The River Will Find Its Way

January 20, 2019

Eulogy for James R. Gregory

May 9, 1938 – December 29, 2018

First United Methodist Church

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

One of the consoling things about a sad time like this, is remembering old stories.

Jessie, Tim, and I never knew my Dad’s Dad, he died a few years before we were born. But a few years ago, I asked my Dad to tell me about his Dad, and the very first anecdote he told seems fitting in today’s weather.

My Grandfather’s name was Judge Belle Gregory. (Judge was his first name, not a title.) Everyone called him Jay. Jay, like legions of Akronites, came up from Kentucky, by himself, to work in the rubber mills. So we know very little about the Gregory side of the family.

The very first story my Dad told me, was that my grandfather Jay was a hard worker. When it snowed in Akron, and the streetcars were not, and the High Level bridge was inaccessible, my grandfather walked all the way from my Dad’s house in the River Estates in Cuyahoga Falls to the family business, the Hosfield Shoe Store on the North Hill of Akron, at Temple Square. That’s about 13 miles.

That seems to be an apt story for today. I think my Dad, and his Dad, would appreciate your efforts to be here today in this inclement weather. And so do we.

Eulogy: The River Finds its Way

My Dad relished growing up along the Cuyahoga River.

It was a newly built neighborhood called The River Estates, where he lived with his father Jay, his Mom Hildegarde, his sister Sue, and his brothers Grover, Mickey, and Jeff. His grandmother Caroline also came to live with them, bringing all of her many books, and her dictionary stand, which held the family Bible.

During my Dad’s childhood, The River Estates consisted of just a few dozen brick houses, constructed in the 1920s.

The Great Depression and the Great War brought a stop to further construction. The rest was oak trees and wilderness, and half shells of unfinished houses. A pickle factory at Hudson Drive and Gaylord Grove scented the entire woods and neighborhood with the aroma of brine, which considering the state of the river at the time, was probably a good thing. All of this was my Dad’s fascinating playground, practically his backyard, and he loved every inch of it.

My Dad and his friends played in the ruins of those unfinished houses. They canoed to Goose Egg Island, swam in the swimming hole at Kelsey Creek, and dove from the high dive into the newly constructed Olympic size pool at Water Works Park.

And, oh, that house on Oak Park Boulevard.

In a family history my Great Aunt Miriam wrote, the house on Oak Park Boulevard "was big and elegant compared to any house I had known, and the Gregories opened their home on holidays and we all ate and had such a good time." (My grandma Hildegarde was an amazing cook.)

There were photo Christmas cards with my Dad’s older Sister, Sue, playing then baby grand piano my grandfather Jay had bought her.

My grandfather ran the prosperous shoe store my great grandfather Henry Louis Hosfield founded. It was said that the Hosfield Shoe Store on North Hill was not only a purveyor of fine footwear for the entire family, but also the sort of place neighbors used to like to just stop in just to say hello.

There was always a pot of coffee in the back storeroom, a warm stove, and usually a card game going on.

My Dad helped out in the shoe store as a teenager, and I have to think that experience of being helpful to customers, of keeping the shelves well-stocked, and making the store a home away from home for both customers and employees was one of the reasons he loved his “retirement” job at the Home Depot so much.

That, and he got to perform his legendary cheerleading skills. (He is somewhat Youtube famous for his Home Depot cheer.)

But those good times on Oak Park Boulevard could not last forever.

The pressures of running the family business, took toll on my grandfather Jay.

He had a debilitating stroke at 40.

The Gregorys lost the store.

The Gregorys lost the house.

By 1954, the world of my Dad’s family had shattered.

But you would never know it from my Dad’s High School yearbook.

The entire inside back and front covers were devoted to a day in the life of Jim Gregory.

There is Jimmy in the cafeteria line.

There is Jim in the school play.

There is James presiding over the student council. There is Jim Gregory in his letterman jacket, with letters from three varsity sports.

These were not empty resume building activities. Jim put his entire heart into every thing he ever did.

In the fall of 1954, above a big picture of my Dad with full game face on, the Falls News posted a preview of the Black Tiger football season:

They wrote, “Crashing the line tomorrow evening when the Black Tigers meet Akron Central in the Greater Akron Preview will be halfback Jim Gregory. Now in his second year of varsity football, Gregory is known as a fine competitor on both offense and defense. A junior at Falls High, he is oftentimes called the “spark-plug” of the team.”

