Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Motes

Shinning bits, tiny and fragmented. Like dust motes floating in late afternoon sun. Bits suspended, supported by nothing but that invisible mass known as air. Some bits are moving and some seem still, just stuck in space.

This array of bits is memory, well more specifically my memory. How my mind stores its past isn't rational or hierarchical. My memory is a thousand planets spewing out across a universe the center of which is me.

Every passing moment either gravity or another force of nature moves a piece of my memory. Some flickers of the past are heading toward the black holes of my personal universe. Some are drawn into the fire of my conscious focused mind for a brief few moments. But like matter twisted by gravity and the other immutable rules of physics so are these little motes are always being modified simply by being part of the stream of my existence.

Maybe it is gravity in every sense of the word that keeps in my mind zipping back to age two. Gasping I am stuck inside a heavy quilted plastic garment bag on a late summer afternoon. My body is sweating profusely and I remember stale plastic smelling air. Somehow I have managed to zipper it closed from the inside. Most likely my breath was getting low but somehow my brother comes upon me and pulls me out before it is too late. And then there was the "scary" lecture from Mom and Dad about death and suffocation and the appropriate places where good little boys should play. Thank God there was no internet or someone, one of my brothers most likely, would have pulled off pictures of purple swollen dead people who had suffocated and shown them to me as an object lesson. If that had happened then I would never have stored my clothes again, ever.

But what are these memories that pop up? In writing a story recently about an incident at the swimming pool of my childhood I remembered perhaps a more telling story of that place and of my relationship with my middle brother. I was maybe in kindergarten. Maybe it happened when I was in first grade, I dunno which but I was young and I listened to my brother back then. My older brother suggested that when Joe the lifeguard was leaning over the pool I rush up behind the big man and give a push. I did, reaction followed action and Joe went ass over head into the water. Me, well I was thrown out of the pool for the day. A large number of people laughed. My brother got thrown out for the day too and my Mom was really pissed. Cue up the disgraced our family lecture. One soaking wet man in his wayfarers yelling at me hangs there in my memory. I laugh a little bit and squirm a little bit when this pops into my rearview mirror. Those two minutes captured in a loop that repeats on certain days, say when I watch my kids at the community pool, says tons about my brother and his toxic influence (at times) on with me. It says quite a bit about my gullibility. But what could I expect of myself, I was six or seven tops and my brother was 14 or 15. He should have known better. Was it the complete impact on my senses of the consequences that followed this action that made it memorable I don't know?

Or the moment when I was sixteen and cruising through the Soo boat locks with my Dad one chilly August afternoon. Wearing windbreakers we about froze to death sitting on the boat’s deck, but I remember the flag on the bow of the boat. The pennant was whipping, whipping in the breeze. Watching that flag I was thinking this would be the only time I was ever going to be here and God what a forsaken place this is The flag which was read and white and I think was the logo of the boat line but it mesmerized me. Life has deposited me much closer to the Soo that I ever thought would happen, but I didn't know that would happen then. Even before I came here I knew the memory of that that pennant whipping wildly above that cold water would pop up again and again in my life.

Or, what is it that takes me back to the lady drowning her child with the ice cream cone? Really why does that bit come back again and again? I mean it was her own fault especially since I had told her not to hold the mountainous twin peaked cone of chocolaty goodness over his face. This happened when I was working at the soft serve place on the boardwalk. It was hot and humid and I told her not to buy the big cone because I knew she would have a mess on her hands. I mean this literally because it was inevitable that the pile of swirled goo would fall off the cone. I mean it was nearing 100% humidity and those soft serve machines don’t really chill stuff when there is such a level of moisture in the air. But the little squalling brat wanted the big one and then didn't want it and it was because of the dynamic of that dispute that she held the wad of dissolving delight over his face and it fell off the contents of the cone filling his eyes, nose and mouth causing him to almost drown on the boardwalk more that 300 yards from the ocean on a dry if very humid night.

