Essays

GONE WERE THE WRINKLES

2012-02-06T04:46:00.001-08:00

Times and necessities change, so what’s cost-saving for one generation is forgotten in the next. Almost gone now are the numerous stories from elders who survived the Great Depression and followed the “Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make It Do” rule. The survival innovation found in such scarcity was a tribute to both inventiveness and common sense.

Of course, generational practices are relative. In too many parts of the world, including our own nation, the old rule is still in force. And, as we have seen in the falling debris of the Greed Era, many should not have forgotten it in the first place, though reasonable consumerism, and so economic growth, does depend on replacing things.

Yet some necessities ought not disappear, for charm is lost, as is simplicity. One example: the sprinkle top fitted to a seltzer or soda bottle for use in ironing. A friend’s mother had such a thing, a bright chrome, mushroom-shaped stopper with many holes. It came in handy for more than spreading a few drops to help erase wrinkles.

She had a rhythm in her ironing, this mom, pulling a shirt onto the angled end of the board so that she could get the back of the garment perfectly flat for a quick sprinkle from the repurposed bottle. She just as quickly applied the hot iron so that a sizzle was heard just as steam chased her hand, as it refashioned the shirt for another run of the press. All this while talking to her guest, occasionally looking at him, which she could do since she had her mojo down pat. The ironer could even reach for another swig from the sprinkle bottle without eying it, so well tuned was her ironing board radar.

I found the stopper interesting. I had never seen one since my own mother used a steam iron. I recall thinking how clever was this device and how simple. Simple often means beauty in my world, so that went down well.

But what worked best for me was that I could stare at the stopper and so distract myself enough not to get tongue-tied as I was trying to make conversation. Young fellows talking to other people’s moms usually don’t have much to say beyond the rescue phrase, “It’s warm today, isn’t it?”

Decades later, I don’t think I have spotted a sprinkle stopper since, but I have not forgotten how long ago one eased the wrinkles from my conversation.

SAVING THE NATION

2012-01-30T05:38:00.000-08:00

The people know what must be done to rescue the great United States of America from stagnation and dysfunction of every sort, beginning in Washington and morphing to the state and local level. There will be little advance to our historic new frontier, to our manifest destiny, scant hope that our children will remain in or join the middle class until money no longer controls Congress and other branches of government. The only way to end billions of dollars in lobbying -- now set at about $3 billion annually, $4.7 million for each senator and House member -- is by a constitutional amendment to require full public financing of congressional and presidential campaigns and to ban special-interest cash, gifts and jobs.

The amendment is necessary to address lobbyists’ predictable, hypocritical cry of free speech denial. That right can and must be satisfied by conducting public hearings, town hall forums and national referendums on issues where great and extensive voice should be heard.

The ordinary American, whom the late and wonderful columnist Ernie Pyle would describe as the really extraordinary citizen because he/she is so common, so ordinary, so concerned with being decent, raising family, doing the job right, is now without representation.

President Obama can proclaim, as he did in a strong and clear State of the Union speech last week, that the country can recover from a near depression by doing this and that, following traditional Democratic ideals, and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels can counter that platform with solutions presented in his Republican-conservative response, but neither person will move forward an inch until the special-interest stranglehold withers in both Congress and the White House.

Greatly bolstered by the unwise Supreme Court decision -- the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court -- greed takes no holiday in Washington, and its example is copied in our states. The system is so perverse that even well-intentioned, once idealistic officials must take the cash if they are to wage successful but uber-expensive election battles.

Ask the average American -- Ernie’s people, you, the sort who ties shoelaces every day and shows up for work (or did when you had a job). They know that Congress and the isolated White House are broken institutions, stuck in stalemate, supposedly over ideology but really over meeting lobbyists’ demands. These moneyed people run your government, ever more so, day by day.

We people require a constitutional amendment to end their influence. Not their voice -- listen to that and any other in public hearing. But make these suitors keep their wallets in their pockets. The relatively small amounts required for reasonable campaigning and paid for by the taxpayer will prove money that will save the nation.

HOW'S THE WEATHER?

2012-01-22T15:12:00.000-08:00

Blauvelt, N.Y. -- My part of the universe, in the Northeast not far from New York City, was hit over the weekend with a small snow, about 6 inches. From the pre-storm hype, though, you would think the Blizzard of ’88 was about to fall from the skies. Even a national drug store chain e-mailed to “stock up on storm supplies TODAY.”

The weather is changing, surely. Super heat in Texas, floods in the Midwest, tornadoes in New Jersey (not Gov. Christie), ice in Seattle, extraordinary drought and too much rain in areas unaccustomed to both. What gives? Environmental pollution? Cyclical weather patterns catching up? Or, at least with flooding, nature not finding the old flood plains to fill when it rains since Huggy Bear Estates or other “progress” construction now occupy the sites?

What does give is that no matter why the nation -- the world -- has been experiencing weird weather, media hype over many storms is overdone. I am not talking about disastrous weather, where reporters take great chances to accurately give the who, what, when, where, why and how. No, storms like the six-inch snow we faced in this part of the Northeast. Except for several hours when the very cold road surface turned powdery snow into dangerous ice, the snow came and went and was hardly a storm in the sense of 15-inch, blowing white stuff we have tackled over the years.

Yet every newscast from mid-week on warned of possible dire situations: roads blocked, power out, emergency rooms jammed, first responders overwhelmed. Comparisons were made to a major storm about a year ago in which New York City found itself behind the eight ball when it didn’t clear streets quickly enough and cars were abandoned by drivers who perhaps should not have been out in the first place. Apples and oranges, this comparison.

The media were underwhelming, and I can say that. I was privileged to toil for a newspaper for 42 years at a serious sheet where good and underpaid reporters, photographers, deskmen, editors, printers, pressmen, delivery people and advertising staff took the job to heart and sought out “real” news. Not just fluff, for there has always been that. Not just the dog saves man story, always that too. Not just the tabloid “Headless torso found in topless bar” copy. But the day-to-day, seemingly ordinary government news that, after hard digging, reveals corruption, malfeasance or incompetence. We and others didn’t always do the job the best we could, but we tried. And with enough of us trying, the news got out.

Newspapers today have lost their ad and circulation bases, and so their staff. More fluff fills the pages instead of news. On TV, its “news” shows are more about entertainment, and the stories seem to come out of reality shows. They relate little to the average Joe and Sue trying to make ends meet, keep a job, pay taxes, have a decent quality of living.

Remember when some of us picked up a date and you didn’t have anything to say to the mother? You talked about the weather. Today, the media, my old shop, is a-courtin’ readers, viewers, listeners, Tweeters, Facebookers, but this time talk about the skies won’t get them anywhere.

UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS

2012-01-08T14:42:00.001-08:00

The last time this scenario played out, I was upstairs, age 13, laying vinyl-asbestos (yes, asbestos) tile and my father and brother Craig were downstairs watching a 17-inch TV -- the Giants were playing. This time, 57 years later, my father was still watching the Giants, but on a 38-inch flatscreen, and I was also doing my thing -- flooring. Only he was upstairs and I was on the ground floor of his bi-level home. Some things never change.

I was the handyman -- even as a young boy -- in my growing-up family in Spring Valley-Hillcrest, N.Y. My father is not exactly all thumbs, but he certainly did not inherit the hands-on, do-it-yourself abilities of his father, a smoking pipe maker, and his grandfather, who fashioned cabinets. Since my dad subscribed to Popular Mechanics, sometimes Popular Science, too, and simply because I took a liking to things electrical, mechanical, to wood, etc., I picked up this or that skill. Local tradesmen and my shop teacher Mr. Carroll didn’t hurt, either.

Nor did my parents’ trust. How else can you explain allowing a seventh grader to install an electrical outlet so his mom could use her very first washing machine? I didn’t burn the house down -- in fact I was super careful -- and the word got around so that I was soon working in this neighbor’s house or that.

But back to flooring. It took some time, but my father found a few bucks here and there, and some scrounged materials, to finish two bedrooms in the expandable attic of his Cape Cod home. He and my mother bought the place in summer 1953 for $12,500, and the idea was that if later the family found need and had some savings and offered sweat equity, the attic could be finished. So, in 1955 the Gunthers were at that stage. Some wiring was in, set by me. Wallboard, a ceiling, doors, trim, paint, wallpaper arrived too, with labor from my grandfather and Ike Pfeffer, a neighbor. We were ready for the floor, and I talked my dad into buying a three-tone (light, medium, dark) 9 inch by 9 inch Armstrong tile, in a “cork” style. I would install it, first following instructions by measuring the width and length of the room and marking the starting point.

Tiling went easy, and to cut it, I softened the tile in a lukewarm oven, then used a knife. No cutting, no asbestos dust. My guess is the floor is still in that old house, safe for the environment as long as no dust is created by sanding it, breaking it up, etc. I must say that the overall look was grand, and I can see it still in my mind.

Now, decades later, I am laying new vinyl, non-asbestos tile, over, yes, vinyl-asbestos in my dad’s 1964 Pearl River, N.Y., home. He’s a single man now, our mom having passed away in 1999, but he’s with it at almost 90. I get to take care of the house, but the fact is I’ve always taken care of it, and the one before this one. It’s the DNA I was granted.

Whatever thoughts I had years back laying the Armstrong tile are long forgotten -- perhaps they were of girls, school, future, cars, electrical work. Today, now retired, doing flooring or otherwise, I still think a bit about girls, no school, though, not much about the future, not really about cars, but electrical work, yes, since I do some volunteering with that skill.

Most of all, downstairs cutting tile in 2012, I am grateful I spent time in 1955 doing the same job upstairs.

THE NEW YEAR

2012-01-02T06:34:00.001-08:00

Although most of us have already ushered in the new year, perhaps celebrated, maybe made resolutions, felt as if we had a fresh start and wondered where 2011 went, another season is about to come soon, the Chinese lunar new year, celebrated on Jan. 23 as the most auspicious animal in the Chinese zodiac struts its stuff.

Amidst end-of-the-world Mayan and other predictions for late in 2012, the Year of the Dragon is traditionally associated with new beginnings and good fortune.

That’s the sort of balance Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great U.S. Supreme Court justice, would have favored in his persistent optimism.

So, what will 2012 be like, tempering any astrological or other predictions with the obvious: whatever the omens portend, you are the real master of your fate?

America will have its next presidential election, and where that will lead could cause even an optimist to tear hair out, considering the undeniable fact that just as soon as the winning campaigner leaves the stump and has his (her?) last roast beef dinner with the common folk in the village social hall, the big door closes at the White House and the new leader of the free world doesn’t see real people ever again, at least while in office. Only the scripted will have the president’s ear. Elected senators and congressmen shut their own big doors. Maybe the Year of the Dragon will offer enough fire breathing to burn the locks of all these blocked passages and let Joe and Sue Citizen come visit a spell and be heard.

Most likely, crazy weather will cause trouble, as has been nature’s habit of late (or is it humankind’s?). Solar flare-ups won’t help, especially in communication disruption at a time when there is almost no discourse without electronics. (Isn’t it odd that with a greater ability to communicate, we seem to hear each other less?)

The world’s banks, said to be sitting on some $17 trillion, may finally get off their duff and use the money they gained through no hard work of their own to actually put people to work. So far in history, the world has not progressed without investment.

Reality shows may -- deservedly -- lose their appeal when common sense in people awakens them to the fact that they have been sitting in the modern Roman Colosseum yelling for blood as victims sacrifice one another.

Twitter Tweets, Facebook blurbs, phone texting and anonymous postings to online material may at long last find melody, rhythm and sense, some structure that allows understanding beyond pig-Latin shorthand, awful grammar and incomplete thought.

Organized religion and atheists, too, may realize that there can be no exclusive god or theology since we are all born as we are, into whatever belief. As a result, we are held harmless for such fate and its consequences except when we do no good, or even if we fail to do good. In short, if any god is the cat’s pajamas, it’s because he (she?) is good. Do good and you are “religious,” even as an atheist.

Actually, good is an ultimate act of faith in this ride on earth, and that’s where I leave this piece in a year that some predict as half empty while others like the Chinese see half full. If we blow up or end up better off on December 31, 2012, it’s the flowers left on our path that will make us smile and prove our worth, however long the earth lasts.

REAL HOLIDAY PRESENT

2011-12-21T05:19:00.000-08:00

San Antonio, Texas -- In the holiday lead-up that is again dressing the nation, in a time of poor economy and worries about not only the American future but the world's, yet another perspective emerges. I am here for a moment with grandchildren -- actually it is always just a "moment" since kids change minute by minute -- and concerned for them, for anyone's young, as you must be, too.

My own Christmases were modest, but there were enough simple presents from two hardworking parents to leave my brother and I awestruck. Never was there a failure to communicate with Santa Claus, and these days when expenses for an elderly dad hit, we who can pay are grateful to help balance the sacrifices made. That we are able to

do so reflects a general American tradition that each succeeding generation will do a bit better. Ever since the Great Depression, that forward movement has built a middle class.

Now in San Antonio, I wonder if my grandchildren will be able to assist their parents if ever in need, or if the parents will have to provide for their young even when they are old, if the money does not run out as the middle class runs for its life.

This Texas city is more a mix than most in the state -- many residents include military and business professionals from other areas -- and so the political persuasion is less Texas conservative and more combined conservative/liberal, a fine point and counterpoint that can bring real and efficient compromise. My guess is that growing children in San Antonio are immersed in political dialogue that includes varied points of view. At least I hope so.

Such mix is elsewhere in America as well, save the nation's much-ruling capital, where the Capitol and the White House seem to act as hardheads unwilling to stop shouting political rhetoric so they can hear the people instead of special interests. Meanwhile, my grandkids in San Antonio or the two in New York or your offspring or your friends' or neighbors' very young, or teens or young adults - all hoping for a Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanza or whatever joy the holidays bring - are left as unwilling bystanders in the grossly irresponsible political deadlock over basic human needs, over disappearing jobs, over an unfocused, obscenely costly war, over what the future should be for America, and surely the world.

The holidays will come to San Antonio, to the many in America one way or another this year, but what will they be like in 2025 or so? Holidays, yes, but. ...?

Ah, what a present it would be if common sense for the common purpose were to appear under the national tree.

AMIDST CHANGE, TRADITION

2011-12-11T14:44:00.000-08:00

I am certain that if you had asked my grandfather or anyone beyond 50 in the Spring Valley, N.Y., of 1956 if community life were more tight knit when they were young, the answer would have been “yes.” And some 55 years later, if you query now-older me, I’d have to give the same reply. Such is nostalgia and the sometimes convenient forgetfulness that happens as we look through rose-colored glasses.

Yet, as with all potential black and white situations, there is a gray area or two or three. In time, certain standards may well disappear, or traditions or quality of living. We may seize upon those to prove our argument that the old days were better despite evidence that always there have been problems, bad situations, difficulties. But, ah, the gray.

I have an example in mind. When I pass through my hometown village these days, the Spring Valley landscape has changed so very dramatically. A long downtown decline was brought on by failure -- here and elsewhere in the nation -- to meet the challenges of suburban sprawl, including the competition posed by shopping centers. Today in the Valley, expensive urban renewal is bringing some hope, though it is an incomplete approach that remakes the mistake of the 1960s-on. Then, downtowns should have been rebuilt by integrating them into new housing for all income levels so as to create walkable, desirable places in which to live and shop in a mixed economy. Today, while urban renewal brings affordable housing, a very good thing, no community can thrive just on government help. It must stand on its own at some point. So, there must also be non-subsidized homes and retail shops and businesses. That will have to come to Spring Valley if the village is to truly be “renewed.”

In 1956, when Gary Onderdonk III, then about 13, followed his Christmas season route of flipping telephone pole switches to turn on brightly colored lights, the Spring Valley economy was enough to support duplicates of hardware stores, bakeries, luncheonettes, stationeries, druggists, clothing stores and whatever else long marked American downtowns.

Garry’s father, Garry Jr., was a local electrician who installed the lights and kept the strings stored in his home. His own father, Garry Sr., was the head of the local draft board and was well-respected and, yes, feared. At one time, the Onderdonk forebears owned much of what would become Spring Valley as well as land in Piermont and Nyack.

The fact that Garry's grandson walked the downtown -- about 7 blocks from Maple Avenue to Route 59 -- as an early teen and flipped switches on perhaps 50 poles assured the 1956 community that it was still close-knit, that although post-war suburban growth was about to explode and break many ties to heritage, tradition continued. The lamplighter yet walked his route.

Even my grandfather and his over-50 friends would have admitted that, though they saw change they did not like. And now, in 2011, this writer, 69, also concedes that while Garry no longer walks the Spring Valley downtown, that while he isn’t there in just about any town you choose in America, the great changes to neighborhood society wrought by the Consumer Age, the Electronics Age, the Digital Age and the “Special Interest Age” that now disenfranchises the ordinary citizen are still not enough to make life simply white and black, good and not so good. There remains the gray.

In the Nyack, N.Y., area, including another old and small village with a downtown that also has undergone serious change, is a fellow I know well, joined by others who choose to live where there are old buildings, where there is history, where you walk to the library, to a memorial park, where neighbors are recognized in a mixed economic community. He and others are the lamplighters of today for they wish to keep old community tradition while also embracing great change. They may use LED lights, not incandescents, but they are mixing with the old and reinvesting. There is balance, without which no community can fully thrive.

VIRGINIA READ IT RIGHT

2011-12-05T05:08:00.000-08:00

In my part of the believing and non-believing world, in this economy, in this doubt of government, corporations and people, the local paper recently ran a story about a teacher telling her second graders there was no Santa Claus. Hullabaloo ensued.

Yet the rapid and firm push children get into adulthood today already unceremoniously strips them of belief in cartoon characters, super heroes, magic fairies and -- sometimes -- all that seems possible. Maybe that’s why we end up with little faith in government or anything else.

I don’t know enough about the teacher’s words, their context -- perhaps no one does except the students. We weren’t there, and I will not judge her. The report is that when the 7 year olds said they knew about Santa’s North Pole, the teacher responded that the bearded fellow did not exist and that Christmas presents were bought by their parents. Media coverage then exploded, the teacher is said to have issued an apology and the community asked to move on, into the holiday spirit. Yes.

In Virginia O’Hanlon’s 1897, it was her friends who told the 8 year old that Santa Claus was a myth, to which New York Sun Editor Francis Pharcellus Church responded in his now famous and oft-republished editorial, “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus.”

He wrote: “Your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except (what) they see ... All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little ... How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. ...”

The sum of Church’s editorial argument was that “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist. ...”

Second grade, in my parts and yours, is a fleeting moment of moving molecules, emotions and whatever is brewing in the individual soul. Its oh, so temporary dwellers have a brief second in which to recognize that all is possible, that good exists, that there is, as Editor Church put it, an "eternal light with which childhood fills the world. ...”

Can you see him now, can you see Santa?

THE MAGIC POCKET

2011-11-28T04:36:00.000-08:00

UPPER NYACK, N.Y. -- Babysitting two grandchildren, one half way to 5 and the other galloping toward 3 means an old codger like me has to be on his toes, literally, in order to survive. There are more questions, emotional turns, spats, hunger moments and funny faces than grown-ups are used to. So, the survival answer is to not be so adult, to join the crowd.

Which is what I did last Thanksgiving weekend, with Sam and Beatrice jumping all over me, the couch and each other. There is never a dull moment since kids do, indeed, say the darndest things. They also have sharp minds, recalling the mistakes you made last time you babysat. And their questions are so simple and direct that you wonder why the gods allow children to become adults. Perhaps our business and government decisions would be far less troubled if there was the young’s directness and clarity.

Children are also more trusting for they have not yet been let down. Beatrice, for example, likes to pretend that every small scrap she gets from rough-housing or other play requires a Band-Aid. And she knows where to get one when I am around since this not-always-watchful handyman carries them for my own cuts. After I once took a Band-Aid out of my pocket to stop her tears, she figured it was filled with all manner of items.

So, she is apt to come to me and ask, “Do you have a flashlight in your pocket? “Or a Gummy Bear?” “Or an iPad?’

Anticipating her needs, I have added things to my pocket, which I must remember to remove when I fly to Texas in a few weeks or the frown of Homeland Security will not see the humor.

The pity is that as the young get older and become us -- mature, ever-so-wise, know-it-all adults -- they stop asking what's in the Magic Pocket.

Therein lies the ruin of civilization.

A THANKFUL DAY

2011-11-21T04:50:00.001-08:00

We always knew it was turkey time back in sixth grade when we took a look at a very old painting of Pilgrims and Native Americans at a Thanksgiving feast, which hung all year long in the cloakroom. Why it was there I cannot relate, but kids seemed to notice it just before we went off for the holiday.

Today, gatherings for those fortunate enough to have family and means arouses the same feelings as it did with the early settlers, I presume. Any day you are off the treadmill, when there is a variety of wonderfully smelling food, when kids are running about in innocence and mayhem, when there are many under one roof, you appreciate -- are thankful for -- what you have.

