By Dan Mackie
For the Valley News

 Dear Kate and William:

 I believe I speak on behalf of the entire United States, and especially the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont, when I say: Loved the dress, loved the kiss, loved it all.

 This is a little awkward, but when in the course of human events it becomes necessary to admit a mistake, well, you just have to declare the truths that are self-evident and unburden your heart. So, your royal highnesses, it comes to this:

 Take us back. Please.

  Yes, we are ready to be loyal subjects once again. God save the Queen. God save Kate’s dress maker. God save the BBC (and those remote cameras).

 The royal wedding has persuaded your former peoples that we may have erred in 1776 when we set off in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Oh, we commoners did all right for a couple hundred years or more, but it’s clear that in 2011 we’ve made a bloody mess of it.

 Your wedding was utterly perfect – a pretty bride, a dashing husband, posh women in extravagant hats. Not to mention the coaches, the horse soldiers, and the cute little royals who looked like they must have been extras from the Harry Potter films.

 We the people couldn’t resist. We roused ourselves from our beds before dawn to supplicate ourselves in front of our televisions. We wore tiaras and, when nothing else was available, paper crowns from Burger King. We waved the Union Jack. We oohed and aahed, and when the announcers said it was “magical’’ and “a fairy tale,’’ we believed.

 Meanwhile, here in the colonies, our own television coverage featured a week of a much less edifying sight. Rather than grace and grandeur, we saw the blighted hair (the color and texture of a decaying coconut) of one Donald Trump, who comes to his claims of elevated class via Atlantic City.

 Mr. Trump, we are loathe to recall, was demanding that our president produce a detailed birth certificate to prove that he wouldn’t more rightly be holding high office in Kenya. Is Mr. Trump the president of the Senate? Speaker of the House? Emissary of the Supreme Court? No, he is host of the “Celebrity Apprentice,’’ a television show on which personalities of low rank compete for whatever it is that celebrities desire: gold, Hollywood estates, TV spin-offs.  And Mr. Trump is apparently contemplating a run for the highest office in our land, reflecting the divine right of fame, or infamy.

 Mr. Trump’s prominence on the national stage, and the interminable quarrels of Congress, persuade us that the republic is in a sorry state. The Madness of King George was a minor mood disorder compared to this.

 Gone are the nobles from our shores, replaced by mere celebrities. You have the House of Lords, we have rehab. Our social “betters’’ are a ruinous collection of tattooed philanderers who compose their personal morality by the hour. And “reality’’ television is creating a new assemblage who are even worse.

  So, as the founders might have said, we humbly beseech thee. We add: Pretty please?

  I’m quite sure you would like the Upper Valley, Kate and William. Local place names are familiar: Norwich, Cornish, Thetford, and so on. The King’s Highway still exists here, but vulgar interstates have made it a minor route. There are some King’s Pines about, although we doubt your majesties still require wooden masts for the Royal Navy. (Look in the Privy Council records; New Hampshire forests once helped Britannia rule the waves.)

 The colonies would come with some baggage. The sun rises and sets on our national debt. Our cars are rather large and so are our midsections; something about fast food or corn syrup or something. We get along well with your subjects in Canada, but our relations with much of the rest of the world are rather strained. The whole empire business isn’t as glorious as it once was.

 You might be glad to know that many of us still speak English, although it isn’t altogether the King’s English. You know the naughty language parts of “The King’s Speech” film? That’s pretty much the standard now.

 We know we can’t demand reparations or any such thing, but we would like some royal tokens for the occasion. We could use some of those double-decker buses here in the Upper Valley, and some red phone booths. A British charm offensive would be just the thing. We need butlers post-haste; service has become unreliable. We also yearn for new British comedies for Vermont Public Television; the color in the broadcast reruns is starting to look like something from old home movies.

 To be candid, there are some on our shores who aren’t on board with the idea of reunification. Some naysayers said the wedding coverage was “too much’’ and “irrelevant.” They claimed that they could care less about it, when what they really meant was that they couldn’t care less. (Grammar has suffered grievously.)

  No need to answer right away; enjoy your honeymoon and your new life. And be sure to alert us about any baby news. Although technically we are your disloyal former subjects, we are sure we can put that whole Tea Party thing behind us.

The writer lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.

