was thinking for he stopped me momentarily, as if to say something. Apparently deciding against it, he asked me to continue.
When they found the opposite world, the anti-world if you will, they realized they had encountered a force they didn’t understand and could not control. My guide’s world, as ours, maintained a moral balance that ultimately kept them from destroying themselves. This balance was not present in the opposite world. It was a world of extreme intolerance and cruelty, a world where any departure from the norm was seen as a threat, a threat that was eliminated by any means possible. They quickly detected the travelers from my guide’s world, reacted and attacked, killing many of the exploring party. Reeling, the survivors fled. Stunned, they quickly marked this particular reality as restricted and travel to it was banned. They hoped to hide themselves in silence, thinking that they couldn’t be traced. As the days stretched into weeks, they began to breathe more easily, but further exploration of other realities was stopped. Such future explorations, they decided, must be done remotely. Reality exploring had suddenly become too dangerous to allow it to proceed as in the past.

The book now took a dark turn as the author explained that it was too late for such precautions. Individuals from the opposite reality came upon them with a ferocity they could not have anticipated as points around the globe were attacked and destroyed simultaneously in a coldly methodical way. No one and nothing, it seems, was spared. Their world turned but once on its axis, a mere day, before the devastation was complete and whole cities lay buried, ruined as if the others were trying to obliterate every trace of their existence from the surface of the planet. The author paused here, at the end of the mural. There were survivors here and there, he wrote, spared by oversight or by luck, and they began to try to come together, a remnant that would have to begin everything anew.
Here the narrative ends with a postscript. For the first time in the book, the author spoke in the first person. “I am burying this book in the box you have seen in the disappearing ruins of this city in the hopes that it may someday be found. A duplicate of this box, without the book, will be buried with this box. If and when this box is found, its twin will be sent to a parallel world most like this one, sent to someone we hope can read this book. If someone is reading this, then the box containing the book has been found and its duplicate has been sent to the other reality. It is a small hope but a hope nonetheless that you will learn of us, of our existence and learn from our mistakes. Listen carefully to him as he reads and heed the story he reveals to you.” The narrative ends here. There is no signature, nothing to suggest who the writer was.
At this point, things get a little indistinct. I had no sense of the passage of time. Minutes? Hours? Days? If I was wearing a watch, I didn’t think to look at it. What good would it have done? I had no idea of the time when I left. My guide was silent for a long time before speaking, not to me, but to the room. “We have it all, then?” he asked. Nodding, “Good,” he said, “have it transcribed and we will talk further.” He was silent again, not moving, and I began to think he had forgotten I was there. Flexing as if he had just awakened he turned and looked at me. “You have done us a great service,” he said, “and we can only repay you with our thanks. You have returned our heritage to us and we will have much to study and discuss as we listen to your readings and ponder their revelations.”
I nodded to him and, knowing I was of no further use to them, remembered my manners and asked quite simply, “how do I get back home?” “The same way you came here,” he replied. “We shall not meet again. But before you go…” Here he paused and turned toward me and I saw, for the first time, his face. It was my face. I recoiled, not knowing how to react, what to say and he masked his appearance again. “It is unsettling, the first time you experience it,” he said. “and you never quite get used to it, to seeing yourself in another reality. It is you, but not you. The people from your world have yet to discover the parallel universes that surround all of us. You are looking, but I caution you to move slowly.” He was silent again and I realized that was my cue to leave. Touching the top of the box again, I experienced the same sense of disconnection and found myself standing in the twilight of my home again. Confused for a moment, I was willing to pass it all off as a dream until I looked at the box I was holding.
“See? Here it is.”

“Strike up the band
for Popeye the Sailor.
Cash in his hand,
fresh off a whaler.
He’s a cinch
but every inch a sailor”

began to play in my head, sung by a baritone voice accompanied by a tinny sounding orchestra, I began to think back as to when I last heard that sung. It was sung during the opening credits of a 1933 Popeye cartoon featuring the usual cast of Popeye, Olive Oyl and Bluto. Not that I saw the carton when it originally ran in 1933, I am far too young for that. I first saw it during the Saturday morning cartoons on WKZO in the early 1950s. As far as I can determine, it was the only Popeye cartoon which featured this particular song and was itself a takeoff of the 1900 song, “Strike up the Band, here comes a sailor.” I doubt that either version was meant for immortality. In addition to this song, the cartoon introduced Popeye’s theme song “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man.” It also featured the cartoon character Betty Boop dancing topless in a grass skirt, a lei discretely covering her exposed breasts. She also sings “Strike up the band” during the opening credits. This cartoon was made before the film industry censorship codes, and the Betty Boop dance scene was expunged from the version of the cartoon I first saw. Should you be interested, the restored cartoon can be viewed on YouTube. What brought it to mind after almost 60 years will remain a mystery.

Earlier in the week, I had read an article where the author predicted that in the not too distant future, people, perhaps even some who are living today, could expect to live to 1,000. He went on to relate what advances in medicine and genetics might make this possible. It boggles the mind – to live to 1,000! I have seen other predictions which suggest that living to 150 might be the norm at some future date, a modest increase when compared to 1,000 but even that modest increase would require a rethinking of our lifestyle. Retirement at 65 would no longer be practical and I doubt that the various retirement plans now in effect would be able to carry an individual for 85 years after retirement. A conservative Congress, such as we have now, already sketchy in its desire to allow for proper health care for retirees (not to mention the poorer segments of society), would most certainly balk.

Think of retiring at 65 and living to be 1,000; 935 years of Social Security would beggar society and further distract lawmakers. I am reminded of a French woman who sold her house to a man with the proviso that she be allowed to live in it until her death, a common practice in Europe. She survived him and two other such investors before going to her reward at 117. Without trying to sound ghoulish, I can imagine these three men anxiously scanning the papers over their morning coffee, looking for her obituary. That one of them didn’t get the idea of helping her along is admirable. Somewhere in the halls of bureaucracy, I can imagine a succession of civil servants carrying out the same watch for 935 years and wondering, as time wore on, if a little help might not be in order. Hey, it could happen. Societal issues and Congressional inconveniences aside, we could work until the age of 850, for example, but 150 years of retirement might still be too much to expect.

