A few more did, mainly to affirm one or another already-voiced position, after which the aspiring teller of this would-be tale took it upon himself to thank our Association chairman for his good offices on our behalf. "No call for that," Dean Pete modestly replied, gathering up his notes. And then, to the house, "On behalf of H-Becka, it's I who thank you-all for coming to this get-together and making your opinions known. We're all plenty stressed out, for sure. But one way or another, by George…" As if just realizing what he'd said, he grinned meward. "One way or another, we'll rebegin!"
Yeah, right. And while we're about it, friends and neighbors, let's rebegin our derailed lives, okay? Taking a more or less alphabetical clutch of us as we've appeared in the Faltering Fables of G. I. Newett, let's have Sam Bailey's wife Ethel not die of cervical cancer this time around, so bereaving my old ex-colleague and Oyster Cove neighbor that he skewers himself (unsuccessfully) with a borrowed machete at the Hardisons' toga party in Rockfish Reach. Okay? And let those other RRers Dick and Susan Felton not feel so prematurely finished with their lives' prime time that they drive home from that same bloodily disrupted fest and off themselves with auto exhaust fumes in their garage, sans even a farewell note to their distant kids! Let good Pete and Debbie Simpson's daughter, Julie — their much-prized only child, on track to graduate from Johns Hopkins, go on to med school, and thence to service in some selfless outfit like Doctors Without Borders—not be car-crashed to death in her sophomore year by a drunken driver on the Baltimore Beltway, so traumatizing both parents (but Deb in particular) that they haven't enjoyed a truly happy hour in the several years since! Let George and Carol Walsh not be crushed to a bloody mush in the rubble of their house on Shoreside Drive (Rockfish Reach again) by that fucking five-minute F3 funnel-cloud! Et cetera? And while we're about all that, let's rebegin us Newett/Todds, making my Mandy this time around not merely an okay Poet + Damned Fine Teacher, but the Essential Lyric Voice of Early-Twenty-First-Century America + DFT!
And her husband?
Yes, well. In the beginning (that chap believes he was saying once upon a time) there was this place, this "development." There were these people: their actions, inactions, and interactions, their successes and failures, pleasures and pains, excitements and boredoms, in a particular historical time and geographical location. Nothing very momentous or consequential in the larger scheme of things: one small tree-leaf in the historical forest, it's particular spring-summer-and-fall no doubt to be lost in Father Time's vast, ongoing deciduosity. But just as, now and then, one such leaf may happen against all odds to be noticed, picked up, and at least for some while preserved — between the leaves of a book, say — and may with luck outlast it's picker-upper as the book may outlast it's author and even it's serial possessors, so may this verbal approximation of the residential development called Heron Bay Estates and of sundry of it's inhabitants survive, by some fluke, that now-gone place and it's fast-going former denizens — whether or not it and they in some fashion "rebegin," and even if this feeble re-imagining them of, like the afore-invoked leaf-pressed leaf, itself sits pressed and scarcely noted in Papa T's endless, ever-growing library—
Or, more likely, his recycling bin.
—[Good]By[e] George I. Newett