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.

Guy Walks In To A Bar: Shine On, Cuyahoga Falls

A guy walks in to a bar on the Front Street of my old hometown.

Atop his head, perched askew, something that looks like an English barrister's wig. Slung over each shoulder, a canvas Akron Beacon Journal newspaper carrier bag. Each bag is stuffed full of plush animals.

Guy in an English barrister's wig inquires about a pay phone.

Discussion ensues: Used to be one at the Sparkle Market. Maybe Taylor Library? Used to be one at the Sohio station but that's torn down now.

Several cellular devices are proffered.

Guy in an English barrister's wig exits bar.

You know that guy?

Nah. Thought you did.

Nope.

Wonder what was up with the paperboy bags?

And then discussion returns to the Indians' abysmal summer.

Not a word about the barrister's wig. Or the stuffed animals. Or the anachronistic request for a payphone.

The other day, against form, I entered a debate on one of those interweb local news sites. The kind where people leave comments, spouting from cyber seclusion with the caps lock on.

Some recent local event had folks blathering about my old hometown. Generalizations: this was a retrograde place. Full of close-minded, ignorant, intolerant types.

I mentioned that although I rarely visit these interweb forums, and had only briefly skimmed the electronic rants that had folks atwitter, my experience out and about in this town where the river twists and drops extravagantly had always been that this is a place with a rather high incidence of, and tolerance for, eccentricity.

In fact, to me, it's the sort of place that almost seems to celebrate it.

This is a town where the beloved Grand Marshal of our 175th Anniversary parade was an octogenerian in a gold lame´ jumpsuit who tap danced part of the way down Broad Boulevard.

This is the kind of place, where, two nights after encountering the guy in an English barrister wig, in the very same block, in the middle of a busy downtown festival, a man in a filthy plush chicken suit plays the accordion. A few polite quarters are tossed in his case. Otherwise, nary an eyebrow is raised.

This is a city where generations of children recited Christmas wishes to a giant, angry, armless snowman, with flashing red eyes.

This is a city loomed over by a giant concrete Tower To Nowhere, unfinished for decades, perched behind a round Cathedral of Tomorrow, just blocks from a circular windowless office building, which was next to the junior high school, and shrouded with sand-cast concrete sculptures of naked ladies dancing.

In short, this is the sort of town that ends up giving the world DEVO.

I think our penchant to accept eccentricity, to think nothing of a guy walking in to a bar on a fine summer evening with a barrister's wig askew atop his head, has something to do with this being the kind of place where we've always kept close quarters.

Back when mills burgeoned along the raging river, this was a boomtown where everyone clustered in about six city blocks on either side of the waterfall.

After that, vast farms stretched to the mire of Northampton, so if you lived on one of the town lots you were cheek to jowl with your neighbors.

Our next boom came after the War. Closely set, basement-less Heslop homes filled the farmland, and classes of 900 or more graduated from the only place that could hold everyone, the enormous Cathedral of Tomorrow with its cross of ever-changing Technicolor, suspended magically from the ceiling.

No matter what you thought of your neighbor, more likely than not a thin asphalt driveway is all that separated your castle from his.

So many eccentric neighbors.

There was Ernie, rumored to be a millionaire, who lived in a tall ramshackle house next to Laconi's Pizza (where, for some reason, pickled green peppers were listed as "mangos" on the menu.) His wife kept pigeons in hutches, and swept the dirt yard clean with a broom every day.

Ernie made his rounds religiously each week, pulling a wagon atop which he had constructed an oversize wooden box. People would set out for him newspapers, cardboard, anything metal. Ernie had a day he hit each street, and the night before, residents left their items for him on the devil strip.

Ernie's shoes never had laces, and he always stomped the heels flat. He was a big man, with gray whiskers, and pants hitched up to his chest and belted with rope. He had a distinctive shuffle, making his way down gravel and tar side streets bounded by deep ditches and towering silver maples lined up in rows along the devil strip.

Rival corner groceries hunkered on either corner of Grant and Meriline Streets, tended by cantankerous proprietresses. If Mrs. Patrick saw you so much as darken the door of Mrs. Jones's place across the corner, she would scold you and forbid you from buying anything from her for a week. (Even if the only reason you went to Mrs. Jones was because Mrs. Patrick was out of milk that day.)

