David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

The Headless Horseman of Canton

Historical Echoes
It’s no wonder that many headless creatures prowl the night among the thousands who annually attend Collinsville’s spirited Halloween parade in the south end of my hometown of Canton, Connecticut.  Ever since the American Revolution, headless phantoms have been part of our historical DNA as the grisly story below explains.  I offer this version of the long told tale as a Halloween love letter to the quirky, creative community where I live.

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Canton’s Headless Horseman
It could seem like Halloween any night of the year on a stretch of U.S. Route 44 from the Canton Green to the Shoppes at Farmington Valley.  Some folks probably wish it was.  It would be comforting to think that the ghastly phantom of a headless horseman that occasionally rides out of the low mist gathering at night was merely a plastic masked goblin or cabbage night trickster.

Indeed, the apparition was once flesh and blood, a French paymaster who left Hartford on Horseback early one October morning in 1777.  He was bound for Saratoga on the Hartford-Albany Post Road, then a narrow, wagon rutted and muddy track where the four lane blacktop runs today.  His battered leather saddle bags were heavy with gold to pay French officers fighting with the American army.  With aid of the French, the Americans under the command of Benedict Arnold and Horatio Gates had chased a superior force of British regulars and Hessian mercenaries to Saratoga and had them under siege.

The River's Pulse: Fifty-Two Haiku Weeks Along the Farmington (part 8: October)

October
Monet mirrored leaves
in gold and red on dark glass
a world upside down

winding among hills
in broadly looping squiggles
the land’s signature

painted leaves hurry
to falls and spin in eddies
messages down stream

riffles to rapids
rock gardens to slackened flows
chorus of voices

glossy fur captures
light until the flat tail slaps
pointed stumps remain

A couple blocks from my home, the Farmington River is the largest tributary of the Connecticut.  From Tinker's Damn, Homebound Publications, 2013,http://homeboundpublications.com/store/books/tinkers-damn/

Fenway Park, the Red Sox, and the Power of Silence

It’s been a mediocre season at best for the Boston Red Sox and the only contest I saw from the stands was typically a loss.  Yet April 15 was my best day at Fenway Park in four decades of attending games.

The Sox were clobbered by the Nationals 10 to 5, silence overwhelmed the usual noise of the crowd, and even with a scorecard it wasn’t always easy to tell one player from another.  Superficially, it wasn’t the most triumphant experience for the hometown crowd.

Despite the generous birthday gift of my children that had me well-seated in the grandstand, I attended with trepidation after turning 60 the week before.  Like any good Sox fan, I’m superstitious.  The number 60 has an almost kabalistic significance corresponding at it does with Babe Ruth’s greatest season record—60 home runs hit for the 1927 Yankees.  The southpaw was a Boston’s star pitcher until Sox ownership sent him to the arch rival New Yorkers after the 1919 season for a fistful of cash.  It was baseball’s equivalent of original sin.  It cursed the team, keeping them from a World Series crown between 1918 and 2004.

Frog Mania Close to Home

Connecticut has an inordinate fondness for frogs.

So might conclude visitors with even the slightest herpetological bent.  They might not think much of it on passing Frog Rock on U.S. 44 in Eastford, perhaps the state’s most famous and oldest amphibian icon.  The roadside boulder is said to have been first painted its trademark green in 1881 by a state legislator and has long been a landmark.  But exploring further, they might start to wonder after passing a similarly painted rock on East Main Street in Norwich and another with a long red tongue at the pavement’s edge along U.S. 7 in Cornwall.  Such travelers might really start to wonder after driving over the bridge in Willimantic where four eight-foot-high bronze frogs perch on large concrete spools.