Belonging

From the cradle to the grave, belonging to something is important.  Neighborhood kids form gangs or sandlot sports teams, teenagers don the colors of Pflugerville High School, college kids fill up the stadium for Old Siwash.  Alums return for homecoming, donate vast sums to the old lacrosse team, travel hundreds of miles and spend thousands of dollars to watch the alma mater in The Frozen Four.  Why?  Because, by God, they belong to something, they are card-carrying members of a club, be it the Shriners, the Trap Door Spiders or the Owlhoots Motorcycle Gang.  They might miss Aunt Susie’s funeral but they’re all in for the annual Sturgis, South Dakota bike rally.  Loud and proud, with God on their side.  I was walking down the South Kabob Trail in the Grand Canyon one fine July day several years back and up the steep footpath came a trekker in a University of Florida cap.  “Go, Gators!” I said in passing and he smiled, straightened up and hastened his pace to the top, cheered on by this unknown brother from the same club.  It’s you and I against the world, bro!  In all kinds of weather we’ll all stick together because otherwise…well… it’s a little lonely.

Belonging is a fundamental part of being human.  We need people and this need is hardwired into our brains.  A recent MIT study found we crave interactions in the same region of our brains where we crave food.  Another study showed we experience social exclusion in the same region of the brain where we experience physical pain.  A study at the University of Michigan found when people lack a sense of belonging it is a strong predictor of depression…an even stronger predictor than feelings of loneliness or a lack of social support.

It’s also telling to look at animal examples.   According to Jeanine Stewart of the Neuroleadership Institute, “When something is conserved across species, it’s an indication that some elements of our behavior are driven by things that are more basic and which we can witness.”  Research from Florida Atlantic University provides a telling example in beluga whales.  The FAU study found these whales form complex social relationships with close kin, but also with distantly related and unrelated whales…a behavior mirrored in humans as well in their connections with close friends, family and others more distant.

As Barbra Streisand sang:

We’re children needing other children
And yet letting our grown-up pride
Hide all the need inside
Acting more like children than children.
People who need people
Are the luckiest people in the world.

That’s you, pal. 

One Nation Under God.  And One Is Enough.

In 1978, National Football League film narrator John Facenda, who sounds a lot like God, used the term “Steeler Nation” to describe Pittsburgh’s avid fanbase, thus drawing a distinction between the Steelers’ ardent supporters and those of other teams.  Ever since, passionate fans of teams in all sports have adopted the term, even if the average observer might wonder how many citizens it takes to constitute a decent nation.  Red Sox Nation is acceptable, of course, as is Gator Nation, but what about lowly Muhlenberg?  Must we have a Mule Nation?  It sounds so awkward and unoriginal.  How about resorting to the phrase “a pack of mules” and calling Muhlenberg the Mule Pack?  Florida fans could be the Alligator Congregation, Ohio State fans the Buckeye Nuts, while FSU would have its Seminole Reservation.  Much better.  Just think of it; the Tulane Wave Surfers, the Army Brats, the Texas Horn Dogs…there’s no end to the possibilities.  Hold on a second---someone just asked about Syracuse, an obvious problem.  The Orange Juliuses just won’t do and the Orange Aid seems wimpy.  Okay, got it---we’re going with the Orange CRUSH.  What else ya got?  Iowa State?  The Storm Trackers.  Baylor?  The Bear Necessities.  We’ll be here all week, folks…don’t forget to tip your waitress.

Jesus Loves You, Despite Everything

Siobhan and I were walking through the neighborhood one recent morning when we passed Cathy, a familiar face on the morning jaunt.  She carried with her a smile and her imposing stick, intended for balancing and to ward off errant coyotes.  Somedays we pass with a couple of words, this time we stopped to talk, and Cathy brought up the subject of church, asked us which one we belonged to.  Not nosy or preachy, just curious.  We told her we were members of the Church of the Golden Rule, which was very forgiving about Sunday service lapses.  Cathy said she was a believer but the main attraction of her facility was its ambiance, fellowship, the opportunity to make friends.  She was fairly new in the ‘hood and wanted to belong to something and when that something is church, nobody asks any questions.  You are immediately assumed to be an okay guy or girl, maybe even a future dinner invitee or quilting bee companion, or, if you get particularly close, co-mourner.  People at these places often speak very little of God, himself, but more about weddings and swap meets and health issues and vacations.  If some unfortunate member of the congregation becomes ill, everyone knows what to do, where to go, what to say.  Of course, the inverse is also true.  If someone is exiled from their religious community for, say, their politics, their sexuality or other unacceptable taboos, they often lose their entire little world.

Fortunately, there are other options for community, sometimes an entire town.  In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, places like San Francisco and Austin and Boulder and Gainesville drew endless young pilgrims looking for a new shrine at which to worship, new companions, a life in common with people who were discovering an alternate way to think and live.  The Peace/Love crowd gravitated to the Subterranean Circus, the Florida Theater, any back porch where a hometown rock band was playing free music, forming their own society within the greater one.  Today, they're still at it---only the venues have changed…to Heartwood Soundstage, the One Love Cafe, Friday Nights on the Downtown Plaza, Chiappini’s sanctuary in Melrose.  On a good night, you might even spot a quiet Jesus floating through these landscapes (though it might also be Chuck LeMasters in a fright wig).

The hippies, of course, had their own religions, often Eastern, sometimes pagan, occasionally Wiccan.  Then---and perhaps now--- there was also the inclusive live-and-let-live Universal Life Church, with its outdoor chapels in the forest.  If you were so inclined, you could send in a cereal boxtop and five dollars and become a licensed minister of the ULC, allowing you to preside over weddings, speak in solemn tones at funerals and give fatherly advice to your flock, as our old pal Danny Levine did.  One day, an old acquaintance from Temple Beth Sholom in Miami came up and asked, “Danny, what’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing in a place like this?”

D. Levine looked up and offered his usual genuine smile.  “Fostering harmony,” he said.  Where do we sign up for that church?

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

“It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood…a beautiful day for a neighbor.  Would you be mine?  Could you be mine?”---Fred Rogers

The Facebook neighborhood is a little rougher these days…filled with varlets pushing crotchy reels, posting silly questionaires and trying to convince you you’re smarter than Einstein if you can just answer these ten questions.  Where are all the stickball players, the hopscotch boxes, those guys who come around in fifty-year old trucks to sharpen your scissors?  Facebook, of course, sends out its Sanitation Department periodically to clean up the place but its difficult to maintain a neighborhood which lets just anybody in.  Maybe they need a few gated communities.

Nobody has to live in a Facebook village, of course, but there are obvious benefits.  If you’re Nancy Kay, you might catch a ride to the ophthalmologist.  If you’re Will Thacker, you can set off stinkbombs.  If you’re Georgie Ghetagrip, you can reveal your flirtations with suicide to see if anyone cares.  Having Facebook friends offers several psychological advantages, including an increased sense of belonging, reduced feelings of isolation and emotional support.  It can also help individuals maintain close contact with loved ones, particularly those who live far away, like in Bronson.  Then too, FB residency provides a platform for sharing experiences and receiving validation, not to mention  the opportunity to post funny cartoons of Donald Trump on the toilet.