In the same block, The Red Haired Lady and The Black Haired Lady lived in small cottages next door to each other, and hated each other's guts. Nevertheless, each night they met on the sidewalk and walked together, noisily arguing, until one peeled off to the Boulevard Tavern and one went next door to the Chestnut Beer Garden. (Each had been banned from the other bar.)

There was Kenny, who rode a bike with flag-bedecked handlebars in every parade. He had a special badge and uniform. We all knew he wasn't a real cop but if there was a fender bender he was often first on the scene, directing traffic until the real patrolmen arrived.

It comes from living in close proximity. You overlook th foibles of your neighbor. You sit on your porch, you hear Ernie's shuffle, and his wagon wheels churning over gravel. You wave a greeting and he grumbles a reply. You never have a conversation, but you break up your old screen door before you put it out on the devil strip, so it will better fit in his wagon.

These were days of walking to corner stores, of open windows, of mothers standing on back stoops and hollering kids in to dinner.

I see my octogenerian neighbors hanging house dresses on the line, sitting on the porch, tending their yard on a fine summer night. I know them by face if not by name. Other houses are buttoned up and silent, but for the drone of air conditioning units.

Do the battened down people have any idea what a sweet honey of a summer night it is, with the season's first crickets? They might be on the interweb, spouting about the horrible town they live in, and the awful people who are their neighbors, who they never talk to and rarely see.

But some folks venture out. A hipster, a World War II Vet, a big guy with extended earlobes and rods through his brow sit at a bar.

A guy in an English barrister's wig and newspaper boy bags full of push toys asks about a payphone.

Each of them proffers his celly.

My Eccentric hometown. Shine on, America. Shine on, Cuyahoga Falls.

When Swans Cry

A complaint of low hanging branches from a bicyclist on the public trail that cuts through our vineyard sends our grounds crew over to the swampy side of the lake. It is that corner of the lake where our resident mute swan Gina has been keeping her nest since February.

She started gathering twings for it way back in February's Full Hunger Moon. Now, on the cusp of the Full Strawberry Moon, she or her mate Guiseppe never stray from their floating twiggy throne.

The geese and the wood ducks seem to deposit eggs willy nilly: on the lawn, at the base of a dead pine tree, next to a parked automobile. But there is something about this perch in the swampy part of the lake, and the elegant creatures who tend it so carefully, that seems almost regal.

Only in recent days has Gina ventured far from the nest, looking skinny and a little desperate, plunging her muddy neck into the mire in search of victuals. Her corpulent mate Guiseppe, fat and sassy from months of chasing intruder swans and Canada geese from his terrain, takes his shift on the eggs grudgingly, though once there, he seems strangely relaxed and content.

On this morning of the low hanging branches, Guiseppe is gliding in full open waters on the distant sunny side of the lake, while Gina is just a few yards from her throne, gathering twings for her daily mending.

With a stunning randomness that brings to mind the Zapruder film and the Single Bullet Theory, by some bizarre trajectory, a rock winged by the groundskeeper's string cutter slices through a thicket of raspberry brambles, sassafras saplings, and bittersweet tangles, and somehow hits one of those carefully tended eggs, dead on.

It shatters with a devastating ping, something like a lightbulb breaking.

From yards away, Gina unleashes a lament, something that sounds exactly like crying.

Silently I have watched her glide the lake for almost a year, with intelligent avian eyes. Usually furtive, during winter's full hunger moon she seeks me out, and I begin feeding her daily, although keeping a distance, remembering always that she is a wild animal and nobody's pet, and that it is dangerous to teach a wild animal to trust a nefarious humanoid.

So it is all the more poignant to hear this mute bird emit her wail.

She power strokes to her ruined throne, and retrieves a shard of the shattered egg.

She swims it some distance from the nest and meticulously washes it, dipping it in and out of the still cool water.

Wailing still, she returns to the throne for another shard and then another, continuing the meticulous ritual until all the bits are cleansed.

Of course it is all too easy to ascribe human emotions and intentions to charismatic mega fauna, such as this pair of mute swans. I am sure there is a perfectly reasonable evolutionary explanation.

Her call is not crying, but a distress signal to her fiercely territorial mate, alerting him that an unknown predator is at large.

Her meticulous cleansing is not sorrow, but cleansing any scent that might draw the weasels and racoons and possoms who lurk in these woods, and regularly nab the less fiercely tended duck and goose eggs.

And surely the brittle shatter, and the length at which the egg had been tended but had not hatched, indicates that it was most likely not viable, a thin shelled imperfect egg from a pair of alien birds that have no business mating in Canton, Ohio.