By Dan Mackie
For the Valley News
There are plenty of songs about summer, but I don’t know if any are about summer work. For many of us, the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer meant a different refrain: Get a job.
Back when I was a teen, which grows more distant by the month, I spent summertime hours toiling at minimum wage — $1.65 an hour — or just above.
I grilled burgers, dug up bushes and trees, and made lonely rounds as a night watchman at a chemical plant. Jobs like these got me through high school without an allowance and paid most of my college bills, back when that was actually possible. I even drove to college in a paid-off Chevy of my own, listening to Born to Be Wild. (I wasn’t.)
One summer job was at Howdy Beef Burgers, a New England chain much like McDonald’s except for the clown and quality control. Hamburgers, thin and greasy, cost 20 cents. Soda was priced the same and fries likewise.
I was a good employee. I kept my head down and worked hard, as if that would get me somewhere. Unfortunately, there was hardly anywhere to go at Howdy Beef Burgers. Most jobs that come with fries have limitations.
Howdy’s, which wasn’t quite as friendly as it sounds, employed crews of teenagers and young adults. Some were college prep. Some were factory prep. The restaurant was enclosed in glass like a hothouse. On one side were a bunch of uncomfortable tables. It didn’t have a drive-through, but some customers treated the interior like the floor of their car. Hamburger wrappers and soda cups dropped like fast-food foliage.
I wore a white shirt and dark pants, a black tie and a paper hat. When we took orders we were supposed to begin, “Howdy, can I you help you?” Somewhat shy, I found this difficult, especially when cute girls were at the counter. They giggled and my face turned red, suggesting I might remain dateless for decades. (If I’d stayed at Howdy’s that might well have happened.)
Actually, Howdy’s was a good place to meet girls, the girls who worked there. Even a shy boy probably seemed more interesting than the fryolator. We worked side by side, burger to burger and fry to fry, and I eventually managed to ask some of them out.
Howdy’s had some benefits. We were allowed to eat for free, although after months you sort of despised the food. Cooking left an oily sheen on your face and skin, which made it easy to meet neighborhood cats and dogs.
I was there in the ’70s, but out in the parking lot a gang of greasers was stuck in the ’50s. They hoisted the hoods of muscle cars and loitered, talking about mufflers and motors. They smoked Marlboros and drank rum cokes and burned rubber when they drove off. Their girlfriends burned through the ozone layer with their hairspray.
When I rose to the title of night manger ($1.85 an hour!), it was my duty to call the cops to roust the greasers. This didn’t endear me to them, because conflict could accelerate their path to delinquency. The Howdy greasers were slackers, content to idle and blast music on tortured speakers. They weren’t motivated to actually work on their life list of misdemeanors.
One afternoon as I was walking to work a group of them surrounded me gang-style. A thick guy with an angry buzz cut challenged me to fight. He got the first punch off, a glancing blow to my head. I grabbed his sweatshirt and he pulled backward, so the sweatshirt rode up over his head. Dumb and sightless, he was an enraged bull. Steam might well have escaped from his nostrils.
As it happened, he wasn’t as strong as he looked, and not in good shape after the smokes and liquor. (Punching is more work than it looks.) He was quickly spent, and he let me go with a warning laced with profanities. My goal — to get out with my dignity and glasses intact — was met.
You learned about people in a place like Howdy’s, where work moved at a fast pace. Some kids couldn’t keep up. Some got picked on. The boss sent one into the basement to get a “bucket of steam.” He, unlike me, would never become a night manager.
I wish I could say I learned useful things at Howdy’s, but it isn’t entirely true. It was second rate, poorly run, and would someday be razed and mashed into an empty lot. I wonder if the smell of fish sandwiches rises from the depths on certain rainy nights.
I liked many of the people I worked with, but I remember them almost as sitcom characters. A boss who was cheating on his wife. A cook with unfortunate body odor. A guy who fretted that he’d lose his pretty girlfriend after he went off to college. A guy who flipped burgers fast and stylishly — the Michael Jordan of the grill. Did that lead to any sort of success?
I left for college and the newspaper life. Even the hardest stretches seemed better than my summer job. I guess there was a lesson in it after all.
The writer lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.

