In Springdale Town

by Robert Freeman Wexler

  {Note 2}

  The material contained here does not reflect the views of the producers or writers of the show Blake’s River, nor is it meant to be a speculation on any episode of the show that has been or ever will be broadcast. Although the name “Springdale” is used throughout, it does not constitute a representation of any actual Springdale, whatever its geographic locale, or the residents thereof.

  {Note 3}

  We were urged by Anita Fulton Long (Springdale Town News, October 12, 1999) to “be a little kinder to all those big, bad property developments,” but the denizens of those tombstone monuments need also be kinder to the pedestrians of our town. The garages of these new high rises house those metal monsters which mount a new daily death toll as they roam our downtown streets. Ms. Long is sure “everything will be okay,” but that’s what boosters also told West Lee, Smithville, and Fairmont, which now face mud, flood, and smog in Necropolis. Why not cage the “carbarians” and bury them before they bury us and write our cemetery epitaphs with high-rise signatures in our own city of the dead?

  –Conrad Walker Burns,

  109 Grapevine Street.

  {Note 4}

  A woman took diet drugs and died while attempting to lose twenty-five pounds for her wedding. Something to do while planning the seating arrangements for the dinner? “Let’s put Uncle Martin with the Phillipses–whoops, just lost another pound.” Some months before her death, she began to hallucinate conversations with an idealized version of herself. The counterpart’s history included extensive training in dance and ice skating, culminating in an Olympic figure skating competition in which she won a bronze medal. The woman wrote in her journal: “There is a hardness to her, so lithe, so strong. Jealousy overcomes me. I want her body.”

  {Note 5}

  Remove glasses, contact lens case, and contact lens solution from bag and arrange by sink, glasses to the left, contact lens case and solution to the right. Contact lenses were a constant source of irritation, but vision with them was so much better than with glasses. Eye drops made lens wear more bearable, though late in the evening, especially after a night of poor sleeping, even that was insufficient. Vision correction surgery, the kind that reshaped the cornea, was an option, but the idea of cutting, even with laser rather than knife, seemed so drastic. And then the horror stories of people who had undergone the procedure, yet still needed to wear glasses, or had their eyes damaged, forever seeing the world as green and gray shapes flowing in and out of focus.

  {Note 6}

  Across the vale stood a circular house, mundane in appearance, though around it was an area of desolation, circular like the house, as though something radiated from it that killed everything within a certain distance. Some trees stood, bare, trunks brittle as dust, unable even to rot without the creatures that feed on rot. If a hapless traveler came upon it, and few did, the person would have felt an oppressiveness, as though their weight increased with each step closer to the house. And the house itself, thick walls constructed from a limestone prized elsewhere for its use in building. The traveler, circling the house, would note with surprise its lack of windows, and upon making the full circuit, would also come to notice the lack of a door. The traveler’s gaze would drift up to the roof, a vault constructed so that each stone shared the weight evenly.

  From the erosion surrounding the structure, the ruts along the south slope and the lifeless earth piled higher along the northwest, one would surmise that the entirety had once been buried, and that the work of the elements over time was slowly revealing more.

  All of this would lead an observer to ponder what would drive people to build such a structure and bury it, creating what must have looked like nothing more than another hill in a landscape of hills. Though, one might assume, it would have been a hill as devoid of life as the area around the house, which, if true, would mean that the piled-on earth, with nothing to hold it in place, had not lasted as long as its builders might have wished.

  {Note 7}

  Savory snack and sweet snack share an origin in the humble grain of corn. Multiple processed products originating from a few raw materials have replaced the diversity once found in the human diet, forming the illusion of diversity. Food that once came from the region in which a person lived now journeys unimagined distances to reach the local supermarket. Though even with this bounty, many choose the pre-packaged route rather than assembling and cooking, and many of the new mega-groceries stock variety more as a colorful display rather than to supply our dining and nutritional requirements.