But still on this warm sunny morning there is part of me that knows that I heard a swan cry this morning, and that something like tears must have been shed from those intelligent avian eyes.

They Dug The Foundation Deeper

A winter morning in 1896. Richard Moore ascends the steps of the bell tower on the corner of Portage Trail and Third Streets, as he does most Sunday mornings. He is a bellows boy, and his job is to pump life into the pride of the Methodist Episcopal Church, its mighty pipe organ.

It's lost to history what hymns might have been sung that morning, but more likely than not there was at least one Charles Wesley hymn, and perhaps something by Isaac Watts. The Methodists, a singing people, were drawn to the personal testimony and witness these great writers brought to their radical hymnody.

Ascending to that height, with the limbs of Church Park's trees winter bare, from atop the tallest structure in a bustling river burgh, the bellows boys look out through the the belfry's wooden slats. They see across the river and its bustling mills to to the pasture land that stretches to Munroe Falls. Looking west, they see a prosperous metropolis stretching well nigh to...Eight Street. After that, the Grant Farm and the Sackett farms roll to the horizon, and then just the wild ravines and mire of Northampton Township.

Lofty voices. A preacher's fervent drone. Warm heat billowing from a new pot bellied stove. A view that stretches to unknown wilds: all these things can cause a boy's mind to wander.

And so that morning young Richard Moore contemplates his future. He jots down some hopes and some dreams. He stuffs them in a money jug, and leaves them for future generations to find.

When, more than a century later, I saw for the first time the words young Richard left for us, I immediately thought: how different was his world.

But I could immediately relate, as can anyone who was nurtured in the embrace of this great church, for this has always been a church that calls its young people to serve.

We may not have pumped an organ bellow in a stuffy belfry, but how many of us sat on the old acolyte bench just below the Senior Pastor's pulpit, and had minds that perhaps wandered to futures unknown?

Perhaps we pulled open the accordian walls in the old 1920 sanctuary on a Sunday morning, so the gallery classrooms could accommodate burgeoning worshippers.

Perhaps we rode an old green bus to Frakes, Kentucky, donned a red robe, and sang in a in tiny mountain chapel. Afterward a very old woman wept: she had never seen so many Christians in one place before.

Young Richard could dream a great future, because he was held aloft by a congregation that laid a firm foundation.

On a rugged frontier, on this ragged corner of Stow Township where the river drops and bends, settlers conducted worship in homes. They pleaded for clergy to be sent from the East. Eventually they rented a storefront by the Big Spring, where Lambert Buick sits today.

Eventually that little Methodist Society got its visiting preachers, and grew beyond what the storefront could hold. Judge Josiah Stow offered them a corner of the public square, next to the more established Episcopalians, where Third Street crossed the old Indian trail.

The very first thing they did: they dug a sure foundation. They erected stone walls, most likely of our local conglomerate sandstone, quarried in these rough ravines carved by the river's fall.

In that basement they worshipped, with gratitude. Their dreams for a permanent base for their spiritual longings were finally fulfilled.

Eventually they were able to raise funds, and after a few years, built a proper church atop their sandstone foundation.

They raised a spire.

They bought an organ.

They sang their praise.

Eventually they needed more room for the Sunday School, so they dug the old foundation even deeper, and added more rooms.

And so it came to be, many decades later, young Richard Moore ascended that belfry, on a languid January morn.

"I am a boy homely of face," he wrote, "but kind of heart."

"I am the poor boy's friend."

He dreamed of a future, and hoped he might grow to be a strong Christian man, like the men whose voices wafted into the belfry from the church below.

He wondered about the future, and who would pump the organ bellows when he was a man.

How many of us have been able to dream a future, because those who came before us laid a firm foundation?

Two decades after Richard stashed his dreams in that belfry tower, with great trepidation and a giant leap of faith, our Methodist forbears dismantled their beloved wood frame church. They met in the Oddfellows lodge down by the river, while they audaciously built a big brick church.

Dismantling their proud wooden spire, they found the money jug, and young Richard's words.

Five decades after the new brick church, as a small boy, I walked down the wobbly slate sidewalk from the library parking lot with my mom, past the little carriage house next to Duckwall's printing, all the while practicing the big, long name of the big brick church with the giant clock tower: First. United. Methodist. Church.

