Every Third Thought

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

for Shelly

“Y
OU DON’T KNOW about me,” Samuel Clemens kicks off “Mark Twain’s”
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by having Huck declare to the reader, “without you have read a book by the name of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
.”

Likewise, Reader, you don’t know about
me
“without you have read” a little short story series called
The Development
, having to do with life in the once-upon-a-time mid-to-upscale gated community of Heron Bay Estates, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, in the quarter-century between its construction in the 1980s and its near-total wipe-out in the late afternoon of October 29, 2006, by a fluke tornado in the otherwise all but storm-free hurricane season that ended with those devastating few minutes. The seventy-seventh anniversary, it happened to be, of the calamitous stock-market crash of 1929 that ushered
in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and one more reason why a certain Has-Been (Yours Truly) came to be who he currently is.

In Huck’s case, the chances were that the “You” he addressed in 1884 would at least have heard of, and quite likely even have read, his tale’s popular forerunner of 1876. A century and a quarter later, the odds are that You knew a thing or two about Huck Finn even before first opening any of his author’s books, so popular an American icon has that boy-on-a-raft deservedly become despite his narrative’s rough initial critical reception and its author’s neglecting to account for semiliterate Huck’s ability to sustain a 250-page first-person spiel addressed to “You.” No such luck in my case—let’s not go into that—and so permit me to introduce myself. “G. I. Newett” here, Reader, his name in wincing quotes for reasons no doubt to be explained although perhaps already obvious: self-styled Old Fart Fictionist and, until his academic retirement some years ago, professor in nearby Stratford College’s pretty-good/not-bad /quite-OK Department of Literature and Creative Writing. Wherein his indispensable wife and soul-mate—the pretty-good/ not-bad/quite-OK poet-professor Amanda Todd—still does her teacherly thing between stanzas, so to speak, and spins out her poetry (sorry there, Mandy:
crafts her verses
) between class and academic committee meetings, just as her longer-winded mate, in semesters past, used to spin out his All But Futile Fictions while coaching StratColl apprentices in the clearing of their own literary throats.

Never heard of us? You’re excused. Being me, more or less, I’m tempted to say, “Gee, I knew it,” but the puny pun would be lost (good riddance), in the unlikely event of its translation. As will another to follow, central to the tale that “G.I.N.” aims to tell if he ever gets its shit together and his own.

Which, begging Your leave, he and “I” shall now re-attempt, if and while and as best we can:

What most bothers Yours Truly—George Irving Newett, with whom Reader is unlikely to be acquainted from having perused his scant and minimally published scribblings—is not so much the psychophysiological fallout from his Accidental Head-Bang in the late afternoon of September 22, 2007, although it could certainly turn out to be more than trifling. For if “Pride goeth before a fall,” what cometh after? Hairline skull-fracture at one’s former hairline? Intracranial pressure from subdural hematoma, leading to chronic headache and even (as shall be seen, or at least imagined) hallucinations? Loss of one’s already ever more fallible memory along with one’s already ageimpaired hearing, eyesight, libido, and general life-zest? We’ll cross those bridges when and if G. comes to them, if he hasn’t already without our realizing or remembering his having done so. Meanwhile, what we-all most fret at (Mandy too, fellow teacher and wordsmith that she is) is the ham-handed
symbolism
of his/my falling, perhaps in more senses than one, on
the
first day of fall
—which moreover happened that year to coincide with Yom Kippur, the Judaic Day of Atonement! As if Adam and Eve’s fateful fall from grace had occurred on the autumnal equinox, and they’d lost their fig leaves just when the trees of Eden were about to shed theirs! G.I.N. would never have let one of his wannabe story-makers get away with such clunky symbolic coincidence back when he was coaching the Stratford workshoppers with one hand, teaching World Lit 101 with the other, and vainly hunt-and-pecking his own fictive follies with some presumable third—“vainly” meaning to quite limited avail, successwise, inasmuch as years of polite editorial rejection had early shorn him of authorial vanity.

Did Eden, come to think of it, even
have
seasons before that “fall in which we sinned all”? Wasn’t the Expulsion from the Garden an expulsion out of timeless, seasonless Paradise into time, self-consciousness, mortality, and the rest? What’s more, that primordial couple’s “fall” occurred in the springtime of their lives, so to speak, and
began
both their sexual history and human history in general.... So hey, the Author of Genesis could maybe use a bit of symbol-adjustment, too: like Yours Truly, perhaps a better hand at coaching others to clean up their acts than at cleaning up His own?

