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...

On The Feast of Stephen

Page and monarch forth they went,
    Forth they went together;
Through the rude winds wild lament,
    And the bitter weather.

On my perfect December day, something roasts in the oven, an old phonograph spins, candles cast amber light. It is a month for looking in and holding close. A month, as the old Advent carol implores, to trim the hearth and set the table.

But on Boxing Day, on this year the Monday after Christmas, the vineyard beckons. I rouse myself from a slumber fueled by buttery treats and amber ales. Every bone aches to not leave the warmth of home, to not venture south on the road to Canton.

The work this day is drudgery, mounding soil up around protective plastic sleeves I have placed around tender one-year vines. This warm and soggy autumn and winter have left the soil workable even at this late date. The rhythm of spade to soil, the clink of metal on field stone, the tenacious grasp of clover roots.

Plant by plant. Row by row. Slow, deliberate work. Eyes to the ground. Frost tinged clover leaves, clumps of soil. Dig. Churn. Thrust. Mound.

But shovel work is satisfying work. The sound of the spade cutting through turf. The pleasant earthy smell. Wriggling earthworms even still.  The soil is alive, and varied, as I cut across the sloping south vineyard: here clay and waterlogged, there sandy and flecked with smooth river pebbles.

It's the desperate honking of geese, however, that casts my eyes toward the sky. They settle into a perfect vanguard just as they pass overhead. I wonder if they are heading south in a hurry, perhaps realizing this balmy December has bid them stay too long.

Even after the noisy gaggle settles into a silent and perfect wedge across the sky, my eyes linger on the eastern horizon. It is startlingly cerulean, flecked with wisps of cirrus clouds. The words of the old advent carol echo cannily:

People look east, the time is near
Of the crowning of the year

In a month of pulling in and holding close, this is a day to look out. That's what the good king did on this day, which is also the Feast of Stephen. But while he gazed  upon snow, crisp and clear and even, I gaze upon a sloping vineyard planted in a field of clover, with a bright meridian sun casting long shadows.

I look out on gold tipped willow branches cast in sharp contrast to a bright blue sky.

I look out on yellow gables of the old farmhouse against a blue backdrop enlivened by fast floating puffs of white.

I look out on a crested blue heron taking wing from the marsh, rising from tawny grasses and red stemmed branches.

I look out on gently rippling lake waters.

I look out on the old tracks heading south to Canton, and know that once the four o'clock train rumbles by, this brilliant sky, and this startling day, will have passed.

I am thankful for this sky and this vineyard to tend, and these old songs that rattle around my noggin. December often casts a melancholy pall, and sometimes a leaden sky settles overhead around Veterans Day and lingers to well past Easter.

But this winter there have been days of bright sunshine, with the long shadows December casts even at noon.

And I think of Stephen, whose feast is this day, and who at the darkest hour, looked up, and saw the heavens open.

Annibale Carracci
The Martyrdom of St Stephen
1603-04 - Oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre, Paris

A Boxing Day of startling cerulean skies and gently rippling lake waters. A Feast of Stephen that brought me reluctantly out to tend these vines, and rewarded me with a magnificent sky.

All we have to do is remember to look up, and look out, and whether the sky be leaden and the ground sodden, or the horizon brilliant and the clover sweet underfoot, know that eventually the cruel frost and bitter weather of the good king's carol will find us.

But we will take these startling days, and these cerulean skies, and they will become the warm footsteps through the sod, the food and wine we will summon, the pine logs that will warm us, against that cruel weather, which will surely come.

In his master’s steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod which the saint had printed.

That is what Boxing Day reminds us, to not just hunker down, but to look out, and up, with gratitude and charity, to make a feast of whatever it is that comes to us, however meager it may seem, knowing that sometimes a heron taking sudden flight from a marsh of brittle grasses may be enough bounty for one day.

Blue Christmas

The legendary Little Blue Santa, of Akron, Ohio

For as long as I can remember, come December my parents screw a blue bulb into the porch light of their small house on Seventh Street.

Other decorations came and went: Wreathes we made in the 70s from cellophane dry cleaner bags. A ribbon around the mailbox. Blinking lights strung along the eaves. Tinsel drapes on the front door junipers.

But the blue bulb is eternal.

