Tuesday, December 24, 2002 3:18 PM
Family Christmas Party
Last year, I pretty much walked out of this Christmas gathering and into a hospital. I spent three days prodded with a stainless array of needle and plastic tubing filling my body with a modern miracle of biological soup. Parked planted and potted I sat in cold hallways with equally forlorn souls opposite me gazing at the floor or longingly out a window. Ill health like a ruthless final examination starts you to thinking. I have spent the year thinking.
I realized that what got me to this state of abominable bad health was a lifelong series of bad decision. I began to dwell with microscopic intensity not only on my physical bad decision, but those of the intellect and those of the spirit. It turned out that at every branch in my life’s path I had made grossly immature judgments and acted in equal proportion with bad faith. What a mess! Don’t worry I won’t list in front of you the egregious list of monumental blunders that I found in my life. Trust me it was a number that rivaled all the sand in all the beaches in all the world, and possibly Mars as well.
I spent dark nights of the soul searching, awake, sweating in the bed. I counted up all the bodies and finally could sleep fitfully on a mattress of gripes and sorrows and plights and hurts and sores and sickness and weaknesses and faults and failings and defects and flaws and shortcomings.
This year I feel like I have been slogging through all that same troubled sand just to get here. At every juncture something has intervened to keep me from fully appreciating the holiday spirit that I have projected on the full silver screen of my fantasy. I feel like a series of sharp stinging electric jolts keep me away from my true desires and hobbled to the “real” world. I shake my head after one year of considering, and wonder if an eternity of thinking will improve me. Changes, large and small, positive and negative, come with a series of corrections in the dark on storm chased seas.
When you begin writing a story, the first idea to develop is the main character’s “fatal flaw”. Without that flaw there will be no engine to drive the story forward. My story is driven by my flaws. So is yours! Those flaws are more responsible for our growth and personality than are our strengths, our talents, our gifts. Isn’t that what they are called? Those shining parts of us? Gifts? Like gifts they are acquired with ease and enjoyed with delight.
It used to make me crazy that gifted people could learn faster, sing sweeter, jump higher, look better, relate more easily than I can. I guess it still does bother me. That bother is one of my flaws. I cry. I rail. I gnash my teeth. I’m really getting the hang of this suffering.
But when I peer subatomically at all the problems that I had been gleefully dwelling upon with the intensity of a Dramatic Tragedy I find that they are merely shrines that I had carefully and lovingly erected on the path. When I open the creaking doors, there is nothing inside. The contents long ago had been transformed. They had been resurrected. They had been reborn, propelled, for better and for worse, into some part of my psyche that became manifest in my personality. They are some of the fuel that feeds the engine that drives me.
One day a friend and I wrote on yellow lined paper tablets lists of all the twisted awful things that we knew somehow interfered with our lives our work our selves. We then took the list, placed it into an empty trash can. Carried it down to the Mon River. Then we set it afire. It blazed in the twilight. Gray dark smoke roiled out of the container. When it remained as only charred ashes, we then kicked the hot can and emptied it into the River. As our worries, our fears, memories of ill wrought events, bad ideas, bad smells, worthless longings, our shower of flaws hit the river, a massive wave kicked a hiss of water back at us onto the shore. It flowed over our shoes and seeped the purified and transformed residue back into us.
I think that we should enjoy, praise and showcase our gifts. They are also a part of our precious selves. But it is time tonight to celebrate our flaws. Here is the challenge. Here is where we limit ourselves. Here is where we embarrass ourselves. Here is where we can dwell in groundless stupidity. Here is where we can truly cause evil to happen to ourselves and to others. Here is where we kill ourselves. And here is where we can be seen in all human splendor.
We find our true worth in the struggle, in the muck of decision that drives us forward in despair, in doubt, and with anxiety. Often we don’t measure up. We dwell lovingly with images that have long ago been raised and transformed from our hollow empty monuments. But it is here, in this slippery, confused ground of being that we can also be delivered to hope and to glory. And as we struggle on this muddied indeterminate field we can turn on nights like these to our friends and family, greater and close, past and present and get a shining smile of affirmation. Merry Christmas to you all!