Thanksgivings this year in our still bountiful nation, a country I remain thankful for, cost more if you have the money, have fewer goodies on too many tables and offer less time to enjoy since so many are worried about keeping jobs or getting them, the health of their pensions and the fitness of their health care.

Now, this is not entirely new -- we have been in distress many times in America’s history. Think of the tough life early settlers had the days before the first Thanksgiving and the days after; during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War; on farms when the crops were wiped out for one reason or another; in immigrant sections of our cities where sweatshops and dangerous tenement conditions prevailed; during the Great Depression and two world wars.

Yet in all that, there was always someone offering the optimistic view, such as Norman Rockwell in his famous Saturday Evening Post cover, “Home for Thanksgiving” (November 24, 1945), which shows a safely returned soldier peeling potatoes with his mom. Our Thanksgivings are the stuff of legends, family and nation, and of genuine gratefulness and of hope.

Where America is headed in these perilous times, so close to another precipice, is not easily predictable, but I will tell you one thing: If we could round up most of our “leaders,” if we could put the money managers with them, if we could squeeze in the greedy and make them all sit out this Thanksgiving, the rest of us, in good and poor circumstances in November 2011 might just have a thankful holiday, thankful for the goodness that is essential America; thankful for the things that matter most, like family and friends; thankful that we remain breathing. In that there is the same hope of manifest destiny and new frontier that lie before the first Pilgrims.

THE SPICE CABINET

2011-11-14T05:20:00.001-08:00

In a time of simplicity and quiet, which can be that moment when the lucky child, alone to explore and imagine, finds again and again that magic can happen, I took a journey. My travel to that special land began on an early wartime morning in late 1944 in my grandmother’s Ternure Avenue, Spring Valley, home when I was very young and the family was temporarily staying there.

I was wandering about, probably 6 a.m. or so, out of sleep and morning hungry, remembering that my grandmother, whom I called Nana, kept the corn flakes, raisin bran and Wheaties in a five-foot-high metal cabinet at the top of the basement stairs.

I continued tip-toeing until I managed to get to the basement door, reached for the 1915 doorknob and used two hands to turn it. There was the cabinet, in faded yellow, its own door held closed by a flip-up shiny chrome latch that seemed out of reach for a little guy. But stretch I did, also quietly, until the door swung open, aided by its tilt on lopsided, old stairs.

There was the cereal, all right, but something else, too, boxes of wonderfully smelling things, which later I learned were spices like ginger, cloves, cinnamon. Some of those boxes must have been in that airless metal cabinet for years, held tight, too by the latched door. What a wonderful collection of smells that brought, a gathering that I have never been able to duplicate in several spice cabinets I have bought or built.

I knocked my raisin bran box out of the cabinet and took it to the table, putting it next to where I sat, to await breakfast, which came just a short time later (maybe I had awakened the house).

Over my many years, getting a whiff of this spice or that, I am instantly taken back to my Nana’s cabinet, that early morning exploration, my pride at achieving success. I can smell the real fragrance of that cabinet if I deeply concentrate, and its memory has gotten me through more than enough less-pleasant times.

That 1944 exploration on a quiet morning offered a lifelong lesson -- that we need so little to make us happy.

A MOMENT MY OWN

2011-11-07T04:33:00.001-08:00

Spring Valley, N.Y. -- If, after 55 years, you remember where the bathroom is at your former elementary school, old age isn’t here yet. Not only was I blessed in finding that but I managed to get to my eighth-grade science classroom, conducted so very well by Mrs. Keesler.

My return to what once was the North Main Street School, which both my father and I attended, was for a Rockland County Arts Council session on grant applications. The science classroom where I spent seventh and eight grades was on the third floor, southwest corner, and is now divided into an office and a meeting room. But the hallways are still in the glossy tile of the Craftsman age when the building was put up for children north of Main Street, with, yes, the South Main Street School for the other half. In my time I went to both.

So much changes in life, especially your perspective. North Main seemed much smaller in 2011 than in June 1956, but I was smaller then, too. Some of my teachers -- Mrs. Keesler, Mr. Gram, Miss Margulies, Mrs. Churchill, Mr. Carroll, Mr. Fazio, Mrs. Badami, Mr. Duggan, Coach Thompson -- also saw to my father and were already legends of a sort. They had quirks, like we all do, and we kids sure exaggerated them, but if I were on the last bus to anywhere, I’d want them with me. Perspectives change, and I did not know then how very well these teachers taught their subjects and better ways of living. I reference them constantly.

I arrived early in Spring Valley so that I could park my car in nearby Hillcrest and walk to North Main, as I did for three years, but that hamlet is now so developed that “No Parking” signs are everywhere and I could not leave the car. So I parked at the school, walked to Hillcrest and back. It took just minutes compared to memory’s half hour, but in those 1956 days there might be pals to jawbone with or a stop at Roth’s store across the street or at Mager’s in Hillcrest. Most of the old sights, such as the great Burn’s estate, are now gone and there is way too much growth and subsequent neglect in their place, but in every step I could recall events, friends, girlfriends, good report cards and not, quick walks home for the holidays, quicker runs when I was late. I could see my parents, then my grandparents driving to our Hillcrest home. I could see myself in my first car.

At my meeting, I was the only one with a connection to the building. None of the panelists had even grown up in Rockland, let alone Spring Valley. Deliberating on serious matters for the Arts Council gave me enough time to day dream back to 1953-1956, when I also day dreamed in Mrs. K.’s class. I even managed to sit in the same area where my desk was.

I was the only one with pedigree that day, in the old North Main Street School. And I was most proud.

A 'PERFECT STORM'

2011-11-02T12:55:00.000-07:00

Rockland County, N.Y. -- The freak early snow that last weekend took down so many trees and branches and with them the power lines of ever-larger suburbia came as a “perfect storm” since (1) the trees still have largely green leaves that acted as a weight for the heavy, wet stuff, and (2) there simply is too much foliage. The suburbs, having lured homebuyers for decades to “the country,” now must eat the fruit of overgrowth.

Trees are wonderful -- they help clean the air, provide stress relief, shade us and remind us that the concrete of “progress” must be eased. But when you plant a tree, just as when you have hair on your head, trims are necessary for both styling and practicality. Nature takes care of tree overgrowth in a forest by lightning, fire, light, disease and drought. But homeowners usually don’t do much to their trees, and many a yard in these parts is out of hand. Overgrowth brings mold to siding, inside, too, and the worry that the trees will fall on something.

This year, a very warm and wet summer in the Northeast helped trees grow at probably twice the rate, and it has kept the leaves green and still attached to branches. So, when the unexpectedly early and heavy snow arrived, the many trees, especially with overgrown branches, came down, in many cases bringing power lines with them. There were outages everywhere in this, New York’s smallest county geographically outside New York City but also a densely populated, built-up suburbia with thousands of utility poles and lines.

When I was Editorial Page editor of The Journal News in Rockland, I penned perhaps 25 edits over 30 years calling for (1) underground electric, cable and phone lines in all new construction, paid by developers; (2) a ban on trees over 10 feet tall within 15 feet of overhead wires and regulation of species (for example, no maple or oak); (3) aggressive trimming of all existing trees in utility right of ways, not the barbershop whisk now provided, which guarantees return work for the contractors already getting big bucks from ratepayers.

Most of all, we advocated for a comprehensive storm response plan. While the Rockland Fire Coordinator’s Office has put together a remarkable blueprint that involves utilities, firefighters, police, highway departments and first-aiders, more needs to be done by municipalities and by the utilities.

• For example, there might be a plan to have on call the great army of landscapers and their workers, quite happy to do immediate tree cutting. Surely liability insurance waivers can be obtained to press these people into service when needed. In the recent storm, trees made safe from power lines were still left for overburdened highway departments and utility workers.

• For public safety, drop-down, four-way stop signs might be installed at all intersections with traffic lights, which could be put into operation immediately. However, officers should be stationed at the most dangerous crossings, with all personnel on notice that they must report whether off duty or not and with auxiliary police and retired officers volunteering.

• To enlarge the community spirit, there should be volunteers ready to help in debris removal, running errands for the sick and elderly, etc. A phone list should be ready.

• Utilities and municipalities should have communication briefings on the hour, via TV, Internet, the media, cell phones. They should have enough live operators to handle calls. Retired workers should be available to help.

Such ideas -- and surely there are others from the full public -- must be welcomed since it seems nature will be blasting us with more bad storms. Rockland must be better prepared.

THE NEW AGE

2011-10-31T09:17:00.000-07:00

ROCKLAND COUNTY, N.Y. -- Having endured an early, rare and very damaging snowstorm, which unloaded yet another of Nature's recent tirades, most of us here are in the dark, without power. Not a problem since we are all descendants of humans who had little but fire, and we live in a world that sees much of its inhabitants do without. So, OK.

OK to a point, and then principle makes it not all right. OK until you meet up with officialdom's response in this NEW AGE of red tape, cost cutting, worry about lawsuits and a sense of incompetence.

Most if us in my area have been without electricity for 48 hours now, with predictions of three or four days more. Still OK, since conditions must be made safe for repair people, especially with so many downed trees and some live wires.

Yet there is so far little indication that much restoration has been made. How long does it take to assess a situation, call in the troops and get things working?

If it is a matter of cutting trees, in another age -- just a few decades ago -- my neighbors and I would have cut the limbs ourselves. Today many still would. So would the great army of landscapers and their hard working staffs. Why were they not called in to help so that power could then be restored? Most of the trees are not near dangerous downed lines.

Utility crews are more than willing to work, but new rules keep them from toiling beyond certain hours, though they did years ago. Adrenalin can chase away fatigue, and surely safe conditions could prevail in overtime. Perhaps the utilities do not want to pay overtime, not surprising in this deregulated market where, as with Wall Street, the bottom line is paramount, the customers be damned.

Finally, many intersections are without traffic lights. Still OK, since we can all use our heads. But in the old days, every cop would have reported in and willingly directed traffic. So would have retired officers.

Ah, the NEW AGE. Watch the money. Avoid lawsuits. "Not my job, so why should I do it?"

HALLOWEEN MOMENT

2011-10-24T04:44:00.003-07:00

TALMAN, N.Y. -- Quietly done, non-fussed-about, get-it-done moments strike deep chords in the reflections of older life, or so it appears in a Halloween memory.

More than a few seasons ago, in the 1949 of my youth, living in this small hamlet of fruit orchards in Rockland County, an equally small church offered a Halloween party, and someone told my father, who was then working at both a nearby hospital and in a nursing home. He was trying to make ends meet, though my brother and I never knew it, so kept were we from the home economy by both our working parents.

In this second grade year, excitement was had by playing in the apple and peach orchards off Cherry Lane (never saw a cherry tree there) and watching horses train at the polo club where actor Burgess Meredith kept a steed. There was no downtown to walk to, a luxury, then a necessity I would come to enjoy when we again moved back to nearby Spring Valley. For this part of young life, imagination had great latitude and deep encouragement in a rural setting where sitting in a tree and day-dreaming was as good as watching “Captain Video and his Video Rangers” on TV came to be in the next year or so.

My brother Craig and I did manage to get together with other boys and some girls, however, and the Halloween party was to be one of them. It was a last-minute invite, an offer made by a nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital who thought it would be fun for us.

So my father left the hospital and picked us up at the Airmont and Cherry Lane schools, and we both sat in the 1939 Dodge as it made its way to the small church and its basement. When we arrived, the very nice woman organizing the party opened the door, saw us and quickly came outside. It seemed neither my brother or I had costumes, which are expected at Halloween parties. My father had had no time to get costumes and would have been pressed financially anyway.

The church lady who dashed out to save us embarrassment just as quickly had my dad bring us right across the street where there was another kind woman, a seamstress who worked from her home. In a jiffy, this lady whipped up two creative costumes, pinned together in flourish. We were fun-ready, my brother and I.

The memory of that 1949 Halloween party is now a blur, but its circumstances and three good people -- the woman at the hospital, the one in the church and the seamstress -- can never be forgotten.

OCCUPYING AMERICA

2011-10-17T05:21:00.000-07:00

When was the last time America smiled? You see tears now, in the households where the unemployed sit for two years or more, from college graduates without hope, from those who bought into the American Dream only to have it dashed by an economy once built on the middle class and now controlled by those who ignore that class.

The young, the vibrant ones, the easy protesters, perhaps even attention-seeking, occupy Wall Street and increasingly across the world, but older people are now coming, too, their grievances of unequal opportunity and clueless government and lobbied officials stirring in a cauldron that promises to be a stew of real taste, a flavor that can grab attention. The focus toward changing government may well come.

Why are we here in this place, in America, in the world? When did the smiles of generational improvement, college and other achievement, satisfying, productive careers, improving health and a better future for more and more turn to forlorn, scared faces?

Nothing great happens in this great nation, in this, God’s experiment in participatory democracy, without going through a “system.” Prohibition, though a costly mistake that gave birth to organized crime, began with populism not unlike today’s Occupy Wall Street, which took on steam when it was legitimized -- enabled -- by the 18th Amendment. It took the system to make it real. World War II was not won by patriotism alone, by selfless soldiering, but by the system forged by a huge defense industry, by that system.

We see the system at work today against Occupy Wall Street, in New York, the nation, across the world. Police respond to a loose movement of occupiers as trespassers, even trouble-makers, and make arrests. Some leaders and candidates, the media, too, characterize the protest as ragtop, young, without a message beyond claiming that it represents the 99 percent who suffer from the 1 percent holding the purse strings. Give this movement time, though, a more diversified membership, set goals, offered solutions, charismatic leadership and demonstrated responsibility for non-violent protest that focuses on free airing of grievances, and it could grow to the point where the system recognizes it, and then things could begin to change.

It’s happened before -- this nation’s independence was not likely. How could the disorganized, under-funded colonials defeat the British Empire? But here we are, a power greater than Britain. The Occupy Boston Harbor movement of the day gained focus, and so may Occupy Wall Street. The key is developing a system.

America is a gift from God. Its shaky beginning has endured, and we have helped save the world from inhumanity. This experiment must not end, must not go down in flames. The majority of our citizens are not physically with the few on the protest line, but the many in America today know full well that Congress and the presidency are broken systems, and great change must come if the nation is to survive. Special interests rule the roost, and somehow the people’s voice must become a lobby.

Maybe then the system would create jobs, perhaps in emerging technology, where we can again become world employment leaders.

Maybe then elected officials would be free of lobby money, with campaigns funded only by limited tax dollar so that Washington, states and municipalities listen to the people instead.

Maybe then the wealthy with conscience, who recall their own upward climb, would help by loaning money to create jobs and also outright invest in America. They have the funds, and you know what? They would be repaid handsomely in renewed economic activity as consumerism “trickles UP,” not down (as it rarely has).

Maybe then the nation, free of special interest, whether moneyed or of political ideology, would decide what sort of health care, pension system and social service network a progressive world leader must have. We must work with private industry to fund it, not government, make it a profitable enterprise, but with greed controls.

Maybe then we would recognize that the super rich were made even more so by our outsized expectations -- bigger houses, bigger cars, goods bought on the credit cuff. We enabled them through the system, shot ourselves in the foot.

America can smile again, should smile again, but it won’t come without change and sacrifice, not only from the ordinary people but from those who have the investment funds, who should be persuaded within the system.

OF A HOLIDAY, OF HOLIDAYS

2011-10-10T06:05:00.001-07:00

On this rearranged Columbus Day, courtesy of Congress’ move to make three-day weekends for pleasure, there were early signs this morning that not everyone had a day off, though too many have unwanted leisure time -- the growing number of unemployed, some chronically. But a portion of those still getting a paycheck were on the roads, adding to the noise level as minimum-wage landscapers started lawnmowers and leaf blowers to sing a shrill suburban tune and manning the counters at convenience stores, malls, etc.. No holiday for these guys.

On such a day, there will be parades to note the Italian explorer, who, working for a Spanish queen, stumbled upon what would become the Americas. Italian-American accomplishments will be noted, as they should be, though the achievements of all ethnic groups, which built and build these United States, stem from the first footprints of Columbus’ landfall at Hispaniola in 1492. Though Leif Ericson made it to North America about 500 years before, it was Columbus who set in motion European exploration of the “New World.”

Exploration of all sort ensued, and the cauldron of experimentation, inventiveness, democracy, independence and influence continues to be stirred. There have been missing ingredients, such as overdue recognition of the Native Americans chased to reservations, and, worse, killed, in manifest destiny; slavery; ethnic prejudice; and greed, which Republican President Theodore Roosevelt trust-busted for the public good and which on this Columbus Day again feeds growing protest across the land.

No American holiday is for itself any more, and perhaps never was. Labor Day. Memorial Day. Veterans Day. Workers may be off; children have no school; good weather brings out the barbecue and other leisure activities; officials note the particular day’s purpose, which some of us are reverent about, but for the great majority, the holiday is just that -- “a day of festivity or recreation when no work is done.”

Enjoy Columbus Day. But please know this: Every holiday is actually followed by “labor days,” for when the 24 hours are up, it is those many days and nights that will make or break our stressed nation, as has been the challenge before, as has been the opportunity to afford us true holidays.

TOO MANY CHOICES

2011-10-03T05:48:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the country began going to seed when Dunkin’ Donuts ended the belly-up coffee counter, its wonderful java offered in welcome-pardner ceramic mugs. For a small price relative to these days, you could nurse the brew while you day-dreamed or maybe shot the breeze with a pal. There were no double-mocha lattes, no designer croissant sandwiches to complicate.

Reaching farther back, the old diners also had counters where the cuppa was even cheaper (5¢, 10¢), and where you were more likely to meet someone you knew or a village character, to have more of a hometown visit. Most “diners” today have menus longer than the counters back when. How did life get so entangled? When did so many choices hit us?

Some parents begin making college plans for their children right out of the box, before they enroll them in the correct pre-school. Seniors on Part D of the national prescription drug plan face quarterly choices over which is cheapest, which gives the most. Young adults don’t know where they should build their lives -- will the jobs last? Will there always be a middle class?

The electorate is totally confused. Candidates push great rhetoric, make many grand promises that get lost in the system once elected. Whom do you trust?

The technologically challenged are befuddled by cellphones, computers, big-screen TVs. What buttons to push? What media/data/voice plan to buy?

The world promises to become even more complex. What careers to pursue in this economy? How to invest wisely?

This isn’t to say that back in the 1960s when Dunkin’ had a counter, life was always so simple it was easier to get through the day, to build a future. That was the decade of continuing civil rights battles, unsettled, unsettling controversy over the undeclared Vietnam War, the sexual renaissance and the start of Great Society social programs. Everything was already changing much more quickly than in the previous several decades. Even Dunkin’ was part of that, its coffee and donuts a leader in the rapidly appearing, ever-more-complex fast-food culture.

It is inevitable that change will beget more change, and that like a bus going downhill with uncertain brakes, the curves ahead will prove challenging. The curves will be many, as will be the bumps in the road. Do we, as individuals, as the nation, as the world get off and take another route?

I think, for me, I’d find that old diner, grab a cup of joe and sit a spell, day-dreamin’.

Too many choices, that’s what.

DEODORIZING PROGRESS

2011-09-26T04:58:00.001-07:00

An apple may not fall far from its tree, but if one drops in 1932 and another fruit in 2011, that’s a story. Or a column.

I live in Blauvelt, New York State, now part of the New York City suburbs but in my youth and in my father’s, this hamlet was about as far away from Gotham as a suit is from a tractor. Yet, the intersection of Western Highway and Erie Street was the busiest in Rockland County in 1932, my dad’s time.

The state had recently opened a psychiatric hospital, and the many jobs afforded during the Great Depression brought heavy traffic along Native American/colonial roads, so much so that the intersection, with no traffic light, was labeled by The Journal-News as the most traveled daily. An amazing fact since the crossing was smack dab in the country, not far from a newly built state highway, yes, but really in a bucolic setting. Tomato farms, orchards, a few summer bungalows and historic homes comprised the area.

Near the corner of Western Highway and Erie was a small apple tree left over from a strand of them. It was next to a recently constructed semi-Craftsman home sitting at the intersection. This tree, like all of Blauvelt and all of Rockland, was not used to the smell of automobile and bus exhaust nor the vibrations heavy daily traffic brought. Maybe that’s why it dropped apples more quickly than, say, the trees at Concklin’s, Davies’ or Brown’s orchards where acre upon acre afforded the fruit kinsmanship. The apples would quickly turn soft in the near-autumn sun and fill the air with a sweet fragrance, a fine counterpoint to the exhaust of progress. Children walking by would smash the fruit under their feet or kick them back and forth to one another.

In the decades since 1932, which include post-World War II super growth, the apple tree has gotten old but, amazingly, still produces fruit. The home at Western and Erie is also there, front porch and all, and the American scene at the intersection is even more hectic than it was 79 years ago. No longer Rockland’s busiest corner -- about 100 intersections vie for that dubious distinction -- the crossing probably handles more than 1,500 vehicles a day, including huge tractor trailers hauling trash to a compacting plant over roads that can hardly carry the load.