I never gave it much thought until someone asked me why.

Folklorist that I am, I string a story together, as I am wont to do.

I recall my Dad's family's simple tree-top star, blue glass with a single bulb in the center, which topped our tree every year until it was more glue than glass.

This was my Grandma Hildegarde's star, whose pride and joy was her silver aluminum Christmas tree, trimmed entirely with blue glass orbs, illuminated by a rotating color wheel on the glass enclosed sunporch of her Ellet retirement home.

I recall my grandma Hildegarde as one who kept Christmas well. She decked the halls, no, well-nigh festooned them, with Victorian Christmas villages, paper honeycomb bells, tinsel, and beads. An intricate handcrafted ornament, her gift to each grandchild. Her elaborate German Christmas cookies, which had to be aged in a paper bag for three weeks with an apple and an orange to reach proper consistency.

I recall our old family nativity, its shepherd with the cracked face, and Mary with her sweet angelic face, clad in a robe of celestial blue, sheltered in a wood hewn manger built by a family member now departed.

I recall my hometown's legendary Blue Santa, a tiny ceramic figure excavated in downtown Akron from an old factory site near the canal, a wise and kindly old elf, clad in blue glazed robes in the German tradition, said to be America's oldest known figure of Saint Nick.

I recall tales of ribald English Christmases of yore, when roving bands of Yuletide revelers might at anytime storm your halls demanding figgy pudding, or worse, in not so polite a manner, and how it is said English Victoria's betrothal to German Albert brought to England the more gentle German fireside Christmas traditions: a tree in the parlor, carols by the fireside, visits from St. Nick, and Luther's gentle lullabies to the Christ child, replacing bawdy English street carols and wassail-fueled debauchery.

I think of my German cobbler great-grandfather, and his shop below the lodge hall on the North Hill of Akron, at Temple Square, and tales of how he kept the shoe store open no matter how deep the snow, and kept a warm fire blazing in the stove in the back room, and how it was said that people came to his shop not so much for shoes as for the hospitality and warmth of the fire.

My great-grandfather, Henry Louis Hosfield, with the Gregory grandchildren. James, my Dad, standing, Grover center, Mickey on his lap.

 I think of my own father's sudden boughts of yuletide merriment, our epic journeys up Smith Road Hill in a raging blizzard, to get something for my Mom's birthday, the longest night of the year. It wasn't just a shopping trip to Polsky's, it was an adventure, and how in the spirit of Hildegarde, but with his own twist, my Dad kept Christmas well.

I think of manning the Jaycees tree lot as a tiny kid with my Dad, downtown Cuyahoga Falls at Broad Boulevard and Front Street when it was a vacant lot, and how we burned scrap lumber in a wooden barrel, and strands of bare bulbs illuminated the offerings, and how we kids gathered branches up off the ground to take home and place in glass Pepsi bottles to make Charlie Brown trees for the dog.

I think of my Dad in his earflap hat and wool coat and corncob pipe, in his element chatting up the tree lot customers, most likely not charging anyone the full retail price, and as Christmas grew close and the night grew late, he gave away more than one tree to the mother with the old coat and the sad eyes, or the family with the rusty car and the dangling muffler.

So, of course in my mind it is a clear trajectory, from Bavaria and O Tannenbaum and Stille Nacht to Akron's North Hill and Blue Santa, and my great grandfather's shoe store at Temple Square, and my grandmother Hildegarde's indominable Christmas spirit, and my Dad's own ways of keeping December festive. It all culminates with the blue bulb in the porch light on Seventh Street.

The 1978 Seventh Street Pageant. My sister, as Mary, of course is in blue. Tim holds Cuddles in her customary role, as a sheep.

 I weave my tale. I connect the dots. I ask my dad, finally, "Why the blue bulb?"

He considers it, for a moment, and says, simply, "Well, because a red bulb looks like a house of ill repute."

I ask my mom the same question. Of course, to her, it is all about the new fallen snow, and how of all the colors of light, it is the blue ones that sparkle on the snow that she has always liked best.

I try out my theory of the blue bulb on both of them, taking it back to Prince Albert and Luther, via Ellet and North Hill and Hildegarde's silver tree with the blue balls, and they both nod affirmatively. Oh, that's a good explanation, too.

