Bigelow Benny

There's a small wooded hill about two miles south of the town where I was born. It was once populated by a passel of squirrels and one human, a jolly man named Bigelow Benny. It was a tar paper shack that he lived in on the small plateau near the top of the rise that was part of the terminal moraine that the last glacier from the last ice age formed when completing its mighty work about 18,000 years ago. Benny wore the same olive drab woolen cap that he owned a dozen years ago when I was a little kid playing with the Dobrolski twins and their sister Thaddea, the tow headed gal to whom I pledged my troth with a cardboard ring one autumn day back then as school was starting.

Benny gave free advice but he never cajoled or pushed. He let you grow up and make your own mistakes, unless danger was an issue. Now at nineteen, my view of him and his ways had grown a bit toward a flippancy that made me sometimes forget our mutual fondness. When he asked about the fancy ragtop I had recently put a downpayment on and I told him of its supercharger, he whistled with appropriate admiration, but he looked a bit worried about the situation, maybe remembering my accident on "The Hill" on my tenth birthday when I had furiously pedaled past his place to keep up with Chris Dobrolski on his Schwinn racer and tangled up one of the cuffs of my denims with the bike's greasy chain that had no chain guard. Ol' "Big" had rubbed a stick of butter on my abrasions, realigned the frame and gave me a pair of his late son's corduroys while he packed the torn and smudged bluejeans into an old paper bag for me to deliver to my Mom once I returned down to our bungalow near the old mill by Jenner's pond.

Benny was older, older than I had always pictured him in my mind's eye. He still had that boyish giggle, an incongruous sound given his turtle-like movements and the sagging flesh that now hung off his frame like pinkish curtains that revealed a weight loss that subverted that roly poly image we had all recognized immediately whenever we journeyed to "The Hill." The sun was high in the sky, but a haze blocked its rays and the air was a tad stagnant given the usual breeze "up Benny's way", as my Dad used to say. "Well, Bud, when am I gonna meet Mona?" he asked, knowing I'd chafe at the personal question. Mona Cafarelli was my first real girlfriend of my post-pubescent period. Thaddea forgive me. She quickened my pulse and seemed somehow inextricable from the excitement generated by my "new" convertible. "She'll come by. I'll bring her in the G.T.O." "'Chickmobile par excellence' eh, young man?" I brushed off the teasing and remembered what had brought me to "The Hill" after all this time.  END OF PART 1