That was my Dad. Never do anything halfway. Play offense as well as defense.

His freshman year, before he made the varsity team, he changed his uniform quickly and also played the trombone (badly) at halftime in the marching band.

Forgive me for just a moment if I brag just a little bit on my Dad.

And my dad was so resilient.

He had the strength of a large and loving extended family. The Hosfield, Gregory and Phillips cousins have a closeness that is inspiring to those of us from later, more dispersed generations. They continue to hold each other up through difficult times.

Taking time off to help his family, and earn tuition money, my Dad worked hard to put himself through college. But he did, twelve years after his high school graduation, graduate, with honors, from Ohio State University.

And what a great Dad he was.

Dropping one of my friends off after a weekend at Camp Manatoc, when my Dad was the Cubmaster, my friend turned to me and said, “You are SO lucky. Mr.Gregory gets to be your Dad every day.”

I wish you could hear him read a story. My brother and sister and I would pile on his lap. To hear him read the Tale of Benjamin Bunny was to be transported to another world.

But that was just the start of it. Our house was so full of books. Wall to ceiling with them.

And such good, and difficult books they were.

My Dad had a complete set of 1954 Encyclopedia Britannica. Onion skin paper, small print, smelled of must.

He always preferred that we do our school reports from them, rather than the more mundane World Book encyclopedias they had in the school library.

Learn the hard words first. That was my Dad’s mantra.

When I was in the second grade, our Sunday school teacher asked us to bring a bible to class every week. The church would give us a bible in third grade, up until then we had to fend for ourselves.

My Dad offered me his King James Bible, from North Hill Church of Christ. I loved the arcane language, and the fact that it was my Dad’s.

He said it was better to learn the hard words first, and that they were more poetic. My Dad absolutely loved poetry.

Likewise, he made my brother, my sister and I take our drivers test on a stick shift.

He said, someday in life you might be required to drive a tractor.

My Dad’s boyhood in the wilds of the River Estates made an impression on him. He wanted my brother and I to have a similar experience.

He drove us down to a used lumberyard near the airport. We bought sheets of pre-used plywood and recycled 2 X 4’s. We brought them home, treated them with Thompson’s Water Seal and redwood stain from Clarkins. My Dad instructed us to dig the footers, two feet deep. That was the extent of his involvement. The subsequent design and construction was entirely up to Tim and I.

That clubhouse stood, probably to the chagrin of our 7^th Street neighbors, for well over two decades.

Many in this room have probably attended a sporting event with my Dad. It could be his beloved Ohio State Buckeyes. It could be the Black Tigers. It could be any of the sporting events featuring any of his six grandsons.

My Dad was an exuberant cheerleader.

He was not an obnoxious sports fan. Never dissed the referees, never criticized the opposing team. He merely shouted his encouragement. His LOUD encouragement. And the nicknames he made up for all of his favorite players. (Many of whom were his six grandsons.)

One of my earliest memories is getting to go to Friday night football games at Clifford Stadium. My Dad was a volunteer ticket taker in the reserved seating section. I was a very small child, and so excited that I would get to help my Dad tear ticket. I didn’t understand anything that was happening on the field.

But I remember my Dad’s unbridled enthusiasm.

He hollered for the hometown players by name when one of them made a good play.

He cheered for the marching band. He cheered for the cheerleaders.

He sang the Alma Mater with full throated gusto, loudly and off key: "As we stand with heads uncovered, on this hollowed ground...."

In retrospect absolutely nothing was at stake. The Black Tigers were rarely in contention for anything, we didn't know any of the players personally. What mattered was that my Dad was fully present, in that moment, with his son.

So much of my childhood was like that: epic, important, memorable, because my Dad was there, and he made it seem that way.

I am sure most everyone in this room has had one of those magic Jimmy moments, when he cheered you on, and made you feel like the most important person in the world. He made everything seem so epic.

My Mom’s birthday is December 21^st, and December 20^th was always an epic journey. In my memory it was always a blinding snowstorm, and the second longest night of the year. But there we were, braving slippery Smith Road Hill, on the way to Summit Mall, so he could get my Mom a gift at Polsky’s. He loved my Mom so much. And wanted her to know it. And she had such enduring love for him. Rarely does a love story in real life look anything like a Disney fable. My Mom and Dad’s 56 years of marriage is a love story in real life.

