WHAT’S IN A FACE?

July 27, 2015

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@yahoo.com

There comes a day when you see a certain face on a relative, friend or former acquaintance, and you realize time has passed, that age has added lines, that days of happiness, difficulty, excitement, boredom and the sometime ordinariness of living have left telltale trails on a visage unique to that person.
Maybe it is because we don’t really look at each other all the time, or at least notice how someone appears on a regular basis, that we don’t see the individual as he/she collects the years. Nor, perhaps, do we see our own aging. Every once in a while, though, we seem to leave close proximity and step back to suddenly notice the person or ourselves in a detached way, almost as an unbiased observer.
It is in that moment that a relative or friend or acquaintance appears to us changed, and that is usually for the better. For we all age, we all have our ups and downs, we all move on, whether it is on the treadmill of life or making the heady climb to whatever is our summit. We are then, at the end, the sum of our experiences, and at any point before that the total of all that has happened so far.
Except for the most hard luck-driven individual, or the person who seems unable or unwilling to obtain some good days, people move toward that summit on relatively clear trails, even if some are unmarked, the many experiences etching the face like so many notches on a Bowie knife. Your childhood. School. Romance. Work. Marriage. Hobbies. Hard times. Good times. They all make their mark on our faces.
Yet nature or your god provides those detached moments when you suddenly get an update on the individual or yourself. One day you spot this person and note the changes, or you get up in the morning and acutely see yourself in the mirror.
Such moments seem so true in their depth of insight, in their perspective that time has gone by, that things have happened, that you or he or she is still there, that the journey continues. There can be grand glory in all this, a small smile at noting how well someone is doing, or even that the individual has simply survived his or her travails.
It is a reaffirmation of life, surely of our own, that we see such change, note it and store the information in the computer that is the mind and add to the mass of feelings that is the spirit. This brings a reality check which shows we all live sometimes challenging lives, that we are all climbing a mountain of some sort.
Imagine if we were not able to step back and take that detached look at ourselves or someone else? We might all live in the past, in a time when we were 16 and the face was without wrinkles, just the oiled blemishes of puberty and all the wonder of that promising but quick moment. No, even as we write the chapters in our lives, or have some lines written for us, we are given a chance to sit down and read the proofs of what so far is written. In that, we might still alter the ending, and in that, too, we can appreciate, even savor, what’s been put down so far.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com

PICTURES FROM WITHIN

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@yahoo.com

 

The painter who touches you has already made that same journey inward, for he/she takes a picture of part of the artist’s soul and renders it in form, line, color, perspective. If you get goose bumps, you get the picture.

This is a gift, which like all the special qualities any have, comes with the package at birth. Whether it is developed depends on what else happens in life – environment, family, opportunity, using free will to make the gift grow.

So, no artist, no writer, no exceptional teacher, surgeon, bus driver, trash collector, parent, citizen of the world ought ever take an ego trip and proclaim that he/she is the cat’s pajamas. You were just lucky at birth, you see, and don’t let it go to your head.

Now this does not mean everyone with a gift will open the box and take the ball and run with it. Humans are also lazy, selfish or are in hardship that dilutes the potential. So many gifts in so many people have gone unclaimed.

But when the ability is nurtured, when it is given expression, wow, can hearts pound, tears come, skin tingle and connection made. A painting that leaves you speechless or that resonates in your particular being. A novel, short story, play or poem, paintings as word pictures, expressed by the gifted ones, also recreate visits with artists’ souls.  And so you say, “Ah, that’s what I mean.”

Life can be so unfair, disheartening, troublesome, challenging while also offering great joy and goose bumps. Yet on both sides of the aisle, no matter what your emotions of the day, a painting, something written, a teacher’s great lesson, a surgeon’s saving hands, a professional’s sacrifice, a trash collector’s quiet handling of your discards in the early morning, just about anything any of us do or can do will express the gifts we all have, whatever they may be.

 

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com This essay may be reproduced.