By Dan Mackie

For the Valley News

 This is the second of two parts in my miniseries about my recent trip to Japan. In part one I was guilty of Writing Under the Influence of Jet Lag, which bagged me for a week upon my return. I felt like a cartoon character who’d been knocked on the noggin. Little bluebirds circled my head, tweeting sweetly.

 International jet lag had all the queasiness of a hangover, but without the pain. My soul left my body and rode the jet stream to Europe. I dozed during Jeopardy (7 p.m.) and woke at midnight, ready to surf in Hawaii. My stomach thought it was time for ribs in New Orleans. Every experience was an out-of-body experience.

 Eventually the fog lifted, and my circadian clock arrived in West Lebanon. Here I will stay for awhile, and review the photos (nearly 500 — don’t ask for a slide show) that are proof positive that I was there, even though I felt a little like Alice awakening after a strange dream.

 Stage two of our odyssey took us to Kyoto, a city of more than a million that was mostly spared during World War II and still has an abundance of older buildings. We stayed our first night in a traditional-style hotel, where I confirmed that I am not suited to sleeping on the floor on a thin futon.

 After I successfully got off the floor, we went into the city and found a three-hour guided walking tour led by “Johnny Hillwaker,’’ an elderly Japanese man whose brochures said he was famous. He must be; you can Google him and read that his real name is Mr. Hajime Harooka. Apparently, we weren’t the first to hear him quip that his professional name is Johnny Hillwalker, not Johnny Walker.

 Johnny took us straight-away to an impressive and impressively large Buddhist temple. It claims to be the largest wooden structure in the world, a fact that must make fire inspectors twitch in their sleep. A new sign out front was covered with slogans in various languages. “Now, Life is living you,’’ it said in English, which is something I’m going to have to ponder.

 We walked to small shops where they make paper fans by hand. Some of these businesses have been in the same family for hundreds of years. Johnny told us that young people are abandoning the life, feeling there’s not much future in fans. America’s former industrial workers feel their pain.

 Johnny explained to us that most Japanese are Buddhist. Also, most Japanese are Shinto. As I understand it, Buddhist monks take care of birth and death and the Shinto priests handle much of the stuff in between. Shinto practitioners wash their hands, ring a bell and say a prayer for good fortune, which is more ceremonial than our lottery machines.

 The next day we rented electric-boosted bikes, which meant I had to play dodge-the- Japanese on the sidewalks. It was a blast, until I crossed a curb at a bad angle and tumbled and rolled onto the sidewalk. “Are you all right?’’ my son asked me. It just so happened that I was, except for a scraped elbow and a bruise that would soon resemble an aged eggplant.

  That night we ran into a strange scene, something I am always up for. Hundreds of people jammed a small street as if there’d been an Octomom or Lindsey Lohan sighting. Apparently, a gaggle of geisha had finished a stage performance and were returning back to wherever the geisha go, so tourists and natives hounded them with the intensity of a thousand flash bulbs. We stayed until we were ashamed of ourselves, and moved on.

  Then on to Tokyo, where I learned humility. It’s a city of more than 13 million, so it could eat and spit out Vermont and New Hampshire, and nearly all of New England. We got around by subway, mostly, which wasn’t easy, since the main station seems to have a half-dozen levels and tentacles (subway lines) going in all directions.

 We saw daringly original architecture: skyscrapers seemingly made of brillo pads, or beach glass, or whatever the architect was smoking that day. We saw a park where Japanese men dress up as rockabillies and break dance. Nearby, others dress like anime cartoon characters and pose for photos with tourists and other grinning idiots.

 We took the train to Yokohama, where we watched a baseball game without subtitles. Japanese baseball fans cheer only when their home team is at bat, and they are lead in chants and songs by flag-waving enthusiasts and fans who just happen to bring a horn along. It’s actually loads of fun, although I missed the spontaneous bitterness of Fenway Park, where people curse long-buried managers, or umpires who blew a call in 1975. (Ed Armbrister may still have a bench warrant out for his arrest in Boston.)  But Japan is a pep squad nation. I think they would cheer anyone if someone sounded a horn.

 This, of course, is unthinkable in America, where the individual’s right to be a lout is protected in the Constitution, Facebook policies, and cell phone contracts, which once signed shall never perish from the earth.

 The writer lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.