It sounds like a parody of a Barbara Walters interview question:

If you were a river, what river would you be?

Most of us would probably choose a big river, or an important river, or a wild and scenic river.

But at the end of the day, most of us are probably more like my Dad’s beloved Cuyahoga: a small river, a twisted river, a river not always entirely sure of its course. A river sometimes prone to catch on fire.

That’s the risk of growing up in a river town: you fall in love with the river that is, not the river as you think it should be.

That my Dad could find so much beauty in such a flawed and damaged river is one of the great enduring lessons of my life.

When my Dad fell in love with the Cuyahoga River the 1940s, there were pipes of sewage flowing directly into it.When he taught us to love it in the 1970s, it was full of toxic chemicals.  

A poet once told us: We must try to praise this mutilated world.

My Dad most certainly did.

Today the river is cleaner than it has been in any of our lifetimes.

It is looking increasingly likely that some of us will live to see the big concrete dam come down, the natural cascading falls the Native Americans called “Coppicaw” restored. That is something my Dad would have loved to see.

We all miss Jim so much.

It’s like going down to the river, and seeing that your favorite landmark boulder is suddenly  gone.

In in the boulders absence, the river has changed its course. But the river finds its way.

And so will we, better people because we were lucky enough to know Jim, and feel the warm embrace of his exuberant love for us all.

Meeting Pete Seeger

Me, far right, in the Gulf at Galveston, on the road to the Kerrville Folk Festival, sometime in the 90s.

News of Pete Seeger’s death flowed from my car radio this frigid January morn, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had met him.

I wracked my brain trying to remember where it had been. Which of the music festivals I’d attended in the early-to-mid-90s? I’d seen Pete at venues large and small, alongside famous headliners and newbie singer songwriters nervously crooning at their first festival gig.

Did I ever go back stage? Did Pete ever come around the campfire late at night to join the all-night sing along?

Truth is, I never “met” Pete.  Except through his songs. Which, the more I learn about Pete, the more I realize, is how you get to know the man.

I remember Pete taking the stage, beanpole tall and lean, but with nearly perfect posture. His voice was thin and reedy, but clarion clear. Every word of every song was audible. These songs were stories, and he didn’t want you to miss a syllable.

Truth be told, at the first festival, when I saw Pete Seeger was scheduled to take the stage, I thought, this might be a good time to make the long hike to the primitive campground latrines.

I was there to discover “new” music: contemporary singer songwriters with a fresh take on the issues of the day. Did I really need to hear a septuagenarian creakily warble “This Land is Your Land?” (You couldn’t come of age in the seventies without having had at least one well-meaning camp counselor attempt to impose her rendition of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” on you at least one too many times.)

But for whatever reason I stuck around.

And as the long tall man with the well-worn banjo offered up those old familiar songs, the ones I had sung in elementary school music classrooms and around campfire circles (always accompanied by a teenage guitarist with his eyes glued to the fingering chart in a Roy Clark Big Note Guitar Book) I realized, those songs weren’t so old. Or so familiar.

On that afternoon I was hearing Pete’s songs from a makeshift festival stage, as if for the very first time.

Hearing those songs so clearly, in Pete’s well-worn but never strident voice, sung with such earnest clarity, it was impossible to not be moved. And yet Pete Seeger never seemed to be working too hard, or trying too much. He just sang.

And it was joyful.

And Pete never seemed more joyful than when the audience sang along. You almost felt like his whole long and remarkable life was culminating in this moment, in this place, with THIS rendition of “If I Had A Hammer.”

And whether it was one of Pete’s chestnuts or some obscure sea chantey with an interesting folkloric pedigree, to experience Pete “line out” a song to an audience was to be clay in the hands of a (very tall) master sculptor.

A sing along with Pete was almost enough to erase the memory of the strident camp counselor balladeer (with her music stand and fingering chart, and her helpful assistant counselor holding up Magic Marker lyrics on a big butcher paper scroll.) Although I am sure if those camp counselors had  joined Pete on the festival stage that day, he would have received them just as warmly, and sing along with them just as joyously, as if Odetta had joined him for a double bill.