Yet there are problems on a personal level that I think need to be addressed before we become too intent on radically increasing life expectancy. And the first one that comes to mind, courtesy of Popeye, is one of memory. Can our brains be expected to hold the memories of 1,000 years or will we have to shovel them out occasionally and, if we did have to purge our brains occasionally, how would we choose what to keep and what to throw away? Would you toss the thrilled terror of successfully standing up on water skies for the first time? Or that first shy kiss? Sitting in the driveway in a cold car with your fiancé listening to “Carol of the Bells” on a dark Christmas Eve? But these are my memories, you surely have your own.

Thinking about them now, what would you chuck and what would you keep? There are some people who have passed through my life that I would gladly forget but many more whose memories are dear to me. Would you opt to keep all of the good memories and toss out all of the bad ones, especially as you realize that some of the bad ones were the most instructive? And what of the pleasure of the occasional forgotten memory passing through, the renewal of old acquaintances. “Strike up the band …“

It is likely that the ideas put forth by the author of the article are a chimera. Something in me suggests that the possibility of reaching 1,000 will never become a probability. We are, after all, a fragile species and we will figure out a way to fiddle with the actuarial odds so as to keep life expectancy low. Even to reach 150 in the foreseeable future probably will be a rarity, not the norm.

Personally, I joke about Willard Scott reading my name on the Today Show. Then I learned that it is very difficult to have your name mentioned by Willard on your 100th birthday. There are more people reaching the century mark than there is time to read them on the once weekly spot. Maybe I’ll just settle for downloading that 1933 Popeye cartoon once again.

Now consider the saying “as busy as a one-armed paperhanger.” I have not heard the saying much of late and suspect that it has gone out of vogue. Having hung wallpaper in my time, it is a task I would consider impossible since my two-handed efforts were less than spectacular. The last time there was papering to be done, we hand it done professionally by an individual with two arms.

A recent accident, we won’t go into the details here, resulted in my breaking my left wrist. Painful and, I subsequently discovered, quite inconvenient. Interestingly, the second question I am asked, the first being how I did it, is “are you left handed?” It so happens that I tend toward ambidexterity although, given the activity, I do favor one hand over the other. I prefer to write with my right hand and throw a ball with my left; the latter activity awkward since I prefer to catch the ball with my left hand as well. A real failing had I aspired to seriously playing baseball. In sports involving a racket, badminton or tennis for example, it does not matter and I never learned to hit the birdie or the ball backhanded and merely switched the racket from one hand to the other as necessary. This shortcoming earned me a D in a second quarter Phys Ed course my freshman year in college. At any rate, back to the right-left-handed question, I usually respond that I am right handed, it being useless trying to explain ambidexterity to the ambidextrously impaired. The comeback to my response to the second question usually is something like “well, It’s OK then.”

It is at this point that I am tempted to tap them lightly up aside the head to demonstrate the weight of the cast on my left arm. Their well-intentioned rejoinder fails to recognize that almost everything we do necessitates two hands. Buttoning a shirt is difficult and slow, as is tying one’s shoes, the latter performed by my good wife until I got a shorter cast that allowed me more mobility, hence the one-armed paperhanger imagery. If we eat out my selections are limited to things not requiring a knife and fork. I refuse to sit quietly by in a restaurant while my wife cuts my steak up for me.

At a concert recently I struck up a conversation with a gentleman whose left arm also was clad in a cast. As we commiserated with each other about the bother imposed by our casts, he remarked that “taking a leak sucks.” It does, you know. I opined that a length of string, judiciously tied, might simplify the procedure (I won’t go into the details, use your imagination). We both decided that while the idea had merit, the string ends hanging out of our fly might garner undue attention. In short, the idea requires further thought.

One does learn to adapt, however, and shirt buttoning and shoe tying reach a certain point of familiarity. You also begin to reach out to other endeavors; typing with both hands (you don’t think I picked this out with one hand do you?), simple housekeeping chores not requiring a critical eye and, the piece de resistance, discovering I can run the snow blower one handed. That, I think, will be my ultimate achievement before this cast comes off.

But what about Cary Grant you ask. I have been envious of him for as long as I can remember and, because of him, have always wanted to own a tuxedo. It is a foolish desire and one I will never fulfill since, after all, just where would I wear it and not look out of place. Even if I did own one, it could never be with the suave demeanor he embodies. I realized long ago that women will never turn their heads, tuxedo or no, when I enter the room unless, of course, my entrance were accompanied by some faux pas, something I am remarkably good at, witness the cast on my arm. I have known other Cary Grants in my life, those who, when introduced to a charming young lady, always have an appropriately engaging and well-spoken greeting. You know the type. Even knowing how it is done, I can never pull it off and usually end up sounding like Goofy “well, hyuk hyuk, garsh, hyuk hyyuk, pleased to meet’cha.”

That said, I also have come to realize that I am in good company, that the Cary Grants are few. While he wouldn’t take a swan dive off the back steps at his daughter’s house (the secret is out, I really can’t walk and chew gum at the same time), such accidents are not unfamiliar to others. The inconvenience the accident engenders is temporary and, I hope, soon forgotten. And without this cast, who knows, maybe I would look good in a tuxedo.

My perceptions of Christmas are a mélange of family practice and radio programs of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. Radio programs of the day assumed a Christian audience and their themes at Christmas reflected that attitude. Not one program of that era failed to acknowledge Christmas and weave that theme into the story line just before December 25th and not one of the announcers or radio personalities failed to wish their listeners a “Merry Christmas.” It is perhaps the reason that so many of my generation have trouble with the fact that you seldom hear “Merry Christmas” publically expressed. There no longer are Christmas parties, they are holiday parties and everyone wishes you a happy holiday. Back in the day, I knew nothing of Judaism or Chanukah for example. Jews were always referred to, if at all, in a negative way, a perception I was not able to shed until I went off to university. Hence, I did not sense the contradiction of such radio personalities as Jack Benny or George Burns talked of going Christmas shopping or sending Christmas cards or wishing their audience a Merry Christmas. The public lens did not extend to their private lives and so we had no sense that they may not have had a Christmas tree and related decorations, but a menorah in which they lit a candle and said a prayer for eight days in December. But in thinking back, there was one exception that I can recall, Molly Goldberg; a kind soul whose gentle humor was always good natured.

Christmas programs on the radio and later on television were invariably sappy and most all had a happy ending. One exception was Dragnet which one year dealt with the accidental shooting and death of a child by a playmate, first on radio and subsequently on television. Yet at the end, through the tears of the grieving parents there was forgiveness and a tearful father who gave the dead child’s presents to the playmate. Such an ending today probably is not possible since it could viewed as encouraging small children to use their playmates for target practice.