  

By Dan Mackie
For the Valley News
I spent nearly two weeks recently as the Upper Valley’s unofficial ambassador to Japan. After such a voyage of discovery people tend to ask — how was it? Although I have spent many years typing professionally, words nearly fail.
Japan is familiar and distant, gorgeous and crass, a place where you feel alone in the crush of a crowd. Dorothy couldn’t have felt any more out of her element in Oz. In the subway station in Tokyo people pour by at such a pace that it feels like a frenzied time-lapse film. You’ve a definite feeling that you’re not in the Upper Valley anymore.
I flew there to visit my son, who is finishing a two-year stint as a English teacher in Sendai, a city of a million that you probably never heard of. It calls itself the tree city, although trees are one area where New Hampshire and Vermont have it beat.
We took trains (so fast they would qualify as runaway trains here) to Kyoto and Tokyo, where I spied giant power lines as we neared the city. I thought of Godzilla, who was famously tough on infrastructure. After a childhood dose of monster and World War II movies I hadn’t kept up with Japan, except for its exports: TVs, cars and, more recently, baseball players.
But ready or not, here I was …
We began in Sendai, a city that’s too busy working to fuss much with tourists. I was lucky to be there on a weekend when the cherry blossoms were in bloom, which meant it was time for Hanami, flower viewing. Hanami fans ponder the fragility of beauty and life, and others ponder the wonders of fermented beverages as they settle on tarps in the park. After many hours they stagger (and I do mean stagger) home.
The gaijin, (foreigners), take to this like ducks to duck sauce, or water. Heavy drinking is an international language, and my son’s friends and I were invited to share a tarp with folks from England, Australia, and Canada, our amiable neighbors to the north. Although they were younger than I, they were friendly and eager to chat with me, which I attributed to their missing the company of English-speakers. I avoided youth-repellant topics like retirement planning, but had little to offer in areas such as death metal music.
In ensuing days we visited several Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, and the family mausoleum of the city’s founding warlord, who in battle wore a helmet much like Darth Vader’s. Atop his headgear was a giant crest resembling the Nike swoosh. Such are the cultural observations I can offer.
We traveled outside the city to Matsushima, a bay dotted with little islands covered with little pine trees. This is one of the Japan’s scenic gems, so inspiring that a famous poet wrote a haiku to show he was at a loss for words:
Matsushima ah!
A-ah, Matsushima, ah!
Matsushima, ah!
We ate lunch at a restaurant that struggled with its English language menu. Although a word or two of English is common in signage in Japan, sometimes things go awry. This menu offered several local craft beers. One was said to be “the popular type that there is not a habit and does a throat, and it is refreshing.” Another featured “the fruity fragrance that used wheat germ. Taste of authority of preference.”
Though Japan’s grasp of English seems superior to most Americans’ grasp of a second language (or first), other examples jumped out. I saw a sign for “T-sharts,’’ and for beers that were either “style-free’’ or “action-free.” An airport sign apologized to anyone who was “amazed’’ by the complexity of the place. A sports drink is named “Porcari Sweat.” I’d have to be awfully thirsty.
Although we Americans like to think we are No. 1, in some areas it just isn’t so. Japanese vending machines put our Coke-Pepsi oligarchs to shame. From two or three machines abreast consumers get about three dozen offerings, including the aforementioned Porcari Sweat. Japanese convenience stores are also superior, with better prepared food (don’t knock rice balls until you try them), not to mention employees who welcome you when you enter, bow and thank you when you leave, and generally treat you as a visiting dignitary.
I spent a day in one of my son’s schools, where the students wear uniforms, bow and thank the teacher after every class, help serve lunch, and join in cleaning the building after classes are over. Yes, their schools are different.
Back at my son’s apartment, we watched a bit of Japanese TV, which is, you may have heard, zany. Panels of celebrities do silly things on studio sets as colorful as amusement park midways while exclamations burst onto the screen, perhaps the Japanese equivalent of “shazam!” or “yowza!”
One night my son and his friends persuaded me to join them at karaoke, something I have never desired to do. Our karaoke escapade was in booth, thankfully, and not on a stage. I debuted singing a duet, Brown-Eyed Girl, by Van Morrison. My voice struggled, but my American partner told me that I “rocked.” I did no such thing, of course, but he has learned the power of politeness in Japan.
Next time: Kyoto and Tokyo.
The writer lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.