And so, in a sense, I suppose it is fair to say I DID once meet Pete Seeger:

On a dusty trampled hillside amphitheatre, in the Hill Country of East Texas.

Along with 50,000 others.

Each one of us felt like Pete was singing just to us, with a twinkle in his eye.

And each one of us probably went breathlessly home to tell someone: I MET Pete Seeger this week!

And thousands upon thousands of us, who "met" Pete at thousands upon thousands of gigs, in thousands upon thousands of dusty amphitheatres, when we heard the news this morning, probably wracked our brains trying to remember when exactly it was that we met Pete.

The River Finds its Way

These days in my old home town you will find us gathered by the river.

We were used to the river as it always was: pooled in stagnant mire behind a sheer cascade over a concrete dam.

For many of us, this was the river, and these watery cliffs, where the water shrieked in perpetual cascades over concrete cliffs, were the falls.

But suddenly everything is different: the Poisodon barge has done its work. The concrete enclosures breached, the river newly dances. 

Briskly.

Twisted.

Loud.

The river finds its way.

Beneath where it once pooled, you see the muck and the flotsam, and every so often a persistent murky pool marooned on high ground. Up in the trees, you see water-borne debris from where the river crested, its highest level ever, a few months ago before the dam came down.

The river seems newly sparkly, and urgent, as it twists about in its old bed, finding its course.

It's alive and it's loud. It is tentative, and yet it sups a new-found freedom.

Finding a new course, which is its old course. 

Boulders revealed, along with rusted steel drums and concrete block and bricks and sycamore roots.

Somewhere down river, past the Prospect Street bridge, after the river bends, and still under water, are the ferny grottoes and the mysterious boulders, and the geological wonders that generations ago brought legions on steam trains, and just beyond that, the stairstep Great Falls the natives called Coppacaw. Our forebears chose to bury those cascades under a reservoir, behind a dam built to pull trolley cars by traction along red brick streets.

But for now it is enough that this one little dam has come down, and like the river itself, we seem tentative and unsure, somewhat like orphan ducklings bottle-fed in a backyard wading pool, and then let loose in free flowing water for the very first time.

Kids who fished off the old wooden boardwalk, in the deep murky pools, find that they can now wade in to the rapids, and cast their lines in the current.

We are not used to how LOUD the river is as it twists and falls, and it almost, at certain points, drowns out the constant blur of traffic, on the state highway whose concrete pilings pierce our twisted river's sandstone gorge.

We get used to things. 

And then notice, suddenly, when they change.

Something as simple and as subtle as the sound of water, and the rate at which it flows.

It was always one way, and then suddenly, it is different.

That is why you will find us, in my old hometown, on these clear August days that feel like May, down by they river.

We are twitchy and expectant, wondering what is just beyond the bend, and marveling at the tenacity of this river, which in spite of us, and the concrete we pour, finds its way.

Briskly.

Loudly.

Singing over sandstone, unleashed.

The Persistence of Geese

Suddenly, in a day, everything has changed amongst the birds.

Winter was a time to hunker down.

Enormous flocks of Canada geese wintered with us, slumbering en masse at night on the iced lake, by day grubbing voraciously through a mantle of snow to pluck victuals from the turf. In their wake, a cacophony of churned earth and webbed foot prints.

Of a January vineyard morning, I would crunch through diamond-crusted snow before sunrise.

Coming to a small patch of open water, and the flotilla of ice where our swans slumber, I feel like I've entered a secret avian dream world: All is peace and crystalline beauty.

The swans allow a small trusted bevy of geese to sleep amongst them on their floating bed chamber, the rest banished to the lakeshore with the ducks. How very wise, I think, to have these squawky sentries close at hand during the vulnerable silent hours.

During these peaceful winter mornings, I observe that our ducks never sleep on the ice, except when there is a downy blanket of snow. On a snowy January morning, I arrive at sunrise to find our entire duck colony asleep on snowy ice. As the sun rises, they arise and begin chattering amongst themselves, waddling busily on the ice. (I think I could be content to watch ducks walk on ice all day.)

But change is afoot in the vineyard, the quickening of the year.

Skunk cabbage shoots rise steamily from the creekbed. Gliding raptors, aloft in a sky that is suddenly cerulean, dangle entrails of branches. On a rainy morning I notice our pair of mute swans display a newfound interest in golden willow branches that litter the lawn.

