I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I huffed smoke in an attempt to mask his boozy funk, listened to my ticking turn signal, and considered myself lucky for getting a fare. I hadn’t heard anything from dispatch for an hour or so, and most of the other drivers had already hauled their bar drunks home and were headed to the airport for the red-eye flights. As the newest, youngest—and as far as I knew—only woman on the graveyard shift, I was low man on the totem pole with plenty to learn.

It was obvious to the other drivers that I hadn’t been in Denver long, so I’d told them I’d left home at seventeen and been everywhere, hoping it would make me seem tough, but I could tell they were keeping an eye on me in a big brother kind of way. Not having had a big brother, this was a new one on me.

“Always check your trunk for a spare, and a jack,” one advised. “Take your tire iron up front and keep it under your seat. Just in case.” Another reminded me about the switch underneath the dashboard I could use to disable a headlight so the cops would pull me over. Just in case I found myself in trouble with a bad fare. But they didn’t go so far as to share tips for scoring fares, except to warn me that the senior drivers did not welcome newbies on the elite taxi stands outside the posh clubs.

Back then, in 1975, the airport was first come first serve. After putting a quarter in a slot to get in, we lined up at the curb and leaned against our thick yellow doors, trading stories while we waited. “May all your lights be green!” we’d yell at each other before driving away.

I regarded my fare’s stale, unruly hair and decaying jacket through the rearview mirror. It was a dark moon night, but you wouldn’t know it from the peachy glow of the streetlights. It had rained a little and smelled of wet cement, oily asphalt, and cigarette butts. A woman who’s lived in this town too long told me she loves the way it smells after a rain. I didn’t tell her I thought it stunk or that I prefer the after-rain smell of pines and prairies.

And then the guy in my back seat surprised me by reaching over and wrapping his fingers loosely around my throat. “I’m going to kill you,” he said, with a slurry little burp.

“Aw, you’re just drunk,” I said. “Where can I take you?”

He gave me his address, leaned back, and closed his eyes. At twenty-one, I was either too dumb to be afraid or wise enough to know the futility of fear. What I did know was this: nearly all animals will relax and go with the flow if you convince them you’re in charge, a truth I had absorbed from working with dogs, cats, parakeets, horses, and my five little brothers.

We made our way across Denver, a sleepy cow town vibrating with fuzzy, dead-of-night energy—he filling the cab with his sour mash breath, me in my black-billed yellow cap savoring the irony of my new job. I was adrift, and yet here I was in the business of taking people home.

I parked outside the address and nudged my fare onto the sidewalk. The man mumbled something about money being inside the apartment and fished around for a key. He shrugged helplessly, and I responded by digging through his pockets while he leaned against me for support. We got the door open, walked down the steps, and he shuffled towards a stained grey mattress.

“Hey,” I said, “You owe me two dollars and seventy-five cents.”

“I’m not paying you,” he said from the other room. I looked around for something of value, hoping for something smaller than the portable television sitting atop his dresser. Fiddling with the rabbit ears, I said, “Well then, I’ll have to take your TV.”

“You can’t do that!” he hollered, and when it looked like he might just make it to his feet, I took my hands off his sole asset and made tracks for the door. I had pressed my luck as far as it was going to go.

Back beneath the blinking stars, I got into the car and placed my cap on the seat. I considered locking the doors. I took a right on Broadway and saw an unblinking string of green lights stretching ahead like an airport runway. I reached for the dashboard mic. “Seven and a half checking in.” Maybe dispatch would have a bone to throw my way, someone sober, with money. It never hurts to dream.

I met Shirley and Ken Kenneally in 1981 when Cathi invited me to their home for a party. Although the house was set a good way in from the street, I could hear the music from the sidewalk. I opened a wrought-iron gate set in boxwood and followed slate pavers to the door. The woman standing just inside turned her face upwards and said, “Welcome! I’m Shirley.”

Ken was equally warm and I soon realized that this was not just a party, it was family. Shirley and Ken did not have children and so put their energies into supporting the arts. They owned Free Reelin’ Sound: two recording studios in two houses. The party was taking place in their main home, Studio A.

The house is iconic, a masterpiece in concrete and plaster featuring a domed ceiling, and likewise, a domed rooftop patio. It was designed in 1932 by architect Eugene Groves for Mary Holland and is registered in Denver’s Historic Landmarks as The Holland House.

Although Shirley was soft-spoken, she had a magnificent aura that simultaneously soothed and energized. I was smitten. She was three years younger than my mother, and I remember telling one of her longtime friends that when Shirley got old I was going to take care of her. “Get in line,” he said.

Ken was a pilot for United and he owned a small Cessna which brought him great joy. He was older than Shirley and looked a little like Albert Einstein. He exuded wisdom, had a dry wit, and was always surrounded by young people, but his special friend — their special friend — was a musician and artist named Fred.