By Dan Mackie

For the Valley News

 Baseball is back, tra la, like sunshine, songbirds, and the evergreen dreams of youth.

 Baseball is a conquering hero. Winter is vanquished, and, if my annual prediction is correct, the New York so-called Yankees will meet a similar fate — their season will end in an autumnal flood of tears. Come World Series time inglorious pigeons will rattle around a silent Yankee Stadium, pecking at the greasy leavings of a wasted season.

 The Red Sox will win with power pitching, stout defense, and enough timely hits to make opposing teams limp away from Fenway series satisfied if they have taken 1 out of 4, or — miracle! — 1 of 3.

 Grizzled managers who thought they had seen it all will say, “There goes the best team I ever saw.’’ Visiting players will agree. “The better team won today. I just may hang them up (retire) and call it a day.”

 This is the year that the Sox hitters will rediscover that Boston baked beans build muscles better than chemicals. Despite some press box grumbling about side effects, the Beantown mashers will send home runs soaring. Sports writers will adopt the slogan, “A Mighty Wind.’’

 Excellence won’t stop there. Oft-injured J.D. Dew, the Red Sox right-fielder, will unveil his own plan for reforming healthcare. Republicans and Democrats alike will see that this was the solution they were hoping for, and will adopt it by acclamation. “Being on the bench gave me time to think about this,’’ the modest Drew will explain. Follicularly challenged second baseman Dustin Pedroia will discover a cure for baldness by mixing tobacco juice, coffee grinds, and mud collected from the depths of Boston Harbor. “I get restless, so I invent stuff,’’ the ever-peppy Pedroia will say. General Manager Theo Epstein will volunteer his services to the nation and solve the economic crisis. He will sum up his efforts: “I traded some hedge fund managers for GM executives, moved Warren Buffet from Omaha to Washington, and put Apple’s Steve Jobs in charge of California.’’ President Obama will say, “God Bless America, and God bless the Red Sox.’’

  Or, I may be getting carried away. It happens every spring.

 I have been following baseball, sometimes closely, sometimes less closely, for decades. I’m fairly certain that I saw Ted Williams play in a night game, but we were exiled in right-field grandstand seats that my family purchased through a First National Store promotion. I wouldn’t have known Ted Williams from Fred Williams at that distance, but my father told me he was over there in left, that he never tipped his cap to the fans, and that he (my father, not Ted) wasn’t going to buy us hot dogs since we had brought perfectly good bologna sandwiches that were just as tasty as Fenway Franks.

 The Red Sox of my youth were dreadful, but they seemed star-crossed unlucky to me. I saw few games on television, and got most of my information from the radio broadcasts, where they followed the song’s advice to “accent-u-ate the positive, e-lim-inate the negative.” It was the gospel according to Gowdy, as in broadcaster Curt Gowdy.

 I checked the box scores in the newspaper nearly every day. Amid a lineup of mediocrities, the Sox had Pete Runnels, a singles-hitter who contended for the batting title. It gave me pleasure as I gobbled my Cheerios to see that Runnels had gone 2-for-3, or 3-for-4, and that his average had nudged higher.

  I was baffled why the Sox were so bad and the Yankees so good, and noted that the New Yorkers had awfully good nicknames, such as Yogi, Whitey and Casey. Mickey, too.

 I was a loyalist. When we bought baseball cards I traded away Yankees stars Mantle and Maris — yuck — for our own Don Buddin (the pride of Turbeville, S.C.) and Chuck Shilling. This was like trading a Cadillac for an old Rambler rusting in a Vermont farmyard. Some of the Sox infielders of the era, in fact, had the mobility of cars on blocks.

 Despite the ignoble start, I stuck with the Red Sox, and had to wait only 40 years or so for a World Championship, to see the taming of the monster. With one fell swoop, and then another, the sting of historic failures was soothed, the weight of Babe Ruth was off our shoulders. Fenway fans no longer gather like a support group with vendors crying, “Hey, get your Prozac here!’’

  I still dislike the Yankees, but it’s out of duty and tradition, not passion. As for baseball itself, I have come to appreciate its drowsy pace. Many games have no drama at all, and the radio announcers turn to storytelling, which suits me. But that sleepiness can end in a flash, like waking from a snooze to find the house on fire, or the bases loaded. The season comes along slowly like a garden patch, and it’s a long wait for the payoff, or playoff.

