The Summertime Blues

This appeared Aug. 27, 2006

During the past week, while you and the rest of the Chester County public have been glued to whatever news outlet strikes your fancy these days - newspaper, television, radio, blogosphere, press releases from the desk of state Sen. Andy "47 Days Since Last Quoted in Daily Local News, And Counting" Dinniman - in hopes of learning the fate of the Former Planet Pluto, you might have missed some truly important news.

Summer's over.

I know you still have August on the calendar, that you still see green leaves on the trees, still fill your shopping bags with sweet corn at the West Chester Growers Market and still wait for the Phillies to take a swan dive, but, trust me, summer's gone.

How do I know? School starts this week.

It didn't always used to be this way, but this is the age of "post" America. You know, post-Watergate, post-Reagan, post 9/11, post-Katrina. The new seasonal calendar began whatever day it was that the planners in school districts across the country decided that students needed to get back to their books before Labor Day Weekend. Call it "post-Age of Reason" America.

Monday will be the first day of school for students in a majority of county school districts. Instead of having that one last weekend splurge down at the beach or camping trip up in the mountains, students will have to lug their 75-pound backpacks to class a week before September starts.

No more final breath of summer at the amusement park on Labor Day; for anyone under the age of 25, it's time to sit down and shut up and listen to the first few lessons of Algebra I of the new school year.

If the kids went to school in vacuum chambers instead of multi-million dollar buildings with state-of-the-art cafeterias, this wouldn't be so bad. We adults could go on pretending that we were surrounded by the carefree days of summer. Yes, there would still be time to get that deep tropical tan we've been thinking of since May 31, or to get that vegetable garden planted in the backyard as we've promised to do for lo these many years.

But school rules all. It's hard to keep up the pretense that summer is still here when you're stuck in traffic behind a bright yellow school bus - the kids inside taking their ADD aggressive frustrations out by flashing the kind of sign language which usually gets you beaten with a baseball bat in certain sections of Upper Darby out the back window in your direction.

"Back to School" sales started, I'm told, sometime in June, about two weeks after graduation. You can believe me or not.

I feel sorry for the kids because, frankly, its hard to concentrate on the business of learning when its 95 degrees inside the classroom and there's not a breeze in sight. And I feel sorry for the teachers, too, because they grew up in a world where Aug. 15 meant there was still three weeks of freedom left. These days, Aug. 15 means you'd better have completed your first six weeks of lesson plans or you'll be hopelessly behind the kids who have been brushing up on their critiques of "Beowulf" in between visits to MySpace.com all summer.

But mostly I feel sorry us, as we lose more time to the Gods of Planning. And for Pluto, who never meant no one no harm.

Not A Normal Night

This appeared July 23, 2006

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

I was reminded of that sentence, the opening of George Orwell's "1984," on Wednesday as I strolled the streets of West Chester surveying damage from the evening's storm and power outage.

Not because of any notion that Big Brother was watching, but rather because as I walked, my watch read 8:30 and the chimes on the clock on top of the Chester County Courthouse were cheerily pealing out the count of 10.

That's the way things were in Chester County the past few days - not quite in order, sometimes way off the mark.

It began with the heat, was punctuated by a swift thunderstorm that wiped out the power grid and ended with a shared experience that gave us something to talk about with family, friends and strangers. The whole experience was not unlike those snow days we have in winter, when the normal rules of social engagement don't seem to apply.

Except, of course, that the mercury in the thermometer was flirting with 100 degrees Tuesday.

It is well documented, not only in these pages but in hundreds of comments and missives that I've made and sent to people I know, that I am not a hot weather person. I've made it known that I would sell my not inconsiderable influence in the editorial department of the Daily Local News to anyone who would build a public swimming pool within easy walking distance of my home on South Church Street.

So, I was not feeling happy that evening, trying to erase the heat with an ice bath, when the lights went out, the fans went dead, the air conditioner stopped running, and everything got a little quiet.

That's what I noticed most, as the lightless evening faded into moonless night: It was quiet.

