The Parsippany Papers-a Novella, part 1; Greetings from "Little Parsippany"
I've hitchhiked over most of New Jersey back when hitchhiking was still reasonably safe and, indeed possible at all. Nobody stops anymore and you really can't blame them. Even then, hitchhiking was illegal in the Old Garden State though enforcement was inconsistent. A police car might stop and an officer would simply give you a ride to your destination.
Another might stop and the officer issue a traffic summons and leave you standing there—then what? Wait until he's out of sight, pocket the ticket and stick out the thumb. Another police car passes; pull out the ticket and hold it up so the officer can see it. Usually, the police car will move on, the officer satisfied that his municipality has shown me the way back to the straight and narrow.
I eventually learned to carry a New Jersey traffic summons whenever I hitch-hiked. All New Jersey traffic tickets look alike and I always seemed to have a fresh supply. In my foolish youth, I would generally ignore these tickets. Barring the possibility of a statute of limitations on crimes of this magnitude, I probably have a stack of 50 year old bench warrants waiting for me in Trenton. However, as old Tom Joad said in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath; "Laws come and go but got-to's go on." A teenager in need of a motorcycle part available only at a dealer in a distant city is a royal flush of a "got-to."
But I'm not sure that I've ever hitch-hiked to Parsippany. Oddly, though, mention of that town conjures up a very dim visual image. I had run deliveries to that general area for my father's business in the company's brand-new 1969 F-100; Haledon, Dover, Totowa. There was some beautiful country there then—it's virtually part of New York City now.
Anyway, I have no solid recollection of Parsippany. Nonetheless, Parsippany has been on my mind a lot lately. I often spend Saturdays at the North River Mills Institute for the Preservation of Antiquated Oddities. This tiny shop is a nationally recognized antique tractor, truck and firearms research station, located in the heart of the North River Mills history and nostalgia district. My radio is usually tuned to WFWM, 91.9 FM from Frostburg State University.
Beginning at 2:00 PM, Greg Latta hosts a program called "Just Plain Folks." It's a pleasing spectrum of music with blues leading into folk, which segues into bluegrass then blends subtly into Celtic.
A tune that Greg likes to play is by Micheal Jurling. It has to do with stopping for the night in an obscure urban New Jersey town. Before you point out that the words "urban" and "obscure" form an oxymoron, just trust me that in New Jersey, such towns aren't only possible but tend to be numerous. There just isn't room enough here to explain.
The person telling the story in the song—Jurling, I presume—finds himself plagued by an inept hotel staff and decaying infrastructure. Rather than getting a good night's rest, the poor fellow finds himself "Wide Awake in Parsippany," which just happens to be the title of the song.
Late one evening, high winds knocked out the power to a few apparently random homes in our immediate area. We were told that this scattered outage was due to our being "on some older line". This outage included us. No problem, we're seasoned off-the-grid people. The woodstove kept the house warm, kerosene lamps provided light and we hauled water from a popular spring that gushes from a pipe along the highway, ignoring the official sign "not a safe water source" as this spring's loyal clientele had done for 100 years.
This three-day outage was the creme-puff version of a blackout. We even cheated a little by going out to eat a time or two in an unaffected area rather than cooking on the woodstove. One thing that we did miss from the real off-the-grid days was the outhouse. Bucket-flushing a modern commode just doesn't meet seemingly reasonable expectations. The presumably illegal construction of an outhouse for these occasions may just prove to be another Tom Joad "got-to."
The phone went out, too. I'm happy to be counted among those who are too gracious to mention the phone company's name in the following context. I've been in business long enough to learn that things don't always go according to plan or logic and some endeavors just turn out better or worse than others. A call to this un-named company established a repair date a month away, more or less. This began a series of conversations—mostly by text—that lasted for over a month without results.
As with the power company, comes once again the explanation that we are on "some older line." The romance of the "older line" isn't lost on me—no way. Historical antiquity always piques my interest. "Some older line" evokes images of slouch-hatted Civilian Conservation Corps workers and steam-powered cranes with maybe an Indian or two looking on. Oh what the heck—let's throw in the characters from Remingtons "Desperados Waiting for a Train."
But I would like the phone to work since I'm paying for it. Moreover, my wife is trying to install something called the internet. No dice on a wire designed for a crank-up phone, charming though it may be.
So texts from the phone company continued. We lost count around 14. Please note that the phone company is using a competitor's system as its only means of contacting us. The texts promise us that everything possible is being done and a technician would be out on such and such a date and at such and such a time. It also said that it would be necessary for one of us to be present.
Often, this date would already have passed. A number of these texts indicated that the technician was there at that very moment. He wasn't. The most interesting text came at 2:30 am as we neared our long-awaited repair date. The text said that the problem had been resolved, that our phone was working again and that our repair visit had been cancelled.
If we still didn't have phone service after this fix, we could schedule another repair, the proposed date another 10 days hence. Wife Stephanie checked the portable phone by the bed—no dial tone. I got up and went to the kitchen to check the phone that plugs directly into the phone line—nothing there, either.
And so there we were at 2:30 AM wide awake and still without a phone. We may as well have been in Parsippany.