Tuesday, December 24, 2002
Monday, December 16, 2002
Monday, December 16, 2002 8:50 PM Joe Coluccio
Dreams of ExtraTerrestrials - Three
Falling swiftly across the frigid north, high above the DEW line geodesic domes painted pure white snow; further blurred white by frequent blizzard came the bright glowing sphere. Some say yellow, some say green. Esquimaux waved as it streaked across the sky. It paid little heed and plowed a heated furrow in the upper atmosphere. Saber jets from nearby Prudhoe AFB scrambled but could not match the incredible speed of the fiery ball. Nations went on Option One Alert Red Red Red. Two youngsters, call them Tommy and Johnny pitched desultory soggy soft balls to one another, whap! and let two or three gather in the outfield before one boy or the other would hop the distance and retrieve them with a weak overhand throw to the pitchers mound. Newscasters with wide banded hooked down brim Stetsons sweated in front of hot studio microphones and announced with a growing foreboding the impending doom. Somewhere above Manitoba the thing did a hard left turn and headed toward our boys in anytown everytime US of A.
Johnny, or Tommy, laid down at the base of the pitchers mound. Tommy, or Johnny, joined him. They shaded their eyes with their heavy hooked hands and looked into the hot pale blue summer cloudless sky. The heat wavered around their bodies. They used the webbing of their catching mitts , expended more work than purchased, to cool sweat rivulets that ran the contour of their faces. A long cool shadow and a low pitched throb that shook the roots of Tommy’s new silver fillings settled over them. The low pleasant throb started an ascent to a high howl and slowly, a slowness that expended massive impressive quantities of sheer power, the, some say yellow, some say green, globe settled earth ward. Eventually landing dead concentric center in the pitchers mound. By that time both youngsters were sitting, one in a blighted elm the other in a sticky maple about ten feet above the ground at the edge of the field.
The Civilian Guard came first with comfortably armed, 50 mm rounds dispensed from an air coiled platform, open half-tracks. Shiny green hard helmets over admirable young shaven heads and khaki green fatigues. They set up a perimeter of fire and drank tin cups filled with sloppy coffee made in large silvery commissary pots. Several shook brown papered cigarettes from government issued packages adorned with green targets. After about two hours decks of playing cards came out of field packs, and from under front vehicle seats and wagers consisting of cans of water packed fruit, tins of spicy ham, three by five photographs of bathing beauties began to madly change hands. Johnny, and Tommy, timidly came down from their perches and ate a can of peaches that was offered to them. The glowing object on the pitcher’s mound throbbed and twinkled. Finally the press was granted entry to the area by General Higgenbottham..
At a little after midnight a hatch making a sound like a man hole cover twirling down the spiral of entropy opened and out popped, quicker than any one eye could see, later photographs, taken by Jim Schneider who was walking the dog and had a camera complete with infrared scan, revealed in time lapse a radiant red dot that grew and finally filled the 35 mm frame with a fearful iridescence, a large metallic, smooth as the gleam on a mirror, robot. Ten feet tall if it was an inch. The Guard sprang to attention and bristled a fairly large array of rifled barrel at the creature. It stood, impassive in the moonlight. David clean features chiseled by some alien Michelangelo. “Hey. Kids, stay back!” barked Corporal Henry Baker IV Corps press liaison. Tommy, and Johnny, moved forward slowly toward the solid monument in the grass next to the sphere sitting on the pitchers mound, Grand Memorial Park. They had their baseball caps in their hands and moved in a dreadful unison. As if in a daze.