 I won’t apologize for irrational exuberance. If philosopher Rene Descarte had grown up in New England he might have put it like this: I hope; therefore I am. Or in the original Latin: Sox ergo sum.

 The writer lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.

By Dan Mackie
For the Valley News
I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid, but most of it is as forgotten as the battered Barbies, deflated footballs and cockeyed kitchen chairs that litter the Lebanon landfill.
I can hardly recall what programs I liked. I liked whatever was on, I guess, or made peace with it. We had less than a handful of stations — only two with perfect signals — so you watched Bonanza or you watched Disney, or when all else failed you did your homework.
One highlight, though, came to mind recently with the death of Fess Parker, the actor who played Davy Crockett, one of my boyhood black-and-white TV heroes. In those days kids had to endure lots of programming aimed at their parents — Steve and Eydie singing a medley from Camelot, or newsmen in eyeglasses talking about steel prices—but Davy Crockett was all ours.
Crockett, if you are too young to know, was “king of the wild frontier.’’ According to hit song lyrics, he was “born on a mountaintop in Tennessee’’ and “kilt him a bar (bear) when he was only 3.” Thus are heroes made.
He wore buckskin clothes and a coonskin cap, and cradled a musket rather than a cell phone in his arms. That was no fanny pack at his hip — it was a powder horn.
Davy went on to have a number of TV adventures, some semi-comical, some soft-core violent (in those days you could stab an adversary to death without drawing blood and the deceased merely seemed to faint). It all was utterly entertaining to an 8-year-old boy. When Davy (spoiler alert) died at the Alamo while whacking Mexicans with his musket, I knew I was going to miss the big fella.
A couple of years ago I picked up a VHS copy of Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier for less than a buck. It sat unwatched until last week, when Parker’s passing reminded me I had it.
Fortunately, we have a video machine that still works, though its front door is permanently open and you have to put a tape in two or three times before it catches. I unhitched the DVD player and reattached the VHS box, which makes strange clunky noises and lightly hisses. To prepare myself, I had read a little about the real Davy Crockett on the internet. (Wikipedia is the lazy researcher’s friend.) I hit play and hurried back to the couch — we’ve long lost the VHS remote — and returned to Davy and Disney land.
The video was in color, although I’m quite sure I first saw it in black and white, since my family wasn’t an early adopter of the newfangled color sets. But this time I watched Davy on a medium-big LCD TV, not high-def, but with a lot more def than our old Zenith.
Davy Crockett is still Davy Crockett, but 8-year-old Danny Mackie is long gone. Still, I kind of liked it.
Davy Crockett a la Disney was a man of few words, and those few he uttered were often ungrammatical. He “reckoned’’ a lot. “I reckon I gotta learn you how,’’ he said to his sidekick, George Russell, played by a grizzled Buddy Ebsen, who later played Jed Clampett in the Beverly Hillbillies. “I ain’t much at speechifying,’’ Davy began when he was thrust into frontier politics.
Davy was my kind of hero. He was good-natured and slow to anger, but whupped those what needed whupping, to express it as he might have. At the beginning he was an Indian fighter, but later became an Indian friend, after he bested a chief in a hatchet fight and gave him a lecture about white man’s law being good for all. Davy was an optimist.
As a boy I wasn’t bothered by the fact that Davy may have had commitment issues. In the Disney story he comes back home to his family only for a couple of days before he gets “restless,’’ and heads off to war, or another frontier, or another miniseries.
In fact, his pretty wife dies from fever when he’s away and Davy shakes it off right quick. “I just need to be alone fer awhile,’’ he says, and briefly broods by a tree. No grief work for Davy. His “young ’uns’’ are never heard from again.
Things were simpler then. Bad people were “varmints.’’ The settlers in Texas were, in Davy’s summation, “Americans in trouble.’’ As I mentioned, death in battle didn’t seem so bad; Indians or Mexicans who were shot just tumbled off their horses onto the ground, as if they’d fallen off a playset.
The real David Crockett lived an interesting life. After his pioneer phase he was elected to the U.S. Congress, but fell out with the Andrew Jackson Democrats and lost a bid for re-election. He told the voters, “you may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.’’ Those are few words, but they are good ones.
The rest is history, or history with lyrics: The Ballad of Davy Crockett. Three versions of the song made the Billboard charts in the 1950s, when the Crockett craze was at full roar. It doesn’t have a great melody, and you can’t really dance to it, but me and ol’ Davy never was much for dancin’ anyway.
The writer lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.

