David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Signs of Surprise

Pollution on a stick. What else to call the thickets of needless and repetitive signs that line our roadsides and penetrate parks and other public places. Some come in words, others in universal  symbols. They may direct, forbid, inform or advertise. New ones pop up all the time like some weedy invasive plant.

In these days of justifiable concern over distracted driving caused by cell phones, eating, and other diversions, it’s remarkable that eye-caching road signs are not seen as culprits. Often there are more messages blaring at drivers beyond the windshield than can be absorbed at the posted speed limit.

To be sure, I value discrete street and directional signs, the more reflective for night viewing the better. But do we really need two or three signs telling us we’ve crossed a town line, that a service club meets on the first Monday of the month, markers indicating mileage every few minutes, or billboards bombarding us with ads for everything from cars to toenail clippers?

Historical Whiplash: Tales of Two Buildings

Reimagining the Past
Historical whiplash! You might just be a victim stepping over the threshold at 144 Albany Turnpike in Canton, Connecticut, my hometown. The structure is a clapboard, center chimney classic built when Thomas Jefferson was president. It sits close to a four-lane blacktop, a commercial strip of twenty-first century clamoring signs and chaos. Step inside to the 1950s, a world of Life magazine, Elvis, and big cars with tail fins. Welcome to Dish’n Dat, a restaurant with an Eisenhower era diner feel, and the mouth-watering comfort food to go with it.

But the way things look is only the beginning. Like any historic structure, it is chockful of stories. A private residence for generations, it began life as a public place when it opened as an in-home tea room in the 1920s. By 1950, in was a full-service bar and restaurant. Soon after, a dead body was discovered nearby. A few decades passed, and the was subject to a lawsuit by an international rock star. By the end of the twentieth century, it would host a series of restaurants offering Mexican, Asian and other exotic fare that would have astounded the original homeowners who cooked over the old fireplace. Who knows what else the walls could tell us?

Small Wonders, Big Stories: Little Free Libraries

Serendipitous portals to far places and new ideas, Little Free Libraries are popping up like mushrooms in late summer. I never know where I’ll find one or where it will take me.  
These book exchanges have been planted on street corners, in front yards and public parks, near the entrance to stores and restaurants, at shopping centers, beaches, schools, playgrounds, rail and bus stations, along bike and walking trails, and wherever people might be tempted by stories or learning something new. A field guide to butterflies, a collection of poems by Robert Burns, and Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code novel have been among my finds.

The concept is simple: small kiosks where you can find books to read, and leave some to share with others. Beyond providing a 24-7 source of reading material, Little Free Libraries are said to promote literacy, neighborly conversation, creativity and community revitalization. The number, design, and location of these book-containers makes a statement about a town, and I look for them wherever I go. Little Free Libraries suggest that people in the area care for more than facades. Finding them an irresistible attraction, I decided to establish one in my hometown.

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.