As a new family in this community, we were able to find our way to this place because those who came before us laid a firm foundation. Those preschool classrooms my mom was taking me to existed because in the 1950s, as the town by the river boomed once more, those who came before us laid the foundation for an Education Building, despite the equally urgent need for a bigger sanctuary as well, just as decades before those before them dug the cellar deeper.

All around us are tangible reminders of the faith of our fathers and mothers:

• A table in the parlor, made of oak timbers from the beloved old wooden church, with the belfry tower that proudly bore the town's clock, a clock now installed at the new clock tower on Front Street.
• The letter that young Richard Moore wrote to future generations, now framed in gold and safely stored in the basement of our sunny yellow sanctuary.
• An old stone we walk over as we enter the breezeway, a piece of that old foundation.
• A hymnal I open randomly on a Sunday morning, presented on the proud occasion of the confirmation of a classmate who left us far too soon.
• Witness trees that dapple the sunlight pleasantly of a Sunday morning, trees that stood before our present edifices graced this town square.

They laid a sure foundation. Ours is not the time to build a lofty spire. Our time is to look with gratitude toward the the grace of our predessors, who imagined our future, who built us this place. Ours is the time, like those who came before us, to dig the foundation deeper. To shore up what is already here, to make it useful and strong, a place where young people can dream from lofty heights.

Young Richard asked that of us. He addressed his words to us, to the generations that would follow him. He wondered who would pump the bellows.

He called us to do what this church has always asked of us: Dig the foundation deeper. Go in faith past the point where we think we have nothing left to give. Reach down deep inside, and find a way to be true to the words of that great Isaac Watts hymn: when we see the sacrifice, and the faith, and the love so amazing, so divine , what more can our souls demand, but "My Life, My All"?

The organ swells. The music floats. Through the wooden doors. Through the canopy of the giant hackberry tree. Out into the old town by the river, and to all the places the people nurtured in this place find themselves taken.

The Next Right Thing

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

~Charles Dickens

Eight Marches ago, on one of those biting Lion / Lamb days when the chill seeps to your bone, but every so often the wind relents and the sun warms your face, I put my spade, my shovel, my rake, and my hopes in the back of my Ranger and drive out to Malwyd.

It was rangy. Cabgrass and truculent hollies. Old azaleas. A grove of gnarled andromeda, noble and twisted.

But also, woodchuck holes and poison ivy, striped petunias and pachysandra, flagstone and old wrought iron. Good bones but rampant: an ancient estate. Nothing but rambling roses, possibilities, trepidation.

They let me place my shovel in that unforgiving clay, and it became a project that fed my soul.

But first we lay the garden hose along the edge of what will become the perennial garden, and adjust it relentlessly until we find a rhythm.

It is audacious: our proposed bed claims much of the lawn. Swift approval: with a nod sweet labor begins. Trenching the edge with a sturdy Amish shovel, I turn the turf to reveal writhing grubs and an impoverished clay, sickly and orange. We work it with mushroom soil and manure and peat and sand. Each thrust into the crabgrass my shovel slides over slippery, hard, angry clay. I turn it and churn it and hope for the best.

These little plugs we plant, from the wholesale nursery in Bucks County, seem so unsubstantial against the scope of the place. But work is underway and does not cease.

Some seasons are impossibly fecund and benevolent: soaking rains, nourishing sun, impossible bounty. Other seasons are pinched, dry, angry, and sparse. Skunks spray, firethorn taunts, there is the day my feet swell and burst the laces of my boots after an allergic reaction to a hornet swarm.

But, always, the labor.

Paths built. Slate cut. Trees felled.

We build a pond, a terrace, an ambling walkway through a grove of crimson maples.

At some point boundaries no longer contain our desire: the neighboring house is bought and razed, the garden doubles. We restore the orchard to where it once had been.

Days at Malwyd passed in a glorious rhythm: a neighboring carillon chimes almost forgotten hymns at just the right moment.

I lose myself in the work, I relish these golden afternoons

But, last March was the time.

This thing I created, this thing I nourished and savored, that also fed me, was left to fend for itself.

Enough of tending a garden that is not my own, last year I turned toward home, unsure what I would find.

All that glorious preparation, all that sweet and sunny labor well spent.

That place where I knew every leaf, and had seen every season, and had labored blissfully until the sun gave way to a luminous moon.

That place where I knew the toads that clamored so frantically on fecund spring days.

That place where crimson stars fell from Japanese maples onto English ivy.

My best work. I left its care to others, in humility and gratitude.

I sought new gardens to tend.

