Goodbye, and Good Luck

This is a revised version of a column that originally appeared on April 27, 2008

Now that they are gone, don’t you miss them?

I’m speaking, of course, of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the two U.S. senators and would-be presidents who occupied so much of our time and thoughts over the past seven weeks as they traveled every part of our state in their seemingly insatiable quest to get us to vote for them last Tuesday.

You opened the newspaper, they were there. You turned on the television, they were there. You went to visit your your son’s high school counselor and there was Barack, sitting in with you and discussing college choices, joking about how bad the food was when he went to Columbia. You went shopping for cammo hunting clothing at Cabela's, and there was Hillary offering to take you up to the family place on Lake Winola for a refresher course in gun safety.

For more than a month, they loved us and needed us and asked us to remember them come Election Day. Then, like Andy Dinniman’s mustache, they were gone.

I know Barack liked me, because he called me and left me a message. His voice on my telephone answering machine was as clear and powerful as it was in that “Yes, We Can” YouTube video that featured dozens of people whose names and identities I could not place, and Scarlett Johannson. He even sent me an e-mail calling me by name, and later had his wife, Michelle, follow up with another call. I was sorry I wasn’t home when they called so I could have spoken to them personally and told them how much I admired them and how all my friends were inspired by them and asked how Barack chose the music for his rallies; I hadn’t heard the O’Jays sing “Give The People What They Want” since I graduated high school.

I was less certain about Hillary’s feelings for me, even though she sent me e-mail after e-mail after e-mail every single day of the month she was here. She wanted me to know where she was, whether it was Scranton or Lehighton or Palmerton or Aliquippa, and what she was thinking about. But her messages always seemed like someone else was writing them, not her. I took it as a good sign, however, that she sent her one and only daughter, Chelsea, to stop in for a quick visit to my neighborhood near West Chester University. It meant a lot.

I wish they were still here because there is so much I wanted to show them about my hometown.

I would have taken Hillary to Jitter’s in West Chester and bought her a shot and a beer and watched the Phillies game with her and made sure she got home OK with her own Jitter’s T-shirt that she could wear when she wanted to fit in with us folks. If Bam had been there, I’d have even introduced them.

I would have taken Barack around the borough to show him that not all folks who live in small towns in Pennsylvania are bitter. Only when it snows and they don’t clear the streets on time. Or when they give us parking tickets for parking in front of our own homes. Or when they put up new stop signs, this time in the hallway between our living room and our bedroom. Come to think of it, we’re pretty much bitter most of the time, but we would have hidden it for politeness’ sake.

Now we are left with an emptiness, a void, a hole in our lives that qualifies us for a stop on U.S. Sen. John McCain’s tour of “forgotten places.” Like a spurned boyfriend who wallows in grief waiting for his ex to return to his life, we would give anything for a note in the e-mail or a flyer in the postal box.

All we have now are the memories. And the remaining campaign signs.

I Know Nothing...

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 20, 2008

Behold the glory of spring in West Chester.

The sounds of birds chirping outside your window. The sights of mothers and father strollering their children down brick sidewalks in the warm evenings. The smell of flowers coming into bloom. The touch of insincere political candidates grabbing your hand and slapping your back as though you and he, or she, were as close as prison cell mates.

Unfortunately, all this vernal activity simply adds up to one more way of exposing one of my greatest failings in life: I cannot for the life of me tell what kind of trees are flowering down my block, what kind of birds are chirping outside my window, and what kind of flowers are blooming in my town.

You can call me stupid for not knowing the basic of flora and fauna around these parts. I've been called stupid before, and sometimes by people who actually know what they are talking about. I'm used to it.

I prefer to view myself as vastly uniformed.

It's the line of work I'm in, I suppose, that counts for my lack of knowledge in matters of day to day life.

You remember the story of how I got this job in the fist place, don't you? How back in 1982 Bill Dean, the saintly longtime editor of the Daily Local News, gave me the mynah bird test? That's where you get a set of facts abut a burglary that included the theft of a mynah bird, and are expected to write a story based on them. If you mention the bird in the lead paragraph, they make you a news reporter. If you don't, you get to be a sportswriter.

Just kidding. Advertising salesman, actually.

But that's the point. All I knew was that the mynah was the lead, and I got the job. I didn't even know what a mynah bird was. I couldn't tell a mynah bird from a cockatiel if you spotted me the wings and the plumage. But there I was, writing about it nonetheless, with authority.

Here's how the job works. The editor tells you to write a story about why a gallon of gas costs more today than a bottle of Chateau-du-Pape 2005. You call someone at the AAA, write down whatever he or she tells you, get them to spell their name correctly, regurgitate it succinctly in 750 words or less by 5 p.m., get the mynah in the lead, file it, and forget it. I've done thousands of stories about subjects I knew nothing about, and still don't. And those are the ones that made Page One. Don't get me started on the inside pages.

I was reminded of this lack of knowledge recently when I mentioned in a column that one of my neighbors had been pruning the blossoms from her gladiolas. A few days after its publication, another neighbor stopped by and said, “Gladiolas don't have blossoms. You must have meant hydrangeas.” Who knows, maybe she said geraniums. But she gave me a look like you give the dog when he hasn't made it outside.

Look. I know I can't tell a crimson-rumped waxbill from a Madagascar periwinkle, but I do know what I like. And I do like the way that South Church Street in early May looks like a snow shower had greeted us out of season when the trees shed their white blossoms, and I like being awakened on a spring morning by the song birds who live next door.

As for the insincere politicians, don't worry. I learned their names long ago.

