Yesterday I saw Jimmy Carter. Today I was incompletely quoted in the newspaper published from our state’s capital city, and while what what they included was fine, they left out the best part. This evening, I had three “bar” shots of Tequila (which I haven’t done in quite a long time) , at home in the safety of my own kitchen and they knocked me on my virtual posterior.
I must say that I’m not much impressed with myself.
This morning I got up and grabbed the cell phone to clip on my hip as usual. Then I realized that it was not, technically, required this morning. I smiled, because it reminded me that, this morning, two people were free. My father died in the small hours yesterday morning. If there’s any mercy in this universe, he is free of the demons which plagued him all his life. I’m now free to remember the times they didn’t stand between us.
Neshaminy Warwick Presbyterian Church is one of those old pre-Revolutionary ones in Bucks County, Pa. It’s located at a curve on the Neshaminy Creek. Bristol Road, the one that goes by the church, takes a sharp turning as it goes over the bridge which crosses the creek. Various attempts have been made over the years to straighten and widen things a little bit, but although the bridge has been re-built for safety reasons its location hasn’t been changed, in part for historic reasons, but mostly because of the odd turning of the creek.
As the story goes, once upon a time, a long time ago, a young woman in a white dress was killed at night on the bridge. There may or may not have been a mist rising from the creek at the time, depending on the teller. She was either riding in a carriage which tried to take the turn too quickly and flipped, crushing her between the carriage and the bridge, or she was waiting on the bridge for a rendezvous with her lover and was hit by a carriage which didn’t see her. After a couple of hundred years, the story has gotten a little blurry. In any event, on certain dark nights, it is said that she can be seen on the bridge and her appearance has been blamed for more than a few close encounters between sides of the bridge and vehicles, even during my early lifetime.
Personally, I always figured it was a matter of careless driving or speeding and didn’t give much credence to it. That was before the time I was up there visiting my parents and had occasion to travel by the church one dark night–and damned near hit the bridge when I saw her.
