[A fair amount of this is touched on in previous ruminations, but I thought I’d try to get most of it together in one place. It’s a result of a wonderful visit from an old friend.]

When we moved up here, year 2000, the house was uphill, at the end of an absurdly steep, winding drive, invisible from any other dwelling in the county. Our nearest neighbors were the Colonnas, down in the valley by the pond, on the other side of Lick Creek.

The Colonnas were the best neighbors anyone in history has ever had. Joe (known as Sonny to his South Philly friends) was a retired stone mason who had made marble pieces for the Vatican and various D.C. fed offices – as well as granite monuments for deceased mob members back home (I’m sure he had a booming business with Nicky Scarfo). Mimi, his wife, was the sole tough broad who hung out with the teen male up-and-coming mobsters. They both had wonderful tales to tell.

Joe would regularly plow the path to the bridge in winter for us and invite us to his summer cookouts for his South Philly friends, especially Carmine. Mimi would help anyone in the world with anything they needed while sounding like she’d willingly slice your head off.

Joe died fairly suddenly while in the hospital for a supposed not-too-serious ailment. We’d take Mimi shopping every week after that (she’d never learned to drive) and that was always a hoot – especially when she forgot to change out of PJs. She later moved down to the Philly area, where her brother, Frank, had bought her a condo. She died about 6 or 7 years back.

They one one child, Joey, in his late 30s when we first met them. Born with cerebral palsy, he had not been expected to walk or talk, but Mimi decided (and when Mimi decided, watch out!) that she would get him past that. She did. Joey is severely retarded, lurching when he walks, with limited, difficult vocabulary, but a huge sense of humor and his parents’ desire to help in any way he can. So the rest of this story is about Joey. 

When he had arguments with his parents, or just for the hell of it, he’d stump and heave up the long, steep drive to visit us. He and I would sit on the front porch, trade jokes and complaints while watching the sun go to hide behind the trees on the other side of the valley. (The time he fell on the drive and I had to haul him to his feet – he weighed probably 240 – was one of my major physical challenges.)

Joey had a rich fantasy life, but not always a bucolic one.

He loved to go bow hunting with his buddies (some of the younger South Philly tribe) and practiced with his bow and arrows in his back yard. I’d find his arrows now and then on our side of the creek. His aim was uncertain at best.

And he was convinced (with questionable help form one of Joe’s friends) that he had a $36 million contract with Princeton University for a building project. He was going to design… I never quite understood what. But it worried and obsessed him, because he realized that not being able to read limited his understanding.

When he found that Linda was a reading teacher, he asked her to teach him. Unfortunately, he thought that learning to read was something that could happen overnight; the idea that he’s have to work at it every day flummoxed him.

The crossover between his love of hunting and his design “business” led to his yearly insistence that he had to map state gameland #13, the largest hunting preserve in the county. So every spring I’d print out a 3-part map of 13, take it down to him, and he’d do his best to reproduce it on tissue paper.

Whenever I went down close to the creek to collect firewood, he’d holler out that he wanted to help. He could carry out the occasion small log, but he also wanted to help chop. I think Joe had something arranged so that Joey could handle, if not an axe, at least a hatchet, but there was no way I’d chance being responsible for how he’d handle a sharp, dangerous tool. I’d find some way to indicate I didn’t need help, or was “just about done.” That part was all a little scary.

But like his parents, he could always hold his own. When I’d go down by the bridge with the weed whacker to trim along the drive, he didn’t like the noise and would shout over, “Derek, I’m gonna sue ya!” On other occasions too he threatened to sue me for one perceived affront or another. Somehow I really respected that. Shades of Mimi!

But last Sunday afternoon was what really set off this reminiscence. Linda and I had started up the driveway when I decided I needed to check the propane level in our tank by the bridge. When I opened the car door to get back in: “Derek! Derek!” It was Joey, sitting in the breezeway between the now-uninhabited house and the garage.

We were both delighted – we’d missed Joey now for years, while he’s been living in a group home somewhere near Gladwynne, where Frank has his home – Mimi’s brother, who now owns the house.

Turns out Joey came up here with three of his housemates and their driver, Reuben, a wonderful guy who dealt with this limited quartet as fast friends. Reuben said Joey had been insisting that he had to go see his true home.

We spent probably an hour, maybe two, in Joey’s living room, just trading tales and outlooks. He told us all how he planned to come back for bow hunting, then close up the house for winter and return in spring to open it for another year.

The visit brought back those evenings on the front porch on the old car seat, some of the most relaxed hours of my life: I don’t relax easily, a worry-wart with always “something else” on my mind that intrudes its veil between me and external reality.