Positive social relations are known to have a beneficial impact on health, physical and mental.  Dawn Stevenson of South Florida, a modern day Perils of Pauline heroine, rises from the dead monthly after yet another scrape with the archvillain Cancer, who carries bullying to new heights.  Just when you think she’ll be run over by that railroad engine steaming around the curve, she unties herself from the tracks and leaps to safety, giving Cancer the finger one more time.  Having a FB audience to cheer her on is like being the home team at an SEC football game and Dawn is boosted in mind and body by her cheerleaders.  Simultaneously, the cheer squad is boosted by realizing they are not Dawn.  Studies reveal that just thinking about friends activates specific areas of the brain---including the ventral striatum, amygdala, hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex---more significantly than other types of relationships.  At least that’s what our pal Big Ted of Newark tells us.

The hitch in our getalong is that after age 70, our friends start disappearing faster than Arkansas Democrats.  In your seventies, you pull up to the toll plaza and the Grim Reaper is manning three-quarters of the kiosks.  Other friends move away to Bhumfuk Junction, like Judi Cain did.  And anybody who’s left can’t leave the house, crippled by some septuagenarian plague like shingles, the vapors, narcolepsy, the rockin’ pneumonia or the boogie-woogie flu.  This is obviously a job for the new Pope, Bobby Prevost of Chi-town, a known healer and righter of wrongs.  We called him and made a deal.

On the weekend of May 2, 2026, a protective aura will be placed over the Heartwood Soundstage facility.  No one will be nauseous, lame or otherwise incapacitated by some grim disease.  For seven hours, everyone will be allowed to dance without fear of heart attack, stroke or angry bunions.  If it’s critical that we see our friends as much as possible, how valuable is it to see all of them at the same time in the same place?  Where have you gone, Michael Hatcherson, Gregory Barriere, Debbie Adelman, David Matthews, Thomas Sutton, the Nation lifts its lonely eyes to you? 

Write it down on your wrist with indelible ink: The Grand Finale, May 2, 2026, 1-8 p.m. at Heartwood.  Free admission to people of good cheer.  All your friends will be there, even Judi Cain, who promises to parachute in naked.  If you liked the original, you’ll love the sequel.

See the pyramids along the Nile,
Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle,
Just remember darlin’ all the while,
You belong in Gainesville.

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail

     

A Mammoth Undertaking

Act I---Louisville Slogging

“All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”---Bill Killeen

Most large organizations similar to the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine like to have their annual conferences in places like Tahoe, Las Vegas and Orlando so there will be plenty to do in the off hours, spouses will come along and attendance will be boosted.  So Lucy, you have some ‘splainin’ to do.  Why in the wide, wide world of sports are we slugging it out in pedestrian Louisville?  Sure, there’s the celebrated Bourbon Trail Tour, but then what?  When, oh when, is the fabulous Korea Fiber Art Festival returning to town?

Siobhan P. Ellison, microbiologist, veterinarian, researcher and the world’s greatest authority on Equine Protozoal Myeloencephalitis was invited to lecture on her subject by the EPM Society of the ACVIM at its June bash in Derby City.  “It would be rude not to go,” she said.  Reasonable enough.  On close inspection, however, a friend pointed out that the awesome and exciting Mammoth Cave was just a skosh over a one-hour drive south.  “Throw in that big boy and you’ve got yourself a deal,” he said.  And the trip was on.

The meeting was held at the Louisville Convention Center and the Marriott Hotel across the street.  We stayed next door at the pricey Hyatt Regency, a two-minute walk to the ballroom where Siobhan would speak.  All I can say about the Hyatt is contained in my review, which they pleaded for and I sent:

“First, the room was freezing-ass cold no matter what you did to the thermostat.  Second, the language-challenged folks at the front desk took a lot of convincing that Bill and William were the same person.  Third, the overnight parking rates would be excessive even for the Hotel California.  Fourth, the in-house Sway restaurant must have had prayer hour immediately after I gave the waiter my order since the food didn’t come back til decades later.  But hey---the location is to die for.  Is that enough?”

I got a nice note back from the management telling me my review would be published in their little online collection.  Just for fun, I checked the first twelve pages and it wasn’t there.  What ever happened to comic relief?  At least they could have sent me some thin mints.

Suffice to say the talk went well for the ten percent of observers who could follow Dr. Ellison’s thoughtful remarks.  This is typical.  When we went to the campuses of Bayer and Schering-Plough, they brought a dozen people into the room and perhaps two of them could follow her reckoning.  They hired her anyway, on faith.  “Just give me the reins and step aside,” she says.  It usually works out pretty well.  We didn’t send out any postcards saying Having a Wonderful Time---Wish You Were Here!

Just Passing Through

After the meeting, we hopped into our Volkswagen compact, which Enterprise insisted was an upgrade, and moseyed down the road to Keeneland and The Kentucky Castle near lovely Lexington, which is all the things Louisville is not.  The Keeneland grounds were in the midst of a revamping upheaval but we managed to visit the iconic jockey statues near the saddling paddock before the security patrol recognized our offense and threw us out.

The Kentucky Castle started its sketchy career back in 1969 when Rex Martin and his wife Caroline, inspired by their recent trip to Germany, decided a castle was just the thing Kentucky needed.  The finished product was intended to have seven bedrooms, fifteen bathrooms, a fountain and a tennis court.  Alas, their marriage foundered in 1975 and the castle was left unfinished, an odd configuration of blocks staring out at passers-by on Route 60 between Lexington and Versailles…another roadside attraction, subject to all kinds of scary rumors.  In 1988, Rex finally got around to putting it on the market, but died before it was sold to one Thomas R. Post, a wealthy Miami property tax lawyer, in 2003.

The new owner thought it would be a cute touch to name the place “Castle Post” and keep it as a personal trinket, a terrible disappointment to the locals who aspired to its eventual reincarnation as a medieval-themed restaurant or museum where they could marry off their progeny.  Then, in May of 2004, after months of renovations, disaster struck the castle.  Newly-installed woodwork and wiring caught fire in the main building, causing significant damage.  Poor old Tommy Post---fortunately still living in Miami and not his beloved castle---vowed to rebuild, a testimony to the assets of property tax lawyers.  Approximately twice the castle’s original cost went toward the renovation project, which was completed in 2008.  New additions included twelve luxury suites, a library, game room, music parlor, dining hall, ballroom, swimming pool, formal garden, basketball court, bar, tennis court and eight maids a-milking.  The castle became a tourist inn, perhaps the only place in the country where you can get a bedroom in a turret.  Rapunzel, where are you---all is forgiven.

Currently, The Kentucky Castle is owned by the THC Hospitality Group, led by Wes Henderson, which purchased the place in 2023.  It operates as a luxury hotel with spa services and, to the great delight of Kentuckians, hosts various other events like weddings, corporate dinners and goat yoga seminars (you think we’re kidding).  There is even a holiday brunch with the Lexington Ballet.  If you’re going, bring your crown and scepter, there’s an Adirondack chair by the front gate for picture-taking.  Forgot your tiara?   No problem, there’s a wide selection at bargain prices in the castle bookshop.

Would you like to swing on a star…carry moonbeams home in a jar…and be better off than you are…or would you rather be a KING?  Step right up, we’ve got your robe and slippers!

Cave City, U.S.A.

