A Possum's Tale

A POSSUM’S TALE (original version submitted to Chesapeake Bay Magazine and published)

 

Wednesday, August 18, 2004 11:04 AM

 

 

  ...so there we were, having a lunch at the dockside restaurant along the Chesapeake Bay, on Solomon's Island, MD, when Toni looks out toward the dock and asks,

"Do you see that thing on that piling?"

"That 'thing' ? On which piling?" I wonder, knowing I should be used to my wife's non-specific choice of words. Following her typically vague wording and unanswerable (for the moment) question, I turn to look at the fifty-odd pilings within vision until I see one right off the edge that looks as if it's got a growth on one side of the top.

"Oh, look, it's moving!" she says, just as I see the one she's referring to.  We go out on the outside eating deck and realize that it's a baby possum hanging onto the piling, with nothing but water under it.

 

Soon, a small crowd of diners and a couple waitresses join us, as the two of us are trying to figure out how to save it.

"I saw that when we came in in our dingy," a guy behind me tells me, "but we thought they were river rats." 

"They?" I ask myself.

Then a beefy fellow in his late fifties, at least, on one of the many expensive boats docked at the marina yells over to tell us that there're another two swimming below the other one, and sure enough, two more babies are indeed swimming back and forth with no clue how to get out.

 

So one of the waitresses comes back out with a round serving tray, lays her very ample bulk down on the grass-and-wood edge of the dock and manages to get one of them to crawl up onto the tray and then flips it over her shoulder onto the grass, making most of the small crowd jump back as if it were a baby raptor or something. Meanwhile, the other swimmer is still doing the possum-paddle.

 

The guy on the boat asks me if I want to borrow his crabnet and I say sure.  So he brings it and I scoop the other swimmer out of the water, while the boat owner tells us that on another morning, he'd seen the mother (and kids) living under the restaurant's open-air deck.  Sure enough, I take my catch out of the net and put it in the grass by the deck and the little critter crawls back under the deck after my wife carries it most of the way there; Toni and I can hear the mother making some kind of clicking noises to call them.  Meanwhile, the first rescued one looks like the proverbial drowned rat and is totally disoriented and crawling around in circles in the grass, sneezing out water in little bursts, with everyone else scattering when it comes close (these things are maybe five inches long, not counting the tail).  So I pick it up by the back of the neck, lay it down in the grass maybe two feet from the deck overhang;  Toni points it in the direction of the mother; it, too, goes home.  That leaves the one in the photo, still clinging to the piling.

 

So I finally get the metal part of the net under it and practically have to pry it off, since the poor thing's scared to death and desperately trying to crawl into that hole in the top of the piling that might be big enough to harbor an egg...the critter gets tangled in the net, and wraps its tail around the metal part, but I finally get it, too, out of the net (it opens its mouth as if trying to bite me...lots of teeth on those beasts!) and Toni pushes that one home to Mom Possum.

 

I guess the only downside to the whole experience was when other diners asked Toni what was going on and she voiced her concern about the lives of the little buggers, some people looked at her as if she were nuts, or they just couldn't care less.  Okay, I know grown possums are downright ugly things, but jeez, little babies?  If we stop caring about baby critters, who's next?  And it's not as though we're PETA fanatics (we're not) or country hicks; we both grew up in the city before escaping to the rural, central-Virginia county we brought our kids to and still live in. 

 

A memorable lunch adventure and the highlight of our one-night mini-vacation...

 

 

 

A TEACHER GETS A PORSCHE

 

So there I was, sitting in my classroom, C-213, after school on October 9, 1976, when in marches my entire fifth-period junior honors English class, along with a middle-aged guy in a tweed sport jacket, a woman wearing sunglasses and carrying a notebook, and a very tall black guy with a couple cameras around his neck.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

The kids just laugh (a few of the girls still giggle) and Jim Pekar hands me a long, thin envelope, the kind that greeting cards come in.

“What’s this?” I ask this time.

“Open it, open it!” a few kids say excitedly.

So I slit it open somewhat hesitantly, still wondering about these three strange adults standing by in the room.