The Kenneallys often went out to watch their friends play in the Denver bars and I become part of their entourage. One Halloween I dressed as a black-leathered biker chick and joined Shirley, Cathi, and her two best friends, Sandy and Cheryl, to watch Fred play with his band in the boonies south of Denver. The three younger women — they called themselves the Pink Pussies — were dressed as roller derby queens in pink satin jackets and short shorts that Sandy had sewn. Back then, we all took Halloween seriously.

We had the bar largely to ourselves and it didn’t bother us at all to dance with each other. The Pink Pussies waved their arms and slid around on their skates, occasionally grabbing me or Shirley for balance, all of us parading back to our booth between songs to catch up with our pitchers of beer.

On one of those trips between the mosh pit and our booth, I heard a pair of husky-looking women hiss something. I ignored them, but each time we made another pass, they got louder and soon we all heard them say, “Girls don’t dance with girls in Douglas County.”

We laughed it off. We were there to have fun and if some people found that offensive, so be it.

Eventually, I found my way to the ladies’ room in the back of the bar. When I came out of the stall, one of the two women was blocking the door and the second one, furious, pulled a handgun from her bag and stuck it in my face. Without thinking, I grabbed her wrist and twisted the barrel away. She struggled, we both lost our balance, and I wrenched her hand towards the door and shoved it across the sill.

With my total focus on keeping the gun outside the bathroom, I had no idea that the other woman had jumped on top of me. Nor did I comprehend that Shirley had burst from one of the stalls and begun pulling the second woman’s hair. Moments later, the Pink Pussies were in the room breaking up the fight. They recovered the gun and alerted the bartender, who summoned the police.

After the cops arrived and took the two homophobic women into custody, the five of us sat at separate tables and hand-wrote our versions of what had happened. We shared notes on our way home and that’s when I heard about what Shirley had done. I kept shaking my head incredulously. It seemed so uncharacteristic, so surprising. Shirley bristled. “Why surprising?” she said, “I didn’t have a choice. It was two against one!” That night we learned that Shirley, that quiet and unassuming woman, was someone you needed by your side in a bar fight.

The Kenneallys were also into wholesome activities like hiking. I was game, despite being woefully out of shape, and so found myself at the base of Bear Mountain one morning with a gaggle of musicians and groupies.

The object when hiking above treeline is to get up and back before the onset of afternoon thunderstorms — advisable, but not practical with a large group of night owls. But we did our best with Ken at the helm, and I soon realized I didn’t know much about hiking. I sank into the boggy terrain, struggling to keep up, as the peak receded and the sun inched higher. Shirley, on the other hand, seemed made for this sort of thing.

We reached our apex as it began to rain. One of the hikers had brought wine, and another a tarp, and we were soon cozily huddled underneath the tarp, laughing and passing a bottle while thunder rumbled overhead.

Someone remarked on our false sense of security and we all laughed harder. That lighthearted sense of safety was emblematic of the Kenneally magic. Their web of friendship, support, and art sheltered us all from a cold and threatening world.

As luck would have it, I was looking for new digs when the house across the street from Studio A came up for rent and I took it. How wonderful it was to have my mentors so close. It was probably around that time that Shirley told me she suffered from loneliness. I had a hard time wrapping my head around this, so she explained. When she was very young her mother became sick, and her father put her in the care of an orphanage. It was a confusing and lonely time for little Shirley, made worse because the staff was forbidden to cuddle and hold the children. By the time Shirley returned home to her parents, she was infused with an inextinguishable sense of estrangement.

Ken was only 54 when an updraft tore the wing from his Cessna. I was living in Loveland when I got a call from Cathi. I remember watching the afternoon light fade from my wall phone, and the flat tone of Cathi’s voice. “Ken is dead.”

I recalled a recent visit to Studio B in which I had joined Ken for a walk. Ken was his usual straightforward self, and we found ourselves talking about death and regrets. He surprised me by saying he didn’t have any unfinished business. He told me that if he died tomorrow, he wouldn’t feel he had missed anything.

I was shocked. I was in my 20’s and couldn’t fathom running out of wishes or goals. I turned my head to examine his face but saw no sadness or depression, only an all-knowing calm. I shivered and gave a nervous laugh.

~*~

Ken’s wake was an extraordinary affair. The grass behind the Holland House was smothered in friends, their voices muted beneath the big trees. Their longtime friend, Charley, stepped up to the mic and said, “We used to call them hootenannies.”

Many of us began wiping at our eyes right then. Every person on that lawn had benefited from Ken and Shirley’s love and generosity. By the time Charley passed the mic, we were clinging to each other. The eulogies went on for a long time. We drank and reclined on blankets as the sky darkened. Fingers gently plucked guitar strings in search of comfort.

After Ken’s death, Shirley spent a lot of time in the air. She would pack a carry-on, slip a book into her purse, and go down to the airport. She came to see Bob and me several times, once in Virginia and once on Maui. Shirley told me that she sometimes flew across the country and back, just to get out of the house and read her book above the clouds. But she always made sure to be in town on the anniversary of Ken’s death so that she and Fred could drive deep into the Rocky Mountains for an afternoon at the crash site.