March is a raw month, elemental.

March is sun warmed soil and wind driven rain. March is biting chill, and hope that soars like a great blue heron, taking sudden flight. March is a month to take stock of paths that led to whatever vineyard you now tend, and a month to mourn just a little for that other path you did not take.

I used to, many Marches ago, think that every time you loved and lost, it left you diminished. But, as Marches go by, I have come to realize: you never lose if your labor is love. It may turn you inside out, but next time, if you are lucky, it will lead you to a fruitful vineyard. Love won't leave you diminished, but only open to the next right thing, grateful for the labors that led you to the place you now stand.

Mrs. Taylor's Spectacles

The old red brick William and Margaretta Library Association, on Second Street,  Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, predating the white brick and marble Taylor Memorial Public Library of my youth.

The normative institution of my formative years had a name that was pure torture for a small child who had trouble with his R's.

Taylor. Memorial. Public. Library.

It was bad enough that my name was Brian Gregory, but this place's name was nearly impossible to say. I didn't really know what any of those words meant, and had to practice a long time to say them in the right order.

The great thing about reading books was that I always said everything perfectly in my head. In real life L's and R's threw me for a loop, and made me a little ashamed.

But I loved that low marble counter on the children's end of the circulation desk, even though I worried because I was always bumping against whatever the generous maximum limit for the number of books you could check out was.

The best sound in the world happened after you handed your peach colored paper library card, with the metal plate, over to the library lady. She placed it in the machine, and then dropped the card from each book you had chosen from the stacks in. It made the most satisfying "chunk chunk" sound that you could ever imagine.

Years later, when they replaced it with a gun that slapped a price tag-like due date sticker on the book, I thought, wow, that seems disrespectful to the book somehow.

The library was close enough to walk to, and once I got old enough to cross Broad Boulevard on my own, I could ride my bike there of a summer day. In the era when air conditioning was still a bit of a luxury, I would then bask in a nearly perfect summer day. It was the next best thing to the forbidden swimming hole at the shale creek we called Trickling Springs, that dumped into the Cuyahoga beneath a hemlock grove, just past Mary Campbell's Cave.

In the summer, there were reading contests, involving a bingo card that made you read from every category in the stacks, and game pieces, which were toothpicks jabbed in a piece of Play Dough.  You got to move a space on the game board for every book that you read. To this day, my brother and I still argue over who read more books. At some point we may have to call in Betsy Booth to officiate.

I loved everything about that library:

The stained glass window, Flora and Fauna of Ohio, which was real leaves and flowers, pressed between glass.

The sound the drawer on the card catalog (a heavy maple wood cabinet, presided over by a paper mache Pinochio) made, when you pulled it out, and thumbed through the cardstock files, looking for whatever new topic had piqued your interest.

The way they let me check out books from the adult section before I was officially old enough, after I had read through everything in the children's section.

The way checking out the LP of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders suddenly made me feel like a really big kid, and like I understood those impossibly tall teenagers who towered over us with their 70's afros. Nothing gold can stay, Pony Boy.

The bronze statue of the fawn, at the bottom of the Story Time circle, where you could curl up with a new book when you realized you weren't quite ready to be a teenager.

I loved how my picture, Leopard in the Sun, pastel crayons on purple construction paper, made it into the All City Art Show, in the basement gallery. It felt like a big accomplishment for a kid from DeWitt, in a show normally dominated by the kids from Silver Lake and Richardson.

There was a metal sculpture by Mr. Simon, the art teacher from the high school. Read Indian flint arrowheads, pressed in glass, right at the Third Street entrance. A glass case full of ceramic figurines of Beatrix Potter characters. A Local History Room full of old maps and yearbooks. The price of admission: your peach-colored library card, and a signature on a page the reference librarian kept, stating you wuoldn't steal anything.

There was no end to the magic of this place, all the more when I realized, I could make a calligraphy masthead across the top of a piece of paper, typewrite my news stories below, Xerox it on the library machine for a nickel, and then sell it to my neighbors for a dime.

(Okay, when you factor in the labor costs, the Seventh Street Bugle-Messenger was never a cash cow, especially when you consider the time I spent, inspired by the Cleveland Press v. Plain Dealer rivalry, of coloring in my pictures with Crayola markers. The Press made a big push for being Cleveland's first color paper, and folded shortly thereafter. The Bugle-Messenger didn't last much longer.)

