Category: Memoir

Horse & Buggy Accident!

a uniquely memorable experience

You would never know it, because I’m really a whole lot older than I look, but I’m one of very few people living anymore who can boast of surviving a horse and buggy accident.

See, a long, long time ago—back when a camera, clock, calculator, phone, music player and video recorder were all separate devices—I harnessed my family into an adventure in the 19th Century.

It was Labor Day and our first visit to the Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania. We had come to Old Bedford Village, a living history hamlet where the colonial period was full on display for the education and entertainment of its guests.

It was there we innocently boarded a wooden-wheeled carriage for a short, horse-drawn tour through the late summer countryside. Our full company included my wife Carol and me, our four children ages 3½ – 8, a young couple expecting their first child very soon, and our 80-year-old driver. Off we started at a lazy, laid-back pace.

But soon, the clip-clopped cadence of Queenie’s hooves rose from walk, to trot, to canter, to gallop. From the driver’s seat came a few, low and feeble, pleading commands—apparently so as to not startle either the passengers OR the horse: “Whoa, Queenie… whoa, Queenie…!”

But Queenie didn’t whoa. In fact, she paid no attention to the increasing cries of the little old driver or to her increasingly alarmed passengers. I aimed my bouncing head out the side window to witness the horsepower boost coming from a gray-dappled rump. The driver’s reins led to no effect on her front end, where, despite wearing blinders, her wide, wild eyes stared upward and to the right. As I followed skyward, a large colorful kite swooped into view.

Now, knowing what your problem is doesn’t always lead to an immediate solution! Oh, we understood the arithmetic all right: 1 large kite + 1 spooked horse = 1 runaway buggy filled with tender, bruisable people! But our difference-making resources from the back of the carriage were, sadly, quite limited.

Oblivious to all dangers but the kite, Queenie galloped straight ahead with her neck craned far to the right. Soon we entered an area with many people who were quickly discovering they’d better run or get run over. (Run… away! It’s a Runaway!)

Queenie slammed her neck into the corner of a building and collapsed. The buggy mounted the porch, separating spokes from rims from axles, and splintered apart. All of us hapless riders careened into the front, left corner of the buggy, piling up, as it happened, on my wife Carol.

With Queenie down and front wheels broken, our vehicle slumped on its side, making it even harder to distinguish each other’s tangled body parts in the messy heap of human cargo. Now to the rescue came the formerly fleeing refugees, who held up our fractured fairy tale of a coach long enough for us to hand the children through the side window to willing hands and helpers.

After we had all clambered from the wreck, and were gratefully awaiting minor medical attention, I realized that the camera around my neck was responsible for the gash on my forehead, and—hey!—still had one last picture left on my roll of Kodak slide film. It shows Carol on the ground holding her aching leg and knee with one hand while the other reined in our excitable 8-year-old from further unrestrained exploits.

A horse-and-buggy accident in 1989, I daresay, was a unique experience even then. Yet, like most catastrophes from which you survive, can be interpreted for a life lesson or two:

1. No matter where we are or what we’re doing, trouble can suddenly swoop out of the clear blue on us. And though it may pursue or even lead us for a while, remember that it does come, eventually, to a conclusion; and:

2. Consider yourself forewarned whenever you find yourself following a horse’s rear end!

My brother Brian

a victorious tragic life
1958-2016

Diagnosed with schizophrenia in his mid-twenties, my brother Brian battled depression, hallucinations, voices, anxiety, and highly threatening psychotic episodes in decades of discerning what was truly real in his reality.

As if that weren’t enough, brain cancer inserted its tentacles into his frontal lobe. He celebrated his fiftieth birthday with the first of three surgeries to counter the cancer’s terrible, inevitable advance.

On a recent Christmas evening surrounded by our family, a series of seizures convulsed his central nervous system in a hostile takeover of mind and body.

The off-kilter, razor’s edge balance of a medicated life disintegrated into a chemically-induced, frantic free-for-all for his future.