Or finally why is it I go back to the time the guy in the infield of the Kentucky Derby was so drunk that he almost drowned on dry land in 90 degree heat? I mean he was so high he fell back against his Styrofoam cooler and it broke forming a collar that fit pretty tight around his neck. This dude was so drunk the cold water didn't wake him up and his head slowly began to tip downward. The man’s skull was at the point where his open mouth and flaring nostrils were about to go under when we pulled him out and let his friends know his was too fucked up for his own good. Maybe alcohol poisoning got him. But that isn’t the memory I hold on to. What I see again and again is the slow motion slide, the tilt into the 1 foot by 2 foot Styrofoam sea.

Maybe as I catch these specks in the light and tie them up and bind them to paper I can let them go. It may be a Buddhist kind of thing the equivalent of putting my wishes or regrets down on paper and then vanishing them. Perhaps I do this by setting this metaphorical paper afire, or by walking away from them after tying them to a tree one to which I will not return. Either way I have unburdened myself.

Any given set of words will never capture a memory; they are just an outline of some limited sense of the objective in a specific recollection. My memories aren't special; they just are my little fragments of a past I can’t go back to.

The reason I write is because the desire to do so is something that has always been inside of me. Deep down there is an urge to create a diagram of these dust motes that make up my life. With words I try and craft a kind of star map of the attic that is my mind. One word and then another must fall onto the electronic paper. One past moment captured and a new space for experience opened up. I doubt I will do enough in these remaining years to make anywhere near enough memories to fill the space I am emptying, but I gotta clear some room out just in case I do.

Motes in golden sunlight twinkling spin on for now, but not forever.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Tech Notes

A note to my readers about some changes on the blog. One person that has tried to peruse my site had indicated that the black on white was hard on the eyes. As an attempt to refine and improve A Space True I took the comment to heart. Looking amongst the various templates this seemed to be the easiest I could find on my decrepit eyes. How is it working for the rest of you? Besides looking like it should offer links to medical offices and explain gently horrible medical conditions in a calm and reasoned way I think the visual effect is an improvement. Let me know if I made a wrong choice here. Also changed was a deletion of the YouTube search feature. Now that I have figured out how to imbed links it was redundant.

Monday, June 22, 2009

I promise I won't make this a habit-A musical interlude

One of my favorite films of recent years was some called Les Choristes. My French is not so good and the spelling is thus apt to be off. The subtitled English version is called the Chorus. He is a bit of the why of my high regard for this film. The music is wonderful and the actors involved have such feeling for their roles.

Everything I Ever Say is a Lie and So is This

Early in my youth my family belonged to a swim club, it wasn’t fancy but it was private. New Jersey in the summer gets hot. Having a water hole built of concrete and filled with filtered cold clear water was wonderful. The place’s mere existence was thoroughly consistent with the progress focused American Dream of the sixties. It was onward and upward for us there in P-City.

In retrospect the private club part may have existed for more than just sharing the cost of a common water playground. Being private our man made cement pond was exclusionary for people like us and only like us. The 1960s a decade of change was not at all an enlightened period in small rural towns. The pool was clearly a segregated gathering spot, at least initially. At that time I was too young to catch on to such hidden agendas. To my young eyes that pool was a glistening blue oasis. I simply didn’t realize there weren’t any black people there, or why not.

Describing the physical place is simple; describing the social place is much harder. As to what one would see with the eye there was a chain link fence surrounded the whole place keeping non members out. A little compound, it had concrete block changing rooms for both men and women. These rooms were housed in a long rectangular box that stretched in a line across the western edge of the site. Access to the pumps and other guts of the pool’s actual operation was obtained through the men’s dressing room, as rightly it should have been back then. I mean men were still men and they worked with wrenches, gaskets, filters and the like. The pool even had a snack bar. Everything about the place smacked of progress. Our pool represented upward mobility in a solidly middle class way.

The pool itself was thoroughly modern. It had a shallow end and a deep end with a diving board. Again as it is in all my tales my memory is not reliable as it once was but I think the board was used mostly for cannonballs and belly flops. When used it produced a distinctive sound, a sproing-oing-oing as the fiberglass plank oscillated to a stop. But the board was not the only sound you would here when someone made a dive. When the Moose hit the water you could hear the smack of that massive torso and feel his wake at the other end of the pool. There was a separate kiddie pool. Being up to date in all things and given the time’s focus on education during the first few weeks of each summer Red Cross sponsored swim courses were given. I know I got up to junior lifesaver before I quit taking lessons.

