Chimney House Essay- First page

By the early 1990's trout season had become a big deal. It was to be done in a grand way at our home far from the DC beltway in Mechanicsburg. My little home-based business we started in 1988 had done very well. We had several offices, some doing better than others and I had purchased a huge home on the the Upper Patuxent near Highland , Maryland. To get away from all that, we had a smaller home near my mother and sister in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. It was a nice upscale country home in Lisburn, on Harrisburg's "West Shore". That meaning the west bank of the Susquehanna River.

The "Chimney house"-a named so coined by my young son due to the two big red brick chimney's it sported. This was our weekend getaway. Return to pastoral sanity. The house sat on a hill and rather towered over the wetlands bordering my youthful fishing dream-spot, the Yellow Breeches Creek. My hard work had paid off. I could walk down the steep stone-walled driveways to in a moment have a trout on. That year we had big plans. Friends and some staff were invited to come up for the weekend, fish, or just relax. This included Brian Feeney, my marketing manager and a few other close friends. It is also the time of the "scrabble game" More later. Shel had a cake made in the shape and color of a rainbow trout

Canadian Thanksgiving, 2007

Transcribed from handwritten manuscript

There is complete silence here-its high noon and I am in my little apartment near the harbour. Its difficult to think of leaving such a place. The task I had really come here to complete is concluding and its time to look ahead, at last. But its Thanksgiving today. The weather seems right, drizzling and just above freezing. Thanksgiving is celebrated here on this day, October first, and it seems much less intense a gathering than back home. In fact, nearly everything is less intense here.

Yes, a lack of any intensity. No better way to recall this day than Thanksgiving on the farm, as only a 10 year old can recall. The cold wet morning romping through the ancient apple orchard towards the now dead toppled corn stalks in the fields beyond. In the distance a row of tall pines marking the imaginary boundary of my world. Skeletons of brown, fermenting apples of russet, green, and yellow fill the heavy cool morning dampness with a pungent, earthy memory. Crows fly at a distance, most likely seeing my shotgun and spreading the word in alert. My best friend in those years, my Shepard collie Ollie, tail wagging madly rushed down the corn rows. In moments with a loud "TERK" a ring-necked pheasant blasts, rocket-like skyward.

My single shot Stevens 20 gauge, the sweet sound of its explosion, the luscious smell of gunpowder in the cool mist. The bird falls and flutters, dying on the bare brown earth between the cornrows. It always amazed me how gently and with what reverence Ollie would pick-up a bird in his jaws like a fragile toy, and slowly walk, bow his head to release the bird, white neck ring bloodied, into my hands.

I would try to pick the shot off, but for sure there would be number six lead pellets in that Thanksgiving dinner. And of course the feathers would be great for tying flies in anticipation of a long away spring trout season.

Those solitary hunting jaunts with Ollie are some of my finest memories of childhood. Better still are too few times I hunted with my dad. Oh, we went out many times for the birds and other game on the farm and environs. But the best and fewest trips were the opening of Pennsylvania antlered deer season-a De facto state holiday. The Monday after Thanksgiving. Too few, as dad died the day after New Years, 1972. I was newly fifteen.

Its a distant place. Sitting with dad in the gun room. With my sister and mother around the always bounty of our Thanksgiving table. Roast fresh pheasant, yams, garden green beans, the fall turnips and fragrant pumpkin pies. The exposed colonial logs of the dining room ceiling and its wide, hand-hewn wide plank floor. The huge walk-in fireplace. I loved that fireplace. Rimmed with Moravian tile work tiles that told a story of Priscilla and depicted sailing ships. I never knew who she was. Her 18th century gown and the ships at full sail on a tossing sea. Perhaps it told her story of her voyage to the then colony, to our colonial aged Bucks county home.

My meal, alone here on this rainy day here in maritime Canada to be winter stew and whole wheat bread, my mothers recipe. Those days remain vibrant when I turn my thoughts to them. My family, my dog, on the farm. I peered into my pond, fascinated by the doings of the newts, small insects and colorful water plants in the spring-fed clarity. I could spend hours as a boy staring into that mystery. In those places, my love of nature was born. Only much later, as it is in a child's time, I would leave that place. The memory of silt from upland construction choking the life out of my pond.

November 9, 2007

From handwritten manuscript, part of material for "Short Stories"


Finding the best place to start a long and complicated journey can be a difficult decision. Long ago, I wanted to take my wife and very young son on a south pacific cruise. Most cruisers on the the trip I wanted chose to fly to Hawaii, and then sail on the Pacific Princess to Tahiti.Always the "contrarian", I chose to first fly to Pepeete and then sail the reverse route. But this is not a travel story pe se, but a life's journey in which I have chosen contrarian, dangerous, and often an amoral and end even an anti-social path.

