13 Willow Lane Dec. 26, 2023
I should have remembered the address of where Pauly and Rick lived, during that decade after Pauly moved out of Passaic for the last time.
The number and name so completely fitting Pauly’s magical
life.
If there was any place, I might find Pauly’s lingering ghost
it would be on that island where he lived and in the now-abandoned library
building where he worked for more than 25 years, cast out by new development
and a new library building for which he was no qualified to serve as director.
It struck me that we should visit that place only after we
had already taken off to visit his last place of residence, where we went each
time after his passing.
That world around that lake changed dramatically as the town
fathers began to realize they could profit from massive new development,
especially on the island where the old amusement park once sat, increasing the
population to the point where Pauly – because he lacked the degree in library
science – would be put out of a job by someone who did, a plotting, selfish town
clerk, who did have the degree and arranged to take Pauly’s place when the
county decided the new library – constructed by the same greedy developer who
filled the island with townhouses – should be a library for the county as a
whole.
In years past, I frequently took the Howard Boulevard exit off Route 80 to visit Pauly at the Willow Lane house and at the old library, although I knew his position was doomed when the town fathers convinced the state to straighten out the kinks in the long and winding road from the highway to the village, part of the plan to expand the population and to increase local tax revenues.
I hadn’t taken the exit since my last visit to Pauly in
2004, when he and the band performed at a local Memorial Day picnic. But the
route was the same and I knew the way to both the house and the library by
heart, choosing to go to the library first, since if his ghost haunted
anything, it would be that old building.
The old library sat on top of what was the old police station, whereas as along with a new library the town also got a new police station. The old library looked exactly as I had last seen it, except for the boarded up windows, and the glass to the front door, shattered by vandals. The inside – I managed to get a glimpse through the door – had been gutted, all the book shelves, the front desk and storage removed – (after 13 years, I would have expected no less). And yet, everything else about it seemed unchanged, the slanted road up, the inadequate parking spots, the large hundred-year old trees.
Climbing out of the car, I have expected Pauly to step out of the door to greet me as he did almost every other time I met him there, the proud father of a library he inherited when everybody else working there decided to retire, and the town granted him the role of director until changes in the population forced him out.
It was here that I met him after Hank’s death in 1995, and
here where he spent the longest time of his life, a part time curiosity at
first, making this small building and its pitiful excuse as a library the first
in the nation to establish its own website.
I walked around the building, then down the steps beside it,
and finally went across the street to take pictures of it, aware of the coffee
shop Pauly frequently went to nearby for his traditional coffee and buttered
roll.
But seeing it only saddened me all the more because it was so unchanged, a time warp in a world that is rapidly outpacing us – we being part of that generation to which the amusement park was holy ground, where we went after it closed, and now, driving to look at the house, where the greedy developer had constructed townhouses, leaving only one small plaque to indicate the amusement park ever existed. But the roads were the same, better paved now, and with a restored arch over the road leading to the older section of the island. I found the old house easily, spiffed up, but largely the same as well, with a roaring stone lion along the slate path I had walked over thousands of times, a house recently sold and now part of the new generation, when the old house had always struck me as a hobbit house, fitting the name and number of the street.
Pauly’s ghost would have preferred the abandoned library as
opposed to the spruced up house, and yet, It was grand to see it again, to
remember all those moments we shared there, from star gazing to making videos,
to simply hanging out.
Driving away, I felt intense sadness, knowing I would not likely return again, and that if Pauly’s ghost still haunted those places, I would not encounter him.
We drove on to our original plan to see the trailer park
where Pauly lived before his death, a vacant spot greeting us during our last
visit, a new trailer greeting us this time. The tree stump where Pauly had
installed a sundial was also gone. The rest of our drive took us through dairy
country and then through a brief history of Pauly’s life, places where the band
played, places later where we all hung out along the highway as teens.
In the end, we came home with the past clinging to our heals,
but no resolution, knowing that Pauly’s birthday loomed but he would not be
here to celebrate it.
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