Sanders rally: a blast from the past

Sunday, April 17, 2016

I hadn’t intended to go to Union Square yesterday; I just wound up there.

Months had passed since I had last visited Manhattan, so I didn’t even mind the mid-town madness, tourists and others crowding the sidewalks, pushing and shoving to get ahead.

I simply got into a groove and let the street take me where it would, through Herald Square, then to the Flat Iron Building and then down into the depths of my teen age years that started at Union Square and usually ended up along the parks near Eighth Street.

I was headed to Washington Square when I paused at the farmer’s market at Union Square to get some fruit, and heard the chanting on the 14th Street side of the park – a flash back to a time when we gathered here and elsewhere for anti-war protests, ex-soldiers and hippies locked arm in arm against decisions being made by our leaders.

Not until I neared the Union Square subway station did I realize it was a political rally, but by then, I could not mistake for whom.

Life-sized images of Bernie Sanders floated above the heads of the crowd, as did giant eyeglasses accompanied by giant white eyebrows, symbolic images as rebellious against the political machine as the peace sign was in my time (although there were plenty of peace signs, too.)

A handful of women, who looked dressed for Wall Street, approached some of the female Sanders’ supporters, saying, “You’re betraying your kind,” meaning that they were supporting a white man over a woman, Hillary Clinton.

This was a clear message that women should vote for a woman, regardless of how much that woman (Clinton) betrayed the poor and working class when her husband was president, or how like a reverse carpetbagger; she had run and won a seat in the U.S. Senate representing New York. While some might puzzle as to why so many African Americans support Clinton, any good history book on post Civil War ought to be a lesson about how loyal former slaves were to their former masters – even when it was against their own interests. I understand women’s needs better, how desperate the feminist movement is to move on up into the White House after a black man made it, and how horrible it is to live under a glass ceiling watching others get their turn. But why does it have to be Clinton? Warren is a much more inclusive woman, but unfortunately, the political machine is behind Clinton.

Most people ignored these Wall Street women; many had bad things to say about Clinton’s support for Wall Street.

I don’t agree with Sanders on a number of issues, such as his position on guns. But I felt the wave of his support wash over me, a flood of nostalgia making me more sympathetic for his cause than I had any right.

For one thing, I had half expected the crowd to be dominated by gray haired hippie types left over from my generation. It was not. It was filled with young people as if some time machine had transported them straight from the Columbia protests in fifty years ago, supporters of every color and gender identity, all caught up in a fever that made me sweat just walking around them. Their signs filled with the same mixture of anger and comedy war protestors had displayed, while on the side likes Sanders organizers quietly signed up these people for their cause.

I had intended to spend only a few moments gazing before moving on to my original quest to find my past farther downtown, but I could not drag myself away from a living breathing vision of the past to wander the ghost town gentrification and Wall Street had turned the East and West Villages into.

This was the place to be, here the war was being waged, like a Native American ghost dance, hoping to hold back the tide of political tanks that backed people like Clinton – these people were like those protestors at Tiananmen Square so long ago, standing their ground even as we in the media painted Clinton as inevitable winners. This was the same faith I saw in the faces of protesters in my own time convinced that if they shouted loud enough and stood firm enough, they could change the world, and keep political Hawks like Clinton from regaining the throne of power.

Unfortunately, I have seen too much of the political machine that backed Clinton to have much hope that Sanders will prevail. But in that moment in that historic park where unions fought for their rights for generations and protestors have always stood up against the system, I wished to believe.

Maybe that’s enough.

Good bye, Mr. Grubbles

Monday, April 11, 2016

He wasn’t quite dead when I found him on Saturday morning; but I didn’t know that until after I called Animal Control, and found the office closed.

Apparently animals aren’t supposed to get hit by cars at another other time of day except 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Monday through Friday.

This being Saturday, the office was closed and the message said for me to call the police, and I did.

“If it isn’t an emergency, they won’t respond,” the dispatcher informed me.

Since I thought the ground hog dead, I hung up.

It was raining. The water gushed down the guttered so that the body was wet. But I left it, and went to do my chores.

When I got back, I thought maybe it would be a good idea to move the body, and when I touched the animal, he moved.

Not much, but more than a nervous reaction.

He was dying, but not dead. But he was near the wheel of a parked car and he was soaked from cold rain.

Monday seemed too long to wait to have someone come.

But I had little choice. So with gloves and a snow shovel, I scooped him up and brought him into my back yard where I have summer cushioned seats under an awning. I put him on the chair. He moved a little. He was still breathing. But he must have been cold.