The large tin man bent slowly and picked both of them up and quick as a nod up the chimney disappeared back into the vessel. Oh Dear! The growing throng of listless people flared passed the phalanx of the Guard and beat on the sides of the space, if that is indeed where it came from, ship. Time, parallel time was another possibility. Eventually a governmental gent from Project Blue Book showed up but by then all the evidence was trampled into the deep recesses of the playground and Tommy, or Johnny, was in the engineering program at MIT. So issued another case of inconclusive evidence by the Air Force experts Possibly, suggested Gustav Holstbinder, Doctor of somethinghighorother, it was just a case of burgeoning master hysteria caused by the psychosociopolitco temper of those times. Most of the crowd pounders got bad ruddy blisters and lived to be a hundred and seven.
9:01 AM The church bells at St Benny’s began to clang and several of the volunteer fire crew present felt the irresistible urge to fire up the sirens down at the hall on Borgman Road. Tommy or Johnny appeared in front of the crowd. The globe began to flash a pastel rainbow of noise that changed to a fine garish neon display and gently, with stealth ease lifted to about twenty feet, then disappeared into an arc of light that reached the ionosphere in 2.34578 seconds, but who was really counting and finally it was coasting on a solar wave into the depths of intergalactic space. After the blush of wonder wiped off the faces of those present, Tommy, or Johnny, were questioned. “What was it like in there?” breathed ace reporter Carol Sajak, for Channel Seven, Canal Broadcasting, the News Team.
“Like a big baseball stadium.” said Johnny.
“Yeah, but the balls were in the stands watching as people went rolling around the bases.”
They never, Tommy or Johnny, said another word about the experience.
Dreams of ExtraTerrestrials - Three
Falling swiftly across the frigid north, high above the DEW line geodesic domes painted pure white snow; further blurred white by frequent blizzard came the bright glowing sphere. Some say yellow, some say green. Esquimaux waved as it streaked across the sky. It paid little heed and plowed a heated furrow in the upper atmosphere. Saber jets from nearby Prudhoe AFB scrambled but could not match the incredible speed of the fiery ball. Nations went on Option One Alert Red Red Red. Two youngsters, call them Tommy and Johnny pitched desultory soggy soft balls to one another, whap! and let two or three gather in the outfield before one boy or the other would hop the distance and retrieve them with a weak overhand throw to the pitchers mound. Newscasters with wide banded hooked down brim Stetsons sweated in front of hot studio microphones and announced with a growing foreboding the impending doom. Somewhere above Manitoba the thing did a hard left turn and headed toward our boys in anytown everytime US of A.
Johnny, or Tommy, laid down at the base of the pitchers mound. Tommy, or Johnny, joined him. They shaded their eyes with their heavy hooked hands and looked into the hot pale blue summer cloudless sky. The heat wavered around their bodies. They used the webbing of their catching mitts , expended more work than purchased, to cool sweat rivulets that ran the contour of their faces. A long cool shadow and a low pitched throb that shook the roots of Tommy’s new silver fillings settled over them. The low pleasant throb started an ascent to a high howl and slowly, a slowness that expended massive impressive quantities of sheer power, the, some say yellow, some say green, globe settled earth ward. Eventually landing dead concentric center in the pitchers mound. By that time both youngsters were sitting, one in a blighted elm the other in a sticky maple about ten feet above the ground at the edge of the field.
The Civilian Guard came first with comfortably armed, 50 mm rounds dispensed from an air coiled platform, open half-tracks. Shiny green hard helmets over admirable young shaven heads and khaki green fatigues. They set up a perimeter of fire and drank tin cups filled with sloppy coffee made in large silvery commissary pots. Several shook brown papered cigarettes from government issued packages adorned with green targets. After about two hours decks of playing cards came out of field packs, and from under front vehicle seats and wagers consisting of cans of water packed fruit, tins of spicy ham, three by five photographs of bathing beauties began to madly change hands. Johnny, and Tommy, timidly came down from their perches and ate a can of peaches that was offered to them. The glowing object on the pitcher’s mound throbbed and twinkled. Finally the press was granted entry to the area by General Higgenbottham..