The psychiatric center long ago downsized, and by then its workers came from all directions, across many intersections. Western and Erie lost its busiest corner marking a long time ago.

But the apple tree still drops fruit from vehicle vibration and the air still smells of exhaust, the fallen apples trying their best, as always, to deodorize progress.

A CHILD'S SMILE

2011-09-18T06:37:00.001-07:00

America doesn’t smile much these days. Jobs gone, debt, deficit, taxes, disappointing “leaders,” the greedy, less spirit, confused purpose -- not much to be happy about. Until you see a child’s face.

Not talking about my own grandchildren, for I am prejudiced. Nor the smiles of any particular kids I know. As with so much of life, it is the anonymous who are seen most acutely, most honestly. We have no direct stake in who they are, where they have been, where they are going. There are no ties, no responsibilities in the seconds it takes to glance at their openness, the smile from non-cluttered thinking in childhood expression.

Where are they, the young who smile? In innocence, surely. In curiosity, yes. In mile-a-minute thinking as their fertile, inquisitive minds begin to collect and catalog sights, sounds, smells, emotions. Most of all, in imagination, in that magical world where there are few limits, where super heroes are made and trusted, where Cinderella can meet her fella, where right can win out, where the frontier is the jump over the moon into the cosmos, and of course any child can do that. He/she has not been taught otherwise.

Adults have forgotten so much of a child’s world and come to tolerate it as a growing phase worthy of a nice pat on the head as they plan for college way too soon, not remembering that the best education in their own lives was when they were young and few boundaries had been set. Who is the wisest in the set? The youth in imagination or the “accomplished” adult who has made a mess of things in today’s America?

The nation no longer smiles, but the young still do, in almost any circumstance. All things seem possible in such early time, anything.

Pity that we grow up.

OF SATURDAYS AND MOMS

2011-09-11T14:40:00.001-07:00

A Colorado correspondent and I had a recent e-mail exchange on moms and Saturdays, 1950s style, and the conclusion was that we each pretty much were on our own, though with a different “push” from mothers. My friend reported, “I don't recall ever being chased from the house ... Saturday mornings were always trips to Nyack (New York) for laundry and shopping, and they were enjoyable. Much more to me, I'm sure, than to my mom. I was responsible for cleaning my room and doing the household dusting -- probably why I recall the lamps and knickknacks from my youth fairly well -- and then was free. Kept out from underfoot well because I didn't want additional jobs. ...”

I didn’t do any chores, at least on Saturday, and I was definitely chased out of the house by my working mom, who with my father, would tackle the week’s laundry and dust. They, particularly my mother, did not want my brother and I to be in the way, and so we were sent packing for six or so hours.

Not a bad deal as it turned out, since my parents had some peace, and though Craig and I generally went separate ways to individual friends or haunts, the key companion for both of us was imagination. No cell phones or pocket video games, no “booked” activities. We had long periods when imagination kept boredom away. We let our minds wander, in day-dreaming, sometimes in the imagination offered by books and their plots and characters, and in hands-on effort like building huts and tree houses.

I had a regular Saturday walking route as well. I’d sleep in Saturdays, get up about 9:30, quickly wolf down raisin bran cereal and, knowing my mom would soon be looking my way, leave the Hillcrest, N.Y., house, turn left on Karnell, then right on State and right on Hickory where there was a wooded path that ran through the back of one of the numerous summer hotels in the area. In off-season, it was abandoned, and we kids used to take it as a shortcut to North Main Street, but not before we stopped at the open barn and sat at an old grinding wheel and gave it a spin. On North Main, I would head through downtown Spring Valley, past the same shops that greeted my father and grandfather in their day. It was a brief walk in town, six-streets-long, but coming from the countrified area of Hillcrest, the hick in me had come city-courtin’, and I was less of a hermit for a moment. It was like getting warm sun on your face on a chilly day, a welcome necessity though you wouldn’t want to stay in the sun forever.

Soon I was across the 1840s Erie track, headed for the South Main Street School where I played in a yard enjoyed by my dad 20 years before. It had not changed a bit.

I might run into a friend, but more often I was alone, day-dreaming my way across town, looking at the stores, the street characters. I passed the time, enough so that I could come back home just when my mom finished her cleaning.

It was a routine, a 1950s moment in which kids like myself and my Colorado correspondent kept busy, out of trouble and with enough visiting in imagination, in day-dreaming, that I can say I was hardly ever lonely.

NO 'LABOR' FROM LEADERS

2011-09-05T05:42:00.001-07:00

EVERYWHERE, USA -- How is labor supposed to rest on this noted day when there are so few jobs? The many unemployed already have nothing but downtime. How did a rich, progressive, innovative, democratic, promising nation, always one with a frontier to conquer, become stuck in high joblessness and its growing disease, low expectation? Where will our children’s children be on Labor Day 2051? Where are many Americans today?

This nation, conceived in liberty, should not have won its war against the well-trained and equipped British; came close to returning to the king in 1812; could have been destroyed by our worst conflict -- brother against brother in the Civil War; could have collapsed economically in the later-1800s depressions; could have lost its identity in the great immigrations, if Old World prejudices had lingered; could have withered and collapsed in the Great Depression; and could have been permanently misdirected in the civil rights crisis, the Vietnam War, Watergate and Sept. 11. But our citizens' bearings remained set. We continued our optimism, inventiveness, innovation, charity and move toward equality.

Not so government, which has lost its way. Today, the presidency and the Congress are isolated, reacting largely to the monied interests required for re-election, encumbered by procedure and lobbies that keep the executive and legislative branches apart from the American mainstream -- its pain and suffering, its hopes and desires.

On this Labor Day 2011, the sweat of many millions of our men and women, our forebears, are now the tears in the eyes of the jobless, in the eyes of parents who fear for their children’s future. Yet we retain our great energy and patriotism and native can-do American spirit ready to tackle the next frontier, if only, if only, that would be set by our leaders.

Where are they?

CAN YOU HEAR THEM NOW?

2011-08-29T06:08:00.001-07:00

NORTH OF GOTHAM -- Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor, was uber-careful to stress the potential destructive power of a hurricane named Irene that seemed headed straight for Queens Boulevard. In the second-guessing that now follows what became a tropical storm, he is criticized for being too careful. Not possible to be too prepared. The beast that was could have paralyzed the five boroughs.

It also could have taken out my suburban area 20 miles north and the surrounding five counties, but authorities here, too, were on the horn warning people to be prepared, even to evacuate. Though there were deaths, major flooding, heavy power loss and much disruption, the storm was weathered.

How much it will all cost has to be totaled, certainly a figure far above the 2 percent budget caps imposed on schools and government by the governors of New York and New Jersey. You cannot put a price on safety, however.

The full damage from Irene, in the burbs as well as in Gotham, though not as great as feared but in the millions nonetheless, did not have to happen as scripted. The grief, the expense, was largely debt-due after decades of poor land-use planning, even greed and incompetence.

Filled-in floodplains, overbuilding by profit-seeking developers, weak construction codes, too much strip-shopping and its impermeable asphalt parking lots as well as maintenance neglect of storm drains, tunnels, transit and other infrastructure have overtaxed government’s ability to manage the quality of life on a sunny day, let alone a rainy one and almost never on a stormy day except by borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.

And that’s what will happen now as the tab for overtime and repair will mean cuts in basic government operation as well as added debt. The bill could have been less if municipalities, counties and states had long ago cooperated on proper building and code practice to seek “progress” sensibly and within reason.

Mayor Bloomberg was right to hit the airwaves and the Internet on storm preparation. So were the governors of New York and New Jersey. Will they now use their considerable voice to plan better for Irene’s sister? For our everyday quality of life? Will there at long last be sensible land-use planning?

THE GATHERED CLAN

2011-08-21T19:40:00.001-07:00

When a family comes together, there is a certain dynamic in play. It matters not which family, where it is geographically, in what age or how many people are involved. It is a study in human nature, in what matters dearly, in a species' survival.

Perhaps on my street in Blauvelt, N.Y., yesterday, there were several homes where families were gathered -- parents, young or grown children, in-laws, grandparents, uncles, cousins, whomever. Food was prepared, conversations had, kids watched super hero movies, memories were repeated. There was laughter, maybe an inward tear on recalling a now absent loved one. The cook was rushing about, assisted by the minor cooks -- but there was just one cook, of course.

Later, after hours spent in a busy pace not normal to the household, this family member and that left as the great cleanup progressed, with help at first and then the entire scene was left to the two or so people who really live in the house. Cleanup takes a long time, for it is not just the putting away of plates and silverware and the floor sweeping, but the arrangement again of one’s home, where routine is cherished. Routine is always interrupted by company, thank goodness, but it must be returned. It must.

In all, a warmness to any of the visits on my street, including in my own home where family gathered yesterday as my father in law had his 98th birthday. There was electricity or at least the steady current that makes life worth living. The few hours were well enjoyed.

But we all cherish our quiet, so while we are happy to see company arrive, we are also pleased to see them go. As they are when we visit their homes and also take leave at some point. That is the price of bonding, one gladly paid to enjoy a family gathering as well as the comfort of kin when we are not together.

HOW ONE CLASS FARED

2011-08-14T11:42:00.000-07:00

This essay was written for my class, the Class of 1961, Spring Valley High School, Spring Valley, N.Y. We had a fine reunion Aug. 14. It is offered here in hope that other former students, of whatever school, in whatever time, can relate to the feelings expressed.

On a sentimental evening, we are not just about sentiment. There’s sentimentality in this room, of course. How could it be otherwise five decades later in this now retouching of friendships and the opening of memory pages? No, sentiment did not get us here, we collection of the successful, the survivors, the lucky. We are as youth once again, yet our lives prove the long journey beyond.

Each class, in whatever age, wherever in the world, has its flavor, its special stamp. Geography, the decade, social direction, the economy, our parents, teachers and whatever other influences the universe gives in the moment help spawn and grow the class. There is the reality of local, national and international events, including war. Economic change. Vast social change. Our own maturing. How our dreams fared. What we wish for succeeding generations. Our health. Our relationships. The complications-- the joys and sorrows -- of the last 50 years, different lives but still, in all that, shared high school DNA, the leitmotif of the Class of 1961.

That peculiar mix, so well stirred in our years at Spring Valley High, began with the bringing together of kids from varied neighborhoods -- the North and South Main Street Schools, St. Joseph’s, Monsey, English Church, Camp Hill, New Hempstead, Happy Valley, Lakeside, and then, toward the end of our high school run, transfer students from New York City as the suburbs started to build. We had a first year of being together in the new junior high of the old Ramapo II School District -- ninth grade in 1957-58 at the former high school, a building that many of our parents attended. Time went so very quickly that season, but the months were enough to push us away from our elementary years and those particular communities into the yin and yang of high school, and to stir the juices of anticipation of what being sophomores, then juniors and, finally, big seniors would be like. How eager were we to grow up.

Each of us has particular memories of Spring Valley High – the teachers who meant the most, some giving us life-changing direction. The friends we made, some for life, others now seen again, with 50 years just a second in time, so mutual are our thoughts and ways, even if not shared for so many seasons. Some recall the sports we played, the socialization of football and basketball games, the clubs we joined, Regents exams, the proms, first dates, first love, first cars. All remember the sudden passing of our classmate Fred Yatto and how on that November 1960 day we among the young learned that life was finite. Some 16 of our comrades have reminded us since.

Most of us have moved away from Rockland, from the Spring Valley area and a main street where we knew all the shopkeepers, a downtown recognizable only in revisited memory. But for a time, in our time, the Spring Valley Theatre, Brown’s Luncheonette, Arvanite’s, Bauer’s market, Ro-Field Appliances, Nat Kaplan’s, Shapiro’s, Perruna’s, Kulle’s Tire, K&A Hardware, drug stores, bakeries, barbershops and so many other businesses gave us a sense of continuity in our hometown. We were all part of Small Town, America.

We took the hometown feeling and that of the close high school community with us, even as we rushed on graduation night, cap and gown flung off, diploma in hand, to jump into college, the workplace, families, careers, other towns. We were in such a hurry that we did not see the door closing on such a vital chapter in our individual lives.

Where were our hearts and heads these 50 years? We built careers, families, relationships, lost parents and friends, experienced joy and sadness and the great in-between that fuels most of life. As the decades passed, we became far removed from the youth of our high school years, from the village where we were cast. Yet, the experiences of Spring Valley high, our elementary seasons before, our downtown, all that we then had remained in our subconscious, as circuits that simply were not switched on for a long time, save the occasional flashback. Now, tonight, this weekend, after the preparation of two years by the extraordinary reunion committee, the circuits are again energized.

So, it is not sentiment alone, this reuniting. It is a deliberate turn of the head back to the closing doors of Spring Valley High as we left pomp and circumstance in June 1961. We did not look then; we do now. This time, we can see what the future brought. This time we know that within the walls of that Route 59 building were the ingredients of a unique alchemy that made us, and only us, the Class of 1961, Spring Valley High School.

SAVING AMERICA FROM A FALL

2011-08-08T05:54:00.000-07:00

Congress and the presidency are now broken systems, and great change must come if the nation is to survive. Otherwise, the road traveled by ancient Rome in its decline -- high debt, reduced revenue, war distractions -- will be a metaphor for the U.S. The fall will be catastrophic.

History tells us how we got here, and it dates from 1918, the end of “The War to End All Wars.” In the rush to “normalcy,” American inventiveness and manufacturing began to produce consumer goods like refrigerators, toasters and radios. Enterprising marketers came up with the time-payment plan to help a rising consumer class buy these goodies on the cuff. It was the beginning of purchasing beyond one’s means. Price inflation ensued, and the greed of the moment extended to margin buying in the stock market. On Oct. 29, 1929, the first day of the Great Depression, over-priced, unsecured stocks, frenzied purchase and high personal debt all proved to be the loose mortar of the new American economy.

In the Depression, Americans pulled pack to the lowered expectation of just a few decades before and survived with the novelty of major government spending until the defense jobs of World War II added more national debt but also personal income. The end of conflict saw the U.S. on top of the world economically since the Axis was destroyed and, among the Allies, we were the only country in good shape. We ruled the universe in our post-war manufacturing and innovative product development. But our 1920s’ habit resurfaced -- a huge and steady regrowth of consumer installment-plan buying and a “must-have” attitude. In the largess, government also expanded, largely through social programs as we marched through the 1960s. We flexed muscle internationally in the deadly and expensive, misdirected, confusing Vietnam War, and the continuing Cold War added to American debt as well. But we were still tops economically, and despite recessions, we thought our system highly resilient. What the ordinary citizen did not realize is that concurrent with our growing desire for more material goods, special-interest groups that could get the ear of presidents and congresses were becoming stronger and stronger. Not the least of these was the military/industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower, our American general and president, warned would become deeply imbedded. Every undeclared war since has had its strings pulled in part by this special interest. Now there are also lobbies that protect big financiers, huge manufacturers, oil companies and corporate-owned farming, etc. There are lobbies for political belief, for religion, for social causes. Special-interest groups for plausible reason and for sinister action.

By the time we got to 2000, lobbies of all sorts were so entrenched that government, which by then was so big and so involved in individual lives, marched largely to special-interest direction. Today, with the awful and real worries about world terrorism; the polarization of government philosophy between heavy and active involvement (investment spending) and deficit reduction at any cost; and the great isolation from the reality of ordinary people’s lives that is both Congress and the presidency, we see special interests taking advantage at every turn. No decision is made without these lobbies. They fund expensive re-election campaigns, provide jobs for former officials and hold the keys to House and Senate committee doors. They are, despite some legitimate aims, largely a cancer on the nation, for they interfere with the legislative, executive and judicial branches. They affect the checks and balances of our democratic system. Government is ever so remote from the people.

End special interests

Until American campaigns are fully publicly funded, with no lobby money allowed, until the concerns of any special-interest group are heard not through the wallet but in open public hearing alone (to protect freedom of speech), U.S. leaders will hear no other voices. The congressional system is corrupted, as are state legislatures. So, if the nation is not to fall as Rome did in its own greed, special interests must end.

As for the presidency, the last time you see a living, breathing White House leader is when he is elected. On the stump, the candidate appears like the people, able to digest their fears, their needs, their hopes. He talks the language. Once elected, as has happened with Obama, the great collection of advisers (read special interests here, too) and the security apparatus isolate the man. Who has his ear? Not Joe and Sue USA.

We, the people, who have allowed the growth of special interests, who have permitted our remote presidency, have, over the past four decades, enabled special interests to end kill U.S. jobs by sending them overseas. This we have done by (1) not insisting on government reinvestment in competitive industry, like steel; (2) by over-regulating business; (3) by making consumerism, principally the buying of goods financed by debt (home equity, credit cards) our basic economic engine. Now, in tough times, as on Oct. 29, 1929, that house of cards is falling part.

How do we rescue America?

We end special interests. We ask our elected officials to serve by conscience and principle alone.
We add a “people’s cabinet member,” an ordinary Sue or Joe America who serves a few months and has the ear of the chief executive on “real” concerns. Then a new American is appointed.
We, the nation, creates jobs, jobs, jobs -- in emerging technology, mainly, where we can again become world employment leaders.
The very wealthy “loan” us the money to create jobs and also outright invest in America. They have the funds, and you know what? They will be repaid handsomely in renewed economic activity as consumerism “trickles UP,” not down (as it rarely has).
We, the nation, decide what sort of health care, pension system and social service network a progressive world leader must have, and we work with private industry to fund it, not government, make it a profitable enterprise, but with greed controls.
We end unfunded mandates and micromanaging of education and housing while enforcing agreed-upon quality and humanitarian standards.
We the people cut back our own expectations. Do we need McMansions? Super-sized cars? Vacation homes? Or should we live within means, growing the economy, yes, but within reason? And paying as we go, perhaps helping others in need, too?

.• We decide what wars will be fought and who else in the world will fight them with us. No more unilateral U.S. action.

America is a gift from God. Its shaky beginning has endured, and we have helped save the world from inhumanity. This experiment must not end, must not go down in flames. We must take action.

AN AMERICA STILL ENDURING

2011-07-31T16:36:00.000-07:00

Ernie Pyle, perhaps America’s greatest columnist ever, told a depressed nation in its worst economic calamity that smiles were still to be seen. His subjects, often found in out-of-the-way places, were people long without jobs in the 1930s, with few relief programs, with a future so very uncertain. Pyle mined them for funny tales and lessons in survival character and served up weekly Scripps Howard newspaper columns in conversational letters to the reader. He was a hit for his honest observations, relaxed writing and, most of all, the faith and hope he found at a time when pundits thought the sky was falling in, that the great experiment in a democratic republic was failing.

The people, so many not sure where the next bit of food was coming from, knew another nation, one not far removed from the pioneers who opened the West, from the tinkerers, inventors and manufacturers who brought the world electric light and assembly line-produced automobiles, and from the great waves of immigrants who laid the foundation for the middle class of their children and their new country.

Ernie Pyle, killed at age 44 covering the war in the Pacific, was the roving Mark Twain of his time, with an acute eye for the ordinary person’s special nature. Though he criticized his writing, Pyle’s columns produced great literature, for his words reported truth, and his readers nodded their heads as they found comfort and assurance through his observations.

Pyle would note the very same things today, in this difficult economic time, even in an age he could scarcely recognize for the intense consumerism of at least three decades. The individuals he would talk to, the places he would visit would still reveal the essential quality of American character-- conservative in thought, often liberal in giving and forgiveness. His take on government, on political leaders -- that they are as remote as ever from the national heartbeat -- would remain.

Most of all, Ernie Pyle would tell us in his “letters to readers” about old Joe, or about Smithtown, USA, or about anything so awfully ordinary that we come close to tears, or laugh, or say “yes, I know” -- that America is alive, enduring.

There is great hope in that these days, as well.

ON THE OUTER CAPE

2011-07-25T04:57:00.001-07:00

NORTH TRURO, Mass. -- Many communities on old Cape Cod are trendy and expensive in these days of the growing super-rich, but some towns have not yet put a price tag on their charm. For the cost of a decent pair of walking shoes and an old pair of shorts, you can amble by Dutra’s Market and the Village Cafe, perhaps linger at either and tune into the tempo of the locals of the Outer Cape. An ordinary coffee, a Boston tabloid or the long-running and still with-it, still-read Cape Cod Times add to the chill-out, which ends only with the time limit of your particular day. No designer clothing required. No Mercedes or Lexus SUV.

Walk up the old Kings Highway, Route 6A, and 500 yards from Dutra’s you see the vantage point that painter Edward Hopper used in “High Road” (1931). The refractive light is the same. You can hoof it or bike down Pond Road to Cold Storage Beach, scene of some of Hopper’s other Cape works. You are just miles from Provincetown, and you can spot in the distance where the Pilgrims first landed (opting to move on to Plymouth).