I’m not certain this is the same ground hog that lived on the cliff behind my house, but I’m pretty sure it was.

I was proud to have him as a neighbor, and his loss struck me hard.

I liked seeing him poke his nose up into the air on warm spring days, liked see him grubble for grubs. For this reason, I called him “Mr. Grubbles.”

Although clearly on death’s doorstep and not completely aware of the world, Mr. Grubbles clearly hadn’t yet passed into the next world. So I covered him with an old hoodie and fixed a lamp above him the way I sometimes did for outside cats – like Charlie.

Charlie had often spent cold winter nights on the same chair under the same lamp, keeping him from freezing.

This winter I brought Charlie inside only to find that he had an incurable disease. I put him down only ten days prior to my finding Mr. Grubbles. So the pain I felt was over the loss of two valued neighbors. Their loss was incalculable. They were part of the fabric of my reality. They made up the last vestiges of the wild world soon to vanish under high rise construction and the chopping down of trees.

I liked to think that ours was an island of wilderness in this insane march towards paving over every thing, and over population by my species.

But civilization is relentless and uncaring, making victims even of those who survive.

Slow moving citizens like Mr. Grubbles cannot possibly survive the endless parade of speeding cars that have turned my street into a highway (as well as a parking lot at night). We seem determined to want to blot out anything that lives free without taxes, whether it is those homeless men who lived on the Palisades or those less human, but just as important creatures who lived here before us.

We seem determined to blot them out of existence, but want them to perish by our time schedule: 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Monday to Friday.

Mr. Grubbles passed away during the night from Saturday to Sunday.

I hope he realized, he was loved.

A chill wind

Thursday, April 07, 2016

The chill gets into my bones in particular this time of year.

I expect this in winter, but the calendar claims this as spring and I’ve already sprung ahead to believe it should be – so my bones hurt as if betrayed.

I strolled along the Kill Van Kull late last week feeling the cold air sweep off the water like an invading army.

It takes over the landscape and holds its ground.

And I am helpless to recapture the good feeling the promise of spring usually brings me.

I live my life marked by changing seasons the way my grandparents have, and their grandparents before them.

But we are living in a new era where these things matter less or are less predictable.

Call it climate change or global warming, it has changed the fundamental make up of what it means to be human, and put us out of touch with the natural order.

Bible-thumpers tell us there is no such thing, hiding their fear behind capitalistic greed.

We dare not admit that after God gave us dominion over the earth, we screwed everything up, turning the world into a place that no longer has a time for growing and a time for letting go, a time for being born and a time for mourning.

We the unwise caretakers of the earth have turned the world into a maze of unpredictably we cannot pray back into submission. So we get 70 degrees on Christmas and 30 degrees two weeks after Easter has expired.

This is not to say that a chill this time of year is unnatural. There have been cold spells before.

But it is clear that those who put faith in god have very little faith in the cycles god set up, and could care less about undermining his creation for their own gain.

Behind each page of the Bible is a greedy capitalist, finding holy words with which to justify his or her greed. And there is a host of true believers who get lured into believing anything that comes wrapped up in scripture, too naïve or ignorant to realize that The Bible is a metaphor, one vast poem saying this is like that, and never meant to be taken literally.

I guess we are so lost in this maze of choices that we will grasp at anything that seems to know which way to go, even if it is in the wrong direction, even if it is a map drawn by a master manipulator steering us to ends that do not profit us in the end or liberate our souls.

We are so desperate for miracles to solve problems we can’t or won’t solve for ourselves that we will follow any huckster showing us cheap tricks and misquoting scripture. We are lambs being led to slaughter.

And the chill I feel isn’t merely from the weather, but from seeing massive rallies like the one that took place in Long Island last night, a flock of misguided, misled fools headed off a cliff, willing to drag the rest of us with them.

A disappointing Spectre

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Just as I was shaking the awful images out of my head from having mistakenly watched a copy of “Snakes on a Plane,” my copy of “Spectre” arrived via UPS.

I had pre-ordered it because I had missed it in the movies, and being a Daniel Craig fan and a fan of his interpretation of James Bond, I needed to see what the hubbub was about, and why Craig was fed up with his own character.

Craig appears to be looking for a way to get out of his contract to complete five films. This latest is the fourth film in the series. While co workers claim it is the best, it is better than the second, but in general, a disappointment.

