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Chicory - Click to Enlarge |
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Horror Among the Hickories It’s hard to turn on the tube or pick up a paper without hearing or reading about what a dangerous place the world is today. Well, being always a skeptic, I have to wonder if that’s really true, particularly in view of world history, but even if it’s so, I guess that how safe you are, or how safe you feel, depends largely where you are, and more than that, on who you are. A few years back, I was lucky enough to find myself with some free time, so I decided to visit Great Britain. Trust me, there is nothing that will convince you of what a cozy little womb today’s world is than to wander among Europeon history. Every stop in the road seems to be the site of one or another massacre, revolt or beheading. I particularly remember riding around London on one of those double-decker buses listening to the guide regale us with various bloody stories about who was slaughtered where, and by whom, and what they did with the resulting body parts. “On yer roy-et, in that wee courtyard is buried the bowdy o’ Suh Thomas More ‘e was executed after a l’il run-in w’ ‘enry the VIII… ‘is ‘EAD is buried at St. Dunston!” If I may digress, I wasn’t really sure if I remembered all the details of this story correctly, in fact, all I really recalled clearly was the guide’s Cockney accent saying ” ‘is ‘EAD is buried…”. Anyway, in hope of finding all the details of the story, I did a Google search on “London” and “head is buried”. The results ran on for eight pages of links to hundreds of the most gory, blood-spattered and unsettling stories imaginable. Suffice it to say, that in London’s history, LOTS of people have been buried apart from their heads. It occurred to me that the results of my ignorance and poor memory were an even better example of my point than was my story. All over England, Scotland and Wales, and I suppose, all of Europe, are castles forts and monuments, not to mention cannons, trebuchets, guillotines, and gallows, all dedicated to preserving the memory of great blood-baths large and small. I kept wondering though, if a simple man, such as myself, could have lived a quiet, unassuming life in those days, rather like I do now; could have avoided dismemberment or disembowelment and could have lived to die quietly of the plague or something at a ripe old age such as forty. Well, probably not, but I suppose if one stayed out of the way of William the Conqueror or ‘enry the VII, or Hitler or Stalin; if one hid out in the forest and kept one’s nose clean, conceivably it might have been possible to avoid brutality. This makes me think of a story that I’ve told so many times that no-one who knows me will sit still when they hear it coming. Back in the days of my own history, when I was a real estate broker, I was showing property with one of my agents and his clients, a young couple from Philadelphia. To be perfectly honest again, I don’t believe that I have ever been to Philadelphia, although I may have been, as one stinky, filthy eastern metropolis looks pretty much the same as another to me. If it happens that I have NOT been to Philadelphia, and if you have not either, then perhaps if will help to tell you that this is the place about which W. C. Fields is supposed to have left the epitaph on his gravestone saying that, “All in all, I’d rather be here than in Philadelphia.” Whether that’s true or not, it is certainly true that Philadelphia is where they consider the combination of beef and cheese on a sandwich to be such a remarkable piece of original thought that they gave their name to this stunning invention. It is a place where people talk even funnier than they do in the rest of the northeast, and where human life has about the same value as haiku poetry in Texas. Anyway, these kids were from Philadelphia. As I recall, they were on their honeymoon, and although that charming detail has little to do with the story, it does help to develop colorful pictures in one’s mind as one wonders about the years of matrimony they shared thereafter. My salesman, whom I’ll call Clarence, because his real name was Bob, and I drove the couple out to see the property they were interested in. At any rate, the GROOM was interested in the property. The bride seemed mildly bored at best. It is not uncommon for people who have spent the greatest bulk of their lives on pavement to misjudge exactly how far into the woods a few miles can be, so I’m certain that when he read the advertisement which mentioned that this land was about ten miles out of town, the young man was thinking about how far ten miles would be from the nearest subway station, or something like that. In fact, this ten miles was paved for about a mile past the city limits, then it turned into a pretty-fair gravel road which shortly turned into a pretty awful one. Because we were hardened real estate professionals, the minute we arrived at the property, we headed down an old logging trail so as to quickly get the clients away from the dry dusty appearance of the road frontage and down into the hollow where, during the wettest of times, one might find a little trickle of a spring, if you knew where to look, and were extremely fortunate.
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