An Examined Life

Nature's Nurture

2010-12-10T06:29:00.000-08:00

My parents were famous gardeners—mostly vegetables for consumption and canning—later freezing. My Mom had grown up on a family truck farm in Southern New Jersey and was an expert.

Before they could afford a gasoline cultivator, my Dad tilled the ground with a one wheel hand plow. In his wake robins dared to forage for earthworms. The texture and aroma of the loam in early spring remain with me from more than half a century ago.

Into the ground went the distinctive seeds of the respective plants: carrots, beets, yellow and green beans, zucchini, lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, and of course corn. Also into the ground went the tomato and bell pepper seedlings that had be nursed along in a hot house sash arrangement on the sunny side of the chicken coop.

Chickens scratched and clucked, laying their eggs inside in straw lined roosts. Year after year the earliest vegetables were the asparagus spears that poked from a long bed at one end of the great garden. Here there was also a compost pile of grass clippings, clean kitchen garbage, and in high summer season overgrown zucchini. When they began to ripen the zucchini hills were impossible to keep up with. (“Betcha’ never smelled a real compost pile before!”)

I didn’t go to kindergarten, Mr. Fulghum. I learned about Nature from Nature first hand, not via a little seed in the Styrofoam cup. I didn’t need to be taught wonder. It flowed from Nature. I was filled with simple awe that has proved to be abiding by the seed planted into the prepared soil, becoming fruit with new seeds in it; fruit that I ate and grew. It was a simple realization that life goes on in spite of death.

In the distance of time, it seems every day of my childhood and early youth was spent in part outdoors, wandering the woods among the trees, a cross a meandering stream with minnows, crayfish, and salamanders, up and down hillsides studded with great blue granite boulders, and into a cornfield that had once been a Leni Lenape settlement where arrowheads could be found by searching the furrows between the rows. Seasons didn’t slide by as much as they gracefully edged toward, out of and into, then feathered away from each other.

Joe's Interment

2010-05-23T19:36:00.001-07:00

The setting: a bleak and decrepit little town in Western Pennsylvania not far from New Castle, circa 1980. The town had been an enclave for East European immigrants who worked the steel mills of the region when the steel industry was booming. It had become a place of closed storefronts and old folks left behind.

Joe, the deceased was a more recent immigrant, part of the jetsam of World War II from the region of contentious ethnic groups that became Yugoslavia. He had an old house and a dumpling shaped girlfriend who’d lived with him, a scandal in this insular community.

His only relative, a niece who lived in California with Unitarian ties, had called me in Youngstown. Niece, the girl friend, and I sat in the living area of Joe’s modest home, in the gray twilight of a bleak winter’s afternoon, drinking his homemade wine from cream cheese glasses. The strong wine warmed the belly and lessened the gloom. The niece told Joe’s story.

As the war progressed, Joe’s village was taken over by an unfriendly group of guerillas who threatened to raze and kill. Joe made an impassioned plea for mercy, declaring “Aren’t we all brothers?” His plaintive appeal saved the village.

After the war, in his new American town, Joe and a few other locals had a dispute with the town’s Catholic Church and were excommunicated. As a result they couldn’t be buried in the church’s consecrated graveyard (not to mention buried by a Unitarian minister!). But they’d made plans. The excommunicants had bought a parcel adjacent to the graveyard and as they died, one after another, the little graveyard filled up. The Church had retaliated, erecting an ugly barbed wire fence where the unconsecrated land began. The message was unmistakable, the symbolism as obvious as a crown of thorns.

As I pronounced the words by the graveside, before a handful of dispassionate people, I looked past the granite tombstones embedded with medallion portraits of the deceased, to the barbed wire fence, and beyond to the so-called consecrated land and stolid church. Clots of snow fell from a leaden sky and wind cut my cheeks.

Were the tears in my eyes from weather. Or were they from an aching grief for the inhumanity of a religion too proud of itself to simply love as its prophet had so clearly commanded?