Hard boiled detectives such as Richard Diamond, played by a wise cracking Dick Powell, would play a tender scene at Christmas. In one of my favorites, he and his ‘friend’ (she was independently wealthy, had a butler and was surprisingly independent for her time. I did not understand the nuances of their conversations when I first heard them) lay on their backs under the Christmas tree, talking to each other of the season as they gazed up through the branches of the tree. Now, I would not recommend doing this to others as the chance of a mishap with the tree is quite high. Others, The Great Gildersleeve, The Life of Riley, Jack Benny, or my favorite, Fibber McGee and Molly, bumbled their way through various crises and miscommunications to the best Christmas ever. Fibber McGee and Molly on a couple occasions closed their program with musical rendition of Twas the Night Before Christmas which featured a little girl, Teeny, played by Molly. I did not know that Molly and Teeny were one and the same until later in life.

There was about it all a wonder that I don’t see today. Christmas has been transfigured from a religious holiday to a shopping holiday and the success of the holiday no longer hinges on the Christian message of hope, but on just how well the stores do.

Yet, one thing seems not to have changed that much; Christmas carols. They fill the air at this time of year and there isn’t a church worth its salt that doesn’t have some sort of Christmas presentation. Figuring prominently in their programs are the carols, the old carols that everyone knows and remembers as the first few bars begin to play. We never seem to tire of hearing them year after year. Aside from a few standards, White Christmas, I’ll be Home for Christmas, to name a couple and those WWII sings both, most modern carols do little more than jangle the nerves. Some from the 50s, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree is one, I tolerate as they remind me of another time and I do have a special fondness for Elvis Presley’s Blue Christmas. Yet the finest carol ever written has to be Carol of the Bells. Listening to it always transports me back to another time and another place. To Christmas Eve, sitting in a dark and cold car with my future wife in the driveway to her house. We’ve been to church and had egg nog and cookies and now it is time for her to say goodnight. WOWO in Ft. Wayne is playing Christmas carols, the only time of the year I can remember them departing from their rock and roll format, and we are waiting for midnight to say good night and Merry Christmas. A choir, singing acapella, softly begins, “Hark! How the bells, sweet silver bells, all seem to say, throw cares away, Christmas is here.” As the sound builds, the choir continues “One seems to hear, words of good cheer, from everywhere, filling the air” as towards the end, the carol reaches a crescendo of sound, “Merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas; merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas” it proclaims then quietly “On, on they send, on without end, their joyful tune, to ev’ry home” then quietly “ding, dong, ding, dong” “DONG.” As the carol played, we were the only people in the world. The carol is not very long and ends far sooner than the listener wants but when it was finished, it was Christmas. Merry Christmas we would say and with a goodnight kiss, she was into the house as I drove off into the dark night.

Were we closer, much closer, I would steal you for an hour for a walk on my grandparent’s farm, the farm which borders on the Ray/Quincy Road and Paul Road. The house is deserted now as are the outbuildings and the barnyard. The fields lay fallow and the fence rows neglected. The owners, past and present, would not mind our short visit as we walked the fields for a time, back to the woods and the back pasture, and I could tell you of Nemo, a collie mix who for years brought the cows in for milking, twice a day. Nemo appeared at my grandparent’s door one night in the tow of a neighboring farmer who had heard that my grandfather was in search of a good dog. He was fully grown and probably around a year old, the farmer was vague on that point but he made certain to tell my grandfather that the dog loved fried potatoes. One could swear that Nemo cocked his head at this with an expression that read “that’s what you think old man.” Nemo never ate my grandmother’s fried potatoes, an anomaly they commented on occasionally, and she soon tired of giving him any leftovers that included that item.

Nemo was a clever animal and it didn’t take him long to learn the ritual of bringing in the cows. “Go get the cows, Nemo,” my grandfather would say, and the dog would head off down the lane at a run. Ignoring the herd at large, he went directly for the lead cow, nipping at her heels and barking, urging her on the walk to the barn. While she was visibly irritated by the dog’s urging, she started out nonetheless, the other cows dutifully lined up behind her, none would have dared precede her, and they began the slow walk to the barn, lining up at the door to the milking parlor and finally taking their places in their appointed stalls. I would tell you what happened one day, shortly after a new lead cow had chased her predecessor to the end of the line, how she decided that she had had enough of Nemo’s nonsense and challenged him. Head down, she charged the barking dog and just grazed him with her horns, sending him tumbling through the tall grass. He was unhurt but it was enough. From that point forward, the cows came only to my grandfather’s twice a day call “come boss, come boss, come boss” a call which echoed from the woods at the back of the pasture. And they would come. Nemo would shy when they came into the barnyard and would glare at me, embarrassed that I had witnessed his defeat. I don’t think he ever forgave me that witness. If you wanted, we could stand at the fence and give the same call, “come boss, come boss, come boss.” Who knows, even Nemo might pay us a visit.

It being a good day for a walk, I would show you, on our return, the tree, large then and larger now, where the cows would gather and rest in its shade from the noon day sun; the noise of grinding molars as they chewed their cud a counterpoint to the chorus of insects singing in the fence rows. The tree coincidentally stands at the highest point on the farm and from it you can get a good perspective of the land and its buildings. Continuing down the lane, the first building we come to is the barn. It is a large building with a white-washed cut rock foundation and walls delineating the first floor which was topped by a wood superstructure, the barn proper, supported by large rough-cut oak beams held together by large wooden pegs. An earthen ramp leads to large double doors on the second level and a hay wagon with its fresh load of baled hay could be driven into the barn; handy for unloading it if the weather was iffy or the sun too hot.

The hay mow in the barn is empty, of course, but I could describe to you how I built forts out of the bales of hay and whence I retired to read my books on a quiet summer’s day. Tiring of that, below was a workbench with tools that I was allowed to use as well as a ready stock of old Price Albert tobacco cans (“Hello, do you have Prince Albert in a can?” “Yes, yes we do.” “Well let him out before he suffocates.”), not the large cans, but the smaller flat ones that fit handily into the back pocket of overalls, the size easily lending itself to sprinkling tobacco onto rolling paper for cigarettes or filling one’s pipe. With some scrap wood and a little imagination, these cans could be made into a number of toys, some more successful in their inception than others.

