Tickling The Ivories?

It was always there - that upright piano in the Heimel household. First in the dining room that's now a kitchen and later in the front room, the room that I had shared as a bedroom with my little brother before we all moved upstairs for our own bedrooms.

The piano with its holiday garb.
An open house in the 1950s.
Neighbor Eppie Bradley on the left.
Can't identify the woman with cigarette.

My mother always claimed it was a good piano - Kohler and Campbell - and I remember Mr. Ellis Munyon coming to the house in a multi-day process to work some kind of magic on the inside of the piano, the cover raised and the place where the music goes pulled off, his tools spread across the piano bench on green felt.

And he fixed the ivories - the covering on the keys with missing ones replaced with those salvaged from other pianos. But afterwards they came loose from their keys and were kept in a little plastic bag in the drawer of the china cupboard in that big old house on North East Street.

That old piano, painted a neutral light gray, was settled in its place on an outside wall through my mother's decor changes in the front room - the orange and gold phase and then the light gray phase. 

The top of the piano was a favorite spot for Christmas decorations - little winter scenes with that white snow substitute you unrolled and spread like a tablecloth, dotted with cotton balls. White plastic reindeer and those little glittery houses with the cellophane windows. Later we'd cut greens from the bottoms of the Christmas trees my dad sold each winter in the side yard and spread them on top, careful to put down a plastic tablecloth to protect the piano. I'd bring out the candles Mom had made from blogs of paraffin frosted with whipped paraffin, white, green, red, some dipped in glitter. We didn't light them - they were just for decoration.

I took piano lessons from Mrs. Simons who lived at the foot of Seventh Street just across the bridge, a quick walk up the riverbank. She also had an upright piano in her living room with a comfortable chair next to it where she'd sit, sometimes nursing her baby during my lesson. "Curve your fingers, Janie," she'd scold. "Count, Janie."

I made some progress through the color-coded Schaum piano methods - I think I was in the orange book when I finally quit lessons after begging my mother to allow that to happen. She told me at the time that one day I'd regret it - and, as always, she was right. I have retained some skills and am much better at counting - likely due to the tutelage of Mr. Wilcox when I took up the flute in fifth grade.

When the day came that my mother wanted it gone - likely a plan to redecorate that room again to accommodate her blue phase - we agreed it could come to our house. There was already a Metzger family piano in the living room but it was deemed un-tuneable so it went into storage in the shop and the Kohler and Campbell came to Crandall Hill.

That process involved a truck, several family members and a repurposed stone boat. I have a memory of it being dragged across a spring-muddy yard with a tractor, the threat of toppling very real - real enough that I removed myself from the scene.

It's lived here ever since. Its big moment came when Johnny Costa of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood fame came to Potter County with his trio to play a concert at the Consistory and stayed with us on the farm. He was hesitant to play it because of the missing ivories and the possibility of cutting his fingers but those familiar Neighborhood tunes spilled from the piano.

But mostly that piano just took up space in the corner of our front room. I played it from time to time and Arthur played it from time to time and daughter Kate took piano lessons for a time. When I changed the color scheme in our front room, I painted the piano a glossy black.

And the day came when I wanted it gone - though it's not really gone.

And in the drawer of my china cabinet,  a little plastic bag of ivories.

A Change Is Gonna Come!

 

"When we elect representatives, we expect them to be held accountable to two things: the people they represent, and the laws they ae subject to. Your elected officials are in office to represent you, and you should have  the power to vote them out if they no longer act in the best interests of your district. 

                                                                                        - from the Campaign Legal Center 

 

I awoke this morning with a sense that maybe, just maybe, things that we've held dear in our world will rise to the top and the rest - the war against Iran, the tyrannical taking of Venezuela, the President's continuing lone ranger alignment with the Putin regime, the ball room, the arch (raising a big something when the obelisk was already taken), the theft of food and health care from our poor while the wealthy buy favors to increase their obscene hoarding of resources and money at our expense, and the seething, rotten corruption that underpins the whole Trump era – will crumble like dirt beneath our feet as we continue on the high road.