There’s an older look here, in North Truro, one probably not all that different from Hopper’s time in the 1930s-1960s. More scrub pine covering what were apple orchards and farms, yes, but the lay of the land is still as God intended, albeit with paths set by Native Americans, then rutted by colonial wagons, then by growth and summers at the Cape.

A certain peace is what enough still seek from a vacation, and if the suburban-like bustle of the mid-Cape now add louder notes, or if bigger, expensive homes or high realty prices sing the wrong tune in some Cape areas, then head north to Truro, Wellfleet, Eastham.

The Highland Light at the National Seashore will bring you back generations, when whaling ships and their crews counted so heavily on a beacon in the Cape fog, when this light welcomed many a mariner home. The house and tower were moved inland in 1996 because the coastline continues to erode, but the structure, an active U.S. Coast Guard aid to navigation, is still set close enough to the Atlantic to be a watchfire, as it has been since 1797. Hopper, America’s foremost realist artist, captured it in a 1930 watercolor, bathed in setting sunlight. It changes you, this look at Highland Light late in day, opening a door into another realm. It is a poetic trip to calm.

Artists, writers and individualists have long spent summers in the Truro region, and if spirit can be left to linger, it surely is felt in the Outer Cape today.

ON TURNING 40

2011-07-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

I used the same headline for myself, some 29 years ago when a weekly Column Rule essay in The Journal-News touched generically on the coming of one’s fourth decade and specifically my own. It was a sum of amazement, reflection, regret, gratitude and fear of the road ahead.

Now my oldest son, namesake Arthur IV, has himself so quickly arrived at the gate, though he hardly seems older than my memories of him and his brother Andrew -- having pillow fights, learning to ride a bike, studying in the third grade, in the seventh, high school, college. Does a parent ever see his offspring without a flash of the mind’s photo album?

Yet our oldest is hard to miss as an adult since -- and this is praise -- his act is together and has been since he could first make decisions for himself. He is bright; he is fit, running and winning road races as he has since middle school; he is a hard and diligent worker, a fine school teacher by any standard.

Arthur IV is a family man who more than shares parental duties, housecleaning, diaper changing, etc. His hours are always long, and he continues his teacher’s voice long after the work day, since he is an instructor, too, to his son Sam, 4, and daughter Beatrice, 2. He is also their partner in crime, passing on some of the harmless shenanigans that he learned growing up with an odd father.

My son is a true Rocklander, cognizant of his lower Hudson Valley, N.Y., roots -- not going back as far as the original county families but by modern standards four generations anyway. He has lived in various places in college and has visited here and there, but Rockland is home, though that was never a requirement. Home is where you make it. Arthur rails against county overdevelopment, complains about political decisions and wonders why there is so much suburbia and not enough village living. That is why he chose to move to the Nyacks, where he can take his children to the library, to the ice cream shop, to the Hudson River, to Hook Mountain for a hike, all on foot. He knows his neighbors, and they know him.

What is next for my 40-year-old son? Good health, I pray. More running (his high school bumper sticker -- “Run Forever” -- is still on our garage wall). Decades of proud years as his own family grows. Many, many seasons in the old home he and his wife Laura bought, a place that particularly fits my son’s personality. I will tell him not to have too much fear. At 40, I worried about career, money, health, life’s purpose. I revisited old doubt, had confidence challenged. There was so much unknown ahead. And there still is. Having traveled almost 29 years beyond 40, though, I can say that the benefits of life, if you are so fortunate -- of children maturing, of relationships enduring, of reflected appreciation for one’s roots, new challenges, joy and tears, life itself -- all are behind the many doors in the long hallway past 40.

Have a fine walk, my -- our -- son.

A DAY AT DAD'S HOUSE

2011-07-10T12:56:00.000-07:00

If you are fortunate, as I am, to have an elderly dad who still lives quite independently, in his own home, then you don’t mind, at my own age of almost 69, if you have to paint his house.

Did that the other day -- the same beige/tan that matches the aluminum siding he had installed 25 years ago, a color to which he is now attached because my late mom liked it. In fact, my father will not change much about his house because my mother chose the furniture, etc.

It’s not that he is maudlin nor romantic. He’s an ex-Marine who doesn’t get too emotional over anything. (“If I survived Marine boot camp, I could face anything,” he once told me.) No, my dad honors my mom by not changing much, and I think it’s the reason he rattles around in a 1,500 square-foot home.

You are never far from returning to childhood when you are around a parent, no matter what your age, despite being a parent and grandparent yourself. There are always the old issues, the usual father/son posturing that never steps down, and probably a sub-conscious desire to get back to the more carefree days of youth.

My day of painting went smoothly enough -- my dad leaves me alone to do my job, as he learned to do when I put in the attic electrics in the sixth grade. (House wiring was pretty simple then, and a few issues of Popular Mechanics pushed me into the self-taught world.)

As I painted, I came to areas of the house that needed repair, and I used tools from my dad’s garage, including an old hammer that went to the woods with me for treehouse building in the seventh grade. There was also the box of nails from those days.

I see my father often enough, but it’s usually just a check-in and some conversation. He likes no fuss, and visits from anyone can be overdone. This time, it was not a visit but a day of work, a very different feeling. The painting ended up not taxing me, and I felt warm about the experience. I did a good deed for the old gent, but I think I got the better part of the bargain given the emotional reward of that day, use of old tools and all.

INDEPENDENCE DAY

2011-07-04T06:35:00.000-07:00

In writing professionally for 46 years, there has been just one rule: Get rhythm. Words strung together without the right flow of sound are like ball bearings that fall from a holder -- there is no stated purpose. Put together there is function.

Writing is best understood, even appreciated, by “hearing” the words, the sentences, with certain syllables stressed, some not, some longer than others. For example, when someone reads a good novel or short story, there is not only the acquired acquaintanceship with the characters and the plot, but the road that takes you there -- the writing. Each punctuation mark is a stop sign, curve, change of direction, hill, valley, level grade on that route. The length of scenes, the amount of dialogue, repetition, emphasis -- all are controlled by the writing and its governing rhythm.

Today, our nation celebrates the Fourth of July and the written Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. The writing in the historic document of July 4, 1776, owes its rhythm in part to England, given the heritage of the signers, including the Magna Carta and common law. But not entirely. The Age of Reason, increased writing (in sometimes stirring rhythm) about abuses of state and church and a growing belief that, in common, the people should seek equality -- all this changed the tempo. A writer knows that what affects him or her personally -- because of society, upbringing, circumstance -- directs the music, often the score as well.

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, as writers of the Declaration, may have been trained in the ways of colonial America, that is close to the motherland in customs, etc., but the rhythm of their prose was distinctly from this side of the pond. The British never got the tune, for they never bothered to listen to the music.

On Independence Day 2011, the mother tongue of a nation now 235 years old reflects deepening and variation after centuries of immigration, but the rhythm of our American theme is as it was when Jefferson’s pen inscribed “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Happy Fourth of July.

AT THE PLAYGROUND

2011-06-26T15:18:00.001-07:00

A woman of wisdom once told me she is happiest when “everyone (in her family) is under the same roof.” That’s certainly true for those of us who have made it to grandparent-land, having survived both trial and tribulation in raising our young, accepting their departure for their own living, getting used to the quiet and slower pace of the empty nest and then welcoming the arrival of grandchildren.

The old saw, of course, is that grandchildren make grandparents happy in part because they eventually go home, that you can enjoy all over again the wonder of growing children, their imagination, their frank questions, their idiosyncrasies, but at the end of the day, there comes a time to depart. Most of us could not go through parenthood again but being grandparents is just right, keeping us in this special loop of humanity. It is its own blessing.

On a recent jaunt with Beatrice, one of my three granddaughters (plus a grandson) in Memorial Park along the Hudson River at Nyack, N.Y., I was reminded of my own two sons’ upbringing, now so deep in the past but yet as if it were yesterday.

Beatrice is inquisitive, bright, says “no” most of the time, wants to do everything by herself as two years olds are wont to demand. In my own time with my sons in this same park, then just steps from my crazy-hours newspaper job at the old Journal-News, I was probably thinking more about job/career stress and paying bills and therefore paying less attention to the boys at the park’s playground than I should have.

Beatrice had my attention, though, on the swings, on the animal figures, in the treehouse, wherever her short interest span took her. A retired “Gramps” is just naturally better at grandparenting than he was back in the saddle as a parent.

I was not alone then, of course. My wife Lillian was an excellent parent, making up for my own shortcomings, and is better today at grandparenting than this old coot. The offspring of the offspring will learn manners and all other good things from her, as did the sons. From me they shall receive wacky answers, fierce independence, self-reliance (I hope) and questioning of unquestioned authority.

My boys, too, heard the same line, and I am proud to say they are as pioneering and individual as an American ought to be, now or back in 1776. But they are fine parents, too, which their mom taught them to be, not me. I see that when their children come to the park to play with an oddball grandfather or when they all gather “under the same roof.”

STATE OF THE UNION

2011-06-19T15:35:00.001-07:00

Where are we in America, we sons and daughters of liberty, of immigrants, of factory workers and hardscrabble farmers?

The news in my part of the patch isn’t full of hope: soaring local, state and national debt; borrowed money for just about everything; education and municipal budgets slashed, money from foreign nations for two increasingly fuzzy wars, to be repaid with heavy interest and God knows what by those not yet born. Roads and other infrastructure neglected while the human skeleton, sinew and mind no longer meet health care for a full tune-up.

Yet we see more rich, enabled by greed, lobbies, bailouts that carry no price tag while the benefactors see no moral need to "pay forward" their rescue. If there is supposed to be re-investment in America from this largesse, most of us are still waiting. I wonder if the top 400 richest people, who according to the IRS pay just 17 percent of income in tax, even know how wealthy they are or how sorely their country needs their money, and so little of it overall.

We are now a country of union against non-union, private worker versus public, fighting over the leftovers, squeezed by the ever inflation of the supermarket, gas pump and taxes. With so many jobs lost, with scarce re-investment, there are fewer people left to pay the bills. This, in turn, increases unemployment and reduces spending, in a vicious cycle not even noticed by the rich. Only their handlers know how much they have in the bank, which they also own.

Now, the rich alone have not caused our stagnation. Some politicians, even of eloquence, fail to serve. Common sense too often is bested by personal irresponsibility. The government must do much but cannot do it all, and what it does must be for need and investment, not special interest.

Logic tells us that if the economy doubled in GNP since 1980, surely the middle class would be larger. Yet every day hundreds turn in their identity card, in a democracy long built on a vibrant, growing middle class and its aspirations, its solidity, its buying power. Where can democracy be headed without a large and strong middle class? It has been our greatest frontier, the frontier of hope. It is why we send our young on to further education, why we take pride in the doctor in the family.

Where are we in America, we sons and daughters of liberty, of immigrants, of factory workers and hardscrabble farmers? It is 2011, and the worry lines are deepening in our faces.

THE PEOPLE ARE NOT A REGISTERED LOBBY

2011-06-12T11:58:00.001-07:00

ANYWHERE BUT WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The ordinary American, an enduring species usually known to senators, congress people and presidents only when on the campaign trail, is suffering. Loss of jobs, homes and hope have brought nervous frustration not felt since the Great Depression.

Democrats talk of job incentives through deficit spending and higher taxes, Republicans of program cuts and lower taxes, but the rhetoric of each side is largely script-written by special interests that in both hidden and obvious ways deal the real mojo. Nothing happens in war and peace, in flush times and not without their say-so. Not in 2011.

Driven by profit goals and sometimes rightist or leftist aims, lobbies care nothing about people, their public relations, if any, to the contrary. Big money can buy big speeches and wonderful feel-good.

Special interests also "grow" government to suit their purposes. Our national, state and local jurisdictions are now so large, complex and bureaucratic that their cost may not measure their performance. Yet government is necessary, especially in today’s security worrisome age, in a time when unregulated greed threatens to destroy the middle class and its hopes, when economic, social, health care and especially old-style American inventiveness are life-and-death issues. The best government is the most simple, as described by A. Lincoln: “... of the people, for the people, by the people.”

If government were more transparent, if special interests were prohibited from giving money to any candidate simply by requiring all campaigns to be publicly funded, then perhaps government would become simpler, more connected to the people, with more principled “Mr. Smiths” articulating the citizenry’s needs and with government acting upon them. Office-holders might actually become beholden to the people beyond stump rhetoric.

Ah, but this is anywhere-but-Washington, D.C. thinking, and it has no special-interest stamp of approval. Too bad the citizenry is not a registered lobby.

FROM HERE TO THERE, 1944

2011-06-06T04:40:00.000-07:00

PIERMONT, N.Y. -- In the 67 years today since the allied landings at Normandy and other French beaches began in earnest the push to Germany, suburbia has replaced what was the staging ground for the end of the Second World War in Europe. It was in Piermont that Army personnel and their massive equipment lined up to board Hudson River boats that would bring them to New York City and overseas carriers. And it was in nearby Orangeburg that 1.3 million Army personnel were processed through the largest East Coast port of embarkation. Indeed, the order of battle for D-Day began at Shanks as units were assembled in logistics and support.

On this day of remembrance, anyone with a smattering of that history who walks in this village, this “Last Stop USA,” just less than 20 miles from Gotham, cannot fail to touch the spirits of the good people who marched by in 1943, ’44 and ’45.

Some years back, in a Memorial Day speech I gave in Piermont, dedicating the life-sized, bronze statue of G.I. Joe that watches over the soldiers’ route, I tried to put stories to the men:

• The young man from Wisconsin who saw his mother’s face on a woman he did not know, sitting on her porch off Paradise Avenue as he passed. Soon enough he would be with the 36^th Infantry Division at Cassino, and the images of the two women would become one, warming his soul in the cold of battle hell.

• The fellow from Camden, New Jersey, brought to Camp Shanks in the middle of the night on a troop train, who a few weeks later would ride on a transport driven to the Piermont Pier by one of the many women of the home war effort. Maybe he recalled her deft steering of the deuce and a half when he saw the Red Ball Express materiel delivery teams after the breakout at St. Lo and the race to the Rhine.

• The two brothers who last touched American soil at Piermont, one off to the U.S. II Corps at Kasserine Pass and the other with the 45th Infantry at Ragusa, Sicily. Only one son would make it back.

• The older man, still a private, who was not drafted but who joined and became “Pop” with the 106^th Infantry at the Battle of the Bulge. The calm hills over Piermont, one of his last sights of America, were in his mind in bitter cold, snowy woods of that awful blitzkrieg December.

• The fellows who shaped up at Shanks for the 32^nd Field Artillery and the First Medical Battalion, units that saw a quiet U.S. sendoff and then the shouting, cataclysmic horror of D-Day and D-Day plus one.

• And all the men, almost all civilian soldiers, once machinists, salesmen, the unemployed, farmers, professional workers, sons and fathers, neighbors and strangers, immigrants and Native Americans and all whose forebears came to this nation, free or not.

They are the spirits who once moved as humanity through this Piermont, past this spot where the inanimate but full-of-life G.I. Joe statue gives constant nod to their service, their courage, their sacrifice, their protection of one another.

This scene of continual reverence plays not just in Piermont but every day of the year, in every year, in every small and big town in these United States. Not one community has been left untouched in the world wars, by the Korean and Vietnam wars, and now by Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wars are fought by the then living and endured for decades afterward by the survivors. The memorials we erect to those gone are in worthy and humble tribute and comfort the living, but it cannot end there. What Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg must be remembered, must be repeated: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Many good people, many ordinary ones made so extraordinary in calamity’s forging, marched in Piermont on the way to war. Not all returned, and those who did had to live the lives of their buddies, too, fulfilling the promises of a safe and secure democracy, so that, as Lincoln added, “... this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

You hear such voice still, here in Piermont, from the one-million-plus spirits who passed through to the European Theatre of War. They will never stop speaking, in this village and in all of this America.

We must listen.

BRINGING A GREAT ARTIST HOME

2011-05-30T09:54:00.000-07:00

Light, front room, Edward Hopper House

NYACK, N.Y. -- Edward Hopper, native son and famed painter of realism, whose “Nighthawks” and other works articulate American solitude as mood, thought and destiny, is “back home” where he was born in 1882.

Hopper House, the art center in the family’s 1858 home at 82 North Broadway, is celebrating “The Year of Edward Hopper” in recognition of four decades of rescue, renovation and use. As part of the celebration, and in the first scholarly effort to connect the painter to his roots and formative years, Hopper House is trying to awaken Nyack to the incredible Hudson River light that is everywhere. Young Edward, who began drawing at least at age 5, saw that illumination each morning as it shot up Second Avenue into his bedroom. In the afternoon today, you can almost touch the light as it baths the parlor, now the principal gallery.

Hopper House, which has the dual mission of preserving the home as well as advancing all manner of art, hopes visitors and villagers alike will observe as Edward did, taking in what contributed to his many paintings, watercolors, prints and sketches, produced almost to the day he died in 1967. A full listing of “The Year of Edward Hopper” events, including the current “Prelude: The Nyack Years,” the May 21-July 17 unprecedented showing of his early works, is available at www.edwardhopperhouse.org

Wherever you live -- in the Nyack area, in the Midwest, in the South, wherever in America -- I urge you to “see Hopper,” as his home community is now doing. His works often include a person in contemplation, say a man sitting on a wooden sidewalk in front of a store (probably his father, a Nyack dry goods merchant) or the “effect of sunlight on the wall of a house,” geometric patterns that seem to be windows inviting the viewer to interpret, the sort of lighting you see all over Nyack. But you need not be in this village to see his take on American solitude.

You spot the “snapshot effect” of his art, moments in time that have an obvious history and the future of which might well be guessed. Look about the Nyack of today, at the woman catching a bus at Cedar and Main, at the couple leaning on a porch rail, at an upstairs window framing humanity. Always a story -- here in Nyack, and elsewhere, too.

Today Edward Hopper is iconic, his “Nighthawks” and other works recognizable worldwide. Recent museum shows in Boston, Washington, New York City and Europe have drawn many thousands in reverent communication with an artist who said so little by speech but who in his paintings expressed deeply and extensively facets native to the American being. Hopper offered as much in this quote: “If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint. The whole answer is there on the canvas.”

The artist’s boyhood home is part of that “canvas,” a source of the light, real and figurative, that was Hopper’s painting harmony. Nyack helped form the vision of an artist who celebrated American solitude and the great quiet, the self-reliance, even the genius within. Now, Edward Hopper has returned home in this local recognition of his gift.

THE 'CHANGEABLE' WORLD

2011-05-23T05:14:00.000-07:00

I did not have to look up, as I was arranging my pocket money, to know the age of the fellow counting my change. He had to be about 62 or older. The clue? The bill was $11 and I gave him $21. Quickly, I was given $10.

There was no electronic register in this farm store, just a man in work jeans who moments before was hauling plants off a skid and, looking over at the check-out counter, saw me waiting. He just ambled by, nodded hello, added up the cost of my items in his head and said “$11.”

I had no $10 bill, just a $20 and some singles but did not want a bunch of singles back, so I gave him $21,” which of course meant that he would flip back a ten spot. I had another motive, and that was to see if people really could still add in their heads and also recall how such common sense currency exchanges as $21 against $11 was the norm.

The fellow came through with flying colors -- never hesitated, though I think he was a bit surprised by my old-fashioned move. Until he looked up himself and saw his contemporary.

Today’s electronic registers will also instruct cashiers to give $11 in change after the operator inputs $21, but I can tell you, when I have tried to give some clerks $21, they have handed back the $1 bill, saying “You gave me too much.”

This isn’t a complaint about electronic registers. Progress happens. It must, whatever the consequences. It’s just that my generation and before and perhaps for a few years after, had to use their heads to add and subtract, divide and multiply. You could grab a piece of paper, yes, but at least in my fourth-grade class with Mrs. Still, we had to do the arithmetic in our heads. It was a challenge, and I still do it today as a brain exercise.

Countermen and women of years back did it in their heads, too, or added the bill on the same paper bag that would contain your goods, the fellow or gal pulling a pencil from between the ear and head, sometimes wetting the tip out of habit, as if to sharpen skills and be precise, and then do the bill.

A lost art. Quaint perhaps, but also somehow an intimate connection in an ordinary shopping experience. One that came even if you and the counter person didn’t exchange a word.

'DOCS' ON THE JOB

2011-05-16T04:42:00.000-07:00

In “retirement,” you get asked the same question -- politely, of course, and with sincerity: “Are you enjoying it?” My answer is always matter-of-fact: “No, I’d rather be at the newspaper.” And that’s the truth even if I am otherwise “enjoying retirement,” certainly a relative term.