When Bob entered my life, I took him to meet Shirley and a few years later she stood beside me as I said my wedding vows. After we moved out of state, we made sure to hook up with Shirley whenever we were in town.

When our daughter Emily married, Shirley gave us her back yard to host a family soiree. Shirley had a spacious bedroom built off the back of the house, making sure it blended perfectly with the original construction. She extended an open invitation, one we took her up on many times. It was a happy place, with its floor-to-ceiling view of the lawn and gardens, flush with golden memories.

Fred tells me that Shirley is too fragile to talk on the phone and that they have called in hospice. That Shirley had fallen ill about five months ago and that he has been with her in the Holland House since she was discharged from the hospital. He tells me that they have moved her to the guest room and that a constant flow of visitors has been cycling through to lend support and pay their respects.

I talk with Cathi the next day. She says they are planning a wake a lot like Ken’s. We talk about how this period of hospice may be what it takes for Shirley to accept that she is not alone. She suggests I send a text just to say I love her. “I will,” I say. I put down my phone and think about how many of us are connected through Shirley and Ken. About their legacy of friendship, music, and art.

It was foggy this morning when I drove the shrouded backroads to visit a friend. I shared what was happening with Shirley and she told me about her aunt who is also dying. We both sat silent for a moment. “So much death,” she said, “So much grief.”

I spoke with Cathi on the way home. She had texted me yesterday evening, “Are you still awake?” but I had already gone to bed. I pulled over to talk and learned that Shirley had passed yesterday afternoon. “She died during happy hour, her favorite time of day.”

I switch on the radio and Harry Nilsson is singing, “I can’t live, if living is without you.” Next up is Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” a song that came out when I was coming of age on the east coast.

At home I pull into the pole barn, wet-eyed and ungrounded. Bob comes out to meet me, and when I tell him, he folds his big arms around me. “I’m heading into a meeting,” he says. I wipe my eyes and say, “I’m going to do some stress eating and go for a walk.”

After a bowl of vegetable soup, I stand on our back steps and stare at the ashen sky. I urge my feet into motion and walk towards the woods. High above the trees, I hear the whisper of a propeller plane.

When Shelley returned home after two weeks away, she was confronted by a loud and needy cat. Lucy let her know, in strident tones, how much she had missed her and how devastatingly hungry she had been. She went on and on about it, while Shelley busied herself with unpacking and reacquainting herself with her very own kitchen, sofa, and bed. Just when she thought she would settle down for real, the neighbor called to say they had an emergency and could Shelley help.

It turned out a very young kitten, black and white just like Lucy, had wandered onto their doorstep. Highly allergic, they could not let it in their house and the poor thing appeared way too young to be outside fending for itself amongst the hawks and possums, and well, maybe Shelley could take it in. Shelley sighed, unable to think clearly amid the sharp mewling of the lost little waif, and took charge.

As far as Lucy was concerned, inviting this flea-bitten critter into her environs was an absolute no go. Insult to injury. And so Shelley set up a kitten holding pen in one of her outbuildings, out of earshot, and wandered back into the house hoping for a good night’s sleep.

The next morning, Amy and I met at Shelley’s house at 7:30 for our first Tuesday walk in weeks, excited to see our friend and hear all about her trip. We all had plenty of new news to report, so it wasn’t until about three miles in that Shelley got around to telling us about her little problem.

Amy thought about it for a minute and ventured that maybe this wayward critter would make a good birthday present for her mom. Shelley’s face brightened. Meanwhile, I was flooded with the memory of a similar situation involving a frightened motherless kitten.

Kihei, Maui May, 2001
We stared, unbelieving, at the tiny blur of a kitten running towards us, scraggly little tail pointed straight up, kicking up puffs of dust on the hot Maui side street. She cried as loud as she could with her small sharp voice, and ran until she reached Shaun’s legs. Hooking her needle-thin claws into his skin, she continued upwards towards his friendly face. Shaun reached down and disconnected her from a thigh, and Bob and I leaned in for a closer look.

Her right eye was swollen shut, and her head dwarfed the attached bag of bones. We looked at Shaun, stunned and on his way to helplessly smitten. He had recently lost his cat and vowed not to take in another animal, something we had sworn not to do some five years earlier. Knowing we had a better chance of keeping that promise, we volunteered to take the kitten and find it a home. Relieved, Shaun fixed us up with a litter box and bowls and we stopped at the grocery store for canned cat food on the way back upcountry.

It was obvious she was going to lose that eye, so we named her Lefty. I bathed her in the sink, watched the water turn pink, then took her to a spot in our sunny garden wrapped in a towel, and with a fine-toothed comb combed out the fleas. It took three baths before the water ran clear, and the pile of fleas on our lawn probably weighed more than Lefty did. We fed her and watched her sleep.

We built a cardboard castle in the kitchen to contain her. Leftie was the first one up in the morning and let us know she was lonely with her shrill little voice. She liked to climb up our legs and curl up on Bob’s chest when he napped.