From my house in the heart of our little farm town it seems like it was about a four minute drive out to the pool; maybe a mile. In the early years of our membership before I hit what is now considered middle school age my mother would load me, my older brother and some folding aluminum chairs into the big old Ford on most hot summer afternoons. Once in the car Mom’s eyes focused straight ahead and we barreled down that old county road, made a right just past the Deaton’s place and kicked up dirt on the unpaved road for about an eighth of a mile until we parked by the pool. What a way to spend sunny summer afternoons. At seven years old it was heaven. My fingers and toes were raisins each day as I came out of the cold, cooling water. At thirteen or maybe fourteen my time at the pool became something else much more interesting.

No matter what age I was I really don’t remember using much in the way of suntan lotion back then. Besides with my buck teeth I really wasn’t at risk for sunburn except for the top of my shaved head. The increased risk of my head for sunburn, the rest of my body being shaded by my buck teeth in case you missed the joke, was because I like every other male child in that part of the world got a shaved head the week school ended as his summer haircut. Our hair would not be addressed again in a barber’s chair until the week before school resumed in September. School started the day after Labor Day as God intended and never before.

Okay let us take in the visual image now of my naked, but for an ugly bathing suit, self. There I was under the burning sun, a myopic fat kid with big ears and a shaved head with either a pasty white or blistered red skin tone. Oh yeah I had black horn rimmed glasses held together with electrical tape at the broken bridge too. It is an absolute wonder nobody drowned me for the betterment of society in an act of vigilante eugenic purging.

While I don’t remember much about some areas of the pool I do remember that the sunbathing areas were uncomfortable. Instead of sand the areas where you would lay out on a towel were covered with small white stones. The net result was that that the surfaces were you could lie out were both hot and uncomfortable. Little sand burrs grew up between the stones waiting to attack a less than watchful patron with a naked foot as he or she padded to a sunning spot.. Adding to the pleasure of this space was the issue that back then I only got a small towel from home to lie upon. My legs below my knee would hang out across the rocks. My lower calf would sizzle and drip sweat on those white and hot rocks. The effect was kind of like a steak dripping juices on a gas grill’s lava rocks.

Did I mention this place was heaven to me? No I mean it; the pool really was something special.

As I grew older I would ride my W.T. Grant’s blue/purple banana seat butterfly stingray bike out to the swimming pool. That’s right with my plump legs pumping, my fat ass was hanging out sorting sucking the whole of my banana seat into invisibility. It was about a 10 or 15 minute ride down an asphalt road that was more a memory of a paved road that a real road. There were patches upon patches of macadam of different shades some oozing as the weather got good and warm, some just breaking up in dry brittle clumps.

On my way to the pool I would head down Front Street past the town school. It housed all eight grades and has been in use since about 1914. I haven’t been back home in a long time but I believe it is still in use today. Winding its way out of town to the east the road became empty of houses. There were two exceptions, a farm house and a migrant shack across the street from it. Sometime I would see the Puerto Rican men in their straw hats heading into different parts of the fields.

Curving slightly just beyond those houses the road would pass over a short causeway over a creek. In Mom’s car you didn’t even notice the causeway or the creek they were hidden in some deep foliage. But to a 14 year kid it was a mandatory stop. Might be turtles out there either swimming or sunning themselves. Of course you didn’t stop if the old black people were there fishing. I never stopped long anyway for this was brackish water and there was a plant we called skunk cabbage that grew out there. It stank something really awful, if not with the exact aroma then with at least the same intensity as skunk spray.

After the causeway I went up the hill past the big old frame house on the right and turned on that dirt road to the pool. At the start of the road it was sandy and hard to pedal. On a summer day this was the part of the ride that made you sweat. Combining a stiff jaunt up a pretty steep grade (for New Jersey normally about the flattest place in the universe) with pushing a bike through loose sand and I would be working up a real sweat.

