SECRET SPOT- STORAGE UNIT #54

For decades El Cornadi was the premiere restaurant catering to Hollywood's elite. The original owners, Mario and Maria Vesponi, had built the restaurant to resemble exactly the country church in Cornadi, Italy where they had been married. They even went so far as to have clippings of the ivy that grew up its walls shipped to Hollywood. Exact replicas of the art and stained glass windows from the church's interior were  commissioned and installed at great expense to the Vesponi family. Inside the restaurant, heavy medieval-looking wooden tables, surrounded by seating which vaguely reminded patrons of church pews, were spread out between the grand columns. Modified confession booths, illuminated by candle light, allowed for intimate dinners for two. No one could say exactly if the restaurant was designed as an homage to the Vesponi's Catholic roots, or if it was intended to be slightly sacreligious. People tended to see in the restaurant what they wanted to see. One local newspaper called Mario Vesponi "The Pope of fine dining" and his restaurant "a temple to the gods of food." Another critic quipped "It was convenient to have a confession booth handy after being enticed by Mario and Maria into the sin of gluttony." Vesponi himself was a member of the local Catholic parish and frequently allowed the church to use his restaurant for fundraisers and other special occasions, often at no charge. On Christmas Eve, the Vesponi's were famous for opening their restaurant to the area homeless who ate for free. El Cornadi specialized in rustic Italian food- simple and satisfying- but the ambiance and elegant surroundings lent a certain mystique to the dining experience which transcended the mere act of eating. As the restaurant's fame spread, Hollywood's elite began to notice, and before long El Cornadi was the place for the who's who of  Hollywood to gather, except on Christmas Eve of course.

Pablo Martine had worked at El Cornadi since he was 15 years old. He started out as a bus boy and dishwasher in the iconic restaurant's kitchen before becoming a waiter. He would eventually rise to become the chief waiter, a post he held until his death at 65. As chief waiter he had the privilege of waiting on some of the most famous men and women in the world. Occasionally even heads of state and world leaders would dine at El Cornadi. Pablo would stand against the wall next to a statue of the virgin Mary, hands behind his back, staring straight ahead, at attention. The patrons who he was serving would forget he was there until they needed something. In the 47 years that Pablo waited on tables he kept a little known secret. He possessed an amazingly accurate memory. At the end of his shift he would document the events of the night- everyone he waited on, what they ordered, as well as what they talked about. He had begun this practice to better familiarize himself with his regulars. He believed in doing his job with excellence. So he would pour over his notes studying the people who he served. Often times a guest would return for the first time and be surprised that Pablo remembered exactly what they had ordered and what they preferred to drink from their last visit even though that had been months, even years ago. "Will you be having the Tortellini a la Panna again, or would you like to try something else tonight?" He would also keep abreast of who was feuding with who and made sure they were seated well away from each other. Everyone felt like a regular within a visit or two. Pablo remembered everything, and it made the El Cornadi's guests feel as important as they imagined themselves. He remembered the names of wives and mistresses alike but never confused the two. He was a huge part of the restaurant's success. He was also the proverbial fly on the wall to many private moments and conversations.

Before long his notes began to extend far beyond merely what the guests ordered. Soon he was neurotically recording entire conversations which covered the mundane as well as the juiciest tid-bits of Hollywood gossip, sometimes even state secrets and criminal confessions were included in his notes. No event or conversation eluded his steel-trap memory or documentation. At the close of his shift he would go home to his small efficiency apartment on Palm View Avenue and habitually, almost compulsively, type out his recollections.  Occasionally he would refer to handwritten notes he had collected over the course of his shift. Most often he wrote mechanically, simply chronicalling the conversations and minutiae of the night. At other times he would depart from the style of a historian concerend only with recording facts and would write with a surprisingly elegant touch about en event he had witnessed or what someone was wearing that night. He was a good writer.

Over the 47 years Pablo served as a waiter at the El Cornadi his extensive collection grew. He had neatly organized his writings by month and year in loose-leaf binders. They represented his life's work and they filled his apartment until he was forced to rent storage space to house it all. A separate booklet contained a handwritten list of the names of his various guests. There were very few newsmakers who did't eventually dine within earshot of Pablo. For easy reference he had neatly entered next to their names the dates they had come to the restaurant. Before heading home he would take a copy of the next day's reservations, and after typing out his notes that night he would drive across town to his storage unit so that he could reacquaint himself with each guest's history. The storage unit was lined with floor-to-ceiling book cases, and in the middle of the floor there was an overstuffed leather chair, a lamp and a small table. On the table sat a photo album containing pictures of Pablo with sports figures, busness leaders, playboy bunnies, movie stars, musicians, and political figures.

