Here Lies David, the Author
A short story and prologue to
Intrepidations & Funny Business

Not often does a 79-year-old author get to return to his childhood home after 61 summers and write his own epitaph. But, that basically is what this story is all about. To comb the cobwebs neat and clean and relive in time what life has dealt him.

It's like, gee, I wonder what it would be like to return to my old town and walk the path that horses and buggies once traveled, see the house that Mama and Papa made home, shake the hands of the remaining few...and the others. If I could, I'd find that. . .

The doctors have moved to the high rent districts where the fees are bigger. One of the two grocery stores is now a post office. The other, a surviving relic of the past, invites you in. Richter's house is falling down and Ol' Doc Taylor is dead!

Nor is it easy to accept that you can't go home again. You can visit. But you can't stay. Because it isn't really there. You can't shake hands with a tombstone. Because the house that used to be no longer is. The school where you once did reading, writing and 'rithmetic is something else. The Jewish prayer house is now O'Sullivan's synagogue. The muscular are bedraggled, the girls have disappeared, the roads are now streets and one gallon of 10 cent gas is more like $1.94.9.

The swimming hole is plugged and the old church bell doesn't ring on Sunday because there ain't no pastor. And you know that four-horse stagecoach filled with passengers that used to hammer along the dirt road with the driver tooting his horn? And the landlords of the inns who were the receptacles and dispensers of news? Where have they gone? To the hill, that's where. Oh, there are ghosts all right. Lots of them along State Route 66 to Hoags Corners and Lower Village; Brainard, Stephentown and Lebanon.

Because I have been there I can talk to them. Especially the ones in the hill The mind is a time capsule. And so I return. On a road that is now cement paved.

( Recollections of a haggard postal delivery man loading the mail on the horse-drawn buggy and chugging uphill past the weathered sign announcing the start of State Route 66 and East Nassau, 1 mile. The horse and buggy are on their way to the antique post office. The depot is also the post mistress residence. The road is hoof-pounded dirt.)

Sixty-one years have passed since I took this route to Albany to enlist in the Marine Corps. The road is now cement paved. I am returning with my wife, Lynette, for a visit. Reared in Louisiana, this countryside is as strange to her as hers was to me when I visited her Franklin Parish. For a visit. That s the only way you can return, it is said.

To my right a house that wasn't there when I left in 1942. To my left the old quarry road, now gated with a rusting sign, "NO TRESPASSING, Lane Construction Corporation, Meridan, Conn."

I trespass.

A freezing wind buffets our SUV and branches bent with frozen leaves glare at me as I glide past the upper slope and begin to descend toward the hamlet, a tiny cluster. .

I allow the Jeep Cherokee to drift down the grade slowly toward the village, a knot hole in a sleepy hollow. To my right what once was dirt drive leading to a bridge is long gone. Once it straddled Kinderhook Creek to the original old town site where a string of homes, a blacksmith's shop, and grist and saw mills flourished. Denny Williams' mail buggy often crossed this bridge, carrying its cargo down the lane to Phoebe Pullover's post office.

Fred Harris, the town barber, sunken chest and hunchback, was always there to cut the crop. No such thing as family hairstyles or style cuts. Fred didn't know about beauty salons or permanent waves. Never discussed the weather or how the war was going. Might ask about Ma or Pa.

His hand-clippers chug along with an occasion pinch and pull. Finished, you hand him 25 cents, if you have it, or 15 cents. That was the charge for a cut in Fred Harris's barber house.

I coast down 66 to the new bridge, soon to be replaced, I'm told, and watch the swollen Kinderhook Creek barrel toward the hidden ravine. Once spotted with fly fishermen from around the country, Kinderhook's shore is empty. The water is unusually high, foaming and threatening...never-ending. Trout wink at me in the current. I cross the bridge and enter East Nassau.

It's heebie jeebie time.

I am in a mausoleum without roof or windows

Copies of David Alter's book, Intepidations & Funny Business, may be obtained by mailing him at owlbeara@comcast.net It will be available at a book signing at the Barnes & Noble book store in Boulder at 5:30 p.m. Friday, March 16.