At a little after midnight a hatch making a sound like a man hole cover twirling down the spiral of entropy opened and out popped, quicker than any one eye could see, later photographs, taken by Jim Schneider who was walking the dog and had a camera complete with infrared scan, revealed in time lapse a radiant red dot that grew and finally filled the 35 mm frame with a fearful iridescence, a large metallic, smooth as the gleam on a mirror, robot. Ten feet tall if it was an inch. The Guard sprang to attention and bristled a fairly large array of rifled barrel at the creature. It stood, impassive in the moonlight. David clean features chiseled by some alien Michelangelo. “Hey. Kids, stay back!” barked Corporal Henry Baker IV Corps press liaison. Tommy, and Johnny, moved forward slowly toward the solid monument in the grass next to the sphere sitting on the pitchers mound, Grand Memorial Park. They had their baseball caps in their hands and moved in a dreadful unison. As if in a daze.
The large tin man bent slowly and picked both of them up and quick as a nod up the chimney disappeared back into the vessel. Oh Dear! The growing throng of listless people flared passed the phalanx of the Guard and beat on the sides of the space, if that is indeed where it came from, ship. Time, parallel time was another possibility. Eventually a governmental gent from Project Blue Book showed up but by then all the evidence was trampled into the deep recesses of the playground and Tommy, or Johnny, was in the engineering program at MIT. So issued another case of inconclusive evidence by the Air Force experts Possibly, suggested Gustav Holstbinder, Doctor of somethinghighorother, it was just a case of burgeoning master hysteria caused by the psychosociopolitco temper of those times. Most of the crowd pounders got bad ruddy blisters and lived to be a hundred and seven.
9:01 AM The church bells at St Benny’s began to clang and several of the volunteer fire crew present felt the irresistible urge to fire up the sirens down at the hall on Borgman Road. Tommy or Johnny appeared in front of the crowd. The globe began to flash a pastel rainbow of noise that changed to a fine garish neon display and gently, with stealth ease lifted to about twenty feet, then disappeared into an arc of light that reached the ionosphere in 2.34578 seconds, but who was really counting and finally it was coasting on a solar wave into the depths of intergalactic space. After the blush of wonder wiped off the faces of those present, Tommy, or Johnny, were questioned. “What was it like in there?” breathed ace reporter Carol Sajak, for Channel Seven, Canal Broadcasting, the News Team.
“Like a big baseball stadium.” said Johnny.
“Yeah, but the balls were in the stands watching as people went rolling around the bases.”
They never, Tommy or Johnny, said another word about the experience.
Monday, December 09, 2002
Monday, December 09, 2002 5:26 PM Joe Coluccio
Everyone who’s heard of Groff Conklin raise your tentacle!
One of the ways, as I chronologically fight with more and hardier resources, sagging skin, loss of hair, couch potato ness and a decided degree of angst in the face of all that I have not achieved, I move, somewhat mentally and mostly spiritually, against ever present entropy is via my own personal time machine. It is a simple mechanism really. No “way back machine”. No Delorian. Hardly new technology. Invented mid-fifteenth century, born royal folio size by hands and design of a German in Mainz, Rhineland, 180 volumes strong of which only 48 remainder pieces are extant, and none of those at the mall in B.Dalton Booksellers next to coffee table books about Hitler’s SS, Marionettes in History and Quilt Making. I refer to Moveable Type! The Gutenberg Bible, the referenced work. Over the centuries the presses have become more efficient, influential and pervasive. Put that in your e-reader Mr. Virtual!
I have been a collector of many peculiar books most of my life. Witness the wall to wall profusion in the basement where I presently sit. Filled as it is with “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”
So, find me, if you look and will, frequently in thrift stores hidden behind rows of hand me down clothing and partially damaged appliances, looking at the eclectic tattered normally plebian selection of magazines, paper backs and hard backs. It is nothing less significant than the conquest of time that I seek. Or maybe just something good to read.
