For all of the times I’ve had to dodge geese while cycling the Hudson River Greenway, I’m surprised that this question never crossed my mind: “What if a goose could ride a bike?”
Funny, how often I find answers to questions I never asked.
Well, all right, it’s a duck. Close enough. (Then again, I am not an ornithologist.)
For today, the Day of the Dead, there’s nothing like a good, spooky mystery.
While Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King and others have written many spine-tingling tales, there is no shortage of real-life accounts of the scary and unexplainable (or yet-to—be-explained.)
Take Lawrence Farrell, a.K.a., Bicycle Larry—as an example. Fittingly enough, he lived—and perhaps died—in Maine, King’s home state.
Locals remember him as a friendly, if eccentric, presence. When people last remember seeing him, he was living with someone more menacing—Norris Perry, a.k.a. Lonesome Loon—in a trailer at the top of the Narrow Gauge Trail, near Windsor.
As the name implies, the trail was a railroad route. It led to a Veterans’ Administration hospital and some locals say they hear the mournful cries of long-lost pass, especially at night during this time of year.
Anyway, Bicycle Larry was last seen in late October 2004. He didn’t collect his Social Security check the following month, or any time thereafter. Before taking his own life that Dece, Lonesome Loon left his sister a voicemail in which he confessed to killing Larry and disposing of his body by a brook behind the trailer.
Given the rugged terrain and long, harsh Maine winter, authorities couldn’t search in earnest until Spring. Neither Larry nor his bike have been found.
During the intervening twenty-one years, some have reported seeing a “spectral presence” of Bicycle Larry riding along the Narrow Gauge Trail—especially at this time of year.
Those of you who have been following this blog probably have noticed that I haven’t been posting as often as I did, say, a couple of years ago. I haven’t stopped cycling or lost interest in blogging. Rather, I have been busy with other things, some out of necessity, others by choice.
Even though I am not working as much as I did in the spring, it seems to take up more and more of my time and, more important, my mental and emotional energy. I am exhausted when I come home. Someone suggested that it’s purely and simply a consequence of aging. The fact that I am not as young as I used to be (if you’ll indulge me a cliché) probably has something to do with how I feel. But I think it also has to do with the changes at work and in my own life.
 |
| From MDLive |
While the campus on which I teach hasn’t specifically been a target of the current Administration, I feel varying combinations of fear, gloom and despair whenever I arrive. Much of that has to do with the upcoming “merger” with another school. I encased “merger” in quotes because the college in which I teach will lose its name and become a location of our “merger” “partner.”
Naturally, many of us wonder whether we’ll still have our jobs or will have to move in order to keep them. Or else we worry that we will be required to abandon courses, research projects and other activities that, for some of us, are the core of our work.
While the takeover (I’m calling it what it is) might be necessary or simply rationalize-able from financial and other standpoints, I can’t help but to think it’s a symptom of the same mindset that causes children to go hungry because of a government shutdown. Some of my students are among the poorest and, in so many other ways, most vulnerable. It’s a miracle (if I can be allowed to use a religious term) that some of them are in college and we do what we can to accommodate them in their fearfully complicated lives, let alone challenge and inspire them. Will the institution that’s taking over, which is much larger, understand their needs, both in and out of the classroom? Will it care?
Also, I have to wonder whether that larger institution, which probably receives more government money, will subject me or others to the humiliation faculty and staff members of other larger, more prominent universities (think of Columbia) have suffered.
The students, interestingly, have been nicer, even if they are too often ill-prepared. Perhaps they know that I am on their side or, at least, not “the enemy.” A few have expressed fears that family members or they themselves will be apprehended, detained or even deported to some country they’ve never seen before. There are times when I wonder whether I will meet such a fate, even though I am a citizen of the country in which I was born to citizen parents—while my father was serving in the military, no less.
Simply living, let alone working, in the United States , is exhausting. Japan is looking really good. So is France. And Spain. And a few other countries. They have a their crazy nationalists and religious zealots, to be sure. But even though the daytime highs were 34-37C every day I was in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, the temperature seemed a lot cooler, if you know what I mean.
