"Take it from your friendly neighborhood realtor, folks," Jeff Pitt is declaring to the Ashtons: "Whatever you have against a second Bay bridge — say, from south Baltimore straight over to Avon County? — it'll raise your property values a hundred percent in no time at all, the way the state's population is booming. We won't be able to build condos and housing developments fast enough to keep up!"
Peggy Ashton: "So there goes the neighborhood, right? And it's bye-bye Chesapeake Bay…"
Pauclass="underline" "And bye-bye national forest lands and glaciers and polar ice caps. Get me outta here!"
Patsy Hardison, to Peter's own dear Deborah: "So, did you and Pete see that episode that Tom mentioned before, that he and all the TV critics thought was so great and I couldn't even watch? I suspect it's a Mars-versus-Venus thing."
"Sorry," Debbie replies. "We must be the only family in Heron Bay Estates that doesn't get HBO." Her eyes meet Peter's, neutrally.
Chuckling and lifting his coffee cup in salute as he joins the pair, "We don't even have cable," Peter confesses. "Just an old-style antenna up on the roof. Now is that academic snobbishness or what?" He sets cup and saucer on a nearby table and puts an arm about his wife's waist, a gesture that she seems neither to welcome nor to resist. He has no idea where their lives are headed. Quite possibly, he supposes, she doesn't either.
Up near the house, an old-fashioned post-mounted school bell clangs: The Greens use it to summon grandkids and other family visitors in for meals. Rob Green, standing by it, calls out, "Attention, all hands!" And when the conversation quiets, "Just want to remind you to put the Rockfish Reach sunset cruise on your calendars: Saturday, July fifteenth, Heron Bay Marina, seven to nine P.M.! We'll be sending out reminders as the time approaches, but save the date, okay?"
"Got it," Joe Barnes calls back from somewhere nearby: "July fifteenth, seven P.M."
From the porch Chuck Becker adds loudly, "God bless us all! And God bless America!"
Several voices murmur "Amen." Looking up and away with a sigh of mild annoyance, Peter Simpson happens at just that moment to see a meteor streak left to right across the moonless, brightly constellated eastern sky.
So what? he asks himself.
So nothing.
Us/Them
TO HIS WIFE, his old comrades at the Avon County News, or his acquaintances from over at the College, Gerry Frank might say, for example, "Flaubert once claimed that what he'd really like to write is a novel about Nothing." In his regular feature column, however — in the small-town weekly newspaper of a still largely rural Maryland county — it would have to read something like this:
FRANK OPINIONS, by Gerald Frank
Us/Them
The celebrated 19th-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, once remarked that what he would really like to write is a novel about Nothing.
After which he might acknowledge that the same was looking to be the case with this week's column, although it's author still hoped to make it not quite about Nothing, but rather ("as the celebrated Elizabethan poet/playwright William Shakespeare put it in the title of one of his comedies") about Much Ado About Nothing.
There: That should work as a lead, a hook, a kick-start from which the next sentences and paragraphs will flow (pardon Ger ry's mixed metaphor) — and voilà, another "Frank Opinions" column to be e-mailed after lunch to Editor Tom Chadwick at the News and put to bed for the week.
But they don't come, those next sentences—haven't come, now, for the third work-morning in a row — for the ever-clearer reason that their semiretired would-be author hasn't figured out yet what he wants to write about what he wants to write about, namely: Us(slash)Them. In Frank's opinion, he now types experimentally in his column's characteristic third-person viewpoint, what he needs is a meaningful connection between the "Us/ Them" theme, much on his mind lately for reasons presently to be explained, and either or all of (1) a troubling disconnection, or anyhow an increasing distinction/difference/whatever, between, on this side of that slash, him and his wife — Gerald and Joan Frank, 14 Shad Run Road #212, Heron Bay Estates, Stratford, MD 21600—and on it's other side their pleasant gated community in general and their Shad Run condominium neighborhood in particular; (2) his recently increasing difficulty — after so many productive decades of newspaper work! — in coming up with fresh ideas for the F.O. column; and/or (3) the irresistible parallel to his growing (shrinking?) erectile dysfunction [but never mind that as a column topic!].
Maybe fill in some background, to mark time while waiting for the Muse of Feature Columns to get off her ever-lazier butt and down to business? Gerry Frank here, Reader-if-this-gets-written: erstwhile journalist, not quite seventy but getting there fast. Born and raised in a small town near the banks of the Potomac in southern Maryland in World War Two time, where and when the most ubiquitous Us/Them had been Us White Folks as distinct from Them Coloreds, until supplanted after Pearl Harbor by Us Allies versus Them Japs and Nazis (note the difference between that "versus" and the earlier, more ambivalent "as distinct from," a difference to which we may return). Crossed the Chesapeake after high school to Stratford College, on the Free State's Eastern Shore (B.A. English 1957), then shifted north to New Jersey for the next quarter-century to do reportage and edi torial work for the Trenton Times; also to marry his back-home sweetheart, make babies and help parent them, learn a few life lessons the hard way while doubtless failing to learn some others, and eventually — at age fifty, when those offspring were off to college themselves and learning their own life lessons — to divorce (irreconcilable differences). Had the immeasurably good fortune the very next year, at a Stratford homecoming, to meet alumna Joan Gibson (B.A. English 1967), herself likewise between life chapters just then (forty, divorced, no children, copyediting for her hometown newspaper, the Wilmington [Delaware] News Journal). So hit it off together from Day (and Night) One that after just a couple more dates they were spending every weekend together in her town or his, or back in the Stratford to which they shared a fond attachment — and whereto, not long after their marriage in the following year, they moved: Gerry to associate-edit the Avon County News and Joan ditto the College's alumni magazine, The Stratfordian.
And some fifteen years later here they are, happy with each other and grateful to have been spared not only direct involvement in the nation's several bloody wars during their life-decades, but also such personal catastrophes as loss of children, untimely death of parents or siblings, and devastating accident, disease, or other extraordinary misfortune. Their connection with Gerry's pair of thirty-something children, Joan's elder and younger siblings, and associated spouses and offspring is warm, though geographically attenuated (one couple in Oregon, another in Texas, others in Vermont and Alabama). Husband and wife much enjoy each other's company, their work, their modest TINK prosperity (Two Incomes, No [dependent] Kids), and their leisure activities: hiking, wintertime workouts in the Heron Bay Club's well-equipped fitness center and summertime swimming in it's Olympic-size pool, vacation travel to other countries back in more U.S.-friendly times, and here and there in North America since 9/11 and (in Gerald Frank's Frank Opinion) the Bush administration's Iraq War fiasco (U.S./"Them"?). Also their, uh… friends?