So, no matter what the reason, for the better part of the four decades that this house has existed on Seventh Street, which was here as a dirt lane long before they put a number to it and this house sprouted in the side yard of an older one, there has been a blue bulb in the front porch light. It doesn't really matter why. But, if you'd like, I'll weave together a tale.

The View From Mount Pleasant: Thoughts On Veterans' Day

With two little babies at home in Lancaster, Ohio, my Grandfather, Marvin Lester Reid, answered his country's call.

Marvin Lester Reid, December 16, 1945, in Japan.

He served in the Pacific. I know this not because he ever spoke of his service, but because my Mom had a little red kimono he sent home to his baby girl, and I once saw a portrait from a studio in Japan, in his dress uniform with a vase of orchids placed in the corner. I saw that photo when I was in college, in a shoebox of family photos. I had never seen my grandfather as a young man, and was startled: I felt like I was looking at myself. Same long face and big earlobes, same lanky frame. I was never a stout Gregory/Hosfield, always more of an attenuated Reid. I was home relaxing on a break from studying English literature, looking at a portrait of my Grandfather at exactly my age, on leave from defending his country.

He was a man of small town Midwestern civic virtue, in the best possible sense. He took obvious pride in his two story white wood frame house, with L-shaped front porch, set up on a steep embankment like all the houses on East Allen Street. He built a brick walkway the length of the long narrow backyard, lined with a long garden of roses, currants, and every vegetable you could grow in Southeastern Ohio. In a shady corner, a porch swing hung from an arbor he built under a crabapple tree. At the terminus of the walkway, paved with bricks salvaged when Lancaster paved its streets with asphalt, a white frame garage that looked more like a stable housed his immaculately waxed Ford LTD, traded in every four years at the local Ford dealer for an updated version of the same.

Jessie and Tim get a good seat on the stoop for the parade, January 4, 1971, Lancaster, Ohio, where my Mon's parents, Lester and Martha Reid lived.

 He did the family's shopping, and going "marketing" with him was an adventure. I loved riding in those plush velour Ford seats, as we went to the butcher, to farmstands, to places that had good butter and cheese. Even when Kroger put in a new, larger supermarket, he still shopped like he was at the local butcher or bakers, speaking to the deli man about cheeses, checking the produce carefully, scrutinizing cuts of meat and engaging the head butcher if something didn't look right.

He knew the proper seasons and places to gather morels, when the hazelnuts would be prime for gathering on Mt. Pleasant, where the best blackberry brambles were. Though his heart was too weak to scale Mt. Pleasant, he encouraged us to climb to the top, while he rested on a boulder. He wanted us to see that view: Lancaster's rows of neat frame houses, the beautiful fairgrounds, the rich fields that stretched all the way to the Hocking Hills.

Back at the house on Allen Street, I knew that at some point the first floor parlor had been converted to the master bedroom, the dining room was made into the living room, and the back porch enclosed as a bath. I knew Grandpa Reid had difficulty with stairs, that his heart had been weakened by rheumatoid fever picked up while serving in the Pacific. But I never thought of him as disabled: he worked all his life, tended his garden, took care of his home. I never heard him complain or express regret.


Holidays and special weekends were spent down in Lancaster. My Grandmother's table strained under the weight of robust turkey breasts and dozens of pies, of glistening glazed hams and cheesecake with homemade black cherry topping. Adults gathered around the kitchen table for Euchre and Camels, cousins sprawled on the living room floor with dogs and games of our own invention. When it was time to leave my grandmother and grandfather kept bringing more and more parcels of food to the car for us to take home. Thy wanted to make sure that way up in Akron we would still have good butter (and homemade rolls and drumsticks and pies and casserole.) My grandfather always told us to be careful (I think he mistrusted my Dad's Japanese cars) and lingered on the front porch until our car disappeared down Allen Street.

I have a brass antique car piggy bank, my Grandfather gave one each to Tim and I, from The Farmers & Citizens Bank of Lancaster. I am sure it is conglomerated into Chase or PNC or somesuch by now, but it always reminds me of him, his pride in his community, how he thought Ohio was the most beautiful place. I think we used to think he was a little provincial, old fashioned. But he had seen other continents, and oceans, and to him, the Grand Canyon could never compare to Old Man's Cave, Buckeye Lake was at least the equal of Captiva Island, Mt. Pleasant a more than splendid enough view.