Lefty was soon sturdy enough for a trip to the vet’s where we arranged for them to remove her ruined eye, de-worm, vaccinate and whatever else she needed, and find her a home. They didn’t think prospective parents would appreciate our sense of humor, so they renamed her Lucky. As in “lucky she ran into you,” they explained. As we left the clinic, we were relieved, but sad. We knew we had done the right thing for all concerned. But it had been nice sharing our little home with this tiny animal and we knew we would probably never see her again.

A month or so later, we received a card in the mail from Lucky’s new owners. In it, they thanked us for rescuing her and making it possible for them to adopt her. They wrote that she was a perky little thing and was adapting spectacularly to her new life. I read the note twice and had to put it down when my vision got bleary.

Back to Moncure, North Carolina August 2018
Shelley, Amy, and I finished our five mile walk, ending up where we began, as always, at Shelley’s house. “Would you like to see the kitten?” she asked. Amy got her phone from the car so she could send some pictures to her sister, and we trotted to the shed behind Shelley. We heard the little fella about fifty feet out, chirping like a demented bird with every bit of his lungs. Shelley picked him up and passed him around. The poor thing had the same needle-sharp claws I remember from Lucky, the same matted coat and emaciated body.

Amy snapped a couple of pictures and left, and although I was tempted to stick around and give the tiny tyke a bath, I drove off to run some errands. A few hours later, Shelley let me know that Amy had returned with a cat carrier. A minute later, Amy told me she’d brought the cat home, dunked him, fed him, and he was sleeping on her lap. Her daughter was smitten and they were tossing around names. Later her mother got to meet the little guy and got him over to the vet who de-wormed him saying that the rescue couldn’t have waited much longer or the worms would have finished him off.

This may sound like a little story, but it felt like a big one to me. First off, every neighborhood needs a Shelley, a “fixer” – someone they can call when they run into a problem. Second, there is the serendipity of this rescue. The neighbors find a cat, Shelley shoulders the burden, Amy takes him off her hands, and her mother is happy. Finally, there’s this: while our weekly walks may seem like non-essential self-indulgence, it’s not. Getting together with friends on a regular basis creates a synergy that strengthens neighborhoods. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are not enough. We need real face time, with real people, to solve little problems, and make real things happen.

It took us half the day to get there. We waited in line for the ferry, trying to ignore the malodorous canine carcass a few feet from our Trooper. The Belize River was high that day, making the process of getting our vehicle aboard the barge even more challenging than usual. When it was our turn, we drove across the partially submerged ramp to the deck. The distributor got wet and we had to push the wagon into its place in line. Panting, we settled in to watch the driver hand-crank the ferry up the cable that stretched across the turbulent water.

Our friends in Banana Bank had invited us to watch Super Bowl 32 and stay the night. We hadn’t listened to a radio or seen a TV since moving to Belize 8 months before, and we were looking forward to a taste of the 20th century.

It was a good game, lots of back and forth, and our team, the Denver Broncos, won. The ads were ingeniously witty as per usual, and the snacks gloriously indulgent. We had brought a big pan of Bob’s famous teriyaki chicken wings. I drank too many beers.

Our hosts were a good ten years older than me and Bob. I don’t know how the conversation got started, but at one point, they snorted and remarked that, after fifty, things don’t work like they used to. Of course we laughed, and shook our heads in appreciation of this sage comment, thinking to ourselves that it wouldn’t happen to us, that our plumbing would never go awry, and none of the things one associates with bad plumbing would ever happen to us.

And yet, here we are, in the same post-fifty boat, sitting on the other side of the river with bad plumbing.

Super Bowl 52 airs this Sunday and we’ve been invited to a party. We’re bringing a big pan of teriyaki tofu and plan on watching the game with a group of people who are mostly younger than us. This is my opportunity to snort and make snide comments about the ravages of time, saying, “You don’t know the half of it,” and “You’ll see.”

More likely, I’ll keep it to myself, because I realize I’m not old compared to my parents who were as old as I am now back when I was watching the Broncos eviscerate the Green Bay Packers. My mother’s plumbing fell apart ages ago, so long ago I was practically in diapers myself. And now it’s her heart and lungs.

Yesterday my mother, who has relied on her doctors for every birth and tooth extraction, infection, ache, and pain, said no to further testing after a visit to a heart specialist. Struggling to breathe, pulse surging well above 100 beats per minute, she told my brother she just wants peace in her old age. I never would have predicted this, despite the absolute predictability of it. She’ll be turning 86 this year and has struggled with health issues all her life. Everyone calls it a day at some point.

A couple of weeks ago, I called my Mom and listened to her pant like a dog for a few seconds before she disconnected. She called back shortly to say she was getting her hair washed and couldn’t talk on the phone. A few nights later, she told me about how she sits in her chair all day watching the people outside her window. They are all walking with their eyes on their cell phones, she said, oblivious to everything else. She noticed there weren’t any cell phones on her wall of Christmas cards, only old timey things like horses and carts. Then she had a coughing fit, and after she recovered, she told me the story again, in the pretty much same words.