My few attempts at meditation drove me batshit; I not only don’t concentrate on my inner being in quite that way, I don’t want to. But there on the porch, with nothing to prove, sitting beside someone who didn’t expect me to prove anything, I learned something about existence that’s really important.

Joey. A good friend, a fine teacher.

Thanks.

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Getting even: You know what’s really behind those Moroccan and Turkish earthquakes? It’s the first stage of Africa’s revenge: “You up there in the Mediterranean and Europe, you spent a millennium enslaving our people? Well, we’re gonna take our whole tectonic plate and cram it up your ass!”

Read an absorbing article in the Guardian (or was it The Daily Beast?) about a family who discovered, via commercial DNA tests, that one of their sons, conceived through IVF, had a different father, arising from some screwup at the clinic. Over the years, they managed to track down the biological father and the two families became friends.

I’ve wondered, here, in the past, if my middle brother, Vic, had the same father as Rod and me. Funny thing: the inter-family differences mentioned in the article were much like those in our family: the biological son and his father were both book readers, the other son was sports-heavy.

With us, Vic, his sons and his granddaughter showed a dexterity that pulled them into sports, while Rod and Dad and I were book people. My nephew Tim (Vic’s youngest and sole surviving son) has never mentioned if he read that rumin, but I know he reads most of them. I’m thinking it’s something we might talk about some day. He’s a realist and I think wouldn’t be horrendously upset (especially since he never knew my parents).

Another thing: I was amazed that brother Vic and his eldest son both died of dementia. Before that, almost all such cases I knew of within the extended family had been of women in my mother’s maternal line. So could an “outside” paternal genetic link to dementia have been involved?

I’m interested mainly for the knowledge. Don’t much care about the inheritance angle itself. The individualities of life are usually more defining.

*   *   *   *

Suggestion for a show featuring a tiny insect that attacks an unsuspecting garden imp:

“Little Louse on the Fairy.”

*   *   *   *

In 2018, Richard Hodges, an archaeologist and past president of the American University of Rome, visited the site of Ribe in Denmark, an 8th century trading settlement. He described it as “a layer cake of superimposed workshops, one on top of another” in  Science News. “Some burned down. Some of them were just demolished. Every one of them was producing huge amounts of material culture.”

Troy and other ancient centers have shown a similar layered buildup: One generation dumps their waste and construction debris atop the previous. This is how civilizations evolved, as immediate centers of existence without a long view of history: “History” was what they could personally recall of the last 2-3 generations.

The attempt today, through archaeology, to preserve and entomb the past is, in many ways, noble, but it’s not human in the broadest sense. Turkey’s attempted upscale development of its seacoast, involving the devastation of a two-millennium past, reflects pretty much the outlook humanity has always had: “This is our home, we can do what we will, and the devil take its past.”

The major difference today is our explosive capacity for destruction, and the insistence to make a profit from every square inch of the world.. We now have the ability not only to rise atop, but to obliterate. And at no time in the past did we have the possibility, much less the desire, to respect and resurrect.

Is this difference good, bad or beside the point? However we may view it, like so much of modern life, it may well prove terminal.

*   *   *   *

Things I hated as a kid that most kids love:

mayo

ketchup

pineapple

celery

breakfast cereals (hot and cold)

Disney animated features (Cinderella? Feh!)

*   *   *   *

Political and social commentary, both right and left, too often assumes that any major change or unusual event threatens to become, if not permanent, at least terrifyingly long-term. This response has become particularly apeshit in the howls over social media as either the upholder or destructor of free speech and informed outlook.

Yes, the social media have brought us raucous scads of conflicting info, and brought it to us too rapidly to allow for serious contemplation. But actually, history is cyclical. Most, if not all, explosive trends morph quickly in ways we wouldn’t anticipate.

This has always been true, but largely hidden. Now, every change, large or minute, is splattered across the connected world, hour after hour, becoming difficult if not impossible to avoid. That, in itself, is the change-of-the-moment, and it too will undoubtedly alter in ways we can’t predict.

So if everyone would just calm down… I’d like to slurp through the day without someone screaming that the latest social or political marshmallow will transform society unto the nth generation.

*   *   *   *

Bringing honesty to phone hold messages:

 • “Thank you for your call: All our representatives are busy wasting our other customers’ time, and have no ability to help you with your problem in any way.”

• “We’d like to assure you that your call is vitally important, but in truth it means absolutely nothing to us; if you would like to leave a message, there is virtually no chance anyone will ever get back to you.”

• “At the sound of the beep, you can either hang up or stay on the line to hear the most inane music ever recorded.”

*   *   *   *

And as Flanders and Swann said of one of their most marvelous songs of the 1960s-’70s:

“This may all seem irrelevant, but it is not irrelevant – it’s a hippopotamus!”