By far the best of the series is Casino Royal, which introduced Craig as Bond. While “Quantum of Solace” did not come up to the same level of expectation, it has its moments.  Skyfall was nearly as good as the first movie, but started to stumble down the path that led to many of the flaws of “Spectre,” foolishly attempting to connect the dots with the Sean Connery Bond movies.

Connery’s movies were strong because they were tightly based on the books, and the failure of later Bond movies was less in who played them than in the flawed writing that went far a field from the start.

This was partly the strength in Casino Royal, where Bond was reintroduced, and the story tried to borrow from Ian Fleming, but did not try to duplicate the cold war atmosphere.

By the time we get to “Spectre,” we are stumbling down a path that makes the film somewhat painful to watch.

This has nothing to do with Craig, but with the lack of originality of the script. We are strolling through a past from which Bond is not likely to recover.

And script affect’s Craig’s performance. He is less sharp than in the earlier films as if he is merely going through the motions of being Bond without being the Bond he was in the first movie. It is no wonder that Craig wants to give it up for something more challenging like taking out the trash at his East 5th Street apartment.

“Spectre” was supposed to show us more of Bond’s inner workings, and showed us far less than “Skyfall,” and still less than “Quantum of Solace.”

Interviews with Craig, however, show just how little he understands the impact of his own character. He seems to hate Bond almost as much as the villains in these movies do, calling Bond misogynistic, when from the viewer’s perspective, Craig’s Bond is exactly the opposite. Earlier versions of the character, especially the Connery’s were, but one of the significant changes the Craig films bring to the Bond character, is the concept of love,

From the first movie to the current one, Craig’s Bond can’t escape love, if not for the women tragically killed in these movies including M, to those he must walk away from. If Bond has a weakness in these films, it is that he cares too much, and tries to make up for it by being even more ruthless than he needs to be, a man full of violence and rage, which he brings against his opponents. This allows him to win conflicts he otherwise could not win, because many of the villains are stronger, meaner and more powerful than he is.

Craig’s Bond is not superman, although he thinks he is, or is like Popeye eating spinach, gets strength he needs to overcome his enemies by pumping up his rage.

Unfortunately, in Spectre, this aspect of Bond is made into a cartoon in the same way other aspects of the film are.

In each film, we get a brilliant action sequence, chase scenes that pump us up, and also give fuel to the story that follows the opening credits. The opening in Spectre seemed too contrived, as if the filmmaker was desperate to out do his earlier attempts rather than to bring us a meaningful sequence.

The great personal mystery that was supposed to bring the Bond films to a new level proved to be simply another plot device in order to introduce the arch villain that Connery’s Bond faced – although Blowfeld in the original series was a weak element. The better films – with the exception of Thunderball – were better off without him.

While Spectre did not leave the same bad taste in my mouth of “Snakes on a Plane” did, it did leave me disappointed. And it made me realize why Craig might not want to do another film since the Bond character is already strolling down a path that will lead to more disappointments.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope Craig makes another Bond movie, and it is a movie as good as his first Bond movie. But I won’t be shocked if he doesn’t.

Star Wars: The Mother of all movies

February 1, 2016

When I talk about the new Star Wars being “the mother of all movies,” I don’t mean because of its sales figures.

I mean it literally.

This is a movie about parenting, fathers and sons – as in past Star Wars movies, but with a new wrinkle giving greater emphasis on the mother figure.

While we saw how Darth Vader’s mother influenced him, she was largely a background character, and not a central figure in the mythological plot taking place.

While The Force Awakens still follows the myth of search for father as the original New Hope series, female characters play a significantly vital role, especially Rey, who appears to be in search of her father, while at the same time plays the role as one of the central mother figures in this film.

She is tough, and yet tender, and it is hoped that as the series continues, the writers will avoid the mistake Lucas made with Leia or the Jackson made in the Lord of the Rings, by softening the character too much in later episodes.

There are four obvious female characters in The Force Awakens: Rey, Raia, Maz and the storm trooper captain.

Although Raia at one point refers to Snoke as “she,” I think this is a mistake or a slurring of words since everybody else in the film refers to Snoke as a “he.”

But there should be another fifth female and may be in future films, a femme fatal or evil mother figure operating in the name of Snoke, someone who helps seduce Ren to the dark side. This part is pure speculation, but clearly a missing element in a film so otherwise built on solid mythological foundations – a female character that helps balance out the obviously good mother figures fully embraced in this film.

Leia and Maz are clearly examples of “good” mothers, though Leia blames herself for Ren’s turning to the dark side.