The Luck of the Draw

This column originally apeared on Sunday, April 13, 2008

You, the folks who live in Chester County who are reading this, don't know how lucky I am.

And by lucky I mean that it took unfathomable good fortune for me to be born and to grow up in Cincinnati, Ohio. That life was not foreordained. My mother was raised in small town Illinois; my father was born in Wisconsin. They met in New Jersey and were married when my father received his doctorate at Penn State. Somehow fate got them to Cincinnati and allowed my formative years to take place there.

According to one source, one's “formative years” are the time we acquire our adult personas as we move in stages from from childhood to adolescence. For example, the source states, in Hindu culture, during “upanayana, sometimes known outside India by the name, 'sacred thread ceremony,' children are taught the secret of life through Brahmopadesam (revealing the nature of Brahman, the Ultimate Reality) or the Gayatri mantra.” The child then becomes qualified for life as a student or adult, depending on his caste or walk in life.

Me, I just went to Skyline Chili.

I do not have to try very hard to capture in my mind the face of he waitress who served me my first portion of God's Greatest Gift to Food – the Skyline Coney. I don't, because she served me those same delights for two decades at the same chili parlor in Cincinnati, on Clifton and Ludlow, where we first encountered one another, until she retired. I didn't know her name and she didn't know mine, but she led me through the sacred ceremony of ordering “two up with mustard,” as respectfully as any guru would the Brahmopadesam.

That's where I grew up; that's where I learned to appreciate the fine things in life.

How lucky I was to spend those years learning how to eat the food of Nirvana from master teachers. The softness of the bun, the tang of the onion, the fluff of the grated cheese, the aroma of the chili sauce, all were as well known to me as the Torah is to any candidate for the Bar Mitzvah.

I tell you all these things because at this very moment I am less than a mile from that self-same chili parlor, and in several moments time, fate willing, I am going to walk into that parlor and order the Skyline meal I was brought up to receive and revere.

My meal will come after having spent the morning wallowing in the glory that are the other foods one can only truly find in Cincinnati. Shopping at the historic Findlay Market in the city's downtrodden downtown, I chose between hot beef metts and mild pork metts; between link bratwursts and old fashioned frankfurters; between garlic sausage and picnic hams. Today I passed on the smoked turkey necks out of a newly acquired mid-life appreciation for moderation. In my 20s, they'd have easily made the shopping cart.

My Cincinnati born-and-bred nieces, Emily and Alice, have chosen to lead vegetarian lives. Although I respect their freedom to make such choices, I sometimes wonder whether their parents should be investigated by the Hamilton County, Ohio, child welfare authorities for violations relating to culinary deprivation. But I let them slide, like a good hearted cop on the beat who looks the other way, knowing that the girls will still accompany their uncle to Skyline when he offers them a ride.

They know how lucky they are to sit in the Temple, whether or not they partake of the Ambrosia.

A Bridge Out of Place

This column originaly apeared on Sunday, April 6, 2008

There are a few things that strike you as if not out of place, then certainly just this side of odd when you travel west from West Chester on Route 842 into the wilds of East Bradford.

The first is the house with the large window behind which sits a chair and a bicycle in perfect repose opposite one another. You cannot be certain if these items are there on display, or whether the homeowner put them there months ago and has just simply forgotten them, or whether he or she sits down in the chair every now and then and contemplates going for a quick jaunt on the bike while the afternoon traffic passes by.

The second is the rusted piece of what looks to be old farm equipment along the roadside past the old Gun Club. You wonder when it was last used. What was it used for? Was threshing involved? Is it there for display purposes as well, or has the landowner been so lazy over the years that he or she can’t get around to removing it?

But for my money what stands out the most as an anachronism is the bridge over the East Branch of the Brandywine at Allerton Road.

Do not mistake what I am saying. It is a picturesque bridge, and not at all without its charms. Casey Stengel used to say that every baseball manager wants a bridge to jump off every now and then, and I think he would have enjoyed doing so here. He’d have gotten wet, but would have likely walked away none worse the wear from the plunge.

The bridge is a steel Pratt Truss bridge, painted a light shade of aquamarine, and spans about 105 feet of the Brandywine in the shadow of the Blue Rock Farm. According to the clutter of signs that line the road on its approach, the bridge can handle a weight of 8 tons, and has a clearance of 12 feet 1 inch. It was built about 1905, I learned, and if you want to look it up in Pennsylvania’s list of bridges, you’d be advised to check No. 15701504380111.

It is rated as “functionally obsolete.”

It is, as I said, a pretty bridge, but to my mind wholly out of place. The bridges of East Bradford should be made of stone, like Cope’s Bridge, or wood, like Gibson’s Covered Bridge. You want your scenery in a place like East Bradford to fit snugly, like a stone barn into a green embankment.

The bridge does not have a name, so far as I can tell. If it did, it would likely be the Jefferis Ford Bridge, since its location is the point of the Brandywine where Cornwallis found the creek sufficiently shallow enough to cross on his way to routing Washington in the Battle of the Brandywine. The sign that tells you this also notes that Cornwallis made his crossing between “1 and 2 o’clock.” No one has ever established exactly how many of Washington’s soldiers were killed on Sept. 11, 1777.

The bridge was not there that afternoon, of course. Nor were the five horses that now dot the pasture on the west side of the creek, nor the fences that line the pasture, nor the barn that the horses came from. All that remains of when Cornwallis and his troops crossed over is the rippling sound of the Brandywine, which is always exactly where it is supposed to be.