After Bob’s mother died, on Valentine’s Day of all things, he carried on stoically. But when his father died a few years later he told me, “I’m an orphan, now.” I casually considered how I would feel when my parents orphaned me. Reality was still outside my grasp.
I had my existential moment while I was at work yesterday, a bit of pre-game grief. I had been talking with one of my brothers after his conversation with what may be Mom’s last doctor. He wished my mother’s boiler-plate living will had concrete directives. For the first time, the terms palliative care and hospice entered our sphere of reality.

After speaking with my brother, I watered the kitchen plants, had a conversation with Malcolm, and called Bob to say I was done with my day at The Plant. He said he hadn’t gotten over to the farmer’s market and suggested I stop on my way home. I was reluctant. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel fit to talk to anyone. I wanted to just stop everything, sit down, and stare at the sun sinking behind the trees.

I felt heavier than usual and was reminded of Tami’s terrible grief after her son died. I went over to her house every day for weeks after that unimaginable and unforeseen event, and one day as I came to her door, Tami got up slowly from her sofa and said, “I..feel..so…heavy…”

But, I did keep on moving. I did stop by the farmer’s market and talked with four bright-faced people I’ve spoken with many times before. I did come home and embrace my husband, make dinner, call my brothers, shower and go to bed. Just like normal. And I will go to that Super Bowl party, and laugh and joke and eat with my friends. It remains to be seen whether I mention plumbing, or hospice, or end of life directives.

It was a picture of her mother holding her as a baby, something her mother might give her if she asked. But she hadn’t asked and hoped not to get caught. All but the oldest son moved away decades ago and once a year the daughter came to visit. In previous years, they had left everything exactly as they found it, out of respect tinged with childhood fear.

At eighty-five and ninety-one, their parents were beyond navigating the narrow pathways and stairs. Ten years ago, a bone-crushing car accident put the woman in a nursing home. When she regained the use of her legs, the kids helped her move to an apartment in town without stairs, near the bus line and the church. The man remained alone at the farm for another seven years. Without his wife to temper his hoarding habit, the trails inside the house had filled in so he moved to town, too.

With the sun low in the sky and their blood pumping, the three grown children parked on the rocky lane some distance from the house. “I don’t want to scratch the paint on my van,” explained the oldest son. The younger son grabbed a bag of work gloves and they climbed up the rocky driveway through a tunnel of encroaching undergrowth.

At the top, the youngest pointed out two tall trees and told their stories, how they came into possession of the seedlings and planted them forty years ago. Back then they had repainted the house, turning the faded green shutters to red. The mother had always wanted a white house with red shutters.

Not long ago, the man had siding put on the house and it still looked pretty good. But the barn has since gone to ground, the garden buried in weeds, and a legacy of cars rust into the landscape. There is the first car the daughter ever drove, forty-seven years earlier, sinking under half a ton of books. Their father was an English professor.

Twenty feet from the front door, they noticed a light on in the living room. They imagined a squatter with a shotgun. But they could see that the front door was still blocked by its wall of clutter. They stalked the perimeter, high stepping through brambles and poison ivy. The daughter tied back her long grey hair, her spinal cord tightening with each step. All they found were broken windows and animal trails. No fresh trash, no path worn by human weight.

They returned to the front porch and pawed through the rubble like badgers, handing stuff back bucket-brigade style. Hedge shears, a scoop shovel, weed trimmer, an axe. “That might come in handy,” the daughter remarked. The youngest chuckled, breaking the tension. “This is insane,” they thought.

Eventually they were able to pull the storm door open several inches. The daughter knocked and called, “Hello! Anyone home?” Hearing nothing, they pushed at the inside door until they could get an arm through. Things must have shifted. “We used to call it ‘the shifting sands'” said the younger son, “Put something down and it disappears.”

Despite the trouble with his back, the older son knelt and snatched at the avalanche of debris, getting ahold of one piece at a time and tossing it further inside the kitchen. They tested the door every couple of minutes until it gave, wide enough to squeeze through, breath held. It was growing dark and they’d left the flashlight in the car. The youngest used his phone to light the way. Dread closed upon their hearts but they forged ahead.

They slid across a morass of plastic bags and magazines, through the kitchen to the narrow stairs, willing them to hold their weight. Without incident, they made it to the second floor, pausing to behold the ruins of three bedrooms. Outside, the sun had set. The photograph in the attic beckoned.

Another steep flight of stairs, and they were standing in a room barely big enough for the queen-sized bed, the same bed the parents used to conceive all six children.

Beyond the bed, on the wall next to a broken window was the picture. The daughter stepped towards it and something squished beneath her feet. Her brother raised his cell phone flashlight to find the floor was covered in animal scat. “Animals,” said the older son, “You know they’re in here hiding,” and stepping around his sister, he removed the picture from the wall.