  {Note 8}

  Citizens Against Microbes and Germs (sometimes sarcastically referred to as “Antibacteriolites”). The group was founded in 1988 by William Blankenship Morris, a wealthy homophobe. He started it in a paroxysm of AIDS-related hysteria, fired by the notion that people (even Good people like himself) could contract AIDS through skin contact. Among other things, he drafted the rules of hand washing and prayer (updated periodically to incorporate advances in cleansing technology):

  Turn on the tap, and while waiting for the water to reach the optimum 65 degrees Celsius (149 degrees Fahrenheit), recite the blessing for mountain streams, then wet hands thoroughly;

  Soap hands (If in a public restroom, and there is only a bar of soap, not the pump-dispensed liquid variety, DO NOT touch it, water alone will have to serve.);

  Rub hands to make lather (While rubbing, keep hands above the free-flowing tap to prevent vital lather from washing off prematurely.);

  Wash the now-lathered hands front and back with a firm motion, being careful to scrub between the fingers and under the fingernails;

  Rinse hands well under optimum temperature running water;

  Dry hands thoroughly with a clean paper towel or air dryer (If neither is available–leave hands wet, but don’t touch anything.);

  Alcohol-based hand sanitizers or gels, or antibacterial wipes are useful alternatives if soap and water are not available (such as after riding in a taxi on the way to a business meeting or before eating a meal on an airplane).

  {Note 9}

  Oscar Pitstick, Make Your Garden! A Guide to Preparing the Perfect Garden Environment, Pieczynski Publishing, Great Barrington, MA, 1997. One of those books that causes purchasers to consider themselves experts as soon as they acquire it, though it does contain some useful information and techniques. As with all guides and do-it-yourself manuals (sometimes called by the clever marketing term DIY), everything depends on the individual. Many people are incapable of following instructions, others excel. Innumerable dissertations have been written on the subject. Richard Shelling proved to be surprisingly (given his actor past) adept.

  {Note 10}

  Parker Duofold, circa 1930s, black body, gold nib. Not a pen to be trifled with. Fountain pens...the velvety way the nib slides across paper, the heady smell of ink...and the status, yet another way for people to flaunt money and pretensions. Fountain pen stores in shopping malls? Patrick Travis had glanced into one his first night at the mall hotel. Uncle Omar’s shop had been a dusty old place, with counters and other fixtures dating back to a long-gone era. But no one knew more about pens. Few people like Uncle Omar left in this disposable plastic world. The old building was, of course, demolished, replaced by a high-rise complex not worth describing.

  {Note 11}

  Map of the United States (lower forty-eight) by body weight. From a model formulated by Drs. Silas Barndale and Jane Bricem in 1994, “Geographic Weight Distribution and its Lack of Effect on Public Opinion,” published in The Journal of Eclectic Dysfunction, Vol. 12, No. 7.

  {Note 12}

  Josephine Rodgers kept a summer house in the area, the garden of which was famous for its splendor; however, during Rodgers’s life, her partner, Susan Marcus did most of the gardening. After Rodgers’s death, her conservative family refused to acknowledge Marcus’s claims to the property and set up a non-profit foundation that paid several family members enough money for them to quit their jobs and move to Florida.r />
  {Note 13}

  Words emerge. Where they come from is a question that has mystified philosophers for generations. The Greeks used to sit under the twisted branches of olive trees and argue that words were given to humans by either whales or birds.

  Some years before the Punic War, the members of the whale camp made the distinction that birds lacked the capacity for speech because their tongues were too small. The bird camp held up the example of parrots to disprove this. Mere mimicry, the whale supporters rebutted, not true speech. These arguments persisted throughout the Classical period. Eventually, a group of rebel philosophers, led by Diogenes of Lesbos, started its own city on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean south of Corinth. Diogenes of Lesbos was a charismatic figure, depicted always with a crow perched on his upraised right forearm and his left hand grasping the staff of knowledge. The Diogenines, as they came to be called, set up a multiracial, egalitarian community based on observations of the Pacific albatross. They learned to communicate with birds in ways never before accomplished.