Now, take a trip with me if you will to 1533 Maple Avenue circa 1957, Rosedale. There I sit with old Fezziwig. It’s Fezziwig alive again!…ooops wrong story…on the front door stoop between the rhododendron plants and the damaged pink flamingos that survived a return trip with my family after a visit to Uncle Augie in Miami Beach. That blue plastic Arvin transistor radio in my lap with the 360 degree AM antenna has no FM band. Frequency Modulation has not debuted. Out of the speakers this wonderfully warm Saturday morning is Al Noble counting down the top 100 hits on KQV. Still 1410 AM. I am personally hoping that the Bobbettes and Mr. Lee make it to number one this week. ..three, four, five, look at him jive.
Next to me three or four garish, lurid science fiction pulp magazines, Astounding Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction and atop those an anthology of SF stories called Omnibus of Science Fiction. Compiled by none other that Groff Conklin. I was certain that Groff was his real name all these years until a small doubt crept into my thinking the other day and I looked it up, dub dub dub. O me of little faith, it is his real name, and what a moniker for the man who is as influential in the history of SF as many of the more luminous bodies. Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell Jr., Healy and McComas, Rod Serling even. (Admit it you don’t have a clue except for Serling.)
The doubt was occasioned by a first edition dust jacketless copy of the aforementioned Omnibus set behind the endless scratchy rows of LP 33 1/3 RPM Phonograph Records. I paid my seventy five cents, less I might add than the original cover price, and jumped (this is real time travel terminology here) back to young Joe. The hard head paid scant attention to my advice. Indeed, he paid no attention to me at all. Youth is wasted, I sighed, on the wrong people. Lest you think this is a fantasy. I am well aware that the Omnibus was published in 1952. I will only point out that the copy with me five years later was from the library. Verisimilitude restored!
I spent time (all the time in the world) in the introduction. Groff Conklin was an Aristotle of Science Fiction. He categorized with endless invention his compilations of stories: Worlds of Tomorrow, From Outer Space, The Best of Science Fiction, The Atom, Adventures in Dimension, The Super Science of Man, Far Traveling a smattering of the groupings cataloged. All of the great, optimistic, golden age science fiction writers are represented in the first five or six of Groff’s anthologies. (Andre Maurois? Jack London? I guess everyone tries Science Fiction.)
I slip back each evening, while I eat some dread natural food and sip some low level dose of alcohol. I laze the lazy day on the stoop, look out at the somnambulant traffic patterns on Maple Avenue (RD1, Verona, PA), wave to relations and friends, listen softly to Come Go With Me, Johnny B. Goode, Rocking Pneumonia and Boogie Woogie Flu, I wonder wonder who wrote the book of love, and read the wonders prepared for me by Groff.
You scoff? Don’t think it happens? Well then, look closely at that picture taken the following summer in front of the house. The Coca Cola Brown and White ’55 Buick in the drive to the left. Isn’t that me? In the picture? Well?
Everyone who’s heard of Groff Conklin raise your tentacle!
One of the ways, as I chronologically fight with more and hardier resources, sagging skin, loss of hair, couch potato ness and a decided degree of angst in the face of all that I have not achieved, I move, somewhat mentally and mostly spiritually, against ever present entropy is via my own personal time machine. It is a simple mechanism really. No “way back machine”. No Delorian. Hardly new technology. Invented mid-fifteenth century, born royal folio size by hands and design of a German in Mainz, Rhineland, 180 volumes strong of which only 48 remainder pieces are extant, and none of those at the mall in B.Dalton Booksellers next to coffee table books about Hitler’s SS, Marionettes in History and Quilt Making. I refer to Moveable Type! The Gutenberg Bible, the referenced work. Over the centuries the presses have become more efficient, influential and pervasive. Put that in your e-reader Mr. Virtual!
