(Warning- this post is boorishly full of the first person singular tense)
I’ve become a hermit. Saint Kevin of Cobb. (For anyone interested, please refer to Saint Kevin in the twin conceits that anyone actually reads this stuff or finds it interesting.) In my hermitage, a lakeside 70’s “sea ranch” wannabe with funky diurnal light scoops and reluctant plumbing, I’m the patron saint of all lower down the Darwin ladder along the West Bank of the lake – except Buck the mortician who squats in the neighboring 70’s house without electricity. I picked him up, once, walking home in the rain from the Cobb County Transit (which NO ONE rides) bus stop and all he talked about while he made my passenger seat wet was his dead mother. My favorite acolytes are three chipmunks, Mr. South, Mr. North and Mr. West. They’re nutty over jalapeño coated birdseed. Seasonal geese love to crap in my driveway.
I wasn’t always a recluse. My moonwalk away from humanity started nine years, six months and nine days ago, and was doused in the dopamine appeal of the internet and accelerated by Covid. Before those two distractions, I was a denizen of the city – a citizen. I lived in Luxembourg for a while. Despite the city/country’s width of only 35 miles, my landlady who lived downstairs had never visited France or Germany. I was schooled in London, living in Hampstead – a neighborhood that remains my second home. I was a New Yorker for two decades and have logged 90 extended trips to Shanghai. I am fortunate to have lived/worked in Melbourne and wear the hair shirt every day for my decision not to permanently Aussiefy.
In New York, I walked home the length of Central Park every night with a postman’s regularity, mostly up Amsterdam Avenue and mostly to shed the day but also to soak in the sidewalk life. A few vodka outposts along the 50-block walk would call out their siren song to tempt me into the rocks – not that liver, a pushover, needed much temptation. One night, I bartered with a near-homeless guy selling his album collection on the sidewalk at 77th and Broadway – turned out to be Tony Bourdain in a low spot of his rollercoaster life. In Shanghai, I would walk through the French Concession after martinis, frites and conversations in French at Franck until it became my delusional neighborhood. That false pride of place would be reinforced whenever I gave directions to round-eyed tourists. All those times and all those places explain why I don’t look a day over 94.
In my hermitage I do have urban dreams though. Before Sainthood, I never remembered dreams. Now I “porpoise” sleep- pass out for a couple of hours, surface awake above the covers, then submerge for another round. It’s the biphasic sleep of anxiety, age and vodka. Anyway, when I break the surface to clear out my blowhole, I now interrupt and remember a dream. A lot of them I’d like to forget, so maybe that’s why I repressed them in my adolescence. In good dreams, I’ve constructed three imaginary cities that I return to with the regularity of my runs to London or Shanghai.
The most frequent dreamscape is a hyped-up mash-up of my birth town, Mount Vernon, Ohio and Savannah. In this town, three-story Italianate commercial buildings of Mount Vernon’s Main Street are extruded upward to six – all with thriving stacked storefronts. The dense six-story brick and cast iron late 1800s confections of buildings surround pocket-sized town plazas linked enfilade with a sheared grid of narrow streets that deny perspectival vistas in preference for the haptic surprise of unveiling plaza after plaza. The narrow linking streets lie in the canyon walls of equally absurdly tall grand residences, like the stately homes of downtown Mount Vernon had been put on the rack until the breaking point of their tendons. This town is the happiest place of my dreams. And like Cypher in The Matrix, I always want to reinsert myself when I wake up.
Number Two in my nocturnal vacation list is also a mash-up – this time a collage of the Washington Heights to 125th Street stretch of Manhattan along the west side highway, slices of Morningside Heights, Georgetown and London’s Hampstead. The architecture has the engineered sensibilities of Violet Le Duc, cast-iron Victorian railway stations and a garnish of Harry Potter. Unlike the midwestern flatness of my hometown dreamscape, number two is a delirium of dangerous topography navigated by viaducts and bridges – a lot like Pittsburgh where I spent the summers of my childhood until my voice started to change and I thought hanging around the community pool with my female classmates was a better plan than hanging out with my cousins.
Number Two would make the winning model railroad tableau in a Christmas window display.
Number three is slippery, elusive. Getting there is half the dream, driving through flat, thick forests along roads that change course in abrupt right angles. After nearly cramping the left calf with all the up-shifting and downshifting through straight, wildly tall tree trunks and a leafy canopy so high it’s obscured by the juncture of roof and windshield, I always arrive from the east into a very dense, very small town that might be a spawning ground for the town that’s the “ happiest place of my dreams.”
The sunlight filtered through the tree canopy gives this a second-place ribbon in the happy place race.
But, back to Mount Vernon my birthplace and birthplace of all my urban inclinations, despite its population of 14,000 spread evenly over 9.9 square miles. If Mount Vernon had the density of Manhattan, I would have had 770,920 neighbors. I loved going downtown, all two square miles of it. Before the discount store strip mall invasion, when common fearless people actually had the foolish courage to start and own their businesses, downtown had three locally owned department stores, two or three men’s clothing stores, a donut shop, a single-showing cinema, three jewelry stores, three pharmacies, two hardware stores...you get it. Little mother worked at the Citizen’s Bank (no kidding), so I’d always peddle my bike downtown to hang out. Later in high school, after my girlfriend’s father gifted me his MG as a down payment on son-in-lawhood, I’d bypass the cafeteria for a stool at a downtown lunch counter.
Once a year, in the fall, the four downtown car dealerships – Ford, Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Chevrolet, had evening cider and donut parties to unveil the new models. That was my favorite outing with Jack Dad Omar (again see What’s in a Name.)