Just up from the barn, the house stands at the corner of the aforementioned roads. A four-square house, it hasn’t changed much, although it seems smaller than I remembered and a back screened-in porch has been closed in. I never understood why a subsequent owner closed in that back porch. It was an ideal place to sit in the heat of a summer’s day. The house is fronted by an elaborate covered porch and a formal entrance. Neither the porch nor the door was ever used although early family pictures were taken with the porch as a backdrop; family members of various ages and sizes arranging themselves on the steps, children always in front. One would think that these family portrait sessions were approached through the front door. Not so. Since the front door was blocked by my grandfather’s chair, everyone approached these sessions from the back door. A one-story addition ran along the back of the house and was divided into a mud room, a laundry/storage area and the above screened-in porch. The downstairs proper was divided into kitchen, dining room, living room and my grandparent’s bedroom. That bedroom, which could be closed off from the living room by large sliding-glass pocket doors, probably was intended for another use as the only bathroom was on the second floor at the top of the stairs. There were three bedrooms up there as well, one of which was closed off and never used. I came to understand why. It was haunted. Standing on the cistern platform off the back door, I could point out the chicken coop and pig barn, an equipment shed and a garage as well as the overgrown area that once was a garden, a garden whose produce supplied vegetables for two families for most of the year. Tucked behind the garage is the outhouse, a two holer which was used by all but company up to the time the farm was sold. This same arrangement concerning out houses pertained as well to my aunt’s farm a mile down the road. We would pass by it to get to my grandparents farm.

But what am I saying. I am not even certain that such a walk is possible now. The farm has stood empty for several years, a fact that does not bode well for its future. It likely will be bought by an Amish family. The Amish have bought a number of other farms in the area in recent years. While the Amish are good farmers, they care nothing about grass or shrubbery or upkeep in general and the neighboring farms they have taken over are looking decidedly seedy as white paint flakes off of houses and the red barns fade and lawns disappear into green memory. I doubt that they would take kindly to a request for such a walk as this.

Her father was working in his shop in an outbuilding that also served as garage and storage area. I walked the hundred feet or so from the house to the shop much as a condemned prisoner approaches the scaffold. I was always more than a little awed by her father, an awe seasoned with a healthy dose of fear, and I was uncertain of his reaction. Approaching him in his shop, surrounded as he was by an array of potentially dangerous tools, hammers, screwdrivers, saws and such, seemed to me not to be the most advantageous of surroundings. As I approached, the slightest sound might have cause me to bolt for the car, but my feet carried me on and when he looked up and saw me, it was too late to retreat. He returned to his work, planing a board. The plane, at least was not a threatening tool, no sharp edges although I suppose he could have beat me about the head and shoulders with it. I remember asking him what he was making. I don’t remember his response. Fear and the churning of my stomach have erased the response from my memory although I think there was one. Not one to delay an execution, I then blurted out “I want to ask you permission to marry your daughter.” “When?” he asked, and I mumbled something about after my first year in college. He looked at me hard and asked if I thought I could take care of her and I told him I thought I could. His response to that is a little hazy, as I was measuring my chances of making it through the shop door alive if necessary, but it was something to the effect of “OK” and he returned to his work. No handshake or words or welcome, just a positive acknowledgement of my question, and I escaped, not quite running, back to the house; understanding the feeling of a prisoner who has just received an 11th hour reprieve from the governor.

I should explain at this point that my future father-in-law was a gentle man with a gruff exterior. I didn’t realize that at first, the fight or flight response of being near him in those early days did not allow me to relax, but I did know that he had a puckish sense of humor. He would occasionally appear at the d river’s side of the car on some excuse or other, once asking me if l cared for some peanut brittle. The first time I met him, he was on the roof with a bucket of tar when I arrived and yet he was at my back as the door opened to acknowledge my knock and I later accused him of jumping off the roof rather than using the ladder to get down. Introductions were made and we left with the admonition to “be home early.” We were. He often remarked afterwards that he could have saved a lot of problems if he had just dropped that bucket of tar on me as I arrived.

We were married on a windy Sunday afternoon in August 1960. The weather was changeable as a front approached that would bring heavy storms later that evening, the violence of which was lost to the romance of our first night together.

To mark the highlights of 50 years together is beyond the scope of this writing, ranging as they do from a beginning as married students at Indiana University where we were joined by our first born, a son, years  that saw an unused dollar as a chance to go for a drive with perhaps a stop at McDonalds afterward; to leaving the insularity of an academic community for the unknown of a first job in Maryland where we were joined by our second born, also a son; to 4 years in Munich where we were joined by our third born, and final, child, a daughter. The return to the reality of Maryland began a blur or settling into a house, of school activities, of children growing up and marrying; to now, when we are a couple again. For all of the adventure of those years, being a couple again is the icing on the cake.

I recently read of a couple in California who just celebrated their 72^nd anniversary, a rarity in any age. They have their own blog at the-ogs.com (ogs stands for original grandparents) where they dispense advice, stories, songs and the occasional video. It certainly is a goal to strive for and I remain optimistic about that, but for the moment I am content with the rarity of reaching 50 years, no small accomplishment as statistics indicate that only 5% of married couples reach this milestone. But as much as I am proud of our accomplishment, this isn’t the real reason for writing this reflection, sketchy though it is. It really is a love letter to she who accepted the love of a gawky teenager and has since been the guiding light of my life, accepting me at my worst and my best and yet remaining a constant at my side. It is she who gives me cause to celebrate the past 50 years and it is she who gives me the hope of more to come.

I love you Princess.

Even as I consider this, I realize the difference between the mores of our generation and those of our children and am astounded at the gulf that exists between us and the present generation. We went steady in those days and double dated on occasion and believed to one degree or another that the logical outcome dating and going steady was to eventually marry and spend the rest of our lives together, living happily ever after. It is in the ever after that we differ little from our children’s generation or that of the present generation. Attending a 50th class reunion of a year ago revealed that the percentage of our generation which divorced and remarried is remarkably like that of that of succeeding generations. In only one area has our particular group diverged from the general population, fewer of us have died than the national average.

Change was in the air and a shift in attitude became apparent in the latter years of the 1950s, a shift which came into full blossom by the end of the 1960s and the world turned upside down for a time. This shift in attitude changed personal relationships, how we viewed each other, how we dealt with the world at large. It is doubtful that we will see a return to exchanging class rings and going steady, of double dating to the drive in, of falling in love and marrying at an early age. The changes we face today occur at a breathtaking pace.

