David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Signs of Haunting

I’m haunted by ghosts very easily seen in daylight. Neither cinematic ectoplasms nor spirits from beyond, they are created of pigment on brick, hardened apparitions you can’t put a fist through. Like conventional phantoms they convey messages from the past, but there’s nothing supernatural about ghost signs. Perhaps, what most makes them ghostly is that while visible to all, they are seen by few.

A ghost sign is a weathered, hand-painted outdoor advertisement, usually found on the brick walls of buildings in urban and small-town downtowns. Composed of lettering and illustrations, they may be faded almost to illegible, ghostly invisibility. Commercial images and voices of yesteryear, they often hawk services, wares, and companies that no longer exist, or beckon to us with nostalgic pitches for products that long ago slicked up their advertising. They persist in a netherworld of salutary neglect where structure owners don’t make the effort or spend the money to paint them over. “New” ones sometimes appear when a building is torn down revealing the illustrated wall of its neighbor.

I take ghost signs personally when walls are emblazoned with long lived and familiar products that I’ve used since childhood, like the one hawking Ivory soap for the long defunct Mareness grocery store in Lowville, New York. I feel time’s passage and long for just one more taste when I pass the ad in Northampton, Massachusetts for Uneeda Biscuits, a cracker no longer baked. Sometimes signs get a hasty revision such as the Pepsi sign in Danbury, Connecticut that has a price of ten cents and the promise of free samples crossed out.

The Lure of Pocket Knife Graffiti

Something about a pocket knife longs for a piece of wood. And something about the incidental, capricious or eccentric carvings of these blades catch my eye. Their work is evident in many different places, but often found on park benches, the walls of backcountry cabins or lean-tos, tavern bars, and picnic tables. Mostly they are names and dates, initials, geometric designs, or hearts drawn by lovers. They tell stories, leave a residue of personality that readers like me can only guess at.

While not entirely disappearing, carving on wood surfaces is an art form or species of graffiti that has become less common. At one time, small folding blades were standard equipment for a guy leaving the house, as essential as a wallet or watch. But contemporary conveniences often obviate the need for a knife and security concerns in many venues make carrying one an annoyance. Fewer knives mean less serendipitous carving.

Poetry in Motion

                                                                                                                                                                                                

Could taking a walk transform a person into a poet? Probably not. But it may be worth a try. Perhaps there’s a connection between the rhythm of footsteps  and the cadence of verse. Poets tend to be walkers. Writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mary Oliver, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Walt Whitman have found their muse while afoot. William Wordsworth is said to have logged 175,000 walking miles in his lifetime, and Henry David Thoreau would spend three or four afternoon hours afield during his most productive writing decades.

On the Connecticut Jail Trail

Prison Afterlife
Electric lights hardly alleviate the gloom in this cavern of rugged and irregular rock that once served as a prison. Sixty or so feet underground with water dripping from the ceiling, darkness seems to absorb any illumination. I’m standing in a dead end passage where inmates were once chained to the floor. There’s still a rusting eye bolt embedded in the rock. When I speak to my companion there’s not only an echo, but a deep, eerie vibration that hums in the walls for a few moments. I feel a chill that has nothing to do with the moist, cool, 52 degree underground temperature. Despite the presence of tourists in sneakers pointing cameras and the exclamations of children, Old New-Gate Prison in East Granby is creepy.

With their heavy masonry walls, barred windows and unusual interior layouts, prisons and jails are not easily adaptable once their life as penal institutions are over. Macabre stories of mayhem, death and heinous behavior leave these buildings with a psychological pall. As a result, innumerable such structures have been demolished and their memory confined to images and stories. Those that survive remain indelible curiosities. They invite new uses that range from restaurants to museums, retail to housing.

Gas Station Eats

Stop for a gourmet meal at a gas station? You might think I have fairly mediocre tastes. But I’ve had some delicious food, rich coffee, and great craft beer recently at Connecticut gas stations. Actually, at former gas stations that have forsaken fuel pumps, car lifts, and pneumatic tools for kitchens, tables, and dishware.

Snack machines filled with candy bars and soda aside, it’s hard to imagine a place less conducive to having a bite to eat than a traditional gas station repair shop with its smells of vehicle exhaust and surfaces stained with lubricants. Even when new, they’re not the most attractive structures regardless of their architectural efficiency in serving the motoring public, but when abandoned they become among the ugliest buildings at roadside, not usually places where you’d ordinarily linger over dinner.

The Courage of Daffodils

And where you see clouds upon the hills
You soon will see crowds of daffodils
“April Showers,” B. G. De Sylva

Daffodils are a sweet, cultivated obsession. By mid April I see them everywhere in southern New England. No spring flower is more widely planted, along with  their close relatives narcissi and jonquils. Long extolled by poets and artists for their beauty, it’s the contagious courage of daffodils that I find most  endearing.

At mid month my wife Mary and I found ourselves in a sloping landscape threaded with lichen crusted stonewalls and rock outcrops where thousands of the flowers grew in clusters beneath mature sugar maples. In an area squeezed between dense woods and a cattle pasture we made our way down a grassy path to a pond where more flowers grew on small islands. Though we’d arrived in the middle of a weekday, we were among many visitors making a pilgrimage to Laurel Ridge Foundation in Litchfield, Connecticut where thousands of daffodils of every description have bloomed since the early 1940s when they were planted by farsighted Remy and Virginia Morosani.

It’s a peaceful sanctuary perched on the corner of wild and cultivated where elderly couples, young lovers, and parents with little children walked slowly and absorbed the quiet as the flowers swayed in a gentle breeze. Traditional yellow daffodils and white narcissi stood out among green grasses fattened by recent rains, along with seemingly endless distinct varieties, some with ruffled petals, orange centers, and other more subtle differences. They seemed so bright and eager, tender looking, a living and palpable metaphor for spring. We imagined they had faces and wondered if they were speaking or listening with their trumpet-like tubes surrounded by six petals forming a star-shape.

New Lives for Old Rail Stations

Orphaned Rail Stations
Orphaned railroad stations are transformers, changelings. If not, they don’t survive. Designed with a specific purpose in particular locations, new uses after railroad days are over may require inventive, even inspired redesign. When visiting an old rail depot reborn as something else you never know what you’ll  find.

From the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century these buildings were the principal portal to places large and small, lifelines to the outside world. Raw materials came in by rail and finished products were shipped out. Trains brought people from far away speaking myriad languages, bringing vibrant diversity and hands and minds to labor on farms and in factories, as well as visitors eager to see new places. Tracks are long gone in many smaller communities, and even where trains still run the stations are often vestigial structures in an age where there are no longer station masters, ticket counters, and baggage handlers.

A Piddling About Puddles

when the world is puddle-wonderful
    e. e. cummings

I delight in puddles. Even a macadam pothole or a muddy wheel rut in a dirt road holds bewitching fascination. Vernal or tide pools fill me with the vibrancy of unfamiliar and strange lives teeming in their waters. No puddle is the same. They can be reflective, transparent, opaque or turbid. Each has its own time  span of ephemeral existence. Many are subject to the vagaries of rainfall. Vernal pools are on an annual cycle, and tide pools emerge from the deep twice daily.

My Webster’s defines “puddle” as a shallow depression full of water, especially muddy or dirty water. It’s also “a little pool of any kind.” But a puddle is an elastic concept. It can be said to be a surface accumulation of water shallow enough to walk through, but not deep enough to float a boat. Limits on puddle size seem to be in the imagination of the beholder.