These quickening days: Behold! And turn your eyes to the March firmament:

To the South, golden rays, impossible blue skies, fluffy white clouds.

Northward, impending wintry nebula, dark and foreboding.

Snow flurries mix with drizzle and warmth.

This fleeting season, marked by the mysterious arrival of impossibly vivid ducks, with crimson necks.

Raw, windswept March, when you experience all of the seasons in just one day. The mysterious crimson ducks flit about on a choppy windswept lake for a just a few days, then disappear as quickly as the whiteout flurries that materialize to displace a mid-afternoon sliver of golden sun and clear blue sky.

The day of the crimson ducks marked a noticable change in avian behavior.

All winter everyone got along, but today our territorial male swan was bound and determined to keep a pair of Canada geese from nesting under a cherry tree. I could swear they are the exact same pair that nested here last year, under a dead pine tree. I christened them Irmgard and Heinrich, in homage to a certain Germanic persistence they seemed to possess.

As the days lengthen, gone are the large colonies of ducks who gobbled at the swan chow bowl on frigid winter days.

Gone the riotous gaggle of geese who slumbered on the ice by night and rooted riotously through vineyard rows for daytime grub.

Gone the marauding robins who came out of nowhere to strip to bare twigs a crabapple tree which had somehow held its fruit through Christmas.

On these transitory lion/lamb March days, the birds have all paired off:

The swans daub a nest from mud and leaves and willow branches in a swampy finger of the lake.

An iridescent mallard and his handsome brown speckled bride toddle about the shrubbery at sunrise, looking for a place where in a few weeks she may deposit her eggs.

A pair of elegant mourning doves coo beside a decaying old grape press in the rose bushes, seemingly grateful for the now bare earth on which to roost.

There is something to be said for a day tending a vineyard.

Even if it is a day that starts with pelting sleet and a glaze of ice. Especially if it is a day during that magic month when the year quickens perceptibly, and avian behavior takes a marked seasonal turn. An entire complex avian world goes about its seasons on the shore of this lake, and I feel privileged to be here to watch it unfold.

Throughout it all, in every season, a solitary Great Blue Heron swoops overhead, knowingly.

And I kind of get the feeling the heron is orchestrating the whole thing.

But as exciting as it is, to perceive each day advance into a new season, and sense a new warmth, and a hopeful stirring amongst the paired off water fowl, I find myself missing just a little bit those solitary winter days, and magic sunrise mornings, when an ever-changing cast of migratory waterfowl bedded down peaceably on a pallet of ice.

And I can't get past the persistence of these geese, this single pair who have staked their claim in hostile terrain.

Last year they built a nest under a dead pine tree. A tree crew felled the pine carcass, and ground it to mulch.

But Irmgard and Heinrich were back the next day, building a new nest atop the wood chips.

This year, after the rest of the wintering Canadian horde has departed, they have their sights on a gnarled old cherry tree. The grub around its exposed roots, roost in various positions at the base of its woodpecker-dimpled trunk, taste a few shriveled cherries that have fallen to the grass. (They seem to be practically measuring the place for draperies.)

Periodically, our resident male swan takes a break from nest building, and chases the geese off the water, with impossibly powerful strokes of his enormous webbed feet.

He overtakes them near the shore, and they retreat to the cherry tree.

The swan hurumphs himself out of the water, and charges toward them with his ungainly, but still frightening (and surprisingly speedy) gait.  Geese and swan charge through pine bowers and vineyard rows, but the geese are fleet on land, and the swan seems to know his strengths, so he never advances too far from the lake.

This goes on for hours, a pursuit by water, by air, and by land.

These placid geese seem mostly nonplussed, and the swan seems to realize he is mostly just making a point.

Eventually the geese will lay three or four large ovoid eggs in a nest of pine needles and down, at the base of the cherry tree. The swan will continue his aggression, ceasing sometime in June when his own mate is off her twiggy willow throne, and order will be restored to the peaceable avian kingdom.

Then the geese will sun themselves with the swans on the grassy lake shore on languid summer afternoons, the ducks hunkered and chortling amongst them, as they await the arrival of the winter hordes, and perhaps gossip just a little, about the mysterious crimson ducks, who came for just a few fleeting March days.