Dime a Dip

2010-04-12T12:27:00.000-07:00

Ellie and I lived in Vermont in 1969/70 when I went to grad school at UVM. Ellie grew up on Lake Champlain on the New York side, literally looking across the narrow waters to the Green Mountains. From the New York vantage it is easy to recognize why Camel Back Mountain (the tallest of the Green Mountains) is so named. Ellie’s family outings often ended up at a famous restaurant in Middlebury, where the poet Robert Frost, then in residence at Middlebury College, might be sighted at Sunday dinner.

I love Vermont. And forty years ago it still had an old-timey feel, here and there in the countryside.

One of my fondest memories of that era involved a late summer/early autumn meandering drive into the hill country. We happened upon a typical little town perched among the mountains, East or West or South Something or Other. The single white clapboard church with weather-vaned steeple had a handpainted sign in front: “Dime a Dip Today.”

We saw folks entering the side door and were soon following them into the familiar surrounds of a modest social hall with a curtained stage at one end. Several long tables, covered in white paper table cloths were set for supper. By the stage, another long table held large and inviting casserole dishes: baked beans, mashed potatoes, egg salad, escalloped potatos, macaroni and cheese, string bean casserole (proverbial church beans), carrot salad, ham salad, cole slaw—all the familiar unpretentious and hearty dishes of potluck dinners. Behind the food were women in bib aprons and print dresses with ice cream scoops in hand—the old fashioned ones with the thumb bail that lifts the ice cream from the metal hemisphere.

By now if you didn’t know already, dime a dip is quite literal. You choose a dish and present your plate. Your server takes her scoop to the dish, secures a scoop, inverts the scoop over your plate and releases a mound of food.

The price 40 years ago was literally 10 cents a dip; a final woman at the end of the table tallied the dips, received the money, and made change from an old metal cashbox.)

There was something fascinating, even charming about a paper plate festooned with little round mounds of food: mashed potatoes in the center, coleslaw to the side, string bean casserole next to the coleslaw, egg salad and so on.

To close the culinary circle, a slice of cake or pie was also a dime, while apple or cherry cobbler was also served by the scoop.

We vividly remember that supper--setting, sensations, and circumstances, including one year old daughter Katie, plum baby food smeared all over her face and on the paper table cover that she ripped to shreds from the perch of an old high chair the women had procured from a closet and wiped clean with a wet cloth.

Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University

2010-01-23T07:49:00.000-08:00

I studied theology at McGill University in Montreal. Here’s how I got there.

We were living in Ottawa (1970-71) when I decided I wanted to be a UU minister. The first requirement was a theological degree. I considered either the University of Toronto or McGill. So, one weekday, Ellie, Katie (who was two), and I took the train to Montreal. I showed up at McGill’s Faculty of Religious Studies unannounced. The professor who headed the program I was interested in graciously gave me his time and walked me through the venerable Faculty building at the edge of the campus. At the end of the interview he said, rather casually, “And, oh, if you enroll, you can become a member of my College of the United Church of Canada and we will pick up your tuition.” (The United Church, the Presbyterians, and the Anglicans who’d once owned the Building, had given the property to the University and in exchange had so many “free” enrollments in perpetuity.) Talk about the kindness of strangers! It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Religious Studies at McGill, was rich with, of course, world-class Christian scholars. It also had relationship with a Hindu Institute as well as an Islamic Institute whose founding director was an important scholar of comparative religions: Wilfred Cantwell Smith. He was unassuming in appearance (very professorial in a tweedy way) but a radical scholar, and something of a post-modernist before that descriptive was devised, who emphasized how Western biases skewed scholarship. (Incidentally, his most influential successor in comparative religion studies is Karen Armstrong, whom I featured last Sunday.)

It was in his Introductory courses on Islam, attended by a host of Muslims from around the world, that I slipped the surly bonds of my own cultural background and became freely, gladly eclectic and relatively cosmopolitan. I began to acquire and assimilate bits and pieces of what I now call “natural religion:” a religion of realities, tested by reason and experience, open to all the disciplines, not merely theology. In fact, I found theology relatively poor. (Dr. Smith once said, "Interdisciplinary studies are a ladder to get out of a hole into which the true scholar never falls.)

