David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Weathering Heights: Bannerman Castle

Sometimes weather cooperates in mysterious ways.  You wouldn’t think enduring a thunderstorm without any possibility of shelter could be much fun, but my companion Bette and I overcame wet feet and wind- tangled hair, finding a storm the perfect dramatic atmosphere for a visit to Bannerman Castle.  Once a strongbox-like warehouse storing surplus military goods ranging from rifles and swords to helmets, artillery shells and uniforms, the structure is now a romantic ruin, its cracked and broken façade covered with vines and threatening collapse.  Last winter, one-and-a-half sides of the building crashed to the ground overnight.

Largest Pie Plate a Yawn

My buddy Alan and I have seen the world’s biggest pie plate and it was a big yawn.  Perhaps it’s communications dish fatigue, but seeing a large metal disc angled toward the sky is none too interesting.   Inasmuch as I share the cultural fetish for superlatives afflicting many of us, I expected to be more excited, maybe awed.  Who doesn’t want to see the largest, longest, fastest, and most powerful?  But sometimes a dull object grown grandiose is . . . well . . . just dull on a grander scale.

Depth of Field: Poems and Photographs

 Antrim House | 2010 | 96 pages | ISBN: 978-0-9843418-5-6 | Purchase

 Depth of Field reads unlike any other poetry book.  In his second collection, David K. Leff continues weaving together the inner and the outer spheres of life, connecting personal striving, loss, and wonderment with the worlds of nature, cultural currents, and our collective past.  But stepping beyond words, he links verbal and visual experience with poems joined to his own sometimes stunning, sometimes poignant photographs.  Words and pictures partner to tell parallel stories amplifying the reader’s encounter.

Watermelon: The Need for Seeds

There are few delights of summer as exquisite as a bite into the crunchy, juicy sweetness of a watermelon slice.  We may gripe about the season’s heat and humidity, but in that refreshing first bite of overmoist concentrated candied sunshine we find just compensation.  Still, there’s a serious problem with watermelon.

It’s not that there’s a shortage.  This is watermelon time in Southern New England and supermarkets and roadsides stands display mounds of them, enough to keep the most devoted aficionado satisfied.  No, the problem is with seeds, or rather the lack of them.  Virtually all watermelons found at the regular outlets are seedless.  Who decided seeds were no good?

Stillwell and Surf

After salt air and French fries at Stillwell and Surf, I sent
you a goofy photo, my mouth hotdog-full, grinning
in a crowd among the clamoring signs at Nathan’s Famous.
Over three bucks for what cost you a nickel.  Like you,
Coney Island isn’t what it was.

Memory abides in a breath-held rush down the steep watery
slide of Luna Park’s Shoot-the-Chutes, then darts through
a chaos of bodies, clashing calliopes and flashing colored
lights to the exit where girl-clasping soldiers gladly toss
tickets to a kid starved for speed and wind.

Today people still watch people while strolling the magic-
carpet planks along that remnant honky-tonk of whirring
rides, clam shacks and yammering barkers. But the idle
parachute jump looms like a lonely Eiffel
and apartment towers conceal elation’s ghosts at Luna.

Wheezing with emphysema in a world contracting
to a Parkinson quake, you know exactly what you’ve lost
and where you left it.  Those distorted mirrors, rollercoasters
and ducks in a row you couldn’t hit now seem life’s true
apprenticeship.  All you ever wanted was one last ride.

Dangling Shoes

About three miles north of Kalkaska, Michigan on U.S. Route 131 is a huge roadside maple and some smaller surrounding trees festooned with pairs of hanging shoes.  The footwear was as thick as ornaments on an overindulged Christmas evergreen, and just as colorful.  I’d seen an occasional pair or two thrown bola style over utility wires or suspended from a sturdy branch, but this was my first encounter with a full-blown shoe tree.  It filled me with a mischievous delight, and I wished I had with me that old pair of powder blue sneakers gathering dust in my closet.

RoadsideAmerica.com lists well over a 150 such trees throughout the country and calls them “the greatest embodiment of the American Spirit you can find on the highway (free of admission charge, anyway).”  This tree had shoes wrapped around branches, clinging to the trunk and dangling like mobiles from limbs.  Most were various types of athletic shoes, but there were snow boots, sandals, wingtips, hiking boots and slippers.  They came in orange, pink, blue, white, yellow, black, brown, and green.  There were shoes for babies and kids, and for adults in every size and enough styles to please most people.  Few shoe stores are likely to carry so wide an inventory.

It was a spontaneous work of art and an evolving statement, a kind of Wikipedia of pop creation that anyone could add to and that was constantly changing without ever being finished.  I felt a kind of whimsical joy beneath the tree, far distant from the sinister rumors that a pair of hanging shoes indicates a site for drug deals, gang violence or cruel practical jokes played on drunks and bullied schoolchildren.  Who, I wondered, had belonged to all these shoes and where had they journeyed before landing here?