I'm going to quote.a little scripture here from Isaiah: "Woe to those who enact unjust statutes and issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of justice and withhold the rights of the oppressed."

It's time to get to work to ensure these representatives we've elected are working for all of us.

Back To Slow Time

This scribe is not a fan of daylight saving time. I'd rather the clocks stayed the same month after month. This sentiment is one that runs in my family. (I wrote here about daylight saving time just before we lost that hour in 2023.)

And here are words from "Golly" over the years from his column in the local newspaper.

Back on standard time - some like it and some don't. But that's all right - some folks like limburger and some don't. Can't please everybody. It is said three members of one family in Coudersport each turned the clock back!

Daylight saving time ends Sunday and we will cut out saving daylight. That causes us to wonder what we did with all the daylight we saved since last spring!

Daylight saving time - what a headache! Personally this scribe wishes this troublesome idea had never been hatched. Set all those time pieces back one hour Saturday night and you'll be all set for Sunday morning.

Kinda funny about advanced time. Some folks like it and some do not. Since there are a lot more "like-it" folks than "do-not," the "like-it" group wins.

That's America.

... and speaking of America, cast your vote on Tuesday, November 3! It seems that there are a lot more in the "do-not like it" group when it comes to the state of the country under the Trump regime but YOUR VOTE is your voice. And that's America! 

In Pursuit Of A Tidbit Of History

It must be noted that both Arthur and I spent some time as newspaper reporters in the 1970s when our dream to carry on my family's legacy in the local newspaper world burned bright. Newspaper reporting in a small town meant you were first and foremost charged with providing accurate information. After all, you were the eyes and ears of the community.

All these years later, in our pursuits that involve writing and music and the intersection of the two, we still hearken back to those lessons learned when we were young and hopeful. And it was our interest in truthful and careful reporting that took me to the Potter County Historical Society last month. I was in search of documentation of a snippet of information Arthur had remembered from a long-ago newspaper piece about New Century Club.

New Century Club was a women's club that began some time early in the twentieth century - and celebrated a milestone anniversary during our time at The Potter Enterprise. It was that celebration and the retrospective of the club printed in the paper that needed to be found.

The volunteers at the Historical Society are always anxious to help solve mysteries involving the community and its people and these women went to work to help me on my quest to find a truly obscure piece of information. Diane Caudell checked sources online and provided the year of the club's establishment, a framework that send Linda Goodnoe Russell upstairs to pore over old newspapers.  

Julia Kolat recalled that there were records of New Century Club stored on the third floor of that fine old brick building. And she took me up the sweeping staircase to the second floor and then up the narrow steps into the attic space. Stacked on the floor, carefully boxed and labeled, records of the Club that served the community for more than 100 years are stored.

And thus began my introduction to Belle Haskell Lewis.

These are her words, taken from a multi-paged document tucked in the front of an over-stuffed scrapbook of clippings. Typed on a typewriter, double spaced with wide margins at the top and bottom, it is a history written in 1935 - a 30th anniversary retrospective.

I was asked to write a history of the New Century Club but many of the records I find missing and most of those available are mere outlines of programs, lacking all the life and color that characterized our activities...

To look back over the road we have travelled is interesting and enlightening. We see a procession of years steadily moving forward. In some of these years things apparently were static. Old customs and traditions held fast and were meticulously observed.

Then as the years passed a more extensive outlook was gained and closer contacts were made with the world's great movements. There were years that were exciting, exhilarating, heartbreaking.

Our country was emerging from its seclusion, and with high purpose had entered a war, to maintain a principle which we thought had been established to be a beacon light to the world. 

The years that followed the World War brought a larger, fuller life for women, a freedom that in 1905 was talked of with bated breath, lest we be thought unwomanly.

Thereafter followed years of reaction, with changes so radical that they seemed to threaten, to undermine, what to us had seemed to be the fundamentals of society. Years of doubt, of confusion in the fog of which we are still wandering.

While we have been moving forward, keeping pace as best we can with the changing world, accepting innovations, following the trend of modern thought. Ever advancing, we have been carried into realms scarcely dreamed of before.

Yet when we looked backward we find that we have left behind us many things that were infinitely precious. We have lost old friends, old ideals wherein we found safety and comfort and security.