“Yeah, we’re goin’ to Cave City, ‘cause it’s two to one.
You know we’re goin’ to Cave City, gonna have some fun…
Two caves for every boy!”---Jan & Dean

An hour’s ride and one time zone southwest of Louisville lies the quiet hamlet of Cave City, population 2,300.  The part you’ll notice is at the intersection of Interstate 65 and Mammoth Cave Road, where all the hotels are, where the Cracker Barrel is and where the billboards tempt a kid to demand a stop at Dinosaur World just around the corner.  “Wander among hundreds of life-sized dinos in a natural setting!” screams the advertising for what amounts to be a glorified rock shop.  But there’s more to Cave City than a hasty observer might notice.

Visit with Eric, the young and gentle soul who presides over the local Hampton Inn and you’ll find a friendly, unassuming Cave City native typical of the area.  “I like it here,” smiles Eric, leaning forward on his desk.  “I left, but soon came back.  The people are friendly here, good honest people who love this place, know each other, quick to help one another out.  No crime, no petty foolishness.  It’s the same in the surrounding area…a nice part of the world to spend your time, however much of it you have.”

He’s right.  The setting is verdant, an exceptional green, with gentle hills, well-cared-for homes and yards and absolutely pristine roadsides.  In three days there and plenty of back-and-forth driving, we didn’t see one piece of litter, not so much as a Snickers bar wrapper or an errant cigarette butt.  A short drive to nearby Horse Cave, almost a twin city, bore the same fruit.  The people who live there mostly stay or leave and return, like Eric, and they take care of their tiny bit of the Earth.

A fortyish fellow named Red Bull (“four cans a day”) who works at all three major hotels at the main intersection expounds on appreciating hard work.  “I guess I go overboard working but it’s something I like to do, like the rest of my family.  It’s no picnic putting in all the hours, but I’ve been able to save to buy a house and help out the family.  I like meeting the travelers who come in here for breakfast, listening to their stories.  I might try out some of those vacation places they talk about but I’ll never leave home.  Most of the people in these little towns around here were born here and see no need to leave.  It’s beautiful here and there’s plenty of agriculture to make a living.”

You get it…you pick up the vibe even if you barely pay attention.  There is a sense of community, which we see less and less these days, a harmony, little anger or intolerance, not much appetite to argue, a live-and-let-live disposition.  You travel to some places and ask the locals about their town and get a blank stare.  In Cave City, they know everything and are happy to talk about it.  The antithesis of judgmental, the exact ideal of human.  Cave City, U.S.A.  A person could do much worse than stake his claim there.

Spelunking/by cave goddess Siobhan P. Ellison

“I must go down in the ground again, to the lonely hole in the limestone.”---W.T. “Burrowing Bill” Killeen    

Our first cave exploration was in one of the two Ape Caves near Mt. St Helens, Washington in August of 2017. The Ape Caves are lava tubes, the second most common type of cave. The most common type of cave is the solution or karst cave. Karst is distinctive terrain that is shaped by dissolving soluble bedrock, usually limestone, by slightly acid water. This natural process creates distinctive landforms on the surface and underground. The underground formations include sinkholes, caves, springs, and disappearing streams.

Kentucky’s geology lends itself to caves because it has large areas of soluble limestone and other carbonate rocks. It is part of a region called the Central Kentucky Karst. Acidic rainwater percolates through the rock and as it dissolves, cracks and fissures form. Eventually passages and caverns are hollowed out, sinkholes form and underground rivers continue the process. Caves are not static, they are dynamic and even though some formed over millions of years they are still changing today. Cavern shapes can be long and tortuous or they can be tall towers.

The Mammoth Cave self-guided tour, a good warmup, enters through the Historic Entrance where you are greeted with startlingly cool air; that is the cave breathing out. The cave exchanges air every 24 to 48 hours; the cool air is pulled out by the ambient and warmer air at the mouth of the cave. In winter the opposite is true, cooler air outside sinks into the cave displacing the warm air. The warmth of humans and the moisture from breathing affects the cave and there are monitors to warn Rangers if the delicate ecosystem will be damaged. The cave tolerates thousands of visitors a year but it is delicately balanced, holding a steady temperature of 55 degrees. Before you can enter you are warned about white nose syndrome, a deadly fungal disease affecting hibernating bats. It is caused by Pseudogymnoascus destructans and can decimate 90% of a colony. To enter another cave that doesn’t have the fungus requires a change of clothes and a disinfected backpack. The Rangers seemed a bit cavalier about this disease that has killed millions of insect-eating bats in 40 states and some provinces in Canada. We were entering the cave in the summer, so no bats were present.

The walls of Mammoth Cave are limestone slabs, rough from ground water erosion and fracturing that started 10-15 million years ago, the resulting debris littering the sides of the tube. Most of the passages were formed by 2 million years ago and continue today in the lower levels. The Green River provides a base level for the water to drain and contributes to the continued formation of the lower passages. Sandstone and shale form the caves caprock and comprise the arch-shaped ceiling, best for preventing spontaneous collapses. The caverns are 50 feet high and in some rooms are closer to 200 feet; the width could comfortably accommodate a 4 stall barn.

The winding passages of the cave were carved by flowing waters that often formed blind alleys or narrow shafts to the levels below. Mammoth Cave is dark, punctuated with artificial lighting highlighting artifacts of human encroachment. Native Americans used the caves as long as 4,000 years ago, mining minerals (gypsum) by cane reed torchlight and as a burial ground. There are no remnants of the early occupants except a few mummified remains that have been moved several times and ultimately transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, taking the last trace of the indigenous people. We saw evidence of the saltpeter mining (for gun powder in 1812) and the last stone mini-house for an experimental tuberculosis hospital. There are numerous names written in candle smoke in the cave. We know Luther Ewing left his mark in 1874. There is also graffiti from years ago when it wasn’t a felony to mark one’s travels.

The Extended Historic Modified Tour, everybody’s favorite, is a moderately difficult 2 mile loop hike with 540 stairs. This hike takes two and a quarter hours and goes down to 340 feet underground. The hike is along well maintained wide pathways and mostly has non-slick stairs but at one point the trail descends into cramped quarters called Fat Man’s Misery. This is a winding, keyhole shaped passage about 100 feet long. The lower part of the keyhole is as wide as a sylph’s hips and widens to about 5 feet overhead with intermittent, head- scalping walls. At the end, there is a 20 foot section where the floor rises, requiring one to stoop. An additional challenge is a very slick pseudo-step up at one point. Of course, the light is very dim.

The cave is quiet but doesn’t echo. Occasionally, one can hear a moderate flow of water as it makes its way from the surface to the outside through the rocks and voids. Other points along the path are bottomless pits covered with grates you can traverse and rooms with 200 foot towers carved smooth by slow moving subterranean waters. Sometimes there is a green hue caused by algae, moss, and bacteria that is called lampenflora which grows near the artificial lights. After descending five levels of the cave tunnel, there are stairs marked with water levels. The cave rarely floods but in 1975 the water reached to the fifth step in the ascending staircase. However, in April of 2025 there was historic flooding with the water rising to ten feet above the floor, marked on the staircase with a pink ribbon. The flood represents the level of the water table to which the entering water from above flows. It might be a good idea to visit this historic national park soon since global warming is going to negatively impact the cave by increased flooding, changes in cave temperature, and disruption of the ecosystem. The delicate formations will be forever changed by ignoring global warming, leaving future generations to observe our impact in the 2020’s.