Forced to abandon his already limited lifestyle, his mobility, his interests, his hobbies, and his home, Brian’s horizons shrank to a double room in a nursing home with a single window.

His is not the archetypical story of Exalted Hero, Exemplary Leader, or Inspirational Honcho.

Yet…

Brian the mild-mannered gentleman, Brian the good-humored wit, Brian the patient and enduring soul, was ultimately the unlikely overcomer of some of life’s harshest punishments.

Though his accomplishments may be meager trifles measured against society standards; though his aims were modest and he consumed, perhaps, more than he contributed, his life, tragic as it appeared, was neither futile nor impotent.

Perhaps like many other so-called burdens to society, his purpose was intended for our collective benefit. Perhaps he was singled out to demonstrate to all of us how to bear an unfair burden. Maybe his gift of humor in the midst of a lifetime of suffering was to show us how to accept grace and how to give grace. Feasibly his sacrificial mission provided a broader perspective on our own discomforts, disappointments and disabilities. Patience through the worst of times? Decisively. Perseverance in perpetual pain? Resisting the ravages of mental and physical illness? Enduring when there simply is no other option? Emphatically yes, yes, and oh, yes!

I am sorry I came to recognize these realities late. But I rejoice in witnessing his ultimate triumph in carrying these unpleasant duties to completion at the finish line.

And to hear our Father say, “Well done, My good and faithful servant! Enter into the joy of your reward prepared in advance for you!”

Saying pieces

Agonizing childhood Christmas tradition develops character

When I was a little kid, it was a time-honored tradition in my church that all the children of the Sunday School classes would “Say Pieces” at Christmastime and Easter.

Such were the agonizing times of Kid-dom. Whether it was memorizing and reciting a scripture verse or short poem, or playing an instrument, singing a song, or even performing a bit of drama, it was a stressful time on Center Stage.

Not that it was a big one. But that didn’t matter. It was all the mandatory preparation and the grown-ups’ stern warnings about getting it right in front of everybody. It was a big deal.

… Not that I can remember any piece of any of the Pieces I ever recited…

But many of them were quite similar to the now well-known declaration of Buddy the Elf: “The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear!” You know, when you’re a little impressionable kid, that’s really a huge pile of words to get just right.

I do, however, remember how we got to dress in plaid bathrobes to play Shepherds Abiding in the Fields. And how, one Eastertime, my cousin wore his green plastic army helmet to play a Roman soldier.

The annual production spared no one. Even the really little kids, the ones who were too little to even know what was going on, were sent out there. This cherished image is of my little sister Ann and her friend Jimmy, who paraded holding hands all the way from the staging area behind the upright piano to the platform, faced the audience with the signs hung around their little cherubic necks, then returned to wild acclaim.

Our individual and collective behaviors solicited both pride and embarrassment in our parents. For our grandparents and all the other old people, the spectacle was highly entertaining.

Afterwards, back in the classroom, we’d be rewarded with a small box of mixed chocolates and an orange from our Teacher: Presents! Next up: the real deal with Santa at home—yeah!

Despite all the trauma however, the ordeal developed character—not that we cared. But it did force us into such real out-of-the-comfort-zone growth experiences as public speaking, addressing an audience of peers and authority figures, overcoming fears and nervousness, exercising brain power, learning new information and how “practice makes perfect.”

I also remember how one little girl learned the power of a bribe. (Or shall I say “incentivized reward.”) All through the rehearsals, she refused to go on stage. But then her mother discovered just the right enticement in the promise of a special lollipop. (Did she bring some for all of us?) When it came to it, the girl delivered forthrightly, then ran directly to claim her reward from Mom hiding behind the piano.

After all these years, I’ve come to value sharing My Piece. It’s proclaimed a little differently now, and disseminated on a blog in a way no one could have imagined so long ago. Yet the sharing of our thoughts, concepts, ideas and ideals in a public forum remains a noble and cherished cause of personal expression and communal liberty.