Pablo never took a vacation. He never bought a house. He never married, and he had no family. Toward the end of his life, as he was dying from stage-four colon cancer, he drew up a will donating his life savings of $1, 500,000.00 to a local Catholic charity, and he willed the contents of storage unit #54 to Samantha Waters, a celebrity biographer and gossip writer who was known to occasionally dine at El Cornadi. In fact, in 2007 she had dined at El Cornadi with a baseball player with whom she was having an affair. She would be surprised and ashamed to find Pablo's mercilessly accurate account of their dinner. That page would forever go missing from Pablo's official record, a sinful act of desecration which would have killed the old waiter if he had still been alive to witness it. Waters was less kind to the other people mentioned in Pablo's writings. She would eventually write a book entitled "Dish," which served up the juiciest and most sensational of Pablo's memories to a public which had forgotten how to blush.  It instantly surged to the top of the NYT's best seller list and served as the basis for the Hollywood blockbuster, "Pablo."

SECRET SPOT

If you follow the river upstream along its meandering course you will eventually come to a place where it tapers to a thin ribbon in the midst of an ancient hemlock forest. Along the south bank there’s a grove of old-growth trees whose lofty, layered boughs block out the sun. The perpetual shade caused by the hemlocks keeps the ground beneath free of undergrowth. The generous spacing of the massive trunks, uncluttered by brush in between, and the open, park-like feel of the place has invited passersby for untold generations to pull their boats out and pass the night. Even today, if you dig a boot heel into the duff at the base of the old pillars you will find the charcoal signature of the ancient ones. How many thousands of forgotten fires had been lit there? I have often wondered about all of the faces and stories which have been swept away by the unsentimental current of time. If only the trees could talk.


Nowadays the old hemlock grove is an abandoned, lonely sort of place. Only one thing evidences that modern man has not completely forgotten the spot. In a clearing beneath a particularly impressive hemlock specimen there stands an ornate metal bed frame with white marble balls at each of its four corners. The bed first arrived in the grove 65 years ago. Ron Dimple, the town barber, salvaged it from the Grand Western Hotel after it burned. The hotel’s owner, Tom Skerring, lost everything in the fire and shortly thereafter took his own life. So nobody was around to object when Ron dragged the bed free of the debris, disassembled it and loaded it into his truck. At first he intended to clean it up and bring it home as an anniversary gift for his wife, Izzy, but in a flash of inspiration he decided to take it up to the hemlock grove where he had asked her to marry him two years prior. On their first anniversary Ron surprised Izzy by bringing her to the grove where she found the bed set up on the very site where he had asked for her hand. Izzy was delighted by the grand romantic gesture, and for years and years thereafter it became their custom to celebrate their anniversary by sleeping in the hemlock grove. They followed the same cherished traditions every year. While Ron unloaded the box spring and mattress, gathered firewood, and threw a couple of fishing lines out into the river, Izzy set up the clearing. She would make the bed and hang strings of Japanese lanterns from the surrounding trees. Sometimes she would gather wild flowers and arrange them in an empty beer bottle. As night fell, the lanterns pushed back the darkness with a soft, yellow light, and lent an elegant, whimsical air to the clearing. Ron and Izzy would celebrate their union while the moths beat their dusty wings against the lanterns and the wind played its old tune through the hemlocks.

Ron Dimple passed away eight years ago and Izzy moved away to a retirement community outside of Seattle. Occasionally a hunter or hiker will happen upon the old bed and wonder about its origins, but otherwise the grove remains an abandoned, lonely sort of place.

But hanging above the bed in Izzy’s room are some old battered Japanese lanterns.

SECRET SPOT

Way up in the woods behind the house in Castleton there is a cliff of matamorphic shale along one side of a pass, and about half way up that cliff there is a ledge. If you found the place, and it is there quietly waiting to be found, you would see at one end of the ledge a crude fireplace- just a large flat stone surrounded on three sides by tightly stacked rocks to kick back the heat. I first discovered the ledge during one of my frequent wanderings through the woods behind the house. I loved those woods. Sometimes, as I lay in bed at night, struggling to go to sleep, I will wander them in my mind's eye. I can still retrace the old faded logging roads and every turn of the brook as it dropped down into the gorge towards its rendezvous with Briton Brook. It is all mapped out in my mind, not as it is perhaps, but as it was when I was a boy. The pass where I found the cliff connected our valley to the next one. It was an interesting spot. I remember that it was always damp up there. Even during the driest of times it was a mossy, squishy place. In the height of summer ferns grew waist-high and bramble canes grabbed at your jeans and t-shirt as if to say "wait a minute." It was a muddy, squishy place because it was a seeping, oozing place. Water made its way out through cleavage planes in the surrounding rocks. It pooled quietly in the low place between the hills before giving birth to mirror brooks which first trickled, then babbled, then flowed down opposite sides of the pass into the neighboring valleys.

The ledge could only be safely accessed by climbing high above it and then working your way carefully down a steep trail (what animal was responsible for that trail I do not know, but I have always wondered). It was necessary to grab saplings and bushes to check your speed as you went. The trail, which is a generous description, came down to the very lip of the cliff where it petered out. Once at the cliff you were forced to lay down on your belly and let your feet dangle over the edge, slowly lowering yourself down until your inquisitive toes met solid footing below. The first time I did this I was terrified that somehow I would mess up and fall to my death, and even after I had frequented the ledge many times I always felt tense and frightened while my feet dangled uncertainly. Only when I felt the ledge solidly underfoot could I resume breathing. Then I would let the rest of my weight down onto the ledge and slump against the cliff face and take in the view. The view was nothing spectacular. Below was the pass in all of its squishy, muddy grandeur and opposite were the woods climbing up the other side of the pass.