She returned to the hotel exhausted, clutching her prize. Her husband’s balmy voice brought her into the present, a place from which to shake the past. She felt dirty, buried, bruised. She went through half a bar of soap in the shower, felt as if she were swimming towards the surface, towards the light. She joined him in bed and slept like the dead.

We decide to make a vacation bingo card. If Jim says “You know, it’s funny,” we’ll mark off a square. If John suggests we taste the honey locust blossoms, if we sneak out to the farm, if Dad loses his temper, if the great grands run up and down the wheelchair ramp and piss off the old folks.

The three of us, me, Bob, and Joe make our rounds. We have a two night layover at Jim and Kathryn’s lake house before heading west. They’ll catch up to us in a couple of days. I know we’re getting close to Shippensburg when the scent of suburbia gives way to liquid shit. Cow manure is the smell of Amish country in the spring.

We’re staying in the fourth floor turret room at Shippen Place. Just like last year. Entering the lobby I’m hurled into 1970. Heavy metal head banger riffs, and plump teenagers hoisting trays for pocket money. They haven’t changed the tape in years. The heart thumping music makes me edgy. I choose the back stairs for my escape and find myself in an alley named Apple Avenue. Someone has stuck a bleached white washcloth between the door and frame so they can get back in without going through the lobby. I hesitate for a moment before wedging it back in place.

Outside, the streets are refreshingly warm but soon turn steamy as I trudge across a memory landscape. I clip past the Methodist Church with the loudspeakers that ring the quarter hour from seven until ten. I pretend not to see a man smoking on his back steps in a dingy beater tee. We kids used to call them “grandpa overalls shirts.” I pass another church and another, parking lot after parking lot.

My fact pattern begins to blur. I’m not seeing things as they are but rather as they were. I first hear that phrase from Kathryn. “It’s lawyer speak for ‘the story.'” I return to our room where Bob’s earnest smile brings me back to the present. Thank god I met this man, I think.

I wonder how my brother John can live here. Like me, he left as a teenager, but he and Darla moved back after they had their three kids. Unlike us, Darla grew up here. Her parents and grandparents are buried here. Their ten grandchildren have never known any place else. They play in the same parks she played in as a child.

The morning after Jim and Kathryn arrive in Shippensburg we go for a wander. Kathryn and I follow Jim to a patch of lawn where he peers across the street trying to picture a house that’s no longer there. It seems significant, so Kathryn and I obligingly squint toward the object of his mind’s eye. He shows us a hill where he lost control of his bike and crashed into the back of someone’s leg. He got yelled at, he says. Jim was only five years old when we moved here from his first home in New Jersey. It was my eighth move. I was sixteen with one foot out the door.

We cross the tracks near where the Harpers used to live. Those afroed twins everyone called “the Harper girls” were my closest friends during that year and a half. We were a triad of trouble. Together we mourned when Jimi Hendrix, and then Janis died. Once we decided we’d had it and ran away to their older brother’s place in Harrisburg. A day or two later we were arrested while sitting at a dimly lit bar reaching for three open bottles of Rolling Rock.

We walk past what used to be Julia’s house, a handsome Victorian that dominates the corner of Orange and Prince. Julia took me in when I was seventeen, after my parents and I mutually agreed to split. Pointing, I say “I lived in that room up the stairs behind the little window.”

We cut through Grace United Church of Christ’s parking lot where I remember waking up with the mother of all hangovers, grateful to have blacked out most of the night before. I had made the mistake of going out with a nice looking guy from school. He showed up with a friend and a bottle of rum. After that I stayed away from the clean cut guys and stuck to freaks, geeks, and blacks.

Walking past a Victorian home with a pointy-roofed turret Jim says, “You know, it’s funny – I used to be afraid of this house.” Kathryn says she loves the house, even its unnaturally pointed hanging baskets and hollow-eyed tower. Nothing about that house is lurking in her past. But I’m looking at it through Jim’s eyes and feel his shudder, his urge to run. We turn back towards the hotel. It’s close to ninety degrees and I’m spent, sticky and soiled.

The next day, I climb into my brother John’s van for a trip to North Mountain. The honey locust in his yard has mostly dropped its blossoms and they are drifting like snow on his driveway. “These are old” he says, shoving at them with his boot toe, “They taste better when they first come out.” A block away we pass another tree just coming into bloom. “Grab a bunch of those, youngster,” he drawls. I reach out my window and bend back a branch. I pop some in my mouth and smack my lips for emphasis, like a giraffe. They are good, kind of chewy with a hint of vanilla. John is laughing.

John and I hike a shaded trail to an old dam and look across a valley that used to be a lake. On the way down, he dives into the undergrowth and retrieves a green canvas camp chair. I test it for comfort while he leans back on a log. We talk about everything. After we’ve rested he returns the chair to its hiding place.

On the way home John stops in front of a small house with two barns and a “For Sale By Owner” sign. He and Darla are thinking of selling their two-story home, planning ahead for their golden years. I dream along with him for a while before he pulls the van into gear and drives through a 130-year old covered bridge. I imagine the sound of horse and buggy echoing off the timber sides. Livestock doesn’t spook at the water below while crossing a bridge like this. Some people call them kissing bridges.

