Author Topic: franksolich reminisces of Hillary women in New Jersey  (Read 757 times)

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Offline franksolich

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franksolich reminisces of Hillary women in New Jersey
« on: June 09, 2016, 04:45:34 AM »
“You’re thinking of all those old ladies you knew back in New Jersey,” she said, as we sat on the front porch.  It was a torridly hot day out here in the Sandhills, with clear skies and temperatures in the high 90s.

The front porch faces east, and this was afternoon, so we were at least out of the sun.  The three all-orange cats Ellie, Rusty, and Russ, were lazily lounging on various parts of the porch, wherever there as an occasional breeze, while she sat on an antique Adirondack chair and I sat on the floor of the porch beside her.

“That’s odd,” I said; “how’d you know that?”

“Well, every time you’re really quiet and looking east with that faraway gaze, one knows you’re thinking of New Jersey, and wishing you were there,” she said.

- - - - - - - - - -

I’d lived in New Jersey during the mid-1980s.  When I’d graduated from college, there was nothing to hold me to Nebraska, my parents being dead and myself estranged from the hippiesque older brothers and sisters, and so I’d gotten a job and moved to Pennsylvania so as to live closer to relatives.

Having been born and raised in Nebraska, far away from any aunts, uncles, and cousins, I’d always dreamed of living surrounded by them.  They were after all rather pleasant people when I visited them while growing up; delightful people.

However, relatives aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and after a couple of years in northeastern Pennsylvania, I moved to northeastern New Jersey, Fair Lawn, near Paterson, so as to put a little distance between they and myself. 

As I’ve never been the sort to break laws and get into trouble with the cops, I never bothered changing my driver’s license, which at the time had some years to go before requiring renewal.


I found New Jerseyans some of the nicest people one could ever hope to meet, being warmly welcomed and accepted by all sorts of people.  As usual, when easing myself into a new place, I first earned the notice and affection of the older women, after which their children and grandchildren followed suit, and I’d gained a circle that encompassed all genders, ages, and interests.

That such women tended to be, uh, up there in years didn’t make them “old ladies” in my own mind and value-system; I always considered them grande dames.

I left there in autumn 1986, after the University of Nebraska had humiliatingly lost to the University of Colorado in football, the first time since 1967.  Such a thing had shamed us all; I myself seriously considered burning my diploma in seppuku.  So great was the wailing and gnashing of teeth that I decided it best I return, to share in the sufferings of my homeland and my people.

(I was not aware of greater humiliations to come later, but all that was much later, so never mind.)

- - - - - - - - - -

Because of my unfamiliarity with the neighborhood, I’d rented an apartment where most of the inhabitants were elderly people native New Yorkers living there so as to avoid the confiscatory taxes of the larger state.


But that was okay; we all got along famously, myself always on call to help carry groceries or to go out on errands, and they always more than happy to include me among their family gatherings and celebrations.

They certainly proved much nicer than my own aunts and uncles and cousins.

I was never sure exactly how they really felt about me, though—and alas it’s years too late to find out—because I’m sure I gave them a phenomenon they either had seen only rarely, or not at all.

That I was deaf was probably something with which they’d had to deal with in others before, but that I was deaf and social and articulate seemed to considerably discombobulate them.  In fact, unless I was spotted accidentally exposing the side of my head with no ear, or the other side with just a flap rather than an ear, many of them adamantly refused to believe it.

But the greatest confusion I seemed to pose for them was that I was a cowboy from the Sandhills of Nebraska.  Nebraska itself might as well have been somewhere out west of Idaho or Oregon, but the Sandhills…..well, the Sandhills they could not possibly imagine any more than they could imagine the 14th-century court of Kublai Khan in Cathay as seen by Marco Polo.

apres moi, le deluge

Milo Yiannopoulos "It has been obvious since 2016 that Trump carries an anointing of some kind. My American friends, are you so blind to reason, and deaf to Heaven? Can he do all this, and cannot get a crown? This man is your King. Coronate him, and watch every devil shriek, and every demon howl."