Chicken Paprikash on the Little Cuyahoga

Steam billows from Seusian stacks at an old red brick rubber factory, into a saturated January sky. Careening from huge soft billowy flakes to slicing icy pellets to springtime deluge, this is a winter sky that just can't make up its mind.

Built on the bank of a raging stream, pipes beneath the factory's foundation spill to an already rain-swelled urban channel. It could be a ditch, or maybe a spur of an old canal. My Google map eventually tells me, it's the Little Cuyahoga, straightened and harnessed into a more efficient route.

The waterway makes its way under a little bridge beneath East Market Street, then disappears behind a tire store.

Sometimes, if you come in search of the best chicken paprikash in town, you might find yourself, unwittingly, in your hometown's steamy industrial core. This little industrial valley, where waters flowed swiftly at Middlebury, before there was  an Akron. This place of rain swelled channels and truncated rail spurs, of red brick factories and disreputable saloons. This place of barbed wire and crumbling vestiges of Vulcanized industrial might, of graceful old Fire Station #11, red brick with Spanish arches and fallen roof tiles, now a dialysis center.

I thought I'd missed my chance for paprikash.

For years I'd passed the tiny red brick diner, dwarfed by behemoth factories. Its name, New Era, and specialties, paprikash and goulash, stenciled on its exterior walls. Twenty years ago it looked obsolete, a remnant of an old era, when factories ran three shifts a day and lunch pail workers walked to work from neighborhoods of closely set wood frame houses undulating in rows across Akron's seven hills.

Someday, I'll have to eat there, I always thought, until one day it was gone. Or maybe just newly clad in vinyl siding, its nondescript building now a used car shop or towing depot.

But GPS and navigational aids inform me, surprisingly, that the New Era hasn't vanished, only dawned in a spacious new locale, catty corner form the little streamside rubber factory that makes stair treads and floor mats.

Balkan travel posters decorate new walls. With accordion-walled banquet rooms and a spacious parking lot, the new New Era betrays little of its former self, except where it matters: the tender chicken paprikash, cooked to perfection, still falls off the bone if you even look at it sideways. It's served with dumplings and baskets of bread to sop it all up.

With a dying camera battery and digital screen averse to gelid conditions, fueled by dumplings and strudel, I take to the sidewalks, where they exist, in this old industrial valley, and marvel at how I have landed in something of the primordial center of the former metropolis that sprung from little stream side factories belching steam and supplying the world with gaskets, galoshes, and eventually, tires.

The campanile of a great company rises from a dismal canal, overhung with scrubby brush and weedy trees. Nearby, across from the porn theatre, Akron Steam Bath and Sauna sports a surprisingly full parking lot for a Friday afternoon.

An art deco municipal airport testifies to the excitement borne of the birth of aeronautics, with embellished weather vanes spinning importantly atop a squatly handsome yellow brick terminal. Vacant aviation strips spread forth across a plane of winter browned grass.

The Rubber Bowl, built in the side of a hill, sits forlorn now, its hulking concrete pleasing yet with streamlined proportion. Derby Downs uses that same hillside for kids to race kit cars of their own fabrication, mini engineers aping their fathers who in these surrounding red brick buildings forged their own automotive strides. It touches me somehow that the bowl was built in a real hillside hollow.

The Goodyear Airdock, where blimps were born, hunkers like an Egyptian monument in a desert of crumbling asphalt and chain link fence.

This is Akron, and as I make my way back to the restaurant parking lot, a faint smell of burning rubber wafts from the little brick factory. I pause at the bridge and watch the waters rush at an almost frightening torrent, and marvel at how we used to circumvent this old industrial valley, by way of the Expressway, to visit my grandmother just east of Akron. Once you crossed over that High Level Bridge, with its metal deck roadway singing under your car's Akron-made tires, you felt like you were entering another world. From the highway, General Tire and Goodyear and Goodrich and Firestone all belched importantly, and the whole city smelled like the faint waft now barely emanating from this sturdy little survivor, hugging a little stream bank, where swift flowing waters in little channels at Middlebury gave birth to a great city.