My great-grandmother, who was born at the end of the Civil War, raised a family in the turbulent years of the 1880s and 1890s, saw the expansion of this country from 38 to 48 states, lived through the Depression and saw friends and relatives march off to two world wars. She accommodated herself to electricity, the telephone and the automobile. She never flew and I suspect never wanted to. She fed hobos who would do odd jobs for her and shot the hat off one who wouldn’t. An independent sort, she married at least four times, the family records on that are sketchy, but kept the name of her first husband through her succeeding marriages. In the years before the Second World War she would tell the daughter with whom she was living, my great-aunt, that she was going to the store and then head off to parts unknown, she explored a good part of the American West during her jaunts, before coming home. Needless to say her unannounced disappearances caused a lot of consternation in the family and were the subject of some discussion, even after her death. To some she was a daunting figure but she was always quite kind to me. I remember her stopping a young woman on the street who was freshly manicured with bright red finger nail polish and ask her if she had cut her fingers. “Oh no ma’am,” was the reply, “that’s finger nail polish.” “You don’t have to paint yourself up for any man,” was her stern reply as she pulled me down the sidewalk away from the rather nonplussed woman.

The changes my great-grandmother experienced came slowly, at decent intervals, allowing her and the remainder of the population to get used to them. Today’s changes come exponentially and, to paraphrase an old joke, many things we purchase today are old technology before we get them out of the box. The first telephone I remember was a wall-mounted crank telephone. Our number was 707, two long rings and a short. Being on a party line, you had to listen for your ring before answering the phone although to some the ringing phone was an open invitation to eavesdrop. Although the telephones took on a more modern guise, the party line was part of our dating life and the operator would always ask me to “please limit your call to 5 minutes” as she put the call through, an enjoinder rarely obeyed. The party line could be fraught with problems, eavesdropping or thoughtless love-struck teenagers talking longer than 5 minutes, a combination that once got me dressed down by an irate, albeit eavesdropping neighbor. She asked if she could have the line and I asked her to hang up so that I could tell my steady good bye, but she came back twice with the comment “are you still on the line?” Repeating my request, we thought that she had hung up and I was asked “who was that?” “Our neighbor,” I explained, “she’s drunk again.” That response was barely finished when a voice hissed “you’re a vicious, vicious boy and I am going to tell your parents.” There was more, but you get the general idea of her invective. Future wife and I said goodbye at that point. My parents were never informed of my gaffe; a saving grace of alcoholism is that the individual rarely remembers the events of the night before.

The party line is long gone and the landline telephone has evolved into the cell phone; a powerhouse of information, telling us where we are, the closest restaurant, passing text messages and photographs all the while allowing the user to play games or listen to music. My cell phone is several generations in the past, allowing rudimentary services, like placing a call and taking a picture, but little else. Quite frankly, the technology might be lost on this user. My iPod Touch, which I dearly love, for example, is used to play radio programs of the 40s and 50s, to great effect, I might add. An anachronism, I suppose, and a capability not anticipated by those listening to those programs live on the old Crosley in the living room.

When we dance, my wife and I, we still dance in the same old way, but I still thrill to the closeness of her as the Platters repeat my own fervent wish “That you’ll always be there at the end of my prayer.”

The moon is seldom what it seems and has been imbued with a number of anthropomorphic characteristics. Juliet admonishes Romeo “swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb.” Joseph Conrad, on the other hand writes “There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery,” while the playwright Christopher Fry wrote “The moon is nothing but a circumambulating aphrodisiac divinely subsidized to provoke the world into a rising birth rate.” The last quote, perhaps, sparked the popular song “Shine on Harvest Moon.”

My love affair with the moon began at an early age. When I was aged 10 or so, I got my first look at the moon through a telescope. Just shy of the 1st quarter, the field of view through the telescope opened up a whole new world for me. There were mountains and seas and craters of every size and description. It seemed as if I couldn’t get enough and the man, whose telescope it was, patiently let me explore the alien surface until I remembered myself and thanked him for allowing me to look. Instead of sending me on my way, he turned the telescope to Saturn and stepped back for me to look while he explained what I was seeing; the magnificent ring system and, next to it, Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. He went on that night to show me Jupiter and Mars, orange Mars with a clearly visible polar ice cap and darker areas that could be mistaken for vegetation. I was hooked. Already high on the science fiction stories I had begun reading that summer, these glimpses through the telescope further fueled my imagination. Still, it was the moon, with its greater detail, which kept drawing me back.

The popular press of the time was beginning to fill up with stories of flying saucers and alien bases on the moon and I used to look at the moon with the hopes of catching an alien ship as it glided to its silent surface. Everyone, it seemed, was seeing and photographing flying saucers and meeting with aliens of every size, shape and description. I spent as much time as I could with the telescope in hopes of catching an alien sighting myself. As an aside, I should mention that I became good friends with the man who owned the telescope, good enough that he often loaned it to me and, when they left their cottage on Labor Day, he would leave it to my care until the following spring.

The telescope used to be a magnate for onlookers and it was seldom that someone did not stop by when I was out for an evening’s observation. Most quickly bored of the sights I used to show them, thanked me politely and continued on their way. It turns out that of the visible universe, what most holds people’s interest are the outer planets and the moon. Cloud covered Venus and the elusive Mercury showed no detail; no polar ice caps, no rings and no moons to catch their fancy. Some would ask me to show them a star, so I would try to find one of more than passing interest, a double star, for example, but all were disappointed with what I showed them. lilt doesn’t look any different,” was the common complaint. They’re too far away to show any detail, I would explain and I would get the look that insinuated, “then why bother looking at them?” One learns early in astronomy that things are seldom what they seem. Looking at the Andromeda galaxy, for example, can be disappointing. We are used to pictures of a pinwheel of stars of all colors and all that the telescope will show is a hazy blob. Not terribly impressive, even when one realizes the tremendous distance involved, 23 million light years away. Was someone on a planet orbiting a star in that galaxy looking at our own galaxy and wondering the same thing? Photography shows us a universe invisible to the human eye and Hubble and its successors never cease to be a source of wonder.

Not surprisingly, I decided at an early age that I was going to be an astronomer and actually began my college career with that goal in mind. But again, things are seldom what they seem and, realizing that I would never master the math involved, I change my major to history. A decision, incidentally, which I never regretted.

In ages past, we watched the moon and quaked in fear as it eclipsed the sun, turning day into night. Priests of an earlier time used the eclipse to their gain. They understood the mechanics of the celestial landscape which pinwheeled overhead very early in human history and had early calculated when eclipses, partial or total, would occur, using this knowledge to further their power. After all, what power must a man have who can command the sun to darken, or begin to do so and then return things to normal with but a word.