With the pool in sight your legs pumped the hardest they would on the whole ride. I would be straining on the pedals of that bike, a machine that was a couple of years too small but which was still my ride. But I pumped hard, real hard so that when I got to the hard packed sand of the pool parking lot I could lock up those coaster brakes and kick that dusty dirt into the air. Cool is very relative to a way too immature 13 (or 14) year old.

I have been thinking about the pool because of Facebook. Insidious thing this social utility (and what does social utility mean anyway). Recently I got a friend request from one of the people who, in my mind at least, is tied to my memory of the pool for ever and ever. I have not seen or talked to this person to the best of my recall since 1975. It was a hoot seeing her image. She looks good, older but good. But my memory of her will always be atop someone’s shoulders in a two piece yellow bathing suit chicken fighting in the shallow end of that pool on a summer day.

I have struggled as to how and frame this story, should it be about the pool or the people? If it was about the people I should mention the lifeguards. I remember a couple of the lifeguards in particular. Actually I knew at least one lifeguard pretty well. Her name was Liz and she went to the University of Michigan. She was fairly intellectual and a bit of a wild child. Sitting on her elevated chair on a sparsely attended July afternoon she was desperate for conversation with anyone and there I was. She talked to me about things that were interesting like Camus’ The Fall and The Stranger and about Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. We talked about music. All the while I was sitting at the foot of her life guard stand like an acolyte to a elevated female Buddha.

Liz had been a mutant child herself, a little too academically smart for her own good and thus somewhat mistreated in school. Me, the year she was our lifeguard, I was fat and somewhat academically talented, you do the math on the peer torture equation. Plus I was the last child and my parents were tired of raising kids and dealing with adolescent angst and trauma. What I got was not the most hands on parenting advice. My Dad’s response when I got bullied was to tell me, hit ‘em back. That stratagem never worked out for me, ever.

Liz would always tell me to get out, to go away to college. She swore to me that once you got away from your hometown choices opened up in terms of socializing. She was right and I thank her for that.

There were other people there too. Some of them I regularly correspond with now thanks to Facebook and e-mail and the like. Some I don’t. The people that are key to this story are Mary Beth, May, Ben and John. Somewhere floating at the edge of this was one of my now dearest friends, but I don’t remember her being involved in the sort of social scene that the above four were. Because I was at the pool on a daily basis I was kind of a voyeur on these folks adolescent social development. The girls were growing breasts finally that were bigger than mine. I did mention I was fat didn’t I? That one change seemed to stir all sorts of stuff up.

So very much of what we learn about life comes in places outside of schools. Sometimes the education is subtle like watching the kind gesture of someone sharing food with a friend. Sometimes that education is pretty brutal like seeing a beat down start at a bar and then watching a couple of bouncers get even more brutal to break it up. At the pool that summer the education came by watching what happened when hormones, pheromones and water combined.

As I was saying when you are hanging around the swimming pool midday in the summer as an early teen, a very fundamental education in life just happens. If you are fat and ugly you aren’t a real participant but you get to watch bug lust on display. As you get to the pool most days there are the guys who clearly are going to play football in high school sunning themselves on the white rocks. They are already conditioning themselves and their bellies and upper torso are taut.

Nearby are the girls. They would lie upon their towels and would rub suntan oil on each other. They wore bikinis. If they had been at the beach they would have unhooked their bra straps for a better tan as thy lay face down. But this was a small town and that was just too risky.

They would banter back and forth. They would talk about what would happen next year. They would talk about who had been seeing whom at the end of the last school year. They would count up their change and go by a soda at the snack bar and maybe a frozen Zero bar. They made small talk that wasn’t about the topic at hand as much as it was about learning to talk to someone of the other sex. Me I lay there and read Shakespeare.

Eventually they would go into the pool the heat of the rocks having gotten to be too much. The guys would try and do some dives woofing on each other for various perceived short comings. The girls would sit at the edge of the pool and drop their legs into the shallow end slowly. After a minute or two of swirling their legs about they would drop down into the water and shiver and giggle. They were indeed such girls. In memory they were very beautiful.