Somewhere near the front door, was a picture of the ivy covered old red brick original Taylor Library, and nearby, a glass case that displayed Mrs. Margaretta Taylor's spectacles.

I always liked that somehow, because it connected us to the person who founded this library, and reminded us that it didn't have to be here. This place existed because a very small woman, whose tiny wire frame glasses were in this case, wanted it to be here, and worked very hard to make it so.

Taylor Memorial Public Library. A difficult name for a small child who had difficulty with L's and R's to learn to say, but well worth the effort.

Lilacs in Tin Foil Vases: Thoughts on Home

On my Dad's shoulder's, Bicentennial Parade, 1976

The house I grew up in, built in 1970, the year before my birth, was on a piece of an old farm. No fireplace, no attic, no ghosts or secret passages: just a bland, new story-and-a-half Cape Cod, built in the side yard of the red brick farmhouse next door. A few silver maple saplings were plunked about the bare yard and the devil strip in soil that had been scraped down to unforgiving clay.

In old family photographs, snapped on my Mom's Brownie camera, the house sits on raw soil, a fresh concrete walkway leading past bare cinder block foundation, to a hollow core front door.

1971, a raw foundation on Seventh Street.

But there were remnants of a former place.

A gnarled grapevine on a rusted wire fence hedged the backyard.

In a corner dark and mossy, a contorted dogwood, by far my favorite tree, crouched under a massive pear tree that would become our space ship. Under the pear tree was a place I loved to dig. Here, the soil was soft, moist, and dark, and you did not have to dig deep before you found treasure: shards of pottery, an old bent spoon, a rusty gate latch. Like the Bennetts' old plum tree or the twin massive cherry trees with shiny peeling bark in the Mays' front yard, or the old twisted lilac next to the brick farm house's back door, all along gravel-and-tar Seventh Street, and even under the soil, were remnants of what had been before.

On a Sunday afternoon thirty-five Mays ago, the day before the big parade, my Mom and sister cut bouquets from that ancient lilac. They took those little sprigs and for each one they crafted a little tin foil vase, and filled it with water, so they would not wilt while the Brownies held them in white gloved hand, down Broad Boulevard and all the way to Oakwood Cemetery, to be placed at the oldest soldiers' graves.

Oakwood Chapel, erected by the Ladies' Cemetery Association, 1883

Years later, my Dad would lead the Cub Scout pack, in signature pith helmet, as we carried the DeWitt School Pack 3186 banner with great pride. To march in the parade, you had to have full uniform, which required a trip down to the Scout Shop, way up on an upper level of O'Neil's, across the High Level Bridge, all the way in downtown Akron.

James Gregory, in signature pith helmet, leads Pack 3186 down Broad Boulevard.

The Cuyahoga Falls Memorial Day parade: an event that, although the route may change, is otherwise changeless: politicians, the marching band, Scouts, drum corps, and always, the veterans.
 

A Cuyahoga Falls parade circa 1963, when the route took it down Front Street.

Thirty five years ago, we arrive early, to get a good seat on the curb of the grassy Broad Boulevard median, a block west of the library, and across the street from the house at Broad and Fourth, which has been under renovation all four decades of my life.

The World War II vets are legion, in crisp VFW and American Legion caps and fezzes. The Korean vets, less numerous, still make a good showing. There are but a few Vietnam vets, scruffy and bearded, who get at first reluctant, and then appreciative, applause. The float where the vets enact the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, as always, garners sustained applause.

A convertible approaches, courtesy of Wallace Oldsmobile on Front Street. A few men, perhaps the oldest I have ever seen, slouch in the back seat, in rumpled American Legion hats. They are the World War I veterans. My Dad, a prescient man, tells me, "Stand up, these men won't be with us much longer." We do, and I offer my best imitation of a Cub Scout salute.

The Broad Boulevard Memorial Strip, in a 1960s postcard view.

This past week, three and a half decades after that parade, in West Virginia, the last of the Dough Boys, Frank W. Buckles, passed peacefully, at 110. A Missouri farm boy who bluffed his way in to the Army at age 16, he drove a rear-echelon ambulance on the Western Front, and saw the aftermath of the war's worst carnage.

These are the things that date you: one day you have great-grandparents, and grandparents, and parents, and then you do not. One day your esteemed teachers are still teaching, and then they retire, and then, they pass. One year there are World War I veterans marching in the parade, then just a few in a car, and then there are none.

The cartoon view of the seventies, of free love and hippies and day glow psychedelia, shrouds the more formal Midwestern first decade of my life.