Astronomers have debated for years as to the moon’s origin. Some say it was carved out of the earth by some primeval collision while others suppose it was captured by the earth in the infancy of the solar system. Whatever the happenstance, the moon is, it would appear, essential to life on this planet; the tides it promotes creating the conditions that may have tempted the first early denizens of the sea to crawl up onto the land. Our current search for earth-like planets circling other suns is in part driven, I believe, by the hope that somewhere else a similar process has occurred and we are not alone in the universe.

Should this be so, I offer the following as a footnote. On a warm spring evening before we had yet taken the first steps into space, I had set up my telescope just after sunset in the hopes of catching sight of Mercury. The closest planet to the sun, its orbit does not bring it far above the horizon and it can be difficult to see in the after glow of the setting sun. Several people had gathered around, curious for look at this occasional phenomenon when a bright orange-colored object appeared in the western sky about 45 degrees above the horizon. I was not the first to see it as I was busy scanning just above the horizon for Mercury. “ls that it?” a neighbor asked, pointing to the object in question. Training the telescope on it, the object resolved into two football-shaped objects, one slightly above and to the left of the other. We took turns watching it through the telescope, easy to do since it did not move, but stayed in the same position relative to the horizon. Were the object a star or a planet, it would have had the decency to ’set’ as the sun had just done. After about 15 minutes, it began to rise in the sky and arc to the east, the two objects never changing their position in relation to one another. When the object reached the earth’s shadow in the southeast, it slowly faded out and was gone. Like a good citizen, I reported the object to NORAD and received the polite response that we undoubtedly had seen a weather balloon. This explanation raised some doubts as I had seen weather balloons before and they never traveled in pairs and the ones I had seen tended to move about in the winds of the upper atmosphere. In short, I didn’t believe them and, to this day, still do not.

Things are seldom what they seem and while I don’t believe that little green men were flying through the night-time sky, I remain open to any rational explanation, excepting weather balloons. To paraphrase Yum-Yum in the Mikado ”pray make no mistake, we are not shy. We’re very wide awake, the moon and I.”

“John,” he said, “it’s good to see you.”

“I’m sorry,” I replied, “do I know you?”

“I’m Tod,” he said.

I paused at this. He did not say Mr. Tod or Tod anything, just Tod, pronouncing it as if it were spelled todt. It was a proper German pronunciation and, as my German kicked in, I wondered If he were using the name as a noun. Tod is the German word for death. I started to back away as I asked my self, “did he just call himself ‘death’.”

Although I am certain I did not voice the thought, he said “that’s right, Death. When I first meet people, I try to use a synonym, something not too off putting, to give the fact of who I really am a chance to sink in. Even though you know German, it took a few moments for the fact of my name to sink in.”

I started to get frightened at this point because, despite his friendly manner, his smile had no warmth, and I was uncertain as to whether I was talking to some sort of kook, a serial killer perhaps, who liked to toy with his victims before doing them in. Yet, despite his cold demeanor, he didn’t look threatening and, in another setting, he might have been taken for an academic out for an afternoon stroll. His eyes were dark and unblinking and I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was looking through me, not at me.

He continued standing on the sidewalk and I was prevented from backing up any further by the fence which suddenly started pressing into my back. He had the advantage over me because if I ran either left or right, he could easily cut me off.

As if to answer this latest thought he told me “no, you cannot run away from me. But that is not the reason I am here. Your time is not yet. I’m here because I sensed that you have had me on your mind of late. I am here to answer some of your questions, save one.”

“And that is?” I asked.

“Don’t ask me how much longer you have,” he said, “that is knowledge that I do not have and it shouldn’t matter to you anyway.”

He was about 10 feet away from me at this point but made no effort to come closer and remained standing on the sidewalk. It didn’t seem possible. Did Death really dress like a preppie?

“No,” he said, “people’s expectations dress me in various guises. In the Middle Ages I was most often depicted in a monk’s habit, the cowl obscuring my face, my bony hands holding a scythe. It is what was expected. I was more familiar to people in earlier times. Wars and plagues took heavy tolls and their view of me as the Grim Reaper seemed appropriate to the time. Priests, after all, often attended the dying and such a stereotype was familiar. Despite at least one recent television program, which depicted me as a loving, caring individual in casual clothes, the Grim Reaper image is the one that most people still associate with me. It is an overstatement of who I am. I am not indiscriminate in my calling, as the image of the Grip Reaper would imply, nor am I loving and caring. I am Death and my sole purpose is to call people from this life when it is their time. I am finished in the blink of an eye and I am gone.”

I had to confess that the Grim Reaper image was the one I associated with death. I had seen the television program he mentioned and felt the Death it portrayed was smarmy and too regretful.

“I always pictured you as Bergman portrayed you in the Seventh Seal, stern faced, business like, but no sense of cruelty about you. Can someone really bargain with you, wager his life over the outcome of a chess game?”
“No,” he replied, “I don’t have that power. My mission is non-negotiable. Your literature is full of such stories, stories where I am tricked or agree to take someone else, stories, such as Bergman’s, which have me delaying the inevitable by playing chess with the individual, one move a day until the inevitable result. Make no mistake, when I call for someone, it is his or her time. When next you see me, it will be your time.”

“If you saw me approaching you as Bergman’s Grim Reaper,” he continued, “you would have bolted long before I got to you. I chose to approach you in a manner that would not seem threatening to you. Television, you see, does alter your expectations. Many cultures have identified me as an angel since the beginning of time. I was named as such in Exodus.”

“A dark angel,” I replied.”

“You may view me as such,” he said, “many artists paint me with dark or black clothing. And there are hints in Christianity that I belong to the Dark Side, that there is an evil taint about me. You view death as unnatural and, hence it is evil. Death is neither good nor bad and favors no one. It exists as one of the constants of the universe.”

I pondered that for a moment as my foot stirred the pile of leaves in front of me. Christians are taught from the beginning that death is our punishment for rebellion against God. That had Adam and Eve not defied God in the Garden of Eden, we would never die. Then I remembered a Rabbi who told me that had Adam and Eve not broken the rules, there might have been only Adam and Eve for all eternity, living chaste and, in my opinion, rather boring lives.
“Procreation,” he said, “implies desire, lust, feelings which, according to Genesis, only came about as a result of eating that apple. Adam, after all, did not know that Eve was naked until he ate the apple. No apple, no carnal desire, no carnal desire, and our sexual nature remains latent.”