Out here amid the orderly farms, away from that little asphalt town with its forty-eight churches I see so much more than that old fact packet of teenaged angst. I feel a sense of place and see generations of family when I look through my brother’s eyes.

I was nine the day JFK died. My brother Michael would make his entrance five days later. It was a pivotal year in many ways. My parents had moved me and my three brothers from City Island in the Bronx to New Jersey, but something went wrong and they weren’t able to move us into our new home. So they rented a nice big house within smelling distance of the Atlantic and kept looking. Avon by the Sea was a resort town, buzzing with vacationers in the summer, and reduced to its core population during the school year. We had a new house, new school, new town, and new friends.

Everyone idolized President Kennedy for his good looks, charming accent, and perfect wife and kids. When our teachers asked us who we most admired it was him, the youngest president ever and perhaps the most powerful person alive. If the world needed saving, he alone was the man for the job. Our future was safe in his capable hands.

We kids spent our year in Avon growing our moxie muscles, running at large in the quiet streets and squirming through boarded up windows in the massive hotels on Ocean Avenue. We took turns jumping off the boardwalk seven feet above the deep beach sand. Or we’d huddle beneath the drawbridge and watch the counter balance, a piece of concrete the size of a car, grind its way down the wall. After dinner we played “Who Dies the Best” on our sloping front lawn, perfect for rolling down.

None of this prepared us for our fearless leader’s death.

Friday, November 22, 1963 started out like any other day. The elementary school was only a few blocks away so Johnny and I walked. Bobby would have been in kindergarten so he probably tagged along. I pledged allegiance to the flag in my fourth-grade home room, fidgeting, distracted by the prospect of another delicious weekend.

After lunch, we were unexpectedly herded into the auditorium. My giddiness at the interruption was immediately dampened by the bleak look on my teachers’s face. When all the classes had filed in, the principle cleared his throat and said, “The president has been shot. School is dismissed. You are all to go home to your families.” No one moved for a minute, the only sound was that of a muffled newscaster backstage.

A classmate asked me to walk her home because she didn’t trust her legs. She lived further from school than I did. She was smaller than me, which made it easy to catch her each time she swooned. We were both in shock and I was glad for the company. What we had just heard made no sense. Why would anyone shoot President Kennedy?

I deposited my friend on her front steps and continued towards home. The streets were uncharacteristically quiet except for the seagulls. Everyone was inside watching TV.

I was surprised to find my father camped out in front of the television when I walked in our front door, his shoulders rigid, oblivious to anything but the news. I paused mid-step, transfixed by a single tear sliding down his cheek. The unimaginable had happened. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was dead. I didn’t know heroes could die or grown men cry.

The wallpaper blurred with my own tears. I’d been strong until this moment. I heard the swish of tires on asphalt, a squealing gull, the heavy step of my ultra-pregnant mother in the other room, and the ticking of our mantle clock.

I was confused and off-balance. Life as I knew it was over and yet it continued to tick along. We would eat dinner, go to bed, and on Monday return to school, yet nothing would feel the same.

Two days later, the whole family went house hunting. I remember all of us silently transfixed in a stranger’s living room as JFK’s funeral procession paraded across her TV screen, united in our grief.

His horse-drawn coffin was followed by a symbolic riderless horse. Black Jack was distractingly magnificent, picked because even at sixteen he couldn’t be ridden. He jigged down the street, fighting the man with his hand on the bridle every step of the way, a pair of tall riding boots set backwards into the stirrups. The black gelding fought his handler the same way I fought to contain my emotions as I tried to make sense of what had happened.

In the weeks to follow I aged a million years. I found myself questioning things I’d always known for certain. I caught myself pausing before jumping off the boardwalk or looking over my shoulder before climbing into forbidden places. I saw the same hesitations in my brothers and our friends.

The assassination had damaged our confidence, and in the coming years I came to know that this was the day a whole generation lost its innocence. Up to now, I’d believed in the infallible protection of our leaders, but with a single bullet I realized I was on my own.

Here’s the technical low down from NASA’s Science News:

Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012
July 23, 2014

Extreme solar storms pose a threat to all forms of high-technology. They begin with an explosion–a “solar flare”—in the magnetic canopy of a sunspot. X-rays and extreme UV radiation reach Earth at light speed, ionizing the upper layers of our atmosphere; side-effects of this “solar EMP” include radio blackouts and GPS navigation errors. Minutes to hours later, the energetic particles arrive. Moving only slightly slower than light itself, electrons and protons accelerated by the blast can electrify satellites and damage their electronics. Then come the CMEs, [coronal mass ejections] billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma that take a day or more to cross the Sun-Earth divide. Analysts believe that a direct hit by an extreme CME such as the one that missed Earth in July 2012 could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn’t even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps.