Another visit was to the privately owned Crystal Onyx Cave several miles east of Mammoth Cave. This is a proper cave sporting speleothems. Speleothems are stalactites or stalagmites formed in solution caves by the deposition of minerals in the water that drips from the terrain above. We arrived just in time for the half mile tour that takes about an hour. This cave is a constant 58 degrees and starts with descent into a sinkhole newly outfitted with crushed limestone paths, metal steps and handrails. Looking up at the ceiling, you could see the track of the river that had contributed to this cave. Each formation in Crystal Onyx Cave has a name: there is the obligatory Alien Room with Norman, the stalagmite you can touch. This is a dead formation, created by an unknown tectonic plate that shifted and moved Norman a few feet from under his sustaining drip from the ceiling. Without continued input from above, Norman died after existing and growing for thousands of years. There is also a Cat Room, the Potato Patch and the Great Room. Our guide was Ian and his monologue was terrific and informative, with mannerisms oddly similar to all the other cave guides. We were told that there was a period of cave wars when competing interests would enter the caves damaging and destroying speleothems. Some of the larger damaged forms near the path were cut horizontally, polished and the rings made visible, reminiscent of tree rings. Another formation called “cave bacon” was formed by lateral movement of minerals containing water, making the curtain-like stalactites. To qualify as bacon, light has to pass through the formation. These formations are facilitated by the slope of the tunnel. When our guide backlit the bacon, the vertical striations were visible. The size of some of these formations was spectacular. Although we didn’t see them, the cave hosts cave salamanders, cave crickets and cave beetles. The cave crickets eat plant material, fungi, mold, cave beetles and other crickets. Cave beetles eat cave cricket eggs exacting revenge on the cave crickets. We were treated to a light show when Ian demonstrated the effects of different light sources. The first was flame, used by early spelunkers. Lamps were dimmer but more reliable. Black light was unique and revealed the fluorescence of some of the rock’s minerals. The fluorescence decayed slowly by seconds so images could be “written” on the floor.

Our third cave experience was Diamond Caverns located inside Mammoth Cave National Park. Despite huge billboards claiming the Cavern was just a mile up on the left it was difficult to find. MapQuest got us there but it is spotty in the area. Diamond Cave has paved pathways, handrails, and 350 steps with the difficulty tagged as strenuous… however it is so beautiful you hardly notice the effort.

In 1811, saltpeter mining was going on in Mammoth Cave. Along a long narrow sink hole valley nearby, mining was also active in Long Cave and Short Cave. An unknown wonder lay beneath. Near the road to Mammoth Cave, in 1859 a slave of landowner Jessie Coats discovered a pit. He tied a rope around his son’s waist and lowered him into the hole. When pulled up, the child said all he saw was diamonds, many diamonds. What he really saw was sparkling calcite formations but his name stuck. A survey team arrived, built steps, and constructed a building around the entrance. These efforts led to the pristine condition of the cave. The cave became an immediate tourist attraction, the slave leading many tours over 40 years.

After changing hands multiple times due to the Civil War and dwindling tourism, Diamond Cave received few visitors but it became a destination in 1904 when automobiles braved the bad roads to the site. In 1921, an oil driller made a new entrance into Mammoth Cave and with 17 active cave attractions in the area the cave wars and destruction of speleothems resulted. Lights were added in 1917 and seven years later concrete steps were added. Over the next 50 years, Diamond Cave tours prospered due to marketing by an influential fellow named Dr. Edward A. Rowsey. More caverns were discovered and explored in 1936 and became part of the tour. After being bought and sold many more times, five cavers and their wives bought the property in 1999. When two of the purchasers began removing surface rocks from a crevice in the back yard, the bottom fell out revealing a shaft that led to 250 feet of undiscovered passages. The crawlway was enlarged and led to the largest room in Diamond Caverns. This area remains undeveloped and pristine with restricted access. There are legal implications if Diamond Caverns is part of the Mammoth Cave system. Kaden, our guide, was evasive when asked if it wasn’t logical that these tunnels were really part of the longest mapped cave system in the world.

It is here we learned of three time periods that formed Diamond Caverns. First, limestone was laid down, the cave passages were carved by underground streams in the second period, and in the third period, calcite formed. The prevalence of limestone means that Kentucky was once under a warm, shallow sea south of the equator. The sea creatures used calcium carbonate for their shells and the shells accumulated as the creatures died. Over a long time, the shells’ fossils became ooze and the ooze compressed into limestone. It is a slow process; each foot of limestone represents 40,000 years. When you descend the steps into Diamond Caverns, each step takes you back 23,000 years. The walls of Diamond Caverns took 4 million years to form. About 10 million years ago, Kentucky was in the northern hemisphere and above sea level. When it rained, the rain made its way to the oceans. In areas with a limestone bedrock, the water took a shorter route to the ocean by seeping through tiny cracks in the stone ending up near a river. It continues this seeping today.

The water dissolves the rock because raindrops collect carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and collect even more carbon dioxide from the soil. The water and carbon dioxide form carbonic acid that dissolves limestone. As the limestone dissolves, the cracks enlarge, more water enters and the cracks get even larger. It takes 50,000 years to dissolve enough limestone to make a crawlway for a human to fit. Ten million years ago, a trickle of water became a major underground river and by about 2 million years ago continental glaciers impacted the flow of the rivers and the cave filled with sediment. The clue to this event is the presence of gravel stuck high up in the ceiling of Diamond Caverns. The glaciers cycled between advancing and retreating, letting the cave stream wash out the sediment. As more carbonic acid dripped into the caverns, the acid lost some carbon dioxide to the air and the less potent solvent couldn’t keep the dissolved limestone in solution. The minerals crystallized forming calcite and calcite was deposited on the ceiling, floor, and walls of the cave.

A drip from the ceiling may form a stalactite. Water dripping from the ceiling may form a stalagmite on the floor, and if the drip is from an overhanging wall then a thin ribbon or calcite drapery is formed. These very thin drapery formations are called bacon formations if light can shine through them. If water seeps into the cave and evaporation is at the same rate, the formation is called popcorn for obvious reasons. Geologists have dated a stalagmite that is about 9 inches tall. The youngest part at the top is 170,000 years old and the bottom 306,000 years old.

We observed bacon, drapery, and popcorn formations in vast caverns. We went down and up the stairs and walked the gently winding pathways. We saw areas vandalized by the cave wars and scarred by signatures dating back to the 1850s. In one “room” weddings were held and a stone with a cross commemorates the area. In some areas the walls looked green due to the light-loving algae and molds. There were pools and great columns and bottomless pits. Kaden told us it doesn’t flood in Diamond Caverns but if there is a good sized rainstorm it will trickle down to the low level of the cave through the porous rock and get the tour wet. The closest underground stream is Hawkins River that runs 150 feet underground. The cave is continuing to form and change but the changes are microscopic and won’t be apparent for many thousands of years.

On our final day, we were tired and muscle-sore from our adventures, but surprisingly alert with a sense of wellbeing as we climbed the steps out of the cave to beat all caves.  Some think the caves have restorative powers and maybe this is a tiny bit true. In this region of Kentucky, it is easy to believe (as the guides hint) that the caves are all ultimately connected to one another. After days in their fascinating bellies, perhaps we, ourselves, become in some arcane way connected to the caves.  Hopefully, human sanity will ultimately prevail and these wondrous places, singular in their magnificence, will be spared for the rest of Time.  If not, well…we had our day in the shade.