Summer of '69

2009-11-07T08:27:00.000-08:00

In June of ‘69 I graduated from the University of Delaware and in September I began graduate studies in history at the University of Vermont. After my graduation Ellie and I moved to income eligible housing in Burlington. Our possessions had fit, with plenty room left over, in one of those small U-Haul trailers. Our first end tables were cardboard boxes draped with tablecloths. We were economically challenged.

Nearly broke when we arrived, we wondered how the three of us,--Katie was an infant,--might financially survive until September, when I would have a stipend as a Teaching Assistant and Ellie would teach in a Burlington elementary school.

Shortly after arriving, from a state employment office, I secured a job cutting grass in a cemetery. At lunch on my first day, I parked my decrepit gas lawn mower beneath a tree and never returned. The pay was terrible and the job awful. I thought surely there had to be better summer employment; at least nothing could be worse.

As a result I had one of the better interludes of my life. I became a ticket agent for Vermont Transit on the town square in Burlington. Vermont Transit was an interstate bus company and state law required all buses originating in Vermont to be carried by Vermont Transit. (For example, passengers on the Montreal Greyhound bus had to depart and continue on to Boston or New York on a Vermont Transit bus.) Burlington was V.T.’s home office. The terminal, on the corner of Park and Main, was a small, time-worn operation. For that matter Burlington hadn’t been gentrified yet; the terminal suited the town. Farmers in bib overalls walked the streets, along with long haired, disheveled back-to-the-land hippie parents and their wan, wide-eyed children.

I looked out from one of the two wickets at the ticket counter onto a gray-tiled waiting room with pitted chrome and burgundy, cracked vinyl benches that seated twenty or so travelers and local-loungers. It was an era long-before computers. I determined routes and fares from a phone book size tariff/schedule volume with tiny type and ran two carbon tickets through a manual ticket printer with changeable metal address plates. Floor to ceiling plate glass windows looked out to the square onto an ornate Victorian fountain that local kids had painted an astonishing electric blue. A favorite task was to announce at night, after the dispatcher had left, on an ancient chrome table microphone the departing buses and their routes: “Now loading on the Main Street platform …

From behind the ticket counter, I had a literal and figurative window on the slice of the world that was Burlington, Vermont 1969. I found that summer, while rich in Vermont lure and pregnant with anticipation for graduate school, at the very least unsettling. The imagined innocence of the Age of Aquarius was slouching toward a more sinister stage. The hippie back-to-landers and denizens of rural communes who roamed Burlington streets, to my eyes, appeared more woe begotten than romantic. Recreational drugs had taken on darker manifestations than cannabis, apparent even among backwater Vermont youth who hung around the electric blue fountain in the square. Of course, the Vietnam War overshadowed every other event that summer. But there was a succession of significant events.

Ellie and I huddled around our little black and white TV. and watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. I followed widely publicized instructions for f-stop and speed settings to capture my own images of the moon landing from the TV. screen on black and white film with a second-hand Argus 35 mm camera.

In the Burlington Free Press, between writing tickets for the infrequently scheduled buses, I read about the sordid Ted Kennedy/Mary Jo Kopechne Chappaquiddkick tragedy and his lame justifications for his actions following the accident; I also read about the horrific Tate-LaBianca murders in Hollywood, that would later fall on the so-called Manson Family, but at first seemed to presage more random acts of violence.

And of course in mid August I fielded last minute requests by Vermont youth for schedules and tickets to Woodstock, NY. After consulting the thick book of tariffs and schedules I concluded, as did the farmer in the familiar Vermont joke, “You can’t get there from here,” which was true because of complications of multiple bus changes for last minute Charlies.

I’m nostalgic for the tumbling days that clustered as the Summer of 1969—I lived through them as I was transitioning with my little starter family. But then and even now I think of that interlude as unsettling, disquieting, disturbing…

Wanderings

2009-10-19T10:19:00.001-07:00

The Dune region that curves around the bottom of Lake Michigan is a source of fascination and wonderment.

Geographically, it's magical--make that spiritual in my scheme of natural religion.

I've learned it's the axis mundi of North American, where major ecosystems converge. It's no wonder that it was a labratory for modern ecological studies in the early twentieth century.

