A Place of My Own

I grew up in Northern Delaware.

Delaware is a small state of big quirks: the first state to ratify the US Constitution, the second smallest state in size, never had a sales tax never will, congenial to business because of lenient incorporation laws, and, at least once upon a time, something of a fiefdom of one of the most private dynasties of all the American plutocracies—the reclusive DuPonts.

In the rolling hills of the Brandywine Valley several miles to the west of my childhood home were the virtual castles of the DuPonts perched on hills given definition by endless, undulating rock fences of a local blue granite. The walls were fashioned by masons whose primary task was to rebuild the black powder plants along the Brandywine that continually blew up. The estates’ fences kept the masons occupied during their "down-time."

Delaware is also the only state with a circular boundary, an arc of a circle 12 miles in radius inscribed from an arbitrary spot in the town of New Castle, near where William Penn first came ashore in America. This great arc extends as the state's northern boundary from the Delaware River in the east to the conjunction of the Mason Dixon Line where Pennsylvania and Maryland meet in the west. Back in the days of ambiguous surveys, that little triangle of land, the Wedge, where Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Maryland met, became a lawless area for prize fights and cock fights and where fugitives from the law fled. My parents' one acre of property ended at this arcing state line four miles or so from the river. In the late 1940s, they had bought the Delaware parcel of what had once been a small dairy farm straddling Pennsylvania and Delaware.

Through most of my youth this area was still country. The farm fields and wood lots near my parents' little homestead had not yet been cleared and transformed into subdivisions by developers. A mile to the north was the crossroads hamlet of Booths Corner, PA.

Booths Corner had a sprawling ramshackle collection of vaguely connected buildings that we called "The Sale." Friday night and all day Saturday vendors would open up their booths to sell moldy WWII military surplus gear, remaindered paper back books and comics with their covers ripped off, cheap toys stamped "Made in Japan," and other such second class goods beyond the main attraction perched at the front canopy: bushel baskets of potatoes and tomatoes and stacks of watermelons and cantaloupes. The retailers who sold the produce wanted customers to believe they were buying wholesale. At one juncture in the covered area of the booths, a gnome-like, cigar chomping little man in a rumpled white shirt and khakis stood at a card table with a Kraft paper shopping bag as rumpled as he. The top of the bag was turned down to create an inverted cuff. He was known as the "How Many Man," for his sing song chant: "How many, how many, how many?" (It wasn't until I was in the throes of puberty that I learned that he sold discount condoms.) One spring Friday afternoon, as the stalls were opening up, a fortune teller inveigled me to give her a quarter to read my palm. “You will marry a blond haired woman and have seven children,” she foretold with disinterest.

"The Sale" was a place to eat great greasy slices of pizza, snow cones drenched in gaudy syrups, red candy apples, French fries served in paper cups. The air was redolent with the enticing odors of these foods over a more fetid, almost barnyard odor. In the gravel and dirt parking lot, beneath the glow of bare bulbs around which moths swirled, hucksters sold strange products, such as health tonics and a liquid that could keep glass—eyeglasses and windshields--from fogging, a steaming kettle of water waiting to effect the demonstration . (The tonic huckster, a toothless senior, demonstrated his strength by bending an iron spike with his gums.) And from the back of a semi trailer an auctioneer hawked products from odd lots, an ersatz auction. When he got a bid he could live with, he would sell all that remained of that product for that same price. In the summer, in the parking lot beneath ribbons of naked light bulbs with more swirling moths there were entertainers: rockabilly acts, hoping to become famous, just like Bill Haley, the father of rock and roll who played "The Sale" before recording "Rock Around the Clock." The Haley house, an ordinary ranch but with a signature pink Cadillac often in the driveway, was only two miles into Pennsylvania on the same road on which I lived.

"The Sale" was a ramshackle bazaar: mysterious—a place to strike buyer-beware bargains, populated with folks who made their living at the fringe of the economy. Whenever I was there, I always felt secure with the awareness that I could retreat from this seedy, decrepit danger to the safety inside the arc.

The greatest influence in my formation was a woods that might have been a mile or more square. It was a climax forest of towering old oaks, massive gray beeches, and an occasional dogwood tree. In the autumn a great migrating flock of blckbirds rooked overnight, settling in with a raucous chattering that rose to a din.

The woods was studded with massive granite boulders with such definition that they appeared alive. A stream cut through it with one flat rock—the aptly named Big Rock—at least twenty feet in width in its flow.

The woods contained a Pennsylvania farm about a quarter of a mile from my house. It had been the site of an Indian encampment of Leni Lenapes. The plowed field planted in corn yielded, now and again, stone artifacts—usually a piece of an arrowhead. When I was eleven or so, after a heavy late summer thunderstorm, I walked the rows where rushing water had cut fresh furrows. I remember the heat and humidity, the cut of corn leaves on my skin, the smell of earth and corn, and most of all the wonder and magic of finding a perfectly shaped, broad, white quartz arrowhead in the red soil. This quest and its reward were unforgettable early experiences—a model for the future.

I grew up with a profound sense of place, though to my young self it was part and parcel with the world I knew. (I had no frame of reference.) This place of origin filled me up: with full blown Nature in the guise of a climax hardwood forest studded with great boulders and cut by a stream, experienced through the seasons; with a tribal-like home state whose arcing boundary significantly circumscribed my life; with mythic persons—the Duponts, the How Many Man, and Bill Haley; with a lost Indian tribe, the Leni Lenapes, who ended up in Oklahoma, but left evidence in the earth to set a young mind wondering.

Drawings

1967

Dick Codor, college roomate, drew this. He is a successful book and movie illustrator. He continues to cartoon.


1981
Richard Osborne

1989

Kutty is the nom de plume of a leading Indian political cartoonist. He drew this during the wedding ceremony I performed for his daughter Maya.

1992

Insinuations and Enchantment

An autumn mood insinuates

change:

The grass a browner shade

of green and ragged;

A smattering of wrinkled

leaves accumulating;

And hosta flowers sere

stalks;

Not to mention lessening days--

a month and a half

from the solstice,

a month and a half

to the equinox--

Premonitions to disturb

the complacent.

Yet, meteor showers spangle

the night sky:

Enchanted Stardust.