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.
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