“Leia, I saw our son,” Han tells Leia when they finally meet again. “He was here.”

Han regrets the fact that every time Leia looks at Han, she is reminded of Ren.

“Do you think I want to forget him?” Leia says. “I want him back.”

“There was nothing more we could have done,” Han tells her. “There was just too much Vader in him.”

“That’s why I wanted him to be trained with Luke,” Leia said. “I should never have sent him away. That’s when I lost him. That’s when I lost you both.”

“We lost our son forever,” Han says.

“No, it was Snoke, she (he) seduced our son to the dark side,” Leia says in what may simply have been a mistake or slurred word, but raises some question as to how Snoke deduced the young Ren, and if indeed there is yet another powerful negative female force to be unveiled in this series.

“But we can still save him,” Raia goes on. “Me and…you.”

“If Luke couldn’t reach him, how can I?” Han asks.

“Luke was a Jedi, you’re his father,” Leia responds, filled with the perpetual faith only a mother can have.

Maz is the clearly the wise mother, the Gaia figure who though is not a Jedi, is aware of the force, understands its ways, and become a guardian of its secrets and an advisor to those fighting on the side of the light.

“Maz is something of an acquired taste,” Han says in describing her. “She has run this watering hole for a thousand years.”

Maz is wise enough to recognize Rey’s potential, and connected enough to have Luke’s light saber in her possession. How she got it is among the many back stories spin off novels may convey but the film does not.

“A good story,” Maz says, “Best saved for later.”

Maz is savvy enough to know that Rey must continue on the path fate or accident has set her on.

“Those you are waiting for are never coming back,” she tells Rey. “What you seek is ahead of you, not behind.”

Lacking a strong female character on the dark side, we are left with the storm trooper captain, who oddly enough, isn’t bad enough to balance out dark and light. She represents a whole different kind of mother. But she is not a mother utterly detached from her storm trooper children. In her own right, she offers protection. But she is a strict disciplinarian.

Finn resent her the way many kids resent strict parents, which is why he goes off on her later saying, “I’m in charge, now. I’m in charge,” as if unleashing rage pent up over a long period of time.

Although clearly an agent of evil, the storm trooper captain fails to live up to the significant mythological heaviness of an all devouring mother figure, or even irresponsible femme fatal figure this film clearly needs. She is incapable of seducing anyone to the dark side.

Since this film is the first part of a larger tale, we might expect another powerful female figure to emerge in the future, someone that may even rival Snoke for ill intent.

But this film is not without bad parents, even though they remain invisible to us.

While Leia takes blame for failing her son, Ren (or Ben), there is plenty of evidence of truly bad parents, mothers and fathers who failed to live up to their obligation to their children.

Although the back stories are most likely told in the novels about the main characters, the film only alludes to some of the events, suggesting that Rey was abandoned by her parents who promised to return to get her. There is a girl screaming during the first scene with the light saber which may be a flash back to Rey’s parting from her parents.

Equally sad is Finn’s story, which has him plucked away from his parents as a child to be raised a nameless number in order to become a storm trooper.

Raia waits in vain for the return of her parents, which Maz claims won’t every return. Finn pines for a family he will never know.

Rey, Finn and even BB8 are orphans seeking new relations much in the way Harry Potter clung to his godfather in that classic film series.

“He’s the only family I have,” Harry says.

Rey, of course, is the film’s main female lead, savvy enough to survive on her own, yet not bitter. She is a story still in transition, and in some ways, the female character in the middle of the opposing forces, the way Luke was in the New Hope series, capable of turning to light or dark, although it is clear, she prefers the light.

She is capable of becoming the mother few other characters can become. Early on, she displays these motherly instincts when she adopts BB8 and repairs its antenna, a tender moment that reminds viewers of what a mother might do to help fix something her child might have broken.

She also appears to adopt Finn (and for that matter Han), although Finn seems destined to become her love interest.

Rey indeed acts parent-like when scolding Finn over a part she needs to make a repair, repeating the word “no,” as if a mother scolding her child.

Although clearly old enough to have already experience physical puberty, Rey’s experience with the light saber seems to suggest her coming of age – and this has several meanings, including obvious sexual ones, as well as the symbolic rejection of responsibility as hero or parent. The first encounter with the phallic light saber scares her into saying she never wants to touch that thing again.

There are huge implications in this moment, as heroine, coming of age woman, and her role as mother. Control of the light saber doesn’t come easy. She accepts it only at the point when Finn’s life is threatened, a motherly act that allows her to overcome her fear and doubt.