In any case (as if all the foregoing weren’t heavy-handed enough), get a load of this: Just as the tornadoing of our Heron Bay Estates community fell on the seventy-seventh anniversary of the Crash of ’29, so G.I.N.’s 2007 bean-banging fall day/ Yom Kippur fall happened to fall on the faller’s seventy-seventh
birthday! Nor are we done yet (Muse forgive the shameless Author of us all!): It was on the first anniversary of that firstmentioned mini-apocalypse—the
yortzeit
, as it were, of Heron Bay Estates, a bit more than a month after his birthday trip-andtumble—that George Irving Newett, just beginning to imagine that he might after all escape any further fallout from that fall beyond a small scar in mid-forehead like a Hindu caste-mark, experienced the first of what has turned out to be (thus far, at least, as afore-feared) five serial, seasonal, vertiginous, and extended . . .
visions
.

Yup: one dream/doze/vision/trance/transport/whatever per subsequent North Temperate Zone season through calendar 2008, we’re embarrassed to report, more or less coincident, after that initial five-week-late one, with each season’s inauguration-day, and each having to do with some pivotal event in the corresponding “season” of the visioner’s life. Nor is even
that
the end of our Clunky Coincidences....

Aiyiyi! If we were making this story up, even G. I. Newett would pack it in and hit DELETE. But facts are facts, as best we can reconstruct and report them—including hallucinated-or-whatever “facts”—and so here we by-George go, with apologies to Aristotle, for example, whose
Poetics
famously recommend to us storytellers the Plausible-Even-If-Perhaps-Strictly-Impossible over the Possible-But-Bloody-Unlikely, if push comes to shove in that department. Apologies too to South Temperate Zoners, whose seasons fall in different quarters of the calendar from ours, with correspondingly opposite connotations to
“April,” “September,” and the like; ditto Tropics-dwellers, all but seasonless except for Wet and Dry....

I give up.

But not undiscourageable G.I.N., who, instead of DELETE, here clicks once again the signature key to every self-disrespecting O.F.F.’s career and to the lives of us still-traumatized Heron Bay Estates tornado-survivors:

RESTART
.

L
AST
FALL—I.E
.
, AUTUMN 2007, or more exactly the run-up to that September equinox—it being about to be G. I. Newett’s afore-specified birthday, he long since out to pasture from Academia and his wife enjoying a last well-earned sabbatical leave before her own retirement, the couple treated themselves to their first-ever cruise-ship cruise: eight days on the Baltic and North Seas (Stockholm/Copenhagen/Dover, with intermediate stops and shore excursions) followed by a week ashore in England and culminating, on G.’s birthday, in our first-ever visit to William Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. Motives obvious, over and above much-needed respite from the reassembly of our storm-smashed lives: couple of long-time English profs, both of whom routinely included bits of the Bard in their undergrad lit-survey courses (George mainly the plays, Amanda the sonnets, neither of us with scholarly authority, but both with the appreciative awe of fellow languagefiddlers). Add to that the Stratford/Avon connection: Our joint
employer, as you may have heard, is a thriving two-century-old liberal arts college in the even older colonial-era customs port of the same name in Avon County, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay, where the towns and counties have English names (Salisbury, Cambridge, Oxford, Stratford, Chestertown, Dorchester, Talbot, Cecil, Avon, Kent) and the numerous tidal waterways are still called by names predating the Brits’ arrival: Chesapeake, Nanticoke, Choptank, Sassafras, and Stratford’s own winding Matahannock. What’s more, while neither G. Newett nor A. Todd attended StratColl as students, the writer of these lines was born and raised in Stratford town—more precisely, in the crab-and-oyster district of Bridgetown, a rough-and-ready working watermen’s ward divided from Stratford proper by narrow, wharf-lined Avon Creek. Which waterway ebbs and flows into the Matahannock River, which does likewise into Chesapeake Bay and thence <> Atlantic Ocean, <> Bristol Channel, <> lower Severn River (
Britain’s
Severn, not Maryland’s over by Annapolis), into which flows one-way > the non-tidal upper Severn, its upstream reaches fed in turn > by the River Avon. Which is to say (so Mandy informed me on location) “River River,”
Avon
being the Celtic word for same. Although none to our knowledge has ever done so, one could imaginably
sail
Stratford-to-Stratford, setting out from one of the wharves near “our” Stratford’s old Custom House (or from late lamented Heron Bay Estates’ once-upon-a-time Marina Club), working downriver and down-Bay, hanging a left at Cape Charles into the North Atlantic, crossing it northeastward
to the U.K., and forging thence upstream to where the original Avon flows through its original “Strait Ford” (i.e., narrow crossing), the eponymous town on its northwest bank. Across from which, by George, and connected thereto by a modest bridge, is the original Bridgetown!