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com

Theater Of The Absurd

The Possum Lady

Remarkably, Georgette Spelvin, also known as The Opossum Lady, has been around for years without us knowing about it.  This is very disappointing because Flying Pie headquarters is tricked out with the most powerful radio telescope arrays known to man and its refined Nitwit Meter is the envy of nutcake hunters everywhere.  Where did she come from, Cotton Eyed Joe?

For many years, The Possum Lady was mild-mannered housewife Georgette Spelvin of Southern California.  But then one day while vacationing in Western Kentucky, she stumbled into a strange cave in the middle of a dense forest.  As she went further and further into the tunnel, the cave opened up significantly and became brighter.  When Georgette hesitated to proceed, a booming voice rang out in the distance.  “WELCOME!” it echoed.  “Welcome to the lair of The Great Possum.”   And at the end of the tunnel, there he was on the Possum Throne.

“I will give you these two stone tablets,” said TGP.  “On them are the many truths possumhood has collected over generations, secrets unknown to mankind.  You will take these revelations and make them known to the world.”  Gotcha, said Georgette Spelvin.  And thus, her adventure began.

Georgette started showing up (perfectly coiffed, ala Jackie O.) on YouTube with important messages for the world, like how to take proper care of your own opossum.  Possums are apparently style conscious, so we mustn’t neglect their wardrobes, where simplicity rules.  It’s also a critical matter to schedule those monthly pedicures.  Spelvin, if you ask nicely, will be glad to teach you how to properly massage your opossum, assuming you’re interested.

Now, some folks might be a smidge concerned that Georgette’s partner in crime is one Pearl de Wisdom, a dead squirrel who knows everything.  But not us.  The Flying Pie feels if there is a deceased squirrel out there willing to share her psychic wisdom with us via an earthly mouthpiece, have at it.  Many fans have benefited from Pearl’s thoughtful commentaries on love, money, work, health and etiquette, particularly as it applies to impatient automobile drivers who can’t wait a few seconds for a street-crossing squirrel to make up her mind.

People who scoff at the possibility of psychic wisdom from rodents should take a few moments to remember the vast contributions of Mighty Mouse. And by the way, how much have you really learned from Dear Abby anyway?

Bizarro World

An enterprising Michigan woman who prefers to remain unidentified is looking for a new home today after police discovered she was living inside a rooftop sign above a grocery store.  Nicknamed “the rooftop ninja” by police, the lady took up residence above the Family Fare store in Midland about a year prior to her discovery.  Police said the 34-year-old woman, who has a job and a vehicle, had furnished her digs with a mini-desk, flooring and a food pantry.  She was released without charges and was last seen heading for Times Square.

Some people just love those thrill rides at amusement parks to death.  Literally.  Recent visitors to Disneyland were bummed to find their seats on the Rise of the Resistance ride smeared with bone chips and ashes, the cremains of someone who must have liked the ride a lot.  Dusting the landscape at The Happiest Place on Earth seems to have become a thing in Anaheim, where remains have also been discovered on attractions like It’s a Small World, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion.  The park would like to remind everyone that grandma won’t necessarily stay where you drop her off.  Sooner or later, she will be swept up and dumped.  Maybe you should try Sea World next time.

It was so hot in Death Valley last July that Belgian tourist Noah Goossens, 42, melted the skin off his feet after losing his flip-flops on the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes.  The air temperature was a mere 123 degrees but the sand has been known to get as hot as 200 Fahrenheit.  The scalding temperatures made it impossible for a helicopter to land in the dunes so Noah was hauled off by park visitors to a safer elevation, then flown to a hospital in Las Vegas.  Rangers advise summer visitors to Death Valley to stay within a ten-minute walk of air-conditioning, not hike after ten a.m., drink lots of water and carry a salt shaker with them at all times.  Goossens says next year he’s going to see the glaciers in Alaska.  Keep your shoes on, Noah.

Bet you can’t tell us who’s eaten the most Big Macs ever.  That would be Don Gorske, 70, who first sunk his teeth into McDonald’s signature sandwich more than 50 years ago and hasn’t missed a day since.  He’s up to a Guinness World Record 34,000 Big Macs lifetime, though he’s cut down to only two a day lately (his max for a day is nine).  When he started his marathon, his mother made him promise to eat at least one Macless meal a day and he’s kept his vow.  Gorske walks about six miles a day, gets regular checkups and appears healthy.  “No one will ever break my record,” Don beams, proudly.  Still, there is occasionally a price to pay.  “My wife and I were planning a vacation to Russia,  then someone told me there were no McDonald’s stores there.  Can you believe it?  Well, we cancelled immediately, of course.  I thought Trump and Putin were friends, for crying out loud.”

Kathygrams

Our alert reporter Kathleen Knight is the Queen of Miscellany, often coming up with significant tidbits unreported elsewhere.  These anecdotes are usually brief, bizarre and of great interest to someone, although we are not sure who.  With that in mind, The Flying Pie has decided to occasionally publish a gaggle of them for public consumption in hopes that they will somehow reach the odd people who should know about them.  Thus, we enter the Era of Kathygrams.

1---Surgeons are conducting rare ‘Tooth-In-Eye’ Operations to restore vision to blind patients in Canada.  The complex procedure involves extracting a patient’s canine tooth, adding a plastic optical lens to it and surgically embedding it in the eye.  Who wants to go first?

Known more formally as osteo-odonto keratoprosthesis, the surgery has supposedly been performed successfully in a handful of countries like Transylvania, but never before in Canada where people keep track of these things.  In late February, three patients Up North underwent the first part of the complex procedure.  If all goes according to Hoyle, they could have their eyesight back by summer.  And yes, they’re all using those toothbrushes with the very light bristles.

2---Swiss scientists played music to cheese as it aged.  The cheese seemed to like Hip-Hop  best.  Swiss cheesemaker Beat Wampfler and a team of crazed researchers from the Bern University of Arts placed nine 22-pound wheels of Emmental cheese in individual wooden crates in Wampfler’s cellar and for the next six months, each cheese was exposed to an endless 24-hour loop of one song using a mini-transducer.  The transducer directed the sound waves directly into the cheese wheels, a practice called ‘hitting the vein’ by Zurich drug addicts.

The Classical cheese got Mozart’s Magic Flute, the Rock cheese listened to Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, the Ambient cheese got Yello’s Monolith and the Hip-Hop cheese was exposed to A Tribe Called Quest’s Jazz (We’ve Got).  The unfortunate control cheese aged in silence.  The cheese was then examined by alleged food technologists from the ZHAW Food Perception Research Group, which concluded that the cheese exposed to music had a milder flavor than the control cheese.  The also found that the Hip-Hop cheese had a stronger aroma and stronger flavor.  The cheeses were then sampled by a jury of culinary experts during two rounds of a blind taste test who came to the same conclusion.  All of which goes to prove what we’ve long suspected---that the people of Switzerland have too much time on their hands.  Asked for his opinion on the matter, American cheese expert J. Ray Cash said, “Don’t take your cheese to town, boys, leave your cheese at home.” 