  The other group, those espousing whales, left only legendary data. At some point before the time of Alexander, they moved to the North Atlantic where they could live closer to the whales. Unprepared for the extreme temperatures, they froze to death, and all records of their research disappeared. Recently, an expedition sponsored by the National Geographic Society encountered what might be the remains of their settlement, located on a promontory in Norway.

  Meanwhile the bird branch has proved that Mozart understood the method by which birds transmitted language to humans. He was working on a piece that, when finished, would have enabled all humans to comprehend the complexities of language. Unfortunately, he died before completing this work, which took the form of a series of harpsichord sonatas. Incomplete, they serve only to show us what might have been. Future researchers may find a way to decipher his notes, which resemble the footprints of pigeons in the sand.

  {Note 14}

  L’empire des lumières (The Dominion of Light) 1952, oil on canvas, collection of Lois and Georges de Menil. Magritte made sixteen oil and ten gouache versions of L’empire between 1949 and 1964. He believed that a painting does not express ideas, but has the power to create them. In a letter to Marcel Mariën, July 27, 1952, Magritte said: “The attempt at an explanation (which is no more than an attempt) is unfortunate: I am supposed to be a great mystic, someone who brings comfort (because of the luminous sky) for unpleasant things (the dark houses and trees in the landscape).” This reconciliation of opposites was a paradox typical of the Surrealists.

  {Note 15}

  Aveda™, Mint and Rosemary Shampoo, with organic invigoration. Is this a pretentious choice? Could her hair not be equally well-served by the products shelved in drug and grocery stores or the natural brands found in the local food co-op? Connor Evans, proprietor of Kinetic Hair, would say that this brand, this particular formula, is perfectly matched with Sammy Hidalgo’s hair type. Though he, of course, is not a reliable reporter. What would be the opinion of Caroline Miller, ex-wife of Patrick Travis and no friend of Ms. Hidalgo (for reasons having much to do with Ms. Hidalgo’s status as an artist and with her Mexican-American heritage). Unfortunate that she’s still in Spain, out of range of this discussion.

  {Note 16}

  Ruth Kinsey-Moore, The Lore of True Cuisine, Williamson House Press, New York, NY, and Glasgow, Scotland, 1974, p. 123. Perhaps the best book on food and eating ever written. Dwarfish, frizzy-haired, and caustic, Kinsey-Moore would not have thrived in this era of telegenic celebrity chefs, though many of the current breed pay banal compliments to her legacy.

  {Note 17}

  Linda Scales. Now the kickboxing partner of Ralph Ambrose in the syndicated action-adventure series Poseidon’s Quest. It is doubtful that she would remember Shelling, having taken no notice of him during their time together on the comedy show, though this was not his fault–Scales was one of the most self-centered people in an industry of self-centered people.

  {Note 18}

  “Only One Sky.” Though actually written by Jack Hardy, released on Omens, 2000. Mindy Vaughn had lied. Why? Was it because she considered her own songwriting to be inadequate and wanted praise from a man she admired? And Shelling–a few months later, he responded to her admiration by ending their relationship.

  {Note 19}

  “What we regard as the real world is determined by the information our brain is able to process. If we depart our ‘real’ world, our brain, depending on the attributes of this ‘unreal’ world we enter, sees only those elements which correspond to our ‘real’ world...if our counterpart exists in this ‘unreal’ world (which would, of course, be ‘real’ for our counterpart), complications arise which stretch the proportions of the world in unforeseen ways.” M. Laureanno, Understanding Dimensions, 2nd ed., Springer-Verlag, Philadelphia, PA, 1998, pp.169–70.

  Springdale Longitude and Latitude

  an introduction by Robert Freeman Wexler

  Once upon a January, 1999. Somewhere in Western Massachusetts. Alone. The kind of drive that extends far beyond actual time or mileage. I happened to stop at a highway diner for lunch. The road might have been Route 23. A waitress pointed me to an empty booth and brought me coffee. I sat and listened to the conversations around me, pocket-notebook on the table and too close to the coffee, which dripped over the rim of the cup and attacked the notebook, granting an unwanted travel souvenir. I can show it to anyone who doesn’t believe me.

