David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Learning from Old Schoolhouses

A Lot to Teach
Old one- and two-room schoolhouses still have a lot to teach. Their original educational mission may have come to an end by the middle of the twentieth century, but they continue to instruct us in architectural simplicity, elegance and adaptability. They abound in lessons about the past and the rapidity and breadth of change. Although attended by now elderly people still living among us, when compared to today’s institutions of elementary education it seems like millennia since the buildings were last regularly filled with students.

Built a century or two ago, these school buildings have proved remarkably adaptable though they are small and were constructed with a specific, limited purpose in mind. They survive in the guise of homes, community centers, offices, church parish halls, art galleries, restaurants, storage sheds, senior centers, and a host of other uses. Some remain empty awaiting their next act. Others have had several lives. Farmington’s North District Schoolhouse, an educational institution for about a century, became a tenement around 1900. Later it was a liquor store and now serves as a dentist’s office.

Shadow Searching

The best in this kind are but shadows.
Shakespeare

And coming events cast their shadows before.
Thomas Campbell

Refreshing the way I look at the world around me often involves shadow searching. Rather than just looking directly at the objects, people, and creatures around me, I concentrate on their shadows. Observing the darkened outlines is so different from my normal way of looking that when I resume concentrating on the things themselves I see nuances, details, and movement to which I was previously blind. My outlook is reset, as if I’ve gone from two dimensional vision to high-def.

Wherever there is light there are shadows. Occupying a three dimensional space behind an opaque object blocking a light source, shadows are the companion of illumination. They get a bad rap as a kind of negative space, an insubstantial outline of something tangible, a phantom existence. As metaphor, shadows have a mysterious connotation, ominous, malignant even. They are the dark side of reality, something to be feared.

The Best Nuts Fall Like Manna

Hickory nuts are among the rarest foodstuffs, yet they grow all around us in southern New England. You can’t find them in the baking or produce department of a supermarket among the   almonds, walnuts, and pecans, or in the snack food aisle beside the cashews, Brazil nuts, and pistachios. Most people have hardly heard of them, or wonder if they are edible. Although you can bake with them, foraging food guru Euell Gibbons found few better for eating right out of the shell.

No truer taste of a tree can be had than in a hickory nut. Buttery, with a hint of caramel, the meats are at the intersection of commercial walnuts and pecans in flavor, but somehow more powerful, richer. They seem to suggest the strength and potency of the wood itself, dense with BTUs as firewood, strong and flexible enough for tool handles and baseball bats that take continual punishment.

Toward the end of September, just as the trees’ distinctive three terminal leaflets were yellowing, I spent a few hours in bright sunshine gathering hickory nuts. Next year I’ll get an earlier start as the squirrels had been to the groves of shaggy barked trunks well before me and taken the best for themselves. Even so, my wife Mary and my naturalist friend Jay took the side of the bushy-tailed creatures and warned me to leave sufficient numbers behind.

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.