I guess you'd have to be an Akronite for the sulphurous aroma of burning rubber to spur something like this pride I feel swelling, on a windy January afternoon, when I went seeking paprikash, but found myself in the steamy center core of the place that grew up from these turgid waters, and spread itself out over the surrounding hills.

A Sudden Change of Scene

A strident blue afternoon sky surrenders to a more familiar wintertime leaden cast. The snow falls rapidly now on this third Thursday in January.

Sometimes, I need these sudden changes of scene.

A December snow falls on sleigh bells and reindeer. A month later, the snow is all you have. January snows are brutal snows, winter at its most elemental.

My inner, earthy Capricorn, where my craggy cliff-dwelling self resides, cloven hoofed and woolly, relishes these gelid conditions. I need to be out in it. I need snow in my boots and ice on my beard.

You tune out the Doppler radar. You don't worry about how this will effect your morning commute. You surrender to the elements. You bask in a landscape transformed.

A few flakes. A gathering storm. Silent accrual.

It coats first the jagged bark on the windward side of ancient trees. It settles in deep engravings in old gravestones. Suddenly you notice green moss on "white marble," dingy in contrast to what has just fallen. Sandstone is not gray but a hundred shades of honey-toned buff, flecked with quartz.

Twin tawny-trunked cedars flank a stone marked "brothers."

The Virgin's sooty and web covered face, but decked still in brilliant raiments, celestial blue and pale pink.

A mantle settles with quiet determination over Poet's Hill, blanketing the obelisks and monuments to Newberries and Sills.


The red brick chapel gable slices through a sky of gray and a landscape newly white.

Gilded letters on the cemetery entrance arch achieve new prominence.

Leaving these wrought iron acres, color is now where you find it.

A Don't Tread On Me flag flaps more noticeably at an old house with a fierce dog, while two doors down teddy bear flags and red hearts cheerily anticipate Valentine's Day.

You gaze through barbed wire and chain link toward yellow goalposts and team colors.

Blotting out some things, making others more prominent. A change of scene. A change of weather. A liminal season.

Another day's light now gone, a few lingering Christmas lights seem poignant somehow. At first they seem tattered and lazy, intrusions on the newly crisp scene. But I come to appreciate the occasional tarrying display. Civic-mandated festivity ended weeks ago. A few individuals do what they must, in darkening frigid days.

Sure footed on the now-substantial accumulation underfoot, I crunch my way down toward the river, the place I always go, when I need to get to the place where the landscape seems primeval. The sort of place a woolly Capricorn feels most at home.

The hum and whir of the expressway give way, as cliffs newly decked in icy daggers muffle all but the roar of turgid water. It dances over sandstone: fleeting but eternal. It is not the relaxing, pounding beat of the surf, but somehow tense and restless. I watch it flow for a few moments, as it begins its turn at the terminal moraine that will bend its course back north toward the headwaters from which it emanates: a nervous, perpetual loop.

I watch the river disappear around a sandstone canyon wall, beyond which are submerged caverns and ferny grottoes and fantastical geological formations, now submerged behind the old trolley company's concrete dam.

I wonder what is beyond that bend, as I turn back downriver, and contemplate this rare quiet, but not still moment. So much ground covered, in a year that has just begun.

Analog Dreams: Reflections on 40

If you've ever stretched the cord of the kitchen wall phone past the Harvest Gold appliances into the bathroom so as to have a private phone conversation: you are analog.

If you've ever fiddled with the round part of the rabbit ears to get better UHF reception for the afternoon Prize Movie when you played sick from school: you are analog.

If your Mom ever taped a dime to your mitten so you could call her from the Sparkle Market pay phone when you finished painting your Park and Rec Halloween mural on the dentist's office window with poster paints: you are analog.

If, inspired by R2D2's projection of Princess Leia, you ever raced home from the General Cinema at the mall and constructed a robot, with your Viewmaster projector perched atop a torso made of your biggest tub of Lincoln Logs, your Realistic tape recorder providing the voice, rigged up to a motion detector made from your Radio Shack circuit kit, so he spoke to you and projected images of Star Wars onto the wall with his stereoscopic eyes when you entered the room: you are analog.

(Okay, maybe that last one is just me.)

Regardless, we are the analog generation.