  At a nearby booth a man and woman, around the age I was at the time, talked about people they knew and had just seen (where, I didn’t catch, but let’s say it was at a wedding, in the back yard of a house on a wooded riverside). Several years ago, the woman had an affair with the groom, during his previous marriage (though she wasn’t the woman who the previous wife found out about, that was someone named Matilda). They paused their conversation to give their orders to the waitress: BLTs, one with French fries the other with onion rings. I looked at the menu. Fried chicken would be nice, but I didn’t want something so substantial for lunch.

  The groom they spoke of was a reporter for a local television station. His new wife worked at a bank, a relationship manager, whatever that is. “Can you imagine anything sadder than waiting to take over an anchor spot on the local news?” the woman said. “Those guys never retire. They just get more and more fossilized.”

  “He’s going to have to move to a larger market. More jobs.”

  “Male anchors, of course. Women have to disappear before they start aging.”

  The waitress brought them drinks and turned to ask what I wanted. I said grilled cheese with onion rings. A nicely-made onion ring is a wondrous thing. For those unfamiliar with the delicacy, here’s a basic recipe: Slice an onion latitudinally (taking root end as south, green end as north); pull apart the rings; dip rings in batter or dip in milk and then in flour or bread crumbs, then fry. A deep fryer is best, but pan frying works. And some history, from this website: http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/french_fried_onion_rings/: 29 May 1910, New York Sun (New York Public Library’s Susan Dwight Bliss collection, pg. 195): “A novelty that progressive New York restaurants are introducing with great appreciation from their patrons is one that can be reproduced at home without difficulty—French fried onions. In flavor and appearance they bear little relation to the usual breakfast dish, and which, moreover, are possible to many to whom ‘for the stomach’s sake’ the others are impossible. The sweet Bermuda onion is used for this new dainty. It is cut thin to resemble French fried potatoes. Before cooking dredge with flour. Fry quickly in a wire basket in hot deep fat until crisp, brown, and free of grease. Very delicious as an accompaniment for beef steak, or, in fact, good with almost any kind of red meat.”

  ~

  With the intrusion of plates, their talk slackened but didn’t end. Listening, I became confused, realized that I had been mistaken. They weren’t talking about people they knew; I recognized the names:
from a television show I had watched in a motel room the previous night. The show was one of those ensemble-cast things, with inter-connected stories and intersecting groups of characters. Actually fairly interesting the way it’s put together. There’s the sad musician–a bass player for a successful band who fled the city with his photographer wife who’s now his ex-wife; her new husband, who runs a store that sells and installs miniature trains for parks or the yards of the wealthy; her restaurant-owner brother; the guy who runs a small high-tech company; the African-American female doctor and her husband, who teaches at the college; other people at the college (there were other ethnic minorities shown, but they didn’t have much to do in the episodes that I saw). I had read about the show and was able to pick up enough while watching. This was before DVD, before streaming or downloading, so it wasn’t easy to watch missed episodes.

  Well, I thought (smugly), don’t these people have more interesting things to talk about than TV drama? And why do they discus it in such detail and from within the milieu? I talk about TV shows and movies, but as a writer, interested in story. I don’t natter about how Daryl treated Betty at the company picnic, or the ordeal that Malone was having with his landlord that might cause him to move his toy store to a new location. The woman was surprised to hear about Malone. The man said that he had been to dinner with Malone on Wednesday, and learned everything directly from him.

  Curiosity replaced smugness.

  From their talk, I figured out that the man worked for a real-estate company and the woman was an assistant principal at the high school. Springdale High (which was the name of the town on the show). The man asked, “anything crazy happening at Springdale High?” That’s how I heard the name. She said that the hole kept getting darker.