I built the fireplace at the far end of the ledge on a snowy day in March. I got the stones to the ledge by rolling them over the lip and letting them drop down onto the ledge. For every two stones that stayed on the ledge a third one would roll off and crash down the cliff face. By the time I had finished building the fireplace the sun was starting to go down so I had to wait until the next day, after school, to have my first fire on the ledge. After school, the next day, I set out for the ledge straight away. On my way up I stripped bark from fallen birch trees for tinder, but I waited until I was closer to the ledge to gather the firewood because I needed both hands to safely negotiate the descent to the ledge. Luckily, there was no shortage of dry wood in the neighborhood of the ledge. I had a lot of awesome fires up there on the ledge, but none as great as that first one. I folded up my jacket so I wouldn't have to sit on the cold rock. Fat snowflakes were falling through the quiet woods, but I was wrapped in the orangle glow of my fire up on the ledge. It was better than any fort I had known as a boy. It was perfect.

SECRET SPOT

The house at 1580 Cranberry Street had been inhabited by five different families in the 27 years of its existence. First came the Taylors, newlyweds at the time, who oversaw the construction of the house in 1968. After nine years on Cranberry Street the Taylors moved into a larger place over on Mittner Avenue, and, and in the ensuing years, they rented the house to three more families in succession- the Fennicks, the Wades, and the Fascos. Then, as Amy Taylor was planning to head off to college, ownership of the place transferred to a retired couple, Mitch and Helen Dumbrowski, who moved in during the Spring of ’94.

By then, the once trim little house, had fallen into a sorry state of disrepair. The most pressing need was the roof, which leaked. There were other things too, little things mostly, and overall the house presented a neglected and shabby appearance to anyone who might be passing by on the Street. Mitch was handy, Helen was enthusiastic, and retirement afforded them both plenty of time to devote to the home’s rehabilitation. The Dumbrowskis were that sort of people who felt that the appearance of their corner of the world constituted a direct reflection on their character. So no sooner had they been handed the keys then they fell to the formidable task of setting things to right at their new house.

While Mitch prioritized and attended to the house’s maintenance needs, Helen tackled the yard. Her special passion was gardening. In fact, that and the price, had been the determining factor in their purchase of the house. The spacious backyard, half in the shade of a towering maple, half in full sun, and fully enclosed by an eight-foot wooden fence had sung a siren song to her as she and Mitch deliberated over the move. During escrow, Helen had filled her days diagramming hypothetical gardens and landscaping the front yard on pieces of scrap paper while Mitch lined up contractors and coordinated the assault on 1580 Cranberry Street.

One day in early May, as Helen was hauling away an old, tumble-down dog house from the back yard, she discovered the top of a thermos protruding from the ground under where the dog house had stood. Using the hammer she had been using she dug around the thermos until she was able to free it from the ground. It was a normal thermos, the sort a man might take to work with his lunch, and when Helen gave the cap a turn she was surprised to find that it turned easily. Inside she found two playboy magazines. They were folded in half and rolled up so that they could fit entirely within the thermos.

"Mitch," she called toward the house.

"Yes, dear?"

"Come look what I found."

Mitch appeared at the back door covered in saw dust, and walked across the backyard to where Helen was crouched over the thermos and its contents. She quickly recounted how she had found the thermos buried underneath the old dog house. Mitch was careful not to glance too long at the magazines and instead turned his attention to the dog house. He flipped it over and observed drawings and graffiti scrawled across the plywood interior of the house.

Pointing at his finding he said, "I bet it was some boy's club house."

"More like a hideout," said Helen disgustedly.

"Yeah," said Mitch.

 "I'll never understand boys fascination with this stuff," said Helen, "I'm glad you've never been that sort."

"Yeah," said Mitch.

SECRET SPOT- INSTALLMENT #1

The village, with its closely clustered buildings and narrow streets, sat in the midst of the valley like a pebble in the palm of a green glove. A thin dusty track, which spanned the length of the valley, ran directly through the town’s middle before continuing on its lonely way. Towards the west, the road climbed, gradually becoming more faint and ill-defined as it went further from the town- just two thin wheel ruts through the tall grass. As it neared a line of low hills and rocky escarpments it narrowed to a single path before disappearing entirely within the low-lying, scrubby woods that stretched away from the valley's edge as far as the horizon.


Not far from the end of the track a boy, no older than sixteen and naked to the waist, sat indian style beneath his shirt, which was stretched between two branches to keep the sun off. Nearby, in the shade of a cliff, water seeped from a slimy crack in the rock and collected in a quiet green pool at the base of the cliff. The dry woods, brittle and thirsty, dusty and brown, surrounded the boy and his secret spot.