If you are of this generation, a John Hughes film of your high school years flickers in a continuous loop somewhere in the back of your head.

And it is most definitely a FILM, slightly scratchy, flecks of dust visible in shafts of projected light. I count among my arcane analog skills that if need be, I could still find my way around a projection booth, successfully spooling a three-reel feature onto dual projectors. The secret is, you unspool an elbow's length of the first reel, mark the celluloid with a white grease pencil, and as the clattering gears of the machine eat the last of reel one, you watch the screen, unblinking, for the flick of your pencil smudge. You then flick off the light of the first projector and flick on the second. With practice and quick reflexes, the effect is seamless. So as not to mar the rented features, I practiced on old strips of coming attractions that were cast about the booth: it is on the the trailers for Let No Man Write My Epitaph that I honed my craft.

 My flickering Hughes film begins with a car scene: a maroon 1984 Ford Escort, my sister's, decorated in unicorns.

We spill out of 1529 7th Street, running late of course, she trailing streamers and ribbons from the paper banners she has to get to school early to decorate her designated football player's locker with. Cheerleading hadn't quite evolved into the athletic endeavor it is today, so although it is the mid-80's, her uniform still has vestiges of a demure 1950s "pom pom" girl: thick wool sweater with turtleneck, short but full wool pleated skirt, white sneakers, bobbie socks (only the year before, and not without some controversy, had the switch been made from saddle shoes to sneakers.) Me: boat shoes, Bugle Boys, department store-brand "Polo" shirt.

We squeal two blocks over tar and gravel streets, past black and gold painted concrete street sign posts, to her friend Kerri's house, where they quickly exchange folded piles of clothes: tomorrow's outfits. Since Kerri attends St. Vincent-St. Mary's on North Hill (LeBron is born right about this time), she and my sister have discovered that they can effectively double their wardrobe of Forenza sweaters and Palmetto jeans by enacting this daily exchange.

Back in the unicorn mobile (unicorn figurines hot glued to the dashboard, a stuffed unicorn hugging the rearview mirror with spring-action legs, an "I HEART Unicorns" license plate strapped to the back bumper), we slow down as we approach Stow Street, AKA "Tiger Lane," and follow the tiger paws painted on the asphalt to the student parking lot. Corey Hart blares from the Escort's speakers, as it does every day: the cassette is permanently lodged in the tape deck. Fortunately, there are half a dozen hits on that tape, and this day, the stars have aligned: "I Wear My Sunglasses at Night" blasts at just that moment when we pass the largest throng of denim jacket-clad students milling about.

As if being a lowly freshman being driven to school by your senior sister in full cheerleader regalia were not enough, I adjust my shades, confirm proper collar flippage, and for this one brief moment, am certain, that the intrinsic coolness of Corey's biggest MTV hit has washed me in its glow. My sister gives a quick wave to the genial retiree who mans the parking attendant booth, we score a prime spot. She races off to decorate lockers and make the banner the team will burst through at tonight's pre-game, while I feel my coolness shrink discernibly with each step away from the unicorn mobile, the Corey cassette, and the sympathetic magic of my sister's presence. I quickly unflip the collar, no longer certain I can pull it off...

The more we spin this mortal coil, the more difficult it can be to knit together the divergent strands of a life. Far flung friends, diverse experiences: faded photographs, bits of folded up notebook paper, boxes of archaic diskettes and electronic gear bear witness to the folly of analog remembrance.

We weave what strands we can in our flickering cinematic memories, and, all of a sudden, realize, the bright shining images of our youth have become a period piece. We hear the crackle of the celluloid coiling through the sprockets, see the detritus in the beam of projected light. The colors seem off: here too drab, over there impossibly vivid. We laugh at the hairstyles, the skinny leather ties, the collars flipped up.

 Our cassette tapes have long ago melted in the glovebox of a truck we junked years ago. We find tins of spices on our shelves purchased a decade ago in another state. A coffee ring mars a torn and faded photo of a friend who left us too soon.

This winter of my fortieth year, I'm finding beauty in things that are broken, out of reach, worn, slipping away. Bits of Paradise Lost, half forgotten poems ("we must praise the mutilated world"), sturdy old hymns all rattle the cage, looking for light. This brutal winter slows me down and makes space for introspection, gratitude. These fierce winter days my hands need to write, before it slips away.