To not know true love, it seemed to me, would have been a very real tragedy.

Remembering myself, I looked up and asked, ”what about it, have you existed since the beginning of creation, has there always been death in the world?”

He frowned at this and his impatience with my question was obvious in his voice when he said “you already know the answer to that question. Look around you. Everything in creation dies. Every step you take, every breath, is responsible for the death of some organism. You know that the creation story is a myth, told to give your ancestors a sense of place, of who they were and where they came from. You have been millions of years in the making and the ground on which you stand holds their very bones.”

“What about now” I asked, “has death stopped in the world because you stand here talking with me?”
A slight smile flickered over his lips as he slowly shook his head. “I think you know the answer to that question also,” he replied. “I already told you that everything in creation dies, from galaxies to bacteria. Much as the one who sends me, I am everywhere at once and can act everywhere in an instant. Death does not cease because I pause here with you. My work is never done.”

“Do people see you when they die?” I asked, “do they know who you are?”

“All see me, but the context in which they see me is culturally dependent and not everyone, the Grim Reaper image aside, recognizes who I am. Earlier cultures saw me in the guise of some real or imagined animal, their totem if you will; others in the guise we have already discussed. Many whom you have known saw me as a loved one, a family member, most often a spouse, and they readily reached out their hand to me. Others resist me until the end, fighting to their last breath for the life they love so much. They know the party will continue after they leave and they resent being left out. You, I suspect, are like that.”

“What of ghosts?” I continued, “how can they remain behind?”

Impatient again, he told me, “remember, I only enable your crossing. I don’t conduct you anywhere. Where you go, is up to you. Some people get lost because there was something about their life that they cannot let go of. Not all ghosts are the result of unhappy endings, many get lost for quite different reasons. Some, as I said, resent leaving the party early and stick around for a while until they realize that there is really nothing left for them and they finally follow their ancestors. Some are afraid of what they will find at the crossing, afraid of the hobgoblins which dogged them in life, and remain as shadows, shadows you yourself have seen. There are too many reasons to speak of them here but all of those who linger, eventually, find their way to their proper place. In your terms of reference, some ghosts may seem long lasting, but from the perspective of eternity, their haunting lasts but a second.”

I frowned at this and, hesitating for a moment, finally found the courage to ask, “what can I expect,” I stammered, “what can I expect after?”

“Have you not been listening,” was his sharp rejoinder. “That is largely up to you,” he said. Some see it as an everlasting sleep and their desire usually is granted. They sleep on through eternity, untroubled by all things past, present or future.”

“But even Hamlet, when he said ‘to sleep, perchance to dream, ah there’s the rub,’ was questioning that particular state,” I said.

Death waved my rejoinder away with a quick flick of his wrist. “You waste your time on details, you want guarantees,” he said.
“But what of God,” I asked in a rush, “will I see God?”

Another impatient flick of the wrist. “Again, that is up to you. Remember, I am but the messenger, the power that sends me does not provide the details of anyone’s life. I can promise nothing but an end to existence as you know it. What happens after depends in part on your expectations and how you led your life.”

“You said it wasn’t my time?”

“No,” he replied.

“Is the time and manner of my death, everyone’s death, preordained and set in stone? Do we have no control over the when and the how or are we all doomed to follow a path set for us at conception.”

“The time and manner of your death is largely up to you,” he replied. You have been given free will and that means that the creator sees endless possibilities at the beginning for each individual. He knows the ultimate result, being outside of time, but when he acts within time, he must watch as I must watch. As you grow older, the number of possibilities shrink until that final decision which sets you on your path to meeting with me.”

“Dickens was right, then,” I said, “that men’s lives portend certain endings.”

“Dickens caught a sense of the truth,” he said, “but you see it elsewhere. In the Faust legend, for example.”

“The Faust legend?” I asked, “how so?”

“You’ve read the folk tale and know that Faust made a bargain with the devil that he might have everything he wanted and live as he liked for a year. At the end of the year, the devil could have his soul.”

I nodded my head and he continued: “when the time comes for the devil to return, the forces of heaven tell Faust to turn aside and repent, that forgiveness awaited even him. Afraid, Faust refuses. Three times the angel pleads with him to repent, but Faust cannot. He fears the wrath of Hell more than he believes in the forgiveness of Heaven. The devil is more immediate and Faust is incapable of asking for the forgiveness so freely offered to him and so is drug down to Hell.”

Again I nodded.

“Goethe,” Tod continued, ” prettied up the tale, as you know and has the bargain set that Faust will not die until, at last, he utters the words ‘now I am satisfied’. True to form, Goethe has Faust begin his search for satisfaction in his lustful affair with a young woman who has fallen under his eye. The affair ends badly with the young woman drowning herself rather than facing the shame of bringing a bastard child into the world.”

I nodded slowly because I was uncertain as to what he point was tending.

“We subsequently see an affair with Helen of Troy and other outrageous acts, but at the end we see Faust surveying his world, a world finally changed for the better because of his liaison with the devil. ‘Now I am satisfied,’ Faust says, and immediately falls dead. The devil arrives to claim Faust’s soul as his own when God intervenes and takes Faust up to heaven. The devil cries foul and God tells him that Faust’s ultimate goals, that he used the devil himself to bring about good, erased all of his past sins.”

Tod must have noticed the bemused look on my face because he went on to say: “some Christians tend to view all of this in black and white. You are either on the road to good or you are on the road to evil; stating further that one cannot travel the road to salvation without assistance, that you cannot do it alone. Dickens was closer to the mark; the divine assistance, as with Faust, would be nice, but it is not absolutely necessary. The believer and the non-believer both can make the right decisions and both will end up with the same result.”

I think I look puzzled because he added: “listen! You all make decisions, some good and some bad. The important thing is not to deliberately make the bad ones. Examples of this abound in human history and it seems that the more powerful the individual, the more likely that this will occur. As Lord Acton once opined ‘Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ The powerful forget that their position does not put them on a higher plain; that they are not above telling the truth. If I have one admonition for you, it is to remember this, so that there is more of Heaven in you than of Hell.”

I pressed on, sensing that this interview was about to come to an end.

“What of Heaven and Hell,” I asked, “do they not exist?”

“Not in the way that you think of it. If people are tormented after me, it is their own making. Their separation in this life separates them for all eternity. In a sense, they do pay for their sins, but the payment demanded of them is of their own devising. Dickens, again, caught a sense of it in his Christmas Carol when he showed Marley in torment, trying in vain to help someone. He is helpless and that helplessness is his torment. Another of your authors, C.S. Lewis, wrote that the gates of Hell are locked on the inside.

