The Development (24 page)

"I'll second that," called Debbie Simpson.

"And I'll third it," added Joan Frank. "We might just want to reconsider the whole gated-community concept too, while we're at it, as Mandy suggested last year."

"Whoa-ho-
ho!
" Jeff Pitt protested, rising from his seat in the audience and, like Mark, not waiting for acknowledgment from the chair: "Excuse me, ladies, but you take this tree-hugging stuff far enough and next thing we know you'll be telling us to donate the whole shebang to the Nature Conservancy instead of rebuilding at all!"

Uneasy chuckles here and there. Unfazed, "Don't think I haven't considered that option, Jeff," Amanda replied: "Collect our insurance payouts and take our casualty-loss deductions and then buy or build in an already-existing population center like Stratford: smart growth instead of suburban sprawl! But I'm trying to be less radical than that: We keep our entry gates and our golf course; we rebuild our beautiful Heron Bay Estates and even keep that pretentious last word of it's name, if that's what most of us want; but we rebuild it more green and eco-friendly, for our own good as well as the planet's! Thank you all for hearing me out."

Your Narrator applauded, proud as usual of his spunky mate, though disinclined to go quite so far as she in the extreme-makeover way. What
I'd
settle for, frankly, at my age and stage, is to be back with my dear high-mileage Apple desktop in my snug little study in our snug little coach home in HBE's snug little Blue Crab Bight subdivision exactly as it was before Mister Twister hit the Delete button, pecking away my Old-Fart-Emeritus autumn mornings at yet another rambling prose piece while Amanda, in
her
snug little et cetera, invokes the Muse of Less-Than-Immortal Versifiers but Damned Good Teachers to see her through yet another
StratColl.edu
semester or three before she joins her gin-and-tonic-slurping mate out in the pasture. Yes indeedy, Cap'n Gawd: Get us back Just Where & As We Were, Sir,
s.V.p.
—rolling our fortune-favored eyes at the word "Estates" and the 24/7 entrance gates and security patrols in our all-but-crime-free neck of the tidewater Maryland woods; tsking our liberal tongues at the U.S. fiasco in Iraq and at sundry other disasters around the world; shaking our snotty-intellectual heads at our community's toga parties and old-fashioned socials while at the same time quite enjoying them.

O bliss!

But no such luck, of course. Fabulator though G. I. Newett by vocation may willy-nilly be, the subject of these present fumbling fabulations is (anyhow
was
) a subdivision of the Real World—wherein, as Reader may have had occasion to note, nothing once truly whacked is ever quite restorable to What It Was Before. Best one can do is bid Mister Chairperson to tap the old microphone/gavel and proceed with our proceedings. Okay, Pete?

"Okay," declared Peter Simpson, and did just that: tapped the mike and thanked Amanda for her input, which he pronounced most certainly worth serious consideration even by those who—like himself and no doubt numerous others present ("Not including my wife," he acknowledged with a small smile: "She's with
you,
Amanda")—inclined to a more conservative conservationism, so to speak: the reconstruction of Heron Bay Estates as expeditiously as possible and as close as possible to what it was before, perhaps with "green" enhancements where convenient and cost-effective. Reduced community-assessment fees, say, for energy-efficient and/or eco-sensitive building and landscape designs?

"Right on," somebody agreed—Gerry Frank, I'd guess, or Dave Bergman—and there was a general rustle of approbation in the hall. No need for motions and seconds, Pete reminded us, since this wasn't a formal meeting, just a sort of solidarity and opinion-gathering session for us lucky-but-hard-hit survivors. "Your neighborhood reps and I will be getting together as often as we can to review and approve rebuilding proposals from individual homeowners, as well as from the condo and villa and coach-home associations and the Club and Marina Club boards, and we'll green-light as many as we possibly can in keeping with HBE's covenant, using what we've heard from you today as our guidelines." Deep exhale; stroke of beard. "So: The floor's open now to any others who want to be heard."

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