I have been a collector of many peculiar books most of my life. Witness the wall to wall profusion in the basement where I presently sit. Filled as it is with “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”
So, find me, if you look and will, frequently in thrift stores hidden behind rows of hand me down clothing and partially damaged appliances, looking at the eclectic tattered normally plebian selection of magazines, paper backs and hard backs. It is nothing less significant than the conquest of time that I seek. Or maybe just something good to read.
Now, take a trip with me if you will to 1533 Maple Avenue circa 1957, Rosedale. There I sit with old Fezziwig. It’s Fezziwig alive again!…ooops wrong story…on the front door stoop between the rhododendron plants and the damaged pink flamingos that survived a return trip with my family after a visit to Uncle Augie in Miami Beach. That blue plastic Arvin transistor radio in my lap with the 360 degree AM antenna has no FM band. Frequency Modulation has not debuted. Out of the speakers this wonderfully warm Saturday morning is Al Noble counting down the top 100 hits on KQV. Still 1410 AM. I am personally hoping that the Bobbettes and Mr. Lee make it to number one this week. ..three, four, five, look at him jive.
Next to me three or four garish, lurid science fiction pulp magazines, Astounding Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction and atop those an anthology of SF stories called Omnibus of Science Fiction. Compiled by none other that Groff Conklin. I was certain that Groff was his real name all these years until a small doubt crept into my thinking the other day and I looked it up, dub dub dub. O me of little faith, it is his real name, and what a moniker for the man who is as influential in the history of SF as many of the more luminous bodies. Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell Jr., Healy and McComas, Rod Serling even. (Admit it you don’t have a clue except for Serling.)
The doubt was occasioned by a first edition dust jacketless copy of the aforementioned Omnibus set behind the endless scratchy rows of LP 33 1/3 RPM Phonograph Records. I paid my seventy five cents, less I might add than the original cover price, and jumped (this is real time travel terminology here) back to young Joe. The hard head paid scant attention to my advice. Indeed, he paid no attention to me at all. Youth is wasted, I sighed, on the wrong people. Lest you think this is a fantasy. I am well aware that the Omnibus was published in 1952. I will only point out that the copy with me five years later was from the library. Verisimilitude restored!
I spent time (all the time in the world) in the introduction. Groff Conklin was an Aristotle of Science Fiction. He categorized with endless invention his compilations of stories: Worlds of Tomorrow, From Outer Space, The Best of Science Fiction, The Atom, Adventures in Dimension, The Super Science of Man, Far Traveling a smattering of the groupings cataloged. All of the great, optimistic, golden age science fiction writers are represented in the first five or six of Groff’s anthologies. (Andre Maurois? Jack London? I guess everyone tries Science Fiction.)
I slip back each evening, while I eat some dread natural food and sip some low level dose of alcohol. I laze the lazy day on the stoop, look out at the somnambulant traffic patterns on Maple Avenue (RD1, Verona, PA), wave to relations and friends, listen softly to Come Go With Me, Johnny B. Goode, Rocking Pneumonia and Boogie Woogie Flu, I wonder wonder who wrote the book of love, and read the wonders prepared for me by Groff.
You scoff? Don’t think it happens? Well then, look closely at that picture taken the following summer in front of the house. The Coca Cola Brown and White ’55 Buick in the drive to the left. Isn’t that me? In the picture? Well?
Sunday, December 01, 2002
Sunday, December 01, 2002 7:20 AM Joe Coluccio
Dreams of Extraterrestrials Version 2.0.0.0
If you go up into the mountains along Rt. 62 and wind down the two lane blacktop with stands of trees that reach past the sky and keep the world green and cool yet on the hottest august day. You come, eventually, after a bridge that crosses a narrow strip of the Allegheny to a double A frame country style store that was equipped with a couple display glass door coolers, filled with milk and sparkling beverages, so the blue and red magic marker sign said; an ice cream novelty case; a small meat locker; a counter the runs the back wall loaded with newspapers some day or older; a dirt brown cash register; beef jerky hung in proud profusion from a pictured placard; furry notions and trinkets fashioned of soft wood sporting outhouse jokes.
