Tag: owego ny
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The Empty Bedroom
This was once my bedroom. There was a time when this room was packed full of the stuff of life… From a crib made in the mid-1940’s, I would look out at the flowered wallpaper. Maybe a mobile hung just out of my reach, and moved about when a breeze caught it from a partly…
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Finding Peter
[Lenny is on the left. Peter is happy to be in Pennsylvania] It was here in the Adirondack Mountains that I walked up to the wall of a ranger cabin. It was a far off December night, when my heart and body were young. I had a flashlight in my shaking hand, and read by…
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Yes, But Why Can’t You Go Home Again?
It’s a cliché. It’s a meme. It’s been repeated a hundred billion times by three hundred billion people. “You can’t go home again” I’ve read Thomas Wolfe’s book by the same name. It was a long time ago. I may be wrong (correct me if I am), but I do not recall Wolfe ever saying…
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From My Cradle To Her Grave
The first woman to see me naked is lying six feet down in the silt of the Susquehanna River. It’s a small cemetery in a small community…not even a town or village…just a cluster of houses several miles down river from the town where I grew up. On the last day of May, I will…
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The Postman Always Winks Twice
Sometime in the late 1990’s, my wife and I drove to Owego, NY to visit my aging father. My mum had passed away in 1992, so my dad was living quietly and alone as a widower in our big rambling family home on Front Street. Room by room and closet by closet, any objects or…
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A Watercolor Found
My father never said much about his life. He did have his favorite stories that he would tell us when his four boys were…little boys. Some of the tales were family jokes, like this one: “We were so poor, one Christmas we got a pair of roller skates. We had to wait until the next…
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Coal For Christmas
My father grew up poor. Not the kind of poor where he would walk through ten inches of snow barefoot or go from house to house asking for bread. Just the kind of poor that would keep his father one step ahead of the rent collector. His parents provided the best they could, but, by…
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Waiting For All Hallow’s Eve XVI: “Is My Childhood Home Haunted?”
Sometime in 2005, I handed the keys of my childhood home to the new owners. That action was very difficult for me. This was the only home I had ever known from birth to the time I went off to college. But, even in the years since 1965, when I hopped into a car and…
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Waiting For All Hallow’s Eve XV: “The Ghost Who Called My Name-A True Story”
What I am about to tell you actually happened to me. But, do I have the absolute right to say that a “ghost” called my name? No, I cannot. Declaring it an actual spirit from beyond the grave, requires scientific proof…and I cannot offer you any. But, I have no other word to describe the…
patrickjegan 