Crystal Palaces

It's the fourth Sunday in December in my old hometown, and snow has finally fallen, for the first time in two hundred and eighty three days.  

  
Snow changes things. Grass, for many weeks a sodden mire, is now fleece topped, with just a few mud patches visible. Gravestones and idle automobiles and inert things made of colder stuff have acquired a more impressive wintry cap. 

Things, finally, look just as they should on these shortest days of the year, when the noontime sun blazes no warmer than the moon.

On the old public square, the Congregational church heaves a snow-dusted spire of dull green patina toward a bright December sky. Across the Christmas tree-studded median, in the white marble-framed picture window of the public library, St. Nick waves incessantly to quiescent Victorian carolers.

In the parking lot of the former Sparkle Market on the old Indian portage trail, a few brittle Christmas trees linger, forlorn, under strings of bare incandescent bulbs.

Over on Church Square, the giant hackberry tree has shed all of its leaves. 

In the Methodist church, handbells and carols and ethereal melodies from a loaner Steinway piano, shrouded in Poinsettias presented in honor of the birth of Christ, waft out the wooden doors and into the city beyond. Mingling with the aroma of Schwebel's bread baking, these are the sights and sounds and fragrances of December, in my old hometown.

These could be the sights and sounds of any hometown in the temperate Eastern United States, perhaps in New England or anywhere across the Alleghenies where transplanted Yankees built Greek Revival churches on village greens over which elm trees would eventually tower, and then fall.

But there is something different here, hidden, unless you know where to find it:

Below the Vaughn Mansion. 

Across from the fire station. 

Behind the Sheraton Hotel where a great water powered mill once churned industrial turbines.

Underneath concrete pilings supporting the ceaseless whir of interstate traffic.

Shrouded by scrub brush and Ailanthus trees, here, our hidden river carves its knurly course, imperceptibly deeper.

Our Main Street was called Front Street, because it fronted this vital watery course, although by the time of my childhood, you'd be hard pressed to know it, as automobile dealerships, tool and die shops, a bowling alley, and cocktail lounges fronted this tawdry avenue. 

Even still, there was the stub of an old bridge, called the Prospect Street bridge, which jutted out over where the river began its rapid descent and dramatic curve north, and on winter days we would trundle over to go look at icicles: such a simple winter pleasure. 

...

Last winter our town kicked off a year-long Bicentennial celebration, with a Winter Festival downtown. There was ice skating on a refrigerated rink. Ice carving contests. The ceremonial tapping of a specially brewed Bicentennial Ale.

All is festive and bright, but on a whim, I decide to walk a block south, to see if the icicles are still there.

While hundreds revel within earshot, mine are the only footsteps on the wooden boardwalk that descends below the tree line, down a sandstone chasm the old timers called "The Glens."

Descending deeper, the drone of traffic disappears, until all you hear is the crooked river dancing briskly on its bed of smooth gray shale. 

Gazing up, walls of Sharon Conglomerate sandstone, studded with quartz pebbles, range in color from gray to tawny to gold to black. And everywhere that water drips, at every crevice and pore, a magnificent crystalline spear, the perfect inversion of the Congregational church's spire, points not toward the crevice of blue sky above, but toward sparkling brisk waters below.

This unusually bright winter afternoon is almost over, and rays of the expiring sun illumine the icicles of the Eastern gorge wall. I pause to admire the illumination of icicles subtly colored by minerals seeping through from some deep source. 

I look ahead to where the river turns course and disappears, at a point where a huge boulder, covered in Canadian hemlock and mosses and ferns that should only grow in more northerly climes, marks the transition of the Cuyahoga from south flowing river to one that runs north.

And suddenly this winter idyll is interrupted, as one icicle after another crashes dramatically into swift flowing water: just as the winter sun is about to set, it has warmed the icicles to their perfect breaking point.

On this winter afternoon, I am so grateful to know this secret place where the river bends, so thankful to have been bundled up for those childhood sojourns where we went seeking majestic places in our own backyard.

Decades later, I learn that in Victorian times excursion trains brought thousands each day to these very Highbridge Glens, where they descended picturesque staircases to reach a riverside promenade, crossed gurgling rapids on swinging bridges, and sought out caverns and grottoes to which they gave fantastical names. 