Once Mary Beth and May had entered the shallow end the diving would soon stop. The girls would work on their stroke. Ben and John would work their way down to the shallow end diving under the buoyed rope separating the two parts of the pool. At first they would rest their elbows on the edge of the pool and pretend to be talking about something, maybe a summer job at the vegetable packing house. Maybe not. Eventually the girls would stop and would come over and start some conversation. Maybe a small rubber football would be thrown around, maybe not. But most days it the end it ended up in a…..

Chicken fight!

A chicken fight works best if certain rules are observed. The lower part to the two person team should be the stouter, stockier of the duo. This is why mixed doubles are the rule in really good recreational pool chicken fights. The upper part of the team should be agile and sinewy. With her fingers locked in her opponent’s fingers forearm strength and general flexibility are definite pluses. Twisting, torquing and wrenching all at once the goal is to knock part or all of the other team back into the water without going down yourself, or at least being the last to fall and submerge.

There isn’t anymore hormonally charged but theoretically more wholesome activity for two 14 year old boys and two 15 year old girls than water bound chicken fighting. Think about it; is there anything more sexual you can do while still being in open public in broad daylight than thrashing about the water in such embrace? Freud just kind of oozes from the imagery of these erect young figures writhing about in so much moisture, it was a teenage boy’s dream come true.

A willowy and breast endowed teenage girl would sit elevated above the water. Her smooth legs wrapped around a beefy teenage boy’s neck, her foot heels pressed into the top of his ribcage in the shallow water. Okay maybe it would have been the teenage boy’s dream if he was facing the other direction but still it wasn’t bad. Hey the water was warm and splashing was involved.

As I mentioned I was the fat kid standing off to the side, on the concrete sidewalk that surrounded the pool merely watching. Myopic but focused on the events transpiring I would just never be part of the action. I was fat not strong. Like the character in Portnoy’s Complaint I stayed on the sidelines and just watched.

Back and forth they went, twisting and turning, splashing and laughing. Mary Beth and Ben tipped back from a sudden drop followed by an upward push from John and May. Ben then crouched in a near squat planting his feet and steadied himself. On that rigid human oil derrick Mary Beth pushed May with more strength than I though she could have mustered. May leaned back at about a 70 degree angle to the water’s surface; it was almost the tipping point.

With a flex of her right shoulder and a push forward Mary Beth pushed forward sending May ass over head into the water. Lunging forward to complete this motion it happened. With that right arm extended almost straight out and now part of a 45 degree second side of a parallelogram with May’s falling body, Mary Beth’s left cup of her bikini bra fell open and there it was, her nipple.

It was wonderful. Assuredly it was the first non familiar nipple I had ever seen that wasn’t covered with a glossy coating incorporated into a body segmented by a tri-fold with staples in her abdomen located in the center of a magazine. As nipple’s go for me it was Plato’s concept of the ideal lying in a world somewhere beyond that tainted realm that our five sense bound selves inhabit. That wet perky puppy was perfection and beauty. It was the standard against which all nipples would be judged for years to come.

If this sounds like arrested development, it probably is, I am after all a man and nothing more. However I am not a pervert, well not unless it suits my purpose and everyone else involved is okay with it. But that wardrobe malfunction was magic and did something to me. (No I am not talking about that obvious thing that you are most likely thinking happened to me although that probably did also occur). That areola with it tiny little pill box center was a key to my future of sorts.

A quick glimpse pretty much confirmed to me I was heterosexual and that I wanted to see more nipples. All the key clues were there, a quick pumping pulse, my heart rate was surging. I had a slack jaw and was overcome by a transient catatonic state. I think I kept staring at the same spot although the water fight was over for a good minute afterwards completely lost in a place that you visit only once in a lifetime.

That flash motivated me. If I was going to see another nipple I would have to lose weight. And lose weight I did. I think by the end of that summer I had dropped about 35, maybe 40 pounds. Hey it was a fair tradeoff for the hairy palms. My mind understood its biological drive was to see more of those puppies and that looking like the fat kid from a Gary Larson cartoon wasn’t going to get me there. That little pencil eraser shaped piece of flesh surrounded as it was by goose bumps would never been seen by me again without change. Okay while I never saw that particular breast again the changes I made did eventually work out. I mean I am married and have kids that are putatively mine.