Tonight I enjoyed some whole wheat bread baked, along with pumpkin soup.My mother's recipe for the bread, although mom would have recoiled at the soup-no such peasant fare for her noble son, who was touted as a small boy to be a future President, or to be destined for some other greatness.

Mom is gone over 3 years now, as are two wives, and far to the south two teenage children wonder if their wayward, unemployed notorious dad cares or not or why he is really hiding on a little known (to many) island isolated between the Northumberland Strait and Nova Scotia.

It's a raw, drizzly night on the island. It's also Friday and party goers drive too fast, or wait for cabs to hop between the few drinking halls with music tonight. Snow will soon fall. Maybe even tonight. The town will sleep off its strong Canadian beer and wake-up sad they spent money. Money is hard to get in the Maritimes.

My pension pays for my rent here near the beach, some foodstuffs, a little very expensive fuel for my tired, aging truck. I even make a kind of beer. Its a concoction of water, sugar, yeast, fruit or other flavors if I had any. It makes what Mika Waltari may have meant when he described "The thin, bitter beer of slaves". in his book, "The Egyptian". Two divorces can have that effect on a contrarian ex-millionaire.

My former best friend and later wife of fifteen years lives above me, on the third floor. Its a big old yellow Victorian home butchered into four apartments. She was having a party tonight. The dance steps and heavy music were loud above me for the first time. I think she is celebrating getting rid of me, finally, apparently. She moved here almost four years ago. I helped her to pay all her bills. As a budding writer of children's books, she found a job working at the quaint little town's butcher shop, and later writing for the small island arts newspaper.

So I followed her in hopes of finding out if our lives were real or imagined. It was really all in my mind-she may have hated me for a very long time. Fifteen years age difference between us, is a lot these days. Not in the past (sometimes now) when men often of wealth or power took much younger women to wed. We had hoped for a family, to be my second. Built on love, a new beginning in Arizona, far away from the horrors wrought by my first wife, the businesses, the chaos. But she could not have children. This torment poisoned our spirits, and although staying together another decade, we couldn't recover from that and many other mistakes, of nature and otherwise.

We vacationed here in the Maritimes. She, lured by the island and "Anne of Green Gables", the red cliffs and pristine beaches. I always loved the other island here, Cape Breton, the seaside highlands, wild forests and big game. We had visited there when I was a small child. My mother and sister, accomplished artists, both in love with rough wild beach scenes. My father in love with any road trip, or anything even mildly Scottish. And it was a big trip for us in the 1950's. Its strange-there is a picture taken as a small boy with a piper at the Celtic college there. When I first returned to Cape Breton in 1992, driving a new red corvette convertible with Arizona plates, with my twenty year old blazing blond paramour, I think the same aged piper was still there unchanged. It must be the Canadian whiskey. I took a picture. It was nice to proof that some things remain the same.

My mother used to say all any of us take away are memories.This fact was so ingrained in me that I disregarded the risks of any material loss and pursued love.At least that is the way that I have justified many of my actions. The truth is I have lived a life in the pursuit of memories. To build experiences while here for the short time, not mansions. This story is about that pursuit. Its about trying to find out where home really is when so many places are or have been "home".

I am trying to find my way home. The mansions gone, the extravagance, cars, my airplane, which now belongs to a church in Texas. Amen. Most of all I want to try to explain my actions to my children. Well planned to millionaire parents, self-made working people, real entrepreneurs. At least, I was. Always a nanny or two since age one or so, it would not have worked any other way. It was only a few short years later that those two beautiful children were living in their grandparents basement. And I was with my blond creating a fantasy life, ill begotten in the Sonoran desert. You see, I was broke too.So the two families of this contrarian cad, one off with the child bride in Arizona, the other, a family that had lived in a primary residence in Howard County , Maryland. Six acres on a lake half hour from the D.C. beltway. A collumnated Georgian monstrosity, built to satisfy the worst kind of ego, and empty soul. The nouveaux riche. The staff of seven cooked, raised the kids, tended the grounds and served the needs of this master of madness-me. There were other houses and apartments. We hid our all-Columbian domestic staff in basement "compound" (the nannies lived upstairs) that was big as a partitioned bowling alley.

It was in this environment I met my blond. Nineteen and nanny number X . I can't remember how many nannies there were. It all happened so fast. No one could get along with my wife, so the nannies came and went on a regular basis. A church provided for us, or smuggled for us, the remainder of the household staff.Fundamentalists from Columbia, escaping the drug war. All of this happened because I got fired from a mid-level management job at a local engineering firm, and started a little environmental consulting business. We have to explore how I met my wife who I built the company with, the whys and fors.In fact our marriage was always more a corporate venture than a romance-but that was romance to us then in the go-go 80's. Others said that, not me. Jealous others, by the legion. We cannot appreciate the power of destiny until we are raged by it. Dragged, like a dry, uneven stone, pulled by pain across a rough, rocky surface. But when its happening, its soft, smooth, sweet like honey-cream.