If you have reasonable health, if other creative opportunities have opened since leaving the job -- ones that would not have appeared if you were still under the clock -- if you have grandchildren to visit in Texas and locally, if you can help as a volunteer, if you can take a daily walk, if you can share time with family when the crazy hours of decades of deadline newspaper work often detoured that, then how can you honestly deny that you don’t “enjoy” retirement?

And I do, and I hope the same for other retirees. The trouble for me, though, is that I always felt like the country doctor -- I did a necessary job that others could perform, yes, and I was as expendable as the rest, but my calling (and I think I was sent to it) was the sort, as is the doc’s, that you don’t leave until God takes you away. I wrote, I photographed, I commented. I cursed my job and many of the bosses every day, but that was part of the difficult daily birth that is a newspaper. In delivery, people were informed, and that is a blessing and a gift for those who receive and those who give. I never would have retired.

But newspapers and the rest of the media are in sea change, and though there will always be insatiable demand for information, delivering it economically and to people who absorb it electronically rather than simply in print are forcing downsizing everywhere. I could no longer get out of the way of the train, though I was grateful that it didn’t let off any of my colleagues, at the time at least. I made way for some younger people, who kept their jobs for a few years.

Five seasons out, I am thankful for the renewed simplicity of life, though I sleep no longer than I did working various shifts for 42 years. I am grateful I can fly to San Antonio to see son Andrew, daughter-in-law Patricia and grandkids Isabella and Emme, or, in Upper Nyack, son Arthur, daughter-in-law Laura and grandchildren Sam and Beatrice. I am blessed for artistic and volunteer involvement at the Edward Hopper House, in various historical societies and, so far, 10 years in a breakfast program in the village of my soul, Spring Valley. I can write online, to the ether at least, photograph, paint and wonder about the same things in life that I did as a boy on Karnell Street, Old Nyack Turnpike, Cherry Lane, Johnsontown Road, Route 59. Curiosity is still my companion, and though the body ages, does the inner life ever get old?

But I can no longer -- with fellow newspaper stiffs -- glance up at the clock in the editorial office, chase deadline and then step back wringing wet from the day’s (night’s) delivery. We were docs of a sort, and you don’t leave the job. It leaves you.

'BOULEVARD' FOR GENERATIONS

2011-05-09T03:17:00.001-07:00

One of the newest places available for walking in my neck of the Northeast woods is in Nanuet, on the grounds of the old St. Agatha Home for Children, where once New York City sent youngsters to be reared by the good sisters of the Catholic Church. The large late-1800s housing/school and outlying dormitories are gone in changing times, and, a few years ago, much of the land was sold through public referendum to the Nanuet School District.

It was a fine save since more suburban housing, with greater land density and higher school and other government costs would have risen overnight. Enough already in this overbuilt ex-patch of the woods. The district’s taxpayers showed great foresight in rescuing the property, and some money has been found to pave a walking/bike path that gently follows the hills and valleys where youngsters once played.

I am on site three times a week, early at about 7 a.m., and share the path with two or three others. One of the sections I walk is a longish stretch flanked by very old oak trees, perhaps 125 years old. One fell down during the harsh winter, its insides long rotted though the upper branches were still budding. Five trees are left, standing almost in military formation, as if set by a surveyor’s line, resembling boulevards in France.

In the great open field that is now the St. Agatha walk, this line of trees is the only bit of formality. Other sections pass ballfields, which tell of suburbia, or woods, which speak of old Rockland County, N.Y., or the winding Convent Road, named for obvious reason. I am loose when walking anywhere else on the one-mile path, but when I come to what I now call “the boulevard,” I stand straighter and nod in respect that these trees have long stood where they have, enduring great summer heat and deep winter cold; their trunks etched with initials in 1902, 1935, 1943, 1960, 1995, etc.; their leafed branches providing shade for generations of boys and girls thinking through their plan of life; the roots drawing water from Rockland’s many underground sources. The history these oaks have witnessed span three centuries now.

I can be casual elsewhere on my St. Agatha walk, lost in the solitude that is the fortifying effect of a stroll or quick step or in between, but in the shadow of the trees on the boulevard, I am in the presence of life lived, the voice ghosts still whispering.

DANDELIONS IN SPRING

2011-05-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

I took a whack at my grandfather’s long spring habit the other day, and it was as satisfying for me as for it was for him.

He lived in a small New York village called Spring Valley, pre-World War II, at the corner of Ternure and Summit. The property was not quite big enough for two lots but still larger than the standard single-family plot. There was much lawn to trim.

And it was a fine lawn, doing well without modern, expensive fertilizer, mowed by hand with a reel mower kept sharp by the self-taught mechanic that all homeowners had to be in those days. My grandfather was meticulous at keeping his lawn neat and trimmed. Perhaps it gave him relief from stress after working all day in a smoking pipe factory (Briarcraft), a Depression time job never secure.

Every spring, early on, my grandfather would take a whack at the dandelions that popped up like smiling lollipops mocking the landowner. They were not welcome, on the lawn or in the cracks of the sidewalk that ran 75 feet one way and 50 more around the corner. The man would get on his hands and knees, and using a well-sharpened, old paring knife, he would insert the blade into the ground, circle the roots and pull out the entire dandelion. At the sidewalk, he would tilt the blade to remove dandelions and strips of moss between the cement slabs. He’d pile these up on the walk, and his young grandchildren (there were five of us) -- whoever was visiting at the time -- collected them and piled the debris alongside the garage foundation. I don’t think any of us have ever forgotten such moments.

My grandfather did not speak much, cutting dandelions or not, but he did tell us that his own grandfather, which would have been Robert, the first of our Gunthers to hit American shores from Prussia about 1848, made dandelion wine. My grandfather made root beer.

Standing in front of my own home the other day, in this spring of sudden blooming, I saw many dandelions. And I had a whack at them, too. But with a hand-held sickle. I don’t have my grandfather’s patience for digging out the plants, and this is a faster-paced world anyway. But I do have four grandchildren, two so very far away in Texas, two much closer. None were about

-- I said it is a busier time -- so I played that part as well, dumping the debris in the woods.

I am thankful, though, that there are times -- dandelion season or not -- when we can all be together under one roof, an entire family. Never seems to be any weeds then.

A CHANCE TO VISIT

2011-04-25T06:27:00.001-07:00

SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. -- Sixty years ago, when you add 10 years to my high school Class of 1961, just about all of us were from this then-country village a mere 22 miles from New York City but, oh, so far away from urbanity. We were either raised there or lived close enough that we went to elementary and secondary school in the area. Some went to the South and North Main Street buildings, to the Monsey School, to Brick Church, to New Hempstead. Some went to St. Joe’s, the Roman Catholic school. We formed our early friendships, even the beginning of life’s outlook, in these community schools, just as did the kids from the nearby private Lakeside and Happy Valley schools.

After school, on weekends, in the summer, some of us from one school might mix with others from another place, though that was rare. We might play with each other in Memorial Park, on the big swings or the merry-go-round. We might see each other in the original Spring Valley Theatre, 14 cents for admission. But, all in all, we were South Main Street, or North, or Monsey, or Brick Church or St. Joe’s kids or from, whatever school. The bonds formed in our elementary sub communities of greater Spring Valley, itself a relatively small village, would remain with us as we all gathered in September 1957 in the first Spring Valley Junior High School.

That one year of ninth grade gave us a moment to meet new friends, keep the old, grow in our bodies and minds, hearts and souls as this new, bigger, unified class would soon begin high school in the relatively new building on Route 59, in September 1958. For three years we would all face the toughening that was speech class with the wonderful Mr. Scott, as well as the challenges of our math, English, social studies, art, music, industrial arts, business, phys ed and other instructors.

We would go to football games in chilly weather, warmed by the joint experience. There would be school dances for some, clubs for many and friendships with the transfer students now arriving in what was becoming suburbia. Many of these students had reluctantly left lifelong neighborhoods and their own high school bonding but quickly became part of what was to be fully cast in three years’ time as the Class of 1961, Spring Valley High School.

Now that class, my class, the class of gathered Monsey elementary students, St. Joe’s kids, Brick Church, from wherever, is planning its half-century reunion August 13 at the Marriott in Park Ridge, N.J. (for information, visit www.50thsvhsclass61.com). Now, not all of us want to go back, especially 50 years. Some may say that it was in elementary school where they formed ties, not SVHS. Others may fence-sit, indecisive about the reunion.

I’ll be there, and I hope many of my classmates will come. You will notice that I do not write “former classmates.” We can never be that, just as servicemen and women who are once together in an experience of growth and emotion can never be ex-comrades. The moment -- and it is just a brief one -- that is high school is classic in life, as much of an emotional lighting as were your parents, your heroes, your first car, your first love. How much would any of us give for a chance to hold hands with any of that again, even for just a few hours before life marches on in certainty and not?

WALK AWAY YOUR ...

2011-04-18T05:41:00.000-07:00

Growing up in a country area, as I did in lower New York State in the 1950s, even as the sure and steady march of the suburbs was at my heels, I walked everywhere, as did all youngsters. School bus limits were set at two miles in Spring Valley, so we walked to the South Main Street School. After school, we might hoof it downtown. On weekends, when my mother cleaned house, my brother and I (and many a friend) were left on our own, and to our imagination, and so a walk to the woods or the hills kept us busy and in adventure for a hours.

The walking pushed the fat levels down, exercised us, cleared the mental cobwebs and gave us time to think. Walking became such a habit that I often found myself “turning on my head” as if it were a TV set whenever I took a hike. I’d leave school or the house and instantly began thinking about something -- say the life I wanted when I grew up; or I tried to solve a first-year algebra problem that I had been assigned; or I came up with the essay that Torger Gram wanted for sixth-grade English. Actually, I purposely walked for the essays. They were due Mondays, and I would leave my Hillcrest home, head down Karnell Street to State, to Hillcrest Avenue, to Route 45, to East Williams, to Hillside, to Stewart, to Trinity, back to Williams, to East Eckerson, to Buena Vista, back to Karnell. On that two-mile jaunt, I’d figure out what to write, though I would not pen it in my head since I’d learned that would spoil the sauce, that if I wrote the composition on my walk, it would not be as good the second time, on paper.

Young walkers often lose their stride to the lure of cars, and I certainly did that, barely using shoe leather for 20 years, until one very early morning, after a particularly stressful work at the newspaper where I toiled, I could not sleep. I had also gained 35 pounds more than I should have and, at 38, was without the energy I had always had. Instinctively, I took a walk, and it were as if I had been sent on vacation. I walked slowly at first, with some huffing, even on a level grade. But the next day -- and there was not only a next day, but a next week, next month and 31 next years now -- I found myself with renewed energy, 30 pounds lighter and with time for imagination.

All for free.

If I were the health care guru for the nation, I would offer baskets of apples, oranges and other fruit, free admission to state parks, money for walking trails and other encouragement to get those who wanted to do so into walking shoes. The country would save billions in health and mental health care expenses. And the people who walked would get the best benefit of all, the great "freeing" that comes with a good jaunt.

MAGNIFICENCE OF SOLITUDE

2011-04-11T05:27:00.001-07:00

When one of my two sons was in the second grade, I took a call from his fine teacher, who in routine discussion told me that he was doing quite well, but that he was “quiet,” and she wished he were more outgoing in class. I did not respond, having heard the same story in own earlier life, and, no doubt, my father in his. We three, as well as my other son, are very different from one another but in one regard -- a craving for solitude -- we are one. And quite proud of that.

There are drummers for all people, and we each hear the sounds according to disposition, place, time, circumstances, need. Both my sons have gone on to very good careers, with much responsibility, to marriage, their own children (five in all). They are who they are -- principled citizens and humanitarians -- not because they raised their hands often in class, though that is fine and necessary for many individuals (and society needs both vocal and not-so-vocal joiners), but because they often found magnificence in solitude. They continue to grow in that non-limiting space.

Solitude -- not being alone -- but venturing off to that realm where thinkers go, where, Tom Edison, accused of day-dreaming in school, ignored such criticism and went as an adult every afternoon of his long life, just before his nap. Imagine Edison without solitude? No light for the rest of us, literally.

Consider Edward Hopper, America’s foremost realist painter, now so popular worldwide. Though his iconic oils and watercolors capture this nation’s solitude and the great possibilities within, Hopper’s acclaimed work was once labeled by critics as a look at loneliness. Not so. Hopper rejected that view as much “overdone,” and those who study his art today instead see endurance, quiet, introspection and the great independence that has long typified the ever-frontier spirit of America. I recently asked a Belgian woman why Hopper is so very popular in Europe, indeed why she paints beautiful “Hopperesque” scenes, and she said one word: “American.”

Each nation has its particular character, its attributes, its failings, and, most of all, its overall look after a mix of individuals is averaged. Some foreign movies peg the United States as a land of noisy, pushy, loud, spoiled people living high on the hog, and my Belgian friend could accept that stereotype but is also reflective enough to know that America offers other themes as well, including caring, generosity, patriotism.

Yet as Americans might see the French as romantic or the Germans as industrious or Asians as hard workers, etc., I think others in the world view a vast America and in that big space many individuals in solitude, on a porch, looking at the hills and the sea, lost in thought. Even in the magnificence of it.

THE BAB-O MOMENT

2011-04-03T10:20:00.001-07:00

Some decades ago, on one of those school’s-out days in early spring when the sun has not yet chased winter’s cold and a youngster doesn’t feel like leaving the house, I decided, half out of boredom, to help my working mom by cleaning the white kitchen sink. She was rather neat, though not compulsive (didn’t have time for that), and the three-year-old basin was usually spotless. I liked that look -- still do -- and so the other half of the motivation was to keep it bright on this particularly lazy day.

It was 1956, in former country that was becoming a New York City suburb in Hillcrest, N.Y., with small, expandable Cape Cod-style homes rising monthly and selling for about $14,000, all with white kitchen sinks. Not every basin was extra-clean, however, owing to humanity’s variety. One neighbor was particularly messy, another left dishes in the sink without visitation rights for days. But just down Karnell Street and off on Orchard was Mrs. Broat, whose kitchen in toto was shiny enough to be in Tiffany’s windows.

My mom was simply neat, as a housemaker, as a person as a mother. She worked all my years with her but also managed, with my father’s hands-on help, to keep a home going as well. Sinks included.

On that school’s-out day, I had just finished the 9 a.m. movie on Channel 9, invariably a 1930s or 1940s black and white -- a Great Depression “comedy” or some film noir -- when I walked into the kitchen to round up Saltines with butter. That was enjoyed at a Formica-covered table with four-inch chrome moulding popular in the mid-1950s. The chair also had chrome legs and the seats were over-padded with thick vinyl in the optimistic pastel colors of the day, especially aquamarine, pink and gray.

Snacking over and moving to the white kitchen sink to wash a glass, I realized it wasn’t as shiny as usual. Since I had nothing to do, I reached below for the Bab-O, then a popular cleanser containing bleach. It sure got everything clean, and its strong smell and reactive foaming action made you think you were restoring whatever to factory new.

For 20 minutes, I used probably one-quarter of the Bab-O to scour the sink and the faucets. About half-a roll of toweling later, it sparkled as well as it ever did. I knew my mother would be happy. I already was since the kitchen now had the same sense of order usually given it on “cleaning Saturday.” No compulsion here, but it set the day right for me, killed time and made me feel as if I was contributing the house I lived in.

All that, until the Bab-O Moment was obliterated in a second when my brother Craig, neat enough but no sink washer, tossed a bowl of orange peels into the jewel of a white basin just before my mother walked in the door with her tired dogs in her work shoes. She tackled the sink within minutes.

BAN SPECIAL-INTEREST MONEY

2011-03-27T06:21:00.000-07:00

(Alas, an early April Fool's Day piece; pity it isn't true.)

NYACK, N.Y. -- Andrew Cuomo, in his first visit to this riverfront village as New York governor, announced today two bills to end special-interest financing of political campaigns. Assembly A. 165 and Senate S. 276 will, if approved, ban all election spending not funded by taxpayers, especially that from lobbies.

“We must return government to the people,” said Cuomo from the bandstand in Memorial Park. “This beautiful Hudson River that we now look at was once polluted with industrial waste and sewage. It was the people’s outrage against that environmental poisoning which prompted river cleanup four decades ago. Now we must rid Albany, our towns and our villages of the pollution of elected officials chosen by the moneyed interests.”

In symbolic gesture, Cuomo walked to the river’s edge, scooped up a bucket of water and poured it on a pile of currency marked “Tainted”. “Tainted,” the governor said, “tainted profits obtained for big business and others by lobbies that vigorously push legislation feeding the voracious greed appetite and which give us a lightly regulated financial market, lax environmental law, overcharging for public works projects, favoritism for particular groups, tax inequality, goughing utilities, the blocking of health care reform and government change for all the people -- Democrats, Republicans, Tax Partiers, independents.”

Cuomo said special interests would no longer hide behind “freedom of speech” to justify paying for campaigns but instead would have their voice heard at public hearings. “If any lobby, if any special interest wants to tell the people why such and such should be done, why this or that law ought be passed, it can do so loud and clear in the public forum and not by throwing big bucks into campaigns and then end up owning the officials.”

The governor was asked by Richard Kavesh, Nyack mayor, how candidates would, without contributions, finance ever more expensive campaigns. Cuomo replied that each candidate would receive a set amount based on the type of office and the number of voters to be reached. The fund would be underwritten by taxpayers, and each candidate could choose how to spend the allotted amount. Government-sponsored forums in counties, towns and villages would also provide a message platform, and Twitter and Facebook accounts would be established.

“Despite the seemingly large expense for taxpayers,” Cuomo said, “the people will actually save billions when true-cost contracts are let, when we seek real health care and other reform, when we protect the environment, when we watch investment and other financial dealings. And you know what? Big business will make billions, too, because New York will be a leader in doing what’s right for the citizenry, and it will be the place to live and work. We will add business.”

Bills A.165 and S.276 will hit the floor of the Legislature later today. Cuomo predicts overwhelming passage since opposing the legislation would have public officials admitting they trade favors for money.

OOPS! Sorry to say, good people, but this is an early April 1 piece. Perhaps some day, some leader, somewhere, will have the courage to ban special-interest money from ever lining a politician’s pocket. Gov. Cuomo has at least tried.

'LOST' IN ROCKLAND

2011-03-21T04:18:00.001-07:00

Here I reside, in Rockland County, N.Y., just 20 miles from New York, for many more city than country since, these days, decades after the beginning of the post-World War II suburban push, most of our residents hail from Gotham or are the offspring of urbanites. For these good people, the county is comfortably near New York, close enough to reach in commute and shopping and visiting. Yet for others like me, in a dwindling group, where we live is more country than city. And never a suburb.

That’s because our roots go back to when there was no big bridge called the Tappan Zee linking two shores of the Hudson and providing a puddle jump for a major U.S. interstate. No parkway from New York City either. No large mall. No highway shopping strips. Instead, walkable downtowns like Nyack, Spring Valley, Suffern, Pearl River and Haverstraw where hardware stores, dress shops, shoe stores, small family restaurants, taverns and all manner of mom and pop places could keep you busy on a Saturday ride in from rural places like Pomona, Congers, Airmont, Tomkins Cove.

When the world seems too busy, when the traffic gets heavy, when my suburban tax bill rises, when someone seems suspicious rather than friendly, I get lost in the old Rockland. Sometimes I have tangible help for that.

Last week, on that wonderful 70-ish Friday, with a sun so warm but not so hot that it felt as if you were young and holding a girl’s hand, when there was a slight breeze that brought the promise of spring budding, I took off layered sweaters down to my winter cotton work shirt and sat on a rock.

When I was a young fellow looking for something to do in early spring, after school or on the weekend, I’d head for nearby woods, which were always nearby, and find a rock, catch the sun, feel the breeze and think I was the richest fellow on earth. That touch of nature was repeated, as the gift it always is, at the rock where I rested Friday after working in the Historical Society of Rockland barn at New City.

This ancient structure on the old Jacob Blauvelt place is filled with donated family furniture dating back centuries, well-used farm implements, blacksmith tools, etc., all representative of the farm/industrial/country life in Rockland up until a mere 60 or so years ago. It has the smell of old wood, seasoned by years of heavy sweat, worker and animal. It has an honesty to it, integrity even, sitting proudly on the few hundreds of feet left from hundreds of acres. You can get lost there, lost in the past, especially if your roots sense the nourishment.

Of course, roots are relative to the individual, and later arrivals to Rockland have their own foundation in various urban neighborhoods, with wonderful memories recalled in street games, knowing your neighbors, stores on the block, etc. They are blessed to have them.

And so am I, so are we of an earlier Rockland persuasion where emerging spring, the warming sun, an old rock, a barn setting, recollection and a breeze make you feel as rich as ever.

ALMOST ST. PATRICK'S DAY

2011-03-13T15:33:00.000-07:00

It is the nearness of things -- emotions, events, people, history -- that steer existence for most of us. Few, thank God, but far too many, suffer earthquakes as are the Japanese today, but the nearness of the tragedy brings empathy, and we, safe or nearly so, signal that humanity is healthy because of that. Our prayers, our help will walk the talk.