How wonderfully strange it was to see floating footgear that will never again envelop a foot.  These soles will walk on air indefinitely, moving to the vagaries of the wind rather than the regimented orders of a leg.  From now on, I think I’ll keep a pair of old shoes under the seat of my car.  You never know when you’ll find the right tree.

World's Biggest Tire

You never know when something long forgotten might crop up on the landscape and bring with it a flood of memories.  Such was the case while driving on I-94 in Michigan with my buddy Alan recently.  Just outside of Detroit, we passed the world’s largest tire.  It’s an 80 foot tall, 12 ton giant that I vaguely remembered from my childhood as a Ferris wheel spinning at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair.  Long ago stripped of its gondolas, it was moved to Allen Park, Michigan in 1966, a fitting location near the Motor City.

Determined to admire an object out of my past, we found the dirt road leading to the rubber behemoth at the back end of a college parking lot.  Unfortunately, the area was fenced and gated, the way blocked with construction materials and heavy equipment.  I went to the construction trailer which was as cold as a meat locker on this hot, humid day, but found no one.  I hailed a hard-hatted surveyor on the other side of the lot, but she shook her head, saying the bridge over the creek was out.

Just as we were about to leave disappointed, a big white pickup arrived in a cloud of dust from the direction of the tire.  Behind the wheel was Jason Y., a muscular fellow with a tan and sunglasses who bore a slight resemblance to Brad Pitt.  The inspector on this sewer project which called for 5,100 feet of 13 foot diameter tunnel, he confirmed that the bridge was out.  He was deeply apologetic, noting that locals like him enjoyed showing off the big wheel because it was an icon, a marker of home.  As a kid he remembered seeing it when returning from long car trips with his parents, a reassuring sign that soon he’d be in his own room.

As we walked back to the car in defeat, Jason shouted that he’d radioed the construction crew and to his surprise they’d just opened the bridge.  Piling into his truck, we took the rough, rutted, and muddy track to the huge monument to America on wheels where it sat behind a chain link fence topped with concertina wire, like an animal in a zoo.

To Alan and me it might just have been really big kitsch, something to say we’d seen and bagged with a photo on our safari through Michigan.  But to some locals, at least, this relic of an era when America’s auto industry was unrivaled had meaning and was embedded with a deep sense of place.

Baseball Dreamland

The old manufacturing city of Bristol, Connecticut is known around the planet as the home of worldwide sports network ESPN.  Little seen beyond municipal boundaries is a proud tradition of local sports from high school football to professional baseball.  That long-time sporting spirit is best embodied by Muzzy Field, one of the oldest ballparks in the nation.

For the first time since the Boston Red Sox had a minor league affiliate in Bristol over thirty years ago, I found myself on a recent warm evening with a hotdog and a program watching America’s pastime from a worn wooden bench in the Muzzy grandstand.  The Bristol Collegiate Baseball Club was battling the Keene, New Hampshire Swamp Bats in the home club’s inaugural season in the New England Collegiate Baseball League where gifted college athletes “play for nothing more than their love of the game and the opportunity to ‘Follow their Dream.’”

It’s a small, but devoted crowd of 325.  Many in the stands seem to know the players by name, shouting words of encouragement.  Among them was Kevin Kelleher, the non-profit team’s president.  An athletic man, he looked relaxed and tan as he rooted for his son on the field.  Most of the players stay with host families, some of whom were watching the game.  One woman remarked on how polite and quiet her guest player was, though her refrigerator was quickly emptied by his appetite and her teenage daughter was heartbroken on finding he had a girlfriend.

Though play was sloppy at points with misjudged grounders and some rusty-gate swings, plenty of drama unfolded to keep fans entranced.  There were solid base hits, diving catches, a close double play and accurate cannon-like throws from the outfield. Bristol pitchers had trouble with bases on balls, but Keene did not get a second hit until two out in the ninth.  Play ultimately went into extra innings with the home nine winning the contest with a two out bases loaded walk-off walk in the bottom of the eleventh.

For the hard core baseball fan, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s where you play the game.  From its curved granite entry to its redbrick façade and green outfield wall embraced by tall pines and oaks, Muzzy is a cozy place where fans can relax and have their hearts sweetly broken by recalling the easy simplicity of the summer game before the flash and fancy of big time money and media.  Arched portals in the walls lead through a narrow passage upward to a view of thick grass and blue sky as you enter the stands.  There’s lots of foul territory down the lines, leaving the impression of a spacious park despite its small size.

Since it opened in 1912, almost thirty players enshrined in Cooperstown have taken the field at Muzzy including greats as diverse as Casey Stengel and Satchel Paige.  Babe Ruth is said to have hit the first over-the-wall homerun here in 1919 during his waning days with the Red Sox.  Professional in every way except for a paycheck, today’s players are here to hone their skills and showcase their talent.  They combine the bodies of men with the dreams of children.  Fans pick up on that magic, sitting back to enjoy a bag of peanuts while the evening’s drama and hopes unfold.