3---The first person in the United States to get a speeding ticket was a New York City taxi driver.  Who wouldn’t have guessed that one?  In 1899, cabbie Jacob German, a driver for the Electric Vehicle Company, was cited for jetting an astonishing 12 miles an hour by a bicycle officer, of all things.  At the time, NYC had a speed limit of 8 mph when going straight and 4 mph when cornering.  Horses, of course, had the same speed limit.  German was actually hauled in and temporarily imprisoned.  The first known speeding ticket in the world was issued in England to Walter Arnold of East Peckham, Kent in 1896.  Walter was traveling at breakneck speeds of 8 mph in a 2mph zone and fined one shilling.  Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do…whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

4---The Moon has its own Catholic Bishop.  No kidding.  According to an obscure Church edict called the 1917 Code of Canon Law, when an expedition sets out to discover new territory, that new land then becomes part of the diocese that was home to the expedition. Since Cape Canaveral was under the purview of the diocese of Orlando when Americans landed on the Moon, Bishop William Borders got the honors.  Following the success of Apollo 11, Bishop Borders had occasion to make an ad limina visit to the Vatican to visit Pope Paul VI, during which he casually advised the unaware Pope, “You realize, of course, that I am Bishop of the Moon.”  Paul VI nervously looked left and right at his advisors.  The current Bishop of Orlando is John Noonan, who is much less of a showoff.

5.---The town of Karawa, Japan has released a line of collectible trading cards  featuring the town’s male elders.  Is this a great idea or what?  Instead of a bunch of rich, honky ballplayers, the characters on the cards are the town’s ojisan---middle-aged or older citizens who have benefitted the community.  “I thought it was a shame that nobody knew about them,” said Ms. Eri Miyahara, Secretary General of Saidosho center, who created the idea.  “The cards went viral and now many kids look up to these men as heroic figures.”  The 47 card characters include local ‘Soba Master’ Mr. Takeshita, an 81-year-old noodlemaker and Mr. Fuji, a 67-year-old prison guard turned community volunteer whose card is so popular that local children will often approach him asking Fuji to autograph his card.

Obviously, this is an idea whose time has come.  We can see it now…”I’ll trade you two Mayor Wards for one Chuck LeMasters”…or “how about I take that Michael Davis off your hands for six Randall Roffes?”  There are all kinds of possibilities.  When we were kids, we’d get down on one knee and scale our trading cards at a wall several feet away…the card closest to the wall wins and gets to keep the other cards.  Or kids would get together in small groups like baseball general managers and arrange three and four-way trades trying to accumulate an entire set.  The old cards came in packages of incredibly bad chewing gum but these new ones could be distributed by hip local institutions like Heartwood or the Hippodrome to supportive customers.  “Anybody out there got a Nancy Luca, I just need her and Mark Chiappini for my set?”  “Yeah, I got Nancy, but it will take two Jeff Meldons and a Bill Killeen to get her”  “There’s a Bill Killeen card?  I thought he was dead.”

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com

Fun In The Sun

Funny how you grow up in the same house with people for seventeen or so years, then you don’t see them any more.  When we were kids, the family chugged along in slow cars on small roads for hours to visit relatives, then they repaid the visit.  People were always home, because where the hell else would they be?  You had to work for a living in the textile mills, shovel the snow, put the kids through school and collect your S&H Green Stamps.  You didn’t have to drive anywhere to visit grandma because she was right upstairs in the same house, where she belonged.  If older relatives became ill, foul-tempered or slightly deranged, you took care of it best you could for as long as you could.  When they started setting the curtains on fire, you reluctantly sent them to the crazy house in Danvers.

If anybody roamed very far away, don’t worry, they’d always be back for Thanksgiving.  Nobody had Turkey Day dinner alone, it was always a massive production of at least a dozen souls.  Alert grandmas would scour their neighborhoods for loners and drag them over for cranberry sauce by their ears.  It wasn’t the Christian thing to do, it was the Nana thing to do, and nobody argued with Nana.  When people graduated from high school, they didn’t go looking for a job in some foreign city.  Why would you want to go anywhere else but Lawrence, Mass. when you had band concerts in the Common on Sunday afternoons, the Red Sox on the radio and Salisbury Beach as soon as summer arrived?

Still, we now and then might cast a lustful eye at faraway Florida.  The Sox had Spring Training in Sarasota in those days and the radio announcers would warm our February afternoons with tales of brilliantly sunny days, grassy green fields and the glories of little gem ballparks in exotic places like Bradenton and Lakeland and Vero Beach.  It was everybody’s dream to some day go to Spring Training where you could see Ted Williams up close and maybe get an autograph.  Nobody was moving there, of course, it was against the solemn laws of New England to bail on your town and leave a weeping mother at the door.  Or as my own grandmother might say, “What’s the matter with you, anyway?”  Nonetheless, the Sunshine State always giggled in our prefrontal cortexes.

Breaking with tradition, in 1958 I was guilty of slip-sliding away to Stillwater, Oklahoma to go to college.  A couple of years later, my sister Alice found out we all wanted to be California girls and blasted off for the West Coast, leaving our little sibling Kathy (8 years younger than Alice and 10 younger than me) sisterless and brotherless.  Somehow, despite all this, Kathy made it through life optimistic and psychologically undamaged.  We were like three points on a scalene triangle and have remained that way, Alice in Camarillo, Kathy in Salem, N.H. and Bill eventually in Florida for all these years.  Sure, there have been the occasional visits, but not enough, and now, suddenly, we find ourselves all very old.  Especially me.  Kathy and Alice, musing on all this, decided a trip to the home of the old gaffer was essential before unidentified gloved minions began inserting him into a furnace somewhere or interplanetary friends of Gary Borse started lifting him off to Proxima Centauri on a benevolent starship.  They got on a plane, Jane, and set themselves free.

Welcome To The Big Swamp

The Two Sisters posse landed in Charlestown, wrecked the place in three days and moved further south.  The night before they left, of course, there was a giant SWAT raid on their hotel, which they claim had nothing to do with them… but come on, how many times have the cops ever raided your hotel?  Next stop was Savannah, where they drove through cemeteries and complained about the downtown parking and lack of action.  “It’s a snore,” griped Kathy.  “Where’s the beefcake?  Where’s the Chippendales?  Where’s the miniature golf course with the big dinosaurs?”

Eventually, the Deadly Duo arrived in lovely Fairfield, encamped in the Ellison estate’s famous Little House, drank champagne to celebrate and passed out.  Alice had trouble sleeping so she went out on the porch and was attacked by a terrifying armadillo.  “It was BIG,” she swore, “about five feet tall with red eyes and bad breath.”  We think it was really just Frank from down the street but we left her to her to her own imaginings.  Sometimes people from California have withdrawal symptoms when leaving the state and hear alligators under the bed.

Next day, it was off to jolly old St. Augustine, where the deer and the John Birch society play.  We parked in one of those places where you have to take a photo of the QR Code, send it in a self-addressed stamped envelope to the Vatican and sit in a dive bar until the Pope’s imprimatur comes back.  Then we marched on to St. George Street, as everyone does.  Fortunately, the crazed woman who daily runs up and down the street with the giant Trump flag was busy scaling speckled trout that day, so we enjoyed a modicum of peace on our little jaunt.  Matter of fact, foot traffic was very sparse that afternoon, a phenomenon we attributed to the arrival of Alice.