We greeted the Bicentennial with unabashed red, white, and blue enthusiasm. We bought stiff leather "school shoes" from an elderly man with a shop down on Front Street, and kept rubber soled canvas "gym shoes" inside our desks, to be worn only for gym class. We learned to read from tattered Dick and Jane readers, with frayed red bindings, stamped with with the name of demolished Broad Street School, which Gordon M. DeWitt Elementary replaced. Sure, there was a house on Francis Avenue above Mary Campbell's Cave at the great gorge of the Cuyahoga, rumored to be inhabited by hippies, but it was still an era in which, on special occasions, little girls wore white gloves.

The things that date us: Memories of musty downtown department stores. Brownies in white gloves. World War I veterans, lapelled with red poppies, in remembrance of Flanders fields, riding in the parade:

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

The day after reading of the death of Frank Buckles, the last Dough Boy, I sat bolt upright in bed, with a sudden need to remember lyrics to a song, sung over 20 years ago in A Capella Choir at Cuyahoga Falls High School:

Fair are the meadows,
Fairer still the woodlands,
Robed in the blooming garb of spring;
Jesus is fairer,
Jesus is purer,
Who makes the woeful heart to sing.

It is a very old hymn, of obscure German origin, which even as we sang it over twenty years ago, seemed old fashioned. It was a favorite, apparently of Miss Josephine Long, who established the choral music program at Falls High and was held in such esteem that her favorite hymn was still sung decades after her death, just as the A Capella choir still processed into the Christmas Vespers concert with candles, as she had done it, and applause was strictly forbidden, as she had deemed it to be.

The fields and the meadows of our memories. Fallow until we churn them, and then one thing connects to another. The day after I sat bolt upright and remembered those lyrics to Miss Long's favorite hymn, I was tending a garden I have nurtured some seven years. It is an old estate, surrounded by tolling bells: from several Episcopal churches, from our Lady of Lourdes, from the seminary of St. Charles Borromeo. And sometimes, from the Merion Tribute House, built to honor of those who fought The War To End All Wars. My day's labor is chimed by bells from many belfries, ancient hymns that I have known: my own perfect Eden.

A frieze on the Merion Tribute House honors Doughboys

That brisk March at noontide, the bells were from the Tribute House, friezed with pugnacious mugs of the Dough Boys it was built to honor. Two days after Frank Buckles' death, the noon after I awoke to that almost forgotten hymn, the tune that the carillon chimed was none other than Miss Long's obscure favorite anthem.

This past year I have been startled by encounters, seemingly random, that later drip with meaning.

It's not magic, it's just living long enough to see the patterns. With enough life experience, every thing that happens to you reminds you of something you've experienced before. And everywhere you look, remnants of what is no longer there. An old priest at St. Marys of the Barrens once told me, you reach a point where there is a ghost behind every tree.

1971, I lean against a newly planted sapling.

In the meadows of our memory, in our favorite mossy corners, we find tokens those who came before us left behind. The rituals and the parades, the stories of those who came before us but we may not have known, the songs and the memory of the voices that lifted them: to me that ground at Seventh Street is hallowed, my own Flanders field, connecting me to the community that formed me, and all the saints who now from their labors rest. The little sapling plunked in unforgiving clay of a small house built the year before my birth is now shaggy barked and craggy. The same wind that blew the poppies at Flanders rustles its silver branches yet. This tree. This earth. This ground. This life.

That tree and the author, 39 years later.

Under The Giant Hackberry Tree

The smell of snuffed candles. An organ postlude wafts through wooden church doors out over just-fallen snow. Under a giant hackberry tree, a lamb, someone’s tiny pony, hay bales, Mother and Child. Across the street, Charlie Boyd’s tinsel and lights, so garish by day, look just about perfect shrouded by snow. It is Christmas Eve 1976, and all of this happened in the one hour we were inside, as if on cue.

Celtis occidentalis, the common Hackberry, gets little respect. Its jagged tooth-edged leaves. Its tart mealy berries. Its lack of a colorful native name. Its wanton indiscretion about where it chooses to thrive.

Harbinger of nipple gall, powdery mildew, witch’s broom, jumping plant lice and a host of grisly arboreal ailments.

When horticulturalists grasp to sing its praise, its corky ridged and warty bark is what they settle on.

This unsung, wanton tree just happens to be the tree that marks the seasons of my life.