  People made a fuss recently when an air traffic controller at New York’s JFK Airport, which is busy as a beehive on overdrive, let his kid relay a few directives to departing jetliners.

  Apparently the boy controller repeated what his dad was saying, and there was no freelancing involved. I don’t think he made anything up, like “Just pick any runway, mister.” Or, “Runway three! That’s my favorite!”
  As for me, I’m a little scared of flying, which has never seemed a natural act. It’s not only being airborne, it’s being airborne while being scrunched in a hard seat that has just enough legroom to avoid being declared an instrument of torture by the U.N. High Commission on Passenger Rights and Airline Snacks.
I squirm, listening to jet engines groan as if the plane is wildly overloaded, and landing gear thump like an old car smacking frost heaves. I await the turbulence that makes the Earth-bound part of me want to shout, “See, fools! I knew this thing couldn’t fly!” (But I restrain myself). During all of this I’d like to think that adults — experienced adults — are in charge.
  Our collective craving for maturity is one reason Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who gracefully glided a wounded jetliner onto the Hudson, became such a hero. In a time when many adults act younger and younger, he seemed right-aged.
  You have to be good to go as far as he has with a name like Chesley, but more importantly, he seemed to be someone who could look disaster in the eye and announce in a calm, almost-sleepy pilot voice, “Uhh, passengers, you might experience just a little bit of bumpiness as we make a water landing right now. On your right, and your left, is the skyline of New York. Enjoy the view and please fly with us again.”
  Sully has clipped gray hair and a moustache that would suit an admiral in a World War II movie. The late actor David Niven comes to mind, although not to the Twitter generation.

  There’s a place for adults, and a place for children, but that notion has grown fuzzier. Cultural trends too big for me to understand have landed us in waters where we work hard to make enough money to send our kids to daycare. Then we fill our office cubicles with guilt and worry. Parents feel pressured to create “quality time” with a determination that resembles preparations for a Himalayan trek. They take exhausting journeys to the Boston Museum of Science with young kids when the Montshire in Norwich would do as well, not to mention a pack of Mentos and a bottle of Diet Coke. (To me, much of the appeal of kid science is to make a mess, and Mentos/Coke will do it.)

  Since family time is compressed, it gets more intense. Sometimes you see parents who look like they are emotionally joined at the hip with their kid. They follow a child like a chattering shadow, talking too much and too fast, fawning over small triumphs. “You opened that door very well! You are such a good door opener, Tiffany!”

  If I had to make a list of places kids don’t quite belong, a control tower at one of the world’s busiest airports might be on it. Likewise, I wouldn’t want a surgeon to let a child tag along, since you wouldn’t want to hear “ewwww” as you went under the scalpel. Kids Day in Congress would probably be all right, because (insert your own wisecrack here).

  But in many workplaces, I suppose, having kids around is all right, within limits. Noisy ones should breeze through, but quiet kids who read or color can stay a while. (I loved the Harry Potter obsession years.) A dose of kiddie energy can cure workplace fatigue, and that’s a good thing. One day years ago my wife stopped at the office and our kids entertained my co-workers without even entering the building. They pulled a prank that many a child thinks is hilarious — once. They locked Dede out of the car and giggled and roared as she demanded that they open the door. Alas, it went on too long, because hijinks are not self-limiting. I had to storm out and make dramatic threats, yelling in my lunatic voice to be heard through the locked windows.

  When I was very young, my dad owned a gas station. It was a cool place to visit, because it had grease, cashews and an old-fashioned soda machine. It also had a mechanic’s pit — a hole they went into to work under a car. It must have been seven feet deep — so of course I went near and tempted fate. But my father never asked me to fix the brakes on a Nash Rambler.

  Mostly I wasn’t tempted to bring my kids along to the newsroom, since the office lacked grease and cashews, and soda is so commonplace it isn’t the attraction it once was. If they could have written stories and headlines, that would have been another thing.

  No, I was always happy to finish my work and get home to them. When they yelled “Daaaaaaady!” as I entered, it was a erfect homecoming.
The writer lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.