Dreams that we once entertained have been dissipated; illusions that we once hugged to our hearts as being things of utmost importance have vanished, lost in the clear light of science.

Old friends: How the essence, the flavor of their kindly spirits permeates all the years since they left us. Many of them we will see no more. We recall how they looked, what they said, even what they wore!

Recollections of them, and of others, come to us over and over, like some haunting phrase of music, a bit of melody wrought out of our association with them in the New Century Club.

... What of the New Century Club of the future? We find ourselves in the midst of a giant upheaval. What the world will be like, how many of our institutions will survive, no one knows.

There must be no limit to our horizon, it must extend beyond tihs world even into eternity. We cannot escape the past, it determines the future. We can never say, "It is finished."

I was enthralled by the discovery of this woman's writing and by the history of New Century Club but lest I forget – that obscure piece of information that was the purpose of my visit to PCHS was found by Linda in the newspaper from 1980. And Arthur's memory was accurate and what he's concocting from that piece of Potter County History - and others - is his story to tell.

And as for me, I'm now on a quest to learn more about Belle Haskell Lewis (1864-1955) and share in this New(ish) Century, her observations about the last New Century.

For now, her poem, published in her 1955 obituary in The Potter Enterprise.

My Tapestry

The tapestry of my life I know

Has been wrought without design;

Seemingly colorless, somber and grey,

Faulty of texture and line.

The world will carelessly toss it aside

When the fabric is complete;

For this is the fate that commonplace lives

In the end must always meet.

I wove each day the threads that came

To my patiently waiting hands,

And I tried to mingle the beauty of the earth

With the dull monotonous strands;

A bit of blue of the heavens above

And the gold of the setting sun.

You will find them there with a thread of love

When the tapestry is done.

Dear Medicare enrollee

The letter came in the mail on Friday. A letter from the United States Government. A letter signed in that familiar yet unrecognizable sharpie signature at the bottom.

I was immediately struck by the number of capital letters in this letter filled with the overwrought and overused rhetoric of DJT. The AI-assisted marketing team affixed capital letters on phrases that have no business being capitalized while in the greeting, it's Medicare enrollee.

I'm wondering why the incessant use of capital letters in a way that would make Mrs. Olin frown and put her head down on her desk.

It's all part of the relentless assault these days on the conventions of how we express ourselves through language. One observer wrote "He uses language to prevent us from holding him accountable for his words and actions in what scholars call 'language intensity'."

She continues "Trump is the outrage president. He doesn't seek to be presidential."

And so we can assume the capitalization of words not needing to be capitalized signals the importance he attaches to those words.  And these particular words tell me that he's sending me a One-Time Payment, putting healthcare dollars back where they belong - in the hands of the American People.

I could more easily excuse the body of the letter if it weren't for the last paragraph.

May God bless you .... 

This from a thrice-wed male who has bragged of his penchant for assaulting women, a man whose association with Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein is well documented. This from a man convicted of sexual abuse. This from a man who has never once even hinted that he has repented for anything. This despicable human who has brilliantly manipulated God-fearing individuals to do his bidding.

Signing off in all capitals - shouting at us once again that he is president of the united states of america.

Afghan

It was a work for Art – this afghan that hung across the back of the avocado green couch in Thelma's living room. You know the kind with the zig zags in sometimes - mostly - garish colors, this one in brown and orange and yellow in those too-synthetic hues. Crocheted in scratchy synthetic yarn that become more scratchy with time.

Ugly, just plain ugly.

"But Jane, my grandmother made it."

"It's still hideous," I said. 

But still it was kept, even plucked from the dumpster after our daughter discarded it along with the worn out pillows and threadbare sheets and old newspapers and even older magazines and the broken chairs that would be perfectly good if just repaired with a little glue and a clamp.

But he rescued the afghan and stuffed it behind the seats in his truck where I wouldn't see it – that's not until the day I was cleaning out the truck. The afghan purportedly so preciously had absorbed half a can of motor oil, miscellaneous discarded foodstuffs and perhaps even some deer blood.