Next to the store is a small office mostly abandoned, except Saturdays in the morning, that has gilt painted Justice of the Peace, Roy “Mad” Hatter on a glass frame in a heavy dark door. At the far end of the strip of building is yet another small office.
“The place has been abandoned and dark like that for nearly fifteen years now. Since Gregory Lukacs died and his daughter moved the Ohio Indiana border.”
Around back in rustic disuse the remnants of chicken wire cages stapled to the long bark stripped poles that once organically graced the clearing in a less civilized day.
“They used to keep the skunks in that one!”
Weathered sign over an entry that would with its large log arch do the great wall of Skull Island, burned as Selznick conflagrated Atlanta in ’39, proud, painted in crude red letters, Petting Zoo. Cage, the rabbits, after cage, a doe and her bambi, after cage, once a bear, but no one would pet it, after cage, two raccoons, an opossum nearly blind crazy from the sun.
“Dolores, that was the daughter, tried to keep the animals, but old Greg was really just a scratch farmer and when cold weather came and tourists left their camps, well…the girl really did the best she could. She was a pretty little thing. Would break your heart. Some would have liked to see Greg sitting in a cage.”
The empty room at the far end was just really four bare wooden walls, a picture of President Eisenhower in general attire with a smile, a log hewn table with matching chair and a plastic covered single pane glass window at the rear. One lighting fixture turned on with a pull chain that clanged like a dull bell against the bare bulb when you used it hung down from the ceiling.
“It made the papers all the way down to Pittsburgh. Not the headlines or nothing like that. There was a picture of Old Greg holding that twisted rock. And people started coming like it was a pilgrimage to something holy. Father Daniels gave us a sermon the first Sunday after, saying that he didn’t think the church was doing such a good job any more of filling our life with the spirit when a piece of a flying saucer could replace Jesus.”
Farmer Discovers Part of a Flying Saucer. The rock was still warm to the touch when Gregory Lukacs traced down the flaming streak in the sky in the woods south of his back porch. Harry Danton picked up the story from Greg at the barber shop the next day and ran it in the Gazette. No one made mention of the little round eyed aliens that surely must now reside up on the Ridge.
“Eloise Cutter seen one, when she puttin’ an apple pie to cool on the sill, across the back yard. Cute little thing. She left the pie hot and shimmering there figurin’ it was hungry.
The Arcadia down on Mulberry Street started running factual movies about “lights in the sky” and the high school dance committee made Flying Saucers the theme of the Spring Dance. Hung cardboard replicas silver painted with gold sparkles outlining the border from the rafters of the gymnasium. Two babies were conceived that night at the Ford high across the river under the dark night glittering with stars.
“Greg did a pretty good job with the empty back room. He hung a bunch of heavy black cloth, donated by Fay’s Fabrics on the walls, over the window, got a spotlight from the hardware that beamed down on the rock sitting on a brick covered with a piece of dark purple crushed velvet.”
It was Delores who took people in. Greg was just too happy collecting the two dollars, five per family no matter what the size. People stood, hats in their hands, contemplating the marvelelous artifact that had come from across the universe.
One small boy, holding his mother’s hand, longing equally for Delores and the gnarled lump of heavy metal stared silently as the dead room air recognized his thoughts. He twisted his head skyward penetrating the confines of the room soaring out into a deep black hostile familiar universe. Rode a comet out to the bounds of the solar system, flowed beyond the frigid Styx guarding Pluto, further than Proxima Centauri, through the dense hot belly of the Milky Way on toward expanding Andromeda and the start of time.