That simple living nativity under the hackberry’s winter bare branches, and the sudden magic of new fallen snow, is my first real memory of Christmas.

Decades later, its jagged irregular ovalish leaves provided May-perfect dappled sunlight for my sister’s wedding.

In high school, under a pelting February rain, a few days after a car full of classmates had careened down a steep ravine, Mr. Harding and Reverend Kimmel gently snaked the line of overflow mourners out from the hackberry’s inadequate shelter and into the breezeway, while more folding chairs were brought for them to the sanctuary. For the first time that I remember, that big yellow room did not seem sunny.

During Holy Week, a rough wooden cross is erected beneath its bud swollen branches, a cross that will be draped with a black cloth on Friday before we deck it with hyacinths and daffodils on Easter.

A silent presence through so many seasons of my life, I have always felt a certain kinship with this hackberry, perhaps because it bears a small bronze plaque declaring it the tallest tree of its kind in 1971, the year of my birth.

Tall Tree Winner, 1971

In the late seventies the hackberry was struck by lightening. Severely pruned in the aftermath, and rigged with wires, it has flourished in the decades I have been away.

For several years, when I would trek back to my old hometown and revisit haunts and dip my toes in the Cuyahoga’s waters, I would inevitably make my way the few blocks from the river to the public square that Judge Josiah Stow dedicated in 1830 for the free expression of divine worship. Ours was not to be a town dominated by a single spire, but in the square, a plot for the Methodist Society, a plot for the Episcopalians, and a plot for the Campbellites; on the green, a place for the Congregationalists; and just above the sublime ferny sandstone grottoes of the Glens, a church for the Catholics.

Disciples of Christ Church, Church Square, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

On my return visits, suddenly this tree, this silent, nondescript backdrop to my formative years, loomed large.

I began to notice it: I loved the shadow dance of floodlit branches on the building’s façade on a windy October night. Of a summer Sunday morning, I loved how its canopy of small jagged leaves dappled the eastern sun. The hackberry’s shade is not the gloom of a big leafed maple, or the solid cover of a mighty oak, but something enlivening and brisk and animated, a canopy that mottles but does not smother the sunlight.

I’ve never known the grace of elm trees, or the majesty of our native chestnuts, now vanished from the American landscape. This sturdy common hackberry is what I have to mark the decades of my life.

I love that any day now this sturdy survivor just might overtake the spire of the big church that was erected behind it. The old architect’s rendering of the new sanctuary, framed on a stairway in the basement, shows a circular driveway with fin tailed sedans where the hackberry stands, and a parking lot in the center of Judge Stow’s Church Square.

Sometimes we have the collective wisdom to not heed all of the experts’ recommendations. So the humble common hackberry tree continues to thrive, long after those postwar landboats moulder in an automotive grave.

I have almost completed my first set of seasons back under the old hackberry tree, my first as an adult in my old hometown.  Not a Sunday goes by that I don’t pause to look up at its branches, to watch the sunlight filter through small serrated leaves, to watch snow coat the windward side of its jagged trunk, to watch small yellow leaves fall on an autumn lawn. And yes, to appreciate even its warty bark, ridged and corky.

In a few weeks buds will swell and leaves will unfurl again, sometime soon after we place daffodils on the old rugged cross beneath its boughs. As I walk out into the dappled sunlight, whatever hymn we have just sung will still be ringing in my head. I will look up at that canopy, composed of rough, imperfect, ovoid leaves, borne on this scaly warty trunk, a trunk rigged with lightening rods and cables, a tree susceptible to all sorts of ailments. A beautiful tree, all the more majestic in its imperfection.

I’ll look up at each of those sawtooth leaf blades, and I will think, these small imperfect leaves on this big tree are all the souls who set aside this square, who built these churches, who sang these songs.

In these songs we remember our faith, our scriptures, our theology. In this tree live all those saints, who sang our songs before us. Mr. Harding who held the front door open for you long after you had been away. Mrs. Underwood who wore a wide-brimmed hat. Mrs. Haught who made you a felt stocking in Preschool. Dr. Drake who signed your Bible in a left slanting script. Kevin who plunged into the ravine, Nancy whose smile lit the room, Steve who left us far too soon.

Ancient gnarled Silver Maple on Church Square.

So many seasons under this old tree, shedding its leaves, dropping some branches, bearing small sweet fruit through the depth of winter after the showier berries are long gone. Then it buds out again, faithfully, sometime shortly after the dogwood trees.