Searching for Ree Along the Allegheny

Today is another opportunity to take about a 6 mile venture in hiking boots close to home in search of whatever one might find along the river and railroad tracks right here in Reno, Pa. The sun is warm and terrific while the sounds of Canadian geese alert me from time to time. Sparkling rock attracts my eye as I catch the glimmer of something like pyrite or perhaps shocked quartz. 

Whatever it is, that is for me an amazing find amid the gravel, piles of burned limestone, previously excavated sod and top soil, run-offs from the foothill streams emptying from under the highway and into the wide green waterway which once carried French and English boats up and down to Fort Franklin or Fort Machault in the 'formation years' of the colonies.

I look for small cannon shot but find none, although others have succeeded in the past. The glimmering stone comes home in my pocket. the river approaches the rail here and there, as the incline changes..."Pole the raft right, Nigger Jim!" (Huck Finn calls out as the sand bar comes into sight...Mark Twain would laugh at the Allegheny, but not me.) 

I know that there are no beaches to softly allow one to step into the water, just a sharp drop and you're deep in trouble. I want to canoe the mass of water but not with any white man I know. Only a full blood Native American in total harmony communing with Ma Nature and the knowledge of survival will do! I trust no one else. 

Walking along on this day I recall vividly talking the last time to Rita, one of my dearest pals of a lifetime. She was the only person willing and wanting to go out and do these searches on the hills and fields. 

...."As soon as spring breaks, and winter melts off we can climb that hill on Hog Back and check out the old dump"...Rita would assert to me.

"Definitely! We won't put it off one more season."

"No, time is awastin' and life is short"...Rita offered back.

Rita who always had that short boy-hair cut with the black curls, a voice like a guy, a laugh that was real and warm and meant for everyone. We searched for lost dogs together in muddy-slushy roads, Rita in the damndest looking black shit-kicker farm boots and the boniest skinny knees showing. 

...."Damn, Ree, you really have the worst knees i have ever seen!," I laughed.

"Yes, I guess I do!"

Looking up the track, it's as if her apparition greets me on this day without her. We missed our chance. When I had my back turned, her disease caught up to her, and snatched her away when I wasn't looking.

At her funeral viewing, little 'Ree' was lying there wearing a gray sweater and skirt that she would never have been caught dead in. But she was. The music playing was the usual drab mundanity meant to drive us to somber tones, so I called to the daughters and said that it just wasn't Rita. the music was aaallll wrong. 

In a few moments, a tape of Elvis Presley was heard through the room. 

The next day at the service, I was the last to arrive, coming from work. As I seated myself in the back to say farewell to Ree, the tape player came on again. One man and a hollow body acoustic guitar singing, "You are my sunshine, my only sunsine. You make me happy when skies are blue. You'll never know, Dear, how much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away..." 

My eyes cried like the rain. That was Rita.

There is a swamp area I am passing now here at the river; trees that clump togehter in the river bottom like cypress in the Everglades. 

..."Rita, look at that? does it look like the Everglades to you?" 

If she was here, she would answer in her down home dialect, "Shur duz! I reckon it's more like the Everglades than THEY are!" 

And this day brings her back to me as I look at the adventures we had together and the ones we have to miss. But if that was her on the tracks, I speak to Ree again..."We will do this, my friend, soon. Soon, Rita, soon."

DEATH, LAUGHTER, ART & OTHER ELUCIVITY (Sept. 4, 2008)

It is time for coffee and cream after last night which lasted too late with phone conversations dedicated to my beloved friends, then there had been more coffee and not much sleep. If only my renigade thoughts, which recently i refer to as the thunder between my ears, were aligned and composed, not just decomposing. Last night included grief at the loss of my friend Susan of so many years ago. Susan who was so much younger than myself.

Her brief moment in time with me was back before she unfortunately fell to a ravage which took her from a hulk of a woman to a wraith. It was back when she finished college, her degree in psychology and her other studies in theater, back when she part-timed at McDonald's until the day she appeared at my door with her wonderful story. 

Susan had been fired shortly before the door opened. "What happened? How does one get fired from McDonald's?" I am laughing loudly at her, waiting for her colorful articulated tale. Something about refusing to wash the food trays. Her manager then loudly proclaimed her 'cast out' from the world of golden arches...FOREVER! Yes, forever. He had used the term "Black balled", as in, "You will never work at a McDonald's ever again! You are Black balled!" 

In return Susan spun, glared at him and said something like, "Now THAT is really going to ruin my life! Won't you PLEASE change your mind?!" as she threw down her apron and walked away from the french fry grease FOREVER.  BA NNED and black-balled forever!

We laughed and choked and held our chest muscles from crushing our innards as the scene replayed a few more times with more embellishments.  and there was the night she dropped in for a bottle of my homemade killer deadly elderberry wine. She had one, and I had one. Much to our dismay. Not much of this is remembered, only the following hangover, but Susan had left some warm spots on my resume, and now she would be remembered and respected for many many more things to hundreds of persons she taught, treated, loved and entertained.

Following my last visit with Susan at the funeral home, there were calls from my friend Raven.  He then launched several of his impressions of her as well, and eventually we compared our friends to people we sometimes meet who are not friends. People who feel no regrets at all, no compunction whatsoever as using us as pawns in their chess games while we are so naive that we do not recognize the sidewalks of our lives as being their personal game boards, as they move us from block to block. Not friends these, who can not even recognize thier own deviations, deceptions and secrecies as forms all of lies.

and Raven and I try to describe how we (he and I) are related, not as surregate mother and son anymore, not even like surregate siblings, but eerily like the endings to each others sentences. I describe to him a 'what-if...' situation and he rapidly fills in the blanks as to - exactly what he would do or say, and it is all just as I have already imagined per word perfecto, what I KNOW he would do and say. He does the same game with me. 

When someone hurts either of us, the other one stands like a shield and sword defying the enemy however daunting and unassailable physically.

Although he and I reprimand each other and guide, feel frustration and dissapointment with our puzzle pieced yin and yang duality, we do so with complete love and devotion which has time traveled for over 30 years. We know that when we are forced to protect ourselves, we fail miserably, and when we protect each other, we do so through disabled bands on vocal chords, our words literally panicking to get free of our sobs and tears so moved are we. Not always a convenience.

During the short visit to Nod before sun up, finally drifting into dream time (which oddly for aboriginals is considered 'real' time) there was this wonderful escapade with Raven: I had found a large plastic netted potato sack which had been cut open and had become an elongated parachute-like piece of plastic about 8 feet in length and about 2 feet wide. Our artistic creativity as well as our childlike oblivion gave me the idea to suggest that we (when you want someone else to do it, you always say "we"...) could use it as a hang glider.

"I know just where we (...YOU) can try it! We (...YOU) can take off from the cliffs overhanging Fisherman's Cove." The following portion of 'dream time' was hysterical.  Raven holds the 'windcatcher' - his arms spread like my totem the eagle, and flys off the cliff over the beautiful ocean waves rushing in to meet the cliffs with spraying foam and sea aromas, and truly like Wiley Coyote, Raven drifts over the waves about 25 feet, the wind stops...he smiles...looks directly at me...then directly down at the receding waves and the exposed wet sand. The last look is one of 'Wiley eyes' wide nano second into mine, but never releasing the now useless potato sack..... as he starts the descent to the beach.

I guess the laughter broke the fall. With us, the laughter always does break the fall. We do fall nonetheless.

and we shall still remember Susan, laughing.