Dreams of Extraterrestrials Version 2.0.0.0
If you go up into the mountains along Rt. 62 and wind down the two lane blacktop with stands of trees that reach past the sky and keep the world green and cool yet on the hottest august day. You come, eventually, after a bridge that crosses a narrow strip of the Allegheny to a double A frame country style store that was equipped with a couple display glass door coolers, filled with milk and sparkling beverages, so the blue and red magic marker sign said; an ice cream novelty case; a small meat locker; a counter the runs the back wall loaded with newspapers some day or older; a dirt brown cash register; beef jerky hung in proud profusion from a pictured placard; furry notions and trinkets fashioned of soft wood sporting outhouse jokes.
Next to the store is a small office mostly abandoned, except Saturdays in the morning, that has gilt painted Justice of the Peace, Roy “Mad” Hatter on a glass frame in a heavy dark door. At the far end of the strip of building is yet another small office.
“The place has been abandoned and dark like that for nearly fifteen years now. Since Gregory Lukacs died and his daughter moved the Ohio Indiana border.”
Around back in rustic disuse the remnants of chicken wire cages stapled to the long bark stripped poles that once organically graced the clearing in a less civilized day.
“They used to keep the skunks in that one!”
Weathered sign over an entry that would with its large log arch do the great wall of Skull Island, burned as Selznick conflagrated Atlanta in ’39, proud, painted in crude red letters, Petting Zoo. Cage, the rabbits, after cage, a doe and her bambi, after cage, once a bear, but no one would pet it, after cage, two raccoons, an opossum nearly blind crazy from the sun.
“Dolores, that was the daughter, tried to keep the animals, but old Greg was really just a scratch farmer and when cold weather came and tourists left their camps, well…the girl really did the best she could. She was a pretty little thing. Would break your heart. Some would have liked to see Greg sitting in a cage.”
The empty room at the far end was just really four bare wooden walls, a picture of President Eisenhower in general attire with a smile, a log hewn table with matching chair and a plastic covered single pane glass window at the rear. One lighting fixture turned on with a pull chain that clanged like a dull bell against the bare bulb when you used it hung down from the ceiling.
“It made the papers all the way down to Pittsburgh. Not the headlines or nothing like that. There was a picture of Old Greg holding that twisted rock. And people started coming like it was a pilgrimage to something holy. Father Daniels gave us a sermon the first Sunday after, saying that he didn’t think the church was doing such a good job any more of filling our life with the spirit when a piece of a flying saucer could replace Jesus.”
Farmer Discovers Part of a Flying Saucer. The rock was still warm to the touch when Gregory Lukacs traced down the flaming streak in the sky in the woods south of his back porch. Harry Danton picked up the story from Greg at the barber shop the next day and ran it in the Gazette. No one made mention of the little round eyed aliens that surely must now reside up on the Ridge.
“Eloise Cutter seen one, when she puttin’ an apple pie to cool on the sill, across the back yard. Cute little thing. She left the pie hot and shimmering there figurin’ it was hungry.
The Arcadia down on Mulberry Street started running factual movies about “lights in the sky” and the high school dance committee made Flying Saucers the theme of the Spring Dance. Hung cardboard replicas silver painted with gold sparkles outlining the border from the rafters of the gymnasium. Two babies were conceived that night at the Ford high across the river under the dark night glittering with stars.
“Greg did a pretty good job with the empty back room. He hung a bunch of heavy black cloth, donated by Fay’s Fabrics on the walls, over the window, got a spotlight from the hardware that beamed down on the rock sitting on a brick covered with a piece of dark purple crushed velvet.”
It was Delores who took people in. Greg was just too happy collecting the two dollars, five per family no matter what the size. People stood, hats in their hands, contemplating the marvelelous artifact that had come from across the universe.
One small boy, holding his mother’s hand, longing equally for Delores and the gnarled lump of heavy metal stared silently as the dead room air recognized his thoughts. He twisted his head skyward penetrating the confines of the room soaring out into a deep black hostile familiar universe. Rode a comet out to the bounds of the solar system, flowed beyond the frigid Styx guarding Pluto, further than Proxima Centauri, through the dense hot belly of the Milky Way on toward expanding Andromeda and the start of time.