We took photos of the splendid lighthouse and drove to the beach on Anastasia Island, where it rained a torrent.  We got out when it died down and crossed a bridge to an ocean overlook, where two ladies from Titusville were enjoying their day.  “We need a casino here,” one of them grumped.  “Where are all the men?”  Kathy and Alice told them not to complain, it was worse in Savannah and in Charlestown your hotel got raided.  “Oh, my!” gasped one of the ladies.  “Think we’d have any luck on the whale-watching tour?”  Maybe with the whales but not the old men, Alice told them.  “You might want to try computer dating.  Be careful, though, the ones with the cutest pictures are all liars.” 

Take Me For A Ride In Your Boat Boat

There are exactly four things your average tourist can do in Ocala; visit a top-flight thoroughbred horse farm, take a glass boat ride at lovely Silver Springs, ogle the awesome World Equestrian Center or swing and sway over the abyss at The Canyons Zip Line and Adventure Park.  We didn’t tell Alice about the zip-line because the last time she went on one (in Belize) she forgot to use the brake and had to be landed by a scrawny little 125-pound Belizean fellow.  Which is a little like standing on the railroad tracks and sticking your arms out to slow down the Orient Express.  They gave the poor guy a big tip but how much does it cost to replace your external obliques?

We went to Silver Springs instead.  They used to have an abundance of wild monkeys there, rhesus macaques to be precise, but they multiplied to untenable numbers and some of them carried the herpes B virus, which could be spread to humans, thus the state took measures to curb their monkeys.  Nonetheless, aggressive monkeys have forced the park’s closure on two occasions.  In one instance, a woman visiting Silver Springs with her family said the monkeys had charged at them.  Bad monkeys!  None of them bothered us, of course, because they were afraid to incur the wrath of The Two Sisters, who carry tasers and keep cooking pots in the car.

Silver Springs’ main claim to fame is their glass-bottom boats, which float over springs producing over 500 million gallons of water per day, making SS one of the largest first-magnitude springs in the world and a significant contributor to the Florida Aquifer.  One fine day in the late 1870s, a couple of Marion county lads named Hullam Jones and Phillip Morrell decided it would be a good idea to fix a piece of glass to the bottom of their dugout canoe to better explore the local springs.  When Colonel W.M. Davidson and Carl Ray bought the Silver Springs area in 1924, they developed the larger gasoline-powered boats needed to take groups of tourists over the springs.  Even though Silver Springs is not the booming tourist mecca it once was, virtually all the boats going out the day we were there were filled.  Even The Two Sisters liked them.  And Bill got a Junior Captain’s badge for volunteering to steer the boat if the Captain got bushwacked by monkeys or anacondas.

Further Travels

On the way home from Silver Springs, we swung by the burgeoning equine playground of the World Equestrian Center, which doubles in size every four hours, about the same as amoebas.  Named one of Time magazine’s 2024 World’s Greatest Places, WEC is easily the largest equestrian complex in the United States with endless horse barns, state-of-the-art arenas and luxury accommodations on more than 2,000 acres at last count.  They even have enormous Jumbotrons around the arenas so blind people can keep track of the action.  Their laundry building is bigger than the Astrodome and their posh restaurant Stirrups in the Equestrian Hotel only takes reservations if you’re in the Fortune 500.

The original plan of the Roberts family which built the place was probably to make a few bucks somewhere down the line, but every time they make a million they spend two million more.  At last count, they had over 3000 stalls, which is double what they have at most thoroughbred racetracks, and the WEC stalls are much nicer.  Each one has non-slip mats in the bath and even those little bottles of shampoo, conditioner and shower gel hanging on the wall.  There’s also a Call Button if you need someone to come in and brush your back.  Young horses in Illinois just beg their parents to take them there, it’s better than Disney World.

No June adventure to the Gainesville area is complete without a visit to the Hippodrome’s dependable summer musical comedy.  This year it’s an oldie---1982’s Pump Boys and Dinettes.  At the Princess Theater on Broadway, it played to capacity audiences in olden times and even won a Tony award for Best Musical.  As with many musicals, the story line is thin (very thin in this case) and mainly used to tie the country pop tunes together.  The musicians, on the other hand, were better than terrific and deserved a larger crowd.  They’ll probably get one if the Hipp ever gets their tiny elevator fixed.  Many oldsters---like Alice, for instance---aren’t crazy about scaling the 30 steps to the staging area, and people over sixty are a large percentage of the Hippodrome’s business.  “We’ve got the UP part fixed, now we’re working on the DOWN,” says the manager.  Let’s hustle it up before Aunt Bea breaks a clavicle or someone falters on the descent, creating a snowball effect on the steepish stairway.

Back at the Little House, Alice and Kathy packed their suitcases with iron bars (don’t argue, I carried them) and loaded up for the trip back to Charlestown and flights home.  We discussed the Good Old Days, of course, as only siblings can and commiserated over the demise of several old neighborhood pals.  We spoke vaguely of a future meeting before the Cosmic Archer starts aiming his arrows our way, hopeful the sturdy Killeen genes allow for an encore down the road.  We’re optimistic because we’re Garfield Street Kids and we don’t allow Reaper parking on our street.  We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but we’ll meet again some sunny day.

That’s not all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com     

   

The One That Got Away

“In another life, I would make you stay
So I don’t have to say
You were the one that got away
The one that got away.”---Katy Perry

When we’re young and foolish---and inexperienced---there should be someplace we can go for good advice.  True we have parents, grandparents and assorted relatives only too eager to disperse the pearls of wisdom they have accumulated over the ages, but there is one problem with that---they’re not cool.  Sophisticated maybe, wise in the ways of making a living or playing the bassoon, but not cool as defined by the Teenage Book of Assessments.

Our friends are cool, of course, and just as ready to tell us what to do, but we can see by the way they conduct their own lives that they are naive, rash and perhaps insane, not that there is anything wrong with that as long as it doesn’t infringe upon our own existence.  So that leaves us with exactly no one particularly qualified to provide guidance on new things which crop up in our lives like puberty, the opposite sex and romance.  What we really needed in such perilous times was a primitive neighborhood street booth manned twelve hours a day by a reputable sage who clearly understood our various dilemmas---sort of like Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip.  Short of that, we were on our own.  Looking back, that should have been very, very scary.  Considering our powers of analysis and decisions made in haste, we’re lucky we got out alive, let alone lost a few girlfriends/boyfriends along the way.  Is it too late to request a do-over?

Candidates

We think it’s fairly safe to say that our quirky high-school decision-making apparatus might have been suspect.  Bill Killeen was accepted by Harvard, after all, but chose to meander across the country to attend Oklahoma State University in Gooberland.  A brilliant friend flunked out of MIT after one year (which most of us would do), gave up on higher education and became a potato farmer in Maine.  In college, my first dormmate became overly homesick for Indiana, if such a thing is possible, and left school after two months.  If these things don’t seem entirely rational to you, welcome to the club.  Should these people be trusted at this stage of confusion to make even more important decisions on who to mate with for life?  Probably not.  On the other hand, my sister Kathy married her teenage one-and-only John Scanlon right out of high school and the two of them celebrated their 50th anniversary last year.  But perhaps that’s the notorious exception which proves the rule.