It was an icy January when he died, salting those steep front steps on Allen Street. He didn't want the mailman to have a difficult time. He slipped and fell to the base. He died of head injuries. Of course, you could say that a septuagenarian WWII veteran with a weak heart had no business being out in an ice storm on those steep slippery steps. But that was not my grandfather: you salted your steps. You served your country. You looked out for your community. That is who he was, and what he did.

Every Veteran's Day and Memorial Day, I think of Lester Marvin Reid. I think of his soft spoken civic pride, his dutifulness, his love of country, of nature and things that grow, the way he provided for his family. I see those virtues in his daughter, and only hope that I can become a worthy grandson.

My Mom found the photo: my Grandfather, Marvin Lester Reid, on leave from the Pacific. My Mom, on the left, looks so much like my sister here. And I have my Grandfather's earlobes and forehead. Except for my Grandfather's uniform, I am certain my Grandmother, Martha Plank Reid, stitched everyone's clothes here.

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They Tore A Schoolhouse Down Today

I’m always sad to see a classic three-story red brick schoolhouse torn down.

September 24, 2009. Philadelphia, PA.

I DO understand, it is being done in the name of our children's brighter future. The new school, I am sure, will be smart-wired and green and energy efficient and ADA compliant and all those good things.

William Brantly Hanna Pvblic School, 1908-2009.

But, still I can't help but think we lose something intangible.

Could not shake the feeling, she was not quite ready to go.

I taught in one of these sturdy old behemoths, General Wagner Middle School in East Oak Lane, Philadelphia. Shabbily maintained though she was, smelling of sour milk and old floor wax, she had good bones. Beneath grime and neglect, at least a little grandeur undergirds bureaucratic negligence. On certain clear sunny mornings after a holiday floor buffing, you almost felt hopeful ascending that marble staircase.

I am pretty sure the School Reform Commission is staffed by those same people as on the committee in 12 Monkeys.

An inherent public spiritedness pervades these durable old structures. From the carved limestone nameplates to the embellishments in stone and copper, a trace of civic pride remains from when this was a bustling city, a growing neighborhood, a new school, a hopeful place.

Before it was a boulevard, it was Broad Street, and there was a red brick schoolhouse there.

 Maybe my own past haunts me here. The low-slung brick and cinderblock elementary school I attended sat on the former playground of a three-story red brick schoolhouse it replaced. Broad Street School's cornerstone sat in the courtyard of our new school, a vestigial remnant of what was no longer there. Its presence was felt, but rarely referred to. One of my older teachers (she seemed elderly at the time but was probably only in her 50s) told the story of the students and teachers walking across the playground from the old school to the new on that bright spring morning in 1970. They carried their old books across the asphalt to the new.

The Broad Street name plate, in DeWitt's courtyard

That story stuck with me. I remember the jarring feeling as a student at the new Gordon M. DeWitt Elementary School, opening my battered old red Dick and Jane reader in Mrs. Suter's first grade reading class, to see "Broad Street School" stamped on the inside cover of that tattered old text. In a few months those battered old readers would be replaced by the new McGraw-Hill Reading series, orange and green and yellow and alive with 70s color, as the adventures of Dick and Jane and their ornery pet goat gave way to stories about Hector and We Lei.

Gordon M. DeWitt faculty, circa 1974

A shiny new school is a good and hopeful thing. All children deserve it. I just fear that something solid and durable and permanent is being replaced by something lesser and synthetic and faux stucco and somehow more shabby. I hope that is not the case. I hope for the students at whatever the school is that replaces Hanna, that it stands as a beacon in this rough but enduring neighborhood, that it stands among but above the rowhomes that it surrounds, that it offers a vision for the future that respects the place where these children come from, but also sheds a light toward someplace new and unforeseen.

A mighty task for a mere building to perform. I hope our school reform leaders understand that it takes more than a new building. Even our neglected aging red brick behemoths, on certain February mornings when the winter sun hits the buffed marble staircase jut right, were big enough places for the most audacious of dreams.

And I just couldn't shake the feeling that Hanna wasn't quite ready to go.