As this “damn short movie” has sped by, that day and in fact most of the experiences I have recounted here had slipped from my mind. But having found out thanks to Facebook that Mary Beth is still alive and kicking I have been reminded of that place, and of the hormones that rage through the bodies of young teens. What a charge to remember that time and the absolute energy tied into the building sexual tension of my then young body. The flash that day was a pebble that started a cascade that became a landslide.

In closing I guess three things come to mind. First I am despite my comments to the contrary an oversexed pervert, prostate or not. However, I am simply going to put that conclusion in a mental box and shove it onto a mental shelf if the back of my mind’s garage with a post it that says look at this later. Second, it makes me think that some much of lives are determined by chance occurrences, insignificant things that are catalysts for major change and shifts in life’s direction. Had I not seen that nipple on that day at that moment I might not have been so electrified by hormones sufficient to motivate weight loss. Of course there were other factors but what was the tipping point? Finally I am certain that much more of our lives are hard wired by the structure and sequencing of guanine and the other elements of the genetic code that we are willing to acknowledge. Hormones and hard wired instincts are the drivers of our live to a far greater extent that our intellect will allow us to believe.

In closing I offer a simple thanks to Mary Beth and to Mary Beth’s nipple for that one flash that helped changed my life.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

The Reason for the Last Post


Mildred A. Savage (nee Asher) age 81 of Carneys Point died Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at her home.

Born in Pedricktown she was the daughter of the late James D., Sr. and Eithel Asher.

Mrs. Savage was predeceased by her husband, Harry L. Savage, Jr. in 1970 and three brothers and five sisters.

Surviving is her daughter, Laura of Carneys Point, brother Forrest Ebb Asher and his wife Bettie, brother William C. Asher and his wife Edna, sister Lillian A. "Kitty" Gessner and her husband Dick, sister Kathryn Youker and her husband Nathaniel "Doc", sister Emma Huber "Sugar" and her husband Bill and many, many nieces and nephews.

A graveside service will be held 9 AM Saturday at the First Baptist Church Cemetery, S. Main St., Woodstown. There will be no viewing.


For those of you who don't do Facebook here were my comments from today.

So it was 1973 and I was about as myopic as they come. I had just turned seventeen and it was time to get my learner’s permit. My father had taken me to DMV in Salem and much to his surprise and mine I qualified visually to get a temporary license. Funny thing is that most people with nystagmus don’t ever get a license. (And that is probably a good thing).

Well the allotted time went past and I went back to center to take the road test. My skill set was very shaky. I mean I got through most of the test barely okay and then at the end came the parallel parking part. As I worked through the road evaluation I was driving a Ford LTD which if you don’t remember is a big butt boat. To pass the test you were allowed no more than two demerits or whatever the negative marks on the road test sheet were called. From best I could tell I had gotten to the parking with no real negative marks. There might have been some neutrals or averages, well probably a good number of them but there were no negatives yet.

No matter how much I tried in practice in the weeks leading up to the road test I was never able to parallel park. I kind of thought what would happen was that I would just take the hit on the parking and get the lecture and then skate away license in hand.

Well at the appointed moment came for me to park I backed up and there is no easy way to say, my car crushed the cone. The analyst rating my skills said in a stern tone “You hit a cone, stop!” Me (in a faux ‘who me’ voice): “What cone?” Him: “Two demerits, one for the parallel parking and one for INATTENTION”. Oh well. He gave me the 'you failed' sheet and I was on my way, head down and in full mope.

I was crushed. I wasn’t sure how or if I would ever pass the driving test. However this is where my Aunt Mildred came in. When she heard my tale of woe she very calmly said “The problem is you are using too big a car for the test, you need to be using my Maverick”. Mildred had a pale blue Maverick that was way smaller than the LTD.

Each night for a couple of weeks we would go out to the parking lot behind the First Baptist Church in P-City. Once there under my very calm and patient Aunt’s tutelage I would work on my parking using the painted lined parking spaces there as templates for parked vehicles.