So I now choose to share with you one of my favorite Pieces this Christmastime. It was written by the Nobel Prize winner of Literature in 1928, Sigrid Undset:

And when we give each other Christmas gifts in His name, let us remember that He has given us the sun and the moon and the stars, and the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans—and all that lives and moves upon them. He has given us all green things and everything that blossoms and bears fruit and all that we quarrel about and all that we have misused—and to save us from our foolishness, from all our sins, He came down to earth and gave us Himself.

And as Ann and Jimmy so endearingly express: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Messing around in a small town

the learning legacy of engaging peers in free-spirited, unsupervised outdoor play

Chapman Quarries is the smallest incorporated borough in Pennsylvania, with a population in the 2010 census of 199 people. It’s where my dad’s family was established, and where his dad, granddad, and nearly all his male relatives worked the slate quarries.

While I didn’t grow up in town, that’s where church was and where my cousins and grandparents lived and where I spent a good amount of time. And it was the only place apart from school recess where I was able to freely interact with a lot of other kids outdoors. Three childhood memories tell a connected story:

Ice skating on the dam. The nearby quarries both used and generated a lot of water, and before Hurricane Agnes’ flood broke it in 1972, the dam was an idyllic nook in the woods. All the kids would walk out the back of town down “the dam hill” to amuse ourselves on the frozen lake. (It was a good joke to tell the new preacher about “the dam hill!”) I wasn’t a very good skater and I remember my cousin Judy telling me that I spent more time lying on the ice than skating on it. The older kids would build a bonfire off to the side, and we’d spend the better part of the whole day freezing, thawing, and “just messing around,” as we called it, with never a grown-up in sight.

Skateboarding on Main Street. The town was founded on a great hill after slate deposits were discovered in the 1850s, which brought an influx of hard-working families from Cornwall, Wales and Devon to work the quarries. When the skateboard craze hit some hundred-plus years later, it drew all their young descendants to Main Street with short, metal-wheeled boards to mess around. (Metal wheels were the leftover technology from roller-skates, which took a special key to adjust on your feet. And—let me tell you—roller skating on uneven slate sidewalks just wasn’t even fun!) I remember my cousin Craig telling me I had to get a skateboard with clay wheels—they’d work a lot better and I wouldn’t be spending all that time lying on the concrete than riding atop it. Like sledding, we’d walk to the top of the hill and ride the boards straight down the center of town, pausing only when someone would yell “CAR!” The old folks in town wished we wouldn’t go so fast because they didn’t want to see us get hurt. But no one stopped us.

Swimming in Claude’s Pond. Deep, water-filled Fisher’s Quarry was the destination of choice for the older teen boys to go skinny-dipping and wash up when it was hot. (This had also been the common practice of all the previous generations.) But I had that opportunity only once, living out of town as I did. Instead, my pappy would occasionally drive me and my brother and sister and a couple of cousins to his friend’s farm pond where we’d go wading and swimming and messing around. The older teen boys would drive there themselves and bring a long wooden plank. They’d extend it over the deep end of the pond and secure it with one of their jalopy’s front wheels to create a perfect diving board. The bigger boys allowed me, as a non-swimmer, to take a few turns, and after some tentative jumps into the shallows, I ignored my own caution and jumped out as far as I could. I remember my cousin Robert hauling me out of the water, saying that I shouldn’t spend more time lying on the bottom than floating on the top.

I learned a lot from my cousins. And from going outside and getting involved.

Like mine, most Baby Boomers’ childhoods were characterized by the habitual frequency in which we engaged our peers in free-spirited, unsupervised, outdoor play. It was there that we learned leadership and cooperation in picking teams for a pick-up game, and creative problem-solving in building a treehouse over a creek. We exerted our bodies while managing risk, and stretched our imaginations while messing around. We discovered both ourselves and our places when we pushed our limitations and our possibilities. Our self-development sprung from self-reliance.

A copious body of research now proves what we then knew, but didn’t understand: that social interaction in connection to nature is essential for our physical and mental health and our intellectual and social development. May we extend that legacy to both encourage and enable it with our children—and theirs.

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