I take out a greeting card, a birthday card – and I apologize for not remembering a thing about it…and out slides a car key on a keychain.  The ornament on the end of the keyring (if that’s the right word for it) is the Porsche crest encased in plastic.

“Okay, what’s this?” I repeat.

“It’s for your Porsche!  Happy birthday!” young Jim kinda shouts as the rest of the kids clap their hands, ending my concerns that they were all there after school, voluntarily, to complain about their research-paper assignment and that the adults were a couple lawyers and their photographer, there to gather evidence of how unfair a teacher I was.

“Are you serious?!” I say, somewhat skeptically.

“You said we’d all get A’s if you got a Porsche!s” Joanne informs me of something I may have said…well, I’m sure I said it, but….

“It’s waiting for you out in front of the school,” the guy in the sport jacket informs me.

“C’mon, Mr. B.!” some other student shouts.

Thus begins a march to the other end of the very large suburban school in suburban Clifton, New Jersey.

And there it was, indeed, a metallic lime-green 1976 Porsche Targa 911 convertible.

“Get in, get in!”  the kids all shout as the guy in the tweed, who I have since discovered on the Long March is a Porsche salesman, the woman is a reporter for the Passaic Co  County Herald News, and the black guy is the photographer for the paper.

“You told them they’d all get A’s, huh, man?  Boy, you’re in it now!” he had whispered to me.  Tweed Guy opens the driver’s side door and gives me the “get in” gesture.

So I get in, along with the salesman…and I turn the key.  You know, the engine sounded just like the one in our ’68 VW Beetle that was sitting at home, in our garage. (We lived a couple blocks from the high school, so I walked to school with the kids every day.)

“Go ahead, take it for a drive,” Tweed Guy says.

So, gritting my teeth and hoping I don’t have a problem with an unfamiliar clutch – it would have been kinda embarrassing to stall the thing out, after all – we pull away from the front of the school to the cheers of an entire English class and the clicking of the guy’s Nikon.  Maybe it was a Canon.

As we near the end of the school’s driveway, about to exit onto Colfax Avenue, Tweed Guy turns to me and says,
”You know, this is great!  The local paper is gonna give us great free publicity for this and we can make your dream come true, all at the same time!” he says with this big, manure-eating grin.

So I have to ask, somewhat incredulously,

“Listen, are you giving me this car, like as part of some kind of tax write-off?!”

I thought Tweed Guy was going to have a stroke.

“No, no!  We’re not giving it to you, but I can give you a good price on it!”

“Listen, I’m a teacher, not a lawyer!  How much does this car cost?
After he tells me, I inform him that I make less than that for my annual salary.

“Well, we have some good used Porsches at the dealership.  What kind of car are you driving now?” he asks.

When I tell him about the Beetle, he smiles and says,
”No, I mean, what is your regular car?”

So I tell him there’s only one car at home, the same VW.  He doesn’t say anything else. So I inform him that he is not making my dream come true, that’s it’s more like taking a kid from the ghetto to Disneyworld but making him go back home to the projects that night.  He doesn’t say anything.

So I drive to our house, the same one that’s a couple blocks away, put the Porsche in neutral, get out, and go ring our front doorbell since my wife is not working at the time in order to be a full-time mother to our second kid.

Toni opens the door and I point to the Porsche at the curb and tell her I’m taking it for a test ride and thinking of buying it.

“Oh, sure,” she says and closes the door.

So fifteen minutes after getting into the car, we pull back in front of the high school where most of the kids are still waiting to greet me with some scattered applause.  I park and turn off the engine and get out.

The article in the paper the next day said that I stood there with “a  bemused look” on my face, so I guess that’s what was there.  I shake hands with Tweed Guy, who tries once more to entice me to go look at the dealership inventory, at which point I remind him that I’m still a teacher and that I’d have to take out a second mortgage and sell my first-born, the daughter, to some Arab sheik to be able to afford a Porsche.  He gets in and drives it away.

“We all get A’s now, right, Mr. B.?” someone shouts.

“You’ll be lucky if you see a passing grade after this!” I growl and they all laugh, knowing that I’m kidding…they hope.
Well, Andy said we all have fifteen minutes of fame…in my case, I guess it was fifteen minutes of being a Porsche owner…or borrower.