Some in their lives find the nearness of success, and that is perhaps enough. Or the nearness of help, which can be reasonable. Or the nearness of love, which offers no complications in its investment yet fuses memory with dream. OPr, this week, the nearness of being Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, when so many of us wear a bit o’ the green.

I am blessedly Irish because of my mother’s side, nearly 100 percent. I grew up with the nearness of Irish ancestry since my mother, whose birthday was March 17, had the native wit, a bit of a temper, loved tea and always had a few stories to tell, including the one about “chasing the growler,” or as a young girl fetching a pail of beer from the tavern’s back door for her aunt, on occasion. It was the nearness of Irish ancestry since my mother did not talk at length about her heritage, mostly for reasons of sadness in a difficult childhood that saw her lose her mother at 7, awakening next to her to find her gone at age 32.

As a child, she encouraged my brother and me to wear green on the day, to watch the New York City parade and to tell us proudly of her relative Hugh Bonner, once Gotham’s fire commissioner. Yet we kids were no different from our friends -- all those of no Irish ancestry -- on St. Patrick’s Day. Our elementary schools made it a gay time, and in college there were serious discussions of the English occupation. So, for many, there was a “nearness” of the day to honor the Irish.

In my geography, 20 miles north of New York City, there is another “county” of both the Irish Republic and the North of Ireland in a hamlet called Pearl River, once of mostly German heritage and now heavily infused with the accent of the Emerald Isle.

It. too, had a large parade, the marchers of which include the same New York firefighters and police who step out on Fifth Avenue. Indeed, many live in Pearl River.

It is almost St. Patrick’s Day, when this writer wears green and feels more acutely the nearness of an Irish heritage. With a bit of color also left for my late mother at her grave atop Mt. Nebo, the day won’t be the other emotion that is near.

NOT THE COOKIE MONSTER

2011-03-06T14:21:00.000-08:00

Retirement can seem like things are crumbling a bit -- too much time, lack of reinforcing work structure, advancing life, etc. -- but then I think of one of my many “jobs” in the so-called “golden years.” I am a “cookie” in sometimes crumbling times.

Like some other retirees. I am a volunteer. I do electrical, plumbing and carpentry work for historical societies, churches and museums, and give of my time in art-related endeavor. This is all a gift, a blessing to me, for it offers a post-career career. I am grateful, for goodness results, and that’s what it’s all about.

One of the volunteer jobs is as a cook, or “cookie” in Navy terms, for the Rockland Interfaith Breakfast Program out of United Church, Spring Valley, N.Y. I have been with them since before I retired as a newspaperman, as part of the Tuesday crew. Into my 10th year, I am now the only cook on Tuesdays, after the passing of George Chalsen and the “retirement” of Al Witt, two colleagues at the old Journal-News in nearby Nyack.

I try not to poison the 120 or so people we get for breakfast, offering French toast, pancakes, sausage, soup and grits. The recipes are not basic -- we try to present unexpected cuisine, with the French toast, for example, made from many real eggs, honey, cinnamon, milk and a bit of coffee.

It is an odd turn of events being cookie since I open the church at 3 a.m. (there are numerous tasks to take care of before the cooking begins). For me it is deja vu all over again. United Church used to be called the Dutch Reformed Church of Spring Valley, and I attended Boy Scout meetings there from 1954 to 1961, also opening the church, then at 7 p.m., for the sessions. (I like to get to places early, and that’s why I am often the opener.)

So, here I am 58 years after first entering the church where I am now cookie, and despite many major changes and challenges to the village where I, my father and my grandfather lived, 3 a.m. Tuesdays in 2011 and 7 p.m. Fridays in 1954 are the same. I still hear the Pascack Valley Line train (the old Erie). I look at the storefronts and recall Brown’s, Arvanite’s, the Valley Theatre, Ro-Field Appliances, Perunna’s, Slavin’s, K&A, Tancos, Kulle’s and many more. I remember elementary school, high school, think about my father’s days there, my grandfather’s. As I cook, I look out the window and see Memorial Park, which I watched being constructed in 1948. I hear the voices of so many gone and see the faces of my teachers, my friends. I recall the cops on the beat, chasing us home at curfew, checking the store locks.

The rhythm of a time past reassuringly reverberates in my post-retirement job as cookie, and it links me to the present. I am thankful I am able to serve, that so many of us at the program are able to do so. I am especially grateful that I am cookie in my old hometown. It kind of ensures that my time-on-my-hands won’t crumble.

A ROYAL TREATMENT

2011-02-28T05:54:00.000-08:00

Long after the fall of the great Hollywood movie factories, those wonderful studios like the original MGM and Paramount that gave us “Gone With the Wind,” “It’s A Wonderful Life,” “Best Years of Our Lives,” “42nd Street,” “Greed” (a 1924 film which could have been made today, with the same title), “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Quiet Man,” tremendous silent films and all our favorite titles, today’s cobbled-together studio conglomerates offer some remarkable work despite, as always, being driven by profit. Witness “The King’s Speech,” winner now of Academy Awards.

The old studios were guaranteed to produce winning movies, since they were long-running and huge, with an uncanny eye for budding and developing talent, training actors, directors, choreographers, camera operators, lighting and sound people and everyone else in what truly became a craft. With so much constant expertise and the insatiable appetite of the pre-TV movie-going public for new films, there were bound to be many winners. And so there were.

One of the staples of old Hollywood was the “historical” movie, not always accurate as the films took dramatic license, but usually close enough to give many of us lessons in history. Some, including myself, may have day-dreamed through social studies, but we did learn about the French and Indian War via Spencer Tracey’s “Northwest Passage.”

With the withering of the big studios, beginning with 1950s TV and federal anti-trust suits, and because moviemakers were then going for psychological dramas like “On the Waterfront,” historically set films became a disappearing treatment.

Many fine movies have been made since the passing of the old structured studios, especially through the creativity of independent, ground-breaking directors and gifted actors, but for so long, the flicks have been set on personal relationships that seems to depend on what is good for one person or two rather than for the people affected by those one or two.That reflects the me-centered society, of course. And such films are of interest to many.

So, it might surprise that “The King’s Speech” has become a winner. At first glance, this movie about soon-to-be King George VI’s speech difficulty and his wife’s remarkable, matter-of-fact search for an unorthodox teacher to help him, set in the mid-1930 against the backdrop of the coming war with Germany, and, first, the abdication of King Edward VIII, attracted an audience of 95 percent senior citizens when I saw it some time back. But then the buzz began about Colin Firth’s stunning performance as the Duke of York, of the film’s other great acting, of the precise British touch of it all, that what might have been seen initially as a “boring,” old-style history movie suddenly became a deeply moving study of human difficulty, struggle, stumble and success.

A metaphor for our times. A script and performances that we can all relate to in a difficult economic, changing age. And don’t we all learn a bit of history in watching such a film as “The King’s Speech”? Not a boring moment. Not a second to be wasted in day-dreaming. Not a movie about something or someone dysfunctional. Not a film about personal feelings alone, but those set in relationship with the greater nation and its people. A story that old Hollywood would have done no better. And a “welcome home” of sorts for the historical film genre.

Bravo.

TEMPORARY RESPITE

2011-02-21T05:16:00.000-08:00

Snowy winters seem easily predictable after the fact. “Yeah, I seen them squirrels collecting acorns, so I knew it was gonna snow big,” says neighbor Ben in July, safely away from the previous heavy snowfall and still far enough from next season to make him sound authoritative. He didn’t tell me about squirrels and nuts in November.

Or, Sally tells you in spring that “I was just sitting on my deck overlooking the river, and the chill that hit my bones that August night told me we would have five storms.” She never mentioned the chill in winter.

Where I live, in a sometimes-memorable part of the Northeast, 25 miles from New York City, we don’t get the relatively heavy winters of Albany or Buffalo, but we can be hit hard every so many years. The current season is one example, with a gently falling but heavy snowfall as I write this. It is beautiful, covering the very dirty ground left by ice, once-white snow and tons of road salt, sand and other debris. Leftover leaves and litter are there, too, the product of the untidiness that comes with suburbs around here, though Fred’s house, a small, even modest, one-level abode always kept neat as a pin, was shining like a jewel in the recent but short-lived thaw.

Fred’s fourth generation, having lived through the Depression when so little was to be had and what you did have you kept clean and working so you could reuse. He also recalls non-suburbia in Rockland County and a less consumer-oriented time, when the roadside had no litter. There were no fast-food places, so no wrappers tossed from car windows. And how many had cars anyway? And did people toss things into the street save in city gutters, where they were supposed to do so and which were cleaned by manual street-sweepers?

Leaves were raked and burned in the country before suburbia, and that method added to pollution, yes, but the fact is the lawns were raked in the first place.

Snow in suburbia is a sometimes welcome sight since it covers faults, fooling you for a short while that all is hunky-dory under the great cover. But like Henry, who quietly says in November that December, January and February will see many storms and is simply right, nature has its smarts, too. It will tell you the truth, eventually.

For those of us who see “progress” as inevitable but who reluctantly but actually welcome gradual and planned change as opportunity for others, the misuse of land through overgrowth, through insensitivity, through greed and selfishness, is a collective eyesore that literally can be next door. Many in suburbia keep their places neat, a fair number do not.

Old Fred’s place is a model of care. The McMansion nearby is not, three abandoned cars left on a deteriorated driveway. Ironically, an army of landscapers descend weekly in season, keeping the green grass trimmed. They mow around the cars protruding off the broken drive. Up a bit, there is the 1977 home not painted since, cars parked on the lawn but at least registered, a broken washing machine under a huge deck just completed for many thousands of dollars. This is the second owner, the first having left the building in long disrepair after telling us he was going south because suburbia was too built-up and the taxes too high. He was welcomed from Gotham in the “progress” of 1978 but for 25 years abused the invitation through property neglect. Taxes rose to provide him services. Then he left us holding the bag.

Now it is snowing, and the unsightliness look at his old home and the McMansion are covered by the same white blanket that graces Fred’s small spot. But spring is coming, in suburbia, too. The truth awaits.

WARMING MORE THAN HEART

2011-02-14T05:00:00.001-08:00

Today is the one set aside for valentines, and I hope you all get them in one form or another, but my love affair for this moment is more about another sort of heat -- steam heating, actually.

It has been a long, cold, old-fashioned winter this season in my part of the Northeast, and the forced-air and water-filled baseboard heating systems that are either in my house or my sons’ or in other places have proven inadequate. Once, there was steam heating, used way back in the later 1800s, and some of those installations are still operating beautifully. The setup, with his occasionally hissing valves, puffs of humidity shot into the air and some pipe-banging, has done the best job of keeping me warm whenever I have found it.

It was “progress” that took us to forced air, in which a coal, then oil or gas or even electric furnace heats air and then forces it out registers by a fan. It was “progress” that put hot water rather than steam into cast-iron radiators, which at least retained heat after the furnace had stopped running, and then into thin sheet-metal baseboard units, which go to cold almost instantly. These systems generally get you warm but then quickly have you chilly as they cycle on and off.

Steam heat, on the other hand, not only warms cast-iron radiators but fills the room with humidified air, which makes you feel warmer at lower temperatures. It has a psychological component, too, since the gentle sound of steam rising out of a radiator valve makes you feel cozy. It also has you nostalgically recalling old school classrooms with steam heat, wet mittens and hats drying atop. I add the memory of leaning my derriere and the back of my legs against steam radiators in various Rockland County, N.Y,. town halls when I was a newspaper photographer some decades ago. Running from assignment to assignment in a small Volkswagen Beetle, which had a poor heating system, left me chilly, and I was thankful for the radiator stops.

Radiators of any sort are difficult to locate anywhere these days, though I have hit upon a few in nearby South Nyack and Orangeburg.

I suppose that heating engineers can give you reasons why forced air, hot water and other systems are used today instead of steam. Perhaps there is greater efficiency. Maybe radiators take up too much room. Perhaps it is really the bottom line: the more profit you seek, the more “progress” has to be shaped away from product improvement to compromise on quality.

If I could, I would retrofit my own abode to steam heat, tossing the baseboard units into recycling. But that is not affordable. Instead, come winter, I will just have to visit friends who have steam heat.

COME TO THE SHOW

2011-02-06T11:40:00.001-08:00

NYACK, N.Y. -- Pardon the marketing, but there will be a free photographic exhibition in this village of artist Edward Hopper’s birth Saturday, Feb. 12, 5-7 p.m., when “Hopperesque: Realism and Light in Photography” is presented in the famed American realist’s family home at 82 North Broadway.

Hopper caught his first glimpse of Hudson riverfront light at his Nyack birth in 1882 and never drew the curtain on it, imbuing his copper-plate etchings, watercolors and, most of all, his haunting horizontal oils with interpretive illumination. His portfolio is a spotlight on the American experience of the 20^th century.

This was the man, tall and lean, quiet and introspective, whose symbiosis with film noir was so interwoven that it is difficult to say who or which came first. Until he passed in 1967, Hopper captured urban solitude and country landscape, his reduced painting symbolic of the independence, the moods of America, its very idiosyncrasy.

Today Edward Hopper is iconic, his “Nighthawks” and other works recognizable worldwide. Recent museum shows in Boston, Washington, New York City and Europe have drawn thousands in reverent communication with an artist who said so little by speech but who in his paintings expressed deeply and extensively facets native to the American being. Hopper offered as much in this quote: “If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint. The whole answer is there on the canvas.”

The artist’s boyhood home is part of that “canvas,” a source of the light, real and figurative, that was Hopper’s painting harmony. After the deaths of Edward and his wife, the painter Josephine Nivison, the house was rescued by local residents who organized a committee to obtain incorporation in 1971 as the Edward Hopper Landmark Preservation Foundation. For 40 years, this non-profit organization, its trustees and members have contributed time, expertise, labor and donations to maintain 82 North Broadway as an multi-arts center; to keep an archive of Hopper documents and memorabilia; to serve as a resource for scholars, art historians and art lovers worldwide; and to encourage and nurture community engagement with the arts.

The Edward Hopper House is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2011, presenting "The Year of Edward Hopper," a series of special events and exhibits honoring the painter and his legacy. Highlight of the year will be a major exhibition of his early work, entitled "Edward Hopper, Prelude: The Nyack Years," scheduled from May 21 to July 17.

Before Prelude unfolds, Hopper House will mount a photographic show, “Hopperesque: Realism and Light,” from February 12 through March 27. To launch the exhibition, Co-Curators Art Gunther and Ken Karlewicz began an international search for photographs inspired by Hopper’s use of light, his color saturation, his take on realism and his view of American solitude. Thirty-three photographers from Rockland as well as Europe and Australia were selected to express photographically how Edward Hopper got into their artistic souls.

So, if you are anywhere near this New York part of the universe, come on by and see Hopperesque. If you can’t, go look at some Edward Hopper works and be inspired in your own way.

ONCE, THE QUIET MORNING

2011-01-31T04:54:00.001-08:00

We all have our time and mood anchors, those moments of memory that moor us in ordinariness as well as the storms which hit our lives. Stress of any sort -- financial, emotional, health -- drive us to port, and we are grateful for the safe harbor.

When I was a youngster, one of my safer slips was early morning in winter, about 6:30, when the house heat had started to come up and I was rousing to get ready for elementary school. My working mother was already off to work, and my father, on the night shift, would be getting breakfast for my brother and me, a simple affair of Rice Krispies, as well as making our lunches.

In those years, when there might be a new school to attend (we moved around a bit), friends to make, classes to get used to, different woods to explore in the semi-rural areas in which we lived, having the routine of a small breakfast prepared by a busy dad, in a house just getting nice and warm, with the dark of winter yet to raise its nightshade on dawn, with the wonderful smell of my father’s fresh-brewed coffee and the sound of radio’s Martin Block on 1130 AM, there was reassurance that the day would proceed in good-enough fashion.

The scene was the same, you see, no matter where we lived, so it was one of those safe harbors. The available anchorage continued through high school, and the memory of it still comforts today.

When I was older but not far beyond my teen years, yet some seasons removed from my father’s breakfast morning routine, another early-day moment came my way and also reassured.

In that time, I drove a friend daily to a New York City college, and since one of my many faults happily did not include honking the horn for someone to come out, I was invited in to wait a short while. In the winter, the same sort as my youth, in the dark, I again felt the rising heat of a household and the strong whiff of coffee brewing as my friend’s mother prepared breakfast for her daughter.

Not much conversation passed between me, shy enough, and the mother, though it was more than what was said between father and son just 10 years or so before. Yet nothing had to be spoken. It was the reassurance of the moment, and even if we were all deaf and mute, we could feel that, appreciate it. The memory of this woman’s welcome, as with my dad’s morning routine, was one of those small treasures available in the box that you open to begin your day today.

A polished jewel, really.

'I'M MY OWN GRANDPA'

2011-01-23T15:18:00.001-08:00

An old song, “I’m My Own Grandpa,” made youngsters like me laugh back in the early 1950s when grandpa seemed ancient though mine was just about 52, 16 years younger than I am now. Listening to that ditty, I never thought about getting older. Or, for that matter, talking and acting like my grandfather.

Or grandmother. Or teachers. Or early bosses who seemed long on the horse. Being young means that you never get old, or at least it’s not what you think about, thank goodness. Youth may indeed be wasted on the young since when we are older, we wish we could go back and better live that time, make wiser choices, tell our family, friends and other loved ones how we really felt about them. Regret is a heavy blanket to carry.

In the metamorphosis that generations make as time passes, grandpa and the other oldies come with you. For example, I have long found myself saying things my gramps uttered, or thinking like a long-gone teacher who I might have characterized as an old fogey back in the day. If there is a heaven, these folks surely must have smiles on their faces, shaking their heads as they utter, “We told you so.” Of course, standing right behind them are their own elders, adding “What goes around comes around.”

I guess this natural progression of thought explains why once-liberal youth, so rebellious, become a tad conservative, or at least less laid-back. The responsibilities of life surely weigh more as you age, and the looking back that you do can sober your views.

It’s a good and fine thing, though, that other youth, liberal and rebellious, take your place, because it is a certainty that we adults don’t have all the answers, and, in fact, what we offer is sometimes dead wrong. Wars, greed, inequality, pestilence are not caused by the young.

If the human race is said to mature, if we are on the whole less barbarian, if material goods mean less drudgery, if humanity has become more humane in 2011, then we are different versions, improved models, than some of our old grandpas.Yet, on balance, many things my grandfather said and did were of better example than I have offered, so there is learning in both directions as I become even more “my own grandpa.”

'SECRETARY OF THE PEOPLE'

2011-01-17T05:29:00.000-08:00

More than ever, special interests can buy an election, influence sitting officeholders and deeply direct U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

Investigative media that once would have looked at such a growing web of influence has shrunk in corporate downsizing. Attempts to bring light to deeply rooted, hydra-like interests, including the military/industrial complex, Wall Street-managed health care and lobbies of varied sorts, are met with planted news pieces, talking heads and blitzkrieg – misleading advertising and loud din that seeks to give lie to truth. Mr./Mrs. Smith are simply shouted down.

Yet this nation has not arrived in the 21st century – after war, division and economic and social calamity – without a moderating factor, an accurate description since it has been the moderates in both major parties who have always represented basic common sense in America, the dream that is this nation, the ordinary person. They have kept the extremes, and they are more so today, from getting us into too much trouble, and they have provided much-needed course correction in various elections. They have done this, this middle-way steering of the American experience, by being so vast in number.

But in 2011 moderates are in danger of extinction. The power of special interests to wither away moderation is frightening as they seek high, sustaining corporate profit that offers downsizing, not new jobs; lobby for a banking and financial industry which grows profit but not re-investment in Main Street; boosts a health care industry in which Hippocrates’ model of serving the ill is shamelessly missing; and supports a military/industrial complex where expensive, long-term wars are the only way to maintain its profits.

The complexity is so great that the simple voice of Mr./Mrs. Smith, or a clergyman’s call to help your neighbor or a fledgling candidate’s eloquence in defining how civility and the other tenets of humanity require a boost in our nation are all increasingly drowned out by the orchestration of power and money.

It is time, then, for the country to have a spokesperson for the populace, a “Secretary of the People,” a Cabinet-level post as powerful as the Secretary of State. It would be filled by someone who advises the president, who can bring to that person’s ears the drowned-out voice of all the citizenry, surely, but especially those from the moderates, who speak the words of common sense, of everyday concerns.

If there were such a secretary sitting with other counselors of government, perhaps the White House cocoon that is inaccessible these days to ordinary people would at long last have an inside man to get to the man.

To prevent special-interest wooing of the Secretary of the People, the post would be held for just one year at a time, with the president choosing each successor from somewhere in ordinary America. The chief executive would not select the individual himself, but rather an independent, volunteer group would search the nation far and wide and make a recommendation. Senate ratification would be almost a given, in the spirit of cooperation and to avoid lobbying by groups sure to be hurt by “common sense.”

