JHFARR.COM

Down by the river
and there’s just me
making my way while
the way makes me

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This is the sort of tale you need your Jesus-in-a-box for. The weird thing is, I only connected the two events below the other day, and this was decades later.

I was a junior at Massapequa High School on Long Island. For this Air Force brat from Texas, going from dust storms and football to New York in any form was quite a shock. Everyone in Abilene was named Jim Bob or Betty Sue. There was a single Jewish family in town who owned a shoe store. At Massapequa High, the student body was one third Italian, one third Jewish, the other third Irish and assorted, and they were always getting into fights. Not a black face in the bunch, you may be sure.

One of the first things I learned about was the murder in the shower room in the boys’ gym. This would have been a couple of years before I showed up. As I recall, one kid had blown away another with a shotgun. That’s the only detail I remember. This was years ago, you realize, when such behavior was unheard of.

Massapequa must have been ahead of its time. There were junior high school girls shooting up heroin on the school bus—Time or Newsweek had an article about it once—all this in a heavily-developed, upscale place. It probably wasn’t just like I remember, but the high school did offer four years of German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese, and that was almost as interesting as my girlfriend.

[continue reading…]

There’s a new thing I’m trying out at Medium. It’s kind of hard to explain what Medium is, but I really like the formatting, and because of the way the site is configured, it’s possible to attract a lot of attention if you’re good. In fact, the opportunity may exist to greatly expand the number of people who see my work. The folks who set it up originally started Blogger and then sold it to Google for a bazillion dollars, so maybe they don’t have their heads up their asses. One can hope.

What I’ve done so far is to select a few essays from this blog for republishing at Medium. Above is the top part of what my profile page looks like for the moment. That’s my Twitter “bio” just below. Farther down where you can’t see is a list of what I’ve posted, all pieces from JHFARR.COM so far, but that will change. They have a very slick Web interface for composing that’s fun to use—especially with photos—and I’m playing around with it to stir up some dust.

Another shot from Bernardo Wildlife Area. This one is barely cropped at all, so you can tell we were close. Dang critters were walking across the road in front of the car! If you want to see sandhill cranes, this is the place.

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