The superhero said, “No problem, man!”
And another instance. We were well into high school the night William and I attended a crucial town board meeting, where, to our surprise, the cousin turned up, too. At that point he’d been living in the stone cottage for about a year. We were along with my father because we had some idea what was at stake not only for him but for us, too. My mother had ironed his shirt and demanded he wash his hair. We were proud of Jim Lombard for being the chairman of the Farmland Preservation Committee, the chairman, which, when we’d been small, we’d thought of as a kind of king. For seven years he and the committee had been working on a draft of a land-use document that would restrict developers in order to preserve farmland in the township, a township that through the decades was becoming more and more suburbanized. My father, with a handful of faithfuls, wanted to prevent future piano key subdivisions, no more quarter-acre lots, the farm fields jammed with house after house, driveway aprons, basketball hoops, lawn mower sheds made to look like little barns. The plan was also to prevent the development of the highway corridor, presently corn and beans and woodland, into the usual one long stretch of Walmart/Home Depot/Walgreens/Taco Bell/Menards/Dollar Depot/Aldi/Ford Dealership/Mattress World/US Cellular/Wendy’s/Best Buy/Staples/Burger King/Dollar World/CVS/Long John Silver’s/Verizon.
The meeting that night was the last in a series of informational sessions and was supposed to conclude in a vote. The board would decide to adopt the Plan or they’d reject the committee’s work and permanently shelve the idea of preservation. We’d long known that if my father didn’t get his way then by the time we were ready for the farm it might be an island, houses like the Plumlys’ surrounding us. The taxes through the roof. But even if we could pay up it would be difficult to spray and raise noisy, smelly livestock, the new neighbors thick upon us, no room for the foxes, the cranes, the field mice, no space, it sometimes seemed, for the stars. My father didn’t say that it was so, but we knew that without a Plan, without his vision, there might not be a place for us.
The meeting room was a low dark hall with no windows, the hanging panel of fluorescent lights doing us no favors, the fifty metal chairs set up on the linoleum a respectable distance from the dais, chairs for fifty persons, the clerk’s generous estimation of attendance. Four of the town board members were men, their stubby fingers stained with oil, men who worked in machine shops or owned farms, men, my mother said, who would not have been orators in ancient Rome or in any other civilization. The fifth member, Pam Getchkey, was a woman with prickly short hair who bred Dobermans. My father didn’t usually imitate people but when he performed Pam snapping her gum we always suddenly realized that he was the funny one.
We took our seats in the meeting room, our blood hot, our hearts pounding. Many of us already hated everyone on the wrong side. We put our heads down and studied the agenda. Sherwood and Dolly sat in front of us and, with five minutes to go before curtain, in comes Philip, washed and brushed, clattering into a seat next to Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood Lombard. What’s he doing here? I radiated to William, a beam he chose not to receive. There was a scattering of hobby farmers and the old-timers who had the habit of civic involvement, and the local developers were there, too, Marv and Susan Peterson. My father had praise and damnation for them, saying it was better to have residents doing the developing rather than gold diggers swooping in, men who didn’t have to live among the atrocities they’d built.