 In the winter, they called these very cavern walls, just a few blocks from my parents house, the Crystal Palace.

This quirky, hidden river is the living soul of my old hometown, the reason people settled in these unlikely parts.

The simple pleasure of walking out on a bridge, to look at icicles, is one of many simple winter pleasures that I fondly recall on these darkest days of the year, whenever the first snow falls:

Being bundled up in more layers than seems possible, feet encased in three pairs of socks, bread bags, and rubber galoshes, to be  pulled by Dad on a sled down the middle of Seventh Street. Tim falls backward, so immobilized by snow pants and parka, that he is a helpless turtle on his back. 

Donning double-bladed skates to ice skate clumsily on chunky ice at the Gorge, where water was impounded to flood a field in a Depression-era ice rink, and the best part was singing damp mittens on the rusty iron warming stove.

Epic December journeys to Lancaster, Ohio,  the Plymouth Volare station  wagon scented with Thermos-warmed coffee, and a highlight was stopping at an old country store at the junction of state route 23, to see the purported last black bear of the Ohio frontier, living out his desolate golden years in an odoriferous cage.

Decorating the Christmas tree to tunes from old scratchy records spinning carols, on Mom's maple cabinet stereo, no homemade ornament to homely to earn a place on the tree.

Dad pulling a volume of the Best Loved Poems of the American People from the overflowing bookshelves, and we sat, enthralled, as just his words and flawless narration brought the saga of Casey, and the despair of the denizens of Mudville, to vivid life.

These winter memories are the crooked knurly river of my memory.  They are always there, like our silent hidden river, and I am so fortunate to be able to call them up, to have them enliven every Christmas season and remind me of simple pleasures which form the craggy sandstone bedrock of who I am.

We sought out the icicles.

We skated on rutted ice.

We made a sledding hill out of an almost imperceptible backyard slope.

These memories and experiences are the Crystal Palaces, the great treasures that so many people seek, in all the wrong places, because they don't know that the most amazing things are often the simplest ones, and that sometimes it takes a welcome cloak of muffling snow, to blot out unnecessary distractions, and to inspire the introspection that these darkest days of the year require, in order to to find the hidden river, and the crystal palaces, that were right there all along.

A Memory of Walnut Trees

Certain older people of my youth knew where the good trees were.

For my grandmother in Southern Ohio, the hickory trees halfway up the slope of Mt. Pleasant merited a journey. Clutching brown paper Kroger bags we debark from the brick path behind her house, down the alley, up a crumbling and slightly mysterious set of steps at the base of the mount.

Excited, we cross the threshold to a well-trodden wood. Lover-carved tree boles. Dirt bike ruts. Spongy mushrooms or jack-in-the pulpit or doll eye plants draw our eye. Somewhere off the spider grid of dusty trail, we pass an enormous grapevine swing, then a grove of ancient mountain laurel, and finally, the hickories.

Strewn on the slope there, what seemed like impossible riches. Vague memories of stout trees with wide canopies, perfectly formed. But below them, on the ground, the reason for our journey. We stuff the best ones, filling our Kroger bags and begin the journey down and homeward, heavy laden with hickory nuts.

Two my third grade eyes, my teacher had something of the aspect of an old country school marm, with an olive green upright piano in the corner of her classroom, upon which every morning she pounded out "My Country tis of Thee."

She'd then have us take out a single sheet of ruled theme paper, and fold it in two, three, or four columns, depending on the day's lesson. We were then to write ARITHMETIC ("A Rat In Tom's House Might Eat the Ice Cream") across the top, in our best block letters.

The first week of third grade, she led us out to a tiny swale in the front yard of our newish buff-colored brick school, and had us gather walnuts from a twin set of trees that grew there where the avenue swerved and then led down to the great falls at High Bridge Glen.

Dim memories of a certain reverie when she spoke of these trees, a certain hush and awe that she shared with other older relatives of mine, when they spoke of walnut trees. Impossibly slow growing. Incredible timber value. The strength, the exquisite grain of its heartwood.

Tales of old dingy furniture possessing magic beneath cracked layers of ill considered paint. Tales of widows swindled by unscrupulous lumbermen, felling ancient sentinel dooryard trees and offering but a fraction of their worth.