Aunt Mildred was not just patient she was very patient with me and very affirming despite my numerous destructions of imaginary cars. She never got mad; she just would say things like “You know what, you’ll get it right next time, that’s just the way you have to think”. It took time but eventually I really did get the hang of it.

When I took the test the next time I passed. In fact when I got to the parallel parking I wasn’t even freaked out about it. Parking was never something I ever worried about over all the years that I did keep driving.

What I am trying to say is that my Aunt Mildred had a very big heart at least toward me. She had a nice smile, a twinkle in her eye and a mischievous laugh. She died on Wednesday night and she will be missed.

Thinking about loss

On a day when loss has been a big part of what I have been dealing with I thought it made sense to post probably the best song I know on the topic. Billy Bragg wrote it about the passing of his father.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Then, Now and the Green World

Then: Green moist dark trees are crowding over the road. Sandy fields on either side seem to be completely filled with tomato plants and eggplants and asparagus. Migrant camps where Spanish speaking men rest between days spent in the fields with asparagus forks bending over and sweating and cursing in staccato bursts in that foreign language I will never learn.

Now: Fading paint is blistering on thin wooden slats that were the outside walls of those decaying migrant shacks that remain. They seem to have torn most of the shacks down. It is a cycle and has been going on for years. Merle Haggard even wrote a song about it.

Leave 'em up and the kids will just smoke dope and screw in there. Frames that once housed men in search of hard wages are empty now, are scary now. Shacks with screen doors with no screens in ‘em just barely hanging on with rusty hinges do become the stuff of nightmares, imagined and real. Punks, weed and the dark space inside create a rent in reality where laws and civilized behavior fade away for a few moments or hours. More than one story has been written about someone who got killed in one of 'em.

Then: For the most part the road is a treat to open eyes. These eyes are bright and dart fast from side to side trying to take it all in. These eyes are looking at it with a focus not as yet jaded by life and its lessons.

Two lanes wind through the cultivation past farm markets and towns and cross roads that have been here for a hundred and fifty years or more. The fields and orchards are verdant and there is the smell of raw stuff of real life in the air. Big machinery unique to packing peaches or apples or other fruit stands there like an enigma for the little engineers in the back of cars whizzing by to dream about late at night when they have reached their beach side resting places.

Now: The old packing houses are folding they couldn't compete with foreign competition. Conveyor belts and other packing machines are rusting. Their orange and pitted forms remain an enigma, a very different enigma.

When you have passed through fields of South Jersey on the way to the beach you smell life. It is almost sexual the aroma. All these many years later when I smell a real tomato not one of those plastic things you find in the hypermarket (you know the ones they won't bruise if you bounce them off the floor) I am right back to a stretch of road somewhere near Bridgeton, NJ looking at those tomato plants that are everywhere.

Then: It is a hot July day and I am pulling my legs over the vinyl seats just to hear the sucking sound that follows. Leg farts. I glance out the window, open to let the air in and there is a color to the sun that is over powering. It is a yellow dusty sun that is hot and growing hotter. The road winds and I whine "How much longer till we get there?" Getting no real answer I look around and the comics of the Philadelphia Inquirer are shoved down onto the backseat floorboard. Maybe I will read "Dondi" again or "Steve Canyon" to kill another minute.

This ride is an explosion of sensual experience. There is the smell of the old gasoline mix, it is intoxicating. You don't smell that anymore do you? The heat comes from the engine and the sun and the blacktop road. A three inch speaker on the front dash is blasting out "Nowhere to Run" and it sounds good. But why is the old man letting Motown play? He doesn't like their music. And then I lie down and stare up at an angle and we hit that canopy of trees.

Green and going on for 10 or 20 miles I am not sure how long it will be but eventually we will pass the old church. Maybe we will stop and I will get to look at the old cast iron headstones. What a weird thing those are. But the Green part of the ride it is cooling and it is not long until I will be at the beach. Looking up at the trees in memory as I whiz by in Ford Galaxy 500, a long gone ghost, I am deep into the green world.