Usually, we've got the university kids to contend with - those jolly folk who need an excuse as trivial as coming to a complete stop at three stop signs in a row to declare party time and begin howling at the moon. But they're away this time of year and so I had only the whoosh of a passing car or the thumping of a free-spirited jogger going by to break the quiet as I sat on the stoop.

I was drawn outside, too, because frankly it was cooler out there. The air doesn't move well in my second floor unit without some heavyweight industrial circulation machinery to help it, so I stayed outdoors past midnight - again, a time I am rarely awake to see.

Later, drifting off to sweaty sleep, I quite expected that any moment I'd be woken by the sound of appliances coming back on as the power was restored. But, by the time the birds started announcing that it was a new day and time for them to start feeding, nothing had changed: no lights, no air.

I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood to see who the electric company gods had smiled on. That's the way it is when the power goes out in West Chester. Nothing comes back on all at once; each block has it's own time, and we all go crazy wondering why the folks across the street got their power back and we didn't. It's a jealousy thing.

Along an alleyway off Dean Street, I saw something that said it all for me about the long powerless night: A fellow curled up contentedly asleep on a couch on his porch.

Perfect, I thought. When normal life goes out the window, the best thing to do is change course and adapt. And if the clock strikes 10 o'clock at 8:30, adjust your watch accordingly.

Going, Going ... Gone!

This appeared June 11, 2006


This was supposed to be a column about the monstrosity township officials in West Goshen are attempting to pass off to the unsuspecting public as their latest "park" - that steel-caged nightmare motorists on Route 100 can view under construction just outside West Chester.

That is, if they can stand the sight of it without screaming and shielding their children's eyes, like you would a particularly grim traffic accident.

And it still is about that, in a way. But more, it's about backyard softball, shady summer evenings, hitting your first home run and an inevitable loss of innocence.

Oh yeah, and beer.

Back in the middle of the Reagan Era, I used to play softball in a coed league with colleagues from the Daily Local News and various friends. The league didn't have a field of its own, and many of the games were scattered across the county - Lionville, Embreeville, a lot across from Schramm's manufacturing plant on Virginia Avenue near Henderson High, wherever.

But the favorite place for all of us to play was a lot we called Ashbridge Field, located in the Green Hills Farm section of West Goshen on, appropriately enough, Ashbridge Road.

We affectionately nicknamed the place "The Bandbox," because of its relatively tiny dimensions. People who had never dreamed of ever being able to jack one over the fence looked at the field and started doing their best Babe Ruth imitation.

It wasn't a formal baseball field, really. I thought of it mostly as some guy's backyard.

Sure, it had a backstop and benches for the players, a few bleacher seats and cutouts for home plate and the bases. But it was a little lopsided and you had to park your car on the grass, and every once in a while a foul ball would find its way into the next-door neighbor's hedges and you'd have to go root around for the ball for 10 minutes or so while everybody else waited.

In other words, it was the perfect place to play a softball game on an August night, then spend 45 minutes replaying the game over a few cold beers as twilight came on.

I decided to visit the field recently for the first time in decades, my idea being to compare its informal glory with the new Park on Route 100. But to my dismay, Ashbridge is gone.

In its place is Richard C. Cloud Park - Mr. Cloud, I assume, being the guy who built the field in his backyard. Ashbridge had been taken over by West Goshen, and is now part of its Recreational Gulag.

As I pulled into the new macadam parking lot and stared in disbelief at the concrete block dugouts, steel fences and regulation baselines, I spotted with horror the ultimate symbol that the party was over for my Field of Dreams: A sign grandly proclaimed the field's "Rules and Regulations."

Closed at dusk. Crowds must register with township. No open burning. All goofing off prosecuted. And, most depressingly: "Alcoholic beverages are prohibited in the parks."

Driving away from the field, I remember President Reagan once saying something about government being the problem and not the solution. Never have I agreed with him more.

The only benefit I took away from the change? One of the rules of the field stated plainly:

"Golf is prohibited."