Despite all this, many of us fondly remember someone from our first 17 or so years as The One That Got Away.  Maybe that’s because the first time for everything is exciting and memorable and usually has no strings attached.  It’s easier for relationships to be perfect the more short-lived they are.  In Still Life With Woodpecker, Tom Robbins says “When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a sudden rush of magic.  Magic is just naturally present.  We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more.  One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone.  We hustle to get it back, but by then it’s usually too late, we’ve used it up.”  And then we mourn the relationship lost.  Maybe the object of our affection forever becomes The One That Got Away.

More likely, The One arrives a little later during the college years, our first semblance of employment, the marriage of a friend.  We consider ourselves wiser now, urbane citizens of the world, better evaluators of talent, but the truth is we are still as dumb as an Idaho congressman when it comes to the opposite sex.  Someone can be perfect for a week, maybe three, then suddenly the coins fall from our eyes at some minor transgression, leaving us dazed and confused.  “Good grief, me golden idol is tarnished!” as the kid says watching the phone booth where Wonder Wart Hog is changing back to Philbert Desanex.  Have we made a mistake here?  Is a reevaluation in order?  It’s impossible to hide our disappointment.  Sensing the abrupt reversal of form, our heretofore beloved slips off into the ethers on that midnight train to Georgia, never to return, thus elevating his/her S&P bond rating to Triple A.  The escapee now and forever becomes The One That Got Away.  Aw, shucks.

Anecdotal Evidence

Eventually most fruit matures and becomes useful, as do we.  Older and wiser, we realize such things as compromise and sacrifice are required now and then if a relationship is to succeed, things we wish a Lucy had told us much earlier.  Our choices for a successful partnership are better considered, unhurried, allowed to develop over time and we are happier with the results.  When disagreements and disappointments occur, we tackle them like reasonable adults, argue the merits of our predilections, hash out acceptable solutions and don’t hold grudges.  But married or not, cohabitant or non, satisfied with life or riding boxcars, there are times when the swirling eddies of time open up a break in the clouds and there he or she is, floating through our memory banks---The One That Got Away.

“I was going through a rugged period in my marriage,” testifies Evan, an attorney from Etobicoke, Ontario.  “I  felt we would work our way through it but there was a lot of animosity between us and we decided to live separately for awhile.  I know it sounds ridiculous, but I couldn’t help thinking of Darla, my old college sweetheart from 30 years ago.  I even got in the car one day and drove eight hours to the Chicago suburbs just to sit outside her old house.  I didn’t even know if she still lived there but I knew she once loved me unconditionally.  I was behaving like a desperate fool, but I couldn’t help it.  I felt that once there was someone perfect for me.  For all I knew, she might now be an oversized dockworker with bad teeth, but I still saw her as she was 30 years ago.  I sat there and cried for half an hour, then I drove home.  My wife and I worked it out, but I still think about losing Darla.  Stupid…I know…but the truth.”

Gregory, a lifetime New Yorker had this to say:  “I met a woman while browsing the new books at Brentano’s Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan several years ago…she just walked over and asked me if I was going to buy the novel I was riffing through.  ‘It’s the last copy in the store,’ she said.  ‘I’d like to buy it if you don’t.’  I was a little put off by her forwardness but I handed over the book.  ‘Be my guest,’ I said.  On my way out of the shop, she came over, handed me a card and said ‘Here’s my information.  Call me and I’ll buy you a coffee for stealing your novel.’  Since she looked like Veronica Hamell, I called her the next day and a four-month relationship ensued.  ‘Veronica’ was perfect for me.  I liked everything about her, especially her brash willingness to try risky endeavors, something previously alien to me.  Everything was great, I thought we’d go on forever.  Then one day out of a clear blue sky, she came to my place and said, ‘I just got a new job in D.C.  It’s perfect, I couldn’t turn it down.  Want to come?’  Even though I had a mere dead-end job of my own in Brooklyn and could have found another easily in Washington, I balked.  If you’ve ever gotten the feeling you’re driving too fast, you’ll understand.  Veronica went by herself, thrived in her new setting and is now someone most of you have heard of.  Of course, I’ve never met anyone else like her and I never will.  Maybe if I’d gone, her supersonic career would have left me in the dust anyway, but I’d sure like a second chance to find out.

Too bad, guys, you’re history  Some people never learn to hit the curve ball.

Retrospect

Reminiscing about The One That Got Away might not be good for us, but it’s the way our brains are wired, says Colorado-based clinical psychologist Jodi De Luca.  “Our memories of the past give meaning to our present and our future.  If the feelings associated with a particular memory are enjoyable, our brains are drawn back to visit that memory over and over again.  Such is often the case with the one that got away.”

De Luca likens this affect to a sort of emotional time travel, the kind we experience when listening to a favorite song from the past.  When we hear a familiar tune, it’s not unusual to suddenly be overcome by what she calls “a vivid constellation of emotions and physiological reactions even including rapid heartbeats, sweaty palms, excitement or tears, all incredibly occurring as if they were happening today.”

Unlike pop songs, however, former relationships have a tendency to be redefined by rosy retrospection.  Seeing the world through rose-colored glasses is based on this psychological phenomenon.  According to Astroglide’s resident sexologist Dr. Jess O’Reilly, rosy retrospection is a result of remembering and judging the past more favorably than you assess the present.  Over time, this distorted view “can negatively affect our experience of the present and expectation of the future.  Though this cognitive bias can be positive if it helps build self-esteem, when you inaccurately recall your ex-lover’s behavior as overwhelmingly positive, it can result in distorted recollections of the relationship.  These biased memories tend to become more positive over time as you defer recalling the end of the relationship and focus on the positive elements as time passes.  The problem is that no one is perfect and the more you learn about them the less you tend to idealize them.  With a fling, you don’t have enough time to see that side of them.”

Clinical psychotherapist Kevon Owens offers one more reason as to why we often glorify past relationships: we simply wish to right our wrongs.  “Finding things that are lost, fixing what was broken…we want to make amends,” he says.  “The one who got away can be a very distracting spot in the direction our life is heading because no one can be all the idealized things we wish for.  In a perfect world, we’d learn and grow and move past these perceived errors, but the chances to do it with the person who got away may be gone and that can be very difficult to reconcile.  The one who got away can symbolize failure in many areas.”

We romantic old fools (and yes, it’s a club I belong to) ignore the above advice and persist.  Now and then, however, we run into someone with a tale that brings us up short.  An old friend, let’s call him Mike, is a notorious loner not immune to the charms of the opposite sex, including an occasional “booty call.”  But everyone has an Achilles Heel and for Mike, it was Sophie, a vivacious redhead who spun him around like a pinwheel.  They broke up, of course, but 18 years later Mike succumbed to ennui and loneliness and decided to look her up.  He found Sophie in Tacoma, of all places, and flew out to stir the embers.

“First of all, she forgot to pick me up at the airport---thought I was coming the next day.  When I got a cab to her place, it was in a war zone, nasty and falling down.  She weighed about 250 and wore spandex and she started undressing as soon as I walked in the door.  She hesitated for a moment, went into the bedroom and put Ravel’s Bolero on her turntable.  I didn’t know what to do so I feigned being ill.  I couldn’t wait to get out the door.  Let  me tell you---in this case I was was The One That Got Away!”

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com