Special interests already have their counselors, appointed and otherwise. Why not the people?

90 MILES TO GO

2011-01-02T14:42:00.001-08:00

It seems impossible that one decade has already passed in the 21^st century. Though it was marked with the horror of Sept. 11 and awful war and terrible economics, these past 10 years ran faster than a super track star in the 100-meter dash. Perhaps our ever-more technological times, with rapid communication and the concentration of anything held to a few seconds make the clock spin so rapidly. Sitting by candle and anticipating the early milking of the cow gave more time to reflect.

But progress is supposed to be good for us – it is light against the darkness, a chance to better lives, to bring ease. Progress has accomplished all that, our history shows, but in its name some have profited more than others. In this new century, special interests that seek money without giveback responsibility and political influence without an adjustment for all the people's needs largely steer growth. While most of us take the train ride – for it is the history of our nation that we chase a new frontier – we’re seated more toward the caboose than the locomotive. We can’t see the tracks ahead.

There are more people – rich ones – in first class these days, and they can see just fine. There are more of the good folk back at the end of the train, too, grateful for a ride though the engine’s cinders may fly through their windows. There is the hope, still, that on the next run, they may move closer to the locomotive. The passengers in the middle, those in second class, are no longer numerous, and it’s more than a pity, for it was their ever-growing ranks and the appetite for middle-class living which built the railroads. And the output of the factories. And the need for housing, the roads, etc. - all progress, surely.

The speed of the 21^st century is so rapid that we can’t see who is on the train, nor have we bothered to care. Americans have taken progress for granted for decades now, in a steady drive since 1945. If we can obtain cell phones and flat-screen TVs and an equity loan or a tax rebate or two to buy them, and if our days pass comfortably enough, we won’t look at the clock and notice it is close to midnight. That’s for another day, yet that dawn may not come. We don’t see horrible war, for it is not in our yards. We don’t hear the gold leaving Fort Knox to pay for a bigger and bigger national debt. We don’t fathom that more and more of us are not on the train to progress any more.

What was the wind that just passed through the station? Was it just a decade in modern speed?

Maybe we’ll get to reflect on it all, even by candle.

RESPITE

2010-12-27T06:03:00.000-08:00

If life were just about cozy socks, maybe adding hot chocolate, reading material and a log on the fire would give most of us enough peace for a long time. But the socks eventually need changing, the chocolate is enjoyed and the log burns down. The book is read. Yet the story is not over since the moment, if we are lucky to have it, is but a page in life.

It took a snowstorm to bring the metaphorical equivalent of that moment to me in my particular part of the Northeast where a relatively weak but genuine “blizzard” hit us for the first time in decades. We have had plenty of snowstorms and drifting over the years but not such fierce winds that even just a foot or so of snow was made into mountains here and there. Bitter cold, too.

Travelers returning to home and hearth after the Christmas holiday were caught in the storm, though most people were able to sit within and chill out, the Sunday after set to 33 1/3 rpm rather than 78, the stomach satiated enough that it could rest and sufficient presents to keep children occupied and out of the SUVs where all too many seem to spend all too much time going to their numerous appointments.

I did not cozy up to a book, though other family members, good readers all, were happy to do so. I did not change into cozy socks though I received a few pairs under the tree, and I am not a hot chocolate fan. But a good microbrew, a newspaper and three pairs of already washed socks brought the purring on in my quiet moment, stolen from the fast pace of life as if I were on a fast train that had pulled into a siding.

There I remained for a good part of the day, happy that the hands of the clock did not move so fast, happy that I barely looked at the time. I sought no complication, did not push my brain to rack over political mistakes in my beloved country. I just put my being on autopilot and perused – did not study – the paper. The beer was not swished but sipped, and my three pairs of socks, regulation uniform on a cold day, constantly telegraphed that they were keeping my feet warm. Reassurance of blessed simplicity

What more could I want in my quiet? Not a thing, except perhaps that it last a bit longer.

TRANSISTOR RADIO

2010-12-20T12:30:00.000-08:00

For some years, my son Arthur IV, a writer too, offered a holiday story published in place of my (former) newspaper column. That tradition now continues on the web. – Arthur H. Gunther III

By Arthur H. Gunther IV

The transistor radio was black. Long ago, the small plastic piece that held its battery in place had been lost. Black electrical tape had by now done the job of the forgotten plastic piece for so many years that the back of the radio was inevitably sticky near its bottom. Max remembered with clarity the eyes of the Eveready cat peeking out from in between the loops of tape. Nine volts was all the radio needed for months of listening. It seemed to Max that the metal antennae, necessary only for FM reception, had never been there, though it must have at one time. The radio’s listeners had never had much use for FM anyway.

The radio belonged to Max’s grandfather. He lived in a small house overlooking the Hudson River, bought long before there was any cache to being near the water that bore the Dutch explorer’s name. Max would ride his bicycle over the mountain from his house on school-year Saturdays and summer afternoons and sit outside with his grandfather while the radio hummed with the sound of that afternoon’s baseball game. The announcer’s voices were both familiar and friendly, their chatter the ideal accompaniment to whatever conversation Max and his grandfather were having. The easy rhythms of the game left plenty of space for old stories, memories, reading and commenting on the articles in any of the several newspapers that were always around Max’s grandfather’s house. The radio even had an ear piece, not head phones, attached to a long white wire which Max would sometimes find stuck in his grandfather’s left ear. He always unplugged it upon seeing Max.

Around the time of his ninth birthday, Max’s mother became sick and found herself in the hospital for several months. When December arrived and it was clear that she would not be home for Christmas, Max’s dad sent him over to his grandfather’s house for Christmas Eve. Max’s father knew the value of waking up to a warm, glowing, happy Christmas morning and doubted his ability to provide it for Max that year. Though Max welcomed every opportunity to see his grandfather, and grandmother too for that matter, he lay in bed that night unable to sleep, filled with thoughts of worry about his dad and mom. Max crept downstairs at midnight, looking for distraction. There on the table that stood by the old green sofa sat his grandfather’s transistor radio. Max picked it up and brought it back to his room. The December night was clear. Max could see the moon reflecting on the river from where he lie in bed. He turned on the radio and scanned the dial for something to take his mind off his worries. The weather, Max’s room on the water and the winter night combined for ideal AM reception, and it seemed that every fraction of an inch the dial turned revealed new sounds, many from places that Max had never come close to visiting in his short life. There were call-in shows from Washington and Baltimore, weather from Buffalo, news from Cleveland, Christmas songs from Hartford, Philadelphia and Princeton, New Jersey, even a hockey game from Toronto. Eventually, Max settled on the voice of Jackie Gleason. A station from Boston was playing audio of an episode of “The Honeymooners” that Max had never seen. It was a Christmas show that was essentially a retelling of the O. Henry story, “The Gift of the Magi.” Though Max was years from reading the actual text, the story was the perfect distraction, and he quickly became absorbed in the voices of the characters until he fell fast asleep as the show ended, barely able to turn off the radio.

Max’s mother recovered and that year ended up being the only Christmas Eve he ever spent at his grandfather’s, though his family continued to visit on Christmas Day for years to come. Years later, Max was at college, in the thick of the all-night studying that was the inevitable sacrifice for surviving the December final exams of the fall semester, when he wandered down to the TV lounge in his dorm for a midnight study break. He found a girl there, presumably with the same idea he had. Max sat down and noticed that on the TV was “The Honeymooners.” After watching for several minutes, he realized it was the same episode he had heard that Christmas Eve long ago at his grandfather’s house. Though Max had always meant to, he had never seen the actual episode. Max gasped out loud at the lucky coincidence of finally finding the show. The girl who sat there turned to Max, as if just realizing he was there.

“Sorry to startle you,” Max said, “but I’ve always wanted to see this episode.” “I think I know it by heart,” answered the girl. “When I was a kid in Boston, there was this one radio station that played it every Christmas Eve at midnight. It was some kind of tradition. I used to fall asleep every year listening to it in my room. It’ll always remind me of home.”

Max sat there tongue-tied, with a goofy smile curling across his face. Two weeks later, when he was home for the winter break, Max told his grandfather the story. And when Max married that same girl five years later, he opened the gift from his grandfather to find the transistor radio at the bottom of a small box. It is all so clear in my memory. Max is me.

Even now, on clear, cold winter nights, when my wife and children are fast asleep and I just can’t seem to settle my thoughts, I’ll find a quiet room in my house, take out my grandfather’s old transistor radio and scan the AM dial, wondering what will be out there for me to find.

Arthur can be reached at clausland@yahoo.com

A HOLIDAY TALE

2010-12-12T13:30:00.000-08:00

Growing up in little Spring Valley, N.Y., a country village near New York City, but oh so far from urbanity, holiday lighting was minimal. Ostentatious wasn’t yet in, very few of us had any extra money, and cheap, overseas-made decoration wouldn’t arrive until nations recovered from the Second World War. Indoor and limited outdoor lighting depended on strings and sets kept for years, with bulb replacement just about all that was necessary.

Most people in the Rockland County of the 1940s-50s would travel to one of the five and tens or hardware stores in the Valley, Suffern, Nyack, Haverstraw or Pearl River and get fresh tinsel for the Christmas tree, perhaps a new ornament and a few seven-watt bulbs. Many would wait until Christmas Eve to decorate. Few put up elaborate outdoor lighting. Our Jewish neighbors lit Menorahs for Hanukkah. Neighbors of any persuasion were invited on the eight nights to participate in the lighting.

Downtowns were lit with heavy strings of colored bulbs across main street from telephone pole to pole. In Spring Valley, Garry Onderdonk, whose electrician father installed the lights, would have to switch each string on nightly, using a long pole. Merchants would add color to their window displays for both Christmas and Hanukkah.

In all, there was enough bright and varied lighting to make the season warm and festive. Just right, most of us thought. In keeping with both reality and our expectations

So it is with prejudiced view, or at least non-approving thought, that I cannot accept the lavish displays I now see in the suburbs, including Rockland. Some homeowners are hiring outfits that bring 10 men and a bucket loader to trim large evergreens with string after string of lights. Giant air-blown figures sway with the wind and against other lighting on the lawn. At the street is a sign proclaiming that the Disneyland spectacular was “professionally” installed.

It makes you wonder how many holiday lights there are at the unemployment office or in homes where people go to sleep solid middle class and awake in lower economic ranks.

Now, I am not blaming folks well enough off to have a design team temporarily triple their electric bill. Yet, the contrast is still there for all to see in a nation that faces Christmas 2010 more worried about debt, jobs, government viability and the national mojo than it has since the Great Depression.

But, hey, it’s holiday time, and colored lights take our minds off reality. Enjoy, please. Come January, the lights again will be white and bright. Enough that we can see what’s what. If only we then take a look. …

'NIGHT CARPENTER' AT WORK

2010-12-06T05:16:00.001-08:00

I think doors have a way of fitting in, just like long-gone Uncle Jack in town for a comfy visit. He gets that way fast. Or people who initially stand out and are somehow morphed into the crowd, hopefully adding to the whole. It’s as if the universe has a carpenter on staff who, in the secrecy and dark of night, planes here and sands there, making adjustments to assure a fit, whether it's doors or people.

Several weeks ago, I replaced six interior doors in my 1973 home with more stylish, six-paneled molded ones. Now, this house, like me, has lost its plumb and level a bit in 37 years, so just one factory-produced door fit without having to trim an edge, more deeply mortise a hinge or move the height of a lock.

The refitting took time, and when the work was done, despite the usual mistakes and miscalculations by this practiced but non-pro carpenter, and with almost a full vocabulary exercised in the cursing language that is always in my tool kit, the doors looked just fine and worked fairly well. Not perfect, you see, since (1) they were not the original doors, which had been fitted to the jambs on an assembly line, but (2) replacements made by another manufacturer decades later. Sizes were off, as they often are. So was my work, a tad.

It has taken these weeks since installation to give a nudge here and there to a few doors, and it is nearing winter, too, when the house moves a bit. That has required further adjustment to the doors.

All is now fine, yet something else is happening. Last night, I went into my office area and flipped the door closed, as I did with the old one. It smoothly went into position, as easily as would a machinist’s pin in a milled location. This is not my “fine” carpentry at work, though. I really believe the doors feel at home, that they finally fit in.

They are now part of the house, as its predecessors were for so long. I miss the history of those doors, two of which were on my sons’ bedrooms, with their signs and posters affixed, different in each season of growth. But today is today, and the hope is the doors will also open to tomorrow.

I am grateful that they fit so well. It must be the finish work of the unseen night carpenter.

SAM'S HICCUPS

2010-11-29T05:40:00.000-08:00

Had a conversation with a young fellow at a train station in chilly, windy weather when the topic turned to hiccups since that was what the 3.5-year-old was using for punctuation in what otherwise was rapid-fire language. We were waiting for his mom and dad, my son and his wife, to return from an anniversary trip to New York City, and I figured he would like to see the Metro-North local arrive. It isn’t every day that a kid looks at a train these days – it’s still a thrilling sight, as it has been since the first Erie ran in my parts in the late 1840s.

But keeping a youngster occupied at a busy station, even for the 10 minutes I figured were left before the train pulled in, is challenging. I don’t know his world, and he doesn’t know mine. What are Sam’s day dreams? His fears? His concept of time, space? How does he look at people? What does he think of his old codger grandfather, an odd-enough fellow?

Discussing hiccups seemed an excellent way to keep him occupied. We had a conversation, parts of which, maybe even the whole, might seem silly, but then again, pondering the universe in any which way led us to the electric light and other good things, too. In the least, it can be entertaining.

I asked Sam where he got his hiccups. Did his mom put them in his breakfast cereal? Did his teacher give a Thanksgiving treat? Since, I, too, wanted hiccups so as to not be left out, I asked Sam where I could buy them.

He answered with a bunch of “no’s” and “I don’t know.” He did so quite seriously, as if we were professors pondering quantum physics. Sam thought it quite natural that his grandfather and he would be having such a conversation, and he pondered every answer. At no point did he think the questions silly. Perhaps in a few years he will see nonsense, but not now.

Now is still time for Sam to have an awfully broad imagination, an unlimited field of dreams where he can race this way and that, chasing this thought or another. Why not? He has not yet been told to limit his thinking, to set boundaries. Sam -- any youngster his age -- can be what Tom Edison always was, a thinker without qualification whose imagination is without limits.

Soon, thanks to a conversation about hiccups, including asking Sam what color his were, whether he saved a few in his pocket for an after-lunch treat, and whether he could see them on his computer, the train with mom and dad pulled in.

The very sight of his parents made Sam lose his hiccups and eagerly embrace his favorite people. Wonderful. Gramps moseyed on.

Hope Sam had some hiccups later, though.

WHEN THE OVAL OFFICE DOOR CLOSED

2010-11-22T05:21:00.000-08:00

Forty-seven years ago this was a Friday, and about 12:30 p.m. I was flipping TV channels when I paused at WCBS-TV, New York. A soap opera was in progress, of no interest to a young fellow age 21, but the long thread of its story line, including every emotion there is, caught my interest and I lingered. But not for long. Quickly, on the simple black and white set, with just seven channels available through a rooftop antenna, came a bold screen with large letters shouting “CBS-TV NEWS BULLETIN.” Then the signal switched to a live newsroom, Walter Cronkite at a small desk, professionally but with almost incredulous tones, reading wire service copy: “There has been an attempt on the life of President Kennedy . …” The venerable reporter and commentator did not leave his post for a day, and this America remained glued to the TV for even longer, over an increasingly somber weekend and through JFK’s burial.

So much changed on Nov. 22, 1963, when 90 minutes later, after numerous news flashes of increasingly negative tone, Cronkite read another bulletin: “From Dallas, Texas, the flash is apparently official: President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. today, Central Standard Time, 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.”

As a young man, idealistic as so many of us were in that folk-singing era when youth had infused government, when hope seemed a sure bet despite a recession, the Cuban missile crisis and still-distant war drums in Vietnam, the president’s death shortened our sunny days, coinciding with the coming winter solstice. In JFK’s place was an older man, the less articulate, old-style politician Lyndon Johnson. He reassured the country as an uncle might after you lose your cool dad, and perhaps that made you get into bed, feel a bit tucked in and have some sleep. But the next morning you knew things would never, ever be the same.

And they have not been the same. Presidencies since JFK have become increasingly isolated, surrounded by necessary security to protect our national leader from nuts but in the process putting the person into a cocoon apart from the people. Elect a president and you never see him (her?) again except through the filters his advisers employ. They have his ear, these special interests of whatever bent, not the citizens who cry when their presidents are taken from them.

Ever more complex is our government today, and the super economic power concentrated in the secretive military/industrial complex that Eisenhower the old warrior warned us about is much stronger and deeply entrenched.

Today no president has simple choices, for the world is so very complex. Idealism seems reserved for the political stump, not for the Oval Office.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, may he rest in peace, kept the stump with him for much of his short tenure, continuing his well-phrased speeches, strumming the rhythm of the song of hope. What success or failure or a mixture of both he might have brought to the nation – in the economy, in dealing with the Cold War, in Vietnam – can only be conjectured. Was his the last approachable presidency? That, too, is speculative.

NEVER FORGOTTEN

2010-11-15T05:44:00.000-08:00

SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. – It is another moment now for my classmates and me, Spring Valley High School 1961, a season so very far removed from senior year autumn 50 years ago when “fall madness” brought the football team to its new playing field and General Organization President Fred Yatto Jr. stood at half-time with Gerd Bitten Andersen, our Danish exchange student.

In a few weeks’ time, the rush of giddy feeling from knowing that in just months we would graduate and move to adulthood and its freedom would be tempered with loss and sadness, too.

On Nov. 19, 1960, Fred, 17, passed away after very difficult, even impossible, heart surgery. A routine school sports physical the previous spring had detected an unusual sound in his heart. Further investigation revealed a hole. This meant open-heart surgery, then in its infancy and far, far riskier than today.

Fred knew his operation was coming up in early November 1960, but he tried to make light of it, hoping not to worry his classmates. Most of us were too immature and inexperienced to know the very grave danger he faced. Fred understood that and continued to be everyone’s friend. His ability to get along with people proclaimed great promise.

On Nov. 12, he presided over a pre-game ceremony on the new field off Route 59 in which Bitten was officially recognized. And about two weeks before his surgery, he went to a party in nearby Pomona with some friends, this writer included. The small amount of alcohol he had there, in his condition, caused him to pass out. We carried him onto a bed in a spare room at Joan Prescott’s Pomona Road home so he could recover. It was a prescient moment.

Just a few weeks later, some of us would again carry Fred Yatto, this time to his final resting place on this Earth, the West New Hempstead Cemetery, only two miles from the Prescott house. Fred died Nov. 19, after the open-heart operation revealed a hole the size of a half-dollar, and in those days it could not be successfully repaired.

When our classmate passed away, so ended the innocence of school life for the Class of ’61. We have had other classmates leave us too soon in later years, 15 by my count from a class of 201, but Fred was the first, and the sobering it cast will never be forgotten.

Good times eventually returned to SVHS, but the black fact that death comes to us all, including the young, was forever imprinted on our psyche. It changed us, some for life. The journeys each of us have taken since Nov. 19, 1960, have been set by it.

While I know that, in an earthly view, Fred was denied the right, the joys, even the sorrows of life beyond high school, the journey into middle and old age, and into the season that is now, it must be said that the spirit of Fred Yatto Jr. has lived a life.

The spirit continues to live in Fred’s friends and former classmates, who, once in a while, reflect on the young man who was and the man who should have been.

I recall his eagerness, his humor, his sense of responsibility, his deep love for living. What were to be his hopes, his aspirations, his ups and downs, have been experienced in some way or another by the Class of ’61. Some of us have thought … what would Fred have said about this or that, or what would he have done in such and such a moment?

The realization that 50 years later, a 17-year-old fellow has not been forgotten is proof that a life did not finish on this earth on Nov. 19, 1960.

LOSS AT WOODSIDE

2010-11-08T09:16:00.000-08:00

NEW HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. – History isn’t always rescued. Sometimes it costs too much. Sometimes “progress” is a big bully and wins. Sometimes no one cares. Sometimes there are priorities. The given, though, is that all history lost is heritage gone, memories set to fade mode, to hazy recollection such as “Wasn’t there a barn over there?”

New Hempstead, in the Spring Valley Postal District, is a smallish village carved out of the Town of Ramapo several decades ago, in part to slow the development bulldozer, protect quality of life a bit and perhaps save this or that part of history. Yet now a big piece of the past is gone. It is a sad story, one that almost anyone, anywhere can relate to since change, while often beneficial, also is like a wake.

On a recent Sunday, the volunteers of the Moleston Fire District, Hillcrest Fire Company, held a training exercise at the long-standing Woodside Dairy barn off Brick Church Road. The barn, not used for many years, had become dilapidated, and it was determined it had to go. So it was put to the torch, doing one last bit of good for the community it long served, training hardworking volunteer firefighters.