COLLEGE PROFESSOR FALLS OUT A WINDOW

 

English Professor Falls Out Window

 It was the spring of 1963, and I was a freshman English major at Montclair State Teachers’ College (which dropped the Teachers’ at the end of that semester and has since exchanged College for University these days) and I had an elderly professor for Early English Literature who fell out a window…honest. As I said, he was old – ancient, actually, because my mother had had him in 1940! -- and on that nice spring day in 1963, he was sitting on the sill of an open window in a one-story, post-WW II wooden building that had been built for married veterans who were finishing college on the GI Bill, and he was reading some of THE CANTERBURY TALES in Middle English and he just fell out…I remember seeing his white bony legs and argyle socks in a pair of scuffed and unpolished brown loafers as he disappeared backwards…we all just sat there in shock, then some of us ran to the window, but he was gone…the next thing we knew, the door to the end of the pre-fab building slammed, and in Dr. Russell Kraus came, still holding the open book, and still reading…with bits of leaves and grass in his remaining white hair and his horn-rimmed glasses somewhat askew…as if nothing had happened. It became a legend at Montclair State…don’t know if anyone tells the story anymore so I thought I’d preserve it here, before those of us who witnessed the moment are all gone.

 

Two new Kindle books: SNOW, NO ACCUMULATION and COLEVILLE

COLEVILLE: 

A trip into eastern Kentucky, where the coal used to be dug out of the earth by broken-backed miners with cracked nails and clogged lungs, opens up a new world for Lewis, a college senior with his eye on a career in journalism.  But what begins as a way to avoid spending the Christmas holidays alone in his college rental house becomes a journey into the lives of a very special family and a romance that he was not expecting.  It will also introduce him to small-town corruption and the real possibility of his own murder.

 

SNOW, NO ACCUMULATION:

 

A trip to the Atlantic City area of New Jersey’s southern shores during Christmas break for culinary-arts teacher Jack Hilton, an unplanned trip to claim an inheritance from someone he’d never met --had never even heard of -- will lead to more than Jack could have ever imagined.  It will be a trip to change his life…forever.

excerpt from Ed's latest Kindle ebook: SNOW, NO ACCUMULATION

On the overpass, I drove back over the Turnpike and the glowing red chain below that I’d so recently been a link on and followed the two-lane asphalt – at least, I think it was asphalt – as it wound its way into and through the blackness ahead and  on either side of the road.  I had no idea what highway I was on; the sideways snow had plastered itself to the few signs along the road.  I think one might have said “524” but it might have been any other combination of numbers, so I didn’t even consider getting out the free road atlas I’d gotten with the AAA membership.

            The headlights illuminated nothing but white through the twin black fans on the windshield.  I glanced briefly down through the dashboard glow to discover that I was going close to forty.

            “Not bad, considering,” I recall telling myself.  The radio DJ told me it was getting close to nine and that he could finally knock off and go home.  I envied him.  I also wondered if he lived close to the studio.  If not, he was going to find that the “non-accumulation” of snow was coming down even faster than the recent update had predicted.  He’d be out in the white shitstorm with the rest of us on Friday night.

            After close to an hour of driving, I’d encountered one lone pickup coming in the opposite direction.  I hadn’t seen a single light on along the road and began to wonder exactly where in the country’s most-densely-populated state I was.

            Finally, I came to an intersection.  I’d had the sense that the road had turned more north-and-south than east-west, so I took a left onto the new road.  The surface was perfectly white, not a twin set of tire tracks in sight. 

            “Where the hell am I -- Idaho?” I growled at the Corolla.  It just kept up that nice, trustworthy purr and itself forging ahead, ignoring me and my grumbling.  It also occurred to me that finding the house, in the dark, in the unexpected snow, was going to be basically impossible, so I made up my mind that I’d shelter for the rest of the night in the first Holiday Inn or any other motel I found along the road.  After all, I was heading toward the Jersey shore, where it sometimes seemed that there were actually more motels and “guest houses” than there was garbage floating offshore.

            When the Toyota began to go sideways, I realized that I might not get to a motel at any time in the near future.