Its history and its lore, along with surviving remnants of days gone by, inspired a romance for one of the most unique regions I've ever experienced.

Ellie and I often travel through, yes through, Gary to Michigan City on US 12 & 20. For some 2o years a favorite byway stop was Andershocks in the country outside of Portage--a rambling, ramshackle farmers market, nursery, and flea market. It was as authentic as it gets--an unpretentious remnant of what once was. In the autumn there were great wooden bins of gnarly apples, piles of pumpkins, and tables of ornamental gourds and Indian corn from Indiana farms. Several years ago Andershocks closed. (Nothing lasts forever.)

In its final days, among the forlorn rows of neglected plants were little pots of "wandering jew." I bought one for a quarter and have managed to keep it alive since then from successive cuttings.

Yesterday afternoon, the sun sluicing in my kitchen widow illuminated the plant's purple leaves. I remembered Andershocks with the sweet pain of nostalgia for day trips to Michigan City and back.

Those day trips around Lake Michigan are metaphors for untold day trips we'd taken as diversion and recreation in Vermont and Upstate New York, Quebec, Ohio and neighboring Pennsylavania and West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.

Hey Baby...

2009-10-12T16:59:00.001-07:00

It was the spring of 1961. I was thirteen, feeling self-important. The world vibrated, the taut string of my being resonated in sympathy.

Dad took me on a Saturday shopping trip to Chester PA to visit men's clothing stores. The downtown was still viable. Shops lined the main streets—Market Street and Edgmont Avenue. It seemed busy—urban, a little dangerous.

We parked in a lot adjacent to the meandering Chester Creek and walked a wobbly pedestrian bridge to the downtown businesses. The few times I’d walked the bridge before, I’d been afraid of tumbling into the river.

We were walking on the shaded side of Market Street. Sun shone on the other side, bouncing off store windows. The light was thin, but bright, The air was chilled but warm where the sun shone. Down the sunny side of the street a throaty convertible, the top down, drove slowly, deliberately. A driver with slick, long black hair had one arm on the seat, the other on the steering wheel. He claimed a progressing slice of the world. The car radio blared a song of the day:

"Hey, hey hey baby!/I want to know if you'll be my girl/Hey, hey hey baby!/I want to know if you'll be my girl."

He words echoed, in my mind, if not off the buildings.

Crossing the foot bridge back to the car, I’d forgotten old fears.

God, I felt alive, that spring day when I was thirteen.

Sartorial Splendor

2009-10-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

Father Clint was a fastidious dresser and benefited from Mother Mary's laundry and ironing skills. When he ran the storehouse at Houdry Products, a research and development plant in Linwood PA, he wore a freshly ironed pair of khaki pants, a starched long sleeved white shirt, and tie every day of work. He was a good looking man, always slim and well-groomed.

Brother Clint was a high school fashion plate, circa 1957. He attended a city high school, P. S. DuPont. He worked in an Acme super market, earning money to pay for his own car and buy clothes.

I didn't care much about my appearance until sixth grade. One day I looked around at classmates and realized that my customary khaki pants and white tee shirt didn't favorably compare to what my middle class peers were wearing.

I asked for new clothes and rather than an excursion to the usual J. C. Penney and Sears Roebuck stores, I had a special trip to Wilmington Dry Goods on Market Street in downtown Wilmington. Perhaps brother Clint shopped there, but he probably shopped more often at the tonier Wanamakers or Strawbridge and Clothiers in Claymont's Merchandise Mart where his Acme was located.

Wilmington Dry Goods occupied an old fashioned building--several stories, cavernous floors, high ceilings, unvarnished worn wooden floors, the merchandise in great wooden bins. The men's floor had a pleasing aroma of wool and cotton, not an expensive smell but more like a textile mill. I carefully looked through the bins and left with a couple pair of pants and patterned shirts, a pair of rough wool sweaters that pulled out of shape with wear, and a brown-striped sport coat that was the love of my life.