Perhaps it was fitting, too, that Hillcrest would bring the barn down since the Moleston District’s first commissioner was Enoch Erickson, predecessor of those Ericksons who worked the dairy farm.

According to Marty Erickson, wife of Gene, daughter-in-law of Clarence (Pete), the Woodside Dairy Barn and Milk House began on purchased Smith farmland. Woodside was a working dairy farm until the 1960s. During World War II, says Marty, “The family made sure local children had dairy products, often at no cost. When the Rockland Leader (a Spring Valley weekly newspaper) burned in the 1960s, the barn stored rescued editions.”

As Rockland County moved from pre-war rural to post-war New York City suburb, local dairies and other farms were sold for housing developments and strip shopping centers, “progress” paving over a long-practiced way of life. Soon enough, people began buying milk from large companies in convenience stores and supermarkets, and home delivery died out.

Woodside was sold “for a token amount, in a spirit of patriotism, for a county veterans cemetery … In recent years, the buildings have been vandalized, the barn roof succumbed to the weather … and the silo was covered with vines,” writes Marty.

The Woodside barn has not been rescued. If it could have been restored, perhaps Rockland schoolchildren could see demonstrations of old-time milking, smell the hayloft straw and the old barn timbers, get away from the hustle and bustle and step back in time to a moment of American history when independence, hard work, self-sufficiency, community spirit and service and pure survival were parts of ingrained country character.

Saved from Woodside are a few milk bottles and fading memories. Yet there must be a repository for all the emotions this farm witnessed over so many years. Somewhere, somehow, some time, they may emerge in realization and enlightenment that progress doesn’t mean just building the new but securing the past as well.

ELECTION DAY 2010

2010-11-01T04:59:00.000-07:00

Election Day this year is more important than in many seasons. If this nation (1) does not show up at the polls and (2) does not elect those willing to forgo special interests and secret money, America will not progress. The economy will stagnate and taxes will rise. Major issues – true health care reform, job creation, fair trade, education reform, immigration, security and the rescue of the dwindling yet vital middle class – will not be addressed.

According to national newspaper reports, in the 2006 mid-term elections, outside groups not connected to political parties spent $51.6 million. So far in 2010, courtesy of a high court decision guaranteeing “free speech” to big-moneyed interests that can bully with unlimited cash, such groups have spent $280 million, 60 percent from undisclosed donors.

It is power and greed, hiding behind political philosophy and jingoistic, simplistic slogans that are behind large secret donations. Continual war makes money for all too many, as Ike warned us in far less involved times. Health care is not about human needs but about profit. Manufacturing, once and for a long time made successful for companies and the nation by hard-working blue collars, has left the USA for other countries, a slap in the face to those still owed for building these companies. But money rules, even if only for the short term since without income, Americans won’t buy products and so keep the economic stream replenished.

If God’s lighting could strike Tuesday, it might bring us a full turnout of thinking voters; it might cause the special interests to wither; it might see the election of thousands of “Mr. (Miss/Mrs.) Smiths, who go to Washington or to state capitols or to town and village halls as disconnects from the almighty dollar, who seek only to do right by their fellow man, woman and child.

Such equality of purpose has not been seen in the Founders’ Land for decades.

'PROGRESS' AND A PLAYWRIGHT

2010-10-25T06:12:00.000-07:00

There is in my county – Rockland – in what just a short 50 years ago was mostly rural land, a slice of leftover heaven. Though within 25 miles of New York City, the absence of interstates and direct rail had until the 1950s kept growth on the other side of the Hudson River. To this place, this country of apple farming since the 1700s, came many artists and writers, who could keep in touch with business/career matters in Gotham and then escape to create in soulful respite. One of these gifted people was John Patrick (Goggan), playwright of “Teahouse of the August Moon,” screenwriter of “Love is a Many Splendored Thing” and other notable properties.

The author guarded his privacy, and he could do that well, living on more than 200 acres of God’s land in the woods, hills and marsh of the Town of Ramapo, off old State Highways 202 and 306. For a very long time, even as “progress” filled in surrounding acreage, Patrick was able to keep his retreat, and, presumably, his quiet so that “Some Came Running,” “High Society” and “Three Coins n a Fountain” could be written. His lavish parties at the estate, which included stables and farm animals, attracted well-known neighbors like the actor Burgess Meredith.

In time, Patrick would leave, as would Meredith, playwright Maxwell Anderson of South Mountain Road, New City, and so many others. The assumption is Rockland’s loss of innocence had something to do with the exodus.

What seemed heaven-sent, so much open and wooded land, in a place where seasons changed, where long country walks in great quiet could be had for free, was replaced with too-many-to-count housing developments, strip shopping centers, then low-rise and high-rise apartment houses, indoor shopping malls, traffic, congestion, noise and high taxes, all made possible by two interstates and a bridge called the Tappan Zee.

This “progress” surely was that for many, just as 1800s growth on the island of Manhattan gave us part of New York City, enormously influential, enjoyable yet teeming in great emotion with all the elements of human living. Paved over was simplicity, nature’s sounds and the awe of masterful creation, there for the taking by eye, ear and heart.

Now, the same “forward” movement of growth is set to gobble away John Patrick’s farm, which, amazingly, has not yet been developed. And it would not be today, in the stress of the challenged and changing economy. There is little money for more housing, even in such a bucolic setting as Patrick’s retreat. Too many homes are already for sale, too many through foreclosure alone.

The equation here for “progress” is a different formula. Ramapo government is trying to accommodate a religious group that contends it needs God’s bucolic acres for its interpretation of God’s work. So, the acreage, once zoned for homes on two acres, with much of the land held back as flood plain, has been rezoned, and the town Planning Board is probably going to approve 87 single-family homes and 410 multi-family units. Guarding the marsh areas in the aquifer will mean heavy, urban-like density, quite unsuitable for this relatively country-like section of Rockland.

Government is failing to balance the quality for life for all in this rezoning, and the religious group is not seeing the wisdom of building a smaller complex so as to be a better neighbor.

Such a script is part of the “progress” play, for old-time Rocklanders could argue that too many developments replaced the apple farms, or early Manhattanites could contend that their neighborhoods were blitzed for growth. Or our Native Americans could justifiably claim that sacred land was taken from then for the white man’s “progress.”

An old story. One even worthy of a John Patrick theme. Certainly fodder for Maxwell Anderson, whose play “High Tor” detailed growth and consequences, too.

Ironically, it is for the sake of God, or, more exactly, for one people’s view of His call to life on this earth, that “heaven” will transform into what would others would term its opposite.

WE MUST DECLARE WAR

2010-10-18T04:45:00.001-07:00

It is time to declare war, America. We are at our united best in such action, one that begins after an attack on our people, noted by the president in a stirring speech and legalized by the Congress. We’re talking World War II-like declaration and subsequent adrenalin load, mobilized defense and full use of our can-do brains and muscle.

Our nation has been attacked, not by terrorists but by special interests who buy our officials and who cunningly direct growing populist rage against government and policy, playing on the fear foaming out of the stirred pot of a prolonged and most severe economic crisis. Feeding the fire are rumor-mongers, nonsensical beings who reason not, who, for example, blame minorities for anything and everything, as if no minority ever helped build this country.

The American middle class, created by the Industrial Age, Progressivism, two world wars and manifest destiny, is disappearing. Corporate greed has outsourced jobs overseas. Focusing on the immediate bottom line instead of the future of the American economy/social structure is creating a third world-like underclass that will be out of work permanently.

At stake is much more than loss of buying power, a stalled economy and the threat of renewed recession, even deflation. No democracy long sustains itself without a healthy middle class and the hopes therein. Cities and suburbs will decay, and crime and social problems will increase. Children will be lost as progress regresses for the short-term almighty dollar.

Aspiring to be in the middle class, with its great comforts, its sense of arrival, has been the carrot that so many Americans have chased, even while under the stick of poor job conditions, long hours and sacrifice. It has always been worth it – the carrot usually has been eaten. Until now.

Now, the rules are different. Greed is the only rule, with profits ever higher for the very rich, for corporations built by the middle class that now outsource work overseas. Greed that is aided and abetted by ever-more powerful special-interest groups, through 501C (4) political action committees and a Supreme Court decision that essentially allows big money to drown opponents and their contributors in a sea of cash. In 2010, big money rules elections, rules Congress. That is an attack on America.

So, let there be war, never desirable but once again necessary since the conflict has not been avoided by true campaign finance reform. Call it “The Greed War,” one that awaits national address by an articulate president who nearly has been done in by special interests and their manipulation of national rage into awful moments of untruths, extremism and even violence, and by himself, since his leadership has been most lacking on what he promised to do. But he is still the national leader, and he can still help save the nation.

Once his words are given in an address to a joint session of Congress, that body will then, as agent for the people, declare that this nation is now at full war with those who thwart our national aims of equality and social and economic advancement through their push for the big dollar and for the special powers – military/industrial/political – the investment dollar might bring.

Once war is declared and the enemy is identified as special interest, it must be eliminated. No more fat wallets for any candidate or office holder, with each and every campaign instead fully funded by the people. Lobbyists would still have their voices, but through public hearings on any cause or government question and not through questionable “donations.”

Then, the war won, a new “Marshall Plan” of recovery, not for Europe but for America this time. Funded will be a new industrial/scientific age that creates innovative work (jobs), the seeking of a new frontier that can guarantee a vibrant middle class, and with it, the wealth of the upper and the sustenance and dreams of the lower. And the hopes of the future for all in this nation.

FREE SPEECH TAKES COURAGE

2010-10-10T14:34:00.000-07:00

Most postings to online news stories are an embarrassment to free speech. The same people seem to post over and over, often answering one another back and forth, in diatribe reminiscent of the old radio call-in shows, also dominated by “regulars.” What is written is usually not thought out, poorly phrased, full of spelling and grammatical errors and not edited by anyone. Worst of all, they are unsigned, which makes their frequent fear- and prejudice-based “reasoning” all the more troubling since their authors strike in anonymity. Rumor-mongers, these posters play on “e-bites,” the Internet equivalent of sound bites. But the full meal, the thoughtful argument, is rarely there.

Is this how we are to “inform” in the new age of declining print and quick electronic comment? If so, the nation, the world, the neighborhood is in trouble. It’s like uttering a joke in one language, translating through the idioms of 10 other tongues and then back into English. The intended meaning is lost, even skewed toward idiocy.

How did we get here? As revenue has declined in dwindling print journalism, newspapers and other media have encouraged online viewpoints, thus giving almost anyone a shot at speaking in the public square. In doing so, there has been editorial ballyhoo about protecting democracy through added, unrestricted comment, but that's a convenient argument used to rationalize marketing for website hits. The more people who visit the sites, the more advertisers you get.

How is public discourse encouraged when too few posters think through what they want to say, often getting off the subject completely and instead pushing whatever agenda they may have? Some examples: A recent Associated Press story about Kim Jong Un, the new North Korean leader, contained many postings, including one that suggested America send “that fat little pork chop” to South Africa where sharks could eat him alive. Attached to a suburban newspaper piece about a highly paid police chief who may retire was the comment that many houses “where lost do to forecloser.” No, many homes WERE (perhaps) lost DUE to FORECLOSURE. In a Louisiana story about that state’s review of the Gulf oil spill, there was this: we should “believe the findings of this committe? yeah tell it to the friggin pope!” (Spelling, grammar, vulgarity not changed “to protect free speech.”) How do these postings add anything coherent to debate?

As a retired 42-year newspaperman who fought for the right to access facts and print them and for the right to express both the newspaper’s views and the people’s, I cannot call for a narrowing of the online response pipeline. Instead, since I am still free in this nation, I will continue to ignore most of this comment, just as I switched off many of the old “hotline” radio callers. But as a former editorial page editor who, together with my newspaper, insisted that letter writers identify themselves, I urge all media companies to require the same for online posters. And any poster immediately should show courage of conviction and stand up using his/her real name. This should make people think first, and think deeply, before posting. It would weed out the ridiculous.

In the letter-writing days, some of the correspondents would ask me to use a pseudonym, for fear that “some nut will call me” or “I will be harassed by calls.” I would reply: “When you use our – your – free speech forum, you hang yourself out there. The right to offer opinion comes at risk. Be willing to take it.” Almost all did.

That’s not the case with online posting. There are too many participants who do not have the courage of their convictions.

STATE OF THE NATION

2010-10-04T05:32:00.001-07:00

Taxes are up, people’s confidence down. Health insurance is ever more costly despite “overhaul,” the rich are richer, and they don’t share opportunity. Manufacturing, once the bedrock of our economy, is silent, its machines now spinning in China. The American middle class, created by the Industrial Age, Progressivism, immigration, two world wars, suburbia and manifest destiny, is disappearing. A third world-like underclass is forming, one that permanently will be out of work.

At stake is much more than loss of buying power, a stalled economy and the threat of entrenched recession. No democracy long sustains without a healthy middle class and the hopes therein. Cities and suburbs will decay, and crime and social problems will increase. Education will not progress in such limited optimism. Children’s dreams will be lost as opportunities dwindle.

The squeeze of the common man is on for the short-term, almighty dollar to enrich the already wealthy, with scant evidence that the largess ever trickles down to reinvigorate consumers who buy most of the products and who want to climb the ladder of success that is the foundation of the middle class.

Our longest war continues without clear strategy. There is no end in sight. It is killing our young and draining not only the borrowed treasury but the nation's future as it will be our children’s children’s children who will have to repay the borrowed debt, if they can.

Special interests – some of polarized political bent, many others industry-driven (health insurance companies, military suppliers, financial houses) – determine our legislatures, our executive branch, too. If “Mr. Smith” went to Washington to tell us this in what was once plain, simple, direct – and honest – language, he probably could not get through Homeland Security.

Politics in 2010 is polarized talk, not service to the people, now delivered in quick sound bites and e-bits meant to inflame, not inform, playing off slogans, playing off fear, based not a whit on facts. The downsizing and less-profitable media devotes too little in investigative reporting and explanatory writing to structure the debate and thus forge the choices that a democracy must make. Instead, we have sloganeering, innuendo, deliberate distorting of facts, pushed rumors – all meant to push a simplistic agenda, such as “take government back” or “change.”

If only it were that simple.

Government investment – deficit spending – was supposed to gas up the stalling economy, but it has not. Bureaucracy, special interests and deliberate distortion of aims have largely wasted borrowed money. It seems the system we have simply shoots itself in the foot, yet the ordinary American feels the pain, not government.

The handwriting is on the wall, and it is one word: “greed.” What the nation requires is a teacher who will erase that from the blackboard and write “investment.” Investment in jobs, in what must become a new industrial/scientific age in America that creates innovative work, the seeking of a new frontier that can guarantee a vibrant middle class, and with it, since it is America’s historical bent, the wealth of the upper and the sustenance and dreams of the lower.

All good will follow – money for schools, for health care, for infrastructure, for defense, for debt.

One last thing: Teacher should send special interest to the principal, recommending permanent suspension. Can’t teach with a bully in the classroom.

BALANCE IN SUBURBIA

2010-09-26T16:02:00.000-07:00

In 1945, even before troop ships brimming with returning World War II veterans hit ports in America, the suburban “plan” had been hatched. Defense contractors like Levitt & Sons knew many of these men, and some women, would never go back to their cities after their breakout. No longer were aspirations shelved by the make-do years of the Great Depression and then a devastating conflict. As well, there was renewed confidence in survival. The G.I., the sailor, the Marine, the airman, had made it back, and maybe these Americans could forge yet a new frontier, as is written in our national genetic code.

The newest frontier was affordable housing for the average American, to fulfill the dream of home ownership. William Levitt and his family, businessmen surely seeing great profit as well as possessing the ability to meet a need, were the first to step up to the plate in 1947 when they began selling homes fabricated in an assembly-line method, with payment as low as $57 a month. “Levittown” would completely alter the Long Island farm landscape, and everywhere else. Quickly, housing developments would grow across the nation, including in New York City’s suburbs, fertilized by eager investment and cultivated by willing towns and villages, which envisioned much more money for tax coffers. What was not expected in the heady rush was suburbia’s cost, its great and growing expense that today is helping drain treasuries from the federal government to the states to communities.

Aging infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, utilities, parks and public buildings; hastily built homes now requiring new plumbing and electrical work; houses illegally modified over the years against zoning regulations to create multiple units; insufficiently maintained homes, some of which stand out as eyesores, with unregistered cars on lawns, litter and unpainted siding; and bulldozed-over floodplains that raise the water table for other residents, filling their basements in storms – all these concerns now haunt graying suburbia, just as many of them have afflicted the old cities from which suburbanites fled in the decades after World War II. Yet, ironically, many of our urban areas have been rebuilt in their rediscovery. Children of suburbanites, turned off by the great development expanse, shopping strips that you have to drive to and the loss of old neighborhood downtowns, seek closer community in walking, downtown areas in Brooklyn, for example.

But this leaves suburbia wanting, for our growing national, state and local deficits and the ever-escalating cost of government combine to raise taxes prohibitively while concurrently not providing sufficient re-investment. Our infrastructure repair budgets are cut; our social services and health care expenses increase as suburbanites age. Reductions in manufacturing jobs and other workplace losses shrink the ranks of the middle class, the suburban bedrock. Suburbia no longer is growing, yet the rather big elephant in the room needs to be fed, its appetite almost insatiable. Who will pay?

A partial answer is in balance, which is necessary in the maturing of the suburbs. When the suburban boom began, planners, developers, investors and government should not have abandoned our downtowns and hamlet centers, instead balancing rebuilding there with the growth of fringe development. Without visionary thinking, we left areas to sometimes unscrupulous, exploiting landlords who turned them into substandard housing. And we vacated our downtown shopping zones in the process.

The proper plan would have been to reinvest in the downtowns, to tear down and renew the old and build a community of shops and housing, tied to outer suburbia. Instead, a gazillion shopping strips went up, with yet another pizza shop, dry cleaner and now the standard bagel joint. No visionary was available then (1945-2005 at least) with a strong enough voice. Everyone thought the suburbs were the best thing since toasted bread. Leave the crowded cities behind, people said. So, many Gothamites fled to the suburbs, but many, too, have now fled from them as well in the inevitable aging of suburbia.

Balance is required in development, particularly in rebuilding suburbia; that is, if growth and regrowth ever happen in this scary economy. But will visionaries speak up and be heard this time, over the shuffling of the mighty greenback?

A NEIGHBORLY VACATION

2010-09-20T04:30:00.000-07:00

ABOARD THE NORWEGIAN DAWN (Sept. 12-19) – I’ve cruised seven days as a tourist in calm waters, though in truth I would rather have been on a high seas adventure as correspondent during trying times. I saw clear to the horizon, literally and otherwise, no other vessels near, the Norwegian Cruise Line ship, its ballasts and stabilizers set for a senior citizen-comfort ride, pushing along at 13 knots, bound for Halifax, St. John, Bar Harbor, Boston, Newport and then back to New York City.

Security was tight shore-wise, ship-wise. It is the price we pay these scary days – 99 percent of the people showing photo ID, facing deep scrutiny by eye, computer and X-ray detector against the 1 percent who might do harm. This puts a damper on fun activities, especially when the rare official is overzealous, but not so much that what you pay for doesn't deliver on a cruise. If you are a casino aficionado, a shuffleboard player, a Las Vegas-type show lover; if you like to eat, to socialize, to relax on deck lounges, a cruise is custom-made; if you like to get off the ship in varied ports (not all do), this is the way to travel.

For me, a cruise is a way to people watch, to observe humanity, to overhear accents - from England, the American Midwest, Canada, France, all over the world, 70 nations represented on my trip alone. It’s been an opportunity to have conversations – so many people were friendly, so many were interesting. Some were endearing. Living as most of us do in a microcosm, interacting with the same neighbors, workers, family and friends every day, immersed as we are in whatever region in which we live, we get used to the habits – the politeness, the impoliteness, the yin/yang – of our particular little world – the moaning and groaning, the good deeds, the annoyances.

I can report that getting out of our cubicles and meeting new people makes you feel optimistic about humanity. You are reassured once again that while we have always been troubled by greed, hate, wars, the better nature of us all is still a good bet for the long run.

As I cruised along, my sense of pioneering, the security blanket of independent spirit that I have carried since birth still wrapped tightly, I was reassured that this nation, this world must never be looked at through the eyes of the self-annointed suspicious, through the greedy, through those who profit by hardship and who would have us live in fear, but through the hearts, minds and values of the corn farmers I met on this trip, and of the English couple bent simply “on a holiday, you see,” and of the Filipino staff most courteous, and of the American westerners with wonderful, disarming manners, and of the older lady looking at an immigrant baby who saw only promise in a nation that once gave her Polish grandfather a shot at a dream.

If only the world we live in – the one determined by our governments – was as neighborly as this cruise has been.