Last week, I wrote about some of the eccentrics who lived near me when I was young. I appealed to readers of the column to submit their own memories of the people I mentioned or to speak of others who fit the description of being eccentric or, in the parlance of the past, “real characters”. Alas, I had no response to the invitation.
Perhaps some readers think it’s in bad taste, or exploitive, to talk about people as “characters” or “eccentric” if they don’t quite fit the norm. That is not my intention at all. I find people who live unconventional, nonconformist, or offbeat lives to be among the most interesting among us, and personally embrace the label of “eccentric” in my divergent approach to life.
My father taught me to be a fierce defender of those with disabilities of any kind. Whenever someone poked fun at a person who was “slow” (today we’d say with a learning disability) or “crippled” (today we’d say they were disabled), Babe would angrily respond, “They can’t help the way they are!” He’d be in fighting mode if they persisted in the ridicule.
It is important to accept people as they are and, if possible, to help them to overcome any hardships, mental or physical. One can laugh about what someone does, but not about what they are. I find social media posts of “the people of Walmart” which people find to be funny as simply offensive.
It helps to adjust one’s thinking as one matures to accept those differences, and one way to do that is to read widely.
John Warner’s Biblioracle column offered recommendations for choosing books that should be on every school curriculum: Some books that engender laughter in the reader; Some books that engender sadness or even grief in the reader; Some books the reader finds difficult or even confusing; Some books that the reader races through at a breakneck pace; Some books that must be read slowly; Some books that are ideally read more than once; Some books that are written from a point of view close to that of the reader; Some books that are written from points of view very different to that of the reader; Some books that are surprising; Some books that are boring; Some books that were written a long time ago; Some books that were written very recently; Some books that the reader will almost certainly agree with; Some books that the reader will almost certainly disagree with; Some books the reader may find challenging or even insulting to their world view; Some books that make the reader feel as though someone else deeply understands them; Some books about the past; Some books about the future; Some books about the present; Some books with animals that talk; Some books in translation; Some books that are poetry; Some books where everything is made up; Some books where nothing is made up; Some books where everything is made up and still true; Some books where nothing is made up but aren’t true.
“The goal is for the student to have reading experiences which provide them the chance to learn and reflect and reframe what they know about the world,” Warner writes. “We should always be prepared to have our foundations rocked by something new. This is the work of being human. At the same time, we also must have a foundational critical sensibility that we can fall back on after we have been rocked.”
I also recently read that research has identified Loma Linda, a city suburb in California’s San Bernardino County, as a Blue Zone, a place with relatively high numbers of centenarians. Exercise, healthful eating, and community connections are woven into the fabric of daily life, and those traits are seen as the reasons people exceed normal life expectancy. Those connections may include faith, empathy, and a sense of purpose.
Those are the things I recall from childhood. Interestingly, my sister’s memories of that same period are much darker, and I’ve never been able to understand why. It is partly for that reason that I asked readers to share their memories of people like “Blackie” the Hermit of Borough Road, Almon Bucklin, the Hermit of Patten Brook, Fred and Frank Patten, John and Helen Tracy, Harlan Lamos, Arthur Woods, and Freddie Robinson. My memory may be (and certainly is) different from others.
We had a neighbor, Harold Kenney, who was a retired teacher (having taught at the tiny one-room schoolhouse on what now is known as Profile Falls Road). Living alone since his mother died, Harold’s home on what now is known as Mountain Hill Road was filled with cats and plants of all varieties. He welcomed visitors to sit on his porch at dusk, with whippoorwills calling and Mount Periwig rising above the treetops. Among his visitors was Fred Ballou, another “character” who would annoy Harold by spitting tobacco juice as he sat in a rocking chair on the porch. Harold also had daily phone conversations (or gossip sessions) with Winnie Gray and Ruth Jewell. We would kid him about Ruth, calling her his “girlfriend” to which he responded by naming the tall oak at the corner of his driveway “Ruthie”. My first job was mowing his lawn, and I sometimes helped carry jugs of water from a spring down the road, since he had no running water.
Harold was a marvelous cook and no one has matched the thickness of the meringue on his lemon meringue pies, which he claimed to achieve by using a fork rather than beaters when whisking the egg white mixture. He would show up at our house with a pie, a cake, fudge, or other confection just at mealtime, feigning ignorance of the time and saying he had to be hurrying along, knowing that we would insist that he join us.
Years later, Almon Bucklin, who wrote the column “The Hermit of Patten Brook” for the Bristol Enterprise, also found ways to get invited to a meal. Living in a cabin, trying to follow the path of Henry David Thoreau, he taught us how to cook fiddlehead ferns and extolled the hermit’s life — as long as he had access to transportation and a radio to follow the news.
There is a verbal story about Almon attempting to block a piece of highway equipment that was trying to improve the road that ran by his cabin. He would have none of it, and stood in the middle of the road to prevent the work from being done. The Alexandria road agent walked up to the diminutive hermit, lifted him off the ground, and set him down at the side of the road, allowing the equipment operator to do his job.
We counted Almon as a friend and stayed in touch when he moved, and moved again, ending up on Hall Road where he died on the winter solstice. The first day of winter always brings back those memories.
Do you have a story to tell?
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