Since Rey is likely Luke’s daughter, her battle with Ren is significant as well, a sibling rivalry for control of the family.

It is no accident that the names Rey and Ren are so similar.

It is also no accident that Rey must eventually bring the light saber back to Luke, presenting it to him as if he was royalty or a powerful godfather or even a god.

This brings to mind an almost innocent conversation early in the film which talked about Leia being royalty.

Passing the light saber is very much symbolic of passing on an icon of power, or passing of a torch.

Rey is destined to become the queen mother Raia once was.

Who are you in the new Stars Wars movie?

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Among the significant challenges raised in the new edition of Star Wars is the question of identity: how people see themselves, how they are perceived by others and are they deceiving themselves and others in their ever-changing sense of who they are?

We get introduced to the concept of identity early in the film when the Monk-like Lor San Tekka converses with Poe Dameron in their perceptions of who Laia is. One sees her as a general, the other royalty.

This sets the tone for what will be a dynamic character conflict that embraces each of the main figures in the film.

“I knew you before you changed your name to Klyo Ren,” Tekka tells the film’s primary villain, stressing the history out of which the First Order has risen, and how as a member of a more righteous family, Ren did not fit.

Ren, of course, is seeking to follow in the evil footsteps his grandfather, Darth Vader eventually abandoned, the ultimate identity crisis he finds almost impossible to resolve.

Ren hides his true identity behind a mask.

Poe tells Ren it is hard to understand him when Ren talks from behind that mask. Rey calls Ren “a creature” behind a mask. Han tells Ren he doesn’t need the mask.

Ren mocks Rey’s friends as thieves and traitors, but struggles to live up to an image he invented, and his grandfather’s memory.

Han complains to Laia that she sees their son each time she looks at Han, part of the reason for their breakup. But the matter is great than that. There is a sense that Ren is jealous of Luke, and Luke, missing in action for most of this film, has given up his own identity as well.

But in some ways, all the characters are wearing masks, and the distinction between good and evil appears to focus on the ability of good people to shed the masks they wear.

One symbolic moment in the film comes when we meet Rey for the first time and she is wearing goggles and her face is wrapped up like one of the sand people from the previous collection of Star Wars films. When she sheds this, she begins to get her own identity, although a good portion of this film (and likely those that will follow) involves her search for who she is and the roots of her upbringing.

Rey, like the other main characters, has a number of identities, partly because she has no real idea of who she really is.

“A big secret, me, too,” she tells BB8.

Rey is a scavenger, pilot and something even more that she has yet to discover, someone powerful with The Force, suggesting a heritage similar to Luke’s in the first trilogy.

Indeed, Luke’s light saber calls to her, and she later controls it even though Ren claims it as his own.

A storm trooper calls her “scavenger scum.”

She defines herself in one point as a scavenger, but when running away from a First Order attack early in the film, Finn yells, “We need a pilot.”

“You got one,” Rey yells back.

“You?” Finn says in disbelief.

Han later also seems shocked that she managed to pilot the Falcon, though she slowly convinces him to the point where he actually offers her a job – an identity. But she says she has to get back. She is waiting for the return of her family, and thus her original identity. But Maz Kanata tell her the answers Rey seeks are ahead of her not in the past.

Annother symbolic moment comes when a dying storm trooper marks Finn’s mask with bloody fingerprints, distinguishing him as different from the otherwise indistinguishable parade of storm troopers that stomp through this epic tale. Later, Finn takes the next bold step of removing his helmet without permission from his superior officer.

Finn has no identity at the start except for letters and numbers that had been assign him when he was taken from his parents. Poe gives him the name “Finn” rather than dealing with this complex impersonal identity the First Order insists upon.

After the crash of the fighter that he helped Poe escape in, Finn inherits Poe’s jacket, and so adopts yet a new identity as a resistance fighter. But it also marks him as a thief originally since BB8 recognizes the jacket when they come together a short time later.

Finn didn’t invent being a resistance fighter. Rey mistakes him for one.

“So you’re with the resistance,” Rey says.

“Obviously I’m with the resistance,” Finn replies.

“I never met a resistance fighter before,” Rey says.

“This is what a resistance fighter looks like,” Finn tells her. “Some of us. Others look different.”

Finn keeps changing identity through the film, starting out as a storm trooper, then a rescuer, then a resistance fighter.

Han Solo understands the deception, and warns Finn that women always find out the truth.