Another favorite was going downtown to the Cub Scout den in the basement of the Congregational church on East Vine Street. Jack Dad Omar would drop me off at 7 and do a drive-by pick up at 9. It was a prep for the 11,200 taxi rides to come.
I’m on the corner, hailing cab 11,201. I’ve got a decision to make. Drop the hail hand back to my side and walk home or slide onto the vinyl backseat of communal DNA one more time. In 1972 Mount Vernon, I worked nights and weekends at THE downtown furniture store alongside its 92-year-old owner. He had one tooth. He didn’t want to hear the R-word and worked until he died. My third favorite person of this life… so far.
If and when I do walk away, I’ll need something to do now that I’ve also walked away from my beloved vodka. I’ve decided that I’ll pick up where I left off on the scouting path. It’s not that I need to finally learn to tie a dozen or so knots with no practical benefit in my remaining years on the downward slope of the actuarial curve – it’s that, in accord with the scouting mission “to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes,” I see a path of penitence over a lifetime of truly awful behavior.
Here’s the history.
A Cub Scout is a bear cub, in a local Den from ages kindergarten through the fifth grade. It’s like a prep school for the Boy Scouts. My Den Leader in the basement of the Vine Street Congregational church, a short guy named Louie who had a lazy right eye and took a lot of cigarette breaks, inspected the cleanliness of our fingernails, the shine of our shoes and cast his approving left eye on the chores, crafts and diaries documenting the thresholds of achievement for merit badges on the “Advancement Trail.”
Here’s where my first path along “The Advancement Trail” went south.
The Advancement Trail is organized by age, from Tiger at age 5 with merit badges such as “Fun on the Run” to “Webelo” (we’ll be loyal Scouts) at age 9 with a Cast Iron Chef or First Responder merit badge. I’m a Type A over-achiever, always have been, always will be. It chafed my blue shorts and knee socks that the merit badge Advancement Trail was tied to age and grade. Overachiever Kevin could have knocked out all 32 of those stupid badges in the first year. So, I said “screw this” to Louie as a Bear – Third Grade and stashed the yellow sash in the back of my sock drawer. So, again, I’ll blame the system, not personal bad wiring, on the resulting lifetime of compromised moral and ethical judgment.
Here’s the math.
I only need nine more merit badges and two electives to earn the “arrow of Light” qualifier for passage into the Boy Scouts. The minimum age for donning the pale green uniform with the dark green sash is 10, so I’ve got that covered by a sound margin. Once in, I only need to tick off “a total of 21 merit badges (10 more than required for the Life rank), including these 14 merit badges: (a) First Aid, (b) Citizenship in the Community, (c) Citizenship in the Nation, (d) Citizenship in Society, (e) Citizenship in the World, (f) Communication, (g) Cooking, (h) Personal Fitness, (i) Emergency Preparedness OR Lifesaving, (j) Environmental Science OR Sustainability, (k) Personal Management, (l) Swimming OR Hiking OR Cycling, (m) Camping, and (n) Family Life” – in order to become an Eagle Scout, life’s moral and ethical pinnacle by my reckoning.
Sounds Easy Peezy. But…
I don’t cook. Pre-pandemic, I ate out almost every night following urban trail markers of barstools. I absolutely abhor camping. Why would any sane person sleep outside when there are so many rewarding five or six-star accommodations available – with rooftop bars? My sincere lack of human empathy rules out Lifesaving. Let’s just slip-knot (k) Personal Management and (n) Family Life together under flawed character...
The green sash of Kevin has a lot of room left for colorful badges.
I’ll need to make a special needs exemption appeal to the Council. For starters, the cut-off age for a Boy Scout is 18, 20 if you’re an Explorer Scout.
Ok, so I’m a late bloomer.
Next, of the more than 135 available merit badges, I can build a tangible case for the following 16:
Astronomy. There’s a very expensive telescope in my living room courtesy of a late evening alcohol-fueled Amazon spree.
American Labor. Despite all my overseas work, I’ve logged at least 134,000 hours in the domestic labor pool. I hope my Social Security check reflects that patriotic contribution.
Architecture. See “hairshirt.”
Automobile Maintenance. I’ve driven the same car, a 1974 MGBGT, since I bought it new for a whopping $3,400 in inherited cash.
Bugling.
Fish and Wildlife Management. Unless you skipped over the lead paragraph, this one needs no justification.
Genealogy. I’m a card-carrying Son of the American Revolution both paternally and maternally – not that this rates a dedicated parking spot at the Publix Supermarket.
Home Repairs. Comes with owning a 70s vintage house and an architect’s contractor loathing arrogance.
Indian Lore. One of my forbearers, Hanford Lennox Gordon, wrote “Indian Legends and Other Poems.” It’s frankly more unreadable than this blog.
Mammal Study. Are people mammals? I think so. I’ve spent a lot of time glaring at people in bars.
Music. See bugling.
Pets. Fluff, a black cat from a neighbor’s house who slips out of the house because she hates the new dog, shows up on my back deck twice a day and I feed her, sap that I am, with expensive cat food.
Reading. The opposite of writing, so I’ve heard.
I’m struggling with building a case for the other 119, although that alone should earn me a badge in “earnest self-appraisal.” Needing only five badges for Eagle, I’ll award myself a badge for “creative problem solving” then propose to the review board the recognition of the following four:
Sarcasm. Special award for the humor of an angry, unimaginative soul.
Narcissism. Writing an entire blog in the first person singular and not caring at all about off how putting that could read.
Chronic inappropriate behavior. I excel at that. Just ask HR.
And finally:
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