The passing of the generations is an awesome thing, someone once said to me. I don’t remember who, which is probably just as well, as the statement is kind of an obvious one.
Until, I suppose, you have to live it.
Maybe this will change if we ever get any halfway decent cell service on the South Fork, where the rich and the powerful play, but in the meantime here’s a bit of advice: Get a damn landline.
When the investigator from the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office did finally track me down through an extended family member and came a-knockin’, two more trite words came to mind: professional and courteous. (Coincidentally, I’d just started watching “Homicide: Life on the Street,” which someone at last had the brains to put on a streaming service, and this guy surely could’ve held his own with the choice banter among those detectives.)
But more than that, as we spoke on the porch it was clear he had grasped without missing a beat what was likable about my dead father, Peter Clune Greene, as it related to his eccentricities: the duct-tape repair to the faded 1966 Piper Cherokee 140, the fact that he was still flying at all at age 85, the comical hoarding propensities rivaling the Collyer brothers, the abandoned trailers and junk cars dotting his property across from the old dump on the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, which must have been noted only after politely ignoring the tongue-in-cheek “trespassers will be shot” sign.
And so, deputy sheriff investigator, yes, that about nails it. And him.
As for me, what can I say, it’s different for those of us born during the Johnson administration who as little kids lived through divorces a few years later in the Me Decade, as Tom Wolfe put it. Thus, while all sentimentality will here be dispensed with, I have to say that my little adventure in retrieving my father’s briefly lost, completely impractical two-door Audi with the expired registration and the dead transmission, found along a fence at the East Hampton Airport and driven out of there through the back roads at 10 to 20 miles per hour in lieu of shifting, did have me acknowledging that the chaotic life is the more interesting life.
It was like a trip down memory lane.