From junior high through high school each year brought a new trend. One year pants had a buckle in the back, the next year two flaps covered the back pockets. In my senior year "wheat jeans" were de rigeur. Dirty bucs were followed by white bucs were followed by desert boots were followed by Spaulding saddle shoes. Athletic shoes had to be Converse; however, one year they had to be white low cuts, the next black low cuts. A season of white high tops gave way to a season of black high tops, the latter were known as "black Cons."

I suffered my parent's frugality. Even when I played junior high and senior high junior varsity basketball they were too frugal to spring the extra few dollars for Converse sneakers. I wore low cut Keds in junior high and P.F. Flyers in high school.

Throughout my school days there were a few constants. Penny loafers (Bass Weejuns) had preppie cachet. (My loafers came from Hanover Shoes.) White wool socks accompanied the Weejuns.

When brother Clint married in my last year of junior high Dad and I shopped at Robert Hall for suits. ("Robert Hall this season, will show you the reason: low over head, low overhead.") I selected a greenish tan suit from the long racks of sized and color arranged suits. (I've tended to choose brighter colors.)

Madras sport coats were the rage in my senior year. I bought a muted gray, black, and red plaid model at Wilmington Dry Goods. My yearbook picture shows me wearing it.

Whatever I wore, it was always spotlessly clean and immaculately pressed. My shirts hung in starched order in my closet.

I had my own taste, too. I was particularly fond of demi-boots sold by Hanover Shoes. I called them cherry boots because of their oxblood colored leather. They polished to a rich sheen.

Over the years my sartorial splendor has been enriched by circumstance, beginning with Wilmington Dry Goods. In high school a friend's mother drove us to the Eagle Shirt factory in Quakertown PA. During graduate school my taste for fancy shirts was indulged at a Hathaway Shirt outlet in Burlington VT.

When attending McGill the Metro stopped between Eaton's and the Bay (Hudson Bay Company), the major downtown Montreal department stores. I prowled for bargains. My prize purchases came from Eaton's, incuding two resplendent, bell-bottomed cotton suits, one mustard yellow the other a celery green. (I had a gray, bell bottomed suit custom made at Eaton's for my 1973 graduation. I wore it with cherry-colored slip-ons with a raised heel and a grayish tie decorated with mushrooms.)

In Youngstown I received a "professional discount" of 10% off from Higbee's on Federal Plaza. Higbee's was struggling to survive and had great markdowns on men's wear. I particularly liked a whitish wool, two button model that made me look very elegant.

Most recently I've shopped a Bachrach Outlet at the North Riverside Mall, where I've found Canadian suits and sport coats, Italian cobbled shoes, and a variety of dress shirts.

When we lived in Canada, 1970-1976, Ellie sewed. I persuaded her to make me three major items: a green velour caftan to wear around the house; a nubby pink, yes, pink, jacket something like a sport coat; and a beigish trench coat.

The two Clints were my early role models regarding clothes. What I wore, how I looked has always mattered, at least since my first foray to Wilmington Dry Goods. And shopping for clothes, particularly to find bargains, has provided pleasure and adventure.

2641 Foulk Road

2009-09-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

In 1949, after borrowing $5,000 from Mary's father Joe Walter, Clint and Mary purchased land from Hyland Gaynor, a nearly acre wedge ($1200) within the northern boundary of Delaware. Gaynor had once operated a small milk bottling business--buying local milk in bulk. On a hill, 165 feet into Pennsylvania, stood the Gaynor's modest field stone farmhouse and gray sloping barn.

The property to the south of 2641 Foulk Road was a farm field that sometimes grew wheat. South of that stood a substantial serpentine (green) stone Methodist church with sprawling graveyard dating from the 19th century. There were 2 houses across the street, the abodes of the Petit de Manges and the Burroughs. South of these houses was a farm field with a wooden windmill in its midst, boundaried by a low, masoned granite stone wall along Delaware 261, Foulk Road. (In the early 1950s it was spelled Faulk Road.)

Clint, with little training, determined that he would build the two story Cape Cod bungalow himself. He relied on U.S. government pamphlets for information.