 

            I did what I’d been taught: I steered in the direction of the skid.  I guess that got me to the three pines faster that way.  The car and I came to an abrupt stop.  As I struggled to get the seat belt and harness released, I realized that it had locked somehow.  I’d read about people getting stuck in flaming wrecks and fortunately, had had the foresight to hang a small but very sharp key-chain knife on the directional-signal lever.  The inch-long blade cut through the belts quickly and easily.  As the harness snapped back past my head, I realized that the engine was still purring faithfully, the wipers were still flapping, and the new DJ was telling me that I shouldn’t be out on the roads if I didn’t need to be.  Well, I wasn’t, I was off the road.  I shut everything off and tried to open the door.  That’s when I realized that the Toyota was neatly wedged between three pines, with no way out of the front doors.

            I climbed over the front seat and quickly opened the back driver’s-side door.  Snow blew straight into my face.  Just as quickly, I pulled the door closed and reached over the seat to take the keys out of the ignition. 

            Then I thought about taking stock of the situation.  I had no reason to think staying in the car was a good idea; I’d seen only one other vehicle on the road in over an hour.  I had a flashlight with new batteries, mainly because I’d just bought it; I had warm clothes and a pair of hiking boots in the trunk, left over from my last trek to High Point…and somewhere, way off to the right, I could see a light once in a while when the snow and wind died down a little.  I got out, grabbed the boots and got back into the car.  A minute or two later, the hood of my jacket pulled out of the zippered compartment behind my neck and now pulled tightly around my face, I locked and left the Toyota with an apology about what I’d done to it and got out on the road.

 

            Fortunately, the wind was blowing from behind me as I made my way up the highway.  Shining the light ahead, it was pretty easy to follow the road, mainly because it dropped down to drainage ditches on the sides.  I kept looking off to my right for the light or lights that I’d glimpsed before.  Once in a while, I could see it through the trees, which seemed to be all thin, scrubby pines, but so growing so densely together that it was hard to get a straight look through them in that direction.

            After maybe twenty minutes, I saw what seemed to be a road or driveway that dipped down, leading off the highway where the trees thinned out somewhat and made a gap and in the direction of the light.  Cautiously, I stepped down off the pavement onto what was obviously not pavement, but definitely some kind of worn track.  I could see the ground on either side rise up to a line of more pines, but the road ahead was clear, except for what was now at least three to four inches of snow.  On the other hand, the wind was now coming from my right and partially obscuring my vision.  Still, I could see that lone light flickering, tantalizingly, straight ahead.  Lines from “Hotel California” popped into my head.

 

        Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light,

        My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim,

        I had to stop for the night.

 

I had to laugh; I’d stopped all right.  And now my old trustworthy Japanese friend was stuck between some unfriendly pines.  Well, my head wasn’t heavy, but the snow was making my sight dim, that was for sure.  There also wasn’t any girl standing in a doorway with a candle in her hand.

            The cold snow made little pitty-pat sounds as it bounced off the outside of the parka’s hood.  I was glad it was a dry snow; the going would’ve been a lot harder if it had been the wet, clinging kind, although the wind was doing a pretty good job of plastering it to the sides of the trees.

            Then, as I stared straight ahead, the light that had been getting progressively closer -- it seemed anyway -- disappeared.

            “Shit!” I said to the wind and snow.  The idea had been that if there was a light, there must be people, and therefore, a phone, or at least, some place to find shelter until the storm passed.  Then the light came back on.

            I shook my head, thinking that it had just been my imagination, or that something had blocked my vision.  Then it went out again.

            I went to the right and stood among an especially thick stand of tall-growing bushes that were just higher than my head, pressing myself back into them.  They did a pretty good job of keeping me out of the snow and wind, despite being leafless.  Then I stared back in the direction of the light.

            When I looked that time, there it was, still glowing yellow and opaquely through the curtain of white.  I went back onto the narrow road and moved off, keeping my eyes on that light.  It was definitely going off and on, but not with any kind of regularity, but more like a bulb that hasn’t been screwed into a lamp securely and flickers when someone brushes against the table it’s on.  Then the light went off again.

            That’s when I walked right into a metal fence, face first.  And it hurt.