8089. THINGS ARE DIFFERENT NOW (#36)

36. NELSON
Sometimes I felt like I was running

a mile a minute, to somewhere, but

I never knew fully where. Fitful

starts and stops. Hesitations and

feint. Weird things. There was a

lady in Elmira, I forget her name,

just knew her as Peggy.  She worked

in the same place I did. She was

maybe ten years older than me at

that time, maybe fifteen  -  she always

told everyone, anywhere, anytime,

that I reminded her of Omar Sharif,

swore I could be Omar Sharif. I had

no clue who the heck Omar Sharif

was. I looked him up once, in the

library, and it still didn't mean much.

Some swashbuckler Spanish guy or

Lebanese, or something. I never

bothered. But she used to drive me

nuts with that. It probably doesn't

come across as much now, but

back then it was pretty difficult

and almost annoying. Besides,

all this lady ever seemed to do

any other time, was listen to sports

commentary on the little radio next

to her, by Joe Garagiola. Strange

world  -  all those old, now dead,

baseball guys were still around then

and all these dweeby little baseball

shows were aired, along with another

maniac sports guy named Howard

Cosell, who stock-in-trade speciality

was 'Annoyance.' Omar Sharif, the

actor, be damned.

-

I was telling you previously about

Ithaca. Up along the Finger Lakes,

right there, my friend Nelson knew

of a couple of spots where there were

grand gorges and waterfalls and pools

of water beneath the falls, in rock

outcroppings. We'd all go there, on

many of the hottest Summer days

you'd imagine. It was great  -  they

had a son, (Ian, some big-wig now

in NBC) about the same age as

our son, and they got along fine.

Jumping from ledges into these

big pools of water, standing at

the base of the various falls,

under pealing runs of descending

and cool water. It was all very

nice. Nelson had a brand-new

AMC Pacer. When they'd first

come out he bought one

immediately. Novelty value

was high, and the kids loved

it, but there was so much

window and glass in the squat

and quite weirdly-shaped, for

the time, car, that it quickly

became, on a hot, sunny

afternoon, like a hothouse,

with all that glass just magnifying

the heat inside. The funny thing

was that Nelson and Kris didn't

share any of our 'intellectual' attitudes.

What I mean to say is that the draw

to Ithaca, for us, was the cosmopolitan,

university atmosphere, and those books

and the few bookstores and coffee spots

with earnest and intense people milling

about, reading and such. That all

meant so much to us, but to them the

only feature useful of Ithaca and

environs was the hedonistic aspect :

fun and the falls, water and the lakes

It was all worlds apart from each other,

and we just never meshed it. They

were soon gone anyway -   not that

they moved, just that we stopped

seeing them, for various reasons.

My wife had an active roll in one

of the churches in town, and one

day Nelson (who was the Elmira

High School Art teacher) crossed

names with someone else in the

school who knew Kathy by name,

etc., and pretty much that was all he

had to hear -  he never let the matter

rest, making fun of and belittling

Kathy as an 'upstanding member

of the church community' and a

regular 'community pillar'. In

his ironic sense; she tired of it,

and we soon enough just parted

ways based on that. As the art

teacher in the high school, at the

time period this was, Nelson

would occasionally end up with

local runaways, who'd eventually

end up at his house, knocking on

his door. He'd take them in, and

then the trouble began. A few days,

then a week  -  who to contact? What

to do? Parents? Police? It happened

a few times and  -  to make it worse  -

they were most usually girls. He never

lost his job over it, I don't think, but

there were a few close calls, and

some explaining needed. Kristin

died some years later, of a cancer.

-

They were interesting people. 

Nelson was from Tupper Lake, a

small community in the Adirondacks,

and Kristin was from Frankfurt, or maybe

Frankford, NY. Also upstate, but I forget

where. I don't know how they met or 

anything, but they seemed an OK

couple, with the usual sorts of conflicts.

I really never saw fully how they did it  -

smoking pot, liberated sexuality, harboring

runaways, boyfriends, girlfriends, on

the stereo at all times either Fairport

Convention or Steeleye Span. Each of

whose music I did eventually end up

liking. They were definitely 1960's

people, just running over into the 70's 

and, for the time, getting by  -  by 

remaining a bit marooned and 
sensitized only to their own coterie of 
references, people and habits. They lived 
on Irvine Place, about three blocks from us. 
I used the name of their street for the title of 
one of the first little 'books' that I wrote.  More 
about place than about them, but it was all 
in there. Theirs was a large, old, ramshackle 
house, probably old-line Elmira from like 1910.
In the entryway, he had a large, oversized
sculpture, made from limbs and branches,
of a human body, standing straight up,
but writhing in some sort of contortion. 
You kind of just never knew what
to make of it.
-
All this was kind of very lonesome.
Nelson was not anything if not totally 
sure of himself. He was adamant, about
all things. I never was  -  I always left 
room for doubt or some discursive 
discovery, and  I always had a religious  
side to me that was paramount. My 
religious side may have tended towards 
the 'magical', the very active and present 
aspect of religion, changing things and 
altering perception, instead of the 
doctrinaire and the credulous, but 
religious it was He had none. 
His profession was always in 
'for and of the momen't only, and 
by the enjoyment of that moment he  
lived or died. All else was irony, facile 
motivations, and being able to pick at the 
foibles of others, most especially the pious 
ones  -  like those who, he'd claim, suckered 
Kathy in. We talked, it went back and
forth. But he was always getting stoned and 
his weird gaze then would just get strange, and 
everything was funny, and the Triscuits  and
cheese were always out. It was really pretty
difficult to really get anywhere on any subject,
let alone the precipice of religious interpretation.
I just think, also, that he disliked old people.
He must himself be one now, so I do hope
he's worked it all out and found peace.
I feel I have.