AWAITING ‘SEASONAL LOVE’

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@yahoo.com

Fruit in season is like long-sought-after love that suddenly makes connection. The heavens appear, but as in many a novel and short story, consumption does you in, spoils you for the ordinary. You can love no more past this time, at least not in anticipation.

Until the next season. …

It isn’t Adam and Eve here, forbidden taste of the fruit that brings guilt and addiction. The peach in season, for example, freshly picked at maturity, never ripened as a green orb by gas in a truck or rail car from this place or that, is like the magical confluence of things out of this world when the tingle, heart patter and goose pimples of human bonding strike as lightning.

You are hooked for the moment. You do not question why this peach is so full of nature’s best taste, why the skin has a snap never arrived in the supermarket variety, which was picked weeks ago. You simply savor rich sweetness that almost makes you cry, humbles you so in the process that you thank your god or your lucky stars. You are filled with satisfaction, and that keeps the tank supplied until next year.

Once, in this region I live, called Rockland, the smallest New York county geographically outside Gotham’s five boroughs, tree-ripened peaches were the norm. But post-World War II development bulldozed most farms and some of the greatest fruit ever grown, given our particular climate and glacially derived rocky soil. Now, there are but a few farms, like the Concklins, the Davies Family, the Van Houtens. In their place is an insult: supermarkets in shopping strips on old farm land that sell peaches from states far away, perhaps wonderfully tasting in their own element, had they ripened there, but not in Rockland as gassed creatures that are so grainy inside that you must throw them away, even after you have paid $2.89 a pound in “season.” You had hoped, but. …

No, I await the homegrown, larger fruit that like the lover you recognize in the dark has its own scent. For a few weeks there is this love affair that has you coming back for more, even moving you to tears, for no man-made sweetness is comparable to a fresh peach, the skin of which produces a snap at first bite that is exquisite foreplay.

Once your time is finished, you will have to move on, for the fresh peaches are no more. But that is just fine, thank you. As with the deepest of love affairs, the sort that can be revisited in  season but never sustained in ordinary time day after day, week after week, you are satisfied so deeply that routine will never do.
You await the next rendezvous. It is worth suspended time.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com. This essay, which may be reproduced, first appeared in August 2006.

A TRIP TO MCNAMARA

By Arthur H. Gunther III

Back when, and “when” is whenever you or I hold a memory about a place or someone or thing, there was a country road in Pomona named McNamara, and though the signs still proclaim it, no longer is this a rural place. Nor is Pomona, named by apple farmer Nicholas Conklin in the 1700s, still wearing the robes of the goddess of fruit, for most of the trees are now 2x4s in suburban development.

There was a ritual in youth back “when” that included a summer walk from Hillcrest, a nearby Rockland County, N.Y., hamlet, to McNamara, early on before the day’s heat and humidity. It began off Eckerson Road onto State Street, to Hillcrest Avenue, across Rt .45 to Locust (sometimes it was the parallel Faist Drive) to Hempstead Road to Brick Church Road to Union to McNamara, where the hills and valleys, however light, caused young legs to stretch and the heart rate to quicken.

It was all worth it, for along McNamara, just before the old ASPCA  animal center, were wildflowers and hay-like straw, which in the increasing warmth and bathed overnight in the wet, gave off a fragrance that Nick Conklin himself  enjoyed so long ago.

For youth a bit bored by even summer recess, a walk to McNamara with or without pals brought accomplishment as well as passing the time of day. It was also ritual, and we all want that because regularity means some things in life can be put the shelf where they ought to be, and we can count on having them there and taking them down when we need to do that.

Back when McNamara still looked like it had for more than 100 years, a simple walk brought a trip to a friendly place,  made that way by familiarity. Its many changes now in suburban growth and the equally major modifications and morphing in a youth’s growth to adulthood and its  own journey toward sunset mean McNamara Road, now mostly in the Village of Hempstead, can only be a memory. But close the eyes, and a whiff of those wildflowers easily returns.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com