Springer lived. Poppy Springer was born in the late 1800’s and had fought in the First World War. He wasn’t allowed to drive a car anymore, so he would get around on his riding lawnmower. Over the sound of chickens and airplanes, you would hear that thing’s engine puttering down the street toward you and know that he was coming to visit. Poppy Springer was missing a few fingers on his right hand from his early days as a machinist. He was an inventor and constant tinkerer, and had bought his house near the airfield because airplanes fascinated him. He told me he’d been born before the invention of the airplane, and could spend a whole day just watching them fly around. When Mrs. Springer died, my parents used to send me down to read to Poppy Springer, but I hated to go. He didn’t seem particularly pleased to have to endure the company of a ten year old and would either fall asleep or start talking about fighting in France during the Great War. He died a few years after that, and it was the first time I ever saw my father cry. Sometimes, I would stand on our front porch at sunset and look out over the fields and trees. A light breeze would roll in, carrying the scent of honeysuckles from the bushes planted along our front yard. I would look up and imagine an enormous space ship coming toward me over the horizon, its width stretching from one end of the sky to the other. I could imagine it so vividly that to this day I still know exactly what it would have looked like. At night, I would terrify myself before going to sleep by imagining monsters lurking in the woods and killers hidden in the corn stalks, ready to snatch me up the next time I ventured into either one of them alone. It occurred to me that every scary movie I’d ever seen was happening at a place that looked exactly like where I lived. Jason Vorhees never attacked anybody on a cul-de-sac. Serial Killers weren’t strolling down York Road picking off people coming out of Burdick’s Candy Store. Those fears disappeared in the daylight, though. My favorite place was a wide stream that ran through the woods across the street. It had large, moss-covered rocks all along its banks, and being in that place made me feel like one of Mallory’s Arthurian Knights. I would trudge through that stream like Sir Percival, searching for the Grail’s hidden location. I stayed in those woods until my father would come out to the edge of the driveway and unleash his world-class split-finger whistle. My father’s whistle can stop your heart at short distances, and as kids we learned to return home at its signal. It had been his decision to move the family so far out into the boonies. For my old man, nothing was better than standing on the front porch drinking a beer, looking out across the open countryside. My mother was raised in Philadelphia and hated that we lived so far from civilization. She often complained that we should have lived in a residential development with sidewalks and other kids to play with. A neighborhood, where I had more to do than spend all day trekking through the Bower Farm’s fields getting chased by skunks. In my defense, I only got sprayed once. My dog got it too, and the two of us spent an afternoon soaking in a bathtub full of tomato juice. It was my mother who taught me how to read and then carted me around to used bookstores in search of hidden treasures. I cannot recall what kinds of books she read when I was a kid. It pains me to admit it, but I suspect they were of the Jackie Collins variety. We had an enormous seven-shelf wooden bookcase in the living room, filled with her books and some Time Life collections that my parents acquired through television commercial advertisements. My father had only two books on that bookshelf, and they were consigned to the very bottom right corner: I AM NOT SPOCK by Leonard Nimoy and CHARIOTS OF THE GODS?
