Stow Neck Road

Okay, to find the place is something else altogether. You get off a plane at the Philly airport and take I-95 south to the Commodore Barry Bridge, cross it, then head south again on I-295 to Hook Road. You take Hook to Route 49, maybe ten miles or so to Salem. You're in South Jersey now, in the Delaware River tidal basin. Ponds and swamps and creeds and puddles abound. Street signs warn of goose crossings.

That's how I started the story. It was a trip just to find their place, an old, old square, brick home, old as any family home I'd ever been in. It stood out in the country, no one else around anywhere close. "To get here," Jana Carman had said, "you just go to the end of the world and turn left."

Sage advice. John was a Baptist preacher; Jana, a teacher. Nice, nice people. I'd met her at some writing conference in upstate New York, where she'd mentioned somehow--or in some correspondence later--that she and her husband were regular listeners to the Back to God Hour. I was doing a book for that radio ministry, stories of people who were friends of the broadcast. 

The place was a dream, something right out of Washington Irving. But their story is all pretty much gone except for something of no importance at all to the visit. 

There was this phone call. The phone was in the kitchen, a room away. John left the living room and picked it up. I kept talking with Jana, but I couldn't help overhearing John because the pace of his responses made clear he was carrying a load just staying on line. His preacherly tone was thoughtful, but the conversation was tedious.

He told Jana when the conversation finally ended who it was, but I think she already knew. Wasn't the first. "Now what?" Jana said.

The woman on the other end told her pastor they were coming for her again, someone from the government, a gang of criminals out to get her. It was all pretty extreme paranoia--little green men or something. They were after her or her money or something, and he was her pastor, and he had to be nice, but it was a burden. 

"But, you know," they said, "something so interesting happened a while back." The caller too had been a teacher, so they decided to get her into a Sunday School class via some pretext, put her up in front of kids, the place she'd been for years--"a good teacher too," they told me. It was a marvel of a story. When they got her up in front of all those kids, something in her reverted to what she'd been. All of sudden, the paranoia was gone, the anxiety had disappeared. She was what she'd always been. She did a great job.

Something about the place, they'd figured, something about being up in front of kids--at that moment, something in her was reborn for that moment. They shook their heads. 

I don't remember much about John and Jana's story, the one I wrote. I remember the house, a great place, a museum piece; and I've never forgotten the woman I never met, the woman on the other end of the phone.

It's been ten years now since I was in a classroom, the place I spent forty years of my life. But last week I was asked to come in and talk about writing a bit, help kids formulate how they were going to tackle some essay assignment the teacher had given.

I told myself before I left that I was 74 years old now, not 64 or 46 or 35, and--goodness knows!--I wasn't 22 like the day I stepped into my own first classroom. I told myself I should be quieter than I used to be, more grandfatherly, less stand-up comedian. I'm not that quick anyway. I told myself to listen to their silence, to bear with it, not try to fill it with endless stories, not try to entertain, not fall back into the old schtick. 

But time and place did a job on me, and the old rhetoric took over, the machine-gun rhetoric: fill the air with stories. I was who I'd always been. I couldn't help myself, and it made me tired and ornery. I stepped into a pair rhetorical slippers I honestly didn't want to wear. 

Once upon a time in a wonderfully ancient colonial brick home on Stone Neck Road, a thousand miles away, a woman I never saw left an pattern on my psyche that never that time itself never wore away, a warning. 

The sun is coming up again right now. The sky is clear. It's ten degrees of cold out there, wind chill -4. Soon enough, I'm sure, things will warm. Yesterday, I'm almost sure I heard a robin. I want you to know there are no little green men coming to get me or my wife. I don't think my wife worries about her aging husband going bonzo. I hope not.

But on Monday of this week, part of me became a ghost from an old farmhouse on Stow Neck Road in South Jersey, a place at the end of the world, then turn left. I couldn't help but wish that weren't so. I couldn't help but be--or try to be--who I was.