I pulled it out and hung it on the clothesline. It disappeared again sometime later that day and he swears it's been eliminated but I fully expect to find it in the of a cupboard in the workshop.

I put together the words you read above on February 27, 2026 during a ten-minute writing practice session with the prompt "Afghan."

We're buried in such stuff here on the farm - not just our stuff, thought there's plenty of that! But we're living in a place where five generations of family - thrifty farmers for the most part - have lived. And if you know thrifty anybodies, you'll know that throwing 'perfectly good' things away is a challenge. You might need it some day.

Add those 'perfectly good' things that might need just a little tweak to restore them to the 'perfectly good' status, and you've described much of what has been squirreled away. And then, of course, the sentimental things - worn out baby shoes, old high school and college yearbooks from parents, grandparents and offspring, funeral calling books from family members who have been in the cemetery since early in the last century.

But we're determined at the end of yet another summer to made a substantial dent in the purging process.

But guess what showed up again draped across the futon on the upstairs back porch to surprise me?

But this time, in the interest of truly making the substantial dent, here's the rest of the story.

Maybe that's the end of that afghan story - but here's the last part of my "Afghan" writing practice from February.

My grandmother made me an afghan when we were married. It too is rather garish but soft with cotton yarn. Black borders with colorful knitted blocks. It's hidden away upstairs in a trunk in the attic and he doesn't know it's there.

 

Genesee Cheeseboxes

A trip to the Potter County Fair always brings a visit to the Oswayo Valley Historical Society building at the edge of the fairgrounds in Millport. This year as I made my way through the exhibits, my attention was captured by this:

While I imagine my grandfather (W.D. 'Golly' Fish) might question the syntax of the label affixed to this particular cheese box, I expect he'd wonder if it made at the cheese box factory in nearby Genesee Forks - known today as Genesee

His words from a long-ago "Golly" column.

When I was a young fellow, before I absorbed a lot of printers' ink in my system I learned to make cheese boxes. There was a cheese box factory at Genesee. Ambrose Veley owned the plant. It employed a dozen or so men at a mill a bit south from the present school building.

The plant made the heads for the boxes from bolts purchased locally. The bolts were sawed on a machine known as a "slasher," a vicious machine that every now and then clipped off a finger or two for the operator.

The heading was taken to an outdoor yard and piled loosely so it would dry quickly. After two or three weeks it was returned to the plant, pieces assembled wide enough to make a head, the pieces matched together and rounded on a small concave saw.

The sides for the boxes were of elm cut by a veneer machine but purchased from Oakes & Burger at Cattaraugus, N.Y. They were called "hoops."

The box maker was called a "nailer" and he was the elite of the plant and for the reason he earned more money than others, his work was "piece work." He received 80 cents for making 100 boxes and 100 covers. The best nailers, when all went smoothly, could complete 200 boxes in ten hours of top speed effort.

A dollar and sixty cents was real money when the common laborers were getting but one dollar or less. just the same the elite earned their pay as they drove nails and tacks at top speed for ten straight hours.

Board at Vern Teater's Hotel (not a trace now marks the site) cost $3.00 a week. Sweet Caporal cigarettes, ten in a package were five cents a pack.

This was around 1895 and before a brick plant was erected to manufacture sand-lime bricks and long before a long cement walk was built to the busy railroad station, a junction of the Buffalo & Susquehanna and the New York & Pennsylvania Railroads. It was long before the building of the huge milk plant with a high stack said to have cost $25,000.

It was even before Dick Coyle, hell-raiser and Irish wit, was a telegraph operator, and before genial Jim Sullivan was the village tonsorial artist.

This scribe knew a lot of people, fine people, years ago at the "Forks," but now only a few.

Even the "Old Folks Reunion," for years a big annual event with a brass band, a male quartet, silver tongued orators and a bountiful dinner has fallen by the wayside, with J.H. Tilburg as its moving spirit. Coming as it did in late summer politicians never missed the event with glad hands extended filled with campaign cards. 

A.J. Borden is no longer blacksmithing, and Henry Clark long ago stopped shoeing horses and hung his leather apron on a peg following his last lay at the anvil. Victor  Allen and the Genesee Times – gone!

How times change!