Without words, we weave the strands in our flickering filmic memories, and, at times, also, our dreams.

Give her enough time, and Queen Mab will knit the strands for you, while you slumber fast, unaware. You just have to surrender to dream logic, which from time to time, I am willing to do.

Approaching my fortieth year, I labored hard on one of those impossibly long June days. Creative juices flowing, a new project at hand. I built a garden path from rubble: leveled the earth, mixed the concrete, hauled and assembled cast off materials into a thing of utility, pleasing to the eye. Losing my light, I called it a day, and collapsed in a heap of grateful slumber, without removing my concrete caked clothes.

Fourteen hours later I awoke with a start, vivid snippets still projecting in my mind's eye. Impossible circumstances, divergent characters flung together. Details fade rapidly with each blink of sleep encrusted eyes, I struggle for a moment to know where I am. This much, I remember:

 A faded amusement park in the Mahoning Valley. A fun house ride. Above the entrance door, an animatronic gypsy cackles. I share a car with a faded 1970's movie starlet. We whoosh through the curtain, transported to a celestial plane. Everything is cerulean, amber, white, and vivid. Then, before me, a most substantial wood desk, and a stern man behind it. His deportment and grooming suggest a more severe Harry S Truman, his gaze is fierce. I know this man, but cannot place him. He and his desk are in stark black and white against a roiling sky. His silent judgment pierces me. A placard on his desk, instead of "The Buck Stops Here," implores, merely, "THINK." Next thing I know, back on the midway, the smell of soggy french fries in vinegar soaked paper cups mingles with roller coaster axle grease.

Like Ebeneezer after his midnight visitations, I burst to the window, still concrete caked, pleased to see the light of a real day. Still not sure if what I'd seen was real or phantasm, a flicker of what has been or is yet to be, I gaze out the back window: the black oak, the neighbor's clothesline exactly where they should be in the bright morning light. Suddenly, I place the man, from a glossy black and white photo dimly remembered, in my Dad's 1956 yearbook: Gordon M. DeWitt, principal of Cuyahoga Falls High School, who became the namesake of my yet to be built grade school.

Fever pitch analog dreams. The longer we live the more we synthesize. Old black and white photos, half recalled dronings of a pipe organ bellowing a hymn, voices now silenced raised in song:

A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone.

 The paper mache brontosaurus you spent weeks crafting in kindergarten is, it turns out, an apatosaurus with the head of a camarasaurus. Pluto is no longer a planet. You spent an entire year mastering looping capital letters in an expert cursive script no one uses anymore. You remember the space shuttle exploding against a cerulean sky and rushing to the bank of pay phones, fumbling for a quarter so you can call a friend to let her know.

Things that are broken. Things that are fading. Things that seemed bright and shiny and never fading now seem impossibly quaint. This is the year, one after the other, my friends roll over the forty year cliff. These are our scars. Like velveteen rabbits only more wrinkled, love and use are what make us real.

We sat in kindergarten, against a projected beam of light in which specks of dust danced. With expert hand Mrs. Burris traces our profiles on black construction paper. I saw those same profiles, in frames over mantles and on stairway walls, in houses on Chestnut and Grant and Seventh and Sixth, whose subjects grew to be teenagers lank haired and gangly, as I rang doorbells to collect money, and record who has paid for what by punching a hole in a set of cards bound together by steel rings: analog, baby. As analog as the thud of a well flung Sunday Beacon Journal hitting blue painted porch planks.

In the period Hughes film of my distant youth, one reel fades seamlessly to the next, grease pencil scribblings barely visible, an expert hand mans the booth. Projected, in pristine black and white, the namesake of my grade school, sent to reassure me, like a benevolent angel from a Capra film, crackles on to the screen. Without saying a word, and yet with excellent diction, he implores: The preparation is over. Life happens now. Be grateful to those who taught you. Those who came before you, these sturdy sons and loyal daughters: hold their memory dear. Their battle is fought, their race is won. THINK. Now, it is you. Praise this mutilated world. Tend this derelict garden. Collapse into now.

And then, the next reel begins...