When Finn decides he needs to flee before the First Order catches up with him, he finally admits that he’s not a resistance fighter at all. But by this time, he’s well on his way to becoming one, even though he isn’t aware of the fact at the time.

When Poe arrives later, he recognizes his jacket. Finn starts to take it off, but Poe said, “Don’t, it suits you.”

Indeed, by that time, Finn is what he pretended to be.

But he’s forced into taking action, he would not otherwise take. Maz Kanata looks into Finn’s eyes and sees him as a man who wants to run.

But love of Rey moves Finn, because when he first met her, she saw something in him, he didn’t even see in himself.

Han has his own identity issues, as somewhat defined by his own jacket issue.

When Laia arrives on the scene, she looks at Han and says, “Same old jacket.”

“Na,” he replies. “A new jacket.”

But this is symbol of a more significant change in Han. After his son betrayed the Jedi, Han reverted to his old identity as a scoundrel. This was made clear from the brief interchange between him, Finn and Rey on the Falcon.

“You’re the Han Solo that fought with the resistance,” Finn (I think) says.

“I used to be,” Han replies.

We get a little bit more of this in a more or less comic exchange between Laia and Han about his trying to be helpful.

“When has that ever happened?” Laia asks. “And don’t tell me the Death Star.”

Arriving back at the Falcon, Han is forced back into his old role as a hero, although – as in the first Star Wars trilogy – it takes him a little while to readjust.

“Chewy, we’re home,” Han says.

Han said after his son betrayed Luke, Han went back to the only thing he was ever really good at, a confidence man. The space gangs, however, do not think much of his ability as a scoundrel.

“There’s nobody left that you haven’t swindled,” one gang member tells him.

Even R2D2 has lost his identity.

“Since Master Luke left, he’s just not himself,” CPO said.

But CPO also is suffering a crisis of identity, but blames it on the fact that he has someone come up with a red arm.

There are tons of other moments in this film dealing with identity, and more likely more to come when the new film comes out later this year.

That historic storm

Friday, January 29, 2016

The memory of “that snow storm” isn’t as clear now as it was, but the storm on Saturday recalled some moments of it, as do the photographs of me dressed up in Harry’s hat and coat, a snow-covered hobbit braving the elements.

Although the photo of the 1957 storm shows me standing on the front walk of my grandfather’s house in Clifton, most of my memories recall the rear yard where the snow drifted so high we built a snow fort for what became a historic memory battle between me and my two neighbors, snowballs flying this way and that, most of which zipped over my head without affect.

This idea of being snowbound as we were this week did not exist for me back then, when each drift was an adventure, and a landscape upon which I needed to leave my mark.

My uncles may have felt trapped by the weather as they struggled to dig out their cars from the drifts in the boat store driveway or on the street in front of the house, but I felt free.

On Saturday, I chose not to shovel the walk until the storm was over. Since the blizzard like conditions extended late into the night, I got up early on Sunday to start the process. Heeding warnings against over doing the digging, I started with clearing the front porch and steps, not even bothering to go beyond the gate to a sidewalk three feet deep in the white mess.

On my second round, I tackled the gate, and at this point, a physical memory of that snow storm long ago hit me, and for a moment, I envisioned myself in my uncle’s overly-large coat and a tilted hat with ear flaps – and felt my mouth for the missing front tooth that gave me a “Dennis the Menace” look I have since lost with the advent of adult teeth and loss of innocence.

The wind had created a gap in the depth of snow in the sidewalk beneath our tree in front, although the length of it made it a chore my wife handled while I rested again for the dubious task of dealing with the driveway and car, which the snow had wrapped in a drift nearly, has high as my chest.

When I came into this, I was again that small, inappropriately dressed boy confronted by elements beyond my comprehension to face. Though my back ached during the relocating the mass of white, I felt connected again, almost as if I could hear my uncle’s laughing from somewhere beyond view, and could see their shapes moving through out drifts – if not of snow – then time.

Being the last survivor of that old house on that hill back then, I often feel abandoned, as if life had stolen something very valuable in allowing me to outlive them.

While nearly all of them died early (some prior to the age of 60, none made it beyond 67 except my mother), they would not have lived to see this new historic storm anyway. So I would have stood here in the snow alone despite my best efforts to keep them alive.

But that thought didn’t strike me until later.

With each shovel full of snow I sent onto the pile in the front yard, I lived again with their ghosts, pale figures keeping me company on this sunny Sunday in January, they sharing my labors and I sharing their laughter. They shared their love and I accepted it, one shovelful at a time.