“Some,” he continued, “who expect nothing after death are quite surprised to find themselves in the presence of the numinous. It sometimes happens when one secretly hopes for that which he or she doesn’t really expect to find.”
I started to object when he continued, “heaven and hell are human constructs. They have no meaning in eternity. You are not eternal in the sense of your creator and, eventually, you will just fade away, you will cease to exist. You have no future when you die, but are part of the great All which is the universe. You are there for a time until you are absorbed by it and become a part of it.”

I looked at my hands holding the rake, the pile of dead leaves, as I tried to make sense of this. So many questions, each leading to another, an eternity of questions. Wanting to ask another, I raised my eyes from the silent ground and realized that the interview was at an end, no one was there. I looked up and down the street, but it was empty. He had, after all, addressed the more important questions. Understanding the answers was another matter and I had much more to ponder than before the interview started. I felt a chill as an imagined shadow passed in front of the sun.

“Are you OK?” my wife called out, “you’ve been standing there so long I thought maybe something was the matter. What did you do, fall asleep?”

“Maybe I did,” I called back, “because I had the strangest dream.” The last part of the sentence fell on silence. She had not waited for an answer but already gone back inside.

It was a cold November day shortly before Thanksgiving, much like any such day in the Midwest at that time of year. Gray, lowering clouds pressed against the shadowless landscape. The threat of snow had hung in the still air all day.

My mother had picked me up from school for one reason or another and had parked on the main street of the small town where I went to school to run an errand. I waited in the car, which cooled rapidly in the late afternoon silence. I should mention that the main street of the town was only two blocks long and one parked diagonally to the curb, an arrangement which allowed for more cars to park along the street while allowing those waiting in cars a full view of the pedestrian traffic. Had the weather been warmer, the passenger side window would have been rolled down to allow conversation with those passersby who wished it. These two blocks included a grocery store, meat market, bank, drug store, dime store, department store, a couple of barber shops, and two bars. Except for the bars, the stores were getting ready to close as 5 0′ clock approached, and people were hurrying to finish last minute errands when the snow appeared. As I said, one second there was no snow and the next second there was. Magic!

I watched as people smiled into this first solid manifestation of winter, some even pausing as they hurried along to hold out their hands to touch the quiet snow. For just a few moments, everyone was a child again, staring in wonder at the snow’s sudden appearance, before remembering themselves and resuming their rush to finish their shopping and get home. Even I got out of the car to witness this event first hand and exchanged bits of conversation with a couple of people as to how much snow was likely to fall. Everyone, it seems, likes the first snowfall of the winter. The seasonal carol, Oh the first snowfall of the winter was a day that we all waited for may have run through my mind at the time since I had an album of Christmas songs by the Walter Schumann Chorus which included this song, although it is more likely that subsequent recollections altered my memory to include that reminiscence. Yet from the smiles and joking banter of the pedestrians as they passed one another on the sidewalk and spoke to me as I stood beside the car, it was obvious that most everyone enjoyed this first appearance. Quite soon, everything was covered with a thin layer of white and meandering paths on the sidewalk marked the passage of the foot traffic while the streets were highlighted by parallel black lines made by passing cars as they drove into the gathering whiteness. As the town closed up for the night, these reminders of our presence would disappear under the continuing snowfall, a landscape which would be largely undisturbed until the next morning when merchants would appear before opening up to rid the sidewalk of what by now had become a nuisance. The exception would be the two bars which took care to keep the sidewalk clear in front of their establishments in anticipation of the evening trade; the Comer Pocket, situated as it was on the corner of the block, had more to care for than the other bar, whose prominently hand lettered sign “No Miners” was its only distinguishing factor.

How quickly the simple joy engendered by such an event pales. The gray days ahead would more than fulfill our expectations of snow. Combined with the unrelenting cold, any residual joy taken from this first snow would finally be erased as the last Christmas present was opened. The coming short days and long nights conspired to keep people indoors and even such outdoor pleasures as sledding and ice skating soon lost their glamour. As children, we began to invent reasons to be out of doors.

One year, to fight the continuing boredom, we got together one Saturday morning in late February with the avowed purpose of building the world’s largest snowman. A damp snow was falling, perfect for snowman making, as we sketched plans for a snowman which was to reach at least 10 feet in height. Eagerly we began rolling the large ball that was to be the base but we soon ground to a halt when the ball became too large and too heavy to push any further. An exaggerated memory would tell you that it was at least 4 feet in diameter, but practically speaking, it was much smaller than that. Although it was not as large as later memory would make it, it was large enough that when we had the next ball all rolled out, also heavier than anticipated, our combined kid power could not raise it into place. We got some 2×4s with the bright idea of sliding the ball into place by means of a makeshift ramp. The attempt failed miserably as our hands pushed into the ball and, rather than moving, it began to crumble under our efforts on the sagging pieces of wood.

Undeterred, we abandoned the idea using the traditional method of building a snowman and fetched buckets and shovels. With these we converted the original first ball into a largish round base that was over three feet tall. We then piled snow onto this platform to create a second level which was above the heads of some of the smaller members of the company. The third and final level was added by a couple of boys foolhardy enough to balance precariously on a couple of rickety wooden step ladders. These two were able to form the head, or what passed for a head in our minds. Some large pieces of coal were stuck into this third level to give “Frosty” some semblance of a face. We stepped back and admired our handiwork, the largest snowman our neighborhood had ever seen, or, we thought at the time, would ever see. Some neighbors complimented us on our perseverance and were too kind to remark that “Frosty” looked more like a disheveled pyramid than an actual snowman.

“Frosty,” being as large as he was, took a long time to melt. Traces of him were visible long after the snows of winter had vanished, well into April as a matter of fact, and a disgruntled parent was heard to murmur that a repeat performance would not be appreciated in future winters, at least not in his yard.

As it was, that November afternoon was the first and only time I actually got to see it begin to snow. Almost, of course, does not count, as in “oh, look, it’s snowing,” nor does checking outside through the window to see if it has begun snowing. As an adult, I no longer have the desire or the patience to sit in a cooling car to wait for someone, even if it would mean witnessing the beginning of the first snowfall of the year.

And it showed no signs of stoppin’, every kind with eyes a poppin’, knew he’d soon be belly whoppin’ on his ear. Oh, the first snow fall of the winter, the first snow fall of the year.