When Bob told me this morning about the near miss two years ago I wanted to think it was a fluke. But actually an event like this is entirely in the realm of possibility. Later on in the NASA story they quoted a study in which the chance of an extreme CME hitting our beloved planet in the next ten years was calculated at 12%.

On July 23, 2012 Bob and I were in Kumasi and might be there still had the storm knocked out Earth’s electrical grid. “It’s not like they have millions of transformers in stock,” Bob pointed out. We stood on the back porch for a few moments, trying to imagine our life if the timing had been different. Wondering how we would have survived and how long it might take the world to recover from this level of destruction.

“Our civilization is a house of cards,” I said “Good thing we’re growing some of our food,” Bob replied. And we vowed to stay put, counting our lucky stars that we didn’t get stranded in Ghana.

After a week of getting jerked around by a cable service provider, Mona had enough, according to the Washington Post story Taking a Whack Against Comcast:
The insulting idea that, as Shaw puts it, “they thought just because we’re old enough to get Social Security that we lack both brains and backbone.”

So, after stewing over it all weekend, on the following Monday, she went downstairs, got Don’s claw hammer and said: “C’mon, honey, we’re going to Comcast.”

Did you try to stop her, Mr. Shaw?

“Oh no, no,” he says.

Hammer time: Shaw storms in the company’s office. BAM! She whacks the keyboard of the customer service rep. BAM! Down goes the monitor. BAM! She totals the telephone. People scatter, scream, cops show up and what does she do? POW! A parting shot to the phone!

“They cuffed me right then,” she says.

Her take on Comcast: “What a bunch of sub-moronic imbeciles.”

The quality of customer service in the United States has been declining for years. All of us have been subjected to maddeningly inefficient automated help lines, warranty loopholes, surly, self-important clerks and clueless account managers. It was only a matter of time before someone reacted appropriately.

I’m surprised that hordes of people are not out in the streets protesting the militarism of their country, the commercialism of their lives, and a host of other indications that corporations come first, humanity second. I heartily aplaud Mona Shaw’s decision to take matters into her own hands. We need more of this!

The best part is that Mona is not looking to be anyone’s hero. As quoted in Florida’s Sun Sentinel
She said many people have called her a hero. “But no, I’m just an old lady who got mad. I had a hissy fit,” she said.

I earned the right to a library card when I was able to sign my own name and when I was older, I was given permission to baby-sit for pocket money. My parents generously paid for piano lessons, riding lessons and weekends at my Nana’s house. My Nana would drop me at the local riding stable for a trail ride while she went grocery shopping. I didn’t wear a helmet to ride. When the students fell during a lesson, the teacher told us we “owned” that piece of the arena where we had landed.

On special occasions, I got new clothes. The rest of the time, my clothes came from the Thrift Store. My shoes were always new. I remember being told that I was “hard on my shoes” even though I did my best not to scuff the toes.

My mother didn’t work outside the home. She taught us how to swim in the bay by holding our hands and telling us to kick. No lifeguards, water wings or instructors. Mom often took us walking to visit the neighbors or to explore nature. We walked to the library, to church, to school, and to the grocery store. If we had to go to the doctor, we went by bus and then by subway.

On Sunday, my father drove us the twenty minutes to his mother’s and we’d spend most of the day there. We kids and often Dad and Mom would walk up through the woods on the hill behind her house to the “Sand Pits” to hunt for chocolate colored stones. Nana served meat for Sunday dinner, which was special because we didn’t eat meat every night of the week. In the summer, we’d eat out on the lawn under the plum trees with Grandpa and various aunts, uncles and cousins.

My father worked for NBC while he was getting his doctorate. He bought us a television and the whole family would sit in the living room and watch The Wonderful World of Disney. Mom would let us watch Mr. Wizard while my father was at work because he was one of the stagehands on that program. We kept a sharp eye when Mr. Wizard called for another prop and if we saw someone’s hand on the other end of the beaker or whatever, we would yell – “That’s daddy’s hand!”

Dad loved physical comedy and practical jokes and kept us entertained on the weekends. He would put one of us on each shoulder and parade us around the house. He often took the whole family to the Zoo or the Museum of Natural History.

My brothers and I ran with all the other kids in the neighborhood after school and after the dinner chores until the sun went down. We rode our bikes without helmets. We didn’t carry beepers or cell phones. We ran through the woods, climbed on roofs and played baseball and football in the unfenced back yards. Most of our play was outside and unsupervised.

I named our climbing trees according to their design. From the top of the “Look Out” tree, I could see our school. “The Ship” had a branch that was perpendicular to the ground and wide enough to sit on with my back against the trunk and read while keeping an eye on my brothers below.

Today, it makes me happy when I see a kid climbing a tree or riding their bike down the street without a helmet or playing ball with other children in their back yard. But for the most part, the neighborhoods are eerily deserted. People tell me the kids are inside playing electronic games or watching T.V. Parents tell me it isn’t safe to let their kids run through the neighborhood. A lot has changed since the old days.