The gathering of walnuts on the schoolyard the first week of third grade was not part of any lesson plan that I recall. We weren't studying ecology, or native trees of Ohio, or botany. We simply gathered walnuts because Mrs. Reynolds knew that they were there, and wanted us to, as well.

For an old country woman, it wouldn't do for a thing of value and potential nourishment to moulder on the schoolhouse lawn, or be ground and flung by mower blade.She taught us that beneath their acrid tangy outer husks, an acid green with stiff quills of hair, you would find the sweet oily kernels. Ripping them open, we'd feel a tinge on our hands, pungent black sap mildly burning and staining our skin.

She warned us not to keep them too long in our brown paper sacks, they might rot and be eaten by worms.

This September, standing next to an old hedgerow, a walnut tree I had never noticed plunked her fruit to the ground. Suddenly, that bracing astringent aroma, and with it, a flush of schoolhouse memories.

As one acid green tennis ball after another fell to the ground, from branches decked in frond-like serrated leaves just beginning to turn gold, I was taken back to a time when I knew where the sweetgums stood, and the horse chestnuts, and the myriad oak trees with their various acorns.

All of these treasures dropping from the sky, there for the plucking, if you were lucky enough to know certain older people, who knew where the good trees stood.

Elegy for a Swan

Of a September sunrise, banks of lespedeza thunbergii drip bowers of pink pea blossoms over still water. A pair of white mute swans and their brood of adopted ducklings slumber on the lake shore, head under wing.

Four great blue heron ring the shore, perched equidistant on spindly leg. The moment I arrive, they take off in simultaneous prehistoric flight, rising on teradactyl wing into the misty vapor burning off toward the sun.

September's fleeting perfection. These goldenrod days.

But as the poet observed, nothing gold can stay.

This first day of October, our big male mute swan glides the lake slowly, emitting a plaintive wail.

The old folklore has it that the mute swan, Cygnus olor is silent its entire life, until at death it emits just one exquisite song: the distilled essence of a placid regal life.

I know nothing of this folkloric final song, but the Cygnus olor I have come to know are not mute. This spring, for example, our female swan honked plaintively, mourning shattered eggs she lovingly tended on her floating twiggy throne.

This first day of October, it is Giuseppe, our fierce male, who glides the lake emitting the saddest possible song.

This weekend his lifelong mate Gina dipped her long graceful neck below water for the last time.

Her buoyant corpse greets us this first October morning. Her mate for life circles the lake mournfully. Together, as a pair, each ensuing season they hone their skill, ferociously guarding their territory, warding off predators, defending their eggs in tandem.

Now she rests on these old Canton acres. We buried her beneath an arborvitae tree.

It seems wrong, somehow, she, a creature of grace and of water, moored to this pebbly ground.

The old timers say, the sudden arrival of a wild swan on your lake brings incredible luck.

And so this spring began, on this very pond. A perfect crystal morning. A great swooping of white wings. And then, suddenly, placidly gliding on the water, a new young male swan, a feisty cob, in the center of the lake.

Displays of strength ensue, as our old male swan with a bum foot fends off a potential rival. His pen swimming prettily, weighing her options.

Onto the ground the rival cobs toddle, an awkward charge through vineyard rows.

And suddenly of a bright spring morning, the intruder swan is gone, as quickly as he arrived, as if a phantasm, as if a fever dream.

Their idyl restored, our resident pair glide the lake once more in tandem: circles, pirouettes, a mirror reflection of elegant necks joined as a heart.

The tender chivalry of these blinding white birds, he placing bits of scratch feed below water for her to gracefully retrieve. She so gentle in the tending of her nest, a regal throne on which she enshrined herself for many lean months, on brittle eggs that never hatch, reaching to scrape sustenance from those low branches her long neck could reach.

The mutability of the swan.

Good fortune and the arrival of luck in spring.

Death and lament in autumn.

I know nothing of the fabled swan song, the mythic melody that arrives only just before the moment of death.

But this I know, these swans are not mute.

Twice this year I heard swans cry.

She, in April, over shattered eggs she lovingly tended.

He, in October, in lament for his mate, probably weakened, tending her eggs far too long after they should have hatched.

And so autumn ends in Canton, after a perfect golden September, a perfect sunrise moment that of course cannot stay.