An acquaintance with a tractor and a clam shell digger helped him gouge a foundation from a shallow slope. Clint laid the concrete block foundation: each block weighed 23 pounds. He hired a carpenter to be sure that the framing was done properly. Once the basics were in place, Clint did the rest of the construction and finishing with hand tools, a process that continued for more than a decade.

At first, there was a kitchen with a knotty-pine cabinets and eating area, living room, and two bedrooms on the first floor. Clint laid oak flooring on the first floor, which Mary waxed and polished by hand every Friday.

The second floor was an attic. Later, room by room, Clint built 3 bedrooms upstairs. The basement was unfinished--housing a small workshop in the midst of a gas furnace and water pump. The pump drew water from a relatively shallow, hand dug well. (Conservation of water was a family virtue enforced by Mary--only an inch of water was allowed to take a bath.) There was a utility sink, washing machine, and chest freezer in the cellarentrance way. Since the basement was mostly below ground it was cool in summer and warm in winter. It held aromas of seasonal vegetables from the garden.

On the backside of the house, on either side of a corridor leading into the cellar, Mary cultivated a sloping "rock garden" that featured multi-colored portulacas and cascading mountain pink.

A vegetable garden dominated the long yard. Clint turned the soil and dug furrows with a one wheeled hand cultivator. In the garden's front was a cascading concord grape arbor. Rows of radishes, cabbage, carrots, beets, lettuce, potatoes, and such led to rows of yellow corn--Clint was a yellow corn man as opposed to my Mary's farm family championing of white corn.

Toward the narrowing point of the wedge-shaped property stood a chicken coop with a small and low cold sash in front of it, for growing seedlings in the spring. Near the garden were two apple trees (Macintosh and Delicious) and a Bing cherry tree. Alongside the chicken coop was a strawberry patch. On the other side of yard grew a bramble of raspberries canes. I have faint memories of a goose berry and a quince bush.

A dog house above the raspberry path had a circular dirt apron, worn of grass by Spot who was contained by a 12 foot chain. Spot was a hunting dog, configured like a Brittany Spaniel. His pedigreed mother had mated with an unknown male.

Popular shrubs of the era served as borders and boundaries: privet (with stinking flowers) and fire thorn (with thorns and red berries). Eventually these plantings grew rank and deeply rooted and with considerable effort were torn out.

Originally the house was sheathed in red brick patterned fiber-board panels. (It would much later be covered in white aluminum siding.)

In the beginning there was no garage. Alongside the gravel driveway, near the house was a mound of soil that had been dug from the foundation.

Finishing the rooms, maintaining the property, keeping a garden plus husbanding chickens consumed Mary and Clint's evenings and weekends.

The property and house, so hands on for Clint and Mary, was the center of their life together. It was a source of pride, as well as a symbol of their work ethic and private sense of responsibility.

Boothwyn

2009-09-01T05:38:00.000-07:00

I was born November 15, 1947 at the Crozier Hospital in Chester, PA. My birth certificate has the legend, Crozier Hospital, Home for the Incurables.

My parents, Mary and Clint Searl, lived in the Margate Apartments in Boothwyn. Clint worked for Houdry Process, a research and development company, once a subsidiary of Sun Oil. Houdry created catalyst for the cracking towers in the oil refineries that lined the Delaware River at Marcus Hook. Clint made it through World War II without being drafted, since he worked in an essential industry. He had an induction notice for the day the war ended, VJ Day, and was told not to bother to report.

Clint and Mary's early years, after their 1939 marriage, were modest.

Older brother Clint was born in 1940. I surmise that my parents had a hard time conceiving a second time. So I was, for my mother at least, a blessing--prayers answered.

My earliest memory is a sun-drenched, early spring day: I'm playing alongside the Boothwyn apartment house, digging in gray gravel with a yellow handled spoon.

After the war, Clint and Mary yearned for property of their own. By 1949 they had borrowed $5000 from Mary's father, Joe Walter, to purchase land and erect a modest bungalow house in Northern Delaware on the State Line with Pennsylvania. My formative years were literally circumscribed by Delaware's great arc of a boundary.

A Place of My Own

2009-08-27T13:26:00.000-07:00

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

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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

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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.